skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understand where the article is coming from, but I don't agree with this as a blanket statement. There are way too many counterexamples of big companies doing incredible things.
As a former UK police officer, I can tell you that UK violent crime stats usually include any kind of crime that includes legally defined force, e.g.

- "common assault" (includes slapping, spitting at, pushing)

- threats of violence

- domestic/marital violence

- physical abuse

i.e. not just "stranger" violence and physical situations where people are not injured.

My guess, for the US statistics to be so low, they may not include similar crimes. Many countries only include so-called "serious" assaults in their stats.

Also, UK figures usually include all reported crimes, whether investigated and/or proven, or not.
Programatically-generated landing pages.  Where are the limits?
We know that this is part and parcel of lots of operations. Surely there have to be limits in terms of when Google (and others) will take a look at these auto-magic pages and simply ignore them. Or, worst, trigger a site de-listing for being "spammy".

Any sense of where the limits might be?

Hypothetical example:

You are trying to get people to a site that gives you instant quotes on airplane flights within various cities in the US.

One could very easily write a piece of code that would spit out thousands of legal city combinations in the form pages named:

"price-to-fly-from-<city 1>-to-<city 2>.html"

Pepper each one with a few variations of a story and you have hundreds or thousands of pages to feed people into your sign-up form.

I am sure this doesn't work quite like that any more. Where are the limits? When does it become dangerous (de-listing).

Not trying to game the system at my end, just trying to understand how not to get into trouble by simply not being up to speed on what the search gods have deemed to be acceptable or not. Considering how totalitarian the approach can be it is prudent to seek feedback on this before launching a hundred landing pages only to end-up de-listed.
I don't think this is necessary for basketball. Having played quite a bit of pickup basketball in SF (and other cities), if you want to play basketball just go to the court with a ball. If there is nobody there, you just shoot around until enough people are there for a game to start. However more often than not on a weekend or other prime times there are already people there and you just join a random group and get in line.
Is it possible to do that and still call it "clothes"?
But they won't be so smug when the rest of the hive is completed....
Personally, I find the concept of lorem ipsum or blocked out letters redundant - unless there is indication of what would be there.

The most basic wireframes will be just boxes everywhere and I label the boxes, say 'Pricing Plan Feature'.

Next iteration, would be wireframe still but all the copy need to be clear and thought out ie: the tag line would be 'Pricing Plan Feature' with a sentence below it like 'Our Plan fits any budget, from $5/month to $100/month' and be in that wireframe.

When people wireframe with lorem ipsum/line blocks, giving no indication of what would/is there, it can create assumptions and confusion - for your team mates/clients. If you say it's just for layout, then just use boxes with labels - anything else is just distraction.

When I get the copy after the wireframe, it can be frustation to get handed an essay and try to fit it in a space designed for a paragraph.

Always design around the content/copy, even at the wireframe stage. Knowing the exact (or close to it) copy/content the better - allowing you to gauge the layout and spacing more accurately.
"The PPA increases the funding target for
single-employer deﬁned beneﬁt pension plans from 90
percent to 100 percent of the plan’s present value of all
accrued beneﬁt liabilities"

Cool, now just make them fund the next 75 years of expected liability, instead of just the current liability.
When you look at the page with text when it's done, you're going to be focusing on the text too. Judging the page in a more realistic scenario makes sense.
It also saves them for offline viewing, so you can view those "tabs" in, say, a bus to work (without using 3G network).
F# is fantastic, and the team behind it is super solid, having delivered generics for the CLR.

What this post leaves out is some of the tooling you lose when you move to F#. For what I assume are political reasons, F# keeps being marketed as a niche "scientific" product, when in reality, pretty much any C# code is better off being written in F#, even if you aren't writing idiomatic F#. I did one small test where I rewrote a C# program in non-idiomatic F#, and it required 1/20th the type annotations. C#'s just verbose - why use it?

Even WebSharper requires a "C# web site" to actually get Visual Studio to kick up IIS and make things run. There's no real C# code, but so much in the .NET/VS environment assumes C# (or VB).

In fact the worst times I've had with F# were due to other libraries depending on how the C# compiler is implemented, and failing when reflection/expression trees didn't look exactly the same. Fortunately the major use case (LINQ) seems to have been addressed quite solidly with F# 3.0.
It was headline news in the 80s - I guess 30 years tends to create a generation who simy don't know - try windscale for example
That's the one! I happen to have what is a fairly complete collection of all of the 'chip' VAX cpus (for Qbus) starting with the KA610 (MicroVAX I), through the KA692 (VAX 4000/700a), and its fascinating to watch the architecture go from a nearly pure microcode implementation to a nearly pure 'gate' implementation. From the perspective of looking at the tradeoffs of microcode vs gates it is really an excellent tutorial on computer architecture.
Excellent post! The one thing I have to wonder is if there are those out there who can really separate themselves from their company's business.

I like to think of James Altucher's advice that you will be most happy when there are the fewest amount of people in your life who have the ability to create negative influences. In this case, having that investor mean so much to you that it has a severely negative outcome on your emotional well being is not worth it. I've come to realize that less stress is definitely worth more than extra income, in the long run.
Does anyone have any experience with F# (and Mono in general) under Linux? How's the library support?

It seems like it should be a good fit for the stuff we normally do (log processing/munging), but I don't know how well it'll work outside of Windows.
What's wrong with learning kids Shell scripting?

Assuming you mean bash-like shells on Unix boxes, quite a few things:

1. Commands have arbitrary, hard-to-remember names.

2. Destructive commands tend not to issue warnings.

3. Mass destructive commands still tend not to issue warnings.

4. Did I mention that destructive commands don't tend to issue warnings?

5. Destructive commands typically can't be undone.

A system where you can do a lot of permanent damage without warning and where the names of things are mostly guesswork is a terrible environment for experimentation, and experimentation is often the best way to learn a new technology.
Wholeheartedly agree. Showing weakness to someone who you respect and someone who respects you is incredibly difficult, but incredibly rewarding.
Some Gotchas should be cached by the ECMAScript 5's "strict mode", see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/JavaScript/Referenc...
Make Emacs Fit your Workflow
haha thanks, fixed
He said:

Your problem is not with programmers but with a term
called abstraction. And fighting that is futile. The
benefits vastly over weight any intellectual argument
you can present against it.

Utterly bizarre, to be claiming that a pure mathematician has a problem with abstraction.
Pagebox: sandboxing XSS attacks
Also, knowing a bit about how your car works will make you less likely to get ripped off by a dishonest or incompetent mechanic.
By marriage for a number of years. It doesn't make me an expert but it did give me a first hand perspective.
With all the digital tools we use to read books (Kindle et al), wouldn't it be possible to track people who have actually read the book? People who have looked and spent at least a minute looking at >90% of the pages in the book? Throw in a bit cryptography and account tracking and it should be much more accurate than just tracking purchases.
It would be good to get people of similar skill to play together. I hate playing with the total scrubs and I hate playing with the ex Varsity athletes. Also it would be nice to meet someone else who has to use contrived situations to make friends.
Hi all. I make Ubuntu packages of the Nginx development releases, so if you want to try out the WebSocket proxying and you're using Ubuntu, these should make it pretty easy to do:

https://launchpad.net/~chris-lea/+archive/nginx-devel

I've written up a very quick tutorial on how to set things up here:

https://chrislea.com/2013/02/23/proxying-websockets-with-ngi...

Hope people find these useful.
The only way to do that is to take away the carrot. They know perfectly well what they are risking and what they gain from it. Take away the gain and suddenly crime is much less attractive.
My second life is that of a competitive collegiate rower waking at 4:30am so this all resonates very strongly with me. It's especially noticeable on campus where people will party hard and then sleep until 1pm when possible; you really come to appreciate the tranquility in the morning. Add in the rush of water moving by leaving ripples on the mirrored plane of the river and the sunrise over the city and you get a form of meditation most will never come to experience. I can't say the same as you in terms of my questionably existent social life, however.
My friend make this cool new image and video site
Not true - they could check email and send you push notifications server-side, but still have the client talk directly to gmail for nearly all functions.
> Type theory and accompanying first-order logic is the foundation upon which mathematics is built.

Since when? Mathematics was originally founded on the study of the natural numbers. The mathematics I find most valuable (eunmerative combinatorics) still uses the natural numbers as its foundation and not type theory.
Yeah, it's pretty awful. Evernote Clearly FTW.
Any recommendation other than plan 9 is seriously considered harmful.
You're doing what 100 other startups are trying to do right now, connecting like-minded people through activites, just to name a few: Spontacts, Woofound, spotvite, aka aki etc.

They have all failed because if you're trying to be everything for everybody, you just end up being nothing for no one.
Well... Japan is a special kind of 'tarded.

You know how we have crunchyroll? That doesn't exist in Japan. Amazon, Netflix; numerous industries just don't exist. The #1 search engine in Japan? Yahoo, although even they can't explain this last bastion. So first of all we got a weird issue of lack of technological disruption in a very wired country.

Secondly, and this is a lot weirder, it all really comes down to lack of being able to fix their own issues. Japan does not sell B2B software at all, and large companies like Sony/Mitsubishi/Fujitsu basically keep programmers fucked by making everything private gardens. Because no one can compete with the internal services, it is a slow death through incestuous defense of certain technology choices with no alternatives.

Everything basically comes down to that oh-so-famous Japanese proverb: "the nail that stands out gets hammered down."
Getting a potential customer to download an app is the single largest hurdle placed at the beginning of the monetization funnel. You could make the argument that since a lot of the incentivized apps are free, it isn't really a laundering operation. The incentivized app only starts bringing in revenue once it convinces a user to start making in-app purchases.
My concern is simply that trying to be the de-facto app means you'll never really get the traction you need to become successful. I hate to invoke Facebook here, but even they started with a very limited market. Once there was enough demand, people were coming to them asking for access and they evolved.

I like what you're saying about keeping it narrow by the communities you're targetting. If it's truly useful, and generic, then people will start finding their own alternative uses.

I wouldn't have three different type of question on your front-page header;

1. Lost my Dog, if you spot it ...
2. Wanna play a game?
3. What is...

I'd pick one type (personally, the 2nd) and stick to that. 1. is only useful with significant localised usage and 3. is better left to something like twitter for now.

Whatever you do, best of luck.
What happens when you scale up your dynos and you end up with multiple servers all coming from different IP addresses?
So, no Federal Budget during your administration. While your at it, perhaps you want to look at the actual text density on federal bills.
I have similar fond memories of using Acorn and Sinclair systems when I was younger: turn it on and start hacking away.

Of course, in those days, everything was simpler, and for all the benefits that the modern, heterogeneous technology landscape offers us, I do think we’ve lost something by trying to make everything do everything for everyone while talking to everything else.

The people best placed to fix that are the ones who control both the hardware and the software foundation running on it, but sadly, the most obvious examples like Apple and the games console makers seem to want just about the most locked-down, developer-hostile environments in computing history.

That all said, today’s kids have the benefits of the Internet and the vast potential it offers for teaching, learning, sharing and collaborating, all on a scale we couldn’t even dream of when I was first learning to program. I wonder whether that ecosystem combined with recent hardware developments like the Raspberry Pi might offer enthusiastic youngsters a very different experience but one that ultimately encourages their interest as well or better than what we had in my generation.
Sorry to butt in - is that " no Japanese blood ancestry" like Arnie has no American blood ancestry (ie is a naturalised citizen).

Is that exceedingly rare? I am surprised, I would assume the Japanese equivalent of a green card would be highly sought after for much the same reasons
How to fully automate your tv downloads with sabnzbd, sickbeard and subsmarine
The only thing current bestseller lists measure is unit sales volume over a one week period. That's it.

I'm a full-time non-fiction author, and I work with a large publisher. "Bestsellers," particularly NYT bestsellers, get huge amounts of display placement in retail distribution. If you make the list, you get additional in-store display and sell many more copies, so most publishers want you to do everything you can to make it happen.

If the author is (or wants to be) a speaker, hitting the list is even more appealing: it's a permanent high-value social signal that will increase demand for speaking engagements, as well as support a sizable fee increase.

Each weekly bestseller list has a fixed number of slots, and many authors are able and willing to buy their way onto the list. The lists don't want to be gamed, so they've developed countermeasures (like tracking national sales distribution), which really only creates demand for order laundering services like ResultSource. The number of authors willing to game the list makes it much harder to hit the list if you're not willing to use the same tactics.

Anti-gaming measures increase the demand for laundering services. If you run a big conference or company, want to give attendees/clients/employees a copy of the book, and you want to make sure your book orders count for the list, guess what: you need to hire a laundering service. If you don't, you probably won't hit the list. If you do, you probably will. (This isn't hypothetical: I've seen it happen many times, both for books that have hit the list, and those that haven't.)

The worst part about the whole game is that, if you intend to hit the list, it affects every decision you make about the book: topic, positioning, title, cover, and content. I think many non-fiction authors, in their efforts to make the list, end up making their books less useful.

That's why this topic hits home for me: I've made a conscious decision not to pursue the lists. Instead, I'm going to focus all of my attention on creating useful, valuable books that are interesting to read, then make sure the right readers know they exist. If one of my books hits the list eventually, that'll be nice, but it's not the point.

I know why I'm doing what I'm doing, but damn, the siren song of the NYT list is still strong. Every few weeks, I have to remind myself that bending over backwards to maximize sales over a one week period isn't the point.

It's working so far: my first book is more popular today than it was when it came out 2+ years ago. My second book comes out in June, and readers are already excited. I'm happy, satisfied with my career, and looking forward to continuing to write books.

Success as an author has absolutely nothing to do with bestseller lists.
Fighting An Epidemic
English Language in 30 Accents
I want to know what you're going to do to attract the every day user? Why would someone choose this over meetup.com or posting on craigslist or reddit, etc.

There're a fair number of ways for people to interact with their local community nowadays (even beyond their local social circle), and I can't see anyone adopting this as just one more way to do so. Perhaps I'm missing something.
As someone in the same boat, I chose PHP as my language of choice, and in a matter of about a year went from not having any real knowledge to landing an internship about a month ago. HTML and CSS are necessary, beyond that, I think any other technologies you pick up will only help your cause. Only piece of advice I have for you is don't slack off and don't get lazy. Think of a project that is far beyond what you can do right now and start creating it, for me, having a project of my own was the most motivational thing I could ask for. One more thing, if you don't type correctly, start learning now! 60wpm vs 25wpm can really affect how long it takes you to develop.
I like this schedule as well. Benjamin Franklin is well-quoted as saying "early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise".

In particular, the 1am to 8am work cycle can be highly productive since email and other distractions are generally quiet then.
We are not about connecting like-minded people. We are trying to help people solve their everyday problems....connecting people is a consequence of it.
With all due respect I'm not sure that that is a fair comparison. Your OS seems to be pretty barebones (I'm not sure if what you posted is all of it but it does not even seem to have a file system). SparrowOS is some 130KLOC and has a lot of shit going on for it.

Here is the breakdown
http://www.sparrowos.com/Wb/Accts/TS/Wb2/LineCnt.html#l711.
But note that not all of it is code (for example the bible).

EDIT: It seems that QnX is a microkernel hence the lack of FS. But it's not really a fair comparison regardless.
My favorite part - they use type providers to work with xaml code. They're moving IDE features closer to the compiler.
To be fair, Python's shutil.rmtree() won't give you any warnings either. Nor will any other programming language that I know of.

And there's a limit on your ability to destroy stuff if you're not running as root.
Doesn't Tim Ferris use a similar tactic for his books? Buy 100 copies get X, Y and Z from him...
From the recent Esquire article[1]:

Over the past five years, FedEx and UPS have spent a combined $100 million lobbying Congress. Because neither company has a delivery network nearly as sprawling as Donahoe's, they contract with the postal service to deliver the "final mile" of much of their cargo. For instance, more than 21 percent of all FedEx deliveries are dropped off by a postal carrier. Meanwhile, millions of postal-service letters hitch rides on FedEx flights every day, for which the company gets paid $1 billion a year. FedEx and UPS don't want the postal service to go out of business but to remain contained, out of the way — one reason many of the addresses on packages that pass through Medford are handwritten by mothers and grandfathers and eBay minimoguls, rather than printed by manufacturers and retailers.

[1] http://www.esquire.com/print-this/post-office-business-troub...
Right, but "last defense" shouldn't constitute our only defense. Shouldn't all freedom-loving Americans speak out and vote against shaving protections against arbitrary search and seizure paper thin? Shouldn't all freedom-loving Americans vote against politicians who support things like universal wiretapping, dragnet searches and presumption of guilt in airports and at borders?

In short, I don't believe that having a gun is any kind of last defense against loss of rights. I'll believe that when I see Waye LaPierre denouncing airport nude-a-trons, or when the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners actively join suit against the US DoJ for warrantless wiretapping.
Great line, thanks!
I meant that you should setup a simple environment, setting up a partition and chroot into it. Learn the kid to use man(1) and ed(1) and after that let him/her play around. I heard someone doing this with his 5 year old kid on the OpenBSD mailing-list, that kid will probably be able to write quite useful scripts in a few years.
Assault is broadly defined in the USA and is generally a misdemeanor. It could be the stats only include aggravated assault, which is a felony. That said, there isn't as much of a brawling culture in the USA as there is in other countries. It wouldn't be surprising if the stats for general non-gun violence were lower.
AFAIK a lot of the IBM PC legacy are already required for the legacy PC BIOS.
Wages, staffing and work rules are huge problems. I strongly suspect that the USPS falls very, very far short of UPS and Fedex on almost any productivity measurement. Because it is politically impossible to take on the postal unions.

Universal delivery is a very important service, but it probably ought to be directly subsidized by Congress. Because the current system of subsidy through monopoly gave a false sense of security in their revenues. Now technology is killing those revenues, and the system is trying to avoid job losses by service reductions. The logical end of that spiral is obvious.
They already do, that is what "present value of all accrued beneﬁt liabilities" means.
To be fair, Python's shutil.rmtree() won't give you any warnings either.

Sure, and that's why I don't think modern general-purpose programming languages like Python are a particularly good substitute for the BASICs of old as a default environment.

If the idea is to encourage kids to learn more about the technology they're using, one of the most basic requirements is a safe system they can use without any danger of causing serious damage.

And there's a limit on your ability to destroy stuff if you're not running as root.

That assumes your system has a concept of root, which in turn assumes your system has a concept of users at all and a robust security model. I'm not sure any of those things is necessary, or even desirable, for the kind of system we're thinking about here. I think the correct requirement is "User can not cause any permanent damage", and if things like Linux or Windows or Python or Ruby can't meet that requirement, then they simply aren't the tools we're looking for in this particular context.
The problem is there is so much 'dumb' money out there 'smart' money is just noise. If you have 50 million to invest then investing 200k in 250 company's at random is a perfectly reasonable choice. And 50 million is a tiny slice of a ridiculously big pie, people spend close to that doing due diligence on really big deals.