skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "Facebook has always excelled on targeting. Google has really been trying to catch up in that regard," says Jeremy Kressman, an analyst at eMarketer, a market research firm. Just this week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google was looking to give advertisers a way to target existing customers, mimicking a feature already available from Facebook.

I feel like this misses the point of Facebook's strength and Google's (and other competitors') weakness. Facebook is freaking terrible at targeting. Essentially every targeted ad or page suggestion they've ever given me has been laughable. It's not scientific but I've yet to meet anyone who's had a different experience. With Google's products, you either hear the typical annoyance associated with any advertising or you hear "it was freaky that Google knew to show me that!"

The reason Facebook is still huge and Google+ is niche at best is interoperability. Social networks (this style at least) aren't like email providers or cell phone carriers where even if there are a few main competitors, you can't just switch to the one you prefer and expect to keep communicating with people on the "established" service.

Facebook was lucky enough to be "the one" that got your mom to sign up along with your grandma, your boss, your doctor, and your ex. Friendster and Myspace and all of those were big but they never really shed that teen/tween association for a lot of people. Facebook came up when all of the rest of the public was mostly ready to see what this social networking stuff was all about.

And unlike AIM or Hotmail or any of the other big players in chat or email, you can't just use Facebook with a third party client or another compatible service. So unless you get everyone to switch over to something else (or you maintain multiple profiles and sets of contacts) there is little to be gained by using anything but the single, big player on the field.

The relative failure of Google+ has nothing to do with how good Facebook is at targeting (or how good the service is overall). Hell, I would have switched over in a second. Way cleaner and faster mobile app. Nicer website, chat, voice calling, and all the other stuff Facebook has or added to compete with Google.

But even though I sorta hate Facebook's site and I sorta love Google+'s Circles feature, it doesn't matter. Because I'll never convince all of those people to move over and without them, a social network is worthless. It really is a shame because it's as if Facebook is the new email except email isn't a standard and you can only use one provider. It's as if AOL somehow made regular email incompatible back when they were a massive ISP in the US. If you had to have AOL to email other AOL users, who would dare switch?
Excellent. This is the crux of the question. Ideas have to be evaluated on their content, not according to the identity of the authors, otherwise civilized discourse is shut down.
Good question, according to wikipedia:

"In contrast with commercial broadcasting, NPR's radio broadcasts do not carry traditional commercials, but has advertising in the form of brief statements from major sponsors which may include corporate slogans, descriptions of products and services, contact information such as website addresses and telephone numbers."

They have a revenue of about 180 million.

I don't actually think they're doing this for the money, they are a non-profit after all. I believe them when they just want the public to have access to FM radio. All the more reason for them not to engage in dirt writing like this.
As far as not catching checked exceptions goes, this is actually possible in the Java language as well since the language allows throwing a generic type parameter. It's pretty difficult to do by accident though, and does at least give a compile warning.

public class Dangerous {

public static void main (String ... args) {
Dangerous.<RuntimeException>throwUnchecked(new IOException("Forgot to catch me!"));
}

static <T extends Exception> void throwUnchecked(Exception e) throws T{
throw (T) e;
}
}
But the question is, what's natural about the Naturals, and whats accidental about the Accidentals? Because taken together they are just 12 equally spaced notes.
> There are a number of rackets associated with easy corporate creation.

This is an interesting point. Italy tends to optimize for the 'worst case'... "well, this could go wrong, so we'll make everyone do X, Y, and Z". Therefore, all the honest people have to pay extra in terms of time and bureaucracy to the detriment of society as a whole.

My take is to make things easy for honest people, and come down on the dishonest/fraudulent ones fairly hard.
I praise you for giving us the fuck!
Rogue Events in Backbone.js
Something doesn't look right.

How can such a small sliver go into flat6(b6) and yet a much thicker sliver flows out into flat7(b7)?
I thought this was going to be about the Flash of Unstyled Text browsers experience with custom fonts.
By idiomatic Scala, perhaps he meant the expressive use of language in contrast to writing an application in Scala using the last century's programming habits.
The IETF does not generally practice what they preach in this regard, Google's contributions being a rare bright spot. The fiasco of trying to get Curve25519 standardized for TLS is a pretty good example of the way IETF tends to work.
Why Prezi makes you dizzy and how to fix it
This is a genuinely interesting piece that touches a number of loosely related points. They are (as I read them):

- Engineering jobs are not primarily being about problem-solving (like he had hoped)

- High-salaries and vanity perks (chair-massage, lunch) can make us feel work-related frustrations are invalid because we have so many perks (on paper). But vanity perks don't compensate for a fundamentally unfulfilling or disrespectful workplace.

- Programming for oneself and for a company can be fundamentally different experiences emotionally.

- A lot of engineering drive (to work overtime) and need to be "the best" stem from overcompensating and insecurity.

- Negating our own and each others feelings is common as exemplified through phrases like "suck it up"

- Competitiveness and attempts to establish superiority through irrelevant disagreements (mansplaining) illustrate an unbearable culture where you won't find friends.

- Provides an anecdote of an insensitive boss.

- Admits to a problem of anger-swings that is exacerbated by software.

- Admits to feeling so aimless that he has not worked for a week at a time but instead browsed social media.

Clearly the author is not without flaw himself, and doesn't try to pretend he is (anger swings). I really enjoy these candid reflections that bring up a number of great questions instead of artificially trying to answer just one.
The greatest natural disaster that almost was
It's funny this reminds of the noFap community on reddit who aim to quit masturbation in order to improve productivity and happiness.
It's funny you should say "Every time I update Windows, or even restart my windows laptop I hope that it'll still work afterwards. Updating has previously killed my dedicated graphics card, which turned out to be a driver issue. With Intel providing 2 nearly identical drivers one of which kills it."

That's funny because …

I just surrendered my MacBook Pro to an Apple Store for service yesterday because the external display mysteriously stopped working and the system won't fully boot. The on-site service tech was super competent but totally baffled and sent the machine away for Apple to replace components until things start working again.

And today Apple just released OS X 10.10.3 Supplemental Update which has description "The OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 Supplemental Update fixes a video driver issue that may prevent your Mac from starting up when running certain apps that capture video."

Hmmmmmmm.
I'm fairly certain that they are identical. Hadley got the publisher to agree to allow him to keep the website up after publishing.
The rude coworker probably has that attitude (i.e., the attitude that technical skill is everything) because his social skills are so bad that he has given up on the possibility of improving them.

So, if your skin is thick enough, you might take some comfort in the knowledge that the guy's probably not skilled enough to harm you even if he decides you "deserve" to be harmed :)
git diff --word-diff=color

Not exactly sentence-level, but perhaps good enough for some...
What do you do when a document has a period in its key?
I do write (draw, doodle, sketch, diagram) with pencil/paper as an initial stage in most pieces of work that I produce. I don't just 'write a lot of words in a row' (quoting Schneier's setup page). Nothing fancy, just HB pencils on A4 photocopying paper on a clipboard.

Once I have an idea of the structure, I can decide which tool to use. Often markdown but equally often LibreOffice. Sometimes Inkscape.

Yes: I also use a fountain pen (I haven't used a goose feather for some decades now, but we did have dipping pens at primary school).

With the new Android text input recognition tool, I am seriously considering the purchase of a cheap tablet and stylus.
You must not really be a programmer ;)

Late night, vision is starting to blur and you've typed `git push origin master` incorrectly dozens of times already...

$ FUCK!!!111ksjdkjsd
The Pursuit of Happyness, Top Gun, The Shawshank Redemption
Okay that was hilarious!
مشاهدة فيلم زنقة ستات
I'm not having any difficulty; if it were thin enough, I don't think I'd mind at all.

My concerns are with the precision.
Microsoft Open Technologies is closing
Minecraft flips this on its head. It has permanence, massive world scaling, and endless potential for per-player experiences thanks to its purely open-ended nature.
His first video is lots of fun and amazing. Glad he set the record straight in his second video.
You think that's bad? In Japan and other countries their mobile phones can pick up broadcast television for free, no problem. It has been that way for many many years. They had that technology before we even had the iPhone. Imagine if you could just pick up NBC/ABC/CBS/FOX/PBS, etc. on your phone without issue. Verizon would have a pretty hard time selling you on NFL live streaming.
Here's an equivalent "alias" for the fish shell:

function fuck
eval (thefuck (history | head -n1))
end
>the experiments are trivial (roll a ball down a slope!)

they should replace it with trivial experiments of the 21st century - photon counting for Bell inequalities testing.

Wrt. the original article - good riddance, one less orthodoxy in science. Because it isn't about a tool - p-values in this case - itself, it is about orthodoxy which is the main enemy of science.
Mostly the gathering and keeping of passenger name records (PNR) by the security services. I object to being registered in this way.
Stuff it in your shorts so you have another hand to swim with.
Thanks much for writing this up! At some point, I hope to get to it, too ;-) Until then, I thought I'd share my approach on how I wrote my entire PhD Thesis using AsciiDoc here. In my field of High Energy Nuclear Physics, data analyses usually are accompanied by so-called "Analysis WebPages" which I generate from the same AsciiDoc source files using Wordpress and Stuart Rackham's blogpost [1,2]. Images and other binary files I organize and version-control at a central location using git-annex [3,4] which also allows me to easily backup and share figures with my collaborators online. Bibliographies I auto-generate from the usual bibtex file via asciidoc-bib [5]. I've developed a Makefile [6] that does all of the above "automagically", triggered by simple commands like `make thesis` (generate full PDF), `make hp` (push AsciiDoc source to corresponding Wordpress page), and `make tag` (generate a new thesis version based on git tag and upload to webpage). Unfortunately, my thesis isn't publicly available, yet, but will be soon along with the sources and git history (I hope). In the meantime, the HN readers with STAR privileges [7] can feel free to explore a full working example at [8-10].

[1] https://github.com/tschaume/wp-pdf
[2] https://srackham.wordpress.com/blogpost-readme/
[3] https://git-annex.branchable.com/
[4] http://downloads.the-huck.com/README/
[5] https://github.com/petercrlane/asciidoc-bib
[6] https://gist.github.com/tschaume/a28fdf3522b81a7a4674
[7] http://www.star.bnl.gov/
[8] http://cgit.the-huck.com/phdthesis/tree/
[9] http://star.the-huck.com/
[10] http://star.the-huck.com/download/
Content Marketing Distribution for B2B Marketers
There's two other differences you'd need to account for:

* One Pu-238 nucleus weighs 238 amu; a triton only weighs 3 amu

* Tritium decays 7 times faster -- a 12.32 year half-life, vs. 87.7 years for Pu-238

Put together, the specific power (watts/kg) of pure tritium is about twice as high. That's chemically just hydrogen gas, which I'd guess isn't practical. The solids with the highest hydrogen density, like polyethylene ([C2H4]n), would be less power-dense, but not by much.

But I think there's some slack here. The ESA is designing their future RTGs to use Americium-241, which is drastically worse (in terms of these figures), yet still usable.
I would think that "people" were driving the company to the ground. I'm working on a large-scale Scala project that has been going on for years. The codebase is clean, methods are easy to reason about. It not as verbose as Java would be, there's no monkey-patching like you might see in Ruby, refactoring is much safer than it would be in JavaScript, and it runs on Linux much better than C# would. And thanks to FP the code is thread-safe and mostly free of side-effects (except where they're explicitly required). I wouldn't trade Scala for any other language, for this kind of work.
A Million Little Boxes: The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament
Well yes, but the interface to the site is much more annoying than the book (which is rather cheap for a textbook of this sort).

YMMV, but I got much more from the book than from the site, and was also able to give hadley some money in the process, so its win-win :)
> Google's been down, ditto for facebook, twitter and Azure

The first three, at least, are free services and availability isn't a priority for many of their customers. Bloomberg users have different requirements.

Boeing 747's are complex systems; it's not acceptable if one fails occasionally.
Actually, the anti-vaccination movement has great relevance here. Much like Takaki's effective treatment was lampooned because of it's similarity to archaic traditional medicine and surely got wrapped up in politics of the time, the anti-vaccination movement has similarly become wrapped up by politics and can no longer sanely be discussed.

Takaki most likely had to contend with thinking his cure for beriberi was similarly "monumentally stupid" and "based on poor 'science' and scaremongering", which prevented an objective examination of his experiments.
I can't imagine using RethinkDB until the query language ensures type safety. The article touts about SQL being full of strings, but ironically there are fully typed query builders for SQL but not for RethinkDB. All DB tables has schema even though it's not listed anywhere, and schemaless databases can't have fully typed query language either.
My social skills aren't exactly world-class, but sure, I could leave if I wanted to. It's easy enough to get another job. But what happens at the next job, or the next?

It's not the "technical skills are everything" view that I think was at play here -- it's the "a person must do X, Y, and Z for me to consider them a 'real programmer'/respect them" (where X, Y, and Z vary wildly from person to person). Java developers scoff at PHP developers, and NoSQL evangelists look down on anything with tables. If you don't know how to search a b-tree, computer science majors extol the virtues of a formal education, and if you're self-taught with 10 years in industry, you laugh at the poor CS majors who can't properly manage a Github repo.

This creates a dangerous mix when a "culture of constant learning" starts to become a "culture of constant pedantry"
> The consumer is penalized for canceling the trip (you can usually get the cancellation fee waived if you have a good reason, i.e. "the driver didn't arrive for 20 minutes and seemed confused when I called them")

As somebody who has only used Lyft, this is yet another reason why I won't even touch Uber. I've cancelled many times because a driver accepted a request while sitting in their house and then wasted my time while they (presumably) sat on their ass and watched TV. I've also had drivers call me and ask me to cancel because their car broke down or the app on their phone locked up. I don't want to have to call support and argue with them to waive a fee every time this happens.

(oh, and your whole comment was spot on... I was just so shocked when you wrote that Uber operates like that that I had to say something)
NSA Spying Is at Stake in This 'Last-Ditch' Reform Bill
Technically free speech but not really means censored speech. Pushing the boundaries of freedom is a virtue in and of itself, for if we do not push on them, they will slowly strangle us.
I wonder if they've done any studies of the impact of circumcision on condom use. In my own experience (circumcised at 31 for medical reasons), post-circumcision I experienced a dramatic reduction in sensation when having sex with a condom on. This isn't really a problem for me, as I'm married, but I could imagine it really disincentivising condom use for people who have more casual relationships.

It was quite an eye-opener for me - previously I'd wondered why people considered condomless sex such a big deal: I preferred it, but it wasn't some earth-shattering difference.
That's not really the complete picture. People want to use the Google standards you mention because they solve a real problem and is proved in production. What problem does Office Open XML solve, apart from not being Open Document XML? You use it because of external factors, not because it is an elegant solution to a problem.
Correction (self-reply): Switching to 32-bit mode won't work - or could be easily prevented at any rate: you can't switch directly to real 32-bit mode ("legacy mode"), only to "compatibility mode" where the page table format stays the same, and task switching isn't supported. Switching to legacy mode requires a wrmsr, which is blocked. Even if there was a benefit to going into compatibility mode with kernel privileges, once there you're limited to the bottom 4GB of the address space, which would normally be reserved for user mode, and since SMEP is forced on you can't execute user pages in kernel mode. So the inner kernel just needs to prevent any executable kernel pages from being mapped below 4GB.

Told you I wasn't an x86 expert. But the other points stand.

...though in the current implementation the inner kernel doesn't block the relevant MSR write, so it may be possible anyway, although the manual says you're supposed to disable paging first, which is blocked. In any case, this, along with the hardware VM thing (since VMX can be disabled in cr4), would be easy to fix. I'm not so sure about the interrupt approach.
FCC opens up “Citizens Broadband” spectrum via spectrum sharing plan
There's also evil-lisp-state (which is essentially a modal interface to smartparens), https://github.com/syl20bnr/evil-lisp-state, and evil-smartparens (https://github.com/expez/evil-smartparens) which makes the default motion operators work better with sexps.
Neal Stephenson wrote three 700 page books with a fountain pen about 12 years ago.
Are you writing in a different language and then translating to English? The point is the text makes no sense coming from a human.
You got the stats wrong. Its always the same site specifically some unnamed Google property (they used Search and Youtube as other examples so it could be one of them).

Google is say that, for clients connecting to the same site, the slowest 1% of those clients saw a 1 second improvement in page load time by using QUIC instead of TCP. (presumably its SPDY + QUIC against SPDY + TCP as they say at the end of the article). That's pretty good.

It was 1 second shaved
Microsoft Open Tech Subsidiary Rejoins MSFT
Which issues did you experience with http://www.artima.com/pins1ed/? (It's a slightly older version, but there aren't many changes which would be important for newbies.)

Partially free:

Atomic Scala also has at least a free sample, which expects basically no programming experience at all: http://www.atomicscala.com/free-sample/

Scala for the Impatient is also nice, but is more intended to help programmers get up to speed with Scala as fast as possible: http://www.horstmann.com/scala/index.html
Validate the encoding before passing strings to libcurl or glibc
> The fact that this remained controversial

It's still controversial. For example, the photograph. If I was Whitehead, I'd take care to preserve the photo, making copies of it, etc. But that photo is the only one not preserved. The only evidence is that massively blurred smudge, which has to be very charitably interpreted as being a flying airplane.

Even if it is, I would suspect Whitehead would have flown it as he flew gliders - launching off the top of a hill and gliding down. That isn't really powered flight.

Nobody can prove Whitehead didn't fly, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and that is simply lacking for Whitehead's flight. I also find it odd that he did not challenge the Wright's patents for wing warping, etc., if he did it first.
Everything you need to understand about persisting data to a physical medium has be written by richard hipp et al. You can't cheat. You can easily write async write calls in your own app to a synchronised storage engine and not assume the cost. When you have to have written logs which are accessed by government agencies you need to think about the atomicity of what a transaction is in you business. Is it when it enters the building as an electrical signal or when you flip the bits on a spinning disk

Methinks the world has forgotten that high throughput systems existed long before the web of recent years. Most of what the web world thinks is high throughput is hilariously slow. The ability to run up another instance to scale sideways has ruined people. It doesn't scale in a linear fashion.
This looks very helpful ... however, could we get a PG version like "The Crap"?
53-year-old Heather Locklear Flaunts Hot Bikini Bod
Maybe, but pedestrians have a higher rate of actual accidents. ;)
> Well, one could write one sentence per one line, but that makes a pretty ugly txt document, when viewed raw.

Many of the tech writers I work with advocate exactly this.

In my stuff, I just hard line wrap the text. Diffs do tend to have more spurious whitespace changes because of this than I'd like, but that's still miles better than a completely opaque binary format like Word.
Remember the saying to not blame on malice what is explained by stupidity? Their organization when it is to their benefit casts strong doubts on the use of stupidity as a satisfactory explanation.