skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Eerie-- I was imagining something exactly like those maps just last night. It looks about as cool as I imagined.
> These fears that in order to achieve high performance, we must reward the high performers with carrots and hit the slackers with sticks are a bastardized religious fiction.

The point is to incentivize everyone with the carrot, and forget about the stick. Getting a small bonus or no bonus is not a punishment because a "bonus" is precisely that....a bonus is the reward/carrot.

Not being rewarded with a bonus is not the same thing as being punished.
Watch later: http://bit.ly/LTsuUY
You mention several online options for learning basic coding, but I'd point out that depending on your style of learning, you may benefit from a classroom setting, which is easily found at a local community college
Great parallel drawn between the iPhone and appliances — it really is the microwave of the smartphone world.

What people always miss when making the "open" argument with regard to the iPhone is this: What functionality is "missing"?

There are a billion things that the iPhone can't do, and much of this "missing" functionality would be achievable if iOS was open source (and is achievable if you jailbreak). But Apple builds products for the mass market, and all of this amazing functionality the iPhone is "missing" is functionality the mass market can live with or without.

As new apps bring cool new functionality, great. As new features come along in future versions of iOS, even better. If some cool stuff is left out though, so be it. 90% of iPhone owners probably won't know or care.

Personally, I do know and I do care, so I use an Android phone.
For every person complaining that iOS is restrictive, there are hundreds of people for whom it's genuinely liberating.

Take my parents-in-law. They have laptops, and they have an iPad. As far as they're concerned, the iPad is a much more capable device. This is because it's got apps that can do a lot more different things installed on it. Sure, technically there's actually a wider variety of software for the computer. But many long years' worth of getting burned by viruses, Bonzai Buddy, and Yahoo Toolbar have taught them that installing software on a computer is a dangerous thing that they should avoid doing without the assistance of someone like me.

The folks who can't see the garden for the wall need to come up with an answer to that. Otherwise all their kvetching is going to continue to fall on deaf ears.
I imagine the US government could find the people & money to make as many photocopies as necessary. The government runs on paper.
> I find it unlikely that there is a big conspiracy involving America though.

Because there is absolutely no recent history of the US conspiring with friendly governments to circumvent the rule of law and illegally transporting, imprisoning and even torturing people that were considered a threat to the US, right?

And surely there is also absolutely no documented recent history of the US pressuring European authorities, especially the Swedish, to prosecuted people for crimes against US interests... cough piracy cough.

You're right about one thing, if the US were behind it, it would be no "big conspiracy". It would be business as usual.
2.45 l/100km @ 160 km/h
A modified Renault Twingo did it more than 15 years ago, without any particularly high tech parts, and running on gasoline instead of diesel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmILE

Running on gasoline is significant because diesel has a higher energy density per volume.
Crockford talks about why he left Yahoo and what he would do if he were its CEO
No one is making a living off the bonus system, so it's unlikely to actually motivate what task you work on.

Votes are also private, including how many votes something has received (except to the person being rewarded). I really haven't noticed any gaming of the system.

The biggest part of the reward is recognition. The money is nice, but as I said, no one is retiring based on it.
> All in order to prevent a possible rapist,

... who might just be innocent, in which case he has every reason to be paranoid about why they are pursuing him in this manner and why they are so concerned about getting him into a Swedish jail immediately instead of taking up the offer of questioning him in London.

He has plenty of reason to fight extradition whether or not he's innocent.

And FWIW, in my opinion the comparison to Polanski, given the different nature of the cases, borders on defamation.
And in the Computer Science labs right before a first year assignment is due.
EU Report Reveals P2P Traffic Interference By ISPs
https://www.google.bg/search?q=96+mpg+in+l%2F100km&ie=ut...

96 miles per gallon = 2.45015191 l/100km
7 Mistakes Serial Entrepreneurs Never Make (Twice)
> To fight the money game you need extremely deep pockets.

Not really. You just need different kind of priorities. For example Diaspora challenges Facebook on the grounds where FB is the weakest - privacy. Facebook can't compete on privacy no matter how hard they try (and they simply won't even try since the whole FB is built on selling off privacy).
How will this ease congestion? Making driving relatively cheaper will only encourage more driving.
I've decided that I am too stupid to figure out such schemes. I just figure out how much my work is worth to a company and then ask for that. As I see it, working for equity is essentially begging to get screwed by someone who understands the finance game better than me.
It works both ways. I think I'm more likely to take advice from someone who appears successful in their field.

Perhaps the choice to work on something they're truly passionate about helped them to be successful, while others who merely did what was expected did not have the drive to excel at it.
I completely agree with this. Once you get over the cheesy metaphor, the book really is packed with a ton of information on starting a business and actually achieving wealth at a young age. Also, the author (MJ Demarco) has made himself accessible for anyone that wants to contact him and ask questions.

I can't recommend this book enough.
Ipython Notebook Intro Screencast
Increasing OS X efficiency with Alfred
The 'West Ham Industry' map is about the area of London called 'West Ham', rather than the meat, as the title suggests. Hopefully that should save anyone else wondering why oranges are needed to make ham...
I'm quite surprised to hear that. My naive expectation was that the UK would be much more likely to hand Assange over to the US than Sweden.
Do you think facebooks payment implementation would be naive enough to allow anything like this?
questioned <> charged
"Virtual dollars"? I never mentioned 'virtual' anything.

You should familiarize yourself with the concept of opportunity cost[1]. As an employer, every dollar I save on a developer salary is a dollar I can put towards a copying machine. As a developer, every dollar I forgo by accepting a sub-market rate is a dollar I can't spend on something else.

'Saved' and 'invested' are both changes in bank balance. One is just a lot more visible than the other.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost
Interesting Captcha (scroll down to the comments)
This sounds like a "30 seconds of usage just to find reasons to bash another G+ product" type of review. The Zagat rating system is pretty clearly described when you choose a category, and it's also shown if you hover the score. Also, are you saying there's too much or too little text? First you're complaining that you can't see enough, then you're saying there's not enough information. There's a contradiction here.

I honestly think it looks fine, and seeing 3 restaurants per category to choose a category seems fine to me. I think there's all the info I need at each step of drilling down as well. Looks great to me.
Regrettably, the video and audio quality are quite poor, and the slides contain few clues as to the content. A previously posted article by Martin Fowler: http://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html. Obviously it covers different ground from a talk about motivations for opening up the design, but does a good job of describing the LMAX architecture.
Finding coders on the subcontinent
Amazon's New Navigational Unit. Love it or hate it?
Not to criticize, but what is the value from this particular service to someone who is buying or selling a home ? Are you making the process easier or just giving rewards like a credit card cashback etc ? I am asking since I would love to work with something that makes my buying or selling part easier. I want to know good realtors in my area, recommendations for my housing preference (based on factors such as affordability, choices, what matters to me most etc). I do not care about reward points necessarily. Just my 2 cents.
What is your alternative way? And why would it be the better way?

If we can use this to help paralysed people move again, it seems to me that it would be a win.
Native (C/C++) Extensions for the Standalone Dart VM
Disclaimer: I didn't try this with rails, but tried this with Django, so YMMV

Yes, the request will take more or less the same time

But 'pushing' the data through rails/php/python uses a lot of CPU

"will occupy a web process for the same duration" no, because then the server will do the work

The real question is the CPU usage, if you measured it and it's acceptable, congrats. (In my Django tests, it was around 40% - for one request streaming video)

The issue is that, for static data (like files), NGINX (and Apache) can serve a huge amount of requests without flinching.

One way to do it is like this: http://wiki.nginx.org/XSendfile then your RoR app sends the request to NGINX and it will send the file (and this works with the streaming modules so you can pass the start position, etc)
Who forms the selection criteria?
Google's F1 - Scalable Alternative to MySQL
I've not seen it, but I'd be willing to bet their search engine code is a mess.

The reason for this: almost all single purpose software is a complete disaster area. (And a massive proportion of other stuff isn't much better). As long as it works within certain parameters then there really is no need to fix it up.
Originality apart, I personally think this is a terrible idea:

- Requires Javascript.

- Makes accessibility suffer (your colorblind users are going to be _so_ mad).
It was proposed to w3c.. kind of http://i.imgur.com/UE85t.png
Depends on the use case. If someone's having a dire emergency (or something that's hit a serious block), I answer them immediately.

However, if they, say, can't find a button on an interface, telling them where the button is in 30 seconds or less will yield an immediate firing back: "I already tried that, that doesn't work!!" 60% of the time.

Waiting 15 minutes to even up to four hours to answer the email will yield "Awesome, that works, thanks and thanks for answering so quickly!" most of the time, in my testing.

In fact, each and every time I deal with a difficult customer, when I go back and look at the thread, der, I answered them in under 5 minutes. I like to answer fast, but I have very much found that it hurts rather than helps so very often.

Gotta wait for some of that frustration to dissipate so that they're calm and able to read and follow instructions again. Frustration does not aid reading comprehension - when you're frustrated, sometimes you don't even read the response before firing back! I myself have been pretty guilty of this as a customer.
Wave was scraped a while ago and taken completely offline just recently. I loved the per-character live action, but the rest of the UX was non-revolutionary and mostly a disaster.
Heck, I've been on three international vacations in the last year, and I have plenty of friends who have done even more. If you're in the US it's easy (and not that expensive) to fly to some random European country for a week.

The deferred life plan isn't just about taking international holidays, of course. I have the freedom to jet off to random destinations at the drop of the hat because I don't have a wife or kids; I've deferred that aspect of my life in favor of another one.

You gotta defer something. You can defer the kids or you can defer the globetrotting lifestyle. You can defer the freedom and job satisfaction or you can defer the material wealth.
This seems like a trivial thing to fix by presenting optimal with limited noise. Let's say it picks the optimal choice x% of the time (some really high number), and when additional changes are made or automatically detected, this percentage drops. If you pick the next most optimal down the line through all of your options, and make x proportional to the period of time since the last change, it should make it reasonably resistant to this kind of biasing in the first place, and can ramp back up at a reasonable rate.

Better yet, make x dependent in some way on time since the last change, and relative change in performance of all options from before and after the change.
Along similar lines, there's this nifty hack from a couple years ago which (ab)uses three different low-level interpreter tricks to get Ruby-ish anonymous blocks in CPython:

http://code.google.com/p/ouspg/wiki/AnonymousBlocksInPython
How about some fish oil with that Mountain Dew?
Woah.
Google Wallet failed because they didn't already have accounts for everyone when they launched it. Paypal was the only competitor but they didn't offer anything paypal didn't already offer, and everyone was already on paypal.

> pretty much everything Google does fails, except for search and email.

I can see that you're having some difficulty with google recently, but you can't actually believe this. What about Maps? Saying that maps is search because it has search built in means we can call GMail search too. What about Calendar?

> I guess you could say Android is only half a failure, because the constant catch-up game they're playing with Apple

This is where the snark starts to bother me. Let's acknowledge that Apple made a phone with a big glass touchscreen before Google. What, since then, has been a great innovation that Android has rushed to rip off?
ALl I remember was that in parenthese he had (folklore) and something else. I don't know, it seems to be gone now.
How Weebly Quietly Became A Giant Publishing Platform – with David Rusenko
There's one major problem for the new owner: all paying customers will need to re-sign up for a new billing plan.
Great little summary and helps to clear a lot up as others have said, great for clarifying the different categories!
You can easily do it in PHP, Python or your language of choice using Mongrel2[0]. Because of the asynchronous nature of the messaging between your processes and the Mongrel2 webserver, a single process can efficiently serve 1000's of clients to stream mp3 or whatever file you want. This is because you are not "locking" a process or a thread for a single client.

[0]: http://www.mongrel2.org
I agree with you. It's very hard to defend Assange's actions without appealing to paranoia. If he didn't commit the crimes, he ought to behave as though he has nothing to be afraid of. His flight from law is becoming a bigger story than the actual accusations--it's hard to look innocent while fleeing the authorities. If he really did nothing wrong, the appropriate place to prove it is in court, not on HN.
Interesting points and I'm glad you shared this information...seriously.

Something that I hadn't considered is that the largest gains in productivity could/would come from your "average" (so to speak) employees .

I incorrectly assumed that money is the most important carrot...like you say, possibly for the top 10%, but everyone else may be motivated in other ways.

After reading the Wikipedia article I'm honestly compelled to learn more about this man and his methods.

I think you may have just made me less dumb ;-)
> Facebook security isn't nearly good enough . . .

Pretty sure most cases where people's accounts get hacked have nothing to do with the security of the website, except inasmuch as the site fails to provide an authenticator. Most "hacking" involves getting a computer virus or entering your password into a site that is not actually Facebook.
Project management software - Cora Systems on Diigo
Badgeville raises $25M to break out from the pack in gamification
You are correct, but keep in mind that it is a negative reinforcement, and carries with it many of the demoralizing effects of being punished.

My main issue with the bonus structure is that by motivating everyone with a bonus you turn the workplace into a social game where the focus is on the bonus or reward itself, and frankly, only 10-15% of people really care about it or think they have a shot at it, and those who do are more into the game than the work itself.

Point being, I don't really want my employees chasing carrots, I want them writing software. The negative effects of the game playing and misdirected goals outweigh the positive motivation effects for the tiny percentage of the workforce who cares.

I'd rather bring the whole company up.
Craig Venter's bugs might save the world
Opera supports this out of the box since 2003 (according to the version history). It's not perfect in my opinion, but I'd say it's not because the web is broken.

http://help.opera.com/Linux/11.00/en/wand.html
I'm not familiar with how Julia uses it, but I've worked on two different projects that tried to use LLVM as a JIT backend, I've written a small bit on the experience: http://www.quora.com/LLVM/Is-LLVM-not-good-for-interpreted-l...
I see where you're coming from, but I strongly disagree with you in practice.

What are we even testing? What values are we trying to breed into or out of humanity? How do we form the selection criteria?

Most importantly, do we have any evidence that genetics has a strong effect on these values? I'm going to guess no on that.
This complaint is getting a bit tiring. It's clear from the context that the author is talking about the real-time web, not real-time computing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_web

Do you have a better term to describe web-based systems that offer the appearance (to humans) of instant communication with the web server?
Oh when it comes to streaming files then I totally agree that the server should do the work. This is more about reducing the visible load time for dynamic pages on a site. My example points to my site (e.g. http://daysoutnearme.com/hubs/city/bath) which uses it to improve the load speed of a heavy processing page; the map loads instantly when the remaining chunks of the page come through as the JavaScript has already been processed by the browser.
I think you're wrong.

Ever had to buy stuff you didn't want to meet a minimum spend on cards? Cause over here many shops have a minimum of £5. And this is why.

Oh yes, the consumer cares, they just blame the shop owner instead of the cartels.
Yes, I am in the startup ecosystem in Bangalore and I can definitely say that there are pockets of real talent here. In fact I feel lucky to be in a place where I am enjoying work, learning a ton and surrounded by some of the most talented people I have ever seen.
He has been interviewed, about these events, on the 30th August, by Sthlm police[0]. Swedish law demands that he can only be charged after a second round of questioning after extradition (as I understand it).

How many "less high profile" alleged rapists leave the country and then fight extradition? It seems to me obvious that he's being treated unusually because he has behaved unusually.

It is not uncommon, especially in cases of this kind, for prosecutions to be brought even in the absence of formal complaints (and sometimes against the express wishes of the victim). That's the nature of criminal actions - you offend against the state, and the state brings the prosecution. It's sometimes absurd but, again, it's not out of the ordinary.

Everything I've heard from Assange about his behaviour has been deflective - "the charges are without basis" is the closest he's got to denying it and that sounds like it came from his lawyer. "This has been a very successful smear campaign", "I'm the only victim in this", "it's deeply disturbing that the charges are raised at this time", and that the extradition proceedings to Sweden are "actually an attempt to get me into a jurisdiction which will then make it easier to extradite me to the US".

If the often-raised last point is true, why the hell did he APPLY FOR RESIDENCE in Sweden three months before the warrant was issued? [1]

The whole thing really seems to me like he knows he did the things he is accused of but he just doesn't think they're crimes or problematic. You're welcome to draw an alternative conclusion, but I don't think there is anything murky in the judicial process.

[0] http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/aug/31/wikileaks-julian...
[1] http://www.thelocal.se/29684/20101018/
Foursquare and Amex join forces in UK to offer discounts
Isn't "path of least effort" == optimal_path ??
The soviet space program sure is standing the test of time.
I wonder if this could be remedied by using a front end Web App Server consuming the JSON API. So you would have a JSON API server and a front end Web App say in Node using the API as a database. You would have the advantages of building a SOA architecture, letting the API server do the heavy lifting. And you could reuse a well tested API for Mobile Apps. I would think a Meteor.JS like front end would be an ideal solution for low traffic websites(Not twitter!)
Do you lament the fact that having books means people no longer have to memorize everything?
When the drawing board screws you over
The irony, of course, is the name of their blog.
Yup. This is a common pitfall when talking about European cars. They're sometimes quoted in Imperial MPG even when they're not for sale in Britain.
How SEMs can fly out of their pigeonholes
I actually jumped straight to the comments on this article to see if he responded. Not that he's required to, but I do find his thoughts valuable on this topic.
My biggest beef with infographics is that they are almost always a static image. This is 2012. Why not make something interactive? It could help address several of the author's points as well.
As far as getting longer than normal looks when you and your girlfriends are together, some of that might simply be 'How did he pull that off?'. While it may be about the fact you are a cross race couple, don't discount the fact that she just might seem that far out of your league. I know my wife is out of mine.
Given where most of the Gnome developers work, I'd choose Fedora
You are right, I didn't remember the first interview. He was, though, subsequently told he was free to leave, after the first prosecutor decided there was no case. When he's a new prosecutor well known for her aggressive activism in expanding the scope of rape law then decides to override, there's every reason to be worried, whatever you've done or not done.
Fix a bug in 1 minute, win $100
Yes. If you shop around, you'll find that wives come in a portable model that you can take with you around the world. In fact, they're much easier to find if you're already halfway around the world, as then they've at least demonstrated the capacity to get there and a predisposition towards traveling.

Kids are pretty portable for the first several years as well. We've only had this one for a little over a year now, but he's got a dozen flights and seven countries under his belt already.

(And heading off the inevitable 3rd piece of that question: Yes. I've found that houses can remain happily unoccupied for months on end, so long as you either bring along enough money to keep paying their mortgage or pay it off before you leave.)