skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you read the article, it points out that the price premium is for all the risk various actors bear in the cocaine supply chain. If you derisk it, you kill most of the profits and suddenly the cartels will have to compete with industrialized agriculture. This will not do wonders for the cartels' profits, and once the profits disappear, the ability to pay enormous bribes follows.

Also, without making any judgement about whether people should or should not do certain things, banning private, consensual transactions rarely works well or inexpensively. My politics do not trend libertarian, but this is a well established fact at this point, whether it's prostitution, drug use, etc.
I like http://popjs.com
In what way is the hierarchical list display in the OS X finder not a "tree view"?
Awesome post. The system really held up too, the liveblog was a pleasure to follow.
I'm aware, I submitted an app already :-).

I'm confused about what he meant about the marketplace having a "bootstrap builder" for x-tags.
The fact that bad people will be bad people does not change the fact that taking away a major revenue source of theirs will lessen how much bad they will do.

For a historical analog, look at the Mafia. When Prohibition ended, the Mafia didn't become nice people. They continued a life of crime. However they had diminished power, and we had fewer open gun battles in the streets. On the whole this was a good thing.
Having written both application and system code for PC/GEOS, it never appeared to have been written by 10Xers.

For the record I've worked with EPOC-32, Windows, NextStep, Linux, VxWorks, and Nucleus - none of them was as painful as PC/GEOS (although EPOC-32 sometimes came close...)
You're right thesis first ! But please keep your hacker instinct for later use ;-) Programming must stay fun.
Understand now, that would still be very valuable.
I use to have somewhere closer to 300 domains. Now I have less than 100.

1. The domains I absolutely know I want to keep, I do max 10 year registrations on them, there are about a dozen or so of these. They're usually premium domains or things like my name, etc.

2. The ones that are currently active with launched stuff on them, a few dozen, I renew these anywhere between 2-5 years in advanced depending on whether or not I think the site will continue to be active in that time frame and reassess when expiration is near.

3. Then I got a ton of inactive domains and these are the ones that are the hardest to gauge. So I tend to do 1 year renewals on these and visit back every year to determine whether or not I genuinely will use them down the road, are there resell value if not, etc... I'd either sell or let expire the ones I don't care about and access when I pick up new domains again.

The yearly rate I pay varies because some of these are already paid in advanced for a few years so its just the numbers of single year renewals that I have to assess.
Also, you can't easily get the link on the clipboard.

You're forced to open a browser and then copy the link from the page. ?dl=1 seems to solve the preview issue, though.
It is 128kbit in the MP3 demo, I think I used LAME to encode it, but I am not sure, could have been the one in OS X. It plays 320kbit files fine though.
Not a bad return... I wonder how many of these still function? This one came with verified original manuals as well.

Now who wants the two working Commodore PET's I have in the closet!
It looks like you're being downvoted, so I'll provide a reason.

Alcohol is legal. The gangs that formed around producing, smuggling, and selling alcohol (e.g. Capone) are gone.

The hope is that once other drugs are legal, the same thing happens to their producers.
Cigarettes, while harmful, don't result in instant death. Banning cigarettes would result in the same problem banning other drugs has created.

The only things that should be "banned" are those that are so intrinsically harmful they cause severe, immediate, measurable harm to both the abuser and society.

There aren't many drugs that people consume that qualify for this standard since to be able to continuously abuse something it can't kill you the first try.
Disrupting a sleeping PC industry
While we're all here ... would be interesting to hear other examples (your own or other startups) and where they fit in this loose classification system.
We're already most of the way there with iOS. The Windows 8 ARM UEFI stuff is pretty foreboding too.
Correct, Mozilla Marketplace is not putting X-Tags in all apps. The dev tooling side of Marketplace will offer a project builder that let's you pick which tags (if any) you'd like to include. It then bundles all the assets you pick into one compressed file and spits out a zip containing a skeletal project with all the script tag and asset references preset for you in the pages.
I've seen developers who create, rather than reduce technical debt; who take longer to get familiar with codebases; have a hard time focusing in the presence of distractions; and who seem to have difficulty ramping up solution domain knowledge (i.e. programming / software engineering techniques). And all of these things seem to be down to individual ability or motivation, i.e. something about the person, rather than external factors.

Most developers suck at programming (and that's actually OK). 90% of the code they write is copy and pasted from elsewhere in the codebase or from the web, and then tweaked until it does something approximately correct. They usually need help when solving a new pattern of problem. What they do often have is domain knowledge not related to programming, and produce just about acceptable results out of the machine in a labour-intensive way that doesn't really scale over time or problem size, but they muddle through with determination.

I don't know about a 10x productivity differences though. I'm not really arguing in favour of that hypothesis. Rather, if anything, I've seen step differences in potential; that is, there are developers that can do things other developers can never do, not in 10x the time, not in 1000x the time.
Wallpaper, screen saver, and home page, I would think. If you want to go over the top, name the account and the hard disk, too.

Finally, if you have style, create your own set of system sounds.
Its an interesting place.

At Blekko we've been very aggressive at building privacy in from the start, and we talk about that with folks all the time.

When I was at Sun I was deeply involved in doing security work both in the kernel and on the network. There were lots of places to improve.

In both the Blekko and Sun cases the 'better' version doesn't seem to carry a lot of retail influence. Which is to say if you offer a consumer a choice, the 'secure' one which costs a bit more (either in cash or in complexity) or the 'insecure' one which is cheaper, not enough people pick 'secure' to make the investment pay off. You have to pay for your investment somehow, and the fewer people who are willing to pay for a feature, and the more it costs to implement, means a higher per-consumer price for that feature. Security often pushed that cost threshold over the limit into 'non-business'.

When we were discussing implementing the best privacy policy and technology in any search engine I was pretty clear that having the 'best privacy policy of any search engine' was a nice add-on feature but you couldn't base your business on it. We had to have a search engine that was just as good or better than the competition, and the fact that 'oh by the way its got the best privacy policy' could be icing on the cake, but for the majority of people it would not be their reason for using it.

You can see this sort of effect in lots of different communities.
This would burn so many bridges with their hardware manufacturers that some would defect and go with some other platform almost immediately.

Microsoft thinks they're the king of the hill with Windows but it wouldn't take long for vendors to team up together and make Chrome OS, Android, or some other Linux variant into a viable alternative.

All this alternate OS would have to do is everything that Windows XP does. The number of Windows 7 specific applications is shockingly low.
Seems nobody is addressing the supply-chain issues. If Apple, say, makes the MBP-R battery replaceable: they then have to design for user-replaceability (both battery and case), provide replacement batteries as a separate SKU part, provide covers as a replacement part, include new cases & connectors etc. in the supply chain, devote manufacturing lines to building & packaging user-handleable batteries, ship them as separate products, devote store space to them, deal with return/replacement thereof, provide personnel support/service, and so on ... all for something which 95% of all users won't use or won't care if they can't.

Being so keen on minimalism for the sake of cost savings, Apple eliminates a huge cost sink by just gluing long-lasting batteries into a sealed case. Re-routing the savings, they can pour more money into the battery power & longevity and reduce the final product cost, delighting users ... and, of course, increase profits.
I'm confident he's serious, and I feel much the same way. I use cperciva's Hacker News Daily (http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/) to help avoid spending too much time at Hacker News and to make sure I don't miss any big stories.
We can debate how much effort is involved firewalling your code from X.

Well, this thread has brought me to the awareness that there is always going to be some effort in this regard. Whichever programming language is used makes no difference.
I have MBP with SSD and HDD. :)
There is an Open Source Rival to Facebook: WordPress
Why would the largest consumer (US) purchase drugs from the drug cartels if it were legal in the US and could be sold at every 7-11?

The drug cartels would lose a lot of the revenue which makes them powerful.
I'd rather not be driving around on the same road as someone tripping on LSD.
What? Both the 420s and its successor, the 430s, are available directly from Lenovo's site--it took me only seconds to find them:

http://www.lenovo.com/products/us/laptop/thinkpad/t-series/
Coffee & stylus precompilation on heroku with django
> I also take issue with your last sentence, with the idea that the US was the first state to directly engage foreign targets. Obviously, the words "of major military significance" gives your argument a lot of room to maneuver, but the overall effect of the argument as it stands is that the US is the only state pursuing any kind of meaningful offensive security effort. That's almost definitely not the case.

Absolutely. The US was simply the first to cause actual physical damage to a high-profile target. Other nation states have focused their efforts on accessing sensitive information, a la Aurora. Occasionally these attacks make it into the news but, more often than not, they go undisclosed by the target and/or unreported by the media.
Reading this article made me think about how well researched Weeds and Breaking Bad are.
I am looking forward to this. Currently, I am using my wife's iPad now and then, and while the display and smoothness of interaction is top notch, I can't say I like the operating system... iOS isn't bad as an application launcher, but I find it too restricting for a tablet. I can't do basic things like configure something like startup script for an app, forward the output of one program to another one, etc. etc... While a lot of people seems to like iOS, something like Windows with touch seems much more appealing to me. Moreover, I could then have one system in both my PC and tablet, which is also (at least theoretically) great.

I also own an iPhone, and there I think iOS is great, since I want my phone to be an application console, and nothing more. But in tablet, I'd like it to be more like a computer, so iOS is not adequate for me here.
Are you referring to chip-and-pin? It's broken http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2010/02/11/chip-and-pin-i...
I'm just guessing here, but I bet its more about communicating a shared perspective on software development than people thinking they're actually "rock stars". When a job ad says "looking for rock stars to blow a hole in the universe", you would be a fool to take that literally. But its along the lines of a "secret handshake" that lets both parties know something about the other in as few words as possible. A job posting like this is basically saying "hey, we read HN, reddit, etc, we know there's a ton of crap jobs out there full of walking-dead programmers. But this isn't one of them". Of course, the whole "rock star" meme has been hammered to death so that you're more likely to be a company pretending to be something you're not. The point is there is validity in this method of job posting.
Wow, I didn't know there was a name for this. On my list of things to make someday is a "Slow Web" social network.
I agree. This whole "Internet" thing is highly overrated. Also, "electricity" and "clean water."
usesthis.com?
The dominating feature of a tablet is the screen. It's the largest component of the design, and has the most impact on the experience. If there was a single point of failure, that's the one to bet on.

Android, likewise, has not been able to compete in the tablet market... even less so after the Retina iPad. Apple has, unfortunately, set a very high mark for competition.

I had just purchased an Asus eeePad Transformer Prime, the top of the line Android tablet, right before the Retina iPad... I immediately sold it, for a loss, and switched.
Do you have a source on your claim that most of their money comes from cocaine and meth?

The first link provided actually says they are the largest foreign supplier of marijuana.
> Aggregates all your accounts, balances, net worth charts, budgets... all that good stuff. It's fully functional personal finance software.

I'm a Mint user. Mint does all those things, no? I have all my accounts pulling in (credit, checking, savings, mortgages, car loans). I can see the balance on each. I can see all my transactions for each (both combined and filtered separately). I can manually enter transactions until they make it through the system (like entering a check so you don't forget that deduction if the person takes 3 weeks to cash it). I can build budgets. I have a grand total of my net worth (assets - debts). I get alerts when budgets are exceeded or finance fees were added. I'd say Mint has put together a nice set of features. So what else are you doing that Mint doesn't?

Edit: oh. I watched the video. So it sounds like the only thing it does that Mint doesn't do is go look for coupons/deals for the places it sees I've spent money. That has minimal value to me. Certainly not enough to make me switch from Mint. It might appeal to others not already using (or not heavily using) Mint.
> attendance at a council run school is not compulsory

You're right, but what I was trying to say was

"A school is ... compulsory for all children" (home schooling being special case of school).
I'm sorry to hear you stopped using iDT. We've heard this same feedback a few times now and we're still trying to figure out how to make it easier for people in your position to get the team interested. Do you have any insight as to why people weren't interested?

I'm one of two co-founders of iDoneThis, the other guy is smalter, not Zach. We tried out doing a promotion with awesomeness reminders for a while. The story of that promotion is the parent to that comment you linked to.
Are you referring to the column view? That's not a tree, it's a bunch of columns. If you have to reach a directory that is, say, 10 levels down, you end-up with a mess of columns that you have no need for.

Here's random example:
http://www.chapo.co.il/content/articles/snmp-fig5.gif
In response to the title of this thread, no. It's ugly. Jobs don't like ugly. That said, I acknowledge the way its designed to attach to the smart cover is pretty cool.
Roundup of 20 API Service Providers in 2012
Ask HN: Beginner to Developers in 8 weeks, BLOC
Hi, I heard the devbootcamp is pretty good in San francisco, but I don't live in the states and I come across to this websites Bloc. There are spaces opened now so I have sent my application. Just wondering if anyone has tried them before because it needs $3000...
The Oatmeal v. FunnyJunk, Part III
Yeah, I only took Hanselman seriously: http://coderwall.com/p/fgtlba

No pointing showing me a IKEA table, a fern and an MBA.
To Upgrade or not To Upgrade
Even if LSD were legal, it would remain illegal to drive while under the influence of it. But more importantly, do the laws prevent someone who wants to drive while consuming LSD stop anyone from doing it now?

I'm not sure about the USA, but in Canada, the number of people who use marijuana and the number of people who use tobacco are almost equal, despite only one of those substances being legal. That seems to indicate to me that the laws have no impact on consumption or the limitation thereof.

If you are worried about the effects of people using drugs, you are already witnessing them.
Donate your old computers/parts that you don't need to help others
I have a TI-99/4A in working order, with all original manuals, and a 1983 warranty repair slip from TI.... Only $50,000!
But the cost to Apple is much less.
Is "Stuxnet represents yet another step towards greater weaponization of IT" really ridiculous? I'm not arguing that the US is the only driver of that trend, nor am I arguing that the US should not (offensively) defend its miriad interests; rather, our (everyone's) extreme vulnerability scares me (especially SCADA and such.) And Stuxnet does make it harder to gather wide opposition to any other nations found hacking.

I otherwise agree with everything you say, especially that cyberwarfare is (so far) pretty nice.
This feels like PowerPoint-driven strategy. All of the executives in Microsoft are like circling vultures, fighting with each other over the flesh of the Windows cash flow stream, trying to get their organizations funded.

You’d think they could just leave and found their own companies, but no, they’d have to make something people wanted relatively immediately, instead of being able to mouth platitudes about being “strategic” and “building moats” to “protect” Windows and so on and so forth.

Or if you prefer, there is a Windows Tax, and these divisions are like government projects, each trying to justify their existence and draw upon the tax revenues. Like government projects, they are not accountable to the people who pay the taxes, just faceless mandarins at the top.They only lose if they are silly enough to cause a scandal with their foolishness and embarrass the company into firing them and defunding their projects.

Building Kin, then killing it, then getting into bed with Nokia, then building their own tablet... Reminds me of the way the city contractors tear up my street, then pave it, then tear it up again, then pave it again, and so forth. As long as the bureaucracy is in control, and as long as the tax dollars keep flowing, it’s a game of who has the best PowerPoint.
Skout Facing Sex-Predator Crisis
How to tell if you are CPU or GPU bound [2008]
Perhaps not, but you can overdose and die from nicotine.

Almost nobody does though because there is a legal form from which to get the high that is a minute fraction of what is required to kill you.
I had a Lenovo system from Fry's that I couldn't install NT on. In the process of trying to get the install to work, I managed to wipe the restore partition.

They wouldn't take it back. "How can we re-sell this?"

"It's broken. You can't."

"We can't put this back on the shelf without the restore partition."

I called my credit card company in front of them and had the charges reversed. "Have fun, boys."

I'm sure that some poor sucker got that machine, DOA, and returned it again, with the same hassle.
Disagree. The hardware manufacturers aren't exactly rolling in high quality operating systems to choose from. What are their other choices? Linux. Many will of course argue that Linux is great and is an obvious choice, which would be a fair enough argument, but for the larger majority of the population who know Windows and don't want to learn something new, the manufacturers will need to stick with Windows or risk alienating those potential customers.

Also, the argument is predicated on the assumption that this is a zero sum game. Microsoft's value proposition isn't suddenly going to be so amazing that no consumer will purchase a non-Microsoft PC. In the same way, I find it highly likely that if Apple's OS were available for licensing, a lot of PC manufacturers would license it without regard for the fact that Apple's hardware is probably superior.
Something like this? http://i.imgur.com/WUDny.jpg
Chicago startup Power2Switch to debut new electricity bill design
Is there really no way to get the batteries out without splattering them everywhere? My current Macbook Pro (which is seven years old and still limping along) has required two battery replacements. If I want my next laptop to last longer than three years I'm going to have to figure out a way to replace the batteries.
FWIW, I agree about tools. I’ve certainly experimented with integrating Lint-like tools into the build process. Every team ought to have coding standards they enforce, whether mechanically, by eye, or a combination of both.
Doesn't really describe "how" it happened.
One of the better sources for these differences and their magnitude is Peopleware. Instead of citing vague research "somewhere", they did their own primary research. More specifically they set up coding wars where different programmers at different companies assigned to the same task independently.

They found 10x differences in time spent on the average coding war (which was typically a pretty small sample) with those finishing faster typically producing programs that worked better. So by any reasonable measure, at least 10x productivity.

There is your 10x, right? Wrong. They found that the best predictor of programmer performance was the performance of another programmer at the same company. Furthermore they managed to correlate a lot of that performance factor to specific factors, such as having a phone that turned off, a private room, adequate desk space, and so on. There was still something like an unexplained factor of 3 left over, but they didn't know whether it was environment variables they had not looked at (eg training), individual ability (which might be correlated across institutions), etc.

It is true that this research happened in the 80s, before the Internet was widespread. I would love to see it replicated again.

(Note, I'm aware of the existence of many other poorly controlled studies, see http://www.flownet.com/gat/papers/lisp-java.pdf for an example, but what is critical in the Peopleware study is that they acquired information both about productivity and about factors that might cause productivity differences.)
Cute, but maybe a little too out cute.

> You are prone to quixotic behavior.

They are looking for people who are prone to irrational, unrealistic behavior? It makes for nice prose but I have a feeling that some of the personality disorders that could be described by their phrasing wouldn't be particularly welcome.

> Full-stack.

What stack?

No really, you're hiring me for the full stack. What is the stack?

Would I ever be writing a line of CSS? Or JavaScript? Or Ruby? SQL?

At least they say "Largely PHP" a little bit later, but that makes me wonder just what their definition of full-stack is.

I appreciate pleasant writing for the sake of it, but there's a lot of information they could have imparted but chose not to. I wonder if they'd respond favorably if I actually replied in kind. Do they really want quixotic behavior? Is being scant on technical details an OK thing for a technical job posting?

I'm tempted to send a cover letter talking about how the best CSS (would I be writing CSS?) is made with oil paint and that I wear a tea cozy for a hat. I could claim to have independently discovered punctuation and talk about how I navigate code by wind chime.