skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>If I could pick one thing about myself to improve right now it would be API design skills.

I know it's cliche to suggest, but learn by doing. You need to think about what you're doing, of course. Otherwise you're just doing things by rote.

One thing I love to do when designing an API is to write pseudo-code that is using the new API, before I even start to design the API itself. Just think to yourself, "What is the exact call I want to be able to make?"

That call probably doesn't have a dozen parameters, or 15 lines of set-up. It has the minimal information you need to get things done.

Oh, and one other trick: If anything EVER annoys you about an API, decide to fix it rather than putting up with it. I don't care if it's NOT "your" API to fix; wrap it with convenience functions if necessary.

Good luck.
What makes sales tax better than other taxes in this regard?
Please read up on public goods, natural monopolies and externalities before you claim that the capitalistic market outcome always reflects what a good is worth to society.
It would also seem the team would be more comfortable in the interview having already gone through the experience and met the interviewers.
Sounds like a great place you have!

I think this whole comment can be summarised by the line of 'do you trust us?' The answer is currently no which is fine, but over time, we might just win you over.

On touch, I completely agree.
- Buying something small to test out the system such as our stool we currently have on kickstarter. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jamesmcbennett/this-stoo...
- Targeting coffee shops to show the furniture
- Pop-ups and so on...
- Also seeing it at a friends house would count too.
- Creating surround sound of postive karma within a city.

Responability is an intersting one for any of these new digtial-to-physical systems. Teaching on 3D printing at General Assembly, we get deep into discussions on the wider aspects of law, quality control and future of quality marks in this new system. Great example you mention Foxconn -> Apple and Apple host reputation on the line. I think Fabsie's reputation is on the line in this case.

At the moment, crowdsourced people = some of the best designers in the best offices in the world who most people don't have access to. When I was working in design offices, most designers (architects in this case) had the problem that we wanted to design a mass product but had no platform to do so.

We are starting in Plywood and will expand into other materials. I am influenced by designers like Marc Newson who can sell the same form at $300, $3,000 and £300,000 depending on what material the chair is made of. We intend to start in Plywood, then offer solid wood and add other digital-to-physical machines.
I was reading the "Google is equivalent to a billion people" article, and it linked to Jerry Pournelle's home page as an exemplar of Web 1.0 "Home" pages, and since I did some intern work for Jerry back in the Chaos Manor days I looked at it, and re-discovered one of his essays on how he felt we could get into space in a more durable way.

I enjoyed reading it again especially on the flip side of the second SpaceX commercial launch and its testing of its Grasshopper tech for re-usable craft.
Just so you know: Every current rule that could potentially reduce your tax burden is now called a "loophole". For example: Limiting deductions for high earners (but not exactly the same deductions for low earners) is now routinely described by politicians and the media as "closing loopholes".
Good point...

Well, if we've always been doing X, and it seems we cannot do without it (well, try to argue against that); and then at some point we started doing Y (while still doing X); and Y is conflicting with/retarding X; then Y must be detrimental to our human nature.

On a different line of thought... In this case, X (i.e the spatio-temporal interdependence of our species) seems to pretty much enable Y anyway, so could X further be said to be more fundamental than Y? Well, Y also could be argued to enable X (hey, consumerism keeps us interacting with each other, etc.)... but it does a rather poor job overall. I don't think it's a great innovation, as much as some sociologists would probably wish to believe.

So... All in all, and to be more polite, we say it's preferable to postulate X, rather than Y, as fundamental to the so-called human nature, in order to make possible desirable results – such as a thirst for learning, curiosity, a concern for others, etc.
> The social aspect can be addressed by having physical activity clubs/gatherings/groups/centers. I don't know if schools already do this,

They do. Really, the negative comments here on homeschooling are staggeringly out of date.

Go look at K12.[0] That's what "homeschoolers" in the State of California use, through something called CAVA. I've got two boys in CAVA and one boy in regular public school. The K12 courses are incredibly well-designed.

The education in the public school (and we're in the best school in Palmdale) is terrible. CAVA is amazingly good, way better than the education I got in public school growing up.

[0] http://www.k12.com/
1. The parents aren't the ones who are expected to teach, they are expected to select online(or off) "coursework." So a parent doesn't have to be proficient in what he expects his child to learn.

2. Does everyone have to know everything? Isn't that a line between good parenting and bad parenting. If you think your kid will benefit from arts and history and what not, you will make sure they go through those courses. Why do you need someone else to force your kids to go through that curriculum? This just sounds like an implication that parents don't know what's good for their children, so we should trust what the experts have outlined for us.

Well, in the homeschool/online education setting, you still could and probably would consult education/career counselors for selection of syllabus.
"slipage is the price the trade gets executed vs. where you thought it would be."

Anyone not using limit orders in an automated trading system deserves whatever they get.
Sorry but I don't think this analogy works. How many people would it take to lift a plane 38,000 feet into the air at 600 mph? You can't measure the usefulness of jet travel by such labor utility metrics, it's nonsense.

Perhaps you can quantify how much gasoline and time jets save as compared to other methods of travel, such as by train or boat. But going on some hypothetical equivalent of Google search with hundreds of thousands of librarians made me stop reading midway through.
Where does it do that?

Basically it says following:
* some people I know are upset
* we know from economics, but often forget, that some products can be not viable even if people are willing to pay for them
* historical solution is to make them public service which also to Krugman seems hard to envison

Nowhere does he say anything about importance of Reader.
Traditional academic institutions serve two purposes:

1) Credentialing
2) Capital-intensive research

There is nothing on the internet that is a threat to these two core functions.
I'm well aware of the other Google products killed during Spring/Fall cleaning runs, but they were all in a similar state of abandonment. It would be a worse practice to let old products sit by the wayside without development, yet be forced to keep them barely alive on life support. They aren't going to kill off Gmail, for example (though I have my doubts about something like Google Voice).
7 most helpful forums where Internet marketers and SEO addicts hang out
Perhaps you have not heard of Microsoft Research. [1]

[1] -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research
Your idea is really awesome....also I think a site like this would be bring better quality to the web development or for those clients that look for quality. Really the quality on Elance is so low that someone showed me a project made with an offshore freelancer and the website has no security at all...not 1 database query is sanitized.
Man, they handled it well. The guy got the low-brow humor without acting particularly low-brow, which is a difficult thing to do. I wonder if.. they planned it? That would have been brilliant.

The thing is, it's probably one of those "only funny once" things, so I doubt that the next company trying it would be so successful. (That, and the original company, man, if they were planning it? they were /subtle/ - and that made it way better. It's totally believable as an accident. that'd be a difficult thing to follow up on.)
The extensive use of slurry walls was one of my favorite parts of the Big Dig. I remember reading about all the European equipment and people who came over. I have an awesome coffee table book about the Big Dig that was given to me by friends who still live in the North End.

Two of the highlights of my time in Boston were the tunnel walk beginning at the southern end of the I-93 table, and talking across the Zakim Bridge before it opened up. I've got 8mm tapes somewhere of video I took on those days. Who ever thought up that idea was a PR genius. :)

(BTW I'm jealous you got to work on the project)
To This Day. A poem exploring the devastating effect of bullying
> his psuedo-socialist, big government, leftist ideology

What are you talking about? What part of the article made that impression on you and why?
Why? That was not the point of his article and it is too soon to tell if we would lost anything. Even if we would, he is not obliged to research and write about every possible aspect.
Get A HN T-Shirt
So, basically, private school?

This is where my wife and I want to send our daughter if we ever make it back to Chicago: http://www.chicagogrammar.org/curriculum.

Basically some guy decided to home school his kid, but let other kids join in.The result was a curriculum in which kids learn formal logic in middle school.
> Parents can choose what is best for their children

They don't need those English courses, or waste time on that History stuff. They'll never need chemistry or physics so why waste their time on that...

There is a time to pick your courses, it's called University. Primary and Secondary school should be a buffet of many many things. Things that are 'unimportant' to their work are actually important to them as an individual. Neither the child nor most parents recognize that.

Case in point, a lot of the current stupidity in US politics is because of people misunderstanding or flat out not knowing the history of the US and the political process in the US. This idea of a la carte education would make that worse. However no parent is going to have their kid 'waste' their time on history or civics when they could be studying to be the next Steve Jobs.

> my kid shows interest in becoming an Astronaut
And next week they'll want to be a drummer. Kids whims change with the wind. Most don't solidify on a career idea until their late teens, if not later.
How is it incorrect? Amazon charges its customers credit cards, and a portion of that charge consists of sales tax which it is obligated to collect on behalf of the state.
This is awesome! All for the longtail! There's definitely a shortage of machinist skills out there at the moment but it's services like this that'll get groups of young people interested in learning those skills again.
Cloud: Where some see slavery, minorities see freedom
Ditto for Ubuntu/Linux!
Not sure how to answer your question, but one thing's for sure: CS is no longer just CS, isolated by itself.

CS is increasingly interdisciplinary, with cross pollination of students and teachers in other fields like bioinformatics, physics, math, economics, ecology, public health, etc. At least in these fields, it's pretty dinosaur like to just think of CS as its own thing instead of applied CS.

And per your assumption, I actually studied biochemistry and economics in college. I taught myself how to code as a way to get out of academia, but I'm pretty useless in anything related to CS research.
1. Yep, I'm aware of Notebook. At the same time, though, notebook was built on an aging stack and had no mobile presence when it was killed. Keep can either be considered a rehash or a reboot of it, but it's a new take on the idea. I'm still trying it out for myself, but I've at least found it partially more helpful than Notebook for mobile use.

2. Google+ won't be killed, because it's a social layer that's built into Google. It isn't a singular product, but is baked into everything Google is doing now that involves social. Sure, at this point in time, it appears that the service is fairly low - but where was Twitter 20 months after launch? I might be playing a "Google card" here, but it's still a relatively new social network, compared to its competition.

I only wish that if they were going to launch further products, they'd tag them "beta," like they did in the past. That way, if they shut them down, it would at least make sense from a "well, it was a trial" standpoint.
It's a resource hog, suffers from XMLitis and theming is much more complex than your typical CMS without giving you any significant advantage.
Proof that you can't do something is harder to get than proof that you can. It's hard to prove that an animal can't make a hammer drill, for example.
Although there are interesting results there. There have been a few studies now done with dogs and their ability to not only recognize human faces, but to decipher emotions from them. It's fascinating insight into how domesticated dogs complement humans in really amazing ways.
Personal Blocklist(by me)
http://crossrider.com/download/29789
> here an extension that works with firefox and google chrome (and maybe with some version of ie)
> currently only block w3schools and expert-exchange :-)
> will be extendable soon

it is not on the browser marktplaces right now, so you kind of got to install it manually.
Worse is when they do use debian, so they care about debian... but not about any other distribution. (And debian is weird in how it packages some things - when I had a project released as source tarballs, the only people I got emails about failing to build it were debian users).

More modern languages solve this by having their own formats - java/maven is particularly impressive, but python/ruby/node all have their own ways to specify dependencies and package libraries - which not only work crossplatform, but also make it much easier to have compatible or incompatible version bumps.

Maybe it's time for a virtualenv/bundler-like solution for C. Or time to stop using it for anything outside the base OS.
For all but the superstars with a desire to pursue academia, it is irrational to stay. Especially outside CS, a lot of quality people are heading towards oblivion (middle age with no job, no prospects) by doing a PhD. I know some of them, and it makes me sad to think about it. There just aren't enough jobs and funding dollars to go around. It's not to humanities adjunct-hell level yet, but it stopped being a sound economic decision a long time ago.

When people criticize academia I listen because I think everybody's got something to say, even if part of their message is self-justification. In non-CS sciences with fewer pathways to industry, it takes guts to speak out about the truth of the situation because the culture selects so strongly against it.
I did something similar for MATLAB; it doesn’t enjoy GUI stuff, but it adds functionality to Sublime Text 2 that was simply non-existant beforehand. Check it out: https://github.com/jessebikman/Sublime-Text-2-build-Matlab-c...
Jury rules Cisco owes $70 million for patent fraud
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=852648
Did a search and found this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_Amateur_Scientists
We're five years and billions of dollars of wealth destroyed from the following Google headline:

Google to re-focus on it's core competency in search, in bid to regain competitiveness and re-ignite growth.

Remember the good old days when Google's mission was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"? Someday, they'll get back to that. For now, it's clone Facebook! Stat!

Google Reader organized RSS feeds -- information. That was the old Google, the old mission statement, the old focus. That's why Larry killed it. Someday, Google will swing back, because that's actually why we all like Google anyway. Hopefully, it won't be too late.
This type of discussion is pretty pointless anyway, but since we started ;-)

I have a few comments about second article "The boat engine is worth 33500 Egyptian slaves"

First ancient Egyptians did not use slaves. Workforce in Old Kingdom which build pyramids were free men. Later it was more similar to feudalism. (BTW: women had more rights in Ancient Egypt than most women in 20th century)

Also towing is not really necessary on river Nile. There are northerly winds for most of year, so one could just use sail to travel upstream.

And third; 'Pharaoh Nile Express ' actually exist, but it had only 30 rowers :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khufu_ship
I just wonder how effective that would be. I think kids would have a hard time focusing in front of a computer, and being lectured to. I think a large part of the elementary school education is working on activities and worksheets, especially in groups. I'm not sure you can replicate that in an online course, and I just wonder how effective an online course could be for younger kids. I'd actually be interested in seeing if there have been any studies done on this.
What nonsense. Either way. I said neither of those things.

It is not age that is the problem, it is RSS itself. RSS is just not a good solution in the long run because, amongst other things, we a. get better and better at parsing language, which makes a separate protocol unnecessary and b. we, right now, are more into cloud based news delivery, think links on twitter, etc.

More semantic alternatives to HTML (like HTML5, but good) will also make things like RSS useless.
It's always better to be pleasantly surprised that a service is around than shocked when it shuts down. I agree in that the lesson should be to be skeptical, because it prevents people from being complacent with their information. I'd much rather pay for Reader or similar services from Google, but that would easily attract hate from the "Google always made free products" stance that's circulated around a lot.

Even if Google doesn't go back from killing Reader, they've seen the response that this particular shutdown has caused. It would be suicide for them to do it again (especially in this manner), so I reckon they'll be more cautious next time. Then again, fool me once...
1. Couldn't read the article, but get the gist.
2. Years ago I got a B.A. in business.
3. I can honestly say 90% of the courses were, pretty much
a waste if time. I literally had one instructor tell his
students, "I really don't want to be here, so I don't
exect you to even show up". Being young and naive, I went
to a few of his classes; He literally read, verbatim, from
a Accounting Book.

4. The Internet can teach a person much more than most
colleges, with the exception of a professional degree--medicine, or engineering. Even then, the degree will just
open the door. I've met engineers that couldn't build a house.

5. If you have the money, go for a degree. The women are
plentiful--that's about all I remember. Oh, yea--learn
what the placebo effect is, and don't let others take
advantage of you. Be careful with the student loans--
they are not bankruptable--at least for now. Hopefully,
that might change.

6. The most successful tech guys I have know dropped out
of school, and learned to program on their own.

7. I've met too any people who feel guilty not completing
the degree. I truely, feel they are better off--really.
I have seen too many Ivy League guys "skate" on projects, while the high school drop out works 2x as hard, and
in the end; most managers do take notice of the "Contributers" and eventually realize the guy with Stanford
sweatshirt doesn't do much, besides look cool in the
company pictures.
This sounds like you're saying "We've always done it so it is ok by me." It's flawed reasoning. Following that reasoning why'd we let women start to vote?

As mlent points out we have a choice today. In the past there were times when it was necessary to travel and survive. Why do it if it's unnecessary?
Non concurrent:

ab -n 100 http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.1/jquery.min...

ab -n 100 http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.1/jquery.mi...

Concurrent case:

ab -c 5 -n 100 http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.1/jquery.mi...

ab -c 5 -n 100 http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.1/jquery.min...
There's a lot of truth to what you're saying, yet plenty of platforms, products and services with perfectly viable business models go away. The Apple Newton (for which people paid good money) was launched and discontinued in less time Reader existed.

Perhaps all the "highly influential taste-makers" who are asserting that they'll not trust Google products in the future chose not to buy iPods because of Apple's behavior. I doubt it.

At the end of the day, the "tax" that early adopters pay often consists both of higher prices and the chance that the thing they are investing in will never take off. Indeed, I bought a Sony Smart Watch last year expecting that it'll fail, but I still saw value in getting personal experience with a type of technology that I expect will be influential.

There are reasons why people are slow adopters and laggards, they aren't just Luddites, they want to receive proven value, and not waste their time on dead ends.

We are lucky enough to live in a time where the rate of innovation is increasing. There are more options, more value created, and also more dead ends. Perhaps some people need to re-calibrate how they self identify as adopters.
Curious, what kind of software do you guys use internally to track financials which is also accessable to the rest of the employees ?
Gentlemen scientists tended to be free of the responsibilities of the common man. The vibe of the Royal Society was a bunch of stuck up nobility debating worthless issues. There is a vain of thought that says science was promoted during the enlightenment precisely because it distracted the nobility from aspiring for social change. Voltaire in Candide mocked this with a debate, if I recall on sheep color.
I think I need to learn emacs.
I'm not sure I want to even learn emacs.
But everytime I see a video of someone using emacs I find myself wondering "what the hell IS this?"

Is this how people feel when they see someone using vim? (I use vim.)
Why San Francisco Really Is That Bad (for women)
Rewriting any code in any language pretty much always show improvements.
Unless we're sure it's not a different data structure or algorithm it doesn't mean that much.
There's always the obvious solution:

http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://www.bbc.co...

But it's a misleading headline. It's about a new type of piano. See
http://www.musicradar.com/news/tech/roli-seaboard-instrument...
It's not entirely clear that you know what the Royal Society actually did. It was hardly a model.

The Royal Institution is more along the lines of what you describe. Or here in the US, the Wood's Hole oceanographic institute. It was pretty much propped up by the Rockefellers.
If you don't need to kill/keep captive animals for food to live healthily, why do it?

Because it tastes good. Just like every other type of food we eat that isn't a requirement for living healthily.
I'm in the UK, and I check TotalJobs and CWJobs daily (Mostly out of curiosity) - I don't actually go to the websites, they email me, persistently, every single day. It was annoying at first but I've made it part of my morning routine to take a look at the cooler jobs they send through, it means I will be in a good place when I finally decide to change companies - I will already have a bucket of potential jobs to sift through without the headache of having to search.
1 Dead After Cedar-Riverside Area Police Standoff « CBS Minnesota