skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The Public Press is publishing the list (the best city record available) so that residents who might possibly be at risk in their homes can participate in the debate over how best to retrofit thousands of properties in coming years.

We are doing so against the advice of some experts, and the Department of Building Inspection itself. Wide distribution of the list, said department spokesman William Strawn, “might create anxiety and alarm” among residents in buildings that may actually turn out to be safe. But critics of the city’s approach, including Building Inspection Commission member Debra Walker, say the city needs more public pressure to move fast on a mandatory retrofit program."
Sociologically, I would agree that religion is powerful stuff. I don't think it is the basis for all culture, if by culture you mean the sum total of experience one is capable of experiencing with minimal effort.

However, just like one can experience religion without knowing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, one can experience technology without understanding even the most basic layer below the UX level. In both cases, the uncurious have a world-view unfettered by the constrictions of cause and effect; so technology can seem like magic, and those outside the officially sanctioned boundaries are both wise and "unsanctioned", and thus witches.
are you a troll
Does instant messaging and email in and of themselves count as interruptions?

If I'm asked to be pulled off a task, then it is a problem. However, if it is a short question, no memory is paged out and it is insignificant.

I ask this because some developers do not want to be available on IM because they feel it is distracting. However, I feel like it causes more interruptions and difficulty in communication because every little thing needs to be voiced and requires full attention at the exact time the question is asked.
97% of federal criminal cases prosecuted to a conclusion result in plea bargains.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044358930457763...
I tend to use CSS for the bulk of layout. Lately leaning on say Twitter Bootstrap as a base... and using JS for some tweening, or other points. I also use Modernizr, and other JS to enhance classes in the HTML element for CSS use. I find this works pretty well... I can keep my rules in CSS, but can enhance them via JS. My enhancers are the only script I put into the HEAD (before the CSS), all other scripts are just before the closing BODY element with ads and analytics last of the scripts. I do think that having a good base CSS knowledge is important.

The exception to this, would be a full-screen site/application where you are using the full field of view for an interactive display, or simulation. Then JS leaning and even canvas are more important for interaction.
Thanks for the feedback. I've begun addressing the performance issues.
Few problems:

1. They already edited their privacy policy, so as far as I'm concerned it's "live". But...

2. It's not. And it will never be, because it's hard-coded into the software bundled out on the Internet today. They may provide new bundles with hash code in place, but it's too late...
I don't have the best vision, and I thought it was fine. I don't know whether it was the slight background texture, or that the colours were different enough, or whether the designer changed it after this feedback - but I didn't find it too difficult.
It would change it a lot, but maybe not enough. As it stands now the combination of civilian population density and quantity of North Korea artillery means that millions of people would die in even a single hour of shelling.

However, even if all of Seoul was evacuated it wouldn't necessarily make things so much better as North Korea has missiles with enough range even to hit Japan or the US, and potentially nuclear weapons to go with them. Potentially one could imagine banking on anti-missile systems to nullify that threat but that's a pretty big gamble.
I sit right next to a tester and he is a constant source of distraction.
Why don't you include examples of IM misbehaving rather than other companies you're trying to associate with them? The other post about this was full of this and it's crap.
There's adding enough APIs for google programmers, and adding enough data access for google marketers. I hope we get the first one, but that doesn't mean we'll get Google's apps.
I'm facing a similar situation, and my big question is: What's the alternative? Do I just roll my own REST layer on top of basic Ember objects or has someone figured out a working alternative?
The holy grail for me (and one that keeps me on iOS) is hardware. Apple knows this, which is why they are so aggressive in patent submission and litigation. Android terrifies them.

If Samsung/LG et. al. could make a somewhat more affordable handset with the design ascetics of an Apple device that ran stock Android, it would seriously disrupt Apple's position.

I had hope for Intel's concept phone [1], but it doesn't look like it manifested in the way it was originally sold.

1. http://www.businessinsider.com/intel-medfield-concept-phone-...
Simultaneously? No. No more often than any other keys which my fingers are both on.
I'd be interested to see this idea in action - got any sites up as examples?
Python LazyDB - A better 'shelve' module
Weekly Meetings: 20 Minutes that will Change your Company Forever
Shall I assume you intended to say principles? Or is it a tongue-in-cheek jab at a corrupt hierarchy?
I don't understand how you possibly missed the sarcasm (it's literally a line-by-line restatement of the grandparent), especially given that you quoted the final part. What on earth did you interpret that to mean?
Interesting but I think searching is fundamental.. any suggestion?
Why the fuck would you make a post about this? It's currently an insignificant problem because everyone doesn't know about it so Soundcloud turn a blind eye to it. If you tell everyone how to do this, they'll be forced to implement DRM or some garbage because you couldn't keep your fucking mouth shut/wanted ad money or something.

Please take this down. You're basically fucking over what is essentially an honour system.
After Aaron Swartz - Op-ed about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
Thanks for the "translation" then! Wouldn't mind to read more.
I use an LG flip phone (generic $20 model) running Java. No touchscreen to smudge. Has survived being dropped in different bodies of water. My 4 year old has not managed to destroy it. It does not feature a case. Oh, and it holds it charge for about 5 days.
Glad to hear the follow up
Personally, I'd love for Congress to permit the publication of all correspondence done by the prosecution in this case. I want to know what was written and discussed among the prosecutors (Ortiz, Heynman and others in that office) and everyone else involved with this case (Secret Service). I think the Internet will do a much better job of investigating prosecutorial misconduct than any internal investigation could uncover.

Once someone assumes a public office they should assume they are now a public good working for the betterment of the society that appointed them. One of the rights, we the people, should have, is the ability to provide direct oversight; maybe not in real time, but at least post hoc.
encipher.it[1] actually looks like it'll fit the bill. It's a browser tool that works from a bookmark, but does all the encryption clientside with JS (I've done a quick glance through the code to verify this)

You and your accountant just need a shared password. For the other attachments, a protected zip/rar file should be sufficient.

[1] https://encipher.it/
I've founded two companies by myself, both "exited".

The first resulted in maybe 2X return on the opportunity cost of taking no salary for a year. It was a 1 man shop the entire time until Gomez (now Compuware) saved my butt :)

The second was far from something that would make TechCrunch, but life changing nonetheless. At the time of acquisition (by Neustar), the company was break-even and there were 3 people in total.

I don't regret doing either of them by any means, but I will never again start a company by myself. While there are certainly many examples of success like these (and even my own) to point to, it was incredibly stressful and lonely most of the time.

I will do another startup, but I want there to be 2-3 cofounders next time or I won't do it. Having someone else to ride out the highs and lows with you is really, really helpful.
How Google became such a great place to work.
A bit of a tangent here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington,_D.C._in_the_America...

Despite being the nation's capital, Washington remained a small city of a few thousand residents, virtually deserted during the torrid summertime, until the outbreak of the Civil War.

"Of all the detestable places Washington is first. Crowd, heat, bad quarters, bad fair [fare], bad smells, mosquitos, and a plague of flies transcending everything within my experience... Beelzebub surely reigns here, and Willard's Hotel is his temple."

At the outset the U.S. Civil War, Washington D.C. wasn't just a stinking, festering, undefended podunk backwater; it was a stinking, festering, undefended podunk backwater bordered on the south by the most powerful bastion of Confederate sentiment and on the north by a state experiencing a crisis of North/South identity. So why didn't Lincoln pack up and move the capital to Philadelphia or New York? This question isn't rhetorical, I'm genuinely curious. Was it national pride? Would moving the capital have been viewed as an act of implicit defeat? Whatever the reason, perhaps the South Koreans felt the same.
RESTful API that Unifies Cloud Storage
So, if the JOBS act was around when Wufoo was taking investments, and I would have invested $1000, I'd have gotten back $295,610? Certainly something to think about...
> would be both very illegal and not very useful as an entertainment device.

Imagine being trapped somewhere you have no Internet. Then a fellow traveler lets you borrow something like a Kindle, which has a color screen and the ability to search for subscribe to any RSS feed. Now imagine what it would like to be a native who never had real Internet access and then get such a device.

There's still much more bang for buck for Radio and The Voice of America.
No, not "validate", that would be equally black-and-white thinking. But a decision of the legality and morality of the action should take into account the whole circumstances, not just the bare fact of the unauthorized access.

This seems similar in many respects to the Aaron Swartz case. My initial response rejects the idea that all actions regardless of motive should be taken as equally unlawful and unethical.
My biggest complaint about HN is the users with enough karma to down-vote that do so just because they disagree with you.

I've had legit discussions here about real tech topics (for example web apps vs standard EXE apps), and the guy who continually disagreed with me clearly down-voted every comment I made, and replied with out-dated counterarguments. I wound up losing almost all my karma from one discussion, all while remaining civil.

It's very discouraging to be new here, and try to openly express an opinion. It should take more than one to down-vote a comment successfully.
It's like you never have seen politician or lawyer in action. Of course they can. That's their job. They can say anything provided it is useful for them - and right now Ortiz feels it is useful for her to not admit any wrongdoing and rely on her superior to cover her. If the public would not put the pressure on those superiors, she very well might be right.
This is really awesome, and thanks for introducing me to Postmark, it looks like exactly what I need for my current project.
Nice article but there's a lesson here.

First I'll come with an old bug of mine (early nineties). The bug was very hard to reproduce because it was very very occasional (but terrible in consequences). I simply couldn't find it. I knew I was probably smashing some memory somewhere (I was not that experienced in C) but couldn't find where.

So what did I do after weeks of hunting the bug? I moved my design away to an entirely deterministic one and started recording all the inputs the program received and then I could replay them. At one point, logically, the bug happened. And so was it "recorded". Because my program was now deterministic, I could simply feed it the inputs (and the time at which they happened) and, surely enough, the bug was there.

And then finding the cause of the bug was of course trivial.

What's the lesson?

Well, first obviously bugs that you cannot easily reproduce because you cannot "reproduce the state" are typically kinda hard to track down.

The less "state" in your program, the easier it is to reason about your program and the easier it is to reproduce the state.

The lesson?

Functional programming rocks.
"Agree". http://www.installmonetizer.com/AT_images/process.gif
No problem! PostMark is really slick, great interface too.
He writes for Western media occassionally:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Lankov
Look up the articles from the "external links" section, a lot of interesting stuff there. Googling might help too.
> The first one is that if someone is suicidal and they commit a crime, you can't decide not to prosecute them simply because they may kill themselves.

When a suicidal criminal is caught you do need to prosecute them. That means that you need to keep them alive to be able to prosecute them. Justice is not served when suspects kill themselves. We still don't know whether what he did was a crime or not.

When no person is harmed, and there has been no physical damage, (but with some kind of monetary loss due to shutting off a connection) it's absurd to suggest that 35 / 50 years in prison is a suitable punishment. It's absurd to suggest that any time in prison is a suitable punishment. Note that this applies even if the suspect is not suicidal.

Using these kind of plea-bargaining tactics when you know the suspect is suicidal is cruel.
You are probably correct that what he did is probably unlawful (Canadian law is usually fairly close to US law), I disagree that it was unethical.

In a general sense It's not difficult to find instances of behaviour that, while lawful are far from ethical, so those to things don't necessarily travel together. Some examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_Sterilization_Act_of_Alb...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sch...
Obviously this could be a long list...

In this specific instance it seems that his information was exposed by this flaw along with everyone else's. Wanting to verify the safety of your own information feels like a pretty reasonable and ethical thing.

I think I would rephrase your example a little: "Let's suppose you let someone store their stuff at your house you come back home and find them picking on your door lock with a lock picking tool. You ask him "what are you doing?" and he says "I'm just checking is your lock safe. I do it for your security." Would you believe him?"
Indeed. Especially common it seems to be to make a subsidiary in one country pay another company a license fee for using the brand.

But making legal hurdles against moving profits this way is not something I am against, I find it more fair if profits are taxed where they are made rather than one country making all tax profits on the expense of others.

But the legal construction should be simple, make sense, and be effective. Not so easy to achieve.
As someone who has dabbled in UX, I wouldn't call "HN is ugly", HN is minimal, functional and highly usuable. HN is lightweight without tons of JS to handle interactions, etc.

HN in a sense is well designed, if by design you mean its usability, interactivity, IA, etc. As a famous quote goes, "Good design is about taking away, and not adding".
Definitely. I find it hard to find any reason why something like Babylon (one of the things I remember that IM might install) should not be called "crapware" or malware. Babylon hijacks your browser and then becomes practically unremovable (it can be removed but the people savvy enough to remove it are the ones savvy enough to never install it).

If users like this software so much then why do the creators of this software have to work so hard to make it next to impossible to remove? Who would want to get rid of software they love?
This is the same paper that was linked in the article, so I think it's all good. Here is the link to The Register for curious (and lazy): http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/21/engineers_cold_and_d...
It actually just occurred to me spontaneously but I'm pleased to find myself in good company
Sounds a bit like my wishlist for iOS2 and 3. At the time, I wanted to write an app that analysed my call history and show me interesting facts. There were no call log APIs in iOS2, so I wrote an Android version, which at the time became one of the top Android apps. I kept hoping Apple would loosen up, but of course they didn't.

Anyway, I wouldn't hold my breath. Doing this would be a big pivot for them and with the amount of money they're raking in, there can't be many urgent calls for this inside the company.
After reading Designer News for the past week I've noticed most threads have zero (or single-sentence) comments nevermind in-depth discussions.

No offense, but it's essentially a dead-forum and to make it invite-only shows the bigger picture is out of their grasp. I hope they open registrations and shape itself to be something...anything.
Despite the fact that somewhere around a third of pregnancies already miscarry. People are weird.
That's a good point, however, the important aspect of typeclasses is that they're type-checked, not that they're compiled via monomorphization. Also, I believe that the way that typeclasses are compiled is at the discretion of the compiler, so actually typeclasses may be compiled in the same way as C++ templates. Another point is that monomorphisation isn't always possible, because a function could be run with an infinite number of types.
Great point. It seems obvious in retrospect, yet I had never thought of it with that level of clarity. It also explains why, as I ponder my career, I'm drawn to companies where a significant portion (or all) of my work would be open source.

On the other hand, given the terrible outcomes communism produced in the 20th century, it has a well-deserved bad reputation. I'd therefore hesitate to link it to open source without noting why open source is different: Code, once written, can be copied infinitely for free (or at a very low cost), so the model can work.

Thanks for a thought-provoking post.
South Korea has already sunk billions of dollars into trying to help the people of the DPRK without even considering unification, and is promising even more than that in exchange for certain concessions from the government. There are still many families that have yet to be reunited with each other across the border, including parts of my extended family. The Korean War hasn't ended so long ago that there aren't still plenty of people that remember what it was like before this split, or even back to WW2 and earlier.

Nobody is saying unification will be easy for anyone, but they're family members. They were friends. They were neighbors. They are not strangers just because the burden is a lot to shoulder.

Not to mention it's not South Korea blocking the development of North Korean workers at the moment.. there have been attempts to work together (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaesong_Industrial_Region) but between the batshit crazy government up north and everyone else scared shitless of what they can do it's not possible to manufacture and import/export a lot of technology instead of just mass-manufacturing clothing with cheap labor. Pretty frustrating.
It has nothing to do with "privacy" and everything to do with un-necessary distraction.

Yes, face-to-face, voice-based collaboration can be a good thing, but very rarely do you need it 100% of the time. Need someone to look at your code? Ask them to come over and look at it. Need to chat with someone to discuss the design of some code? You can still do that.

Why folks somehow tolerate "everyone gets bothered by any side conversation" is beyond me, especially when you can have perfectly fine collaboration without open-plan offices.

It's incomprehensible why companies with "communication problems" think that will be solved by throwing everyone into one room. I bet good money the problem isn't that Jane isn't overhearing Joe and Bob's conversation. It's some deeper disfunction that is being exposed as "communication problems".
Some of you guys are being ignorant, and too much time on your hands. What IM is doing seems legit from all the information here. It's giving devs some opportunity to make a living. If you don't like the wares don't install it. Simple.

If you were seriously concerned about internet privacy you'd be discussing in depth Google, Microsoft, etc.. policies which affect virtually all inet users and not some small operation like IM.
Shin Dong-hyuk appeared in a Google talk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms4NIB6xroc
It may very well be so, then the project of copying JSTOR would be marginal and would descend into oblivion without any external intervention.
You can use Nano/Pico if you want edit.com capabilities... but there is a reason nobody takes them seriously.

Non-modal (I consider Emacs modal too) non-programmable editors are toys.
I think here's where the difference would apply. Designers almost all of them use high resolution displays. And maybe Designer News is aimed at those designers, who're at the cutting edge.
I wanna know what devs think. Is this useful?
JavaScript Comes to Minecraft
I just had a brief conversation with the most powerful man in the world.
Bootstrap your online business
The old appeal to popularity. The only argument that is worse is the appeal to faith.

An intellectual circle jerk occurs when one repeats the same old mantra without doing any actual research. There are plenty of "shipping" products in languages like Haskell. I'm no expert on Haskell, but this wasn't hard to find:

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry

A better tagline might be: Think more and don't settle for the status quo.
Those are consequences of not having static types; they are not consequences of having dynamic types. I have to stick up for ObjC, which has dynamic types, but enjoys the advantages you listed because it also has static types.
Invite-only can help with scaling issues as well.
When Software Can Be Considered a Work Made for Hire
Ask HN: What affects your Job Satisfaction?
Hacker News Community. I am conducting a simple job satisfaction survey. If you have a few minutes I would appreciate your responses. I also would like to open up the comments for discussion on the topic as well. Thank You for your time.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dF8zOWVpeHd2aUhUSzlvRGNmVXEtaGc6MQ
Simple answers lose again!
Clickable: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dF8zOWV...
I've heard about ubuntu-dell laptops, i'll be trying some soon to see how it feels (don't know why but I don't "trust" dell as a brand)
> Samsung/LG et. al. could make a somewhat more affordable handset with the design ascetics of an Apple device that ran stock Android, it would seriously disrupt Apple's position.

Or, what if Google bought a company with great supply chain expertise? Then they could sell tons of those Nexus phones.

What about a Google retail arm? It should probably be a different company entirely that Google owns. It could sell Nexus devices and Chromebooks and have its own version of the Genius Bar.
9 SEO leaders reveal their most significant wins
Ask HN: Who are your programming heroes?