skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From my understanding, we really should be looking at the dB drop and not the number of bars lost, as a drop in 20dB or so may only show up as only a bar lost (if you started out at full bars). (or did they fix this in the software update?)

So maybe this is why nobody in Australia is experiencing the antenna problem, because the 20db drop is hidden by only being a single bar loss? That or they changed something in the manufacturing...

But I digress from the original discussion...
Most of the recent criticisms of TV that I've seen don't spend much time recognizing that the human brain needs downtime. As a way to veg out after 12 hours of programming, TV isn't any worse than reading a trashy novel or whatnot. I think the real question is, is there something about bad TV that changes our brain?

That is, is it not just a break from work? Are we actively making our brains more demanding of a break? In my limited experience, TV does seem to "rot" my brain. The more I watch, the fewer hours I can spend each day doing productive tasks.

Thus, my goal is to find an activity that allows me to veg out as effectively as TV while improving, or at least not inhibiting, my mental acuity. One obvious example is exercise. Of course, as any regular weightlifter or long distance runner can tell you, exercise can be rather addicting itself!
Great idea. I'm convinced that we can find a way to tap into all of the wonderful data on the Internet. Right now, it's just too hard, which is one of the delights of reading a well-researched article.
I remember seeing this in a computer store right after the Power PCs were released. My friend and I spent the next hour or so visualizing equations. It was immediately intuitive and powerful, like a TI calculator on steroids. It was everything a school kid could want and played a huge part in buying one of the machines.

While there are certainly more powerful mathematical software applications available today, It's a shame this type of easy to use application (my friend and I figured it out within 30 seconds) seems very rare.
But I think it is also helpful to honestly consider how far we have come, too, without constantly self-flagellating about the fact we haven't gotten to perfection yet. The problems you describe are not of the same order of magnitude of the problems that buro9 described.

I had a class on homelessness and did volunteer work in a homeless shelter and I have lived with the kind of stubborn personal problems that typically lead to homelessness. I am well aware of the personal factors involved. I don't think it is self-flagellation to realistically assess the impact the current housing situation has on the availability of suitable, affordable housing and how that relates to increased homelessness in recent years.
Time not watching TV != time doing something productive, much less efficiently. Ever heard of burn-out?

But I'm sure we all knew this. Anyone read the book, and can comment on its contents?

All that said, I have no TV, except for one I occasionally hook up for movies with friends (my computer screens / speakers are unwieldy). I don't miss it, and I've read a ton more without it (including frightening amounts of time here.). I'm certainly more productive without it.
any examples that prove this?

and doesn't all this depend on how what you consider a country? hasn't Wales been colonized by the English for a long time or does some geographic separation have to exist?

And is colonization of Korea during ww2 less destructive than the British colonization of Hong Kong? Or does the colonizer matter?
The game is a sandbox game in which the world is made up of block units, all of the same size. Units can be dirt, sand, stone/cobblestone, and various ores. There are trees as well, and combining various raw materials, you craft progressively more complex things. From there, you can build almost anything granted you have the resources.

In survival mode, there are zombies and spiders that appear at night. They're pretty difficult to kill with just your hand, and they will mob you pretty quickly. So you essentially have to construct a safety fort to live. People solve this problem in pretty elaborate ways sometimes.

One of the most interesting aspects of the game is how subtle the world around you is. When you cut down a tree, you usually can find a new tree seed to plant it again. The tree grows based on how much light it's exposed to. The zombies sometimes get in fights with each other, or local non-violent wildlife (pigs, cows). Water can flood your tunnels if you hit it, and lava does the same.

All of this, and it's endearing. The menu screen has a joking catchphrase which changes every time, the developer Notch is as in love with the game as everyone else, and the rest of the community is hugely cooperative in building things, even if it takes a huge amount of effort. These reasons are what get people to stay, and get the purchase.

I only wish I could hack on this code, the problems seem hugely interesting (rendering miles of block, even at low detail, is resource intensive, and simulating an environment on top of that).
Yep it's that simple. I was in the "I don't get it" camp and then I read the example of Indian farmers at the market. They would use it to send messages to groups about seed prices and such at different markets using Twitter via SMS.
I've found Hulu to be an increasingly effective TV-replacement. TV gives a temptation to just sit and watch whatever comes up with no end in sight. It's a lot like going to one of the higher-traffic Reddits. It's a ton of least-common-denominator crap that offends no one significantly and interests everyone marginally. On Hulu, I zero in on what I want to watch, I watch it, then I do something else.
Wikipedia Co-Founder Larry Sanger on Being Wrong
Their is always more work than that which can be accomplished. Unfortunately right now, we don't know what that work is and what its value will be. This makes it extremely risky for people to jump careers since they don't know where to go, and it makes it hard to invest capital/start a business because the future payments are unknown.

If the housing market was at the correct value - not insanely overpriced as it is now people could be employed building bigger/new houses. If certain resources are limited (high price) then investments can be made to harvest them more cheaply. It takes time for people to experiment and for knowledge/price information to make its way around the market. Unfortunately, we also have some government policies that are actively distorting market signals and also increasing uncertainty of the future.

So while jobs disappear for good, new ones will be created -- unfortunately it is not quick or painless. I believe Ned Ludd's town took ~50 years to achieve the same level of success after the introduction of the automatic loom.
Ian is awesome. Glad his reddit comments are finally getting popular. Last I heard he is a mentor for Capital Factory (YC-like seed stage in Austin)
'Chance favors the prepared mind.'
i am for abolishing the patent system - it is archaic - the reason no one can duplicate googles success is not the patents they hold but the infrastructure they built -furthermore- competition actually helps to -increase- the market - in new yorks fifth avenue there are hundreds of luxury brands - doing business next to each other - and thriving - if your competition copied you - you copy their improvements to improve your product - copyright is an impediment that serves no body ----except the government bureaucracy---- who enforces the copyright --laws--
That is only looking at one side of the minimum wage coin. There are also a lot of people who may only contribute 4$ of value per hour (inexperienced, etc) who would like to work at that wage but won't get hired due to their lack of value. But if they could get a job, they would gain experience and eventually start contributing more value and thus be able to justify a higher wage. Minimum wage hurts those who it is trying protect -- in fact when I worked menial "minimum wage " jobs, I was always actually paid more than minimum wage.
See here for an economist's take on that: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/07...

He notes that there's been "[a] recovery in output, but not in employment. That means a smaller number of laborers are working, but we are producing as much as before. As a simple first cut, how should we measure the marginal product of those now laid-off workers? I would start with the number zero. "

Also here (linked in the above article): http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/07/the_zmp_hypothe....

Kling's pet theory is "recalculation," in that recessions are frequently the result of lots of people being employed doing the wrong thing (in this instance, building and selling houses), and it takes a while for those workers to be "reassigned" by the market to productive jobs. Money quote here:

" Let us talk about the marginal product of worker i in occupation j. In most cases, this is indeed zero. My marginal product would be zero in fishing, medicine, and many other fields. In a complex economy, if you were to randomly assign workers to jobs, ZMP would be the norm, not the exception. The more complex the economy, the more carefully workers must be assigned in order to avoid ZMP."
pretty much.

How come you couldn't reboot it yourself?

Also note, we're pretty liberal with refunds if you decide we aren't good enough.
>I do believe their management is smarter than that.

The evidence would suggest otherwise.
It is interesting to note that the problem the Xanadu effort was attacking, payments for content, etc., is still unsolved.

Newspapers are going out of business because it is difficult to be compensated for information/content made available over the internet.

It is also interesting to interpret many successful internet firms that offer blogging, Facebook, as steps towards the Xanadu vision of everything being editable.
hm... I think I didn't explain properly (or I misunderstood your point).

Lets say you have a method the sole task of which is to call call .read() on its argument and return a single char.

char readch(obj) { return obj.read(); }

Now, since I have not declared any explicit type for obj, the compiler would generate code like this:

interface readch_obj {
char read();
}

char readch(readch_obj obj) { return obj.read(); }

So the function basically takes in an interface readch_obj which defines a single read() method that returns a char.

Now, the trick is, the compiler can intelligently recognize that the FILE object has a method with the required signature (char read() ) and that the STRINGIO object also has a method with that required signature and so the compiler automatically tags the FILE object and STRINGIO object as implementing obj_readch and so, either of those objects can be passed in as an argument to readch().

Note: I'm not saying this is how the Go compiler actually works but this is the basic concept from what I understood.

The language doesn't need to allow for adding methods at runtime for this to work.

If the language did have the scaffolding needed to add methods at runtime, then yes, this technique wouldn't work and thats probably the fundamental difference between ducktyping and this (structural subtyping? not sure what it's called).
I've consulted for dod contractors and have witnessed such stupidity as buying a half -written ipv6 stack from a vendor rather than taking it from the Linux codebase because 'a foreigner may have touched that code.' Never mind the fact that the vendor was free to hire foreigners. Or that Linux is already used by dod. Or that the vendor is clueless and charging you out the ass.
Couldn't you contribute the code to a developer under public domain, meaning they can do whatever they want with it (relicense it etc...)?
1) Twitter represents the shift from the static web to the dynamic web (Web 2.0) to the real-time web.

2) "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse." -- Henry Ford

3) It's a marketing channel for brands and a low friction communication channel for normals. Wave wasn't built for normals. Google doesn't understand the existence of normals.

I would suggest reading The Medium Is The Message by Marshal McLuhan.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25955.The_Medium_is_the_M...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_is_the_Massage
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25955.The_Medium_is_the_M...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Media:_The_Extens...
This reminds me of what Clay Shirky talks about in "Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age". It's the difference between intrinsic motivations and extrinsic (generally financially related) motivations. These guys wanted it to work, and operated with the earnestness of a startup. That passion is powerful stuff.
As I started reading the first paragraphs the thing that kept popping in my mind was Java. It almost seemed like they were describing java. Specially the part about garbage collection, although they did not named it garbage collection. They simply described that resources would be released once nobody was using them.
Not a Phd, but I'll take a stab at it anyway...

Unlike in other systems, processes in Singularity are software-isolated processes, or SIPs, that rely on language safety, not hardware mechanisms, to isolate system software components from one another. SIPs provide isolation and failure containment at far less performance cost than hardware mechanisms, so they can be used in more places than conventional processes.

This is the (IMO) really interesting part, and is why I've decided I like instead of dislike type-safe virtual machines on general principle.

The Singularity architecture avoids many of these problems. For example, SIPs are sealed processes that prohibit shared memory, in-process code generation, and dynamic code loading. A process that wishes to invoke an extension starts the extension code running in a separate SIP.

dlopen() cannot exist. I'm not sure how/if you could write your own JIT (say, for something like... a JVM?), you'd probably have to fully pre-compile down to MSIL. This is one of those "nice in theory" things that I suspect won't work so well in the real world, because the extra development overhead probably isn't worth the added safety in most circumstances.

Having this be a flag that a given process can declare in its manifest might be good, having an optional startup parameter to the OS to require it for all processes might also make sense. Making it universally mandatory seems questionable.

With only two exceptions, an ABI call affects only the state of its calling process. The two exceptions alter the state of a child process before or after it executes,
but not during execution. The first is a call to create a child process, which specifies the code loaded for the child before it begins execution. The second is a call to stop a child process, which reclaims its resources after all threads cease execution. State isolation ensures that a Singularity process has sole control over its state. (From http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=5271... )

In sounds like it's an object-capability system, which is very cool.
My "secondary connections" seem to be a bunch of cosmetic companies.
Not exactly recently; and for the record, that post made the MVP program more transparent than its ever been (thanks to some detailed in-the-know commenters).

The world you would live in is full of sycophants. The only people you'd have talk about XYZ would be people who love XYZ. You would dismiss anyone who thinks better alternatives exist.

Q: "Hey, isn't this antenna problem awesome?"
A: "It ROCKS!!!! Its like a super cool game!"

Q: "Dude, don't you love how this page doesn't render well in IE?"
A: "Oh Man, we get to play with HTML and CSS for the next hour!"
Just like hand-crafted, well-made old furniture is more valuable than the superstore variety. It's just that the number of people who value it at that level is pretty small. Not enough people care about aesthetics, and for practical purposes, it's disappeared.
Really? Svn? Subversion doesn't belong anywhere near Git or Mercurial, as far as classification of SCM software goes. It's much more conceptually related to CVS or Perforce.
Typo in the description of this page: http://scraperwiki.com/editor/new/PHP (i.e. search Python).

Anyway, the IDE approach looks very very nice. I have done similar thing before, but using Selenium/jQuery: http://github.com/tszming/Selenium-Google-Scrapper. I still believe my jQuery approach is more flexible for screen scrapping :)
If you like this type of stuff, check out the book "Lisp in Small Pieces".
Blogs themselves aren't short but the RSS feeds for them usually are. Blogs + RSS roughly equals Blog + Twitter with link but for some reason Twitter took over from RSS/Atom.
Is it worth taking a year off of college to work at a start up?
I honestly think people often forget the reasons things succeed in the beginning and replace them with the reasons they are successful now. You know the main reason I think Twitter was successful? They had an SMS gateway. I knew loads of people who never sat in front of a computer except for a few minutes a day at best. It's easy for us constantly-connected internet geeks to forget how the rest of the world lives. These people were completely isolated from real-time one-to-many messaging we all take for granted with email, IM, & RSS. Twitter filled that gap. They got a huge following from people who had no regular internet access but unlimited SMS.

The other major factors were simplicity (at a functional but also an API level) and the alignment of self interest with the digerati who in their quest for self-promotion became instantly addicted to Twitter's public follower numbers. Thus it became the topic of nearly every tech podcast for a good 12 months straight with sickening regularity.
The Java Implementation of the visitor pattern involves interfaces and classes plus double dispatch.

All that has been replaced with one mapping.

Which was Tim's point.
Whether it's worth the effort is debatable. When you (not you specifically, in general) design a database, do you use types, do you mark a field as int or let everything be a string? Yes, when you code you can make sure to only put "integers" (as string) in that field and everything will work. Maybe it's not the perfect analogy, but I think it touches an important point. From a statically-typed point of view it "feels" dirty. When I look at a method declaration, I want to know that it only works with integers, the same way I look at a field in the database I want to be sure to expect only integers, and nothing else.
Windows 7 tablet holds it own against the iPad
did you read what I wrote? specifically:

"On the other hand, if you hire 10 guys with brooms, you just eliminated a higher paying job in favor of 10 low paying jobs. this will tend to increase the number of people taking work that is beneath their skill level. so one could say that a high minimum wage is a subsidy on skilled labour."

So yeah, a higher minimum wage does favor more expensive people who can be more productive over less expensive people who are less productive.

My first job didn't pay minimum wage, and I know that some 15 year old fixing computers is rather different than an adult labourer trying to feed a family, but I feel that I benefited from having the job; It got me my next job (which was minimum wage) which started me down the path, a few years later, to a 'real job' with real pay.
where a bunch of devs who've done exactly one project in one framework sit down and figure out what their Dream System would look like, and end up reinventing either Classic ASP or Cold Fusion, but in a comically terrible way.

We have our own webframework that grew over time and I don't feel bad about it. It's custom-built for our apps and so, it does exactly what we need and abstracts away the exact feature set we need. It's not more powerful than any existing framework and is certainly not for everyone but it suites our needs perfectly.

I don't see writing custom frameworks or templating systems as any different from writing a DSL.
I totally agree.

We all read the same blogs. We read the same books, take more or less the same classes at schools, watch the same videos, read the same articles. We all have at our disposal cheap, powerful technology.

What is our advantage?

This point can be spun two ways: because our resources are so uniformly distributed, we can attribute more and more to randon luck. On the other hand, you can also say that because all else is equal, success depends solely on your creativity and and hard work.

Interesting topic for sure. And btw, personally Im a firm believe that we have a hand in making our own luck.
This is what I left most curious about. There is no mention of compensation that I see - were they eventually appropriately compensated?

It seems strange for them to leave out this detail - but perhaps not since money was clearly not part of their motivations.
PySerial (and it's close cousin PyParallel) are pretty cool. couple of months ago, i wrote a trivial program to interface HD44780 board using PyParallel. available here: [ http://github.com/anupamk/hd44780.git ]
Agreed, threads should be used only when true CPU concurrency is needed, and it is Too hard for most programmers to use (correctly). See John Ousterhout's presentation: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~norm/508/2009W1/ouster95threadsbad.pdf
My current source of choice for finding music I like is Time-Warner cable's music channels. I usually have something like "Singers and Swing", "Jazz", "Blues", or "Classical" playing. When I hear something I really like, I look it up in Google or in Amazon and see where it is and what people think.

I prefer to buy a CD from Amazon and rip it (at 256 kb) unless the MP3 is significantly cheaper. It then it in iTunes (on my MacBook Pro) and then onto my iPod Classic (160 GB is nice).

I sometimes but rarely buy from the iTunes store. I do subscribe to more podcasts than I can keep up with, but WTH.
Outside the Echo Chamber: Growing A Startup In New Hope, PA
I tried, quickly got lost, and started learning calculus as a result. I still need to get back to SICM.
I'm not clear on how that would work. A good DDoS attack is nearly indistinguishable from normal traffic. How would net neutrality play into it?
I'll second this. Meet real people. Above all, they will provide more value and meaning to your life than any code ever will. Lone developers tend to forget that, and our social skills suffer. Hackerspaces are like the social scene for our kind. Get out there and hack -- together. That and co-working.
Because where I work, rebooting machines is the Domain Of The Sysadmins.

And there's no refund policy :)
Comments were due by August 2nd. Did they extend that?
It is really hard to judge why something like this might have happened. However, I would bet it is related to one of two things: Either he had information (as you mentioned) or his actions after it hit the fan was inexcusable.

I can't imagine Jobs being very keen on somebody worrying more about covering his ass than taking care of Apple when things go wrong.
I suspect Apple never caught this call dropping issue due to the fact that everyone who had one of these new 4G iPhones was required to keep it in a case when they were field testing them. Wasn't the phone that Gizmodo got their hands on in a big case that made it look like a 3GS? How can anyone but the people who insist on this secrecy be responsible for the fact that the field testing seemed like everything was working fine?
This.

I find it absolutely amazing this hasn't been talked about more. I have no idea what the majority of the population is going to do in the near-future. These jobs are not coming back. I posit that a large percentage of the currently unemployed will never be employed in their sector again. We will never reach pre-2007 employment levels because the majority of jobs weren't and aren't necessary.