skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to lead the development team for Yahoo! Answers, which was split between London, UK and Mission College, CA. Because of the massive time difference (8 hours, or an entire working day), collaboration was hard. We got by with a mix of the following:

- Weekly conference calls via video chat. For those with less budget than Yahoo!, Skype would suffice;

- Adobe Connect with screen sharing and shared chat for tech demos or presentations. It's the easiest to install and seems to work the best on iffy connections;

- Shared collaboration areas (Wikis and mailing lists) to dump things when others are offline;

- IM and IRC for "hi can you look at this?" type questions, or link sharing; and

- Conference calls on the phone for targeted meetings (the productivity cost of a phone call is too high to have it frequently - people can work on their laptops in video conferences if they need to).

Between all these things we just about got by - I'd like to add the voices in the comments saying that face time is still very important. We'd typically fly to Santa Clara once or twice a year for either an entire sprint or for specific architectural/product meetings.
I cannot believe they actual gave it to him. It was fairly obviously hacked, and it isn't like 4chan has all that much real world influence (excepting when the hive mind decides to do something, but moot isn't at the head of that).
I used POE to get more work out of each thread of a web crawler. It scaled to about 20 asynchronous crawlers in one thread, but above that amount things got much more complex than using threads. POE's non-preemptive scheduling made it quite tricky to get everything working ok past that point - some component or other would time out, and it was murder debugging POE's debug output.

It ended up being harder than just using threads, although I was able to get 20 times the work per thread, so I'll count that a success.

POE is tricky as hell, and I kept thinking, "Why am I not just using Erlang? It does this, only its scheduling is preemptive and I don't have to worry so much about things breaking."

POE is cool, but it only gets you so far if you're doing something very parallel.
100 Useful Tools, Apps, and Add-Ons for Finance News Junkies
From desktop news tickers to mobile financial tools, here are 100 tools to modify your browsers, trick out your phone or share and search for the latest news and information about the financial market.
In the phrase "every word works hard for its living", every word works hard for its living. What would you call that, a meta-sentence?
I've stayed away from mobile browser development for anything other than iPhone and Android. In the past, BlackBerry's user-agent was unique to the phone, not the browser, making it extremely difficult to target ALL the BlackBerry handsets with one swoop. In addition, mobile browsing has been dumbed down — I'm not sure you really need a CSS framework given the simplicity.

As for the iPhone, I'm a fan of iWebkit. It could be very easily tailored to work on the Android, IMO.

http://iwebkit.net

And here are 3 tags for mobile Safari you'll find useful:

<meta content="yes" name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" />

<meta content="minimum-scale=1.0, width=device-width, maximum-scale=0.6667, user-scalable=no" name="viewport" />

<link href="http://link-to-your.com/app-icon.png" rel="apple-touch-icon" />
I find it somewhat amusing that none of the comments so far seem to acknowledge that this is written by Eric S Raymond. I guess that shows how far he's fallen into irrelevance.

Without wanting too engage with the actual content too much, he appears to be arguing, despite the headline, that there is no economic benefit or cost to the the GPL. The only impact is based on human (actually corporate) psychology of not liking being sued.
This article is silly. There is a HUGE difference (several orders of magnitude) in CPM between slapping up some Google ads on your blog about puppies, and hiring a sales team to sell ads into your niche site full of highly qualified people who advertisers want to reach.
How to Improve Typography In Your Designs
I love the BBC just because it's publicly funded — they don't even need to grab your attention to make a profit from you!

It's a tax I can honestly say I don't mind paying!
>> "How? Use innerHTML wherever possible. "

Terrible advice IMHO. True, innerHTML is faster in IE, so if you care about IE being slow (I don't), use innerHTML. However, innerHTML is buggy, has a bunch of caveats, and just looks incredibly ugly.

http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/innerhtml.html

On non-IE browsers, the difference in speed is negligible, and the code is far nicer using dom methods. (My browser SF/OSX reports 20ms for innerHTML, 25ms for DOM).

You also have useful references to nodes you might need later which makes code nicer and more optimum.
For example, you could do innerHTML=foo, then use getElementByID later to update one of the nodes in foo. But using the dom methods, you can just save the ref to the node when you create it yourself. You can also attach any event handlers easily as you go, rather than trying to cram them in the HTML (Even more eugh) or set them up afterwards.
That's nice. What proportion of the population is mentally capable of the abstraction and symbolic logic necessary for science? Somewhere between forty and sixteen per cent and forty would really blow my mind. For the maintenance of our way of life we don't need scientists, we need engineers (not suggesting they're scientifically ignorant) Most people are way more interested in people than things so enthusiasm for science is limited to a subset of those capable of it. Sagan was only right if you're in the context of rebuilding after a disaster and if interested amateurs have much to offer we're probably all screwed.
Web Apps: On Value, Originality, Execution and User Needs
The phone I have, a Nokia 6120, actually has a good browser, it's just that the screen is awfully small compared to, say, a laptop, so things laid out with a rigid pixel width are going to look kind of wrong/not work out as well as they might.

However, I'm far from an expert, so I'm curious what solutions other people have found.
Communicause - Social Media makeover for a charity of the community's choice.
In the interest of full disclosure, this is a project my employer is running. I thought that the HN community may enjoy it though.
His site has different priorities than a newspaper, but I've always been fond of Khoi Vinh's titles on http://subtraction.com, which have been consistently good even since before he started working at the NYT.
Yes, it's inefficient for everybody to learn details about specific scientific subjects.

What people should learn is the scientific process, how does science advance, how do we know the things we know. And they should learn how much we owe the scientific method, people should know that if not for science we would still be freezing, starving and dying of easily preventable diseases, that the comfortable lives we live today is a result of scientific thinking.
Xtract - Take any data source and give it to the world
I remember when I was Time's person of the year back in 2006. Which is to say I'm not sure how much can be read from this. It's amusing they had the wit to run with it and I'm intrigued to see if this does anything to raise the profile of 4chan.
For full disclosure, this is an event my employer is doing. But I thought that the HN community would be able to get into it and nominate their favorite charities.
So the guy basically got disillusioned with one doctrine and went and took another doctrine. It's like deeply religious people suddenly realising that god may in fact not exist and go and seek another religion to see if that may be correct. Sure it will take some time to shift the perception of life and their position in it which in turn creates a melancholic view of life. They simply need to think stuff through, they don't need another doctrine to screw up reality.
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Self referential, perhaps.
questions like “what is the meaning of life?” will be practical engineering questions.

uh... I've heard that from another science fiction writer somewhere... now what happened with that?

I don't think we have been becoming better at "outsourcing our cognition" (though it's an inspiring goal). I've tried to do this as much as possible in my own life, and I've found I'm much more effective when I don't do it at all (the most effective outsourcing is to try to articulate one's idea to someone else - but they don't need to actually do anything). This lack of gradual increase means there's no extrapolation to further increase, let alone an exponentially increasing acceleration into a singularity - not, at least, for me :-(.

Mechanizing conceptual understanding remains difficult. Although we human beings are good at modularizing knowledge (it's what we constantly do), and it looks like it should be straightforward to automate, we haven't managed it, at all. So many times in history, people have thought they are on the verge of it...

Did you know that Mr Boolean originally called his algebra the "Rules of Thought"? What he did was very cool, and you can see what he meant, but... it's such an awfully long way from "thought".

I think it's possible to create human level intelligence (and probably faster and broader - but maybe not any deeper); we just have no idea how. And machines that are 16,000 times faster (21 Moore years) aren't going to help with that, in themselves.

But it would be awesome.

(My masters was on statistical inference of pattern, without predetermined patterns, and taking into account the complexity of the pattern sought. I chose this as the closest approach to automating thought. We are a long way away, IMHO).
I wonder whether super human intelligence is a super set of human intelligence or something entirely different. I find it rather plausible that machine intelligence will very soon be capable of doing things we humans cannot do. In fact, that's already the case to some degree (and I don't mean just doing things faster).

However, I believe the day when machines will be able to do everything we can do, only better, is very far out. 2030 is in about 20 years. Looking at things like anaphora resolution and how far we have progressed in the last 20 years, I'm not optimistic we'll make the deadline.

And then of course, the singularity would not be a program that does anaphora resolution, but a program that writes programs to solve any new problem and determine worthy goals in the first place, because these are all things we humans can do.
Time acknowledges that the vote was hacked:

TIME.com's technical team did detect and extinguish several attempts to hack the vote.

I don't think it's obvious that a hack went undetected by Time and gave the vote to Moot. What seems more likely to me is that more people voted for him.

Clearly Moot isn't actually as influential as an individual as, say, Barack Obama. But he represents the power of the internet masses, whose influence is proven by his victory.
Or try your luck at Core Wars. There you write programs in a simple assembler (Red Code) to fight against each other i.e. make your opponents execute an illegal op-code.
No, really, it's not. It's an engineering issue.
20 Firefox Add-ons for Hackers and Power Users
Map of the swine flu: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&t=p&...
Rails is still a ghetto (possibly nsfw)
The problem is that we are so complex and this world is so complex that the factors which may contribute to longer life are at best probabilities and much of these probabilities are not even known. Although there is plenty one can do, Italians for example seem to live longer that is due to their Mediterranean diet and their love of wine.
Operating System Interface Design From 1981 to 2009
> When I read your comment I hear:
> "I am comfortable with my brain and
> I don't want to do anything to change
> the way it works."

And there is an element of truth in that.

> you talk about how you take medication,
> pain relievers, coffee, etc. Do you know
> how pain medication works?

Actually, yes. I've assisted with clinical trials on both analgesics and anasthesia.

> It messes with your brain.

Not really, no. Not in the same way.

Further, the ones I've taken have been subjected to long standing double-blind clinical trials. It's pretty well understood how they work, and their short and long term effects. Certainly more than other stuff.

> The phrase "change your mind" means to reconsider
> things you once accepted as truth. You seem to be
> opposed to this idea; I see it as a beautiful
> opportunity.

That's your opportunity. I "change my mind" regularly by reading, studying, and generally improving my knowledge and abilities. I don't "change my mind" when I change or reconsider my opinion. My mind is the same, although the conclusions I draw may be different because of further analysis, etc.

Studies have shown that there are risks associated with drug usage that you can't control, and are unpredictable. You may be willing to run those risks, and participate in others doing so. That's your choice. I'm not.
School sucks!
Wait, did you consider how this impacts the gender identity of hydrogen ions? Isn't ionization just another word for racism? Etc etc.
A fair point.

But they gamed the whole vote not just his position.

The first letters of the first 21 names still spells:

"Marblecake also the game"

All of the top 21 are in those positions because of the engineering of Anon. - so, basically the vote is worthless.

Not so much the masses behind him but a devoted few :)
I used to do DOM editing in my app that uses webkit. I changed it to use innerHTML, because the DOM was just too slow.

I agree that manipulating the DOM looks nicer. But if it saves 1 second of stalling, I'll use the innerHTML method any time.
This is a standard problem with attribution of Googlepages content here on HN. By far the least informative URL snippets after titles here are those that say "google.com" or "googlepages.com"--who knows who really wrote them?
overreaction?
Also for a faster Javascript you need to avoid script blocking downloading content. See http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2009/avoid-javascript-blocking...
I'm not sure if there's much truth to it, but I read that the BBC news headlines are so short as there is some central system that provides them to Ceefax too (which can only display 24 rows of 40 characters).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceefax
There is an assumption that all home schoolers keep their kids locked up all day away from other kids, or that home schooling requires this.

Yes, that is the assumption, but that is not at all the reality. We have a very strong local group here specializing in homeschooling "gifted" children (standard term, not meant to be a brag) that is helpful for all the parents and for most of the children. I'm also part of several national online networks related to various aspects of homeschooling, and have been an officer of statewide homeschooling organizations.
Once an organism has lived long enough to be able to reproduce and no longer is able to reproduce, there is no evolutionary purpose for that organism to stick around

The theory of evolution speaks of adaptation to the environment so that one may survive. Whether they want to survive only so that they may pass on their genes is only a hypothesis which sounds rather convincing, but there is hardly any evidence for it. There is no reason to assume that we only live so that we may reproduce, although reproduction is an important part of our existence.
x.innerHTML is a DOM operation too. I would think you want to differentiate between doing an "innerHTML" operation and "other DOM operations"

That said, constructing HTML as a string and using one innerHTML call is much faster than doing createNode/appendChild multiple times. DOM operations are definitely the bottleneck when it comes to performance : The less of them you do, the better off you are. (I learnt my lesson the hard way)
You would get really into the product again if you started making money from it.
I flagged this. I don't want to see general swine flu on this site. This story has nothing to do with Hacker News. Believe me when I say that every other news outlet everywhere is covering this outbreak and we don't need to hear about it here.
I think we'll see more and more legal frameworks such as the Great Lakes Compact where the export of water from the region is illegal. Our water-rights laws in the US are totally messed up. For example, in CO (where I live) and UT, it is illegal for you to collect the rainwater that falls on your roof: it belongs to someone else.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact

Solving the upcoming water problems is a wholly political problem and not one of engineering.

http://anthropik.com/2006/08/israels-water-wars/
Lol, I would never have thought that there would be someone else on HN that has wasted time on that game :-) Do you realise how much time it takes to get to level 21?

Which, back on topic is perhaps a flaw in the game - I stopped playing it because it didn't end in a reasonable time-frame, and couldn't be paused. These days I play Wordle(in English this time) on my iPhone, which has a similar idea, but you can pause at any time.
As the list currently stands, it looks more like a list of controversial topics. Maybe you "can't" question capitalism in a "right-wing" setting, or defend it in a "left-wing" one, but that seems fairly tame. And it's well-known and accepted that there are two groups who disagree on the subject. Noone will argue that you should be locked up for taking either position; you won't be ostracised from your community even if it predominantly disagrees with you.

Sex and minors is better; "children have sexuality" can be said but "children are emotionally capable of choosing sexual partners outside a narrow age bracket" probably can't outside of NAMBLA.

I've also added holocaust denial.
To expand on the second point a bit more: one of the virtues of the department model is that (most) departments teach a particular way of approaching problems, a "discipline" if you will. They teach you to "think like a [computer scientist|chemist|psychologist|etc]".

Certainly, there's often a great deal of value in breaking down these disciplinary barriers and attacking the problem holistically - which is why many institutions have interdisciplinary programs and the like. But there's also a value in fields of study retaining some identity as disciplines, with particular methodologies, mores and so forth.
BBC articles in the "latest headlines" RSS feed that comes with Firefox tend to be poor - they often don't match the article itself and tend to be link bait type titles. The alternative is when they give too little information.
Using the heap to store stack traces when TCO is in use and a "debugging" flag is set won't work. It could cause memory to be exhausted. You're effectively causing each recursion to consume memory; something TCO is trying to avoid. If the coder assumes TCO then they could have written code which will exhaust memory once the "debugging flag" starts storing stack trace information.
you can derive a preliminary intuition of a topic without anyone telling you what to think, or giving you a demonstration one way or the other, is [a] revelation enough

Indeed. However I studies philosophy when I was 14 and I suspect it may be due to this early "training" that I am incline to think stuff through on my own and get a logical understanding of things. I have been pleasantly surprised often by so many things I have come up with on my own to only find out that many other people with proper objective undertakings have arrived at the same conclusions, or things I thought were knew and insights to only find out others are studying it indepth.

I think people do not try and think stuff through on their own perhaps because they have not been giving this "early training". There is a danger with thinking stuff on your own and that is the fact that one may come up with whatever story, which is perhaps another reason why laymen may disincline to endeavour in such activity, however if they were introduced with some philosophy and emphasised the objectivity of their undertaking our place perhaps would be filled with much better adapted individuals. For such reason I propose philosophy be introduced in the curriculum at grade 9, rather than religion as they teach here in Britain.
Let The Students Teach
Happy Birthday, Samuel Morse
this was posted last week when it was in smashing.
That's just bullshit. The last thing I want from a content host is an agenda and bias against certain players.
Scala Considered Useful
Same exact sentiment for NPR, even though it's not completely funded by public funds.
Scala and Adding New Syntax
More Joy
You obviously are committed and passionate and have put in a great deal of work. All the more reason I hate to say it:

You have nothing.

I hate to be so harsh, but ideas are a dime a dozen and great software written in a vacuum isn't worth much more.

What was your inspiration for this? Did you have prospects say, "If you write this, I will buy it?" Or did you just figure out, based on "most commercial offerings in its field", that you could build a better mousetrap? Maybe you did, maybe you didn't. There may be a logical reason (that you are blind to) that the other offerings are there.

OTOH, if your software is as good as you think, there's only one way to find out: with a customer or two. You never know, you might just find a customer who loves the product so much, they may want to buy it and get into the software business themselves. They already have the industry contacts and would love the software margins. It's happened before.

You remind me of the guy who swam 99% of the way across the English Channel and was forced to quit by his crew because of bad visibility. Don't be like that guy! Take a break, find a partner, bring in a sales person, hell, give the first version away. But don't quit. You, your software, and the rest of the enterprise world deserve better.
Great presentation, true information, excellent complement to "When Genius Failed", well worth the 90 minutes run time.
I'm conflicted about this. It's actually a very regressive tax, you pay the same whether you are rich or poor, whether you have 1 television or 20.

It's also enforced in an incredibly harsh manner and we (the taxpayers) are actually footing the bill to send people to jail who get caught without a license and then can't afford to pay it (though an outrcy in the House of Lords massively reduced the number being imprisioned down from 200 to 20 (roughly) a year.

On the other hand, if it came up for debate and reform, certain political factions would basically kill the BBC, which I love.
Installing Ubuntu 9.04: A Designers/Development Environment
Indeed, but it's still silly that I can get the connection plus a computer for a fifth of the price!
Great work considering the time. (just judging the website, not whether the need exists for another URL shortner cause the title says "Rate my App", not "Give me your opinion on URL Shortners"). Anyways, can you tell me where you got your .in domain from, I'm looking for a good registrar? Thanks.
Ruby on Rails for Designers
If you have to run ancient applications that no longer have support, then you deserve to run ancient applications that no longer have support ;-)

You should always have an exit strategy.

But running an emulated Windows environment is not the worst possible scenario.
The people on wall street making the big bucks are not crazy. The investors paying them, for them to gamble with the investor's own money, they are crazy. But why should I feel bad for them?
But doesn't that assume the exponential stays exponential and doesn't slow down like a sigmoid?
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