skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No.

Providing options, with a professional and courteous tone, to rectify the situation is different than apologizing. Polite expressions of options are necessary.

But apologizing? As in, "expressing sympathy"? IMO, no.

Humans do not get offended when their car doesn't start because it's out of gas and doesn't offer an apology. They still love their car, they will still continue to use it.

Humans do not get offended when they click to a cable channel that they aren't subscribed for and an expression of sympathy isn't displayed. They will continue watching television and subscribing to cable.

Humans do not get offended when the hold a hammer by the "business end" and try to drive a nail in with the handle, and an "I'm sowwy!" flag doesn't pop out of it. They will go on to learn the correct way to use it.

Computers are merely another inanimate object. Ultimately it's a system that serves the user when used correctly. A bank teller on the other hand, should apologize because there is the appearance of discretion in the bank teller's undesired response. Applications have no discretion in their actions. Humans are fine accepting that their actions led to an undesirable outcome, especially when avenues of correction are explained. Constant expressions of sympathy are annoying at best, and at worst can plant the seed of mistrust in the design and value of the system.

This doesn't hold when it's reasonable to hold the developers at fault for the undesired outcome. For example, if a feature was removed or redesigned without fair notice, an apology might be appropriate. In this case, they're failing to meet a certain expectation that had previously been set.

Update:

Upon further reflection, I recognize why I feel so strongly about this. I've worked on many public-facing applications before, from finance to social media. In each case, the use of apologetic or sympathetic expressions matched the site designer's personal belief in the value of the system and the correctness of the design. Where they had also expressed doubts about the success of the project, apologetic error messages were standard. Where they believed the project was well-designed and, if used correctly, would benefit the end-user, merely professional messages were used.

I now find myself inadvertently inferring such levels of confidence from all application messaging/copywriting.
I'm using AngularUI for the nice google maps directives, but this one appears to have some nice directives (e.g. date/time pickers) that don't require me to pull in jQuery-UI...which I welcome with great zeal.
"Oh, this is (candidate), but let me save us some time. I thought this was going to be a technical interview."
That guy bombed the interview right then and there. I didn't tell him that, though. I let him dig the deepest hole he could imagine by doing my best ditzy/derpy voice and just saying things like "they want me to ask about the load... average...?". He'd make up some garbage, and I'd log all of it. This way I could bury him both for being a sexist bastard and for being a lying piece of trash at the same time.

He has already sunk the interview in her eyes, but she doesn't want to tell her employer that this guy bombed due to his interactions in the first 30 seconds with her.
Moreover, he is a sexist bastard.

He then tells her something she disagrees technically about load average, and this makes him a lying piece of trash.

Regardless, he has bombed and sunk the interview, and her only duty now is to spend another 44:30 seconds to bury him.

Of course, she is playing this for humor, so I am out of line for thinking Rachel sounds like a jackass who has done a disservice to the candidate as well as a disservice to her employer.
I read the grandparent as suggesting that it was attitude rather than a real factor. I suggest that he was denying the bias, or at least the severity of it.

My experience has been that it's a huge factor. What frustrates me about this kind of response is that I have worked very hard, lost > 55lb in weight, asked women out in real life, ~150 online, etc. with a positive attitude and got nothing in return, and yet suggestions like that suggest it's all my fault and I'm simply afraid of admitting failure.

I wish I could believe there were things I could do to overcome this, but I don't. I have friends who are short yet a little bit taller than me who are perfectly positive yet experience exactly the same thing. It doesn't bode well - at what point do you think 'this handicap is just too much'?

I work for a startup by the way, so this is not an attitude I take to everything in life :-) however, if all evidence points one way, wouldn't it be mad to somehow have faith that the fact isn't so?
As a matter of fact, they do try to block Opera aggressively from their Google Apps. Gmail on Opera (Linux version only) will force you to use the HTML-only version of the site, while display a message telling you to switch to a more modern browser (even though Opera is usually the most standards-compliant browser at any given version compared to its rivals), linking to Google Chrome. I searched on the internet for this, and it seems to happen to non-Linux machines too, but since reports of it are so scarce (Opera is probably the least used browser out there), no one seems to care.

I'm very saddened by the results of the antitrust motion and I hope they get cornered again on antitrust issues. Google and Apple are the new MS, really.
North Korea Enlists German Help to Prepare Economic Opening
> (And the parenting example is a good one. IMHO someone who does their best at raising a child with random genetic disorders like sociopathy, schizophrenia, or Down's Syndrome absolutely deserves as much praise as someone who raises a bright genetically-endowed child to be a great man or woman.)

That's not the question he asked. You're comparing parents who face different challenges. The question was about parents who face the same challenges, and both sets of parents put a lot of effort in, but one set is good at parenting and the other set is bad at parenting.
Interesting to post this 4 days after another terminal version of Hacker News

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4992951

Maybe should have put "another" in the title? :-)
Would you mind sharing this party pooper business check list?
Looking at the equation mod 3 you get 1 + 2^N = 1 mod 3 or 2^N = 0 mod 3. Not possible.
OpenSearch extension for Safari
You can add more search engines to safari with it. It's kinda handy.

Recently i found this browser extension. After using it for a few days i must say, it brings back old memories using opensearch with firefox and is really handy.
Thanks, appreciate your candour + glad to hear things worked out for you. I'm always open to different perspectives on things. I will check out the book.
I eagerly remember everything I read in wikipedia. Because I read what interests me, because I have grown-up context and know how to remember things.

I sound like a person who don't want to buy that expensive and useless can opener, but I'm forced to.

http://math.info-servis.net/59.jpg <-- this is almost useless (knowing about them are fine, memorizing is useless)

http://shkola.ua/web/images/uploads/algebra8klass_merzlyak_-... <-- this is an example of totally useless math
This is a field already well-served by ARMA and whatnot--why not try pushing the envelope in other ways?
I believe he's using modafanil in the sense of broadly neuroprotective.

However selegine in microdoses is a true neuroprotective in that sense..
I think that many men feel that the risks are much higher for men (at least in the US) when it comes to marriage and making a mistake.
How To get stuff made in China
If you like reading, is it worthless for the authors who will write the books that you will read to have studied history, language and literature?

Or in other words, do you use/consume stuff that are the product of what you can't remember from school? And if so, does that make [edit] the knowledge behind them less useless?
Seems like quite a lot of the billionaires in the US are relatively unknown:
http://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/list/#page:1_sort:0_directi...
Very nicely designed, but it needs an About section :)
Justifying a trip to Australia via Cochlear Implants and Programming
"At some point, the cheerleaders—and yes, amazingly, they’re out there—are going to have to face reality: Windows 8 is selling slowly."

Paul Thurrott is one of those cheerleaders. Now he is negative about Windows 8, but when his Windows 8 book was coming out, he was enthusiastic and even antagonistic toward critics.
For your thing about not looking at certs... that's not true since all browsers now show the 'O' in the address bar for EV certs. And people definitely look at those, in my experience.
Deep Dive With Google’s Snapseed Team
Your second example is practice--think of it as training the ALU in your brain.

In the first example, learning those trig relations is useful later for doing calculus and other things. You may forget them over time, but to have never been exposed to them would be a loss.

The answer that "Well, I can just Wikipedia them later!" assumes that you know what to look for later. This turns you from being a thinking person into a glorified cache for the internet. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

How old are you, anyway?
On my mobile right now so cannot use this just yet, does anybody know if this works in the UK? (with three mobile network)
But people don't write just English words. Norvig dismisses any word with any character other than a-z, but those words still get typed. As do numbers, punctuation and not-real-words like names.

Redesigning a keyboard should be based on what people need to type, rather than on how English words are structured.
I really100x want to know who and where these specialty Rails shops are.

In short, I am calling out those numbers.

8k/month/dev in a Rails shop, which there are plenty of them around, including those in India, seem like way too much. Especially just for your regular web app dev (just because they can do Rails do not make them special and business care less about the framework).

I have been hearing these crazy numbers specifically from patio11 and amy hoy lately but I am not convinced.
haha, very much agree agree. his initial arguments about a 'universal printer' diluting the market in time seem to hold more water in the realm of hypothetical machines than real ones (for some reason the mental image of self-replicating Universal Turing Machines with a printing functionality came to mind :P)

in reality, there a number of principles in the realm of material physics that might constrain a machine simply 'printing itself'. In the near and medium terms, 3D printers that transform 3D CAD renderings into smaller objects will command a real market niche. In the long term, we will be talking about molecular fabrication (matter compilers a la "Diamond Age")-- but that is a whole other ball game :p
Pre-version 1, there were no promises that your code would not be broken. In fact, quite the opposite is true. It is hard for me to classify this as a failing of Go when it was exactly according to plan. Now, if future versions break version 1 code...
Site seems to be down now; just displaying "error".
I wonder if Google has an analytical models to try to understand what makes candidates successful in their company. 1 of 2 new hires leaving is a problem.
I don't know if that sentence is supposed to make Microsoft employees feel any better.
Is there any reason I can't read the comments in the terminal? It should be relatively easy to implement once you've rolled out your own parser...
My New Years Resolution to stay on task
High demand and resale value don't indicate the device is better?
I don't think it has to be angular-this vs angular-that.

Having a vibrant ecosystem is what matters.
A startup tale from the crypt
If you do nothing else, you must first represent your users. You care about them more than anything. You live in their shoes. You go to bat for them at every opportunity.

Strive to nail that, to get to a place where your normal mode, your "instincts", are driven by genuine user empathy.

If you struggle with this, either keep working at it or look around for other roles you can play. If you can't get comfortable caring deeply about your users, you're probably not going to be able to help your team or your organization build great products for those users.
The people who don't get the spirit of this post will miss the point and focus on the trees instead of the forest.

Widen and expand your spectrum of experiences.

Learn the difference between change and change for the better.

Learn what being a real friend is so you can have others be real friends to you.

Learn value. Your own value. The value you can provide others.

Start a student group with a goal of it existing in 10 years and no one knowing who your were.

Learn that it's not what your degree makes of you, but what you make of your degree.
Like perhaps one set of parents consist of an orphan and someone who grew up in a household with mentally-ill parents, while the other set come from comfortable intact middle-class nuclear families? And the first set just don't know how to parent because they had shitty or no role-models growing up?

I would still respect the first set of parents. They did the best they could with what they had to work with. It's a sad situation though...in a perfect world effort would equal results, but the world ain't perfect.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'keep the language in their own privileged domain' actually means, but I do agree that it is Apple's strategy to invest in Objective-C above other languages on its own platform, and that they have no investment in making a cross-platform framework other than HTML5.

I don't see why you describe Apple's approach as a 'trap'. They are providing a lot of software components that save effort for those who use them. The results are platform specific, but everyone who uses them knows that and chooses to make that tradeoff intentionally.

What you describe as "VM-managed library bundling" sounds a lot like "building your own platform out of open source parts and maintaining a compatibility layer to your target platforms".

That strategy works for a few of the largest most-well resourced projects - e.g. the browsers Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera etc, plus the Adobe Suite, and even these draw criticism for the results not being as good as they could be if they focussed on one platform.

Something like this works on the web too - where people assemble a 'platform' out of javascript libraries - because the base platform simply doesn't provide enough.

I don't see it being a viable strategy for a small team or an individual developer trying to build native applications though because of the amount of time you'll spend keeping the compatibility layer up-to-date with the rapidly changing underlying platforms.
He doesn't actually say "confident" or "well spoken." Those are things of substance, and he left them out.

> Nobody is making you buy the jagerbombs and popped collars part.

This is true. I guess I just cant help the correlation in my head, because it seems to be that prevalent.
This already exists. A lot of WordPress blogs use it (I think WordPress might have acquired the company that created it). I have disabled it on my WordPress(dotcom) blogs because it's just a PITA. It takes too long for a preview to be created and it blocks the blog -- which is an issue if you accidentally run your mouse over it (like those stupid popup Share buttons all over the place now).

EDIT: I've done a screensnap to show you what it looks like in my WordPress Dashboard for Comments (where I apparently cannot turn it off): http://mikecanepics.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/site-preview-in...
> Human relationships are mostly defined by cultural norms, not genetics, or else short people would have been selected out millions of years ago.

I think that humans are taller than we were millions of years ago. So yes, in some sense short people are getting selected out. (Though I don't have data. I'm actually more confident that we're taller than we were thousands of years ago, than that we're taller we were pre-agriculture.)

2.5% of people will always be 2σ below the norm.
Facebook does use PHP still don't they just pre-compile it to make it run faster? I'm sure they also use C/C++ in addition now though for certain resource intensive processes like image and video processing
Magnesium and blueberries seem to be the easily within reach stack to take with amphetamine.

Noopept is quite good. I stopped taking it because for me it seemed acutely enough anxiolytic to cause rebound anxiety.
You don't even really have to put in those terms. The best thing you can possibly do for your career is to be as prolific as you possibly can.

Whether it's writing, writing for comedy, programming, etc.
I think he's also not giving enough emphasis to the technical realities of the time. When K&R was written, bytes were EXPENSIVE, tracking the size of a string that had to be longer than 255 characters using anything but end-termination would result in every string wasting precious bytes.

Everyone agrees that NULL-terminated C strings are the wrong thing to do now, this is why virtually every modern language (including Go, which is obviously very C-inspired) splits a string into data and length as separate entities (even if this separation is mostly hidden from the language user).

But when you only have a handful of thousands of bytes for an entire system, you just have to accept some amount of unsafeness as a practical reality. Should K&R be amended with a warning lest it mislead people working on modern systems? Maybe. But I don't think it is fair to code review it using modern thinking about the expense of different operations and the modern luxury of vast amounts of memory.
Certainly there is a cause-and effect misunderstanding if one says that online dating is threatening monogamy. Monogamy is in crisis for decades as divorce rates (and sex tourism, and the rise of the man-o-sphere) show, and there doesn't seem to be a reversing trend. Online dating is just capitalizing on the trend, nothing more. It's very probable that in the not too distant future commitment will lose its high social value. The question is if societies are prepared in order to avoid side casualties (children).
Google Wins an Antitrust Battle
You're right, I don't know of any other company tht does it exactly like Facebook does. Tripadvisor, though, will let a significant portion of their candidates do a 1-year rotation through four different teams, then you get to choose the one you liked best (or potentially a different one if you're sure that's what you want). Not exactly the same, but still a larger than normal investment prior to setting you on a team.
Icaros Desktop 1.5 has been released
It was stolen. Taking property that obviously belongs to someone else is considered theft. And, as mentioned in this other article[1], the police were willing to get involved, but the owner preferred to keep them out of it.

[1] http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2013/01/05/brooklyn-man-tricks-i...
Hard disks don't increase the price tag over 16 gb ssd, memory is cheap. The fans, ports and connectors are all in the 400 € machines, so they obviously don't add much to the price tag. Larger display, ok, but how much more could a 13" standard-res touchscreen cost when retina ipads have 10" touchscreens? The case doesn't have to be aluminum to feel nice, there are plenty of plastic phones and tablets that feel nice that prove this for me. You don't need an optical drive. The only price drivers i see are the battery and the chipset, and possibly an ssd instead of a hard disk. I don't buy the story that you can't build nice laptops for 700€ when the BOM cost of the retina ipad is less than 300€.

Anyway, there are sub-1000 touchscreen machines that are nice, like the dell xps 12, but its obvious the vendors consider touchscreens a premium feature. They're wrong. Laptops no longer have the luxury of not shipping with touchscreens, at any price point. Even apple gets this wrong, something which amazes me. Imagine someone trying to sell a tablet with a trackpad instead of a touchscreen. The very idea is ridiculous. Every reason you want touch on your tablet also applies to your laptop.
From the instructions / about section:

what is this?
sometimes we get carried away with the big 'important' things in life and forget how many happy minutes and seconds we have had.

this is your happiness jar. use it to keep track of every bubble bath you take, every puppy you pet. use it to retrieve sweetness when you're a bit sour.

give us your phone number and we'll store every text you send us in your jar. give us your email address and at the end of the year happy memories will fill your inbox.
You're assuming that because the contractor has a higher paycheck that it's more expensive. This isn't necessarily true.
I am about your height, and did not find it too hard to find dates in Britain.

(Oh, and after moving to Singapore, I can tell you it's now actually harder to avoid the attention of women than to get them.)
Oh nice, NONE of this things (or text message notifications) ever work with Google Voice because it doesn't support shortcodes =-(
> I sometimes felt angry about how we were treated until one day I realized that they made a great parental sacrifice, exchanging their own popularity for our potential.

I feel absolutely the same. I've spent a lot of time trying to reconstruct how my mother raised me. Things I consider average and normal human potential seem outrageous to a lot of people i meet.

For my brother when people were always telling him how great he was, she was the one pulling him back on earth.

One thing I noticed is that once you start believing that you're awesome, you stop becoming awesome.
But what does Ballmer know about product? He's a sales guy through and through. He'll never take his game face off publicly, but I'm sure he realizes privately that it needs to be better. The problem is he has neither Jobs' taste nor Gates' technical instinct. Obviously it's the people in the respective companies that actually do the work, but the CEO sets the culture. If you wonder Microsoft has become infamous for nasty infighting and a disastrous brain drain, look no further than Ballmer's personality and credentials.
Also, your first paragraph is ambiguous, I'm guessing it means: drd is a guide to 'derailing' tactics used on forums, that is itself used to...

Yes, thank you.
I like it; much lighter-weight and simple than jQuery Mobile. However, I do wish it wasn't so iOS-focused; in my mind, the core strength of HTML5 apps is that they are (mostly) platform-agnostic, and I would love to see CSS wrappers for Android and (eventually) Firefox OS and Ubuntu Mobile.

Also (and this is a nitpick), this library fails my standard test for emulated iOS controls: the checkbox toggle cannot be dragged left or right in addition to being tapped. (Very few libraries pass that test.) :)
It might not be exactly the solution you're looking for, but the Reddit Enhancement Suite [1] has a dashboard where you can add subreddits as widgets and limit the number of stories you want to show per widget.

[1]: http://redditenhancementsuite.com/
How does this hurt Microsoft? If everyone is tossing their netbook every 6 months, doesn't Microsoft get them to pay the Windows licensing fee more frequently?
Et Tu? Google?
The Statistics Software Signal