skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really like all of Charlie's books. The Laundry books are definitely different; closer to fantasy in fact, but still nicely in touch with hacker mentality.
I don't think this is a big deal at all. It is unclassified and also not marked with one of the Sensitive But Unclassified markings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_but_unclassified) meant to control distribution. You could request this document through a freedom of information act request.
Don't Drink Your Own Kool-Aid
I wonder if they got approval for this or if Apple doesn't know about the back door features.
"While sexual aggression and the desire to debase women may not be what arouse all men, they are certainly an animating force of male sexuality. They may be unattractive and even, if taken to extremes, dangerous, but they’re not, perhaps alas, deviant."

That's a pretty ugly thing to say and requires a bit more evidence than just the pervasiveness of online hard-code porn.

Inexplicably the author seems unaware of the contradiction in her article in pointing out (correctly) that the various porn sites online are dominated by mundane amateur content (housewives, random teenagers etc.) while claiming that online porn demonstrates how the male psyche is fueled by the need to hurt and humiliate women sexually (for example the double anal porn she cites about 15 times.)
I signed up and used a 30-character secure (alpha+symbols) password. The signup accepted the password, but now I'm unable to sign in, and the password reset isn't working. Help? My tagmask account name is dhess, and my contact info is in my profile.
Mac OS X versions are named after cats: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X#Versions
because it was likely designed for displaying social bookmarking links in a neat way.
>I know exactly how to make the best mobile gaming device. You need something more along the lines of a wide Playstation controller with dual-analog sticks on the thumbs.

Good luck playing something like WoW with a gamepad.
I'm very much hoping we have something like Emotiv (http://www.emotiv.com/) for text entry by then.

(They have one promising competitor, I forget what their name was.)
You've made an assertion with nothing to back it up. Thirteen year olds pirate because they don't want to pay? Please provide data and evidence to support your case.
Will emacs be around in 20 years?
> We took her to the hospital where doctors absolutely refused to admit that the MMR vaccine could have anything to do with these symptoms she has never had before or since.

What did the doctors say was wrong with her and what do they think caused it?

If you only have one explanation, the natural tendency is to latch on to it. But there are probably millions or more different things that can go wrong with the human body and nobody knows them all.
Tourscript, lightweight jquery script for building site tours
In 20 years the United States could be well on its way to becoming a third world backwater.
Yes, definitely. I have pondered this fairly extensively but off the top of my head I'll try to remember some of my conclusions.

- ergonomics - holding arms up to a touchscreen for long periods is tiring

- tactile feedback... touchscreen keyboards lack it

- freedom of positioning... at least in desktop machines, they keyboard can be positioned independent of the display for comfort

- privacy... voice recognition is cool but I really don't want to be writing my girlfriend a love letter by voice while sitting on an airplane

- speed and accuracy... voice recognition will eventually match/surpass this but so far I haven't seen any other form of 'physical text input" that matches a good touch typist.

All said though, of course keyboards are going to occupy a smaller slice if the "input duty" than they do now. We're already coming up with nifty ways to input small requests, text messages, commands, etc. But I don't expect to ever see a "Scotty" moment in my lifetime...

"Oh, a keyboard... how quaint."

edit: one more thought... what will kill the keyboard? The day computers can accurately read our thoughts. When I can purely think input, then keyboards will be in trouble. As long as we have to use physical actions for expression, the keyboard is pretty safe.
This is what I found within a couple minutes of Googling. Do you have any contrary information suggesting that the majority of doctors are in fact up-to-date with the latest academic journal articles published within their fields?

"One New England Journal of Medicine study found that patients get only 55 percent of the care that's recommended for the leading causes of death and disability. Similar research in children showed they get just 47 percent—and a mere 41 percent of preventive steps that are proved to help."[1]

"Despite 15 years of advances about what is known of [sinusitis], the information isn't making its way to internists because it is not been published in journals or other sources often reviewed by internists, who most often treat sinusitis. For instance, many internists are unaware that chronic sinusitis can cause serious chronic fatigue, Chester says."[2]

"It’s unrealistic to expect the majority of physicians to go back to the original literature or even to go back to systematic reviews of the original literature,” said Gordon Guyatt, MD, of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who is credited with coining the term “evidence-based medicine."[3]

"In a 2005 systematic review in the Archives of Internal Medicine, most studies found a correlation between increasing years in practice and decreasing quality of care."[3]

[1]http://www.rd.com/living-healthy/is-your-doctor-out-of-date/...

[2] http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2010/08/17/Doctors-need-more-...

[3] http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2009/12/doctors-stay-date-curren...
Rutgers Project Uses Scratch to Make Household Appliances Easily Programmable
Also, it would be foolish to think that Facebook isn't also aware of this analogy. I am certain they are looking at how AOL lost their stronghold and working to correct those mistakes. That is likely the driving force behind FB's willingness to participate in the open web (on their terms).
Toxic Environments
I did not have any problems with how different the Mac App Store UI is and how it's inconsistent with the other Apple programs. Same thing for the Twitter app. It looks different, yes. But none of the points in the article made it more difficult for me to use.
The fact that the proprietary protocols haven't been replaced by more open alternatives is largely irrelevant where the end-user is concerned. As long as the protocols have been reverse-engineered to the point where cross-platform tools are possible, it doesn't matter (to the user) whether the underlying protocols are open or closed.

There are now a plethora of instant messenger clients that allow for a single sign on to various instant messaging networks. I think we might see the same in the future for social networks. Facebook and Twitter will be relegated to the role that the various instant message protocols play in a multi-network client.
"We Are Typists First, Programmers Second" - http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/11/we-are-typists-firs...
A bit pricey at $5/fax. I won't be using it.
Intel shows that Portal 2 game runs fine on its Sandy Bridge chips (video)
I wonder if chorded keyboards will ever take off?

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

You can use them with one hand and I've thought about trying them so that I could use the mouse with one hand and the keyboard with the other instead of having to switch back and forth, but they're not friendly to hunt-and-peck usage, so most people probably will never learn to use one.
Kind of like the old Newton soup view (instead of a memory card in the slot you have the "cloud").

Explanation: The Newton showed all the entries / files on the Newton plus any entries / files on the card as one view. Pull out the card and those entries disappeared.
Use Scratch to Easily Program Household Appliances
Also see:

http://www.freepopfax.com/

http://greenfax.com/sendonlyplan.php

http://www.hellofax.com/

http://www.onesuite.com/

http://www.popfax.com/
The Triumph of Apps
SimpleDB essentials - Hard-won wisdom on getting the most out of SimpleDB
aw come on that's the funniest feed I've seen on twitter
$5 to send a fax seems pretty steep. I would think that after people have gone to the trouble of creating a PDF (by either scanning or converting), they would just email it to the recipient.
The End of Spam?
Logos are symbols. Symbols are vehicles for a message, not the message itself. A logo without any meaning isn't generally trying to convince you to like it or not. Instead, it exists to be a mental placeholder for all of the feelings and experiences you have with the company that uses it.
My prediction is that by around 2013/2014, Facebook will use an open, distributed protocol. Just like AOL eventually embraced SMTP and the web.

They will still be one of the biggest nodes (expect one of China's social networks to fight for that crown, however), but as time goes on, it will matter less and less. Just like AOL.
How about the failure of a blog's UI that rescales a 1046 pixel-width screenshot into 480 pixels wide, without adjusting the height?
Lessons from teaching MapReduce at SPA
Fun facts (directly quoted) from Adam Lisagor, who made the video:

* All the locations are real Airbnb places.

* The pretty lady in the video is Venetia Pristavec, who does all the in-house video content for Airbnb, traveling around to different countries and interviewing hosts. She’s great.

* Where you see people, those are real Airbnb hosts.

* The site is neat, but you should download the iPhone app. It’s one of the best-designed, most beautiful and functional apps I’ve ever used.

* The cinematographer is my friend Rachel Morrison. She’s great.

* That villa with the credit card logos in the pool? It’s in Puerto Vallarta. The crew stayed there for a few days. It’s great.

* My side of the Scrabble board spells out “COOTYS RAT SEMEN”. Venetia’s spells “BEANS”. I won.
Netbooks have reduced keyboard space due to the need for a trackpad. This thing apparently does away with it and just uses a touchscreen, leaving more room for the keyboard (partly mitigating the gorilla-finger problem too).

Still, I wonder if it's really possible to have long gaming sessions with the arm stretched out like that, it can't be that comfortable.
I guess that contributed plus a spike in people starting to use iPads and smart devices and Macs and Kindles etc and either abandoning or just not having their Windows desktops turned on as much. Botnet agents can't send spam when turned off or offline.
I'm sure they are aware of the analogy, but they are also enjoying the Goldman Sachs sponsored money-go-round and will eventually need to step off.
Science shows women's tears are a turnoff for men
The only real pivot that I can see being a true revolution is if FB takes on Amazon and starts selling stuff to its users through an internal facebook store apps - and gives FB users a discount to the purchase of said items.
LinkedIn reportedly planning IPO
Having a direct brain interface working implies both understanding of the speech-related part of the brain as well as a big advance in artificial intelligence to deal with the noisy signal. (Perfectly dealing with the brain signals is at least as hard as perfect NLP / prefect machine translation.)
I don't know how many people get away with it, but that sort of thing definitely happens. Google claims they filter all the bogus clicks out and you aren't charged for them, but you kinda have to take their word for it since there's virtually no way to verify.
I would try and add a bigger twist to standard x vs y poll to separate yourself. The basic concept has been done many times before, without massive success.

USvsTHEM (http://usvsthem.com) is a site that I co-created - and still very early alpha; but adds a twist that centers a debate around people and their network of support. There is no browse-able stream yet, as the alpha release was meant to test the social utility.

Good Luck!
I just hope that, from the end user's perspective, they pull this off as smoothly as Apple managed the PowerPC to Intel transition. I'm taking it for granted that most .NET applications will work on Windows ARM out of the box, but that won't be nearly enough.

If people can't run existing native x86 Windows apps on this, it won't be thought of as "real Windows". Legacy x86-only Windows binaries will be around for a long, long time given the enormous size of the Windows ecosystem.
subscription

minimum 25 dollar increment credits

this one looks cool

looks sketchy like the rest of them

and subscription

...I think the focus is how easy and quick it is to do one off faxes
I checked out your post and you’ve got some great thoughts there.

I’ve been given some of those BDUF software projects in the past and they’re definitely painful - if not impossible to deliver. The only reasons they were successful were that the clients were enormous and ultimately paid for us to keep modifying spec documents as we went along.

We planned for that going in and the fixed price agreement was loaded up with all kinds of contingency (read, lots of extra cost to the client). In the end, it cost them more and delivered less. Sure, they got a great “as-built” plan showing exactly where things were different from the original blueprint - but having a great looking plan wasn’t the real goal. The sad part was that we could have done so much more feature development with that extra money.

Early stage entrepreneurs (which is who the post is about) are different. They don’t have the time or the money for that kind of inefficiency. They need an app that works. Now.

We do some up front work with them to lay out the flow of the major features. Then the client prioritizes them and we start with the most important thing first. We push new code very regularly and they tell us when they think it is working well enough for us to go to the next feature. Not sure that would be realistic in a fixed price model.

I like your final point in the BDUF post - that the development of the software is organic and ultimately determined by the process. Sounds like a great rationale for T&M vs. fixed price!
Google Docs Plays Videos
I didn't think there was imminent danger of hurting anyone, just that if I left it unchecked it could get to a stage where eventually I couldn't control it anymore. I was there seeking guidance on how to stop something from potentially becoming an issue, but I was always mindful that someone could see it as a more imminent threat than I believed it was, and would report me.

I have trust issues in addition to the anger issues (the anger issues are mostly controlled now, though the trust issues remain) and so I could never feel free to open up to a counselor because that would make me vulnerable. If you have a minor problem but opening up leaves you vulnerable to major complications, then you're understandably less likely to open up because the risk isn't worth the reward.

Counselors are a bit like HR. In theory, they can help you, but in practice they're often not worth the risk since putting anything into "official channels" makes everything formal and there are rigid procedures to follow. I'd rather talk to a friend than a counselor, just like it's often better to informally take problems up with your manager rather than reporting the issue to HR.
PC era is not over
Many things men consider to be "human" or "neutral" are in fact norms that exist to reinforce male hegemony.

Can you explain what this means, and tell us some non-bedroom "human" or "neutral" activities which really reinforce male hegemony?
Apple Reportedly Looking For New CFO
I'm just surprised hosts have enough marketing wherewithal to do that on their own. Though maybe AirBnB makes a point of telling people to get professional photos done.
I suspect we're communicating at cross-purposes here: If we stripped our two approaches of their labels, they'd look very much alike. You do time & materials; I do small-granularity fixed bids on individual features.

If you've used Pivotal Tracker, you'll understand my model: I commit to doing, say, 5 or 15 points of features in an iteration, for a fixed price. If the client wants to adjust the feature set, that's great! If I misjudge an estimate, and spend an extra day on something, the client doesn't pay extra. But if I have an extremely productive week, I earn a bit more. In the end, it balances out.

Usually around week 2, there's a brief moment of awkwardness where the client realizes that scope creep costs money.[1] But I help them cut a few marginal features, and we're ready to proceed. And from then on, the client is thinking about trade-offs, ROI, and priorities. And that's an excellent basis for a successful, long-term relationship.

I'm happy that you've found a model which works for your and your clients. Contracting should not be a miserable or adversarial process.

[1] Scope creep always costs money. It's better to make this visible to the client, even at the cost of some initial awkwardness. The usual alternative is to surprise the client later, when the bills come due. I've seen contractors do that, and I dislike it.
>Valuable as a way to learn about business? Sure.

hah. well, it depends on what you want to learn.

I was taught business that way; If anything, in an even lower-paying way. I grew pumpkins, with my Father's help, and then took them door to door in a wheelbarrow, selling them. Seventy five cents for the big ones and fifty cents for the little ones. I made maybe $25-$30 a year that way. I was maybe 10-12 at the time.

The thing of it is, most HN readers, and especially Sebastian, would call me a loser even today; he would say I'm still overly focused on the "provide value" side of the coin; the business I spent the last five years on is worth maybe a cheap south-bay condo[1] right now, and I believe has the lowest margins in the industry. It pays my rent, sure, but if Sebastian looks down on patio11, he's going to look down on me, and really, anyone else who takes that view of business.

[1] note, I actually like doing this, I wouldn't sell at that price; but as far as I can tell, that's market value, give or take.
I don't think the facebook case studies in the article are against AB testing per se, but more against the fact that AB testing is often used to focus on minutae. It seems to be a psychological temptation to use it to focus on minutiae, rather than something that's inherent in the research method itself.
PS3 master-key finally hacked
Facebook Will Go Public or Disclose Financials by April 2012
How do I feel about Scheme's runtime performance? I feel happy :-)

Seriously, most Scheme implementations are fast enough. I use Gambit-C for writing small memory and fast command line utilities and some other utility type applications. I don't much use Racket, but the JIT compiler seems to produce good results and (like Chicken) it has great contributed libraries.

Ruby is fairly much my favorite language but it is much slower than even Scheme (e.g., http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...). In a lot of cases runtime performance does not matter nearly as much as the agility of a language.
somethings require faxing or mailing. A lot of government docs and things like that

5$ is expensive but if it saves you the 20mins required to set up an account and then cancel the subscription for other services it's totally worth it

it's worth noting that I am not the creator btw. I just hate existing faxing options
BackType is hiring hackers!
We're growing!

We live and breathe product and ship to production every day. We're obsessed with measurement and data to inform decisions, learning about our customers and their problems, and doing whatever it takes to minimize waste.

We hack with a wide range of technologies: from Python and Clojure, to Cassandra, Hadoop and Thrift. We open sourced Cascalog, a query for Hadoop, created a database optimized for batch exporting and serving data and are currently developing a stream processing framework (code-named Thunderlog) that will generalize our real-time work-flow much like Hadoop does for batch work-flows.

For the back-end hackers:

- we have > 25 TB of compressed data

- more than 100 billion records

- serve more than 400 requests per second

- operate a cluster ranging from 60 to 150 nodes

- we do this with 3 full-time people (just added two interns)

For the front-end hackers, our flexible back-end lets you build what customers ask for very rapidly. Features that take other companies months take us less than 24 hours.

We have world-class investors (http://twitter.com/BackType/investors/members) helping us out and are generating significant revenues. Drop us a line at jobs@backtype.com.
how much is your time worth?
Could also be a side effect of government efforts to close any security holes that have been or might be used by Wikileaks. Wouldn't have to be limited to US govt, could be others too. All speculation until more evidence comes to light.
Yet, if you watched any porn these days, the males are always agressive and the females almost always take the submissive role. The advent of "gonzo" porn hasn't helped matters.

This material is training a generation, from puberty, how to act sexually.
Mobile Landing Page Builder, Mobilastic is simply stunning.
Myths and Fallacies of "Personally Identifiable Information"
fair enough - I last looked at it in detail about the time my daughter had her seizures and found it useful. If you look beyond the emotional content there were some fairly balanced opinions. I think it is unfair to call concerned parents "activists" though.
I enjoyed this book and couldn't put it down, but was sad to find out the sequel was not about getting vengeance, which would have been awesome.
NYT Review of ‘The 4-Hour Body’
Keeping them alive even though they don't rake in any serious money.
Five Myths About the Chinese Communist Party
Salesforce makes another acquisition: DimDim
Just to check, we read these as if it's Adam saying them?
i'd point out that you don't need to go to a crossfit gym to do crossfit. just get some friends and do the exercises that you can with what you have.
Love the Sneakers reference.
Type study: An example of Lettering.js
Doesn't affect the question much, though. Even today, most third world backwaters have ubiquitous mobile phones. In 20 years, material goods will be common in third world backwaters. Healthy food, quality education and good healthcare probably won't be. Of course, by those measures, America is already halfway there, according to pundits...
awesome video!!! like, i kinda teared up at the end. really.
Nemdil tags news
Agreed. I don't think it's going to be happening in the next 20 years, at least not well enough to replace the keyboard. However, it's the only alternative I can imagine that would be a real improvement over keyboard input.

Edit: Note, I can imagine the need for direct text input being reduced over the next 20 years thanks to UI changes ("Select your house on this map" replacing "Type your address in this box", for example), but I don't think that the keyboard will go away as the main tool for doing it when it is needed.
At $5 per fax I believe they have priced themselves out.

Not sure what this service buys me, typically the only time i have to send a fax is because I am sending a form that requires a signature and the company prefers to receive a fax. So regardless I have to either scan the document then upload it for faxfresh to send or I can just simply scan+fax in one step. Is this supposed to be for people that do not have a fax machine (or a printer that can print+fax)?
More discussion. it's slashdot, so YMMV: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/01/06/1917214/Will-Tou...