skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lady Gaga is such a uniquely positioned figure in music, and you have to give her all the credit for that. What she has been able to do with her image would be a remarkable accomplishment for a career of effort; to do the same in such a short span of time with really just one album (counting The Fame Monster as part of The Fame) is goddamn ridiculous. Hell, just look at her Google trending: http://www.google.com/trends?q=lady+gaga

She just really is that different from anyone we've seen before, so much so that she's remarkably undefinable-- an extremely difficult quality to obtain, convince, and especially to exude, yet she made it look more than effortless. She made it look natural.

To attempt to sort through her persona, list and categorize everything about her, and draw a concrete explanation for how exactly she did it seems...strangely pointless. You just get the feeling your chosen descriptors would always be slightly off the mark, that the right words would always be on the tip of your tongue but never appear, that you'd always be missing something about her.

So I'll just end like this: Maybe you're not the hugest fan of Gaga or her genre, maybe you think her lyrics are too severely lacking in depth to take her music seriously, maybe you don't find her to be all that noteworthy, maybe you even think she's just a passing fad and don't understand what all the hype is about. I couldn't completely dismiss any one of those sentiments. But let me ask you this: the last time you heard one of her songs the whole way through...was your foot tapping? That's what all the hype is about. That's why she can go anywhere she wants with this.
> However, the Royal Navy argued that its officers could be trusted and: "It would be invidious to suggest... that senior Service officers may, in difficult circumstances, act in defiance of their clear orders."

Even by the standards of a world gone mad, these people are #@!%ing lunatics.
Moving your neck around constantly. I've had recommended by multiple ergonomics specialist and a chiropractor to only use as much display as I can see without having to move my head to see it.

It's not that moving your neck is bad, it's that constantly moving it around all day causes unnatural stress. Much like you can give yourself RSI from bad posture when using an input device.
I think they do it by adding a div right under the selected text.
In such a situation your choices are either: buckle and become a cog; do it anyway and ask for forgiveness later, if anyone notices (good luck); get the eff out as fast as you can.
Hold on, there's plenty of evidence for a link between smoking and cancer. They looked at lots of people over time and the ones that smoked got more cancer. They didn't have to force cigarettes onto anyone.

I'm sure similar data has been assembled for vaccines and autism to show a lack of correlation. They've not just handwaved it away.
I know it is - I have it installed on my Macs. Unfortunately, it's slow, cumbersome and can't do a lot of stuff apt or yum can rather easily. I tried Fink before, but it's not the same. And you are not package managing the OS, but a "shadow" of it in a different file tree.

It's a kludge.
I actually got a week's worth of PTO after a little crunch time (a month or so) at the last startup I worked for. However, I don't believe they still exist in any substantial form anymore (and couldn't in good faith recommend them anyways, for reasons I don't believe I should go into).
The key difference between the employment relationship and other mutually agreed contracts is simple: high switching costs that are mostly asymmetrical. Losing your job is extremely disruptive to an work, much more so than losing an employee is to a corporation[1]. Because of this, the labor market is in a constant monospony situation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony

This is unlike, say, the market for going out to eat at a restaurant. There are very low switching costs for customers with regards to restaurants (and vice versa), so the market is efficient.

[1] Of course in some situations the opposite applies: highly skilled workers are very costly for a corporation to replace and generally have no trouble finding other work. So their bargaining position is excellent and they tend to get market wages. For example, programmers.
I would not hold my breath.
"Real life" in the sense of "someone's half-baked and faked-up design concept", I'm afraid.
EFF Panopticlick reveals your browser's perhaps surprisingly traceable footprint
You could jailbreak it and run X and Gnome on top of the iPhone OS ;-)
Gets pretty interesting if you Firebug that select box and ramp the points to 50 or so...

EDIT: 100 points and some futzing created so much feedback I ended up with a little cyclone going for a while.

EDIT: pic -> http://i.imgur.com/qhsDnl.jpg
Actually 00000000, according to Bruce Blair's first-hand account. He has been one of the go-to authors on nuclear weapons control issues for many years. (Received a MacArthur Prize for it, in fact.)

See http://www.cdi.org/blair/permissive-action-links.cfm.
No. That is not the only thing he did wrong.

The issue was that along with...

- calling the entire industry scum to pull in attention

- going out of his way to flam Squidoo as a spam site until he got them penalized

- creating something far spammier and far more automated than Squidoo

When you add it all together it is pretty bad.
Copy & paste some text from this article. Notice anything funny?

No?

(Thanks, http://www.ghostery.com/ !)
Didn't claim the PDF was shady...claimed that lying about being ignorant about SEO while selling SEO services was shady.

Big difference.
If you're interested in building consumer products, using popular consumer products like Twitter is a must. It's just sort of expected that you have this background when you go talk to other consumer internet people. Plus your products will be better if you're inspired by all the other interesting things other people are already building.
Does it matter?

If we can prevent children from having a potentially dangerous disease with an intervention that is both inexpensive and safer than the disease itself, why wouldn't we? It's much less expensive on a personal and societal level to use vaccines.
Ouchie! My particular combination of installed fonts and plugins makes my browser unique among all 250,000 browsers tested there so far.
Introduction to Object-Oriented JavaScript
The latter proposal is just punting on the problem of what math to teach when. You're going to teach some subset of math first. You might disagree with the particular ordering that is mainstream now, but calling it 'year 1' and 'year 2' just begs the question. Yes, focus on problem solving is good. Yes, these problems are dumb. But people still are going to learn what a cosine is sooner or later, and you have to decide when, and you're probably going to put in the course description that yeah, you learn what a cosine is this year.
> What am I missing about labor laws?

There are more employees than employers. Thus, the vast majority of people are unsympathetic to the hard decisions that employers make - many people have direct experience under a boss who is a jerk, very few have been forced to make the extremely difficult and taxing decisions employers are forced to make, where the buck stops with you and the rock and hard place calls are all yours.
"Databases, web services, html code, javascript, business analysts, testing frameworks." yeah I never have to deal with any of those in Django....

I know what you're trying to say, but saying things like "Rails/Django" lack SAML is silly. It would be fairly easy to implement if needed, it's just not needed by the majority of us.

I've worked most of my career building web applications and while it isn't magic and does still take time, it doesn't take more time than I would expect usually. If it's taking 80-120 hours to put a simple app in production either you have a bad team or some seriously bad processes.
Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark: HBase, Cassandra, and Sherpa
man, this is a cpu killer...
Next up: If a session of Congress was like a print ad.

Seriously, what's the idea here? That a speech and a national government are, gee whiz, just a little different from a meeting and a corporation?
How A Self-Promoting Blogger Makes $1.3mil A Year & Still Gets No Respect[video]
How about Google release a benign virus that would install FF and make it a default browser... and release the virus on Google.com homepage.
Same. What was the widget? Been thinking of hiring someone to do some board layout work to build these.
Here:

http://haitirewired.wired.com/group/constructionbooklet
This is a question of perception. Faced with something that doesn't make sense, a geek will see it as a challenge, a puzzle, a worthy adversary. Geeks love challenges.

A lot of people don't. I have many people who have me on speed dial for when they feel like tossing their laptops out the window. It's for these people that the iPad is designed.

All of this "death of tinkering" shows me that none of you guys actually take the time to understand people other than yourselves, and this whole movement speaks to just how self centered the whole geek tribe is.

It disturbs me.
I believe that Jason's original plan was to have a true search engine with quality human written pages that people would want to use as their homepage instead of google. However this plan was not successful and Jason has realised the opportunity to drive huge amounts of traffic to Maholo from Google. This means that ranking in google for hundreds of thousands of keywords comes first and the quality of content on the pages comes second. It's obvious by the number of ads on the pages that they don't care about the user experience. They know that if people don't find what they were searching for they will click on an ad when leaving.
> And the type of person who spent a month's wages to tinker with a computer in the 1980s is not going to buy an iPad as their only computer today.

So, the only people that bought an Apple IIe were tinkerers already? What about the example of the father that bought it for the word processor? Is that example entirely unreasonable or blatantly false?

What about the Commodore 64?
hmmm, having a chinese plugin for taobao really marks my browser.... I wonder if there's a way to tell to safari not to return the list of plugins? But then I guess it would break a few pages...
Did China Try to Hack my Site?
The same pictures and general story, though from a different site, has been submitted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1015326 I think think they just stole his pictures.

That claim is reinforced by their lack of understanding of the point. It doesn't save pens, unless you write in an exact computer font, which you don't.

Writing words in the font with pens was a way to measure (based on how much ink was left in the pen at the end) how much ink the font used. It will save computer ink, though. Not pens.
In your opinion, which functionality do you think we lost in making it into an enclosed house (shed)? The shingles are a little gimmicky, but the roofs are for a real purpose (sound dampening). Not trying to challenge, just genuinely curious.
"But I always prefer a def and a map to a for loop."

For those I either go with a list comprehension or a generator expression.
I haven't really programmed the iPhone yet, so I am not sure. However, I must admit there might be one way out: there is a JavaScript interpreter on the iPhone. I guess if you made a simple form and had it's contents be evaluated by JavaScript at the press of a button, Apple would OK it (not certain, though). Unfortunately JavaScript is quite restricted on the iPhone, too (I've heard it just gets killed if it runs too long, too long being on the order of seconds).

Not sure what Apple would say if you wrote an interpreter for something else than JavaScript in JavaScript...
Doesn't seem to make much fuss under Chrome/Linux. Of course, per a past thread Chrome's Canvas is way faster than other browsers': http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1084456

A very cool effect in any case.
Why the hell do you think i want one so badly?
Ditto. I posted this mostly because I was suprised the comparison hasn't come up more in discussion, so I figured maybe not as many people were familiar with it as I assumed. Discussion of the various benefits and short-comings aside, I am so ready to pretend like I'm on the bridge of the Enterprise...
My point was that, given the choice between a swamp and a nearby and deep ball pit in the middle of a parking lot, the swamp would be a much better option given the low probability that one could actually hit the ball pit -- an argument not made in the article.
Well they already released Chrome Frame, which turns MSIE into Chrome: http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/
Check again - I see a comment by you on the first one.
So... The FactorialCommand one was the good Java programmer?
Why are we talking about the Apple IIe? I'm sure a lot more people that learned to code and about the guts of the machine in the 80's did so on Speccies (£180 in 1984), C64s ($595 in 82) or Amigas ($699 in 1987) than on Apples/IBMs.

I was bought a Spectrum as a child (and saved up christmas money for an Amiga). My parents weren't at all technical. I learnt a bit of BASIC but not much (I didn't have the patience to program much), but I did get a decent understanding of what went on inside. So I was happy to build my own computers.
Wow, that's pretty bad. And this whole time I thought IE6's non-standards compliance mostly had to do with the broken box model and quirks mode...
Does anyone have a link to the actual algorithms?
Sounds like a cache at work. I know for a fact that WP's caching does not do anything intelligent to determine if it is invalid. Post a comment, and code is run to invalidate the cache. But delete a comment from the database, and it will just be served from cache.
Tail call optimization primarily optimizes memory, not time. It will reduce time costs, too(assuming calls are more expensive than jumps, which would probably be true in any architecture), but the memory used is the main issue.
And suddenly the sum-total of intelligence on the Internet increases.

Next stop: Digg and Reddit.
Nah, I'll blame IE when my site works in every other browser besides IE. IE doesn't follow standards. IE8 doesn't follow standards. Any argument you make about it being my fault is going to be wrong because IE just doesn't follow standards. And "optional" languages provide a(n) UI. You may prefer to not build those into your sites, but most of the development world would disagree with you.
I'd like to see a real-word implementation of a sonic screwdriver: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_screwdriver
Picky, but the Altair did have a single chip CPU (the 8080).
What would be really cool:

1) We find out these flashes are all over the place
2) We put a ton of batteries in space powered by these flashes and send them to earth
3) Number two is cost efficient
Thanks for reminding me that I need to use Privoxy.
Ask HN: If the iPad succeeds, what will this do to business applications?
A few years back I suggested (with tongue in cheek) that rich web applications like Google Mail were educating users about how helpful and useful computers can be, which in turn would put social pressure on business application development to keep up.

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/09/we-have-lost-control-of-apparatus.html

Now I wonder: If the iPad is as much of a success as the iPhone, what will this do to business applications. Does it raise the bar for user interfaces?
Thanks for that. :-)

I also feel that Mahalo falls into that category and I don't understand what the problem is with us explaining the SEO value of our Q&A/knowledge platform.

It's excellent at white-hat SEO, just like Yahoo Answers and Wikipedia are.
More: http://s3.amazonaws.com/drawohara.com.html/jquery-onload-bug...
California wants to register Apollo 11 space junk as historical
Hah. Yeah. It definitely pre-disposed me to liking the concept.
Although not directly related, I found this to be an interesting read (I believe it was posted here a few days ago as well): http://reason.com/archives/2006/03/01/why-poor-countries-are...

It would seem to me that focusing on only one aspect of the hardships suffered by a people is like you said, going to give rise to many unintended consequences. Granted "improving infrastructure" isn't quite as sexy as "providing vaccines", it would probably make more sense to focus on a holistic approach than an isolated problem.
A good point. Amateur developers can't afford multiple devices to test on (Android), but they also can't afford to be rejected indefinitely (Apple). So really, there is no good platform for developing mobile games on.
Correct!

We make great content and tools for companies and they happen to be excellent at SEO.

I love SEO and Aaron is just going insane because he thinks I am a better SEO than he is.

Now, I don't think I'm better at SEO than Aaron.. in fact, most of what I've learned is from reading his blog and GREY Wolf's!

So, I don't understand why he is so full of venom for me when I always give him credit as a great inspiration for me!
I want to discuss the nature of benchmarks, not which line of Java to change to make one program run one second faster.
No,

It's worst standing but I believe a Gorilla arm "effect" results from any devices which forces the user to do extended input without physical support for his/her arms.

Just see how long you can sit at a chair with your hands in the standard keyboarding position but without the keyboard.

The iPad looks just big enough that any serious input going to require repeated arm-raising whereas the iphone/ipod-touch is small enough you can use it with your hands always resting on a table.
Capable is a tricky word, without a user who can use it the computer is capable of nothing.
I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with. To the extent that the iPad makes computing more accessible to more people, that's a good thing. The problem is with the entirely separate issue of Apple actively putting roadblocks in the way of those of us who would like to customize it.
Perhaps I'm biased. Unfortunately, people who purchase an iPhone may also be biased by post-purchase rationalization. I actually have used touch-screen keyboards, especially the iPhone's, many times. I'm not saying it's the worst experience ever. It's far better than typing on a number pad with T9 or another predictive algorithm. With time it would certainly be doable, maybe even unnoticeable to the user. Still, it is far worse than even the worst tactile qwerty phone keyboard.
exactly!

Aaron Wall can keep attacking me for a throw away comment from five years ago (five years!) and ignore the fact that I'm a fan of his as much as he wants.... but I'm not going to get baited into agree with what I said five years ago.

I was wrong about white SEO, I was right about black-hat SEO.

Aaron is sort of obsessed with me as you can see:
http://www.google.com/search?&q=calacanis+site:seobook.c...

I've given him credit for teaching me the Jedi ways of SEO and for that I'm thankful. Don't be upset because you taught me how to do it well and in a white hat manner Aaron!
Same here, but mine was unique based only on HTTP_ACCEPT and user agent. Try hitting reload...
IE6 doesn't support HTML 4 properly and it especially doesn't support CSS 2.1 properly. The effect is that whereas normally the cost to support a given browser is relatively low (especially more standards compliant browsers such as those based on webkit) the cost to support IE6 is very high, especially if you demand that the appearance on IE6 should be treated with equal importance as other browsers. The result is that even though IE6 usage is maybe 20% of internet users as a whole (and perhaps less on a given website), supporting those users is vastly more expensive than supporting other users.
Nice. I played with a similar thing years ago: rigid bodies connected with various constraints. The simple solving for the acceleration of the point masses under the forces from the connections that this computation seems to do works fine as long as the cloth is elastic. If you try to compute the dynamics of points connected by rigid rods, the large forces makes the system really stiff and your integration time step drops precipitously. In that case you have to generate a large linear system of equations and solve for the global motion of the system. It's quite a bit trickier. It's also interesting how situations that are familiar from real life, like a drawer getting stuck diagonally in the slot, really are singularities in the equations.

I realized this was actually an area of research, and found a bunch of papers by this guy: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~baraff/pbm/pbm.html
> If it was an open platform, it would most likely have been of lower quality, not as ground-breaking

The issue isn't that the platform is open/closed. Open or closed is a binary decision that Apple made that was entirely separate from their user interface decisions.

It just happens that most of the development money is behind closed products.

NOTE Before anyone on here says anything more about how much better/worse open systems are vs closed systems when it comes to user interface and integration, think about these points:

* Do you feel that at any point during the development of the iPhone or iPad, Apple's designers would have been restricted had the platform been open? (By designers I mean user interface designers; please don't give me some smug, "they couldn't have incorporated a close-source library," answer)

* Do you feel that if Apple were to release the source code to the iPhoneOS tomorrow that the usability of all iPhones would immediately suffer and there would be mass panic as people were not able to continue using their iPhones?

* Is there any real reason that Apple couldn't have a 'devmode' switch that voids your warranty, but allows you to run whatever you want on it? Note: I'm not talking about jailbreaking. I'm talking about an official switch that flips the only-run-signed-binaries bit off, but at the sacrifice of Apple supporting your further actions.

Apple is all about control. One example, is when they removed the built-in ability to theme the operating system (in OS9) when building OSX. I remember that the justification back then was the Steve Jobs wanted every Mac that was running OSX to have the same interface so that: (1) it would be highly recognizable and (2) people wouldn't have to worry about differences between different setups.

What gets my goat about this is that they were selling computers to the masses. They weren't setting up some sort of corporate infrastructure or university computer lab where all the computers must be the same. What if I want my computer to be different than someone else's? What if I don't care about whether or not someone else can sit down and use my computer? What if X modification makes me more productive? I feel like if I were an Apple employee and voiced such concerns at a planning meeting I would be looking at a pink slip, the way that Steve Jobs runs his boat.

I guess the point of all this is that I see a lot of the electronics industry going the way of 'dumbing down for the masses,' but not just specific products... EVERYTHING. Just look at what happened with TechTV/G4TV, now it's no longer about tech, or even gaming. It's just a SpikeTV, "Let's watch some wrestling" network. The same with SyFy. I feel like this is the start of a 'race to the bottom' in the industry.
We are well within Google's guidelines.

We are noindexing the pages that have short content and are older than 30 days. If they are less than 30 days old and get more than 50 views we build them out.

That's just a smart strategy, and there is nothing black hat of it.

Also, 90% of our traffic comes from Q&A, walkthroughs and howto articles that are REALLY DEEP in terms of content.
Sure, some idealized, hypothetical Linux device could be better than an iPad or iPod or iPhone.

Am I willing to bet money that we'll actually see one that anyone but an open source partisan will consider better?

No, not a dime.