skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't realize how integral the numbers were to how I read HN until now. It's taken me a while to stop feeling lost without them, but with the orange dot present, I at least feel like I'm getting the insightful comments after a quick scan of the page.
Our social photo sharing website Snapact (http://www.snapact.com/) uses Blueprint - but not to its full extent. We don't take particular advantage of typography and certain other benefits.
There's a "news news" section but, sadly, this change hasn't been mentioned there yet.
I would add that a sweeping statements will need a book to build a proper argument, not just a two page article.

Actually, stratch my statement about Watt getting rich. The source I read indicate that Watt was able to kept the price of his steam engine up by the virtue of being first even after the patent expiration. It is still true that he use legal forces to keep his many inventive competitors at bay. http://mises.org/story/3280

So he still have a competitive advantage after the fact that the patent expired. It is what people refer to as "first mover advantage".
Throughout the story I kept wondering 'how old is this company?'. Till the end I could not tell.
See also previous items:

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=490292

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=273825

Here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=636038
Suggestion for what the mouseover could read: "Our most sincere apologies; YC News has contracted a rather serious case of the chicken pox."
(:
Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on.

That's like saying, "Much more important than breathing is having a beating heart."

Theroem: Working hard and working on the right thing are both necessary but not sufficient conditions.

Corollary: Working hard on the right thing is a necessary but not sufficient condition.
Very true. Likewise, throughout the story I kept wondering how did they start? Till the end I could not tell.
You're not wrong.

What the author means is that software maintainers need to embrace compromise instead of Stallmanesque freedom. The first he calls open source, the second Free.
Yeah, removing the stylesheet would have also been good. ;)
I just meant that C# isn't that good and never will be as good for quick scripting. Only if you don't know anything else.

Often, the best tool for the job is the language you feel most comfortable with.
Godaddy is not cheap, they seem cheap. Their whole game is to get you in the door with their prices, then they'll try to fleece you every chance they get. Tanstaafl.
It's not terrible slow, but I've noticed that recently, within the past two weeks, it has started hanging periodically, even on a T1 connection.
Using moniker and very happy with them, not a single glitch since I started there when enom bought out bulkregister (and I decided to preemptively move out instead of waiting until enom and BR system integration).
Lose Weight Without Starving - Is This For Real
Can't believe I've never noticed that before!
Well, at a conceptual level, mutability doesn't really mean what it sounds like in Haskell. Anything that looks like it has mutable state is (roughly speaking) syntactic sugar for sequencing operations via function composition with a guarantee that the pre-"mutated" version of the data will no longer be used.

Of course, with a guarantee that only one copy will be in use at a time, you're free to implement the data as a mutable structure, as a practical optimization.
but you can also ride it for as long as you like if you're going down hill, without pedalling.
sending people into space right now is grandstanding. the resources that go into it would be better spent preparing for true permanent habitation of other planets.
Acknowledged. I suspect that writing only English is much less of a problem than your data source(s). I can't critique, though, without seeing relevant TV programs.

Good luck ...

FWIW: I'm based in the UK.
There's no strawman, the author simply misuses some terms.

To put it simply, the OP advocates that open source should be more like BSD and less like Debian. Including NVIDIA drivers in your distribution is in a sense a
matter of "adhering to standards" and also something many OSS developers feel strongly against. The author argues that more is accomplished by giving users what they want, even when that means you have to work with and include propriatary software.

I'm not familiar with the author though, so I may be giving him too much credit.
Manned missions involving highly trained air force pilots and school teachers on a government funded space ferry seem undesirable. Manned space flight involving random wealthy civilians seems to have taken its place.

Perhaps folks are tired of sending the typical astronaut to space on some government mission on their dime, and are ready to go themselves. If commercial space flight catches hold and the price comes down, my guess is people will get interested again real quick as it becomes a realistic candidate for the old "bucket list".
Ask HN: what do you think of the "can't see points on replies" feature?
It looks like there's a new feature: you can't see points on replies.

This is an interesting experiment - it probably removes some group-think, because folks are less inclined to judge a reply based on how others have ALREADY judged it.

...and, yet, I find myself bugged by the fact that information is being hidden from me.

What do others think?
Founded in 2005

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/diapers-com
Much discussion already at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=844979
Ranking and Mapping scientific Knowledge
How to solve 9 sleep problems
...and Ben Hogan - "the more I practice [golf], the luckier I get."
I wasn't necessarily referring to posts when referring to "bad" - I've seen/experienced behaviour from HN members outside of here that negatively impacts my opinion of them.

Nonetheless, I was just making the point that it's not just about positive bias, which is what many people seem to dwell on.
Apparently apropos of human, rather than robot, exploration, this article says:

Frankly, the chance of finding evidence of life on Mars will always make it a more attractive destination than our close, but definitely dead, satellite.

So it looks like everyone has conveniently forgotten all about Arthur C. Clarke's 1961 short story Before Eden.

http://books.google.com/books?id=iL2-iRGDjScC&pg=PA60...

That's the one where the humans visit Venus, discover life, high-five each other, and leave.

The next trip discovers that all the Venusian life is extinct, having been contaminated by the humans that had discovered it.

Back in the 1960s people remembered this story. Probes to Mars and Venus were deliberately sterilized before they landed. So far as I know that practice continues today.

The last thing you want to do to a planet that might contain life is to send living things from Earth to visit it. Their residue will screw up every experiment forever after. Even now, when all we send are sterilized robot probes, avoiding contamination by Earth-derived biomolecules is a major struggle.
My score is -2 but I got no replies, I wonder if it's because you think that 6 hours of hard work a day are too little, or for other reason. Please feel free to comment even anonymously because I'm very interested in this issue. Thanks to downmodders for any hint, I believe that smart people should use critics to improve themselves.
Who Is The Venture Capitalist's Customer?
Acid Reflux Symptoms in Women
Men and women usually have the same symptoms and signs of acid reflux. However, during pregnancy, women have different symptoms of acid reflux
Confront Your Cheating Spouse When You Have Your Evidence And Ducks In A Row
Confront your cheating spouse basically when you have all your ducks in a row. And I mean all of them. There is a right time and a wrong time. The wrong time is as soon as you find out your spouse is cheating, although that’s what most people do.
Howtoforge spam.
Just a thought. Why not set a time limit on patents, like copyright? You have a patent, its valid only for say 30 or 50 years, then its public domain.

or something like this already exists?
actually that phrase is normally credited to Gary Player.
It waters down the expectations that a writer should have of their readership however and the expectations that a reader should have of an article.

Personally I would not mind reading some of pg's articles as although some may contain obvious information, they usually have been thought through and synthesised to create new knowledge. This article however is simply stating the obvious as much as an article suggesting that you should eat everyday would be suggesting the obvious. I do not think it has escaped by anyone the fact that they need to work on the right thing, nor as the above comment suggests, that sometimes they may be 'traped' by focusing too much on a certain thing. If the article was about research findings on how to organise your time, how to manage tendencies towards perfection, how to recognise when you are spending time on something you should not, then perhaps the reader would have learned something. The article however is superficial and typical of a wider trend on the internet where opinions are the norm and currency rather than imparting knowledge on the readership.

Perhaps to suggest that what the article contains and the one who wrote it is dumb - within the confines of this specific article - might be perceived as derogatory and uncivilised, yet I do not think that one should refrain from speaking their mind. I found the article dumb, I could have said pointless, yet I thought dumb describes it better because it is so obvious, the title is misleading and hardly supported in the article and the article itself has not been thought through at all, let alone the title. If the writer wants me to hail her as a beacon of truth then she should try much harder rather than think that she is having a chat with her friend while drinking a coffee about what she thinks of hard work.
Code tests when hiring engineers
Just something that's interested me for years. Might eventually become a part of some commercial embedded devices I've planned, but that's a long way out.
Relatively new here. I don't really recognize a lot of names and tend to pay less attention to names here than in other environments. This is in part for reasons others have mentioned: There are no avatars and there are no signature blocks. The design here is more minimalist than anything else I have participated in. I am still getting used to it and not really in a position to make a judgment call about whether the orange dot (lack of visible scores) is a "good" change or a "bad" one. My general impression is that pecking order matters less here than on most discussion sites. My general feeling is that is a good thing. I hate the Lord of the Flies stuff that is so common in online groups.
This is only bad news if you happen to be a politically motivated person rather than a person of science.
Much Ado About Lunch: Fast Food a Little Faster
I don't doubt their execution, but its domain(diapers.com) might have helped big time in their success.
"new", I believe, is actually an ancient relic of the prototypal class system.

I believe it is quite the opposite. It was a failed attempt to make the prototype-based object system look like class-based one. I vaguely remember reading this opinion in Crockford's "Javascript:The Good Parts" book.
Time limit already exists. The thing with software is that its associated technology will most likely expire long before its patent does.
That stability comes from the angular momentum in the wheels, not in the drive train.
High Performance String Split Functions [T-SQL]
This article is wrong. You need to use prototype when defining your functions.

Here is how to do it:

<html>
<head>
<script>

function HotDog () {
this.name=arguments[0];
}

HotDog.prototype.name=null;

HotDog.prototype.getCondiments= function () {
document.getElementById('test').innerHTML='started...' +this.name;
};
var myHotDog = new HotDog('test 001');

window.onload= function() {
setTimeout(30, myHotDog.getCondiments());
};

</script>

</head>
<body>
<div id=test>loading...</div>
</body>
</html>
Serious question: I am wondering if you aren't American. American culture puts a lot of emphasis on "work ethic". Someone in the comments section of the article indicated they were British but living in America and generally appalled at how we "flog ourselves to death" constantly. Perhaps this observation is more "obvious" to people from other cultures? But for most Americans it probably merits repeating (very regularly even).
Your life will be productive, if you plan your life in your teens in reverse order (death->life).
Well, presumably the first experiment was constructed to help control for that. Though I've never been terribly sure how effective these sorts of high level psychological experiments are.

I'm much more at ease when someone talks about millisecond response times and sacchades.
Okay, so holding to uncompromising moral principles isn't particularly compatible with real-world success. This is neither new nor limited to Free Software; you either compromise in order to get along, or you retreat with like-minded folks and live your own way (cf. Amish communities, hippie communes, &c.)

Not everyone agrees with Stallman's ethical standards, and it's not even hard to argue that strategic compromises could better achieve the long-term goals of the FSF (in fact, they've been known to make exactly those sorts of compromises).

But it really bothers me when people criticize Stallman for being out of touch, or imply that it's "hatred of Microsoft" or whatever motivating him, while sometimes seeming to promote compromise as a virtue in and of itself. Are these people willfully ignoring the explicit philosophical/ethical framework behind the FSF? Are they opposed to the ethical stance but unwilling to say so directly? Is it inconceivable to them that someone could actually dedicate their lives to a moral cause?

I suppose the obvious cynical answer is "they're trolling GNU/Fanboys in order to rack up more website hits", but I try not to assume acting in bad faith as my first explanation.
While I think there is merit to the concept that "workin' hard is for suckas", I mean that only in what our classical conception of what "working hard" means. Our entire industry, this "Information Technology" thing, is fundamentally about making things that allow people to not work hard. Technology is about being lazy, about avoiding effort where effort is not necessary.

Using index cards and typewriters to compose documents is certainly harder work than using a word processor application on a PC. Nobody would ever say there was greater merit in the old way (well, nobody worth paying attention to). It's the distinction between "working hard" and "working smart."

So "hard work" in the classical sense seems to mean "sit down, head down, move the pencil, move the pencil, move the pencil." That's toiling. That's not thinking of more efficient ways to "move the pencil". Working hard is a productivity enhancer, but only in a linear fashion. Technology is a productivity multiplier.

I refer you to the Robert Heinlein short-story "The Tale of the Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail," which is provided in his magnum opus "Time Enough for Love". We should be "working hard" on finding ways to be lazy. It's through the pursuit of technologies that allow us to be as productive as we are on less effort that make the big advances in productivity, not "working hard".
If you plan the rest of your life out while you're still in your teens, you'll likely end up with a bad plan (because you lack the life experience to know what a good plan looks like), and you will probably miss out on a lot of the nicer things in life. There's something to be said for stepping back and experiencing life now while you're still young and flexible instead of waiting until after you've achieved "success" and are consequentially old and creaky.
I mostly agree, but I think it's important to note that readership has been on a steady decline for decades, but the ad market crashed very suddenly and drastically in just the last few years. And you are correct that many of these advertisers won't come back.
How to Improve Search Traffic Using the Right Keywords | Internet Security
Simply put, absurdity exercises your brain when you seek meaning in such. Such exercise increases your ability to find meaning and patterns.
The best tool for a job is almost always to select a language you are already comfortable with, which is exactly why it's beneficial to be conversant in multiple languages of different styles.

If all you know how to use is a hammer it may be faster on a given task to nail everything together instead of learning other tools. But if you take the time to learn other techniques before you need them, it'll pay off in the long term.
john carmack does not believe working hard is overrated:

"Putting creativity on a pedestal can also be an excuse for laziness. There is a lot of cultural belief that creativity comes from inspiration, and can't be rushed. Not true. Inspiration is just your subconscious putting things together, and that can be made into an active process with a little introspection.
Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better."
And working fun beats working smart and hard.
Yeah, but JavaScript IS not, by any stretch of the imagination anything like scheme today, aside from first class functions. It really pains me when people say JavaScript is scheme + self. That just isn't true.
While you can use prototype, why do you need to? What specifically do you mean by "the article is wrong?"
could always make software patents last only 2-3 years. That should be enough for the original company to get noticed
From The TC50 DemoPit, Trademarkia (TM) Simplifies Trademark Search
The lambda calculus doesn't really have assignment, so you can't call a function recursively in the way we're used to in modern programming languages. However, Y allows us to give a recursive function a temporary name which we can then use to apply it recursively. It's trippy, for sure, but pretty much theoretical use only for most people.
> Consider the patents held by MPEG LA (MPEG codecs, Firewire, H.264, etc.) These patents represent years of R&D work by their member companies and describe inventions that are non-frivolous. Surely these companies deserve some kind of protection for their work to encourage them to continue to invest in such research and publish it.

There are two separate issues here, (1) whether patents are necessary to encourage innovation, and (2) whether companies "deserve" patents.

To answer the first question, the existance of non-patent-emcumbered codecs, such as Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora, demonstrates that software patents don't need to exist for these things to exist. (I sometimes half-jokingly refer to arguments of the sort "but without copyright/patent incentives, X wouldn't exist" as "the Linux-doesn't-exist theory of intellectual property").

To answer the second question, why would companies deserve patents? So they can make bigger profits, presumably? But why is that a good thing? The purpose of the economy isn't for companies to make profits, it's for the economy to make things people need and want. Companies making big profits is a good thing if and only if it leads to the economy making things people need and want -- so if people want to make money they have to make something people want, not game the patent system to no-one else's advantage. And since software patents aren't necessary to produce good software, and since they in fact overall harm progress in software rather than help it, in the interests of the economy they shouldn't exist.
The role-based favicon, and why Novell patented it
"The Tale of the Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail,"

I hadn't heard of that but I like the title. It reminds me of some personal experiences I've had where I listen to how other people handle certain problems and then think to myself something like "I don't have the time or energy to do things so inefficiently/ineffectively."
> Imagine now that people had secretly claimed land, and done so in a way that even they didn't know what the boundary was. "That land over there" or "the thickest part of the forest" and yet these secret, vague claims could be legally enforced. Imagine investing money to build on that land, trying your best to avoid accidentally stepping on anyone's property.

That's a nice analogy. I'm writing a book about intellectual property and the Pirate party movement; mind if I use your analogy?
I'm not exactly sure I understand what you're saying. Are you saying . . .

1. You used to pay more attention to scores than to text? (i.e., "I used to skim the score to see if I wanted to read the comment, but now I skim the text.")

2. You used to pay more attention to text than you do now? (i.e., "I used to skim scores, then read text more carefully, but now I just skim text and move on.")

3. Something else entirely?
If you want to invest a lot of money in making a place livable for humans, might I suggest Detroit or Africa?

I'm not even kidding. If we're going to spend a few billion, lets save some lives with it, rather than produce extraordinarily expensive screensavers for geeks.
Is it another change to HN that handles don't show up sometimes? Any background for this change or is it a bug?
In my usage, the orange dot is getting confused with the orange star of "this is my post". I like the consistent color scheme, but maybe there needs to be something else to make it more distinct.

Other than that, I really like it.
British IT workers 'crowded out'
Oi! Those bar graphs confused me for so very long. A better graphic would have been a scatterplot or time series chart and the x label should be something like "repetition no." or "trial no."
That's a nice little app to see the relationships between journals, but I was expecting to see a Google-maps mashup where they ripped out the locations from published papers then plotted areas of high intellectual concentration (pardon the pun), to show which areas of the world are focusing on certain topics.

Also, for the rankings, they could rank fields based on how often papers are cited by other fields. For example, if a certain Mathematics paper is frequently quoted by physicists, it would contribute to Mathematics having a higher rating than Physics (over a large number of papers, a better average rating would emerge).
The crawl runs on a super-heterogenous network of computers from around the world. The JVM sandbox is the only thing we know. Java is the only language that has something like this.

Yes, Java isn't as sexy anymore. But running your code on 50,000 computers sounds sexier to me than a REST API.
I don't know as much about C# as I do C or C++ but they both have the concept of sequence points in between which order of operations is undefined behavior. As such I find his specification of order of ops suspicious and makes a stronger argument for explicit statements. However the whole if you don't know what it does then you should be learning not dumbing down the rest of us should apply.
I'm genuinely curious, not trying to start flaming, but does this increase the expressiveness of the underlying language? Or is it mainly useful as a syntactic shortcut for function composition (as the article implies)?

@dec1
@dec2
@dec3
def some_func(arglist):
...

vs.

some_func = dec1(dec2(dec3(fun some_func(arglist) ...)))

I feel like I'm missing something, but perhaps I'm just used to using other idioms for this.
Latest news being: Bugbase, the core module you build from, now has WiFi baked in.

Bug always interested me in the same way Arduino does.