skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was waiting for your reply and couldn't wait anymore. I have to work tomorrow, you see -- I work 7 days a week on Free Software, so I just can't stay up late.

Anyway, I did hit reload one last time and saw your reply, but I assure you this has to be the last one but I welcome you to email me if you'd like.

The reason I used that political way of interacting with him was that I have been one of Canonical, Ltd.'s critics for a long time -- back before it was popular to "pile onto" Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu, etc. (I noted that in my blog post in the section I talk about why I stopped; they'll be more on the next episode of Free as in Freedom audcast [0] released next week.)

I've found that there are a lot of people out there in the Ubuntu community who really do treat Mark like he is, as his title insists, a Dictator for Life and simply are his proxies out defending him. Again, I'm using a politicians' word -- proxies -- and a politician's analysis. But, the fact is, there are a lot of people out there, and many on identi.ca, who proxy for @sabdfl.

I admit that I incorrectly assumed that fellow was one of them. I think you're taking that one conversation and attempting, in a confirmation bias [1] sort of way, to extrapolate that it shows some principle that's always at work in conversations with people like me. Fact is, despite that I suspected the fellow was acting like a proxy, I still engaged with him in multiple threads in parallel, just in case I was wrong (turned out I was), precisely to avoid the very problem you're accusing me of in this thread.

Setting aside the fact that you seem upset that I don't really use this site often, and that I clearly don't keep the same sleep schedule and/or am in the same time-zone as you, it seems we're having the type of conversation and discourse you want. Yet, you've framed the conversation to talk about this meta-issue of "I can't talk to you people" rather than have the conversation about whatever it is you want to talk to Free Software zealots like me about.

I'm sorry you've had bad experiences in communication with some Free Software hard-cores. I hope I haven't been one. I still don't think, for various reasons I've stated (the most important one being the one you keep ignoring: that there were parallel threads going on), that the one I had with that fellow on identi.ca is an example that supports your claim. I completely believe you that you've had frustrating conversations of that nature with others. I know they happen and I will validate that point for you. I just don't think this example was one of them.

I wish you a good $timezone_greeting, but mine is "late in the night" right now for a guy pushing forty-years-old in the US/Eastern time zone, so please do email me if you want to discuss further.

[0] http://faif.us/

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
> This is a gimmick. It's gimmick engineering, really.

Is it a gimmick (I dunno)? Their apparent goal, a more robust and less finicky alternative to front-derailleurs, seems pretty much in tune with what you want...

> It's a market designed around either enthusiasts...or parents...

Look outside the U.S. for very different approaches, e.g. Japan, where bikes are ridden by everybody (bike mode-share is an order of magnitude greater than even bike-friendly cities in the U.S., and far more evenly distributed amongst sub-populations), and generally not fetishized (there's an enthusiast market, but it's very small by comparison).

I agree that the U.S. market historically resembles your description, but that's started to change in recent years as the overwhelming obsession with automobiles has cooled, and we start to enter the "post auto age" (very slowly in the U.S. of course!). American biking culture is still very influenced by older patterns, but this is changing too.
I know you mean well, but I'm aware of that and it is tangential to my point.

What I'm taking issue with is the underlying inertia that causes it to be in a self-reinforcing loop as most widely supported protocol for mobile. When I got my iPhone I had to pick between a handful of sync protocols, EAS being one of them. My Android devices let me download apps that add new sync providers.

I don't so much as care about the day to day machination of google and microsoft as the ability for our tech to cope with whatever they want to throw at us. In this case google happens to be behind both gmail and android, but my point still stands that the android platform is a better suited to dealing with generic external changes w/r/t features that need to hook into the built in functionality of the device. I'm not saying I think it is better overall (I do have an iPhone), I just think this is one place where the architecture of that system is strong and wish that other mobiles took a similar foward-thinking design. If they did, it might not matter at all that google dropped X for Y, just a slight inconvenience while you install the requisite adapter to maintain the same level of integration.
I never knew that I should use bootstrap and then extend it with custom CSS to make my site look better. I would have never thought to do that! /sarcasm
My Sidekick had a fantastic keyboard. I miss that thing sometimes.
I'm not begrudging you sleep, I was just annoyed it was edited in while I was in the text window replying to you (and not furiously refreshing). You're even mischaracterizing that by trying to say I'm annoyed you don't often use Hacker News, which isn't accurate or logical on any plane of reality.
For future reference (since I can't edit): I spent a while researching and couldn't find any definitive answer, but found some places which supported the implicit assignment ([0], [1]). However, these aren't anything official, so I think ultimately it just depends on what your particular implementation supports...

[0] http://www.verilogtutorial.info/chapter_2.htm
[1] http://www.doulos.com/knowhow/verilog_designers_guide/wire_a...
I was confused by the extended metaphor, too, until I saw the notice at the bottom that the author is writing a book about how to think like Sherlock Holmes. It's useful when reading this kind of essay to find out what the author is selling, although it usually isn't this obvious.
It's weird to single out Q objects since they're the most functional, composable, flexible parts of that API. Passing around clauses lets you do things like build a list of them then reduce that list into a single query via |. There's a lot of mental gymnastics involved in learning Django's ORM but the Q object is not something I would ever suggest as a candidate for dismissal.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html
Numbers 6 and 7 both apply, et the least.

Why does the appellation bother you so?
Necessarily? Powerful incumbents can put up artificial barriers, but many times these players can be blindsided by the innovative competition anyway. So is America's economic system, and the full business environment for internet startups inherently caustic to new business ideas such that you have to work outside the system?

And are most YC applicants significantly revolutionary? How many systemic barriers would you expect to hit if you have some insight on how to build the next popular photo sharing app, for example? And if they are applying for YC and answering that question, it's not a safe assumption to make that the founders would have hit up against those barriers yet. A lot of YC founders are barely out of college and just turning their idea into reality.
I believe he was referring to petitions.
I would like to see it at $1337
Ask HN: When will Hacker News improve their HTML?
Hello there.

First of all, I found Hacker News a really great and intelligent site, since I knew it is my primary source of news, I spend more time reading articles here than every other site, but I don't really comment to much.

My question is when will Hacker News improve their HTML, I see that there is no doctype definition and comment treads are a bunch of tables and even font tags.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want an interactive site full of ajax requests and infinite scroll or something, I just want to know if there is the possibility to improve a little more the site, I use the Clearly extension for Chrome http://bit.ly/PS9WCJ to read better the comments, but is kind of annoying doing it all the time.

So, what you think about my question?
The physics community has known that its current theories are wrong for a long time now. The only reason we are not going back to Newtonian physics is because it is even more wrong.
Yup, $10k/year and $.15/unit. It doesn't look like it's mandatory, though; the language on the site[0] is really hard to decipher. I imagine that they're not going to prosecute one guy for using a chip in his personal build. Obviously the Raspberry Pi guys are getting around this somehow, though; I'd be curious to know how.

[0]: http://www.hdmi.org/manufacturer/adopter_registration.aspx
>Then perhaps you shouldn't be giving design advice.

I think design is something that is relatively easy to learn (for a hacker) if it just has to be "good enough" to pass muster with the latest design and UX standards. Certainly something a hacker can learn.
What about shaft-driven cycles? I've never tried on, but wanted to, as they seem like they would require a lot less maintenance. And I'd get less grease on me.
Or reddit or RPF or 4chan or board game night or Comic Con or...
Dura ace is a competitor to this? When it's all said and done, it's going to be too expensive for most commuters and maybe that makes it like "durachi" but if it has any market it will be for the suburban super commuter buyers.

Put a belt pully on it and if its reliable maybe you'll see it on some of the $1500+ super commuter bikes. The nexus, roloff and alfine are all remarkably reliable, just pricy.. The appeal isn't weight, it's durable purpose built commuter stuff. Maybe some downhill honks will like it but I've seen a whole lot of those guys just riding single speeds any more
PhoneJoy Play: Turn your phone into a console On Kickstarter (kickstarter.com)
Assigning the wire on the same line it is declared is supported in all major synthesis and simulation tools I have used. I'm not sure what verilog standard its from, but I would guess its part of verilog 2001.
Oh, yeah, that makes more sense. I guess that interpretation is more likely than the one I walked away with.

Thanks for replying instead of downvoting.
Why OpenPhoto will defeat Picasa and Flickr
You are exhibiting a deep misunderstanding of human intelligence.

Ken Jennings thought that a woman of loose morals could be called a "hoe" (with an "e", which makes no sense!), when the correct answer was "rake". Is Ken Jennings therefor inhuman?
I took a quick look at the IEEE 1800-2009 LRM (SystemVerilog, a proper superset of Verilog), and I can't see any BNF production that allows this. I think this is a case of iverilog being somewhat permissive.

In looking it up, I did come across the keyword "alias", which I was not familiar with, that effectively does what you've done here.

That said, it doesn't detract from an enjoyable tutorial. It's nice to see a little ASIC content on HN - duly upvoted!
I don't consider either of those to be useful, because once you've had to open a new window/tab, you might as well just have opened another application.

This recent obsession with rewriting the world to run in a jumped-up document rendering system is unhealthy and insane.
re-brand?
Google has been an AI company since 1998.
Thanks! Nice to know. I must've picked the habit up before from just reading code on the internet (as per my other comment in this thread), but I'll try to phase this out. This is what I love about Hacker News - people commenting really know their stuff, almost always well enough to teach me something :)
> All due respect but

Our culture's greatest and most universally consistent flashing warning sign regarding the words after it.
Thanks for the link, sounds really cool!
Yeah I mean this is really not good design, at all. And I'm so strongly against the idea of using bootstrap as a "hey slap this on my site and now i don't need to worry about design anymore!" type tool -- the fact that this person is trying to promote this exact idea makes me ill. Please HN community, we should value good design. It's really important. Really, important.
> [...] and vacation is unlimited.

I think there's a case to be made for mandatory vacation. Just make people take off at least two weeks every year.
> Why is it necessarily the case that "stars would compress into this material rather than into black holes"?

There's a good argument to be made that this isn't necessarily the case. I was thinking that all particles are interchangeable at sufficiently high temperatures (i.e. they can switch from one particle to another so long as energy is conserved). I overlooked the fact that stars don't get hot enough.

> Or why can't it be the case that the crushing process doesn't take matter through the infinitely strong configuration on the way to black hole configuration?

If the "infinitely strong" configuration got crushed into a black hole, it wasn't infinitely strong.

> For example, why can't it be the case that there are two kinds of matter, one that can be used to build infinitely strong wire, and one that can't, with stars being made of the latter?

How would the infinitely strong wire be held together? Electromagnetic force? Strong force? Weak force? Those forces (which are the only ones we know about apart from gravity) travel at c. If part of the wire is in, while part is out, we will necessarily break the bonds holding the material together if we attempt to pull the wire clear. If nothing else, this breaking will occur because those bonds rely on force carriers traveling at c, and so somewhere along the wire those force carriers will not see the items they are supposed to bind together.

Let us say we hold the wire so that a portion of it is past the event horizon. The bit of the wire at the event horizon, if held stationary, is traveling at c because light is also stationary there. Whatever bond existed at that point is no more; the force carriers can't make it to the particles they're supposed to bind together.
Even the most devoted Windows fan I know merely shook his head at it.
I would assume that "et al" hides a lot of the same people contributing to multiple papers. The wikipedia estimate is likely wrong, but I don't think by an order of magnitude.

I agree with you on the Linux kernel. I even noted that about half only contributed one patch.

I suspect that I disagree with you about what Dijkstra's point was. When you're programming, there is nowhere to hide from the fact of your code not running. By contrast in pure math, a surprising amount of sloppiness can be hidden in the fact that minor papers do not always get completely rigorous view. Therefore if you're inclined to that form of sloppiness, you're better off in pure math. (Which is not to say that all people in pure math are sloppy in that way.)

I don't think he's right - I've met too many programmers and bad computer scientists to have illusions that all are capable - but he does have a point.
Last I checked, the title of this article was How to Make Your Site Look Half-Decent in Half an Hour, not A Complete Guide to Good Design. The subtext of that, which she talks about in the text, is that even for a developer with no design sense it doesn't take much effort to make Bootstrap not look like Bootstrap.

She ended up with something that didn't look like Bootstrap at the end, with minimal effort and allowing the developer to focus on coding. That was the entire point. And you know what? I wouldn't have picked that particular font, but the end result did not look that bad.

There are a lot of developers working on MVPs here that have absolutely no design sense nor the budget to hire a designer that might find this useful. Just because you don't doesn't mean it's useless, and I find your comment needless. Read the article before commenting, please. It's important. Really, really important.
Afloat != viable. There may be some shell kept alive to take advantage of those contracts, but the chance of a renaissance is 0.
When the HTML is the most important thing to work on.
I would recommend reading "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug. It will teach you the most important aspects of a usable design - - which are much more important than just doing a pretty design.
I'm crying. Why is this the #1 story? And how can a person with such a hideous looking site give design advice?
No. Inside the event horizon, all paths lead to the singularity. If you had gravitational sensors on your spacecraft, they would show the singularity all around you.
The chumby was sort of a precursor to the tablet life most of us live now. It's sad that it failed, but the concept of chumby no doubt influenced a lot of really handy app design.
My suspicion (ie no facts) would be that either the light just does make it to the event horizon to leave because of time dialation effects, or we can't answer it because our math breaks down at the horizon so we can't say anything about the universe past it.
rsh or ssh? All my VPSs have rsh disabled.
Try the book:
Why Meditate: Working with Thoughts and Emotions
By Matthieu Ricard
ISBN-10: 1401926630 ISBN-13: 978-1401926632

Mr. Ricard also gave a TED talk on the topic of happiness:
http://www.ted.com/talks/matthieu_ricard_on_the_habits_of_ha...
http://startupsthisishowdesignworks.com/
He's using his ingenuity to make snow do something it wasn't generally believed able to do.
I'm always wary of an API that I don't pay for, less likely of a financial motivator for an API provider to maintain status quo.
That was discussed in the middle of the article, and an alternative site was suggested. I'm kind of disappointed that the majority of the comments here seem to be from the title and first few paragraphs alone.
I would encourage people to check out http://getskeleton.com instead of Bootstrap.

Bootstrap has a very rich design already, so it's not a great scaffold to build on top of because there's very little room for you to add flavor and customization to it without making it look like a frankenstein design.

Skeleton is really minimal, it basically just does typography, some basic form styling, and a grid system. It's a much better base to work off of and add to than Bootstrap.
Can you sell ads on unused winter pastures?

IS NOTHING SACRED TO YOU PEOPLE?!!!
Definitely smart to adopt software at the correct point in the hype cycle so other people solve core problems before you start using it:
http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologies/hyp...

It sucks to be the alpha tester. However, the SQL vs NoSQL debate is silly, because Facebook seems to be using both to scale.

A lot of content at Facebook seems to be served from a denormalized NoSQL storage and that is the useful takeaway insight. I do not know what I can learn from the fact that a team with some of the most talented SQL ops and developers can store some core data in SQL.
I'l love to hear any suggestions for a framework between Skeleton and Bootstrap, by the way.
Not fundable
Thank you for your content-free comment. Allow me to point out some problems with it:

1) This is the #1 story because people other than you find it interesting.

2) The "hideously-designed" site is merely publishing the author's essay, and is not owned or controlled by the author at all.

3) If you are crying at a Hacker News article which you entirely missed the point of, as did half the other commenters, then you need a walk.
Ok, I know HTML is not the most important thing on the site, but that kind of thoughts only leads to procrastination, because there will always be issues on other stuffs like databases and security, but it would be nice to HN pays a little of atention to this kind of stuff.
Breaking news: our computing technology is not perfect, neither is our world

He dismisses and complains about every piece of popular technology back then as if the world is about to collapse because hey! look, these apes invented COBOL and FORTRAN.

What did he do? Did our world come to an end because how terrible COBOL was? No, we learned some lessons and we paid the price and now we're doing better, this is how it works.

Every piece I read from Dijkstra it seems like he is having a hard time accepting the imperfect aspects of our computing technology. He wants the perfection of formal proofs to be everywhere in every program.
Going beyond the not so great font, is it really a good idea to mix serif fonts with sans serif on the same page, specifically having (sub)headings one and main content the other? I've noticed this in a few places lately, but it doesn't seem very clean to me.
For (1), if the user has to install software on their client, then the entire point of webmail has been bypassed.

I disagree that reducing the security wouldn't render end-to-end encryption useless. Remember that the purpose of end-to-end encryption is to protect the user against malicious service providers. If you want to store a user's data on a Google server, but ensure that Google is unable to read it for XX years, then you need to take a lot of security precautions. Forgetting any of them would allow the user's data to be compromised.

> Nobody should be able to run a search on every word
> I've written to anyone in the past ten years but me.

If this is your goal, then your only realistic option is to install an open-source mail client on its own dedicated machine, set up GPG, generate your GPG keys on that machine, and don't let it do anything but talk SMTP+POP3 with your mail provider. Read all your email in plaintext.

This sounds paranoid, but it's actually the absolute minimum required if you want to ensure that your emails are safe from a malicious entity with corporate- or government-sized budgets. Further precautions might include removing the HDD and keeping the machine airgapped with email transfer performed by CD-ROM. Then you get to go down the physical-security rabbit hole to prevent someone with a warrant from bugging your keyboard.

The reason for all these precautions is that a malicious provider could save all of the encrypted emails you send/receive over the years. They only need to grab your keys once.

Or you could, you know, relax a bit and figure that storing personal email on Google/Microsoft/Yahoo/Apple servers is probably OK.
I had no idea about that, thanks
1.1) Play Bongos occasionally / as appropriate
In the alternate universe where something like this could happen, wouldn't it just result in companies being more reluctant to publish an API in the first place?
I read it as the same thing, if you take design to mean superficial design rather than design as a stand in for overall quality or long-term useability. (Because it's pretty clearly not even true otherwise, since obviously not all current products have good "design" in the second sense after deeper inspection.)
Wow. I get the feeling he's kinda into hardware!
Google's Ray Kurzweil Hire could yield some good results
Everything was sort of okay until the Corben font was introduced onto the page. A complete crime against design, in the way its been used.
A significant aspect of the Japanese market is the prevalence of $1,200 electric bicycles, which now appears to be at around 30% of bikes seen around in Tokyo. Automatic gear shifters on standard bikes are fairly common too. Also pertinent is the fact that Japanese tend not to repair their own bicycles - not even a puncture. Rear brakes are typically not user serviceable anyway. So I suggest they should try to ride the EB wave in Asia to market this system at first.
I thought this was going to be an article that would tell me how to fix my existing sites. You know like, make the font larger, increase line height, that kind of thing.. I know that for new sites I should start out with bootstrap...