skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of the comments below engage in back-and-forth (up-and-down?) about whether or not it is permitted to use downvotes to indicate disagreement. Pretty much every time long-time users of Hacker News participate in a discussion on this issue, someone remembers to bring up pg's comment in an early thread from 1608 days ago.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

"I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness."

If you check the currently posted site guidelines,

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

the only guidelines you see about downvoting occur right at the end:

"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

"Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you."

A thread opened by pg 466 days ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

asked, "How to stave off decline of HN?" He wrote, "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."

So at that time, he thought that a significant subset of comments was getting too many upvotes (and, by implication, too few downvotes). That led to a software change such that users can no longer see the net comment karma totals of other user's comments. (You and I can still see the individual net karma totals for each of our own comments.)

To sum up, what I really like to do is upvote good comments. But there is no rule against downvoting a comment if it is mean (definitely not), nor is there a rule against downvoting a comment if it is dumb (the trick is perceiving whether or not a comment is dumb), and especially there is no rule against downvoting a comment if it is both mean and dumb. And if a comment is just a snarky remark that doesn't advance the discussion, or a lame attempt at a one-liner joke, or otherwise doesn't add value to the discussion, it doesn't harm the community to downvote such a comment without further reply.

(They're not really logical opposites and their use frequency is quite different.)

I'm happy to upvote more than downvote. I get the sense that some of the best stuff here on Hacker News still isn't upvoted enough.
Telugu Movies Now
Neither of those two examples give away their core software for free though, which sounds like what Simperium are going to do.

I'm absolutely not saying it can't work, and kudos to Simperium for taking this approach, it looks like there is an absolutely great product there and I'm going to be checking it out.

There are of course examples where this does work, RedHat for example (heh - I do it myself as well!), but I was wondering if anyone has tried to look at it analytically, or is it just a gut feeling that this is the right approach to maximise revenue?
I used to use MarkItUp but eventually moved away from markdown altogether. I found I had to keep tweaking the parser to allow stuff like inline, floated images, code blocks with language-tagging (for syntax highlighting) and so on. It came to be more work than just using a WYSIWYG editor.
NoSquint is pretty good for this as well.
anyone can point me to something explaining "The Hyperloop"? not much luck after a few searches
> similarly I think "nigger" derived from some matter-of-fact observation

The latin niger means black
Patent trawler aims to predict next hot technologies
The young lover: return to the wild youth feel
There's a hundred Thinkpads on the ISS right now, and zero MacBooks. There's a data point.

And if you're concerned about useful life, then I can tell you right now that you'll get major OS updates for about three years. Windows 8 requires basically a good graphics card, 2 GB of RAM, a dozen GB of space and a 1 GHz CPU. It'll run on your 2005 Celeron as well as Vista did. May not have been well, but a 2006 PC will, on average, run Windows 7 well enough.

Meanwhile, in Appleland, the Mac you bought in February '09 won't run the next version of OS X that's just about to come out. Seriously.
I never said side-projects aren't great for experimenting & broadening your knowledge. In fact, I'm painfully aware of that. It's just that in a startup setting doing side-projects quickly becomes lethal. Maybe us entrepreneurs should get a traditional job once in a while so we can afford side-projects again?
So why start another topic to discuss it? Seems contradictory to me.
This is very sound advice. On a long enough timeline everyone gets hacked. You should definitely spend the money to get audited by professionals.
Some things I've learnt about writing
Great article! Small nitpick from someone who just tried this on his server logs :)

* on my machine xargs -I implies -L1, so you can drop that
* use gnuplot -p or the graphic will disappear immediately after rendering
Thanks for the patronising tone, but I follow your logic (such as it is). You're just wrong.
How does this compare with Flattr? It may be slightly different, but is it sufficiently different?
Privacy at (Dutch) startups
You say a lot of work for little reward, but the cost of them giving a big "fuck you" to WP7 early adopters is a much higher cost than the salaries required to pay programmers/managers to port WP8 to WP7 hardware. Why would anyone buy a WP8 device after this debacle? They basically killed WP8 before it even started. In order for WP8 to succeed, they need early adopters and loyalists to evangelise WP for them for free. They've killed any loyalty anyone might've had for the WP platform. These users will ditch WP when their contract expires and tell all their friends and family members to buy Android or iPhone.

As I see it, MS has only two choices to save their WP platform: priperly port WP8 to WP7 hardware, or give WP7 users free WP8 phones.
I know how Zimbra works, yes. And I think it is a bit harsh if you call Exchange a Model T - even though the search facilities through Outlook are crap, and many Exchange instances are configured with ridiculously little mail storage (eg. 250 MB/user).
Highly disagreed. I think assuming that people want an in-store experience when the extra information from online shopping is such a net gain is just an old way of thinking. Look at some of the work coming out of the best retailers, are from some of the researchers at Accenture Technology Labs into the Store of the Future.

For many things, I care more about the information - does it work, does it fit, what do the reviews say? - than I do about touching the object. Even small retailers are starting to do this - if you look at http://www.marinelayer.com/ - they offer approximations of sizing based on your height and weight.
At first I thought he meant something similar to Tesla's idea of building a ring around the earth and the blowing away the pillars. Yet I can't seem to find anything about his 'hyperloop' of sorts.
BUY A QUALITY PRODUCT FROM CLICK BANK
cmd + alt + eject is the sleep you're thinking about. ctrl + shift + eject is just for the displays :)
Even with the UNIX subsystem installed?
I appreciate the idea behind this, and it's an excellent technical demonstration. Very impressive and all that.

I'd just like to, however, preempt anyone from thinking that this kind of thing is appropriate for books or texts of any sort. Can't select anything, can't hash-link through to a paragraph, have to wait for the transition, have to orient it right... it's not much fun. If you're looking for a UI for this kind of thing for whichever project you were going to do (most likely some menu for some restaurant), I'd much rather have the Kindle-approach apply.

No UI, just the book. It's lovely. It's liberating. Skeuomorphism usually deserves contempt. Not always. But usually.
Animal identification
Animal indentifications werden bei Haustieren eingesetzt, welche von gesetzeswegen markiert werden müssen. Die Megatron AG bietet den richtigen Kern.
I was wondering the same. For whatever reason, the first thing I thought of when I read that was something like those proposed vacuum tube train things (eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain).
Fully recognize I am outing myself here but the timing seems great given the Vim articles that have been coming up lately, as well as my Lead Engineer keeps bugging me to really get into Vim. I have used it before, but never GOT it. Is there an online guide that is great (and not just a story like this one) or do I need to get the O'Reily Vi and Vim book?
If it's valid, it should be useful. All true and valid things related to an issue should be useful. It's the false or invalid things, or the ignorant things, which should be useless. In an ideal world.
As a .NET application Powershell needs to be JITed before execution starts.

However in most systems I never had more than 5s startup time.
The actual harm is when the general public gets the notion that 'The Market is Rigged' and goes into other markets with the assumption that the next market is not rigged..for example crowd funding startups..
WebKit sorts JS arrays using Selection Sort
In one sense you are very right, on the other I think this is a very wrong way of thinking of these things.

At some point liberal economics-philosophy became very uncomfortable with the whole concept of ethics, norms, conventions and such. Slightly ironic as Smith was (IMO) a moral philosopher primarily (eg "The Theory of Moral Sentiments") with "economics" being a supplementary way of understanding right & wrong.

When you view the word entirely from an economics/incentives/meta-institutions I think you are giving up on some things that are extremely important. Societal norms, shame, morality: these are a natural and integral part of how human society works. Laws and regulations are important too, but one cannot replace the other. There is a problem with diffusion of responsibility combined with corporate mandates and institutional mentality eroding how people behave.

Taking the cold incentives view, you look at employment for example as an agreement fully captured in a contract with no further responsibilities on either side. It's negotiated based on market prices. That's true in one sense, but looking at employment that way does not capture a lot of crucial nuances. Treating it that way is not a natural way for humans to interact and will not achieve the best results, psychologically or economically. You need employees to be intrinsically motivated, believe in the company, belong, be obligated. They expect respect and care and empathy and responsibility from the employers. This is very basic and it plugs into parts of human behavior that are older than money and older than humans as a species.

Its hard to capture in an equation or a model. It's even hard to capture in a "theory" of psychology, sociology, history or whatever. So, there's a tendency by people trying to understand things to ignore these crucial elements. That's absurd. A society from a household to a company to a country cannot function based on individuals narrowly and coldly following their self interests (even though you can prove that they do).

More importantly, no "law" can work if the only reason anyone follows it is fear of punishment.
Here's how to future proof UIs (a tutorial on Prism, MEF and Event Aggregators)
Republic Wireless takes Wi-Fi virtual with Devicescape deal
And the fact that it's a pile of poo.
I've been using fontello.com to make custom icon font sets - it's great for keeping the bandwidth down.
When compared to other overpriced sites, yes. But I think the price is quite realistic. It's not like, for example, meebo has a value of $100M.
i'm a java IDE user (eclipse, then intellj).

in intellij, you can ctrl+w to select word, ctrl+w again to select statement, ctrl+w again to select function, etc.

you can also refactor replace all, shown if foo.gif actually exist in img src, ctrl+click to css, shown if a variable (in code/js/css) is unused, hinted if a line can be simplified, etc.

can vim do that?

if it can not, what's the compelling reason for people like me to use it? (i honestly interested, but wondering if it's worth the effort)
Order-Preserving Encryption Revisited [pdf]
It manages memory ok, but it is rather greedy. If you've got less than 8GB of RAM you should upgrade.
How does on estimate the probability for a unicode character ▲ to be included in a majority of fonts? Is the triangle available on all devices?
Ah, I thought the voice was familiar. I like the fact that he types fast but mostly acts smooth. Very easy to follow.

side note, everyone has to watch his https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat/ talk
Life would be so much easier if instead of "width" we had "content-width" and "total-width", wouldn't it? (conflicts would have to be resolved one way or another, though)
Recent password db leaks and considerations around storing HIPPA data in the cloud had me thinking about encrypted data in RDBMs.

Given the limitations that seem apparent, I am wondering more about whether the correct approach is to encrypt/decrypt everything client-side and only store encrypted data. Your client gets hosed at some data point, particular once data size gets big, for some definition of big, since it has to handle all the data munging.
That wouldn't really mean anything unless using "afford" in the absolute sense (eg. max out your credit next time you're buying shoes).
The majority of people in windowsland can't upgrade to 10 because they're holding on for dear life to XP. 10 being a better browser than 6 isn't going to persuade those people to upgrade their OS. They'll just switch to Firefox and Chrome to get a better browsing experience on their OS version of choice.
Note I didn't say no trust. I merely said watch incentives and balance of power.

I also didn't say every decision.

It's a balance. You have drivers licenses to ensure a standard of safety and trust - but after that you leave people alone (risky if driver's do bad things). It's a tradeoff.

However in this case, society has seen it fit to give a few individuals too much power, without placing the correct checks and balances upon them. This creates a situation that allows "nasty" agents to exploit it for their own benefit.

Don't blame the hackers. Blame the system designer (a security researcher told me this).

You must assume, upon creation of a system, untrusted and "nasty" agents and deal with them (at some cost). This is how cryptographers and security researchers work to ensure our safety. Maybe we should get them to look into this problematic mess (they love finding flaws in systems :D).

It's easy to blame Hitler for the Holocaust (which was a despicably evil thing). But you must also consider how one could've stopped a situation from developing such that an artist drop out could end up seizing control of an industrial powerhouse.
Still can't build it (llvm fails somewhere) but reading the source code is interesting, very concise.
Those aren't (all) personal preferences. Using superglobals is definitively bad, in the same way that using GOTO is. Not using PSR-0 autoloading is flying in the face of the community consensus and makes it much harder to use other libraries with CI compared to other frameworks.

Your point about PHP versions isn't very valid. 5.3 is over 3 years old now! Plenty of cheap hosts are far more up to date than that.

There is a difference between being "newbie friendly" (which I will admit, CI is - it's a lot easier to get into than say, Zend, by orders of magnitude) and "enabling bad practices". You could say that using mysqli and concatenating data into your queries is newbie friendly, and it is - it's a lot simpler conceptually than prepared statements, but that doesn't stop it being categorically a bad idea.

For the record my CI experience ended about 9 months ago, and I have contributed code to CI, so I feel that when I say certain parts of the internals are very badly coded I do have some valid perspective on that issue.
I have a bookmarklet that makes the Up arrow large enough to click on an ipad. (
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1398539 )

I've adapted it to change your preference for the vector up:

javascript:{im=document.images;iml=im.length;for(i=0;i<iml;i++) {if(im[i].src=="http://ycombinator.com/images/grayarrow.gif"){var old=im[i]; var p=old.parentNode; p.removeChild(old); iml--; p.innerHTML="▲"} } alert("Done"); void(null);}

Down arrow left as an exercise
I agree, good article.

A sort -n is also required before the uniq since server logs have the time of the request but are printed when the response is complete so they're not necessarily increasing.
I think I can either smell a personality cult coming up or a reality distortion field. Or it may be both.

Can we please leave it up to Elon Musk whether he wants to go to Mars or not, without presupposing the notion? I'm fairly sure he might have something to say about the matter if he really does think we can do it (I feel dirty just typing this).

Edit: He has said that he is going to Mars, I know that, and I know the replies to my post here missed this. I'm saying that it's up to him to do it, without fervently believing that he is the second coming of Jesus and will in fact do this. I'm just saying that our reaction to this is not entirely outside the field of personality cult. While knowing that he did say all this, I'm also pretty sure that he will eventually accomplish that goal, and I wish him the best of luck. I'm just not sure that we should see him as the second coming of Jobs, Branson and Jesus combined, which is what this is starting to smell like.

Let the man do electric cars really well first (i.e. outside a few thousand people in California owning the Model S) and do SpaceX really well for a while and then we'll talk.

Edit 2: The more I get downvoted without an actual reply to my point being offered, the surer I'll be that it's a personality cult that's going on here. At least until I actually see more than one Tesla on the road here or some manned regular spaceflights. Let's keep in mind that it took four attempts for Falcon I to succeed, but the current score of my comment seems to suggest that apparently the attention span here isn't that long. All the best of luck (and at his skill level, luck doesn't have much to do with it any longer) to Elon Musk however, and I 100% support everything he has been doing. Although PayPal.
Fullscreen and Versions need to be killed or fixed.
Fluid UI
Pure mobile prototyping tool
> You've quite obviously never tried to code anything in vimscript, have an axe to grind with Python, or are Tim Pope

All your claims are preposterous. I have coded in Vimscript, I use Python and have no axe to grind; and I am not Tim Pope(duh).

> Vimscript is a horrible abomination that's painful to do just about anything in. Python is far, far superior.

I don't remember claiming Python is inferior to vimscript. Have you actually used vimscript, or are you speaking from superficial experience? Vimscript is not a general purpose programming language, but does the job of extending vim fine.

I was in middle of writing a small function which syncs up nerdtree highlighting with bufexplorer buffer switch(came here to take a break). Here is what it looks like:

function! ChangeBuffer()
if bufwinnr(t:NERDTreeBufName) != -1
exe "normal! :NERDTreeFind\<cr>\<c-w>\<c-w>"
endif
endfunction
let g:BufExplorerFuncRef = function('ChangeBuffer')

The amount of general purpose programming involved is minimal.

1. BufExplorer provides a hook which takes a function reference. A variable assignment.

2. If nerdtree is active(simple function call), call the command to find the current buffer in nerdtree(vim specific normal command execution), and switch back to editing pane(again normal mode command)

A good part of tasks make use of exe, nnoremap, iabbrev etc; and vimscript is powerful and pleasant enough for the rest(lists, dicts, simulated objects, variable namespacing...). It has it's quirks, but so has many mainstream languages - you know about the quirks when you are using the language, and avoid them.
Yet we've heard recently that those who're reminded how good they are at a subject perform less effectively ... wouldn't that be an opposite result for men who were aware of a gender based performance stereotype?

Also, I'm hoping they looked at situations with opposite performance stereotypes to confirm their results?
I'm pretty sure that "faster and smoother" isn't all you get.
World War 3 will be because of bad software
Seeing how software is developed and how everyday that goes by our life depends more on it, I'm afraid that the next world meltdown won't be caused by a war but by bad software.

Not only are our lives increasingly dependent of software, everything around us is. Nowadays, even TVs have software updates. WTF?! It won't be soon until even our coffee machine will crash and deprive us from the much needed caffeine. How will we be able to work without coffee?

Honestly, I think the major concern today isn't global warming. We all should care about how good software is! If people burst when they have to ctrl+alt+del their computer just to get back into Facebook, imagine what will happen if you car, pacemaker, whatever crashes.

Seriously. Stop playing pretend engineers.

(Link to post: http://andretavares.com/2012/07/13/world-war-3-bad-software/)
I am not really concerned about the OS as I am a Linux person. I am just really concerned about build quality and performance.
I don't think the problem is with the financial industry. The issue is most definitely with the financial/political system. We haven't run true capitalism in the Western nations for decades. It has been a hodge-podge of crony capitalism mixed with token dribs of 'social democracy' championed by wealthy political elites that no more understand the life of eg a bus driver than a tea leaf understands the history of the East India Company.

Take the Libor scandal. Would this have happened if the banks had not been repeatedly bailed out - 'too big to fail' - giving traders the impression that they worked in a politically-sanctioned realm where the normal rules of capital did not apply? There is no danger of your company going bankrupt through loss of reputation or massive, penal fines for criminal behaviour if you have an unconditional sovereign back stop.
I think it could be the next feature for ifttt.com. That's it
Supramolecular nanoparticle for better chemotherapy
I don't think that's the case. Your point boils down to, "Sometimes women want their asses to be grabbed." It is true, but playing harassment roulette still seems ill-advised.
>Can we please leave it up to Elon Musk whether he wants to go to Mars or not, without presupposing the notion?

He's been pretty open about his plans.

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/03/elon-musk-says-ticket-t...

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/03/15/elon_musk...

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/04/11/elon_musk...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/01/elon-musk-s...

http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2011/04/26/elon-musk-we-...
I can't imagine anything more horrific than publishing my emails to facebook.