skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Complexity is also introduced by well-meaning people on the implementation side as well. Software developers like challenges, and the challenge of building a complex system that serves up a simple interface is especially alluring. Consider DSLs, abstractions and the attraction to being the one to build a framework that gets leveraged for years. This drives us to introduce huge complexity debt we defend with statements like "it makes it so easy once you understand" and "it will save us so much coding." Writing the lines of code is rarely the big cost in engineering: it's the understanding, the communication and the maintenance.

Ok, but did it save so much coding, or not? I do try to restrain myself from being clever when I realize it's really not worth it, but being clever sometimes does pay off. Extra coding is complexity too.
I really don't think it's worth learning no matter what language you know.
The FBI currently uses Helicopters and people generally don't complain about them violating their privacy. However, this may be because Helicopters are rather hard to miss if one is parked over your back-yard. Drones can be much smaller and quieter than any manned aircraft, and some even have the capability of entering buildings. In the near future we can expect drones the size of insects to enter use.

Suggestions:

1. A drone presence should be legally treated the same way as the presence of an FBI officer. Namely, to enter private premises they should require a warrant.

2. Legally require drones used in public spaces to be equipped with lights/speakers to make their presence as detectable as a helicopter. I'd rather not live in a society where insect-sized drones could be eavesdropping on any conversation or watching everything you do without your knowledge.
Most money nowadays is just some records on some databases. I certainly don't keep more than maybe 30% of my paycheck in physical cash at any point in time.
Can DirectAccess take over the world?
The Pace of Innovation is not Slowing Down
Nuclear weapons, like guns and cars, are just tools, and themselves not inherently evil. Ergo, there should be no restrictions on anything related to nuclear weapons.
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Yeah, I'm a bit confused. To me the big news doesn't seem to be that some mathematicians wrote a book using Github.

The is that there is now an expansive, informal/readable, and machine verified writeup of homotopy type theory.
CTRL+F didn't find it. Which one is it?
OP here. My point wasn't that we should remove all other types of media from the web. (I love other types of media)

My point was that the most powerful tool on the web is still words.

Here's why:

1. Words are an excellent starting point. All you need is a text editor. Words are a great way to express ideas in a concrete way. Words can stand on their own.

2. It's easy to add things to words. Adding an image, video, or other media to words has the power to further strengthen the message. Side note: there's also the (negative) potential for adding too much, or for muddling the message.

3. Text on the web is small. My page was 4KB. Most people around the world, even with a bad connection, would be able to view that page.

You're right: images can be powerful. But on the web, I think text still rules.

(I notice you responded to this thread with words, and not an image or a video)
Because other people have given good answers, I just wanted to add.. the Web was so much better linked together back then. Prior to Altavista made searching useful most of the time, it was common to rely on jumping from one site to another through plentiful link pages, web rings, and lists of resources that people had put together. There was also Usenet which people often posted links on and which was sorted by topic and a handy way to find stuff.
Digging In: New Startup
For a more accessible introduction to SIMON and SPECK take a look at this IETF mailing list message[1] especially the video with introduction by the NSA developers:

"Today at the MIT Media Lab Legal Hack-a-thon on Identity we had a great
presentation from a couple of designers from the NSA regarding their new
lightweight ciphers called SIMON and SPECK. These ciphers are designed
for low-power limited gate devices (such as RFID and similar devices).

The MIT Media Lab Hack-a-thon page is here: http://iauth.org

The NSA presentation is here (You Tube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtyo4nWGBwk

Their paper (PDF) is here: http://iauth.org/legal-hack-a-thon/simonspeckperformance-2/ "

Note: I changed the youtube video from a tinyurl link to the actual link. If you want to tell tinyurl that you visited the youtube video click here: http://tinyurl.com/bf6fbju

[1] https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/cfrg/current/msg03274....
If this document contained modern TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, Procedures) it wouldn't be declassified. This is a historical document. This is also probably a repost. This document has been around for 2-3 decades.
I sometimes have a hard time putting certain thoughts or feelings in to words, in which case I either draw a picture, play a melody, or use one of the other myriad forms of expression available to me to communicate with others. I in no way feel like I am translating these thoughts from words to these other forms of expression. I have a much easier time singing a melody than transcribing it. I have to force the music to comply with written forms.
That said, making a simple system that provides a simple interface to a complicated (or at least, a sophisticated) issue, is much better. And, you don't have to control your ego either. You can learn to take pride in the expressiveness and simplicity of your code.
We have some node.js and frontend js work that is up for carving out if you want to talk. Send me an email. You can reach me at my email on my profile or through our company site http://tenorent.com
Ask HN: How big is the slashdot-effect of front-page HN post?
Hi,<p>I'm creating a multiplayer free-to-play strategy game using HTML5 Canvas, socket.io and node.js. It's almost complete, and I'll probably do a Show HN post. The source code inside HTML page will not be minified, so anyone could read it and see how I did some stuff (or even write their own client).<p>To save myself a future embarrassment, I'd like to prepare the server(s) well for the incoming traffic in case people really like it and it reaches the front page. Can anyone share some numbers?<p>TIA
HipChat integration doesn't seem to be saving for me. I pasted in a Notification auth token that I generated (which caused a green checkmark to appear), and wrote in the ID of one of our HipChat rooms, but it doesn't seem to save the ID (if I leave settings and come back, both fields are empty).
Why does penicillin work?
>Net, there is only one branch that can say if a law is constitutional or not, the judicial branch

This is a myth. Any branch can declare a law unconstitutional. If Congress thinks a law is unconstitutional they can keep it off the books. If the President thinks a law is unconstitutional he can refuse to enforce or execute it.

The courts get a reputation as the ones who decide because A) if the other branches do their duty it never gets to the courts, which means the courts have the last word and are the final check on unconstitutional activity, and B) the other branches of government are happy to let you believe they have no responsibility to uphold the constitution (even though they very much do) because they're elected and elected officials violating the Supreme Law of the Land is fairly unpopular, so all the better if people mislead themselves into thinking that they have no responsibility.
Procedures used by NSA to minimize data collection from US persons
Because it's an easy argument to bait others into, but doesn't solve anything. Offensive nerd sniping is another way to look at it.
I've done a bit of googling on this myself, and all I can find is that evidence could be thrown out in a criminal case based entirely on aerial footage, but that is rarely the only evidence provided. You likely don't own the airspace above your property, certainly not above a thousand feet, and technically no one owns outer space, so I would say that in 2013 or beyond, your expectation of privacy in your back yard is likely to dwindle severely over time.
I mention those two events because they're analogous to the drone strikes going on now that people suddenly seem to have a problem with.
It works because it's a one off.

If every page did this then a contrary page with images would make the point against just words and everyone would agree.

Looking at simple page's like that all day would be depressing, I want beauty in my life, not just words which can be beautiful, that's why I read novels, I also want visual beauty.
Holy shit! What a great comment.

I love how serious inquiry into language almost always reveals that the "Rules" are wrong.
It really depends what is your market? What kind of products do you make or services do you offer? You would use very different approach if you're making a game, car or bug-tracking software.
False equivalence and a slippery slope. How did you get from "big RC helicopter with video camera" to nuclear weapons?
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If the overly righteous and shortsighted preservation of a police state isn't evil, I don't know what is.
Apply for a 2014 Code for America fellowship
Let's assume that it is slippery slope. Where do you draw the line between tools that are 'just tools' and tools that are not 'just tools'?
I'd say that there's a whole lot of effort that goes into marketing, retention, and conversion (as opposed to visual work).

I didn't cover how to drive traffic to a web page; that'd be a great "sister topic" to this one.

As an aside: that little link at the bottom of that page has converted better than anything else I've done. ;)
They're my children and they have asked!
Brain training app brings big data to human cognition
> IQ is not normally distributed.

IQ is actually normally distributed by definition. Actual intelligence, if such a thing exists, may not be. The reason for Terman's finding is that there aren't any IQ tests that are valid for people with extremely high IQ.
If you sign up for a free trial you get a 37id which you keep after canceling your trial.

Basecamp personal doesn't offer the calendar he talks about though.
The last guy that I met that talked like you had blue-gray skin. This isn't silly like arguing against thermodynamics, but it is an extraordinary claim and anecdotes are just not going to cut it. This isn't quite 'Nobel Prize' territory but it would be a sea change in the scientific literature and it goes without saying that we can always use a new antibiotic.

If anecdote is all you have to offer, however, please refrain from troubling us with reading it.

On topic, didn't we see some similar claims a few years back about sugar increasing the effectiveness of antibiotics greatly?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110511134215.ht...
[original paper]
http://www.bu.edu/abl/files/nature_allison_letter.pdf
But an acre of farmland and an acre of suburban front-lawns are wildly different.

Agricultural chemicals are tightly regulated, various environmental groups watch them like a hawk and are quick to push for legislation against new chemicals. The EPA has strict rules on chemical run-off, retention in soil or ability to impact drinking water. On top of this, most farming is relatively low margin and farmers don't want to spray any more than they have to because of cost.

Meanwhile, the average suburban American will gladly dump 10x the appropriate amount of chemicals on their lawn in an attempt to keep up with the Jones' next door. Or think nothing of their fertilizer-infused irrigation spraying half onto the driveway or sidewalk, flowing directly into the storm sewer rather than being absorbed by the soil.
This is true for this specific program and only under the current policies. Let's just stop kidding ourselves and assume that the NSA stores our communications indefinitely, and design our software accordingly.
Why China and Russia Banned Google from their Country?
> Nuclear weapons, like guns and cars, are just tools, and themselves not inherently evil.

True!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaceful_nuclear_explosions#Sov... / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plowshare

Beyond the obvious (digging big holes fast) there are proposals for using them to extinguish particularly bad oil/gas fires (perhaps Centralia, Pennsylvania could be a use case?), stimulating natural gas production (this one is likely to be unpopular these days), and destroying large amounts of chemical weapons (and while you're at it, a nuke ;)).
This is how you stroke the ego of users.
Twitter’s Nicole Wong joins White House as deputy Chief Technology Officer
You should take a minute read about the dude whose comment you replied to
Bullshit.

Smith is way less common of a family name in English than Kim is in Korean.
You don't believe that there is some sort of institutional sexism in mathematics, manifested here in a very skewed gender ratio?
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Pretty much everything I read on my Kindle looks the same in terms of font, styling, etc. Far from being "bleak and characterless", it gets out the way and lets me read the story, which is what I'm there for.
#2 sounds like suggestions that electric car manufacturers have "fake engine sounds" coming out of speakers, so deaf people can hear the normally-silent car coming.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090921/0141396258.shtml
(5) It is always possible to agglutinate multiple separate problems into a single complex interdependent solution. In most cases this is a bad idea.

--RFC 1925, http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1925.html

I highly recommend reading RFC 1925: The Twelve Networking Truths. It's a much faster and more amusing read to get the same information.
Are people mostly developing full sites on Firebase, or just mini-apps?
HN had another article a couple weeks ago asserting you shouldn't add business processes to your company unless they had an expected value of increasing foo by at least 10%. The author argued this was a good way of avoiding creeping bureaucracy. It's striking how similar that is to this article's thesis re code complexity.
> "a little different..."

Now we get cat and food videos that are super-stylized to look like they've been made with a plastic filter over the lens. ;-)
McKinsey don't operate above the radar, but are responsible for helping with an incredible number of major corporate decisions across the world.

Recruitment and development is McKinsey's core advantage. They attract and retain incredible talent from all sets of places.

Teams work with the top clients - the CEO and team as well as high flyers at more junior levels. Things get done extraordinarily quickly. And well. But make sure that the internal team is up to scratch, and that there is that mandate from the top.

There is no prescription for how to deliver a project, beyond the hypotheses approach.

There is an obligation to dissent, and a client-first mandate. When enforced well the client gets what they need to hear, not want they want to hear. High quality consultants don't want to work on projects justifying dumb decisions - and can choose not to.

Use McKinsey and other consultants to help with new issues, not business as usual. They are fantastic for quickly understanding and assessing important questions of strategy, for mergers and acquisitions, organisational design and so on. They help understand the context and set the new agenda, or validate the old one. Generally clients simply don't have enough internal capacity to perform this work alone.

Use them, decide what to do and start doing it - and then get rid of them. Consultants that are camping at a client are in effect wildly expensive employees.
If Google Maps used the image, they'd have to blur your sunbathing.
There is a Thiel Foundation fund for scientific ideas that can't get traditional academic funding: http://www.breakoutlabs.org/home.html
With astigmatism, I can't comfortably read the current light-on-dark text.

http://blog.tatham.oddie.com.au/2008/10/13/why-light-text-on...

Light-on-dark can be more comfortable for long-term screen reading, but a bold or heavier weighted font is really needed.

I felt the original piece was effective because it really was expertly designed.
Mortgage Hacking Calculator – a better tool for comparing mortgages
Litvinenko's assassin used Polonium, which is an obvious and disfiguring poison. The article mentions using morphine to poison a drunkard in order that his death might be mistaken for the effects of habitual alcohol abuse. Aside from causing the death of the target, those two methods have almost entirely opposite goals.
> "given that in the absence of a used game market games can be rapidly price slashed"

This is a common raised point - but there's no evidence that this will actually happen. Valve has certainly done this, but Valve is also an extremely atypical company in their industry.

We have seen, for example, with existing digital purchase games (on PS3, 360, and PC) that games cost the same as their retail counterparts. The "no resale" model exists, and with the except of Steam, the lower prices thing has never materialized. This is true across all platforms - on PS3, on 360, on Origin, etc.

What Microsoft tabled was a lot of what ifs that had almost no chance of actually panning out. With the death of used games publishers could charge less, but neither logic nor industry trends bear that out.

The value proposition was a giant (unlikely) hypothetical vs. a cold reality of killing used games.
How to spoof a MAC address
For those who don't know about Bourbaki, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki:

"Nicolas Bourbaki is the collective pseudonym under which a group of (mainly French) 20th-century mathematicians wrote a series of books presenting an exposition of modern advanced mathematics, beginning in 1935."
Aquel Overol Azul.
I love Firebase but I don't see how I could build a serious web app without server-side logic. How do you for example handle validation?
That's how I feel about Apple deeming unimportant my Home, End, PgUp, PgDn, and front-delete keys.
Introducing our Performance Suite for Automating Responsive Images (and more)
Wow, that one really resonated with me. I hadn't really thought about how to put simplicity into perspective quite like that. One of the things that frustrated me about Windows was that there was always about 7 different ways to do the same thing (or get to the same place) and that lead to amazing time wasting discussions in attempting to support customers remotely.

Google has (had? I suspect they still do this) company wide 'fixit' days where people would fix bugs for prizes and what not. I suspect a 'delete-it' (or 'simplify-it') might be a useful exercise as well.
Ask HN: Conducting a survey on Facebook Login, can you take it?
I'm conducting a survey about Facebook login, 4 simple questions takes about 10 seconds. I'll be writing an article on the results soon -- I've surveyed several different audiences and demographics.

Survey: http://www.survs.com/survey/E6CFIJIKI0
Clickable link: http://www.survs.com/survey/E6CFIJIKI0
I don't think people are talking about pre-rolls here, they're talking about FB using it to run video ads in your newsfeed.
Exactly. This is what Snowden was warning about. There is a single variable (in each program) that determines this expiry date. Today it's set to '5' years. But a flip of a (few) bits and that could be 50, or 500. Much like the Mickey Mouse laws. That flipping a bit, he analogizes to 'turn-key' with the result being quite close to tyranny.
India introduces Central Monitoring System
Phone calls, texts, emails and even social media all now snoopable.
I'm always a bit frustrated that Google Docs doesn't have a save icon. It simply says "All changes saved in drive". But you see this doesn't stop my habitual compulsion to press the save icon (or at least do :w in Vim).
I can't speak for anyone else, but my disdain for Quartz comes from the fact that following a Quartz link on the device I'm using at that moment seems to have a less than evens chance of delivering readable text.

For a site that's full of content, they make it hard to get that content. If they were failing at a hard problem, I'd be more sympathetic, but overcomplicating the business of putting text on a screen to that extent is just inexcusably narcissistic.
It takes time to build surveillance capacity. If they build the camps first then people can pick up their pitch forks and organize a resistance before it goes anywhere. If they build the surveillance first then the day the camps become public they already have a list of all the prospective resistance leaders to round up and everyone else is too afraid to express opposition for fear of creating evidence of a lack of fealty.

The problem with widespread surveillance isn't that it's inherently malicious, it's that it's inherently dangerous. Because most people are good, the potential it creates in the hands of a good leader to catch evil terrorists will always be less than the potential it creates in the hands of an evil leader to catch good freedom fighters. It's a tool for the concentration of power. And it shrinks the time lag during which to mount a resistance between when someone malicious takes power and when the whole world is on fire.
So there should probably be a fairly large tax on lawn fertilizer to cover repairing the damage it causes.
One year away from being annoyed at the web to being blown away by yahoo.com. A friend searched for some game or something on yahoo and I was like what is the trickery?
For what it's worth: There are much worse examples of blogspam posted to HN, so it's kind of frustrating to see this thread derailed.

I'm not making any comment on Quartz, because I haven't seen enough to form an opinion.
Another one I like is "John Hummer" from Hummer Winblad.

A memorable name can be an important asset. It can be a branding if it makes a strong positive impression. Of course like anything lacking one can be overcome once you gain a reputation. [1]

I know someone whose last name is "Bogus" believe me nobody ever forgets that name.

[1] Fred Wilson, Paul Graham
Your hyperbole here is incorrect and unwarranted. Agricultural chemicals in the US are highly regulated. Many types of fertilizers and pesticides have been banned, others have restrictions on the volume and timing of their use.

The EPA has a 10 Billion dollar budget, which it uses to do massive amounts of research to help control and mitigate negative externalities. Fines and penalties for violating EPA rules are severe.
> I have much more frequently seen video whose author had deluded himself into thinking it was beautiful.

I have some sympathy for your point, but I don't think the argument about video is valid. 99% of the web is crap. Always has been. Probably always will be. The crap includes text, video, etc., etc. That's why we have search engines and sites like HN -- to help us find the 1%. The existence of the other crappy 99% says pretty much nothing about the relative advantages of text vs. video.
In the youtube video I linked to one of the NSA guys says something like "You may even think of these as ultra lightweight block ciphers."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtyo4nWGBwk
Bird, Plane, Bacteria? Microbes Thrive In Storm Clouds
I don't. What I do believe is that differences exist between men and women beyond genitalia.
I'm interested in the pricing decision. How big is the market for apps that are popular but free or unable to support the higher prices? I wonder if any thought went into a plan for them?