skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Meh. Its an opinion that was formed from observation after a long period of time. I don't have the time to find individual instances, and I really don't want to dig through that site anymore.

Also: if I did mention support for each of the points whats stopping those examples from being edited, deleted, or someone from aruging "those are extreme cases"?
I don't know how the things work on the Fire, but in the ad supported e-ink kindles the ads are fairly unobtrusive. They appear on the rotating "screensaver" images (so you see them when you first pick up and start to use the device) and also as a banner on the home screen. They don't appear when you're reading books or otherwise using your Kindle. The ads I've seen were pretty tasteful too. No "one weird trick" belly fat ads or stuff like that.
...and made it standard on a widely selling phone, and got app developers to make their apps with high-res art so users could actually take advantage of it, and decided to push it to their other devices also, repeating the process in other markets. Now there is fire on Microsoft to do the same, and I wouldn't be surprised if the whole industry doubles DPI on tablets and PCs within a couple of years.

I'm sure Apple wasn't the first manufacturer to get rid of floppy disk drives and standardize around USB with the iMac, but they surely had a huge impact in their choices.
I'm not sure it was a useful one. There is a similar dip in the early 90s that doesn't seem to correspond to much.
Searching for a Speed Limit in High-Frequency Trading
Amazon backtracks, will offer $15 opt-out for ads on Kindle Fire tablets
I think its good that a CEO steps up and reaches out to customers, but many people have had bad experiences with funds being frozen on PayPal along with their terrible phone support, and things like that never get forgotten. I get the impression that addressing fraud on PayPal's global scale is very hard. But they could make things a little more bearable by training their phone support people to be at least a little more polite and customer-oriented.
Presto. Compared the chord that Randy Bachman played against the original track and it sounds exactly the same to me. For anyone else interested in knowing what the 12-string chord is, pretty sure this is what he described:

1st string = G on the 3rd fret (pinky)
2nd string = C on﻿ the 1st fret (pointer finger)
3rd string = A on the 2nd fret (middle finger)
4th string = F on the 3rd fret (ring finger)
5th string = C on the 3rd fret (with the thumb, curl it over)
6th string = G on the 3rd fret (with the thumb as well)
The myth of the super programmer
I think there was a round of refinery closings around that time.
This is a worthy point. Newspapers are also products that you buy (typically, for the higher end ones at least) that are also supported by ads. Other such products exist, such as cable television, dvds and movie tickets with pre-roll ads, hulu plus, etc.
The ban on electronic devices rests on anecdotes
the dip in refinery sales might be related to the shutdown of a few refineries which appears to have occurred during fall 2011.

here is a google search i used: https://www.google.com/search?q=gas+refinery+shuts+down&...

edit: speeling.
No, the main thing Apple did was make it available to me (and hundreds of millions of people around the world). To buy and use, in a great form factor, with great battery life, and accompanying software.
Perhaps sensitive but nonspecific?
something has been very effective at reducing deaths by fire: http://www.chicagonewscoop.org/chicago/wp-content/uploads/20...
First off, I agree. However there is a difference between a new player tripping at a hurdle and an old hand making the same mistake. There is an expectation (by me at least) that tricky situations have been encountered by large organisations before, and that a combination of institutional knowledge and good systems prevent problems escalating. New businesses deserve (I think) a little more leeway.
I detest that questions are being closed because they are subjective. Often I am interested in subjective questions. Opinions on Clojure vs. Scala and the like. Discussions are even better.
Looks to me like they split it up into retail sales by gas stations owned by the refiner, and wholesale sales for resale.

Most sales are wholesale -
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&...

Going to take a wild guess and say that a refinery sold some gas stations or somehow a bunch of sales got reclassified from retail to wholesale.

See definitions
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/TblDefs/pet_cons_refmg_tbldef2.a...

If you think about it 25m gallons per day is not the right number for the USA, it's like 0.1 gallons per person order of magnitude, 10x that seems more reasonable, you also have to count all the public transportation, trucks etc.

If you hie over to FRED and look at retail sales from gasoline stations (which also includes candy bars, lottery tickets, etc. and is in dollars, not gallons), you will also see there was no recent massive drop -

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CES4244700001

edit: Ack! that's employment at gas stations. Here is retail sales at gas stations -

http://www.economagic.com/em-cgi/data.exe/cenret/nrt447sa

the human mind is truly a rationalizing machine - when you look hard enough for a reason you will always find it, even when the data is bad.
11-inch MacBook Air. People are always amazed I code on an 11-inch but honestly it works just fine--> (screenshot of eclipse) http://i.imgur.com/84TlU.png

The resolution is actually fairly generous. And if you're hacking in the terminal it's more than sufficient.

I find the 11 inch keyboard is just a lot easier to type on. You don't have this huge plane of plastic sticking out under your wrists.

And I generally lay down on the couch. I can't handle desk+chair. Too hard on my wrists and back. If I have to work at my desk I usually try to prop my feet up somewhere.
I think this represents a stay of execution for PayPal. I bashed them in the past, but maybe there is some hope.
The CEO also posted a reply to the original story here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4485627

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidmarcus
Not that I pay for.

I'm not paying for a product with ads (especially intrusive ones) in it.
Do you have any evidence of this contraction? I'd be curious to hear which statistics you think are better indicators.
Decrease in cigarette smoking over time?
Amazon started making cheaper versions of kindles that were subsidized by adds. They added it as an option to drive prices down as much as possible. My guess is that the add supported versions were so popular that they wanted to stop selling the more expensive option.

It was still a bad idea not to have an option.
Shit Apple Fanatics Say Part 1 & 2
Use hierarchical directories. They work. I sort my mp3's into two distinct music collections:

/Albums/
/Singles/

Then I sort by genre:

/Albums/%GENRE
/Singles/%GENRE

In Albums, I then sort by artist, then by album:

/Albums/%GENRE/%ARTIST/%ALBUM/# - %SONG.mp3

Whereas in Singles, I organize by:

/Singles/%GENRE/%ARTIST - %SONG.mp3

This system scales very well. I have a 100GB collection and can nail down any song or album in my collection in a few clicks.
Last time I looked into javascript based mining perhaps a year ago, the effective earnings for a site with a few thousand uniques per day was only a few cents. Considering that a CPU intensive background process will impact negatively upon some of your visitors, is it really worth it?

Happy to be corrected if circumstances have changed since.
If you want use IDE, try some vim plugin for IDE, like vrapper, ideavim and so on
Posting screenshots of text instead of text make me sad.

It excludes visually-challenged people from this discussion, makes old people get out their glasses and squint, and makes cutting and pasting impossible.
> I'm curious: if you were starting an open source project and you wanted to make contributing as seamless an experience as possible, would you still use tabs for indentation?

That's an interesting question, because reducing friction for contributors is important. But yes, I'd still use tabs. It honestly sounds like the least of my worries.

Clearly, many people prefer two-space indents as your study shows. But how many people are seriously inconvenienced if they have to edit a file using tabs? Don't modern programmer's editors detect a file's indentation settings automatically? Or do they? I'd hate to use an editor that didn't. I use Komodo IDE and even though I have tabs as my default, when I load a file using space indentation it uses the correct setting for that file.

> As for coding in a proportional font, I've never even heard of that before. I'm tempted to try it just for a day, to see if I can get over the initial revulsion. Which font do you use?

Well, if you think you'll find it revolting, then maybe you will. :-) It depends a lot on your coding style. If you use column alignment (alignment after the indent, as opposed to simple indentation) much, a proportional font won't work for you. I stopped using alignment in my code a long time ago, so when I tried a proportional font I hardly noticed any difference.

I've tried a number of fonts, but the one I keep coming back to for some odd reason is Georgia - I just like the way it looks on my ThinPad display. Georgia is kind of a radically proportional font - numbers are proportionally spaced along with letters, where many other proportional fonts have monospaced numbers - but I just find it pleasing to my eye.

Komodo has a killer feature for proportional font programming: when you set up a font/color theme, you specify two fonts, a proportional font and a monospaced font, and you can switch between those two fonts easily. Oddly enough, they don't provide a keyboard shortcut by default, but it's easy to set one up in their keyboard shortcut dialog - I use Alt+O on Windows. So when I'm reading code from someone who uses column alignment, I can just hit Alt+O and read it in a monospaced font.
Year______Cars____Trucks_________ Total

2011_	6,089,422___	6,951,210___	13,040,632

2010_	5,635,433___	6,136,787__	11,772,220

2009_	5,400,890___	5,200,478___	10,601,368

Here are some data. Lots of trucks.

Fleet Fuel economy != improving ?

edit:

Newer trucks are not much better on Gas, still ~20Mpg/ish

Maybe old trucks were horrible? Dunno

If not replacements, blending in more trucks is not helping MPGs
The banner on the home screen is pretty annoying.
The data seems a bit fishy to me. I have a hard time believing that gasoline consumption did not change for 22 years (1986 to 2008).
Show HN: sortByTimeAgo.js - A jQuery plugin I'm working on to sort by time ago.
I think this is a smart move on Amazon's part (even if they feel slightly forced into it). I currently own a 3rd gen kindle touch with ads and preordered a "paperwhite" kindle with ads earlier this week.

It's quite likely that I would have never bought either kindle if I didn't know that I'd have the option, after purchase, to pay the difference and get rid of the ads. This way, I can see how bad they are and judge for myself if I'd rather go ad free.

Having this option on the latest Kindle fire would make me more likely to purchase the version with ads initially, as it's a lower price and I know I've got an "out".

In the ~9 months that I've owned the kindle, the ads haven't been offensive or obtrusive so I've never bothered to get rid of them (and I refuse to watch cable TV because the ads bother me too much).
<sarcasm>

Whatever you do, do NOT turn off Javascript, or stop using Microsoft products like Windows, or Adobe products like their "Flash" player or even their seemingly harmless PDF viewer.

Don't be fooled into thinking these "highly sophisticated" hackers need such things in order to succeed in their "exploits".

And even if they did, the costs of NOT using Javascript, Microsoft and Adobe far, far outweight the benefits.

</sarcasm>

Nevermind the word "lethal", I've always wondered by the word "attack" was chosen within the cryptography/computer security world. Maybe someone knows the history behind it? Once you get used to this term it's seems normal. But at first it's a bit strange. Playing around with computers and binary numbers seems like the furthest thing from an "attack" one could imagine. But I guess it goes without saying that computer nerds have very vivid imaginations.
He said he just took over 5 months ago. He's probably just finished filling out his w-2 and selecting health insurance :)
Not sure about the logic of this: "They will live in a world where China and India will have 50 percent of the world GDP. They will live in a world where, if they cannot function successfully in the Asian culture, they will pay a heavy price."

Today, the US + EU have about 50% of the world's GDP. Do Chinese kids pay a 'heavy price' because they cannot function successfully in the Western culture? It seems more like the heavy price is paid due to lack of economic integrity and opportunity in China. The importance is in getting a solid education. There will be plenty of work to do here in the US and in China.

Related topic: The Hong Kong Chinese don't want their kids to learn about about China: http://news.yahoo.com/hk-drops-china-education-plans-mass-pr...
Not to mention random emails about stuff with no attached context.
Production doesn't show a massive dip, but does show a general decline.
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&...

price spikes do seem to align though..
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&...
The product is discounted compared to other devices in it's range and they did that by showing ads on the lock screen that is often unused by users. In the past Amazon's kindle ads have been quite tasteful and non-intrusive.
Just because newspapers are not doing well in general does not ipso facto make all every facet of their business model wrong.

Dying industries are usually doing things 80% or 90% right - otherwise how did they become the powerhouses of old? But it's the 10% or 20% that's changed from their heyday that's killing them.

I don't even have an opinion of ads on the Kindle Fire. I just think the argument you're making is fallacious.
That was my conclusion as well, this seems to be a more realistic representation of consumption: http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&...

Although its not easy to tell, the EIA's site could use some improvements in terms of clearly defining what the data displayed represents.
It was a big moment! A load of other crazy stuff happened around the same time - the original artists were played the track and approved it for general release, and I was getting about 100 emails a day from random listeners who had tracked me down.

The best advice I ever got was not to associate my real name with the track, so that a relatively crappy 'one hit wonder' didn't define me forever. Now it doesn't matter as much. Suffice to say, I'm firmly in favor of pseudonyms online.
The problem there is, if Google donated $7.5 million (15,000 engineers * $500) to the Eclipse Foundation, that would certainly give the impression that Google had an unfair amount of influence on the direction of project, compared to a small company only paying a couple of hundred $ (or an open source developer, not paying anything at all).

I think that goes directly against what you say is the primary benefit of open source: that no one company has an undue amount of influence on the product.

I think it's much better that they contribute a few engineering resources directly to the product, rather than just handing over money. That way, they're guaranteed to be engaging directly in the open source "process".
Ok - Awesome idea and project. I just tested it out and it worked great but I did have one bit of feedback.

To make it more realistic, you should let the call run a bit longer. For example, on my phone with the volume up in a quiet room you can hear the beep when the call ends. With this service the call ends quite abruptly. Perhaps let it run for a few seconds though I am not sure if this would incur any cost on your side?
4bit: Terminal Color Scheme Designer
Sure.

You are looking at one, in gasoline sales.

U6 over 15% looks pretty miserable:

http://helpthe99ers.blogspot.com/2012/02/graph-of-day-u3-u4-and-u6.html

and the less-easily-manipulated population employment ratio is bouncing along the bottom (maybe contracting):

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300000

General sales taxes in CA are down (although the latest data is not up yet):

http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/united-states/state-taxes/california/general-sales-and-gross-receipts/tax-revenue-per-capita/2011/q3#graph

Generally, the harder the statistic, the worse the situation looks. Which, given that we are in an election year and should expect the govt. to be juicing the economy as much as it can, should be worrying.
This is so so true! The problem is that the person saying "you're doing it wrong" often has no clue what they're talking about. I daresay Rich Hickey, Bjarne Stroustrup, or Brendon Eich would get told they're "doing it wrong" too.

When people ask questions online, far too often the person answering assumes that whoever asked the question must be a complete idiot. There are plenty of topics in which I would consider myself an expert, but I still get treated as if I know nothing about the subject. (I've noticed the problem also manifests itself in academia -- the more prestigious the academic institution, the more everyone assumes everyone else is "incompetent by default").
Thats not what the data represents. It represents sales by refiners to retail. That is buying gas from a Shell gas station (also a refiner) counts, buying gas from a mom + pop corner store who wholesale buys their gas from a refiner (or distributor) doesn't count. The graph seems to just say that some refiner sold off their retail gas stations (or something like that).
Did you read the article? Google donates quite a bit to Eclipse in money and man power. This one time donation was specific to a need for new machines _today_.
The site works just fine

How do I add text to a retweet?
This seemed familiar; Hacker News discussed this topic in 2008: "Beatles Unknown 'A Hard Day's Night' Chord Mystery Solved Using Fourier Transform", http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=347231

The current article claims improvements on that solution.
Your signup process is really frustrating. First, your About you should give me an indication of how many characters have been completed and how many are left. Second, your Captcha is asking for the X month of the year. Most people I know dont say September (when typing at least), instead just say Sep. There is no visual clue or early warning before you bounce me 4 times. Frustrating.
As someone with no idea what libuv is, the book certainly doesn't explain what it is very well in the first few pages.

> This ‘book’ is a small set of tutorials about using libuv as a high performance evented I/O library which offers the same API on Windows and Unix.

Okay.

> You will use libuv purely in the context of node.js. For this you will require some other resources as the book does not cover parts specific to v8/node.js.

A library for node.js, I take it? My best guess is that libuv provides a way for using C code in javascript.
I have an interest in this and am trying to build up a disk survey system to try and learn about this in the open, it's still not up yet but you can subscribe for an announcement and read some thoughts at http://disksurvey.org/
look at historical prices, my guess is they were spiking

[yes, from $1.XX in '05 to $4.XX in '08]

edit: citation

http://66.70.86.64/ChartServer/ch.gaschart?Country=Canada...
Strange, I ordered a Paperwhite on Thursday and they charged extra for 'without special offers' (which I opted for). I'd assume that they would do a similar thing with the Fire.
There's a way to eliminate vertical alignment issues and make your code equally readable in a proportional or monospaced font: don't use vertical alignment.

About ten years ago, I got tired of having to adjust the spacing whenever I edited the function name in code using vertical alignment. I'd been running across too many cases where people would take code like this:

def func_with_lots_of_parms(parm1, parm2,
parm3, parm4):

and change it to:

def betterFunctionName(parm1, parm2,
parm3, parm4):

Oops.

So I asked myself, who do we have a different rule for indenting with parentheses than we do for braces? We don't indent functions like this (JavaScript example):

function foobar(param1) {doSomething();
doSomethingElse(param1);
andWrapItUp();
oneMoreThing();}

Geez, you'd have to re-indent the whole thing if you came up with a better name for foobar()!

So I tried indenting function parameter declarations and function calls just like function bodies, and I found I liked it quite well:

def func_with_lots_of_parms(
parm1, parm2,
parm3, parm4
):
doStuff()

or JavaScript:

function doSeveralThings(
param1, // one interesting param
param2, // another interesting param
paramWithLongerName, // comment too, but don't "align" comments
lastParam // that's enough
) {
doOneThing();
finishUp();
}

Some time later I discovered that whatever version of Visual Studio I was using back then supported proportional fonts, so I tried it out and found my code looked pretty much the same either way, just nicer looking and more of it fitting on the screen with the proportional font.

If I'd still been using a lot of column alignment, though, I probably wouldn't have liked the proportional fonts at all.
Chalk up another one, Bob.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Metcalfe#Incorrect_pred...
Forget the radio interference, put hard projectiles like laptops and tablets away during take-off and landings so they don't go flying around the cabin if there is an incident.
I get those sorts of answers most often because the real problem is too complex to give as the example, and I simplify the example down to what's essential to my question. Then, there's often a better way to solve that particular example, which wasn't the goal. I often even put something in like "I know you could solve the problem in this example with X, and I'm not looking for those." And people will still say "Why are you doing it that way just do X". That gets pretty infuriating.
Caves? I bet $15 is more valuable than the ads for most users. I wouldn't characterize this as Amazon "caving" in!
This article's conclusion is kind of a let-down, but I think the thrust of it touches on part of what bothers me about the Bay Area entrepreneur scene: the strangely myopic focus on "business" as the primary mechanism for "creating."

If we can accept that there are profitable companies which aren't socially productive or inspiring, shouldn't it follow that there are potentially a myriad of possible projects which might be amazing and worthwhile things to build, even if they obviously won't turn a profit?

I can understand needing to sustain your own existence, but I'm always curious why "entrepreneurs" who've made enough to live comfortably (and even to endow their children) continue focus their productive energy on building companies measured by financial success, rather than exploring other creative possibilities.
Explaining a "better" way is great as an addendum to an answer for the actual problem asked. As you said, it can be very helpful to provide an out of the box solution.

However, it is very annoying when I ask a question and the only answers are some variant of, "you are doing it wrong." Multiple times I have had to write an explanation that is longer than my actual question to convince people that I actually do want an answer to the question I asked.

If you really think you understand my problem better than I do, based on a simplified explanation, awesome. I would love to hear a better way to go about what I am doing. But please, try to answer the actual question first (or at least say you don't know the answer). There is a slim chance the "better" way is not actually workable in the real world scenario.