skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did they claim that that _is_, objectively, the property of being red, or did they claim that it is an isomorphic way of thinking about it? Isomorphisms can provide an alien way of thinking that forces the mind to ignore the contexts something usually occurs in and discard assumptions, so they can be extraordinarily useful.
I agree with this article. The current thinking on poverty is from the rich man's POV. And consequently, the solutions provided from that POV will do nothing to eradicate poverty.

One such solution is the "One Laptop Per Child" program. And this article explains why the OLPC will never work in the impoverished countries. The child is not hungry for education. The child is hungry for parental care from her indifferent parents who have given up on getting their bee stings looked at...
Ask YC: Whats the best tool to load test a web app?
Need to load test our web app - any recommendations for tools that are easy to set up? I heard about JCrawler, but looking for something even simpler. Is there any simple online tool that can do this? Thanks a lot!
Facebook Chat Launches, For Some
Well, crux_ misrepresented my views, and that's that.

But fine:

At birth, does one newborn somehow deserve better education, improved nutrition, and a life that will offer far more opportunities and fewer hardships than some other child?

In fact, parents are responsible for their own children. I am not responsible for other people's children. That is a hard, cold fact. The only way to force equality is just that: To force it. People who are careful with their finances, with their vocations, with their reproductive activity inevitably wind up supporting other people's children. Think what you will about that. To me, it is disgustingly criminal.
Admittedly, I haven't read the texts on design patterns, and have only a cursory knowledge of what they're about. So, I'm about to commit the cardinal sin of talking on a subject that I don't know intimately.

Near as I can tell, design patterns are just ways of vaguely describing common solutions to common problems. They say, "You might try to solve problem X in some language by creating an object that does Y."

In lieu of actually understanding the specific problem they're facing, the inexperienced or less skilled programmer then looks through their dictionary of design patterns, finds something that sounds like it fits, and then proceeds to throw some very generic code at their problem until it goes away.

This strikes me as very similar to the problem Feynman discussed in "Surely You're Joking", when he worked as a professor in Brazil and came to realize that, on a national basis, the students had all been taught to memorize entire books of facts, but hadn't done experiments and didn't understand the concepts behind the things they were taught.
It's syndication, not link-jacking. All those newspapers that use the AP aren't really linkjackers.
Depends how you define hacker. I prefer to work with programmers who have read it to working with programmers who haven't.
Ask YC: Speed reading?
How quickly do you read on average? Not how many books you read over a certain period of time, rather how much time do you have to invest into reading a certain amount?

Does anyone have any experience with methods, exercises or anything to help one read faster? Of course, I mean improving speed without reducing comprehension or retention. Secondly, reading "technical" material is different from most other reading and this doesn't need to help with "technical" reading.
Fractal - A Direct3D Demo of Natural Phenomena
I'm not talking about the same news in Spanish, but authors writing their ideas about tech in their language.
So how do you avoid Singleton? I hope not with another pattern...
Improvements in Firebug 1.2
I'll take a few more brilliant bio-weapons researchers who do what they're told by Uncle Sam over a few more brilliant bio-weapons researchers who _don't_ do what they're told by Uncle Sam.
I was waiting for him to chirp an alarm system key-chain at the end. Great job though!
I am curious about why Windows would be "too expensive" to support.

Two reasons: 1. With system files, file locking, the registry, and similar complications, Windows makes backup software far more complicated than necessary -- in this case, "expensive" means "it would take a long time to write all the necessary code". 2. Windows users are generally less clueful, and therefore require more time-consuming hand-holding.

EDIT: There's also another benefit to starting with FreeBSD: Many FreeBSD users know and trust the project's security officer, while most Windows users haven't a clue who I am. :-)
What a DVCS gets you (maybe)
I'd like to hear about valid uses of Singleton. I'm not completely sure there aren't any, but I don't think I've ever seen one.
Usually when I see Singleton used, what the author really wants is either a value that is cached after the first time it's created (so the correct pattern is "cache"), or more often just a global variable.

What I find offensive about Singleton is the idea that that the author knows there is no context in which you might want more than one of some object. This is especially bad in libraries, where having objects enforce their own uniqueness breaks the ability for me to use two FooManagers where the author only envisioned using one. Designs are generally improved by accounting for the possibility of more than one instance, even if it isn't immediately necessary.
I must admit I can't remember when I have last seen it. I guess the usual case is the ConnectionPool for the database, which for most Java Web projects is being handled by the container (not sure how Rails does it). But in that case it does not seem the end of the world to have two connection pools. Somehow you have to still manage the whole picture, though... Maybe two are OK, but what if suddenly you have 1000 connection pools? Maybe then suddenly you start wishing you had restricted them to 1 from the start.

How is a global variable different from a singleton, anyway? Seems to me, in distributed and multithreaded environments the singleton problem is still a hard problem.
"2. Windows users are generally less clueful, and therefore require more time-consuming hand-holding."

And you earnestly believe that forcing them to use BSD would make them somehow better able to grok computing?
oh, wow. You must have gone to a really shitty school. You either are too kool for skool, or maybe really smart enough you probably should have skiped school alltogether.
Dick Cavett on improving your speeches
Useless degree. Seriously, what happened with college preparing you for life?
I think this country would be much better off if people start studying more concrete sciences. Doing biology, math, physics, bio-chem, computer science, accounting... so we have the talent of actually solving real world problems, energy, polution, less co-2 emissions, alternatives to oil, better design and architecting of towns, less sprawl, etc.

How is a society going to advance with a bunch of people majoring in b.s., All they would be able to do is complain about how pollution is wrong to society, yet being unable to do anything practical about it.
How does a society advance with only people being able to talk the talk, but not walk the walk?

Studying Philosophy would be great if it is a minor, or a second major in school. Plus, you could learn a lot more by yourself, by reading books and such. While hard sciences are much more difficult to learn by yourself.
But most people who start out with "The C Programming Language" and never read "Design Patterns" will only ever use for loops and never think about iterators. How do you want to transmit certain concepts without giving them names?
I also had situations where "Design Patterns" helped me find a solution. Of course I also experienced the IT Manager who wanted to see Design Patterns everywhere, no matter if they were useful or not. But that is not the fault of the book.
Had a speed reading class in 8th grade. Used an exercise to recognize several words at a time by reading pages with the material split into 2 columns starting with 2 words in each one building up to 4 or 5 over time. We were tested for reading comprehension and speed. It really worked for me, but not everyone. Can scan pages insanely quickly now. Retention is another story.
Thanks for sharing. We can all learn from Tiger Woods and his determination and heart.
I recommend reading a text on design patterns. The Brazil example falls short, because people having no understandings of concepts doesn't invalidate the concepts themselves.
ConnectionPool is an excellent example of a bad case for Singleton: what if you have two databases? What if you want to use different pools for different types of queries?

A global variable is different from a Singleton because if you write a Singleton class in some module that I want to use, I have to fork your module if I want to make it possible to use two of them. If you use a global variable, I can always make a second global variable.
OK, I am not even sure anymore what the singleton pattern is _(it's been a while). If it is the class constructor that makes sure you can only ever create one instance, it might be bad. I thought any mechanism for ensuring singleness would qualify for the pattern. Then you examples wouldn't invalidate the connection pool, you could just have to different pools, one for each database. I agree that with the "class instantiation implementation" you could probably not do that.
Become an Xcoder: An Intro to OS X Programming (e-book)
I took a class with the same title and it was fascinating. Unfortunately it didn't reach to far into the digital age, but it was just good to get a broad sense of the arguments before delving into any new writings on the subject.

I also think I learned more in my Philosophy classes than my Comp Sci classes, but then I dropped out of the CompSci program and majored in Philo, so I am probably biased.

I'd judge myself better off than a significant number of technical majors that just were trying to get a good job after graduation. I had the benefit of a Liberal Arts school too, so I also took a lot of CompSci classes (How many Philo majors do you know that took Digital Electronics and had to build up an simple computer on a breadboard?).
i prefer to read slowly. as i understand it, part of the idea of speed-reading follows: step 1: you read the words aloud; this is slow because you can only read as fast as you can talk; step 2: you read the words aloud in your head without your lips moving; faster, but still slow because you can "see" faster than you can "hear"; step 3: you identify words/meaning through sight and not sound. the thing is, moving to step 3 takes away some of the musicality/beauty of language.
Startups That Came Back From The Dead
There's nothing wrong with having common terminology. But when people are being taught about bad ideas without any cautionary comments, that's a problem.

By the same token, there's nothing wrong with knowing what a goto statement is. But I'm glad we don't have a popular book that implicitly advocates its use, or college classes that teach it to students as if it's the state of the art in control flow.
Still, crux_ is playing the straw man, and it's risky to legitimise such comments. He is twisting his parent through bad interpretation to be a comment about what people 'deserve', and then develops this theme. So let me attempt to deal with that idea of 'deserving'.

What people 'deserve' is arbitrary, and extremely position sensitive. For instance - what if you were to phrase the education issue in terms of "if somebody works part time and wants to pay to attend university to do extra subjects that are not provided under government university sponsorship, do they deserve to be allowed to do so?" Or "if somebody works hard and drives an old bomb of a car in order to save money to pay for a particular education for their children, do they deserve to be allowed to make that choice?" Or, "if somebody wants to spend five years sitting around smoking marijuana and collecting government benefits while failing to make any progress on the degree they're supposed to be doing, do they deserve government funding for this, when the opportunity cost for that choice hits poor people who have no interest in a university education but who can't get jobs due to the correspondingly higher levels of taxation required to fund such university places?"

The idea of what people 'deserve' is completely arbitrary. Ideas like 'deserve' and 'fairness' don't belong in public policy, except in reference to:

* direct application of the rule of law

* formation and honouring of private contracts

* ownership of private property (and that excludes anti-rights that are often mislabeled as property, such as "copyright")

These rules extend from the idea that you should be allowed to do what you like so long as you are not impinging on your neighbour. As 'mynameishere' says in the existing reply to this comment, the only way to guarantee other equality on other levels is to force some individuals to give up something for the benefit of expense of others.

And one of the side-effects of that sort of thinking is policy that acts against even the common interest. If you ban private schools so that everyone can be equal, that means people who would have put extra money into education (creating spaces in private schools and thereby removing demand form the public sector) instead spend it on improvements to their house or funding a more luxurious lifestyle. People who to improve education standards for poor people by abolishing private education need to think harder. And people who want to make everyone equal regardless of relative outcome need to have a look at Cambodia.

I'd like to return to another part of mynameishere's previous comment: "We want to pay right-thinking, liberal arts majors middle class salaries for them to administer money distributions from functional people to dysfunctional people". Governments tend to grow in a way that gives more work and power to the decision makers. This process is the enemy of individual freedom, and - as a general measure - fails on a utilitarian basis, also. If they don't have unambiguous facts to support what they're doing then they need to be blocked.
Erik Naggum, RPG, Kent Pitman and Design Patterns in Lisp
Thanks for that summary, willz (and congrats on your first post). That really helped me see the "big deal" about Loopt. I read about it in pg's essays and visited the website, but I didn't see any extreme usefulness in an application that "shows you where your friends are." However, if it is expanded to the point of making recommendations, then I can indeed see the brilliance. It's like expanding Web 2.0 into the real world, isn't it?

That's very cool. I see, now. Although I can indeed as well think of many privacy concerns with Loopt (which Sam has probably solved), I wonder if you could use it as an aid to finding stolen or lost phones? Many possibilities come to mind.

This just adds to pg's thesis: startups are almost never what they start as, but what their users need them to become.
Still in alpha, but beta1 seems to be around the corner:
http://www.getfirebug.com/blog/2008/03/18/27/
I'm working on a tool now that should be dead easy, but there's not a whole lot out there now for online tools. If you want me to email you when it's ready, shoot me an email. On gmail, I'm ebeland.
50 facts bout Sergey Brin and Larry Page
ApacheBench is great.
Good clipart site?
Does anyone know of a good quality clipart site with a license that will allow me to use the clipart on a website?
I'm not even all that old (32) and even I recall at least two previous cycles where "philosophy was fashionable again" and newspapers wrote about it after which philosophy was pretty much ignored for a few years.

And I'm willing to bet that in five years or so there will be yet another one.
Dijkstra: The Humble Programmer
Greenspun's Tenth Rule
Choosing Languages
1) Work on 1 computer, receive email on another (KVM switch works well for me)
2) Always follow this order: write code, write blog, read blogs.
3) Stop eating out -- it's not actually faster (at least when you work from home making something right there is faster and cheaper)
4) Just do it. Don't procrastinate. Don't check things online (download stats, visitors logs, etc.). Don't distract yourself with work that doesn't get you anything.
5) Stop watching TV when you have something interesting or arduous to do. Finish it first.
6) Stop playing video games when you have something interesting or arduous to do. Finish it first.
7) Don't over think posts on news.ycombinator.

-- Get back to work. :-)
wow that's a lot of upvotes for not saying anything interesting.
Does anyone else find this article slightly contradictory? On one hand they are advocating abolishing government involvement in business then, two paragraphs later, they want government subsidies. Subsidies and regulations are one in the same, different modes to the same goal, government control.
I guess 2c is really a lot more money to the local economy though?

I also enjoyed a reference to Uzbekistan that wasn't the end of a joke ;)
It sounds like I'm one of a number of philosophy major who reads this site (and who works as a software engineer), and I'd like to second that philosophy can be a great major as long as you don't plan on being a philosophy professor (which, for most people, isn't an option). You can kind of take what you want from the major, so if all you want is to bullshit people that's what you might end up learning.

As for myself, I learned a lot about how to carefully construct arguments, how to make my arguments clearly so that people who disagreed with me could easily point out why they disagreed, how to critically analyze and (civilly) disagree with someone else, how to care more about getting to the right answer eventually than about being right in the moment, and how to be willing to change my mind when someone did make a well-reasoned criticism of my argument.

I studied mainly the ethics and political philosophy, rather than the more logic/cognitive science side of things, but I've still found it incredibly useful to my work as a software engineer. The process of breaking a complex argument down into appropriately sized chunks that say enough to be meaningful but little enough to be clear and (hopefully) self-evidently correct is incredibly similar to the skill of breaking a complex program down into parts that are large enough to do something useful but small enough to be correct.
Design patterns are on my reading list, but these days that list is much larger than my available free time.

I agree with you, actually. My point wasn't that the design patterns themselves are wrong, or necessarily bad, it was that (I think) they'll tend to get used in situations where the programmer doesn't understand the immediate problem or solution well enough to deal with it directly.

Anecdotally, this came up somewhat recently when the question of whether or not it's "OK" to return early from a function got briefly passed around the net. I noticed a lot of instances where people were coming up with some pretty absurd reasoning to justify always doing it one particular way, the 'textbook' way if you will.

Myself, I think it's _sometimes_ OK to return early from a function. It depends on what you're doing. You have to understand the situation you're looking at, and all of the various circumstances around it.

So, the idea of "never return early from a function" isn't necessarily wrong, but it does indicate that the programmer probably doesn't really understand what they're doing.
http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?SingletonPattern has some good discussion on it.
Well, yeah, at the good schools there is analytic philosophy. But at local community college or state universities (where most people get degrees), it's a mix.

And dancing maths on the head of a pin, that could never be a useful skill to develop?
Before I went to college, I read a lot of philosophy, and I thought I was learning a lot. But there's a huge difference between reading Plato or Nietzche or Rawls or whatever else you like and having to write papers that critically analyze said works. For all its reputation as a haven for people who bullshit a lot, I've never had a paper more savagely ripped apart than by an analytic philosophy TA. It's an experience I never got in other departments, and it's something that everyone, especially know-it-all-type high school students, can really benefit from. Learning how to be wrong is an important life skill, and reading books just doesn't teach you that.
Cool, how's the performance? What do you use it for?
Hofstadter hit on this almost 30 years ago I think... I thought his dialogs with the ant eater were really entertaining and thought provoking as well.
"I think this is probably one of the main reasons that the Scandinavian countries are ahead in the mobile game. You can get cheap plans that include an unlimited amount of text messaging"

I'm from Scandinavia and this isn't really the case. Data is more expensive in Sweden than in US. The US market has done a lot to make it easy for people to use data on their mobile phones. Sure, we have advanced phones in Sweden but that's about it.

Some countries with cheap data-plans for mobile:
http://gammalife.blogspot.com/2008/02/pricing.html
Don't bother. Just read more. I've always read very fast, and I don't think it helps that much. My experience has been that reading quickly is reading carelessly, which serves well for scanning and finding info - but to understand, you have to slow down and make metaphors, pictures in your head, or work with pencil, paper (or programming tools!)
Isn't this more of a Reddit post?
The problem is that you have to get a phones sold by Sprint which sucks.

Sim-cards is a great invention. Compare with computers, imagine if you bought a computer from Dell that would only be allowed to run on the Dell-DSL network and only allowed to run Dell-approved software. Not a great deal
http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Touchstone/dp/0671212095...

I read that for a high school english class, and it changed the way I read. It teaches you how to absorb more information in less time.
this is great. if they could open up the network fast I'd be happier.
Way back in the 80's I doubled in CS and Philosophy. I had a philosophy professor who was a noted expert in symbolic logic. After my last course with him, Dr Aycock was hired by an AI company to do pure research. He left behind a tenured position to go into the private sector. He probably spent the next few years pecking on a Symbolics keyboard.

Philosophy was very important to me because it showed me how thinkers over thousands of years have struggled with corner cases, figured them out, integrated them into routine thinking, then moved onto the next set of corner cases.

Read David Hume for a mind expanding experience. He is surely is one of the most brilliant minds of record that humanity has ever produced.

With regard to philosophy's influence on the hard sciences, Immanuel Kant plays a fundamental role in undergraduate study, as well as Descartes. It's said that he discovered Cartesian coordinates during his "Meditations."
I agree with you on all counts. But there is a curious business model that is opened up by the US's draconian SMS arrangements, and that's free digital integration.

Companies like Swaggle, 3Jam, Twitter, and Dodgeball all get full cooperation from carriers because they encourage MORE received texts. If carriers didn't charge for received texts, these services would be creating situations where the users save and the carriers lose. (At least at first. You can probably successfully argue that Dodgeball and Twitter eventually encourage the users to send more texts once they're naturalized.)

But as it stands, cheap SMS integration into web apps is a boon for startups with a mobile twist.

(That being said, carriers are still running a cartel in the US...)