skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Kendo. Its quite expensive and more of a sport than a martial art but keeps me fit and gives me an excuse to go to Japan every so often.

Video for the curious:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XRZF7IqakI
To quote Theo Jansen, "The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_Jansen
But that's not what Stallman believes, that's what the author of the article wrote. What makes a freedom a freedom (to me) is that you have the ability to waive a freedom if you wish to do so -- otherwise it's an obligation. And Stallman is of the opinion that you should never trade freedom (at least when it comes to proprietary software) for convenience. I actually asked him about this a few weeks back, if he thought there were situations where it's reasonable to willingly and in full knowledge give up some freedom (the question was in the context of software as a service). He interrupted me before I finished and said that you should never do that, because even if you're not giving up much freedom now, they'll be taking more and more of it as times goes on. (I hope I'm not misrepresenting his views, but that is the impression I got.)

I disagree. While perhaps it's wrong that many people give up freedom without really knowing that they're doing so, I think it's reasonable to on occasion to do it if you know the trade-off you're making.
The Newspaper is Dying. This is great.
I'm glad to finally see some marketing that focuses on Android. Right now, the average consumer doesn't know that a Droid will run all the cool apps they just saw on their friend's Nexus One.
Tell HN: JPL Annual Open House this weekend
I think we're running around agreeing with each other. I think any scientific research involves a bit of art and intuition in the approach to the discovery. I think the only difference would be that I don't consider the research part as programming. It involves programming, but in itself is really the same as any other scientific discovery process.
> By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?

Yes, let's hi-light and praise what's probably one of the most absolute jerkiest part of the exchange.

You don't have to make something popular to do something great. And no matter how great Jobs thinks he is, he didn't personally create most of the things Apple puts out -- the team of dedicated employees at Apple did. Jobs is deriding and belittling their work just the same.
The point of that, really, was that Jobs shouldn't need to convince anybody about Apple's decisions, the products of the company speak for themselves. It's not as much an ad hominem as a "if you don't like my decisions Ryan, go make your own product and your own company." That seems fair to me.

Jobs isn't exactly bound by divine law to uphold every blogger's rosy picture of the future of mobile computing. If he's bound by anything as CEO of Apple, it's to make the future of the company a great and profitable one, and you cannot argue that he is not doing that.
What should a parent tell a child who wants to go into a non-"money" field? Should one still pay $80,000 for 4 years of "Social Studies"? Tell them not to go at all and get a 2 year degree from a community college?

We all grew up brainwashed with the idea that "4 year college"="better jobs"="better life". Colleges have been raking in good profits all these years by exploiting that mantra. It is really hard to all of the sudden deny it and go against the popular opinion.
I don't necessarily disagree with the article, but it does a very poor job of explaining why programming is low stress, aside from saying that some programmers work from home.
Most of this Apple nonsense would make a lot more sense if you imagined Apple had 1m dollars in annual revenue. Then, whatever Apple is doing would not seem so bad because they would be a struggling company. People feel entitled because Apple is successful and makes a lot of money. It's pretty disgusting.
Now that I'm a little older and my focus has narrowed, I wouldn't buy it. But, an insatiable younger version of me surveying the tech field and looking for a place to fit in, might buy it - provided it wasn't so advanced I thought it was a lost cause. Don't know if that's helpful or not to you.
I think the theory is that even though people ignore banner ads that just say "Drink Coca-Cola," seeing it enough times will make them drink more Coca-Cola.
ah!!! I've been trying to write an NES emulator. But I couldn't get more than a few docs and a video on how to setup the data structures for the 6502. And never did anything to start my project other than just create a dir for it. Tough job with no resources for amateurs.

Something in detail with working code would be nice. Sort of... step by step building of an emulator. Writing with NES emulator as a case study would be awesome.

If you are releasing it free online, i guess you could just write it chapter by chapter and put it up. Or if you are writing it as a commercial ebook, start accepting pre-orders right now and release chapter by chapter! :) That way you can get feedback slowly on each chapter and write more if required. Then move on to another chapter.

Please write it in some easy-to-use programming language like Ruby or Python. This way you'll find way more audience who'll just pickup the book and read it than just say "ah I'll have to learn C++ before buying this book".

I'll definitely buy it if the reviews are good.
Same. Proprietary software provides unique encouragement for something to be created. In my experience, much of free-OSS has been significantly worse than a cheap proprietary, if it exists at all.

"much", not "all" by any means. Some utterly, incomparably awesome stuff has come out as OSS.
Thanks for the insightful posts. I'm just curious as to the "older faction" within the government you pointed out, any idea as to their age, or how long they are likely to remain in power? Do you think there will be a succession of their ideologies or will they be buried together?

Sorry if the question sounds kinda narrow, but it seems like a bottleneck to a lot of problems. In my limited knowledge of Chinese politics from surfing, it seems that the faction of engineers among the newer generation of Chinese politicians happen to be quite enlightened, though they have to compete with the children of the previous communist leaders who came to power through nepotism.

It just reminds me of the whole thing Europe had to go through not so long ago.
I tried this as well. The first time Shanghai, China gave 100% packet loss for dropbox.com but every subsequent time I have tried all packets have been delivered.

Pinging facebook.com seems to drop all packets reliably though.
Does that not exacerbate the supply-demand problem?
It must have taken him a while to get to that conference, not having used any planes or modern motorized transport that rely on proprietary software.
Hey, if you aren't going to commercialize your emulator, do you mind putting the source up somewhere for free or atleast writing some article about CPU emulation. I understood how to read and decode the opcodes. But the CPU emulation is what still makes me ponder
In my experience, comments that are funny generally get voted up. I'll leave you to join the dots on that one...
Where's the line between a document and an app, after all?

It's usually the same as the line between code and data. Yes, this line has been crossed before, but the practice is not without downsides one might want to avoid, and so a Turing Complete format like Postscript was supplanted by a static representation of the same drawing model in the form of PDF documents. Word macro viruses may not have done the same to the Doc format, but I still think it should be considered an antipattern.
Lean Startup "Marketing Bullshit"
Right, which simply means that the leverage developers have is a non-zero positive value.

It doesn't mean it's a large, non-zero positive value. I think recent developments in mobiles have shown that customers have orders of magnitude more leverage above everyone.
Do you guys realize there are books written about this? http://www.amazon.com/dp/0374158282
Kindle for iPad vs iBooks: eBook Reader Shootout
Deconstructing Reach: our time with the beta
There's pretty much infinite demand - those markets are enormous and diverse, iphones the smallest I mentioned with a mere 50m potential customers.

However it's very easy to make a game that doesn't stand out and doesn't make money.
Hacker/Designer Roommates
I don't see an email address in your profile?
Sometime to have it work for you, you have to contribute. In other words, most OSS works only because someone else contributed.

Free software works for us. We ship a complete box with a free OS, built on completely free frameworks, languages and libraries. We release any contributions or updates we make to the OS software.

Just recently we had to license a close-source library. It has been very frustrating having to deal with licensing and support. Send emails back and forth each time something doesn't work instead of being able to just look at the code, apply a patch locally and send it upstream.
Case 1. You hired me for my engg. skills, but I suck at managing my time. Spending an hour teaching me time management is going to give far more returns than anything else you can do.

Case 2. You hired me as a junior sales-person. I've done product sales, but I don't understand solution selling. Training on solution selling is going to pay off.

Case 3. You hired me for sw devel. I can do some design, but I'm not as good as you are, and you can see that I'm not that good. Spend time coaching me on design, instead of criticizing my design work.

You don't hire a person for just one thing. Anyone you hire is likely to be strong in some things, and weak in others. Training is what's going to plug their gaps and make your team stronger.
How about "phone book"? You can't deny there are network effects. How sticky the network effects end up being is questionable, but denying them is stupid.
If only these cigarette packet sized gadgets could actually hold some cigarettes. Maybe I should email Steve!
That's not to say Apple doesn't care about their developers at all. They've created nice development tools, easy distribution methods that can lead to handsome profits, and they even hold a pretty neat conference for developers once a year. It's just that it's all secondary to their vision for the user.
And then Jobs "liked" Adobe Flash, and that too got leaked.
Of course, but this is not even trying. :)
Programmers and engineers always think they have the most stressful jobs. Nothing new there. Most don't have experience outside of the industry to realize these are fundamental plight of the working man sort of complaints that apply equally to their jobs as they might to a teenager working at a fast food restaurant.
That reminds me of this Fake Steve Jobs Crunchies Acceptance video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmfP6aXNSis
"no matter how great Jobs thinks he is"...
"Jobs is deriding and belittling their work just the same"...

I didn't read that Jobs thinks he's great or that his employees are stupid.
What bothers me about the tone of his statement is that it puts down anybody who doesn't make something "great". Great being narrowly defined as "making a metric ass load of money".

Additionally, he's presuming credit for the work Apple's engineers and designers have done. There is no doubt that Jobs guidance, and decision making has pulled Apple from the ashes. But he's not personally writing up engineering documents or slinging code.

My wife made some meatloaf today for the very first time. I thought it was pretty "great". Does that mean Jobs thinks that she's worth his consideration now? Or only if she puts the recipe out and made a metric ass load of money? I gave her the recipe, should I just take all the credit?

By defining "make" in a way that implies Jobs' participation in the process beyond those normally assigned to a CEO, and conflating credit and accountability with the process of actually "making" something, implies that he gets the credit for the late nights up writing code, testing out production designs, and all the other things that Jobs most certainly did not do is wrong.

If the world worked that way, with people taking credit for other's work, it would make for a pretty shitty place.
After reading this article, I want to start a company that makes computing products to free users from the oppression of Jobs' proprietary software. The advertisement will be the face Steve Jobs reading this email on a huge monolith-like television screen. A woman will run up to it, and throw a hammer at Jobs' face, smashing the monolith into millions of pieces. This represents the freeing of the users and developers from the tyranny of Jobs.

For some reason, though, I think I've seen this before... somewhere...
Almost everything is not hard "in principle", though. In quantum physics, you've got 4 fundamental forces, a handful of elementary particles, and together they explain all of the universe. In medicine, you've got a bunch of organs hooked up to the circulatory/lymphatic/nervous systems, and they make the body go 'round. In molecular biology, you've got 4 bases of DNA and they explain basically everything.

The problem comes from the complex interactions between those elements. You can learn how the body works in high school biology, but that doesn't prepare you to operate on it. Similarly, you can learn how software is constructed ("make sure the right lines of code are used, follow each other, and are debugged properly") from Hacker News, but that doesn't prepare you to actually put those lines of code together.

One of the unfortunate effects of Internet forums is that it seems to have shifted attention from the nitty-gritty details of how to do something to the high-level overview of how to do something. So we have a bunch of programming forums where we talk about programming, but never actually program anything. It's not just programming (just look at reddit.com/r/economics), but programming seems to have been one of the most affected disciplines. But I'm afraid that this is giving a skewed perception of the field to newcomers, such that they look at the code they see on blogs or Hacker News and think that's all there is to programming. The #1 reason people fail Google interviews is because they don't have enough depth: they can recite code snippets they found on the web and maybe even put them together, but they can't analyze the performance of their programs or suggest how they might adapt them if requirements change.
Network effects- just because I don't own an iPhone doesn't mean I don't have to deal with people (more importantly: customers) who do.
Stallman usually talks about software when it comes to freedom. I wouldn't make any conclusions on his opinion about "freedom to kill" without asking him for clarification.
I suggested him as a speaker to TED. Later I introduced myself at the conference. Introduced him to some other folks and the ball started rolling.
That article was predictably bad, but what really clinched it was the claim that civil engineering jobs are less stressful because projects have long deadlines without giving any consideration to how much time the job actually requires.

Somehow I don't think a five-year project with a deadline three years from now is the most stress-free job around.
One thing that annoys me is internet comment threads speculating about the mental health of people the commenters have most likely never even met.
To provide another example that does work on the iPad, though, SVG files can contain code, such as this analog clock: http://anomaly.org/wade/projects/svgClocks/simple-analog.svg
I found http://openbookproject.net/py4fun/ a while back. It has quite a few projects, one of which is a "toy computer" emulator written in Python. It goes from the raw emulator, through to writing a simple language and compiler for it.

It is a toy example (hence the name, I guess), but a picture is worth a thousand words, if you're wondering about the nitty gritty of it all.
Dick Durbin speaks truth.
Then why would he say it? The implication that he thinks he's done something great is clear (not saying that he hasn't done great things, but the semantics of his statement are clear, "go away guy who hasn't made billions of dollars and come back when your bank account is full").
> As a non-fan of Ruby, his contributions to programming outside of that community seem minimal.

Funny, that's exactly the kind of thing I'd expect _why to say if he were to take up a new pseudonym and participate in discussions on Hacker News. I'm sure he'd just be trying to convince us that he wasn't actually all that great.
One more employee from Foxconn falls off building and dies
they should really spend more time improving their app marketplace website. It's very crappy compared to the iPhone app store
> In my experience, much of free-OSS has been significantly worse than a cheap proprietary, if it exists at all.

For us, OSS has worked a lot better. Having the ability to inspect the source code all the way down to the hardware level, tweak it, adjust it, and share the fixes with the world is a lot better than waiting for that phone call back or that tech support email back. -- This is the practical benefit of OSS. It also appeals to those who want to understand how the system works, and those who dislike dealing with black-boxes that constantly break.
Am I the only one reading these comments that appreciates the need for some people to settle down given that our current "nomadic" lifestyle is heavily dependent on farms?

Last time I checked, none of these people were hunting and gathering with their 14 pound packs. In fact, I would argue that were they to start deriving all their food from hunting and gathering, their packs would increase in weight by approximately one spear and probably a decent bow and arrow. A gun, would of course, require people to work in a factory to manufacture it, so that's out.

There seems to be a general ignorance amongst many people these days that almost everything humans have accomplished started with domestication of plants and animals. And a core element of domestication is a sedentary lifestyle.
What about the blackberry/crackberry addiction?
Computer Den Troubleshooting, Virus Removal, Games, and More
Logic on Mac, Cubase if you're stuck with Windows, Native Instruments Massive is a pretty awesome synth (for beginners and pros) and Izotope Ozone for mastering. Logic has pretty much everything else you need included but if you go with Cubase or Ableton then you'll need to stock up on 3rd party plugins including a good EQ and freq analyser, good dynamics compressor and a decent sampler.
Buy Vodka Online
I don't normally write reviews about products I buy online except when I have a really good experience (or a really bad experience!). However I recently had to put together a large event in Sydney that required a lot of liquors, wines and spirits for the guests (over 600). I'm an event manager and like to be able to pick up the phone or go online and get what I need quickly. Well I tried WebCellars who are an online wine store and their service was excellent, delivered on time and at a great price. This event was for a Russian wedding so as you can imagine Russian Vodka was high on the list. Now I thought "Can I buy Vodka online? Let's check"
Sure enough I came across their site, picked up the phone and 'Voila' order placed within minutes and delivered within days directly to the event location. What would normally have taken me several hours offline I managed in under 15 minutes. Thanks Hazel
Definitely a better plan than ignoring absolutely everyone. While it's certainly not good to be overly influenced by others, being completely unaware of what's going on isn't the best plan either... yes, I tried it.
If nothing else, I think we can all agree that the "China" topic can bring an emotionally heated debate and it's great to have the platform to discuss such issues. Thanks to pg for that! Forums such as these are not as common in the rest of the world as one could naively believe. But to bring this back to dublinclontarf 's original comment, I will write my last words on the subject.

As we are becoming more and more dependent on this thing called the internet, we must begin to create and offer the same types of securities, rights of access, usage and opportunities to the world, equally. Under the guidelines of free trade, like the WTO, we should have these already in place in some areas As online businesses are businesses, none the less, they should be given their due protection.

By restricting internet businesses from others and controlling what can and cannot be said on them is wrong. As China grows to become more powerful and has more ability to control their internet, I can only see a darker future for the state of freedom in China.

What we see now, are only examples of the type of governing and leadership in the CCP today. Human rights, free speech, social stability and environmental well-being all grow from the same tree. That tree looks to be quite unhealthy.

Bottom line, you do not have the freedom to discuss what you like on the internet in China. Period. Do so and you risk anything from losing a business license or police harassment to imprisonment or worse, in extreme cases. You do not have complete access to the online businesses being created daily across the globe. These are facts.

These freedoms that we take for granted in the US (I am an American) come from a basis of law and order. As I said before it is not perfect. Nothing humans create is. But from that law, we have much prosperity. the clean air comes from regulations and restrictions on wanton over-development, national parks have come from the common man fighting big business to protect something pure. By the way, even our president had to use his constitutional power to save one of the world's most precious gifts, the Grand Canyon, from the might of big business. And millions of immigrants have found a home to raise their families and prosper in their own unique ways.

Governments that oppress these freedoms and deny those rights have never fully grown to become world powers and beacons of hope. They made money and won some wars, but were never considered safe havens.

The problems associated with Internet and Freedom in China are merely symptoms of larger issues looming on the horizon. As we build this world wide web ever larger and stronger, we will see just how those two ideas are so intertwined.
Sorry, perhaps my post generalized too much. This was in the context of proprietary software, specifically software as a service. I've edited my post to clarify that.
It's nice to have at least two viable implementations of any software component, so not everyone is relying on the same code with the same potential bugs. It's a lot harder to crack into a mixed Linux/BSD environment than one that's purely one or the other.
Funny, yes, it really is like that, I call them 'cargo cult coders'.

Able to produce by tying together endless snippets of googled code, it is the professional equivalent of the script kiddie.
Interesting. I guess in a similar vein, my Android phone affords me freedom from fart apps. And my Windows box gives me freedom from a stable os.
Nope. You certainly seem ... engaged ... when people mention taxes or government regulation, though.
Steve Wereley's particle analysis estimate 70,000 bbls / day leakage.

The much publicized 5,000 bbls/day figure is from a surface only estimate by NOAA. It's been discovered that much of the leak is forming large sub-surface slicks. One such below surface slick is 10 miles long, by 3 miles wide, by 300 feet thick.

These guys are not going to be visible til / if they come ashore.