skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Right now, my girlfriend and I are reading the same physical book. I read it at work over my lunch break and she reads it at night before going to bed. Is this piracy too?

The key concept here is 'excludability'. Only one person (maybe two) can be physically reading it at once. Digital goods, sans DRM, could in theory be shared with pretty much the entire world without depriving anyone of their experience.

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

This difference between ebooks and 'real' books is the heart of the problem, and why people want to introduce artificial excludability. Actually, I'm fine with that: treat it like a real book in terms of only letting one person at a time have it, but let me freely choose who has it when and for how long.
At some point, all that carbon we're emitting was originally in the air.

The fossil fuels are from old plants, the plants took the CO2 out of the air and turned it into carbon-based biomass via photosynthesis.

A question I don't have the answer to - at that time when all that CO2 was still in the air, what was the CO2 concentration and what was the temperature? And if the two are causally related, would we be OK if the Earth reverted to that state?

A flippant point... would someone like Burt Rutan whose life's mission is to build innovative aircraft running on fossil fuels be OK with the notion that fossil fuels were messing up the planet?
Yeah it's easy, just convince everyone you're too big to fail and have the American taxpayer pay it off.
Indeed; especially their PhonoSDK. http://phono.com/ I didn't really understand what it did until I listened to this podcast: http://changelogshow.com/105/18576-episode-0-4-1-telephony-w...
+2 for Tropo... it is sweet.
Why web designers must know HTML and CSS
The more systems there are, the more likely this kind of thing is.
After a bit of experimenting myself, I think these numbers can be quite misleading.

It appears that execution times change drastically depending on function names and orderings! (This is in both firefox and chrome, on a macbook.) I tried copying the 2d array function and renaming it different things, and found different times, which often caused major differences in its relative order against the original function.

Also, running the test multiple times gives different enough results that orderings change.

Finally, I think the timing code needs some work. I remember John Resign had some posts on this. This is one of them:

http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-benchmark-quality/

But I can't find another one where he talks about the fact that with very small times, timing functions in javascript give wildly varying values, because they depend on some sort of interrupt (maybe?)...
People apparently still use that:

http://www.staples.com/Staples-Green-Bar-Computer-Paper-14-7...
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Those taxpayer subsidized loans to get you an engineering degree are such shackles...
Thanks for the note. I visited your site and sent you an email. Talk soon.
I think that the company that could make that any time soon and make a killing out of that is Amazon.
"I dare anybody to tell me that it’s bad manners to hold the knife in my left hand."

Well, not while while you're holding that knife ...
> It ignores the end result of every government based on Marx's theories that has ever existed in the history of man.

Marx wrote a brilliant critique of capitalism, but failed miserably when it came to designing what the replacement would be. He believed that an almost supernatural rationality would evolve out of the inherent contradictions of capitalism and the worker/ owner conflict; organizing society rationally from the top down is really the only thing of his that made it into supposedly marxist regimes.

Don't judge Marx by Russia -- read Marx. Or, well, don't pretend to know what Marx said...

He also believed very strongly that "communism" could only appear in a society after it had gone through its capitalist stage thoroughly -- he was hoping for Great Britain to become communist, and the idea of an agrarian society like China or Russia becoming communist was just goofy.

Marx also never foresaw the compromises that would happen in an increasingly wealthy and unionized society, and which have forestalled any revolutionary drive (as the builder of the first tract home developments said: people with mortgages and a postage stamp worth of land don't join the CP.)

Also "liberal" here refers to liberal as in "neo-liberal": those who support the freeing up of regulation and tradition in the support of capitalism. You may be using "liberal" in the current usage of "leftwing and sort of socialist" which it never meant originally. This liberalism very much is tied up with "utilitarianism", which basically thinks that everything can be reckoned in terms of consumer utility; the idea that we are driven by consumption and pleasure (as in "the pleasure principle") pervades our society, but is not necessarily the basic scientific principle that economists and Freudians pretend it is; meaningful work or prestige might be contenders...
Nobody mentioned GIT. I went too deep in Git this year.

Others would be Sproutcore, Rails3, Coffeescript, Erlang.
Still, somebody has to have it. If the number of people is too low, you risk them all being unavailable when you really need them. And there isn't a whole lot you can do to stop a malicious actor who already has root.
iPod touch, flip video recorder, droid 2 global, linux mint on usb, 1.5 TB drive, and a remote control helicopter... good year
Best Wishes from SothinkMedia at This Holiday Season | Sothink Media Blog
The email in your profile is broken. Here is what I tried to send you:

Hi there partition,

I can't just send papers your way, but you're free to ask me questions
and I will relay to my social circle of PL snobs (most of whom are in my
twitter follows anyway)
Real Time Chat Site
Yes.

You do not realize how arrogant and powerful the corporations that have been in control of these industries are. Historically they have had their way and raked in enormous profits for so little effort to such a degree that the idea that they have to bend to the will of customers or to technological innovation is completely foreign to them.
India’s booming microlending industry is part of a global phenomenon that began as a charitable movement but now attracts private capital seeking growth and high returns.

Good old capitalism, always there to turn nice things into shit.
Amsterdam NL - great for tech community and the cultural experience

Melbourne AU - also good for tech and culture, though it is closer to what you're used to (I'm assuming American)

New York US - hard to beat as a city

Important tips:

- live only in cities where you speak the local language, but visit countries where you don't.

- expect your productivty to be reduced by about half. Learning to live in a new country is surprisingly time consuming and the simplest of things can take hours.

- make sure you have at least a small social group (2+ people) or way to break into a social group in the new city.

I've lived in 4 cities across 3 countries in the last 2 years and in my opinion, moving to a foreign country while beginning a startup is like trying to swim while juggling.

I still say go for it, it'll be an experience, but starting a business is hard enough without having to learn to live in a new city, so if that is your ultimate goal, stay close to what you're familiar with.
Nigeria is one of the last countries I would ever trust with any sort of credit card information. However, if namecheap can nab these as an option, I'll probably snag a few of them
Avoid fragmentation by just dropping support for older versions of the OS?

Keep in mind, Apple occasionally charges for iOS upgrades, so requiring an upgrade effectively increases the cost of your application by a nontrivial amount. Not all users want to upgrade, especially when upgrades degrade performance and have limited new features for older devices.
Update (can’t believe no one else posted this as a comment): Skype denies this. http://mashable.com/2010/12/30/china-skype-ban/
You're right, I should be running each test at least a few times and taking the average. I found that the results vary a few percent here and there, but the drastic difference between the different datastructures is always consistent and visible.
>>Perceived threat

Put in place a procedure to rate people in a relative fashion, and link this to benefits and compensation. Make hard slabs in percentage for each rating (excellent 10%, good 25%, average 50%, below average - rest). Does not matter if there is a team full of awesome wonderful guys, someone is going to get rated as 'below average'; and in a team comprising mostly of below average guys, many still end up getting 'excellent'/'good'.

>>Small kindness

Boast of world-class infrastructure, gym, sprawling campus. This would trump the fact that BigCo pays less than industry average, or the abysmal type of work involved.

>>Isolation from other perspectives

Again, the cult of personality and culture vacuum as mentioned in the post. And a lot of make-believe thrown in. And Goebbels style propaganda to instill that "all's well" notion, worked out masterfully. Not many within this BigCo would know that the tools of the trade are, or the best practices, or even the options in terms of technology.

>>Perceived inability to escape

In case of few places I know, this is not just perceived, it would be a hard fact and reality. Maintaining legacy VB code, spending an average of 6 months on every sort of technology (without mastering anything), and being an excel warrior aren't really great on resumes (except of course when applying for BigCo, that is).

"Institutionalization" is the word that many of my colleagues use to convey the feeling. :(
And Apple extensively emphasizes this point: there is no substitute for testing on an actual device with your target OS installed.
This post made my day. I've found some new interesting stuff from the comments. Thank you.

2010 was a year of discoveries for me. I started learning and using technologies like Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, HAML, Google Maps API v3. I started reading HN. Just in the end of the year I've discovered that with technologies like Rhodes framework, Appcelerator or Phonegap I can create iPhone/Android applications with HTML/Javascript or Ruby without knowing objective C. And this is just the most recent excitement I got.
And yet they distributed pink slip quite leniently.
The Menace of Telephones
This could be a fun experiment on how many people click the upvote based on pg's name
The worst offender is the comparison methods:

NSString *myString = nil;
if ([myString compare:@"something"] == NSOrderedSame) {
...
}
Psychic Debugging
RethinkDB internals: handling stack overflow on custom stacks
I like bug fix releases, but does this really warrant the front page?
Deadlines keep you ALIVE - a blog post
you can watch the decline of SKS Microfinance the poster boy of Micro-finance in India:
http://www.google.com/finance?q=NSE:SKSMICRO
TechFemme
I'd love to hear any thoughts or opinions on this post, and on my blog in general!
That's reasonable :) I love Jekyll, so I have no objection to you switching. Just pointing out that there were probably much faster ways to get the same speedup.

Feel free to email me if you need any help getting the last bits figured out. I use jekyll for blog.danieljackoway.com and danieljackoway.com, and I've done some weird stuff with it (like pages that are generated purely through the layout + YAML frontmatter--no "content"). Plus I'd just like to see the redesign early :)
Yes the memory usage in 0.3.3 is much better. I don't know how much is node and how much is the switch to v8 3

Although https is broken in git at the moment due to a rewrite
Errr, not really. You need to do and experiment. My path won't work the same as your path.

Tumo is well documented on the process which monks (names including repa indicate mastery) use to practice in the strong cold winds of Tibet. One thing that helps learning is that of necessity.

One of the first things to learn, in order to do tumo, is that of grounding, centering, and shielding. Then, after that, you learn how to go in a strong meditative trance In which you control parts of your subtle energy. Once you learn that, then you can direct the subtle energy in such a way that brings the psychic heat forth.

I also live near Bloomington,IN and also receive help from the Buddhist monestary here. I would recommend that you find a temple and request help along this endeavor.
The answers, yes, and no longer.

The inspiration for writing a chess program was a book by a guy called David Levy called 'computer gamesmanship' in the dark ages of personal computing.

A friend of mine (hi Gideon!) and myself wrote our own chess programs and had them compete. His was written in Pascal and very clean and easy to read, mine was in assembler and full of dirty tricks to make it faster to mask the lack of actual strategy beyond a materialistic approach.
I'm pretty sure there are startups using any and all of the listed options, along with Scala, Erlang, Clojure, Haskell, Common Lisp, OCaml, Java, C, C++, Standard ML, Prolog, C#, Visual Basic, Ada, Tcl, Perl, COBOL, FORTRAN, RPG/400, APL, Pascal, JCL, PL/I, GW-BASIC, Whitespace, Befunge, Brainfuck, and Intercal.

IMO: Learn something you find interesting, instead of worrying about "what do I learn to get hired." You'll be happier in the long run.

That said, don't underestimate the power of "COBOL on COGS." http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM
Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness
Important Safety Notice from WakeMate
From my email just now.

Imporant Safety Notice

Hello WakeMate Customer,

We have just been alerted to a safety issue with our product. The black USB charger bricks that have been included with the product are defective. Do not use them.

The USB chargers were sourced through a Chinese vendor. We paid to have the proper certification and safety tests performed here in the U.S. for the chargers. However, tonight we were informed by a customer of a safety incident with the black USB chargers. Therefore, effective immediately we are recalling ALL USB charger bricks and informing our customers that it is not safe to use these USB chargers to charge your WakeMate.

We will continue to look into the situation but needed to email you immediately to ensure that you stop using and unplug the included Black USB Power Bricks.

We are extremely sorry that we sent a product containing defective components. However, we also want to stress that this issue is with the chargers only, and not with the WakeMate itself. It is still safe to use the included USB cable to charge the WakeMate, and it is safe to wear the WakeMate while sleeping.

I sincerely apologize for this mishap on our part. We are doing everything we can to prevent any further incidents with the USB charger bricks.
Chess engines are fascinating to study for a lot of reasons. I've done a bit of tinkering with some of the open source programs available - check out Stockfish and Crafty for some very nice code to work with. If you dig into the computer chess scene, there has actually been a lot of heated drama about source code provenance of various proprietary and open programs like Rybka and the Ippolit family.
Video: http://www.twitvid.com/UBBWC
Honestly, I have to admit, I've never played a game of chess in my life, though I admire those who do.
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And how is capitalism turning it to shit exactly?

Many capitalist systems have this thing called bankruptcy which can be used to escape debts you cannot pay.

This particular shit incident was caused by culture and beliefs, if not mental illness, and a lack legal innovations like bankruptcy, not because people started lending money for profit, which is an ancient practice that predates capitalism and microlending.
Man these guys can't catch a break. I really want to love WakeMate but they're making it hard.
It's likely that the chargers that were tested and the chargers that actually ended up shipping are quite different inside.

This seems to be a constant battle when going the Chinese route. You have to cut open a few from every shipment and check to see if inferior components have been subbed in since last time.
I think PHP is not a bad choice. It's not as cool as Ruby but it gets things done (not that Ruby doesn't). If I were in your shoes, I'd go with Ruby, just because my intuition says so.
I'm not sure this is true. Size != success.
My own experience is that there's a world of difference between moving between cities every few months (with a home base), or actually living somewhere for a few years. The former is more expensive, but far less hassle and lighter on the soul.

Your view of a city will be vastly different depending on the length of your stay there. I thought Dubai was great on my first three-day visit.

Check out Taipei. It's vibrant, colorful, accessible, and lacks the heavy greyness I felt in mainland China. I dream of going back.
But despite all that description, all my deployments have been one-liners with 3-4 cmdline params only. It really adds near-zero deployment cost.

Squid can do what varnish does, but it's 2x slower by my measurements, and it has a gigantic config file. (Squid can do things that varnish can't, so you may have to use it anyway.)
Clickable:

Launch blog-post: http://personalmba.com/personal-mba-book-launch/

Book site: http://book.personalmba.com
2000 Vs. 2010: How the world has changed
I'm pretty well-convinced that sooner or later, quoting Marx and quoting Hitler will have the same levels of social respectability. They both advocated a lot of nonsense and violent insanity.

Just like a blind squirrel occasionally finds a nut, the advocate of violent nonsense occasionally has a decent quote. Still, you can find better sources of quotes on anti-consumerism than Marx, just like you can find better sources of quotes on helping people than Hitler... too much violent insane nonsense attached to those blind squirrels, even if they occasionally stumble on a nut.
Man, this is big. What a bummer for Wakemate. I admire your honesty though. Thanks for not keeping quiet.
Ask HN: Is it a bad idea to do a launch on New Years?
I was debating this with myself, and figured HN would be a good forum for my question. This weekend, I am planning to launch a mobile, touch-optimized, version of a guitar tablature site I built. I was planning to co-inside with the release date of jQuery Mobile (which I am using for the project.)

I was also considering purchasing a press release with PRWeb. Although, today I am wondering if my news will go on deaf ears. I figure no one will be working on New Years day. Although, there will be many people at home on their computers. What do you guys think? Should I launch on New Years as planned? Or, postpone until the workweek?
I wonder how many people killed themselves before microlending existed because they had no hope of improving their lot in life.
"Keep in mind, Apple used to charge for iOS upgrades, so requiring an upgrade effectively increases the cost of your application by a nontrivial amount." [FTFY]

Apple attributed the fee to strange accounting rules (something dealing with when revenue is recognized - I don't exactly recall off hand) - rules which were recently changed. Just an excuse to milk some more cash out of iPod touch users? Maybe - I won't argue with you on that. But as of iOS 4.0, Apple no longer charges iPod touch users for updates.

"Not all users want to upgrade, especially when upgrades degrade performance and have limited new features for older devices."

Here is the real roadblock to updating. 4.0 has rendered my 3G frustratingly unusable. In my mind, those who haven't updated fall into three camps:

1. Those who jailbroke and haven't gone through the hassle of updating

2. Those who could care less about new features/aren't aware there is an update

3. As you mentioned, those who have older devices and don't want to update because of performance or development reasons
Eh? I'm not disputing that at all, I'm a contributor to PyPy, probably the leading python JIT. None of that has anything to do with whether it's semantically possible to do a full type inference on a language like Python.
Otomotif-jualbeli at blogspot
you can find the previous icml best paper awards by looking at the previous conference websites. for example:

http://www-ai.ijs.si/SasoDzeroski/ICML99/award.html
via http://www.machinelearning.org/icml.html

in machine learning, i think the significant conferences are NIPS (http://www.nips.cc/), ICML, UAI (e.g., http://event.cwi.nl/uai2010/), and AISTATS (http://www.aistats.org/).
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What I meant is that five days a week 9 to 17 is hardly "a lot" and if it's already too much for you, perhaps the problem is with the job itself.

disclaimer: workaholic bias?
> Marx wrote a brilliant critique of capitalism

Not really, because he makes a fundamental mistake. He thinks those that hold capital use violence and oppression against the masses.

But he's got the cause and effect wrong - the people who use violence and oppression wind up seizing capital.

What's the difference? Well, look at history. It's not the merchants and traders and inventors and builders that oppress people - it's the people with swords and guns. Marx's prescription to that is that the oppressed people grab swords and guns and raise some hell, and take over, and then... whoops.

The accumulation of resources (private property) and voluntary exchange (capitalism) aren't problems. Violence, coercion, oppression is the problem. Unfortunately, Marx gets the cause and effect backwards. He sees violent people holding capital, and blames the capital instead of the violence. He then says the people without capital should use violence to seize it... with predictably bad results.

Marx didn't understand capitalism - he never did productive work in his life. The cause of oppression stems from violence and coercion, not accumulation of resources and voluntary exchange.
At a place I worked a few years ago we had to individually retest every single unit of our products. This involved opening up packaging and repacking and reshrinkwrapping afterwards. In between unpacking and repacking there was testing and finding about 1/3 of them always had problems. Some boards could be fixed by diagnosing to the component level, replacing components and even resoldering incorrectly wired interboard connects. This work was done by asian immigrants of uncertain immigration status. This rework quadrupled the cost of the products but somehow it was still cheaper than just manufacturing locally to begin with, something like the exact same product was costing $20 per unit from asia, but $200 per unit to build in the US. Apparently the big cost difference was due to the effect of environmental laws regarding not being able to dump toxic waste in a river in the US.
As someone working on a hardware startup I feel like I can only create a competitive price by sourcing and assembling overseas, and yet it seems like once you do that every turn is fraught with peril and counterfeit.

It would be awesome to hear more advice or stories, if you have them.