skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think HN moderators could have a pause button for top threads like these. If there is a problem for the baby tech thing, just put the thread on pause for sometime [vanish] and bring the thread back online [reappear] the moment DB error/any error is sorted out.

Quite often we see connection errors or other problems for these new cool things, and the guys behind it lose a lot of crucial steam.
Recent news reveals that not only are they not in danger but are instead thriving. Kind of inconvenient.
Be mean to me, I love it.
It sounds like he's shipping, which means he's doing it right.

All of life is trade-offs, no?
I've been spending some time to try and pick up Haskell and I just thought I'd mention that I found "Real World Haskell"[0] to be a bit more understandable and accessible to me than "Learn you a Haskell".

Different strokes, obviously, but just thought I'd mention an alternative.

[0]: http://book.realworldhaskell.org/
The quality control exists, but it's become ad-hoc and decentralized. I think this will ultimately be a very good thing, though we are still experiencing severe learning pains.

In many ways, sites like Hacker News and reddit serve as democratized curators of quality content. If quality content is rewarded with high karma, this hopefully rewards more people to produce that content.

Even when a site like reddit gets bogged down in the low-form entertainment of the masses (which, admit it or not, we all comprise at some point in our days), the site itself forms a "bud" off the main branch with a return to quality [1].

In the end, I think we're both right. There's more writing than ever before (good), and there's worse writing than ever before (bad). We as a society must figure out not only how to do quality control in this new environment, but also to recognize when we're merely being snooty (in public, while laughing hilariously at inane facebook updates in private).

[1] see http://www.reddit.com/r/depthhub
Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg career advice
Nice article. On the other hand, in a slightly joking manner, I really wonder how some people can live with 8-space tabs with 8+ levels of indentation!
How many times have you look into webkit or gecko
source code to fix layout problems?

That's not really the point. Let's use the Adobe Flex Framework as an example. If you bought into Flex 5 years ago then you're probably starting to feel a bit nervous. The reasons being:

1. Adobe are themselves signaling that
HTML is the future by releasing HTML5 tools (Edge)
2. Adobe have abandoned mobile Flash development
3. Developer mind-share is firmly in the HTML camp.

Now, if the full adobe/flash stack were open source and there were multiple companies working on it, it would be less of an issue as the technology you invested into would continue to be supported. The fact that you, personally are not working on the flash/flex core would be irrelevant, as is the case with HTML5 and the open web.

If you think a layout engine is complex enough that
need to be open sourced, you are doing it wrong.

I'm at a loss trying to respond to this. If you think writing a layout engine from scratch is easy then you simply don't understand the problem very well. Even writing a good text layout engine is very hard to get right, and text layout is only a subset of the whole problem. Not only that, but layout is an orthogonal problem to the one you're trying to solve (unless you're writing a browser or word processor), so the time you sink into it is wasted.

native app development (Visual Studio, XCode) layouts are much
simpler and more powerful

It's simpler because the complexity is abstracted away from you by the IDE/tools. The actual (hidden) application logic driving the layouts is just as complex if not more so.

The problem with HTML and CSS is that they are either
document flow based or absolute position.

Absolutely agree with you here. The document paradigm has been abused horribly to allow for complex layout on the web, and its roots are painfully evident - it certainly wasn't meant for this type of work.

It's easier to do it right in native ways. There are much richer containers,
control groups and docking options.

Agree here too. Having said that though there are great advances being made, the flexible box model being one of them.

Oh wow, Javascript for layout, right.

That's sarcasm not a rebuttal :)

Going back to the original point, I think that CSS for native layout may be an OK idea, CSS certainly has it share of strengths and weaknesses. One thing this approach has in its favor is a low barrier to entry for web developers which may help bridge the designer/developer divide.

It's been fun sparring with you :)

all the best,
eli
Which is why it's so funny, given that the very article on the same blog he linked to in his apology [1] is why we're even having this conversation!

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/
All the details of programming are complicated and you can justify it with your expert knowledge as fact. Perhaps marketing is just as complicated but seems simple since you just see the output / results and do not have the expert knowledge to realize the detail that went into it?
I like how your example of a secret ransom completely failed at being a secret and proved the fallacy of secret ransom.
Correlation is not causation. We don't really know what combination of the many factors in Google's culture made them so successful. For all we know, it may have been due entirely to the people they hired, and the same team might have produced great results with or without all the perks that Google is famous for.
The perks are certainly nice and likely a good move all things considered, but at some point she is going to have to inspire and innovate.

A "Google-like office", without a seriously great product, will probably be tough sell, longterm.
Do you have a mirror anywhere? in the past people would just put a github gist or something.
I came across pipes the other day while attempting to link my twitter feed to a (new) identi.ca account. The concept sounds powerful and I like the idea.. although I'd like to be able to view the source without logging in.
The arguments you are providing seems plausible but I don't see how you can connect them to the need to educate your clients (which are less educated). It's more about Google providing better information, wether clients are educated or not, right ?
I think it's a fallacy to believe that suddenly Apple became stupid just because there's no more Steve.

I bet there's a lot more to this story than we can see at the moment.
If it's a personal blog, maybe submitters should just use a coral cache link or something. hard for us commenters to contribute anything useful if we can't see it!
http://ctftime.org/
I disagree with Taubes reasoning for other reasons, but the point the poster made was that someone who studied physics at Stanford will understand how the Laws of Thermodynamics work.
Google gave out cell phones as a gift to promote interest in their mobile business. Then they gave out cell phones for traditional work related purposes as well.
Best Countries To Live And Work In
Bridging The Data Deluge Gap
It IS pssible to implement a microkernel in Golang.
Also, hunter-gatherers may get a lot more calories gathering than hunting. Women often gather more food than male hunters, collecting things like tubers, fruits, honey, etc.

IIRC, Homo erectus evolved to eat a lot more carbs than homo habilis. It's only if you pick specific points in human evolution that you can say we didn't eat carbs.
Based on the things that came out of google labs, I think it's more than possible that a seriously great product can be a byproduct of a google-type office and not just a prerequisite for said office environment.
This second-guessing of the post-Jobs executive team has gotten really out of hand, though this was to be expected to some degree I suppose.

My personal experience with Apple Retail has still been nothing short of stellar, recently with two almost-no-questions-asked full replacements of a faulty iPad and Retina MBP. Sometimes strolling through Apple stores I have wondered if they were overstaffed, based on the simple fact that lots of people know how to use the popular devices and probably don't have as many questions as they did back when the store was mainly about selling Macs and digital cameras.

As for cost cutting, Apple has been doing it for years. Witness, for example, the radical reduction in pack-in goodies over the course of the development of the iPod. The second generation iPods came with a carrying case, remote, and charging brick [1]. The third left out the remote and carrying case [2]. The fourth left out the dock [3]. The fifth left out the brick [4].

Guaranteed if Cook had been in charge these would have been decried as evidence of Apple becoming a stingy, bean counting big corporation that lost its soul to save some money on pack-ins. In reality they were cutting fat and passed the savings on to us.

1) http://ilounge.com/assets/images/reviews_apple/ipod20gb/imag...
2) http://www.ilounge.com/assets/images/reviews_apple/ipod15gb/...
3) http://www.ilounge.com/assets/images/reviews_apple/4gpower/p...
4) http://www.ilounge.com/assets/images/reviews_apple/ipod5/5bo...
Yes, anyone can become a really bad marketer by reading a book, just like anyone can become a really bad Engineer by reading a book.

The thing is? being a good marketer has more to do with who you know (and who knows you) than what you know. (just like being a good Engineer has more to do with how well you can figure things out than with how many languages you know.)

knowing people that can get you press is super important for marketing people (and, of course, the ability to get people to like you.)
Apple quickly bans Samsung phones - TVNZ
"... they expend on average no more calories in a day than the adult population of the industrialized world."
Did they take weight difference into account? is it per kg or per person? I find the article lacking in a few important details...
Yes, but my point (which was admittedly a little oblique) was that Google should ensure that their information is properly targeted. I don't think a promotion and information campaign in an affluent neighborhood would work as well in a low-income neighborhood. But then, I'm not a marketer.

My perspective comes just as someone who has circles of friends in a bunch of different income/social levels and I'm trying to imagine what they would say upon given a flyer or sales presentation that might make me salivate.
If someone points out someone else I admire is a criminal, I would approach it a different way. It has less to do with what I want to call archetypal and more to do with the historically observable fact that what is legal is not always what is moral. Murder, torture, slavery, etc. These have all been legal in some past (or present) context. The possibility that someone who is acknowledged as a decent person could be a "criminal" is no surprise to me, and I'd rather argue to that point than dismiss the whole argument.

And even if I support abortion rights, the act is technically killing. A 'life' is terminated. Regardless, I'd point out that murder holds a different connotation that implies hatred or ill-will (or "malice aforethought") toward the victim. Same with euthanasia.

Why not take these as opportunities to explore the meanings and limits of a word? One person's definition of what is the archetypal murderer or thief or racist may easily differ from yours depending on their own experiences.
Internet Marketing Business Content PLR
A silly take on Linux [video]
Hawthorn effect [1] seems to explain why most productivity hacks seem to work initially but later relapses: "Changing a variable usually increased productivity, even if the variable was just a change back to the original condition."

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
I'll encourage them to do a blog post on it.
That's correct, this announcement is what's new: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4442143
That's correct, this announcement is new: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4442143
Does anybody know how Go manages to call the given function of the matching interface when it gets only a pointer to the struct? Like here, where label and button are otherwise unrelated structs but both have the same Paint function:

for _, painter := range []Painter{label, listBox, button1, button2} {
painter.Paint()
}

In C++, where inheritance is used, the virtual function pointer tables are maintained and the inherited class will have the function at the same index which makes calls of virtual functions slower than normal calls but the cost is still just an indexing of the table. However when there is no inheritance specification, the indexes can't be maintained, I presume. The easy solution is that calls are resolved using some string fingerprint lookup but that would make such calls really slow (compared to the C++).

Then how do they do it?
"... The second man on the moon, Buzz Aldrin, an intense, extraordinarily intelligent man, told me that one of the mistakes made by NASA was that 'we never sent anyone who could really communicate what was happening'..."

There's no room for emotion when you need to relay information. The choice of test pilots dictated the lack of emotional response.

"... The moon - the reality of it - remains a missed opportunity for art and literature. ..."

That's Al Beans job ~ http://www.alanbean.com/available_originals.cfm
You can't remove jams by adding a new process to report problems...

If you want to remove jams, just make sure decisions are taken as low as possible in the hierarchy.
This is actually a really interesting idea. While it appears (from the vid) to be really "to-do" listy... the concept that sparked it "why dont I know all the things my friends want to do?" is a powerful base...

I have a range of lists for things i recommend to people: best date places, best dance spots, best bathroom, etc...

This is something inherently social and as long as the UX is great will be really popular.
Non-inheriting CSS widgets are coming with Web Components and the Shadow DOM. http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webcomponents/raw-file/tip/explainer/i...

Browsers, in fact, already use the shadow DOM to render many of their custom forms. It's just not available programmatically yet.

Layouts aren't completely horrifying if you use a good, responsive grid, although within that grid framework itself there are likely some hacks. But as mentioned -- new CSS layout types are coming!
It only took 10 years and a lot of pain to get CL to do anything resembling innovation....

BOOOOOO I have lost most if not all respect for craig/CL
Anyone who is saying this is probably wrong, unless the hire getting this rate has very clearly awesome traits that the company really wants to develop.

People just out of college almost invariably are really bad at actually releasing products. They've often been shielded from the merciless process of productization of a system. So the first year is almost always going to involve a lot of hand-holding. "Yes, you really have to write tests," and "Yes, you really have to have repeatable deploys," and "Yes, you really have to document this." You know, the important but humdrum part of being a software engineer.

Exceptions to this rule; the kids who excel right out of the gate? Cultivate, cheerlead, and rapidly moved up your pay scale. Because invariably kids just out of college are going to work longer hours than most other people; they just don't have much of a life compared to people who've been out of college a few eyars.
Coding impact - Are we losing software engineers?
>or re-sync the whole library to another iTunes match account for $25.

why $25?
Retail cost-cutting and pack-in goodies are different.
My custom CSS makes it disappear (while normal images stay). Web developers should keep accessibility features of browsers in mind when coming up with ideas like these.
I wonder what the stack ranking in MSR (the pure research arm of Microsoft) looks like.
ironically, the last time this site was updated was about 2 months ago....
Altewai.Saome S/S 2013, Stockholm
Nice tip, I'll give it a shot. It's in General -> accessibility -> triple click home in case anyone's wondering
Why nobody is mentioning free internet service (for households not public buildings)? You pay $25/month for 12 months (or $300 one time fee) and then it's free. Wouldn't it make sense for low-income family?
Do You Think Lindsay Lohan Stole The Watches? - Cinema Blend
My mistake; I would define it either way.
Isn't the experience diminished in both cases?
For one, it'd be much more expensive in the massive sprawl of San Jose and all but impossible to deploy in San Francisco or Palo Alto.

For two, there's this big question of how the cable and telecom companies are going to oppose this. Part of this fiber rollout is sort of an elaborate demonstration to the big cable and DSL providers in which Google says, "You are aware we can cheerfully destroy your market if you don't improve and play ball with us."

If the KC deployment goes well, Comcast and friends will have to start thinking very long and hard about how they are going to keep Google out of their slice of the market, because given the current climate in politics they probably aren't going to be able to make an anti-trust argument stick.
Yes, a walled (maybe) and elite city-state at current rates.
Love the concept, but I found Pipes got very complex to do anything I wanted - a common problem with visual tools.

Zapier solves this by pre-configuring tasks that most people want. Also better times for it, with so many web-apps and web APIs around now.
Long before IFTTT, Pipes was an excellent solution for various social media needs.

I recall mashing up RSS feeds and using it to bypass various platform throttles.

It was awesome for fixing wonky feeds.

Love the UNIX metaphore and interface.

Pipes was the only Yahoo! product that really sang to me.

I think I've been relying on IFTTT too much lately. I may have to revisit Pipes.
What 3 months of boxing teaches you about programming
I agree with you but I say we shouldn't depend on intuition - it too often is wrong.
All the utilities in Kansas City are above ground, so no digging is required.
I think there are some obvious mistakes in it: 1) The NewXXX() function should return a pointer by Go idioms. But they return the value in this article. 2) For methods on IntSet type, it says the receiver should be pointer instead of value. "If we used values, these would be copied and any changes applied lost." Actually, since the data field is a reference, using value as receiver can change the content of the map.

Maybe not a good tutorial for people new to Go.
I wonder if there's some sort of way to definitively defeat someone's argument in issues other than math and science. I doubt it -- I suspect all arguments essentially boil down to moral relativism based upon gut feelings (environmental or genetic factors).

I guess a more optimistic question is whether there's a statistically significant process to convince* your opponent that your argument is correct. I would actually be more interested in knowing this.

*By process, I mean a general purpose algorithm that someone could follow that's more effective than alternative algorithms at making your opponent say "you know what, you're right".

EDIT: While I'm at it, I would really like to see more articles/analyses on the nature of arguing. It seems like argument could be a study in its own right, though I doubt there exist any strong efforts in the field.

EDIT 2: You know what, if someone got really good at analyzing the way people argue, they could optimize their own argument strategy to become a very powerful/dangerous person. I suspect this happens naturally (political leaders) but I think there's a huge potential if someone were to go about this consciously and objectively.
Is HN that important for you to follow up religiously? For many it's not. For many it might be. It differs from people to people like almost everything else.
Active in Cloud, Amazon Reshapes Computing
Google Chrome seems to think this page is in Indonesian...
There are two things coming that will cause Apple to be making changes now: First is the economy is cooling off globally. The second is that Apple has major new product opportunities and it makes changes well in advance so that these new product launches go well.

On the economy:

The economy is really slowing down globally right now. This is much like the summer of 2007... the hints are there but it took a year before all hell broke loose (saw it in the dotcom bust as well. Same hints.) No way to know how bad it will be or if it will be anything very startling, or just a couple years of lower growth.

But when this happens companies feel it early, and the good ones react, and this happens months if not a year before things start to show up in the popular press like they did in 2008.

On future products:
One thing intrinsic to apple's DNA is evolution. This is a company that is not complacent.

It is also a company that doesn't broadcast its intentions or its moves or its plans.

This means that when it sees opportunity, it starts to make changes well in advance of when it will be able to capitalize on that opportunity.

The Apple Store itself is a good example of this: One of the reasons the retail operation was created was to be able to eventually sell the iPhone and iPad directly to the public in a way that couldn't happen before. Macs can be sold online, but the iPad and iPhone need to be seen to be understood.

Apple stores have always done very well on the metrics apple cares about, one of which is profit. I don't see any reason to believe they are going to sacrifice those metrics to try and boost profit.
Crawler in the Spotlight. Googlebot facts you need to know about.
“Why did our PageRank go down?”
I have two issues with your comment:

1) It is a blog post not a scientific study or an article in the newspaper.

2) Everyone knows republicans can't read.
haha~ henter@henter.me (PHP+MYSQL)
I actually find Instagram is the opposite - because every photo shows up as its own 'story', people use more discretion in what they upload. There are Facebook albums filled with hundreds of photos of parties and people dressed up going out, but that's not really what Instragram is about.

YMMV, of course, and as with all social media, depends on the people you follow.
Let’s get rid of CC-NC and CC-ND
You know TLP and Jupiter?
Young cannabis smokers run risk of lower IQ, report claims
Necessitas alpha 4, a New Hope
Samsung to Announce Android-Powered Galaxy S Camera This Week
> but the creationist has a point that some of the more fantastic parts of evolution are harder to directly observe in the same way as, say, gravity.

Honest question: which parts?
I think it's on purpose. LessWrong does not aim to be an academic discussion forum, but a practical real life provider of thinking tools. Using real-life, emotionally charged examples is probably part of the training.
Maybe I interpreted the grandparent's "perfectly" here a bit too literally:

> Don't be so naive, a world without copyright could perfectly work.

I don't doubt for a second that some music would be recorded and some software be written without copyright. But for it to be "perfect" or anything close to that, it'd have to be of the same amount or at least quality. How is it naive to doubt that this would be the case?
Google’s Motorola Files New Patent Case Against Apple
A more complex, but perhaps better solution, UI-wise: HN could just poke Coral/Google/whoever to cache any site that hits the front page, so there'll be a guaranteed fallback--and then switch the link out for the fallback when you press your hypothetical pause button. (The only problem being that this works for web pages, but won't do much to help web apps.)
[Joking] this looks like a copy of this:
[Fake Video] LEAKED Official Apple iPhone 5 Promo Video - Keynote 2012
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIRBxRlsYR0&sns=em
Google Turns Up The Heat, Files New Patent Lawsuit Against Apple