skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Regardless if you normally like history or not, I'd point to the Sengoku Warring States Era of Japanese history as worth studying for almost anyone who wants to be successful at anything.

All cohesive authority broke down into basically a 30-sided civil war. Thus, there's surprisingly large amounts of data about tactics, strategies, diplomacy, troop movements, alliances and betrayals, etc, etc, etc. Trying to make sense of why this guy won or that guy won goes a long way towards learning how not to make mistakes.

Here's the era -

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

Here's "the three great unifiers" - originally the latter two fought on the side of the former, until he was betrayed by one his own generals.

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

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

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

Particularly, if you can understand why the Tokugawa wound up ruling Japan for 250 years and not the Toyotomi, I think that goes a long way towards learning how not to be overexpansive. Toyotomi Hideyoshi was more impressive than Tokugawa Ieyasu through his whole life... Hideyoshi probably had 10x or maybe even 100x more excellent victories and innovations and insights.

But Ieyasu was always able to avoid the large fatal mistakes, whereas Hideyoshi made a couple of those - invading Korea shortly after conquering all of Japan but before power was consolidated, and putting his nephew to death for poor reasons.

Really, in many respects Hideyoshi was a much smarter, stronger, better man than Ieyasu, but Ieyasu avoided the overexpansiveness mistake, and thus his family went on to win in the end.

Check out Sengoku. I think most people here would find a lot of fascinating lessons from the era.
Like the (brief) period when the sense of traffic lights was changed, so that "red" indicated "go". This makes perfect sense, since anything red must of course stand for making progress.
John Williams is in the business of creating great soundtracks (haha) and selling subscriptions to his newsletter on inflation.

Immediately what stands out at me here is his graph. I'd like to see the dataset, but it looks like he is claiming substantial inflation over the past 30 years. I'd guess that it averages out to about 8% a year. That would imply prices have increased over 10x from 1980 vs. 2.66x in the official BLS statistics. What seems more realistic to you?
> Then a developer in the corner says, "Well, I actually built the prototype and it's working and we can all use it right now."

Very nice. :)
The irony is that the article's author doesn't realize that of all platforms, Windows needs an app store more than any of the others.

While most of my Windows use is confined to snapshot'ed VMs, I still don't download or use closed-source Windows software of any kind, free or otherwise. Spyware and malware have ruined the market for free-and-ad-supported, freemium, and nearly-free Windows software. A heavily curated and controlled Windows software market could improve the signal-to-noise ratio for low-cost windows apps from legitimate developers.
I do that in bash for root/non-root users (root is red, non-root is blue):

if [[ ${EUID} == 0 ]] ; then
PS1='\[\033[01m\][ \[\033[01;31m\]\u@\h \[\033[00m\]\[\033[01m\]] \[\033[01;32m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\n\[\033[01;31m\]\$\[\033[00m\]> '
else
PS1='\[\033[01m\][ \[\033[01;34m\]\u@\h \[\033[00m\]\[\033[01m\]] \[\033[01;32m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\n\[\033[01;34m\]\$\[\033[00m\]> '
fi

Interesting to think about using it across servers, though.
I'm the founder. If anyone has feedback or questions let me know! thanks
antirez and I tried but the schedule didn't work out. He’s on my list for 2011, if he’s still up for it :)
You should never ssh into a production system, everything should be going through automated scripts. Doing this will really save your life. For me this means:

$ fab deploy
... oups errors on the website even if tested on stagging ...
$ fab getdebuglog
$ fab rollback
... fix test ...
$ fab deploy

fab is fabric, a very very nice deployment tool in Python: http://www.fabfile.org
It brings me hope that a non-coder can make a dent in the tech world. Job listings in the past few months have been a bit discouraging for business dev & marketing types.
I applaud a university for standing up for academics, but this author sounds slightly unhinged. Affirmative Action and other such policies have some serious downsides so I respect people who are willing to criticize such a racially touchy subject, however the authors animosity towards the subjects of AA, rather than just AA itself, seemed to leak into his writing.
Ask HN: When should comments be flagged?
What's the consensus on flagging comments? My personal approach is to flag only those that are obvious spam or genuinely abusive, but sometimes I wonder if the site would benefit from a collective lighter trigger on dumb jokes, me-toos, and memes.

Unlike downvotes, there is no visibility into how others use flagging. What does everyone else do? Has anyone thought through the endgames and decided they have a best strategy?
Statistics: See distribution of Android-OS Platform Versions
Analemma - SVG and Charts for Clojure
How to make your shopping cart (or registration page) suck less
It depends on what you are looking for. Many socially awkward "nerds" learn how to socialize outside of just academics when they are in college. If there are few outlets besides just academics, it's hard to become "well rounded" socially. I can tell you I'd rather hire a socially adept but slightly less intelligent person rather than the brilliant but incapable outside of his field person. Unless of course I am hiring a nuclear physicist, etc etc.
LOL. I love that I get downvoted and the child comment gets upvoted. ITT Religious people are sad that their ilk are ignorant and are holding back social progress.
As of 04-January-2011:
Android 1.6 has 7.9% of the market.
Android 2.2 has 51.8% of the market.
Really? I'd say "on" is pretty clearly a preposition— here meaning "onward". Since "on" isn't often used in that sense except in the case of compounds like "go on", "move on", "drive on" etc. it might make more sense to say that "go on" is a phrasal verb and a single lexical item. (Note that we could replace "go on" in its entirely with a more semantically shallow "leave" without affecting the rest of the sentence.)

"To" is tricky because it seems that we can replace it with a conjunction and maintain the meaning of the sentence— "I go on and start Woven" does mean nearly the same thing. However, you need to look at the ellipsis (linguisticspeak for omission): "I go on and [I] start Woven" makes sense. "I go on to [I] start Woven" obviously doesn't work. So we've actually changed the structure of the sentence, meaning our replacement is no good.

It makes more sense to see the "to" as attached to the infinitive "start", with the form working as an adverb of reason: "Why do you go on? To start Woven." The actual implied conjunction here is probably "in order". (If you're feeling clever, the infinitive also assumes the subject of the main clause, thus the ellipsis: "I go on [in order] [for me] to start Woven.")

So by my analysis, both of those words are actually part of verb forms. Uncapitalizing either seems to separate them from their verb phrase, causing the confusion we've seen. However I'd recommend, especially in this informal context, just using normal sentence capitalization, which everyone will have no trouble parsing— and which is how the title is capitalized on the blog itself!
I do not really care anymore, but it would have been a cool experience to go to a good school.

Not necessarily. Would you be okay with being the dumbest person in the room, not just for one class or one semester, but for four years? A lot of smart kids go to CalTech, MIT and Harvard, but end up dropping out and finishing their degree somewhere else because they're not accustomed to failing on a regular basis. Unless you're convinced that you'll be able to handle repeated failure (because it'll happen when you're trying to achieve at that level) that sort of school may not be for you.

Then there's the fact that these schools are expensive. So not only do you have to be able to deal with failure at an emotional level, but you have to be able to deal with failure financially as well. If you don't have the budget to repeat at least two or three classes - don't bother with a top-ten university.
It is not my intent to invalidate the author's thesis. I attempted to point out that skepticism is not enough; one must also apply skepticism consistently to all sources in order to free oneself from unconscious cognitive bias. As evidence, I use the author's treatment of global warming, where the evidence supplied is far too poor to support the conclusion. It's not a matter of quantity--it's just a blog post, after all, and I would have been tolerant of zero support for his claims. But if the author does supply support, it shouldn't be so crappy to as to suggest that does not apply a skeptical viewpoint to his own sources.
Google is really good at marketing (vs. Opera)
Who is the best acquirer for square?
I made the wrong presumption that we should use government to funds these kind of projects.

But if life problems, accidents, aren't as urgent due to capitalism solving most of our problem, I am assuming we would be thinking of large aspiration beyond a nice house and 2 1/2 kids.
Some problems require a revolutionary approach. For example, managing the info in a departmental system for 100 users is very different from an Internet application serving a million users. You can't just evolve from one to the other, you need to radically re-design for fundamentally different requirements.
Go about emailing some prominent travel bloggers from communities like bootsnall, (like the families going across the world, etc.) and then try to give them some sort of incentive to update your site, and then talk about it on their blog. Use some way to integrate with a few that are influential (even if you have to pay them) and hope that it catches on in that community.
I realize the "Death to the Shaw" spelled out by the first word of every seventeenth page was supposed to be a joke, but it is not very funny in light of the recent events of the last handful of days:

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2011/0105/Suicide...

Though I viciously dislike of all forms of royalty, they are still human beings and they did not get a choice about being born into the nonsense.
Never say never. I've done development on production machines, sometimes even when logged in as root ;)

But I agree with the sentiment - think very hard before doing this, and don't make it a habit.
I've love to hear a properly recorded talk with antirez. I consider Redis to be one of the most intelligently designed pieces of software I use.

I was excited to watch the London meetup videos, but unfortunately the combination of the audio quality and his accent made it quite hard to understand what he was saying (my brain seems to be able to deal with one or the other).
The reason he had those problems, I'm guessing, is that he never setup traffic classing filters.

Generally, I've never run _just_ TBF/HTB + SFQ. I've always run them hierarchically, HTB on the top interface, then several HTBs feeding into that one. Each of the lower HTB queues has a different amount of "flow" allowed to it.

Once you approach it this way, it all works rather nicely. As the multiple queues allow you to spread bandwidth, but also priority into the higher level queue. I can run telnet/ssh sessions during a torrent swarm with no issues.
I don't understand your point at all. What does opening a gas station on a busy street have to do with producing a useful tool for an industry about which you have no personal experience? Pretty much everybody understands what a gas station's customers need — they need gas.
Bob Muglia, server and tools prez, to leave Microsoft
Definitely flag/downvote any of the /. crowd stuff... anything that smacks of an Internet meme probably deserves to be done away with.
Huge list of self-tracking tools
I was actually just trying to make a bayesian joke, but I think it was a little too subtle.
NSA breaks ground on Utah 'spy center' data center
It looks like the OP doesn't like CEOs. Fair enough, what with CEOs raking in the moolah while the stock underperforms / short-sighted decisions that pander to the 'analysts' are taken etc.

But, the OP also seems to be making the mistake of implying CEOs == the rich. This is patently absurd. There are plenty of rich people who are not CEOs. How about Larry Page, Sergei Brin, Michael Jordan, Barack Obama, Senators of the United States?
This is Mutually Assured Destruction though. There's a delicate balance between Google profiting from spammers running google ads and the profits dropping as users trust google less and search elsewhere.

In the long run, it's a losing prospect for Google: short term profits at the cost of long term reputation and trust doesn't make sense for a company as large and as public as they are.
Recall versus Recognition for Search
But, I like SQL. And Perl even.
From the links at the bottom of the OP, it would appear so: http://paraschopra.com/blog/personal/how-making-money-change...
Sphero the robotic ball: ready for game development
Yes, it uses hidden services; I won't know x23ff...sds is you. However, the most plausible link between me and evgen is HN, so x23ff...sds appears on both of our contact lists, it's likely to be a HN user. More widespread analysis of contact lists can probably tell us who you are. (So you know evgen and me, but not RickRoll? That gives me a good idea of who you are...)

This is one reason why it'd be good to use different IDs for chatting with different people. Unfortunately, Tor wasn't designed to work that way, so you may need to run multiple clients or something similarly annoying to get this to work.
Square Raises $27.5 Million
Right on, just because there is an app store doesn't stop any app makers or users from installing applications from other sources. However, finding and installing apps just became easier for users as well as providing a centralized distribution channel for the app makers.
"Exploit now, pay later": music labels finally pay artists
Really interesting. Quality over quantity :)
Nemdil world news
Agreed, great announcement. Congratulations!
Since you believe this using C to reduce function call overhead is cheating, here's Pyramid 1.0a9 profiling output with the "zope.interface" C optimizations disabled (same methodology and code used to test the C-optimized variant):

http://plope.com/static/noncoptimized.txt

That's 27 lines of profiler output, which, if you're keeping score, is still fewer lines than any other framework tested. We're not really hiding anything here.

The comparisons to other frameworks are largely a gimmick to drive traffic and comments, granted. In the real world, these numbers shouldn't make the difference about whether you choose one framework or another.

However, there are actual speedups to be had by other Python web frameworks if they'd consider using some of the techniques outlined in the blog post. In the real world, actual benchmarks seem to have Pyramid bottlenecked by the WSGI server (see for example http://blog.curiasolutions.com/2010/11/the-great-web-technol...), so the optimizations we're doing are working, AFAICT.
Strange things in nature. I remember a natural' hologram produced on a car hood that had been waxed with a gritty cloth, when an ice sheet formed on the hood.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Make-a-Tool-to-Draw-Scratch-...
Many Caltech freshmen got a perfect 800 on their math SAT, while a near-perfect 1560 combination score placed an incoming freshmen at only the 75th percentile of his entering classmates.

One of the most interesting things I heard in my first day at orientation at Carnegie Mellon was CMU's president talking about all the students they rejected- xx perfect SAT scores, xxx students with a 4.0, xx valedictorians, etc. In other words, CMU's perspective is that someone purely interested in academics (and nothing else) isn't as strong of an asset. I think it made for a more fulfilling academic atmosphere for the entire student body.

What this means is that at Caltech, there are no dumb jocks, dumb legacies, or dumb affirmative action students.

I kind of think that's weird too (besides the offensive nature of those words). Carnegie Mellon has a reputation for being an absurdly nerdy school, but along with Computer Science it also top business schools, drama schools, and art schools. That is a weird-ass cross section of human. There's plenty of areas that CMU may lack compared to other top schools, but I think having a broad, diverse student body is one of its strongest assets.

That said, I'm trying not to translate much to Caltech itself from this article since this cat sounds kind of crazy.
> But when you add social proofing on top of it you have created a verification mechanism that is much stronger since it includes my very existence, my friends, what I do etc. Things that can't as easily be faked.

The point many of the critics here are making is that anonymity and privacy is required for a functioning democracy.

Why does it matter WHO is saying something. Shouldn't the most important thing be WHAT is being said?

Even in today's "everything goes" situation, libel/slander etc hasn't reached epidemic proportions to require policing everything people say.

And even then, I would much rather have a central clearinghouse where aggreived parties can register to have their names etc not be displayed by web sites (think of it as a robots.txt for humans). Note that this can be implemented without an online ID and is different from the current proposal.

I still haven't understood what is your problem with today's situation where people can create as many alter egos as they wish.
One major difference between Caltech and many other schools is that Caltech is a technical school, and doesn't provide a liberal arts education. An underlying assumption of the article is the superiority of the technical education vs. liberal arts, but the evidence he provides that this is actually the case is rather thin: the author seems to expect the reader to accept this point of view by default. It would have been better if the author could have made this argument explicitly.
Every nation sees their own atrocities as "aberrations", while the atrocities perpetrated by other nations are seen as deeply revealing.
"The funding is also the latest sign of the optimism around Silicon Valley start-ups, with many companies garnering large funding rounds at high valuations recently." Yeah really. Good timing. If it is in fact a bubble, nice to have the money in the bank ...
How much gas per day? Where's the best place to open a station? Is it better to build one or look for one that's shut down and re-open? How often do you schedule tank refills? What regulations do you have to comply with?

And you'll go broke quite quickly if gas is all you can sell!

The point I was making (poorly, I admit) is that just about everyone who starts a business has to learn how the industry works one way or another. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems. "Producing a useful tool for an industry about which you have no personal experience" really isn't a larger obstacle than most entrepreneurs have to get past.
The "dynamic stuff" appears to all be included. Just not eval(), which is probably a bad thing for most JS code anyway...
Pretty neat hack! Were you conscious of the script each time you opened the lid? I imagine I would forget about it after the first week.
If you're thinking about Wikileaks, think about how the official reaction is being widely regarded as a very overbearing, and very un-American thing, not as a typical expression of well-established values.

Indeed, for a summary of well-established American values, see the collection defined by the Pentagon Papers, the Watergate story, and more recently, the NYT's Warrantless Wiretapping story. Together, they put the Administration on the wrong side of our national character, and to a very embarrassing degree.

So I agree with you; the Wikileaks response doesn't just look bad, it is bad. But you join others on the more dubious side of the issue when you cite errors like this as excuses or justifications for vastly more abusive practices elsewhere, rather than violations of civil liberty that shouldn't be tolerated by self-respecting people anywhere.
I'm not sure how athletics is such a huge problem. The teams meeting in the BCS championship tonight have about 20 thousand undergraduates each. The football team, the largest surely on campus has something under 100 kids on scholarship, so about one half of one percent. Are there schools where it could be a problem? Perhaps. I've heard the complaint made about the Naval Academy.
No kidding. My school had D-I athletics and affirmative action but it hasn't slowed us down in terms of (externally granted) academic awards or excellence in engineering and other specialties.

The bigger problem I think is the belief that everyone has to go to college to 'get ahead' and the excesses of credentialism.
interesting idea .... i will def look into it
I agree. foo.github.com and github.com/foo are the important domain considerations.
End of an era: Bob Muglia is leaving Microsoft
I'd love to be the dumbest person in the room. I've found in my life that my largest leaps in development come when I throw myself in the deep end that is outside my comfort zone. These days it's the primary thing I look for in a company. Are the people I'll be working with as good or better than may on average? If the answer is no then I'm not interested.

this of course assumes I want to be good at whatever the subject of the room is.
The thing Christian Rudder fails to point out explicitly is how man can put this information into action. Knowing that women with tight distribution get messaged less men should start messaging cute girls with tight distributions to improve their chances.
One interesting entry that didn't make the cut: transreal number. It now redirects to "James Anderson (computer scientist)", who makes interesting performance claims about an extended arithmetic that seeks to legalize expressions that produce NaN:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transreal_arithmetic#Transreal_...

http://www.angletechnology.com/events/investorday/Dr%20James...
Apache Co-Founder, Mozilla Board Member, Becomes New CTO of World Economic Forum
Swine flu survivors developed super flu antibodies
Yeah I meant relatively new accounts. You do need 500 points to be able to downvote, but it's also become easier to get to that level by simply posting linkbait articles from any well-known blog.
Honestly, it feels like steam should license that to another party for steam sales for non-games.
Heh, welcome back :)

Okay - then I need to brush up on this Bayesian stuff, care to point me in the right direction? I only have undergrad level maths only so nothing to tricky please !! I really haven't meant to raise anybody's hackles here.
Selling Software or Wanking Code?
Startup Sherpa (Kickstarter): Going Direct To Audience For Crowdsourced Funding
Not sure about bing, but DuckDuckGo is basically Yahoo with the search spam filtered out. On heavily spammed searches DDG has become noticeably better, IMO.
The relationship of Sage with existing open source projects was something I never quite understood. Instead of investing their knowledge and time into improving the capabilities of existing systems (SciPy, NumPy or Maxima, Octave) to bring them up to par with the more pervasive commercial offerings (Matlab, Mathematica, Maple), they basically just bolted Python onto everything without in the end improving anything. Sage to me always seemed as just some kind of Python promotion vehicle trying to hide the fact that basically all the underlying systems it uses are written in other languages.