skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have been a professional webmaster since 1995. I have worked for California's largest privately held webhosting company. I am an MCP in Windows server and have been the only guy on staff willing to support customers with IIS.

I base my statement partly on that experience.
Thank you for linking to main site from blog logo. Finally a startup that gets it!
Except Mitt Romney, apparently!
Oh no! Chevron's secret centrifuges are doomed! Well, at least it won't play AC/DC.
Because it's usually the people who feel that they're entitled to a discount no matter what, who also feel that they're entitled to white glove service, support calls after hours even for trivial questions (with 10 minute turnaround), similar discounts off their already discounted price, special features written just for them.

Oh and they get to stamp their feet and hop up and down with rage and send shitty emails when you don't live up to their expectations.

And they also usually do this to all of their other suppliers and customers too, which means that they tend to go out of business without warning, still owing you money.
I think the strategy is to let the browser be a platform for application development. The better the foundation, the more robust and varied apps developers can build, the stronger the ecosystem.

Looking at it from the perspective of "so what if the browser is standards compliant, users don't care about benchmarks" is a bit short sighted since it's not just about the browser, it's about the foundation of the phone's ecosystem.
Check out Silver from yesterday:

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/08/as-natio...

Obama's tipping point state was CO, which he won by almost 5 points, or somewhere in the vicinity of 80-90k votes. People will pay a lot of attention to Ohio, Florida, and Virginia (crazy that OH was closer than VA!), but Obama could have lost all three and still won.
Wait a sec, anyone I've given a check to could withdraw the entire contents of my account?
Why can't we have the expressiveness of CL or Haskell with the performance of C++?
Heck, I remember a Republican candidate who was amazed by the scanner at the supermarket checkout.
Apple is doomed because they're not focusing on desktop computers? Um..... what?

Alternately: Apple is ignoring desktop computers because the market is mobile and laptops, and really it's just corporations and enthusiasts that will go out of their way for a desktop... ya know, the kinds of people that aren't going to buy a Mac anyway. So why should Apple focus on a market that they're making obselete?
Their idea of the "Best Web Browser" is passing a standards compliance test with top marks?
A: ungraceful crash under load
I will freely admit that most of what I attempted to read beyond the first few pages was over my head (and certainly my attention span), but the gist of my interpretation would be that humans are increasingly mating with sameness in mind, or as I will henceforth (egotastically--not a typo) call "self-identifying physiopsychological compatibility".
10,000 hours doesn't make you an expert
cannot agree more. saw firsthand how hard this team kept at it!
I think we'll put this to use right away.
I don't remember which version I started on, but remember a friend showed me one of the Phoenix betas. I had been using Netscape, and then the Mozilla suite, but I was blown away by what I saw. Ever since then, in some form or another I've used firefox.
What else do you call it? A "mobile website"? I don't think that's the real problem... the real problem is none of the users actually had an opportunity to use prior to it being absolutely mission critical.
Actually it's not a complete word. So, it's like "understan" or "comprehen". Probably because it's still beta.
That's a big part of my idea of a good web browser, as well.
No one should allow a business or non-profit to face a situation like this. Only bad managers put something so important into such difficult circumstances. Why go live the day of the election? Are they insane?

Unless the contract (to build this application) had some kind of clause like "This thing must work perfectly or all the money will be refunded" then this is a great contract to get. Let us consider this cynically for a moment. I wish I could land contracts like this one. Can you imagine building an app that the client will only need for 1 day, and you still get paid even if the thing does not work? The chance for fraud is huge. Who would even allow this? The people pitching this must have been some very talented salespeople (perhaps they were convincingly able to argue that they were such huge Republican supporters that if they lost then that would be punishment enough, as it would be so very sad for them to see Obama win?)

I've worked with a lot of startups and clients and the staff always needs training and you never, ever know what all the bugs are until you've gotten some feedback from the staff who are using it for real. To suggest that a software project is done the day you first give it to the staff is idiotic -- that's simply the moment you move to real world testing.

Some developers might suggest that a really good suite of unit tests might provide enough insurance, but that is not true -- I've worked with non-technical staff who tend to confuse bad UI decisions with software bugs, and if a UI decision is bad enough, I think it is fair to classify it as a bug. If some_important_action is crucial to the staff, and none of the staff can find the link to some_important_action, then the UI decision that hid it is effectively as bad as a Fatal Exception, but no amount of unit tests can tell you that the staff finds the UI incomprehensible.
Wait a sec, anyone I've given a check to could withdraw the entire contents of my account?

Donald Knuth (author of The Art of Computer Programming) no longer writes personal checks.

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/news08.html
In five years, native apps will be much better too. So it would require HTML5 apps to not only be better than native apps from now but also native apps from the future to be considered as cool. I dont think this a very good bet since in the end the browser itself is a native app!
Predictably there are a lot of haters on the thread, but can't we look at this as a good thing? A great browser won't be anywhere near enough to win, but a crappy browser is game over. I, for one, would like more competing platforms rather than fewer.
I'm starting to get tired of "shootouts" where nobody wins. Come on. Be a mensch and pick a winner.
I think he means "Did these WikiSpeed guys sell anything or did they just get a lot of traffic?"
>To build Orca, the Romney campaign turned to Microsoft and an unnamed application consulting firm.

Lawsuit incoming in 3...2...1...

I can't imagine the billionaires who funded the campaign and the various Super PACs are going to be pleased to find out Romney likely lost because of a failed GOTV effort.
Why I Quit Law School and Became a Programmer
SharePoint. Oh my head. When I saw us using that in the future ops center for Fukushima, it was the same feeling I had when I came back from sea duty and there was this thing called PowerPoint: I felt like they were asking me to put my brain in egg slicer. Giving a bunch of Marines with history degrees network and expecting them to understand version control is a step to far. Maybe in ten years. But the interface is sooooo bad, they'll never figure out how to use the one feature the system is intended to provide.
We do, its called the D programming language.
Your entire life is online
> Wow, if BlackBerry really thinks a better browser will help them retain more customers they really don't get why people prefer iPhone and Android phones.

Blackberry doesn't have a choice. They're in a tough spot. They need to "skip" a generation, if they have any hope of survival.

Things are moving toward web/html5 tech and that is the future. Not now, but in a few years. All of the direct-hardware-access stuff is being worked on right now.

Even now, you can build metro/Windows 8 apps using html5. There's Firefox OS. WebOS is barely alive, but still kicking.

And, of course, there's the simple argument that the most important and popular app on both iOS and Android is the web browser.
It's threads like this that make me thank my parents, who prevented me, at the age society didn't even trust me with a beer, from signing on to most than a decades worth of debt in order to go to a trendy school.
If your ecosystem is "the entire Internet", I'd say it's a pretty good ecosystem to start with for BB10. I'm not particularly excited about BlackBerry, and never have been their target audience, but a good browser is absolutely one of the most important factors in my phone decision.

I still believe in the power of the open web over closed ecosystems, despite the billions Apple makes from their App Store. I'm hopeful that the open web will win on the phone, just as it has begun to win on the desktop. And in that world, it won't matter what OS you run, as long as your phone has a competent browser. Sounds like BB10 will have a very competent browser.

That's not to say I believe RIM can pull out of this nosedive, but at least they're making moves in the right directions, for the first time in years (I think; I haven't seen anything else from them that makes me think they understand the new reality of the mobile landscape).
It is by a YC company, and recommended by pg.
Lawdingo Makes It Easy To Find And Instantly Consult A Lawyer Online
Even better than Firefox OS?
Is that $1500 for your own place or $1500 with roommates?
Having just finished writing a phonegap app (or Cordova as it is now known), this makes me much less likely to want to use BB10. I've only used Cordova on ios and android (simply because blackberry has such as small percentage of the target it is not worth the investment).

Native apps are much nicer and easier to code, regardless of the platform. And don't even get me started on the mess that is trying to use JS frameworks such as Jquery mobile to actually do something useful. Such as facebook or twitter integration.

Cross platform app development is a good ideal but none of the current platforms can do it in a way that isn't a horrendous pain.
I found that a rather good introduction to code as data, but I am not sure whether I am supposed to have been hit by the enlightenment he describes… :-)
Does someone knows how to use Google Analytics API with cURL?

btw: nice overview!
If that is your qualification for a dictatorship, then the U.S falls in that category as well. See WikiLeaks, and Assange.
But increased mating with sameness in mind causes increased variability in phenotype. For example heights in the US span a larger range now.
carwoo.com
It would give me more pause if Mitt Romney were involved personally in this sort of a project.
More Players Are Turning to PPH Bookmaking Service - The $7 Per Head Shop
To understand Lisp is to understand interpreters. With that understanding you can create domain specific languages which is extremely powerful.

But I wouldn't recommend using Lisp itself.. macros in particular are unhygienic.
Amen! <3
But that's not how software works most of the time.

With most software licensing schemes large companies are, for lack of a better phrase, gold mines.

They have more money, more users, more computers, more servers, require more support, and require higher up time. All of which you can charge them for if you license your software appropriately.

Not to mention it's usually easier to jump through hoops for one or two huge customers than it is for a hundred small customers.
This is great feedback, will definitely look into this.
BlackBerry aren't even in the competition anymore.

It's over for them.
Really, that was my first thought. Before reading any article I usually want to know who is writing so I first look for a link. I hate when people link to the blog home. Ah... First World Problems
Moderate fascists are still fascists.
Yes? How did you assume a check worked?
Lonely No More: How to Get Followers on LinkedIn
Alas, you are not the average person.
A glimpse of what? That money buys power, and the "shining light" of democracy is just a plutocracy much like their own system... That IS brutal, but not in the way you think.
Another blog spelling doom for Apple. A few months back there was one similar for Google, then there was the Microsoft one. I must say 'Blogosphere is Doomed'

EDIT - I was close to reporting the story, but then even though trite, it's an opinion.
Try at http://www.flash-navbars-and-java-applet-clocks.com ; they're also part of a really cool webring!
Actually I am. In fact, you'd be amazed at how many people are in this kind of debt who has learned their lesson and would love to be able to get out the debt once and for all.
> Even if you supported Romney, this has to give you some pause about the man's management skills and who he hired to run things.

Wait, what?

There's a difference between people taking responsibility for what their staff do (thus, he should take responsibility for it) and people actually being responsible for what their staff do - especially if those staff are not staff but sub-contracted service providers.
Ducking Google in search engines
The UK Court Sanctions Apple, Hopes "Lack of Integrity" Is Not "Typical"
So I see from your profile that you're an admitted contrarian, but I'll bite your troll-bait. I think if only 18-20 people have the skill, then it does not qualify as a "base or core" skill. The fact that a skill is necessary to complete a task does not, to me, imply that it is also "of central importance". Feel free to continue trolling on the matter by yourself.
I meant the guys who he hired to take care of this stuff.

Of course, after Tuesday, they're all looking for work now.
I would love a system that is schema-less by design, but has guards that can be enforced at insert/update. That way, the underlying data structures don't have to be locked up from complex migrations (as needed w/ ALTER TABLE), but you still get type safety. A migration instead would simply involve a change in guards and an asynchronous update of existing entries. Plus you'd get all the wins of something resembling optional types: you only enforce guards if you want.
>"We asked if our laptops needed to be WiFi capable," Dittuobo told Ars. "Dan Centinello went into how the Garden had just finished expansion of its wireless network and that yes, WiFi was required. I was concerned about hacking, jamming the signal,* etc...*

This brings up a whole nother can of worms - electoral cyber warfare. What if the Dems, or some sympathizer group, say some local Anonymous, decided to disrup the GOP's centralized GOTV operation?

They could point LOIC at the IP receiving all the real-time field reports, set up hidden wireless jammers around Boston Garden, and any number of other hacks and exploits to disrupt this centralized system.

I use the GOP and Anonymous as an example here, but it could work in any direction. It's one thing for a campaign to lose due to its own incompetence and negligence, but quite another to lose due to outside interference and being the target of cyberwarefare.
What Advice Would You Give a Graphic Design Student?
If you don't hire people with adequate management skills to assess risk and take proactive steps to mitigate problems before they become dangerous to the mission, that's a failure at the highest level. Someone should've see this coming, or Romney clearly doesn't know how to delegate responsibility well.
Would love a comparison of this to couchbase which seems to have a similar sharded distributed setup.

Congrats on shipping!
Nice. I hope you make it. I have something that looks like a book and would love to have tools to finish and publish it without friction.
Many Worlds vs Copenhagen is a largely irrelevant debate. It doesn't make any observable difference whatsoever, so it's metaphysics. By analogy to classical probability, Copenhagen is like looking at the sampling of a random variable, and Many Worlds is like looking a weighted list of possible outcomes. It's just a different perspective on the same thing.

I say largely irrelevant because there is a minority of people (including, if I'm not mistaken, Nobel prize winner 't Hooft) who say that neither Many Worlds nor Copenhagen is right, because there are hidden assumptions in EPR that are overlooked. Since you seem to be a fan of lesswrong.com, this should appeal to you ;-).

I think for the rest we are in agreement, I misinterpreted "as long as we didn't find complete laws of physics, we're bound to ignore something" and "Probability is still in the mind. Not in the territory.". The latter statement becomes rather tautological and its meaning rather weak if you include QM randomness though. In the context of the frequentist vs Bayesian debate it means something far stronger.
Agreed.

I'd also like to note that the quid-pro-quo model of patents suggests that, in fact, it shouldn't be enough for the solution to be non-obvious: It should have to be non-obvious even once you have been told such a thing exists. Because if the mere knowledge of the existence of something would be sufficient to render how to do it obvious, the inventor cannot hope to keep its workings secret once it is released, and so we are trading for something that would be worthless anyway.
Yes, for me the first time I read about the lisp syntax I was thinking:

"oh cool, it makes (+ 2 2) exactly equivalent to the syntaxic tree

+

/ \

2 2

"

But I don't find it particularly enlightening and I still don't see what cool stuff you can do with macros that you can't do elsewhere.
Coming from a launch that had its own share of issues, I can say that things like these happen for a variety of reasons:

1. Developers overestimate their capabilities
2. Developers underestimate timelines

3. Client overestimates developer throughput
4. Client underestimates man hours required for any given feature.

5. Someone expects someone else to do QA.
6. Project manager assigns everything an ASAP priority

And this is just to start.
ISO 8601 is a standard way of representing dates as strings, e.g. "2012-11-09T08:08Z".
And then a 18 yo REMF downloads all your secret classified documents and uploads them to the Internet.
wow, not one comment dissing Obj-C? my head just blew up.
How Music at the Office Affects Your Work Life
What jumps out immediately at me as I read this paper is that the author is not a behavioral geneticist, but an economist,

http://nymag.com/news/media/51015/index3.html

and most of the people he credits for helping him on the paper are other economists. He cites psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen a lot, but Baron-Cohen's view of autism is not yet the mainstream view among autism researchers.

Other economists are examining behavior genetics issues, and one group of economists has published a paper updating their fellow social scientists on issues of human behavorial genetics that are little understood among most social scientists.

Chabris, C. F., Hebert, B. M., Benjamin, D. J., Beauchamp, J., Cesarini, D., van der Loos, M., ... & Laibson, D. (2012). Most reported genetic associations with general intelligence are probably false positives. Psychological Science.

http://coglab.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc/Chabris2012a-FalsePositiv...

"At the time most of the results we attempted to replicate were obtained, candidate-gene studies of complex traits were commonplace in medical genetics research. Such studies are now rarely published in leading journals. Our results add IQ to the list of phenotypes that must be approached with great caution when considering published molecular genetic associations. In our view, excitement over the value of behavioral and molecular genetic studies in the social sciences should be tempered—as it has been in the medical sciences—by a recognition that, for complex phenotypes, individual common genetic variants of the sort assayed by SNP microarrays are likely to have very small effects.

"Associations of candidate genes with psychological traits and other traits studied in the social sciences should be viewed as tentative until they have been replicated in multiple large samples. Failing to exercise such caution may hamper scientific progress by allowing for the proliferation of potentially false results, which may then influence the research agendas of scientists who do not realize that the associations they take as a starting point for their efforts may not be real. And the dissemination of false results to the public may lead to incorrect perceptions about the state of knowledge in the field, especially knowledge concerning genetic variants that have been described as 'genes for' traits on the basis of unintentionally inflated estimates of effect size and statistical significance."

So my caution here would be that an unpublished working paper like this (a common form of preliminary sharing of speculative results in the discipline of economics) is very unlikely to be the definitive word on this interesting topic.
The ABC'S of No-Budget Filmmaking
So because you have no idea how to represent some arbitrary things with JSON, we should all stop using it? You, sir, are not making any sense.

Also, you seem to be confusing primitive data types with complex data types. Yes, JSON doesn't have a 'color' data type. But guess what? Neither does C, nor Java. If you want a 'color' type, you'll have to create one yourself! Mind blowing, I know.

So here, let me suggest a possible solution:

dates: string

timestamp: integer

colors: string (RGB,BGR,RGBA,...), integer, object

Part of 'data modeling' is to model your data out of basic types. Shocking! If JSON had types for every type of object under the Sun (like you seem to want), JSON parsers would be a lot more complicated and little thinking would be required in the process of modeling your data.
So because you have no idea how to represent some arbitrary things with JSON, we should all stop using it? You, sir, are not making any sense.

Also, you seem to be confusing primitive data types with complex data types. Yes, JSON doesn't have a 'color' data type. But guess what? Neither does C, nor Java. If you want a 'color' type, you'll have to create one yourself! Mind blowing, I know.

So here, let me suggest a possible solution:

dates: string
timestamp: integer
colors: string (RGB,BGR,RGBA,...), integer, object

Part of 'data modeling' is to model your data out of basic types. Shocking! If JSON had types for every type of object under the Sun (like you seem to want), JSON parsers would be a lot more complicated and little thinking would be required in the process of modeling your data.
How do filters work? They seem pretty difficult implementation-wise since you can write them in any of the language bindings. My first guess is that you pipe all the data in a table to the client, and the client itself does the filtration. But this would be extraordinarily inefficient.
"For those unfamiliar with American customs, Black Friday in the US refers to the day after Thanksgiving Day, which is traditionally considered the first day of the holiday shopping season. It's generally the busiest shopping day of the year, resulting in huge profits for retailers – thus, putting them 'in the black.'"

This is not why it's called Black Friday. It's called Black Friday originally by the retail workers who had to man the stores that day. "Black" meaning bad or dark, in this case, like "this is a black day", rather than any reference to finance (or racism).
Those who worked their way into the corporate structure of many retailers, or graduated college and moved on in their careers retained their floor-worker slang, and the term spread.
I would assume if you had access to that, the device would have a web browser as well?
Common Lisp != Lisp. You mean Common Lisp, Lisp is the family of languages (which also includes the Scheme sub-family, Racket, Clojure, Arc, Kernel…).
Realizing the Limitations of Responsive Design
In 15-20 years, a new generation that is aware that nothing can really ever be "blocked" on the internet will come to power.

Until then, long live dns servers & vpn.
$1500 per person, you won't find your own place for that price in SF.