skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Then we can know when an issue has been resolved and plan to remove it from normalize.css

That sounds excellent, but what's really going to be "removed" from normalize.css is not merely the code for resolved issues, but more importantly official support for browser version X where version X+1 fixes the issue. Because browser vendors are not in the habit of backporting fixes to old versions. They simply release a new major version. IE 11 fixes some issue? Great, but it will mean nothing as long as you have to support IE 10.

normalize.css will finally become obsolete, not when all browsers fix all their issues, but much much later, when none of the browser versions we use today are used by more than 1% of the world's population anymore.

Nevertheless, it is refreshing to see a developer plan for the obsolescence of his beloved product, even if it will take 10-20 years.
This is a TERRIBLE rule: they have no clue how git works.

Read: http://goo.gl/ONw7Q
I'm running an "established Internet business" on Azure. I moved from VPSes to Azure last year when the "Azure Websites" feature was available. It has saved me money over the VPS instances, actually increased performance a bit at the lower price point, and has dramatically lower administration overhead since I'm using it as PaaS.

The only thing negative I could say is that I have a hard time logging into the portal sometimes, due to some weird interaction between my primary MS account and one of my clients' Office365 organizational accounts. So, I sometimes have to switch to an incognito window to log in and use the portal. It's a nuisance, but trivial.

Otherwise, I couldn't be happier.
All poorly titled summary articles aside, money may or may not buy happiness, but it can buy some pretty sweet vacations.
I think a blend of raspberry pi + phillips hue lights + data + code = awesome product.
This would be fun, I'll try to get Netscape Navigator 4.5 and AOL Explorer 1.? running...
This is why you compile with -Wall and -Werror...
Are all of Google's lawyers also hackers/developers? I'm amazed/impressed.
The Chinese already manufacture a large volume of our hardware as well (with some of it skewed toward Taiwan). They have plenty of opportunities to install monitoring devices surreptitiously on land-based stuff, if they've already haven't, so unless the U.S. is planning on developing all hardware for the base stations as well (chips and all) in-house, this isn't doing much more to deliver that precious satellite data to them on a silver platter.

That said, Huawei has such a big lead in the rest of the world in comm tech, they probably already are monitoring. A wise opponent lets his adversary volunteer information first, before prodding for it.
Yes, exactly. However it does seem to shatter the myth that "people are happy about their lives in poor countries", which is the rhetoric we tend to hear every time someone wants to make a case against materialism in developed world.
When pirates play a game development sim and then go bankrupt because of piracy
I have training in designing such circuits and I'd still use an opto-isolator.

This is not manufacturing. It's a one-off project. It's not a highly refined design. You don't have to worry about finessing a marginally lower build cost because of what it will mean in 10k unit quantities. Just use the opto-isolator.
The key is balance between theory and craft.
Reminds me of Joe Haldeman's scifi short None So Blind. I won't spoil it but I'll give the first 2 sentences as a teaser:

It all started when Cletus Jefferson asked himself
"Why aren't all blind people geniuses?" Cletus was only
13 at the time, but it was a good question, and he would
work on it for 14 more years, and then change the world forever.

http://www.sff.net/people/joe.haldeman/story1.html
All 5 pages render fine on IE 5 (I cannot read the text though). Only baidu gives me a JS error message, but seems to work regardless...
Never been in the navy, so just guessing. Just kicking around ideas...

Option A: You hand-crank the beast somehow? To get the glow-plug going, you again use a hand generator? Hopefully enough to bootstrap the generator (maybe it's a smaller generator that runs a larger one)? Generators all the way down?

Option B: You blow ballast somehow and use the inrushing water to drive a turbine that runs the generator or gets it going?

Option C: You manually pull the control rods and switch the coolant loop to run a small turbine to prime the generator?

Option D: You mayday and get a jump from the Russian/Chinese/Iranian sub following you around?

Option E: You try something dumb and dangerous with hydrogen peroxide from the torpedoes (I think/hope that that's phased out now)?
Shopper prioritization application (http://www.akamai.com/dl/feature_sheets/Akamai_Shopper_Prior...).

Linked to a page which displays one of four random mp4s which refreshes once every thirty seconds via a meta refresh.

Magic!
TCP/IP packets made with building blocks, brilliant. They could also be used as cuisenaire rods. I would be interested if anyone has used them in a nontrivial way to represent computable expressions (if you can do with alligators and eggs, you can do it with Lego)

http://worrydream.com/AlligatorEggs/
Here's the black start procedure for the 1950's-era ship I worked on. No idea if this is at all similar to how they start diesels on a modern sub.

1. Hand-crank a small diesel engine connected to a small air compressor.

2. Use the small air compressor to build up pressure to start the emergency diesel generator.

3. Start the emergency diesel.

4. Using the emergency power, run one of the large air compressors to build up pressure for starting the main generators.

5. Start the main generators.

The emergency diesel was near the stern of the ship, away from the generator room, to ensure an generator room fire couldn't take out the emergency diesel.
Completely agreed here. Perhaps I should have been more specific in the article in saying that a phone call is almost certainly the better option. As you mentioned, most people are uncomfortable with the phone call, regardless of the situation, which is why I built in an email option. I will keep this in mind, especially as I teach this material within college settings.
HARVEY MUDD ACCEPTANCE RATES BY GENDER

MALE: 15.8%

FEMALE: 43.6%

Source: http://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-545-Harvey-Mudd-C...

The Harvey Mudd story is just actually the really boring fact that if you get to pick and choose whoever you want from a large applicant pool, you can have whatever composition of whatever random demographic your hear desires.
Everyone who has shipped a production site knows that codeschool doesn't have a mission to teach you "programming", so much as a stripper does not want to have sex with you. They are both meant to tease and entice you.

Given the author references a site like codeschool, I wish the author would have provided more direction/books/guides on how to become a programmer through knowing the conepts that he lists so that we could have a productive conversation over content rather than a service/business meant to address a giant market need (skilled workers in the CS field).

I can only speak to the merits of this article, it feels like it is just meant to get a rise out of the CS theory side and the non-CS theory side; which is sad.
Super Resolution Microscope Allows Nanostructures To Be Seen
You know it's time to leave your startup when...
Couldn't agree more. I wrote a blog post about it a while back demonstrating my take on this. Here's common household appliances getting web interfaces that can be accessed with any smartphone by QR Code. No arduino or soldering mains current required. I think every electronic thing in my house should have a little QR Code next to it so I can just point my phone at it and get its interface.

http://www.thesinglestep.org/thoughts/qrcontrol/

The video halfway down shows it in action.
Hoping this was meant to be ironic. You pirated in the past when you didn't have the means but started paying when you could pirate instead.

Sounds perfect to me. Oh wait ... unless the game devs made a bunch of baseless assumptions that all pirates are lazy yuppies who have the cash for games but choose to pirate instead just to spite game developers.
I'm actually referring to physical and mental health.
>> And the FDA has quite likely killed more people than it has saved,

> My immediate reaction is to say you're full of shit. But I'll hold off judgment and see if you can offer any shred of an argument that justifies this statement (not even asking for proof here).

The result of the FDA's post-1962 efforts has been to dramatically slow the rate of introduction of new drugs with essentially no effect on the average quality level of the drugs that do get introduced. Some new drugs still get through, but less than half as many per unit time and the FDA approval process delays the use of those drugs and makes them vastly more expensive to develop. These extra delays and higher costs are estimated to have caused, at a minimum, hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.

Good drugs save lives. Good drug information saves lives. The FDA often finds itself in the business of postponing the use of good drugs and preventing the dissemination of valid drug information. It has a powerful institutional bias towards inaction, but failing to approve good drugs in a timely manner kills people with at least as much certainly as does letting bad ones through.

The notion that the modern FDA on net hurts us more than it helps is a pretty common belief among those economists who have studied the matter. I'd start with this general overview of the issues:

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PharmaceuticalsEconomicsa...

And then browse this site - lots of good stuff there:

http://www.fdareview.org/

Bryan Caplan summarizes the general state of opinion as: "The public thinks the FDA is great. Regular economists think it's pretty good. And economists who specialize in the FDA think it's pretty bad." (source: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2005/04/fda_public_econ.... )
I didn't know bash or zsh had a built-in package manager!
giving people money they didn't put effort into earning makes them less happy, and less able to provide for their own needs. Is this anyone else's experience?

Try it with an infant, and you'll find the need to further qualify "people", because as you put it, the theory doesn't work out. So let's call them grown-ups, not referring to just being physically grown up either. Now, where do you draw the line, and how do you assess on which side of it a stranger is?

What I'm asking is, what makes you assume the person you see begging actually did have a fair shot at it? I don't deny that some of them did, but even if it was the majority; what make you assume that about every single one? That it's comfortable? That it couldn't possibly be that it is just LUCK that you weren't raped as kid and ended up as alcoholic with 12, or something like that? Just face it, as much as effort makes a difference, it's still luck to even have a chance. If everybody got what they "earned", all of us would have the same, namely non-existence. It's easy to forget privilege once you have it, and make that the cut-off point.

So personally I like to err on the side of compassion. I don't like drunks, alcohol is a black hole and to be honest, I consider some of them walking dead; I don't like being actively bothered too much, and professional beggers are air to me; but otherwise, giving a bit of change is sometimes just a way of not ignoring a person, and an opportunity to wish them a nice day. That doesn't change their life, but it's at least a tiny ray of light instead of yet another rain drop of being ignored, which is proportional to how little it costs me personally.

There are people who simply fell on hard times, and what the am I expected to ask of them so they can "earn" a few cents, or euros? To prove that it wasn't their fault, to have their papers on hand? To shine my shoes? To ask real nice? Sure, I'll admit, I like it more to give something to someone trying to sell those homeless people newspapers, or someone playing an instrument. But I rarely take the paper (though as far as newspapers go, they beat mainstream ones, they're way more interesting), and the crappier they are at playing the instrument, the more likely I am to give.

I'm not berating you for your choices, but I know why I make mine, and why I feel good about giving.
Ok, this is tangential, but how is it that one of the founders of Netscape/Mozilla has a website that is so painful to look at? Flourescent green on black.. my eyes!
In Norway, it's usual for employees to sign intellectual copyright waivers for all work done for their employers. If Trond developed parts of the CB browser and/or other intellectual property whilst working for Opera (during office hours), they could easily claim - and probably win - a case that parts and/or all of the CB browser rightfully belonged to Opera Software. I haven't read their lawsuit, I'm just saying that the case might be more complicated that one person's blog post.

There was an (in parts) similar case to this one in Norway about Nettby.no, the so-called "Fredrik Kristiansen vs Dagbladet" (Google it if you're interested).
While I love the idea, I am sorry but call centers are about driving the cost down no matter what, and generally, the call drivers for any institution are broken into fairly small manageable chunks to be resolved by a script :(

Most of the call center industry is just outsourced, especially in the usa, and all the vendors want to do is make sure they pass all their audits, and maximize their profits. That means they generally treat their people like farm animals, and they pay about as well.

Companies like rackspace or 37 signals have a very specific clientele they have to cater to, while most large companies pretend they want this, they do not have this market or this need. (not your website, the need of unique interesting people being tech support)
Personal responsibility in customer service
Ask HN: I spent 1.5 hours on the phone with Dell today trying to get a downgrade from windows 8 to windows 7 for 4 comouters we bought for our call center today because windows 8 sucks. but that is not the problem. I talked to 4 different people in customer service and tech support all on one long phone call and they presented me with policy based responses that when i asked them if they would think them reasonable I got a unanimous answer that they would not but that was the policy. does this bother anyone else? how can it be done better? what about on a large scale?
> Do you know what a binary tree is? The difference between a merge sort and a quick sort? What the singleton pattern is, and why and when you should use it? If you can’t answer one or all of those questions, then it’s time to start learning the techniques.

A thousand times this, I'd respect a programmer who can do this and a lot more in a single language, rather than FizzBuzz on 10 different languages.

Even though being a polyglot helps (and provides different perspectives to solving problems - OO, functional, etc), a decent level of knowledge needs to be in place for that perspective to resort to anything of use.
Finally 2 karma on News Combinator
CS theory by itself is useless unless backed by knowledge about building stuff, this is where all that theory comes into practice.
I didn't appreciate the pun either, but I find your comment to be rude and tangential.
Yes this would help for optimizing a giant site, but the author is referencing codeschool...that is like throwing a middle school football player into the NFL. Some things truly don't need that level of CS proficiency now-a-days.
Judging by the threads, no good deed goes unpunished.
I knew it! Generators all the way down!
Yeah, Opera comes in at a whopping 1.74% browser share. They are a competitor to Mozilla in the same way that the Zune was a competitor to the iPod. Not really a competition.
The data also literally doesn't say it. Sneaky of them to plot income on a log scale so you don't see diminishing returns.
It is certainly possible to avoid feature branches with multiple contributors working on the same areas. We've even been pretty successful performing major refactorings to substantial codebases in this way.

The key is to do continuous integration properly - i.e. actually integrate your changes with the rest of the team several times a day. We actually deploy to production several times of day. This requires you to break down changes into very small steps that can be completed, tested, and deployed in an hour or so.

Each small change is far less likely to break something, or cause performance degradation. If it does, then you know exactly what caused it without painful debugging. Each small change is unlikely to cause significant merge pain for the rest of the team.

This requires you to have excellent automated testing and rapid <5min deploys.

There are also tools like branch by abstraction and feature toggles which can help but are only tools. The key is how you work as a team.

Feature branches are another way of working. They may be the only way of working in many cases (e.g. distributed team of sporadic contributors). Feature branches are almost the opposite of continuous integration. By definition changes on the branch are not integrated.
European Companies Linked to Collapsed Bangladesh Factories
That makes me wonder what we will think 30 years from now, when we look back at how we develop software today.
I think michaelochurch himself has suggested moving away from NYC/SF before.
Water pressure?
Wacom Helper
Would any of you be interested in taking my app out for a spin? The app's name is 'Wacom Helper' and it is:

- An osx application for wacom tablets

- An app that helps you switch the tablet area between screens really easily.

- An app that allows you to create up to 10 mapping presets per screen for your wacom tablet, and lets you switch between them really easily.

I'd be thrilled if you guys could try out the app and give me feedback. I'm trying to save up money to buy a Mac Pro for VFX related work so the eventual plan is to put it up on the Mac App Store (very soon) for $1.99.

Anyways, here's the app.

http://d.pr/f/rqWv

And, here's a guide.

http://d.pr/i/53NF

(NOTE: One thing I forgot to mention in the guide is that you can switch between screens by pressing cmd+shift+w once the window in on the screen -- so, a cmd+shift+w the first time brings up the window, and pressing the combination more than once will toggle the app between all available screens).

Cheers!
Birdman invests in Rap Genius at $1 BN valuation
Exactly. It makes sense to rebase for a single commit or two when you're syncing with a remote frequently, but in any other case merge is much more sane.
Well if we are going to be technical about it, why is Google even required to make a written offer under the GPL? They can, for example, never release the source code for software that didn't make it (in binary form) onto the devices. Right?

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePos...

Let's make this question more relevant ... if you write server code that isn't released 'to the public', but powers your website which is publicly accessible, must you release the source code if your server was "linked with" (whatever that means) GPLed code?
An Introduction to Python Concurrency
Having "git log -p" be readable is infinitely more important than so called "accurate" history.
> Never rebase if you've pushed the commits to a central repo because git will detect conflicts of the changes.

the manual already cover this issue[1]. In short, rebase when you pull if you prefer to, but always merge when you push.

[1] http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Branching-Rebasing#The-Perils...
Is coderwall some sort of troll site, like the the Swedish Lemon Angels recipe in How to Play With Your Food?

I keep seeing bad advice posted there and popping up on HN.
Norway, and how different depends on what you're comparing with. Probably not too expensive for his means.
I haven't used Opera on desktop in probably a decade, but it's been around since before Mozilla. How is it a 'me too' product?
Thanks for this :). You painted a wonderful picture for the reasons why anyone working away from their office might want to use an always on video service like sqwiggle.
"we’ve seen no discernible increase in piracy on any of our titles" [...] "The move has been a hugely positive one for us" [...] "we’re still pleased that we took this step"
That homepage makes me feel sick.

Is that why you posted it?

Because the design is terrible?
It is not really enough to just compare looks.

For example, even Amazon sites on Firefox 3.6.* browsers in the last couple of months show extremely inconsistent behaviour, e.g. inability to submit new searches after an existing search.

I suspect the only sites that actually work on that list without significant issues are Google and Wikipedia, both optimized to be highly compatible.
Absolutely none of this is true and reflects your bias more than anything else. Anyone with a passing familiarity with Wikipedia would know it to be false. Your lack of knowledge is apparent and your opinions are of no value.
You had me at: "interlacing the structures of a switch and a loop"
I have a t-shirt that says "Don't you miss Peek and Poke?"
Equal representation for O-Town!! What's the history of T-graph? Peralta? San Parblo? I bet MLK (nee Grove) has some interesting history.

(I assume T-graph followed a telegraph route between Oakland and Berkeley. I more or less know where West MacArf got its name.)
Student wrongly tied to Boston bombings found dead
> Does that mean from now on, rather than "Copyright © 2013 Kailuo Wang", I have to say Copyright © 2013 my Email address ?

No. You can put in whatever copyright information you wish as long as you are able to be contacted based on that information.

> Does it mean that if someone steal my photo without permission and removed copyright information, other people can just use download it from there and legally use it however they want because they cannot contact me?

Yes.
> local merge commits (e.g. when closing off a feature branch & getting ready to push the merged results

Why not rebase the feature branch onto the master branch? Then the merge from feature to master will be a fast forward commit rather than a merge commit.

Developing this way one can mostly avoid actual merges. And the repository history is simple and linear afterward. I've been working this way for a while and I have found it effective.

% git checkout feature
% git rebase master
% git checkout master
% git merge --ff-only feature

(-ff-only isn't needed, but I like to confirm to catch mistakes)

Any commits that you have made locally (and haven't pushed anywhere public) are safe to reorganize in this way, and it results in simpler history.
CSSO might take care most of this issues: it removes overwritten elements. http://bem.info/tools/csso/
Money can be the limiting constraint on having more options or freedom. Now the study only shows a correlation with between log-income and happiness but it's not crazy to assume that having health insurance, a savings account, money for flexible travel, all increase your freedom and thus happiness.
Purdue professor identifies proton pathway in photosynthesis
> Don't miss the .png at the end that has the entire source code

You mean I have to type it in by hand?