skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was quite keen on SO at first, but have gotten much less so over the past year or two. The most recent incident that really put me off was a month or two ago when I found what I considered a pretty ideal SO question; ie. a "how to do X programmatically". Someone (a relatively new user) had already commented that it was a dupe of another question which it clearly wasn't; several of us simultaneously corrected him, and all seemed fine. Until a few hours later when some drive-by mod arbitrarily closed the question as a dupe; they obviously had enough ninja power to do that off their own bat, but it needed four or five of us to vote to reopen and the last I saw it'd only gotten to two or three. The original questioner seemed fairly demoralised by it; I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't come back.

I'm sure there are plenty of other cases of good moderation, but to me it highlights a serious problem with the site. One loose cannon (who I can only assume either was a badly written bot, didn't speak English, or was just trolling) and one overactive mod managed to ruin that question for everyone, and the rest of us had little power to really help.

I don't know what the answer to this is; it bears a lot of resemblance to Wikipedia, and they still struggle with it.
People love NodeJS is because it's JavaScript and Async. If you don't like both you are not in the NodeJS boat.

But don't blame it. Everyone has their choices.

And NodeJS is not a general purpose stack and It never says it is like that.

When you need to do some nasty app with lot of IO and you don't need to learn erlang than NodeJs is for you.

Haters are always there! Who cares?
great article. i am amazed. (many articles from ledgersmb folks (or only this person, i don't remember) are great.)
God, this is depressing.

Young people putting themselves into crippling debt because college has been sold as the only way to get good, "real" employment in this country. And you know what? It's probably true in most of industries and for the vast majority of people. We've been taught that without college, you'll be stuck in a fast food job forever. Everyone has to go - high schools have replaced all of their "technical" classes with "college prep" classes; everything rides on that SAT score, kids having complete breakdowns over not getting the scholarship they wanted...

All for colleges that gobble up money for degrees that seem to never correspond to actual intelligence or skill in a field like they're intended to.

Ugh.
I encourage you to read the essay referenced in the article: http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html (In Praise of Idleness, by Bertrand Russel)

A true eye opener.
Sure it is. MySQL is just a database with fewer features (and less rigid ACID compliance.) Like SQLite vs. MSSQL or PG vs. Vertica. Different tools for different jobs.
Does a $15 fee mean that Amazon puts the value of ads for a customer over the lifetime of the product $15?
Ah, the slippery slope argument. "If WE aren't tight on the rules, the site will quickly degernate into a useless mess." Where have I heard that before? On Wikipedia. It vastly overstates the job of those that delete stuff. They aren't the ones creating a great site. Those that ask and answer questions are.
It's not that async is hard, it's that callback-based frameworks like node.js force the programmer to structure their code in an entirely different (and more verbose!) way to what they would writing synchronous code. It doesn't help that the shortest way of declaring a function in Javascript is function(){...};

Look at coroutine-based frameworks like gevent if you want to see what easy async looks like. You'll still have to remember you're writing async code, but instead of do_lots_of_io(function(){wrap_up_afterwards();}); you can just do_lots_of_io();wrap_up_afterwards();. It makes code infinitely more readable.
Elon Musk doesn't really have the money to run them any other way, to run projects of that magnitude at a possible permanent loss you would need to be right up the top of the worlds richest people.
"Different tools for different jobs"

that's exactly the (or better: one) point of the article. no disagreement here, right?
> How do you spread billing across multiple providers if you don't yourself have PCI compliance to retain billing information?

You become PCI compliant! That's the price you pay. Or you ignore PCI compliance and risk it. You probably wouldn't be surprised to learn that this is far more common then people will admit (and I'm not even talking about people in high-risk industries).

Anyways, there are a few ways you can do this without having to deal with PCI compliance, though it doesn't solve the problem as well.

First, you set up multiple merchant accounts. That way, for a normal transaction, you might send person A to provider A, and then person B to provider B, and then person C to provider A, so on and so forth. The goal here is to spread the threat over more than one provider. You don't just allow PayPal, and if PayPal starts receiving too many transactions, you remove it as an option for a while.

If you are limited as you mention to PayPal, Google, and a real payment system, the best way there is to offer encouragement to use one system over another. Which ever system you want to encourage use of.

You can also find a PCI compliant provider who you can then attach merchant accounts to. They handle the PCI compliance, you provide the merchant accounts.

Of course, none of these solutions are really as easy as just using PayPal. But then you start to see why PayPal is so popular. It's downright easy.
Sounds really neat, I've solved it for my own personal needs with some imapfilter scripts, but the thought crossed my mind to make a service out of it.
The reason not to was the tricky part of needing customers imap credentials and store them safely.

Integrating to tightly with gmail would perhaps make it harder to support other imap platforms, since gmail can do more in some areas.

Good luck with your project!
It's definitely a plus if you're already an avid user but I think it shouldn't be a requirement. Say, if you wanted to learn about compilers, you can efficiently extract a lot more knowledge by going through the source and docs of a real-world compiler project, regardless of your usage, than by merely reading compiler texts.
They still have time to file their appeal - since they're going to be filing against the whole jury verdict.

Eagerly waiting for that and the groklaw review.
4 hours in, and not a mention of ESR's "Smart Questions." Here it is: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

It's a wonderful document and covers quite a bit, going far beyond just how to ask smart questions.
I think he is referring to the Logitech Squeezebox:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squeezebox_(network_music_playe...
Scaling up the putt-putt
Having worked with it for a few years, modelling music metadata is indeed an absolute nightmare.

There are some efforts to standardise this stuff though, see http://www.ddex.net which a lot of the digital supply chain is starting to adopt. It's something of a set of scary great kitchen-sink XML schemas (schemata?) but might be of interest to those who get massively nerdy about this sort of thing.
Meet Apple’s Favorite Blogger
Notifications and Usability: Skype
Great startup from the SpringBoard program! Recently we interviewed Tray.io co-founder Dom Lewis http://howtowriteabusinessplan.com/2012/07/tray-interview/

Check it out! During the interview Dom talks about startingup, their pivot and shares advice to aspiring entrepreneurs.

Job lads!
A Big Default Problem, but How Big?
Italian Fig and Cheese Filled Galette Recipe
That's the one.

I use Squeezebox server on a QNAP NAS storage thing.

Then I use a Squeezebox Transporter for the superlative DAC that it has.

Squeezebox server allows me to listen remotely too, so for more than a decade I've had the ability to listen to my home music collection from wherever I am in the world (assuming I have an internet connection). I use DNSMadeEasy for their dyndns stuff.
You can't do concurrency with threads. I think you're confusing concurrency with parallelism.
Pre-Med’s New Priorities: Heart and Soul and Social Science
Wrong thinking: free eTextbooks are the way forward. It will take a while, but the younger generation of Ph.D. is more savyy in using technology as a means for communication and it is (I hope) only a matter of times until we have Creative Commons based textbooks in all disciplines. Amazon would do well to stay away from that ... and focus instead on expanding beyond the U.S.
Cloudy Day Bad For Cloud Technology.
My favourite example of prior art, from a Donald Duck comic: http://www.iusmentis.com/patents/priorart/donaldduck/
"The async-style of programming is almost entirely inaccessible to my brain. Certainly not a fun way to write programs." does not equals to "a terrible platform"
US Amazon 'product release 14 sept', EU/UK 25th of oct. As long as release dates are like that I would not buy for fun.I know a lot of people think the same; as long as non US is a second class citizen I don't see any company 'winning' anything. After a keynote you want to order. You don't want to wait and especially not when the product exists. This is even worse for virtual goods (music/software/movies etc), but for physical goods as well; if you cannot deliver it immediately then it doesn't exist for most people. And I know a lot non tech people who won't buy it; it seems that companies like this do not see that announcements are no longer local. When any company does an announcement it's in 'the papers' (virtual or real) immediately all across the planet, not only in the US. So people read, want to buy, cannot buy and go for your competitor who does have the capability to release worldwide. Newspaper articles mostly always mention the competitors. I personally know a lot of people who bought an iPad instead of a Fire in the first release because you simply couldn't get it here (the Amazon.com site doesn't allow you to order from EU for this item, so you need someone in the US). It's rancid and it needs to stop now.

Edit: the iPad / Fire price difference doesn't matter for most people from the Netherlands, that is something you need to know before reading this. We are known as frugal but in real life most people make a lot of money and just buy what they want, regardless of price in the < E1000 range.
If you read my post again, it seems we're "violently agreeing".

As I said, I doubt we'll get rid of the phrase.

Then again, from this point forward, I have every intention of
depicting the Internet in network drawings as a fishing net
labeled "Net" with the hope of tricking the marketing types into
using "In the Net" rather than "In the Cloud". I doubt it will
work, but it would still be fun to try. ;)
Some complex systems can be described using simple laws e.g., complex interactions of gas molecules can be described using thermodynamics with aggregate terms such as temperature, pressure.
One anecdote to mix in -- I was at school in Australia in the '90s. Learning Japanese was heavily promoted as it was the big, growing economy at the time.
1. The "burn after reading" feature is added to the github issues list (As a "Feature request").
2. Yes, but you control the way of you share it.
3. Thanks.
5. I wait some spams... However, 1 paste per X secs is not difficult to implement.
That's classy.
Most of the methods provided are functions already built into Python (map, filter, reduce, all, any, min, max)

Also the underscore variable name conflicts with the common convention of using an underscore as the i18n translation function.

Those issues aside, the templating looks handy, and I'm sure the whole thing was fun to write.
Author mistakes a text editor for an IDE and drops it when he understands his error. How interesting!
I quit the site in July when I got 16 down votes (actually there were more) on my question because it got closed then I had the audacity to complain about it on Meta.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-elisp...

I think the "we will teach you a lesson when you disagree" attitude is pretty juvenile. It also seems like it's bad for business. People won't ask questions so there will be fewer search results directing people to the site.
Are there any books out there that describe how to efficiently use PostgreSQL's object-relation techniques?
Bypassing Antivirus with Smart Crypters
Having programming experience is absolutely not a requirement for understanding the technicalities of what software does

No, but having experience and knowledge about computers in general is required to make a decision on, say, whether a mouse-over event is innovative.

There's a short clip of Feynman describing the problem here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM&feature=playe...

And yes, people are that clueless about "computer stuff" that they could just as well have been from another planet.
I second this - only two irregular verbs? Japanese is so nice (but sometimes too context-dependent)
> Seemed like I was trying too hard to make it do something that it wasn't intended to do.

This is a very common mistake, really. Vim is different. Not embracing this difference will only result in frustration.
Early on Stackoverflow was a great place, because you could ask any programming related question and you basically got a good answer or someone pointing you in the right direction quickly. Nowadays you first need to figure out where to ask. For some reason too granular classifications seem to be connected with programmer mindset. Also earlier lot of subjective and interesting questions were allowed, nowadays anything like that is closed quickly.

That said, nowadays I mostly browse ux.stackexchange which isn't as nitpicky yet.
It is my belief that there are three components which form the trinity of the super programmer:

* Tenacity

* Working memory size

* Creativity

You need tenacity because seemingly intractable problems come up all the time when programming. There are those who simply throw up their hands and give up, and then there are those who just won't let it go. They'll keep it in the back of their mind, mulling it over, poking at it, discussing with others, until they finally have an epiphany in the shower or on the bus or in a dream. They do great things because they go where others fear to tread. Without tenacity, there's little hope of becoming a great programmer.

If tenacity is the base signal, working memory is the amplifier. The greater your working memory, the more concepts you can hold at once, which means you can break down problems much faster. Your potential is increased significantly.

All of this is capped off by creativity. Tenacity and working memory will allow you to push through a problem, but if you're not stepping back and looking for patterns and meta patterns to exploit, you'll miss any chance of finding novel solutions that save time, space, and aggravation compared to existing practices.
Why, oh why?

map(str.upper, ['foo', 'bar']) == _(["foo", "bar"]).invoke("upper")

[w for w in ["foo", "hello", "bar", "world"] if len(w) > 3] == _.filter(["foo", "hello", "bar", "world"], lambda x, a: len(x) > 3)

sorted([i 2 for i in [10, 48, 56, 30, 20] if i > 20]) == _([10, 48, 56, 30, 20]).chain().filter(lambda x, a: x > 20).map(lambda x, a: x * 2).sortBy().value()
It seems to me that all this wrangling and instructing juries is an argument for having dedicated, technically and juridically trained jurists decide these cases.
You should add Queen to that list, too. Makes your "uniqueness" statement a little weaker, but I think it strengthens your overall point: having more than one great songwriter in a band is a really potent combination.
The problem with people hunting for working solutions and not knowledge is that, if you're the kind person who provides said solution, you may be inadvertently thrown into a situation where the poster loses all form of initiative and depends on you to get things done.

You might post a code sample, and they will then return to you asking why it "doesn't work." There will be no attempt to debug it, and you realise you might just have left a syntax error in there by mistake. You fix it, and still it "doesn't work." Your frustration increases with each complaint, and the urge to tell them to figure it the fuck out if they've half a brain becomes more irresistible.

It's almost parasitic, even if well intentioned or in good faith, and it's such a drain when you're giving the help that you'll stop answering questions where the poster evidently never tried, or didn't want to.
Well, from what I've read the book and the products came substantially after he started voicing his concerns, which sort of implies that he might've taken the matter in his own hands since no one would listen to him.

Even assuming he is a complete loon, the theory of an environmental cause is actually quite plausible. Perhaps not fungus, not phosphorus, but something in the bedding that just knocks those kids out.

With regards him being evil - I don't really see it that way. Why do you say that parents stop following established best practices once they wrap their kid's mattress? Parents aren't idiots, are they? What he's advocating for is orthogonal to existing prevention measures, both easily combined.
Agreed. The questions that are closed are the ones that are usually helpful to me, like best way to make money on Android, etc.. The questions that aren't closed tend to be stupid stuff you can lookup in the docs anyway. Site just isn't useful to me due to the heavy handed mods.
Yeah at the wrong companies it does definitely. You can bullshit your way in/out of anything, especially in big companies. Just find another job if that happens; if you are really smart and competent, there will be no problem finding something which does fit. Don't stick with elbowing morons, ever.
> Node.js is async for people who don't actually know what they're doing

"Node.js is rubbish and if you like it and try to argue otherwise then, as I've already said, you don't know what you're doing so I can just ignore you."

Clever.
What is the typical number of rules someone has to write if they get, say, 100 emails per day from any combination of 1000 contacts?

If you have 100 common contacts (as opposed to the other 900 who email once and a while) and I need, say, a rule or two for each to cover the basics... and a rule or two to cover groups of people (because one-to-one emails are the exception in business not the rule)... isn't that hundreds and hundreds of rules?

Not having seen the alpha, that feels like an insurmountable first threshold, UX-wise.

Also, just out of curiosity, other than general ease-of-use (which seems much nicer in your 3 examples), how is this better than typical filters (which I don't use)?
Visual Programming and Why It Sucks
When people talk about risk (and return) I always feel like there's something I'm missing, something I don't get. Can never quite put my finger on it.

I guess it's something to do with wilfully gambling vs. relying on your own abilities. They seem like very different things but somehow get classified together.
Test your Startup idea, Quick and Cheap. No coding needed.
Have been trying it out for a month or so. Love it to bits.
Does AdWords deliver positive ROI to your startup?
Anyone have any success or failure stories?

I've had really mixed experience using AdWords to acquire customers (profitably) for B2B Software as a Service Products.

If you calculate your Cost Per Acquisition as (AdWords CPC * Onsite Conversion Rate) then you may be paying hundreds of dollars for a client worth maybe $10-50 per month. Fine if you know they subscribe for 2 years, but if they quit in 3 months you're losing money.

Am i thinking about this right?
I wonder what percentage are caused by cigarettes. Especially combined with alcohol.
For an individual person to generate 15 dollars of ad revenue based on clicks and impressions, they would have to be pretty active, ad-wise. I think, on average across a whole system of advertising, Amazon will probably gain monetarily, not to mention the user satisfaction.

The target customer for a product like that has a genuine hate on for those ads... if it's worth it to them, it's worth it to Amazon, in my opinion.
Same happened to me. That was the moment I stopped posting answers. I was a very active user before that.
Actually, it is all theatre. Here's a recent comment with lots of citations that sums it up: http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/zjxc8/passenger_not_al...
Is there any way to make the completion on this work with zsh?
Macon is a town with a large blue-collar population that lost most of the major industries in the last 15 years. This is part of a multi-pronged approach to get Foreign-owned companies to locate low-skill jobs in the city.
Does anyone ales feel as though the majority of questions like the example in the article are asked by children? I almost always assume it is a young child asking a question like that and one who is still in the process of "learning how to learn".
+1 on this, I probably haven't used Tray to the full potential but the simple features such as putting all attachments into Dropbox and sending me an SMS for server test notifications.
I strongly recommend not reading the source, it's worse.
You could also imagine that the punishment for leaving a cell-phone was much more severe. I'm not totally in agreement with the article, but it is strange that the airline claims a phone that's switched on is a major problem, yet the way of enforcing that they are of is by giving stern looks.

The rule can very easily be broken which suggests that it is useless. They either have much stricter enforcement or none at all.

The comparison with weather conditions is problematic since there is no way to control the weather while you could introduce a detection system and severe punishments for cell phone use.
postgres docs are full of performance tips
I find all these stories weird, since on the day of the keynote I went to check buying options for Kindle Fire and there was definitely a way to buy it without "special offers", at $15-20 more the original price. What gives?
College Book Reviews on The Book Thief
This is the API that made me do it: http://api.ihackernews.com/page?format=jsonp
I was using it along with reddits api to sort posts together on this website, http://www.hackerreads.com/.
Working at a start up where multiple investors came into the same round at different valuations; so yes, they should, it makes sense as different people bring different things to the table.
It doesn't even really matter if China will become a superpower bigger than the US - since most of the production of physical products is there, it makes a lot of sense to teach children the language - it will make it so much easier to work in the future. I also still think that somewhat advanced economy classes in schools would be a great addition...
I care less about "why" than about practical techniques for managing this reality, given clients, coworkers and suits who keep an 8-5 schedule.
You're probably right, this should not depend on jQuery. I'm the most comfortable with it and decided to just roll with it this way. I'll branch out and try making it not dependable on anything other than JavaScript. Thanks for the feedback.
I would never make an API that returns time ago and force my users to sort that way. This was made because: http://api.ihackernews.com/page?format=jsonp