skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They're both pretty old I think, around 2001? Neither seem particularly relevant to today's SSDs.
Good point. Not all games have to be theatrical, visually evocative to be immersive and emotional. I remember many times getting worked up over a game of Risk or Monopoly. The pieces on the board and the board itself were just proxies to stimulate our imagination and competitiveness. Games may never reach real-time you-are-in-a-movie status; maybe it's enough that they are fun to play.
Higher Search Engine Rankings Without A Home Page
Shameless plug, I have a love/hate relationship with Missed Connections, and as a result created http://www.MissedConnections.com to improve on the good work Craigslist started.
According to the article, we should comment here about it with our views, lest these threads are monitored and lead to our firing.
using their buying power to break monopolies of useless companies. Nice.

Wish i had the power to do this to my ISP.
Nice, though I don't see a speed difference between the examples.
My personal favorite is A Tale of Two Cities, but I haven't read enough Dickens yet to be sure what I have missed.

But while I heartily agree that reading classic literature is very worthwhile, I also think that reading a nonfiction book like SICP (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs) can be a deep and rich experience, a reading experience that can change someone's life for the better.
Or, say, tactile sculpture. I'd argue all art requires audience participation. Suspension of disbelief on film, hell any symbol or metaphor in any medium has to be actively analyzed.
Saying Goodbye to Apple
Yes, I think it's a matter of demarcation.

A chess set can be art, but a chess set isn't a game, it's just a tool used to play a game. Chess is the game, but it's just a set of rules; it may be a great game but it's not "art" in any useful sense.

A computer game is both the set of rules and the tool you use to play it, which I think is where Ebert might be getting confused. There are a few exceptions; Nethack could be considered a game which is just a set of rules independent of the particular implementation you use to play it.
Another game worthy of consideration as art:

http://www.playauditorium.com
24 More of the Best Linux Commercial Games (Part 3 of 3)
Paste this into your console, and it should align correctly:

var b = ["ie7","ie8","ie9","ff35","ff37","op","sa","ch"];
var rays = document.getElementsByClassName("css-chart")[0].children;
for (var i = 0; i < rays.length; i++) {
var ray = rays[i];
for (var j = 0; j < b.length; j++) {
var curr = ray.children[j];
if (curr.className != b[j]) {
ray.insertBefore(document.createElement("b"), curr);
}
}
}
"Google's unorthodox press release raises questions"

Newspapers afraid of change, read all about it.
Tut tut tut, poor/non-existent support for 1024x768 monitors. The worst fact is the page hijacks the mouse scroll so it took me a few reloads and zoom-outs to realise there was some really bad placed text at the bottom
Alain de Botton's Twitter Account
Visiting bookmarked blogs became too cumbersome for me years ago. I switched to Netvibes as my home page, with RSS feed widgets. That felt clunky, and I switched to Google Reader. I'm still on Google Reader (where I frequently add and remove feeds as I find new interesting sites and remove the ones that produce drivel or content overload). Regarding content overload, on a number of bigger blogs I switched to following the PostRank "best" RSS feed for them just so I wouldn't get flooded. That wasn't enough, so I dropped a lot of the big sites (in one case I felt their good content was just sourced from Reddit anyway.)

Currently I still use GReader a lot, but more and more often I find good content via my twitter stream, which acts as a quality filter and as a source of fresh content.

I do not get much off of Facebook, but I can see the same exact use case as how I use twitter for finding content.

To answer the question my guess is yes, people use RSS less and rely more on twitter/facebook/digg/reddit/etc because they provide more diverse content, but still relevant to an individual's interests, and naturally filtered for quality.
As long as you are happy writing your blog and you feel that you give a small amount of value for the blogs you write, I think that is what matters. There is a reason why inspirational blogs are so popular - people want to believe in the narrative, that there are others out there experiencing what they think they are relatively unique in going through. I used to ponder why http://thinksimplenow.com had so many comments per blog posts. Why Roger Ebert's blog posts generate so many comments. I think it is because they are sharing a feeling about an experience that encourages others to share their own personal experiences. Blogging is an ego thing, don't get me wrong, the real Gutenberg press, but if you are just writing about facts and technology without delving into the realm of feelings now and then, you might be editoralizing yourself. For what is Engadget really but a blog about a few of the seven sins. It's not a blog but check out http://urbanbaby.com
While not exactly news, his account is filled with a continuos stream of truly interesting philosophical ideas, 140 characters each. Quite the contrast to the typical wordy philosophical discourse.
BS. Sleeping 8 hours a night doesn't make you live longer.

Sleeping less than 2 hours a night for a long period of time may make you live less.

Same with diet. Eat a normal average diet, and you're set. Eat MacDonalds every day for breakfast, and maybe you'll die a bit earlier.

Don't forget also:

total happiness = time spent doing something * happiness level

eg, I would hate to maximize for 'time' at the expense of average happiness level.

The chances are we'll mostly die from accidents, cancer, etc anyway.
"However, some worry that this trend may harm individual and less-sophisticated investors who cannot access the blogs and websites as quickly as professionals. Others worry that not everyone will get the information."

Putting the stuff on a public website with a simple url makes it HARDER for non-professionals to access? Someone clue me in to their reasoning as to why.
It's a pity Ebert isn't here, but I wonder if he could be convinced by some crazy examples. Let's take a great film like, say, Psycho. Now let's add a single point of interactivity; Janet Leigh starts taking a shower and you can, playing as Norman Bates (uhh, sorry if I just spoiled the movie for anyone) click one box to go and stab her, in which case you see the rest of the movie, or click the other box to not stab her, in which case you see a title card that says "Marion finished her shower, had a good night's sleep, and escaped to Mexico, married a fisherman and lived happily ever after".

Now, that wouldn't be an improvement on the original (though now I've typed it I kinda want to play it) but is it enough to push it from "art" into "not art"? Let's assume this was the actual original form in which Hitchcock, in a fit of originality, decided to release Psycho in the first place.
Tandoori Raan Recipe
- Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell

- How the Steel Was Tempered by Nikolai Ostrovsky
Maybe these non-professionals are getting their information from portals that only show press releases and MSM stories.
have you figured out how to set up the whole toolchain of scipy + lapack + GotoBLAS (or something) ?
More often than not people are interested in tools and ability to generate answers themselves, not just answers.
Whoa there. Contrails do bounce a lot of radiation back in the short term, but you haven’t showed that they balance the greenhousing effect of the exhaust gasses over the long term.
I would be in favor of legislation limiting what can be sent to arbitration and what can't. i.e. Cases like the Jamie Leigh Jones case should not be left to arbitration.
21st-Century Origami (printed)
Biotime Reverses the Aging of Human Cells
The fact that even IE 9 is missing several important things, like the SQL db and Canvas, is ridiculous. I guess it's early-stage enough that they might add more. If not, I think IE might finally die when people see all these cool HTML5 near-desktop-quality webapps that say "just download Chrome or FF and you can use me."
The difference between distributing and using your software.

If I had a site where people could watch the pirate copies of movies for free - would the MPAA not care, because I'm not distributing the movies I'm just 'using' them.
The Dogs of War: Apple vs. Google vs. Microsoft
It’s hard to grasp the breathtaking scale of the epic war between Microsoft, Google and Apple. Billions upon billions of dollars. Entire industries at stake. This is the board. These are the pieces.
agreed on all points.
Novels once rated the same consideration by critics.

"Once upon a time there were good American novels and bad ones, but none was thought of as a work of art."

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7197.html

Moby Dick, written in 1851, wasn't widely regarded as a work of art until after World War I.

To counter Ebert's summary: Why are the self-appointed guardians of the ramparts of canonized art always so jealous in protecting it from being invaded by newcomers? This story has been repeated over and over again with portrait paintings, Impressionism, architecture, novels, cinema, and everything in between. It's an old and tired plot, and one he should certainly be familiar enough with to disdain.
I think he believes half of it: that no games rising to the level of good art (let alone great art) currently exist. The rest, where he's forced to tie knots in the definition of both "game" and "art" to prove one can't be the other is a lot iffier.

It's a pity he didn't limit himself to the argument about whether any games which are "good" art currently exist, or else we could be having a much more interesting discussion. Personally I think that Half Life 2, say, is far better than many of the movies to which Ebert gives four stars, but not quite good enough to kick it into the stratosphere of what's truly great.

I guess that video games are probably the hardest medium in which to create great art. It used to be said that filmmaking was the hardest medium since it combined most of the others; music, writing, photography etc. Gamemaking is even harder since you have all those other elements plus the need for gameplay.
This is interesting. It seems dangerous, but I can see how it might be effective in the short-term.

Actually, you just inspired me to rethink my entire site structure. Thanks!
I think his point is that Excel is a powerful weapon in the right hands. Most people don't do much with it, but it's powerful none the less. If dollars were points, many trillions in commerce and complex decisions have been made on the result of analysis done by spreadsheets.
Currently investigating to see if I'm wrong about this - if eBay does actually have a dynamic time limit feature and I was just unaware of it.
I'm not entirely sure what kind of analysis you are thinking about. Statistics in R for me entail a lot of human intuition, interpretation and decisions. You probably don't want a script building your models for a confirmative factor analysis, for example.
A very valid point.
The "comments" section which mixes all kinds of mentions from the Internet including twitters is really annoying.
Though I feel the same for the most part as the author, I just decided to not buy an iPad - not ditch the OS. But then again, I'm a designer not a developer, and too afraid of the jungle to leave my big cats behind.
Excellent timing for me. Just this past week, I set up a Wufoo form as a performance review for myself. I asked a bunch of users at my current client to fill it out to let me know how I've been doing. I thought it would be useful for me, since I don't have any formal feedback mechanisms as an independent consultant.

Everyone was happy to oblige and several filled out a form. Then I got a call from someone who, just on a whim, decided to check with HR first. That's how we found out that it's against company policy to allow people to provide feedback to outside consultants. This is in case the consultant gets let go and the feedback contradicts that of the consultant's direct supervisor. If some kind of dispute arises, they want everything to match the company line.

Having worked for these types of corporations for so long, I completely understand how this policy came about. However, thoughts of "evil" Toby from "The Office" keep cropping up somehow.
I hear the argument and it is sound.

I believe it isn't. I appreciate Michael's summary because it shows where Ebert's blind spot is. (I think you get it though.) Games allow you to be pulled into stories better, or at least differently, than movies. More like novels than movies as you find yourself putting more into the story than you're given, or as in Bioshock you adopt the character as yourself and wonder what do I really think about Ryan? He seems okay to me, but I'm not sure about Atlas. The story is about as artistic as a sequel to Atlas Shrugged could be.

Then there is the idea some games contain art. Donkey Kong 2 isn't a game I would claim to be art, but Stickerbrush Symphony is one of the finest levels in any game I've played. The experience of bouncing from barrel to barrel with this beautiful music and environment... I'm not talented enough a writer to explain. The music and scene are the lines in those cave paintings.

Ebert's hung up on the word game and can't see those moments frozen in time. And without playing the games and giving himself over to them he won't be able to. The over riding purpose isn't the game play, it's those moments in time where you don't just understand the story, but you believe it.
I wonder if Rcmdr would be up your alley:

http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/Misc/Rcmdr/

Screenshot:
http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/Misc/Rcmdr/Rcmdr-screenshot....
I'm not quite sure what this could be useful for. Working with xml in a browser isn't as easy as json, but it isn't so broken it needs another intermediate layer.
cash is not a good motivator. What money affords is the opportunity to attain a desire (power, consumption, freedom, increased peer perception). What motivates people is the ability to capture what they covet.
They don't, and I agree that it is flawed. But perhaps flawed is too strong of a word, and it's just that ebay auctions don't tend to mimic real-life auctions (and maybe there is a reason for the discrete time limits, ie sellers need to know exactly when items are ending; buyers are often time limited sometimes as well: 7 days often seems like an eternity anyways). Many of the up-and-coming penny auction sites include this feature, as it is much more necessary to their business model.
It seems strange to expend 80 MB of RAM just to play an MP3.

I liked that bit a lot; iTunes is gigantic resource hog.
Well that an the fact that if you're an analyst covering 100 stocks you now are responsible for monitoring 100 different sources!
As a quick aside, I’m not completely sure what this means for my opinions on patents in general, but I am pretty sure that I think the whole patent system should be abolished. You shouldn’t be able to own ideas.

I think people who are opposed to patents could benefit from thinking about them in a different way. Instead of seeing them as "ownership of ideas" think of them as a bounty on ideas. The generation of new ideas benefits us all, so when somebody thinks up a new idea the government pays the inventor a bounty in the form of an exclusive right to make commercial use of that idea for a certain number of years. The great thing about paying it in the form of an exclusive right is that the value of the bounty automatically winds up being proportional to the value of the idea.

Now if you're a strict libertarian you can quite sensibly oppose the payment of bounties by the government, but if you're a more modest libertarian like myself or a non-libertarian then I think it starts to look pretty sensible.
Why Does the World's Top Mathematician have a Public E-Mail Address?
Comparing a hockey match to a computer game is comparing apples to ninjas. The proper comparisons are: a hockey match to a particular run-through of a computer game, in which neither is art, in the same way that a particular instance of someone looking at the Mona Lisa is not art; and the game of hockey itself, to a computer game. Hockey is not art, nor is it meant to be, and neither is Medal of Honor, but that most certainly does not mean that games in general are not capable of being artistic.

Hockey and computer games aren't particular comparable because no one is trying to make a new type of hockey every year to push the boundaries of what hockey can be. Hockey is a single instance of a game, and a (mostly) static one. The computer game industry is continually updating itself with several notions of design, some of which have artistic merit.

I also think that professional sports are a red herring as a comparison, because I doubt that multiplayer games have as much potential to be artistic. The artistic games tend to be tightly scripted and non-competitive, something that doesn't jive well with introducing a player-adversary. Unless you want to be one of those avant-garde artistes making a statement about how we objectify each other or something.
WebServices Technologies
OpenZDK is the answer to the closed and limited nature of XNA for the Zune
The intention of this visualization was to show how much support exists for a particular HTML5/CSS3 feature among the 8 browsers, but not which specific browser supports which feature, which are already covered well here: http://whencaniuse.com
The method the author proposes is to redirect example.com to example.com/latest-post/

For many blogs, I don't feel this is the best user experience. I feel like a blog homepage should include some content that introduces the visitor to the site. This isn't always appropriate for individual post pages, which should primarily be about the topic the post is about - and any content within the blog that relates to this topic. This depends upon the degree of topical focus of the whole blog, though.
Private arbitration as it currently stands in the US is hopelessly broken. There are numerous conflicts of interest for arbiters, all favoring employers. As the article says, arbiters find in favor of employees in 30% of cases at best. I'd prefer to see mandatory arbitration made completely illegal until it can be fixed - if it can be fixed.
I love the border-left on the paragraph, I usually select text I'm reading but this approach works pretty good as well!
I really don't see a point to RSS. I use it to subscribe to a particular forums category, but that's it. If I want to get a persons blog post, I add them to my 'Tracking' list on twitter.

Most people don't write consistently good stuff. And I dislike seeing "50 unread items" in my google reader - it seems as if I am obliged to read them, when most will be bad. Any really good post is either going to show up on hacker news, on reddit, on delicious.com/popular or on my twitter tracking list. If it does not show up there, then I probably don't need to read it.

Twitter pre-filters my posts, RSS does not. That's why I use rss.
Nokia N900 Sim Free Mobile Computer
You mean Gnumeric!
A decade ago, when the company I worked for was sold, I was given a sizeable retention package; one-third was paid thirty days after the sale closed, the rest six months later. My extant stock options were made given excellent strike prices. All told, it was roughly a six-figure package and it kept me with the company another fifteen months until it was clear that the new owners were, indeed, incompetent.
If G2s are shipping with TRIM firmware, couldn't you just downgrade to a pre-TRIM version if you're so concerned?

I don't understand how running Win7 makes you a 'power user fanboy' as opposed to running OSX or Linux. Next time leave the second half of your comment off, and maybe provide some evidence for your first.
I don't think the patents itself are wrong but the broken patent system which accepts obvious ideas (1 click patent ?), limits itself to the big boys and then grants large patent terms.

Also, the patent shouldn't be on the idea, but on the exploitation of an idea. If a given entity makes more money from a patent by licensing it compared to actually using it, it's a pretty good sign that the society didn't benefit from the patent but actually granted a temporary monopoly on something and that's actually slowing down progress.
Well, so much for that. Now Google Chrome and Twitter both think my site serves malware. Anybody know what to do about this?
Ok that came of way too snarky. What I was attempting to say was that Thinkpads were (I haven't used any that were made by the Chinese manufacture so I can't answer for them) made to be used and were designed to handle the hits and spills that would happen naturally over the course of such work (the keyboard had drainage, the hinges were extra enforced and it could take quite a few drops).

On the other hand my iPod has already got three scratches in it. One was because my keys were in my pocket (which I do all the time with my cell, without any issues) the other when when I dropped it two feet (of my bed, and not on purpose).

Sure the iPod stuff is nice, but I wouldn't rely on it for actual work.
>> if you're a more modest libertarian like myself

Almost everyone is a "modest libertarian".
They all want the govt to intervene in some areas, but not in some others.
The problem, especially in the software world, UI, etc is that having the idea is often trivial. We could all sit down and think up thousands of cool ideas, patent them, and wait for people to do the hard work in implementing them. But that's pretty uncool.

For example, having a touchscreen that makes things zoom by pinching. How else would anyone do that? It's trivial, obvious, and there actually isn't any other useful way you could do it.

I'm all for bounties on things that are actually difficult, but having ideas, and making software, isn't hard.
Stay! Good dog.
I feel bad for you to feel bad for me. We each have different opinions and this book has a very special meaning to me. I never said I didn't like other books, but this one is my personal favorite, even if it's a technical book.
The $500 Experimental Twitch
It's not true that you don't get those rights with proprietary software. It depends on the license, as always.

The disconnect the GP has is that the GNU GPL is based on freedom, yet it places significant restrictions on what you do with the software under the GPL. It's a fine license, but calling it "more free" is nonsense.
Ubuntu broke 'netcat' in Lucid
You won't believe it. They broke 'netcat' in Lucid Lynx.
Why not just post a link to the article rather than copy and pasting it ?
any bio geeks here to clue the rest of us in?
Wow, looks like people are out with their claws over what is just a simple, fun experiment with CSS transforms.

FWIW, if you dont like it you can try tweaking it yourself : http://github.com/paulirish/html5readiness.com
Top 15 Google Products for People Who Build Websites
Ask HN: what if the patent system was decentralized?
The typical example in favor of patents is that of drug discovery: it's expensive to conduct but a drug is trivial to copy once approved. Since the FDA is the govt entity mandating the trials (which is a substantial portion of the time and cost), why not let the FDA itself grant exclusive approvals to drugs for n years? E.g. approve only Lipitor (Pfizer's brand) for 7 years, and then approve Atorvastatin (the chemical).

Other regulated industries could do the same: the regulatory body offers the temporary monopoly to incentivize innovation. Are there any unregulated industries where patents are critical to innovation?
Why would you assume Palm is worse off because of this?
"If I wanted your Web site to make noise, I would have licked my finger and squeaked it on the screen."
They were 3 / 6 / 10. "Up" was a similar story. Looking forward to Toy Story 3 though definitely. Much more fun.