skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh, I just realized you're the poster of the blog article, submitter, and a member of the creative class. Cool - You've got some interesting ideas, KM. Here's a thought on part of the article:

> So who would make these decisions? In part they would likely be automated, with an algorithm that is publicly decided upon. In other words, this is group decision making that stems from the bottom up -- not command and control decision making that stems from the top down.

If you paid people for contributing to something like Wikipedia on a public formula, people would work to crack it. If it was based on pages written, people would work to write as many as they could about anything. If it was based on how often the pages were read, you'd have people fighting to erase each other's content or adding true-but-useless information to every popular page. If the first creator of an article got paid, there'd be a rush for anyone to create a page about any major event even if they didn't have information. If it was voted on, people would try to game the voting. Command and control has some serious problems, but replacing it takes a lot of thought. You've got to be very careful with how incentives line up - people can and do just gun for the incentives.
It's been a long time since I've tried it, but will try again soon. From the guided tour, it looks impressive:

http://www.pgadmin.org/visualtour.php
PyPy: JIT progress, 50% faster baseline than CPython
I came here to say exactly the opposite.

I read a lot of code these days where people seem to think that descriptive variable and function names replace the need for any comments. But, even the most well written code is only going to make it clear _what_ the code it doing. The _why_ is likely to remain obscure. And without knowing why the code does what it does, it will often be impossible to know whether you can make certain changes.
This is one of the more brilliant examples of a company getting their shit together to do something awesome on VERY short notice.

The Guardian did an awesome job, and kudos to the developer, Simon Willison.
This has been submitted/discussed on HN before: http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-us&...

I'm not complaining. It's probably worth the resubmit. I've used the site several times since originally it on HN.
"Go-getters are always busy but they only focus on tasks that get noticed by executives. These tasks are usually highly visible but rarely important to the success of the company."

I stopped taking this article seriously at this point.

Are people voting this up because they think it's funny? There's not much here that rings true, in my opinion.
if you vote on a post you should be able to find it here http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=oditogre
Can somebody explain to me how this manages to create regexes not confused by false positives? Like if you select a string that must be at the beginning of the input, it doesn't seem to enforce that.
Along with the huge NASA cash ($billions) for SpaceX, it's a good year for Musk.
Tom Anderson doesn't even run the "Tom" account. In fact, Tom's entire identity on the site is mostly fictitious, complete with a falsified age. He's pretty much a figurehead, all they're paying him for is to avoid making any negative press about "MySpace fires Tom" or something like that.
I have nothing against weapons. I actually like them. However, a camp for teenage boys where there's weapons training would be a PR disaster. The feminists would complain that it was a men's conspiracy to impose the old status quo. The far left-wing whackos would compare it to Hitler's youth. I believe that teenage boys can be taught how to shoot, and that they can be trained to use weapons in a responsible manner. An old drill instructor would be required to keep the kids in check, though.

Much of this PR nightmare could be avoided if there were no weapons. Martial arts would be OK. By keeping weapons out, you could sell it as an extreme sports camp, rather than a boot camp for teenagers ;-) Image is everything.
TechTrotter: A Journey To Discover The World's Technology Hubs
Chris Anderson's Free Contains Apparent Plagiarism
Seconded! Andrew- I'd love to see transcripts of the Mixergy interviews as well, as I'm sure many others are too.
The whole idea of FlyClear disturbed me. On the one hand, getting through airports quicker sounds like a great idea. But what sort of message does it send? That you can either suffer through a crappy process, or give up tons of privacy? Do people start looking past the problems with TSA because the norm is to submit yourself to fingerprinting and eye scans?

All in all, I'm quite happy to see Clear go under. Now, the frequent flyers can continue to put pressure on the lunacy of the TSA security process.
I don't think the founders would be to concerned, they made there millions.

It wouldn't have done much better solo unless they had seriously changed there engineering and removed all the backwards compatability.
The eternal optimism of the Clear mind
The sidebar displays of textual comparisons in the submitted article are very interesting, as is the attribution of the Wikipedia entries.
Army Exoskeleton Suit Gives Man Superhuman Strength
Real life is not that simple. Many times, graphs and charts (especially when they replace actual numbers) can be misleading, even unintentionally. In this article, you could focus on IOPS, if your target workload is sensitive to that. Or you could think about maximum bandwidth, or number of rack units required, or the fact that one of the options requires special drivers and multiple PCI-e channels, and so on. Just throwing a graph up would hide a lot of useful information, and encourage knee-jerk reactions to the article. We all know from the Megahertz Wars that this isn't good for anybody. Pretty graphs have their place in pop-tech pieces, but this article was more useful in just two pages than most of those articles are in ten pages of graphs.
As a programmer who works at a newspaper, I must say that this is totally wicked.

For minimal investment you get a lot of people doing work for you - for free - and a huge PR boost. Plus a bunch of nerd cred.
To a layperson, "protocol" is what you brush up on before you meet a distinguished personage.
I really can't tell if this is satire, maybe my detector is broken, but most comments see to be taking it semi-seriously. I apologize if I'm being dumb/baited.

Anyway, if it isn't, you're the sort of stupid cunts I want to strangle by the end of a project. I have to spell out every fucking thing that needs to be done for you, or get your manager to schedule every stupid item involved in a task in ridiculous detail with you.

The whole value of someone who isn't an intern (or at a the same level), is figuring what needs to be done, not the actual code design and typing part. If you're waiting for someone to assign things to you, you're already useless to me.

Yeah, ok, I think it must be a joke because every item on the list makes me more aggravated. Oh well.
I don't disagree with anything you said. But, if I understand you correctly, you don't think that demonstrably fixed elections would effect that complex mix at all. I think they would.

My simple rational is that you're going to have more support from the people and lower levels of the government if one can provide compelling evidence the elections were fixed. There's a difference between most people thinking the elections are fixed, and actually having evidence to support the conclusion. Such knowledge emboldens people.
Contemporary Styles - What's Next?
Style exists in every work of man that is not inherently and exclusively, function and not form. All design styles often "arrive", but only until all aspects of the new design vocabulary are explored...
This is all I get after registering:

Account activation

Sorry, your account could not be activated. I don't care why this happened.
I generally just assume that it's common knowledge that it was genocide by neglect, and was copied and improved upon by Germanic efficiency 80 years later. As evil as the holocaust was, the groundwork was laid by the British (and Canadians/Americans) the century before.
Additionally, there is not-universal-but-fairly-widespread culture of contempt for folks who make suggestions like that. "Bah, typical Excel user with your useless eye-candy and summaries and obsession with ease of use."

I wrote an article some months back about competing with OSS, which included some very basic advice like "If you offer software for download, you should have a prominent button which lets people download your software". I did not anticipate this recommendation would be controversial. I got some absolutely priceless comments about it. My two favorites: users who can't find the software without a big ugly button don't deserve to have it, and technically disinclined users who are attempting to install software from the Internet are already doing something wrong, they should be getting it from their distro's repo instead.
A Danish tech firm harnesses the power of the autistic brain
Perhaps, but I'm guessing that what he means here is more of a rough structural understanding of the code. In other words, what pieces have what function, and in general how do they interact with one another.

While this doesn't necessarily mean the code will be readable, I'd say that there's a lot to be said for a code layout in which it's easy to figure out roughly which code needs to be touched to make a given change or fix.
18 Superb Photoshop and Design Tutorials 
Photoshop gives designers unlimited potential in creating something from the void of the mind. Here are some superb tutorials on just that subject.
Deep in Bedrock, Clean Energy and Quake Fears
Given Anderson's response that he screwed up and his plausible explanation, the article's gotcha title and the way that it's structured (first as a pompous "investigation", then springing this critical information on the reader at the end) strike me as a little unfair. Obviously what he did was wrong, but it was pretty clearly sloppiness rather than theft or deceit. (Edit: either that or a very clever coverup of a very stupid crime.)
How is this not the # green belt feature: Access your mail via https.

Everyone should be doing that, it's like a 10 second config change to gmail.
someone should do an LCS on the electronic version and submit the results to Wired :)
I'll add some more as they come to me, but in general, my impression is that the so-called "meritocracy" is really a preponderance of faux-intellectuals and figureheads.

Exhibit 1:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=671520
Politicians Accepting Insurance Donations Less Likely To Support Public Option
Sorry, but if you're trained as a journalist, it is.
The _why_ is likely to remain obscure.

The why might remain obscure, but that depends on two very important things: your documentation, as you noted; and your data structures.

Show me your flow charts and conceal your tables and I shall continue to be mystified, show me your tables and I won't usually need your flow charts; they'll be obvious. - Fred Brooks

As much as you can organize your data to make the purpose of it obvious, do that. It will make the system far easier for a new-comer to comprehend, and will make far more obvious to do you the sort of code you need to write to make the wheels turn. Where that is not enough, then use comments, but don't assume that prose is an adequate replacement for precise and logical data representation. Often times, I've found that the latter is a far better choice.
Caught another plagiarist a few days ago here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=661875

Seems like you could catch a lot of plagiarism by doing a sentence-by-sentence google search of a submitted work. Probably against Google's ToS but it would probably turn up a lot of dirt.
Hospital in Memphis Says it Did Jobs’s Surgery
Being more strict than the standards already are would be horrible. The Web succeeded thanks to the loose coupling between browsers and documents, allowing us to make browsers which behave the way we want instead of merely porting the original browser from TimBL's NeXT.

Writing documents which degrade gracefully isn't hard unless you do it backwards (scripted frills before meaningful content).
I don't see any actual content here. Google thinks the web should be faster. That's obvious. They just say this over and over.

We have more pressing problems, like browser compatibility to solve first. Maybe if Google could host a service that would take a page known to work on FF3 and apply magic to it on the fly and make it work on IE6/7/8 etc that would be something useful...
The Wal-Mart of Weddings: David’s Bridal outfits one-third of America’s brides
Depending on the context[1] (i.e. a loud, packed bar is ok), a light-but-firm, non-creepy hand on the shoulder of someone in a tightly packed group can alert them that there is someone behind them who should be in the conversation[2]. When they turn towards you, you need to be smiling and have open body language[3], and greet them with a loud, confident voice[4]. They aren't trying to exclude you; they just probably haven't noticed you, or don't know how to talk to you if they have.

[1] On context: my impression is that the louder the atmosphere, the more appropriate/necessary it is to use body language and body contact to communicate.

[2] Have you ever been in the way of a bouncer or glass-collector in a nightclub? They have a certain practiced, assertive way of getting your attention - usually a hand on the shoulder that isn't pushing you out of the way so much as alerting you that someone's trying to get by. It's like that. (Some bouncers and staff are less polite, of course.)

[3] Open body language is mostly about not having your arms between you and the other. If you're holding a drink, don't hold it in front of you defensively; hold it to your side, and maybe lower than you might ordinarily hold it.

[4] If you're like many introverts, your voice is quieter than you think it is, so you need to overcompensate for that.
Augmented Reality & Motion Capture Shopping App
Visual Decision Making
That's an earnest apology, not a naive one. Even those who feel they did something wrong, desperately want others to understand their side. I think the problems comes from people mixing in the explanation for why they did what they did with the apology.

I think it takes some sophistication to realize that if you explain yourself, there must also be an unequivocal apology separate from that explanation. See Richard Clark's "I failed you" testimony.
You make a good point about why vs. what. Still, my experience has been that if I ask myself when adding a comment, "Could I make the code say this instead?" the answer is "yes" 9 times out of 10. It is preferable to do so because code is much likelier to be read and maintained than comments are. Also, this question often makes me see flaws in how the code was expressing itself, so I end up with better code.
Social Skydiving with a Code Monkey
This technology is already commercially available in Japan. (The focus is less on giving superhuman strength as to giving regular human strength to people who don't have it -- think disabled folks or 60-something construction workers being able to handle loads more appropriate to 20-something construction workers without risking severe injury.)

My previous employer had a team working on various robotics projects, and I was invited with them to a public presentation about related technologies by a few companies in the field. It involved their favorite two tech demos: having a skinny engineer pick up a young female presenter, and then having the young female presenter pick up a large bag of rice, both without noticeable effort. They also had a partially paralyzed man walk, thrown in as an omake. (I don't even know what you call that anymore. You know the "And if you order a large pizza we'll throw in a free small coke at no extra charge?" deals you hear all the time. The small coke is omake. Like, you know, healing the lame. Not worthy of a full bullet point by itself but as long as we have your attention we thought we'd slide it in there.)

I asked when it would be commercially available, figuring "Five to ten years in the future, right?" (+) and was told "Do you have a credit card on you?"

Some days I feel like I'm living in the future.

(+) I was attached to an AI project at the time. Like any good AI project, it will be available 5 to 10 years in the future, just like it has been for the last 30 years. Just like cost-competitive solar power. If you actually ship we AI researchers get peevish and drum your stupid little engineering trick out of the field.
I love how my comment went up to 7 points last I checked, then almost immediately down to 1 after this was posted.
So you're admitting that HTML is simply an output format?
Methodist University Hospital Confirms Steve Jobs's Liver Transplant
Ok, so maybe the comment wasn't constructive, but isn't that what you all think when you watch the video?

Oh well. I'll try to make up for it!

One of the reasons this seems so awesome to me is that it could replace the forklift, winch, pulley, or any given lifting/pulling/etc. based device. Wouldn't it be so much easier to just lift something and carry it, rather than loading it onto a forklift and then driving the forklift? It's a much more intuitive and easy system.
I often copy the uncompressed source directly over the compiled file, make my edits on the live file, and then copy it back when I'm ready to check-in. Granted, the system I work with compiles and doesn't concatenate, which is a slightly simpler problem. But you could easily have your build script leave comment markers in the file (or just look for top-level '(function(){...})()' closures which nearly every sane system uses) and "unbuild" the concatenated file from that.
e) never
u: m00m00
p: m00m00
50 Cent To Hustle New Cologne | Hip Hop MVP
Design For Mobile: resources for designing and building mobile apps and sites
You're onto something here - and Google has already digitized many, many books. This has enormous potential value as a collaborative endeavor; Google might not object if they were made a party to it and the search conducted at a low intensity. Alternatively, some kind of peer-based comparison a la BOINC ought to be possible. It has value beyond simple plagiarism detection.
you're talking as if it's wrong for a company to look after its own interests?
This. How on earth you could have an explanation that's essentially "I relied on my memory to figure out the quoted cites after the fact that I deleted the cites because I couldn't find a fucking cite format" is insane. The dude pretty willfully plagarized as far as I'm concerned. I mean, seriously, fucking Google has this as their first hit for [cite online sources]: http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/online/citex.html

Now, look, Doris Kearns Goodwin got nailed plagarizing, too. She did her penance, and now she's back on TV and everything after putting out Team of Rivals, which was seminal. Anderson will have to do something similar.

What's striking is that if you make it to the top of the profession, you can get away with this. If you're 28 and toiling to work your way up, it's a death sentence.
I tried it and was disappointed. For example search Wolfram Alpha for "Abraham Lincon's Height" and it won't be able to figure it out. Search Google, and it will be parsed out nicely at the top of the page, no wading through search results necessary.
"Training as a journalist" is a joke. Pretty much every article I've had firsthand knowledge of has contained errors so egregious that it wouldn't take any training at all to have avoided them, only basic intelligence and diligence. Sorry, but that profession richly deserves its current collapse.

Given that, I find Anderson's screwup with footnotes no more objectionable than the critic's self-interested attempt to drum up a scandal out of it. It's not like the book gains anything by not citing a few Wikipedia articles; given its genre (popular economics) it would in fact be more convincing with them than without them. If it were claiming original scholarship it would be a different story.

Anyway, my point isn't really to defend authorial sloppiness in shallow throwaway bestsellers. I just didn't like the bait-and-switch in the gotcha piece. (Or its self-importance. "Investigation?" Please.)

Edit: ok, my conscience made me go back and reread the VQR piece to see if it was all that obnoxious. And it says it wasn't really and I have to add that here. In a footnote. :)
Stay safe online. Lie flat in a ditch.
> You know the "And if you order a large pizza we'll throw in a free small coke at no extra charge?" deals you hear all the time. The small coke is omake.

I'd call that an "added bonus", i think.
Pl check http://www.dnsserverlist.org/indexbeta.php?oby=Q_RTT
Don't let endianness byte you
Yeah, a bit the same here in New Zealand (20 days/year is standard). But I think that would be quite generous by U.S. standards.
FYI: http://www.nihongodict.com/w/66864/omake/
Hmm. Must be an error from copying a template. Boston is just not a city to joke about such things.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_Mooninite_Scare
Well-written.

We're eventually going to reach a point where most people actually know their way around technology. At some point, everyone will have grown up with technology, and their lives' intertwining with the internet will be second nature.
$100 Laptop Becomes $5 PC
"...because our research indicates that people prefer faster, more responsive apps..."

I find this very funny. They were possibly screaming Eureka!
Well, if he did this with content licensed under the ShareAlike, then he has to release his book the same way. Right?

Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Comm...
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Oracle will kill MySQL, but the code behind it under the different name will kill Oracle sometime in the future. You can't fight the weather, working open source is unkillable.
That depends a lot on _who_ you're expecting the code to "speak" too. If I were writing code and expected non-perl programmers to read it, I might avoid using Schwartzian Transforms, but the reductio ad absurdum arguement for that point of view says you could only ever write code in plain english[1] because you might someday need it to be fixed by someone who doesn't know language-de-jour.

If a Perl program needs fixing, you need to get someone who knows Perl to fix it, which means they _should_ know the standard set of Perl idioms. You _can_ write Perl in a way that Cobol programmers can easily understand and change, but you should never have too...

big

[1] or perhaps chinese to maximise the probability of being understood by a random maintenance programmer?
Good question.

http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

(Dunno if it still has a karma threshold)
The destruction of Europe and post-war prosperity and the advance of technology has led Americans to grow progressively more entitled. It's no wonder kids today lump it all together, because in general any American under 60 is way more self-entitled than is warranted under current global conditions.
They also gave terrorists an easy way to find if they under investigation.

Bruce Schneier's words: I think of Clear as a $100 service that tells terrorists if the F.B.I. is on to them or not. Why in the world would we provide terrorists with this ability?

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/01/clear_register...
Bill Gates: “Our Most Potent Operating System Competitor is Linux”
hah, you better not be doing this on mysql/innodb
Outlook’s broken—Let’s fix it