skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I no longer store music locally on my computer; instead, Grooveshark runs 24/7. They have made my life much easier.

I wish they put up a "legal donations fund" so I could contribute.
It's a different intent entirely. Halloway's is purely meant as an introductory piece, this book is more targeted at giving you a deeper understanding of clojure and why you should do things in specific ways.

I'd think of them as companions to each other, and both likely worth getting (I've read 2 of the 4 available chapters and found them very good).
"My team at Google also plans to continue work on [the analyzer] on a part-time basis, as it's an important part of a larger project we're doing in this space."

Interesting... I wonder what Unladen Swallow or App Engine could do with type inference and static analysis?
It would be a small matter of programming to add a function to Slime that, upon typing a symbol presents a list of every function that's reasonably likely to apply to it. I think the reason I haven't seen it is that it represents a very noun-oriented way of thinking about programming. Lispers are less likely to program that way than say Java programmers, where the language enforces the style.
Actually, as far as well-specced cookie-cutter stuff, I would say outsourcing/consultants tend to do a good job if they're managed properly.

Where they fail (overrun budget and time) is for more complex stuff. Software complexity requires exponentially better programmers to cope with it. Each time you're building a complex piece of software, it's like you're having to invent the burger again and explain it to a computer.

Couple that with the fact that each company will want their particular meal tailored very specifically to their tastes, so that there's little reuse of recipes possible, and it's obvious why a lot of projects fail when the burger flippers are asked to design a new burger.
A lot of people are similarly confused by my biking when I tell them I don't have a car, and that I decided to use the money for down payment on a house instead. Typically they think I'm talking about living at the very edge of my income or something. They offer to help me figure out how to save better and get all pissy when I tell them I have enough cash saved up now to buy a new car, I just am waiting for one I like to come along.
A quick look at the site you mention gleans these words:

"SEOmoz surveys top SEO experts ...opinions of the algorithmic elements that comprise search engine rankings"

"Each participant was asked to rate more than 100 search ranking factors"

So it's not reliable, it's a survey.

It's not backed by evidence but by opinion.

And how can an SEO be called 'referenced'. I didn't realise SEO was a science.

The only true thing in your statement is up-to-date.

A better description would be that it's based on guess work by the men who are most known for snake oil and me-too mentality in the IT industry, SEO 'experts'.

Just playing devil's advocate but I don't really think that article is any more likely to be right than this guy's.
I don't have any nails, therefore all hammers are pointless.
I know all of that(and if I didn't...their design just screams facebook). Oh and I'm pretty sure they are self-funded.

But yeah I can see Quora being written about on it's own merits.

But to mention it on the same level as Wikipedia and Aardvark, like they are already being used by everyone...when the author himself hasn't used it...just seems odd.
You got additional invites if you donated.
I get a lot of "you're so brave to ride all the way to work!" (2 miles on back streets and one major road to cross. Aside from that road I'll maybe see 2 cars the whole trip).
Eclipse Duration Would Not Be Exceeded Until December 23, 3043
Actually they just stated what the prosecutor said, not that it's true.
Nice lists, I often recommend these for people who want an introduction to the field:

"Mathematical Statistics and Data Analysis" by John A. Rice

"All of Statistics: A Concise Course in Statistics" by Larry Wasserman

"Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning" by Christopher M. Bishop

"The Elements of Statistical Learning" by T. Hastie et al http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/

"Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms", David McKay http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itprnn/book.html

"Introduction to Information Retrieval" - Manning et al. http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/information-retrieval-book.h...

"The Algorithm Design Manual, 2nd Edition" - Steven Skiena http://www.algorist.com/
A chap on the train once asked me if I was looking for work when he noticed my Thinkpad had a GNU sticker on the lid.
Sapper, Stradivarius and Skylight (Design of the Lenovo Skylight "smartbook")
One example of downmodding that I've seen personally is that someone will post a reference of a link or a book that I had never heard about. When it is particularly valuable to me I like to respond thanking them for posting it. I don't expect karma from this, I simply want to convey my thanks to the person who provided the information and to encourage other people to do the same. I also upvote them, but I think the personal thanks is more valuable. I've had these "that you" comments downvoted consistently, to the point where I no longer thank people and ultimately delete the comment. I find this behavior strange in a "community".
Why do all those people think that the author is lying? Those are very plausible, I'd even say likely!
Clickable:

http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
A Short History of the Tablet Computer
Yes, this kind of payment withholding happens to immigrant workers almost always, and to native Chinese workers often.

That's not to mention the children and mentally handicapped that are literally sold into slavery. http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1635144,00.htm...
Obama: Patent office's system is 'embarrassing'
Ok so they use what's called packers to not only obfuscate the malware code to bypass signature based A/V but also hide inside other binaries or Dll's to further evade heuristic defenses. Then a reverse encrypted tunnel for control of infected machine was routed over normal HTTPS also undetectable by IDS. It was to dynamic dns domains such as yahoo1.dyndns.org. Reverse meaning it connects back to the attacker to allow ssh like access to the compromised host via the trojan.

There are all extremely advanced (but known) evasion steps for a very targeted attack. It's rare to see all of them successfully used in one attack because of the complexity and skill required.
The processes, not the patents it's granting, however.
I'd have read more if he could have done it without continually calling McDonald's workers idiots.

My wife worked at McD's in high school. She's now an attorney who graduated with honors.
Doesn't that actually encourage more mob voting, as only people who the majority vote up are allowed to vote up? It seems like it would be a self-reinforcing mechanism, with people who often take unpopular stances unable to participate in determining what comments and stories get the most votes?
Yeah I think they work differently in general. From my experience they do not benefit from iterative development the same way we do. They do but they iterate when solving the problem, usually on paper.

Yup, I've seen it too, from my experience. I was once writing some desktop engineering apps, to help mechanical engineers / designers do analysis on materials etc. They spend enormous amount of time doing iterations/studies on paper. It is worth it, because it usually saves lots of money and time down the road. They don't have the luxury that software developers have.
I think the reason music makes us emotional goes beyond language. I think music also taps into the Amygdala, which is the part of the brain that regulates fear. There are certain sounds in nature that are scary or ominous. Low sounds like the sound of thunder or the low bellow of a lion are scary sounds in nature because they come from dangerous things. Things that make you disappear. Being afraid of those sounds is an avoidance mechanism, I think. People who avoided the things that created those sounds survived, therefore natural selection must have played a role in why we find certain sounds scary...or happy or whatever. It's possible to mimick those natural sounds artificially through music. That's probably a a big reason why music is so emotional. Sound informs us about what to like and what to avoid in our environment. Music just kind of fools the brain.
I really like seeing the number of points next to comments. When I come to a discussion late, it's the best weapon I have to skim through lower replies to catch the "theme" of the discussion. It's especially important on nested replies that may be attached to a highly voted root comment.

If you decide to hide comment points, perhaps consider at least showing the points after you vote. I'm not sure if that would encourage voting, though, in a case where people would have skipped voting before. I know I would vote more often in that case.
Though it's in a bubble, Beijing's current median salary to median house price is 1:27. Normally anything over 1:4 is considered expensive. That analyst will have a hell of a time getting an apartment, nevermind the Ayi (aunt).

The Ayi doesn't have much beyond a subsistence living. Needless to say she's probably supported as well by her kids or something, but if not she's in a world of hurt when she's too old to work.

I do appreciate why it's used but slave wages is probably the wrong term, the Ayi is working in a market economy that simply has way too many completely unskilled workers for the work needing done.
Distributed Ruby with the MagLev VM
s/e/o/; # I fixed their domain name for them.
Yeah, it looks to me like pg is a lot more subtle than most of the techie-types who come here. He is not loud or brash or confrontational. He expects people to observe and figure things out, rather than being told explicitly. That goes against many people's expectations.

On the positive side, he is very responsive to people with problems who are sincere about working with him. Almost everybody who has ever been banned and made a good-faith effort to work with him has gotten unbanned. From what I've seen, this pretty much always happens via email. As others have mentioned, that's the go-to communication method for people with problems.
Good catch! Thanks for pointing that out. We're writing the entire book in a bastardized version of Markdown and Yak-shaving some bits to do so. Unfortunately little things like this still need to be ironed out.
In Praise of the Purple Cow
Add it to the list of 'questionably legal' things I do online.
There is a secure auth mode for SSL called TLS-SRP, RFC 5054. It is quite clean, deriving a session key and authenticating the session in the same number of round trips as a regular TLS handshake. It is secure against dictionary attacks.

http://srp.stanford.edu/whatisit.html

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5054.txt

Now, if only more browsers would support it.
He's talking about the receiving, printing, scanning, and management of patents being embarrassing.

He wants to speed up the process by which big business can cripple innovation.
I didn't mean mob in the sense of groupthink, but in the sense of a volatile, easily swayed mass. The situation I'm worried is the one where voters end up being like a crowd egging on two people who are fighting.
Agreed. I don't know why someone would attribute malice when laziness or verbosity is the probable explanation. The author knew about Quora and included it in a sentence.
With Computers: Don't Repeat Yourself. With People: Do Repeat Yourself
After working (in tech, not as an english teacher) and living in China for several years this is pretty much on the mark.

The deck is stacked against foreign companies. If they get large enough their business will be manipulated to fail in the favour of a home grown competitor. There is no effective rule of law and most foreign companies are seen as resources to strip and discard when their utility has ended.

(I had posted a more detailed comment along these lines in the Google thread here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1050829 )

China also has a looming demographic timebomb that will tear the country apart. This year was the peak of the working age percent of the workforce. From now on the ratio of working age adults will only decline (thanks to the single child policy). China isn't wealthy enough to support all those non-working people.

The world needs to start being more forceful with China. We don't want their model to succeed. Trust me, you don't want to live in that world.
One time, I took my laptop to a restaurant that my sister and I were meeting some of her friends at because I was curious about the restaurant's WiFi connectivity. My sister's friends in this story are film students. After exchanging pleasantries, as they were all talking, I took out the laptop and started kismet inside gnome-terminal.

My laptop happens to be a MacBook Pro, upon which I dual-booted OS X and Fedora, but mostly used Fedora.

One of my sister's friends leaned over and beheld that I was using Linux on my MBP -- they've tinkered with OSes a little bit so they know what Gnome looks like -- and proceeded to freak out. I was bombarded with questions like "Why would you use Linux when you have OS X?", "You could be using OS X right now! I understand why you'd use Linux if you had a PC but you have OS X!", "OS X is so much better and friendlier than Linux, and you can do so much more on it, why are you using Linux?", "Sure, a _developer_ can use it, I guess, but why would anyone else?", etc.

This discussion took over the night. All three of them now hate me because I chose to use Linux instead of OS X.
> Probably as many Somalis died as in Haiti (though not in one day) but we only have ourselves to blame, and each victim left a blood debt on his killer, which "must" be avenged (or it has been avenged, and now the victim's family are awaiting reprisals)

What are you talking about?
Scribd founder and his entrepreneur Dad
I ride in pretty heavy traffic but normally I feel very comfortable sharing the road with motorists (my city has very few bike lanes and for the most part they're non-continuous).

I follow the rules of the road (Ontario Highway Traffic Act) and best practices (e.g. Ontario's Guide to Safe Cycling). On multi-lane streets where passing vehicles are dangerous, I assertively lane-block.

Interestingly, I've noticed in the last month that driver hostility toward my presence on the road has increased dramatically. Almost every day I experience an act of driver aggression, from honking at me to passing too closely to deliberately cutting me off. I consider myself a seasoned cyclist but it's starting to get unnerving.
A little better:
echo -e '\E[32;40m'; cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc 'A-F0-9'
Almost always? That's a bit of an exaggeration though I don't doubt it does happen. Most Chinese workers do get paid, even the migrant workers. Indeed the laws protecting them are way better than laws in the US, though of course endemic corruption means laws are often ignored. You'd hear about the odd riot here and there where the builders didn't pay in a failed construction project but they'd have a tough time completing a project and not paying anyone. Certainly in any urban area.
Not when you manipulate your currency and throw aside human rights and environmental restrictions.

The playing field isn't level.
Thanks to liebke for posting this, and Bradford for writing it.

I have two points.

First, your point about programming is incredibly important. I've worked with people who had amazing insights about statistical problems, but went cross-eyed upon being asked about SVN and Git. This makes a CS homework assignment unpleasant, and a real world research project impossible.

Second, this really begs another post. It should be called "Learning how to read a textbook on your own." Successful self-learners don't just __read__ a textbook. They toil with it, try proving things on paper themselves, work through exercises, attempt to apply it to some real-world situation, and hunt down someone who's smarter than they are to explain something that seems unclear.

Not all textbooks - certainly not every one on your list - can be read with a great application in mind. A reader must interrogate mercilessly the book on analysis or the rigorous probability book mentioned in the post.

This seems intuitive to someone who can successfully learn on their own, but most people are not taught to do that. The difficulties of relicating a portion of the classroom learning experience is a major barrier to entry. This is why online intro lectures for programming, math, and certain CS topics like algorithms can steer a learner in the right direction. Stanford Engineering Everywhere and of course MIT's OCW, links to which have been posted on HN at least once a month, are great starts.
Would pushing highly turbulent comments further down in the thread accomplish some of what you're going for? In a large thread the arguments would fall to the bottom. I would probably rather read an 8 point comment with 10 ups and 2 downs than one with 110 ups and 102 downs.
"Fill your newspaper with news from around the world, about the news topics you care about."

Using somebody's else copyrighted content and then charging for the newspaper? Good luck with that!
I think there is: the Microsoft product line. They are the company everybody loves to hate for their mediocrity. If you want an office suite, email, calendaring, etc., they are what most of the consultants install.

On the other hand, when you (metaphorically) want the same consultants to go beyond "twoallbeefpattiesspecialsaucelettucecheesepicklesonionsonasesameseedbun", like a McBurger flipper trying to make basil aioli, it usually doesn't turn out well.
Hmm. I got 9/10, and the one I got wrong wasn't the one I expected to get wrong. It was also one that in some sense "doesn't matter," but I'm still slightly embarrassed.

An interesting quiz, certainly. The problem is that the article contains no suggestions for the question asked: why?
Computers 30 years ago: http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/c64/h/complete.jpg

Computers now: http://www.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/appl...

Sure, the basics are the same. However, nothing about these changes are "boring." I would argue we have nothing to worry about. In 5, 10, 15 years, we'll have some pretty cool gadgets to play around with.

Take a look at cell phones- everything is starting to use touch screens. Tablets are going to start becoming popular, and eventually that will seep into desktops and laptops.

Don't worry, we'll be fine.
Very excited about this book. Both chouser and fogus are ripe with deep knowledge of Clojure. It's great to see more books coming down the pipe as they'll only further the adoption of the language as a whole.
It'll make the next attack much easier -- they'll have a better idea of the flaws available, and more ability to find unpatched, non-public bugs.
It suits those in power in western governments to paint China as an existential threat to their respective countries. The reality is somewhat more complicated but it will be impressive if China manages to hold itself together over the next 20 years, never mind becoming a superpower which is laughable on examination.
Timeline of Major Trends and Events (2000)
Yeah, that was why I brought back points the last time I tried removing them. Without points it was harder to read comment threads. But I have some other ideas about how to solve that problem. For example, I could distinguish comments by users whose recent comments are over a certain average. That approaches the score of a specific comment as the window size decreases. If I didn't discard outliers, as I currently do when calculating comment averages, I could probably even catch the case of the high scoring comment made by a user with an otherwise low average.

I may also try letting users specify other users whose comments they're interested in, and distinguish those in the display of the thread.

I don't know whether these will work, but I want to try them and see what happens. If anyone has other suggestions for things to try I'd be glad to hear them.
One of the most joyful things for me is see someone try working with my pc (ubuntu, no panels, gnome-do and compiz). It often results in a fair number of shrieks.

Before I had my macbook I had a lot of people, including mac users, assuming I was running a hackintosh, despite the previously mentioned lack of panels.
but terribly slow...
Last semester the guy sitting behind me asked, "Dude, are you a hacker or something?"
'This.'

That is my current annoyance. I don't know where it started, but since a few weeks 'this' seems to be turning up in more and more places. I really can't parse it, but I think it means agreement with the previous comment, sort of like an upvote.

It bugs the hell out of me.

Random example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=875816
One suggestion to try: for a young comment whose score has not stabilized (i.e. high recent variability), then no score is displayed except for an indicator for users whose recent comments have low recent variability and high score.

(Edited for brevity)
link to Google Translate'd in English:

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&h...
It would have been nice for the author to recognize that the reason that we have the DRY principle is because there is a natural need to repeat. If information and processes didn't need to be repeated then DRY wouldn't exist in the first place.
I heard the patent office wants to modernize their system, but they can't because there's a patent already covering 'a system to electronically manage patent submissions...'
> Where there is a will for violence and anarchy, the dominant or pre-existing "laws" only become pretexts, never deterrents, or they become marginalized by "circumstances".

That's probably the most astute observation I've heard this week.
I guess it depends on how you define "reasonably" private.

E-mail is a little different than something like Facebook, initially, because Facebook persistently displays your data whereas email is a one-time thing; you list the people you want to see the email, send it, they receive it, and it's offline in the meantime, it's not a shared asset. So, in that way, it's not subject to the same kind of possible privacy alterations that a social network where your data is always displayed and available is.

That said, e-mail is rather insecure. While it might take more effort than sending a friend request, intercepting an email is still pretty easy, and people at Google can access your data. While it's not likely that there are Google employees going through random email boxes for fun, the contents and metadata of your emails can be disclosed through subpoena, security breaches, or other means.

So, while there is some privacy in a normal Gmail account, say, enough to keep a casual home or business user satisfied, that privacy is still highly dependent on competence and goodwill at Google.

The bottom line is that if you have something that really needs to be kept private, you need to at least encrypt your data with something like PGP. Your data is not private at Google and it is certainly not private on Facebook or Myspace, whose business depends on increasing pageviews and time spent on site at minimal cost (i.e., making extant content available to more people).
Video: Artificial intelligence: Noel Sharkey on the inexorable rise of robots
Asking YC: How does USocial Work?
I want to write a post on the black market for buying Facebook Fans, etc. Does anyone have an idea how sites like uSocial.com work? #askYC