skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity" - it's more likely that Microsoft's PMs and developers felt swayed by new features and possibilities and when the issue of performance came up, it was "meh, the average computer selling today can cope with it" and therefore little thought was given to performance on older tech or tech that has most of its performance diverted to other tasks.
I'm going to ignore the utterly-intolerant and ignorant last paragraph of your comment, but weigh in on the starting part of your comment.

You seem to assert that those two statements:
a.) "research about GLBTQ populations asserts ... orientation is ... a state of being"
and
b.) "[Keeton] will not affirm the morality of those behaviors"
are contradictory.

Are they?

Does psychological research dictate morality? That seems to be what you're saying.

What about other behaviors society more consistently deems as immoral, like drunkenness? If some day the "psychological research about alcoholic populations asserts that that propensity to drink in excess is not a lifestyle or choice, but a state of being", would that suddenly make drunkenness moral?

Do you truly believe morality comes from the dictates of psychological research?
Good point about underlying issues. Each morning, if I feel distracted; at the bottom of my todo list I make a list of "Bothers". Things that are taking mental energy. I just list them and that seems to help focus. They can be big issues or small, from "where to get haircut" to "where was she last night?"
Breathtaking visual effects in the 8-bit color cycling demos. Direct link: http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/?sound=0
js and coders? sorry, but whoever vomits JS over his keyboard is not to be called a coder.
I think this is a very bad advise. Don't use drugs EVER.

Drugs never fix problems. The only hide them. if your body is telling you something, you should fix the root of the problem, not remove the symptoms.

Whatever a drug does(stimulant, depressant...)the body will balance it giving the opposite effect over time(the roller coaster effect).This means instability of everything from mood to chemicals on your blood. Not to mention the body getting used to it, needing each time more and more to cause the same effect and getting addicted.
Peter Norvig at Facebook Engineering Tech Talks
We could spark a whole discussion about whether Postel's "law" is a universal good thing (it makes more sense in early-stage standardization efforts than it does in software design), but do we really need to dignify the asinine argument that Postel meant browsers must support specific plugins?
What a strong human. I poked around her site and found another very special essay of hers that, if you enjoyed this one, you will like:

http://jenniferlawler.com/after_dakota.html
IPad: Satisfaction or Disappointment?
So for my home dev machine, I got an MSI wind ($120) and a 32gb SSD ($70) and a 4gb stick ($20) IIRC. It's pretty nice, but I don't run X on it, I SSH in from a mac.
The SIM lock is why I have yet to buy an iPhone. I don't mind the mandatory contract and I don't mind having to buy prepaid SIM cards when I travel abroad. But I live in Canada and travel elsewhere quite often; roaming charges are such a blatant rip-off that they render the phone useless when it is most needed.

Yes I know I can jailbreak it, but I'm not going to buy a premium product to only be saddled with sysadmining it so i stays up-to-date.
In Italy this is the default (pay as you go). There are maybe something like 1% of mobile phone users using a contract.

IMHO the best data provider is WIND: there is a plan where with 9 euro/month (called "Internet NO STOP" http://www.wind.it/it/internetmobile/scheda542.phtml) you have 1 GB of traffic in GRPS/EDGE/3G/HSUPA, when you consumed the whole Gigabyte you can still surf without being charged but with limited speed of 32 Kb/s.

There is another similar option with 19 euro/month where the limit for the fast speed is instead 10 GB.
Here's yet another idea:

Your mind and body need to be in balance. I believe this is the essence of the solution.

One factor that I believe is amiss is their speed. It appears that your mind is thinking quicker than your body is acting, and this is causing your discomfort.

There are of course two remedies, and they can both be administered:

1. Speed up your body.

As many here have suggested, anything that increases what you do will be a good thing. Exercise, work, chores, personal errands, etc.

2. Slow down your mind.

Realise that your body is not functioning at the speed that your mind thinks and simply accept it. Your mind will naturally slow down and you will begin to appreciate your task, the present moment, and your life. This will release your body from the paralysis as it now becomes possible, and even enjoyable, to do that which your mind is currently thinking.
Thanks for the link. I do a less formal version of this sometimes. If I've got so much to do that I can't do anything, I make a list of everything then start doing as little as 30 seconds on each thing and cycle through them till something gets traction.
Fruit is a big part of the solution, but if you only stick to that you're going to be left craving fats and protein (and if your stomach is sensitive, feeling sick from all that acidic and sugary fruit). Identify healthy fats and sources of protein. My list includes olive oil, whole-grain bread, low-fat cheese, hummus, avocados. This list may not be the pinnacle of health (I don't know), but it goes a long way towards nutrition and heading off cravings for junk.
9 months in. Almost back to my good-old-days weight after losing 19 pounds, without hunger, without fatigue, exercise while still enjoyable and have more energy for it I do little (High-intensity short duration infrequently, but not chronic cardio), no more feeling bloated. So my personal anecdotal evidence, my echo-chamber of positive feedback :), my results, all have me happy. YMMV.

BTW, seeing that this thread has over 100 comments just confirms that when it comes to advice, especially nutrition, a lot of us think of ourselves as quasi-experts. We're all oh, so bright, and have the key to success right here! I doubt the OP will be able to make up his mind from this.
Awesome atmospheric game screens by Mark Ferrari, brilliantly translated into HTML format with the color cycling animations looking "better than ever" thanks to a nice blending effect.

Does anyone know which game these screens originally come from? It's not mentioned on the site.

The resolution is 640*480 at 256 colors, which is better than VGA. That would suggest something fairly recent (perhaps 1994-96).
Be sure to click on "Show Options" to actually see the palette cycling.
The Craftsman in the Cubicle
Of course he didn't specifically mention mobile safari. That's why it's a "principle": it applies to other situations too.

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

If anything, websites that depend upon Flash are "defective implementation that send non-conforming messages".
well articulated j.
Quick trip to Wikipedia gives the reason I assume is correct, which is that we only notice Paul because of his success. After starting to notice him, the odds of guessing the remaining games was much more likely (assuming no cheating of any kind, even).

Quotes from the article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_octopus):

'Spiegelhalter and Roquain point out that there are "other animals that have attempted but failed to predict the outcome of football matches"; it is not remarkable that one animal is more successful than the others (including humans), and only the successful animals gain public attention after the fact'

'Paul started to receive international recognition after he correctly predicted Germany's win over England; after that he made four correct predictions. The chance of those final four predictions being correct is 1/24 = 6.25% (odds 15 to 1).'
Ask HN: Anyone have OCD?
I thought I would throw this out there for the community after watching an episode of "Obsessed".

If so, care to share your habit? Or care to share any habits you find yourself continuously doing?

I don't consider myself to have OCD, but one habit I always find myself doing is when changing the radio volume in the car I usually always have to set it to an even number (10, 14, 18, etc..).
Totally agree.
Would add one more: when there is a problem, they never hide it or ignore it. They face it in a very hands on way and clearly articulate it to all involved in the project.
Maple : Arduino Compatible ARM Microcontroller Board
Video of VC explaining how to do your cap table, term sheet, etc.
well done video of VCs talking about term sheets, cap tables and the like.
I think karmic is a better word to describe my feeling. schadenfreude carries a connotation that I didn't intend to convey.
Bach on a mobius strip
A very neat animation of a crab canon by Bach.
Counting the number of lines must be done after the algorithm is described. There are two roles: those finding the correct algorithm for a problem and those writing the code for implementing the algorithm.
I would also like to know which games these screens are from. The art is breathtaking and the fact that it is achieved with nothing but some cycling colours is nothing short of astonishing. Why don't we have games like these any more?

EDIT: Actually, Braid.
these are amazingly evocative! i wonder whether this style could be achieved with a 3d renderer. imagine walking around those scenes.
Could you elaborate on that? I don't see a direct causal link between two-thirds vote requirements and higher union pension obligations, and your comment appears to be popular.
I use both django and rails frequently, and I've been looking for a rails version of django's admin forever. Do you have any links?

All I've seen are things like activescaffold, but that's not even anywhere near being comparable.
No increment is specified.
Had to upvote simply for the memories of doing palette cycling in C
the mood reminds me of "shadow of the colossus"
I have almost the same views. All through my childhood I liked building things, and taking other things apart to see how they worked. An elementary hacker if you will.

Then I grew up and went into a subset of manufacturing, but always loved playing with technology. After some years, I started building systems to help me perform my job with more automation and skill and after a couple projects, I needed to learn to code, which I started to pick up. Programming things is something I love, but its a tool to do other interests.

Coding and programming just to write keywords and numbers in a text editor isn't all that fun.
California state spending doubled between 1996 and 2006. The problem is not that not enough money can be taken from the taxpayer.

I think whoever and however things are decided, spending with debt ought to be as hard as spending with tax money.

And this practice where you work tons of overtime in your last year and get paid extra for those hours for the rest of your life is simple thievery. Who in their right mind would agree to pay for such a thing?
Most of the scenes are from an old, animated desktop calendar app from 1993 called "Seize The Day" (can't find a link anymore). I believe the rest are from one of the Magic The Gathering games for PC.
My current workplace is very relaxed. I do continue working outside of the office-time and I'm sure that I deliver, but

I regularly start at 10am+, sometimes 11 or 11:30. That doesn't keep me from leaving at ~6pm - it's mostly to have some office time (highly overrated in my opinion).

I'm not going to bed before 1pm, most of the time I pass 2pm as well.
I have to set the number on the tv, thermostat, radio etc to an even number. It started as a joke, but has taken on a life of its own.
With all due respect to Aaron, and as someone who wants enterprise software to get the attention it deserves, this reads more like an ad for box.net than a compelling argument as to why enterprise is making a comeback. Of the few investments being made these days, venture capitalists are by and large investing in consumer products and "green" technology, and until they feel those markets are totally saturated I don't expect much will change.

It's also the rare twenty-something founder straight out of college in the Valley who knows anything about double-entry general ledger systems or what CIOs of Fortune 500 companies really spend time worrying about. When I see headlines about Oracle and SAP worrying about their profits, I'll be more convinced that something has changed.
Indeed, it could be that. But I'm still wondering if maybe it was more deliberate than that. After all, it would have been a way to make more money for both Microsoft and Intel, so there was an incentive there. And the downside was very small (what was the average Windows user going to switch to between 1995 and 2005?)
What you want is find out how marijuana works before trying it. Essentially, there are two mainly psychoactive chemicals in a cannabis plant: THC and CBD, each one is more prevalent in sativa and indica strains respectively. THC improves concentration, helps in imagining the problem, and is a hallucinogen (think towards LSD from sober). CBD gives you a couch-lock, makes you sleepy and is a sedative (think towards Xanax).

Sativa-dominant strains will have more THC than CBD and thus help you with your problems immediately.

Also beware that THC is a mild psychedelic so all the "set and setting" rules apply.
> No, the stupid 2/3rds rule to pass a budget did that.

As well as:

* The initiative ballot propositions system (especially combined with the 2/3rds rule)

* Proposition 13 (1978) in particular which completely broke taxation in California.
New Yorker on new voting methods and fair elections
I wish I could up-vote this more than once.
To summarize: There are many new and interesting problems for a enterprise to solve and there are not related to marketing. Since the problems are well defined and there is a lot of money involved, good software is appreciated and paid according. This is a new landscape. The article include many examples.
The Winter Forest – Snow one is amazing.
mainly because we have 32 bit colour and accelerated graphics drivers today. You can't palette cycle 32 bit colours because there's no palette to cycle.

An 8 bit display meant that you basically had a lookup table of size 256, and each entry mapped to an 18 bit colour (6 bits each for R, G & B IIRC). These days it's kinda normal for a bit geek to have numbers like 1024, 1048576, 16777216 and 4294967296 permanently burned into your brain. Back then we also had 262144 burned in -- the number of colours we had access to.

The best part about palette cycling was that you didn't have to wait for the VBLANK to make your changes. For most frame changes, you'd have to wait until the cathode ray hit the bottom of the monitor and was slowly making its way back up to the top to scan through again. You had to make all writes to video memory at this time to avoid screen fuzz, ie, half a screen with the old frame and half with the new frame. Palette cycling could happen at pretty much any time, so you'd just hook it up to the timer interrupt and let it go.
No.. Its not.. Sorry
Although I appreciate the thought and attention that goes into articles written for LessWrong, the language is often difficult to unpack.

Take the term "Pareto-efficient society" used in the first paragraph. This is a term I'm incredibly unfamiliar with. A link to a definition or an article on it would have been useful. After doing my dutiful research on wikipedia, I found that the definition means more or less "a society in which it is impossible to make one person better off without necessarily making someone else worse off." This definition is analogous to "zero sum society." So, the fourth sentence of the first paragraph reads "this bias [thinking that it is impossible to make one person better off without necessarily making someone else worse off] is the major obstacle to a society in which it is impossible to make one person better off without necessarily making someone else worse off."

Buh?

I support a lot of the concepts behind LessWrong, but all of the articles read like Critical Theory midterm essays.
Anecdote: I know a couple, she a former high-level bureaucrat for the state of Ca., he a former mid-level Ca. bureaucrat. I say former because they both retired at 55. I don't claim to know much about the public employee's retirement system. I do know public employees do not pay into Social Security, and no one can retire on SS at age 55. I also know it's very likely this couple will live long enough so that they both enjoy more years in retirement than the people of Ca. paid them to do something productive.
Let's imagine Postel's law applies. Postel's law would say that if MobileSafari had a plugin system (or one extensible by third parties anyway), Flash should not be refused.

Well, MobileSafari doesn't have a plugin system available to third parties. Thus solving the issue: Postel's Law applies exactly nowhere in this case.
Why did Dell give up on the Intel payments by offering AMD chips if those payments made up 75% of their income?
If it works for you, more power to you. :)
Bah, these guys are getting smashed by Dropbox.
I seriously do not understand why people don't just use the free GUI builder that comes with Netbeans, then wire up the resulting classes.

And wiring them up doesn't get any easier than using JRuby with Monkeybars (http://monkeybars.org). Yes, I'm biased, I'm the project leader. But still. :)

DSLs and such are nice for smallish UIs, but once you get to anything remotely sophisticated tweaking text files to sort out alignment, flow, balance, etc. is crazy. (And double crazy if those text files are XML.)
Thanks! I'm glad you like it. It's still very much a work in progress - I was debating whether I should post the link or not given how much I left to do before it's really "ready".

For CPUs, were you looking for a price/core ratio?
Remove yourself from a place where you can access it easily for a few weeks.
As a full-time Rails developer I think some of these gripes are valid.

I have tried to get away from AR for a long time, with other ORMs such as DataMapper or Sequel, and more recently Mongoid. The AR in Rails 3 has adopted some of the good bits from both DM and Sequel, so that might make it more pleasant to work with.

In terms of templates, HAML/SASS are popular alternatives to ERB. For the admin backend; there are plugins for it.
It's not infinite. It's equivalent to while(i<count). The right side of the && has no effect (for i<count, !(i>count) is always true, and it short circuits to false when i==count).
Typus is excellent, only drawback is weak documentation + the authorization/authentication system lies outside your application. It's extensible enough to add in analytics pages, etc. I use it in every project.

http://github.com/fesplugas/typus
This is one of those posts that periodically appears, but something that's almost never pointed out is that QuickDraw was written in assembly. So, by reducing the lines of code, not only did he reduce the complexity but he also directly made the code faster by being smaller.
Cool. Thank you for rescuing this art from digital oblivion!
City Journal is a quarterly magazine, published by the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a free market think tank based out of New York City.

This is not an impartial source when it comes to California's problems, not that they are wrong, unions are part of the problem, but there's also the 2/3 rule for raising taxes, corrupt and ineffective politicians who have constructed non-competitive districts for themselves, the initiative system and ultimately California voters who apparently don't give a rats ass about anything unless it is approving more services and lower taxes for themselves.
The Steve Jobs song
I've gone into a pattern of going to bet sometime between 12:00 and 1:00, and then waking around 7:00. I am sure this is going to bite me hard in years to come, but damn, at least I have time to get things done this way.
Basically nuts and fruits should be your choice, BUT if you work out regularly I think you can get away with a PB&J sandwich, hack it like this: get some dark bread (best would be self-made, otherwise check the bread from the store for unnecessary sugars [gluctose, fructose] -> avoid these), then get some organic all-natural peanut butter (no salt, no sugar, no extra fat, just peanut) and organic honey, most jellys have stuuupid amounts of additional sugar in it. Make some PB and honey sandwiches, eat them when your craving. Try to avoid them in the evening (go for fruits and nuts in this case)
Fantastic, added Boost Mobile info for the U.S.

Anyone know of a prepaid SIM provider other than Boost who does unlimited data in the U.S.? Boost coverage is too spotty for me.
What is interesting here is that the limited environment actually spawned a level of creativity that is unique to the era, once you have 24 bit colour and gobs of memory coupled with CPUs that would shame a supercomputer from not all that long ago you focus on different things rather than on getting the most out of such a limited environment.

To some extent mobile computing may revive this sort of sentiment. The 'demo scene' is another place where people still do absolutely amazing things with very restricted systems and/or environments.

Maybe there could be some kind of revival of this, webpages under 1K in size or something like that.
I think this is a very bad advise. Drugs can sometimes be good.

For the last 3 years (since a long relationship ended) I was in a bad funk, getting very little done and having a baseline that was a bit depressed, with occasional moments of manic happiness/productiveness.

A few months ago, a new friend told me that I just had to try mushrooms. It was a spiritual, life-changing event. I have since done them 3 more times, and LSD once.

Good drugs (and I guess I basically mean psychedelics when I say that) can teach you a different way of thinking, one which you continue long after your use of the drugs. My life is orders of magnitude better than it was six months ago. I'm enjoying the little things, and figuring out how what I'm doing fits into the big picture of how I'd like to live my life.

I really cannot get onboard with the advice to not use drugs "EVER". Even from an anti-drug standpoint, it's very hard to argue against using pain-killing drugs for the week following a surgery. Drugs have their purposes, and as long as you don't let them take over your life, they can be quite positive.
Blast, I just picked 30 cups of blueberries to freeze for smoothies. Is it really so bad?
What's especially sad is that pipe organs (not often from the 14th century, but still old and incredible ones) are being gutted daily to make way for digital music systems. It ends up being less expensive for churches, and frees up more seats for theaters where ranks of organ pipes take up a lot of prime space in the wings.

I'm all for digital music, I even make my own, but it's depressing to think that there isn't really a home for a dislocated organ unless you're an obsessive tinkerer with oodles of spare space on hand. Fortunately those tinkerers do exist in little pockets around the globe.
Though not the original commenter I can elaborate.

The people of California are well intentioned. So they tried a very liberal approach to their public employees pensions. This quickly got out of control. But the fact that they need 2/3rds of the vote to get anything done combined with special interest money has made it impossible to repeal this well intentioned system that simply doesn't work. Because doing so would require a cut in the budget for said program. So we're being bankrupted.

This is true of many of California's problems. Our State Government lacks the ability to even pass a budget on time so repealing the public sector mess that has been created is far beyond what they are able to accomplish