skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Allow me to quote a randomly-chosen comment from this thread:

> _why's influence isn't only in code, but in thinking. And if you look around, for example on github, you will see a lot of people hacking away for fun, trying out new stuff and just doing something they love to do. Did _why start this trend? He didn't, but he was a big advocate of it.

Yes, that's right, this person appears to be seriously suggesting that _why could have been responsible for people hacking for fun (in the "I'm not saying that...", right after saying it kinda way).

> I'd argue his unique way of thinking has also pushed the boundaries of programming as a science in the way that calculus changed people's ways of thinking about math and physics.

As influential on programming as calculus was on maths and physics? Really? _why is on equal footing with Newton and Leibniz now?

> As for his strange charisma, I would say _why is to programming as Ramanujan was to mathematics.

This one suggests that _why is to programming as a Fellow of the Royal Society was to mathematics! Awesome!

> I always thought he was one of the most creative people currently working in any medium,

Yep. That one pretty much speaks for itself.

I mean, the _title_ of the article is "A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius".

Need I go on? I believe my use of the word "sycophantic" was justified and I stand by it. Genuine praise for someone's achievements is completely justified and should be given freely. This is not genuine praise. It appears to be a pissing contest between different people trying to find the most absurd hyperbole with which to describe the effect that _why had on them, the Ruby community, the programming world and the entire universe and all matter contained within it.
I appreciate your reply, and all the points you make. My issue is not with how much information he shares. We all have that right. My issue is with a very smart person who knowingly offers to share information he has no real intent to share. That's at least disingenuous.
In general, if you're not sure if someone is a philosopher or not, just add a prefix to "philosopher". If you call someone, for example, an "urban philosopher", nobody really knows what that means, and therefore they're going to have a hard time arguing against it. And the rest of us can get along in peace without being drawn into another semantic debate.
or a browser based on Firefox's codes - and with H.264 support.
Solar-Powered Battery Gives You 29 Ways To Charge, Choose One
Slow 4G start in Scandinavia
Agreed. Banning drilling in U.S. waters will likely only move it to even less regulated areas of the world. We need a focused, determined effort to wean ourselves from petrochemical fuels.
My thoughts exactly. "quote from a blog post that everyone read three weeks ago" http://shrt.rl/omgaweomse #imanentrepeneuroneoneone!!

I read Twitter because I like to see what "meaningless" activities my friends are up to, not because I want a rehash of HN.
Agreed. I do find it hard to believe that an industry which has been drilling oil in the ocean for decades and has been making billions of dollars in profits is somehow unable to figure out a reliable way of preventing this from happening, or least reliably preventing it from spreading once it does. Ultimately, it's oil leaking into water -- to an engineer's mind, it doesn't seem like rocket science to prevent it from happening and/or dampening it's effects by 90% or more. A thumbnail solution I can imagine involves, oh, I dunno, say a barrier of some kind, either already in place or that can be rapidly put into place in the first few days after the spill starts. In what universe of competent people (with decades and billions under their belt) could it go several weeks in the state it's been? Smells like gross incompetence and/or greed combined with disdain for their fellow citizens.
More like a successful con
I've always thought that Wikipedia needed a way to move articles to a non-notable fringe instead of deleting them. The porn-star listing could go there, and the deletionist controversy would lose a lot of its urgency.

In other words, lazy evaluation of compromises -- because we all have different ideas of what we want an encyclopedia to be.
Agreed. And I like the jokes going around about alternative energy, the ones like, "You heard about the huge wind farm disaster? Yeah apparently it's caused a gentle breeze." and "You heard about the big disaster at the solar panel farm? Yeah apparently it's caused an annoying glare." Etc.
One can learn how non-religion-related facts are attained and evaluated, while compartmentalizing this so it doesn't affect religious ideas. It's awkward, and I couldn't pull it off for long, but lots of religious scientists presumably manage it.
"The only pre-requirements are a willingness to learn and a willingness to spend the time..."

There are many people for who this is not true when it comes to programming, and this is why they will never become a programmer (good or otherwise).
I really don't know what people have against Tintin.

Maybe because I grew up with a partial collection of it that I inherited from my brothers.

Can you explain what's disturbing about it?
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PHP: So you'd like to migrate from MySQL to CouchDB? - Part I
Try "The Concentration City" by J.G. Ballard. Fire and brimstone may be a lesser hell.
What bugs me is that his last post from about a year ago says that there are still three more. I've found all of his writings very interesting, and am kind of sad that there probably won't be any more.
From the way the balls move I'm guessing there's a strong magnet in the center pillar and the balls have magnetic cores.
A thumbnail solution I can imagine involves, oh, I dunno, say a barrier of some kind, either already in place

There was one, namely the blowout preventer. It failed

or that can be rapidly put into place in the first few days after the spill starts.

That's much easier said than done when you're talking about oil coming out at high pressure, and uneven topography all at a depth of 1 mile under the ocean.
That actually sounds like it would be fairly easy to add to the wiki software, and practical as well. You could even just add a cookie to remember people's preferences about adult images, the way Google Image Search remembers your "SafeSearch" preferences for a while even if you're not logged in.
One of the trickiest 'resource constrained' code I ever did was an index across 100,000 hotels in 64K of RAM on a whole bunch of criteria, 100's of them. From swimming pool presence to dog walking service (and pets permitted or not) and so on.

Obviously, you can't really do it so I first pre-sorted the hotels with some common criteria in large chunks, then sampled random bits from the rest of the criteria to fill the memory based portion of the index. When a query would come in a mask was made for the various criteria in the same way as during the indexing, and this mask was then used to get the indices of hotels that might be right, candidates so to speak. Then the candidates would be loaded from disk and checked against all the criteria and an answer would be returned to the caller. It worked pretty good, the disk block caching mechanism really saved the day.

This was on a QnX system before they had a 32 bit/large model version...

That's when programming is fun!

Of course 64K is still not really 'constrained' ;)
Which god?
For proxied services, the proxy (e.g., squid) server on the other end of the ssh tunnel will be making the DNS requests.

If you want to be fastidious enough to hide the DNS for un-proxied services, you'll probably also want to have a firewall blocking and logging most outgoing non-tunneled services so you can identify them and configure the clients and proxy appropriately.
But tensors are more romantic: http://people.ee.duke.edu/~wrankin/misc/tensor.html
:) My idea is not to replace traditional college, and I am pretty sure some people will always require one in one interaction to be able to learn. My hope is remove the barrier to higher education, the way things are right now anyone who wants to join college needs to invest lots of money and time. It should never be like this and anyone who is self-motivated should be able to have easy access and learn and finish college.
One low-cost option that sometimes works well -- Creative Commons images that are licensed to allow commercial use (flickr lets you search for them).
Honestly, it feels a bit weird to be ranting pro-Gates -- I spent most of my high school years despising him because of Windows (I did tech support for 4 years). I agree with you that while Gates did advance computing, if he hadn't, someone else would have -- and possibly do it better. Or do it worse.

The "hours wasted" argument doesn't hold a lot of traction for me. As anecdotal evidence, I believe I saw a statistic that "House" is watched by over 300 million people globally -- that's 300m * 42 minutes _per week_. (Clay Shirky has a great article about mankind's surplus hours and how they're wasted in television).
Marc Andreessen: A Panorama of Venture Capital and Beyond [video]
What if it violates your principles, but not mine? What then?

Of course you don't care about violating my principles. But do you care about violating your own?
From my understanding (I think we all know what it means if somebody on the internet says 'my understanding'):

There is a giant pipe connecting to regions with liquids in them. Liquid flows from region to the other because that is what nature says it will do. The way you stop the leak is by closing that pipe, without creating any other holes connecting the regions. This pipe did have a shutoff valve for exactly this situation, but it failed and will not activate. So basically your option is to squeeze the steel pipe shut, and hopefully this doesn't weak the pipe causing it to break. Also, apparently the pipe is mostly covered by rock, so somehow you have to work around that.

I'm sure we've all tried to stop the water from coming out of the garden hose by putting a kink in the hose. It's like that, except now you can't reach the hose because it's under lots of rock, and really far under water. You could put your thumb over the top, but there is too much pressure.
I think it would make plenty of sense to let companies see students, and vice-versa.
Max Klein. It's in the title, Duh!
A Pandora's Box of Start-up Expertise [video]
How exactly did Comcast win?
I can't believe nobody has mentioned naive Bayesian text classification yet. It sounds like it could work wonders for Twitter. I'm much more likely to be interested in tweets with words like "hylomorphism" than tweets with words like "omglol", and a text classification algorithm could learn that if you trained it up some. It doesn't have to be perfect; it just has to improve the signal-to-noise ratio significantly.
Add one for telecommuting.
Glad I don't own BP stock
Since that quote is straight from the 1984 commercial, I guess I am learning from the master of hyperbole and reality distortion himself.
Excellent post! I came to the same conclusions in February and am working on fixing the Twitter garbage problem (what I see more broadly as information overload) with Slipstream: http://slipstre.am/

Would love your thoughts here or over email: arthur@slipstre.am
Those dirty reverse SQL injections!
You sound like a Java programmer who doesn't see what makes ivory-tower ninnies like McCarthy or Knuth so great. "Because this person's work was focused in a different area than mine and he values different things than me, anybody who praises his work — no matter how earnestly and without hope of reward — is a sycophant."
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What gave you that impression?
If you're programming for an embedded system with severe memory constraints and a simple pipeline, this could be worth doing.
Is there anything fun and joyful that is not a form of self-importance?
Well, yeah... but it's some dude I've never heard of who thinks he's somehow important enough that a significant subset of hackers should have heard of him. Cursory Googling shows he's "The cube of M" guy, and I couldn't care less.
Hah. Something about the proxy server we have at work makes this unnecessary. If HN takes too long to respond, I end up logged in as a HN-reading coworker :)

Maybe there needs to be a "cache-control: no-cache" header, or something.
"I honestly don't see this as a problem. I don't read every Tweet that comes through my stream its kind of random access information, I look at twitter every now and then and if something interesting strikes me I look into it."

Don't you feel like you miss out interesting and relevant tweets with that kind of random access? Imagine if the proposed filters were in place. They would give you the best and most relevant of everything. Isn't that better than random access?
Yes. USENET is littered with journal and conference announcements and requests for papers.
Good question - sorry, I don't have an answer.

A more descriptive title, such as "Ask HN: Publication without affiliation," would help a lot.
The concept of suing a researcher for presenting a proof you consider a trade secret is ... very strange.
Yes, it was a bit of a dick move to simply take the content offline, but the fact is that he created this content in the first place. If he hadn't done something very valuable, nobody would have cared when it was gone. Does one inconsiderate act counteract all of his contributions? Even with all of his stuff deleted, his contribution to the community was still bigger than yours or mine, so I'm going to say no.
I don't think that's a solution because it assumes everyone would agree that X is for personal posts, Y for professonal, etc. I don't think that kind of agreement will ever come about. I believe in filters but all the ones currently out there aren't at the right level of granularity. It's not about the service, the person, the list, or the search result. The update itself is the right granularity to consider for relevance (as this blog post shows).
I think saying WebOS failed is completely off-base. From everything I've read, WebOS was a very successful operating system. Rather, the company around the OS failed.

From a historical perspective (not sure if it is currently true), Palm's customer base would have lined up well with RIM's, too.
Probably about 120. The limit is the number of people we can fit in the big orange room, but we're not exactly sure what that is now, because we just expanded it.

If we get a huge number of really good applications we might have two sessions. So far we have 196 applications.
"Of course, this guy is an architecture major, so maybe we will see that same level of skill, dedication, and attention to detail come out in the real world."

God help us.
I second that, and I'm eager to see what people say.
To be clear, every point in a Braintrust conversation is linkable. So technically, all you have to do is start having discussions and start linking them during checkins.

I'd love to hear thoughts on how to make this more integrated as well.
Let's just hope somebody doesn't try to get sneaky and make a circular XOR linked list. It'd be hard to start a traversal from head = )
> But coding is the easiest part of what they need to do.

I agree that it's easy, but it's also time consuming. They originally gave themselves 3 months -- that's a vanishingly small amount of time to produce any kind of fully working product.
<i>, and is only considered high quality because the rest of the state of web-based email interfaces is horrible, open source shit.)</i>

I take issue with this. Google is also better than non-web based email clients as well, including outlook, thunderbird and Apple mail. It searches quicker as well, which is completely unbelievable.

Sure, some things these clients do better, but for most tasks, gmail is much better. Outlook 2010, just released last week, has just started linking email conversations.
I suspect the first of many lessons Diaspora would do well to learn from Facebook: the hype cycle giveth, and the hype cycle taketh away. Right now, they're hipster Linus times four, getting fawning press coverage, and raking in donations from credulous blog-readers. Several months hence, with nothing that anybody would want to use working*, they may find the media, and many whose checks they cashed, suddenly less snuggly-wuggly.
Yes, but you don't use Facebook to communicate, you use it to facilitate other forms of communication. IMO, even as you praise it your actions recognize how limited it is as a communications medium.
Windows Server 2003 Security MCSE 70-298
The CompTIA A+ Certification: Essentials section of the program prepares you for the CompTIA A+ Essentials certification exam and builds practical job skills for computer hardware and operating systems.
Why peer-reviewed specifically?

Every professor I've had who is a theoretical physicist has posted their papers at http://arxiv.org/. It's not peer-reviewed but as far as I know pretty much everybody reads it.
I'm (temporarily) leaving theoretical physics, too. I'd like to continue on, but without the affiliation. Can I pick your brain about what's it like doing research outside of academia? rodguze@gmail.com.
I have neither requested nor received any emails from "Max Klein" these finding are a result of simple google searches.

Max Klein does not exist. He is an identity created by Mark Essien (www.essien.org).

Mark Essien has two companies registered in the UK one "Qubikle Development LTD" (www.qubikle.com)and a second "Feather & Moor, Ltd" (www.feathermoor.com).

The namesakes of Feather & Moor are Joel Feather and Tracy Moor. BOTH of these individuals don't exist, they are again creations
of Mark Essien. The pictures used for Joel are taken from istockphoto (http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-1997908-waiting-for-y...)

whois results for maxkle.in and markessien.com have the same telephone number.

Feather & Moor, Ltd has approaching nearly 300 applications on the appstore. These apps are "cookie cutter" apps that contain pictures and simple text.

The signing identity on the applications names qubikle.

A cursory googling of the text in the screenshots of some of the applications reveals that text is taken from wikipedia and other pages without attribution.

OPINION:

I don't know what the contents of the "other" email was but looking at the apps from "feather & moor ltd" it doesn't strike me that these are
wonderful apps of substance targeting niches but instead low quality keyword targeted cookie cutter apps using content without permission.
I would post much more "garbage" if there was a decent filtering system. I only post substantive tweets as I'm worried I'll annoy people with useless stuff. Why would someone care about where I'm eating or what movie I'm watching if they don't even know me. So I keep it focused on purely technical topics.
"[..] if you didn’t want your pictures shared with the rest of the world, you shouldn’t upload them in the first place."

Why can't we expect services like Facebook to keep our private stuff private? Facebook was always about sharing stuff with friends and not the world. I agree it's smart to keep personal things off the web but I wonder if this guy would stand by his opinion if Gmail started publishing his e-mails.
Oh, come now. If you're a retired physicist surely you should know all about how to publish?

Now, it's an unfortunate fact that 95% of all physics papers submitted by unaffiliated researchers is garden-variety crackpottery. Giving you the benefit of doubt and for now assuming that you're not a crackpot, though, there's no problem with just submitting your paper to the appropriate journal and keeping the "affiliation" field blank.

Oh, and remember that the editors will be alert for any signs that you're a crackpot, so write your abstract and cover letter in a way that emphasises the genuine and original contributions which your paper makes and doesn't exaggerate its importance.
There is a good book on the concept of Leisure by Josef Pieper called Leisure: The Basis of Culture
I've looked into this a bit, albeit more in a spam-filtering context; tweets have very little text for naive Bayes to latch onto. 140 characters would be 20-30 words, tops. That is so few words that it is hard to move the prior very much, unless there are blockbuster words that almost always indicate a bad tweet; as the article suggested, "breakfast", "beer", etc.
Great data, but have they never heard of a Histogram?
The Story of the Making of Wolfram Alpha (video)
places like Battelle, Noblis, Mitre etc

Can you give more examples? I've never heard of these places..
I went to the page hoping to signup, but I fall into 1.5 categories. Sorry for the humour. Anyway, I'm a student from a not-well-known college and I'm a freelancer. How do I signup as a freelancer?

Do you also accept companies from outside US?
It's a people problem, but the problem is you. If you don't care about what he's having for lunch, then I'm not so sure what's so hard about ignoring his tweet. It's only going to be on your screen for a split second as you're scrolling through other stuff. Presumably anyone you follow would post more things that are worthwhile than not; otherwise, you should just find new people to follow.

One of my friends tweets quite a bit about Magic: The Gathering. I don't care about that. Somehow I get along just fine by not paying much attention to the posts I don't care about. I don't quite understand your dilemma.
I don't mind sharing with those I explicitly choose--- it is everyone else that bothers me. The idiotic mantra of 'privacy is dead' is being used to fanboy those who are killing it for a buck.
The impact of a non-peer-reviewed paper which only appears on arxiv is generally pretty low. A bunch of people might read it on the day that it comes out, but it won't show up in all the databases in years to come, and might very easily be forgotten. If you've done real and credible work then it's much better to get it published in a proper journal.

(On the other hand if you've done work that wouldn't pass peer review then please don't clog up the arXiv with it)
The need for commercial and social innovation in social gaming
A very interesting quote, seeing as I seem to always be told what I want and if I don't then buy/develop for something else.
It's not completely illegal, there are some costs associated with an H1B application that it is legal for the employee to pay. Just not the entire cost.
I would think that the main problem would be lack of access to libraries and hence journals.

Still, I would assume you should have friends and colleagues still within academia who could probably sort you out with library access in one way or another.
They already have some working code, and they're cheerfully hacking away on it as we speak. So I'd say the Diaspora guys are doing well at this "Get to work" thing.

(Diaspora guys, if you're reading this: good luck!)
Unfortunately, we all own stock in the US.

(speaking for HN readers who are US citizens)
They seem to be focusing a lot on infrastructure and APIs, so even if nothing comes of this directly, their efforts can still be useful.
The same thing happens to me at work. There are a lot of HN readers at my company!
I'm in the process of switching from a TN to an H1B, and the cap is not filled. They're probably assuming it is similar to 2008 and before, when the cap was typically reached within a day or two after they started accepting applications.
The iPhone was truly innovative, same for the iPad. iTunes as well.

<i>There will usually be a twist that distinguishes it from the mainstream pack, but all of the parts will have been implemented before.</i>

You could say that about anything innovative, it always consists of parts of things from before.
No. Not to learn C. These books, and others like it (for C and any other language (including Python)) have exercises.

The guy was looking for exercises.

You can implement the exercises in whatever language you're learning. Python, for example.