skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a dedicated message window on part of my screen where all private messages aswell as notifications matching my defined hilights end up.

Other than that irssi has a pretty good activity tracker; and combined with a script to allow me to filter out things/channels that I don't want to trigger activity (joins, parts for example, and certain channels I just don't care as much about). On top of this I just have a hotkey bound to "/window goto active" that basically takes you to the windows with the highest activity and the lowest identifier. These ones combined does most of the trick.

But its obvious I can't read and keep active track of 120 channels, often I just briefly glance through things, if someone has lots of activity and/or mentions of me I appear and can keep track. Except that its just manual choice of what channel I want to use at the moment. :)

Not a perfect system, but works for me.
A node.js library for the blink(1) by ThingM
I hate how hostile and incompetent the US immigration process seems to be for foreigners. It's sad to go by an embassy basically anywhere in the world, see the fortress that is the US embassy, and the huge lines and amount of documentation needed for people to get US visas. Even worse is the non-deterministic hell on actual arrival.

I'm glad I've never had immigration or customs problems anywhere, despite going to some really sketchy places (flying into Iraq as a civilian at the civilian airport with no visa a few times after the invasion...) or otherwise bending the rules ($200k in computers, including 6 big 21" CRTs, on my way to set up an office in Anguilla...).
Sure, this is a anecdote based argument levied against the hypothesis. Its a fairly weak way to make final decisions though. Again the point was that there was intuitive reason to believe this concept may be fruitful, the problem was we devised too large of an experiment and spent too much time to get to a point to validate the core hypothesis.

To be perfectly honest opinions like yours provide guidance of what to focus on but in general this type of intuition usually turns out to only capture part of the dynamics when something is actually used by millions of people, and in many cases intuition turns out to be the polar opposite of the reality the data tells you.
I understand the terror, particularly of the US ICE people, who are unnecessarily militarized at the best of times. But why the puerile jab at the officer's "educational attainment"? Needed to feel big? Story wasn't "punchy" enough?
Backbone.js logo in CSS
I don't know about Top Gear, but Doctor Who is cut on reruns. It is broadcast in its entirety, albeit interrupted by commercials, on first showings (which means it runs long by about 15 minutes).
I'm not entirely sure, but he may have taken exception to the following from your piece:

>Of course, you and I know that the latter is just a general form of the former, but somebody whose educational attainments have qualified them to sit behind a desk stamping passports doesn’t.
The problem is that the hand-waving could conceal a lot of useful variables -- and different people will care about different variables.

So one variable might be "time to customer value", and dynamic languages have been steadily dominating this space. But another variable might be "lifetime cost of defects" and static languages might come out in front by simply precluding many classes of defect.

And just like that we're back to trading off the long term and short term.
Not exactly the same - especially since water gets drawn out of reservoirs (typically) so there's already significant buffer, but here's a plot of water consumption in Edmonton during Canada's gold medal olympic hockey game back in 2010.

http://chrisblattman.com/2010/03/08/graph-of-the-day-canadia...
Quite often the dialogue text leaves one unclear in what the button will do.
Yeah, being an immigration worker would actually be kind of interesting and fun in a way, if you liked people. You get to meet a bunch of new visitors to the US, be the first contact they have on arrival, etc. I know in other countries (middle east, asia), it's a highly sought after job, and has relatively high status and decent benefits, if not high pay.

Customs, however, would be hell -- essentially on the front lines of the war on drugs and maybe terrorism in some cases (although I guess immigration is relevant to terrorism in limited cases too). Customs people tend to also be more corrupt in many countries.
At least w/ Top Gear, they definitely are.
"Moai" look nice for game.
http://getmoai.com/products/sdk/

HTML5 with canvas+javascript can be an other possibility.

(I do not the limits of these tools)
Mars Sample Return: Bringing the Red Planet to Earth
The problem is that too many dialogs are designed to require reading an overly verbose message when in reality the vast majority of the time the 2 or 3 words on an appropriately named button are all the context a user needs.

If I initiate a format on a drive volume I don't need a lecture on what a format does and what the risks are, I know them already, I just need a confirmation step.
I'm not seeing this? Maybe I missed something.

Ah. Okay, yeah, what's up with that dude? :)
A beginners guide to singleNucleotide Polymorphisms
"Of course, you and I know that the latter is just a general form of the former, but somebody whose educational attainments have qualified them to sit behind a desk stamping passports doesn’t."
Partly because I think it's a relevant detail -- I think he genuinely didn't understand that a web developer is a type of software developer. But partly because they scared the shit out of me, and the system is stupid and unnecessarily hostile, so, yes, I'm angry at them.
I had many similar run-ins with immigration when I worked for Microsoft in the Redmond area (brown guy with a beard, likes to travel the world [sometimes taking trips as short as one weekend]). I've missed more than my share of flights (at one time my name was in the do-not-fly list because it partially matched the name of someone they wanted).

Final straw came when one time I was returning from an international trip with my x-wife and kids when the immigration officer decided she didn't qualify to accompany me (we were married at the time).

"No big deal, she'll just fly back to Canada" (we're Canadians).
We were told she couldn't do that, she had to be deported to the country she came from.
"But sir, we just had a single entry visa and cannot re-enter".
"That's not my problem, the law is the law. You need to be deported back to countryX".
"But sir, we have no ties to countryX. We dont have visa to countryX. We have a Canadian passport, if you dont want to admit us then let us just turn around and go to Canada".
"Oh y'all can come in, but she can't".

So I ask for a supervisor and he refused (I later learned he wasn't allowed to do that). Had us sit there for many hours with cranky kids after a transatlantic flight and then said:

"You can take her now (take her??) but I'll hold on to her passport. She can come before the judge in 30 days with the document and collect her passport or she'll be deported to countryX".

I had to unnecessarily waste time and money hiring a lawyer to figure out what the heck went wrong. She showed up 30 days later with our lawyer and the judge couldn't figure out why she was there. Gave us the passport. My x-wife dropped me home, told me to pack up and drove up to Toronto the same day. Even though I was about to get my green card (everything including labour cert was done) I told my employer to halt the process and moved back. For next few years I continued to work for US companies but remotely from Canada and pulled in close to $1 million in salary and stocks over the years that IRS wasn't able to tax at all. Canadian economy (not the American economy) benefited from my well over average spending over these years.

I can wrap my mind around "your name is similar to xyz we are looking for [even though xyz was a different ethnicity with a different age, height and everything]. But for me this made me realize how vulnerable non-citizens are when it comes to US immigration and border patrol. To this day I have no idea what ticked that guy off to single us out like that but I decided I did not want to live in a country where I had such little rights. I am well educated, make a lot of charitable contributions and spend a lot of time volunteering in the local community. Everything the US used to benefit from but now Canada does.
Yup, making it tortuously elegant doesn't somehow un-make it a put-down. Just because you have more formal education than someone, doesn't entitle you to look down on them.
Don't most stoves in the US use 220?

EDIT: oops, just realized that these are likely electric kettles. I was thinking of the stovetop variety.
Here's a theory:

1. People only care about the first few search results.

2. Infinite scroll exists solely to make it easier to scroll past the initial view.

3. Therefore, infinite scroll made it easier to scroll away from the results people care about.

There you go.

By the way, I don't get why Google's "instant results as you type" was cited as a reason to pursue this infinite scroll feature. Those are totally different things.

"Instant results" is for faster display of the first few results, which is great for search. "Infinite scroll" is for scrolling through long streams of information -- great for newsfeeds and timelines, but not for search results where you only care about the first few.

Google doesn't even implement infinite scroll in their results.
Which airport?

IMHO, SFO is probably the best airport to arrive at immigration wise. LAX is a little bit worse, but that's more of a 50/50 on whether someone's having a good day or not.

JFK, on the other hand... Ouch.
As long as you feel the benefits outweigh the downsides the only person you can complain to is yourself. You're still going there aren't you?

I've had an episode quite comparable to this one and it was the last time I visited the US. I don't bitch about it, I don't begrudge the border guards their jobs or attitude (I assume they get a lot of shit heaped on them every day, not an excuse for a non-professional attitude but I'm sure that it eventually wears you down). I simply took my few-hundred-K per year benefit for the US elsewhere, their loss.

Don't like US immigration? Good, don't emigrate to the US. Once enough people do this that it starts to affect the US GDP I'm sure there will be some change. As long as everybody accepts it this will continue or it will even get worse.

I had a pretty lucrative offer about two years ago to become involved in a company. The catch: the work had to be done in the United States. No thanks... But call me when the TSA is abandoned and the border guards are no longer treating immigrants like shit. You know, the way it used to be before everybody went crazy.

And on an off-topic and non-related note, additional conditions would be that Guantanamo is closed, the US ceases its drone program and the CIA gets thoroughly reamed for their 'renditions' program, including full exposure of all parties that were involved domestically and abroad.

Until then the US will have to do without me, I'm quite sure they don't care one bit.
This is something I've thought about for so long!!!

It's one of the coolest things I've seen in years!!!
What? How is that not insane when a 2 dollar watch can use quartz with near-perfect accuracy?
If you have a green card you can avoid this by signing up for Global Entry[1]. Then you can avoid customs lines and just swipe your card at the kiosk - enter the country without ever talking to anyone. As an extra benefit the kiosk is always empty so you are through in minutes... hmm maybe I shouldn't be spreading the word about this :)

[1] http://www.globalentry.gov/
Anti Piracy? The insider's view
EC2 for power!!
> Instead consider the implications of a single corporation with a machine learning system that has access to the private communications, personal documents, and physical location and web viewing history for a billion people and can use that information to predict the behavior of each one of them better than they can predict their own behavior.

Funny the corporation that makes that more visible to me is Netflix. After rating so many movies it can pretty well predict if I would like a move or not. It does it better than me reading the description and the title.

It is kind of nice but a bit worrying. Wonder what kind of psychological profile it could build and sell to other companies if it wanted to.
No console errors, just not showing. Let me know if there is anything I can send to help debug.

Also, not sure if this is by design, but after I post an in-place reply, I have to reload the page to see my post. However, upon editing a post, the page reloads immediately. I didn't see any error in the console.
would you be willing to sell talkto.me?
For some reason I didn’t read “the fuck” as emphasis, but as a direct object—the person had had a fuck previously, but have since given up that fuck.

I’m going to use that as an example of why UX is hard: not only are people generally not paying attention, but sometimes they misfire even when they are.
Is there a good guide to writing canonical looking Objective-C /Cocoa APIs?

I read the .NET Framework Design Guidelines back when I was doing .NET and it was an excellent how to guide on writing APIs that behaved and felt like they were part of the BCL. Something like that for Objective-C and Cocoa would be a boon.
I would never do anything to jeopardize my processing

They can google your name and find the blog post next time you enter.
I read the article and then came to the comments looking to make this exact point.

Gofmt is my favorite example of why coding conventions can, and should be part of the language.
As someone who went though lengthy (10+ years) immigration process, from student visa to work visa to Green Card to Citizenship, with extensive travel in between - there is nothing particularly unreasonable about the experience described. OK, so he was delayed for a few hours, due to some error or inconsistency in the USCIS database... There's no reason to freak out.

And the condescending remarks about the officer not knowing the difference between "web developer" and "software developer" were unnecessary.
China basically blocks anything the mentions the word China/Chinese so unless your server is in China your site is going to get blocked. Even if it doesn't get blocked it's going to be too slow to use so if you are serious about supporting Chinese users then you have to setup shop in the mainland. Yup, Chrome. This website was made by 1 person, it relies heavily on javascript apis that are only in HTML5 spec ; we do plan to support other modern browsers at some point but Chrome is the 1st choice for us.
It's not only insulting and juvenile, it's irrelevant. I've met PhDs from the LSE who wouldn't know the difference between email and snail mail, but that's not material to a) how good they were at their jobs or b) whether or not they were good people.

The system is stupid, and hostile, and (in my opinion) totally self-defeating. And people -- normal, decent people -- will act like petty little tyrants in that sort of system. Isn't that sufficient to call them out? An asshole is an asshole, regardless of their eduction, no?

EDIT: Too, it may very well be material that you gave a different answer. There's only one word different between "landscape architect" and "naval architect", and those are significantly and materially different positions. How is J. Random Tyrant supposed to know that a is a member of the set b for all given a?

EDIT the second: Man, I was in love with the word "material", eh?
For Legacy Media Companies, a Lucrative Year
Do people also drink coffee? Or only tea?
SJU (Puerto Rico) is probably the most lax of any I've seen.
Apparently the HN crowd is squatting on half the .io domains :)
It's much more elegant in your reading.
To Succeed, Let Yourself Fall, and Fail
>They keep taking breaks to crack off-color jokes about each other’s sex lives, and moan about how hard they’re having to work tonight.

The jokes might be uncalled for, but you just told us they were under-staffed and had hundreds of extra people to process. I can see why they'd be upset. Especially when absolutely zero of the hundreds of people they talk to in a day are happy to see them.

I get the impression you've never worked in the service industry or in retail. The immense fuckup that is United States immigration is not the fault of its lowest level employees.
I don't understand how he can want static checking, but no warnings. "x is declared but never used" has saved me so many times. Maybe he's used to languages where warnings cannot be locally disabled? In Common Lisp I can (declare (ignore x)) to "shut up the compiler", and it works really well.
Pointless, wasteful bureaucracy

I think few people would consider border controls to be any of these things.

You were flagged somehow and that sucks, but if you don't like the immigration procedures of the US you are free to either a) live elsewhere or b) try to take action to change it (we are a democracy after all). On the other hand, venting on a blog isn't going to do anything but irk people who wish they were fortunate enough to hold a US green card, or come back to haunt you if this happens again and some cranky overworked agent google's you.

FWIW I'm a former, now naturalized, US green card holder and this happened to me twice in six years. It sucks, but I considered it a very small price to pay for being able to freely travel and work (or not work!) in this country.
...he took exception to something I wrote about him 2 days later? As I've mentioned in another reply, I was scrupulously polite at the time.
Is "Mac Mini + a nice Dell screen" really portable and does it have excellent battery life?

Your criteria seem to be inconsistent.
>>You might argue that there is still a lot of Perl around according to programming language popularity metrics, but very few if any new things are being done with Perl, at least in this neck of the woods.

Perl is used extensively and probably more than any other language in its stride even when it comes to new projects. Unless your definition of new projects are projects which spit out HTML and nothing else.

A very big world exists outside web development.

>>Want some data? Take a look at TIOBE

I don't trust data which includes treats ruby(the programming language) and ruby(stones) or Python(the programming language) and Python(the snake) as same.

>>The popular static languages are more popular than the popular dynamic languages by a factor of 4:1.

Correction, IDEs of popular static languages(Read Java and C#) are more famous than static languages themselves. Who 'really' programs in those languages these days? Today its all about auto complete magic with armies of low paid mediocre programmers. In fact IDE's are the only reason why static languages are even round.

Else who has the time to sit down and write 20 lines of code with 10's of API calls just to open and write a line to a file?

For 99% projects programmer time is vastly more expensive than CPU time.
KX Systems (KDB/k/q) overhauls its website
I have no idea why you got downvoted.
This is confirmed by my dental surgeon. (I had a minor graft to fix the receding gum above one of my canines.)

Plaque is something you need to remove with the toothbrush, by massaging the area where the gum wraps around the teeth.

On the other hand, my surgeon doesn't believe in mouthwash and says it's a waste of money.
I think this would have been a stronger article if it had addressed the counterpoint that was floating around in my head the entire time I was reading this: correlation doesn't equal causation.

While this phrase has become somewhat cliche, this is a perfect example of a case where it is important to remember the principle. Considering the types of disease that these medicines are meant to treat, I think it's pretty obvious that some, if not all, of the "side effects" mentioned could just be symptoms of the underlying disease, which were apparently not effectively treated by the medicine. But this is quite different from saying that the medicines themselves actually caused the symptoms.

Of course the article could end up being totally right. It was just poorly argued in my opinion because it failed to address this point that any reasonable reader would consider.
This is really cool. Definitely want to implement someone like this with my teams.
Where did you make the argument? I see you making the claim, but there's nothing arguing it, no evidence. There's just the vague thought experiment about extracting signal from noise.

To point it out another way: humans can't be intelligent because they are lacking in six senses that Martians have. It's that even richer experience that enables true intelligence; without these qualia and the vital marrow of the foundation of the core of the heart of really truly scotsmany work, humans can't be intellegent. Can you knock down this claim without knocking down yours as well?
Boy, I really hate infinite scroll. I've never found it enhanced my experience over plain old paginated results for anything product related (sure, maybe it works for Google or HN home page).

I like knowing:

* how many items are in the results

* how many pages there are (a derivative of the first, sure, but helpful to know)

* where I was if I accidentally close the tab and re-open it, or follow a link and need to hit the back button, or share my position with a friend (yes, most paginated results aren't stable in the long run, but usually are in the short run)

* easily jump to either end of the list (or, near to the end of the list, e.g. < 1, 2, 3, ... 98, 99, 100 >)

For example, I follow way too many people on twitter (1700!). I know I'm getting tweets throttled so I miss out on people I care about.

I also know that when I first picked up twitter years ago I made some noob mistakes and followed things I, well, shouldn't have (@Tide? I think a friend was working at P&G or something...).

Anyway, "People you follow" on the web UI is an infinite scroll. Even worse, it's buggy so sometimes you can trigger it to not register you're at the bottom and it won't load. AWESOME. I just want to get to the LAST PAGE. BUT I CAN'T.

And since it seems to load about 10-15 at a time, given that it takes about 1/2 a second to scroll down and wait for it to load, that means it'll take at least 60-85 seconds to reach the bottom - IF it doesn't crash (a reload takes me back to the top). Which means I've never been able to do it.

I had to pay one of those "show the folks you follow that haven't tweeted in n-months" just to try and prune the list, which helped me go from 2,000 to my present number.

Yes, this could be solved by sorting and filtering, but in the truest MVP sort of the world, why do all that extra work just for the "infinite scroll" fad? Switch back to pagination and I could accomplish all I needed and have a nice pruned list. And I bet it's less effort and has far fewer bugs than the current implementation.

I hope that in a few years enough data against infinite scroll will have cemented it as a generally accepted bad idea, only working in a few particular cases.
This double dipping by ISPs annoys the hell out of me. Who should pay for bandwidth: the ISPs or content producers? How about--oh I don't know--the ISPs' customers who are already paying for bandwidth?

If there is any compelling argument for net neutrality it's this: don't let regional monopolies decide what sites their customers can access based on what kickbacks the ISP receives.

Widespread opt-out ad blocking will likely end in content producers blocking offending ISPs.

As for the particular case mentioned (YouTube bandwidth for Free) I would like to know if the take advantage of the edge caching available.

All in a this reads as a pro-ISP fluff piece.
Well it's a relief to know you only belittle people behind their backs.
This was MIA. And yes, SFO is by far the friendliest airport I've ever arrived at (the others being Dallas/Fort Worth and JFK).