skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My favourite tool is simply gpw(1). It tries to generate semi-pronounceable words that aren't necessarily dictionary words:

$ gpw
rpreence
rethersi
atencend
rostrass
rtschers
pocrevoy
umblowfl
disalsit
rmsturnu
tinfethe

I then have a perl script which can give me slightly more interesting capitalizations and numbers:

nessinea 258 rusness
redoodr rInGLe 893
orinGsT 87 iNdaPeRv
3423 RisEv screar bullys

I've become quite good at remembering these. I can usually remember them even if I go a month or two between usages. It's hard to explain, but it seems to require a different memorization effort that somehow sticks better into my long-term memory than with random dictionary words.

(1) http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/hardy/man1/gpw.1.html
Imagine if you could cover or just replace every fragile piece of anything with diamonds.
Can't you edit your comment? You ought to be able to go that within the first hour or so.
> ..and this could simply be a kind of aesthetic bias (that might make sense for us, humans)

I think that sounds very plausible. We generally don't seem to like it when someone 'pulls aside the curtain' when it comes to things that feel hard to control or define.

For example, the best way to escalate a fight is to say something like "are you on your period?" or "did you not get enoug sleep last night?" They are perfectly valid questions in themselves, but asking them (assuming you mean well, of course) is not a good idea.

It makes sense that our minds don't like being treated like the often irrational, physical organs that they really are.

For example, while I feel perfectly comfortable treating a 'physical' headache with pills, I feel much less comfortable taking medication that alters my mood (although doing so for fun, and being 'in control' makes it significantly more acceptable).
No acknowledgement that the other side of the tradeoff might have some great merit in the software correctness argument, even when discussing accomplishments as great as putting a guy on the moon on a tight schedule. And throw in there something about pretending not to understand what "lines of code" means.

Dijkstra doesn't disappoint in this interview.
> My conclusion is that people who wants diamonds want simply something expensive, as status symbol. They don't want a shiny rock at the most reasonable price, otherwise, it wouldn't be a status symbol anymore.

Right, until recently, it's been a hard to fake McGuffin. A small, highly portable thing you can point at to demonstrate wealth (or the appearance of wealth).
What would a company possibly have to gain by creating a service that a lot of people will use and not pay for?

Despite what you may have "learned" from the examples of Facebook and Twitter, companies giving away things for free isn't a very good business model.
Number of patents filed doesn't by itself mean anything. These days, companies have to amass large patent portfolios for defensive purposes, if nothing else. Failure to do so would get them sued by their shareholders.

The question is to what extent they use their patents aggressively, and how good a case they have when they do so. I don't know the answer in Oracle's case (and I'm no great fan of the company) but again, mere numbers of patents won't tell you that.
I use my work laptop for business and for personal use. As I sporadically hack on my work code for fun, I don't want to run two computer user accounts.
You don't "keep your prices high". Your prices reflect the market price now (whereas they didn't before). Auctions ensure that the market price is found by inviting a significant number of participants.
For me, the money quote from this article was:

Scott Winship, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute who disputes Mr Piketty's overarching narrative about inequality wrote on Twitter last night:

"I’ve spent time with Piketty U.S. wealth ineq[uality] spreadsheet and LOTS of time with his income data. He’s not up to funny business."
The worst part about Firefox 29 was the hamburger button. I couldn't believe it when I saw it.

Aw fuck! Et tu, Firefox?

...was all I could think. As I explored further, my worst fears came true: they had destroyed Firefox's extremely versatile and fully customizable toolbar, and re-architected it as a woefully inadequate and fully customizable hamburger.

</first-world-problems>

P.S. The fact that a floating unicorn appears, when you elect to have an empty hamburger, is little consolation.
Mike Bostock pointed out that he had already extracted D3's DSV parsing into it's own repo when i expressed my disappointment i couldn't use d3's w/o rewriting parts of D3's DSV parser.

It lives here: https://github.com/mbostock/dsv

ps it properly scans & tokenizes CSVs and handles quoted fields fine as a consequence
Here in southern Europe is totally different. $90K for a new grad? That's incredible. Here, the majority of new grads earn about €15-25K. Take a look: https://www.infojobs.net/madrid/analista-programador-j2ee/of...

(Says: J2EE Analyst with 3-5 years of experience and a lot of another requirements => €27-30K)
The crazy thing is that nobody really knows what team/technology will win the race. There several blockchain 2.0 projects out there, all with different technological inovations. Bitcoin itself will almost certainly be eclipsed in a few months/years.

I have a hunch that we'll see Bitshares DPOS consensus algorithm partnered with Ethereum's turing completeness combined in one DAC. Open Transactions will most likely become the equivalent of the web browser to TCPIP.

We're still at the veeery early stages of the blockchain development. Our team is extremely excited to have caught the wave so early and to work with such great startups and people.
There's a lot of claims in this article, but from what I can tell they're taking the Iranian media's reports entirely on good faith. Given Iran's propensity in the past to stretch the truth(putting it lightly) with regards to their military capabilities, I'd take this article with a huge grain of salt.

This was linked in the Further Reading section, which seems to debunk many of those claims(similar arguments have been made in the comments here):

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/ed9dd24dffa8

> That a drone landed in Iranian hands is still an intelligence failure—the CIA is widely believed to operate the Sentinel. But one rule of drones is to not fly anything you’re not willing to lose. This is because drones are finicky and crash at higher rates compared to manned aircraft.

> Aviation Week also reported in 2011 that the RQ-170’s sensor package was already obsolete. And it’s unclear if Iran managed to copy the drone’s sensors. Even if the Iranian drone can fly, it doesn’t mean it can spy.
Interpreters vs. Compilers
Most large financial institutions use it, as well.
Interestingly, it's been theorized that DeBeers actually sold their rough diamonds below their monopoly price - to keep participants happy and not "rock the boat".
> Though the finding is surprising and worrying, the possible harm to marine life is so far unknown, the authors concluded.

Sentences like this is not science. It's FUD.

And as such I find the entire article dodgy. I can't see Arctic ice containing massive amounts or plastic compared to the oceans. Nor have I seen evidence that plastics in the oceans can cause any large scale harm anyway.

As compared to over fishing which we do know is causing harm. I don't really understand they people divert from real known issues to these end of the world style made up catastrophes.
Fusion Center surveillance of peaceful protest
Wait, did you work on Megamek? That's...where I got my start doing actual released software too. I was responsible for a bunch of random-ass (and not so wonderfully coded, I'll admit, but I was 16...) features: protomechs, VTOLs, artillery...Hell, I learned Java from scratch to be able to work on Megamek. Those were the days...I haven't played Battletech in ages, but I miss it still, and there's always a nice feeling about the game in my head from its relation to the (very) beginning of my career.

God it's a small world out there.
No, there's no need for a new term. From what I've read 'full-stack' in this context is not much different to 'vertically-integrated'. The way it's being used, it's about as useful as 'ninja' or 'rock star' in job ads.
Michael Jackson Hologram
Uh, because employing the teeming masses in production of goods that improve the quality of life is better than jobs for their own sake.
For all the money they already paid to make that possible, paying an extra $2 to make your trip free would be a very small addition.
"IMAP was working less reliably and I felt more like the product than the customer"

This is the key for me. (1) IMAP not working well and in particular, (2) feeling more like the product than the customer.

With fastmail.fm their business model is they provide a service (email) and in return I give them money. They succeed as a business by getting more money. I am happy to give them money in return for a high quality product.

With Gmail their business model is they provide a service, and in return I give them permission to scan the content of my emails, to data-mine my contacts' names and addresses, and use that information to (a) serve me ads, (b) make money by selling it to third parties, and (c) who knows what else. Gmail succeeds by obtaining (and selling) more and more personal information.

I don't like this and frankly I persist in my surprise that Gmail users accept this transaction.

Sure, in principle, fastmail.fm could be surreptitiously selling my personal information as well ... but the point is that (a) they say they don't do this, and (b) their business model and their success (presumably) don't depend on this. If it was found out they were doing this, (presumably) their business would suffer greatly.

Anyway I recently switched over to fastmail.fm from Gmail as well, like the OP. So far I am extremely happy with it. A MUCH better experience on iOS and on OS X Mail.app.
The Perfect Crime (2005)
Not really, it was mostly made for my own use then thrown on Github in case someone wanted it. It works for most games, but isn't guaranteed to be able to parse all games. I added example code to the readme.
I don't think he meant to say it is unclear what 'line of code' stands for, but rather the correct observation that it may mean very different things depending on the programming language involved, and the problem being solved.

What is this "other side of the tradeoff" you speak of? Should there have been such a tight schedule in putting a man on the moon? I think you might have an argument about software development in general, where the standards do not need to be this high all the time, but in the case of the moon landing it's hard to argue for loose standards when human lives are at stake. It's rather disconcerting they admit they just got lucky, in terms of software correctness.
> This is normalized of course, and so it's important to remind that working odd jobs while you "write your novel" is entirely devoid of such stimulation, and I believe, actually and actively kills brain cells.

Hmm. I'm a developer now because I had a brain-numbing government employee job - I had developed an interest in programming as a young child, but it never went anywhere, and I'd largely forgotten about it.

Fast forward, I'm stuck in an underpaid overworked dead-end job which I'm resigned to because I have a wife and child to support, and I'm borrrrred. I then stumble across a website discussing how fun and accessible Python can be for newbies, and I give it a crack, and I'm hooked.

I get a new government job, better pay, less work, still boring. But the boredom at work gives me a huge amount of mental capacity for my learning at home. My sleep admittedly suffered because of my programming, but my work didn't. In my downtime at work, I'd write programs. I spent a lot of time learning JS because it was available to me for hacking on in my locked down work environment.

After five years of government schlepping by day, and programming by night, I met a man who could overlook my lack of qualification and who would give me a chance to prove myself. And all that boredom finally paid off.

Now that I'm a developer, my work is so intellectually challenging and interesting that I could not replicate the same learning that I did in my duller days. I just don't have enough mental capacity left at the end of the day, these days.

In summary - my boring day job gave me the capacity and impetus to learn to code.
interesting. I wonder if we could have a fabric woven with the little structures built into the weave. Then we may have super water repellent raincoats and coverings (that do not require sprays) .
> What is this "other side of the tradeoff" you speak of?

The guy he was talking to put a guy on the moon and Dijkstra didn't.
Generally, the reasoning behind not using text on a button (or wherever) is related to internationalization and locales.

Nascent software projects usually don't have the manpower or the budget to translate their user interfaces into multiple languages early in the game.

When tasked with coding a button labeled with text, many developers will simply hard-code the label onto the button, unless explicitly instructed to code the label as a reference to a separate resource of constants containing appropriate label strings.

This can be murder to re-develop, after the fact, when tasked with developing foreign language versions of the same software. You'll find that a team of ten developers have implemented a hundred different button labels, ten different ways, and sprayed them in a thousand places across the whole code tree, leading to partial and inconsistent translations, that need to be tested and re-tested in painstaking and tedious incremental iterations, and then you still have to dive back in and fix bug reports after releasing the translated version because you missed a spot.

To side-step this pitfall, and anticipate the potential for internationalization, one tactic is to implement languageless icons that define the look and feel of the interface. The drawback, of course, being that all users are confused equally, regardless of their native tongue.
>For me, the biggest issue I see with the example hamburger buttons there is that they don't look like buttons --- they look more like an air vent/grille, a stylistic thing rather than "touch here to get more".

Agreed, but if the trend continues eventually it will become known as the menu. It took my way to long to figure out what the hamburger did across all the apps and devices. I really disklike it in firefox and chrome on desktop, it seem unwarranted, but I guess firefox's change is just conforming to what the designers see as a common icon set.

I see two issues with menu / option icons.

1. There is no universal icon. There is the 'up' arrow on some IOS and android apps, the '...' on android, and now the hamburger. The fact that the hamburger doesn't look like a button will become irrelevant once the general user associates it with a menu. I personally don't like it either, but all I really want is consistency.

2. Related to this consistency, the hamburger button doesn't always perform the expected function. Both of these are UX issues that cannot be easily standardised. It really is noticeable when it 'breaks' the flow of the application by changing the state of the main window instead of offering a menu. I can't recall which apps I use do this, but I remember being frustrated, much like the abuse of the back button on android (I think google play breaks this on the My Apps sections).
You're spot on. Work is so much more meaningful when you are allowed to influence your workplace.

I work in online advertising, hardly the most glamorous market, I'm not exactly sequencing genomes to cure diseases - but my work is meaningful to me because we have so much control over how we work, and how we treat our employees.
I've never understood the hate for the "Hamburger button". It's here, it works fine and doesn't hurt anyone.

Some options just don't need to be in the face of the user 100% of the time. Why do I need a "setting/more" button at the bottom of the screen all the time?

I can understand, it's often overused. Some applications would be better by using "tabs", some would be better by just placing the most-used buttons somewhere in the screen when you can always watch them. But why not doing both? Put your most-used features in an easy and discoverable position, hide stuff that the normal user don't need often in the hamburger button (A good example for that is the Play Store, the slide menu has a link to settings, an about, and the user picker to switch user).

Also, the proposed solution is to have an auto-hiding tab bar. Please, please, think twice before implementing this. It's really annoying to have something popping up and disappearing when I'm interacting with your applications, and not with your menu.

The Hamburger button has the advantage of staying to his place until the user decide to interact with it. This kind of tab bar instead is almost random. The user has to scroll up/down to show/hide it, which one already do when interacting with the applications. Also every applications seems to do it slightly different, so pulling up half of the screen might be enough in one, but not enough to show it in a different one.

So, the hamburger button might be horrible, but the tab bar is worse, at least in my opinion. The user interact with it more just because it's getting more annoyed by it.

As an additional note, see the recent Google+ for Android redesign, which removed the hamburger button. Now it has two bar at the top of the screen which disappear/appear while scrolling, occupying almost 1/5 of the whole screen. Plus a "+" button hovering the content all the time. The general consensus (at least, the one I've heard) is that it's a terrible upgrade.
I agree with losing the hamburger buttons, but the Facebook example is terrible:

http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/facebook...

Left: Facebook’s old hamburger button navigation. Right: The new tab bar style

Looks to me like they just moved the same set of buttons from the top to the bottom, adding a "More" button.. which is a hamburger button!
> P.S. The fact that a floating unicorn appears, when you elect to have an empty hamburger, is little consolation.

Haha! I had no idea. I just tested this and had a good laugh. I also didn't know this three-line glyph was called the "hamburger menu."

Since I have never used the new Firefox hamburger menu, I think I'll leave it with the unicorn.
A note to poor kids, or kids who don't want to rack up huge
student loans listening to some some Blow Gard who didn't
stay current, and spends a month talking about history of CS. Many of you can learn the employable CS skills on your own, with the help of the Internet, of course.
Android apps that use an action bar no longer use an option menu button, which, in earlier Android versions, looked like a "hamburger button."

They might still have an overflow pop-up for commands that don't fit in the action bar. That's shown as three stacked dots. That depends on screen geometry and how the app has configured the action bar. Apps can avoid having an overflow pop-up and use, for example, a split action bar instead.

The article's main complaint isn't about the hamburger button per se, but the fact that it often pops out what in Android parlance is called a "navigation drawer." That's what's bad. And Google is pushing that idea as a replacement for a "dashboard" screen which was even worse, and is now deprecated as an official design idiom. But, as the article points out, a navigation drawer is just as much a nowhere-land as a "dashboard." Avoid it.

The article advocates a tab bar as an alternative. On Android, you have the choice of Tab objects that would show different Fragment objects, or a split menu bar. But, better still would be to make navigation an organic part of selection within the app. This has the added advantage on Android of not requiring different tab bar behavior on multi-Fragment layouts.

Some Android apps might have a hamburger menu leading to a navigation drawer, but that is probably due to iOS port-itis, not a deliberate idiom using Android UI elements.
No no no. Not auto-hiding. The tab bar should always be visible.
Fastmail is great for email, but what really makes them awesome is they can also provide static web hosting, custom DNS services, and even a Jabber/XMPP service for no additional charge.

If you want to host a personal home page + your own email, this is really compelling. Much more power-user friendly than Google Sites, much more reliable than most virtual webhosts, and much cheaper/easier than AWS.
Facebook seems to have been a poor example. The only item pulled out from the hamburger pane is the search bar. Which, while nice and all, is not as dramatic of a change as the article seems to make it out to be.
It isn't the large scale harm we are looking after. If we know such harm exists then it would be too late to step in.

Here is a documentary of what happen to the millions or even trillions of plastic flooding around the ocean.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulkY7mOkdqs

Is this a small harm or big harm? What if an entire population on some distant island gets wiped out because of that? How would we know? Even for a small number of death, we are responsible to help clean up the ocean as much as possible, just as we are responsible for cleaning up all the space debris. Is it right that we just blow up a satellite and not worry about the orbital debris?

If it's not right, we don't do it, regardless of how small the harm is. If we overfishing, we ought to mark certain part of the ocean free from fishing.
Same here! Have been using fastmail for ~6 months now. I was hesitant, thought I'd miss push mail on iOS but it has been just fine. Also, there are some iOS mail clients that can push on FastMail (http://mymail.my.com) I always hated Gmail's slow/weird IMAP behavior. Switched to Office365 at some point. Exchange was great but so freaking slow. FastMail has standard, fast IMAP.

I also use the included DNS server for a couple of domains that had been lying around and the static file host for some http placeholder pages and stuff.

I'd never go back to Google at this point.
Sounds like the ST monad.

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Monad/ST
Good UX discussion over at Stack Exchange about this a month or so ago.

http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/55807/is-the-hamburger...

The only problem I see is that we are getting closer each day to mainstream adoption and just when this is starting to happen it is getting yanked back by UX studies.
>Or maybe i'm just giving them too much credit.

I think you are giving them too much credit. The US Government has already demonstrated that it and its 3-letter agencies are above the law when they failed to prosecute high-ranking officials for lying to Congress which is supposedly a capital crime.

I'm sure that if they wanted to surveil DEFCON, it would be trivial for them to do so.
Using Genetic Algorithms to Break Things