skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article doesn't really offer much in the way of concrete suggestions other than handwavy stuff like "more documentation" and "it changes too fast" and "it doesn't change fast enough".

Here's my suggestions:

- make a breaking change to the gem versioning system to force all library, framework and gem authors to use versions properly. If you make a breaking change in your API, you MUST change the major number. Rails made a couple of breaking changes in the transition from 2.3.5 to 2.3.6, for Pete's sake, and a huge number of breaking changes in any of their 'minor number' upgrades. Many gems are even worse. Yes, this is going to cause massive version number inflation. So what? Chrome increments their major number even faster and with less reason.

- If a change to a plugin breaks on an older version of Rails, tell the authors so they can update their gemspec so that other users of older versions of Rails don't get the update.

- Make it easier to contribute to the documentation. It's already pretty easy, but make it easier. Add an "edit this page" link on every documentation page that goes to the corresponding "edit this file" in the docrails project in github.

- 90% of the "documentation" for Rails can be found randomly scattered across the internet on blog posts. Of course, these are usually out of date. "Encourage" (with a stick, perhaps) people to stop doing this and instead to add to the documentation. If that's not appropriate, stack overflow or some other blessed site. Not a random blog post that's never going to get updated and will probably disappear in a few years.
They will choose where they contribute and will modulate the risks they take as a function of pay-off, though. These aren't things you see hitting instantly, but it affects decisions at the margin and eventually nickels add up.
IPhone. Photography. Awesomized. Free.
The Google model of development (2005)
You're assuming that BioWare's change of direction is because of EA. That is, you're assuming it's not what BioWare wants to do of their own accord. Is that your assumption, or have you heard either EA or BioWare say that is the case?
Then figure out why developers would use your service and charge them for making it easier to achieve that goal. I'm sure that scraping content is just a means to and end.
Republic Lost - Lawrence Lessig
Kinda depressing, but if he gives some good examples on how to reform politics and campaign financing more specifically...
After Vista, PlaysForSure, Silverlight, Windows Live all killed their brand/device/service? I think the lesson for consumers is that Microsoft has not been able to expand beyond its cash cows (Xbox/Kinect the notable exception).

If you google [microsoft flop] you will get many overlapping examples. Kin shows up, of course. As does Vista, as does Zune. And that latter day tablet product that never was. And the other products of MSR that never quite make it to stores. Consumers are not dumb. They are aware of these high profile collapses.

And there is a general trend of lagging the market, then failing to catch up. This more than anything explains the performance of Windows Phone in the market.
Apple Dividend May Return Part of $98B Cash
Less than 3.8% of users were affected, take your trolling else where.
The debt burden makes the college graduate more desperate to work, but not for any wage. There is a hard line below which the student is unable to make payments and a softer line above that allowing for various qualities of life. The key in the analysis is if the non-grad can under-price the college grad near (or even below) that hard line for long enough to get entry level experience and thus be treated as another experienced hire.

There is also something to be said for a self-starter who drives himself through an online programme and comes out with a working understanding of a topic.
Windows Server "8" Beta available for download
Tint control is still a flop. I don't know anyone who threw away their old TV to buy a TV with tint control.

Accessing the internet on your TV isn't a "killer feature." It's a "nice to have."
Microsoft's Azure Cloud Suffers Serious Outage
Anjali
Reading that Rails is an "older project" kind of took me by surprise. I guess in internet years, it's about middle age now.

My personal feeling is that Rails still does way more right than it does wrong. I find that I'm gravitating to the Node frameworks that are modeled after Rails (tower.js & railway) because working with straight up Express.js or even sinatra for non-trivial apps is kind of tedious.
On Not Being Scrum Enough
Perhaps for consumers, but enterprise/office-workers will never switch to tablets. Keyboard/mouse is just too damned efficient for data entry and manipulation. And, I always thought that office-work/enterprise was MSFT's bread-and-butter.
3 reasons you should upgrade to an iPad 3
The Mozilla Marketplace is officially open for HTML5 app submissions
The features should be turned on for new applications and turned off for upgrades. In fact, that's what the rake rails:upgrade does in some cases. It probably doesn't do that often enough.
Symbolism or not, I think there's no denying the fact that he worked very hard during the early stages. My point is to highlight the fact that in light of his struggles, I can appreciate his frustrations. While the attacks are not justified, I can at least see the path of events that led to this act.
GCC is becoming larger and more unmaintainable with each release. Competition in this space has been pretty sorely lacking for quite some time. The OpenBSD folks are also pushing PCC as a GCC alternative.

It'll be nice to have a BSD-licenced GCC equivalent for distribution with FreeBSD/OpenBSD, too.

Clang also has REALLY great error messages compared to GCC. It will tell you exactly where you forgot a comma, semicolon, quote, etc. instead of randomly pointing to some line around the error in question.
provided all the connections are consciously made
Should You Outsource Your Company Blog Content?
Flat 20% discount on first purchase on single order by Shersingh
Didn't their open letter just say that they support open access? Because this press release says they "still oppose government mandates".
Nike Free Shoes For Women , Men, Cheap Nike Free Sale Online
Cheap Nike Free shoes for womens, mens and Nike Free 3.0 shoes from nikefree30cheap.com SAVE 35% to 60% on this store, Nike Free Run offers improved fit,support and cushioning.
It's 50% split based on the actual revenue, not the actual price of the ticket, which is not as ludicrous as it sounds.

eBay has a similar affiliate pricing scheme - giving 50%, even up to 75% (last I checked?), but it's % of actual revenue, which is peanuts if you think about it. eBay takes like 1-3% of the actual selling price, and they then give you 50% of that.

Now if it was 50% of the actual ticket price, that would be really something, but it wouldn't be profitable for them of course.
From business week, about iOS:

"
In other words, should he shrink the Mac, which would be an epic feat of engineering, or enlarge the iPod? Jobs preferred the former option, since he would then have a mobile operating system he could customize for the many gizmos then on Apple’s drawing board. Rather than pick an approach right away, however, Jobs pitted the teams against each other in a bake-off."

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/scott-forstall-the-sorc...

So, two separate teams working simultaneously on the same problem, competitively.
NICE! I wish I had determinated co-founders like you guys.

The UI looks good :)
This in is essence exactly the argument that Google Books is using so copy/paste all the arguments against that (the French were particularly vocal) to see the problem.

If I had to choose between the government (French, US, whatever) and Google doing such a thing, I would definitely choose an entity like Google on the grounds that since they stand to make money and have a stake, they'll manage it better than a typical government can.
I think this is the problem with rewriting platforms, libraries and languages from scratch instead of incrementally chiseling it into something stable like in the open unix world.
There can't be a billionaire without millions of wage slaves

Except for where there can. Economic productivity is nowhere close to decoupling from population mass yet, but when it does, you won't need low or semi-skilled workers.

There is a careful calculus happening at every level comparing the productivity of a human versus machines (and other humans). To deny that competitive spirit, à la Greece or Italia, builds systematic inefficiencies into the economy.

At a certain point there won't be a place in the world for unskilled humans - they will be un-differentiable from a defective tool.

TL;DR This may be a problem, but will be un-avoidable. Social structures, demographics, or both will have to adapt to new realities of productivity.
The crappy, dystopian future is here: Transparent Billing
I, for one, would love to get my hands on a good Nokia Lumia 800 running Windows Phone 7, but despite reading about them for months-to-years, they're never available when I go to the store. MSFT could learn a lot from Apple about not making announcements until products are ready. It's very frustrating.
Nobody wanted a set-top box that just plays what all the other set-top boxes already offer.

And for the TVs with it built in, that's nice and all, but is old hat at this point. Plenty of manufacturers like Vizio have their own built-in software for accessing the same content providers.
And failing!
As a person in the comments references from Steve Jobs "The computer is a bicycle for the mind."

I think that is the best metaphor for a computer I've ever heard. But I'd say the increase in potential a computer brings is more like from walking to flying via a plane than from walking to cycling.
Even so, that really is a quote I'll be keeping in mind.
I think that much rich world unhappiness stems from spending a lot of time watching TV or playing video games. If you spend your time playing (e.g. hanging out with friends, playing sports) or working (e.g. accomplishing something), then I think happiness is more likely.

The last sentence in particular resonated with me: “Happiness is not measured by the number of days you live but, rather, by the number of days you remember.” Every day I've spent consuming media is a day I can not remember.
Schengen is a lot like the "states" of the US. If I want to travel from New York to Illinois, there is absolutely no government intervention.

Schengen is a great system. I've taken the train between Denmark and Germany and it's not much different from commuting to work in the same city :)
Great idea! As a fellow Cambridge HN'er, I'll be watching closely. With local app launches, it's a good idea to go old school around campus and hang flyers.
Apple Market Cap Shoots Above $500 Billion
Rails does upgrades better than any other fast-moving large open source project I've seen. They have things like the rails_upgrade plugin, which most projects don't offer.

Projects that do upgrades better than Rails do so because they either move a lot slower or they have a lot smaller API area or they don't have a kajillion plugins available, many of which aren't actively maintained yet are still useful.
This is a very inexpensive product produced by a charity. How can they afford what it would take for a launch like this to run flawlessly? I work for a non-profit that does all it can to provide a high quality service at a below market price, so I have sympathy for these guys. If you want first class service from day one, expect to pay a little more than $35. Even Apple with their high profit margins has had difficulty with launches for high demand products.
Nokia 808 PureView 41MP Smartphone Showcased At MWC 2012 | Tech Hungama
Jobs provide more than income, they also help with self-esteem and prevent idleness, which in turn keeps things like crime down. I think useless make-work jobs are ultimately more feasible than guaranteed income for those reasons.
Wisdom "here?"

You can do better than to listen to the Y-Combinator-funded "geniuses who are attempting to re-implement poorly the protocols which worked fine 20+ years go.

Oh, and they STILL work, too.
Does the coffee script compiler inline the addition calls? Does inlining actually do anything on v8 or the other javacript compilers?

I guess a better question for me to ask here is:

Is there any good in depth guide to the current javascript compilers so that library design decisions can be made, or are we basically restricted to reading the source code/ making a guess and checking with a profiler?
Yep, we're working on an Android version as we speak.
Raspberry Pi launch turns into frenzy
The most amazing HDR Photo Collection from 50 World Cities
HDR can make the ugliest, run down, industrialized cities seem appealing and beautiful. They seem to capture those cities from a different perspective and highlight different elements from that familiar scene that you would had never noticed before
Well There is less to be tought on emotions, it all depends with how we react on different issues in life that brings about emotional reactions.
I'm sure there is an amount of 10.5 users... (Looking at my old PB12.).
Hiring a designer: how to review portfolios (by Chad Thornton of Airbnb)
I'm wondering the same thing - I assume it does expire, but there's no indication of when. For what it's worth, the FAQ does instruct you to use the product key "NF32V-Q9P3W-7DR7Y-JGWRW-JFCK8".
Why not just use Visual Studio 2008 or 2010? XP is a drag on new development paradigms and practices they want to get rid of.
Damn! Thanks. I guess I'll try it with VMWare on my PC.
Windows Live isn't dead, by any stretch. It's been rebranded as "Microsoft Account", and actually extended a ton in Windows 8. Vista wasn't "killed" any more than Snow Leopard was "killed" by Lion.

PlaysForSure and Silverlight are actually great examples of what I'm talking about- consumers have zero idea what they are. Developers are angry that MS dropped Silverlight because they spent a lot of time learning it and creating stuff with it, but beyond an initial install screen (which they've already forgotten about) consumers have no idea whether they are using HTML5, Flash or Silverlight. This is a good thing.

Consumers do not regard the MS Courier tablet as a flop. They have never heard of it.
Google will add "Do Not Track" to Chrome
Previously, your only option would have been to start using another browser, but Google has felt the pressure for user privacy and agreed to offer a "Do Not Track" button in its Chrome browser
Depends what you define as a "PC" , if you mean an intel x86 CPU in a box with a MS operating system and a "C drive" as the dominant platform with 90%+ market share then probably yes.

I don't really see this as PCs vs tablets where only one can be left standing, I think we will see a diverse range of devices and software come to market over the next few years. The ones that actually suit peoples needs will survive.
Seti live relaunches. Uses HTML5 to let users classify signals
Seems to be down. Here's a clickable Google Cache link:

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http:/...
Stanford will also (hopefully) offer a free online Algorithms course soon: http://www.algo-class.org/.
Thanks! We'll be in town soon and certainly get to it.
Can we have your email to get in touch with you when we're in Boston?
And since they are, in theory, business to business you don't get the already weak UK legal spam protection.
64-bit Windows contains both 64-bit and 32-bit versions of all the userland libraries -- things like user32.dll and comctl32.dll -- as well as both the 64-bit and 32-bit versions of .NET.
3 UX Fails in the Gilt Groupe Checkout
AT&T Blames Adele for Dropped Calls
This is a misunderstanding. You can read my question as "According to [..] the SICP is one of the top 10 CS books. Which, do you think, are those?"

I'm just interested because it seems SICP is THE book on programming, and I wonder: Which other CS books are that prominent? The only one I can think of, is "Artificial Intelligence - A Modern Approach" by Russell and Norvig.
Extra binaries for 32bit compatibility probably take most of the space. On my 64bit win 7 install, C:\windows\SYSWOW64 takes up 1.4 gigs.
Cre Fuller hacks whimsical robot sculptures out of scrap.
Congrats! I love getting inspiration like this!!
I just signed up through the backdoor, good looking website.
Are you going to publish your blog on how you got it done? I see the link to the blog on the site isn't working at the moment.
Am I missing something or is this just a http://www.taskrabbit.com/ copycat?
Could this set a precedent in the SOPA vein of things?
I'm getting a database error so I can't see the actual article, but I disagree. One case is enough to prove that it can be done, and it may possibly happen again. Even if this gets successfully challenged, in the interim all .COM registrations are potentially at risk.
Tips for Startups Looking to Maximize SXSW Opportunities
You are essentially arguing that Windows Vista, 7, and 8 do not offer substantial improvements over XP. They do, though.

But anyway, given their customer base and the history of their decisions, there's not a lot MS can do to make everyone happy. All they can really do at this point is make the best of a situation that is pretty crappy in a lot of respects. Bitching about it, however valid, seems sorta useless to me. The plane has already crashed into the goddamn mountain, to quote the Big Lebowski.
Yes, MAME cabinet etc. Thanks for that pixel-kit: I own a lot of 8, 16 bit retro machines + joysticks (and mice), so I would like to get them working. I made something myself for that years ago, but it didn't work totally so I just bought the old machines themselves as that's cheaper/easier (and I think they look great :)
Cool app, I think this will do well with the college scene. I just recently graduated and I know this would have come in use many times. Quick question, how are the payments handled so that the user who completes the task definitely gets paid? I could easily toss a task up there saying get me lunch and I'll pay you $50, but when they show up with my lunch I could say sorry I only have $5 to offer.
> Designers are treated like royalty at Apple, where the entire product conforms to their vision. This the polar opposite of the way it works at other companies. Instead of the design being beholden to the manufacturing, finance or manufacturing departments, these all conform to the will of the design department headed by Jony Ive.

Two ways to read this: 1) Designers are dictators who bend organizational BS to their will, or 2) Designers are experts who understand process and materials ridiculously well.
People mostly hate change, and metro gnome shell and unity all represent that. Why did people like Engadget go from hating Vista to loving Vista SP1 aka Win7? They had gotten used to it and microsoft gave them a good excuse to change their minds. While gnome shell was a bit rougher around the edges as most dot oh open source projects tend to be, you'll emd up seeing the same behavior in n years when people will be screaming bloody murder about giving up gnome 3... or win8/9.
Ha, that's cool to know. I think this tool is a bit more lightweight - it just links you to drivers, and doesn't need a setup. But it's a bit depressing to know drivers were still a headache even then!
They're trying to force those people to upgrade. I don't know if that's a good idea, but that's clearly their intent.
Ruby Enterprise Edition End-of-Life, Phusion Focuses on Passenger
How are joke tasks ("Need a full body massage, pronto") filtered out? Is there a cost-upfront to posting a task?
Yeah, whatever they're doing about server-side rendering is just completely failing, which is really surprising. Gmail works well without js, so it's not as if they don't have competent web devs.

Smuggling XML in a giant CSS comment is also very … special.
Goodbye, First Amendment: ‘Trespass Bill’ will make protest illegal.
λ→ is normalizing
On Code Readability (Haskell/Python examples)
The <reviews on Amazon for this book are not very positive:

http://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/1455516074/ref=cm_cr_d...

Anyone read it and care to comment?
The malls aren't for you, they're for people--predominately women--who shop recreationally.
> No WP7 device is capable of running WP8(or at least that is the rumor.)

I thought the rumor was the opposite?

http://www.windowsphonedaily.com/2012/02/rumor-apollo-will-s...
> Let's use TV as an example. So yep, if you spend your time on one of those cable channels where you watch rich people all the time, pretty soon it's not that you'll understand how rich people live, it's that pretty soon you'll start believing that it is better to live like they do.

In Brazil and India, rich people on soap operas don't have many kids; sure enough, when you correlate the opening of TV stations with birth rates... http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/10/fertility-fall-still-p...
Undeniable evidence of electoral fraud uncovered
It's called precedent, look it up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precedent
I read it the same way you did but then I guess the point is that people are not coming back. So for this reason, the headline is worth the mention.
And yet, I love my Sony Google TV.
This seems to be the same issue as megaupload. A company outside the US, marketing a service that's illegal in the US to US citizens. Money paid for the service is then moved overseas. (I understand there may have been users in other countries, like megaupload)

While not something I necessarily agree with - I don't think this particular move indicates all .COMs are now threatened.
That's a non-issue. They've already been through plenty of anti-trust lawsuits.
Could be that they just can't get enough IPv4 addresses to implement it anymore (at least without sacrificing windows XP compatibility :/)
Computers are an extension of consciousness. What I believe the author is trying to say is that programming is more than just a skill task. It is akin to giving someone hands in a handless world allowing people to manipulate their environment.
“Sports betting is illegal in Maryland, and federal law prohibits bookmakers from flouting that law simply because they are located outside the country," DHS said.

LOL what? "You can't flout the law just because you're outside the jurisdiciton of the law".

---

Also, the crux of the article is that a .COM domain registered an operated by Canadian entities was "taken over" by Verisign at the behest of DHS. Verisign added NS records at the root to redirect the affected domain to a takedown page.
How Does Our Language shape the way we think?
Although true in a practical sense (NYT cited a study on older people where in which more introspective types were less happy) I reject the option of extra happiness brought about by lack of knowledge, e.g.

To each his sufferings: all are men,
Condemned alike to groan;
The tender for another's pain,
The unfeeling for his own.
Yet ah! why should they know their fate?
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies.
Thought would destroy their paradise.
No more; where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise.

(Thomas Gray, "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College", this is the origin of the term "Ignorance is bliss". The notes on this stanza are worth a read: http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/comment.cgi?text=odec&...).

Would you rather be Cypher happily eating his steak in a fictional world or the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar living in a real but wretched world? I would choose the latter but this is by no means an easy question.
France plans things pretty well in comparison (at least on outwardly views) compared to the US. I realize you said based on a typical government. There are negatives to a for-profit company doing things as well, where if something that could be developed would be beneficial to usefulness to users - but perhaps would hurt the profitable, then it likely wouldn't get implemented.