skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's The One Word That Describes Your Company?
my name is already taken :(
Maybe you're fine with other people dictating how you should think.

I'm not.
Apple's response to DOJ ebook case [pdf]
These icons will look stupid against a bright background.

But since most Adobe tools use a dark, custom interface that doesn't match the OS at all, I guess they won't feel any regret about ignoring those who prefer UIs with bright backgrounds.
> Cherry picking commits and branching on every possible merge conflict (and picking one winner for each branch) should be relatively straightforward

The problem is that, in general, (1) it is not straightforward and (2) you can be liable for damages if you state publicly "this is the correct version" unless you are a judge or the appointed authority.

Talking more practically, here is something that would be interesting to have: a tool that (1) analyses an act (or a bill), (2) identifies which parts of it state a modification to existing acts and codes, (3) have a look at these target documents and (4) tell you which of the "hunks" of the "patch" can be "merged" in a straightforward manner, almost straightforward or require an expert review. Steps 1, 2 and partially 3 are already done in many systems through NLP techniques (have a look at http://wyner.info/LanguageLogicLawSoftware/ for example). Step 4 is a brand new thing. Do anybody want to work on that?

A tool like the last one would simplify things a lot. You go from "sorry, I cannot tell you anything because a lawyer is required for everything" to "here is what I am reasonably sure about; for the last 5% you have to ask your lawyer if the correct merge is A or B".

> I guess the question is how big of a set of possible documents might this be - 10? 100? 1000?

The set of possible versions grows exponentially :(.

> Would this be a process done by lawyers for the purposes of understanding laws on the books or by someone in the legislature at the end of each session?

Lawyers are required. Many institutions publish "end of the year" consolidated versions of their acts. In some countries these consolidated versions have legal power, in others they are just handy references (the judges cannot use them).

Fun fact: it happens quite often that one branch of a parliament thinks that the current version of an act says X while the other branch thinks that it says Y.
Lack of Pinterest API is a Lack of API Business Strategy
No.. That's a common misconception. 1% of search market is not 1% of revenue because companies won't spend any time and investment in places with little traffic.

Bing is 20% of search market yet last I checked they are nowhere near that amount in revenue
What do HNers think of the possibility that younger people coming up may not have ready access to the 'big yellow machines' of coding/software?

At present, you can get an old workstation and monitor for cheap, put Linux on it and have essentially the same tools that the folks at Facebook/Google?local startup have.

Once the divide pointed out by the author becomes entrenched, it may not be that easy to get access to the same environments that professional (paid) coders have.
If lobbying were just groups of vested interests putting their best foot forward, that would just be free speech.

But "Lobbying", the practice, is understood by the public to be the process whereby monied interests essentially buy votes via graft, bribery, etc and/or buy votes via contributions to re-election campaigns.

The result being that it is (usally) not the speech and thus the data or moral argument that changes minds in government, but the money.

And that is what's inherently bad.
backbone.modelbinding is abandoned. Alternatives:

https://github.com/theironcook/Backbone.ModelBinder

and https://github.com/amccloud/backbone-bindings (my library)
I think you are willing to give a lot of latitude to the sales person here. I think it is true that it is human psychology to trust a relationship that is established, but we would prefer a world where rules still have to apply, no matter what. Right?

It is so much better if this incident sets a standard for their company and the telemarketers are forced to validate each time irrespective of their past association with the callers.
Disqus comments are loaded with AJAX as you probably all know. Try disabling Javascript, no comments show.

This is most certainly not SEO friendly, as it is not discoverable by Google. I have heard that Google can run Javascript in crawl and index content that is loaded this way, but it's still a bad idea to rely on that. Also worth considering is that they might only enable this sort of content discovery on sites with enough value (large enough).

It seems to be a design problem to me, because it's a third party plugin I don't see any easy way to get around this, unless Disqus are talking directly to Google to get this solved.

From a purely SEO perspective in my opinion and from my understanding, it's bad, and SEO benefits are non-existent/minimal. This is one of the reasons I don't like surrendering control of some important aspects of my websites to third party services.
Market values in US history
Curious, have you given dotcloud a try?

Good roundup list.
I would add the course: "Reading Code."
Apologies - I thought this was a restriction on early versions, maybe they changed it with later ones
Taxi Penang
Another thing to bear in mind when getting a taxi specifically when you're a tourist is to prevent taxis waiting in the vicinity of tourist spots just like taxi penang. There are a few taxi drivers who are extremely persistent such as individuals who drive a taxi penang and do not make use of the meter.
My issue with this bubble is that there's no underlying. Instead of green technology, we see Zynga employing people who work full-time trying to exploit the same class of people that were targeted by the dreaded telemarketers of 10 years ago.

The late-90s bubble was frothier, with all the talk of a recession-proof "New Economy" (oddly, most people now long for the Old one) and the massively overvalued technology stocks. Even still, there was a real underlying. The Internet really was changing the way people do business in a rather permanent way. The reason for the bubble was that people overestimated how soon certain changes would arrive.

This bubble doesn't have much of an underlying. I'd even argue that there isn't one. Facebook is a decent product and has provided a lot of value to its users, but it's not as earth-shaking as the Internet, and these "Facebook's tapeworm" startups like Zynga are insults to the millions of people trying to build things that are real. Also, the current climate of extreme social openness (where people want to broadcast their careers and locations without thought to whether they really want people to have access to that data in 5 years) is going to end, and the "cool" social startups will either be dead, or successful and "uncool", within a few years.
Poor analogies. Try this:

The idea that one must hire an engineer to walk across the bridge is warped and disgusting.

That's one demented bridge.

Hiring lawyers just to grasp the law is absurd and reveals a fundamental flaw within our body of law and government process.
Completely disagree about excluding algorithms and data structures among other things. In fact, I would say current curriculums feature much too less of design skills in these departments.

Algorithms and Data Structures needn't be about existing ones, although they are great examples. Algorithm design skills are a prerequisite for getting anything done efficiently, quickly and readably. Design patterns and software development models are secondary.

The case of data structures being available in libraries will lead to confusion as students will lack the ability to select the one with most appropriate performance characteristics. To them the only difference will be syntax. You could argue that one can look up complexity characteristics, but then how can you teach someone what is complexity without doing algorithms and data structures?

Algorithms and data structures are so prevalent, that they drive design issues that on the surface seem unrelated. Why map reduce is the query format we are using; how Clojure can have immutable, persistent yet still fast data structures; why public key cryptography is safe? And more importantly, algorithms and data structures teach us about tradeoffs.

It's not by accident that top companies test algorithm skills in interviews.
Functional programming falls within the realm of declarative programming, so he's got that covered actually.
Offline: Ignorance
GridFS (MongoDB) and Python
Not in the situations I've seen, but perhaps this situation was different. I really doubt it though. Each "sales person" is in a cube with a headset on and an auto dialer either getting calls transferred (like in the OPs case after answering some questions) or making outbound calls from a pool or the call back / appt list. It's integrated with a CRM so that everyone can be tracked and the audio of the calls are recorded. The conversations are scripted and the agent reads what's on the screen while answering any questions with other prompts.

It's not like he got in touch with a sales guy who was going to take him to dinner. He just got to a human at a telemarketing company. They are just cogs in a larger machine.
I never said there wasn't infringing content there. I had never been there, after all, though I just took a quick peek after you linked to it just now. Nothing loaded. That's probably due to noscript, which I wouldn't dare turn off on a site like that.

I still think it unlikely that anyone is gaming that metric. It might be a bad one for whatever reason, but I can't imagine that anyone has been gaming it given that nobody knew of it until just now.
Profitable, commendable, and a fine example to us all, but BORING!!!!!

Before I go on, yes, I do have way too much time on my hands, and a hugely immature area in my brain.

I like to go for creative abuse. Immediately I start arguing and generally giving them a hard time, winding up to virtual verbal abuse until....

...two things happen. They hang up, and never call back. Bonus: I feel better for getting some stuff off my chest. Dirt cheap therapy which they pay for!!!! Triple win. Yay!!!!

Dunno what its like in the US but here in the UK it seems that these people are not allowed to hang up. Big no no, from what I can tell. So, a great game is to time how quickly you can get them to hang up, or how long they can last out.

Should I grow up and generally get some sort of life? Yeah, probably.
My favorite feature of Google Voice is the "block caller" button. Works like a charm.
This attitude makes me very angry.

Even if 80% of users don't use capitals in their passwords, the 20% who want that added security don't get it. Even if you believe this made-up statistic due to your condescending attitude towards "normal" users, the password should be case sensitive.

A (very stupid) alternative would be to notify the users that their password isn't case sensitive so that those who mind can use a more secure password.

The argument that "most" users won't be affected is absolutely negated by the fact that some are.
If you are using backbone and don't need a complex templating engine, just use _.template. It comes free with underscore, which is a requirement for backbone.
I tried this not too long ago and gave up. You need 6 or 7 different daemons running, most of which give very little in terms of debugging information. You actually need a decent sized VM to host everything needing to run.
Good spotting, I assumed a typo and skimmed on. I was imagining some kind of unknown-to-me efficiency in super light space ships..
Actually, this is intentionally a low impact design, to avoid the following problems with the old "ram into each other" method:

* require substantial force and velocity for docking alignment and capture

* create critical operations

* affect structure fatigue life

* disturb zero-g environments

* difficult for small mass vehicles to use

* support a limited range of vehicle performance capabilities

So the miss you're thinking of isn't really where this is used. Also, this is an androgynous design (it can dock to itself) which makes things more complex.

(From this PDF: http://dockingstandard.nasa.gov/Meetings/TIM_%28Nov-17-2010%... )
I don't see the dock much because I just quickly command+tab my way to the windows as it's more efficient.

But I think the departure from the solid colored blocks towards the colored strokes and text is the wrong way to go because of how much more subtle it is.
> 4. None of your points support the case of "don't use stdbool"

Huh? I was saying that the language did not have to be extended to get a bool typedef. C99 defines a new type, _Bool (name from the reserved identifier space), which is different from existing types. stdbool is a simple typedef of _Bool to bool.

Also, introducing bool would have had meaning if implicit conversion to int wasn't allowed. But since it is, it's a useless type.

My viewpoint is that types exist for enforcing semantic constraints; what use of a bool type that allows performing semantically nonsense operation, such as implicit conversion to int in arithmetic context? The C99 committee messed it up big with bool.
We'll be talking about this more in the future, but we have confirmed with at least one major index that the content will be indexed as expected within the new system.

Edit: And since we seem to have already named Google, it's obvious who that is.
I disagree. Whatever you have to say about the hacked stuff in Diablo 2, it didn't really make the game much less fun, neither for people hacking it nor for people playing it straight.

The problem they're solving isn't a problem that players have. It's that they want to make money off Diablo microtransactions, and they think they can't do that in the presence of hacked characters and items.
Mike, I totally agree with you and it drives me crazy and has become a bit of a personal mission. My field is career development and so I work a lot with people during their job search, and one of the first things I ask is "what happens when someone googles you?" Then I'll explain the value of having your own domain. I understood when older workers would say they didn't understand how to set it up, or were confused, etc so I often walk them through it.

Then I went back and spoke at my college (I'm 42). I figured, well, these 21 year old internet whiz kids will certainly have this figured out. Nope. The number of people I met that owned their domain was about the same... consistently about 1-2 out of every 10 people I ask.

So in tech geek/lean startup mode, I got frustrated with explaining it to people over and over, so I purchased a domain, bought a theme for $8, used my friend Jayme as a guinea pig, and in 1 weekend recorded a how-to video and built a site so I didn't have to explain it over and over. It's called GetYourNameToday.com.

Look, I realize there's no way for me to not make this comment look spammy, and yes, in full disclosure there is a GoDaddy affiliate link on there (which I note in both the video and on each page), but I figured if it doesn't cost the person anything more, I am genuinely helping them out, and I can get a little something for my effort, why not.

I'm very transparent with who I am on the site, link to my career development/new media blog to show that it is in sync with what I do for a living, and even tackle questions such as WHY to register your name and what to do if you have a basic name that isn't available. I'm with you... seems like there are very few reasons why someone wouldn't see the benefits of securing their name for the "investment" of $10.

Would love to hear your feedback on the site and if you would have positioned it any differently or what I could do to improve it. Thanks!
Jim
I could imagine allowing users to opt into certain kinds of campaigns -- an "I'm interested in: [] Internet freedom [] Reproductive rights [] African warlords," or alternatively allow certain organizations / sponsors to control usage: "I'm open to issues promoted by: [] ACLU [] EFF [] NRA"
> When searching online I find it vaguely insulting that my presumed default state is one of not already knowing what I'm looking for

If you find the Google experience "insulting," you are far too emotionally attached to how you interact with Google's services.
Resolution on a laptop screen doesn't mean shit, what you need is effective pixel density and that's going to vary too much. I don't know of any browser that communicates "hey I'm a 15" screen and my resolution is AAAAxBBBB and my user sits CC" away from their screen on average" Of course with an iPhone/iPad you can do a bit more generalization but not for laptop screens.

This is the premature optimization of design.
Yes, but may I suggest you change over to RestructuredText, Sphinx, and publish on rtfd.org?
I wear a hat tin foil hat with a wide brim, so I understand where you are coming from, but I don't think you should take it personally (my parents will probably die never knowing what a browser is, and they simply need help). Just use Chromium with certain modifications to remove all ~tracking related functions, and then add 'noscript', 'ghostery', 'better privacy' and/or other extensions to remove the more intrusive parts of the web (it's the best we can do right now, and no one party is acting significantly more intrusive).
MyPC Backup Reviews
Mozy lead the market from small consumer to big business online data backup. Mozy offers two products: Mozy Home and Pro. For the technically
So you would prefer one monolithic binary over a collection of binaries each of which does a specific task (bibtex for biographies, xindy for indexing, dvips for converting dvi to ps, etc.). For comparison, the git installation on my computer contains some 160 binaries (hidden in a directory different than /usr/bin). Should git be rewritten in a leaner way as well?

Most of the size of a TeX distribution is due to the fonts and the documentation. I did not analyze TeX Live distribution due to its size, but ConTeXt standalone (which is a distribution just containing files needed for context), is around 230MB, out of which 100MB is fonts, 45MB is binaries, 42MB are core macro files, and 26MB is third party modules (and their documentation). You will get similar numbers if you install only the LaTeX packages that you need. Blame your distro's packagers for forcing you to install a single monolithic 3GB package.
In VC-land, down rounds are highly stigmatized. No one knows what anything is worth, but a company that remains in reasonably good esteem can ensure that the valuation doesn't go down, even if it "should" based on fundamentals. Terms can get worse and funding may become harder to get, but down rounds can be prevented unless something really bad is happening.

On the stock market, where the valuation process is nearly continuous, almost 50 percent of days are down days (the daily drift is tiny in comparison to the standard deviation).

What has happened is that the Facebook stock has gone from an environment with artificial support to one without it. It has nothing to do with whether there's a bubble.
Google indexes popular websites very fast, but smaller websites wont be crawled at this speed.
Yeah thanks,
I forgot to add a note on this.
White House Receives Flood Of Applications After Its Disrupt Announcement
We've actually had support for this in our WordPress plugin for quite some time (longer than I can figure out, at least 2 years). What we're addressing with our new platform is unrelated to what the WordPress plugin already provides.
This seems sensible. Of course many people could quibble about things they wish were included or dropped, but almost all of this stuff I've had to learn the hard way. Having most of this information presented to someone in an organized way would go a long way towards making them a formidable hire.
I don't think I am giving him latitude, if your job was selling to people and a customer had expressed interest in your product and had agreed to wait for you to call back would you in a million years stop to think "maybe he was lying to me, when he said he wanted to call me another type he wasn't telling the truth, I'd better check the database to see if he doesn't want me to call"?

Other than random, unexpected cases of people trying to trick you, any customer in the world would, if they changed their mind about being interested, wait for the call back and say it then, not contact someone else at the company to be put on a do not call list.
Its really not hard to submit a DMCA complain with fake credentials
#include "stdafx.h"

#include <iostream>

using namespace std;

class HelloWorld
{

public:

HelloWorld();

};

HelloWorld::HelloWorld()

{

cout << "Hello World\n";

}

int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])

{

HelloWorld * hi = new HelloWorld[100] ();

return 0;

}
Because 1) bool is a useless type in C and C++ since it's an arithmetic type, 2) it's no clearer than an int. (consider a function that returns true on failure, logic being that the rest of the program should be aborted.)

You expect that "true" is success, but you can't know without checking, and then you're back in the same situation as with int.

In practice, idiomatically, you write something like if(!some_function(blah)), and in this context it totally doesn't matter whether the function returns bool or int.
>I'm a little shocked at the negativity towards, of all things, an icon and a splash screen.

People, in general, just have a hard time dealing with change.

I'm not a huge fan of the new icons/splash screens either, but I'm sure I'll get used to it and in a while CS5 will look dated.
That's a discussion I'd really like to see expanded.

There are various sandboxing models out there, none of which really suitably address my privacy concerns. And most of which will break large portions of the transactional Web as it exists today (that is: websites which interact with other systems, and/or specifically transact commerce).

Of course, there's little to pushing the data sharing from the client to the server either. This is a fluid in a balloon. It tends to spill out elsewhere when squeezed in any given spot.
The argument was the browser as gateway to Facebook. So it wouldn't matter if the browser was ultimately doomed. As long as those users became Facebook users and stuck with Facebook even after they upgraded to newer phones/browsers.

AOL, Compuserve, et al hung in for a very long time, even after people begrudgingly ditched their dialup for broadband, solely because they were so comfortable with AOL from that first experience.

Experience suggests it could very well work.

I think the bigger question is whether it would be cost-effective. i.e. to what degree would that be effective in capturing social network market share in those regions, is it the most cost-effective way to capture that share, would it be enough to simply pay Opera to 'partner' with Facebook, etc.
The simple solution is to forbid 3rd party cookies (and while we're at it third party JS as well, which I think is a much bigger problem than 3rd party cookies. I'm sure that will send shudders through the industry). And enforce it at the browser level by default and put up a big fat warning what the consequences are when you disable it.

That way we don't need to have silly laws that nobody will respect and we can all get on with making stuff work.

Third party JS opens so many cans of worms that I think it would be better if we just forgot about that whole idea, it'll never be secure and it puts too many juicy bits in the wrong hands.