skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It would be funny if they made a few more subtle changes, like a search/replace HN for riddlr. Then the top story would be "Ask Riddlr: What is Riddlr?"

Or even do it both ways. "Ask Riddlr: What is HN?". It would be like some weird parallel universe.
At least one of Plato's dialogues had to do with the laziness and corruption of the youth at that time, so this has been going on for quite some time now. Remember that the Boomer generation were once shiftless hippies who had nothing better to do than smoke pot and weaken Americas moral fiber.
You are correct. I am a boomer, and I got participation trophies in the '60s and '70s. My kids, who are kids today, do not.

One thing that we think we've learned in the last 50 years: praise works better than threats as a motivator. Perhaps that is what these complaining old gruffs are seeing.

Academia is about the only place left where you can still give criticism that makes people cry and keep your job.
What if the benefit from the nice aliens is to protect us from annihilation (whether that's from natural causes or from other aliens) ?
> As all political intervention (initiation of force) in the marketplace is outlawed under capitalism, a harmful monopoly under capitalism is impossible.

That's at least a bit naive.

If declaring something outlawed made it impossible we would live in completely different world right now. We could manufacture teleportation device powered by only clever lawmaking.

This kind of statements seem like sticking fingers in ones ears and repeating a mantra.
I did, but if anything it had the opposite effect of what the author describes.

For instance, I played soccer as a kid and was quite terrible at it. Getting a trophy for showing up just made me feel slightly awkward; ultimately, it ended up giving me a healthy contempt for systems that rewarded such mediocrity.
I find these sorts of arguments rather short-sighted.

If there are aliens out there, they would have to have evolved technology at a rate within a few hundred years of our own on a scale measured in billions for this discussion to even be relevant. It seems to me that the odds of aliens existing and evolving at a rate so precisely aligned with our own are pretty slim, compared to the odds of aliens evolving somewhere at some time.

If the aliens are more than a few hundred years behind us technologically, it's not likely to matter all that much what they think of us. And if they are more than a few hundred years ahead and they really do turn up on some huge nomadic spaceship that has been travelling across open space for millenia, what exactly do Hawking et al think we're going to do if they are hostile and decide they want to take over our planet? They could squash our entire civilisation as easily as we would control aggressive garden pests, and with about as much concern.

What I find saddest is the assumption of hostility. If, as Hawking suggests, we look at the development of our own species, we find that where communities have formed and their members have collaborated for mutual benefit, they have typically done better in the long run than any aggressive group. You can take stuff and destroy things by force, but you advance by building new things, and sooner or later you usually advance to the point where taking the other things is no longer relevant anyway. In our case, we haven't cracked the secret to eternal life or worked out how to solve planetary overcrowding and resource shortages, but just about anything else is on the cards as technology improves. Why, then, would we assume that an alien race that has advanced sufficiently to allow serious space travel and has sufficient power to pose a threat to us if it wished would actually be hostile?
How to cook something: how to make an omelette or how to bake bread.

Or how to fix something: a leaky faucet or toilet.
I wonder if he is going to talk about "singularity" life forms outside of earth. It seems to me that eventually, we're headed towards a giant computer based "consciousness." Therefore, the idea of aliens living on ships seems a bit odd, and more likely that the ships themselves will be aliens.

The idea of cities on other planets seems nice, and seems natural given where humanity is at now. I don't imagine it will be that way for civilizations that develop much more than our own.
On the flip side, if I discovered aliens I would destroy them immediately

Apparently Hawking feels that they would do likewise.
Dracula HD 1.0 for iPad - Realistic Presentation of Bram Stoker Classic
Sure, and Apple can say "that 4G had a new processor chip. We've only built 10 to date and spent 40 million dollars on designing it, doing revisions, and renting fab time to make these 10."

Now the phone is worth 4 million dollars.
Market draws it's power from being multiagent and dynamic. All monopolies are evil not because they exploit workers and consumers (which they may o may not actually do) but because they harm things that power market. They reduce number of actors, narrow choices and lower the speed at which market adapts to situation.
"I sure as hell don't remember being showered with praise or getting athletic trophies just for turning up"

I experienced a lot of that, but in retrospect my parents managed it pretty well by rewarding hard work. If I got a trophy for a bad sports season, they gave me the option to throw it out. I always did. When I was little, I earned an allowance by doing chores and yardwork. When I was in high school, I was expected to work in the yard if I didn't have a weekend job, so I was always working, but only sometimes getting paid. I was given cash rewards for quarterly grades through high school, but a B paid so much less than an A that it was more of an insult.

I came out the other end a little backwards: I dislike getting awards, and I feel uncomfortable if someone tells me I did a good job.

In the end, child development always comes down to parenting. If the child's environment isn't pushing them hard enough, they can do something about it
My guess is that they could make use of each other if you had a way to expose method signatures from one environment to the other environment.

As an example, the IKVM project acts as a Java runtime within the .NET environment, and lets you create .NET classes that wrap java classes so you can use them from within .NET. My understanding is that IKVM works by translating Java bytecodes/signatures to the .NET equivalents.

Note that while translation in one direction - Java to .NET - is relatively easy (mostly due to the fact that .NET offers almost all the features that Java has), the other direction is more difficult due to the large number of features in .NET that don't have direct Java equivalents. One simple example: .NET APIs make heavy use of delegate types, which would all have to be translated into listener interfaces or something similar to be Java-friendly. Translating .NET structs would also be difficult, since their value-type behavior would be somewhat hard to reproduce using Java classes.
I'm pretty sure every tech marketing manual ever written has had the mantra "push benefits not features".
Perhaps. But the original stucco was falling off, so I didn't have any choice.
Can you add annualized return for each entry?
If we have deflation, that makes sense. Banks could even charge you to hang onto your money.

But if you have any inflation above interest rates, surely you could just take out a loan, buy durable goods (houses, tinned fish, iron ore), hide them under your mattress, and make a killing.
Maybe not in your mind or my mind, but the kid with the spray can is living in a different reality.
Actually Ubuntu already has features for installing third-party packages that could be easily monetised (currently packages have to handle their own licensing sales) the problem there is that it would run into some cultural opposition.

In fact looking at http://www.ubuntu.com/partners/ISV
it appears as though it's already possible for commercial software to be distributed and updated through Software Update; the only thing that's missing is to add a payment method so that sales could be done that way as well.
The slideshow mentions that Millennials like their large tasks broken up into manageable chunks with successes celebrated along the way. Who doesn't like that? Is there a waterfall mentality in non-tech fields still?

I've also read that the way to handle a generation of gamers is to humor them with clearly defined goals, regular feedback, and involvement in decision making. Again this seems universal rather than an exasperating personality unique to kids. Was there a recent generation that happily served as unthinking, unfeeling, unquestioning drones?

This is all a bit hard for this millennial to swallow. Frankly these analyses feel like another case of analysts telling their clients what they want to hear rather than offering any new insight. [1]

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1257644
Why Most Business Books Suck?
Arc runtime for LLVM would be much greater news..
I've been using Parallels on a Macbook for a year or so. Though I have been thinking of switching to a Windows machine. The guest OS is Win2003 server which runs great. Though I get spinning beach ball problems and need to reboot the host OS fairly often which disrupts my productivity. I may try a Mac desktop next...Maybe it's a dodgy laptop.

I've just been on a Mac for a year and enjoying the change of pace but frustrated by the number of problems I've had. It seems comparable to XP on my Thinkpad...but bad compared to my 2003 Server desktop.
PIC-SAFE 1.0 for iPhone Offers Exclusive Drag and Drop Technology
Post the Sphinx source to github so we can start submitting patches.
Quite a good post and I agree with most of it, just a slight nitpick:

> 1) The stock-market itself is theoretically a zero sum game.

Stock markets aren't necessarily a zero sum game, because investors have some say over the management and running of the company. For someone with .00001% of the company they don't make much difference, but if Warren Buffet buys 15% of a company, he also brings prestige, cache, signals it's a good buy and will be going well for a while, and thus helps the company attract greater personnel. So if Buffet buys a stake of the company, it can be a net gain in the long run. The smaller the company, the greater value-add intelligent investors can be.

Individual stock transactions might or might not be zero sum - they might even be slightly negative sum if you consider brokers' fees. But this is a bit different from the stock market itself - wise and intelligent ownership and investors can bring value to a company by taking over ownership positions from less wise and intelligent investors.

Very good comment though, I agree with the essence of what you're saying.
gvim

no, really.

The basic vim commands are easy. As with python you can ignore the more advanced topics until you are ready to take advantage of them. It has a GUI interface so users used to pointing and clicking will feel comfortable.
You don't even need a program. The TI-83Plus lets you create backups that survive wipes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weBNfd26_r0
Not really relevant, I'd say.

To get a useful analogy, assume the Confederates had won the "War Between the States" and following that this sort of split and lack of understanding developed. Even then, it's hard to imagine the Confederacy e.g. taking such a harsh line toward contacts of any sorts with the Union.

That sort of next door, you were once part of us thing is very far removed from events on the other side of the globe in country with a very different (and ancient!) culture, religion, etc. And one where visiting during a lot of these events could result in death or something quite unpleasant (they're still holding those hikers who (maybe?) strayed across the border, right?).

Heck, the current regime in Iran is more outlaw than the DPRK, in terms of diplomatic protocols (our embassy) and the like, right?
If they were raised to be the "self esteem generation" then what does it say about their parent's generation and its parenting skills (or lack thereof)?
I actually LOLed when he did this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p4j0CODBX8
SphinxAPI vs SphinxQL benchmark
The crux of the complaint is weather GS lied or not. But what are they supposed to have lied about? If they were selling this fund/instrument/collection of bonds to third parties, by definition there must be a short on the other side - someone has sold the instruments into the fund. So what?
People like me haven't (and won't ever have) a f*cking facebook account.
We cannot know the motivation of aliens. However, we can know that they evolved. The process of evolution means that whatever their version of "genes" are were those that were most successful at replication.

Organisms composed of genes that were the most successful at replication are undoubtedly dangerous. However, in order for them to come up with technology, they must have developed some semblance of cooperation. It's unlikely for star travel to be developed and kept by only one long-lived individual (although possible)

The question is how far does their cooperation extend? Even in humans, we're only really good at cooperating with close relatives or mates, and the same is even more true for other animals.

So I think the point is valid.

Except that I'd definitely be willing to sacrifice the entire Earth for 10 minutes of interaction with an alien being :)
Seems like a fairly theoretical look at monopolies, right out of Econ 101. The argument does, however, seem to ignore the barriers of entry that are very real in the real world.
What stops me (as the developer of a similar app) from screen scraping the information I gleam from visitors to my web app?
Original, and far more meaningful and accurate, title: A Recipe for Motivation: Easy to Read, Easy to Do.
Does a same law exist for lying about massive destruction arms ?
I'm no expert on the matter but I believe the problem is that GS misrepresented one side of the trade. So having a short and a long side to the trade isn't an issue - the problem is that GS misrepresented Paulson's hedge fund as an independent recommender of the long side when that same fund was in fact shorting the securities (and GS clearly knew about this). If a truly independent party had recommended the long side of the trade then there wouldn't be a case.
I imagine he has the ear of more than a handful of important people at Apple, so him saying 'give the kid a break' would have a fair degree of influence.
How to find a salesman for your startup (or product, whatever)
I've just gotten two developers (Java, C#, PHP) and a website designer for consulting and custom application development (as well as website design etc.)

Being that we're all in China how can I get a hold of a salesman (is that even the right person I should be looking for?) in the US(or Canada/Australia/UK) to sell our service?

Any idea's are appreciated.
Yeah, but you need liquidity for a variety of things. You can't easily turn those durable goods into payment for unexpected medical expenses and other emergencies, college for your children, etc.

Gold has been favored for deflations since it's "the only liquidity that doesn't depend on someone else's liquidity", but FDR got Americans out of that game when he confiscated the nation's gold supply. It wasn't legal to own gold until a little while after Nixon closed the gold window, and the wild gyrations after that due to a variety of factors didn't make gold look like a good place to put your money (in general, commodities haven't been a good bet against inflation in the modern era as we get better and better at extracting/growing/whatever them).

Hmmm, my father is the sort of person who can play this game, he's at times acquired various sorts of goods and sold them generally at a profit (I can remember one time 1/4 of our garage being filled with cases of suntan lotion), and he never played that game.

Probably because if you have the sorts of skills and network my father has, there are much better games to play, in his case N startups, a few of which paid off big. Also real estate, but that's mostly passive in his case.
Hi,

There's a long tradition in ex-USSR math schools and math department of "teaching by doing", or by solving to be more precise. And I think it gives superior results given talented and motivated students.
have you ever seen this book?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Algorithms-Programming-Undergraduate...

it would be really cool to have a book of the same level for python.
Sony to discontinue 3.5 inch floppy disk in Japan
The obvious alternative is to not use all the layers, but that is anything but straightforward.

One way the slowness of libraries can become obvious is during optimisation - as a simple example memory copying can be optimised if you are doing large copies - the C library memcpy has to work in the general case and afaik it typically just loops over bytes and copies them one by one, which is probably optimal if you are copying a small number of bytes like 2 or 3 - probably a common case, but on modern CPUs you can get substantial speed ups by writing your own partially unrolled loop to copy 4-bytes at a time, or even more if you are willing to write assembler code where you can copy 16-bytes at a time, and with non temporal cache hints. Think about how many routines copy memory about by using this library... and this is just one example. In an actual use case of software rendering I used this to copy a 320x240 framebuffer and my final, assembler optimised version was a good 15% faster than using memcpy.

The problem is that libraries are convenient and they have to work in a large number of cases which may prevent them from using the choice of algorithm that is optimal for your problem. Even the fact of being in a library requires some small slowdown from not being able to inline, e.g. the C standard library math functions can be optimised just by writing equivalents that can be inlined - the gain is small per call but it still exists.

I'm not 100% sure but the C library math functions may do things to undo the features of the FPU as well, e.g. the fsin instruction fails for values over 2^64 iirc, the library function might do expensive operations to get around this, in which case the gain of using a single fsin instruction will be significant, perhaps more than twice as fast as the equivalent C library function.

Some of this is the rational behind my FridgeScript language (which tries to be fast at floating point ops), which is measurably faster than the MS C++ compiler provided that the code is clean (FridgeScript does no optimisation to a very good approximation, so things like foo+1+bar+1 mostly end up as three additions instead of two)
> Why would you go through the effort and uncertainty of unting wildlife when you can just saunter down to the local grocery store and pick up prepared meat?

Because, to use your analogy, that would be like the aliens living in New York, but doing all their shopping at a local grocery store located in London.

The distances to these far of galaxies are measured in the hundreds of millions of light years, if not further.
no, seriously,whats wrong with gpl?

Don't ask me; ask the guy who came up with the "FPLL" dual-licensing.

LGPL single-licensing would probably be better.
Is space terrorism a realistic prospect at some time in the future? I honestly feel like a dirty tabloid headline writer for asking, but do you think it's a viable future probability?
The heart of the case is that they were selling a product as being composed of a high-quality mix of mortgages likely to produce positive returns while simultaneously working to engineer the actual content of the CDO to be almost exclusively bad debt unlikely to avoid default.

It's like a real estate agent knowingly selling you a house with a mold problem. Or maybe more like a developer selling houses that had been constructed with substandard materials.
J R T Activation now in our server
A "professor" that teaches writing skills that uses "gonna" and "gotta" in print.

You need to be careful about the praising for trying bit, especially as they get older:

"Actually, they were being treated like children but they had been their whole lives and didn't know the difference.

"Treating like an adult: You're fucking up. Here's how to fix it. Now fix it.

"Treating like a child: You're trying really hard! Good job! It's not the result that matters, it's just that you try!

"(That's actually a functional way to deal with children up to a point. In most cases they can't do a real job. But when they get to the point they can, when they're ready to learn to be adults with adult responsibilities, "it's a good try" should never cut it.)"
Easy read, I'd use it if I were learning python.

Now to the critics:

- Change the book title. If I see it on a shelf I wouldn't pick it. "Easy Python", "Python: First Steps", "Become a Pythonista" or something more approachable to the unwashed.

- PDF sucks for online reading. Big time. Make it one huge html file, no page breaks, no headers and footers on every page, it sucks. Epub may be a good choice but I rather use one single html file.

Good work!
Is a minder just the person who watches over you when you visit North Korea?
The War essay
A war essay can be quite upsetting to write if you are the kind of person who empathizes with every single person in the world. Considering the fact that this is quite unlikely,
Time to sell AAPL? =)
Dale Carnegie has been writing about this stuff since the 30s, minus the pithy blame. This guy sounds like he is going through a late stage realization wound up with an entitlement attitude.
Whats wrong with browser history?
Delegates could be done in java albeit not trivially. They're essentially just syntactic sugar for a one-method class.

I would be a bit more worried about handling generics. The CLI has true generics while Java's generics are syntactic sugar for casting to and from object.
There's a difference between militarization and weaponization. As noted, space has been militarized for a long time. There's a crap load of military equipment floating up there. "True" weaponization of space would be putting orbital to surface or orbital-orbitcal weapon systems in orbit. You know, death lasers, nukes, KEMs, sat-killer sats, whatever.

People want to keep the weaponization down for two reasons. The first is more or less idealism. It would sure be nice not to fuck up everyplace we go with our nation-state rivalries. The second is because orbital weapons is just a huge game changer. You put a sat with a bunch of KEMs on an orbit that just happens to pass right over Beijing or Washington, or Moscow? Cost/energy effectiveness aside, the warning time for such a strike would be tiny (far less than sub launched nukes). Does the government just go nuts everytime the sat comes over the horizon?

Yeah, not pretty.
I think that humanity still has trouble with accepting insignificance of its efforts. We cannot even grasp how advanced would be civilization that is 1000 years more advanced than ours and 1000 years is a blink of an eye in comparison to most likely time of offset between two neighboring civilization.

Hit earth for resources? If an alien civilization has capability of interstellar travel at galactic scales then it surely has the abilities to harvest necessary resources from uninhabited planets that are much more common in universe.

Alien civilization might be interested in life itself though. Life is a evolutionary solution of a very complex nonlinear problem. Designing proper life for given sets of conditions might be hard even for very advanced civilization so they might be interested in every instance of naturally existing solutions such as place where life evolved spontaneously.
Facebook is a Little Shop of Horrors
If Prompt Global Strike was stored in orbit as described in the article, it would not look like an ICBM launch at all.

"[A]nother space launch by a Minotaur IV rocket . . . was carrying the prototype of a new weapon that can hit any target around the world in less than an hour."