skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hope this is a joke.

First, this is probably factually false. I don't have studies to cite offhand, but it seems that the brain is immenantly trainable to virtually any specific task. Perhaps, just perhaps, many people do not have the innate potential to do Nobel Prize leve research, but I suspect anyone without a genuine mental disability can with time and determination master just about any undergraduate level topic.

If I am genuinely wrong and some people are not innately capable of passing a specific class, then the answer is still not to lower the standards so they can pass it. Rather that would mean (if true) that that person does not belong in that class. Perhaps they need to change majors or choose different electives, but lowering the standards will harm everyone else in that class.
Exercising control over a given market ("video games for Xbox" or "software for iPhones") in which you have a monopoly is not illegal, it's when you use your monopoly to push out competitors in different markets (such as "development tools" or "mobile advertising") that the Sherman Act prohibitions on illegal tying apply.

In Eastman Kodak Co. v. Image Technical Services, Inc., the Supreme Court ruled that Kodak had a monopoly on replacement parts for Kodak copiers, and by refusing access to parts and manuals to their competitors, they were illegally tying their parts monopoly to the market for repair service. The Court wrote: "power gained through some natural and legal advantage such as a patent, copyright, or business acumen can give rise to liability if a seller exploits his dominant position in one market to expand his empire into the next" (504 U.S. 451, 480 n.29 (1992)).

In the case of video game makers, you may have a case if e.g. Microsoft took active steps to prevent someone like EA from creating their own version of Xbox Live (since the market for games is different than the market for online services), but I don't believe that's the case.
On Formally Verified Microkernels (and on attacking them)
His claim was, and I quote, "The goal of public schools is...". That's attributing a set of values to society (and his tone implied that he agreed with those values). Not making an observation as to what is happening.

If he had said "logically this outcome is the end result of [insert economic factors here]" I'd have no problem with his statement. But when he says this is what we as a society intend and that there's nothing wrong with that I have a problem.
Lenny Bruce Is Giving You the Finger
Looks like it searches the text for text inside <b>...</b> tags and writes out the list of matches in an absolutely positioned div. A Topics script written for a sanely coded website would presumably look for text inside heading tags.
No it is not. More precisely, I don't see how you could avoid manual memory management in any significant C++ project. Here's why:

The only memory that is automatically managed in C++ is the stack. (If you disagree, please know that I will be very difficult to convince.) So, "properly written C++" literally means "C++ code which doesn't uses the heap at all". That's probably not what you meant.

Relaxing this rule a bit, you could code in a RAII fashion. That way, the users of properly written objects won't manage the memory themselves. The implementation of those, however, still have to. A prime example is the STL.

Plus, I'm not sure RAII all the way down is "properly written". See, such logic is quite copy-prone, affecting the code's efficiency. You use C++ for it's performance, right? So you have to manage the memory manually at some point.

Or you could use smart pointers. They mitigate the need for manual memory management, and allow sharing. But even then, you might want to (manually) pay attention to loops in the pointing chains.
The Ubuntu changes make me cringe - I like how windows are now, and this sort of change makes me hesitant to upgrade.

I like using Ubuntu, but several times when I've upgraded it trashed my system, or features didn't work right on an upgraded system while they did on a fresh install.

Those are the issues I think they need to work on - making it flawless for the masses to use. A bad upgrade experience for a normal user and they'll go running back to Mac/Windows. On top of that changing things like this will make it harder for normal users to find the buttons they're used to.

I'm not anti-progress, but it seems like you should make significant changes after you have a large market share.
The worst part of insomnia (for me) is that I'm too tired to do anything productive and that time is completely wasted.
It could be devastating mentally - some poor student might discover he is actually a middle of the pack business major rather than Einstein pt. Deux. Adjusting your ego downwards is an unpleasant task, but is nevertheless a necessary and important one.
The list of requirements is made available to the developer well in advance, it isn't arbitrarily made more restrictive by first parties (Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft), and every developer goes through the same submission screening process. If a game is rejected for not meeting the established criteria it happens before it has shipped -- titles aren't just pulled for no apparent reason.
So Apple has a monopoly on the iPhone app store - no great surprise there. I may as well claim that Microsoft need to open the 360 marketplace to my personal ideals, because they have a monopoly on licensing XBox 360 games.

The Android app store certainly exists, and is doing quite well. The web is free for all platforms. Apple don't, by any realistic measure, have a monopoly on application sales for smartphones. They just couldn't - with only 25% of the smartphone market, and an app store that targets only that 25%, how can they have a monopoly on smartphone app publication? What they might have is a monopoly on the wealthy gadget consumer with large amounts of disposable income to spend on apps. I'm not, however, that Apple's clever demographic targeting, coupled with the inability of their competitors to eat into this market via fair competition, is reason to force them to change their business model.
We have clients with different-enough needs that it's often easier to write a new, simple shopping cart for them than it would be to integrate an existing behemoth to do what they need.

Should we have every single project certified? How do you even go about that?
> If Microsoft had a clause saying that you had to use Visual Studio Ultimate on Windows 7, they would get demolished.

But XCode is free with every copy of OSX. If the same were true for Visual Studio Ultimate, I don't think it would be an issue.
That's a very nice visualisation. And a pretty effective indictment of our (the UK's) ridiculous electoral system.
Demand has been lower due to the global recession -- there is no indication that oil production can't go higher than ever before, once demand starts picking back up.
Hi. My webapp is a good example. It's http://www.SignAppNow.com - a simple and easy way to create sign up sheet. You can immediately use it without registering and there is no limit to the number of sign up sheets you can create. If you want features like editing your sign up sheets, custom url, and so on, that's the time you can register. Thanks!
"The amount of trust you build is directly correlated with the difficulty of your situation when you do the right thing by someone. Your short term loss will translate into incredible future opportunities when you’re surrounded by people who know you’ll do the right thing no matter the situation."

I think this is a very good advice in general. Doing the right thing can be difficult given the constraints that we usually have, but it is definitely worth it. It will sound silly but I truly believe that one way of doing the right thing is to think whether doing it will change the world or not. Once I have that idea on my head, doing the right thing gets easier I think, no matter the context...
>> Prior to the iPhone, there was virtually no real development allowed on phones that achieved any levels of success (carriers had the platform locked down hard).

cough The development for mobile phones partially sucked (and still does, partially; it's in the nature of the beast I suppose, for now) before the iPhone, but I don't know about it being not allowed. You have to draw a distinction between so called feature-phones and smart-phones here. Feature-phone dev was and still is largely restricted (not to mention uninteresting from most POVs) but the same cannot be said about smart-phones. Seeing how the iPhone is supposed the be a smart-phone, we should compare it to those I think. And to that end, I seem to remember writing mobile apps for Windows Mobile and Symbian long before the iPhone existed. Some of that writing didn't even suck that much and I definitely didn't have to ask nobody's permission to distribute the apps. Python for S60 [1] appeared before the iPhone not to mention the c/c++ based toolchains from MS and others. Even the appstore concept is not really Apple's invention, Handango predates it by quite some margin for example.

>> In many ways, the iPhone has been the founding of "open" phone development

I don't know in how many were those ways. I would say it made it's (phone development) products cool (albeit not yet mainstream) for the masses, and that is very nice and respectable, but "founding" and "inventing" and "reinventing" are just hyperbole filled, marketing words that Apple touts around.

>> Post iPhone, we've seen actual competition in this space - the entirely open Android strategy (though their App Store also has restrictions, they just apply them post-release rather than pre-release); the semi-closed iPhone and Nokia Ovi models, the web app model of all the platforms.

A few lines up, you were talking about "phone development" and I assumed you were referring to application development because you mentioned carriers platform locks. Now you refer to appstores. Not the same thing. And even there, there was competition [2].

>> People claiming that Apple has created a locked-down environment have very short memories

I would argue that it's somebody else exhibiting short memory here but I have already.

>> even the closed nature of the App Store via 3.3.1 would have been considered insanely open only 5 years ago.
No... it would not have been. Again, please see [2].

The thing is, we had "open for development" smart phones before the iPhone. The platforms were less cool. Some of today's platforms, that are still more "open for development" are more cool in at least some ways that the iPhone.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_for_S60
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_digital_distribution_pl...
I wish I can clone my two Math Copy-Books and send them to you; they have all the mathematical baggage needed for a programmer. If there is something that makes me think that my 12 years of my country-system education weren't lost is my mathematical background. I don't have any resources, but here are the things that you'll need most.

* Learn Limits, functions (linear, parabola, hyperbola, eclipse...), derivative , primitive.

-> How to trace a curve, asymptote, resolve an equation and also use a calculator to check the derivative

* Neperian Log, Decimal Log, Exponential, their curve and the relation in between. Also how to put points on a semi-logarithmic paper. You are going to use those functions frequently.

* Statics: It's simple. Learn also how to use a calculator, Excel and Extrapolation.

* Probability: Not as easy as it sounds. Don't jump it, I used probability a lot.

* Complex numbers: I never needed them, but they are easy to understand so it's a bonus.

* Have a mathematical sense.
ReWork Roundup - Highlights from 37Signals latest book
The article you linked is weak. The first retort isn't much of a retort really, over 90% of chrome users don't change their search engine and Google does see everything you type into what normal people used to consider to be address bar. You can call it all kinds of fancy names, but midnight visits to goatfetish.com that used to be private are now google's property.
This justification is one of the most astonishingly vapid ones around. I'm not quite sure how it keeps getting repeated as if it has credence, when technically it has no legs to stand on.

The distinction Apple is making is that they have a temporary mindspace monopoly of the smartphone markets and they want to cement it in by forcing developers to help the Apple cause.
H.264 is a codec, Flash is a platform
For me the disconnect of translating what I want into natural language is part of the benefit of Cucumber.
The real problem with public education: the parents.

You can't teach kids who come home to parents who do not value education.

An oversized classroom is not as bad as students who have no interested and no motivation to learn. But it's not the student fault, it's their parents.

Sad thing is, it's kind of an endless cycle. Maybe we should punish the parents... but I don't know how well that would work either...
Possible market impact of gulf oil spill
Dubai in 45 gigapixels
Executive summary:

The author expects "government intervention of some kind to occur before prices get much above $200/bbl."
It should be a viable approach - the algorithms we (humans) all use to pass the Turing test were developed using a genetic process after all. :)
First learn about the complex plane. Be able to tell someone why (-1)*(-1) = 1.

Buy a Schaum's on college algebra. Work through exercises you're unsure of. Then buy an introductory, undergraduate discrete mathematics text, or a calculus text, depending on your interests. Work through that.

If you want to continue, buy a book introducing you to basic proof mechanisms and work through that.

After that dance, you should have a good foundation to read upper-level mathematics texts. Remember, mathematics cannot be learned without working exercises.
although Scala has local type inference, you see far more type declarations than you would in ML or Haskell. if you have a lot of one-line functions (which might be 5-15 in Java, say), the type decls become a significant fraction of characters typed.

even with that, on the merits Scala is one of the best languages out there in my mind.
Whenever you tie student test scores to national standards, which affect funding, and thus compensation, this is what you get.
Posted because it's an interesting picture technically, because it's bizarre (to me) to see a city like this in a desert (yes, Vegas is bizarre too), because zooming in, it's almost impossible to see people (contrast with any major NA/European/Chinese city).
Because of insomnia, bedtime turns into a stressful event for me.
You can see it working online (without any install needed) on http://paulgrahamsidebar.heroku.com/. The source of the web app can be found on github: http://github.com/danielribeiro/PaulGrahamSideBar
Supposedly the ancient Romans believed that one's body and soul renewed itself every seven years, which is probably the origin of this myth.

Regrettably, I can't find a good citation on that, although it's widely cited as the origin for the superstition that breaking a mirror causes seven years of bad luck.
Interface guidelines and look and feel matter a lot less when you are making a game doing OpenGL. This is a big market where Flash apps could have competed quite nicely with the Objective-C apps and Apple is blocking that for no actual reason.

Games consume a lot of resources (battery included) anyhow so it's really hard to claim doing it in Objective-C is in any way better.
It would only work in a 'Mac World' where there was a set of interface guidelines that were not only religiously followed by developers, but also rigorously requested by users.
I like Cucumber better. Plain language means you could use it without being a rubyist.

I'd like to see a repository of Cucumber tests for basic HTTP and DOM interaction, with implementations in multiple languages.
How Online Businesses Make Money
"They're making choices based on what they think is best for their platform, and letting the market chose."

The former is absolutely true. The latter is absolutely not. Hence why the government is looking into it.

Apple's actions are completely inexcusable and borderline illegal. It is only by incredible bravado and arrogance that they could have ever thought that 3.3.1 would be acceptable. They could have accomplished the same goal more subtly, but, probably due to Jobs universe-sized ego, they had to bring this upon themselves.

"This is how the free market is supposed to work."

No, it isn't at all how the free market is supposed to work. 3.3.1 is the exact opposite of a free market.
Couldn't recommend this enough. I'm using it for Calculus and Linear Algebra.

The "lectures" are all around 10 minutes explaining a single core concept, most times with examples. Everything is done with a tablet+drawing software and some person talking, but this simple setup couldn't be more effective.

I have found that each of this 10 minutes lecture is equivalent to a full hour of my normal class, with an easier to understand (but not simpler) flow.
With Extrapolation my monthly net income from the Internet will go past the yearly income of my father.
Review: Penultimate puts multiple notebooks on your iPad
The difference is that he is saying that is the way it is, not that it is the way it should be.

I read it as coming closer to condemning the status quo than supporting it.

I personally am not sure this is the actual truth. I have relatives who work in public schools that tell a different story of teachers trying to do their best in bad situations, but with that said he is still trying to describe what is happening not saying that what is happening is right.
do you mean webrat steps?
Hi! Checkout:

* Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham

* The Web Startup Success Guide by Bob Walsh
> I'm not quite sure how it keeps getting repeated as if it has credence, when technically it has no legs to stand on.

So you've never encountered a standard/API/platform that perpetuates bugs, support for bad practices or misuse of old interfaces to avoid breaking legacy apps?
And what do you think triggered the global recession, if not an oil price that spiked to an economy-busting $147/bbl in the two years after production peaked at 85 mbpd?
Yes, that is pretty much how it works (it is a very simple hack). Therefore it is very specific to pg's essays, as it doesn't uses headings. But worked so well for me that I decided to share (and do a sinatra app that injects it, as some of my friends would not install greasemonkey just for this).
Price controls won't change anything. Did prices controls of food in the USSR kept worldwide food prices deflated? No! You see every nation in the world is competing for crude oil. If broken American can't afford it, Asians and Europeans will.

The history shows us that price controls never worked. NEVER.
HackerMed - My HN-like Site for Hackers Interested in Bio/Med
It's actually between 2-5k per month, depending on average ticket. For merchants looking to maintain volumes less than that for the long term, other providers will cost less in monthly fees (but may have a higher total cost when including other items such as pci compliance, recurring solutions, etc.).
>> Prior to the iPhone, there was virtually no real development allowed on phones that achieved any levels of success (carriers had the platform locked down hard).

Windows Mobile / Windows CE phones have been around for years. I still remember the joy of writing my first app in Visual Studio to run on my Samsung i700. Also I spent many hours playing Monopoly on that same phone.
This basically works just like the OSX bar... I'd dare to say even better.
Maybe take a guess, watch a lesson (they are just around 10 minutes) and see if you need to go to simpler of more complex ones?

I think it depends too much on what you already know, what concepts are you familiar with and what you really want to know. But I guess not even you could be sure about that, so go explore some.
So, you agree that the word has been tainted by shoddy businesses overusing it, yet you still think this article is to be disregarded?
I'm not sure, however, that there's a huge use to society in allowing many bets like this given at the very least it's a huge sink for quality human capital.

I understand that there is value from the insurance/hedging side, but as we've seen recently risks may be concealed rather than allayed.
OS X isn't.
Investors in iPhone game startups unfazed by new OS
My favorite quote on Nassim Taleb's writings:

Taleb’s writings are filled with certainty, anger, and immodesty, having the Godelian impossibility of someone shouting 'I am the most humble!'

Spot on. From http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/review-of-talebs-blac....
This is similar to Citrusbyte's Stories library (disclaimer, I work for Citrusbyte). http://github.com/citrusbyte/stories

It's a fairly lightweight layer on top of Test::Unit that lets you define nested stories and scenarios, integrating with Webrat (soon Capybara when we get to it).

One differentiating feature of Stories is that you can print out a readable PDF doc with each story, and the specific scenarios that make it up, leaving off the Test::Unit implementation of the scenarios. Because really, clients don't want to read even cucumber's specs. The nasty secret of Cucumber is that it's still programming. You have to be very explicit in what you setup, and what you expect. Even if your explicitness is hidden behind english, it's still there, and many client's just don't think like that. Heck, that's why they hire programmers.
openbsd user here

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1315021
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1189358...
http://stevegrand.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/where-do-those-da...

I don't know any specific place to point to, but I have heard this from scientists that I know.

None the less the point I was trying to make was more that the body is in flux not simply a static thing.
That's what the BYU business plan competition looks like.
maybe we'll get an updated pg_migrator once the release is out. While dump/restore is for sure the safer option, once your databases reach Terabytes in size, doing the migration in-place (most of the time the on-disc structure is quite similar between releases) will be a huge speed advantage.
"Seamless Integration" should be added to that list.
These are great additions to my iPad (especially Backgrounder).
To others interested, the PalmPre-esque application switcher is pretty wonky with the iPad, and causes problems with Backgrounder for me.
HP drops Windows 7 from 'Slate' tablet, will use WebOS
Just because something isn't designed to your spec doesn't make it unethical.
> That said, aren’t you Americans always gonna be out of luck? I thought the iPad’s 3G only works with AT&T, the best you can do if you don’t want AT&T is get Edge and T-Mobile. That must suck.

It looks like maybe not?

The iPad supports UMTS/HSDPA (850, 1900, 2100 MHz). at&t operates on 850 and 1900 MHz. T-Mobile operates on 1700 and 2100 MHz. I don't know enough about modern cellular technology to know whether that means they'll have 2100 MHz towers in most or all service areas where they support 3G.
The secret life of toys
My midnight visits to goatfetish.com aren't private?!