skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The claim that such huge increases in manufacturing can be explained by variations in indexing--well, that's a pretty nutty claim to make. For example, the CPI is actually thought to overstate inflation. And not by very much. The PCE/PI--an index the Fed uses that leaves no room for subjective selection of a goods basket--rises by about a third of a percent less than the CPI. This is a lot in the very long run, but over, say, two decades, that compounds to a little over 6%.

Tiny differences in inflation measures--and inflation has been, by any measure, pretty tiny for quite a while--cannot possibly be big enough to invalidate Silver's numbers. The changes are just too big.
Facade printer - a paintball graffiti robot
Sure, they could find a guide. How could they find a trustworthy guide?
> Actually, you can't, at least not in the US, and that's been true for decades.

What about by illegal means? I believe that is relatively easy. Theft? And, also, non-automatic weapons are pretty easy to come by.

Indeed a better way to put it would be that it is easy to obtain an automatic weapon with relatively little planning/effort.
I don't think there is as much sniping of talent in the BSD world as in linux. I feel like the Linux distros are more competitive with each other so it seems like a bit of a problem to me.
Asshole comment or not, if Canonical wants help they should pay for it. Ted's not obligated to continue work for free simply because he's done so much work for free in the past. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's the opposite.

I might fix my girlfriend's computer for free, but I make sure to bill everyone else.
The air is beige -- A startup called "Despair Inc." (2007)
You're not alone, I did too.

Even worse, while scanning through I kept thinking "why is he calling this thing Adolf Hitler?"
Did you neglect the November 5, 2009 shooting at Ft. Hood that killed 13 people out of convenience to support your point or because you don't consider it a terrorist attack?

Even so, there's something insincere in a post that would mention a starbucks bench bomb, but not an incident that was perpetrated by a terrorist sympathizer that killed or wounded over 40 people.
I dunno, as someone who does a lot of free support, the quote in context sounds blunt but not asshole-ish to me. (Especially if Canonical has a track record of trying to get free work out of him or other kernel developers.)

"I've already done Ubuntu a huge favor by spending ten minutes to do a quickie investigation. Ubuntu needs to learn that it can't rely on upstream developers to jump through flaming hoops on short notice before a LTS release deadline as a cost-saving mechanism to avoid hiring their own senior kernel engineers."
Ask HN: next big site in the social network niche?
With all the privacy concerns, bugs, etc. that have plagued Facebook lately, I'm thinking it's time to move on to a different social network site. Was wondering what the HN community thought would be the next big site in this area. Is there a Facebook killer out there?
Google's new buggy microblogging Web app aims to educate
Gilt Groupe Hires CFO, Considers IPO
He's working on ext4 at Google: http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Ted-T-so-moves-to-Goo...

(Probably other things too, but I suspect they hired him more because of their infrastructure requirements than for Android)

And to be fair, he said "Red Hat or Google" will hire them. He was implying (saying, actually) that Canonical don't pay their engineers enough, not that Red Hat or Google pay exceptionally.
Apple: Eat Dirt
thanks for spreading the word.
How do I put all the photos on my droid in my dropbox? That should be simple, but I can't figure it out.
Asking him to work for free, and asking him not to be an asshole are two very different things.

I assume you don't act like an asshole no matter who you are helping. I'd go further and assume that even when you turn down people asking for your help, and suggest they might want to hire someone instead, you're still not an asshole to them.
I wish I had read something like that years ago.
Personal Knowledge or “Qualifying Questions” as Authenticators
Illustrator CS5 is lovely, but Adobe still needs competitors
Leaked release Prove Visa plotting NFC iPhone case
Are we sure the security hole was limited to merely viewing your friends' live chats? Sure, the "review how your profile appears to another person" search box will only give you your friends --- but you can change the "viewas" id manually.

Edit: I see someone in the Techcrunch comments section posted what he claims to be Mark Zuckerberg's pending friends requests - Ctrl+F for "Random Jo - May 5th, 2010 at 3:04 pm UTC" ...
I would say no, solely for the fact the people will join social networks where their friends are, and their friends are on facebook.
posted about this below, wikipedia does not consider Ft. Hood event a terrorist attack, since the government isn't calling it one.
The Basics of Good Economics (with an admittedly liberal bias) [video]
I don't think you can make a decision like the author has unless and until you compare yourself to a good programmer who's using the possibly better tool. And by compare I mean watch him at work and how he does things, a bit in the direction of pair programming.
Dependency injection with Spring.NET
Either there are groups of terrorists who are willing to kill and die, or there aren't. My question is: why do they seem to prefer complicated plots involving heavily guarded airplanes instead of simpler plots involving lightly guarded [anywhere else].

The UK liquid terror plot resulted in 25 arrests: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_plo...
It was complex, required coordination, and failed utterly, resulting in 0 casualties.

In contrast, the Lod airport massacre ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lod_Airport_massacre ) was only 3 guys. It was a pretty simple plan, which would have been hard to foil completely, and resulted in 26 dead and 80 wounded.
Alan Kay and Daniel Hills interview (1993)
I can't help but wonder if this opens up a niche in the marketplace for a social networking site that actually does respect your privacy.
> now everyone takes it for granted that the the mushrooms are good!

Especially on college campuses.
My guess is no. Like there isn't really a google killer out there (for search), I wouldn't expect there to be a facebook killer out there any time soon.
a)estimate right when given the chance,

First look up the definition of "estimate".

Second the shorter the estimate the more accurate it will be. So, I a developer says I can do this in a day that's probably mostly right.

But if he says that he can build something in 3 months, that's most definitely wrong.
I think he's arguing that money != wealth, and that other things contribute to standard of living other than how big one's house is.
How to write better JavaScript code
I think the basic motivation for why Harvard kids head to Wall St. are clear enough (and decently explained in this article). What would be more interesting though would be to explain why an ever increasing greater proportion of Ivy League students go into finance/consulting today (as opposed to 20 years ago).
Nate Silver's post has absolutely nothing to do with forecasting. Why include a quote about forecasting?

The BLS (bureau of labor statistics) numbers do indeed have some problems with the way they are calculated. Any way you choose to calculate these sorts of things is going to have some problems with it. I don't believe the problems are nearly as big as you seem to think, but that's beside the point. The point is, there are simply no better numbers than the ones the BLS provides. Nate Silver's evidence may have some flaws in it, but there simply is no better evidence out there. There is certainly no evidence out there to suggest that the author of the blog post is correct in saying "we don't make anything anymore".
Correction: The user's name was "moonshine" as stated in the article and he has admitted to making it all up before.
A Scheme Syntax-Rules Primer
View webpages as a Google/Yahoo crawler bot
I completely agree. I frequently think about leaving the tech sector and going into consulting for just this reason. No work environment (except for a small non-profit I ran for awhile) has been nearly as stimulating as the ivy-league environment I was once in.
When I was an undergraduate, a friend of mine worked for a physics prof who was researching something with superconductors. He cooled his experiments with liquid nitrogen. So we had a ready source.

We started by chilling our soft drinks with liquid nitrogen, then someone came up with the idea of sealing nitrogen into a 2-liter coke bottle. A coke bottle swells up to about double its original size before it pops, and it makes a most satisfying noise when it does. We'd use 1/2 liter of LN and wait about 10 minutes.

From there, we went to aerial explosions. Fill six trash bags with helium, tie them to a coke bottle of nitrogen, and let them float away. Ten minutes later, boom from somewhere high up and down wind.

I would like to take credit for all this, but in truth most of it was other guys' ideas. I was an enthusiastic implementor, though.
Called it back in February:

http://www.danhulton.com/blog/2010/02/17/get-scared-and-subm...
You may be playing "devil's advocate" here (and I thought of the same thing), but what about the complete lack of terrorist activity BEFORE 9/11 when we presumably weren't spending as much money?
those things are easy to obtain, but they are well-on near impossible to smuggle into the US without someone noticing.
It's just as fast in Opera!
As he mentioned above the Federal Government does not consider the Fort Hood shooting a terrorist attack so it was left off the list.
In 18 months? Tough but doable, if you are willing to set aside everything else, including a relationship if you have one.

It's all about choices with stuff like that. Personally I would not make that choice.
I was looking for the killer GUI for a while and then I found Git X which filled the gap for me.

http://gitx.frim.nl/seeit.html

There is also an interesting fork which I have yet to try:

http://brotherbard.com/blog/2010/03/experimental-gitx-fork/
I'm not sure who downvoted you, because you made a good point.

Anyway, I think it's a matter of different strokes for different folks. When I started working post college, I worked a lot of hours, because everything I did was hard. Now I've learned that a "work-life" balance keeps me the happiest. I'm a much better engineer, so I'm more efficient in these 40 hours than I used to be in 60-80 hours. The key has been--when at work, always be productive. When at home, do not think about work.

It helps that I now work at a mid-size company that encourages exactly this. :-)

Now different strokes for different folks--a very ambitious person should probably work more than 40 hours.
Am I missing the point? Isn't Peter just an asshole?
Living in a $2400/m studio apartment for a few months is a good way to cure one's self of this conceit.
Fifty-one percent (on hiring strategy)
The real question is: could such a site be profitable and respect your privacy?
Really? What dimension of reality are we living in if we're even considering comparing this to canvas today?
the text-based MUDs of old

Hey now, text-based MUDs are not yet obsolete. There are quite a few folks out there playing them. Most often, they are free, they do not put viruses or DRM on your computer, and they work for the folks who are trying to play online computer games out in the boonies with low bandwidth.
They want the privacy leaks to happen only through their APIs.
"Graphics driver" still sounds too complex. The code was probably poking bytes to the memory segment mapped directly to the display - just like in DOS days, where each byte of the 0xA000 segment represented a pixel when using a VGA 320x200 resolution, 256 colors palette.
Women navigate more efficiently than men
I can see the first, but the second is not going to happen in a 1000 years, forget about 100.

It will take many generations before there is going to be some objectivity in that dispute.

The end of oil might achieve it, as would a collapse of the US.
This article is interesting (to me at least) in two ways. One, it is safe link-bait guaranteed to draw a lot of hits without a lot of effort. There is no great insight, no analysis, no sense of history, and it is written as a rant. It probably took no more than an hour and will generate a lot of ad revenue for IT World.

The second part is more interesting (once again to me) that it shows how much of an echo chamber most of these authors are living in. I don't own an iPad, but a lot of non-techie people around me have bought them. Their like for it is best summarized in this quote "I don't have to read all those tech magazines you have to". They don't seem to care about the drama. There biggest disappointment is that they still have to have their PC or Mac for iTunes to use the iPad.
You can preview feeds in Google Reader now, without having to add them.
This is a story about a sociopathic middle manager guarding his territory from someone qualified to take his job, but unfortunate enough to be hired below him.

When I read it, the first and only comment under this at DailyWTF was sympathetic towards Peter. I hope that commenter had just skimmed it and missed the point.
That he can't afford the house he grew up in has to do mainly with two factors:

1. House prices are still ridiculously high, since cities and college towns haven't hit the back side of the bubble yet.

2. The academia job market has shit all over its knees.

The economic tone of the past 35 years isn't growth or decline but stagnation. Some people are better off than their parents; some are worse off. This has always been the case, but it used to be that being better off was far more common. Now it's 50/50.

Economic growth has been decent in the past 35 years, and world economic growth has is at record highs, but the upper class (which is better described as a malevolent and extremely powerful interest group than any kind of formal conspiracy; of the latter, there is none) has done an excellent job of siphoning off all of the gains for themselves, leaving the lower 99.5% of the American population in essential stagnation. They don't want the American lower- and middle-classes to get poorer (they'll revolt) or richer (they'll challenge their position) but to stay right where they are.
For tech, this is almost certainly not a universal thing. Back when I was in college doing a BSCS, we almost universally respected the industry and it's ability to execute and research.

Sure, there were jokes about making money instead of quality research or software. There were jokes (very valid ones) about the pain of dealing with the uninitiated; we all feared and obsessed over life under a PHB. But the tech sector and even compsci and math didn't carry any derision towards I could detect in my interactions with people from diverse schools across the US. Perhaps because there was so much money to be made, even post-bubble.
Okay, how does that work?
150 in Opera runs smooth
You could start by making a rational argument instead of appealing to a cynical belief that everyone is irrational and intent on restricting freedom. The essence of the irrationality that pervades American political discourse is exactly that sort of "everyone is crazy" mentality. There are plenty of people advancing rationality and freedom. You aren't one of them.
Yes. I bet there is a market for a wikipedia type soc-net.
Flash Games, demos, and webcomics are nice.

However:

No matter the codec or operating system, we should not NEED Flash to view video on the Web.
The SWF specification is published. Anyone who wants to can http://www.scaleform.com/products/gfx.
You can also create a compiler: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTASC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWFTools.
"our power grids, air and ground transportation, telecommunications, and water-filtration systems are in jeopardy."

Simple solution to all but one of those: unplug the uplink cable. There's no reason that systems with control over power grids or water filtration systems should be connecting to any public network.
Single image, multiple machines.

That would be a pretty big step.

Then we can finally forget about things like cluster topology and inter-node transfers because they would all be completely transparent.

A node breaking would simply cause the unified virtual machine to become a little slower.
This reminded me the story of "unpaid internships" (http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/03/19/two-ubuntu-community-tea...), IMHO, there's nothing wrong, but their HR can do it better?
World hottest news: NY bomb suspect 'nearly escaped US' on Dubai flight
I have a bunch of friends who are philosophy students and right now they are "on strike", occupying a building at Middlesex University.

The irony that they gleefully proclaim that they aren't studying a lowly "vocational" or "technical" course, yet have purloined the language and ideology of, umm, actual workers seems to have entirely escaped them.

Then again, several of them genuinely believe that writing essays at university is morally equivalent to building tractors at a factory... Marxists, eh? They'll be in for a bit of a shock when they have to meet the real world.
Looks like they are in the middle of patching that -- I see a lage number but when clicking on it I only see my own messages.
Intel wades into smartphone wars - Moorestown Atom
Pingdom lets you test load times for everything on your site: http://tools.pingdom.com/
Summary: dude spills coffee on laptop, buys replacement off of Craigslist, and notices that used Mac laptops sell at high prices. Dude concludes that this is not because it's what the market will bear, but because of a collective hallucination on the part of the sellers. Dude swears off of vendor for its sorcerous ways and secretly expects others to follow him.
If you look for excuses to dismiss an article you're always going to find them. That way you're not likely to learn much, though. The error in this case was minor, because his reasoning doesn't depend on it.

The article is making the (rather mundane) point that more innovation is a good thing (premise) and that many of the best students are not going into industry but are lured away by academia and a few well compensated fields (law/medicine) and that the country is worse off because of it.

So whether the USA produces much outside of tech isn't that relevant.
Does anyone know where the habit of writing $6mm instead of $6m came from? Is there some ambiguity in writing $6m that I'm not seeing?
The problem is, we as a society crave sensationalist news entertainment. How to fix that? :/
The marginal costs are pretty small. It could easily be handled by a site with an emphasis on simplicity like Craigslist.

Personally, I would prefer a non-profit. I can't stand a private company like Facebook being the primary gateway to my social life. I would like to see multiple companies involved, but it would be a lot more difficult to get the network benefits of Facebook with multiple sites.
Jef Raskin: Holes in the Histories
Oo, fun! A populist economic screed!

A growth rate of 2% instead of 3% doesn't mean you're getting poorer instead of richer. It means your country is getting richer at a 2% rate. And it certainly doesn't give grandpa evidence to blame all the perceived economic woes of the country on the things that were better back in his day.

But of course, this is not an evidence based article. This is a mindless rant.
I recently went in to update some minor thing on my profile, and I had to delete all my interests, activities, etc. because Facebook wanted to make them into connections, and would not let me leave them as they were.
One of my friends, through efforts involved in (OSS subsystem) maintenance, worked at, and loved Canonical for a period. He's a seriously talented dude and widely considered number 2 in his field. But yeah, he ended up at another Linux vendor and has been there for a very long time since.
Well, more like "service industries necessarily contract when an economy contracts (unless they help others deal with the government)", "whereas manufacturing and industry may expand."

E.g. your solution to "coffee for less" may be making your own, which will involve some equipment purchases on your part, but on the other hand the coffee shops you and people like you used to frequent won't be buying more equipment (in fact, new entrants/shops will likely be buying used but serviceable stuff from failed shops).

Getting outside of the service field, lots of people including my father have decided to drive their current vehicles much longer than they'd previously planned. Auto companies are seeing much less demand due to that sort of thing (uncertainty on the part of my father, others just don't have the money) and are buying less capital equipment, tooling, etc.
Indeed, I read the article after reading your comment and there is no insight or anything really, just a hint of a rant.

Here's a nice quote from the article:

> You can buy one of Apple's various really overpriced notebooks, but the only interchangeable parts might be the hard drive and maybe the memory sticks.

... as opposed to the other laptops that have which other interchangeable parts ?

So he's just mad at Apple for providing about what they promised, minus a coffee-safe MacBook Pro, which they never claimed it was. That and because they are expensive. If a replacement MBP would have been $300, this article would have never existed.
Well, the Coast Guard has spent considerable time, money, and effort learning how to effectively detect and (if necessary) stop people in boats from getting into the US from Haiti and Cuba- at this point, they're pretty good at it.

Not to say that with sufficient funding and time it wouldn't be completely possible; just that it's not as easy as setting out from Havana and ending up in Miami.

Sneaking into the country's no picnic, no matter how you do it. I've always thought that this fact says a lot about what the places that people who do sneak in must be like.
Dramatically faster on Chrome vs. Firefox. I think Google is right... javascript speed does make a difference.
yes most of these actions are the work of a lone nut but the problem is the increasing impact that nut has thanks to evolving technology.

the ability to cause mass destruction is following a law similar to mr. moore's (albeit we are on the early, flat part of this curve). a century ago it was impossible to wipe out a huge population; 50 years ago the largest nations could do it. today the nuclear and biological options have added an order of magnitude to the club and there is no reason to believe this will stop.

rather than a vested political group that would themselves be subject to revenge it's the irrational individual that will inevitably prove most destructive.
I just shared this URL on my wall and it didn't go to the feed. ha.
The blue comments at the bottom of the page are "Featured Comments" chosen by a moderator for being really interesting. The full comments list is http://thedailywtf.com/Comments/Minefield.aspx