skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So why did Timeline make the list?

I was thinking about leaving it off because it is really, really bad for anyone who actually reads Sci-Fi. I put it on the list because despite the fact that it's almost completely unreadable because the Wal*Mart set needs their Sci-Fi too. I wanted the list to cover as broad a spectrum of sci-fi as I could without making it 100 items long.

I left off a lot of greats including:

Vernor Vinge Dan Simmons Arthur C Clarke Iain M. Banks

and other works by Stross and a few others

Why is Rand on this list? Well, besides the Bible (go figure) Atlas Shrugged is apparently the most influential book ever written. Do I agree with the whole Objectivist shtick? Not hardly but it is still worth mentioning.

The Giver? Like Anthem it's Sci-Fi for grade schoolers, worth mentioning because a lot of people were introduced to Sci-Fi with books like this.

Leave suggestions, as many as you want. If you don't see it on the list it probably would have been there if I had remembered it while I was compiling.
I agree for now. Google needs to protect their bread and butter, paid search, which requires advertisers to have a lot of trust that Google does not act in any way creating a conflict of interest.

However, right now is the good times for Google. The true test is to see how a company (or real people) acts during the tough times. Google's time as king of the mountain will only last so long, and it will be interesting to see how they handle their descent when the time comes.
Welcome to the Rotten Tech IPO Market
Wisdom of small crowds, part 1: how to aggregate Turker judgments for classification
Source of FriendFeed Spam Revealed - Write APIs Can Be Trouble
Not sure what your problem was. I just popped up a 91M log file I had sitting around in my emacs (a CVS build from about a year ago, somewhere on the 23.x line I think). It took about 7-8 seconds to come up (probably building the table of line numbers) and is perfectly snappy interactively. This is on a laptop with 2.5G of memory running Ubuntu Gutsy.
Your best chance at negotiating any salary related issues is before you start.

Don't think 'If I perform really well - they will compensate me fairly'. (speaking from experience)
No, absolutely, that would be stage 1 of the let-us-share-an-office plan. And I think that would be awesome (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=232235). This post was more "how far could we take it?", but the model you brought up would definitely work.

And, I might, add, strippers work on this model. They pay a floor fee to the club and keep the tips. (Don't ask me how I know.) If it's good enough for strippers, by golly, it's good enough for me! (This also brings to mind the concept of specialization, although I'm not sure if I want to elaborate.)
Git-issues: a distributed issue tracking system based on git repositories
I think Atlas Shrugged might qualify -- it takes place in an alternative universe and deals with the implications of a couple of fictional technologies (Rearden metal and John Galt's engine). Animal Farm is really pushing the definition, though.

Since I'm sure everybody's idea of the best three will differ, a list of 32 with summaries so you can pick out the three (out of those which you haven't read) which are likely to appeal to you is probably more useful.
The real killer app would be a low level development tool that does not require you to use 4-5 different tools and wait near to 5 minutes to test your design on hardware.
In my many years consulting, I've seen two types of clients:

1. Corporate - pays the market rate but will not assume the legal risk of taking on individual developers; will only work with another corporation or agency.

2. Mom & pop - will work with individual developers but only on a fixed bid; expectations are about a quarter of realistic budget.

So my choices as a freelancer are: work 8-hour days and get paid my full rate through a recruiter (yes, they skim off the top but who cares, my rates are what they are), or work long days + weekends on freelance projects and get paid pennies on the dollar (both in terms of lower hourly rates and never getting paid for all the hours you work).

Add to that the tax benefit from maintaining a home office, and you realize that there is simply no reason not to work through an agency/recruiter. They take care of finding the good (i.e. paying) clients, billing, etc. A developer "coop" is simply neither here nor there... at least from my experience here in New York.
Noted. And I do agree with your original point; look around your neighborhood at 10 different small local businesses. Dry-cleaning, carpet-cleaning, etc. Services. Products are sold by Wal-Mart and Home Depot and Gap. There's no question that, for whatever reason, service is hard to scale.
37s posts are one thing, but we're really going to start putting all the SvN effluvia here too?
Your staff look like an Abercrombie & Fitch store...
The building blocks of Lego
Multicore is nothing special if you are doing web apps. So I guess the trend towards multicore and the trend towards web apps will reinforce each other.
Yes. After a year(ish) of lurking with no account, and 130 days of having an account here, I have finally settled down to a state where I type out at least 1/10 the comments I think of, post at least 1/5 those I type out, and leave the majority of those undeleted!

And after working with my current co-workers for a few months, I finally have courage to say something once in a while.

But attrition doesn't work in most social settings... It's a difficult way to make friends (though the friends you do eventually make are good) - I made one friend in 4.5 years of college. And it's downright horrid for getting girlfriends...
try to observe it from a non-judgmental standpoint (and definitely don't push it away). you might then be able to figure it out.
Where does the money for those salaries come from? Profitability? Funding? If these guys are funded enough to pay salaries and haven't worked out the equity issue, I'd be concerned. If it's profitable enough to pay competitively, will the founders necessarily be seeking a liquidity event?
Justin.tv: having scalability issues.
I hope founder of justin.tv's founder reads this message.
I have been trying to watch Nadal Murray match online for last half an hour. But the page never loads :((

http://es.justin.tv/nadal2
If you're so shy, how'd you manage to post personal information in a public forum, like this?
http://www.justin.tv/help
There are a couple odd choices on that list. I thought Timeline was pretty entertaining, but it's a typical Michael Crichton made-for-tv story and probably not worthy of such a list. I guess it sort of makes quantum physics palatable to the average joe but you could hardly say it's pushed the boundaries of the genre.

It's also worth mentioning that Minority Report isn't even a novel. It's a short story than spans maybe thirty pages. Still, virtually anything by Philip K. Dick could make it onto a list of the best sci-fi.

Anyway, there's still quite a bit of good stuff there- even the ones that aren't exactly sci-fi.

There was also a list of the top 100 sci-fi books that was going around on Reddit or Digg a while back that looked really good. Here's the link for anyone interested: http://home.austarnet.com.au/petersykes/topscifi/lists_books...
Agreed, the EEE (on which I write this) has surprisingly short battery life for such a limited device.

However, the SSD more than makes up for the battery consumption by being silent, blazingly fast and mad robust (this is my four year old son's computer and he can drop it on the floor while the disk is running without killing it).

I can't wait for SSDs to become standard.
I don't know about "these guys", but our answer is straightforward: cash flow.
IBM Acquires Platform Solutions Inc
Samsung i640 Silver (Unlocked)
The Samsung i640 is another sleek slider from the World’s number 2 mobile phone manufacturer though quite a bit different from their other slider phones. The Samsung i640 when compared with Samsung’s other slider phones is probably a bit wider and a bit bulkier than the others.
I really don't like Snow Crash much.

Firstly, it's dated quite badly, since it was written in the recent past about roughly-now. He gets the technology pretty much right, but the speculation about how that technology will change society pretty much all wrong.

Secondly, Mr Protagonist, as a protagonist, annoys me in that he seems more like the kind of character that a fourteen-year-old boy would think was awesome (greatest swordfighter in the world, for no good reason!) than somebody I want to read a book about.

Cryptonomicon, on the other hand, is a must-read. I don't really even like science fiction that much, but Cryptonomicon is a must-read.
It looks like we're going to be wishing the GHz wars were still going on pretty soon.... All my software is multi-threaded, but not in a way that would make it any faster on 200 threads than maybe 4 maximum. It's not (as Ars makes it seem) an issue of my deciding to split the code into only 4 sections; it's a matter of launching new threads when you need them instead of whenever you can just for the hell of it.

For instance, my usage of multi-threaded code is to to keep the UI alive and responsive while firing off threads in the background to accomplish different things. A thread for each independent procedure being done in the background - but the problem is that there simply aren't enough procedures happening at once to go around!

Not all programs are just a single big mathematical problem being analyzed that can be split to an arbitrary number of threads, most of the time, most of the software, you just can't spread your code to an infinite number of CPUs - it would be stupid to even try.

Instead of getting into a pissing contest over core counts (anyone remember the tri-core AMDs?!?) the chip giants should be focus on better instruction sets, improved pipelining, lowered energy consumption, and - yes - even faster clock speeds... just not at the cost of performance as they had in the past.
And it is seemingly getting slower. Lots of complaints about speed with the latest 1.2 release.
Sorry? You're linking to the same page?
Following the link: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13953_3-9980569-80.html?part=rss&#...

Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations at Facebook said:

"...through that process we were able to lock in prices today and carry those prices forward as all the commodity components costs drop."

Is it just me? Don't you want the new future pricing as commodity component costs drop? Why lock in and carry forward today's prices concerning technology?

Please help me with this one.
CakePHP 1.2.0.7125 rc1 was used in the test, that's pretty current (rc2 is the latest). Having no problems with speed doesn't mean it's slow--you just might have pushed it beyond the three requests per second that it can handle.
Even with the interspersed words I still can't make sense of it.

Unlike, say, buffalo [that habitually] buffalo buffalo [habitually] buffalo buffalo [that habitually] buffalo buffalo.
Personally, I disagree. It's more of a form of self defense to prevent ourselves from getting hurt. I feel like a lot of shyness comes from being afraid showing people our true selves and being ridiculed or criticized for it.
The Samsung i640 is another sleek slider from the World’s number 2 mobile phone manufacturer though quite a bit different from their other slider phones. The Samsung i640 when compared with Samsung’s other slider phones is probably a bit wider and a bit bulkier than the others.
Microsoft Seeks Partners For a New Run at Yahoo
Why XML is Bad for Humans
Microsoft/Yahoo Secret Meetings: "look for the woman with the red umbrella"
Intel would like to charge people more for multi core CPU's because they are easy to design, but don't forget each of those new cores can still do 1,000,000,000's of operations per second. If your app works fine on say a 1GHz single core PIII then nothing is wrong and there is no point in writing multi core code. Anyway, it's not like Intel is going to build a CPU than can't run single core code as fast as their current crop of CPU's so I don't see any problems.
So it's hard to write programs that aren't steaming piles of crap. Your point?
"Once you get the hang of that, you'll find yourself cursing any editor that doesn't have an easy way to move to the end of the 3rd word from the current location."

I find myself cursing any editor that is moded. Moded editing is simply wrong. That said, I doubt there is any movement command in vi that is missing from emacs. The editors are the same in basic text-editing functionality. They differ drastically in philosophy and extended functionality.
This may be a special case, but it worked for me so take it for what it's worth: take the job, work hard and take on as much responsibility as you can, until you are indispensable. Then ask for (demand) equity. They will give it to you.
So has anyone here had success with or even tried affiliate marketing? I didn't think this was the place where that would get mentioned, but that seems to be who the blogger is most concerned with.
How Testing The VC Market Can Lead To An Investment: Being Monitored
It may be similar to the "its easier to be an asshole online than in person" phenomenon. It's easier to talk about personal things online than in person, or so my experiences show.
The Black-Market Code Industry
I apologize if anyone sees this as "polluting" HN, but I thought they were interesting quotes, and might warrant some discussion from at least someone on here. If people aren't interested, they probably won't upvote it, so I doubt you have much to worry about. Isn't that the point of the system in place here?
Satellite Solar Power for the Whole World
Intel Thread Building Blocks
http://www.intel.com/cd/software/products/asmo-na/eng/294797...

It makes writing apps that take advantage of multi-core architectures almost trivial. We've benchmarked it on our machines and on Amazon EC2 with very impressive results.

Also, RapidMind has some nice libraries that allow you to fairly easily parallelize code to optimally take advantage of multi-cores and GPUs. Although their licensing is obscenely expensive at the moment.
Don't fall for that. If the company wants to see if you are a good fit before hiring you they should hire you as a contractor and pay a good hourly rate. Which from my experience in the Bay Area is at least 75 bucks an hour for 40 hours a week.
The Secret of Social Media:  Ultimately, We All Just Wanna Be Rockstars
This is good news for great programmers. Anything which helps to easily stratify (and hence appropriately reward) the great from the average is welcome.
Future of Education by Michael Wesch
PDF becomes ISO standard
Microsoft releases subscription-based Office
Why Powerset is important and different
Yup. But he doesn't know it!
Somehow I feel comfortable here. Not sure why. I wouldn't have posted this anywhere else.
actually they've done that several times now.
Security is only part of the frameworks job. It should definitely follow best practices and have functions to deal with security concerns. But its really the job of the programmer to make sure his/her code is secure. And I don't just mean sanitizing data. For example it's not the frameworks responsibility to make sure you don't put a sequential session ID in a cookie that could easily be hijacked.
Don't Buy an Unlocked iPhone From AT&T, Just Cancel a New Contract
The Orion SF Masterworks collection is much better, exhaustive, and actually published as a series (not in the US unfortunately). Take a look lots of awesome books you may or may not have read...
http://www.sfsite.com/lists/orion01.htm
The Future Online is Relationships.  Heuristics for tracking and evaluating.
Adding cores to a CPU is not quite as trivial as all that. You have to consider the implications of shared memory and caches and the overhead of bus traffic between the cores. As the number of cores increases the overhead begins to dominate the design rather than the cores themselves.... there's been lots of good research on how to overcome those issues but it's very much an open problem at this point.
IANAL but I would think selling exploits would be legal (and distinct from using them). A very strong argument could be made that it's no different than an employee of one of the security groups or the government uncovering them.
Also fully PHP5 :)
That's awesome, congrats!

BTW, are you (tptacek, not the company) in Chicago or NY?
Unwelcome Advice
On a similar note, what I would love to see is full, free access to pure, unadulterated historical data from all facets of government.

In the U.S. for example, try finding the correlation between GDP growth and number of border arrests. Or domestic oil consumption versus domestic production versus unused land leased to oil companies.

Just a simple directory that would pull data from CIA, BLS, DHS, Treasury, etc. And you can download them in whatever format you chose.

I'll put that on my conversation list when Barack comes over to my house for hamburgers. He really likes my recipe.
The laboratory at the end of the solar system
They have the .co.uk domain as well. Probably got both to help drive traffic.
All this psychologizing about shyness: poor self-esteem, self-consciousness, withholding oneself from others out of selfishness, etc. My own shyness, and that of other shy people I know, has been due to something completely different, and much more straightforward:

Not knowing the social conventions.

What is it that people are doing at parties? What are they talking about? Why are they doing this? It seems incomprehensible. With someone I haven't met or barely know, it's hard to find a way to say what comes to mind in a way that a total stranger would relate to. With someone I know well, I can say what comes to mind, because there's a lot of shared context. This is the common pattern among introverts: quiet with strangers, endlessly talkative with close friends. And why is that? Because with close friends, you have the shared context and conventions needed to have the kind of conversation that makes sense to you.

(Please, no pity or advice. I've worked on my shyness and gotten good enough at connecting with strangers to occasionally even pick up women on the street--a skill every hacker entrepreneur should have. I'm just pointing out that the psychologizing is wrong. The path out of shyness, at least for a lot of us geeks, is simply to learn to play the social game, not to address some sort of self-esteem issue.)
Yep, let the people writing the web servers, app servers, languages, and libraries deal with multicore. I'll happily run on those uber-optimized platforms.
How to Work 80+ Hour Weeks
I am a civil servant/not in the UK can I enter?

All ideas must affect and be implemented in the UK, but other than that the more ideas the merrier! The only caveat if you are a civil servant is that you will not be eligible to win financial elements of the prize. We are arranging for an alternative prize that can be awarded - something like a Macbook Air.

I'm not sure, but I think that's saying you have to be in the UK. It's not very clear.
I agree. In manner of response to the very agitated repliers: I'm not saying that sharing fault is something to be ashamed of.

I'm not also morally condemning my parents for lying to me, keeping me away from nice things and generally failing to teach me everything they should have known.

I'm not going to condemn anyone for trying to make a relationship work and then recognizing it failed. Maybe you failed. Maybe you had poor judgement. Whatever. It failed.

It is partly my fault that me and my wife are still together. I'm proud of that. I'll still be proud of that when she leaves me in 10 years. And I have been sharing the guilt.

I'm not big on the 'you can always see it coming' argument. I think there is always a reason person X wants to break up. And that reason must have something to do with person Y as well, otherwise, why break up?
Argh. Do you have the new 901? That's a big big difference.
This looks like spam. It's submitted by someone with the same name as the linked blog, and it's just an Onion-style parody article.

Unless reddit has changed their theme to look like Hacker News, I don't think this belongs here. Flagged.
Indenti.ca: May A Million Twitters Bloom
It's an ego thing. Nobody wants to admit the fact that they made a major mistake.

I look at it differently, though. It's your fault if you use open-source software that's insecure. The code is right there; if finding the vulnerability was so simple to find and fix, you could have found and fixed it yourself. Since you didn't do that, you really have no right to deride the developer for also missing it.

It's easy to play blogger pundit, but harder to write software that people find useful.
Point #15 is important. I've found that just going out and being as social as possible with many different people is essential in honing your own social skills.

Don't sit at home on the couch (or chair, just coding). You need to get out there in order to succeed.
I can just imagine Steve Jobs continuously yelling at the waiters and deputy chefs... ahhh.
Suggestions, eh?

I personally love Stanislaw Lem's books. Two of my favorites:
- The Cyberiad: a set of short stories that read almost
like silly little fairy tales, complete with
probabalistic dragons, poetry machines, and kings,
and electroknights.
- His Master's Voice: A rather cynical look at
deciphering a message from the stars.
Sounds like a startup process

* have an idea

- LEGO: I want a coast guard helicopter

- SW: It's a digg clone!

* design

- LEGO: 3d modeling

- SW: a whole bunch of whiteboarding (WIKI etc.)

* what's custom and what's stock

- LEGO: nice to have 1 day turn around on the custom

- SW: using libraries vs. what's custom

* is it cost effective

- LEGO: what's the price point of the set

- SW: how many people do you have to hire

* usability

- let the customers play with it
Nor, is it that funny.
In Perl, you can set $SIG{__DIE__} to a function that gets all exceptions. You can also override CORE::die or CORE::GLOBAL::die.
Apologies in advance if this question is inappropriate for hacker news, but the gadget blogs seem to have quite trollish communities and I didn't want to bother posting the question there...

If I get an iPhone in the USA, with a contract or no-contract, can I pop a local SIM in it if I travel to Europe or Australia and expect it to work?
Here's a short vid of the actual controversial line call in question: http://youtube.com/watch?v=G2py2SlUBeg
It's awesome, but really --- if we can do it, I absolutely guarantee you can too!

I'm in Chicago. Half of us are in Chicago, the other half in Manhattan.
Ask YC: How important is comfort to your productivity?
Hey YC'ers,

I find that me being comfortable (always having a good cup of coffee, good chair, good lighting, clean work surface, good smell in the air) is paramount to how productive I am.

Am I just being a prissy and demanding developer, or do you just have to have that cup of Starbucks (or Tim Horton's!) before you feel that you can be truly productive?
I fixed it. There is a feature request page.
This "try before you buy" contractor meme is awful. 1099s are responsible for their own payroll taxes and their own health insurance. If a company suggested that I relocate for the opportunity to consult with them, I'd hang up the phone. It's insulting.
I agree. Though the author has a nice, leaden consistency.
The Death of Gallium
I know enough to know the author believes it to be a serious contender. At least it's not some kind of joke.
The whole business stinks. I wonder if these black hats offer right of first refusal to the affected vendors, because that sure sounds like extortion. "I'll happily sell this exploit to you... or to the Russian mob -- it's your choice."
Some of the SSDs in the article are using sophisticated controllers that consume more power.
its more based on personality, in my experience. you sound like you know your personality and know what you need to be productive. congrats; not everyone does.