skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seems to be a Seattle thing. I feel Amazon has a similar culture too.

Or perhaps it is just a big company problem. When the two ways to get ahead is: 1. Do something and brag as much as you can about it (shameless self promotion) 2. Criticize everything about everybody around you, even for the most minute details (make your self look good, by putting down everybody else ideas or way to do things).

Not helpful behavior, all disguised in the name of the company's 'good' of course.
It's likely that an analysis has been done, but isn't public. Teams keep lots of advanced stats to themselves as a competitive advantage.
Personally, I like Schiller (http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/) more than Roubini. His record: he wrote a book called Irrational Exuberance, and the .com market promptly crashed. He wrote papers from 2003 to 2007 suggesting the housing bubble was real, what it's effects were and how it might be mitigated / avoided.

Where Roubini simply says we're all walking in the dark, Schiller is the rare critical eye who offers, in public, insight about where and how things are going wrong.
The Joy of REPL
What if the pirates have mirrors? What if they have laser safety glasses with the correct range of filters?

What if the laser that's tuned for a long distance reflects off of something closer and permanently blinds the crew?

This sounds like an expensive and dangerous solution that can be easily circumvented.
And you can absolutely bet that this will be tied to a SSN and will be necessary in order to interact with the government.

In some ways, this is reminiscent of Microsoft's attempt to 'reboot the internet' with their own security code. I believe it was called Hailstorm.
>> Of course, if you view a PhD purely as training
>> for academic positions, then clearly something is broken,
>> because there are very few academic positions.

It always surprises me when people think this. It stands to reason that in a non-expanding market that each professor can on average train only one replacement in his/her entire career.
The perception of who's 'alive' really depends on the perspective. If you're dealing with software solution consultants you can't get around IBM - but if you're a small software developer you might just as well never have heard of them.

just for the record, take a look at the revenue and employe numbers to see what has changed since the 1960s (big blue is still on top):

IBM
$95.75 billion / 399'409 (2009)

Microsoft
$62.48 billion / 89'000 (2010)

Apple
$65.23 billion / 49'400 (2010)

Google
$23.65 billion / 23'331 (2010)
- "There are a bunch of studies linking IQ drops to fluoride exposure."

By "a bunch" we of course mean "an inconclusive one comparing two Chinese villages from a couple weeks ago": http://ashartus.wordpress.com/2010/12/29/fluoride-and-iq/

- "The negative health effects are not hard to find."

Ok, such as? You just rattle off industrial uses and act as though that affects its usefulness in medicine. (DID YOU KNOW IT WAS USED TO MAKE BOMBS??)
I shared my thoughts in detail about this more than a year ago, we should get out in front or as now coming true my prediction was, "As private industry and a world society I hope we can take care of this ourselves before it gets so out of control Congress tries to figure out how to do it and we end up with some horrible mess of a “National ID and Digital Identity Act” that looks at it only from the perspective of the USA and makes it very difficult for non-US citizens to do anything online (as most of the major Internet properties are US based) creating a whole new barrier for 3rd world citizens to overcome."

http://www.bretpiatt.com/blog/2009/07/25/cloud-computing-mak...
There are identifying documents, such as passports, drivers licenses and credit cards. These are sufficient for any situation where you might need to verify an identity.
It's a truely brilliant book, pretty short and an excellent holiday/weekend read.

Link to a html version of the book with original illustrations: http://xahlee.org/flatland/index.html
I find pg's proposed way of Microsoft becoming a contender again interesting. I don't doubt that he'd like Microsoft to start buying up more Web 2.0 startups. Granted, that doesn't make him wrong. I just find it interesting.
Implementing breakpoints on x86 Linux
Passports are issued by the UK Passport Office, and driving licenses by the DVLA (Driving & Vehicles Licensing Association). These are both effectively government agencies.

However, as having a passport or a driving license is not compulsory, there were plans to have a national identity card, as is the case in many European countries that would be compulsory for all adults. This has fairly recently been scrapped before it was ever adopted. Partly because the cost ended up being estimated at £18B (US$30B). Quite how a database and some photo cards of 60M people(less if you only include adults) would cost that much is a mystery that only governments can solve!
Gevşek Vida
The vast majority of the book is dedicated to optimizing Pentium-and-earlier processors as well as EGA/VGA programming modes, with a smaller but still significant chunk on software polygon rasterization. There is value in the bits on BSP and visibility, but it's probably only a third of the last ten (of 70) chapters. That said, there's probably more relevant worth in those bits than any Game Programming Gems books :).

Abrash is a great writer and, even if you skip the deep technical dives and code listings, the book is still worth reading.
I haven't looked into that; the designer we used didn't use that effect and I've been strictly 'painting by numbers' trying to visually match IE to everything else. Sounds like a pain though.
http://www.cookingforengineers.com/
The .com is available.
RIM: a leap ahead in user experience, but can it execute? | VisionMobile: blog
I totally understand your need for guidance, but this might be better put on Reddit.com. There would be a lot more people answering your query, and topics like this are common and acceptable there, and I've always seen a lot of quality answers. If you get a lot of advice here, that's fine, but keep Reddit in mind as an alternative.
Ask HN: Ways to make an AGM more interesting / valuable?
We have our AGM coming up and rather than do the usual CEO speaking to attendees with little interaction, we were wondering if there were other ways to make it more useful/interesting/ effective. Basically, what would make a good AGM for you?
How did you turn what I said into "disband the FCC"? Government needs a consistent set of rules, the FCC is part of our current rule apparatus.

The key part of my statement was "consistent". Unclear direction creates uncertainty. The health care and tax legislation have created massive uncertainty. This is not good for recovery. This "lets take a new direction" approach played out in 1929 just as it is playing out today. In 1929 and forward there were many new approaches and many attempts at a "solution". All of these caused problems by changing the rules. Now, we will have more uncertainty because a new party controls the House. I don't see the rules stabilizing again for a while.
Ask HN: How are Mac programmers different from Windows programmers?
I keep on hearing that, even non-Apple, Mac programs are more elegantly made (clean, focused, and with attention to details) than their Windows counterparts. Why is that? Are Mac programmers adhering to some design principles that their counterparts are not? Does the OS X environment encourage better development? or is the premise faulty to begin with?
I remember reading about the application of this mindset in retail establishments before. It's also why I never specify a size before seeing the actual cup sizes.
Press'n It. 3 tips to gain press for early-stagers
To generate the unique string, do SHA1(content + TheirIP + unique secret). The chance of collision is practically zero. Also, you can then conclusively prove that it was you who created this unique string - which may come in handy.

(Talking about SHA1 because I used it myself in a lighter version - just a hash of my name - to check how the search engines work with the content of my little blog).
I don't think Windows is a horrible OS in any meaningful way to the market. To the layman, there is not much difference in productivity, fun or functions between OSX and Windows 7, and most users don't need the features Linux provides.
In Spain also.
Flatland now always reminds me of the Big Bang Theory:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmiXemW_oBQ
I can sympathize with discontent about this, but almost nobody has brought up the positive uses of unique Internet ID.

Suppose you want a system where you want to signal to all internet companies that you don't want your browsing data to be harbored without your consent. The ID system would allow the creation and enforcement of such system.

The support for this comes in part because of pressure from the groups who are concerned about privacy and fretting over how their browsing data is used. While infringement of privacy hampers the growth of ecommerce, complete ban on harboring data hurts e-businesses (they won't be able to advertise efficiently). The solution to it is to create a free market: assign everyone a unique id, to which your preferences about harboring date will be assigned. Even better, data associated with that id can be considered proprietary, and users can license it to companies who are willing to pay for it and users can sue companies that infringe on this proprietary data bc courts will recognize it as solely yours. This is a good start if government wants to step in to protect your privacy from the "evil" corporations, while not hindering the growth of e-businesses.

Ideally, you will be protected from corporations who are after your private data. Government, however, will surely continue using it the way you don't want.
This is awesome! Thanks!

The reason I used English corpus words was precisely that I did not have this surname frequency list handy.

I don't think this is a list of English names, though. #18 is Garcia, and #19 is Martinez, and so on. It's a list of US names. A similar list for Argentina would probably be most useful for me at the moment.
Why TechCrunch's iPhone Verizon Predictions Are Wrong
One other thing I should have noted is that, because of Mongate's batch functionality, depending on the type of data you are inserting, you can actually get better performance from it vs. an SSH tunnel. Here are some tests I ran, benchmarking a batch of 50 insertions/updates on an SSH tunnel ( ssh -C -o CompressionLevel=9 -N -f -L 27017:localhost:27017 -C root@mongo_host ) vs. Mongate.

50 Insert/Update Operations

Pymongo over SSH Tunnel: (5.5 + 5.8 + 5.9 + 2.0 + 5.8 + 5.7 + 5.7 + 5.8 + 6.1 + 5.9) / 10.0 = 5.42s

Mongate over HTTPS: (3.7 + 3.7 + 3.6 + 3.7 + 3.7 + 3.9 + 3.7 + 3.8 + 4.7 + 3.8) / 10.0 = 3.83s
I read it recently. Great short read. Extremely sexist, but I guess it's a book of its time. Got me thinking hard about higher dimensions for a while, until my head started hurting :)
Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed them.
Spec: an event-driven JavaScript unit testing library
I would think it's false, even with the surging popularity of Apple computers recently there are still far more people using Windows and far more developers writing Windows applications. With more applications being developed comes a much greater number of unreliable, slow applications with poor user interfaces.

Though I wonder if the use of Objective-C, and lack of any safety scissors-esque programming environments like Visual Basic, is helping keep out cruft like Bulk Rename Utility (http://bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Screenshots.php).
The mailing list is having some trouble surviving, too. Apparently at some point Google decided our domain was spammy, and all the Gmail subscribers started getting their mail automatically spam-filtered. I contacted a bunch of people directly (via Google Talk or Facebook) to get them to fish the latest mail out of the spambox.

Beyond that, I don't know what to do. I guess I could post more often.

I certainly need a better blog interface for it. What I have right now is http://www.bentwookie.org/blog.
I´m pretty sure that´s part of the point of the book; in addition to the obvious, it is also social commentary on views on women at the time of its writing.
This presentation is great in a historical context as well as still being technically relevant.

The mid-90's is the era that saw a broad transition in game programming from at-the-metal, low-level coding towards more algorithmically driven approaches, since the hardware had become beefy enough to allow the kinds of large datasets where algorithms matter more than constant factors. Abrash notes it himself - his VGA/DOS knowledge became meaningless within the span of 2 years.

One thing that is overlooked in all the emphasis on 3D rendering is that real-time strategy also developed in the same era as the first-person shooter. This isn't just because of mice, but because it was now feasible to do fast real-time pathfinding in games. Earlier, similar attempts at the genre suffer from playing sluggishly or avoiding any pathfinding.

Another 90's genre that came about because of hardware improvements is music games: CDs and memory for sample playback made it possible to play back high-quality audio tracks.
Re the sexism, read the article linked above ;)
I think the real challenge will be if they can give the TAT team the authority to win the user experience battles that they'll inevitably have with the development teams.

That's pretty typical with an engineering centric company like RIM.
It said the site would load but the video would not in the original article, which was part of where I was coming from. Plus, features like Opera Turbo inside of Opera Mobile, for instance, would make such proxies transparent to the user.
Graceful degradation doesn't just mean "works without JavaScript".

This demo doesn't let you link to (or bookmark) a page or open questions in new tabs. For an app like Gmail that probably doesn't matter, but for something like this I'd say it's pretty crucial functionality to be missing.

Progressive enhancement where you add JS to improve the experience is a much better approach. That way you get all the basic functionality for free instead of trying to retrofit it onto the ajaxy app.

Now that you can manipulate the address bar with pushState [1] you can even make these enhancements completely transparent.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/Manipulating_the_browse...
Please explain why such a "serious" use cannot be implemented with today's technologies. You can trivially ask people to give you their license number and run a lookup to confirm that they're who they claim to be at signup time. Yes, it's not gratis (see publicdata.com). But you stipulated that this is "serious" use, so that shouldn't be a problem.
Online We're Googling, Offline Still Stumbling
The great firewall existed in the 90's and the 2000's right?
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland with links to e-versions: epub, kindle, etc. via Project Gutenberg.

And, new to me, Project Gutenberg provides QR codes for phone download. Nice.
Ask HN: The Web app that you just write into and register if you want to save?
There was a Web app that someone on here recently showed off. Basically it was just a minimalist page with a big text box and you could just start writing in it and if you wanted to save it you could register an account. It had the theme of being a peaceful/minimalist writing environment. Does anyone remember what I'm talking about? I've literally scoured my browser history and I've searched Google (constrained to this site, ranged over the past month, with several keyword combinations) and I've had zero luck finding it. This is my last resort.
Is The New Mac App Store the Beginning of a Cultural Revolution?
Don't forget the even more magic cure-all: zoom: 1;

It doesn't cause z-index bugs like position relative does! :)
The experimentation in system's programming still exists, it just takes a different form (possibly because the cost of committing a design to code is a bit more). Jeff Dean says that the hallmark of a good systems programmer is the ability to mentally simulate the effects of a number of different designs so that you can quickly throw out ones that won't work. You don't sit in a corner trying to perfect your design, you go out and talk to many potential users of your system to make sure you understand its requirements, then you come up with many possible designs that might fulfill those requirements, then you prune that down to one design that you actually implement.
It seems like formerly popular but effectively dead languages tend to be most popular with sysadmins. (It explains bash, sed, and awk, at least.) So I'm not sure that being popular with sysadmins is really what the folks who want to revive Perl are going for?
I don't see how this would be implemented at the ISP level, but maybe that's a failure of my imagination. I'm imagining something similar to Open ID.

With no details about the government's plan for an internet ID, we're left to our imaginations, which probably vary widely from person to person.
tl;dr:

"ZGN-433 caused 24 obese women to lose, on average, a kilogram a week for a month – with no harmful side effects."

"This is a stunning rate of weight loss, especially as the women ate normally and were not given exercise advice. It is almost the maximum rate considered safe, and nearly as effective as surgery to reduce stomach size"
My windows are at ground level, but I really hate buying apples at the market and then having to wash them. Time for...

Roomba for Macintosh
As they're only using a single green laser, I wonder if the pirates could wear a head mounted display, with a webcam attached, which could display only red-blue.
Ah fair point, I don't use Chromium so hadn't noticed whether or not the effect was present.

The page itself confused me though as I thought the inline images were meant to be working demos and they did nothing for me until I went to the demo page itself.

[edit] fixed typo
I recommend the movie too. There's 2 of them, make sure you watch the half hour one with Martin Sheen, Michael York and Kristen Bell:

http://www.flatlandthemovie.com

The full length 95 minute one is less favorably held.
Don't really wanna go down here, but _why left after someone claimed to post his IRL name/info
And that is a very large controversy. Governments can't even get voting machines that a) work correctly and b) are tamper resistant. It scares me to death that the same contract/bidding system that produces the many monstrosities that support a basic right are going to produce this.
I just downloaded and took a look at the paper. I've got a problem with it -- it is only looking at data from 2006-2009.

This is an issue, because of the way that benching starters has become conventional wisdom over the last 25 years. In fact, the foul out rate is down over 40% during that period (http://www.pistonpowered.com/2010/12/nba-players-are-fouling...).

So on one hand, yes, playing a starter in foul trouble could cause them to be less aggressive. On the other hand, I suspect there is VERY strong cultural bias that magnifies this.

I would imagine that an NBA team that has either veteran players or a very strong culture of understanding advanced statistics would be able to play as well when in foul trouble. (Think San Antonio, Boston, Dallas and Houston). I would also imagine that the evidence would not be as strong when looking at other time periods.

So it's an interesting observation, but it makes sense that coaches approach this issue on a case-by-case basis. Play Tim Duncan, bench Blake Griffin.
Steve Dorner, Creator of Eudora, Has Cancer
Stackexchange for linked data enthusiasts
I think it's something of a faulty premise - both platforms have UI design guidelines (Ribbon interface, Chrome, etc...) - Apple's are more extensive IMHO, but that's a developer guidance issue and not a platform capability issue.

I think the perception of comes from a bunch of legacy Win32 apps that are still lingering around which have the crusty old design.

Newer apps made on Windows using WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) look great - like the Zune client, Visual Studio, Expression Blend, and third party apps like MetroTwit and Paint.NET. WPF uses a mark-up language to build UI elements and is thus more designer-friendly than WinForms and older Windows UI technologies - this fact in combination with the Aero UI leads to more elegant-looking Windows apps imho.

Apple has a longer-history of offering designer-friendly tools and UI guidelines to go with it, so that's probably where the perception comes from, but I'd argue it's a dated premise now.
Wow, lots of hatorade on the drinks menu today. I of course had the same reaction as everybody else to the sensationalist headline... but when I read the article I agreed with pretty much everything he said.

I suppose that is fair and preserves my strong PG contrarian streak, the articles everyone else loves I hate, and the articles everyone else hates, I love.

====
From the article:

So if they wanted to be a contender again, this is how they could do it:

(1) Buy all the good "Web 2.0" startups. They could get substantially all of them for less than they'd have to pay for Facebook.

(2) Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley, surrounded by lead shielding to protect them from any contact with Redmond.

I feel safe suggesting this, because they'd never do it. Microsoft's biggest weakness is that they still don't realize how much they suck. They still think they can write software in house. Maybe they can, by the standards of the desktop world. But that world ended a few years ago.

====

This is brilliant. And when we look at the Microsoft Kin Phone Debacle of 2010, we see that indeed they splashed the cash to buy a startup (Danger) to get into the smartphone game, but they critically failed the second part of the plan, which is the lead shielding bit.

This is why PG is a genius, and this is why we can say that Microsoft is dead. Because they are the problem. The problem with Microsoft is Microsoft. Because they are irrelevant, and to Microsoft being irrelevant is worse than death.

One of the things I've noticed about Microsoft over the last couple of years, is that when someone leaves Microsoft, and they blog about it (as you do), and then you get ex-Microsofties arguing with current-Microsofties, is that they have their own weird sub-culture and language that is incomprehensible to anyone on the outside. The more inward focused they become, the less and less relevant to everyone on the outside they will be. This is another sign of their decline.

Joel Spolsky said some interesting things about this, on the topic of hiring programmers. Someone asked him how much a programmer should be paid, and he said that across the industry there was a pretty uniform amount of profit that a company can make per programmer - something like $100k-200k, but that there are a couple of exceptions to this rule, one is Microsoft, because the Windows and Office parts of their business are ridiculously profitable, and the other is Google. And that Microsoft makes millions per programmer, so they can afford to go out and hire the good and the bad, in order simply to prevent them from working for their competitors. So they hire all these people, and then ignore them or put them to work on bike sheds. I think it is very dangerous for a company of any size to ignore their smart people, and this is another sign of their decline.
Evolution of lice shows humans started wearing clothes about 170000 years ago
OK, read it now. Great summary of the book. I hadn't realised the author was active in the women’s suffrage movement. I'll have to read it again! :)
Created by Zafgen a Cambridge MA startup.
IANAL, but this is technically legal, so long as it's used ONLY for commerce, by means of the Interstate Commerce Clause of the US Constitution.

After that, it becomes unconstitutional, far as I know.

So, in other words, it's unconstitutional, because it won't be used only for commerce.