skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What does, "knowledge order than dirt" mean, exactly?

Are these types of errors a symptom of touch screen input, or apathy? I have noticed the occurrence has increased greatly over the last few months. I feel like a pedantic asshole, but it greatly impairs my ability to read comments fast, and it gives me the impression that code written by the same people would confuse me as a beginner/ hobbyist.
The benefit of designing the hardware is that your driver support can be flawless, since you know exactly which devices you need to support. Things like sleep/wake that never freezes, squeezing the absolute longest life out of the batteries, etc. are all easier when you control the hardware platform.
Functional JavaScript with LiveScript, Mocha, and ExpectThat
MR. FISH—A Cartoon
It's really hard to use on the iPad, it doesn't behave how one might expect, click it makes the window zoom, clicking a second time slides the toggle. Sliding the toggle does nothing.
Alright, if I get to dream big: pandoc[1] as a first class citizen in ikiwiki.

[1] Speaking of jgm have you seen his cloudlib project?
If they make TwitterPorn, I'll be onboard.
Why Your Company Doesn’t Have To Be Instagram
Facebook Find Friends Nearby
Apple's industrial design is legendary and goes from top to bottom. In the end, it isn't just that the software is better nor is it just that the hardware is better; it's that both of them just work. That is the essence of good design.

While Mach predates iOS, to say that iOS wasn't designed from the ground up for the environment it is running in would be a gross mischaracterization. The pieces exposed, the services provided, all reflect the realities of the hardware it is running on (eg highly constrained and battery driven).
Dave, Dave, don't be so defensive! I mean, I spend time googling for my name too, but I manage to resist the temptation to throw myself into any discussion of my work, it just comes across badly. I mean, I did go and buy a copy of your book, hardback too, and I did just go and give you a semi-positive review in which I heartily recommended large chunks of it. I really did enjoy quite a lot of it.

You're right, page 4 does mention the idea that a debt is a promise. But it's immediately pooh-poohed as an idea that's "dangerous because it's self-evident". And the last paragraph does call a debt a "promise corrupted by both math and violence", but it's not clear how anything is "corrupted" here. So yeah, you acknowledge this self-evident idea, but only to dismiss it without a proper argument.

Also while you're here (actually yours is exactly the kind of book that I read while wishing that I could argue with the author about certain points, so it really is a privilege to have you here and I hope that doesn't sound like a backhanded compliment), the other point I think you dismiss without enough of a fight is the idea that all human interactions are based on reciprocity. There is of course one counter-example, the child-parent relationship in which the parent is generally happy to give selflessly, but that's a special case which seems to be more-or-less hard-coded into our genes; our minds are programmed to give selflessly to our children since from our genes' point of view they're nearly equivalent to ourselves. Once we step outside the parent-child relationship, however, your other examples of non-reciprocal human behaviour (apart from outright theft, extortion and other forms of behaviour where one party isn't consenting) don't ring true. Two labourers working on the same project will, of course, pass each other hammers, but there is an expectation of reciprocity even in group work, as anyone who has ever worked in a group with someone not pulling their weight will know.

In conclusion, you've written an interesting history of debt, but I think you've started off with some kind of antipathy towards debt which has stopped you from really gaining a good perspective on it. I still don't understand the objection to the basic concept of debt: that if Alice has something and Bob needs it then Alice can lend Bob that thing and get it back in the future, for mutual benefit. I find that to be a glorious example of human interaction at its best. But then again, I've already paid off my mortgage.
State of Technology last week #64
Google AdWords lowers highest CPC ad bid to "the second highest bid + $0.01".

These banks did essentially the same with their bids, just without consent from their clients.
According to Wikipedia, sold to Lycos: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonique_%28media_player%29
Wait... A Typical gamedev studio uses 50-100 own executables, if not more. Directly fro perforce/svn/etc. In between studios.

....
That was a shame. I'm still using Winamp 2.81 (from 2002, 10 years ago). As long as it continues to work on Windows, I'll never let it go. Never could get used to the later versions.
Scientists developing device to 'hack' into brain of Stephen Hawking
Interesting comparison, but only using generated mixtures of gaussians for training data severely limits any conclusions that can be drawn from this. Naturally the method with the same assumptions as the generating process had the best performance.

It is important to note that both the performance of the machine learning algorithm (in terms of the error metric) and its runtime are very dependent on the source data in most cases.
I've been looking for more of a direct comparison of OO vs. FP with side-by-side examples. I think there are a lot of specific but concise examples for demonstrating the two paradigms. I tried to do a little bit of this in a recent post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4154484

Would be interested to hear of any other resources that do something similar -- that show specific OO code and corresponding functional takes on the same code. I find that a lot of the discussions avoid getting down to specifics, with code.
Here's what I understand of Frost's opinions:

> if european whiteness is a product of sexual selection of rare blondes

It isn't. European whiteness (of skin) is a product of women being more heavily selected than men, since paleness of skin is a sex characteristic of females. (For example, african boys are born light, and darken over time. African girls are born light, darken until puberty, and then lighten.)

European variation in hair and eye color (but not skin color) is a color polymorphism typical of sexual selection. On this theory, 85% of adults sharing the identical hair color is unexpected.

-----

Here are some of my own thoughts on your question (I claim no qualification at all to pontificate here):

- What size are these "some parts of Sweden and Finland"? The smaller they are, the less interesting it is that they might appear uniform.

- Do 85% of adults share the identical hair color, or is variation being binned into the category "blonde"? Compare the internal variation of african or chinese hair color.
Call.me.maybe()
Nice post. Thanks for mentioning Intercom (https://www.intercom.io/). I don't think people generally find the social profile stuff creepy, but I'll admit that knowing who they are on Vimeo, etc. is not very useful. We just link-up whatever profiles we have but don't give them much priority in the product.
There's more to design than just "how it looks" and "it's based on BSD". Apple's software is not just a bunch of open source stuff glued together as your post implies. The iOS kernel, for example, is substantially proprietary and heavily customized for Apple's iOS hardware. You don't get any lower-level than that, and that was definitely developed alongside the hardware.
Just a heads up, my anti virus Nod32 says that there is a trojan embedded in this link.
Because in environments where Java is used "switch language your're using" just isn't such a viable option. Especially in the light of an option of just upgrading the language. There's nothing seriously wrong with Java that couldn't be fixed by incremental language updates - like the ones C# has received in last couple of versions.
Clojure: Production Web REPL
Poor Man's Application Launcher
Anyone using the OS X version? All I need is playlists and start/stop using the special keyboard keys.
> Is there a way to speed things up?

Afraid not, the team will manually vet your executables so it takes some time. Fill out the forms, I wouldn't be surprised if they responded by monday. Make sure you list the possible locations to download your software.

I'd mention on your download page that Norton is currently vetting your software, so a WS.Reputation.1 message can be expected. Users are able to pull the file out of quarantine, if they read the popup message, so it'd help if they are expecting it.

>> Second: sign your executables. Well - now I know. But I just leaned it because I got complaints from my users.

ALL DEVELOPERS SHOULD SIGN THEIR EXECUTABLES / PACKAGES: it's not just for antrivirus products, its a way for your customers to verify they are getting the expected product from you.

> So you say that it will help 1) To place the downloads on the "old" domain? 2) Sign the executables 3) Move the downloads back to the new domain / cdn?

I wouldn't change anything at this point, you have the downloads working as you want, let Symantec fix its reputation for how your system works.
> Please point to the part of my comment where I said I got nothing in return.

It was your self-entitled attitude that reeked from your comment. If I was wrong with that, sorry.

In that case, your demanding they give you something for nothing.

> I'm not sure what makes you think that customers can't demand things of those they do business with.

Demanding things while offering nothing in return doesn't help. Also, "Please point to the part of my comment where I said customers can't demand things."

> Also, who's saying I've upped my price?

You have. You're asking for control over their API's.

Seriously, people like you think these companies have your data. They don't. You still have your data. You've shared it with them. It's theirs now. If you really cared about controlling your data, you'd have worried about this when you first signed up.

You're just acting the part of a self-entitled egotistical internet drama-queen "fighting the big guy oppressing the little guy", and frankly, that song-and-dance get's old quick.
Bad advice, in my experience.

Anecdotally, I did a website recently for a carpet cleaner. Standard wordpress job with his services and things. At the top of the home page, he wanted a link to a form for redeeming living social coupons, which, not wanting to say "Click Here for", I just made as "Reedem Living Social Coupon".

It turned out after a couple weeks that many of his users were not clicking "Reedem Living Social Coupon", but clicking the "Contact Us" link. As a quick fix, I renamed the link to "Click Here to Redeem Living Social Coupon" and bolded the text. He mentioned a week later that this had a noticeable improvement in people clicking the correct form.

People who use the web for scheduling carpet cleanings are not always the same as the twitter crowd. You need to remember who your audience is, not what all your programmer friends prefer.

(And for some closure, I ended up adding a "coupon code" optional entry on the generic contact form for people who still clicked the wrong one anyway.)
It's fairly clear to me, from the rushed event, to the complete lack of specs and the hands-off demo approach, that Surface is very much a Beta product at this stage.
It's disappointing, but I can understand why Michaelsoft would want to keep hush about any sort of specs - because they likely haven't been finalized at all yet, and the device probably still crashes a fair bit.
It's unfair to raise such accusations in public without providing any details; especially considering that the accusation comes via a third-party.
Very cool. Interesting to see the schematics and design. However, you can tell the dash was definitely designed by engineers. Lot of buttons, switches and knobs for a short drive on a glorified electric golf cart. Nice find!
Eurostar Competition
I think the argument is not as much, that it was a better ROI, but rather the opportunity costs of buying property would have been more expensive.
I was impressed that random forests did so well for the irrelevant feature detection, given that they know nothing about gaussians. Though IIRC, you've used them to win Kaggle competitions, so maybe you already know their power.
I'm no fan of GoDaddy but "There are 3897 domains hosted on this server." is misleading. The IP address could very well a high performance load balancer serving content from a rack of NATted web servers.

It's been a very, very long time since an IP address equated to a single web server in any kind of serious environment.
"The most important principle on HN, though, is to make thoughtful comments. Thoughtful in both senses: both civil and substantial. [...] Which brings us to the most important principle on HN: civility. Since long before the web, the anonymity of online conversation has lured people into being much ruder than they'd dare to be in person. So the principle here is not to say anything you wouldn't say face to face." -- http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
Maybe because getting things pixel perfect across browsers can be hard and is an art in itself?
For me the part that hit a nerve was this: "Nobody likes to have debt and as soon as you have it, you become restricted in what you can do."

Most of us hear the constant refrain of what a good idea home ownership is, and how it so much better than renting, when you take into account the mortgage interest deductions and appreciation. And that's all true, but what they never really emphasize is that once you take out a mortgage you've got that $1,000 monthly payment (for example) that you've got to meet EVERY month, for the next 30 years or until you sell. And you have insurance, property taxes, maintenance, etc.

Carrying long-term debt and especially owning a home really does impact your thinking. You become more risk-averse. You start thinking that a steady paycheck is a better idea than taking the risk of starting a business. As time goes on, you feel like you have MORE to lose because you've been paying on the debt for a while and you actually have some equity. It's why banks view mortgages with equity as lower risk, and why car insurance is cheaper if you own a home.

As far as buying property as an investment, i.e. renting it out, the "common wisdom" is that you make your money when you buy. You absolutely need to get a really good deal when you buy, because the rent you're able to collect will basically be a break-even on your expenses, so wnen you eventually sell your profit is a function of your purchase price. Unfortunately a lot of people pay too much for houses that they think are in a "hot" rental area, and they never really make any money on them.
Voice algorithms spot Parkinson's disease
Larry did not have mutual business/sales relationship with HP. That is the biggest flaw with your argument.

Second, Ballmer said it himself that it will not go down like that for PC business. Why do you think they have x86 and ARM?

I will take your bet when it comes to MS launching its own PC. MS will definitely not do that. I have the insider info up on my sleeve albeit a few years old but still recent.

Like I said, tablet or other devices, other than laptop and workstation, will be a different ball games altogther.

Everybody has too much to lose when it comes to workstation and PC.
To be fair, it also favors higher quality incumbents over the dozens of knockoff me-too apps like Grumpy Avians, Monsters Eat My Apartments, and Temple Race+. Or worse yet, the "strategy guide" apps for games that cost more than the original game.
There were several programs in my college classes (enterprise bullshit) that I needed IE to run. I didn't say it was a good thing, but that is the way it was.

Also for testing website as listed below.
I can see where you are coming from, but those extra stuff does add depth to the game once you learn all the new weapons. Granted, this is coming from somebody who plays a lot of TF2, but the "too many options" problem goes away certainly after 30 hours of playing, and often much less.
No, the argument is that he could comfortably experiment with starting his own business because his financial obligations are minimal.

If I had bought a property I would have had to service the gap between
the rent and the interest repayments along with other costs like
maintenance etc. If I could buy a property outright, or if rental
income serviced the debt and made me money, then I’d buy property but
it never does.

On his last point in that quote, I can't actually find it now but I believe I read on Calculated Risk recently that rental income will service the debt from a recent house purchase at this point. Now really is a great time to buy. :-) (In the US. The Australian market is still insanely overheated.)
Why would they need a template engine? Erm.. because they have more than one user....
Is there a fire risk with MS building the cases out of magnesium? Magnesium fires are intense and difficult to put out.

I can't imagine MS is going to put out a product that oxidizes violently, so how will they prevent it? Can MgO retain the look (everything I've seen of MgO is a white powder)?
"For example if you can start a new business with $50,000 then sell 20% of it to an investor for $200,000 in 1 or two years, you’ve created $1m worth of value in that time. Do you think if you bought a property for $1m with a 10% deposit, it would be worth $2m in two years or less? No way."

Sorry but I have to point out that this is a very flawed comparison. How much work did you put into that house? - I think the assumption here is none. How much work did you put into your business? - depending on how much you consider your rate to be probably a lot... potentially even more than $200,000.

A more fair comparison would be an actual home builder or developer and there are many that do just this and could cite comparable or even much higher returns.
A couple of things for perspective. Here in Australia HELP (it used to be HECS) is a government student loan that you pay back as you earn later in life. You can pay your course fees upfront instead if you like, but either way the amount is not onerous for a basic degree, and it's basically a few percent extra on your income tax until it's paid off (if your wage exceeds $X)

The other is that housing in Australia has gone berserk in price. We have the most expensive housing relative to average income in the developed world, except for Hong Kong. That's happened in only the past 10 years. What was a $200k house then is now a $500-600k house, and wages have not grown to match. Buying a house now is not a good investment. Buying a house back then was a good investment, with the benefit of hindsight.
Version control products wont have to deal with the reputation engine.
Mobile App Privacy Best Practices
I think in general, if you are targeting the "general public" or an audience you know is probably not tech-savvy, you're better off with links that say "Click Here" or actually using buttons.
It's a typo for "older".
I must have missed something huge because I've been using Winamp for as long as I can remember and never ever seen a need to change. I don't see what's been undone. Missed opportunities to expand and become some big evil money scraper, sure, but what I see today is still a product that does what its supposed to do, and that's that.

What's the problem here?
My book on CouchDB & PHP Web Development was just released
Is it? It's tough to say whether the wording was the problem in your case without seeing the site though. Was the link visibly clickable? Was it a button? What would happen if it was a button and it had a Living Social logo on it? Bold text calling out to click sounds more visible and enticing, but there are other ways to grab users' attention.

Yes, you can print an A3 sized sign to remind visitors to flush the toilet, bolding, italicizing and underlining the text to get their attention. Or you can make a clever doodle or an icon, and make it fit into the bathroom's interior design.
To be fair, it's only the aol acquisition that gave them potential access to the time warner music library and the ability to go negotiate deals with the other content owners. I think it's unlikely 4 guys in arizona making $100k/mo with no connections could have made that happen.
It is hubris to think that your users should change for you. Usability is about adapting computers to fit humans not changing humans to fit someone's definition of "right".
Help provide machine learning training data to diagnose Parkinson's disease
I didn't miss that part, I was simply saying that a client that had the file could tell what byte 1257 was to the other client (or some other random byte, as requested by dropbox).
To consume as in gaining resources that actually increase survival and replication value? Sure.

The kind of mass consumption spawned from the US that has people sitting in front of their TVs 6 hours a day on average, obsessed with celebrity, eating fast food, getting fat, buying and hoarding tons of junk they hardly even use, being seriously in debt, working jobs they hate to keep the cycle going... stuff that is actually deleterious to physical and emotional health? No. And that documentary brings context to how this mess came about.

Just give it the first 15 minutes and find out how one man behind one public event changed the perception of women smoking forever:

"Bernays staged the 1929 Easter parade in New York City, showing models holding lit Lucky Strike cigarettes, or "Torches of Freedom". After the historical public event, women started lighting up more than ever before. It was through Bernays that women's smoking habits started to become socially acceptable."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

This same man, the double nephew of Sigmund Freud, also coined the term PR and got his start as a propagandist for the Wilson administration during WWI.
I don't understand or agree with your logic at all. Oracle shouldn't waste time on Java because it is already so far behind as to be hopeless? That notion seems silly at best, especially as 99% of code written on the JVM is still done in Java.

Also, generics fiasco? Generics may not be perfect, but I haven't met a single person who isn't glad that they are in the language. Who has done generics better? C#? Because C#'s type system is baked so heavily into the run time, the CLR actually has a harder time supporting languages with more powerful type systems than does the JVM.

See, for instance, this post: http://olabini.com/blog/2010/07/questioning-the-reality-of-g.... Both Ola, a JRuby developer, and Martin Oderskey, the creatir of Scala, prefer the JVM's type erasure to the reified generics of the CLR.
I'm interested to see at what point the speedup happens. In other words, is offloading static files faster because:

-Node has more cycles to compute things?

-The server node's on has less contention to deal with (disk, network)?

-Putting statics on another server allows the browser more simultaneous connections when loading the page, so it loads faster by default?

"Don't use Node.js for static assets" is an interesting observation but I'd like to know exactly why.
Sigh. Reminds me of my (late) mother, who would accidentally click on the "Subject" header in Outlook (causing messages to be sorted by subject) and have no idea what happened or why messages were no longer sorted in the order they arrived.

She would call me saying her email "looks all different" for "no reason"
> Maybe the next blog post will be on how to store salted passwords?

Given the number of hacked password databases that weren't hashed and salted, this might actually be useful.
How we used Rails & Backbone.js to build a lightning-fast webapp.