skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think a lot of developer tools come with exactly the type of statement the author is looking for--"what the developers were thinking when they designed it...the assumptions that were made about how the program should be used." I too would also enjoy it if people started doing this for ordinary software as well. But I think I know a reason why they don't.

The author raises the example of Microsoft Word, so let's imagine we were going to write such a statement for Word. The problem is that we'd end up writing something that would piss people off. The author says this: "Why is it so much work to change the fonts in a paper written in Word? Because you shouldn't be setting fonts directly; you should be using paragraph styles to signify your intent and then make visual adjustments later." But when I look at word's interface, it doesn't look like word was designed with that philosophy in mind at all. He's right that using styles instead of setting fonts directly will make it easier on you later, but that clearly wasn't Word's philosophy.

If you want to directly change the font or style of just the one piece of text you selected, there are multiple toolbar and menu widgets, highly visible and available, as well as multiple shortcut keys. In office 2007 they added the "live preview" feature to make it really smooth while you're doing it. They clearly went out of their way to make these types of direct changes really easy and really discoverable.

On the other hand, if you want to define a new style, or change one of the styles that is already defined, you have to do through multiple layers of nested modal dialog boxes. Once you have done this, using the style is made easy and highly available (lots of ribbon space, etc.) But again, the easy action is a purely local action--it operates on only on the text selected.

So to me it looks like word's philosophy is: you should be able to visibly see ALL the results of what you're doing right as you do it. Anything that violates this rule gets set aside in a dialog box so that the ordinary folks won't hurt themselves with it. That can make things really frustrating when you're editing a large document and want to keep things consistent across it, but they'd rather make their tool easy to understand upfront, even at the expense of larger scale advanced use. Other tools that are intended for mostly professional use, such as Photoshop, make the opposite choice--they allow their interface to be less obvious at first in order to make it easier to use at an advanced level.

The kind of philosophy statement the author is looking for would end up making that type of tradeoff pretty obvious, even if it managed to avoid stating it explicitly. And most people won't want to do that when they're thinking from a marketing perspective. They never want anything that states, or even too strongly implies, that their tool has a drawback--even if it's one that was accepted on purpose to get a better benefit elsewhere. I'm not arguing that this is (or isn't) the right way to approach marketing--but I can say it's easy to observe this mindset across many different fields, including our own.
I think that SERIALIZABLE should be the default eventually, but others may disagree and I won't make a prediction.

However, it isn't necessary to solve the problem. It would be relatively easy to use a row lock in this case to solve the problem, as well, but I like to avoid those unless there's a reason.

If you want to have a mix of SERIALIZABLE and other transactions, or you are worried about making a mistake (or some malicious user), then you need to use the row lock. Eventually there should be a way to force users into serializable transactions.

EDIT: actually, in the trigger, you could explicitly check if the transaction isolation mode is serializable. That would be the best approach:

if current_setting('transaction_isolation') <> 'serializable' then
raise exception 'serializable mode required';
end if;
I would say, word all your failures as successes. (+)points for "a day without junk food" instead (-)points for "junkfood". With HabitRPG you can do that by making everything a habit with only "up" enabled - don't use dailies, and make sure your habits have "down" disabled.

Alternatively, if you find compounding failures to be the issue, you can reset your character on HabitRPG (which I do quite frequently) when you're ready to start over.
twitter bootstrap + simple scripts in PHP.
I've created small custom cms to add new series. I get episodes and air dates from epguides.com.
Hosting: Cheap linode instance.
Azure offers a SLA with a 99,95% uptime guarantee for computing instances and a 99,9% uptime SLA for storage. If they do not meet this SLA you will get your money back.

You can read more about it at www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/legal/sla/
I'd like to have hope that this is not a long-term trend, that these counterproductive lawsuits will soon awaken politicians to the need to reform patent and copyright law to a form that encourages innovation and creation.

I'm not sure if this is an easy problem to solve, though, or if it requires deeper problems of corruption to be fixed first.
I'm always amazed at how an experiment-driven mindset helps uncover pockets of extreme interest among people clicking carefully-crafted ads or links!
I've enjoyed Systematic, http://5by5.tv/systematic/.
I'm OK with using it as a label, as you say, but most people don't stop there -- they believe in the label's actual exegetical power.

And even if they don't, there's someone like you around to claim they do, which is the whole cause of this thread ballooning into such crap with lots of noise and no signal. Good luck with all that I guess.
My old German teacher said the same thing about American food. Everything has sugar in it.
My rant about Haskell
Instantly bookmarked. Useful, simple, and no nagging sign up or share buttons plastered everywhere.

What are your plans going forward?
FYI, "sezon" (sic) is written as "season." Cool project!
Right?! This is very interesting and I just discovered it by chance. If it were just one browser we could write it off, but it's not. I'll try to find out.
Maybe the world is ready for RACSP (Redundant Array of Cloud Service Providers)
By using open source products in education in the first place, you can push students to install the same software at home and continue tinkering. Without regard to their material status or moral character.

I don't see why you demote this to merely an option. It's the cruical selling point. Open source programs also tend to be cross platform (available to more students) and support open data formats (their data will not be locked, flowing freely).
The core service, sure. The problem is that Netflix accounts for something like a 3rd of US bandwidth consumption. Not many services can sustain that. Netflix also has to manipulate a giant library of assets. Doesn't sound like this is part of their service. A normal company should be able to fail-over.

I have been experimenting a lot with Google App Engine. Failing over from a PaaS like that is not easy because your app typically relies on a bunch of proprietary APIs. However, it is possible, provided you keep right replication and architect the application accordingly.

You also don't need to fail over 100% of your app. I don't have a very clear understanding of what Soluto actually does (sounds like a GotToAssist competitor), ability to fail over the part of the system that facilitates the remote desktop experience would be more important than administration or creation of new accounts. (This is a crude example.)
Its just too expensive, you cant host your custom domain name on free instance. And there's nothing between 0 and 50$.
I'm waiting for prices of azure web sites, hopefully it would compare to shared hosting prices.
Let my email go: A critique of Google Play's unsubscribe flow
I chose the US because I had those statistics on hand.

If we widen the comparison to the entire world, Patrick will be even more "successful," considering the prevalence of poverty in the world.

So yes, he is not only more successful than the overwhelming majority of people in this nation, he is also spectacularly more well-off than most people in the world.

Changing the scope doesn't change the conclusion.
Keek might make a reasonable example of something do ewhere between facetime and instagram. It's a lot like instagram, but the medium is <36s long videos.

Just bringing it up as food for thought. No real point here.
That's not scapegoating, it's pointing at facts. Sad as they are. When you have a complex web service, you rely on a provider. That provider can go down sometimes, and it takes you with it. Again I'll point to Netflix and AWS, they waited until AWS were back up, they didn't "restore a backup" somewhere else.
Wow, great. Searched for a site like this a while now, but never found one with such a simple interface. I would like to have an API though, to integrate it into my current episode-reporting-bot :)
I have a VM on azure, and no downtime in last 3 months. Also, didn't notice any problems with disks.
> The vast majority of the deaths to the Indians were due to old world disease, and cannot be reasonable blamed on settlers.

As far as I know, the settlers at least tried to use what is in fact a biological weapon on Indians on numerous occasions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_biological_warfare#N...
Oh, I thought 'sezon' was a new slang term for 'season'. Haha.
Not much, simple FB fan page and auto posting reminds about new episodes.
Does anyone know (either statistically, or anecdotally) how common drug abuse is in the Valley? I've never seen anyone I've worked with use hard drugs, nor have I seen anyone act like they were on hard drugs. The article makes it sound like it was a culture at McAfee's company. Is this just because he was a drug dealer, or does this happen elsewhere in the Valley?
And the ignorant and fearful keep marching in their parade of bloodlust and violence... while the rest of us keep burying the dead, unfortunate casualties in your paranoid experiment of personal rights and politics. Nothing but hypotheticals to compete with the hard facts seen in studies of other nations, the truth pales in comparison to the nightmare you wish we all lived in.
Interesting article. The cost of the ad reflects it's impact, but what about other off-beat search terms that might not have the same cost and combined could yield the same click rates?
Where's the GitHub repo so I can submit pull requests for shows I care about?

http://epguides.com/Castle/
http://epguides.com/CovertAffairs/
http://epguides.com/WhiteCollar/
http://epguides.com/ModernFamily/
http://epguides.com/Middle/
Architecting KnockoutJS Applications
How is he to know if he was "blind?"

The fact that one girl exhibited preferences counter to his assumptions does not mean that those assumption are incorrect.
1. get accepted into MIT
2. continue losing weight (40 lbs so far)
3. just got a Xilinx/Digilent Atlys FPGA board and hope to have a pimped out CPU implemented on it with HDMI, Ethernet, Audio, and SPI storage interfaces
4. Better understanding of digital design in general
5. get my internship at intel extended for the coming summer
Please consider an API. Having this data in an easily parseable format like JSON would be awesome.
That was also a troll/spam bot that had no affiliation to Travis CI. Their GitHub integration has always been classy.
You could also mentally convert the temperatures, I can do it easily despite never having lived in a country where Fahrenheit is used.
ask.fm sounds very similar to formspring (http://www.formspring.me). Formspring used to be popular about two years ago.
Lessons From Cherry
That's too close to RackSpace. Choose another name :)
With so much buzz covering the whole "facebook depression" phenomenon and studies both proving and disproving it to some extent, I think the article is pretty apt.

I, personally feel the same way. Enough to have deleted my account. And somehow, not witnessing a constant flux of achievements and instagrammed food is keeping me rather calm so far.
Unless you get that feeling because you, say, suffer from depression (as I do), where that might progress to "I don't even want to be alive."

But even before that, the feeling isn't one of having everything you need already. It's one of almost crippling apathy.
With my limited experience with Box2D, I can hardly think of a case where it would be both useful and overkill. It's really a quite straight-forward tool and provides rich features. Once I started using it, I immediately found that many of its features made a lot of interesting options suddenly trivial to implement. The only 2D projects where I would discourage it are ones without any semblance of physics; tile-based games, or example.
Progressive JPEG needs a minimum of 2 x width x height additional bytes over baseline to decode an image (maybe more, definitely 1.5-3x more than that if you're displaying coarse scans), regardless of how many scans you have or display, as it needs to save coefficients for N-1 scans over the entire image, whereas baseline needs only to save the coefficients for a couple 8x8 blocks at a time. Though if you're clever about and sacrifice displaying coarse cans you could reduce this some.

If you don't display coarse scans (and if you're comparing progressive vs. baseline CPU usage then counting such isn't fair), then approximately the only additional CPU time progressive should take is the time additional cache misses take. It's probably a wash considering that decoding fewer coefficients / less Huffman data takes less CPU.

Maybe I'll get some numbers, I'm curious now... But unless you're serving multi-megapixel images the additional CPU and memory doesn't matter. Probably not even until you're in the double digits, if then.
If you want an example of an efficient upper-middle range restaurant: Cheesecake Factory. So efficient that someone used it as an example of how to fix the healthcare industry.

They use a lot of science/tech, although not all computers.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/08/13/120813fa_fact_...
Bruce Sterling on Why It Stopped Making Sense to Talk About 'The Internet'
...in 2012. I didn't room for that part in the title field because the totle exceeded 80 characters.
> What is the impetus to write or read these things?

As I've mentioned in other HN threads, I'm a living patio11 success story.

Over the past two years, the trajectory of my life changed from

"Well, maybe I'll figure out a way to get out of this $70,000 USD a year developer job some day."

to

"So that's what having six figures in the bank feels like, I guess we can have kids now."

in large part thanks to the example he sets in posts like the one linked here and the advice he gives.

Aside from that, although I don't know him personally, Patrick has been an unreasonably nice human being in any interaction I've had with him, and I'm quite sure other HNers would agree. Celebrating his successes in 2012 I think is a good enough reason for him to post this here.
Perhaps this is part of your current problem with Azure, but is it possible to retain some part of your frontpage during an outage like this? Or failover to a static page with a basic description of the service? Your support site seems to look ok.

I only make the suggestion because I was not aware of Soluto. I went to your homepage and see the outage notice and a link to support. I still have no idea what your service is about.

Perhaps not the best time to be spruiking your site and service, but any-publicity-is-good-publicity etc.
I like it. It's more series-focused than other sites I've seen, which is easier than flipping through months trying to find when Breaking Bad starts again. (http://pogdesign.co.uk/cat/)
...in 2012. I didn't have room for that part in the title field because the title exceeded 80 characters.
Not in India and Africa. And even in the West there are many dishes that people prefer to eat with their hands.
Facebook’s High-Stakes Poker Game
An old survey. "The most recent of the algorithms surveyed here is due to Bentley, Sleator, Tarjan and Wei [Bentley et al. 1986]." It doesn't cover, for example, the Burrows-Wheeler transform.
> K-san: "I have absolutely no interest in that."

If this is the Japanese I think it is, I would have had difficulty not laughing out loud.
Intel’s Cable TV Service & Set Top Box To Roll Out City By City
Yeah totally - I do that too. Know lots of people who do

But what do you email ABOUT that's what I meant... Like emails from Amazon are plainly not "doing email". That stuff should go somewhere else
It has IntelliJ support.

Just wanted to point that out, because you mentioned Notepad and VI. If you don't like IntelliJ, that's a whole other story.
Very impressive story Nathan - you'll go far for sure. I would be interested to know now that you're working for yourself if you think you'll develop more iPhone apps in the future or does that effort consume too much time for the return?
Just a link to my own site! Took a lot of time to put this together, hope HN appreciates it.

I've got something like an exclusivity HN in the post - check out the first Iconic Web Font named "Elusive Icons".

Awesome replacement for Font Awesome. Just released & glorious :-)
YouTube's Charlie the Unicorn Returns After 3 Years
Google promoting iOS team, encourages iOS developers to do work that ‘matters’
Does it really has to be that way? Is it flying or crashing the only possibilites?

Maybe not. Maybe soft landings are possible, just don't put everything you got in just one shot.
Then you will pardon me if I find it curious that the ACLU blog has linked to a Glenn Greenwald article on the FISA topic when he wrote at Salon.com

http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/aclu-lens-court-r...

And you'll also pardon me that I find it curious that Glenn Greenwald has been asked to give speeches at ACLU events.

http://aclum.org/greenwald

"On Thursday, May 26th, 2011, award-winning Salon.com columnist and New York Times-bestselling author Glenn Greenwald gave a fiery address to attendees at the ACLU of Massachusetts annual Bill of Rights Dinner. He described how the Obama administration has aggressively defended--and at times expanded--the Bush White House's attacks on civil liberties, expansion of government surveillance and secrecy, and executive power assertions in the ''war on terror.'' He argues that this continuity between the two major political parties spells long-term trouble for the Bill of Rights in the United States, and suggests that the work of the ACLU is crucial to reestablishing the rule of law."

In fact Mr. Greenwald turns up on their site again and again:
http://www.aclu.org/search/%22glenn%20greenwald%22
Knowing that Greenwald trained and practised as a lawyer you should realise that the ACLU is one of the few organisations he points to as standing up for the average citizen against the possible (read actual) tyrannies of government.

---

I know you're a smart guy: may I suggest that there is some cognitive dissonance at play between your statements, "If you want to have your biases confirmed, Greenwald is a very effective mechanism for doing that." and "I generally find ACLU's takes to be honest and well-studied." given that these two actors practically seem to sing from the same hymn sheet.
I'm in 11th and I read Hacker News on a daily basis, so I'm a bit outside the general population when it comes to issues like this. With that said, her thoughts on Facebook are echoed by everyone who I've talked to. Many are sick of it, and fewer each day check it regularly.

If I need to contact someone, even someone with Facebook on their smartphone, it takes hours to get a reply. If I use SMS I'm acknowledged near instantly.
But sometimes it takes a while until you find the right clients. I learned that you have to be very cautious.

One of the problems is also, that some clients are not realistic enough, they are very optimistic, which may lead to not being able to pay you.
Site site generator startup
Does somebody know if exists a startup built on the static site generated cms. It seems a good idea to me, what do you think? Thank you
Last time I bought bottled water I'm pretty sure I got water inside of a bottle, and that was exactly what I wanted. It's convenience, and that absolutely is beneficial.
Google+ hangouts are bandwidth optimized.
What's your perspective on other customer acquisition channels (via media buys) outside of search (PPC)? I'm curious about your take on mobile, CPI/PPI and display (outside of the google content network).
For those who are curious

Cached copy of the front page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0vf1uUF...

Their support site: https://support.soluto.com/home (not down)

Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soluto

Soluto alternatives: http://alternativeto.net/software/soluto/
From article and context it seems you do not have a VA yet--do you mean to assume they will be female?
I've consulted in this manner and I'm surprised this isnt the norm. It reduces risk for both parties. The client is seeing tangible results sooner and you're minimising potential losses due to non-payment (for whatever reason).
"In May I made a commitment to write 1,000 words a day. [...] That slow, consistent progress is what allowed me to write two books, almost two dozen guest posts, and over thirty posts on this blog in the last year."

Very well done that man.

I was just wondering how many hours each day it took to crank out the thousand words? I'm assuming that research time was minimal as these appear to be howto books - the research was in launching two successful applications.
The obviously emphasis here with Kotlin is that you can also compile it to JavaScript. Which may be a smart move for Kotlin.

One reason why I chose Node.js over Scala for my current personal projects is that I prefer programming in the same language on the client and server.

That being said I've never used Kotlin and can't compare it with Scala, which I have used for my personal and commercial projects.
ICSI Certificate Notary
"The limited walled garden approach to computing ensures that she doesn't accidentally install malware, etc"

OK, but why not have a sanctioned, free, voids-your-warranty way to disable these restrictions, so that users who want to install software without using the app store can do so? This would not be hard. It could be buried somewhere deep where users cannot find it, it could be loaded with warnings, but all that would be fine.

Apple wants control, because control is profitable. Control lets them spot the next cool application early, so they will not be blindsided like they were by the Web. Control lets them promise developers and media partners that copyright infringement will not be such an issue. Control lets them maintain their image on a level that was not previously possible -- they can make sure that iPads are not associated with pornography, that iPhones are not associated with political cartoons, that nobody will point at Apple devices as a symbol of some national rebellion, and so forth. Control lets them slow down their competitors until Apple has a chance to market their solution (even if that solution is a total boondoggle).

It is hard to believe that Apple's policies on the app store were created with users as the top priority.

"the inherent danger is unfair competition - the gatekeeper can decide to reject software whenever it wants and impose fees and crazy rules"

Which is already what happens.

"I think it is best that the European union would regulate such walled gardens, e.g. by limiting the percentage that the gatekeeper can charge,"

Did they regulate video game consoles?
Guessing: rendering anti-aliased text over an image background is expensive (you have to read the background image to blend colors). Re-rendering page text multiple times while an image is loading may not be a good idea.
I'm not as familiar with adwords as I want to be. What exactly are the ad groups? Is it the positioning he is referring to? What exactly is suppose to jump out at me?