skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was responding to a preposterous absolutist comment that government sucks at solving any problems. This preposterous absolutist comment was backed up with a small handful of examples solved poorly by government, so I put up a few counter-examples. You can counter some of my counters and we could go back and forth all day, but that doesn't help anyone.

The fact that government can provide multiple valuable services for just a fraction of overall budget each isn't proof of anything. There's a very trendy and shallow mindset these days that government is absolutely terrible at absolutely everything. The truth is more nuanced than that.
According to Wikipedia, it's called Domain Name Front-Running:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running

Network Solutions have been accused of doing it loads of times, and I think it's not that an uncommon practise for the larger guys.
It's nice to see this kind of information sharing. A training program used by a big company is a nice indicator that it's probably pretty good -- so often with programming languages it's hard to find a good reference for learning. Most books are crap, and the internet will often provide a great reference (in the core documentation) followed by a horrible hodgepodge of random useless "tutorials".
Experts Exchange needs to die in a fire. They're the reason I wish Google had a 'never show results from domain X' feature. This graph makes me very, very happy.
Palm did very well with the OS, but they screwed up everything else. The hardware is crappy, the performance is sluggish and unresponsive, too many bugs, their marketing sucked, etc.

I think the only solution for Palm is for Google to buy them. Then Google can incorporate some WebOS stuff into Android.
Neat. I'm surprised this hasn't been done before (assuming it hasn't)

One feature I like about rlwrap is the persistent history.

It might be nice to build this into Linenoise as an option, rather than having to roll your own for every tool you use it on.

Antirez: if you think it's a worthy feature I might be willing to submit a patch. I think I might use this for the Narwhal and Objective-J REPLs.
For those who may not know (I didn't), Sass is a meta-language for CSS, which adds variables and some syntactic sugar. It stands for "Syntactically Awesome StyleSheets."

http://sass-lang.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sass_%28stylesheet_language%29
Exercise. Heavily.

The best time of my life was the fall after a summer of cycling every day. I gained several (real) new friends. I started participating in intra-mural sports, at which I was actually good. (Some quite negative "jock attitudes" had kept me away from organized sports in primary and secondary school.) I reconsidered my education and began to see past all the "don't do that" advice towards a course of pursuing what actually interested me.

There's a lot more to this, especially as researchers look at and measure various biological changes and effects, than just a one liner. But to summarize: When you feel better, you feel better about yourself, and, feeling better about yourself, you approach others on a more equal footing.

I was cycling 2 - 3 hours a day. It may not require this much activity, but I am talking about more than a 15 or 30 minute workout. (Well, maybe a heavy 30 minute routine would suffice. Others might have more to contribute in the way of details.)

P.S. I may be mistaken, but I seem to recall some good threads on this (both shyness and exercise, and the union of the two topics) back in the "early days" of HN. Unfortunately, I don't have references at hand, but a look through

http://searchyc.com/

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive

might turn some up.
Simple sinewave synthesizer triggered by an ordinary 16step sequencer.
I wonder if he minds being called the "creator of JSON"? Yes, he created the standard, but I imagine the notation was really decided by Brendan Eich (author of original JS implementation).
For me, Google index cheating is not that big of a deal.

The fact is, Experts-Exchange.com sucks.

Even though it mainly targets programming questions, it doesn't even provide syntax highlighting for the code!

And now they added a BIG banner at the bottom to encourage you to sign up.

Check this question:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=c%23+generics+exper...

[Giving Google link so that you can actually see the answer.]

There is no way to directly link to a particular answer.

And answers have those 'text-hover-ads' popup, I hate them.

StackOverflow is infinitely superior and I am not surprised that they are destroying Experts-Exchange. Good riddance.
SO has 25% more visits per visitor. That says good things about the site's stickiness and interaction.

I would've expected the discrepancy to be even larger but I suppose there are people who voluntarily use EE.
So the legislative approach is to put something out there as quickly as possible and then iterate on it? Fitting.
Cardpool (YC W10) Featured Briefly on NPR's Morning Edition (audio)
It seems like you're arguing that visas should just be expanded, period. I agree.

The problem is that when you propose something like that, you get all these groups that are opposed, from the "dey took our jawbs" crowd, equally split among the left and right, to the straight up xenophobic crowd, which mostly lean right.

However, if you dress it up and make it sound like we're only importing the right kind of foreigners, with money and oxford accents, it's possible to actually pass something.

So that's what we have. The choice is between whittling around the edges to get a few more people in, or not. Unfortunately, wider reforms are off the table at this point, so a preference for them isn't really a valid reason to oppose incremental bits like this.
You'd be better off contributing to a Free/Open Source Software project.
Results of a Speed Dating Event for Hiring Software Engineers
shout to duckduckgo-- i googled a couple increasingly complicated queries("english guys and girls group unisex") and got garbage results. DDG nailed it.
"search term -site:experts-exchange.com"
His main gripe of making CSS more verbose than it needs to be can my solved easily with SASS:

.my-container
+border-radius(3px)

And the implementation: http://gist.github.com/340185
Its easy to add more vendor implementations to this macro, each with their own quirks handled.
Thanks for that comment. So many arguments break things down into simple one-dimensional reductionist perspectives. There are so many material differences between the US and the EU that it's impossible to predict exactly how incremental regulatory changes in either place will change things.

I remember a joke I heard a few years ago about how by law German offices must have windows and German garages must not have windows, so you can't ever start a company in your garage.
> People will look very far down a page if (a) the layout encourages scanning, and (b) the initially viewable information makes them believe that it will be worth their time to scroll.

If I behaved like that I'd never seen nice and interesting eye tracking diagrams in the middle of that post.

For that article what's above the fold is quite boring in comparison to the rest.
Stackoverflow vs codeproject would be more interesting.

Although I use SO daily and have 20k rep, CodeProject is still better for posting, supporting and asking question on specific code.

It would be a shame if SO destroyed CodeProject. Especially for anyone stuck on MFC it's vital.
Amazon shows off Kindle app for iPad
Compete shows you passing them on visits 3-4 months ago. http://siteanalytics.compete.com/experts-exchange.com+stacko...
Ack, the guy either lied to you or you were at the wrong bike shop. Try and find one with some higher-end mountain bikes and they'll definitely have spokes.
They're of course the same thing, I just found the mental model of dragging forward to be simpler (in either model you still have a special case for the end of a line). I may have had someone point this out to me, I learned EMACS in 1980 and half my professional work in the '80s was on various UNIX and LISP versions of EMACS.

And it adds to your editing toolkit, you can not only transpose two characters, you can also drag one a few positions forward, which for the way I (mis)type is useful ^_^.
> They're the reason I wish Google had a 'never show results from domain X' feature.

They do.
-site:experts-exchange.com

To avoid typing that into all the search boxes, just modify the query string for google that you use to search for with the search box/keyword for searching in the url bar. I have that and a couple of dozen others in the "g" keyword in my url bar.
From Wikipedia ..
Doctoral advisor	None, as Milner never did a PhD[1]
Doctoral students	- about 19
Allow him to justify himself before you down-vote him for saying something interesting.
How do you know that Compete, Alexa, or Quantcast haven't undercounted Experts Exchange?
I agree 100% in theory, but in concrete it just doesn't work. How do we determine the person is an entrepreneur we want in? It's easy to say if we are going to give them an H1B or a startup visa (whatever that ends up looking like) we should just give them a green card, but it sounds to me like a major part of this issue is who is actually doing the deciding, not only what the decision itself is.

For instance, we trust the government with software patents right now and over and over again they approve what we consider to be horribly damaging patents. We should trust them to evaluate an entrepreneur as well?

There is a reason this decision is outsourced to the employers/investors: it's actually the more free solution. Otherwise it's up to the government to determine who's/what's worth paying for, and just hoping they are right. This way we've already established a market for the person before they enter the country. It's far from perfect, but if you just give people green cards how many people do you think will suddenly want to be entrepreneurs to get their green card?

The government doesn't seem capable of regulating anything right now, so I'm pretty content to outsource the decision to investors and employers. At least that way they have a chance to get a Fred Wilson, instead of a guarantee not to.
"SO makes money and the StackExchange platform makes money."

If StackOverflow was really profitable, they probably wouldn't have been messing around with Google Ads and Amazon book affiliate links. Those things make 0 money, even Jeff's own admission (http://bit.ly/bbIUuh). Those sponsored categories might be turning some cash, but I still doubt they're making as much profit as E-E, evil as they are.
Esolar and the future of solar
5 Changes Twitter should consider – Part 1
He also wrote what is, imho, one of the best programming language books, JavaScript: The Good Parts. (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517748) I found it super handy mostly because he made no claims that JS is the best thing ever. A lot of it sucks and he admits that. Which I found super refreshing from the standard "ZOMG X IS TEH BEST EVAR! USE X AND GOLD COINS WILL FALL FROM THE SKY!" of most programming language books.
Introducing Imnowave - Crossword puzzle collaboration with Google Wave
Haven't read the article, I just like the picture...

http://plpatterns.com/post/307982918/its-hard-to-change-a-li...
What I was trying to express, poorly, is that the same benefits package is much more expensive to the smaller employer than to the larger one.

For me, what it meant was that I had to make a (relatively small) sacrifice to take a job. For others, it might be the difference between being able to work at a startup or stay with a soul-crushing big company.
The fundamental problem with AI is the lack of parallelization. There are more connections in the human brain than there are atoms in the universe.

I am sure someone can write an AI program that is comparable with human intelligence on paper at this moment in time. But, the complexity of the algorithm would probably be exponential, hence massive parallelization is necessary.

I think the ibm blue brain project has the right approach for AI. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project
I recently used pickeydomains.com to find a new product name. Best $50 I spent. I got a ton of name suggestions and there was a dozen really good ones for me to choose from before I decided on the one I liked the best (http://githaven.com). Not only do i highly recommended this service, but I know I will use them again in the future. I felt a lot better about this name than in the past where I had to choose from the dozen names that I was able to come up with (most of which were only ok, not great).
It's obviously valuable to evaluate your options, but there's a point where it becomes useless. Like most other things, this just needs to be done in balance; you can spend all day arguing why OO is better than procedural and vice-versa, or whatever you're arguing about, and in the end a decision still has to be made.

It's much more useful to get out there and do something, basically anything, than it is to wax on about that thing's implications for an unreasonably long time.

Everything should be considered, but then a decision should be made pretty quickly.
No, as noted elsewhere the late December Senate bill has been passed by the House and will become the law of the land tomorrow when Obama signs it (subject to challenges heard by the Supremes and for all we know a Constitutional Convention (yeah, yeah, but this is the first time I've heard it being really seriously discussed)).

Going forward, the Senate may end up passing nothing that amends it in addition to the other possibilities mentioned in this thread.
> having to change those 2 or 3 lines every time you make a change quickly becomes a maintainence burden, especially when they're littered throughout your CSS.

You make a good argument for generating CSS via some kind of more programmable system.

> Not having to alter your code every time a new browser comes along that is identical to existing implementation is useful

And what about those times when the new browser isn’t identical? I'd hazard that that’s more usual with this kind of experimental new features.
Fair point. I'm sure SO brings in at least some revenue. Think of that as a subsidy to develop and prove the desirability of the platform, which I'm sure is/will be very lucrative for Spolsky.
You can only scroll down if visiting from Google. Copying the URL and pasting it into your browser returns a page without the answer. I'm suprised Google didn't exclude them years ago. (Apologies if that's what you meant).
Steganography with Clojure - Hiding Text in Images
I found it interesting that the sum actually isn't relatively constant. The sum is steadily declining from 1.89M in februari 2009 to 1.65M in februari 2010. Given the ongoing growth of the internet (and the population), the total traffic should have increased, making the shrinkage all the more interesting. I'm guessing there are either Asian sites eating away a substantial market share or that the measurement methodology of Compete has been changing.
Am I right in saying you think it's bloated because it's superfluous? If that is the case, may I draw your attention to one of the most important reasons for doing request handling within PHP: testability.

Were it not for that I would be in complete agreement with you; I have absolutely no time for any framework that does not allow you to construct a mock request object, throw it into the controller, and verify correctness of the response object produced.
I really wish they would include gtk2hs by default, it's such
a pain to get working on windows.
Interesting. I wonder why the democrats didn't think of this right away? Everyone was saying the bill was dead when that republican senator got elected right?

Was this procedure hard to figure out?
Is it really eating away at EE or is it just a huge growth in support questions for Rails, iPhone, CSS, jquery that SO has an advantage in? The top search term for EE is Microsoft Outlook, while the top (non brand) search term for SO is "from_tag rails." Seems like search demographics are a huge part of the relative growth differences.
Ah, I see it has the new version of GHC now: 6.12.1
I was an unhappy owner of a Pre for a few months. The software they shipped on the Pre could generously be called beta quality. After 6 months of slow speeds, lack of features, and almost no third party apps I gave up and got something else. I think Palm in retrospect should have tried to hold off releasing WebOS until it was ready. I realize there may have been some business realities that made that impossible but it looks like they're going to suffer either the consequences either way. Early Pre hardware and software destroyed Palm's reputation among a lot of loyalists.
Even Google + Nexus One hasn't sold more than about 100K phones with the "unlocked, GSM" strategy. So, whatever Palm's mistakes, it doesn't look like this was one of them.
What schools are these? I mean their numbers. Just curious.
Is the Startup Visa better than the status quo?

All the criticism about the Startup Visa seems right, but still, for someone seeking a visa it's still better to have also this option than not having it.

People criticize things for not being perfect (or actually very imperfect) when what is important is if it is a step in the right direction. Does the existence of the Startup Visa make things easier for foreign entrepreneurs compared with what we have now? Yes it does.
Although I wholeheartedly agree that StackOverflow is orders of magnitude nicer than experts exchange, I really don't trust compete and their numbers.

compete reported a sharp decline of unique visitors to our site in nov and dec, even though those were are best months ever for both traffic and business (according to google analytics, and our bank acocunt). Of course there's nothing we can really do about it. What can you do? Complain? Write a flame blog post? Compete's numbers are not solid, they are all estimated from some crazy algorithm. It would be nice to just brush it off, but when potential customers are looking at compete and thinking we are tanking, it's bad news.
Yeah, I've also wondered about that.

Plus that I see JSON as a minor format, it's not like someone didn't think before: "let's just wire some lisp over a socket and eval it on the other side".

The same about the guy that invented Markdown, another minor microformat that somehow is seen as a great accomplishment in some circles (mostly Reddit).
Ubuntu Music Store is opening today?
Hey, I made this. I'd love feedback if there are other Erlang projects for embedding scripting languages that I missed.I've been focused on Lua (erl-lua and erlua) and I know about erlang_js but haven't found anything else to-date.
Tree Recursion- A point of readability
I'm one who likes to think things through to some kind of conclusion before acting. Often the conclusion can be "I'm not going to reach any sort of meaningful conclusion if I wait on X, so ..." And it's very rarely too difficult to complete that "so ..." part.
7210 Supernova Insert Sim Problem
Just FYI, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and Edubuntu are not really forks -- they're official 'flavours' of Ubuntu supported by Canonical. (As are Ubuntu Netbook Edition, Ubuntu Studio, and Ubuntu Server.)

Linux Mint is probably closer to a fork of Ubuntu -- they take the Ubuntu distribution, make some changes and additions, and re-release it.
I didn't know this and I'm amazed. They've been receiving complaints about experts exchange for years. Why haven't they been tossed into the black hole? What motivates Google to allow sites like this to get the top hit on searches?
Ohhhhhhh, now I get it! I always thought it was "Expert Sex Change"!
If you scroll down past the adverts you can read the answers at the bottom.
How does this install on Mac OS? Does it dump everything to /usr/local, or is it clean and self-contained inside its .app bundle?
Stick around longer than 134 days and you'll learn. This forum is a "hacker" forum not a "webapp/startup" forum.

The hacker community is interested in many things.
I purchased 'Communicating and Mobil Systems: the Pi-Calculus' last week. http://www.amazon.com/Communicating-Mobile-Systems-Robin-Mil.... This is the first computing theory book I have read. It's quite readable and very well written.
I like Crazy Egg, but when I used it it the scripts absolutely killed my site's load time. That was around a year and a half ago, I don't know if it has improved since.
Getting it completely right is surprisingly tricky while inhaling whiteboard marker fumes. I've found that it is a reasonable test of how much experience a candidate has:

http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-...
In his book, he disavows "creator", and prefers "discoverer".
These days, if you are a entrepreneur then you better come to realize the importance of design.
Excerpt from binary search article on Wikipedia:

"Although the basic idea of binary search is comparatively straightforward, the details can be surprisingly tricky…" — Professor Donald Knuth

When Jon Bentley assigned it as a problem in a course for professional programmers, he found that an astounding ninety percent failed to code a binary search correctly after several hours of working on it, and another study shows that accurate code for it is only found in five out of twenty textbooks (Kruse, 1999). Furthermore, Bentley's own implementation of binary search, published in his 1986 book Programming Pearls, contains an error that remained undetected for over twenty years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_search_algorithm#The_alg...
Visualization of the Global Risks Interconnections 2010
Persuasive essay ideas can be found online with no difficulty
Most students when asked to attempt essays have no clue as to how to go ahead with the writing process and thus buy essays. This although is not always true, some students use the essay help option
I posted a similar analysis a few days back about this Startup Visa. [shameless self-plug] http://vinthanedar.com/2010/02/26/my-thoughts-on-the-startup...
Great to see that on that side of the ocean the VC system is working and DB startups can get money. I assume you guys are pre-revenue?
Proposed FTC powers & consumer privacy legislation worry some in online ad world
No it doesn't. Its just another form of slavery like H1b.
I can relate to the cooking part. :-)

I have a "boom box" (what are those called, these days?) in the kitchen, and I'll listen to it while doing basic prep work, stirring, etc. But when it comes to adding spices and testing for taste, I have to mute it. If I leave it on, it is a mental struggle to relate what I am adding (not just items, but also hand-measured quantities) to past experience and to fully perceive what I am tasting (particularly as I am looking to adjust and optimize, and not just enjoy a finished preparation).

I also need to turn the music way down or off during various parts of cooking. For example, when I am frying up meat and waiting for the right time to add onions, either sound from the pan helps me adjust heat, stirring/flipping, and timing; or silence allows me to better focus my concentration on same. Another example, when bringing something to a boil, I am using sound and not just visual appearance to judge progress.
I am curious, where is that language in the actual bill?
What do you plan on doing if you get a serious illness? Could you afford the deductibles for that? The whole point of insurance is that you have to buy it before something bad happens. It's incredibly risky and stupid to gamble on the fact that you're currently young and healthy.

>Why should I have to subsidize fat baby-boomers?

Who you're subsidizing depends on how you think about it. An alternative is to consider that you're subsidizing your future old, unhealthy self. Once you're old and unhealthy, no-one's going to want to sell you a new insurance plan with better coverage. (Ignoring whatever changes the recent bill might bring about.)