skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While that sounds reasonable, by your suggestion no policy can ever be changed if it is found to be too expensive to complete.

Thats no good either.
This is a laughably stupid piece. It says nothing new about beer and everything about the amazing ignorance of the author. There are so many beers and even types of beer, that to consider Coors, Pabst, Miller Lite, Budweiser, Colt 45 and Guinness to represent a cross-section of beers requires him to willfully avoid learning anything about beer.

Conventional American lagers are ONE type of beer in am ocean, The range from stouts to wheat beers is astounding. This is as if I compared only cars from China, and threw in one Chevy to analyze the car market.

He ignores the fast-growing premium stuff, e.g. Sam Adams. Every town has its own version; here in Tampa, it's Ybor Gold. Of course they don't, individually, sell as much as Budweiser; by definition, a local brew is only local.

Yes, better beer is more expensive. That cheaper beer sells more is hardly news. But to think he's found any information in a test that is designed to produce the result he got is nonsense. Of course, five cheap, American lagers taste about the same, and of course, it's obvious that an Irish stout tastes different.

I have a Welsh, beer-loving GF; the author could at least try Wikipedia.
I complete agree.
Anyway, when did it become the role of members outside a group to tell them whether or not they should be offended by the name they are called?

Um, when they started calling them names? Now, don't take this the wrong way, but that sounds a little defensive. It's quite normal for people to explain the reason they chose a particular characterization of a group, that name catching on, and the other group getting affronted at being called a group. At this point a new characterization, one without connotations, is found. All along, people keep explaining that there's nothing bad at being in a group, or alternately that grouping is only done to divide and conquer.

no one ever uses the term Americans to refer to all inhabitants of the North and South Americas.

And that'll be because they know they'd be misunderstood. I used to call people from the USA "people from the United States", but that got too cumbersome. So I switched to Yanks - fully aware that it is also a poor choice of word, but at least more specific and apolitical around here. I've most recently transitioned to "American" plus qualifiers (such as state), since I've been reading stuff written by themselves. I don't see any other words coming beyond the horizon, except maybe cultural ones.

However, I wouldn't put calling all inhabitants of the Americas "American" past biologists and other non-geopolitically minded people.
Cloudant's BigCouch is Now Open Source
On Henry Ford and his $5/day wages
People born after 1981 have lower privacy standards, Loopt CEO says
This is very trippy and will take some time to process. Part of me is in revolt: "You shouldn't be able to make a film about me and my house!" And yet, I know that it's not about me or my house per se.

Yet this is clearly a portent of things to come: when everything I see is 'about' me.

For instance, when people cull Street View data (or something similar) to identify houses with wood siding, and send direct-marketed advertising with a "before" and "after" photos of the house with aluminum siding or fresh paint. I could potentially identify east/west facing houses and market shade trees or awnings.

My movies could be similarly contextualized: living in LA I get to see a lot of architecture I recognize since so many films are made here. So I see Fox Plaza in Die Hard or Fight Club. Why shouldn't Des Moines residents see 801 grand topple, instead?

And the ending, as trees 'reclaim' the space? I've often wondered what people might think if they were to return to this place following a catastrophic collapse of civilization. Now I have a visual inkling of what they might see.

There's something interesting going on here that more insightful minds will hopefully digest.
The Gender-Neutral Pronoun: 150 Years Later, Still an Epic Fail
Here's the best reference page for the project:

http://esolangs.org/wiki/C2BF
I was going to write that Android needs a Dictator that lays down the law with minions and partners alike, especially to enforce a "No Devices That Suck" policy. But honestly, does Google care? If Dell wants to ship a device that sucks, let HTC prove this is a terrible idea by eating Dell's lunch. If Android 2.2 is better than Android 1.5, let customers vote for 2.2 with their wallets.

Of course, there is always the risk that a customer who hates a Dell Aero will replace it with an iPhone instead of an HTC, ...
The risk validation pyramid
If I can't finish the book in a few days then it usually takes forever to finish. Sometimes when I pause the reading for some time, then it's hard to restore the context so you can continue enjoying the book (true mostly for non technical books). But I agree that it would be more productive to define two or three categories and keep only one open book in each, while switching between categories.
How hard is it to throw together an Emacs command that re-styles your parenthesis? I know the creators of Go went so far as a to make a program that converts "valid" Go code into "canonical" Go code. Parentheses seem like an easy problem to solve. If people can re-parenthesize their code with the press of a button, you can still have the community interoperability without having to sacrifice inclusiveness of personal eccentricities.
I'm wary of any article that begins: "The Truth About ..." and I haven't read this one yet.

"The Truth About ..." is designed to get your juices flowing and to get you to read.

Caveat lector.
Slideshow on my Intel Core 2 E5400 with the latest version of Firefox.

If this is the best HTML 5 has to offer over Flash, color me not impressed.

EDIT: There seems to be something wrong with Firefox on my computer. It doesn't seem to want to update HTML canvas properly unless I'm actually moving the mouse around in the canvas. Might have something to do with it. Weird...
From what I've seen, cc fees are usually about .40c + up to 3% a transaction. A big cut (25%) of a $2 charge, but far different than suggesting it's 100+% of revenue.
The tracing overheads are pretty huge. Running with tracing but without compilation takes 107s.
Everything Dell is doing is Android 1.5... they're WAY behind the curve. People need to wake the hell up and realize that the most important part of their devices is the EXPERIENCE, not the bells and whistles. They won't even remotely be able to compete on the experience front without Android 2.2.
The important distinction between fashion and software is that clothing is useless unless properly manufactured. The materials and manufacturing process are an integral part of the final product. To duplicate a garment is to reverse engineer it, source the materials, and then remarket it as a knock-off, or as some imitation item under another brand.

Fashion doesn't need strict copyright enforcement because by the time you've reverse engineered something and put it into production, it's already wildly out of date.

You can see how Apple applies this principle to their main products, aggressively innovating so that by the time their products are copied, which is inevitable, they have already obsoleted them.

Software can be duplicated at effectively zero cost to produce an identical copy. It also has a much longer lifespan for mature packages (Office, XP, etc.), where people will use the same software, plus or minus patches, for five years or more.

There needs to be some kind of reasonable limitation on what people are able to do with software that they purchase, so at the very least a form of copyright is required, not unlike protections offered to books.

The real thorn is that software patents are mostly preposterous, with very few requiring actual innovation to produce. It's like trying to patent a plot twist or a character quirk and then suing all authors that use it.
In my experience, this isn't the sort of framework that Emacs users or developers really want. It is too much under one roof; a way to edit and maintain Makefiles, an object system (eieio), a reimplementation of tags, "smart" completion, a parser generator library, ...

These components would be useful on their own, but as a whole, it's not very useful. EIEIO only supports the exact subset of CLOS that the author needed for CEDET. The parser generator is only good for parsing C and C++. Etc., etc. The reality is that I don't want to write this stuff myself for every language, so I appreciate the generic-ness, but it's just not the Emacs way.

Take a look at SLIME, for example, and notice how it doesn't try to generalize to all languages. And yet people have implemented SLIME support for various non-Lisp languages, and the support is actually useful.

What Emacs users really want is a mode for their language that fits like a glove, but shares common functionality with the rest of Emacs. M-. is the general "find me this thing" command, but it's good when the mode-specific integration layer extends this to actually understand your code. What's not good is when it becomes another generic mechanism that doesn't quite work.

Anyway, the Lisp community is still learning about libraries. (I write a lot of Lisp, but I come from a Perl background. Perl gets libraries. Emacs Lisp does not.)

Eventually Emacs will have "packages" and people can start factoring the libraries out, and then people can start cleanly improving them. Then CEDET should be excellent, because you can reuse most of the code as you're creating $perfect-integration-layer-for-your-language. Until someone takes the initiative to refactor, though, people are just going to do their own thing.

(First we need a package system. Then we need some way to write unit tests. Then we need to write the unit tests.)

Incidentally, I have noticed a few projects that depend on eproject now... which is exactly the use case I designed eproject for. Yes!
> vodka taste tests

The bottom shelf to mid shelf price increment is pretty damn obvious in taste. The cheap stuff is bad. Once you're paying over ~$35 per liter I doubt anyone can tell anything apart.
Well, the largest problem I can see is that it's hard for customers to know what version of the OS comes in the phone they want. Google owns the Android trademark, they could just prevent anyone who isn't complying with certain guidelines from advertising the name Android.

They could call it whatever they want, just not Android.
I currently use Moneris for an e-commerce site. The application took over 2 months and their fees are quite high. They use PayPal Payment Pro Flow as their gateway. That was probably the only high point on this company as it was easy to integrate with Magento.

For my next startup, I plan on using Pay Pal's simple merchant account. It is easy to setup and has no monthly fees.

Let me know what you end up with.
Modernist Cuisine: Nathan Myhrvold's $500 Cookbook
Well, I quibble about the "multiplier effect" (which I admit I haven't seriously studied at all), since it's my understanding that it ignores the costs of taking out all that debt (but since I guess this happens in a period when no one wants to borrow anyway ... well, as I said, I haven't seriously studied it :-).

However the "can't survive contact with real humans" is spot on. One thing you left out as I understand it is that you're supposed to pay back the money you borrowed after the economy recovers. This of course never happens.

True, some countries do decide to seriously pay back debt, I understand Canada did a lot not too long ago, and we paid back a lot of our WWII debt, but those are not the same thing.

And countries that run their operating budgets on ever increasing debt inevitably renege on it one way or another (getting conquered was not uncommon in times past), with I suspect the recent technology based boom (say the post-WWII one) being a special case of the game being able to last a lot longer than normal. (I.e. that's our (the hackers) fault :-).
$86,000,000 / 480 units = $179,000/unit ?!
Sounds like someone is getting ripped off. My guess it's the government with the low income housing tax credit.
Can you patent patents and then sue the patent office for patent violation? I hope so.
Because they spend a ton of money on crap "enhancements" to the original UI (except for HTC sense which I don't really care about, all others I've seen are crap). If they just released plain Android they wouldn't have anything to differentiate themselves. The problem with their plan is that they suck at software development and their enhancements make the phones worse and outdated.
Missoula. I might be slightly biased.
The Wilderness Downtown - Google Chrome Experiment [HTML5]
Open source linux hardware hacker board - The Chumby Hacker board
Except Hoover didn't engage in either a massive or unprecedented spending. All his public pronouncements and actions show that he was concerned with keeping the budget close to balanced over stimulus, whereas FDR was the opposite.

EDIT: Here you go:
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year1929_0.html#usgs302

Total federal spending went from 3.8 to 4.3 billion under Hoover over the 4 years from 1929,1930,1931,1932. Hopped to 5.1 billion in FDR's first budget. 15% is "increased spending", 3% is really not, in the context of rolling over a large institution, it's basically holding even or cutting a little.

Far lower rate of increase under Hoover than under, say, Reagan. Hoover also lobbied for a big tax increase in 1931 to "balance the budget", and typically in economic contractions the states and municipalities cut spending, because they have to run balanced budgets by law most of the time.

Also, the recent stimulus bill was over 1/3 tax cuts -- so it's not really like like they're spending more than the Iraq war. More fun with statistics.
Facebook and farmville are the ghettos of the social media world, playing to the same audience feelings that Jerry Springer did in the 90's. Remember, we all watched that show back then.

No, we did not.
1) You lose credibility (whether its unfounded or not is irrelevant)
2) People refuse to spend much time looking at your code

Over the years I've spent coding I've learned not to judge other coders based on their preferred style. Often enough I'll encounter really brilliant code whose style I find aesthetically unappealing (or "non-standard"), and I would have been worse off if I chose to ignore it. Some people just Think Different, and that's not always a bad thing.

Conversely, I've learned that prickly people who get red-faced upon encountering an unfamiliar style are often worth avoiding.
I would hold off judgment till when HTML5 gets properly hardware accelerated.
Check out Grizzly Growler. http://grizzlygrowler.com

It's a blog dedicated to Montana microbreweries.
The problem is the graph is beyond misleading, it is false. It purports to show a decline in web traffic, when what it really shows is a decline in web traffic relative to other protocols (including video, which is a further mistake since a lot of video often comes over the web, and can't be mutually exclusive as the graph presents it.)

In absolute terms however, the web is still growing, which is why it's not just a matter of opinion.
Adams doesn't address the issue of quality of practice. Practice makes permanent. Perfect practice makes perfect.

There is a huge advantage to practicing something useful even if you're not very good compared to the best. Like he says, he can beat 99% of people in eight ball, even though he'd probably be easily defeated by most professionals. Of course, playing billiards is pretty much useless. I don't consider my computer skills in any area to be top notch, but when I help out non-technical people they think I am some kind of wizard. I say "hey, I barely did anything!", but to them any interaction with a computer is a complete mystery. So I'm not a great programmer, and I'm definitely not a great sysadmin, but with just some basic skills 99% of people will defer to mean on technical issues.

I agree that this is a vital lesson to teach kids. It is even more important to give them the freedom and support to discover what endeavor they really want to apply that effort to.
Men Waste £2,000 in Fuel While Lost Because They Wont Ask for Directions
Uh... it's art. It's supposed to be form over function.
I have 60000 fans on my facebook page and it doesn't really help me. So when I hear about ~3000 fans, I don't see how you can do something of it. Same remark for tweeter
Telling people what hardware they can and cannot use to run your code isn't very Open.
Did you just slashdot that blog with a single HN comment?
Bah. No Street View in Germany yet.

Tried London. Interesting, though the trees did apparently grow through cars. I certainly would be happy if there was more content like this.
Kind reminder: please (re)read the HN guidelines
Yes, many probably could. But that doesn't mean that the column's message was primarily about running workshops.
Sounds about right, although I'd bundle collecting & verifying requirements in with the 1/3 time for design.

When you say "a day of coding," what fraction of a normal workday are you able to spend actually writing code?
Sure it is. You restrict the use of your brand to people who meet your restrictions, à la Firefox. Everyone else can still use the code, just not the brand.
Apparently the editors at Inc. came up with that headline, not the author:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646234
I was looking for that one.

In one paragraph he says they didn't do anything and the algorithms must have changed.

And then he called his SEOs.
This whole post boils down to, *After being dope-slapped for SEO hijinks, we leaned how to properly make people aware of us. Aren't we cool?"
I forgot about this one. I was thinking of the 38 limit for startup. OK back to reading PAIP so I can master lisp by the time I am 50..
I suppose you're right. Seems strange for those things to apparently be so badly broken by OS upgrades that they need months/years to fix. You'd think the savings on support costs alone would be substantial from not having to support older, presumably buggier, versions of the OS. Though I suppose most of the support for these devices comes from the telcos not from the handset makers.

Anyway, here's a radical and not necessarily good idea: what if the base "Android" release didn't have a launcher/etc at all, leaving what's commonly called "the UI" entirely up to handset makers. Sure, spin off the existing launcher as a separate open source project, but make it just one competitor among many. If diversity in this area is good and manufacturers really do want to differentiate themselves, make that a core part of the platform. It's not like it's that expensive to write a launcher.
I drink upwards of a gallon of water a day, maybe only 3/4 gal in winter. I'm very easily dehydrated. I weigh ~350lbs.

Just a reminder that studies may find a typical or probable result. They do not find cause -> effect for everyone.
Very cool, though it would be about 114% better if they used just normal divs inside a single window.

If you manage to navigate away from the browser, good luck restoring the state.

Also why to spoil beautiful content by putting chrome (lowercase) around it?
I don't remember ever playing a game this simple that made me start giggling.
Marx was held back by his historical era (as are we all); he believed that evolution consisted of a progression. We now know pretty well that evolution goes any damn way it wants, and imposing a direction as "forward" is wishful thinking at best. The spontaneous dissolution of the state is probable - eventually. Very eventually. Forcing progress, as Lenin hoped to do, was naive, although (imho) well-intentioned.

The breakup of the USSR is not a victory for anybody, really. The very presence of the USSR in the first place was a detriment to the mindshare of communism, and its breakup ensured nothing beyond the fact that Americans could say they "won" the Cold War, whatever the hell that means.

Something like the original communist ideal can be seen - as it's always been - in the spontaneous organization of maker communities and other types of community. But if real communism is ever going to appear among us hominids, it's not going to come out of a State that grants it to the masses. The masses are just going to have to make the State superfluous. And that is not going to happen any time soon, libertarian science fiction notwithstanding (I like my Vinge as well as anybody).
They missed the death of blogging and Facebook, and of course the death of Microsoft.
Are there many new applications that require the use of Android 2.x? It seems to me that could be a serious problem for "Android": consumer buys new Dell phone running "Android," finds they can't run half the cool apps their friends' EVOs can because they've got some old version of Android, consumer now hates Android.
Yes it does, at first. Low income housing ain't what it used to be. My wife works with low income families. Many of these residences are at least comfortably middle class. Some are quite nice and you'd never know they were "low income" unless you saw the sign.
Doing workshops seems scammy to me. It's like doing popup ads.

Sure, you could, but eugh.
Hefty! As an exercise, any sense in inlining the tracing into compiled code? That way you sacrifice the startup time benefits of the JIT (by AOT compiling at start) but still retain trace specialization.
Is anyone using the Dropbox API to do backups? Synchronization is a tricky issue but full backups/restores might make some users happier.
There's way more important things in life than money.