skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I somehow don't think that the cost of using two requests vs just one really matters with that kind of size difference

On DSL it probably doesn't (let's consider a 150ms ping, we'll take that as the time to initiate an HTTP connection, with 10Mbps of bandwidth or 1.25MB/s): the single image will take 150ms + 440ms (download) for a total of 590ms, whereas the pair will take 2x150ms + 40ms + 3ms for a total of 343ms.

Now consider 3G: 3.6Mbps (460KB/s) (we'll consider a pretty basic HSDPA) and pings of around 600ms are common. The single image takes 600ms + 1246ms for a total of 1846ms, whereas the pair takes 2x600ms + 100ms + 9ms for a total of 1309ms. Still lower, but we're getting closer. 7.2Mbps HSDPA bumps the bandwidth to 920KB/s and doesn't change the ping significantly. Now the single image only takes 632ms to download for a total of 1232ms, and the pair takes 54ms for a total of 1254ms.

And cell data usage will only grow further.

Now of course, a 573KB full-color PNG is going to be hell on a mobile browser and its cache, but still, HTTP request cost is coming back with a vengeance as HSPA makes high amounts of bandwidth available.
I didn't put it in the title, but it's worth noting that a student was apparently tasered and beaten into unconsciousness during this incident, with the cops involved screaming "Anybody else? Who's next?" after it happened; several students got into trouble because the cops banned the use of cell phones during the raid. The task force responsible for the raid was tasked with cleaning up the violence on the streets of New Haven.

This is very sad, when I was at school years ago I always found the New Haven police to be pleasant and helpful, but the officers involved in this incident seem to have stepped over the line. From what I can tell, this was a fairly responsibly managed party (it was one of the yearly "screw" parties, not just some random gathering), they were actually checking IDs at the door, which is more than a lot of (most?) New Haven bars can say...

The Yale community is fuming over this, and I don't expect the issue to go away without at least a few heads rolling.

A couple other YDN links on this topic:

http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2010/oct/02/video-nhpd-rai...

http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2010/oct/02/five-arrested-...

http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2010/oct/04/alchemy-lawyer...

http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2010/oct/04/univ-may-launc...
Quite a few people do live in the mountains, it just isn't particularly high-density, and a relative lack of good roads reduces the area where even that low-density development can happen. The Hwy-9 corridor probably has about 50,000 people along it, as the main concentration (if you include Scotts Valley and the upper part of Los Gatos). There are other people scattered about, but once you're off the main roads, it starts to get remote enough that nobody's going to commute to San Jose daily. Lots of interesting "weird" folks, though, ranging from the lefty types (hippies, pot farmers, etc.) to the righty types (gun-toting mountain libertarians). Also, Robert Heinlein built a geometric house up there: http://maps.google.com/maps?t=h&q=37.058811,-122.158461&...
To examine this I think we need to think about the stereotypes in modern terms and apply them to future trends.

Here are my top 3:

1. Startups - Nerds these days are worshipped more-so for their mainstream accomplishments than their underworrld ones. It's cool and sexy to own your own startup in the nerd world and it's still for the elite. The best data point for this is the movie The Social Network. All around the world people are envious of Mark, who is portrayed as the ultimate alpha geek. Moving forward, startups are going to be further romanticized and every fanboy is going to want to try their own (more-so than the common trend already).

2. Anime. It seems to me that a lot of Alpha Geeks like Anime and Manga. Over the summer Naruto was the #1 show on Hulu. This trend will definitely continue to grow. As a general trend, I'd bet on more mainstream adoption of Asian culture as a whole.

3. Social Shopping. Sites like thinkgeek.com, woot.com, sparkfun.com are filled with Alpha Geeks tweaking with the latest gadget (Arudino, which is still primarily an Alpha Geek toy). This will slowly adapt to other more mainstream consumer companies as consumers start coming online.
One thing to consider is that the usability and maturing of the mainstream tech has helped it's easy adoption by people who otherwise wouldn't be bothered. I'd say the same thing will happen with 3d printers. Possibly we will see an easy abstraction over the top of things like the arduino - roomba type gadgets which are customizable?
No support for Read It Later (only Instapaper)?
> One way is to use the @class declaration to say that the
> class will exist at run-time and the compiler doesn't have
> to worry about the lack of a header.

Sure, you could just put "uses NSWindowController;" in your .m file and the compiler would know all about the NSWindowController class and its methods, but what about all the typedefs, defines, functions, and other bits C/C++ heritage that everyday Obj-C code uses?

Obj-C has been around for 25+ years, and while the libraries have changed a lot during that time the language can still be implemented essentially as a preprocessor on top of a plain old C/C++ compiler, and I don't think that will ever change.

Long live MacRuby, though. I look forward to the day that becomes an official first-class language for OS X development.
"Strong beliefs, weakly held." That hasn't failed me so far. What people have said here (other people) is plenty to make me understand that Gonzo journalism means something else. I'm not particularly stubborn when proved wrong.

Do you see the irony in your own statement? "If you're going to blame something for lots of problems, kindly learn what it is first." and immediately "You are king among the problems in the United States today."

P.S. I can't believe people are up-voting something that is clearly meant to be personal.
You are looking for something computer related, because it's the last change. The world is probably not going to evolve twice in the same way. That would be ungeek ;). Alpha geeks seems to be in space rocketship and biology today. May be this is where we will see the big changes in the future ?
I would also move source column to right. Readers want to focus on article titles, not where it came from.
What is it exactly that Malcolm Gladwell consistently gets wrong? Is there a trait? Any good sources on this?
Considering driving a vehicle or taking the bus/train is usually a sitting activity, to get down to the 3 hours or below mentioned in the article you'd basically have to have

a) a standing desk

b) a job that doesn't involve sitting

Has anyone proven, by the way, that a standing desk actually solves things?
Mark Zuckerberg Joins Bill Gates And Steve Jobs With ‘Simpsons’ Cameo
Has anything else in SF besides SOMA, Mission and the Financial District ever been startup-y?
Anyone here who experienced post-Soviet currency collapses would instantly remember prices in У.Е. ("convention unit", in reality a legal way to put U.S. dollar price tag), monthly re-indexed МРОТ ("salary unit"), and so on. Alone they did not help anything, until economy and fiscal policies fundamentally changed.
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail looks interesting. Thanks.
Four Conditions Causing a Herniated Disc in Your Back
> and then inexplicably France and England don't attack.

This is easily explained. There was at the time no possible way to coerce the deeply traumatized French and English to attack. When Daladier and Chamberlain came back from Munich in 1938, they were cheered by the crowd in Paris; Daladier told Chamberlain "ils sont contents, les cons" (they're happy, these morons). He was perfectly aware that the vast majority of englishmen - and even more frenchmen, were so deeply against any form of war after WWI that the concept of a preemptive strike was simply unthinkable.
3D Printing, for example? Hm, I need to get my hands on one of those MakerBots...
As a newcomer to writing DSL's, I found the book very valuable as an introduction to all the intricacies that can be involved in writing a useful, nicely integrating, DSL. The abstraction of the 'semantic model', which Fowler advocates strongly, has proven indispensable, allowing me to easily build GUI-based DSL editor for an initially completely text-based DSL, without changing a single bit in the code executing the parsed DSL.

Incidentally, this book and the definitive ANTLR reference are exactly the two books that appeared on my radar when searching for literature in DSL's.
Why is it logical to presume all the geeks would/should switch to OSX/Apple?

1) it doesn't fit with classic geek- you pay a lot of extra money for shiny hardware. Classically, a geek did it on the cheap and 'hacked' something together.

2) I consider myself pretty geeky, and yet I run Windows exclusively now. (and my servers run Linux, and I agree with OSX for media computing) Why is this? Well, to start all the tools I care about run on Windows. CAD programs, Matlab (USED to work on OSX. Key word USED), development tools, and to some extent games.
paypal offers a micropayment "mode"

https://micropayments.paypal-labs.com/

5% + .05
Nokia tops RIM in daily app downloads
A parser does not a DSL make. I find this advice, and the advice of the parent, dangerous, as it suggests writing a DSL is just a, relatively simple, technical challenge.

It is like advising the Dragon book and someone replying 'meh, just read SICP'. As in that case, SICP or articles on LR parsers do not even remotely stack up to the Fowler DSL book combined with the ANTLR reference.
An ironing board + 2 dumbbells under the laptop.
The problem is how do you craft a set of effective community norms that allow for one type of humor and not the other? What are the design primitives that support this enforcement?

I don't quite know the answer to this which is partly why the essay remains unfinished. But I do want to note that the upvote/downvote mechanism happens to be especially vulnerable to pathological humorous behaviors. A small, concerted clique of the "wrong element" can radically change the tenor of the site compared to a large and silent majority and, once the shift is made, the trend becomes self-reinforcing.

All it takes is a couple of redditors coming over and unthinkingly upvoting the humorous answers to start a mass movement.
If you're comfortable revealing the name of the site, I could give a more insightful comment but yes, humor becoming operationalized also means it can be operationalized for good.
I use the FREDRIK desk from IKEA. It is adjustable, it is a standing desk, and does not look like it should fall apart anytime soon - what more could you ask for?
Back-typing Keyboard For Tablets
> seem to always recognize the particular pattern they did their thesis on.

That'll only be true if Hoover ran the country like a mine, or Reagan ran the country like a movie set.
The one time I’ve been in that situation I’ve ended up leaving that company and taking a much better paid engineering role at a different one :)
I agree, the purpose of the piece was not a proof, but a narrative. The long tail of quality vs edited, curatorial content is an orthogonal argument to the one I'm making.

I guess I'm arguing that, given the same person, placed in two contexts, they will produce two different types of humor and the offline version will be objectively funnier than the online version. And the core of the difference between the two is due to the affordances of the space. Is that a bit clearer?
Social media is really good at a few things, like disseminating information to a large group of people backed by the credibility of the source.

It also lowers the transaction cost for donating money to almost nothing. Which was demonstrated when people could donate money to the red cross Haiti effort using their cell phone and they raised millions in a few weeks.

So rather than say the social networking will or will not replace strong tie activism it would behoove charities to embrace it as one facet of a multi-faceted strategy (which is what most of them are doing).

Gladwell himself talks about the importance of connectors or "masters of the weak tie" in his book tipping point. They serve an important function it helping issues reach critical mass. It seems like social networks are a perfect technological replacement for connectors (individuals with hundreds of acquaintances with whom they have weak ties).
Reminder: please post links to single-page articles if possible
On sites like nytimes.com please post links to single-page articles instead of ones with multiple pages. Sometimes people open links in browser to read them later when they don't have internet access. When you forget to check this it is frustrating to find out that an article has more pages and you don't have internet access.
That's a much better way of looking at this post.

I suppose, I could've phrased the post:
Is a link full of SEO spam, aa links, and ad networks a legit HN post?

I guess from the upvotes and comments, it is. I was strangely curious.
The people that I think of as 'alpha-geeks', that is the ones for whom technology is their creative outlet have moved from doing things with the internet to doing things with the physical world. Whether building 2-d tables for homebrew lasercutters, enthusiastically joining the cult of arduino, or more mundane things like building houses they want to live in or learning to fly, the common theme seems to be getting physical. That's just my take.
How does old money separates it from new money? I can't think of anything less nerdy/geeky than an Iphone or Iwhatever - everyone have them now. New money.

Being a consumer of new tech things and download fart apps does not make you a nerd.

Building a computer within MineCraft or doing something inherently difficult which seems like a waste of time to normal new-shiny-money-iPhone-people-without-creative-thinking. That's nerdy.
Dear Yahoo, We Want "Instant Search", Here's the Solution...
Come on, do I have to give you the solution too? You don't even know where to look do you? Go get your boss kid and show him this. Then have him call me.

I rolled my hack out Sunday (36 hours ago) and still didn't get one bad remark on hacking it. Its based upon key_up() by Srinivas Tamada who wrote an introduction in early 2010.

I dislike having to edit my own blog but that's what I get for allowing people onto my box and roll unedited.

Yes, and when I said I was number 4; in a list of 5, [0] is No. 1 and [1] is No. 2, and so on.

So, you want your own keyboard controller? Or instant search just like Google's? I was laughing when I saw this! Obviously kids from Stanford put puzzles together easily. http://www.tikku.com/jquery-jqtube-util#jqtube_tutorial_3

Yea, Google, YouTube Facebook, Twitter a kid from Stanford and me? I didn't go to Stanford, I went to Parris Island.
Using www.* gives you more options for load-balancing and distributing your website too, since an A record can only resolve to an IP address.

I recently learned that the hard way when the Amazon Elastic Load Balancer IP address we were pointing our A record at abruptly went out of service. Serendipitously, we had already been preferring www.* for some arbitrary reasons so it was an easy fix. And it turns out we're reaping the benefit of what Johann describes too, as we are also serving a large number of images from a separate subdomain.
I wonder what sort of riots we would have over here if it costed hundreds of dollars for a gallon of gas. Not a valid comparison, but still fun to think about.
Zimbra Co-Founder Heads To Hot Storage Startup
Do you mean a delay for the reply link to show up ?
Timeout is confusing. I didn't know about this feature.
I'm confused by their graphs. The horizontal axis is labeled MET-hours/week, but given that sleeping consumes 0.9 MET-hours; I'm unsure how someone do < 24.5 MET-hours in a week.
Infosys make only 2% money from selling software.
98% money they made by selling consulting viz bribing clients, exploiting engineers and manipulating stock prices.
I don't understand something about this story.

Hyperinflation is primary caused by government printing money right? So if switching to another currency helped stop this...I get how it could help people changing their perceptions, but wouldn't the root cause be that the government stopped printing money with the new currency?

It seems like it would have been almost as effective if they had simply stopped printing more of the original currency until things stabilized?

Maybe I'm missing something. But the article seems to put too much weight on this clever idea of shifting to a new currency. While if monetary policy had stayed the same with the new currency I don't think it would have made any difference. The monetary policy here was the important part, not the new currency.
Nice. I love URL interfaces (phras.in is another good one). Definitely useful for tutoring over IM.

Font looks a bit cartoonish though...

http://texify.com/?$\int_a^b\left(\frac{\partial%20L}{\parti...
Foursquare is a product and Facebook Places is a feature
This sounds odd, but just typing in a message feels unusually slick compared with e.g. GMail in the browser, which I struggle to explain. Has anybody else thought this? Is it a projection caused by a pretty-looking interface? Or the instant updates in the message thread while you type, noticed in the corner of your vision? Or perhaps the font choice? Or do the characters actually appear a millisecond or so sooner? Does the cursor work slightly differently? I can't put my finger on it, but it surprised me.
I use a lamp with a timer that gets gradually brighter. It turns itself on some time before I want to wake up. Instead of a single point of waking up, there's a window of around an hour when the light gets brighter for me to wake up. One can be rigged up with just a regular lamp and a power outlet timer, although that doesn't give the gradual brightening part.

Of course it's possible to just sleep through the whole thing if sufficiently sleep-deprived, so something like the WakeMate could still be better for waking up less painfully from a shorter than usual night's sleep.
Needs web design
An information I failed to find is text formatting methods. Sometime I see itallic text, others courrier text. URLs aren't always shown as clickable links. How can we control this ?
Nice and clean look. Have you considered lexical parsing to generate a list of trending phrases?

I suppose there are several possibilities to track trends this way.

Great job.
I never said it was a good idea[1]. Just that it was possible.

But, yes. Long live MacRuby. I can't wait until the day I can use it for iOS applications.

1. From my previous post: If you guessed that its a giant hack either way, you'd be right!
There is, it's called mbsync.
BeagleBoard is nice, but the PandaBoard is better (dual Cortex-A9 at 1GHz)
RSS Reader (all items in reader)
Mugasha
iLike
Apple Ping
Friendfeed
Two things: (1) classifying Chapter 4 of SICP as a chapter about parsing is just plain wrong and (2) Fowler's DSL book just came out; by definition you simply can't place it in the same class as the Dragon book.

I think if you actually read Chapter 4 you would have a much different opinion. There's nothing "simple" about it. If you actually grok Chapter 4 then you grok Lisp. After that, it becomes apparent that the phrase "Domain Specific Language" is really just unnecessary terminology.
[Citation needed]

I wonder why they don't make all of the money this way.
Increasing the efficiency of work is what we've been talking about.

When you defer consumption and use the funds to improve your productive capacity, you are improving the efficiency of your work. I wasn't just talking about not consuming.

Sometimes a thought is not complete in the first two sentences of a paragraph. Sometimes the third sentence has to be read too.
Annoying marketing piece devoid of any real technical content.
I was a little startled when results didn't appear as soon as I started typing. I'm actually used to instant search now. When did that happen?
Blippy
That's definitely something I'm considering doing in the future...Maybe on day 3 :)
Plancast
Any credible sources to back that?
From what I've seen, I think that we don't understand S-curves, either. No matter which side of it we're on.

They can look exponential... until they hit the limit.
SpellDial your name could be your number
i'm sorry, but i'm completely tired of these posts saying that they have the solution to yahoo instant search. there's a difference between some hacker in a basement doing a one-off site that a few dozen people visit over its lifetime and a system that can scale to millions of simultaneous users.

to the original author: have you simulated millions of simultaneous users against your 'solution?' if your answer to scaling is simply to lean on the yahoo api, then you don't have one. i'm not saying their api/server farm can't handle it, but i suspect that it's not set up for it at them moment.

no, i don't work for yahoo.
Using everything free and open while being a geek and a designer.
One more thing people who discovered the new communication media today forget is: the "social" media existed for much longer, and if anybody would want some serious analysis, we already have decades (even centuries?) of experience, even with much less noise than of today and with more people being more of "peers." I'll spare you of the stories of old Usenet or even chat functionalities before the "web" existed. Much more existed for much longer. There's just more people behind the screens today.

My personal experience is: online communication can help in motivation to do something, but only as long as it actually leads to communication or engagement "in flesh." It's as simple as that, and it can be the easy way to measure real impact of online activity. So I'd say, Gladwell is more than right this time. As long as you just sign online petitions or join Facebook groups with the names "save the ...", it's just the "feel good" activity with no real impact. Whoever wants more scientific measurements has an easy method to measure the real impact.
but sometimes the single page versions are missing photos, slideshows, and other multimedia/interactive elements. i like words, but i also like the other stuff.
Gladwell is a writer. If you write enough, eventually you're either going to make factual errors or state opinions that people disagree with. In this case, being "wrong" simply means she disagrees with his opinion.
Forbes new list of world billionaires
You can't bend the laws of physics though. Absolutely true.

So is the fact, that the laws of physics have been there since big-bang. The question would be, have we realized all the potential of all the laws of physics out there, yet? Have we even discovered all the laws of physics, yet?

No amount of technological progress hmmm, I wouldn't be so confident of using those words. All one has to do is look at the history of the last few centuries, or the rate of scientific progress over the last few millenium. It has been exponential.

I think the convergence of easy availability of knowledge to the masses, availability of massive and cheap computational power and the massive inflow from developing countries into the engineering and scientific workforce , will probably make the word 'exponential' obsolete. But then as they say, proof of the pudding is in eating. We should repeat this conversation 20 years from now and see how it went, just for the fun.

Yes, splitting the atoms locally is a good alternative (at least in theory, for now). Watching the progress of battery technology, from the old mercury types, to NICD, then lithium and then A123, that's a promising area.

Caterpillar is now selling a hybrid bulldozer, who knows, them making a plug-in hybrid bulldozer coupled with A123 or more dense battery tech. will inspire the military to build electric machines.