skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that this was a great little essay. I like your illustration, but I think your point at the end of your comment disagrees a little with the essay, and I have to disagree with you a little as well. A computational model, such as Maxwell's Equations, is a theory. Creating a simulation of two balls falling would also be formulating a theory. It may be an incorrect theory though, as you point out, and that's where the other leg of science, experimentation (what you refer to as tying back in to the physical world), is necessary.

Taking more from your example, I would agree that scientists today are trying to answer questions by diving right into computational models (theory) without experimentation, but I believe it's because they are tackling questions that are very difficult to experiment with. I don't think that's altogether unprecedented though. There are instances of scientists producing theories without the means to test them throughout history, only to have them proven or disproven by experimentation at much later times.
Two Thumbs Up? ZaReason's Verix Laptop
I am happy to see that CERN uses Oracle extensively, presumably for the data that matters.
Our tax dollars should only go to a reliable, proven database solution.
Your "hint" is wrong. Women benefit more when they are able to share wealthier or more powerful males than when they are stuck as the wife of some loser. It is the weaker males that benefit most; and the overall birth rate. Agriculture is the source of monogamy, as the population that had the higher birth rate tended (very quickly) to overrun those with smaller populations.
"Everyone around you treats you like you have a flexible schedule and asks you to do things during it."

If you have any self-control you just ignore them or tell them you're not available, then you do what you're supposed to be doing.
Swimming and freedom
There's no such thing a nonpolitical issue.
We're fitting a lot more into a wooden block than we used to.
Everytime I get linked to a Folklore article I end up hitting next until I look up at the clock and get amazed at how much time has gone by. True hacker stories.
Feature Creeper
Knowing the relational model is really important, but you're also going to have to unlearn it in order to do a good job with NoSQL. It's a totally different set of rules.
A logo in the shape of an Apple with a bite taken out of it formerly in a full, colorful, playful rainbow.

A sad mac.

A bouncing beach ball.

Cute naming using words like "mighty", "magic", "Newton", "Lisa", "Macintosh" and the prefix "i-" and "Power-" or the postfix "-book"

Software named after cats.

Codenames after scientists, swords and other stuff.

Funny shapes for hardware: cubes, circles, etc.
etc.
Experience getting back into us after a vacation during financial meltdown of 2008-2009

Immigration "officer": Are you sure you still have your job at the bank.

Me: yes

Immigration "officer": If that turns out to be false we will kick you out like dogs
Bundler works together with RVM gemsets. If you have an active RVM gemset, Bundler will use it.

The goal of Bundler is portability between deployments. It answers the question: "How do I package up everything required to run this app so I can deploy it anywhere."
Doesn't the checksum allow the cracker to check if a key is "real" even if he only can reverse engineer part of it?

Or at the very minimum the checksum reduces the number of possible keys that still work with the checked portions, so the cracker can release a series of keys and tell the user to keep trying them.
I like that on HN, people use memes intelligently.
Even here, you might be surprised by how limited some NoSQL stores are. E.g., if you have a requirement like "find the first 20 blog posts written by X after this date."
Not recently, I tried it a few years ago and it didn't seem like it would work for me for some reason. If it's a viable alternative to the Adobe tools, that's great.
Almost everything is hard when you have 128KB of memory and a CPU that does only 8 MHz. Not to mention having to write in assembly.
Yes, defgeneric is.
Cyborg Fly Pilots Robot Through Obstacle Course
You're assuming AdGrok is just a frontend to Adwords. I think their platform is much more than that: besides the prettier/easier interface, I imagine its core is based on campaign optimization/management (through ML algorithms) and keyword generation, like kenshoo, clickfuel and clickable.

If that's the case, then it is more than worth the 5% comission.
Gizmodo Really Likes Patent Trolls
Really not understanding why the author is giving so much free publicity to a well known patent troll. See here: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100217/1853298215.shtml
I found the American model of screwing around all day in order to have something to do during your (essentially mandatory) overtime to be present in Japan as well.
It's taken to an extreme in both cultures, and the drop in productivity is obvious to the outside observer.
The funny thing is that, at least in Japan, pretty well everyone recognizes it as a problem, but no one is willing to make any progress towards fixing it. They are completely resigned to it's "necessity".
Sure, you can create a massive json hash and store it in a sqldb field. However, most sqldbs that I'm aware of do not support searching that massive hash. You need to come up with index tables.

The nice thing about Mongo is you can query that hash without having to have an index table.
I had great teachers that helped me with my education at my school and they truly enriched my learning experience.
The example you suggested is probably too simple; one should realise that the actual experiment might be very difficult, if not impossible to carry out. Consider a theory of galaxy collisions---I am unable to see any way of testing out the hypothesis, unless the equations are simple enough.

A computer program just a different language of expressing the theory... Hence, I see no reason why one should separate theory and computer programs.
Like I said, I'm a very happy father (my kids are 5, 2 and 1). I love them (they helped me understand what "love" actually means). They are the joy of my life.

But spending too much time with them is not as fulfilling as actually doing something -- or even reading a good book.

There is no fulfillment in wiping a child's ass, or even feeding them. You do it because you have to, and I actually don't mind doing it. But as useful as it is for them, it's pointless for me.

That is not a problem as long as I have other things to do / to care about; it would be if they were the beginning and end of my day.
Here are three more very recent articles promoting IV:
http://gizmodo.com/5621869/why-ideas-are-expensive
http://gizmodo.com/5621679/how-intellectual-ventures-wants-t...
http://gizmodo.com/5621607/iv-gallery/gallery/

I am at a loss why this would be something Gizmodo would fall for and publicize. Didn't they do a google search?
The way I interpreted the quote was that if you don't know your goals you are going to take every opportunity that comes your way and not turn down any projects.

It's very easy to fall into this and end up with lots of crappy projects that continue on for months. Especially when you first start out as a freelancer and worry about getting consistent work.
Why? That sounds like a complete waste of time to me.

PS: I have a CS degree and I have written a fair amount of low level networking code, but I have no idea how that helps someone understand networking on either a practical or theoretical level. But, if you feel it was in anyway useful I am all ears.
I kinda get the point he's making, but the EMH metaphor doesn't work at all.
.swf for JavaScript cross-domain flash cookies
> _People have talked about how webapps are going to kill traditional software for the next decade. If the relevant browsers implemented this, could it finally actually happen?_

I would say that the difference between webapps and desktop apps will disappear.
HTML5 & (X)HTML Mobile Reference (public beta)
Nike Patents Marty McFly's Self-Lacing Sneakers
What makes it "chaotic" isn't just that it'll turn right if you start it leaning a tiny bit right and left if you start it leaning a tiny bit left. What makes it chaotic is that, if you start it in position X, it might make the series of turns RRLRLLLRL... while if you start it in position X+epsilon, it might make the series of turns RRLRLLLLR... or LLRLRRRLR... or some other completely different sequence. It may even make the first hundred turns exactly the same, and then diverge at turn #101.

In other words, any tiny change in the initial conditions, even if it doesn't change the first turn, can change the pattern of turns farther down the line. In chaos, sensitive dependence on initial conditions doesn't just happen at a single point, but throughout the system. It's not just a matter of making or missing the train, but of talking to different people or having slightly different mannerisms because you were 3 minutes and 2.8 seconds early instead of 3 minutes and 2.7 seconds early, and those tiny changes eventually adding up to lead you to Boise instead of Miami.
Go read a little about genetics. Your comment is too silly to even critique rationally.
I'm primarily a Linux user, and (perhaps) thus not too concerned with appearance. But I'm very concerned with functionality, and I think Apple consistently fails to apply obvious little touches. I use my girlfriend's Mac quite often, and almost always leave angry at the interface.

Here's two:

Why does Cmd-W close some dialog windows but not others? I frequently hit Cmd-O, realize I'm in the wrong application, then hit Cmd-W to make it go away. Occasionally this works.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1052118/how-to-make-a-key...

Why do some clicks on background windows cause actions, and others are ignored? I don't want autoraise, I just want explicit clicks, say, on links or buttons in web pages, to be obeyed.
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/04/settling-osx-focus-f...

Some of my hating goes towards applications (why does Acrobat insist on popping up windows off the screen? why does printing work from Preview but not from Illustrator?) but a lot of it goes toward the basic interface. In my opinion, it's very well polished, but not very consistent or well designed.
Links to UniConf:

* http://alumnit.ca/wiki/index.php?page=UniConf

* http://alumnit.ca/wiki/attachments/uniconf.pdf
A computational model [...] is a theory

I guess that's where we disagree. I respect your point, and of course I accept we are in a regime where computational models are the only options in some cases (we can't start a whole new universe off to see how it worked). That has no bearing on their limitations, though.

I think a computational model is not a theory, it is a theoretical construct. I concede this may seem like splitting hairs to everyone except me.
He should take this a step further and talk about BATNA. It explains a lot of other reasons why you might stay in a crappy job, such as that the job market is lousy right now. You can also say the job market is not "liquid" right now.

Many people are sitting in local maxima rather than risking their milk money trying to climb the ladder. The sculptor works at a bank and the banker works at an antique store because it's not time to follow your dreams just yet...

In IT, the best explanation is here:

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Up-or-Out-Solving-the-IT-Tur...
Maybe you should start out with part-time 'regular' work, and do your start-up stuff on the side, then as you make more money on the side you can build down your 'regular' work. That way you get to do it without taking the plunge in an all-or-nothing fashion.
Are you sure about that? .rvm/scripts/cd still has this at the top [1]:

# Source a .rvmrc file in a directory after changing to it, if it exists.
# To disable this fature, set rvm_project_rvmrc=0 in $HOME/.rvmrc

Also, the new security features that Wayne mentions in this post suggest that a cd automatically leads to a check on the directory you cd into. Doesn't that imply that rvm still has to plug itself into cd? (I may be confused here.)

I have to admit the cd thing ended up throwing me for an interesting loop at one point. I was scripting and no matter what happened, cd was returning 0 (success) - even when the cd command was actually failing. I could not figure out for the life of me why the right exit status wasn't being reported. It turns out that rvm wasn't saving and then returning the exit status of cd itself. (So the exit status I was capturing wasn't actually that of cd.)

Long story short, two minutes in #rvm and Wayne had it fixed [2].

Edit: I think I see the confusion. Cldwalker is saying that he doesn't like rvm tinkering with cd. Bgentry is saying that rvm no longer automatically switches Ruby if it finds a .rvmrc in a folder (after you cd into it). That's right, but it doesn't change what is bothering Cldwalker: rvm does in fact still get in front of cd. (I think 'hijacking' is too strong, but I know what Cldwalker means by it.) If you use rvm, then by default every time you issue cd, rvm runs the code in [1] (part of which obviously punts to the built-in cd). You can disable this behavior, as Cldwalker says, by setting the environment variable rvm_project_rvmrc to 0. Unless I'm wrong, the default is still on.

[1] http://github.com/wayneeseguin/rvm/blob/master/scripts/cd

[2] http://github.com/wayneeseguin/rvm/commit/f9aa3adebcca547924...
Speaking of; when did mere programmers turn into ninja/rockstar developers instead? (Probably around the same time that 'sysadmins' became incapable of shell scripting.)
Maybe cheating is ok. Sure, there is a reason why it's faster. Maybe the guarantee of the write to disk is not as necessary as some people would believe.

It's certainly not the same as writing to /dev/null.

Maybe the developer can have other ways of guaranteeing consistency.
In Safari, Chrome and Firefox, it should. I couldn't get it to work properly on IE9.
The implication that you can't really be productive, or at least as productive as him, without using Linux with emacs and a tiling WM really tainted the other, better advice in this article for me.
I specifically used the word "opinion" rather than "fact" for that very reason. You got downvoted (at least) 5 times, the dismissive response from ars got 16 upvotes, and I'm trying to explain to you perhaps why that all happened. That's not nitpicking, it's not fucking trolling, and I didn't do it to put you down.
Aren't they Gawker's? fact checking was never a priority there.
Modeling is at best a thought experiment. It can only show you if a theory is reasonably self consistent based on your assumptions not if it's actually true.

PS: There are limits on science, and the ability to conduct an actual meaningful exponent is one of the largest ones.
Ah, lein-daemon - didn't know about that, thanks!
If you can implement it yourself, you understand it at a much deeper level than if you just read about it. This is why CS students still implement their own basic data structures (linked lists, hash tables, trees) in the freshmen and sophomore level classes.
Is this some kind of generative cartoon? Plug in a dialogue in text, and it generates too teddy bears speaking the dialogue?
Side note, but the check marks going beyond the box's border is driving me insane.
I'm not quite sure how this would work; the color models I have currently are three-dimensional so can be specified by three pieces of information (square x, square y, bar y). CMYK is 4-dimensional so you'd need something like 2 squares to specify a color. (Note that Photoshop's color picker doesn't have bubbles next to CMYK.)
there are a whole lot of unknowns in the whole debate, many of which could have unpleasant (to say the least) consequences. Brushing the entire field of climate science aside and declaring that all of our problems can be solved by pumping sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere is wildly irresponsible.

I think the article says just that:

Myhrvold is not arguing for an immediate deployment of the sulphur shield but, rather, that technologies like it be researched and tested so they are ready to use if the worst climate predictions come true.

It seems to me that any objection to this reasoning is really in favor of what we're doing now, which to run around in circles crying that the sky is falling, and claiming that the only possible solution is to pretty much destroy our way of life.

I certainly prefer the Myhrvold approach, of thinking outside the box and challenging others to react, than the Gore fear-mongering.
Wholesale Consumer Products
Another apple cirle-jerk, yay!
Unusual Settings: Applying UX design to a public garden entry
Typically interns (externs? what's the difference) get paid for their work at this level.
The visualization makes it seem obvious. Thanks.
the 'getting a job on a farm' being directly ripped off of the mongodb is web scale really ruined this for me
I wonder if that wooden block had rounded corners?
> anyone else whose jaw dropped

Wait, really? You never worked out in school (or on your own before it ever came up in school) that

1 + 2 + 3 + ... + n = n * (n + 1) / 2

and likewise that

2 + 4 + 6 + ... + 2n = n * (n + 1)

and

1 + 3 + 5 + ... + (2n - 1) = n * n

? (of course, it also comes up geometrically if you start looking at the number of little squares in a big square, and count the next row)
CSS3 Font Smoothing
This article appears to be a response to the new Journal of Computational Science whose editor-in-chief promotes computational science as separate from theory and experimentation.

The inciting text can be found in the description section here (click to expand the full Aims & Scope section):
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home...

An excerpt:

"Computational Science is a rapidly growing multi- and interdisciplinary field that uses advanced computing and data analysis to understand and solve complex problems. It has reached a level of predictive capability that now firmly complements the traditional pillars of experimentation and theory." - Peter Sloot, Editor-in-Chief
From the article: "perhaps nature [designed men] to strive, mostly unsuccessfully, for greatness".

Leaving aside the fact that nature does not design anything, if evolution is to select a trait that is "mostly unsuccessful", then this trait is to be incredibly successful when it actually succeeds.

And in fact, Genghis Khan is the exception; other well-known world conquerors are not exceptionally prolific, casting doubt on the possibility that "unknown world conquerors" (if such people ever existed?) would have been prolific enough and numerous enough to have an impact on the human species.

I'm well aware of Evolutionary Psychology, its premises and its shortcomings; it isn't "soft science" but rather "non-science" since it can't be refuted. Most of its claims may be right, or wrong, but that doesn't matter because we have no way to tell.
http://www.xtranormal.com/

"If you can type, you can make movies."
Search YC has better sorting options than Google for this type of situation: http://searchyc.com/Halliburton?sort=by_points
Unique Birdhouses | Quality Bird Feeders | Build Your Own Birdhouse Kits
Cracker might find working key from known checksum, but that would give only one key, and if you have checksum, you probably have rest of the key too.

Cracker couldn't create keys from checksum algorithm alone, because random checksummed data would pass only first checksum check, but not additional validation.
Yodlee seem to do okay out of it. Their SDK offers a way to extract statement data from online banking sites which, I believe, is a glorified screen scraper.

http://www.yodlee.com/
I'm confused on the difference between a theoretical construct and a theory.
There's a good reason for vms (like Java/Dalvik) on mobile phones: different processors. Google can't make sure every Android device rubs on the same processor and Dalvik bytecode runs unmodified regardless of what processor you have in the device.

Native binaries work for Apple because all iThings use ARM and that won't change anytime soon.
It's not new. There was a time, not long ago, where all sysadmins were "devops".
Thesis HN: People are now targeting blog posts at Hacker News
Over the past few months, a shift in the popular content showing up on Hacker News has occurred. More and more stories are blog posts catering specifically to hacker news readers. True or False? If this is true, I'm not sure what the implications are except a possible decrease in the quality of the content that gets to the top due to it being upvoted for superficial characteristics that are known to please HN users rather than real insight/value provided by the content.
Oh great, it's you again. Apparently you're not getting it. Start engaging this community more intelligently or go back to 4Chan.
The problem is that a lot of people don't learn how to learn until fairly late in their education. Whatever clarity of thought and healthy skepticism I have developed, I give most of the credit to the great teachers who challenged me. It is misguided to tell most high school students to go and learn completely by themselves. Disregarding the motivation that school brings, someone that opts instead to study alone in their room runs the risk of fooling themselves -- the risk of not really getting the point, or not asking the right questions, or being just plain wrong (for long periods of time) without even realizing it.
What's the best way to find that kind of work?
Yeah, it's far easier on a CAD machine these days. I added that shape to our AutoLisp function library years ago and it only took me a few minutes, including testing.
"i.e. that they are a. doing an unpleasant job they'd rather not do and b. are likely to try to cop off as much as possible"

If you make the mistake of taking management classes, you learn that this is one of two possible theories. I think they're called the "x" and "y" theories--one is the one you just cited, and one is the theory that people like to work, and are intrinsically motivated to do a good job. Of course, business culture does seem centered around the more pessimistic theory which you outlined.
If only it wasn't a single citizenship country :(
Well, this is as far as I could read.

Despite the numbers, social democracy really does work...

Yes, numbers, those pesky axioms that just won't obey when we legislate away the laws of physics.

Oh. My.
Ten Easy Ways To Improve Your Landing Page Conversions
Asteroid Discovery From 1980 - 2010
I remember seeing that when (I think) I was sat in the church for a school service one year. I'd forgotten all about it, thanks for the reminder.
Anything will do, really the only requirement is that you don't have to be there all the time, so this is more geared towards the kind of job where people can be replaced on short notice without interrupting the workflow.

Think retail, that sort of thing. All you need is for it to cover the basic expenses and to leave your head free so you can think about stuff while doing the work. Then when you get home you're not too mentally tired to do some 'real' work for a bit, and on your 'off' days you can implement the stuff that you've been thinking about / working on on a slightly larger scale.

When I was 17 or so I worked in the mail room of a bank while at the same time working hard on becoming a professional computer programmer. If the work had been more demanding mentally that would have been a lot harder.
So .. I have a physics problem. I know, I'll write a simulation to solve it. Now I have two problems.
We launched http://48ers.com a few weeks ago to do a similar thing. Obviously Google doesn't have our scale, raw computing power or potent technical acumen, but it's nice to see them trying.

If it goes anywhere for them we'll most likely just buy them out and quietly sunset their little pet project.
The author claims this is not a legitimate reason: "Just ask any Mac developer". I'm assuming here he means that compilers can solve this problem for you (and hence don't incur a run time performance tax).