skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There was a book written by a man with locked-in syndrome after a stroke. It made me want to write a living will.

"The entire book was written by Bauby blinking his left eyelid, which took ten months (four hours a day). A transcriber repeatedly recited a French language frequency-ordered alphabet (E, S, A, R, I, N, T, U, L, etc.), until Bauby blinked to choose the next letter. The book took about 200,000 blinks to write and an average word took approximately two minutes. The book also chronicles everyday events for a person with locked-in syndrome."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diving_Bell_and_the_Butterf...
I really disliked this article and found it a complete waste of time to read. On this web site, I would expect this article to lead to something scientific, something related to programming, or perhaps information that would be beneficial to someone starting a business. While off topic content is certainly acceptable at times, this is really pointless to me and contributes nothing. It was not worth reading, and the only reason why I am even responding is to hopefully contribute by having others consider their content before linking worthless content to the site. I cannot really see how it has been rated so highly, and it makes me wonder if I am missing something. It is neither accurate nor useful in any way. It does not even benefit me in a way to get me thinking in a positive manner or to help me generate ideas.
That read a lot like the recent Bill Watterson interview.

Fans: Blah blah blah invention of lisp 50 years ago?

McCarthy: I don't know, I can't remember that far back in that much detail and it doesn't matter now anyway; can't you move on and ask me something about my recent work and stop objectifying me as some kind of ancient artifact?

Fans: Thanks for the interview, we all appreciate you inventing Lisp!

McCarthy: {smiles through tensed jaw muscles and compressed lips}

* Implied content, they didn't actually say these things.
DIY Canadian SEO - Google LOCAL Maps
> Plus the story is about removing those with dissenting views from a social invitation only event in a private location.

Just because the event was hosted in a private location does not make it a private event. Just because a supermarket or restaurant is privately owned doesn't make it a private service. Saying that it does allows people to selectively discriminate based on race.

Yes I would maintain my view if they were merely attending the speech and not being a nuisance: which is the case in this article.
You're only out of luck if you want a detailed history or to view it on the web, plenty of monitoring devices exist that are compatible with the analog models. http://blackanddecker.com/Energy/PowerMonitor.aspx?WT.mc_id=...
I don't understand when people go crazy with their servers after getting mentioned on the social web because of the load. It's short lived, no need to panic, just make the page static.

wget http://www.mysite.com/page-being-hit-all-the-time -O /var/www/static.html

and add a rule to your webserver

location /page-being-hit-all-the-time {
return /var/www/static.html;
}
It doesn't have to be active, it might be passive. A small bug in the networking chipset that crashes the machine with a given packet... ;-)

It would be used only once. Like the nuclear weapon.
Here's mine, just for fun. I haven't seen anyone else using anything like it.

kVariable: A constant value, even in languages that don't support constants. Usually either a semantic shortcut for some value, or for some knob that can be turned at the top of the code.

xVariable: A local variable.

gVariable: Global. (I care much more about variable scope than I do about variable type.)

x, y, z, i, j, k: Counters. I try not to nest or overuse these too much. If it starts to get hard to follow, then I rename them.

There are a couple of other hints that I leave myself too. For example, I tend to pluralize the names of variables that contain arrays or lists of things: xWindowElements for example.

I never cared for Hungarian notation or its brethren. To me, it just had too steep of a learning curve for too little payoff, and didn't even convey the information that I usually needed.
My last day with Microsoft is on Tuesday. I also feel the same way. I think working at MS in the 80s/early 90s would have been exciting, fresh and challenging (not to mention extremely lucrative). But now? "Frustration" is the best word to describe it :-/
Yep, Google webmaster tools have been leveraged.
I'm not interested in sports analysis per se, but I am interested in interesting data analysis in general and have a soft spot for excellent visualizations.
I don't really see any way those links are different than the links pulled in by just about every advertising platform out there (including AdWords). The links appear to be being served up with Javascript (except for the "Ads by the Lounge" part), as opposed to being statically embedded like Text Link Ads or the other link brokers do. I'd doubt this is the issue.
I've done so, and think I am generally familiar with the concept. I don't see any direct connection. Could you explain the relevance that you see?
I fully agree with you. For past few years they are all over the place. From digital homes, car entertainment they are pursuing everything. And now retail stores. They are forgetting the fect that they still have not delivered an OS that will replace XP in corporations.
Apple's iPhone Takes a Hit
that's one elegant and simple solution, I agree :-) But in this case the load wasn't so targeted, it was spread on 3-4 pages. But you're right, I could have made them all 3 static.

Thanks for the info, really appreciated :-)
(my background: I worked at MS from 2003-2007 until I jumped ship to join a 20 person startup.)

The answer is simple: Microsoft needs its own Steve Jobs, not a Steve Ballmer.

Without an absolute tyrant with a keen sense of where the market is, and where it's going at the helm, Microsoft will continue to flounder. And with good reason, there are too many internal fiefdoms, and too many internal rivalries.

To be honest, I think MS would've been very well served to have been broken up at the end of the 90s. If the company had been divided into three separate firms, like Office Inc., Windows Inc. and Everything Else Inc., I think things would've turned out very differently for those firms over the past ten years: fewer boondoggle projects that only have a prayer of making a profit in the distant future, less of a whackjob 'better together' mentality that hamstrings Microsoft developers into using inadequate internal solutions or forces them to bolt useless features onto their products, and so on.

Sigh, sorry. I really think Microsoft is capable of so much more than they've been able to do for years, and it frustrates me to see so much talent go to waste.
It's true that most advertising platforms use javascript to generate the ads, but I believe that the "ads by the lounge" link could be the culprit.
I like to be somewhat verbose with my naming. I don't like to abbreviate unless its a very common and well understood abbreviation. If nothing else because I can have a terrible memory and find myself struggling to remember exactly what a variable is storing otherwise. I can't imagine what it would be like for a different programmer entirely.

Perhaps I've just had to work with too much code that has poorly (in my opinion) named variables.

Then again I also have intellisense and autocomplete so I don't really fear a slightly longish variable name if it makes sense.
This is one of the reasons for Sanders' early retirement.
Unlocking the Art of Reward-fare
Would like to hear more thoughts in response to this on what HN thinks about the right and wrong ways to go about implementing rewards systems in games, applications and services.
My current favorite Linux LiveCD is Grml (http://grml.org/), a Debian-based distro. It's like Knoppix without KDE, Gnome, OpenOffice.org, et cetera (but with X Windows), and with a multitude of command-line utilities. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
This is terrible! I can't imagine the incredible amount of abuse the police will be performing if they have such a toy.

Neither the police nor the government should EVER be trusted with such kind of power.
It seems terrible to have a device in my house measuring electricity (the meter), then put a reader on it, stream the data over wifi, over the internet, to a company with a bank of servers and several full time employees then process it then stream it back over the mobile phone network, all in the interest of saving energy.
I've been working with a company for the past while now that deals with sports data. Perhaps you can verify this for me, but I've noticed a pattern: if a sport is American, and in a college, the stats and math behind it are disproportionately more convoluted than ANY OTHER sport, league, etc.
* Running another OS in a virtual machine.

* Jumping around between/within apps using only the keyboard. (I use vim, xmonad, Gnome Do, etc.)

* Dropbox, Google Voice, Android Maps navigation
what's the best way to contact you as your profile is missing contact information?
Watched a movie by plugging my laptop into my TV.
This sounds event worse than Bush Patriot Act joke.
I can't comprehend why the presenter would focus so much on the theatrics of pulling this information out of your briefcase. If you've gone to the trouble of analyzing a prospective client's business to the point that you can produce a 3-5 page summary of its problems and their solutions, you don't need these theatrics. You could pull that information out of your shoe and it wouldn't make a difference.

Try this: pull a yellow sticky-note with your grocery list on it out of your briefcase and present that to your prospective client. Now tell me, was it the briefcase or the information presented that closed the deal?
The Bible needs a good VCS.
And that relates well to the Girl story the author wrote :)
The Broncos under Shanahan always had strong run blockers and created a bevy of successful rushers.

This past season, a near-requirement for success (a playoff berth) was having multiple starter-quality rushers, underscoring the importance of the offensive line.
ISP iiNET wins court case, not responsible for customer copyright infringement
I'm curious what form you expect that such a proof would take.
Addressing the Dearth of Female Entrepreneurs
Couple of questions.

1. Possible to update through mobile/email/iphone-app/phone-call, do u have plans to do so anytime soon ?

2. * Could you be more clear about your intentions on offering the student account for free.

3. Is all my information exportable (also as spreadsheets etc.), do u have that option right now/plan to do so soon?

4. Possible to check grades with a classmate, but not a teacher(privacy features etc.) and compare ?

5. * Possible to arrange the courses according to semesters/years ?

Also perhaps, a facebook/goog/openid/ etc. login should help convincing students to signup.
Different take on web frameworks from PHP's creator
I wrote several Gtalk bots and asked them to add those as friends.

They had fun chatting!
Are you using less electricity to do the same things, or are you living differently in order to lower your electricity use because electricity use is in your focus?

If so, would those changes be annoying to live with if you weren't so interested in your electricity use - if you tried to get a random person to reduce their electricity use in the same ways, would they say "sod that, it sounds too hard/stupid/cheap/complex"?
They really should go back to "Information at your fingertips."
Capital Efficiency: How to Build a Fortune 500 Enterprise from Scratch
I gotta disagree with the whole "make sure you're ready" idea here. It goes against the launch-and-iterate mantra that I live by.

Always remember, the vast majority of sites don't scale...because they don't have to. Just don't do anything really stupid when you're setting things up at first, and be ready to make changes when (more like if) you ever get popular.

Still, I do agree with not shooting from the hip in the middle of a huge traffic load. Installing new plugins or tweaking code at these times is an awful idea. Much better to call your host and ask to be bumped to a beefier machine. Throw money at the problem and hope it helps.
It might appear that way if Microsoft was the only company one was following back in the 90s. While they were freezing the market with promises of what Chicago would be, NeXT had already brought the future - and that codebase still feels like the future today.
I do this too, and I use Emacs's autocomplete to write almost everything.

Another good reason is that I use search to navigate through files, and verbose names are easier to search for.
YouTube enables IPv6, causes traffic spike
I am truly psychic! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1095965
Is Security Worth Risking Your Job?
Switching Costs (or why moving sucks even if its just 10 blocks)
Former Tablet PC guru: Microsoft has sabotaged itself
> It allows for the creation of real Domain Specific Languages and the real extension of lisp for a given problem domain.

I think the problem was that until now you weren't giving any examples that explained how Common Lisp macros were giving one any greater ability to do this sort of thing than Ruby. One could say "Ruby allows for the creation of real Domain Specific Languages and the real extension of Ruby for a given problem domain," with only a slight alteration in what one considers "real". As such, saying something like "Ruby doesn't give you real foo" doesn't tell anyone anything about what CL gives you that Ruby doesn't.

Also . . . I totally understand the desire to keep (non-earth-shattering) performance differences out of the discussion. After all, one doesn't use Ruby to write realtime systems in the first place. The performance of its implementations is simply not impressive. If I've chosen to use Ruby for something, I've already thought about the performance implications and decided that the performance penalties of Ruby as compared with something like C (or even Perl) are not limiting factors for the particular task I choose to tackle. As such, it makes sense to say "Please tell me about the syntactic and semantic value of Lisp macros, rather than the performance benefits of a Lisp implementation over a Ruby implementation."

You did, however, get into a little more explanation this time, which is good. I just wanted to point out that your disbelief at the notion that someone didn't achieve enlightenment based on your previous comment seems a bit unwarranted.
In the past two years, some of the most brilliant engineers I've ever had the privilege of working with have decided to throw in the towel at MSFT. It is not a good sign. I am ramping up my sales of MSFT stock, for sure.

There is still religious fervor inside the company. While at MSFT I worked with a handful of "true believers." Unfortunately, their enthusiasm and faith has yet to translate into interesting new products...

Anyway, if you're in the Seattle area, get in touch. The entrepreneurial community here very much rocks.
For example, the patient didn't answer the last question because.. he fell asleep? I would imagine if I was trapped inside my body and suddenly given a mechanism to communicate, I would be too excited to fall asleep.

They probably made that assumption because people fall asleep inside MRI's all of the time, especially during extremely long fMRI tests, when they try to isolate the senses (i.e. it's very dark, you wear earplugs and ear phones). Also, the brain damage might predispose someone to have a short attention span/wakeful periods.
Why is it that Google does not seem to suffer from the same internal competition as this article claims present at MSFT?

I don't know, but I'll ask it at the next Android/Chrome OS meeting.
Do you want to vanish ... and win 10K?
trying to paint those statistics as negative is hilarious on the articles part. we have insane mobility compared to any other society at any time in human history.
My wife's uncle taught a AAA defensive driving class for the elderly. The AAA approved course at that time (this was in the mid-90's) taught them that the safest speed is the average speed of traffic, regardless of the posted speed limit. If they could not drive comfortably at that speed, then they should stay in the right lane. If they were driving much slower than traffic and could not comfortably drive any faster, they should avoid the highways altogether.
I generally appreciate sports analytics, but in the sport I watch the most (NBA) they have a long way to go.

While I admit this is a personal failure, I too often find the articles (especially by guys like Hollinger) obnoxious. They love to tout simple stat concepts (regression to the mean! sample size!) as keen statistical insight. Another example is the PER metric: it is a simple weighted average of multiple stat categories but the author regards it as the authority by which all players should be measured.

Additionally, nba stat analysts believe stats tell the entire story. The nba right now, more than any other sport, in my opinion, is the sport which can least be described by statistics. Reading one of their articles, however, would leave you wondering why they even bother playing the games.

Edit: clarity.
I'll second that - Statsheet is quite a one-person startup success story.
Multiple sync'd viewports in JS
It's rarely up and to the right
> People. Python hackers are much, much nicer folks to hang around with. I don't like to start a war here so I'll refrain from going further with this point. Besides, I feel like Zed Shaw said it all.

I don't buy this point. I think you're confusing what Zed said about the Rails community with the reality of the Ruby community. Frankly, from what I've seen, the Rails community is a bit of a ghetto within the larger Ruby community.

I've also seen a lot of what amounts to acrimony and vitriol from Pythonistas when discussing other languages, where Rubyists (not Rails developers, specifically, but people in the broader Ruby community) have tended to be much more appreciative of what developers in other language communities, and other languages, bring to the party.

What's the difference between a Rubyist response to a Python way of doing things and a Pythonista response to a Ruby way of doing things? In my experience, the Rubyist says "Hey, that's kinda neat -- but it's not for me," but the Pythonista says "You're doing it wrong."
If you're already very energy-conscious, I can see your point. However, most people probably don't think about how much power their standby (and operational, but unnecessary) devices consume.

An analogy: I don't need Mint to tell me I waste money. Of course, I try to minimize the amount of money that I waste, but some is inevitably spend on stupid things. However, Mint is a tool that helps me identify exactly when and where I'm wasting the most money, which informs the financial decisions I make.
The first thing I thought of was Trusting Trust[1]. If the system is untrustworthy down to its lowest levels, it can also cover its tracks completely or nearly-completely.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backdoor_(computing)#Reflection...
Sounds like you didn't read the comment before commenting yourself, then...?

(Noise & disinfo levels seem at all-time highs recently... Engadget may merely be the first site of many to adapt.)
Virtual Private Networks themselves aren't buzzwordy; a non-technical article which includes, effectively, "don't worry about bad things because {name_of_popular_technology} will make it safe" is buzzwordy.

Or it would be if it said that - a second reading shows I've taken it out of context, that's not how it's used in the article. I apologise to anyone misjudged.
"Basic income" has been pilot-studied in Africa to great success.

The reasoning is very simple: If you are living hand-to-mouth with unreliable income - so unreliable that you can essentially expect "the end of the world" to come at any time - then you cannot make any future plans around earning and saving; consuming as much as possible immediately holds more value.

But if you have a government-guaranteed income, you can build plans around that - you can pursue the risky project, you can start the startup, you can go to school, etc. One anecdote I read(this was years ago) involved a woman who built up a flock of chickens from basic income. This lifted her out of poverty, since the chickens can pay for themselves with eggs in just a few months.
Extracting a 3DES key from an IBM 4758
Google's explanation of these issues is generally that they want to make sure all followed links are editorial votes of quality. I'd argue that this link counts as such with the owner basically saying "I use ad Lounge, it's great and you should too." I do grant though that Google might not agree with my interpretation of their rules. ;)

All that aside if I were the site owner I'd at least nofollow that link, or preferably remove it if it doesn't violate some TOS with the ad service just because I wouldn't want to give my advertising away for free.
I was present at the micromouse competition the first time a mouse ran diagonally down a zig-zag path. It drew audible gasps from the audience, followed by a round of applause and standing ovation.

I'm not sure, but I think it was MITEE mouse.

I had been intending to enter, but the night before I plugged in the EEPROM the wrong way round and fried it. I didn't have a spare, so that was it. I ran out of time to enter the following year, and never got back to it. I still have the mouse ... I wonder if I could ressurect it, just out of interest.

In my copious free time.
CNET co-founder announces an AppFund for iPad developers
You make good arguments, but you didn't pull them out of a briefcase and hand them to me, so I'm not convinced.
Not really much of a "Technique" -- just basic salesmanship.
Actually, detecting brain activity in an MRI requires long aquisition times. Around 30 seconds per answer at least (which is the duration used in this study AFAIK). That means that a single "yes" (imagining you're playing tennis) or "no" (imagining you're walking in your house) requires 30 seconds of sustained attention.

This patient is obviously severely brain damaged.

If you've ever seen a person recovering from brain trauma, you'll know that their ability to focus is usually minimal. Answering questions for this patient may very well have been exhausting. This means that out of the other 22 patients in the study, some may be conscious but unable to cooperate long enough for the mnesic trace to be recorded.

Regarding other signs of activity, you can't detect random activity using fMRI. I haven't read this paper so I don't know the details (I'm only familiar with previous studies done by this team), but regarding heart rate, blod presure, etc, the brain damage may prevent it from occurring too.

Since he was only able to produce yes and no ansers using a contrieved process, he was of course unable to produce any other message.

He's definitely conscious.
Correct, and in California, this is codified as a traffic law.

Unfortunately, it is almost completely unenforced. Highway patrol and local agencies instead focus on speeders -- including those doing 5 over in highway "safe zones" -- because the fines for that are much higher, and it's less defensible in court.
I have also been thinking about this. Makes me want to null-route any traffic headed for China/Russia. However, I'm much more paranoid about the ripoff Cisco equipment made by Huawei.
I'm obviously a big fan of LinkedIn, and I see them as a poster child for faceted search. I hope they take the next step and do interesting things with the skills data that is latent in their profiles. But I'm happy that they took the bold step of putting faceted search front and center--and that they're seeing great returns on that investment.
So she went linearly through the whole alphabet until he found the letter he wanted? Sounds like somebody should have used a binary search! Hey-oooo!