skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
nooooo..... I still use word 97 on my windows 7 laptop as it does everything I need (even in 2012!). Office is just to fancy nowadays and takes up to much space - I got my word 97 install to 10 megs.

Oh well - rtf it is then.
I'd still take a self-driving car even if it pulled over to the side of the road and forced me to drive in heavy rain, snow and fog.
A lot of us write in an offline text editor and paste the results when we are more-or-less finished (the finish line is an asymptote for people like us!).
It's actually not that different, and of course they make as much use of caching as possible.

So does my self-hosted wp blog, for that matter. If you are using WP Super Cache correctly, you can deal with significant amounts of traffic. I've seen peaks of hundreds of simultaneous users on my blog, with a server load < 1. The server is a modest aws small instance.
It'd make even more sense for Mozilla, given they're a nonprofit with promoting openness and innovation on the internet as their official purpose.

But yeah, Google support, although it would compete with Google+, might not be as far-fetched as it seems. Google Talk and Facebook Chat both use the open, distributed XMPP protocol. In the same way, it would be great to see commercial services that get mass use built over Tent.
New SARS-like virus detected in Middle East
Seriously. I spent many hours building my own pjax like framework with pushState, and what I've done is (quote) "worry about what element on the page to replace, and tailoring the server-side response to fit, " . A standardized way of doing this would have been so much better.
Notice the "Satire" tag.

And if you're curious about what editor Linus actually uses: https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/iySKQGtkmtb
Yeah, it's not as if Google could abstract or overload the export function.
The editor is called "Satire".
I will buy one. Maybe not the first year, but certainly after they've been out for five years.

I don't care if they can't drive in the snow, heavy rain or fog. As long as the car can tell when driving conditions are too difficult for it and pull over to let me take over, I'm happy because 99% of my driving time is in decent conditions.

Even if I drive to Tahoe in the winter and have to deal with driving perhaps as much as 75% of the time, I'll still take automation the other 25%.
Is this machine translation or human translation?
How can he do the work himself if he can't hear?
How To Build A Black Hole Laser
Previous discussion (two years ago, with comments):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1565764
Can you reasonably expect http or https for all endpoints? Then truncate the protocol segment.

^tent is bad because whoops I copied this message to another tent server and now the identity doesn't make sense.
And how many requests/sec per CPU?

They have like 300 servers and who knows how many cores.

What kind title is this? The target High Scalability reader must be presumed to be a complete fool.
You're talking about Metro(WinRT) apps which are hosted and distributed by Microsoft.

The OP and the article are talking about desktop apps, which the store will only have a link to the developers website. The cut is zero for desktop apps.
Doubtful - insurance is about pooling existential risk. The probability of an accident might be lower if a computer is driving, the possible damage might still be to much to handle without insurance.
Googles ability to copy formulas across cells and automatically adjust them relative to their new postion is weak compared to Excel. Basic patterns work, but if you are doing anything complex, Google just doesn't do it.

Also, Google's formating possiblities are very limited compared to Excels. I run into this limitation frequently.

There are numerous other restraints I come up against with Google Sheets occasionally, but these 2 are the ones I miss almost every time I use it.

I have not spent a lot of time with Excel Live, so I am not sure how well it competes.
Design Principles Behind Firefox OS UX
You forgot to ask, how many people need to export to a specific older version format to support their colleagues or customers.
Criteo Nabs $40 Million in Funding at $800 Million Valuation
Let's consider both the DDOS botnet (most would consider "bad") and a program that contributes CPU cycles to Folding@Home (most would consider "good"). If it was buried in the TOU and we don't have a reasonable expectation that the user was aware of it, then it's malware, in both cases, plain and simple.

What's absent from this is the intended target because it doesn't matter - a program was duplicitous and installed programs that the user wasn't aware of.
Not to be rude (everything I've heard about GitHub makes it sound like an amazing place to work), but the entire point of a company culture is that it's 'bigger than any one person.' Culture that's the size of one person isn't culture, it's just that person's personality.

This is a fluff piece that says literally nothing more than 'hey GitHub is cool' -- it doesn't explain GitHub's 'unique culture' beyond the fact that every employee is working towards a common goal, which is hardly unique.

Honestly, I expect more from Svbtle-branded blogs.
Hm, I'm not sure how to introduce the pre-authentication bit even further. Maybe it isn't the best subtitle.

I agree that colouring the output could make things more clear. I'll keep it in mind for future articles!
Old School! Nice to see Bush sprouting up on Hacker News!

@Turing_Machine - stay tuned. 2-way public hyperlinks might just be on their way : )
That makes sense. Not a lot of people still use the older microsoft office formats 97-2003. Do current Mac's and PC's still support those older formats?
as-per-sion:

1. a damaging or derogatory remark or criticism; slander: casting aspersions on a campaign rival.

2. the act of slandering; vilification; defamation; calumniation; derogation: Such vehement aspersions cannot be ignored.

And you? ;-)
I took the photographs with my phone, next time I'll use a better camera. Changing the red is probably a good idea anyway. Thanks!
I think all programmers should know that even medical grade equipment can go terribly wrong (Therac-25 anyone?). The fact that this stuff isn't medical grade, isn't being operated by people who understand the risks, and isn't allowed to be inspected makes me feel very unlucky.
> The human eye is an amazing sensor, one we can't even get close to with our current technology.

It's a pretty bad sensor. We can only see certain wavelengths need corrective devices, have a blind spot and can only focus on a small part of our visual field.

And if the system gets tired and the sensors shut down.
Exactly. If Tent is to grow beyond the tech crowd, it has to be friendly and easy to use. Using @daniel.tent.is is smart, because it doesn't look like a URL, even though it is. It hides the underlying complexity, which is the right thing to do.
Regarding your fill() example, I believe his point was that uninformed decisions are a reflection of the interface exposed. Since the fill color is an implicit global variable, and not exposed anywhere in the interface, there is no way to discover its existence or behavior except via trial and error or reading the documentation. If the fill color were either exposed via the programming interface, or were explicit, then no meta-knowledge would be required to use it.

Similarly, the heap size limits in Java are global limits implicit to the system, not to the program being designed. His solution to the larger problem—data growing beyond available resources–might involve providing a better visualization of the data. Something more responsive than the feedback loop provided by heap limits. Getting an OutOfMemoryException doesn't help you to understand how the data grew beyond expectations; it is always followed by a heap dump. What if you could better understand the patterns of allocation during design instead?
Yes, in a large system, many of Victor's techniques might only be usable in isolatable areas, like well-mocked unit-tests.

Regarding "some kind of VM that remembers all its previous states", check out 'Omniscient Debugging': http://www.lambdacs.com/debugger/
If you have any examples handy of the kinds of formula copying or formatting you're talking about, I'd love to hear them.
Interested?
I have built a little project that I would love for you all to enjoy, you can check it out here: http://listenserv.com
I don't understand what's wrong with people building on his ideas, taking the subset they think they can implement and, yes, sometimes bastardizing his lofty ideas into quick hacks because something is better than nothing. That's how ideas spread. That's how people get shit done.
I think there are a number of factors which will affect the outcome, including:

- number of $(document).ready() callbacks that check whether the current file should run within the single application.js approach. This could grow to be an issue with much larger apps.

- how often the application.js file gets invalidated by a deploy (if it is every deploy this may be annoying for users if there's always a large performance penalty on the first download - especially for apps where the usage isn't regular).

- in the 2 scripts version it's very unlikely that the heavyweight application.js global file will get invalidated regularly, but it is likely that several of the smaller specific page js files will get invalidated with each deploy.

I guess the question is whether downloading several smaller files for each deploy beats downloading the whole application.js file for each deploy (network overhead being the likely bottleneck here).
I found one comment on NYT particularly interesting:

> There is a simple solution to this problem. You cheat, you get expelled. It doesn't matter how serious the cheating is, you get expelled. As long as schools, school administrators and parents condone cheating through insignificant punishments, it will continue.

I think this policy, while nice in theory, would fall flat in practice. If a teacher catches a student cheating, they would be highly dissuaded from reporting it or punishing the student. Imagine if the accepted Ivy League student represented in the article was caught by the teacher with this policy in place. The teacher would know that the student would almost certainly be barred from the Ivy League school, and have his/her academic career severely tarnished. What kind of teacher would take this action? It might be the 'right thing' to do, but it's also pretty heartless, and would no doubt only strengthen the "fight the system" mentality the students already have.
Former-dc-mayor-adrian-fenty-joins-andreessen-horowitz-as-special-advisor
Prateek, I've emailed some details to your suppport email.

I would definitely love to import our existing support emails. As I mentioned, only Desk.com supports this, and not particularly well.
I was thinking the same thing when I logged into Google Plus earlier (for the first time in months). I could see it using Tent under the hood, and still be successful because of the added features.
The secret to happiness is FREEDOM
I still don't get it. What existing abstractions did he display? What were they abstractions of?
It would make no more sense to call Alzhimers Type III diabetes than it would to call diabetic nephropathy or poly neuropathy type 3 diabetes.
Nevertheless Mark Bittmans articles are some of the most interesting and thought provoking pieces on health and nutrition that I've come across of recent.
I think he is referring to the photos that they displayed on the day it was revealed. The pictures are there on nokia site and are equaly impressive. http://www.nokia.com/global/products/pureview/
The evolution of the scroll bar
I thought blowing into the NES cartridge flipped the cosmic bits inside so that it may be played once more?
Single author mini-blogs without logged in users are super easy to cache.

But multi-author blogs with thousands of logged in users is a nightmare with wp.

I suspect 90%+ of wp blogs are in the mini-blog category though.
Yes, maybe the navigation bar isn't necessary for the login page and both the login and registration should be more prominent. Thanks for the feedback!
Oh my bad! I thought you were referring to having a high everyday email volume. We'll work on the importer at some point. Just focusing on other stuff right now. The idea is to make an importing API and let the community build the actual importers (after the reference one). Btw, have you looked at our API - http://developer.supportbee.com? Thanks again for spending the time to give us such detailed feedback. This is why we love HN :)
Cached or uncached is not relevant to the article.

They are talking about using nginx as a load balancer. It just proxies all requests off to the application servers that actually prepare the results. This article is really just about the fact that nginx can efficiently service a very impressive number of connections at once.

Those backend servers will be using caches of course though.
It would make sense for Google to cannibalize their social network, because G+ is more a defensive, strategic alternative to the existing social networks than anything else.

Google would love for the walled-garden social networks to give way to open social networks -- closed social networks are probably the number one threat to their position as the center of the web.
That the arguments for both sides is spacious is in fact an argument in favor of not using the machines. "When in doubt, default to not x-raying people." is a pretty good policy as far as I am concerned.
According to the article they have 2 thousand servers. These are Dual Xeon 5620 4 core CPUs with hyper-threading.

So that averages out to: 70000 / (4 * 2000) = 8.75 requests per second per CPU.

That seems like quite a low number, I would presume that the load would be shared amongst less servers than this and the others would be used for replication/redundancy.
This is what he is suggesting for learning to program. I don't think he is suggesting that general purpose programming languages be built with these aids ...only an idealized learning language
I checked, the gem only has the Coffee source, no JavaScript. This frustrates the hell out of me -- clearly the message that you should ship JS is not getting through. When CS can do source maps, ideally people will ship the source, compiled JS and map together.

Having either in a gem is rare, but sensible if the gem wants to include a client to interact with the service it provides.
That interface is entirely possible in a browser. Blurring the concept of software and web applications is entirely the trend that people should be pushing towards.
I've been told I can't twice. I always want to protest, but never do for fear of ending up on the irrational, incontestable no fly list.
I don't think bitcoin related sites have less security than other sites that claim to be secure, it just that they are such a high value target and attract the attention of nearly all criminal hackers.

Also nearly all of the thefts that occurred where a result of a compromised email account which eventually led to root level access of the server through a virtual server console. Not as a result of bad programming that led to an exploit.
Fair point, but I am guessing the answer again is "few". Most people probably send out PDFs if the technology situation of the receiver is that rocky.
Apple Needs To Find Its Exit Strategy From China
Yes. His approach presents a proper critique with a path forward. I love what KA is doing, but it is going to be iterative (I presume), and I'd hope they are listening to well thought out ideas like this.
What If Google Were Run By Replacement Engineers? : The Two-Way
worked with a recruiter by that name. Creeped everyone out in the hitting on candidates sort of way.
Oculus Rift can now be pre-ordered
One very deep notion in there is "identity within the system". Some people learned it from Smalltalk; I learned it from LambdaMOO.

I respectfully submit that people who are focusing overmuch attention on Light Table "because Bret Victor" are mostly missing the point. As Bret points out, there's a lot you can learn about these things from existing (even old) systems.

If you already know Smalltalk, Logo, HyperCard and Rocky's Boots (I'd missed out on this one but it reminds me of Robot Odyssey which I did play), you could do worse than go and play with LambdaMOO for a little while.

(ETA: it turns out that Roboy Odyssey was a sequel to Rocky's Boots.)
CSS selectors should describe visual design, not content. Selector chains like .landing-page #buy-button are a CSS code smell. Unfortunately this seems to be more common than not, in my experience.
I can't wait until something like google fiber's 1Gb is standard and content like this is trivial to load.
Just responded to a FB post about this. The link to nitrosamines appears somewhat dubious to me. After some scouring I found the root to be this paper: http://www.molecularneurodegeneration.com/content/4/1/54#B51 which to me appears to have some statistically poor evidence.
here's my take on it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4577003
I agree, I got the book because it was recommended by someone here on HN, and I found it full of reference to studies that I think most interested readers would already be familiar with. Then it would take those study results and extrapolate, leaving me thinking "wait a second, that wasn't proved at all."
I'm sure OStatus is a great suite, but my impression is that it's a lot more complicated to set up, and it depends on a slew of work-in-progress protocols. Tent on the other hand is one protocol. I think that makes a huge difference when it comes to adoption potential.
Their Security page offers some hope in that direction.

http://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/628970-...
I've only looked at the images in the PDF, and not the text, but could a similar technique be applied to image demosaicing?
Need a PHP person to work with me. Who is in?
The only functional problem with windows 8 metro I find is it's exclusiveness. I think windows 8 has a terrific UI for an application, just not for an OS. Give me windows 7 desktop where on the press of the windows key I get a windows 8 metro overlay like steam/xbox 360/ps3/etc, and I'd probably love it.
This article is a summary of another article. I'm not sure what the point of it is other than to fawn over GH.
I think it also depends on how you use Varnish. A lot of web applications can benefit from the reverse proxy capabilities of Varnish, but if you make Varnish part of your application stack from day one you can do things like I describe here. :)
Agreed. I want to work somewhere where I can trust my employer to be fair with me - I don't want to have to keep negotiating everything with them after I'm employed. My advice is to do your homework and know your real market value and then force them to say a number first. If they're not offering to pay you close to your real worth, that really is a sign you probably wouldn't be happy there.
What? IDs and classes are part of the HTML, not the CSS, and as such, they should specify semantics, not presentation. If a class or ID specifies presentation, like .red-button, you have to change the HTML when the design changes, not just the CSS.
I really like this article. There are a lot of unconventional candidates out there that could do great work if any established business or startup would give them a chance, but since they're not the perfect resume candidate, or close to it, they can't get in the door to show their chops. It's basically classism, because the candidates most likely to have that perfect resume or flawless work history would have come from a privileged background, where they had all sorts of resources available to them, were never forced to get a job outside their field to earn a wage, and were never hurting for connections.

Take me for example. I graduated in 2008 with a computer science degree from a pretty good state school. I resigned from my first job after feeling extreme burn-out and anxiety from a broken process and constant missed deadlines.

If you have any gap in employment though that throws up huge red flags for a lot of employers, as well as being anxiety prone and not interviewing so great because of it, or not being fully knowledgeable about whatever particular software stack that business is using.

And i know you can lie on a resume but some of us aren't so comfortable doing that. So it ends up if you have any red flags, you're basically never getting employed again. Fired unfairly from your last job: good luck explaining that one. Family or personal emergency create a hole in your resume: that's not gonna look good. Have other concerns that take up your free time besides building up your Github: you must just not be dedicated or in love with the field (which is not the same as not being able to do the work).

I sort of long for the early days of programming back when you could just walk in the door and take an IQ test with an employer to see if you were capable of being a programmer, regardless of your current / past employment, personal history, etc. Now to do any sort of work you have to have already done the work, which is exceedingly difficult if you are currently working full time in a different field (out of financial necessity), and aren't a lone white bachelor who has loads of free time to spend on personal projects.

So what do i do now: i clean houses. It's fine work if you have nice clients, but i'm also underemployed and very low income. It's easy to get discouraged about even trying to interview, when you're pretty sure once they see your resume, any effort you've put in would have been a waste. No one seems to want to hire a housecleaner as a programmer (classism), regardless of my education, high SAT / GRE / college GPA. I'm damaged goods, and it doesn't matter if i can do the work or not, i'm just not an attractive candidate.

Sorry for the rant. But i can't be the only one out there. I bet there are a lot of capable workers out there that are either unemployed or underutilized because of discrimination of one type or another.
I agree, there are a lot of people who don't learn that well like that. Visual programming makes it a bit more approachable but whether or not it helps learn beyond the first couple lessons (or is overkill) -- I'm not sure. With a lot of these early concepts I feel like just getting one or two reference points can start a snowball effect. Eg. Tell a philosophy student that object orientation is like Plato's Theory of Forms.

From personal experience however I still would argue that just building something is the surest way to go because it requires you to follow through.

After about 2 years of programming full time, I started to develop a sense of why and when things would go wrong up and down the stack, and I don't really think it's something you can teach. It's something you get from loads of accumulated practice -- eg. Oh that's how indices work in Oracle vs MySQL, dynamic proxies on Groovy methods don't work when called from Java, I just built this but now I see I can refactor and save tons of code next time, what are kwargs in python, etc.

I've tested out little one offs like try mongodb, try redis, or interactive js tutorials, but I forget what I've just learned until I need to build something on my own.
Personal Analytics of Stephen Wolfram
Not really "shatters", more "claims to have an insight into".

I'm a little torn. It's interesting that he describes finding engineers as like "detective work". My first instinct (as a developer) is that if someone is difficult to find, it's quite possible that they're not interested in being found. If they were looking for a job, they'd be visible. Does he consider it his role to 'educate' engineers about the possibilities available to them?

I've just been through the process of finding a new job. I expressly avoided using any recruiters, and am very happy with the result. Maybe engineers are hard to find because they're used to hiding from recruiters. I negatively judge startups that use recruitment agencies, but maybe I'm part of the problem.