skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't say my system was without flaws, it's just my way of thinking.

And it is relatively rare that an innocent man is convicted and sentenced to death. We can have a system that forces all of us (as taxpayers) to pay a HUGE amount of money keeping all of the vile criminals alive for a chance that they're in the <1% innocent who were wrongly convicted. Does that make good financial sense though?

Also, I'm talking about the future, not the past. Sure there were many wrongful convictions in the past, but the same technology that is freeing those who were convicted wrongfully in the past is the same technology that will help prevent innocents from being put on death row in the future.
I really think it's backlash against the iPhone culture.

I'm not particularly sold on Android, and I really like my iPod Touch. However, AT&T is notoriouly lousy in my area, so I purchased a Droid when they were released in November.

I was at a family gathering and got into a discussion with my sister-in-law and a mutual friend about the pros and cons of the iPhone versus the Droid.

I was at a family gathering and got into a discussion with my iPhone-fangirl sister-in-law and a mutual friend. I said relatively little until our friend asked about the AT&T network. I mentioned that I had the same concern and showed her my phone. At this point, my s-i-l made a face that reminded me of the scene in Fellowship of the Ring when Bilbo Baggins sees the ring hanging around Frodo's neck. Her attitude really changed even though she lives 2000 miles away and knows very little about AT&T's performance in our area.

At any rate, there are plenty of great things about both phones, but I did feel my attachment to the Android community grow a little stronger after that encounter, which was the first of several over the last couple of months.
Have you played with Scala? It reminds me in some ways of Ruby, you might find it to your liking.
Can't start a business only eating a Tombstone pizza every day
Witch-doctors reveal extent of child sacrifice in Uganda
> They can't suddenly change their mind and make the next version for-pay.

Yes they can.

> They can't impose pushy conditions, Bitkeeper style.

They can if they relicense (though previous licensed versions would be unaffected).

> And if they go bankrupt the code won't be left in legal limbo.

could well be. It is still a legal asset so those assigned to selling off assets may well sell off the IP.

The copyright holder ALWAYS has absolute authority :) they can do what they want with their code!
I've had this problem in the past and continue to have it occasionally. I'm not usually thirsty and/or hungry, but usually my mind will wander and I'll start getting excited about some project I'm working on or (worse) start worrying about something that at 3 in the morning I can't begin to do anything about.

Here are a couple of obvious things to try (granted, they were only obvious to me in retrospect):

- No caffeine (not even tea/soda) after 3 in the afternoon. Better yet, no caffeine at all is best. Counterintuitively, your body will totally wake you up when it wants a caffeine fix.

- No alcohol if you have to get up at any particular time the next day. It will put you to sleep, but meanwhile your body is trying regulate itself and will release adrenaline, which will wake you up once the alcohol wears off.

- Likewise, no sweetened or starchy foods in the evening. This is basically the same effect as alcohol, except that it's the sugar/starch crash that's putting you to sleep.

- (Never done this, but) keep a journal of when you eat, drink, caffeinate, and sleep and see if you notice a pattern. You might find that, say, eating a late dinner screws with your sleep.
To provide a counter viewpoint, the new C++ features are a major reason why we choose to use/continue to use C++ for the game engine my friend and I are writing. As heavy users of C++, we consider the changes to be a welcome and useful modernization of the language. It has allowed me to write a powerful script binding library that I could not have done in old C++.

It's easy to sound smart when you're only detracting from something because you aren't providing a (complete) counterproposal that could be criticized. And it's easy to say "don't add features, remove them" if the feature being removed is not one you personally depend on. And if you're not an actual user of the C++ language it's especially easy to say "don't add features, remove them" because you aren't depending on ANY features!

There are minimalist languages; C++ is not one of them.

I think it is much more interesting and useful to explore how far you can go if you program entirely using the new syntax features. This may make it look and feel like completely a different language than old C++, but rather than put it up as a straw man and knock it down, recognize that this new language is an exciting undiscovered country.
In a similar vain to double click v.s. adsense in the 90's. Back in the day they would count each ad install, done via an ad team and they have several thousand or something. Comes along google with a little javascript you insert into any page with little to no pre-screening and they get millions of installs.

Rather then setting up and maintaining a box at sites just put up a vmware image for people to run :)
What's new or interesting here? Obviously if he was able to read and handle every every single piece of mail, it didn't matter what system he used, as long as he changed something up to renew his optimism and enthusiasm.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
ISPs could not be profitable if end users started reselling bandwidth while paying flatrate fees. They'd be forced to enforce volume caps.
Kinda related: there are various genomes that encode overlapping genes. This makes them very compact in that they take less physical space to achieve the same end result,

In this analogy, the language is the genome (DNA or RNA) and the program is the set of proteins that make up the virus or whatnot.

As far as I know, there aren't any computer programming languages that do this. Not that I want them to...

A reference: http://www.bookrags.com/research/overlapping-genes-gen-03/
When you work out your burning energy (calories) and losing water through sweat.

1. Try eating an extra healthy snack like a cup of yogurt and a piece of fruit before you go to bed every day, like a ritual even if you’re not hungry.

2. Your body seems to need more water to replenish what you sweat out, that’s why you’re thirsty. Try hydrating yourself more by drinking "a lot" of water starting when you get up in the morning and sipping all day long like bodybuilders do.

Maybe that will help.
Looks like Myst to me. Beautiful.
I completely agree about the power of test-driven development, but I think the take-away hits home the most:

"...shaking things up, doing things a different way for awhile..., is never a bad idea."

I recently spent some time forcing a friend of mine to learn some basic Scheme (which I learned in school, and have always loved), to try his hand at programming. This led to basically reading though my Scheme book again and hacking through some examples. Going back to work - developing in Java - I found myself writing much more concise code and spending enough time thinking about the problem to find a solution that felt elegant.

Edit:
I'd add to the article's point by saying: don't stay in the same environment for too long, or you'll get stale. Switch things up from time to time, even if that means switching to an environment that is inferior in some ways - you'll get something out of it.
What you're saying is that if I click on an ad, and that click results in a company in a completely different country paying another company in another completely different country a certain sum of money, that my government should be able to tax that? There is no money entering or leaving France when a French person clicks on a Google ad. The French government has no business whatsoever trying to tax online advertising revenue that occurs due to transactions in other countries.
I'm using it in Firefox 3.5.7 on Windows XP (behind a proxy server). A couple of observations:

* It flags spelling and grammatical errors but when I click on a fix suggestion for a grammatical error, it does not apply the fix.

* Browser slows down to a crawl while the proofreading bookmark is in operation.

Great concept; I would love to use it if you can address these issues.
"Having done all my schooling through high school in Texas and having a mother who still works in the elementary system there I know that they like to focus largely on testable material, almost to the exclusion of everything else."

Are there any states where this is not the case?
I'm pretty sure you have to iterate over it at least twice. I guess the specification is implicit in that.
In my mind, the fanboy-type reaction is little different from any other consumer attachment. When we buy something, we believe, or at least really want to believe, that we made the right choice. Our subconscious mind works really hard on this stuff, and the more you spend the more it matters. There's a whole bunch of psychology behind that (The Paradox of Choice takes an interesting look at the subject), but the result is a strong defensive reaction when a purchase is criticized or a product's value is called into question (even a little bit).

The iPhone, as an alternative product that I did not buy, must be inferior in some way or I must have made the wrong choice. But I didn't. I made the right choice. I don't regret a thing. I bought the superior product. I'm a smart consumer. I love my Droid. It is the best phone ever.

And there you have it.
Maybe because that fragment makes sense sometimes? "I marveled at its awesome power."

If you use "Its awesome." by itself, it does catch it.
However, when building functions with combinators it's clearer to use bound lambdas along the way:

\I = (S C C)

\U = (S I I)

\R = (S (C S) C)

\Q = (S R (C U))

\Y = (S Q Q)
That's interesting brazzy, but I think we would be surprised with the results of such a project. For example, if I were a user and this was available to me, I would have multiple ISP accounts and boxes. I imagine many others would do the same. I also think, an interesting side-effect would be a reduction in piracy.

The way to cure piracy is not to sue everybody that pirates, the way to do it is to create an explicit opportunity cost for your time/bandwidth/storage.

If I know that for every GB I pirate, I lose $1/month (or whatever the figure turns out to be) that changes my decision making process.

So I figure that yes, along the limit (i.e. approaching infinity), assuming no one pirates and all customers are a CDN peer, the ISPs might not be profitable. But, I think we would see some very interesting social behavior changes before then, that the ISPs might be able to benefit from.
i think the point was to reduce transit traffic between providers. "local" mirrors accomplish that.

regardless, users still have underutilized bandwidth, capped or not. why not resell it?
Exactly...so I would love to see someone do it =)
If you're just making games, you should just use one of the many free, cross-platform rendering engines (OGRE3D, Irrlicht, etc.) or a comprehensive game-maker (Unity or UDK). Both of these options abstract away OpenGL, Direct3D, shader implementations, extensions, etc.

I have wasted a pretty huge amount of my life writing engine code when I don't much care for engine problems and know someone else will be able to write something that performs better and has a good-enough API.
Fair enough! I'm interested in seeing what you do next.
Make a paper Tux Linux penguin in less than 15 minutes
This is a Newyear gift to all Open source Lovers..We all love penguin right? It is not enough to be a real Linux Geek, if you really want to impress then you must have a Linux mascot in your apparment..
I would love to see PG add this as a rfs. Just a thought.
Just goes to prove that the 'attacker' generally has the upper hand when looking at security issues like this. DRM is another good example of the impossibility of plugging all the holes...
Good Strategies to Find Deals in the Real Estate Franchise
Would whoever downvoted me care to explain why? If I made a mistake, I'd like to learn. If I said something offensive, I'd like to apologize. Thanks!
Greek astronomers knew the earth was spherical around the 6th century BC (easily deduced by observing ships sailing in the Mediterranean, as well as the visibility of the stars at different latitudes) and had already demonstrated that the moon was a sphere 150 years before Ceasar's reign. Pliny records that Gaius Sulpicius Gallus enjoyed promotion for winning a battle by correctly predicting an eclipse and timing his military action around it, also before Ceasar's birth. Around the same time, Seleucus (who lived in what we now call Iraq) postulated that the earth orbited the sun rather than vice versa.

Ceasar himself was interested in astronomy, to the extent that he replaced the previous Roman calendar with the Julian Calendar (a modification of the Egyptian Solar calendar), the first to feature a year of 365 days and and include a quadrennial leap year, which endured for 1500 years before the Gregorian Calendar tweaked the leap year scheme for centenary years; considering that the inaccuracy of the Julian calender only amounted to 3 days over 400 years, it error factor was < 0.001%.

Ceasar may not have thought of the earth as just another planet orbiting just another sun in just another galaxy, but it's highly unlikely that he believed the earth to be flat.
He could have said "Fuck You" as well - which is basically what he did - but most people don't consider that positive communication.

I don't think the response he gave was the one that would have the most positive effects.
why don't you?
Why only 1/3 of Dell’s Mini netbooks were sold with Linux?
Recently while surfing, i found this image which gives a good answer for the above question.
BBC News - London unveils digital datastore
I had to Google "purrel -purell" to track that down, and even then it wasn't an immediate hit.

According to WordNik.com, which cites the "Century Dictionary", a purrel is "A list ordained to be at the end of kersies to prevent deceit in diminishing their length."

Wasn't that helpful?! According to Wiktionary, a kersie is Afrikaans for cherry.

Ergo a purrel is a list at the end of cherries to prevent lies about their length. Clear as mud, eh?

(Yes, none of this is helpful at all, but I'm cracking up)

http://www.wordnik.com/words/purrel
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kersie
But he didn't renew his optimism or enthusiasm, unless I'm missing something. Rather, he just did the first one anyway, even though he wasn't enthused about it.

This is a lesson I have to learn over and over, because I want to do things I'm excited about doing. There's a lot of things, though, that I want to have done, and for things like that, there's typically no way to make them more exciting or to make me more optimistic about handling them -- I just have to start. Once I've started, continuing is far easier, for whatever reason.

When I programmed mostly for myself (that is, with no set schedule other than a dimly seen deadline), I had quite a lot of trouble getting started, and so I developed a trick to help with that: at the end of the day, I'd make sure to leave some small, quickly-accomplished thing undone, to have something to do when I started again. Sometimes I'd also write a note on how to do it, if it seemed like I might forget. Over months, though, this turned into a problem itself, since I would spend lots of time during the day coming up with tasks that I could do the next day to start, and then I would use that as an excuse not to do them today, because, hey, what if I wasn't able to come up with anything else to start on easily tomorrow? I might lose the whole next day!

Eventually, this got to the point where I'd spend weeks doing only one or two small tasks in the morning, and then being afraid to start on anything bigger lest I not have something easy to start on the next day. Of course, this defeated the purpose...

Actually accomplishing things, whether coding, or writing, or cleaning up email, or just cleaning the house, is something that you have to just do. You might be able to trick yourself into doing a little more of it, but if you focus on the trick, you aren't likely to build the habit of just doing things, which means that you'll easily stop doing them when something happens to make the trick less effective.

People for whom the trick(s) really seem to work have moved into a psychological realm where they have the habit of getting things done; the trick is no longer really the point, I'd guess.
Morning cold fingers. A quality comment that I meant to vote up and missed. Sorry.
Why God's a Hacker
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You wake up thirsty and hungry in the middle of the night? Sorry for the silly question but are you having proper dinner at the proper time?
MagicJack's Next Act: Disappearing Cell Phone Fees
Very good question. The truth is that the timing wasn't right for me when I originally thought about it, but depending on how the discussion goes here I might re-consider.
There were a gaggle of companies trying similar things with bandwidth and/or computer cycles in the 1999-2001 era.

RedSwoosh was was eventually acquired by Akamai. BitTorrent still plugs its 'BitTorrentDNA' offering as a P2P CDN alternative. Kontiki was bought by VeriSign... but later spun back out.

There was some speculation Adobe was adding P2P CDN capabilities to Flash Player in 2007, based on some combination of Kontiki technology and that of another P2P VOIP company they'd acquired, Amicima. (See <http://gigaom.com/2007/01/24/adobe-and-its-p2p-ambitions/...)

But, none of these have taken off in a giant way. There may yet be a magic formula, but many variants have already been tried.
Even if you could have a very smart network where only users within the same ISP exchange data (this not incurring peering fees), all that data still needs to be routed and transported between the ISP's access points, a cost that scales up with usage. If all users started using all of their bandwidth (or a larger portion of it than they do now), costs for the ISP would go up, and they would have to pass that on to the users. Earning $5 per month from reselling bandwidth is not so attractive when it means your ISP bill goes up $20.

The business plan does not account for this. It assumes bandwidth to cost the users nothing, which only is true now because of flat fees, which are only viable when users use a very limited portion of the total available bandwidth.
They blew $18k on rent for 3 months? Sounds like best business decision ever.
The most important life lesson that I have learned that I like to share with fellow entrepreneurs who have failed in startups or friends and family members who have lost a job is the old Chinese saying that, “Grass survives the heaviest of rock.” The emphasis here is “grass”. If you put a rock on a flower, flower will die. If you put a rock on grass, grass will find a way to survive. As entrepreneurs, we are not entitled to anything. We must not think of ourselves as flowers that deserve sunshine and nutrients. We must accept that we are the lowest form of beings, or we won't find the courage and the clarity to survive. As I learned to say in America, as entrepreneurs, your ass is grass and the world is your lawnmower. So don't go looking for “love” in the wrong places. Good luck, everyone.
On the Stack Overflow podcast I believe Joel Spolsky said something along the lines of "C++ is the only language where every new feature turns out to be something everyone recommends you should never use."
"Emergent" Images to Outwit Spambots
I wish I'd seen this a week ago. I was staying in a hotel less than a mile from the place.
Also Project Euler might be worth a look. It focusses on solving math-related problems with progams.
Ouch. jQuery is great, but was this the site that the guy behind the "JavaScript rock star!" page has dreamt of making ever since?! It took me a couple of minutes to work out that there was actually some useful content there, and I would long since have given up if I hadn't been expecting something worthwhile since I found it via an upvoted post on HN.

For those who are wondering, this seems to be the only real page there today: http://jquery14.com/pre-release-1/new-jquery-api-site
I believe the Chrome issue is a conflict with Chrome's popup blocker or same-source policy.

I created a page with nothing but a textarea and put it on the same host where the request with your text goes. It works there in Chrome.

I then put the same page on another host and I get the "no writing errors found" response.

If it's a security policy or popup blocker, that may explain why I'm not seeing any errors from the browser. It looks like I'm not going to be able to fix this for Chrome without some serious work arounds.
Google does some automatic translation of common terms and provides an option to search for pages in different languages. If this feature improves, this advice could soon become obsolete.

Anyway, one reason for using English versions is that localizations are often rather strange and that GUIs or less well tested. It can easily happen that a text doesn't really fit into the space that was left for the English message.
Send your application errors to hoptoadapp.com in Python
How to optimize Common Lisp under SBCL
Was that before or after the Japanese did the same thing? I nominate you for the Ignorance-Award. I've never read such a stupid/useless Comment on HN before.
As you say: second-order effects. If user home broadband connections are being sold cheaply enough to be able to be resold for a profit, the ISPs will either raise the price to recoup this (the value of the connection has gone up to you and therefore you will be willing to pay more), or cut out the middleman and directly provide these services with their bandwidth (forbidding end users from participating), pocketing the money.

This entire plan hinges on the ISPs doing nothing in response. And the responses the ISPs would make aren't even "evil" or anything, it would just be rational market behavior on their part.

Furthermore, there would be major quality issues. Clever programming and design could make this work with enough redundancy in the system that even as people log in and out the content wouldn't disappear, but this does not come for free. You must pay a price somewhere else: increased latency (one of the most likely outcomes, many P2P systems make this tradeoff), decreased bandwidth, grotesque requirements for content replication that goes a long ways towards mitigating the capacity of the system. You can often trade one kind of quality for another, but you can't increase the total quality available, and a home consumer broadband connection is a low-quality connection for this purpose. And the quality of home connections aggregates distinctly sublinearly, especially since so many of them are badly asymmetric.

This is a terrible idea and anybody going into it will lose everything they invest, excepting the IMHO faint possibility that some interesting technology could emerge that could eventually be repurposed for something sane. (I call this a faint possibility because that would then be facing competition from technologies directly purposed for whatever this later domain is and given the likelihood of a large difference between the initial design constraints and the final design constraints you're likely to have a very inferior solution.)