skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would find it easier to remember that the 400's are webservers than that the pnictogens are webservers. You can also make the even/ oddness of the numbers significant like interstate highways.

For practicality, you would combine meaningful names (for the groupings) with numbers (web3, dev5, router2) rather than bijecting the entirety of your company's assets onto a set of integers.
Not to nit-pick, intended to help: I think you mean "coarse" rather than "course". After the item here a day or two ago about Garden Path sentences, your comment took me several re-takes to parse correctly.
You must not have kids yet.
actually, AFAIK, all the studies I've seen about english say that when you read, what you're looking at is the shape and pattern of the word, not it's representation as a string of symbols pasted together. (this is why you can read things that are misspelled and not notice that there are mistakes- your brain thinks that the shape of the linked letters looks close enough and is interpreted as being the actual word... besides which, in english letters only represent syllables in the loosest sense- it's not like there is a self-consistent system)

I'm not sure if that middle meaning (of disparate symbols that compose the whole) detracts from making the "word" in it's entirety less abstract, but I would say in general that I think about words in terms of their abstract meaning first, then about their relation to other meanings and words. In general (and more so today with spell check) I would say that no native speaker is thinking about the letters that compose a given word.... I'm sure that there are people who can recall words by thinking of the word as it's written- that sounds like one of those memory retention "hacks" I hear about sometimes. Maybe that system is just more prevalent in the asian education system.
Cache is the new RAM, RAM is the new disk....
Steve Jobs & LSD
That happens to me as well with my cousin. Apart from the deceased facebook page that they already have, they could avoid sending messages if they see that a user hasn't logged in in the past 2 months for example. Either that person is no longer with us or he or she has decided to give up facebook. Either way it's annoying for everyone involved.
Threads link in the header shows you all the comments you have made and replies to them.
Just finished reading 'Siddhartha'
For the past month I've been reading alot lately, I was wondering if anybody knew some books that were equally or more compelling as this book I've just finished.
It makes future sales of their name bring in less money.
Pentagon declared Wikileaks as a threat to national security.

I we look at The Apache helicopter and Australian internet plans leaks, the government was trying to do something wrong, which Wikileaks exposed. Now they have been declared threat to national security. Great progress in hypocrisy.
As I see it, its easier to mix any subset of procedural, oop, or functional code than it is to mix either of those with relational queries. Operating on query results WITH Ruby is easy. Writing relational queries AS ruby is a big impedance mismatch. There isn't a simple mapping I can hold in my head. Here there be magic, in the form of implicit joins. Also, good luck trying to optimize.

It's not that I've decided it will leak, it's that I can never quite trust that it won't. I would have to continually prove to myself that my code is right. It's a weakness of mine that if I don't 100% understand the code I'm writing, I worry and that slows me down. That code becomes something I can't quite get out of the back of my mind.

Also, I don't buy your readability argument. I can read and think in SQL just fine. Yes, SQL can be complicated, but only when the problem requires it. It maps very directly and naturally on to the problem of querying. There isn't much in SQL that isn't necessary. There isn't much in SQL that is missing. It's already as simple as can be. To make it any simpler makes it worse. Mixing the asking of a question with the processing of the answer makes both parts harder to understand.

Perhaps it is easier to read for some people, but I think that's likely because they just aren't very good with SQL yet. So, this seems to me to make code less readable and more difficult to reason about. I don't see the advantage.
Yeah, what he said... sort of.
First we tried just smushing everything into JRuby, but that was a mess. We then split the app into a bunch of services, instead of one monolithic rails beast. Each new service is a simple java app. It was a gradual process, taking about 7 months.
> Getting told to 'reconnect' with a dead friend can be mildly traumatic.

Not if it directs them to a virtual ouija board.
So Apple have made a skype clone for their iPhone :/

Call me unmoved, and unexcited. Why is this important? We've been doing video conferencing for decades now.

You can also just download 'fring' for free on Android to get skype video calls. (You can even use it on 3G or whatever you feel like. Unlike Apple which restricts everything).

Only Apple can routinely release decades old technology and hail it as revolutionary, and seem to get away with it.
I had a glorious day last year where linked in recommended a friend who had committed suicide a few days earlier AND the person who many years earlier had shot and killed a couple of my friends. I wonder what the odds on not 1 but 2 at the same time are...
But we need to conserve helium!
For One Quarter of Users, the iPad is a Game Machine
tl;dr the same story as all the other iphone -> android stories.
At the risk of veering into off-topic territory, I'd like to thank you for all the insight you afford this community. I've spent the last year building a software shop from the ground up. I've personally spent hours reading through your post history and have benefited from nearly every post. Your insights on sales, management, and general day-to-day business operations have directly benefited me on the order of tens of thousands of dollars.

So, on behalf of myself (and I'd imagine a hefty chunk of this site): thank you for your time. You should write a book- I'd buy three.
I miss _why.
It's not the "sentimental" part that's objectionable, it's the "bullshit" part. Marry someone you love, marry someone you trust, of course. But understand that the future is unpredictable and forever is a long time -- there's nothing wrong with being prepared.
Perhaps this is why it generally takes a new generation of thinkers to push political thinking forward. I would postulate that we are more likely to reject the views of our parents than we are to reject our own.

If that is true, it explains, for example, why gay marriage is a hot button issue for baby-boomers and older, but largely less of an issue for people under 30 (http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2009...).

I'll bet racism data looked pretty similar a few decades ago, but now expressing racist views publicly will get you in trouble even if you are extremely conservative (that Republican politician from the south a couple years ago who got extreme negative publicity for calling blacks "monkeys").

If it is necessary for one generation to die for political views to move forward, that doesn't bode well for progress if Aubrey de Grey and Ray Kurzweil prove prophetic. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgLRhxvRlKg) and (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzwei...)
You're scaring me a bit. I may not have that much more experience than you do! =)
Does it notify their friends? eg "XXXXX has regrettably died" :/
Engineering Large Projects in a Functional Language
I just switched from a more technical position to this type of role for this exact reason. Your 10% comment is only partially true, though. I think it depends on both the product, industry, as well as the client; some sales are inherently more driven by technical expertise & experience.
Bay Area as a City State
I just ordered this book. I loved "Surely you're joking Mr. Feyman" and didn't know there was a sequel. Thanks for the comment!
The key is to lessen the value of being right, and heightening the value of exploration and seeking truth.
Strong Resolution For How To Write Thesis
Writing is not the only important thing in doing a thesis. Formulating the thesis statement, making a timetable, writing an outline and doing the research are equally important steps. Value of making a strong resolution at the start is emphasized here.
>If/when the iPhone is available on Verizon,T-Mobile and Sprint (besides AT&T), Android's momentum is going to drastically slow down.

Good luck with that.
You know, software developers know EXACTLY why facebook is recommending dead friends. Yes, almost all of us KNOW that the algorithm has absolutely no way of knowing that dude is dead. We also understand exactly why the trigger "he is not posting much" works.

But for whatever reason, when someone mentions something like this, we pretend we don't know the algorithms behind it. Dudes, you know it's no facebook conspiracy - they are just using some standard algorithms you understand pretty well, so let's not pretend like it's some special thing.

If their algorithms somehow parsed the RIP on his wall and stopped suggesting him, then THAT would be special.
Anyone know the name of this algorithm? There is a similarly solved classic problem in complexity theory: Given an O(m) list of O(n)-bounded integers, determine if there are duplicates in O(m) time and O(n) space.
'reconnecting' with a dead friend can also be mildly therapeutic.
Unwrapping Flowers With Processing
Converting Smalltalk to Newspeak
Politicians suffer dreadfully from this, to everyone's detriment.
There's some talk in the high-altitude ballooning community about using hydrogen - it's much cheaper - but as yet I don't know of anyone doing it.
http://www.sqlalchemy.org/docs/session.html?highlight=expung...

The following is more of a screed than a personal response to your post, so please don't take it personally.

This is something I run into quite a bit more than you might expect. Partly it is because I used to spend a lot of time in #sqlalchemy, #pylons, #pocoo, #python, and #postgresql on freenode (I'm 'ltbarcly' on freenode, feel free to msg me HNers!). For some reason it is common to believe that you can sit down and write applications that use an ORM and relational database without knowing both the ORM and relational databases.

If you are going to use relational databases, you should be prepared to become an expert in SQL, Database drivers, unicode (and why utf-8 or any other encoding isn't the same as unicode, in the same way that jpg or gif isn't the same as image data), indexing, data types, normalization tradeoffs, transaction isolation levels, locking semantics, ACID tradeoffs, how to read and understand query planner output, and much more. This is a lot to know, but if it were a college class it would be less than a semester long.

If you are going to use an ORM you have to know everything you would need when you use a relational database, and in addition how and when the ORM performs queries, how it maps to the database, what queries it will produce and when for any given action or attribute access, how db transactions map into the orm operations, how to perform common SQL operations via the orm (rather than loading more data than you need and filtering or joining via the application).
Anyone know where the pictures in this comic are taken from?
"critical" moments?

Not really. I think most people would argue as social animals that being physically present at an event underlines the importance and respect for others. No one sane dials into someone's wedding or funeral right?

For me that's why only the opening sequence of the advert worked - keeping in visual contact with your child. The deaf conversation is thrown in as a calculated validation of the goodness of FaceTime, given this, what cold soul could not understand the importance of this technology?

I'm sure medical staff are buzzing with anticipation about their future arguments with hipsters trying to use their phones in scanning units where such devices are usually prohibited.
Yeah fessbock is wanting you to die so youew can reacenact wide yer olde pal. Hopto
What makes you so sure that it's public domain? Of course the published forms that Mark Twain and his friends published should be public domain, but these seem to have been released in installments and other incomplete snippets. The full, raw manuscript, which seems to be what's requested, would naturally contain portions which were never published. Given that such a collection in its entirety would be a pseudonymous, unpublished work, the entire manuscript won't be in the public domain until 2031.

http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/usc_sec_17_0...
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/usc_sec_17_0...
Art Thru Browser Elements
Interesting connection with self-esteem and fear:

"if you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen — and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t. This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated."

This theme is developed well in the "Power of Nightmares" documentary by Adam Curtis. The more scared the people are, the easier to control them. I think Leo Strauss and his neocon followers realized this. Deep down they wanted to help their country. But realized that "the informed, rational citizen" didn't exist, aside from a narrow "elite" segment that truly understands how things work. So this ruling elite should create powerful myths for people to believe in. People have to be led by irrational fears and beliefs.
This guy used hydrogen -
https://medschool.vanderbilt.edu/vusm-blogs/really-crazy-ide...
Makes sense. I should have considered that possibility, but being featured in articles is something I haven't had the chance to experience yet ;)
Positech Games
So many interesting details even in the first post…

• Some GPS modules are crippled to not work very high and very fast so they can't be used on ballistic missiles.

• "Rise time" is an issue with balloons. You want to hurry up to your burst altitude to stay warm and not drift too far. I suppose aerodynamic shapes are out since it has to be able to expand hugely as it rises.

… ah, details.
> If it is necessary for one generation to die for political views to move forward, that doesn't bode well for progress if Aubrey de Grey and Ray Kurzweil prove prophetic.

I really want to say you are not right here, but I cannot.

Obviously, being able to live longer carries a greater responsibility. One would hope that our ethics and judgement can evolve too.

One a positive note, the rate of cultural evolution has been increasing. Now we often have dramatic shifts in opinion between generations. That wasn't always the case.
This is pretty much exactly what Thoughtbot's Squirrel does. They decided to discontinue work on Squirrel though.
Where the Robots Came From
It's not that DoubleClick has done the terrible things, it's that Google has done them. The naked attempt to monetize wikipedia's eyeballs that was Knol. The careless lack of attention to privacy that was the Buzz launch. The very existence of Buzz, a me-too product that does nothing different to the existing competition. It's hard to imagine the Google of 2004 launching those products.

Of course, it's not all bad -- Chrome is very much an old-Google product, pouring innovation into a category that was content to slowly iterate. Android is another example of good-for-Google, good-for-everyone innovation. But those examples are getting fewer and further between, while copycat products are getting more common.
Quite the dilemma. When this happened to me, a former coworker who succumbed to cancer. I thought about unfriending him just to make the suggestion go away but that gesture is just too cold. I'd rather FB provide a mechanism to mute their "reconnect" suggestions.
Heh, you sound like my girlfriend. She has a similar problem in which all letters appear as they do to you with numbers. I've had her sit down and explain what she sees, along with drawing what she sees. She's also the only one she knows that has her type. And she also thinks she's stupid. Btw, she has 4 bachelors, 2 masters, and a phd. Her intellect is through the roof. But because counsellors in her high school had no experience in her learning style, they simply said it was "not applying" or "stupidity" or some such tripe. She also has a photographic and phonophonic memory, so those voices appear in her head telling her how stupid she is.

So yes, even as a SO, I understand. And judging from your writing style and comprehension, you're not stupid... Just different.

There's a few other things you'd be good at, but those would be best to take private.
There a plenty of people who use hydrogen in the gas balloons, even in places where helium is cheaper

Here's some info: http://www.balloonfiesta.com/gas-balloons/gas-ballooning-faq...

but there is more to be found.
Pre-ordering mine now.
Ask HN: Only one text field allowed on the webapp 
Looking closely what I see is Google, twitter and friendfeed have just a one point of interface between the user and application. What do you think is possible if we are if you are allowed only one input box for your idea.

* Google Search: One input field (Rank 1)

* Twitter: One text area (Rank 11)

* Friendfeed: one text area (Rank 735)
I think it's great that some people are switching phones due to subjectively perceived advantages. "Openness" is one of those issues that gets brought up all the time and it's really more of a personal preference than a "hard feature" that makes one thing better than the other.

To me, this means that we have now two got options on the market and it's up to people to choose. I hated how one-sided the market was for a few years, where AT&T had an amazing phone that was so much better than everything else. At least now, there's a competitor that's gaining ground. Let's hope this is is good for everybody.
Why wouldn't they just get a technical person to do it?
Since the copyright clause clearly states that copyright is allowed so that living authors are encouraged to create more work, it makes perfect sense that Twain's work from the 1900s will remain in copyright until 2031. This Twain guy is going to do a lot more writing before then.
Assange is aiming at maximum impact. He knows human nature well enough to understand that people love polarization, and he exploits human weaknesses in order to accomplish his goals. Who has ever heard of Cryptome or Steven Aftergood? Very few. By contrast, everyone knows Assange these days. You may find his approach distasteful, but you can't claim it's not effective.

In any case, why shouldn't the "collateral murder" video have been editorialized? I don't care if the soldiers were obeying the ROE and had the right to defend themselves. They still are the invaders, and the invasion is still illegal. Ultimately, I don't blame the soldiers, for they were following orders. I blame the American people for blindly trusting their government and failing to demand accountability from the morally challenged elected officials. A docile populace is the first step towards tyranny.

If Assange stokes the masses and gets people angry, I am perfectly fine with that. Anger in the face of tragedy is preferrable to utter indifference. If Assange is self-aggrandizing and has an agenda, I am fine with that too, for he has done a great job so far and it would be enormously unrealistic to demand zero self-interest from a person who has amassed such immense power in such a short period of time.
When I engage in difficult or critical conversations, I try to avoid the word "you" as much as possible. This immediately tends to put people in defensive mode and their response can become combative as they perceive this as an attack on who they are.
BP drilling in the Gulf may have released a world-killing methane bubble.
unobtanium, adamantium, mithrilium, ...?

Edit: imodium?
Maybe this is a natural reaction to the fact that so much of the information we receive is propaganda? Even if, for example, a news story presents a series of facts, other relevant facts are often elided to give a mis-impression.
For anyone who isn't already using DM, you should be. Thanks Dan!
My current company has me in a cube with a room full of salespeople. I find just listening to them talk on the phone to be great experience (the company installs solar panels). Things I have noticed:

- very knowledgeable about the product

- work to apply that knowledge to the individual's problems

- establish a friendly rapport, be courteous and respectful. One of the most common phrases I hear them start a call with is "Is this a good time to talk?"

- it's a lot of work to be prepared, keep up to date with the customers, and the sales "environment" (in our case things like government regulations and grants, media, other stuff.
Nothing. Flagged.
This Mobile Payments Company May Self Destruct In 15 Minutes
Yes, we know how it works. Someone was looking at what happens in the common case and didn't think of this edge case. It's a reminder that social situations are complex and though we try, it's impossible to think of every edge case.

That's why you need a way for people to report bugs to you, a way to quickly disable features that aren't working, and a process to fix them.
"Science advances one funeral at a time." -Max Planck
Once again, a study proves the obvious: there's nothing you can give your child that will magically make them smarter. As a parent, you have to be involved.

On the other hand, the study keeps saying "only computer skills were improved" as if these were not worth having. My self-taught "computer skills" are the basis of my career. Practically everything the modern knowledge worker is required to do could fall under the category of "computer skills": word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, modelling, programming. These seem like worthwhile skills.
I'm glad that you enjoyed that. I was using the blog post in part to document what I had found. Hopefully, others will found the information useful.

I went to a balloon launch yesterday in Cambridge and the guys there were great. Very helpful and explained many little things that I don't have time to blog about.

http://blog.jgc.org/2010/07/ballasthalo-5-launch-afternoon-o...