skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hope that everyone watches the full set of four videos of Ira Glass on storytelling from which this comic was excerpted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loxJ3FtCJJA&playnext=1&#...

It's important because you get a different perspective on a "story" from the artist's side, and it gives you an idea of how to communicate: there are moments of "drawing the reader along" with a causal sequence, and "moments of reflection" where you pause and say "here's why you care about this."

If you think about writing a good tutorial, I think everybody understands that it should be incremental knowledge, that you should build upon whatever your students already know. But lots of tutorials are confusing precisely because they lack the other bits. Some tutorials look more like API documentation -- a bunch of disconnected things; no causal narrative goes between them. Other tutorials -- especially in functional programming! -- link together a whole lot of great ideas incrementally, and it's a killer story... and it's never really for anything.

Contrast this with SICP for example, that famous realization which many of us had where you're halfway through this Lisp course and suddenly, out of nowhere, the authors say, "okay, let's introduce the assignment statement." And you have this moment of reflection -- "wait, assignment statements aren't necessary?! ... huh! I guess they weren't! I did a lot of stuff without them already!".

Even if it's a tiny little moment where you mention, "okay, so here's an example of what you were writing before, here's why it's ugly, here's how this new technique does better" -- that sort of short intermezzo can be so amazingly helpful for learning programming that it startles me how often it's missing from tutorials. I think a good understanding of storytelling can help inform how we present information in general. (This especially holds when you draw a distinction between new ideas and news, as Alan Kay does in the SRII 2011 keynote: http://vimeo.com/22463791 .)
Thanks to all HN users who upvoted this story. I don't remember seeing comic strips on HN frontpage, and wasn't sure about sharing this post. But I found it really good, and am glad you all found it useful.
You're right, I didn't do those things. I don't know many people with a HN account. I got a few stories to the frontpage before by just submitting them, so I figured that would do the trick.
We soft launched https://starthq.com through comments and got a few hundred visitors. This showed that time on site was high so we launched as a Show HN linking to a blog post, which got to the front page the first time and drove a couple of thousand uniques. Let me know if you are interested by upvoting this comment - would be more than happy to share the details in a blog post.
Dead code is rotting your codebase
But somehow the author has to monetise the content, because the huge amount of bandwidth required to blurb out 1.6 MB on every access is not cheap. So he has to include some advertisements and then also content-like pictures, because people don’t like advertisements being the only pictures on a website.
Ivory, yet another simple front-end framework
Show HN: Gentleman
http://i.imgur.com/fSBsN7c.png

want to play?
How Anonymous have become digital culture's protest heroes
> "I am guilty of contributing to terrorism and the purposeful killing of innocent woman and children civilians?"

How do you know this? Has he had a trial?

Citation needed.
I built this app to help in those situations where you want to play a game with your friends, but don't know what games you all own and actually play. This will tell you.

What it does:

Pulls a list of games for you and each of your (publically viewable) friends on Steam and returns the Steam games you have in common that have multiplayer features. From this list, you can see what your friends' favorite multiplayer games are, if they're logged in, and even send them an IM through the Steam client (must be installed).

Example:

http://www.mysteamgauge.com/friends?username=monkeyagent

Issues:

-The app sometimes gives up mid-process. I think there's some rate-limiting mucking things up on Steam's end. I'm still working on it, but it doesn't happen too often, so try again if you get an error page and you're sure your username is correct.

-It takes a while to load. If you have more than 30 or so Steam friends, it may take several minutes.
Tough shit. If they didn't want to take responsibility for these people then they shouldn't have interned them in the first place.

Also, this definitely isn't hacker news but I'm glad it was brought to my attention anyway.
Thanks for sharing the video link. Will check it out :)
I may be narrowed minded, but how is this demo site related to "semantic wiki"? Couldn't really see the connection here.
It will help you understand the turing machine.
Take part in the Opsview I.T. survey - win a Jambox speaker
Yes, you are wrong.

Refugee status was invented for such people.
The antisocial network of bitcoins
General Motors, Ford join for 10-speed transmissions
How “Japan’s Angry Birds” Racked Up 30 Million Downloads
Also annoying is that the page jumps around whilst the adverts load, making it hard to even read the text.
New Stereo Vision System Using the World’s Smallest Camera
It was? That's news to the Taliban.
Are you trying to get hired by the financial industry, or is there some other reason for doing this?

As you may well be aware, HFT is a scourge on the world's economy, and it's a game only the biggest and best-connected players benefit from.
>Um, except that coherent planes/tiers of abstraction is the foundation of robust software engineering. You write languages to a spec; compiler authors emit bytecodes for another spec; hardware engineers optimize transistors and lay traces on silicon to meet yet another spec. Etc.

Except that we talk about stuff that should be in the same level of abstraction in the first place. It's not about writing a compiler or OS in Python, or using Python for CPU microcode.

It's about writing the numerical routines in a scientific/statistics package in the same language that you write the core business logic, etc.
Not really. We all have our source of hot new projects (eg: http://thechangelog.com/) but things we end up using usually come from our own projects / work. From my point of view I see two types of contributions.

The first one is a drive-by contribution. You're using project XY to help reach your goal but it wasn't perfect. The contribution is providing the fix for that. I guess the equivalent for you is that you see the website's using Helvetica and it hurts your eyes so you want to fix it. I would love that kind of contribution but never saw it happen.

The second one is a owned project. It's your baby. I have a couple of those, they're things I think are great and I would like to help them grow. For that I give some of my free time to nurture them. I would love to see a designer adopt them as well and have discussions on the content and form of the documentation or how we could improve the message by changing the design.

I'm not sure if I'm conveying the approach but what I want to say is that it's not really a task list. It should also be your drive-by contribution or a baby. Just choose what you want, no pressure. And let us know if there's anything that we're doing wrong that throws you off.
This is disgracefully inhumane.
and here's a question for you-- when you posted your Show HN, did it "organically" find its way to the front page? Or did you receive "...a little help from your friends.."?
Say a function requires an object of type t or it will fail, in a dynamic language it is often fine to assume if the object is not a t it is a valid initializer for a t instead. Eg a string could be used as an initializer for a date. The problem with the map example is the ambiguity.
The crawler still hits the actual "URL" he found, so that provides sanity checking. It's just another way to discover (potential) new URLs.
Even following nominally "quality" news sources -- NPR, PBS, The New York Times, the Economist -- I've been finding the points of this article increasingly true.

Mainstream commercial news -- CNN, HuffPo, my local city paper / news site, and much of what passes for news on the Web, are virtually intolerable. Banal, lowest common denominator (erm: "greatest", but nobody would understand) content, celebrity gossip, baiting headlines, "ten reasons" pageview content. Gratuitously paginated articles. Excessively overdesigned pages with floaters, social nags, and pop-up interstitial surveys and yet more "social" pleadings. Fake-viral advertising whether "flash mobs" orchestrated by banks or Hollywood movie hype engines. Intentionally infuriating political tactics. Get off of me!

Somewhere during the past Presidential campaign I think I started to snap. Whether it was talking heads blathering about things they understood poorly, incessant focus on horse-race (and ignoring the deeper historical and policy stories), everything just started grating on me.

The lack of depth and context to much news coverage has also been apparent to me for quite some time. Particularly in the case of large developing stories, or those with a long backstory, I've found that Wikipedia is often a much better source of information. I'd first realized this during the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake & tsunami -- far too vast a story for any one news article to wrap its head around. TV and radio could merely repeat the basics or show the same footage repeatedly. Wikipedia could organize and contextualize the facts as they came in.

There are also the odd stories which do affect me, my life, my neighborhood, or my professional interests. They're rare, but they do happen. A benefit of today's world over, say, 20 years ago, is that when such events do occur, it's much more possible to dig in and get more than the very light spread of truth and misreporting that's inevitable in the lay press.

Not that I've stopped paying attention to the news. But I'm very conscious of when it is annoying, and there are days I'll turn it off. The day of the Newtown shootings I heard the news late in the day, and just turned it off. I knew largely how it would unfold, that it didn't affect me directly, that there was nothing I'd be able to do that day, but that listening would just sicken me.

Increasingly, rather than turn on news, I'll put on music. Often classical or jazz. And listen to that instead.
Why Does Music Feel So Good?
What I like about these solutions is that they give proper discussion to implementation, not just the theory behind the encryption. It wasn't initially clear to me why salts were stored out in the open and when they were brought into the actual encryption process but this is a very clear explanation.
It has been a convenient excuse for me to not join the gym because my friend found it more convenient to close his bank account and all cards there rather than get Planet Fitness to cancel his subscription. Too bad for me as I could use the exercise. :/
It matters to me since my taxes are paying for its production. I would prefer to have both the penny and nickel discontinued.
Please check Data.Gov

http://www.data.gov.in/
As I understand it HN has various methods built in to prevent this. i.e, if a post receives an usually high number of votes in a short period it will be limited.
HFT isn't necessarily a scourge - if anything it discourages people from short term investing, which is a Good Thing.

Long term investing isn't affected by HFT, except in providing more liquidity at the point you want to exit any position. If you're planning on holding for 5+ years you're competing against relatively few people and can do good research. Any shorter timeframe and you're competing against millions, against computers and against unknowables that will distort the price in the short term.
How does this compare to Compund.js (http://compoundjs.com/)? I've only given it a cursory glance but it seems to be under active development, and similar in it's inspiration, no?
Open Data initiative of Government of India
I'm curious about the "best trading platform" claim - what is going to make it better than any other?
Especially as the real High Frequency Traders are busy spending fortunes on placing their hardware as close to the exchange as physically possible.
I would not worry too much about people misconstruing greatest common denominator as something "great". At least not here on HN.
I meant political content. Thank you for your reply.
I (informally) study procrastination and attention management, and maintain The Attention Management Blog (http://attnmgmtblog.com). That's not to say my advice will be better than anyone else's in this thread. But there are two really simple things I've found that have helped me maintain focus and momentum, especially when I'm feeling especially distracted.

First, break your larger tasks into absurdly tiny steps. I mean, embarrassingly small steps. “Why would I even need to write that down?”-small steps. As others in this thread have mentioned, when a task is too large, or has too many dependencies, or the next concrete action step is unclear, the easiest thing for our brain to do is to punt it. Our current brains have a lot of confidence in our future brains. Too much, in fact. Breaking a task into steps that are so small that you can't help but do them is hugely helpful.

Second, write things down. Two parts to this. First is that you need a trusted system to capture everything you have to do (all those big tasks, and all the tiny steps that comprise them). I use a Field Notes notebook (http://fieldnotesbrand.com/), and find that writing stuff down on paper is essential. I'm not sure whether it's because it's an analog break from digital stuff, or whether it's more flexible for the kinds of notes I'm writing down, or what. But writing it down on paper is essential. I also have a larger "programmer's notebook" (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00007LV4B/) that I use for longer notes. The second part of the "write things down" piece of advice is to write down what you're working on right now. That can be on paper. I usually prefer to jot it down here: http://charliepark.org/rightnow/ (disclosure: mine, totally free), as it's a temporary notepad that takes up zero resources (no notes I have to save, no Post-Its on my desk I have to revisit and think through, "did I get this done yet?").

One of the best writers on this is David Allen, with his book Getting Things Done, which your local library will have. I also like Cal Newport (http://calnewport.com/blog/). And, of course, if you want short pointers to longer articles, I post a not-overwhelming stream of stuff at http://attnmgmtblog.com.
You need to do <i class="icon-iconname"></i> instead of <i>icon-iconname</i>... The links all have icon names in them.

Edit: Ah. It now works only with JS on when putting the icon-name into <i> and not in the class. Sorry for that, seems to be new in Bootstrap.
jQuery UI is a whole different beast and there's a reason it's required separately.

Also at this point the base jQuery UI is pretty solid, but plugins are a different matter.
Publicity for their situation - which is terrible.

A prisoner's attempt to get publicity does not influence the morality or legality of practices at Guantanamo Bay.
Yep. Most Americans have the attention span of a gnat. Plenty of us care, we just get distracted by other things. And that's the point really. The government wants us distracted. It's called Negative Liberty.

Most who read that article wil be outraged. They'll share it on FB. And forget it by Friday when the net big movie, sport event, or parade comes along.
More authors should make videos like. Well done!
Anyone have a count of how big a "complete" page of this article itself - all 748 characters of it - is? I make 64kb for the html alone, but apples-to-apples means we should compare the rest of the assets too.
It's Twitter bootstrap. http://twitter.github.io/bootstrap/base-css.html#icons
Bootstrap V3 has tweaked the way icons are implemented slightly.
Yeah it's for their own good, the same way Bradley Manning had to be naked in his cell for his own good. Yeah right </sarcasm>.
This is meant to be intentionally ironic, right ?

Or "This Page..." is actually a self reference ?
This example is unfortunately somewhat broken: the 'salt' in that case does not yield an exponential but only linear increase of the number of dictionaries.

Contrary to what the post says, it is not necessary to compute the 3,125 possible orders. Only 5 reverse dictionaries are enough, with reverse(n, w) = "the set of definitions the nth word of which is w". Then, iterate the reverse lookup following backwards the provided salt.

It makes the attack much more tractable, in particular since the length of definitions is bounded (you know how many dictionaries you need to compute).
FWIW, I think that removing inheritance is a major strength of Go. Interfaces and composition give you most or all of what you want and get you in a lot less trouble.
Being in prison is not the same as being tortured.

You may be thinking of Abu Ghraib
Exactly my reaction.

I specifically call myself a developer and say "I can design but I am not a designer" because I am not as good as the pros at it. I have respect for those who are better than I am.

Put another way; I can change my brakes, oil, spark plugs, and other basic maintenance items on my car. But I'm not a mechanic. I can't rebuild a transmission.
> The problem is that to close Guantanamo, you need funding to a least move the prisoners to another facility

You need funding to keep Gitmo going too. I seriously doubt that would be a problem.
A related question I had was whether you are better off submitting your site as a link or an Ask HN style question with a link to your site in the text? It seems like submitted links are much more likely to be completely ignored than "ask" submissions from what I've seen. However, I've heard that "ask" submissions drop off the front page at a quicker rate.
How to work with Software Engineers
He did say he didn't have any solutions.

I'd recommend getting inspiration from other blogs, https://svbtle.com/ for instance.
On this blog there are 11 "share this" buttons, a huge pointless banner of mostly black space, and half a page worthwhile of text is followed by 5 pages of black space to allow for all the sidebar links. Is he being ironic?
Recently, I've submitted exclusively ( only here ), free to use (MIT/OFL license) icons font set linking to github page. My title was "Show HN ..." . I'm not posting the link on purpose. And I got 100 page views for the next 24 hours. My post was rated 2 points and basically didn't get to the front page. It was very strange for me, two days after my submission, when I saw that I got most of my visitors from Japan, including from Japanese blogposts for my work.

Also, I got no comments, which I expected, since here people are critical + constructive in their discussions.

I know for sure that if any post didn't make it to the front page, this doesn't mean that is invisible for most of the community. There are a lot of blogs that follow what's been posted here. I hope the visitor impact isn't related with the time when people submit stuff here!
That's not a formal petition, it's a post on a website
It does have inheritance although the syntax is different:

type SubClass struct {
SuperClass
other fields...
}
"Second capitalism has actual, real information to base it's conclusion on, and nobody can unduly influence it's opinions for long."

That would be an interesting society to live in. Your quote above is basically the opposite of the USA, which brings it pretty far from the premise of the original article.

Also the most efficient long distance navigation path is a great circle route not a "straight" line. The geometry of projecting a round-ish globe on a flat map on a large scale has always been pretty messed up, so its actually kinda unusual for long trip to have the shortest route on a map be a straight line.

One interesting startup idea related to the above is people have historically had all kinds of interesting compromise map projections, but it should be possible to compute and display an optimized custom map projection for any specified route with minimal distortion such that the shortest path really would be a straight(ish) line on that optimized map. I'm sure there's a forest of patents on this idea preventing progress of this idea, at least in the USA, see the original article, etc.
Lab-grown kidneys transplanted into rats
We have a program for start-ups. Contact sales@jetbrains.com and they can inform you.
Is there no way you could have a computer and internet and yet still respect human rights? Or is it really all or nothing?
Yes, you're right. The US is not perfect, which makes it exactly like a prison full of extraordinarily rendered un-tried suspects.
and this is why cellphone apps rock! they keep it minimalistic
Did you know that due process was violated in WW2 and WWI and many other major wars?
Ratios for this article: 713 characters of content (43 kb if you include the screenshot), total page size: 898 kb.

Edit: adjusted sizes to correct for errors due to caching.
Could you reopen the discussion thread there? I was trying to reply to a comment but then realized that was closed! I don't get closed comment threads.
I think "this", in the scope of irony, is self referenced regardless of how it was defined globally.
No, I'm already in the finance industry. There are two main reasons I'm doing this:
- I think the finance industry is very closed when it comes to intellectual property development, and an open source approach can be seriously competitive. An open approach may well be the future when it comes to being 'connected'
- HFT is an interesting multi-disciplinary problem and the shear breadth of expertise required - modern chip design, low-latency software/hardware interaction, lock-free concurrency, fault-tolerant system design, adaptive learning algorithms, k-means clustering - means I'm learning heaps every day.

I just don't agree that HFT is a scourge. It's an ecological shift (neither good or evil) and longer-horizon investors need to evolve.
I never understood what problem the Segway was supposed to solve. Same with Glass.
True. I'll add a PS pointing to this comment and set it as an exercise for the reader that it would be possible to reduce the number of dictionaries.
Turn your browser into a drawpad
This blurb was painful to read.

The entire page, sans Adblock-able advertisements is 900KB-1MB.

Granted, that includes:

The site's scripts - which can ostensibly increase usability

Images - which help tell the story, establish branding and increase usability

Stylesheets - which make a page visually appealing and increase usability.

If you want to complain about the state of the Web, at least take into the account that the Web/Hypertext is about more than just text.
You know this for a fact? Not to be too cynical here, but do you have a citation for any of your claims? Who is able to review these taped feedings in order to confirm that they're being carried out in a humane way? Could I, as a citizen do this? Could a reporter for the NYT? The absurdity of the censorship at the KSM trial makes me think your claims would be hard to verify. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/01/secrec...

And frankly, your nationalistic sign off makes me less inclined to believe you without references. "We are still the good guys" is kind of vapid.
Great， let's take a look.
The interview in the story claims to be reported by the prisoner's lawyers. What prevents them from taking legal action now? What changes if their client is released?
It's also about half of Nasim Taleb's content. He repeatedly asserts that outside of the hard sciences like physics, there are no experts.
Maybe it's confirmation bias but most "big bang" inventions or services seem like this to me. It's the relative slow burners that build up over time that seem to get huge in their fields (e.g. the iPod, Skype, Facebook, Pinterest, even HN.) A big launch almost seems to be a curse. The iPad is probably the main counter example I can think of in recent years.