skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought the 'enterprise' programmer was the java programmer.
iPad: the next BIG Fashion Accessory
No multitasking. No Flash. No Camera. AT&T. and so on..

None of that seems to matter because the iPad is going to be the next BIG fashion accessory.

People will buy the iPad for the same reason they buy luxury items. So they can flaunt it. Shallow? You bet. it's that simple.
He properly just saw what happened on wall street. Why make money by working hard to produce value, when you can make more money by going the easy way?
You can't amuse thousands of techies with an import from a math library..
Yes, there are edge cases. Yes, if you jack it to levels that are substantially higher than market rates there are negative effects.

None of that demonstrates that reasonable minimum wage laws, in the aggregate, cost jobs.
Can software that is open without bound remain simple (non-complex), logistically, politically, technically?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1087226

The video linked above talks about exactly this issue.
Yes I agree with this idea 100%. Somehow all the features of the iPad have been deemed interconnected and necessary, as if it would be impossible to create a machine that is both easy to use AND didn't have Apple arbitrarily denying apps to.

I wish we would approach these two subjects in a completely separate fashion: Yes, the iPad proposes a new interface to computing that is quite revolutionary and ultimately healthy I think. Separately, it continues to push an ecosystem that is closed an unhealthy.
It's an IDE and runtime for the UserTalk programming language.
It's funny, algebra is when I first started liking math. I hated arithmetic and got poor grades because for some reason I could not memorize addition and multiplication facts very well so I was slow on the tests.

With algebra I started to see that I could actually do something useful with math. It became more about thinking than memorization. Yeah a lot of the problems were contrived but at least it was more interesting than long division.
A new way to deploy Python web applications
And if you do survive, please do sue the airline company for putting a "Flotation device" under your seat and not a parachute. It is about time somebody stop this madness.
Using NoScript, do you block ALL .js files, or just selected ones?

Doesn't NoScript / using no .js break many web 2.0 ajax sites?
In this specific presentation Mahalo is advertising a platform for how-to guides and answer services that can be used on other sites - how is that wrong? Google is about producing good content that's relevant and useful. Mahalo does that along with the right linking structure in place. If I was paying someone to help create content+an engine around it I'd find SEO to be an important sales point worth touching on.
How quaint.
Funny that 80s and 90s sci-fi is beginning to look just as archaic as 60s sci-fi (blinking light bulbs and many switches) looked then. We’re not quite there yet, but soon we will.
How many years has Linux been trying? 10? More? And they're still not there. Android is probably the next best hope.
>It would matter to me if someone saved my life from sickness, even if I did die of starvation shortly afterwards.

I'm not sure if the money would stretch this far, but what if instead of saving you, the money was spent developing the country in a way that would save 10x more people. Looking at this problem from a personal perspective gets in the way of doing the most good for the most number of people.

>I don't understand. By that logic, action is only worthwhile if there is exactly one form of suffering. Surely that can't be right.

Or action is worthwhile if it treats multiple forms, which I believe infrastructure development would do.

Perhaps I'm wrong and vaccination is the first step in the path to pull the countries out of poverty.
to grannyg00se (author of dead sibling of this comment): you appear to have been put on some sort of HN shit-list where your posts are being autokilled. You should email pg and ask him to remove the ban.
* smack * duh. Should've read the author's comments, eh? My mistake. I was assuming the circles on the end would perform the same action, but guess not.

Thanks for pointing it out ^^;
Ha Ha Ha!
Was there any follow-up to how TC was hacked?
CommonJS: the First Year
I love Gruber's assessment:

Yes, there is much jealousy from iPhone developers at the sacks full of money being made by Zune and Windows Mobile app developers.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/01/29/msft-ipad
I never said that all mitigation efforts are futile, only that I think the money could be better spent helping poor countries in other ways. Like I said, I think treating disease is a treating a symptom, instead of trying to treat the main problem.

But as I said, I could be wrong. Either ways, props to Gates for trying to help out.
Yeah. Somebody who's really good at "tracking" (flying horizontally) can fall at about a 45 degree angle. So, from a couple miles up, ...

Another thing not mentioned is that terminal velocity decreases as the air gets more dense. So, if you fall four miles, you can't track four miles -- the 45 degree thing is based on dense air.
What the Best Bagger Championship says about work and competition
DPL-E4500 PORTABLE EXPLOSIVES DETECTOR (GC-CHEMILUX)
I'd say that's a good thing. Radio Userland is not the poster boy for simplicity.
Good god, no. Here is much better advice, in much shorter form:

If you're storing a password, use bcrypt or I'll bite your thumbs off.

If you're making sure something hasn't been modified by someone and you absolutely can't use a signed GPG message, use HMAC-SHA256 and a constant-time comparison algorithm or I'll bite your thumbs off.

All the business about hash functions is like advice on how to build your own car brakes using a backyard smelter and a sand cast. You might get something of roughly the right shape and weight but someone's going to get hurt down the road.
It initially blocks all, and you can choose to allow js from domains on a case by case basis.

For example, on the Hacker News main page, i allow js from ycombinator.com and forbid js from co2stats.com
YouTube as Video Store
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=14

"Regarding the question of vaccines and autism, for ethical reasons we cannot do a double-blind, randomized, control trial of vaccines with and without thimerosal. However, we can do the next best thing, and, indeed, we now have several good studies since 1999 that do just that. Some of these studies are epidemiological; some are ecological. What allows us to use them to reject the hypothesis that mercury in vaccines is an etiological agent that is either associated with or causes autism is a very simple but powerful prediction that the hypothesis makes. Quite simply, if the hypothesis is true and thimerosal-containing vaccines (TCVs) cause autism (or are even merely a significant contributing factor), we would expect that the removal of thimerosal from vaccines would lead to a rapid decrease in autism incidence and prevalence within 2-5 years.

"There have now been several studies that examined this very hypothesis in countries that removed thimerosal from their vaccines before the U.S. did. For example Hviid et al3 reported that autism prevalence in Denmark increased from 1991 to 1996 despite the removal of thimerosal from vaccines, while Madsen et al4 looked at the time period from 1971 to 2000 and concluded that autism diagnoses continued to increase after thimerosal was removed from vaccines. Neither study supported a causal link between TCVs and autism, and they were a prominent part of the dataset that was used by the Institute of Medicine to conclude in 2004 that there was no good evidence to support a link between TCVs and autism. A more recent study by Eric Fombonne5 in Montreal examined 27,749 children born from 1987 to 1998 attending 55 different schools. Cumulative thimerosal exposure by age 2 years was calculated for the 1987-1998 birth cohorts. This exposure ranged from 100-125 μg from 1987 to 1991, 200-225 μg from 1992 to 1995, and then none after 1996, which was when thimerosal was completely removed from vaccines in Canada. The result was that autism, ASD, and pervasive developmental disorder diagnoses continued to increase in all periods, demonstrating no relationship between TCVs and autism or ASDs. Even more recently, a large study6 failed to support a relationship between thimerosal and adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes, a result that led one of the investigators in the study, Sallie Bernard, a proponent of the thimerosal hypothesis, to disavow the study in a case of sour grapes, because it did not show what she had hoped that it would show."
The author brings up several good points and examples about the way some British newspapers twist headlines and stories (I am assuming the headline is intended to make fun of the topic the author is writing about, as opposed to a generalization about all British newspapers).

A more positive side of the British journalism tradition is that they can be far more skeptical, pushy, and hard-hitting when it comes to dealing with corporations and governments -- which is a good thing, IMHO. There's a brief example here with Apple's Phil Schiller from a few years ago that illustrates this point:

http://www.istartedsomething.com/20071117/taste-apple-public...
At the airport kiosk. I never print it myself.
> most head to D.C. as paupers and leave as kings

Um, most senators head to DC rich and leave richer.
Rights in the workplace
It's about time ...
http://cryptome.org/ There's some of the data here and a mirror http://mirror.wikileaks.info , I would hate to see this data die
IEA: Oil demand has peaked in developed world
The "007" thing makes sense from the standpoint of preventing rogue launches. It's not intended to prevent the missiles from being launched without command authorization. Instead, no single person has all the information needed to launch, so there must be at least two people in on it.
All of your arguments have been fully and completely refuted using real science, not anecdotes and paranoia. Check out ToddW's AntiAntiVax compilation (http://antiantivax.flurf.net/) for all the facts. Please don't spread lies in future. Thank you.
I've read about quite a few documented survival cases of shot down pilots during WWII landing without a parachute. Pretty much all of them had the same scenario: landing site was a steep slope covered in snow. Snow helped cushion the initial impact, and the rest of the kinetic energy was dissipated during the roll to the bottom of the slope.
Moderately Overweight Elderly Live Longer?
It depends on how you wrap it. You don't even need to mention climate change. It's a "technology push for job creation"

What it isn't is an obvious friction imposed on the entire market. People don't like that.

We spent 10X this number of bank bailouts and such. That didn't piss normal people off because the messaging was that it was needed to fix the economy. Obama should do this as a followup to 2010 being a year to push job creation. The rest of the initiative could be to lower certain taxes and regulations, which is generally free. Then the messaging could be "Obama backs $200B job creation effort".
People are already confused which Google technology to bank on for mobile: Android, or Chrome OS?
Web developers can rule the iPad
They keyboard is 95% of full size. I think people get psyched out by small keyboards but that after a few hours on it your hands naturally adjust (perhaps practice going between keyboards helps)...

I don't use a particularly small font. I find that emacs works great -- switching between buffers, toggling between marks, bookmarks, etc., is extremely easy, and some chords are easier to type b/c of the keyboard design.

I have the font size set to 10pt which seems to be about the right size. I would probably use that size even on a larger monitor. Subpixel rendering and the LED backlight on this netbook (plus a nice emacs color theme) makes the text read very easily.

For documentation, I just open it in a web browser and switch with alt-tab or ctrl-tab (within the browser).
Good Karma is better than a Sand Hill Road rolodex
It's hard to have a rational discussion with "Corporations are evil! Mcirosoft is Evil! Bill Gates is EVIL!"
I guess that depends on whether you like having windows tiled or if you just like to use one window at a time. I generally prefer full screen with one thing going on at a time, and I can switch to a different one instantly by hitting alt-tab.
Or they had a hard landing as a child and have been trying to recapture the experience ever since...
> usable by "normal people."

I haven't owned an iPod, but I remember setting a couple up for my family on a PC. It was NOT some cakewalk. I hit problems and syncing later broke.

There was never anything notably usable about the ipod vs. competing models, especially those with the "drop the mp3 files on the usb drive" approach.
I disagree -- understand Ruby will make many parts of Rails crystal clear.
Startled, yeah. I know, four whole points. I almost stopped breathing...
I actually pronounce it "tree-eye", even though that's all sorts of incorrect.
quiet, peasant!
Android's open-ness has already been a thorn in its side. Right now we're seeing the splintering of the Android platform thanks to meddling by individual hardware manufacturers - consumers are getting wildly different user experiences, some worse than others, depending on who they buy an Android phone from. This is disastrous for a platform trying to gain mindshare.
While I am quite cynical about many situations in the world, I absolutely reject cynicism here: preventing the deaths of children is good. I don't care how poor their country is, or how likely they are to grow up into poverty. They still have a chance, even if a small chance, to grow up and make something of themselves. No child should ever be left to die because statistics say they will have something we judge to be a "bad" life.
I've noticed that the biggest problem for my hands, wrists, etc., is using a trackpad or mouse. The more my hands just stay on the keyboard the better they feel.

One nice thing about typing on the netbook is that the front part (in front of the keyboard where your palms tend to rest) is very short and this prevents me from the bad habit of resting my wrists... since the netbook is light it also prevents the bad habit of exerting downward wrist pressure to keep the laptop balanced.

I think it's good to do whatever works,... I was skeptical that I'd like the netbook, but I haven't used my full size laptop in months.
My wife painted our porch floor in sort of an argyle pattern with a border. That takes two equations and two variables to work out a pleasingly proportioned pattern that also meets the border in a uniform way.
The fantasy version of Mahalo is that some people (your grandma) would use Mahalo as their interface to Google. Mahalo would intercept the top n% of queries with better results, and pass the rest on to Google.

The reality is that getting anyone to switch to Mahalo as their destination search engine is nigh impossible. So, they go back to their real plan: create a crappy Wikipedia-like site for tabloid content and rely on SEO to get page views and fill those with ads. Use the human powered search as a legitimate cover. But that's just my opinion.
It is not that providing SEO services is wrong or bad. The point is publicly Jason claims ignorance toward SEO whereas privately SEO is the cornerstone of his sales pitch.

It shows is public claims of ignorance toward SEO are (at best) dishonest.
we don't take kindly your kind here.

...They took us jobs!
Programming is a super power – but if you want to be able to use it, you need years of training. Not in the strict sense. But you need to be motivated, you need to invest time, you have to fight with the (foreign and abstract – non-intuitive) basic concepts and many people won’t have the time to do that. Becoming a lawyer is quite hard enough, thank you.

Just as it’s hard to be a doctor and a lawyer at the same time, so is it hard to be a programmer and a lawyer at the same time. Even if you only know a bit about medicine. Even if you only know a bit about programming. That’s not to say you can’t do it, but it’s not easy and many won’t do it.

It’s frustrating: I (not being a programmer) spent a few hundread hours of my life understanding programming and programming. Heck, I can explain bisection search or bubble sort to you. I can write cute little (clumsy) programs that do stuff (useless stuff, that is). But that’s not enough to save me hours in Excel. The most frustrating part about this is that I know what kind of automation is theoretically possible but I can’t actually do it. That knowledge is so often so unbearable. But I don’t have the time to invest a few days worth of work into understanding how to go from theoretical to practical, not for this one specific problem.

But that’s just how it is. You can’t be an expert at everything.
http://www.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html

for all the closet functional programmers around here :)
I challenge the validity of your source.

The mission statement:

To replace the existing systems for health, education, government, money and business with systems which are in harmony with nature and which give maximum
freedom, wealth and happiness to ALL the people and animals of earth. Please pray for this situation to come into existence
An interview with (OpenGL lead designer) Kurt Akeley
Unfortunately, people dissatisfied with Apple are creating N different platforms and none of them has enough R&D budget to match Apple. Android vs. Maemo vs. Chrome OS is the new GNOME vs. KDE.
This whole tinkering panic is ridiculous. Did tinkering end when Nintendo released the NES? Or more recently with the Wii? His dad could have bought a word processor instead of a ][e, would he have been able to tinker with that?

Some devices are more open than others. This is not a new phenomenon, nor did anything change on Wednesday.
Looks good! Some of the loast-foam casting stuff he's done looks very cool. At some point I'll be looking to do the same...
> Now, what real-life example demands systems of equations?

Finding the cheapest phone card to use is a good example.
It is bizarre because what is the point in having a secret instruction to a submarine captain when his home country is completely and utterly destroyed by nukes. Consider that everyone that could possibly benefit from such an instruction are no longer in existence.
As the author wrote it, he's also criticizing Windows, OSX, & anything that's not the iPad. See his finder example. Instead of focusing on people who want to run their own programs, he says they don't want to make easy OS'es. (it doesn't make sense to me either)
profit in a market represents simply what people want, and how they value those things in voluntary exchanges. mixing up the concept of "profit" with racketeering, corporatism, cronyism, and making money off of various other involuntary transactions is a huge mistake since it colors your perception of the world.
One company that sold lots of easily-modified computers is now selling a harder-to-modify computer.

Could you get an Apple ][e Emulator through the App Store? And throw in all the tips, manuals, and cheat sheets Mark referenced?
If you happen to know of a place where you earnestly hear "take the week off, thanks for your heroics!", please don't be stingy with their URL. I'd be interested in working there.
Gates has obviously made a calculation here, one I believe to be correct: the far greater returns generated by profit-maximizing investment can be used to do more good than the harm that might be caused by any of the companies he invests in.
I prefer the Genius features.

However, what you want may come down the pipeline in the future: http://mashable.com/2009/09/09/itunes-twitter-facebook/
Seriously, you guys are making me sad. Use some imagination -- there is a lot more to tinker with for your dollar in 2010 than there was in the good old days. For the price of your dad's ][e you can now buy multiple linux boxes, a bucket of Arduinos or a NerdKit, robotic legos, and -- if you are so inclined -- an iPad with developer account on top of it.

At first I was wondering what the ulterior motive to all this drama was. I'm beginning to think it's just link-baiting.
I didn't notice because I highlighted + middle clicked.
I'd be very interested to hear your results. I too am an over-pronator and while I'm curious about barefoot running, I'm hesitant to take the plunge without some knowledge of how it will affect my feet (+shins and joints).
Forget iPad - check that really nice Android tablet from Dell
So... Their problem is that log files don't filter out VT100 escape sequences by default?

This is not a terribly serious bug...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail-deadly

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand_(nuclear_war)
Interesting...one solution from the perspective of the tracker might be a system that assigns different weights to different types of information, with things like fonts and browser plugins given less ranking than things like OS, browser type, and time zone, which probably change much less frequently. You might not be able to get 100% unique tracking, but if you could guess that there was a 99% chance that it was the same person, doing things like behavioral advertising would probably still be worth it.

The interesting application of things like this and the visited link color hack is to use them in Europe, where apparently you have to get users to approve a cookie every time? This might be a good way to skirt the issue for a lot of sites that don't need a guarantee that it's the same person.
very very interesting and somewhat scary....
I'd rather have one large display than two medium-large ones, so I can keep what I'm mostly working on centred for ergonomic reasons. But having a two medium-large displays is definitely better than one, IMHO: modern software puts so much clutter on the screen that the useful working area is often just a small fraction of what it used to be when everything was designed for full-screen working. I consider the second display to be the equivalent of having a 3GHz chip and 4GB of RAM now so my poorly programmed word processor can let me type the same letter I could write with a 133MHz chip and 256MB of RAM a few years ago. :-)

By the same token, I totally understand people who want a big central screen and secondary screens either side for supporting tools/reference information. As long as the set-up doesn't have a break in the middle so I can spend most of my time looking straight ahead rather than keeping my neck permanently kinked to one side or other, I'd find such a set-up very useful.
Tesla Files for Initial Public Offering (IPO)
I've used Burkhard-Keller trees to do something like this:

http://blog.notdot.net/2007/4/Damn-Cool-Algorithms-Part-1-BK...

I don't know off the top of my head which one is more efficient.
I have a geothermal HVAC system, and it's not very well designed. If the loop temperatures drop below a certain point it becomes ineffective, and I need to manually switch to a secondary heat source.

In a single afternoon, I was able to hook some one-wire sensors into the loops, attach them to a widget that made the sensor data available via IP, write a daemon that monitors the temperature, and then automatically notifies the IP-enabled thermostat to flip over to secondary heat if the loops go below effective temperatures, and to flip back when they recover.

The next day, I made it so the loop temperatures were recorded and graphed, and that I receive an SMS alert if there's a complete HVAC failure (loops too cold + secondary heat failure).

That was some awesome tinkering.