skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, this is Digg material at best. Brazen, obvious trolling and over-the-top insulting of the establishment. All he does is stick something at the top of the article that almost all his readers will agree with and then relies on everyone who doesn't read the rest to reflex-upvote it.

Your average Digg politics thread is more civil.

I mean, seriously, "They hate capitalism, they hate Western civilization, and they hate their own ancestors.". What color is the sky in a world where this isn't flamebait?

Flagged.
Collective Intelligence. My bad. I got a little algorithmically dyslexic.
A massive hangover...
You've just described Google Wave. However, I think there's plenty of room in this space to come up with alternate implementations and interfaces.
Ouch! $22/month for 512 kbps? I pay about $15/month for 30 mbps and at this point couldn't imagine living without it. Downloading big updates, videos, game demos, you name it, and by the time you're done naming it you're almost done downloading it...

EDIT: To clarify, I get that in Redmond, WA. Definitely have a serious advantage there.
I got a really nice citrus press - http://www.amazon.com/Breville-800CPXL-Die-Cast-Stainless-St.... I make orange juice with breakfast every morning and this will cut juicing time from 5-15 minutes to 2 depending on how many I'm juicing for.
In which country?
I'm Jewish... but I got a winter break from college to spend with the family. For that, I thank you all (while my patience with my mother lasts).
I got a watch, scarf, and gloves. I am at the airport on my way to visit my girlfriend and am interested to see what she gives me (she is getting a sweet camera).

But now that I have kids the giving is so much more fun than the getting. I got them a Samsung N130 netbook, mini helicopters, some books (DIY Diary of a Wimpy Kid looks fun), moleskines and no socks or underwear. Being santa is fun.
I never got Emacs to display line numbers properly. Also, Emacs cannot heal that piercing pain my wrist felt trying to do crazy maneuvers.
I bought my kids an N130 too. Pretty sweet little machine and you can put a 2GB RAM chip in there (which I did for $60).
300 baud??? You had it lucky, I used to use a 110 baud teletype.
That optibay, is that the thing that replaces the DVD drive? I have been tempted to do that too.
Didn't this get turned into a popular song?
You are correct. Moreover, from talking to people who work therein, I get the impression that broadcast production is full of such systems, with overengineered unhelpful software if any.
It would be an ad hominem if he said "And thus they are wrong." But he doesn't even say they're wrong! He just says that they happen to reach the conclusion that lets them act in their ideological interests.

Was there any language in the article that you found particularly wasteful? Did you have any criticisms besides the misplaced accusation of ad hominem?
Certainly the deeper strategies of the game can take a while to develop and master, but the basic mechanics are fairly simple...
(global-linum-mode 1)
He's paleo-conservatism's apostle to the nerds.
"Even though we’ve invested $2.5 billion tax payer dollars and 10+ years of time on studying complementary and alternative medicines – we have discovered NO single breakthrough in medical treatment as a result."

What about the use of Neti pots for sinus hygiene?

http://www.jfponline.com/Pages.asp?AID=1355

My quality of life improved significantly... Maybe this doesn't count as a breakthrough but that's a pretty high bar.

Also in the linked article:

"The lone exception: ginger capsules may help chemotherapy nausea."

"As for therapies, acupuncture has been shown to help certain conditions, and yoga, massage, meditation and other relaxation methods may relieve symptoms like pain, anxiety and fatigue."

It is useful to remind people that it takes nearly a billion dollars to bring a drug to market, so if the public discovers a new use of equivalent efficacy for a natural treatment or a drug already in the public domain for less than a billion dollars it is a benefit.

Compare these alternative therapies to antidepressants, of which $11 billion worth were sold in 2008, and appear to be barely more effective than placebos.

http://www.healthyplace.com/depression/antidepressants/antid...

It is simply hard to find treatments that work.
Aha! It did. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_Sunscreen, "The most popular and well-known form of the essay is the successful music single Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen), released in 1998, by Baz Luhrmann."
PSP Go!
No, no need wasting words. And: not misplaced.
It actually might not be illegal. I was on safari last year and I was told you could buy a license to hunt leopards, just they are very expensive. You can also hunt lions and other big game.
We are also trying to figure out licensing for this genre for Mugasha (http://mugasha.com). It has been a big PITA so far.
Yes, I have used Bloomberg quite a lot, although I spent most of my time with its painful API. I just wanted to get your perspective on what Bloom feature you'd like to see in a web site/search engine.
I have (though I bought it myself) a Carolco bond (which covered Terminator 2), and framed it, and I point at it and go "Without this paper, no Terminator 2!"
What? You made two assertions, one unsupported, one wrong. Repeating them is pointless.
My dad gave me bees.
A WakeMate! Well, a printed email confirmation of a WakeMate preorder.
People don't want to wait. And many people are used to using their browser to access a corporate LAN and usually pretty fat pipes to the 'net. And when advertisements are increasingly large flash files...

Sure, the "concert tickets" line is funny, but I don't see this as wholly unreasonable.
convertible mitts! http://www.ems.com/product/index.jsp?productId=3651700
I got woken up at 1:30AM for a database replication problem, which wasn't a problem at all, there was no new data because IT WAS CHRISTMAS and there were no goddamn transactions to replicate. FFS!

Anyway, Merry Christmas!
Livecoding is a fine art. a christmas carol
On modern processors simple arithmetic like incrementing is effectively free. Control dependence is expensive. Data dependence is somewhere between. Fat pointers do not add any dependence. Storing the end has little cost given shadow registers.

If this had been adopted 20 years ago the likely outcome would be that cpus might have fractionally more integer resources. It wouldn't affect the wallclock speed of any code.

All of the operations you describe are done just as easily with fat pointers with the additional advantage of being applicable to truly arbitrary data, not just null clean strings.
Sunscreen is harmful. The threat of skin cancer is much less than the dangers of the diseases related to lack of sunlight which is blocked by sunscreen. The diseases include osteoporosis, prostate cancer, breast cancer, ovarian cancer, depression, colon cancer, schizophrenia, rickets, psoriasis, SAD, chronic vitamin D deficiency, diabetes and even obesity.

Much better advice: Get out in the sun, lose the sunscreen!
Tons of resources on cryptography
I am a huge fan of finance. I used to collect assets from other banks for accounts I opened, and I always loved looking at the old stock certificates. By far, the most amazing certificate I have ever seen is one from Disney. It's a piece of art.
I got a similar one (smaller white Cuisinart) last year for Christmas and it has been fantastic! You should break it in with some stir fry.
I say auction it off with the donation $ given to a fund that saves leopards...

* Some guy who wants one gets it without having to kill yet another.
* The charity will save more leopard lives.
* You get a tax deduction via charity donation receipt.

That's what I would do.
The content/applications for network usage in those days weren't too bad at 300 or 1200 baud. Mostly text or small binaries. Lots of single user stuff too. Today it's not uncommon for a family to have multiple computers and other devices that can access the Internet. If everyone is interested in doing streaming video I'd say 10-15Mbit/sec is a realistic minimum.
Hackers: Minimalist music, complicated board games, and sophisticated teas.

Yes.
Nanoc: a Ruby site compiler that generates static HTML
I thought that the Neti pot was a private enterprise project, not one investigated through alternative medicine research funding by the federal government. I see from the journal article link you kindly shared (thank you very much for that) that "Support for this study was provided by the Small Grant Program from the Department of Family Medicine, University of Wisconsin, Madison." So one conclusion from this is that there will continue to be funding sources for investigation of new therapies whether or not there is a federal government agency specifically tasked with funding investigation of "alternative" therapies.

It is useful to remind people that it takes nearly a billion dollars to bring a drug to market, so if the public discovers a new use of equivalent efficacy for a natural treatment or a drug already in the public domain for less than a billion dollars it is a benefit.

That's a very good point. Economic issues matter. What I would like to know more about is whether there has ever been, or ever will be, an "alternative" therapy of comparable safety and effectiveness that will come to market at less research expenditure than a "big pharma/mainstream medicine" therapy for the same condition. Human subject safety and effectiveness studies are inherently expensive, and until they are done, it is not clear that two therapies from two different paradigms of treatment are comparable at all.

Thanks for the other link about antidepressant drugs. The best considered view of the authors of the standard textbook on recurrent and bipolar depression

http://www.amazon.com/Manic-Depressive-Illness-Disorders-Rec...

is that mood stabilizers (lithium, depakote, carbamazepine) are better first-line drugs for depression with cyclic course than the SSRI drugs mentioned in the link you shared, and that talk therapy, especially if based on cognitive principles, is surely as effective as SSRIs and often needed in conjunction with any drug treatment for depression. The new SSRI drugs for depression indeed do not make mood disorder symptoms go away all by themselves, in the majority of cases.
Emacs cannot scroll the point off the screen.
2 hangovers in a row (maybe 3? we'll see...)

Coupla magazine subscriptions since I don't really want much else right now.

By the way, just finished Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance a few weeks ago. Great read even though I don't agree with it all.
The science of Santa
Collectively, users of those three sites are mostly European and American. And if only 9% of HN users are American, then yes, it does make sense that they didn't target this site.
Fixes to these problems needn't be startups. Part of the fix for problem 1 is the international Pirate Party movement.
"Your approach" is what Stepanov was referring to as "concepts" about .. erm .. 10 (?) years ago. It is effectively a template argument constraint system.

Concepts were one of the most expected features of C++0x, the one that got just recently dropped from the consideration due to being "not ready".
Well, to start, if I could get correlation data from Yahoo/Google Finance that would be a great. In addition to that, if I could get my hands easily on data concerning pending lawsuits, better industry data, and better regression tools (though this may tie in with the correlation data requested above), that would also be wonderful. Those are just a few key things that would be nice for equity. Also, the data concerning anything outside of equities is severely lacking in Yahoo/Google Finance.
My rule is exactly the opposite - I have cash and I can buy anything I want basically, and I can always save for more expensive things.

So the rule is simply - I neither give nor receive cash or gift certificates. That way I get things I may not have known I wanted, or unexpected things. It also brings a lot more fun into unwrapping presents.
After Copenhagen.. - good complement to the "china ruined it all" piece
Unfortunately, there isn't a good vim frontend. IIRC Viper mode and Vile mode both do strange things.
Even if owning it may not be illegal, I think trying to make a profit by selling it will surely end up with me posting an AskYC: How do I get out of jail?
ITablet Beta Tester Breaks Embargo
Prettige kerstdagen, Hacker News.
The Ink Efficiency of Common Typefaces
Thanks for that Ask YC link. Since I had to upvote it, I must have missed it! Feeling wistful because it's EOY and nearly EOD. There have been some wise Metafilter threads.

"My son is graduating from high school in a week. I want to make him a Best of Ask Metafilter book with all the best advice from the hive mind."

http://ask.metafilter.com/122353/Whats-the-Best-Thing-Youve-...

http://ask.metafilter.com/27160/What-would-you-tell-20yearol...

I sometimes think we old people (old as in relative) like to give advice because we have regrets or want to pay-it-forward or just want to get on our soapbox?
Amen from your Muslim brother. :)
Well, then I guess we will have to disagree.
Jeesh,

Your criterion for distinguishing an ad hominem argument is not at all valid.

It's enough for someone to say "that theory is the darling of every cannibalistic child-molesting moron in Sweden". If they said "that theory was created by a cannibalistic child-molesting moron and thus it's wrong", all they would be doing is giving away the irrationality of the implied ad hominem argument. It's much more effective and much more common for an arguer to toss insults and let the reader's emotional reactions create the conclusion.
I'm not sure what problem Powerset is trying to solve. It seems to me that they don't bring any extra functionality to searching Wikipedia with Google. Maybe I have misunderstood their project...?
You cannot take a substring without copying.

That's not a bug, it's a feature. Indeed, immutable strings should almost always be the default choice due to security concerns alone. C is optimized for the rare case, modern languages with immutable strings (like C#) are optimized for the common case, this is how it should be.
One that solves this

http://000fff.org/slaves-of-the-feed-this-is-not-the-realtim...
Nice digital picture frame (I was running out of room on my desk for all the photos, so it's nice to have them all in one frame on a slideshow),some DVDs, new speakers.My biggest joy today has been watching my daughter, who is 7.5 and has taken a serious interest in digital art/design, as she learns all the ins and outs of how to use her first WACOM. :)
Kindle ;-)
Gladwell clearly has a gift for writing interesting stories. Maybe he is also capable of being a great scientist, but I don't think he needs to be. The practical usefulness is twofold:

1. His works serve as food for thought. There are far too many topics for one man to research them all. Providing inspiration for further research is a worthwhile endeavor as well.

2. He provides thought frameworks. He reminds me of an old wise man. His writing contains key ideas, while not based on scientific fact, which are useful as rules of thumb. Sometimes decisiveness and confidence is more important than correctness or optimality. Tribal knowledge has its place.
http://www.furisdead.com/donate.asp
People are trying to create a language that fits the niche that C is supposed to fill in today's world but just barely misses the mark (fast, low-level, but still sane and more or less modern). To a lot of people it looks like the easiest way to create a language that fills that niche is to fix the bugs in C rather than create something new from scratch.
He's a homophobe.
I agree this is the way to go...
Socks are indeed an important business asset. We've always said that when our startup is actually profitable enough to have a proper office, it will include a dry-erase floor and a large supply of corporate socks... you know, for all the planning meetings and UI sketches and what not.
Indeed. I use emacs just for SLIME, and I keep running into tiny corners. I've got a .emacs that rounds some of the corners off, but it's still not perfect.

Which reminds me, if anyone knows how to get backspace to close the minibuffer when it's empty like vim does, I can smooth the most annoying corner I run into right now...
Emacs cannot solve the halting problem.
At first I thought you meant someone had burned you a copy of Snow Leopard. I guess that probably would've been better...
Being homophobic is illogical.
Well, emacs is scriptable in a Turing-complete language, so it can do anything any other computer program can do. Of course, that doesn't mean it's feasible or even preferable for it to do any of those things.
But STEVE is INSANELY HAPPY with it! Whatever it is! So it must be great!
We would have killed for 110 baud. We had a three baud modem and had to carry all the 1 bits by hand.
Building an Awesome Sound System
Ouch. "filters" wasn't the right word there. Sorry about that.
Actually,

I should mention that I don't necessarily agree that the original article only sneaks in ad hominem attacks but I would say that gratuitous insults towards "Marxists" on the left in certainly mar the conclusions it aims for.

In generally, I actually think the article tries to make the valid point that science shouldn't be manipulated by anyone. On the other hand, I think the point that since massively increasing emissions of all variety of pollutants could very plausibly be causing irreparable harm to the environment, we should cut them back seriously. I don't think that line of reasoning makes me a Marxist. I won't pretend this is a scientific argument however. But they are many situations where people have to make decisions where the science isn't settled (and waiting till the science is settled is just the decision to do nothing).

The unfortunate thing is that the level of national dialog has kind-of degenerated to the point where you get traction by clothing yourself in the authority of science and belittling your opponents. Some part of the article might serve as an effort to improve this dialog. The part where the author talks about the "Western left-intelligentsia, their kitbags stuffed with all the sub-Marxist and ethno-masochist flapdoodle of the modern Academy. They hate capitalism, they hate Western civilization, and they hate their own ancestors."
Gneve is actually quite a powerful video editor. A lot faster than click-click-click for power users.

Also with emacs' command recording facilities, it's far easier to reproduce your editing actions and keep them as scripts so that others can see what you did to go from a raw file to another intermediate file.
That's what I first thought too. Lol.

It would be really smart if Apple picked up on this and created a campaign where folks could get a discount on the OS when showing a receipt from PETA for donating a leopard fur.
3 baud? Luxury.

We had 1 baud and we kept it in a box in the middle of the road. Every day we'd get up, clean the box, read the bit, and then go to the factory to work for 20 hours. And when we got home every night our father would cut us with a knife.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo

Merry Christmas!
Yes I am not sure why we're posting song lyrics on HN now.
Dominion is the best game I've played in a long time. Easy to learn, and incredibly addictive. I'd gotten bored with most strategy games, but we've been playing hours of Dominion a night for a month.
Really, he's homophobic? Well I didn't know that. I like hearing him talk. I like his dry British wit.

Anyway, isn't homophobia defined as a strong disdain or dislike for homosexuals? And if so, must homophobia be logical or illogical? I think discrimination or malice toward homosexuals is immoral and unethical, but mere dislike when not called to coincide with a value system, does not provide enough information, by itself, to be considered illogical.
In my opinion, that's a problem. If you don't understand what is actually going on under the hood, you're likely to get bitten when things don't go exactly as you expect.

ActiveRecord is the most obvious example of this. If you don't know what queries it's going to throw out for a particular call, it may work just fine in development but could easily bring down a site in seconds in production.

Routing is another example. If you have a particular action that needs to have as low latency as possible changing its position in the routing file is often one of the easiest and most effectual changes you can make. Someone who just codes in the framework and doesn't understand how it works is unlikely to realize that.
An IR thermometer! I've always wanted one but never got around to getting it. I've been measuring the temperature of /everything/ since this morning. It's awesome to see how fast heating elements get hot, or quantify just how cold your coffee has gotten.
Kindle 2 or DX ?

Any idea how are the PDFs on Kindle 2 ?
Your time is your own concern, see you at Demo Day this March.
Is that similar to this Haskell code?

max :: Ord a => a -> a -> a
max a b = if a > b then a else b

The concepts that Stepanov was talking about, where algorithms are defined for classes of data structures supporting certain operations (iteration, comparison, etc.), sounds very familiar to anyone who's familiar with Haskell's type classes.
> that mood stabilizers (lithium, depakote, carbamazepine) are better first-line drugs for depression with cyclic course than the SSRI drugs

When these "work," it is by removing emotional affect entirely.

And lithium guarantees irreversible organ damage.
A Novation Launchpad, which I have already hacked to play Connect 4 with. I really wanted to play with a Monome a couple years ago but I could never get my kit to work very well (electronics were no problem, building the case was), so this is perfect.

Also the world's most awesome toy car: http://www.geekfu.org/things/delorean-1.JPG
Mabrook! (assuming an Arabic-speaking Muslim, of course :P)
Tell HN: A Great New Card Game
I wanted to tell everyone about a great, relatively new card game I discovered, called Dominion. Some of you have probably played it, but for those of you who have not, you're missing out. I highly recommend spending the 30 bucks or whatever it costs on Amazon and purchasing it.

Everyone seems to be talking about Settlers of Catan these days on HN, but if you want a real strategy game, that doesn't have the huge amount of luck Settlers has, try Dominion. I used to play a lot of Magic: The Gathering - I played in all the big national tournaments for years, so I have a special place in my heart for card games.

If I were to summarize why Dominion is good, I would say:

1) Though it is a card game, there is less luck than most card games because of how many times you draw each card.

2) It takes the best part of Magic (the deck-building) and turns it into the entire game.

3) It can be learned quickly, but it is difficult to master. My eight-year-old nephew picked it up in one game and loved it, and his mother (my sister) liked it too.

4) It's fun for 2-4 players.

5) The constant shifting of the cards means the game does not get old fast.

Anyways, if you have some holiday loot, get Dominion. Take it from a hardcore gamer, who has no affiliation with the publisher, Rio Grande. I'm just writing this because the game is great.