skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not in the geopolitical sense being discussed here, no. Israel's occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights and Sinai in the '67 war all make sense as a strategic measure to acquire a defensive buffer. The 1973 war proved its necessity, as with the forces arrayed against it Israel came close to defeat and may well have lost had it not possessed the additional territory.

Bear in mind this has nothing to do with whether a country is morally right or wrong in its actions. One can disagree strongly with Isreal's treatment of the Palestinians and demand reform while still recognising the strategic imperatives that led to its actions and its inherently defensive strategic posture.
Good employees will do that, you are absolutely right here. As was the parent poster. I think it all depends on the current stage your emplyer is in, organisation-vise. Right at the start and for quite a long time only the bad ones will quit after the first feed-back rounds. As soon as these rounds become actual "warning shots", meaning they aren't constructive any more but turned into some behave-or-be-kicked-out process (sometimes around the same time the reasons for being warned tune from actual performance andmistakes to percieved value and personal and / or political issues) the good ones will leave. Eventualy you be stuck with a bunch of people who were to smart to be warned earlier on in the process and unable to leave in the later stage.

In this last group of people, those unable to leave are the really poor souls. I don't speak about those being to bad to find something else easily but rather those willing to leave but who either stuck for being to old, to sick, being the only employed person in the family, unable to move elsewhere for whatever reason.

The result for you as a company will be unmotivated (aka pissed) and unable workforce. Welcome to big company hell.

The Ribbonfarm articles on the Gervais Principle (a rather long 5 article series with part 6 in the making) provides stunning background on this. Thanks for the HNler to bring it to my attention and thanks to the author to formulate that good.
The Bubble of Distraction and Why I’m Ready for it to Burst
Tory MP Louise Mensch launches rival to Twitter
Lots... yet everyone quotes that same australian one. That misrepresents a suburb as a 'city'.

How many places in the world have vacant property developments? Do you call them 'ghost cities'?
Microsoft wins congressional backing for Do Not Track default in IE10
Same here. The ribbon requires more steps to get to the functions you need. It might be good for discoverability, and it might not hinder experts (since they'd use shortcuts) but I feel that it is a big let down for power-users that know what they want to do but don't use it enough to be able to do everything with the keyboard. That and that it is ugly and takes a lot of space.
I don't really think that makes any difference to the point made.

The overall idea is that it is helpful for them to present an image that less gullible people will immediately write off as a scam, so as to reduce the responses to a set of people that are gullible enough to be profitable to pursue.

The ideal scenario for these people is to be busy all the time dealing with the most gullible potential victims rather than chasing people who will balk at sending them money. Any more responses than they can deal with, and they'd be better off filtering out more of the less gullible people by making their initial approach more likely to send poor targets running.

Presenting themselves as Nigerian is one way of increasing the odds of triggering alarm bells with the less gullible people, but by no means the only alternative.

There's also every reason to assume that a reasonable number of scammers are simply clueless and try these scams because they think they'll make money, not because they've actually found a method that is viable for them, so you'd expect to see a reasonable chunk of scammers that don't do the optimal thing anyway.
Agreed. Imagine needing OS pre-approval from Google on a machine that comes with ChromeOS... or wait, by Apple on a machine that comes with OSX.

That's tongue-in-cheek.

And yes, I know Microsoft has the desktop market cornered. However that market is no longer what it was, and there is little (other than the economics of adoption) stopping any OS vendor from doing the same.
I disagree. Here's why. I used to work out quite a bit and, with the help of P90X, I got up to 170-175 pounds of lean weight. I maintained it for a while, but adverse life events, a huge workload, and a crappy diet made me lost most of the weight (and a lot of the muscle mass) that I put on before.

Since my weight tumbled to 145 lbs, I noticed a huge difference in my physical well being, especially in sedentary positions. My posture worsened, my back constantly ached, and I started to suffer from RSI. I've been using the same chair all the while, a Herman Miller Mirra.

So, from my experience, weight and muscle mass was a primary determinant of my sedentary well being. Believe me, I was putting a lot less stress on my spine when I was doing 48 pullups in a workout, vs 8 now. I'm slowly working my way back up, and the back pain from sitting has lessened.
10 domains @ namecheap.com - Looking to trim it down further. Anyone want housinspired.com / pursuitofhousing.com / apartmentsredesign.com >> Let me know.
Think of it as you are reducing clutter in your personal life. If these people are not really important, then they must not be really important. If someone was really a good friend, they would definitely tell you what they feel about it.
The point is to prune back the API for small devices

I don't disagree with the general sentiment that it was time to clean out the cruft in OpenGL, but I find this part of the argument to be a bit humorous. These "small, constrained devices" we're talking about are probably 10x faster than a goddamned Reality Engine.

I tend to agree that the API should have been renamed entirely once it was pared down this far, as 3Dfx did when they created Glide.
Everyone (at least 99.9%) Overestimates how good they are.
Activities That Will Make You a Better SysAdmin
With menus, it was still possible to page through the menus until you found what you were looking for.

With the ribbon, I still find myself going through every option to try to find something, only to end up googling where on earth they hid the function I was looking for.
I'd suspect the current state of Slashdot is helped by Slashdot not being the "in" thing anymore too. A lot of the noise-makers have moved on, or aren't finding the site in the first place any more.
He wouldn't even need to touch a hot handle, everything else can be kept the same. the only difference would be a little required filling of a tea ball before he started and emptying the tea ball after he is done. an additional 10-15 seconds for tea that is streets ahead.
St George really is an exception! I've had all sorts of problems in the past with other banks. In recent times Bankwest has been great too, but St George wins for API's available if you need to do more than just accept payments on the web.
Ribbon sucks. It sucked then. It sucks now even more. It doesn't work on desktop, and it certainly does not work with touch. Almost nobody has adopted ribbon. Even MS does not use it outside Office. You are not alone.
In my opinion it would make more sense to simply embed LaTeX in HTML5.
Sorry, not going to drink the kool-aid.

There is something to be said when almost everybody you talk to hated their first experience with Windows 8, and those that didn't, feel the need to make excuses for all the faults they found: "this and that isn't very good, but you get used to it."

Being new and different doesn't imply being "innovative" and "better". Sometimes it's just worse. And Microsoft is, again, touting something new as something better. We all know how that worked out for Vista...

If Windows 8 is about the future, then it's a future I'm not interested in.
It doesn't really matter that much, if your city wasn't destroyed during the war, it was destroyed during the 70's or 80's (in a process continuing to this day) when the communists governments decided to ruin every larger town in a same manner as the Americans did 20 years before them, massive tear-downs, urban freeways (right through the city center, see Prague), uniform large scale housing projects on the periphery. Admittedly, the scale was not that large, but it was the same kind of destruction.

Krakow's greater center is just gorgeous, I really loved it. But it was a similar experience, to a certain degree, as well. On a train from Katowice, the first sight was something called "Krakow Business Park", disgusting office park, a place that doesn't belong anywhere, I work in a similar project and it is almost the same. Glass blocks surrounded by an endless parking lot. Then some recent suburban development, complete clusterfuck under all circumstances. And looking from Kazimierz across Wisla, what I saw on the other bank was also very disappointing. Or this https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-dO_Cw7ayCQk/Tx2LuPNmF0I/A..., seen right from the castle Wawel. And this was not built by the soviet engineers. Not much has changed after 1989. Maybe nothing at all.

This sums it all. You don't need a war. http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/4967/houstons-cars-...
Put some info about yourself into your profile so that graphics nerd colleagues (me) can learn about your very interesting work experience!
There's always a bit of black cardboard and tape. Try to take a picture now. :)
The whole hater/fan mindset about OSs/phones/technology perplexes me. Why do some people feel so strongly about these things? And where does these strong feelings come from? To me these things are just not emotionally engaging in the way that, say, a book or game or work of art can be - and I wonder if this engagement is trivial or actually quite important.

Are so many people identifying as haters of fans because these things are genuinely emotionally engaging? Or is it an amplification effect of the internet echo chamber? Or because some of us make career investments in these technologies?

I develop on the Windows platform and have done for about 20 years. Its okay and practical and I'm comfortable with it, but I don't feel that that makes me a fan of Windows or a hater of other platforms. Same with my Android phone. I don't particularly like Apple as a company. Their products seem okay, but I alternate between wondering if they focus on surface appearance over substance or whether this might actually be a great thing. Does this make me an Apple hater?

If I try and get inside the minds of these people, here are my impressions of their thoughts/emotions:

- Apple. Haters see an authoritarian company obsessed with style and controlling its customers. Fans see the long-time underdog finally triumphing through attention to design and vindicating the fan's loyalty.

- Microsoft. Haters see a big, stupid, evil corporation deservedly slipping into insignificance. Fans see solid engineering and persistence in supporting their customers in the long-term.

- Android. Haters see a lazy, poor imitation of iPhone that is unworthy of success. Fans see the last hope in a titanic struggle for freedom.

Obviously these are stereotypes and I'm emphasising extremes because that seems to be what haters/fans do. But how does technology do this to some people, and is this new?

I'd be very interested in other people's opinions on this.
Got it in one :-)
so what should I do with my most recent post? http://serverfault.com/questions/400268/profile-long-running...

Should I submit the same question to SO instead?
C is my absolute favorite language, and as such, I learned a long time ago to pay very close attention to compiler warnings and Valgrind memory errors.
The DarwinTunes algorithm: from random to rhythm
This is what I think that a lot of people is misunderstanding. You will use the desktop as always in a workstation. Only while launching apps you will use the new start screen, unless you pin your most used ones in the taskbar. That way, you could work all day long without using the new start screen.
No, you have it backwards :-) SGI devised OpenGL and then implemented it in hardware, not vice versa!
An obvious thing that took me a little too many talks to figure out, is to say "Thanks" when you're done. The audience wants to applaude, but the speaker has to initiate it. It always gets weird if the speaker goes to Q&A without it. Do we clap now? Later?
I've delivered a paid contract that would say otherwise =)

(Not OpenGL ES1.1 but a similar narrow API. One frame latency penalty in my case as the calls enter a staging area for analysis one frame before tiling and dispatch).

Dont forget the original iPhone also has been fully sandboxed OpenGL ES1.x

So its already been done.

Things like PCC (NaCl) and Xax (to a lesser degree) also reveal surprising results as you would know.
Mars One introduction [video]
The first chemical circuit developed
In Russia, (Web) Business Does You - Like This
Biggest problem with customer discovery
I am working on tools for early customer discovery (before a working MVP) and was wondering if any of you are doing a lean startup and what are your biggest problems with getting feedback from potential customers. Anything you can share will contribute to better tools in the future.
This is like saying you would have been okay with Hitlers whole plan to get some Lebensraum if only he hadn't killed all those people to get it.

Face the facts: Israel is promoting apartheid conditions in the region, upon a mass of population that it has no legal right to do so. Why on earth would anyone who lives in the region, who wants stability in the region, trust the nuclear-armed state of Israel if it is continuing to kill innocents in its quest for power?
ah, thanks, I missed partially applied operators.
But then, it seems easy to do it with single method calls too, e.g.

map (.length) x

rather than

map (call \length) x

does not fit more complex usage, but it's a tiny improvement I'd think
Cars are switching from petrol to hybrid to electric motors, but roads still work... "Rapidly developing" is a red herring.
Mozilla Firefox 13.0.1 Final Portable on Downloads App
They are still fighting the popularity of Windows XP which is a tough act to follow. I upgraded to Windows 7 about 6 months ago, and despite tweaking it to get it very close I still suffer bouts of profound exasperation when using it.

I'm not saying that XP was flawless by any means (and I was using the much reviled 64 bit version), but it accomplished an excellent balance between simple ease of use and access to more complex features, which no Microsoft product has managed since.

There has been a gradual shift toward automation which in a few cases is welcome but in others has become an impediment to actual use. The automated functions just aren't up to task at this point, either technologically, or because of the assumptions the designers have jumped to about what you want to do are just wrong.

In addition some people don't cope well with context sensitive menus (and I am one of them I freely admit), they are messy and unintuitive after a certain point. Sure once you learn them they can be helpful but if you have to learn something it's not intuitive.

Nowadays there should be no reason to learn technology, it should just work.
mjg59, the Fedora employee whose posts about UEFI have earned a lot of HN karma, has posted about why Fedora considered and rejected the system Ubuntu is putting in place:

http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/13713.html
In fact, the concept of "freestanding implementation" (as opposed to "hosted implementation", which is a implementation of the full standard) exists in C, and is sometimes used in embedded systems:

a conforming freestanding implementation is only required
to provide certain library facilities: those in <float.h>,
<limits.h>, <stdarg.h>, and <stddef.h>; since AMD1, also
those in <iso646.h>; since C99, also those in <stdbool.h>
and <stdint.h>; and since C11, also those in <stdalign.h>
and <stdnoreturn.h>

(source: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.7.1/gcc/Standards.html)

So yes, a conforming (freestanding) C implementation without printf for embedded systems can exist.
This cannot be emphasized enough.

To anyone reading, you don't have to do more than the big three — squats, dead lift and bench press — to build a strong core and ameliorate most RSI issues.

Regular cardio fitness and 10-minute work breaks are good, but can only take you so far. Being stationed at a computer for extended periods of time requires having a proper muscular frame to support your bones.
How to Make Your Own Wonderful Wedding Photo Slideshow
Android Tablets Still Suck, And Google's Running Out Of Time To Fix Them
I, for one, welcome our new search engine overlords.
> To be polarising, psychologists believe that language influences thought/culture and linguists believe that thought/culture influences language. There are evidence to support both conclusions(...)

I sometimes get the feeling that people in such debates don't understand the concept of feedback loops. It is entirely all right for language to influence culture and to be influenced by it at the same time. And it's not even that mind-blowing or difficult to reason about, one just needs to step one level higher on the ladder of abstraction.
Ask HN: HTML-based presentation tools
I am looking for an HTML-based presentation tool for classic slide-based presentations.

As news about this kind of tools pop up on hn from time to time, I thought people here might have some experience with them.

I spent quite some time evaluating different options, but have not yet found the ideal solution for my purposes.

I need the following features:

a) It should look beautiful. I really like the looks of shower (https://github.com/pepelsbey/shower). But the project does not have to look like that. It would be sufficient if slides could be easily styled via CSS. Of course, a set of gorgeous built-in designs would be a big plus.

b) Slides should be defined in a simple markup language. My first tries involved writing a preprocessor so I could define my slides in HAML. But I realized this might not have been the best idea. So Markdown or something similar would be fine as well. Bonus points if you can easily split up your presentation in several files and a tool automatically combines them.

c) I need to print handouts from my slides, 4 slides on a single page. This has been painful in the past no matter what tools I used. If I gain only one thing from this, it should be fully-automated handout generation. I have seen approaches using wkhtmltopdf to accomplish this, but this has some serious issues. By the way, I do not expect the printed slides to look anything like the HTML ones. They just need to have the same contents and the numbering needs to be the same.

d) I need a slide overview (menu) to quickly change between slides. Deck.js and shower both have this.

e) Syntax highlighting, ideally supporting a wide range of Ruby and Rails related syntaxes (.rb, .erb, .yml, .js, .coffee, .haml and so on). This does not have to be part of the system as long as I can easily integrate a JS solution such as SyntaxHighlighter.

There are so many promising frameworks, libs or tools out there that have 3-4 of those features. But do you know one that has all five?
This is awesome. The thing that has put me off the standing desk is the cost. I sit too much. With such a small investment it doesn't matter if it fails or not. Similarly such a small table can be easily discarded.

I am getting the bits later on today. I hope to have a standing desk by the end of the week.
Cladding Removal London
Do you really run a business where you threaten employees with termination as a form of motivation?

Absolutely not.

Putting an employee in a defensive state (where they're either looking for another job or trying desperately to keep their current one) is not sound management technique.

Agreed.

I've built three companies and have managed, hired or fired dozens of people. Under no circumstances can I see what the OP proposed working for me.

I think we're both reading different things from the OPs post. I don't see it as threatening. I see it as transparency. Making it clear to everybody - employer and employee - how issues around continual employment are resolved.

This is not something that's introduced at the point of "I want to get rid of this person". This is something that's a part of how the company is run, and is made explicit right from the start.

This is not something that's done with the aim of firing somebody. This is something that's done with the aim of fixing the problem. Fixing the problem doesn't always mean firing the employee. That's just one outcome of many.

Perhaps it's a cultural thing.

I'm in the UK and pretty much every company I've worked for, and every one I've run, has had a structure to how employees leave a company in the same way that there's a structure to how they come on board.

The "fire you for any reason at any time" thing that seems to be the general rule in the US seems a far more scary and demotivating mechanism from my perspective.
GoCardless is looking for a designer in London
GoCardless is transforming online payments. By linking your bank account directly to our systems, we aim to make it easier to pay and get paid online.

We are a fast-growing London-based team that is backed by some of the world's leading investors, including Accel Partners, Passion Capital & Y Combinator

We are looking for a talented designer to help us shape our brand and service. You will be helping us to solve varied design challenges, from figuring out the right UI for complicated transaction flows, to making our splash pages beautiful.

You will join a team of two front-end developers who care deeply about design. Together we will make sure your designs are implemented, just the way you intended.

Requirements:

- Experience with and a passion for designing beautiful, engaging user experiences
- Well-versed in fundamental design disciplines and principles
- A dedication to getting even the smallest details just right
- Ability to deliver to tight deadlines
- Comfortable working collaboratively and in an iterative process

Bonus points for:

- Experience in creating stunning graphics - ranging from logos to web icons
- Experience developing brand style guides

To find out more, please send your portfolio to hiroki@gocardless.com.
Interesting, but I strongly dislike the use of whitespace indentation for new statements/segments of code,

it

will

get
tedious

when
you
are
nesting
multiple
blocks
of
code.

And I like it when Xcode highlights the brackets/parenthesis because it's just easier to pick up ( and ) and { and } from a line of text.
I don't know the professor, but seems like he's sticking the school with a problem in the fall with his sudden resignation.
Further on in the article, they talk about statistic x. They explain that it is variable, but that the boolean model represents a worse case scenario where all gullible people buy in.

It's to get a ballpark number.
It's funny how americans boil water in microwaves, while the rest of the world does it in kettles. There was a discussion on reddit about it. I didn't realize it, but apparently it has to do with the fact that most americans rarely drink tea, but rather prefer coffee from coffee machines and so they don't need kettles. Personally, I can't imagine how one can boil water in a microwave, it sounds ridiculous (in a good way, no offense), but these little differences fascinate me.
Maybe, this kind of excessive focus on metro is because its the real novelty in this os. The rest, is just a stronger and faster Windows 7. But understandably, that doesn't seem to be that interesting in comparison
The universities that do this best will gain prestige. Not to mention that education is a significant component of the mission of the university.
And the response from Mark Shuttleworth is in the post. Fedora is trying to justify why they were quick to pay for a signed bootloader but its not all adding up like everyone wants.