skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
She starts to wonder what I'm doing on the computer so late every night - am I working or am I chatting with someone else, or less paranoid - do I really need to be up so late and is the computer or whatever work I'm doing more important than her? Am I working as productively during the day as I can so I don't need to always stay up so late at night?

Also some of the best conversations happen late at night laying in bed. If you go to bed at different times, these never really have a chance to happen. And of course one of you is getting a decent night's sleep and the other isn't, so one of you is consistently more grumpy than the other. :)
Alternate reference frames seem like a great compromise that can solve the same problem as B-frames without as many downsides. Does anyone know if there are other codecs using this technique? Are there some major downsides that aren't mentioned in this post? It seems like a technique other codecs would be using since it's more flexible than B-frames, and doesn't sound particularly complicated to come up with (it reminds me of the principle behind simple dictionary compressors like LZMA).
Can you elaborate? What things? And how do I decide?
Lisp dialects afford you more powerful tools for abstraction. Whereas most languages provide abstraction at the function level, Lisp allows for syntactic abstraction via macros. Think of constructs like the if-statement that only evaluates one of its consequent and alternative, or short-circuiting and- and or-expressions. These things are impossible (or awkward/difficult) in most languages, but Lisp makes them relatively simple.
What they've disabled is unauthenticated LAN games. The plan, at least this time last year, was to have connections try to go over the LAN if the players are within a LAN. All the players must however authenticate with the Battle.net server.

I asked Canessa whether the solution his team is working on might include a pseudo-LAN connection, where the game would only check in with Battle.net to authenticate before reverting to typical LAN behavior.

"Something like that," he replied. "Maintaining a connection with Battle.net, I don't know if it's once or periodically, but then also having a peer-to-peer connection between players to facilitate a very low-ping, high-bandwidth connection.. those are the things that we're working on."

From http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/60156
Counterexample: Just last year a StarCraft patch (1.16 IIRC) came out which drops CPU usage from 100% to around 3%
is there a reason? I don't see why you should, amidst all the cruft, there are good projects there some times.
More testing needs to be done on the Application Cache(http://www.w3.org/TR/offline-webapps/#offline), but you know it might just be possible to cache video content, and if not now it might be possible in the future.
Bloatware charts new frontiers in 2010!
Yeah I do love sizeup. I even purchased cinch too for the times where I only have my hand on the mouse. But I still feel that I could use something more....
We can watch 1080p video via YouTube, there is zero reason you can justify keeping it a non html5 app wih large downloads. Making an HTML5 magazine/blog/ipadzine is like a candy store to me.
Intro to CUDA
Yes, StarCraft is still alive and kicking on battle.net. Hardly surprising considering that the game is still incredibly popular in Korea, with a pro scene and all.
Consider that for a lot of people, the kitchen is the center of the house; it's where they hang out with family.
Yes, in which he claims that all languages are equally good. In which case I assume he writes everything in assembler.
I'm not sure what he is referring to, but I would suggest narrowing your focus too much to make use of unanticipated opportunities (or even notice them, if you're narrow enough). As PG has repeatedly written, many successful startups end up changing direction at least once before they get a successful product.
Terrible communication. Story-based reasoning. Lack of planning. Betting on low-odds outcomes, etc. Not being persistent. Being too persistent. Being distracted. List goes on and on and on.
I cannot math :(
If you ask for the credit card number up front, you'll increase the number of people that stay users once the 15 day trial is up, but you'll drastically reduce the number of people signing up for your service.

For a new app, I recommend that you let people sign up without entering their credit card number. You need lots of feedback right now and you won't get it if you ask for the credit card number up front. Plus, getting people to fork over their credit card number will force you to spent a lot of time on your site's design so that it appears credible, which is not something you should be focusing on yet.

If your app takes off you can consider taking the credit card number up front, but until then, get it after the 15 days is up.
Direct links: http://pstviewtool.codeplex.com/ http://pstsdk.codeplex.com/
The Humble Programmer (Dijkstra's Turing Award lecture)
http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD...

IMHO, factors influencing programming intelligence (PQ?) include things like short-term memory capacity, and experience of similar kinds of problems. But everyone has a limit, of innate talent and of acquired talent, and some of us pursue increasing challenges until we hit that limit - and then seriously work on strategies for tackling complexity. Probably the more intelligent of us recognize this issue earlier.

I hit my limits daily, despite my best efforts of decomposition, abstraction, narrowing scope, narrowing aspects of concern (I often fall into the trap of trying to optimize before being 100% on top of my algorithm), defining the problem explicitly (ask the question before answering it), and trying out ideas to see if they work (yes, trial and error) and to gain more information (data) about the problem.

Perhaps the best an individual can hope for is to make intelligence and time fungible - to be able to solve a problem of any complexity, given sufficient time.

Unfortunately, the task of decomposing problems well does not itself seem to be decomposable, as they grow in complexity.
Why are candles old fashioned? Sure electric lights are convenient but what do you do if there's a power failure?
More Workers Start to Quit
That sounds like a real waste of space in your cupboard. I feel compelled to take that iPad from you to free up some space :)
A NOSQL Summer: international reading club for NOSQL papers meeting in your city
End-To-End Performance Study of Cloud Services
Thank you for the source link - I stand corrected, but I will wait until I see it in action before passing judgement. In retrospect, it makes sense that they would have some way of running a game specifically for high-level competitive tournaments as a percent of their market (and a very vocal group) plays specifically with that in mind.
I would point out that no serious or semi-serious players, in Korea or anywhere else, actually use Battle.net for Internet play. They generally use iCCup, a hacked-together custom implementation of Battle.net with its own ladder, anti-hack, and out-of-game integration. Blizzard is not happy about this and is apparently going to work as hard as possible to try to keep total control this time.
http://www.amazon.com/Coleman-Family-Size-LED-Lantern/dp/B00...

An LED Lantern. Superior in almost every way.
NPR interviews Mark Zuckerberg about the latest Facebook privacy changes
Clause 3.3.1 states:

Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++,
or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine

This means that any "interactive" elements must either be written directly in Objective C, or you're confined entirely to WebKit.

If you don't fancy building new Objective C apps every time you roll out an issue of your magazine, you have two options.. do it entirely in WebKit or pre-render everything and spew it out with a simpler native reader. Looks like Wired took the latter option. I'd always wondered how magazines would get around this issue - guess we've found out.
The No. 1 Habit of Highly Creative People
It is about realizing that the complexity of software dwarfs even the most brilliant human; that cleverness cannot win. The only weapons we have are simplicity and convention.

I am tempted to tattoo this on... somebody.
The fundamental argument is flawed - I find it extremely hard to believe that anyone could create the same seamless experience as the iPad Wired app in HTML5. I certainly haven't seen any demo's that would imply it's possible, saying "you could do that in HTML 5" if very easy to say, a lot harder to do.

Maybe if the authors of these kinds of posts provided us with a demos I'd start taking these missives seriously.
what do you gain from that?

- less control over interaction

- less snappy animation

- approval of some bloggers

- easier ports to fictive multi-touch tablets on other platforms

(Yeah, I understand your question was retorical, but I couldn't resist)
>It's a catastrophe, no doubt, but even catastrophes have levels. I'm betting the financial damage will be very, very, very bad and not very, very, very, very bad.

Where do you get "minor accident" from "very, very, very bad"? He is just saying that the liberal media is, as it usually does (ratings anyone?) exaggerating the situation. It doesn't help either that mass media types covering this kind of problem are usually the sorts that have orgasms from hugging trees.
If the app had been based on HTML5 it would have been a 'mare to cache all of the content locally for offline viewing. HTML5 does offer local storage, but not in a way that would allow sites to cache 500MB of content. And even if they could, do you really want to wait 20 minutes for that Pixar feature to download over 3G?

You can build an iPhone OS app that contains all of the data to be rendered by a Webkit UIWebView. Apps built on Phonegap use this technique, for example. It's possible to build a pre-packaged app that's basically a glorified Web browser with all of the content embedded inside as resources. The interactive elements could then have been made with JavaScript, rather than pre-rendered.
But there you go--people loved laptops because they could take them to a park and work. You don't hear about people working on an iPad.

In fact, laptops probably became stressful to people just because having a laptop meant you could work--and were expected to work--whether you were at the park, on a flight, on the train, or wherever. An iPad is explicitly unsuited for serious business, therefore it won't be expected to use it for serious business.
Cory Doctorow: Publish books free online
That's not the way I read it. It seems to me what he meant to say is that, no matter how good and smart you are - software can outsmart you.

Or in other words, debugging code is twice as hard as writing code, so if you write the smartest code you can, you will not be able to debug it.

But having said that, I do think that the headline is link bait. I only agree with it if you add: "On very large, long term projects".

For the release often and early and start-up crowd, smart and fast is probably better then disciplined and maintainable.
No, you're not the only one with that experience. Most vexing complaint: too hard to type to be a practical device for -- well, anything.
Right. And his mistake is in equating smart languages with smart code.

A smarter language will make debugging easier. Smarter code will usually do the opposite.
Dear Jetblue - please read this
It is, of course, relative. My laptop is _more_ casual than my desk top, and I'm finding my iPad more casual still.

Now, I often use my laptop _as_ my desktop computer; hook it up to a larger monitor, mouse, an external keyboard, stereo/video/telescope/interociter/history eraser button/etc. But that doesn't mean that my laptop experience isn't casual when I plop down on the couch, sans accoutrements, and surf hacker news, listen to music, or watch a movie.

And the iPad is more casual still. And the fact that I _can't_ do many things that are not casual may help to keep it casual. Maybe not...

(And for the record, just carry the iPad into the "little room down the hall" for the _ultimate_ in casual computing...)
Why, yes! I've grown up with hard rock/heavy metal, opera, and good food. Food usually gets good when mum's rocking out in the kitchen :P
There's absolutely no reason for it to turn out smaller. The meat of the app is in the media.

I make cocoa apps, and I'm pretty sure that the 'native' part of the app — the part of it that could be ditched by linking to WebKit instead – weighs in way under 10 megs
If you think you know something the market doesn't know about those countries, and future inflation rates, then your strategy makes sense.

But otherwise, investing in a pure cash portfolio is super-exposed to inflationary risk, and very low-growth.
So that you can make an informed decision. Also, there is often a middle ground. "Fat and salt are bad for me, so I will keep eating them, but now I will do it in moderation."

Similarly, there are times you may decide to take an action that will risk a lawsuit, but you can do so in an informed way by consulting a good lawyer. Paul Graham makes the point in http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html that most startups should simply not worry about infringing patents. This is a calculated risk, but one they should know they are taking if they do so.

Similarly, there is a calculus of negligence (brief laymen's overview at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_of_negligence ) that essentially says that if the probability of hurting someone else's property multiplied by the most likely damage is less than the cost to remove that risk, you simply accept the risk and be prepared to pay out the damage if it happens and do nothing to reduce that risk. This is a very calculated risk since if something happens you will be required to pay for it and the other party will rightly sue you if you do not. Yet the rational thing is still to just accept that risk, but you can only make that risk rationally if you have calculated that risk (perhaps with advie of a lawyer).
It's a nice tool for abstraction, but its simply another tool. Once you have the ability to make a function that returns an arbitrary value, including other functions, and can take an arbitrary value, I think you're largely done. I can build conditionals, lazy vs eager eval, and the whole nine with this simple contruct. And sure, it starts out looking uglier, but c'mon, we're comparing to Lisp. :-)

The real question is how much of the language is built out for you already. And what type of "culture" does that build out presume or create...
And in general, minority investors should always be handled with the assumption that they can and will do arbitrary things to kill deals. And then, they will sue you. :(

It's not that bad all the time, but prepare for the worst and hope for the best.
Also, the proposal it is based on:

http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/lambda-dev/attachment...
Yes, you are correct; in all likelihood, they technically do not have to fight piracy. I was just conjecturing that the cost of some piracy prevention is probably lower than the gains. i.e. squashing out every last pirate is financially a poor choice, but the low-hanging fruit are worthwhile. Typically I refer to a clearly wise business move as a 'need', though that is technically a mistake on my part.
Why is the app 500MB? Because all the rich content are bundled into the app

The article says that rich content isn't the source of the bloat:

Each full page is a giant image – there are actually two images for each page: one for landscape and one for portrait mode.

If the app stored text as, you know, text then presumably it would require significantly less space. Eliminating the portrait/landscape duplication would also save space.
These devices are mostly network devices... no amount of added CPU power in the iPhone (which it doesn't really seem to be lacking as-is) is going to make it have a 10" screen.

Honest question: what could you do with a phone that had 10x as powerful CPU in it than the iPhone does that you couldn't do with a current smartphone?
Hmm, it's a kind of broad question. What kind of project roughly do you have in mind? Is it something along the lines of: compare/benchmark existing techniques for [some problem]? Or: improve current widely used technique by using [some ideas]? Or: propose new technique based on some idea of yours, your advisor's, or from the literature? The risks/etc. of the different approaches are pretty different.

As a time-limited project, one way of reducing risk is to think up front about your hypotheses, and stick to testing the hypotheses and investigating explanations for your results, rather than engaging in a more open-ended quest like "improve performance on [problem]". That is, your successful end state is: I confirmed or refuted this hypothesis, and did a good job explaining every step of the way.

For example, based on background knowledge/etc., you could come up with an argument for why it's plausible that some algorithms could be improved in some particular ways. Perhaps you're proposing an improvement that was used successfully in a different domain, or on a related algorithm, but hasn't been tried in this one; or you have an argument for why it should work based on some sort of theoretical analysis. Then, implement and run tests, and try some variations based on those results. Then report whether your improvements worked or didn't. If your initial hypothesis is reasonable, even a negative result can be fine, especially if you can, after the fact, explain why this plausible-seeming technique or improvement turned out not to work (i.e. what was wrong about the initial intuition, or what differs about your domain where it didn't work from other cases where something similar was applied successfully).

The biggest risk is probably proposing to come up with a solution to a problem where no decent solutions currently exist. Then it's hard to promise that you can get one in one summer. It's possible you might, or it's possible you'll just find 5 ways that didn't work. If you do plan to go that way, you should make sure your advisor would accept a "progress towards solution" writeup in the event you don't come up with something. That kind of thing is common in math and theoretical CS, where it's quite possible even a PhD student will fail to prove some important theorem, but after working on it for a few years, will write up a thesis that's more or less: here are some approaches to Important Theorem, and what did and didn't work about them. It's a bit less common in ML, but if you can explain why the problem is interesting, and demonstrate that the obvious solutions don't work and lay out the parameters of what would have to be done to overcome those problem they have, I could see that being a good thesis.

---

A short version: come up early on with some idea of what your hypothesis will be, and what sorts of positive or negative writeups you could write, depending on how experiments come out. What you don't want to do is just spend 11 weeks working on random things, then one frantic week trying to figure out what out of that you can write up.
A Look at the Gear That Experts Use to Spy on Spies
I rather like this bit of Dadaism: http://www.americaspeakingout.com/questions/3702/why-the-hec...
I don't really understand your point, can you elaborate? That's all that's being discussed here - native app vs. HTML5 (or some hybrid, which is perfectly valid under 3.3.1).
The many faces of Android fragmentation
Working at FoxConn appears to lower suicide risk
Apple opens iBookstore to self-publishers
> Most people already have.

For varying definitions of most. People living in Silicon Valley and/or San Francisco and spending all of their time with other techies have a skewed perspective of how many people out there actually have access to 24/7 Internet. I'm not talking about a broadband connection vs dial-up here. I'm talking about an Internet connection no matter where you are (which 3G only brings you if you live in urban areas... as long as you don't hit a deadzone or a tower that's congested... ).
In my experience, writing simple code often requires more cleverness from the programmer than does writing clever code.
> But having said that, I do think that the headline is link bait

You realize the title of TFA is "Mea Culpa", right? The "link bait" headline was written by the HN submitter.
Eliyahu Goldratt The Goal http://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/08...

Felix Dennis How to Get Rich http://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/08... which I found from a link here on HN last June.
I refer you to my last sentence: What would be the benefit in this when tools for building rich HTML5 apps are non-existent?
And then some people wonder why most of the mainstream seems to like the idea of government intervention into the markets (as long as it's not their industry being regulated ;).
Oil Spill Photo Gallery
Glorifying "hard work" as more important than intelligence is a common mistake made by intelligent people when they finally realize that sitting around being intelligent is not, in fact, sufficient to make things happen (this is often surprisingly contrary to expectations formed during schooling).
Netflix's business opportunity
I was writing a small hobby project (a web email frontend) and abandoned GWT for ExtJS. I got a lot more done with a lot less code. Personally, I find javascript a more powerful language than java for writing event driven applications.

The advantage of using java is access to libraries, but at the time most of the libraries I was interested in wouldn't compile into a GWT application.
That article was 100% different than I thought it was going to be.
I thought about doing this project in the past and I really wanted something on the opposite side of Daily WTF (the code, not the stories).

I remember reading about Quake's inverse square root ( http://betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-quakes-fas... ) and how a website should be dedicated to beautiful code.

I've never got into thinking what features the site should or should not have, for example: comments? forum-like interface? code-wiki so people can improve the submission? user submitted code? editor reviewed, crowd votting? tags to classify code? tales of adoption in production?
1Password being Mac only and no cloud sync doesn't work for me.

I've been using LastPass for the last week. It has Chrome extensions which on my personal Macs and work Windows machines. The Chrome extension UX is a bit too rough for me to recommend it to non-techies but I think the idea and execution is sound.

Recommended. I don't use it for Gmail or banking passwords of course.
You might want a label on your form field. I wasn't sure what to put in there to move the spill. "Location:" would work.
From somebody I trust who's been through this:

if he really did sell it for $5M, and assuming they didnt load him up with an earn out or an escrow (which is unlikely) then after taxes (because he was proly too dumb to do an 83b election) then he'll get hit with 35% federal, and probably about 10% state, depending on where he lives.

so that leaves him like $2.8M, and say he's conservative and invests in muni bonds, he'll get like 3.5% after tax every year, so that's like $100K per year.

of course, he would still want to buy a house and maybe a car, and depending on where he lives, that could eat up $1M or so, which would knock him down to about $60K a year in income, which is not bad, but not exactly a wealthy lifestyle.

anyway, good on him.
SSB?