skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your headline is ingenious: "We may be late to the party, but we brought a keg."
I don't see why the comments were so derogatory. This is a perfectly reasonable question in an enterprise setting. Heck, Internet Explorer offers something around 1300 different possible group policy settings for administrative control. Why wouldn't a Microsoft platform developer expect something similar from the Sidebar?
"The Art of the Start" by Guy Kawasaki is a good read.

+1 to mixergy.com. There are a lot of very good interviews there.
Anyone have invites to give out?
Alpha One Labs: Hackerspace in Brooklyn
Here's What Comes After The Social Graph - Financial Graphs, etc.
And it would eliminate the need to say "skip ahead to 4:25 to hear where he talks about such and such"
The scientists in the article assign low probability to that outcome. While species in the ecosystem are interconnected, but the degree of those connections varies greatly. Other species can fill most of the niches occupied by mosquitos, and they'll likely carry fewer diseases.

You seem to be arguing from ignorance and advocating caution. I'd usually agree, but right now millions of people are dying and suffering because of mosquitos. With decisions this important, you can't just play the "what if?" card; you have to make the best choice after looking at the available evidence.
A great article. Bloggers who fancy themselves New Journalists would do well to read it and learn.
I also used to assume that getting rid of a disease like malaria would cause populations to sky rocket in developing nations.

Fortunately, this line of thinking is wrong. There is a great TED talk by Hans Rosling on global population growth that shows increased child survival rates result in smaller families and more prosperous nations.

See http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_g...
Earlier thread with some good discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1498224
That's a good point. Eliminating the need for resources to fight one issue would allow for overpopulation to be mitigated (more education, and more resources poured into increasing available food and standards of living). Reducing the amount of time wasted being sick would also allow for people to improve their own standard of living (as I assume that you didn't get as much done, and were less happy, while you were sick, and during the recovery period).
Four syllables: IPv6.
I think EULA's are considered signed to some degree. I don't know how or if that reasoning extends to online TOS. I wouldn't be surprised to learn the courts are fairly liberal in what they consider a contract but don't give all contracts the same strength.
Well that's the issue is that I am constantly experimenting (tasterator.com fmstalker.com), but feel like I am lacking direction.
To clarify, are you asking where you could move to join a company which pays you the highest salary to be an iPhone programmer, or do you mean which market is best for making your own apps and publishing them through the iTunes store?

I'm pretty sure you are talking about the first instance, but I want to make sure.
How much validity is there in positing the evolution of different contemporary human subgroups when these change at a fairly rapid rate and intermingle quite readily?

The modern "underclass" has probably only existed for at most, 100-200 years in various places. That's 3-10 generations with plenty of gene-movement in and out of the group in the meantime.

It seems a bit more plausible to me to argue that humans already have a variety of strategies for reproduction and different circumstances bring out different strategies.

My impression is that in peasant societies, teenage pregnancy is very common and families try to maximize the production of children. However, in hunter-gather societies, which pre-date peasant societies, my vague understanding that is teen-pregnancy is less common and there is less maximization of reproduction since population is often consciously consciously kept in the bounds of the land's productivity.
RE: "it just works" - you're right of course, and we're definitely trying to make it as simple as possible.

There are some features we're going to implement down the road that can be done better with p2p solutions though (aggregated storage across devices, for example), so I hope you give us a chance! :)
I first encountered this language while looking at the ToC of "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks":

http://pragprog.com/titles/btlang/seven-languages-in-seven-w...

...and it was the only language I hadn't seen anything of before. Interesting mix of paradigms, and very clean syntax, at least from the little I've seen of it. If any HNers have used it for a non-trivial project, would love to hear of your experiences please.
The email address is not displayed on the profile page.

A user can customize his or her profile URL with an email address. The settings page clearly states that the email address is publicly discoverable if the email address is used in the profile URL.
Me vs Backspace: my war against a rogue character
This is the irony of most internet advertising campaigns. Media Buyers (the people who organize ad campaigns) are graded on three things:
-Brand Awareness (how many people see it)
-CPM/Cost Per Mille (how much the ad costs per 1000 impressions)
-CTR/Click Thru Rate (how many people clicked on the ads)

Most ad campaigns have nothing to do with actually trying to drive product and most ad agencies are not tied to incentives surrounding product sales.
About 817 results (0.22 seconds) - Not the Zillions I was expecting
Exactly. In addition, because cloud servers to us are merely a "super peer", AeroFS offers a superset of what a cloud-based solution can provide.
You should also remember that a lot of the time, you're reading about efforts that take teams of extremely bright individuals to make successful. Sure, there's the occasional lone gunman out there, but two brains are almost always better than one.

In fact, in my own experience, I have found it is very difficult for one person (me) to be amazing at all the different things needed to make an idea successful. I'm pretty amazing, but not superman! ;)
I'm a computer scientist, and I call the (very old) study of graphs "graph theory". How is "network theory" different?

And is it just me, or is it painful to read this? It has the feel of a student taking an intro course on optimization, then exclaiming, "everything is an optimization problem!" I mean, sure, this is true, but it's tautological and feels forced to me.

And sorry, but Twitter's main innovation was discarding symmetry? People have been subscribing (an asymmetric relation) to things on the internet and otherwise for ages.
You can sign up in the web page to get (i hope) an invite
Old Spice definitely does sell deodorant and it doesn't have aluminum. Here are the ingredients on the back of mine (Pure Sport High Endurance - which seems to work for me):
Dipropylene Glycol, Water, Propylene Glycol, Sodium Stearate, Fragrance, Ppg-3 Myristyl Ether, Triclosan, Tetrasodium Edta, Sodium Hydroxide, D&c Violet No. 2, D&c Green No. 6.
I think you are talking about if you're working as a developer right?

I feel like in Europe people are really looking for good iPhone devs in general, because they can't outsource the whole project.
For those mac users out there, Macports is currently at 0.9.6.2.

sudo port install py26-bpython
StayFocusd rules.
lionhearted: out of curiosity, did OP prompt you to write your most recent blog entry?
I applaud what this guy is doing and I hope he can get new business from it, but for most RadioShacks it's a lost cause.

I was last in a RadioShack a week ago to find a spool of wire-wrap wire. The salesperson didn't even know what I meant, so he just let me look around until I found it. It's kinda sad because I'm old enough to remember being a kid drooling over their huge component selection and going in every day to look at the short wave receiver I wanted for Christmas and being able to have an intelligent conversation about electronics.

But when I bought components yesterday, the $40 or so I spent at BG Micro (http://www.bgmicro.com support these guys, they're nice :-) would have been close to $200 at Radio Shack even back when they carried most of that stuff.

Don't mourn Radio Shack -- experimentation, kits, and hardware hacking is bigger than ever. It's just moved online along with everything else.
Firm scrambles to patch vBulletin software flaw
> How much validity is there in positing the evolution of different contemporary human subgroups when these change at a fairly rapid rate and intermingle quite readily?

The article doesn't suggest that subgroups have evolved, rather that we have evolved to produce offspring sooner and faster in response to harsh conditions.

(So basically what you write in the rest of your post agrees with the article. I think!)
It uses p2p syncing: Any device that was invited and has sufficient privileges on a file can serve the file to peers.
I think this is probably true too, that they didn't want to have a separate operator just to reassign a reference. I think it could have been made to work, but just wasn't worth it.

Fortran for example has this - pointers in fortran behave like value types (like C++ references) when performing operations on them, however there is a special => operator to change the actual pointer. I never used operator overloading in fortran but I don't think it would be much of an issue, you would be able to overload the operator for anything except a pointer type.
You can't really compare them. Eclipse is a full-featured, lots-of-megabytes IDE. BPython is just steroids for the Python interpreter.
Lay off the dairy and it becomes less of a necessity. You do need to wash the pits very well at least once a day if you're going to even attempt this, though.
Most web developers can adapt to "HTML5" rather quickly. It looks more like .NET3.0 VS .NET2.0. Recruiters may not be able to fully understand the difference and would think that "HTML5" represents something completely new.
Buffett as Entrepreneur
Yes you are, and you can choose to go down that path or not.
I've had this exact thought and may even try to implement it. What I'm planning is closer to a MOO than an MMORPG or other game type, but we're on the same wavelength.
How to explain Singapore’s growth despite lack of stimulus?

The simplest explanation is its proximity to and focus on Chinese market.

China's growth is not cyclical. It is driven by demographics mostly and it can be described as a secular trend. Rural population migrates to cities, they become consumers and bring down their abnormally high savings rate to the levels common for developed consumer societies. China today is what Japan used to be in the 60s. Its growth will continue for a while, crisis or no crisis.
My favorite reaction to bpython was showing it to somebody, watching them use it for about 30 seconds, and them watching them alias it to 'python' without even thinking :) It blows the default python interpreter environment out of the water: it remembers history between sessions, autocompletes just about everything, and even has a shortcut for dumping code out to Pastebin.
Try turning the statements into genuine questions. For example: "I don't know but, the library you are using is bloated compared to library X". That could be turned into "Isn't library X much smaller than the library you're using? Do you need that big of a library?" Or even "I thought the library you're using is considered bloated compared to library X." It's a gentle way to get the other person to explain themselves.
...(an asymmetric relation) to things on the internet

You mean a link? ;)

With regards to your other points, I do think the general premise of the post is correct that the pendulum is swinging back (?) towards more flexible data structures (e.g. graphs).

The writing does come across as though the author just had an epiphany ... hey... these things are all graphs...

Yeah, and so are lots of other things.
I'd already done that, but I'm impatient. :-)
I need to add that to my resumé

"good with HTML5"
Edisonart  provides wall sculpture
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it would be great if every language on their home page, as well as listing how to do common things such as this:

http://www.iolanguage.com/scm/io/docs/IoTutorial.html

would also give a demonstration of what makes this language unusual (beyond syntax).

for io it seems like this might be some smalltalk-inspired message passing stuff:

http://www.iolanguage.com/scm/io/docs/IoGuide.html#Objects-F...

combined with concurrency:

http://www.iolanguage.com/scm/io/docs/IoGuide.html#Concurren...

but it's hard to tell at a glance.

fwiw, the haskell page does a great job of this: following the "why use haskell?" gives the classic quicksort example.
Many thanks! I learned something new today.
I believe I've read these points multiple times from multiple sources, but this one post puts them together rather effectively. I'll be printing this out and sticking this on my wall (as well as keeping this in my Notes app) so I can review it regularly. Thanks.
I've recently started using chef for config management. It's Ruby, I'm Ruby so it was always going to win over Puppet there. Off the top off my head observations:

* Conceptually clean and very powerful

* Quick and easy to write new cookbooks from scratch, but the public repo of cookbooks is more useful for code examples than day-to-day use

* Documentation (the wiki) is patchy but improving

* The webui could do with some love (buggy, plus some useful tasks like executing a chef run are missing) and the CLI, knife, is a bit odd and bloated with stuff that belongs elsewhere

* The chef server stack (Merb, Solr, Couchdb) needs babysitting

* Bootstrapping is still a pain (ain't it always?)

* There are some inconsistencies and a bit of churn in the API

The Ruby DSL has some interesting quirks. Recipes are compiled in one phase and executed in a later phase. So just to make a simple log entry:

ruby_block do
block do
Chef::Log.info("File created!")
end
end

Eww.

But overall it's an effective tool for an essential task.
A recent issue with my server caused me to look into this. I ended up writing a shell script to deploy the server: install packages, add users, set up services (copy config files). The beautiful thing is that I can run the script repeatedly without side effects, so now instead of using apt-get I just add the new package to the list and run the installer.
We give rev-share on virtual goods. Bigger market than ads
How exactly is it about Facebook Games? I see the satire - they basically stripped Farmville as I understand it to its bare minimum - but I thought there would be more to it.
Precipitating crises as a way to spur innovation? Could work; it certainly has in the past. However, you're phrasing overpopulation as something for the future; it's already here. The world's population is nearing 7 billion, and, according to wikipedia, in 2006 the world's population was using 40% more than the Earth can support[1]. It also gives the median estimated supportable world population as 10 billion, but more conservative estimates are as low as 4 billion.

We haven't quite hit, on a world-wide scale, the point where we have to start seriously considering how we're going to survive as a species (without sterilizing massive portions of the population, or requiring child licenses, neither of which would be good things), but we're nearing it, and we're too tied up in money for many of the really good solutions to work.

All that considered, though, it will spur a lot more innovation than bringing the population down to a stable, normal point and keeping everything constant to maximize how long the resources we have will last.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopulation#Carrying_capacit...
>"One of Twitter’s central innovations was to discard symmetry: you can follow someone without them following you."

Apparently Twitter rebranded the concept of a hyperlink.

>"I expect we’ll look back on the next few years as the golden age of graph innovation."

I would say that the 'golden age of graph innovation' began much before this. Which is why in Computer Science, as he describes, we have a special edition of graph theory named 'network theory'. I wonder what that's for!
As a young entrepreneur starting out, this video explained a number of terms (pun intended) that I had no idea about before.

Thanks Mark Suster!
By this arbitrary criteria I would say there are about 100 times as many blogger-journalists than there are television-news-journalist. Those guys on TV need to stop giving the bloggers a bad name.
This is an ongoing theme of Raymond Chen's blog. He posts something (anything) about Windows, no matter how informative or unbiased, and there are at least a hundred comments describing how stupid Microsoft is.

In an enterprise setting, this would be fairly trivial to do, either through group policies (do not allow sidebar modifications), or sheer workarounds. He said there is not a supported way, not that it was impossible.

Also, Raymond has posted similar topics to this before. Such as: why can't you make a topmost window over other topmost windows? A: It then becomes an arms race, and then everybody wants a top-topmost window.

I would not expect this sort of inane behavior out of an API. A window is either forced to the top via API (or a gadget is at the top of a sidebar), or it's not. I don't expect special treatment.
I only played around with it a long time ago. Very interesting language indeed. You may also like Ioke (http://ioke.org/) - a jvm based language that is directly inspired by Io.
There are two fallacies that come into play when an American considers Singapore.

One is to look at Singapore's positive results and assume we could have the same clean streets, low crime, efficient public works, growth-friendly environment with a tiny government sector if we only had the will.

The other is to look at some of the key differences in culture/population/geography/governance and thus assume we have nothing to learn from them, "comparison is meaningless".

The truth, and all interesting discussion, should come from somewhere in between. The USA is far from optimal and could learn a lot from other countries -- though we rarely look. (Indeed it's amazing how little US states like California seriously look at how other states are doing some things better.) But we'd best not cherry-pick the factoids that help our preferred side of some debate-of-the-moment.
Excellent rant! However, she sets the standard too high for some mainstream "journalists" to qualify (no, not just MSNBC and FOX stooges.)

--

Edit: s/he/she/g
Excellent post. Thanks.
I don't think your argument holds up. Any service is offered under some terms; it's irrational and unreasonable to assume that when you use someone's website or service that there are no terms whatsoever attached to that service.

So where do those terms come from? Rationally, one might expect the website to spell out what they expect from you and under what conditions their services are provided. If you don't like those terms, don't use the service.

It seems like you're arguing that you should get to determine under what terms the services are offered, or perhaps alternatively that services offered should never have any terms attached whatsoever; both of those positions seem pretty indefensible to me.

Just because you don't get a chance to negotiate terms doesn't make them invalid. It's a take-it-or-leave it offer, and you always have the right to leave it. When a restaurant gives you a bill, do you pay less than the amount just because you didn't get to negotiate the price? Do you walk into a restaurant shirtless that explicitly asks you not to do that? Of course not: your ordering the item indicated your willingness to pay the associated charge, and likewise if you don't want to abide by their rules around appropriate dress, you just don't go in.

You don't get to make up your own rules and then apply them to someone else's services.

It's a different question if the TOS are deliberately obscured such that you don't actually know what you're agreeing to, but the argument that just because you can't negotiate the TOS they're somehow invalid and you're thus justified in still using the service in violation of them is absurd.
There have been a lot of answers about the AI-competition aspect. Here's an attempt at a MUD-style distributed, programmable MMO: http://wiki.erights.org/wiki/Den
Just strive to the best you can be. No matter how good you are, there is almost always someone, somewhere, that knows more or is more experienced at something. If those people are within this community and willing to share their knowledge through comments, it is a great opportunity to learn and get better. I've learned so much since following HN.
"I don't know..." is not a real qualification. Qualifying things also means working at doing proper qualifications. "I read a comparison of library X and Y a while ago that stated (qualification) library X is bloated to library Y, so we should investigate that before making a decision as too which one to use"

It is a great point that people don't qualify because it makes them sound less confident, and people that sound more confident end up being more convincing to most people. So there is a cultural problem there (hopefully confidence does not sway a scientific group).

Cultural problems are tough- to maintain your stance you have to try to change the culture (sometimes impossible) or move to a different culture. But you can change the culture a little by asking "where did you read that?", or "so you have used/did that yourself?". Obviously you have to do this in a way that doesn't annoy.

You have to work at finding the middle road between qualifying and giving an impression of relative confidence.

Let me qualify this by saying these are just what comes to my mind on this issue. I would very much appreciate the pragmatic advice of others on this concept.
SpeakerCave is the rawest form of a startup pad. Four dudes, no ac, shirtless half the time, coding like fiends and having a blast!
They're surely positing an evolution of _behaviour_ rather than genetics.

Either way they're approaching it from the wrong angle with the somewhat patronising "underclass" suggestions. A significant proportion of girls having children fairly young is the norm in the developing world and has been the norm in the West for a long time. It's the deliberate decisions of "upper classes" to defer conception/birth until long after becoming sexually active in order to prioritise other goals that's the [unnatural] development. And it's the middle class people opting to have their first children late after achieving their career goals who are the outliers.
While I would agree that most bloggers should not be called journalists, I think that the author comes dangerously close to "no true Scotsman"-territory.
Many, if not most of the people commonly referred to as "journalists" (e.g. people writing professionally for big newspapers) would not fit her definition of a journalist. It is more a description of a romantic ideal than of the people actually working in journalism.