skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With the Scripted API, you can build a self-publishing website in < 50 lines of code. We're publishing to our own magazine sites using this API!

Basic flow:

Use a feed to parse and generate topics
Push blog article jobs to Scripted
Pull finished content from Scripted
Post content to your CMS

We'll write another blog post about it in a couple of weeks.
It's not like bananas are even one of those crops which requires cheap labour in order to be economical.

The Australian banana industry gets by somehow, paying sky-high Australian wages, and you can still buy Australian bananas for no more than you'd pay for an Ecuadorian banana. (At least, in those years when the Australian banana crop hasn't been wiped out by a cyclone.)
In the spirit of GCD et al. I'd advocate for a simple reduction process, like square root approximation. With emphasis on dependant variables, and convergence.
Most likely it never will be faster than just GIL. It may be very close to the same performance, but nothing is likely to beat a "one lock every N thousands of instructions" approach when you have a single thread.

If it's within 5% though, I'll be happy - especially if the backend is possible to switch. It seems that it's possible now - so if you know you're running only in a single thread you could just choose the cut-down version.
They have a word for this: Business

Your friend just turned out to be a lousy business person and his employer was not.
I've never heard the crab expression, is that really true? Are crabs just vindictive little creatures?
> The more difficult question is: what if they lay off his coworkers because of his innovation? How should he feel then?

That's a question of how to deal with a broken system. Automation is by definition the destruction of manual work. Most of the time, of boring manual work. This is great. We should automate as much as we can. Oh, but it happens right now: hourly productivity, according to my source[1], more than tripled since the fifties.

But, as you point out, sudden increase of productivity mechanically creates unemployment, if you don't have a massive consumption growth to absorb it —not a good idea in the long term, and doesn't happen anyway.

There are several solutions out of this dilemma, which you can apply in parallel. The most powerful one is: work less (at the national level). Get nearly everyone to work 32 hours per week (typically 4 days a week) instead of the usual 40. (You can use incentives instead of force if you don't want to appear too communist) If Productivity grows again too much in the next decades, get down to 28, 24, or even less.

There. I'm happy to be a programmer, whose main job is to destroy others'. Except the system is broken, and shows no sign of being fixed. Getting back to your difficult question, I don't know what I'd actually do. I'd probably tell no one, given the risks, both for me and my coworkers. I'd feel bad about reaping all the bonuses, though —but I would save them to buy a house or whatever.

[1] http://www.roosevelt2012.fr/propdetails?propid=13 (French, see 3rd chart. Watch out, it seems Wikipedia disagrees —maybe they're not measuring the same thing?)
I had the impression that "Node.js (readfile)", and possibly "Node.js" meant the blocking call but that "Node.js (streams)" meant he was using something like fs.createReadStream(). But you're right, I don't see that anywhere in the posted source.
It's not just icons. Phrases are the same.

I'll bet many people here have never heard a broken record, but still have heard the phrase "sounds like a broken record."
I feel that distributed teams definetly have many postives, it is just much faster to work in the same building as a person. My startup works via chat room, except for one day a week when we meet in person, and we just get so much more done.

The reason face to face is so much better for us is because so much more information is communicated via talking versus typing. Firstly, the speed one talks usually is faster than their typing speed. Second of all, information is contained in things such as tone, expressions, and gestures, none of which have a digital substitute. Furthermore, it seems that face to face contact facilitates far-reaching conversation about strategy and general topics, rather than just the code at hand. Finally, it is much easier to show someone your error message on your screen, or point to the block of code, than to copy and paste or say line numbers. That final qualm is getting better with the advent of screen sharing though.
When using the vector tools in photoshop, it is important to make sure "snap to pixels" is selected. It fixes this issue when creating things like boxes and buttons.
They deserve a lot of praise for defending their constitution without violence. The interim president stepped down when he said he would and did not run for the office. Elections went off without problems. It should serve as an example for the rest of the world.
There are quite a few places where people get a % of the money they earn/save. Data entry generally isn't one of them.
When you're teaching something completely new to someone, at first you won't even have a common vocabulary. This is true no matter what you're teaching, and you have to dedicate some time to establishing the language (English, not computer).

One thing that makes coding a little harder is that many of the analogies we make for non-coders aren't especially clean: A hash is like an set of cubby holes, each can be named and filled, and the set can be infinitely expanded. Packet routing is like trying to find your way from New York to California, only stopping at major cities to ask for a general direction. Memory is like a big sheet of paper, and x = 5 is like writing 5 somewhere on the paper, and x somewhere else, and then drawing an arrow between them.

I'm not saying these are the best analogies (or even any good), but I have yet to hear ones that aren't riddled with holes. The average non-coder doesn't have the context to back-fill these holes. As an instructor, you need to realize this and take the time to lay more of a foundation than you think.
However I like the use of shrill in this context, as even though it is technically incorrect it made me think of a little bird being paid to shriek nonsense.
Anyone feels this everlonging problem is related to autofocus ? Pretty sure it wouldn't be very hard to automatically realign subparts to fit based on Fourier analysis.
It seems to me that what we are doing is creating new ideograms - that their icon nature will soon enough be beside the point, because they will be something closer to letters, like 漢字.
How I built a fashion brand with no experience
How many typical workers does it take to make one Fortune 500 CEO's salary?
This is, essentially, how language itself has always worked. Common sense labels are applied to things, and they make them things their own and outlive the original reference.

A tin (can) is still a tin despite the fact it has nothing to do with the element today, a light bulb has no bulb any more. The floppy=save isn't going anywhere.
Yeah, I just didn't figure that GAE's limitations would hold him back on a cool idea, so I was wondering if this made cool things much, much easier. The alternative explanation would be that he uses GAE to the exclusion of all else nowadays.
Facebook Employees Could Pay Up To 45% Tax On New Wealth
Hear From The People Building Tomorrow's Tech
I like this rather new solution, which actually works in older browsers including IE7 if you happen to need to support that. Still uses text-indent, but pushes it right instead of left and sets overflow hidden to hide it.

http://www.zeldman.com/2012/03/01/replacing-the-9999px-hack-...
Probing the secrets of the Antikythera Mechanism
He's not suggesting that you subpixel antialias manually. He's pointing out a benefit of leaving your images as vectors: the browser knows the subpixel order of the display, and can make the image prettier than you can without that information.
I was working from home, mostly drunk in a hammock while wearing a dressing gown. I had to leave the hammock and put on some respectable clothes and everything.
I've always found this an interesting discussion and I'm not really sure how I feel about it. It seems that most people look down on the CEO's as being greedy but I say if the company is in good health and not laying off employees then good for them. They have obviously done something right to put themselves in a position to acquire wealth. Thoughts?
No, he and the board should all resign.
I think the blog post goes to show that much like words change their meaning over time, icons can also come to represent objects that are much different from their original metaphors. As new generations of people learn to associate concepts with the icons that embody them, the original metaphor loses its importance.

To give an example, the word "microphone" has only been used to represent modern microphones since 1929. The term referred to the mouthpiece for a telephone between 1929 and ~1878, and from ~1878 until 1683, it described ear trumpets.[1]

[1] http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&s...
Sitting continously for long periods is very harmful to our health
Most of my data is too big for CSVs but too small to justify distributed storage. I use HDF5 with chunking and column compression. I think many other people in the sciences and finance also do this (along with using NetCDF).
It's scary precisely because software is different than physical establishments. If I frequent a restaurant, but one day they decide to impose their moral values and kick me out, I can always go somewhere else. But if I build my business on top of some vendor's platform, and then one day they decide to impose their moral values and kick me off, now my business is screwed.
$99 iPhone Case w/ Unlimited data via WiMax Up For Pre-Order
One use-case would be setting clock time, though with some modifications. I had such control in mind before. I think for some of us it would easier to make two clicks rather than enter numbers.
Excellent point. Not only that, but analogies always come along with extra bits that may lead them down the wrong path. It's very tricky to find just the right metaphor.
> It would only take a small amount of reworking to make the "floppy disk" Save icon look like an SD card and still look enough like the original icon to not confuse people.

What would be the point, though? Surely the floppy disk icon has more meaning now as "save" than as the original metaphor of "save to floppy disk." Besides, SD cards are outdated now - I think the only thing of mine which uses it is my camera, and I never actually remove the card. I would guess that more people would recognize the floppy disk than the sd card.
It's obvious, and they should have known.

In my experience the best people to educate the newbies are the people who were newbies a year ago. They know what the roadblocks were for them, and the don't know 'too much' as to complicate things.
Great quote—thanks for sharing it!
Regarding the ethics of allowing a coke dealer to use the service: it doesn't matter because anyone knowingly facilitating illegal activity can be prosecuted under federal RICO statutes and they'd have the entire business seized under the seizure laws. Operating with the law as a benchmark isn't about ethics, it's about good business. While we can debate the ethics of the law, the law itself must still be followed. That's just responsible business. Discriminating based on one's beliefs is definitely an ethical issue but that can lead down a potentially dangerous slippery slope. Should Amazon (or libraries) refuse access to books to certain people because of their associations? It seems like bad business to have litmus tests beyond illegality. Can a store refuse to sell twinkies to fat people? That would be viewed by some as ethical, although potentially illegal.

The best course would be to ban hate activity on the site, but it would be impossible to know hate activity without violating privacy. And what is hate activity anyway? Who decides? The KKK seems like an obvious group, but what about the Black Panthers, certain religious groups and even so-called Civil Rights groups like La Raza. It's very difficult to determine hate activity in an objective and business-defensible way.

The law is the clearest standard rather than nebulous ethics. Besides free speech should apply to everyone, even if we disagree with the content.
New Google Analytics Easy Dashboard API
Hadoop API is a pain. Well, it is fine when doing the vanilla mapreduce, but once one steps away from that, things get ugly real fast with the zoo of Jobs, Tasks, Contexts, two mapred/mapreduce apis which do the same thing, plus hadoop.23 specific calls.
I haven't touched Hadoop 1.0 yet, though I doubt they have cleaned all the mess. Hope they will streamline the API by 2.0
My War on Spam
I'm pretty sure this is what drives me nuts about the kickstarter logo. It could be so much crisper:

http://www.kickstarter.com/images/kickstarter-error.gif
Inserting DOM elements via document.write will kill the performance of your site. Don't do it.
Japanese developers abandon kompu gacha mechanics in social games
It can make it effectively higher-resolution than you can, but that doesn't mean it can make it prettier. It could still look end up looking worse (from the color bleeding effect, for instance).
Excellently scripted API doc.
This article would have been interesting if included actual suggestions for replacement icons.

Being anachronistic isn't inherently a flaw. However, if our attachment to anachronism is preventing us from using more intuitive icons, then our bias toward anachronism is something we should examine critically.

So, the real question is: are there more intuitive visual representations available for common computer actions? What does an e-mail address book look like?
> Facebook's App Center has a distinct advantage over alternatives: they have much more information on the users of their apps. Also, because ratings are based on real names, they'll have a much easier time preventing ratings spam.

How bad is the ratings spam problem? (I'm not a mobile app developer)

Don't Apple and Google require a credit card to have an account, which means there's at least some barrier to making accounts to spam? They also have data on if a user actually downloaded an app they're rating, if they've made many ratings before or if this is a brand new account, etc. Meanwhile, there are already "Like" farms that you can pay to boost like counts on Facebook for your content.

It seems like if there's motivation to spam ratings, Facebook won't have a great advantage over the problem.
Floppy drive -> dresser, dresser drawer, kitchen cabinet ... File cabinet. Although I suppose not-old people don't do paper anymore. Plastic storage container? Warehouse. Glovebox (and why is it still called a glovebox anyway?). Bookshelf.

It doesn't really matter as long as it's roughly ubiquitous, which the floppy drive is. It doesn't even matter if no one's seen a floppy drive; if someone doesn't recognize what the floppy icon does, then the rest of their computer is new to them and they're learning. Once learned, forget about it.

Etc.
Blood returns to European Tera with patch next week
no, management should be furious with themselves because they have created an environment where innovation is not shared due to a dumb bonus structure, leading staff to optimize for personal instead of organizational outcomes.
Well... Some people have been saving stuff to flash memory (even calling them SDD's is an anachronism)
> we’re not fans of the KKK’s messaging. But KKK rallies aren’t illegal, or at least not inherently so. On the contrary, they're protected free speech. Shut down the KKK account? Our answer: No

This is just absurd. They are not bound by the first amendment and are entirely free to make judgements about the hosted content.
Who is the best Avenger? (infographic)
Why do we even have a save icon function anymore anyway? Just to torture people who forgot to save their file? Google Docs doesn't have a save button because it is saving all the time. Why would you not want to save what you are doing? Why is not saving the default? (Alan Cooper made this argument in About Face in 1995.)

Also, if you want to talk about outdated terminology, theres "disk" and "drive". These are being incorrectly applied to flash/solid state storage. They do apply to hard disk drives, and optical media.
For quantities, yes, but for ratios, I'd prefer pie charts and knobs.

"75%/25% odds" would be nicer on a knob display, for instance.
"There is an interesting paradox in teaching: the better you know a subject, the harder it is to talk to beginners. Experience means you have forgotten what tripped you up when you were a beginner."

This reminded me of how I always have to clearly explain to my beginner piano students that the higher the note on the staff, the further right on the piano it goes. It's very non-intuitive that up/down on the staff = right/left on the piano.
> and then an "open play" mode where everything is available.

Games like Mario Kart Wii and Smash Bros. Brawl seem to do well with the the `open play' mode that doesn't have everything unlocked from the start.
Well that particular one we don't have to worry about.
The expectation of having to explicitly 'save' an electronic file is (finally) on its way out.
complaint: no visual way to determine if a knob is read-only?
Looks awesome, quick question, is it possible to mutate data from a javascript client? In the API reference, all I see for javascript are event listeners. Also, how would a javascript client receive an access token? https://auth.simperium.com/ does not allow cross origin requests.
One thing I hate about finance is how every little trick is named by borrowing the name from an existing concept in mathematics which only barely relates to the financial trickery.
A better approach for using Facebook connect in your website/startups/forums
jQuery knobs + jQuery Rumble

http://jsfiddle.net/NQBjn/

Want to help update the script to keep the number in the middle?
Anything that can recreate local independant context is golden to me.
I also did not know the origin of the term radio buttons, though I DO recall that our old cars as a kid did have those type of buttons on them.
I always wondered what was wrong with English. You know, using 'print' instead of a 'what-does-that-box-of-kleenex-mean' icon?

And for non-English speakers, is it really harder to learn what 'print' means than consulting a cheat sheet for what the icons mean?
I've always wondered if it's true, because it's a very common expression here in Jamaica. We call it "crab inna barrel" (crabs in a barrel). Another term for it is "bad mind" - to be jealous of or try to impede another's success.
It is
horribly slow right now, so consider this as nothing more than a demo
:-)

^^^^^maybe tell us again when its not thanks!
I found it bizarre (and sad) that the author believes that a screwdriver and wrench are somehow only tools for old people, that 20-somethings would have never wielded one in their life?
Websolr has an AWS US-West region that is close enough to be practical for GAE.
> Who in the world would buy a $1000 laptop with Intel's 3000 series graphics chipset?

Someone who wants it to work in Linux with no issues, great battery life, and who doesn't play games?
No worries. I often make the same mistake, to the point where I knew what you were referring to but had to break out the googles because I wasn't sure if it was the right story. Both are excellent, btw.
I'm not sure that I agree with the "Photography" examples. Even for people who haven't seen actual Polaroid cameras, the icon is clearly some sort of camera. The author finishes his argument with a quote from a recent pop song, which probably means that Polaroid pictures aren't an extremely obscure reference. Also, I bet that Instagram's early adopters know exactly what Polaroid cameras are, and the reference isn't lost on them. I'd also be willing to bet that there's at least some overlap with early adopters and people who are aware of the Impossible Project. Those people would at least make the connection between analog photography and the filters that Instagram provides.

That being said, Polaroid-inspired icons are probably not ideal for every use.
I just saw it on Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality
> I think the omnipresent external force has been much more important in determining outcomes than local culture

Maybe, but you seem to assume that the impact of an omnipresent external force is always negative.

The more I read about history, the more it begins to appear to me that today's economic boom in Asia is in no small part due to the British imperial system a century ago which first set things in motion.
I agree, I was very surprised that he doesn't even mention the "hourglass". It's true that it's less and less frequent but I would argue that it's more common than the floppy disk.
This sort of thing is a tough call. I'd say the pixel fitted logo looks better if each is considered in isolation, but viewed as a set the anti-aliased ones look better as they look more consistent.

Fonts have a similar issue. The TrueType font hinting made fonts more readable but sacrificed correct horizontal spacing and often made them less aesthetically pleasing IMO. If I were considering a font purely for on screen work without scaling then I think a carefully designed and hinted font looks best, but if there is going to be any scaling (through different font sizes or zooming in or out) then I'll go with the Apple style every time.
The reason we still use these old icons is because every single icon requires people to think about and learn what it represents. The only icons that don't require the user to think are ones they see all the time. If you've never seen an icon before you can only really guess what it means, the shorter the time it takes to guess, the better the icon is. It's for this reason that I don't like icon-only user interfaces, they require too much thinking and guessing from the user.

Take a look at these ones that show up when you select text in Android ICS:
http://asset3.cbsistatic.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2011/10/18/ICS_co...

What on earth do they mean? I've been using ICS since January and I still don't know what they do except for the cut one. Because there's no way for them to show tooltips on hovering the only way to learn is to press it and try and work out what it just did.
Here you go, I created a box, zoomed in, and resized it using my cursor. http://i.imgur.com/Nx0Bx.png The pixel dimensions show whole numbers. Punching in numbers into the properties inspector isn't always an option, for instance when you're trying to resize a box with rounded corners while preserving the corner radius.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SoundCloud_infoModel.jpg
Indeed. This one used to mystify us on the UK driving test 25 years ago - way older than steam trains, and presumably anachronistic even when it was standardised:
http://wwwdelivery.superstock.com/WI/223/1848/PreviewComp/Su...

It's not a UK sign. Most Europeans will recognize it, but I doubt it travels well, and even where it has local currency, many peoples grandparents won't remember these in real life.
The Redis docs are similar, albeit not quite as fancy. The reference page for each command includes a few example requests and their results -- and it's connected to a running Redis server, so you can actually type commands into it. Check it out:

http://redis.io/commands/sadd
Thanks for clarifying. I will try it out, it looks interesting.
Short version: principle of least privilege.

I crank down perms and open them as little as possible, for as brief a time as possible.

If your site's annoying enough to visit, I won't.
No. It does not generate GPU binaries. It generates "PTX", which is a pseudo-assembler format. You then feed the PTX to Nvidia driver to generate the actual binary. AFAIK the actual ISA and binary formats are not openly (officially) documented.
I'm on a horse (Gmail search WTF?)