skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sometimes a decision can be made to accrue technical debt or to keep paying the interest on the acquired "technical debt rather than the principal. However, the decision has to be made by someone who understands what an elegant solution would look like (if time or budget restrains aren't there).

That's why you need somebody who is both smart (can see the elegant solution) and gets thing done (will ship a minimally acceptable solution and re-factor when needed).
A number of people are doing this already (technomads). I am, and yeah, loneliness is an issue. I always live with flatmates to alleviate it, but I still don't have anyone to speak with about science or technology. Thank god for the web...
Well, someone has a strong opinion: http://www.twentynot2000.com/
Poor article in the sense that it does little more than list out the plugins, rather than providing some commentary on how each plugin improves productivity.
When I was in physics grad school we used the Force Concept Inventory for assessing the intro level physics classes. It was always very interesting and showed that they were able to greatly increase understanding over the course of a few years by focusing on a few areas.

I feel that (introductory) physics education has benefited greatly from education research, partly because data can be easily collected and at universities you can adapt and iterate on a semester (or annual) time scale.

It would be nice if this model could be adapted to other areas, such as graduate physics, but the normal response is that grad students are supposed to be responsible for their own learning...
I think its a shame they shut it down as well. I can't say about the search engine ranking, but I doubt it would hurt them too badly if it did.

I image most of their readers reach wikileaks are direct from blogs, news articles, etc.
Motorola WX390| Motorola WX390 Mobile Phone
We've had two stories about the pronunciation "2010" today. I don't think it's that big of a deal, really. What works will stick. We'll find out soon enough.
Six Things We'd Like to See Leave the Web in 2010
It looks like the complement to CouchDB: it actually implements all the hard distributed stuff that CouchDB never delivered on, but doesn't implement any of the fancy stored procedure stuff that CouchDB actually pulled off.

If only I could have the chocolate and the peanut butter together...
Yeah, it's the Four-Hour Work Week thing. All you need is a business model which requires neither time nor energy and you're fucking DONE. So many lazy thinkers on a site like this. I never said I was starting businesses that require time or energy. I said I was starting businesses. Period, the end.

Apart from anything else, say for the sake of argument that it just offends your sense of logic to put together a business which requires time and energy, when you know business models exist which don't require much time or energy. Just assume, for the sake of argument, that it horrifies you to your core, this insane idea of wasting your precious moments on this earth making money the hard way when you could have made it with much less effort.

If you say "I'm launching a new business every month this year," you've just painted yourself into a corner which requires that you put together businesses that don't require time or energy. That's a good corner to be in. With our hypothetical, how do you feel about that corner? You feel pretty good.

But if you say "I'm going to set up one business this year, just one, only one, and after I make that choice, I'm committing to it for years", you're painting yourself into a different corner, where whichever business you choose to start, you're fucking stuck with it. It's your whole life now, for years to come. So you're going to hem and haw a long god damn time before you choose which kind of business to start, and when you finally make the choice, you might choose a shitty business model because it revolves around a technology which would be fun to build.

That's a bad corner. It's bad for your integrity and it's bad for your quality of life. (And this whole site is basically devoted to exalting that particular bad decision.)

Also, RubyFlow could become a Reddit or a TechCrunch. The fact that it isn't one now doesn't mean anything. The fiercest tiger starts life as a kitten. If you start 12 companies in a year, you can always come back to them a year later and decide to put a little more effort into a few of them and build them into larger things. I aimed for 12 miniapps last year. I didn't hit that mark, but I ended the year having built a bunch of miniapps, and one of them (Hacker Newspaper) I'm definitely going to keep around, and can, if I wish, add new features to. That's so much better than just building one thing and betting the farm on that one thing.

I mean there's a reason venture capitalists never bet the farm on one company.
You're right, which is why teachers/schools/education authorities shouldn't be setting the exams. The purpose of the exams is (or should be) as much to check that they're doing their job as it is to examine the children.
I was hoping to see some awesome new features that we could use in other editors. Kind of a let down.
My favorite quote: "Frischling said [the TSA agents] had to go to WalMart to buy a hard drive, but when they returned were unable to get it to work."
Screen printing
Sacramento based Abacus Designworks offering a wide range of promotional products as well as screen printing, embroidery, and signs. The site features an on line design tool.
I've been a fan of McKee for ages. Everything from his playing to his song construction is really good and getting better as he learns more. His time under Don Ross is really paying off.

Erik Mongraine, while talented, I think really lacks in the cohesive song construction that's necessary for him to take off. His sound is arguably better than McKee, but the songs just never go anywhere.
I'm not sure what makes you think Microsoft have let .NET languish.

The .NET runtime and languages have been updated regularly with significant changes and improvements, and Microsoft themselves support C#, VB.NET and F# as "first-class" languages, as well as developing IronPython and IronRuby and working on the Dynamic Language Runtime project to ease dynamic language implementation. All of these equal or better Sun's support of Java.

There are also quite a few non-Microsoft languages based on .NET including IronScheme and Boo. .NET's CLR also supports tail-call optimisation, something the JVM doesn't.
We (Colloquy) built our own analytics for our app. It shows us exactly what we want to see, and gives us the raw data to examine as needed. Prior to that, we had played around with Medialets analytics (which were quite nice, but not quite what we wanted, in terms of how to look at the data or how it worked (although I've heard that Medialets has since improved their analytics in this respect)).

Its not terribly complicated, just POST'ing some data with NSURLConnection. http://colloquy.info/project/browser/trunk/Mobile/Controller... is our implementation, if you're interested. Its under a BSD license (although you'll have to write your own way of sorting through the data).
Please tell me more about bots of this kind.
Blub paradox. There are a limited number of programmers who wouldn't automatically dismiss F# as too weird to bother learning, and the ones who don't need .NET support are already using OCaml (or Haskell or whatever).
I've been looking for a good self-help book -- particularly one for public speaking / conversing with people. Anybody have a good one (besides this)?
Here is a business suggestion, if you're looking for any:
Create the Rails* framework of businesses (Corporations on Concords?) , so you and others could build a business in 15 minutes, and do so on a monthly basis.

*Rails 3, to allow for Merb-like slices...
Thanks for your clarifications on products law (I am not a tort lawyer).

On the other hand, I am an experienced litigator and the points I made about litigation process, etc. are spoken from real-world experience going back many years and including a federal clerkship and Big Law tenure where I had lots of experience in seeing how class actions worked in practice. I have simplified those points in order to avoid legal technicalities and have instead tried to express them in terms of their practical effect (which, in the world of class-action lawyering, has much more to do with legal shakedowns than it does with formalities such as proximate cause or actual injuries suffered by individual plaintiffs).

Would be happy to talk further offline if you like - just email me.
I think it's interesting that you can start saying years in the form of twenty ten at 2010, but there are other year forms that we still can't use yet. We used to say things like "Back in '86, I saw my first movie" but that form won't sound natural (to me at least) until we get to year 2021.
I was thinking of evangelizing "twenty ten-one" through "twenty ten-nine" for the next decade. Now's the opportunity for the ideosyncratic "teens" to be deprecated. (See chapter 8.2 of Outliers.)
That's horrible! No one should ever have to use digest mode, especially since it makes the list even worse for everyone else. Maybe you should get a better email client? I know some people that use Gmail as a mailing list client independently from their normal mail.
I think it's the marketing. Server is just a scary word. Most people don't know it exists either. I'm REALLY hoping they update it at CES with the 2008 Server platform without jacking up the OEM costs.
Will be using these guidelines to improve the Stormpulse UI.
I have goals sorted out like this but my A-goals just don't seem do-able...it just seems, though, that they're not obtainable.
Its kind of funny, Aral was one of the guys behind OSFlash.org, and a pretty well known Flash guy. I do understand where he is coming from though.
Okay, good example. At the same time, though, trying to see the problem through a functional lens I'm stuck wondering why there isn't already some stateful context in place. You're linking coupons with the order data and unless you've been just threading that through functions --- which nobody wants to do --- I'd feel like that there would be more structure.

For some reason I'm stuck on the idea of using heterogenous lists to store "things that can affect the order". You apply them in order in a stateful context and produce a finalized order or an error. To add coupons you just make an instance that lets coupons be a "thing that affects the order" and stick it in the list. The code is decoupled, order processing is modular, and you're using a data structure which fits the problem well.

I'm obviously using some 20/20 hindsight, but I think that frequently the initial headaches of refactoring by type turn into insights to how the problem is forcing you to use the right tools.
No.

1) The TSA is a farce. They've done more damage to the US economy than the terrorists themselves.

2) The changes themselves aren't intended to stop terrorism. They're intended to satisfy the public that "something is being done".

3) Terrorism is extremely rare anyway. If people spent more time worrying about not smoking (for example) and less time worrying about terrorists we'd save thousands of lives every year.

The best thing we could do to fight the bad guys is ignore them and get on with our lives.
You needn't ever say "cat myfile | ..." period!

The shell has stdin redirection built in via '<'
Have you read The Soul of a New Machine? It sounds like something you'd really like.
Ironically, I found the typeography of the main article so hard to read I had to use Readibility. The main font appears to be one of these two:

http://typekit.com/colophons/vcb6rkj

The combination of font and size chosen is an exceedingly poor match for 96dpi web rendering.
if I saw the domain, I'd probably think it was a CSS resource site
I was in that boat for a while being both of a similar mind and in a similar situation. I got over it by the simple work of being absolutely pulled through the ringer by a diabolical prof on Abstract Vector Spaces.

(btw: I love that professor today. He was just underhanded enough to do what we all needed.)

I'm utterly convinced that pure math needs to be taught at a high level for anyone in advanced science/engineering. It hurts for a while, and then you look back and everything is clear, simple, and bright shining.

I've also heard this just keeps happening if you keep on with math.
I prefer Justin King: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh_24DXNy8E

But they are all pretty good.
Don't worry, 2010 is gonna be the year CouchDB lands the cluster-awareness (among other things). We've been moving forward steadily since 2005 and we're not stopping anytime soon.
At the same time the article IS absurd. The author even admits it.

FP is letting us get control of our state in ways undreamt of previously. Unfortunately, we're still not really good at it.
Wow, that's a lot of vitriol and indignation, considering their record is actually perfect. Did they get lucky a few times to keep that perfect record? Sure they did. But you can't know what would have happened if they hadn't been there.

The air puffing machines were a pretty ambitious project, carried out in the haste that comes from knowing that every day you delay may be the day that a preventable tragedy occurs. It's easy to make bad decisions in such a situation. To be able to do chemical analysis, in the field, sampling completely uncontrolled inputs, all completely automated with no chemical analysis expert on-hand to vet the results, and the expectation of no false positives to inconvenience anybody. Seems like you could cut them a little slack.

As for the "x-ray vision", as you call it. That seems to work great. It's hampered by public body modesty taboos because it works too well.

Anyway, I'm surprised at your level of angst over this.
Tiny web app for sharing youtube moments with each other
Wndchrm - open source easy to use image recognition
My parents started a software company out of their apartment in the early 80s that lasted about twenty years with a sole product, which was based entirely around a PC database / development environment. When I was cleaning out their office before they sold the apartment a couple years ago, I found a little cubbyhole next to my Mom's old desk.

It contained a stack of shrinkwrapped end-user software licenses for the long-dead database environment their product was based on, one for each of their 60-70 customers over the life of the company. Cost at least a half-million dollars total, and went right into the dumpster.
Yes! I shall call it "Viaweb."

(Just kidding.)
Have you broken out more achievable goals in the mid and short term? Have you outlined actions to achieve these stepping stones? If you do that, maybe those long term goals aren't unobtainable anymore.
The most realistic UI ever:

http://www.mintpass.com/select/select_detail.asp?idx=117

----------------------

Inspired by layersapp.com. Since win32 window and controls are standardized, why can't we make awesome screenshots like the Chrome ads do? http://i.imgur.com/tYGFk.jpg
I took a linear algebra class and they explained nothing. Sure they'll prepare you for their tests, but otherwise their material was way too abstract. Not until I watched a lecture by Gilbert Strang on iTunes U did I finally understand what an eigenvalue/vector is and what the hell the matrices represent.
It's Le Monde Courrier STD.
I also agree, I always feel like McKee is playing the guitar. This guy, in contrast, feels like he is smacking the hell out of it.
I agree. Justin King played at my University a while back, he's incredible.
This is dangerous, it carries far too much baggage and abuse potential. Terrorists may have dangerous weapons, but governments have police powers, extraordinary renditions, secret prisons, special interests, corrupt (and non-corrupt) officials, J. Edgar Hoovers, and an extraordinary knack for getting basic human rights issues wrong.

And this concept is a fairly standard technocratic response to danger too: "technology shall save us!" Just don't ask too many questions about the unintended consequences.

We can expect that everyone is about to start becoming strip searched every time they get on the plane. Thanks for suggesting ways to make it worse dude.
Given TSA screeners have failed to detect most fake bombs I think you can put their success rate down to terrorism being incredibly rare rather than competence on their part:

"Screeners at Los Angeles International Airport missed about 75% of simulated explosives and bomb parts that Transportation Security Administration testers hid under their clothes or in carry-on bags at checkpoints, the TSA report shows."

(source:http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-10-17-airport-secur...)
Okay, I'm interested in some more detail regarding your concerns. In particular, why do you consider their track record to be horrible, and what actions should they have been taking to prevent liquid detonated PETN bombs?

Off the top of my head, I can fault the TSA for only two things:

1. They don't have Full Body Scanners in place. The technology has been around for 3+ years, and would have caught the PETN sewn into the underwear.

2. They still allow liquids onto planes, which can be used to detonate and/or do significant damage to the inside of an airplane.

You clearly have your own list of steps the TSA could have taken - I'm wondering what they are?
Questions about the Apple tablet that no one is answering yet
This is a really great article for today's design trends. It provides the sort of knowledge that would really help a mediocre designer (i.e. multitasking founder) jump up a level.

I wonder tho. These principles were presented as universal. I wonder if the 2d/3d design trends are really universal, or whether it would be reasonable if something else had/will evolve.
Maybe he was just trying to make a quip.
You're...mocking me, aren't you.
As you say using it early into an intro programming class may be a mistake, but it's soon useful in that you can say 'don't dereference b, it might be null' instead of something like 'don't attempt to read the data located at address b, b might be a null pointer'.

Are you sure about 'referencing' though? I've never heard it in this context. It could be confusing given how C++ has references has well.
I never seemed to understand cream.

The idea is to take vim and basically castrate it by getting rid of the standard keybindings and ways of doing things to make it 'easier' for non-vim users. It even appears they got rid of modal-editing.

The issue with this then they don't learn how to do things the vim way which defeats the purpose of using vim, just go use notepad++ or any other gui editor you get the same experience.
Christmas Shopping
That's why the air puffer would have been really cool, had it worked. Again, we're to the body modesty. Short of clothing penetrating scanners, either visual or chemical, you're left with somebody caressing you thoroughly to detect these bombs.

Caressing you very, very thoroughly. This last guy's underwear bomb was actually molded into the shape of his butt, as near as I could tell from the photo they showed.

At this point, the public isn't willing to allow that sort of intimacy between them and their security personnel, and, frankly, the TSA operators are probably also not willing to do it. At some point, as it usually does, I suspect technology will solve this.
still married in spite of everything, I'm pretty sure that puts him in the good 50% of all marriages.

Statistical quibble: MORE than 50 percent of marriages stay together and never end in divorce.

http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/d/divorce.htm

http://www.divorcereform.org/rates.html

http://www.divorcereform.org/nyt05.html

But, yes, your specific point is correct that former President Clinton is still married to the only wife he has ever had.
Steve frickin' Ballmer... Does anyone believe that he'd still be CEO if Bill Gates hadn't anointed him as his successor? He's the Gordon Brown to Gates' Tony Blair. Microsoft is never going to be relevant until Ballmer and his horde of bean counting lackeys get the boot.
First, I am sufficiently embarrassed that I neglected to check your profile. I slightly remembered your name, but could not remember why. Then I refreshed my recollection by viewing your profile and remember your Startup Law 101 posts.

I tend to side with letting the courts do their job. Yes, legal shakedowns certainly occur. I am more worried about smaller companies being affected than large ones, though. But that worry comes from much less legal experience than you.

Is it too idealistic to think that Rule 11 limits the scope and frequency of legal shakedowns?
Technology predictions for 2010
I was told recently that ideas are cheap and easy. Market value and execution aren't.
I'm not sure passing on Youtube and Yahoo were bad decisions for Microsoft as stated by the article.

As far as Youtube is concerned, AFAIK it still hasn't been profitable for Google and would have likely bled more red ink with Microsoft in higher bandwidth charges, or alternatively, MS might have tried monetizing sooner slowing Youtube's growth. It's doubtful purchasing Yahoo in this economic climate would have been a big winner either.

I also don't really buy the article's description of the Xbox business defying the data and business common sense. For a long time, Microsoft has wanted to be in the living room, purchasing WebTV in 1997. If anything, it's an example of how Microsoft has succeeded in the past; constantly improving upon it's past mistakes and not giving up as quickly as other companies might. The original XBox wasn't all that successful, but they did some smart moves with the 360, getting it out earlier than the PS3, providing good tools and support to their development community, and realizing that good networking support at the OS level to allow seamless multiplayer experiences was going to be a game changer for this generation of consoles.
Gorilla Arm alone makes tablets a total nonstarter. Even if you don't have to awkwardly cradle the thing in your arms while you use it, you still have to hold out your arm to poke at it.

Microsoft only persisted with their Tablet PC crap for so long because the thing was designed for their middle managers to fiddle with in their constant meetings.
Does anybody else ever get problems from youtube doing this? I'm on a 30mb connection and videos still pause to buffer sometimes when I'm watching in HD.
A corporation consisting of thousands of people who can make decisions, and probably hundreds of people who can legitimately take personal responsibility for those decisions, is going to break the law, wrong someone, or simply screw up every so often no matter what kind of legal system you have. Part of putting these thousands of people into a corporation together is pooling their professional legal liabilities. So at some point you're always going to have this kind of cost, though the cost could certainly stand to see a drop.
Maybe you mean counterintuitive?

Thank you for the suggestion on word choice.

I hang around a lot with individual differences psychologists, so I'm used to hearing rather broad claims of what IQ ("psychometric intelligence") means. To some people, it is taken to mean general adaptive ability. But what would an organism adapt to if not overcoming challenges to reproducing, under selection pressure?

But, yes, if what IQ tests estimate is something narrower than David Wechsler's claimed general ability to adapt to the environment, it is understandable that some high-IQ people never even get to first base in the biological task of reproduction.
Pfaide - Intuitive Python IDE for Windows