skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah by that quote this guy is still completely dualist and a bit silly.. Of course you will never explain how these patterns of electricity give rise to a seperate metaphysical consciousness. The patterns of electricity ARE consciousness.
Any complex system could be said to have a degree of consciousness, just very few complex systems have a qualitatively HUMAN-like consciousness because they are not capable of demonstrating high-level analogical reasoning.
I'm an iPhone developer who lives and breathes ObjC. I've had two e-mails so far today from people who want to hire me now that their framework is banned.
A collaboration tool for designers to receive feedback on your mock ups.
We speak English, not Latin. Latin may be the origin, but the context of this conversation is in the English language and English has adopted the word Curriculums, which is consistent with other English rules.
Most unexpected so far!
Safari 4.0.5: 115/160
Ask HN: What do you do with your iPad?
I got my iPad a few days ago and I've found that all I really do with it is surf the web while watching TV.

I was hoping to be able to take notes with it during meetings but I haven't found an app that lets me do that easily.

What interesting things do you use your iPad for? Any killer apps so far?
"Well statistically half your employees by definition are sub-par."

Not at all. First of all, 'par' doesn't mean the average of the skill levels of your employees. 'Par' could be 'satisfactory' or 'the average skill level of the market as a whole'. Your own employees should not be a random sample of the market - otherwise why do you have a hiring process? Your employees should be above average - otherwise your hiring process needs improvement.

And if you have a stand-out performer at either end of the scale, then that will skew the distribution.

Thoughts:

If you couldn't hire an A player in the first place, maybe you should think about replacing your hiring process or look to make improving people a strength? This improvement may even pay off on your hiring process in the future!

It's difficult/impossible to judge the effect on a group dynamic that one person can have by any realistic rating system. Whatever system you choose will have exceptions and problems and you'll do some damage to your organisation by following it.

"But if you can't hire replacements better than the people you fired, that's when you need to stop the practice."

No, I disagree. Firing people and hiring them has cost. Your true indicator is 'if the risk of damage to your business caused by churning your employees and potentially not replacing them with much better candidates represents a larger lost profit than improving your staff (cheaper than hiring new), then you should stop trying to manage by silly quantitative rules and display the judgment and management for which you profess expertise.
Yes. That is extremely important to provide balance to the conversation. While I can't infringe your right to express your opinion about me, I certainly do have a right to add my voice to the conversation. Unvarnished allows profile owners to claim their profile, respond inline to review, request more reviews from their network, and so on.

You're right on the money about 'focal point'. Right now, reputation conversations already happen, but they're sprayed all over the web. I don't know who's saying what about me on what blog or what twitter stream. Moreover, I don't know how authoritative that blogger / twitterer is, when I'm reading claims they make about someone else.

On Unvarnished, the interests of the three sides of this conversation are balanced: the profile owner, the reviewers, and the review readers. No one's interests trump, but there is a framework and rules for the discussion.
Book Discussion: Daemon
I just finished reading Daemon ( http://www.thedaemon.com/ ) and I found it so thought-provoking that I wanted to both recommend it to the larger Hacker News community, and also to discuss its significance with all of you bright people. Who here has read it, and what were your thoughts?

SPOILER NOTICE: I'm hoping this thread dives into the book's details, so don't read below if you haven't read it. Just go read it!
Correction to your point: On Yelp, you or I can add a restaurant, doctor, dentist, whatever, to the site in order to review them.

Again, people can speak about me without my permission.

And no one's reputation is being held ransom. Individuals can claim their profiles if they like, or ignore it if they like.
If you were racing through the presentation, could you have seriously been reflecting on its contents? Much of the visual movement was designed to accompany a process of thought. In short, you might consider chewing your food instead of swallowing it whole.
As Paul Graham said "If you can find a way to turn dicking around into a profitable activity then by all means do it!" on his speech on him entering the porn industry(will add source later)
Startup Ideas Spreadsheet Exported
Whoa, nginx can do a hell of a lot via conf scripting. You could build a semi-decent REST interface to a data source using the modules in this presentation...
Ambien (sleeping pill) Used to Wake Patients From Coma\Vegetative State
I had the same reaction. Unit tests mean you have twice as much code to change when requirements change. And in my experience, whenever a unit test fails you have to spend a lot of time debugging the test itself to make sure the failure is even valid.
I'm using it to take notes in class and it's awesome. It fits really nicely on our desks (much more so than my 15" MacBook Pro). I haven't found a very good notetaking app either though. Currently, I'm just using Pages with headings and bulleted lists. It would be nice if Apple brought over Pages for Mac's outline functionality with gestures for changing the indention level.
That is obviously wrong as there's an N in there. CS professors will tell you the same.
Where are WebSockets?
How to Install Microsoft Office 2007 in Ubuntu 9.10
I couldn’t sleep at night. I’d fill up a bathtub and scream into it.

Eh, what? Do (normal) people do this? Is it because it absorbs the sounds or something?
Macrumors: Apple Removes 'Rate on Delete' for Apps in iPhone 4
He invokes Excel as an analytical engine several times in this story. I am trying to figure out if he actually considers it to be a powerful statistical engine, or if he is merely using it synecdochically for the benefit of non-technical readers, in order to represent statistical software more generally.
The profit strand
You mean the iWipe? I wipe my ass with it, just like Steve Jobs had intended.
IPad Safari: 115
This is amusing and absolutely true.

The small town (population: 120,000) that I grew up appears on Google Maps before NYC or Washington are visible.
Open Access to Inspiration
The right order to get high search engine rankings, - The most useful free and open-source software for operations research, statistical and industrial engineering,.- Publish your data from multiple websites and services into a single HTML page. - Free Web Publishing Tool for Your Open Journal System
NASA adopts "agile" strategy for getting to Mars
Well, this is the sort of thing that we believe persistent identity and review graph analysis will help us prevent. We are committed to ensuring that the content on the site is not spam or shilling, and that it remains a place for productive conversation about professional reputation.
There's a web site that lists iPhone apps that send data to third parties. There really are quite a lot:
http://i-phone-home.blogspot.com/

I was alerted to it when my own app appeared in their list with two entries -- one for using Flurry analytics, which is true, and another entry for connecting to my own server, which only happens if you're running a pirated version.

I was astounded that someone would be so concerned about their privacy being violated... by the software they stole from me. If they're downloading cracked software from strangers I'd say that's a bigger risk than apps phoning home.
Well worth navigating through - it just gets nuttier and nuttier. I certainly didn't know you could execute SQL queries against Drizzle from within your nginx.conf, parameterise them based on the query string, hash them to different backend shards and format the results as JSON...
Google new search page goes live
do a search
direct link to the related video:

http://vimeo.com/7812379
Pointless pedantry is alive and well on the internet.
Actually not. Because we can see, in the backend, the reviewing patterns, along with a variety of other tools, it's possible to discern when folks who have likely not worked with each other are reviewing each other.

Also, the site is only for people 21+ years of age. Very good point.
This is not a religious war, at its core. Anyone making it out to be is confusing the issue, but I haven't seen much of that on HN.

The owner of a platform is making a very clear and calculated business decision in order to strengthen their position. This comes at the expense of the thousands of businesses that are attempting to profit from the platform.

Just because Mac vs PC, Android vs iPhone etc from a consumer perspective gets lost in endless, meaningless, irrational internet debate does not mean that you can't have rational, in depth discussion about issues related to developing software for these platforms.
"The goal of any organization eventually becomes to perpetuate itself."

(Not a direct quote, but the observation does not come from me. It's in that class of observations so cynical that they can't help but be true... and are. Note the "eventually", it's an important word. A few organizations have managed to avoid that fate for a long time, most succumb within a mere fifty or hundred man-years.)
To connect this with the 29 other stories here, Literate Programming is also now no longer permitted on the App Store. Tangle and weave on the Android if you must.
It's exactly this kind of sarcasm I avoid when replying to someone I disagree with (HN has definitely helped me mature comments-wise). It antagonizes the opposite party, preventing a rational debate.

There are plenty of smart people who disagree with you. Assuming the answer is obvious harms your argument. (I have a personal exception for tea baggers.)
I'd argue 256 mb is more than plenty to run a VM. I recall running much slower and memory-hogging VMs (earlier versions of Flash, Bochs, Blackdown JDK 1.3 under Linux emulation in FreeBSD, how's that for layering?), running much heavier applications (Netbeans, Tomcat under Blackdown) in 256 mb of ram on a machine with a slow PATA disk and a Pentium-III processor. It wasn't pretty (this experience is what turned me away from JVM until recently), but it was tolerable.

I am not saying the JVM (at least HotSpot) is actually best for the iPhone/iPad, there are better VMs out there. Erlang's VM is better (and again, runs in a much more restricted space), there are also register based VMs (e.g., Dalvik and -- best example -- how Apple themselves emulated m68k on PowerPC based Macs).

I'll definitely trust you in regards to UI programming: last UI programming I did for a salary was GTK+- in C, having played a bit with OS X SDKs / IB -- even prior to iPhone -- I found that to be a much better experience. The only Java desktop apps I use extensively are the IDEs (and both Eclipse with SWT and IntelliJ IDEA with its JNA/JNI libraries make heavy use of native APIs).
It actually is the de-facto-standard modeling engine in a lot of areas, even some scientific areas, but mainly economics/finance. There are some pretty nuttily complex simulations written entirely in Excel, with the visualization part of the simulation done by popping up a chart--- you can even make it animated by popping up a new chart at a certain time interval. There's even a market in commercial spreadsheets, which you buy and load sort of like libraries: http://www.palisade.com/RISK/

Not necessarily a good idea, but somehow it caught on. One possible reason is that it was one of the earlier widely available pieces of software for doing declarative, dependency-based modeling that auto-propagates updates: if box A and box B are linked by a "B = 2*A", then B auto-updates whenever A changes, without you manually writing a propagate-updates loop. You can now do stuff like that in a lot of languages, but it's relatively recent (e.g., it's one of the new features JavaFX variables have).
Bravo Apple:

... By raising the barrier of entry, and only permitting "real" programming languages (ie, "C" based ones)

Frankly I think, and I'm sure many here would agree, this is bullshit.

[edit] The rest of the post only gets worse. Very little facts and plenty of noise.
My URL is too long
"(I have a personal exception for tea baggers.)"

I have a personal exception for anyone who thinks it is a good idea to legally enforce programming language choice in a developer agreement.
Git with privacy is a bit hard. Imagine that you determine that 123456abcde is a the SHA-1 for a bomb-making cookbook. Well then you just monitor the net for requests for that hash, and you see who's making bombs.

Tor-type privacy is also possible; but in this case I figure just delegate to people who seem competent and also aware of the problems.

Btw it's all totally way too ambitious. Who knows what will happen, though?
And that's been the case for about 15 years!
> Aren't there just as many, if not more, that will stay on iPhone [...] AAA-capable shops will build where the money is.

Well, that's the question, isn't it? I would argue that the AAA shops will ultimately define where the money goes in the long term. Early adopters buy based on platform hype, but what really attracts users is good applications.

> There's been a LOT of controversy about Apple's terms in the last two years and I don't know of a single example of a AAA moving off the platform and onto a competing one.

I'm not sure any mobile applications have reached AAA level yet. It takes time, research and evolution to achieve that kind of status. But it also takes the right development team seizing the opportunity, and that in turn requires that team to be looking in the first place.
Google Home View
You know I think Steve Jobs maybe is doing the right thing for Apple by not allowing all of these cross compilers. I mean, that article really gave me a look at the history that Jobs is talking about when he says these cross-compiler vendors never support Apple as a first class citizen.

I don't LIKE it.

But I have a better understanding for it now.

Adobe, obviously, always wants to target windows first. Companies like Unity and MonoTouch obviously are more in the C# and even .Net camp. These guys are targeting iPhone as an afterthought. And while we know their products do not run well on macs at the moment, I used to think that they would run well on macs in the future.

I'm not so sure anymore.

Maybe Apple does need to go it alone with respect to middleware. Even better, some enterprising start up could make an Objective-C game engine.
If you want, a plugin could be written to simplify WPs administration area. It would be easy enough to hide things that you don't want admins to see by default ("n00b" mode), useful stuff that won't break the site ("l33t" mode), and everything available ("hax0r" mode). A custom setting in the user profile would be enough to trigger it.
No, I think the problem is that until now it was a kind of a tacit assumption by developers that no company is really interested in restricting something as arbitrary as the way that you code.

I see this as a sort of bizarre breach of social norms on apple's part.

I thought that the rule against interpreted code was a little weird from the start. I understand the reasoning behind it (you can't very well allow someone full use of what you sold them, it would be anarchy).

But now, you also can't use other non-interpteted languages. From the perspective of anyone who knows anything about computing, compilers, programming etc. It seems completely nuts. The only real difference is that in a better language I have an easier time writing the damn code.
The sarcasm/satire was bad, but it should have been detectable.
Its probably decided by algorithm. It seems to that several states are very small in that area and maybe too many names will obscure state borders.
The networking concerns (Metcalfe's law and all that) are definitely a problem. I don't think that an autonomous network could start with facebook; it would have to build up to that kind of application through iterative development and refinement, accompanying deployment increases. The typical scaling problem, in the end, but not insurmountable, given the demand.
Of Google and Page Speed
The internet is full of cuckoo quotes being wrongly attributed to famous people. It's an easy way for memes to propagate. For example, ever hear the quote from Gandhi along the lines of "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."? Cool line, which has made it onto T-shirts with Gandhi's photo, but Gandhi never said it. It's been traced back to a speech by a garment workers' union official in the early 20th century. Anyway, there are zillions of examples, many being propagated by spam websites supposedly specializing in quotes. Because of this, online references that say "attributed to Bonaparte" (or whomever) are worth nothing. In fact, they're evidence to the contrary, because if Bonaparte really said it, it wouldn't be "attributed", it would be sourced.

The rule of thumb is: if a famous person said it, it will be easy to find a precise textual citation on Google. So if you can't find the precise text, it's likely inauthentic.

Wikiquote is pretty good at distinguishing between sourced and unsourced quotes and providing precise references for the former. Take a look at their page on Napoleon (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Napoleon_I_of_France) and see how many of them are traced to his letters. (By the way, the "never attribute to malice..." one is listed under misattributions on that same page.)
r56990 — 143
There are several ways to adjust access. The easiest way to limit editors is with the 'access-question' field in the configuration file; if you use the field, then the "question" must be answered by anyone setting up an account.

# Example:
# access-question: What is the code given to you by Ms. X?
# access-question-answers: RED DOG, red dog

See http://github.com/jgm/gitit/blob/master/data/default.conf

Or see, e.g. http://groups.google.com/group/gitit-discuss/msg/e07fcabd70b...

On patch-tag.com (which hosts darcs projects) the gitit wikis are set up differently, with the natural default that they are only editable by members of the project. You might sign up there with an arbitrary 'test project' so you could try out the wiki mechanism. (Many users just use it for the wiki, apparently, though I can't point to an example.)

(The patch-tag gitit wikis are the only publicly accessible gitit wikis I've used regularly. I use a git-backed gitit wiki locally for everything; it's awesome because of the connection to Pandoc and the indifference between LaTeX/HTML/RTF output).
Stallman has done lots of lovely work. Now he does some OK thinking. Just let him be :)

In my case, one must recognize that the GNU manifesto was also impractical. This totally might not work, but I think the concerns are valid, and the implementation at least sounds fun to hack on.
Still not enough to imply migration, unless we see App Store submissions drop significantly in unison.

I should say, it's inevitable that the Android Market will surpass the App Store in scale (and install base), but the 3.3.1 change by Apple suggests that they aren't hurting for submissions, they're more interested in (their idea of) quality.
Great description of burnout: "What I learned is that burning out isn’t just about work load, it’s about work load being greater than the motivation to do work."
It's a bad habit that I've (mostly successfully) tried to stop myself as well. Growing up, I was struck by two realisations:

1) I had dismissed sarcastically (or worse) many people as idiots who I discovered later were right

2) I have very little capacity to determine whether someone is thinking two or three steps ahead of me, at least from a couple of forum posts

The pain of remembering multiple situations where I was 'that guy' is enough to keep me in check, mostly :)
I'd never heard of it before. I too assumed that muting the sound was the idea, he mentioned he was staying at a hotel, so I guess screaming would have raised some serious suspicion. I wonder if the sound would travel down the drainpipe, though.
Amazing Graphic Design Work
Maybe he meant that he got into the bathtub and then screamed underwater?
The point of this post being that these aren't very good algorithms.

And the part of the algorithm that allows suburb-names to outpower city-names is clearly nonsensical.
I don't think Apple have any interest in strictly enforcing this rule.

Stupid rules are not improved by selective enforcement. The randomness, the unfair application of them makes it worse.
/learning languages quickly and being a really smart engineer are nearly the same thing/

Only if we're thinking of formally specified computing languages. Since it's a world travel business that demands just a few lines later that you travel around the world as part of your job responsibilities, I read the requirement as refering* to natural languages.

I think an ad like this could work for a small, high profile startup like this but it should really take a line to say, "we mostly write all this in [RoR|Arc|Django|Objective-C] and need to keep [Oracle|Psotgres|MySQL] back ends tuned." That way we'd have some clue what to expect.

* Look, I'm qualified to write web standards.
Dammit you beat me to it :-)
The author's first two articles on Dubai:

http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N16/dubai.html

http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N17/dubai.html
You are right. At its core the dispute is not funny at all. And I'm not against rationality. I'm affected financially by Apples move myself (before anybody asks: no, not flash). I stand by my point that it's a religious war since it's not about technology _at all_. There are fundamentalist on both sides and they don't and won't care about any argument.
Endless, meaningless, irrational internet debates don't mean that you can't have a good laugh.
This is covered in InformationWeek Article
'Serious Java Flaw Surfaces'[ http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2010/04/se... ]
El blog del Afrikano
OK, so all LaTeX documents will have to be rewritten in pure TeX, because using an extra translation layer produces substandard results.
Latest, ie Gecko/20100410 Minefield/3.7a5pre 20100410 (well almost latest): 102
hmm... while I was backpacking on the PCT the term 'scream into a lake' was used (for when you got really mad).

Ever talk or scream in a pool? Muffled, distant sound, but is still there.
This article is the financial-world equivalent of beating up on a security researcher for working on Windows exploits.

JPMorgan is a grownup company, it ought to be able to take care of itself. Outrage over the crisis should be directed squarely at those who weren't smart enough to see the problems with these practices but were issuing insurance and ratings anyways, and at the powerful companies who used politics and fearmongering to convince the government to take over their idiot counterparties' obligations so they could get paid off at 100%.
"Given its immense importance…".

I wonder if Justin O'Beirne lives in NYC?
Why would you do this? Use a proper web framework!
Perhaps being an 'important' well-known city counts against being displayed. The more well-known a city is, the less likely you need it to be displayed on the most zoomed-out levels. You know where to click to zoom in if you want to see New York City.

Rather than dismissing Google and Yahoo in favour of Bing, I'd be interested to see if there's any actual user testing in favour one way or the other. Otherwise, it's just uninformed opinion on what 'should' be the best way to use a map.
That's better. (And I'll stop nitpicking.)