skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some on this list are great, some just good:

_The Critique of Pure Reason_--got about halfway through 30 years ago, set it aside, picked it up again. Probably shorter than <i>The Fountainhead</i> but takes a long time to read.

_The Vindication of Tradition_, Jaroslav Pelikan, theology, very short quick read.

_Netherland_ by Joseph O'Neill, via the neighborhood book club. Interesting picture of New York, thin characterization.

_The Library at Night_, Alberto Manguel, actually a gift to my wife from a friend of hers. Good browsing book.

_Untimely Thoughts_ by Nietzche. Probably not a great place to start Nietzche, but at least the first essay is interesting.

_The Spectator Bird_, Wallace Stegner. Good novel, though maybe not my favorite Stegner.

_Germany 1866-1945_ by Gordon Craig. Long, very readable.
I understand that E.T. Jaynes' book on probability theory, which I have not yet read, does not go the route of random variables.

Jaynes' book is excellent but is more about the philosophy of the Bayesian interpretation of probability than mathematics.

His problem with "random variables" is not so much the concept (although he wasn't a fan of measure theory), but the "random" in the name.
Kind of tangential, but I love Dive Into HTML5's style and tone. It's up there with Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby and Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good in my "Awesome documentation that makes me happy when reading it" list.
The reason MacVim and GVim were both mentioned was b/c the setup mentioned would work with either. Never messed with setting up Vim on Windows and wanted to be explicit as to not lead people down a painful path or to get troubleshooting requests.

The other intent was to show people how they could easily set up Vim as a robust Rails editor without needing to learn a ton about how to install Vim plugins which normally assume a strong understanding of Vim to install and get started with.
They would either have to type the date input or you could have a fallback date picker using jQuery (or whatever framework) that produces the same format as the built-in date picker.
The British computer scientist Martin Ward has a site dedicated to G.K. Chesterton, with a fair bit of his work on-line.

I lent a copy of Nabokov's _Verse and Versions_ to a friend, and the cheap binding finally gave out. Look for his poetry, also,
Oh there is a lot of difference, in terms of body position. It's just not as much fun/comfortable to read a book at a desktop while sitting in a chair etc as opposed to laying on the couch with a tablet. Do not underestimate the power of a comfortable body position.
You need to add a "neither."

I use Python/Sage/NumPy, and when I want to send stuff to non-techie Windows users, OpenOffice Calc.
For my modest needs, OpenOffice Calc does the trick.
Ask HN: Best way to learn C
In your experience, what is the best way to learn C?
Bill Gates' Workflow (2006)
well this is NYC, $80K here is like $45K in Kentucky
That statistic gets dragged down by nurses who only have associates degrees. Nurses with a B.S. earn over $60k on average.
Wow HTML5 is powerful. I hope Firefox 3.6 will get more of it?

I can see us telling children "back in our day you had to use 100k of javascript to do what you're doing in one line of HTML5 !"
a quick monkey patch for rails to be able to do 'f.text_field "email", :type => "email"' (though i guess f.email_field would be more appropriate but more code)

module ActionView::Helpers
class InstanceTag
alias :orig_to_input_field_tag :to_input_field_tag
def to_input_field_tag(field_type, options = {})
orig_to_input_field_tag(options["type"] || field_type, options)
end
end
end
Why on earth aren't the links in the first post clickable? Bad bug
There's a brief paper on the practicalities of using lava tubes as bases on Mars here:

http://www.norwebster.com/mars/lavatube.html
For all first-time entrepreneurs, first read the original post and then remember the following as your first lesson of 2010. Whatever you do, don’t post on the web immediately after you fail. Don’t try to make yourself look smart. Don’t try to rationalize your failure. Talking about failure doesn’t make failure go away. It just opens yourself to saying things you will surely regret in later days. Instead of talking, you would be much better served if you just shut up and peddle like hell. Now is not the time to seek fame and recognition. With success, you will have both. It is much more fun to do a Blog when you fully recover and share your hard earned experience from the vantage point of sweet success. Otherwise people would make the obvious observation that you are nothing but a wannabe. However, if you inadvertently discover you have a knack for on-line comedy, then you should give up being an entrepreneur. It is a much better career anyway.
Nice little app. Kudos on launching it.

As you're seeing, as soon as you make it usable by anybody, people start complaining about form validation and usability issues. You should decide now how much effort you want to put in.
Apache in pre-forking mode might have inspired you. High availability Java might be relevant.
CKAN: the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network
But now there's a standard. jQuery will (most likely) support this, as will any other javascript library. Just include one file (that you're probably including anyway) and you're good to go. The cool thing is that now people with HTML5 browsers will have access to plugins that can extend the behaviour of these fields.

One plugin I'm missing, that this makes possible, is adding a "recent dates" box to the date-selector: when planning a vacation, I need to enter the same two dates (often 4-6 months in the future) on the websites of airlines, hotels, car rentals etc. over and over. That gets old really fast.
Wow, I never thought of it that way. Maybe we need to look more to our artistic side and less to our technical side? I started programming because I was interested in creating a text-based game that was going to be more fun to play than the one I was already playing, at first, it was an artistic drive that got me to do it. But the technical aspects soon took over as I learned more about programming and as the problem solving got more interesting. I really need to go back and find that artistic drive.
It's possible to get 80k out of school as a computer scientist and I also know nurses that have a 4 year degree before they started nursing school so...
Chrome overtakes Safari to become #3 browser
"Man is not a rational animal, man is a rationalizing animal"
Things get weird if you use weeks as a unit and then also display the year. For example, if you have an event that took place on 2010-01-01, then iso_week_of(2010-01-01) will return 53 and year_of(2010-01-01) will return 2010. So your wonderful app might display "Week 53, 2010", which makes it look like it's the end of 2010.
The Mobile Challenge
No, I'm implying that his message (which is political, not scientific in nature) fits the goal of the Chinese government very well. I don't for a second think that Mr. Stiglitz doesn't hold the beliefs that he expresses, but knowing that China does not, whatever the other qualities of the papers mentioned are, have a free press, it's a safe bet that a equally qualified author with the opposite view of Mr. Stiglitz would not have been printed.
Find a mini project where using C is a strength, then try to write it. I'd say, a small project in systems programming or embedded programming.
Elegant. Seriously that's one of the best executed small projects in a long long time. It's like a little jewel or a good pocket magic trick.

I hope it will take off, it's a really nice example of how it's done. I'll try to live up to your standards the next time I release something.
Google Docs Spreadsheet here.
Not at the same level of abstraction, IMO. To take a representative example, pointer arithmetic simply isn't really available to you from Java, unless you pretend your integers are pointers and go through JNI functions for indirection, etc., which is going to be slow enough to defeat the purpose.
What type of work do you do that you never have urgent bug fixes and/or never have features that take more than a day to complete?

I've always worked to constrain non-linear development to the absolute minimum required because the technical costs are easily dwarfed by the human communication overhead and inherent organizational complexity engendered in multiple disparate branches of development.
I have one company that uses Google Voice and one that uses Grasshopper. Grasshopper allows you to easily set up a local number and/or an 800 number (you can also import your own number, for instance you GV number). It allows you to setup "lines" (press 1 for support, 2 for sales, etc), which can forward to other numbers, record messages, have on-hold music and a hunt group, etc.

So, to really answer your qustion, I think it depends on what your startup is. If it's a B2C company that really only needs its own number for support issues and whatnot, you're probably good with just a GV account that forwards to your cell phone. If it is a B2B company though that needs to sound established and professional, I'd consider setting up an 800 number with a multiple-line answering service like Grasshopper, even if every line only forwards to your cell phone for now. This also makes it very easy to scale once you start hiring people.
This poll will reveal more about what you use spreadsheets for than anything else. Excel is often used as a Mini-OS, running programs and interfacing with databases, the web, etc.

I've never seen Numbers used that way.
What would you like to see in eCommerce software?
> Also, the present leadership of China has no real desire to denounce capitalism.

Not directly, but the more the people can be led to believe that the current state of wealth is due to the glorious policies of their benevolent leaders, the better. This column serves that purpose nicely.
... if you forget to specify a version number for one of the dependencies, doesn't maven just default to the latest version at build time, thus becoming nondeterministic?

No.

... if you want your build to be deterministic, and of course you do, you still have to specify bar and baz explicitly

If you declare a dependency on non-snapshot foo, then it will also declare a dependency on non-snapshot bar, ergo, reproducible build.

Your comments seem to be the standard "I don't understand Maven, but I hear that it's broken."
I built it for me, and it's sufficient for what I need. As I have other projects demanding my time, I'm planning on only fixing bugs, and not adding any new features.

For the most part, this was an exercise in taking a project to completion, which I've always had trouble doing. I think that I succeeded in that, and I'm not particularly interested in turning it into yet another ongoing, never-finished project.
Not a bug. From the FAQ:

"You can't. (This is to prevent people from using this method as a way of submitting a link, but with their comments in a privileged position at the top of the page. If you want to submit a link with comments, just submit it, then add a regular comment.)"
Students can still solve many sorts of problems without a good understanding of foundations.

They may use random variables frequently without being able to define them.
I'd have to say I agree - It's quite easy for someone to come up with the same idea as you and not even be aware that you exist(ed).

Blog posts and comments about my startup (http://FriendBinder.com) often think we copied FriendFeed, SocialThing or some other site though the reality is that those sites didn't exist when we started early in 2007 (or were in stealth at least).

That's life I'm afraid.
Short strings in Python are interned, i.e. 'foo' always returns the same string, not just an identical one.

There's some noise but the important part is that both x and y have the same address (0x37e300) and point to the same str object.

Python 2.6.4 (r264:75706, Nov 25 2009, 21:38:24)
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646) (dot 1)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> x='foo'
>>> y='foo'
>>> x.__add__
<method-wrapper '__add__' of str object at 0x37e300>
>>> y.__add__
<method-wrapper '__add__' of str object at 0x37e300>
>>> x is y
True

and a counter-example just for fun:

>>> x='this is a longer string. i wonder what the limit is?!'
>>> y='this is a longer string. i wonder what the limit is?!'
>>> x.__add__
<method-wrapper '__add__' of str object at 0x35a840>
>>> y.__add__
<method-wrapper '__add__' of str object at 0x35a890>
>>> x is y
False
VOIP + Cloud = Better Political Campaigns
Web tools aim to open the gates to academic research
Personally, I found the best way was on a Linux system with two books: the Deitels' C: How to program which is a book about programming that happens to use C, and Matthew & Stone's Beginning Linux Programming which is a terrible book about programming but a very good book about programming in the linux environment, from command line utilities to KDE.

I'm assuming, of course, that you don't have a lot of programming experience. I like the Deitel book because it balances discussion of C syntax and good practice with discussion of thins like linked lists and binary trees, and when/why you should use them. Also, the exercises are varied and interesting.

The Linux book, by contrast, introduces the environment and popular Linux libraries very well, but inexplicably assumes that your primary goal in life is to implement an inventory control system, which is about the last thing I'd use C for.
I just introduce variables instead to keep the complexity of expressions down.
If you think this law is outrageous, you should check into the CA knife laws. They are extremely broad and vague. You pretty much can't carry any knife at all, depending on the officer's mood that day. I guess one should just try to stay out of trouble, be courteous, and avoid the ire of law enforcement.
T-Mobile will give you a cheap plan for the Sidekick because it's not powerful enough to use much bandwidth. A Nexus One is likely to use a lot more.
> i've tried hard to stay out of that debate because it is a false debate

> zynga makes almost all of its revenue on virtual goods

> i said in my etsy/san telmo post the other day that more tractors are sold every day in farmville than are sold in the US every year

> that's where the money is in social gaming

> the "scammy ads" thing is total red herring that everyone got excited about but is almost entirely irrelevant

in the comments to that post: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/01/areas-of-interest.html#comme...
I tried gambling on the stock market years ago, and only ever lost money. The thing is that the value of stocks has almost nothing to do with the quality, innovativeness or technological superiority of the products being sold by companies, so as such it's very difficult to get a handle on things without delving into the world of rumour and gossip - something which I have very little inclination or aptitude for.

I even wrote software to predict stock prices using fancy techniques, but also found that this is no panacea. My conclusion is that the markets are only predictable on a very short time scale, so unless you're investing in large volumes of stock it's unlikely that automated systems are going to help you. Worse, there are many factors of a very human psychological nature which are just extremely difficult to design into the prediction system.

Also buying and selling stocks is just another form of gambling - like betting on horses or football teams - so the same rules apply. If you can't afford to lose it, don't gamble it away.
I have many features that take more than a day to complete, but I prefer to do them in such a way that it doesn't break other stuff. That's just the way I prefer to work. If I'm working through a big arch change, I'll do it in sections, each time making sure everything builds and works and is sane. I checkin often, once I hit something that builds+works.

That's just the way I work.

Similarly, I don't use threads in programs unless I absolutely categorically have to. It's a similar sort of thing. Call me crazy :/

I did use git for a bit, and thought 'meh'. It didn't solve any real world problem I had.
It's not really native to Kabul area, but loosely representative of former Northern Alliance (read: Tajik). And Pushtu tribes (southeast of the country, Taliban demographics) are not happy about that and never going to accept it.

Maybe it could be better to really split Afghanistan by ethnic boundaries, then there could be hope of building some form of society in one of them. Of course, not going to happen.
Small Tips and Blips To Create Your Brand
Their shady, but perfectly legal business practice is fairly common. Are you going to hold Greylock to the same standard for investing in Facebook who profits from the same means and ubiquitous tooth whitening snake oil ads? Should KPCB and Sequoia be treated as sleaze merchants because Google hosts ads for companies that sell less than honorable products?

I appreciate the journalistic effort at TechCrunch and applaud Zynga for taking a hard line, but no money was embezzled and no one got ripped off.
Defend yourself online.

Ok. Defend yourself more online.

Ok. Wait, there are still some people who disagree?

Defend yourself online. Right!

Ah, not everyone yet agrees!

[continue as needed to staunch the hole in your ego]

Lot's of people fail at startups. That's actually the norm, despite the way that people perceive the market. Only the most asinine people would make fun of you for just not succeeding. But the difference between most people's attitude and your attitude: you seem to think that you did everything right, that everyone else conspired against you.

That kind of mindset is not the way to succeed in this business.
> exceeds the capacity of the blog medium.

What's the better alternative?
A no-posting-ban would be way too strong for this kind of error. If we're going to make the distinction that something is old, first of all, pg ought to add better duplicate detection (I've seen cases where the same link can be submitted multiple times if enough time has passed, I think). Secondly, posting something old is almost always an innocent mistake; so if we're going to criminalize it, we ought to at least present the poster with a digg-like "Are these items similar to what you posted?" thing to give them a chance to fix it.
Parcellite 0.9.2 su Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic
Thanks for the suggestions. I use Ruby for whatever I need, but I don't really understand all the lower level concepts. I read an article today on HN entitled "Why git is so fast (or why Java is not as fast as C" and it inspired me to find out why C is so important. I thought the best way to do that was learn about it. Bringing me to my question.
What Startups can learn from Lady Gaga
Whenever compression or dedupe is involved, it matters what data you're writing; unfortunately Anand doesn't specify that so it's hard to tell how realistic these numbers are.
Can't you already post links now? Isn't it better to link to a site that does a good job of hosting portfolios instead on expecting LinedIn to handle that well?
You will fail
To be fair, there's a good chance I'm missing something here, but 25 gb of data (and not super-redundant low-entropy ascii, a lot of executable machine code) being compressed into 11 gb seems pretty amazing. Have any third parties verified these numbers?

Editted to add: Beyond that, it seems like all this tech would make random lookups abhorrently expensive, because a seek(30) doesn't necessarily jump to the (30 * A + B)'th place. But I'm not a file systems/storage guy at all, so I'd love for some education here.
"Do not underestimate the power of a comfortable body position."

OK, but what about the tablet affords for more comfy positioning that you can't achieve with a paper book?
'cause your name makes it clear you're trolling? =V
Actually, scientists do a great job speaking up about evolution.

It's topics like vaccines causing autism, wifi/depleted uranium/breast implants/etc causing cancer and "alternative" (unproven) medicine where scientists really need to speak up.
That would be the ultimate killer e-book reader. I would definitely buy one.
"Since there is no way all my users will have an HTML5 capable browser (I'm looking at you IE)"

Do you not think that IE will support HTML5 by the time the W3C makes it a proper Recommendation?

Microsoft seems to have picked up again on supporting such things, so it may happen, given how long it may be before HTML5 gets the W3C nod.
and yet it functions perfectly with no problems when I use it in the VimClojure plugin. Tex hasn't been "updated" in ages either yet its fully functional. Sometimes software is just done and no further activity is needed. Judge it on whether it works not the date of the last commit.
I understand your general position. Your assertion that of course China would print it seems to make at least the following assumptions that in my experience are not correct:

1 - China is the borg, everyone, and especially everyone in the gov thinks alike. Not my experience, which is that inside various Chinese government groups, there exists a wide variety of opinion.

2 - China's news is heavily censored. A few topics are taboo. Sometimes a reporter/editor gets reprimanded or fired for crossing the line. But for the most part, there is plenty to report on that does not get censored.

As to your general position that an opposite view would not have been printed, this may be true as it is true for many U.S. papers.
Aughts were a lost decade for U.S. economy, workers
Towards a new entrepreneurship
Your technical comments are fair but here's the history: fiveish years back a friend of ours (Divide) got some metal cards and Melvin liked them but wanted something a little different. Jeni, Mel and I came up with the lock picks. Kevin's cards are a derivative with the picks shortened to fit more contact info. If you wanted to build a more robust version you could use thicker steel and replace the chemical etching with laser. I think a simple cipher machine or something like that would be a cool next step.
If you allow people to tie in an email address when they're overdue with their goals than you've got a really nice hook to slip in some commerce at a much later date.
Creating Movies with PyPlot / PyLab
Original at http://www.dailyspeculations.com/wordpress/?p=4249
Any anglo google site (us aus Ireland uk) works too. Ncr is meant to redirect and allows others (such as me currently in Germany) to see the Easter egg
International Standards Organization years; standardizing date-time formats across various UNIX systems. Many people from Europe, for example, prefer the month to be stated after the day of the month. "2 January YYYY" whereas in other places (in formal writings) people prefer the month to be written first: "January 2, YYYY". Sometimes (if, for example, running virtual host) they can appear to be a mix-up since there's quite a bit of ambiguity within the %m%d%H%_M% or "%m%d%H(M)" string sequences.

For sources, see also "errata" on intuitive.com/wicked

when the correct time to use them is?

Basically amounts to personal preference since options can be formatted.
Agreed. Whenever I see one of those operator precedence tables in a programming language book, I just skip it. Other than BODMAS, I have no real idea what precendence logical/bitwise operators etc have - I just use parentheses, and always have done.

Like you say - why waste brain cycles trying to parse expressions. But then I also write comments in my code :-)
Start reading code. Every day, every free moment. Find an app in Linux which you enjoy using or think would be hard to write. Read it from main() to exit().
* Economics in One Lesson by Hazlitt

* Man, Economy, and State by Rothbard

* Road to Serfdom by Hayek

* Capitalism and Freedom by Freedman

* Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Nozick
(politics/philosophy, but a great book)

* What has the government done to our money by Rothbard (http://mises.org/money.asp)