skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course it's from China and they are worse. But it's STILL mainly true. Our government does monitor all of our communications.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepting_v._AT&T
An apology to pg and the latest YC class
The other day I made a thoughtless comment, several actually, when I should have congratulated you all on the hard work you've put into your startups. In the future, I will be more conscious and empathetic. Had it been me, I would have been offended by my comment, so I broke the golden rule. Instead, I should have found something good to say, because I know there are plenty of good things I could have said.

I'm sorry and I wish you all great success. I hope all your hard work is justly rewarded.

Sincerely,

fnid2
Facebook Proposes Revisions to Privacy Policy, Hints at More Location Features
"These are two different systems, and if they want to fight each other, let them, but why should we be involved?"

Sorry to digress. This is a genuine question out of curiousity and I am not trying taking any sides.

I am not an expert on the history of the world, but is there any example of a first-world country that got from a rural agririan economy to its developed status without either 1) relying on exporting its abundant natural resources, or 2) exploiting its people under some form or authoritarian system during its early stage of industrialization?

Scandanavia, Canada, and Australia were resource-based. Europe, America, and Japan had their dark days. The Asian Tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore) were all authoritarian until the late 20th century. Israel started off with an educated population. Did I miss anyone?

I am a bit pessimistic that there existents a good example of development for the poor countries to follow at all, and I really hope someone can prove me wrong. Of course, I am not saying a vague umbrella precedence justifies any particular wrongdoing, that's a big topic on its own. I just want to get a birds-eye view of where things came from and where they are going.
Ten levels of productivity
HP Mini 311 would be the best netbook to hackintosh.
Steve is a master at making his shows odd yet familiar. His mastery of the awkward sparks curiosity, which leads to attraction/engagement from the audience.

This was succinctly outlined in Scott Adams blog post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1164323
Dean Baker is a good economist, who predicted the housing bubble early on, as well as the resulting recession.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Baker#Financial_crisis_of_...

I think it makes sense that some economists are a lot better at their jobs than others. Many may fall into ideological ruts, because industry and government have strong interests in the outcome of this social "science".
The demo is right there on their website - bottom left corner.

Edit: apologies, that was such a short reply that it's at risk of coming across as snarky, but no such intent!
Just checked - it seems it doesn't appear every time I load the site, therefore I missed it the first time. Try reloading the site a couple of times.
Augmented Reality comes to Real Estate
Ask HN: Introduction to web design?
Can anyone recommend a place to find the absolute basics I need to know to create simple, easy-to-use, cross-browser interfaces? I understand the principles behind html/css/js and I've worked on server-side software. Where I fall down is in taking the design in my head and translating it into an actual page. I would prefer to avoid anything aimed at non-programmers because the signal to noise ratio is maddening.
Works fine under Linux for me (Slack 13).
I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to say. I'm openly for the Chinese system of government as I've stated several times in the past. I believe that freedom from poverty, a lack of violence and a massive emphasis on educating people even at the cost of supressing dissedent opinion is far better than the systems being tried in other parts of the world, as these systems have resulted in brutal systems that cause suffering and death everyday.

If you want people to stop suffering, then go save people being executed on the streets everyday in the cities across west africa. Go watch sahara reporters and see the truth about extra-judicial killings. It's documented and available for all to see - you can watch the videos and then make a difference. Saying that china is doing this even though there is no evidence to support this thesis is just a way of keeping the argument abstract - you can blame the country but not have to actually do anything.

I would not ever argue this point if I had not been in all the countries. I've been in China, in the U.S and in Africa. I've seen how the different systems work, and I believe the chinese system is a system that is right in bringing such a huge and diverse country into wealth without devolving into war.

There is no nerve to hit here, this is my open opinion about the issue. I am not anti-american or anti-freedom, it's just my opinion that the chinese system at the moment is the best system for china.
ACTA agreement leaked
Even if it's only 75% as good, it's 1° free 2° free 3° free so it doesn't cost any money, and you can adapt it / enhance it. So it beats photoshop hands down easily.
Here it is: http://pewresearch.org/pubs/906/china-economy

It's 86% satisfaction.
[... crickets ... a day later, back at the ranch: ]

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/biv72/why_git_a...

As a game developer, my repository is many gigabytes in size - consisting mostly of binary data. Perforce handles it like a champ; it scales incredibly well, even to the near-ridiculous volumes of data I need to build my projects.

And first hit on a quick search: It is well known that Google uses Perforce as its internal source management system (it has a source license).

So, obviously, it should be prescribed that everybody and his dog use a DVCS good at merging changes on text files, which solves the problem of the subset of people that:

1 - Hop around like rabbits, carrying their copy of the whole repository, and previously had to mail each other patches.

2 - Only work on text files, code with barely any non-text documentation, like top-dog kernel developers.

Good going.
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1216172

(Also, you can get the PDF directly there without going through the torrent.)
Don't underestimate how ITERATIVE the design process is. Do something then tweak it, then do it again then tweak it.

Don't think that everything is ruined and hopeless just because you can't get your ideas down right away. Iterate!
do you not think that one can only find that hilarious, by totally missing the point of its publication, i.e. to point out, either aggressively or tongue in cheek, that one kitchen vessel spends too much time commenting on the makeup of another?
This makes me sad. PLT folk are great Scheme researchers and practitioners; now I fear their work and conversations will turn ever-more inward.

OTOH I can't blame them for wanting to leave the current Scheme governance story behind.
Java data compression
Haha, I played with exactly that picture with resynth yesterday too. :)
The more important questions for hackers would be: are there ways to automtically detect astro-talk much like spam-mail?
Non sequitur
Effective Meal Plan For Type 1 Diabetes Diet
Vitiligo, anti vitiligo, vitiligo treatment
Why America Needs To Start Educating Its Workforce Again
I really wish he hadn't used literal zero and one arabic numerals (along with blank) as his tape symbols.

dash and pipe would have been much more evocative of 1-bit information, rather than persisting with this misleading "ones and zeroes" bullshit that has infected popular culture and tends to totally obscure the underlying concept.
Apps that block their own ads? I'm sure Apple wouldn't give a shit. App Store apps are sandboxed, and can't fuck with each other or with the built-in apps.

Apple doesn't sell the iPhone through carriers anywhere without an unlimited data plan. They'll only be changing that with the iPad in a month or so.
Google’s Doodles (on corporate symbols)
No, I don't get tired of having to pick something different every day.
CubeSail to drag debris out of Space Orbit
"Your website visitors are really confused."

No, your website visitors are really confused. i.e. me
This really confused me too, I could only see the "Try it" button and presumed it would give me a demo. I am not seeing it at all on the front page but do get this error:

Error: $("#haas").offset() is null
Source File: http://www.helpbubble.com/
Line: 33

Edit: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.15) Gecko/2009102814 Iceweasel/3.0.6 (Debian-3.0.6-3)
Lose Weight: How to Lose Belly Fat and Get a Six Pack Before the Summer Arrives
But that's like saying you can secure a computer by sealing it an concrete box and burying it under the ocean.

Wikileaks triages the data, pushes it out to the media, maintains physical drop-boxes across multiple continents, and much more. All of which requires people doing real work, the storage of data is a tiny part of the problem.

And even for the storage part freenet isn't a real solution. How many journalists do you know who use freenet ? - pushing data into the public domain is useless if only a tiny handful of people have access to it.
Git, internally, is very simple.
Intelligence and Metabolism
Thanks for the comment and link.
MafiaWars Reintroduces Robbing
Essay Intro Samples Are Very Useful in the Course Of Writing
Essay intro plays an integral part of essay writing. It should be well-designed and then written in accordance with strict requirements. A good essay introduction should grasp the readers’ attention and interest at once.
Thanks for the advice. I'm going to try that. 6-10 books. OK. I can do that in 4 months.

First topic: learning, memory & reading comprehension techniques. Then change habits. I have a couple books already.
And what happens if that system fails because those that declassify are the ones that have agendas to not release this information?
I'd argue that our computers are no universal turing machines, but they surely are close enough for everyones needs. Just like the ocean is infinite if you try to swim through it, even though a plane crosses it in a few hours.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/30/us/politics/30secrets.html

"President Obama declared on Tuesday that “no information may remain classified indefinitely” as part of a sweeping overhaul of the executive branch’s system for protecting classified national security information."

It's getting closer to that goal.
Not quite, in practice they are pretty much equivalent but they're not Universal Turing Machines. For that they would need to have infinite memory. A Universal Turing Machine is a theoretical construct, it's not something that could actually exist.
True. And, yet, if the floors are spotless, but the janitor seems to spend 90% of his day on the iPhone... How many managers are clueful enough to figure out that the janitor is accomplishing the task and leave him to do so in his own way?

All kinds of people mistake work for a form of punishment: if you don't look like you're toiling you must be doing something wrong. This is especially true when evaluating someone else's work.
How To Answer A Programming Interview Question And Look Good Doing It
200 years of human activity triggers new geological era. Scary.
So you really think the authoritarian communist government of China is superior system? Have you considered relocating there? If not, why not?
So keep it isolated in a separate branch? I do agree style wars are pointless.

Personally, while I can and sometimes do have to use the style mentioned in point #3 of the blog post, I curse under my breath every time. (It should be: "\n} else {\n"! Not "\n}\nelse\n{\n"!) Saving myself that frustration can be useful. But for a better example, I'll sometimes come across code indented inconsistently with spaces and tabs, and need to reformat with :retab and == in vim. Separating complex code into chunks makes it easier to parse for me, adding comments, etc. etc. etc. Remember, this is to understand the code, not necessarily to make a bugfix. If I'm going to muck with someone else's code, I'll usually follow their style even if it's not mine. But I might first solve it in mine.
Another example of this insanity: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/04/13.html

(Cube farms aren't necessarily cheaper than nice permanent construction, but you have to amortise tax deductions on the latter over 39 years).
These scanners are pretty much worthless. They are written by script kiddies for accountants who pretend they know something about IT when most of them have never administered a system.
They also don't seem to escape eBay auction names properly, in IPN notifications at least. If you have an auction name with & in it then that gets stuck straight into the URL encoded IPN body. You'd think this would be the sort of thing they'd really want to get right.
Car Transport Companies
Perhaps you’ve been confronted with that that question before.You’re in New York and you’re moving to California. You just bought a car online.You have a classic car and you want to get it to an auto show.In each and every one of these situations there are basically two options.
I actually have had this steve-martin-ism floating around in my head for more than a couple of years now.. that is truly inspiring (not sure if he ripped it off from another). It's related to show-biz, but I apply it to my classical music ambitions and now my entrepreneurial projects, too: "Be so good, that they _can't_ ignore you." It's quite a zen thing, actually, and it dissolves perhaps some of the complexity of breaking through to the other side with one thing to keep in mind.
WA seeks new tax revenue from software, but not from Microsoft
If you break the law or cause damage while under the influence you should be held accountable for your actions. I don't think anyone is arguing against that.
Working Smarter Means Measuring Smarter
Graphics Tech: Shadow Maps
Deep Inside Google Documents - Video Series
Having been a procrastinator, I know the feeling he's talking about. In fact, what I advocated above is basically large-scale procrastination of basic life activity like socializing.

And there's a difference between simply being able to work effectively and being able to solve a single difficult problem. For typical programming challenges that can be broken up into smaller chunks a bit of context-switching may not slow you down that much and you can be sure to give attention to important things like paying your rent and having dinner with your girlfriend.

Also, as a quick comment on your post above-- to the extent that "progress, even if it's not progress" isn't basically rephrasing my recommendations to study tools and similar problems, doing the 'work-on-context-instead' approach can be risky. If you spend too much time avoiding the big problem you may never solve it.
Like it or not, Eric S Raymond is to the hacker community what Louis Althusser is to French philosophers. Or Stanley Aronowitz to pomo sociology. Or Mark Foley to the Republican caucus. Or Crystal Gail Mangum to feminist bloggers. Every time an outsider first realizes how this guy was universally accepted as one of our leaders once we've taken a collective kick in the gut. The sooner people forget about this clown the better.

Your parent is an unsupported personal insult, you're not wrong about that, but if it discourages others from advertising esr essays it's legitimate and meaningful.
Why Git Ain’t Better Than X
> I was AMAZED how poorly Oracle performed in one certain use case (real time aggregation of a relatively large hierarchial database)

Out of interest, what kind of hierarchial database was this?
Something like this?

http://explainextended.com/2009/09/28/adjacency-list-vs-nest...
I'm going to make a bold assertion here: This is useless.

This kind of "augmented reality" (I think it diminishes reality) is a usability disaster. It's basically the worst possible way to display information about locations. Maps offer so many more advantages that it makes it hard to find any way to justify Layar.
ha ha, Good luck dude :)
Is this not another example of the "10,000 hours to be good" meme that's been floating about for a while? Desire gets you going, and of course it's good to have talent, but then practice and luck... Doesn't work with everything (no way I was ever going to play roundball well, but I could nicely handle soccer), but it's always amazing to see it when it works.

This should be read by everybody thinking an overnight sensation merely took one night.
Deus Ex (if you're not familiar with it) is a first person shooter with some RPG elements. One of the reasons it's so well-loved, even years after its release, is that within each area, the player can choose their own pace and method. You can play through the entire game without being seen, or without killing anyone, or pretty much any way you want.

You should try it.
Surprisingly tame. Any American radical left-winger would probably have come out with much more damning statistics and anecdotes.

Pity that the only response this will get in the US is possibly a derisive snort from the White house press secretary.
The case against teaching math
Or maybe they just value the ability to make more money than others.
Does Rest Of World Matter More Than The US?
Smart meter flaws give hackers power
> So I don’t need to mentally deal with repositories vs branches, I just store my large projects in a shared repo, and it’s all good.

And here I was thinking he was going to explain why it's better to have them separate. If I must decide if I need a repository before creating branches, to me it means exactly I do have to deal with repositories vs branches.
looks expensive, you will have to put in procurement request with approval from three levels of management accompanied with a two paragraph justification of need. This will get processed in four weeks.
Ubuntu 10.04: The Perfect Consumer Operating System?
Has there been any justification given for negotiating this thing behind closed doors?
20 JQuery Tips
right.

the tape only has to be $steps long, for $steps steps of computation, because that's the longest distance the head can travel at all.

any program that eventually halts, has a finite number of steps, so the band can be finite.

the only thing that requires an infinite band, is a non-halting program. and non-halting programs (unlike real-world servers and OSes) don't have a result as defined by the turing machine concept.
Too bad you're leaving us, but good luck man :)

Where did you get that Y! branded wizard's hat by the way?
Side-Channel Leaks in Web Apps: a Reality Today, a Challenge Tomorrow [pdf]
Found via http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/03/side-channel_a...
Been using this solution for quite some time. Works great. Found it on lifehacker.com. Using plastic rain gutter as a wire trough is another good one.
I know everyone is now going to be suggesting their favorite non-action game but this one is just too awesome not to :p

I've just completed Machinarium (http://machinarium.net) and it's absolutely fantastic. It's a point&click like the old LucasArts games except it just gets it all so right, no insane puzzles where the only solution is to try everything on everything here, most can be solved using just the things on one screen. Add to that the amazing artwork, great soundtrack and the fact that you play a robot and it's the best game I've played in a long time. It's also available for Windows, OSX and Linux.

Please buy it! I really want them to make more :)
Nellie the School Computer 15 February 1969
I learned maths AND was able to solve "story problems" in elementary school.

Looking back, the maths taught in elementary school is very basic, too. Just multiplication and division of integers, not even fractions yet.

To be honest, I don't care that much anymore if somebody doesn't want to learn maths. It's just their loss. But maths was one of the few things I enjoyed at school, so I absolutely see no point in removing it from the curriculum.

There are some school forms (like Montessori I think, quite popular here in Germany), where pupils can apparently choose for themselves what they want to learn at any particular moment. Not sure how exactly it works, but might be a good idea.
chalk this submission up as "should have been a comment"
I took your advice and sent the app off to Apple last night.

Here's a updated video showing off the version I submitted:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fg4PAefWC4

...thanks again for the advice and encouragement!
there is nothing "impressive" about signing up for calligraphy class. Maybe those were the easy classes at his school - I don't know. But there's nothing inherently impressive about taking calligraphy. I don't even know why you would put that on your resume unless you were going to write an essay about it.

Steve Jobs seems to think it was a big deal: http://www.google.com/search?q=steve+jobs+calligraphy
Who voted down this guy?

Linus earned his stripes; 30, 20 or 10 years old, the man delivered a world-class piece of software.

Patronizing him is just pulling non-existent rank so ESR doesn't feel like a fish out of water. Remember, while Linus oversaw the hottest piece of Unix software to come in decades, Eric Raymond was making a living off of "seniority" and "lore".

Eric Raymond is the spokesperson of an "in-crowd" whose membership he didn't earn.
Honesty or Smart Messaging? Startup Approach to Product Messaging
Why we got brilliant engineers for only 2,000$ / year
He never said it's a superior system. He said it's the "best system for China."
And how is this justified, does the companies brand and support structure really outpace the value that consultant is creating by a factor of 20 or 30?
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1218613
I've heard this sentiment before. Every year since 2000 has been proclaimed the year of consumer Linux. Yeah, sure, 2010 is the one and Ubuntu will do it. I've been testing every single release of Ubuntu, Fedora, and OpenSUSE on my laptop for the past few years and never did any last more than a few weeks. It's just too abrasive an experience.

Sadly, I will download and try this year's crop and, predictably, they will be rubbish.

And next year, it will be the same story again.
The article mentions a trick whereby the other player clicked their "Camera move" stick instead of their "Character move" stick in order to fool the other play who could here the click the control pad made. This strongly indicates that the players are on different screens (close together in the scenario but I imagine usually it would be played over the net)

I agree that it sounds like it would be very hard to make this into a playable game. But if they manage that it could be really good.
trivia: the portuguese form of work (trabalho) is a derivative of tripalium - an ancient roman torturing tool.

So yeah, it kinda makes sense that some people take work as punishment... :-)
I disagree with this.

Sure, kids don't like math. I myself didn't like math when I was a kid. Why? Well, because math takes work. Sometimes lots of work.

I believe a solution to this has to do with how math is taught, as opposed to just abolishing the subject altogether. I don't hate math any longer - I can sometimes see the beauty in it, and I sure as hell know that it comes in handy, especially when working with computers.

But even if it isn't taught properly - there is something to be said for doing math at an elementary level. Working on math problems tend to give you a certain kind of mental tenacity, that would come in handy later. The question, really, is how to make math seem fun/relevant - especially when it gets more abstract.

Steven Strogatz has some cool ideas:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/steven-strogat...
A Second look at the Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999)
Just in case they haven't: https://www.google.com/analytics/siteopt/exptlist?account=50...

Engineers should be data driven.
Call it the Holly Lands, or some other noun, and refuse to recognize either until they embrace each other as one?