skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The only time a machine would make slavery inefficient is when such a machine could do everything a human can do, and with less energy requirements. Slaves were not limited to harvesting cotton. Slaves were meant to provide wealth to their masters in any form which could be had, including both physical (working fields, being maids/nursemaids, cooking, cleaning etc.) and often sexual labor. It's also not a widely known fact that slaves built much of the U.S. capitol. Many Americans would love to have a butler, but can't afford one. Well, you could if the only payment required was feeding them scraps you intended for the trash anyway. Having slaves provided tremendous economic benefit and wealth to slave owners, even if not always measured in dollar terms.
The new C# 5.0 proposes to bring asynchronous keywords, which I believe works like macros to turn imperative code into continuations.

The “await” operator used twice in
that method does not mean “this method now blocks
the current thread until the asynchronous
operation returns”. That would be making
the asynchronous operation back into a
synchronous operation, which is precisely
what we are attempting to avoid. Rather,
it means the opposite of that; it means
“if the task we are awaiting has
not yet completed then sign up the rest of
this method as the continuation of that task,
and then return to your caller immediately;
the task will invoke the continuation when
it completes.”

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2010/10/29/async...

async void ArchiveDocuments(List<Url> urls)
{
Task archive = null;
for(int i = 0; i < urls.Count; ++i)
{
var document = await FetchAsync(urls[i]);
if (archive != null)
await archive;
archive = ArchiveAsync(document);
}
}

Microsoft has been very lucky to have someone like Anders Hejlsberg, who has steadily brought a stream of features to an enterprise programming language.
I think the WSJ's intent in publishing it was a little more complex. The piece accomplishes two goals: it ridicules the ineffectiveness of soft, touchy-feely, liberal childrearing, and it presents the Chinese as alien, inhuman, and a superhuman threat, just like the Soviet scientific juggernaut we feared after Sputnik. We are supposed to be scared that the Chinese will "bury us" with inhuman discipline and achievement, and we are supposed to blame liberal attitudes for our weakness.
This line here creeps me out ->

"The market share of browsers that support H.264 exceeds WebM capable browsers"

Google's online advertising monopoly is working on overdrive to ensure that won't happen.
The Digital Scientist (for distributed computing)
I agree... but for a totally different reason. I thought it was an incredibly bad joke considering that Brisbane, Australia has just been hit by the worst floods since 1974. The CBD and many suburbs are literally awash in water. It's a national disaster: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/special-reports/gallery-fn7... So... I was relieved to see the piece had absolutely nothing to do with the plight of Brisbane, Australia!
Reminds me of an episode of "Brasseye" where they show a graph over time of "Crimes we know nothing about" and it's increasing ;)

"Clever" -- as in thinks it's clever but actually highlights a misconception. Such a graph could refer to unreported crimes, which can be estimated through sampling.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(statistics)
Just guessing: But I think the flakes that cause silicosis are much larger than something 15-30 molecules wide.
Makes some good points about how the situation today isn't the same as past bubbles: the companies are profitable, they've got track records. "Combine these factors and you have what I view as a pretty solid environment: a strong demand for quality companies, and quality companies to fulfill that demand. Is $50 billion too high for Facebook, or $5billion too high for Groupon? Well, we'll see."
I'm going to start a pool. Buy in is $200 equivalent[1] per square. The board will be a 3 dimensional matrix, whose axis are:

1. The amount of time from now the collapse occurs. (most likely a logrithmic scale)

2. How far civilization falls, e.g. "back to the 19th century" or "back to the stone age"[2].

3. How "wierd" this makes the world, e.g. are there 40 degree temperature shifts in the afternoon in San Diego and warm beaches in Antarctica. Are there now hyper-intelligent wasps running the show. Do we discuss the "fragility of the fabric of space-time" much more frequently.. and so on.[3]

Finally, every "square" is actually in a state of superposition, based on the answer to the question "are there zombies[4] now" at the time of selection. Therefore if you are sure 10 days from now, early 16th century avg tech, wierd factor of .09, put in $400 worth of goods to catch the both zombies outcomes.

Winners will be chosen at the END of the collapse, before the rebuilding period. The winners will be given the location and secret combination to enter the cache. Transport and armed escort will not be provied by me or any other participant of this pool, (except by other arrangement out of scope of the pool) nor will any other form of survivability enhancement until reaching the cache.

[1] Entry fee must be in the form of non-perishable food, ammo, guns and other items traditionally considered valuable post-apocalypse

[2] Avg tech level does not include the fact that various warlords, mad scientists, intelligent creatures and other bad guys will have access to various tech remnants and caches... This is strictly about the level of technology and civilization available to the average person.

[3] Weirdness factor algorithm tbd, but it will be normalized on a 0-1 scale, with the current state of the US being .27.

[4] Zombies here includes both new and old style zombies, some forms of mutant, possibly mind-control victims, and certain types of insectoid horde. All other types of undead, mutants and creatures, as well as those with supernatural powers are actually just manifestations of the wierd factor (see [3]).
A viral "launching soon" form - Visualized
Has anyone tried simply changing their address to a US one?
http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/09/02/international-k...
I think that for high volume customers with offline purchases, such as Tide who are essentially augmenting their traditional advertising with online this could be true. However, for low volume customers with online purchasing such as most startups it's probably best to stick to CTR.

Indeed, it would seem a new 'revelation' in online advertising that depreciates the value of a click would be highly valuable to web properties with notoriously low CTRs. I think it's primarily a puff piece to generate increase revenues for properties with low CTR. (I'm looking at you Facebook)
So, basically, promoting WebM is actually promoting Flash. Sure. Well put.

And then: so... what?

Am I the only one unsurprised that Google would fight Apple? (in convoluted ways sometimes)
Offer HN: Three useful functions for async javascript
Javascript has always given you a nice, event-driven, single-threaded environment to write code, and now with Node.js, it's become even more useful.

But sometimes we need to do things with async and writing the same code over and over gets cumbersome. It can drive a person nuts (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2101210) ... until you decide to just grab a couple functions that help you express yourself.

That's what I wanted to offer HN. These are the functions that I use all the time in Javascript applications.

The first one is called "pipe" and it basically lets you express yourself simply by saying "wait until objects X and Y are available, and then do something)

var p = Q.pipe(['user', 'stream], function (params, subjects) {
// arguments that were passed are in params.user, params.stream
// this objects that were passed are in subjects.user, subjects.stream
mysql("SELECT * FROM subscription WHERE user.id = " + params.user.id +
" AND stream.id = " + params.stream.id, this.fill('subscription');
}, ['user', 'stream', 'subscription'], function (params, subjects) {
// now we have all three objects ready to be used
}, function () {
// execute this function every time something is piped
});
mysql("SELECT * FROM user WHERE user_id = 2", p.fill('user'));
mysql("SELECT * FROM stream WHERE publisher_id = 2", p.fill('stream'));

and the Q.getter function takes a regular getter and enhances it with queue support, throttling, and batching.

All you have to do is do:

Users.get = Q.getter(Users.get);

and now you can use it from anywhere like this:

Users.get(29381, function (user) {
// do something with the user
});

without having to worry about who else has requested the same user. If the user is cached, the tail call occurs right away. Otherwise, the function calls the "real" getter to fetch it. If someone else requests the same user, they are placed in a waiting queue. When the user is finally fetched, ALL the callbacks are invoked. Not only that, but you can also tell it to throttle on a resource. Just use a string or an object for the throttle. And it will make sure there are only 10 open requests at a time. And also you can implement batching.

https://gist.github.com/778822 <-- here it is

Anyway, check it out. I think it will help you with your javascript coding
Greg
I felt the same way, but thankfully Javascript lets you write really cool things that handle the flow of your code in ways that correspond to the way you think of it.

I encourage you to check out http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2101789 ... with those functions javascript will be pleasant again.
Clients should be able to allow you to switch between top and bottom posting at will.
There's always QuietURL for Firefox, which converts text to a link when you hover over it.

It's nice to have.
I wonder how you remove this kind of coating? Sandblast it?
At the risk of sounding like a snob (though please note I am not in IT):

Folks who are reasonably bright are often given hell in school and become social outcasts because of stuff teachers, society and other kids do (teachers are really bad about holding up the smart kids as examples to follow even though no amount of studying will make the other kids that smart and, no, it really isn't anything the teacher did though they are trying to take credit for it). Condescension can be a form of ego defense -- ie "I have few if any friends and I know you hate me on sight just for being me, but I'm better than you and probably make more money".

You can often get past something like that by overlooking it and being genuinely nice to them and sincerely respecting their brains/ability/contribution instead of resenting it and trying to fight for the limelight with them. Only the occasional hardcore asshole will persist for long with consistently asinine behavior in the face of genuine, sincere niceness and respect/appreciation.

(Though, really, all the folks from IT at my company that I can recall interacting with have been just genuinely nice to me from the get go.)
You need to make the level after 100 high and have some power.

Also, could you have a nice-rank algo that weights votes by the nice-rank of the voters? Or is that how it works?
You still need to convince a number of government bodies and the wider medical community that your results are kosher. If you've been shown to put your name on papers that falsify results it is going to be very difficult for you to convince these groups of the quality of your work.
You're wrong, but it's not why you think. iTunes is no less awful on the Mac. It's arguably worse, and certainly no better.
The "what" being that, assuming the ideal is a move away from proprietary technologies like Flash, supporting WebM alone in the current environment is likely to have the opposite effect (and thus hurt web open standards, at least in the short to medium term).

I too liked Chrome's support of both WebM and H.264. Theirs is a disappointing move.
http://www.quora.com/Which-startups-are-hiring-in-the-San-Fr...
2010 Tied 2005 as Hottest Year, Climate Figures Show
I've seen some Sri Lankan names that are not far from that.
There are like 100 forms of asbestos with 6 types being extremely harmful. The manufactures started using the cheapest of the materials (which are extremely difficult to tell apart).

http://www.asbestos.com/asbestos/types.php
Humans vs. automated search: Why people power is cool again
It is e. e. cummings and not E. E. Cummings. As Will Arnett would say in arrested development, 'coooome oon!'
Thoughts on Webmatrix (Microsoft's simple website development tool)
Tech sites will still run PR pieces, and the audience is valuable enough that many will run ads just for impressions. (eg. Microsoft, Apple, etc), or shift towards running more PR based ads. (eg. Corporate culture, etc)

You'll never be kicked out, at worse you'll be offered to upgrade to a paid account. Also, how much value is there in the people unaffected by ads commenting, submitting articles, linking to the site, etc.
My university had this competition with a different twist:
- The egg was dropped from a 10-story building
- The winner is whoever gets the egg safely to the concrete below in the minimal time. Nothing else matters. (But the judges must be able to see that the egg does indeed touch the concrete).

Most contestants tried to get the egg to drop slowly, e.g. using helium or parachutes.

The winner used a rocket to speed the egg down, and placed the egg within a honey jar. The jar hit the floor and cracked in ~1.5 seconds, the honey absorbed all the shock, and it took 2 more seconds for the egg to roll out of the honey and touch the concrete.
I agree that you wouldn't need to move. It would be tough to walk or bike to work though.
I'm pretty sure when most people hear "open specification," they'll think it means "open for anyone to read and implement" or something along those lines, not "owned by a consortium of corporations rather than a single corporation." I know that's what people mean when they say H.264 is open, but "owned by a consortium" is not the usual connotation of "open."
That is, in fact, what he's saying, although it wasn't definitively shown. But clearly it was known to be a carcinogen when they built my high school in the early 70's, and yet they were still using it as a standard insulation and fireproofing material. I have lots of asbestos tape in my house, too.

Lead paint, though - there's a good one. Everybody knew you shouldn't drink it, but nobody suspected the dust was a problem. (Although Japan had already banned it by the 20's, if I recall correctly, while America was still merrily painting everything in sight with toxins).

And of course, the Romans didn't even know you shouldn't drink it. Although the benefits lead plumbing in Rome due to widespread availability of clean water almost certainly outweighed the costs of some stupider Romans.
Steve Pavlina releases 1000+ personal development articles into public domain
I'm one of those weird people with 10,000+ lines in /etc/hosts mostly filled with ad servers and agencies.

wc /etc/hosts
13381 28071 387932 /etc/hosts
How Can I Improve My Posture?
The problem is using a physician's name to lend authority to a physical regimen that might be harmful without that physician's approval. He's clearly attempting to mislead his readers.
I really like JS and it has excellent closure support, but it's really obvious that heavy async programming like we're doing nowadays with AJAX is not what it was designed for.

The 'nested callback' problem is one I've encountered over and over. I've figured out a relatively nice way to work around it. The solution goes something like this.

- Take the individual actions that you want and put them in closures.

- These closures take 1 argument, which is always a callback function that takes no arguments (this is the convention you structure everything around)

- Put these closures in an array, in the order that you want them executed

- Pass the array to a function that executes them for you (in Haskell it's called a sequence)

I have a really quick and really dirty presentation about it here, http://www.moondust.dds.nl/text/async-presentation/

Some code on github up here, https://github.com/michiel/asynchelper-js - the sequencer.js function is verbose, if you read the next SO link I've included a three line example of implementing it.

And a stackoverflow answer using this code and some explanation here, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4462605/jquery-ajax-each-...

And another one as a gist on github here, https://gist.github.com/604730 (for rendering a massive table from JSON data).

There's a lot more to this sequencer pattern. You can nest sequences, you can have the sequencer run each callback using setTimeout(callback, 0) to release control back to the main loop and get out of 'script is doing too much' popups, etc.

Need to make an async call? Make a closure that performs the async call and invoke the callback argument in your async callback.

Need to add some random JS code to a sequence? Wrap it in a closure and call the callback when you're done. If the random JS code requires an async call, see the previous paragraph.

Error handling, of course, is still awful. You can extend the sequencer convention to add error closures as a second parameter, you can do everything inside the closures in try/catch blocks and finally always call the callback, etc. But that just tends to make a mess of things. So the examples just assume everything is going fine.

It's not an ideal solution, but it's native JS and works everywhere.

It allows you to structure your code into functional blocks and work on them separately instead of making everything one big nested callback mess.
I'm not convinced that monads give the best tooling story. If you have a nice syntax for passing the operations into the monad, that means there's going to be quite an aggressive transformation of the source syntax; and since the control flow - i.e. the calling of the functions passed into the monad - is determined by the monad, it's harder to analyse at a higher level.

If you have a powerful type system that's open enough to encode further guarantees in it, so that the library itself can supply higher-level proofs of properties (if not analyses that can e.g. be queried and manipulated in an IDE context), that's great; but it doesn't help in an environment like Javascript, or even Java or C#. And I'm not sure it helps in larger scale situations, e.g. debugging multiprocess interaction. With so much done in libraries, you run the risk of tools not knowing enough about the program to help.

I guess what I'm saying is that the case for ad hoc special cases is quite strong outside of situations where all your programmers are highly trained and have deep knowledge of all domains intersecting with their problems.
NASA media sucks, so I made this
Fascinating. I did not know this. Sounds like a clever, or at least smart, legal move!
Extremely rare compared to what? Compared to the entire population of the United States?

Compared to other health threats in the US. Before the 60's and 70's, Asbestosis was a minor concern except for people with occupational exposure (e.g. asbestos miners). Much bigger and more pressing issues were polio, malaria, measles, and the like.

Once we became rich and healthy enough to care about it, we dealt with it. It was hardly an unknown threat, just a minor one.
Secret Service Study Probes Psyche of U.S. Assassins
You could say the same for any tribe, I think. I like Google but I doubt that they are making decisions for the greater good intentionally, or all the time. I do think that Google, like Apple, try to swing their business model towards a better design or better implementation. In a lot of those cases, the better implementation or design is open source or built for the greater good.
Exactly, I used to interleave...but the times are a changin and there's not much we can do about it. Twitter, FB, blogs are not going to change (nor should they). OP is about 16 years too late to this argument.
Yea I only click on The Deck and similar ad formats once a month. They have relevant content for designers and developers. The landing pages are usually fast and simple HTML, no fancy flash with preloaders. The format requires the display ad to be the one and only one on the page. Also it is a small jpg, not Flash, so it loads faster and doesn't slow down browsing.

Just demonstrating that display ads can work when they're properly executed. iAds are a similar story.
I guess you'd be happy to break up asbestos sheeting with no breathing apparatus then? Or participate in loose-fibre insulation removal, again with no protection? We'll check in with you in 20 years and see how you're going.
>> If it's difficult to find great Perl developers, that's because [fewer] great developers flock to Perl.
> I would like to see non-anecdotal evidence for this.

No non-anecdotal evidence for this, sorry. It's just a result of thinking about what Perl offers and what current languages offer. I know Perl quite well, you know.

>> Heck, even the humble Javascript allows you to perform mind-bending dynamic feats.
> It's also borrowing features Perl has had for years. Hm.

Right. Just like Perl borrows features from other languages.

>> Other languages offer multiplatform support (native, Java, .NET) which Perl lacks.
> That definition of "multiplatform" differs from mine. Perl 5 runs on more platforms than the CLR and JVM do.

My comment is not about platform themselves. It was more about: "I need to hook this Java/.NET library" and then there are languages where you can just switch platform (interpreter or compiler) to interface such a library natively.

See, Chromatic, when I met Perl I was amazed by its capabilities and progressed to read advanced books about this language. But nowadays, after meeting other languages, I regret my time spent with Perl, and I wouldn't recommend such language to anyone, just like I wouldn't do that with C++, another language in which I have progressed to what I think is almost "wizardry".

After a lot of time spent in learning different languages, I do think that there are languages not worth learning. It may sound arrogant, but I think so, and I think that experienced developers have the right to think so and make newcomers spare time.

Do you think Perl is worth learning? You are entitled to that. Don't I think it is? I'm entitled too. And both of us are entitled to share our experience.
Not that I know of but google sync manages it quite well for smartphones (though it is syncing it to a gmail account and not dropbox).
Yammer's Leaderboards Show How Workplace Discourse Will be Analyzed
read the comment above by dkarl - he wrote a concluding paragraph that turned your observations into something of significance.
Reddit, Digg, Fark, /., TC & Others Sued Over 'Online Press Release' Patent
It's not Google making up FUD — Google is noting an objection that's been around for a long time, and they're doing something about it. Mozilla has been saying the same thing for a long time.

And I don't know how you even create FUD about something like this, where the uncertainty is based on traps that are known to exist, which most users are currently standing on but simply haven't been triggered yet. Is it a controversial claim that H.264 requires a patent license? Is it a controversial claim that MPEG-LA has only offered a limited-time indemnity, and that only for a subset of uses? This is all verifiable and documented.