skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Blogger was like that too and I loved it. It's why I've had super basic shared hosting at Dreamhost for so long - it could handle pretty much any traffic by serving up plain HTML.

I'd be curious to see how a "Blogger of today" would fare if it also had Dropbox integration, so you could use specialized local apps like IA Writer if you wanted to but also still write or edit on the go without your main machine.
Awesome! Thanks for this link.
Perhaps it's not an fbi conspiracy, it's the secret brotherhood of BIND admins who just really want a day off.
Flash isn't harder to program for or distribute on. It's so easy to build in kids make games, and it's so easy to distribute since they're a single self-contained file that those kids can make games that get country-sized volumes of traffic playing them.
I did the same thing. You can actually change the weapon to "flask" (so it doesn't show up) and armor to things like "boss", "rick", "nyan", etc. "Rat" is pretty fun too.
Google Chrome v18 Released
This would be even better if it could display change over time. To support, for example, animate the change in wind direction for the past week.
Rails 3+ requires a js runtime too, if you don't install one you'll get an ugly crash the first time you try to do anything.
What do you think is wrong about writing an IRC bot that responds to "that's what she said" with quotes from famous women?

I'm curious. Because the only answers I can imagine are (a) you think writing IRC bots is wrong, (b) you think that displaying quotes from famous women is wrong, or (c) engaging in public discourse that politely and indirectly calls attention to sexist behavior is wrong.

I'll wait. I'd really love to hear more of your opinion on this.
The characteristic need not be common, just easily associated.

See the study here for rape and sexual abuse statistics: http://www.publicintegrity.org/investigations/campus_assault.... Even if we limit "rape" to situations involving violence and the threats of violence,[1] the study found about 1.3% of the college students questioned admitted to acts that met the definition of rape, and 1.1% admitted to acts that met the definition of sexual abuse of a child.

Now, for example, are even 1% of muslims terrorists? Almost certainly not, but the behavior is common enough that it is easily associated with the group, and readily supports many jokes relying on that association.

The relevant behavior does not need to be common, just common enough such that it is readily conjured up in the mind of the listener in response to the joke.

[1] If you include people who answered "yes" to the question of whether they had sex with someone who was "too intoxicated (on alcohol or drugs) to resist your sexual advances (e.g., removing their clothes)" the number skyrockets to 6.4%.
Cute but silly really. If you want to see a genuine Saturn V rocket there is an actual one on display in the Apollo building at the Kennedy Space Center. It's open to the public and it's intact and it's amazing.

I think Bezos is just pulling a publicity stunt here as he makes no mention at all of the artifacts and treasures on display to the public at the inspiring Kennedy Space Center.
Design of Servo - Mozilla's next-generation rendering engine
The story of 24 million empty Google+ Profiles
My undergraduate institution (Reed College) has a student operated nuclear reactor on campus. No weapons grade nuclear material, and it wouldn't make a very good dirty bomb either. However, it's useful for bombarding things with neutrons and it does give off a pretty blue light because of Cherenkov radiation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed_Research_Reactor.
All I could think of when I saw this were the jokes about McDonald's having braille for their drive through window.
Unfortunately, DSLRs are painfully outdated. With them you can’t tweet or email photos, you can’t crop or adjust them and you can’t organize your library. And to get your photos anywhere, you’ll need a cord or a compatible card reader. This is ridiculous given that it’s 2012.

I don't want to have my phone in my camera - I certainly don't want phone calls interrupting my pictures. Actually, yes I can do quite a bit of editing from my DSLR and it's not even a top-of-the-line model. I don't mind transferring my photos over USB and storing them on cards, but if I was in a big hurry I would get a wi-fi enabled SD card or battery pack to offload my pictures/video automatically I shoot them. These products have already been on the market for several years.

My DSLR generates files that are about 22mb/shot or ~225mb/min for video. I really don't want to be trying to send that sort of data over a cellular connection. And although the idea of a swappable data-processing module such as a phone is basically a Good Thing, I really don't want to be locked into a single manufacturer's platform.
Funny thing is, the "psyche tricks" are the reason they "want and need" to use the product in the first place, they just don't know it.
With google.com and many other big players having a TTL of 300s, that's not a long time.
Drowning in Email, Photos, Files? Hoarding Goes Digital
Actually, we just added the ability to attach iPad taken photos to project drawings in our last version.

You're right that people really wanted the feature - we're getting amazing feedback on it from our users.
Only because that's all that's been implemented. They're well aware of GC and compiler optimizations being a target for future versions of Go.
Because the articles have to be concise to be readable? For example I just stumbled into the article "Tinnitus" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinnitus) which contains a "list of notable individuals with tinnitus" (given that tinnitus is common, this is analogous to a list people who like the colour beige). Makes the (medical) article a bit longer, but crucially it fills the references sections with totally irrelevant links.
also, some great advice by Zed A. Shaw

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/advice.html
Http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&pub=timemanagement
The End of Anonymity; The Rise of Personal Brands
Mobile operators lost $58B in 2011 from faulty billing systems
On Lion and later, it's even easier. Just hold down the e key and you get a list of the various accented versions.

Granted, it doesn't work in the Terminal, or certain other apps that don't use the standard text edit widgets (e.g. MacVim, TextMate), but in those apps you can continue to use the old ⌥e+e trick.
Frontend SPOF in Beijing
The history of the Internet goes offline at LOL gallery
The interesting thing about a culture where the long work day is more common than not is that it starts becoming an expectation even though it isn't codified in any rule. So for example you'd be less likely to get a raise or promotion than a person who puts in more hours than the required. So even though you're not abusing the company you get less benefits for doing the amount of work you're getting paid for.
Are there any interesting advances in desalination technology on the horizon? Access to fresh water is already a critical health issue and it will become more challenging with population growth and global warming.
Ask HN: Jobs/skills required in big data
Hello,

As someone who is interested with data, I am considering possibly diving into the world of 'big data'.

I'm looking to see if someone can direct/help me in figuring out the main skills required to get a job/create a company/work at startup in this area.
Start-Ups Good At Y Combinator Demo Day, But Is Price Right?
I'd like to look more into this, and thank you for providing some further reading on that. However, regardless of how long wealth lasts, I'm only alive for this generation, so I can't say that it'd change anything for me personally if the trillionaires of 2112 aren't the billionaires of today.
Building Scalable Enterprise Systems
I'm pretty sure that mother bears aren't at all keep on strangers being around their cubs...let alone playing "patty-cake" with them!
Sony Playstation 4 set to kill used-game market.
Indeed, the valley has the benefit of having lots of successful tech entrepreneurs reinvesting back into the community whereas most other cities depend on more old school angels or gov financing who only focus on safer bets.

This is not to knock on angels in canada, but an important to note when comparing SV with anywhere else... its not just about having VCs with big funds.
I feel the same way. I left when I saw pricing wasn't available until I signed in via Twitter.
of course... didn't think of that.
Depends on what they mean by biofuels. Many current biofuels are net energy losers, and specifically require more fossil fuel as (energy) input than they yield in energy output. Moreover, I'd expect the food-vs-fuel issue to become significantly more prominent as population increases.
Final Approval by House Sends JOBS Bill to President for Signature
Why executives are learning to code
Any chance you'll do a Pintrest version soon? Love this idea/concept.

The age of dadaism is upon us with memes and the Internet. <33
also, I would LOVE to contribute to the GUI design. Let me know... lukemh -at- gmail
At the risk of making everything about Google... I'm going to talk about Google (with the disclaimer that I've now worked here for only ~1.5 years so I'm not authority, etc etc).

stcredzero mentions a laundry list of soul-sapping bad behaviour and in previous jobs I've suffered through (or quit over) probably all of them at one time or another.

There are some subtle yet fundamentally important differences in how Google (from my experience) approaches software development that end up addressing a lot of these.

1. Most (if not all) engineering managers are... engineers. I've seen internal job postings for engineering directors (to put that in perspective, an eng director might have 30-100 engineers under him or her typically with some engineering managers in between although some particularly senior engineers may report directly to their director) that call for "deep knowledge of C++". Some eng directors still submit CLs. This is something Google takes very seriously;

2. As an engineer, I don't have to work for you (where "you" is any particular manager or director). This is incredibly important because it puts strict limits on how much crap you can be given because (assuming you're in good standing) you can request a transfer to any team that will take you (within limits and your existing manager can delay you but can't block you);

3. Internally, Google is extremely open with what's going on in the company. There are a handful of things off-limit but in almost all cases you can view the data and code and announcements for almost every project in Google;

4. The level of meetings and overall bullshit has been, in my experience, incredibly low compared to previous employers;

5. Performance reviews are peer-driven. This system is not perfect and you'll have critics who point to thinks like you need senior people around you to get promoted. Some of these claims have merit but the system while not perfect is still (IMHO) very good; and

6. Gratitude. As Steve Yegge [1] puts it:

> You can't help but want to do your absolute best for Google; you feel like you owe it to them for taking such incredibly good care of you.

I find many of these alleviate burnout by way of mitigating resentment. I'm not sure I fully agree that burnout is solely caused by resentment however. I've known people who have been well-rewarded and respected for what they've done but they just reach a point where they need a break and have to do something else. I'd characterize this as burnout but perhaps definitions vary.

Lastly, I'll touch on a point someone else mentioned: as time goes on my tolerance for bullshit and time-wasting goes down. No I'm not going to your daily standup ("mini performance review") because it's a waste of my time. No I'm not going to work on your shitty project that's made shitty technology choices for political rather than technical reasons. I don't have the time nor inclination to indulge you in this.

[1]: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-agile...
Let's see how things go, thus far SpaceX has proved they can get stuff into orbit but they aren't super-cheap yet.

Private industry can do a lot of things but a Cassini probe mission for $71 million all in seems unlikely in the near future.

NASA has a contract with SpaceX for 12 supply missions at $1.6 billion while NASA says a shuttle launch was about $450 million (but that figure probably doesn't include all the costs).

So SpaceX at this stage is at about 25-33% the cost of a space shuttle mission, but that's still a long way until we get to "45 Cassini probes" for $3.2 billion.
Crashlytics takes on Apple, tackles ‘big data’ with rockstar developers
The scenario isn't about the lying, I was just anticipating the argument that the standup wouldn't improve communication if someone wanted to subvert it. The basic situation---a teammate who isn't communicative---can only be 'fixed' by getting him to communicate. You might argue that I fire him and spend weeks looking for someone who codes as well, or alternatively hire a 'communication coach' to help him with his personal problem (I'm not sure what solutions you're offering) but I prefer the vastly simpler option of just having a standup. Which also solves the problem of good communicators who don't realize they've got something worthwhile to communicate.

We don't do standups to fix broken team communication. We do standups to augment ordinary team communication. If you've got an uncommunicative team member, that's not unusual. If you don't have an uncommunicative team member, now that's unusual.

If, as a manager of 5 teams, you feel like you need a direct, daily report of what every person on every team does, your life is going to be hard.

I may or may not need the report, but I want to make sure that every member of every team knows what's going on on their team. That's not adding process for process' sake, it's just ensuring communication rather than leaving it to chance or some utopian vision of human nature. A 15-minute standup isn't going to hurt a good team's productivity, while it could greatly improve the productivity of a mediocre team.
From mourning to merchandise
It Turns Out the Galaxy Note is a Huge Success After All
Good question. And one I can't easily answer to be honest. In most respects I suppose this is very much a subjective matter.

For me it's the language's simplicity. There are no hidden surprises in the spec. It's short, clean and easy to memorize. The syntax is clear and (for the most part) un-intrusive. Some of it's idioms really force you to think about what you have learned in other languages. And then either forget any of that ever happened, or at the very least become a critical thinker about the usefulness of these things. For example: the standard inheritance based OOP model.

Go simply allows me to 'get shit done' fast and without having to jump through hoops. It's very much like a breath of fresh air in what was quickly becoming a stale and obnoxious development environment (for me at least).

Edit: I would add that I do not particularly like evangelising about anything; that includes Go. It is beautiful for what it is. but by no means should it be considered a silver bullet. If your current tool chain(s) and language(s) work for you, by all means continue to use them. Go has its strengths and its weaknesses that should always be considered at the same time.

The right tool for the right job and all that.
I can answer just for myself.

I don't like to spend time on irrelevant things like "why the binary does not link", "in which shared library this undefined symbol is located" or "how to parse XML", or even plain "why it does not work".

With Go I _usually_ have a predictable process of writing a program, when simple things are simple and complex things are reachable. It makes me happy.
Interesting as it is, it does not belong on Hacker News.
This was my response as well. I've been researching all of this stuff for a while now for my PhD thesis. I'm a CS guy, not a Psych guy. I'm largely interested in what works, not why. I've largely steered towards behavioral economics because there's clear experimental evidence that's easily understood. Social games use BE effectively and often (although it is not clear to me how many developers really understand what they're doing, and how many are just copying Zynga).

Skinner is not entirely rejected by everyone (Ariely uses variable schedules as to describe email addiction in Predictably Irrational), and it seems to make sense when you're discussing reduced problems like slot machines or email. However, it feels too reductionist for all problems.

I'm largely working more with Daniel Pink's Autonomy/Mastery/Purpose framework, which seems to do a lot better at describing why people are encouraged to perform more complex tasks over and over, particularly games. Games tweak AMP very directly, and they fail quickly when one isn't in alignment. Autonomy is the freedom to make decisions, mastery is the space to get better at something and continue learning, purpose is discovering that what you're doing matters to you.

What people are seeking is usually feedback. Feedback about themselves, feedback from others. Feedback is usually the only reward you get, but feedback is what is required for AMP to work; you need to know what choices you are actually making (autonomy), you need to know how well you're doing (mastery), whether what you're doing is affecting anything that matters (purpose). Feedback is what drives people that care about karma on Hacker News or Reddit.

HN is a decent example of this if you're karma-oriented: you can write what you want (autonomy), but you can't do much to encourage people to agree or upvote (mastery), and if no-one upvotes you, you lose your purpose. Instead, if you focus on a goal like "writing makes me better at understanding my own ideas", you really can get a real AMP thing going. How many blogs have died because the author thought no-one was reading?

I think designing for AMP is the real desire engine; a self-perpetuating intrinsic motivation built on feedback.
>"in Russia it probably looks like an attractive get rich quick for anyone with tech skills."

See also: 419 boys

It's not just Russia.
Doesn't work very well on ChromeOS. Also, why is there no HTML "file format"?
Unless this is 1 cent per phone they are talking about, it's a stupid idea. Last I gathered, the damages went down to under $100 million. If I were them I'd rather just pay that much if I lost the trial, than to pay them for the entire life of Android.
Guys, the reason that the author didn't use these tools himself is because /they will kill you if you mess with their stuff/.

That's what global crime syndicates do.
I have several problems with this. The first, and most important, is here:

http://xkcd.com/927/

The second is personal, so please take it with a grain of salt. I pointed out that Yehuda's Bundler gem has an automated condescension feature; if you try to use it without saying 'source :rubygems,' it heckles you and mockingly asks you 'did you mean to say source :rubygems? if so please go back and type it in.' this is pretty anti-Rails in my opinion, insofar as Rails is about sane defaults and programmer happiness. But I raised this issue, and the only response I got was 'fuck you.'

If I've had that kind of interaction with you, and you want my money, you better have an absolutely rock-solid plan for world peace. This is something other than an absolutely rock-solid plan for world peace, I've had that kind of interaction, he's not getting my money.

Not proud of taking the conversation there, but I do at least want to be honest. I gave Ze Frank $600 on his Kickstarter, but this project isn't getting a dime from me. I had in fact been thinking of contributing some amount in that range but after a brief attempt at talking to Yehuda spent it instead on a music class I wanted to take. :-)

Anyway, another objection: I've never heard of him doing anything with Objective-C and have no idea if he's ever even used the language before.

(If you follow @jm on Twitter you know where I'm stealing a lot of these ideas from.)

Another objection goes back to the first one, the XKCD 'standards' thing, and comes from a @jm tweet as well as from an undervalued comment buried way, way, WAY the fuck down at the very bottom of this page: we already have several projects of this nature. For instance:

https://github.com/thoughtbot/laptop

http://bitnami.org/stack/rubystack

https://github.com/joshfng/railsready

So yeah. There are too many competing standards. What to do? I know! Create a new standard!

I think a much better and simpler solution is to tell people to read http://railstutorial.com/

But the best objection comes from @patmaddox on Twitter:

http://mobile.twitter.com/patmaddox/status/18513425005033472...

Step 1: make Rails hard

Step 2: ask for $25K to make Rails easy

Step 3: PROFIT
What is Google's alternative to fixed deadlines? (Really, really curious about this.)
IPhone passcode security can be bypassed in less than two minutes [video]
Is rails technically a microframework? It feels absolutely massive compared to, say, Flask or web.py
Wow that's cool. Where do you get the wind data?
Given Nauru's isolation and exposure to the elements, I'd
rather install a couple 7.5MW Enercom wind turbines, a few
MW worth of solar panels and maybe a tidal generator instead
of a nuclear reactor.
Notice I didn't just say it was elegant, I said why: "There are no tables to mess with and no joins (everything is explicitly joined)."

I find elegance in simplicity. If you don't need the tabular features of a relational database, why not use a graph DB for relational data? It's like a key value store with directly connected relationships.

This is so much simpler than having to deal with creating tables, DDLs, and migrations:

>>> g = Graph()
>>> james = g.vertices.create(name="James")
>>> julie = g.vertices.create(name="Julie")
>>> g.edges.create(james, "knows", julie)

Futhermore, there's no impedance mismatch so your code is cleaner.

But regardless, this is Hacker News where people explore, build, and share new things. I hope we're not moving to a place where that gets admonished.
Rumored Kindle Fire With Retina Display?
I thought the vulnerability that Pakistan unwittingly exploited was already fixed?
Desalination is a solved problem if you have energy. It's unlikely that the energy/liter of desalinated water will get much lower, so the big issue, as always, is producing more electricity.
I agree. If you haven't yet seen it, "Failure is not an Option" is an awesome mini-documentary about mission control from the early years through the Apollo program.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9mFBY1oT8
Maybe I misunderstood what you're saying (and on re-reading I'm still not entirely sure). Are you saying you chose a tool that doesn't work on windows and those tests would never run because of the tool you chose? Or are you saying that automating the deployment of VMs based on machine templates for testing is not possible in windows (hence "those tests would never run"). Reading your parent comment re: automated provisioning and configuration of virtual machine images - windows has all this. You suggest that people learn linux better, but seem unwilling to do the same for windows.
I am talking about the federal government that may handle sensitive information - not local government. Where important things are done they do not use Google Apps. They use Microsoft Exchange for email and .DOCX for word documents.
Most things stolen in industrial espionage are either copyrighted or trade secrets, both of which fit within a formal definition of intellectual property.
Agreed. That's the type of startup I'd want to work for. While it's fun to watch the Groupons and Pets.coms of the Valley come and go, profitable /experiments/ are, IMO, much more interesting.