skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No but its just one of the pesky things that shouldn't be. Most people are typing things on word that are formal or formal-like. Meaning, they want TNR font, pt 12, and perhaps 1 inch margins double spaced. Of course, Microsoft wouldn't know that because rather than listening to users they're trying to buy yahoo to expand their horizons.

I'm not really trying to criticize microsoft, I just felt that I should point out that Microsoft seems to be overreaching in terms of the things its trying to do and pushing "ahead" when many aren't really ready or willing to deal with the changes they make. Are they listening to their customers anymore or are they simply assuming that people will use their stuff because thats all they know to use?

Seems to me its the latter, and that they're going ahead to be a jack-of-all-trades instead of doing what they do well.
Sometimes I think advertisers overpay because of publishers and fraudulent clicking.
"Massively undervalues" is a way of Yahoo saying "We think our share price should be higher than A: what it is, and B: what you're offering."

Yahoo is undoubtedly going through a rough time in terms of their share price, but what's being forgotten is past performance. Since the beginning of 2007 Yahoo's share price has averaged around $25 or so, with a low of $22.73 and a high of $33.63. The pre-bid low this year was $19.05, and was probably due to the fact that the majority of the industry was taking a beating, along with the rest of the economy.

When companies offer takeovers, they usually pay a premium in share price, however Microsoft took advantage of the state of the economy by offering a takeover at a particularly low point in share price, allowing them to offer an artificial premium that was - when compared to YHOO average share price - at only a $5 premium, or 20%.
That makes sense. I think you're better off using copyrights than patents. No application process, and typical friendlier court procedures.

With a patent, you need to prove in court that your idea was novel.

With copyrights, you just need to prove that you wrote your code first.
PLT Scheme: Implementing a web-server featuring continuations in a few lines
Microsoft’s $80 billion (and growing) Yahoo Headache
You misunderstand Microsoft. They listen to their customers probably more than any other software company I know. Unfortunately, they have way more customers than any other software company I know. Hence the feature creep. They'll pretty much add anything people ask for (especially if people = big companies paying $75/Office seat). The definition of "what they do well" is Office, and in particular the fact that it's a jack of all trades, and a master of most.

As for the default font, I believe it's actually Calibri, which is a great sans serif font. Personal preference will dictate whether it's appropriate for your uses, but that's why it's a dropdown menu and not a hardcoded value. If I had to guess why they left Times New Roman, I would guess because based on their collected statistics more people use sans serif fonts, or maybe just that it's more readable. Also, TNR is pretty ugly.
It works in Google Reader!

Thanks!
No Matter Where You Went, Your Education Wasn’t the Best
Essential Python Reading List
This looks rather familiar
I've been doing a couple side projects in Io over the last few months. It really is a beautiful language. Honestly, it reminds me of what would be the love child of Lisp and Ecmascript.

What really struck me was when I realized that I could get it to do Ruby style hash and array literals, from completely within the language. Really cool stuff.

Also, doing a Markaby clone was remarkably (hah) easy.

Oh, and the Regex library is rather nice.
I think no matter how hard Microsoft tries to beat Google at their game, it's not going to happen. Google has held the upper hand since day one. It's obvious they know the pressure points to their own company and they sure know what to do when someone thinks about beating them at their own game.

Microsoft is making the mistake of trying to beat giants in one market when they are already a giant in their own. I'm not sure how Microsoft wants to play, but I am certain this isn't going to turn out like a David vs. Goliath.
You don't have to be the #1 player in a market to make tons of money from it. If Microsoft's advertising wing made a tenth of what Google makes, they'd be pretty happy.
If $29 per share massively undervalues Yahoo, wouldn't Yahoo have spent the last two years buying back huge amounts of its own stock?
Yay, I believe the narrative on that one was poor. It lacks some details and makes you ask yourself lots of questions that are not actually part of the enigma.

xkcd has the same enigma, with a better wording (with no ambiguities): http://xkcd.com/blue_eyes.html
Requires cash :(
Getting a .ca in Canada is very easy and pain free (I buy them all the time). This post is inaccurate, at best. There is no bureaucracy involved in the process, unless you consider receiving an email to legitimize your registration a bureaucratic process. In fact, it's not different from any other registration method where you have to verify who you are, surprisingly, via email.

And the "Domain Registry of Canada" letters are a scam; it's painfully obvious that they are. BTW, the emails you get from the lawyers of dead generals in Africa are also a scam.
Network TV is in the process of being killed by vertical entertainment as both cable TV and online video make gains in quality. If Yahoo! beat Google in the vertical search market, it could certainly change the outlook for the embroiled company.
Really? Enough to be worthwhile?
I don't know how this article made it up so high, but Google didn't beat AltaVista, it was gone long before that. Inktomi, which powered Yahoo! and HotBot's search for quite some time, displaced AltaVista primarily because it distributed searches across a network for faster results. Google, of course, displaced Inktomi with an entirely different algorithm.
CSS3: Hide an image in html
Also sonar is a lot better choice for this application.
Steve Yegge on Rhino on Rails (video)
Real Time RNA
Yes, I get those errors too.

The first error that shows up after executing 'make' is:

In file included from source/simd_cph/include/simd_cp_x86.h:47,
from source/simd_cph/include/simd_cp.h:115,
from source/UArray_math.c:13:
/usr/lib/gcc/i486-linux-gnu/4.1.2/include/xmmintrin.h:34:3: error: #error "SSE instruction set not enabled"

I'll ask in #io - perhaps they'll know what to do.
The best scams usually are--BBC television licensing comes to mind.
"Add comment" page does not use the custom color.

Also, having the Y icon match the custom color would be great.
American voters must be insane
FUD.
More Greenspun hyperbole:

"Google unseated Yahoo at a cost of about $20 million in financing"

That completely ignores major things such as, oh I don't know, the Google Pagerank patent. It isn't like Google just won on simple UI; if their search hadn't worked way better than anything else, they never would have taken off.
Some solutions to project euler in Lisp
Bloglines now shows the link twice, one from <comments> and one from <description>.
Me too, I think by now Yahoo search is about as good as Google, for some things even a lot better. It's their ads that are much worse.

Google docs is a gamble that may or may not pay off, but it's not making them any (significant) money.

Yahoo does feel very unfocused. That's probably a bad sign.
I think they just have it pointed at the server.
Argh. Can anyone tell me a format that will work on all readers? Is the answer to ditch the comments field?
For now, there are any number of advantages to desktop apps. Ten years from now, everything is going to be in the cloud.
Yeah you're right...that makes sense. But how would they collect statistics on whether people use sans serif fonts more? Because at a glance, it seems serif is used more. Students, teachers, professors and professional people who use office need formality, thus serif seems to be the obvious answer...

At any rate, yeah I guess it makes sense to me now. I still maintain that I feel like I'm drowning in the new interface for office though. Thanks for the insight.
I bought an EEE PC and its a wonderful first computer for my 5-year old son. I also use it sometimes and its great for travelling. yes there are issues with the small screen size, but generally I'm happy with it. For the price its a great machine. I also have a MacBook Air which is fantastic as it is light and has a large screen but obviously the cost is 10x that of the eee pc
Alright, I asked for help in #io, and it looks like there was some known problem with SIMD due to a recent patch.

In order to fix it for now, go to libs/basekit/source/UArray_math.c, and comment out the line:

#define IO_USE_SIMD 1

That should do the trick.
maybe the market was accurately valuing Google, though? of all the startups out there, how many deliver on a Google scale?
Objective-C?
I thought webkit was Qt/C++ like everything Kde!
WebKit proper is Objective-C. WebCore and JavaScriptCore (which sit below WebKit) are both C++ (technically portions are Objective-C++ I guess).
Seriously, the author says there are 2 "plausible" arguments. Obviously, he got it wrong the first time and won't let it go!
An Open Letter to Steve Ballmer
I'm surprised at home many times I actually RTFM and are amazed by functionality that I didn't think was there. It's tempting once I get the core of a language or technology under control (especially when in a rush to deliver a working application) to cut some corners and just lookup exactly what I need (and miss out on all the things I didn't know I needed).
Perhaps a private equity firm would have stepped in if this was really the case. And if Yahoo knows something its shareholders don't (as to why it is massively undervalued) it better speak up soon.
If Yahoo! does reject the offer, their stock price should, were the market completely rational, fall a lot. Back to what it was before Microsoft made the offer in the first place.

Yahoo's the same company it was two weeks ago; the stock was just worth more since MS was offering a premium.
I've been sitting here learning rails with the highly appraised book 'agile web development with rails (v2)', and I often just don't find the information dense enough, or specific enough. Lately I've just been reading RDoc, or the code directly. I've actually found that to be more effective.
What an awful article. It sounds like it was written by a 12 year old: "It's even hard to trust trusted sites is not safe any more." Huh?
Fine, they all decided to watch tv instead, since they logically know thinking could get them killed.
Well, the problem is fundamentally that the people should've been playing the game before anyone said anything, so there's some confusion as to why the game only starts when the guru mentions a fact that's already self-evident.

That's a problem in both the grandparent link and xkcd's story.
You don't think the guru provides more information? I don't follow.
Too bad the cookies don't make it across.

Yay for relative links, PG.
The math is wrong and ultimately not even related to the point. Why include it? I would've preferred a post consisted of the 3rd and 2nd to last paragraphs.
Value is in the eye of the shareholder ;)
That's exactly the interesting point here: the foreigner states something self-evident (there is someone who has blue eyes), and yet it will kill all blue-eyed people, who would otherwise have been fine. Without the foreigner, the inductive chain cannot start at n=1.
Opera has been far faster than Firefox (I believe) since inception. It remained my browser of choice until Firebug tipped me over: I gained much from being able to run hundreds of tabs simultaneously. I'm thrilled with the news.
I wouldn't count on it. Look how many of 1908's giants are still big today. A few, but most are dead and gone. This book talks about some of the reasons why:

http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/2/why-most-things-fai...
Not to mention you can use webapps from your wii console, iPhone, etc etc. You get multiple platform support pretty much free.
Sure it can. Take the 100 brown, 100 blue problem xkcd states. If they all kept their eyes closed and then starting today opened them, the end result would be what you claim the foreigner would've instigated: people remove themselves when they figure out their eye color, and after enough time passes, if a bunch of people are still there who you believe should be gone, you must be part of the cause of uncertainty.
I think the Asus did an amazing job entering the Ultra portable market with the Eee PC. It might not be the best Ultra portable but for the price its a great start. As the article mentioned, obviously there are some issues such as the screen and reliability. But those things can be taken care over time with revisions.

We have to remember, perfecting laptops is not very easy and it takes a few trials. First Apple laptops were horrible, both design and usability.

I think this is where linux could make a serious entrance for mainstream consumers. Offering a cheap laptop with ample of features and portability without sacrificing software. Eee + Ubuntu is a great as some of the users have noticed. I think they can perfect the Ubuntu/Eee combo and make it a killer offering.

Thoughts?
I need a downmod.
I need 10 downmods for you sir. But alas ycnews in it's infinite wisdom has denied me a down arrow.
Also, this problem isn't solved by induction. It's solved by recognizing the pattern. You don't need to establish the base case via the outside observer. All you need to know is that the day-based formula works for any number of islanders.

It'd be like proving x^2 - 1 = (x+1)(x-1) for all x by starting with 1 and walking up the integers... Which is to say, not a bad way to prove it, but not necessary when you can logic it out otherwise.
No.

Suppose there are only three people with blue eyes. A knows that B can see at least one blue-eyed person. And B knows that C can see at least one blue-eyed person. But A doesn't know that B knows that. A reasons: if I have brown eyes, B can only see one blue-eyed person, ie C. And if B can only see one blue-eyed person, he will reason "if I have brown eyes, C cannot see anybody with blue eyes". Thus, if I have brown eyes, B does not know whether C can see anybody with blue eyes.

Or when there are four blue-eyed people, A's reasoning will be: if I have brown eyes, then B will only be able to see two blue-eyed people. He will then reason according to the above case. So if I have brown eyes, B doesn't know that C knows that D can see at least one blue-eyed person.

By saying "I see a blue-eyed person", the foreigner removes this uncertainty.
Hmm. I'm getting too tired to think really clearly about this. I could be way off here, but

"B does not know whether C can see anybody with blue eyes." - that's not true. C can see A.

And for the four person case, the same is true. If there is more than one blue eyed person, everyone knows there's at least one blue-eyed, person, so no new information via the foreigner.

....

edit for the three person all blue eyes walk through, via the eyes of person A. Persons B and C have the same exact thoughts.:

Day 0) Everyone gains consciousness together. I look around and see two people with blue eyes. Either I have blue eyes or not blue eyes, and I'll know soon enough which based on how confused the others are.

Day 1) So everyone's still here. Great. They're confused too. Well, that's to be expected. B and C saw each others' blue eyes, but couldn't know whether or not their own matched, even if I were not blue eyed. Maybe they saw my blue eyes and needed even more time? Doesn't matter, tomorrow's D-day.

Day 2) Oh shoot. Everyone's still here. If I were not blue eyed, these guys would've noticed yesterday that something was up and figured out that they individually had blue eyes. I guess that means I confused them an extra day, so I have blue eyes, too.

Day 3) [silence]

Also note: the game not only progresses without the outsider, but it relies on the fact more than one person shares an eye color.
Yep - another confirm - comment linked working in google reader now - thanks!
OK. I doubt that Microsoft and Yahoo will be around in 2108. It seems inconceivable that Google could fall though, especially if Google.org's energy research pays off.
Earth, the planets, the sun, other stars..[gif]
Affiliate marketing – Commission models
You don't have to be top to be profitable but there are disproportionate rewards from being top.
Here's the paper:

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-8282(199805)88%3A2%3C62%3ASASMAT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-8

Unfortunately it's not free. The stats cited in the book are that only 20% of the top 100 from 1915 were still there in 1995. Think about the technology landscape 100 years ago, and how much it's changed. I think there's every chance that Google will either not be around, or be radically smaller or different than it is now. It could be even larger, too. It's simply not possible to know. What is evident though, is that with time, companies grow and die.

Bonus fact - this is one of the oldest companies in the world:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zildjian
Likewise, if Ballmer steadily sold Microsoft shares then they'd be worth almost nothing by the time he finished.

1 million * $1 share != $1 million
I also see them twice, but it doesn't bother me. Just leave it as it is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers#KHTML_and_...
Another example is www.alltheweb.com. They were very good, but I switched to Google because it was easier to type :-) If they had a more catchy name and better PR they could have been in the position that Google is now.
While, as a devout Ocamlist, I don't much like Python, Git's code is indeed a Torvalds-style mess with an unholy mixture of C, shell scripts and even bits of Perl. Now it certainly has innovative concepts but writing a complex app like this in C is not a good idea. A HLL would have been safer, and for performance-critical parts, you can still use C, as in Mercurial. Actually, Mercurial's code is rather clean, a bunch of Python files, plus two C stubs. Also, Git doesn't, understandably, work well under Windows. I would consider this an advantage but my bosses insist on shipping Windows software for some strange reason.
I'm already really FED UP and annoyed with the content of Hacker News and length of the RSS feed
Please create categories (with separate RSS feeds) Mr. Graham or force your moderators to delete off-topic content.
good point but in how many real world situations is this going to be an issue? for situations like measuring distance to a car while parking, a camera works well.
Virtual worlds Management, Industry forecast 2008
Ad-spending usually plunges when economic growth slows. Will it be any different this time?
"B does not know whether C can see anybody with blue eyes." - that's not true. C can see A.

Yes. But what you quoted was part of A's reasoning. A doesn't know that he has blue eyes. If he doesn't, then C can only see B with blue eyes. And if C can only see B, then B doesn't know if C can see anyone. So A doesn't know whether B knows C can see a blue-eyed person (implying A has blue eyes) or not (implying he doesn't).

It's not about what people know directly. It's about what people know about other people's knowledge. In the three-person case, I know that there is at least one blue person. I know that everyone knows it. But I don't know that everyone knows that everyone knows it.

If K(0) is "I know there is at least one blue-eyed person", and K(n) is "I know that everyone knows K(n-1)", then (assuming I have blue eyes), K(0) is false only if I am the only blue-eyed person. K(1) is false if there are one or two of us. In general, K(n) is false if there are n+1 or fewer people with blue eyes. The foreigner makes K(n) true for all n.
This was a terrific interview; I listened to the whole thing. Thanks for posting it. Joel has such a lively manner: I wonder if there are other recordings of him?
Microsoft has decided to buy another Microsoft instead of making a Google.
A good education is a more personal and independent experience than the article seems to imply. Rarely are the words or presentation of lectures the most valuable thing a school produces; most importantly, education often involves joining a learning community (or synthesizing one's own). This is not trivial: examples on the internet so far produced remain unusual. The video lecture is usually quite awkward: I hazard that it will always remain a limited form, unable to really support much attention or community.
If you want to learn, care.

Otherwise, whatever.

That's my school experience anyway. I think if you are passionate about a language the simple fact that you care about it will mean that you want to know everything about it that you can. If you're just trying to get the job done quickly, use a cheat sheet or whatever. Only the former attitude will make you a better programmer.
Vedic Mathematics
Husband of a friend works in management over at Yahoo. She says the word is around the water cooler, that Yahoo's looking for around $36 a share, and then will sell.

Sounds like morale is pretty low, and sound like there's going to be a lot of engineers looking for new jobs soon. Or, a lot more startups rising for Yahoo's ashes.
Day 2) Everyone's still here. If I were not blue eyed, these two guys would've noticed yesterday that they individually had blue eyes ... no they wouldn't have, because for each of them would be also reasonable to assume that there was only one person with blue eyes, who survived day 0 not knowing that there is anyone blue eyed at all.
Ship's Anchor Cut Internet Cable in Mideast
It's Raining Energy. Hallelujah
not really a good example. goog queries can be equally as pedantic as dead trees. i look up solutions and nowaday it's mostly blog entries but they provide greater insight than an author can with the dry subject of coding.

this isn't like punching in numbers into a calculator and not knowing what those + - * / symbols do. grepping information can be from so many references. i mean.. i don't throw out butterflies and hope their wing movement effect the disk write on my computer, i just want to make a program work.
I've had the same experience with certain books. That suggests to me you might want to try a new book. Of course, different books have different slants. Books designed as introductions for someone entirely new to the subject or as quick references are not going to be as mind-expanding as books designed for the intermediate or advanced reader.

So far, I have found "The Rails Way" quite good when I've used it as a reference, if that is any help to you.
unless it's harvard http://rccse.whu.edu.cn/college/sjdxkyjzl.htm. then you win. or something.
so javascript is becoming probably the most portable language ever!
* Browsers (all of them!)
* Java VM
* .Net
* Windows scripting
* infopath
* Ajax
* Rails

Interesting! Learning javascript nowadays is definitely a good time investment.

I still wonder if the google ppl ever checked helma http://dev.helma.org/
Laid-Off Ford Employee Decides To Start Own Car Company
Introduction to GUI Programming with Python and Qt