skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I sold a domain for five figures and have given others away for free. I've turned down offers for four figures and two figures... :)

I know there's a lot more to a brand than the domain name, and I know a good name is important to a brand... :)

FWIW.
It only seems to work on Chrome right now. Safari doesn't support the FileSystem API, so it doesn't seem like even Webkit's enough.
>> pretty far fetched.

I would say 'more difficult than it needs to be.' But essentially correct.
"Your evidence that reddit is replaceable is you've used similar sites (most of which are basically dead in the water at this point)."

That's the point. Internet communities come and go all the time. None of them have proven to be hard to replace. Quality news organizations don't pop up every few years.

The New York Times has competitors, but not equals. All of the papers you mentioned (except for the WSJ, which is indispensable in its niche) have a small fraction of the subscribers the New York Times does, which seems like a pretty good metric for unique value.
Thank you for being reasonable in your response, and I'm glad that you've taken the comment to heart.

I agree with another commenter: I think this letter would have been better left closed. I had the privilege of meeting Ray Kurzweil last year in New York at an intimate talk (he was annoyed he had to cut his preso down to an hour), and he's a genuinely smart guy and a real pleasure to talk with. That being said, he has some genuinely bananas-crazy ideas, and they might work or they might not. I'm happy to see him try on the off chance they will, though, and I'm glad Google is paying him to explore some.

I know a lot about Paxos after spending years studying it and its implementations, but I'm not going to openly and publicly criticize Mike Burrows for his work on Google's Chubby. He knows a lot of things that I don't, and I'm smart enough to realize that. I'm more game to learn from his work than criticize Google for hiring him. I do take who a person is into account when thinking about their body of work, but only in the positive.

That's where I'm coming from. You care about all of us working together and succeeding, yet try to divide with your letter, so it's a bit strange. That's all.
Root Certificate Authority research
It's my sincere belief that the bloom in programmers talking about SRS in the past few years goes back to this precise article.
> The amount of stuff that users are buying should be pretty much the _only_ metric you care about.

Generally yes, we would trade an increase purchases for anything else. The test was a negative effect because we forced people to stop using search, which was the feature we were experimenting with. Making buying less efficient, even if people want to buy so much that they eventually succeed, isn't a great result.

> And they are probably not using search as much because browsing is much nicer with infinite scroll.

No for two reasons. First, browse pages didn't have infinite scroll back when this test was done. And second, the point is that people seeing infinite scroll purchased less from search as compared to the control. This was a controlled A/B test.

As gfodor says, yes the back button did return you to your place (or it did, once we ironed out all of the problems with it in early incarnations).
I actually agree with you. They should be possible, and I'm sure they will exist. However in terms of building one, the only roadmap we have includes a body. To my mind it's not either/or, its now or later?
I see it as an over reaction with people spreading bad news like the Mayans are changing world ending dates. Now everyone agrees that its popular to talk about how bad Windows 8 is and what the next End of World date is, but those people have not experienced at least one of those and more likely neither. Windows RT is store apps and Pro is store apps plus traditional apps. Naysayers... pffst! I'll stick to my nice Windows 8 Pro install because its pretty bad ass!
What's the performance impact of starting up a python script every time the shell needs to show the prompt?
I'm pretty sure some of it is broken in all browsers now because the specs for these APIs have all changed.
When I submitted my research proposal I had the vague notion of turning into a site like this (I decided against it in the end).

Looks great, I hope you do well.
Innovation means not playing by the rules
Bullshit. I can start streaming Avengers from iTunes in 1080p with 5.1 audio in under 30 seconds. It couldn't be any easier. With an AppleTV I can do that in my home theater. Amazon also has video on demand options. So does Xbox amongst many others.

If you want to be a selfish twat and not pay for any content then so be it. You'd hardly be alone. Just don't add lying to your list of sins.
GitHub Survivor: a bug leaderboard for GitHub issues
You can fairly argue that utilities are natural monopolies and that having a government regulated monopoly is more efficient. That's a reasonable position.

But then it has to be a government regulated monopoly. You can't just let them do whatever they want or they'll walk all over everybody.

In particular, a monopoly over the wire should not be allowed to be leveraged into a monopoly over content. Utility companies should be utility companies, period, and leave the content distribution to competing content distributors.
Not to mention the hazards of excessive antacid use, such as bezoars.
I write a fair amount of video processing and container parsing software, and I wouldn't even think of doing this in any language but C. But for anything else I do -- which is all strictly higher-level, mind -- the bare metal begins to burn a little.
One of the disadvantages to using imgur is that it's blocked for a lot of corporate users.

I'd suggest instead to use S3. Things like S3Fox[1] make uploading easy.

[1] http://www.s3fox.net
"Director of Engineering" does not mean they are in charge of the engineering organization. At Google there are many people with the title "Director of Engineering". It's a 2nd level management position, leading perhaps 50-100 people.
To those who read it now, it seems he updated with new content - SPOOL/DESOLEE (and removed the older ones, IDEAS, NOTES and TEST)
Surprise, Surprise: The Banks Win
Regular Expression Flavor Comparison
Chrome — Google Developers Live
Really? I know less about the GOOG organization than I thought, and I stand corrected. Thank you for correcting me.

Who is in charge of the engineering organization? A SVP? I would have assumed a Director of Engineering would have reported to Vic Gundotra, and overseen engineering as a whole.

That undermines half of my comment, so I'm glad you said something.
ClearQAM tuners like Elgato won't work with premium-tier channels like HBO because the networks mandate that the cable company implement encryption and DRM to protect their content. This effectively means the subscriber must have a set-top box or CableCard, to decrypt whatever content scrambling system the provider uses (e.g. Motorola's DigiCipher II) between the head-end and the set-top. Also, with a set-top box or CableCard, they can set the 5C flag for the FireWire port to prevent the recording of the content with a DVD recorder and can mandate HDCP protection for HDMI. [Of course, there are still HDCP strippers and the analog hole, so if somebody wants to cap their content, everybody knows this isn't going to stop them.]
"I remember realizing that at the end of every week, I had implemented a feature I had no idea how to do at the beginning of the week."

This was beautiful. I guess I passed that stage without consciously realizing that; thank you for reminding me how wonderful programming is.
I have had similar issues so mostly a "nap" for me is closing my eyes while laying down in a dark room for 20 minutes at most, often with my hands behind my head.

I always feel really refreshed afterwards. YMMV
I see the article mostly talking about the actions of those involved in the case and not the defendants. The actions performed, for example by Jim Keyzer, is criminal. The actions of the defendants, however one feel about it, doesn't excuse criminal conducts by people employed by the justice department.

However, I will try to answer the question on why creating an indexing site called the piate bay should not be illegal.

1) A crime need to first have happened, and then linked to an individual before prosecution. Its the basic idea of all justice system, and without it, justice don't work. You end up with "justice" that say "well, you are the son of So and So, and thus you are going to commit a crime sooner or later". In this case, its "well, someone somewhere is likely encourage by the site's name, so lets throw the creators in jail for that someone somewhere".

2) The pirate bay is a tool with a name. Its like having a crowbar named "heist". A name should not be enough to distinguish a criminal factory producing tools from an illegal factory. An search index, however named, should not be deemed legal liable for its users just because then name is more suggestive than "Google".
Since both green teas and black teas are made from the same plant -a plant that contains caffeine- it seems likely both tea variants contain caffeine. The withering & oxidation processes might increase the caffeine in black teas though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_processing

If you want a caffeine free tea that tastes well (imo), consider Rooibos tea. It contains no caffeine whatsoever: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooibos
Basically this is to support "expression" like syntax such as people are used to in C, for example i++ and x=y are expressions with side effects in C and a lot of C idioms depend on such things. This kind of thing was originally not allowed but I personally found it clumsy to manually split out the imperative parts from the functional parts, so I taught the compiler how to do it for me :)
I'm not sure I'd say that HTML+JS as a development platform is more or less "modern" than native code. It has strengths, and weaknesses, but isn't really a better or more refined method, just a different one.
The Loci Method?

It's a well respected way of storing information. But (drawing a terrible analogy) it's a linked list, not a hash.

It's hard to perform a random lookup on something 2/3rds of the way through your mental tour.

SRS works on the well understood phenomena of repeated exposure and tested recall. They're very good at imprinting atomic information even if that information has no context whatsoever. The original research was done with randomly chosen letters.
Is that supposed to be a joke or are you really being that ridiculous?
MBA is too big and heavy? Right...
The Samsung Series 9 is typical Samsung poorly made junk and a Chromebook is a whole different story.
The MBP is not heavy or overpriced for what you get. Show me something else in the PC World that compares..oh thats right, there isn't anything.
I love coffee and drink it pretty much every day. The issue I found with coffee drinkers in North America (when I lived there) was that most people would order huge cups of extremely sweetened coffee. I use to call it sugar water with coffee flavor. The general level of quality of coffee was also quite poor.

I generally drink my coffee with a little bit of milk and no sugar. It is quite easy to do when you get an amazing shot of espresso (or make it yourself at home with an AeroPress for eg.)

I never really feel any kind of disturbing feeling from coffee. I do get that feeling from energy drinks and generally avoid them.
Give HN: For the weekend hacker looking for product ideas
A hint would be nice.
A Viral Formula
First in a series about how to create a viral video leveraging discovery
The 13" retina would be a perfect solution if you could get it with more than 8GB of ram. But since people are suggesting Airs with that much ram I would certainly take the retina 13" instead. Actually smaller but a little heavier than the Air but with that fantastic screen.
On Exploring the Oceans - why do we have better maps of Mars?
Actually, in regard to the Appeals Court, its the majority usages of the site that count. If your blog's comments is mostly used for illegal activity, you are guilty of facilitating the crime by having said blog. Intent was not mentioned by the Appeals Court to have any baring on the matter.

This is how they said Google was not guilty, but the pirate bay was (they mentioned Google specifically in the question and answer).
Had you read the article, you'd know that link describes something the author actually took time to tell you wasn't available to him.
Can you cite a case that actually says that? I'm genuinely curious, because I'm not aware of any. And I would be interested to see how the courts handle the fair use argument in a case like that.
Seems like infinite scroll is a solution in search of a problem. Users don't want to see more results. They want to see the right results. Etsy seems to fail in this regard and has dozens of pages of irrelevant results. A better move would be to rethink search relevancy and discovery.
Yeah, it's a bit flaky; but it's more like a conflation of two different cultures by the term "hacker" than a malicious slam.
On my machine:

real	0m0.075s

user	0m0.047s

sys	0m0.024s

This seems to be a common concern, but I've never noticed a delay in practice.
I drink coffee everyday (somedays four or more espressos). I also stop drinking coffe for a few days at least twice every semester, just in case.

Even at peak coffee, more coffee still stimulates my mind and makes me infinitely more focused. The only times coffee hasn't worked is when I'm genuinely sleep deprived, although I typically get 6-8 hours of sleep.
Well, I know trolls, elves, goblins, orcs, wraiths, wargs, wizards, dragons and eagles at least were all existing notions. Some of them he popularized (e.g. "orc" and "warg" were both lost to modern usage before Tolkien brought them into currency), but he didn't invent them. I know "balrog" and "hobbit" were original, but I think most of it was a synthesis of existing mythology. Can you come up with many more original species?
Actually Xfinity has Self Install kits for new installs

http://customer.comcast.com/help-and-support/selfinstall/

They only force a truck roll if your residence hasn't had cable in a while.

BTW I've had Comcast happily install service without a TV, I got an install before we moved and the tech had no problem just setting up the boxes and leaving.
My favorite books in 2012
It’s interesting how they’re both so important to humanity. We socialise over alcohol all the time, and we’re more productive with a little bit of caffeine each day. Plus it’s generally safer to drink beer and boiled beverages than water.
5 ways your business MUST adapt in 2013 to survive and thrive
Exactly. "You can't safely return fire, so allow yourself to be killed" is something you can say to a robot, but not to a human.
Nobody sets out to write bad code. It is easier not to suck if you can control / choose the scope of your project. But more often than not, the scope is dictated by a real-world set of complex needs and circumstances that evolve throughout the whole live of the project.

In the end, good UI, proper testing and responsive customer support play a bigger role in customer satisfaction than the quality of code.
I was hoping this would be from in-game mechanics. Just drawing isn't that impressive.
Lessons from Coleslaw
An Apology from the Soluto Team (MS Azure postmortem)
It's pretty common for us to look at new vs. returning users and Etsy sellers vs. others (sellers are obviously really engaged users, and behave differently). Occasionally one group will stand out, but not in this case.
Common Pitfalls in Building Products and How to Avoid them
Given that I've never yet used an infinite scroll implementation that had reliably-working 'back' button behavior, I'm skeptical of the claim that yours worked. I'd put some money on the hypothesis that it worked under ideal conditions, or worked in testing, but failed an irritating fraction of the time in actual real-world usage.

EDIT: In fact, even if by some miracle it didn't, it probably still triggered a twitch of stress and irritation in users who assumed it would.
Some form of BASEXY encoding XY not being 64? I see +,-,/,! and ":" in the text. Also spaces and newlines. BASE71?
Contrary to Dan McKinley's half-apology as quoted in the article, infinite scroll is stupid on your website.

Infinite scroll flies in the face of the way the human brain works with groups and sets, makes it virtually impossible to usefully search within the current page using the browser's search feature, etc. And the positives are? Nothing, other than novelty.

It is one of the many recent examples of webdev/designers doing something because it is possible and trendy and new rather than because it adds any value.

Paged results with a well designed indication of where you are plus good server-side categorization and server-side search to filter results is far preferable to infinite scroll in every practical situation.

Keep the infinite scroll for those purely arty non-commercial story-telling sites, if you make me try to use an infinite scroll interface to buy stuff from you I will buy nothing.
I make the argument that 'some' of the sensory experience must be available and that interaction with the real world is crucial. To your point about Ms. Keller, I have used this example myself as to why robotics should focus more on the sensation of touch and it's why I commissioned the development of a low-cost etextile robotic skin from a brilliant designer/engineer at MIT. That project (rSkin) can be found here (http://www.instructables.com/id/rSkin-Open-Source-Robot-Skin...)
plangr.com
Such as funding them with millions of dollars for their default search engine deal?
I think it would be better if the site handles all that for me. Having to switch to another site for uploading images is kinda 'distracting' to me.
I admit to the tactic, but received extremely helpful criticism and rapid response. I do genuinely hope that Mr. Page reads the letter though.
Add full-screen button for complete distraction-freeness. And there are some server errors, not sure why http://throwww.com/a/337
I'm sure I'm not the only one insanely reserving those on a whim for projects that never materialize. Some of them would actually make great company names I think, but alas...

replicure.com

repliture.com

replition.com

loopfeedback.net

evlix.com

talklevel.com

talklevel.org

plotspot.net

fusync.com

donatetime.net

vergis.net

I'll give any of them to HN users with 500 karma or more for 30,00 € via Paypal.
Codereview.me
It's "test-specific" if the only time you ever specify that parameter is in a test. You're right that published_at is an attribute that can be set, but if you just wanted to set published_at to an arbitrary timestamp, Rails already provides that functionality for you: update_attribute :published_at, some_time.

I agree with everything else you've said around the semantics of publishing something, but those are implementation details of the application at hand. Having a #publish_at!(publish_time) method may or may not be what users need in this application, but the original example (adding a parameter to make testing cleaner) seems like a clear case of writing to the test to me.
Tealeaf Academy teacher here. :)

We use a custom built application for our program. There's a discussion board that Chris and I monitor often and students questions are answered typically in a few hours, sometimes in minutes. We have a chat room too, where students work together to solve problems, and we are there often to help out.

Teaching wise, we follow the "flip the classroom" model - there are lecture videos and we use the live sessions to tie up all loose ends, demo and live code, and do code critiques.

For the curriculum, we have looked at all that's available online but in the end decided to build our own - most online materials either teach concepts in isolation or try to teach too much all at once, which is very overwhelming to students. We crafted a curriculum and refined it from over one year of teaching, and we want to introduce concepts slowly and plenty of exercise before students move on to new topics.

All our courses are project based - our students will write code on their own (not copy and pasting!) for 3 projects, with increasing difficulty, with the last one being a production quality e-commerce app.

Check out our site and I'm happy to answer any questions.
It would, but Apple did the same thing when they switched to Intel and worked out pretty well. They even shipped all the PowerPC binaries for a while, together with an emulation layer, so you could run old apps on Intel (albeit slowly).

It's more of a backwards compatibility/marketing issue, I suppose. Apple could afford to have programs work 'more or less', Microsoft with its track record for backwards compatibility probably cannot.
I've edited the letter a bit with a note of the help I got from HN. Do you still feel it is divisive?
It begs the question why can't the operator watch a computer that does the operator's job for him. Is split second power allocation really done better by a human? Note I'm not suggesting computers are perfect operators, just less error prone.
Maybe you missed the part where Universal's content will not be available on iTunes, Amazon, Netflix, Xbox, Playstation, etc. until after HBO is done with it.
I believe he was making a joke about one of the dominant gaming distribution systems being named "Steam".
Well, it did rather obvious to me that Google, one of the most brilliant engineering companies in the world, wouldn't put Ray Kurzweil in charge of its engineering operations, a field he is known not to specialize in. Just as much, being such an engineering focused company, Google is going to have a lot of management people with titles related to engineering.
This also happens in Canada, but synchronized to hockey games (predictably). http://www.patspapers.com/blog/item/what_if_everybody_flushe...
Good analysis and a good explanation of why I am so bullish on Android. It's going to be much bigger than phones and tablets because it's going to become the go-to application stack for anybody that wants to build a new special-purpose device.
Lenovo reveals 27-inch touchscreen AIO-tablet Windows 8 PC
While that may be the dominant theory it doesn't appear to be true. I follow a doctor out of NJ who uses dietary intervention to successfully treat a lot of diseases most doctors will say are "incurable", including ulcerative colitis, IBS, lupus, psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, and diabetes (the adult onset type). He has an entire newsletter devoted to the following:

Inflammatory Bowel Disease – Aggresive dietary modifications hold key to relief and recovery.

Irritable Bowel Syndrome – Recovery requires adherence to high–nutrient, fiber–rich diet.

Nutritional and Dietary Protocols for IBD – These nutritional basics have helped hundreds of patients.

A Crohn's Success Story – IBD patient makes recovery even after two surgeries.

Specific Carbohydrate Diet – Lack of scientific support and low success rate on this diet.

Eat For Health Recipes – The highest scoring recipes from Dr. Fuhrman's newest book.

https://www.drfuhrman.com/members/NewsletterDownload.aspx?is...

He shows (with references to back every claim, as with all of his writing) that these diseases DEFINITELY have a LOT to do with what is eaten.

The newsletter is $7. I wish it were free for as important as I feel this issue is. I would hope that before you continue to make such definite, and possibly dangerous claims, that you would fork over the money to at least make sure you're not helping to send people down the path of needless pain and suffering.