skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The crux of the argument:

The link is, in a way, a technologically advanced form of a footnote. It's also, distraction-wise, a more violent form of a footnote. Where a footnote gives your brain a gentle nudge, the link gives it a yank. What's good about a link - its propulsive force - is also what's bad about it.

I must say I am sympathetic. I have recently even developed a habit of opening long articles on the iPad instead of the laptop because there are fewer temptations to wander away and thus more chance of reading the article.
You're centering your argument around "the government is forcing ERs to service people who don't have insurance"

This is why libertarian arguments always become absolutely ridiculous when you try to apply them in the real world. In what world would an ER turn away someone with a massive head wound because they don't have insurance?

Sarbox is intended as a fraud prevention scheme. Libertarians tend to be opposed to it on principle because hey it's just creating a bunch of extra unnecessary paperwork, drag on the economy and all that. If corporations aren't committing fraud, why do they have to do all this unnecessary work and let the capital-G Government snoop all over the business? All fair points until Enron and Worldcom collapse and blow up a million people's retirement funds. I'll take the drag, thank you. (actual implementation of sarbox could undoubtedly be improved).

You might be right about that boundary, but it's all in how you define bad acts. I'm glad that you see the risk as being an actual thing (5% chance of it means you caused 5% of the damage, statistically speaking, even if someone else drew the unlucky number).

I suppose it's all in how you define externality too. I'm all about hiking up the gasoline tax by 2-3 bucks a gallon over the next decade. We have a trillion dollar defense budget, a boatload of strategic issues and dubious alliances all based around oil - those aren't priced in, and that's why we have such a hard time getting off of it. But most libertarians would probably tell me that that's a perfectly functioning market, oil even gets traded on commodity exchanges, how can that not be a market? It's all in your frame of reference, I guess.
Looks like the Dallas datacenter is back online now.
I don't understand. The number of apps seems small. The number may be wrong, or the perception may be incorrect, but the existence of a base of developers with the requisite skills should make this number higher, not lower compared with the early days of the iPhone.
Thanks for the kind words. And that's a really good idea..

I've been keeping a list of tools & frameworks that seem helpful to startups, and I hope to bring them together and have founders pick & choose the structure they think will be most beneficial to their situation. The accounting is a good addition. It's still unclear where I can add the most value, but, as you mention, there are lots of promising possibilities.
Insurance Quotes R Us
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Understood lionhearted, consider the fluff nixed forthwith.

I have always been more drawn to virtue theory. I have of late been drawn to Wittgenstein's archly enigmatic, "aesthetics and ethics are one". I don't know if Wittgenstein ever said anything about disease. One philosopher I hugely admire is Peter Singer and he's a utilitarian of some stripe so that gives me pause for thought in dismissing consequentialism/utilitarianism but like I said I have been drawn more to virtue theory side of things.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/
Thanks for the feedback. I think that's more than fine. After all, paper is what I've been using until now ;). I wasn't really planning to "launch" this or anything. I pinged the lean startup mailing list to get feedback on the layout of the canvas, and it made its way here.

Security certainly wouldn't have been difficult to fix, but it would have added a few days and locked me a little bit further into a canvas design that may-or-may-not be correct. So I started with the big risk first, and the other stuff with fall into place fairly soon.
Costs for tablets will certainly spiral as manufacturing is so simple and Android is free to the OEMs. Tough comparing to iPad to Android #'s b/c everyone needs a cell phone and their lifecycle is about 1.5 years.
Indeed, but also http://www.savagechickens.com/2008/12/iq-test.html
It could also be that because the device is more capable, creating the applications take more work - because they are bigger, require more UI development, and because people will expect more out of them.

Give it another quarter.
Seems simple enough, just create a corporate account that they can use on their work computer and that they don't have the password to.

If you're still worried, change the password every time someone quits. (Which is usually a good idea.)
I'd love to see how Apple would reinvent the car.
I think this is because the ipad has a larger screen and thus you need to have more features (and longer dev cycle) on it or it will look empty. There is also the expectation of higher quality apps. Fart and other junk apps probably don't work very well because of this and thus the total app number is much lower.
In fact; is she not already more of a success.
Is anyone else tired of hearing about all the mythical rival tablets that are "just around the corner"? I mean, Call me when you have a product and I'll be interested but for now stop bugging me.

Especially from the OLPC project which has a history of promising price points that they can't meet. Again, once they have a product in hand I'll be impressed but these types of articles are tantamount to FUD (albeit a kinder, gentler FUD with unrealistic hope replacing fear)
> 2) Currently each JVM language has its own incompatible reinvention of closures.

Yeah, but as long as they expect Callables in the right place interop can be pretty easy with just interfaces. For instance, you can pass JRuby lambdas to Clojure functions just fine. Sure there's a duplication of effort, but it's not too bad for interop purposes.
Request HN: HN Reader for Android
I know that there is already a HN Reader app for Android. Unfortunately, the lack of support for voting as well as commenting, makes the experience incomplete at best. Surely someone can do better.
Ask HN: What are most innovative college programs in online/digital instruction?
So many campuses seem to be stuck with Blackboard/WebCT or DesireToLearn. A few are using Moodle.

Anyone here attended/taught_at a campus that was doing something more exciting, innovative, engaging-to-students, productivity-enhancing-for-faculty?
Daniel Jalkut's favorite scripts
...or LLVM :-P

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Level_Virtual_Machine

"The Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) is a compiler infrastructure, written in C++, which is designed for compile-time, link-time, run-time, and "idle-time" optimization of programs written in arbitrary programming languages. "
I'm less interested in the gaming part but more in the ways this will invade our daily lives.

If it works as advertised then it might soon be built into TV sets, PC monitors and all sorts of public infrastructure that we can't even imagine, yet.

If microsoft can hold a big piece of that cake then that should be huge.

I mean, obsoleting TV remote controls alone is big, but only the tip of the iceberg.
How about interactive advertising (stand in front of a shop-window, interacting with a bigscreen), touch-free car dashboard, the whole "home automation" area, and so on.

This is ofcourse all under the assumption that it really works as well as shown in those videos.
if you only dislike js syntax, check out coffee-script: http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/
There's a simple straight alternative called YMLP (http://ymlp.com). They're dirt cheap and they're more than 10 years on a market.
Clojure Inspector
It's always good to ask why something is a problem and whose problem it is.

In this case, many people are saying "{x} is a problem and I want to help". That's okay, if it stops there. However, many then conclude "people with {x} are obligated to make my help as inexpensive/effective/etc as possible".

That's incorrect. The folks with {x} are not obligated to do what the helpers deem appropriate. The helpers are free to refuse to help if the helped don't cooperate, but that's the extent of the helper's power.
Beyond BigData.
This could be really great for GCC if they pick the right subset.

For instance, I could imagine that a GCC that takes advantage of namespaces, overloaded functions, and template functions (notably: not classes, exceptions, or implicit type coersion) to be quite a lot easier to understand than today's deeply preprocessor-dependent GCC.

It's easy to assume that C++ implies OO, but you really don't need to go that way, and you might not want to if you're starting with a project as old and hardened as GCC.
I think it depends on your trajectory. I did BASIC then 6502 assembly language then C. Then a few other languages before spending considerable time in Lisp/Scheme, and then Haskell.

Much like the author of the posting, I find some elegance in Lisp, but I've never been comfortable with it. While I can code anything I've ever felt the need to do with it, it would rarely be my first choice language. And especially with respect to performance -- I find myself having to spend a lot more time at the whiteboard ensuring that what I'm doing isn't too computationally expensive with Lisp. I just don't have nearly the same sense of cost with it.
Suddenly large percentages of the Native Americans were alcoholics.

It's a small point but this isn't true. Native Americans had beer and liquor extending back beyond written history.

Here's an example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulque

There are many more, and the effect on Pre-Colombian society is also documented.

I think this pervasive myth is derived from unconscious euro-centric moralizing.

The first accounts of American and European contact are quite interesting, for anyone interested I recommend the accounts of Cabeza de Vaca: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%81lvar_N%C3%BA%C3%B1ez_Cabe...
IBM and Bull (Bull works almost wholly with IBM) own 100% of the super computers marked as "classified," which are in the USA, UK, and Russia.
It's not delinkification. It's just link reorganizing. They are still all there.
If I were preparing to make decent, reasonably usable Android tablets to debut at, say, $300 or $400, I'd be super annoyed at the folks making $100 or $200 tablets because they're just gonna taint the brand as being utter unusable crap for anything but particular hackerish use cases.

Listen to kids and non-techies talk about music players... there are "iPods" and there are "MP3s"... most often expressed in a form like "Oh it's not an iPod, it's just an MP3." Tablet makers are gonna be in a pickle if the same dichotomy arises around iPads and "tablets".
What Is Intelligence, Anyway?
We aren't talking about the "rare" individuals. The obesity problem seen in the United States is almost exclusively due to people eating crap food (sugar sugar sugar) and not exercising, period.

I am not a doctor, but I'd still be willing to wager that the health benefits of going on a diet/exercise regimen, thus losing weight, FAR outweigh any potential downsides to dieting. Seriously, how can you say "oh, overweight people might be harmed by diet restrictions and exercise" when for 99% of the cases out there this simply isn't the case?

There is no way to lose weight besides caloric intake being less than caloric expenditure. By saying "you are making yourself weaker and more vulnerable to disease" you are effectively saying (though probably not meaning) "you should not slim down". Trying to drop 25 pounds in a week is pretty insane, but a well balanced 1-2 year plan, approved by a doctor, will go a long ways towards health and not against it.
Gov 2.0: Google Readies Government Cloud
Probably, I'm just curious as the way you speak can radically alter the impression people get of you, and your project.

In my mind referring to something as a 'site', rather than an 'application' or 'web-application' makes you seem less serious. Just a thought...
Are you smarter than animals with brains a fraction of the size of yours? Why or why not?

If the answer to the first question is "yes", it shouldn't take much to extrapolate from there.

Now, how to divvy up that quality which we call intelligence into what is inherited and what is learned is an open, and difficult, question. I think it's pretty clear that both are important, and their relative weights probably vary from individual to individual. Still, is the idea that intelligence comes in part from our DNA "remotely suggested"? I think it's fair to say so.
Interesting.

The way I usually deal with this is to right click links I want to follow and open them in new tabs (and I have my browser set so it doesn't move focus to those new tabs). I can then follow up in my own time. I either eventually get to open tabs or for longer things instapaper them to read on my phone later. The fact I have a strategy for dealing with this would suggest I subconsciously see it as a cognitive load.

It would be really good to see some proper research on this - with a brain scanner and watching the cognitive activity in real time as people dealt with the article.
It's just the headline (hoping to be link bait).

The substance of the article warrants something more like: "Rival tablets hoping to bite into iPad lead." But you know the effect of competitive pressures among media.
Yeah, absolutely. Fart apps make sense on the iPhone - it's something you always have with you and you can whip it out when you're with your friends and do some cute little gimmick that's deleted 2 minutes later after the $0.99 of value has been drained from it. iPad uses are for the most part much closer to a 'traditional computing' model.
This is getting stupid. People program real, working things in Lisp. People program real, working things in languages that aren't Lisp.

Grow up.
True. encFS is much better choice. It can be transparently mounted as regular folder in linux but I don't know if there is a windows way of accessing to it.
My node is back, but linode.com still down for me.
I don't have any supporting evidence, but I have read over and over that you cannot exceed more than 2 pounds of loss per week without doing some damage. 25 pounds in a single month is HUGE.
> Also, these are not directly comparable to US salaries, because you get a lot of things almost for free, which you'd have to pay for in US: education, healthcare, transportation, sauna every day, etc.

Someone is paying for those things, so they're not free.

In terms of tax dollars per capita, the US is in the middle/top of the EU. However, it looks like we get less for our tax dollars than EU folk do. It's unclear how more US tax revenue would change that.

On the other hand, the US is significantly above the EU in terms of income and GDP per capita.
I agree with you. With college admissions, a good second step for students is to understand that they actually can afford to go. From a financial standpoint, those in poverty simply don't have to pay to go to the top private colleges in the US, and they can often get enough need-based aid at the public institutions to make attendance possible, too.
I'm Canadian. We use Beanstream as our payment gateway. We got a USD merchant account through them (at TD Bank).

Have you looked around at local options? It's definitely possible to get a USD merchant account, and it does NOT need to be at a US bank.
"The school is fighting an uphill battle to change an ingrained 'mentality among lower socio-economic [students] who believe they cannot make it,' he says."

There is indeed a set of barriers faced by high-ability, low-income students that is not faced by low-ability, high-income students.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_27/b3840045_...

http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffp0621.pdf

http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ff0615S.pdf

http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Education/carnrose.pdf

http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Education/kahlenberg-affacti...

http://harvardmagazine.com/2005/05/a-thumb-on-the-scale.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200511/financial-aid-leveragi...

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=510012

http://www.equaleducation.org/commentary.asp?opedid=1240

http://www.jkcf.org/assets/files/0000/0084/Achievement_Trap....

http://www.reason.com/news/show/123910.html

It's very commendable for school principals to encourage students from poor families to keep pushing at those barriers. Meanwhile, principals of high schools in higher-income areas don't need to do the same kind of encouraging for academic preparation, because families in those areas know that their children can get into college even if they are very poorly academically prepared for college.
I have been doing this as well. It has the added bonus of easily zooming in on the article's main content with a double-tap, which not only makes it more legible, but also hides other distractions elsewhere on the page (ads, archive links, etc.).
My linode in Dallas is still online.
Consider how many iPhone apps work essentially perfectly on the iPad, though — it's an awful cliche, but imagine if you're the maker of a 'fart app': do you do that much better by scaling your UI [still just supporting the exact same set of features... it's not like an iPad runs such apps better than an iPhone does] to fit the iPad a tiny bit better, or by adding more and better fart noises to your existing iPhone app?
The ipad circa 1968.
Picking things apart is good. Using a good thing as a justification for smug is usually bad.

It's often been noted that the best way to discredit something good is to espouse it badly. How about: The best way to discredit something good is to be a jerk about it. (Disclosure: I'm at least as guilty of this as anyone here!)
Important Gotcha for Windows users: "Windows may not update changes to symlinked files automatically."

They recommend putting the real folder inside your Dropbox folder, and symlinking to it from the other locations.
We are just starting to test http://www.adyen.com/ in our web app.
The guys at http://www.knowledgeplaza.net are using it for a while and recommended it to us.
A lot of it is statistical arbitrage.

That is: you look at the historical prices of all commodities over time and try to figure out which ones tend to vary together (eg copper-mining companies go up when copper prices go up... but you're looking for less obvious examples than that). Then you look at whether current prices diverge from these trends at all, and if they do you buy/sell accordingly. At least, that's the handwavey version I know -- I'm sure whatever they're doing at Rennaisance and DE Shaw is something I don't even know about.
See also

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/magazine/12QUESTIONS.html

New York Times: What is your I.Q.?

Stephen Hawking: I have no idea. People who boast about their I.Q. are losers.
I've had dropbox lose files inside bundles. We were abusing dropbox with hundreds of thousands of small files, so I'd be very careful about putting your entire $HOME folder in there since it's a pretty similar scenario. My personal rule is that only copies of data go into dropbox. Nothing important ever "lives" in dropbox.
No matter what you think about the device (and by extension Apple), these are impressive numbers.
Want to burn your eyes out with a laser? Have fun.

"Warning: Do not look at laser with remaining eye."
The chrome interface sucks. Surprisingly because their website is quite nice.
Inside the mind of a music pirate
Feed6, hotornot.com for twitpics
"As of 10 years ago, the world needed more software engineers than it had; today this is questionable."
My perception is that a lot of software engineers are needed. At least they are needed more(in numbers) than computer scientists.
I click with the mouse middle button, and in most browsers, a background tab will open. So I can keep reading the current page and have the other already loaded by the time I decide to close the parent page.

And using Opera, it's just a matter of a few mouse gestures :p
I'd say our customers would think we're slow to support new Java versions. But I'm also pretty confident that they've never heard of Clojure and probably not even Scala. I added support for Groovy a few years ago and it's received very little attention despite the fact that it often makes it possible to apply code changes immediately and avoid the long (2-3 minute) application restart time.

Our customers are mostly fortune 1000 companies, the people we deal with are not very technical and almost always outsource all of their development work overseas. They're also very good at finding outsourced developers with minimal skill sets. So a language with a smaller pool of developers would probably be seen as a negative.
How to Influence People
I didn't say the quote was from Ballmer.
Do you consider facebook as a site which has applications or is it an application?

If someone were to speak about the functionalities of the site called facebook - then would using the term "site" make facebook sound less serious?
Truecrypt volumes aren't striped...
How is the service/price with them ? I was going to try them; yet I could not find anyone who has used them before..

Cheers
Please try my reader: http://toadjaw.com/hn

I'm still thinking of a way to implement voting and commenting into it. I have an idea on how to do it, but not sure if it'll be acceptable.

Please let me know if I can add anything to this to make it better.
Unfortunately it's good for nothing in this case since the Liberals have similar aspirations (and I say that as a liberal voter). The two parties differ on crime/environment/tax issues, but when it comes to pandering to big business they are both the same.

I've been thinking about setting up a social site where youth voters who generally don't vote could be convinced that their vote could actually count in some of the swing ridings. In this minority parliament maybe we could scare the parties into actually considering the will of the voters.
It's not a shared account... You remove it from their device and revoke their access to the shared folder. So, the same way you'd do it if they had a branch checked out, etc.
In Computer Science, you only get an expansion of the envelope when some corporation makes a new toy everyone goes crazy over, not realizing it's just like that other toy someone else came up with 10 or 20 years ago.

This is an unintended admission by Zed that he's working off of 2nd or 3rd hand knowledge.
The VC Branding Problem
It's not so much a justification for smug; "justifiable smug" is the goal and the positive acts are the means to achieve it. It's a reward intrinsic (a term from game design), usually known as "gamism" under GNS and the people seeking it "Artisans" under the famous MUD paper on the subject: they seek reward by rebalancing power structures in their favor, and by visceral experience.

Combined, these are quite often thought of as "bullying" or "trolling", but not necessarily so—it can also be felt, as the name suggests, while using tools with finesse or performing authoritative power exchanges; surgeons are a good example of someone who has routed gamist reward intrinsics to positive acts. I would interpret the posts you refer to as another.

That is all to say, this is the reverse of a fundamental attribution error: this is just how these people are, not something they can change. It's part of their utility function to "satisfy" their urge to smug, just as one would satisfy hunger or sexual arousal. And, if we want these people in our society, we should learn to accept that as long as it's not actively hurting anyone.
That's new for lambdas.
Real World Cassandra and Ruby
You could but the talent pool is much smaller for both of those and the customer might not like that.