skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am not talking about their intentions - that is not a domain of "simple logic" anyway. What I am saying is factual statement: the set [made cheaply] is a subset of [made in misery]. So you cannot escape purchasing stuff [made in misery] if you buy suff [made cheaply].
"16- to 18-year-olds perform seven tasks, on average, in their free time — like texting on the phone, sending instant messages and checking Facebook while sitting in front of the television. "

Um, yeah, those aren't exactly "tasks" as I would define them... What scares me a little is that every single kid I have met in the last two years was unable to concentrate on learning anything (like how to solve a puzzle - concentrating on TV is not really an achievement). Could be normal, but I am not sure - I still hope it is just a phase...
Ironically, I just blogged about this, except with FB in the place of Google: http://blog.1530technologies.com/2009/12/where-is-the-disgus...

I remain confident that a portion of the success of Google has come from the fact that they came along at the peak of anti-MS fever in the industry. People were yearning for someone other than MS and jumpped on to Googles wagon and haven't looked back. Everything Google does is spun as the ultimate good. Even though if MS launched hotmail and had the phrase 'scanning the users email to tailor ads', people would have erupted.
"Google's privacy invasions..."

Could I have a list, with details, of these privacy invasions?

"the shenanigans that Apple and Google have been pulling"

Is that your opinion or fact? Were they mis-steps, mistakes or shenanigans?

Are you bringing these popular topics up because you read about all this on forums or do you have facts?
That he works for an angel (very few angels have staff) and what they invested in.
"Make something wanted", which is the passive voice for your "Make something people want." It's also technically more accurate, as many dog food and pet supply companies have found out. ;-)
Printing a warning would be easy enough, you could disable the warning if you want it to work like this. Leave that for one generation with a 'deprecated' attached to it, remove in the major release after that.

Lots of things that were wrong have been changed like that.

The biggest one remaining of the 'old' bugs which I think really would break too much is the strpos return value in case of no match (which is 'false' but 0 is a legal return value as well, -1 would have been a far better choice).
Surviving a Job Promotion: when a developer is promoted to team lead
I'm pretty sure it's a joke, like brainfuck, whitespace etc. If not, then god help us all.
Ollie fire bathing | @stewarttownsend
Is every language claiming to be faster than C now?
Have you seen the full quote?

"I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines–including Google–do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities."

In this context, and not in the pull-quote part everyone loves, I think his meaning is quite clear. Your expectation of privacy is flawed because of the legal system you (probably) operate within. I'm trying to imagine what you want him to say: "We think privacy is important so we ignore federal laws for geek cred WHOOO". Does that seem like a prudent thing to say as the CEO of a major American firm?
Does this article deliver on the hype?

What I got out of it was: "Some people are dumber than me." This is a well-known problem both inside and outside the programming world, and unfortunately killing the people dumber than you is not the solution to the problem.
Oh yeah? tell it to ones who immigrate from China to Kazakhstan for example: Kazakhstan has very limited trade with USA, but quality of live is much, much higher than Chinese.
People will take any opportunity to push you down the ladder. They worm their way through any small hole they can find and they attempt to change your perception of yourself to that of a lesser human being. It is even more petty when they do it in front of other people. It's a status game, and I luckily started to notice it while very young.

Unfortunately, there is not a lot of hope for people who don't see the problem with this practice and who have followed it for a long time, unquestioningly and subconsciously. And confronting them about it is only good for increasing the temperature of their head. That is, their temperament is volatile and effects the density of their head... makes it susceptible to temperature increases. Thus, hot headed.

This is one of those things that really, really, really annoys me. And it needs to become socially acceptable to call people out on it.

But I have a question. I skipped college, so I don't know. Do people still do this in higher education?
Having read the tutorial it (the dining philosophers problem example) now looks quite elegant. I'm still a little unsure about exactly what latches do and when you're meant to use the -> operator though. A quick syntax summary would really help.
I agree. It seems you could have written this article during Jane Austen's time. "Children growing up are going to be SOOOO much different from the previous generation because the post is delivered as often as SIX times a day and OMG will this kind of instant communication breed a new race of hive mind humans?????????//?/?"

(Perhaps not the most believable pastiche of 18th-century written English ever.)

Another bubbling intra-generational gap, as any modern parent
knows, is that younger children tend to be ever more artful
multitaskers. Studies performed by Dr. Rosen at Cal State show that
16- to 18-year-olds perform seven tasks, on average, in their free
time — like texting on the phone, sending instant messages and
checking Facebook while sitting in front of the television.

People in their early 20s can handle only six, Dr. Rosen found, and
those in their 30s perform about five and a half.

I think that the physical differences between the brains of those three age groups is pretty significant. Isn't it possible that a fifteen-year-old would lose her multitasking prowess by her mid-twenties, whether or not she was born with an iPhone in her hands?
Thanks very much for the kind words - don't know what Google can do but I agree it has a lot more leverage today than it would have had in its early days. Whatever happens, it will be interesting to see how this unfolds.
glSlideshow has been in xscreensaver since 2003. And some of its hacks have been able to use a directory of images when they need a source for a lot longer.
Semi-Realtime Satellite Desktop Backgrounds
So when do you work? I suppose when you don't know what to do?
Fucking thank you.

Do you have a twitter or something? You just made me want to listen to more of what your obviously sensible brain has to say :D
Accumulated experience isn't an end in itself. I guess I don't know the salary situation, but web development pays fine.
Like VHDL
Alternative search engines don't help much when you need traffic to your web site. Alternative MP3 players don't help much when you want to sell mobile apps. (Note: I don't like the "monopoly" cries either).
According to the wikipedia article the above out-of-context and possibly misremembered quote is full of shit.

Without having a transcript of that particular cosmos episode I would not go so far as to say Sagan was full of shit. Do you have it ? Is that a literal quote ?
Autoplaying video. Worse, buffering autoplaying video that I can't reliably track down by tab.
If this is a joke - this is a very well thought out joke by someone who has a lot of time in his hands: http://code.google.com/p/anic/wiki/Tutorial
Yes, and most of them are written in C (OK, C++ for anic).
> Von Daniken in his 'Chariots of the Gods'

It's a contender in the list of 'biggest pseudo scientific bs', runner up is the scientology junk.
Fair enough. Please do note:

1) I find your writing style juvenile and distasteful. Maybe some of you yanks actually like that kind of writing. Personally, such writing makes the reading intolerable, even if the content is interesting.

2) Still regarding 1): if you already have the fame, why do you keep writing like a disgruntled teenager desperate for attention?

3) Interestingly, I don't disagree with the points you made in the article, I just don't think that insulting your audience is the best way to make your point. Maybe some people like it. To me, it just sounds vulgar.

4) Statistics taught in undergrad and business school is pseudo-Statistics. I don't mean to be pedantic, but the truth is that only graduate-level, rigorous, Mathematical Statistics counts as "true Statistics". One does not need to know the entire field (that takes at least one lifetime), but one needs to know the fundamentals very well in order to apply them.

5) Mere mortals can only be experts in one or two things. You have programming and guitar. Sorry, but you still are no Statistics expert on my book. 10 years of R is impressive and valuable, but if you don't know the foundations, you're a technician, not a statistician.

6) My field is not Statistics. I am no expert in Statistics, and I am not qualified to write about it. I can write a blog post on Algebraic Geometry, but you would not understand it, so there's no point.

7) Unlike you, I have no interest in revealing my true identity. Unfortunately, there are evil people in this world, and whatever I would write on HN under my real name could be used against me later on. If you're not in that position and can write what the fuck you want on your blog, then I must say that I envy your freedom.

To recap: writing like a teenager does alienate some readers, and calling a non-expert an expert is something to be avoided.
I do too, but this is one of the few hour-long videos that's worth watching. And I HATE long videos.
Don't Be A Hero
This may surprise you, but there are intelligent and rational people who aren't personally offended by the same things you are.
Which may not be a good thing, in the long term - some software just isn't going to get written for free, and sneering at anything that steeps so low as to charge money for work isn't a strong motivator.
Torture Kids Instead (Robin Hanson)
I think what you're overlooking is the LOADS of kids that go off and become Mechanical Engineers, Civil Engineers, and mathematicians. Lots of people care about developing solutions to hard problems, but they just aren't exposed to technology in the same way as most of us were. I think that this is changing.
Works okay in other countries. And I know it's not because, say, Australian government folks are just less corrupt than American govt folks.
If you ping me, I'd be happy to send you the spreadsheet of the keywords. My contact info is in my profile.
When it makes sense to INCREASE Burn rates
What does "the slate" mean here? There's not one master language out there, so "killing PHP" means one of two things:

1. Using something else for an individual project (maybe a good idea)
2. Replacing all PHP with something else (impossible)

Since a massive amount of the web runs on PHP, "starting off with a clean slate" would definitely NOT be easier. In fact, it would be impossible.
"They are probably worse than MS in terms of vendor lock-in but just don't have a large enough market share to bully people around."

?

In the past couple years they created a cross platform multi-vendor open standard for GPU computing, they took a big risk by launching the iPhone without support for flash and have continued to be basically the only major company giving adobe any pressure to improve its shit-tastic platform, they have (granted extremely slowly) improved their iPhone development program from basically non-existant to acceptable in a sadistic way (and if the trend continues it might actually be good within a year or two), they mostly got rid of DRM from iTunes, and most recently they opened up their SDK for making the iTunes LP things (which will likely be of importance when (if ever) the iTablet/iSlate comes out).

The only two (somewhat related) things Apple does that I would classify as vendor lock-in are 1: XCode, and therefore OS X, is required for iPhone development, and 2: You need a Mac to run OS X. I would consider these to be more of an issue if Apple preemptively put a stop to #2 through activation checks or some WGA-esque program, but they don't. As long as you aren't going around selling preinstalled copies of OS X on non-Apple hardware, Apple could seemingly care less.

Microsoft in recent history hasn't been bad either, they still have WGA, and there was the whole OOXML thing, but other than those two things I can't think of anything they have done that has caused an e-uproar. Personally I would put the two (Apple and MS) roughly equal to each other in terms of Evil.
A paper he wrote covering the same material:

http://www.nature.com/nrendo/journal/v2/n8/full/ncpendmet022...
Theres plenty of dataflow-type languages out there. One of the most interesting, IMHO, is Lustre, since it seems to be used heavily in the defence and aerospace industries, though its pretty tough to find any information about it (though there were quite a few code examples in a recent SIGPLAN publication).

Besides that, you may find the languages listed here interesting: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/461796/dataflow-programmi...

I've been playing around with dataflow concepts myself and personally see them as the way forward in programming, though I'm not quite sure yet how it would need to be done to catch on as a mainstream language. I think I'll play with anic for a bit and see what happens :)
How can you possibly tell what is a good trade when using nebulous terms like "Freedom"?
Many computer science "weenies" go on to make big bucks, thank-you very much.
Why do you hope this is a joke?
Apple Tablet Being Developed For HealthCare Industry
There is no better tool for improving government image that terrorist threat. It's objectively pretty harmless threat that can be medially inflated to such great size that control and security provided by government will seem absolutely essential for all citizens.

I can't think of another harmless thing that will make having government along with army, security and spies appear equally useful.

War is good at justifying existence of army but it's devastating so should be avoided at all costs. Cold war was playing nice for few dozen of years but enemy collapsed. So now we have terrorism. Good thing is it's much safer for us.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link."

We've been through this over and over again. There's Hacker Hacker News on top of Hacker News that's using Bayesian Filters (as far as I understand) to display technical topics only: http://hackerhackernews.com/
No that is a gross mischaracterization. Rand is talking about the degradation of society as a whole, rather than the depradations of just one person in a society..
Is Google Good for History?
The Company That Paid $300K To Not Make Millions on Guitar Hero
What does it matter what the compiler is written in? (Disclosure: I never checked if this compiles directly or if it uses C as an intermediary, if the latter, then Ok)
So in context, we should cut Schmidt slack for enthusiastically following and enforcing an unjust law, and even worse, profiting from it?
The only sad thing about Hacker Hacker News is...

Page generated at 17:55 on 15 October 2009
Get NoScript.
There is no correlation between gun ownership and murders because if you want to kill someone and plan for it you have fair odds of succeeding even if you use rolled newspaper as your murder tool.

On the other hand there is a correlation between gun ownership and homicides because killing human accidentally is most easily achieved by use of gun (maybe I'm wrong and the car is best tool and gun second best?).
HaXe - haXe Introduction
Erlang becomes easily readable once you wrote a few dozen lines yourself.
> who actually is?

Like many other 'methodologies', it has uncritical advocacy. (http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2009/10/07/tdd-derange...) (HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=866707)

I agree that automatic testing is nearly always a net gain, but using tests themselves as the primary driver for the design process suggests to me that the developer has little other design experience to draw upon.
Oh, I didn't notice that. Still, the source code is available on bitbucket at http://bitbucket.org/sqs/hhn/ so there's nothing stopping anyone relaunching it.
No, you're right. Instead you should quote him out of context and suggest he's saying no one should have privacy.

That seems like the smartest thing to do. Certainly gets you more up votes here.
Standard dataflow stuff really. Still, I'm excited to see how this turns out.
re: Quantcast: PG said that this site was getting around 40k uniques a day a few months back.

re: the font. I'll have to mess around with the fontography and see what I can do. The summaries are italicized right now. Is that what you're referring to? If those are hard to read, I can change that around.

re: the summaries. Thanks for the feedback. I thought long and hard about that, and one of the big reasons that I did it, was SEO. I thought that Google would appreciate a few more sentences per link to index and rank a bit better for the keywords I'm targeting.

Thanks for the feedback on the summary extraction. I worked pretty long and hard on that one. It's suprisingly challenging. I'm glad it's worked for you so far.
I'm not necessarily against doing it quickly, but I see that as orthogonal to the protein/carbohydrate mix in the diet. As I see it, Person A currently has an average calorie intake of C, burns C' calories a day and requires P grams of protein and F grams of fiber. I would contend that it if you construct a diet plan with D<C' calories, then you will receive more favorable results with a proper diet that covers protein and intakes proper amounts of fiber and carbs and micronutrients. For me, this is a very vegetable heavy diet with daily protein supplements (I prefer brown rice protein + orange juice, to which you may add active culture yogurt)
Or FlashBlock.

But the problem of audio from an unidentified tab suggests a neat feature/add-on for future tabbed browsers: indicate when a tab is making sound with some animation in its tab/favicon. (This might be easiest for Chrome with its process-per-tab model -- which processes are making audio calls?)
Settimeout.net: personal time-delayed RSS feed
I ran linux on the desktop for a year, and it was a similar experience to using a mac... some stuff that should be simple there just isn't software for, and your limited in a weird sort of way. Having said that, it wasn't as annoying as my mac is, but then I am a techie.
$I $use $PHP $on $a $daily $basis $too... ;-)

Mainly because I have to. And I often have to, since many el-cheapo web providers only offer PHP+MySQL. PHP isn't too bad, I don't get bitten often by strange bugs. I see PHP as a common workhorse.
have you ever tried to use Processing for business? i did some visualization/art stuff that maxed out at 20-30 fps in processing, and was easier to do and ran at 100+ fps in vvvv. it's a toy.
Best

DOUG: Hmm, I'm curious if Joe can make a 3:30 seminar.
When is Joe's flight due in?
YOU: 3 PM. ... What's the seminar?

Conversation potentially ensues.

When you ask someone a question out of nowhere, even a simple, factual question, they will immediately wonder why. It's what we do. Since you want information from them, throw them a bone and give a phrase-length preface to why you want the information.
So if people didn't buy stuff from these miserable countries the people there would be better off? Absolutely wrong. Typically their other choices are subsistence farming, prostitution, or selling children into same.

Also, I'm amazed that you tried to equate economic decisions to the acts of torture and mass murder committed by the Nazis. There ought to be a law about that sort of thing. ;-)
You're handwaving the part where this is presumed to be bad.

It may seem obvious to you, but it isn't to everyone, and the process of explaining why exactly you think that is probably more useful than asking people to be more upset about it. Why is having all of my data on Google's servers bad? I keep all of my money in a bank without trouble, and that would seem to be at least as important as my data. What makes Google evil?
In the trash? Come on, you could at least take its skin off and, along with your kid, turn it into a papier-mache artistic creation which actually moves.
Note to pg: see who downvoted this and check their downvote history...
In common lisp 08 is the number 8.

clisp -q -x "(print 08)"
8

An octal number has the prefix #o, as in #o3
Apple wouldn't have to develop anything in particular in order for an iphone-like tablet to be supported by the third-party medical software providers to want to develop for it, I imagine.

Disclaimer: I do some contracting work with corporations named in the post.
Haven't used it much, but I find Fish shell control structures much more consistent that those in *sh: http://fishshell.org/
The description sounded too over the top, too many words. Kind of like "The peoples socialist democratic republic of ..." its a pattern that rings negative alarms.
Working on a web crawler that tracks the associations between websites online. Currently working on the front-end which will, at first, simply list websites ordered by how many other websites link to them which is not incredibly interesting in and of itself but my rough plan is to implement some sort of crowd-sourced categorization system to demarcate the data in such a way that people will find useful.
Because, I'm afraid, your assumptions are flawed.

You are failing to account for the capital built up in the property which is only returning 5% (on average), whilst it could be earning a (historical) average of 12% elsewhere. (The average index fund growth.)

You are also failing to account for maintenance costs, which are not cheap on a property of any size. Specific to the UK market you are also not calculating stamp duty and capital gains tax, which are either property specific or harder to minimize on property.

The reason that the economics are debated on-line is because:

- Rentals have hidden advantages (opportunity cost of invested capital).

- Housing has unhidden advantages (capital growth of the property).

- It's much harder to screw up a family-home-property based investment scheme.

Which means that people invariably don't correctly account for all of the variables.

If property investing were that clear cut then investment capital would buy up property until house prices had risen and rents had been depressed to remove the advantage! Markets seek an equilibrium.

EDIT: I should probably point out that I have in front of me the yield data for four cities at the moment and the average return on capital for all of them is 4.8% - you personally may have found a better deal, but that's just an anomaly. I'd probably buy something if I had children, but it has nothing to do with the value of the investment.
I wonder if anyone will use this data to help decide what part of a city they want to reside in...