skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm also trying to get my head around it. But I guess the only way to learn is: Write an app myself using the available tools - and maybe create something for everyone else in the process.
I'm going to call this out as an important general principle:

Don't worry about people wondering about you.
That was so cool. Simplicity is more difficult than clutter. My wife and I moved from a large, "partially cluttered" house on the beach to a small and very tidy house in the mountains. It was not easy going from 2600 sq ft to 1150 sq ft, and after moving 12 years ago we had to make a rule of getting rid of something when we bought anything new.

It takes real energy to go through belongings and decide what to give to the Good Will or to toss.
Google Android — a Universe of Incompatible Devices
NVIDIA's Optimus is primed for new Apple MacBooks
I moved from the UK to the US in 2003, with just a couple of bags of stuff. I threw away a bunch of my possessions when I moved, and the stuff I couldn't bear to throw away, I left in storage in the UK.

On one of my trips back, I found a few big boxes full of my stuff and really couldn't remember what was in them. I'd been out of the country for a couple of years by that point, and clearly hadn't actually missed whatever was in these boxes. I threw them away without even opening them - still have no idea what they contained ;)
Actual notice has more information:
http://drupal.org/drupal-7.0-alpha2

Also, this is just a copy+paste from drupal.org.
One way I try to fight this is I bought a big cardboard box and put almost everything in it, which has doubtful usage. Stuff lingering on desks, old gadgets, etc. If I need something I take it out. Whatever is left in the box after a month I throw/give away. A few Arduino boards, accelerometers and RFID readers will soon be available to a good home.
As an entrepreneur, I found this to be very motivating. It highlights the essence of why some of us do what we do.

They guys at Grasshopper seem to be dedicated to motivate anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit to go for it.
Simple:

(time taken to close window ) x (amount of messages per day)

Compare 'Alt-F4, up arrow' with 'up arrow'.

Making the text width narrower also increases your reading speed, around 6-12 words per column is apparently the ideal width and is the basis for all newspapers, and since suck.com started it in the late 90s, the majority of websites.
The same (excellent) book has a different title in the US: "Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health", by Gary Taubes (Paperback - Sept. 23, 2008).
Free Apps I Can't Live Without
Everything you need to know about rel="shortlink"
Twitter ad platform was always coming... but hashtag ads?

Even if these are just a temporary work around I get the distinct feeling that Twitter are going for very much hyper-targeted advertising.

In lots of ways if they are this is much better than just "sticking adSense on", which so many web sites opt for. But I guess when you have the time, as Twitter do, you do it right.
Can anyone explain shortly, or point to a source describing why is the GIL actually needed? Lots of sources say "it would make GC very complicated otherwise", or "current design would need lots of changes", but I cannot find any detailed answers. The question is - why cannot python migrate to a Boehm-like GC with "stop the world" step and kill the GIL completely?

What is the biggest problem?

Update: actually the official wiki turned out to have some of the answers... http://wiki.python.org/moin/GlobalInterpreterLock - it seems that backwards compatibility (extensions, destruction timing) is the biggest problem
I don't think experimentation is passive-aggressiveness. It was a valid way to determine how often they actually use the TV to see if it was necessary.

Radical views should be backed by solid evidence of their correctness.
Principles behind a "Freemium" revenue model
But... you also don't have a juicer.
PHP compiler performance
With the release of Facebook HipHop PHP compiler, the matters of performance of PHP compilers and runtime engines gained special relevance.

This article presents a performance comparison of between different PHP compilers and runtime PHP execution engines, so we can evaluate what is the best solution that can be used in different PHP environments.
You are free to embed other systems. E.g. most companies embed a command-and-control economy into capitalism.
I wonder if httpd's Event MPM can be good enough to compete with the current crop of servers e.g. lighttpd / nginx.
Cassandra @ Twitter: An Interview with Ryan King
Tweetminer Browser Share - IE less than Safari at 13.7 percent
When It Doesn't Pay to Be Google's Guinea Pig
Am I missing something? Surely almost all the blogging sites offer this already?
I think he's saying that pornographers are doing a better job utilizing this resource than everyone else.
Hmm... Neat video, but I'm in the "I suspect sock puppets" camp.
Did Steve Jobs outburst reveal iPad's largest weakness: GPU?
Compressed sensing and single-pixel cameras (2007)
This bit caught my eye:

> [...] it [Silicon Valley] has its peculiar jokes and rhythms and closely-held shadow beliefs which owe a bit more to repetition than they owe to empirical reality

The problem is that those beliefs include a broad perception of women as less than equal. Lack of diversity is a self-perpetuating prophecy in that way.

--- Broader reply:

I also think that Patrick is severely underestimating the benefits of a diverse environment. There are reasons Silicon Valley is next to SF and not Dallas; many of them have to do with the vibrant mix of cultures there.

Personal anecdote: I've moved across the country in search, specifically, of greater diversity. I've turned down jobs because the workplace was a monoculture. And the single biggest negative for me of the space I'm currently co-working in is that it is entirely composed of white guys under 30. I may or may not be the best developer ever -- but the best programmers and businesspeople I've ever met share some of the same values. In other words a homogeneous environment will not only drive away 'diverse' people, but also may be doing the same for the best non-diverse people as well.
Hey Jason, thanks. Totally agree. I think there's also a certain value in the knowledge that the testimonials were unsolicited - just freely given to a friend in a normal conversation.
Inversion works so long as you understand what the true cost of the purchase is. And yet, if someone gave me a week off and $1000, I'd immediately be looking for plane tickets, because I love travel and I'm limited more by time than by money.
Twitter to Launch Ad Platform at SXSW
> So it is true that GUIs are untestable, but this doesn't have to be true.

I respectfully disagree. You can't codify aesthetics or usability, and even if you could, the return on investment would be abysmal.
That sort of sums up my rule. If I haven't used it in the past five years, I toss it out. It's only rarely that I come across something that I threw away earlier. Only exception to this rule is books and I doubt that'll change.
Juniper Networks launches VC Fund, is Corporate VC making a return?
We ended up getting the juicer a couple weeks ago (due to a weird coincidence, we got it for free).

It has been used once. It gets in my way every day.
Why the iPad is not for web browsing (yet)
"There are reasons Silicon Valley is next to SF and not Dallas; many of them have to do with the vibrant mix of cultures there."

Erm.

As of the census[1] of 2000, the racial makeup of Dallas was 50.8% White, 25.9% Black or African American, 0.5% Native American, 2.7% Asian, 0.1% Pacific Islander, 17.2% from other races, and 2.7% from two or more races. 35.6% of the population was Hispanic or Latino of any race. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Dallas)

In 2000 the racial makeup of the 9 County Bay Area was 58.10% white, 19.01% Asian, 0.54% Pacific Islander, 7.53% black, 0.64% Native American, 9.24% from other races, and 4.93% from two or more races. 19.39% of the population was Hispanic or Latino of any race. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area#Demograp...)
"Even" or "especially"? I'm very inexpert on this stuff, but I thought the folklore was that Apache is appropriate when you need its configurability or when most of the time spent servicing each request is spent doing real work rather than web-server overhead, and that you want things like nginx/lighttpd/... for cases when you're serving mostly static files and care about pushing them out as fast as possible. Am I way out of date?
"Choose something with meaning, even if it's expensive and difficult to acquire, rather based on domain name availability, because otherwise, you're going to kill word-of-mouth."

Absent any indication of how to acquire a domain like mint.com, this is irritating advice. Moreover, there are tons of counterexamples. I'd guess that most brand gurus would counsel against such nonsensical domain names as weebly.com or wufoo.com, but both of those companies are kicking ass. I also find it telling that 37signals has been able to build several highly successful (and essentially non-viral) web apps with such unlikely domain names as backpackit.com, basecamphq.com, and campfirenow.com. Come to think of it, 37signals.com is also an unlikely domain name for a runaway success.
Welcome to being a woman. Remember how the old ideal figure for a woman was a small waist and big hips? It turns out that being shaped that way means shopping for jeans is impossible--unless you want them to be skin-tight on your thighs and rear and so big on your waist that your underwear shows when you bend over. My hips are 37 inches. My waist is...well, Lucky jeans made for a 25 inch waist (their smallest size) are about an inch too big on my waist (and barely possible to pull up over my rear). I have a friend with a 30 inch waist and 44 inch hips. I have no idea how she finds anything that fits her.

My solution is to always wear skirts. I wear long skirts year round. In the winter, I wear leggings under them (stretchy!) for warmth. Maybe you could get a Utilikilt?

Really, though, I suggest you learn to sew. I've been sewing since I was 3 or so. If a toddler can do it, you can do it! I've started taking in my shirts that are too baggy so that they fit my waist properly.

ETA: I have noticed that yoga pants, because of their sheen + stretchiness, can pretend to be slacks for women! One lady I know has pinstriped yoga pants. Looking at her, you'd never know she was wearing comfy pants, not proper slacks.
Beijing blasts Google claims as 'groundless'
I sincerely apologize if you took this as ad hominem. I honestly didn't mean it that way.

FWIW, I've been living in the US for the past 3 years but I'm not American and neither is my wife - and our couch is far too small to sleep on (we do have an airbed though :))
This is a wonderful hack to get around the lack of a license to talk to the processor directly: use the weakness of an integrated graphics chip, where it uses main memory as a framebuffer, to bypass it seamlessly by simply writing to memory.
Fair enough. But when was the last time anyone called Dallas "vibrant"?

Maybe it's just as much about perception of diversity.

Edit to add: how about apples-to-apples comparison too, eh? You could have chosen:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco#Demographics

Or:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas%E2%80%93Fort_Worth_Metro...

Instead you chose to compare the 7 million population Bay Area to the 1.1 million population city of Dallas.

Second edit: I'd like to retract the 'fair enough' since it wasn't actually a fair comparison. ;)
"Aesthetics" or "usability" as a whole? Sure, of course not. No more than you can codify "works correctly" as a whole.

Codify huge swathes of it, though? Absolutely. Assert that correct fonts and font sizes are used. Assert that color schemes are correctly followed, or that certain widgets always have attached desirable behaviors, assert that all widgets have keyboard shortcuts, assert that those keyboard shortcuts are coherent (CTRL-F is not assigned to three actions), assert that using the keyboard shortcut has the same behavior as whatever it is the shortcut to, assert that automated validation of appropriate accessibility guidelines hold (ie, for web interfaces assert that a Bobby run over your interface holds no surprises), and so on.

Sure, you can't "automate usability" but if you just give up at that point you'll miss out on a lot of things you can automate... or could automate if GUIs let you, getting back to my original point.
The Fallacy of Channels: Startups Beware
Yeah, given that he stayed out until things collapsed, then swooped in and bought at the bottom, I think it's pretty hard to tag him with "involved in the collapse".
Based on Fig. 1 and the text describing it, the study seems to conclude that imperative programming is unlike anything students have seen before.

"all had enough school mathematics to make the equality sign familiar."

Sure, but = in imperative code is nothing like = in math. It's hardly surprising that it is confusing.
Case closed: why most of USA lacks 100Mbps 'Net connections
I've yet to notice anything and I'm pretty old, but I also look much younger than I am, so I'm probably not a good data point. I think attitude plays a huge role here. I don't act like I know it all or have nothing to learn because I'm relatively new to development (officially), having done QA before that. If you're curious and willing to learn, it's unlikely that you'll written off as inflexible and closed minded. (AKA, "age is a state of mind.")

Regarding the article, I wish it had some actual empirical evidence to back its claims.
Shortest version. Francis Bacon was right, "Truth comes out of error more readily than out of confusion."

Short version, they gave non-programmers a test before they had learned anything. They found that people could be divided into those whose answers showed a consistent mental model, and those whose mental models from problem to problem were inconsistent. A followup administration of the same test partway in the course showed that the consistent/inconsistent description was stable, but consistent people's mental models improved. The distribution of scores for the final exam for the two groups looked like normal distributions with very different averages - most inconsistent thinkers failed while the consistent ones did ok.

When analyzed in more detail the final exam scores for the consistent thinkers had a bimodal distribution as well. However the test provided offered insight as to how to distinguish the average consistent thinkers (averaging 60% on the final) with the high scoring ones (averaging 85%). The sample sizes are small enough that I would not put too much weight on that observation though.

Amusingly people in the social sciences that they showed the results of the initial test to predicted that students who formed inconsistent mental models would do better because they tried to form the right model for each question. The cynical part of me says that they would have approached the test that way, and assumed that people like themselves would do better.
Venture Region Survey (Using Urtak)
I really enjoyed this. To me, the crux is here:

> My beef with the discourse of “diversity” in a nutshell: it screams “give us more women” and whispers “give us more women like us”.

The real lack of diversity in startupland doesn't seem to me to be in chromosomes or melanin, but in experience and target markets. Everyone's building general-purpose to-do lists and twitter clients instead of researching and finding underserved markets.
The link points to an entry in the comment section. Is this intentional?
This is possible by adjusting software settings. I noticed a huge difference when I changed the colour temperature of my monitor from 9300 K to 5000 K. It made everything look "warmer," as you describe.

In addition to generally feeling less eye strain, my eyes no longer tear up and hurt after a number of hours, and I don't have trouble sleeping after using my computer at night.
Confusion turned out to be irrelevant. Consistent confusion mattered a lot.
That's not unlikely. Perception may be as good as reality, if you're figuring out where people will relocate too.
That's a good way to see if the language actually helps you do things easier, too!
There's a rationalization used by underemployed startup workers that goes something like, "you're going to lose your BigCo job anyways, so the startup isn't that much riskier".

It isn't valid.

When a startup fails, you are very likely to be broke. The only thing you've added to your resume is a company nobody has heard of. You've been working and networking with people who are going to stay in startups. It's also harder to leave a startup preemptively, because all startups look risky all the time.

When you leave a BigCo job, you are very likely to have a nest egg, because they paid you consistently and generously and you were able to tune your standard of living. You've been working and networking with people who then diffused through a variety of other BigCo's in your area. Everybody you interview with knows the company you worked for. And if layoffs are coming, you saw them coming at least 6 months ago.

The risks involved in startups aren't comparable to the risks of a BigCo career. That's why most people in our industry work for BigCo's, profitably, for the entirety of their careers.

Also, speaking as a long-term veteran of startups: career stagnation and unrecognized toil are the standard everywhere.
Not to scare you but we've turned people away (not me personally, my company) who have stayed at the same position at the same company for the past 20 years without advancing to a more senior position. That doesn't mean they're management, but more that their company didn't feel their input was relevant and they didn't have the drive to find another place where it was. My current co-worker is in his 50's and still doing what he loves but he's been exposed to a ton of different areas and has the resume to prove it (embedded, game, DB, web, you name it.)
If you're going to go down this road (I hope to as well) make sure that your experiences are broad, the skills you picked up measurable, and the work performed varied. If not, companies like the one I'm part of will lump you into the "not motivated" category. I've seen the ageism and it's very real.
China launches strict new Internet controls
Do you have a demo running anywhere?
Of course, in this case Twain is guilty of statistics. The group of people most likely to die (old, infirm, sick) are more likely to be in a bed than on a train. And the people in New York beds spend a significant fraction of the year there, while the people on the train are only there for only a few hours or days. If Twain made an honest comparison of deaths per hour across similar demographic groups, the bed would look a lot better than the train.
Beautiful Emotional Photo Manipulations
Amazing and beautiful Photo manipulations revolving around female emotions.
Then it would be better run as a service like Google Ajax API.
Nutty:

"China's technology ministry moved to tighten controls on Internet use Tuesday, saying individuals who want to operate Web sites must first meet in person with regulators."
Ubuntu 10.04 to include a built-in mp3 store
About 6 weeks ago, I had to pack up all the stuff in my Manhattan apartment and stick it into storage to tend to a family emergency. In 6 weeks I dont think I've missed anything except for a few books.
Why will his estate not be taxed? Because he's going to give most of it away before he dies? That makes him some kind of tax cheat?

The estate tax doesn't even kick in unless the inheritance is over something like 2 million dollars. That is one "anti tax" issue that I seriously don't understand. Seems like that should be literally the last tax that gets cut, why not cut the income tax if we're cutting taxes?
I think SAT and travelling salesman are the wrong analogies, because solving both optimally can involve lots of backtracking.

Forgive me if I'm not understanding what you're getting at here. (I haven't read the paper). But, on first blush, it appears that 3-SAT is not mentioned for the purpose of analogy, but rather for use as a standard "reduction" (in the parlance of NP-Completeness proofs), in which case reducing to any NP-Complete problem is as good as reducing to any other. They're typically only chosen by whether they are amenable to some poly-time transformation, aren't they?

It's been a long time since I've had my course in this, so caveat emptor.
If the older programmers are discriminated against, why is it that almost any job posting I see has minimum 10 years experience as a requirement?
Explaining IE 6's CSS Failures with a Photo
How to Hack Rapidshare Premium Account Password
Ok, how about this phrasing,

"If you're a scholar from Hoover, you'll write dozens of articles a year castigating government involvement in the marketplace as a general idea, while never, ever, once writing anything that praises government action [unless maybe if it was government action by a republican]"
There is a lot of money in connecting horny men with women with webcams.
Here is an article linked from the above text:

http://dsp.rice.edu/cscamera

That shows how the single pixel camera works, it is sensing with only a single element, but it make many sequential (randomized) scans to form the image.

Just like the drum scanners of old, only non-linear.
How to Get Rich Part 1a
Functional Programming with Python – Part 1
Did not work for me. Took 10+ minutes to load the People tab. Then showed only 1 contact. I had emailed this contact last year to sell something.
Creating a Web App from Scratch
You are right of course, but nobody said that GUIs weren't testable. Just that some bugs cannot be expressed as tests.
Actually the market will force him to do something. that's capitalism. You don't just charge whatever you want without regards to market forces.
The Gruber 10: Apple's Top Issues (video)
I wish I had some kind of glasses like that a decade ago, when my monitor was a small crappy CRT. That thing was painful to use, in the proper sense.

Nowadays, I don't care that much, the currently available LCDs are pretty good.
Agreed. Unless you're in a state of flow that would be disrupted by 20 seconds of staring into space. This probably isn't always the case—when I'm working, I sometimes look out and think—but much of the time it probably is.
If you provide something that will automatically split my long tweet in to multiple tweets then it could be useful.
Like? No. Understand and be able to use, because it makes a lot more sense to a lot of the people on this Earth? Yes.
Is there anything beside intuition that makes you think this would help anything? It seems plausible to me too, but I have zero evidence that it would help anyone's eyes.
Benoit Mandelbrot did some interesting stuff in this direction. (Sorry, can't remember more details at the moment.)
Hi - I see you're talking about links, would you like some solid gold cuff-links? Click <here>.
Yes, the tests are the interesting part. I especially liked the way they did some of the testing before the teaching started, and it still showed useful results.

Maybe there's hope? (see the recent discussion on interviewing programmers)
I'm a freelancer web developer who recently had to cut loose a client of mine. It was fantastically awesome and I recommend it to any one who has a particular client or customer who creates more hassle than the revenue they generate is worth.

I wasn't a total jackass when I did it. I was very polite and suggested they find someone else to meet their needs but I was clear in stressing that I was no longer interested in going forward with them.

There weren't any hard feelings on their end and I got a lot of peace of mind when it was over and done with. I wish I had done it, quite literally, years ago.
Sure it is. It uses a common trope; the omission of the repetition of a verb in a pair of yoked clauses is called "zeugma".