skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
French workers also have an old tradition for manufacturing, produce quality products and have one of the best productivity per hour of all the developed countries (mostly due to the fact that they work slightly LESS than other workers in developed economies).

But what are you gonna do, it's become trendy to take swings at the French for being cowardly, lazy, corrupted union-loving socialist epicurian bastards with no engineering and manufacturing skills whatsoever even though rankings, statistics and facts paint another picture.
New feature at BeeUX, reports
I'm disturbed by how much of myself I saw in this. Cutting off all contact with friends in order to work on my project without distraction. During my day job I space out fantasizing about re-emerging into society as a successful entrepreneur. And I've picked up an adderall habit to facilitate binge programming on the weekends.
Bollocks. Chrome's PDF implementation absolutely sucks. I have numerous PDF documents which it can't handle at all. I've just opened them in Firefox 19 and they are absolutely spot on.

I'm uninstalling Acrobat reader for a week to see how it goes now. Chrome never gave me that.
Rails Has Turned into Java
> the fact that something hasn't been done yet does not necessarily prove that it's impossible.

No, but it does suggest that if it were easy and efficient, someone would have done it already.
Thanks for writing your story. I didn't read the whole lot but I can tell you're a person who could use a friend or someone who can help you.

Would it be a loss for you if you told your story to a professional counselor? I think you should. It's only a small step to take and there are no obligations what so ever.

You're a prisoner of your own life and it doesn't have to be like this. You already took a first step by publishing this story, now take that second step!
Designing for crappy screens
Can you specify what frames you are talking about? I am asking because I don't see any trace of html frames (http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/present/frames.html)
Book Review: Metaprogramming Ruby
LOL. A couple hundred requests per second? Is that something to brag about?

What the fuck is the point of opening a million connections if it takes you 1.55 hours to process one request from each connection?
Has Social Media Changed the Way We Design Websites?
even a cursory read of the post would suggest that the OP is actually doing quite a good job of dealing with his problems
Here's one quirky thing though, there are moments in life where everyone around you wants to take a picture. Like, a celebrity walks by. Or you are at the top of a long climb. Or you're at the zoo. Are people in these situations going to be just a sea of voices saying in round "OK Glass take a picture, OK Glass take a picture"?
That's provably not true. Everything that concerns actual software (and not service!) is international by-default. That's my personal reason to hate services, they can be (and often are) discriminatory.
Different layers of abstraction. JavaScript embedded in a PDF probably turns up as a string after being parsed. It doesn't necessarily get eval'ed. It's turtles all the way down, until you say no.
Not too mention all the trouble when you live you life in two different languages... somehow, none of all language aware things are very practical when you communicate sometime in english, sometime not.
Samsung’s Rex ‘smart feature phones’ will bring the Web to emerging markets
So, where are all these unemployed American programmers, who lost their jobs due to offshoring and H1B's? If you are one, please email me, as my $DAYJOB employer - Open Software Integrators - is aggressively hiring at all levels, from interns to Senior Developers and Senior Consultants. We are mainly looking in the Raleigh/Durham, NC and Chicago, IL areas, FWIW. prhodes (at) osintegraors (dot) com

The thing is, I'm skeptical of all this howling about American job loss (in terms of development / IT anyway) due to offshoring and H1Bs. It's all we can do to find qualified people.. we advertise for months and months and do dozens of interviews to find one person we want to hire. And it's not like our hiring bar is set super high... we don't do Google or Microsoft style "trick" interviews and we don't expect intern level candidates to code a red-black tree on the whiteboard or anything. We just want smart, hard-working people who are motivated self-learners and have reasonable social acumen. And there isn't exactly a flood of people like that beating down the door.

Now, I'm not saying that no one has ever lost their job to offshoring or whatever. But from what I can see, there is still plenty of work available for talented IT people in the US.
Yes, this is somewhat unfortunate and someone should really light a fire under the HTML5 implementors. However, I wouldn't call it essential since you can archive/zip/tar a bunch of files and upload them all at once and do the processing server side.
Add a chat/texting app and give it to teenagers and it will be instantly considered "cool".
That was never cool.
It's interesting to compare the findings with website popularity: http://5000best.com/websites/
Girls Gone Bitcoin
My father's pleasure is to spend half an hour a day on Windows Solitaire. He moves the cards faster than I can see what the cards are... It took him probably a week to accommodate with the mouse and now he is faster than anyone I know. My guess is that if he knew a little bit of English he would have entered "that Internet of yours" with no difficulties. He is technical literate mind you - he build in the early 90s a Spectrum clone.

On the other hand I see plenty of 25+ people that don't care too much to change their status quo. I might as well be one of them and pretend I'm not.
It is not included, but can be installed. (libpdf)

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chromium#Open_PDF_files...
Really? That's interesting.

I've noticed that units never seem to have the good sense to target Brood Lords rather than Broodlings when they have a choice. It seemed odd, given that the AI had improved so much in other areas -- pathfinding, running from unwinnable fights, varying its opening strategies. It never occurred to me that things might be that way because it's fun!
All he succeeded in communicating is that he thinks in stereotypes and is a jerk. Why do you think this letter is now on public display?

Workers in France work for three hours, eat for two and talk for another three? Really?

Producing in France is only expensive because of the labour costs? Or is there maybe also that pesky environmental controls issue?
Foxconn hiring freeze unrelated to production of Apple's iPhone 5
(Original Author): Relative. In the wine example, if you add a fixed cost, total absolute consumption will decline, but relative consumption of the more expensive one will increase. Likewise, when fixed costs are lower, absolute consuption increases, as per the law of demand. People spend more time watching media in general now than in the Middle Ages, but cat videos are relatively more popular.
It takes millions of lines of incomprehensible computer language to do something as trivial as "browse the web".

Now imagine the task is "defining the lives of 300 million people a significant fraction of which is actively engaged in attempting to find any loop hole" and think how many lines THAT would take.
All those criticisms look pretty irrelevant in Backblaze's scale-out cold storage use case. Their performance requirements are essentially zero. They already handle full pod failures, so a partial failure is no worse as long as they can recognize it and fail the whole pod.

Having said that, it is interesting to compare Backblaze's design to Facebook's Open Vault. Facebook's design has much better mechanical serviceability, redundant power supplies, and redundant SAS expanders. Facebook believes that they can afford such features even for cold storage, so why is Backblaze cutting even more corners?
Yep - they're Apple for credit card processing. All they do is UX work and strip out features.

That's a great thing. My wife and I own a small boutique, and we've been using Square since before the public launch in the App Store. We've just about outgrown it, but have been challenged to find another solution that fits in-between the low cost, extremely easy to use Square and the traditional high-cost, complex to set up POS solutions.

As one of their employees here has said, GoPago seems to fit that nicely, but we're not decided yet whether we want to commit to a $100 / month payment. Being a hacker, there's also the fact that I have a room full of hardware in the back I've collected over the years, which includes a nice flash-based small format PC, a comparably tiny monitor, bar code readers, and a couple of retail thermal printers.

I know I'll never actually sit down and hack out a POS system, but it's nice to think about and the idea has helped in keeping me from sinking a wad of cash into a system I don't absolutely have to have yet.
Probably more a flaw in the relationship. She was probably bored. Sorry to break it to you. Not being an asshole, but your young, and I'd hate to see you get in the habit of blaming random things instead of owning up to the situations you find yourself in.
Probably more a flaw in the relationship. She was probably bored. Sorry to break it to you. Not being an asshole, but you're young, and I'd hate to see you get in the habit of blaming random things instead of owning up to the situations you find yourself in.
What the hell? Seriously. This was not a silly one line meme reminiscent of reddit. Someone posted a long, well written story questioning the social implications of a new piece of technology, which generated a huge amount of discussion.

A one liner saying go back to reddit is not HN material. Please go back to reddit.
I don't have a technical education so I'm not sure what differentiates here-- could I get some examples of A versus B tiered schools (besides the obvious A schools like MIT/Stanford)
That's speaks the distinction between just hearing someone and actually listening to them.
Can you elaborate on what "modifiers" are? Just curious.

Are they just addons? For instance, "add cheese" for $1 to an existing menu item? Or are modifiers something else entirely?
This is a great piece and something we had to think about a lot ourselves.

Name changes never makes it to the top of the list, as it often times it masks other - bigger - problems about story telling and value prop.

That however may not apply to payments, where trust matters most - so this is a really good read if you are thinking about it!
I live in LA, and today I honestly noticed a significant reduction in my commute time (from 45min down to about 30min), but this is the first I've heard of this. I thought I was just hitting all the lights, but interesting to find out it may become a more common occurrence! Looking forward to gathering more experience with the system.
Visualizing Designer News's Growth By Inviter
This was just a random example. I'm sure if you take a statistically-significant variety of PDFs and benchmark rendering quality, speed and features in all PDF viewers out there, PDF.js won't be any closer to the top; Chrome's viewer will certainly not be the very best but not one of the worst either.
Is there an easy way to go back and forth between data with schema and data without? I'd love the benefits of this for queries, but for the production side of things, imposing a schema would be costly.
Last I checked many Norwegian online banking and credit card payment systems use applets.
"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."

--William Strunk Jr., Elements of Style
I wrote the post in October of 2011, but people have reblogged it recently in response to Alchian's death.
Just a fun little project. Code is here: https://github.com/sarahgp/DN-Sunburst
https://aws.amazon.com/opsworks/faqs/#amis : "Q: Can I use my own AMIs?
No, however you can customize the AMIs OpsWorks supports using Chef scripts to install agents and other software that you require."

This makes OpsWorks useless if you want to autoscale with any reasonable "nimbleness" - meaning the amount of time it will take to wait for a non-custom AMI to be bootstrapped with chef client and then load and run all my standard and customized cookbooks is way too long... I need to be able to specify custom AMIs that are already largely prepared so they can boot fast. Also, the Chef bootstrap process is brittle. twice in as many weeks it has been broken by dependency fails. (First, a net-ssh dependency, then a JSON gem dependency).
There is a movement in the legal community toward using plain English. Though, some think that doing so somehow reduces the quality of the legal writing.

I was recently struck by how Google's terms of service are written in plain English legal writing:

https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/

Compare a contract term like this, often referred to as a severability clause (from Google's ToS):
"If it turns out that a particular term is not enforceable, this will not affect any other terms."

With this, in traditional legalese:
"If any term or other provision of this Agreement is determined to be invalid, illegal or incapable of being enforced by any rule or law, or public policy, all other conditions and provisions of this Agreement shall nevertheless remain in full force and effect so long as the economic or legal substance of the transactions contemplated hereby is not affected in any manner materially adverse to any party."

Both have the exact same effect.
Clarence's decision and the decision of many other politicians is likely the product of Orwell's writing.

After reading Orwell's "Collection of Essays" I've been doing the same. In his essay, "Politics and the English Language." Orwell boils down good writing to:

1. “Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.”

2. “Never use a long word where a short one will do.”

3. “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.”

4. “Never use the passive where you can use the active.”

5. “Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.”

6. “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.” (170)

edit: removed words

http://law.marquette.edu/facultyblog/2011/08/31/george-orwel...
Yahoo Redesign Deconstructed
We have had this in Houston, TX for nearly a decade. They work pretty great if everyone is driving at the speed they're designed for. Otherwise you have to deal with red light runners, people parked at green lights texting, metro bus drivers parking their buses on the road while they go on break, people speeding and getting to the lights too early and people driving too slow.

That said at off hours they're absolutely fantastic. You can make it through the city center at great speed. I frequently take surface streets as they can be faster than the congested freeways.
I find it somewhat odd that he rails against workers earning too much, when what they earn is but a fraction of his own salary. I doubt they work any less harder than him either.
When I first read Isaac Asimov's "The Naked Sun" as a kid in the early '90s I was thinking "hey, this is really only science fiction, we will never be like that". With the passing of years it seems that we get closer and closer to what I was actually thinking was only fiction. This is the story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Sun#Plot_introductio...

> The planet has a rigidly controlled population of twenty thousand, and robots outnumber humans ten thousand to one. People are strictly taught from birth to despise personal contact. They live on huge estates, either alone or with their spouse only. Communication is done via holographic telepresence (called viewing, as opposed to in-person seeing). It is likely that the society is based on that in E. M. Forster's 1909 short story "The Machine Stops".

Of course, the irony is that I had forgotten the exact name of the story and I had to use Google and a very fuzzy search to find it. And Google actually found it.
You seem to have a significant bias against leading an asocial lifestyle. I suggest that this says more about you then it does the OP.
How do square's fees compare to paypal? I got a free square thingie at a conference, gave it to a vet friend who does a lot of house calls and needs to accept payments. He ended up not using it, preferring to manually type CC#s in paypal's UI. Explanation: cheaper
Small percentage but still interesting. Although if this functionality didn't exist, would it really be missed? I suppose these are the people playing on guest computers/at work. Wonder how many of those 33% of people have an up-to-date Java plugin?
Being in a position where we could prove you wrong would cause us to break multiple laws.
Nice to see another option, but the early termination fee of, "$2376, less $99.00 for each full month of Service completed," is brutal.

Source: http://www.gopago.com/merchant-terms-conditions/
"a good deed never goes unpunished" (95% billing to prevent bursting megabills)

"don't be evil" (except for 3000 exceptions)
YC-Backed TrustEgg Launches, Lets Anyone Create Trust Accounts For Their Kids
This is a good point, but a separate issue (and kudos to PDF.js if accessibility was a purposeful design point of their implementation, not just a happy coincidence... they could certainly have chosen other avenues, such as generating a WebGL scene that would be opaque to screen readers). And Chrome's viewer should indeed be accessible, I'll raise this question internally.
It's a good HTTPD Dummy. I've mostly used it in debugging purposes - a little as a swiss army knife.

It's not that useless that you're portraying it as. But I do however agree that it's below toy level. It's not for production or long-time use.
I did some analysis once about a year ago, and found that a large number of domains were inactive.

http://garysieling.com/blog/one-third-site-auctions-abandone...

It's possible this analysis is over-estimated (e.g. could be defects in the scraping process) but I was surprised even just checking domains randomly how many were later abandoned.

I suspect that there are a lot of sites that use various techniques to fake their numbers; if this gets the purchaser banned from adsense it makes a site in the lower price ranges basically worthless.
Square's Wallet app also allows customers to send orders right to Square Register. Square wallet stores your credit card info so you don't have to swipe. The customer's picture pops up on the register and the seller taps the photo.

Square Wallet also does business discovery via location and promotions/loyalty programs (i.e. virtual "buy 10 get 1 free" deals, etc) and gift cards.
I'd recommend Three Felonies A Day by Harvey Silverglate. It's a good review of exactly this issue.

http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Innocent-ebook/dp/B...
Are plug-in cars selling badly or well? Compared to what?
Something being closed source matters to some people. You might not be one of them, but other people might have different perspectives that cause them to value an open source option above a closed source equivalent.
What no one has mentioned is how many "essential" skills have arisen as a result of this hack.

For instance, an everpresent threat in Starcraft is the Zerg Rush, in which a player skips building an economy to build zerglings---cheap, light, raider units--- to attack the opponent early before he has any defenses (as he, presumably, has not skipped building an economy). The zerglings are melee attackers, so holding a small choke point is an effective way of only allowing one or two zerglings to attack at a time, even if there are more (usually 6-8).

Of course, this poses a problem---if the tight spaces allow only two zerglings to attack, that's great, but the tight spaces also only allow two of your workers to fight back. Actual fighting units will slaughter worker units, so you've merely slowed your death, not prevented it.

Except! By ordering all your workers to harvest the same mineral patch, you can activate this collisionless behavior described in the article, and then fit your "super-group" of ten or so workers into small spaces---to fight the two zerglings at a time. The workers can definitely win now!

This has become a giant wall of text, but this is actually basic, easy, essential knowledge for the competitive starcraft 2 player, so it's fun to see its origins in this article.
Mad Hat Party Puzzle
I have a logistical question: how/what do you eat?
What about Cochlear Implants?
Your last statement is way overstating the original remark about NaCL. Google has definitely been pushing PNaCL as the solution for running large, complex apps that are usually native (like 3d games, and things that require lots of computation) on the web. And there's no way PNaCL is going to be viable in the next decade, it takes way too long for everyone to agree & implement.

Gmail, docs, etc are complex, but don't require tons of computation. They just require good web technologies. Google's work in this area is awesome, but that doesn't mean we can't call out PNaCL as a bad technology to push.
> ...now be the best person in other people's lives.

...Why?

I've spent most of the last ten years trying to do just that. Do you know what it has gotten me? Let me tell you what it has gotten me: friends and family that never call unless they need something; an utterly depleted bank account; a complete lack of respect or even human regard from my peers; a pile of strife and struggle and pain and misery and not one single positive thing to show for it other than impotently small differences in the lives of sycophants.

No, do not live for others. Never live for others, because nobody will laud you for it -- in fact, people will find it laughable and openly sneer at you for it.

He wrote, "In the aftermath of emotional implosion; friends, family, colleagues and even strangers will metamorph into an invasive species from planet Concern," and I thought, "pfft, that must be lovely."

Further, I really wish people would stop talking to people with depression as though they were in boot camp for Turning Their Lives Around. e-shouting "find professional help!" is a sure sign of someone who has never actually tried seeking professional help, because here's the thing about a lot of "professional help": the professionals really suck. How do you think someone feels after sharing their troubles with a cold stranger for an hour, getting merely a few minutes' advice and another appointment at the end, and then paying for that? And when that person has tried 2, 3, half-a-dozen professionals, how do you think they begin to feel then?

Your commandments here strike me as being like an extrovert's advice to an introvert: "these are my values, and you must live by them! It is unacceptable for you to not go to parties!"

If a person wants to change, then perhaps you might be of some help to them -- and then only if you spend more than a minute's effort banging out a comment on your keyboard. I haven't yet finished reading his screed, but so far it sounds to me like he is not only not asking for help, he is openly rejecting it, in which case I doubt anybody else should have much to say about it.