skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My wife studies multi-modal literacy as part of her PhD studies. She was, at one point, staunchly against letting our young daughter play too many computer games, but as a result of her studies has done a complete 180. We monitor what our daughter is exposed to, for the most part, but we find that introducing her to games that stretch her skills in literacy, music, logic, etc. has been really beneficial. The result? She was reading at 3 years old and reading well by 4 years old. She just turned 5 and is into chapter books. Is this result completely due to her game playing? No. But the games have definitely helped.

tl;dr version: in my opinion, based on experience, the right kind of games will help literacy development
Guns, Germs and Steel - It will change the way you think about the course of human development and the forces of history.

The Innovator's Dilemma can be summed up in two paragraphs but is still worth reading - it explains why giant companies fail to keep innovating.

Stumbling upon happiness - how people's perception of what makes them happy has little basis in what actually makes them happy - and why.
I recommend The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker.
if your comments can lead to insightful discussions, why not both? Doing in HN is more fun because more people tend to respond to your point
No, UK card and UK addresses. This was when they'd just released the ad platform though, maybe things have changed?
The Tantalizing Promise of Social Search
When I said the "average" American, I meant the mathematical mean. That is to say, if the health-conscious people get slightly healthier and the rest stay the same, that pulls the average up slightly, which means less medical bills on average (again, mathematical mean) and greater average productivity.

I don't disagree with most of your points, but at the same time I don't see why there's any reason this law should not exist; it's easy to implement and does help some people. This law is not the health care solution; it's one tiny part of it.

I think that the article is arguing that since this law will not have a major impact on Americans' health, it should not be implemented. I'm arguing that it's a good law because it makes sense to provide basic information on food, and it's not an unreasonable hassle to do so.
The guidance computer doesn't have enough RAM to contain the code for the entire mission, though. They have to load in a new program once the the orbiter is in space, and another one before it de-orbits.

There's a fascinating (and very detailed) series of lectures on the Shuttle's design online on MIT's OpenCourseware site:
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Aeronautics-and-Astronautics/16-88...
oo, interesting - sorry, i didn't read that far.

even better (from my pov) would be something that worked similarly, but used used a local cache and told you when pages changed. i imagine it would always warn on first change and then flag pages that always change as "insecure", pages that have changed just now as "hack attempt" and pages that are constant as "original". you could imagine browser bar colours that signal those...

this is the same kind of approach i think should be used with SSL certification (indicating when the CA changes for a particular page), which would help secure against the recent discussion of govts pressuring CAs to sign fake certs (and obviously isn't new - it's basically what ssh does).

[edit: hmm, although what page is completely constant? when my bank balance changes i don't want an error flagged. no idea how you solve that in general]
Finally? This was posted in September of 2007. You can see the section under "The Rails Way" used in a large number of plugins and gems, as well. The pattern is no secret.

That said, it is a nice article. It's just not new.

There's been a fairly large refactoring/re-architecting for Rails 3, including, unless I'm mistaken, avoiding alias_method_chain.

(I want to say that this whole pattern or ruby-ism is now being avoided in Rails proper, but that would only be hearsay based on something I think I read many months ago. ... Yehuda?)
But to play devils advocate, doesn't advocating using a NoSQL solution as the default storage option suffer from the same fallacy?

For many of the people on both sides of this argument, I think they are both right in that the solution their promoting is optimal in certain contexts.

For many of the people on both sides of this argument, I think they are both wrong in that their advising using a tool across the board, independent of the context of its use.

Also, "good programmers know how to index properly" and "he's a dba that's scared of his career disappearing" are both ad hominem arguments. Let's stick to facts people.
In my opinion it's completely scary to think that there might be a campaign to discredit wikileaks, but it's a huge relief to see that that document was itself leaked, suggesting that at least some government employees are aware of possible excesses committed by their departments.

Which document are you referring to?
Electrical switching circuits have the possibility of two logical interpretations, fx

Electrical Positive Negative
function logic logic

L L | H 0 0 | 1 1 1 | 0
L H | H 0 1 | 1 1 0 | 0
H L | H 1 0 | 1 0 1 | 0
H H | L 1 1 | 0 0 0 | 1
NAND NOR
Related: I've often wondered why no one has found a successful way to brand opt-in ad targeting. You'd have to be big enough for it to matter (Google?), but it would have a tremendously positive effect on both the end-user experience, and on ad revenues.
I wonder how that was all written. Is it mainly hardware, assembly or a language such as Forth?
That's weird. Why would they even need date logic in the flight software?
Every time you use CSS, you're doing Aspect-Oriented Programming
Article summary:

Because it’s where the money is (supposedly). Each era of MBA graduates have their defining characteristics. The ’80s conquered Wall St, the late ’90s conquered Silicon Valley, and now they’re off to dominate Asia. MBA graduates taking jobs in Asia has doubled in the last 5 years, growing from 5% to more than 10%, and it’s the promise of rapid growth which is drawing them there. Experts say the percentage of graduates taking international jobs typically increases during a recession, however the number of graduates now asking for assignments in China, Vietnam, and India right now is unprecedented.

The geographic arbitrage is paying off well for these MBA grads, allowing them partake in the upper-crust Manhattan type lifestyle of having food delivered to them daily, maids clean up after them, and skipping around to different Asian cities, all for the cost of living in the cheapest of cities in the US.

Chinese firms didn’t used to recruit talent from United States universities, but that is starting to change. Large Chinese firms are showing up at recruiting events at America’s top business universities in increasing numbers.

http://hnsummary.com/2010/03/29/why-mbas-are-going-east/
Power Tools
I don't know why they're going, but seriously, if they all want to stay over there we won't miss them.
Can everyone commenting on this thread also add 2 lines on -

1) What the book is about
2) Why do you recommend it?
Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely: http://www.predictablyirrational.com/

Interesting book on why people act irrationally.
The Gold Bug Variations, by Richard Powers: a love story that touches on music, genetics, history, art... lots of themes that HN readers might appreciate.
doesn't it worry you, then, that your reasons for selecting the technology are unconnected with the big differences noted above? or do you think that "different beasts" boils down to what language you use?
I think you're giving too much credit to memory. Even though I've looked at the nutritional information on my fish sandwich the last three or four times I ordered it, I honestly cannot give you even a rough estimation of the calorie count -- nor would I be able to have an informed opinion the next time I'm in line and trying to decide between the fish and a big mac.

On the other hand, having that information displayed prior to ordering not only makes it readily apparent, but it also removes the burden of forcing the consumer to be constantly carrying around past nutritional information in their head.
I'm reminded of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English

Now, shall we perform similar analysis on vocabulary use by the adults currently working in all those jobs British teenagers supposedly risk not getting?
A lot of the classics mentioned can be found for free in .txt, .html, or ePub via Project Gutenberg.

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
Deploying Django with Fabric
Makes me wonder why there are 30 articles per page. I guess pg has a really big screen.
Fabric, Django, Git, Apache, mod_wsgi, virtualenv and pip deployment
I'm looking forward to having the option to prefer HTML5 video over Flash on my desktop browser. The average low quality Flash video pegs my CPU at 99.7% while a 1080P H264 file in VLC and it hovers around 60%
Ask HN: Names for printers and conference rooms
What's the naming convention at your workplace for -

1. Printers and Conference rooms
2. Where do you work? (Company, location)

I am very curious on what naming conventions are used by various organizations in various parts of the world. Name of Planets? Names of famous inventors? Name of mountains? Names of Star-Wars characters?
The kind of programs that go into space shuttles and airplanes are quite different than the windows and os x systems out there.

Their task are very specific not really leaving room for flexibility. You can almost compare the importance of these systems working exactly as expected with the physical parts of the shuttle.
I mastered a little about Rails internals by looking at the source code (of the framework), changing some methods (and entire classes) sometimes and by reading the development mailing list, I recommend the same way of learning for everyone working with Rails. Anyway, it would be nice to have an article describing the changes Rails 3 will bring to this architecture.
My favorite non-software books (I've mentioned these a few times around HN before):

* Atlas Shrugged (also good: The Fountainhead) by Ayn Rand

* Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

* Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Freedman

* The Plague by Albert Camus
It's not quite true that investors don't respond to emails over the transom. In my experience they just have to be very targeted.
The army intelligence assessment doc that was circulated a few days ago.
Inside a global cybercrime ring-How Hundreds workers created profitable viruses
When I was young my Dad got us an Atari 400 with the BASIC cartridge. He then told me I could "program" the computer to solve my math problems. Learned a lot, didn't save any time. :)

-- on the game front the 400 version of Pac-Man looked like the arcade game, not the plumber tools the 2600 version looked like.
If you're talented and get frustrated with stupid people, you have to read "Musashi" by Eiji Yoshikawa. I mean, you have to.

Musashi was one of the greatest (maybe the greatest) swordsman of all time. He invented a Japanese longblade/shortblade mixed style of swordsmanship, at one point fighting himself out of an ambush when he was attacked by over 30 men. He was undefeated in over 60 duels, including defeating arguably the second best swordsman in Japan at the time while fighting with a wooden oar he carved into a rough swordlike shape.

Here's Musashi's Wikipedia page:

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

The book by Eiji Yoshikawa is historical fiction - it's period accurate and follows all of Musashi's most well known story. It fills in some other details we don't know of Musashi's life - how he might have trained, some minor scuffles with bandits of the day, and it added a love story.

The book is exceptional. Musashi has immense amounts of raw talent, but is in conflict with himself in the world, arrogant, keeps getting into problems and trouble until he comes to more mastery and wisdom. Seriously, I read a lot, and this is hands-down my favorite book of all time. It's a hell of an enjoyable read, really pleasant and beautiful, fun and adventurous, but also filled with deep wisdom. It's a great swashbuckling story, but also teaches you about thinking critically, tactics, strategy, training, tradeoffs, and so on. Just a masterpiece. Easily the most influential book of my life.

No affiliate link:

http://www.amazon.com/Musashi-Eiji-Yoshikawa/dp/4770019572

Whilst on subject, I'll also recommend Husain Haddawy's translation of Arabian Nights, which is uproariously funny and also contains a lot of wisdom, and "The E-Myth Revisited" by Michael Gerber, which I consider the Bible of small business. I buy a copy of E-Myth and make anyone I'm going to partner with read it before I'll do business with them.

Arabian Nights:

http://www.amazon.com/Arabian-Nights-Norton-Critical-Edition...

E-Myth:

http://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-Abou...

Edit: Wow, that's quite a few upvotes pretty quickly. If you pick a copy of one of these and enjoy it, feel free to shoot me an email if you want to chat about it. These books have been huge for my life, and not enough people read, so I don't get to talk books as much as I'd like. Also, people with similar tastes feel free to make recommendations either commenting here or by email. Lurkers too! I'm always looking for great books.
Either that or prefers scrolling to waiting for another page of articles to load. Also he probably knows that most if not everyone that reads this site can point to the scroll wheel (or equivalent) on their computer.
Well this is just absurd. I bought my PS3 in a large part to support this open(ish) hardware notion amongst console makers. What a lot of good that did.
I thought about this early on. I think there are two working definitions of retirement:

1) Financially Independent
2) Relaxing for the rest of your life because of #1

I think in our community in particular, the concept of retirement really means "tinkering with side projects". We're "makers", none of us want to stop in the traditional sense of retirement, and I'm no different.

For our community, the more meaningful part of the word is the financial independence. That was my reasoning when I phrased it that way.

You can disagree with my semantics, but the bottom line is that I don't have to ever lift a finger and my bills get paid on time anyway.
That link has 14 different definitions of "open standard".
Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape
Brian Hayes

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393329593/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp...

This book is a "how it works" guide to the infrastructure of modernity: the power grid, mining, steel production, etc. Great photographs & readable text. I read it cover to cover and was enriched thereby.
Given the current fears (Chemistry Set = Terrorists), I wish simulators were much more available. The current iPod touch, iPhones, Android, and iPads would be good toys to have school bought simulators.
This is why you shouldn't sent or say over the internet anything that you wouldn't show your mother and why you should try to keep your private life separate from your internet live. If I was a user I would never again use this service. This wasn't even a security flaw it was plain incompetence as some redditors mentioned.
The burden placed on the healthcare system are not by health conscious people but rather the people making poor lifestyle/food choices.

First, do you think that a health conscious person really needs that label to make a choice? Chances are they are conscious enough to make the proper choice to begin with. They are also probably making choices between items that are healthier than what an average person eats from a typical fast food joint.

Second, if they are already health conscious, I would go so far as to say they, on average, use the healthcare system the least in terms of ailments caused by poor food choices. So if you take a slightly healthy person and possibly make them marginally healthier, are they really using the healthcare system less, as a whole, to make a difference?
Im not sure that electricity was the main driver here either. From my point of view the impetus was building a processor that was high performance and not needing active refrigeration to keep it from burning up.
I wonder how roachblog's emotional bank account balance stands with Covey after ripping off half the blog post from him?
This appears to be in response to the announcements of PS3 hypervisor exploits that rely on the use of OtherOS (specifically, Linux), since in the past Sony has insisted that they had no plans to ever deprecate Linux support, let alone force it in this manner:

http://lists.ozlabs.org/pipermail/cbe-oss-dev/2009-August/00...

Allowing people to opt out of the firmware update isn't as nice as it sounds, since you can't have a damaged PS3 serviced without getting it updated to the latest firmware. A few PS3 devs I follow on twitter have already discussed buying extra 'fat' PS3s to use as replacements in case their current ones die.

Kind of a short-sighted decision, since a lot of people who do development on PS3 software use this feature - getting a real devkit for use at home isn't particularly easy, and PS3 linux lets you do a lot of Cell hacking on inexpensive hardware.
"How Buildings Learn: What happens after they're built" by Stewart Brand (ok, it's about systems and software arch)

"Walt Disney: Triumph of the American Imagination" by Neal Gabler (This is awesome because the 1st third is about his multiple failures)

Any David Macaulay book (breathtaking deconstruction construction)

Any book on child crafts and games, vintage better. (The writing is superb and a lot of activities are excellent)

Any book on network marketing (I'm not involved but have been pitched many times. The talk about funnels for recruiting is realistic).
I am reading that right now, as recommended by I don't know how many people and I have to say that while it started out interesting, I find it increasingly more boring with every page. Which annoys me because it seems that everybody else gets something out of this book that I am simply not.
The first time I heard the "triangle argument", the points were labeled "Good" (as in quality), "Fast" (in terms of time to deliver), and "Cheap" (cost of the project). Maybe that version is more specific to MIS-type projects?
It probably has something to do with where to point the thing during re-entry. The shuttle would need to be able to land on different days in case something went wrong. Actually, the date stuff is probably used for all sorts of orbital calculations.
Maybe it's that many "video games" tend not to have much in the way of problem solving. The latest race car or shooting game probably doesn't require much thinking at all. (And yes, there are games that do require thinking and should be applauded.)
It's amazing how many good historical works are out of copyright and free. I got an Amazon Kindle as a gift, and it's been really wonderful for me.

If you like Roman history, you've got to check out Gibbons' History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It's just a masterpiece. I flip through my copy of Meditations from time to time (actually, now I look at it on my Kindle, but I used to flip through my paper copy) and just pick out random quotes. A great work. "It is not the thing itself that disturbs a man, but the man's perception of and reaction to the thing. The thing may not be able to be changed, but a man's perception and reaction may be changed." I'm butchering that quote, but it's incredibly meaningful to me, and I try to reflect on it when things seem to be going wrong or I get inconvenienced.

While talking about classics, there's a lot of good philosophy out of copyright. Beyond Good and Evil and Thus Spoke Zarathustra aren't perfect works and I disagree with a fair bit of it, but there's some absolute jewels in them too.

Lately I've been looking for a decent electronic copy of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents and Kierkegaard's Either/Or, but I've been having a hard time finding copies that are decently formatted and readable.

Also, got any other recommendations Staunch? I'm going to get Gallic Wars, and it seems like you and I have similar taste if you have other recommendations.
The problem in NY State is not the publication requirement per se, it is that you must publish in 2 newspapers for 6 consecutive weeks, and one of those 2 papers must be this one specific law journal that exists for the sole purpose of taking your $1,500.

The 6 weeks requirement is arbitrary and onerous - if the public was not sufficiently informed after 2 weeks or 4 weeks, is it going to be informed after 6 weeks? Likewise, the law journal requirement is arbitrary and onerous - the journal has no public readership whatsoever so it cannot claim to achieve the purpose of informing the public about your new LLC, nor can it justify the exorbitant advertising fee.

Over the years, there have been multiple lawsuits to repeal the requirement but nothing has changed. It's a money issue, as usual - the media lobby is strong and wants to hang on to these bogus fees. By the way, it takes exactly two minutes to find any LLC on the official NYS website, and it's free.
Okay, I'll give you this. You made some good points against PHP, but prior to my post, look at some of the suggestions that were completely off-the-wall, impractical and hardly ever used for anything in the wild. I won't enumerate them here. Perhaps ruby or python would be okay. And sure, if you wanna break out frameworks (the auto-tune of programming) be my guest.
Do you really think that either are a healthy choice? You're comparing two poor choices with each other and both will likely have the same outcome if eaten regularly. No nutritional label is going to change that.

Also, you're making the assumption that people can make a proper choice after reading a nutritional label. I could show someone that is less informed the nutritional data for various pieces of fish (that hasn't been breaded or deep fried) and they would think the fat and cholesterol content means that it's horrible for you when in fact fish has been shown to be beneficial.
I think it also feels more informal/no-big-deal than with Polaroid: a cell-phone snapshot feels casual, while taking a naked picture with a Polaroid camera feels more like producing amateur porn.
Here is what comes to my mind a my all favorite books:

* no exit - jean-paul sartre
* brave new world - adolous huxley
* 1984 - george orwell
* foucault's pendolum - umberto eco
* l'etranger - albert camus
* 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - jules vernes
> If I was a user I would never again use this service.

It would also include other services by the same management to the list :-)
I have found "The Goal" by Eliyahu Goldratt to be very insightful. It is written in a novel like format, with the purpose of teaching a certain way of attacking problems.

http://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/08...
I look at this as a game theory problem. If the number of VC's out there is very large, they are not well-connected, and the number of funding interactions you're going to have over your career is small, then ask away. Who cares if you upset that person? You're never going to deal with them (or their network) again.

If, on the other hand, the number of VC's is limited, they are well-connected to each other, and you plan to ask for funding repeatedly, then how you handle each individual interaction becomes VERY important, because it has a high chance of affecting all of your future interactions.

I find that much of the advice out there on sales and networking is focused on the former case, where the goal is to maximize the chance of a win in the first contact, even at the risk of making an enemy.