skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
By asking questions, and putting answers in different contexts.

For instance, questions about the reality such as "what if?", "what makes it right?". Once there's the answer, try to find another space where it fits.
I used Ruby and switched to Python. Most of the answers to my questions got answered with links to Python solutions and code.

At some time I decided to give it a try and wasn't disappointed.
You might wanna watch this video titled 'Where good ideas come from'.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU
Spending lots of time thinking about what you want

Trouble is, my ultimate goal in life is to do this as little as possible.
> The package manager concept is actually what I hate most about Linux systems

You really should give Slackware a try. None of that sophisticated package management nuisance[1] and everything just works!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slackware#Package_management
Many of the 'friends' you have on Facebook are anything but. They're all superficial and mainly virtual relationships you have with others you will most likely never meet let alone contact offline. I quit Facebook several months ago and haven't felt a thing. You'll soon realize that those you really cared for and whose relationships mean anything were those who you already kept in contact with outside of the service. I didn't bother leaving a going away message. Unless your friends are part of very small circles, your absence will go unnoticed. Facebook is great at making people think they're getting a lot more attention than they really are, and so people tend to think that leaving will create a void that friends will cry over. While the reason to quit here isn't really a valid one, I really would recommend deleting your Facebook page to anyone, unless the survival of your circle depends on it or you need it for familial purposes. It's a huge time sink and for something so shallow.

In short, if you really want to leave, just do it. Don't bother with being graceful; no one will notice or care for more than a minute.
Thanks for mentioning public choice theory. It's an interesting discipline of political science

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice_theory

that appears to explain some phenomena that are not readily explained on other grounds. Public choice theory was a big part of the content of the course on legislation in the first year of law school, and had much to do with why I don't expect to solve all of my country's problems by passing new laws.
Everything I've ever read about Microsoft's problems always point the finger at crippling management problems. Each department is out for themselves, not for the good of the company as a whole (see the Kin/WP7 debacle), and yet many departments have says and vetos on those of another (there's a good piece about the Windows Start Menu shutdown behavior somewhere... it indicated all sorts of problems with the kernel team telling the UI team what to do).

As soon as the inmates aren't running the asylum, Microsoft does much better. The Entertainment and Devices division and MS has pretty much full autonomy, and they come up with a very popular console line and a unique motion gesture system within two generations, they take a chance on the Zune (particularly the second generation UI... although the Zune didn't sell in the end, they put up a good effort). Microsoft Research does great stuff, and is also completely autonomous.

Ray Ozzie was supposed to move Microsoft away from monolithic development, but it requires a full rebuild of Microsoft's structure, which I can only assume Ballmer is stalling.
Something like 30% of the Web servers on the Internet run Windows. There are millions of ASP.NET developers worldwide and Windows is by far the most popular Web platform for internal business apps.
I don't think that's true at all. Not knowing much about economics does not cause people to have less strongly held opinions on it, it often causes them to have more. There are millions of people who don't even understand basic economic concepts who are vehemently opposed or in favor of government bailouts.
If you're interested in journalism, trends, government and information visualization / mashups and usability, shoot me an email.

I am still organizing the team while building the infrastructure, and I will add you to the mailing list to stay in the loop, maybe something for you after school :-)

For now here is an idea for you. After big political events, you usually have media coverage of opposing points of view using the same photo-set. After a Palestinian-Israeli peace summit, for example, you will see the same image with different headlines.

Scrape Google News for images pertaining to a keyword ("Obama" for example) and do a visualization showing one photo, along with every headline in a news article it has appeared in. You can use the TinEye API for that.

You will shock the world by laying rhetoric bare. In a future version you can add sentiment analysis to sort the articles in a two-column format, but that will require more programming (unless you opt for a crowd-sourced solution; two arrows "negative/positive", etc.)

If you like this, there is more where it came from :-)

Cheers!
Google URL Shortener-Express technolgy
Google last night has opened its direct URL shortening service for the public absolutely free(as always) through http://goo.gl/ .However the service was introduced back in December last year when Google announced that it was something that they have specially thought of for the users exploring the Google Toolbars and its Feedburner service.Now it’s being offered to anyone much more easily through a dedicated web site.For more Read http://xpresstechnology.blogspot.com/
I agree with you on that point. The nptel by iits and iiscs is much better than ocw. I say this because I have used both and found that the nptel videos cover the subject more broad while ocw courses lack in number as well as some in depth stuff.
Bah, it's not really that easy. I remember having an annoyingly difficult time getting a working up-to-date Glade on the latest LTS version. Sure, it worked on the latest Ubuntu just fine, but shouldn't we able to have some popular applications up-to-date without a big mess? But yeah, in general its pretty great.
Then you, unlike most people, already know what you want. If that's truly your ultimate goal that is.
Gmail Video Chat and Voice
I'm not sure I would say "everything just works" and Slackware in the same sentencd!
Being a person that studies this lecture (but not on MIT), I would love to have summarized transcripts as long you don't remove examples which would help in understanding how things work. Nothing is better than looking at a problem in different perspectives to understand it better.

I'm also pretty sure that there are many people here who want to (or at least, should) refresh old courses and algorithms.
> By the time you get to 1776 everything is in copperplate :-)

Caslon, surely.
The title is a unbelievable deceptive because, unless I missed something, all of these experiments were done on completely unregulated toy markets.

I would be curious about what would happen if, instead of rewarding people directly with the returns on their trades and their dividends, you gave them a baseline salary that they can never go under, then gave them a bonus based on a percentage the gained market value of their holdings during any particular round, but ended their game if they ranked below 50% of the other players for two rounds in a row then gave them severance equal to five times their baseline salary plus their average bonus per round over the entire game.

In short, I'd be interested in how far fiduciary investment bubbles would deviate from the bubbles produced by direct investors in these same safe markets, and whether changing any of the variables above could bring them closer together.
Thanks for the feedback. It may turn out to be better off as a standard API. I've considered that approach as well.
IMHO I feel that CLRS is a great book. I consider it to be my bible of algorithms. I have viewed almost all the videos the course ware apart from the last few which constitute of advanced topics. :)
Soon we will all know the joy of accidentally creating a real-life professor Moriarty who we have to defeat using only our powers of deductive reasoning!
Sorry, Malcolm Gladwell, the revolution may well be tweeted
How Popular Is the iPhone, Really?
Wow, my first sentence was made incoherent by backediting: "The title is unbelievably deceptive because..."
Since X != X + Y, I consider X + Y to be a new product Z. I signed up for X, you switched me to Z.

This is absolutely unreasonable to apply in general, because it would devastate the pace of change for web applications, and it is actively harmful to the users as well. You're going to be routinely asking them to make decisions which a) they do not want to make b) they have no information to make and c) they are incapable of making. It will merely confuse and annoy them, and the best possible resolution is that they do what they do any time people put up meaningless repetitive dialogs and click Next Next Next until you stop asking such stupid questions as whether to format C:\ or not.

("Attention, non-technical elementary school teacher in central Kansas. You signed up for Bingo Card Creator revision 1,550. Since you last logged in yesterday, we have made 5 changes to the service. These are summarized as: $INCOMPREHENSIBLE_COMMIT_NOTES. Do you want to consent to these changes, or should we keep a Rails application stuck to r1550 spinning for you until the end of time? Pretend this does not sound scary and that you understand that sentence. It is not scary and you don't understand that sentence, but you have no good way of knowing that.")
In the US, bikes are basically considered toys.

You make excellent points, but in US law they are considered vehicles, and subject to the same rules of stop lights, stop signs, and waiting-in-line as automobiles.

Many, many bicyclists don't understand this, however, and run red lights and stop signs seemingly at will.

This never really bothered me until I had kids and was teaching them how to ride. I would always point out (because I knew they saw) when someone would bike illegally, in hopes that they would learn right from wrong.

As a counter-example, just two days ago a man was bicycling with two young children at a time when parents were dropping kids off at school (so, presumably he was taking them to school). I was driving a car down a road and passed them on my way to take a left turn. As I was waiting for traffic to clear for my turn (here in the US, to make a left turn I have to wait for a break in oncoming traffic), he and the kids came up on my right and started to ride in a pedestrian crosswalk (illegal- they are vehicles, not pedestrians) at that intersection that passed in front of my car. The man came within a few (maybe 10) feet of the front of my car before I made my turn. I only saw him at the last instant (a quick, reflexive check to my right, because I had already ascertained that there were no pedestrians).

I hope I scared him. I hope even more that I scared his kids who undoubtedly saw the event. I hope he had a long talk with his kids afterward.

But the real point I want him to understand is that if some child dies because they learned unsafe bicycling from watching his behavior, he is partly responsible for the child's death. Part of our jobs as adults in society is to demonstrate proper behavior for those in the process of learning it.
With programming, it might be best to pause for a minute and "convince" yourself by writing your own examples.

If the text book says "array elements are stored in contiguous memory", pause for a second and write a snippet that iterates over an array and prints out their memory addresses. Now, was that a static or dynamic array? if it was static, how do the pointer addresses change if you created the array in the body of a function vs as a global variable? how do the pointers change if you change the array type from int to long to character?

This is the same "convince yourself" techniques that one uses to teach themselves mathematics. Math books are usually terse and require a lot of active participation in one's mind.
I haven't been particularly active on Facebook for a year or two now. I think the very-active period lasted only a few months for me.

However, Facebook still has huge residual utility value even if I'm not actively using it. Friends use it to get in touch sometimes. Occasionally I receive a message from someone I care about who doesn't have my email anymore for some reason.

I wouldn't delete my Facebook account if you gave me £100 to do so, even though I'm not actively using it - for the same reason I don't delete my LinkedIn account.
it's easy.

post "i'm deleting my facebook account"

deactivate your account

stop using it for 14 days

you're gone.
I see your concern. I'm approaching this as an experiment, so I'm not entirely sure how it'll work in terms of your concern about examples and other context. Let's see how it plays out.
No Babies? -- Causes for the aging population of Europe
I thought it was some less informed person talking about encryption when I saw the article.

Journalists (who won't read this comment anyway, c'est la vie): When you do an article about something you know little about, talk to someone who knows more than you.

This works for just about everybody who knows little about a subject.
Zen Habits [...] seems rather un-Zen

You're right! I never noticed that before.

My favorite example of this phenomenon is the label I saw on a fancy candle at a friend's house: "Zensual". That is so hilariously consumeristically hedonistically oxymoronic, it's delightful: http://www.zensual.com/index.php. (I talked to an American guy who spent a year at a 12th century Zen monastery in Japan. What it was really about was managing the pain from frostbite cleaning stone floors with freezing cold water in the winter and welts from being struck on the back by senior monks with big sticks. "Zensual" indeed!)

Much of this is about the 20th century collapse of Western religious institutions, corresponding exactly, I think, with a hunger for alternative traditions to fill the resulting vaccuum. Prior to WWII this was mostly drawing on Hindu traditions; after WWII, from the Beats on, Buddhism. But these imports have been inexorably and fundamentally transformed on being drawn into our vaccuum.

A writer I like put it this way: The East never came west. What came west was a Western version of the East.
well, Steve Balmber isn't the one who will actually build the competitive device, and judging from demo videos I'd say Windows Phone 7 as an OS, looks liike a serious competitor for people to build applications for.
Software Theft a Problem for Actual Thieves
I would assume that you've already heard it some times, but I find this way of finding an idea to be very good:

Take a shower, and what your mind thinks about during the shower could lead you into some pretty interesting ideas. Of course, they have to be relevant to your study, but they may not immediately look like they are: That's usually how great ideas come to life.
Rick Sanchez gets fired for calling Jon Stewart a bigot
I agree, however would point out that Senators were originally supposed to be appointed by each state, and were to represent the interests of the state (as a check on Federal power). That they are now popularly elected is a step backwards.
Why I Love the Khan Academy
To all those being critical of the idea, consider this:

The only difference between a life with goals and a life without goals is the amount of guilt you put yourself through for not meeting goals. If you live a life with goals but don't make yourself feel any guilt for not reaching a goal, surprise -- it's the same thing as not having goals.
I think the author's onto something, but unfortunately, he never comes out and says the word that could give his article some real legs.

The word is "improvise".

You can plan, you can set goals, you can track milestones, (or not, if you follow the article), but at some point you'll hit a crossroads where all you have to go on are your experience and your instincts. And then you'll have to act.

You'll have to improvise.

And to me, these moments of improvisation are where life is at. They're the moments we remember. The moments we tell stories about. The moments when success and failure are born.

Now, the author seems to be living a life of pure improvisation. That's a beautiful thing. However, it's most certainly not a goal-free thing. He's eliminated the "how" (he makes it all up as he goes along) but he hasn't eliminated the "what". He still has goals. He still has wants. Heck, his number one advice is to "follow your passions" -- and what's passion but an overwhelming desire to achieve some goal?

What he really ought to have said is, "Know yourself, know what you want, but don't tear yourself up over the logistics."
Most of it is very, very good. But how we chose who represents us and the lack of approval we have of their actions are the big flaws. If we make a few changes, I think the ship can be put back on track.

As far as what century it applies to, the problems of government are pretty timeless. When one class of people is free to exploit another, the results are the same no matter what century is it.
I've always liked §295 of The Gay Science where Nietzsche makes the distinction between "brief" and "enduring" habits:

"I love brief habits and consider them an inestimable means for getting to know many things and states, down to the bottom of their sweetness and bitternesses...

Enduring habits I hate, and I feel as if a tyrant had come near me and as if the air I breathe had thickened when events take such a turn that it appears that they will inevitably give rise to enduring habits...

Most intolerable, to be sure, and the terrible par excellence would be for me a life entirely devoid of habits, a life that would demand perpetual improvisation. That would be my exile and my Siberia."

(http://clichereality.blogspot.com/2009/07/philosopher-as-tra...)
how about high-perf joins at run-time?
The thing about 6.046 is that a lot of the lectures are taken straight from CLRS chapters. Reading the book is equivalent to what you're saying.

When you start having classes without textbooks, some upper level algorithms classes at MIT have what they call 'scribes' to do almost exactly what you're planning on doing.

For example, here is the Advanced Algorithms home page (http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.854/current/) and here for example are the scribe notes on Min-Cost Flows. http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.854/06/scribe/s11-minCostFlow...

Worthwhile searching around if you're looking for this kind of thing.
Compare with this article from a few months back: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/world/europe/10iht-sweden.... . While this article isn't exclusively about just birth rate, it notes that Sweden has one of the higher birthrates in Europe. Looking at wikipedia, the birth rate for Sweden is still (what I suppose is) low, only 1.67, compared with the US at 2.09.

edit: just in case you aren't inclined to read through, the article is about granting fathers paternity leave.
It's interesting to many of us here who are interested in building online communities. If a person happened to walk by this man's funeral, they probably wouldn't shout that he was "better off dead". But a person who happens to see this man's obituary online apparently has no qualms about the online equivalent.

As hackers, we build things that are used, ultimately, by fellow human beings. Those things we build can have unintended consequences. This story highlights that fact.
I second that, how do they monetize? I see lots of ads as the only solution. And ads in texts are super annoying.
Eric sounds like a Hari Seldon[1] trying not to disclose too much.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)
Have a conversation with somebody who is interested in discussing ideas with you. It can be anybody, really, even if they aren't interested in pursuing something like you are. Just the act of having a dialog with a person (vs. the internal dialog you have when it's just yourself) has helped me time and again to get through a problem, come up with better ways to do something, work through the details of new ideas, etc. My thought process goes in directions it wouldn't go on its own. There have been many times when I'm just running something by my girlfriend, and before she even says something back, I'm thinking in different ways just because I said it out loud.
Flagged, sorrowfully. There's probably something socially profound in this story, but online fora are far too coarse in granularity to get at it. Driving through a minefield in a Range Rover does nobody any good.
I see. So CGI::Application (and Catalyst) is a built-in part of modern Perl. Interesting.
I'm also a vim addict and keep all my notes in a semi-gtd inspired vim wiki. It's a vim plugin on top of the viki plugin (http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=861). The code is up on github for anyone interested: http://github.com/benbest86/vikigtd

It has some basic functionality like keeping reference files, search with Xapian, project todo lists that you can easily print in a daily log and check off in a single place.

Haven't ever really thought about making it easily installable etc, not sure what the GTD+vim market/interest would be, but I'd be happy to up the documentation if someone is interested.
September 2010: seven Cisco vulnerabilities
I too used to think like you do. But I've been using Ubuntu at work, and now when I go on a Mac I actually miss the usability features of Ubuntu.

Just a tiny example: hitting alt and clicking anywhere on a window to move it instead of going to that top bar. Or the multiple different ways to switch between apps. etc. etc. There's probably 100 small things that I now can't live without. So I would say the statement "Mac Os X is not as usable as Ubuntu" is actually true. Surprisingly.
These diagrams look very good. So good in fact that it would take more time to make them than to completely memorize their content?
I should have clarified what X and Y mean in this instance. They do not correspond to individual software features but rather the set of expectations that both parties have agreed to beforehand with regards to privacy, access, security, and overall functionality. Every site has terms of use that basically say "you agree to the condition that we can change anything anytime and you cannot do anything about it." So as far as I am concerned as a user, X stands for the entire site experience regardless of the terms or privacy policy. I don't care that your 45 page document said you can add Y anytime. If Y was not there when I signed up and it affects my security, privacy, or accessibilty in a way that I value, you should tell me about it before you opt me in.

Personally, you would be the last person I would think of as pulling such shenanigans. Your work and words have shown that you care about your users more than making some extra cents in the short-term. I can't say I feel the same about others.
I'm not sure Google's alleged "honest" interface is only a product of company culture: The launch of Buzz was the target of as much criticism as received by Facebook.

It might just be that social network interfaces interact with users more intimately, and thus are more problematic to toy around with.

Either way, Facebook's chameleon interface is definitely irritating. You can see some of their design anti-patterns here: http://wiki.darkpatterns.org/wiki/Home