skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Except that the abusers often go to prison, and there has been no established link between the perpetrators of these acts and the undercover reporters before.

Frankly this is silly. Are you suggesting that animal rights activists are really just people with a secret fetish for watching animal suffering? Maybe the same way pro-life activists love looking at pictures of mangled fetuses, and would love for more fetuses to be killed simply so that they can keep making more signs. This view is really quite disrespectful and insulting actually.
Very excited to see the network panel, as that is what makes me go back to Chrome or Firebug most often.

In the network panel, being able to sorting/filter requests by content-type, request verb, and response code makes it much more usable for me. I didn't see that in the video-- do you plan to include it?
How can I pull the backgrounds out into simple image files. I'd love to use the top 3 images in the blog post as desktop wallpaper (but they're too small - avoiding copyright issue perhaps?).

Or are they just in-game screenshots - small views of the larger textures (explaining their tiny size in the blog?)
The examples are great, which is to say they are terrible. Well done.
I fully agree. Although some buttons might be hidden away a bit better, perhaps moved to about:config or have them trigger a warning, I love that Firefox has these features. I've used almost all of the mentioned features (including turning off images), so none of them are useless to me.
I've always had the impression that submissions on HN were done by the authors 99% of the time. It's funny to hear about it happening the other way around, and him not even knowing about it.
Internet pioneers win engineering prize
User Research for Lean Startups
I tried to like Google Drive, It was half the price of Dropbox and being a poor student I really needed the alternative.

After a month I closed Drive down and went entirely over to Dropbox, it wasn't just one thing but many many little things that just showed how bad Google can be at desktop software. You get this feeling they hate the desktop and want it all to be online.

Dropbox is so easy to use and does everything very well. I really wish it was a little cheaper though.
For something to be interesting the outcome of research on a given plant should at the very least be that there is an effect to study, or it's not worthwhile. Nobody says "we don't understand how it works, therefore it doesn't work and we should throw it away".
"Coding/authoring in the browser" - this is EXACTLY the idea of LIVEditor, my code editor project which was started before Bret Victor's talk, the announcing of Light Table and Brackets.

But it's not out yet, because it's only me working on it...

URL: http://liveditor.com
This is beginning to sound like the script to Primer. Ugh. I'd have to somehow force skydrive to do its sync before google, before dropbox.
Most sites are not one page apps. Their js is silo'd per page.

You misinterpret my personal skill level, I don't believe you as I've worked on more than one codebase of both kinds. Most javascript today is still employed as the scripting language it was originally introduced for. It does very little apart from open a lightbox or get something via ajax or something trivial like that.

There is a tiny % of javascript coders like us that use it to write programs and an even tinier percentage that use coffeescript. It is worth keeping that in mind at all times when discussing coding.

You don't have to be an architect in order to make a wall.

I also spent time running courses for non-coders in basic coding in a previous job to allow them to slightly customize their own product. Going in with advanced and abstract concepts like closures is a sure fire way to frustrate a student, not enlighten them.
Performance change after some wikipedia templates were rewritten in Lua:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dragons_flight/Lua_perfor...
Which itself must be a reference to Nikita Khrushchev's famous outburst[1].

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_will_bury_you
Years of experience developing so called web applications with a technology stack never meant to reproduce a native desktop experience.
Just write a cron job to sync a folder to S3, it works pretty well for those of us doing that as a backup to all these services.
Debugging Python on Linux from *Visual Studio* (PyCon lightning talk, 5min)
obviously this is the best solution: http://www.dilbertfiles.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module:Citation/CS1
I've got to reexamine git-annex some day, but I've been happily using unison (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/) for the past seven years or so. It's rock solid. I use it to sync my home directory, 2TB of media files, and retrieve email (Maildir).
Ask HN: Small business software that is primed for disruption?
I just got word today that the company I work for is splitting in two and the project I've been working on for 2 years is going one way, while my employer goes another. I have the option of following the project or staying where I am and, thus far, I'm opting to stay where I am. I've been reassured that there is plenty of work to do outside of this particular project, but the company will be looking for new spaces that we can be potentially disrupt and I've been tapped to offer any suggestions I can come up with. They're primarily looking at aging software used by small businesses where there aren't a lot of players or VC funding, and that be can be transitioned from local installs to a web-based system. Some initial thoughts, that may or may not even fit the criteria, were P.O.S. Systems for small restaurants and shops, or Patient/Appointment managing software for small doctor's offices.

I know that the schools of thought on "ideas" are divided between them being worthless without execution or them being potential goldmines if you hit the right one, so I'm hoping to tap the former thinkers on any ideas they might have. I've read PG's startup ideas essay, but I'll review it as well.
Teehan+Lax Launches Innovative Agency Site with Focus on "Stories of Making"
The startup is actually pretty good. They are selling real product and it has very positive reviews in market.
Use Open Source Software says UK Government
It's not just hard drive failure. Account stolen laptops, out of charge laptops and convenience of accessing any file anywhere anytime (tablet, phone or PC).
Short Term Thinking vs Long Term Thinking
Charge a million dollars per minute in fines if a service is essential (e.g. Google, Gmail, Facebook, etc.) and goes down.

That will fix the issues.

While we are at it, some law that forces companies to give service to everyone (no bans) and extends free speech to privately owned websites (no censorship) is also sorely needed.

Right now the level of unpunished abuse of power by service operators whose service has become a de-facto monopoly is immense.
i agree with a lot of these, but there should be some middle ground between a options-for-everyone dialog and about:config. many of those options should be in a power user menu, along with many about:config settings.

i still cannot believe they removed "homepage in new tabs" setting...you now need an addon for this. wtf?
"I clicked the link, but Hacker News is often blocked in the Marshall Islands, so I got a 404."

Is there reason for the blocking? Is it the government censoring content? Or is it simply an island nation has to ration its bandwidth?

I ask because Marshall Islands are in a free association with the United States (where the US provides services and protection). Preventing residents from reaching US websites really rubs me the wrong way.

Maybe I'm just reading too much into the word block when he really means unreachable. Marshall Islands are rated as Free under the Freedom of Press Report, but are unclassified by the OpenNet Initiative. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_country

edit: I am sorry for my tangent based on a single line in your write up. It really jumped out at me and I hope you can expand on the situation.

You have a cool product and congratulations on the exposure. Good luck!
> "surfaces that can be easily cleaned." Not very unlike a car repair shop, really.

Except, car repair shops (at least the ones I know) are rarely clean, ;)
I've resigned to the fact that I'm probably going to get fucked over by people removing options from existing software (software that self-updates, by the way, and that needs in some aspects to be updated in order to stay useful, but you get all updates whether you like them or not). I understand, you're all busy people, and I'm not paying so I shouldn't complain, and who wants to work on backward compatible cruft when you could be building the next 'awesome bar'. I get all of that and people need to make trade offs - heck, I do it myself in my own software.

But then please for the love of god make about:config something that can be used without trawling mozilla.org discussion threads or random about.com 'articles'. There are hundreds and hundreds of about:config options, most of them more useless than the next, except for maybe 25 or so of them. If mozilla is already tracking so much, why don't they track the most-often changed settings through about:config and put them in their own section at the top of the list? Or, here's a radical idea, why don't they put the options in a tree rather than a flat list? Maybe ordered in a way that makes a bit of sense, but I may be pushing it there, I know. Why are we punched in the face with an 'options' dialog that (it seems) should have, in the eyes of most 'designers', only a very few options to the point where it becomes useless for 'advanced users', or kicked in the behind with an about:config page that could, functionally, just have well displayed 50 kb of output from /dev/urandom?

This : http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-cost... applies not to just Google Reader, guys... I've been using Firefox since the milestone builds of what back them was still just called 'Mozilla', if I'm remembering correctly, and I have yet to find something better (at least if you count in all the addins) but damn, if I were religious I'd do a prayer every time I see it 'installing updates', out of fear of what it's going to screw me over with in 'interface innovation' this time.

(done ranting now)
In 1978, you were a newborn male baby. A data broker identified you through your birth record, parents' buying habits before and after you were born, etc. And the tracking began. . .
Or perhaps a hidden developer menu, visible once you have done a specific action.

For example, in the last Android version you have to tap 7 time on the "Android version" field in the "About" screen to enable the developer menu. A casual user will never go there.

Or maybe just hide developer options in a about:developer menu.
Can anyone give some insight into why HN would be blocked in the Marshall Islands?
Heh. Ever heard the expression, you gotta kiss a lot of frogs?

Finding the right place for me is very different from finding the right place for you. For example, where I work (zulily) there is a ton to do. I think about all the cool problems I get to solve. But at the same time, I have to deal with a lot of "not how I would have done it" solutions. Don't get me wrong, I'm fully aware that any decisions that I make will be castigated by current/future workers (the wheels on the bus go round and round).

With that said, find an industry that interests you right now. Find companies that are using software to solve problems in that industry. Then just start working. When you are there, you have 2 outcomes - one is that everything is amazing and nothing needs to change (unlikely) and the second is that it's mostly OK.

If it's mostly OK, you can decide to put up with it (because the challenges and coding are tilting in the favor of happiness) or you can (cliche alert) be the change you want to see. If you see a process that you don't get, question it and find out why it got instituted. If no one can give you a good reason (and good is subjective I know), then change it. Get rid of it. Nuke it from orbit (it's the only way to be sure). If your boss says things like "Because I said so" - find somewhere else to work.

A lot of people will tell you "Just code on side projects". That's an awesome idea. but you can work on side projects about 2-3 hours a day (assuming you've got friends and other hobbies). Is that 2 hours a day really enough to make up for the soul sucking 8+ hours you spend at an office? I know it isn't for me. I've got side projects, but most of them revolve around how I can learn a new technology to help the company I'm currently working for.

And just to answer your original question: Yes. I'm still excited by programming.
Isn't the first paragraph exactly about that?
Thanks! A good idea, simply expressed. I am way off from my last known working configuration, time to switch back.
There is also
about:config
Well, hydro doesn't directly rely on the carbon cycle, but to be reliably practical, you need to build a reservoir, which usually absorbs lots of land already in use either by people or other denizens of nature, everybody seems to fight them when planners start planning.
Clever writing. The JS detracts heavily from the immersion of the tale, unfortunately, but the writing is very good.
The original Unreal used to wow me in terms of scale and beauty as well
This would be helpful for entrepreneurs in South Africa as well... http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm
Vagrant VM for StatsD and Graphite
Sorry Google, I’m switching to Microsoft
IMO, the issues you are describing are not design errors. They were _bugs_.
I would argue that Dropbox's design is quite resistant to failure since it allows for offline work and can even provide some P2P sync functionalities when the backend servers are down.
I decided to exclude global variables from my definition of closure to make it perfectly clear that closure, as it exists in JavaScript, LISP, Python and most other functional/modern languages, is different from raw function that can be defined in C, Java, and similar.

No, I deliberately chose the "wrong" example, and included a Note, saying that the function doesn't close over the values of its free variables, but rather over the whole variables (in different words, over the references to the values).
Fix your site; it doesn't load at all with JS disabled.
I think it is proof of quite a few things.

It proves that they are developing functionality that I've been looking for and some I didn't even know I wanted.

It is evidence that they want to be a great tool for developers and that they recognize their tool needs work.

It proves that I made the right decision (completely subjective which is the nature of a comment like the one I made) in moving away from Google for a more user centered and open-source browser.

And yes it proves that they listen to their users.

All of that is assuming they weren't lying or creating fake mockups (which I feel is a safe bet). Sure that's not a lot of proof for a scientific theory, but for a decision on which browser I want to use and which company I want to support I think it's proof enough :-)
Yeah. We're actually in the process of moving to D3 partly because of this. :\
Checked out her site, anyone else feel like she's outed the kool-aid man's family on the icon pack?
How to Build Your Own Functional Pressure Suit
You brought up poultices, or rather you linked to an article about them!
Innovation Park a Logical Place for an Innovation Conference
Thousands of people attempting to write to it at the same time? Maybe Drive wasn't prepared for such an eventuality.

In any case, I'm just speculating based on the mighty odd timing.
That’s because Netscape’s original counter-proposal to CSS for a styling language was called JSSS[1]. When it became obvious that CSS was the way the industry was moving they hurriedly implemented the new CSS API on top of the old JSSS engine, which required JS to run.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript_Style_Sheets
irrelevant. google provides ways to move your data - google.com/takeout/
OMG, thanks. Finally a reader as fast as Google reader.
> What happens to that process if you hide the things they could use to undertake it?

Then I, for one, would have never learned how to code.
The historical Lisp term is "upwards funargs".
I removed search box from Firefox few months ago and never looked back. I use search engine keywords instead[1]. My current keywords include goog, bing, amzn, crate, and wiki. Guess what search engine they refer to. :)

[1] http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches
GitLab now available in BitNami: installer, VM, cloud
The #1 thing the Firefox DevTools group should be doing is integrating Firebug into Firefox. Right now they have the same team maintaining two codebases. That seems like a significant waste of time.
The getFingerPrint Method - Oh Dear
On the business of literature - Richard Nash
Agreed, I would move a lot of these things to about:config so that power users can play with them while hiding them from average-Joes.
Learning How to Program ROS and TurtleBot
Hi Paul,

What I understood from your article is that you're mostly exploring 1) the possibility of opening up the dev tools to locally-installed applications like SublimeText2; and 2) the integration of jsFiddle-like apps within DevTools.

Please correct me if I misunderstood.

What I'm asking about is creating an in-browser API for a website to interact with the dev tools. Obviously, this would require a very thorough review of the risks of having such an API from a security perspective (and how users can opt-in in a transparent and well-controlled manner). That being said, I am still hoping!

If this is already in the books, then Hooray! I can't wait to start experimenting.

I hope I didn't come across poorly, because I really appreciate all the work you've been doing!
The composition of beliefs in the animal rights movement varies quite a bit. There are some that believe all killing of animals is wrong. But there are a greater number that believe the suffering inflicted by cruelty and careless farming methods is the only evil here. Some organizations are entirely devoted only to stopping cruel practices. Some of these people might be against eating meat entirely too, but only because they believe factory farming and cruelty is an inevitability for the mass production of meat.

Movements are inevitably made up of many different kinds of people with varying motives. There are always going to be radicals (like many with PETA), but the majority often have reasonable arguments and concerns.
Waiting for the day that NewsBlur becomes so successful that they get acquired by Google.
Decentralization.

AFAIK the biggest downtime-related issue for cloud services is network infrastructure. Single configuration changes, even distributed across dozens of global sites, can quickly bring down an entire network. Sometimes it's a bug in firmware across multiple hardware types from a single vendor. Sometimes it's a network storm. Sometimes it's a crappy BGP change.

There's no simple way of fixing this as unified configuration and deployment of changes is necessary to manage enterprise networks. Beautiful networks that use anycast and a single network protocol to manage distribution of load also have a single point of failure. And of course the application-layer systems themselves can carry bugs that lay hidden in software until one global change brings it out.

I recommend decentralization. Don't let a single company govern how the service runs. Let everyone on the internet participate in running it. This is how mail works, this is how DNS works (sort of), and this should be how HTTP works.
Why "bootstro" attributes instead of "data"?
> They are sleeping better w/o medication, they are not having anxiety attacks anymore, I could go on and on with her stories.

I would definitely attribute sleeping and anxiety problems as mental issues; medication will try to mess with the body's (brain)chemistry to fix it, but, whilst not into alternative medicine, I do think non-chemical treatments - psychology, relaxation therapy, physical therapy - can help with that category of ailments.
Well done. I've been thinking we need something like this for our app, but haven't poked around yet. Thanks for making this available.
Evolution is natural selection. They are precisely the same theory.

Directed evolution is a whole different ball game that presupposes an active god or a detailed master plan. Either way, that is not evolution as most scientists would view it or as Darwin theorized. And regardless, humanity is not at risk of spoiling such plans.
I remember reading a couple of blog posts about leaving the "powerful but hard to configure" vim land for the "powerful but differently and simpler" Sublime Text a few months ago.

But the authors didn't seem to know much about Vim anyway, so switching to ST2 may make some sense for them. Even if most of Vim's missing features were not missing at all and most of the touted ST2 features were gimmicky at best…

I have no idea why a seasoned Vimmer would decide to switch to ST2.
I kind of disagree, I would rather see Firefox DevTools not be Firebug. Firebug is not that great (compared to Chrome's debug tools) due to its UI. It looks like Firefox DevTools is at least going for a much better UI, so being constrained by Firebug would be a loss.
I don't think I am and I don't see how this makes it okay. Services that want to track people shouldn't be opt-out in the first place. It isn't obvious to anyone without some knowledge of computers (the vast majority of people) when they're being tracked.
What is your evidence against it? Clearly you know very little about the matter as all of this is well established and any biologist or TV wildlife program can set you straight.

Few predators "finish off" their prey though they may often kill it during the hunt, once the prey animal is disabled they start to feed.

House cats, for instance, will capture, release and recapture the prey animal, sometimes for hours.

Wolves and Dogs will hunt and not feed, often leaving the prey animal to die from it's wounds.

Also look into how predators teach their young to hunt. It is very unpleasant.

I'm not saying that factory farming should be allowed. In fact, I think future generations will correctly judge us harshly for the unnecessary atrocity that is modern agriculture.
Indeed, the audio is much louder than the voice.
Can you have it all? VC Jay Levy is the latest to try to build a co.
Why Roaming Costs Are Unjustified
"6 figures revenue in a couple of days"

Those couple of days took 4 years of preparation.
Quick nit-promote (nit-picking in order to agree even more), elite professional programs generally have attrition rates even lower than 3%. Columbia law school has an attrition rate of .3%. Yale and Stanford law schools have no attrition. [1]

http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2008/04/law-school-r...

[1] just noticed that these are 1L attrition rates. So actual rates may be a bit higher.
If poem -- programmer's version
short poem on programmers highly inspired by IF (Rudyard Kipling)
Putting a few dotfiles in a repo and cloning it for each new machine is a useful way of getting the advantages of dotfiles, which are many. Avoiding all customization just so you don't have dotfiles, just so you don't have to manage dotfiles (which is not hard, there are any number of simple techniques if you don't like this project) is counterproductive
The Good & Bad of Level 4 Media Queries
Who is making that argument though? That's not what this article is about. Most animal rights activists are primarily opposed to cruel practices only, not killing entirely.
I don't think the general personality traits of engineers lend themselves to "negotiating better".. . this is based on observing engineers that I respect and admire.
It's a design term. You'll generally hear people refer to "design comps" or the like.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_layout
Kandan, an Open Source Alternative to HipChat