skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure I agree on your last point; some of the younger, less print-bound designers I've worked with have a good understanding of the difference between presentation and semantics, and have been often enough annoyed by sites which look just dandy at 1920x1080, but are unusable on a phone, to have a burning desire not to produce more of the same.

Stipulating that point, though, perhaps the solution is to keep designers at a higher level of granularity -- to have them produce designs for "large screen", "small screen", "mobile", "print", &c., including general ideas of how body text shall appear, but leave the more granular detail to someone who's not so much wedded to pixel-perfection, but instead understands that the same content will necessarily look different when differently rendered, and who can understand and accommodate those differences to produce a result that works well across all of them.
I made a recent trip to NYC and visited several museums and Five Points. I was more impressed by the artwork by the graffiti artists than the majority of items at say MoMA PS1.

Unfortunately, I think graffiti art will be accepted one funeral at a time.
Exactly, which is why Bloomberg considers Banksy a vandal.
That's because every KoM award I've ever heard of involved going up the hill(s). (Note: I know very little about MTB racing, maybe they have one for going down.) The downhill Strava segments strike me, and maybe this is a little mean or judgmental, as something to strive for if you're a Cat 6 [0] racer who can't climb. The first person described in the article was a mid-packer in an actual climbing competition. But when it came to tucking in and staying off the brakes, he could shine at least until tragedy struck.

[0] http://bikesnobnyc.blogspot.com/2011/05/probing-for-answers-...
I can't speak for today but in 2008-2010 this was definitely the case. It's not exactly a direct arbitrage play as a lot of the end advertisers tend to be doing full media buys. Top banner ad, background page ads and they are just paying for 100% coverage for a day or week or month. One large gaming news/reviews site was buying about $10k/day worth of mostly fraudulent traffic. The traffic wasn't bots, per se, it was "real" users but they had compromised machines with popups and toolbars. So there was a high visit count of real users but there was no conversion metrics or time-on-site to be measured. They continued buying the traffic for at least a month so I can only assume it was meeting their goals. We had a lot of publishers all doing the same thing.

As this was second tier, I wouldn't really call it "search" traffic. Just a ton of users with keyword-like queries being routed to various xml feeds/exchanges. When we'd send the traffic to actual publishers with conversion goals the rates were abysmal and we'd end up issuing lots of refunds. The only publishers that seemed to like the traffic were ones that sold their own dedicated ad units to large brand advertisers.

I'm just glad to be out of that industry :)
But the moment you've done that, you've established a de-facto government, thus violating the definition of anarchy. This happens with a lot of utopian schemes, actually: the logistics of maintaining them require them to mutate into something decidedly other than the original intent. Eventually, in the case of anarchy, the de-facto government inevitably finds a way to cement its power in a more de-jure fashion, and from there corruption proceeds as normal.
Fantastic! Really glad to find this.
I want to redo the cover. Think thats kosher? I have actually wanted to do it for a while now, before it was even open source. Too awesome of a book for that so-so cover.
Certainly, there are plenty of things in HTTP 2.0 that make sense to be there, such as server push, specialized header compression, etc.

However, some things, such as avoiding making multiple connections due to congestion and due to slow-start being slow, flow control, and arguably encryption, seem like they would be better addressed in TCP. And in fact, Google is trying to do that with QUIC.

The problem is that if (when) those things get standardized in HTTP/2.0, they need to be supported forever, even if an improved transport layer protocol makes them obsolete in relatively short order.
Use the responsive design view built into firefox and try the different screen sizes. You still are going to care 'how it looks' on all of the devices you expect to see it. I understand that it's nearly impossible to control for every screen size, and maybe that's the point, but you should still know and understand what most users will see.
That'd be awesome if you open sourced this!
He makes the contemporary/2000s artist pages in a number of the generic art books I've picked up over the last few years. Although I can't claim to be any kind of a critic.

[Goes to play some Weird Al on Spotify ;-)]
That is easiest [cough, imho] solved with adding a version number to stored records. Since data is not in much of a normal form and there won't be that many joins, it generally is easy to handle in code.

Sometimes you have to do update of records with a certain version number.

My opinions, for the record: MongoDB is a tool with some use cases. I'm more of an SQL+Memcache guy, if possible, but not religiously if a good argument is presented (that don't sound like "let's use .*, I want another keyword on my cv").
This prototyping story sounds to me like admittedly shooting yourself in the foot if your prototype turns out to be worth a damn. Basically, you're saying mongo is an excellent choice only when your storage backend is a moot point.

I can't think of any codebases I've seen where intentionally choosing the storage backend you know you don't want to use (if the project is successful) would be a reasonable thing to do. Understate it if you must, but having to change your backend from mongo to postgres is not a desirable situation. Besides, if you're going to use postgres to scale, use it's features and write well optimized queries for it. The difference between a bad massively complex query and a well optimized one can be several orders of magnitude, and that optimization can indeed be difficult. It goes without saying that you wouldn't leave that to an ORM.
As I've come to understand it, live coding is about programming while the program is actively running, changing the program's flow and behavior in real time as part of a cybernetic melding between programmer and program. Live programming is about better feedback between the programmer and program, which also involves execution, but the program is undergoing development by the alone programmer in a dark room somewhere and is not actively being used, program execution is just to collect data to present to the programmer so they can develop the program!

Whereas live coding has been presented as a new experience that transcends programming as we know it, live programming is just a new twist and substantial incremental improvement on the old programming experience, boring and pragmatic. In much the same way, Victor's Learnable Programming provides similar feedback to improve how programming is taught, and not to revolutionize what programming is.

I used to read a lot of Shadowrun in High School; the decking experience was about hacking through heavily secured computer systems by creating and customizing programs in real time. But when I started doing this, programming turned out to be more of a cerebral experience where real-time problem solving is neither necessary nor (yet) very effective. I'm quite OK with improving on that experience.

> We've been around this a couple of times though, and I think can probably predict each other's points by now. :)

Surely. We need to have a formal debate sometime if we ever attend the same conference.
I spent about a year writing PHP, and I thought it was a fun language. You can write very compact code in it, I could write it fast, and I seldom had to do any difficult debugging.

I saw some really bad PHP written by other people. But that shows how easy it is to write. Even people who are terrible at programming can figure it out, sort of.
Strava does allow users to flag segments as dangerous.

I've flagged quite a few on a local multi-use "bike" trail - there are just too many pedestrians, joggers, and horses to try and chase the clock.
Don't take critics too seriously. Nobody here can name a single critic. But we all know Banksy.
How? You mean you intuitively understood, or you can prove it your solution without calculus?
That's exactly my problem. I work well on my own and prefer it, but I want to change. I'm building stuff on my own right now and will continue doing so, but I realize there's no way I can run a company by myself forever.
I use MATLAB .. I guess I'll settle for the Royal Navy, then. My dream to be Jack Sparrow and have an excuse to be constantly drunk and awesome has just been shattered.
Feminism is about empowerment and choices. Being empowered to choose not to get married and have kids as I read it, considering that in the Western world that was "a woman's role" for probably centuries. At least as long as we've had patriarchy, which is quite a while.

Once women have the freedom to choose not to get married, have kids, etc it seems likely that some choose not to and thus the rise of feminism is roughly correlated with a decline in birthrates.

I've tidied this up in a nice little causal package but it's quite likely not so clear cut. But it certainly does seem that way at a glance. Which is why the notion gets such good traction amongst some.
Why can't vandalism be an artistic medium? I don't see any reason why someone can't be labeled both "vandal" and "artist". (edit: re-reading my sentence an hour later, I think even better wording might be "an outlet for artistic expression" rather than "an artistic medium".)
I don't think the cynical view makes a lot of sense. The original contractor is likely billing for hours to fix the site now. Bringing in additional experts doesn't benefit them. A failure of this scale and visibility isn't going to help their business reputation and if they lose the maintenance contract on the site they're likely to be out for millions. I can see bidding low with the expectation of making a killing on change orders (I think the contractor succeeded at that), but outright failure to deliver doesn't make a lot of sense.

I think like most IT projects you need to look at the management team in charge and the decisions they made to understand if this failure could have been identified and avoided.
How does Strava know what the speedlimit it?

From memory, Strava's most popular markets are the US, the UK, Australia, Japan, France, Italy.

Speed limits vary widely across jurisdictions and change frequently.

IMHO the best thing to do would be to remove the leaderboard from segments over (say) 3% negative gradient.

(For non-Strava users, Strava does have segments where no leaderboard of the fastest users is shown, but your own times are shown.)
Reminder: Y Combinator Winter 2014 Application Deadline Tomorrow at 8pm
Reminder to start/finish/submit your application for ycombinator - http://ycombinator.com/apply.html .

What is everybody else working on? We're making an alarm clock app (sounds dumb, right?).
Graffiti is art. Tags are just dogs marking territory.
My last business was ad-supported (premium, big-brand advertisers). One day, out of the blue, one of the companies which sold ads on our behalf sent us a nasty letter accusing us of buying junk traffic / creating false impressions and clicks - something we most definitely did not do.

Digging through the raw ad server log files, I discovered that the "suspicious" impressions and clicks were all originating from AWS IP addresses - most likely someone was using AWS to run a spider on our site, the spider followed Javascript links, and therefore clicked every ad on every page.

We ended up adding a rule in our ad server to prevent ads from being served to any IP address which belonged to cloud hosting / VPS providers - this solved the problem for us.

I've since sold the business and therefore don't know if the problem ever arose again, but I believe blacklisting IP address blocks which are highly unlikely to belong to real human beings* could be a good start for anyone running into these sorts of issues, either on the advertiser or publisher end.

*Yes, I know some people run VPNs on AWS or similar VPS instances, which means they are real humans - that was a loss we were willing to deal with.
Open sourcing my project:Finderous
Since I have been working on a new startup, I was thinking of open sourcing my previous project to HN members.

The advantages:

1 You will get to learn a lot working on a live system.

2. You can introduce as many features as you want.

The only thing I ask is to maintain the code working.

Do you guys think, it's a good idea to open source it? Please email me if any one of you is interested, I can open source the repository on github.

Details about the project:
It's called Finderous (http://www.findero.us) and is about location based tiny interest groups. It is an iOS app and the backend is on PHP. I have seen fair amount of activity on it from some loyal members, though its not too great.

But I think it can be made great with open sourcing and adding new features.

Shoot me an email if you are interested.
It works fine in my Opera 12.16 for Linux (amd64).
I think the "perfect J" comes from the fact that we are solving the instance with the critical value K = 4.60333... If K were any greater than this, we couldn't escape.

If K were less though, an "open J" path (like Path #2) would also work.
Not just financial institutions - I've seen it when consulting at older medium-to-large companies. They've got new mainframes and code they've been running with minor patches for 30 some years.

I find the mainframe fascinating, honestly. It's an entirely different world than the one I'm used to, from terminology to how systems are structured.
I'm perpetually puzzled that people in tech keep seeing nefarious purposes behind this failure when it sounds like every failed project we've heard of. Moving targets (how many states, how many users), feature creep, managers with no understanding of the undertaking, too many managers, and no time for testing and debugging.

It's not evil, it's just incompetent and embarrassing.
> Having a schemaless, easy to manage database is a step forward for sooo many use cases

Can you explain why can't you do schemaless with an RDBMS?

From what I understand MongoDB is schemaless by storing all fields as one single JSON document. So what stops you from doing the same in an RDBMS - have a catch-all field "JSON" and store all your data there?
SecureDrop Launches New Open-Source Submission System For Journalists
Okay, I'm on it ;)
What you say gets to the essence of the difference: a man who wants to assert his ego, against others and the state, vs a man who entertains the middle class with whimsical, nostalgic, left wing drawings (basically the XKCD of graffiti).

I think both are equally valid forms of expression. However my main surprise was with the people in the story who believe that artistic merit should determine who gets to break the law.
What is the point of healthcare.gov anyways? You can go and buy an ACA compliant plan on a comparison shop website like ehealthinsurance.com that works pretty well why did the government need to create it's own?
It's only vandalism to those who want to control the city yet not participate.
I'm an engineer at Tokutek

I'm confused by your comment. The beginning acknowledges the fact that MongoDB has a weak storage engine, but your conclusion is that, even with a strong storage engine like ours, there is still a problem. What other problems do you see? Are they something we could work on?
My apologies, site is currently down. Trying to fix and maybe repost.
Indeed, people not having procreative sex would be more correct.
It is not about being brilliant but about solving the problems that get on your path while making something.

When I want to learn something new or a new language I always set up a project that seems interesting to me, this will force me to solve all problems along the road towards completing that project, when done I often know enough about the language to go ahead and use it in the real world.

You learn from mistakes but most from other people's mistakes.
First-world problem...
They were, confusingly, referring to 'No[v]. 17'. The prior sentence refers to a new day coming, which is 'No[v]. 18'. I have no idea why they didn't go with the accepted abbreviation of November as 'Nov'. They weren't referring to building number 17.

Just clarifying, not disagreeing with your statement :)
> the solution for content creators and content managers is not to copy and paste from full fledged word processors like MS Word, LibreOffice, and Apple Pages

A solution that boils down to "take all the tools in your workflow that you're already familiar with and throw 'em out the window" is not going to go over well.

Those of us who work in the content-management space have been trying to get people to understand "pasting from Word is bad and will break your heart" literally for decades now. It never works. Word is the only composition tool many of these folks are familiar with, and that familiarity has only come because (from their perspective) they've had to fight with its idiosyncrasies for so long that they finally know where all the land mines are. The idea of having to go through all that all over again with a new program is frightening, so they hold on to Word with all their might.

It's possible that eventually Word will become less of a problem, not because it'll get better but just because a generation of writers will grow up who are more familiar with Web writing tools than offline ones. But we're at least a couple of decades out from that being the case, alas.
Physicists and the financial markets
I don't think you'll be able to repost, HN prevents dupe URLs. At least within a certain time frame, I've been blocked before.

Maybe throw the content up as a comment until you have it fixed?
By that definition, tagging an (original) poem is art?
No, it's not correct. The author's argument is that you absolutely should not use pure black in design because it's "unnatural". The false assumption he's making is that artwork and designed objects or interfaces should be natural, and even that is based on a very specific definition of natural. What's natural about a computer or an LCD display? Even the best devices are comprised of "very striking unnatural structures with aggressive, sharp edges".

The author supports his argument with artwork, photography, and applications that are no more natural or effective than the ones I linked (oh, and how about Ansel Adams http://www.anseladams.com/? A legendary nature photographer — his images are full of deep blacks.) It's a matter of personal preference. Telling inexperienced designers to "Never Use Black" just isn't sound advice. I would sooner advise designers to work only in black and white. Design a great application in black and white, and then begin working with color and tone when black and white aren't enough. A more appropriate, though less provocative title for this article would be, "Shadows Aren't Always Black".
Good to see a google alternative. Also, I'm very curious: is this really written in PHP?
Isn't AdWords an auction of sorts? If so then this 25% is already baked in.
Tombstone. I didn't mind Django: Unchained as a riff on Westerns.
This is hilarious ! Somebody had just seen "The Pursuit of HappYness" and took it to the next level.

Let's offer "Hot Soup Processor" classes for free and will have homeless people coming in thinking there's hot soup in there.. And that wouldn't be as bad as HTML classes. At least there's "hot soup" in the name. As Zed Shaw would put it: "Incentive, motherfucker. Do you speak it !".
Go is definitely faster than Python for those types of tasks, however I'm suspicious of it being that much faster. I've crunched massive data sets in Python and as long as you're aware of its limitations, you can make things pretty zippy.
Sounds like a standard run-of-the-mill Government contract job to me. It's a known fact getting a Government contract is like winning the lottery for a lot of businesses. Ramp up your usual price by 1000%, take twice as long as you should and when SHTH proclaim the problem is a lot more complex and bigger than you thought and all is forgiven. Having said that, not all contractors deliberately waste money and drag out projects, but it is a known aspect of contract work. Whether or not that is the reason in this instance has not been proven and probably never will be.

The Obama Care fiasco continues, almost like it was deliberately on purpose in a way.
Neural Network Driven Car Simulation [GitHub]
This quote does leave out one crucial item, though (I don't know exactly which Wikipedia page you are quoting from, so I don't know if it's brought up elsewhere on the page, or on a page it links to): how do you know the initial concentration of the decaying element? (This is often asked by creationists trying to discredit radiometric dating techniques.) The answer is that, if you make some additional measurements, you can figure it out from the data, as explained in the Isochron Dating FAQ:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/isochron-dating.html
I wonder how many of them are literally "new", as in, "What cures a hang over" versus "What cures a hangover", and how many of them are "new" by the time Google's computer breaks it into a normalized query? I guess to the engineers designing that process, it's all new data that their algorithm has to deal with. But it'd be interesting to see the vitality of the search for new concepts and knowledge among Google's users.
Most sites have segregated data from presentation. The problem would be your second point - that it's not exposed as being user controllable. It is in fact user controllable through scripting in most cases, but it's not surfaced in any way.

Right in my browser, firefox, and maybe yours, I can set the default fonts, sizes, and colors, and I can force sites to use my settings. This is a partial step towards where you're going. Most designers will not simply use the foreground, background, serif, and sans-serif fonts that a user has set. This could be a good thing, since the majority of people don't even know that these options exists, but it is forcing a single design upon the users.
It’s funny he contrasted Banksy with Pollack. I’ve always thought of Pollack (and many other modern artists) as a sort of charming guy who figured out that the art industry is a weird product of status games and so decided to create positional goods with the least amount of effort possible.
Traditional writers dislike Bansky because he is seen as a hipster cashing in on hiphop culture without living a hiphop lifestyle [1].

They also dislike stencil art in general, as it takes far less technical skill and practice to execute. Again, this is seen as yuppie kids ripping off authentic street culture.

The most offensive way to express dislike is to cross out or tag over someone's piece.

[1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Elements+of+H...