skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why would you want to use software that hasn't changed since your house was built? I wish my house could be updated as frequently and easily as my software.
Part of me is a wannabe writer and I love the craft of writing. With that perspective, I see Blogger and Twitter as heralding two innovative new forms of writing:

Blogger (and blogging) brought about short-form personal essays; Twitter brought about ultra-short-form personal messages.

Both have spawned many other uses as well, as people made each their own. But the writer in me loved the limitations each had, since limitations often leads to creativity.

So I'm excited about what Medium could be. Looking at their examples, my guess is they're mashing together elements of Pinterest and Tumblr (and Svbtle). Perhaps they see power in making publishing more visual and flexible. A visually-appealing layout invites a reader in. And there are all kinds of writers - or better - content creators. Some are visual (hence the all-image collections), some are textual, some are a mix of both. Perhaps in the future, they'll offer video and audio too. Well, maybe not audio ;) (cough cough Odeo cough)

Will it work? I think they've got something interesting here, though I don't see a leap that's as revolutionary as Blogger or Twitter yet.

As a content creator, my main concerns are:

+ Is it easy to create? (This is perhaps the biggest concern)

+ Can I express myself in the form I want to? (In whatever format I prefer)

+ Can I be creative in my expression? (Sometimes limitations are good here)

+ Will I have an audience? (The follower system seems to work well here, as well as ways to share to other social media networks)

+ Can I hear from my audience? (Comments, likes, votes, ratings, etc; moderation and filtering is key here)

+ How can my ego be fed? (Creators may not think about this consciously, but all public creators care about their reputation, be it through audience engagement, social media metrics, etc)

Blogger, Twitter, and other social media creation tools offer these to some extent. I think part of Blogger and Twitter's success was how they enabled the first bullet point: they made creating content easy. Ridiculously easy.

The examples Medium offered only show off the final products, so I don't know anything about the creation process. Will it be ridiculously easy to use, easier than Blogger, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc? It looks very interesting, but I don't get a feeling of it being revolutionary. At least, not yet.
How 1and1 could have verified identity over phone without asking for password
I hate 1and1. I had to deal with their awful Website interface for a client of mine recently. I had to transfer over 100 GB of stuff on this guys "unlimited" storage account. they capped the speeds around 500KB/s. it seriously took all week. uploading to amazon and rackspace cdn's were a godsend after that.
This Is What Happens When You Lose Money
See I think language is a tool and some judgement about a tool is more rational -- so I appreciate all the features listed about it, it is very unique, other judgement is more subjective -- "oh I don't like to use curly braces" or "stupid Emacs keybindings are breaking my pinky finger" etc. and those are also very important decisions for picking a tool.

I just highlighted that the choice to present the most obfuscated and hard to read (and by number of upvotes it seems that most agree) piece of code on the front page of the language is not helping appeal to that second (subjective) part it drives people away before they even get to click on the the tutorial (which explains what is what).
Sad to say I know where one is non ironically posted.
We are probably on the same page. I wrote this:

http://ledgersmbdev.blogspot.com/2012/08/patterns-and-anti-p...

Comments are not for maintainability.
Mega Man 2 strategy guide example using rpglogger
I believe that the people you are talking about can not be addressed in a milder tone. Of course you are not directly addressing them but I get the point. Hence upvoted.

PS: Fuck you is the best reason ever.
The thing is I don't think it adds 30%, but more like 10%.
a syntax highlighter for plaintext gmail emails.
Maybe it was added later, but the article has a link to a photo album of a "hot tub" in the Seattle office. There's no water in it, people are just using it to hang out.
Price will favor self driving cars? What about all the lower income people that are limping along with $2000 fifteen year old cars? So if we give the industry 20 years to get to the point where you can but an old used first gen self driving car for $2k, how well do you think all those automation mechanisms will still function?
For anyone wondering why Daring Fireball is able to garner a lot of attention (and for that matter, almost any article pertaining to Apple) I refer you to two studies:

- When, Why, and How Controversy Causes Conversation by Zoey Chen and Jonah Berger

- What Makes online Content Viral? by Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman

Results from the first study reveals that controversy significantly affects likelihood of discussion. The second study comes to a similar conclusion but fleshes it out a little more eloquently:

"Importantly, however, our findings also reveal that virality is driven by more than just valence. Sadness, anger, and anxiety are all negative emotions, but while sadder content is less viral, content that evokes more anxiety or anger is actually more viral. These findings are consistent with our hypothesis about how arousal shapes social transmission. Positive and negative emotions characterized by activation or arousal (i.e., awe, anxiety, and anger) are positively linked to virality, while emotions characterized by deactivation (i.e., sadness) are negatively linked to virality. More broadly, our results suggest that while external drivers of attention (e.g., being prominently featured) shape what becomes viral, content characteristics are of similar importance (see Figure 2). For example, a one-standard deviation increase in the amount of anger an article evokes increases the odds that it will make the most e-mailed list by 34% (Table 4, Model 4). This increase is equivalent to spending an additional 2.9 hours as the lead story on the New York Times website"

Apple is well known for controversy and Gruber is known for his snark (though I found this article to be insightful speculation) - the two seem to really complement each other and a lot of their success comes down to their behaviour. So for anyone who feels inclined to write another "Why is Gruber on HN?" post, that's why.
That, and the hints that he is interested in doing Siracusa-style iOS reviews. I love long form pieces by Gruber, but if it's also inspired by the great detailled reviews of Siracusa, I think it will be awesome.
They are creating Twitter overlays -- new applications that attempt to leverage the Twitter social graph in clever ways.
After reading both this and the iMore article, I really feel like Q4 this year is going to be like nothing we've ever seen. There won't be a reason for the average consumer not to get an iOS device. I think we're heading into a time where Apple's dominance will pass the threshold of what Microsoft had in the 90's.

And, if you consider a revamped TV is on the way in a couple years — man, we're talking about iOS in the living room, in your lap, and in your pocket. It's astonishing to think that the iPhone is only 5 years old at this point.
Great talk. Love the phrase "Information Technology not Technology Technology".

But I do think he has been a bit unfair to databases (and primary keys) generally, in characterizing them as "place oriented". The relational model is actually a brilliantly successful example of a value-oriented information technology.

The very foundation of the relational model is the information principle, in which the only way information is encoded is as tuples of attribute values.

As a consequence, the relational model provides a technology that is imbued with all of the the virtues of values he discusses.
* language independence
* values can be shared
* don't need methods
* can send values without code
* are semantically transparent
* composition, etc.

It's true that we can think of the database itself as a place, but that's a consequence of having a shared data bank in which we try to settle a representation of what we believe to be true. Isolation gives the perception of a particular value. In some ways, this is just like a CDN "origin".

Also regarding using primary key as "place". Because capturing the information model is the primary task in designing a relational database schema, the designer wants to be fairly ruthless by discarding information that's not pertinent. For example, in recording student attendance, we don't record the name of the attending student - just their ID. This is not bad. We just decided that in the case of a name change, it's not important to know the name of the student as at the time of their attendance. If we decide otherwise, then we change the schema.
Not the intent. Just trying to find the balance between UI clutter and ease of access to information. As a stop gap links have been added to a post in the "About Medium" collection: https://medium.com/c/b969ac62a46b

We'll certainly look into this more though. Thanks for raising the concerns!
How Governments and Telecom Companies Work Together on Surveillance Laws
> The good ol' fashioned make tool does exactly this and, in the spirit of Unix, pretty much nothing else.

Make still requires a manual step. I'm thinking of systems that do this themselves. Active control systems, constantly comparing the state of the world to the reference graph.

I don't want the unix tradition. The unix tradition is a pain in the rear end to actually administer. I want a single management framework with a single DSL that does it all.
Thank you for demonstrating the truth of Steve Yegge's observation in https://plus.google.com/u/0/110981030061712822816/posts/KaSK... that Google's software culture tends towards risk-adverse conservatism.
One way to think of SMT is context switches for free, and lots of them. What happens when you run two processes on one core? Every 10ms the kernel copies out all the registers from one process to memory, copies in the regs for the other, and switches. What happens when you use SMT? Every "2" instructions the CPU switches from one process to the other, transparently, without hitting memory. After 20ms, the same amount of work is done, possibly a little more, and if process two only had 1ms of work to do, it doesn't have to wait the full 10ms timeslice of process one.

SMT is not about instruction reordering at all (within one process). Just like the OS switches between processes whenever you wait for disk, now the CPU switches processes whenever you wait for memory. It just happens that virtual cores are the way the OS programs the CPU scheduler.
Finally a use for my shinonome_nano template.
My recollection is that in the bad old days of Network Solutions, you have to fax in domain registration and change forms. I seem to recall someone stealing a big brand's domain name for fun simply by faxing in some instructions on bogus letterhead.
You'd better have a proper license for that chicken's source code.
S-expressions are neither wonderful nor terrible. They are just A Decision. Certainly you can have bad syntaxes and good syntaxes, as well.
On demand plus the 3 minutes of RSI-inducing cranking.
Eli Pariser: Beware online "filter bubbles" (video)
Sadly there is a particular type of person who discovers the day that nobody is supposed to go to meetings is the day when everybody is free and the meeting rooms are available. And then starts scheduling meetings for that day.
fb culture is toolbagish
Well ... you're not running Linux, so systemd is moot (you've got launchd instead, which has certain similarities).

I'm a fan of small form-factor systems, though I suspect we'll start seeing these as G3 tablets (where the iPad was G1, and the current Android-and-others are G2). Which is to say, devices with integrated display and battery, to which other peripherals may be attached (physically or wirelessly, say, by Bluetooth). That said, we're not there yet.

And yes, small form-factor PCs (CPU, no battery, no display) are pretty slick. I'm something of a fan of the FitPC offerings: http://www.fit-pc.com/web/purchase/order-direct-fit-pc3/ (Googling "small form factor" will show you numerous other vendors).

I used a similar configuration under Linux for a time, and as of mid 2000s, found suspend-to-disk worked pretty reliably, though not perfectly. In the past 4-5 years on laptops and desktops, I've had very few problems, mostly traceable to display drivers.
I grant it may not be quite as important in the industry, but got a lot of popularity in Academia, and some very modest inroads in the industry.

But you're right, it never had the singular popularity that Javascript, Java, or Python now enjoy. Sorry if in my haste I gave a false impression. Not what I meant to imply.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems
There is no doubt in my mind that streams will be a much bigger part of the future than they are now. (They won't completely replace page-based content where that is more appropriate.) Currently streams seem to be the domain of the big 'platform' players (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, maybe a feedreader for those so inclined) so I am only really have to 'keep tabs' on a couple of streams.
I think our current tools for creating and consuming streams are still relatively basic and for 'streams' to break free from these strongholds requires a lot more innovation in how we can create them, interact with them, manipulate them and transition in and of of them seamlessly.
He still manages to come up with gems like this:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/08/01/nokia-nail-polis...

He and Siegler come off as partisan hacks and nothing else. Hence mostly only Apple fans seem to think he writes great. I do not know why they have to hate other competing platforms so immensely to love Apple.
Hydrogen Audio treats Lame -v4 setting (~165kbps) as perceptual transparency. Meaning loss, but transparent.

Youtube doesn't use MP3s, but AAC for hd content, which provides even better quality. There are numerous tests that compare AAC at 64kbps to MP3 at 128kbps.

Often artists upload music attached to HD still picture, to ensure that high quality encoding is available.

The low quality is not an issue with Youtube audio bitrates, but problem stemming from people uploading low quality sources. Audio re-encoded multiple times. It is common to find a mono music with 12khz cutoff.
Facebook is, presumably, many separate components that don't depend on each other in any way

How could that even be possible?
True but assuming the future is that of mostly robo-taxi companies (and not individually owned self-driving cars), there will tremendous business pressure on robo-taxi companies to make their cars as efficient as possible, as the cost of gas (or other energy) will be part of their cost of providing the service.

Today car companies sell cars based on many criteria. Fuel efficiency is one of them but when gas prices aren't too high, individual customers don't care about that very much.

Someone who operates a fleet of 10.000 cars will make fuel efficiency their top-most priority because that will drive down the cost of their service and the cost will be a major reason why customers will pick one provider over another, not how stylish the car is or how fast it goes from 0 to 60.

E.g. if they realize that by putting solar panel on the roof of the car they can save money in the long term, they'll immediately put solar panel in every car. The progress in making cars more efficient will be much faster.
The changes the author proposes will not occur for the vast majority of the population of the earth - not in China, or in India, or anywhere in Africa and not in many places in south east Asia or south/central America. He has the first world, US-centric view of most futurists. In places where people don't have reliable access to electricity, or even safe drinking water, absolutely no one would be interested in self-driving cars.

He also raises a disturbing point, but masks it as an advantage - "People said it would take years to get these things on the road. It took Google a few months of lobbying Nevada for it to happen. The US states and cities are broke, and Google has $43 billion in cash." In other words, he implies that this will happen quickly because corporations are able to strongarm broke government institutions into policies favouring them, a trend that is dangerous for the average citizen.

He also misses that self-driving cars becoming a norm leads to more car-centered infrastructure over public transportation, leading to a continuation of the vicious circle of over-reliance on cars.
It's helpful. Thank you.
>Limiting to low PPI for app compatibility seems like a hack.

What, and give developers another resolution to develop for? No.

The iPad Mini will use the iPhone 3GS LCD pixel density. Then in a year, the iPad Mini will adopt the iPhone 4 pixel density. This means that every "retina" iPad app that currently exists will display natively on the device.

So basically: wait a year and then you'll have that crazy-good iPhone 4+ density.
I think there is a confusion here: our "mental" grasp of a physical process and intuition is tightly related to how the world works. We develop our intuition from real-world experience. They're not two separate things. This's also why quantum physics is so non-intuitive for us, and why we struggle dealing with it (counter-intuitive it is, we do it anyways, because that's just the way the Nature works --it's not something man-made like Lisp).
That being said, the physical processes don't depend on people's understanding. Physics doesn't depend on how you think about the world. The quantum state (or a classical state) is there, and it won't go away just because you want mathematical elegance or try to see things in a different way in your inner world as hard as you can.

That being said, of course it matters the way you write your software. There is a huge gap between actual CPU instructions and Lisp. Between Lisp and the machine is an automated, soft layer of emulation, which may or may not be optimal and is extra work anyway.
Driving to ski fields will be fun:)
What would I use bitcoin for?
No mention in the article that New Super Mario Bros 2 will be released in the eShop. Having such a big game straight from Nintendo being digitally distributed will be interesting. It might give the eShop a boost in people checking it out.

I'm a little disappointed that NSMB2 will also have a physical release. But I can understand Nintendo not wanting to take such a risk.
'“The Akula was built for one reason and one reason only: To kill U.S. Navy ballistic missile submarines and their crews,” said a second U.S. official.'

Yes, that may be why the Akula-class sub was designed - but to imply that that's what this particular sub, on this particular mission, was attempting, is a bit disingenuous.
Roads existed long before cars. Even the Romans had paved roads. That is not a valid argument.

The reason people took a long time to take up cars was cost. It took time for cost to come down and reliability to go up. Once that happened, they were adopted widely. Even then, it took a long time for cars to disappear.

Any photo of San Francisco around 1915 or so will show plenty of horse-drawn vehicles on the roads, and cars will be present, but scarce. This is 7 years after the Model T entered production.

abruzzi has answered this well - not everyone can afford a self-drive car. They will not be cheap initially - far from it, in fact. I'll grant you that the cost-reduction time will be faster in this instance - nobody has to invent the modern production line - but the cost of development and warranting of all the parts will be expensive.

Replacing the vehicle fleet takes at least 10 years. Replacing it with self-driving vehicles could easily take twice that long, even if you started today, which we are patently not.
You'd be on the upside of that margin though.
I am not going to be your proxy for every perceived irritant in the course of discussing lisp. Asking me to be this is unfair.

You can say I am some sort of hater and now it's Rails's turn, but I've been consistent with this even when I was a full time rails programmer [1]. You can find essays by me on the inadequacies of Rails dating back years now [2]. The very things I was complaining about in 2007 are now the glaring flaws in modern Rails. So I made the decision to strike out for tools that don't have a cultural bias against progress in areas I believe important.

So, if I am a Smug Lisp Weenie, then surely I am also a Smug Scala Weenie. And a Smug Erlang Weenie. And a Smug Haskell Weenie. And a Smug Ruby Weenie. And a Smug Hadoop Weenie. And a Smug C weenie... Because one thing I've made very clear is that I think attachment to tools is the problem. We should always aim to use the best tools at our disposal, and I think the place where Python and Ruby are the best tools are shrinking under the onslaught of the competition. Argument from familiarity is something I simply cannot bear to listen to anymore.

If believing this makes me smug then I guess I am smug.

[1] http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/06/multicore_hardwa...

[2] http://dave.fayr.am/posts/2008-11-20-the-opposite-of-momentu...
re: growth. Facebook has one billion active users. There are seven billion humans in the world. There is a lot of growth left.
Great talk. Most of these talks on functional programming make perfect sense. These also look ideological superior.

My only problem is Object oriented programming looks more pragmatic in the real world. There are libraries, tools, tutorials, help forums and a lot of other stuff out there which helps anybody who wants to start learning OO from to go from nothing to far places.

You can't say the same thing about functional programming. The community is too elitist, the tutorials are math heavy. And the tools are too ancient. Having to use simple text editors and selling them as technologies used to build large applications is a contradictory philosophy.
I've seen it suggested that the Nexus 7 isn't the Android iPad, it's the Android iPod Touch. This makes sense to me, and it makes sense to me that Apple could be moving in a similar direction with the iPod Touch itself, especially if it can hit those weight goals. This would also seem to open up some space for the iPod nano to gain functionality.
Good luck with this argument. I ran it on an earlier HN thread about the cost of a driver being only a small portion of the cost of a cab. But people don't want to listen. They think because they hand a driver a $50 note, the driver makes all the money.

Taxis cost money because of (a) running costs (b) finance/depreciation costs and (c) regulatory costs. (a) and (b) isn't going anywhere, and (c) certainly is not.

Drivers are only a small part of the picture. Removing them won't dramatically alter costs or availability.
Two that I keep wishing for:

(1) An easy way to download YouTube videos (preferably, any site's videos, but YouTube is the obvious target). There used to be several extensions that did this, but they all seem to have been broken by some recent change Google made.

(2) An URL rewriter: something that lets me set up a list of regex-based transformations to apply to any link I click on, redirecting me to the transformed URL instead of the original one. There are all sorts of uses for this, but the one that keeps annoying me on a regular basis is sites like DeviantArt that make you go through an "are you sure you want to leave our wonderful site?" page on every outgoing link. (I seem to recall something like this existing for Firefox, but it's been a couple of years since I used Firefox regularly and I can't find anything like this in a quick search of their addons page.)
Graphite - What kind of toolkits have people written on top of statsd?
Diesel cars are dirtier for particulate and Nox emissions.