skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's also boring, ugly, and at a level of sophistication roughly equivalent to a depressed fourteen-year-old kid's poetry

Waaah, life sucks
And you're going to die
Isn't it horrible
And meaningless?

Portal at least has some craft to it.
Not So Glamorous
People should always be themselves, they shouldn’t try to imitate or impersonate anyone.
Ask HN: I love astronomy and I would like to do something about it.
I love astronomy, and I wanted to become an astronomer since I was kid. I build web sites now.

I would love to do something about it. I would buy a telescope, but I rent an apartment on the 9th floor and I have windows only on one side of the room. I don't even know where to start. After work hours, I am working on my pet projects, and I would love to do something with astronomy.

Any suggestions?
> Of the references you list, only the PageRank one has anything to do with the search algorithm.

...

> There are more than 200 other signals used to determine relevance, and PageRank is only one of them (http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html). The others are completely secret as far as I can tell, and there's no indication what weight is given to PageRank now.

I gave a link to
http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html
which links to
http://research.google.com/pubs/InformationRetrieval.html
which links to
http://research.google.com/pubs/pub35599.html
and
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1571941.1572114
among many other papers that talk about signals other than link structure and means of combining signals to derive a relevance ranking.

But, sure, Google has large scope and importance, and they do have secrets (about search rankings and other topics). Policy statements and economics papers they've published about the alignment of users' interests with their own are only suggestive and don't guarantee good behavior. As long as they have secrets we can't be sure they're not doing evil (or even just failing to serve each of us as well and faithfully as possible).
I believe this article had the basis that the reality of the market is changing. So while Blackberry may have some passionate users now, the gap in quality of their software compared to android/ios is going to keep widening.

Basically they either need to get their software up to speed or move to android.
This, alternately, lends credibility to a smear campaign or a cash grab.

In the case of the former, flaunting rape allegations only to withdraw them makes people susceptible to taking the insidious "asshat" argument at face value without wondering too much because it seems that everyone is acting responsibly and rationally in contrast to earlier.

In the latter, having filed charges whether successful or not (and with the same "asshat" implication) legitimises selling the story to gossip magazines.

In both cases, there is some tarnish to the reputation unless completely debunked. Or of course the allegations are true.
There are 21 convictions of CIA operatives in Italy. They were convicted for capturing Abu Omar and delivering him to Egypt in 2003.

This happened at the height of the US/Middle East conflict (before major combat started in Iraq). Abu Omar was a prominent member of Jamaat Islamiya, a peer organization of Egyption Islamic Jihad, a group publicly affiliated with "al Qaeda" (probably more for PR purposes, though) and a group led in part by Omar Abdel-Rahman, the guy who coordinated the first bombing of the WTC.

Julian Assange is not a leader of a violent Islamist movement. We are not at war with Julian Assange. No foreign policy objective is accomplished by kidnapping him off the streets of Sweden or Iceland or wherever he is now.

I don't want to sound (too much) like I'm advocating for the capture of alleged terrorists off western city streets. That's not my point. My point is this: do I believe that the CIA might try to kidnap or kill someone they believe to be a key figure in a bona fide "terrorist" (ie: organized, violent, competently armed, transnational militant Islamist) organization? Absolutely.

Does that mean kidnapping is S.O.P. for the CIA any time anybody antagonizes the US? Ralph Nader better watch his ass, then; third-party left-wing candidates pose a greater danger to the current administration.
Looking back to 1971, for any 20 year period the S&P 500 netted a gain. For the last 20 years, that gain was 6% per year. OK, but not what I would term "crushing" performance.

For the last 10 years, the S&P 500 is down 2.5% on an annual basis. You could have done better w/ govt bonds & CD ladders.

I think the 20 year plan assumes a greater will power than the greater investing community possesses.
Look-Alike Medical Tubes Kill Patients
This is just message board geekery. Nobody could reasonably argue that the requirement is to "segfault"; C runs in many places where there's no such concept. Jacques point was that C string literals are immutable. Stop bickering with him; he's right.
Hey neighbour! Yeah, I think pretty much our entire area is like that :/
Read 'The Age of Wonder' By Richard Holmes. It will get you outside ;)
I did not say the US government. I said:

"we have read only recently by certain people asked to be arrested in defiance of international law"

Why would I want a screenshot? This was written at 8:30 US time

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/08/21/smear-campaign-suspecte...

That might be irrelevant. My point was that a conspiracy theory is something which has no base in reason. The entirety of these events however cries out for an explanation.
Haha, yes, I've heard that some places (like Nigeria, I think?) have absolutely horrible drivers. I've never been, though, so I can't tell!
Kudos to the Brazilian government:

Advanced societies invariably have subsumed whatever indigenous populations they've encountered, determining those tribes' fates for them. But Brazil is in the middle of an experiment. If peaceful contact is established with the lone Indian, they want it to be his choice. They've dubbed this the "Policy of No Contact." After years of often-tragic attempts to assimilate into modern life the people who still inhabit the few remaining wild places on the planet, the policy is a step in a totally different direction. The case of the lone Indian represents its most challenging test.
Why so many colleges are education-free zones.
This would actually be a terrible idea. Imagine all the rewriting of every little business app people have written for their blackberries, and the instant obsolescence of BES servers. No, RIM just needs to innovate in a way that doesn't seem half-assed.
The US can't even figure out how to assassinate key military adversaries based on Baluchistan, one of the most violent and contentious areas in the world.

I'm not sure this is relevant. Life in Baluchistan is not nearly as amenable to government surveillance as life in Sweden. And besides, I'd say that the US government is pretty skillful at killing people with drones by the point. Not always the people they meant to kill....

The idea that they'd be scheming to kill someone simply out of spite (for nothing they do at this point to Assange is going to keep the machinery he's put in motion from publishing every document disclosed to him) is an insult to our intelligence.

One thing that has surprised me is the degree to which people in the US national security community believe that organizations can be stopped by killing the right leader. It seems like a case of "if all you have is a hammer, then every problem starts to look like a nail" -- we're good at killing individuals but pretty clueless when it comes to understanding mass movements let alone engaging with them or changing their incentives. For example, there was a lot of internal resistance behind backing the Anwar Awakening in Iraq as opposed to continuing the status quo of killing insurgency leaders.

So I agree with you: killing Assange would do nothing to stop WikiLeaks. But I'm not sure that understanding is commonly held in the national security bureaucracy.
The best appsumo for startups - the $25 optimization bundle
I was going to say that this applies only to old versions of calc, but the calc.exe in W7 has a cube root button, and also a generic y root of x button... but no sqrt. O_o
If you actually want to trade, be sure to go for a broker that has a decent real-time simulator. optionsxpress does. Trade on that for a while, always comparing against an index, and see whether you can actually beat it over a signficant amount of time. You probably cannot.
Steam Hardware & Software Survey: July 2010
I work with court-evidence daily; one thing I have learned is that while CSI makes this look really logical... it absolutely isn't.

All the above only really proves intercourse; proving the ''intent'' is the hardest part of law enforcement.
That is the precisely the type of "no smoke without fire" thinking that those who consider Wikileaks a gadfly will be delighted to see stick.
It is! I listen to an episode almost every night. I will listen to the coordinate systems one again, though.
There is simply no evidence that anyone in "the national security bureaucracy" is entertaining the idea of killing Julian Assange. There isn't even any evidence that any military or law enforcement agency in the US is entertaining the idea of apprehending him. On what grounds would they do so?

It is, on the other hand, very easy for me to accept that the US would try to recruit any one of the tens of thousands of well-armed, morally ambiguous bandits carousing around the western tribal provinces of Pakistan. After all, tens of thousands of well-armed American and NATO fighters are waiting just on the other side of an invisible border between Afghanistan and Pakistan to shoot at those same bandits.

There is simply a world of difference between the Assange scenario and the AfPak scenario; an avalanche of incentive exists in AfPak, and yet we're still bound by a kabuki dance of "rules of engagement" and "surgical" airstrikes.

There's no way I can win an argument about this with you, because it demands that I prove a negative: that nobody in the US government, no matter how ineffectual or mentally incompetant, would, given the chance, seek to neutralize Julian Assange (by PR, by arrest, or by murder). But suffice it to say: you're talking to someone who believes that if agents from the FBI, CIA, and AFOSI were standing right in front of Julian Assange in an unlit alley blocked on either end with vans ready to spirit him away, they'd try to get him to answer a few (or many) questions... and then leave him to walk away.
[Edit: This was days later, the one I comment on might never see it. It is just for my personal peace of mind to answer seriously, despite that the subject is a bit more flaming material than editors.]

In hindsight, it doesn't feel good just to answer by a couple of edits on my GF comment.

First, as I wrote, the way how the arguments change over time is irritating -- now you dismissed not only CPAN but also that the OO afaik is superior to Python.

Perl is messy and complex from its natural language inspiration. The main problem with that is the learning time. (Given that you work with non-newbies that can document and follow coding standards.)

The advantage with being messy is that growth happens in more areas. Moose is arguably a better OO then Python at this time. There are now standard ways of extending the language. Etc. (You could call it "better evolvability".)

Personally, I like the insanity -- that Perl breaks most every design rule for programming languages that ever existed, but still works. Well, that and the smart and laid back people of the community.

That is what keeps me using Perl; it puts a smile on my face and keep me happy. When the day ends, motivation is everything. I can't get out of bed in the mornings just for money...

But... I am not religious. A job offer with a nice Lisp variant would tempt me. I should get a book about Haskell and read. Or maybe Perl 6.

To change between Ruby, Perl and Python do seem totally meaningless, they mostly fill the same niche. Which is why the trolling of competitors seems so intense from the True Believers' preferred environments (and yes, that view of Python has been growing on me over the last few years.)
Note that I was talking about parsing a stream of text into a DOM tree or SAX events, not parsing a DOM tree or SAX events into some second-order structure.

Lookahead: Your parser will need to read the entirety of a tag (from the '<' to the '>' or '/>') to know whether it is a start tag or a complete tag. I think my use of the word backtracking was a wee bit sloppy, although the above situation may cause it in some types of LL() parsers. http://www.antlr.org/wiki/display/ANTLR3/3.+LL%28*%29+Parsin...

(Another parsing gotcha: XML isn't even context free, since the start and end tags must match and, for a general parser, there's an infinite number of possible tags.)
They are active:

http://tieguy.org/blog/2010/08/20/notes-on-diaspora-talk/
Strictly speaking, XML could be extremely well done and still have horrible horrible things done with it higher up in the layer cake. ;)

There's no surprise, though, that a shoddy foundation might encourage crappy houses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwins_law
Foursquare iPhone app sends passwords in plain text, don't use
Did a Wireshark session vs. Foursquare for iPhone's traffic after reading the news today. Found something very unpleasant.
Here's a link to the BBC coverage of this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11049316
I've had phenomenal experience with isha yoga's Inner Engineering. It is basically a daily 21 minute practice, that they thought me in a 7-day program. The practices are very simple (no strenuous postures etc). Since i started in Dec 2007, i haven't skipped a single day - the benefits are great enough that coming back to do the practice daily happens naturally.

Now it is also being offered online at www.innerengineering.com.

Above all, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, the person behind all of this, is the coolest, most awesome spiritual master i've come across.
The dropped charges. What else besides the accuser(s) lying could be the reason they would be dropped so quickly?
Your probably correct;
"if meditation doesn't boost attention, you're probably not doing it right."

As an EEG tech, the stories from the 70s were somewhat legendary, about meditation and EEG. Alpha training was considered almost magical.
The specific point that m0nastic just said (and which you seem to have ignored) is that it /doesn't/ stand up to it, with an anecdote that aomeghing glitches up every 20 minutes. Your response makes it sound like it was an ad hominem attack of the form "Zynga is addictive, they use membase, therefore I hate membase due to negative connotaion", as opposed to "Zynga's data seems fail, Zynga uses membase, therefore membase may be suspect as it could be contributing to those failures (making Zynga a weird example to choose)".
You definitely want the MIT Media Lab. They have hardcore things going non from both ends of the spectrum (quantum computing all the way to next gen human interfaces)
RIM owns QNX which has been working in embedded communication devices for years.

Why would they need Android?
Sounds like a good book
"Prayer is also a framework for solving problems"

Agreed. They stay on top of different assumptions: Prayer supposes that there is "god" that can overrule everything, mathematics stands on top of axioms.

Mathematics, even though can be amazingly beautiful in certain cases, is nothing more than a collection of maps (theorems, problems) from assumptions (axioms,definitions) to statements(solutions, proofs).

One of the awesome things about it is that the axioms and definitions are extremely portable to many different domains (in nature). The notion of "number" can be applied to almost everything around us, euclidean geometry laws fit pretty well (yet not perfect) the surrounding physics reality.

Yet, aliens may have completely different mathematics, built on completely different set of axioms, applicable to their needs and easy to process for their "brains". IMHO, it is a little arrogant of us humans to assume that alien intelligence would have the same type of mathematics as us.
I don't think I said I had a right to require google to disclose how their products work.

I do want reassurance that Google's algorithm is aligned with my interests. I want that from everyone who provides me with a service, and every corporation I've worked for has wanted that from their suppliers. If I have evidence that a company is going to work against me in the future, or is doing so now, then I'll choose not to buy their products. Understanding what you're buying is a key part of making markets performing well.

I think BMW does actually try to make cars that are aligned with their customers interests, that's why their customers pay for them them. One part of my point was that I'm not Google's customer - the advertisers are.

I can't choose a car solely by inspection from the outside or even with a test drive. I wouldn't be able to know whether a vehicle was safe, efficient, or reliable over a reasonable lifetime. Fortunately, I don't need to know determine these things for myself for two reasons - we have legally mandated safety and efficiency standards, and the workings of cars are not secret, so other people who know more about cars than I do can examine them and publish their findings.

I wouldn't have to understand the complete search algorithm on my own. Just as with encryption protocols which are also hard to understand, openness would allow a large number of people to participate in the scrutiny. Nobody argues that security protocols should be kept secret because it would be preposterous to try to understand them.

The fact that you suggest that if I don't like Google, my only option is to use Bing as if that isn't much of a choice undermines your argument that the market is working well here.

And no, no other search engine is transparent to my liking. That doesn't make transparency into an unreasonable request - quite the opposite.

Frankly I find your position somewhat strange. Markets work well when we place demands on them, because then suppliers know what to make. If people demand a more open search engine, then perhaps Google will provide one, or maybe a competitor will produce one.

Your argument seems to be that I should not publicly articulate my needs, but instead only choose from what is already on the market and not complain about the aspects I find inadequate. I don't understand what good that's supposed to do.
How ancient kings invented a powerful idea: diplomacy
I wasn't aware Windows Phone 7 was released. I don't know about you, but I can't really tell what a product is like until I've at least read independent reviews, or preferably used it directly.
- Javascript for APIs and backend frameworks (work & fun)

- Perl for scripts and a documentation tool (work)

- Scala for fun little projects (fun)

- C/C++/C# for small things just to keep my skills up (fun)

- Shell for portable scripts and such (work & fun)
I totally agree. Another good pairing I have thought is HP(webOS to me needs better branding then either HP or Palm) and Nintendo. Exclusive access to Nintendo games and Nintendo allows devs to create/submit apps using some of their IP (Luigi but not Mario for example)

Id buy a Nintendo like iPhone.
A couple of pointers: read 'the soul of a new machine' by Tracy Kidder, if you find yourself agreeing with the fact that you are 'signing up' then the problem may be on your end.

But the fact that you think that it is company wide suggests the issue may be with your management.

In that case I would confront them with this. Maybe suggest that that is not a long term workable solution and if they refuse to change tack start looking for other options or put down your foot once to see how they respond to that.

good luck, that's a tough situation to be in.

Don't fall like I did for the 'I've already invested so much in to this, one more thing I can do' trick, that carrot can be moved ahead of you for ever.
Maybe RIM could work on porting apps to android behind the scenes and then when everyone wants android on there bberries, bam. That os is free and open source, right?

thought #2 open source to != profit. Ever heard of apple, microsoft, cisco, etc.

Companies need to protect there intellectual property.
There is simply no evidence that anyone in "the national security bureaucracy" is entertaining the idea of killing Julian Assange. There isn't even any evidence that any military or law enforcement agency in the US is entertaining the idea of apprehending him. On what grounds would they do so?

Um...I'm not claiming that anyone is planning on killing Assange. Please reread my comment. I'm only disputing some factual claims that you made. Just because I think portions of your argument are weak and unsupported (or irrelevant) doesn't mean that I agree with the people you're arguing with.

There is simply a world of difference between the Assange scenario and the AfPak scenario; an avalanche of incentive exists in AfPak, and yet we're still bound by a kabuki dance of "rules of engagement" and "surgical" airstrikes.

When you say "we", are you referring to the US military or the civilian contractors that are running their own airstrikes in AfPak totally apart from the military and military rules?
Coke w/ ice tastes better w/o a straw and directly from the glass...
Nice try, iPhone-lover! You just want to get RIM out of the picture for good, probably so your beloved platform can have the enterprise market all to itself or something... And what better way than with RIM switching their "fan base" over to WinMo.
/~

Seriously, I don't know where to begin dissecting your assertion that "Microsoft has a pretty great mobile OS in Windows 7". To start, it would be prudent to point out that Windows Phone 7 is not even out yet, so who knows how great it will turn out to be. The screen captures so far seem a little bit low on usability to this smartphone user, but it's obviously a bit early to be making such a judgment. At this point, we don't really know whether MS has an ace or a turd up their sleeve.
"You must be really strong to live through it."

Why is that necessarily the case? Perhaps there are some aspects of this culture that make is psychologically easier for him. For example, maybe he believes that his people are with him just in another form.
Digginthefuture predicts future stories on Digg.
Futurama Writer Created And Proved A Brand New Math Theorem Just For Episode
But Linux wasn't started with that motive and I guess neither was Apache.
There is no real authority on whom should call whom by what name except for the one that has to wear said name. The term Indian for a native to the amaerican continents has carried a lot of derogatory meaning. Notwithstanding it is just plain inaccurate.

So I do think we (all of us) can do better than following a 500 year old misconception, if nothing else
"Indigenous" is the word you're looking for, not "native".

I've seen no evidence that the term "Native American" is in any way a term Indians use to describe themselves. It's most likely a neologism of white origin used to assuage white guilt. It's considered respectful to call any group of people by the term they prefer to call themselves, not to invent your own term out of patronizing guilt for 400 year old navigational errors.

(Incidentally, "native American" is ambiguous in that it could also be used to describe people of any race who were born in America. In fact, the term "native American" was used in this manner throughout the 19th century by anti-immigration activists, also known as "nativists". That's why "indigenous" is the most general and ambiguous term.)
Robert Taub is a phenomenal pianist. The app is quite cool and slickly done as well. I can see the complains, esp. here, about the essence of any new (or not new) IP, but Taub got my $5 bucks back in the day to hear him play, and he got my $7.99 today.