skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The saddest thing about the Steve Jobs hagiography is all the young “incubator twerps” strutting around Mountain View deliberately cultivating their worst personality traits because they imagine that’s what made Steve Jobs a design genius. Cum hoc ergo propter hoc, young twerp.

I loved the swipe at the fake Steve Jobs's out there. I worked for one, although he wasn't young and it wasn't in Mountain View. He would cite Steve Jobs to defend defective practices. It was ridiculous.

It's a great essay, and I like Spolsky's management philosophy a lot, but I don't entirely agree. A business isn't academia. Businesses have to ship products and please their customers, and leaving these tasks to "the crowd" doesn't work. "The crowd", when we're talking about software engineers, produces brilliant chaos. That's great sometimes, and it can produce excellent products, but it's not good when you need focus or to meet a ship date. Sometimes a CEO or CTO needs to decide what gets worked on, how people do it, and to motivate people to make sure it happens.

Likewise, sometimes a leader needs to step in and resolve bike-shedding conflicts among two equally smart, strongly opinionated engineers who disagree on a core question, and to look for a compromise. "Management fiat" shouldn't be used lightly, but it's not without purpose.

That said, I think Spolsky deserves a lot of props for pointing out that the managerial relationship is two-sided. A lot of companies and bosses don't figure this out until they face uncontrollable talent bleed, and even then there's a lot of self-deception (I've known some ineffective managers to become bitter about their best reports "abandoning" them, as if it were some ethical lapse, but never to own up to their role).
That's not a browser, that's a psuedo-browser. All rendering and javascript is done on the server.
Genshi is a much better replacement for Kid. http://genshi.edgewall.org/
Most likely Japan AND China...

AND Germany...

AND Brazil...

etc...

It's the nature of that particular tech.
Ask HN: Good payment provider in Europe?
What is a good payment provider in Europe?
> many providers (o2, t-mobile, vodafone) across the world embed another js script

> The lack of semi-colons in the dropdown js file causes this compression to break

Thanks for the heads up, no bootstrap for me! (At least without something that's going to add the necessary semicolons... I wonder how many HN weekend projects out there simply don't work for people using their wireless connections?)

Also interesting that it appears the issue was closed because it contained the key phrases 'compression' and 'semicolon'... but it was not re-opened even after the maintainer realized the problem is with the wireless providers.
Yes, I wanted to write something similar. There needs to be someone with a vision of the 'whole thing'. The guy who steps in and tells the marketing guys that no, they can't add one more feature, or the hackers that no, they don't really need to implement their own database system, or whatever other things people get 'tunnel vision' about when not thinking about the company as a whole. Sure, in a good startup, everyone does keep that vision in mind, but it's good to have someone to adjudicate conflicts in a more or less impartial way, and set the general direction.
What's really odd about property taxes in CA is they only go up a fixed amount per year which has not kept up with growing property values in many areas. So, even though property values have dropped significantly revenue has not dropped as much as other states.
When we say "grey area" the test is "could this image be absolutely non-controversial in a "normal" context". For example; if you seize a computer containing lots of images of girls in swimwear the owner has some issues. But if one of those images appeared, in, say a family photo album no one would bat an eye lid.

In that case I absolutely do prefer to frame the situations differently. On the one hand we have a someone who's tastes directly drive gangs to abuse more children. On the other hand we have someone who is contributing to the violation of childrens privacy (through sites that distribute these images).

At no point am I suggesting these crimes should be treated differently, just that we should consider the differences.

Both are forms of victimisation; however in the latter case the victimisation takes place after the photo is taken (when it finds its way on line) rather than at the time (when the child is being abused).

The problem here is not how I describe these. It is with a society that sees the word "Child Porn" and goes off half cock, but sees "Invasion of privacy" and "Emotional Trauma" and shrugs.

Just to be clear; I work within the field of forensics, which means that, yes, I do investigate such cases - and I am exposed to the legal structure and opinion related to these crimes. If you read over my comments carefully at no point do I try to dismiss the severity of the issue - I just gave some very brief feedback from my experience.

What I was noting, legally speaking, is that many images are in a grey area where they are not explicitly abusing a child (although they are abusive in being traded around online). If all you have in your possession are such images you will not likely see the inside of the court room.

Speaking personally I don't entirely agree with this state of affairs (perhaps I should have made that clear in the first posts :)).

EDIT: I should explain that this state of affairs has come to evolve because of how juries tend to react to CP prosecutions. If the case involves images of children being abused sexually then the defendant is seen as reprehensible/evil. On the other hand, if all you have is a collection of - individually innocuous - pictures of kids the defendant tends to be seen as having more of a mental issue, and elicits sympathy - "he didn't actually hurt anyone". The jury, obviously, fails to see the secondary abuse in distributing the image.

I don't think you can prosecute someone for being attracted to children, that would be thought crime and is a slippery slope. But clearly, participating in sites that distribute those images are is reprehensible abuse of another sort - and that is what they need to be punished for.
Show HN: Coworking Weekly, the first newsletter for the coworking industry
The Aikido videos are indeed sad. The saddest part is knowing how surprisingly representative they are of the Aikido mythos, originating with the founder himself. Accounts of Morihei Ueshiba and his supernatural adventures in ki are perplexing at best.

That being said, I don't think Aikido is as ineffective as the videos may lead one to believe. I recall a similar experience to the one described in the article, when I strolled into the Aikido dojo with a new black belt in TaeKwonDo. The sensei saw my colossal attitude and broke my confidence repeatedly in front of his students. It was entirely open ended; I attacked and he countered. Each attack landed me in a painful pin. And while my strength and stamina were utterly exhausted, he managed me effortlessly. I was made an example; humbled.

The core techniques of value are not exclusive to Aikido, however, being borrowed from prior arts, and I believe more practical sources of them are Bujinkan and Krav Maga.
You can only come to that opinion if you don't read books. I aim to read a (non-fiction) book a week, but usually end up finishing them in roughly 10 days. My split is about 50% library 50% Amazon.com purchases. Without the library my reading habit would be massively more expensive.

Right now I'm reading a book by Bain about the transcontinental railroads that I picked up at my local library (after reserving it online, picking it up at the front counter without even having to look for it, and walking out the door in <60 seconds using the automated checkout machine) and a book on startups I got off of Amazon.

I've read the wikipedia entry on the transcontinental railroad, it's good. But it's not as detailed as book. And there are about 50,000 blog posts on startups, but none are as detailed as the book I'm reading.

Wikipedia and blog posts are all shallow overviews of the subject. If you want nuance, if you want depth, then you need a book. And the internet doesn't even come close.
Activity Monitor is a tool too blunt for these kind of scenarios. It pains me, Mac OS X has DTrace which makes it a breeze to find out what really happens, however, the only GUI tools built on top of DTrace are profiler for programmers, nothing for the casual user.

Activity Monitor presents data that's not really useful and does so in an intrusive manner and in a confusing display.

Mac OS X already comes with parts of the DTrace toolkit, you can install whatever you're missing: http://www.brendangregg.com/dtrace.html#DTraceToolkit. These tools allow a very deep understanding of performance problems.
ESA's first Vega rocket blasts off without a hitch
Maybe this kind of reasoning explains why their API is such garbage.
Coffee Shop Kanban: Is your dev team a Starbucks or a Costa?
Wilson Miner - When We Build (vid)
The thing about all of these Sinatra-like frameworks is there is a lot of code repetition. Instead of passing in a function for each http method for a given uri, it would be nice if I could pass in an object for the uri once, then have the framework call the object's head, get, put, etc. functions.
Depends on the library. EX: Library of congress still orders of magnitude ahead of Wikipedia.
I am excited that Alex is curating coworking content for me. Alex/IndyHall is our inspiration for WorkHappy - http://weworkhappy.com
Steve Jobs was a multi-faceted person. He definitely had a difficult personality, but I've heard he was less of an asshole than he's made out to be; the problem is, when a person lives in the spotlight, all of his worst moments get air.

He also had a different management style at Pixar than at Apple. During his first stint at Apple, he was extremely young and inexperienced. Pixar was like a research department, and he was generally nice to the people working for him. When he returned to Apple, he came into a fairly nasty culture that had been created by people other than him. If you've ever seen a company with a young wolves problem, you know that sometimes the boss has to be an asshole.

Also, my understanding is that he was generally very nice to the line engineers but hard on people VP-level and above-- and that at Apple, VP is a seriously high rank involving high-6 figure compensation (at least) rather than a 50th-birthday present (or in investment banking, a 30th-birthday present) as it is in most companies. I think that if you're making that kind of money, you can take serious scrutiny.
NASA considers manned outpost around moon to control robots on lunar surface
Aaaahhhhh ... rails developers. I take your point.

As to CHAR vs VARCHAR -- well, is it fixed length or constantly changing? The clue is in the name. And CHAR is usually up to 50% faster on overhead and VARCHAR uses padding which can be a huge waste of space. They should just know this.

Then, SQL Joins are plain English and should be easily visualised in the abstract (it does help if you can see the data in front of you though, I can't deny).

Date vs Time is something I am finding confuses lots of people. Precision as well.
Unfortunately, this also means 'stupid' people accept everything they're given :-(
Weekend hack ingredients:

* $8 themeforest theme + some elbow grease

* Mailchimp

* My existing knowledge of the industry

* Some copywriting coaching from Amy Hoy's 30x500 workshop

Inspired by @peterc's excellent work on Javascript Weekly, and my fast-growing personal archive of news stories on how the coworking industry is exploding around the world, I decided to launch a simple weekly industry newsletter focused on sharing the best news, stories, announcements, etc.

If you work at or run a coworking space, there will be stuff in this newsletter for you.

Disclosure: I founded one of the earliest coworking spaces in the country, Indy Hall, in Philadelphia.
This sounds a lot like the spaces vs tabs holy war. The C way vs the Ruby/Python way.
I remember reading about this a long time ago. The builder's own website on the subject is a much better link, which presents the hows and whys:
http://www.simondale.net/house/

The OP is nothing more than a copy-paste job, though given how old it is, there might be some interesting discussion in the comments.

I believe from what I've read in the past that this was more of an exhibition piece than a long term place to live.
Interesting concept... but you might as well use the standard tools.

Look at one of the examples:

q "SELECT COUNT(1) FROM exampledatafile"

The output will be exactly as if we ran the wc -l

I would rather use wc -l
Should be titled, live like a hobbit for $5000.
I think the trackpads are good (I mainly use the keyboard so I prefer the smaller ones over Apple's, because the keys are reachable more easily) What is it you don't like?

(I'm judging the T510, T60 was also ok)
The Barbershop Load Distribution algorithm for Linux kernel scheduler
http://www.ciracar.com/img/weird/build_a_house_for_less_than...

If it rains enough, I expect that the house will collapse.

Also what about Electricity, Water and Internet (ok there is wifi) but electricity and water needs their proper setup. Gas is important too, if it gets too cold, and I expect they want to cook something.
I believe Instapaper uses a custom parsing engine for stripping content from pages.

There's a page here which lists the site specific rules Instapaper uses for extracting content:

http://www.instapaper.com/bodytext

I think this is why you see such good results from Instapaper.
I find it interesting that the terms of use (licensing and all) are nowhere to be found. Barring implied licenses (I don't know if there is relevant case law), you could probably force them to remove all your comments with a simple DMCA takedown request, since you hold their copyright.
I think within 2-4 decades humanity (as we know it now) won't even be relevant.

Relevant to whom?
>> And of course this does not support installing Python, Ruby, Perl on any other software that has its own way of distributing software.

> which is bullshit (although there's no Perl)

Last time i looked Perl could be installed via homebrew...

$ brew install perl

Also Perl can be installed via MacPorts...

$ port install perl5

However my preferable way is to use perlbrew (http://perlbrew.pl) which allows you to install & manage multiple versions of Perl and it then allows you to use the normal CPAN toolchain to manage/install your modules.

# install perlbrew (normal user in ~/perl5)
$ curl -kL http://install.perlbrew.pl | bash

# install & switch to perl 5.14.2 via Perlbrew
$ perlbrew install perl-5.14.2
$ perlbrew switch perl-5.14.2
$ perl -v # (will show the perlbrew perl 5.14.2)

# Add cpanminus to perl-5.14.2
$ curl -L http://cpanmin.us | perl - App::cpanminus

# load Moose module into perl-5.14.2
$ cpanm Moose
That reply seems to reference Play 1.x, which is a very different beast from Play 2 (I've just completed a project using the Play 2 beta). I haven't used Xitrium. I think Play 2 is very good if you want a RESTful web application and you want to render pages on the server-side (which is largely what I wanted for my project). For my current project I've found we're shifting to client-side rendering, and then these kind of web frameworks are redundant, with BlueEyes being a much better fit.
I switched to DDG about 3 Month ago and use Google only for image search and when I am not happy with DDGs result. More often than not Googles result are not better so I have to change my search terms :-)
I love the look of that house, seems extremely cosy and well-designed.

But it's pretty hypocritical to present it as cheap and frugal.

The cost of a house is land + labor + material. Land costs depend on where you want to live, but can be the biggest factor. He mentions 1500 hours of labor, which, if you were paying somebody to do it, would be somewhere around 100000 USD (full cost of a skilled craftsman is around $60/hour). And even the 5000 dollars for materials is a fool's calculation, since he mentions using scrap materials, i.e. stuff that somebody else had to pay to produce.

If you want something truly sustainable, i.e. not something pseudo-green and feelgood-ecologigal, but something that anybody can afford, you'd unfortunately would have to go with a mass-produced high-rise block of flats.

Not a fan of the do-gooder hypocrisy here, but as an example of an architectural style that blends into nature it's adorable and looks fantastic.
Basically, people don't want the minified versions of files while they're developing, and there will always be people coming to the project with whatever minification tools in their build that can't handle the missing semicolons. Currently, the answer is "change your build tools".

https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/issues/1795
This is my first paid webapp, so I'd appreciate especially feedback about the sales process, and the generic app usability.
There is a reason for the insanity you are complaining about. The vars are effectively hoisted there by the interpreter anyway, by pulling them to the top of the block you remove a possible point of confusion, and more importantly a possible point of bugs.
You can get similar bang for your buck by firing your own bricks for a masonry house. Nice project!
while I agree, the point is moot as this talks about developers. So yes, apple did not make a package management tool. That pisses developers off. Makes no difference because you suck it up if you want to develop for mac/ios.

Its kind of like developing on windows, for windows, gota do what u gotta do.
That observation of how peaceful and interdependent the world looked at the dawn of the 20th century is also how Niall Ferguson's book The War of the World starts.

It really is quite sobering to appreciate how people back then really believed that mutual dependence and globalization would make large-scale warfare impossible.
Well, I know the basic about SystemTap, but I'm not so much familiarized with low-level stuff, I'll look for DTrace to see what's happening. Thanks for the information.
Homebrew does have binary packages (we call them bottles).

I'm the guy who implemented the feature and I am realising that as I didn't shout very loudly people don't realise that it exists.

For example Qt has a bottle:
https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/blob/master/Library/Formula...

The reason we aren't doing this for more packages is basically people power and hosting (as I'm not sure Sourceforge would be happy we hosting the number of binaries we'd want to have).

Hope that explains a bit. Feel free to comment if you think we're taking a good/bad approach here.
Yeah, I'll bet a mass-produced high-rise in China costs way less than $5000 per one-room unit, and at practically zero land cost, too, given its vastly smaller footprint. That's a damn good point.
I get the room part, but it cost him 5000 pounds because he built it out of logs and straw bales. There's not really a massive supply network needed for that sort of thing.

Also, your idea of a decent house is (obviously) not necessarily his idea of a decent house (eg. he has a composting toilet), but it looks pretty warm and dry and vermin free to me.
If your problem is that you are running out of RAM, Activity monitor will tell you precisely what app is the culprit. Nothing "blunt" there.

If you want to know why a specific app is frozen (beachballing), you can click the "Sample Process" button in Activity monitor to perform a time profile.

Yes, if you want more details, you have to use Instruments or write your own DTrace scripts. But I doubt that even a time profile is useful to the "casual user".
If DDG is too slow try disabling JavaScript. It is much faster then.
Yeah, scroll is very odd behaving on Android 2.3.
Web Based HOA Software
Condo Manager LIVE is our online solution for associations and management companies. LIVE contains a full accounting system as well as all of the tools needed to manage your associations all available from anywhere.
I didn't like this, and I'm struggling with how to explain it. After all, these are excellent and insightful questions.

I think the reason is that people are unable to answer these questions -- it's the type of question that can only easily be answered by an outsider, or by somebody two years after their startup idea didn't work. So while the questions themselves may be very good -- perhaps as a way to help your friends -- asking them to yourself doesn't seem very worthwhile.

Especially troubling was the one about loving what you're doing. The more infatuated you are with some idea of yours, the worse off you are. A better question might be whether or not you can stick it out for the years necessary for things to happen. Yes, if you love something that's all great, but reality distortion fields are not so fun to live in when the world is tremendously apathetic to your cause. A character that can work hard and pivot on something they logically feel might work is much more desired, in my opinion, than simple "love what you do". My dog loves fetching sticks. It really doesn't add that much value.

Having said that, you should love the value you provide -- the part about people wanting what you make. But that's just being a good person.

I don't know. I'm sorry to be so critical. The article just didn't sit well with me.

I'm sticking with "Make something people want that scales easily." I can derive questions from that starting point.
Strawbale walls + wood heater. Did you read the article at all?
Too small (I have fat fingers) and low sensitivity compared to the one in PowerBook (back then). This is from a company-issued laptop four or five years ago, however, I don't know if it has seen any improvements over the past years. (Especially the "too small" part.)
Homebrew started taking off, and in
my case Just Works

This is the first time I ever heard anyone saying it.

Here's another: it worked for me perfectly, in and of itself. I use pianobar, which frequently updates (due to Pandora changing protocol or keys), and I often have to do some recipe editing to get that latest update, but it seemed simple enough. Since the brew update list doesn't get fixes anything like as fast as the pianobar author updates when something breaks, it seems to me that having to wait for someone to actually compile pianobar elsewhere would mean that I'd have to wait days for the packaged version.
Some recent discussion of this over at hackful:
http://hackful.com/posts/370
ESA's VEGA rocket just exploded
I do happen to have an 8 GB machine, and almost never reboot (only reboot for OS updates).

I run half a menu-bar full of resident helper apps, like Dropbox (a big one), Fantastical, ScanSnap, Xmarks (another big one), Transmit (another big one), Evernote, and more. I also keep Apple Mail running, mapped to a half dozen Gmail IMAP accounts. I have "geek tool" updating my desktop with iCal appointments and various ps outputs.

I'm running a local MAMP stack and local Django stack. I run a Parallels Windows 7 VM for testing things in IE and testing from Windows in general.

Other running software is usually Safari, Terminal, Sublime Text 2, Codebox, Source Tree, Sequel Pro, Adium. I run and quit Office 2011 every time I need to edit a document. I run and quit Aperture and Photoshop.

Using this command line to see memory used by processes:

ps -x -o rss,command | awk '{sum+=$1} END {printf "%9.3f %s\n", sum/1024, "MB" }'

Gives 3000.535 MB for all of the above, 3235.000 MB after adding Word and Excel, or 3794.277 MB after adding Photoshop CS5 and iTunes streaming radio.

Makes me wonder what you're doing to run out of memory.