skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am one of the people who has not bothered to learn about the "actor model" and thus perhaps lost billions... Why? Because it smells of needless complexity, just like XML, Java, Haskell, and everything Microsoft touches.

I think for a technology (or at least a language) to go viral it needs either (1) lots and lots of money (Java for PR, VBA because of the $$$ MS ecology) or (2) a fairly genius level combination of power and simplicity (C, and why Tcl/Tk won't quite die...).

The actor model, functional programming, blah blah blah, have neither enough money behind them to make them happen, nor the magic balance of simplicity and expressiveness such that that a smart 17 year old can spend a weekend learning them and then begin writing apps that had been impossible before said language (lua, for example).

So ... keep trying ;)
this is exactly the wrong approach to solving this problem. scary.
Which is why I've subtly modified the title here.
will -> would have when it was new
They also have some software (PROFESS):
http://www.princeton.edu/mae/people/faculty/carter/homepage/...
well, that's an argument ad hominem if I ever read one... To refute Ayn Rand's philosophy one should bring forward some arguments against her position and not ramble about the personal circumstances of Ayn Rand's sociopathology... If we'd refute arguments because of the ideas and lifestyle of the author we'd have to dismiss a whole lot of philosophy and science...
The social safety net does not have to be the same everywhere for us to make ethical decisions on the products we buy, or for a company to make ethical decisions about how their products are made. I'm sure these teenagers' wages were important to their families. I doubt they were saving up for a Xbox, but I can't exploit that fact because I want a cheaper Nano. I just can't. I'm glad Apple is taking care of this.
I, too, do wonder.

Right now, it's not clear what those conditions were; my comment was meant to address the only clear-cut part of this vague article: that 15 year-olds were working in a factory.

I'm not justifying poor working conditions, nor am I justifying overwork (though I find it interesting that we don't see it as criminal when professionals spend around 130 hours a week working.) I was simply astonished at the knee-jerk reaction so many have when children... gasp... work!

Substantiated claims that the working conditions of these children were poor can be addressed separately.

But, by all means, protect these children from feeding their families.
it'd be really interesting to see that paper, or even get a bit more information about where you think you saw it/what discipline it was in/etc., so i could find it myself.
Agreed, a very cool idea. I believe you are right on the parallelism front, cloud.call just offloads the processing on their servers, but you'd have to call it multiple times to get any parallelism.
How did he get Steve Job's email address?
Apologies, wasn't accusing you of baiting. I did notice that you changed the title :)
Tethering is available for the iPhone - it just needs the carrier to activate it.

The carriers in the UK offer tethering (for an extra fee, of course).
I think this misses a key phase in technological progress which doesn't match simulated annealing:

Once you get to that final minimum, where you can only iterate to improve, people see it as the every-day, and start latching onto a new round of fluid creation (and there's the fight-The-Man attitude, too).

I'll call the growth-after-optimum a "flowering" period, where things shoot off in all directions. Frequently, they're based on that optimum, but not always (seeds spread).

(and how exactly is the Windows / Command key a major innovation? there have been function keys longer than there have been computer keyboards)
NB: This was from 1997.
It's sort of a tautology. If innovation happens in a mature section, it creates something different so it's happening in a different field. If no innovation happens, well then it's still the same field. Next year he could be talking about the rapid rate of innovation in dumbed-down tablets.
I was never really a frequent user. I have some friends that didn't know of the site pre-redesign, but have since discovered it and love it.
This is just a way to call a function and run it on a different server(s). You still have to design your program to handle parallelism.
The famous Ichthyologist JLB Smith http://cdserver2.ru.ac.za/cd/011120_1/Aqua/Ichthyology/Ichth... used to say that every time he memorised the name of a new fish, he forgot the name of a student. (For his brain remembering the fish was more important that the name of a student). You are probably shifting your interests in other areas than the commonalities of every day. While you packing lunch for the office your brain is already working in the background on your work, girlfriend problems and the like.

Your screen time reason is probably right too. Our attention to topics is constantly shifting. Get off the internet for a day or two and read a book that interests you, you will be surprised at your retention.

I personally don't like the idea of any supplements or artificial food. Try and get what your body needs naturally. Coffee can help.
Except I can answer that question easily with those companies off the top of my head:

Exxon-Mobil: Bringing petro-chemicals to the World.
Walmart: Low-cost retail leader
Microsoft: PC software.
Berkshire-Hathaway: Financial investing by the best.
General Electric: Making electricity work for us; the tools, the distribution, and the applications.
Johnson & Johnson: Making toiletry, and medical supplies.
Cop Out & The Crazies Box Office Gross Fail to Overtake Shutter Island & More
I used it a lot before and I use it a lot now. It took a bit of getting used to, but I rather like the new design. I've found that I'm listening to a lot more new music, where before the redesign I just kept listening to the same stuff over and over.
"The social norm is that generally we should avoid inflicting needless suffering on animals, right?"

Theoretically, yes. In practice, no. Most people agree with this statement. However, you don't need to eat or wear animals to lead a happy, productive life (e.g., I know someone who has been vegan for over 30 years). So eating meat is optional--it's a choice people make. It's not necessary.

As far as the suffering goes, the suffering that occurs in factory farms is the worst imaginable. For example, it's routine for male chicks to be ground alive and for chickens to have their beaks cut off. And more than 99% of livestock is factory farmed.

So this is where theory does not meet practice. If people really believed that "we should avoid inflicting needless suffering on animals" then the majority of the population would be vegetarian.

"set stray cats on fire for entertainment"

To me this is morally equivalent to eating factory-farmed meat because you enjoy the taste (provided you are aware of the intense suffering of factory farms).
steve@apple.com

(seriously)
Apple audits their suppliers, finds violations and fixes them, so you want them punished? Not a very good way to encourage other companies to clean up their act.
good list of books, some of which i've read, all of which i want to read, except this mastery one is new to me. thanks!
This implies a really interesting strategic model. Up to some point, strict control is profit-maximizing, by ensuring that desirable initial impressions of the platform-as-a-whole (or store-as-a-whole) are established.

But after some point, with the image established, inclusion is the winning strategy -- or else money is left on the table, or an opening for other competitors emerges. Few adults hold a lower opinion of bookstores, cable-operators, and movie-theaters that include among their range of offerings some things that are diametrically opposed to their personal political/religious/social standards.

When does a a platform proprietor know when to shift? Is the shift best done rapidly or gradually? Even if the model is correct, is Apple being too conservative in opening up?
I joined after seeing a story on techcrunch about the redesign. I had never heard of it before. I am extremely fond of the new design. Its simplicity really appeals to me and I've been using it everyday for 5-6 weeks. Previously I was using spotify and have not even opened the application since.
It would have been nice if in-between there was a plain languish ala Asimov that could have put this in more plain scientific terms.
But if you can't hear yourself think, you and your friends can't create your own psychic 'space', well, it's no good for hanging out in.
i relate to this. the hardest part, in my experience, of getting started with startups isn't the money, knowledge, or any of that. most of that is available easily enough in one way or another. what's hard is getting over the idea that you're crazy for even considering it, and finding people who don't think it's crazy, so you can bounce ideas off of them.
You're mixing things here. It's like you say you didn't steal the wallet, and also there wasn't anything in it.

Either those children working is a bad thing, or it's not. If they're making money necessary to feed themselves and their families, then you should be proud of paying part of those money.

Of course, we don't really know if it was a good thing. We don't know if they were 17 or 10, whether they really needed the money or how many hours they worked. The situation is much murkier then the knee jerk "I can't exploit it". And unfortunately not trying to think more about it doesn't help those kids one bit.
You're saying that people can't tell the difference between a telephone and a store, but they can tell the difference between an application written in HTML and Javascript and an application written in Objective-C?

I get that we're all technical people here, but you're looking at this wrong. Imagine this conversation:

BOB: I am really angry at this thing my kid was playing with. It portrays a class of people as less than human.

TOM: That's horrible, where did she find it?

BOB: HorribleWebsite.com

TOM: That's tough, have you talked with her about being careful on the net?

Now Bob's daughter may have been using an iPhone, or an Android phone, or a computer, it doesn't matter. The Internet is unavoidable, and we have to deal with things that we don't like.

Lets try another.

BOB: I am really angry at this thing my kid was playing with. It portrays a class of people as less than human.

TOM: That's horrible, where did she find it?

BOB: She bought it on the AppStore.

TOM: Apple lets them sell that sort of thing? I'm going to take my son's away and get him another phone. I don't need that in my life.

Now, does either Bob or Tom know the different between an "Objective-C" application and an HTML5 offline bookmark? I can't tell, and it doesn't matter. They do know whether this offensive content can be avoided by abandoning the platform based on whether this is "web" content or not.

But sure, show your crying kittens video. Apple doesn't know what they're doing, their success was probably just luck.
my guess is their social situation and their mindset. if they think it's ridiculous to even try, and everyone around them does too, they won't even consider it. if they think it could be worthwhile, but everyone around them thinks it's ridiculous, they still may try, but it's going to require a bit more balls and dedication. but if they think it's a good idea, and even some people around them do as well? that's a big deal.
"Rich Dad Poor Dad" - wow.
Do you also make vision boards on Youtube and ask others if they know The Secret?
Do you mind sharing your django.wsgi file? I'm trying to set this up right now for a site I'm working on. After looking throught the docs and some blog posts it wasn't clear to me how to hook up apache and virtualenv. Do you source in the env via the activate script? I feel like I'm missing something. Thanks.
The Stages of a Color Scheme
Substitute "white and affluent" for entrepreneurial in

"They believe that successful entrepreneurs come from entrepreneurial families and that they start their entrepreneurial journey by selling lemonade while in grade school."

and you pretty well have the gist of what Jason, Fred and Silicon Valley VCs believe in. Not quite racism, but certainly when asked "what does a great entrepreneur look like?", their answer is "just like me."
When I at Google, I remember that they explicitly stated that they did not review iGoogle gadgets or toolbar buttons for content, at all. Because that might lead to some kind of liability, but I don't know how.
By the way, my other response doesn't really address what you're saying, so I'll reply again. When I read blintson's comment that "animal cruelty doesn't bother me at all" I took it to mean that he didn't see anything wrong with the cruelty we put animals through for the sake of hunting or eating. If that's the case, then blintson's values are the social norm. If you read it as not caring about animal cruelty in any form (such as abusing pets), then his values fall out of the social norm. I'm not sure which way blintson meant that in his comment.
Google the subject. It turns out there are several posts about this. This happens to be the first one to call this aspect of her life to my attention.
davidw is not a big admirer of articles that are completely off topic.
Given that many older people call the internet by their web browser's name, it may be generational. So, a long time... 15 years? Its difficult because those of us who want to know are so steeped in the details that we have no perspective. I am continually amazed at the amount of advertising Apple buys for the iPod. There are people out there who still need to be convinced that having portable music / audio books / (video) podcasts is a good idea. These people would certainly conflate AppStore content with the iPhone, and it would probably affect their buying decision.
Python is a functional language in the sense that it has first class functions and you can pass them around.
Few adults hold a lower opinion of bookstores, cable-operators, and movie-theaters that include among their range of offerings some things that a diametrically opposed to their personal political/religious/social standards.

Uh... this is wildly untrue. You don't find XXX movies at mainstream theaters or Barely Legal magazine at Barnes and Noble. Likewise you'd be hard pressed to find your typical college-educated liberal at a christian bookstore.
The Plan: Finish documenting the little i18n library for .NET that I built last week and release it open source.

The Reality: It's 95 degrees here in Cartagena and my fingers are sweating onto the keyboard. Cuba Libres sound like a much more viable option.
Note to self: I have to find better names for the articles I post :)

FYI: I've posted this 2 days, ago, but to me getting points is a game, so I'll just learn from louislouis

Heh, here is my link - 1.5 days before this one - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1149402
Social Media Marketing, ROI and Beer
> (let ((c (make-instance 'circle :center '(0 0) :radius 4)))
...

Erm, what? This is supposed to show smart compile-time checking about runtime behavior?? This no more demonstrates what you apparently think it demonstrates than I could demonstrate Haskell's type-soundness by taking some Template Haskell, inserting 'head []', and saying 'it crashes during compilation, eureka!'

What would be fairer would be wrapping all that in a '(defun foo () )', in which case one doesn't get any warning relating to the 'location c' or "B":

* (load "foo.cl")
STYLE-WARNING: Implicitly creating new generic function CIRCLE-AREA.
; in: LAMBDA NIL
; ((LET ((C (MAKE-INSTANCE 'CIRCLE :CENTER '# :RADIUS 4)))
; (FORMAT T "~A~%" (CIRCLE-AREA C))
; (SETF (CIRCLE-CENTER C) '(2 3))
; (SETF (CIRCLE-RADIUS C) 7)
; (SETF (CIRCLE-RADIUS C) "B")
; (LOCATION C)))
;
; caught ERROR:
; illegal function call
;
; compilation unit finished
; caught 1 ERROR condition

T
The author does not understand that book/movie in the least sense.
Fewer Products, Fewer Menu Items, Fewer Choice…Fewer Friends?
I use "pv" (pipe viewer) for this. So the example would be:

pv tarball.tar | tar xf -

And the output is great.
Have no fear, we have an awesome tsunami damper in the ocean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch

By the time tsunami gets through all that trash, it's going to be a wave even surfers wouldn't like.
P.P.S Can kids even get paper routes in the US these days? My limited observation is that it's now large routes driven by adults who throw papers from car windows.

I think it's a combination of fewer newspaper subscribers (meaning larger distances between each subscriber, so less practical for bikes/walking) and a culture where parents are afraid that their children will be harmed if allowed to bike around delivering papers (because cars or pedophiles or something else).
When It Comes to Content, Amazon’s Kindle Won’t Be Undersold
Starting JägerMonkey (method-at-a-time JIT for SpiderMonkey)
This is insanity. They're giving away the software, but have put incredible amounts of engineering into making sure nobody can know how it works. The parts where they make money have little to nothing to do with this.

I've stopped paying for skype service because of the features they force me to have on. One of my "final straw" bugs has been opened since 2007. And it's trivial. How much anti-reverse engineering work has gone in since then?

I'm sure I'd pay them again if I could actually do my own build of a skype client with some of the behaviors I don't like modified.
I have lots of shit installed on my computers (no really, shit - not stuff). I don't have problems with, like some people have, Silverlight or whatever people refuse to install for whatever reasons. But one thing I don't have installed is skype. Skype, for some reason, just scares me and doesn't feel right. I can't explain it. I had it installed on one of my laptops while I was travelling heavily and it felt like computer was bogged down by it, even though it had almost nothing installed on it. Call me paranoid - and I never am.
I used the site both before the re-design and after.

love the re-design.

Lots of reasons:

-the core of thesixtyone is about discovery and the problem with many discovery sites is they are too bogged down with choices. the browsabilty of the new design is commendable.

-all of the stuff they are clearly doing around machine learning is more obvious in the second version

-the new design is edgy and i'm sure they knew they would alienate some users, but it's also gorgeous. about time artistic content was more aligned with artistic design.

sure, there are definitely a few usability kinks (trying to delete a song from a saved list, for example) but am i confident that they'll fix them eventually? absolutely.
Old School Steve Jobs flicks off IBM
Ask HN: Try my Jeopardy game
I built this game using the data made freely available by j-archive.com (a wonderful site). It's "multiplayer"---so you'll get the most fun out of it if you've got some chums around. But there is also a single-player "study mode" at /blast.

I'm worried that the site (made using Ruby on Rails) won't stand up to serious traffic, and so I'd appreciate some advice / info on that front. Please forgive me if you notice sloppy performance. Also, have low expectations re: bugs and the like.

Finally, I am working on a "real-time" multiplayer version using the Juggernaut plugin for Rails. I'd say it's about 40% of the way there. I'd be happy to open the code up if anyone wants to pitch in. If nothing else my rake task for scraping j-archive might be useful to other folks.
Where art thou Rubyist?
Apparently Ruby developers are non-existent in NYC? We're about to raise a substantial Seed/Series A from top NYC investors/VCs - any lead/senior Rubyists in or looking to relocate to NYC, interested?

josh[@]goodcrush[.]com
I am looking forwards to a new system programming language - hopefully it matures well in the next few years. I still love C, but would love to be able to work in a little bit higher language. I have python for high level work. Will have to give go a try for my next tool app.
I don't have time right now to look for the source, but it's reasonably well knows that depression improves critical thinking directly. (maybe this? http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a785... )
That some children have to work full time in factories to feed their families is a bad thing. I cannot exploit the fact that bad conditions exist.
MS Admits Influencing EU Regulators in Google Anti-Trust: Says "So What?"
The Science of Liberty, An Interview with  Murray N. Rothbard (1990)
Actors are not a good concurrency model
Very cool. Great use of GAE's quick deployment/scalability. I assume this is based on a general purpose people finder app?
I think if you give a close reading to Patrick's postings here, you'll quickly come to the conclusion that the differences between the app store, Safari, and the iPhone are irrelevant to non-technical users, just like the fact that Bosch makes my engine ECU and OBDII sets the standards that govern fuel efficiency vs. performance are mostly irrelevant to my evaluation of a car.
Compete shows traffic shot up in January.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/thesixtyone.com/
Looks nice, but I would rather have the processing power local to me. I have used the python framework, octopy. It is a mapreduce framework for python. Caveat: I have only used it for trivial problems thus far.

http://code.google.com/p/octopy/
Not the best forum to ask, but just in case there are any Ruby ppl reading... Honest questions (I like Ruby):

* Is there an ETA for 1.9.2?

* Are major, minor & patch level numbers being "dropped"? 1.9.1-p376 is kinda ugly / uninformative.

* Will odd minor numbers go back to indicate unstable releases?

Thanks!
US Secret Service IT is 1980s mainframes, only up 60% of the time
Fair enough. I'm sure that address works and someone reads it, but I would imagine there is an alias address that he actually uses on a day-to-day basis for any meaningful exchanges.

I suppose this one might have caught someone's eye and he responded, but I'm surprised.
> More control means more crime.

Citation? Every study I've seen says higher numbers of police and CCTV surveillance cameras both lower crime.

Unless you mean criminalizing normal behavior causes crime, in which case, yeah, I'm with you. But if we're talking street crime - vandalism, mugging, pickpocketing, robbery, assault, etc - I think it's pretty well proven that more presence/proactive action actually reduces that stuff considerably.
That there are a few things major chains avoid doesn't invalidate the fact they carry many things opposed to the tastes of most of their customers.

You will find books, magazines, and movies with nudity and sex at Barnes and Noble -- far moreso than allowed under current App Store standards.

Also, to the point of the original app rejection, you will find plenty of material that mocks all sides of the political spectrum. A countdown to Obama's inauguration with a negative caricature of Bush is mild compared to what you can find in bookstores, cable-channels, and theaters.

Those outlets carry such material without their customers getting offended by their mere availability.
That's the natural tendency toward "mirrortocracy". Most people are disastrously bad at assessing the talent of people who are not like them.
Yes agreed. However I still believe we need to be careful calling this "child labour". Something went wrong here - but it wasn't necessarily malicious. Children are definitely forced to work in other places; and throwing this in with that is a) unfair and b) gives the real exploitation less impact.
In the third (fictional) case, I think the punishment was more for being a violent psychopath than for liking classical music.