skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The characterization of Slashdot is accurate. Slashdot exists for the sole purpose of pandering to a particular demographic of anti-social nerds through out-of-date news articles that were posted to Reddit days earlier. It's become a pro-Google, pro-Linux marketing machine, especially in the comments section where the moderation system has been subverted to filter out all opposing opinions. I don't mean anti-Google troll posts--try writing a well-researched post that's relevant to the topic and is critical of a particular Google behavior or praises a competitor to Google and just watch what happens to your karma.

The best example I have of how out-of-touch the site has become is when, just before I left permanently, a story was posted about Reddit banning child pornography. Shockingly, the comments were filled with anger at Reddit and defense of the posting of sexualized imagery of underage girls. Posting my shocked reactions got my karma from "Excellent" to "Terrible" in half an hour. It was then that I realized the demographic of Slashdot had drastically changed, and that the more neurotypical users had long ago left for sites like Hacker News, leaving behind a group of very creepy, socially-stunted loners who seemed to have no self-awareness at all.

I have a 5-digit UID and used to read the site regularly years ago. Slashdot really is one of the worst tech communities. It's the Ain't-It-Cool-News of tech. You don't even need to visit the site to know what its front page will be any given day: Linux rules, Google rules, piracy rules, Apple sucks. That loop of topics has run every day for the last few years. Slashdot's goal is to pander to the demographic by providing them a forum to vent their rage at the conventional bogeyman of the day.
Large link targets surrounded by empty negative space seem like an easy way to solve this problem.

That's correct. Adding a tasteful mouse-over effect also serves as a nice additional visual cue.

(Speaking from experience: I have a very shaky hand due to an old injury.)
That would be an excellent way of curing yourself of the risk of ever feeling nostalgia again.
I'm curious - a quick look at your comments history shows you to have a fairly libertarian type of political leaning. But in this specific case you seem all for the government intruding to force one organisation to hand over information to another. Why the change of heart on the role of government?
There is still a lot of good legacy code hosted on SourceForge, I end up there all the time and figure that whoever the owner was never got around to moving it to github or google code.
How can you tell if it's a good summary if you didn't read the article?
oh shit.. Excuse my dumbness for not checking the date on it.
Ask NH: how to politely say "no" to potential acquirer?
1 y.o. startup, seed funded, raising round A. Few days ago we've been asked if we consider being acquired by pretty big conglomerate. We think it's too early and we can get better price in 1 year period. What can be done and how to convince them to invest in us rather than buy. Or maybe that's not a good idea?
Thanks. I hope so too.

And good feedback. I was meaning to add some padding, but it somehow slipped my mind!
Where Will the Jobs be in 2020? (hint: not tech)
Some examples:

* Resizing your browser window.

* Changing font-size for accessibility (Ctrl+, Ctrl-)

* Moving your browser between multiple screens

If responsive was server-side, each of these scenarios would cause a page reload in order to accomodate the adjusted layout.

Responsive design doesn't just mean CSS media queries. It more commonly means using floating div/ul instead of tables for layout.
Here’s What It’s Like to Run a Successful Ecommerce Site
I feel like I have tons of ideas but nowhere near the time to pursue even a fraction of them. I like a lot of these ideas and wish at least someone would pick one up and run with it so that I could take advantage of the product/service. I'd like a site where I could post such ideas. Allow for someone to post an idea with an explanation. Other users can discuss and tweak the idea and eventually, if there is enough support, form a team and actually work on it. Sort of a crowsourced incubator. Name ideas: StealMyIdea, lightbul.bs.
Windows isn't a premium product, but Office definitely still is. It costs significantly more than Apple's (or anyone else's) equivalents, and still sells by the bucket load.

The fact that surface (and other win8 tablets) can run Office gives it a huge market that the iPad currently can't get to.

It's been well known for months that Office for iPad exists and works, but MS aren't releasing it. The reason for that delay is fairly obvious.
Rethink Robotics reveals Baxter: A revolutionary manufacturing robot
At 22k with two 7 DOF arms this guy is 20x cheaper than most of it's competitors.
Take the fuzzy logic and intelligence in commercial-grade data cleansing programs, and create a version that will fit on a mobile and de-dupe my contacts.

It shouldn't just present them as one contact on the phone, but actually update the record on Google Contacts or wherever to reflect the "merged" identity.
>but all the features you list already exist in Python

Not all:

- string interpolation is way more flexible in CS

- splats are sort of partially covered by several python features, but not nearly so elegantly

- the existential operator is not found in Python at all; you have to test against None instead. Also, Python does not have anything like the "soak" feature that the existential operator does.

- No really, readable regex. Python still doesn't even have a literal notation for regexes, but CoffeeScript allows multiline literals with comments, ignored whitespace, and interpolation.

Also, I don't think that lowboy mentioned multiline lambdas, but yeah, multiline lambdas.

I once thought as you do that syntax is secondary and that what really matters is functionality. That was before I started using CoffeeScript. The thing is, syntax isn't important for the sake of making it a pleasure to write. It's important for making it a pleasure to read. And odd scoping scenarios notwithstanding, CoffeeScript is exceptional in that regard.

Here's an example. String interpolation in CoffeeScript is incredibly simple:

console.log "Hello #{name}, how are you doing?"

translates to

console.log "Hello"+name+", how are you doing?"

That's all. Typing it out, CoffeeScript saves you one keystroke. But there is a subtle boon to readability in the interpolation syntax. The first line says "We're placing the result of an expression here". The second line says "We're ending the string, concatenating the result of an expression, and then we're going to concatenate another string to that." The canonization of the idiom into syntax lets your brain relax and stop trying to translate.
If they're smart they'll try to create a profit model oriented around online services, and switch their revenue stream to be funded through this.

I'd be fascinated to hear details on how they can fund the £3.5 billion-ish the Beeb gets through each year via the licence fee by a profit model oriented around online services :-)
The pizza button is a fantastic idea as an iPhone app. Show a huge pizza icon, nothing else, press it and get your pizza delivered to your home and discounted from your credit card.

As a developer, here are the interesting bits:

- Press many times get as many pizzas
- Configurable default pizza
- Configurable default credit card
- Configurable address
- Keep it as simple as possible

Press pizza, send order to papa johns, get back confirmation and estimated delivery time.

Love it!
SF is not "social", quite slow and is more difficult to use for developers. However, I feel that it is more end-user friendly. Maybe not inherently, but because of the differences in culture. There are tons of software there that I can just download and install without any tinkering. I don't recall a single application that I've ever installed from GitHub.
Congrats on the upcoming launch. I've been wanting to check out Divshot for awhile but I haven't gotten an invite :)

I am the founder of Jetstrap (http://jetstrap.com/) and we've built an interface builder for Bootstrap as well, so we are definitely in the same space.
Today is National Cheeseburger Day
Yeah that's obvious, but I disagree with "the whole point of the article" hence my previous statement.
I don't mean to speak for CWuestefeld, but from my perspective its about transparency in government. Mann is/was a government employee (I'm not talking about federal funding, but the fact that he was an employee of the Commonwealth of Virginia through UVA), and as such should be subject to the same laws and ideals governing transparency with regard to government workers (and resources), from the Governor down to low level bureaucratic civil servants.
Who doesn't like free money? I just didn't want to come across like that was the only reason I was posting the link.
This is insanely handy - thanks!
Silicon Valley & The Currency of Time
"BBC's anti-war stance"

If nothing else I guess that shows that they aren't simply a government mouthpiece.

And it's hardly that they are anti-war (I can remember their coverage of everything from the Falklands onward) - they were anti Gulf War 2 but then most people in the UK were...
We don't know what Microsoft will be charging for their own surface tablets, I'd hold off making any conclusions until then. I'm going to guess that Microsoft will be undercutting their "partners" in the tablet market.
"Caps would defeat this purpose."

What purpose? The purpose of delivering an obsolete product by the time it reaches customers months after?
I could previously see 6/7 of the account's previous tweets (on a more-standard resolution than most devs are used to),, now I see 3. All for a blue-ish box.
I can give you many counterexamples, at least in computer gaming circles. You need to have something in addition to cynicism, though.
There are even weirder examples of this in the alcohol market. Jeroboam and methuselah bottles of champagne are easily 200-400% more expensive than the equivalent amount of alcohol packaged in normal-sized bottles. I always found this amusing, like a tax on ostentatiousness.
If someone is a biology researcher who does some programming for their research, does that programmer need to stay on top of developments in the software industry? Or know the history of the programming field ... as well as keep up with the biology field?
> WiFi has nothing to do with the requirement for a massive heatsink. If it did, you iPhone would be a huge block of aluminum with fins. No, the heatsink is required because 80% (or more) of the energy going into an LED is converted into heat

I believe the author meant that without proper cooling, the excess heat would fry the WiFi controller

That being said, I have no clue what the operating temperatures of today's WiFi systems are
This was an attack article through and through.

The author chides them for not using a more powerful processor (that would kill the battery life), when Microsoft worked directly with Intel and had them build a processor designed specifically for the Windows 8 kernel that would offer the longest possible battery life.

Shortsighted indeed.
How to Raise $10,000 on Kickstarter
No, it is not 'professional' just because you feel entitled to that information and have labeled it so.

The lives of your potential employees are their own, their time spent outside of work belongs to them. That time does not belong to you, it's not on the table, it's not up for discussion. It is, in fact, fucking creepy that you feel like that because you're offering a pittance of a salary you should be able to rummage through the contents of someone's life looking for things 'you don't like'.

You have no respect for the lives of your employees, else you wouldn't expect their social network profiles all lined up and waiting for you to hold judgement over, looking for 'barbaric rituals' and other unfunny comments. It's that simple.
Punch Reloaded
There's no mention of the storage on these Asus tablets.

The article compares to the 16 GB "new iPad" but if it has 32 GB or 64 GB, it's actually priced in line with the respective model on the former and $100 cheaper on the latter.
Two points:

1.) The article title and contents say it SUGGESTS Microsoft has/will lose the war. It doesn't declare anything.

2.) Historically speaking, pricing commodity gear isn't rocket science. History shows that competitors in the space almost always are on price parity.
Difference being iPod 1 had a much, much better UX than a Nomad.

Anything with less than 200DPI is not going to deliver that in 2012. Even at $300 it would be barely competitive, and at $600 it'll join the Xoom in forgotten tabletland.
A well-kept secret for growing FB brand fan pages overnight
We should have thought of this. We will get this incorporated, until then: without funding you simply need to multiply the exit value by your starting % ownership less dilution from employees (good approximation).
Japan has found out pretty much the same thing. With a huge aging population and not enough people to care for them they have/are encountering this issue sooner than the US has (mostly).

One of the interesting answers to the problem for the Japanese has been to work toward mechanized solutions to many problems that might otherwise have been performed by additional workers. If any of them are actually reasonable I think has yet to be seen. I do know that on a nearly daily basis I see some new robot meant to care for or interact with the elderly population. It's kind of an interesting development and oddly seems to have pushed for more expressive and capable robots.
>> The heat sink is crucial, especially if you want to put
lots of wifi electronics into the bulb.
> Which is complete and utter nonsense. WiFi has nothing to
do with the requirement for a massive heatsink. If it
did, you iPhone would be a huge block of aluminum with fins.

Maybe they're saying that the WiFi components are temperature sensitive, and that the LED element generates tons of heat (more than, say, the iPhone)?
Contest tracking

Track the developer contents, list the APIs allowed, deadlines, countries, prizes.
Allow people to comment around the tasks
Allow people to provide training around the tasks (sell the e-Book versions of the training, give part of money to the original contributor)
Allow people to subscribe by programming language
Setup landing sites by keywords, etc.
Brilliant example. There's another social signal that's relevant across cultures regarding wedding rings: the design of the setting. The complexity and attractiveness of how the stones are set is what people notice, above and beyond the stones themselves. (The only thing people tend to notice about the stones is the size and quantity.)

My wife wears a moissanite ring, which she loves. The deciding factor was that we could afford a unique custom-designed setting if we went with moissanite. The same ring with diamonds would have been more expensive by at least a factor of ten.

My wife worked in high-end bridal in NYC for a few years, and rings were always a topic of conversation. The amount of times prospects noticed the stones in her ring were moissanite: zero. The setting sends a stronger signal, and it's less expensive. To echo patio, people who saw the ring assumed I was unreasonably well off, when the true total price was less than the latest MacBook.

Paying up for "perfect" diamonds is a complete waste of money from a signaling standpoint. Spend on the setting and design, not the stones.
this makes no sense. on a purely personal, self-development level, you're talking yourself out of opportunities for no gain.

there's nothing magical about lisp compared to other languages. to read it you don't need a cs degree and you don't need vast levels of intelligence - you just need practice. after a while it becomes quite clear.

you're free to think whatever you want, of course, but this kind of negative attitude - "it's for the smart people, not me" - just means that you lose out.

lisp itself is not that far from a language like python (or, i guess, in the context of this thread, ruby) once you get used to it. it's really not rocket science. all you're doing here is harming yourself.
Excepting modern professionals in various European countries where 1 month is pretty standard.
A single days case work for a London Magistrate
I've been thinking about something similar to this - particularly for me in relation to when bands bring out new albums or new TV series come out. I was thinking I'd probably tackle it a vertical at a time and find a source for the information (e.g. last.fm for albums, IMDB for movies/TV series) that can be put to use automatically. I reckon the simplest way to monetize this would be affiliate links in the alerts - the click through is obviously going to be pretty high (people have actively said they're interested in something) but I've never seen affiliates as a great source of revenue.
There's an inverse curve to being the dinosaur who doesn't want to change. When your technology is phasing out its hard to find work, but when the technology is old and crufty and you're one of the few people who know it then you are in demand again.
A lot of products are targeted at confused and befuddled people. The "Protect Your Identity" ad could be an ad for one of those, in which case Yahoo's optimization process has placed it very well.
I've always thought the func block list syntax in Perl [1] also had a strong influence on Ruby's blocks. Here's an example of map in both languages:

# ruby
double = [1..10].map { |x| x * 2 }

# perl
my @double = map { $_ * 2 } 1..10;

NB. For more examples of the func block list syntax in Perl see grep and List::Util / List::MoreUtils modules.

And it's easy create new ones as well:

sub loop (&) {
my $block = shift;
$block->() while 1;
}

loop { say "Nuts" };

And you can also chain them together to build more complex constructs:

sub ifTrue (&@) {
my ($block, $cond) = @_;
$block->() if $cond;
$cond;
}

sub ifFalse (&@) {
my ($block, $cond) = @_;
$block->() unless $cond;
$cond;
}

ifTrue { say "True" } ifFalse { say "False" } 1 == 1;

I once wrote a lazy functional syntax in Perl using this approach :)

[1] - Not sure what the proper name for this syntax is!
I was so pleased when I acquired the username `bogomips` on sf. Never did use it for much though.

Sad how obvious it is how it slipped away long before github filled the vacuum.
There is such a thing as an e-fax (you send an email and it magically turns into a fax on the other side). I have only seen it from one side and do not have any details, though.

When I was doing Lots Of Paperwork for something, I'd often print out reams at the office and fax reams back. I consider myself rather fortunate that no one ever complained; being friends with the receptionist (who sits next to the fax and was thus ideally suited to calling me out on excessive usage of office equipment for personal use) probably helped.
In the example provided the ad link has a decent amount of white space between it and the inbox link. There's even an intended barrier between the two in the form of a horizontal rule, granted one pixel. What more do you want?

Are we to ascertain the shakiness level of the user to determine the proper amount of white space? A CSS media query maybe?

@media min-shakiness: 0.5 and max-shakiness: 1

But then, I'm just being rude here, sorry.

The other case seemingly ignored here is that the clicked link in no way resembles the intended link. Assuming the user can read the link it seems he did not read what he's clicking on. Granted, life puts limitations on us as we get older but I don't understand how one can predict behaviors of people who do not fully read what they are clicking on.

There's a great deal to be said about examples of bad design causing people to do things they did not intend, I don't believe this is one of them.
iPlayer shouldn't be assumed to be 'free' to use. The BBC is paid for by the UK license fee-payers (the majority of the population) - there's no reason why other countries should be able to access it. Not to say that I'd be against charging a subscription for overseas access though.
I had to walk around some US suburbs recently to visit a friend, it was hilarious how sprawly, labyrinthine areas with zero sidewalks and the barest of shoulders were advertised on the real estate signs as "walkable". I suppose you can technically walk from one place to another, but not easily, and not with any density of things to walk to.
Every Libertarian I have ever met or talked to has been absolutely rock solid on the position of government transparency, which is what he is arguing for (he certainly doesn't get a choice to not pay for this research, the IRS frowns on that).
Find me an app

App to do social voting for iPhone/iPad app to find apps for X
Make it free to watch (viral aspect)

Pay $0.99 to vote for questions/ideas
$5 for 10 votes (or some similar scaling)
If not winning, keep (all, half?) the votes
The most voted proposal - somebody at the company does the search, review of requirements
Allow to tag, tweet, share to get followers, maybe even track source
Also can be leveraged into contacting the original develops and asking them to add specific features (maybe with committed funds - Mini kickstarter)

Something like this? https://openspacestore.com/
http://allthingsd.com/20111213/an-honest-to-goodness-app-sto... (service since dead though, don't follow links from article)
I think you could get this data by tracking (1) How many people came in, potentially via number of meals sold (2) How many times you have to re-order each type of drink. It wouldn't be real time but the data presumably already exists. Plus nowadays I see those fancy electronic dispensers with touch screens and would be very surprised if they didn't have built in metrics.
Weird, aside from the first email in August I've had no email notification that it would start today. The only way I knew about it was through HN.
A certain segment of Android users--I stress that it's not all of them, but a segment of them--has become the most annoying, obnoxious kind of poster on the internet, worse than the biggest Apple fanboys ever were, convinced that they're smarter than everyone else for using Android and that they're freedom fighters for rooting their cell phones.
I was encouraging you to write down your mathematical evidence of better performing algorithms, because I know from my experience that when I try to write down proofs, my assumptions and reasoning become clearer. And often a step in the proof or logic that seems trivial becomes less trivial once you actually try to lay out the proof.

I believe that one of two things will arise when you go to write up a mathematical proof. One, you will be dependent on a statistical test that makes a normal distribution assumption implicitly or explicitly. Two, you will dependent on a bound that only applies in the limit. There is a third possibility, which is the most interesting to me, which is that you are dependent on a period of stationarity in your data, in other words, the distribution you are measuring must be stationary.

The proofs in the MAB papers are not intentionally obtuse or ignoring mainstream statistical ideas. They are written that way to say very explicit things under well defined assumptions. Locking down assumptions and being very precise is what writing down a mathematical proof is all about.
I rather not be in a 100 degree Celsius room.
The Facebook Eye and the artist’s eye
Kids' checklist

For pre-reading kids, activities with big-pretty icons for things like:
putting toys away
brushing teeth
etc.

Allows them to check items off to give kids good habits. Gamify the achievements.
This exists for the fridge, but doing it on mobile devices makes it look cooler.
The future of discourse
Sorry, I meant to point out that there are two possible ISPs that the user might have trouble accessing it on. To my knowledge, no UK ISP blocks content by an automatic or specific filter, aside from the Pirate Bay of course.
Microsoft has signed a licensing agreement with BlackBerry manufacturer RIM