skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> A lot of these things won't matter as legacy browsers fall out of scope.

As an engineer whose recent focus has been front-end, I wish this was true.

The iOS7 rollout is what's been on my mind lately. That version of Mobile Safari had a number of new quirks/bugs which caused some significant usability issues on the site of a major automaker that I've been working on most of this year.

After poking at one of the biggest problems for two weeks, we eventually came to the conclusion that there was no fix available, and the choices were (a) live with the problem (b) entirely re-engineer some components just to accommodate iOS7, or (c) gracefully degrade for the newest version of what is likely the most significant mobile browser.

I've enjoyed watching and participating in a lot of the progress and excitement on the front-end over the last 10 years. But this development really depresses my enthusiasm. It was kindof understood years ago that, sure, for now we might have to make sure we knew the quirky minutia of each of the major 3-4 rendering engines, but the promise was the quirks would fade, browsers would converge on standards, we'd paper over whatever Microsoft couldn't/wouldn't manage to fix themselves, and eventually get on with the actual engineering.

Watching another major vendor introduce new quirky minutia in 2013 makes me wonder if front-end engineering will always mean that you'll have to fill up your head and your time with ephemeral, non-generalizable knowledge that will never really help you grow into a better problem solver.
> I suspect we will end up focusing more on the log as a commoditized building block irrespective of its implementation in the same way we often talk about a hash table without bothering to get in the details of whether we mean the murmur hash with linear probing or some other variant. The log will become something of a commoditized interface, with many algorithms and implementations competing to provide the best guarantees and optimal performance.

Very insightful. Thanks for the in-depth write-up.
It sounds like you're more of a businessman than an IT guy. I used a job in IT to leverage my way into my current role of information security by listening to the needs of my company and offering my services doing way more than security work.

I don't think anyone would disagree that being able to find a need and sell yourself as the solution are two of the biggest assets in finding success.
Further, this means that code that was once GPL or public domain could be reverted back to private ownership by the author or his heirs after 35 years.

It seems this applies to transfers, not licenses that have no effect on the copyright holder. The GPL, for example, doesn't take rights away from the original author and give them to someone else, unlike a recording contract.
The Only Thing Weirder Than a Telemarketing Robot - Technology - The Atlantic
PhantomJS is awesome for speed, but I noticed that it sometimes doesn't render iframe elements, ajaxed elements properly while using just Firefox does render all elements correctly.
$5/month is more than I'm willing to pay to try it out.

First month is free.
Facebook Launches “Donate” Button For Non-Profits That Also Collects Billing
Well, there it is. The administration's case. It is legal.

However, my question was along the lines of political theory, not constitutional law. There's no doubt that some really powerful legal minds have concluded that all of this is legal, but can a government function this way? Obviously this type of information collection and storage wasn't happening before at this scale. Obviously it is now. Aside from the most likely correct reading of the constitution, does it not seem from a simply observational viewpoint that something is now amiss? Would it not be reasonable for the average citizen, looking back on decades and centuries of private conversations with his friends, meetings which did not involve public records being kept, and private papers immune from government scrutiny, to wonder if somehow he wasn't getting the short end of the stick compared to his ancestors? Or is your response that since it is legal, our citizen should just shut up? Or perhaps you have something along the lines of "elect representatives who will then pass laws"

I find it fascinating that the status quo has changed so much, and because a technology shift was involved, your presumption is that it is the citizen who should have been more wary, lest his personal affairs become part of the public record. Especially since 1) officials have been very careful not to allow the citizens to know what they are recording and what their capabilities are, and 2) It's virtually impossible to live in the modern world without "broadcasting"

If you've got something else besides "but it's legal!" I'd love to hear it.

Thanks for the engagement, btw.
>Studies have shown that if you add in even a small amount of extrinsic motivation (i.e. pay people) it dramatically affects their perception of intrinsic reward.

These studies are typically set up such that there's no choice; you have kids (usually) do some activity like drawing for either no reward or extrinsic reward, and then see how many continue once you remove the extrinsic reward.

There are a lot of possible explanations for this; the one I like the most is based on self-perception theory, which would predict that once you've accepted the reward, you attribute your motivation to the reward.

There are some differences between those studies and this scenario:

1. Open-source developers have a far wider range of options, and must actively choose to work on a project with financial reward.

2. Open-source developers who have already contributed some amount for free should be less influenced than new developers -- they already have had altruistic/intrinsically-motivated self perceptions.

Developers that are attracted to OWS projects because of this reward probably won't stay if the reward is removed, but I'm not sure, and don't predict, that OWS projects will attract fewer developers overall because of this.

I think that intrinsic and extrinsic motivators can definitely co-exist, especially for domains where there are differences in the tasks -- for example, offering these bounties for "less fun" stuff (or dynamically offering more for parts of the repo that have been touched further into the past).
It's called Bayes' Equation. Given an older wealthy man and a young attractive women dining together, the probability can be calculated to be enormously in favor of some sort of sexual relationship between them.

You can't shame people out of drawing this conclusion. It's math. You can't shame math.
E-cigs are not supposed to help people quit. They are a smoking alternative.
Yes, but when someone says "Bob took advantage of Amanda" they likely do not meant Bob leveraged Amanda's capabilities to mutual gain.
[1] http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2013/11/googles-forum-s...
i do think that in a pedantic way he is right - you can never do away with government if you define it in that way. i'm just not sure what the value of such an observation is...
"What was cool in the 70s wasn’t cool in the 80s."

Its very important he phrased it that way, because bell bottoms had another day in the sun. Happily young women wearing skin tight spandex/yoga pants from the 90s had another day in the 10s. Its difficult to find a womens fashion fad that doesn't repeat every 20-ish years.

The endless rotating wheel of fashion and fads doesn't rotate at a speed of 1 rotation per decade. Its more like 1 rotation per 2 decades aka generation.

I predict that 2030 will be an excellent year for 2010 style social networks.
Comcast weighs options for Time Warner Cable deal
Agreed - I just think it's lightyears ahead of other charities. Most of the time, I have no idea where the money even goes, which is really unfortunate (and makes me not want to donate to them)
It might be disappointing that the concept of force/consent doesn't simplify the "which system is best" problem, but I don't see how it's absurd.

If a moral dilemma vanishes when you look at it from a different viewpoint, the most likely scenario is that the new viewpoint is obscuring the crux of the problem rather than miraculously simplifying it.
WeBRAND Launches Startup Apparel to Fund Bridge; Designs for Team Y, Scobleizer
Every so often a company will make a move that is so smart that it boggles your mind. To me, this is one of those moves.

For a company so evil in so many ways, this really surprised me.

Think about this, if this works, low-income households can increase their earning power through learning skills that will allow them to make more money. Once they're making enough, they'll be more stable customers for Comcast and having used the internet to improve their lives, the internet will be one of the last things to cut. (If I was in the position to benefit from this, I'd never "bite the hand that feeds me" if I can avoid it.)

If they don't screw this up, Comcast stands to win hundreds to thousands of new lifetime loyal customers (assuming they don't screw up retention).

Low income families increase their earning power.Comcast wins more business. Khan is more successful. There are no losers.

This is absolutely brilliant. Good job Comcast!
...more to my social environment than rational thought? Not sure what your point is or if you're just trying to blow up and discredit a view point with some pop-psychology/anthropology 101 that could apply to everything equally and thus be a completely meaningless statement.
I'm not sure what your traffic goals are, but there are a lots of ways to skin this cat (no cats were harmed in the making of this comment).

Have you:

* looked in google webmaster tools (and the others, sure, why not) and made sure the googlebot likes what it is seeing
* considered PPC/adwords? How about facebook ads?
* created a facebook page or instagram/twitter account (depending on your demo) and followed people that are interesting to you w/r/t this area?
* joined communities that are interested in what you are doing--and contributed to them? (It's not enough to just drop in, leave a link and go.) Email list, facebook group, web forum, wherever. I've had success with this, and just a signature block.
* reached out to bloggers in the same space and offered to do a guest post
* sent emails to travel writers with helpful info that refers back to your site
* started a tumblr/linkblog/real blog that can point to this

(I have a side project that gets ~2k visits a month: http://coloradocsas.info/ -- couldn't resist putting that in.)
Facebook News Feed style ads could come to Gmail
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I'm using Ghost to host my blog: http://www.sergiotapia.me/

CPanel has a great 1 click installer. It just works out of the box.

Things I like about it are markdown support, and... that's pretty much it. I'm kind of underwhelmed by it.

No comment system, I had to tack Disqus on to the handlebars template file.

No statistics? It's a planned feature, but I feel like this should have been like priority one. Bloggers like to see that people are reading their material.

Slow despite being so light in features. This one suprised me; the page is so miniscule in feature that I wonder why it's taking so long to render blog pages.

No syntax highlighting built into the markdown for code support. :(

I feel like Ghost has tremendous potential but it's just underwhelming in it's current state. It's landing page marketing is fantastic, hell it got me to use it, but once I had it I was like: "is this it?"
We haven't been publishing benchmarks yet because it's hard to do a good, scientifically sound job. Different hardware, different setups, different conditions make things really difficult.

If you run into any performance issues, please let us know, we'd love to fix them!
Still, why? Why open 38 doors? I don't think this emphasizes the difference in probability, it just creates artificial bias.

Let's analyze the classical problem. After you pick a door, one of the remaining two doors is opened.

With more doors (say, 11), it wouldn't make for an interesting show if you opened 9 more doors after the first one. A more reasonable approach would be to open one additional door and let the player choose to switch or stay with their choice each time. But that would only complicate the explanation, of course.

Let's dissect the 11-door case. We will do the following: the player picks a door, then the host a) opens one other door; b) opens 50% of the remaining doors; c) leaves one door closed.

IMO, the (a) case is the closest generalization of the original problem. You have a 1/11 chance to pick the car door on your first try. Then, one other door is opened, and if you switch to another random door, the best case probability of you getting the car is 10/11 * 1/9 = 10/99. This number is slightly bigger than 1/11.

In the (b) case you get a better result when switching, but to me that just looks like adding artificial bias. Obviously, the (c) case looks best because you've removed so much choice by leaving only one other door closed. Adding more doors does one thing: improves the probability of switching. That's good if this is what you're aiming for. But this turns it into a completely different problem.

So, you can see that the result depends on what you want to get. If you try to stay faithful to the original problem statement, adding more doors actually makes the benefit of switching less obvious.

In summary, I'm convinced that 3 is not an accidental number in the original problem statement. Whoever came up with it, they knew how to remove space for speculation by providing the only reasonable thing to do: open 1 door (or 50% of the doors) and leave 1 other door closed.
> The AUMF is not a declaration of war

It most certainly is an exercise of Congress' Constitutional power to declare war. It may not be a formal declaration of war under international law, but those are two very different things.

> it expressly avoids being called a "war" in much the same way as ye olde Vietnam.

Vietnam was also a war for which Congress exercised its Constitutional power to declare war. See, e.g., Orlando v. Laird, 443 F.2d 1039 (2nd Cir., 1971).

> What it is is probably illegal under international law

Please cite the provision of international law (either a treaty to which the US is a party, or a generally accepted provision of customary international law -- and, if the latter, please also provide evidence that the cited principle is a generally accepted provision of customary international law) under which the AUMF itself is illegal.
That is an amazing amount, congrats you guys! Also, thanks for the clarification -- somehow the article (perhaps unintentionally) reads as though the management of the Humble Bundle company donated from their own funds/profits.
RSS feeds on a blog and "click here to email me" links?

Personally I'm waiting for someone to "reinvent" NNTP.
I haven't used toothpaste regularly for about 8 years. I've never told my dentists. I have had 3 fillings but I'm not sure if not using toothpaste was a contributor (I used to be really lazy with flossing. I think that's more likely).
Congrats on the deal. It is some cool tech.
I (and probably many others) would be more accepting of my data being collected and analyzed if there was an equal effort by the government to make it's own data equally available and easily analyzed. Instead I feel like the government is as secret as ever (and prone to blatant lies) and I'm skeptical of their actions by default.

Can I use any of this new tech to see which lobbyists a Senator talked to before an unpopular vote or listen in on some of those back-room meetings? Or is it only the general population that gets spied on?
Good luck tracking people bringing bitcoin into the country
> Seriously, why do people waste time writing these types of stories?

> Why. Why must you do this. Why must you dismiss articles on hackneyed grounds and kill the chance for an interesting discussion about the nature and direction of social technologies.

For the same reason. People like being perceived by others as contrarian or controversial, and people like perceiving themselves to be most clever/insightful/prescient than the next guy.
Right. But $5/month is more than I'd be willing to pay for a personal blog. That keeps me from investing time to try it out for other uses I'd be more willing to pay $5/month for.
Spam link
sounds like user error ... in the form of interrupting local sound as sound pushed through a speaker
I'am 18 and I agree with you. The way the discussion one day happened in status updates have now moved to usually hidden groups. The groups are usually built around some specific event, say prams, or alternatively around some common interest such as LAN gaming or binge drinking. It works as a new and more appealing way to create what you may consider mailing lists. Engaging in those groups is easier as you post something relevant to the topic and know that your or your friends aunt will not see what you said.
Also check out https://github.com/primus/primus It's an abstraction layer over sockjs, socket.io, etc.
The take-home from me on this article is that google is succeeding.

In their own words 'We don't want to become an ISP', 'we're simply doing it to shame current ISP's into acting'[0]

As AT&T are building their own networks, even if google do not get access to the poles, it means that they won.

Eventually, there would be a way around the pole problem (like in the UK where most ISP/Phone lines are buried), but for now, they're winning.

[0] - http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/01/google-fiber-sh...
I'm excited about the mix of coding and compensation. As a coder with a strong open source ethic, I feel there are enough secondary benefits to direct compensation to justify the potential loss in 'pure' motivation.

The twist I would like to see, which I feel fixes the fluff commit problem, is to write unit tests associated with a coin bounty. It puts a burden on the test author to write tests that are not easily gamed, but thats good practice anyways.
you'll enjoy this: http://marscoin.org
> If you want to enforce contracts, pick a language that encourages it.

Yeah don't worry, I'm not gonna use Python.

> Besides, what would a contract be in a dynamically typed language?

Being dynamic has nothing to do with this. See: Clojure, PHP, etc. They have contracts.

Of course things might not be appropriate everywhere. But with Python/Ruby you don't have a choice, they just lack these features.
> I know it's fiction, but you want examples

No, I don't want fictional examples of something posited as a loose analogy. I want an explanation of how rigid ethics would impair the effectiveness of the United States National Security Agency in fulfilling its duties under the laws and Constitution of the United States.
Saying they "don't understand" is really condescending, especially given that "you are the product" sounds more like a political slogan than anything. It's more accurate to just call it a two-sided market.

Realistically, I think most people just don't care very much about targeted advertising.
Anecdotally, I was about 14 when this law came out. At the time probably about 300-400 of the 1200 kids at my college that biked to school. There were multiple bike sheds and they were always packed.

Fast forward 20 years, and my son is now the one biking to school. I think probably there are about 15-30 kids (out of about 800) that bike to school on a regular basis. The single bikeshed is usually almost empty, and at least half of the items in there are scooters (which are not affected by this law afaik).

Probably loads of reasons that this is the case - more protective parents, better school zoning rules (closer schools). Equally I know there are less buses (ie no busses to my sons school). Seems possible to me that having to wear an 'uncool' helmet has contributed to this huge reduction.

I bike to work everyday and have never had an accident, (but couldn't imagine not using a helmet). I do wonder though about the cost of health terms of having all these kids being driven to school instead of getting a daily bike ride in...
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My next fantasy is to see Snowden come back to the US, be tried, and be acquitted.
> Seriously, why do people waste time writing these types of stories?

Why are you wasting time complaining about it if you don't like it. Just ignore it and move on.
Yeah, that's not cool. I wouldn't trust anyone with a $50 million piece of paper that I won, contract or not.

Good luck, though.
And slightly older, Fuji: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26bw-fF3QbY&feature=player_em...

The Mercedes one is way better, though.
How many billable hours would it take to make the $60/year this will cost you?
>The man lasted 6 months, the woman 7 months. //

There are plenty of people and some evidence to suggest that people are considered a disposable resource. Burn 'em out and chuck them back on the unemployment pile.
Fast-growing company in the newest YC batch looking for first business hire
A company in the current W14 batch at Y-Combinator is looking for a hard-working, jack of all trades to help us scale our business operations.

We are an enterprise logistics company, making it easier for small and medium sized businesses to ship products globally. Although we have not yet announced our participation in YC, we are launched and adding dozens of new businesses to the platform weekly.

You should be sales-oriented and results-driven, with a willingness to pick up the phone to make deals happen, write web content, dive in on data entry projects, run errands, track key metrics, collect customer feedback, research markets, establish partnerships, and do whatever else it takes to scale this thing to infinity.

Like the rest of us on the team, you should be in love with the Internet and everything you can do with it. You should enjoy solving tricky problems and be a great communicator, in person, on the phone and in writing. No experience is required, so long as you are hungry for growth, ready to dive deep into the startup experience and prepared to grind, day-in and day-out.

The position is full-time and reports directly to the founder and CEO, a successful serial entrepreneur who previously built a large business (50 employees, 4,500 active customers, 1M monthly uniques, $10M revenue) in a closely related part of this enormous and important industry. You’ll work from our headquarters near the ballpark in San Francisco.

Competitive compensation including stock options, health insurance and paid vacation, with major upside opportunities as we build the business. There will also be massive opportunity for personal and professional growth as you learn the ins and outs of scaling a successful startup in a key sector of the world economy.

If this describes you and the opportunity seems exciting, we need to talk. Send an email to yc14job@gmail.com to introduce yourself. We’ll be happy to fill you on the details of the company and more about the opportunity.
The problem about handling donations can be given to an external party like Software Conservancy, the Apache Foundation, or for GNU software, the Free Software Foundation. We use the last one for GNU Octave.

This seems to me like a better solution for collecting donations, which is a solved problem.