skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Plus there may be some selection bias going on. How do you know that some of your high-functioning coworkers aren't heavy pot smokers when they get home?

That doesn't make sense. There is a definite/noticeable slump below the norm for all the pot smokers I know (off hand count; perhaps 20-25) across a wide variety of jobs/ages.

Certainly some high functioning people I know could be abusers behind closed doors; but they exhibit none of the standard symptoms so it's hard to imagine that is true... (I will try and do some surveying though :))

In other words; you really need to find a high functioning heavy pot smoker to give the theory credence - and I don't think that is going to be easy.

Well, then we should avoid encouraging fast food, liquor, and a lot of other things

We are already doing that; indeed for several years now there have actually been campaigns to discourage the overuse of those things.
I mean, seriously, I'd never specialise in this language because everyone will turn to a teenager when you are listing your skills.

You are really good at coq? So, what's your favorite thing about coq? Do you guys ever have coq meetups?

Naming is important.
So much for me being able to think an original thought.
Devs, Let’s Log Intelligently. Or A Day At the Little Gym
What were their intentions... to trick people with their security settings? Perhaps they just didn't take enough time to plan out the settings the first time around.
That's not unusual. Running is very different from lifting weights or similar. This discussion is worthless until "exercise" is more precisely specified.
The FSF does as much enforcement as it has resources to do.

If someone would like to see more FSF actions, I would suggest they donate to the FSF, volunteer time to the FSF or release code under the GPL.

Donation page:
https://my.fsf.org/donate
HTML5 Versus Flash - Is It Really So?
AVTECH dvr file system
I need to extract data from a disk used with a DVR from AVTECH (773-m). This company uses an unknown file systems.. does anyone know anything about it?

I have two disk, one with some working videos the other with data I cannot access (probably there's some problem with index/db?) what can I do to identify the video files and copy to the working disk to be viewed?
Please no.
If I want music, I'll play my own.
I've been working on my own to learn Ruby, and I know TDD is a big part of things. Have you used the Peepcode screencast? Would that be a good starting point on RSpec?
see also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1381127
love the post, and the variety of ways for folks to get involved -- seems like they're primarily tech/dev-related opportunities (per the title), but i'm wondering where product folks can/will have the biggest impact...
Why your company should have a very permissive open source policy
I suspect that this was just a sound bite in 1997, but Jobs himself said it: "We have to let go of a few things here. We have to let go of the notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose."
Apparently it's been done already, see above. So it wasn't that far out :)
I have a strange feeling we've been here before: Are Magazine apps going to be the new Flash website?
Just a FYI - reddit allows me 1 request/2 seconds - so a lot of queries may only return Bing data (no score/comments etc)
Tantek Celik on DiSo 2.0 (part 3)
"Even email is centralized"?

I can start my own email server (or use one of millions of others) and send/receive to/from users on any other server... clearly decentralized (where is the center?)
Wow, that happened a lot faster than I thought it would. Well, to be honest, I think I wanted Apple to overtake Microsoft more than I ever thought I'd see it happen.

I wonder if in a few years from now Facebook'll overtake MS and Apple? ;)
The site was doomed from the moment 4chan heard about it. When are people going to learn that you can't expect online polls and discussions to escape the trolls? There isn't much that can be done about it either or else people would complain about "censorship".
Eww, looks they are bundling photos with status and posts (you can see them grouped in the pic). So, to make your posts world readable, your photos have to be too. That's not very good control.
Their intentions are to make butt load of money. The only way they can do it is by selling users data one way or another. One of the main reasons I user facebook is to keep in touch with my friends and know what they are doing without having to do much. Big announcements or happenings are also passed on through facebook, nowadays, which is fine. However, this information is just between friends. Unless, they somehow make most of this information public, I dont see a way for them to make loads of money. They have a funding of $716M and a lot of it at $12B evaluation. What else are they going to do?
I code almost all day wearing a pair of these. Without music playing, they mostly block out a conversation on the other side of the room. With music, the outside world is nonexistent. The biggest downside is a weak plastic headband casing. There's a strong metal band inside, but the plastic casing will eventually crack (it happens to most owners -- might be dependent on head size). That said, I wrapped mine with clear packing tape a couple years ago and they've been fine since. They're comfortable enough to wear for an hour or two on, 15 minutes off, repeat.

Another great sounding set is the Audio-Technica ATH-M50. I bought my brother a pair for $100 new on eBay. They're more durable than the HD280s, and fold up better for portability.

Avoid the HD202 unless you have small ears. Also avoid anything from Grado; they're totally open (lots of sound leaks in and out), and are mostly appropriate for rock (they have a very "colorful" sound -- not at all faithful to the source material). Don't go anywhere near Bose. You'll get a lot better sound for a hell of a lot cheaper from just about anything made by Sennheiser, Audio-Technica, Beyerdynamic or AKG.

This is a great source for info: http://www.head-fi.org/forum/ Try not to get too sucked into the hi-fi tomfoolery though, for $100 you can get a great set of cans, and a laptop or mp3 player will be a sufficient driver. A lot of the higher-end gear will require an amp to sound decent, and there's some wickedly diminishing returns once you pass the $100-200 point. There are a lot of conflicting reviews on that site, but there's seems to be a general consensus about certain models (the ATH-M50 is widely respected, for example).

[For the best noise blocking (aside from in-ear), you want a set of closed "circumaural" (around the ear) headphones. Open-back cans don't block any external sound, so you have to crank up the volume to drown it out.]
Seconded about Google trends being a bad way to measure anything.

Though, I think that people might be searching less for php and more for php frameworks. I guess with the success of ROR and Django, people are looking more to imitate that success by using similar frameworks.
FWIW, he's probably referring to .NET, which appears to be powering the Republican web site as well as NASA World Wind, which can be used to view lunar data sets.

http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/download.html
Exactly! One of the best essay in PG's H&Ps book in my opinion was the one that explains how winning doesn't have to be a zero-sum game, you can generate wealth. This seems a no brainer but a lot of people don't get it.

Many predict that a similar thing will happen in the battle between Google and Apple.
Didn't realize Glassfish was that fast. Thanks.

And hadn't heard of Play! Will check into that.

Also, just as a counterpoint to all this - as PG pointed out in his book, with Moore's law, speed of execution is no longer the limiting factor in most software development. It is programmer time and productivity, where (I'm guessing) Rails still wins this test. I'd expect that to be an ongoing trend. But of course speed of execution is still necessary in special situations, so this is still valuable.
> Right, because no salesman ever managed to improve his sales skills.

That's not what I said.
DF: The New Icon for Twitter for iPhone (Née Tweetie)
If a Java, C#, C++ (or F# or OCaml) programmer isn't able to pick up Scala (or any other typed object oriented language) quickly on the job, they aren't that great of a programmer (even if they are experienced).

Same for knowing any of {Perl, Python, Ruby} and being able to easily pick up the other. Some of the more advanced idioms may take longer to learn, but it's a fact of life that you'll have to learn new languages as you go.

On the other hand, if you need to hire average but experienced programmers (e.g., if you're doing outsourced CRUD app development) then you might have an argument.
Well, you know what they say about markup in the food industry.
At it's peak, AOL/Time Warner's market cap was higher than both.

Market cap is not always a trustworthy number.
12 awesome sci-fi themed lunch boxes
General consensus is that the stock was converted (to common shares) and sold sometime in 2003.
That just means everyone from 4chan is on there trolling away.
Interesting tidbit, when you scroll down the page to the end where the logos are displayed, the apple logo looks new, shiny and modern, the microsoft logo looks old and boring.

Their corporate images reflect the logos quite well.

edit: funny moderation here, would you mind telling me why ? Apple logo on the page not shiny ? Microsoft logo not old and boring ? Or do you - mistakenly - take me for an apple fanboy or something ?
Well, their publicity is working.
Try refreshing it once or twice and it should come up.
Probably got an influx of people from this site and others visiting it which overwhelmed it.
Great political ideas come, not from committees or from random samplings of the uninformed or semi-informed masses, but from intelligent and forceful leaders who can think them through thoughtfully, who can articulate them in a way that resonates with people, and who can set out an agenda to carry them into effective action. None of this is easy to do and it takes exceptional people even to make a credible stab at it.

There is no need to bring in modern politics to illustrate this. Any glance through the Federalist Papers will quickly show to any informed reader that one can take very difficult and highly contentious topics (how to form a country, how to divide its power among different groups, how to limit its power decisively in furtherance of broader principles such as natural law) and make well-reasoned and even brilliant arguments about them in ways that compel people to action. The people who made those arguments were steeped in a lifetime of ideas and imbued with a strong philosophy about the principles of right government, and it showed in what they wrote - even when those writings essentially took the form of propaganda pieces (which is really what the Federalist Papers were).

You won't get this from a website such as the one featured in this piece. You won't get it from Democratic Underground either. Leaders are leaders and hacks are hacks. The world offers the latter in abundance but good leaders are a precious few. This is not to say that normal, day-to-day people can't have good ideas or be intelligent in a political sense. It is to say that the intelligent articulation of such views won't come out in a mass setting and that is why political parties are ultimately driven by insiders (who are, one would hope, effective leaders) and not by soliciting random views from the street.
Where have I heard this before?

http://prlmnks.org/html/501131.html [2005]
http://www.perlmonks.com/?node_id=561229 [2006]

...other places...we've all heard predictions of doom...

I agree with the sentiment against perl as a language, but we need to all move on from this "perl is dying" and "perl is becoming less relevant" meme. Unfortunately, there is no solid evidence to support it, not five years ago, not four years ago, and not today. Time to beat a different dead horse (the comments, not perl).

Seems every programming blogger looking to get some extra publicity has to cut his teeth with the same non-issue tripe about perl. I rarely see this with other languages that become popular and then unpopular, and it makes the ridiculousness of the remarks that much more poignant: people are blowing steam to get noticed. It is less fashionable to educate people into why regular expressions and hashes are not always the best tools for a job and more fashionable to whine about it.
Also: More controlling than Microsoft.
I haven't heard of the idea of algorithmic link shortening before but it makes a lot of sense.

Found this and Tantek's custom "personal publishing/syndicating/tweeting/updating web application" Flacon (http://tantek.pbworks.com/Falcon) really interesting. The implementation on his personal site leaves something to be desired design-wise but I really like the ideas behind it.
I also recommend DataMapper. You don't mention a framework, but Sinatra is very simple and a good choice for banging out a web app fast.

Start with the main page -- whatever you (or your users, if you plan to have them) will be looking at most often. Put text on the page, even if it's static Lorem Ipsum. Or, as Tom said, the handlers for GET /foo and POST /foo. IMO, it is much easier to live with ugly pages at first than to start out with a rigid idea of a design and then struggle to cram stuff into that. Getting the CSS just so seems to take so much more time than anything else -- I prefer to save that for last.

After your main page, start asking yourself questions about how your app is going to be used. Does it need admin pages? Will it need a login page? What kind of data does each page have and how will it be displayed (eg, a directory tree with collapsible subitems)? Write all of this down. Really.

By the time you're done with this, you'll have some idea of how many pages/views you'll want, and some mental idea they should look like. Do a web search for designer portfolios -- this is a good way to find ideas for UI elements in similar apps. Use Sass + Blueprint to put the text in columns and boxes. If you use Firefox, I highly recommend Firebug (Safari has Web Inspector, but it never works quite the way I expect it to). Print out these pages and mark it up using your favorite color of crayon. Designate where stuff like images, forms and tabs will go. Take a look at CSSEdit, too.
Well, considering most of the government uses a Microsoft stack I'm not surprised.
Besides, their categorization is pretty well-done. Reddit and sites such as this one are harder to use for people who don't write software or regularly browse the internet.
(And, considering Stackoverflow is based on a Microsoft stack very similar to this site, it's slightly silly. Pick the right tools for the task and a dev stack you enjoy).
It took 14 days for my account to be deleted.
How do you know it's THE ONE?
How do you know if the idea you're working on is THE ONE?
I have a few ideas that excite me - what should I think about when deciding which is THE ONE I should focus on and which I should leave on the back burner? Is it too early to determine at the idea stage whether it could grow into a sustainable business someday?
...it is only in the last hundred years or so that our technology has advanced to the point where we can really fundamentally disrupt the balance created here by four and a half billion years of evolution...

This statement is so wrong I don't even know where to start.

For hundreds (if not thousands) of years humans have dramatically altered their natural environment by cultivating land, hunting various animals to extinction and selective breeding. However, evolution never achieved a "balance" for humans to disrupt. Evolution and "balance" are almost diametrically opposite. Are you under the impression that after 4 billion years of evolution, we finally reached a stable terminal point, only to be disrupted by naughty humans?
You really think a huge company full of lawyers and an entire office in DC dedicated to privacy & policy messed up because they were in a hurry? Trust me, there's not a single setting in the old design that wasn't vetted by a pile of lawyers and policy wonks.
I find this article not only strongly biased (both in the presentation of the actors of the debate and in the poor addressing of the arguments themself) but also completely missing the core of the debate.

Opponents are depicted as driven by their "fears" (of accidental or voluntary release of dangerous synthetic organisms). Whereas propoents have a "goal" (to produce efficient and clean products, and even to clean our current ecological situation). One of the opposing organism, the ETC group, is described as an "anti-technology group" even if its position is basically presented as people wanting to think before acting. More, on ETC website I am reading: "developments of technologies useful to the poor and marginalized".

The "fears" of the opponents are not stated as groundless as they are not negated, but solutions are presented in the second part of the article: synthetic organisms would not be dangerous because it's too early, we survived extinctions related to movements of organisms caused by humans, and because synthetic organisms could be watermarked and controlled with chemical deficiencies. First one is not even logic, second one is saying that retroaction is not useful in the process until we are not dead, and the third one, well, what about voluntary leaks, evolution. Well, maybe I've seen to much science fiction.

But in the end, this article is just poor because it hides its position in the debate behind "it's science!" and just doesn't address the true political questions appearing with each technology: who will control it and towards which end? Obvously, discussing patents and interests of Venter and associates (which happen to be... Exxon Mobile or BP...) should definitively be out of the discussion scope, just like the irony of the way the try to surf the "bio-ecologial" wave: "look ma, we're going to repair damages we've made and make $$"
I doubt it. The cat is out of the bag... Facebook can at a whim change the privacy of your personal data. Sure they caved under pressure and took a step backwards, but whose to say things might not change again in the future?

Some people are totally comfortable with the risk, but frankly I think it would be good for everybody that the "social networking infrastructure" is not owned by one company. Then... like email, ISPs, IM, mobile phone providers... everyone would have a choice and companies could compete for their customers.
So, elaborate then because I'm not following you. You say "Never teach a salesman how to sell, this will not end well".

But the guy is already a salesman. So we're not teaching someone to sell that doesn't know how to.

He needs to improve his skills, and that's teaching someone how to sell as well, but not from scratch. Or isn't it ?
You, sir, have done a great public service.
Ask HN: Parents' Sayings
Growing up, what did your dad (or mom) always say? They often seem very cliché, but usually have an immense practical value behind them. Let's pool parents and find some really good ones.
Here's a few to start:

"Life isn't fair."

"Stop crying before I give you something to cry about."

"Don't have any fun!" (Before dropping me off at a friend's house)
Consider that Apple's P/E is 24.5 and Microsoft's P/E is 13.4. Basically, while Apple may be in demand right now, Microsoft is earning almost twice as much.

Also, Microsoft pays a (albeit small) dividend, whereas Apple does not.
Facebook doesn't require you to make your data public to target ads to you. Advertisers don't ever see your actual data -- they target to demographics, and Facebook acts as the intermediary, displaying those ads to the appropriate users. Here's a related FAQ: http://www.facebook.com/help/?topic=privacyupdate
A few questions with Frederick Brooks
I think http://mirror.href.com/thestarman/asm/eicar/eicarcom.html is a better link for that
Which is why you can still also access the granular controls and choose different privacy for those items.
yeah carl sagan was pretty high functioning guy
Because making it illegal does not make it go away. It certainly hasn't made it difficult to get for those that want it bad enough. Instead, it drives casual users away that know how to control themselves away.
Actually, I haven't read it yet - I tend to skim the comments first and then decide whether or not the article is worth my time. I prefer to avoid articles where most of the comments lament that "this post is bollocks/misleading/media spam."

I'm not saying the OP is any better than you accused... I'm just pointing out that not everyone in the HN audience reads the same way.
> The sourceforge project was registered on the 15th of may, this is not a project that has been in

> mainstream development for two years. It may have been in development for two years but not with the

> kind of push behind it that you need for a successful launch of a web application.

Not sure what it matters how long it's been in development. If he's worked X years and gotten N amount of work done, he's still N amount of work ahead of where he'd be if he just started today, or the same day as the Diaspora guys. If that work amounts to anything, it could be a considerable advantage, if he does get some attention and gets some other people onboard. If not, he's still no worse off than if he hadn't done anything and decided to launch a new decentralized social network project today.

> It looks like someone's pet project that did not gain much traction that they're trying to breathe

> new life in.

Yeah, I know the feeling. I started a project with similar goals a while back ( https://openqabal.dev.java.net ) but got distracted and didn't get very far with it. Now I've changed the focus of my project to something different and am restarting development, but it's kinda moved away from the Diaspora / decentralized social network thing.

That said, I do think that everybody working on a decentralized social network (or any social network, really) should get together (virtually anyway) and collaborate on the underlying protocols and techniques for federation. No reason one shouldn't be able to run a Diaspora server and exchange data with a site running a $WHATEVER server (allowing for privacy restrictions, etc., which kinda kick-started this whole discussion).
Google, Android, and the Future of Games on the Web
On several occasions, I have seen and heard of RFPs written so specifically as to rule out all but one bidder.

My family's business does grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies, and we don't respond to RFQs and the like: http://blog.seliger.com/2009/12/27/why-seliger-associates-ne... for this reason, among others. The other problem we have, as described at the link, is that contracts to write grants are often wired for local grant writers, which makes it futile for us to apply.
That's a pretty naive assumption about the uniformity of GC performance across all implementations and algorithms.
When AOL/Time Warner merged, Microsoft was peaking at over $500 billion. They've since continually edged back, but far slower than the collapse of the AOL monstrosity.

You'd have to go back pre-90s to even consider the possibility that a cable co beat out Microsoft. Maybe in the early years.
So it sounds like I'll once again be able to keep the entire world from seeing my education, interest, and work history data. I deleted those after the last policy changes.

Sounds good, but for how long will this remain true? I'm not going to add stuff back when I feel it's just a matter of time before that information, once again, becomes world-readable. This is where some contrition on Facebook's part would be needed. I currently get the feeling that they are merely making tactical adjustments in their quest to make almost all user data public.