skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Am I the only one that found staring at orange hard on the eyes? I guess I should give the author credit for all the work that they put into this rant, seems like a blog post could have done just the same without all the fancy graphics and what not.
Anti-Chavez TV channel owner arrested in Venezuela
All humans everywhere. It takes rather a lot of work to get out of it; it takes a lot more for newborns to be somewhat reliably not-in-it. I suppose the same would go for silence, too, but the road from silence -> sound is a lot shorter than the one from hunter-gatherer -> first world industrial economy.
VIM has a similar file finder using a plugin called Fuzzy Finder
http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1984
Interesting examples (blog posts from Meliea author):

http://jam-bazaar.blogspot.com/2009/11/memory-debugging-with...

http://jam-bazaar.blogspot.com/2010/01/meliae-020.html
"you would need to do it for all the apps"

If "all the apps" meant the half-dozen apps most played by your friends, this wouldn't be so bad.

What makes this so bad is facebook sweepstakes apps that are essentially copies of each other. Sweepstakes #1: win an ipod nano is a different app than sweepstakes #2: win an ipod touch, which is different again from sweepstakes #3: win a macbook.

My dad enters a lot of sweepstakes (winning many thousands of dollars worth of stuff per year). When he reached sweepstakes #100 from the same company, I asked him to set up a second facebook profile just for sweepstakes, so I could block them all with one click. Having a script to do it would be even better.
> I assume you're speaking of the war in Iraq. Hmmm... I see a significant difference between a citizen breaking the laws of his own country (as this is what I was referring to) and a country breaking no laws to stop a tyrant who was slaughtering his own people. Wow I'm sure this will be a popular opinion here.

No, I mean the American Revolution.
Um, wasn't that kind of the point of corn subsidies?

It really wasn't that long ago when the biggest problem in the lower class wasn't being too fat, but rather being too thin.

Certainly this is a cause for concern, but keep in mind that there are worse things than having too much fat and too much leisure time.
Thanks, teaches me to post when tired.
Filmspiration – Alice in Wonderland
So here we are – after the huge anticipation – ready to buy one more “Alice in Wonderland”. Tim Burton’s remixed version of “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass” seemed to be a great reward for everyone who had patience. But for me this film was only an opportunity to realize that Lewis Carroll is untouchable!
There's also a similar site for Mercurial users: http://hgtip.com/

Disclosure: I made hgtip.
I think that kind of blog is very different. The general purpose blog is for customers (or potential customers). The Tech/Eng/BD blogs are great for startup enthusiasts, but aren't going to be very efficent channels to get customers to sign up. Unless the potential customer fits one of those groups and is interested on a couple levels. I agree with you though, I find the behind the curtain stuff fascinating.
He is saying that the Chinese government has been able to reduce poverty quicker that usual by taking a heavier controlling hand.
Make Yourself Presentable
Django-lawnchair
Maybe I'm an asshole, but I'd simply hide him from my feed altogether, and maybe check his page once a week or so for any updates.
I know where Singapore is, I dun need to look it up... Singapore is in a great spot for a port--lots of easy-to-travel water to the east and to the west and big trading partners in all directions. But, besides Hong Kong and maybe Keelong (in Taiwan) I'm not aware of any closer "Chinese" ports.

Anyway, this is a digression. Your remark does nothing for your original point.
Coding Horror: Treating User Myopia
Same here, I struggled to read the whole thing. By comparison the screenshots were refreshing to look at.
One data point is the netflix rating set from their contest. The system is 1 to 5 stars. The average movie rating was 3.4 in 1998 climbing to 3.8 in 2005.

Back to the original point -- if you used a formula with a default rating of 3 it would underestimate low-frequency movies. People don't view movies at random. They try to pick things they will like, which should be reflected in the statistical model.
> 172 startups is several times the number a VC partner would deal with in his career.

I wish VCs would take note.
http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=carnegie...
The Making Of A Venrock Venture Capitalist
Actually, I had a harder time reading your comment, while my eyes re-adjusted to a more "normal" color scheme.
There are arguments for and against tabs and spaces.

... and if you don't want to rehash those arguments, jwz has a nice summary: http://www.jwz.org/doc/tabs-vs-spaces.html
Conventional wisdom has it that Android isn't so much scaring Apple as pissing off Jobs personally.
It's easy to remove HFCS from your diet: Just eat whole foods. You really don't want all the chemicals in processed foods anyway. If you just eat fresh vegetables, fruits, meats, and whole grains you won't ever have to worry about what's hidden in the ingredients because there is only one ingredient: whatever you cooked.

I know, easier said than done, especially since it requires a little cooking, but I'm seriously surprised by the amount of people I see at work saying "I can never lose weight" - then I see them in the break room at lunch nuking a pakaged frozen dinner. Just stop, ask yourself "did my grandma eat this?" If the answer is no, then don't eat it. This is actually a great question to ask because it doesn't matter what culture you are from. People two generations ago didn't have access to food made in factories. It was all fresh from a farm, and it was good for us.
Having lost a lot of weight on a paleo-ish diet, I don't find this surprising. A related note: fruit, while generally considered good for you, also has a lot of sugar/fructose. In particular, the process of selective breeding has made fruits like bananas ever sweeter, much more so that our primitive ancestors would have encountered. Now I consider most of it (aside from berries) in the same category as candy.
Lady Gaga Is Probably Not An Illuminati Shill
"all the apps" does include all these me-too apps that are born every week. I haven't seen sweepstakes, but I have seen many quizzes.
"A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he knows something." Wilson Mizner

Friendly - practice smiling by thinking about something you enjoy.

Talkative - focus on asking good questions.

Communicative - consider who you are talking to and what they are asking for. Real communication isn't what's said, it's what is understood, so you need to ask questions to make sure you were understood.

Funny - "The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit." Somerset Maugham (It works for me).
If you can't connect to the servers because the middleman blocked them, a user might assume that the servers were updated, and then proceed to use the spoofed file...
China's Great Firewall spreads overseas
What's your cholesterol like? I imagine it's pretty bad, eating mostly meats and cheeses.

You can eat carbs, just eat good ones. Good ones being whole grains and legumes, not ground wheat flour. Stay away from pasta and breads (except sprouted wheat berry bread is ok), eat real good carbs like steel cut oats, buckwheat, quinoah, wild rice, brown rice, etc, along with fresh vegetables and fruits.

The carb heavy lunch leaves you dragging because you're eating bad carbs which are quickly metabolized into sugar in your blood, causing an insulin reaction and subsequent crash shortly later.
What Are Your Favorite Interview Tests?
I have a number of candidates I have to interview over the next two weeks and it's been a while since I've interviewed anybody. In the past one of my favorite tests for candidates is to build a basic programming language with the candidate. It's a lot of fun and really demonstrates core knowledge.

I was wondering what other people like to do and have found successful.

[EDIT] Sorry, should have said this is for a Ruby on Rails engineer.
I shall subscribe to your mailing list.
While siculars makes a reasonable comment about authoritarian creep, I would argue that the discussion hasn't reached the required length for Godwin's law to kick in, and the comment might have better been kept for a little later. It's also true, as maukdaddy elegantly puts it, that supressing fb-purity is quite a long way from genocide.
According to the organizers, the latest versions of all browsers are used. http://dvlabs.tippingpoint.com/blog/2010/02/15/pwn2own-2010
Not academic just typographish :)
Selective breeding of bananas? Culinary bananas are sterile and grown exclusively from cuttings. Also, the Cavendish is a lot less sweet than the previous banana of choice, the Gros Michel (which was sadly not as fungus resistant).
Yeah. If you have objects, skip the relational mapping and just use an object graph database.
I love how people then tend to bring up Win32 "wide strings", Java and .NET as alternatives, all of which use UTF-16, which is also a variable width encoding.
Interesting. Paleo diet has the right foods in it, but I suspect you're not gaining anything by not cooking your meats (except possible food poisoning). As others have said, cooking just denatures proteins, which is similar to what your stomach does anyway.
This is correct. With perhaps a few exceptions, your body is not in the business of absorbing whole proteins. Trypsin is one of the enzymes used to reduce peptides (protein fragments) into even smaller blocks (often down to amino acids). So yeah, whether or not that protein is denatured before your duodenum, it sure as hell will be afterwards.

At least, so one hopes.
Cooking food increases bio-availability of nutrients while decreasing the amount of nutrients present in food.

Cooking food is believed to be one of the important factors that led to increased brain size in sapiens as it increased bio-availability of nutrients. Whether that increase is still relevant given the total availability food in modern society is debatable.

These are general statements, in specific foods it may be preferable not to cook them. Certain foods such as chicken & pork should probably always be cooked.

The basic premise is this, if you are going to eat 1 carrot you will get more nutrients from it being cooked. The real question is whether it is better to eat 1 cooked carrot or two uncooked carrots. Our ancestors didn't have the luxury of having two carrots available so cooking was much preferable.
Geographical locality matters somewhat less than the fact that any ship sailing from China to India, the Middle East, Africa, or Europe passes trough Singapore.
I'm just reaching the end of a pretty soul-destroying consulting project. The client side is C++, and uses a lot of strings. To my horror, there still doesn't seem to be a de-facto standard way of dealing with the various unicode encodings in C++, even after my multi-year C++ hiatus. I ended up using the WideCharToMultiByte() and MultiByteToWideChar() Win32 functions, which are rather yucky. I'd fully expected boost to have an answer to this problem by now, but that only offers UCS-4 <-> UTF-8 conversion.

What libraries do C and C++ programmers use to hold unicode strings and convert between encodings these days?
In my experience, Anything provides better file and buffer location for Emacs. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Anything
Typical designer. "Oh no, my text editor displays its status to me using text."

Yeah. Some people get their eye-candy feed from lolcat videos, and then use their tools for work. (My desktop doesn't even have wobbly windows! Just a 1-px red border! How can I get any work done that way!)

Also, I'm fairly certain that eproject gets rid of the "wall of text" that disqualifies Emacs. In a perl project, for example, I can hit C-c C-f to find project files, but the files are displayed as the names of their resources -- instead of lib/Foo/Bar.pm, I see "Foo::Bar".

Personally, though, I just "eproject-open-all-project-files" when I start working, and then just iswitchb to the file I want to work in. Usually, you are two or three characters away from any file you want.

Learning and thinking > pretty.
Stackoverflow clone using Rails, Mongomapper and Mongodb
At the risk of ending anticlimactically, I plan to release it as a serious helper application with painless TextMate, Vim, and Emacs integration for a small fee (payable with PeepCode credits or free to Unlimited subscribers).

Good to know. We're saved. For a small fee.
Money quote: The device mitigates electrical interference from the stereo, lights, air conditioning, and more that can negatively affect the ECU’s ability to optimize fuel injection and fuel efficiency.

Silliness. My lighter is on a different circuit from the ECU. And doesn't the ECU have maybe a couple of capacitors in front of it to clean up noisy power?
We're talking politics, what your side does doesn't matter. Notice that the reason stated that the US can't ratify it is because China is essentially exempt under the current protocol. The current US reasoning plays well into the aforementioned reasons.

e.g. We have to stop paying them so they'll ratify a non-exempt agreement so that we can ratify it. :)
I wrote a simple fuzzy file finder extension for Emacs that tries to address some of the things I don't like about IDO (namely the "big paragraph" presentation that this article tells about), but does much less of course. I use it myself all the time, and if it could be of interest to the readers of this thread, here it is: http://code.google.com/p/find-file-suggest
How to find hottest search topics in Google Trends
I'm still trying to find one valid use for length of string in unicode characters. What one usually needs to know is length of string as it's rendered by some output device, which is not related to count of unicode characters in any useful way. Even for fixed point fonts you can have glyphs that are composed from multiple unicode characters or characters whose glyphs occupy two consecutive positions.
'M$'? Seriously? :)
UCSF's Dr. Lustig disagrees with that assessment. According to him, the fiber in fruit counteracts the negative effects of the fructose: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
Surprised they didn't use svg/vml eg. http://raphaeljs.com
Disruption is on the back burner, but it looks like his primary intention is to inform, so I don't see the problem.
I'm surprised he didn't use SVG - it provides an object graph, and will handle clipping/rendering for you.

A low level API like canvas probably isn't necessary for this kind of work.
Where's the geany integration? sniff
My favourite text editor still has to be Notepad++ on Windows. I've never found another (both for Windows or Linux) that was as snappy and simple.

shrug

(never quite "got" emacs - it reminds me of the crappy, buggy, horrid PIC IDE we used at uni)
How am I at risk of food poisoning if I eat blue-rare steak (which is beef)?

I agree that cooking hamburger all the way through is necessary (because the outside gets in when it's ground up), and that doing this doesn't work for chicken and pork (you need to cook those meats).

But I still don't understand why you think my microbiology professor is wrong. She says that all you need to do is to kill the E. coli on the surfaces of the steak (which can get there from fecal contamination during butchering), and doing more than that is a waste.

The outsides of the steaks I make are crispy, but about .5 cm below the surface, it's nice and red. (I don't eat cuts with huge veins and the like inside them.)
First, your quote from the economist covers 24 years. During that period a lot of people came out of extreme poverty. That does not mean that a huge portion of them are not poor.

It'd be interesting to be able to look at the original papers and break down what you think is not anti-poor. You've conceded that the corruption is widespread, so please stop acting like this is some sort of charity.
I wrote a snappy Ruby-based Vim plugin called LustyExplorer which does fuzzy/flex matching for opening files and switching buffers: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1890
"Getting log output from an embedded Flash component is a huge chore, but with Canvas you can simply use console.log to output status messages to the inspector."

Hmmm, you might be doing it wrong. Just trace(whatever); and keep a terminal open running tail -f flashlog.txt and you're good to go.
I actually saw raw Chicken breast in the grocery the other day that had HFCS in it. I have no idea why they felt the need to put that in the meat.

I agree with you about whole foods. Getting the time to do that though is usually the problem. I get up at 6am and usually don't get back home till 9pm where I then have to do a bunch of other stuff (pay bills, do school work, etc.). I don't even know what I would do if I had kids. My wife shares a similar schedule.

So getting time to cook stuff from scratch, which I love to do, is typically not possible. As a sad result, I find myself eating so many processed foods it's really rather sad.

The good news is that I can still find a surprising number of processed food vendors that sell stuff that typically doesn't have HFCS in it, like Kashi.

However, when I have slow stretches at work, I really enjoy cooking full meals and sitting out on my deck, enjoying the sun shine and a nice glass of wine with some roast duck, or home-made Shepherd's pie. And I feel better about life in general if I get to do that 2-3 times a week.
Kate comes close to providing what he is looking for:

It doesn't do an x/y fuzzy search, or an x y fuzzy search though it does to single word search.

It colors files by how recent they were opened and by if they were most recently edited or just viewed (changing/reference code).
The file searches include folder names.
All navigation tasks work through the keyboard.
It has GUI beauty.
Agreed, though consumers aren't really going to switch unless the geeks in their lives tell them to (much the way FF was mainstreamed). Not saying they should or shouldn't switch, but without a bit of tech evangelism ain't gon happen.
Oh, and also a version for Emacs: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/LustyExplorer
maybe "telnet {$addr} 80".

Summary: The Telnet service in Microsoft Windows 2000 SP4, XP SP2 and SP3, Server 2003 SP2, Vista Gold, SP1, and SP2, and Server 2008 Gold and SP2 allows remote Telnet servers to execute arbitrary code on a client machine by replaying the NTLM credentials of a client user, aka "Telnet Credential Reflection Vulnerability," a related issue to CVE-2000-0834.
Published: 08/12/2009

or maybe not ;-)
Given that Webwise replaces original ads with ISP's ads, and the website gets exactly nada from any clicks, I'd say that it is pretty much website's business.
If we're going to use a Bayesian treatment, the real sin is throwing away your uncertainty.

What I would love to see is a ranking algorithm that provides an elegant, intuitive interface to fuzzy ranking. If we can't be confident of the ordering, why pretend? It's a usability problem, not a statistics problem.

Your estimator is slightly more resilient than Amazon's and somewhat less conservative than the author's. It's definitely simpler, but who cares? Visitors never have to compute it after all.
> Just a 1-px red border!

You don't use xmonad, perchance? It's the only one I know of that uses the one red pixel in the default scheme. I guess Awesome or the like might too, but I haven't used them in a long time. Tiling window managers are a great example of something that is less "advanced" but more useful.

And as far as I can tell, both Emacs and Vim can easily satisfy all but the "beautiful" requirement for him. I think he should just replace all of his requirements with, "a powerful and extensible plug-in system."
Five Lessons Apple Can Learn From Amazon
This is really well done, and especially interesting because I am doing research on making a text editor right now.
I think your attitude is overly dismissive. At least, I'd have a hard time writing someone off as a "typical designer" (a bit of a tired stereotype) if they're experienced in both vim and emacs, let alone work for Peepcode. The author offered a sustained, reasoned argument for better navigation within projects.

I agree that as a programmer, I care about functionality and tools that get out of my way so that I can get my work done quickly and efficiently. But I don't think that means that everything has to look ugly (or better - that it couldn't be more elegantly presented).

I'm a Vim user, and rarely leave full-screen mode. It's a great app, but on large projects even with the Fuzzy File Finder plugin, I agree that navigating can be cumbersome. I'd like to try out Jamis Buck's "Fuzzy Finder Textmate" plugin that builds on this, but have had trouble getting it installed on both my desktop and laptop.

tl/dr: The author knows what s/he's talking about, and things can be pretty and functional, too.
Mayhaps it was the world's shortest, flattest island, and has been lost, thousands of (nano) meters below the waves?
You're fine then. I assumed you might eat other raw meats. I still enjoy a nice medium rare steak from time to time, although I don't like mine quite as rare as yours.
Or a nice 301 redirect.
The best resource for learning Git that I've found is "Understanding Git Conceptually" [1].

[1] http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~cduan/technical/git/
Yes, like most fruits, bananas are sterile polyploids that have to be replicated from grafts.

However, the intent of his post is still correct - these grafts are selected to ensure high sweetness and sugar content. It's not very different with other commercial fruits (See Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire for a similar story on apples.)
Not that I agree with everything in the article, but it's interesting how Amazon's cross-platform distribution mechanism makes it a significantly more attractive option for readers.
Actually a bunch of them contradict each other, so it's almost impossible for me to dislike or like all of them.
Look people in the eye when you're talking to them. This helps me focus on the conversation and not get distracted, and it also helps to convey to other people that I'm focusing on them.