skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks. Yes, that's why teachers will never be not-wanted. We need experts/teachers who can cherry pick concepts and help us sift through the maze.

Thanks for the link!
Yes, and if you read the book "DisneyWar" highlighting the Eisner era you'll learn that the Jungle Book was made during a dark period after Walt's death when the studio was at its creative Nadir. People were hardly working, they lacked direction, etc.
I started with PHP and I wouldn't recommend it. It teaches you horrible habits and its type system is equally confusing if you get started or if you come from another language. Plus, you have that heavily polluted global namespace, a half-assed class system (objects are special, classes are special, primitives are special -- in Python the experience is closer to "OMG I've been using objects all along!" (like in those movies where the protagonist suddenly realises the shoes weren't magical, "the magic was in [him]") whereas in PHP you actually need to understand a completely different approach to what you're used to.

And don't get me started on naming conventions. Sure, you can adapt to PHP's inconsistencies, but ideally the first language you learn should be reliable and consistent.

BESIDES: if you learn a web language, you have to learn HTML first. And if you want to learn HTML these days, you also have to learn CSS and then JavaScript isn't far off either. In short: you'll have to learn a whole lot of stuff just to get anywhere. If you start coding in a shell and eventually start on GUI code, you only have to worry about what it all looks like on YOUR machine (and if you want to share your code, you can simply (have your daddy) make sure the other person has all the necessary modules in place).
Based on my reading of the first few pages of the paper (available here http://arxiv.org/abs/0905.2658 ), your description appears roughly correct.

E8 is a lie group, which is a set of matrices which is closed under inversion and multiplication. In fact, E8 is a very large group.

Particle physics is based on a set of smaller groups, but these groups are distinct. A "theory of everything" would embed these smaller groups into a single large group. Lisi showed that you can embed these smaller groups into E8, although he didn't show that all the important properties hold.

Garibaldi showed that there are only 6 ways of doing this embedding which don't create higher spin particles. He then showed that none of these 6 ways preserve chirality (the right-handedness of the universe).

So basically, while the relevant groups can be embedded into E8, they don't preserve the physics necessary for a theory of everything.
Reputation is already very important online. How many forums implement some sort of karma system? Imagine an anonymous rumor about a new Apple product left in a comment in some random website. How much stock would you put in that versus the same rumor printed by John Gruber as an anonymous source. Both are anonymous, but Gruber would be putting his reputation on the line when he promotes a rumor.
A reputation site for journalism could work well because it could be structured to be immune to the big problem of such sites: there would be no hearsay. One couldn't just make up a factual error written by the some author. That author actually has to go and publish the erroneous text.
In the middle of reading it I wanted to reply by saying that the framing in terms of extraterrestrials was just a device to get across the real warning of obsession with virtual realities, but then I got the end and the essay dissolved into incoherence.

I see no evidence that Christian and Muslim children are less prone to addiction. The high-minded Puritan work ethic attracts some, sure, but "the family values of the religious right" are in reality just a thinly-veiled excuse to be the mean, hateful, narcissistic, exclusive bastards they already are (why yes, I do have issues from my upbringing, thanks for asking, but it's still true).

In any case, the essay says that we haven't met aliens because they wiped themselves out in an evolutionary dead-end, but then the religious assholes' descendants (sorry, the super-duper-moral humans) will be the future of humanity meeting other such dipshits. Which is it?

In any case, to sum up, there's no there there. If you haven't read the article yet, it's really not worth it; if it's too late, I'm sorry.
An article posted here a few days ago suggested that it would be a good idea to integrate things like open files, project, version control status, etc., so here is one more piece of that puzzle.

(For project support in emacs, try eproject; http://github.com/jrockway/eproject)
Dijkstra be damned, I think BASIC is perfect for a beginner because it has such a readable syntax that it really doesn't take long to learn it. Not only is it simple, it's regular, readable and relatively quirk-free. For a beginner with only a small amount of skill, it's easy to look at BASIC code and work out what it does.

Scheme has a simple syntax too, but with it comes much more complicated constructs like closures, scopes, etc. But still, simplicity, immediacy, predictability and regularity are what a beginner needs, and Scheme has that.

Compare them to, say, Javascript, which looks deceptively simple but has so many quirks that we regularly get articles explaining explaining the syntax (such as "this") on HN. I can't imagine diving in to Javscript as a complete beginner.
Ask HN: Recommendation for web hosting
Any suggestions for a good and reliable web host for a website which will be used for experimenting with web programming & database management? Found a plethora of web hosting services out there but there seems to be negative comments for even the higher-ranked services as well.

Anything else that I should look out for?
People, get your names straight. It's Windows(R) Phone 7 Series; leaving out the Series is like calling Apple's desktop computer an iMa.
Kids should have fun programming. Line numbers are sheer torture.

I speak as someone who learned to program in TI-99/4A BASIC. The eventual move to QuickBASIC 2.0 was bliss: structured code and full-screen editing. I realized instantly what I had been missing.
"Ask her! First, figure out what exactly she wants to do/make/play with—then pick the best tool for the job."

I think you've totally nailed it here, but the other part is actually providing something to do.

Knowing how to program doesn't mean that you have something to program, which is often borne from some frustration or something that's missing in your computer life.

I just want to throw out there that the other half is stoking the creative fire. I think challenge projects are fun for this (like homework in a way), but the key is finding the right balance of challenge and reward.
AVM2 is currently non-generational, so it benefits from pooling. This works out just fine for Flash games, since you generally want games to have a highly static data set anyway - otherwise performance is just all over the place.

AVM2 also has the "Alchemy memory" since Flash 10 which adds a whole new option, independent of the GC, for tightening your space/time constraints: http://lab.polygonal.de/2010/03/15/memorymanager-revisited/
"In the hyper-competitive world of college admissions, transfer students have become the latest sought-after commodity, viewed as increasingly important to keeping seats filled and diversifying the student body through their varied backgrounds."

It was the superior treatment of university as a business at the cost of education that made me weary of post-secondary education here in The United States. I watched the shift happen at the turn of the century, especially at the university I attended in Philadelphia, PA.

I am all for running anything (for profit or not) as a business to financially sustain and grow success and value, almost nothing is free, but I don't believe you do it at the expense of the true purpose--in this case: education.

So, when I see things like this, it makes me even more disappointed and rehashes my thoughts on creating a co-op university not influenced by the "business of post-secondary education"; self-sustained and grown through the fruits of the student and faculty body labor by intertwining education and real world experience from beginning through the entirety of the curriculum. In other words, each program in the university is actually a business, creates product, sells product, etc. I could go on and on, but I think I have already been a little long in the tooth.
Tell HN: HackerNews Tel-Aviv meetup #2
Hello everyone

We are happy to do a second Tel-Aviv (and all of IL) meetup.

This time, very informal. A general meet & chat event.

- 13/4/2010
- 8:30pm
- LoveEAT (top floor), Nehalat Benyamin 3, TelAviv

Details & Announcements at the FB event page:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=106386552725158

* You don't need to reg on the page, but please drop a line so we know how many people to expect.
What of this possibility: Aliens and intelligent life-forms do exist at many levels of development, but no-one has discovered a way to travel the unimaginable distances of the universe. Even at near light speed travel, we can barely visit our own neighborhood in practical times.
If that's true, then a pro-privacy group can spring up that fights trash with trash. Spread lies about everybody and you won't be able to distinguish between real gossip and fake gossip. Suddenly everybody is anonymous again, and you won't have a meaningful online reputation anymore.

Unless... of course people claim ownership of their accusations. In which case the laws against libel come into play again.
I, and quite a few other people, went for http://www.webfaction.com/

Excellent support, intuitive management-console and lots of install scripts for various dev platforms.
Personal Information for 3.3M Stolen from Student Loan Handler
GNU gold developer on linker basics (2007)
It's reputed to be very good.
But in terms of their 'real business' it is not the number of customers they have but the number of they have but only their employees who will be using their systems. The purchase records, products and credit card numbers are closer to Tweets than users.
Apple's elephant in the room is Steve Jobs. He's undoubtedly one of the greatest, if not the greatest business leader of the twentieth century, and a lot of Apple's fortunes can directly be ascribed to him being at the helm of the company.

It's uncertain what will happen when he passes the torch along, voluntarily or otherwise. There are ongoing concerns about his health, he has had a liver transplant, he's had cancer and as Wikipedia states: On January 14, 2009, in an internal Apple memo, Jobs wrote that in the previous week he had "learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought" and announced a six-month leave of absence until the end of June 2009 to allow him to better focus on his health. [1]

As the Sculley period shows Apple without Steve Jobs might not do as well. He's truly one in a million, and a lot of the company's fortune has his signature on it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Health_concerns
A patch to autojump that:

* Makes it possible to jump to a relative path (e.g. `j ../models`)

* Possible to specify multiple patterns, e.g. `j my_project static`

http://github.com/amix/autojump/commit/f5fff8d8c0c6e8ce676aa...
Insurance is explicitly about pooling risk, and treating individuals along group lines. If the insurance companies could isolate, to the individual level, what the exact risk is for that person, it wouldn't be insurance any more.
In the hyper-competitive world of college admissions, transfer students have become the latest sought-after commodity, viewed as increasingly important to keeping seats filled and diversifying the student body through their varied backgrounds.

One can also see the transfer students with high GPAs as "proven performers."
Worthless? Really? Assume you're interviewing 2 people for a job, and they're both good candidates. However, 1 has a nasty anonymous review about how they suck at their job, and the other doesn't. Just because it's anonymous, you're going to fully, 100% ignore it? Or, could it possibly bias your decision by just a teensy bit?
I'm in pretty much the same position with my parents. The main issue as I see it is getting the thing to drive a printer since they will occasionally want to print documents or photos. Let's see what's in iPhone OS 4.0
Serious question: why are "nuclear proliferation", genocide, poverty and bad education bad things?

On what basis do you declare them to be bad? (Vs., say, the inevitable state of nature?)

How is the whatever that brings you to these conclusions not a "religion" in function if not style?
hackers speaking on politics...
> but the morons who routinely give up all their privacy on facebook for the fun of it don't give me much hope

Facebook has over 400 million users. That's more than there are people in the USA and Canada combined. When you reach those kind of numbers you can't credibly dismiss people who throw away their privacy as being morons.

I bet that people will just grow numb of scandals in the way that people have grown numb about inefficiency in the government, misconduct by the police, or gross negligence in finance or about wars in foreign countries. People just shrug and go on with their lives.
Am I missing something? It appears to be only an API developers so their Atlassian plugins have a consistent look and feel. I also cannot find any source nor license over the AUI components.
Are you a chronic liar, a drunken slut, a responsible employee or a good parent? Soon the world will know so act accordingly.

More like "does someone think you're a chronic liar or a drunken slut" or "have you got on the wrong side of someone"?

Better hope you can please everyone or this reputation of yours is ruined.

This entire concept seems creepy, judgmental and open to abuse.
Erm. Another JS framework. Seriously?

C'mon guys, everyone is using jquery now. And YUI will also be around for a while longer, until everyone has finally recovered from their bad java childhood.

What does this bring to the table that neither those two elephants nor one of the 28(!) other js libraries have?
It's Sunday-morning, and this topic is near and dear to me ( http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology_is... ) -- so time for a rant

It's interesting that we generally suppose either we'll achieve some super-greatness as a species or die out in some horrible cataclysm.

How species-centric.

As the author notes, a long, slow, fizzle into nothingness seems much more highly probable than some dramatic ending.

As an exercise, what do the democracies and the people in them spend their money on? Not space exploration. Not even war -- the last "real" earth-shaking war was well over 50 years ago. Lately it's all been bush wars. We spend more and more energy and money on ourselves. It's not the species, it's the comfort of each individual.

What do people value and celebrate? Adventure and discovery by moving out into the Solar System? Heck, there's already a serious movement among scientists to eliminate or seriously limit human exploration. You see, we could contaminate the places we visit.

I could continue with examples, but it's seemed obvious to me for many years that, as far as moving towards the conquest of space or self-destruction, we're doing a lot of plugging in, turning on, and patting ourselves on the back about it. But not a lot of exploration. Not only do we not live in a culture of risk-taking exploration, we actively view our presence in the universe as an evil and do all we can to avoid making any kind of permanent mark at all.

I fear over the long term we will succeed at this.
One could be a bad speller, but still be conscientious about editing and be civic-minded enough to use a spell checker. If someone doesn't mind decreasing the S/N ratio of the web by failing to do the above, one is free to make that choice. I wouldn't trust such a person.

(Exercise to the student: Does it logically follow that I disagree with the advice? That's another symptom right there.)
Molecular gastronomy would be a fun thing to try at one of the hacker spaces (hacker dojo, noisebridge, ...) (or just one well-equipped kitchen).

Several cooking techniques (e.g. sous vide) use some interesting electronics and control systems, combined with chemistry. I've also seen some traditional techniques/foods (smoker for pulled pork) augmented with monitoring systems (it posts to twitter when ready).

Switching food distribution from "ship finished packaged processed product to end user for consumption" to "query local ingredients, do local processing in a semi-automated fashion, profit" would be interesting. If you could make the tools smarter, and give step by step instructions and instant feedback/correction if something goes wrong, cooking would be a lot easier, and more fun. (e.g. making a sauce, a camera could observe if it is too thin, and suggest a specific amount of cornstarch to add)

Sort of like the "rock band" of cooking.
Tech firms try to outperk one another
Amazing rain drop logo created with nothing but simple HTML and CSS
Clothing Optional: 8 Crazy Festivals Around the World
The fact that a single person can create a Google competitor indicates this is something that Apple might not want to get into.
Not if you use AKKA!
What If Public Schools Were Abolished?
Nope, it doesn't work like that. Insurance is about reducing variance.

If I know the chance of crashing my car and losing a leg is exactly 1 / 50000 (per year), and if I can insure against that at roughly that rate, I would still get insurance, because $20 bucks a year doesn't affect my life, but a million will help a lot when I do lose that leg.

In this case risk is still pooled and the insurance company can still function because the misfortune of the individual is paid for by the more fortunate.

There is still a need for insurance companies exist in a world with perfect information. Of course the insurance rates would shift. For example, when in a large group of people a few have a high chance of an expensive disease the insurance company wouldn't give the same rate to everybody. You'd still want to get insurance, though.
This has been asked many times before - http://searchyc.com/hosting

My favorite has always been (and continues to be) http://www.linode.com/ for their value, simplicity, control panel and support.

I've always wanted to try http://www.webfaction.com/ too, might give that a shot next for a small project.
I knew two men in my Baby Boomer generation who each managed to attend four different undergraduate institutions in pursuit of an undergraduate degree, finishing their degree programs in four years. They kept trading up year by year, transferring their credits to each new college they attended. They have both had successful careers in what they have chosen to do. Don't give up. Keep pushing forward.
Make Use Samples of Narrative Essay Prompts 
It is rather interesting to write such kind of paper as narrative essay. With the help of narrative essay prompts, you may write about different events or situations. It requires writing about your own experience or the experiences of somebody else.
"good parent" is an excellent example of how this is a terrible idea.

A story from the spooky future...

Father: "I told you to do your homework before flying on your jetpack with your space friends! You're grounded! Go to your room."

Child stomps up stairs. Soon, the soft sound of typing "...and he routinely abuses his children, both sexually and psychologically. And he's a drunk."
Be carefull with what you wish. Ill motivated attempts of refactoring more often than not disrupt an entire team rythm. I come to appreciate the simplicity of lazy spirits.
Hội An sôi động với các hoạt động văn hóa tại Tuần lễ văn hóa – du lịch” Hội An
ừ ngày 22/3 đến ngày 1/4/2010, “Tuần lễ văn hóa – du lịch” Hội An diễn ra sôi động với nhiều hoạt động văn hóa, thể thao phong phú. Chương trình do UBND TP. Hội An, tỉnh Quảng Nam tổ chức nhân dịp Kỷ niệm 35 năm ngày giải phóng Hội An (28/3/1975- 28/3/2010) và Kỷ niệm 35 năm Ngày giải phóng tỉnh Quảng Nam (24/3/1975- 24/3/2010).
Bhutan takes the next step in democratizing happiness
Quite the contrary. Social sites aren't a replacement for human interaction. I think there's a lot of data out there about me and everyone else. I think we're in an age where data isn't as valuable because there's just so much of it. We're no better at putting it together. Show me a website that will literally tell you if a person is a chronic liar, drunken slut, or responsible parent and then I'll be impressed.
What most people don't realize is that while Apple claims to be a mobile device company, the truth is that Apple is really a mobile ecosystem company.

It's the ecosystem which is the key! The seamless iTunes/iPod experience was built on the foundation of a workable, legal, profitable music download ecosystem. Apple then leveraged this into the iTunes/AppStore/iPhone mobile device ecosystem.

Remember the lessons of the iPod. Lots of people made mp3 players with more/better stats and features. But no one else had the ecosystem on which to base a smooth and seamless experience. (And the marketing to not only bring it to our attention, but make it hip.) Right now, lots of people are making phones that can do more than the iPhone, but once again it's not the device, it's the ecosystem. And as heavy-handed as Apple may be, they're still at least twice as good as any of their rivals. The carriers are suffocating the gosling that will grow up to lay the golden eggs. Apple is feeding theirs enough so it will grow up marginally healthy. That's why they're winning.

(Palm understood this, but by trying to sync through iTunes, they put Apple in the position to sabotage their ecosystem. Bad move.)

EDIT: Suspect I am being punitively downmodded by someone whose post I criticized.
Google Searches for a Foreign Policy
Action Script 3 Memory Management
The 40 highest-paid people on the project bill taxpayers at least $500,000 a year. These enormous salaries are coming out of a $139 million extension to the CityTime contract that began July 1 and runs to Sept. 30.

...

Take, for example, Brian Fallon, a CityTime "project manager." The Science Applications International Corp., which employs Fallon and supplies the consultants, charged $653,554 for his services in 2009.

Whoah. There is a big difference between a consulting company's bill rate and a consultant's take-home pay. I take home nothing resembling my bill rate.
I submitted it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1224646
Yes and no, network speeds are base 10 when you buy it and when you spec hardware. Most users interaction with quantifying network speeds, however, is the browser download progress bar, which always uses base 2.
I really hope you meant Microsoft(R) Windows(R) Phone 7 Series
The subsequent blog entries on linker basics can simply be reached by increasing the number in the link (i.e., /39, /40, and so on).
"So evolving intelligence seems likely, given a propitious habitat..."

I would argue the opposite. Human level intelligence isn't necessary for survival, so why should one assume that it's bound to be common when its not even the case on Earth now or in it's history? What percentage of life that has ever existed on earth could you consider to have an intelligence on par or better than ours? Obviously less that a hundredth of 1%. If evolution is the law of life, then I doubt that intelligent life in the universe is as common as is assumed