skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Money. Not a ton, but it's a very time-consuming job.

I do like writing documentation, and I'm pretty good at it. Unfortunately it's a thankless task, and criticizing or feeding back to developers about shortcomings often engenders a frosty reply, so I rarely do it any more. Add in the fact that for simpler software, good UI design often makes documentation redundant, are you have to deal with the fact that the things most in need of good documentation fall into two classes:

a) domains of expertise where the documentation needs to be as much an introduction to the task for which the software is used as how to use it. Example: Adobe sells a great, great piece of audio editing software called Audition. It has been my favorite for over a decade. The manual is...well, generic. Before they bought the product, it was called CoolEdit, and it had one of the best manuals I've ever read: written by the main author of the project, it was as much an introduction to signal processing and audio engineering as a guide to using the program, since the utility of many fine features is not apparent to the novice user. Inexplicably when Adobe took over the project they ditched this - perhaps preferring to rely on third party publishers or their own publishing imprint (which is quite good). Some of the best documentation, like the above, gives the sense of having been written before the code, rather than afterwards when the programmer is burnt out.

b) legacy systems which may completely suck but which we are stuck with. Unfortunately, project managers tend not to look kindly on documentation that starts by acknowledging the software in question is poorly designed, confusing, or contains bugs which may never be fixed. They want documentation that tells yo how things are supposed to work, not documentation that goes into detail about what happens when it fails and how to deal with it (although this is the time when the end user is most in need of quality information).

There's one other problem, that of social exclusion. It's assumed by certain kinds of programmers and administrators that the code or tools must be accepted much as they are, and if one finds the system opaque or perplexing that that is part of the price one pays to develop expertise in it.

Many years ago, when I first installed Linux, I ended up at a shell prompt armed only with the knowledge of cd and ls. Typing 'help' yielded only a polite error. It took me quite a while to discover the 'man' (manual) command, and when I did I was less than impressed with much of the documentation. As mentioned above, many man pages devote no time whatsoever to explaining why you might want to use something. This is a kind of an artificial example, but one that encapsulates the seemingly arbitrary and unfriendly experience of computing for many people.

Reference materials usually do not perform very well as tutorial materials, and yet they are likely to be the first thing the typical user encounters. I made fun of Microsoft's Clippy character along with everyone else, but for the general user who just wanted to use the computer rather than understand it, it was actually a godsend.
Very professional but often very narcissistic and demanding. I had a friend who was tour managing for a major artist-- the amount of logistics he had to juggle was mind-numbing-- only to be fired a couple months ago because he forgot to order a pizza for the artist after the show. :-/
I believe he met domestic mass violence, i.e., riots.

The only major US riots of the past few years are the LA and Detroit race-riots, neither of which was related to overarching policy.
First steps in creating an internal DSL with Groovy
Example project how to start creating an internal DSL with Groovy.
Wow Google makes $106 million in about 43 hours. If this is accurate http://www.incomediary.com/top-earning-websites/ google makes almost 700 dollars per second.
most of the company descriptions just sounded boring. I skimmed through most of it and nothing popped out as "oh thats interesting, let me read more about this startup" except for the one about self guided tours. I though that was pretty cool. When I go to Europe I would love to have a self guided tour of London or something. That would be great.

maybe they were just poor descriptions in general.....
Using the brown M&M's as a test to check if the contract was read thoroughly counts as a clever hack in my book.
Ask HN:  How would you write novels for people who rarely read entire books?
People do read a lot nowadays, but generally this consists of reading short articles and snippets of text.

The internet has made people very impatient when it comes to reading long articles/books.

How would you write a novel for people who rarely read books cover to cover?
If you get a good zshrc, it Just Works, without much additional effort.

Admittedly, I mostly use those parts of zsh which are similar to most other shells, but which it does better (argument completions, some directory stack, etc).
The problem with translating legalese into a programming language is that the targets are police officers and juries, not Von Neumann machines or lambda calculus.
The Savior of Newspaperdom
Ouch!

...but, OTOH, it worked out well for ESR...
I've used both. They just don't feel quite the same for aimless web browsing.

Maybe it's because with a trackpoint my fingers don't leave home row, but I find that it isn't that much better (especially on some link-heavy sites)
I want a search engine that tries to find me what I want, as opposed to inundating me with thousands of products for sale, that might remotely resemble something I said.

Here is an example. I am looking for an outdoor security camera. So it needs to be weatherproof. It needs to provide at least 1024 (preferably 1200) horizontal lines. It must have a 100+ Mbit Ethernet connection for data transport and it would be nice to support POE (Power Over Ethernet), but in any event needs to run continuously -- so no battery-powered cams. I don't care either way about pan / tilt / zoom, but might use hardware motion detection.

Try asking your favorite search engine and see the plethora of useless results thrown your way. Lenses. Weatherproof housings. Tons and tons of indoor cameras with 480 lines of resolution. But nothing that meets my needs, regardless of how I phrase my search query.

Maybe what I really want is a search engine that I can interact with and say "I don't like this result because ..." and have the engine filter out all similar results. Google squared is such an approach but it doesn't work, at least for this task.
Dark energy may disguise shape of universe
I write open source software for fun. No other reason. Your ability to use my software for stuff is a side benefit for you of this. Writing documentation is not fun. I don't want to fill my fun time with not fun activity. I will however take money for writing documentation (quality not guaranteed).
Allen Andersson loses $300M fortune (and had a blast doing it)
Writing documentation is NOT fun.

Writing really cool code is...

What you're asking is that people turn projects that are "fun" into projects that are "work" and still do it for free?

Really? Because I'm perfectly content using software that works, works really well (better than the costly alternative in some cases), and is 100% free. I'm totally fine with having to find some of the devs on IRC or a mailing list instead of having to look through some docs.

Yeah, documentation is really nice, but suggsting that we stop using projects that have poor documentation is a bit silly.
ATLlogos on TechDrawl Thanks to Paul Freet
I also have the x61 ThinkPad and love it.

During class time, I use it to take notes. Being able to search and organize notes digitally is fantastic, as is the ability to quickly email them to someone who has missed a particular lecture.

During my off time--and occasionally at work--I use it, along with Inkseine* from MS Research, for iterative design of user interfaces.

* http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/inks...
Yes, but Intel may "fix" the license by just making it proprietary like most of their other development tools. IMO the worst part about the Cilk++ license is that I just don't understand it. (I suppose if I actually used Cilk++ I could ask them for a clarification.)

Sometimes I think it's too bad that the Open Source Definition pretty much marginalized any innovation in open source licensing; OTOH most licensing "innovation" is evil anyway.
This isn't a better way. Sure it looks neat, and seems better to people who know about this stuff, but people who aren't on computers every day might need to spend an extra minute figuring out what's going on when they try to select the text that is still there when they click on the field and they can't. So yeah, great for nerds, but not great for usability.

The link above posted by alabut is awesome, thanks.
The NAS parallel benchmark suite are used to represent tasks that appear often in scientific computing. They were designed so that running them on a computing platform would tell us how amenable that platform is for scientific computing.
I'm not sure (a) is true. I've worked with advanced DSPs, like TI's DM-642. It's popular to do H.264 compression. The hardware acceleration in DSPs like this have nothing do to with H.264 codecs, you're right.

But the software libraries to do the best in class compression are H.264. And I'm not going to write my own compression algorithm. So the choice is lower quality or licensing libraries to take care of the compression.

The software for this DSP would certainly be a hell of a lot cheaper with a Google backed solution. And it might even be free.
But that's not true. The essence of exchange trading is that you never see your counterparty. You say to the exchange"I want to buy X", they say to the exchange "I have X to sell" and the exchange makes the transaction. The only way to compete is to offer a better price, otherwise you'll never get matched! So Goldman are making a large profit yet, but that necessarily is less than the total profit that could have been made by its rivals had Goldman not been there.
In the UK libraries pay me a royalty when people borrow my book.
Pure genius!

I had a lecturer (a Brit) who would insert the phrase 'Rule Britannia' into lecture notes to see if anyone ever read them.

There is also an urban myth about some entrance exam for Police/Army/Pilots etc where the instructions say read all the questions first. And the last question says, do not answer any questions just 'do some arbitrary thing' - to check wether you follow instructions properly.
I would actually enjoy reading a PG-written 1-2 sentence summary of every YC startup on demo day.
Write a whole novel in bullet points. Release one page per day in a blog format.

Or how about a twitter account where each status update says what's happening now to the main character?
Only lefties are in their right mind.
It's not really "give it away, let people pay", it's more, "let people choose whether to pay or steal". Bezos' prediction that e-commerce would "work" when it became easier to buy than to steal has been true now for several years, and I think that's a better principle to go by than trusting soviet economics :)
not if you run your shell under emacs. Running interactive processes in emacs is such a powerful model (python, bash, sql, slime, moz-repl). it makes using any of those processes signifcantly easier
That sounds like a standard 'negotiable' clause - you can argue that pretty much anything should/shouldn't have been done for a world class superstar.

The M+M one is cleverer because it is a no-arguements, you did it or did not. You don't have lawyers arguing about the meaning of "arrangements commensurate with"
In this case, I'm fairly certain your last sentence gets to the heart of the issue. The biggest motive of most people writing OSS stuff is: Fun. Documenting is un-fun. Since there is 0 obligation on the author's part and any benefit gained by others is a side-effect, documents won't get written, particularly to appease people who come in an demand better docs without offering any compensation.
There is something very good about learning the hard way how to debug a logic circuit instead of having an FPGA in some factory made board. You get to see how finicky hardware really is.
Woobius - The software of business
The example given -- evaluating a new hash mapping the keys x, y, and z to random numbers in the range [0:100) -- is expressible in python3 as:

{(x, random.randrange(100)) for x in ["x", "y", "z"]}

My point wasn't that "tap" is identical in functionality, it was actually the opposite: for the use cases here, both "tap" and "returning" are inferior to the python syntax.

That said, I continue to assert that this is a dumb example and you should just initialize the empty hash like your parents did.
Wired 8.12: O, Engineers (follow up on the soul of a new machine)
The truth about grit - a success recipe ?
Yup, same here. Being able to Slime into your WM is occasionally very useful.
How much equity should I offer a writer to work on my iPhone app?
Good point. I wonder at what % utilization a cluster beats EC2 in terms of $/computation. Actually I'm sure there are all sorts of variables, and it becomes an optimization problem, but I think it would be cool to see an analysis of this in terms of $, computation power (time/jobsize or something), etc.
You Can’t Spell Failure (or Success) Without ‘U’
But I don't use your software. I use software written to be used. Web.py is written to be used. The developers want people to find it useful. Lighttpd is written to be used. Apache's software is written to be used. Ruby and Python are written to be used. Perl is written to be used. Yes, they may all be fun for the developers, but ultimately, they strive to be useful. I'm sure not every aspect of developing a major open source project like one of these is fun. I don't know anyone who finds debugging fun, for example. It has to be done though if you want to produce something useful (even if only to yourself). Documentation really should be done if you want to produce something useful to someone other than yourself... and even to yourself if there's any chance you'll leave it alone for years and then pick it up again.
Why would you want to avoid the mouse? You think it is faster? Have you measured that? Human perception of time is unreliable.
Tim OReilly's twitter book is like a slide deck. It's also not really writing.
Tweet and Update Facebook from Your TV
Cool Things You Can Do With Your USB Flash Drive
Just because those people use Tweetdeck doesn't mean most people use Tweetdeck are like that. They have such a large userbase that this kind of statement is both false and trolling.
The “Over The Phone” Test [2006]
I'm looking forward to having him out this way. I'm sure he will pop up in the community from time to time. Would love to see him speak.
The entire Ruby community, at one point. Why do you think he switched to Python?
> "One of the main purposes of our paper is to introduce Markov models, and statistical models in general, as computational tools for investigating ancient scripts," Adhikari said.

This is bogus. (Hidden) Markov Models and other generative probabilistic models have been used in all kinds of decipherment for years - see the latter half of http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/people/naacl09-print-1x2... for an overview.
Kauffman Foundation Announces 1st Class of Postdoctoral Entrepreneurship Fellows
Obama Announces $2.4 Billion in Grants for Batteries and Electric Cars
I didn't get Stuff White People Like. It seems to be Stuff Yuppies and Hipsters Like.
Making law "compile" could be useful in democratizing a process that's entirely dominated by lawyers.

Once a law is in "code form", links, ambiguities, contradictions and loopholes becomes (more) obvious, and extending it with e.g. precedent and opinions is simple. It would also help the legislative process - you propose you change, and everyone can run their test-suite on it, and see if and how they'll be affected.

My first though was the software that the European Union has been developing (I don't know the state of it) that, on the fly, translates what the writer is typing into a intermediate language and back into the writers language - that way ambiguities and idioms are caught immediately. It's not exactly useful for poetry, but should help in creating concise and unambiguous texts, even in just a single language.
I think that the ranking reports that the advancedwebranking.com site offers are probably what I need - thanks for the suggestion. If you have a referral code, pass it along and you'll get credit if I buy!
I said that you seemed to be philosophizing rather than speaking from any reality or evidence.

You made lots and lots of general statements that would make my kindergarten teacher's heart glad, but don't present any actual facts. That makes me think that you argue based on the world you'd like to exist, not the one that actually does.
Yeah its pretty cool its peer reviewed learning, so you help other people and it makes it easy to link up with penpals. I've been using it for 2 weeks now, pretty cheap and good.
I've wrapped up what I think common conceptions of teens toward twitter are. Keep in mind, I've been 20 for 5 whole months now (on Friday), so I'm not _technically_ a teen. That said, it was recent enough to remember what I and others thought about it then.

What's important to remember is that we all grew up on Facebook, so I'm going to explain things about "twitter" as a Facebook user. They might not all be accurate, but they are all more or less believed.

RT/Re-tweeting is analogous to seeing an interesting facebook status, and copying it to yours. Even if it's spectacular, at best, people won't care, and at worst, you're seen as unoriginal.

@'ing It's like using your status message to say something to a friend. You don't need to do that, people don't care what you have to say. Instead, write on their wall. It still shows up in minifeeds and people can still see it (more private messages go through facebook messages), but it doesn't have the undertone of "EVERYONE should know what I'm saying to you" (maybe it should?)

Tweeting in general - Tweets are analogous to facebook statuses. The thing about statuses though, is that no one reads them. I know almost no one who bothers to keep their status up to date. On the other hand, people are tweeting every 10 minutes during "important events".

If you want to provide a narrative, use pictures. I'd much rather look at an album then see "Just got to the party" "It's kind of lame" "Now we're dancing" "Everyone's so messed up" "Now we're at Denny's"

Among teens I know, only the most vain and the most geeky have twitter accounts.
Not at all. It's a block: the first value points at the code, the rest of the values are the free variables.
OCaml's internals benefit, in particular, from the GC needing very little layout information. All non-conservative GCs need to know what's a pointer and what isn't. Many languages, from Java to Haskell, associate this info, at runtime, with each heap object (and stack frame!). This is actually done quite elegantly in Haskell (stack frames and thunks are structurally equivalent: returning from a function is effectively popping a thunk of the stack and tail-calling it). Java's design, as a language, is constrained by this. For example, you cannot use a primitive in a type parameter for a generic for this reason.

OCaml doesn't need this, although every heap object is still tagged (for various reasons) and stores the size in the header. The OCaml GC can tell what's what by just inspecting the value itself (and some block tags imply no-follow, like float array, string, opaque, etc). In effect, OCaml's distinction between primitives (value itself passed around in machine word) and non-primitives (pointer to block passed around in machine word) is invisible to the programmer.

Also unlike Haskell and Java (not to say there's much in common with these two, but goes to show how OCaml's implementation differs from those of a wide spectrum of languages), very little type information is stored in the tag.
I wonder how this relates to magazine ads that occupy the right pages. From what I've heard so far they cost more because of the way we hold magazines and thus it is more likely the viewer will pay more attention to them.
Maybe on a more subtle level they are more effective because the majority is right handed.
This type of plugin would be useful where space is a premium. A good example is the Site's contact form. You are correct to say that when 'javascript' is off the label should be outside the field. With javascript on it is simple to adjust the css to move the label over the field.

I voted the effort and the plugin.
The best index writers can't match a decent full text search. For that reason I fully support google book search -- It's easier to re-find information I already read. I have read books on google books, and then didn't buy them, but I wouldn't have bought the book anyway, particularly technical books. At least this way I may recommend your book to someone.
A Theory Of Identity
#10 is freaking awesome - I hadn't thought of that before. It certainly raises the cost of losing a flash drive, or having it get damaged, although I'm sure there are ways around it.

The others are mainly blatantly obvious uses, or windows-only suggestions (many of which do have counterparts in other systems).
Surely it's more fun to do your own design? It would be for me, anyway.
Like many relationships, iPhone love can sour
It looks as though the "pressure" field is created from the bottom - notice in the video he repeatedly taps the piece of paper from above and no other angles.

Once they show that same demo but being able to tap from above, side, bottom, and even "poke" the ball and watch the paper crumble under the resistance - well then that would just wreak of awesomeness!
In previous teams I worked on, I've often had to send out long emails or documents because someone got on my back over an artificial deadline. I would send it and make sure that an important link in the document was broken. If they didn't notice it, they didn't need the document/email urgently and usually get to hear a lecture from me later on arbitrary deadlines.
Detailed PHP vs. ASP.net - Windows vs Linux?
Massacre Gmail Ads with These Two Sentences (and Some Tragic Words)
The ratio of things we know to things we don't know is essentially zero. Thankfully that doesn't preclude us from dreaming big and accomplishing great things.
Apple Rejects Dictionary App for Containing Swear Words
What's worse is that this doesn't gracefully degrade. If you have javascript disabled your text will be written over top the label text and is completely unreadable.
> There are no "strong oxen" in today's world

Some problems demand shared-memory architectures. The fact that those who work on such problems lack the funding to support a large market in shared-memory machines does not negate the problems' existence.
Definitely, but designing an instructionset is not that easy. Small changes in how you lay out your instructions can have a big impact on the design.

The nicest I think are 68K and mips, everything else is pretty messy.

A good standard by which to measure how good an instruction set is is how many lines of code it takes to simulate it.
This is a very good start. There is a huge need of inculcating entrepreneurship attitude among researchers in STEM. I see a lot of innovation around me being a PhD student but a lot of money is wasted at the same time. Good luck to these postdocs. Hopefully, they will be successful and more researchers will move towards researching on real world solutions.
Write it as a screenplay; film it as a series of 45-minute episodes.

The same people who don't read long books will often watch ten- or twenty-hour seasons of a television show.
Will Silicon Valley look like Hollywood?