skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Little disappointed so many commenters seemed to miss that. I thought that paragraph was the entire lesson, with the preceding material there so this point would sink in.

Since I'm interested in information design (especially right now) I was quite disappointed with the graph he ultimately produced. I'm hoping someone with a bit more time than me takes up his challenge and goes back to correct some of his mistakes (in both analysis and storytelling). I'd rather like to do it myself but I doubt that's going to happen anytime soon.

Ultimately, a compelling story about how we as humans require stories for understanding, and how important it is to verify the stories that we choose to believe.
Life imitates art. Has anyone else read The Unincorporated Man by Dani and Eytan Kollin?

"A brilliant industrialist named Justin Cord awakes from a 300-year cryonic suspension into a world that has accepted an extreme form of market capitalism. It's a world in which humans themselves have become incorporated and most people no longer own a majority of themselves."
Why reinvent the wheel? You can get 3 summaries a month from Soundview for $8.25 per month. http://www.summary.com/subscriptions/_/Online-Subscription/?...
Pieces of information should be known for what they are

However, to be able to get to them, you will always need a unique identifier for each piece of information. I have a file named 'expenses-2010-03.ods' on my machine. I can imagine a 'file system' where this piece of data doesn't have a filename, but where it has a set of tags (or whatever other name you would like to give to the pieces of meta-information identifying the piece of information). I'll type, say, or think 'expenses' and then 'select' '2010'. Then I need to be given the choice between 'january', 'february' and 'march'. Is that much of an improvement? There is no indication that, in the foreseeable future, machines will be able to automatically provide correct meta-information. Is tagging them really less tedious than coming up with proper filenames?

If I may hazard a guess, I think that in your heated argument, you are defending your position with vague ideas of futuristic sounding things that may come. However, without concreteness, you can defend your idea against anything by hiding in the vagueness. This 'person' is trying to drag you back to earth by stating a simple fact: to be able to get to information, you need to be able to identify it. You can only do that by a unique set of computer encoded units of meta-information.
tup looks very cool, but I don't see how to fetch the source.
More details here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03...

All apps using a technology called PlaceEngine to estimate location via wifi signals have been banned. Supposedly there's a statement on PlaceEngine's Japanese site (http://www.koozyt.com/?lang=ja) saying that Apple changed their policy regarding the way apps access Wi-Fi devices. I don't read Japanese, so I can't verify what it says. Does anything care to translate?
"The NYC Startup Job Fair will bring students, young alumni and startups together to help place bright motivated individuals in exciting New York based companies."

Emphasis on "young".
this seems to work:
git clone git://gittup.org/tup.git
"[0012]The inventor and the assignee of this patent have no intention of applying the techniques described herein offensively but instead intend to use the patent defensively to discourage patent trolls and the like from extortionist practices."

Whew, that could have been bad.
I think it would be useful if you put the year [2000] in brackets after the title. For some reason I read the e-mail thinking it was contemporary!
You didn't name but tag that file:
- "2008" - all files from/related to year 2008
- "tax" - all documents related to tax
- "return" - all documents related to "return"

Now, your file should be in the intersection of those tag- sets.

I quoted about the nipple, it's a well know quote, but the insight in nipples is always worth recording, kids are coming. :D
If you going to have public funded education, make it a voucher system where the parents are allowed to send their children anywhere. Make the barrier to entry low, I could imagine 2 or 3 teachers starting a 2 room school house where they teach the curriculum they decide on.

Then parents and students can choose what type of environment they want.
I enjoying working with others. The issue I face is many people might "like" an idea, but so few are willing to commit to it. So I am currently working on my own just out of shear tenacity.

I'm almost of the opinion to work on a startup with someone you have to come up with an idea with thatperson/those people.
I think it's worth saying that it's not just that gifted people don't need to learn study skills to get through school. They can be actively prevented from learning them by being forced to focus on a curriculum for which they don't need them. Denying gifted people the opportunity to take on real challenges while they are still at school when their mistakes are not too critical, which happens all too often, is worse than not recognizing their gifts, it is actively denying them the opportunity that others are given.
Rule 0. Bring a gun and friends.

A friend of mine shared a bit of wisdom with me:

"In a knife fight, everyone bleeds."

I wonder how that could be applied to this metaphor.
North Korea Linux Distro
Whew. I got really upset when I heard another group that has my same idea was contacted by you and I wasnt. Thanks for clarifying.
Does the LG Prada (or any other phone prior to the iPhone) contain any of the things that Apple has patented?
Edit the title to include the year (2000) ?

-----

The overall point is solid. Many times, the "gifted" have sufficient brain capacity to be able to track or process fairly complex problems. As such, they see no need for the sort of support structures and habits others use to solve the same problems. Therefore, they don't develop those things in the "natural" way, piece by piece. Instead, they finally run up against a problem too big for their brain, and have to develop those habits all of a sudden.

For some people, that's an obstacle they never overcome. For others, once they realize the problem, they're quick to get advice, research solutions, and develop those structures. I hope this letter served its purpose by giving Linus the motivation and information he needed to overcome the curse of the gifted.
I love to discuss about how to setup affiliate type program for local business. One of the problem is payment tracking. I am trying to come up a solution. Love to talk about it...
Thank you for your kind words. You are most welcome to quote me.
More commentary and background at http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Torvalds/kernel_in_pain.s...
"Your tendency to undervalue modularization and code-sharing is one symptom [of the curse]. Another is your refusal to use systematic version-control or release-engineering practices. To you, these things seem mostly like overhead and a way of needlessly complicating your life."

I'd say he came around on version control with git - five+ years later.
your absurd "there would be no touch without Apple" stance

Who are you quoting?
I believe he is talking about large scale, generalized p2p and finally merging the web app benefits with supercomputer's power of our desktops, coordinating power across the net, and having information "fly around" in cyberspace.

sexy.
I liked it too, but it was still bait-and-switch. Boo to you.
There were ancient versions of the free Opera.app buried inside the app bundles for several programs in the Adobe Suite at least through CS3. If I remember correctly, both Help Viewer and Bridge wrap Opera. They hid it from the user, but not from LaunchServices -- right click on an html file, open with, and there would be at least one copy of Opera there. Launching it would reveal it to be from back when the free version had a banner ad in the browser chrome...

Acrobat Professional had a full copy of MySQL included in its bundle, and there'd be a mysqld process running whenever it was.

When they switch to WebKit, they'll probably bundle their whole own copy of that too, probably via their Air runtime.
They could, but that could, perhaps, increase the OEM license prices for that manufacturer.

Microsoft doesn't take being cut out lightly.
The Toyota Production system that led into Lean manufacturing and more recently Lean thinking in software provides a strong counter example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System
Torvalds sort of addresses the issue, http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0008.2/0241.h...

"On the whole, people tend to _want_ to share, because it ends up being the
easier "quick hack" in many cases. So I'm not worried about that part
overmuch. I'm worried about people who share even when it doesn't make
sense. And I'm worried about people having bad interfaces, which makes
even sensible sharing end up as a experiment in horror.

That's why I'm so un-interested in the "let's share" argument. I don't
think that is where the problems are. "
The author uses the timing of Google's patent filings and published papers to imply that Google would not have published the papers without patent protection. I think the timing of the events does not provide enough information to determine what Google would have done without the patents. Google might have freely published the papers in a world with no software patents.
I'd like to see Ubuntu taking a really radical approach and giving the user a choice of more non-traditional desktop options such as these custom desktops, courtesy of lifehacker:

http://lifehacker.com/5043712/roll-your-own-lightning-at-sun...

http://lifehacker.com/5087956/customize-your-own-killer-enig...

UI looks set to change radically over the next few years, it would be cool if they looked at the multitouch route:

http://gizmodo.com/5457472/how-the-apple-tablet-interface-co...

It can't exactly hurt Ubuntu's market share to really look at exploring the possibilities (sorry couldn't resist). Apple (naturally) and even Microsoft are really upping their game on the UI front and there's the danger of Ubuntu being left even further behind.
XML3D - Raytraced Venice in Wikipedia [youtube]
Achievement Design 101
That's actually quite a brilliant hack. I wonder, has it ever been done?

X launches a patent-trolling suit to try to get in on Y's patent. These guys launch a countersuit at X for using their patented technique, stalling the original suit. The best part is, the evidence for the countersuit is already known to the court...
YouTube begins auto-captioning for videos
Gary Flake: is Pivot a turning point for web exploration?
Fired 'Call of Duty' developers sue Activision for more than $36 million
To cut down the volume of applications, YC should charge an application fee, like most colleges. That will quickly filter out the crap. An app fee is not evil. Id pay $25 or so to guarantee honest, thoughtful consideration by the YC 4.
That is a good point you are making.

However (this might be a personal opinion only) this system is just an optimized way to look at an assembly line. What I mean is that it is very well applicable when applied to develop projects that consist of large numbers of relatively similar actions (action being writing code in the case of software development) but it is less applicable in one-off projects like delivering a building or a space station.

On the other hand I might just be missing the essence.
A trivial tangent: oddly enough I find that, whether I'm programming for distributed applications or animations, it is the number theory, and not (surprisingly) the linear algebra, that I am most grateful for having learned. Boutade's Law: do not underestimate the algorithmic utility of knowing your way around the integers.
I once read/heard an argument against the patent system in that the patent system didn't really help disclose secret inventions.

What it does is shift the focus of inventions from the highly secretive kind to inventions whom inter-working would be rapidly discovered anyway.

Something to think about.

(BTW, everyone should read Against Intellectual Monopoly at http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfi...)
Last I checked, Google owned Doubleclick, and they are in the ad business and want to get more page views and clicks on ads. So, it's kind of hypocritical of a Google engineer to say something like this.

And what's wrong with link exchanges, anyway? Let's say I do Model Railroading, and I want some traffic. So, I join a "web ring" of other model railroader websites. Now my page rank goes down? Screw you, Google!

This also seems like a Blackhatter's dream. Got competition with your ad campaigns? Fine, just report your competition to the linkspam link and boost your rankings.
IE pre-loads at Windows start-up, effectively. If browser start-up time bothers you, there is a fast start-up pre-load thing for Firefox. Personally I just load Chromium when I login and leave it open until the next restart, possibly weeks away.
an entrepreneur making 10mil lifetime? a reasonably bright kid could prob make half just by climbing the corporate ladder.
Using vCloud and Amazon CloudWatch with libcloud
End-of-Life Warning at $618,616 Makes Me Wonder Was It Worth It
Solid long-format article about the costs of healthcare for a dying husband.
I use clojure not just because it's a practical lisp (it is), but because Rich Hickey is a genius, and is stirring up programming language design in ways we haven't seen in a long time.

If you haven't, go read his slides from the "Are We There Yet?" talk http://wiki.jvmlangsummit.com/images/a/ab/HickeyJVMSummit200... (PDF) . It's worth a read, regardless of what programming language you like best.

Where everyone else (except for maybe the Haskell people) seems to be doing the same old grab bag design "oh that's a cool feature, oh, and that too", Rich has a clear idea of what programming should be, and he moves closer to that goal daily.

I think people overestimate the significance of choosing e.g. Ruby over Python or vice versa. C vs. Java is a legitimate choice, Java vs. Clojure is legitimate, Ruby vs. Python is not, IMO. I'd like to see an example of where choosing Ruby / Python / Perl is a momentous decision.
apple does indeed sell apps of its own in the store:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/texas-holdem/id284602850?mt=8

it seems like they are for the most part playing fair: apple's apps don't use private apis, they are required to compete against other apps the same as the rest of us, and so on. if there have been any violations of that "gentleman's agreement," i haven't heard about them, and i pay a lot of attention to the blogosphere on this subject.

it seems to be only the apps that are installed by default on the device that get special treatment.
"It’s easy to denounce the tyranny of the online masses when you live in a country that has strong rule of law and institutions that address public corruption, but in China the human-flesh search engine is one of the only ways that ordinary citizens can try to go after corrupt local officials. Cases like the Lin Jiaxiang search, as imperfect as their outcomes may be, are examples of the human-flesh search as a potential mechanism for checking government excess."
Apart from the fact that Steam versions are typically 80-100% markup in price over shrinkwrap versions.

For example, Bioshock 2:

30GBP, "down" from 40GBP
http://store.steampowered.com/app/8850/

16.74GBP
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Take-2-Bioshock-PC-DVD/dp/B00175SOS2...
link gives an error.

[Edit] Why the downvote?
A lot of acronyms to essentially say that you can't write-once-run-anywhere in mobile.

From the article's glossary: "XHTML – multi modality markup language". What?
Presentation and Pitching Skills for Entrepreneurs
Conclusion: taken over a broad range of speed tests, Chrome narrowly edges Opera. Safari is a solid third, Firefox a solid fourth, and IE is dead last.

But there's more to a browser than speed. While I'm currently using an older version of Firefox, I love Chrome's homepage (showing your most-visited sites). I love Opera's mouse gestures, too.
You're welcome.

Ivar's work is perhaps more methodology than project management and an early version of his "Swedish Method" (as I like to refer to it :-) was used in the early '70s by Ericsson for their AXE phone switch that was (as reported by him) quite successful in the marketplace. It required a lot of flexibility so that they could customize it for N different markets, Sweden being quite small for that sort of product.
rms on emacs-dev
This may be true in the UK, but in the US Steam games are price-competitive with shrinkwrap versions.
How Sony Lost Its Way
I think I'll patent "A method and process for mounting a legal defense against patent lawsuits."

And next, "A method and process for preventing patent litigation through acquiring patents and threatening to counter sue."

I'll be unstoppable!
I saw a screenshot showing exactly that option, so it appears to be true.
I'm pretty positive that they have a bunch of people typing these things up as they come in.

I took roughly the same picture of the same book twice, and it returned two distinct results:

"Godel Escher Bach An Eternal Golden Braid" vs. "Godel Escher Back Book"

Then I tried a WarCraft III CD case:

"Warcraft Dvd" vs. "Warcraft Video Game"

Some noodles:

"Neoguri Snack" vs. "Neoguri Spicy Seafood Udon Noodles"

JBL Creature Speakers:

"Jbl Speakers" vs. "Computer Speaker" vs. "Jbl Computer Speaker"
The Man Who Was Allergic to Radio Waves
I figured that this was too good to be true. They seem to be exploiting people with a fairly decent command of English, though.
As for me, I eschewed the applied topics (no ODE's no PDE's) in favor of the "pure" (algebra, analysis, topology, etc) only to discover that, because I had little interest in becoming a professor, most of it would only serve to keep my happily diverted on what are now ridiculously rare lazy Sunday afternoons. In these topics, so long as one is interested in the propositions in need of proof, real study is relatively useless. I first learned what it meant to study in the "real world" - in the lowly field of IT - when the fiat came down the line to transform format X into formats Y and Z, and ensure that changes to one translate to the others, keeping in mind that simultaneous changes may occur, in which case on the 'right' change should be kept. The old dictum is true: there is no substitute for experience.
Buy Intel stock.
It is probable that Google would have published their algorithms after a long period of time. By the time that happen, the old algorithm would probably have no competitive advantage anyway.
Apple is about to launch a new product that (if successful) will undoubtedly spawn dozens of imitators. They want to prevent the competition from this product from getting a free ride on their technologies (let's assume that each is a credible invention and valid patent), as they undoubtedly have to some degree with the iPhone.

they could just stay ahead of the competition with innovation

The usefulness of this strategy is diminished when the competition can simply copy what you've done. Bouncy scrolling lists (etc.) may seem trivial, but if they didn't represent added value why would they be copied? And if they do represent added value, why shouldn't that be protected?
The chart of all the revolutions frustrates me because all the dates are 10 years earlier than they occured.
At the time of the initial report, I suspected that a reason Google seemed so angry was that the hackers had tried to inject new vulnerabilities into Google software that would then damage third-party Google users (either via browser compromises of downloads of Google-distributed client software, like Desktop/Toolbar/Chrome/etc.).

Stealing 'secret algorithms' is in one category of transgression. It's still somewhat flattering to the target. It's driven by curiosity, not always a bad thing. To the extent such theft-of-secrets enables competitors to increase market share by improving their own operations, it hurts the target, yes, but might still be net-beneficial to society in a dynamic long-term analysis. It's theft, but not really violence. A victim will adopt countermeasures, and might expect compensation/damages, but may not be moved to retaliate in-kind. A rational weighing of costs and benefits tends to dominate the choice of responses.

On the other hand, to try to corrupt a company's offerings to damage their customers -- and possibly destroy the company's reputation as a trusted source of downloadable software -- moves into another more serious category. It's malicious and destructive. The victim may feel existentially threatened, and feel obligated to retaliate using any means available. A rational weighing of options may not matter; there is a urge to punish, even incurring large costs in the process.

Google's initial response made me think they viewed the China breaches in the latter category, despite the limited details.
> To backup 25GB of data with synchronous replication a business may easily pay from $150 to $500+ in storage and maintenance costs- and that's per employee.

Per year? Per month? Dollar numbers for maintenance, without a time period, have no meaning.
Three of the Stages Of Programmer:

- Designing too much flexibility at the start of a project and regretting it when it takes ten weeks to build a prototype.

- Designing too little flexibility at the start of the project and ending up living with unmaintainable cruft.

- Realizing that all projects are hell and planning on a rethink/rewrite/refactor when the real requirements become clear because no one can predict the future, so why not hold some contingency for the inevitable.
It's 'destination India' for top global schools
So... China.
perhaps someone should patent the process of patenting the process of patenting. no one will beat that, surely.
To those who think "saved my life" was overly dramatic, try to remember that you were reading a sales flier, not a deep introspective blog post. The fact that it came across very much as such a blog post (because it partly was) is part of the brilliance, but also means that you might take the life saving part a little more literally than the "the best cola ever" advertising vibe that it maybe should have had.

That was a top shelf ad/promotion/infomercial Amy. Hats off.
This is a patent application, not a granted patent.
Caribus paribus, two equally skilled programmers will differ in programming productivity by language choices.
No, they don't use live crowd sourcing. They mean that they learn from the "crowd" of users. What they wrote is misleading.
Google's Human-flesh search engine:

http://www.google.cn/intl/zh-CN/renrou/index.html

Google translation (weak):

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&langpair=zh-...

(btw if you search for anything, it informs you (in Chinese) that it's an April fools joke)

For translations of these kinds of forum discussions see http://www.chinasmack.com
"I'm almost of the opinion to work on a startup with someone you have to come up with an idea with thatperson/those people."

I've done that a few times - and once both people could almost contribute nothing at all, besides sales/marketing. And neither wanted to do sales or marketing. It was a big lesson learned. Certainly taught me something about picking partners.
Ask HN: Is emotional intelligence just the latest buzzword?
Lately, I've been seeing "emotional intelligence" cited here and there as a critical link between intelligence and success. I grabbed a copy of "Emotional Intelligence 2.0" by Bradberry and Greaves to form my own opinion.

Most of the things I read seem like common sense; the main benefit for me has been it focused me more directly on trying to improve myself, much like visiting a therapist.

So have I been the latest buzzword victim to the tune of $20? Or is there something to this?
Simple, reliable, and engine-specific CSS generator for border-radius
Everytime I hear the term "micropayments" I think of the penny arcade comic: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/6/22/