skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I was in College I took a course that introduced me to logic gates and how they worked.

Using the basic logic gates in LogicWorks we built a fully functional 8 bit micro controller, including op-codes that could be used to execute certain functionality. It was slow, but from the ground up I KNOW how to build a micro-controller, I know what goes into it.

That doesn't mean that what this guy did is any less valuable. I might not have built my micro within a computer game, ultimately my LogicWorks project was just as valuable as this simulation in game.

Could the time have been spent on implementing the ALU on a FPGA? Absolutely, but it would have been like any other ALU, nothing really special. It wouldn't have been the next super-bang-whizmo. The ALU's in modern processors are much better designed, much faster, and running an ALU on an FPGA doesn't suddenly make it special. People seem to assume that FPGA's are magical. That is not the case. Could he use his talent to build specific VHDL or Verilog to run on an FPGA that is specialised for certain projects, absolutely. But yet another ALU is nothing special.

This project would not have received the same attention it has because implementing ALU's on FPGA's is something that is done in curricula around the world. I've implemented a full micro on an FPGA (as a follow-up to the previous class mentioned) the novelty is in the fact that the building blocks exist within Minecraft to simulate an ALU. THAT is something to get excited over, it means that technically Minecraft possesses the building blocks to create a fully complete turing machine. That is absolutely amazing.
It's an insult that respected, powerful men want to risk half their net worth to marry someone? Take a look at the NYT wedding announcements some time, and note the facial expressions of everyone who is insulted in such a manner.
Organized crime AND/or labor groups? Really?
The Wright Brothers: The Aviation Pioneers Who Changed the World by Ian Mackersey

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0751533688

Recommended read (it is a bit effusive in places but also relatively balanced)
How about the way that the standard doesn't specify the linker's name mangling, so many linkers do it in mutually incompatible ways, meaning you can't use a library linked by one linker with a main program linked by another.
My Indyarocks: Anger Management
From the article: "one of his outgoing missives includes the dire warning that he'll "dash your hopes later, there are a few catches.""
It's a mostly useless list. The main problems are just like with startups - finding the right people, getting your product right and fundraising.

Amongst the questions not answered at all:

- How do you find good co-founders if you're not amongst the analyst legions at GS, MS or some other bank?

- How do you set your fund up, legally, technically, strategically, and foremost financially? Who funds you if every institutional investors wants either a prior track record or a list of credentials (partner/MD at mega-bank etc.)?

- How much money gets spent immediately on Bloomberg terminals, other database subscriptions etc?

- And: How do you make money? How do you go about executing an idea?
The real difference between Mercurial and Git:

Steve Losh is to stupid to use git.
The sub-pixels are physically oriented horizontally normally; if you flip your monitor, they become vertically oriented, and most OSs/font renderers aren't set up to do sub-pixel antialiasing in the vertical direction, so they just disable it. It might not be much of a win to do it, either, since it'd just be giving you more effective resolution along the height of letters, which isn't usually the direction most in need of it.

Nonetheless, I think that's a small price to pay for being able to fit a vertical PDF on a monitor nicely.
China Unicom exhausts supply of 100,000 iPhone 4s in just four days
Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick any two.

That's a big part of it. The other part is the picking. How can I, or the average person, judge the efficacy of safety protocols? I'm sure there are plenty of well-meaning people who invest enormous effort into precautions that are completely invisible to me. But I also know that the cheapest form of employment insurance is being visibly indispensable, which would tend to subsidize highly visible actions regardless of efficacy.

Then you can factor in moral hazard; people take more risks if they feel more safe. This means that if something increases safety, but less than you'd imagine, mandating it can increase danger. e.g. if drivers thought that seatblets made them 99% less likely to die, when the real number was 10%, you'd naturally expect more fatal accidents with more people driving as if their risk of death had dropped by two orders of magnitude.
If the guy had implemented his ALU in LogicWorks, gatesim or in VHDL/Verilog on an FPGA it would not have received the same amount of attention it has.

The fact that Minecraft provides the basic required building blocks to make the various different logic gates, to allow an ALU to be built in the first place is amazing. The fact that someone took the time to sit down and calculate out how to use the building blocks and how to arrange them is novel.
Yeah, the title makes you think the article is going to be about ways to work on your projects while keeping your day job. I was looking for things like maximizing efficiency while coding on nights and weekends, or lunch, or downtime, or something.
Blackberry launches iPad rival
I don't think this is a fair blanket statement. The fact is that most people don't enjoy reading (or learning) and many are functionally illiterate. Religious leaders aren't going to stop practicing & preaching in order to educate their flocks -- ESPECIALLY in Christianity; many other major religions have a stronger focus on education. I know many people, of different religions, who place a strong emphasis on scholarly research to inform and strengthen their faith.
Screenshot.

Once it's been transmitted the end user has full control. (Which is why DRM constantly fails)
The bible is pretty long and rather heavy going in places - I'd be pretty surprised if most Christians have read it in it's entirety.

I can remember being pretty surprised by what is clearly an account of invasion and what we would now call ethnic cleansing by the Israelites when we read most of the Old Testament in primary school. Looking back our teacher was clearly being subtly contrarian - a fantastic chap and ex Battle of Britain Spitfire pilot (inevitably his nickname amongst the kids was "Hitler").
If anyone else is interested in Zurich startups, Zattoo (a household name in Switzerland) is hiring engineers in Zurich (the rest of the engineering team is in Ann Arbor, MI): http://zattoo.com/en/jobs
Nice work - one of the more exciting apps I saw at MidVentures. (And nice meeting you yesterday)
Everything you wanted to know about the Thing-O-Matic...
Looks good. My suggestions:

* After altering the sort, I can't click on a book in Firefox

* The URL changes when I do things, but the back button doesn't seem to work

* I'd like to see more than 10 results

* I'd like to be able to click on the suggestion
Apple’s growth vs. top ten largest tech companies
* Add paging of search results in some manner

* Delay search by a split second on keypress and cancel if another character is typed. Currently if you type a word quickly every keypress results in a separate search that flickers up on the screen, and if there is a delay in results you have to sit and wait for them to appear sequentially.

* Show more information about book in detail view

* Allow building of custom bookshelves (at least without login) by dragging book somewhere, then allow useful actions on that list like emailing info, send to amazon wishlist, compare in amazon somehow, etc.
It helps to read the vendor-provided help, "how to share" is handily listed on the front page of Dropbox's Help Center:

https://www.dropbox.com/help/19

Summary: If you need more space, you upgrade one account and share the folders with your other users.
Really, really nice. I can see myself using this, as a peeve of mine searching Amazon for books was certainly the horrible UX. First big suggestion: please, please, include some way to scroll for more search results. Also, like another commenter I noticed some odd search behavior for the results to settle down. Last, the name is fantastic. Simple, short, easy to remember. Good job!
Symbian was even mostly ignored 4 years ago. It's sad but it's true. Those old mobile OS's have just had it coming.
Thanks, can't believe you only got 2 points for this.
That analogy doesn't work all that well, though - a better one might be if scientists were less aware of basic questions of the scientific method than the general public. (After all, they are "practicing the idea of science" in some sense, as opposed to merely "supporting the idea of science".)
I agree with that. I think it takes a special eye to look at a system and figure out how to get it to do something it wasn't designed for. Some people refer to this practice as hacking. I was not trying to lessen what he did, but explain why it's not a waste of time.
Morgan Stanley analyst: Microsoft will buy its way to 3x smartphone market share
this immediately made me think, don't the amazon API limits prevent one from making more than a few thousand calls an hour. Would be very interested to learn how you are countering that. I simply avoid doing anything with Amazon's product api just because of that reason.
Reflecting on something while working through it is interesting to me b/c it's less prone to revisionism. Maybe just refer to it less as advice and more as an experience.
I, personally, am fine with those when they come after the article. However, asking me to like, upvote, retweet, subscribe to your RSS feed, or do anything indicating that I like an article before I have read it is a really, really good way to get me to close the tab and go read something else. Even more so if, as on some sites, the request appears in a pop-up thing which obscures the text of the article.
I'm fairly confident it is true, though. While you won't hear such things said, they definitely won't advise you on a "History of Christianity" reading list.

Try talking to a Jesuit priest. Their knowledge of these sorts of things will astound you, and they'll be only too willing to share it. Rabbis, too, so I hear.

Your average American evangelical preacher? Well, maybe not -- they don't come from the same sort of academic tradition.
Android software piracy rampant despite Google's efforts to curb
At no point I wrote that I'm for IE being Windows only. Sure, Mac version would make sense. But a Linux one? Not really.
The #python IRC channel on FreeNode is a great resource for programmers learning python. (But don't expect to be spoonfed, or have everything served on a silver platter, it'll be greatly appreciated if you can show your efforts (using a pastebin site, don't paste into the channel ;-))).
What would confuse me about generateEmail is that on the surface without even looking at the code I would wonder if it built the e-mail body itself or sent out an e-mail or both.
Fogbugz world tour registration now open (free)
Not really. The analogy would be if physicists know less about psychology. I'm sure that religious people tend to have more knowledge about their religion than atheists.

When the questions span all religions and include several questions about history, not practice (e.g. Martin Luther), it turns into more or less just a test of general knowledge, which I would just expect better-educated people to win. I got thirteen out of fifteen (above average) and I couldn't give a hoot about religion one way or the other -- I sure as hell haven't done a "deep exploration of my faith" or whatever else.
I saw a guy I know at a wedding a few weeks ago who works at Shaw Research, and I asked him about this. He didn't give explicit details on custom vs. commodity performance, but he did say they had machines up and running and giving novel results.

I doubt it is fair to say they are ignoring software improvements. I saw Shaw talk about the machine architecture and he had a lot to say about balancing programmability for later software improvements vs. specialized computational resources. Also, it was his algorithmic improvements, the "neutral territory" methods, that were inspiration for the machine. Are NT methods still state of the art for molecular simulation?
I couldn't agree more. The teams have agreed not to use the F-duct next year.

I found the late 80's in F1 extremely interesting due to the technical innovation. By the end of that era, the cars were "active everything", completely reconfiguring themselves (aero and suspension settings, brakes, you name it) for every different turn on the track. As an engineer, I was just eating that stuff up.

The argument against it was that the proliferation of technology was leading to development budgets spiraling out of control. But the budgets haven't gotten any smaller since, AFAIK.

It seems to me that the cars of today are so similar, differing only in tiny details, that there is precious little difference.

Gone is the creativity of the 70s, like the Tyrrell six-wheeler [1] or the Brabham "fan car" [2].

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Tyrrell_P34

[2] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Brabham_BT46#...
The Forbes 2020 team of experts and authors predicts that by the year 2018, 20% of all food consumed in U.S. cities will come from rooftop and parking lot farms. Read that again: 20% of all food in the US.

Has anyone read the full report? That claim seems incredible, in both senses of the word, and I'm curious what their line of reasoning was.
I put a lot of time into naming things correctly. If I can't find a name that I like I will use what is foremost in my head, comment the function of the variable, and move on.
The point of the Catholic church was that only the priesthood could really interpret the scripture.

If you are actually involved with a church, you will find that what people really read at "bible studies" and such are a very select few passages from the bible, usually prepackaged into convenient paperbacks and pamphlets so you don't even have to lug a heavy bible around. There's also tons of non-scriptural commentary packaged up as quasi-scripture, usually labeled as "devotions" or something like that. Also, nearly all of the songs and prayers and creeds are not from the Bible at all, it's just something some clergy, or even church poet or musician wrote long ago. In contemporary mega churches it's even worse, you're probably watching powerpoint slides cribbed from a Tony Robbins seminar and singing songs written by Alanis Morrissette, while the pastor delivers his sermon about 401k plans.

I guess you are right that clergy probably won't actively discourage you from reading the bible, but I'm almost certain they will steer you to a devotional book instead. If you actually go off and read the bible then ask a pastor what the deal is with the goat headed UFO in Ezekiel they get pretty uncomfortable.
I really hate people walking behind me when I'm trying to work. The feeling that someone might be behind me prevents me from fully concentrating on what I'm working on.

A previous boss liked to stand behind me and watch (and occasionally make inane suggestions) when I was trying to fix a particularly high-profile issue. It negatively impacted both the speed and quality of my work.
People who produce things don't need to justify why those things exist. You, as the consumer, simply choose whether or not it interests you.

It's not like he's asking you to buy a book.
I think you have the causal arrows pointed the wrong way around. Historically, it is oligarchy and entrenched aristocracy that leads to an inequality in the distribution of wealth. Oligarchies are formed by force and perpetuated by social convention/norms, not by wealth. Wealth is the spoils.

Hawthorne said that "Families are always rising and falling in America" and to a large extent this is true. The rich don't necessarily stay rich, and the top 100 companies from 50 or 100 years ago bear little or no resemblance to the top 100 companies today. While we may have high levels of inequality, it does not appear to be an entrenched inequality.
What you actually need to start a hedge fund:

- A long & phenomenal track record of making a LOT of money trading for big name firms, ideally in a new or "hot" market
- Have clout and a great reputation in the city or on wallstreet, pref both
- Have lots of "ins" with big fund and asset managers who can connect you to people who have a $100m to invest.
I'm not sure how your analogy works. Are "scientists" supposed to be analogous to "religious people"? Because religious people are the majority and hold the default position in current American society, whereas scientists are a small minority, the elite of those who "support the idea of science" whatever that means, perhaps more analogous to priests and ministers.
Conversion between mainstream file formats is built into many current GIS systems, and it will be hard to beat the software vendors at SHP conversion.

I agree, there is a need for converting to and from unsupported unsupported formats. How that need creates a market would probably be at the level of converting an entire dataset rather than file by file.

GIS conversion tends to be strategic and metadata is the bigger issue. Converting the file is only the first step. All the pain is afterwards.
From the comments:

"There is a third kind of manager, who is typically a ‘nice guy’ who doesn’t have a problem with chicken suits or a bit of browsing or working time as long as the job gets done but micro-manages the crap out you stopping by every 15 minutes to see ‘how you’re getting on’, just like Dick.
Micro-management sucks ass"

I think the third kind of manager is almost worse than Dick. Micromanagement makes getting anything done near impossible. I've taken to wearing headphones at the office and generally ignoring my manager due to him falling into the third category. The phrase "How are you doing over there?" makes my eye twitch these days.

It would be easier to stand up against Dick, assuming you have nothing to lose by losing the job. Usually the third category is the type to have his/her feelings hurt and resort to personal attacks should you question their management style.

Just my personal experience, I realize that's probably a sweeping generalization.
Agreed, node is very fast.
It's worth mentioning that there is no point clicking on this link unless you happen to live in the United States.
Real clickable: http://www.icount.com/connect?referral_code=a2

Using: http://wheredoesthislinkgo.com
#NewTwitter simply too crowded?
I'll give you an upvote for your logic, but I'm also a web developer and know that porting IE to other platforms would only complicate my life, adding additional browser/platform permutations that I would have to test. Porting IE 9 to the Mac isn't going to spare me from running a VM to see how sites look and function on Windows.
Somebody is hoping for a job offer from Apple...
Actually it is OK to use a license that says that if you change X, Y, and Z then you can't name it Foo and can't say it is written by Bar.

I think that such a license would fit Zed's needs perfectly. Particularly if his restrictions were mild enough that nobody minded following them.
Did you look at the quiz? It's not an in depth survey of religion. It consists of 15 factoids about the major religions of the world.

I'm not religious, and while I did get 14/15 right, I think it was completely meaningless.
Personally, I much prefer simple view engines that have limited computational power - the port of StringTemplate to ASP.Net MVC being my current favorite

http://code.google.com/p/string-template-view-engine-mvc/:
I suspect the main advantage that the Unix family has in targeting these smaller environments is more the user-space than the kernel - init, the shell, the contents of /bin and so on.

It's pretty easy to configure a minimal but useful unix system without needing a GUI, graphics drivers, GUI configuration tools and user interface toolkits - look at one of the Linux-based router firmwares like DD-WRT for example. I don't think the existing windows user-space can be shrunk to fit on these small platforms, and if Microsoft built a new user-space to run on an NT kernel they would lose the developer familiarity that is probably the main selling point in the first place.
Sell my House: Home
Another fun fact:

Even if you delete a photo from an album, Facebook doesn't get rid of it immediately. I know this because I was able to retrieve a photo that I'd seen in someone's album, a day after it had been removed from that album, by retrieving the image url in my browser history.
Yep, later on - AXP also developed by DEC with VMS in mind.
Valuation Witchcraft - Where Do Seed Valuations Come From?
I don't know why he's wasting time teaching python he could make millions (bwahahaha) giving "getting things done" seminars.

Of course they would probably consist of him saying "find something that pisses you off.Then fix it" over and over.
The Roman Catholic Church refused to deliver mass in vernacular until very recently. This was the entire point.

The message from the RC Church was indeed "Don't read the bible, we'll tell you what it's all about". In fact, Bible ownership was banned by them for a long period of history.
Did you read the second article?

> Intel announced it will reduce its workforce by 4,000 workers (5%), mostly through attrition or voluntary separation programs.

I joined Intel shortly after that article was written (2002). For much of my tenure (3 years), Intel had a US hiring freeze (except through acquisition, how I got hired) and aimed to reduce its headcount primary through attrition, not layoffs. I felt like Intel treated its employees pretty well.
Gorgeous Amazon Instant Search
I don't think it is being entirely serious....
No results from AdWords does not mean there isn't a market. Is nobody clicking or is nobody searching?

Maybe your market is other GIS software vendors, not end users.
I think the affiliate tag might be messed up in the URL, looks like the ampersands are getting URL encoded?

http://www.amazon.com/Fifty-Years-Well-All-Chicks/dp/0307717...

I think that should be &tag=amzn_instant-20
I took the quiz online and the articles about it have been highly misleading. I consider myself a fairly knowledgeable religious person and I got 26 out of 32 questions right. Here's the thing, though: I got that many right because I took theology and history classes in college, not because I know anything about my faith. The average person isn't ignorant because they don't know who Maimonides, Jonathan Edwards, Vishnu, or Joseph Smith was. This survey appears to test primarily for education level.

Less than half of questions were actually applicable to the practice of religion, the rest were history and sociology questions. I guess, "Americans Don't Know Religious History" wouldn't be much of a headline.
Not to lighten the issue, I think this is a security flaw, but the same is true if they simply save it to their computer. You have to trust your audience to begin with or you're hosed. There's no real way of stopping them from copying or disseminating content.
You're right.

I've also talked to them about requiring so much information up front. They're working on a new registration process that lets you add more information later once you decide you'd like to stick around.

They won't spam you, they actually use your information only to verify you against voter registration databases. This way they can show you YOUR representatives.
A great bonus from TechStars NYC program this year: http://www.businessinsider.com/techstars-new-york-is-moving-...