skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you are in any way like most of us, everything you are pationnate about eventually loses its luster and will feel like finshing your degree. Learning to work yourself in these situations will be more valuable then anything else. Finally don't assume a degree or a kind of degree is tied to a job or a type of job. It may look like it is but it doesn't have to be.

The situation would be différent if you had customers for your business.
He must mean instantiate. Personally it's one of the best things I've ever done. I recommend creating a subclass and overloading some of the methods though particularly spew() and crap().

You might want to mess with a dummy object first to practising instantiating without producing any person objects.
How Close Are We To Colonizing Space?
Being online: identity, anonymity, and all things in between
Create a Custom Transitioning Background for Your Gnome Desktop
Well no not really. I guess you could use this lib for metaprogramming (code generation etc.), but I don't really see much benefit. This just seems to be an odd wrapper that doesn't make things more apparent (though that may be because I already know a good bit about Ruby and can't see with "n00b eyes").
We need the reverse ... spam your social networks with your real-world suicide, as explored at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=831537.
Bruce Schneier: The Eternal Value of Privacy
Web Winners and Losers in 2009
Gigapixel Treasure Hunt – win $1000 «360 Cities Official Blog
Zappos.com Sells 6-30% More Merchandise When Accompanied By Video Demos
Why Entrepreneurs Shouldn’t Write Business Plans
The secret history of Silicon Valley (video)
Who wants to start an HN team?
OMG No Facebook at Work? See Ya
Is Facebook a Brand that You Can Trust?
Should We Be Worried About Fast Food Content?
Best Buy, Samsung, And Westinghouse Named In SFLC Suit Today
I've read ... I think on an AWS forum ... that the EC2 addresses are already thoroughly tagged as spam. Using EC2 to send out spam is much more obvious than using it for botnet command and control. At the time they'd just rolled out a scheme to address this and many EC2 users were already using 3rd party email services.
What's interesting to me is that the acquisition market seems to be warming up again. It doesn't surprise me. There's a lot of large companies that have slashed payroll, cut costs, and now have a bunch of extra cash on hand. Those companies need to start growing and expanding in new directions soon.

I think acquisitions are going to be happening more and more frequently for startups. Parallel to that, with some high profile exits in the last few months, I think that angel/VC money is going to start flowing more freely.
I'm sure they're worried about a membership drop, but you really would think that the ACM of all people would understand that false scarcity is not a business model for information-based organizations in today's world.
Bayes-Ball: The Rational Pastime [pdf]
> * Mental context switch between server/client languages.

Not sure I follow. The client-side Javascript you write will probably interact with the DOM API. The server-side Javascript will probably interact with the filesystem of the server, it is BYOD (Bring Your Own DOM). Plus, no matter what, you will always have that switch between client/server because that switch is what defines client/server.

> * Better code reuse, i.e. the same model class can be used on the server and client side.

Does anyone actually do this? True, it is the same language, but it is not the same environment.
I would be interested in hearing more about your strategy.

India: Are you planning to deploy at NIXI or at many of the larger ISP's, in which case, it's not very efficient.

Africa: What countries other than South Africa, Egypt are you looking at?

Asia: Are you looking at deploying at the Equinix in HK, Singapore; how about Japan/Korea?

My email is in my profile, if you want to reply offline.
It might be because it says the same thing as another comment, which was probably posted earlier. As such, it's noise in the conversation.
The buildings are of remarkably uniform height. My guess is either limitation of building material at the time of greatest construction, or zoning ("cannot be higher than the church").

Even the modern buildings are mostly low.
You've clearly never been to the philosophy building. If they're lucky, it's in the unfinished attic of the English building.
A video or screenshots would be nice.
I went to a church on Christmas Eve last year for the carols and I found it invigorating and enlightening to talk to people who weren't 20-something grad students or professors. I worry that we're missing out on something by congregating in social and intellectual monocultures in which we are never challenged by someone that sees the world from a different viewpoint.
I had a gen 1 Kindle, and sold it because I was frustrated with the page turning rate. Well, not just the page turning rate. It was that, combined with a smaller screen area, combined with a lower-contrast display (than paper), which made me increase the text size over paper books. Combined, it meant that I spent a whole lot of time looking at the flickering refresh, and not reading words.

I really wanted to like the Kindle, and I think that one or two more revs and It'll be something I want to use.
What a golden quote:

"How would U.S. voters react to a Senator claiming that a given piece of legislation (say, one reducing restrictions on campaign financing) “strikes a fundamental balance between the needs of the Senate and those of the United States of America”?

In my minds eye, I saw Joe Lieberman giving a press conference: "The health-care bill now strikes an appropriate balance between the interests of Joe Lieberman and those of the United States of America".
The others may mock you, but you are in fact correct as to why it is impossible for two nuclear-armed foes to fight directly.

There will never be a hot war between US and China for so long as nuclear weapons have no effective defense. Nuclear weapons are probably the single biggest enabler of peace on the planet.
Odd: "engineers are more likely to be religious than other graduates"
Moving some of the folks on the right side of the bell curve to a new city won't necessarily help out the folks on the left side. The Bay Area has lots of tech jobs AND unemployed and smelly people.
Fear of nuclear annihilation is why there hasn't been a war. Nuclear weapons = peace. Not a happy peace, but infinitely better than either no nukes or a single side having nukes.
VLC for the Mac could use a hand
It was ours to begin with, but with an 11 trillion dollar debt, we'll just never get it back.
Brainstorm hn: time tracking charts, graphs, analysis
And maybe a link to a twitter account that shows how the friends tree looks like.
Palm's Browser-Based IDE for WebOS Released [First Look]
It sounds to me like I should configure a service when setting it up. You don't hook up a TV and just accept that the default settings are the best quality you're going to get.

And OpenDNS isn't the default here anyways. You have to make a conscious choice to use them. Unfortunately, there's a disconnect between creating an account on their site and setting up to use their resolvers.

Perhaps this would be resolved if they first redirected you to create an account when visiting the first website you go to? Much like a wifi hotspot with a login. At least then you would be prompted to create that account.
The country club revolt (aka Operation Chokehold)
This is a pretty powerful article. Regardless of your thoughts on global warming, it's rather upsetting to see scientists' careers ruined through having opinions differing than the gatekeepers of the peer reviewing system.
You can see what the teaser theme looks like by checking out my Twitter page: http://twitter.com/fpotter
2010- Governments slip even further behind the mobile worker, everybody looses
Honestly, I think they are just better at pretending to be interested and letting you speak. People tend to think a conversation was great if the other person gives them positive feedback. My girlfriend is a hairdresser and she does this quite well, and she doesn't care about at least 75% of her conversations, but you'd never know it as a client.
While I agree, I can't for the life of me figure out where you stand in this whole debate. What you said seems to suggest that you don't think geeks need to change, because those who truly want to work in CS will anyway... but you seemed to write that as some sort of rebuttal to someone who was asserting that very thing.
Sharing models makes doing some form validations MUCH easier. My template language also runs on both server and client making progressive enhancement pretty trivial (in terms of updating dom elements when models change)

As for context-switch on server/client... if you use something like underscore on both ends, lots of things end up looking the same.
True, but unfortunately not going to happen at this time.
I don't think he was :-)

(I was going to say "you must be new here", but clearly you are not)
As a scientist, I find it depressing that people would engage in this kind of behavior. But on the issue, I just watched this MIT "debate" about the impact of this incident:

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/730

One thing I specifically remember is that one of the panel members (and member of the IPCC) concluded that the attempt by Mann et al. to bury conflicting studies was not successful, as some of those very papers were discussed and cited in the IPCC reports.
Top 50 Venture Capital Blog Posts of 2009
in favor or less context switching wrt code reuse: i will say that allowing my firefox extension (client) and django website (server) to share the same templates is pretty awesome. (thx static)
I like the Lieberman joke, but the original metaphor isn't quite right; there's definitely a difference between (on the one hand) the relationship between the ACM as an organization and its members, and (on the other hand) the US Senate and the citizens it represents.

It's very possible for an organization to have interests that are not identical with the interests of its constituent members.
I think the numbers are fudged because of the "definition" of a smartphone. Most Japanese phones are probably considered media-phones or enhanced-phones.
Running a profiler can reassure you that while yes, your HLL code may be doing decadently inefficient things for sake of developer convenience, most of the time it has a negligible effect on overall performance. Just rewrite those parts in C if you have to and you can get the best of both worlds.
But then how would he get new visitors to his blog? ;)
Derek Sivers’ Critical Marketing Basics Every Musician Should Know
The title says it's for musicians, but the advice applies just as well to startups.
Well, at least there are some helpful tips in there. It sounds like his "secret" questions came with predictable answers.
Validating your startup idea and initial customer development
Tim's criticisms weren't at all small nitpicks. That's Design 101. I'm not a designer and I noticed the same things he did.

While it's true that designers thrive in critique, this simply was not an impressively-designed site.
That's cool. Sometimes I wish I worked on planetary exploration rather than astrophysics...
Should I overlook the fact this guy is employed by The Cato Institute, which is funded by big oil?
Well, being pedantic, that should be

struct thing *foo = malloc(sizeof(struct thing) + sizeof(char) * i_need);

since sizeof(char) isn't guaranteed to be 1 byte on all systems.
Google Loses in French Copyright Case
This was also on NPR a while ago: http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...
My experience with this is that most companies today just stop communicating with you, and don't even have the courtesy to tell you that you were rejected.
Because the best way to destroy the Great Satan is to keep people from reading about what I ate for breakfast.
I believe if you reduce the argument to one or two specific papers you can easily see that they get out.

More distressing is the overall pattern of behavior, where editorial boards are rigged and scientists just "give up" working in this field. No amount of good papers getting through is going to fix that, unfortunately.
I think there's definitely a way to accomplish the "book learning" parts of that experience without giving up a social life. I find I don't learn appreciably slower now than I did then - the social life seems to come out of the Reddit/HackerNews time budget, which is fairly low signal-to-noise ratio anyway.

I don't think I could've accomplished the self learning part though. Even if I learned just as much, there'd still be the nagging question of "Could I have learned more? Could I have accomplished more?" And I wouldn't have the experience necessary to judge what's really important to me, and what tradeoffs I want to make with the rest of my life.
Yep, those are on the front page now. Don't know why I didn't do that to start with :-)

The tree looks like this: http://twitter.com/fpotter
Microsoft: mainly the XBox division seems to still be doing this.

Also, the developer division: Generics, LINQ, F#. They all came from Microsoft Research.
Perhaps. But I guess my point was that "be the change you want to see in the world" is easy, since all I want is for everybody to be like me!
LuaJIT is wicked fast, and being able to have multiple VMs with a single interpreter is very nice as well. With cooperative coroutines, a nice C API (for calling into lua) and C/Invoke for calling out of lua nicesly, it is a very clean and effective way to power your applications.
Very unsettling. I don't understand how this topic is a punchline to so many people.

Utterly tactless, but I'm not sure how much you'd be able to muster with a url like that.
I wrote a, failed, game for Facebook, but was really surprised what information the FaceBook API would give you on your visitors once they approved your app.

No matter the intent of the changes are. The article implied that they wanted people to share more information, but I think that just stopping the API from giving applications free rain is a good start.
Notion Ink smartpad (PixelQi+Tegra+Android)
No, but also don't miss the fact that most of those on the other side are funded by big government. Neither side is neutral.
Thanks! This is exactly what I've been looking for. A dynamic language with Haskell-like syntax.
Scratch is an amazing piece of work. It's sad that the license prevents it from ever being part of a default OS install.
Datacenters and Solar Panels
This is the device that I've been waiting for: a Kindle+CrunchPad thanks mostly to the PixelQi display.
That's a fair explanation. I think I understood the spirit in which that point was intended; it just stood out to me because of how often people harp on content being #1. I liked the post overall, for sure!
This is just ad hominem. You might as well say "I am politically on the left and I don't like the Cato Institute". It would be more honest.

As an aside, the Cato Institute turned down a donation from Fannie Mae before the financial crash so as to avoid the appearance of bias in their advocacy, so I have a bit of respect for them. How many think-tanks would do the same?

Yes, they were founded with a gift from the Koch families decades ago, but does that invalidate the work of Michaels, who by all appearances is a climate scientist that has published real research? Should we dismiss his thoughts outright and not listen to what he has to say?

(Update: a link below shows 3/4 of Cato's annual funding comes from individual donations, only 2% comes from corporations. Presumably, the rest comes from non-profit foundations.)

Sorry, I accidentally up-voted you when attempting to do the opposite.
I'm sure someone spent some time on this but I fail to see how things makes things easier or clearer. If anything it just muddies the waters.
I know that metaprogramming can be hard to get your mind around sometimes, but you're much better off running through the existing material. If you keep at it eventually everything just clicks into place and you have that "ah-ha" moment. Takes a while but it's worth it.

Check out this link for some great resources (this has been posted on HN in the past):
http://ruby-metaprogramming.heroku.com/
The people who feel the need to do this have missed the point of the sites in the first place.

I have an account on all three services. All of my friends on there are people I have physically met and like as people (or in the case of LinkedIn, business contacts). The only site I'd probably be fine with losing is MySpace, as it was fine before Facebook went public, but after that all of my friends moved to Facebook, making MySpace redundant.

I think the real issue is people who treat it like some soft of demented game of Pokemon. You don't have to "catch 'em all" and get everyone on the site to "friend" you. You don't win.
Agreed. It's a fine line between rejecting "crackpots" and those with whom you simply disagree.
I firmly believe Google has the right vision and the right products.

Did you believe this while you were employed by Microsoft too?
So he's basically saying (loudly) that facebook changed the default privacy settings to be more permissive, which is true. On the other hand, when facebook changed the default privacy settings, they put a giant-ass unmistakable pop-up message telling you about this and literally did not let you access the rest of the site until you had read about it. And the old privacy settings are still available.

I trust facebook not to give away more information than I tell them to, because when they got burned for that before they reacted well and learned from their mistakes. They're certainly encouraging people to open up, and I'm a bit wary of that, but they're a far cry from jumping the shark.
I think there is a lot that is lost by society's tendency to group similar people and people's natural tendency to seek out those who are similar to each other. When all the elderly people get put in retirement homes think of what is lost by those who could have benefited from the elderly person's years of experience and wisdom.

If you want to be a better entrepreneur, you are probably going to find an older entrepreneur who has some experience to teach you something, not one in your peers. Well, if you constantly surround yourself with those similar to you, how are you going to be challenged to grow as a person?
Novamente is written in Java and is in the symbolic/probabilistic vein of AGI schemes. From very loose and unsourced scuttlebut I have heard from time to time that performance has been an issue. To go out on a limb, I would venture a guess that it has a lot of possible optimizations which are too difficult for a compiler but would eat up a lot of programmer time and hinder the extreme flexibility and changeability that Novamente would need, and so a smarter optimizer would be of considerable interest to Goertzel.

On the other hand, program optimization in general has been called an AI-complete problem (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/AI-complete), so maybe the reason is the other way around.
Agreed. I don't think Apple would start making decisions like crippling WebKit just to sell more apps in the short term. It's just not their style. Sure they use lawyers, secrecy and all manner of proprietary strategies to maintain market control, but they would never sell out the quality of their user experience clutching greedy fingers at a market slipping away—that's more like what Microsoft does.
My comment should have read, "there isn't much good about C."
We could've done it with 1970's technology. The primary hurdle is economic. (Fast Mars missions would've been feasible with Project Orion's nuclear propulsion. Background radiation would be a lot worse now, however.)
http://netherpad.com

Sponsored by PBworks!

Or if it's easier for you to remember:

http://etherpad.pbworks.com
meta-note: I've noticed a tendency on HN for commenters to impeach people sometimes without good reason (this case may or may not be a good example, that's not the point) On several articles today the comments basically boiled down to an ad-hominem -- and this was on subjects as far-ranging as naval warfare, startups, science, etc.

I'd like to call it out more, but there's so much of it -- it's a lost cause, I think.
That's a fair perspective, but I'm left wondering if it sounds good only because it's very nebulous and hypothetical. I wonder if it would sound as good if you were to be more concrete.

In particular, would you mention (or, at least, loosely characterize by subsystem or specification) some of the bugs in IE that you would consider a higher priority?

I'm asking because all of the following appear fundamental to me: DOM Traversal, DOM Range, DOM2 Core, DOM2 Events, DOM2 Views, DOM2 Style, CSS3 selectors, ECMAScript conformance & garbage collection, the behavior of HTML forms when manipulated by script, the HTTP 1.1 Protocol...

I admit that there are 4 tests for SVG and 2 for SMIL that could be placed at a much lower priority, and if IE were sitting at 94/100 for missing those then I might agree with you. (Those were among the bucket 5 tests that arrived via the contest.)
This is because if you make the slightest deviation from 'correct grammar' in a piece about grammar, you'll be attacked mercilessly. Every word, every m-dash, requires an unshakable argument for its correctness in that context.

Pity really, but as long as it's cheap and easy to attack anything with a whiff of hypocrisy...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_Institute#Funding

Looks like they receive funding from ~20 corporations annually accounting for 2% of their overall funding.
At the same time each building is different in style, something that many US cities lack.
I would be happy to test it - pls let me know.
They had cut quite a few corners when they first released the iPhone. It certainly wasn't suffering from feature creep. It didn't support 2G, video recording/playback, it didn't have a GPS etc. They have gradually added features after the initial release.
VLC is infringing a ton of US patents.
That's the same idea as in this David Brooks' editorial, in case anyone's interested:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/opinion/28brooks.html
And dumb for Sony.
True. But that popup was pretty confusing. It took me a while to grok it, and even then I wasn't exactly sure what my settings were going to be after clicking Done. When I went to check out the new feature of "what my page looks like to most people" (whatever that means), I was very surprised to see that my fan pages showed up.

And apparently people who hadn't tweaked their default privacy settings before (which is probably most people), had the "Everyone" option selected by default. I'm not saying Facebook was intentionally doing something shady, but my reaction was, "Wow, a lot of people are going to be tricked by this."
Fair enough, but the security and welfare of citizens is the primary interest of big government (o.k. secondary, but aligned with the primary interest of getting re-elected), whereas big oil has no interest other than making loot. With respect to climate change, big oil loot comes at the expense of our planet (and our security, and lives our troops in the middle east, and our health, and our economy).
What? The TV tower is awesome. Especially the crawling baby sculptures..