skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great news. Although I've been running Wheezy on my desktop for quite some time now. Guess its time to update my laptop which is running Squeeze.
> But growth in places where Google makes its real money (US, EU, Canada etc) has plateaued for a while, IIRC. Growth in ad clicks mirrors growth in revenue and we know a click from Guatemala is not the same as one from NYC.

Actually, average cost per click has been going down for a while now. I don't see any breakdown by geography, and wall street had been all worried about what that means for an ever-more-mobile world, but, again, the data isn't there to back up your supposition. A large part of it could be growth in regions that bring in lower ad revenue.

> Maybe, but if you read the comments, people are accusing Google of making results worst to boost the ad click rate. That's wrong on so many levels.

Er, what is wrong on so many levels? I can't tell what you mean from that sentence construction. You say, "maybe", so you don't disagree with me, but you backed up the only other "accuser" in your post above, so I don't think you disagree with him...

In any case, the considerably more obvious and likely explanation is the one I think most people have tended to assume: google disambiguates terms automatically because it's what works in the 90% case. It's annoying for power users, yes (even back when it was less of an issue, at least we could +terms, so I miss +ing terms like crazy with today's google), but it makes no sense to attempt to optimize for ad revenue that way. Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence...or in this case, any evidence.
The site is fine. Your post is a bit condescending to say the least.
Are you aware that if you load lots of pages in a short time from the same IP, the load time is deliberately increased? Other user behaviour can also lead to an increased respomse time. Perhaps you've triggered that - load time is sub-second for me in the UK.
This whole thing is such a logical fallacy I can't pick one name for it. How about fundamentally privileging the survivor hypothesis effect bias?

If the 911 turned out to look shit or be unfashionable, they would have changed the styling/stopped making it completely, like most cars from the 70s.

On the other hand, maybe it is still fashionable because they still make it? After all, generally what expert designers say is fashionable, is fashionable.

On the gripping hand, so? Maybe the turnover of style in a niche (sportscar vs mass-market) is slower (as you would expect given fast fashion and volume of play). That does not mean that niche is any better designed, only that bad design takes longer to be recognised and/or fashion tastes change slower.
If we're talking about "designed to appeal to the average driver" then why (cherry) pick the Cadillac? I'd choose the Volkswagen Beetle. It was simply known as Volkswagen at first, which literally means "people's car." I cannot think of a more "timeless" car than the VW bug.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Beetle

https://www.google.com/search?q=vw+beetle&safe=off&s...
Imagine being on your deathbed, looking back at times like these. Imagine how silly you'll think it was that you were so nervous. New jobs, new relationships, new challenges -- these are good things in life.

Also, remember that your new colleagues are probably decent human beings. They'll be nice to you. Don't be afraid to ask them for help.

If they're jerks, then you don't want to work there anyway, start looking for a new job.
Britain also has this kind of legislation. But e.g. Tesco often tries to play around it, by listing, say, different kinds of apples sometimes by piece, sometimes by kg.
Persistent Homology: The Basics (Slides from Big Data Week Berlin)[pdf]
"rockstar"? :(
Overall, great article, but keep in mind that the goal of good design isn't to make people go "wow," it's to be invisible

Or rather - it's only to make people go "wow" if making that happen is part of what the goal of the design is. Designs being invisible that should "wow" are just as bad as "wow" designs when they should be invisible.
Well, in Canada, if you can't support yourself, you'll freeze to death on the coming winter.
Thanks for that video. Really cool to see what they've done!
>Porsche have spent years keeping the brand and style consistent. It was expensive and exclusive, which made it desirable.

I'm not a car person at all, and immediately I was able to see that the Porsche is (more) timeless than the Cadillac.
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5 Reasons to move to Berlin (thanks Node.js - great summary)
1. Lowest livings costs with highest standard of living. Stay in gorgeous, perfectly renovated apartments in pre-WWII residential buildings with high ceilings, right in the middle of the center and pay a fraction of costs of any other capital (even cheaper than any Eastern European capital). No need for a car—Berlin has one of the densest subway nets and wide streets make biking fun + we have Car2Go and Drive-Now (these are world's best smartphone-supported car sharing systems with brand new cars at every corner, cheaper than owning a car or riding a cab). In addition, Germany has an amazing social health care system including health, unemployment and pension (when working as an employee).
2. A vibrant and fast growing ecosystem of smart people. A vast number of new software talents, founders, software companies and VCs are moving to Berlin, every day (Twitter, Google, Soundcloud, Early Bird, Mozilla and many more).
3. People here are open-minded, outgoing, mix well and international—no need to learn German, everyone speaks English! Making new friends is a matter of days. Visit tons of networking and startup events, every week.
4. Easy work permissions—Europeans do not need any and can work from day one.
5. Berlin's night life is unmatched, huge and changing every day (plus ridiculously cheap). Berlin has got some of the most dazzling, naughty, and original clubs on the face of the Earth.
Berlin is calling and getting the new tech hub of Europe. If you are passionate about building great software, we’d love to talk with you. If you don't live in Berlin yet, we could help to fix that.
What I find more surprising about the UK is that thanks to the many post codes (and hence just a couple houses per post code), something like

13
AB1 CD2

is an absolutely unique address.
Slightly offtopic, I like that this is about design in general, and not about "css and pretty pictures", which is what the term "design" has unfortunately come to mean on HN.

I often think that software design, API design (of libraries, not just HTTP APIs), and so on, are somewhat underrated skills, contrasted with being an "awesome super-fast programming ninja".
That sounds right too. I'm not sure if it mandated or convention.
Because basically, design (at the beginner's level) is a whole bunch of little tweaks until something looks just right. If you are designing in the same environment you code in, say by making your tweaks directly to the HTML/CSS, you're just going to get frustrated if your tweaks take any longer than a second or so to make and reload your page

That's actually a moderately good analogy - even though I disagree with your conclusion.

Approaching design like that is like the developers who approach learning development by writing crap and then randomly tweaking and tweaking and tweaking until it sort of runs and does what they want.

Neither is a particularly good approach to learning design or development.
Well, that's pg's opinion, not necessarily mine.
> ...over the weekend to work, they don't switch on the AC for cost cutting

To be fair, this can be true in the US as well. Some buildings literally charge thousands per day to run AC during non-business days. It'd be a stupid waste of money to pay that much for just a handful of people to work.

Of course, no one should be working in a 100F office. They should be working remotely or not at all in that case.
Well, I can scroll down.

So scroll down. who cares. Most people don't scroll down and probably most don't know that they clicked on ads.

Adios now.
I wasn't at all. I had to read the next paragraphs to figure out that the Porsche was intended to be the "better design".

I suspect that this might be due to me being European though. Classical American car designs, like that Cadillac, are very rare here and (possibly as a result of that,) considered quite classy. For one, I'd rather have the Cadillac parked on my driveway than the Porsche.
Well, I am not disregarding the fact that there are really great Indian programmers out there but seeing CS grads out of Tier3/ Tier3 colleges and seeing the growth of software industry, aren't passionate programmers still not an asset like in US ?
Please wire this up to a t-shirt printer! Maybe an artsy 3D printer-based plotter for the vector patterns?
Why don't you bridge the last mile with a bike? I have never been to L.A., but you should be able to just buy yourself a 7th hand old beater and park it somewhere next to the commuter station, then ride the rest of the way.
Java's recent popularity?
It almost seems like Java's popularity has skyrocketed after the advent of hadoop and associated projects. Take a look at the recent projects: hadoop, hbase, cassandra, flume, kafka, etc. Large highly successful companies are using it extensively (LinkedIn, Netflix). And these are not our cookie-cutter enterprise projects. These are high performance applications. Wow! And the industry keeps talking about the death of Java. (I'm not Java fan; I used to program in C++ for more than 10 yrs until I found the dearth of internet companies - other than yahoo, google, facebook - who use C++). So I guess Java is here to stay for a pretty long time? Thoughts?
Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5656174
The space taken by an adjacency matrix doesn't depend on edge count. That's why it is usually the favoured representation for dense graphs.
oh yeah, i meant to pick on java's opinion in general, not you :)
Very good points, but the article a little bit and the comments here in particular remind me of one of my favorite tweets:

> Let's argue about whether Haskell or Clojure is better while somebody else ships products using PHP and duct tape.

https://twitter.com/agentdero/status/174965036928868352
> C is a ridiculously good language, smalltalk and lisp? They've always struck me as pretty specialist.

It's funny because my impression is completely the opposite: C is a very specialist language suitable for a narrow domain of low-level code. For everything else, it's just begging for rampant bugs and security issues.

On the other hand, Lisp and Smalltalk (well, maybe just Lisp--I am not really familiar with Smalltalk) are very general-purpose languages. You could reasonably use them for all sorts of tasks. And you would avoid whole classes of bugs common in C.

Just because many people didn't use them doesn't mean the languages weren't well-suited. Sure, they were never populist langauges, but that's ultimately of little consequence. Especially for "hackers".
Never mind the fact that all of his original points still stand to this day.
Your blog looks strange in Firefox 20.0.1 (latest stable as of today) on Windows 7.

http://i.imgur.com/XwBytbO.png
Thoughtworks used to provide some of what you are asking for. A friend worked there a couple of years ago. I'm not sure how things have changed since but I've only heard good things.

Google India has a lot of the perks they have in the USA (another friend used to work there).

Redhat has a pretty nice work environment.
That's a blatantly false dichotomy.

Often the people doing the arguing are also the most productive: witness Don Stewart. Quantitative finance is more demanding than some PHP-laden startup, and yet he still manages to write a bunch of libraries and surprisingly performant code.
Non-Coalescing OR operator
This is really not much of an issue, if you bother to learn the language. If you don't, then yes, things will be confusing.

sub named_params {
my %P = @_; # named params in hash %P
my $foo = $P{bar} + $P{baz};
return $foo * $P{multiplier};
}

my $rvalue = named_params( foo => 1, bar => 2, multiplier => 3 );

Or, some people prefer to just pass in a hash reference:

sub named_params_hashref {
my $P = shift;
my $foo = $P->{bar} + $P->{baz};
return $foo * $P->{multiplier};
}
my $rvalue = named_params_hashref({
foo => 1,
bar => 2,
multiplier => 3,
});

But of course, why bother letting common sense, and a single line of code stand in the way of your chance to deliver a pithy remark?
More often than not you'll either be strong in design/art, OR strong in programming.

The question is though whether that's a natural law, or an artefact of the culture of those communities of practice. Personally I lean towards the latter.

I'm seeing a lot more dev folk get more than competent on the design side (and a few UX folk getting competent on the dev side).
PG has a date on each of his essays, this one doesn't have one. Neither can I find it in his list of essays. What is it?
Why are there no photos of poorly written addresses in that article?
no it isn't. its a terrible "meal."

delusions are not your ally. try not to embrace them with such zeal.
On someone's personal blog, if you're going to comment, and the person's name and photo is right there, it's about the same as addressing a female in person as "Sir" (or in this case, "dude")
A design becomes "timeless" when the problem is solves spans several generations. The need for paperclips hasn't declined, and this is because of it's simplicity and performance (timeless needs).

I do think, however, that the car metaphor is flawed: technology is changing at such an amazing pace that within a couple of decades this might read this as discussion about what's the best horse-drawn carriage.

The craft of programming is particularly young, I'm not sure that coding of the future will look anything like what's done now. It has certainly changed a lot in the past 40 years. In other words: I'm not sure we will be driving cards in the future.
Yes. Here a lot of websites just ask for house number and post code and then look up the full address in the PostCode Address File.
Because, maybe, but only maybe, there might be software that is not split up into lib, bin, doc directories and that doesn't log into /var/log?!
There actually is quite some software like that and sometimes it even has a technical reason.

Especially some commercial and proprietary software that runs on Windows, HP-UX, SCO, AIX, Solaris and Linux tends to go the "easy way" of packaging and just put stuff in one place on every system.
How exactly does threading ‘not jive with the way Email technology is structured’? In-Reply-To: and/or References: are pretty much all you need for threading.
There's always a market both for expert users and for the broad mass. Room for both Arc and PHP.

Which one will still be used and developed in 30 years? I wouldn't go with pg's argument that the one designed for experts will prove timeless, there are simply way too many factors involved.
In this article, PG makes the claim that "Even a child would think the Porsche 911 is a better design than the cadillac"

Am I the only one who looks at these cars, and sees two quality cars, both with different design goals? I've driven a TON of cars, too.

Use the right tool for the job.
In Europe, when we only need to cover a short distance like a mile, we typically use an antique means of transport called "walking".
And how does your point lead to the conclusion that installing such third-party software to /usr/local/whatever is a bad idea? I can just run 'ls /usr/local' to see a list of non-conforming software.
I have to bring another ruse to surface: I could not find where the "cached" option went when they changed the search interface. Right now, it is buried inside another drop down menu near the website name, and guess what, it is the only one option. Why cannot they have it the previous way? Just mention it right next to the result. Crazy UI to me, guess the G+ designer they hired is working out good for them, and am sure they have 11 use cases for justifying this.

Another big big problem is the "Quick VIew" option for the pdf or doc files in search results. Earlier, if I did not want to download it, I could just use "quick view" option. But they took it away, and now I have to be logged into my gmail account and it takes to google drive, so as to let me simply view the document. Crazy. And this is why i turned to mozilla, their pdf.js is still lacking...but I will support it such as it will be up to par or even better someday.
A few days to schedule an interview upon receipt of your resume. Interview within current or following week. Rejection or offer within a few days of interview. Start date within 2 weeks.

Days = business days. Weekends can stretch things out. Ideally at most a month from resume submission to chair-buttocks contact.
> That's a blatantly false dichotomy.

Hint: A lot of jokes are based on one.
Heh, the car comparison really does resonate with me: I like the Porsche far more because it is a simple design, aesthetically. Sure, the actual implementation--the weird engine position and all the mechanisms needed to compensate for it--is relatively complicated. But this does not compromise the minimalist aesthetic. Quite a nice feeling, especially for a car from that era. The great performance is just a boost.

The Cadillac, on the other hand, is probably simpler mechanically. It's a much more conservative, reasonable car: after all, who would be mad enough to put an engine at the rear of their sports car? But, wow, is the design busy. Little fiddly bits, fins, wheel-covers, too much chrome...

Perhaps the best way to think about it is that the Porsche is a car with a small surface area (metaphorically) and a large depth. The Cadillac is the opposite: larger surface are but less depth. I much prefer the former.

And this preference carries over into programming languages. I always like a language with nice aesthetics--simple semantics--even if it's harder to implement efficiently. I want a language which is simultaneously simpler and more flexible than the alternatives. And good performance certainly wouldn't hurt!

At a high level, these qualities mirror preferring the Porsche, which is why I like this metaphor. Sure, it's not perfect--but it isn't supposed to be. I don't even think of it as an argument in favor of one aesthetic over another; instead, I think it's just a great way to describe why I like what I like.
I notice that your bit-twiddling version avoids
the conditional branch for choosing whether to round up or
down. Nice, but not easier to explain.

(0x00800000 >> exponent) is easier to explain that what
I did (1 << (23 - e)).

> C tends to make this sort of thing relatively verbose.

If this were assembly, there would be a chance that the
test for whether to return the argument without change can
be factored with the computation of the quantity (23 - e)
(which would be computed directly from the unbiased exponent),
so I would really have to try both before deciding on a variant.

> although I write this sort of stuff professionally,…

Since you are reading this (assuming you are reading this),
may I ask you what tools you use? I have been making do
with CRlibm and a good C compiler, occasionally relying on
long double when extra precision was needed, but it has been
close to inadequate a few times.

Is there a standard multi-precision floating-point calculator
that all floating-point experts use for quick computations,
with hexadecimal input and output, or does one have to build
one's own?
I was thinking of forcing myself to learn either bc or Gappa,
but they both seem to have horrible syntax
(that is, not a syntax similar to something I'm used to).
> My notion of the "work that needs to be done" is in no way limited to what current job openings exist.

while in theory this is true, the fact is that the other kind of jobs you referred to (the research positions, etc) are jobs that do not produce results quickly(nor is guarenteed to produce results). And yet, those who work in these jobs needs to be fed, clothed etc. So who provides these resources to keep these people alive while they perform non-productive, exploratory jobs? Basic income _may_, but that just shifts the cost to the entity giving the basic income, instead of the investor who take the risk and profit from the outcome of the research/exploratory work.

The bottom line is, there isn't enough free resources out there to support such endeavours, as much as i like it to be true. Who wouldn't want to have the freedom to do what their passion tells them, be it artistry, scientific research, or social work. But reality is harsh, and the reality is that such people are not needed as much as they think they are.
Look perfectly fine on the same combination.
Whew, she is in Finland.

In the USA, Carmen Ortiz would be sending in cops to shoot their dog and seize their computer.
I didn't say it's a bad idea, i said it's a matter of fact that software exists that runs in /opt/ and that sometimes there are reasons to do so. For example, a particular usecase is to have a specific mountpoint that holds shared binary and configuration in a cluster environment that can't be mixed with native applications and configuration files. Also sometimes you don't have the user rights to install in /usr or policy forbids to install 3rd party software in /usr. /opt is the usual way to go then.
I'm also excellent at web design, because it's really a logical, emotional, and time/test driven process more than aesthetic.

Once you dig into some design theory - you'll find that visual design (and other elements of design) are a lot more "logical, emotional and time/test driven" than you think ;-) There are lots of rules of thumb and heuristics. Lots of applied knowledge rather than just judging things from an aesthetic POV.

Indeed the process of becoming a good designer is basically building up that aesthetic POV from the ground up. In a similar way that experienced developers see "ugly" code much more directly than beginners do.

Obviously I don't know you - but I've worked with folk who have said very similar things to what you've said about having no eye for aesthetics who have ended up with some fairly good basic design chops.
It isn't actually a convertible. Rather, the soft roof is just a particularly American design affectation.
Access Control - Are you in or out?
Update Galaxy Note 2 LTE N7105 with Android 4.1.2 XXDMB6 Jelly Bean
Please don't make us "Europeans" look bad. The part of Europe I come from those kind of American cars are only considered "classy" by white thrash. Or people own them "ironically".

Then again, it's also been a few decades since owning a Porsche was a sign of good taste...
Yes. There is a huge difference between someone who has rote-learned to use helvetica, put lots of negative-space on the page and can mumble something about 'flat design' and 'skeuomorphics'; and someone who can actually sort out workflows for a user.

'UI flows' as you say are a black art. They require considerable individual thought for each application (and potentially every user). Often engineers if they put their mind to it could do this better than any 'designer'. Usually nobody does. I think this is usually because there is no reward for it - because it takes time and doesn't produce any clear result.

Its the same in architecture (buildings) - I know because this is what I do for a living. People sell themselves as 'design-architects' but don't design good outcomes for the building's users because actually there is no incentive for them to put the time in.