skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder what the ethics review board would think about training someone on a nonstandard keyboard layout, as that would introduce a handicap to their life outside the study.
Clever. I wonder if the illusion is broken if you actually speak Korean. I would definitely notice if someone chopped and reassembled random words in English.
Ah some more chrome only stuff :)
I would be interested to see what happens when you do this to other types of music.
Lesson 1) The Kid is unemployable
Lesson 2) That's why The Kid is The Boss.

Be The Kid (or get a job).
If you bought your gadget, you own it, and you should be able to install whatever software you please without facing potential legal threat

Such a simple thing but the folks who bought DMCA would never get it. Sigh!
You can use a new keyboard layout and still remember QWERTY. It's just like learning a second language (only it takes a lot less time).
It would be interesting to read the proof that de Jong's function has an attractor. Do you know where I could find it?
I'll see if I can dig up my old app for collecting the data (it was an OS X app, but would be easy enough to port). It can actually be layout agnostic (although I may have just implemented it with Colemak in mind, since it was for my own use). For the user's sake, it asks you to type out symbols according to your own layout, but the way it stores the data is only interested in key positions.

One confounding factor in collecting data this way, though, is it's actually quite a lot more difficult to copy a random sequence of characters than it is to copy real words, and I don't think that's just because of the key positions. I think it just takes more brain power to process them when you can't leverage your brain's language hardware to divide it into chunks.
JQuery UI icon name map
Why Is Megaupload (Still) Censored by Google’s Piracy Filter?
>cultural meme in America that isn't in English

Yep, it would be interesting to read about things we miss - lyrics, and meaning of obvious references we don't get. For example, I think that dude in the elevator is an actor I saw in some movie, but I don't know if I'm correct. Obviously scene in sauna has some humorous meaning, but, again without lyrics it's unclear.
This is insane. The closest scenarios to this I've seen in my career:

1) A private frame relay network that one day stopped passing packets over a certain size. Worked around by lowering the MTU at both ends till I was able to convince the frame relay provider that yes, the problem was in their network. This was relatively straight-forward to diagnose, but it was still odd being able to ssh into a box, then have the connection hang once I did something that sent a full-size packet (cat a large file, ls -l in a big directory, etc).

2) A paging gateway program I wrote (email to SMS) that worked fine when testing on my Mac, but couldn't establish connections to a particular Verizon web site when I ran it from a Linux box. Turned out that the Linux TCP stack had ECN enabled and at the time the Verizon website was behind a buggy firewall that blocked any packets with ECN bits set.

3) A Solaris box that could randomly be connected to, but not always. Turned out someone had deleted its own MAC address from its ARP table (yes, you can do this with Solaris) so it wasn't replying to ARP packets for itself. As I recall, it could make outbound connections, and then you could connect to it from that same peer until the peer timed out the ARP entry. Then the peer couldn't reach the Solaris box again.

None of these are nearly as complex as the scenario in this story.
I just checked on my Xbox. It seems to be very alive and has no intentions of dying until the next generation arrives.

Really, this is the second article I found here today claiming that the console's dying. It isn't. Mobile isn't gonna kill it because it is an entirely different animal. When I sit down in front of my Xbox and play a game, I expect to be busy for hours on end. When playing a mobile game, I expect to be entertained until I step off the train.

Again it's a case of "Tablets can do this and that today, so they're totally gonna kill off everything else". They're not. They are capable and have filled an interesting hole in the market but they're not going to kill off the PC or the game console. However they're not gaming machines. Modern gamer computers are incredibly powerful in order to render the most vivid scenes. Even the best tablets don't come anywhere near them at the moment and they're not going to for the next couple of years either.
Perhaps, but there's a dramatic difference in the psychological reward that one gets working for a charity verse supporting one. There are lots of tech savvy non-profits that need top-notch tech talent to help them get better, faster, stronger. Non-profits can't hire teams of 50+ programmers. Usually it's 1-10 people that move fast and ship constantly. Although it's not right for everyone to do this, they do need some people to do this. See my other comment with links.
Why do you get to be the arbiter of what is "toxic"?
Most crashing application on Win8: Windows Explorer. On Win7: Google Drive.
Certain people would still like to compile this as a "CPP" file, examples are lua - it's in "C", but it's compilable as C++ too (some people then are more or less strict whether the function interfaces should be extern"C" or not).

Ayway, not that important... But there is a whole lot of people that like amalgated sources (typical examples - juce, freetype2, lua, sqlite) where you include in one or two files all the rest and they compile fine.
No other OS has wallpaper pictures taken from space by someone directly involved in making it. It takes the "vacation pictures" concept o a whole new level.
Basic Litmus test - is it something that Engadget/Arstechnica/etc would pick up? If yes, then I'd rather not see it here.

And that's a perfectly reasonable litmus test for what you consider fluff/non-fluff.

It doesn't work well for me (for example - I personally like the arstechnica stuff I see here. I don't follow, and don't have the time or interest to follow, most of the arstechncia stuff that gets published. The stuff I see here tends to be the stuff I'm interested in. On the other hand I could quite happily never see a techcrunch or verge post ever again ;-)

I'm sure there are a bunch of HN posters who would disagree with both of us (and a bunch more that would agree).

To misquote Walt Whitman - HN is large. It contains multitudes :-)

If I was going to bet - I'd say that HN is going to end up in one of three places:

1) Things stay pretty much as they are. The admin folk add in new tweaks around post promotion, voting, karma displays, voting on new posts, etc. The community continues to grow. As it does the majority view of what the site "is" will change. This will annoy some folk who preferred the 'old' majority view. Where this ends up - something like slashdot.

2) HN fragments. Tagging / sub-groups / whatever. Some way for folk to focus on the stuff they're interested in and ignore the rest. They'll still be trolling/flames - but it'll be more obvious since folk will need to explicitly search it out rather than having stuff that runs counter to their world view hitting their front page. This ends up more like reddit.

3) YC/PG/whoever decides what HN should be. We acquire moderators with banhammers of doom - possibly recruited/promoted by the HN community. Much more focussed submission guidelines. Lots of self-policing and strong and rapid responses to closing/flagging posts. Associated accusations of bias / censorship.

I suspect we'll get (1) or (2). Especially with us being a rather geekish site - and us geeky folk do love trying to solve social problems with technical solutions ;-)
FWIW, in Firefox (15) I just see a white square. Works fine in Chrome.
You can, but if you don't regularly practice, your QWERTY proficiency will deteriorate startlingly quickly. It's easier to pick back up than learning a whole new layout, but still.

It was really unsettling to watch, in only two weeks, my QWERTY proficiency drop from "90 WPM burst speed" to "stare at the keyboard while I type".
This is the prime pain point for me with Hacker News.

I'm not turning 43 this week, but I am exhausted to death of the inability to filter out categories/sub-cultures of content like this.
It's difficult to say that mobile evolution is faster until we have seen the next gen consoles. It will be difficult to beat a console in terms of price/performance since there is no portability/battery power tradeoff for consoles and console makers seem happy to subsidise the console in order to sell more games (compared to Apple who make big profits per iPad sold).

A PC resurgence doesn't have to mean the death of consoles, we go through this cycle many times.

In the mid 90s consoles had an edge because PCs were expensive and difficult. In the late 90s/early 2000s PCs had an edge because of better graphics , more internet gaming options as well as the modding scene. Late 2000s it began to swing back in the consoles favour again because of Xbox live etc as well as HDTV.

There's no reason that next gen consoles cannot include plenty of indie games via a digital download marketplace, Xbox already has this to an extent.
RAII would break you if longjmp/setjmp are used. For example if you had the code in C++, but with "C" externs (like zeromq for example), then using RAII might bite someone unexpected where longjmp/setjmp would not unwind and call the destructors.
While this is true, I think you're missing the point. Typography as a primary graphic (al-la-street art / grafitti) is actually a distinct notion. Seperate from idea from notion of typography as a digital variant of calligrophy, etc. The latter has always been an element of publishing/desktop publishing and design (steve jobs, etc). The former has not.
Does it count if they're weird misconfigurations which may or may not have been set by a human?

http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/08/16/window/
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/07/02/ninja/
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/01/08/blackhole/
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/01/18/alertstorm/

There are many more. Unless specifically noted, they all happened to me at some point.
I feel uncomfortable with this. What's it actually achieving?

We dig oil out of the ground, transport it to land, turn it into plastic, ship that to manufacturers, turn it into troll dolls, ship those to suppliers, ship them to retailers, ship them to customers, ship them to the patent troll, send it to landfill. (Or, if they have any sense, some children's charity with a matching donation.)

All through this chain that are a bunch of people paid low wages to shift product just for some stunt. I'm not opposed to stunts, I just don't think this is a good stunt.

Instead, show what patent trolls actually stop people doing, and say why it's bad that these things have been stopped. (Single handed keyboards are one example.)

And if you're counting bang for buck, $9 can possibly save 18 lives. Oral Rehydration Salts and zinc cost $0.5 per course, and could prevent about 3/4 of the 1.5 million child deaths from diarrhoea.

http://www.irinnews.org/Report/94996/GLOBAL-Follow-the-fizz-...
Real-life tractor beam developed at NYU
Что? Где? Когда? Осенняя серия игр (2012) - SATRip
Killing Your Startup on a Thursday Night
I'm curious how the kernel was able to diagnose that a single one bit always being fixed on the 15th of 16th bytes in the packet was corruption. That sounds like some intense algorithmic profiling especially if its being applied to every packet.
As a current zynga contractor who is losing his job there next Friday, I have to admit I have mixed feelings about this.

Firstly, I don't see the employees being let go as victims, most are getting 3 months severance. Secondly, I don't think there is any real evil going on by Zynga; they accidentally hired more people than they can afford, it sucks as I'm one of them, but I fundamentally agree with the notion of at-will employment in the US.
Higher-math skills entwined with lower-order magnitude sense
So I guess this works best because most of us can't understand the lyrics so if we did this with an english song or any song the native listener understands you might end up with nonsense lyrics. It doesn't sound like it's jump around making nonsense sounds, but it might string words together that are really bizarre as it bounces around the lyrics.
Anonymous is now composed of jilted Zynga employees?
> I would move json_* _t structs to the header file and eliminate a bunch of API functions that service the access to these structs. It's a C library after all, everyone knows how to shoot one's own leg.

From what I know I would suggest to only do that if the code is never to be used as a shared library, as otherwise the structs can't be changed without recompiling all programs using the library.

There was a Debian security update to libxml2 in 2008 that made various Gnome apps including, IIRC, the window manager crash for many users in various circumstances (depending on the used theme etc.)(* ), because it changed some struct. Public API functions were provided in that case, but apparently direct access to structs was not discouraged enough to prevent some programs from going the unsafe route anyway (or perhaps the API wasn't sufficiently complete? I don't know the details).

I haven't created any wide spread C programs, and don't know if there are ABI checkers that Debian should use / have used, or if it's really just restraint to procedure based APIs that can avoid such problems.

(* ) e.g.
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=496125
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2008/08/msg01864.html
> Trying to be philanthropic directly is usually less effective than making money and then paying others to do good on your behalf

Have you tried? What's that based on? I know lots of people doing great direct work.

In my experience, money is NOT a good substitute for concerted, focused, long-term attention in a problem domain.
I dunno, I mix iPhone, iPad, Kindle, Samsung (Nexus) and Griffin chargers all the time, bring only one of them (typically iPad) on the trips, and it works out completely fine. I think that Kindle and Griffin are the slowest though.
Thanks, that could be valuable. Is the data separated by keyboard layout?
The kernel is rejecting packets that fail the checksum verification. It just happens that the source of the bit errors was behaving in this predictable way.
3 months! Wow that's way more than generous. Anon might want to target someone else
That's only an answer if you're just trying to appease your own conscience instead of earnestly solving the problem. Working for the NSA while donating most of your income to the EFF is still net evil.
Whois Privacy Issue
A jQuery plugin to deliver different content to different devices
If you read Ben goldacre and then Tim Harford you take the view the doctors are acting rationally.

Pharm companies withold negative trials, bribe doctors to use their latest expensive treatments, lie, cheat and steal.

So a new treatment you have never heard of and are asked to evaluate, in-between appointments, will get shoved into the mental bin of "all new treatments look good till the real world results start coming in" let's keep doing the things I know do "only" kill 2/1000.

In fact things are so bad that one MP in England asking, yes just asking, the government what they intend to do to stop pharma companies lying, is front page news.
http://www.drsarah.org.uk/sarahs-blog/
With a freemium product, I think the short vs long copy really depends. For my product, the average time between first visit and a sale is 5 months. Unless you run the tests for a year, it is difficult to determine which version effects the most revenue/profits.

My rule of thumb is that if you have a very solid on-boarding process, then short copy and a giant signup button will likely work well (Dropbox, 37Signals, etc). They transition the prospective customer from mildly interested to an active user via the app itself.

If it is not, then longer copy on the homepage to prime the customer for why they need your product makes more sense.

When A/B testing, it is important that you are optimizing for active users, not just trying to maximize the number of rows in the user tables. When I run A/B tests, the units are dollars, not percent. It means the tests have to be run for a really long time, but it is common that what is best for revenue, is not always what creates the most button clicks, or the most rows in a database table.
I would be shocked if this isn't actually just a post-rationalization for previously completed hacking activity (which has been the majority of their previous M.O.)
Yammer’s Cindy Alvarez: Five Types of People I Should Have Fired Sooner
This blog[0] provides excellent context for the song, including subtitles for the song (overlaid on still shots) -- the last several seconds of the video will give you the names of the famous people with cameos.

[0] http://mydearkorea.blogspot.ca/2012/08/korean-music-psys-gan...
I admit I don't know, and as always the industry will exist on a spectrum not as a couple dots. But I think the whole spectrum is shifting such that only a few franchises/studios can pull off a $60 game, and it will be so risky to start that effort up that it will only be trusted to those few. You'll still see block buster titles from block buster names at block buster prices but fewer... and everything else will move down the price spectrum.
I’m a Mac. You’re a PC. There really are two types of people
Expecting a doctor to know statistics and evaluate information like this is like expecting a master computer hacker to perform surgery on you.
Indeed. It's these kinds of things that make me a happy Hacker News reader.
> The reason C++ is so humungous is that everyone is using different subset of it.

I completely agree with this. Incidentally, this is exactly the reason why C++ libraries are far less useful than the C ones.
Well, in many countries it is illegal.

I'm not really looking to debate the rights or wrongs of at will employment, but it's pretty common in Europe that sacking a worker requires going through a lot of legal hoops (broadly speaking, unless they've committed gross misconduct, you have to show that you've made efforts to help them improve, that you've provided guidance, and that you've given clear and explicit warnings). Laying them off in Zynga's circumstances involves statutory redundancy regulations (including minimum redundancy payouts according to length of service etc etc).

So I think that it is somewhat unfair to say that their position is fundamentally juvenile or under-informed - agree with it or not, laws based on the principle that you can't sack employees at will are very well entrenched and popular in a number of countries.
I don't think I understand how to use gunits.
How do you "accidentally" hire more people than you can afford?

I could see two people both hiring a janitor without realizing it, but not "accidentally" hiring a lot of developers, designers or whatever else.
>you shouldn't be so quick to dismiss things or actions you don't understand.

Instead you should offer more speculation on top of what You don't understand?
Reminds me of a problem I had with a T1 circuit corrupting packets.

Shortly after bringing up a second T1 into a remote location we discovered that some web pages would show broken JPG images at the remote site.

Some troubleshooting revealed that this only happened when traffic was routed over the new T1. The old T1 worked just fine. Pings, and other IP traffic seemed to work over either line but we kept seeing the broken image icon for some reason when traffic came over the new T1.

We tried several times to confirm with the telco that the T1 was provisioned correctly and that our equipment matched those telco parameters. Still had some mangled bits going over that new T1.

Finally had the telco check the parameters over every span in the new (long-distance) T1 circuit and they eventually found one segment that was configured for AMI instead of B8ZS (if I can remember correctly, certainly it was a misconfigured segment though).

The net result is that certain user-data patterns that didn't include sufficient 0/1 transitions would lead to loss of clock synchronization over that segment and corrupted packets. Those patterns were most likely to occur in JPGs.

Once they corrected the parameters on that segment, everything worked as expected.

Quite a bit of head scratching with that one and lots of frustration as the layer-1 telco culture just couldn't comprehend that layer-2/3 Internet folks could accurately diagnose problems with their layer-1 network.
Thats standard, two months(60 days) are required by California Law(WARN act) and one month pay is usually tied to an agreement that you won't sue.
I have trouble when I'm in American and I order water. I need to soften the t to a d, and drawl the word.

I almost always understand Americans, apart from a few movies where they speak rapidly with background noise.

Here's an example of what it's like: (http://youtu.be/q-cAnFbEXY0) - it's almost recognisable, but not quite.

So, mashing together sounds to create fake words can create something tantalisingly close to what I'm expecting to hear. Mashing a bunch of random words together usually doesn't work, but putting a Markov chain in the again creates something that gives the initial feeling of "this is not nonsense".

And for most songs you probably could sting random words together without so many people noticing; random sentences would probably be fine.
Seriously -- I am dying to get some kind of good, nuanced study on this.

On the one side, defending long-form copy ads are David Ogilvy (probably popularly considered to be the greatest advertising genius ever, and who rigorously statistically tested all his methods), and today, companies like Apple.

On the other side, are lots of Web 2.0 A/B testing results that basically say, shorter is better.

Now, I'm sure there are times when each are right. But I've never heard anyone explain when long-form is better vs when short-form is better, and when each performs worse.

Is it high-end products (long copy) vs low-end products (short copy)? Is it "experience" products vs "utility" products? Is it left-brain vs right-brain consumers? Is it impulse buys vs researched buys? I could invent a million ideas, but I want proof, not hypotheses.

I am positively desperate for some kind of researched and statistically backed-up explanation that figures out the factors on both sides!
New Monte Carlo Simulation tool (Knockout.js)
tl;dr: I'd very much like a "noprocrast front-page only" or "comment threads ignore noprocrast" checkbox.

I have a huge noprocrast.

Having to /logout just to check out a story or its comments that I got linked from somewhere else (and that I know I really want to check, specifically) is really annoying.

To me, this is a completely different use-case than browsing stories on the front-page. Browsing of the front-page is a significant threat to my productivity, hence the huge noprocrast. Browsing of stories I have a direct link to is not a significant threat to my productivity.

Hence, the suggestion above.
Glider - A minimal, text-focused theme for Wordpress
IDEs Are a Language Smell
Actually, you don't understand Zynga since you're relying on rumor and hearsay. I've worked as Zynga. Things aren't as black and white as you think they are.
It's a good goal if you can support yourself while you do it. Otherwise, it remains but a dream.
And it has its own dance. The Macarena, Cupid Shuffle, etc. are as popular for their dance as they are for the music.