skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's exactly what I'm talking about. "Pleasing users" is often used as an excuse for horrible internal design. People cite examples like ls and proceed to conclude that the Unix philosophy is a concept of abstract philosophy not applicable to real life, when they should conclude that there are simply some issues with ls design.

Nearly every time I hear "but it's okay to be messy, because it's real life" or "I must do this bad thing to please the users" the person saying it advocated something that is an insignificant short-term gain for a tiny subset of users at the expense of very significant long-term losses for all the users.

Internal design usually does not affect end users directly, but it has tremendous indirect effects in terms of performance and reliability, which people do care about.

LS is a good example of this. Having some obscure flag might have solved a particular problem in the past, but now everyone has to deal with extra documentation, complexity and bugs.
Based on what? Based on the fact that FB IPO'd at 38 so 14 suddenly seems cheap? Are you simply looking at price or other things also, like outstanding stocks, revenue, future potential etc. or just a single number "14".

What if FB has twice the number of outstanding stocks, so todays 38 would have been effectively 19, would you still have done what you're saying.

This is the fundamental problem with a lot of folks, they just look at the price, and why stocks normally go up when split, it "looks" cheaper but nothing has changed.
Probably when bio-based methods of authentication become cheaper and more commonplace. The problem is the passwords themselves: having to remember something arbitrary and outside the normal context of your day.

Hell, their sole purpose is to be cumbersome.
Thanks. I felt I was missing something. I should have waited for the coffee to kick in.

I'll leave my comment as a warning to what age does to a person. ;-)
>> Nortel and Lucent were worth $200 some odd billion, around the time Cisco punched up to $600 billion.

This is really good to know. Nortel has a pretty significant presence here in Dallas, TX and I remember hearing stories that they were handing out brand new Porsches to new hires that signed on with them in the 90s. I never understood how much money it would take to see that kind of excess, but now I know.
I used to see these s/bad/better a lot around the web for many years. I could understand what it meant from the context so I never took the time to actually look around for an explication. I simply assumed it was an old BBS thing.

Well, until I started to learn Vim
Oh that's clever. Although it's less of an April Fool, more of an April prank.
> The point of the versioning is so that I can see which representative made which change

In many legal systems you cannot link representatives' votes with acts. For example consider http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recorded_vote , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_vote or the fact that many parliaments vote on single articles (or single modification proposals) and the complete act is never voted.

If you want a `git blame`, well, that is almost impossible in current legal systems. Parliamentary records are much more interesting for that purpose.
It's worse than that. This webpage presents the information in a clear, readable text format with no unnecessary clutter. Why, it's such an old design that it's similar to what Gutenberg was cranking out on his printing press and to what you can buy today on your Kindle. Imagine that!
But in terms of business an revenue (that's what stock exchanges are all about), I can't help thinking that you go to Google to stare at advertise and click them! You go to Facebook to stare at friends' pictures and comment on them! Totally different behavior scenario!!!

Its literally like running a public toilet on Times Square that is free of charge (so millions per year are using it!) and trying to sell a chocolate cakes on the premises!

It won't work!!!
I see your static image and raise you a gif! http://dl.dropbox.com/u/123449/dragon/Dragon%20docking%20wit...
Send Nice Emails and Get Happy Customers.
(3) You bring up an interesting issue. Why is there so much variance out there? Google uses 2 spaces, the linux kernel uses 8, and most people I know use 4.

Are people using such a wide range of font sizes, and font aspect ratios, that 4 spaces doesn't make sense for everyone?
On one hand, this is a momentous day for private space flight. On the other, we're closer to Moon lobbyists than ever.
Let the zuck cheer you up
Was really into the idea - until I saw the price.
That map seems a tad too precise for comfort.

For example, I can see that Newcastle Uni ordered two.
Yeah, a literal case of voting with your feet.
It makes sense from a South African point of view, though. I am in South Africa and our company deals with clients in Kenya, Tanzania, etc.

When we refer to the market on the actual continent we refer to it as Africa (or the african market), so in a way it's implicit that we're talking about countries in the north.
Truly historic feat. I'm working for the man on screen 1 as I watch more interesting happenings in space on screen 2.
Security Expert Fools, Records Fake Antivirus Scammers
I'm a Solution Architect at Akamai, and we can definitely help you out. PM me if you want to chat.
Battle Brewing Over Labeling of Genetically Modified Food
Microsoft wins patent fight with Google's Motorola unit
I can't really comment on code since i'm no master of C programming myself, but there are really way too many comments. It actually makes it harder to read code if there are comments on every new line, and harder still if you have multiple lines of comments to explain one line of code.

My recommendation is to have one comment to explain a large chunk of code and let the programmer discern what part is doing what instead of annotating it piece by piece.
> The next step is to utterly forbid "installers" and make everything work this way, and to add stronger privilege isolation and organized APIs for apps to talk to each other.

I agree and disagree with you. I would be awesome if I could restrict apps and forbid installers. I'd also like to be able to run arbitrary apps as forbidden to use the internet and make them think they are reading/writing to /some/path/ but they are really reading/writing to /app/sandbox/some/path. I'd love the option.

But then there are problems with that as well. Want to make an app plugin? Nope. Want to share libraries? Nope. Want to talk to an app? Hope it's got a canonical port number.

So I don't think enforcing boundaries is the way to go. I'd love to see other opinions and whether or not there are any alternatives, though.
> -T seems useful doesn't it? How else would you get that info?

The long (-l) format already provides the month, day, hour and minutes. -T adds only seconds and the year. No utility can possibly provide every format option that someone might find useful. If you really needed that format, and ls were leaner, you would need to write a script (in whatever language).

> And -x is a personal preference.

Basic utilities shouldn't include so many options that are variants for personal preferences.

> None of those seem especially useless.

I don't think that they are outrageously useless, but let's set the bar higher. The core utilities should be, in my opinion, much much leaner than they are.
You know... Someday someone will put a Pan-Am logo there...
Looking for a few good women and men to code and kick-ass for America
Lap Dancer Breaks His Laptop.  Offers input port access. Tech entendres ensue.
Absinthe 2.0 Released Brings Jailbreak iOS 5.1.1 Untethered
'Spacebook' needs to give you a call...:)
From what I've read, Loreen from Sweden was pretty nervous during her performance (in comparison to the local competition, where she seemed very secure) which affected how she acted and sung on stage pretty badly. It's nice to see that she still appears to be a favourite, and I hope she gains some courage for the final.

(I am Swedish, I have yet to watch this semi-final, and personally don't enjoy her song that much, but is still happy to see that we're doing well.)
The Wrong Advisory Board Will Hurt Your Startup
This. Having a paragraph of explanation text for each line is not a replacement for source code that is readable by itself.

I understand, though, that explaining each and every line of code was done for the sake of learning C.
Is it me or is this getting absolutely no press?
There's a typo on the landing page. Tt instead of It.
Our main problem is that computers have never been good at making suggestions to users. "It looks like you're trying to..." Clippyism was a disaster, but nobody ever came up with a better alternative. The trend on tablet computers seems to be toward minimalism, solving the problem by reducing the set of possible interactions to something easily comprehended by a user, but with very little scope for creative combination of tools.
Most number crunching is definitely functional; however, most programming (even in science) is about all the window dressing before you get to the actual heart of the number crunching. For those tasks, an imperative syntax is usually more approachable for those without formal CS backgrounds (especially if they know a little C, FORTRAN, or MATLAB). This is why Python is so popular with the scientific computing crowd.
Considering hackernews' way-above-average aspberger's demographic, expect a lot of "ERROR INCOMPUTABLE" type comments in here. You're going to need a lot more hand holding in your pitch (not literal hand holding, that makes us uncomfortable.)
Not only is the entropy difference small, there is also an added benefit in less users having to reset their password. Forgetting how their password was capitalized is a big problem for people.

Letting improved user experience trump a tiny bit of extra security is a good tradeoff for Blizzard. They're not a bank.
Battle.net authentication misconceptions
I guess it's now on the frontpage of CNN but still - I haven't heard any fanfare over this and it's pretty monumental.
Absolutely agree, and I actually get that from a lot of places in addition to HN. If you want to be mainstream you have to engage with the mainstream.
I can't quite tell if this is great, or if they're really over-thinking it.

That said, I do appreciate that Adobe hasn't fallen into the trap of making their apps blue circles like seemingly every other app.
Matt Drudge had it in bright red at the top of the "fold" until a few minutes ago. It's still there now, but without the color highlight.
You'd think that of all groups of individuals, mainstream media would be able to come up with some ultra-hyperbolic headline to make this seem more exciting to the general public.
Your point does not contradict mine though. I did not say the UL label is a requirement.
Tech wrecks — Lessons from some of the biggest hardware screw-ups
Turn.js - Make a flip book with HTML5
If you're in the LinkedIn "Python Data" group, I posted a comment with a list of the ToC (hope you don't mind, Wes!)

http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=4388870&...
Thanks to Elon Musk for making transport to Low Earth Orbit boring :-). Now we can work towards doing more interesting things in space ;-)
Yeah, blizzard are big kids, they would never be so astoundingly incompetent as to do something like say, trust the client to decide whether or not a character is realm. Oh wait, yeah they did that didn't they? But surely they would never be so incompetent as to trust the client to tell the server the clients co-ords right? Oh no, they did they too (and still do!). Seriously, blizzard's demonstrated repeatedly that they either do not understand security, or do not care about security. Either way, "trust them because they have lots of users" is ridiculous.
Here's a little restartless FF addon that will tell you if the page is using IPv6: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sixornot/
While this is true and will most likely not work for all businesses attempting to gain publicity, they could always pivot the QR code to adjust for the sun's position and/or clouds.
Because of people like you facebook is such a screw up stock from day one.

Look, I don't care how fast they grew and I don't care how amazing they are! Show me the _fucking_ money!! This is what stockholders are screaming for! Facebook is amazing in being in business of giving free candy! Free! Free candy to people that are busy consuming it so you won't monetize on them! I know they have trillion users but this won't do it in terms of revenue.

Stop believing that technology company that did tremendous job at connecting the world together will do equally tremendous job at milking them into the $200B stratosphere!!
Is Your Data Really Safe In The Cloud? — Tips from Legal Technology Expert
It'll be fun watching the Dragon docking live while following along with this document.
I'm not sure I believe you that Haskell is faster than Python. In general, most of your python operations will be raw matrix operations handled by blas/lapack/etc.

While Python's functional programming constructs leave a lot to be desired, they are usually good enough for numerical work. Instead of using reduce(...) to sum an array and having it compile down properly, you can just use arr.sum(), which is implemented in C by numpy anyway.

I love Haskell (and want it to beat Python), but at this point, Python is the clear winner for numerical work. Libraries matter more than language in this case (as matlab demonstrates).
Er, why do we care?
> you seem to be assuming ls will always be outputting one file per line

No, I am assuming a "do one thing" `ls` would be used in long format (or as inode numbers) whenever it need to be worked with, and would be massaged into form by further commands. For `t`, `r`, `S` and a bunch of others you'd ls, sort and then cut/awk/whatever to format into a "short form".

Not that it matters a bit.

Also, I didn't claim these weren't useful, I claimed they were redundant. Which they are.
Thank you for constructive feedback. There's no place like HN for that ;)

We took your advice to heart and changed the text to present the purpose and benefit of the app in a clearer way. Hope it helped.

Right now we are working on recording a short demo video. It should be online soon.
Thanks! InfoQ "presentations" are so crappy...
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Consider four companies' returns: [1, 1, 1, 100]. The median, 1, is a reasonable predictor for the next company's return. The mean, 25, doesn't seem like a likely outcome.
I said nothing about my own religious views - merely that Dawkins long ago abandoned science for his own brand of dogma.
What you say is very true. Dunno why people downvote a little truth when it's stated clearly.

If what you said didn't have a strong grain of truth in it, then there would be no need for this project. Our laws would naturally be more straightforward, clearly written, and better organized because they're so important to society.

There are some really strong forces that oppose simple and clear laws. Some of them are more natural results of maintaining a complex system. My feeling is that a lot of the code ugliness is due to the selfish needs of those in power.

In HN terms, the current system is Proprietary. This GitHub project is looking to add some Open Source goodness to the mix. I think it's a really wonderful idea, since the very act of shining light into the enormously daunting spaghetti code that we have to live by every day may help to wake people up to the unneeded obscurities, contradictions, redundancies, anachronisms, wastes, and outright abuses of power.
Clearly, section 3.2.1 is the most important part:

All dimensions are in millimeters. All angular dimensions are in degrees

Implementors in non-metric countries, take note. Nothing is more annoying than arriving at a place where you might want to use your docking interface, only to find out it doesn't work. :)
I agree.

More people watched European Song Contest than are seeing this.

Yet again something profoundly depressing about modern life.
A step backwards from CS5's branding in my opinion.
I bought a few towels yesterday, and while I walked through the store with them draped over my arm, I felt like I was ready for anything.
Privatizing area on the Moon is quite frightening to think about. I wonder if one day copyright law will also reach other planets and moons.
If we had moon lobbyists, at least NASA would get better funding. I'd take moon lobbying over coal/oil/defense/farming/etc. any day.
They showed it live on CNN with a lot of commentary, same with the launch.
This is like asking for plain-english compilers. IANA lawyer, and never wish to be one, but it's just a fact that legal process involves particular concepts that are represented by a specialized vocabulary.

Legislators tend to "add features" and "fix bugs" by hacking in special case handling, turning the code into a mass of hard to follow exceptions. I definitely think they do this in part because no one fires the one guy who understands the undocumented spaghetti code. But even if they placed some value on elegance and simplicity they'd still have to use some legal jargon.
EyeZo: current ISS location
Just curious, could you link to some of these libraries? Genuinely curious here (I really want Haskell to win).
I was also very disapointed with DAwOST; it's a book about data analysis techniques with a bit of code mixed in. This is a book about _programming tools for working with data_, pretty much the exact opposite.
"That's great, could you do the dishes?"
Only about 5% of Americans even have passports. They just aren't interested in the rest of the world.
New Jersey Mayor and Son Charged In Hacking Incident
I think it must be quite humbling to be a part of one of humanity's accomplishments, whether it be inventing an aqueduct or traveling through space.
If programming languages were religions…
There were comments in that thread that were less constructive. This one for example, strikes me as particularly aimless in its hatred: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4021828.
Here's an animated gif of it docking: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/123449/dragon/Dragon%20docking%20wit...
Are you sure the JS will work when the newsletter is displayed in actual emails?
sort -k 3
New York Times Data Artist, Jer Thorpe on MIT's 1978 touch UI
Vim got it from sed :)
I used 3 on my last open source C project, just to troll every faction of the indent war. I actually think it looks pretty nice.

https://raw.github.com/udp/json-parser/master/json.c
Excuse me for having an emotional response. I will try to behave more drone like in the future in order to avoid causing distress to sensitive humans.
Beyond Voodoo VC: Can Data Revolutionize Investing in Startups?
Yes, but a Pareto distribution looks just the same if you left censor it at some point.
Hopefully this lay some of the paranoid guys to rest.
He perhaps is just a loon wearing a towel and not a towel day observer.
This blog post is pretty light. If you really care about Knuth's work on METAFONT then you should just read the source code. It's written using WEB: http://www.tex.ac.uk/ctan/systems/knuth/dist/mf/mf.web

WEB is a language created by Knuth that supports his notion of literate programming.
I find that ESC used to be a great contest that launched some great artist (think ABBA). While it may not be as powerful or entertaining as it once was, I don't see why someone should be judged for choosing to watch it over a space launch.

I think you'll find that the majority of the population is not interested in space exploration or development so it is quite okay to assume they would watch ESC over the launch.
Google's search button is grey on the landing page and blue on the results page. Does anyone actually click the search button? Heck, does anyone actually even go to the landing page? I don't think I've ever actually used DDG's landing page, I just use the Chrome address bar...
When I was writing a lot of C, I settled on 8-column tabs (a style I copied from OpenBSD). Combined with an 80-column wide terminal, it prevents you from nesting too far down — 4 or 5 levels and you keep having to wrap, which is an automatic sign that "something is wrong, I need to refactor this."
This is for a web version of the newsletters. I thought it was obvious.
> but what am I supposed to actually do with it?

Plan 9 is a research os that was made to explore the rigorous implementation of a few key ideas. You're missing the point if your criticism of it is that it doesn't run your favorite database.

If you like the ideas that Plan 9 implements you should apply them to you favorite big and nasty, full-of-compromises, gets-real-work-done OS.

For example, a key idea in Plan 9 is that all resources, from files and networks, to a processes runtime environment, to compute clusters should be represented as an entry in a single hierarchical namespace that is accessed with file semantics(read(),write()).

This is a really cool approach. It makes interacting with resources really easy. You can use any tools that manipulate files. It allows easy remote sharing and manipulation.

Want to use a printer on a different machine? Mount the printer and go. Want to write to a remote screen? Mount the framebuffer and go. Want to administer a running daemon? Mount the directory that represents it and starting messing around.

You can also create your own resources in this namespace. An example was a computing cluster with a file interface. Want to run a program on the cluster? Just mount the file an write your binary to it.

It is a neat approach and I would recommend you check it out.
60 second ideas column on BBC
Eric Simons built his startup squatting at AOL's campus
> While 'bool' is valid C99 code, it is more or less never used in C code.

I disagree. It's used quite a bit in the code I work on. Little things like an explicit statement that this variable is only true or false significantly reduce the cognitive load when reading code.

Anyway, even if it were true that nobody uses bool, there's absolutely no reason to discourage its use.
I think it should be possible to practice empathy even if you don't have a person physically near.
Programming languages ARE religions. Just check those language wars out there!
What disappoints me about your argument here is that you're basically complaining that other people aren't doing things the way you'd like them to be done.

You mention egocentricism, but don't seem to realize that he is under no particular obligation to live up to your standards. Reasonable people can disagree on how to handle this. He apparently disagrees with you, possibly as a matter of morals, but more likely as a question of how best to solve a problem with limited resources.

If you really care about this problem, solve it yourself. Go make something that makes it easier for somebody like this to act the way you want than the way that's easy for them. Until then, you're just one more person telling the Little Red Hen how she should bake her bread.
No, but $home instead of ~ is, IMO.
I think there are creative solutions to this. Like I said: there would need to be a well-designed inter-app API.

Plugins for instance could be handled like firmware updates to a device. Send the image to the app via the API. "Here is your plugin..." Or some apps could have their own plugin stores, ala the Chrome store. There are different ways of handling this.
>> I don't think any professional will care about this. In fact, it's probably good news for them (us). Any barrier to entry means slightly less competition.

I think it's unfortunate that the professionals would see this as a good thing. New developers to the MS Stack can bring a fresh perspective with newer, more unique approaches to solving problems. That leads to a healthier ecosystem.