skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But isn't there a basic curiosity in some people?

I have a hard time imagining somebody who truly cares about programming to learn about Joel's blog and not devouring it (I mean the earlier days, when it was still about programming). I could let it pass if they never heard about Joel, but they know lots of other interesting stuff. Or anything else, really - it is the basic difference between somebody just doing their job and somebody curious about everything. If somebody is a Java developer and only reads about Java programming, he might be a good fit for some jobs. But I am different - I constantly read about new programming languages and development trends.

Why should it be good for me to work with somebody who only cares about Java? And what would you take about during lunch - Java development?

I am not saying you should hire based on musical taste, but I am waiting for a solid argument for why you shouldn't.

More specifically: why is "hire who you know/is like you" supposed to be a bad heuristic? If you know you yourself are efficient, it seems likely somebody like you is also sufficient. At least it seems more likely than that a random stranger (or somebody who explicitly isn't like you) is efficient. Please show me data to the contrary if you disagree with that heuristic (especially, as I said in my first comment, as nobody really seems to have a clue how to hire).

Back to Joel: it seems more likely that somebody who knows Joel is a good programmer than somebody who doesn't know Joel. Would you disagree with that assessment? Look at it in reverse: how would a good programmer not know about Joel's blog?
For what it's worth, The Daily Show has been covering Egypt fairly regularly, including having Gihan Ibrahim as a guest earlier this month.
This isn't exactly politics is it? It certainly is about geopolitical event, but not quite one party vs another.
You're right, the average American commute favors cars much more strongly. At 10 miles I'm remarkably close to my work and have a favorable biking environment most of the route. Yet it still is a bad alternative and in 7 years I have yet to see a single person bike along that route.

The question of "why don't Americans bike to work more" is not going to be solved with any number of bike routes (which I support the building more of BTW) until it can be solved for frankly trivial cases like mine. It suggests that local environmental conditions are probably more important to favoring biking than any number of infrastructure initiatives. Simple things like "bad weather" and "showers at places of employment" and "places to store bikes so they won't get stolen during the day" probably have to solved en masse long before bike lanes become part of the discussion.

All the unused empty bike lanes in the world aren't going to kick start a biking revolution.
"Users came to your site for a reason or a receipe that you did right somehow, so stick to it." Agree. Always be listening to feedback, but balance it with data and your gut-feeling. If you're building something for you as user, listen mostly to your gut. I've learned that the hard way.
Bitbooks: Build Online Books from GitHub
Fernando Branco e Inês Flores-Colen Coordenam Curso de Gestão de Edifícios
No they do not become non-users. They are still coming. Hell, the site traffic has never been so high recently although more than 88% are returning visitors. They are just satisfied with what they signed up for at the beginning I think.
One shouldnt have to do that at first place.It's just a bad UX decision and serves little purpose.

People are going to register only if they want to interact with the website.

If I just want to read content,I shouldnt have to register.Stackoverflow made the right call and today it's infinitetly more popular than Quora will ever be.
It's great to see decisions that are made via metrics. I've only got one issue with the post:

"Feature requests have to be normalized by the total number of daily users on the site -> the users who remain silent are not too lazy to ask for something more, they just don't want anything."

I tend to think the users who don't provide feedback are those who are too lazy and/or don't want anything. Either way you can't listen to someone who's "silent".
> In these global dragnet surveillance ridden times it should be a no-brainer but please don't expose your visitors to third-party websites, respect their privacy, host your assets yourself.

I still wish there was a "hash" attribute to script tags (and others) so that browsers could cache common JS/CSS/etc assets cross-domain.
I still don't quite follow the purpose of the validation. Is it against malicious use? In normal use, I would think that pretty much any URL that's good enough for the browser sending it would be good enough for the link shortener.
Actually, this article should not really even be here as it's about politics/current events:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> So I would say cycling is a perfectly reasonable solution for the majority of people.

This is patently absurd. A more gross generalization could hardly be made.

And the average between this and reality is worse than the status quo, so when politicians compromise, we get worse off overall.

Irrational people...
I'm looking forward to the first "How I gamed the UK charts with Mechanical Turk" blog post.
Downvoters unfamiliar with Oz politics: This is a mildly notorious political catchphrase, not too far off from "Mission accomplished" in the US.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/election-20...
> From spring straight to winter?

That would be Ukraine, where two Russian journalists were killed recently during bombing of Lugansk.
> What good is a browser that can't browse?

That is the reason why they switch engines from Presto to Blink. This also caused issues with us having a Linux option.
[T]he users who remain silent are not too lazy to ask for
something more, they just don't want anything.

This is an important insight, and there's an equally important corollary: many of the things users ask for will be:

- not what the user wants at all

- what the user thinks they want, but so poorly described as to be impossible to implement

- what the user thinks they want, but actually doesn't

- what the user wants, but also a terrible idea that will make your thing worse for everyone else

There are ways to get useful feedback from your users, but asking them to tell you what they want is probably the worst one.
That's the opposite of my experience ... I (apparently) started using Quora relatively early and finally requested that they cancel my account a few weeks ago. The sign-up process and amount of information they want to collect is now (what I consider) unreasonable.
That title makes no sense at all. Perhaps they meant "5 all-time worst domain expirations"?
edit: this is a response to "That she named it in her suicide note isn't enough?"

No, of course not. People misattribute causes all the time. She had already attempted to kill herself twice, but we can be certain that the prank call wasn't involved in those. I estimate that the responsibility for the successful suicide can be attributed nearly 100% to whatever it was that caused the other attempts, and less than 2% to the prank call, humiliation at work, national visibility, etc, that resulted. The prior suicide attempts have so much explanatory power that almost nothing is left over for the prank call, no matter what one of her suicide notes said. She left another suicide note (same suicide, separate note) complaining about the management at her hospital, with whom she had had ongoing difficulties. Should we conclude that you shouldn't adopt policies that some employees don't like, because someone might kill themselves?

Rough impression of where I picked numbers like "nearly 100%" and "less than 2%": two questions. First, of the people who become nationally notable in some minor but arguably humiliating way (she wasn't even the staffer primarily targeted by the prank call; it's not clear to me whether anyone outside the hospital would have known she was involved), how many attempt to kill themselves? Second, of the people who attempt suicide twice, how many attempt it a third time?
Roughly ...

They were going to use a length such that a pendulum would have a 1 second half period, or 2 second full period. That varies according to where you are, but it's pretty good. This means that g=(pi)^2, because the period of a pendulum T is given by 2(pi)sqrt(L/g).

Since that varies according to the local value of g, they then used one ten-millionth ( 10^-7 ) of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator running through Paris. They actually did that by extrapolating a shorter distance, but it means the Earth is, "by definition", 40 million metres circumference. They created a platinum bar of the right length and declared that to be the answer.

Turns out it's wrong, but they never bothered to fix it.

However, in 1960 the eleventh CGPM defined the metre to be 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red emission line in the electromagnetic spectrum of the krypton-86 atom in a vacuum. Obviously much easier to use.
Another thing to consider is parallel downloads. Last I checked, all browsers limited simultaneous HTTP calls to a single domain. Spreading downloads across domains will increase multithreaded downloading, which on most connections will increase speeds.
https://github.com/ProTip/linux-go-dash

I started this fork in part to port it to go and in part to create a set of packages for getting at linux system information(for use in monitoring agents, etc). I haven't visited it in a while but it's always in the back of my mind in case anyone would like to contribute :)
If like Rome, Silicon Valley should ever lose it's eminence, the blog post from 42Floors is a classic piece of evidence as to why it happened.
Gravit – Simple free design web app
It's a school project I thought from reading the philosophy page. Pretty good I thought, albeit lacking a bit in copy and POV to make this more critical.
Yes I agree, my point was that these silent user can be a majority and they seem like they really enjoy your site too, coming back each day and all. But in the end, when you introduce a new feature most of them (in my case close to 100% of them) will ignore it and stick to what they first came in for. That's why I propose to "normalize" by the daily active users...
It's worth asking, is there a similar set of services that one could run on their own? Controlling one's own data and all that...
BBC launches a video news channel on Reddit
2 months ago I had never touched code. This is my first app.
I had never touched code until May. After 2 months of trial and error with teamtreehouse.com and stackoverflow.com I have finally released my first app. Check it out! Any advice/comments/critique/reviews would be extremely helpful!
There's a Tumblr for that. http://plaintextoffenders.com/
How do you know if the people coming this week are the same people who came last week? Just because overall site traffic is increasing doesn't mean you have a low churn rate.
Due to various (business) reasons it was easier/cheaper to get the stupid bundled land line with cable tv.

I had so much spam on that line that I changed my recorded message to the three tones with the "We're sorry. The call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and try your call again." message. After about a month all the spam stopped.
people who give you feedback are the "fans", core users, who you're supposed to make the happiest and who'll stick around the longest, - says the old wisdom.
The Myriad Uses of Stronger Than Steel Kevlar
This is the ugly head of the post-web world. Let's for a moment assume that the web is being phased out in favor of a constellation of apps on a closed OS gated by a monopolistic appstore/playstore. The end game is for a Microsoft of modern days to form, with a far stronger power than MS in the 90s. Since every player in the market knows this, there'll be fighting either for the top spot or, at least, to keep the market fragmented enough to prevent the new monopoly from forming.

In either case, consumers get screwed. Either they get screwed like in the 90s, or they get screwed by systems incompatibility and fragmentation.

All in all, this war is moot. Moore's law applied to bandwith, to device computation speed and to software evolution leads to this: http://xkcd.com/1367/
> Everything he said is simple truth. ...You can do better than argument by assertion.

Why change now? It's assertions all the way down.
They don't have to switch engines to stop supporting Opera on Linux again. They just have to stop releasing new builds. With Opera being closed source software, Linux users can't just compile it themselves from source. They're stuck with whatever version Opera chooses to release.
I've been following enough of what's happened in Egypt that I can tell you this is the least of the bad news from there; spring passed straight to winter quite a while ago. In short, foreign interference in Egypt - in the Middle East in general - in recent years has been an unmitigated disaster. It's long past time we in the West started minding our own business and focused on fixing the problems in our own countries instead of exacerbating the problems in other people's countries.
5 must-have websites for your startup
It's great to hear from you again. When I saw the feature on nospronos, I thought that maybe your authentification strategy was not giving good enough results. Sounds like I was wrong.

Did you try to know why they wanted a real account in the first place? Was it because they kept loosing their secret URL? If yes, a resend feature via email would have done the trick.

Anyway kudos for the website, we are having great funs with our (mostly wrong) predictions.

Did you try to see how close from reality have been your best user?
Why would you switch? The only benefit to me is: my mail/calendar is not on the servers of big companies like Google or Apple.

I somehow (not objectiviley) like the impression Fastmail gives me. The cowboy-ish yet serious way they try to compete with the big ones. That might be a reason to join too.
Where I live in West Central Florida we get about 50 strikes per square mile per year, 1.5 million per year for the state. Lightning is common here during the rainy season.
Support is, indeed, nascent; but it is coming along well:

https://github.com/JuliaGPU
I don't know what "statistically normal" means, but I'd estimate that 20-50% of my colleagues are in the same position as me and so would benefit from better cycle infrastructure.
I'd store all of the stock prices plus lottery and sports results from 1975 onwards on it and encrypt the whole thing.

Then I'd start buying stock and lottery tickets. Then once the internet was invented I'd start leaving odd time traveller hints across the web so those guys who recent ran that study about internet time travellers could then have some positive results.

My first priority would be to obtain an identity. Assuming I know when and where I am travelling to I would travel with the details of someone who had very recently died who suited my purposes and would take over their identity on arrival before any death certs are issued and social security records were updated.
Replying to myself and quoting myself: "Am I the only one who believes that it is bad for me to spend more than 20 hours . . . a week in the state?"

That is misleading because it gives the impression that I spend a non-negligible fraction of my time in the flow state. I do not. I spend at most 15 to 20 hours a week programming. These years, very little of that time is spent in the flow state.
If you wish, I can help. I am changing my work of line to get more into web development/ data analytics. I am a good manager and a fast developing developer. :)

My email address is in my profile.
> Well, you could make things quicker but you'd still be limited by the hardware of the time.

But a lot of it is down to knowing what is possible. E.g. we know internet access via late 70's level home machine is possible with a few KB for a trimmed down IP stack and SLIP (because it's been done by now).

We know the basic concept behind the www. Creating a trimmed down web that'd be feasible to make available by 1980 would not be all that hard - it's not really a hardware/speed problem, but about maturing ideas (e.g the basic ideas had been around since at least Vannevar Bush's Memex idea, published in 1945; and in more fleshed out forms adapted for computers since the 60's).

You'd be limited by networking. Or rather, primarily by uncommon it was. But by the early 1980's, non-internet systems like GameLine, Quantum Link etc. that were to become America Online, started appearing. Arriving with the knowledge that the internet would become dominant, and even a rough idea of how internet protocols works, and the knowledge to go seek out people that could help you with the appropriate standards etc., you could get into that market years before, and be in a much better situation by e.g. being prepared for TCP/IP and the web becoming dominant.
Artificial Intelligence – Rational Agents
They are "returning visitors", that's basic Analytics stuff: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1144424?hl=en-GB
The problem is that the phrase "This is not crawling, only scraping" is to be taken with a grain of salt. If you find a page with a lot of information and you "just scrape it", you may still be subject to "sui generis" database rights, i.e. you are probably not allowed to reuse the data you just got.

You can say "it is only an alphabetical list of names and titles", but you have to remember that the "sui generis" DB rights have been created to protect phone books, and almost every compilation of data is more complex than a phone book.
The Solar Solstice
Heartbleed: An Eminent Threat Isn’t Completely Neutralized
Very nice. Sounds like a bunch of guys I'd like to work with, if I had any clue about security.

Only thing I missed was an "about" page, introducing the founders, pictures are a plus. Also, who is investing and how much runway do they have are questions any sane employee would have to ask anyway.
There is a project to detect lightnings over Moscow with cheap sound-only detectors on the roofs of skyscrapers, they managed to restore ever shapes of lightings in 3D with it:

http://habrahabr.ru/post/211701/ (description of their technology in Russian)

http://flashlook.ru/ (official site, no realtime translation now because of lack of funding, there are some prerecorded lightings)
Kinetic scrolling doesn't let me go through your site how I'd like to. It zips past, in one flick I am at the footer.
A silly question: why did you add a login?

Is it because 30 people typed text like "how do I create an account" and you interpreted it to mean "I want an account"? And even if they did explicitly say they want an account, which force made you interpret that to mean what they said?

What happened exactly?
I prefered the D-Day kerfuffle http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/02/tony-abbott-vid...
Put Yourself Out There: The Myth of the Genius Programmer
HN automatically strips certain words from titles. Sometimes it messes up the titles a bit. The word here was probably "Top".
No, I don't particularly enjoy driving. I try to go out of my way to avoid it most of the time. I'd much rather walk, public transport, bike to work, but the reality is that, for most of the world, local practical issues make those alternatives far more inconvenient than driving and no amount of bike lanes in the world will change those conditions.

It can be subtly simple things, like, working in a job where you have to go across town to a customer site 3 times a week during the middle of the work day and can't afford to take 2.5 hours out of your day to bike there and bike. Or living in a place with lots of hills, or having no place to clean up once you get to work.

All those issues have to be solved long before bike lanes becomes part of the discussion for biking to become a practical choice. A few people who are really into biking, crazy spandex outfits and all, might be willing to ignore those practical considerations, but if you want to get the average citizen up on a bike like in the Netherlands, you have to solve the rest of the issues.
Because we all agree that we hate republicans... I mean egypt?

It's political, but it's not US politics, so it seems to pass the 'not political' HN test.

Odd, but seems true from my experience.
I came here to say this. The importance of good food is severly underestimated. If you improve the quality of the food you eat, you improve your life. Also, you can save lots of money. And it's a great skill to have, socially. Being a good cook also makes you more attractive to members of the opposite sex, regardless of gender (that's not even a joke).
People also hate having to use facebook/google/whatever, as then you are essentially charging a fee of their privacy to register.

I avoid using any site with a third party login on principle.
"But isn't there a basic curiosity in some people?"

Someone who does not read the same old blog as you is not curious? That does not make any sense. I checked out Joels blog now (after years) and there does seem to be anything exceptional or different then what is on gazillion other blogs.

If anything, Java guy reading about Java could learn about map reduce, full text search, security, compilers, algorithms, sound processing, text analysis, artificial intelligence and million other things in the process. There are java libraries for all those things and when you follow java news you are primary learning about those.

Mastering full text search library in ruby is easier if you already mastered another full text search in another language. The underlying concepts are going to be similar.
I get it, you care more about language itself, but that does not make you more curious nor better developer. It makes you slightly different.

"And what would you take about during lunch - Java development?"

I would try various topics until I find the one we can talk about. Plus, discussion with someone who knows different things then me is more interesting usually, I learn new stuff from it. Listening to the same ideas I read about yesterday does not make for a compelling lunch.

"I am not saying you should hire based on musical taste, but I am waiting for a solid argument for why you shouldn't."

You might as well hire on color of their eyes.
This is true. They couldn't keep up. I've used Chrome as a side-browser for quite some time already. I understand the need to switch the rendering/js engines, but I don't understand why they couldn't give it some time and keep around what made Opera - fast and responsive full-featured browser out of the box with the ability to customize almost everything.
The Great Promises of Data Science for Healthcare – Infographic
Glad you still enjoy it :)

The best user so far has 38 points and a difference of 42
That is out of the 32 games played :

- 9 perfect predictions
- 11 correct outcome predictions
- 12 wrong predictions

which is pretty impressive
Norse Dark Intelligence
Think professional apprentice / associate professional entry point.

Now a lot of jobs that where available to school leavers are graduate entry - talk about grade inflation :-)
You could use XPrivacy[1] and prevent access to anything you wish.

1. http://www.xprivacy.eu/
cycling should work in the vast majority of the world and why cars don't

Nobody ever made this claim, so there's no way to illuminate you about it. Same goes for the part about the idiots and morons.

Which part exactly doesn't make sense

For instance the part where you say Is an inconvenient, slow, tiring way to travel in anyplace without a good climate or near perfect. That is merely a generalized opinion.
No one would ever wake up and go: "I need/want coke" (without advertising).