skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This was interesting and pretty cool MVP.
I provided a whole bunch of suggestions. However it wasn't long before it degenerated into a cesspool.

I really don't understand how people have time to waste in uttering such bollocks into the chat.
I'll second this. I'm currently using the X220 with Gentoo and it works perfectly except for the trackpad (which shakes the cursor in some areas). I have to use the keyboard mouse pointer. I was also concerned about price and managed to get mine used on Craigslist.
Interrupts are not without drawbacks. There are valid reasons to not implement them, particularly on the web.
They can't let passengers test the devices:

"For example, if the airline wanted to get approval for the iPad, it would have to test the first iPad, iPad 2 and the new iPad, each on a separate flight, with no passengers on the plane."
Cool idea, I'd definitely make use of this feature it was available. However, I don't think we'll ever see it, manufacturers won't consider it something people want.
Google Wallet’s Founding Engineer, Product Lead Already at Work on Tappmo
Newest Freebies from the Designmoo Community
You seem to be attributing to me a lot of beliefs I don't hold.

Can you give examples of any specific sentences or passages I wrote that you believe to be false?
I think it's useful - all of these sites fall into the social networking space, but they all have different ways of changing these things (and every site is changing them, at that).

Next logical step is tapping into API's for settings API's have control over so you can streamline the settings update (obviously that will never be completely possible for usernames/passwords etc - but the more social apps and customizable settings out there the more of a pain point that will become).
I've learned that there is a difference between being a good speaker and being a polished speaker. PG isn't very polished - there are tons of uhms and some inherent awkwardness to his talks, but I still consider him a very good speaker. With his awkwardness on stage comes some natural sense of charisma. The audience laughs, feels engaged, and is glued to the speaker wondering with anticipation what he's going to say next. At the end, everybody is very happy for having heard the talk, and I don't think anyone ever feels bored during it.

I expect with a few lessons it would be fairly easy to add polish to those talks if it becomes necessary (e.g. running for office, etc.)
Chat is NOT dead. See campfire for example which even is a quite new chat tool. In fact, entire companies (including my own) are using chat for all their internal communication and were doing this for years. Maybe the anonym chatroom for teenager in the 90s is dead, but that is for good reason. The Chat as a tool itself is still really powerful and effective. (and widely used)

The implementation of rabblr also is really cool. But i think the part with the anonymous users might be a problem. I just logged in for a few minutes and it was full of trolling. Also that you can't carry the chat over multiple pages is anoying, but there might be a way around that.
Plus i really don't want to talk to random people on webpages. I probably want to talk to someone who can give me an information that i want, which would be a site adminstrator or company staff or whatever. Like olark.
Or i want to talk to my friends or people i know, but i can do that on any IM that i got open anyway.

So to sum it up. Nicely done, but i also doubt the usefulness of this tool.
Sometimes I like to think about how this sentence will be finished:

"One hundred years ago, programs were punched onto cards that were fed into the machine. Fifty years ago, programs were written in a text editor and compilers just did the most basic optimizations. Now, of course, programs are...."

It seems obvious to me that in 30, 40, 50 years, we won't be developing software in the same manner we do now. Especially web software, which is a painful step backwards from UI Builders.

In this timeline, the transition from procedural to OO is insignificant, like the transition from hand-punched cards to machine-punched. With the benefit of hindsight, OO, Functional, whatever, will all feel primitive.
The " legal theories underlying establishment of jurisdiction" consists of who has the biggest fleet.
This has been true for about 5000years since the Egyptians got their act together, has continued through the Greek, Roman, Venetian, British and now American empires.

The only thing that is new is the power behind the fleet is now whoever pays for the commander-in-chief's re-election effort.

If you doubt this you should look at UK students being extradited to the US under 'vital anti-terrorism legislation' for running a site giving links to TV shows
Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail
I get the convenience for things like paying rent, taxes, etc., but the main reason I don't use credit cards for small things is how much less convenient it is. Much easier to hand over 50 Kr than go through the routine of: gesture to indicate I'm paying with card / make way over to machine at the end of the bar (waiting if someone else is using it) / insert card / enter pin / pause to confirm it went through. Even if I have to wait to receive change, it's usually still faster.
Can you tell me the sentence where I claimed that?
You may laugh, but how many years ago would extraditing a university student with a website that had links to pirated content have been laughable?
Yes, Visa, MC and Amex take a cut. This infuriated shopowners to no end when they raised their tariffs, prompting a wave of "no charges under 50kr" or "3kr extra if you're paying with card (under x kr)"
Verizon bill pay offering checking before credit card
This isn't new but I love the idea of sticking it to the credit card companies. I wish consumers were more educated about the costs incurred by businesses when they use plastic instead of paper. What other examples have you seen of online merchants offering the checking account as the primary payment method?
Ironically, Twitter came from the midwest (Jack Dorsey.- St Louis, Missouri)
Most DF posts don't make HN.

edit: and regardless he makes a good point here.
Another vote for ASUS U31SD!!! (I am also excited like a teenage girl about this laptop!)

I bought it for $650 from Amazon almost a year ago. It is not really an Ultrabook. But, I think it is perfect. The screen size is a 13", it is incredibly light, yet still has a full-size keyboard, all ports you will ever need, and quite A LOT of power (4Gb RAM expandable to 8Gb, 2 cores, 4 hardware threads). I use Ubuntu with Unity, with a lot of browser windows, a heavyweight IDE (NetBeans), lots of terminal windows and it works very snappy. It also never gets hot. The battery life is terrific.. 7-8 hours!

I didn't buy an SSD yet, but I intend to, in a few years when they get cheaper.

I dual boot Windows for gaming, and I've even played some relatively recent video games (like Just Cause 2, Mass Effect 3), with maxed-out resolution on an external monitor. Works like a charm.
I've been running Linux on laptops since 2004 or so. Used Debian, then Ubuntu and never had any bad hardware issues. The worst issues would require connecting the ethernet cable and downloading missing modules (that couldn't be distributed on the CD).

I just got myself a Dell Vostro v131 n-series that came with Linux preinstalled. I updated it to the latest Ubuntu and everything works flawlessly. Just about any average notebook will run Linux well, unless it's specifically designed not to. My second option was an HP netbook, but HP insisted I'd have to buy it with Windows if I wanted the 768x1366 screen.
If you run a business, skype

If you run a team, campfire

If you're whiz kid running a team, hipchat

If you work, gchat

If you're a kid, facebook

If you're old, yahoo

If you're a nitwit, twitter
>Any language that isn't a fairly close C descendant. Haskell, Lisp, Python, Perl are languages I've done some work in with minimal OOness.

At least in Python - which is the only one of those four I can speak for - all you are doing is basically OO (in fact, everything in Python is an object). The beautiful thing about Python is how it's abstracting a lot of this away by providing functions which implicitly call "magic methods" which are either generated by the interpreter or can be defined by the programmer (ie, __iter__(), __next__(), __init__()), and by virtue of Duck Typing, which means an object defines itself by what it can do, not its identity or origin.

You'd never even notice a lot of this unless you dip into the internals of Python a bit. And ultimately, I don't think this is actually possible without using OO or some close equivalent. So in the end, a lot of the "solutions" people have proposed in this thread ultimately depend on the very thing they want to "solve": Object Orientation.
You're right that the scope protection I'm talking about isn't as clear cut when it comes to classes. Design by contract is an attempt to address this. Client code can only refer to another object through a well-defined interface. Thus your limited scope is enforced by the type system itself. Furthermore, much of this discussion is about perception of complexity rather than actual complexity.

In python you can access any classes internals if you're persistent enough. However, the difficulty in doing so and the convention that says that's bad practice gives the perception of a separation, thus one does not need to be concerned about its implementation. It lowers the cognitive burden in using a piece of functionality.

Haven't you noticed this yourself? A simpler interface is much easier to use than a more complicated one. If you're familiar with python, perhaps you've used the library called requests, its a pythonic API for http reqeusts. Compare this to the core library API using urllib2. The mental load to perform the same action is about an order of magnitude smaller with requests than urllib2, and its because there are far more moving parts with the latter.

My contention is that if bits of data and code are exposed to you, it is essentially a part of the API, even if you never actually use it. You still must comprehend it on some level to ensure you're using data it can access correctly, aka interaction space (I feel like I'm selling a book here).
I'm curious if there is a higher percentage of programmers than the population in general who are bilinguals. After all programming requires us to learn new languages for talking to the machine, there could be a correlation in ability to learn machine languages.

Could someone make a poll here?

I speak norwegian and english fluently and dont translate in my head when using english, but I'm currently in and around central/south america and learning spanish, and when speaking spanish I at the moment translate from english so probably a long way to go before I could consider me trilingual. Whats interesting about languages is that just like programming languages two different languages are not equally adept for explaining the same situations.
I'm glad to see near the end the mention of high-density displays. When designing icons, a 64@2x icon should be different than a 128@1x icon. Although the former is technically at 128, it is going to be displayed on a high-density display at a smaller size, and care should be taken to simplify embellishments and details that will just make it look too detailed when viewed.

For icon designers out there, I'm curious how many are already aware of this distinction and are designing icons accordingly?
pg is certainly not the best speaker I've seen but is one of my favourites to listen to. Every word has so much value behind it, and the honesty of his thoughts comes across much better in-person than in-essay.

I notice pg uses footnotes very liberally throughout all of his essays. How do you decide when something should be a footnote, as opposed to another sentence or parenthesized thought or simply redacted?

I'm used to footnotes being links and references, not clarifications or justifications as I often find here.
John Gruber is a well-read author. Many of his readers frequent Hacker News.

There's a reason he's so well-read, too. His comments are frequently insightful and quickly make sense out of complicated issues. He's been my favorite online writer for years; sometimes he gets petty or partisan, but usually his writing is damned good.
I believe people disagree with him and downvoting has replaced discussion in many cases. You may downvote a comment that's plain wrong, but you shouldn't do it if someone else already countered the argument.
I don't care that pg says "umm" a lot. The content of the essays and speeches is what I find interesting.
So should the US have jurisdiction over .com/.net/.info etc rather than just over ".us" ? Isn't .com an international designation nowadays?

Isn't that like giving the country that invented the telegraph jurisdiction over all undersea cables wherever they are installed?
I'm not talking about basic thoughts. I mean, when you trace logic in your head, one language or another appears.
pg, I may be alone in this, but I think your talks, even when read out verbatim, have an extra dimension that is missing in your essays. When you speak, your curiosity and sense of humor come through strongly.

You like to use writing to explore radical new ideas, and to this end, you refine your essays to have as few qualifications as possible. On the page it sometimes comes off as arrogant. But with your voice, I can hear you proposing these ideas for the sheer delight of a new perspective... the tone says "what if we thought about it this way?"

Also, I'd like to slightly disagree that when one is in an audience, one's critical thinking goes down. It's a matter of knowing how to focus your attention. When I watch someone speak, I'm looking for the unintentional parts as much as the intentional. Where does the person smile and feel relaxed? Where do they seem stressed? What's their body language saying? For a geek metaphor, think of that part in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash where he describes how certain people have the ability to "condense fact from the vapor of nuance". This gives a whole other channel of information to engage your analytical mind, so watching a speech can become like reading.
I would agree that speaking relates to action whereas writing relates to contemplation and creation.

I don't believe it's one or the other but rather both being part of the cycle that enables us to transform our reality.
In addition, most non-OS X operating systems boot on Intel Macs using their EFI BIOS emulation layer, which doesn't quite give you the native hardware control that booting straight EFI does.

I work with enterprise deployed Macs and I'll tell you that most Linux distributions, when booting Macs via EFI BIOS emulation, do not properly control CPU and GPU power and tend to run them at full tilt. Apple's Bootcamp drivers for Windows address this issue but Apple hasn't released equivalent drivers for Linux.

The end result is that, if you intend to use Linux multiple hours a day, nonstop, on a device as space-constricted as an Air, with CPU and GPU running full tilt - yes I know when running in BIOS mode a Mac's fans stay permanently at max speed - you are going to COOK that little unit.

I've seen it more times than I care for.

I'd -really- suggest looking at a different machine if this is your use model.
I hate the term "Brogrammer" and everything it stands for. I hope this fad ends soon.
Yep. Things get 'troublesome'.
A car could get you there faster, or dryer in the rain, or carrying more stuff. But there's not much Excel can do for the vast majority of users who just want a table with a few dozen records, that ViewSheet (or the granddaddy of them all VisiCalc) can't. Same with wordprocessing.
All grocery stores around me use a sealed cash system. I've been more often stuck behind people wanting to pay with cash when the cash scanner breaks down compared to the card machine being down.
The very meaning of the term “icon” implies a non-literal representation, and since there is no automatic way to transform high-res representation to low-res caricature, you end up with vector artists doing horrendous pixel art.

Pixel art is a very different medium from what they’re used to, and there are specific techniques that they haven’t learned, largely because they don’t even know such techniques exist. They don’t know how (or when) to antialias or dither by hand. They don’t know what banding is and why to avoid it, nor what selective outlining (“selout”) is and why they need it. They especially don’t know how to correctly choose a good, limited palette. All of these things taken together make for designers at best reinventing tools and techniques, and at worst making icons that suck.

But what can you do? Pixel art isn’t a popular medium, so the wealth of knowledge out there goes to waste. It’s such a pity.
What Does It Mean To Love What You Do?
March Madness - SQL Azure - sys.databases
Not sure why this can be a "solved problem" with fonts (mostly) due to intelligent hinting.

Is there nothing like "Hinting for SVG" or an SVG equivalent to "Multiple Master" fonts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_master_fonts)?
False modesty aside, I am a very good public speaker. Doing debate in high school, I had an undefeated regular season, as in not losing a single round. I say this just to point out that I'm not a mediocre public speaker championing the written word.

Paul Graham is right, but it depends more on context than he suggests:

Speaking about a technical subject, you want to communicate the ideas themselves. The emotional content in this case is noise. Paul suggests in the notes that academic talks are more immune to this, but having been to quite a few academic talks and given a few myself, I still find them quite inferior to written papers and one-on-one conversations. True, people can still inject the emotional appeals in papers or conversations, but they tend to get more easily noticed and filtered by the reader or listener without the spellbound effect.

Political debates are perhaps an exception. When you watch a presidential debate, you're not only looking for the president with the best ideas, but a president you believe has the leadership capacity to carry them out. You might personally want the president who has the best ideas, regardless of how charming they appear on camera, but like it or not, a lot of that leadership rests on personal charisma.
I agree with you that Point3D-type-thingies are a sweet spot, though your operator-overloaded line is not doable in most class-based languages, and indeed is generally controversial in OO, so I don't think it gets to count here.

That aside, you're quite right that when one has a common construct that permeates the entire program, one badly wants to give it first-class status in the language. What I've noticed, though, is that these constructs don't tend to get involved in complex object graphs (or if they do, they're leaf nodes). Rather, they tend to be atomic and universal (i.e. interoperable with anything) and simple. So I wonder if what one really wants here is the ability to add new primitives to the language. That's potentially quite different from classical classes. It's more related to the "build up a language that fits the problem, then code the solution in that language" idea.
Single page link for those who don't want to read an article split up into 5 pages:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/bank-of-america-to...
I have found speaking to be much more about introducing the dots to the audience and letting them connect the dots themselves. To do this the dots have to presented in a very simple form. Sometimes over simplified.

Good writing, goes a step further. Introducing clear ideas in short form, and then expanding on each is much more indicative of writing that helps explain ideas. Especially in Tech/Creative/Startup/Media/Design circles, you have a bit more liberty to do some of the dot connecting for your readers.
And with the transaction history included, and most transactions, by necessity, tell something about you (at least the merchant probably needs to know where to send your item or whatever) it seems to me that it would be utterly trivial to get a hold of the real identity of the vast majority of the users after even his/hers first transactions. And this is valuable information and it will, as today, be bought and sold freely - maintaining a database of who is who seems like childs play. Not only that, but also who bought what (or at least from who), making it the least anonymous way to make a purchase imaginable (almost as bad as saying what you bought on twitter).

For anyone hoping of using bitcoins for their everyday transactions, would that be any more anonymous than a credit card is today? Or even worse, it might give you the sense that you are anonymous when you are not.
Sure, but there are still configuration problems. I remember having once set the root password to "", thinking it will lock everything out. Turns out that it only locks it for login, but not email server authentication. Someone managed to send emails as root@mybox, logging in with a blank password.

I realize this isn't OpenSSH, but there will always be stupid users. Exposing as little as you can is a good idea.
>was there a period of time when you could actually use your phone on a plane? I'm pretty young so I don't remember back to the first cell phones.

There used to these cord phones in the seat in front of you above the food tray where you can pay $10 or whatever to make a call. I have never seen anyone use it though.
Cython is both differently defined and serves a different purpose. First of all, RPython is runnable, Cython is not. RPython has type inference, but more importantly, because it works from live objects, it has Python as a metaprogramming language. It's also much easier to extend than Cython.

Purpose wise cython is for optimizing pieces of code, rpython is for writing interpreters. RPython is quite faster than Cython, but it's also much more restricted, making it a bit unusable for the purpose of "just" speeding up pieces of code (you can't have PyObject equivalents).
Cash is remarkably resistant to all the potential problems that could disable credit card transactions. For example, in 2003, much of the northeastern U.S. was affected by a power blackout that lasted over a day in some places, and of course credit card readers require power to operate. The servers that support credit card transactions have backup power (although only for a limited amount of time), but they're also vulnerable to network outages, software failures and deliberate attacks (we've seen how bad some of our major banks are at security). Having cash as a backup seems to be a prudent choice.
It feels to me that PG is simply making excuses for not preparing for his talks. There is no reason technical talks can't be fun, engaging, and full of information. If you only read it out loud once, you're not doing enough prep. Sure you could do a funny talk, which sounds great and doesn't have substance. But it's not a zero sum game.

Don't read your talk out once, read it outloud a dozen times. Don't present it unpracticed infront of the conference hall, present it in front of friends / coworkers first.

Speaking and writing, the two, are a major way that programmers get to be known. It's important that we learn to communicate clearly in an engaging way with our community. If you're having trouble, take a monologue class at your local theater.
Wow pretty slick. Add more options to intuitively control all the FB privacy settings (I only see a few basics covered here) and I think this can really gain some traction.
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The main reason I use credit cards for everything including small things is that it's so much faster and more convenient.

Also, I don't carry coins anymore, and I rarely carry bills either (I'm in the US).
Hence the "in general". It still has its place for internal company tools. I often use IRC for technical help. Still, chat as we knew it, as some people still think of it, is dead.
So, WebSockets are a mistake then?
A Curious Company