skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cosmo copywriting: it works. (You could write a book on how playing on people's aspirations to be Smart People, 10X Engineers, etc etc works at getting their attention, too. It's almost as effective as "... That $DISFAVORED_OUTGROUP Doesn't Want You To Know")
How WordPress Themes Actually Work
So basically Ubuntu with more icons? Can probably do this yourself in a couple hours. Just replace icons and install a new theme.
I've personally read it, bought it, and loved it.

I don't know whether I've directly "created something of value from it," but it's certainly expanded my toolbox of ways to make money.
Windows Should Implement an 'App Store'
I don't think anyone expects 3D TV sales to take off for the foreseeable future. We don't have enough content, and 3D TV prices are still too inflated, for the casual consumer to be enticed. When 3D TVs are priced as cheaply as regular sets, when glasses-free technology is the norm, and when more content is broadcast in 3D (especially sports), we'll probably see a shift. Those three things aren't likely to happen for another two years though.
Your vision sound much closer to what I was hoping Rush would be. I don't think it is bad form at all to mention it.

Not sure if this exists in Bash at the moment in the various/terminals and consoles but a searchable history of the commands I've run would be handy. Also, some easy way to get command history in segments (maybe allowing me to comment my command history and pull everything from one comment marker to the next) so I can make a repeatable shell script out of the correct set of commands once I get the commands right.

As another idea to play with, if there is a way (probably using github) to index shell recipes others have made and look them up on the command line, that could be fun. So I could do "urchin search 'postgres 9 snow leopard' and grab someone else's command recipe to build postgres if one is out there.
What are the essential differences between claiming Chinese mother supremacy from white supremacy?

Naked appeals to racism are out of fashion. Attributing differences among ethnic groups to “culture” provides one with plausible deniability. As a further bonus, Chua’s op-ed provides anecdata for people who want to beat the drums of “if you are poor it’s your own fault for not trying hard enough”.
I got second place here for http://www.proggitftw.com. What a great contest.

I wrote a few Python scripts to scrape Proggit every few minutes, looking for new comments. Sending them to IndexTank was simple--just one call. On the Rails app for the searching, same thing--just one call and you can get the results from IndexTank.

I'm going to spend more time on it and make it a bit more usable. HelpShelf's highlighting is cool so I'll do that, and I think auto complete is a no brainer.
I'm using faceting pretty heavily. Scoring and autocomplete are awesome indextank features that I'm going to try to integrate in the very near future.

Thanks!
Does scala have that many third party libraries ala java ? Because these days for web application most of us use Java with Spring or apache commons.
I was all set to give this post props for it's helpful infographic til I too saw the cheezy ad plug. Even worse, it's not "powered by" or "brought to you by"... it's "This infographic was created by". Disappointing. Though this shouldn't impact my judgement of the value or utility of the infographic in imparting information... it just does.
One of my favorite MeFi comments on the original op-ed:

Dear Asian-Americans,

Thanks for taking over from us that stereotype of the overachieving, uncreative grind! Feel free to hand it off to someone else next generation. Should be pretty easy, since we're planning to pass you control of the media.

Love,

The Jews

http://www.metafilter.com/99339/Why-Chinese-Mothers-Are-Supe...
Here's a screenshot:
http://elementary-project.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2010/1...
Brick Your iPhone with Lego Cases
They don't NEED it, but they WANT it.
What is up with the dodgy numbering? I hope he didn't get a Scala program to do the list!!!

I am always deeply suspicious of any appeal for using a language that uses as it's initial premise that the language is shorter or saves keystrokes.

Personally, I'd take one of his examples and make it 'worserer' by enbiggening it.

new RunningReporter();

public class RunningReporter extends Thread {
public void run() {
System.out.println("Running");
}
}

And then I'd redesign it to something useful, e.g.

public class RunningReporter extends Thread {
public void run() {
System.out.println("Running");
doSomething();
}
public void doSomething() {}
}

So then subclasses of running reporter would spit out Running to System.out.println and then go and do their funky thing.

But even that isn't as useful as it could be, it should really be something like:

public class RunningReporter extends Thread {
String message = "";
public RunningReporter(String s) {
super();
message = s;
}
public void run() {
System.out.println(message);
doSomething();
}
public void doSomething() {}
}

Okay, so now you can customise the message, so that you can tell these threads apart if you're doing stuff:

e.g.

new BluetoothRunningReporter("Spp fix");

So we've passed through shorter, and gotten bigger, but the line that would be used in the program conveys enormously much more information.

I find that upon examination, in a properly and well designed Java system almost all of the anonymity disappears... which makes me uncomfortable with that example of how Scala is better than Java, because in the real world, if you were doing it properly, you wouldn't do it that way in Java anyway.
Just counting old-timer votes doesn't seem to change the ranking much: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2073513
Is Apple charging for free apps in the Mac Store?
I signed up for the app store last week and downloaded a free app, but have now seen a charge of 1.98 euro (or equivalent of US$2.50) on my credit card account. There was no email, invoice or anything from Apple and no indication of a purchase from Apple in my mac store account. Could this be an authorization hold? Any info on this would be great, we're looking at porting some apps to the store and can only imagine what kind of customer service nightmare this might be.
Additional question: do you use any methods of promotion for your blog (twitter, facebook?, etc) ?
Before I got started, I reviewed a bunch of popular blogs. There's basically two ways to build a successful blog - the first is to only produce extremely high quality content. This means writing less frequently and throwing away your pieces that aren't incredibly polished and don't come out just right.

This is the model that Paul Graham and Derek Sivers follow, for instance. This model requires you to let pretty-good-but-not-excellent blog posts/essays die on the vine, so the signal:noise ratio remains incredibly high.

The other way is to post every single day. I did a little surveying of the landscape, and it seems like going from 4x per week to every single day produces a few massive jumps - more consistent visitors, a faster finding and evolving of your core topics of any given time, and faster evolution in your writing ability.

If you've already got practice in writing, a well-defined theme, and have launched enough projects or writing or marketing materials that you can recognize when you've got a winner on your hands, then the high-quality-only model can work well. For the rest of us, every single day is far more likely to lead to improvement and successes.
spam, check the link at the bottom
Oh, sorry. I was thrown off by `dollar' in the grand-parent, and did not think about the Z$.
'the typical 6,000-square-foot Apple store rang up sales of about $4,700 per square foot in 2008, which was "undoubtedly the highest among retail chains in the country"'

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/apple-stores-now-just-...
Earth + 0.4: smallest exoplanet spotted
Shakira is single again
I've been using the "eGTK" (Elementary GTK) theme for just about a year now. For my money, it's the cleanest, best designed GTK theme Gnome has yet seen. It still doesn't feel as smooth as I'd like, this due I suppose in part to Gnome and the way the desktop environment is integrated, but that said it's still quite nice to look at.
Twitter for Mac, Worth the Wait?
The multi-window thing would be fine, but why does each window need a button on my taskbar? On both Windows or Linux, doing any serious work in GIMP destroys my taskbar's usefulness.

Then, which windows are on top of other windows is never what I expect, even after years of using GIMP.

In my opinion a multi-window image program is the way to go, but GIMP's implementation of it is not.

(P.S. I think Apple's Interface Builder's multi-window implementation is much much worse, however.)
Anything you can use in Java is available in Scala.
Geeks: Get out there and meet new people
I wonder why people so often use athletic or industrial metaphors when talking about excellence in the sciences or technical fields? I look at mathematics for example as a creative endeavor. It scratches the same itch for me as drawing or making music. Why would I want to put any emphasis, as a creative person, on the rate of achievement in any of these fields? I would rather make one profound original contribution, if given my druthers. That is an extreme chosen for the sake of argument, but don't you admit that this might be just as valid a model of scientific or mathematical excellence?
I don't think driving your children to excel is incompatible with showing them "real" love. Just because parents derive pride from their children's success doesn't mean that you are nothing more than "an ornament." How did they abandon you?

I am personally disappointed in my parents because when I decided it was easier to just skate by in life as a teen, they let me get away with it. Things are sharper now, but I wasted a huge portion of my life and they were more concerned that I didn't want to go to church any more and were placated by my athletic achievements.

So, showing your kids no love is bad, but giving in to them for short term happiness sucks too. The self-esteem movement is overdone. I know people who are afraid to tell their kids that they are fat. Honesty and direction communication among family is enabled by strong family bonds, and, particularly in East Asian cultures, Confucian values that clearly establish the roles of parent and child. It's just hard to find the right balance to get kids to maximize performance.
Related project: RAMCloud at Stanford.

http://fiz.stanford.edu:8081/display/ramcloud/Home

It's a _pure_ in memory key-value store, that aims to give the lowest latency access to data as possible (~1 to 10us for small bytes of data).
Scala, like most/all languages that run bolted on top of the JVM can use almost all of the libraries that Java itself can use, since the Scala code gets auto-converted to Java classes. (Typically (in the examples I've seen) one Scala class gets converted into many Java classes)

This is not entirely dissimilar from the way that JSP gets converted into a Servlet.

Scala/AlternateLanguageRunningOnJVM fans please provide corrections as appropriate, but be gentle, I'm making some broad generalisations here with all the flaws implied by that methodology. :D
Great material, I'm studying operating systems and this really helps me. It'd be great to find similar material about other OS topics(scheduling, I/O...).
same question. Initially, I got the impression that they're building a new OS altogether, but the more I read, the more they seem to be just another Linux distro, albeit prettier.

Perhaps the team needs to be more clear on what makes El-OS different/better as the current description is too vague.
What about annotations?
I used to read HN comments before reading articles, but I don't do that much any more because I find the top comments on HN often miss the point of the article. The top comments are almost always criticising the article, which is OK because "good post" comments are mostly boring. But the criticism is often due to misunderstanding the author.

Most articles are not worth reading because they don't have much substance; so there's not much point reading comments about them. For the very little original and interesting writing out there, I prefer to read it before reading any comments.
I had hoped that people would do things like that (summaries, discussions) on SqueezedBooks.com but now I've sold it (although I retain some interest in it) and am not sure where it's going to go right now.
Steven Novella's response to the Decline Effect
I think you're illustrating the point of the author: such an option should be the default. The user shouldn't have to go looking for it.
You can use them too.
Is Spam Killing Google?
BitBucket integration added to PlayNice.ly
Because they don't know what it means to be poor?
So are you confirming that it's a theme? I think most of us were confused from the title "Elementary OS," and the project didn't have an About page to explain what it was.
FB finances leaked in the Goldman deal. They did something like $2BN in revenue and $400MM in ebitda in 2010.
To everyone who is replying to the 8bit issue by mentioning GEGL - Have you actually used it in a professional capacity?

As a (now part-time) professional photographer, I have evaluated GIMP; and as a FOSS advocate I really wanted it to work. The performance issues the article mentions are with reasonable sized images at only 8 bits, but editing a 16bit, 25MP image wasn't just slow, it was unusable. Photoshop however, runs in near real time at these image sizes. Even automating a GEGL filter to run on a series of a few hundred images would take long enough that I couldn't maintain a usable workflow.
Technology and Inventions Don’t Make a Business
people's definition of success is quite relative, depending on other people's current perceptions and ideas of how we should be or what people envy, or image.

You can easily replace success with happiness in that sentence.

For example, spending more time sitting and walking in parks, feeding and playing with stray dogs, and remaining in the present moment (whatever that means) sounds extremely boring to me. It would make me miserable rather than happy.

It's more complicated than it looks.
I thought one of the premises of Scala was that you could use all of the Java libraries as well?
I think that is because in the old days, brands manufactured their own stuff. Today, major brands subcontract out manufacturing and assembly to some no-name outfit in China.

Now, if the owner of said outfit has ambitions, he'd want to sell his stuff (that he sees being sold by the big names at 2x the cost) directly to the consumer. But he has no brand name; so it'll end up being sold as some generic name as "lucky star" or "super max"; or he'll license the brand-name from an old brand (I'm looking at you, Westinghouse).

The classic story is that of Lenovo. They used to make Thinkpads for IBM; and then one day decided to just buy the brand from IBM.

I heard once that there are basically only 3 laptop manufacturers in the world; all the laptops you see (Dell, HP, Gateway, Acer, etc. etc.) are all made by one of these 3.

So, to answer your question: compare the specs of the no-names with those of the big-names. If you find specs that are mostly identical, then you're basically getting the same thing at a lower price. However: you won't get the customer service and after-sales support that big-names carry. Plus, there's the possibility that the no-name may be selling the stuff that the big-name's QA rejected, so the quality may be suspect.
The bioinformatics curse
Code From Clever Algorithms: Nature-Inspired Programming Recipes
I read that WSJ article and had it clanking around in my head for a few days... I was countering it with some of the 'free-range' parenting styles you read about.

The most valid insight of the article was that some things (ie - violin, number theory, LISP, organic chemistry) are inherently hard and require discipline to get through the 'rote-learning' boring parts. The 'touchy-feely', "let's make math interesting" style of parenting/ teaching misses this. There is something to 3 hours of violin vs 45 minutes and 2 hours of TV as a reward...

I am no 'Chinese Mom' but see that this style of parenting is best for a kid who has certain proclivities. If they have an impulse towards music it is important for them to push them selves past the drudgery of practicing scales onto real accomplishment.

If the kid hates music then drop it and find something else. But push them enough so that they understand that if they work through the initial tough part some real beauty lies ahead.
Ask HN: Why do some paperbacks cost less than their ebook versions?
This doesn't make any sense to me at all. It is very frustrating to see paper backs cost less (sometimes upto 20% or more) than kindle versions. There is so much cost involved in printing, transporting, stocking paperbacks, but ebooks cost next to nothing.

What am I missing?
Suggestion: On your landing page, remove the definition for Twitter. Your users are already using Twitter, so they don't need a definition. It's probably more important to set focus on the "Slipstream" definition.
You could have one global list that essentially is a bot-competition (which I think is interesting in itself) and then allows users to create named lists, allowing friends to compete internally.
10 Simple Truths That'll Drive Him Crazy In Bed
Streaming the 2011 Google Science Fair on
And the fact of the matter is that Photoshop has far from the world's greatest UI either (for one of the usual reasons--so much stuff has been incrementally added over time) so saying a UI is bad compared to Photoshop really is pretty damning. Contrast with Lightroom which, although I disagree with one or two of the fundamental design decisions, was coherently designed from the ground up.

The situation with The GIMP is really a lot like OpenOffice on a smaller scale. Lots of people would like a free image editing program but it's a big undertaking to produce something that's competitive with the proprietary alternatives and there's no commercial organization that sees benefit in supporting such an effort.
o_O

check again what app you bought.. maybe there was some update or other stuff.. be more accurate before asking these questions )
Impressive.

Frankly, I'm still not sure that Dell or Apple would be a good choice to include here anyway; of course a place that sells $1000 - $2000 objects is going to have incredibly high revenues, and as you can see on the graph, it kind of skews it a bit...
Signal over noise. If you update too often (especially with uninteresting stuff), I'm actually less likely to read, since I don't want it junking up my RSS reader.
That looks like a great site with lots of good content. Does it bring in much revenue?
How to build a tech startup outside of Silicon Valley
The numbering is based on the "Tip" Numbers from the Effective Java book. Each tip is numbered and indexed, and it is common to use the tips during code reviews.
Hudson (OSS CI Server) to rename itself to escape Oracle's control
Why did they put a non-linear x-axis on that graph? From 0% to 80% of income is only the first 40% of x-axis space! Then tick marks (with equal physical spacing) change from 5% to 1% increments.
Perhaps it's because the definition of "rich" that they would need to feel is one where they'd never have to work again if they didn't want to.

The article points out an annual income of $172,000 as being rich, but by implication, these people still have to work for their money. Therefore probably don't feel "rich"

If they could maintain that income or even half that income in perpetuity without working. If they could spend their days doing just what they want and not what they have to then maybe that's what feels rich?

Maybe?
Hm good point. In this fashion, how would you target say Concert Pianists or Firemen? And where would you post that link?
Roughly half the public money for "research" is actually pocketed by the university and spent on education/administration/etc (the university calls it "overhead"). This is a dirty little secret of science funding - a big chunk of it isn't funding science at all, but is merely a subsidy for big research colleges.

Also, even tuitions at private colleges are massively subsidized - the subsidies just follow the students (e.g., subsidized student loans, need-based aid, etc).
From the guidelines:

> If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys."
Interesting take on rich vs uber rich. I grew up in an area with a lot of that 90th-95th percentile group but everyone seemed to believe they were "upper middle" class. The "rich" people were the few at the very top making millions more.

A family making 250k/year is doing very well, but when they look at someone making a few million - they don't group themselves in that category.

I also wonder if this is reinforced by the numerous 'reality' tv shows that document the uber rich lifestyle. Even in a town full of people that are well above average, no one is living like those top 1-2% of earners and therefore don't consider themselves rich.
When you listen closely to what he says all the time, one has to conclude that this man is one of the most violent aggressive people around, violence is mostly not physical but rhetoric.
Have you planned for IPv6?
shameless plug: My book R Graph Cookbook is out soon - https://www.packtpub.com/r-graph-cookbook/book. It contains recipes for doing things with graphs, which can sometimes be obscure, annoying and time consuming.
It doesn't matter where you start out. You're always staring up at that sheer cliff (in fact it's probably true that it seems steeper and harder to climb the closer you get to it).
I dunno. I think the majority of companies log for the sake of logging. Some take advantage of this data, but I doubt most do. Instead it just sits there on a drive waiting to be accidentaly leaked, stolen by employees, stolen by hackers or subpoenaed by governments, both good and bad.
The parent is correct, but to throw another shoe in the gears, there are other situations in which a proton is referred to as a hydrogen ion. For example, during reionization in cosmology, hydrogen becomes ionized. The H+ ion is then referred to as hydrogen.
Sometimes in chemistry when dealing with acids, H+ is referred to as hydrogen and not a proton, but I've also heard it the other way.

I think a good guess, is that if you're dealing with nuclear physics, call it a proton, anything else call it whatever you want.
Ask HN: Is ADA inherently more reliable?
This article:

http://www.sae.org/mags/AEM/8982

...indicates that students have found coding in ADA produces more reliable software and ADA is used elsewhere in projects where "hands-off" operation is critical.

Anyone familiar with ADA care to comment on this or describe the language features that might contribute to this feeling of confidence?