skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi there, I'm the author of the post.

I couldn't agree more with your comment. I liked the letter so much I put it in a frame I had lying around and I mounted it on my wall. I think a lot of startups should heed your advice and provide this same kind of "WOW" service. Letting your users know you respect them can go a long way for a company that really means it.
Yahoo’s Chief Said to Tell Executives He Did Not Submit a Résumé
Q: "What's better than this stack for application development?"

A: So many things. Cocoa comes to mind.

HTML/CSS/JavaScript were never created to build applications, and it's very apparent when you do so. I've built a lot of web apps, but out of necessity. I think we're going to actually see the opposite trend in software: moving client-server apps away from browser-based solutions and toward native apps. In fact we're already seeing that movement—and I would argue that a big reason behind it is how much writing client apps in JavaScript sucks.
Shy people fear negative judgment

What? While I absolutely agree that introversion and shyness are not the same thing (although they probably often reinforce each other) I've never heard and deeply disagrees with that definition of shyness. Shyness has nothing to do with fearing negative judgment.

Wikipedia says: In humans, shyness (also called diffidence) is a social psychology term used to describe the feeling of apprehension, lack of comfort, or awkwardness experienced when a person is in proximity to, approaching, or being approached by other people, especially in new situations or with unfamiliar people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shyness

That is a much better description in my eyes.

And shyness itself isn't by definition a bad thing. Depends on context and what is valued in society. That said I really believe that being able to challenge your shyness is valuable (needs practice) and that you should be aware of what opportunities you might dismiss because of your shyness.
I think the person is simply frustrated because he realizes that StackExchange could be so much better. I quit a few years ago when they changed all question upvotes to be only worth 5 points, but rejoined about a year and a half ago because it's still the best existing option.

When asking questions, I try to make them good enough so that other people will find them useful in the future, and it's great when I get a like-minded answer. Some examples:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9708945/how-to-embed-a-ne...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10252440/changing-the-det...

Still, I think StackOverflow could be taken up a notch to allow more collaboration and organization. Also, wouldn't it be great to be able to provide runnable source code in some sort of git archive? For some languages like Javascript the code in the questions/answers could be in something like http://jsfiddle.net

Ideally, a group of people could pick any topic and essentially write several books (beginner and advanced) by asking lots of questions. At least that was my initial belief. Say, for example, you wanted to learn elisp, and you typed: "Hello world in emacs", well I've got that answered:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2170528/writing-hello-wor...

I didn't quite get a book with Elisp, but I did throw down quite a few breadcrumbs:

CGI: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1532311/cgi-programming-i...

AWK Example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2260294/awk-print-2-1-in-...

Extract URLs: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1642184/extracting-urls-f...

Parse CSV/Gen HTML: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1541682/lisp-script-to-pa...

Wrap Selection like Textmate: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1558178/wrap-selection-in...

MySql (Unanswered): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1532365/mysql-queries-fro...

Generate a Quiz: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2264286/generating-a-quiz...

Open Browser: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1532365/mysql-queries-fro...

Generate a Quiz (Common Lisp): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2264267/generating-a-quiz...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2115341/sorting-buffer-li...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2358604/convert-decimal-h...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2170120/operating-on-mult...
> Ask some people how many golfballs fit in a bus. They'll be stumped. They'll have no idea how to proceed. They'll just stop, and look at you, and flounder.

Because, as ebbv said, there is absolutely no way they can get a decent level of accuracy that would be useful for any kind of purpose. Any estimate in such a situation would be thrown away as soon as Google and other resources are available. Therefore they effectively cannot answer the question, and the question is useless.
This would also prevent you from seeing potentially important phone calls. Technically speaking airplane mode with wifi is no longer airplane mode. Your phone should have a "don't use data when roaming" option, use it.
How many chapters are there? At Chapter 4 now - I took way too long figuring out the chess reference.
I personally find disturbing how people wants to do _everything_ with web technologies. Can't they just learn how to write native apps? I wouldn't like to see my desktop full of slow and bloated web apps.
> they'll make assumptions (and note the dangers of assumptions)

So is it OK to make assumptions or not?
Is the domain "Thigy.com" worth anything on a domain marketplace?
I participate in the SO community a lot (I'm top answer-er for the Canvas tag and HTML5 tag). It's not quite a "community", though, because while I have a lot of respect for the other answer-ers I don't really get to interact with them very much, aside from complimenting a novel solution and the like. I sort of wish there were more methods for interaction (the chat channels don't help that much for niche tags).

And while my interaction with askers is always fleeting, I'd really like to thank them for all their support. At the end of the day their words are the only encouragement I need:

http://i.imgur.com/POZmt.png
>You obviously are a jerk.

And you are obviously a "nice guy."
Galaxy Note Starting To Get ICS - US Coming Late
Rob Pike is one of my software architects idols. but he is a AT&T/google ambassador.

and a public figure. this is a good propaganda piece. it's interesting, but you can't ignore the semiotics of how it makes stallman looks pathetic (no eye contact) and the events all turn out to play right to the good side (a more pragmatic analysis would say that 100% of the audience were people already intending to attend anyway and they just decide to do so carrying signs).

all that said, i believe having both sides is healthy. and i'm not against patents. i learn a lot about reading them. my only 3 grips with the patent system are 1) patents have more legalese than technical details 2) patents last damn too long 3) because of #1 they give out patents for too generic stuff.
Spaceship Enterprise in 20 years? Beam me up
My last sentence explained why that's not an issue. If you're going to be condescending, you should read more closely.
j_baker called it sarcasm. More generally, "could care less" is an idiom. It has a figurative meaning that is different from its literal meaning.

Here's a link to "could care less" in The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, http://books.google.com/books?id=9re1vfFh04sC&pg=PA137&#...
XUL is not html, and you'll have to hit the docs every time you need something. Also, debugging XUL is a pain. XUL is pretty ancient too, so that probably doesn't help either.

Sticking with plain jane html is definitely the better approach, however I doubt the XUL implementers would have ever known that back in the year 2000. There's still a bunch of tools for XUL, but fairly rusty:
http://xul.sourceforge.net/
Is this normal?

{"error": "Service unavailable, please re-issue request."}
yeah, i felt guilty for years. glad it's gone now.
My senior project: Cura, remote systems administration from your Android phone
would greatly appreciate feedback, suggestions
Now to be fair, the oldest phone I've ever used is the Blackberry 8100, released in 2006, but I've never had a phone lose its clock when pulling the main battery.
Is the bus in space? Is it a toy bus? Is it a bus for aliens? Can I assume the bus is perfectly spherical? Is the bus a ghost? Do I have a ray gun that can shrink and enlarge things? Are the golf balls made out of water? Do kids keep coming along and stealing golf balls from the bus until it is perfectly full? etc.
my bet, it's an opinion that helps google monetize on software research. whatever that is.
>And is that really an awful way for guys to hit on you? They're going to do that anyway, and at least this way they're expressing interest in your interests, rather than just staring at your chest.

If the man is attractive, women will generally welcome the flirtation. If he is unattractive, the woman will generally perceive it as an insult to her attractiveness, since the man should know better, that she is "out of his league."

Also, can anyone explain why it is considered a "good thing" to have a gender balance in tech, or any industry? Who decided that every industry must have an equal number of men and women?
I'm probably biased because of my years ago experiences w/writing compilers/vm's, but I'm a big fan of "code that writes code". Like any technique, there is a time and place for it though.

One use that is highly relevant to many shops is creating client tools for their APIs. That is, creating libraries in common/target client languages for higher order abstractions of some of the granular/repetitive stuff and/or some of the mechanical access actions.

Keeping this sort of stuff straight by hand as an API evolves is tedious and error prone. Creating the infrastructure to generate these sorts of libraries is a largish cost up front but pays off hugely downstream.

We are still working (very early stage) on our tools, but our tools code generator(s) works/will work off of the same infrastructure that generates our API model metadata (https://sigkat.com/services/api/model)
ugh. have you ever developed stuff in XUL? It's not a great system. It's also pretty ancient, so there's probably cruft there support old XUL applications built in 2002.

I think the main problem is that XUL is like HTML, but not. So people's brains are already wired to understand html, but when there's something that looks identical to it, but has it's own set of quirks, it takes a lot of time getting used to. It's as if someone took C++ and changed just enough stuff so that you wouldn't notice it until you tried to run it.

How many html tags do you recognize here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/XUL_Reference ?

Lots of the tags are somewhat historical because css wasn't as powerful back in 2002 as it is today. Most people starting to hack XUL won't know the difference between a bbox and a deck tag.
I don't think there's anything to debate there. It's just a matter of personal taste. I find the whole minimalist thing to be very "hacker-esque" (if that's the right way to say that).
I would love any type of input/crit about this listing, it's obviously my very first.
Fundamental ideas are portable ideas. Lisp didn't start out as a programming language. It was an abstract model of computation. As an ex-Symbolics employee friend of mine says, "Math never goes out of style."

Eschew what's popular and what gets attention. Seek the fundamental instead. This is the difference between learning about Ruby because Rails is the current big thing versus knowing enough to be interested in Ruby because it embodies the objects+messages model and you find that beautiful. (And if you value the objects+messages model because it was a big thing in academia at some point, you are still missing the point!)

Programming has many of the features of "pop-culture" because the rate of change in the field is faster than the rate of actual progress. Learn in-depth the actual progress.

EDIT: Switched the positions of fundamental and portable, since fundamental => portable.
There's nothing communities like better than meta-discussion.

I've seen it myself - my post comparing HN traffic to my blog on technical vs fluffy posts actually got further longer than any of the posts it was comparing.
What I'm curious about is how much control they are willing to give their developers over their workstations. At a previous company they had trouble because the developers needed administrator access to their Windows systems because they needed to install a lot of different software and run many things in administrative mode (server development). It was a constant tension between developers and security. I wonder how it is with Linux, which might have more fine-grained controls and an easier way to install per-user software.

I'm surprised xmonad got a mention. I interpreted it as a window manager that didn't have much traction outside of the Haskell community, particularly with all the configuration being done in Haskell. Perhaps it was just an example of an one of the more strange requests.

That said, I love xmonad. People keep asking me for help with their Gnome desktops and I have to shrug and point out I don't really use Gnome if I can get away with it.
Although the mandatory sign-up for VBV on Newegg is old news (~3 years ago now?), any time you get a "you are now being redirected to your credit card's website for a mandatory additional agreement," that should be a huge red flag.

You can cancel the "mandatory" VBV page by pressing the back button. At first, the VBV page did have a tiny link that let you opt-out, but it disappeared some time in 2009.

I was quite surprised when I had finally given up and was ready to empty the Newegg shopping cart, only to find the order was accepted when I used the back button to escape VBV.
I talked to a lot of people about almost this exact idea in late 2011. Though I didn't build it because I got involved in something else, everyone I talked to was very enthusiastic about the idea (e.g. ready to hand over a credit card).

I think you should pursue this idea further!
This seems extremely conspiratorial and likely wrong.

iPhones can already be locked to a carrier. Whether the SIM card is virtual is irrelevant. If the carriers want to screw you, they already have means to do so.

In fact, I suspect a phone with a virtual SIM card may be easier to unlock than a physical one since Apple must distribute software designed to program the virtual SIM card. You also won't need to physically get a SIM card to use a network and you'll be able to use multiple networks with the same phone. That sounds like a plus to me.

Regardless, the SIM card is certainly not the limiting factor in carrier portability or locking. It's essentially a floppy disk, and is quite unnecessary given data connectivity these days.

The idea that Apple wanted a smaller SIM as a step closer to no SIM is ridiculous. What difference does the size make? Having a card or not having a card is binary.
MObtvse yet another blogging platform | Ruby, Mongodb
Can't stop people writing them, but it's certainly time to stop clicking on headlines that end in question marks...
This would also prevent you from seeing potentially important phone calls.

I didn't want to get calls at all while overseas.

Technically speaking airplane mode with wifi is no longer airplane mode.

For one thing, this is how the iPhone UI presents it, and since "Airplane Mode" is just an arbitrary UI thing, that's as valid as anything. For another thing, many airplanes now have WiFi during flight, so it seems you'd be hoist on the level of pedantic you're currently invoking.

However, using the "Data Roaming" option is a good idea.
As evidence - of course not. But as means to fin out who that is - sure, why not. Once the person is identified, it is a question of good old survelliance, and they are professionals at that, so chances are the guy will make a mistake, and sooner rather than later, and the hard evidence will be there. Look what happened to LulzSec - once the person is known, if he continues to do what he does, he will lose. Even professional spies can not pull it off if identified, what to say about some college students?
I'd argue that what you propose is covered by a sane approach to "obviousness."
> It would be nice to see a total abolition of parties

Abolishing the formal definition of parties wouldnt help, because like-minded people would still team up and form de facto parties, so nothing substantial would change.

> People should vote for other people, not for parties.

In Germany, you have both. There are two votes, the first one is for people, the "direct candidates". The second is for the whole party, which again is represented by a list of candidates determined by in-party elections.
I'm getting the same thing. I wasn't 100% sure I had it correct, but since other, similar URLs issue a 404 this makes me think we got the URL correct. Either I am not seeing how this relates, or they are having issues.
> Also, can anyone explain why it is considered a "good thing" to have a gender balance in tech, or any industry?

We strive for a balance because that's a good way to avoid excluding people. Excluding groups of people is bad because they may have different ways to attack problems or different insights to bring to development etc.

Mono-cultures are generally weak and vulnerable. Diversity is generally robust.
What I would like to see is a "privileged mode" Chromium
(or Firefox) that would let applications break out of
the browser sandbox and directly perform operations such
as filesystem I/O.

This is exactly what Microsoft HTML Applications do (available since IE 5). In other respects, I'm not a big fan of Internet Explorer, but this is one thing I think it did amazingly right, and way before anybody else. I was very excited to see the headline, and then horribly disappointed to discover that what they're offering is Not As Good as 13-year-old Microsoft technology.
Learn CSS Selectors interactively
I think I finally realized why Internet flamewars are as a rule comprised of insults and poor spelling and grammar:

Passive aggressive, thinly polite, well written (In a grammatical and syntactic sense.) posts on the same flame-inducing subjects are actually more painful to read.
Direct link to video: http://youtu.be/fu3pT_9nb8o
Discussion is only tolerated insofar as it allows refinement (and editing for improvement) of the question and the answers. Discussion in and of itself is not the goal; getting a verifiably great answer to your question -- even if you didn't ask it -- is!

At Stack Exchange, we do science in the small. Bite-size, fun-size units of science that shouldn't feel like work, but collectively build something amazing for a community of people who love a particular topic.
Nah, it's the airlines/regulators that are being hoisted. Normally you are 'required' to shut down all transmitters in your devices during flight, and this is what airplane mode would do. As has been discussed over and again, the reasons for this are mostly bunk, which is underlined by allowing transmitting 802.11 (only if there's money in it, natch). I can't speak for how Apple chooses to represent concepts in their UI...

Fair enough on the calls.
would greatly appreciate some feedback, suggestions
I am using a pseudonym.

I realise that things I write can be linked back to me, but I want to not make that too easy.

I haven't posted anything stupid.
It really does feel great to have an answer accepted, you get something similar to that feeling of "ahh this is fixed, finally!".
So you can defeat a patent by claiming you invented it independently later?

... how would that work?
It's not about getting the "right" answer, it's about how you approach tackling the problem. If you talk through your solution as you do it, no one is going to question which assumption you make. The assumptions are baked into the answer, but part of the point of these kinds of questions is that they don't matter that much. Or more to the point, the uncertainty in your answer is on the order of the uncertainty of your assumptions, which hardly matter whether you assume a 25 ft bus or a 50 ft bus, if you think the precision of you answer justifies confidence better than a factor of 2, you don't understand the problem as well as you think you do.

And the seats really don't matter, volume-wise. Unless you're actually counting the golf balls, which, I agree, would be silly.
Douglas Rushkoff on the changing relationship of artist and technologist
for me, I changed https -> http and it worked.
How do you make an idea portable?
I use LastPass, I've still managed to lose a HN password. Shit happens now and then, and it's silly that you'd lose your account over it.
Looks pretty neat! I've been thinking of using FORTH in the same way; I'll be really interested to read through your sample games.

(I played around with GraFORTH on the Apple ][ back in the day, and I remember it was wicked fast, and kinda fun)
I'm confused - is the video mocking women who whine about "that's what she said" jokes?
char format[10] = "%10.3f%10.4f%10.3f%10.4f%10.3f%10.4f%4d";

printf( format, x, y, a, b, c, d, n );

You can get similar behavior from C, reusing the format specification? No idea if this was true in the K&R days though.
> People should vote for other people, not for parties.

I would like to take this concept even one step further.
People should not vote for other people. They should vote for ideas and concepts.
I do not think "no discussion" rule is enforced to mean no any discussion at all. I have routinely seen and participated in discussing merits of certain answers, and nobody minded. The premise is however that there is a right answer to the question and it is knowable and findable, not just a matter of opinion that can be debated endlessly. Yes, some questions do not fit - but many questions that are complicated enough for me that I could not find it by myself without wasting a lot of time - do fit. Documentation is very different format - it usually shows you what tools you have, but not how to use them. Compare "here's a hammer, it is used to drive in nails" to "how do I hammer in a nail that is slightly crooked into a concrete wall?" or "Can I put a nail into a porcelain tile without breaking it?". The docs probably won't answer such questions.
Lamenting the loss of "hard mode"
I just tried that, but still get redirected back to https. I even tried using curl and I get a 302.
Yes, but even if those two stipulations were sufficient, neither seem to be possible with software.
... I am sorry, but that's very untrue.

As it happens, not every language is implemented using runtime written in C/C++, nor does every language modules written in C/C++ to extend it instead of FFI.

Dealing with libraries written in C++ without C API is one of the worst PITAs in my experience, leading to crazy things like KDE's SMOKE (which, to make it funnier, has bad documentation, so I'm still unsure if I can make it work outside Qt's object model)
Sounds to me like a cognitive escape velocity.
An idea needs a certain amount just to get out of your head, and an even larger velocity to get out of the 'bubble.' People encountering the idea can either increase or decrease its velocity, like booster rockets.
Now, I wonder if the escape velocity of a given bubble, or the current velocity of a given idea are measurable in any meaningful way, so that we could act to change them?
Just keep refreshing.
My personal take: Why I don’t like newspaper paywalls
Isn't that just syntactic sugar[1]?

Actually, it's runtime-during-parsing magic, IIRC.
What a waste of time!
Appcelerator is putting its titanium desktop framework under opensource which does EXACTLY THAT.
It already works on win/lin/mac and would only need a cleanup and update.

Why wasting time and re-creating everythin from scratch?!
Well, I guess you need a meta debugger here.
Searching for meaning in distant solar systems
What a ridiculous story. It is sad that two people died, but to imply that a cell phone company is somehow liable or should have been coerced by the government to have more cell phone towers is borderline insane.
How can you review your own code?
Penny Auction Reviews