skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with most of the post, but this:

> Programs have to be easier to read than write

I think is impossible.
Take over the repair world with iCracked (W12) as its Lead Front End Hacker
This just keeps getting better and better. True or (probably) false, this definitely needs a Hollywood adaptation.
> I don't bitch about it, I don't begrudge the border guards their jobs or attitude

Is it because of lack of time? It seems like those are general problems and highlighting them in some form might help improve the situation.

Sometimes it just takes a model story "An investor is turned away by power tripping and unprofessional immigration officer" or something like that. Maybe it won't be the story but one of thousands out there.
Node's philosophy is exactly that: small and independent services that together make an application. If you want a huge monolithic codebase definitely avoid node.

The "script" in javascript doesn't make it any less of a programming language (it was a marketing play on Java), and in some ways it is more powerful than many others. Debugging is the same as debugging any other server-side language, and you're only worried about your application code; V8 is a very stable project, you're not going to find yourself debugging the interpreter.
I know this is a bit off topic, but I find Ad-Blocking to be an interesting problem. On the one hand, it's a person's choice and anyone blocking ads was likely not to click on them anyway. At the same time though, it's clear that if Ad-Blocking were to go truly mainstream, especially if ISPs started to block ads themselves, a major portion of the internet as it stands today would be financially unsustainable, especially when it comes to content sites. Even my mom (non-tech savvy in any way) asked me if there was a way to block the ads on Google the other day. She didn't like how they had started to add pictures for products but all the products were just ads for all the more expensive ones when she could find better deals elsewhere. Her exact quote was "Why do I have to scroll past all these ads to find the better deals down below..."

I think outside of ISP issues like those discussed in the article, sites like Google are actually hastening the average users desire to ad block. I think it's possible that with the addition of things like the product ads for a product search and the fact that Google is the default jump off site for many people, they could be exacerbating the ad fatigue of their own users. I bet Google will have a tough time finding a sympathetic ear if Ad-Blocking goes more mainstream...

At the same time though, I despise the ISPs that take user money and then complain that Google should also pay before they deliver me what I paid for. That's just ridiculous, and I hope Net neutrality can get in place before it's more mainstream of a practice.
What you described was unremarkable. It should not have been stressful, and it is certainly not worth complaining about.
Eric Schmidt: "“Is it a ‘hot dog’ or a ‘hotdog.’ And, if you knew something about whether the person had dogs, or whether the person was a vegetarian, you’d have a very different potential answer to that question.”"

The problem with this semantic search "problem solving" is that a vegetarian who had a dog is still searching for the food. If their dog was overheating they would search "What to do about an overheated dog".

Conclusion: This isn't the problem they are trying to solve.
I'm a Canadian citizen and get this type of treatment all the time. Every time I enter the US, which is about once a month or so, they send me to a back room for secondary screening. The reason? Their system thinks I overstayed my visa once back in 1995. What actually happened was my family took a road trip to New England, and nobody bothered to check our passports on the way out, so there was no departure record.

So for the last 18 years, they've sent me back for questioning every single time, wasting countless hours of both my time and their time. They always ask me if I worked illegally in the States in 1995 and I just tell them, "No, I was nine years old." When I ask them if they can remove the flag on my account, they say it's impossible because only the government department that created the flag can remove it, and that department no longer exists.
I have never used an ad blocking service before as my general stance is that if it helps subsidize content presentation, I think it's perfectly fair for the provider to serve ads.

To be honest, I normally pay them no mind in the first place, which might be overall more harmful.
American versus British language is like that in general.
Serious question: can you be non-white and get one of these?
It's embarrassing how poorly people are treated when entering the US. We should put pressure on the government to improve that, but also pragmatically if we want to keep attracting talented people from around the world we really need to change this.

For the time being, I'd highly recommend to the poster to enter into Global Entry (people with PR are eligible: http://www.globalentry.gov/eligibility.html)
hiiire.com

lyricaly.com
I wish my weekend projects had +100 forks and thousands of developers bookmarking it...
> "Does it fit down your hallway without turning it sideways?"

Hallways in most of the US are required to be 36" wide. This should accommodate even the 39" diagonal screen currently being tested.

Most of your objections-as-questions seem similarly overblown.
Any way sites could refuse to serve content to Free's customers?
IMHO, Java combines the worst of statically typed and dynamically typed programming languages. To paraphrase Rob Pike, programming in Java is like dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's in a fairly complex contract but at runtime, the contract can be overridden by dynamic classloading. So you do not get the efficiency of a statically typed language (because the compiler cannot make certain assumptions about the types / classes) nor do you get the expressiveness of a dynamically typed language.

In the case of DI, I would observe that no programs in other languages seem to require or even use this pattern. If you need to implement LGPL at the language level, a better abstraction is modules with contracts... or even better a proper metaobject protocol a la Lisp.
Ah, yes indeed. I suppose yes/no scheme may be applicable to command line tools where the user actually has to type, in the model ui world, it's not really applicable.
I don't either especially since I am not even bitter about the experience. I am just confused.

The irony is that since then I've crossed the border 12+ times a year and the experience is always pleasant (now I enter as a Canadian citizen for either vacation or a short business trip). One would think they'd have preferred me when I paid taxes there (and by the virtue of being on visa, they knew a lot more about me).
I was conflicted about whether or not to update new comments inline or force a page refresh. So the behavior with the comments is intentional. I may end up changing it if it's confusing.

As for the other problem, I'm confused about why that's the only thing not working. Are you running any other extensions that could be conflicting?
I find it funny because I worked part-time as a border guard with the Canada Border Services Agency doing exactly this job at YYZ while in university getting my engineering degree.

And just because you don't need a degree to be a border guard, cop or soldier doesn't mean that none of them have post-secondary education.
Uh, yes. A (non-white) friend of mine has it. The program also allows South Korean and Dutch citizens to enroll.
There are some pretty simple solutions to the problems that you mention. For example, Amazon's bar raiser program was introduced specifically as a check to the power wielded by managers and to ensure a consistent hiring bar across the entire company. A bar raiser has veto power over the candidate which cannot be overruled by anyone.
Show HN: My first Android app - point at clothes to see if they suits you
I like the way that comments become "read" as you move through them with the shortcut keys.

But I prefer the simple orange line highlight that the hckrnews.com extension and (shameless plug) the Hacker News Enhancement Suite [0] use. Your variable width grey highlight becomes looks very chaotic.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...
Agreed -- it was difficult to get motivated to read deeply into the article when I was wondering why there is more to say than "values in physics should be strongly typed".
Funny that Linux is everywhere in the form of Android and Chrome OS, but for all the efforts of Linux on the Desktop, it just isn't terribly successful. Is it a marketing thing? By all measures, Ubuntu (preinstalled) on a laptop is more functional than Chrome OS, or is the continuation of the dumbification of computing interfaces?
You're not wrong. On further consideration, I've edited the post to reflect that it was a rude and unnecessary observation.
The customer is paying for their bandwith. Google is paying for their bandwith. What more does this scum bag want? Fuck him.

Unfortunately the general public, and maybe even politicians, don't understand this and believe the lie that google is freeloading.
I think the gist of it is probably true. I can easily imagine south american officials being very happy about receiving free laptops and using them without hesitation.

What is more difficult is keeping your private army quiet, but i guess enough money could do that.
> Customs people tend to also be more corrupt in many countries.

Ha! I was flying from a East European country. At the Customs at the airport someone was stopped over something they couldn't bring in. I overheard him tell the customs officer "hey let's step over to the side and 'figure this out'". 'Figure this out' is euphemism for "I'll pay you some money or drop some names and you'll let me in".
Yes, the UI is the mechanism that pops up the messaging, but the UX is the consideration of how the message will be used or misused by the user.

Ha, a terrible sentence. That's why I'm a back-end not a UX person :)

It's definitely a blurry line a lot of the time but having worked with a UX guy who was part of our design department, he definitely added a lot of value to the design process.
I know this will get downvoted but judging from the comments, we've reached a point where self-proclaimed geeks (from the Apple camp, the one that's supposed to think differently) just can't handle innovation...

Downvote away (fan)boys...
I actually prefer the idea of using "Don't" instead of "Cancel." When combined with always using a verb instead of "Yes" or "OK", I think it makes for completely unambiguous dialog.

"Would you like to format this disk?"

"Format" - "Don't"

"Would you like to cancel this transaction?"

"Cancel" - "Don't"
Apple (and NeXT before them) was able to compile "fat" (multi-architecture) app binaries since the 1990s. The original NeXT machines had Motorola 68030 and later 68040 processors; OpenSTEP also ran on Sparc and Intel and I think PA-RISC also, of course then PPC, and then Intel again --- they've had architecture independence in their frameworks for a LONG time.
I really don't think it is my problem to solve. There is no upside to me from writing that. Such blog posts you can find by the thousands, and yet nothing changes.

When Obama first became president I had some hope that things would this time change for the better. But he's as much a chip off the old block as the guys before him.

Let's just say that I'm disappointed in how the US has squandered its goodwill and potential over the last decade and a bit but it's entirely theirs to squander.

China and India are the entities that stand to gain the most from this and in another few decades you'll learn just how much was lost. The US is still #1 in exporting its IP (and is trying hard to get proxy laws enacted the world over by using the WTO/WIPO/Worldbank triumvirate as a means of strong-arming the unwilling), they've outsourced an irresponsibly large portion of their manufacturing capability and they're in debt at a level that can only be described as reckless.

This will go on for quite a while but it won't go on forever, if the US does not learn to play nice and responsibly with others then in the longer term this will take care of itself.

Look at what's left of the former superpower known as the UK to see how fast you can fall.

My writing or not writing a blog post is not going to make one shred of a difference in this respect, these wheels are moving and have an inertia of their own. Stopping them or reversing their direction will have to be done from within rather than without.

When I quit going to the United States I essentially gave up, thinking that within my lifetime things will not be getting any better.
It would be awesome if they were allowed to Google me from their stations, since the Internet is very clear that there is only one male human being called Laurie Voss in the entire world, and Twitter provides daily records of my movements for anyone who cared to find out. Unfortunately, they are only allowed to look at the screen in front of them, and the few details in the USCIS database.
Ask HN: Last minute, unplanned meetups
Hello!

I'm in SF, and plans for this evening changed at the last minute. Even if they hadn't I'm often a pretty spontaneous person, and want to do things at the last minute.. It seems though that every other event site is based around planning a few days in advance.

Are there any services that let me say, "ok I want to do something now with other new people"?
It looks slick, but nothing in the center appears clickable. It took me a while to figure out there was bottom-left nav I could click on.
Sure, but that way you're punishing the users, not Free.

Simply block their IP ranges in your firewall.
There are much better things on his blog. This is just a text box that is styled.
It has a lot to do with diversity: Android and Chromebook are (mostly) the same thing. With desktop Linux, you're supporting every different distribution, hardware, driver, and custom configuration.
I like this a lot. Just one small issue:

The default background color for new comments seems too dark for me--the contrast is low enough that new comments are more difficult to read than previously read ones. What about making the background for new comments lighter than the HN default?
"press → to move on"? Seriously? I want to use my mouse.
It's my belief that the first computer programs that we would consider a real AI have already been built, and quite recently. Somehow or other, when enough information is finally available for such a breakthrough, there is a kind of 'leakage' that happens into the public domain. News articles, science and tech articles in particular, begin to converge. From this 'leakage' it is possible to piece together how such a thing might be accomplished. And usually, within five years or so, a big announcement is made by a big company. The funny thing is, I can already see what the big limitation of AI is going to be. It's not going to draw up plans for a warp drive or cure cancer any time soon, as some have imagined. Instead, we are going to learn something very interesting about the current rate of scientific progress.
That's pretty cool..
As a US citizen, I, on the other hand, am extremely bitter and angry about these kinds of offenses. It makes me sick to my stomach and I really do believe every day is one day closer to me becoming an expat.
It's highly unlikely to be a name match -- my name is not very common, and combined with my gender is literally globally unique: there is no other male called Laurie Voss in the whole world.
The footer at seldo.com refers to Laurie as 'he'.
I am aware of its philosophical meaning. But normally one does not correct someone's usage of a word if that usage is in the dictionary, even if it might not have been fifty years ago, except if the topic under discussion is philosophy or logic.
Not today but for six years mac os x shipped on powerpc and could emulate mac os 9 and x86 (via several software emulation options).

You can probably find a decent "classic" option for intel macs if you look hard enough, but that wasn't the original point.
I agree that the style in your link is cleaner looking. I don't have a very good sense for how to make things look nice. I might clean it up a bit because my goal is to keep HN simplistic but just add the few features that I've been itching for. I hadn't seen your before, though. It looks nice.
This story is true the world over. A friend got deported from India the other day for a mistake they (as in the Indian government) made on his visa.
I remember hearing from someone I know intimately of an awesome deal worked out where someone could hypothetically "steal" his own packages from the airside of an airport, for $20, to bypass months of customs impound (no duty was payable, including the 5% reconstruction levy, since the actual items were going to exempt parties such as the national government).
Anyone want to bet this actually ships?
I think UI is a subset of UX. UI design is the choice, arrangement, and labeling of widgets on screens, whereas UX design also includes more abstract decisions such as whether to require that the user sign up before they start using your website or whether to provide permalinks to individual pieces of content or only have a link for collections. In this case, choosing labels of buttons on dialogue boxes is related to the UI, so it’s both UI design and UX design.
Thanks for the edit. I'm sorry if I came down on you too hard. Late nights, long weekend -- no excuses ("an asshole is an asshole, right"?)

The systems should be designed to guide the people to act like humans, I think we can both agree on that.
It's probably been said over and over again, but the problem is that Linux (or I guess Ubuntu) isn't really easy to use for the non-tech type. It's an OS that gives you an interface to your computer, not an OS that will get out of the way and just help you do what you need to do. However, after switching to Mac, I've realized Windows is not really easy to use either, but that's been kind of shoved down people's throats since they were young, so people kind of know their way around it.

Dumbification does imply simplification though so I think it's generally a right direction and may be one factor that makes ChromeOS appealing (the problem there though is that it lacks a few fundamental features right now, but that's more easily fixable).
I promise I'm male, Jacques :-)
If websites are worried, why not just use TLS, which should prevent this sort of thing? This is not ABP, it is just an ISP being naughty (albeit in a way that its customers probably like).
Hehe, yes, my bad :)

Apologies!
You, sir, are awesome. Thank you.
Book Review: Effective Javascript
Bath salts are a hell of a drug.
Nevermind the grid, that guy in the video has not just one but several bitchin' keyboards.
Now HN is carrying stories from World Nut Daily? Gimme a frickin break.
Google Says It Will Stop Blocking Maps from Windows Phone
... as opposed to how you are compassionately honest and direct with people who can ruin your life-as-you-know-it based on which brand of bigotry pill they ingested that morning? (Clearly, this applies to many other aspects of life, not just international travel!)

Sure, insulting people behind their back is unethical. So is the treatment OP was subjected to.
Great extension, I'll definitely be using it. If I can suggest something, I think it would be better to bold the unread comments (in the home page) only if you've actually open the link or read the previous comments. Otherwise it adds a lot of distraction on the page, and the bold links don't tell me whether I cared or didn't care about the associated news.
>Instead, we are going to learn something very interesting about the current rate of scientific progress.

...Which would be?
Ah yes, because everything we do is worthy of praise, or makes for interesting discussion.

Just because some things are unjustly "middlebrow dismissed" does not mean that all "middlebrow dismissals" are unjust.
Rate My Idea - Quiver
I only enjoy infinite scroll on touch screens. I think the perfect solution would be paginated results, but if the user ontouchstart pulls the page past the bottom, it would automatically load the next page (like reverse of the facebook app's pull-down for new items). It's much more convenient than trying to tap just perfectly on the "next" arrow, but paginated is just easier with a mouse.

That mindset of design I think is the next step after "responsive" design. Rather than just scaling the visual design of the page, how about truly designing the user interaction to fit multiple scenarios. If it were up to me, I'd call it Symbiotic Design (responsive 2.0)
"The meta lesson may be that no two successes are exactly alike" -- on Rework
You misunderstand me. My weekend project - my morning dump - completes on Sunday morning, after I drink my 20th cup of coffee. I am extremely constipated. I was implying that this project is incredibly complex, nuanced, and worthy of discussion.
Emulation is fine when you're switching to a faster processor (68K -> PPC, PPC -> Intel). In this case, MS is introducing a slower processor so emulation would probably be painful.
My "big" startup project is tangentially related to this problem.

That is: users hate ads. But someone has to pay for all this stuff.

The obvious model -- user pays -- has never really worked. There's been lots of variations on micropayments but so far they've all sucked.

Naturally I am taking no account of the horrendous base rates in this area and am crawling ahead anyhow.
everyone can delete other people's posts? (in anonymous mode)
I agree with SoftwareMaven and jacquesm. Sounds like an awful experience, and you're cool about it.

I'm confused as well: which path in the system should be credited as most wrong? The intersection of you being Canadian, brown, and in a better profession than customs agents seems rife with opportunities for them to F you over.

Hell, I'm a white guy and despite this privilege I ass-kiss too much whenever I travel because they can decide to do the same to me. Not nearly as likely, but since we gave up our rights to opaque government security services, who knows. Not to be US-bashing, I do the same when I have gone international.
Microsoft may not last as long as we (I) have always assumed — on the PC front at least it seems to be bad news and more bad news. Mobile sales already dwarf desktop, and installed base will soon follow. Even if MS is successful in mobile, there's far less fat to play with — it can't sustain licensing costs (netbooks already dinged it) either for OS or applications, and its network effect lockin is pretty much broken.

Interesting times.
Ad blocking, like piracy, is a market phenomenon
I am very impressed with the thread over at XDA - really impressive hacking skills and discussion between a talented few. Go to pages 20 and 21 to see things like PuTTY and 7zip compiled and running on a Surface. Utterly fantastic!

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1885399&...