skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good article but I don't agree with ”When you have more than 15 options in a menu, you should either lessen the amount of options, or use a text field to allow users to enter their own data."

Almost all forms use a select menu for user to choose country, especially when you are entering an address. The reason is data integrity and it I think it is ready for the user to choose from select menu than to type.

I also think it is perfectly fine for user to choose the dates from a dropdown (think credit card form). Typing can be more troublesome.
Seriously 30 minutes? Is this an American thing? To my mind almost all of them were obvious from the shapes alone (the one with straight edges wasn't, but the very fact that its borders are straight lines tell you there's only a few parts of the world it could be in).
remove the karma count in the upper right corner of the landing page.

every single time I go to the site I unconsciously eyeball that karma count to see if it went up or down. it can be very distressing and distracts me from the content of the articles. would prefer some other kind of notification method that someone may have replied to my posts.
Announcing the Verold 3D Engine
Agreed. While we're clearly not as rich as you or the top commenter on Quora, we're definitely in the "not really limited in purchasing" category of wealth. Sure, we can't just up and buy a second home, but we are definitely of the "just buy that nice mid-range car you want, in cash" category.

There is a third way to deal with the loss of excitement of buying -- not just buying 10x, or buying nothing, but engaging in the thrill of the hunt. Instead of expensive off-the-shelf commodities, rarer things. They don't have to be expensive.

Ex: I spent 6 months off and on looking for the right medicine cabinet for the bathroom in our "new" 265-year-old house. The new cabinets I saw at all the home stores looked cheaply made, or too cold, or too glam. I ended up finding a barber's cabinet with an extending mirror-door… super cool, not really unique but certainly not something you'll find in anyone else's house, from probably around 1910, just like the other piece of furniture we put in the bathroom (a dental cabinet made of solid quarter-sawn tiger oak).

It wasn't that expensive as far as medicine cabinets go ($300 — you could easily spend that at Home Depot on some poorly joined piece of crap from Indonesia). But it was an extremely satisfying way to spend not a lot of money. It's just perfect for the room, for the house, and it really did take a lot of looking and digging and strategizing to get it. It makes me happy every time I look at it.

That's the joy of collecting. You don't have to spend a lot to get the joy, either. I love old cameras ($20-50/ea) and West German art vases ($10-100/ea) and paintings by a certain pair of California impressionists ($80-300/ea). It's fun to be always on the lookout. And as far as thrills go, it's a lot cheaper than 5-star restaurants, and the result (ownership) and the experience (the hunt!) lasts a lot longer. There aren't a lot of meals that you can enjoy every time you sit in a certain room, but that's how often I enjoy a small painting I won in an eBay auction.

Teach yourself to enjoy the hunt and enjoy deal-making and you can get a lot more out of your money at any income level middle-class or above.

EDIT: It also gives you room to overspend for things that are "unreasonable." For example, I want some cabinets made for my living room. I don't like the off-the-shelf options. So instead I am taking woodworking classes and hiring one of the teachers to help me plan and build the cabinets at $60/hr. This will end up costing 2-3x what a cabinet would cost at Crate & Barrel, and take a lot longer than if I simply hired a professional (esp. considering my time), but I will get exactly what I want and have the pride of having made it (with help). The whole experience & result will be a lot longer, more joyful and challenging than outright buying what I can afford. Still, spending $2000 to $3000 on a built-in wall unit isn't even remotely in the same category as collecting cars.
A very small practical result is that it could get a mention in half a sentence on CNN and Faux News ("... petition with 25,000 signatures ..."), sewing a sliver of doubt in public sub-consciousness.
Sigh, another day, another post from you bashing the "ruby community". You got you message accross - ruby sucks, you're migrating to php, good for you! I've read like 15 post from you saying the exact same thing. Please, enough already!
Show HN: Slidescroll – view your slide decks together
How I Respond to Unsolicited Email Newsletters
See the tools in action - https://vimeo.com/59245029
...or this wiki:

http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php
I use Opera: it can switch off all styles, leaving only defaults. It does wonders with a lot of "only the author loves that formatting" pages.
Sorry about that. Guess I conflated the number of seeds with the workers.
Now, on alert completion do this:

window.location.href = 'nyan.cat';

Neat little app, nice to see a simple non-Flash version of http://e.ggtimer.com
Well, what I would love to see in startup FAQs: what's your revenue model, i.e. how do I know that you won't get acquihired and shut down while selling your entire database to betelgeusian mafia?

The app itself seems great, though.
Note that few languages can provide truly Lisp style REPL. For this, the language needs to make no distinction between data and code. You need to be able to generate all language statements dynamically (not string representation of statements that can be then then evaluated, just statements). Erlang does not have this, data and code are different things, so it can't provide Lisp style REPL (The same with Python). Some more info about this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12253200/what-is-so-power...
Jennifer Gooch worked on an identical art project at least 5 years ago. The website used to be onecoldhand.com, but it seems to be a link farm now.

You can read more about Jennifer's project at http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/innovation/2008/winter/one-cold-... or watch a presentation about this project at http://www.allartburns.org/dorkbot/dorkbot-200801-jenn.m4v (244 Mb M4V)
>But in my life, most of the decisions I've made with my happiness in mind have had the side effect of reducing my income -- going to music school, leaving my day job, choosing to spend time with my girlfriend instead of getting in 8 billable hours every day.

But this is exactly it. If you were dirt poor you couldn't have done these things. Conversely if you were richer you would be able to do less of them. I suppose, anyway.
Good point but I don't think this is entirely right. Startups are a gamble because businesses are a gamble; most fail very quickly for a variety of reasons. I'd guess that product-market fit and poor management are the two biggest failings of any business, not just tech businesses.

As much as it might be desirable for people in startups to put more effort in and try harder to avoid failing (and there are some very high profile examples of startups that just sort of floundered around), that's a small but high-profile minority who are already well-known; maybe Color falls into that. However, that's not most startups. Most startups have people doing their best but the business either isn't well-run or doesn't serve their market. That's a different problem and one that isn't solved by telling people to work harder.
Come join FarmLogs (YC W12) in bringing the world's farms online
FarmLogs is modernizing the way farming is done by building the world's best online farm management platform and gathering insightful data from the people that feed our world. Our team is passionate about solving this incredible problem and being able to make a significant impact in such an important industry.

We are looking for someone who can leverage the latest front-end tools like Backbone and work magic with javascript/coffeescript. As an integral member of the team, you'll be able to influence the product direction and the technologies used to build it.

FarmLogs is a well-funded YCombinator startup. Our small tight-knit team of 5 is is based in Ann Arbor, MI. We are offering $60-120K in salary with matching equity. You can learn more about FarmLogs from our features in the NY Times, Bloomberg, GigaOM and others.

You need to have:

-An in-depth knowledge of JavaScript, jQuery, and backbone

-A strong desire to constantly challenge yourself and learn

-Demonstrated ability to create clean, and, testable code

-The experience to know when to throw that out the window and just hack ;)

-Proficiency with using git in a team environment

As a bonus you might have:

-Grown up on or have a connection to the farm

-Experience using d3 or other technologies for data visualizations

-Significant contributions to open source projects

-Familiarity with CakePHP

If your interested, send us an email at Jobs@FarmLogs.com
I always find that the most talented people are relatively pretty down to earth given their accomplishments, while the higher the mediocrity to the position the more arrogant a person is, like a middle manager who only got the job because his in-law sits at the board.
Unfortunately it seems the lectures have been taken down.
I made a spelling mistake for that post but can no longer edit it. It should be 'Any kind of explanation about dinosaurs extinction'
Don't vote this up. This is terrible tech journalism.

Zero skepticism. It's a press release.
The trends to make thin grey text on nearly-gray background are driving me nuts also. I have two global Stylish [0] styles in my Firefox and I toggle them when I need to read something on a page like this:

1) Enable Georgia font instead of the author's favourite thin font:

html body, html div, html span, html p {font-family:Georgia !important;}

2) Make everything black (except links):

html * {color:black !important;}
a {text-decoration:underline !important; color:#00a !important;}

Those are not perfect but they work for me in 95% of the cases.
The first rule is a not a catch-all to not put Georgia in code/pre/textareas etc. `html` is necessary not to affect Firefox's (browser) styling.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/
Brilliant! I've often thought about doing something like this... but with shoes. Except mine was more of a market place where people who found one single shoe could trade with other people that needed a match... even if they were not originally belonging to the same person. Obviously my idea is doomed to flop... but it sounded funny.
Roole: A language that compiles to CSS
And it still uses canvas rather than SVG, so it looks ugly on Retina screens and clunky custom scrolling doesn't work on touchscreens.
Good points. An additional one I've found useful is an enthusiasm meter.

How you define that will be application dependent but I always aim to be fairly stringent.

For a forum, something like, "Number of users that make at least 3 posts per week that are longer than 100 words" would be a good one.

Watching that number can give you an outstanding early warning system, alerting you to problems that might not be immediately obvious.

As soon as your most enthusiastic users stop being quite so enthusiastic you need to know.
If you have an iPhone, switch to EDGE for something roughly approximating the dialup experience. (I think it's a bit faster, but they're in the same ballpark.)
"the conduct of the prosecutors was close to standard procedure"

This is part of the problem. It is standard procedure and it needs to be changed. Firing those who've acted too aggresively will help to change the way prosecutors operate.

"If it was wrong of the prosecutors to make an example out of Aaron, it is equally wrong to make an example of the prosecutors"

No it is not equally wrong because we're not suggesting anything like the same punishment. Losing your job versus facing decades in prison are orders of magnitude apart.
The RoR security issues have been depressing for me. My daughter had a credit card stolen from a web site, built on rails by a third party for the owner, the owner didn't know what powered the web site, they had a really "easy to use" tool for putting things up there. A code audit showed the site had been completely re-done to appear the same and provide a card harvesting service forwarding card information to the Ukraine.

How many more of these are there out there? tens? hundreds? thousands?
>I wonder - is a mitten a type of glove, or is a glove a type of mitten? Or is it neither, or both, or does it depend on where you live?

It's 2013, you don't have to wonder. Look it up!

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mitten
If that's the case then there are a lot of sites that are willfully ignoring the correct snippet. Perhaps this was something new that they added recently - or perhaps there's a frequently-incorrect snippet that's copied?
Ha, nice demo presentation.

One minor piece of feedback: add slide number out of total below the slide.
If I understand correctly, mintchip relies on the private keys inside each chip to remain private, otherwise you can print money by generating fake transactions. Doesn't sound superior to me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MintChip
I'm not totally sure, but I think the linear time papers I've read sacrifice some of the aspects of the original Knuth and Plass algorithm. I think some of those are going to be necessary to properly implement the Knuth and Plass algorithm in browser (also, floats are going to be interesting.)

The performance isn't actually that bad, I can perform line breaking in JavaScript on some very large documents, with the only performance bottleneck being DOM node creation (which native implementations won't suffer from.) If necessary the linebreaking could also be done incrementally, with a first first-fit pass and then the Knuth and Plass algorithm.

I could be mistaken, but I'm fairly certain Internet Explorer implements the Knuth and Plass algorithm when using `text-justify: newspaper`. Unfortunately, I can't check because it isn't open source. The output however is pretty much identical to what my JavaScript version generates, so I'm inclined to believe it is the Knuth and Plass algorithm.
Better URL Routing
They lock in the price. I bought 3 bitcoins for $48.48, and shortly thereafter the price jumped up by a couple dollars. 5 days later, there was a charge in my bank account for a total of $48.48.
Or poker (https://sealswithclubs.eu/). If you snoop around on the twoplustwo poker forms you will see there is some interest and decent reviews of the site. I imagine for someone that gambles regularly, it's easier for them to leave their bankroll in bitcoin rather than continuously exchanging it back to USD or whatever.

I'm no economist but this is how I see a fiat currency like bitcoin deriving value. Even if no one used bitcoin for a currency, there would be some people who would be interested in buying some just for the novelty of it. That alone gives it a non-zero value. From there, if it has the properties of being a useful medium of exchange, people will use it as such. Over time, the value grows as the amount of "float" (value exchanged into it) grows.
4chan creator Chris Poole draws a future where anyone can make art
What he is saying is that it looks like we are explaining the unknown based on our greatest fears - coming to a conclusion and then finding evidence to support it - rather than by looking at the evidence.

It doesn't mean the conclusion is wrong, just that it is always worth remembering how our ability to analyze data points is always done through a haze of our own experiences.
This is debatable, but IMHO your job as a post-doc is to learn new things about biology and publish papers on what you've learned. If you can document your code along the way, that's great. But if it's taking up a bunch of your time then it's probably a misguided effort.
My evolution as a JavaScript Developer:

1. I found out I could use Rails helpers to make really cool stuff. It generated ugly JavaScript code and errors that no one could see. No one got hurt. Win.

2. I realized I could use Prototype.js directly. The code was still ugly, but I could do even more. I eventually switched to jQuery because of the large ecosystem.

3. I started buying and borrowing JavaScript books. I decided to use vanilla JavaScript. I realized that it was a pointless exercise because of browser incompatabilities: http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/w3c_core.html. Now I understand JavaScript, but use jQuery to interact with the DOM.

It's probably impractical to suggest people learn vanilla JavaScript first. People who find jQuery are going to use and love it. They are going to write ugly code, but they will actually be able to accomplish something. As time wears on, they will learn the finer points of the language.
I have to second the usefulness of devtools/wiki. Its wonderfully clear and concise, though it does take some getting one's head around. And I write R every day and have read all of Venables and Ripley (more than once) and R still trips me up quite a lot. I tend to understand the error messages now, which is certainly progress.
Nice work. Number of viewers or devices the presentation is open on would be good info for the presenter too.
Great point! Metrics are certainly content dependent and take careful planning to get right.
As mentioned above, Knuth's algorithms are implemented in many professional typesetting and layout applications. I think the people implementing those applications have great respect for Knuth (and Plass.)

My impression is that the users of those programs are unfamiliar with the algorithms used, so I think it is the latter.
Caffeinated drinks are always a net gain in water in the body.

Otherwise, individuals who drank nothing but caffeinated sodas would die of dehydration.
I liked the casual tone. It read like the sort of thing you'd actually say when explaining the framework, and required less mental effort to interpret than program documentation usually does.
Nice :) I'm curious to see how long the http://slidescroll.com/demo_presentation holds up as HN comes barging in! Right now, every time someone clicks that link the presentation starts over at the beginning for everyone.
Except that birds did quite well during the extinction event, all things considered; more so than mammals.
I used to call the scientific software that I was writing, "paper-ware".

You aren't building a system for other users, you aren't really doing anything other than one-off analysis to create charts, which will be explained in a paper.

Things have changed somewhat since the early 2000's, but the concept remains the same. Nowadays, for interesting or controversial results other scientists want to be able to verify your results. However, that is usually more related to your data and how you processed it, rather than your software algorithms (which should be explained in the paper, and can be recreated from that).

So do these systems need to have reams of documentation? Probably not. However, if you leave the system for two years and come back to work on it, or figure out how it used to work, then you best have enough commenting with a thorough readme about some of the decisions you made and why. It's more analogous to scripting rather than software engineering.
My definition of grade A might be different than yours.

Grade A to me is a browser that is part of the "used just about everywhere" group.

Windows 7 ships with IE 8, so I consider IE 8 a grade A browser. Using tools like history.js to offer buggy fall backs isn't acceptable behavior IMO.
I was just thinking the other day about how good academic software is getting. And how useful it is to society that masters and PhDs are making software for the research.

Look at RapidMiner (developed at U. Dortmund), Stanford's CoreNLP, and the brat rapid annotation tool. These are better than a lot of commercial tools. They are more text-analytics than bioinformatics, but same diff.
Mailbox App has over half million reservations in 24 hours
This is awesome.

I did want to report a few bugs I noticed:

- Sorting appears to be broken. Specifically, sorting on the salary field appears to neither sort the data is currently visible nor all the data (i.e. the global max or min).

- Sorting on salary also causes the "Title" column to resize. I tried in both FF and Chrome, and the behavior is consistent.

- Pagination is also kind of weird. The total number of pages listed at the top is different than the number of pages listed at the bottom.
They buy your bitcoins immediately with their own funds, then when your money clears 5 days later they get reimbursed by you.
> jQuery exists for one simple reason : deal with DOM inconsistencies between browsers, and it works.

It exists for a second reason as well: make DOM interaction not suck. Because they suck hard out of the box.

> Why is it hard to work with the DOM ? because it is STRONGLY and staticaly typed !

Not really. It's because it's defined through a very restrictive abstract language which assumes almost nothing about the implementation language (basically, that the implementation language has method calls and a name can map to multiple arities somehow). That gives an API which can be implemented on pretty much any object-oriented language, but will also suck on pretty much all of then.

> querySelector to until it was made a standard

Uh... no it was not, if you want to give MS credit where credit is due you can give them XMLHttpRequest, but definitely not querySelector which is a WhatWG brainchild (the first revisions were by Anne van Kesteren and Lachlan Hunt). MSIE didn't get querySelector until IE8 (March 2009), Webkit landed it in December 2007 and Gecko in July 2008.

Also, innerHTML was standardized as part of the HTML5 effort, as well as a number of ther "DHTML" features.

And while you give praise to MS, don't forget to criticize them for e.g. not having implemented the DOM Events API until IE9.
They had a 10 year or so golden opportunity to pivot and try different models backed by dial-up revenue.

I'd say that they failed
Chrome still doesn't support CSS3 hyphenation. I wish they would, because it has a huge impact in web typography. http://caniuse.com/css-hyphens
Looks interesting - glad to see some competition heating up in the POS space.

Any way to try out the service without fully signing up for an account? There are a few features I'd like to see if it has (that almost every other iPad POS lacks) and I don't want to create an account just to sandbox....
Very nice, however the "unsynced" mode doesnt' work for me, still seems like someone else is flipping pages for me
As a "Planet of the Apes" fan myself this sounds like a very cool idea, honestly
To be fair, he's responding someone who is telling us to not talk about the issue and simply perform the action he favors, in so many words.
Yes, but it's kind of interesting if some big birds had big ancestors running around with the dinosaurs. "Later" could mean "after someone got feathers" but still be before the mass extinction.
Hydra: a triple-output power supply for electronics projects
I'm willing to bet he would care if he got fired.