skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's relative to expectation. Many of us have been hearing about the Milgram results for years. After a while, the shocking side of it seems to be the only significant thing. Reading that transcript (and even more, watching the video of the interview, linked above) is a shock of a different kind, reminding us that there are angels in us and not only devils. The OP took inspiration in that. So do I.

I wonder how many of the more compliant subjects would have changed their tune if they had been in the room when someone like this guy (or the one after him in the video) stood up and refused. In this respect, the laboratory conditions were pretty artificial. In life, the social context is usually much larger. It would be interesting to know under what conditions an individual saying no would have an amplifying effect. Perhaps someone who knows social psychology can cite some work on this.
Yeah, as long as you don't run out of tin-foil hats you should be fine.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "reputation"? I think it's potentially a really interesting point and I'd just like to have a better idea of what you mean by it.
It's in my rss feed, so I read it when it updates. That said, it has been less and less amusing as time goes on.
Apple's products don't seem like good counterexamples to me.

Apple is promoting the iPad as a different kind of iPod Touch. The thing sits right next to the Touch in stores and on web pages. It runs all the same software. It even looks like a giant iPhone. The "magical" and "revolutionary" adjectives are different, but differentiation is an essential part of the strategy: You can't just clone the product with an existing market, you have to improve upon it somehow.

On the one hand, promoting the iPod as a "better MP3 player" would have been a losing strategy because "MP3 players" were not an existing market worth entering. The number of people using MP3 players ten years ago was tiny compared to the number of music buyers. And on the other hand, iPods were aimed pretty directly at the market for existing portable music players, which was much larger. The slogan was "a thousand songs in your pocket", and the iconic image was a pair of white headphones snaking out of that pocket. I don't think people missed the fact that the iPod was a Walkman, only better. Apple could, instead, have played up the fact that the iPod was a tiny computer that played games, or a tiny portable hard drive that let you tote documents around, but in fact these aspects were very muted, because they distracted from the story that the iPod was a super-Walkman.

Apple's actually really good at playing the existing-market-only-different game. The iPod was a different kind of Walkman; the iMac was a different kind of Windows PC; the iPhone was a kind of phone and a kind of iPod; the iPod Touch was a kind of iPhone and a kind of iPod; the iPad is a kind of iPod Touch. It seems evident that Apple could have launched the iPad ten years ago as a new product, and failed. In fact, that seems evident because it actually happened: The Newton came out, it was a new kind of product at the time, and it died horribly. So instead of repeating that mistake, Apple bootstrapped the iPad market, one tweak of an existing market at a time.

The biggest "failure" (or, in Apple terms, "hobby") in the current Apple product line is the Apple TV, and a big reason it's failed so far is that nobody knows what kind of thing it is. (It isn't even "a kind of TiVo", for all the good that would do.)
A company I worked for in Atlanta did the same thing (pay the difference). However, I suspect this is still the exception, not the rule.
I haven't thought about this extensively, but quickly considering this, I'd imagine one would be able to target users with ad networks much as you can do that with ads today. Given a number of networks, display ads from the network most likely to get a click-through from the user under consideration.
Redesigning Agile Series: Part III – Putting Forge to Work
Meet the Dell Venue Pro. No other handset on the market like it today:

http://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/Direct2Dell/b/direct...
Secrecy: Apple's secrecy is comparable to the U.S. government's in terms of "need to know" and compartmentalization.

This. My roommate is a hardware engineer on the iPad team, and he won't even confirm that there will be another iPad. He takes extra precautions when working at home - he won't take work calls if I'm in the room, and he set up the furniture in his room in an awkward fashion solely so that his computer monitor didn't face towards the door.

Several times I've brought friends or family down to Cupertino. He lets us inside to walk around the inner campus and eat at Caffe Macs, but that's truly all there is to see. Certainly we can't enter any other buildings on Infinite Loop.

One thing this article doesn't mention is work-life balance. We live in SF, and my roommate has a 90-minute commute (each way) on the Apple shuttle, and he usually works 12 hours on top of that. He's out by 8am and doesn't usually return until 11pm. He tells me this is a common topic of discussion at Caffe Macs - the balance between working on groundbreaking technology and, quite simply, having zero personal time during the week (and often on the weekends).

He can be called to go to China with no more than a few days' notice, and the duration of his stay there is never known ahead of time. He often estimates 7-10 days but it frequently ends up being closer to 2, even 3 weeks. Apple covers all of his expenses, of course, but he doesn't much care for Shenzhen.

He really likes working at Apple, but I think he recognizes that it's not a sustainable job for him for more than 3 or 4 years.
Sailboats can't sail directly downwind (say, within 5 deg. of directly downwind) faster than the wind. However, they can and do travel downwind with net speeds faster than the wind. Indeed, "speed made good" directly downwind for sailboats and iceboats has been measured at several times that of wind speed. This has been recorded in the America's cup race, for example.

So this result shouldn't really be that unexpected. Sailboats can't sail directly downwind faster than the wind, but they can travel downwind faster than the wind.
But what the company is saying is counter-productive to their business... If they were confirming your argument then it might be more reasonable to be skeptical but this company is turning away business otherwise, so I'm inclined to believe them.

Also what do you mean there's a good reason it's it's the best quote I could find? I Googled it and went through the first 5-10 results...

Also, marijuana smoke doesn't have free-radical particles and isn't carcinogenic--it doesn't cause cancer. And most, upwards of 80-90% of the psychoactive components of the smoke are absorbed by the first inhalation, the rest is exhaled into the air and becomes negligible once it mixes with the air supply.
You are awfully judgmental.
I'd rather that part of my service is to give my client a sort of guarantee on the cost, given the requirements[1]. How many hours I work? What technologies I use? What OS do I work on? What's my text editor? What version control system do I use? These are things they shouldn't have to concern themselves with -- I'm a black box.

Do you ask Apple how much it cost them to make that iPhone? No!

[1] If the requirements change, then of course, my price will change (most likely increase).
There's also LaunchBar: http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html
I taught myself Ruby on Rails--what should be my next app?
I started learning in March, read a book on it, built some practice apps...<p>My first "real" project was http://archive-fb.com, just finished a few weeks ago.

I don't know any other coders, so I really have no idea how far I am in learning or what I should do next. I want to make an app that forces me to learn some new skill(s) that would help me get a job.

Should I try to learn mobile development (and if so, what does that even involve)? JQuery? Just brush up my Javascript/Ajax skills (they are pretty minimal)? Should I acclimate myself to different testing plugins (Shoulda/Factory Girl, RSpec, Cucumber, what have you)? Any particular API that I should really get familiar with? Please don't say I should make a check-in app (hah).

Any info re: what level I'm at, and how far I am from employability would also be awesome. Thanks HN!
Why would passing AcidTest be all that interesting? I get HTML5 support, but it seems like passing a test where the weights are on more obscure features would be low on my priority list.
Can't recommend this program enough! New England isn't as hot a scene as other parts of the country, but the Cambridge location places you right in between MIT and Harvard. Broderick is a hoopy frood who really knows were his towel is, too.

Work shoulder to shoulder with the other companies in the TS Office, interact with awesome mentors, and have access to an amazing network for the rest of your days as an entrepreneur. Wicked good stuff, if you ask me.
If thats really an issue, why don't they setup a system that makes you go through a CAPTCHA before it will allow any internet access?
Please let someone discover a plot where they use screaming babies to set off the bomb.
Opera Mini is required to MITM by its design; it can't render HTML, only OPML fed to it by Opera's servers. I don't know what exactly the security implications are.
http://wouldworks.com
What I think you're missing is that the wind never drives the propeller - the wheels drive the propeller.

When it first starts moving, the propeller moves the opposite direction from what you would expect - so that the propeller is actually pushing back against the wind from t=0.
Apple has never developed their own hardware architecture.
Krolman Corporation now pricing based on CRB index
Well you say that, but 3D on the iPad is very impressive.

The XServe was a server product, its job was to sit quietly in the background doing work that for whatever reason desktops couldn't do, or would be suboptimal for. What to Apple desktop users with significant compute needs (e.g. movie makers, CAD users, scientific users) do? Maybe they can use Mathematica and submit the jobs to Linux boxes running the Mathematica back-end (or whatever) but why not provide the seamless experience?
This is very welcome! I'm working on a little project that'll use superfeedr, and was already dreading figuring out the XML bits. Good job guys.
Soon: Travelers will have to spend their time onboard in suspended animation.
Okay, then that makes sense.

Thanks.
This contains some good bits, but "The Unix Programming Environment" by Rob Pike and Brian Kernighan is a much more eloquent and concise explanation of the essence of the Unix philosophy.
It seems to me like the problems you're having, like intellisense not working correctly and the debugger being broken, are problems with the SDK tools and not with Eclipse itself. Writing your own tools I fear you will run in to many of the same problems. While I feel that you're right in saying developing Windows C++ apps under VS is a superior experience as compared to developing Linux C++ apps under Eclipse, Visual Studio cross-target development kits I've used in the past tended to be sub-par compared to either. Many degenerate in to rather dumb text editors with project management. From a technical standpoint, integrating with intellisense and the graphical debugger is much more difficult under Visual Studio. Either way, good luck and keep us posted!
If you want a far more detailed discussion, especially one that goes into why it can't work, see Eamonn Fingleton's book Unsustainable (or the earlier version In Praise of Hard Industries, there is little difference between them).

And if you want a good story about specifically how innovation grows out of practice, see Bob Johnstone's We Were Burning about the Japanese development of the first blue-light laser diode.
That's an awesome invitation, and I'll likely take you up on it. FYI, the "email" field your profile isn't visible to others.
> Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, by W. Richard Stevens and Stephen Rago

Stevens was a great writer, but his books covered precisely all that was and is wrong with 'modern' Unix systems, they could be considered a summary of what is the opposite to the Unix philosophy.

To truly understand the Unix way, Pike and Kernighan's The Unix Programming Environment is by far the best choice.
Tips for your first day at a new startup
This is really cool. Wish I had this when I built my PC.
um...i don't know why it fucked up the formatting. i didn't type any <p> tags; just pressed enter.
A truly social network (based on XMPP)
Sorry to be the naysayer, but big deal.

We were pulling 30-40K a weekend throwing raves back in the 90's. Ostensibly, they were drug and alcohol-free. cough

I am curious how he is getting liability insurance for these events though at his age. I remember it being a bitch to get when I was 20. And what of security? We had to hire off-duty cops until it was found out that it was against the rules for the cops to do that.
Indeed . . . to be fair, back when we decided to rename the language internally, we looked for any existing projects using the name, and we actually contacted the Gosu library guys to make sure they didn't mind us using the name Gosu for our language.
I've been expecting this from the moment I first saw an exploded view of an SSD. I understood the case allowed for the SSD to be used as a replacement drive, but figured it was only a matter of time before they'd be installed in slots on the motherboard. Next prediction: RAM/SSD soldered right onto the motherboard. [Yes, I realize I'm stating the obvious.]
I'm doing something similar to shift a few pounds. Two weeks ago I came home, I'd been particularly involved and forgot to eat. In order to get my calorific intake up to the minimum in my diet, I had to get some serious calories. So I had a small pizza, 4 bottles of Sol and a wife with a very suspicious look on her face.
If your net speed is more than 512 KBPs you are not going to notice any improvements whatsover, rather (as you said) you might notice delays due to the increased overhead. However, on slower connnections the effect is marked.
This is because a 100 KBps connection can download 100KB in 1 sec and 200 KB in 2 sec. On the other hand a 10 KBps connection will require 10 sec and 20 sec respectively. And, in this case, the effect of Opera's compression becomes noticeable.

P.S. What Opera is doing is similar to what www.onspeed.com does. I used to use that during my dialup days, and it was a big big help.
Great idea - if you arrive at your job on thyme, you must be a terrorists.

Be late, its the american way.
ah, thanks :)
This comment is the positive side to what I've been complaining about and been seeking all along in this community.

Thank you.
What about simply having computers and other machinery powered down? If we situated several probes closer to the sun, they could warn us like a canary in a coal mine. The satellites would simply transmit a heartbeat and status signal along with electromagnetic observations data. When one fo the satellites fails, we'll have a couple of minutes to shut machinery down and get the most sensitive equipment into Faraday cages.
That's most of the NY Post readership.
It is not sailing in any conventional since. The purpose of the vehicle is to demonstrate whether any wind powered vehicle is capable of traveling directly downwind faster than the wind. Many people believed, or still believe, that it's impossible.
Canuck vs. Yankee Beers: on Google.ca
First Impressions of Python from a Java Developer
They're welcome to ask. Repeatedly. I live in rural Indiana, and drones are close enough to black helicopters that I think it's not going to withstand close scrutiny that I take what they're freely giving.

Especially if they're flying a three million dollar drone over a town that has no fricking jobs to start with. I think people around here would be pretty interested in that disparity. Five bucks says the drones aren't manufactured here, now are they?

I could only wish they ask for their toy back.
That ad network could have used all this publicity to get more customers, if you would just share that information.

But I understand it is totally your call.
XML Sitemap along with Google notifications goes a long way!

Many sites do not notify google when their XML sitemap is updated yet it is a very efficient way to achieve instant indexing for new content!

While large sites with high PR are crawled frequently, crawling rates for small/medium sites will never result in instant indexing unless they use this method.

Use it and gain some search engine results momentum!
I just read their new book, "Do More Faster". To get a little better feel for what TechStars is like, I strongly recommend it. (Read it anyway, whether you're interested in TechStars or not.) My comments last week about their book:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1864922
Let's Talk About the 1995 Newsweek Piece That Says the Internet Will Fail
I like it. It could be more ajax-y and not have as many page refreshes.

It could also provide more info on individual parts. I do a LOT of spec-reading when I buy hardware. Customer reviews usually factor in as well.

I would like to be able to pick which retailers I want it to use prices from. I only shop a few places, so some of them wouldn't really be the best price for me.

I didn't have any confidence that it matches my CPU and RAM and Motherboard properly because of the warning on the page. I thought that was the main draw, but having to match those things manually defeats the purpose for me.
"It just isn't a priority for us right now"
I think the number of upvotes your getting demonstrates a sincere interest in such a framework. Really look forward to seeing more from this project.
Teach Me Your Trade and I'll Teach You Mine
Meet The New Borg: Google, Facebook & Apple
AudioHover 0.1 – Create audible hover effects in html5 quickly
But Open Genera isn't a language-oriented VM, it's an Ivory emulator. There's a huge difference.
Ahh, love this idea. Was going to use PriceMyPC.com / PriceAPC.com for it and have it affiliate the parts efficiently. I never worked past the hw compatibility issue. Great to see it working.
Someone could probably make money by launching 6 or so observation satellites around Mercury and at Mercury Trojan points. Since mass ejections are directional, we should be able to quickly confirm that as the cause of failure for a satellite with the others, and send out a digitally signed warning via the networks. This should give us a couple of minutes time to shut machinery down.
Congrats on launching this, it's great. I'm in the UK so obviously my first suggestion is UK webshop integration =)

The site is simple, clean and easy to use. I noticed that a lot of the small touches of UI which add to the experience were there as well - eg a little tick next to each component when you've selected it and then it does go away again when you click remove. (Sounds straight forward I know, but great attention to detail)

Here is my feedback - I've thought of a fair few things - please don't take that as a negative, it just has lots of potential!

1. Lots of the items you have lots and lots of components, which makes it quite difficult at first to look at. I have a few ideas but don't know if they will help

- RAM - perhaps tabify the interface (eg have tabs of 12GB, 8GB, 6GB, 4GB). You are even listing 256MB ram sticks on there. No-one should be buying 256mb of ram. Educate your users and don't allow anything less than 4GB.

- Hard Disks - you could tabify that by SSD, and then speed perhaps?

- CPU - tabify by number of cores or clock speed?

2. the tag line "Pick your parts. Build your system. Compare and Share" is pretty good - how about "Pick your parts. Build your own PC. Compare and Share" - system is ambigous, PC clarifies what it is, and ties in with your domain better

3. Bring in ratings / reviews from other sites, link to them etc...

4. Have a "E-mail me when this system price drops below $xxx" form

5. I might want to buy all the items from one store - give me a comparison between 'source parts from anywhere' v one store. I don't know if you can get stock status as well, but that would be good.

6. You don't have monitors or software. You could have a "I also need Windows" button or something like that

7. With so many components on the graphs, some of them are grouped together so tightly, that's it almost impossible to distinguish them without a lot of tedious hovering. Not sure how you can improve that

8. Add a Reset / remove all button to the system build page

9. Once I've made my component choice - when looking at the component page, put that clearly at the top of the list - rather than a little box in the right hand side?

10. Fill out with content - suggest enthuiast websites, "Why build a custom PC?" etc etc

11. White label it and sell it to pc component e-stores.
Tactics to Speed Company Growth
its taken down
Obviously, this is only my opinion but:

I find the rants amusing.

I take comfort in the fact that there are people that share my opinion, especially when the sites that I most regularly visit (SO,HN,Reddit etc.) all seem to take a differing view - that XKCD is good.

It's intriguing to me why people would think most of the comics are funny. It's something I really don't understand. Is there something wrong with my sense of humour? And when there's something I don't understand, I try to study it.
Heinlein argued for base 60. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal
The Best Magazine Articles of All Time
OMG stop cooking your brain! Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius but on a daily basis you put your brain to 37 degrees Celsius! That's not boiling point but because it's warm it could potentially harm your brain like boiling your brain would!

/sarcasm
We don't work around Java type erasure: if you create some object in Java and pass it off to Gosu, then that information is lost. For Gosu classes that are reified, we actually store the type parameter on the object itself, and it becomes an implicit constructor argument. For generified functions, we pass the type parameter through that's determined statically by the parser. For enhancements on generified Java classes, we also pass through the statically-determined type parameter. I.e. if you have a Gosu class Foo generified on T, when you construct Foo with type param String we'll pass the String type through to the constructor and store it on the object instance so we can retrieve it later. If you have something the compiler thinks is a List of Objects, and you call an enhancement method on List, we'll pass through Object as the type parameter, even if at runtime it's actually a List of Strings. So it's not perfect in its interaction with Java code, but it's usually good enough (and better than losing it entirely). As far as the Java classes we generate go, your generic type Foo has only one class, but as far as Gosu's type system goes, Foo parameterized on Object is a separate type instance from Foo parameterized on String.
Yeah, the best I can come up with is that you have to trust them that the data never makes it to the disk. But then they don't seem to be disk caching anything at all.
Weekend Hackathon: Hacks/Hackers in the Tenderloin
Quote: "All communication between the Opera Mini servers and the Opera Mini client on your phone is encrypted?"
Source: http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2010/04/15/public-wifi

So basically, as long as Opera's security is ok, we are ok. However, if someone manages to find a hole, we might be screwed. But, how practical is it to launch an attack on a mobile webbrowser that is possibly using encrypted WiFi along with a encrypted communication channel? May be someone else can shed more light on this.
Presumably Bruce is envisioning a world where airlines refrain from providing internet service on a plane to prevent a device from being triggered remotely, not one where they provide wireless service but instruct you not to connect to it.