skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some thoughts that occur:

* Was that test just on new users - or subscribers in general? If the latter you're going to self-select for folk who are interested enough in your stuff to read regardless, which will skew the results somewhat.

* Also - judging by the blog topic - you've got a pretty technical audience. One of the few groups that do have the knowledge to use tools and preferences to get around the problem. I'd be leary of generalising that to other markets.

* You're a/b testing on max-width setting - not line length. So a bunch of your users in both groups are going to get exactly the same experience if they're on smaller displays. This will make the improvement on larger displays seem less significant.

* Tests like this can be really skewed if you have audiences that shift device over time (e.g. getting popular link tweeted and retweeted can push sometimes push up the mobile portion of a site enough so that certain display types work better/worse.)

* The line length is something that has interactions with other typographic features like line spacing and font size. Optimising on one alone can lead to poor results.

I'm not saying that you're wrong - but those are things that occurred ;-)

In general what the research done by others indicates is that users prefer shorter physical line lengths, but read faster on some longer line lengths (within limits obviously - backup http://www.usability.gov/articles/newsletter/pubs/082006news...)
Getting involved in Free Software
That sounds an awful lot like "Hollywood accounting".
How would this work? 20% every time you buy or something? Or targeted on things that are scarce or a limited (eg higher tax on oil than lettuce)? It seems to me that targeted taxes end up encouraging elaborate workarounds - this is a problem.
Download WinSnap - NTWind Software
Free trial: BitcoinMonk - Bitcoin SMS alerts made easy
Hi all,

In order to introduce our service, we offer a free trial to the first 100 users who will be trying http://www.bitcoinmonk.com, a simple and reliable SMS alerting system for the USD/BTC exchange rate.

Just input your alert (without paying on step 2) and we will validate it for you.

I'm happy to answer any questions you may have, and would love some feedback from the community.
On Ubuntu, try:

mkdir -p ~/.fonts && wget -O /tmp/symbola.zip 'http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/Symbola708.zip' && unzip -j -d ~/.fonts /tmp/symbola.zip Symbola.ttf

Restart Chrome. It should work on 10.04 or later (and possibly in earlier versions as well).
It often seems to get missed that it was Why the lucky stiff that first coined the phrase tumblelog, which is where the name Tumblr comes from. Even this article just refers to him as a 'user of Redhanded.com'.
I would say, it is developers that:

- started coding after Java and .NET became mainstream

- only know C and C++ as compiled languages, never tried anything else (e.g. Modula-2, Delphi, Haskell, ...)

- lack CS background

So they think any language with stronger type system than C or C++ can only be provided via a VM based runtime.
That's a good question. I've given some thought to how we might build drivers in languages that don't support lambda functions and unfortunately, there don't seem to be any good answers.

The actual underlying S-expression syntax for ReQL lambda functions is pretty ugly by itself and I'm glad that so far we haven't had to expose it. The python `lambda x,y: x + y` actually gets compiled to something like the following: `(func [1,2] (add (var 1) (var 2)))`. Variable references have to be constructed manually no matter how you do it. With native lambda functions though you can at least hide those constructions behind the scenes and bind them to the function's formal arguments.

Fortunately though both C++ and Java, the two "traditional" languages we would most like to support, have either just (in C++11) or are about to (in Java 8) introduce lambda functions rendering the point moot.
I like the idea of working out a better forum experience, but your page does not really explain where and why you are different. Maybe you should include a section for this somewhere.
JuKo
> If everywhere had the same tax levels, why would anyone bother to be resident anywhere other than the London/New York/Tokyo.

My question is, why would I ever want to be resident in any of those places? Never in my life have I ever considered living there. I barely tolerated San Jose for 9 months before I moved to Santa Clara.

There are plenty of reasons to live outside megacities, taxes are way down on the list.
I guess you could say taking any position to an extreme is bad. However each of these diseases opens paths to future cures. It helps us understand human body better. And those cures will open ways to more ideas, etc. Without diseases we'll never have a chance to explore. I'm not negating those defects don't leave their parents in despair, but I speak from a position of a similar though magnitudes way milder defect (hip displacement). Eugenics taken to extreme would have discarded me.

Eugenics on small scales does have some advantages, though I fear it would bring advantages in a way that will only widen inequalities i.e. only people with money would have enough money for it. Rich people wouldn't just have money, but also best looks and best health.

Eugenics on large scales is on the other hand simply disastrous as it leaves monoculture and erradication of anything perceived as abnormal.
Not to mention, it can stuff the rhythm of your heart. I work for an electricity company, if we get a shock job we tell them to see a doctor.
Because the cost of living (food, residence, etc.) would go up to match demand?
This sounds like it's practically the opposite of the accusation I quoted, no?
I had a .ch address. Got verified in 10 minutes.
Yes, and the utility companies are extremely efficient collectors of that kind of tax.
You are only taxed for the difference between your US taxrate and your place of residency's taxrate, this means for many citizens the tax paid to the US is very little or even $0 (but they still have to go through the trouble of filing).
I think one naive answer is that US citizens living abroad get credits or deductions for local taxes they may have paid. A more general one is that we already accept the idea that corporations and individuals are governed by different tax laws so "Why shouldn't one be exactly like the other?" has a somewhat flippant reply in "They don't, already, for various reasons, so why should they be?"

But I don't think the objections (or counter-arguments) to Apple's behaviour as simplistic as that - it's just I don't quite understand what the source of the controversy is and was hoping that someone else did.
I know someone with FOP, and this pretty much fits his experience. His is a mild case, but he carries crutches because his knee sometimes locks from one of his attacks -- muscle sprain in childhood -- and he needs its support. He's also talked about the pain going to the doctors becomes at times, because pretty much everything is handled by specialists, or with their consultation, and he just wants to get on with life.

One of the things that this article doesn't touch on, though, is the difficulty in getting treatment and effective care for comorbid diseases. Because these diseases, especially things like FOP, can manifest in odd ways, they tend to lump all of the other abnormalities together, even if the other symptoms run completely counter to what the disease does to others. So, standard diagnostic batteries for the other diseases aren't run, even if such a diagnostic would be useful in managing body issues that can and do come up. Thankfully, though, he's managed to get a decent amount of day-to-day coping skills with his other disease (Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome) from the internet. It still would be nice for him to get a firm diagnostic, so that interactions and symptoms could better be monitored.
They pay almost no tax in Australia. The Australian government is madly going around closing loopholes, mainly because Apple made close to a billion dollars this year and made almost nothing (comparatively) in taxes in Australia.
Brilliant, I use Github to contribute to open source, but have had my private repos on Bitbucket. It's great to move over to the one platform :) Thanks Github!
Let's just admit that what these companies are doing is pretty sneaky, and unfair. If they actually made $5 billion with their business in Ireland, then I'd be fine if they only paid 1% in taxes or whatever are the taxes in Ireland. Same for their businesses in any other country. Maybe they pay 5% in some, 15% in others, 30% in others and so on.

They should abide by local laws, and pay taxes on whatever they are making there. They are doing business there, so clearly they believed that market is worth it for them, and it should be worth to pay the taxes there, too - after all if they do pay a lot in taxes, most of that will be transferred to the consumers in those local markets anyway. But what they're doing is taking their cake and eat it, too. Making those customers pay more, but then avoiding paying the taxes that were most likely already included in the price the consumers paid there.

Then taking virtually all the profit from all the countries and transferring it to Ireland so they pay the absolute minimum, while pretending they are barely making anything in all the other countries, because they get their Ireland subsidiary to take all the money, so there's "barely anything left" to tax in other countries - is not okay at all.

Some may say that it's Apple's "duty" to do this, but it's their duty in the same way it's their "duty" to sue many other companies for infringing on "slide to unlock" and other such trivial patents, by (legally) abusing the patent system.

So just because it's not illegal to do something, and it's their "duty" to maximize profit by any means necessary, doesn't mean we should pretend it's "morally okay". It's also the governments' duty to fix these loopholes, and restrict the companies from doing this as much as possible (some international treaty is going to be necessary). And I also think it's the consumers' duty to not be okay with this, and protest against it.
The 1990s All Over Again
Most quants use functional programming to some degree when not locked down into C++, be it in a specifically funcational language or not. At least in London F# is commonly used in Credit Suisse, Barclays and UBS that I know of. Heard that Morgan Stanley uses it a bit too but didn't sound very widespread there.
All the press about them leads off with "non-military".
I seriously thought this article was about converting to backBONE.js
I think they meant no big ad sponsored free b2c
Are you suggesting that Apple, by selling products in foreign territories and profiting from this, are somehow stealing from the US Government? IMHO, that is backwards. The USA have absolutely no entitlement to money any business (or for that matter, any individual) makes outside of it's borders.
Confirmed. letter-spacing: 1px, vs -1px :)
Solving the real-time targeting challenge
I hear in the early days, Amazon employees had to assemble their own biodomes from scratch on their first day on the job.
Like stackexchange's area51 without the voting. Do you allow users to add custom code?
It's there, keep looking.
Standard chartered

Credit Suisse

Barclays capital

Tsuru capital

GSA capital

Alphaheavy

Edf energy trading

... Just off the top of my head :-)
The problem is that multinational companies are allowed to place IP in low income countries, set the royalty payment themselves (only subject to transfer pricing rules) and then deduct royalty payments from the earnings in all the high tax countries.

Any royalty for patent, trademark, design and copyright licenses should be deducted in the country where the patent is awarded, not where the owner of the patent happens to be situated. This way all the shenanigans would come to an end.

As a European, I am quite appalled that Apple almost doesn't pay tax in Europe either. Apple's European profits are compareable to their American profits, http://investor.apple.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1193125-11-....

Apple is competing with European businesses for customers and through European patent and trademark rights Apple is awarded competitive advantages in the European market. Not paying tax is another advantage. So what if the research is done in America? The European patents and trademarks apply in Europe. Let them pay tax income tax on American profits in America, on Irish profits in Ireland, German profits in Germany.
Jargon Buster: Some Words And Phrases Often Used In Mortgage Documents
I suggest http://sidebar.io/
Petition to Google to Open Source Google Reader
Please type +1 and your name in the comments. If you work at Google then please talk tell your management to look here.
Or... you can pay $7/mo, given that as a nom-student you can probably afford that much? :P
Ask Google to open source it. Go to this thread and add +1 and your name.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5761892
Seth Godin made more on a book he gave away than on a NYT bestseller
No, no, no. Don't like. Don't want. Why does mother nature keeps coming with shit like this? :(
Rebuild YouTube's mobile-like progress bar in jQuery
I honestly wish I could do something like that at work. I already do it all the time at home.
Oh it's okay. Thanks for pointing it out. Truth is I lost my password and I hadn't given them my email, so I just made a new account. (I'm not upset about this.)
I personally always get Haiti and Papua New Guinea confused in my head. I know they are very different, but for some reason I have to think for a few seconds when someone says Haiti.
as far as IRS is concerned, Apple Inc. is barely breaking even therefore is not paying its fair tax share.

Is this really true, though?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-23/apple-tax-rate-igno...

Among various other points it says Apple paid 6 billion in taxes last year which sounds unlikely if they were 'barely breaking even'.

I don't have any trouble believing that a large multinational has the means, opportunity and incentive to exploit every bit of every tax code it is subject to in order to minimize its tax liability. I'm just finding it difficult to get a handle on the basic issues between the 'zomg corporations, our evil overlords' and 'leave Britney/Apple/the free global market alone' rhetoric. My vain hope is to somehow summon up some grellas-like entity who is knowledgable in these matters and will provide a bit of level-headed insight.
Beside brute-forcing the PIN with reaver, one can test for defaults first, a lot of people do not change them (or are even aware of WPS being enabled in the first place).

Title's a bit misleading, I clicked it expecting a some kind of a rpi+drone rig. This is still a drive-by, not a fly-by.
Never-before-seen Images of Pandas
are you using tastypie, the django rest api, or just writing views from scratch? what do you think is proper level of integration between a rest api module for django (or more generally a server-side library) and a client-side model layer such as anglar's or backbone's? and where do you place those boundaries, particularly when your rest api might be used by more than one type of client?

in any case, yeah, one way or another, serve static files & expose a rest api. this is the way forward. i'm excited too, just not exclamation point excited. or, well... fine: !
Architecting for High Availability
That page is out-of-date and we're re-writing it. We actually launched 2 weeks ago, got a load of feedback and active users, and are currently re-prioritising in the light of all that feedback.

The biggest difference is that within a forum, instead of just "posts in threads", a whole slew of things can exist and are properly structured... events, classifieds, galleries, polls, Q&A, wiki pages, articles, reviews.

No-one has to adapt a thread to be an event as an event type exists with time, place, attendees, etc.

Imagine the first 80% of common functionality of a meetup.com page or eventbrite page and imagine that inside a forum and that a conversation about it can also exist.

Then imagine the same for ebay adverts, magazine reviews, long-form articles, wiki-pages, surveys, etc.

And none of that stuff is global, it's not outside of the forum but on the same site, it's deep within the forums, right there beside the "posts in threads".

Instead of a community fragmenting and externalising themselves across the web, or struggling to fit everything into a threaded conversation... every tool a community needs gets surfaced within a forum... and even sub-forums.

Then imagine that instead of site admins and technical people determining which sites exist and the structure of them, that the users themselves get to define it. They can create their own sites, and their own spaces within existing sites. The simplest way to explain this today would be sub-reddits, but what if creating a whole new reddit.com was also available... so that the strength of identity of a community could be fully realised.

Basically, imagine forums that could be created in seconds, and have all of the ways in which communities and sub-communities communicate and transact dealt with in the one place.

Instead of ebay or meetup.com trying to build a community around their classifieds or events... imagine instead bringing the additional functionality that communities require and embedding it deep within the place that the community already hangout.
My guess is that it uses too much of Google's core infrastructure for them to open source ... so the answer is probably going to be "No" no matter how many people sign.
How do you efficiently administer a road tax[1]? How do you measure a company's use of the military defense of a nation? The police protection that makes their locality safe for business in the first place? What about the nearby public park that attracts families who frequently go to a nearby ice cream shop? What about the fact that the local bar attracts people who get into fights on the sidewalk?

[1]Gas taxes are obviously not the answer.
As a heavy user of Excel+VBA I would love to be able to switch to coding in Python. I detest VBA with a passion. Plus the DB stuff is nice. It's much better able to return results as a formula array vs the native MS facilities which populate ranges with static data (and potentially clobber existing content). Plus it also means your data is refreshed with a simple Shift-F9.

I actually wrote a wrapper for the ADO/Jet DB engine in VBA which does exactly this [1]. However, doing it all in python would be a heck of a lot easier.

1) {=DB_QUERY("/path/to/.csv|.xls|.db","SELECT * FROM....")}
How to overcome failure
I actually find this case far more intriguing. Probably 1 of 3 in the world

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooke_Greenberg
Is is, in fact, much much slower than both SQLite and Postgres. It's even slower than a fully indexed hstore in postgres! (which is pretty much identical to mongo's data model, except consistent, durable, with transactions, etc.)
how did you learn this? whats your guys' educational background? i always wanted to know this but never took my education that far, for it was too much work and kind of boring, also hard to find advice on this stuff.
MyISAM has reader/writer table locks[1] which meant that nobody could read while someone was writing to a table.

SQLite can be ran in two modes 1) database reader/writer lock or 2) in WAL mode[2] where readers do not block writers and writers do not block readers. Writers block each other though so there can only be one concurrent writer. WAL mode provides concurrency superior to what MyISAM did.

1. The locks could sometimes be bypassed by inserts, but not reliably so.
2. http://www.sqlite.org/wal.html
5 Steps to Make Bug-Fixing Fun Again
We're hosted by default, and give a lot of customisation options, but if you find yourself constrained by them we've open-sourced our front-end (Django - https://github.com/microcosm-cc/microweb ) and the whole site and full functionality is through an API ( http://microcosm-cc.github.io/ )... so you can deploy your own front-end, delete anything you don't want, and add anything at all that you do want.

We're currently keeping the storage layer closed though. We have an open and ongoing debate about whether to open that in future. We want to do a lot of things that improve the user experience and doing so requires an ever more complex back-end. Things like replying to email notifications putting the reply against the thing you were notified about, or providing interfaces through other protocol (events get surfaced through webcal, all content through IMAP, etc). As it's early we want to get on with building that without someone deploying the backend and freaking when we change the requirements ("you now need to add email gateways, MX records, and your infrastructure diagram now has these added boxes, etc"). When we've done most of that we'll return to whether that should be, or needs to be, open.
Really cool feature. Thanks for sharing!

(Incidentally, did Randall not write a transcript for the latest comic 1216? I'm not able to find one yet.)
ROP (Return On Project): over-convoluted prj workflow (‘I hate overhead’) [1/7]
Is This Google X's Plan to Wire the World?
I think it's: "Searches related to troll ... 4chan"
Also, in some work place like mine. There are set of pseudo rules implied by managers who ask people to quote a valid reason when you work from home. Most of the times, There is no reason when I feel like working from home. Actually thats also i have come across few people who kind of misuse the option of working from home and employ it when they have some other stuff to do, in which case they would be spending lot less time working.
> Let's not forget that client-side window decorations are not exactly going to be a security improvement.

Why would it have anything to do with security?
So you are blaming Google not for what it has done, but what it could do?
Agreed, I was hopeful to see some Wardroning ;)
Unfortunately and it's sad but don't believe in this for a minute.
Thanks for checking. I'll attribute the changes in the hashes I was seeing to a bad internet connection.

By the way, I also saw the hash ending in 9a3e a couple of times. About 4 other times, I saw different hash #s.
From your link:

3. You are a citizen or resident alien of the US whose physical absence from the US constitutes a minimum of 330 days out of any 365.

When I lived overseas I knew US citizens counted the number of days they spent visiting family to make sure they stayed under 30 days each year.
That was very similar to my original aim too! I wanted it for feedback when drafting blog posts, and also to let people truly engage and critique my writing, when I'm talking about history or religion.

Your naive plan was mine too, but... then I realised that for feedback while drafting, I'd be breaking up paragraphs (with comments on them), adding new ones before commented paragraphs etc. So it never happened.

http://blog.bitbucket.org/2012/10/30/building-inline-comment... seems a far more technical (and reliable) way to handle these situations.
... but now it worked.
I think that the problem is not the personalisation but all the stuff they had to build to make it happen, the side effects of prioritising Google+.

I don't mind a functionality that I can disable, the real issue is all the stuff I need to go through to have that functionality that turns out... I don't need or want!

So Hangouts will provide some advantages over XMPP, at a cost. It doesn't matter I don't really need/want the improvement if I can't keep using the stuff that was already useful to me.
* {
text-transform: lowercase;
}

If it bothers you so much. :)
http://www.readability.com/articles/7kplxemi