skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Web devs , you are stupid sorry. JS is disabled on my browser and i get "Your browser sucks!" . Do you really think that makes me want to turn on javascript on your website ? no. My browser(chrome with js disabled) may suck , but if you cant provide at least a message like , 'please turn on javascript' instead of insulting me , then F. you . I'm not going to turn JS on on your website.
要做被在乎的女人 不做只在乎的女人 - 家庭爱情文章 - 佳礼网络社区综合论坛 ～ 马来西亚中文论坛 - Powered by Discuz
> I'm promoting SQL here and I still have to point out that SQL handles XML like crap too, try and index an XML blob.

To be fair SQL Server has constructs for this, but they are plenty in types and awful in nature. They are even worse to understand how they work and interact together and how they will optimize your queries.

And I guess maybe that was your point?

Handling XML in SQL was "reasonable" when the option was full fledged, tripple-verbose DOM code in compiled languages. These days though, you have better ways of "shredding" XML into usable data-constructs and the desire to do anything of that sort inside the DB is definitely approaching zero.
Our website design was stolen
I am the lead UI/UX Engineer for a company called HelloWallet in based in DC, and I came into work yesterday and was sent a link to this website: http://themattressboutique.com/

Our website is located here:
http://www.hellowallet.com

Notice any similarities? We are taking the necessary actions but I am curious, what would you all do in this situation?

Here is the traceroute:
xe-7-2-0-32767-sur01.floridaave.dc.bad.comcast.net (68.85.81.181) 9.943 ms 13.016 ms 10.529 ms
4 ae-20-0-ar04.capitolhghts.md.bad.comcast.net (68.85.115.201) 35.839 ms 22.171 ms 12.891 ms
5 pos-5-7-0-0-cr01.ashburn.va.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.90.85) 33.425 ms 20.759 ms
pos-4-3-0-0-cr01.ashburn.va.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.90.173) 17.624 ms
6 xe-11-1-0.edge2.washington12.level3.net (4.26.6.21) 20.346 ms 19.578 ms 17.183 ms
7 vlan51.ebr1.washington12.level3.net (4.69.146.190) 78.736 ms 76.601 ms 76.790 ms
8 ae-6-6.ebr1.atlanta2.level3.net (4.69.148.105) 78.316 ms 77.705 ms 77.245 ms
9 ae-63-63.ebr3.atlanta2.level3.net (4.69.148.241) 77.589 ms 79.110 ms 78.466 ms
10 ae-7-7.ebr3.dallas1.level3.net (4.69.134.21) 78.302 ms 78.583 ms 80.935 ms
11 ae-3-3.ebr2.losangeles1.level3.net (4.69.132.77) 76.571 ms 77.794 ms 76.753 ms
12 ae-82-82.csw3.losangeles1.level3.net (4.69.137.26) 78.186 ms
ae-92-92.csw4.losangeles1.level3.net (4.69.137.30) 77.761 ms
ae-62-62.csw1.losangeles1.level3.net (4.69.137.18) 83.570 ms
13 ae-2-70.edge6.losangeles1.level3.net (4.69.144.78) 75.762 ms
ae-3-80.edge6.losangeles1.level3.net (4.69.144.142) 79.727 ms
ae-4-90.edge6.losangeles1.level3.net (4.69.144.206) 77.652 ms
14 * * *
15 * * *
16 web04.lax1.pronethosting.net (209.151.224.237) 107.211 ms 76.224 ms 77.021 ms

And here is the web hosting company that is hosting it: http://www.coolhandle.com/

Flattering, huh?
> I guess it's 50/50 for the buyers now.

You need to retake basic probability.
UPDATE 2013-04-08: I got a phone call from a recorded voice that said that my laptop have been shipped and I would get it in 24h.

UPDATE 2013-04-09: I got another phone call from the Dell support center that confirmed the shipment but they said that may laptop have not been fixed. They are shipping it as it was a month ago!
They are sending me a new laptop in about 2 weeks and in the meanwhile I can keep my old one. I asked if they were sending me some sort of gift or a refund for all the trouble but they said that, as they’re a support center, they can’t and if I want I can send a letter to their lawyers. Another terrible story from Dell support service.
"Now imagine we change that drastically, to 100 of 1000 or even more. People will start to build their own little apps to solve their own little problems. And if these break, nobody cares, but them."

This was the old dream of Hypercard, and it worked very well for a long time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard

Both Danny Goodman and Bill Atkinson have stated publicly that they got programming questions from every kind of person: small business owners, school teachers, ski bums, taxi drivers, etc.

Hypercard let non-programmers build simple apps, and so a lot of apps were created that would never have been created if app-creation was left in the hands of professional programmers. And many of those little apps were tailored to what the creator needed at that moment, in a way that could never happen if a professional programmer drew up some spec.
> Acknowledge any inquiry within 5-10 minutes unless on a lunch break. Otherwise it means you are afk.

Quite possibly the worst piece of productivity advice I've ever seen. Given that if you're concentrating on a task it takes more than that amount of time to get back your train of thought, if you're doing this regularly during the day you'll get almost zero work done.

http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
Some people want to hit the world with something new and some people just want to get rich :)
And then someone emails 'the' spreadsheet to someone else, and now you have 2 different versions and no rational way to reconcile them. neither is authoritative anymore, and one probaby calculates the average of a list of phone numbers. (actual example...)

They're great up to a point, and that point is sharing. I'm actually surprised that google docs hasn't picked up more traction for that reason alone. sharing a google docs spreadsheet doesn't cause divergence.
Nothing like a rude message to encourage you to enable client side scripting.
I have merely a passive interest in economics, but my two cents:

There was an (anonymous) article a while back from someone who ran an [I believe a small] exchange, whereby he could manipulate the buy/sell prices to his advantage (driving up BTC price) - and I can see that happening very easily; I don't know what sort of algorithms Mt Gox (or any exchange) runs for it's immediate buy/sell spot price, but a simple variation of the weighted average over the past hour * 1.05 would easily provide a price that is always rising, unless a user manually gives a lower buy / sell price - and even then that would have to be beat the current price by 5% to make any impact on the spot price. Hell, you could just inflate the prices you show to users by a certain % to create that sort of meteoric rise, even if they do place lower/higher bids - those bids are somewhat based on what the value they see in that moment.

Is this a bubble? We just don't know. Currently there are people who are willing to part quite a lot of money for a scarce virtual currency, so by all accounts if there's a demand - the value will rise, especially if supply is limited (not just now, but there will only ever be a finite amount of BTC).

Even with the hiccups (0.8 vs 0.7 double spending, Mt Gox crashes) - and a price crash in it's history - surely anyone would think twice before putting down $200 per BTC, especially when it was worth only $15 three months ago.

What's convincing these folks to invest, I just don't know. Maybe they see something I don't, but at the moment I just see a very overvalued bubble just waiting to pop. A part of me fears that it's being overrun by folks who don't trust private financial institutions to hide their (illegitimate) wealth, as I don't think the average Cypriot has the wealth, nor there are enough Cypriots (or average / middle/working-class Europeans) altogether to create the demand which would push the price where it is now. Maybe someone can run the numbers; average salary, savings, investments, total # of folks who are tech savy enough to buy BTC, compare that with the uptake in Mt Gox (or other exchanges) signups, volume, traffic etc and put together a more substantial assessment.

BTC is something the world needs badly, and over the next decade I can see it becoming incredibly prominent. But the sort of rise we've seen in the past 3 months should've taken at least 3 years; and even then it's an incredible run for what's nothing more than a digital, limited commodity.
University of Nigeria,Nsukka
Check out this link (unn.edu.ng) for details on UNN's academic programs
That's essentially deflation and is generally regarded as a very bad thing. Nice write-up by Krugman: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/why-is-deflation...
"They wouldn’t pay any notice to flimsy trends, since monkeys don’t read TechCrunch."

Maybe we do pay too much attention to TechCrunch, but can you imagine the articles you'd read there when they start reporting on the Simian Start-ups? (simianstartups.com and simian-startups.com are both available ... let the gold rush begin).
I'd love to see a videoconferencing solution for cheap that dedicates a full wall of your home office (projector and hd camera combo) mirrored to a similar wall at the office, always on. I know there are expensive 100K type solutions out there, but I think a simple kit could be pulled off.

If someone wanted to do a quick face to face, they'd just walk up to your wall and start talking :) Additionally you could link walls with other remote workers or other wall set-ups elsewhere in the main office.

Edit: a mini short-throw projector would work well here

Edit2: for privacy, since this setup would be always on, you could switch to "closed door mode" which would project a wall and door picture instead. Perhaps the camera on the office end could detect using kinect style magic when someone knocks on your "door" :)
I'm along your lines. If I happened to have a stash of bitcoins in my pocket, I'd be very careful about actually buying anything with them today, as the next week they would be more and more valuable. So I think the deflation is the main reason why I don't feel comfortable with idea of using bitcoins as a currency for buying anything - selling might be a different story.

edit: How large volumes of selling bitcoins for USD/EUR/etc. is enough to have significant effect on the value of bitcoin? For example if I had VERY URGENT need to sell 100 000 bitcoins by tomorrow in exchange for USD.
You say that as if your users will actually read that. I find that the ones who need the most help don't read anything you've written and expect to follow the process they have in their mind no matter what happens.

I have literally read the message on the screen to someone to solve their problem.
I know this sounds very condescending and even a little elitist, but usually when people say "I am proficient with a CLI but prefer a GUI" I hear "I have memorised a few commands but I don't understand them, so I prefer a GUI". The reason being that I have genuinely never found a GUI for an application which is simpler or easier to use than a CLI.

I'm just curious; you seem to imply that you find basic commands (add, commit, push, pull) easier to perform in a GUI than a CLI. Why is that? What is it about a CLI which isn't simple?
i've already made my xtranormal bears video for the crash...
These four words can change your entrepreneurial life forever.
I could hear the volume of my 'mental voice' rising as the various forms of emphasis started overlapping and leaving less and less text untouched, until it felt like I was reading the screaming denouncements of a deranged dictator.

The content was actually quite interesting underneath.
Startup idea: Biggest Bitcoin Online Shop
One thing that I've learned to do after a few years working remote is always, early in the beginning of the work day, to send an email to other co-workers with a list of TODOS I plan on working during the day and ETAs for each one of them. This way everybody knows what I'm working on and what deliverables to expect from me by the end of the day.

It makes it possible for priorities and adjustments to be discussed before I start working and it makes me feel responsible for deliverables and not for being always online in fear other people might think I'm slacking work.
Since when have we only had javascript in the browser? We've had Java applets. We've had Flash. The issue is security holes. The reason our children will never laugh at us for only using javascript in the browser is because we cared about writing secure web applications.
You're not missing anything :)
As is the case with most Important Capitalized Phrases he uses.
The preference is always to get some sort of websocket connection. If native websockets aren't present and flash is enabled, it'll try to create a websocket connection via flash first. It's only if that fails for some reason that it tries to connect via other means.
And only four to counter: "Be a hard worker".
General purpose programming languages' speed of light
And are there any considerations nowadays to not just run the whole site under HTTPS?
You can't actually buy that, though. The Belkin dock is the Duke Nukem Forever of the peripheral industry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
Pitching Wigwamm in an elevator
A) It's insulting your browser, not you. Don't take it to heart it looks like a joke.

B) Your browser DOES suck if you're not using javascript.
Except in the world of C, the common denominator isn't the language but binaries. You can write in any language you want so long as you have a good compiler.
There are rumors[1] that MtGox will be announcing Litecoin and Namecoin support this week, which may alleviate things. (Litecoin has four times the number of mine-able coins that Bitcoin has and its proponents refer to it as the silver to Bitcoin's gold.)

[1] Based on their API responding to LTC/USD requests (http://data.mtgox.com/api/2/LTCUSD/money/ticker) and some Twitter chatter.
Reading some of the go programs, they do not appear to be configured to take advantage of more than one core.
While "incremental counter" is a cool idea, I fail to see how it really improves anything. You're just moving the same problem from one layer to another. Node.js does all Pushpin does and you can write "simple chat server in 30 lines of code" as well, without the need to set up another piece of software.

This look like band-aid for developers still stuck with Python, PHP, whatever... technology from 2000's. I see I've got a down-vote from fanboys already, but that's just the way HN works: it's hard to have a constructive coversation, but it's easy to hate.

P.S. @jkarneges, this reply was not directed at you, but whoever down-voted my simple question. I mean, how can you down-vote a question? Let's not question anything and spread love, a la Facebook "like-button-only" style. :(
I hardly think Steve Gibson is a freak.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Gibson_%28computer_progra...
> That might be enough to draw interest

That is pretty much the zinger. If Google hadn't been involved, Go probably wouldn't be were it is at all.
My personal experience has been that working remotely can actually make you significantly more productive, because you can shut off email and all distractions and concentrate on difficult problems for hours at a time. Just make sure people have your phone number if something truly urgent comes up.

In an office environment you have people wanting to talk to you all the time (almost always about things that could have waited), and you're constantly distracted, which means things take twice as long to get done.

This of course depends very much on the nature of your job. For programming, research, writing etc. the above holds, but for other jobs the situation might be quite different.
Selling clothing at a retail store isn't the same thing as selling Apple devices at an Apple store? Huh. I thought profession was more important than understanding an industry.
The world's largest enterprises are increasing their investments in Linux
Imagine an infinite number of 32GB microsd cards. One of those cards would contain at least 100's of the best apps out there for every platform, 100's of the best books, and 100's of the best photos, as well as 100's of the best blog posts. It would truly be original unlike all the software today that builds on previous ideas, or books that build on previous ideas, or art that builds on previous ideas.
Are you suggesting it's substantially more likely that it will crash?
Cloud's real ecological timebomb: Wireless, not data centres
This reminds me of Google's effort to run C and C++ code on the client side of the browser.

https://developers.google.com/native-client/
Rewrite are bad, true. But sometimes unavoidable. Really.

When you have a PHP project where there's a mix of procedural function (the code is at the top and the html at the bottom, so it's easy to split right ? Hum and those includes, what do they do exactly ?), ... classes (We used classes to put our functions in so we do OOP, right ? Err... no) and parts of a heavily customized Wordpress.
Plus two-three half started in-code reorg/rewrite that went nowhere because the devs jumped the ship.

You're told you have to I18N the whole spaghetti meatball soup. You try a few weeks and then see you're going nowhere and start to realize that you're doomed to a rewrite. Oh, and you're a team of two. Sometimes you really have to. And migrating data .... such a pain in the ass ! Test encoding I'm looking at you ! At of hand int code (would not call that enum) I'm looking at you too.

But. It's not always the case. And right now I'm starting the reorganize and refactoring a project that was already in a descent shape. And it's much more interesting, less straining and business owner have more visibility on the work done and are happier.

So yes, whenever you can, incremental rewrite is the way to go. But never say never. There are contexts where doing a rewrite is just plain necessary because the code is in such a bad shape you just can't add any feature anymore.
Whats with all of these anti-Bitcoin articles from people who keep cranking out strawman attacks?
"I know I'm in the minority among shoppers"

Vast minority among people who count shopping as a hobby, yet vast majority of the population. This is like the TV narrowcasting phenomena where a "success" is 2% of the population being rabid hyper fans and 98% of the population not even willing to watch for free, or to a lesser extent FPS video games. Hyperoptimization to a small group guarantees lack of large group/total population success.

Locally a regional competitor Kohls and national player JCP fight pretty hard for literally generations over who wins the "my hobby is shopping for womens clothes" crowd. The other 95% of the population, like us, go to Target, walmart, pretty much any place else. Dropping the hobby shoppers means they lose whatever fraction of the 5% they used to have, plus the 95% have been marketed for generations not to shop there. I certainly have not set foot in a JCP over the past 14 months. Given a couple years I might have been convinced to try it, but...

You can't turn around a business model that has been marketed for over a generation. If Pepsi decided to skip all this HFCS cola stuff and ship canned apple cider, its going to take a lot longer than 14 months or whatever this guy had. The startup lesson is its much easier to pivot into something entirely new, like a desktop/laptop computer company going into portable music players and then pivoting again into phones, or a search engine giant going into webmail and then into phones.

For some tech examples of rough pivots that are just too close to home to succeed, think of ebay trying to turn themselves into a poor copy of amazon by driving away all the small/individual sellers, or craigslist trying to turn themselves into a poor copy of ebay instead of being the wild west of classified ads.

Closer to home "hacker news" could probably pivot into a daily tech video newscast feed, but it would be hopeless to try to pivot into a poor clone of digg/reddit. (LOL have some "hacker news gold" for your post, or maybe we'd use BTC LOL)

Could Walmart pivot into an upscale bespoke merchant of $2500 mens suits? Not a chance, too close. Could they pivot into being car dealers or check cashing bankers? Sure! In fact that's probably a good idea.
Someone paid me 0.5 BTC for a $15 subscription a while ago, now it's worth $100.
Dear rsvidal,

Congratulations and I wish you the best of luck.

As you can infer from the comments here, please keep in mind (as you no doubt already understand) that Elsevier is widely mistrusted and nobody is willing to take them at their word. Indeed, with 13,385 of my colleagues I am a proud signatory to the Elsevier boycott.

Regardless of whether Elsevier is an "evil" company or not, they are mostly engaged in rent seeking rather than wealth creation, and I am convinced that academia will be better off without them than with them.

However, organizations can and do change, as you acknowledge in your blog post. You have a difficult road ahead of you. I wish you the best of luck. I have never used Mendeley, but it sounds like you have enormous power to do good if you succeed.
You should. Cathartic.
Just don't be too specific and don't name names.
Long distance 3D laser camera
AppCooker – The Amazing App Mockup Editor
AppCooker’s mockup editor gathers all major graphic design tools: vector shapes, text, bitmap drawing, icon library, images, and all of the UI elements for iPhone and iPad (bars, buttons, objects, etc.).
Ask HN: Which is the better option?
Over the past month or so I have been trying to teach myself JavaScript. I have minimal previous programming experience and have only used online resources, CodeCademy and LearnStreet, but they don't go into the level of detail I am after and confuse me.

Although I have friends who can help me if I have questions, not everything is making sense! I'm not sure if it's because of the sheer flexibility of the language or I'm just not picking it up.

My question to you is, would it be easier to grab the concept of programming if I were to learnt a more structural language first, e.g. C# or Python, or should I just carry on with JavaScript?
Were there "mysterious" injuries during production though?
the crash will come, the question is at what price and what will be the floor after the crash. Is it a bubble if it goes to 100000 and crashes to 5000? yes, but still good for bitcoin I suppose
Startup opportunity, dealing with the infinite food supply and the infinite amount of monkey poop.
Money should increase in value only in debt/interest free society. If you have in the economy debts deflation is bad idea.

Economy is positive feedback loops mostly. Exponential function is a bitch to control in the real world.
Fry.IO -  An ultra simple URL shortener
Where is gold traded as a currency? In what market are weights of gold used as a medium of exchange?
Cable itself is dying (or at least stagnating) as well. Overall new subscriptions to cable/satellite are essentially zero [1]. To the extent providers are getting new customers, they are mostly coming from a competitor.

People are less and less inclined to plan their schedules around broadcast content. They want to watch what they choose, when it's convenient. Cable doesn't really offer that any better than over-the-air broadcasting.

1: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_ZERO_TV?SITE=AP...
If you are starting with some new language or technology that you are not very fluent at, and months later you land in that same project with a wider experience in the language, would you rewrite that code?
“Whitespace is Insignificant”?
I just don't think this is possible at the moment. A t-shirt a few months ago would've cost 3 BTC ($5 each.) Now that same T-Shirt, with the same BTC price would cost $200.

The solution here looks like you need to make a store that automatically adjusts the prices based on the current exchange rate. But then why not just use USD instead?
Branding does matter for a startup
Why? So long as there are proper repercussions against the person who did the deed, if that person wasn't a part of Disney, what could Disney have reasonably done? If there turns out to be nothing it could reasonably have done, then whence comes responsibility?
Where are you? I would guess Japan, but they have a decent google job presence. It's a world market for good software talent, so you are high end and have flexibility where to live, there are plenty of ways out.