skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: There is room for innovation in a blogging platform?
I was thinking about the features provided by the usual blogging platforms and how they have innovated throught the years. It looked really strange when I saw that there aren't any real improvements to the final user.

Don't get me wrong, I think that WordPress, by exemple, is an awesome product, but that there is a lack of features that could be pretty useful for the users and an excess of boring administrative stuff.

I'm launching today a page to validate my hypothesis that people will like something new in this area. Do you think that there is room for innovation here?

Some features I'm working on:

* Every blog has yours own API which will allow a user to "get connected" to it (to the user point of view, it'll be only a button to get connected, every technical detail will be hidden).

* Better sign method: The idea behind Mozilla Persona is awesome and I really want to make use of it.

The idea is to make it free and open source.
Any kind of feedback will be appreciated!

If you got interested, this is my landing page: http://barapps.co/rlie
A twitter search on JustFab also shows they have hired some spammers to pump their site. Lots of tweets like this: "Dеаr guуs, whеn will уоu lеаrn? Girls сan nеvеr hаve tоo manу shоes! Sincеrеly, Sign uр аt JustFab & stаrt buуin"
To Encourage Biking, Cities Lose the Helmets
https://github.com/witoff/BrowserAge

"How long has it been since your browser was released?"
>a majority of them are miserable. They feel trapped and they feel like they have few options.

This describes the feelings many of us have towards grad school; by now there's a rich anti-grad school lit that I've contributed to in my own small way. [1] Interestingly enough, here people are risk-averse too—but instead of being awesome, the money is terrible.

The interesting thing is that very people seem to be leaving, despite the money issue, which makes her last point less analogous.

[1] http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-kno...
My browser is TypeError: argument of type 'NoneType' is not iterable old.
The simple answer to that is that they're ~not~ respected by anybody other than fellow PUAs.

"It works" is an overly broad statement, any cult could claim the same.

Confidence works. Abusive language "works" on those preconditioned to abuse. Certain ridiculous practices certainly do not "work", and at the very least are unnecessary. Being a PUA does not make one more successful at picking up ladies, or more happy, and you can certainly find more success by applying the basic techniques of showing self-confidence and interest in women without all the bizarre cultlike requirements sold by the PUA "leaders".
Thanks for the link. I finally got around to reading it.
I remember that it was rather jarring at the start of the second season to find that Sinclair was gone. This finally explains it.
What a pity! Even though I grew to really like Sheridan, B5 would have been even better with Sinclair all the way through. I wonder what Sheridan's quotable lines and monologues would have been like coming from Sinclair.
Primitive Obsession, Custom String Types, and Self Referencing Generic
I don't think that is what he is saying. I think the key sentence is the first one, not the last in the quote: the courts should let those who want to market new technologies carry the burden of persuasion that a new exception to the broad rights enacted by Congress should be established.

In other words, the burden rests with the one exploiting a new technology that invades someone's copyright. He is not saying that the burden of legality rests on the new entrant, just that the burden is there when it requires an exception to someone else's already-legislated rights.
There are plenty of roads like that, but if you wanted to get to somewhere on Street X, the correct location shouldn't be Street Y on the same road.
Agreed! WebGL is a perfect example
As someone who works in finance in Scotland there are several other factors outwith this article to consider. I know people who have left because of the inertia at some banks - systems don't improve and "workarounds" are the norm. Retail banks that aren't risk driven can have horrific IT.
But there are reasons to stay in - plenty of institutions manage to be places you can have a lifelong career at, they won't lay you off and you can do relatively interesting work. That is the flip side of the personal risk the author talks about. These places don't pay $400k. And especially don't do obscene bonuses - but they don't treat you like dirt either.
Half the reason they don't get mentioned often is that people don't leave very often, there isn't scandal associated with the companies. My employer has a reputation for being the place people come to from other companies.
That's the library where Carl Sagan recorded a segment for Cosmos right? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E0yzMgqOUg
I agree about the phone screen length. Whether you call it an interview or a screen it can probably be much shorter than hour with almost all of the benefits.
Pick up artists have a negative association because they are a group of insecure people putting up a fake facade so they can focus singularly on having sex with as many women as possible.

Worse is pickup artists who actually keep score of their conquests. Ugh.

If I'm trying to come up with a list of groups of people I would never want to know, let alone hang out with, pickup artists would be near the top of the list.
This will become the hacker news law.
On any submission with a headline ending with a question mark somebody will point out the stupid betteridge law.
If PUA focused on the things that worked and not treating women like some sort of MMO, the practitioners would be more happy/healthy. Of course, it wouldn't be PUA then, which focuses on these silly min/max "techniques" that frighten off sane women.
Some people work so they can earn money to live the life they love. Others find living in work as much as out. Neither is better, they're just different personalities and cultures.

I've felt compelled to put down a book and get a drink with friends as often as to postpone travel to fit around a client. Just because someone leads a different life from the one you choose to or would choose to if uninhibited doesn't mean they're miserable. Watching Jiro Dreams of Sushi where Jiro, a world-renowned sushi chef, takes pride in doing the same thing every day for the rest of his life (his words) helped me reflect on that.
Especially since, with these GLSL filters that use the same subset as WebGL, you can already do this with WebGL.
I like thinkin' tags, but what about the price tag?

PS: fix the "truely" typo
World's biggest hedge fund is owned by Apple
Could you buy something and cancel your account immediately afterwards, so you just pay once, log in, cancel account, and that's it?

Don't get me wrong, that does not make this right. It's just, I wonder, if their business model is based on these "zombie subscription fees" (as reitzensteinm so aptly called them) would they maybe lose money on actual, singular purchases? (or an unsustainably small profit margin)
What's a typical day like for a software engineer working in finance? I've worked in a variety of environments so I know that arrival times, perks, leaving time, meetings etc can all vary a lot. However I've never worked in finance or known anyone that has.

I'm under the impression that algorithms and data structures knowledge is very important. But do software engineers in finance really deal with this on a day-to-day basis?
...and they didn't deserve to get fired a month earlier? Or 3 days later (after vesting)? There is no such thing as a coincidence when money is involved.
I spent my first few years out of college working for an investment bank, and feel the same way as the piece author – I have no regrets leaving. Finance can be a great way to start / springboard your career: I sharpened my analytical mind, saw how companies worked under-the-hood, really learned how to work hard and was able to save some money. But as a long-term profession, at least in the area I was in, it's brutal. The job took a huge toll on the people that stayed with the career for 5-10 years. And like the author said, once you're making insanely great money it's hard to give that up.

When my (now wife) and I went to my going away party, she was approached by many of the other banker's wives. They said they were so happy for her that I was leaving the industry, and expressed the difficulties the lifestyle presented to raising a family and relationships. I loved the people I worked with - they were hard working, honest, great people. But only an all-consuming industry could generate this kind of response from the families of my co-workers.

After my stint in banking, I left to start my own company which I've been doing full-time for nearly five years. And while banking provided the initial savings safety net to scale-up the business I couldn't imagine going back. For anyone interested in the full story of my departure from finance, I wrote about it in the post below:

http://www.ecommercefuel.com/my-corporate-escape-story/
Firefox Aurora "17.0a2 (2012-09-30)". Updated roughly 10 minutes ago, yet it says 25 days.
Android Malware can now steal 3D Model Of Your Location
Haha wtf. After learning Haskell and seeing stuff like lparallel for CL, I just fundamentally can't pretend this is even worth learning. The GIL and the lack of foresight in designing Python are problems that are too fundamental to the language.

I love python, I've used it for a long time, but using it as anything other than for readable shell scripting is a waste of time. It's using the wrong tool for the job. If you are worrying about speed aside from algorithms, learn a different language.
You, are right; but there is ambiguity. 'Startup' is not never mentioned by the authors.
Here's his EuroPython talk http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pDkrkP0yf70

And here's another talk about an alternative approach By Robert Hancock http://lanyrd.com/2011/pygotham/shppw
In this case, "hardware accelerated" means drawing web content into an offscreen image -- as the content is transformed using CSS, the image is re-drawn and blended using the GPU. This is faster than re-laying-out and re-drawing the web content directly (even if re-drawing the web content itself uses the GPU). It's a good trade-off when you have animations that update every frame.

The biggest cost is memory. Every pixel of hardware accelerated web content gets 4 bytes of memory. This adds up quickly, especially since any content that overlaps hardware accelerated content must become hardware accelerated as well.

The other big cost, as olsn already pointed out, is that blending these offscreen images onto the screen takes time and power on every frame. In extreme cases this can cause scrolling to stutter.

See the "Optimizing Web Content in UIWebViews and Websites on iOS" session from WWDC 2012 for more information about this.
I disagree. 3D is art, and there's value in uniqueness. For example, game characters have to be always unique. Of course there's certain props which could be reused, but I don't think the market for 3D models is that huge. 3D models for printing purposes is a different story.

Another problem is that those 3D models could be ripped fairly easily (they are downloaded in your browser anyway). That would put away any serious sellers. Although, reusing stolen assets in games for example would be noticed. Of course, as a complementary monetization strategy, it wouldn't hurt to offer downloading with paid rights for reuse.

As a learning 3D artist myself, I think this is a really great way to show off your 3D and explore what others have done.
Wasn't this known already much earlier?

There has been an RC glider community doing dynamic soaring probably for decades, it's easy to find videos on youtube.

Basically it's just extracting energy from the wind velocity difference.

Of course you could use it at much larger scales, like a huge UAV dynamically soaring high up if the winds are in different directions at different altitudes.
A lot of heterosexual men can experience this by going to gay bars. You'll see what its like to have people start at you and try to chat you up.
Good. Have you succesfully used your ideas to improve your numbers?
As typical of reddit: sounds clever, but ultimately shallow. And obviously written by nerdy boys.

The real world is far more complicated. I'm sure most girls would agree that less attractive gents can be considered "so sweet" and handsome gents can definitely be creepy.
What an obnoxious tosspot you are. Once your karma is in minus territory I'm not sure you are qualified to comment on the HN community.
Oh the irony of this being presented as an "interactive" infographic. Their number 1 takeaway is "Understand my users & their needs".

This information may or may not be useful, but the format prevented me from being interested in finding out. Next time just present this as a body of text and images with some nice typography.
I mean that they are used to prove it.

Basically anything that you can prove using direct calculation and induction a finite number of times on the integers can be proven starting from the Peano axioms. It is not obvious that there are computable functions that those methods of proof do not suffice for. Goodstein's function grows too fast for this to suffice for.

The proof that it is actually computable requires transfinite induction on the countable ordinals.
Bridgewater's founder, Ray Dalio, wrote an amazing internal document on his principles of work, business, and life is an amazing read... one of the top pieces of nonfiction I've ever read --

http://www.bwater.com/Uploads/FileManager/Principles/Bridgew...

Edit: Seriously, regardless of what you're surfing online right now, stop it and go read Principles. It's worth it.
Java is big, the java ecosystem is huge.

Sure it is. However you don't have to learn all of it.

I never learned much about Swing, AWT, JSP, JSF, EJB, Struts, Spring, Hibernate and all that crap. I tried them out at some point, but eventually I had the common sense to just say no.

You're basically comparing a language with the entire ecosystem of another. I remember trying to make MOD files play in Turbo Pascal, which left me with about 200k of memory for whatever else I wanted to do. I remember trying to read BMP files and because I had no available libraries, I had to implement the functionality by my own (and forget about GIFs or Jpegs). I remember trying to create a window with a button in Windows 3.11 and for some reason whatever I did was freezing my computer, so I had to reboot all over again, until finally giving up in agony.

I know at least one man that gave up on programming when the transition to Windows happened, because Borland Pascal was so goddamn awful for anything not involving a text interface running in 286 real mode - that it left that man with the impression that programming was not for him.

Yes, you can go from 0 to "knowing turbo pascal" in a short time. However that doesn't mean much, when in that same time you can accomplish so much more in a modern environment, even if you end up just scratching the surface.
Side note: Ray Dalio (founder of Bridgewater Associates) is an incredibly interesting guy. He wrote a 100 page handbook entitled "Principles" that describes his life philosophy in detail and is required reading material for all new associates. If you've ever wanted to see inside the thought process of the founder of the world's largest hedge fund, this is the way to do it.

http://www.bwater.com/Uploads/FileManager/Principles/Bridgew...

From the intro:
"Above all else, I want you to think for yourself—to decide 1) what you want, 2) what is true and 3) what to
do about it...If you can’t do these
things, you should reflect on why that is, because you probably have discovered one of your greatest
impediments to getting what you want out of life."
This is an amazing quote:
"Social like IRC, not social like a Facebook Timeline-enabled Flash game."

p.s. You can bet I'll be adding that to my .plan file ;)
"We are now getting misleading Techdirt stories secondhand through Slashdot. It's interesting to see how far this game of telephone might go."

You know when I was watching President Obama's cover of the hit single "Call me maybe" [1] I was thinking the same thing.

Kidding aside though, the two things that the Youtube spoof and this have in common are taking snippets of actual "stuff" and mashing them together into something that the person making the mashup finds useful/amusing/entertaining. As HN and Reddit and slashdot before them seep into the journalistic consciousness there are pretty clear efforts to craft a message based on selective sampling. By drilling into the sources for all the clips (unnecessary of course but bear with me) used to compose the 'call me maybe' video its clear that the President never set out to make this video or even knew the lyrics (probably does now though :-) and this slashdot article appears to be a lesser instance of the same effect. Pull a few bits out of context, wrap them together into a choice sounding narrative and blam! you've got a "story."

So to answer your question the 'telephone' you mention is simply 'spin doctoring' (to use the 20th century vernacular) and it will continue as long as people make long enough sound bytes in their communication that they can be re-purposed for spin without setting off too many alarms in the readership.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX1YVzdnpEc
I always liked working in at65, the cafe in the lobby of Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center.
Sometimes performance is unrelated to the ability to thread, so the GIL is not always a relevant issue.
You're right.

Why do I feel so bitter about some shitty company that I'm leaving and never coming back to anyway =/ Fuckin' childhood dreams.
I couldn't agree more. :)
So nice of you to share [some of] your source code.

http://pastie.org/4887851

Turn off debug, kids.
This sounds like the book of the month or CD of the month scams we would get in the postal mail. The first month is free and you buy discounted books or CDs but after that each month you buy one or they charge your credit card each month. Same thing but a web site.
What's a better one, and how is it better? Mobile Safari's pretty widely acknowledged to implement a much better HTML5 experience, for example, and clearly it can be made to make good use of hardware acceleration for modern non-document-ish uses of CSS.
Command-line tool for checking who has unfollowed you on Twitter
Yeah, mine is too. Guess they shouldn't have showed HN...
I'm not denying stalking exists. I'm just saying that her "stalking detector" is utter nonsense.

Someone who knows enough about you to find you online (knows your name, has seen you, has probably said hi to you) actually saw you online either by searching or by FB suggestions, and saw the part of the profile that you left public. So far nothing stalky about this. This is just someone who wants to know more about you or wants to strike a conversation with you.

Now, if this was a complete stranger who followed you to your locker to find out your name, has it tattooed in his or her butt, slept in his or her car outside of your house, etc, then yeah that's pretty fucked up.

But the fact that people look up what you make public about you isn't stalking. Looks to me like someone with a precious princess complex. Checking on someone's FB and not directly admitting is normal if there's not much confidence, as in not enough to actually send a friend request. Trying to avoid awkwardness is completely human.
"writeup"? Ouch! Ah, it's the The International Obfuscated C Code Contest.
Iran touts domestic Internet as Gmail ban rankles
SVG - How to create and use vector graphics on the web
Pick up artists have a negative association because they are a group of insecure people putting up a fake facade so they can focus singularly on having sex with as many women as possible.

You've described one type of pick up artists.

Also, PUAs are as insecure and put up as much of a fascade as women in high-heels with pretty make up to hide their wrinkles.
I find this incredibly interesting. I have a production server running a Flask app, performance is not stellar, and I've been meaning to try running it with Pypy w/ a web server, but I have yet to find a good resource for this. Anyone has any tips? Seems kinda counterintuitive with all these performance numbers with Pypy > Cpython when I can't even run it in production.
Well, at least by the time you're burned out and start a new career, you could have a very large chunk of change saved away.
If you go to a gay bar it's expected. If I went to a gay bar for some reason and got chatted up, I'd just make it clear I'm not gay. Problem solved.
The problem is 15 years ago had you suggested that most apps will run server-side, with an interface exposed in a browser, people would have laughed at you regardless.

People don't really remember that 15 years ago it was a monumental feat to build something usable, without having the resources of Microsoft.
There's a big spread, and it depends on which institution and where in the institution you are.

the closer you are to the money (front office vs back) the more money you make, but the more stress you get

the smaller the firm, the more freedom/autonomy, the bigger the firm, the more beauracracy you have to deal with. Imagine working at microsoft vs your own startup.

Other than that, it's not much different than any other technology job
Keeping a list for this newsletter.

http://www.panix.com/~melling/nyc/

The Google spreadsheet for the "Public Works Spaces" is here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AphQpsbOUWiedDV...

Everyone should feel free to add to the spreadsheet.
I'm curious as to how companies believe Will.I.Am is a voice in the tech scene?
While I'm sure using clojure for the entire stack simplifies things for pros like you. It is not an adequate replacement for newbies. You still need to know: Clojure (and the lisp way of things), Java, Javascript, HTML, CSS, and SQL to understand the system. Leaky abstractions indeed.
Ask HN: How to track real people impressions? Not bots.
User agents, IP addresses, and browsers loading javascript are all methods I've heard of to measure whether an impression is a real person. Is there a checklist, good guide for lessons learned, or a toolkit out there you would recommend?
I downvote any comment that does nothing other than cite the stupid thing. I encourage others to do the same.
I don't know if this is really a fair comparison. You can do simple forms in plain HTML if you want to, after all. No CSS required, no Ruby or PHP, no scripting, no nothing.

If you want to persist the form submissions you need to have some logic (which brings in a programming language) and a database (which brings in SQL, or maybe structured text files), but that's just as true in a single-user or client-server application as it is in a Web application. The only differences are that the fifteen-years-ago application probably used a language like Visual Basic rather than PHP or Ruby, and a simple embedded database engine like Jet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Jet_Database_Engine) rather than a standalone database server. But the basic concept of a form-based application hasn't changed much, and the scope of knowledge you need to build one hasn't changed much either.

I've noticed several sites recently that are including more than one version of JQuery (and a copy of Prototype) on the same page - which is a symptom of this to me.

This is more of a symptom of idiots having access to programming tools. Idiots haven't changed much in the last fifteen years either. There were plenty of line-of-business apps written in (say) VB whose code would make you scream "Burn it! Burn it with fire!"
Aaaand there's the misogyny.