skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ben Fry's dissertation 'Computational Information Design' [http://benfry.com/phd/] is a great start. He breaks down many of the skills needed to succeed at information design and processing.

He's recently released Mastering Data with O'Reilly, which is essentially an expanded second addition to his dissertation.
I heard about this over 15 years ago on the radio program Living on Earth (http://www.loe.org/) while I was in college. It is very true, even if the story is slightly inaccurate. We really need to stop prescribing and taking antibiotics for things that are clearly viral infections.

At the time I heard the story, I went to the student health center (at ISU) and asked one of the doctors about prescribing antibiotics (amoxicillin was the drug of choice at the time) when students clearly have a viral infection, and that antibiotics are not going to do anything. He completely agreed, but he said, "If we don't prescribe something, we'll have angry parents calling to complain."
You can spend the next 6 months of your life knocking on investors' doors with just your idea, and have nothing to show for it.

Or you can spend the next 6 months to hack an ugly prototype. You'll be amazed how much further along you are.

That's because in the second scenario, you actually did something. That has value. It may not be your final product, but you'll learn so much more than tweaking the template on your powerpoint deck.
AJAX originated as an obscure hack put in IE by a Microsoft employee. The only reason it made such a splash later is that other people tried it, found they could use it to do cool things, and then spread the word.

HTML5 could make just as big a splash. Someone making local storage work seamlessly in a large webapp would be noteworthy, and take away the biggest problem with Chrome OS: can't work offline.
The barrier to learning HTML 5 for the entrenched HTML/CSS/JS talent is too low and the migration path is too clear that being an "HTML5" expert will be notable enough to provide exclusive niche marketability.
I have respect for the pen, due to its portability, convenience for quick notes and use for making sketches, diagrams, and free-form documents. The type writer, on the other hand is idiotic. It's rigid, even worse than computer documents. It's also completely incapable of handling Chinese, which makes up a large part of what I have to write. On top of that, a typewriter weighs more than a backpack with a laptop inside.

What's next, Mass production vs personal forge?
Realistically wireless coverage inside your house will be spotty for a long time to come. And you will may never get service in your basement.

I'm looking for femtocells to provide service in these situations.
DSL is being replaced by FTTP--all the major phone companies are switching to fiber. Verizon has FiOS, AT&T has U-Verse and Qwest has what they are calling "fiber optic" DSL but which isn't really DSL.

It will take a while, but fiber is the future.
Sales.
"Jungle Dave", Founder of Jungle Disk, Leaves
Hello Nathan, and thank you for the comment.

Actually the “off by one” bug is by design – it looks empty when the value of the dial is zero and the colorful ring around it is completely gone (and given it is midnight it would stay like this for an hour).

However you are free to change it – you’ll just need to change the line above from:

var angle = (360/total)*(current+1);

To something like this:

var angle = (360/(total-1))*current;
So, there's both a proximate and an ultimate cause. The ultimate cause of cheaper laptops is cheaper laptop parts. They wouldn't even be possible if the parts couldn't be had for less than the sale price.

But until somebody in the industry breaks from the pack and says "I'm going to offer this cheaply, damn the profits", all that cost savings accrues in profits to the OEMs. That maverick could be an upstart startup intent on market share with nothing to lose. Or it could be a nonprofit director on a mission to save the 3rd world.

In this case, the OLPC was the catalyst. The technology existed beforehand, and most people knew the technology existed. But Nicholas Negroponte was the first one to say "It can be done, therefore let's do it."

The same structure exists in lots of other industries. Why is broadband 10x faster in Japan than here (citation: http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/Images/commentarynews/bro...)? They have the same technology. But the telecom industry in the U.S. is a duopoly between Comcast and Verizon (with a few bit players), and they have an incentive to dribble out only enough in speed increases to stay ahead of their competitor.

Perfectly competitive markets exist only in an economics textbook. In the real world, things don't happen until somebody says "We're going to make it happen."
Google is starting to look at microformat data. All that needs to happen in order for more semantic tech to take off is the search engines paying attention.

As soon as a technology translates into an edge on the web, it'll get implemented. This fixes the monetary motivation problem, and forces people to solve the other two :)
I misread "The db.eval() statement provides a way to automically perform several operations at once; however, its use for this is not recommended as this eval() atomicity will not be supported for certain cases in sharded environments" as "...eval() atrocity..."
We have hurricanes where I live and mobile is much better able to cope--phone lines get blown down. The carriers have done a good job with securing towers and providing onsite power. They even bring in extra capacity in critical areas on trucks: http://www.corp.att.com/ndr/images/2007Q4_1022_259_tch_satco...
Centrify Awarded Patent for Authenticating User Accounts via a Directory
http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT7591005
If you aren't already doing it, try making your specs human and machine-readable, using a tool like Cucumber. This is a process-oriented improvement (not a technological one.) The $ benefits come from decreased status-checking overhead and transparency in the functioning of the code base.

Similarly, invest in testing technologies for the front-end. Many web-app shops only focus on testing the back-end, but as front-end logic becomes more complex, the advantages of testing become more fortuitous.
> What usually happens is that low performing teachers (or school systems) lobby to have the standardized exam watered down.

In Britain, where the exams have been dumbed down significantly -- see http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2007/08/31/gcses-are-dumbed-d... or http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/do-you-see-with-yo... -- the main driver has been the ministry of education AFAICT, & their motive seems to be to increase the level of exam passes.
UMA is what could solve this--you can switch calls between the GSM tower and over the internet through WiFi. Call passing is tricky, but the tech is here and it works. If you have WiFi at home and the office, it's game changing.

T-Mobile is the only US carrier pushing it, mostly because they are the scrappy smaller player.
Hmm, that is a good point about the "empty ring" but it looks bad when the ring is off by one for the entire rest of the day.
it's not going to pan out because we're going to roll back to single cores?
Have you tried a femtocell?
4 in 5 people scanned, send 5 people
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the term defererencing. There ought to be a better word for following a reference.

(This question is of practical interect to me -- I'm currently designing a language that has a dereferencing operator deref() and am wondering what better name to give it.)
Recession fuels spike in foreign investor visas
I think another angle to this is if actually successful it will be a public demo of space warfare capabilities. Sort of like the Chinese anti-satellite missle test.
Sorry, I had to close the page after reading: "I'm not sure that it's possible to know how to code in as many programming languages as I do"

tldr: It's painfully apparent the author is getting too old to Keep Up and is taking that frustration out on newer technology. Retire already. No one uses gopher or typewriters anymore (for serious work), nor will they ever.
Rails Business - What Have You Learnt in 2009 That You Can Use in 2010?
I worked at one of the bigger semweb startups for a few years, been to the major conferences several times... the whole concept of putting structure to data makes a lot of sense. However, an explicit ontology is not necessary to make data useful. RDF is a great technology that exploits the generality of graphs, but I'm not sure if and when it's going to catch on. I'd still rather use JSON for most of my transport layer stuff.
Any kind of heuristic weighting scheme like this can and usually should be replaced with a machine learning approach.

During heuristic weight development, the developer sets the weights, experiments with it for a while, notes whether particular URIs are not ranking highly which should be (or vice versa), and then changes the weights.

Doing this the "right" way formalizes this process. The developer assigns a desired rank to each URI (or NA if he just ranks the top few) and compares this to the computed rank (as a function of the features, e.g. visitation time, visitation frequency, etc.).

A few rounds of this on different computers and eventually the coefficients settle such that the computed rank matches the desired rank most of the time. Moreover the process is more transparent and can be re-run should new features be included.
"Lucky for all of us I don't think the 80s lasted very long. "

Wow. I'm guessing this person did not live through them. It was a great time for art and music.
Excellent answer, thank you.

This is one of the main fields I have been looking into. The idea of iPhone/Android/Blackberry/etc app, sounds absurd to me with the Internet-Everywhere movement.

Uniform web hosted apps are surely to be here soon.
But until somebody in the industry breaks from the pack and says "I'm going to offer this cheaply, damn the profits", all that cost savings accrues in profits to the OEMs.

...or the manufacturers concentrate on bringing the features of $1500 laptops into the next generation of $1000 laptops, instead of bringing the features of $1000 laptops into a new generation of $750 laptops.
first, you need to grok the basics http://academicearth.org/courses/machine-learning but data mining can't be learned from a passive standpoint. You need to find a large dataset http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/ and try to do something with it. I've been pleased with http://neuroph.sourceforge.net/ for a lot of the stuff I do.
I like the "I am not these Trevor Blackwell's" section. Without the clarification, champion MTG Trevor could have convinced me he was Anybots Trevor.
Only eye candy? I would not underestimate the importance of an application's visual aesthetic. As the author demonstrates, even subtle details (like a 1px drop shadow) can breathe life into an interface.

We developers might dismiss 1px drop shadows an unimportant; after all, the "real" application is the code we write. But users make no such distinctions. To them, the interface is the application.
I don't think you could have comfortably done Rails dev on the typical 1999 workstation.
The reason nepotism is so despised in the west is because we still remember how it worked the last time we tried it -- aristocracy is just the extreme version of nepotism.

There is nothing wrong in trying to provide for your child as well as you can, but (s)he shouldn't end in a leadership position just because of his pedigree. Nepotism is generally one of the opposites of meritocracy.
This is already the reality on the ground, not 2 years out
Doctorow, How to Destroy the Book
> "If we don't prescribe something, we'll have angry parents calling to complain."

That's what's so good about homeopathy --- a generally accepted placebo.
you've actually got the processing power to do interesting things. I've currently got a 250M record database in my domain of interest - a few years ago, crunching on this database was prohibitively time expensive but now it flies, without even getting into what it means to be able to run stuff on EC2 with arbitrary power... that's direct experience with the same database btw, not supposition based on two different databases. Next, consider how much more data is being generated... it should not be difficult to believe that drawing interesting conclusions from data is and will continue to be interesting.
As of this Sept., Xbox's tie ratio is 8.8, PS3's tie ratio is 6.8, and Wii's is 6.5 [1].

Per console, it does look like Xbox and (barely) Sony did make more money per console.

That doesn't really mean all that much though, since Wii's console base is roughly twice that of the Xbox.

[1] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4172/npd_behind_the_nu...
Pro-tip: jQuery is light and fast enough for mobile and provides clean abstractions.
Apparently it's a technical term -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_fraction

relating to absorption of CO2. But it's easy to misunderstand if you don't know the precise meaning. I doubt the title is intentionally misleading.
I don't think anyone said GitHub is "the one true way".

No, I don't think anyone did. pohl's comment that it's meant about "the general prevalence of a meme that roughly fits that description" is about right.

because of the general uptick in contributions when code is hosted there.

Github is a slick and friendly home for open source, even if the Windows Ui tools for git still need a lot of polish. But do you have numbers to back that idea? It could well be true, who knows.
Relevant parts:

Paradoxically, the best terrorist strategy (as long as they have enough volunteers) under unpredictable screening may be to prepare a cadre of suicide bombers for the least rigorous screening to which they might be subjected, and not, as the strategy assumes, for the most rigorous. Sent on their way, each will either succeed at destroying a plane or be caught, but either outcome serves the terrorists' objective. ...

We might reflexively assume that any passenger screening system needs to be 100% effective at detecting all possible weapons and dangerous objects, an obviously difficult task. But, fortunately, that's not the requirement. Instead, the mechanisms need only be highly effective at detecting objects that can create actual terror under the conditions they will be subjected to in an actual flight. That is, in order to have meaningful security screening, we first must understand what it realistically takes to bring down an airplane. The security system can then be designed specifically to eliminate the preconditions for successful terrorism.

The TSA's much maligned "three ounce" liquid rule is, in fact, a nice example of good security engineering of this kind. ...
It seems more efficient to try and raise economic activity to the point where foreign aid is no longer required; the OLPC was an attempt to do this through jump starting technology education.

The areas for which it was intended did not need mosquito nets - places such as rural Mexico. These places have power and running water.

While saving lives is a worthwhile goal, saving them just so they can carry on being perpetually dependent on foreign aid seems to be pretty unfair on both the nations giving aid and the nations receiving it.
The Full Disclojure videos have helped me understand some of the features new to clojure in 1.1.

http://www.vimeo.com/channels/fulldisclojure
I wonder how large an impact would be required to alter the earth's rate of rotation. I think we could all use a slightly longer day ;)
On most keyboards it is very hard to touch-type while programming. Seriously, I just can't enter a curly brace while keeping my hands on the home row. It hurts :) And once you move that hand, repositioning it takes time.

The other reason I never learned to type properly is that I just get bored. I tried several times, and always gave up. It just feels like a waste typing fjfjfjfjfjfj when I could be entering code.

Finally, the productivity of a coder isn't how fast he/she can type. It's how well they think, which is mostly inversely related to WPM.
The primary impetus behind the EEE was massive overproduction of LCD screen assemblies for portable DVD players (7", 800x480) so the prices hit rock bottom, possibly below manufacturing cost. In addition there was a lot of dead stock of crap Celerons, along with Intel continuing to produce a really cheap several-generation-old power-hungry chipset as the bottom of their range.

Netbooks are a result of a boom/bust cycle in Taiwan and Shenzen.
You should have at least finished the sentence before concluding that it makes no sense. "I'm not sure that it's possible to know how to code in as many programming languages as I do, own an iPod, three laptops, two mobiles and be able to quote verbatim from some W3C/IETF specs and consider oneself a Luddite unless one significantly bends the definition of Luddite."
If Microsoft had purchased YouTube, I don't think it would have had the same low bandwidth costs that Google enjoys per that article.
Frankly, the vast majority of applications don't have these classes of concurrency, capacity and computational concerns and can be adequately scaled in the traditional fashion.
I've used flurry - It's easy to integrate and good for charting numbers and new users.

The "events" and crash tracking functionality was not as useful as I had hoped - if I have a rare crash I'd like to see the events that lead to that crash, but that data is not linked together. I'd also like to know the phone model an OS for the device that crashed, but the OS and device data is logged separately and isn't connected to the crash reports.

Maybe the event integration will improve with the Pinch Media merger.
Full marks for getting to the core of what I was asking. It seems almost like a year ago nobody had heard of github; and now there are people who don't seem to have heard of anything else.

Not to take away from GitHub being good, but I'm asking what makes it seems that good.

I put a new code on Github and it seems all right. But I'm not going to move code that's been hosted elsewhere for several years even if something slightly better comes along. Consistency is a virtue.
It's perfectly possible that an organization headed by the government whose primary focus is the security of airline passengers is completely incompetent and ineffective.

But is it not also possible that the TSA is purposefully putting on the guise of an incompetent governmental entity? That would seem like an excellent strategy to take, as it follows the principles in Sun Tzu's Art of War to the letter. If you are strong, appear weak, if you are weak, appear strong, etc.

If these terrorists think they can easily game the system, it will likely lead them to be less cautious, exactly as stated in the article:

Paradoxically, the best terrorist strategy (as long as they have enough volunteers) under unpredictable screening may be to prepare a cadre of suicide bombers for the least rigorous screening to which they might be subjected, and not, as the strategy assumes, for the most rigorous.

That seems like a good thing to me, and if this is the TSA's actual strategy, it's a smart one. Say one thing publicly, but do another privately.
I am surprised no one raised the issue of smart-devices. I mean the hundreds of planned smart, wireless, SOC devices that are prophesied to become deeply ingrained into our lives in the coming years.

ZigBee/WBAN/RFID and the technology around them.

This fields has myriads of required applications:
- Firmware upgrades
- Control & Monitoring
- Inter communication tools
- Security
and more and more and more
Engineering Your Way To Marketing Success
Any form of sleep/anaesthesia has a nonzero chance of killing somebody. I don't even want to think what the insurance and liability issues would look like for this.

You can say, "well, only if there's a hijacking" and I'll say, "but how could they be 100% sure, and what would insurance companies make them do to be sure before allowing them to potentially kill innocent passengers, with that insurance company liable?"
/edit also works on submissions. useful for grabbing the url from a dead'd submission.
Given the charged political content of the subject, and the fact that this is an article intended for non-expert readers, I'd say that it's all but certain that the title is intentionally misleading. It's constructed as link bait to draw exactly this kind of post on news aggregation sites.

But yes, it doesn't say at all what it seems to. The fraction of CO2 in [edit: should have read "entering", apologies] the atmosphere that is due to anthropogenic sources (vs. natural sources) hasn't changed. But overall CO2 has been increasing steadily; that's a very old and very well established result. Type "hawaii co2 measurements" into google image search. The chart is clear as day.
Those are two great examples. I've heard of KNN, but I will certainly be looking into KSVM!

My personal recommendation is the Naive Bayesian Classifier:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Bayes_classifier

http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html
It's a little more subtle than that.

AT&T can get out of the POTS biz tomorrow by selling it and the pieces that are regulated with it. In fact, AT&T was out of the POTS biz in most of the country and bought its way back in.

They could, for example, do cell phone, long distance, and cable TV without being in the POTS biz.

However, they can't provide DSL capacity without being in the POTS biz.

What they want is a monopoly for certain forms of access without having to provide POTS. (I'm not sure exactly what.)

If we buy their "universal service" argument, the solution is actually to use cell phone revenues to bolster POTS service. There's precedent - they took their POTS revenues to build/buy their cell phone service.
Then again that is true regardless of what martial art you practice. Without people who are capable of giving solid, well intentioned strikes you will learn little of any practical use. Although the likelihood of finding such people probably does vary by art, and having studied some Aikido besides the teacher and some of the more advanced students, most did not know how to (including myself).
This article demonstrates what I like about Matt Blaze's physical security writing that I don't like about Schneier's.

Both are computer security experts by training, but Blaze's writing has a concrete engineering-driven perspective that Schneier's lacks. Schneier's writing always "feels" right, but leaves you with the sense that's it's not based on any operational reality.

It's probably not a coincidence that Matt Blaze has done formal research on physical security topics (safecracking, wiretapping, etc) --- in addition to being a bona fide computer scientist.
Why not just get some tileboard? It's $12 for a 4'x8' chunk at Home Depot: http://www.johnmurch.com/2007/10/20/diy-whiteboard-on-the-ch...
To illustrate the scale of the tragedy there are around 1.1bn people living in poverty.

If those people had been afforded opportunities similar to those available in the US their total salaries would be somewhere between $20 and $40 trillion.

That's a huge amount of wasted potential - all those resources could be working on making all of our lives better - advancing medicine, computer science, engineering and other things. Instead they are living miserable lives in atrocious slums.
Last day to send a message to the KEO time capsule
This is largely inspired from a conversation tptacek and I had at his offices earlier in the break. (His company is like two blocks from my dentist. Small world!)

The thesis is, essentially, that you'd get much higher ROI if you redirected engineering assets from building marginal features to supporting your marketing endeavors. For concrete suggestions as to how to do that, see the article.
The idea that Matt Blaze thinks the three-ounce rule is sensible was surprising to me; I hit it, jumped back to the top, and re-read the whole article. What's the flaw in his reasoning? The three-ounce rule always seemed like one of the more ridiculous TSA measures.