skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My impression from Wave was the same: the hierarchical structure turns "waves" into an unmaintainable mess too easily and too quickly. I find the user interface a bit counter-intuitive and cluttered too.

Whatever Paul feels about Wave, he actually makes a couple of clever suggestions Wave's team, I think, should listen to: make it (optionally?) linear and also build the wave-to-email gate. These two things are more important for Wave at the moment than anything else.

If Paul built Wave it'd probably be in a more usable state now, wouldn't it?
He wrote GMail. It's very common for humans to have a strong enough emotional investment and attachment to the fruits of their labor that they act irrationally in manners involving that creation. Seeing GMail get abandoned by users would be psychologically very similar to (though probably far less severe than) the pain of seeing your child spurned by his peers.
Santa uses R
"...but if an argument is based on data from a complex system I don't think it's possible to determine if that data was chosen in an unbiased manner without actually looking at all the available data and essentially re-deriving the arguer's conclusion."

But this is exactly what I come to Hacker News for. In this case, there are definitely HN readers who can understand the code ESR is talking about, and pretty quickly figure out if there are flaws in ESR's reasoning regarding the code in question.

Once we have the actual flaws in his reasoning, his tea-baggery or whatever become completely irrelevant, because we have much more solid reasons for rejecting his conclusions. If this were a different forum, with no participants well versed in technology, mathematics, and the scientific method, maybe you need to consider the motivation of the arguer when considering the validity of the argument. HN is not that forum.
"board members and, as a consequence, managers have a fiduciary duty to maximise the wealth of shareholders."

Not all business are publicly traded corporations.
In Firefox:

— Adblock Plus: makes the Web so much less claustrophobic.

— Firebug: Although I don't do much actual web development, I'll often use it to grab the URL of some Flash video so I can watch it in a real media player, or disable some CSS mistake to make reading more comfortable (letter-spacing, I'm looking at you).

— Firegestures: I miss the old RadialContext extension, but mouse-gestures are an acceptable replacement.

— It's All Text: Configured to open files in a tab in the currently-open gvim instance, it's vastly more comfortable to edit lengthy wiki-pages or file detailed bug-reports than using the dinky little textarea control.

Honourable mention:

— Tree Style Tab: The best thing about this extension is having a huge expanse at the left-hand-side of the browser upon which I can double-click to get a new tab, but making it easier to work with massive numbers of open tabs (say, API references for various classes I'm working with + various google searches for error messages + the bugs I'm working on fixing) is much appreciated too.
To some people, rejecting pledges is sane for the same reason that rejecting the right to sell oneself into lifelong slavery is sane.
Flash, Erlang and Realtime Collaborative Interfaces
an erlang server that enables flash clients to stay synchronized and creates a realtime collaborative system ...
http://jottit.com/udef3/
The passion that flows through this man's veins every time he speaks is amazing. Just listening to him makes me want to turn toothpicks into treasure.
On the plus side, if aliens like these ever do show up it's because they genuinely have our interest at heart or they want something but not something they can just take -- leverage on our part -- which for them, would be easy. Also good, they can eliminate us in a heart beat so don't have to worry about waging war with them. :D
Good God people, Why is this even a discussion ? If this Muppet is taken seriously - maximize the wealth of shareholders ABOVE ALL ELSE, then why not shoot rival fund managers? Invade small countries? You are either ethical or not. There is no middle ground.
Sounds like a rough way to live. No drivers license. No insurance. No access to debt. I'd have had a real tough time getting any work without promising to actually do the work.

Honestly, I'm pretty impressed you're able to maintain an internet connection without promising to behave in a certain way.
This is a very nice post showing that sometime you need to go far away to see what assumptions you are quite unaware that you are holding.
Presentation logic mixed in with business logic? Non-reusable models? Yuck!
Yes, but coming up with a non binary data management system (ie: one that uses a bit in four states) requires a whole new language of machine code before you can get the quark to talk. Making one bit of info is still thirty years away from a functioning device
Wave seems to afford multiple interaction conventions, but unlike with email (where we know the pros and cons of top-posting, for example), it isn't obvious what way works best, and for what situations. It seems unlikely that we'll know anytime soon, either, given that Wave is meant to encompass a wider range of tasks than any of the systems is is typically compared with. Right now, we have the conventions of the linear or hierarchical conversations used by email and web forums, and we have the conventions of the collaboratively annotated and edited documents, but we don't know which to use in the gray areas, because that decision has previously been made by the choice of program. It feels to me like we're driving cars prior to the invention of turn signals, brake lights, stop signs, and demarcated lanes. We have to use trial and error to evolve the rules of the road.
It's hard to understand why the personal computer wasn't invented by a large company.
My kids just started playing games on my iPod touch, now I'm seriously thinking of getting each of them one of these pads for Christmas.

Let them loose with one of these pads, periodically review what they come up with, and maybe they'll happen upon a marketable app idea. :)
Since it's a weekend, I believe the board is open to rampant speculation, and this is a good topic as any for it.

I mostly lean towards C -- all civilizations perish. But I think we use the word "perish" to mean some sort of cataclysmic end. That's probably not the case at all. As I look back on the last 300 years, I see mankind evolving more and more technologies. With each new evolution, people do less and less physical activity, and more and more emotion is put into virtual reality. The cataclysm won't be nuclear war -- we should be so lucky. The cataclysm will be eon after eon of inactivity and stagnation. (I already see this in the movement to "solve problems at home first" before space exploration and the "what right do we have to contaminate other planets" school of environmentalism.

I'd give B good odds as well -- good enough that there are probably thousands or millions of civilizations that survived. Also looking at patterns in our own evolution, I think machine-based intelligences operating at super-high bandwidths and living for millions of years would have as much in common with us as we do with ants. Do ants know that people exist? Probably not.
It's a discussion because it's true. In many countries, including the US and the UK it is illegal for a board of directors to not do whatever it takes to maximize shareholder value.

The implications of that are particularly important when, as is currently happening in the US, there's a discussion of the role of government in things like health care.

Basically: In a lot of cases it's illegal for a company to do "the right thing" if that right thing looses the company money, but isn't explicitly illegal. See pre-existing conditions.

One thing that does fall out of this that is rather counter intuitive and the Ron Paul's of this world don't like to hear it is that quite often, big companies are lobbying for stricter regulation.

The reason is that they may have ethical/marketing problems with doing a certain thing, but can't not do it, as there are other, less scrupulous companies that don't have these problems and thus squeeze them on price..
Surely nothing is wrong with following the orders of the shareholders. What is the difference between their recommended oath:

I pledge to maximise the wealth of the people who pay my salary, i.e. the shareholders, unless the shareholders tell me in advance that they want me to do something else.

and

All Political Leaders stand as appointed by the Fuehrer and are responsible to him.

There is such a thing in this world as individual, moral responsibility.
A better title for the article might have been "Five Heuristics for Writing Good Code".
Doesn't matter, also applies to shareholders of private companies.
I haven't applied this principle to my daily life like he has, but it is an important problem solving technique that I apply when programming.

Most people just call this "managing complexity". ;)
Or maybe bandwidth just gets too at any distance and nobody wants to be that far from home...
So directors and officers have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value, and therefore any obligation that conflicts with this duty is improper?

I wonder whether the author would apply this to lawyers. They, after all, have fiduciary duties to their clients, such as that of zealous advocacy. Is he advocating that no ethical obligations should trump the lawyer's duty of zealous advocacy?

If not, what is the distinguishing principle?
"The odds of there being only one single planet that evolved life among all that unfathomable vastness seems so incredible that it is all but completely irrational to believe."

Not at all true, until we find a second. Because you can't really use statistics until that point.
Nowhere that I can see do they sell a ~$300 product. They sell "trials" and subscriptions, and hide the full price in fine print. A legit business would at least show a real price tag for the real product. (For example, ads for products with a rebate usually show the after-rebate price in a large font, but the before-rebate price is always adjacent to it, not in a sidebar or at the bottom of the page, and never on a separate page.)
I am the VP Marketing at Justin.tv, this was also not reviewed by a lawyer :)

"DMCA basically gives you 72 hours to take something down"

I don't believe there's any law or precedent that states 72 hours (or any number of hours) as a required turnaround time. More importantly, for the vast majority of infringing broadcasts, we don't take 72 hours (or any number of hours) to respond to a request for takedown. Instead, the vast majority of owners of infringing content (over 150 companies including probably all copyright owners you can name) have access to a tool that lets them take down content instantly without any intervention on our part.

"Livestreaming sites have put content fingerprinting technology in place and often respond very fast to takedown notices"

When you refer to these sites, I'm curious which ones you have in mind other than Justin.tv. We do have live finderprinting and we do respond instantly to most takedown noticed. However, I don't know of other live sites that are doing either of those. In fact, Ustream was sued this summer due to not responding to takedown notices and Fox's content group legal counsel has specifically stated that Livestream has not gone to the same measures to protect copyright holders as Justin.tv.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/17/ustream-sued-by-boxing-...

http://newteevee.com/2009/11/11/justin-tv-live-fingerprintin...

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/110031/JTV/Video/content%20filtering...
I was about to give up after the first paragraph or so of the README. Wasting time telling me how bad something is doesn't really help me understand your project if all you do is heap on empty hyperbole.

My bigger complaint is that after going through the whole README I still didn't know if this lib does everything that XSLT does.

I've written way more XSLT than I'd care to remember (though it was a good way to get familiar with functional programming), and my biggest issue was that most of the transforms I cared about were on large files of regular data.

Since then I started using Ruby, and found that rolling my own transformation code was pretty straightforward, but the key was using a pull parser so that I didn't have to slurp a giant XML file into memory. (I've written about this; the curious can google for the article).

I saw nothing in the README about handling large data or working with a pull parser.
I have had that experience with many companies. Often times in financial companies it will be up to the discretion of a partner to decide if they would like to pay interns.

I interviewed with two different offices of a large brokerage (shall remained unnamed but they were purchased by BoA). One office told me I would get school credit for filling orders. The other office offered to pay me for doing market analysis. It seems the difference lies in how much they value an interns service.
This piece only talks about the needs of the new mom and neglects to address reasons why the company should feel motivated to be accommodating. That's like asking for a raise because you need money rather than because you bring more value to the company than you used to. Here are a few reasons companies should make an effort to accommodate the needs of moms:

Diversity. A diverse workforce is a strength for a company. Excluding moms would cause a weakness in the corporate culture which may go entirely unrecognized, even if it ultimately helps contribute to the failure of the company.

One thing this particular form of diversity could help address: The fact that females play games a lot less than males as well as generally have less interest in a variety of tech products. If there were more women and mothers in programming, the odds are good that apps would be designed in a way which appealed more to the female market than many of them currently do.

Company policies that are friendly to moms and their kids tend to also be better climates for anyone who can't make it on "traditional" terms of success. Finding an effective means to accommodate the rather large issue of motherhood would tend to automatically create a company culture and set of policies that resolved many lesser issues with little or no additional effort. Happy workers who don't hate some aspect of their job are generally going to do a better job. If the working climate is vastly superior to that of your competitors, you will likely also garner high levels of employee loyalty and a lower turnover rate. Lower turnover pays dividends in many ways, well beyond just the obvious savings of not having to spend so much time and money on the hiring process.
The NFL has access to a tool (along with over 150 other companies) to take content off of Justin.tv instantly. We are pulling the content down immediately after they submit the form asking us to.
Cheers - got it :)
It's true that in the platonic ideal, referees would not trust authors.

In reality, referees do trust that authors are making a good faith effort to present their results accurately (except for a little bit of cherrypicking and glossing over messy parts). As a referee, I'm simply not paid enough to search for fraud.
Finally: Social science data that could be all about you
For firefox, fisheye tabs, ad block, no-script, firebug. Plus some bookmarklets to make pages easier to manage: zap colors, linearize, remove redirects.

And greasemonkey, with about a dozen scripts for various sites.
Programmer.

It doesn't excite me in the least because, since I can't afford to alienate big chunks of my audience, it might have enough penetration to use in, oh, 3-5 years? Meh.
How can you support that claim without having any relevant knowledge? I don't see that a general knowledge of statistics is particularly relevant here -- we're all well aware that things can, in general, be correlated.
Thanks, got it too!
Journalism Schools Can Push Coverage Beyond Breaking News
"Please enter your email address below and we'll let you know when it's released."

An early developer channel version is not a release, else Google would call it so.

Further, it's ridiculous to expect a designer to download a developer release of a browser just to make sure his personal blog is design compliant for a moving target.
What magazines do you subscribe to? All the magazines and newspapers I read sell time-limited (typically annual) subscriptions, and as the year draws to a close they get more and more annoying about asking for a renewal. They are typically advertised along the lines of "10 issues for $60", and that's what they bill you for. Consumers generally only tolerate opt-out billing for ongoing services that aren't delivered in discrete units: things like electricity, water, cable TV, and WoW. A library of n videos is, on the other hand, simply n items.
It still seems unfair to extrapolate from one anecdotal instance to the broad assertion that the smarter 'water' must flow west.

Very condescending.

Edit: My objection is this.

You're saying: A := is-smart => B := must-go-west
Therefore, ~B => ~A, or not-in-the-west => not-smart.
"I would be astounded if scientists routinely actually committed to paper an exhaustive list of all the software installed on the computer they did the math on. (What version of which library, etc etc. So you can reproduce bugs.)"

This shouldn't be necessary, of course. The raw data and a description of the algorithms (with sufficient latex-y equations) should suffice. If not, I don't think the paper is worth much.

I think, though, this is what you meant by:

"Nobody is ever going to try to actually duplicate the math it took to transform your raw data into your massaged data -- that is hard work"

But that is exactly what must happen for anyone to claim they have reproduced the original results. If you just get a VMWare instance of the original author's computer, run his program and get the same results you still are no closer to knowing whether he made a mistake or not.
"After all, it's my iPhone, isn't it? Or is it?"

The phone hardware is yours once your subsidized contract is up with your carrier or you pay the early termination fee. The software is licensed. I don't know of any modern SmartPhone platform that makes juggling operating system versions easy.
Poll HN: What language for a programming competition?
For a programming competition most comparable to MIT's 6.370 that would draw from a large base of programmers, both hard core professionals and amateurs, what programming language would be most accessible for people?

The goal would be to not scare anyone away from the competition and actively encourage non/infrequent programmers to participate. At the same time, we would want the language to offer flexibility to the competitors in their approaches and styles.

Please comment on your choice and what aspects of the language influenced your decision.

EDIT: For clarification, this contest would be most directly comparable to MIT's Battlecode (6.370) http://battlecode.mit.edu/2010/info. This competition involves programming the AI for robots in a simplified RTS game. However, there's no reason why we would necesarily have to build it on the java JVM.
Other (Comment)
View source has a word wrap option.
Do you think the web will be a lot better 5 years from now as a result of HTML5?
Both.

I haven't seen anything exciting about it. It doesn't let me do anything significant that I couldn't with existing technology. It's just the New Style.
FSF works with PayPal to the benefit of the free software community
We do not know the rate at which technology-producing species come about, period. A couple months ago there was a post about how people will come up with a business idea and falsely extrapolate how much money they can make by assuming a seemingly tiny fraction of their imagined potential customer base:

http://sivers.org/1pct

This is precisely the same principle. Remember, there is no designer. The universe was not created as a petri dish for technology-producing species. There is no evidence we are not the only one.

This article tries to cloak the discussion in "logic", but the data is so horridly poor that any discussion about it will serve only to identify each respondent's personal biases about human nature and etc. Your opinion on this topic is all assumptions and no data.
It's definitely the case that I've written programs - or just specific features - that were wrongheaded and caused too much maintenance overhead for the perceived benefit.

But when you're thinking in terms of an organization, the overhead of most complex solutions can be waved away by throwing people at it. And that, in turn, can be the foundation of a strong business - or a huge wasted effort.
I'd love to read a meatier piece on this subject. Not sure the lessons in here actually amount to much.
I see the website fine in Firefox (OSX)
Investment Scale in Seed-Stage Startup Funding
Often, people don't see the long-term consequences of such choices. That lack of broader perspective always reminds me of the Aswan Dam. It accomplished all of its stated goals and was, therefore, a "success" as measured by the stated goals. But it had a few minor little unexpected side effects, like causing a schistosomiasis epidemic, increasing the amount spent on fertilizer for farms by like 600%, etc. ad nauseum.

I get labeled a bleeding heart idealist by a lot of people. I remain frustrated at my inability to adequately explain that my views are typically rooted in something deeply practical. A short explanation: I basically believe in "karma" -- but I don't think there is necessarily anything mystical to it. Just because people frequently can't trace the effect back to its root cause doesn't mean there is no such relationship in reality.

<crossing my fingers and hoping that doesn't sound like some unrelated meandering rant>
Mostly a programmer, and not really. To be honest I would be much happier with better CSS capabilities (better syntax, variables) than video tags and whatnot. I'm not against it obviously, but probably won't be rushing out to learn all the new features.
That's the main issue. The user base for it will be relatively small for several years.

Hopefully many of the people on IE 6 will leapfrog to a HTML 5 browser in the next few years, that would solve a lot of issues.
Explain why you need to enforce one particular language instead of letting contestants pick their own?
It really depends on what are the questions like and whether you're concentrating on the result or the design. If you're concentrating on the results only, then I would recommend the standard acm judge (and similar competitions) technique - put the input on standard input and get the output from standard output. This way you can support all the languages that you're able to run (and you will get less people saying that they cannot use their favourite language X). But choose languages you know how to compile - I remember one competition from highschool times where Pascal people had their code optimised by default, but C people didn't - that sucked.

If it's about design, then look at your audience... there's not that much of a difference between python and java - just choose one. Although with java you'll get loads more boilerplate code which might be tedious to look through.
Considering the guy is from a rival business school, it may safely be assumed that at least 50% of these arguments are put forth solely to rubbish the competitor's product.
Its not unspoken. If you actually read the book, he talks extensively about market types. So do most of the presentations. In fact, these guys are the first people to actually talk extensively about market types and how they effect strategy.
I was too clueless about such things during college to do my own business. Most of my income during college came from working at a grocery store, and as a computer tape librarian.
it's all a hoax? that's it, I'm selling the Prius tomorrow and buying a Hummer.