skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It really depends on the target audience. I, for example, love to read documentation rather than watch videos. However, the users of my webapp (not technical at all) prefer video tutorials. We provide a large number of knowledgebase articles as well as video tutorials. Our video tutorials have 4x the click-through than our knowledgebase.

I think the tech community does prefer docs over video but, the rest of the world loves watching videos.
It actually happens in some scenarios.

Let's say, outside of the tech world: When you send a post card (cheap ones) to a friend, you won't receive any delivery confirmation. You just send it and go do whatever you please, believing the post card will be there. If the envelope don't get there, no biggies, you will send another on your next trip anyways. No hurt feelings.

But, let's say you need to send me a check. You want to know if I received it or not, specially because sometimes I don't cash checks right away. Without confirmation it would be difficult to you to decide if you cancel the previous check and send another, or do nothing, because I could be at that very time trying to cash the check or it could be lost somewhere. The delivery confirmation is an add-on where you receive a confirmation that the envelope got there, but see, it will take time for that confirmation to arrive. It's expensive. If you are sending a 0.01 check, you can just send another if the recipient asks.
Testing iOS 6 Maps – tldr; It’s a Beta.
Fees are already included in the given price. One example is $38 per month for triple play in France. This is actually 30 € all taxes included.
Dunno, all I saw was a grey box:

YOU DO NOT HAVE THE FLASH PLAYER INSTALLED.
MEDIA REQUIRES FLASH TO PLAY.
DOWNLOAD IT HERE

Yes, it was even uppercase.
I agree, but I think it can be done. The early "outside AOL" internet was less well designed, more haphazard, etc. What eventually pulled people out of AOL and into the metaphorical wild was all the riches that could be found there, and found easily and painlessly (getting to that latter step was the key). Both literally, from a business-opportunity standpoint, and figuratively, from a consumer-enjoyment standpoint. There was more to gain outside the walls of the AOL garden, and so people were (eventually) willing to step outside the comfortable, reasonably well-designed walls and explore it. And they started exploring it when it became easy to find and easy to access.

Apple has done a phenomenal job creating a design-forward, UX-optimized, sparklingly walled garden. But I believe that a richness of content, easily accessed and easily used, can lure people outside.

Two things need to happen: 1) more entrepreneurs need to be convinced that the big rewards are outside the walls, and 2) the things they create will need to lure people out there. We may need a third factor, like the one Yahoo and eventually Google performed for the nascent WWW, which was to add the easy-access layer on top of it all.

Full disclosure: I used to work at Apple, I greatly admire them, and I bear no ill will toward them at all. But I am a big proponent of the open internet, and I believe that the arc of history will bend back toward it eventually.
I think "Number" is a better name than "Float". It's a much more common word which I immediately get a feeling for. That typeof NaN === 'number' really makes sense for me, and I feel that most wouldn't need a long explanation to get it either.
I agree with the idea, but please don't put them into the browser but in a "social media" extension. I have never clicked on one of these buttons (in fact, I block them), so cluttering the default interface of my browser with them would be very annoying.
Lights Out For Flickr Photo Sharing – How Social Media Platforms Can Die And Why
I think 'forgotten' should be removed from the thread title. Linkbaity. This is a fairly well known doc.
Fun video
I envy you; you haven't had your "this is all bullshit" moment yet. It will happen. It's not questioning the value of the technology (as you believe), it's questioning the place in your life.

This isn't "neo-Luddism," this is people questioning whether all of those things are actually important enough to us to warrant a context switch. As I get older, the context switches hurt more and more, and I desire a higher SNR throughout my life. That means less Facebook, less Twitter, and a lot less HN. All push notifications are off on my phone. I wouldn't recommend my system to everyone, but I do derive a tangible benefit from being less connected. (There is also something to be said for keeping the constant, mostly inane chatter of random Internet denizens out of your mind, but it's too early to draw any conclusions there).

Generally, if it happens on the Internet, it probably doesn't matter very much. I'll see it when I need to see it.
Some good discussions taking place here, and I responded to some of the individual points made, but I wanted to chime in and say that the Paleo mode of thinking, which suggests that we should eat only what we "evolved" to eat, is bullshit.

There are a multitude of problems with the assumptions underlying the Paleo diet. First, the statement that the human genome evolved during the Pleistocene period rests on the gene-centered view of evolution, which is described by prominent biologists as excessively reductionist. It's akin to "Darwinian fundamentalism", and as with fundamentalism of any kind, it's dangerous thinking.

Second, the idea that 10,000 years is not enough to ensure an adequate adaptation to agrarian diets is questionable. For example, humans got a lot better at tolerating lactose just a few thousand years after animal husbandry was invented. Similarly, scientists have observed increases in the number of copies of the gene for amylase, which digests starch. This appears to be related to agriculture. Both of these changes in human physiology suggest that 400-500 generations may be enough to sufficiently adapt to changes in the environment.

Third, we have evidence to suggest that the diet of Stone Age humans did in fact include refined starches and grains that are excluded from the Paleo diet. This evidence shows Paleolithic societies processing cereals for food use at least as early as 30,000 years ago, and possibly even as early as 100,000-200,000 years ago.

The bottom line is that the Paleo diet is based on a misunderstanding of biological evolution and seems to be inspired by a naive adaptationistic view of life.
That's why N9 makes more sense. I hope Jolla will make a handset that will work on all major GSM networks in US.
> Governments should use the helpfulness of ISPs as a criterion for awarding public contracts

It's almost impressive how even the most innocuous public projects can be turned against us by the governments. Every euro you pay in taxes can and will be used against you, no courts necessary.
I was surprised to see the article mention that they'll be going for flight testing later this year, given that the only picture accompanying the article is a rendering. However, if you go to their site, they have photos and videos[1] of working airships. The cabin is tiny though, with room for only the operators (these may be the cargo ships mentioned in the article, rather than passenger vehicles).

[1]: http://www.aeroscraft.com/#/video/4565658106
We ought to move from browser languages to browser bytecode VMs. Everybody gets to use their favorite language and we have a single target to secure.
Out of interest these hash functions can be implemented in very few bytes with 100 being mooted for this skien hash. With that in mind when it comes to brute forcing I do wonder if it would be possible to just brute force a better solution easier than brute forcing a hash, I say that in jest.

But it does make you reliase how much empressive stuff you can do in just a few bytes and what else is out there.
I cannot tell you the number of times non-technical teams have asked me (technical) to be employee number 1 and then offered a small amount of equity. I bail every singe time - it becomes clear they have 0 understanding of the time commitment on my part, have 0 understanding of the emotional commitment on my part, and 0 understanding of the opportunity cost of taking their offer. If you want people who know their stuff and are committed, you need to offer enough ownership for them to invest themselves.
Why don't they have an rss feed for their blog?
Um it was on mine... I just had to go hide them all. WTF FACEBOOK.

*edit: I'm in the U.S.
This is a concept that I find myself continuously in love with. As ahi points out, it comes up every few years and never seems to go anywhere, but something like an airborne luxury craft sounds like a fun vacation. You couldn't have all of the grandness of a cruise ship, but you could find several ways to take recreational advantage of being several thousand feet in the air. For example, a rock climbing wall outside of the ship. And instead of having a ship designed for a 2 week journey, maybe only 3 days (or one day), because there is inherently less room for things like spas and casinos and restaurants.

I also like the transportation focus presented by this article. Perhaps having a useful application (IE retrieving large things that are difficult for helicopters to retrieve) will help to encourage the market for all types of lighter-than-air craft.

Would cruise ships have happened without cargo ships first being designed? My guess is no, because cruise ships largely piggyback off of a technology that is industrially very useful. I do not think that a recreational company would dump so much money into finding ways to make ships more economically feasible. That takes industry, where the need is more obvious, and the potential demand is much easier to predict.
Most of the OP's points seem to be cherrypicked from the typical "don't do this" lists. Bad developers will be bad developers. By the time we can invent languages or softwares that turn bad developers into good developers, I think we will be ready to hang up our keyboards and pick up art.
It's really funny to watch tech journalists try to write about Google infrastructure from the outside, based only on one paper...

Hell, it's usually really funny just to watch tech journalists try to write.
“It’s impossible to get into some of the resource rich areas of the world. Ecologically, you can’t do it. Areas of the far north, or the Amazon are good examples.”

Oh great, now we can give the final blow to that annoying Nature!
I am not sure if the aircraft in the article is actually light than air or if it is a hybrid but I can assure you that hybrid airships are in no way shape or form vaporware. The US Military is currently developing multiple models and her is a recent video of one that can stay in the air for 21 days with a 1 ton surveillance package. Note the difference between these and normal airships though, they are not 100% buoyant in air and require active thrust in order to fly with a somewhat aerodynamic body.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1G-L7qvTKI
New HTML Trick for Web Developers in Apple’s iOS
GetUserMedia() Particle Demo
The social contract holds that you don't start yelling at people just because they walk up to you. It's user-hostile web design.
Flagship Smartphone Display Technology Shoot-Out: iPhone 5 - Galaxy S III
State of ActiveRecord and concurrency, another update
That's strange. Right now they list 5 GB plan as $70/month:
http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/monthly-4g-plans?clicked=...

And usually their non contract plans are cheaper. They do offer another 5 GB plan for $30, but with 100 minutes / month for calls.
IPad application development trade-offs
Josh's original blog post announcing the fund:
http://redeye.firstround.com/2012/09/the-dorm-room-fund.html
I live here in Seattle and would love an alternative to comcast, however, I don't think this is it. I googled them, looked at their website and see nothing about pricing, how to sign up and their links under "Services" on their homepage don't even work.
You both could be right.
> I'm pretty sure that if all the garbagemen and all the aerospace engineers disappeared tomorrow, society would miss the garbagemen a lot sooner and a lot more.

Yes, but this can't be used to argue that garbagemen are more important. In the short term we would miss the garbagemen, but in 90 days they would be replaced and forgotten. Not so for the engineers.

>> "The fact that these people were lawyers is entirely coincidental to who they really were."

> So you think they'd have be able to do what they did if they'd studied aerospace engineering?

Straw man. The fact that Gandhi and Hitler were both vegetarians is entirely irrelevant to their true place in history.

>> "And Arisotle was wrong about nearly everything."

> He wasn't wrong about logic.

He seemed unable to apply logic, only describe it, and he was antithetical to experimentation. Bertrand Russell on Aristotle:

"Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths."

> Total bullshit. Their philosophy is the sole reason we've even heard of them today.

First, that's not what I said, and second, it's false in each and every case. Try to argue that Thomas Jefferson's philosophical speculations put him in the history books, rather than his having penned the Declaration of Independence. The same for the others on your list -- each of them is remembered, not for having a philosophy, but for having acted on it.
True, that could explain why Internet over fiber is less common, but does not explain the poor and expensive cell phone coverage. We have good coverage in most of Sweden, even where virtually nobody lives.
Unless I'm mistaken, a cursory examination of the certificate supplied to your browser should show that it is one of those "mitm" root certs and not the certificate for the website you are browsing. That should make it simple to at least know your encrypted traffic is being hijacked.
How to hack your brain to become more stress-resilient
Quartz lunches today. Quartz is a news outlet in the new global economy.
A tutorial for searching with blekko
I get it now. So first they start monitoring everyone, illegally. Then they pass new laws to make it legal. And then when more sites and people start using encrypted communications, they start complaining about new technologies making it "hard for them" to monitor everyone. So, kind of like it's already happening in US.

In fact, I'm pretty sure this idea was suggested by US. US already has some one-way deals with EU where they get some EU's data on EU citizens (but not the other way around, of course), and now they probably just want more of it. Why settle for only US data when you can have the world's data? On the other hand, it's possible the EU commission wants this kind of power, too.
Doesn't Google already have this? Go to...

Show Search Tools -> All Results -> Visited Pages
Really? Because I couldn't get the Ubuntu package or the one from pip to work. And the last article on HN that mentioned it has the author having to install it from a bundle on the pygame site, which is also what I ended up doing before moving on.
Sony commits to support PS3 through 2015
Yes, it's goofy that typeof (NaN) == 'number'. But it's not that unreasonable to have a numeric value that's explicitly invalid. Pointers and references in other languages have null, which is a legal value for any type of object, but is explicitly invalid if used as an object.

Also, isNaN is global.
Adobe Edge Animate
By my lights, the most effective application of "video tutorials" is not as tutorials at all, but rather as marketing tools, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. In the best cases, watching a mercifully-brief video "tutorial" gives me a sense of what it actually looks like and feels like to use some tool/framework/language/whatever. That helps me decide whether it's something I want to dig into deeper (say, by using ACTUAL tutorials, reading docs, etc.), or whether it's something I can safely ignore.
Government owned infrastructure.

The most expensive part is the "last mile" or hooking individual buildings up to the grid. What I propose is that the Federal government build fiber to each and every public school and university.

From there, leave it up to the individual state, county, and city governments to see if they want to front the real cost, which is the last mile.

You could even make it like the New Deal and only hire chronic unemployed workers (unemployed >6 months) and train them to lay the fiber. These newly trained workers can then be hired by the local governments who choose to complete the last mile from the national backbone.

It would at least give the unemployed work, the schools access to information, and let the rest of us to decide whether or not to pay the real cost.
It is not actually limited to Node. https://github.com/learnboost/socket.io/wiki

Though some of these libs do tend to lag in version support.
I'm using SockJS (client and server: https://github.com/sockjs/sockjs-client) for project I'm working on, which does implement a variety of fallback methods (iframe tricks, JSON polling, etc.) and it's been working pretty well (some work better than others.)

For those who to opt for these libs, I recommend the following for protocols/fallbacks:

protocols_whitelist:
['websocket',
'xhr-streaming',
'iframe-eventsource',
'iframe-htmlfile',
'xhr-polling',
'iframe-xhr-polling']

This gets you a working system in pretty much every modern browser supporting WS, and /usually/ works pretty well in IE8/9. Just try to avoid page refreshes in those two browsers (very spotty results if you don't - I'd recommend putting up a message for your users) and implement the workarounds for finicky browsers (things like catching ESC in Firefox.) I've been pretty happy with it so far.
I sadly feel the only way it can be fixed is via government solution. But it has be done on the federal level because a great deal of the issues we have with the current system is due to government on the local level. The system as it is in place right now is highly favorable to the providers which was rubber stamped by local governments in many places.

The US is a big country but it's not the problem of sprawl/distance/density or any of that stuff. The problem is that the US is essentially made up of fifty states that each have their own laws and regulations. Even then these states are broken up into counties (or equivalents) that may also have their own laws and regulations. Now toss in there the different deals and contracts that the different companies have with each of these entities. There's a reason why one neighborhood only has provider A while the next neighborhood down only has provider B.

Granted, there are things like this on the federal level too.

At some point it'll probably take an act of Congress to get the courage to say that the current system is not acceptable and detrimental to the country's future. What will probably have to be done is some kind of mass movement to convert the system to some form of municipal-based service similar to electricity and water in most areas. But even that system doesn't work out well for everybody.
Buzzword headline aside, the Spanner paper is great and worth your time. As is the BigTable paper, the Dremel paper, and the Paxos Made Live paper.

I read the Google whitepapers and wonder, is there anywhere else one can go to work on real solutions to distributed systems problems? At smaller scales you can cheat -- you don't need Paxos, you can get away with non-consensus-based master / slave failover. You can play the odds with failure modes. At Google's scale, you can't: behavior under normally unlikely failures matters, probability matters, CAP matters.
Are you ok with reading text with ~1900px width?

It's way too wide for my taste and not very readable.
How is that different, from the US system? We pay cable companies $80/month, and they pay $60 to content producers. Does it really matter that Downton Abbey is publicly (ITV) funded, and Breaking Bad is privately (FX) funded? The £145.50/year UK color TV licensing fee must be included when comparing costs.
if i understand the CEOs comments correctly (which is not an easy thing) then this statement

>his is free for anyone who wants to create an app that does not generate revenue in any way.

is just not true (a.k.a. false). but in the current state of this affair, we do not know for sure (and maybe never will).
This is exactly why I'm going with Django for my project. The Django book that is online is just so straightforward and easy to understand. With Rails I have not found that to be the case at all.
Looks pretty obvious to me; however I am a novice when it comes to RTFM..
Any thoughts on avoiding generic 404s in case of typo or removed content, in the hope of returning something more useful? Can we use context info from the URL given to personalize the 404 response, or maybe route to a different resource instead for certain contexts? This all seems so simple with client-side hash routing.

[Also, would that mean that I would need to maintain a list of every single possible route in the whole site?]
You are misinterpreting the CEO's statement. He said:

Was the sales rep over eager and trying to hussle
to get a deal? Probably. In my opinion, that's the
job of the rep and we work with hundreds of new paying
customers each quarter and we've only had a few
complaints about it.

He's not saying they've had a few complaints about so-called "extortion". He is saying they've had only a few complaints about their sales reps total for all causes.
If you try and load this page from the UK, you get:

"We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes."

O.o
Although I'm in favor of paranoia generally, I don't think it was suggested by the US.

All you need to know about "plans" for the EU was divulged by Vladimir Bukovsky a few years ago.

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/865
A cursory examination of the certificate will appear to be exactly the same as the "real" one, with the exception of lengthy obscure keys and numbers that nobody would identify unless they compared them to the original side by side.

The proxy vendor MAY provide its own issuer description in lieu of faking the original, but it by no means has to. Fake certs can look just as authentic as real ones if your browser trusts the root cert that signed them.

If you want to verify a certificate is signed by a "real" trusted CA, use a program that traces the chain of trust against a list of CAs that ship with browsers. I have such a tool here: https://github.com/psypete/public-bin/blob/public-bin/src/ne...
I work in manufacturing (actually a lot of the products I work with are bespoke). They are going to have to complete on price and with their method of operations they aren't going to win that battle. There is a reason why automated tube socks are still made in China and not America. From a operations POV there is little difference between tube socks and 3d printed goods.

Don't misread me. I am not commenting on the 3d printing technology. That is going to be successful irregardless of this naive attempt.
There's Flashblock and other addons for that.
This was one of the most surprising things about commuting 25 minutes on the train for me, the break between 'home' and 'work' and the ability to just sit and think are really useful.
Financial employee logins stolen by phishing, keystroke loggers, and trojans
You could go to Basho to work on Riak Enterprise.

http://basho.com/products/riak-enterprise/
How Flutter Wants to Become the Eye of the Machine