Should be fixed now, as well as the issue that came out of the fix where you couldn't log in.

And Mr. Stewart, who signed off from “The Daily Show” on Thursday, was more qualified than anybody to puncture this particular pretension. He trained his liberal-leaning audience to mock hypocrisy, incoherence and stupidity, and could have nudged them to see the planks in their own eyes, too. Instead, he cultivated their intellectual smugness by personifying it.

God damn, I think it's just really sad that we've put all this onus on a comedian. "His claims to be objective fell flat", what claims?! He's always been a liberal comedian with a hefty bias. He's not some news man who needs to be objective, he's a comedian! And I don't think he can be blamed for a generation of mindless, non-critical thinking liberals. He was funny, and often held a mirror up to hypocrisy while saying, "This shit is messed up" which is pretty par for the course for a comedian. That his audience didn't go further isn't a mark on him, and that others expected him to make his audience go further is more a mark on the general state of our media.

I did not expect this, at least not this soon. Not that I think it'll change much in the long run. They have much the same board, and the previous people in charge (going back before Pao) did a lot of damage that we probably still haven't seen all the consequences from. As Alexis' initial response to the recent mod blackout has shown, just because you're a founder doesn't mean you necessarily know what the community needs.

chuff chuff chuff chuff

“Not only do authors of negatively-evaluated content contribute more, but also their future posts are of lower quality, and are perceived by the community as such,” they say. And it gets worse: “These authors are more likely to subsequently evaluate their fellow users negatively, percolating these effects through the community.”

By contrast, positive feedback does not appear to influence authors much at all.

We probably got more traffic than that as a ton of pages didn't even load all the javascript before timing out. Here's a bandwidth graph for ya.

I'm no artist, but shameless plug for some of my wife's work

Facebook wants it to be clear: its pushing the forefront of artificial intelligence research. But with that statement comes a reassurance: these machines are not evil, and they're going to make life better.

That reassurance isn't very reassuring to me. Not because I think machines or AI will be necessarily evil, but that Facebook's AI won't necessarily make our lives better.

Also, flagamuffin hopefully this is what you were hoping for.

I had the same experience at the dentist months ago. It was the first time I had actually sat and watched the news for anything longer than a glance. They were really good at extending 5 to 6 minutes of content for damn near an hour.

My condolences, we had a cat go through renal failure and gave her subcutaneous fluids for about 6 months. Best thing we did for her was just gave her palliative care - fed her all the junk Friskies we could.

My wife took it the hardest, as it was her cat since she was a child. I'm sure you're already well informed, but she wanted to pass along these links.

Comprehensive Guide To Feline Chronic Kidney Disease

And the kitty crack we fed her.

When I saw the headline I immediately though of Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice. The issue of what to call yourself is definitely an ongoing debate within software and computing. The last place I worked at let you pick your own title and I chose 'TLA Enthusiast'. I think that using the term engineer may be a bit of a hold over from early in the life computing science where people tried to apply the terms they already had to this new field. Should it be something else? Probably. What should that be? Probably not programmer, as it's a little reductive, IMO.

Shoot, I'm not quite sure, though I've been crushing on women since Kindergarten. I could probably chart my school career with lost loves instead of years and it would make sense (i.e. well I went to my first school dance in the year of Sarah); women are probably my greatest motivation.

My crush was probably in Kindergarten with a girl who I would play tag with after school while our mothers chatted. I didn't see her again until high school where we became friends again. Or perhaps it was in the first grade with a girl who I car pooled with and who was probably my first good friend who was a girl. I also didn't see her until high school at which point she was a popular cheerleader and didn't have for me, who was the only one in school who still knew and called her by her full name an not her nickname.

Or maybe it was the first girl to really broke my heart. You see, I had quite the routine by grade 10. I would fancy a girl and over the school year build up the courage to let them know. Then they would avoid me and I would get over it during the summer break. This happened again in grade 10, but this time it really kicked me in the ass. Maybe it was just because her reaction was so contrary to what I thought was her nature, or because she was a closer friend than any of the other girls. You see, she was the first girl whom I ever made cry (well, apart from my sister). I saw her walking in the hall of school and just looked up at her and smiled as kindly as I could as we passed each other on the way to our respective classes and she grabbed a friend and ducked into the nearby bathroom. I later found out that she either cried or laughed in the bathroom, and I'm not sure which I prefer to think of. I tried to make amends somehow before the end of the year and wrote her a note saying something or another. The only thing I remember putting in that note was, "as they say, 'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.'" Needless to say, this didn't help.

That whole ordeal, however, was the first to really rattle me. So much so that the 11th grade is just a blur, probably because I can't define it by who I fancied that year. Sometime in that year she did end up coming up and meekly apologizing. She said she didn't know how to handle that kind of attention. Later, when I would get my first girlfriend at the end of grade 12, I would look back and that and empathize with it much more. I had spent my entire life chasing and being rejected by women that when I actually got one I hadn't the faintest idea of what to do in a relationship. I was so paralyzed that I ended up just stopping talking to her, not even breaking up with her, because I was too cowardly to do anything.

I like to think, however, that my wife is the first person I truly loved (and not just to score brownie points with her, though that too). I met her after going through my usual cycle in college and we just sorta clicked. It probably helps that she really did more of the initial work than me: inviting me over to play Halo 3, stealing our first kiss, giving me enough to drink so I wouldn't be sober enough to drive home and would have to stay the night. I dated my wife for four and a half years before we got married, and I loved her more each and every day. It's like something my mother told me, "You don't find your soul mate, you become someone's soul mate." She was only my second chance at a relationship and I made sure to not just let her slip by (by which I mean not to let myself be a lazy coward). I consciously worked on building our relationship and she made it really easy. I like to think that all the work we've put into our now-marriage is an investment that we will see the dividends of throughout our lives together.

Whoops, typo with a fix I pushed last night. Should be good now.

Absolutely love this. One thing I've been looking into is intro.js for giving people a little walking tour of any given page. Start out with hubski in a sentence, go through each link on the page (feed, chatter, etc) explain what they do, explain following, etc.

I feel so lucky, I found my wife just as the advent of online dating was upon us. I don't know that I would've faired well in the tinder and hook up culture. I gained a bunch of weight working in a call center with an in house cafeteria, I have a hairline that makes me look 10 years older than I am, hate bars/clubs, and make awkward first impressions when my wife isn't there to be my better half. So glad I don't have to deal with all that.

Christopher Ryan - who the article mentions - also did a brief interview on harmontown (warning: autoplaying audio); found him quite interesting.

The interesting part of is this, to me, is:

what actually happened is that somebody reported the original upstream of this fork (WebMBro/WebMConverter) but since @WebMBro himself left a while ago (which prompted me to make this fork in the first place), GitHub couldn't get a response from him, so they shut down that repo along with all forks, with seemingly no communication towards other fork developers.

I had to contact GitHub myself in order to even get a notification of what was going on, and it took them about 3 days to restore any kind of access to my fork of the project.

One of the core guiding principles of open source has been, if you don't like it, fork it. Github made it easy to see where you forked it from, but apparently is pretty gung-ho to kill those forks without contacting them.

Sounds like an interesting idea: an 'everything I missed' feed. I'll mention this at our meeting tomorrow.

I feel like I waited to long to actually start working on something that'll hopefully become a big part of my life.

I know that feel bro. Worse, I'm 7 years into my 4 year degree. One of the things that helped me gain perspective was Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years:

Fred Brooks, in his essay No Silver Bullet identified a three-part plan for finding great software designers:

1. Systematically identify top designers as early as possible.

2. Assign a career mentor to be responsible for the development of the prospect and carefully keep a career file.

3. Provide opportunities for growing designers to interact and stimulate each other.

This assumes that some people already have the qualities necessary for being a great designer; the job is to properly coax them along. Alan Perlis put it more succinctly: "Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had to be taught how not to. So it is with the great programmers". Perlis is saying that the greats have some internal quality that transcends their training. But where does the quality come from? Is it innate? Or do they develop it through diligence? As Auguste Gusteau (the fictional chef in Ratatouille) puts it, "anyone can cook, but only the fearless can be great." I think of it more as willingness to devote a large portion of one's life to deliberative practice. But maybe fearless is a way to summarize that. Or, as Gusteau's critic, Anton Ego, says: "Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere."

It reminds me of what my teachers always told us, "You can do anything if you put your mind to it." It seems like the self-esteem fluff that's said to make everyone feel special, but I now think it's much more literal than that. It really is just a matter of discipline to learn a skill and a matter of prolonged discipline to master that skill.

Two people embody this, for me at least. The first is Dan McLaughlin of The Dan Plan. He was a 30-year-old photographer before he decided to try and become a professional golfer by following the 10,000 hour idea.

It’s a project in transformation. An experiment in potential and possibilities. Through 10,000 hours of “deliberate practice,” Dan, who currently has minimal golf experience, plans on becoming a professional golfer. But the plan isn’t really about golf: through this process, Dan hopes to prove to himself and others that it’s never too late to start a new pursuit in life. For a detailed description of the project, please read this blog post: http://thedanplan.com/blog/?p=1090

The other is Jimmy Carr, the British comedian. He left a marketing job at Shell to pursue stand-up comedy at 25 and now he's one of Britain's most well-known performers.

Hell, even my wife only just now got her first job in the animation industry (at 24) and she never even went to school for it! She was only able to do this because she made an effort to work on her skills even through shitty retail jobs and surviving off just my student loans for the past seven or eight months.

I struggled for years after high school because some of my best friends just knew what they wanted to do and how they were going to get there. I dropped out of college a few times, worked soul-sucking jobs, and only relatively recently found a passion for programming (I'd been doing it for years, but only out of necessity).

One of the great faults of my 'Career and Personal Planning' courses in high school was their insistence on knowing what you're going to be before the end of grade 12. I remember we had a folder which was supposed to contain the best of the best of our work over our high school career and which the Universities we applied to would look at. That was bullshit; not even I looked at the stuff that was in there. But that mentality haunted me: I was already too late to change gears, I couldn't do anything great with my life. I looked at people like Stephen Wolfram who got a PhD in particle physics at age 20. It was only after dropping out, being human pylon, going to and dropping out of bible college, climbing as far as I could up the corporate ladder without going into management that I shook that mentality and worked on realizing that yes, I could do anything I put my mind to, as long as I learned to kick myself in the ass - because I'm a lazy motherfucker.

Side-tangent: I really shouldn't be, but the amount of pro-donald posts I've seen hit the front page of r/all on reddit recently is a little depressing. I want to believe it's all just a circle jerk, but something tells me that's just wishful thinking.

If they were half as competent as they are malevolent we'd be in real trouble.

That has been the most amazing thing to watch for me. It's like a race to see who can shoot themselves in the foot fastest between the parties, and the GOP has more guns.

Ha, only took 600 days or so :P

My mother told me something which has stuck with me to this day: You don't find your soulmate, you become someone's soulmate.

It's definitely for hardcore enthusiasts/early adopters. It'll be interesting to see what the reviews for it are and if it lives up to the hype.

Always interesting to hear thoughts from jedberg (I've been reading/watching a lot of his talks/posts while planning hubski's technical future lately. If it were possible I'd beg/ask him to mentor me). Unfortunately I don't think we're at the point where we have a 'new link' problem but it's definitely a good think to look at; in all honesty if we did start to see a deluge of new links I'd probably implement rising/organic algos.

What caught my eye was this comment, in particular:

1) Devote a portion of prime real estate (e.g. homepage) to new or trending links, as Reddit does.

2) Give higher placement to submissions that come from someone whose previous submissions the user has upvoted.

3) Give higher placement to submissions that come from the same source as previous submissions the user has upvoted.

4) Give higher placement to submissions on which a person has commented whom the user has previously upvoted.

One way I think HN, Reddit, and other link-recommendation sites can put power into their users' hands is to allow each user to tweak the recommendations algorithm to suite their own preferences.

For instance, one user might want half their homepage to be filled with trending stories, rather than popular stories. Another user might find Technique 2 above to be useful but might not want to enable Technique 4.

Techniques 2-4 are things we have looked at recently, but the bolded part is what I think separates hubski from other 'link aggregation sites'. One of the things that anyone will tell you to do when you start heavily using a site like reddit or tumblr is to install a third-party service to give you features necessary to continue to enjoy your experience (i.e. RES, Tumblr Savior.) Some of the most commonly used features of these are ignore/filtering out posts based on some criteria (e.g. filtering out all apple posts, especially on product launch days). IMO, these things should have been implemented as first-party features.

I definitely see this as putting "power into their users' hands" and as a good thing. A lot of the friction/drama you see in communities lately is the tension between average users with limited power (e.g. you can sub/unsub from subreddits and that's about it) and those with, relatively speaking, all the power (e.g. moderators). A lot of people will say that if you give users too much power over their own feeds you'll just get an echo chamber, but I don't see it as so black and white. And besides, if someone really wants to they can use a third-party tool to give them the content they want. And the more you start to rely on third-party tools to use a service, the less useful that service probably is.

Since we can't be there, my wife and I are taking her new wine glass for a spin at home.

Cheers!

Interesting points, but I'm rarely a fan of manifestos as they usually take black and white stances and leave no room for nuance. In particular this part makes me laugh

If you are trying to make a web application, just stop. Build a native application. It's nicer for everyone.

Yup, don't try to make a web application, just put your app in the hands of Apple or Google and all the tracking, proprietary formats, and "new annoyances" that come along with that.

'Don't be evil' my ass; this time they've gone too far.

The first is that the URLs aren't "pretty". There is often a "?id=" on URLs, which only saves four characters when removed, but it's an annoying four characters. Obviously, I don't know how your systems work so I assume this is more complicated than a bunch of RewriteRules. A few past posts indicate that it's not that simple.

I very much understand the want for pretty urls. Some urls are probably just a few rewriterules away from being pretty but we have some legacy issues preventing us from just implementing it. We use nginx as well as HAProxy for hubski, and then we use piwik which is using apache, and both of these need to be accessible from the hubski.com root domain, mostly because we didn't shell out for a wildcard SSL certificate. Also we do some weird things with custom feed and such. We could probably write around these edge cases but I'm just putting that energy into a rewrite of hubski which will have pretty urls.