skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with this post 100%. However, there is one thing I'd like to note. While I agree that one should not be blindly obedient to methodologies, one should make an informed decision about what parts to pick and choose. Unless you've actually tried the whole thing, chances are you won't be informed enough to make a good decision. Otherwise, it's way too easy to look at some parts of the methodology and say "well that just sounds stupid" without really seeing the benefit.

I'm not saying everyone needs to drink the Koolaid at first, but I do feel that it's better to err on the Koolaid side until you have a better understanding of what works and what doesn't.
They do... what you see there in the "4,000 page" bill is legislative language - pretty clear code for a lawyer or legislative aide. On the other hand, the Congressional Research Service puts out some pretty good nonpartisan "plain-language" bill summaries (and for anyone who asks "well why don't they just use those the laws themselves", ask yourself "why don't you just write code in English" - they both have the potential for ambiguity).

Incidentally, I put "4,000 page" in quotes because it's a pet peeve... if you actually look at the text, it's in 24pt font and giant margins - makes it much easier to read and mark up around a table, but in no way approximates the amount of text people envision when you say "X-thousand pages".
The Nexus One is a better phone than the iPhone for the technologically adept. Apple is not uninterested; its recent lawsuit against HTC is testament to its fear.
The basic story was taken right from Dances with Wolves.

No, the basic story is taken right from FernGully.
I put no words in his mouth. You apparently failed to read the article.

"... and the flying birds were derivative of Potter creatures, including mastering flying on the back of big bird creatures."

And I am sure Kurzweil knows about Pegasus. All the more the reason his article was bunk!
- "I would call earthquakes and smallpox evil."

Ah, that you see is the challenge of Stoicism. A Stoic does not believe that there is anything evil in nature, impersonal perhaps, but not bad. There is nothing evil about death, earthquakes, viruses or asteroids. They just do their thing and sometimes happen to go against human interests. This does not make them evil.

This is a difficult way to think at first, but it makes sense to me. Stand out under the stars and look up. Take a look at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra_Deep_Field). The universe is just so much bigger than me, so much bigger than my species. Why would I be surprised that it does not always operate directly in my interests?

Think about an ant in a busy railway station. If she gets trod on, does that make the commuter evil, or just indifferent to the ant's interests?

That is one of the lessons I have learned from observing nature. The complete absence of self pity, ruthlessly so.

The short poem 'Self Pity' by DH Lawrence illustrates this well:

"I never saw a wild thing

sorry for itself.

A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough

without ever having felt sorry for itself."
WANdisco launches new Subversion Binaries
Regardless of the details of the actual defect, I think this whole Toyota fiasco highlights a problem in training. The sad reality is that the vast majority of the fatalities could have been prevented if the driver had simply shifted into neutral.

It's important to understand our machines instead of depending on them.
Maybe a different way to say - "Accept who you are"?
It sort of looks like Cassandra is where all the people with A LOT of data are going. Any particular reason(s) for that?

(Edit: as compared to other 'non traditional' database systems).
http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/01/sunset

discusses: glassfish, netBeans, etc
According to official anouncement [1]:

> This data is not sold by MySpace, but given out for free from their API and then packaged by Infochimps for redistribution.

So the title is wrong. It's not MySpace who sells the data, it's InfoChimp.

[1]: http://blog.infochimps.org/2010/03/12/announcing-bulk-redist...
Paul Graham certainly didn't give Viaweb to Yahoo for free.

Joel Spolsky sells software for a living and is looking to turn a profit with StackExchange soon.

Why should people be criticized, on a site specifically built to attract entrepreneurs, for trying to turn a profit with their venture? How hypocritical.
A note for those of us who perhaps know "unter" but not "untergang": the official movie title English translation of Der Untergang is Downfall. My G<->E dictionary suggests setting, sinking, fig. ruin.
"For OSX, they give away development tools better than the ones microsoft charges ridiculous amounts of money for."

People tend to make this claim and I just don't understand where it comes from. Microsoft has made available the express editions of Visual Studio for the last several years and they are pretty damn good.
This blog about the class seems to go a little more in depth:

"1. Carve out your areas of incompetence: There was some debate about the downside of such a principle (ie: young girls jumping quickly to say "I'm bad at math" when they might have a tremendous, although dormant, capacity for mathematics) but overall there are some apparent benefits to this practice. One tangible example was given of a consultant who joined some firm and, rather than follow suit with his colleagues and claim he could handle any of the potential tasks thrown his way, he chose to be very upfront, to carve out his areas of incompetence, and tell the people he worked with exactly what he wasn't good at. The story goes that he was promoted faster than any of his peers because of this practice."

http://thepowerofsocialtechnology.blogspot.com/

It sounds this practice helped his boss delegate tasks better and helped convince his that he was honest.
Interesting idea. I suppose hospitals should get rid of the clowns that entertain hospitalized children. I mean, they use humor to make them laugh. I suppose medical science should retract their findings that laughter can indeed heal, since humor obviously is a destructive force.

I don't mind if people don't want to upvote a joke. That is fine by me. But, we don't need to downvote them either.

I disagree with jokes being the catalyst which will change HN into Reddit or Digg. I don't think it is the comments that turn the worm, rather the quality of the bookmarks which are submitted. If the heart is true, the body will be also.
War is far from the only way people kill people. Add up all the people in the US killed in auto accidents and you are going to be in the top 10 on that list.
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I've found that intensive practice of meditation over the last 3 years including both a daily practice and going on more extended retreats has fundamentally shifted the way in which I perceive and engage with moment to moment experience which has in turn steadily raised my baseline level of happiness.

I fully understand this is subjective anecdotal data and that it's quite possible I'm fooling myself though I don't believe I am. I've heard similar reports from others who have engaged deeply with various contemplative practices.
Plato's "The Sophist".

Saint-Simon's memoirs.

Neither really for theories as such, the latter for reflections on the the behavior observed.

Since wturner mentions "Blood Rite" let me throw in Vico's "New Science"
This is clearly a sarcastic response. Yet, he received nine points. Why? I thought humor was not allowed? I am trying to flame. I am asking seriously.
I think it's the only review I've read where keywords are highlighted with a javascript function that says:

javascript:loadBrain('Technology')
Apple’s iPad Will Read Books Out Loud, Support Open EPUB Format
Actually AT&T does have one: http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/cell-phone-de...
I saw this all the time when I worked at a movie theater 12 years ago.

Vampires and Blade (1998)
Mighty Joe Young and some other ape movie.
Two horror movies with bats.
Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line.

It happens over and over again. A semi-biggish movie and another that gets forgotten.
I am confused. What are cell phone subscribers vs mobile web users? Except that it's just for one site here, I suppose?
I think this means you should accept your flaws. It's a counter to perfectionism.
As far as I can tell there's much to be said for your thesis, except that the breakdown seems to be in design (engineering), not badly manufactured parts.

Prior to this mess I'd read that most of Toyota's major recalls were due to design defects; the cost cutting push resulted in these bad parts being put into more and more different car models resulting in bigger and bigger recalls, but the root cause was early in the process.

A little quality time with Google will find a lot of support for this, e.g. in how they drastically compressed the time to develop new models and more recently pledged to add 6? months or so to the process, although people are skeptical it actually happened.

When you burn out your engineers you're not likely be happy with the long term result.
Maybe it is, but it does give a very unfinished feeling when just about everything scrolls at like 10-15Hz instead of silky smooth as iPhone does.
I appreciate what you're saying, but IMHO almost none of the samples on that page looks sufficiently professional that I would use it to set a textbook. Computer Modern has at least stood the test of time, and gives a clean, uniform appearance to text and mathematical type.

If I were setting a serious work, I would like to use a high quality serif font, something like Emigre's Mrs Eaves or Adobe's Arno Pro, but alas, these fonts have a rather limited range of mathematical glyphs, which means you either get the "two similar but different fonts" problem (which nearly always looks bad) or you have to pick a font that isn't as nice for the body text just because it has matching math symbols available.
Extension authors, browser hackers, meet js-ctypes
Figure out what types of products would be interesting to these people. Maybe nintendo maybe casual desktop games?

You could always do adsense but really throw it in their faces. Perhaps the screen just shows ads and the user has to scroll down to get to the games.
I think the simplest thing to do about it is to not give a hoot. The karma point system is so obviously broken that hand-wringing about its deficiencies is largely a waste of time. Case in point - the person who was lucky enough to post the google announcement regarding China got 1000+ points. Let's say a particularly insightful comment is worth 40 points. That means being first on something everyone is likely to know about within half an hour is worth 25 (count em) very insightful comments. If you take the hit of posting an unpopular opinion, you can make it up in spades by posting an old pg essay.
It's all about money - if they start making more money on ipad-type devices, and less on osx-based devices, they'll start making more ipad-type devices. Follow that line of logic and you'd end up in the more restrictive world of the ipad-type devices. But I did say if.
Do you fully subscribe to the notion of pure meditation, in that you should feel neither good nor bad? Once I understood what it meant to fully meditate; give up desires to love, build stuff I have a passion for, tackle challenging problems, I found that the proposed benefits of feeling not bad just didn't seem to weigh out.
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my link was to a twitt calling them pussy :) . I wasn't trying to use my twitt as a relay to the article. I removed link to avoid confusion now.
I would tend to agree ... but what if all the relevant controls are "fly by wire" and there's a problem there?

Based on something I just read I'd guess the transmission lever for the Prius is one of those (it was described as being on the dash, quite close to the steering wheel and as very simple: F, R, N and a B to save your mechanical brakes on a downgrade (regenerative braking, no doubt)); I really hope the brake and emergency brake controls aren't (yet or ever).
You can freely distribute Mac OS X software. Why are you comparing Windows with iPhone/iPad?

I'm going to compare games on Mac OS X and Xbox, why can't I make Xbox games and distribute them freely, when I can do that on Mac OS X?
pg should just start charging a nominal fee for new user accounts. Cuts down on trolls AND spammers.
I just remember a lot of pictures of him looking rather pot-bellied. It probably wasn't the most tasteful remark but you have to wonder about chubby dictators who rule starving countries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra_(database) has a pretty good overview if you're not familiar with Cassandra.

Cassandra only guarantees eventual consistency where as most RDBMS systems are focused on always showing a consistent view of data. Because of this (and other trade-offs), Cassandra is able to provide much higher IO rates as well as improved fault tolerance and linear scalability.

Twitter, Digg, and Facebook all happen to have usages which fit perfectly with this model. If you see a status update a few seconds (or even minutes) late occasionally it's no big deal. If your bank funds aren't matching for that long, it can be a big deal.

Edit: I just started looking into Cassandra a few days ago so someone please correct me if I've mis-stated anything.
When Optimizing, Don't Test Everything
It is growing fast. It has more than doubled its market share. I don't care how small the actual starting number was, it is still good progress. If you don't think so, go ask Palm!

On a similar note, the rapid Android evolution, I think, might actually be harmful. I have been without a contract for over a year now. I have been wanting an Android phone. However, each time I settle for one, a new and better one rises over the horizon. So I wait. By the time that one comes to market, the pattern is repeated.

Another real interesting story, from this data, is that the iPhone growth has become stagnate. Looks like Apple hit the ceiling! Unless of course they add in iPad sales numbers next year.
I've seen perfectly intelligent responses downmodded for an opposing view. This wouldn't sadden me as much if some of the threads were not echo-chambered group think. I know I just thew out two very over used buzz words, but in this case there are some pockets of conversation that lend itself to this on HN (and anywhere else on the internet). There have been times I've decided against posting my two cents because its obvious other views (that aren't necessarily opposing) aren't welcomed.
I'm more interested in the comparison with Redis, MongoDB, et alia.
I have very mixed feelings about that.
It's good when such a big company takes those measures.
But in the end it will harm google more then it will do good, as no other company will follow.

And Chinas government may be very happy, the got rid of _the_ source for political information for the people and now can work further on controlling the rest.
I don't like drive-by downvotes, is basically how I feel about it.
Rackspace & Drizzle: It's Time to Rethink Everything
I'm a bit confused. Who can vote something down? I don't have a down vote button and thought only moderators had one or something like that. How does that work?
There was an aborted attempt at a German/French initiative that was supposed to become the de-facto search engine for the European Union.

I personally don't think a state run search engine stands even a tiny chance.
I believe if you have over a certain number of points you can downvote items

From the FAQ:

Why don't I see down arrows?

There are no down arrows on submissions. They only appear on comments after users reach a certain karma threshold.
Unsolved Problems in Physics
A notion of pure meditation doesn't have much meaning for me. It just sounds like someones attempt to take an extremely broad and varied set of useful practices and overly simplify in an effort to assert internally or externally that there is one right/best/pure/perfect way of doing something. I don't subscribe to that view. Like programming languages or frameworks or methodologies or any other set of maps and techniques they have their various levels of usefulness depending on person and circumstance.

Also, the idea of giving up desire, passion and things of this nature is often misunderstood. It is not necessary to give up ones humanity, emotions, loves or anything else. It's more about changing the way in which you perceive and engage with all experiences of life. It's not like I've stopped feeling bad. I feel bad plenty. It's more that feeling bad (and feeling good) is experienced in a very different way.
There's a difference between downvoting a +10 comment down to +9 out of disagreement and downvoting a +! comment down to 0 out of disagreement.

Also, "disagreement" isn't always the best characterization. If someone makes factual errors in their post downvoting is a perfectly valid signal, for instance.
I for one hope the best implementation gets included, not the one that has the most strings to pull.
There's a karma threshold.
One way to understand cars better is to learn how to drive a manual transmission. You'll become more attuned to engine speed, which gear you're in, the responsiveness of your gas pedal, etc.
This is one of the flaws of the upvote/downvote system, it can give people a bit of a mob mentality where making a comment or opinion disappear is as easy as a click (and anonymously too).

Maybe downvotes could cost the voter karma, or have a higher bar for who can downvote.
They're not the party selling the data to the users, but they are a beneficiary to the proceeds.

> these datasets are the results of an agreement with them to redistribute their data, with revenue share, on Infochimps.

To me, this sounds equivalent to Infochimps acting as an agent for Myspace's sale of data.
For the longest time, Steve Jobs himself didn't use a Mac. He used a ThinkPad with NeXTStep. I guess that's not really competing, though.

To be fair though, Apple did give all their employees an iPhone when they came out.
Agreed. I believe that "50% of it" is UN-determined. Genetics undoubtedly play a role, but environment (development, interventions, etc.) dually play a role.

The problem is that environment and its interventions can be a difficult variable to tie down in studies. Good call.
This has been discussed to death many times. The system isn't perfect and various meanings get assigned to downvotes. I believe pg was considering a separate voting axis for uncivil messages, maybe he'll do that but I don't think there's any use us discussing this yet again.
Downvoting needs to cost a karma point, or perhaps a fraction of one.
I think he means Windows Phone 7 and Windows Mobile.
This used to upset me, I have simply stopped caring and feel much better for it.

That said, I've had some fairly drastic changes in my private situation so I'm not nearly as active on HN as I have been in the past.

The best way to deal with an unjustly downvoted comment is to simply vote it up if you come across it (this you can do pretty much forever), and to ignore the issue if it happens to you on the assumption that on balance HN contains more nice people that griefers.
The voting system encourages groupthink. The Mahalo/Calacanis issue is a perfect example. No matter what Calacanis says in the comments he gets massively downvoted, that certainly sends a message to anyone who might dare to agree with him.
My opinion/experience:

Karma and other systems may have their social uses, but the single most effective means to improve a social setting is to set a better example. Resist the temptation to snipe at people. Give the benefit of the doubt and first assume misunderstanding rather than malice and, if possible, attempt to clarify rather than attack or defend. Don't take things too personally. If I am in a personal space (not feeling well, recently had something negative happen to me, etc) where I am feeling particularly prickly and thin-skinned, just walk away and come back another time when I am less likely to make a mole-hill into a mountain. And so on.

My experience over the years is that if I engage in more socially effective behavior and do so consistently, eventually, other people will begin to mimic some of those behaviors. Not because they think highly of me, but just because it works. If people don't know a better way, they fiddle around and do whatever it is they do know and then vent about their frustrations. Show them a better way and many people will eventually happily and voluntarily adopt those methodologies because it makes their own lives better. If you want to live in a better social "ecosystem", look to "the man in the mirror" (though, technically, in my case it is "the woman in the mirror") and work on their behavior. Then have a little patience. Sow the seeds. It will bear fruit (as long as you don't then pull it up by the roots to check if it's growing :-D ).
Build native iphone and android apps in nothing but javascaript
Oi, the "extortionate TV license" is well worth it. The BBC content itself is freaking awesome.
Is Myspace's privacy policy significantly different from Netflix's that they don't have to worry about a lawsuit?
MS is so huge that different areas of the company can be vary different. Still, the basic problem IMO is an upper management culture focused on appearance. From an eat your own dog food concept a team should use their own products, but not to the exclusion of all others. The goal is to understand what users want and how the product is broken, not just to make people look good. I work with MS products on a regular basis and like them, yet basic problems can continue for way to long.

EX: Most people in our office want to add Excel Graphs and then edit them and on average PowerPoint crashes around 4-5 times a day. This is fairly basic functionality that most poeple using PowerPoint in the workplace actually want and it just fails randomly way to often. But, I am not talking about a new issue this is several years old and it's not getting any better.

I really like Visual Studio + C# but anything past the most basic windows features and you get into voodoo land where you just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. I know I am looking for the happy path and I know I can find it but sometimes it's in a vary strange place.

This is the type of things eat your own dog food is supposed to fix, yet for some reason that's not happening.

PS: I still think many MS products are the best option for a lot of things. But, often it's the surface that's great, it's easy to install, it does the basics just fine, and the deeper you go the worse things look.
After more experimentation I find Texto pretty unreliable at grabbing the existing text from a textarea. So it's not solid enough yet for me to rely on.
For me it's quite simple, really:

- think about the pleasant things in the past,

- focus on the nice experiences and senses in the present,

- and look forward to great things in the future.
Steam is, after all, a type of DRM (albeit a much less restrictive one than others)

For Valve games, Steam is a type of DRM but it's been fairly consistently so in a literal, rather than some Machiavellian sense. Steam will put the Valve games you have purchased on your new PC. Steam handed out transferable licenses to Valve games for Valve games you already owned when the Orange Box bundle came out. Mac Steam will put Valve games you own PC licenses for on your Mac. If that's what DRM means, more DRM, please.
Interesting how as one giant corp gets nailed for sharing its user data in an attempt to improve its service Netflix, another goes ahead and shares them for profit.
The former (a company full of zealots who drive the company into the ground due to their lack of fair judgement) is a classic case of a late-stage company overtaken by the clueless, who survives simply by inertia.
Heartthrob’s Blog Challenges China’s Leaders