skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The fuzzy bunnies are just not going to let this stand.

Were you perhaps in the bathroom during the last part of "The Holy Grail"!? There's just no way...
How to Find and Hire Amazing People, Part 2
Ask HN:  I don't see reply links on some comments... is this a bug?
I just noticed that there were a few comments that didn't have reply links. I'd get a pic, but the reply links are there now. Is there some amount of time before I can reply to someone else's comment, is this a bug, or am I just going crazy?
>If we're lucky, we'll die before the countries we love turn to tyranny. Will our children? Will our grandchildren?

I understand the sentiment, but when I look into the face of my son. I hope every day that if it should ever come to armed resistance that it comes to pass in my time and not his. I am a pacifist above all else, but I would rather have the moral obligation and the wages of war payed by my hand rather than that of my namesake.

He did not create this mess and it weighs on my mind that this is the legacy that I will leave him. We should all be ashamed of the legacy we are leaving to our children and if our legacy to them is tyranny, oppression and struggle then may we all be damned.
she was very unprofessional and condescending towards arrington's concerns, which were completely valid. i think the correct response from a ceo should have been: "wow, thanks for bringing that to our attention, that's going to the top of my priority list after i leave this conference."
You can say what you want about DHH, but he's 100% correct here.
Yeah they do, but it's a tough situation for everyone. If the HR person didn't fire Mr. X, someone else more opportunistic and less scrupulous would've done it - and the original HR guy's head would've rolled with Mr. X's.

Things like this will keep happening so long as we're willing to trample all over each other in our race to the "top".
I think this is less about AA being crap and more about you being a frequent flyer with ANY full service airline.
It really comes down to whether you view HTML/Javascript as source code or object code.

If HTML&JS is source code, you ought to keep it clean and minimal. You're betting that browsers will evolve to include desktop widgets and other aspects of the "native" experience in HTML tags and Javascript APIs.

If HTML&JS is object code, you're rooting for abstractions over HTML and Javascript, so that HTML/JS becomes assembly language.

I don't mind the extra abstraction. But it's unfortunate that we're adding so many layers of abstraction over a system that wasn't really designed to be used that way.
Uh,

The situation that applies today is the treaty is being negotiated in secret in order to ratified in as much secrecy as possible and with the hope that once that's done, it can enforced as quietly as possible and the repressive parts of it may be used to make that silence mandatory as well.

-- Contrast this to the US constitution, which involved long and difficult demand before ratification.
The Journalist's Dilemma
There is no reason all phones would have the same time. I know some US phones sync the time with the carrier, which is a great function but not seen in the rest of the world.

You could use bluetooth, but then you have to switch it on.

You could use the camera to pick up the phones behind you somehow, but that would not always work.
"Their website is not very Web 2.0, it's true."

One of the original reasons why I disagreed with Dustin. Slick Web 2.0-y goodness does not imply a better user experience. Copious amounts of whitespace is easy on the eyes, but also doesn't automatically imply discoverability or readability. I know first-hand of at least one top-50 website that is very Web 1.0 but absolutely excels at what it does.
It doesn't have to be a network-effect business for customers to prefer the popular product as a "safe" choice.
I've noticed the same issue. I hope someone has an answer (explanation).
blah, GIT is the way to go
I agree. I can't put my finger on it, but the white/red text on the page positively glows at me, not in a pleasant way either. It feels like I'm staring at a lit light bulb.
Um, you can. Comcast Business Internet. It costs 2x to 4x as much and there's no throttling.
The deeper a comment is nested, the longer the delay before the "reply" link appears. This is basically to throttle flamewars or other thread-hijacking discussions.
I'd guess that it's a difference in screen brightness. Try turning down your brightness and see if that helps.
Andy Ihnatko slams Verizon's iDon't campaign
You're making far too many assumptions about the code to be tested.

The folks who wrote our math libraries (primitives such as 4x4 matrices, vectors, planes, spheres, axis-aligned boxes, etc), would agree "don't leave home without it" for TDD.

The folks who wrote our drawing libraries cheat on the TDD a bit and write the code first, then capture a screenshot and use that screenshot for automated testing to verify nothing breaks in the future.

The folks who wrote the sample code that implements a simple game (involving math and graphics) laugh at the concept of TDD. What would you possibly test? There is no `bool IsFun(Game)` function. How should Mario jump? I dunno, just pick some random numbers and math operations until it feels like it works. Then try not to break it.

The interesting bit here is that each of these groups of folks are on the same team, in fact many are the same people. Use the right tool for the job. Invest your testing efforts where you get the most bang for buck.
Thank you for your feedback. We put together our current page in a rush. We are working on improving it. There are some very good suggestions here. We will roll out an updated page today. For this site, we will focus on just the three apps and make the signup process easy.
I'm curious as to why you feel it's unfortunate to add so many layers of abstraction over the system. Besides the "All abstractions are leaky abstractions" argument, is there any other reason you feel like this is a bad thing? Or is it ruffling your engineering feathers?
Actually I would argue that 37signals thrives on the network effect. A network of anti-enterprisey, web-savvy, tech trendy folks but still the network effect. I think maybe joel was wondering is if they were in danger of falling behind in their particular network.
This prompts the question, if you're entering a field that has a 'safe' choice, how do you position to compete?

I'm sure there were other bug-tracking systems available when FogBugz was being developed, yet FogBugz has stuck around and is perceived as being a 'safe' product now -- perhaps because of Fog Creek's longevity?
Sadly, the sole purpose of an HR dept. is to keep a company from getting sued. The bigger the company, the more that's their sole focus.

This guy admitting anything but the most perfect of environments and purity of process, while not a firing offense to normal folk, opened a vector for the possibility of the hint of something bad being done. So he had to go.
I wondered that as well and assumed he used his corporate account to make his identity claim more credible.
The mistake Mr. X. made here was not about caring about his job or even criticizing his employer. He contacted an outsider, with his company's email server, ostensibly on their behalf. At bigco, you just can't do that folks. Everything that leaves corporate walls must be vetted by legal, (and probably marketing too). There are lists of 100's (maybe 1000's by now) of innocuous seeming words that you just can't use. Language, nationality, gender, and racial issues all must be considered.

Like it or not, at Bigco International, everything is a press release.

Personally, I would have given the guy a warning. What he said was quite harmless and almost certainly common knowledge, but we don't know the whole story here. He may have been warned before, or AA burned by this type of thing before or both. Its unfortunate, but understandable. In the name of tolerance and acceptance, we've built one of the most intolerant and litigious societies ever. This is just one of the many sad side effects.
Besides the mouse scroll wheel hack (which is only necessary for Macs if memory serves), what other limitations did you need to circumvent in order to address scrolling in Flash? I've built more than my fair share of scrollbars over the years in Flash, and the JS-mouse wheel-mac hack is the only hack I've needed. I can imagine that building a custom scroll component in Flash would be easier to do, and the code would be far more clean, than implementing in JS. Am I wrong?
I have the same issue with light text on dark background pages, I generally dislike them. It actually affects my vision for a few seconds after I look away from the page, before my eyes adjust again. That page could certainly do with a little more contrast between text and background at any rate. I recently created a site that does make some limited use of light text on dark background and found this post from a few years ago to be a good resource for looking at the issue from both sides (the comments are an important part):

http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200608/light_text_on_d...

For as long as I can remember I have not liked reading large amounts of light text on dark backgrounds. It's always felt as if this was some kind of genetic predisposition for me. While for others, the opposite (i.e. strongly preferring light text on dark background) seems to be true.

I'd be really interested if anyone has heard of some solid research on why certain people prefer one over the other.
Growing PayPal may one day overshadow eBay
My feeling is that Joel is really just getting tired of his comfortable, but small, operation. If he keeps doing what he's been doing he'll probably be relatively small forever.

37 signals is in a similar situation. They're really small relative to what's possible. As far as I can tell they're on course to be small forever, in terms of revenue.

You already have a good product. You know there's a market. You know people are willing to buy it. Now what do you do if you decide you want to accelerate your growth a lot?
Yes, but also I think that there's even more basic stuff. For example, make numbers line up on the decimal point.

It'd be fun to put together a one-pager.
The difference is that there are fewer companies buying bug tracking so there’s a lot more money per customer. 37s makes $1800/yr tops off of a Basecamp customer, but Atlassian or FogBugz can make several times that. If you’re fighting for fewer, more profitable customers, you need to be able to win. It’s different markets - you wouldn’t suggest to Boeing to give an all-you-can-eat deal to any airline for a fixed price.

Fog Creek could try to shrink the industry by getting rid of the per-seat licensing, but if they have a similar price structures and features as their competitors, they’d better be able to win deals.
That's exactly my point. How do you measure image? During tough times, you focus on measurable returns.
Just because their product doesn't have a strong effect, it doesn't mean their customer base doesn't.

If ten times the number of people are raving over their competitor eventually, that'll have a big effect against them (or, at least, put them on the back foot).
Primarily because it's an inefficient abstraction.

Yeah, Moore's Law and all that. But still.
Introducing Debugging for MonoTouch
I've been tempted to use (the impressive) Cappuccino for a couple of apps but based on its lack of keyboard tab focus and performance on slower systems I decided against using it. I like to build simple, accessible apps.

Somebody--Sofa I think--was using it for back-end administration while presenting a more typical interface to public users, and that may be a better approach.
I've recently finished listening to "Influencer": http://www.audible.com/adbl/site/products/ProductDetail.jsp?...

From my review: "I expected this book to be less scientific and less valuable than it turned out to be. Not one of those stupid motivational books, but rather a good theory source with real-life cases as illustrations.

Some of the chapters move you away from the major subject while trying to prove a point, and discuss things like, for example, delaying gratification studies or skills acquisition processes. These topics, however, are presented in a great scientific manner (well, maybe not a scientific, but at least authors are not bullshitting with you and consider you to be smart) and are supplied with data and good examples, so it's a pleasure to read (listen to) them.

I also think this book is a must-read for entrepreneurs, as they are the ones, who must influence people all the time and be good at it. And while they usually learn to do so by practicing, this book might provide a great deal of theory to start with."

I'm also listening to the other book by these authors now - it's called "Crucial Conversations", seems like it's really useful too.
'lots of people would ask why their speed "went down"'

I don't see that as a problem. It's just an education issue. Besides, better products thrive in a marketplace with educated consumers.

If broadband providers were required to advertise their offerings in a consistent way (as they are here in Australia, although not in the way I describe upthread) choice for consumers would be a lot easier. The only people that lose are the big companies with big marketing budgets and inferior products.
Those 7 habits has exact spirit from Sun Tzu. It seems that given similar environments, evolution process fosters similar way of thinking.
Or they could spend money on bandwidth...
I. Avoid war by every possible means..

Yes, they call Basil II (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_II) Boulgaroktonos because he avoided war so much.

IV. Replace the battle of attrition and occupation of countries with maneuver warfare

Riiiiight.... is it just me or is that not in fashion today and was not in fashion when Byzantine occupied most of the freaking ex-west Roman empire.

V. Strive to end wars successfully by recruiting allies to change the balance of power.

Oh that worked out real well with the Ottomans, they didn't turn on the Byzantines at all.
What does command+clicking in the track do? It works the same way as just clicking for me, unless I'm missing something.
Using a screen capture is not exactly cheating. It's automating regression testing and that's a Good Thing. A human ensures the first implementation is correct and then the tests ensure future implementations are correct too. There is also stuff that could (and should) be tested - like a drawing primitive that should not exceed a given region, a pixel that should be of a given color or even an operation that should finish in a given number of cycles for a given pixel count. Erroneous arguments should also be tested as the proper exceptions should be thrown (or, at the very least, proper error codes should be emitted).

For those who write the demo code, there is a lot of tests to do on the gameplay itself - collisions detection, rendering tests, physics and a whole lot of stuff that will also serve as nice documentation on how to use the components that are being exercised.
I think Microsoft Project does Gantt's
If no one wants a dictionary, then no one will pay for it to be written. That's the same now as under my regime. My idea is, if someone wants a dictionary, they would either write one or pay someone to write one. It's still pretty capitalistic. The same people pay for it, there's just more haggling and risk involved.
He could have emailed Dustin from gmail then told Dustin to make a throw away email that he would email "hey Betsy, hope the trip went well. Did you bring me back any chocolate from Switzerland?" Done. Verified and completely secure.
I'd include: have really good walls. Those saved their bacon time after time.
1) Create something significantly better than the safe choice has.

2) Convince a few well respected companies to take a chance on you.

3) Use that social proof to get everyone else to follow their lead.

4) Profit.
Venture capitalists: Startup failure as a badge of honor
I had problems with clicking on the track to jump the scroller to a given position. Also, I find that the memory resources used by Flash when the scroller contains a lot of objects is unacceptably high resulting in slow scrolling; therefore I had to waste time doing some funky lazy-loading stuff also.

I would say that implementing custom scroller in JS is far easier (and reliable) that Flash. And there are plenty of frameworks (ahem Cappuccino) where such controls are included.

But scrollers are just one example of the UI controls the article talks about :)
Here only alt+clicking does something different, on tiger.
that's an interesting reason to not try something. i don't entirely understand the reasoning.

did you also not try google when it launched because they didn't have as many employees as yahoo?
"The Source" for all your game used memorabilia
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Perhaps, but this is not about the best SCM tool. I'm not sure SVN needs the warm wing of Apache, but I don't think it hurts, either.
Hmm .. maybe this will catch Virgin attention if all of us do it?

http://twitter.com/hwijaya/status/5436741226
Not sure what they mean, but if you give another window focus, you can Command+Drag the scroll bar, and the window won't receive focus.
Signs of Prostate Cancer
In real life he is obviously extraordinary, I don't understand the point of the last comment, "especially given that in real life he's comparatively normal."

The very fact he does this, and shares it makes him extraordinary.
Yeah, this happens on some screens. I spend all day looking at and designing white websites, and I just enjoy playing with dark on my own site.

I feel I can take risks with my blog that I can't take elsewhere. Sorry if it bothers you.
With the current 'jake' branch and its' imminent merging into master, the framework resources are sprited meaning they all load in one http request (rather than many). This eliminates the fragmented loading of the UI, which, I agree, can throw people at first!
I haven't tried it but I ran across this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GanttProject
This reminds me of something I heard about Motorola, and their decline after the Razor phone peaked. They learned that the phone business is more like the fashion business than the electronics business.

With software related to the dev process, look how fast Subversion went from cool to uncool. It took just one viral Linus video.

I think there IS a bit of a network effect and Joel is correct to have concerns.
A tiny house, a few books, and a big bottle of Smirnoff. Could be paradise.
Help John recover
this is why i run ubuntu in a vm and do all my serious development there.
The lingering cognitive effects of a bad night's sleep
That's still heavier than cash when you look at the purpose of owning physical gold - as a store of value. People usually want to store increments of 10K, 50K or more, and that gets heavy/bulky enough even as paper 100s - so with your gold calculation we'd multiply that by three. Bank transfers or checks are far easier to handle. For everyday trade or barter it's not so much the weight of the metal as the drag on trading - using scales, checking for shaving or lead etc. What I meant was that gold has no valuable purpose, aside from some jewelry application, so people primarily use it as a store of value, and as that it's not the best, whether you're a wealthy individual, bank or country.
AANAL, but I'm pretty sure he's covered by trademark law anyway, and could win in court. (In this case, I'd say _would_ win in court.) He would just not be a allowed to win damages unless registered. (He'd have to pay his own court costs.)
The tradeoffs largely depend on 1) your deployment model and 2) the cost of the bug itself. If you're running a web service, diagnosing and fixing bugs is a whole lot easier than if you're shipping pre-packaged, installed software. If the cost of failure is just "some user action failed, they'll try again when it works" it's far less critical to prevent it than if it's "your data is now corrupted." Something like a social media site is on one end of the scale, where you're running a service and where most bugs are non-fatal. Installed backend financial transactions systems for large companies, for example, are at the other end of the scale, where fixing bugs in deployed software is hard (you might not have the information to really diagnose the failure or the ability to reproduce it in-house, and the fix will require a patch that someone else has to apply and deploy), and the failure can be incredibly costly.
HTTP's Best-Kept Secret: Caching
Catch MLB World Series 2009 Live Yankees and Phillies Game 6
How to ensure that [some] people won't read your post: require Flash.
It would depend on the particular tests they are allowed to undergo. For example, it's been stated that the M16 needs to be properly cleaned, so any test that would emphasis taking a pristine sample and shooting would not produce adverse results and probably make the gun place highly due to its better accuracy.

However, were the trials to include sullying the rifle, banging it against something, throwing it on the ground repeatedly, etc. What would the results be then?

As another poster mentioned, sometimes in life (and especially in combat I would assume) shit happens, and you need a gun to fire then, not when it's all nice and clean.

So it's very easy to game the system, especially if the war games include strictly enforcing weapon maintenance which might not be the case in actual combat.
I would advise staying away from both Ant and Maven. Use Rake or some other scripting based build system and cut out the XML middleman (this from a long-time Java coder who's fed up with the impedence mismatch of 'I want to do X, but XML lets me do Y, and I don't have time to write my own Ant task to do it').

But, if you must, use Ant and forget about Maven - way more complex than it needs to be. And, again, if dependency management is a must, look at Ivy.
Perhaps you should check out NOLOH, http://www.noloh.com. It's similar to Cappuccino in some ways, yet very different in others. For instance, NOLOH is lightweight and on-demand. It also fails gracefully when JS is disabled in most cases, and is faster overall (this is based on our internal testing. Not trying to start a war). Notice how noloh.com loads instantly without any loading, or delay.

NOLOH also works with tab focus, and is more accessibility friendly. You can read more about our accessibility features at https://www.noloh.com/#/faqs/. We'll be posting major updates to HN in the next week or two, we last posted around a year ago, in case you haven't heard of us.
New Insights into Web Application Performance (webkit inspector additions)
Just so you know the backstory:

Ladies and gents, our friend John was the victim of a violent crime last night. He was shot in the chest in Louisville Nov. 3rd by two men while picking up dinner for his wife. Our heart goes out to John and his whole family. John is a terrific guy and an invaluable member of our team as our lead Rails developer. We want to support him during his recovery and hope you can help too.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions the news consumer of the future
KORa - 3D racing for your Java-enabled phone
I'm not sure what fool voted you down, but I fixed that. He's talking about local (checked out), not repository, copies.
i would be down for organizing something to help make this happen.