skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of the problem is caused by cell phones. People talking on phones are usually louder than in-person chatter. And while a conversation is distracting, half of one is worse. Also, cell phone conversations on public transit seem to be more common than talking in-person. Everyone has a phone, but not everyone takes the train with a conversation partner.

Different cultures have different rules about mobile phones. While vacationing in Japan, I noticed that nobody talks on their phone on trains. It's wonderful. As soon as I came back to the states, I was crudely reminded how horrible American cell phone etiquette is.

A few years ago, I bought a cell phone jammer. It has paid for itself many times over. If you find yourself distracted by obnoxious people on cell phones, buy one. You won't regret it.
Also Opera's Turbo can be used to bypass internet censorship.
The post was mostly about challenges around integrating with popular JS MVC frameworks. I think the overall ClojureScript JS integration story is as about as good as Clojure and Java.
I view free speech absolutism as nothing more than intellectual cowardice. Why deal with all the grey areas when we can just declare it all permissible and move on? Boom, done, next. Absolutes are so simple.

I'm your average white boy from the suburbs. There's not a lot people can say to bring me down. That isn't the case for a whole lot of people in this world, and I fully support the use of legislation as a tool for inhibiting those who would use their position in society to inspire hatred against others.

Oh, and ignoring people spouting racist and sexist stuff doesn't help. I have the privilege of ignoring it; others do not. So no, I won't "stop listening". This is see no evil, hear no evil crap.
On a related topic: if you are a developer and are forced to deeply concentrate in public places, after three years of doing that daily I arrived at a system that could keep me coding.

1. Figure out what earplugs work well. Working well means good sound suppression but also means earplugs that you can have in your ear comfortably for long stretches. I can sleep the entire night in the ones I settled on (I buy them bulk: http://www.amazon.com/Moldex-6800-Pura-Fit-Soft-Earplugs/dp/... ).

2. Get over-the-ear headphones, the kind that physically enclose your entire ear. Mine are noise-canceling as well but most of the benefit comes from the enclosure.

3. Play a white noise mp3 into the headphones. Turn the volume up to the point where you can just hear it through the earplugs you're also wearing.

With that setup, I would not even notice people talking next to me. People would often have to wave their hand by my laptop screen to get my attention (to ask me to share the coffeeshop's power outlet or what not).

I rent an office now and am happy that is not a daily situation for me, but that's how I made the best of it after much experimentation.
It seems like it would be a massive, massive jump in usability from iOS

Really? Utility, maybe - but usability? I've used an Asus tablet with Windows 8 on it and usability is far worse than iOS, at least where discoverability is concerned. It's too easy to get trapped in the faux desktop mode, and none of the gestures are as intuitive as they are on iOS. The gestures aren't difficult to use or clumsy - it's just that they're counter-intuitive for a new user (in my own anecdotal experience).

What they've done is certainly leagues more impressive than Apple's plodding, torturous attempts to wedge iOS concepts into its 20-year old WIMP model (seriously, go use Mountain Lion - its a complete mess - but no one attacks Apple as harshly as they do Microsoft... funny that.)

My impression of 10.8 is that OSX is being maintained by a skeleton crew who decide what new iOS features can be ported over to the desktop to warrant a new version. But I wouldn't call it a mess - not at all. Notifications and inline progress indicators are both welcome improvements. Reverse-scrolling is just wrong, but that's easy to turn off. Apple plods because OS X works - both OS X and Windows 7 are good at what they do.

Windows 8 isn't just a bit experimental - it's a groping attempt to stitch wings onto a monkey or a beak onto a cow. As a technical decision, there's no good reason to replace the start menu with Metro or to bring metro to an OS that's typically run on computers with multiple high-resolution displays. And there's no good reason to bring a pseudo-desktop UI, complete with tiny little touch targets, to a tablet other than to accomodate a hacky non-metro build of Office. But this isn't a technical solution - it's marketing strategy. This is the bridge that carries Windows over to the tablet, whether it belongs there or not.
Fail: Pcmag doesn't work in lanscape
First, let me claim that I am unwillfully ignorant of how to begin to treat these balancing issues - so take it easy in my response. I think that articles like this (the tone is a bit flame bait) actually are part of this problem.

We don't need to turn this issue into what race has become in America - where white people are scared to ask each other - let alone a black friend - about the issue in a rational way. It's fucked up a lot of good intentions, and replaced them with empty PC platitudes and non/empty-actions that help few.

I say I'm unwillingly ignorant because I've sought out everyone's opinion about this I can find: from guys/girls in and out of tech. I still don't know what the stance is with regards to such issues. All I know is that of course the ratio is bad, culture needs to change, etc. - we all know that.

I'm not looking for answers - I'm even before-that, I want the problem further defined. I bet these guys were a lot like me: not thinking actively about anything but trying to do something cool. They didn't cover their bases with regards to this problem - this is actually part of the problem. We need to not demonize these people, we need to find better ways of helping guys like this not miss these kinds of things.

Am I unreasonable?
Radiation Dosage  in Flight  through  the  Van  Allen Belt [1959]
>Every browser has an option to disable loading of images, javascript, flash or java. At least Firefox and Opera have them for sure, I suspect others do too, because why not?

1. Opera has also option to show only cached images and option to load selected image.

2. Chrome has not option to disable images.
Yea I was about to post about that too. I'm guessing it represents the quiet ones' gut response (a barbaric one) that is being masked with the politeness of the silence sign.
1. If we are talking about really big companies there are a handful of examples anyhow. I am not sure if an empirical comparison is even possible.

2. I think there is a survivor bias here. Most of the biggest companies reach scale very quickly. The scale creates an incentive for the other co-founder to stick on. There is some anecdotal evidence to believe that if scale does not come early on - most likely there won't be a 'really big' company. If the co-founder quits and the founder soldiers on - it just adds another data point to pg's co-founder theory.
I remember using opera mini on my blackberry and 2G tmobile connection in NYC a few years ago. It was definitely the best thing on BB, and I remember it worked amazingly well.

And for those wondering about Opera's business model, see here [1].

[1] - http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/blog/2011/01/03/how-does-ope...
What parts of Mountain Lion do you consider "a complete mess"?

LaunchPad is a joke, but other than that I find Mountain Lion to be very intuitive and easy on the eyes.
thanks

re g+

- if on android/iphone and not using g+ app the albums/photos aren't so great

- urls are to longs and not presonalised

- if the users isnt logged into g+ there to much chrome around the albums

- photos are 2nd class g+ citizens

re 1
- thanks - ive about 100 albums on g+ - dont want to go and have to click into each 1 then click 'storify' just so the album contents display

re 3
- thanks - if video was treated just like a photo would be perfect

re 4
- both sub-domain and full domain - so i can point photos.mydomain.com to mystorify

re 5
- thanks - this is so i can email the link as photos.mydomain.com/london2012
Don't roadblock - Make it dead-simple for your advisor to help you
I'm surprised no one found this condemnation of a society "constantly getting louder with this new internet generation" to be oddly similar to the idea that "each successive generation is getting more and more immoral" -- an idea that I would argue has not only been thoroughly debunked, but also rather impossible as well.

Of course I'm not saying that overall our cities haven't increased in their background volume by virtue of more people and things such as air planes and leaf blowers, but to go another step further and call a entire generation of people inconsiderate and loud because they're used to being on a "solipsistic" internet smacks of a classic sense generational moral superiority.

And I'm also just as surprised that to come here, with as good of a community as I feel HN has, after scanning through the comments section, not a single person mentioned this in the first comment in each comment-tree. Instead it was a mess of "well, yes, us quiet people are so superior...".
These comments are revealing in themselves.

Every system has bad actors. Open identification and criticism of those bad actors marks a robustly free society, not a weak one. Talk of positioning, imprudence, insult, and hushing up... that trips alarm bells.
The Amiga was released a year later and made the Mac look like an overpriced toy.
I use and recommend gandi.net

The answer to 'Why' is 'No Bullshit'. http://www.gandi.net/no-bullshit
Congratulations Meraki, very well deserved!

I just wonder if they had continued their run, could they have IPO-ed at a much higher valuation? They seem to have both very strong product and business fundamentals. Would love to hear thoughts on this..
I was responding to this line "Still, I'm hopeful for pure ClojureScript libs that show how expressive Clojure can be for client side development if you approach the problem without the usual JS assumptions.", which is what I don't understand.

I havent used coffeescript, but from the article and your comment, it doesn't sounds like the integration is as good - the Java/Clojure integration is really very very good in practice.
Windows 8 supports multitouch trackpads on new computers. Many older laptops can also get gesture support with the correct drivers. My 18 month old laptop has pinch support + all the edge swipe gestures.
You're right that there should be some sort of affordance to access programs.

What I meant was that the problem isn't that there's no `start` menu - it's that there's no consistent, intuitive, and quick way to access any program (along with having to switch UI's between desktop and metro, and a lot of other things) which are problems that the start menu originally solved.
A passive aggressive is unveiled?

"shhh" == "fuck you" in the quiet car
Is a tabletop search for Planck scale signals feasible?
I second the suggestion of Awesome. It's really easy to set up your own highly customized window manager. The tagging concept is also really interesting, and I haven't seen anything quite like it in any other WM.
yes, I'm not saying Japan is strictly better...
This reminds me of an anecdote from Feynman about what sorts of mental things he could and could not do while counting seconds, and how it was different for different people. His counting was internally verbal and he could do anything that didn't require him to speak or anything else that was internally verbal.

On the other hand, a mathematician he knew was able to do lots of mental things while counting that Feynman couldn't, and wasn't able to do other mental things while counting that Feynman could, because the other guy counted visually.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&...
Projectionable - Client-Approvable Project Estimates
"People will be able to opt-out of HTTPS for maximum speed if that’s how they roll."

Why is that even an option? This entire article is written in such a way that most users are going to assume that Facebook is going to start loading at a snails pace.

Turning on SSL is technically slower, but it certainly is not going to be noticeable. Perhaps if all Facebook was serving was a couple of small text files, the overhead associated with SSL could be noticed, but with that isn't the case.
World Bank says world likely to warm by four degrees
Users have learnt to open task manager, find the process and click "End Task". That's a whole lot more complicated. I think people forget that at some point everyone went through a learning curve to learn even the basics of how to operate a computer. Having a learning curve does not make something a failure.
I have yet to take the leap in terms of using it day-to-day. I just don't have the time to play.

I had my kid install it in a small netbook we were not using just to see what it felt like. Neither one of us is interested in using it very far past boot. It's one of those "Right. Brilliant!" moments and then the notebook is closed shut and turned off.

Professionally my concern has to do with wasting time and not being able what we absolutely-positively need to do on a daily basis. As I type this I have about twenty programs up and running on this machine. It has three large monitors attached. It was specifically built to make programming, electronics design or mechanical design far more productive. If doing a web project it is not uncommon to have multiple browsers, virtual machines and IDE's going as well as PDF's and reference material. Similar scenarios exist when doing electro-mechanical design.

My current first-touch experience with W8 is just that: a first impression. And this impression has not been positive at all. I, frankly, don't have time to deal with bullshit. Metro (or whatever they care to call it) might be great for a tablet or for grandma on a single screen laptop. It absolutely suck ass for us. I wouldn't even want it present on any of my machines. What I need is an evolutionary improvement over where we are as opposed to a pole-shifting paradigm shift. I would suspect that if I decided to switch my development machines to W8 (not likely) the process might easily bring productivity down to zero or less for at least a month. This on the assumption that all applications play ball.

What's disappointing here is that, to me at least, it sure feels like MS has more than lost its way. They seem to simply not understand who uses their machines and what they need to do with them.

I get it. I get it. Grandma, uncle Fester or cousin Itt might need a dumbed-down single-finger point-and-something-happens interface so they can waste five hours a day on Facebook. However, the massive population of users who needs these machines for business, engineering, design, industrial and other applications don't need this at all. They need the ball to keep rolling in the same direction. Less bugs. More speed. Cheaper. That's it.

I was hoping that the day might come when MS might fully embrace Unix/Linux as the core underneath Windows and move us all into what could be a really neat platform in a manageable way. Of course, it is lunacy to even think that this could be possible. Then again, I present you with Windows 8.
They've done studies showing that listening to half the conversation is the key to why it's annoying http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_shots/2010/05/cellph...
Designing Pricing Plans for Subscription-Based Web Apps
>I agree there should ideally be more encouragement, but I don't think it should be required for conference organizers to do that, to avoid allegations of discrimination.

So, it gets more complicated than that.

Most conferences can't fill their rosters via just calls for proposals. Instead, it is the director of speakers that has to individually invite speakers to attend. As a result, they tend to be dominated by people they know, which tend to be white men.

The only way to escape being dominated by your social network is to invest the extra energy.
> the most diehard Bayesian, in that situation, will produce something like "confidence intervals" because that's what Bayesian decision theory says to do.

I disagree that this is what "Bayesian" decision theory says to do. It's what decision theory says to do, and it's what math says to do, and it's what the constraints require. It's not particularly "Bayesian" -- it's just what you have to do.

If everything that happens to be the correct answer (including frequentist confidence intervals when called for) is now described as Bayesian, then the term has no meaning and we are all Bayesians. :-)

> Is there any not-so-contrived situation where the problem solved by confidence intervals is actually an important one?

What would you do in the case of my 100 robots, where you want 70 of them to come to the correct decision, and they have to make their decisions independently? Having them all calculate a posterior independently works terribly (as I showed, 80% of them come to the wrong conclusion with >73% belief). Confidence intervals work a heck of a lot better.

The optimal approach would consider what single algorithm works best when run independently. Finding these solutions (on, e.g., a decentralized POMDP) is an open problem.
A very well written article indeed.
Surface, my go to Tablet
I've spent ~15 years in online advertising and this sure isn't limited to just being a "Facebook scam".

This style of advertising called "incentivized co-registration" (co-reg / co-reg path) (1) has been a long running plague - as far back as 2008 the FTC penalized ValueClick ~$3m (2) for this exact same thing as it's deceptive.

On the front-end you've got Facebook, Microsoft, and Google (to name a few) making money hand over fist letting these co-reg paths buy their media.

(As an aside Bing is well known to be the loosest with regulating compliant advertising which is just sad given that it impacts the MSFT brand.)

On the back-end you've got brands like Netflix, Nokia, Guiness, GAP, etc etc that lend themselves to being on the co-registration path and offering a variety of offers like "Join our newsletter etc" so they can then market to the consumers that say yes.

Again, great in concept - fill out your information once to enter for a "prize" and then select brand offers that you're interested in.

The problem is that most of the guys running the actual paths - buying the media etc - are small affiliate marketers. These are one to five man teams that slap together a variety of these co-reg offers from the "legit" co-reg company APIs.

So you'll see the big co-reg companies bragging about how they power the USAToday.com registration process, but the reality is many of them make the bulk of their revenue through their API sets and affiliate programs, which they leave damn-near unregulated (unless put under the microscope).

So every now and again the FTC hammers a few of these small timers, but the reality is an affiliate - doing "ok" - can make anywhere from $10 - 100k/mo in profit just doing what I describe above - build some direct-response landing pages, pull brand offers from the co-reg company apis, and buy media from companies that love to sell it, and don't look too hard for reasons not to.

So anywho I love getting on my soapbox but it's insane how many huge companies benefit from these scams, and how simple it is for them to have deniability due to the ecosystem of using these small timers on the front end.

(1) A great breakdown of "what is" co-reg advertising http://www.coregmedia.com/demos/demo-pub.php

(2) FTC Settles w/ValueClick http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2008/03/vc.shtm
Opera has been light years beyond the other browsers in caching for so long it seems they'll never catch up.

It did have a hard time recovering from the early backlash against it for not being open-source, belying the involvement and contributions of Opera engineers to the open standards web.
EIR[1] has worked on a temporary solution to resolve this by re-interpreting the laws for L and O making it more startup friendly. This was further confirmed by Doug Rand (from whitehouse) at GAN[2] conference but no ETA on formalization.

[1]. http://www.uscis.gov/eir
[2]. http://gan.co/
Well, at least Facebook does their very best to coordinate with law enforcement to take down those who use their platform for scams.

jerk-off gesture
That was a good bet, congrats.
The Frontier Elite Galaxy
I keep seeing this on HN, and keep thinking "Finally, can write apps in python", then it goes back to the same old python shell program and I'm a bit saddened.
It's kind of similar to people who had uninsured art in safe deposit boxes in the World Trade Center on 9/11.

In the old days you took $10,000 to your bank or broker and got a bunch of certificates. Then, as coupons become due, you detached them from the bond (they were actual, paper coupons) took them to your bank and deposited them like checks. Then, when the bonds came due, you presented them to the bank for redemption. If you sold the bonds, workers in the bank's vault a/k/a the cage handled shipping certificates from the seller's bank to the buyer's.

But bearer bonds stopped being issued in the early 80s. Now, the issuer's transfer agent keeps an electronic registry of who owns what and who is due interest payments. When you sell bonds, the transfer is made electronically on the books. There should be very few bearer bonds still outstanding.

Also, they got wet, it's not like they went up in smoke. Bottom line, I wouldn't expect losses from destroyed certificates to be a big number like tens of billions. If they can't salvage them, sounds like it could impact some people, and could be a legal scramble to see who ends up on the hook between DTCC, the banks, the customers, and their insurance companies.
As someone that really wanted Win8 to succeed being primarily a Win dev, I can't help but agree with the article. MS needs leadership that truly understands usability. Win8 missed most of the boat for what consumers want and drove their core supporters of enterprise devs away with all the HTML hoopla. With Sinofsky out, Ballmer needs to go next and be replaced with someone that's a better speaker and better understands users/developers if MS wants to retain any market share.
you don't have to wonder which threads ran when

How does that work? Does it really record every single assignment to every variable in every thread? Wouldn't that potentially slow everything down sufficiently that some classes of multithreaded bugs wouldn't show up under ODB?
Or, you know, not storing large amounts of money in a long-obsolete financial instrument that you can't back up.
From a purely desktop perspective I've found Windows 8 to be a positive step overall. As a 'power user' the main benefits I have found are better performance and stability. Those alone should be enough to mark it as a success for heavy users. The new task manager is just a bonus.

As far as the start menu is concerned I'd be surprised that any 'power user' would miss it all that much. I always used a launcher (executor) as keyboard trumps mouse for speed and the new UI makes the 3rd party launcher app obsolete. Pressing the windows key and typing the name of the app is something most users could learn and come to appreciate the boost in productivity.
Android Camera Code
Well said james.
"Ask HN: Does alchohol make you a better programmer (more inside)"

Maybe, maybe not, but it impairs spelling "alcohol."