skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't start group discussions by sharing initial preferences
If receiving investment information via blog is a problem for you, maybe you shouldn't be inventing in google. As Warren Buffett says: invest in what you know.
Perhaps because the advertisements are mixed with the content.
Zeo Sleep Monitor is One of the Medical Toys Consumers Like
To give an opposite view point, read Charlie Brookers article

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/dec/11/charlie-bro...

"If you don't play games, you're not just missing out, you're wilfully ignoring the most rapidly evolving creative medium in human history."
Ripoff Report: Spa World Corp - Joe Schwartz - Ira Schwartz - Tova Schwartz
He had a Crucial SSD which died on him, then ended up getting the Samsung part for its size, part for Samsung's vertical integration.

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=592
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=770
Microsoft changes naughty 'sexting' Kin ad
YourSQL, MySQL, and NoSQL: MySQL Conference Report
Dimension Shift-3dimensional representations of classic arcade game characters
True, but the best alternative would be to show a "cannot install please upgrade your software sign" otherwise, how are people to know that their phone is out of date?
For generic sites(wordpress, forums, clients websites, etc), which run php/mysql, I use liquidweb.

For custom applications, I use and recommend Linode.
It's a bit dated, now, but I found Ang Lee's "Eat Drink Man Woman" (饮食男女) a very enjoyable window into a bit of contemporary Taiwan. I'm not sure how "authentic" it is, given Lee's diverse background, but after viewing it, I felt as if I knew Taipei a little bit better. Not that it shows that much of the city in terms of exteriors. But I'd be interested to know whether it is accurate in terms of those aspects of personalities and the portion of contemporary society that it displays.
"How is this any different than a proprietary license?"

With GPL software, you get the right to modify and distribute under certain conditions. With proprietary software you do not have those rights at all.
He was such a nice, approachable guy. Was fortunate enough to meet him at a TiE presentation once - he championed so many ingenious yet simple ideas in the developing world.
Do all these serve your needs or is there some feature you find lacking in them that you wish was there?
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/planes-or-volcano...

(graphic if the full page won't load: http://s3.amazonaws.com/infobeautiful/planes_volcanos.png)
Recent improvements to node.js have made it even faster [pdf]
I dunno. As an experiment I turned off RSS on my blog. So far one (1) person has mentioned it. I get less than 5% of traffic from RSS readers, and those are people following HN or Reddit's RSS, not mine.
I could do with an answer to that one as well although I'd rather work with a startup than a bigcorp.
That is very sad. I feel bad for you. There are so many wonderful books in the world - the fact that a programming book is "by far" the best book you've read in the world is just tragic.

Try these ones:

- Narcissus & Goldmund by Hermann Hesse

- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marques

- Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
"No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets."

I'd nominate Alpha Centauri -- it profoundly affected me, and linked me to a much greater exploration of human philosophy and scholarship than I might otherwise have encountered.
I like the presentation idea, but it should be inverted, so that browsers that have most features would be the innermost ring and create a nice consistent ring around. The outliers in providing features than would become graphically that as well, outliers.
Impending sale is a unique situation where some of the other motivators are in serious doubt (control, status, etc.). No one can be credibly offered the other motivators when there's a chance of complete ownership change in the near future. ("The new owner might promote you; they might fire you. We can't guarantee either outcome because what we're selling is the option value.")

None of the studies of motivation I've seen have specifically addressed such a situation. They concern motivating good work, not sticking around through a foreseen ownership discontinuity.

A stay package may not make people happy and productive, but it does contractually keep them around, giving the new owners a reasonable chance of receiving the knowhow and functioning business, before eventually making their own personnel/motivation decisions.

(That's why even though Fred Wilson is right about the stay packages' propriety and value, I don't think there's anything wrong with calling them 'bribes'. That's a vivid analogy for the sort of purchased-but-not-necessarily-enthusiastic compliance they can achieve.)
I would stress that with Excel, changing the underlying data set, especially dimensions of your data is annoying and not very automate-able. This is the case even when the analysis is the exact same or very similar as the original. You either need to copy formulas over for every data set/sheet or write VBA code to automate this, which still isn't as flexible as in R.

Excel is better if you want to pore over the data: study a piece, scroll down, study some more. R is better if you can easily pinpoint the areas you think are interesting and index directly into the array. Excel has indexing capabilities (F5 which goes to an address), but not by row/column names.

Additionally, you can't do multi-step analysis that involves segmentation/sub-setting of the data very easily with Excel. This is related to the first point about changing an underlying data set or its dimensions. There are ways around this, but they are VERY annoying.

I use R for the majority of my analysis. I used to be a Matlab user but needed to find a cheaper tool when I left my job. I still use excel for simple data inspection and when I need to send my analysis to other people to peruse.
I've generally attributed this result to simple laziness. Someone else has an opinion, and if you respect their opinion, you are less likely and less motivated to apply original thought to the outcome. i.e. someone else has already solved the problem, why do we have to discuss it?
There are quite a few mp3 players that are superior to contemporary iPods on a technical basis.
Oliver Twist is certainly a great one. But my Dickens' favourite is David Copperfiled. I still read it from time to time and it is always a great journey.
There's no video game out there in which the story is of a comparable quality with a novel?

A reply from a video game reviewer (me, for clarification):

Okay, let's get started: The Halo series, anything by BioWare, The Elder Scrolls series (excluding Oblivion, story out and out sucked monkey nuts as it didn't have a single plot twist or revelation in it anywhere), Fallout 1 and especially 2, anything by Tim Schafer (hello Grim Fandango?), Broken Sword 1 & 2, Space Quest (especially #6), the legend of Kyrandia, Kings Quest, The Longest Journey . . .

Here's the coupe de grace, The Dig. Spielberg gave the idea to Lucasarts because he knew it would take decades before the technology would be available to do the story justice. Written by Spielberg and Orson Scott Card.

I'm sorry, but Ebert has no fucking clue. There was a game out in 1995 written by the Steven Spielberg and the Orson Scott Card, that game alone quantified the video game medium as having great potential for artistic works.

There's a whole whack of games from the SCUMM era that have so much story it's still unbelievable by today's standards, even with BioWare.

Sorry Mr. Ebert you're now entering your second decade of being out of touch with the world, obviously we left you behind in 1995 when Spielberg, one of the greatest film directors alive, saw greater potential in video games than in film. If you were aware of this fact, I wouldn't doubt you would still hold a grudge against video games like newspapers hold a grudge against the internet and blogs. I know it must hurt that video games are know a bigger global entertainment resource than film, but that is a fact you will just have to live with. Don't worry, just like the inevitable death of newspapers, you'll probably still be so outdated that you won't notice the death of film before the world has forgotten your once relevance.
Imagine the ultimate irony if it were written using Flash.
Why Goldman Sachs Was Wrong
Got a source on that? Any strong evidence that it was a true temperature spike due to that effect rather than... y'know, the usual week-to-week fluctuations of weather?
Fair enough -- iPhone sales are up despite it being an inopportune time to buy an iPhone. This doesn't exactly refute my point.
Copenhagen to Paris? Join the Crowd, Drink a Beer
Israel Bans iPads
Is a Tamagotchi a game? People have been crying over dead tamagotchis for almost 15 years now.
But money can get you over that hiccup that a sales causes. The worries of going into an unknown environment can be enough to cause people to jump ship. But if you pay them, you get a year to sell your company to them as a long term solution.
I'm not sure why Ebert's opinion matters on this. He doesn't play games and is hence manifestly unqualified to comment on them.
The arguments are good, assuming you're the only person working on the analysis.

As a consultant I'm always constrained to use the greatest common denominator - that is, something that my clients can use, modify and extend themselves after I leave. In 99.9% of the cases, that means Excel, regardless of the task.
Also this part, for those not on unlimited data plans (most of the world, I believe):

Blackberry is so bandwidth efficient [...] not exceed the allowance provided by a $25 fixed-rate international data plan. [...] iPhone [...] too bandwidth inefficient

(I think that's the purpose of Opera-mini, very much misunderstood ...)
With the first iPad model still at 256 MB RAM, and no sign of GC in the iPhone OS 4 preview, memory management will be with the platform for a long time. I think we'll see multi-core first.
The Jakarta Incident, or Rebooting 747 Engines In Flight
terrible to use to make comparisons.
They cannot possibly process that much email in realtime and terabytes of storage is dirt cheap (especially on an endless government spy budget) hence the storage.

I am betting gmail poses a real problem for them because so many people use it, but since one of the google founders has ties to the CIA, you can be sure they have an official backdoor.
Campus alerts go beyond text messaging
New tech sees dead people
Because buying Apple products is voting for a future in which editorial cartoons are censored by a giant computer company with monopolistic ambitions. Even if you have to live in that future, it would help to know you didn't have a hand in bringing it to pass.
I'm just starting to go beyond Excel, but I chose to learn Python and scipy over R due to reading that R's scripting language didn't match up to Python. Am I handicapping myself by ignoring R?
But none that are good enough that their names popped into your mind when you wrote that comment?
While your clients need to look at the output of the analysis or the end result, they don't need to see every branch of it that you have explored.

I will do serious exploratory analysis in R and then show my conclusions and maybe a few alternatives in Excel, but that doesn't mean you have to always work in Excel. Further, I could not be anywhere near as productive in Excel as I could in R.
I think the volcano itself makes more of a "bang" sound. :)
My uni had a copy, complete with the "barfbag".

This classic book is worth a look. Funny and well-written, including the anti-preface by Dennis Ritchie.

I'm a UNIX lover, btw :-)
Personally I use GReader a lot to source content and interesting ideas.
Typically I will instantly subscribe to rss to a blog/etc when I come across an article I like from another aggregate source (HN/etc). As I see more of the blog, and get a feel for it's content, I may unsubscribe from it the very next day, depending on the drivel or quality of content it spews forth. How often a blog updates has no impact, only the quality and uniqueness of the ideas presented. (I have very little tolerance for another me too fluff article about the ipad, for example.)
I don't think you are handicapped, but it would be good to familiarise yourself with R. R as a language may not match up to Python, but it is quite powerful. You can do a lot in few lines of code. And I think it's quite easy to pick up the basics.
I post in hacker news because it is a place with people interested in the subject, sorry. Moreover, the links are quite clearly marked as buy on Amazon link. If you don't want to buy that book, you don't click on the link. If you found the review of a book interested, you keep reading, if you don't, you close the tab and keep on browsing. It's not like I'm putting a name and linking to another place.

The link got a few votes (thanks everyone who read and liked), so I guess I was right in posting it here.
He knows that; it was sarcasm.
Thanks, I'll try to get myself a copy from a library. That's how I got to read the LL, and really loved it (that's why I have a try to A little Java).
That is pretty cool and creative. One thing though is that you have more markup that does nothing and is only for the purpose of display.

You couldn't add your spotlight effect to css zen garden, but you could possibly add the CSS3 spotlight.
You could always use sage if you want scientific computing in python. It makes interacting between different libraries like SciPy, NumPy, and a ton of other math libraries pretty strait forward. You can even choose your version of numbers if you want. It also has rpy.

www.sagemath.com
Given that art is defined differently from person to person this is pretty weak statement by its nature... I'd agree though - games contain art rather than being it. Some of the artwork done for environments and characters is incredible compared to the trash that gets passed off as modern art.

This argument seems a bit light too - why does being able to win at something stop it from being art? Is he saying that nothing interactive can be art? The argument that sports and board games can not be considered art is silly too... its like saying the Sistine Chapel ceiling is not art because my plainly painted ceiling isn't - a flawed analogy.
TIM (about six years), while busily engaged in licking a pot, asked, “Papa, how can we be sure that everything is not a dream?” (p. 1)

Am I Chuang-Tzu, dreaming I am a butterfly, or a butterfly, dreaming I am Chuang-Tzu?
More “Insights” on the Facebook Open Graph API Surface
Welcome to HTML5! Completely overdone graphics with no usability (for a while anyway).
Aeroplanes are part of nature too, y'know.
Jath - declaratively transform XML to JS objects
1 slap the business in two. 1 as a non-profit research entity (with a watershed of tax and funding possibilities) the other as the for profit side which licenses the tech developed by the non profit.

2 offer premium experiences on top of your technology. consulting, curation, etc.

3 if someone wants a feature, great. inform them of what it will cost and bill them.

4 charge per usage. this rolls with a freemium model where the basic is free but they have to pay in order to get deeper information revealed. make sure you constantly bait the hook on this one and are clear up front about how it works. nobody like clicking 5 times and then getting a sudden request for cash.

and on to the ads...

5 sponsorship is technically advertising but by aligning your site brand with the advertiser, you dont have to worry as much about query volume. think: montblanc.professionalsearch.com

6 what really works once you have query volume is advertising. look at yahoo autos. query any toyota car. who is advertising? yeah toyota. its brand protection and inside verticals it brings in the most money anywhere i can think of.

7 advertorials. look at techmeme. love those sponsored listings.
I don't think you can claim that mixing advertisements and content is a bad thing unless the advertisements are misleading. There is nothing misleading about those links.
So now the wires stop charging for distribution and start charging for syndication... simples.
Why is it Google's responsibility to keep PR news wires in business?
Cash may be an inefficient motivator. Perhaps an extra monitor (~$700) motivates some engineer more than a $2k/year raise. That doesn't mean that cash, especially in large quantities, has no motivational power.
I hear the argument and it is sound.

I'd like to mention though, that when I finished through Braid I ended up with the feeling that it's primary goal was not to make me look at pretty images or listen to some music or even to make me read the puny bits of story. I don't think it's purpose was for me to finish it either.

The gameplay was original and highly enjoyable, but that might not have been the point still. It sure pulls you through the game, but the graphics and the music and the story contribute to that aspect in their own right.

I ended up thinking that the game's purpose was to communicate a feeling, a certain moment frozen in time when you realize for the first time that you've made a mistake, that what you have come to believe about the world is false or backward, and you're, in essence, a devastating force. This is the moment when you want to take it all back, to have made different choices.

And I think I'm not alone in feeling that. I also happen to think that these moments of direct communication are what art is about, and that they might be achieved with simpler means – a song, perhaps, or a poem.

Ebert hasn't had any exposure to this kind of experiences, it seems to me.
it is interesting that the mind resorts to linearity on the edge of the recursive cosmos.
Wow. Camelot sounds interesting, but their site is stupendously bad. http://www.python-camelot.com/ It's impossible to find out what camelot is and why i should use it.
A "cloud-aware" printer?

As far as I understand, most network printers already support IPP (Internet Printing Protocol). I haven't yet understood why Google's proposal is different from what network printers already do.
Is "Ironic how commercially useful a tool for freedom can be, huh?"

a response to "..and here I thought the GNU was about freedom and helping your fellow man. Instead, it's about preventing someone from "making a lot more money off of it than you do"."?

I ask because most folks measure commercial success by how much money they make. Very few measure it by how much (or little) other people make.
If you were the only bookstore that is I would fine you, sure.
Facebook’s f8 Developer Conference, a Recap of Rumored Launches
We have created Facebook applications that allow people to subscribe to YouTube Channels on Facebook. We have been getting really great traction. We want to expand this to Blogs and are currently looking for Beta testers. You essentially get your own Facebook Application that lets your users know when you release new content. This may help solve your subscriber problem you mentioned in the article.

If you (or any other blogger reading this) is interested check out our website http://apprats.com/ and an example YouTube channel app http://apps.facebook.com/mysteryguitarman/. If you are interested in being a Beta tester you can message us through our site.
"my hands are too valuable to waste on a cheap keyboard."
Sadly, what Corey did was probably illegal:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03intern.html
Wow, Palm is really about to disintegrate.

This is a huge patent portfolio acquisition, interesting for many companies. I hope for HTC to get it!
Here's a better link to that same clip: http://barefootmeg.multiply.com/video/item/56
The Scratch iPhone viewer was developed by a 3rd party not associated with MIT.
Google shares slide after quarterly results fall short of expectations
Enforced arbitration clauses strike me as the most worrying thing. As described, it amounts to signing away your statutory rights and submitting to some form of private justice, somewhat like a non-free person. The most horrific case I've heard about is of course the Jamie Leigh Jones one.
I'd even go as far as saying it's barely usable at all.

You can't tell anything from it at a glance; you have to hover each "ray" one by one to know what it's about, and then most probably for at least the first 5 or 6 times look at the top left to know what browser each color represent; and you're supposed to know what each feature presented actually mean.
I'm not a fan of arguments over vague definitions. However, I've come to believe that something is art if someone believes it is art. Hence, I would say that this author is incorrect.
The writer has clearly never played one of the set pieces in HL2. Nuff said.

A more expansive answer: the writer dwells a lot on the visual. But remember art is expansive; it is about evoking a reaction in people. I still recall a particular set piece battle in HL2:Ep2(the one in the tunnel with the Antlions) with the building music and tension - brilliant and evocative. Art.
But copying successful stuff without understanding it is the whole point of evolution!
Miss EtherPad? Check out MeetingWords...
[Games require points to be games, Art does not consist of points, therefore Games are not Art.] This is a fallacy of necessity. I wouldn't take it too seriously.

One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.

Ebert's opinion is rather polemical. I sat in on a panel he did a few years ago on this topic but this "points" thing seemed to be his ultimate sticking point. It looks like his opinion has changed much since then.
Thanks for sharing that. My interpretation of what Spielberg is saying is that he means when that kind of emotional response is mainstream - which will happen when tools to create emotionally-involving games are more powerful and it is almost expected to provoke a strong emotional response in the game participant. Somewhere between Farmville and the Holodeck.
What about a graphical front end to R? I wonder if 90% of R's use cases could be represented in the form of a flowchart diagram, which then would generate R code. One could have the automatically re-run the script when the diagram changes and render graphs and other output. I was thinking of having a "remote control" for such an app on the iPad, with the ability to use the keyboard/mouse and script certain things by hand to enable the more esoteric 10%.
Planes or Volcano?
I started writing a big long winded argument but really, Ebert is trolling here. Creating controversy for his own benefit. His rambling half formed ideas, much use of spurious philosophical definitions of 'Art', make me think he doesn't really believe any of it himself.
Some of Alistair Reynolds' books feature Neotonic Infantry - genetically engineered super-soldiers that look like children. They take up less space, eat less and being forced to kill a small child causes serious psychological damage to the enemy.
Ebay's auction model includes a strict time limit that doesn't adjust for bidding. That is, if someone bids in the last few seconds of an auction, there's no increase in time as there would be in a traditional physical-space auction to allow others an opportunity to bid higher if they're interested. This leads to the whole phenomenon of auction sniping, which is pretty silly when you realize it's all the result of what's arguably a design flaw.

Imagine an auctioneer in real life implements this policy. "Going once for x. Going twice...." They begin mouthing the word "sold" when a competing bidder jumps in at x+1. The auctioneer proceeds as though nothing happened ("Sold!") except that the sniper wins ("For x+1...").