skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you think speech like this has no consequences at all? That's what I'm trying to find out, whether people believe this sort of thing genuinely has zero effect.

Personally, I think speech and communication in general goes both ways. It reflects what the source thinks and feels, and in turn affects what the listener/reader thinks and feels. I think there is an effect.

Do you think there is none?

And then there is the other aspect. Do you believe that speech with consequences should be censored or controlled? Or do you believe that all speech, even shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater, should be uncensored and uncontrolled? You appear not to have answered the question I actually asked.
Four-part series: Solaris Cluster 4.1/Solaris 11/VMware/iSCSI
If you are willing to spend a little time with it, this might help give you a more intuitive udnerstanding:

http://intromath.ca/aakkozzll/

The trick is to keep in mind that in this model, each ball has a 50/50 chance of either going left or right when it crosses each peg.

This is analogous to a game where you flip a coin 9 times in a row and win a dollar for every heads, lose a dollar for every tails. On average, you come out even, but the outcome of any particular game is like one of the balls falling down that Pachinko board. You might get really lucky and get 9 heads in a row, but usually there's a mix of heads and tails, and if you look at all the possible results, it would stack up like those balls in the pachinko board.
I worked at Yahoo 2003-2005, and already then the split between the "Yahoo is a technology company" crowd - exemplified by those who still wanted Yahoo to try to compete on search technology - and the "Yahoo is a media company" crowd was rapidly being won by the media company crowd.

I was in London, and I don't know much about how this played out in Sunnyvale, but apart from some occasional attempts at convincing people otherwise (like the acquisition of WhereOnEarth that was widely "advertised" across the company) on our end at least "everyone" apart from some pockets of engineering appeared to understand very clearly that Yahoo was a media company where growing pageviews to monetize them with ads was the core of the company.
Three arrested for tweets
Indeed, according to http://www.w3schools.com/js/js_timing.asp, the first parameter of setTimeout should be a function. I don't know if "_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', '15_seconds', 'read'])" will be treated as a function.
I'm usually pro having the "implementor(s)" be the dictators.
If you code it, you have a say.
JavaScript is most emphatically not the assembly language of the web. It is instead the lingua franca of the web. I actually think this is what people intend to convey when they say this sort of nonsense.
98% of this article is a discussion of the use of strings in HTTP headers. The last 4 or 5 sentences tries to generalize the conclusion to strings at large.

I feel a bit misled by the title. It would have been nice to have 3 or 4 examples, and a much larger argument that strings in general should be abstract.

However, even with all of this underpinning, it doesn't work. This is like an argument against integers because integers can express so many things: age, number of arms, days of the year, and so forth. Base types can cover a lot of things! Film at eleven.

The discussion should have been about proper API construction, and when to subclass. Or even particular problems with HTTP Header APIs in Java -- I really liked that part. If the author had stuck with it, I wouldn't have felt a bit bamboozled.
Making monitoring graphs for your CEO with zero code, with Heroku Dataclips
OP here, I agree totally. Steve Jobs was by all accounts a jerk and I think it's unfortunate so many people idolize him instead of people doing more human good like Bill Gates. But it's undeniable that he had a once-in-a-century eye for picking and tweaking good design, and he was a once-in-a-century businessman too. Was he a good human? All signs point to "not really". But his uncompromising vision and massive business success are stories that are hard to match in modern times.
$100 Million Mega-Mosque
Illegal numbers: Can you break the law with math?
http://www.lomography.com/magazine/lifestyle/2011/10/06/stev...

I've seen that picture and story referenced many times as an example of a pure drive that isn't influenced by money. That it was "all you need".

At the time Steve Jobs was already a multi, multi-millionaire (from the IPO of Apple in 1980 he was worth some $200 million). He had the freedom to never worry about basic needs, could travel the world at his leisure, could do essentially what he wanted, etc. He had the sort of freedom that such wealth provides.

It is convenient to be in that position and no longer worry about money, because you're already there.
As a person who's done GA implementations and subsequent reporting on around 100 websites this is correct.

On a side note, a tangential GA issue was recently discussed on HN and nearly everyone had a misunderstanding of how GA worked in that thread too... sometimes I'm worried that developers will get wise to analytics and I'll be out of a job, and then I come here and my fears allayed.

The thing is, GA is very simple and it all works together. I'll leave the below link here, because I think a lot of people could get value from it...

http://cutroni.com/blog/
Whenever I hear people try to argue that certain jokes "aren't funny" and therefore shouldn't be permitted, I get the urge to ask them what they think of postmodern art. I've learned from asking that most people don't hold consistent positions.

About 100 years ago when Duchamp put a urinal on display and titled it Fountain, you bet people were screaming "that's not art!" And that was just the beginning.

There's anti-art and anti-jokes. There's institutional critiques, inside jokes, and meta-humor. It's not all appropriate, and it's not all good.

The rule is: if you don't get it, then it's not for you.
There are not ads on Netflix. I wasn't being clear enough. I meant that if there are video on demand services like Netflix without ads then people will see ads as a discomfort in vod services with ads, like Hulu.
This is actually a fairly optimistic projection. Consider how difficult it would be for a secret policeman to infiltrate a dissident group in this kind of environment.

The real dystopia comes with privileged groups being able to block recognition.
The argument isn't "Because facebook isn't a government entity it should censor things enough people don't like".

It's "Because facebook isn't a government entity it should be able to decline to publish whatever it likes".

That including 'not publishing things enough people don't like'. It also includes 'not publishing things coloured blue, on an irrational whim'. You can point out the sillyness of not publishing blue things, or say it's bad business, but it isn't censorship. Censorship would be if publishers were banned from publishing blue things.

Netrus was replying to mixedbit's Noam Chomsky comment, pointing out that, if facebook removed the post, that wouldn't be analagous to someone not having the 'right to publish a ridiculous book', it would be analagous to a private publisher having the right to decide not to publish it. [Edited to clarify, per mixedbit]
I'm guessing you're getting downvotes because it's a trivial reply that doesn't add to the discussion.

One could make the argument that Hexo is fast because it's:

- fast to compile: probably faster or equal to industry standard Ruby/Jekyll

- fast to install: npm

- fast to deploy: single command for Heroku / GitHub Pages

- fast to write: Markdown

You're taking the one word "incredibly" and blowing it out of proportion. We're not talking about super computing here, fast is a relative construct.
the author tries to cover himself by saying "people without families to support"

but of course most people plan to have a family someday... when that's taken into consideration, I think the author's claim of "a wasted life" seems extremely naive and misguided
Star Trek feels like 1960s scifi. I want to see 2010s scifi
While I love sci-fi featuring white male protagonists, the positive is it is the most far reaching stretch of the human imagination; the negative is I am sad it focused on space exploration and failed to incorporate the most recent futurist ideas like transhumanist consciousnesses, world libertarianism, and AI hive minds. We need more sci-fi featuring the kinds of things we can get done in the next 30 years.
If you believe those linked examples constitute humor, I'm shocked. Tell me, would you also find these funny?

* A photo of Matthew Shepard's body with a joke about gays?
* A photo of Jyoti Singh Pandey with a joke about uppity Indian women?
* 50 years ago in Southern US, a photo of a burnt body with a joke about blacks?
* 75 years ago in Europe, a photo of a rail car with a joke about Jews?

Rape is a serious problem today, and men need to own this and stop laughing it off. Just because women are as numerous as men does not mean they are not persecuted.

1 in 6 women will be victimized in her lifetime, and rape can destroy lives. We all need to grow up and stop acting like teenage frat boys.

Edit: Reformatted the bulleted list
A tagging strategy has one purpose: to gather data for a reporting strategy. Why report on bounce rate where the expected use case is to "bounce" (follow link in, read, leave)? Surely the aim of blog reporting is to track visitor trends for overall audience growth/decline and topic popularity.
The post is really about rock-star-developer-ninja ego, which is a non-problem really. Ego / Persona / Flair are all part and parcel of Hollywood / Music / Fashion / Chefs and now Software.

The question is, are you going to be sadomasochist follower or an individual (which ironically is precisely what a person with a healthy ego is).

Have good opinions. There is much to improvise in this world, nothing is final ... every class is open.
But I am a bit mystified - I assume that in Java I cannot subclass String? Which seems to be the whole argument.

Well, you know what my answer to that will be :-)

(To be fair I have just written a session-cache- management system for python and did not subclass anything much. I suspect I should look into that :-)
I hadn't heard that before. Is there a link or something that we can read about this?
There's Crypto-Stick [0], a security USB key with many interesting features. It's essentially an OpenPGP card with some added features.

What excites me about their project is a very simple file-system based interface they are planning to implement for their upcoming version. Plug the key in, it looks like a regular USB key, put a file in a specific place, get an encrypted/signed/whatever file from the file system from another place. No driver or software required. I hope their project takes off and people start buying these keys. The price is a little high right now (59,00 €) and it is currently not available.

[0] https://www.crypto-stick.com/
>It's the same case as hackers sentenced for years away from computers.

Which always was, and remains, complete nonsense.

If someone steals a car, you don't prohibit them from driving their own car to work after they return to society.

The analogy the proponents of this nonsense will present is that it's more like lawyers being disbarred or bankers being prohibited from working in the financial industry. But that analogy fails, because prohibiting you from using a computer is not the analog of prohibiting you from being a lawyer or a banker, it's the analog of denying access to the court system or the ability to use money.
...so add a GA event to every action that's of value to you:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
Some analytics services do this for you automatically. Clicky has been doing it for for about three years, for example: http://encosia.com/how-30-seconds-dropped-my-bounce-rate-by-...
Saving energy by trimming your toe nails?
Wouldn't a responsible government try to provide this to all high school graduates as a fallback minimum?

If bought by the millions the cost should be a fraction?

Would never fly in the US because we do not invest in the future anymore unless it's for corporate profit.
"Having a say" is very different to being a dictator.

A good designer understands that design is a discussion and that there will always be pragmatic compromises to be made.

However, having the implementer make the important design decisions about a user interface is nearly always the wrong thing to do. The implementor knows too much about the implementation to see it the problem like a user would. It is this which causes UI's that look like database tables when they should resemble faces and buckets and controls that mould to engines rather than fingers.

It is not the implementors' fault. They are just to close to the metal and too far from the users.
This reminded me on Joel's leaky abstractions. And you could hardly find more leaky than strings.

Amusingly, the history of the evolution of C++ over time can be described as a history of trying to plug the leaks in the string abstraction. Why they couldn't just add a native string class to the language itself eludes me at the moment.
مشاهدة مباراة بايرن ميونخ وبروسيا دورتموند بث مباشر
I didn't say "negative value in Silicon Valley" (it definitely isn't), but, "Silicon Valley Startup world" (I.E. the first six-eighteen months when the technology is being built).

At one very prominent startup that I worked for, lead by some very, very well known executives (who are extraordinarily prominent in the valley today), there was a general position for the first two years of our company, "Hire no MBAs." They really believed that the MBA was a negative at that phase of the company's history, and were looking for Programmers, designers, coders, systems administrators, DBAs, etc.
Tarsnap is brilliant. cperciva is a well known and respected HN user too.

(https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cperciva)
Tarsnap is by prolific HNer (cperciva). It's been on HN, literally, hundreds of times: https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=tarsnap
>> "he was a once-in-a-century businessman"

I would disagree with this. He was certainly an incredibly successful business man but there are plenty of others that have matched him: Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Henry Ford, Sam Walton, Jack Welch etc.
> If you believe those linked examples constitute humor, I'm shocked.

I believe some of them are jokes. I don't find them humorous.

> Tell me, would you also find these funny?

Probably not.

> Rape is a serious problem today, and men need to own this and stop laughing it off.

Where was I "laughing off" rape? What do I need to own up to? Where have I ever said rape is not a serious problem?

Looking forward to your reply. You've totally misunderstood what I've been trying to say, and managed to portray me in a totally unjustifiable way.
My intention is not to be snarky, but people post all the time about discovering the itertools or collections library. I notice it's a common gap in newer Python programmers.

Save yourself time and effort down the road and read through both libraries' documentation, they're well worth the effort:

http://docs.python.org/3.3/library/itertools.html

http://docs.python.org/3.3/library/collections.html

I tend to use defaultdict, deque (thread safe), namedtuple, imap, izip, drop/takewhile. In Python 3, map and zip have been replaced with their itertools equivalents.

I blame Haskell for all the lazy evaluation influence. :P
I don't think so. All you need to do is be able to monitor everybody else. Secret policemen not required anymore.
A huge number of the examples are encouraging raping, beating to a bloody pulp, and/or murdering women. The issues with them goes well beyond being offended. However, I'm guessing arguments about rape culture are unlikely to sway you if you think these are jokes and not hateful.

As a side note, facebook already censors a bunch of things. For example, they've taken down images of women breastfeeding if nipples are shown. It's kind of fucked up that the sight of nipples in a non-sexual context is worthy of a takedown, but encouraging violence against women is totally ok.
While it's likely I'd be the person not wearing Glass in 10 years, the scenario in the article shows a world in which people would likely not judge a person by their appearance, but rather what info comes up attached to their profile(s). Good for INTPs who don't care for chit-chat.
I'm still not sure whether I can trust somebody else with my data, but I'm growing more and more concerned of hardware failure of my own backups. Might try Tarsnap one of these days.
Dystopia? This sounds amazing! I assume that AdBlock will still exist, which optionally removes the one thing I felt even slightly bad about in this scenario.
Your argument goes the other way. If someone with a printer can do the malicious thing quickly then prohibiting ownership of the printer is useless, because someone prohibited from owning it could just borrow one from someone not so prohibited for a very short period of time, do the crime, and return it without being detected. You might as well just prohibit the act of making detonators, because you'll never catch one without the other. Prohibiting ownership of the printers will just prevent those trying to reform themselves from using their skill in using printers to make legitimate things that benefit society.
If you're generating static HTML, why not generate static JSON? Then you can use it for client-side search, for example.

Check out my website's repo: https://bitbucket.org/devlinzed/devlinzed.com/src. It has a JSON format for just about every URL, but is still entirely static:

http://devlinzed.com/2013/may/keeping-all-your-data-safe

http://devlinzed.com/2013/may/keeping-all-your-data-safe.jso...
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=156641.msg1660732#ms...
I've used tarsnap for a few years. It's good.

Tip: forget everything you knew about scheduling full and incremental backups, because you don't have to. Tarsnap provides logical snapshots and does all the diff magic for you.

(Hence tar ... snap)
US plans paperless public library
Haxe WWX 2013 Conf is Live
I know you're trying to remove the connection to rape to help solve the dispute, but bear with me.

Would shouting "Tape her and rape her" in a crowded theater be acceptable? It would certainly be disruptive, and you'd be asked to leave, but it wouldn't carry any serious consequences to the other theater-goers. I guess my point is that the comparison of rape and "fire" is not appropriate.
Where Have All the Shuttle Engineers Gone?
I don't disagree that dictators can make great software. My point, perhaps poorly communicated, was that using these exceptional success edge-cases as an excuse to uncompromisingly drive your own design vision will probably do more harm than good--precisely because they were successful as edge cases.

The Gnome 3 discussion from last year sparked this post because Gnome 3 was becoming an example of that: designers creating a product that many vocally disliked, and insisting on sticking to their original vision, torpedoes be damned. The result, many argue, is a deeply flawed product.

The thrust of the post is, "be humble and open-minded as a product leader, because chances are you're probably not the genius that these exceptional success stories were/are."
This sounds horrible.
Jokes like this can and do contribute to a culture where violence against women is a very real and regular thing. Regularly joking about how hilarious it is to beat and rape women normalizes it to a degree and encourages those who already think this is acceptable behavior.
Fretboard Heatmaps
There are no answers to the difference in tuition prices that don't lead to uncomfortable social comparisons of two countries. It depends on if you believe education markets are efficient or not, meaning the true value will be reflected in the price. Two things that would make a degree worth less are limited access to education and limited social mobility for degree holders. Free also does not mean unlimited access.
Edges of Humanity: What does the future look like?
That's the definition of a bounce. A visitor comes, they check out one page, they don't interact with anything (reading is not interaction), they leave. This might not be the most useful thing to know for many sites (a simple blog which doesn't have "recirculation" modules / isn't, like larger media sites, geared to having someone come and stay), but it certainly is a useful concept for media sites where pageviews are still king.

But even on a simple blog, bounce rate is a useful stat. Many bloggers don't just want people to come from Hacker News and stay for one article, they want these visitors to click around to related entries after they are done reading. Bounce rate gives a good idea of whether this is happening or not (unless you automatically count almost all visits as non-bounce by triggering an event after a brief time interval).
It wasn't incoherent, and being "extremist" isn't necessarily a bad thing.

So I suppose you're just complaining that it's paranoid. How so?
Well that's where our differences lie. I probably find them equally as distasteful as you, but I don't think a lot of them are encouraging people to actually commit the act of rape and assault.
"The problem is not the cult of design dictatorship, the problem is bad design and bad designers."

Do you think bad designers will be more or less drawn to a culture where they don't need to defend their decisions, than one where what they say will be discussed and validated?

Bad designers seem like a constant to me, so there's no point wishing they didn't exist. Instead, design culture ought to respond such that good design can still happen in the presence of bad designers. That can't happen in a dictatorship.
There's also a really obvious example of a thing that might be any of 100,000 characters and between zero and 2 billion characters in length: the contents of a plain text file.
No, probably Metallica's Seek & Destroy.

Which, while not in heavy rotation on my current playlists, would still be a big upgrade.
Who exactly are the members of this cult? Seems to me the members of the "A/B test everything" cult are much more prevalent. I wonder if the author just works with a designer who's a domineering jerk :) If that's the case, sorry to hear it, but that does not a "cult" make.

Not a big fan of the "cult" phraseology either.
I understand that EU-citizens get free Masters' education. This is somewhat a side-effect of the EU-wide Bologna process, which promoted everyone's Bachelors degree into a Masters by adding a year's worth more of education and introducing a credit-system.

This isn't true. I'm from England (hence EU Citizen) and Batchelors and Masters degrees are two different things.

I have had to pay for both my Batchelors and my Masters degree - having said that the government does offer a basic loan for Batchelors degrees BUT there isn't any funding for a Masters degree, you have to pay that yourself.
Seems like the article is making a case for Yahoo buying Pinterest, not Tumblr. Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't Tumblr posts generally without context?
That's because (hopefully) if you find them distasteful you're not the sort of person who thinks violence against women is awesome. The thing is, there are people out there who do think it is awesome. They tend to have a very different response to these sorts of "jokes" and imagery.