skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Amazon isn't the whole problem, it's just that Amazon was the winner.

It used to be that most towns had a bookstore, and larger towns or cities had several. Eventually they were displaced by chains: Waldenbooks and B. Dalton, Borders and Barnes & Noble. First the chains chased out the independent bookstores by being able to cut costs and order more efficiently; then the chains ate each other at the same time that Amazon was cutting costs even further. Now there's one limping chain, B&N, and some specialized chains -- mostly religious, secondhand or otherwise discount -- and Amazon.

Efficiency is best served by a single distribution system with maximum economies of scale. That isn't actually a desirable outcome for customers or producers, though.
Where did you hear that Braintree is going to a 100EUR monthly minimum?
Lack of clean air can also _impair_ the right to live. When coal was the default source of domestic heating in London, toxic smog frequently caused hundreds of deaths and generally caused respiratory diseases.
Under average circumstances I have to drive about 50 minutes from my house to my office. This past winter we were expecting a bad storm one evening. Being a hardworker, I took home stuff to work on if I got stuck and couldn't make it into the office.

Just before I got home that evening one of my tires blew. I called the manager I was working for and explained the situation. I was planning on getting the tire replaced first thing. The tire shop didn't have internet, but I had plenty of paper work that didn't require internet, so I could work at the shop. And of course, I would call him as soon as the tire was fixed.

Next morning the storm had settled over our area. I limped to the tire store. It took about 1.5 hours for them to replace the tire (they had to wait on delivery of the tire from their supply house). When they had replaced it I called the manager and let him know I was en route. Unfortunately, a couple of exits down the road a tire related emergency light came on.

So, I turned around and headed back to the shop. En route I saw a large accident happen on the road I had just traversed. As soon as I got to the shop, I called the manager. I explained the current situation, and suggested that I just continue to work from the tire shop and when they were done I could work from home.

Long story short, this "productivity focused" manager insisted (i.e., I would be fired if I did otherwise) that I drive down to the office. I ended up spending 2.5 hours stuck in winter storm traffic, so that I could sit for an hour at a desk in an office to do paperwork that I could have done at home. Of course, I then had to turn around and drive back (thankfully that only took 2 hours).

So instead of 3.5 hours of productivity I got 4.5 of completely wasted drive time for 1 hour of actual work. (Then there's the fact that if I'm on a work roll at home, I tend not to stop, so he would have likely gotten more than just the 3.5 hours of work out of me.) All because his idea of 'work' is that someone in a seat in an office is productive while someone at home can't possible be productive.

I'm now much more punctual about working as close to 40 hours/weekly on the dot as I possibly can (I used to average many more hours).
I won't do more than cursory email checks from home.
And, I don't care how productive I am when I'm actually at the office.
Because clearly all that actually matters is that I'm physically there.
I completely identify with this. Certainly, some of this is introversion, but more of it is science. Peruse Hacker News for a few days and another article will pop up justifying what we all feel when we're at work: interruption is poison, and casual environmental talking sucks brain power.

I like the idea of caves. We share our office with another company, Southtree[1]. Our nook of the office holds about five of our desks. We've decided to move our desks to the walls, so we don't face each other but still benefit from some of the pieces of an open office. I can say this has definitely helped our productivity, but we're still susceptible to flipping our chairs around and talking.

At that point, I think it comes down to discipline.

I would prefer, I think, to have a "shut down zone" of sorts, like your cave but less cubicle. Maybe slightly darkened glass walls or something, so the feeling is open but the noise is not.
There is also a presentation hosting service, based on this at http://Slid.es
" for me a smartphone can fill useless time like waiting for an appointment, the bus, etc. "

The article attempted to make the point that such times are not 'useless time', they have a useful purpose.
Also synchronization sucks. I often use it from my desktop only to get "new message" notification on my phone somewhere around 10 minutes in the conversation with some messages from the beginning. It also loses message regularly so I am now used to ask for copy pasting if it's obvious something got lost.
Blatant disregard of things like sorting via status (or displaying that at all) or introducing more of them is another thing.
It looks like some crazy manager designed his evil plan and convinced all his bosses that it's the way to go. The app sucks, everyone I know hates it, they forced feeded it to users with Android update with no way to go back to gtalk.

It's amazing how they completely ignore what people want in the name of some lucid vision of how web talk should be done.
Worse yet, they first lured people in by releasing an awesome app (gtalk) killing most of the competition and then changed it to "Google way of doing web" without asking anybody and with competition already (almost) dead.
/rant
The BBC story says that it's their first space station.
I looked at Reveal recently (the Google Chrome DevTools guys use it for all their demos) for a presentation but ended up using Bespoke.JS instead (which oddly enough the Mozilla folks have been using recently):

The following presentation gives a good overview of the differences between Bespoke and Reveal:
http://markdalgleish.com/presentations/bespoke.js/

(keep pressing forward...it gets more interesting as you progress)

I liked the plugins, the docs were simple, they include grunt so your style changes are applied live, and they linked to other people presentations so you could peak at what others were doing.

In particular, I was 100% willing to switch right back to Keynote the moment any JS based presentation tool made me work on the tool more than the content. That never happened, and I ended up finishing the slides in Bespoke.
Honestly, I've had the opposite experience. The lack of online status certainly hasn't been missed, as I've been using hangouts to completely replace SMS. It's way more convenient. With the Chrome extension, I have all of my messages without ever having to have a certain website or even Chrome open. Maybe I've gotten really lucky, but I haven't run into any of those other problems. The only feature I'm waiting/hoping for is for it to be seamlessly integrated with SMS.
Revive Adserver - The open source ad server formerly known as OpenX Source
> For many small publishers like Roundabout, Amazon accounts for a large portion of sales, but the publisher realizes very little of the purchase price owing to Amazon’s discounting policies.

This I don't understand. How is it possible that Amazon's discounts reduce the publisher's margin? Doesn't the publisher simply sell it to Amazon for what the publisher thinks is a fair wholesale price? Amazon can screw small bookstores by reducing their own margins to almost nothing, but surely they can't reduce the publisher's margins? If Amazon wants to pay less for the book, then surely the publisher can simply not sell through Amazon?

So what use is it to tell people not to buy from Amazon? Maybe I just don't get how the book industry works.
John Ousterhout delivering keynote at Tcl 2013 Conference now
I think the main difference between our views is that you're assuming our hypothetical idevice wins or loses based on whether it gets game developers while I'm assuming it won't even be marketed as a game machine but the developers will move there because that's where the most customers will be. A dedicated $400-$500 gaming machines can die from a lack of third party games. A $130 converged set top box that people buy for netflix doesn't.

People love to watch netflix on their PS3 but at the end of the day nobody drops $300 on a PS3 to watch netflix. Plenty of people buy Apple boxes just so they can watch netflix. That's the difference the price point makes. When there were 30 million 3DS's and 100 million ipod touches people stopped making games for the 3DS.

...

"Nobody makes ARM games except mobile developers."

What developer isn't in mobile today? This is like saying no one knows how to code for ARM except for everyone.

"consoles live and die on their triple-A titles. Your GTAs, Halos, Marios, and Call of Duties are what sell consoles, not cheap hardware."

I would say that is misreading the biggest lesson of the current generation which saw the Wii dominate it's first 3-4 years based on (1) the cheap hardware and (2) Wii Sports, a new title. To some extent AAA titles will go where the users are.
Looking at it, I have about 10k files and it is only using about 12% memory, perhaps not as bad as I thought. 50k should be absolutely fine I would think. Here is the output of top showing btsync at idle:

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2993 btsync 19 -1 122m 60m 2988 S 11.9 12.4 610:05.84 btsync

I have noticed that the CPU takes a beating during any sync operations, tends to grab 100%. I limit the CPU for the btsync process to 60% max and also overclocked the Pi up one level (after installing a heatsink kit). Here it is during typical filesync operations:

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2993 btsync 19 -1 122m 60m 2988 S 63.8 12.4 612:51.33 btsync

To limit the cpu I use cpulimit and put this in my /etc/rc.local

/usr/bin/cpulimit -e btsync -l 60 -b >> /dev/null
Fund to Let Investors Bet on Price of Bitcoins
Show me a company working as a purely Internet bank of sorts and I'll show you a company with pissed off customers. Truth is, this business is very hard. For every time Paypal misidentifies a target and blocks their payments, they correctly identify scammers many more times. We tend to think "is it that hard to tell a scammer from blah legit site?". The answer is yes because guess what scammers are thinking everyday when they wake up? They are thinking 'how can we look more like a legit business so our payments go through'.

I say this as someone whose had to go through paypal's painful process several times in over a decade of use.
I agree. The infinite scroll is really well-implemented in FastMail. It's much better than the pagination in Gmail, which makes it extremely difficult to jump, say, 2/3 of the way down in a search or label with thousands of hits.
15 percent of Americans find the Internet irrelevant and hard to use
comments from last year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3383673
Lessons learned in a year of freelancing
> That which i have mentioned doesn't even touch the search algorithm itself, which I probably don't even have to say anything about because it's common knowledge how far ahead google is in that aspect too,

It is a source of great sadness to me that Google's algorithm, and the misuse of it be SEO scumbags, has fucked the web as a fun place to get information.

Even if we remove the scumbags we see a degraded web experience. Here's one example.

Play Dough recipe:

----
You need:

2 cups plain flour (all purpose)
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1/2 cup salt
2 tablespoons cream of tartar
1.5 cups boiling water (adding more in increments if needed)
food colouring (optional)
few drops glycerine (optional- adds more shine!)

Method:

Mix the flour, salt, cream of tartar and oil in a large mixing bowl
Add the boiling water
Stir continuously until it becomes a sticky, combined dough
Add the food colouring and glycerine (both optional)
Allow it to cool down then take it out of the bowl and knead it vigorously for a couple of minutes until all of the stickiness has gone. * This is the most important part of the process, so keep at it until it’s the perfect consistency!*
(If it remains a little sticky then add a touch more flour until just right)
----

With images this is, at most, a couple of hundred kB. But the page I get this from is over 2 MB.

(http://theimaginationtree.com/2012/04/best-ever-no-cook-play...)

It's a suboptimal experience. It's not even the ads that I dislike, I'm pretty tolerant of them. it's all the other junk and cruft. A 1998 WWW site would have had a recipe, and then had reasons for including the different ingredients, and an explanation of what happens if you don't have them. (and maybe it would have been collaboratively written by a Usenet newsgroup for their faq.)
IRSSI doesn't allow basic needs for a team (not only developpers).
It needs persistence and a web based client.
I don't think it would be very challenging doing a open sourced service like this but I don't understand why anyone hasn't done it.
I don't mind adsense, and if I did, there's always AdBlock. No, analytics was annoying me because of page load time. The number of times my browser stopped loading because "waiting for google-analytics.com" got me wound up enough one day to just block them for good.
"harsh winters" is relative. :) There tends to be less snow accumulation in Berlin than much of the Northeast US, and chances are you won't need a car, nor need to shovel it (plus walkway and driveway) out. And besides, meh-weather helps with productivity.
My favorite past employer had a sea of 8x8 cubes. The solution to communications issues like this was all you can eat Friday night pizza parties. People stayed to 11 PM hashing over issues of the week. One day, the beancounters decided to put a 3-slice quota on the pizza. That was the end of that.

A few years later they tried to shove engineering into 6x6 cubes. That lasted 2 months. Productivity had plummeted.

Naively imposing open offices to improve collaboration is like naively imposing scrum to improve communication - both are externally imposed edicts attempting to establish by fiat something that needs to grow organically.
I do love my latte in the ... squirrel!
Rebranding. Cubicles are for Dilbert.
This is hypocritical. US and the whole Western world is not any better on this.
Fashion?

There was a time when any group of people standing around would usually include at least one person smoking. That time is long past.

Eventually it will be uncool old people with phones and cool young people with .. _something else_.
I want to talk about something that has nothing to do with books or Amazon but CSS, and this website is a good example.

CSS transitions are a great feature, however, using them to make hyperlinks fade slowly over 500ms on hover is a really bad idea.

It is both distracting and not helpful, as a casual pass over a link with the mouse won't actually reveal it.

So please, please, by all means use CSS transitions for nice graphic effects, or to make the colour transition smoother over 50, or 100ms, but too much is not better.

I have the feeling CSS transitions are quickly becoming a kind of modern standard of amateur design, discreet and appealing yet annoying and distracting, like coloured scrollbars and animated mouse cursors once were.
https://github.com/turkishdelighthorse
All you guys are developers and you know how hard it is to develop a computer system. Our body has multiple systems running in perfect harmony. And all the animals has it too. The solar system with all the massive planets spinning with an unbelievable precision that we can calculate where a planet will be in 10.000 years from now. And they are travelling around the universe and you think now body is in charge? Somebody very very intelligent designed all this. And most of you hope that God does not exists because He left commandments that we not follow and He will judge each and everyone of us and because of that men hate God.
Biolite appears to have been formed in 2009, so much before this product: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioLite

The tech used in either of these (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peltier_effect) has been known of since the 1800's - in the tech world we usually see it applied to exotic cooling solutions for microprocessors.
How DevOps is reconstructing deployment, one integration at a time
Imagined Communities
Thank you so much for sharing this!!
How To Integrate Waiting Time Into Your User Experience
Fed up of losing visitors due to long waiting times? Learn how to turn that wait into part of your site's user experience.
He sure took his sweet time.
If enough people bought the book (i.e., were interested in reading the book), money wouldn't be a problem.
I would love to work in an office that has caves like that as opposed to the open office I'm in now.

I'm constantly distracted both audibly and visually -- the constant visual distractions being the big kicker.

I definitely think open office plans for software teams are not the way to go.
Flaming remarks. Removed
I've been having an internal struggle regarding the purchase of a BioLite stove. The primary reason I haven't is because of it's weight. As a backpacker, the stove is just way too heavy to carry on a trip (weekend trips, fine - but anything longer it would have to stay behind).

The FlameStower seems much more practical for longer trips because of it's weight / bulk.
I've just "hacked" Reveal.js on my own prez to support some code injection and enter/leave support :-)

http://greweb.me/webaudioapi-introduction/
I hadn't actually thought about trying to get a developer drunk.... Underhand tactic, but it could work. Unfortunately I'd probably end up married to Britney Spears!
Forrester report: next wave of user experienc is touch, 3D & motion sensing
They took on a lot of VC and there is no way that an IPO would have valued Braintree at the level that PayPal did. With the amount of investment they took on, they needed an acquisition of at least 500-750 million to get the 10x return their investors expected.

In short, when you take on enough investment, your options are IPO or acquisition, whatever makes your big investors the happiest.
Oh god, the notifications. There doesn't seem to be any intelligent targeting for them. Whenever I receive a message, every single client I have gets notified regardless of what I'm doing. If I'm actively typing into my android hangout client, chances are my tablets and my gmail tabs don't need to beep to let me know there's a new message.
Technical Thoughts on OpenShift and Docker
Thought I'd comment before the typical anti-Chinese-Engineering brigade shows up.

In my opinion, Chinese engineering is a wonder to behold in an era of modern western bureaucracy killing amazing projects. I realise Chinese politics are so far the other way they can be just as bad in different ways, but if China had the same level of bureaucracy as the west their insane Beijing-Shanghai high speed rail link would have never happened. In the process of creating this, they built 3 of the top 5 longest bridges in the world.

China have a lot of wealth, a lot of manpower, a lot of ambition. Sure, there is a high cost, but there was a cost to the pyramids, the great wall, skyscrapers in any top tier city, castles around the world and so on.

I'm not trying to glorify the obvious human rights abuses which lead to such amazing monuments of modern engineering but I find it difficult not to be enthralled by the wonderful creations of China of late and look forward to how they compete with a new space station.
'physical presence matters less than it used to.'
Physical presence matters just as much as it always did, what's lacking is the appreciation of how much is being missed.
As compared with being a prospective tech co-founder, which is more like hanging out in a Vietnamese pool hall in a short dress. There's money to be made, but you know the chances of being mistreated are pretty high.
"Accounts Payable, Nina speaking! Just a moment!"
We'll post the details when everyone is ready. Some of them are coming back from vacation, others want to test the waters first... and of course there are some who have committed already. Some are in but don't know yet when and how long they'll come.

All in all, very impressive people.

If you would like to be a resident...

We have sponsors, so we'll be able to pay travel and lodging given the right circumstances.

The way it works is that we get some advanced people (residents) and invite them to stay with us and share what they know. There's no structure; if you come, you can work on whatever you want, as long as you help other people. Maybe some would become contributors to some of your projects. Hacker School NY managed to get Peter Norvig as a resident.

Weekends and Mondays are busier, because then the two editions are in the same room. During the week it's only the fulltime people, who are just a handful, but the most dedicated.
So say you are a programmer and you have a coding problem. You have some friends which you know could help. You don't want to spam all of them but just ask the one who is available now.
Just one use case for online statuses.
Another one is, you know, you just want to chat with someone to make next 15 minutes pass and for that it would be nice to say "hi" to a person available for a quick chat right now.
Excellent. You've brought up some points that come up commonly. I have some follow up questions:

* To quote Dijkstra, "Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs", so presumably, you write tests to build confidence rather than to ensure "that what you think the code does is what it is actually doing". Is this accurate?

* If so, suppose you given a code-base that contains tests. How do you determine how much confidence to place in said software?

* It's very common for the space of possible inputs to be infinite, so you can't possibly test every case. How do you decide which ones are useful to write tests for?

* What is your response to Rich Hickey's depiction of, what he calls, guard-rail programming ("Simple Made Easy" from around 15:30 onwards)?

* Finally, how do know when you've written a good test suite? It's obviously good if it finds bugs, but how do you know that it is good without running it?

Sorry to bombard you, I'm asking because I'm genuinely interested and I want write more robust software.

> Have you ever made changes to some parts of the code, but then worried you might have broken something? With unit tests, you can be confident that your change didn't break any expected behavior.

I must say, I've done every permutation of changing code with/without tests where my changes have broken/have not broken things. Subjectively, I can't say that there has been noticeable correlation in any direction. Perhaps that's because I'm bad at writing tests, but then, how do I write good ones?
Hi pedalpete,
many thanks for you very interesting comment and for your appreciation.
At the moment we are collecting inputs and suggestions to improve Noisli, and they are all very welcome and precious.

We would like to keep the interface as simple and clean as possible for both mobile and desktop experience. Just the essential.
But we will keep all the suggestions in mind.

thanks again for your help
:)
It's not simply that we're constantly hunting for information. It's that too much information is crap. We use Facebook to find out what our best friend watched on television this week, read some blog about "10 secrets of successful entrepreneurs" (they really aren't secret), then head over to our favorite news site to have our political opinions affirmed by pundits.

The advertising revenue model gives the media incentives to make lots of cheap, addictive information. They don't have an incentive to make quality information. So we get what we pay for.

I have vowed to spend less time consuming and more time doing. It's hard. I cave in often. But I recommend it.