skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is a point worth considering, even if it is a little off topic.

I hear about this 'disadvantage' of being intelligent often, and I won't disagree that it can be crippling to learn to avoid challenges, but when discussing intelligent children in school, I think there is a much bigger pitfall. The picture of gifted children breezing through school is often painted without a second thought. From following the popular narrative of the elementary school and middle school classroom, you'd think that every above average student is a carbon copy of Lisa Simpson. The greater hurdle in my mind is that school caters to the average student. The most successful student in many cases is probably the very average child. Being excessively inquisitive and driven makes the classroom hell, because the system seeks efficiency, and that means punishing the margins for not fitting in with the crowd.

Sorry, but when I read "[s]chool work is a breeze, resulting in a little to no stress ..." it hits a nerve! :)
Or: 5 reasons why I left my last job. It was a toxic environment where the management didn't trust the employees (taking away personal laptops, then iphones; requiring time-sheets; installed website-blocking software; etc.)

Hiring was also emphasized on finding the cheapest developers as possible, preferably ones without experience because they specifically wanted developers they could "train" to their backwards coding practices. And this was a startup with only 12 people total.

After three years of trying to hire new developers, they still only had the original people that started the company because the cheap devs they tried to hire never were any good (how surprising). And those devs had been working at the company for so long that they're scared to leave for a better job.

/end rant.

Wish they'd read this article and change their tactics.
Thomas Sabo Charms, Charm Up Your Life
It's based on @font-face, which has been around for a while, but stalled over worries about font licensing, and disagreements over which font formats to use. It's
slowly been getting support and is now in most major browsers, though I believe IE and non-IE browsers (as often) still don't support quite the same set of font formats, which is one thing the Google Font API wraps.

Here's the w3c's page on @font-face itself: http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-fonts/#font-resources
Kodachrome used very different dyes than E6 (current slide film) or C41 (color negative; basically similar structure) and was sensitive to slightly different wavelengths. As a result its color gamut, as it were, is very different form either of those two, or digital (designed as it was to look like existing film). I'm not sure that a filter would be enough to "correct" for that; it could be a lot like trying to mimic infrared, which can be faked but not really replicated by anything that can't see into those wavelengths.
STM, CouchDB, and writing 5500 documents/second
B&W film (which is I think the majority of those "new emulsions" is embarrassingly easy to develop; the list of possible developers includes random things like polluted river water and certain kinds of red wine. Color is touchier but can be done at home.
Film and developing doesn't really cost that much. Comparing the cost of a film camera (used) plus film and development, you'd probably have to shoot hundreds of rolls to equal the cost of a digital body.
I get the feeling he's more concerned about in person conversations, where looking things up before you speak is not really feasible (yes, you have your iPhone, but seriously...)
This is a much bigger deal than it might appear at first glance. To understand why, see my post that collects the many recent, detailed articles about how difficult it is to fire teachers: http://jseliger.com/2009/11/12/susan-engel-doesnt-get and why so much of K-12 education is so bad.

The short version: it's almost impossible to fire teachers in most districts, even for egregious incompetence; unions reinforce those rules by protecting bad teachers; some change is afoot because so many studies now demonstrate the importance of teacher effectiveness on student learning, and that effectiveness can't be predicted by factors like educational attainment or test scores in college.
David does a great job of pointing out a mistake people make when interpreting the Lean Startup philosophy. It isn't about optimization, its about validating basic assumptions.
The Freakonomics guys correlated the drop in crime in the 90's to the legalization of abortion in the 70's, and others think that the drop in crime is a byproduct of the tougher three strikes rules states have adopted. I'm just speculating, of course, but I wonder whether the internet has been a factor in the drop off. Less boredom = less crime?
Whoops, sorry. Although I'm a native English speaker, in my dialect of informal spoken English (New Zealand English), people sometimes say "we" to mean "I". I try to avoid this ingrained habit when out of town or on the internet, but sometimes slip back into it.
I love when PC goes too far. Teachers who have students with low iqs will have low-testing students, by the very definition of iq and the fact that most standardized tests are at least weakly correlated with iq tests. Vice versa. Intelligence, especially as operationalized by standardized testing, is as biological as height and athleticism. If I were a teacher in DC and the majority of my students were not from middle+ class families, I would quit ahead of time and save the district some trouble.

Honestly, what do people think "education" is? By lecturing at children cooped up in classrooms for 6 hours a day and then shoving scantrons down their throats everybody will magically become doctors and lawyers? All socioeconomic class distinctions will be eliminated? There is no reason to make working teachers suffer because of this unscientific bullshit.
The divide by zero anecdote is really odd. He offers it as an example of something crazy "they" used to do in the olden days (before "they" knew better), but the twist at the end is that he proposed it and his coworkers voted it down.
Also worth pointing out: your site crashes iOS4 Safari while loading your index page. Running on the latest.
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/js_developer_guide....

It looks like the major use case is adding functionality to interactive forms. For example, you could create a PDF that allows you to submit to a SOAP service upon clicking a submit button. You can also apparently interact with database services using ODBC on Windows.

Why you would opt for this vs. a web form, given that both approaches would require a coder, I really can't imagine.
Experts: Health Hazards in Gulf Warrant Evacuations
Nuts & Bolts: New Datacenter
I have to partially disagree. While I definitely don't think you should second guess your every turn, it's probably good not to go repeating things (especially unusual things) until you've at least tried to verify them. That's where urban legends come from, and its part of why its so hard to actually get the truth out. It gets lost in so much noise.
> prepaid anonymous credit card business

Haven’t these been targeted by government regulation in the last couple years? I remember reading about police agencies wanting these banned (along with pre-paid cellphones) for enabling the drug trade.
Glad to see this go through. The Unions are going to fight it all the way, but IMO it needs to happen. The current public school teaching system is pretty broken, someone had to at least start to make a stand. Props to Rhee for being willing to deal go through with it.
> were blasted by investigators from the U.S. Government Accountability Office for drawing unsupportable conclusions

> from the gene samples they analyzed and making health predictions that didn't always jibe with their customers' actual medical conditions.

I wish they held doctors, and others practicing pseduo-medicine, to the same standards.
Yes, you can. Especially if you're not an expert, sometimes talking a bit less, and listening more, is certainly a start to fixing this problem.
This is a follow up to the original post here http://dosync.posterous.com/22516635

This whole thing is making Clojure seem more interesting to me. I'd be curious to see how close Node.js can come to extracting this much write performance from CouchDB.
Zen.
Liran - it's Amal from LHS. Glad to see that you're livin the startup life. We're doing that out in California. Good luck with finding a cofounder.
Odd, I answered every query identically but did not get the violence question and then my line diverged from there. An element of randomness?
This was an interesting, albeit admittedly anecdotal, comparison from the comments:

I've had several jobs in game companies, and several non-game jobs too. The
biggest difference I've noticed is that outside the game industry it feels like
co-workers, managers, etc. are actually happy to see you at work. Outside the
games industry there seems to be a strong sense of networking, a sense that
people want to find good workers they can build a team with so they can all
move up the company ladder. In the game industry, everyone else in the
industry is like a competitor, someone who might steal that job you want.
Top News Today - 2010: Natalie Portman shows off her sexy legs
I do microsites on my VPS with a templated config script and a script which copies and then does a search/replace for the domain name followed by an apache restart.
Opinions are one thing, having your facts wrong is another.
Australia, is turning into an e-Tibet ... Get ready for millions of innocent websites dying at the hands of OberFuhrer Robert McClelland.

Yeah, that statement may sound over-hyped today, but come talk to me a year after that thing gets signed into law.

Aussies have gone soft, in the balls (they were already soft in the head -- which was the only good thing keeping democracy alive in Australia until now).

edit: an attempt at preventing godwin's law invocation and a visit from the anti-defamation league. ;-)
Great comment to link to! He should have been the one writing the article.
I did not mean to say film is the only way to learn photography; it clearly isn't. The art transcends any tools used to perform it. I just feel nostalgic for my journey from a n00b to non-n00b and how the challenge of film contributed greatly to it. More power to you, and to anyone, who masters the art regardless.
I always thought the tin-hats ought to love this as a conspiracy much more than ufo's or big brother mind control.

Its a perfect setup.

1) Pick a minority with an easily identifiable physical trait (so your beat cops don't have to be too bright)

2) Encourage a set of behaviors through entertainment culture that are unique to them, easily identifiable, and just distasteful enough to garner popular support against them without destabilizing society.

3) Arrest them en-mass and incarcerate them in private prisons.

4) Hella-profit. Channel a portion back to #2. Repeat.
Why did this invention -- obvious and trivial to implement -- take 30 years?
Hand dryers in public washrooms are absolutely notorious
for taking forever to dry your hands. But I'm now seeing
a new generation of hand dryers that blow the air really
hard and dry your hands in just 15 seconds.

What I can't understand is why such an obvious innovation
took 30 years to become available.

This is not like waiting for technology to catch
up. Surely, sufficiently powerful motors were available
30 years ago.

Simply asserting that "strong motors are expensive" doesn't
answer the question. If expense were the determining
reason in the past, then no one would make/buy them today either.

I'm thinking that there must be a more complicated or
subtle business or social reason for why an obvious
improvement--taking the product from ridiculously awful
to quite acceptable--should take so long. But what?
Too many tabs has never been an issue for me. Can anyone actually read more than one tab at once? If you're thinking of buying a DSLR, then focus on researching cameras. Close those tabs when you're done.

Exercise restraint, guys. Tab grouping is the classic engineer's solution to a non-problem.
For me, the problem has always been the indexed views taking too long to generate for a large amount of documents on first view. I know that some people do a bulk update, then hit the different indexed views to get them updated incrementally.

What can be done to increase the speed of the first view of new indexed views that you might have later on? Do you just have to wait for it?

What about ad-hoc views? Are there ways to speed that up?
What about riak ? How does that compare ?
If "direct democracy" was so powerful, how come they keep making laws against p2p or legalization of weed given that most people are against those laws?
How are the doctors practicing pseudo-medicine?
arora - http://code.google.com/p/arora/

That's one anyway.
Social security is unsustainable. It is a solution which will not work unless every attribute but its name is replaced. How is that not an objective enough measure for anyone?

However, social security also has enrollment forced under thread of punishment. Social security has a clear negative impact on free enterprise. Social security embroils the government in private matters for which government's involvement simply limits liberty with no other benefit to social welfare. Social security is less effective than other solutions such as defined contribution retirement packages, IRA, individual savings when coupled with strong community support and a basic welfare program.
... or China! Google will have to create an offshore website in New Zealand for uncensored search results.
The meta-issues (how the plan is being negotiated and managed) are almost as bad as the actual issue (censorship, privacy invasion) here. There are a lot of people who can come to terms with the idea that there is at least some kind of content that might, in some circumstances, be worth blocking or monitoring on the internet (I'm not saying this is my position). But not this plan, not the way it is being done - zero transparency, zero accountability, zero consultation, zero acknowledgement of real criticisms by honest well intentioned people. If the government wants to do this then they need to be at their most open and transparent, their most considerate of well reasoned objections.
Chiropractic?
The key is: don't experiment / develop on a giant database. Make a small subset of the database for testing views on. Then they are plenty fast.

As far as generation speed, what matters is that the indexer can keep up with the insert rate. Unless you are doing a big import from an existing dataset, you'll have to have A LOT of user activity to generate so much data that you are outrunning the indexer. In that case you probably have a big enough project that it makes sense to use a cluster solution like CouchDB-Lounge (which will divide the generation time by roughly the # of hosts you bring into the cluster).

Someday soon I hope we'll have an integrated clustering solution (Cloudant is working to contribute theirs back to the project) so you can just deploy to a set of nodes and get these benefits without much additional operational complexity.
Is the brain a digital computer?
Sometimes I'm amazed by what people are willing to put their name to.
I had pretty popular podcast and a relatively popular free game on the app store, and I can agree that the gamers are a tougher audience than the general public. There are bad podcasts but you usually don't see reviews ripping them apart for trying. Likewise there are free games which obviously took more work than some of the one button apps I've seen on the app store, yet everyone who plays it feels the need to leave a snide remark. I personally wish the app store had the option of turning the comments off like YouTube. Maybe Apple wasn't ready for the cynicism of the gaming public. I know I wasn't.
The Radioactive Boy Scout
I just really want to know the reasoning behind this. What would make a person propose such a thing? What loophole were they thinking of closing? How could they not see what is so blatantly wrong with what they are proposing? I wonder, who is this person?
Cuteness in Japanese Culture
The difference is that re2 avoids backtracking in most cases where Python's normal regular expression engine would use it. And by avoiding backtracking, avoids the possibility of exponential slowdowns.
This is such a great presentation. Thank you, David!
Perhaps running the learning process multiple times and averaging(?) the results would eliminate irrelevant motions. Or perhaps the irrelevant parts are critical to the rest of the movements, and removing them would break things.
Bookmarking this for the next time I hear the "iPad is for consumption not creation" argument. ;)
Oh, I lived off of street-vendor food in Beijing, no problem, and I love Thai food. But I'd still kill for my weekly bi-bim-don. :)
I often wonder what is at the heart of massive snooping/censorship schemes like these. I'm still waiting on the data that supports a link between violent media and violent people, sexually explicit pictures and acts of sexual violence, and transparency sponsoring open debate leading to anarchy.
The increased availability of libraries for Haskell and Erlang's suitability for distributed applications kinda stole OCamls thunder.

It is quite nice for Unix development, due to some concessions to "impure" practices. I use the Unison file synchronization tool at work, and used to run mldonkey in my wild file-sharing days… That area is mostly dominated by C tools, as scripting languages are either too slow / memory intensive or carry a lot of baggage with their runtimes and libraries. And for a long time, OCaml was one of the few (open source) compilers at all that could produce fast and small (i.e. no full images) code for the free Unix variants.

But yeah, that article would have been better with some simple examples. Hope they're going to share one of these toplevels.
UFC subpoenas Justin.tv, Ustream.tv
When do you get here? I'm heading back to the U.S. on the 15th of August, because my business partner and I really want to be in the same time zone when we launch.

If you get here before that, I'd be happy to show you around a bit. I speak the language pretty well (patio11 will back me there), and I'd love an excuse to hit a rooftop beer garden with a fellow HNer.

Back to squashing bugs and rolling out my shiny new search parser...
Bitching about calling it "visiting" files is like saying that OS X sucks because the close button is on the left side instead of the right side. What?
I don't know about Navigenics but 23andMe clearly states in multiple places on their website, that their service isn't a medical diagnosis and it may be prone to error.

As acangiano already posted, they obviously don't hold 'holistic' products to the same standard. I wonder what the government wants from them.
Counting Characters in UTF-8 Strings In x86 vs C
There's now a little family of quick and dirty documentation generators, a-la Docco (the program used here):

Docco (CoffeeScript) http://jashkenas.github.com/docco/

Rocco (Ruby) http://rtomayko.github.com/rocco/

Pycco (Python) http://fitzgen.github.com/pycco/

Schocco (POSIX Shell) http://rtomayko.github.com/shocco/

Lo-fi literate programming for the rest of us...
Intelligent and measured comment is more likely to be listened to, especially if it comes from people educated in tax law and accounting.

I don't think the IRS is reading angry internet forums.

This law is just noodling. They're just fishing around for new income ideas, throwing spaghetti at the wall, and seeing what sticks.

Don't freak out.
How Accurate are Police Sketches? A comparison.
I don't know about your usage profile but.. https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ is a well known "pay as you go" host for stuff like this. They've been around ages.

They have an API that can make it as easy as a couple of calls to set up a new site and do the DNS. For example: https://members.nearlyfreespeech.net/wiki/API/PHPExample
Good point, but for most of the websites guilty of these problems I really dont care about stealing my session or any data being transmitted. Most of them have little other information I care about being stolen, besides maybe my email address (and that shouldnt even be a problem if the website is designed properly, although of course if they arent using SSL in the first place you might they probably aren't)
I was responding to someone to someone talking about a 20-foot dish though. That's not something you stuff in a backpack. I was commenting on his desire to listen with a huge dish at a distance.
I could not agree more. I had the exact same experience going through school. I would always ask for more work in order to be challenged. I would constantly be looking to do more, because you are correct, school is extremely catered to the average student.

Also, about that quote, because I wrote it, I don't get the readers experience. But looking at it now I can completely get your frustration. I would feel the same thing, since I was frustrated going through school, even though I did fine. I wrote that line as more of a generalization.

"The most successful student in many cases is probably the very average child. Being excessively inquisitive and driven makes the classroom hell, because the system seeks efficiency, and that means punishing the margins for not fitting in with the crowd." This is bang on. Thanks so much for the great comment.
I'm a European citizen, I've lived in China for a number of years behind the "Great Firewall" which is easily circumvented.

The last thing I expected when I moved to Australia was to be behind the "Great Barrier Firewall".

Not sure if many reading this realize that there is an election coming up in the coming weeks, the current government probably does not want to give ammunition to the opposition about this whole sordid affair.

Stephen Conroys office has spent an obscene amount on why he thinks the Australian filter is a good thing. Any kind of back-down or debate on the issue would just go against the current regime.

My only hope is that if the party goes back into power after August that this firewall business will die a slow death.
Safari uses Quicktime for their HTML 5 video. Any Quicktime codec works. For example you can install XiphQT and get Theora support.

Opera (on Linux only) supports any GSteamer installed codec IIRC.
Nice presentation, keeps it very simple. Oddly enough I signed up for his other startup performable the other day, seems his whole startup is oriented around helping you do this lol.
i love how they're openly stating it's confusing and controversial so they're going to keep it secret so no one can object before it's completely finished. this will become a barbara streisand pretty quick.
Could just take the first derivative. A teacher's job isn't to make kids smart, it's to make them smarter.
Frankly, being allowed to fire people is the right direction.

If you can't fire anybody, even for gross incompetence, then it's going to make it far more difficult to move your organization in the right direction. It's also going to make it easier for organizations to move in the wrong direction. However, that's a risk you're going to have to take if you want to move out of your mediocrity.
That gal is a fantastic hacker. I wish I knew more about circuits when I ser her site.
Education is a team sport. The parents ought to be held equally if not MORE accountable.
I'd like to define "reading" a book to mean something a bit closer to sitting down with a book, or some sort of study, rather than looking for a quick reference.

Reading papers sounds like a gray area there. I don't consider that to be "study" (since some papers can be digested in 15 minutes) but it's usually more informative and demanding than reading an article. If you're into certain branches of computer science, you'll tend to read more papers (and/or journals) than books per se.
The Best Role Model of Our Time