skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many people are commenting that writing improves with practice, and that's true, but it probably isn't enough. The 10,000 hours count only if they're done well. I'm not a writer but here are some basics I've found helpful.

1. Revise constantly. If you haven't revised it three times you almost surely haven't done enough. You don't need an outline, but as you write new thoughts will occur to you, previously open questions will be answered, opinions of priorities will shift. Writing in the Rubber Duck school of programming to the nth degree. All that you discover you already knew should be completely reflected in the final document. This is a very painful thing, you can spend hours on something and be "almost done" when you realize the key question on which all depends, the answer to which requires a complete rewrite of the document.

Note that "revision" often means changing the purpose of the document. You can go from reporting status to asking about key variables driving that status. Text may not be the right medium for the new message.

2. Edit ruthlessly. Everything can be shorter. The time you take clarifying and shortening saves your readers that much and more -- since you, not they, are best positioned to solve the puzzles posed by an obscure sentence, and to summarize an overly long one. If your readers number more than one, the time savings are multiplied.

3. Be very clear in your terms, meanings and references. If they aren't clear, explain them. Did that explanation just blow up your document's organization? Time to revise. Be precise. Your audience does not have your perspective -- your local environment variables are not theirs -- you need to orient them to the topic before you can expect casual references to be meaningful.

4. Much business writing requires an imperative style. At the top, tell your reader the action or decision expected / hoped for of them at the end of the document, and tell them what you will talk about. As you provide information, keep it in relation to the action expected of them. If there is no relation, what is it doing here? If it must be in here, why? and what are the implications for the stated purpose of the document? Is it time to revise again?

At the end of the document, give them detailed instructions about what they should do next -- call at this number, email that address, provide these thoughts, whatever.

Good training in writing is available and worthwhile. If you really want to get better, seek it out.
I typed in my zip code and got "Can't find shit there. Try somewhere else." Thanks, wtfsie!
The novel, short story and so on are absolutely tools used to build things[1]. So are genres (sci-fi, fantasy), narrative modes (free indirect discourse, stream of consciousness), and even rhythms or styles (see the Oxen of the Sun episode of Ulysses for an extreme example). Concepts are generative: if you decide to write a Künstlerroman, a lot of the heavy lifting is done for you.

That said, a single writer can't, as a general rule[2], "use [their] ability to make using [their] ability easier" in this way, since genres, modes and the like don't "just work." Even when they descend from the work of one or a few innovators, there's a long process of consensus-building that has to take place before new concepts become conventional and, as a result, productive.

1. The screenplay (for both film and television) in particular is structurally very rigid, although slug lines and such admit more variation than most people think. And the actual writing is capable of great variety. Check out the original Alien script (http://sfy.ru/?script=alien) or the Alien-inspired style of WALL•E.

2. Though of course it happens: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, et al.
You might like Perl too.

Edit: haha I love how people downvote this like i'm being sarcastic. Down with Perl, that horrible language with a community and modules 100x larger than Node!
Paralyzed Woman Controls Robot With Her Brain
The liberal arts need to be valued more highly. 'Nough said.
Credit cards are also not so popular in Germany. Supermarkets accept the local bank debit card, but I typically leave my Visa to home.

Usually I remember to get enough money from ATM's. The worst day to forget to withdraw some cash is the first of May, when it's a bit different because all the ATM's are closed to prevent the protesters from breaking them.
When, Where to View Rare Solar Eclipse
Using AWS and Bit.ly to Eliminate Server State
You can compile Go to js with gwt. You can reuse code that way.

This makes me wonder.. and this is totally off the cuff, non-researched pondering.. could there be merit to a JavaScript dialect that would compile to Go?
Context.IO 2.0 API - New features Pull email data into your app
The original article is about a UAV that masses 20 g, whereas the links you mention have video from a Funjet, which is has a mass of 550g, according to this: http://www.barnardmicrosystems.com/L4E_arctic.htm#x3

So, that's 27x the mass -- a completely different problem in terms of engineering.
Awesome. But I've never heard of the "is now diamonds" meme...
Don't Sweat Missing Out On Facebook's IPO, And Don't Buy It Friday
Google Ruby port to NaCl wanting to be merged by Yugui, the 1.9 release manager
it was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaweb
All is dependent on audience.
Web Intents and You (and AddThis) | AddThis Blog
Fair enough; but you're still going to limit your liability. Assume your customer spends $10K/month with you; or $120K/year. Would you ever commit to compensating them $1MM+ in the event of an outage? Of course not. It would be business suicide.

If you want that level of uptime, you build out your own place (i.e. Amazon, Facebook, Google). If you're not big enough to build your own, you live with the possibility of downtime.
Vert.x vs node.js vs APE2 simple HTTP benchmarks
Why use anything but its-all-text and vim?
The main problem is Go uses every core, while Node does not if you do not use clustering. And with clustering performance scales up linearly, try if you wish.
> Non-programmers will likely not be poking around on Google's engineering blogs

This is the central "Official Google Blog", not an engineering blog. From the other articles on the blog (most of which are written by marketing and other non-engineering disciplines -- see the last lines), it's pretty clear that the intended audience is anyone who's interested in Google, not just programmers. I know lots of non-programmers who like to read these, especially since a lot of news sites link to and quote these articles.
It looks like parts of it were authored in Flash and converted using http://www.google.com/doubleclick/studio/swiffy/
Indian Schoolboy’s security lock for iPad to be featured at WWDC 2012
Discussion here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3982887
It's pretty cool how hovering over the name highlights which person it is.
In the Race to Win Social Video, Is One App Gaming the System Too Much?
I think you are automatically limiting your audience with the high level of profanity on the site. Don't get me wrong, I like the functionality it provides -- but find a better way to grab the audience's attention. Look to Zappos and some other companies for friendly, engaging copy.
Combining these four elements has allowed me to upload and serve images from the billr.me domain without maintaining a database. I’m hosting on https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ for pennies per month and never need to do any server maintenance.
Terrorism is opposition to the current political setup.

Totalitarian regimes' innovation is making opposition to the current political setup terrorism.
Any of you beancounting/game theory types fancy analysing this trend in the FBI's behaviour from an economic perspective? What is the driver or incentive for them to do this?
I read this as "LostOrage", so it would get much more attention if named as "LoStorage.js".
It would have more utility if in the search box you could type the RFC/BCP/STD number, e.g. "1591" or "STD 3".

Unfortunately every RFC I tried, except for the provided examples, returned "Could not prettify this RFC".
It's shit like this, Apple.

Sure, the cutesy "tee hee, aren't I clever" routine was cute when Siri first came along, but now that we're past that and moving into the real world of real use, Apple's self-serving editorialism undermines the whole thing.

We're talking about a platform that is widely held to represent the future of HCI. While there's no doubt that Siri is a technical marvel, we're still a long, long way off from a better world in terms of actual content. If I ask Siri what the best phone is on the market, I expect Siri to tell me the 'truth', not some banal "You're kidding right?" straight out of marketing. The specifics of how Alpha messed up their original algorithm aside, Apple's glossing over of these inconvenient truths doesn't bode well for the impartiality of Siri as a knowledge conduit.

Imagine if Safari automatically re-wrote web content that was critical of Apple, or if it simply put a giant black 'Redacted' overlay on top. There would be riots in the street (or on Twitter). I don't see Siri's editorial stance as any different; you're either a conduit for information or you're a spin doctor. You can't be both.
Maybe they don't need it.

However there's an other audience: limited partners. Most of those sites communicate a "we're stuck in the 90's, plus we're really boring" message. Maybe that's the right thing to do? Seems like horrible branding to me.

In any case, you'd think they'd at least update things so they're decent on mobile.
Cute, I like the way ASCII art is preserved.

Small bug: RFCs < 1000 that are not prettifiable have a extraneous zero in the datatracker.ietf.org link.

Eg: http://pretty-rfc.herokuapp.com/RFC123

redirects to: http://pretty-rfc.herokuapp.com/RFC0123 (left padding is probably a mistake here; some day we will have >9999 RFCs)

links to: http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc0123/ (404)

should link to: http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc123/

ps. XML format for RFCs that this leans on: http://pretty-rfc.herokuapp.com/RFC2629
Where does the search bar go?
All dependent on context. In the context of a team, one can rarely solve all problems by herself. More importantly, it can cause greater disfunction when work isn't coordinated/communicated appropriately. The whole point of working in a team is to get more work done more efficiently because the work load is shared and each member focuses on her specific skill, and doesn't do everything.
When I search for "1483", my only result is 2684, which supersedes it. But when I try to view it, I'm told "The source XML for this RFC isn't available, therefore it can't be reformatted." Did the IETF shut you down?

I don't think the original documents on the IETF datatracker site are that bad- it seems pretty clean and easy to read already.
Glancewalla: Glancee + Gowalla = the perfect pair in Facebook's mobile strategy
I find it a tad bit too minimalistic. Why not use a tagged based search, like "pizza in san antonio texas"?

And the domain name, is too long. People will misremember and mistype it as "wherethefucktoeat.com" or "wherethefuckshouldieat.com" or similiar.
Totally agree. However, I grew up with a family in the film business, and my parents always said you could tell who was in charge because they were usually wearing jeans. The pages/errand boys were the ones in suits.

I also wish their website would be a bit nicer, but they have probably realized it doesn't matter, they are on top and anyone whose worth one's salt already knows it.
Backgrounds, Shadows, Fonts, and the Cascade
More Google+ in Gmail: Improved Circle Integration
Thanks, I appreciate the response. I'll look into OPT and think of some big companies like Google and FB.
And because the framework is based on Node.js,
developers don't have to worry about connection
issues or scale.

Err, no. It might be better for open connections, but nothing is worry-free ever.

Also, I don't buy the selling point "hey this is a new tech so you don't have to learn any tech!". What is this rush to introduce new stuff to solve the problem of too many?

And why push it harder by stating not only the big guys can do this? Nobody should do it only because Twitter or Google do it.

It's not like I wouldn't use real-time solutions, but this article did sound like "let's find a use for this new thing."
"medium" means I don't have personal experience of how the percentage scales to large applications.

as for sharing: data sources, domain models, utilities and templates can be shared. its the io handling (HTTP and dom) that can not be shared.
Half of it was true for Ruby — many people were unaware. What they don't have in common is people's immediate reaction upon discovering the language.

Common first exposure to Ruby: "Oh, wow, that's cool. It looks pretty easy."

Common first exposure to Erlang: "Oh, wow, I didn't know you could code in Klingon."

I do agree, though, that Erlang could probably gain a lot more popularity if somebody introduced a framework that really showed what it could do. The most popular web framework right now (at least I think it's the most popular — there aren't any official polls or anything) is MochiWeb, which kindasorta doesn't have any documentation.
This is great. Small complaint: searching for RFC2822 comes up with nothing. 2822 gets what I want. Plz to fix :)
Aw, that's disappointing. I automated those steps in my old package generator(s). After you build a couple thousand linux packages from scratch, you notice most of 'em follow some simple conventions which you can look for and package in an automated way.

http://psydev.syw4e.info/new/autopkg.pl/autopkg.pl-1.5/usr/b... (oh god, this is bad code)

http://psydev.syw4e.info/new/slacktools/slackmake
I suspect however, that it doesn't support X11 and many of the other required libraries that are required by Emacs.

Also, don't feel bad about "actually..." ing me, I'd prefer to know the truth, than to think a falsehood.
Gave up google months ago, haven't missed it.
The unofficial CouchDB Wishlist
nooooooooooo dont try DPD. look at trust pilot first. average score 2 out of 10 from 880 posts. they are truly awful
It's not predictably happening with _all_ websocket server implementations. I tried with node.js using a combination of https and ws modules. That worked. We crashed Chrome using em-websockt and netty, though.
It is a reference to Old Spice's "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" ads: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE
Except for the fact that the bulk of the arrests on terrorism-related charges in the past year have been white supremacists and "militiamen" who share your apparent fantasies regarding an oncoming fascist state I guess you would have a point...
The links you reference are mosly for OpenGL, SDL, and File I/O, which is a small part of what Emacs actually needs.
Personally, I would like to know if this setup is available using gunicorn.
A web framework built on top of Elixir would do it.
FOCACCIA ALLE OLIVE RICETTA SALATA FINGER FOOD
Is Comcast prioritizing traffic or not?
Kind of a clunky way to handle versioning though. In Lein (for example), adding

[noir "1.2.0"]

ensures I'm always grabbing the same version. In Go, appears the only way to guarantee this is to check in the full source of the library alongside your own in your repo.
Timeless [2011]
I dont think he is counting the cost of hosting on S3. :)
RunCore InVincible SSD with physical wiping of data
Via COM. Technically any language with a COM or DCOM bridge will work fine. lispworks has one and there is a route via the CLR here:

http://weitz.de/rdnzl/
I think you hit it on the head. I'd break down the 75% a little further in my case:

- 25% Poisonous people in key architectural/infrastructure positions who actively make it as difficult as possible to communicate.

- 15% "Mea culpa". I fail to clarify or make an assumption due to busyness, lazyness or missing something.

- 25% Folks who do not take initiative to engage in conversations at the appropriate time. These folks typically pop up with 11th hour critical path problems.

- 35% General nonsense: People incapable of writing english, etc.
More power to ya Jerry. That's the lifestyle I'm working toward myself.
I don't think so, but I could be mistaken. (btw, someone pointed that out as a drawback on another thread.)

What I've done sometimes is just clone the repo within a directory that appears in the GOPATH, maybe checkout a specific revision, and that solves the problem.
The Perfect VC Pitch
Hawk Light Brings Safe Solar Lighting To Africa’s Most Populated City
How to build a location-based hybrid mobile app with reverse geocoding
At my current job I do spend a lot of time caring about using the right data structures and algorithms to get decent performance. At my previous job, where performance was not as important, there were still places where this knowledge was required. For instance, we had something analogous to Google's instant search, where each keystroke in the search box would cause the results to change instantly. Implementing this incorrectly would have caused it to be very slow for the user.

I don't ask these questions to separate people with formal education from people without. People with formal education get these questions wrong quite often.
Rackspace 256mb + HN ~ NodeJS = Thrashing
COMMUNIA explores role of digital public domain in final report
Based on the headline, I am against it.
They should be allowed to leave if they want to.
It's not so much an economic perspective as a political one, the government derives its power (and income) from the current federal reserve system, if something were to undermine this system the government would be left toothless and facing a very angry populace.

A full investigation of the banking system would cause credibility to be lost by the banks which would unravel the whole system as the fractional reserve system collapses. Thus the government needs to remove credibility from those who pose a threat to this system.

As to why white supremacists aren't targeted, white supremacists don't pose any fundamental threat to the banks or to power because their ideas are unpopular, occupy touches upon an angry thread running through the country that the average person cannot get ahead. Threads like these unseat governments, an unseated government cannot prevent an investigation into the banks.
How Many Daily Downloads Does It Take To Reach The Top Of The App Store?
I doubt it does. net/http looks like a basic http listener? As such, the comparison looks biased to me. Mind you, I don't know much about node.js or Go.
Yes, like the HTML web this web of data grows by network effects. The "Semantic Web" was only ever a data model and exchange formats - a standard to guide independent efforts. Now, of course, a lot of that data will be protected by the internet giants for their competitive reasons, but the standards still provide the interoperation at the edges.
Maybe the thought of people who do know how to communicate, such as Mayor Bloomberg, learning to code is bothersome to Jeff Atwood. If so, consider why.

My concern is that Bloomberg is just looking for money. He may have no interest in how a computer works.

If he could code, what sort of programs would he write?

For example, with respect to the desktop and the web, many "coders" write programs that are a constant game of manipulation of naive end users. The moral issues raised in programming are seemingly endless. It's relatively rare to find a programmer with a social conscience. Mainly because few people with a social conscience know how to program.

Would people like Bloomberg bring a greater sense of social conscience to programming? Or would they worsen the situation?

On the flipside, having more people be more familiar with programming might reduce the amount of manipulation that is possible. More people might start demanding and reading source code. That could be a positive force.
I think that there are two things in their favor here:

First, they are Google, and therefore possess huge quantities of data and the ability, courtesy of their uber map reduce prowess and ultra-fast custom hardware, to make sense of it.

Second, they bought Metaweb (makers of Freebase) and with it some of the best semantic expertise out there. Toby Segaran is a brilliant dude. His O'Reilly book "Programming the Semantic Web" explains in 20 pages what most books take 150 pages to do: the concept of a URI based graph database and how it enables data to be merged from multiple sources and reasoned over with applications.

I only hope Google open-sources some of their research here for the rest of us.
Ask HN: What tip or experience has most improved your writing?
Re: "Please Learn to Write" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3982354
So he is using bitly as a key value store.

other than url shortening, does anyone offer this as a service? a key value only online service?
Why don't I work at Shopify =/
Zoomi | ריפלקטור
Indeed.

We have 400+ page documents in the system and they all work nicely :)
The incentive is the same with any law enforcement agency, arrests & convictions. The number of arrests & convictions is how all law enforcement agencies are judged; the more you the better you are.
Great tool. May you share how you built it?

This is very useful to me.

Email address to contact?
MaKey MaKey: An Invention Kit for Everyone (Official Site)
S3 is pretty cheap as well. $0.125 per GB of storage. Considering the images are ~80KB on average, S3 hosting is also just pennies per month. :)
Google revamps search, tries to think more like a person
Hapland 3
This is the most valuable thing I've learnt during my PhD. PhD teaches you:

research skills 50%
ability to communicate your research to others 50%

In my experience, I've noticed a lot of very smart hackers to be woefully bad in communication, and PhDs to be much better than the median at it. On the other hand, I think there is no correlation between research skills and having a PhD.
Very close layout to http://documentup.com/ Which is nice =D
Kudos to the effort, great app.
It's not simply a political factor (although it mostly is.) This has nothing to do with the Fed (which I believe should be done away with.) The powers the USG use to go after groups that potentially threaten it existed before 1913 (even though more powers have been added since then.) The Fed has nothing to do what so ever with this discussion.

Edited for some grammar & clarity.
This argument is fallacious.

Would you expect conservatives in 1970s britain to avoid using gas, electricity, trains, the telephone and so on, because they were publicly owned?

Do you expect socialists in modern america not to ever use commercial businesses?
This doesn't explain why they keep doing it to muslims who don't care about the fed, or at least dont care about it any more than any other aspect of US culture.

I meant economic in more of a generalised "freakonomics" sense.
That's great to quickly show someone a program, but not so great if they try it a few weeks later and get a non-stable version of your program, otherwise that definitely won't be it, they'll have to spend some time figuring out what went wrong.

If Go adds some method to specify a tagged version that could be pretty nice though.

I hope it goes without saying that there's no way this kind of hack (neat as it is) is a substitute for a proper package management system like npm (which is a very good package manager).
Since the dataset has an open-source (CC-BY) license, I am at a loss to imagine how someone could kill it.
you realize that the semantic web is not about the semantics of the data, but instead about the semantics of the schema, right?

I'm having trouble getting your point here. A schema can be thought of as metadata about the data to which it is applied; so "semantics of the schema" are also implicitly "semantics of the data" in a sense. I guess I'm missing some nuance about the point you're trying to make... would you care to elaborate?
Same here.

DISCLAIMER: This reply contains a slightly modified implementation of RFC 1097.
This is one fucking funny recommendation engine.
Love at First Click - Code at a Non-Profit