skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Flash is evil. Whenever I'm watching Flash videos on OS X or Linux, my CPU usage shoots up to 100% and temperature goes up to 80ºC. Worse still, I have to install several 32-bit libraries if I want to run Flash on 64-bit Linux. The only place Flash works sort-of-okay is Windows.

QuickTime can play Flash videos just fine. More importantly, it's not a CPU hog and can actually use your video hardware (AFAIK). If Adobe haven't been able to optimize the Flash Player for plain ol' x86 processors (which is their major market), I don't see how they're going to optimize it for low-power ARM chips that power the iPhone.

About the "packager": I suspect they're just going to put your Flash app in a application bundle along with a binary of the Flash Player itself. What makes them think Apple will allow something like this through the App Store approval process?

Aside: I was under the impression that Flash is the only crappy app Adobe produce, and the rest of their Creative Suite was solid. Well, a couple of days ago I tried installing Photoshop on my Mac and it refused to install because I had a case-sensitive partition. Needless to say my opinions on Adobe have changed radically.
Okay, so City Hall was responsible for the damage to City Hall.

But blaming the city for everything still strikes me as absurd. It was a private enterprise that dug tunnels without getting permits from the city, and it created a problem.

Saying it's totally the city government's fault strikes me as nonsense given that reality.

I'll grant them some responsibility, because government does tend to clean up when private industry leaves a mess, but it seems far from total to me.
The device would need a power meter to detect and switch channels, which involves altering the resonance frequency of the antenna, ( I suspect an amperian loop )
http://www.physics.upenn.edu/courses/gladney/phys151/lecture...
"Frankly why they’d willingly submit themselves to any of those horrors when they could simulate the entire experience from home simply by wiring a thousand dollars to Steve Wynn, dropping a tab of acid and then heading to Best Buy with a hooker." - That made cold beer come out of my nose. As douchey as TC editors are, I have to give them serious bonus points for their acerbic sense of humor.
People who are interested in upper Paleolithic lifestyles will be fascinated by the book The Nature of Paleolithic Art by R. Dale Guthrie, my favorite read of 2008.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=sy...

http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Paleolithic-Art-Dale-Guthrie/dp...

The author is a paleozoologist who specializes in upper Paleolithic megafauna (which occasionally are found as frozen specimens with soft tissue preserved in the part of Alaska where he conducts his research) and is also an experience bow-hunter and expert visual artist. The book has an astounding bibliography listed literature in English and other languages about all aspects of human life in the Pleistocene epoch.
As for #2, imho, the article is deliberately written to caricaturize, which may well be appropriate for a mainstream lifestyle section of a newspaper. IIRC, an earlier article in the same paper on the crossfit exercise plan was quite alarmist (implied neophytes would by dying like flies) and dismissive. Vegan and yoga are the accepted modes of the NYC healthy lifestyle :-)

> we aren't cavemen anymore

In behavior and lifestyle, no. But in terms of the evolutionary stage of our digestive systems? Lactose tolerance [Lactose], for example is quite new (and beneficial enough that it spread rapidly).

The mechanisms described in the "Expensive tissue hypothesis" still apply. [Eades] has a nice description.

[Eades] http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/low-carb-library/are-we-m...

[Lactose] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090827202513.ht...
Mexico cartel stitches rival's face on Soccer Ball
But simply my $NULL.

Oops!
Micro-Econ Nit: Increasing prices do not impact demand, rather they have an impact on quantity demanded. Availability of more affordable substitutes such as electronic cars will effect demand.

The argument that quantity supplied of petroleum will continue to rise fails to take into account that at a certain price point, substitute sources of energy make more economic sense.
I like to say that the fact that humans are omnivores is descriptive, not prescriptive.

That we can use alternate food sources in times of hardship is a survival mechanism. IOW, omnivory is not a preferred mode of eating (genetically/evolutionarily speaking).

Individually of course, we may prefer omnivory, frugivory, x-vory.
12% of children's jewelry contains 10% cadmium; more dangerous than lead
This from a man who had a mental breakdown and was probably at least a little insane before then. ;)
Gmail：来自 Google 的电子邮件
Thanks. Listening to the other reviews makes me nervous about buying anything new. I wonder if those reviews actually provide a service to most consumers or are more suitable for the suggestions box of the manufacturer.
I am not too sure what you were trying to achieve (all I could see was three or four widgets) and the page kept refreshing every few seconds.

Can it be useful? I think it can but it needs a lot of work. Firstly are you looking at the dashboard from a seller's point of view or a buyer? From a sellers point of view I think there is a market. Just sell anything at ebay and watch the process, it has a lot of weak points. (There is a lot of services out there of this type, you will need to study them).
Sounds like you've discovered what that "fork" button is for.
Neat idea. I've been meaning to learn economics, maybe I'll use this.
30, 40 years ago, there were a lot more guys out in their driveway working on some old car on an average Saturday afternoon. Those folks [and their modern counterparts] need something to do.
Now I want to write toptop, which measures the hit your system takes when running 4 different kinds of top. :)
The argument is that the mismanaged spending and high taxation rate are actually pernicious to the community's welfare, this isn't just a matter of cynical reflex saying "look at those do-gooders thinking they're making a difference".
So which came first: Clozure, or Clojure?
Stupid people don't tend to make very good programmers, no matter how industrious they are.
its the perezhilton.com of internet technology
This is more like going down to the dealership every Saturday afternoon and buying a new car, just for something to do.

Fun stuff if you have the cash, I guess!
It is worth noting PayPal's activity is regulated within the EU:

"On May 15, 2007, PayPal announced that it would move its European operations from the UK to Luxembourg, commencing July 2, 2007 as PayPal (Europe) S.à r.l. & Cie, S.C.A.[33] This would be as a Luxembourg entity regulated as a bank by the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF), the Luxembourg equivalent of the FSA.[34] PayPal Luxembourg will then provide the PayPal service throughout the European Union (EU)." -- PayPal's Wikipedia page.

This status, within the EU, provides some protection for both businesses and customers.
Precisely because paleo man was more animal-like. Less cerebration was involved in deciding what to eat. Animals don't synthesize textured protein from soybean, they eat what is natural (instinctive) for them to eat, to the extent that Amazonian parakeets (and many other species) eat a particular kind of clay to neutralize the toxins they ingest in their fruit-based diet.

If we do synthesize our food, and process it more than any other animal, we should consider whether what we're doing is good for us.
One thought I just thought about. You say you should "self grade" your homework. It makes sense, but this means someone needs an answer key.

What if I decide to use a textbook to structure my class. E.g. each week we go through a chapter and do the exercises. We may not have the answers. Is there any way to add some "social" grading? I realize this may be tough with trick/tough questions in textbooks, but still, I think requiring an answer key will make this tough.
If I remember correctly, "NSFW" is the title of Paul Carr's 'column' on TC. So the NSFW in the title doesn't refer to the post, but to the whole series of posts by that author.

Edit: According to his entry in Crunchbase, he also wrote a column for the Guardian called "Not Safe For Work" before being 'kicked out' and going to TC.
Erik Naggum wrote a piece about Atlas Shrugged that is rife with errors and confusions regarding Ayn Rand and her ideas. Most, if not all, of his errors are addressed in Rand's non-fiction work. At the end of the article Erik wrote "It is just as impossible to become a contributor to a free, humane society without having read Ayn Rand as it is to become one having only read Ayn Rand" which I agree with. Read Ayn Rand's works (and other thinkers) and judge for yourself.
FYI: NSFW is the title of this regular column, not a commentary on whether or not the content is safe for work.
This should clear things up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit

Also this:
http://www.het.brown.edu/people/andre/qlambda/index.html

but the basic idea is that quantum computers allow operations to be taken on an entire list simultaneously (entanglement).
"Where Mathematics Comes From" was nothing less than a world-changing read for me.
Canvas does bare-bones drawing all right, but it's nowhere near Flash in terms of being a featureful graphics engine for things like games. For instance, you can't really detect clicks on individual shapes, etc. Maybe I just need to wait for a good wrapper library to come about... as long as it performs well, that would work I suppose.

Canvas just isn't a good Flash replacement yet. It can replace some things that were done in flash, but not everything.
Food for thought, Dr Eades on the issue.

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/obesity/another-china-stu...

I also read somewhere (probably Eades) that the China Study (the book/Campbell one) was a survey, iow, not an intervention study.

Lastly, when I read the China Study book about 3-4 years ago, it started off with an impressive anecdote about feeding extra protein (peanut butter) to filipino children to improve their diet and wham! cancer.

Blame protein, or aflatoxin? Campbell chose the former. Now that I know a bit more about animal vs. nut (soy, peanut) protein, I'll take the former, thanks.

The Panu weblog puts it in the simplest terms: choose a food whose defense is to run away from you, not one that will cook up chemical defenses to being eaten.
I'm going to miss Rasmus at Yahoo!. I've spent a fair amount of time with him on the road giving lectures to college students and at conferences.

This is one of the reasons he's such a great leader. He's got a sense of humour, but he still explains it to you no matter what. Good guy.
This is old, was posted on reddit a while back, along with another post about how they are now donating them.
Read PHP's parser.
Do you have any concept of just how much time and money hacked-together PHP has cost?

Do you know how many aggregate human lifetimes are wasted on the simple act of regularly upgrading PHPBB, WordPress, MediaWiki, et al?

It's mindboggling. It's sad. It's penny wise, pound foolish.
My fellow citizens include a lot of people who a) make less than the guy who watches a toolshed and b) will have most of their wages confiscated to pay him for having watched a toolshed forty years ago.
But it's not intrinsically good; every one of PHP's advantages is offered by other languages, without all the downsides. PHP's poor design and implementation has probably cost the world millions of lost man-hours; loss that could have been avoided by choosing a better-designed solution.

It's certainly an accomplishment to create popular software, but this popular software is not necessarily something that should be used. The popularity is a function of choices made by uneducated users.

(IE 6 is very popular, after all, but it's definitely not the best web browser around.)
This articles provides an interesting counterpoint to the one about China ruining the talks about global warming.
I would guess even lower. I'm not sure why that depresses you though. In my mind, that's actually a sign of success for the language.
Yep -- the URL has "NSFW" in it, so wanted to make it clear.
Motorcycle Ride Through Chernobyl
Shatel | ADSL2+ Customer Zone
For the record, the original title was:

"The tunnels that did not revolutionize delivery in Chicago."

The point was to tell a lesson for current startups: it is about tunnels, the tunnels were supposed to revolutionize delivery, and they did not do so. It's a story about a bold vision to change the world--very relevant to a lot of startups that think they will change the world but might end up being abandoned in a few years.
Ex-Bell Labs AI researcher unveils first life-size AI-driven sex robot
Thought experiment: people who don't eat vegetables must get scurvy, right?
If they toned it down just a bit, it would be as hugely funny as the Onion!
I think you make a valid point.

Maintaining PHP apps can be a pain and the language isn't the prettiest to work with.

However, PHP has created a world where millions of people can create basic web applications, which has led to the creation of tens of millions of new sites and applications, some of those which have changed the world.

PHP has allowed more people to code, which has allowed the world to test many more ideas, many of which have created tremendous value that I think far outweigh the costs.
>It is patently false to claim that all marketing acts explicitly against the interest of those it advertises to.

So it's a good thing no one has claimed that here.
They don't package the Flash player; they translate and compile the Obj-C.
The Hacker News Network
It was briefly mentioned before but now it is out of beta. After ten years the original Hacker News Network is back. Originally a side project of the hacker think tank L0pht Heavy Industries HNN has relaunched as a video blog reporting on news and views of the information security and computer underground.
ActiveModel: Make Any Ruby Object Feel Like ActiveRecord
The "deferred life plan" is one of the items I enjoyed thinking about in the book as well.

Also, I think people get really hung up on the title of "The Four Hour Work Week." Tim has explained before that he chose that title after running AdSense tests to see which possible titles people were interested in. The original title was "Selling Drugs for Fun and Profit" (a phrase he actually uses early in the book) because he ran a nutritional supplement company. I think the story is a retailer balked at the title, so he ran his test, and picked the winner.

Anyway, people seem to get hung up on that aspect of the book, but it's really about much more than that.
I think you could make the somewhat tautological case that IE 6 is not bad enough to make many people use something else or that php is good enough to make many people choose it.

Defining good is always tricky, but being chosen by many people when other good choices are available is not a bad test for certain definitions of good.

Choices may not always be %100 rational. They are usually not random.
What do you mean?

Quantum mechanics is indeed a different viewpoint

As I recall, the Feynman diagram approach assumes that every conceivable interaction between particles that could happen does happen with a given probability depending on the interaction's complexity.

Indeed, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is quite a mind fuck - if you know the exact speed of a particle, the location of particle become utterly uncertain to the point that it could be anywhere in the universe.

So what specifically is your problem with the above quote?
It's not that bizarre they budget biennially -- when you consider that the Texas legislature is part-time, and meets only every other year.

Given the eternal train-wreck that is California budgeting -- even in good years, they just give away the store in future obligations (like public pensions) that make the bad years twice as bad -- fewer, longer budgets might be a good idea here as well.
Hey, I just picked up that book, and I'm really looking forward to reading it. Taubes' also has a video up.. I may post a link.

Anecdotes are not evidence, but for me, it's been 13 months. Triglyceride count is 40mg/dl, and I seem to have avoided four serious flu epidemics, the last around christmas (so my white blood cells are low). I do very little exercise, tomatoes once a week (bloat afterwards), eat cheese and cream, but no milk. I also noticed the reduction to being hungry only twice a day.. imho, that counts as basic intermittent fasting though (if you skip the morning meal).

Unlike the caricatures in the article (and Taleb, from another somewhat sardonic writeup) I don't take it very seriously.

As for the digestive part, this is quite remarkable, and I can only explain it by saying that everyone (or at least me) is borderline coeliac/lactose-intolerant.
>PHP's poor design and implementation has probably cost the world millions of lost man-hours; loss that could have been avoided by choosing a better-designed solution.

Could you give some examples of this?

I'm not a huge fan of PHP, but it generally works, as folks like FaceBook have proven.
I sure hope they program these with the ability to recognize safewords.
A bit off-topic, but am I the only one who always sees character encoding problems on that web site? Check this out for a particularly egregious example:

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/BNF.html
On the other hand, think of all the jobs and employment created as a byproduct of all this "waste"! I daresay php has created wealth.
A more interesting question than I expected!

Clozure's more or less official announcement was on October 19th, 2007.
( http://article.gmane.org/gmane.lisp.mcl.general/2593 )

Clojure was released on October 17th, 2007.
( http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/msg/16fec21eb1fff8aa )

Of course Clozure is much older if you look at the code and not just the name.
This sounds like a false dichotomy:

- A world that has PHP and enabled web developers.

- A world without PHP in which only Java EE-enabled engineers can write webapps.

I think that's a demonstrably false assessment. A language as poorly designed and implemented as PHP isn't necessary to be accessible to "millions of people" -- in fact, does the opposite in enabling them to make serious and expensive mistakes.
The United States needs to learn to function as one power in a complex system that it can neither escape nor dominate. It also needs to view other nations successes in pulling their citizens out of poverty not as a threat but as an opportunity and it needs to ask a lot of questions.

- Why are we in Afghanistan, Iraq?
- What we learned from Vietnam?
- Why is the Palestinian problem not solved?
- How can we stop large oscillations in our Economies?
- Why are our friends trusting us less?
- Why is our infrastructure aging?
- Why did we export manufacturing to cheaper labor overseas and not imported
the labor?
- How much of our large Service Industry can go the way manufacturing did?
- Why is Health Services and Insurance so expensive?

I can fill a few pages with questions. America certainly has the brains to answer those questions, but not the will to implement the answers.
Traveling to heaven
Blog about any beautiful places in the wolrd that must you visit for on traveling
>Do you have any concept of just how much time and money hacked-together PHP has cost?

I don't think it's fair to blame bad programming on the language itself.

>Do you know how many aggregate human lifetimes are wasted on the simple act of regularly upgrading PHPBB, WordPress, MediaWiki, et al?

Software written in other languages doesn't require upgrading?
It wasn't to them at the time... not until we had processed about 80-100k did things settle down.

I think they have a hard time with their risk management protocol. Keep customers happy and loose a lot of money or piss off customers and loose less money from scammers...
Agreed.

We tried using mac minis as little servers, but they wouldn't boot if a monitor is not connected. We got around it by making a dummy DVI connector with a resistor in it. But still, it is jumping through hoops. That and the silly BIOS, it is as if Apple went out of its way to make it less user friendly...
How to live free, do everything you want and insure you’ll never, ever be happy.
is a lawsuit the reason for removing the button on the pre?
It is the government's responsibility to protect the common good, even from threats not of their making or even illegal in origin.

Government is one of the few places where "could have and didn't" becomes the same as "did".

The Katrina debacle is the largest example of this.
http://seanhussey.com/
Agile project management
Using Scrum project management software is a simple way of making sense of large amounts of data and putting it into different forms that are easier to understand, such as graphs or charts. Large projects, with lots of information, can be difficult without the proper software.
Saw another similar article recently: http://www.newgeography.com/content/001296-dont-give-up-on-t....
A tool library is an intriguing, possibly beneficial idea. But whether it's actually worth what's spent depends on facts not in evidence: how many people use it, how efficiently is it run, what's the cost of the next-best-alternative, do wealthy homeowners need the subsidy? Anything well-intentioned looks good in a vacuum; it's the tradeoffs that matter.

Given the way municipally-originated projects are run, I doubt a rigorous cost-benefit analysis has been applied. If it were a privately-run tool rental facility, and it survived its startup period, I'd have more confidence that it was earning its keep: willing customers would be paying its costs plus enough profit to keep the owners interested.

Municipal projects can survive for years based on little more than "sounds nice", "employs some people/friends", or even ego-stroking "how Berkeley can we be?"
Netbook as victory of the proletariat? I think not.
Re: immigration...some folks appear to believe a population Ponzi scheme is just the carpet under which to sweep the fallout from decades of [government] financial Ponzi schemes.
To be fair, Hpricot was created by _why. I'm sure 400 years down the road another madman will laugh, completely understanding what _why was going for :D
I'd say that that war is a lot worse in Middle East than it is in the US. Not speaking from personal experience, but having a $5000 dollar bomb dropped on you and/or your relatives seems like it'd be worse than paying for it.
You're claiming that Google/Schmidt is being a hypocrite for condemning over-spending, while being in the marketing business himself... as if his work naturally leads to consumers overextending their finances.

I'm telling you here that marketing does not at all necessarily encourage spending beyond one's means - and in fact in many cases saves consumer money. What Schmidt does is really morally very neutral, I do not see the need to single him out for it.
Just to pick on one point: what conceivable moral logic leads one to choose democratic representation based on the financial health of their existing government? I just can't see where that comes from. What's next: people with net credit debt are worth 3/5 of a non-slave?
Inspiration for the sex robot sprang from the September 11, 2001 attacks. "I had a friend who passed away in 9/11," Hines said. "I promised myself I would create a program to store his personality, and that became the foundation for Roxxxy True Companion."

That one detail, I did not expect.
CES 2010: What did we learn this week?
This is Paul Carr. He's in a class entirely different from the TC editors :)
The original headline wasn't too bad, except for the confusing name of Paul Carr's TC column series ("NSFW"). I'd suggest...

Paul Carr: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crunchies

...because a key point is that it's Carr's irreverent op-ed, and not TC/MA speaking.