skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good point. The focus on evaluating the success or failure of programming languages as a popularity contest is also unfortunate. There is also the matter of influence.

In the mid 80's I took Dan Friedman's (author of The Little Schemer) Programming Languages course and simply had a ton of fun learning all about Scheme & the implementation of languages. I had no idea at the time it would be by far the most important class that I took as either an undergraduate or graduate student.

Turns out, one of the most important things programming languages do is influence the way we learn and think about computation. I've learned crucial lessons from Scheme and all the languages I've worked in over the years. To this day, I am perplexed by people so vested in one programming language that they fear instead of savor the chance to work in another.

As a math major, a key lesson demonstrated so vividly by Prof Friedman & by the philosophy of Scheme resonated with me personally: the importance of clearly understanding "what depends on what?" and of learning which things can and/or should be made fundamental and which derivative.

The Golang Team has looked at their problem domain and, through the creation of Go, has built a striking and innovative statement on what they've judged as fundamental. I welcome their emphasis on selectivity over accumulation and believe there is much to be learned from their choices.
Um. Then you need to hire people for that. Sorry, but, "i'm not paid to be on call 24/7 but I am anyway" is not a reasonable argument. Fix it or deal with it and move on.

And what do you mean, "worse than regular jobs?" Have you looked around much lately? Sitting in front of a computer all day doing what you love pales in comparison to about 95% of all jobs on the earth. And do you really think "HR" people just go home and chill? Everyone has responsibilities that exceed their billed hours. That is part of life.
Does the first HN guideline still apply? There has been a significant increase in political submissions (not about some new phenomenon):

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It is possible to click "flag" on them, but I try to only flag things that are blatant; this seems more like naivete.
When the PlayBook was released, people also slammed it because its Mail client was terrible (you had to have a BB phone). The internet was sure that it wasn't even worth a look as Android tablet sales would take off real soon now.

History repeats itself faster than ever.
All of those products exist because they all have slightly different benefits and drawbacks. What cocktail of analytics products is right for you depends on your specific needs. In general I would say use google analytics (because it's free), and when you want to pull a report that google analytics can't give you, consider what other service(s) could.
3D Mapping of Beating Heart
Corporate bureaucracy often results in bad, strange, or just plain weird circumstances. Film at 11.
One thing I find interesting is that humans tend to take more care of their environment as prosperity increases. It isn't subsistence farmers campaigning for nature reserves. Even compare poor versus rich housing areas - you immediately know which one has more "green".

Prosperity is strongly correlated with (and some argue caused by) trade and specialisation. Compare this with anti globalisation and "local" movements. It is certain that the latter leads to subsistence if taken to its logical conclusion. So perhaps the best thing to do for the environment is to encourage even more globalisation, only let "local" win when it does by the same measures, and have more trade and hence specialisation. As a bonus, more prosperous humans tend to have fewer children.

Matt Ridley's Rational Optimist has a lot more detail about prosperity, trade and specialisation. Here is a Ted talk to get you going http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex.htm...
Don't quite follow the logic - were these books being illegally reprinted in the USA? Or were they originals?
Google analytics is great for basic web stuff (getting origin of requests and so forth). KISSMetric is phenomenal as well. If you do email marketing, I think SendGrid might be a good option to measure email engagement metric, on top of not having to maintain an email service.

If ever you feel like doing more data crunching on your own, I recommend getting started with Splunk. The company i work for uses it extensively. Splunk is phenomenal but tricky to use properly (I'll explain). I think the reason it works so well for us is because every action taken by either the server or user-facing devices is carefully logged. As a result, we're able to pull insightful user metrics in highly customizable way that any other service out there just can't get you. Here's the downside of Splunk: since it's so hands-on, there's little initial guidance as to what you should be looking at, and thus the hardest part of Splunk is knowing how to ask the right question. Beyond that, it definitely has its quirks. For example, I wish it was easier to export data to do more in depth data analysis with matlab and the likes (they have a so-so api). I also question the accuracy of their indexing at times (rumors has it around the office that there are log lines that don't get properly fetched...). In any case, if you are serious about analytics (and can afford it in the long run), Splunk is a strong candidate. It will force you to think long and hard about what exactly you are trying to measure.

edit: grammar.
I completely agree with you. I was public as a kid and then went on to an "elite" institution, so I don't have the _entire_ perspective, but:

The value of simply being in an environment for 4+ years, mashed together in tight confines, with 10,000 other people WHO ARE ALL AS SMART OR SMARTER THAN YOU, is incalculable.

Honestly, 10 years later, I would drop another $150k just to repeat the experience.
"How much can we give for all we get?"
Via http://monome.org/. "Dr V's hospitals give sight to more than 500 people each day." particularly struck me.
He absolutely needs to be put on a note. He's one of the most important persons we've ever had grace our country, and with the help of a few other honourable Brits, and some extremely bright Poles helped secure the world we now live in.

Consider the fact that he was treated dreadfully after the war, and that the vast majority of our country would probably think Simon Cowell is more significant, we need to celebrate Alan Turing. Hopefully the first steps to another Age of Enlightenment.
Not using opendns that I know of.
Reminds me of a card game that augments chess called Knightmare Chess, out of print now but not hard to find: http://www.sjgames.com/general/outofprint.html

Each player gets a deck of cards which change the rules of chess, for example, you can play a card that makes the board cylindrical, so the edges wrap, and you can move pieces from one side to the next, or another card that allows the king to move two spaces at a time, etc. I always thought it was a neat game.
You might find this useful: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/DOM/window.location...
> Facebook contacted him to defuse a potential PR situation, he didn't call them

From the description, it sounds like the security department called him, not the PR department. And sounds like they're sort of OK as a security department, but that they DID need to coordinate with the PR department in this case, and they didn't.

> You'd imagine they would be smarter than that, after all they are the world experts in virality and social media

Their product people are experts in virality and social media. Their PR people - I don't know, I guess they're ok. Their security people? Obviously not. They just moved quickly and broke things for the PR department to fix.

If the blogger is lying, I'm sure facebook will shame them publicly - they have a recording, after all.
ChartIO?
FSCONS Keynote speaker annoucement
This is possibly the most reasonable and cool-headed analysis of an upcoming election that I have ever read.

I love how he concludes that voting is rational. I'd never thought to multiply the, potentially massive, cost of the candidate I disfavor getting elected, multiply it by the tiny chance my vote makes the difference, and compare the result to the amount of money I make in an hour. He admits his cost figures are fudged, but in principle, it works out.

Since I spotted this on the front page, it seems to have been nuked by mods. Perhaps that's for the better, but I'd be much more interested in discussing politics if everyone could handle it with the restrained style and tone in this article. Interesting link.
You're welcome -- I only found out about them recently too
Can you provide more details on how you use Chart.IO? Seems like it could be useful for aggregation of different sources, but that doesn't seem like something they promote as a feature they support. They mention Google Analytics, but not many different analytics tool beyond GA.
You are not.

> Everyone has opinions about consumer electronics. Everyone's entitled to them, even when they're wrong. I owned and liked a Windows Tablet PC at one time!

This was also telling, as it was itself a pretty clear insult, going so far as to call an opinion wrong, buried in a plea for people to be more careful with their arguments.

(In fact, I flagged this "Tell HN"--not that I imagine it will matter--as I believe that it is actually worse than having the threads of people arguing with each other.)
Fair enough about the "overly dramatic response" and probably equally fair downvote(s) on my comment. From the guidelines, then:

> Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports
> on something they found on another site, submit the latter.
Not sure what your objective is with the site so I have made some assumptions and here are few simple things I would do:

a)Get more info above the fold. There is so much space which can be utilised.
Ex: The left category bar can be pulled up so viewers at first glance can see the entire inventory and choose directly without having to scroll down. Give them the answer before they ask.
b)Since albums/art work are the main part of your site I would suggest getting a slider/carousel style template so you can give more info in less space. Ex: TheFilmReview.com (see how they use the slider to their advantage, not perfectly done but you get the idea).
c) Since this is a music oriented website, give it more life.
Here are a few examples how a music/band websites should look: http://www.mybandtheme.com/features/17-beautiful-layouts/
d)Single page websites, especially ones which do not have enough relevant content/information, and redirect users to other sites forcing them to purchase products are a hard sell. I would suggest once they click on one of the albums take them to a dedicated page where there is some info about the album (history/concept/production) and on that page populate your affiliate links or redirect people from there. Give users info they are seeking and that will lead to purchase.
All a quick redirect with no relevant info leads to is a high bounce rate.

Hope this helps.
to quote my favorite seen from the lion king reference: "http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0000591/quotes "look harder". You can parse URL's in JavaScript using window.location or anchor.href, both provide solutions for parsing URL's... someone else from this thread referenced: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6168260/how-to-parse-a-ur... (above i believe)...
People are using the surface primarily without a mouse, the way a tablet is supposed to be used. Yet there's still so many tiny touch targets all over the place when classic Windows stuff pops up. I cringe when I see video reviews of people trying to laser-tap these and miss a few times until they get it.
Isn't splunk just used for server performance monitoring or is it a general analytics tool?

At a previous job at a hosting company we used splunk, but we used it for monitoring a couple thousand virtual and physical services. Does it have uses beyond that?
Very cool to add extensibility to the search engine like this, anyone have any ideas of what would be good to add?
The quality of these threads could be improved cheaply and easily by automatically score-penalizing any post that satisfies =~ m/.* fanbo[iy].* /i.

Beyond that, perhaps the occasional deus ex machina - moderation from above - is necessary.
Rise of the Tiger Nation: Asian-American Success
Big questions + bad decisions = better entrepreneurs
Mixpanel (web) and Mixpanel (iOS).

Our Product/Marketing Maven and iOS engineer are both obsessed with Mixpanel.
It's in the Constitution: http://www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/articles/2/essays/98...

The non-enforcement of DOMA is based on the President's obligation to not enforce unconstitutional laws: http://www.justice.gov/olc/nonexcut.htm

More generally, the Department of Justice is the Attorney General's office, and the Attorney General is the Government's lawyer. Congress is the primary organ of government. Like any lawyer, the Attorney General has a responsibility to vigorously represent his or her client except to the extent it's illegal (unconstitutionality is illegality). This includes arguing for interpretations of the law that favor the client.
> This is the first time I've seen that outside of dedicated chargers and Macs (I assume of course that some PCs do this as well but I haven't seen one yet).

My Asus motherboard can do that with the right software/driver installed and it seems that all products made by Asus these days support this. It's an optional install you can find in the Asus support website for your devices.
Crystal Ball Gazing: Amazon and 3D Printing
How to Conduct Long Tail Keywords for a New or Traffic Crackdown Website
Timeline: New York Times Presidential Endorsements
A boss who tells you to crank something out in a hour won't remember (or care) about that detail in 6 months when you need to tweak that code. It'll just be your fault for writing bad code. Some clients do this kind of thing as well. They ask for a Cadillac, but can only afford the economy version. But - at the end of the project they'll still be expecting all of the Cadillac features and everybody will forget.

I can sympathize about bosses who are angry that things don't get done quickly enough, but there has to be a balance. If I was continually running into this I'd probably look for a new job where quality was encouraged.
To be fair I don't see corporate America throwing out their PCs running Windows any time soon. Another thing with Microsoft is that they're brilliant at being the underdog, and add to that they tend to get it right after a few versions (Windows 3 anybody?). I also wouldn't bet on Google, Samsung and Apple to always get it right — so I wouldn't write off Microsoft just yet. Lastly one thing that Microsoft does well: They value their developers.
Any piece that crosses the Event Horizon (I'd say from B4 to G4) would get torn apart under its own gravity and just disappear into nothingness. Although from the piece's perspective, time would come to a standstill? Now how about that...
A couple minor nitpicks, in the interest of improving the site:

- On smaller screens/windows, the "plugin examples" slides overlap the text at the top, particularly the subheadline/description. Obscuring this text prevents visitors from immediately understanding what the site is about, which could cause them to bounce quickly.

- I'm not a fan of the missing vertical scrollbar, but that's just a personal opinion. It should be noted that it does appear if you use the arrow keys to scroll, but not if you use PgUp/PgDn or Home/End. If you page down and then start scrolling with the arrow keys, you get scrolled back to the top of the page to where you would have been had you used the arrows from the start. It's inconsistent, and potentially confusing.

- I'm not sure about the advice to non-Perl programmers that "if you don't know Perl, you can just use this Rosetta Stone-like page to hack it together using your language of choice as a reference". Again, that's a personal opinion, but it seems like it could easily lead to poor quality plugins.
I know Mixpanel is super useful for measuring specific actions, flows and features within a webapp that you want to measure and promote, but does it have utility beyond this use case? How are you guys using it?

Were I working on a webapp at my current startup, it would certainly be my first choice as an analytics tool of the ones I'm familiar with. However, I'm not working on a webapp. Instead I'm working on a javascript library/framework that developers will integrate into their own products once it is released, I'm not sure whether mixpanel provides value to me except by proxy if/when our customers use mixpanel themselves and share some of their insights with me.
It actually expired almost 6 months ago, on May 8.
In fact, the text of the 2010 post appears to be almost entirely lifted (without attribution!) from this 2006 post you cite. The wood-inlay board is very nice but the design of the illustrations appears to be lifted from the earlier post as well.
An interesting aspect of the pawn movement is that a pawn on a semicircular square can capture, but not be captured by, a pawn on the semicircular square directly rimwards. In normal chess, all threats between equivalent pieces are mutual. (Well, except for the en passent rule.)

I think I agree with the others saying pawn movement is hacky. I'd be inclined to say that a pawn promotes when it reaches either side of the board, but this isn't great because you need to keep track of where a pawn started to know which direction it's going.
I'm just curious, but have you ever observed anyone give up and buy something because they failed to pirate it?

I've done it myself many, many times.
The SSL certificate expired Tuesday, May 8, 2012.

Pro tip: Set up monitoring alerts on your SSL certs to alert your sys admin when they are getting close.

For example, here's a Nagios SSL expiration alert: http://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Plugins/Network-Protoco...
Show HN: Frankenstormtrooper.com - Turning Buzz to Bills
Completely agree, which is why I asked the question. I wanted to hear more about the analytics cocktails of others and the startup they are working on to determine which ones may be useful to investigate further if their startup is analogous in someway to the one I'm working at now.
We don't have a response rate graph yet. We do have a time before first response rate graph. Fred is comparing the total number of emails that he gets vs he sends from/to certain people, which is not the same as response rate.
I'd say this would be a fair criticism of a v2 or v3 product, but at v1, I think we can give either starbucks or apple a pass on not having this integration worked out.

I would expect that the user would reload the card with passbook, if that is the method of payment, rather than the stores app, but not being a passbook user (I barely use iOS), maybe I'm missing something.
The logic is just that courts aren't stupid.

I've noticed sometimes this tendency in programmers (and in my younger self) to see human systems like computers. A court isn't a VM running the law as a bytecode. It's a bunch of humans, and they operate on common sense, too.

Often there are gray areas and it's possible to sidestep the law, but you need a minimum of plausibility... if you put a note on textbooks to say "for use as fuel only", then go and sell it to students, I doubt that'll fool anyone.

It's the same thing for selling burned CDs with a note to say "for use as recycled plastic only". There's a difference between selling them by the crate to a recycling center, and letting customers buy specific titles individually. The letter of the law may not specify that difference, but that doesn't make it irrelevant.
That calculation assumes your judgement is better than the typical voter's. You should weigh it by P(better)-P(worse). (I'm not necessarily saying people with reason to think they have at-best average judgement should patriotically not vote; but the calculation is.)

(It's also worth considering a la Hofstadter/Yudkowsky that something like your decision process is instantiated in other people like you -- if you decide not to vote, many of them won't either, even with no causal link.)
A month after what? September 27th is what?
Another term I like to use is analysis paralysis - basically spending all of your time preparing to do something, but getting bogged down in the preparation instead of the actual goal.
TOO MANY GRENADES Battlefield 3
Lots of explosions and some great moments
I don't think super storm is a bad term to use. We call the most severest of storms hurricanes/cyclones. We don't normally call them "super storms". I think super storm suggests a storm that is stronger than the typical storm you'd expect, but doesn't meet the normal definition of a hurricane. Yes you could potentially call a hurricane a "super storm", but not many people do. You could also call them "extreme storms" or "serious storms". Just calling this thing a "storm" I don't think does it justice, and might lull people into thinking that it's not as bad as it could be.
If you start your essay with a vision of the future spanning millions of years ahead, your call to action at the end is only going to evoke the emotion of "I don't care about introducing some variation in this one big random process".

Context indeed.
I'm glad I read this post; I saw no storms load and assumed the site wasn't working for me! The link in the nav bar (which I now know to be a link) looked to me like it was just saying what it was (supposed to be) displaying. So I closed it. Then I read the above post and tried it again....
Westerners who laud a Chinese meritocracy continue to miss the point
Why do companies buy certs one year at a time?

You can make certs for ten, even twenty years.

This all goes back to the SSL cartel wanting control.

Just make a cert good until January 19, 2038 and get it over with.
Why does black have only 7 pawns?
Sounds like you shouldn't use Mixpanel.

We're a consumer company: engagement, usability, etc all matter to us.
It's easy to get analysis paralysis with analytics, because pretty much anything can be measured now. You'll need benchmark analytics like visits, pageviews, etc; then you'll want key performance indicator (KPI) metrics that change over time. The KPI stuff will vary depending on what you think is important for users to do. For instance, if you were an e-commerce store, then you'd want to look at cart abandon rates, conversion rates by category, traffic by category, conversion rates by traffic sources, week over week revenues, 30 day daily average, 90 day daily average. For cohort analysis and anything money related, I've found custom sql queries displayed on a reporting page isn't too hard to do, and it's great when your KPI's change or you want to add more into reporting later.
Is Microsoft using people in some way to try and take over the psychology of HN'ers.
I do know what you mean, I'm at that stage where I start to care more about process more than anything. It's not about getting the job done - it's about getting the job done efficiently and with as few mis-steps as possible.

It's easy to so get wrapped up in the process that you don't like to introduce risk of experimentation.
The state of Computer Vision and AI: we are really, really far
I love when shit like this happens. Edit: love when it happens to other people.
There is a big problem with generals with battlefield experience - they fail in the next war because they cannot break free of what worked in the previous war.

Technological progress is so rapid that doctrine has to be rewritten from the ground up for each conflict.

For example, we went into WW2 with heavy reliance on battleships. They were quickly discovered to be worse than useless, the aircraft carrier was far more effective.

The examples are endless, such as the disastrous misuse of cavalry in WW1, and Hitler using obsolete WW1 tactics.