skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author has a problem with this comic:

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/abstraction.png

Before anyone reads this blog post, let me quote you a gem in response to some xkcd text, "An x64 processor is screaming along at millions of cycles per second".

He responds thusly:

"There is no 'x64 processor;' though the 'x64' moniker is a generic term for Intel x86-compatible CPUs with the EMT64 or AMD64 extensions..."

Really? Sounds, from your comment, that there is. Colloquially, almost everyone that I know of who talks about this stuff says x64 when they mean 64 bit. This is language for you and it's not incorrect, it just is. It's the same as how people will say "roller blades" when they mean "inline skates."

As others have said, this is really just xkcd hating for hatings sake. The author even admits that some of his quibbles are debatable.
One of the reasons why I enjoy reading HN is exactly because of those capitalistic comment/posts. I haven't really found the same combination of business/programming community elsewhere.

Plus, reading HN is easy on the eyes.
"NASA has managed to write bug free code at a rate of about $1000/line. If you'd prefer to work that way, we can."

The simple fact is that it's cheaper to get it approximately right and fix bugs as they come up then to guarantee no bugs in the beginning.
I don't need this device to tell me that standby devices waste power. Just install some power strips and turn it off completely.

I don't see much other use for a device like this if you've already eliminated standby devices. Sure, it can tell you that your fridge is wasting alot of electricity, but that's what the energy labels are for (A++ etc)
Can you trust Chinese computer equipment?
Rising College Costs: A Federal Role?
p.s. We're looking into integrating 80legs with Lucene/Nutch/Solr for indexing goodness.
"real-time" ish. I like the way they switch a light off, then stare at the iPhone for a few seconds to tell them it's gone dark. ;)

Joking aside, I didn't know meters had "LED ports on them(IR?) and assumed these sorts of devices would have to be complex and measure current somehow.

It's another place where I think "great, but I don't want it streaming to the cloud, can't I host it myself?". Follow up thought: I'll be much more willing to host things myself for internal use when SSDs are common enough to mean small computers can be completely silent.
My issue is more with people who like xkcd and the subculture surrounding it. I feel like that's really what the author is saying.

It's hard to deal with your world being infiltrated by newbies who act like they know everything.
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Never been a fan of polyphasic sleep. The consequences, e.g. complete disconnect with diurnal society, not to mention side effects yet to be understood, seem pretty grave. Even Buckminster Fuller gave it up due to his wife's objections (or so the story goes).

In the end, you're not a robot with tunable duty cycle. You do your body a disservice treating it like that.
Mystery Debris Pattern Could Be First Image of Asteroid Collision
Has the idea ever been tossed around for a personal blacklist? If you really just hate http://some_tech_site.com/blog , and can't bring yourself to ignore it, you would be able to add it to your blacklist under your profile settings, and then any links from that domain will not show up on the front page when signed in.

EDIT: Also, regex pattern matching on the title would be kinda nice too.

/ipad/i

/\d+ (Things|Reasons) You Need (.*)/
Too Many Opinions On The Internet
The Cloud Mirror: Uncomfortably augmented reality
As the article points out, and I'll highlight here, right now it's Kwedit in exchange for virtual property. That's unlikely to crash the economy no matter how large it gets, if we don't start extracting second-order derivatives from it. If you can start taking out mortgages by putting up Kwedit as your collateral or somehow start involving real assets, then yeah I think this is a recipe for more trouble.

Oh, and connecting a story from a few weeks back where the spelled-with-a-C credit agencies want to start using social networking to gather credit rating info, Kwedit is credit rating info on a silver platter. How long will it take for failing to pay your Kwedit to show up on your credit report?

It's an odd thing where it only mostly works if they don't extend it at all, but the pressure to extend will be enormous.
For this particular device it would mean that they would loose their monthly subscription (as I don't think people would accept to pay a monthly fee for a clientside app). This is their business model.
I have tested the currentcost and it's a different thing in some ways -- WattVision has the distinct advantage of not requiring you to open the electrical box, for one, but also doesn't have a display (yet). CurrentCost is all about the monitor, similar to Owl. I think everyone is working towards some sort of online feed; TED 5000 has one that hooks to Google PowerMeter, but WattVision is a somewhat simpler and more extensible design IMHO. Honestly, I like them all -- monitoring electricity has helped me identify innumerable little ways to use less; the big picture is that I now use about 1/2 the electricity I did a few years ago.
That's nothing. There is a huge passage in II Kings 19 which is a verbatim copy of Isaiah 36-38:

II Kings 19:
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Kings%2018-2...;

Isaiah 36-38:
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah%2036-38:8...;
A Collection of WordPress theme frameworks
I was thinking the same thing, but I'd be willing to be they thought of that.

Likely it has more to do with the types of tasks they're doing. If you think about facebook and how it's used, it's mostly a lot of little bits of data. An awful lot of little bits of data. Sure there are lots of images - but ignoring the image data its self (that's only really useful to end users) it's still just a bit of data, owner, dates and users tagged.

What they have to do is crawl a lot of social graphs to update users with a small bit of data, the things their friends are doing. Locality of reference is a good thing, but probably very hard with the type of operations they're performing.
It sounds like he also found the job on Craigslist. I've found that most of the jobs on Craigslist are wishful thinking... must have 10+ years of CSS/JS/HTML5/J2EE/C/C+/C++ - salary is $15/hr.
Consider the life-time revenue and cost of the Xbox project starting before 2001. And don't forget that $1 billion written off for RRoD warranty repairs. Over this last decade, Xbox is still in a pretty deep hole, and even optimistic earnings mean it will take awhile before breaking even.
I'm intrigued about how to deal with the, hum... logistics issues that arise from being 4 days in line.
Take responsibility for UX
I'm a total Common Lisp whore but my code's still pretty procedural and loopy (although not bracey). I use iteration far more than recursion. Like someone else already mentioned the excellent ITER and LOOP macros take care of that.

Dunno what all this says about me though :-)
8e6 R3000
"made" $375 million? Is that profit or revenue? One is very good, the other... not so much without a clear view of expenses.
Sorry to nitpick, but it's usually a good idea to link your header logo to your homepage. It's something that a lot of people expect - even if you have a tab that says "Home". Just a small usability thing.
In my opinion, bugs are identified after mistakes are made.

Mistakes are items that are not clearly defined as a requirement to the client and use cases identified. If your code passes the documented requirement and use cases supplied, then it is a mistake. Further requirements analysis should have been conducted by the client. Mistakes happen as the set of requirements and use cases become very interrelated to make a complex solution.

A bug would be not thoroughly testing the code to pass all identified requirements and use cases.

The dilemma I have previously run into is the balance between client happiness and my own. If you endlessly do free work for the client, they may come to expect it. If you do not, future work may be lost. My opinion would be to go over requirement docs and statements of work with a fine tooth comb, line-by-line. Any holes, plug them. Any questions, clarify them. Make sure the client knows which party owns which set of risks. You should not take 100% of the risk when maybe the client can spend more time identify requirements.
I think this is a reasonable request. I set up my RSS feed to publish to my @zburt twitter account, thanks to the nifty twitterfeed.com service.
In the UK you can get this from your supplier. They send you out a little unit that shows your current usage, cost etc etc.
Barring the complaints about syntax and the assumptions made in the article, I would still say the one reason someone should learn LISP is that most likely one will have an entire career of writing logic the "other way", I am not disparaging the "other way", just stating that it is far more prevalent and if you are learning something for personal growth LISP will give you a more diverse perspective than using a language that is an evolution of the "other way".
I wonder how far you could extend the analogy. If distance = $ and force = effort, what startup attribute corresponds to mass?

Maybe difficulty of the problem, or level of competition.
Agreed. Its much easier to ask for $100 with a track record at $50, a reference, etc. Then ask for more as demand dictates. The ideal situation is to build your demand and clientele to the point that you get $200+ for the most demanding work that requires the least time.
And the box never gets heavier.
I don't suppose it has occurred to anyone here that the reason certain passages appear twice is because they merited repeating? The Bible is meant to be read by people, and people often times take a while for a message to sink in once they're exposed to it. So it is worth including more important points several times to make them harder to miss. In rhetoric and writing, such repetition is not only taught but considered necessary for good speeches and writings.
I do wish more IDEs would integrate JSLint. I even put it into my iPhone PHP IDE Mides.
Poll: Are HN users interested in sports analytics?
See lhuang's comment on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1100486
yes, but not on HN please
It's a bit of both of course, but I'd say mostly the latter.

As you point out, Youtube can make Flash apps that don't kill your cpu, and so can I and many other people. But there's a ton of developers out there for whom Flash is just too flexible.

There's been a big backlash recently against Flash, mostly I feel by people who have never actually done any Flash work. Having done plenty of it myself, here's my opinion - for what it's worth: If we ever manage to get rid of Flash, it will be because browsers finally catch up and do all of the things that Flash does, with the same amount of flexibility. That will be good, because the standards and most of the implementations will be open. But it won't fix the problem of spinning fans. The same bad developers who are currently making your fans spin with Flash will just move on and do the exact same things in javascript.
Good question -- I am. I created a poll here to see if other are as well:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1101191
Unfortunately, there's the small matter of them requiring orders of magnitude more energy than exists in the universe.

Link to the Alcubierre Drive - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
Taking apart the federal budget
Or, "why a literal interpretation of a poetic notion is a killjoy, by example".

His complaint is that the comic's expression of the anthropomorphizing of the machine (which leads to the author's amusement about the vast complexity required to achieve the inane) is fallacious. Eh. I don't require intellectual rigor from the funnies.
If your meter looks like a spinning disk, you're out of luck—for now.

I have read where a fellow used an LED and a photodetector to watch his spinning disc and measure how long it takes to go around. Sadly I can't find the web page anymore. Still, it is possible.
The Briefcase Technique -- to earn tens of thousands of dollars in interviews
Cool little technique I've used in interviews to earn tens of thousands of dollars over the last few years. Thought you guys might like it.
This is actually a rather big deal. He's not the first oil CEO to say it, but probably the most important one at least for US imports, etc.
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Oh, come off it. Have walks in the park. Check out a few museums in your area. Things like that. Try to enjoy life.

What I'm getting to, XKCD isn't meant to be taken seriously. There are a lots of things in life that shouldn't be taken seriously. Silly webcomics are one example. Try to relax a little bit.
They haven't had time to fossilize. Give them a few years. All corporations expand to the point where they require cover sheets on TPS reports. That's inevitable.
> If one VP came up with a use for it, the other VPs would sabotage the project, so they could use it someday.

Disgusting, and telling of how un-savvy those VPs were. Within an organization, it's not very difficult to put a traffic or QoS cap on one department if the other departments were afraid of being shut out. A company that has VPs that think their one department in deserving of exclusive control of a corporate resource deserves to fail just like MS is.
There are myriad ASP.NET based websites that rank well. Look at the markup on Guthrie's or Hanselman's blog. Both have WebForms artifacts like ViewState, __doPostBack, and generated IDs, but rank well.

WebForms definitely encourages sloppy markup, which I'm no fan of, but that clearly isn't the only issue Justin's having.
Who said i didn't like nifty tricks.

As someone who can proudly admit to loving PHP (she makes me $) im fairly interested in HipHop. I've been thinking about this problem in PHP for some time, and was this || close to doing exactly what facebook has done.

The ability to write PHP and have it transformed down to C++ and compiled is pretty sweet. Its PHP with out the PHP. Sure its brand-spanking-new so we all need to watch and see whats to come. I mean; code is still not released.
it wasn't meant to be a literary masterpiece. it was meant to complain about a bunch of know-nothing pseudonerds who use xkcd as an identifier for their cool kids' club

i also think you missed the point about my "apple products" comment, but that's cool. you missed the rest of the points, too
If the math is interesting, certainly. It's all about using knowledge to one's competitive advantage.
Noting the amount of hype he's seen lately about the new runtime, Lerdorf wrote, "I'd love to see those same people get excited about basic profiling and identifying the most costly areas of an application. Speeding up one of the faster parts of your system isn't going to give you anywhere near as much of a benefit as speeding up, or eliminating, one of the slower parts of your overall system.

Good advice, and one that I've been guilty of myself. Often I find myself spending an inordinate amount of time on the fixes and enhancements that are unlikely to yield a huge improvement, instead of focusing on larger issues, because they're harder or just because everyone is talking about the new shiny tool.

Not to take the analogy too far, but I think a lot of entrepreneurs do this in a business sense as well, focusing efforts on the new shiny things (Facebook, Twitter) instead of the more boring, but proven tools (phone, email). The bottom line is that you should be strategic in where you spend your time, instead of chasing whatever the cool kids are talking about.
Heh, I would actually put that in reverse. I'm pretty comfortable with polyamory, but I don't buy into polyphasic sleep for a minute, and the idea that he married a telephone psychic (and takes her profession seriously!) is what put him into question for me.
I like that it is written in Gambit-C Scheme, which has been one of my weapons of choice when I want to code in a high level language and produce small, fast, standalone executables. As of last year, Marc made it very easy to compile and link executables, and portable across OS X, Windows, Linux (just do a rebuild on each platform). Recommended!
For those interested in sports analytics, specifically NFL, but really any sport feel free to email me. Contact info in my user profile.

I'm working on an interesting project in this space and would love to talk to more data-oriented sports fans.

gmail me at burntreedown@...
one can greatly increase their income with other strategies

Of course those "other strategies" have a different risk profile. You might be right about not considering income, but then you should also ignore risks. All of them.

If I were in the same position, I would go for it ... or something vaguely similar (like, say, Kwajalein radar support). But then, I never was a party animal.
Is the problem “jealousy and feudalism” in general, or is the problem efforts by the leaders of the Windows and Office units to preserve their turf in particular?
It's also a non-goal. I used to work there. It was hard to see stuff ship since researchers seemed incentivized on some value of 'prominence' (research community and MS-internal).

Even in the cases where they productize it - the Program Manager on the product team is not going to get a bonus by taking on some new project in MSR in addition to the commitments filed last year.

So researchers get on just fine without slaying dragons to ship. More cool papers to publish anyway.
Unfortunately, the book is not available but only a few pages from each chapter. Too bad, it looked interesting...
Rasmus made a bunch of reasonable comments and the Times article cut and spliced them to try to stir up some noise.

i.e., he described the project as a "nifty trick", not "just a nifty trick", which is an important distinction.

Also, he advocates -- shock -- tuning your PHP code before turning to tools like this.

...Somehow, that turned into him asking if it was "just a nifty trick".

This should probably be flagged, it's nonsense.
The article repeatedly contrasts Bowles with Friedman, but Friedman also supported a 'Negative Income Tax':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
An Introduction to the C Programming Language and Software Design
Can someone explain why chi-square analysis would even be a useful thing to perform on this string?
Skype on iPhone may signal end of voice plans
Well, I can personally attest to polyphasic sleep working. My friend and coworker does it -- three hours at night and three naps. He's still sane-ish.
Bill Gates Knows What You Did Last Summer
Copyright-Safe Full-Text Indexing of Books
"I am going to fucking kill Google" it's been their mantra for the last ten years (since ballmer got the CEO spot).

They don't innovate, they just embrace and derail, extend and delay, patent and extinguish, copy and destroy.

Great company solely focused on money, at the cost of fucking up everybody else, and killing progress for their own benefit, when the rest of the world is focused on progress, and money.

Ballmer must go, and that destructive mentality must change.
Microsoft's entertainment group's revenue was 2.9 billion.
very interesting and also very well told.
Tell HN: major and very subtle possible problem with mod_rewrite
What's wrong with this picture:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteMap lc int:tolower
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} [A-Z]
RewriteRule (.*) ${lc:$1}

At first sight, absolutely nothing.

But if you play around with it on a live server you'll find out that the 'rewritten' urls do not stay inside the document root, but can escape the 'sandbox' and roam all over your filesystem.

So a URI of /ETC/passwd would suddenly map to your password file instead of giving a 404.

The fix is to always prefix the rewrite rule with the documentroot. I never knew this until it bit me today, hopefully it saves someone else the trouble of finding out the hard way.

Mod_rewrite is like a very sharp knife, it's great to work with right up until the moment you cut yourself.

What bugs me is why the default is not to stay inside the document root, and only to 'escape' when told to do so explicitly.
The Psalms are a collection of songs/poems collected orally at several geographic regions in Israel. Most scholars recognize in the neighborhood of five different independent sections.

Thus it should not come as any surprise that a given psalm appears twice with some differences--it was recorded as it was known in two different regions.
Well, define your criteria for success.

Xbox is successful in that it has a large mind-share in the hard-core gamer community, but financially the project is still a failure. Had Microsoft decided not to begin the Xbox project 10+ years ago, it would easily have a few more $billion in the bank today.

Contrast that with the Wii, which, along with the DS, has added billions of dollars in profit to Nintendo's coffers over the past few years alone.

Now that Xbox has established itself, the next decade will show whether or not the system is net-profitable, or whether the project never should have started to begin with.
Exactly. I had a BBC Micro with Basic, Pascal and a wordprocessor (Wordwise) in ROM. It booted in a second and gave you immediate access to all the software in ROM.

First time I used a PC, it had no HD, so you had to boot DOS from a disc and then whatever software you wanted from another disc. And everything was green. Why anyone would want to use one was beyond me.
Robot Mice Solve Mazes With Blazing Speed (Video)
I thought this would be about the duplicate passage that constitutes 2 Kings 18:13 - 20:11 and Isaiah 36 - 38:8, although of course for that passage neither occurrence is marked off as an exact "chapter" in the much later numbering scheme for the Bible.

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Kings%2018-2...;

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah%2036-38:8...;
The curve doesn't even look exponential since it seems to become infinite at finite time, more like 1/(T-t).
That's awesome, I remember when you guys first went live (err, it may have been a closed beta, but I remember your initial announcement), and it seemed like a real niche. Glad to see that it's turning out so well thus far, and I hope things keep working out for you.
Off-Topic: Can you do a fexl vs gambit scheme comparison? I am interested in the interleaving of functional programming and C
In my opinion a "bug" is when you complete the project based on the client's requirements/spec and a piece does not work as intended. On the other hand, a "mistake" is when you miss or do something not defined in the client's requirements/spec that causes the application/site to function contrary to the client's wishes.

Based on these definitions, the charge for a "bug" is covered by the client, while a "mistake" would be absorbed by you.

There is one disclaimer here, mistakes can results in bugs. If you were unaware of this issue at the onset then you are partly responsible for the bug in a sense. In this case you may choose to offset some of the cost for fixing the issue.

The key to determining where "bugs" and "mistakes" fall is in having a clear requirement/spec document ahead of time. Each party should understand where their responsibility lies and who assumes the risk.
BTW, I wrote an article for DevX last year on Gambit-C (pardon the self-plug): http://www.devx.com/opensource/Article/42778/1763/