skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is it really worth installing an entirely new library just to achieve something a simple line of CSS could do?

.modal-background { background:white; }

For me, Twitter Bootstrap's components have been the right tradeoff between flexibility and functionality. It doesn't have too many bells and whistles which makes it way easier to integrate into my own code.

Maybe I just haven't run in to the use cases for Bootstrap's modal that causes the pain that this fixes, but most of these "features" seem like "it would be cool if..." product cruft.
This is actually really nice, well done. Hard to drop the frills for thrills so to speak. This is a much more functional site than most of the similar bootstrappy approaches, despite it looking like it came out of the 90s. It's actually useful, I like.
" Running these machines requires a basic understanding of metallurgy, physics, chemistry, pneumatics, electrical wiring and computer code"

For $10/hour? Sign me up...
It's not law it's agreements between powerful parties promoting each other's interests for their own benefit.
It's true I gave some what of an ad hominem attack.

But lets apply the social media marketing analogy to Pepsi.

Does Pepsi have an active social media audience that is feverishly reading their tweets and is very open to promoting them to their friends the same way Obama does?

I doubt it.

I pulled some more quotes from the article:

> “Politics is a direct-response business,” Goff says. “People do things if you ask them to do it, and for the most part don’t do it if you don’t ask.”

And then talking about using their facebook page over direct phone calls:

> "5 million voters were contacted this way (via Facebook)"

How many people are going to openly receive direct-marketing messages from a corporation like Pepsi about their products via Facebook?

TLDR: The tools sound the same but political marketing is VERY different than business marketing. The type of audience you are reaching and their engagement is everything.
"No need for right of way" is also enough to know that none of these tube proposals are correct. You can't build a tube from SF to LA without running into right of way concerns.
Sounds like someone sufficiently motivated enough could use something like https://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/elections/da... to predict or promote more Silicon X'es.

Caveat: just looking at one characteristic of a given geographic location (voter preference) is definitely limiting though.

Edit: added the caveat.
I appreciate Martin's contributions to KDE, but when I read that blog post it seemed like he was taking the Trinity fork personally, especially due to one of this three imagined reasons for the fork being "Haters of “KDE 4″ technology". There are many other reasons why someone might want to keep KDE3 going apart from the three he gave.

Also: "Seeing commits to “twin” really hurts and our current version of KWin is just better in any area."

That post was from February, though, so there's little reason for us to continue to dissect it now. I just use it as an example of some of the unfortunate reactions developers have to forks of their code, and a demonstration that those deriding forks should not be taken seriously until after some investigation confirms the validity of their derision.
The Rise of Neo-Evolution
Don't most of the newer languages have these types? And even the older languages support them now with their most popular libraries (e.g. C++/Boost).
"5 Ways The Obama Campaign Was Run Like A Lean Startup"

-----------------

1. They measured every single thing.

2. They used A/B testing.

3. They used behavioral targeting to increase engagement.

4. They streamlined the checkout process.

5. Their marketing was nontraditional.

http://www.fastcompany.com/3002973/5-ways-obama-campaign-was...
> People go into vehicles that I'll call cars, even though they aren't really cars. These cars can be fired by a railgun to match speeds with the tube

Most railguns I've read about produce extreme g-loads. Most people would come out as super-gross wonder-jelly if fired out of one. I think what you want is some kind of electromagnetic accelerator, but not necessarily a railgun in particular.

> On its own that space would heat up due to the friction on the gas, but you can put a heat sink (eg a block of ice) in the car and keep it comfortable inside.

The cabin of a vehicle is quite small, and the ride time is quite short, so a large block of ice probably would be feasible. But you are talking about having a car leave every second, so for each loop you would have to have a plant capable of freezing something like 2 gallons of water per second, as well as a means of refilling the ice container in each car. That's going to add quite a bit to the expense and energy use of the system you describe. Refrigeration systems become quite a bit more efficient as they become larger, so probably this is manageable.

Depending on how quickly you can turn around each car, each loop might require quite a few additional cars. (But still a fraction of the total number)
Which ones? I've tried Ubuntu and Mint but not Fedora. I tried googling it but all I ended up with was a several pages of articles talking about UEFI and the secure boot without a single link TO a Linux that did it. I'm dying to know 'cause I can't stand another minute on Windows 8.
When I read the book and this post, also reading almost all the comments here, I feel like one can just build a survey with direct questions about the assumptions and beliefs and get answers. Why even elbow grease? or do anything else?

Is it that users need to be in the "situation" to really give you correct data driven instinctive answer? While if you ask them a set of questions, the answers might not be correct or they might not answer?
ops sorry it's 20k visitors a month about 800 unique visitors a day
JPictag - An Awesome jQuery image tagger plugin
Hehe. Yeah. Most people don't realise that the US has insanely high taxes for almost zero in return. Plus, double taxation on corporate profits.

Most sane countries have things like franking credits where owners only pay to top up from the corporate rate to the personal rate. You can sort of get around this in the US with a S Corp, but you're still paying something like ~50% for zero social services.

Let's not forget world wide taxation and other arcane issues in the US tax code.

Sigh... :)
Background info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_well_(condenser)

The device in India shown there produces 15 liters of water per square meter per year. The surface area of a bottle is, say, 500 square cm, or 1/20 of a square meter. That would produce about a liter in a year.

http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/publications/data/2005-01-05gshar... talks of 0.042 liter per square meter per day, in extreme.y high humidity.

Clearly, some efficiency gains are needed w.r.t. those designs to effectively make the claim "water bottle tha fills itself". Whether that is possible, I don't know.
Go is much, much more strict than Python. Python is actually fairly forgiving when it comes to whitespace everywhere except for indentation. And for indentation, it doesn't complain as long as you're consistent (for both tabs vs. spaces, and if you choose spaces, consistent with the number of spaces).

Go, on the other hand, checks for many aspects of style at compile-time. If you include an opening brace on the same line, import a package that isn't used, define a variable that isn't needed... all of those will cause compile-time errors.

At first, it can get annoying - especially when you comment out a single line when debugging and then realize you have to make some other minor change elsewhere just to avoid one of the aforementioned style issues.

But on the other hand, I can't deny that it makes my own code cleaner, and it probably saves some errors down the line. Furthermore, it made my code more consistent with existing Go code right from Day 1, even when I was just learning the language. Furthermore, for anybody who wants to do any metaprogramming/code translation, having a more rigid syntax enforced by the compiler is very helpful.

Python doesn't do that. PEP8 is great, and I'm thankful that it's very widely followed. But it's much more powerful when these issues of "style" are made as mandatory as any other aspect of the language specification[1].

This "benevolent dictator" approach has its pluses and minuses, but having written Go code a short while now, I've come to appreciate some of its benefits in the case of coding style.

[1] Okay, so the Go language specification doesn't include all of these, and yes, there are two independent Go compilers. But we can say that it's "mandatory" in the same way that we can say that "Python" has the GIL, when in reality many implementations don't (Jython, Iron Python, etc.)
There's standards and there's standards.

C allows you to place your braces, commas, other tokens and whitespace in whatever form you desire. I suppose there's no need to get anal over those.

But then there are standards such as assertions, avoiding type casts, and breaking functions into helper functions. Those have an effect on code quality by setting up guards for conditions and sentinels for invariants.

I've had my code blown up an assert call so many times that writing all the rest of the assert calls have cost nothing compared to the savings initiated by forcing myself to evaluate where my thinking went wrong as the assert failed.

Formatting coding standards, again, should probably be banished in favor of letting programmers express their thinking in form of how they format their code. I'm pretty sure the best programmers all have top-notch consistent formatting over all their source code files. And if the worst programmers don't, we have bigger problems than formatting.
Yeah. That is my assumption too. But all these proposals just seem to gloss over it.

edit: Jacques admitted it was an oversight.

Still, it's interesting reading these ideas even if they might not be what Elon is thinking.
Quick hack for ignoring Facebook's new Sponsored Posts (Chrome)
The lesson is the first bridge would have been an unqualified success if only they had conducted usability studies and A/B testing and gathered feedback from community-oriented focus groups and practiced just-in-time lean-agile bridge-driven design concepts.

And applied for 6000 patents.
Respecting Google's Java standards, sure. Respecting GitHub's JavaScript guidelines? No thanks. When organizations have earned the right to tell its employees to use a style it's no problem to do things slightly differently than you normally would, but when they haven't earned it...
It doesn't tell that. From Modernizr wiki[0]:
"webforms UI: datepicker, colorpicker UIs cannot be detected, only the associated constraint validation"

[0]: https://github.com/Modernizr/Modernizr/wiki/Undetectables
What you are complaining about is incompetence, not a standards document.
This is a drop-in replacement so that once you hit those use cases, you won't have the pain others have already felt before you. =)
http://www.sopcast.com/

mac/win/nix/droid. we use it around olympics/world cup time. nix client is open source, anyone know an open source server?
Hi there. Just wanted to say I made this rudimentary extension a few days ago in like an hour or two (not trying to brag for coding fast but to make it sound less important, since it's an extension for enhancing procrastination), and then forgot about it. But now when I found myself on Facebook again, and the News Feed seemed somewhat less clustered. It even took me a bit to realize that, hey, it's that thing I made last weekend, and it's kinda working. So why not share it, then. Here's the GitHub repo: https://github.com/skidding/chrome-hide-facebook-sponsored-p.... The code is not very optimized, but it's short, clear and of course there's no funny business (seeing how it's requesting access to *.facebook.com)

EDIT: Oops, I posted with the /publish-accepted at the end which opens up the "published" notification. Oh well, use the clean link below:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ogacbihneknbgjlkgn...
These are valid points. For a megacorp, a lot of what OFA did just won't work.

A political campaign is able to build a very personal connection, and not just with the candidate. There was a mention in another article that fundraising emails 'signed' by campaign manager Jim Messina did very well. People built that connection with another person, an individual.

Some companies might be able to pull that off. If Elon Musk had a consumer company that needed that kind of marketing he'd be able to do it. Jobs could have, and in a way he did. It would be very difficult for Pepsi to pull it off. Not impossible, I can imagine it being done, but it's very unlikely.

I wonder if at some point in the future there's demand for a C level exec with populist charisma in the megacorps. Maybe.
I would suggest to turn the discussion in a different direction -- why don't we bring back wind power to sea transport? There have been multiple trials with mega-kites that can demonstrate 20% or more fuel savings with relatively modest implementations. (see http://www.treehugger.com/cars/cargo-ship-with-kites-first-t... just one example).

Direct wind power would seem to beat out most of your proposal for land-based transport, which, even running on renewable energy, would require a double-conversion to electricity and then back to motive force. It certainly beats out nuclear!
You are correct. I should have been more clear. Our expectation for addition to be associative is deeply ingrained and it's shocking to discover that's not the case when performing floating point computations.
Lots of people successfully run Rails on Ubuntu in production. I don't think it's fair to cry "rotten wood" here, unless the Rails ecosystem is flush with amazing systems wizards who can work around crippling flaws in the OS to run their software.
Obligatory reference: Fremen windtraps from the Dune novels.
Thats a valid theory, but only going back to the dawn of TV/Radio. Before that politicians actually had to have some content in their messages.

for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%E2%80%93Douglas_debates

The format for each debate was: one candidate spoke for 60 minutes, then the other candidate spoke for 90 minutes, and then the first candidate was allowed a 30-minute "rejoinder." The candidates alternated speaking first. As the incumbent, Douglas spoke first in four of the debates.

Those were 3 hour debates. Now all a politician has to do is look good holding a football.

(this is basically paraphrasing Neil Postman's work from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death)
HP's Financial Mess Is Making Everyone Sorry
Block by Block: A Personal Story
I will not be the first to think it or even post it, but in the end they weren't the reason he won. He has never faced a truly critical press. If anything far too many in the media are still enamored with him and he also has one fall back which is even being exploited today in regards to other members of his administration, race.

Simply put, he cannot be criticized without risk of those who do so being branded bigots or racist and that inhibits many from who can be unbiased but critical from speaking out because fear is a great was to stop people before they move.

Yes he had good people working his campaign, but they didn't really have that hard of a job cut out for them. This guy is part cult in his appeal and had a small portion of the vote automatically locked in. He didn't have to win over as many voters as the other guy, and again the GOP ran their Kerry / Gore / Dole / Mondale. Politicians who are easily defined by others because they cannot define themselves face an uphill battle.
What do you mean? The whole point of multicast is that you don't have noise. You choose exactly what you want to get.
Removing use flags and playing with optimization flags can be one of the intermediate steps on the path from "knows nothing about Linux or computer hardware" to "expert low-level developer or admin with detailed knowledge of CPU microarchitecture and practical OS design."
New 'Double Slit' Experiment Skirts Uncertainty Principle
All you need is a couple fields in your profile that lets you use a custom CSS and a custom JavaScript file... You know, like the current `topcolor:` field.
Definitely. It's still enjoyable to read these ideas though =)
I feel quite certain that Elon Musk will be remembered as our generation's greatest entrepreneur.

Even if this idea doesn't succeed, the scale of his ambition is breathtaking.
I've seen his right of way comment. But if you've got something ground based, that is 1200 km long, how can you avoid right of way issues? My guess is that he means to build it in the ocean. There aren't a lot of people living there. If so, it could look like anything you want and there would be no "right of way issues". (Update, it just hit me! If you build this in the ocean, with neutral buoyancy under water, then you don't have to worry about earthquakes or weather! Built on land and able to handle earthquakes is a lot harder.)

But the stopping properties deserve more thought. California has regular earthquakes. What happens if you've got large hunks of metal going 1200 km/h over a section of loop that just was hit by one, what happens?

My suspicion is that you build regular emergency exit tubes. (Many of which might also be good for regular tube service.) The cars are let out at the nearest one. The machinery is at risk, the people are mostly OK.

You then try to stop the plungers with regenerative braking, dumping air in, etc. Or you can build a fast emergency stop, such as having exit holes that you can drop plungers into at high speed, which carries them far enough away from the tube that they won't destroy it when they impact.

This has to be carefully worked through. But the first and most critical piece is the ability to quickly and reliably dump passengers from most of the system. And that shouldn't be that hard to do.
> I wonder if at some point in the future there's demand for a C level exec with populist charisma in the megacorps.

Interesting point. It's true corporations tend to hire celebs strictly from promotional pieces. But it's easy to see past the phoniness of the message because you know they were hired to say it.

But if that person was an executive who worked directly in the business it would definitely add credibility.
I really don't see it as even close. Moving anything through air requires far less power than moving the same thing through water.

With regards to the rest of your comments, I've done some of those calculations. Again, there is no comparison.

I need to repeat that the idea here is NOT to in ANY WAY use existing truck or cargo rail systems. They just don't perform. Here in the US you are lucky if you can get cargo trains moving on average at 20 to 30 miles per hour. In other words, the move just as slowly as cargo ships, except that they can't pull the same number of containers.

The idea is that a new purpose-built system is the solution.

Also, please keep in mind that the idea here isn't necessarily to search for the most efficient mode of cargo transportation in complete isolation of the realities of where they derive their energy from.

Here's a very interesting paper on the aerodynamics of high-speed trains:

http://ompldr.org/vMXlsOA/Aerodynamics_HSR02.pdf

Anyhow, I sent you all my files via a shared Dropbox folder. I'd be interested in what you have to say once you have a chance to look at it all.

To be sure, there are huge issues with the idea that have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with science and technology. I could not imagine the problems one might encounter in terms of the various special-interest groups that would get in the way of building such a thing, even if it was so good that it would save the world. I think the phrase "can't get out of our own way to save our lives" rings true in more than one way, at least in the US.
It's impossible to formally define a complete system of mathematics which is the most strict logical system out there. Yet you somehow expect laws to be formally be defined.
Transporting mining material, freight, etc. seems like an excellent proving ground. Much less chance of a disaster killing someone and killing the project. Often there's a large amount that has to go from one place to another place, not people who have many different places to go. I guess the only problem is that freight often doesn't have to move fast. If it takes your mining output an extra 8 hours to get to processing it doesn't matter. If it takes a person an extra 8 hours, they'll pay less or use other forms of transport, or require stopping stations...
Does being a psychopath help you start a company?
3DS sues Formlabs, Kickstarter for patent infringement
Has anyone attempted this for regular web apps? We are about to begin the process of creating performance tests from our audit logs, biggest issues we have come across is scrubbing sensitive information.
Open Mircochips (literally)
The first that I personally have seen so far that doesn't screw up when zooming in on a mobile device (actually resizes and re-positions itself), so great job! I'm sure there are others, but this one is now the best in my opinion solely based on that regard.
The world's hardest logic puzzle
I would concur with you on your caveat. There is activity in all of the repositories, but it also feels sometimes like the projects are drifting sideways. I'll also add that the documentation could be a lot better. I'm primarily familiar with the Resourceful component, and I frequently have to go back to an early version of the README (as well as perusing the source code constantly) to recall how things are supposed to function.

Those negatives aside, I think it's a pretty solid framework.
Anyone outside of the company would just be guessing. If anyone inside of the company could answer that question, they wouldn't be shutting down.
Wouldn't you say there was room for improvement?
I guess if you get to define the value and credit of one's labor, you can still maintain that there is a difference where one doesn't really exist.

"Value" distinguishes between "Someone dug a hole where I needed it" and "Someone dug a hole and filled it back up".

"Credit" distinguishes between "I dug that hole" and "She dug that hole".

If we're having trouble distinguishing between "value" and "credit", even before addressing principles of valuation, then I can no longer concern myself with this discussion.
Will NASA release Earth- … er, Mars-shaking news?
At my workplace we do it like this:

1. Here's the Eclipse code formatter settings - format your code with those

2. Never format your code otherwise

3. If one or two lines of code formatted this way are unreadable and you can't rework it, format it how you see fit.
I remember reading about a P2P API inside Chrome, but that may have been just an experimental mode for WebRTC at the time. Having a built-in bittorrent technology would be a big addition to browsers, especially if they intend to use the technology for broadcasts to a lot of people in the future through WebRTC.
Modern front-end developer is more like racing car driver, he is just driving the car aka using tools he is given by developers working on them.
There's a good book on this subject from 1985, where the author explores how the requirement in politics is no longer real action/results it's entertainment.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

http://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Busi...