skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have two laptops and a desktop, not looking for another full-featured computer. I love the idea of a "big iphone" or simplified computer that does a few things well. I guess I'm a tech whore. Im interested in the JooJoo and Norton Adam too, its just that the iPad has a huge lead when it comes to software.
Draft book: Practical Foundations for Programming Languages, RHarper [pdf]
Chat Roulette Piano Improv #2 (Merton returns)
Most people that have handled an iPad dismiss that it's just a larger iPod Touch - the old axiom a picture is worth a thousand words certainly applies here.

For education / gaming / medicine / industrial / etc etc the apps we see for this format are going to be incredible.
ContactMe Form - How it works
A million years ago, humanity's genome looked rather different. Is there any point in colonizing another galaxy with an alien species (i.e. ourselves, evolved)?
Natural Weight Loss Secrets Revealed
Every time I think of this I think "If my gym were smarter about game mechanics and WoWed up all their participation stats I would have +5 Abs of Steel and Epic Purple Arteries by the end of summer." (They've taken wee baby steps: at the end of the workout the screen will say "You burned 120 calories, which is an apple." and "Yay! You've completed your 17th Tokyo Marathon." That's great, but I think two guys and a couple boxes of ramen could do much better.)
Not being dreadfully slow will also make it unlike an iphone.
Hacking Spotify (in the US)
This study groups is using the out of print Barr/wells, which I couldn't find for purchase

http://groups.google.com/group/bacat/topics?start=
Brushes is going to be a big deal among people who can draw. The iPhone version is incredible, and the larger screen will make it more so.
I didn't read any type theory book but I'm interested in the subject. I think I will buy Pierce's "Types and Programming Languages" based on the recommendations on this thread: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/492
Chapter 7 of Essentials of Programming Languages (EoPL) has a nice introduction to some basic topics including type checking and type inference.

It's a nice gradual introduction, and help me get started with TaPL (although I wish I could say I'd made much progress).
I subscribe to the theory that our own bias as humans leads us to believe that human style intelligence is the pinacle of evolution throughout the universe. As one of the great old sci-fi writers said human intelligence has yet to be proven as a long term evolutionary advantage. It may be that less intelligent but more sustainable life is more typical. Look at the dolphins for example. They don't seem to have any interest in building radio transmitters or spaceships yet they are very intelligent. If this theory is true we can learn a major lesson: We have to become more sustainable creatures if we want to win the evolutionary contest over the long term.
what if the market disproved your idea and finds ways to teach failing people?

Because that has happened and is described in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, about a school in a poor area of a big city which has good results, and their secret is school every weekday and Saturday, starts early, finishes late, focused work.
Previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1221068
MTV Building Interactive TV for iPad - Beavis & Butthead #1
What this really needs is a way of performing git operations on the files in the iBuffer, then it would be a nice replacement for the various git modes for emacs.
Unfortunately, I think Bhutan is in the vanguard here.

We don't yet have a prime minister who gets to issue policy initiatives to increase Gross National Happiness.

But you can certainly get a lot of approval publishing articles explaining why letting people do what they think will make them happy doesn't actually make them happy, and everyone would really be happier if someone important just made the best choice for them.

Cass Sunstein is my favorite example of an intellectual who relentlessly argues that individual choice is bad. When I started typing this I had totally forgotten that he is now an official working for the Obama administration. Department of National Happiness, here we come.
Pfft. The most interesting part is Andy's using my analytics system in the game he's talking about. :)
agreed. it was not my best post. i could and should have done better.

but you have captured the essence of it

thank you
"biometric scanners and automatic timeclocks on all personal computers" is what they are building. I work in a strip club that has this.
He helped popularize it, but he did not create it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanstaafl
Law schools often use transfers as a way to increase head count without lowering admission standards.
"This goes against all my experience. Certainly, practise is needed to become a master at something. But innate ability combined with motivation and practice will yield a result that motivation and practice could never yield on its own."

citation needed. These tone deaf kids who practised a lot ; how much focused practise did they do to improve their tone recognition, exactly? Any at all? Or was their instrument practise of the "play the same tunes over and over" kind? Was it actually "a lot" or just "some"? In what kind of environment with what kind of support?
Maybe it's just because I haven't had any coffee today, but I failed to pick up on this to the depth you have, so thank you for bringing it to the surface. I think the original post should point to or incorporate this.
Well corrected. |You don't need geometry to understand calculus, either.
Haven't emailed them. I'm less worried about being the first to get one. I want to let the early adopters figure out whether this thing is legit and then I'll make my decision. I really hope it's the real deal.
My toy project to help you kick the Google habit
I would of gone with dinosaurs as an example but the point still stands
I've been developing relatively large and complex games on the Flash platform for a while (see: http://www.rocksolidarcade.com), and if I put into words just how badly made I think the entire platform is, I would expect to get written off as a troll.

With that said, the garbage collection is actually pretty decent. It's one of the few (perhaps only) parts of the entire ecosystem where I've never found any hair pulling, WTF worthy bugs.
Random Thoughts On Twitter & Social Media
Angela's World Patch 1.1 Released for iPhone and iPod Touch, Price Reduced
That is some nice work, but -moz-radial-gradient and -moz-border-radius are not "pure CSS".
Should I die to prove pakistan is dangerous?: Fathima Bhutto
Yes. By AA, I mean smooth edges of the drawings. Pretty much like how Flash does it (or any other vector composing tool). Although not essential, it's a nice feature to have. Just my 2 cents :)
I find that one of the subjects with the rarest of documentation is linkers. I often run into linking problems and all I have is the gnu linker manual.

Partly the problem is that linker people are unaware that the new generation of software engineers have no knowledge of linkers. I hope he goes one step further and makes a book out of it.
> Making sure every "new" was matched by a "delete" was tedious but absolutely necessary

Anyone who thinks this is necessary should check out boost::shared_ptr, weak_ptr, and scoped_ptr:

http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_42_0/libs/smart_ptr/smart_pt...

C++ has been around long enough to have had several distinct epochs of style and best practice. It's not necessary to do much manual heap management in modern C++.

And the subtle upside of using ref-counting is that the ownership and lifetime of your data becomes self-evident in the types. It takes awhile to appreciate that, but it makes garbage collection feel a bit like dynamic typing: yes, it requires you to think less, and there are heroic, inspiring optimizations behind it, but ultimately makes it harder to understand the runtime behavior based on just looking at the code.

This post is interesting because he's identifying those limitations of GC: he's ending up having to add reference management to his GC code, by making sure to null out references, etc. It's nice to have the type system do that for you.
A free (legal) audiobook version can be found here:

http://www.learnoutloud.com/Free-Audio-Video/Self-Developmen...
Good point. Volkswagen did as well, during the kerfuffle with Porsche in 2008:

http://www.autoblog.com/2008/10/28/volkswagen-temporarily-be...
I was making the opposite assertion. How are classes simpler than prototypes? If you want to add behavior to the proto and the clone, you just add a method to the proto. If you want to add behavior to a class and its instances, you have to do a fair bit more.
http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html
Well, I mean with files that are open and unmodified. If I change to a different branch to work on something else, emacs will prompt me for what to do with each open file that is different between branches.
What do those have to do with Ruby? Those things have nothing to do with Classes, Modules private / public ivars ...
Clearly the death of reputation will be a good thing for tech crunch.
There's a Better Way To Start a Company. Step One: Don't Work Too Hard.
A good article with a terrible and non-sequitor headline.

Perhaps we are moving toward a society that overlooks minor indiscretions. That doesn't mean we overlook everything. With the increase in data, we can start paying more attention to substantive things (that indiscretions were only a proxy for anyway).

There's no reason not to jump ahead here. This is a good time to take a look at your own habits in judging people and make sure you're doing it fairly.
Gross national happiness is a great idea until prosperous people with guns and bombs decide they want something you have.
Rocks. I love JS for what it is, even though I would equally love for CoffeeScript to be mainstream and natively supported across all browsers :)
I personally read "Category Theory for Computer Scientists." - http://www.amazon.com/Category-Computer-Scientists-Foundatio...

It was pretty rough. Reactions by page:

1-2 "This is pretty easy."
3-5 "Okay, I can see how this is getting harder..."
6-... "My mind is blown."

The real difficulty is that it dives into mathematical notation that I'm not used to reading fairly quickly. I'm still slogging away at it in my spare time.
Hopefully soon we can engineer an eat watch
http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/eatwatch.html

The rest of the Hacker's Diet is worth reading and has an excellent analytical approach to describe the eating (inputs) and energy use / exercise (outputs) of a simple model for your body.
Does MongoDB manage indexes for you?
Ironically, your post bad mouths fnid2 without justification the same way fnid2's post does to Fred Wilson.

There's some deep commentary about online discussions in there somewhere.
"Good results", what is that exactly? Doesn't it depend on your goals? If my goal is to find a job, "good reults" would be me being able to find a job after school.

I reject the notion that all kids should have high scores on their government demanded tests. It's easy to become blinded by flashy results. But remeber the tests you had to take in school. There were always two approached.
1) Study a lot, fill your brain with all the details before the test.
2) Just understand whatever it is you're doing.

Method #1 is hard, you have to focus, and you won't really learn anything either, al you will learn is how to repeat something you've heard before. It's likely that you'll forget what the test said you had supposedly "learned" within a year.
Method #2 is easy if you're smart, especially in High School, later on in life you actually have to practise

I'm saying that the market would produce what we demand, not what some social engineer deems fitting.
The important thing is this, though: it doesn't matter if you'll believe it, it matters if everyone else will.
There are many many free and legal books available, so it's not especially interesting to point to just one. What's interesting is to know which of them are worth reading (and, preferably, why).
This is a set of UI components, not a general purpose framework like jQuery. The two libraries have almost nothing in common.

Separately, I don't agree with your premise that more frameworks is a Bad Thing, nor that jQuery is/should be used in all projects.
There's something about scandals that seem to keep people interested. That's all most reality TV is, really, scandals about people that you don't even know. Tiger Woods (and Jesse James) certainly weren't the first famous men to cheat on their wives... but people still eat it up like a greasy bucket of KFC
New Blog to go with our new Site.
I strongly recommend "Proofs and Types" (http://www.PaulTaylor.EU/stable/Proofs%2BTypes.html), which has the added advantage of being free.
Really great thread, thanks for pointing that out
Latest lineup and Song list.
> the morons who routinely give up all their privacy on facebook for the fun of it

I'm not going to vote you down, even though I'm one of those "morons." Just remember that not everyone else has the same values as you do, and some of us weren't tricked by the Big Evil Facebook Button, and made a conscious decision to put our information out there.
I can attest to this. It seems that the new OS updates are really rather demanding, and my meagre 2G iPhone lags and stutters constantly.

I had to disable shake-to-shuffle, because the poor little thing would lag for 5 or 10 seconds, and seemed to condense accelerometer input during that time, making it think it had been shaken when it had actually just been sitting in my pocket.

I'm switching to Android next month hopefully, but that has little to do with hardware quality.
Ah, I don't know if magit has that feature. It's relatively easy conceptually though.

You'd write a hook for magit that on branch change would check what buffers were open to files within the repository and refresh their contents.

Maybe something like that exists already. I just press "r" to refresh the file from the filesystem when editing the individual files in this case.
Do you think that Apple would have survived without the "Sculley period"?
I've given up on humility, I'm smart, atleast relative to my environment. This has become obvious to me during my school years. I've never had to do homework or study before tests, because I'm smart. I know people who aren't dumb who have had to spend a lot of time studying.

It's not hard to know if you're smart or not, what's hard is knowing really how smart you really are. I'm probably not the smartest person on HN, I might very well be among the dumber ones? How would I really determine that? I have no good answer to that. But I am smart. You probably are, too, and the sooner you realize that and admit it openly, the better.
Lots of good suggestions in here, depending on the answer to "ask her."

I'll just add that at 13 she's old enough to start in with something more "real" than squeak or scratch. While they do teach logic, she'll be able to build on something more realworld-like for much longer (like, forever if she wants).
Thanks, added to the bookmarks. Alongside with the one I found earlier http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/sjt/TTFP/ttfp.pdf, this book seem to cover not the type theory per se, but the mathematics that make its foundations. This is great, though not exactly what I'm looking for.
Go ahead and read it. You'll know why I shared it (it's only 30 pages long).
Would pay for something like this, if it was solid, always up, and didn't require a plugin.
Useful Collection of Wordpress Plugins for Bloggers.
Works well, but I need it to consider the whole site.

For instance, I fed it the root URL, and most of the unused selectors it surfaced are in fact used on other parts of the website.
How to blog insightful
It depends what you mean by "type theory", but you're right. See Pierce for a more practical introduction. "Proofs and Types" is more fundamental and focuses on the interplay between the operational semantics of the underlying language and the structure of its type system (read as proofs of properties of programs written in the language).
Does this require a plugin? I missed it if so.
I chose to give the word "god" a positive, secular meaning. First of all, I've made it attainable, but not to everyone, just to the ones with ability. Because that is what the word has always been about, someone with ability (often someone omnipotent), who is a creator. If you have innate ability, intrinsic motvation, and the will to practice a lot, why wouldn't you be able to become a god? I say that you can.

Am I using language in a way counter to what it is for? Maybe. Am I trying to convey a point I think is important by doing so? Certainly.
Hi there. I happen to be on the Wikimedia Usability team, but on a separate project from the ones discussed here.

The team did their latest formal usability test just last week. Those results will be posted soon. In the meantime, the results of the October 2009 usability testing are here:

http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Usability,_Experience,_a...

In addition, they've been tracking the retention rates of people who try the beta:

http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Beta_Feedback_Survey

As for a WYSIWYG editor -- I can't speak for that team, but pretty much everyone agrees that this is required if we're going to achieve the goal of an encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

The WMF has recently instituted some permanent positions related to user experience, so stay tuned, or, get involved.
Definitely enjoyed it, forwarded it to all the other interns I worked with :)
Cool, btw, I wonder what was the point of the latest change to the coke (and not only) can redesign. Now the diameter is smaller but the can is higher. Just marketing to make it slim? (while it will make you fat...).
Gross national happiness is a great idea unless what makes you happy differs from what's in the metric and the policies designed to increase it.
Honestly, not exactly the most well written or enlightening thing I've ever read...

Not when such classics as Sherlock Holmes [1] are available free :)

1. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1661
I'm somewhat put off by the similarity of the ideas in this book to the ridiculous "The Secret" with its "Law of Attraction." I found this out through reviews of the book though, and the similarity may well be superficial.
Indeed, this works fine for pages which just contain CSS for that specific page but I'm not sure how often that actually occurs in the wild. And if you've got just a one page site then surely managing the CSS for that isn't a big issue?

For most of the sites I've worked on, I bundle up the CSS into a main stylesheet and then often one specific stylesheet per-section. If this could spider the whole site and generate a report on that then it would certainly be more useful.
Which analytics system is that? Sounds interesting.
I think that's for shipping efficiency, too. They can fit more cans per case.
Matrix Benchmarks: Fast Linear Algebra on the JVM
It's just another 37signals love-fest.

Y'know, I like 37signals as much as the next person. I thought DHH gave a great talk at Startup School a couple of years ago. But, what made his talk great wasn't so much the business development strategy he was talking about, it was that he was advocating a different way of doing things in the middle of a bunch of people repeating each-other.

"The 37signals Way" suddenly becomes a lot less attractive when it's presented as the only way to do things.
(I left this as a feedback on your site as well).

I agree... works well. But in the case of http://inclojure.com/ it says the URL is broken.

On a positive note, I tried it on 2 other sites, and it works really well. Great job.
http://www.swfstats.com/

If you want you can sign in to my account and see it in action on some of my games, just drop me an email: ben at swfstats.
I don't see it that way. I care what my friends might think, but they wouldn't be the ones that would be anonymous (nor would they believe a faceless site over their real world experiences). Everyone else? Who cares. Some of the treads on here mention getting a job or your boss seeing something. Do you really want to work with someone that would let their decisions be swayed by something like this? In reality the same thing can happen now at work, but it isn't a problem so I don't see this changing that.
It's funny how much effort goes into image and reputation management, as if we're putting more effort into maintaining this false appearance of who we are instead of simply being ourselves.

For me all throughout college I put up this fake front of who I wanted to be because I wanted to be popular and accepted by the world. It wasn't until after college that I came to realize (and still am) that internal acceptance and living truthfully with others removes such a huge mental burden. I have my utter failings, and I have my great successes, and both of them I am more than willing to share with others because that's who I am.

Reminds me of the Billy Joel lyrics...

Well we all have a face

That we hide away forever

And we take them out and

Show ourselves

When everyone has gone
Economics seems to be the only officially recognized form of utopianism.
NAT-to-NAT direct connections with no proxy/STUN needed
"Imagine for instance someone writes a little snippet of code that lets you use jquery plugins in YUI3."

Is that even really feasible?
from the article:

As Fried and Hansson write, "The most important thing is to begin."

I disagree, I think the most important step is to finish/release. I can't tell you how many products I've begun. But after a year and half, I've finally finished a product and will start accepting paid orders tomorrow. The sense of joy is overwhelming, even if I don't make a dime off of it.
Thanks for the feedback!

I halfway implemented traversing whole sitemaps, but never finished because the waits were getting so long that I would need to move away from django and towards something like twisted where I could incrementally update the results and work asynchronously.

Would you rather give a sitemap or a representative list of URLs?
YUI 3 has a very cool module system. I'm really looking forward to when jQuery provides $.require() so that it can do something similar.
I'm not so sure about this -- it would only play out this way if people's perception of size were based on the company's size, rather than their exposure to the company.

For one example: one of my business clients has a couple of die-hard Mac users (who I'm happy to support), and the administrator there is one of those "bah, Macs are toys, why don't they just get a PC like everyone else?" idiots. I mentioned to him one day that Apple had enough cash in the bank to purchase Dell outright. However, this did not at all change his perception of Apple.

It doesn't help that many individuals' exposure to Apple right now is through consumer devices like the iPhone and iPod, and not so much through "serious" computers.

Oh, and also: software. I'd hazard a guess that most of my clients don't think of the stuff on their iPhone as software in the sense of "stuff that runs on a computer". I suspect that they think of it more as "features", so for them, the only Apple software that they know of is iTunes.
Like others have said, the ability to add multiple URLs so that it can scan the entire site (or better yet, have your code follow the links a few layers deep to discover the pages itself) would be immensely valuable.
I am not too sure about this whole 37signals gurus thing. Their advice might be great, but it seem to me that it is pretty hard to do so or take a lot of work in actuality.

No offense, but if you're wanna be patio, you have to work your butt by learning all sort of cool hacks, statistics, etc.

5 hours per week might seem a breeze, but it's easier said than done.

But then again, I am a 18 years old who possess 1/100th of the knowledge of people like patio, and Tim Ferris...so what I think look like a huge gulf might be a pond to adults.