skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
HTML and CSS often feel like they are poor fits for the purposes we put them to.

HTML works well enough for its purpose, but its SGML heritage makes it awkward to read and write; it is implemented inconsistently and sometimes clumsily, with countless edge cases where each browser pivots a different way; and it changes far too slowly to live up to our demands.

CSS is worse: it is simply unsuited for layout. Don’t believe me? Without looking anything up, design a three-column layout where all columns have equal height even when their contents are unequal. There’s a reason this layout was called “The Holy Grail”.

I used Flex for several years, before returning to Javascript at Paperless Post, and I have to say that Flex may have been huge, may have been overengineered, may have been Flash (an unforgivable sin indeed), but it was also consistent, layered, and open. Open in the sense of open source, but also in the sense this article demands: you could subclass or monkey patch everything in the system. You could make your components do anything you want, while keeping everything that was good about the superclass.

It isn't baffling that "open web" technologies lack this kind of programmer-facing openness. That's a result of the browser wars, the underlying implementation, the original design concerns, the limitations of the early internet, and umpteen other factors both human and technological.

But our systems _should_ become open and layered, or else Javascript polyfills and libraries will be the new platform, and HTML and CSS will simply be the uneven ground upon which that level platform was built. This is very nearly the case already. It's not a future that appeals, but maybe it's what we'll have to learn to expect.
Try Ikea and nearby stores in Emeryville, which is close enough to SF that you may be familiar with the malls in question.
My startup (uses an algo to find the perfect bra) got covered by BI
This (my) comment is just noise, but I support the choice of short keywords - it helps in seeing them iconically. It's not the typing, though I think that helps too, but the reading - a long word, you have to /read/. A short sequence of chars is an instantly, right-brain recognized pattern. For that same reason I much prefer '0' to 'NULL' for ptrs in C/C++ to (I'm talking about visually, not type safety).
Playing B-Ball with Obama: 6 Steps to Crossing Anything Off Your Bucket List
The author's skepticism is pretty reasonable, but I feel that he misses an important part of the story. Here's the closest he gets to it:

"Is it plausible that this practice is widespread, and getting moreso? Sure, it’s plausible. Our privacy erodes every day, and millions of us do it through Facebook willingly. The story has the feel of truthiness. Doesn’t it just seem like the thing that Big Business would do to us? We already piss in cups to prove that we’re drug-free so that we can come in and shuffle paper."

I think that the reason that the Facebook issue blew up so well is that it touches on two major fears that people have, at least one of which is entirely reasonable. It's the fear that corporations control everything and aren't accountable to the law. As far as I'm concerned, that's a reasonable and well-founded fear. I grant the author's point that the issue at hand may be over-hyped, but I think that the fact that people are so worried that it's easy to press that particular button, should definitely tell us something about how much inappropriate power corporations have, and how little accountability.
I think it's more likely that the President supports the increased IP protections of SOPA but not the protection measures (DNS tampering) of SOPA.

I think it's a bit self-defeating of groups like fightforthefuture.org to label any type of support for increased copyright protection as "pro-SOPA", as there is nothing in this statement that says "the Administration supports protecting copyrights even if it means blacklisting DNS entries".
People want to do them when they pay 70k per year with excellent health benefits and excellent pensions. People want it to be like it was when the auto industry was booming. Unforunately, that just doesn't make sense.
Short answer: No.

Long answer: They do not.
Wow. This reminds me of the trick they used in "Permutation City" by Greg Egan for infinite computation power.

EDIT: shame there's no rule that allows to add copper cells from inside the automaton. It would make it possible to rewire the computer according to program.
Speaking for myself (I am also a developer), I am concerned with the circumvention of due process and presumption of guilt that is built into these bills. If I am operating a service that someone files a complaint against, especially if I am a startup, I have very little recourse before my business is trashed. This is independent of whether or not I am guilty of anything, or my users have submitted infringing content to my service. Content owners and federal agencies have a historical lack of concern about the accuracy of their claims, so I would like to ensure that they have to be rigorous before they can take down my service. They should have to prove to a judge that I am in fact in violation of the law before they can cut off my source of income.

Speaking to the philosophical issue that pg raised, I believe people have a right to attempt to make money from their efforts. I also believe that they most definitely do not have a right to be successful in that attempt, regardless of how much effort they have put in. They also do not have a right to continued success if the world around them changes. What works on Monday may not work on Friday, and the fact that it worked Monday should not serve as a guarantee that Friday's endeavor has a right to success. If the effort it takes to secure a number of the size required to represent a 3 minute song becomes a burden on society, then I do not think they have a right to be successful in doing so. The same goes for the software I produce. If my securing it from copying that I do not approve of becomes a burden on society, then I do not have a right to be successful in securing it. Personally, I interpret a circumvention of due process and an attitude of "guilty until a successful appeal is filed" as a burden on society.
Yeah, I'm torn on Phoronix. They're a terribly SEO-me-harder experience in a lot of ways (40% ad content on the page, nine-page articles, scraped junk mixed in with the good stuff). That said, their authentic reporting (especially on graphics stuff) is generally among the best available in open source focused blogs. I read them.
Tool spinning, task boxing and the trade-off between usability and learning
Thanks! Will do!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that cryptographic and non-cryptographic hash functions have similar avalanche properties (and therefore similar probability of accidental collision); the difference is just that cryptographic hash functions make it difficult to intentionally create a collision.

Is that right?
Agreed. But I'm not advocating sticking our heads in the sand. What I do think is that, if we let ourselves get sucked into playing the game by their rules we (the tech industry) will lose. They have more lawyers, politicians, and even law enforcement officers in their pockets than we do.

The only way to win is to do what they cannot do: Innovate and build platforms and technologies for sharing information so quickly that it becomes impossible to stop the sea change. If we spend time and brainpower trying to compete in their arena we will get crushed just as surely as they would if they tried to compete in ours.
I'll second the motion for Unicomp, Ultra Classic.

It's an IBM Model M keyboard, with updates.

It's clicky. I like this, personally. My hands love they keyboard, the feedback from the 'clicky'.

You mentioned 'looks' twice. This confuses me.

When I use a keyboard, I don't spend a lot of time looking at it. It's an input device. A tool.

What matters is how well it works, not that it looks sleek and ready to spring into the air. Get one your hands like, not your eyes.
It can be a bit dangerous to group all NoSQL databases together as they differ from each other as much as they do from relational.

In some ways MongoDB sits in between relational databases and other NoSQL databases. While MongoDB doesn't have SQL transactions, it does have atomic operations similar to relational databases.

Normalization is an interesting term that really has been defined or redefined to fit into a relational mindset. Denormalized often implies unstructured mess, while that could be the case in any database (relational included). It is certainly not the norm for MongoDB.

In MongoDB a properly designed schema is very structured and 'normalized'. In truth these schemas don't mirror relation schemas, they could, but it would ignore beneficial additions the document model provides. It is very easy to use the same ERD diagram for both relational and MongoDB. What you will find in both is very structured accessible data. In MongoDB you will find that the ability to have a given fields value be an array or object permits your schema to more accurate map to your actual use of the data. The schema will be simpler as you no longer need things like many to many join tables.

Not to say that MongoDB is better than relational, just different. Sometimes MongoDB is a better fit, and sometimes relational is a better fit, just depends on the situation.
Part of the fund is held for doubling-down in subsequent rounds of seed/series-a companies that are doing well.
At this rate, they've got just two years left before they're forced to seek a new name.
The project has a fixed budget, so it won't be $100k ... more like $35k.
It may be illogical for the organization, but it's certainly not for the individuals who actually comprise and run that organization. We need to keep in mind that companies, while useful abstractions, are fundamentally just groups of people, and often suffer as a result of individual shortsightedness.

I suspect that many of the people that actually comprise the RIAA's and MPAA's member companies, and many of the decision makers, are "over the hill" of their careers. They're not interested in radical change or reshaping the industry. The industry as it stands has been good to them, and they want to continue to milk that for as long as it takes so they can retire comfortably.

That attitude -- both hyperconservative and with its over-valuation of short-term gains compared to long-term ones -- adequately explains many of the actions taken by the music industry in the late 90s and the film industry today.

It will take a new generation of leaders in those industries for them to make the leap to new business models that will keep them profitable over the long run in the modern competitive environment.
I believe every single desktop browser besides IE has WebGL support by now. IE10 won't have it either. Maybe IE11.
Open Source Framework for Cooking
Danbri has moved on – should we follow?
How to Add Push Notifcations to your Website
Oh look , IE letting the side down again
We have a new cluster that's intended to replace the current one, which as you point out is running on 2006 hardware. (It still performs extremely well, however.)

Those numbers would presumably translate pretty well to newer CPUs as the numbers reflect the change in read I/O. Newer CPUs would handle the load faster, but the read traffic would be the same.
You are an idiot, its a MVP. There is no point in browser testing early on for ignorant people who are determined to stay on a legacy web browser.
I'd add Kuhn to that list.
Conning investors is quite different from making an actual go at a business.

What is the difference? The difference is that when you invite investors to invest in your new location-based social network for morticians and coroners (or whatever the fsck), you are making an actual go at a business. Whereas when you invite investors to invest in your new programming language, you are conning investors.

Conning the government means making flagrantly bogus and absurd claims in your grant applications. Please bear in mind that all your competitors will be doing this. If you don't intend to play by the same rules, you need some other way of stabbing your competitors in the back before the finish line. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

I am descended from a long line of Beltway bandits. I recognize the patterns and practices of the tribe at once. Indeed I recognized it in my first week at Berkeley, when they sat us down and gave us the basic lecture on what it means to have a career in "science" today.

I believe the numbers given were that half of us first-year grad students would finish, half of those would find teaching jobs, and those who found teaching jobs would be dividing their time three ways: 1/3 teaching, 1/3 research, 1/3 grantwriting. I found this broadly credible and still do.

So, that's only 1/3 of your day spent as a professional liar (and/or backstabber). You might as well try to spend only 1/3 of your day as a professional crackhead, whore, etc. But hey, it's worth a try.

As for trolling - absolutely! Laugh while you can, monkey-boy...
Well, that's LA. Most Americans don't live in LA. (Or New York, or the SF Bay Area.)

Beware over-extrapolation of your personal experiences.
[Disclaimer - I'm married to one of the founders so very biased :) ]

I'm a huge fan of their approach. They're taking a hardcore CS approach (recommendation algorithms, machine learning, etc) to a space that rarely sees lots of tech applied. And they close the loop all the way to having great suppliers/product.

This is exactly what Marc Andreessen was talking about in his software eating the world article.
Not saying this does, or does not mean anything, but here's the whois info for the domain:

Domain Name: madeiracloud.com
Registered at http://www.dynadot.com

Registrant:
INiT Inc.
Peng Zhao
HaiDianNanLu 12
Building 54, Room 110
Beijing, Beijing 100082
China

Administrative Contact:
INiT Inc.
Peng Zhao
HaiDianNanLu 12
Building 54, Room 110
Beijing, Beijing 100082
China

+86 13911041736

Technical Contact:
INiT Inc.
Peng Zhao
HaiDianNanLu 12
Building 54, Room 110
Beijing, Beijing 100082
China

+86 13911041736

Record expires on 2012/06/16 UTC
Record created on 2011/06/16 UTC

Domain servers in listed order:
ns1.dynadot.com
ns2.dynadot.com
I've used a machine gun. Keyboards are a lot quieter, and have way less recoil. But your friend has a point.

Have you ever used a late-model IBM Selectric typewriter? Now that is the acme of keyboarding. IBM knew their users would spend hours at the keyboard, designed with that assumption in mind.

An IBM model M (now made by Unicomp) is the Selectric of keyboards.
Sparrow now supports Push Notification. SIKE
It's not just having the dry powder -- it's knowing which companies are worth spending it on. You're either "defending your position" or "doubling down on a loss." Great way to lose money fast unless you can find some real signal in the noise of going from Seed to Series A.

And this is another brilliant part of Dave's model. He can rapidly apply lessons from the last 50-100 startups he funded to the next 50. He can rapidly collect metrics that will allow him to determine which companies are worth following on with.

His "sample size" is much bigger and therefore allows him to mine out statistically significant data about where to follow on.
Great browser support is about the only thing Rim is doing right. They should go all in on web apps. Join Mozilla's WebAPI project, make web apps a first-class citizen on BBX (not requiring their own webworks stuff)
Social Networking Bill of Rights (INFOGRAPHICS)
Note: the below may apply more to contractors, but if you read through it I think you might find it useful...

in order of confidence, here is how you hire someone for the job. (perceived)

100.000% - The job is done already, just like something you already had the same guy do and it was perfect, now you pay him.

95% - The job is done to your satisfaction, you know the guy and he's solvent and vouches for what he's done. He hasn't done just this, but maybe something similar for you. You're not sure if this works as advertised yet...

90% - The job is done to your satisfaction, you know the guy and he vouches for what he's done. He hasn't done this for you but did it for someone else you know, who vouches for the guy.

85% - The job is done to your satisfaction, the guy comes recommended only by people you don't know, but warrantees what he's offering and seems like he cares about his reputation and about you, seems solvent and in a situation to fix it if it's not what you thought you were getting.

80% - The job is NOT done (none of it is), but you know the guy (rest per 100.000%)

75% - The job is NOT done (none of it is), but you know the guy (rest per 95%)

70% - the job is NOT done (none of it is), but you ... (rest per 90%)

65% - the job is NOT done (none of it is), but... (rest per 85%)

60% --> the job is not done and you have a guy offering to do it who comes recommended by people you don't know, you haven't worked with him, and he doesn't seem like he's in a situation to warrantee what he's going to do or care utmost about his reputation and about you. However, he brings proof he's done it before (portfolio).

55% - the guy comes with recommendations from people you don't know, but brings proof only of things OTHER than what you want him to do for you. He is not in a position to guarantee what he's going to do for you.

50% - the guy comes with recommendations from people you don't know, and doesn't bring proof of anything he's done.

BINGO. This is where you are if you get a stellar resume and cover letter with references from people you don't know.

Now of these resumes, let's go through the hiring filters that work...
40% of the time...
30% of the time...
20% of the time...
10% of the time...

Ready? Okay, you know what, let's not go through all that. If you are trying to filter the hires so that you're getting the best of it like this, well, what can I say. Good luck pal.
Because you can't do the due diligence a VC firm does when you invest in 250 companies.
I guess they came from the ChinaBang conference?
Plaid -[scintilli(any track)]
Celebration -[What's this magical]
Beach House -[Teen Dream]
Aphex Twin -[Chosen Lords]
The Jam -[Any song]
Autechre -[any album, any track!]
Spot on. Would it be accurate to refer to this as a case of mass hysteria or moral panic?
Actually I have a question ... maybe you can't answer it. But as we are looking for radio signals from other civilizations, what are we doing to make sure we continue to send out strong, unencrypted, easy to decipher signals from earth?

To say that IP law will result in all terrestrial signals being encrypted in say, 150 years, is not unfathomable. Then, at that point, if the encryption is good enough, it will just look like noise to a would be discoverer of us.
The graphs are produced by a web frontend (I forget the name) that reads from Collectd data. Collectd runs on each box and collects performance data that can be graphed on a central box.

We used Munin previously, and I must admit that Collectd feels like a step backwards. Both are very primitive, so we might look for something better soon, perhaps Graphite.

I recommend migrating to Linux (or one of the BSDs) if you want to get serious about system administration. The wealth of mature tools is vastly superior.

The Postgres book by Greg Smith is indispensible if you want to tune a Postgres installation.
Jon,

Thanks for the interesting perspective. I've actually opened, run, and sold a retail store before (mobile phones and accessories) so, while the type of layout logic I referred to in my comment above did not apply to my store (because it wasn't large enough) I did read ALOT on the subject and was part of the local Chamber of Commerce so I can assure you that impulse buying considerations are a big part of why stores get laid out the way they do.

There are even consulting firms that make a tidy income by advising stores on product placements within the store for maximum sales.
Beautiful soundsculpture
Mike Daisey loses honorary degree, withdraws from college commencement speech
Are you an indie, angel or venture company?
Even more frictionless than this PayPal model is using Fiverr. I know you don't get the big names on there, but they have some amazing unique stuff on there making you wonder how they produce it for $5 (custom videos under a minute). I agree there is a lot of crap on there, but the top rated stuff can be gold.
But, but... outrage!
Gloves would be a '90s throw-back solution when the Google Glass device should be using the camera to detect your finger/hand positions.
>Actors and STM are great thought experiments but real-world production stuff tends to always circumvent them for the java.util.concurrent stuff.

Its a mixed picture, if you want to be honest. There are places like bofa where I've pushed into production a cvar processing module on 500,000 loans which uses only actors. No low level tinkering with util.concurrent, no Threadpool setting, no Executors, no synchronized anywhere in my code. In the past at GS, I wrote concurrent code where I explicitly specified the number of threads & we had a ThreadPool manager & internally it used the util.concurrent classes. At LinkedIn, I believe they started with actors & switched parts of it to Doug Lea's framework ( which was the sort of the foundation of util.concurrent). I have seen financial shops where they do half & half - the quants seem to like actors but the swing programmers like to have control on threadcounts, & they tend to do things like naming threads & creating parent-child relationships so swing can paint reliably & they can debug threads by name when it doesn't. I did the same in the past when most of my work was on the swing side, creating custom blotters to show trade tickets & the like. But now I primarily do quant model building work with actors & no more util.concurrent stuff. If you want to construct a lattice model to price structured options on a 100 different strikes per month for 5 years in advance, you can find no better friend than an actor. Actors are certainly not a thought experiment, very much a reality.
Not following you here. Care to elaborate?

I'd invest my money in a company who makes 200,000 in revenue with 100,000 in profits much faster than one who makes 200,000,000,000,000 in revenue with 0 in profits.

To me, this seems so basic, and I'm certainly not very well versed in business. Am I missing something?
Neither Hayek nor Marx is "politics." Politics is Olbermann and/or Glenn Beck.

Hayek and Marx are history and literature. If you're not supposed to talk history and literature at the workplace, you may be in the wrong workplace.

Hayek is a second-rate figure both as writer and thinker. The only Austrians worth reading are Hoppe, Rothbard and Mises. I would read all of Rothbard before I read any of Hoppe, and all of Mises before I read any of Rothbard. I would not read Hayek at all.

What's cool about Dabney and Fitzhugh is that you could be expelled from any university in the country if someone found them in your dorm room. I wouldn't want them on the shelf at work either. Even Carlyle is pushing it in both contexts.

You certainly can't say that for Mises and Rothbard, even - not to mention Henry George and Karl Marx. About the only thing more innocuous than Henry George and Karl Marx would be a pile of old National Geographics, if screened for tits.