skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When Mozilla ships better developer tools than Chrome, I'm sure there will be posts just like this one. The fact that developers prefer Chrome is not a failing of developers; it's a failing of Mozilla to provide compelling tools.
Speed Reading Techniques and Tips
Speed reading techniques are not magical techniques. It takes a lot of time and practice. Speed reading isn’t something you can master in a few days.
First of all it is important to know why speed reading will work for you, what it will do for you?
By mastering speed reading techniques you will get information more quickly, you will get a better understanding of the information you are reading. You will have a higher amount of information in your short-term memory by reading more quickly. For more
Google on track to outspend banks, big tobacco in lobbying
You're better off going through the pain of learning the hard way.

It's like cheating and looking at your hands when learning to type. You'll never really learn to type properly and it slows you down a lot. Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and do it right. I wouldn't be able to hit 80 WPM if I had to stare at my hands.
Twitter Bootstrap: The Ultimate Resources Roundup
It's just a convenience (and most *nix Systems comes with Python). You can open the generated file in browser by giving only the file path (but then stuff such as AJAX won't work).
I've found that most people don't know what they are doing. Which as you pointed out is fine. But what I find very alarming is that most people don't ever take the time to mend their ignorance.

I've also found that since people rarely know why they are doing... The ones that can bullshit the best are viewed as more competent. These are the worst perpetrators of the ignorance issue. These are the people that become the token useless over compensated middle mananger.
Agreed. When you don't know the language, knowing the alphabet is pretty useless. In Israel I recall being able to read signs.. and have no idea what I was actually reading.

On the other hand you do have languages like Chinese where learning the written language actually is the majority of the work. Spoken Chinese is probably one of the easier languages out there for a person coming from a random language.
Google to angry GMail users: we know better
Where are the numbers? Who's upvoting this stuff? Here's a more fitting title: "Sarah fondly speaks on random Quora factoids overheard in a bar."
Thanks for the comment. Was there anything specific you could point me to that you felt was above your head? I'd love to do a follow-up with more introductory material.
From http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archiv...

>If you have an Android device, we also encourage you to try other apps from partners built using SkyDrive APIs. For example with Browser for SkyDrive or Cloud Explorer for SkyDrive, you can view, access and upload documents or photos on your Android phone. Portfolio for SkyDrive lets you organize and upload photos from your Android phone in batches to SkyDrive. If you want to add SkyDrive support to your app, site or device, please visit our developer center.

Looks like there's OneNote and third party apps, but official support would be nice.
I'm not a big fan of protecting people from themselves. Who are you to tell me I shouldn't be allowed to invest in a startup because I'm too dumb to make that decision for myself? Whether or not you are right about the bubble is besides the point.
> I haven’t found a use for the Properties section yet

It displays DOM properties and their current state. That's pretty important to any web developer.
This is the first time I've heard of tornadio2; it turns out there is a list of other socket.io server implementations at https://github.com/learnboost/socket.io/wiki/
جيدون صندباك Gideon Sundback
جيدون صندباك Gideon Sundback
جيدون صندباك Gideon Sundback
جيدون صندباك Gideon Sundback
جيدون صندباك Gideon Sundback
جيدون صندباك Gideon Sundback
http://mushahda.com/45.html
While visiting Israel I picked up the alphabet from the street signs and found it useful for identifying which sherut went to Jerusalem (their signs were in Hebrew only).
Alexa seems to show that they've moved up about 165 Alexa ranks to be the 775th most popular site on the Internet, and their users use the site for an average of 3 minutes. Looking at the trend it looks like they're just a bit past a early-2011 peak and have been steadily improving for 6 months after a slump.

It's true that their rank appears to have mildly improved, though 'surge' is an exaggeration.
I use Transmit and Amazon's s3. Not the best but works well for storing photos. Cost me about $1 a month.
Analysis of the April 2012 CPU for the Oracle Database
finally,!!! Boston.
Isn't that the same thing really, even if it ends up benefiting us? I consider all money-based lobbying as bribe. Just because they made it legal, doesn't mean it's right.
53% of Recent College Grads Are Jobless or Underemployed—How?
Petition against CISPA nearing 1M signatures.
Evolution.

When we lived in caves, there were men who were perfect estimators and there were men who were hopeless optimists.

When the optimists said "I'm going to get a deer!", the perfect estimators would explain with great precision and accuracy how difficult it was. The optimists ignored them, and the perfect estimators just sat around the cave. The optimists did finally catch the deer, even though it was probably more work than it was worth.

That's why most of our ancestors were hopeless optimists. The perfect estimators just didn't reproduce. So how can we help but be hopeless optimists ourselves when it comes to generating schedules?

The solution: multiply your schedule estimate by pi to get a round number.
Regarding virtualenv, I have come to the conclusion that Linux containers are robust enough now (like freebsd jails say two or three years ago) that I don't need to virtualise just python - I can afford to have the whole server as a "virtualenv" - no need for that extra complexity just install into site packages. No conflicts because a whole instance is dedicated. Jails take this to the limit - one virtual machine, one process - say Bind. A vulnerability in Bind ? The attacker takes over ... Nothing.
Dropbox is now at the inflection point of having become a standard. All of the various cloud-drive solutions are gauging themselves in comparison to them; as such, they have won.

Will SkyDrive manage to become a good competitor? I would expect so, especially given how Microsoft can push into the field by piggybacking it on Office, etc.

However, should Microsoft? No.

For Microsoft, SkyDrive will not sell more copies of Windows or Office. Instead, it will simply be another waste of money and resources on a feature that will not sway people to their products. If you're going to get Office, you're going to get Office - a cloud drive won't convince you over some other offering.
I definitely agree with the end of this. There's been many times where I've come up against something I need to learn - a new technology, technique, library integration, and wondered how I could figure it out.

Then I remember, years ago, thinking the same thing about the things I'm doing now. How I thought Python looked fancy and confusing, how configuring servers was arcane, and how I took hours to make a page POST a value to another page. And update a database (with no range checking, so that went into negatives, but it _worked_).

Now I can reasonably assume that given enough effort, I can figure almost anything out.
> The smartest developers/people I know don't have to prove they're the smartest at every step.
They have the comfort to say "I don't know" and "You could be right".
Most importantly, they have an attitude of "I can probably figure something out that will work".
They rarely say something is not possible. They rarely say no outright.

Thank you for this. Most people I've interacted with throughout my life are afraid to say "I don't know", likely out of fear that they will seem stupid or inferior.

When you admit you don't know something, that's when you start learning. It's simply impossible to learn if you think you already know everything.
Even Nashua to Cambridge has been same-day for me a couple of times.
Wag.com (and soap.com, diapers.com, etc) are wholly-owned, very profitable subsidiaries of Amazon.
perfect timing...was just looking for a new apartment after my landlord raised rates again...
for those that took the point: I meant an extra level of encryption, just in case there's a backdoor on the default one.
Is the effort to create, really the key matter? Typically most of the cost is incurred in other activities, such as maintenance of software after the initial release.
FYI, JSDOM isn't the default parser in node.io. It uses a faster and more forgiving parser if you can survive with a subset of jQuery functionality (https://github.com/chriso/node.io/wiki/API---CSS-Selectors-a...)
The compounding returns of intelligence
Can't wait for this to come to the Bay Area. SF apartment hunting is a nightmare!
Yet another techie Hall of Fame debuts
You have it backwards. SkyDrive won't sell more copies of office, it's office that will sell more subscriptions of SkyDrive.
Looks like someone made a "randomize user-agent" for Chrome: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3880536
I remember reading a comment on another story which I thought was a wonderful explanation of why estimates tend to be too short:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3522910

To quote one part:

Let's say that you have 20 tasks. Each involves rolling a 10-sided die. If it's a 1 through 8, wait that number of minutes. If it's a 9, wait 15 minutes. If it's a 10, wait an hour.

How long is this string of tasks going to take? Summing the median time expectancy, we get a sum 110 minutes, because the median time for a task is 5.5 minutes. The actual expected time to completion is 222 minutes, with 5+ hours not being unreasonable if one rolls a lot of 9's and 10's.
You can learn to read Vietnamese much faster

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet
Fabric seems to be the most popular deployment tool, yet the author advises against it without giving any reason why.

I'd love to see some proper detail in the article around why.

And not in the vein of "Chef/Puppet are better", but more along the line of "here's what can go wrong with Fabric".
Well, aside from well-meaning paternalism... everyone who overextended themselves with a too-large mortgage did it of their own free will and hypothetically were only screwing themselves. But when things go to shit, the effects of a large number of people screwing themselves spill over to a bunch of complete innocents (well, people who are innocent of everything except existing in our contemporary economy).
API as the Deliverable at the Hackathon
This is why one of the most important skills I look for in dev-types is their ability to learn and figure s#$t out. It's not only what you know today, but that you don't know what you don't know tomorrow, but you've gotta figure it out.
If your education is paid, I'd finish it. Try to make the best out of it but don't let it consume you.
Oh, someone did beat me to it. I think too much (and slowly), it seems.

The useragent is much too random, though. As explained quite nicely on the eff page, it defeats the purpose. You've managed to uniquely identify yourself as someone with a very random-looking useragent.

I was more thinking along the lines of sending random "genuine" user-agents (combinations of various versions of Chrome/Firefox/Safari on various OS).
And with some more clever way to make sure the cookies match, or fixing the user-agent is a bit useless..
Not always, but there is software that you write once, and then forget. For some shops (proprietary and custom software, mostly), the cost of the first try is what counts most. Nevertheless, I addressed that effort to create: geniuses write languages, and the rest of us use them. And with sufficiently good compilation languages, I bet we wouldn't need a genius to implement a worthwhile language.
> how else would they know they wanted to use them?

By reading blog posts and articles about new 'hotness'. I often want to use something without having previously used it.
The challenge with crowdsourcing votes is avoiding users gaming the system. Even a well organized system with this in mind requires tremendous buy in from the entire network, such as a vested interest, to avoid popularity contests, two horse races, and troll votes.

I agree with your assessment that many times the other presenters will be exceptionally qualified, but as you state about the other judges, they also may not have the deep domain knowledge required to make an informed choice.

The most important vote to earn is from your customers, which is why at many of these presentations, traction and market validation still reigns supreme.
The whole concept of "digital modernism" is a fluke since modernism emerged from seeking functionality, not aesthetics, while the former is trying to emulate modernism on GUIs. Print design can appear "modern" and "Swiss" since its function is to be read. GUIs are different, and require new thinking to design and style correctly. Just removing the "style" portion and calling it modern is like adding fins onto the back of a car to make it more "space-age". Apple already debunked this movement, since the general user obviously prefers the higher-fidelity GUI -- even if the trend is now growing out of proportion. For a designer with a trained eye, of course s/he needs less visual cues to figure out the GUI, so anything remotely physical looks overdone. I would react the same way when approaching from a modern graphic design standpoint: Hey, that's not how things should look if I apply the grand unified theory of modern design that I learned in design school. I'd say no one is closer to getting "digital modernism" correct than Android, but essentially redefining what it means for a GUI to even be modern. This idea from the article to knockoff the Swiss movement is sadly, a joke. I've used Prismatic beta, and the UI didn't wow me, at all (from either designer or layman standpoint).
> When you don't know the language, knowing the alphabet is pretty useless.

Knowing the Japanese hiragana and katakana means you can work out some menus in Japanese games - "startu"; "opshun"; etc. (This is not romaji, because they're using English words and a Japanese alphabet. So what's that called?)
Amazon can offer an option for rapid pickup at their warehouse in major cities, and it would be pretty easy to implement it(especially using warehouse robots).

But i guess that it's a small non-strategic business, so they won't bother.
I guess, billion for Evernote is less "bubblish" than a billion for Instagram.
Spotify Promised Advertisers 50 Million American Users by July...
What Instagram actually cost Facebook + Facebook's mobile designer speaks
Is this just a ripoff of PadMapper (http://www.padmapper.com)?
Thanks for the heads up. Working on fixing that up as well as less decimal places right now.

Should be done soon.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3878438 I guess. Though it's actually more like 7 hours than 40 minutes.
One-line Tree In Python
"Transliteration"
Startup Weekend Kansas City Recap
The generic form of this headline is usually true:

$COMPANY to angry $SERVICE users: we know better

and sometimes it is true that $COMPANY knows better. Most of the time, it's just uncomfortable. And $COMPANY never does it for a whim: code quality improves, or performance, or scalability.

And if $COMPANY does it to enough users enough times, a competitor will come along and take all those users.

Google and Facebook have, apparently, not reached the point of "enough". Yet.
> The point I was, somewhat poorly, trying to make is that in my experience it's equally common to find a single language focus with folk in their twenties.

I definitely agree with that. My point is that newer devs tend to know newer languages that are in vogue. Eventually the cycle repeats itself once these 20 somethings get older. I've already seen this happen to most programmers that I personally know with very few exceptions.
I acknowledge WebKit's monopoly on the mobile landscape today, I make no claim whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, that argument would distract from the reality that if you want to make a mobile web app work well, you need to build it on webkit and debug it on webkit
Misleading title and description. This is actually written in C++.
The Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics is another one. It was developed by a missionary that noticed that when aboriginal where written in latin script the result was often long and awkward.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics
I am not familiar with many languages, but something that is unique about Korean "alphabets" is that alphabets combine to form a character.

This makes sentences more compact in appearance, but it also creates difficulty in creating fonts, since a single alphabet looks slightly different in combination with different alphabets. (For example, Gulim font, a standard sans-serif font, contains 49,284 glyphs according to this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Gulim.)
It's a project created and maintained entirely in my free time. I provide free support when someone needs help and I fix bugs when someone files an issue. I've written documentation and a guide in the project's Github wiki. This is all done outside of full-time work. Forgive me if I don't spend more time improving the website and uptime when it's an endeavour that brings me no income whatsoever. You're the type of person that makes me hate open-source sometimes.
This is more likely to put mom & pop stores out of business than threaten the big players like Fastenal, Grainger, McMaster-Carr and MSC Direct.

Mom & pops focus more on retail / small business customers who are price sensitive, so this is going to hurt them.

But the big players mainly rely on their services because industrial and commercial customers care more about minimizing downtime and reliability than on price. The customer service at these companies is great and helps sort through 1 million+ skews, which is completely different from picking 1 out of 20 TVs at Best Buy.

Their customers are companies like Caterpillar who need projects to be on time and same day delivery. Fastenal even puts fasteners directly inside of bins on the assembly lines so that the customer doesn't have to haul a huge chunks of metal.

Amazon would have to seriously boost its service (ie, same day to location) delivery to gain the non-retail customer base as well as expand its sales staff expertise dramatically (which of the 1000 cutting tool bits do I need for X job, what angle does it have to be installed at etc?). What this will do is consolidate the industry with Amazon and the existing big players at the expense of the mom & pops which are over 80% of the market.

It's a $140-160bn a year market. Just goes to show how much opportunity there is in technology to expand outside of consumer-focused businesses.
exactly. Everything they do will be replaced by machines.
Well this explains how my Korean friend in college could type touch type in Korean and English on an American keyboard. I didn't know that Korean had an alphabet, I thought it was pictograms or whatever.
National Velocity Note System
I already know vim keybindings and this part stumped me for a little bit. I think that, while the rest of the tutorial makes sense without listening to the people, this is the only part where it isn't obvious from the environment what you're supposed to do. Just a thought.
No problem. My experience has been mostly with SNL, LANL, and ORNL. These labs are richly stocked with extremely bright people working on solving some very important problems.

Some of these problems have commercial applications, some are strictly of value to the government, and some are so far out there that no one's really sure where they'll end up (how again was ARPAnet supposed to be used for defense?).

Two different points:

The problem with commercializing government technology is that you need an entrepreneur to push it. The labs do make overtures to allow their well-paid and securely-employed scientists to leave the nest, but the scientists seldom want to stop being scientists, give up a comfortable and tenured six-figure income, to network and sell when if they wanted to network and sell they wouldn't have gone for the Ph.D. in the first place.

If I'm in a metro area where I can, without moving, find a job making a comfortable living doing what I like after my startup fails, I'm much more likely to take that plunge. In "company towns" like Los Alamos or Oak Ridge, there really isn't any chance of that.

This leaves a relay baton drop between scientists who don't sell and would-be entrepreneurs with nothing worth selling.

No problem, the labs can license their stuff out. Problem, the terms of these licenses usually carve out a pretty generous chunk for the lab that spawned the technology, and the implicit terms include delays and risk of expropriation.

The terms of the lab carveout are often pre-ordained, based on revenues instead of margins, and don't take into account whether or not a business model can support them (because it has to be fair and defensible, and how do you know ahead of time what's fair?).

This leaves a would-be licensor to choose between many worthy projects, and as you want to be close both to your inventor and possible funding sources, this creates a bias toward licensing big-city lab technologies like those found at ANL, LLNL, LBL, NREL, and SNL-Livermore.
They still had 1 bill in revenue not so shabby. Without Facebook half the internet would appear not to function correctly be it SSO or analytics. Guess they are here forever and ever and ever
Ask HN: Business Insider Startup 2012
I just won a free pass to attend on May 3rd. I need opinions. Is it worth the $450 round trip? Any thoughts on this event?
Fabric is an invaluable deployment tool, but you have to know its boundaries for what it was intended.

With Fabric you tell what to _do_ and with Puppet/Chef you define what the result should _look_ like.

You define how a server should look like and it can make sure its true for 1000 servers. Or 10000.

It’s not about Fabric vs. Puppet, but how to use both in the most efficient way.
Why not just link directly to the site itself, instead of some 3rd party site? http://boston.renthop.com/
You're right, sorry about that ;) Guess I was thinking too much about the "compile everything" people.

Great article, btw!
Counter Hack Reloaded
20th International Obfuscated C Code Contest Winners
Apparently I've read my limit of 10 free articles per month. Is this article anywhere else?
Obligatory link to your single page static HTML homepage for comparison: http://many9s.com/
Nginx 1.2.0 (stable) released
It's called information asymmetry. As an individual, you do not have the power to get all the necessary information to make a sound decision, but working through the government - which in a democracy ideally represents you and others like you - you can get that information.
Not really - my point is that SkyDrive adds nothing to Microsoft's strategy.

It won't really sell large numbers of Office, and the fact that less than 1% of people use more than 7gb (the free tier) means that it will make very little money overall.

Office will certainly sell subscriptions of SkyDrive, but they'll be free subscriptions mostly and the people won't really care about it. It doesn't make the core product offering more compelling, which seems to be their core strategy based on the yearly price.

Dropbox has done so well because they aren't just the first mover - they are the standard by which others are judged. With this in mind, Microsoft is making a mistake trying to make an offering to compete with it. They should have just made a deal with Dropbox in the first place.

Dropbox integration would be a fantastic selling point for Office; SkyDrive integration is not.