skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>It's hard to experiment with a toolbar in Excel because millions of non-computer-geek users

Excel is another of my favorite "Why did they do that?" examples. In my opinion, MS absolutely ruined Excel somewhere in the transition from Office 2003 to 2007. If you were a power user with Excel'03 you felt like a total idiot with Excel'07. And, this wasn't a matter of a few buttons here and there. The thing was almost utterly unusable compared to what you could do with the '03 version. Furthermore, they complicated the usage of VBA modules. If you had a library of VBA work that you used regularly you, all of a sudden, found yourself scratching your head trying to figure out how to do some pretty basic stuff.

I use Excel extensively for automated code generation. Simple examples are the generation of repetitive lookup table code in various languages. Or code to pre-stuff database tables. Or maintaining a complex LUT-driven state machine. I have custom Excel tools that have taken months to develop that do increase productivity in a measurable way. For example, one tool uses Excel to auto-magically write the code (LUT, callbacks, etc.) for a menu system on an embedded device with an LCD display. Before the tool it'd take hours, if not a couple of days, to maintain. After the custom VBA tool it was a matter of minutes.

Anyhow, upon switching to '07 (mostly a forced switch because I needed to migrate to a 64 bit OS for Finite Element Analysis work) I went from light speed to crawling. That, to me, is not an improvement. I am OK with learning new things, you have to be open to it if you want to remain in this game, but sometimes you can't help but scratch your head and try to figure out what the hell they were thinking.

Thankfully that was easily solved with a VM running XP and Excel'03.
Basically they're talking about drafting "enforceable codes of conduct", which smells a lot like what PCI Compliance is for credit card numbers. Anybody who's dealt with that can tell you is a clear set of easily-implementable rules that in no way requires you to spend gobs of money on consultants. </sarcasm>
Why Apple products are well designed and buggy
I think you and Patrick are illustrating the philosophical distinction between "is" and "ought".
I've read a couple of different posts / comments from Matt Cutts that state subdomain vs subdirectory makes no difference for seo.

Do you have a quick explanation or link as to why a subdirectory is better?
Does anyone really use "save" so infrequently that they have not memorized the keyboard shortcut? There's a reason no apps on OS X have save icons...
You're right, of course. I must have spent thirty or forty seconds looking for a more accurate phrase, but settled on "for their own good" because it flowed better.

Now, those pro-anorexia blogs are creepy and disheartening; I looked through some a while back, and they really are as sad as they sound. If Tumblr's goal is to prevent more teenagers from latching onto that subculture, there are a few things they might try. They could stick warning banners up on the blogs in question, visibly registering their protest without going so far as to remove content. Or they might shrug regretfully and say there's not much they can do, since they hardly have a monopoly on the blogging platform market, which would be true. Setting themselves up as censors was not their only option, and as far as I'm concerned, it should have been pretty far down on the list of ideas.

In general, I'm uncomfortable with the impulse to try to stop people from saying messages that you don't want others to hear.
My understanding is that HTTP/1.1 pipelining can break in a messy way where the client isn't sure whether some requests in flight will be serviced or not. Thus it tends to be disabled. In contrast, SPDY either works correctly or it falls back to regular HTTP.
For my part, I started using git at the command line because most of the Linux GUIs were pretty weak. They may have gotten better since I looked (1 yr?) but at this point I'm comfortable with the command line interface.

Also, I jump between Linux at work and OS X at home, and the git workflow is the same on either if I am using the command line.

The Mac GitHub app seems really nice, though.
How do you feel about someone livecasting their own suicide, then, to take your position to an extreme?
The Tesla Roadster costs in the neighborhood of $130,000, so $40k is a fraction of its price.
There is no "slope" when it comes to private establishments. Just like McDonalds reserves the right to not serve you if you aren't wearing shoes or a shirt, Tumblr reserves the right to limit whatever content they see fit.

Freedom of speech does not apply when participating on a private organization's platform.
What Facebook really thinks about your personal privacy
Yea, it almost always works this way. Some entity in power thinks it's for the greater "good" to censor content from people and the slippery slope of censorship begins. Why can't Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, or any of these other social media outlets have enough faith in humanity to allow people to make their own informed decisions? Boggles my mind how these sites preach freedom of expression yet censor anything they don't agree with.
How many times did you bought a new app you discovered through Genius? That's why.
Certified programming with dependent types (a tutorial)
Should All Web Traffic Be Encrypted?
Promoting suicide ≠ snuff films
Rejection therapy is amazingly effective. Almost shockingly so. The effects seem to last the rest of the day.

I didn't like the regular rejection therapy deck suggestions so I compiled my own list.

* Ask a random person for their phone number without introducing yourself, explaining why, or anything.

* Ask people for money.

* Ask some store employee if it's alright for you to explore some employee-only area of the store, e.g. their back room, or behind a door marked "authorized personnel only".

* In general, go somewhere you're not supposed to be where someone is likely to discover you and kick you out.

* When you're leaving Point A for Point B, ask a stranger at Point A out of the blue if they'd like to travel to Point B with you.

* ”Do you have a minute to talk about [insert issue]?" Save some time by inventing your own issue.

* Ask someone on the street if you can have your picture taken with them.

* Ask for hugs/neck massages.

* Come to some sort of event. Ask if you can give a quick presentation on something before the main event.

* Ask someone to tie your shoes.

* Ask to trade clothes.

* Ask people to give you a ride to wherever you’re going.

* Ask for a bite/sip of someones’ food/drink.

* Ask someone to sing or dance right there in the street with you.

* Try to buy people’s personal effects, i.e. watches, glasses, phone, for a dollar

* Try to sell your own personal effects.

* Ask someone to rate your theatrical death.

* Ask to cut in line (start at the back and see how far forward you can get!)

* Ask to have a staring contest or thumb wrestling match.

* Ask for a discount on a purchase, or a free sample.

* Ask where people are going, then ask if you can come.

*Ask if you can pick someone up (if they are smaller) or if they can pick you up (if they are bigger).
The problem isn't leering over her photos---I believe she's a body sculptor so is used to that particular attention.

The problem is that police officers are illegally accessing her private information to know more about her purely out of a puerile interest.
Independent of the community and boundary pushing aspects of Node.js, I don't recommend it to people because it commends an incredibly irritating pattern of programming.

I get the impression that Dahl knew ahead of time that he was working with some serious limitations with event-driven programming such as it is on V8. He's a smart guy, he had to have known how much cleaner things like Erlang are.

At the same time, we have a bunch of zealots who've never done any event-driven programming on C, Lisp/Scheme (CPS), or on Erlang who think it's the best thing since sliced bread because it's FAST.

I'd argue that the main advantage of Rails wasn't "speed" and I don't think it ever was.

Rails' main advantage was making the human fast. Node.js reeks of misguided pre-optimization to me. It doesn't make building a product any faster.

Could just as easily build a web app with CoffeeScript + BackBone + Flask (python), or Clojure, or Ruby, or whatever.

The single-page app paradigm needs to be pushed in terms of integration and productivty in order to get adopted. The backend involved is almost immaterial, it's just a JSON API conceptually.

So why are we pretending Node.js is somehow a successor to Rails when it doesn't actually improve on anything in terms of product or performance?
There will certainly be folks that decry this move as limiting freedom of speech, but the reality is this:

Freedom of speech does not apply when you participate on a private organization's platform.

For those that strongly oppose these types of policies from social networks, I'm very much in favor of you starting your own social network to cater to tastes and generes that suit what you feel is appropriate for your community.
Oh great. So now what am I going to use to search for new apps in Android?
Re: IBM's 1993 Simon: "The e-mail app even included the ability to click on a phone number to dial it."

Would that not constitute prior art in one of the patents Apple asserted against Android recently? I am only vaguely aware of the finer details so I'm probably mistaken on some point.
The HTC Dream didn't look anything like the iPhone either, but Jobs still says Android is a stolen product. So the question is, what did Android steal from Apple?
The author mentions this a little in the article, but I feel like they probably could have expanded on that point - the "$I" cost of piracy can change depending on the seller's track record. As noted recently in the Oatmeal comic about pirating Game Of Thrones (and Andy Ihnatko's response), the state of piracy is such that, effectively, all efforts to make piracy harder, make piracy more appealing.

I wonder how much pain these various industries will need to endure before they realize that the solution is to stop punching themselves in the face.
Indeed they don't have special ground with the iPhone. Except maybe for one "thing".

Back in 2007 I joined a new employer. One evening during my new hire training a colleague demo'ed his iPhone he brought over from America to Europe. All other attendees, including myself, were amazed about the multitouch, pinch and zoom photo's, the easiness of use, the awesome GUI and the beautiful design. At the end of the demo there was a deep respectful silence by all of us. Amazement. Thinking about our own phones at the time compared to what we just saw.

Then.. the owner of the iPhone put it gently against his face and caressed it. Yes he actually caressed it. I still remember that image.

This is the "thing". You know, this thing called love. Something that cannot be traded like an item and which still holds true for many.
I'm aware that they're shipped but disabled by default. I think there's something of mental blind-spot, however, because they're discouraged or treated as something only experts should use: I've never seen anything like the level of obscure error messages or cumbersome UI in any part of Mercurial which is enabled by default. I think it deserves more respect as a valid working style.

I would disagree with the statement regarding history rewriting and non-expert users, to note two exceptions: Git's amend commits are extremely easy to explain and rebase is not that much harder for common cases. These same users are going to have issues with merges and rely on good tool support nearly as much in that situation, too.

What I think would be welcome in Git is the very nice phased commit feature you mentioned. That's a great example of where the concern should have been directed towards the UI rather than the operation.
I can see how it’s better (the performance is awesome, searching in iTunes is just sooo damn slow, inflexible and no fun) and it has some cool but obvious tools. I’m just wondering why Apple needs to buy them. Can they really not just copy that?
Just to note, I subconsciously skipped over the examples in the article as if they were ads -- then wondered what he was talking about for a few seconds afterward. Must be my years of kung foo internet training.
Case Study: Using Mongo and MapReduce to Analyze a Difficult Research Problem
Because it's more fun.
Memory and learning is not just something that magically happens, there's a lot of electro-chemical machinery underlying all of it that is greatly influenced by gene variation and other factors:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_potentiation
Which ones specifically? I had to keep the micro-explanations very short so they only give a very very basic over-view, but the full page explanations should be more than suitable as they're a combination of the Wikipedia explanation and the official IETF explanation (from the RFCs).
Fwiw, fossil is engineered from the ground up to have an enduring disk representation if that's the top of your list.
I've developed a simple set of questions to avoid these types of pointless interviews.

It was last tested about two weeks ago when I was casually talking with the founder of a local startup who wanted me to join his team. I politely declined the offer.

Here are the questions:

1. What is your product?

If the answer to this is marketing talk, they fail the test.

2. Who is your customer?

Same with #1, but add "everybody!".

3. What is your development setup/rules/guidelines?

No source control? Bye.

Testing on production servers? Bye (this startup did that, and wondered why their app failed to work).

No workstations? You mean that I will use my personal computer at your office? Bye, Bye!

What language/framework/technology do you use? If the answer is PHP/in house MVC then I'm out. I dont mind PHP/MVC, but most are hacked up pieces of crap that can't compare to symfony or even code igniter/cakephp.

This allows me to consider working with people who know what they are doing, instead of wasting time with people who want to test me on what they think I know.

This simple test was developed after an interview with a local startup. The interviewer was the "software engineer", and he had pulled questions from project euler to test me. After realizing this, I ended the interview quickly.
Their product? A web app for realtors to showcase their listings. Yeah, that required developers that were able to solve advanced project euler exercises.
Talent acquisition?
I feel like censoring it would be unethical, while refusing to host it would simply be poor form.

Livecasting of own suicide: freedom of expression + freedom to make choices with regard to own life.

Edit: This is not to imply that Tumblr is not entitled to do whatever they damn please with their own website. But, should someone build a website specifically for livecasting suicides I would very much disagree with its censorship.
That's what I write Clojure for, and end up with something faster and cleaner anyway. I even get to use Netty if I want.

It's a bit misguided to make it a matter of taste anyway. There's nothing to discuss if you're making a decision on the basis of "fun". If you don't have rational reasons for making the judgment call, then you don't have anything of substance to actually share about the stack.
I've used Qt Creator only once or twice, but my memory (and the handful of screenshots I see on google image search) is that it's pretty much the same. An editor rectangle embedded in a bunch of other crap with way too much vertical space above and below it dedicated to things that aren't very important.

For reference, my emacs window has the gnome 3 panel and the window manager title bar as waste and that's it. And for years I ran a custom metacity theme which turned off the title bars entirely (haven't managed to port that to gnome shell yet).
I don't think this is necessarily a slippery slope.

AFAIK (I may be wrong though) this isn't due to external pressure or some PR fiasco (coughreddit), this is something Tumblr has decided did not reflect their company ethic, and wants off their platform.

The difference between this and reddit's last run-in with offensive content is that Tumblr has shown no weakness here, whereas Reddit more than proved that a sufficiently large PR catastrophe is all it takes to change site policy.

What Reddit has encouraged is more boycotts and more PR shitstorms from 3rd parties hoping to affect change on the site. Tumblr, by acting proactively, has not opened these doors (yet). They are still their own arbiters of good taste, as opposed to opening the floodgates of mob-rule.
It's a little bit of an overgeneralization but it's a feature which is disabled by default and generally described with caveats like for experts only, in certain situations, etc. while it's such a routine way of life for Git users. I really do believe that's the sign that the Mercurial community is a lot less comfortable with that working style in general and that impression has been supported by the general clunkiness and obscure failures which is completely unlike the normal Mercurial experience, suggesting patch queues are an under-loved feature.

I am happy to see phased commits - perhaps that'll start leading to a little more UI support for operations which historically were considered edgy.
There are some problems in HTTP pipelining. Nevertheless Firefox and Opera have pipelining implementations that work and are significantly faster than HTTP with keepalive. It's enabled by default in Opera.

The point being that they've designed this new protocol based on their assumptions and hunches. Same lack of rigor is present throughout the whole spec -- take a look at how much redundancy is in the prefix dictionary for instance.
Hey, stick around and comment more. The HN APL/J/K/Q mafia needs all the help we can get :)
"So in the end, every new Apple product has what they consider a finished design with new ideas, but with rough edges like crashes, performance issues or some less relevant features omitted to be reworked later."

Where is the "It just works" in that statement ? If this were to be true, it would seem that for Apple a finished product is a product that has a cool design but is functionally flawed. I have to disagree.

The author seems to confuse REAL bugs with lack of features. I think Apple does risk a lot every time they release something new, but I have not experienced a big number of crashes or performance issues.
"Slippery slope" is not a rhetorically valid argument. (just sayn')

I agree with you, it's awfully two faced of the popular organizations. Historically, if you really wanted freedom of speech, you pretty much had to own the printing press. I think the same thing is largely true now. You gotta own the server that hosts the blog. no one out there will protect you.
Why does anyone have to decide what is "appropriate" for a community? Why can't a community just be?
And submarining Android app discovery doesn't hurt.
This app looks pretty awesome. It will be interesting to see what competition springs up in the next year or so.
I just tested this, and both IE9 and FF10 insert new tabs to the right in Windows 7.
Or, let's be honest, because Github already nailed Git so we had to base bitbucket on something else.
> How would you implement this without closures?

You don't have to look too far to find out: blocks haven't always been supported, and the older animation APIs still exist on UIView. You need to set a completion callback selector instead of passing a block. It's certainly uglier, on both sides of the API, but particularly on the implementation side. Blocks wrap up the state they need by default (well, for the majority of cases) which saves a lot of tedious work.
I'm going to apply this to my management style and make sure I praise people for working hard, trying hard, but not being smart, or naturally good at anything. They know they are good at stuff naturally, but for the team to be most effective, the smartest people need to work the hardest.
I, too, am uncomfortable with such things. The slippery slope does exist, although to a lesser degree when the entity does not hold a monopoly (don't want to drive users away to more permissive options). However, the slipperiness of the slope should not preclude people stepping out onto it. It is less comfortable out there, less simple, less black-and-white than settling at one extreme or another. To take the example from the other direction, consider zero-tolerance policies for weapons at schools. I don't think many people would find it reasonable for a young student to be expelled for bringing a swiss army knife his grandfather gave him to school. Doesn't matter, says the school district. Slippery slope. Where do we draw the line?

As rational individuals, we can decide where to draw the line. This vastly increases the surface area of critical attacks - the line will seem arbitrary, and there will always be boundary cases which could go one way or the other. "Why this and not that?" will be heard often. It's an easy target. So yes, the easy answer is that all discourse should be allowed.

But really, I don't want people advocating that bullshit to teenagers.
That's true. You can't talk politics in the mall. OTOH if you actively encourage loitering then get pissed off when people loiter - you're a hypocritical asshole, and i think your property rights should be diminished.

edit very first line from http://www.tumblr.com/about

"Tumblr lets you effortlessly share anything."

which is a bold faced lie.
Locust: A scalable user load testing tool written in Python and gevent
Because everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, has an axe to grind at some point.
Sequel looks pretty interesting. I've really fallen out of love with ActiveRecord ... mostly because it really only simplifies the most basic scenarios and as an abstraction it's so very "leaky" as Joel would say. I've begun work on an idea for an ORM that just simplifies the most tedious parts of writing SQL but requires no boilerplate classes and is light and speedy https://github.com/iaindooley/PluSQL (but it currently only supports MySql because it requires buffered query sets)
Atmospheric focusing is a pretty inefficient process, on top of the existing inefficiencies of massive nuclear weapons it's probably not worthwhile to use as a weapon. It's a lot easier to send conventional bombs or bullets to Finland if you want to break windows there than to use multi-megaton bombs thousands of miles away.

The main reason you build big bombs is (aside from the arms race / show boating aspect) to destroy important targets with inaccurate delivery systems. The other reason to build big bombs is to intentionally create fallout, which could be used in a "doomsday" weapon, possibly as a MAD deterrent. If you exploded a 1,000 MT nuke on a containership in international waters off the coast of Europe or North America and you took advantage of the prevailing winds you could do devastating damage to the population, agriculture, etc.
Inventing a new company policy in response to something you found distasteful and then enforcing that upon your existing user base screams slippery slope. Especially given there is even less of a brightline standard of what violates Tumblr's policy than when we were considering reddit. It's much easier (not to trivialize it) to determine if something is child-related and sexual of nature than the entire realm of things contained in "self-injury".

As I implied in my other comment, things like "self-injury" are very arbitrary and vary person-to-person. (Not that I should have to disclaim this, but I don't think things like suicide or eating disorders are "good" or healthy).
Defending Independent Innovation