skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not clear to me why having cards that say bomb is at all relevant. What's the thinking here, that any terrorist needs to be able to say "bomb" in Arabic to make it go off?

For a country that allows people to say that they support the Holocaust in the name of free speech, this seems COMPLETELY misguided. Not just a little, but completely. I'd bet that there is zero correlation between being able to say bomb in Arabic, or between wanting to learn to say bomb in Arabic, and wanting to set one off.
I just tried connecting via FB and starting a plan - the system seems to hang after I create the plan and won't let me get out of the message to click on the timeline to start. Any thoughts?
They don't have more rights than he does though.

And because he got there first probably less.
Annals of Artificial Intelligence: Gmail Edition
Not like all Mobiles
It's no secret that cell phones have long ceased to correspond to the phrase means of communication, they can make music players, game consoles.
Every time I visit HN (which is several times a day), I read the main page first, and then immediately go to the newest page. I upvote submissions that satisfy intellectual curiosity, come from sources I trust, and don't duplicate something recently posted here.

I also go to the noobs views

http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories

http://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments

from time to time, especially right after I have seen what appears to be a noob story that deserves a flag on the newest page.
I couldn't agree more—it's highly unlikely that he would craft only two flash cards to help him with Arabic.

Also, god forbid that someone disagrees with the US's asinine foreign policy over the past decade or so — the last thing we need is a country of critical thinkers.
For many reasons, including:

- We already have the expertise to do so, so the cost to us is much smaller

- We can ensure a much higher level of service by making sure every component along the line is up to par (you'd cry if you heard what some colo providers do)

- We can fix problems in-line with our priorities, since we're the ones that fix them (like keeping published sites up, even if the editor is down, for example)

- We can set up and manage geographically redundant datacenters

- And finally, we're able to do so extremely cheaply

It's definitely something to consider when you reach a certain scale, and especially if you have the know-how to get it done. We've calculated that for every server we purchase, we'd pay that cost every 2-3 months on AWS, for perspective.
I did not say that personal impact is equivalent to wealth. It was meant to respond to the parent comment ("some people claimed that the only objective measurement of the value of your work how much you get paid") and to imply that wealth is a result of personal impact, magnified through network effects (having people work for you, television/cable).

Gandhi et al. have had an impact that defies quantification (e.g. world changing)

I personally believe personal impact is answered by this koan:

What is the meaning of life?

It's up to you to define it.
High Performance Web Sites: Browser Performance Wishlist
Right. I like StackOverflow's karma system for instance. It keeps spam out and rewards for quality content.
I will still upvote you (or anyone else) if I see a comment that a submitted article is a duplicate submission. There are many cases that are missed by the automated duplicate detector, and I appreciate knowing that I am not remembering incorrectly when I see a story that I think I have seen before.
This was before the liquid restrictions.
Fav4.org Is a Dead Simple but Very Attractive Start Page
Google Bomb
Ah, now I see. So this will get around the true multi-threading issues. Thank you both for the clarification. This is truly something to watch.
Try reloading the page. Can you tell me what browser do you use?
I don't think the author was implying that stopping when the note is found implies a "lucky" personality. I think Dr. Wiseman was looking for personality traits that are common amongst "unlucky" people. The newspaper test demonstrated that unlucky people are more tense and anxious than normal, and this could explain why they may not spot new opportunities.
Is Google Referrer Spamming Too Now?
There's probably a more elegant solution, but I doubt there's a cheaper one (at such a low quantity)
Yeah, don't buy it. Not at startups.
Real Men don't use debuggers
Operational efficiency analysis originally came from optimizing military operations in WWII, and it cut its teeth in industrial production in the following decades. The history shows. As a discipline, it's still focused on lowering the amount of time, labor, and money to achieve well-defined objectives (and to be fair, it's very good at it).

The field is still somewhat lost in optimizing creative work, like coding. I definitely agree that cognitive load is the operative bottleneck in a large swathe of non-industrial work. I think that operational efficiency research probably could be used to good effect there if it were applied correctly, but the problems are still poorly understood by the experts, so it's a while off.
The submission and the first two upvotes were simultaneous at the 1 minute resolution we use for those things, and that is usually a sign of something fishy. Usually there's something else fishy too, and it's the other things we currently look for.
Buzz as a product may fail, but they did save Google as a whole from much worse publicity.

They took a serious hit as it is, but they did a good job of damage control once they realized it was necessary.
For sheer presentation beauty per unit of user-effort, Keynote still is way ahead. S5 does have its uses, though.
It's scary how often the decision making process is more expensive than making the wrong decision.
You're right, portability of applications is an issue. Though I'd say it's deeper than toolkits, deeper than libraries or frameworks, and deeper than languages.

It starts in the interaction model. I like what Apple is doing with this (think iWork on the Mac and iWork on the iPad), and I'd hate to see that go away.

You could argue all you want that the Windows 7 desktop is not that different from the MacOS 10.5+ desktop, not that different from the Web interaction model; you'd have your points and I'd have mine. My main one is that if it feels different, then it is (a bit of a duck-typing mindset, understandably).

And if it is different, then it requires fundamentally different software application, even if the problem domain you're tackling is the same. Some low-level things might be portable, but many won't be; whatever's closer to hardware (audio, storage, search, video, rasterization) is more likely to be reasonably and defensibly portable.

Everything else I want to be specific to the interaction model of a given device, within reason.

Objective-C and OCaml are fairly high-level, but that's not what they are going after here; they are going after the likes of WPF and Cocoa and Cocoa Touch, general-purpose high level libraries of code. And that's exactly what I would not want to ever happen.

Let's not go there. Because it would be terribly silly.
Great example. About a clever technique. And implementing it in the author's own code.

Check out Dr. Spinellis' Code Reading:

"Code reading requires its own set of skills, and the ability to determine which technique to use when is crucial. In this indispensable book, Diomidis Spinellis uses more than 600 real-world examples to show you how to identify good (and bad) code: how to read it, what to look for, and how to use this knowledge to improve your own code.

Fact: If you make a habit of reading good code, you will write better code yourself."

http://www.spinellis.gr/codereading/
> confirm that he is a terrorist when they find a paper in his apartment with some quotation from the Quran on it and they believe it is some cryptic message/map or something

That sounds similar to a movie I watched in school a long time ago about the Japanese internment situation. If they found a bunch of stuff in someone's house written in Japanese it was assumed to be communications from Japan or 'secret' instructions or something. The movie was a fictional story (though it may have been based on a real life story), but the parallels are there.
Of course, the deeper lesson here is that race itself is a concept invented by racists.

Thank you. Although your wording may be a slightly more confrontational than I would have put it (that "race" is purely cultural), you raise a very important point.

The word itself has become impossibly overloaded, meaning a poorly defined combination of genetics, national/cultural origin, and current culture. I remember marveling at the admonition on a user's social network page: (paraphrased) "I'm Hispanic, not Asian!"

What I find important to note is that the spectrum of meaning of "race" ranges from something an individual has no control over, to something that is pure choice. Although discrimination based on genetics being wrong is something that's relatively uncontroversial, discrimination based on choices/behavior is much less clear cut.
Missing the point entirely.

Yes, Google worked as it was intended to work.

No, how Google is intended to work is not the ideal solution for the problem people are trying to solve when they use Google.

It's the wrong solution. That's the point.
Scoop St. launches as New York's answer to Groupon
It really is true. You can travel by train across India as a foreigner, everyone staring at you, and not have any problems. That doesn't mean common sense does not apply, but overall India is very safe - crime wise. You'd better look out for cars, though ;) There is corruption, but there is also a strong culture imposing limits. Its complicated, but I rarely feared for my safety in India. I frequently did so in Moscow - nazis, militsia, thugs, etc. etc.

As to everything being built from an idea - thats true. But its a question of whether that is the right idea for that place. No one can doubt that there is an abundance of brilliant hackers coming out of Moscow. But the 'silicon valley' model requires an abundance of social capital - and Moscow is incredibly impoverished in this area, despite being relatively wealthy, it has very, very little social capital.
Countries are a figment of our collective imagination, and crossing from one border in to the next should by itself not be reason for suspicion. The simple desire to be somewhere else should not get one 'marked'.

But traveling by air is now synonymous with giving up your every right as a human being and because of that we're all willing to take it without protest, the perceived cost of raising a fuss about this seems to outweigh the cost of pretending to be sheep.

But the security situation is only very marginally improved by all these measures, long term there will be a new terrorist success, after which even more draconian rules will be enacted.

We made this bed, now we have to lie in it, until we decide collectively that we're not headed in the right direction.

Just today a dutch student protested at the court for having his finger prints put into a national database on grounds of privacy violation.

It seems some people still understand when too far is too far, how about the rest of us?

The 99.999%+ of the people that travel 'legitimately' should not have to pay to this extent for the < 0.001% of the people that intend to disrupt society by killing people, if the price of absolute safety in this sense is a totalitarian state with access to information on its citizens well in excess of what the Soviet block regimes could only have dreamed of then we're definitely on the wrong track.

The more interesting question is if we let it go too far can it be rolled back?
> Wouldn't it be more likely that they had legit reasons for
> travelling to those countries, like visiting family?

These systems work badly for exactly this reason.

It's always more likely the person isn't a terrorist.
same here. I spent 30 seconds and have no idea what it does or why I want it.
Ok, it's working now :) I'm using Google Chrome 4.0.249.89 unknown (38071)

I'm curious, once you publish it, why can't you go back and edit it again? (I know of almost no plans that don't get revised during the process)
no it doesn't. That's detention after an arrest.
Wait, people brush their teeth more than bathe?
Sure, but should you be recharging your mental batteries (reducing cognitive overload) based on what documents your printing?

Short breaks and walks are wonderful and productive, but not necessarily at the times your printing.
Hey, you break it, you buy it!

On a related note, where is my liquid-quark fueled warp engine? I'n not giving all that gold for you to propel to 99% c for nothing, am I?

Dumb, sophomoric "humor" aside, what practical implications does this discovery have? There is a blurb about proteins and what we can digest, which to a layman like me makes no sense, and something about a desolate universe made up of dark matter, which again fails to come home to me.
Top “Clean Energy” Topics to Keep an Eye On
Right, because everybody knows that those that want to bomb airplanes go around with flash cards in multiple languages and discuss their desire loudly with fellow passengers before the flight.

Anything passengers say should be 100% ignored because it doesn't add any factual information unless you're being approached by someone alerting you to a possible situation.

People in line for a security check will naturally tend to discuss topics related to security.
"I'm perfectly capable of inserting all the necessary disclaimers, but I left them out for readability."

If enough people are distracted by their annoyance at un-disclaimed overgeneralizations, you haven't actually increased readability.
Just an FYI your twitter account isn't spitting out the url to the articles you post there

Example - Open Source Open World: http: Comments: http:

http://twitter.com/YCHackerNews
> By talking about how Pitchfork Media has 'no legal right' to the sub-domain, I take that to imply that he's claiming -- at least one some level -- that he does have a legal right to the sub-domain.

i think his point is that they aren't legally entitled to hijack the subdomain name. there was no infringement or impersonation or anything happening. tumblr wasn't put under the legal thumbscrews on this, they coughed it up willingly when asked. that is not a customer-friendly move, and so he is angry about it.
I gotta admit it takes a lot of guts to fess up things like this. I looked at the "Stupid Things We Did" and was shocked at how stupid some of it really was considering that these people were calling themselves founders and even had investors. But then I suddenly got reminded of how I once spent a week creating a scrollbar from scratch in ActionScript for a product that nobody cares about now. I've also spent a lot of time writing my own libraries because they are cleaner/more-efficient than existing utilities out there only to throw them out completely because the specs changed. Had I used a slightly bulky off-the-shelf library, I would have saved a lot more time and could have replaced it with my own code if the library caused a bottleneck.

As I work on my new project now, I keep asking myself "Is this actually going to matter to anyone except my OCD-self/ego?" If yes, then I do it. I've wasted too much time because I'm a stickler for file-naming-conventions or got stuck with one weird bug that only affects 0.1% of my target users.
The article opens with a similar joke. As it says: some people find it funny, others dont
a tumblr employees response to the OP: http://meaghano.com/post/393246405/tumbledore-ive-run-pitchf...
Good point. In fact, I suspect we are saying the same thing, but lack some common language/terminology.
David Beazley's bug report on I/O-bound threads and New GIL
Windows Phone 7 Series Features Video
If you can break it then it wasn't really a law.
I lived both places. The average block in Moscow is like some shady alley in Old Delhi at night ;)
Based on the first book, lucky is probably right. She needed the experience of danger in order to broaden her horizons and to grow as a person.

Clearly, I haven't read enough of the series to comment on the last statement .... and they could easily alter the perception of the events in the first book.
I agree with the other comments saying that your home page doesn't describe your product clearly enough. I disagree that showing a video is the best solution. As a user, I don't want to waste my time watching a video until I'm convinced that I want to investigate further. Instead, I would put a Top 5 showcase of some great looking plans on the home page. This also gives an incentive for the users to create something that is really cool, so they can be featured on the home page.

I think relying on Facebook Connect only might be a bit iffy, unless you absolutely require it for core functionality. In your case, Facebook adds some social elements but the core competency of your website is building plans. I might want to sign up to play with your site without using my Facebook account. If I like it enough to recommend it to my friends, I might be willing to link it to my Facebook account later.
Twice a day vs. once a day.
My brother (not a twin, physically very different from me) once came with an HP laptop with fingertip unlock, and my finger unlocks it ~ 50% of time.

I suspect those system to be set with an extremely high level of tolerance; if they aren't, they probably often fail to recognize legitimate fingerprints and people revert to the old, not-hardware-vending passwords.
I'll be honest it looks like Facebook OS for phones :) Not bad, not bad at all. Still though, imho, Microsoft will lose most of the old Windows Mobile fans and users and will start from scratch with this one.
Wow, that is surprisingly simple. I'd heard that fingerprint readers were easily fooled, but that's crazy. Good find!

How long until this is someone's start up idea?
Reddit did something like this before the top entry became a sponsored listing. Instead, the very top entry was in a blue box and was randomly selected from the most recent posts. Certainly got my attention and I voted a few up.
> (you'd cry if you heard what some colo providers do)

I'd love to hear more, if you're at liberty to share.
I always ask my friends to upvote my articles. What are friends for?
Well said. While I love "The Elements of Typographic Style", I find there is plenty to argue with, even before dragging the advice to the web where it may not apply.

For instance where Bringhurst gets hung up on a kind of Pythagorean numerology about proportions. He seems to think that, if you can find some rational geometric basis for a proportion, then that provides an explanation for the aesthetics of the proportion.
Because the expected earnings from a new customer is higher than that of an existing customer?
We are trying to build a system with reusable plans - where a plan is essentially a step-by-step instructions plus timing data. So the idea is - somebody creates a good plan - like a recipe, or first 10 weeks of life of a child - and then many people should be able use it.
So master plan should remain the same, in our opinion. On the other hand, you can change positions of steps, add/remove reminders and if you are not satisfied with the plan completely, you can duplicate it and create a new one based on existing.
We are not trying to create yet another project management tool - it is more of tutorial with timeline, reminders, images, videos and reusability is the main focus for us.
Okcupid's blog is amazing. We need more people to utilize their masses of data for this level of insight. I only hope everyone can do it with this much class and style.
I look at it a few times a week and I consider myself a pretty active member. If there were a "better" (and I can't define what that is) way to monitor new entries without having to keep going back to the page, I probably would.
Rubyists always get the pretty toys.

You ended up with Zed, though.
I wonder how long does it take Youtube to remove the video. I really expect it to happen (in the name of taking down harmful instructions for terrorists, etc.)... Otherwise - most of the things that come from CCC are good learning materials.
This is really horrible, but i can't help but be reminded of the episode of "The IT Crowd" Where the lead character goes on a date with Peter File. Just goes to show how much value all societies place on titles, no matter how un-deserved.
Some fascinating data here. The 'do you enjoy giving oral sex' geographical heat map which is user selectable by age is great. It's kind of hidden at the bottom of the post -- to summarize, older women tend to enjoy it a lot more than younger!

min/maxers should optimize accordingly...
Moral of the story: don't use tumblr.

I'm pretty sure blogspot (for example) wouldn't do that to a blog (call a blog inactive cause the last post is 2 month old), do-no-evil or not, free service or not.
Reading should be a process of getting as much out of something as you can, which usually means giving the writer a little bit of credit and preferring stronger readings over weaker ones. There are always readers who want nothing more than an excuse to take offense, but there's no point in writing for people like that. I only added the disclaimer to frustrate them a little bit.
It may be putting two hot topics togeher (MapReduce and GPGPU), but they sure don't make it easy. One of the strong sells of the MapReduce feature was how it reduced the amount of code something as complex as PageRank was written in and made most programs fairly straitforward.

There is a lot of challenges of programming CUDA (disclosure: this is what my ongoing MS thesis work is on), but their code examples show they add no abstraction layer and because of the generality they force on their kernels (all must have the same signature) will be near impossible to reach full GPU performance.

tl;dr Unlike MapReduce, this does not make programming GPUs easier or accessing their hardware potential easier.
Roger Ebert: The Essential Man
You have a very good point about the dangers of zooming in, especially on self-selected subsets; but I didn't mean that LOLcat fans are less intelligent. I think that simpler forms of humor indicate, not lower intelligence in those enjoying them, but tensions and stresses that are nearer to the surface of their lives. (Did I mention that "All Your Base" still cracks me up?)

By my theory, Monty Python's "wide accountant sea" is the product of a civilization that is largely content with its lot in the world; but if a civilization finds it adequately entertaining to observe that I are serious cat and this are serious thread, then there are problems somewhere near the surface of that civilization, and the civilization is aware of them.

As an example: at least as far as I know, East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) humor is much simpler than American and English; East Asians are more intelligent than Americans and Englishmen on average (at least as measured by IQ testing), but they have social stresses that are _much_ nearer to the surface.

I also doubt that low intelligence limits comprehension of refined humor. G.K. Chesterton thought that the English peasantry, who were at the least uneducated, were better at telling and at understanding jokes than their social betters; my own -- admittedly just anecdotal -- experience also seems to suggest no correlation between intelligence and sophistication of humor, but a high correlation between low social class and low education on the one hand, and good comedic style on the other.
Most malware in 2009 used Acrobat/PDF for exploits
Experiments in Pricing at a Lean Startup
Sounds like an excellent way to check to see if people are presenting alternate content like expert-exchange always used to.
> It's probably not mere chance nor prejudice that some groups are better or worse represented in professional sports.

Cf. http://www.jewishmag.com/45mag/basketball/basketball.htm