skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point to me is, don't care about the rate at which others go at all. It is completely meaningless. People see my art and they think it came easy to me. I've been drawing and painting for 20 years. It wasn't easy.

Lately, I weave in and out of painting, coding, and studying mathematics. The switch between the fields often has me feeling lost when initially starting back up into one or the other, since I sort of go through these manic cycles of learning rather than something continuous and balanced throughout. When I switch from painting to math or coding, I usually feel very dumb for a while, relearning all of the new terminology I have missed. It is often a significant blow to my ego, and over the years it has required me to develop sort of a thick skin to approaching sets of people who are technically minded, while my mind is still in the la-la land art world, and vice-verse.

But I mean, out of everything I have approached to learn to do or learn about, the one thing I know that is true for all of them is that nothing is actually simple. Doing calculus and memorizing formula to apply to a very specific set of a problems requires a strong memory, which younger people tend have the advantage on (not myself though, 26 and my memory is garbage). But actually understanding the concepts, and being capable of applying them after you take the class, that's different.

I surprised someone, in grad school I think, explaining how to calculate how large a container we would need to clean the espresso machine (it drips water through), based on some simple dimensions of the input container, and the flow rate. That's calculus. I knew a lot of students in engineering who did really well in the class, and are doing really well in their specific sub-field. But to actually understand what one is learning, that is different. Everyone can do it no matter what age, it just requires dedication and actually being able to think about what confuses you. And it is often a person's ego or fear of their ego appearing 'less than' that hinders progress in learning and doing. Or probably, it is always the case that that is why people stop learning and doing.

It is not difficult to ask simple questions. I mean last night I spent about 6 hours thinking about what a point on a number line actually is. Had anyone seen my notes, they would probably look like they came from a 1st grade maths class. But I'm connecting it to many other topics I understand - and that is something those people don't see, the tangential thought process that develops along with my learning and questioning. So when someone asks a simple question that may seem trivial, instead of scoffing at the fact that that person does not know the answer, I prefer to ask myself "Why did they ask that question?", or, "Why is it important that this thing is so clearly defined or understood - what about this thing is necessary or important to understanding of the whole?". And those are my favorite kinds of questions to ask in learning, because it keeps every topic interesting.
Show HN: Updatified — a sleek way to keep tabs on your online life
Plivo (YC S12) raises 1.75 million from Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, others
Nobody is born with the skills to open a door or push a button. I have a <1yr old that still can't do either of those. That is something you learn. Metro is just a different type of UI that you might want to learn.

"Can I click on all those tiles?" - if you try to touch or click them, you will quickly see a 3D effect that mimics that of a push button (tile scales to 97.5% of its size similar to a pushed button). After that you will quickly learn that you can interact with tiles.
Both Mozilla and Google consider their browsers to be shims for the underlying OS. Firefox OS and Chrome OS betray that assessment. Accordingly, IE has been historically crippled by Microsoft because they realize that browsers obsolete operating systems in many important ways for end-users.

Consider that operating systems are tremendously sophisticated user-facing applications in their own right, and that dwarf the high level "web browsers" they support in complexity. ;)
Droplet plans to disrupt mobile cash with no-charges payment app for iOS
VigLink does the same as SkimLinks (has been around longer too, and is backed by Google Ventures) and they don't make you wait if you're referred by another VigLink member. You can use my referral link (if you'd like) to at least get your monetiziation up and going ASAP. http://www.viglink.com/?vgref=6106
Oh of course. I just think it is interesting how the game aspect is used for leverage.
A little OT, but it does make me chuckle when you read this on a blog with little to no visual affordances. The title and the date are both permalinks, but there's no indication until you mouse over to check. That's fine - for the sake of cleanliness it's an acceptable trade off. And also, importantly, we've learnt that they probably are. Consistency is also important. Whether people will learn Metro successfully (statistically) etc. is yet to be seen I guess, but it's more complex than this.
Says the guy with the black and white blog. ZING
Great post, I need to increase my current karma, 68, avg 1.6
I'd love to but I live in the UK!
I'm sorry, but making a desktop app look like a phone app doesn't really "improve the user experience" by default. I've been using itunes for 6 or 7 years now, and i literally stood there for 5 minutes trying to figure out what the hell i was looking at when it first started up.
Nah, I don't buy it. These kinds of things are easily learned. Web links don't have depth and we all learned pretty fast that we can click them (in some instances they don't even have to be underlined)
"That is, an attempt to constrain/define time leads to a broadening in frequency, and vice versa."

That is also a really well phrased one line point of commonality to talk to a telecom / RF / EE type person about communications bandwidth theory. If you just wedge in signal to noise ratio / bit error rate, and look at what you phrase "time definition" and "frequency broadening" in the right way, then you pretty much have Shannons famous paper.

The FT shows up all over the place in science and anywhere you find it, you can analogize it into a totally different field of study. One "design pattern" hundreds of "implementations".
obvious q is how this differs from frp. the same author (i think?) addresses that here - http://awelonblue.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/comparing-frp-to-...
As for Gates, I would never dismiss him.

He took advantage of his connections and built one of the biggest, most influential software companies ever.

He then stepped back at the height of his career, listened to his wife, and the two of them built a very innovative philanthropic organization.

There are plenty of rich kids that don't accomplish anything, Gates wasn't one of them.
Cross-VM Side Channels and Their Use to Extract Private Keys
WOW, that's definitely the longest README I've ever seen on a github project!
As I mentioned above: PG has made so many unpublished modifications - for obvious reasons - to karma, spam filters, voter-ring detection, I wouldn't put too much stock into sussing out the inner-workings of HN through the original Arc download.
I thought the rumour was he only had a few million left in assets (could be wrong). He hasn't been affiliated with McAfee since the mid 1990s
Or not.... http://www.whoismcafee.com/i-am-safe/
Light bulbs?!? You can't sell light bulbs. What will happen to the candle maker's guild?
But a physical button has a shape or appearance that makes it look like something to push. It's learnable.

The author is making the point that Metro has zero visual clues, it's not learnable. You don't know which tiles you can interact with until you try and interact with them.
Amazon Prime is like crack. Sure it messes you up, but it just feels so awesome!
That's really kind - thank you..
Thanks for your comment.

I really try to find which part of this post could alienate any of our customers and I can't. I just described why we decided not to use ORM and I find it quite interesting for others - they can disagree, show why I'm wrong. They're (and also you) smart guys, know what to choose and if ideas are worth to apply.
>I don't get this argument at all.

The argument, not that I agree with it, is: there is a finite pool of advertising dollars. By taking them and spending them on other stuff, Google is cutting the funding of news/television/radio. It's like pg's suggestion that the invention of the camera may have damaged art by depriving artists of "day job"s painting portraits.

>Studies have shown that Starbucks has actually increased the quantity of viable coffee shops in neighborhoods. Is this something different in England?

I doubt it. But there are still many owners of small coffee shops who hate Starbucks - mostly the ones who can't compete because their coffee is terrible.

>The Gov't not getting taxes is strictly the fault of the Gov't for allowing the loopholes to exist and be exploited.

And now the Gov't is taking action to correct that.
New startup http://matchist.com connects top freelance developers with projects based on their skills and preferences. Clients are mostly startups/entrepreneurs looking to build apps and MVPs.
The flip side is that interfaces have tended too much towards faux 3d on a superflat 2d screen and also ignoring that the UI can be "authentically digital" instead of being tied down to analog equivalents. I find the author's analysis very simplistic.

Also, this is just about mostly about the buttons and links which can probably be fixed easily in the future. Metro is much much more than that, Metro also removes a lot of unnecessary chrome like lines around menus etc. and reducing visual clutter which are very important on mobile devices where you're looking for actual information in a pinch on-the-go. The codeword for this is "Content over Chrome".

Android(starting with ICS) also is trending a bit towards Metro in things like the weather app, Google Now and the overall designed aesthetic. https://lh4.ggpht.com/p-eZmyce7_T2-_eOwltQxU6glPj6f53kDXvDvN...

Anyone see the similarities between this[1] from 20 years ago and the iPhone UI + every other mobile OS including Android, Palm, Windows Mobile < 7, Blackberry, Meego, Firefox OS etc.?

[1] http://img.tfd.com/cde/_PROGMAN.GIF

Here's more information if you're interested in the design philosophy behind Metro written by an actual designer who designed Metro like content for his clients' websites.

The principles of Microsoft Metro UI decoded
http://www.riagenic.com/archives/487

Going full Metro.
http://www.riagenic.com/archives/493

Things you ought to know when designing metro screens
http://www.riagenic.com/archives/526

Hopefully all this results in better UIs in the future instead of the tired old jaded WIMP interface and Desktop on mobile yet again with some added touch features and I think Microsoft has taken a good first step here to shake things up.
The thing I like most about (commenting on) HN is that it's incredibly easy to predict if a comment will get karma or not. HN is slow enough and the comment listing algorithm works in such a way that if you post during the first half of a submissions life your comment is guaranteed exposure and if the comment has value it'll float to the top.

I don't think I've ever posted a comment and felt that the score (or attention) didn't fairly reflect the value of the comment[1]. Something about the uniformity is very reassuring, unlike reddit where you need to either be in the first 5% of comments or provide something seriously exceptional that appeals to every reader to even have a chance of being listed near the top of a submission.

From my experience the "best" scoring comments are easy to pinpoint why they've scored well and if someone was so inclined they could very easily spend their day "farming" karma here, but if someone were to do so they'd be benefiting the site because the only real way to obtain karma here is to provide value. Even if that value is trivial (like mentioning a relevant article, or giving a brief anecdote that validates a point) it's still value.

[1] Sometimes controversial topics result in "unfair" scores, but they're also very easy to expect before hand and generally if you post something controversial you'll get good enough discussion from other users that it's never a question of "I wish I knew why people gave me that score!" which is the most frustrating thing.
I watched a keynote recently where Guido - the Python guy - made the point that Ruby, Python, and Perl are all essentially the same language.

I like Perl because it's:

* Stable, reliable, very very mature

* Has a testing culture really second to none, excellent testing tools, and a unifying testing mechanism (TAP)

* CPAN really is awesome

* Almost any tool you enjoy from the other languages, Perl has an equivalent
Hi there - yes I was out in Seattle for two accelerators actually - Microsoft Accelerator for Kinect powered by TechStars ( http://kinectaccelerator.com ) and Fledge - a conscious company incubator ( http://fledge.co ).

The Seattle hacker news meetup - which I've gone to at least once - maybe twice - seemed massive --- like 200+ people show up... I'd say its kind of an anchor of the tech community out there - kind of like the NY Tech meetup here.

Healthcare tech --- I know there's been a fair amount of people show up to my Kinect meetup group with that interest --- we should actually do an event on the topic - perhaps you'd like to help organize something? It's at http://meetup.com/volumetric . Meetups are a great way to find people to work with. Hackathons are even better.

My email is on my hacker news profile - feel free to get in touch to chat more about Seattle or healthcare tech. :)

-Sean
I don't think it's that difficult to get. The UK government has been partly naive, though many would say typically liberal, about corporate activity. In truth, the only reason this is coming up now is because some elected politicians equate legal tax minimisation with avoidance. This from a group who were discovered to be minimising illegally expenses, and where local offshore tax havens like Jersey have been allowed to continue to operate for a very long time.

It's politically convenient to blame foreigners while the general population has had their personal wealth diminished through multiple runs of the money printing press.

The rationalisation seems to be that because local firms, unless using what would now be seen as avoidance, cannot avoid profits and so corporation tax, then everyone else should jolly well pay it too. Of course, in the days when Britain's large international companies like BP returned taxable profits to the UK, the accumulation of wealth through extra national activities barely mattered ethically. Now of course, the UK is contracting both in real terms and comparatively.

It's odd. These rules were set by the very people complaining about them. And from what I've heard from some if the participants in the committee, some haven't the first idea about the Companies Act and its meaning.

If Starbucks is willing to reallocate an amount from an expense to profit for the purposes of corporation tax, I have to say, even despite any other consideration, that's its tantamount to a gift. A sensible good will payment, but a gift none the less.
Same here. I already have degrees and the certificate of completion doesn't do much for me. I value the knowledge and want to use it for fun projects. I am really annoyed by the course format for Coursera and the other clones. They should let anyone access the old archival videos for all their courses. Frankly, I'd pay for that.
I've noticed that the average only updates sporadically - maybe every few days - not after every post. That obviously could have led to the numbers not adding up, in addition to the outliers being tossed, as mentioned by another commenter.
Why the need to use "Metrosexual" reference? A little sensationalist isn't it?
HEYOOOOO!
Courts in the UK have historically had very narrow interpretations of tax laws. The classic example is a House of Lords case called Commissioners of Inland Revenue v. Duke of Westminster, where one of the judges gave this great judgment:

"Every man is entitled if he can to order his affairs so as that the tax attaching under the appropriate Acts is less than it otherwise would be. If he succeeds in ordering them so as to secure this result, then, however unappreciative the Commissioners of Inland Revenue or his fellow taxpayers may be of his ingenuity, he cannot be compelled to pay an increased tax. This so-called doctrine of “the substance” seems to me to be nothing more than an attempt to make a man pay notwithstanding that he has so ordered his affairs that the amount of tax sought from him is not legally claimable."

The influence of this case is still strongly felt today in courts, and this leaves the British Parliament with little power to make "strong" tax laws that have no "loopholes".

American courts and laws do far more to assert jurisdiction and prevent tax avoidance, but as we know American tax rates are much lower than most countries.
ISPs cannot truly be forced to disallow encrypted traffic, because encryption is necessary for secure online commerce, DRM systems, the security of corporate secrets, etc., etc., etc. However, it is possible that a government might try to impose licensing for encryption, similar to how licensing for radio works -- perhaps a licensing system that requires one end of an encrypted connection to have a special registration that only businesses can afford / obtain (likewise with WDE). Thus the "little people" will be unable to legally use encryption to protect their privacy, and hackers will be charged with yet another "crime."

Most governments care about business these days. Do you think any government would say "no crypto" when Coca Cola says they need to protect the secrecy of their formula, or when HBO says they need to prevent people from copying movies?
This is great. Well done.

From your "..As we go through our beta phase, we want to launch only for students that have .EDU email addresses supplied by their schools..."

Are you planning on opening up to non-edus soon?
And to add to the confusion, why are there different sized tiles?

Why on earth would that be confusing? When I see a double door next to a normal sized door I don't freak out and try to break down the wall instead.

I get the point being made in the article, but I don't quite buy it. I don't think that people understand they can press app icons on the iPhone because they have raised shadows around them, I think they press them because they are visually eyecatching and surrounded by areas that are not. There are many different visual cues out there, and people adapt to new ones all the time.
I don't think the map relates to the "Mad Despot", and I think it's only about risk of disconnection (including accidental disconnection). I was shocked to see Portugal there at first, but I guess they have transatlantic cables to USA or maybe to UK and not much to mainland / Spain, and that's why they are low risk.

Original's Renesys (the map creator) here: http://www.renesys.com/blog/2012/11/could-it-happen-in-your-... (I don't have time to parse it now, my first paragraph is just an idea)
Well, Amazon also has the exact same ability to add anything on the web - add-on/extension available for most browsers. Importing my existing amazon list would be an incentive for me to at least try it in more depth. However, I might view it more an an extension of my current amazon list rather than a replacement.
i'll wade in. note that i'm bigoted against perl, i'll say so clearly up front.

perl is better than shell scripting at automation, this much is true. perl has a strong use case there. had, i'll argue.

perl's idioms and structure promotes wonky, hard to read and hard to maintain code. it's true. get even the most die hard perl fan a beer or two and they'll wind up admitting it, sheepishly and quietly. but yeah, perl too easily promotes a mess. and when you have to maintain code, borrow code, etc .. readable code matters.

my biggest complaints about perl usually fall into the bucket that perl fans claim are its strengths. brevity, wit, etc. those wind up confusing almost all perl developers and users, in my experience, because you have to shift gears mentally to figure out wtf a piece of code is doing, what the developer intended it to do, and thus diagnosis is a pain. too many perl users just laugh and say, "yeah, i can't figure it out either." funny until you realize they're laughing about wasting your time. my second biggest complaint falls into the reusability of perl by its design. not so modular without some surgery (minor or major, depending). the C (or ruby or python) code that people trained on perl develop is, almost always, horridly inefficient.

CPAN is nice, i wish my language of choice (python) had as extensive a library so easy to use. and then you get into the mess of CPAN, which is littered with half completed, poorly documented modules. you wind up having two or three modules that do the same thing but are dependencies elsewhere or actually implement some promised functionality, etc. (cheeseshop, pip, etc yes ... but so much stuff isn't deployable like that is my point...)

the perl documentation library was a big selling point about 10 or 12 years ago, not so much now. everyone else caught up is my point. python, ruby, etc are now mainstream.

the "perl is everywhere" mantra used to be compelling, too. but python and ruby are just as widely available on systems and ... far more suited to long term development and maintenance than perl is. again, "better" languages for long term use and development are now mainstream. they weren't before.

i tend to sum all this up for someone with "perl sucks" or "don't use perl, it promotes brain rot". and no, i wont revisit my thinking. perl had its day, but i think the sun has set and rightfully so.
For me personally, there's nobody I automatically upvote. There are a few people who get the benefit of the "PG effect" in that I automatically associate their name with specific domain expertise and give them the benefit of the doubt within that domain.

What I have found is that writing comments that get upvotes provides valuable feedback about the mechanics of writing comments that get upvotes - just as writing downvoted comments provides feedback (more quickly). Writing one good comment increases the likelihood of writing another one - writing bad comments, also increases the likelihood of good comments via downvotes.

HN provides editorial feedback in a form other than LOL's - comments and votes. Editorial feedback is a proven way to improve writing, and improving writing is the surefire way to get higher comment scores.
Thanks! I write this :-)
We also have come up with a new home page redesign.
I don't quite get what the average karma rating is...is it simply karma-per-post? Because I've seen it jump up and down (on my own account) no matter what I've posted or how little of new karma I may have gotten.
It should read something like:

9. Letting your love of your work blind you

This is really true in any creative field. Publishers receive manuscripts all the time from authors who demand that nothing in it be changed, some going so far as to claim that it's a product of divine revelation.
> But after you hit like 1000 karma...you just don't care anymore.

Why did you care in the first place?
What font did you use?
Sanergy Turns Poop Into Profit In Kenya's Slums
Seriously. This shit turns HN into a tabloid.
It's yet another rant, but there's a deeper problem with GUI "thrash" at Microsoft. One example is Outlook. The interface changed in 2010 and again in 2013. This causes confusion and doubt amoung users and distrust from IT and the folks that write the checks. Is the new software really better, or are the folks in Redmond just remodeling the interface to sell "new" versions?
The UK tax code is also the most complex on Earth. A much simpler one would be much less likely to have "loopholes".