skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a several-year-old Dell Vostro 1400, completely stock, and as I mentioned in a different comment, every distro update since Hardy has broken something that used to work. Intrepid broke wireless--I had to swap out my Broadcom wifi card for an Intel one. Jaunty broke graphics--I couldn't use Compiz without doing some insanely obscure rollback patch to a different version of X or something like that (can't recall now as this was some time ago... Google "intel gm965" hardy). Karmic broke sound--every few minutes my music would permanently transform into loud static. Solution: hotkey `killall pulseaudio` to F12. Lucid seems fairly stable so far. I'm crossing my fingers for Maverick. But all of these problems are on the same laptop with the same hardware! (Except for the wifi card).
USB used to need a bit of charge to negotiate a session with the host so you couldn't charge a completely dead battery by connecting to a PC. I'm not sure if that is still true. I just tried to charge a dead Canon point-and-shoot camera over microUSB and it didn't work.

The dock does a/v out without needing another connector. For example, the HTC EVO has an additional HDMI out port.

Apple has added additional features like the control capsule on headphones.

It'd actually be nice if the 30-pin dock connector was standardized and everyone used it. Apple probably isn't too keen since USB beat Firewire the last time Apple tried to standardize a connector interface.
Finally facebook is making use of Divyashot it bought few months ago.
If you are ever asked to make a Pie Chart for general distribution please take this as a perfect example of what not to do. This is almost completely unreadable for 6-8% of the male population who suffer from colour-blindness (myself included).
But it's not the entire story. Just because X dollars was spent on the military for example, how much of that X was actually put to good use? As a former employee of a military contractor, I can attest there are entire companies built around taking advantage of how inefficiently the government spends its money.
Its obvious that we need shorteners, the original purpose being email but Twitter bucked that trend.
So now, what we dont need is more URL shorteners. What we do need is more sites to implement their own shortening like YouTube and Flickr (eg, http://youtu.be/3jDfSqtG2E4 and http://flic.kr/p/MGuRJ). Its all about the rev canonical. This way, a shortened URL will stay about as long as that site is about and the internets doesn't break.

People seem to want click stats though, although i dont see why you cant get these out of google analytics etc.

Check out http://revcanonical.appspot.com/ for more.
I can't imagine it's accomplished very much differently than any radio-transmitting iPod attachment for a car.
Just because a user might search for the terms every day doesn't mean it's necessarily even possible for them to convert more than once (like for a subscription service). On top of that a lot of searches are really just content-addressable bookmark lookups.

"searches" is some multiple of "customers searching"
I think they are now "seeing other people" after Denmark made some comment about expanding glaciers that Greenland took personally !
I do like the idea, but a cursory look at their 'receipt' and where the numbers come from showed a pretty large flaw: half of social security and medicare is paid for by employers. Unless you consider your salary to be an extra 8.65% than it really is, you're not accounting for all the taxes the government receives based on your paycheck. Although this is really a "hidden tax" on your paycheck, most people don't think of it as part of their salary (which is why they do it this way).

There's also other types of taxes paid by non-individuals, like corporate taxes, estate taxes, and the like.

In any case, it means the numbers in their receipt for SS and Medicare are off by a factor of 2, so you should evaluate this only based on the idea, not on their actual numbers. (Not to mention there are likely an abundance of other problems with this method, like spending that is not part of the budget, or when the government is over-budget and issues bonds to pay for it.)
I called one of my senators, Patty Murray, since she's up for reelection. I also called her challenger, Dino Rossi. I talked with staffers from both. Sadly, neither indicated that they had taken any position on S. 3804.
I guess this is a tiny point, but is there really no supported way to update from the command line?
People need to stop this meme. He is a religious nut. He does not deserve the attention.
From the linked Thirdway page:

> Would this be hard and expensive for the federal government to do? It shouldn't be. The mathematical formula to do this is very simple. The Social Security Administration does this every year ... This would be far easier. It could also be done online. An IRS website should be available so people could key in the amount they pay in taxes and a receipt pops up showing several dozen recognizable programs and the amount that went to each of them

Your point, I take it, is about government resistances and inefficiencies, and spot on. But it wouldn't have to be the government to do this. The information is available. Thirdway, or anyone, could do it themselves and make it available to any website. A developer could do an app and sell it for a dollar.

edit: that was quick: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1745312
I can't stand Apple's iDevice ports. They are wide, difficult to plug, and feel like they will break or snap off. They also collect lint like there is no tomorrow.

Apple's magnetic power plugs on the other hand are awesome! I suppose magnetic interference prevents them from becoming a digital port, but it sure would be nice!
People, especially in management, really need to read and understand Kohlberg's theory of moral development [1] before comparing adult incentivized behavior with the behavior of children.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlberg%27s_stages_of_moral_de...
Except the G1 does audio out with a hybrid port, so it's not that good a reason. (It does have its own share of issues, but not being able to use a normal micro-usb cable is not one of them.)
We do need them. While twitter pretty much spawned the whole ecosystem, there still is a very important and functional use for URL shorteners.

The biggest, outside of twitter, has to be the method of emailing enormous html links to someone. With so many email clients out there, it is a crap shoot to send a link. Personally and professionally bit.ly has really helped out in those cases.

With that in mind, I wonder what impact this announcement has on bit.ly and the other players. Does google provide analytics on their shortened links? What is the value be between the different shorteners now that Google has an offering.
That's actually a better characterization of the newspaper industry than you probably mean for it to be. From the editors' perspective, of course it's all about the news (I'm sure this is true for Google's search engineers too). But from the publisher's perspective, the news basically is some very attractive window-dressing.
You made my week with that link. Thank you.
I thought the same thing. It looked as though they completely left out weapons procurement outside the scope of the wars, which seems almost dishonest. But it feels like I'm nitpicking; overall it's definitely a worthwhile effort.
>SQL is actually quite often a bad way to try to answer those questions, too! See http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/data-warehousing.html for an entertaining explanation.

That's why data warehouses rely upon cubes/OLAP for analysis. It is a specialized solution that serves the need very well.

>One great point about MongoDB is that it makes the ETL process a lot easier (you don't have to prepare tables with the right schema and it supports large amounts of data).

So does a CSV. In fact, so does the last silver bullet, which is XML. XML is a loose or as strict as you want it to be.
Megan McArdle is skeptical: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/09/spain-co... , at least skeptical that Spain could've cooked the books to the extent reported.
Good point. congrats to you!
Care to speculate on the hardware video encoding capabilities of the capable iDevices?
The title isn't a question, it's a statement.

I'm pretty sure Mr. Stonebraker's English is better than that.
But does it have a spellchecker?

In all seriousness, though, this feels like a cargo cult. Duplicate the chrome (as it were) in an attempt to try and duplicate the community feeling.
I don't exactly know why, I just find it easier read with 4 spaces. Maybe a subconscious issue about the eyes having to move more with 8 spaces.
Are you asking for something like Hpricot (http://hpricot.com/) or Nokogiri (http://nokogiri.org/)? They will let you parse and search HTML and XML using CSS or XPath selectors.
I recently hopped on the custom shortened bandwagon for our twitter accounts. mostly for branding purposes.

macrumo.rs
toucharca.de

even if people don't click through, they see the names. and I'm not too worried about long term stability of the links, since they are only sent out through twitter, which tends to be a rather transient medium anyway.
Total failure of a product which did almost everything just exactly wrong. Wasted a year of my life on it before I realised it was a total flop.
MicroUSB can do AV out, it just can't do HDMI. I would imagine the apple connector can't do HDMI either. Although I really don't know how many "free" pins there are in the 30 pin connector that could be purposed for it.
Pretty good list of management wisdom. I would have to disagree about one point though:

6. Praise people publicly, but discipline people privately

I used to completely agree with this earlier, but somebody(can't recall who) pointed a problem with this principle, a while ago.

Most things in the work place even if 'done' by one person has contributions from many to enable that person complete that assignment/task/project. Praising that one person in front of others can make the other feel shorted.

I would prefer to do this: "Discipline people privately and praise people privately, unless it is the whole team that is being praised"

Of course, there are always special occasions, when one has to boost up the standing of an employee in front of others, in preparation for bigger roles.

my 2c
Design Ignites Change. (worth a good look)
Point being, Einstein spent a large part of his career completely unable to deal with the sheer weirdness of quantum physics. ("God does not play dice," "spooky action at a distance," and so forth.)

Ultimately he was able to adapt his worldview to include the implications of quantum theory, but until then he was most certainly not in a state where he would "never understand physics."

It was a great essay, actually, just a terrible lede, as EY himself acknowledged in the comments.
The continual realization that nothing private stays private. The number of times that Facebook has added privacy settings set at default-allow has made me extremely wary of putting anything on my page that I wouldn't want an employer to see-- and for that, I have LinkedIn. The only thing I still have Facebook for now is for family in other states.
If you do you just get:

The link may not be safe

Safe.mn
Safe.mn is a URL shortener service: we transform long URLs into short ones. Before Safe.mn redirects visitors to the long URL, we ensure the final destination is safe. We have found the following potential problems with the website:

Questionable content: Adult

and then a link to the site.
Python's a great language for teaching this. In my an undergrad CS languages course we wrote both an interpreter and compiler (to MIPS assembly) for Lisp in Python in just a couple weeks. I'd written an interpreter for another language in C++ once and spent 3/4 of my time getting pointers and other language constructs right.
If the entire web were RESTful, we probably wouldn't; however, the web is full of broken applications that embed lengthy get request parameters into URLs. I'm not saying that get params are bad, just that it reaches a level of absurdity very quickly.
Still, it's a general law of NPR reporting that a left-wing think tank is called a "think tank" and a right-wing think tank is called a "right-wing think tank".

I don't really have a dog in this fight, but a quick search suggests you may be mistaken. [site:npr.org "right-wing think tank"] os 8 results; [site:npr.org "think tank"] has about 2380. Nothing funny in robots.txt.

But you never know, maybe there aren't that many transcripts on there or something...
Well if we're going to start coming up with different grades of angel, we can at least use the thousands of years' worth of existing terms. The level above "Angel" is "Archangel".

Then it's Principalities, Powers, Virtues, Dominations, Thrones, Cherubim and finally Seraphim (the exact order can vary, but I'm going with Dante).

That should provide enough fuel for angel-on-angel one-upmanship for now. (If not, we can move on to the Jewish angelology, which includes four additional ranks above Seraphim.)
Considering the site we're on, I'm betting we're a minority that cares (or pays attention to) privacy measures-- the ones who would call us paranoid are the ones who are getting divorces after putting pictures of their mistresses on Facebook.

That said, it'll be interesting to see if more millenials leave Facebook as their parents join.
True, but it's Google's search engineers that made this change, not it's ad engineers.
To be honest, when I first read the title I thought that it was yet another basic article about writing a basic lisp interpreter (google returns 47000+ links on this subject). But of course when I saw it was written by lisp über guru Peter Norvig I knew it'd be good.

(I was amazed when I saw that he wrote the scheme interpreter in Java in order to learn java better: http://norvig.com/jscheme-design.html)

Edit: fix grammar.
I call it cargo-cult because Shuttleworth makes UI decisions like "move the window buttons" to semi-emulate OSX, but seemingly without doing any research as to why such might succeed or fail. Originally they were even in a different order--his only concession to angry end-users was to arrange them like OSX, in a different order than originally envisioned. Or take the indicator applet: his complaint was that the regular system tray icons are cluttered and disorganized. Solution: reinvent the system tray (which had fairly clear HIG defined by Gnome, which for the most part were followed), almost bit for bit, but with different colored icons, no tooltips, and no default left-click action. If you look at the old system tray and the new indicator applet, they quite literally are almost identical in appearance/clutterdness (yes, he merged mail and IM, and with Maverick merged volume and the music player, so that's two less icons, but the usefulness of those changes is up for debate).

I call it a dictatorship because big decisions like that are made by him, seemingly by fiat. He even calls himself SABDFL (self-appointed benevolent dictator for life).

Shuttleworth is trying to be the Jobs of the OSS world--making design decisions because he thinks he knows software design best. Which is fine--like you said, he's paying for it all. But the difference between him and Jobs is that Jobs defines useable software where Shuttleworth just copies and reinvents. And in my opinion, Shuttleworth doesn't seem to have the insight into users' thought processes that Jobs has.

Again, you're right, the man is paying for it all, so who am I to complain? I can just pick a different distro. But the problem is that with all of these more serious stability problems remaining unsolved and stuff like windicators and indicator applets and fonts getting all the attention, I and others might eventually get fed up and switch to a more stable distro (does one exist? Will I go back to Windows?), or not recommend Ubuntu to friends.

What should I tell my friend: Yeah, install Ubuntu, it's great, but whatever you do, don't let it automatically update because your laptop might never suspend correctly after that?
Simon - The list compiled in this post is of people who've raised actual funds and so who are not just investing their own money.

Micro VCs seems to be a more apt description but the popular/tech media def seems to have gravitated towards the term super angel.
what? I wasn't saying RIM is a "great artist" at all, they're terrible. The quote is supposedly from steve jobs.

While I'm writing, my opinion is that the big problem with RIM's tablet is that they didn't think at all about designing hardware that met the enterprises needs, or as you say "people with a lot of money". If they did, they would have made a tablet great at capturing employees thoughts and ideas. My opinion is that this requires two things:

1) A tablet that handles multitouch AND pen input very well (i.e. get n-trig / wacom hardware/licensing for the touchscreen)
2) A tablet that doesn't have a small 7 inch screen. The screen size equivalent to a stenographer's book is 10 inches. It's great for writing down lists of things down.
No secret services?
Did anyone else find it hilarious that an entire section of time is blocked out for "Administrative Happiness"?
Another thing people forget is the variety of devices Ipods plug into. Your high-tech treadmill, for example, uses pins dedicated to video out.
Well Micro-USB was standardized by the USB-IF in 2007 and the dock connector was first used in 2003, so I'm going to go with "linear time and a desire to be backwards compatible with the enormous ecosystem of products which provide them with a significant competitive advantage".

I mean, I can go to most hotels now and more or less count on the fact that even if I forgot to pack a charging cable, I can stick my phone on the alarm clock's dock connector. That's a big factor contributing to the low-friction iDevice ownership experience.

*edited to reflect the fact that the dock connector came in with the 3rd gen iPod in 2003, not the 1st gen in 2001.
Just reverse the phase polarity in the coupler coils.
I've always thought Jay should go into politics. Because its hard to find any word in that article that isn't spin.
But the Helios probes aren't constantly accelerating.
(NSFW) Eric Schmidt vs Steve Jobs
I want to alter the world for good in some small but tangible way. Right now I'm trying to do this through creating better technology.
I wonder if these numbers are made up or have any basis in reality.

One item that caught my eye was spending on the DEA of only $3.14: Wikipedia puts yearly spending on law enforcement related to the War On Drugs at about $44 billion [1] and gross federal tax revenue for 2009 at about $2.1 trillion [2]. This works out to roughly 2% of tax revenue spent on the War On Drugs. For the $5,400 of federal income tax in the linked example that would work out to more like $100 rather than $3, no?

Of course, the Wikipedia article doesn't state how much of the $44 billion goes to the DEA and how much goes to other law enforcement agencies.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs#Costs_to_taxpayers

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#Ma...
And 4 results for [site:npr.org "left-wing think tank"]
PG's thoughts on New Twitter
I think anything built on top of IPv4 must be less expensive than IPv6, simply because the cost of converting to IPv6 is deceptively high and because we'll inevitably need to build an overlay layer anyhow.

The overhead of NAT is irrelevant on overlay networks; it scales linearly with the number of direct connections established (OSPF would call them "adjacencies"), but probably scales logarithmically with the number of relationships on the network.
Upgrade points noted.

JIRA 4.3 and Confluence 3.5 will make it much easier to connect to Crowd. No editing of files required.

We don't have write support for the Posix schema scheduled for Crowd, I'm afraid, so no promises on that front.
The Overton Window Concept is a potential anchoring case for this law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
Hate to break the analogy, but, actually: not true. There's a simple numeric scaling bottleneck with IPv6 already: routing table size. There will, for the foreseeable future, be scarcity in portable routable addresses.
Are housing prices still inflated? Also, are people able to renegotiate their mortgages?

The US also had a major housing bubble. I am interested in how Spain is handling it.
It is obvious if you think about it, but often overlooked by developers attempting to debug websites.
I like this quote from the article, "It's all about feeling the granularity of prioritization." And this comes close to a good takeaway from what Belsky describes. But I think he is wrong about the repetitive productivity routines being negative and causing a "burden". I find that constantly revisiting an incomplete task gives me a feeling of control of the process and gives me new information about the task. It builds a feeling around the task.
how can I improve my personal site?
To be fair, the statements we get from Social security suffer from the following very serious problems, which actually have the opposite effect of the one you describe:

1) They aren't redeemable for the promised amount if congress lowers benefits, as it has many times already. We all know that benefits will be lowered significantly (or removed) by the time most of us here reach retirement age. Anyone under 40 should consider the money deducted for Social Security flushed permanently.

2) They are not in projected inflation adjusted dollars. The $1500 per month someone read on the piece of paper is actually in 2060 dollars (for example) not 2010 dollars; if shown in 2010 dollars it would be laughably small.

These sorts of numerical tricks would never be tolerated if a private firm was perpetrating them.
This was the old version which I recently changed: http://sahillavingia.com/old/
And the market could be improved so easily:

* Make the top listings more interesting by sorting them differently (eg. by a ratio of time, comments and ratings instead of the total number of downloads). There should be more change and not the same apps in the top positions for years.

* Combat spam publishers (those with hundreds of sound boards and similar apps, which pollute the new listings by pushing interesting apps way down, which happens rather frequently). One idea could be a timeout between publishing/updating apps, for example only one app per 12 or 24 hours. Could be adjusted depending on the rating of the apps.

* Make a market website where developers can link to their apps (a la AppStore)

* This app website should have an push-to-phone button. If clicked Google pushes the app's package name to the user's device, which opens a popup for installing it. That would _greatly_ simplify installing apps - QR codes simply don't provide enough usability.

* And as dpcan said, the ability to describe an app with more than 325 characters.

I get the feeling as if the Android market is just not a high priority project of Google.
Vala and the comma operator
Microwave.

Followed shortly by evacuating the office for the rest of the day to escape the horrible stench.
It's all totally pointless. So might as well try to change the world and such.

Like Kirk said right before he finally died (about doing something hard that made a difference): "It was fun".
I'd be careful about reading too much into Minecraft's success with iterative development.

Here's the simple truth: Many (most?) big-budget games are meant to be played only once or twice. If it's not 100% ready to go when first launched, nobody will stick around to see it finished. Minimum viable product is hard to apply here. (This also partly explains why there aren't very many good FOSS games.)
We have a big meeting coming up soon where I work. I can very much relate. I was recently thinking "That something like 1500 man hours wasted on all this togetherness when we could be accomplishing something."