jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
I wish I had the means to do what he's doing. But the problem for me, and for many other people I'd imagine, is that when I'm at an airport, chances are I've paid a very large amount of money to be at a certain place at a certain time for what is probably an important reason. Risking losing that much money and the possibility of not getting to where I need to be, even for the noble goal of civil disobedience to protest a ridiculous and screwed-up system, is just too daunting for me. All it takes is one TSA officer having a bad day and misinterpreting something I've said to send me and my bags home--and even if they're in the wrong, the only thing that can decide that is an expensive court case, and I'll still have missed my flight.

I applaud people like this who remind the system that it works for us and not the other way around. I sadly can't take the risk of doing it myself.
Last I checked, "I was just following orders" isn't a valid excuse. I understand that they're at the bottom of the totem pole in this whole thing (and as good human beings many of them are probably secretly against it as well), but as long as dissenters don't cross the line, actions like this may be what it takes to get the TSA workers to speak out against it as well and get it changed.
So the shadow scholar submits his version history. And then?
There's a fundraising drive trying to get together the money so Bletchley Park, the museum dedicated to the work of Turing and the other codebreakers at Station X during the war, can buy the offprints and keep them for public display.
More info: http://www.justgiving.com/turing-papers/
OKCupid seems to have been making changes that would allow something like that to become a factor in their compatibility ratings. Their "Special Blend" ranking algorithm is multivariate secret sauce, and it's easy to imagine them offering the option of sorting on proximity.
That was my first thought as well. My initial exposure to nix was a purchased copy of Red Hat Linux 4.2, running on an HP Vectra tower. and I remember paying extra for the CDE install CDs. An absolute noob when I started, by the time I'd learned enough to make my modem work I felt like I'd climbed a mountain. sigh* Good times.
One of my favorite quotes is "gradualness is very powerful." (Happens to be a PG quote.) It helps explain why most people don't seem all that phased by the latest TSA policy changes. Imagine how ominous this video would have been 10-15 years ago.
Where and what kind of business card companies make these kinds of business cards? Or do they do all the printing and cutting themselves?
Jesus christ, these stories make me cry. I don't know if this is something I need to explore deeper, or if I'm simply torturing myself by reading them.
It's been pretty hot here yesterday (40ºC) and I was a bit bored, so I had a go at designing a clock with only one hand. I was happy with the result, but then didn't have anyone to show it to, hence this post.

Works in Chrome and Safari and on iOS devices except the colours are a bit dark. Seems ok in FF, but the seconds take a while to sync with the hand. not sure why
>Scarcity produces unhappiness

Beyond a basic level, this fails to be true.

>which in term induces human productivity/creativity.

Show me that depression leads to greater productivity. I expect that you cannot.

>climb the social/professional ladder to get what it is that you couldn't get in the first place.

This has nothing to do with depression and little to do with happiness.

>All great literature, music, scientific discoveries were of products of unrequited love, jealousy, or the urge to overcome a self-inferiority complex.

This is trite, wildly hyperbolic, and almost certainly baseless.
I think you're right. I've never even seen landing pages of most of the food brands I eat. Why would I bother?
I agree with your point, but before you bashed Newsweek did you read any of their previous Mayer coverage? http://www.newsweek.com/search.html?q=marissa+mayer

I think you'd have a hard time putting together a collection of "Girls can do it, too!" articles that outweigh all the regular coverage of Mayer and her work at Google
I'm a big Tcl fan, and had a hand in the most recent version of Ousterhout's book, but it's a bit of a surprise that they picked Tcl, as it's honestly not that popular these days. Wonder who it was that made that decision.

If nothing else, sounds like round 26339132 of the Tcl marketing "fail": company complains about not finding people, while simultaneously hiding themselves from the community of the product they're using, and hiding the fact that they're using the technology in question.
Yeah, they have been doing a bunch of great data mining
To make sure I got it right:
1) you would volunteer for sparked.com (the business) up until a certain point - when it started to feel like real work.

2) you would volunteer for a nonprofit on sparked.com at any time - regardless as to if it felt like real work.

That right?
- ben
After delivering pizza for a restaurant for two years, I finally convinced the owner that his free, Frontpage-generated site wasn't good enough, and got him to pay me to do a redesign. I learned a few things along the way.

1. Restaurants have tiny margins. 7% profit is doing well, and dishing out $1k or more for what they perceive to be a Yellow Pages ad is unthinkable for a brick and mortar store.

2. Restaurant people are techno-iliterates (in general). I set up a Google Apps account so the managers could communicate with branded email, share documents, schedules, etc, and had to give more than a couple training sessions on these basic tools.

3. They don't consider it something to be 'involved' with. I've tried to press the point of building a presence through social networks, etc, but they can't wrap their heads around it. To them, you should pay someone (as little as possible) for it and it does it's job.

4. They explicitly ask for the faux pas. Owner asked me to take down the "outdated announcement" that we'll be having an event, since it was from last month. This is on the blog portion of the site. Owner asked me to upload the rest of the photos from an event (at least a hundred), even though the entire album is on Facebook, even though I explained no one in the world is going to care enough to flip through hundreds of jell-o wrestling photos on the news page of some restaurant's website. Owner asked for a photo background versus the subtle textured one I had designed the site with.

In the end, trying to teach them what emails is, arguing over design elements and explaining how people will use the site isn't worth it because they are going to be more work and less money than just about any other business owner. Slap something together and collect your $500.
I have it installed on my Belkin router because the stock firmware doesn't support Telnet connections. It's pretty great.
Downvoted. Nevertheless, it's a an important issue to consider. Not less important than other aspects of the technical OS features or corporate issues of Apple/Google/MS/Amazon etc which are frequently discussed here.
If you're actually interested in understanding the arguments for worrying about AI safety, consider reading "Superintelligence" by Bostrom.

http://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-N...

It's the closest approximation to a consensus statement / catalog of arguments by folks who take this position (although of course there is a whole spectrum of opinions). It also appears to be the book that convinced Musk that this is worth worrying about.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/495759307346952192
Where does the angular momentum in a star go?

To orbiting planets? If so, I wonder if they can use that 10% error to infer things about the planets orbiting that star.
> It probably won't even want to take over. That's a very human trait, and Strong AI wouldn't be human.

There are reason to be worried that prescind from that.

Consider the Paperclip Maximizer[0] example: we build an AI with the sole task of producing paperclips, and it ends up destroying the human race.

[0] http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer
Is this the entire story? It's true that there are many times more iOS users than OSX users, but what percentage of each are their target market (who I would call 'power users')? Panic make great apps (I use them on both iOS and OSX), but I expect not everyone using iOS is a potential customer for a (great) ssh client, while a much higher percentage of OSX users use it because they want a Unix that has $Mac_Feature.
This is the first Arrington article I actually wanted to double up vote. This guy may be a lot of things, but he is dead on when it comes to this subject. Government really needs to take a breath, relax and stay where they already are meddling - wall street, automobiles, health care, etc.

What Government should do is lay the groundwork to incentivize a coast to coast robust fibre optic network with fair access for all it's inhabitants. Fast, cheap, reliable communications access is the new transportation network. There are roads and highways that go to every location you can find on a map in this country. Why can't a lot of these places get good internet connections?

Speaking of transport, the Government can just keep bettering our transportation infrastructure. You know, all the shit we need to exist so that UPS can deliver our Amazon orders overnight.

Has anyone here been on a flight recently? It sucks. I'm just thankful when I land in one piece, safely. Let's get those newfangled super trains functioning. What's wrong with America when places like France and China have train networks that make us look like we're in the stone age?
An API? That's a sad joke. (I say that bitterly as someone who's been knee-deep in the HTML structure of HN for the past few days, trying to parse out data for my own app.)

I talked to someone in #startups a little while ago who was developing a server-side API for HN, but last I heard it wasn't done.

There's a few sites that are sort of "HN aggregators." Unfortunately I've lost the links, but there was one that used a simple algorithm to accumulate the top stories of HN. It would scan the front page every N minutes and give each story X points based on its ranking at the time. Does anyone remember that one?

At any rate, the best you could get from those sites would be a friendlier HTML structure that doesn't feel like 1994. You'll probably have to parse some HTML yourself.
All I saw was an opportunity for fragmentation. If a developer wanted to make an iPhone app that took advantage of the new resolution - he'd either be limited to the original iPhone resolution, or to only the consumers that had the iP4.

In either case, I can't imagine games running their own UI would look better as the images are limited to their original resolution. Only the UIBuilder interfaces will look sharper.

What about battery life?
Good post.

I'm a big fan of looking at the assembler code generated from programs - even if you are not optimising - it helps give a depth of understanding which is simply not possible without doing it.

Not to mention that the "smart" compiler is a myth - I've seen some downright stupid asm come out when the compiler is configured wrong - and it gets missed, even with profiling based optimisation targetting the area - because looking at assembler is actively discouraged.

We are spoiled with IDEs and high level languages...
It will come out precisely 1 month after he gets 100 people to sign up on the hypothetical teaser page committing to buy it for $20, sight unseen. Once enough signups, he can design and produce the DVD, etc. That would be the smart/lazy approach. :)
Except these demos were not HTML5 http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/2010/06/intellectual-honest...
> http://www.google.com/phone/static/en_US-nexusone_tech_specs...

Takes 480p video at maybe-20 fps. If 480p is HD, then my bad, but the iPhone 4 is doing 720p video at 30 fps.
I don't see how Apple could get more "open" than what they're doing with Webkit and their HTML5 implementation. Let's take an example: CSS Animation. They have:

* Made an official spec for a CSS3 addition, labeled CSS Animation.

* Submitted the spec to be included in the overall HTML5/CSS3 document.

* Wrote a reference renderer in Webkit that properly uses a vendor tag for non-standard CSS elements (as per the CSS spec).

* Open-sourced it in Webkit.

I don't know how more "open" you can get with Apple's HTML5. Somebody has to create the bleeding edge in order to get there. How do you think CSS3 supports the features that it does now like border-radius or RGBA? Somebody made it and submitted it.

Just because Apple forces you download Safari for (presently) Safari only demos doesn't mean it's any less open. I know that Firefox is slowing working towards adding all the cool features. For example, the 3.7 alpha supports CSS transitions (the precursor to animations).
Every stray cat has the toxoplasma virus.
"Wrong" can mean both factually untrue and immoral. I was using it with both senses.
Now, how would you tell if overall productivity went down?

The problem at hand is that we measure "overall productivity" via the proxy of "the number of articles a panel of other scientists considered interesting enough". Everyone who has dipped a toe in academia can tell you how bad that is at even remotely correlating with producing actual value.

But, the actual value of a piece of research often comes to light decades after it has been first published. Rutherford has been at it since 1911, but we only got first value out of his theory in 1940s. Man-millenia have been invested in the meantime. Would this be any better, if all of them had to spend half of their time working on securing funding?
>Life sentence for a 15 year old who didn't provably kill someone seems excessively harsh.

Excessively harsh for a _white kid_. Ligon getting life without parole in 1953 is not at all shocking. Ligon is just lucky that a white girl wasn't involved or he would've gotten the chair.

Teenage black boys are still having their lives disposed of in 2021 because they dared to be dumb teenage boys while black.
> He never applied for commutation, though he could have had a strong chance at clemency in the 1970s, when hundreds of Pennsylvania lifers were released. Instead, he put his faith in Bridge and waited for the day he’d be released. To prepare himself for modern society, he watched world news on a small TV in his cell.

He did watch TV so he isn't entirely out of the loop and will probably learn how to navigate today's world with a smartphone and the internet in a couple months/years. Given an option, I think staying outside of prison is better than staying inside for everyone.
"several parts separated & were distributed over the ground"

That seems like a comically understated way to say that pieces of a plane broke off while traveling a few hundred miles an hours & fell 5,000 feet to the ground below.
Python struggles with it because so much networking code deep in networking libraries such as gunicorn, database libraries like psycopg, depend (or did depend) upon mutable global state and non-reentrant blocks of code that, upon introducing concurrency result in all a manner of poor behavior.

Do a search for "psycopg2 decryption failed or bad record mac" for example. Or replace psycopg2 with celery, or gunicorn. Python has a difficult history of half-way attempts to parallelize, a half dozen eventlet libraries that never made it to the standard, and only recently - in terms of library support - is an official coroutine implementation available, albeit not as widely used as it needs to be. Library support is still widely lacking.

It's not that Python can't do it well, it's that the ecosystem has dug themselves a pit by doing things that aren't legal Rust and would be frowned upon in other languages. Those hacks to support parallelism and greenlets, gevent, etc. rely upon juggling file descriptors and carefully tweaking global state in each library. It's gnarly stuff and results in errors that are clearly the result of failing to catch all the balls correctly.

Those SSL errors, by the way, are incredibly concerning. It means that wires are getting crossed and if it weren't for SSL authenticating the packets, the wrong data would happily get sent or received to the wrong party. In a network server, yikes.
I retract the “whatever” part. I shouldn’t have been rude.
Nope. To be precise, it will be only a issue if Android compatibility was dropped from applications compiled targeting Pie. Even Gingerbread apps can still run on Q so unless 12 has drastically changed things, it wouldn't be a problem.
That would certainly be nice in some ways, but then you'd deprive yourself of the joy of learning.
> This is an absolutely ridiculous assertion.

What do you think is a better proxy?
It's impossible to prove they didn't randomly mutate a virus until it reached its current state, so people who want a conspiracy theory are already falling back to that, Russell's teapot style. But there's also no reason to care if they did or not.
That is certainly impressive. But why does emacs have that functionality?
That's a mistake if you have a +-normal immunity. Ie childhood immunity is in desperate need of opponent so it can train itself. If you keep your kids in sterile environment, its more or less guaranteed they will end up with nasty allergies for the rest of their lives. I would expect this should be true in lesser form for adults too.

Anyway it doesn't make sense at all, most of the time folks are sick its not flu - its due to bacteria/viruses we already have in ie throat or nasal area that spot a weak moment (ie getting cold or eating too cold food) and attack. I basically get sick only like that during winter. One time I had pretty bad case of food poisoning from stale mayo and was so weak, I had sore throat and running nose almost immediately.
Gene Wolfe’s work is great, and I feel he is appreciated by many HNers. But one author I think is too seldom mentioned and read is Ballard. His take on science fiction is very interesting, often working on a more psychological level.
Please can you elaborate on the objective measures of code quality part? Do you mean to use static analysis tools like code climate?
Also, if you don't mind can you share some good reads/books which cover these topics?
Thanks
Yea but airplanes still crash all the time
Minor nit to give credit where it's due. 280 North had three founders: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/280_North,_Inc.
If there was ever a sign of a bubble, it's this comment.

Some local coupon startup thingy bigger than Google? u-huh.

People have been saying 'local is gonna be big' for years. I don't see why. Why do they think more money will be spent locally than people already spend other places?
I'd actually consider paying the pre-order fee to keep it in a perpetual state of pre-order. Goes from epic vaporware to a whole new vapor-based business model.
I don't think you need to worry about that. I had played entertaining video games before I started programming, and never produced anything of similar quality. None of the games I made came anywhere close to resembling the glitz and glamor of the media or video games I loved. It's easy to look back at the 1980s and see nothing but drabness, and conclude that programming provided a competitive entertainment experience, but that's not what it was like at the time. Sometimes I'd borrow a new game disk from somebody, boot from the 5.25" floppy, and the graphics would blow me away. Nothing like the crappy graphics I could make. I wrote programs to solve math programs, generate mathematical patterns on the screen, quiz me on my schoolwork, and do simple text-based games that were already lame by the previous decade's standards. Unless you were truly exceptional, the games you wrote for yourself did not compare at all with the excitement of games you could buy for a PC or an Apple II, and even the truly exceptional kids who created entertaining video games had to be willing to slog through hours of hard, unglamorous work. Kids today who expect programming to be entertaining the same way movies and video games are entertaining will do exactly what those kids did in the eighties: turn up their nose at programming and do something else. Kids who enjoy programming will program.
> My mother, is trying to figure out how to attract new business into her Coffee Shop for a new line - just to let people know it exists, and is considering a groupon deal.

Have you read the cautionary tale from Posies Cafe? There will be tons of people who will try the new product, but most of them won't stick around long enough to pay full value. Gotta be careful with this form of advertising. (Disclaimer: I know the owner of Posies.)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1698833
I'm an atheist who feels the opposite. I'd much rather have someone wish me "Happy Holidays". Assuming people celebrate a certain (your) religious holiday is presumptuous, IMO. Aside from that, with "Happy Holidays", New Year's is included along with Christmas, Hanukah, Festivus, Kwanzaa and all others.

Why leave out new year's?

Headline: THE WAR ON NEW YEARS HAS BEGUN! :)
Is anyone expecting more than a mediocre game?
What, exactly, do you propose they do, require samples (with full pedigree documentation) before allowing a coupon to go out? Where do you think the line should be drawn between inquiry and trust?
It's a company failure hence "Groupon fail"
While the quote is catchy, it's not applicable as stated.

In our society, money is the fishing pole and boat. You can teach a man to fish with his bare hands in the middle of Death Valley, but that will do him little good. He'll die just as fast, if not faster.

Wealth redistribution isn't an either-or question. It's really giving the man fish today, because learning to fish takes a while. And learning to fish decently requires that you have a good constition.

Our biggest entitlement programs go towards largely benefiting white people (everything from freeways to police departments to the courts to the military).

The Marty link was a funny one. I used to do tutoring at a "black" school. I met teachers like him, who told me the students were worthless. Two of the "worthless" students I tutored, I was able to help them get 800s on their math SATs (one went to a military academy and the other Berkeley).

The problem isn't that we've given too much, but the school system is filled with Marty's who never really gave at all.
can anyone explain to me why someone would want to use cassandra when not handling internet scale stuff?

the team am in uses it, but after many times asking why it was chosen since it seems a poor fit for our uses cases compared to a relational DB, the only justification I was given is a that the cluster is easier to maintain for our ops guys.
All combines into a final impression. Great body and all the rest can be easily ruined by ie weird shape of your head, something hair can hide very effectively. Final impression is not the sum of positive parts as much as negative ones (and for attractivity the lack of those).

Its like saying look it easy for me, I've done it so anybody can. But not all have the same conditions, genes etc.
The correct haircut for a bald man is muscles.
Yet it takes it weeks or months to leak out (I suppose it'd be more accurate to say 'slip between' the other molecules) of an extremely thin mylar balloon. I am sure it's an engineering challenge to keep it inside a small metal box, but it seems possible, at least. After all, the reserves we have have just been stuck in the ground, without managing to leak into the atmosphere.
Allow me to restate your comment more briefly: "The F-35 depends on your definition of success. It has not achieved the goals in its original funding application, but some of its traits might inspire future traits in future other things that might turn out to be good and worth the money we've spent so far, so therefore it's not right to call it a failure yet."

That's not a friendly restatement, no. "Might" does not make right.