skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ongoing · The Web vs. the Fallacies
Unfortunately, JSLint objects strongly to using 'new foo()' without assigning the result to anything, which is a pain if you're using Prototype AJAX since firing off an AJAX request is done by calling 'new Ajax.Request(url, options)'. The only way to get around this seems to be to put parentheses around the statement - there's no way to turn most individual checks on or off, unlike other static analysis tools I've used like PMD and FindBugs.

I still use it - because that trailing-comma-in-hash-definition issue in IE is really annoying.
Yes, I would "accept" that—as a theoretical explanation. However, as a pure-determinist, I would also accept that people would be offended be her incivility, as their social mores would tell them to be in response. Likewise, rape is an evolutionary urge—but so is the urge to punish people for it, or prevent people from doing it.

To simplify: there is no need to apologize for your urge to punch someone you don't like in the face. There is no need for them to apologize for defending themselves, or calling the police. Both make subjective sense. Apologies are for when you were wrong given your own perspective.
If you're looking for design, ilovetypography and SmashingMag.

If you're looking for "general art", you're dealing with an incredibly tough subject, because each specific field of art requires just as much focus as the field of computer programming. There are few similarities in technique between composing and popular songwriting and rap, for instance, in the field of music alone. Oil painting and photography and sculpting and weaving are all drastically different. So the only depth you could get on a general art site would be something like "Look at such-and-such pretty thing," unless it was very cleverly designed to allow for more in-depth conversation. Then you'd have to convince those sorts of people to use the site, and some varieties of artists almost routinely avoid the Internet.

Hacker News works because programming is very online-intensive as-is. Art isn't. Making the transition is very hard. I should know: I've made three attempts thus far.
Personally the following quote was the one which made me laugh the most: "The PHP developers have failed, well, because they're PHP developers. Microsoft has failed because they're acting as that unscrupulous dealer who provides PHP to people that probably shouldn't have access to it."

This is without a doubt the most inflammatory, outrageous and entertaining thing I've read on theregister in ages.
CueCat 2.0?
Sorry, I was using the politically-correct singular-second-person-of-unknown-gender pronoun (I couldn't tell from the post that you were male.)

People don't seem to care as much when you assume a girl on the Internet is a guy, but assume a guy is a girl and everyone is up in arms. (This may be a point toward your post.)
"NOTE: Depending on your query, it may take several minutes to return the results of your query to the worksheet."

First thought: this has got to be a parody.

Second thought: Oh Cthulhu, it is for real.

Third thought: Just by mentioning this link almost anywhere, it'll be excoriated as "just another baseless attack on Microsoft (which I, being a technologically fair and balanced soul, will admit to having less than stellar practices)"
Are you working on anything to enhance the field of computer science itself? Or using your comp-sci knowledge to work in some applied area?
Do not stop moving the mouse until all the data has been returned to Microsoft Excel.

Priceless.
See also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625489
I'm not sure if I should be thankful that things haven't gotten much worse or depressed that things haven't gotten much better... Given the impressive advances of the last decades in many fields, I'll go for depression.
This is an insightful post. Sometimes people let themselves off the hook.

Defining which problem is the "most important" is a bit tough, but whatever problem you are working on ought to be very important to you.

So in a sense, the point is to avoid just working for a paycheck and try to do something that means something to you.
This reminds me of the first pg essay I ever read, "Good and Bad Procrastination," which also references Richard Hamming. This essay directed me to his site, and eventually here.

http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

I like pg's treatment a little more. He distills it down to one sentence, "What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?"

This single sentence has pretty much directed much of my work since then. It's so simple it's almost counter-intuitive. I have designed systems to sort "problems" by descending value and taught my users to just work on #1 until it's fixed. But it wasn't until reading pg's corollary to Hamming's work that I did it myself.

Thanks for reminding me.
The journalism bubble
I haven't used Windows in years.

Does anyone know if these http://ishmeet.wordpress.com/2007/09/28/3-wicked-microsoft-b... still exist?

The =rand(200, 99) one looks interesting.
Don't forget the warning at the top, "This information is preliminary and has not been confirmed or tested by Microsoft."

So while it's funny to say, "haha, isn't this typical of stupid M$," they apparently didn't produce this advice. More likely, some support tech recorded the mouse bit from the customer just to be complete, and 7 years later it still hasn't been verified...
I'd be fine with banning TC for the simple reason that every time I see a TC story on HN, I've already read it. There's no sense in seeing it twice, especially since nearly every single TC story is promoted to the front page.

I think that 100% of HN members are aware of TC, and have already chosen whether to put it in their feed reader or not.
I like Hamming's challenge, but I read this quote yesterday, and I think it might be more insightful:

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” -- Howard Thurman
Last two look more like easter eggs than bugs.
Duh? Any developer knows that the success of their app is a crap shoot. We don't need techcrunch to tell us the bloody obvious.
The Bush one is in fact a bug, described pretty well here: http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2006/07/11/662342.aspx

The second? No clue.
Yeah. Flagged for newsworthlessness.
Entrepreneur pushes idea of air-powered cars
You still can't name a file or folder "con" (even in Win7) because it's a reserved word used for keyboard input on the command line. When Windows 9x was popular, you could bluescreen any machine on a local network by trying to access the share \\machinename\con\con, which was great if you lived in a dorm :)
I think you need to read the full article, which is really good: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/%7Erobins/YouAndYourResearch.html

He talks about Nobel Prize-level research, and justifies what he says with a lot of examples of researchers he worked with, who won Nobel Prizes or similar awards.

The original article is really not fluff.
The writings of Thomas Malone are also very insightful so here is an introduction http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/future-of-work/the-crowdsourced-...
Why would someone want to copy the native OS UI for a web app? That will just make people think your app is poorly made, when the controls look identical to those from their mobile device's native OS, but function in a hobbled-via-Webkit-limitations manner.

Making something aesthetically ... harmonic ... with the native UI is fine, probably encouraged, but don't set you and your users up for disappointment and frustration by replicating the aesthetics of controls you can't replicate functionally.
I'm going to toot my own horn an link to an article I wrote six months ago: http://20bits.com/articles/the-099-app-store/

It's the same fundamental misunderstanding. It's like launching a Facebook app and hoping the app directory helps you take off (in the early days there were people who did just this), or banking on getting mentioned on TechCrunch.

Now, I don't know what Rick Strom did or didn't do to market his apps, but success or failure isn't the App Store's fault. It removes a huge chunk of friction from the sales funnel, but it's all at the final, transactional step.

There's a big chunk in the middle which consists of marketing and, AFAIK, no app developer has talked extensively about their marketing efforts, only about their position in the App Store.

Rick is right: you're probably going to lose that game. Rather than go home I'd try to figure out a better game to play.
I think this is inevitable when governments have anything to do with schools. Even though we're seeing a lot of these "education today sucks!" articles, I realize very few of the authors (and very few people here at HN) would agree.
I can only imagine this is taking advantage of the fact that Windows task scheduling gives higher priority to threads which are currently receiving user interaction.

In certain cases, doing this would allow the process to handle returning data faster, especially if it was having to communicate with Excel a great deal and there was a lot of context-switching/waiting between the processes and you wanted to favor Excel's processing of the returned data over a background task with high CPU usage.

Perhaps the problem is that pieces of the Excel side were timing-out and causing all the returned data to be lost.

To read more about UI thread boosting in Windows, this article is a pretty good one:
http://www.sriramkrishnan.com/blog/2006/08/tale-of-two-sched...
I think your hunch is right http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/02/20/535440....
13. Mass Customization is risky, especially in commercial environments. Buy something customized and fail; it's your fault. Buy something mass produced and fail; it can't be your fault because everyone else was doing it too.
I'd love to see this built out with a larger ball (as proposed in the video), so one could play in a standing position, moving the ball around just like the Prince does in-game. Great stuff, though!
Wow. Same here.
Great point. It is a takeoff on the "No one ever got fired for choosing IBM" bromide. I design physical products at my job and there is always a bit of nerves before the product hits the shelves. I imagine this is much worse if you are doing it on your own with no team or systems for support!
You can do it with Cygwin though, and Explorer will still have trouble dealing with it after it's been created. You can also create files with a trailing period or leading/trailing space, which usually isn't allowed.
I guess we agree that one should make sure everyone has enough income to live. Something like basic income (or so) might do a better job than a minimum wage.
Rather than go home I'd try to figure out a better game to play.

Downloadable software where the main source of app discovery is Google rather than the App Store? (i.e. for Macs or PCs or both)

App Store: 600,000 competitors, success by any of which decreases your visibility.

Whole wide Internet: lots of other people writing software, but if they're not in your niche they might as well not exist. I don't lose sales just because DeliciousMonster launched.

App Store: sales curve starts with initial spike, then dies within 2 weeks.

Whole wide Internet: sales curve typically gradually increases as you tune your site and marketing with step increases at new releases

App Store: iFart

Whole wide Internet: you make apps people use on a daily basis for things that are important to them. They send you letters about how happy your app made them.

App Store: $4.99 is expensive

Whole wide Internet: $19.99 is cheap
What does it say that HN has much better design than this site?
That is actually an interesting thing to ponder (what would happen if there were no direct federal taxes). Instead, taxes would be funneled through local or state governments, which would be responsible for contributing some amount of that to the federal government. Local governments could then tweak who, what and how much they tax in order to attract business. Policy might also become less homogeneous across cities and states because the federal government would have less money to hold over the heads of local policy makers. But maybe not...just thinking out loud here...
Perhaps you and I should talk. We're working on something in this direction at the moment, based in part on our existing systems and cloud management tools.

But, because we don't see an immediate way for it to pay for itself (and the investors we've floated the idea vaguely before aren't too interested at this particular moment in history), we're being a bit cautious about actually deploying...but there is a long history of corporations, governments and schools donating mirrors for Open Source file service...no good reason why they shouldn't do the same for cloud-based Open Source services.

The existing tools generally are somewhat less oriented towards sandboxing than they would need to be for this to be feasible today, but it's definitely not an unimaginable future. Trust in widely distributed filesystems is also a problem that isn't entirely covered by existing tools; though the techniques for insuring trust are obviously well-known and understood by a small set of developers.

But, if you assume a distributed VCS as the starting point (git is, I suppose already capable of verifying itself and its contributors), a distributed trustworthy key/value (Tokyo Cabinet or similar with contributor signatures built in) as the configuration source, and distributed trustworthy map reduce and relational databases as the data store, it'd begin to look like something usable.

It introduces problems that current web services and even cloud hosting services don't have to solve, though, which is potentially untrusted machines being part of the cloud and holding the data. Going fully distributed means you don't have any single source for trust information. And, key signing parties are so 1991. I'm not sure exactly how to solve that one. It's not impossible, it's just one of those problems that I don't see an immediate solution for. Short-term, perhaps a single trusted source for keys would be an acceptable solution until a network of key-signing entities could spring up. Alternatively, traditional SSL certs could be used with the usual crappy process of issuing them.
Choosing between Webkit and Mozilla
It seems to me this is just one big made up story. I seem to recall TechCrunch was one of the sites reporting these hyped up stories of someone successfully quitting their job to develop iPhone apps or a teenager making $20K a week. Now they're telling us not to believe the hype they helped create? Seems they're milking this thing for all its worth.
Coming from Haskell, this seems a lot like taking the entire state of the world, sans I/O, and just bundling it into a monad (or MonadPlus, etc). Powerful, but a bit of a blunt instrument compared to using a finer-grained technique. The backtracking use-case given of trying two keys to open a safe, for example, is straightfoward to solve with the List monad.

import OutsideWorld (keyA, keyB, unlocksSafe)

unlockSafe = do
key <- [keyA, keyB]
if unlocksSafe key then return key else mzero

Of course, in Haskell, this would be more idiomatically solved simply using filter; but it's a toy example after all.
VentureLoop advertises venture-funded startup jobs
seems like a gimmicky cover to me. nothing terribly noteworthy about the artwork itself other than the medium through which it was produced.
Why doesn’t Wired magazine practice what its editor preaches?
Are you implying that it is somehow illegal or "infringing" to dump a data stream being sent to your computer to a file?

I cannot imagine what insane logic could lead to such a conclusion. If we were using this logic 20 years ago, VHS recorders would have been deemed illegal.
What if we are culturally programmed to refuse singularity?

The key in the article is that constructing a higher intelligence will enable us to get to the next level faster - by using our new found capacities. But all we see around us makes it pretty obvious this is not the case. Whatever means we have of improving ourselves, they're woefully underused. We actually have ways to make intellectual work better. Not science fiction, but simply a trip to the pharmacy. They work (there have been several articles on HN about provigil or ritalin), and they can be made safe - they mostly are, all we need are some proper guidelines. But what do we do? We talk about outlawing them. And they are definitely not publicly acknowledged.

And before you say that this is not the same: how exactly is it not? Can you imagine a way to improve a human being which would be socially acceptable? Not curing handicaps, but making better for the sake of making better. Just imagine the public reaction if a company offered implantable headphones. Cutting a human for no medical purpose is social suicide.

Now of course this can not stop progress forever. But it can make it a good deal slower.
When is there ever anything especially remarkable about New Yorker covers?

Personally, I think producing that on an iPhone is reasonably impressive. Sort of like art done with a mouse in oekaki or mspaint.
Start one at slinkset.com
Ask HN: Examples of good Ruby API design (gems, stdlib classes etc.)
I've just watched Joshua Blochs talk on how to design a good API (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw) and it left me wondering if there are any particularly well designed APIs used by the Ruby community frequently. Any suggestions?
Artist Draws New Yorker Cover on His iPhone
not necessarily. mutt/pine, emacs/vi, irrsi/chatX, python/ruby, .... in general a good thing.
And in other news 104 years old woman uses twitter. Riveting.
what if someone changes git history? some rebasing or something like that? how does it affect downstream hg clients?

thanks.
Thanks. This can solve data and config mobility pretty nicely. For large amounts of (media) data an external 2.5" hd works pretty nicely.

For applications, it seems to depend a lot on the OS. Is there a good/easy way to track what apps/package have been installed (for Debian/Ubuntu e.g.)? How could I take replicable snapshots/images of my system (without user data)?

Would something like this even be possible on windows (since it doesn't have a package manager and installs stuff all over the place)?

The next level of hardware independence would be having a system on a USB device to be able to boot into it on different machines (e.g. a light notebook and a gaming desktop) using the same system on both.
Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose
Ok, so it's basically half and half.

Now what?
As a similar mac user, I would agree. However, when I flip flop to other platforms, the native experience isn't so great - so outside of the mac, I can see the general desire to just make the web the UI for any and all productivity apps at least (and who knows, perhaps even richer apps and 3d stuff in the future).

Its funny, on a mac, if you time things with a watch its not "fast" - loading times, and so on, but the experience is smooth enough that I find the native apps quite nice to quickly open, jot down a note and move on (eg evernote).
I find interesting, here we see the structure in RAM becoming almost as complex as the physical world (Or at least very dam complex.). This starts to make the heap react in way similiar to those in the physical world. We get a "mechanic" solution to a digital problem.
Suggestan - Addicting Q & A site. 
From the guy who post "Facebook/Twitter too shall pass".

You can submit suggestions based on particular question. You can even up/down vote suggestions.

If nothing else, it's fun and addicting.
It's hilarious how the 'abstractions' that SOAP and WS-* attempt to provide are really indirections via these fallacies.
An Open Letter to 20th Century Businesses
Yes. If they don't, who should? The parents? Many parents are completely useless (or worse); should we just write off their children?
I think there's a lot Apple needs to do to improve the IA of the App Store, and they need to make the iTunes store accessible from standard web browsers rather than just the iTunes software. But there's nothing preventing iPhone app developers from creating websites for their apps, and there are a variety of sites that review apps. That you cannot buy an iPhone app outside of the App Store does nothing to prevent developers from gaining visibility outside of it. There is nothing preventing anyone from Googling for iPhone apps (just as you can Google for non-iPhone apps), than the developers themselves.

As for the differences in sales curves, that's actually reflective of how much easier it is to find and purchase new apps on the App Store (as well as the increased competition -> price reduction that their aggregation provides), as opposed to having hundreds or thousands of different purchase sites with their own method for payment processing. Also note that most iPhone apps tend to be for entertainment, for which an early sales spike and sudden drop-off is the norm regardless of platform...or medium.
Anyone willing to take up this challenge?

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1244601&cid=280...
An FAQ is documentation with a specific format. You don't have to wait for any questions to be asked before starting your FAQ, though it should highlight any questions you get asked regularly.
Dustin Curtis recommended me 3 sites on twitter the other day:

http://www.alistapart.com/ Articles and reference

http://creattica.com/ Social voting on CSS, logos, biz cards etc.

http://typophile.com/ Mostly discussion as far as I can tell.

Creattica is by far my favorite for just browsing. ALA is popular destination for anyone involved in web design.
The title should be "Controlling a Katamari with a Giant Trackball". I hope Namco immediately hires her and releases a new version of Katamari Damacy bundled with it.
Everyone could be creative, if given the chance

I disagree with you whole-heartedly. Certainly everyone has the capacity for some level of creativity, but I think the type that we're talking about here is the same sort of gift that artists have.

Similarly to how some people are simply born with a genetic predisposition towards athletics, some people are born with the same sort of genetic predisposition towards mathematics.

The idea that everyone has got the same abilities is exactly the problem that we're talking about here. Some people ARE born with an advantage (or have one nurtured into them), and those people need to be allowed to excel, not held back because of those around them.
I just verified that the =rand(200,99) one does still exist (in Word 2008 on Mac anyway). As brunov said, this looks more like an easter egg than a bug though.
I don't think so. Most modern webapps or user interfaces strives for simplicity rather than just piling feature upon feature on top of each other. HN is a great example of this.

Efficiency can often be won by choosing the simple data structure or algorithm. There are numerous examples of the simple choice beating the complex one for all imaginable problem instances (although the advanced datastructure is faster in asymptotic behaviour). Another very important modern player is the cache. Simple and small often wins because it has better cache behaviour.

Note that I am not advocating for "outright dumb". "Outright dumb" is when your search of 100.000 elements is done via a linked list. Fortunately, such blunders can often be corrected with a bit of code that does not impair the readability of the whole thing.