skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I could never figure out how to actually search Quora to find answers to stuff. Maybe you have to log in to do this, but I don't want to create an account just to see if I like the sites content enough to create an account, so I never used Quora and likely never will, especially after reading the article.
Introducing Better Nest: A better Twitter.com home experience
Come on, let's not get swept away in the hyperbole and be reasonable for a minute: MADD will never go away.
Confessions of a middle-aged games writer
> It’s [HN] also boring as hell. It’s an echo chamber, a bubble.

Funny... the reason I like HN is because the comments are actually well-thought out and interesting.

I honestly can't understand how Twitter, with it's character limit and lack of threads, can provide more "interesting" "discussion".
I'm not sure what's gotten into Gruber lately, but not only is this entire essay basically attitude free, he's also got a lot of content, and, dare I say, math/geometry in this piece?

He gives credit to Digitimes of all orgs for the original (March!) prediction of a thin-bezel ipad - and goes out on a bunch of limbs predicting what the new iPad Mini might look like. In particular, his weight prediction, of 265 grams, is somewhat hard to believe - but would be very much appreciated by those of us who spend 2-3 hours a day reading books on our (somewhat overly large for that function) iPad.

I guess we'll know in another 30 days.
Code maintenance isn't free. An unmaintainable codebase can easily kill a project after awhile.
90 Minutes of Reddit in 57 Seconds
Luckily it's harder to automate motorcycle driving : D

Plus there's less incentive because they usually only injure themself unless something goes terribly wrong. <darkhumour>
This is a very interesting and negative way to look at it. Male-Female (and vice-versa!)exploitation is illegal no matter the situation and automatically going to such mindset ("dirty old man") says more about you than the program; everyone of their investors is accredited and, as such, must have a net worth over $1mil, they're not randoms picked off the street. If you look at their current backers, they work for MIT, Google, or other such prestigious companies. I would be willing to bet they have a vetting process complete with background for their backers as well as their upstarts. But as I mentioned before, I have a call with them scheduled for this Thursday, so I'll let you know the details.
First, I think that requiring the reader to know the code in depth is a good thing. Comments should not be used to avoid this. Comments can decay in relevancy and, aside from function API documentation, should not be used in debugging. The way comments should be used is:

1) API documentation says this: does the code conform? If not, either the specification is bad or the code is bad.

2) Comments inform collaboration, but do not inform debugging other than as API documentation.
The Mozilla developers explain the reasoning at length.

They don't want to tie people to Firefox. So when a standards-compliant version of a CSS directive becomes available, they deprecate their own -moz version.
Eventually they remove it.

The goal statement is that a page written using Firefox as the development browser will look the same for Chrome, IE and so on.

-moz defeats that purpose because it's browser-specific.
> I should add I think what AMD is doing with Bulldozer (claiming two virtual cores are actually full cores) is bullshit.

I think AMD is doing whatever it can to get people to buy its CPUs. If it weren't for their ATI purchase, I think they'd be basically dead by now. It still amazes me how far they've fallen: I built my first computer with an AMD X2 when I was 15 (6 years ago now) - they looked like they were going to upset Intel as deciding the future of x86 chips. They did for a while - we got a sane 64-bit architecture out of it. I'm not sure where they went wrong: was it marketing, was it manufacturing tech, was it profit margins, was it Apple? I don't even know if their current processors are competitive or not in the performance market - things like "Bulldozer" make me think not.

Anyway, could SMT be implemented on top of ARM v8? My knowledge of hardware doesn't include multithreading. However, from my limited understanding of it, I don't see SMT making much difference in tight RISC code, which is designed to have a high instruction throughput per cycle, leaving little for instruction reordering to optimize.
Re: 3, he didn't say mechanics would go away, just auto body/collision shops.
I prefer:

Comment why, not how.
I doubt that car insurance is dominated by fixed costs - istr payout rates are over 70%. Even if the number of policy holders falls by half (which is unlikely to happen in a decade) premiums shouldn't skyrocket.

More robot cars on the road likely make it safer for the remaining humans, which will tend to lower premiums.

The only problem is if the most dangerous humans prefer to drive themselves. I can see factors in both directions.
The funny thing about this list is that a few of the items, while intended as satire, are actually spot-on. Especially item #1:

"But the rate of source code commits continues to grow proportionally with the number of engineers. This is in clear violation of the law that Fred Brooks established nearly 40 years ago in The Mythical Man Month."

Whoop de do.

This might, just maybe, because no particular behavior of FB really matters all that much. You're not building a space shuttle launch program or even a spreadsheet that people rely on to give correct answers.

I'm sure that a business model that can allow 80 godzillion developers to fling spaghetti at a wall in parallel with a view to seeing 'what sticks' is quite a bit less subject to Mythical Man Month type scaling problems.

And is there anyone so naive that they don't understand the agenda behind "3 free meals"?
Reading this made me wonder why so much concern about segregation due to 50 dollars as an entry fee. You already have segregation on an important part of the world population in terms of:

-access to electricity
-access to a computer-like device
-access to an internet connection'
-free time to participate in social networks

as far as battles against segregation go there seems to be a considerable number of more important causes.
My theory is that we'll see the rise of what the author calls robo-taxi companies e.g. Uber or Google can provide car-as-a-service, for a monthly fee or

1. robo-taxi companies will self-insure. Insurance is just spreading the risk. If you have a fleet of 10.000 cars, self-insurance will be cheaper

2. by "death" he means "significant decline", not "disappearance". A company that buys 10.000 cars has a purchasing power that a single customer doesn't. They can dictate the specs to a car company and they can pit several companies against each other to get the best deal. They can even co-design the cars for their own metrics (e.g. fuel efficiency, reliability, maintainability is super important for someone who has a large fleet).

Car companies will have no choice but to play ball, some of them will go bankrupt and the remaining will service a much smaller market.

3. You assume that self-driving cars need a lot of new regulations. They don't - they just need to be allowed on the road. The rules have already changed in Nevada in California. When the technology is proven, the states will have a hard time justifying not allowing technology that is proven to save a significant number of lives.

4. robo-taxi companies will bring repairs in-house or outsource to existing companies. Again, they'll have upper hand in negotiations due to providing a lot of business and the overall market for repairs will shrink dramatically. Google could bring all their statistics knowledge to predicting what and when will fail and use the past data to improve the parts that fail the most.

5. not sure what you're driving at

6. agreed, probably overstatement on the author's part

Google (or some other robo-taxi company) doesn't have to make their own cars, they'll have enough pricing power to pit multiple car manufacturers against each others to get the best deal, drive down the margins etc., just as Apple does with iPhone parts manufactuers (where Apple gets most of the profit from the phone).

They can self-insure - the liability never goes away but will be manageable from revenues.

As to people who insist on owning a car - most of them will change their mind because of price. If you leave college with $50k in student debt, are you going to spend $10k on a new car + monthly insurance + gas + cost of garage ($100/month in San Francisco if your apartment doesn't already come with it) + hassle of owning a car or will you pay $100/month for much more convenient car-as-a-service deal?
If App.net is anything like HN then sign me up!
DSP, Decision Theory, Machine Learning.
> A short, atomic unit of 4-6 lines of code does not deserve to be a function simply because it's an atomic unit

And I couldn't disagree more with that statement, and virtually everything you've said. Maintainers don't need to look at a function to see what it does, that's what its name tells you and keeping functions focused on doing one atomic thing is what allows the name to replace the implementation and makes for well written programs. I despise programs written in the style you suggest.

A well written program is a thousand small functions/methods unburdened by long methods full of comments. Good code requires few comments other than those that explain implementation choices or class responsibilities. Comments are a code smell most of the time, they exist to make up for poorly written code.
Reddit Island: This Is What That Nerd Enclave Would Look Like
I agree. I think that there are a lot of situations where homogeneous interests/views can preclude interesting conversations, but I don't think HN is a place where this applies.

The reason is, while HN may be filled with all people who like startups--in fact, it may be primarily white males--so many people know so many different things, and have so many different perspectives, that I consistently fin conversations of a higher quality than anywhere else on the Internet.

I agree with the OP that we should try not to limit who can participate in a forum because of high barriers of entry, but I'm extremely skeptical that said limitations actively lower the quality of conversations on a site like HN.
To me, there are still so many questions left unanswered...

First and foremost, the majority that believes AC will resolve heavy traffic in the cities is wrong. At the end, its about people, not cars. Think how you behave nowadays in the city crowded with cars -- you are perfectly aware not to f*ck with the driver, because if you step in his way you may get killed. We are humans, we make mistakes. Now, I would imagine those super cars must see everything around -- otherwise noone in the GOV in their sound mind would have approved AC to drive around humans. Therefore, I can imagine hoards of people taking advantage of this and just simply walking in front of a riding AC just because they know its not a human steering the wheel and that the car has no other choice than stop in front of the pedestrian, regardless if he stepped in and force the right of way or not. Heck, most likely the car will not even hunk or course at the pedestrian. Awesome! In the crowded cities, people will establish this behavior: before walking into the street, check the car - oh its AC, fine I am stepping in, no worries! And whos gonna enforce those violators? 100 more cameras at each corner??

Second, I still have no idea how on Earth would AC riding on a highway know that it is a black cat, not a black bag laying on the street. We humans see the difference faster than a blink of an eye. Are you telling me that Google invented perfect image recognition system that will be always right? What if someone paints a black cat on a bag that flies low on the highway?? -- will the car stop or not? I can see the news: google AC ran over Missis Jennings's cat -- noone is liable; noone will be responsible.

The bottom line: sooner or later AC will make a mistake. Hope it won't be in front of you.

Last, who is liable when the system makes a mistake? When you crash into other vehicle and there are victims. Are you liable? Can you go to jail? Will google go to jail? or car manufacturer? Are you telling me there are NO chances whatsoever that this will happen again?? [1] [2]

[1] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35589163/ns/business-autos/t/toy...
[2] http://articles.nydailynews.com/2010-02-22/news/27057005_1_s...

edit: not to mention all the suiciders -- now its not only trains, but I can throw myself under riding AC.
> A complex instruction set computer (CISC, play /ˈsɪsk/)
> is a computer where single instructions ... and/or are
> capable of multi-step operations ... within single
> instructions.

What's a "multi-step operation"?

I ask because I worked on the microarchitecture (read "implementation") of a microprocessor that had what was generally regarded as a very RISC instruction set.

Yet, almost every instruction had multiple steps. Yes, including integer add.

Were we doing something wrong?

And no, "one cycle fundamental operations" doesn't change things. Dividing things into cycles is a design choice. For example, one might reasonably do integer adds in two steps.
> Intel, clearly, would dispute my claims.

Remember that it's peoples' perception of products, not reality, which makes money.

This is all very interesting. I'm going to have to break out my Hennessy & Patterson and get back into hardware.
Took me until point 4...
There's a whole bunch of tools groping awkardly in a single direction here:
1. Give a graph to the computer
2. The computer makes the graph a reality

The good ol' fashioned make tool does exactly this and, in the spirit of Unix, pretty much nothing else.

The problem is in determining whether the dependencies of a node in the graph are satisfied. Make does this by comparing file times. All the other 'graph resolving systems' you mentioned do something different. Obviously the solution is to abstract the dependency test from the graph itself. Then all these systems become pretty much the same.
Public education is about citizen training not job training.

Once upon a time, employers would actually train their new employees. These days they have managed to push those training costs onto publicly supported community colleges and the unemployed.
Perhaps what's needed to establish rational expectations about tech companies is another success from value-creation. Then again, there are a few lately that fit that criteria - Dropbox, GitHub being big examples of that.

I think this distinction will serve everyone better - founders, employees, angels, VCs and the tech community in general.
What about it's utility for documents like PDF's?
The laser guidance system costs $70K by itself.
http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news/consumer&i...

It makes sense on long haul trucking but it is going to have to get a LOT cheaper before it goes on passenger cars. 10+ yrs is my guess before you see it on luxury cars. Same as Tesla.

People who can afford a driver will replace them with Google Bots who won't sell their story to People.
I feel this approach is more confusing than clearer specially for beginners. Without giving a primer to the proposed languages (seems like they are using javascript and css), I feel a newbie would get more confused and leave the site after a few minutes.
> I'm not.

Then who wrote

> This means that for some time it has appeared that large numbers of low quality inbound links has been a negative for Google SERP placement

?
Does this mean it's too late for me to get together my op-ed piece about App.net's "segregating" policies?

Seriously, though, do we know if the $50 upfront is only for this early stage or is that also the plan for when it goes live to the public? I would think there'd be a subscription option...
This all makes sense to me and I can see this being a successful product. I don't know if its too early yet, but normally when Apple telegraphs a new product people will fall over themselves to hype up the specs and decry it as useless if it doesn't meet expectations. That hasn't started happening yet - I can imagine Apple hates the over expectations but I wonder if the opposite is worse. Maybe this is just a better understood fit in the market, or maybe it hasn't sparked peoples interest in the same way.

Personally I'll definitely be buying one, but mostly because I'm very money conscious and would love a slightly bigger iOS device.
Email and face to face communication are completely different beasts though, particularly for tougher issues.
wow, that is actually a pretty slick move
Very good points. Almost all of them. This, however...

> Think how devastating that would be to the car industry. People use their cars less than 10% of the time. Imagine if everyone in your city used a RoboTaxi instead, at say 60% utilization. That's 84% fewer cars required.

Somehow that does not ring true. 84% number assumes that no matter the utilization, car lifetime will be the same. As a driver, I know this is definitely not the case, especially in colder regions.
Brand New Screencast Series Teaches Programming to Total Beginners (using Ruby)
FYI, the article suggests self-driving cars have been approved in Nevada and California, which is true -- but in both states, a human passager (presumably with a driver's license) has to be in the vehicle. In Nevada, you actually have to have two passengers, which in some cases makes it more inconvenient than regular driving.

So ideas like sending your car home instead of parking it, or sending tractor trailers across the country without a driver, aren't going to be legal for the time being.
How Rumors Spread Online
Huh? So are you saying the cars are too safe or not safe enough?
US Population Hits Pi (314,159,265)
the browser crashing problem just shows it's still such a new paradigm that programmers still are not tackling the problem correctly. many libraries are already being written to better handle this problem.
> We were discussing what is appropiate policy wrt student loans in bankruptcy, not who else is a bad actor.

You originally and repeatedly asserted that non-profit schools were far superior to for-profit schools.

Now we find that said assertion isn't true....

As to the German system, surely you're not suggesting that we abandon what we've got until it's in place....
Study shows half of all websites use jQuery
More generally than that, why is he characterizing the discussion quality of Twitter at all? Everyone's experience varies based on who's following who. I hardly get replies, for instance, because I hardly have any followers.

Vastly different platforms to compare.
People still ride horses and enjoy doing it, but I don't see anyone advocating using horses for their daily driver (the Amish excluded). Driving for pleasure doesn't have to go away.
Show HN - 9bro.com (meme comic creator)
This is my first programming endeavor - a simple meme comic creator inspired by my addiction to a friend's wildly successful site - 9gag.com.

More than anything else, as my first project, I learned that I have a LOT more programming to learn. And also, that programming is freaking awesome regardless of my current ineptitude.

I built the site using JS/jQuery/HTML/CSS and a dash of PHP (for base64 string to file conversions) and the Bing Image API for image searches (not currently working because Microsoft moved to pay model - boo!) all running on micro Linux instance on AWS.

For a few month learning all that stuff from scratch, I'm pretty proud of myself. For my next project, I've been playing with Node.js and MongoDB to try to sort out server-side magic.

Anyway, Hacker News has been pretty inspiring for me - I started reading it about 10 months ago just out of curiosity and understood about 1% of what everyone was talking about. Now I understand...10%? That's progress at least, right? :)
1) There will still be insurance but it will get negligibly cheap if these cars are as safe as we think.
As a user, I'm not so sure #1 and #2 are haha funny. Things are being added and changed constantly, reducing usability. Features seem to be broken or at least temperamental all over the place.
The article is hyperthreaded so you can read all five pages at once if your brain supports that kind of instruction set.
Just a heads up, I'd be careful before you characterize the author as a 'he.'
Well, yeah, but where do you get a list of known GUIDs for InstallShield? Might as well just gather a list of all known Program Files directories.
I work at Cloudera, and engineering has work from home/no meeting Wednesday. It allows people to work wherever they prefer and are most productive, and to have the whole day to focus with minimal distractions.

That said, we do still communicate as needed for the active work. But we do so in terms of emails, chat messages, and sometimes phone calls between only the necessary parties, without any long scheduled meetings or meetings that provide value in the longer term (eg. interviews or longterm planning meetings) as opposed to helping someone do the right work today.

It works great, we've been doing it for basically the whole life of the company, and I don't see it stopping.
The bottom line here is that almost everything has a cost. You can pay with money (App.net) or you can pay with freedom (Facebook / Twitter). Is there a third way besides pure charity?
While the site is indeed good, if you want truly awesome, BEHOLD the POWER of the TIME CUBE: http://www.timecube.com/
It's likely that the code is not coupled. Fred Brooks studied OS/360, which was essentially one big component. Facebook is, presumably, many separate components that don't depend on each other in any way, and so the "teams" are much smaller than "all of Facebook".

If you watch velocity on individual components, you'll probably see sub-linear scaling as Brooks predicts.
ISP tech support is the same way. The guy paying $30/month for his internet is complaining that he has lost tens of thousands of dollars today. Perhaps he should invest in some redundancy if the internet is so important to him.
Why would robocar companies be sued if they are not at fault?
Just read the bold in a sarcastic voice and it all makes sense. That being said,it reads like each point has a grain of truth.
Google went from zero to making a large amount of computer hardware in a decade, partly through using the large existing contract manufacturing chain. The auto industry is not entirely different: Bosch, Rotax, ZF, etc would all design and build parts for Google...
Sure, but not all issues are "tough". Many people never write and always meet. And that's the wrong balance that annoys engineers.
I hear the subscription price will be... $50 per year. But seriously, I would hope Dalton is open-minded about the future evolution of his business model.
This is almost certainly a troll. Pretty well done, too.
The typical case where this happens is that the logging was added because of some bug somewhere and this was put in place to figure out what was going on with total. See it as an archaeological record more than anything else ;-)
If your meeting absolutely positively must happen on a known weekly no-meeting day then there's really only three cases I can see:
1. You are bad at planning
2. You are bad at communicating
3. Something really, really bad happened and people will understand breaking policy

There's a big difference between "no meetings ever" and this.