skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Writing is inherently about its author, and is a product of their personality and opinions – that’s not something to be shy about, and we shouldn’t try to change it either. So, write for yourself – and hold yourself to an appropriate standard, because you’d better believe that others are judging the person as well as the piece – but as soon as you publish your views, you’re inviting readers to take a look."

Matt comes very close to one of my beliefs about writing... Creative writing is a way to give yourself an opportunity to think through an topic or story and give the rest of us an insight into how your mind works. That's the kind of writing I love -- the kind where I can see the gears moving to a certain degree and I know the author is honestly putting an effort into analyzing a subject or putting something difficult into words.

As an example, I think this is why the recent "Hyperbole and a Half" (http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2013/05/depression-par...) about Allie's experiences with depression is so valuable and compelling.

And it's why I find listicles and articles that purport to be delivering glorious nuggets of truth from the top of Mount Bullshit to be boring, frustrating, and obnoxious. (If you look at my comment history, you'll probably find a fair amount of bitching about articles that are nothing but (often wrong or over-simplified) conclusions with no evident thought process behind them.)

I think it's actually something that's hard to fake. Like Matt says, your personality and opinions are integral. And it almost forces you to start writing about something you're not so sure about, which can seem uncomfortable. Because you might come to wrong conclusions. But if you write to edify yourself and to give yourself the chance to meditate and process the world around you, then suddenly sheer audience count will matter much less and (if you're a good thinker) you might find yourself writing much more compelling pieces, anyway, since, like I said, I think people appreciate being able to see the mental processes of another person at work.

So. I've diverged a bit from Matt's initial point, but his words made me think of this so I thought I'd share...

(Before someone else says it: No, I'm not talking about technical or instructional writing. That's different.)
Astronaut Chris Hadfield was in a simulator 2 hours after returning to Earth
> waste disposal

In my case, it's easy: All the 'stuff'
from the kitchen or bathrooms flows through
big, white plastic pipes to a concrete tank
buried in my back yard. Out of the tank
are some tube, tile, rock or whatever
ways for the water to flow. Done.
I never see the stuff again. The
water from the tank adds water and
plant nutrients to my backyard.

It's all the courtesy of some wonderful
'bugs': Once I had a sore on my foot,
applied some Wal-Mart triple antibiotic
cream, washed my socks, and a few days
later way in the back of my backyard
saw 'stuff' bubbling up, stuff I didn't
want to see again! Sure: That Wal-Mart
stuff was POWERFUL and sterilized my
septic tank! Solution? Sure: There's
a box, Rid-X or some such, can buy at
the grocery store. The box has some
dry beads with no odor. So, flush the
beads and, presto, the septic tank is
working again.

For milk, I've poured old, sour milk
down the kitchen sink with no evidence
of a problem.

Net, for a lot of disposal, not a problem.
Yeoman - Modern workflows for modern webapps
I agree. Let's applaude the lone electric car success.
They may not have a clue about DRM, but what they do understand is, "If I switch to <competing thing>, I won't be able to use it to listen to my existing music collection, or read any of the books I already bought, or run any of the apps I downloaded?"

And that is all caused by DRM.
The challenge is to design your code in a way that either makes it impossible to end up with race conditions or non-deterministic behavior, or if at least limit the number of possible points-of-failure. This requires a good understanding in what coding styles and data structures to avoid or pay extra attention to, but if you're aware of the pitfalls, it's actually not all that difficult. Just make sure your workers don't share any state, collect their outputs in a single thread-safe queue, use off the shelf components to represent threads, thread pools and locking mechanisms, be aware of things like multiple-read-single-write locks, and if you really can't avoid writes to shared state, only then start thinking about mutexes or semaphores. If you're smart about how you set up the code, more often than not you can get away with just some thread-safe queues. Take a look at Objective-C's block syntax and GCD for example, it makes maybe 90% of tasks suitable for multithreading dead easy.

Your estimate only 0.05% of programmers could write reliable multithreaded code is extremely pessimistic, cynical even. I almost feel flattered, having written a fair amount of multithreaded code that works perfectly myself, but I most definitely would dare count me with the 0.05% top programmers or whatever. My estimate is that with proper preparation, at least 50% of all programmers could learn to write reliable multithreaded code, and the remaining 50% probably wouldn't have a use for it anyway.
HN Checkout Readmill.  Great Ebook Reader / Recommendation Service
Automate your house with ifttt:
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514941/home-tweet-home-...
As I said, there's nothing wrong with your point of view. There's no denying that in the history of the web, those were important moments.

I'd say the creation of the web browser, HTML, HTTP, were even larger moments. And in that regard, Microsoft and Google are standing side-by-side on the shoulders of giants.

And I'd go further and say that when Google decided to make JavaScript performance a top-priority, and started pushing HTML5 standards, Microsoft has been the one playing catch-up. I'd say that those efforts enabled Microsoft to produce Metro, which is core to their new push.
US Government Biggest Hacker In The World?
I should add that another reason can be "because I can", which is a perfectly fine reason too, but then label it as such so that naive greenhorns don't start pushing production systems in this direction, requiring others to then deal with the fallout.
Most of the button wasn't circuitry and the one wire chips were packaged in various formats depended on the use. There were some nifty amazing prototypes that never made it to the public. (I can neither confirm nor deny previous employment at DS or TI.) :P
IBM researchers implement psychographic targeting from Twitter & Facebook feeds
For me, bookmarks are a hole where content goes to die.

Beyond about 5 of them which will get used more or less daily, I'm more likely to just search for content again than to think to check my bookmarks. Unfortunately this usually leads to 100-200 open tabs at any given time of things that are either "in-queue" for reading or research/reference for what I'm currently working on.

I'm not going to claim it's the best system (or even a good one), but you really do get used to it and it works pretty well.
Wow! This is really impressive. I had no idea about the scale of the destruction.
to add a small thing to what Selena already said, Salesforce is sponsoring the "Unconference" day at PgCon 2013 (held in Ottawa this week). It could be nothing but it seems to me a good thing.

Despite of that, I think that if Salesforce will let Tom to focus on postgresql development as RedHat did in the past we(1) are ok.

(1) = postgresql users
Elixir v0.9.0 released
The problem is that the DOM is a hard upper limit on performance compared to what the performance of an unsafe language (asm.js) is. It is massively complex because it must perform every UI task in the browser and simply moving around DIVs doesn't give you a feel for its the performance in complex scenarios.

If you think about how native applications perform and then imagine every one having to go through a DOM interface and every button and UI interaction being composed of DOM elements and re-styling these elements on every interaction you get a sense of what the problem is. There is simply no way to get the DOM to do something it wasn't designed to do, which is to be a document display interface and not a general graphical user interface. You have to clobber together a lot of interactions to get the desired behavior and not only does this increase the overhead for both your program and the DOM you are going to hit cases where the DOM isn't optimized.

This doesn't mean that the DOM is inherently slow. If you tried to offload the UI work onto javascript you wouldn't get the performance benefit of doing that on Asm.js or NACL. You really need unsafe code to solve this problem. Asm.js and NACL are only useful if you are going to do this; targeting the Canvas and WebGL gives you the ability to do that.
http://di.fm
I'm don't understand - how does the existence of alternatives prevent improvement? Could you clarify this point?

It is very simple. If there are two somewhat separable programs, but one is much more heavily used by the constituents that politicians care about, the privileged one will consistently enjoy an advantage in resource allocation decisions. This eventually will cause them to be very unequal alternatives.

Also schools are in the habit of raising money from parents in a variety of ways. If all of the well-off parents go to one school, then that school will naturally enjoy a significant funding advantage. If this is what the parents want to do, then fine. But that should be a private school, rather than a charter school that received public funds on top.
3D-printed pizza may be delivered soon, thanks to NASA
This is great for the owners of Makani but what does Google honestly know about running an energy company?

With all of the side projects that Google has shuttered lately, I am disappointed more than anything by this acquisition.
Although I do enjoy the Economist's coverage of subjects like Africa, EU politics, book reviews, and obituaries, I find their coverage of American politics to sometimes be very sub-par. A couple of examples:

- Endless war-mongering. They pushed heavily for the disastrous war in Iraq. After the Boston bombing, they asked whether America was getting complacent. They post a lot of stuff implying that America should go to war in Syria.

- Their coverage of American presidential politics is horrible. In 2000, they endorsed George W Bush, a political scion who was clearly an anti-intellectual and bit of a fool, over Al Gore, a visionary vice president who had co-presided over the longest economic expansion in American history. In 2004, after 4 disastrous years, their "endorsement" issue was titled "Incompetent vs Incoherent".

This stuff, especially the war-mongering, has made me care a lot less about the Economist than I did when I was, say, 18. Given that SV is a very forward-looking place, it is unsurprising that the Economist is less respected than it is in many other locales.
> how is that a surprise or relevant to the discussion

Lots of people will have _some_ photos that would be a bad idea to post on Flickr. Anyone with children, for example, will certainly have photos that obviously shouldn't appear on a public website.

Which means there's a very large set of people who can't save _everything_ on Flickr, and since the original post said 'I have ditched iPhoto as my archiving software', it seems completely relevant.
At that point, aren't you just adding the sugar back in?

(I'm only justifying my own habits, mind you -- when I'm not eating it with dinner, I have a giant dollop of sour cherry jam that's going in.)
Is Excel drawing rasterized or vectorized? I'm quite curious what the drawing tools of Excel are now, and also if he uses a mouse.
I get the same error on FF Nightly (24).
You're getting a little too New-Agey for me, but I'd pick B.

All of the smarts in the world means nothing if you don't apply it.
Note to self: Do this to my brother for April Fool's Day next year
I've worked with psychopaths. Like, straight up would slaughter you in your sleep for your last dollar. So yeah, smuggling pop? I couldn't give less fucks.
Full disclosure: I'm a founder of UsableHQ ( http://www.usablehq.com ), a graduate of the first round of the UK's Ignite100 accelerator.

Exits take time. Quite a long time at that. Even an "overnight success" takes a year or two. Most of YC's exits took 3 or 4 (http://yclist.com). Given that the majority of accelerator programmes have been going less than that, you wouldn't really expect to see significant numbers yet.

Exits are a pretty poor metric to gauge accelerators on at this stage.

Also... in the UK start-up scene there's a definite trend towards "accelerator + PoC funding" at the moment. You get the standard accelerator deal of "$n per founder", but with an attached convertible note of $100,000+ agreed at the beginning if you complete the programme and hit a few targets (having a working MVP, proving a market exists, having a plan to take the product to the world, etc). You're not compelled to take the post-accelerator investment, but it does mean that rather than 13 weeks to go from zero-to-investable you have a runway of 13 weeks plus about a year if you're frugal. It's still hard, but it's a lot less distracting than trying to raise funding the traditional way. You can concentrate on the business. That's what you're supposed to be doing as an entrepreneur after all.

I strongly believe it's the future of accelerator programmes (confirmation bias, etc etc).
I really enjoyed this article, and I'd like to add that software developers working remotely could probably learn a lot from the wisdom of writers, which has been collected in hundreds of articles on the web. (search for "advice from best authors" or "daily routines of great writers", etc, and you're bound to find many such articles. Some are good, most are puffery, but so it goes with anything).

Not all of the advice applies, of course, but there's a lot of good advice on making a good workspace and keeping yourself motivated. I've certainly noticed after working alone that there's a lot of implicit encouragement merely from working near other people, and this makes working at home harder than the same work might otherwise be. That's part of the reason why many prefer to work from cafes or worker/hacker-spaces, I think. Motivation is contagious.

(The positive flip side is that working from home removes a certain set of distractions that might otherwise be bothersome, and gives you more fine-grained control over the distractions you have in general).

Lots of authors use funny setups to transition from home-mode to work-mode. Some people build extra doors in their house so they can "leave" their house and "enter" an office that is sealed off from their house, but is otherwise the same building. One author (Roald Dahl?) worked from a bunker.

That being said, its probably a bad idea to get hung up on the idea of perfect working-from-home conditions. Per E. B. White:

"A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper."

Some similar important words from Tchaikovsky, which I found especially relevant to working from home:

Do not believe those who try to persuade you that composition is only a cold exercise of the intellect. The only music capable of moving and touching us is that which flows from the depths of a composer’s soul when he is stirred by inspiration. There is no doubt that even the greatest musical geniuses have sometimes worked without inspiration. This guest does not always respond to the first invitation. We must always work, and a self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood. If we wait for the mood, without endeavouring to meet it half-way, we easily become indolent and apathetic. We must be patient, and believe that inspiration will come to those who can master their disinclination.

I think motivation is under-stated in its importance when it comes to working from home. Even if our work demands little distraction, we're social creatures, and we've probably all had days where its hard to even open up the editor.

It's important to stay positive and stay at it. As Joel said, "We just have to come in every morning and somehow, launch the editor."[1]

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html
"Flask is like Legos in that you choose the pieces to build onto its minimalist stack."

Very well said.

"best for new-comers to web dev to use a full stack that makes decisions for you"

I do not agree. When I started learning web dev. using python, I started with Django. As I moved along trying to hack a simple side project using django, I realized that I was just not understanding the "why" of many things. For example, I tried to create a simple user registration and needed my own fields on the user object. Playing around with User and User_Profile on django, I gave up after a few hours. When I came across Flask, I actually found it easier to do some of my own stuff to understand the whys and then i could always choose a vetted extension/plugin. For example, I wrote my own login system in flask and then switched to Flask-Login later. Btw, this is not about django vs flask but just giving a perspective as a newbie learner.

To newbies, my personal opinion is to understand the "whys" a lot more than just the "what". I actually think that flask is a better way to start learning because it will force you to think about the basics like sessions, user management etc. The more you learn why something works the way it works, the better you will become at it.
Because he is The Little Guy, and there is a massive and highly publicized campaign by the US government against him. This is him doing what he can to fight back.

I think it says something that he never did anything with the patent until now, I believe that he has good intentions and no desire to be a patent troll. Given his unique situation, and his flair for drama and unorthodoxy, I think it makes perfect sense.
This Quora answer gives a little insight in to the needs of a modern store: http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-new-instantaneous-payment-s...

Also these stores basically couldn't exist without robust inventory management systems. There is probably more technology in the average big box than we realize.
Sound advice...I'm viewing the OP from a tablet so I don't know if I'm seeing something different than the norm, but whatever sparked the trend toward single column content design...thanks! When I was mucking about in my original blog's CSS, I wasted a ton of time thinking I needed multiple columns (in the blog content) for floating images, boxes, etc.

Now I'm happy with just single columns...much less work to maintain, much more readable for users, and more time to think about the actual words rather than CSS.

Moving to Markdown helped expedite my preference for simplicity, too.

As our viewing surfaces only get more diverse, I hope single columns are a long lasting trend
Is it possible to kick start science?
Freedom From Snark
I thought this article would give tips on how to find a job where you can work from home.
Yes, YouTube does solve the problem of playing your videos. And sharing them with your friends. And archiving them, in case of disaster. If you're willing to use YouTube, of course. If not, you can use Smugmug or Flickr or Vimeo or...

ChromeOS is inherently an operating system that uses the internet to solve users' problems.

Expecting ChromeOS to have BUILT-IN ways to do what you want to, is kind of silly, in my mind. I validate that you may reject the design idea, but you're forcing it into solving problems in a way it was inherently and intentionally NOT designed to solve them.
I don't see how the two are related. Hulu is for consumption of produced video where as Vimeo is for oriented towards user generated video. They don't fulfill the same need.
Yes, license would be allowing Google etc to use the method described in the patent (and potentially making money from it), buying the patent would give Google etc the ownership rights and allow them to license it out themselves.
I haven't had significant memory issues with Angular. Have you profiled your app? Where is the large portion of memory being consumed. The apps I'm building are being deployed on an embedded system with a custom WebKit -- where the memory constraints are significant (the hardware has a total of about 400MB RAM for everything) -- so I'm pretty conscious about memory issues, and we did test/profile Angular on this hardware and did not find issues.

That isn't to say you still can't shoot yourself in the foot with Angular (especially with something like ng-repeat). There are ways to code an Angular app with an eye on memory / performance, and there are ways to do the opposite, but I don't feel like the framework itself introduces significant overhead.
Journalists Find Data Security Lapse Through Google Search, Receives Threats.
You know, my first thought was that you were wrong. But then I was thinking that maybe something changed after the influx of the new free-to-play games that recently appeared on Steam. So I decided to look into this.

From what I've read you are correct in that Steam can be a delivery service in that some games do not require the Steam client to be active. Although, they do seem in the minority. I found that it interesting that games using DosBox tend to not require Steam running to play. I was not aware of that.

Although, I still stand by my statement that Steam is still DRM in that an account is required to use it. It's just that unlike most DRM, the range of rights management that it supports is broad. As long as an account that can be revoked is required then, admittedly to me, it is a form of rights management.
Summer of Design
Does this page work or you: http://get.webgl.org
I'm more into the proselytization. I'm at my third company that I've migrated from MySQL to PostgreSQL.
Cooling costs ! Buildings whose whole structure doesn't take data center cooling requirements into account are at a significant cost disadvantage over modern ones built specifically with cooling optimization in mind.
Going Quantum podcast
> The mere fact that the instructor has a schedule put up and sticks to it makes it better than any lab session I had.

You seem to be impressed by the oddest things! FWIW, our labs adhered to a schedule too. Engineering colleges in India fall on some range within the spectrum. You seem to have studied at one of the poorer ones. k4rtik, below, seems to have studied at one of the better ones.

When I made judgements, I made it on the basis of the output of Indian and western colleagues. Compiler versions are a non-issue for me. µA741, though outdated, taught me well enough.
Read their second post - that person is either very, let's say, eccentric, or under the influence of a psychedelic.
That's nice of Space Camp to reach out to her like that. I don't know if Kiera Wilmot is going to be the next brilliant scientist or not but I do know she seemed like a bright, interested student who was unfairly targeted by our schools' protofascist zero tolerance policies. I could imagine it would put a distaste for involvement in science in your mouth if you were persecuted for what's an obvious nothing story, so I hope Space Camp's nice gesture does something to counteract that.

Also Space Camp is sweet, I spent a week there as a kid. I didn't go through the official program but I saw and experienced a lot of it and it's one of the most unique and fun youth programs in the world.