skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Things are not black and white like that. Someone might be intelligent, and have lots of evidence, but maybe they're trying to deceive you. Alternatively, even very intelligent and very well informed people are sometimes wrong about things that are within their field of expertise. e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thomson,_1st_Baron_Kelv... .

This happens even in the exact sciences. Move to a field like economics, and you'll find lots of smart and knowledgeable people who can't even agree on the basic principles.
Apple's AirPort works fine for me at the moment. I just wish that its support of IPv6 included DHCPv6…

What I don't understand is that most ADSL-modems include a router? I usually set it up in bridge-mode, like I did with the ancient Zyxel 650.

Funny development: I will now have to replace the modem because it has become the limiting factor: The maximum throughput of the modem is about 60% of what my current ADSL connection could handle.
Rootless Root - The Unix Koans of Master Foo (Eric S. Raymond)
No. It is a networking event that revolves around building stuff.I have attended 4 of them and I cannot get enough.
Optimizing text entry on mobile phone keypads
Designing journalism to be used
Amazing!
"Why isn't the soil waist high!!!!"
ha ha ha!
I am not sure if this is actually the best way to design an application, or if it is just that we are so used to it by now. Seriously, not sure.
Guy Kawasaki: Marketing to the new influencers
Did you see the SEOmoz beginner's-guide checklist?

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-beginners-checklist-for-small...
Video Conferencing with the HTML5 Device Element
I suspect schools may view it as competing against themselves

This kind of thought process is strange to my way of thinking but plausible; very few teachers I ever had said, "Hey, this is why we're doing what we're doing and why it's important," which is part of the reason I make a point of saying exactly that in the classes I teach. One favorite question: "Why are we reading this, as opposed to something else? What are you supposed to take from it?"

by showing students all they need to know, thus allowing them to skip school and learn the exact same material on their own.

This seems implausible: if students came in already well-prepared or overly advanced for the classes I teach (chiefly Engl composition), I'd be delighted. By now I've taught about ~250 students, and somewhere between 1 and 6 haven't really needed a comp class. Probably only 1. But I can guarantee that more than 6 have thought they didn't need a comp class...

HN has a lot of talk about being self-motivated, and learning on your own, and so forth, which I think is great. But standing in front of a classroom makes me think that the number of people who will really do this is not very great, especially without deadlines and so forth to motivate them (for more on this, see Dan Ariely's book _Predictably Irrational_).

That's not to say the number of very self-motivated people who could acquire the knowledge that school imparts on their own is zero. It isn't. But it's really, really small, which is part of the reason school systems are shaped as they are.
"And it should request exactly the columns that are needed by the result"

Gavin King (the Hibernate guy) argued that all columns should be fetched by default because (A) the marginal cost of doing so is very low once the db has taken the disk hit for any data in the row and (B) an in-memory object cache is easy/efficient if entire objects (rows) are cached at once. I might be paraphrasing a bit much.

One could argue that, when some databases can return a subset of column data from indexes (vs eating the disk hit for the row data) that limiting the columns fetched could be much more efficient.

There are probably very few areas of any app I've worked on where I would have gotten significant performance gains by limiting results to a subset of columns.
In this case I'm talking about apps where there is a constant cost to providing the app (i.e. it's a service) — rising the price doesn't fix the problem, a paid subscription would be the alternative.
That's pretty awesome. So similar to the general idea of the Wiki Game, yet different in practice.
You might want to back up "competing just fine" with something.

Numbers on Compete (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/foursquare.com+gowalla.com/) suggest that Foursquare is pushing quite a bit more traffic than Gowalla, at least on the web. Most reports suggest that Foursquare is also beating out Gowalla in terms of users.

(Full disclosure: I have friends at Foursquare, Gowalla, and on the Lift project. I don't really care about any one of them "winning", I just like facts.)
Welcome To Lagos - African Life and Business (BBC)
Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is watching.

I value the character judgment of a few people who have vouched for Conway (including pg), so i assume he's not a dishonorable man, but have no illusions -- your best interests as an entrepreneur aren't the same as the best interest of investors. Sure, they want to see you do well, but there will often be disagreements on how much to risk and how much to pay to see you get that succes.

I always say investors can get a 10% success rate and be incredibly successful. You, however, need a 100% success rate.

Yes, you need the angels, and if product/market is big enough , you'll need VCs. But don't kid yourself, investors are your 'friendly adversaries'. If you keep this in mind, and recognize the symbiotic relationship for what it is, you won't get disillusioned if thing don't exactly go your way.
Facebook working with INQ Mobile on "custom mobile phone"
Why is this different than buying a newspaper — in the case I'm talking about, you're also getting a constant stream of new content, which you obviously don't with a newspaper. (I'm genuinely asking)
I don't think 802.11 can penetrate 2300 meters of rock, vinhboy.
Which make a lot less money online...
Small correction. At one point, you say, "Graduate Students (like me, as of this writing) have earned a B.A. and are working towards either an M.A. or a Ph.D." Of course, many graduate students have not earned a B.A., but rather, a B.S.
Charity degrades & demoralizes? (Slavoj Zizek)
Well then, head on over to Boston. The startup scene is hot here and it's a fun city.
ACM Classic: Reflections on Trusting Trust
also check out cofoundernetwork.com
Maybe it should be a fail whale or two?
It's thin reasoning.

Does Silicon Valley have dilettantes like Sarah Lacey? Sure. But these people are everywhere. Does it have figures whose estimation of their own importance is over-inflated? Absolutely. Again, they're everywhere. Can you find some events here that cost more than the value they'll provide to the median attendee? ... You get the pattern.

The thrust could have more profitably culminated in "TechCrunch is the last place I'd go for information on the Valley." This conclusion could be reasonably supported by the argument. I still wouldn't altogether buy it, but it wouldn't be crazy.

I'm just not sure you can write off an entire region because of the behavior of one publication.

As a Valley transplant, the value I see for founding a business here is tremendous: A huge pool of extraordinarily talented technical professionals. Bigger, perhaps, than anywhere else. It's about people. And it doesn't stop with having fellow hackers. You'll discover investors, of course, plus a lot of senior people who can give you good advice from their hard-won experience.

There are people who annoy you in the Valley - big deal. Speaking from experience, I'd rather have bickering neighbors like Arrington, Dave McClure and Ron Conway instead of, for example, the kind of people who cherish a certain skin color, superstition, and pickup trucks.

For me, it's a culture thing. And it's priceless.
I really liked this app but didn't understand the part about "This app was developed with women in mind." Why? They're more social?
It's trial by fire here at HN. Yeah, people can be harsh, but HNers are nothing if not practical.

I'd rather some guy tell me my product sucks, here's 10 ways to improve it, rather than someone pat me on the head and commend me on a good job!
It is not obvious that the bulk of the resources come from the idled workers. Resources are needed to pay the workers. Resources are needed to buy the steel, concreate and other materials used in the projects.
I'm having problems parsing this title.
A related historical event:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpbalZ5DUbE

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springhill_mining_disaster
If you're interested in computer science, a lot of research groups have programming tasks that they need done that they are more than happy to hand off to people.
We've been treated to a post by Sarah Lacy blaming teachers' unions for the "Why Our Schools Suck"

Granted, Lacy might not be the best person to listen to about this, but I have yet to hear a better explanation for why public schools can't seem to get their act together.
She should DoS his site to teach that punk a lesson.
I second this, and go a little further...stop reading TechCrunch. It jumped the shark awhile ago.
I don't really buy all this big campaign to promote MDC.

First of all, I do it anyway. I constantly promote the MDC resources when ever I write a blog or forum post about some JavaScript thingie.

Secondly, the MDC site itself is not a perfect guide to JavaScript. Just look at the main page - https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript - it's overwhelming. Even though I use it frequently, it still makes me feel lost. Plus it has the same academic feel as W3C pages, and you know what... HTML spec is not the first result in google for "html" either.

Compare all this to the w3schools page on JavaScript: http://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp It might not be teaching the best practices, but it sure as hell is a lot clearer than the MDC page.

Therefore I would suggest that MDC guys follow the first rule of SEO: just make a better site.
I like that there are perspectives that question the Silicon Valley approach to start-ups. Although of course there's definitely good to come out of it, there's also an extraordinary amount of ego and hype. Some might argue more than there is good.

I'd prefer to see people focus on building entrepreneurship in other cities, as well as experimenting with alternative forms of business structures (non-profits, cooperatives, etc), for those who are really adventurous.

There doesn't have to be a one-size-fits-all track for creating a new technology, and a diversified tech economy is a healthy one.
I believe this segmenting is a good thing. VCs are now more knowledgable about the industry that the start up is in, and can actually provide more help and assistance, as well as evaluate the state that startup is in. Gone are the days where VCs mindlessly gives money to startups only to see them burn through it in less than a year before closing shop... hopefully.
I gave the tool a try and at first the search page would just refresh itself.

It turns out it does that if there are no results. I tried a more general search and a few profiles were returned.
Encrypted Duck Duck Go with encrypted Google Suggest
Are you kidding? Facebook makes keeping in touch with old friends much more efficient. Twitter makes the distribution of ideas or links to news or ideas more efficient.
It depends. If there are a lot of columns and you're only interested in a handful, and there's an index that contains all those columns, it should be much cheaper just to select the interesting columns, as all the data needed can be retrieved from the index. Asymptotically, the size ratio between the columns selected and the columns in the table gives the speedup.
I've always thought it would be fun to play a "black hat" wikipedia game. You would register an account, and then proceed to make false edits throughout the site.

To get scores, we'd take all of the edits for each account and multiply the brazenness/funniness of the edit by the number of pageviews you got before the edit was reversed.

The game ends when you get banned.
A lot of good points are made in this article including the main one of doesn't this all serve Arrington's #1 interest (himself) in the end?
Yep. Though, I think there are excellent start-ups out there, who are innovating for the long term - but those aren't the start-ups that attract the easy money, publicity and hype. At least not at the moment.
I have yet to hear a better explanation for why public schools can't seem to get their act together.

Unequal funding based on property taxes further penalizes the lower classes. The wealthiest go to posh private schools, the upper-middle classes have public schools with greenhouses and olympic size swimming pools, most everyone else has outdated textbooks and low salaries, and the lower classes have lead paint and crumbling infrastructure.

The result is that, averaged out, we have terrible results. Mostly because there's only so much you can do with money, so the wealthiest who have access to a surplus of funding can only do so much to balance out the disadvantages of the rest.

An equalized system would produce much better results for the country. This is how Finland and other social democracies operate.
It's beyond thin.

Every VC environment has loud personalities and personal conflict between various groups. Whether it's the Valley or Chicago you're going to have these types of stories. So to condemn the valley based on those stories getting more press is silly. It shows the author lives in a bubble and has never experienced what it's like to really raise money in such an environment.

Worse though is how high this got. The fact that this made it to #1 on HN actually makes me a little queasy. I don't tend to pay attention to all the HN is degrading talk but this makes me wonder
Uh, what?

At least the Hitler video was funny.
You only get a limited amount of space for description in the market, around 300 characters, which really doesn't allow for this and other useful information.
At least with SQL, it's obvious and not hidden by a layer of abstraction.
Ron comes across as a phony.
But how are you going to get new Perl jobs on CraigsList now that they've banned the dirty sections? Sorry ... left Perl for Python in the late '90s. Clean syntax and Zope and Plone for frameworks even then!
UK Tech Journalists Blog Together - pressthedotcom
"a big intermediate result that you have to process aside from the database because your ORM doesn't allow you to do that within the database."

Processing in the DB isn't always desirable or even possible. Let's say that you are writing the Mint.com killer, and you want to fetch a user's portfolio and query a bunch of 3rd party systems (Yahoo finance, whatever) for stuff related to individual holdings. Let's say you have a table of holdings (security symbol as business key) along with a related set of buy/sell records for each holding.

Let's say that, there a 5% chance that there's something interesting found from the 3rd party systems which requires the buy/sell history for evaluation (capital gains tax-related? I'm just contriving an example here). One strategy would be to do a big join fetch of the holdings and history table. This would be efficient from a DB perspective if you would eventually require a high enough percentage of the history records. But, if you only require a small fraction of them, then it would be better to lazily initialize the history set on a per-portfolio basis. The exact percentage at which you would be indifferent between strategies from a performance perspective would probably be dependent on so many things that you'd have to just experiment with both fetch plans.

Unless an ORM tool is smart enough to observe code execution paths over time, profile them, and dynamically adjust fetch plans accordingly (a cool idea?), the ORM client code has to be able to specify the strategy it thinks is optimal.

Granularity becomes important when doing batch-y stuff. Throughput is significantly higher when you select or insert records by the thousands instead of individually. However, you do take a big memory hit because you're keeping thousands of records around at once. So, if using table X for some batch activity running in only one thread of your application, it's probably best to use coarse grained fetching. However, if you're reading/writing as part of user transactions and are concerned about allocation/deallocation, record-by-record processing might be better. My knowledge of DB internals is too weak to discuss the trade-offs in the db of fetch granularity decisions.
lxrs are a good example of a kind of search that google can't replace yet:
http://mxr.mozilla.org/search

i also find http://koders.com to be useful

bing video search has lots of advantages when it comes to showing and previewing results. (and google video search sucks)

for places photos i always use panoramio search. (compare their results to google images)

Google Blogs search has been completely replaced with twitter search.

and i use thepiratebay.org to search for torrents. (but only backups of things i own :))
It's nifty, but I've never looked at web comics and thought "I wish they could parallax scroll."

I think it would be better if you could drag to move the frame. I don't like it auto-following my mouse. It was also a little choppy in firefox on windows.
I guess I was speaking more anecdotally, in terms of both sites providing roughly equivalent functionality and supporting non-trivial load. Thanks for the analytics link though. I didn't realize the traffic disparity was that high.
Two big groups Medicine and Education..

Several stories and articles posted this week with actual science data showing that its the deep culture in both preventing change and progress...

You will find the articles here at HN, reddit , and slashdot..
It's unfortunate that the ethos of TechCrunch's reporting is founded on Arrigonton's bizarre disregard for sober, non-sensationalist journalism. It leads to wildly variant levels of quality in the posts, both in terms of objectivity and insight.
I had never read Techcrunch before "anglegate" was posted here, and I wont ever read it again. Never liked the reporting style.
If his name really is Steve Jobs, it would be wise to adopt the use of a middle initial, or at least make a remark acknowledging the coincidence in his profile 'about' page.

Otherwise, even if no one believes it is "the" Steve Jobs, people will have the impression he's a prankster playing off the famous Steve for attention or laughs. (That's what you usually get when someone adopts a famous person's name in a pseudonymous web forum.)
Not to mention they don't seem to be scaling well:

"Service Unavailable

The service is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later."
I used HyperNeWS for a few years and it was most certainly mostly written in PostScript - pretty much a work of genius by Arthur van Hoff before he joined Sun and worked on Java.

NeWS windows were objects in PostScript - I can remember logging into colleagues NeWS servers using psh and doing things like setting the CTM for a window to rotate it by a few degrees...
Good point. I was an aerospace engineering major and complained about having to take an electrical engineering course. Now that I'm in industry, I'm glad I did. I wouldn't have understood how we collect structural load data via strain gages which are just wheatstone bridges, or the nuances of sampling periodic data.
Good idea! i just made that change :)
How about:

"Billions of Dollars Spent on 'Nanotechnology' Were Really Spent on Ordinary Chemistry"
Unequal funding based on property taxes further penalizes the lower classes. The wealthiest go to posh private schools, the upper-middle classes have public schools with greenhouses and olympic size swimming pools, most everyone else has outdated textbooks and low salaries, and the lower classes have lead paint and crumbling infrastructure.

And yet, there are schools attended by the "lower classes" with much higher funding levels than private schools who rank as some of the worst in the nation.

According to a 2007 article in The Washington Post, the Washington D.C. public school district spends $12,979 per student per year. This is the third highest level of funding per student out of the 100 biggest school districts in the U.S. Despite this high level of funding, the school district has produced outcomes that are lower than the national average. In reading and math, the district's students score the lowest among 11 major school districts – even when poor children are compared with other poor children. 33% of poor fourth graders in the U.S. lack basic skills in math, but in Washington D.C., it's 62%.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_the_United_States#...
What part of lzw's logic is twisted?
Nodestream: Templating for Realtime Apps in Node.js
I think a checklist gets you to C+ SEO at best. It will work for baseline on page optimization, but after you have title tags and headers you have to start asking information architecture, keyword selection, and strategy questions. Those get tricky!

Checklist item: implement scalable method of link generation... sounds less than actionable to me.
That's an interesting case, but it's far from representative of the system as a whole. The best you can do in that situation is use that information to criticize that specific school district, but you can't extrapolate that to a systemic critique.
Nokia’s Bureaucracy Stifled Innovation, Ex-Managers Say
I reposted it because frankly nobody knows what Petrov Day is and chose a more informative headline
AFP: French court convicts Google and boss of defamation
TC Hackathon Alum GroupMe Hits 1 Million Texts, Adds Sponsored Groups
RFC 2616 HTTP/1.1 has a definition of idempotence with regard to request methods:

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html

Section 9.1.2

"Methods can also have the property of "idempotence" in that (aside from error or expiration issues) the side-effects of N > 0 identical requests is the same as for a single request."
At Maker Faire, giant mousetrap crushes a taxi
Quants: The Alchemists of Wall Street [Video]
This comment is under-voted based on its probability.
You're wrong and I'm happy to bet against you.

Proof points:
1. Tencent QQ is a Chinese social network for games. It's essentially Facebook+Zynga combined. Many of the top games on Facebook are ports of popular Chinese games, e.g., the farming genre. Tencent has been around for 12 years and did over $1Bn in revenue in 2009, representing a 61% increase in profits.

2. Over 500MM people use Facebook every month. That demand doesn't just disappear. The only way Facebook is going to lose is if someone comes along and gives people something better to do with their time.

3. Facebook has their pick of engineering talent in Silicon Valley. If you're an engineer looking ad a mid-sized startup, Facebook is the best place to work, hands down. Look at their open source projects (e.g., Cassandra.). How about their PHP compiler? Or their numerous patches to memcache? It's clearly an engineering-driven company.

4. Just because you think something is frivolous doesn't mean it isn't valuable. Was Atari frivolous? Electronic Arts? EA, obviously, is still around and immensely profitable. Moreover, the same VC that backed those companies also backed Apple, Oracle, and NVIDIA.

There are plenty of startups working on problems lower on the stack. One can innovate at any level -- why is Minecraft any less valuable than a video game that pushes the limits of modern 3D algorithms?

Was Facebook less innovative than PayPal? Oracle?

Personally, I think the attitude you show in your response is a defense mechanism. You feel like you're somehow "above" Facebook and therefore their success isn't valid.