skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Somebody(geek) please reassure me that these 'changes in behavior' are not paramount to becoming a parent because this premise seemed pretty implicit throughout most items in this list. It's hard enough for me to grow up as is; it's especially harder if you still love being immature (yet playful) towards your peers and are older than twenty-two.

EDIT: I've been fired from a marketing firm for forgetting to remove my test word 'Poopy' from a Fortune500 company's web-site (running on WebLogic, yikes). No one knew the word was there for like a week since 'Poopy' was not an actual product it only showed up in their glossary. A week later I told my boss after releasing the next update and removing the test word: she flipped out, told the client, and fired me that following Monday because word got around their (the client's) IT department resulting in someone digging up a cached copy of their web-site's glossary and passing it on to someone higher up the corporate ladder. I'm an idiot for using such a vulgar test word but I had no business working there (in a marketing firm), let alone no business editing 14,000-20,000 lines of XML. (seriously, there were about 3-4 XML files that long) In retrospect though, I'm glad it happened because now (then) I finally had a reason to learn Mercurial (or why version-control is important and how branching could have saved my ass) :P
I'm still not sold on household robots yet.

Looking out from where I'm sitting, I see hardwood floors, throw rugs, carpeting, and lots of accumulated, moving household detritus brought in by the family. Shoes lying haphazardly. Afghans partially off the couch and touching the floor.

The point isn't that I have a messy house, but that it's really difficult to isolate one function, say swiffering, and make it work, because it's related to a bunch of other functions, like putting out the cat, or picking up the living room.

Perhaps it makes sense in a bigger, more empty house, filled by people who don't leave lots of things askew. Don't know.

I'm betting in 10-15 years we'll start seeing some multi-function household robots -- perhaps that can pickup and clean. Once they reach 3 or 4 related functions instead of just one, I can see them making more sense.
No, everybody should realise as early as possible that not knowing english is damaging their ability to participate in anything international.

Not knowing english means no access to science or post graduate education, no access to international media, no access to hacker news or important blogs, no access to international job markets or even to jobs in big domestic corporations.

Not knowing english correlates with being poor, uninformed and excluded. Localised UIs are evil.
Ha! "Free bear", this is excellent
My impression is that the early wide adoption of Minitel created an 'online mindset' that also fueled adoption of the web in France. Pride of people in power may be another story, but everyday usage seems to come pretty natural to them.

It looks like they came little late to the internet party, but caught up quickly: http://www.ipsos-na.com/news/pressrelease.cfm?id=3030
Indeed, this very strategy is recommended right up front in Secrets of Power Negotiating, where it is called the Higher Authority gambit.

"You should always have a higher authority with whom you have to check before you can change your proposal or make a decision. A negotiator who presents himself as the decision-maker has put himself at a severe bargaining disadvantage. You have to put your ego on the back burner to do this, but you'll find it very effective.

"...When the other person knows that you have the final authority to make a deal, he knows that he only has to convince you... Not so if you are telling him that you have to answer to a higher authority. Whether you have to get approval from a region, head office, management, partners, or board of directors, the other person has to do more to convince you... He knows that he must completely win you to his side so that you want to persuade your higher authority to agree to his proposal."

You also buy time to review any proposal that is made, or look for counteroffers, because that proposal has to be taken away behind the scenes and shown to the higher authority for approval.

Note, however, that your family isn't the best choice for this: "be sure that your authority is a vague entity, such as a pricing committee, the people back at corporate, or the marketing committee. If you tell the other person that your manager would have to approve it, what's the first thought that they are going to have? Right: 'Then why am I wasting time talking to you?'..."

Of course, the flip side of that is that a company might find it exceedingly awkward to demand that your wife come in to work and participate in the negotiations. Such things are just not done. So the "wife" version of the gambit does work better than the "manager" version, though nowhere near as well as the "ambiguous corporate overlords" version.

People often allege -- correctly, I fear -- that some companies prefer to hire single people rather than people with families. And here we have the reason: Having a family automatically, perhaps even unconsciously, puts you in a stronger negotiating position with your employer, not just at the beginning of the job but day-to-day. "Oh, how I would love to spend the entire weekend fixing my co-worker's bugs, but my child needs me." If you are a single person and your employer knows it I encourage you to invent some fictional relatives. For an astonishingly relevant guide to this, see Wilde, Oscar: The Importance of Being Earnest.
Thanks for re-balancing the view.

The big picture behind this is scary. If every nation starts taxing internet companies from every other nation for revenue generated off their own population (regardless if said company has a presence in that country), it'll slow down growth tremendously and kill a lot of business models.
@wyclif thx!
What Blackberry Is For Outlook/Exchange, Android Is For Google Apps
> I don't just use one dish at the top of the stack

I'm a bachelor as well; you should re-consider how big your stack is in the first place. Why do you have more than 2 of anything?
This is good advice, but in practice I find it very difficult to translate these tips if you don't have to sell a product/service.

Case in point, recently I was asked for a job interview to "prepare about 10 slides as a short training session on the use of the Ensembl Genome browser by wet bench lab scientists".

I tried to use the techniques described in this presentation and at presentationzen (http://www.garrreynolds.com/Presentation/slides.html) (use high quality graphics, limit bullet points, choose your fonts with care,...). My result is here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/138632/EnsembleGenomeBrowser.odp (OpenOffice Presentation file, since it is a very visual presentation see the notes for the accompanied text).

The problem I ran into is that I had to use lots of screenshots of the Ensembl Genome browser to tell how it worked. I tried to make those screenshots as pretty as possible (maybe even too cliché with the fading mirror effect) but I din't find much room to show my passion for bioinformatics. Any advice on what I could have changed?
God, I hate this kind of marketing. Until I read this link if anyone had asked me I'd say very convinced that I'm in favor of fair trade. I guess these days you have to be more careful what you support.
The world has passed them by? They have caught up you know - France has higher bandwidth at lower prices than, say, the U.S.
The other thing that happens in recessions is innovation. And some companies will decide that it's easier to "roll their own" than put up with pushy software providers.

Sure, in many cases, there may be legitimate license violations. But as the article implies, if the provider is exploiting loopholes or basically showing no compassion whatsoever in order to be paid, all they're really doing is risking the loss of a customer.
Alternatively you can view this as evidence that catastrophic social changes set back humans by 1500 years.
I don't know if I want to get caught inventing fictional relatives, but your general observation about higher authority is dead on.

Negotiation tactics exist in order for both parties to be able to pressure the other ones and find out more about their true position without the use of force. It's a dance -- sometimes a complicated dance, but a dance. You resort to higher authority, I pull a previously-made concession, you ask for a price, I give you one, you flinch, etc.

There are lots more tactics than just higher authority, although that is a good one.

BTW, great book and set of tapes Secrets of Power Negotiating. I used to read/listen to a lot of business books and tapes, and it was one of the few that really made a difference in my work.
Another interesting one from China, from (supposedly) 2600 BC: the South Pointing Chariot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pointing_Chariot
Let me guess twitter's bigtable:

- id, nick, mail, pwd, time, mytwithere
- id, nick, mail, pwd, time, anothertwithere
- id, nick, mail, pwd, time, mythirdtwithere
- id, nick, mail, pwd, time, mylasttwithere

hmm, no, that won't work

normalization still wins
Give me a small collection of articles (just their linked titles) of the newest updates about what people I know (as well as myself) are interested in. Send that by email so it waits for me when I wake up.

A sliding scale of interests where, for example, I could give the business articles at the New York Times and the market news articles from bloomberg a very heavy weight, while giving valleywag articles a very low weight.
Why startups work, doing so much with so little is impossible to predict
Right, that is the reason that there is such a huge difference between the runtime for eval between the languages. Macros do slow down eval if you are doing macro-expansion. They are complicated enough that normally you do not write (or expect) them to expand quickly. This is obvious because macros and fexprs are much different. Overall, macros can speed up your program because you are allowed to do certain calculations ahead of time, if you are clever about it.

I am not saying that you should avoid eval completely, I am just saying that it shouldn't be your only tool. And when you do use it, if you put it in a tight loop, you are probably doing something wrong.

The main alternative that comes to mind for me is function passing. There is a lot that you can do with function passing that overlaps with eval, except the function passing version will be safer and faster.

We agree that is one of the most powerful, most fun aspects of using lisp (the power is what makes it fun!). I also hope we agree that the frequency of its use should be the inverse of its power.
Reposted:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006980

But it's such a huge PSA I'm upvoting anyway.
On the Consequences of Simplicity
As an iPhone user I'm shocked if that is actually the state of things in Android. The iPhone automatically fades out music for calls.

And these multitasking interfaces:
http://www.cultofmac.com/kirikae-jailbreak-app-switcher-for-...
http://www.multifl0w.com/
Donation based app?
Hey guys!

I have this app [really basic] called "tu-dus" [htttp://tu-dus.com] that helps you with your to-do lists and so on. It's really simple right now and totally free, mainly because it doesn't cost me anything to maintain it and I made it for myself [I use it a lot].

I've seen that in Brazil, it's getting a lot of reviews and people are using it, despite the fact that I've never marketed the app.

There are a lot of ideas that I would like to put into practice to expand the app and make it more "professional", so I was thinking about revamping it a little bit, make it international and so on...

I didn't want to charge for it's use but I would love to see some money as a thanks or something. Maybe I'll enable file uploading and this kind of stuff, and that might cost me some money... You know.

Well, the question is... Is it possible to release this app as a "donationware"? Where people pay what they want as thanks or whatever? Would that work? What do you think?

I can see Wikipedia working like that, but Wikepedia is huge. What about a small app? Really unpretentious...
Now I have to wonder if caverns like this can survive a plunge into the mantle, a la The Core.
Additionally, a compression algorithm need only have a worst case of adding one extra bit in the case that it couldn't compress a file.
Opposite - having kids IMHO keeps you young, and in touch with your playful side.

One of the reasons I had kids early was to do that. I didn't want to be one of those old parents who has already "grown up" and lost all touch with fun.
Possibly got the idea from this book. (Depending on how old his kids are.)

http://www.amazon.com/17-Things-Not-Allowed-Anymore/dp/03758...

We have it and it's mildly funny, there is one line that makes our kids erupt into hysterical laughter everytime.
A few years ago someone gave me a stash of self-adhesive metal labels intended for vending machines. They are imprinted "INSERT 25 CENTS" and have coin slots cut into them. I'm sorry to say I have as yet not stuck them inside the elevators and sent round a company-wide memo: "Due to new cost-saving initiatives and in an effort to promote physical fitness..."
I saw this literally after just finishing this video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4362041487661765149# Gary Taubes giving a presentation about his book Good Calories, Bad Calories.

If you've never seen someone actually make the case for this stuff, but only let other people diss it for you, I encourage you in the strongest terms to actually listen to the case directly and make up your own mind. These are not the rantings of people who think fire can't weaken steel or that insist immunizations cause autism; indeed, they make a very strong case that the people who insist on the "calories in/calories out" model should be lumped right in with those folks.

(Oh, guess I missed the party 18 days ago. Well, nobody linked that video that I saw. If you are interested in Good Calories, Bad Calories, but don't want to buy it, that video is a reasonable substitute for the scientific explanations in the book, which is very similar to the linked video. You don't get the huge sheaf of references in the back or the long exposition of history explaining how we got where we are, but if you're interested in that after the video I'm sure you can find the book.)
A domain in non-english characters communicates that the site has a high chance of being written in a non-english language.

Since I do not understand neither Cyrillic nor Chinese, I would probably not click on any of them.

Except:

1)...If I would really need to click on them (i.e. import some goods from China) in which case I would click on link and visit the site hoping that there is some kind of english description.

2)If I saw the link on Google (i.e. a search engine that I trust) and saw in the excerpt that there is some sort of legitimate description, it would be more likely that I would follow the link.
IF you install the expensive blackberry integration stuff, no? Our company uses exchange but won't install that after market blackberry server something-or-other. As a result, my Droid, with native exchange sync, gets MUCH better service than my coworkers with the blackberries.
The phenomenon of a startup succeeding is not very different from a poor person getting rich. These are very similar problems for which there is no known solution (despite the large number of how-to-get-rich books).
Americans aren't as ignorant as you think, everyone has now seen images of sweat shops and knows if you ask them that manufacturing conditions for the things they buy at Wal Mart are awful. However, they continue to buy them, just like an alcoholic continues to drink even though he knows that it's killing him. That's textbook addiction right there.
I just bought some cool propaganda merchandise from teh official North Korean website :)
You can read the original text yourself: http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/ptm/antikythera_mechanism/ (you might need to download the PTM viewer and PTM files to zoom in close enough).
> cow-orker’s

Grow up.
Conway's Game Of Life in one line of APL
The site looks good. The screencast ( http://tu-dus.com/files/screen_pt.swf ) explains things well even though I did not understand the language.

I have no first hand experience in receiving donations (tried, but failed). I have heard from other people that the 0.01% to 1 % of your visitors will donate depending on your audience and your campaign.

If I were you, I would not expect a business to be sustainable based on donations alone.
> having kids IMHO keeps you young

Let me guess, you think having a mortgage keeps you thinking independently and on your toes, too?

It's amazing the conclusions people will arrive at to rationalize their fucked up thinking.
Sorry about the ambiguous that, I was talking about the idea of systematic leap years not our calendar system. It was my understanding that during this time period the calendar was still being reset based the vernal equinox and a hard and fast rule had yet to be added. Otherwise there would have been no need to adopt the Julian calendar in the first place.

According to the later writers Censorinus and Macrobius, the ideal intercalary cycle consisted of ordinary years of 355 days alternating with intercalary years, alternately 377 and 378 days long. On this system, the average Roman year would have had 366¼ days over four years, giving it an average drift of one day per year relative to any solstice or equinox. Macrobius describes a further refinement wherein, for 8 years out of 24, there were only three intercalary years, each of 377 days. This refinement averages the length of the year to 365¼ days over 24 years. In practice, intercalations did not occur schematically according to these ideal systems, but were determined by the pontifices. So far as can be determined from the historical evidence, they were much less regular than these ideal schemes suggest. They usually occurred every second or third year, but were sometimes omitted for much longer, and occasionally occurred in two consecutive years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar
"having kids IMHO keeps you young, and in touch with your playful side."

Agreed, and since I had my kid later, I'm still goofy and playful. I think if he was years gone I'd be guarding my lawn with razor wire and proximity sensors.j

Children give you the chance to appreciate childhood.
Apparently one can overcome some of that with sufficient resources.

But in general you make a good point The main thing is probably not that the parents help with all those "science" projects the pranksters inflict in the primary grades, rather that the parents back the school and convey the message that school is important. A woman I know well remarks that she taught O- and A-level chemistry to girls from villages barely out of the stone age in east Africa 50 years ago.
EBay auction software
AuctionSplash's advanced eBay tools specifically designed to buy and sell easy eBay. Also offers FREE eBay image hosting, FREE auction templates and desktop convenience. Free to download and use.
Geoengineering the climate: science, governance and uncertainty
I'm not seeing the parallel there.

Having a mortgage is pretty much the most efficient way to save money for the future. But I've no idea why that's related to having kids.

And what's fucked up about having kids young in life? It makes a ton of sense when you think about it.
I think 'old parents' losing all touch with fun is an unfair stereotype, but I think I understand where you're coming from by narrowing the generational/cultural divide between you and your son or daughter you're minimizing the difference in how you communicate and think.
Mutation accumulation in modern humans
I got the sense that he didn't grasp the point of Kent's paper (c.f. his remark regarding "N+1 schema"). I personally agree with Kent's view regarding the necessity for yet another (but final) abstraction layer to decouple semantic and logical abstractions. At some point in the future DSLs and Schemas will meet in a happy union to achieve this.
The Rise and Growth of Social Location Applications
What's Being Ignored in the Crowdsourcing Debate
CSS3 Gradient Generator
clicky: http://tu-dus.com
The algorithm actually deals with this; if the same person keeps upvoting your posts it will no longer work after a while.

So if you're using this strategy, save it for special occasions.
Twaddle not twitter.com
presumably, the real issue of cracking a hashed password database is that you can then test if the user has the same password for other services (which is a fairly reasonable assumption). Collisions are likely to hinder that goal, by providing multiple 'valid' passwords which may not be the ones originally chosen by the user.

Still, I'm guilty of implementing the brain-dead 'append-a-secret-and-md5-it' scheme, so I'll be using something more sensible in future.
It's the Latency, Stupid
Amazing pics!!!!!!!!!!
"Ironically, Asiatic Japan comes closer than any nation on earth to what Hitler wanted. It is a socially conservative, hierarchical, technocratic, orderly, pagan, sexist, nationalist, racially pure, anti-communist, non-capitalist and anti-Semitic society."

in what sense is japan anti-semitic? is that so?
They're largely a confidence booster for kid and parent.
Summary at 6:30 of section 9 of 9: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tyaRnfGRV0

The guy seems pretty sensible in his explanations earlier in the video series, but his style is inflammatory. If he left out the bitterness toward the industry players that he's arguing with, he'd be more convincing.
You sound like a lot of engineers I know: you devalue your own time/expertise and are not comfortable with charging for it. I strongly suggest that you move past this hangup.

It isn't "pretentious" to sell things to people who want to buy things from you. It also isn't hard -- if you can set up a Paypal account to take donations you can just as easily set up one to take purchases. I recommend e-junkie, they'll automate the recordkeeping and license key delivery for $5 a month.
Here it is, all in one long (90 minute) video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
Best of luck with your new site! (By the way, it's = it is.)
To steal a line, dietary science is younger than it looks. Don't be surprised if decade spanning long held beliefs start collapsing.

Another good video. Stanford nutritionist and self-described vegetarian admits benefits of low carb diets: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eREuZEdMAVo
"I will not dial someone at random and conference them in to the building’s intercom system." LOL

Thanks for the laughs. Congratulations on being irreplaceable enough to be able to build such a list. From the sound of things, the list will grow, too.
You won't make any money that way. I know a guy who does that - he makes $300 a year. By charging for less useful stuff, I make more than $300 a day.

Just add some small feature like adding todo by email and make a pro version and charge $5. The people who love your app will glady support you. When you spend more than 2 weeks on a feature, put it in the 'pro' package. Take a look at how todoist.com is doing it.
Problem with such design is that when it does not work, it's very hard to figure out why. Douglas Adams comes to mind.
My first impulse was "must be fake" so had to go find some more: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/04/photogalleri... WOW!!!
If someone legally authorized to translate a book doesn't have the right to translate the book, then something is horribly wrong with copyright.
I'd prefer a written overview of the ideas rather than sitting through an hour lecture. The first ten minutes really didn't offer a lot of detail.