skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I come from a marketing background, and I have to say that sometimes the negative view of marketers is completely deserved. All it takes is some kid in business school to watch The Social Network and decide he needs a "code monkey" to build his awesome idea. He becomes the "idea" guy, tries to find someone to give 10% equity to build everything, and gets ready to snort cocaine in Palo Alto.

But if you've ever worked with a truly talented marketer, it's an incredible experience. The way they can take something, craft the messaging to it's JUST RIGHT and find the proper channels to market on - it's a beautiful thing. But for someone who doesn't come from a marketing background, it's very hard to discern.

I'm sure there are really bad hackers (or do we still call them "hackers?"), but if you're a marketer it's hard to tell the difference.

Generally disrespect comes from a lack of willingness to understand what actually happens on the other side. I think it should be mandatory for every marketer to learn how to code - even if it's some basic HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Hackers should all have to try and acquire customers, and see that it's not all sending out a couple of tweets or emailing a TechCrunch columnist. Whether you consider the other side a "code monkey" or a "non-technical idiot," you're in big trouble. It takes two hands to clap, and both are immensely difficult to accomplish.

You have to specialize, but you also have to understand.
Thank you for posting this Jon. I do believe I will have to put one together now.
Yep. Know who else tried to wave an algorithm at a community to fix it? Digg.
How do you recommend I link someone else to the exact docs (in lock-step with tutorials, etc.) going forward?
Hey guys, quick intro.

I was procrastinating heavily these days and reading HN more than usual, and the listing > article > listing > comments flow started to become kind of frustrating. I would sometimes go to the comments page and then the external link from there, just so the BACK action would take me to the comments page.

But this was not ideal for two reasons: 1, if I got to read the top comments first I'd probably already be biased by the time I got to check out the linked page (I guess that also says a lot about me); and 2, I don't always want to go through the comments page at all, but I can't really know this up front, without visiting the link first.

So, since I never got to make a Chrome extension before and because there's never a better time to experiment with new stuff than when you're avoiding 'real' work, I tried to create one to fix this. With only a few coding hours this evening, it already works great for me. Here's the flow:

- Install the Chrome extension (find link in github README)

- Click on any link from the HN listing normally

- If you decide to comment or read comments after visiting the linked page, press SHIFT+BACKSPACE and it will take you to the comments page on HN

- But wait, if you do BACK now, it takes you back to that page and you want to go to the HN listing instead. Do SHIFT+BACKSPACE again then

PS: Let me know if you also find this flow helpful or if you have ideas for different shortcuts.

PPS: I'm not tracking anything or doing anything malicious with your browser, but since it's my first extension, let me know if you see any fishy coding logic in there.
FreshBooks is not changing it's name - we are changing the way we describe our services. Why? When we started almost 10 years ago we only offered online invoicing. Since then we have added things like the ability to track expenses and a profit & loss statement. As a result our customers have started calling us cloud accounting, so we are changing the way we describe ourselves to reflect that, and to better signal what they can expect from us going forward.

I wrote a very long letter to our customers about this. I encourage anyone interested in getting more clarity to please read it in its entirety. Here's the link:

http://www.freshbooks.com/cloud-accounting-letter/

Mike McDerment
Co-Founder
FreshBooks
I've experienced this. I forget what it was but there was that one exploit that terminated some critical service makes Windows reboot after a 1- or 2-minute countdown. Frickin pain in the ass that was...
Code Complete referenced studies saying that programmers write about the same number of lines per day, no matter what the language is. It follows that more concise languages really do translate into faster development.
You can make one on CafePress. Here's one that I just made: http://www.cafepress.com/cp/customize/product2.aspx?from=Cus...

It's a little pricey for a t-shirt---probably because they only expect one sale. I don't know if there's a better way to design custom t-shirts.
Live: Apple's closing arguments in Apple vs. Samsung
What I've Learned So Far (Python in 30 Days)
What kind of idiot wears that to an airport?
The kind who wants to grandstand about free speech.

Knowing that people are dumb as bricks, and that airport security has no sense of humor, he should have chosen a different shirt. Don't poke the bear and then complain when he bites you.
"The pixel grid is not visible."
human perception is different for individual humans. Is a 10 inch 1024x768 display already retina, because many humans cannot see the pixel grid? Or is the 3.5 inch iphone 4 not retina, because a very healthy human eye can still see the pixels?

The distance is also very squishy attribute. From my experience, people look at a 10 inch tablet from about the same distance than they look at a smartphone. Still, Apple gave the ipad a lower minimum requirement for the Retina label than the iphone 4.

And does this mean I can "retina" and "unretina" a screen by moving closer/away from the screen?
Only in the case the local law doesn't hold you responsible for not having protected your network in the first place.

[Edit] This is the case in Germany. http://ratgeber-recht.welt.de/offene-wlan-hotspots-sind-zula... You may have your own hotspot but you may be liable for misuses.
Vicarious Raises $15M to Build Software That ‘Learns Like A Human’
How I negotiated my startup compensation (with numbers)
That's sort of the point, though: the templates are completely HTML. There's nothing else in them at all. Your designers can write straight up HTML and not worry about templating at all.

Of course, then it's on you as a developer to use Enlive to replace whatever stub/sample elements are present in the HTML with real data, so it's not an entirely free lunch.
Why JSON will continue to push XML out of the picture
If you're interested in Developer Evangelism in Chicago, email me. We make it there but not nearly often enough.

I'm Austin based.. and it's way better than SF. ;)
Li Zhong Rui
Did you read what I posted? The man page excerpt that I included specifically mentions weird printer behavior.

When you posted the nmap scan report I thought you were trying to replicate what had happened. Otherwise its not really news that print devices have a lot of ports open.

In order to not waste paper you can just have one or two sheets in the tray...
> Why does an OS need to have an EULA while a car does not?

Have you checked your car's user manual?
Unfortunately, it seems the author doesn't have time to keep up with it's popularity. The code hasn't been updated in months (other than the "lazy fix"). There are 23 open issues, many over a year old.

https://github.com/cgrand/enlive/issues?state=open

I got hit by a bug the other day (it assumes http resources are UTF8), and even though fixes are available, none have been merged in.

See also "Is Enlive Alive?"

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/enlive-c...

Having said that, I still think Enlive is awesome. I just which development was more active. Take a look at the network graph and you'll see people fixing a lot of issues on their own branches.
http://reaDIYmate.com are pretty cool too.
Quinzee has launched
I have little doubt that the problems discussed actually exist, but the biggest reason for the difference is simple economics. Anything free, or at extremely low cost, is over-consumed; hence the many sign-us for the course. But completing a course is NOT free, or usually even cheap, it takes a great deal of time and effort for any but the simplest courses; therefore most end up dropping out when it stops being free.

As for the "cheating versus mastery" part, it depends on why and exactly how he is working it. Simply taking the course over and over could be either; signing up for multiple, simultaneous sessions and picking best scoring sessions is pretty obviously cheating.
I'm half remembering a BBC documentary with Robert Winston. He holds a newborn baby and explains we're born with a few instincts. He then looks at the baby and grins, the baby smiles back.

Maybe "Smiling is the only intuitive interface, after that it's all learned." Assuming I remembered that scene correctly.
"Personally I think the only way to maintain a very high standard of quality in a community is strict hands-on moderation and swift ejection of members who don't match the community's goals and vibe."

Many communities I've seen have done this in a way that drops-off over time.

Screw up any of your first 3 posts... you're out of here.

Posts 3 > 10... you're going to get a warning, and may still be out of here.

Posts 10 > 25... warnings only, only extreme cases get banned.

Above 25 posts you're largely left to it, though once in a blue moon someone will screw up so spectacularly that they'll get pulled up by the community.

Even then, the "pulled up by the community" is literally that. No moderators or banning, but the communities that enforce rules strictly for new members and than relax once you get comfortable within the constraints, generally are also the ones in which if you suddenly made an extremely racist post the solution is to be ripped to shreds by your peers rather than to censor and hide it... it reinforces the "that behaviour isn't acceptable here".

This is currently the most successful pattern I've tried. It works far better than other systems I've seen.
At 1GB/hour retrieving a 3TB archive takes 6 weeks...
Portable Kanban
sounds nice,
could u post a link to the app
You have the right attitude about schooling. I never went to school for this, actually I am a high school dropout and never attended University. I have no degrees, and am happy about that. Instead I now have 16 years of real life work experience (and an additional 4 years of programming for myself). I make it a point to learn constantly - whether it is algorithms, compilers, statistics, etc. I have met plenty of people who have that background and still have no clue what they are doing.

Remain passionate about what you are doing - that is what will make you a good programmer.
The factors that make it seem most like a work of fiction:

- No screenshots with players visible.

- Play only continues when all 30 people are online at once. Anybody who has tried to make something like this happen will immediately notice how difficult it is for this to occur with any kind of regularity whatsoever, yet the claim is that this was happening for weeks.
Interesting, as Firefox 17 has caught up to Chrome in older benchmarks.

http://www.arewefastyet.com/?machine=11&view=regress

http://www.arewefastyet.com/?view=regress&machine=10

With this kind of competition, we all win.
Thanks for the pointer. I appreciate it. I am going to try digging up the reference.

I find it hard to believe though. Beyond the code reading challenges that developers have had, I have seen highly varying productivity in code bases that have different amounts of 'brittleness' (and code cycles). On some codebases developers even after understanding what is going on and understanding the change that needs to happen, developers can very easily spend hours making sure a line of code will actually work in different situations.
There were a few features released even after Nehalem which makes me basically uninterested in pre-Westmere CPUs.

AES-NI is the big one. Improvements to VT-x and VT-d for virtualization performance and security are other big ones.

Pure CPU clock hasn't been increasing, and number of cores isn't useful for many tasks due to difficulty programming, but CPU features are still a big deal. FMA with Haswell is going to be a big deal too.
People don't divide cleanly into good actors vs bad actors. Feedback mechanisms such as karma and downvoting on HN allows people to learn how to behave within the community. The better the feedback mechanism, the better people will behave.

Properly weighting the votes from each user would allow more effective moderation to be crowdsourced from the whole community. Everyone should be a moderator, but only with the degree of authority that he has earned.

That weighting can be done with a technical approach as has been proven by search* companies. How does Google deal with the fact that there is no moderation on the web in general, and a multibillion dollar incentive to manipulate their results? Google results are really clean and usable despite the above limitations. Their approach is purely technical.

This proposal is an effort to enhance the ability of the crowd to moderate HN more effectively by improved weighting.

*Note that Google is almost solely a ranking problem, and the the term "search" is a bit of a misnomer. If you could see the bottom ranked matches for any query I'm sure you would see plenty of unsavory content, but the first results (the ones you actually see) are really clean.
I don't think this is a problem. Some things are of different interest to different audiences. HN is one audience, and that's where its strength is. If you want a system that supports multiple audiences, why not use Reddit?
You're putting the cart before the horse. The reason that performance has not improved in the desktop and gaming are due to hitting fundamental limitations in the design of hardware.
Without SP2 installed, I had multiple systems infected before I had a chance for the service pack to finish installing. I eventually had to order it on CD from Microsoft.

I'm guessing that Windows Firewall (included in SP2) buys you some time, but I can't see unpatched system lasting very long.
> Robust observation agrees with this sentiment exactly.

Observation, robust or not, isn't science. If it was, I could say that there are brights spots in the night sky and that observation would count as science. It isn't science until I try to explain what the spots are, and accept a possible falsification of my explanation.

All observations are preliminaries to science. All untested explanations are also preliminaries to science. Science is when an explanation for observations collides with reality, with an attempt to validate an explanation.

> You're trying to paint me as a crazy pseudoscientist,

Not at all -- your words, not mine.

> you're working from a faulty perception of what science is.

I didn't invent the definition of science, and I'm simply repeating the definition that has come to be accepted, by consensus, among scientists, and in courts of law.

Guess how society keeps pseudoscience out of classrooms, for example, "Creation Science"? They do it by asking scientists what science is, discovering that untested claims and observations don't count, and acting accordingly.

In McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mclean-v-arkansas.html), Creation Science was determined not to be science because it failed to meet these scientific requirements:

"It is guided by natural law;

It has to be explanatory by reference to natural law;

It is testable against the empirical world;

Its conclusions are tentative, i.e. are not necessarily the final word; and

It is falsifiable."

Observation doesn't meet these requirements (one cannot falsify an observation). Attempting to explain observations, and accepting falsifications, does.

> So you're saying that classification like taxonomy, the periodic table, and even SI units are 'not science', because these things are not due to a tested claim?

No, they aren't science because they only describe, they don't explain, and descriptions cannot be falsified -- that's reserved to explanations.

This, by the way, is why there is so little science in psychology -- it's mostly description, with rare attempts to explain. For example, Asperger's was accepted as a real mental illness based only on description. It's now being abandoned, again based only on description (i.e. the earlier description described far too many people). But at no point did anyone try to explain Asperger's in scientific terms.
what do you call a 3d printer? It's a robot, but actually automation equipment. I didn't know about heating AC units.
Literary Sex and Sexuality
Chirp.js - Tweets on your website
Is the app an integral part of it? I don't do any banking on my phone.
Building an email newsletter to 80,000 subscribers in two years
Personally, I'm on a 2008 Dell Business Vostro 200 with an Intel Pentium Dual Core (same under the hood as Core 2 Duo, maybe?). I'm gonna upgrade someday, but if this thing is sluggish I don't really notice it at all.
Arguably, a big part of the reason why "lactation consultants" exist is because breastfeeding has become relatively uncommon in places like the U.S. It's not that the nipple isn't an intuitive interface—it's breastfeeding that must be learned, and the generational transmission of that knowledge has broken down.
I just turned my 5 year old Core 2 Duo Thinkpad into my home server. I was able to put two 1TB drives into it. (Using a laptop has the advantage of builtin screen, keyboard, wifi and wired networking, and most importantly a builtin UPS.) It replaced my previous server (single core AMD from ~2005.) Most noticeably power consumption has dropped from 75W to 14W.

I need 16GB of RAM in order to work with development data sets, and the old Thinkpad chipset can't take more than 4GB. Heck my brand new one is limited to 32GB, so that is probably what will cause my next upgrade. (I'll omit my rant about laptop screens getting worse.)
The computer market is not a conspiracy of manufacturers that get together and decide to screw customers.

Then how do you explain the kinds of deliberate and obviously anti-customer behaviour I described before?

In some cases, a single dominant player is abusing their customers because they have a captive market. This is often the case with high-end equipment or software, because once someone has committed to using a certain product range the cost of switching is prohibitive.

In other cases, while there may not be active conspiracy, I can see no credible explanation for the way multiple suppliers all impose the same unnecessarily consumer-hostile policies unless there is a lack of effective competition such that those who offer consumers a better deal gain a commercial benefit from doing so.

Anyway, I'd like to see a "modular, flexible" hardware device that meets the specs of an IPhone or Macbook Air.

Completely modular in the sense of a tower PC case, of course not. But that doesn't mean they have to glue stuff together so even their own people can't easily repair a failed component.

As for printers and gfx drivers, those have sucked since the beginning of time.

Perhaps. But they mostly used to suck because there were no standards, so every device/software combination needed its own version of what we now call a device driver. There's no such excuse today.

Now the drivers suck because someone at the source made an active decision to screw their customers. How else do you explain a newer, much more powerful model of graphics card that somehow has severely degraded performance in some functions compared to a card of the previous generation, while much more expensive workstation cards using the same new generation of hardware under the hood do seem to exhibit the performance improvements one would expect?

And what other description is consistent with releasing a hardware device that should be useful for many years, yet not releasing drivers for it when Windows 7 comes out just a year or two later? It's not as if the arrival of Windows 7 was a surprise or the manufacturers don't know how to write Windows 7 drivers for their equipment. Chances are the next product range runs just fine on Windows 7 and its drivers are probably using a lot of the same driver code as before.

Obviously there is profit in these behaviours, because it forces customers to buy much more expensive high-end brands or to buy replacement equipment much sooner than they otherwise would have to.
As far as I've heard, we haven't hit that limit in the consumer space yet, as we're just starting to get close to hitting it in other spaces. Is this not true?
Yes, I think you are correct.

Digging deeper, I see that libraries are added via pull request and that the Nivo Slider library was added 11 days ago. Other libraries that have been there longer (such as jQuery) continue to have old versions.
The company to get all of this right will be the first two trillion dollar company.
Markdownr - online Markdown tool made simple
Doesn't seem that difficult. Raiding guilds in Everquest and WoW pulled this off for years with 40 players and more.
"I see the shithouse quality of work that comes out of people probably equally skilled, but not as passionate, everyday"

Passion makes one want to learn more, and constantly improve. People who love what they do will listen to others advice and are able to be molded in to a great developer. Without that passion, you are just doing your job - and when it is "just" a job, then you aren't giving it your 100%.

Maybe blame the "shithouse" quality of work on the person, and not their background. Additionally - take the time to correct those people and guide them. If you are that experienced, become a mentor instead of a critic.
I cannot stress how useful this is. When I came to the SF Bay Area I was working for Intel, but I too felt that some day I wanted to run my own company. My job at Intel was an engineering job but I spent all day interacting with the marketing group and the design engineers as a liason. I realized I had some built in assumptions about how 'easy' marketing was and I didn't even know what they did.

When I was recruited into Sun I had a choice to either take a job offered by Marketing (Carol Bartz was my boss' boss :-) or the kernel group. I chose Marketing because I really wanted to learn that skill. It was a hugely valuable choice. After 18 months I decided at my heart I was an engineer and switched over to the systems group, but having that knowledge gave me a new found respect for what marketing folks have to do, day in and day out.

That in turn let me recognize the difference between good marketers and mediocre ones, and to understand what they needed from engineering to communicate to future customers.
"I don't want to wait around for 3.5-4 hours before my data even becomes available for restore in a disaster recovery situation"

ding!
Even if the top submissions and top comments fit squarely with what HN is supposed to be there is still going to be comments and submissions that don't and they will continue to be a problem.

Only if those comments are made public to everyone. If this system were adopted, it would be sensible to also implement a filter so that low-scoring comments only appear to high-ranking users, who are presumably responsible enough to filter the bad ones out and raise the good ones to visibility. I'd be happy to see fewer comments per post if the quality increased.
Agreed. Looks cool and I'd like to support them but for the most part, the only improvement over my current bank is the design.
Seems very embellished. From what I know of minecrafters, it's very likely they would have flattened the ground, set up a tree farm, and starting communally building within the first hour or so of play.

The only competition would have been for highly scarce materials, however the other key point is that it's trivial to make another nether portal once you have access to the nether.