skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since 1991 :)

Seriously, it is one of the biggest open-source C codebases out there, with thousands of hackers working on it. And the result is very good, as the majority of the internet is running on it.
The USA was blessed with some great geography too. Two giant mountain ranges capture enormous amount of snowfall and the snowmelt drains into the interior of the country, rendering massive areas amenable to agriculture. In turn this created a large population suitable for industrialisation.
fortunately this is not a strict coders' forum as far as i'm concerned - i appreciate all kinds of people with varying experience from diverse sectors, after all this is what information exchange is about, and more variance adds to a broader and more objective view, lots of fun and more information (and entropy for that matter).
in fact i don't even believe there is a specific topic other than things that are obviously very interesting to a certain group of people.
as for my communication skills - i think i have none, and despite my earlier statement being more a lame excuse for my lazyness to communicate, I'm kind of proud of being disconnected and I somewhat aim for provocations, since all I care about is rationally and deliberately looking at things from a different and unique perspective, since i believe this kind of contribution to be of value, even if it might appear naive or if i'm slashing the common ground or if i don't point out purpose.
but since english is not my native tongue I'm not really successful at communicating sarcasm in a rhetorical way.
so please don't vote for me since i'm not used to that :p.
I am pretty sure that the 1970s sucked.
Love it. I prefer the design aesthetically and functionally to the old docs. Not sure about the name change though.
It hardly seems wrong to judge a protocol by the client software when there is only one client worth mentioning?
I understand that this raises eyebrows, but it's hardly fraud.

Do people actually think that retail price is a function of production/R&D cost? It's not, never has been. Dropbox charges 20$ for something that consumes marginally more ressources and incurs identical R&D costs when compared to the 10$ product. Chip manufacturers do this all the time. Discounts for electronics and groceries are fully artificial.

A much more realistic model is price as whatever the market can bear. I sincerely doubt that there is a moral obligation to set price points in any other way.

[This may be relevant: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...]
Yeah, I closed the tab halfway through for that reason. Who would you rather hate you, your twitter account or your readers?
I was curious about this one, but my use case would have been Javascript and Python, and when I looked a few weeks back, the Python version out there couldn't even handle all the examples in the man page.

I'll have to keep an eye on the 2.0 project.
I often ran into these roadblocks around February of every year -- the same thing. Every February I would reflect, and suddenly realize I didn't like something (or everything) about my life and I'd make drastic changes.

* Lost ~80 pounds starting in February a few years back. 200->120. Hovering at a healthier weight, or so the wife says.
* A few years back, I had a consistent contest on one of my projects (hostjury.com) where we'd give out ipods once a month. I hand-delivered one of them ~6,000+ miles away, by car.
* The next year, I got a motorcycle. February.
* The next year, I moved to Vanvouer. February.
* The next year, I put ~80,000+ miles on my car. February through June. Anywhom..
* Found a wife, the next. She's put me under some new limits but we're probably moving to San Diego or *.in.cali. soon. //February, again. Uhaul is cheap ;)

There isn't anything inherently wrong with having sudden desires or your mind screaming at both your body and soul that it's in a rut. I too would highly recommend getting some exercise.

Try doing the grouse grind a few times a week. I used to live right up at the top of the mountain and would make my way up there each morning. It's a beautiful way to start the day, and is a fantastic starter workout. My time was about ~35 minutes once I got into the habit, but initially it was 1.5 hours -- so keep that in mind.

Start small. And hey, changes of scenery don't hurt either. Take a trip, wield your vacation pay. Change your personal life, your work life will follow suit.

In the meantime, eat a bit healthier & get some more exercise. Oh, and get a bicycle. Steed cycle is on the North Shore & that's where I bought mine. Put ~40miles a day on it in Vancouver and loved every minute of it.
> By definition, the position that there are significant differences between different races is racism.

Actually, the definition is believing that the differences are large enough to render some races superior to others. It's a political belief, not a biological statement.
understood. it will be gone. :)
You wouldn't, I wouldn't, but we are at the extreme right end of the spectrum. Most people don't have nearly as high requirements as we do, nor do they have the same skills we have.

So don't base your guesses for the future on what you need. Base them on what your mother needs (unless she is Admiral Grace Hopper).
I would posit that "worlds best minds, and many of histories great figures" are revered for what they did and not what they taught, nor their positions of tenure.

Did Einstein have tenure or a teaching position when he discovered relativity?
Point out to me those revered figures of history known primarily for their teaching or tenure positions.
The worthlessness of the university system is exemplified by people like the Admissions Dean of MIT who was able to perform magnificently at her job sans the appropriate degree. The degree obviously being so unimportant to MIT to even bother checking that she had it for some 30 odd years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/27/us/27mit.html

The statement is insulting only to those who hold their degree / teaching position as part of their identity which is supposed to be some kind of proxy for them knowing / being able to do something.

I greatly respect the capable, the intelligent, and the driven, what I don't think is that having a teaching position / tenure is a great proxy for knowing that.
I'm genuinely interested in this, I work from home so this would be perfect for me (I'm also in rainy old England, although I like England!) my only problem would be I'm terribly unsocial so wouldn't fit in well, but I'd love to attend something like this.
Unsurprising, my mate is a tester in the UK and they gave it to people to play on their home PCs to test the multiplayer.
You know, that makes me think - arrows seem totally obvious to us, but would they be obvious to someone from a completely different culture? <- could be 'go this way'; it could also mean 'avoid as if it's the mouth of a crocodile'.
Great bargain. Additionally, the HD-555 can be had for about 100 on eBay. I've been buying my Sennheisers there for years, always the 570 model but that's a bit dated now.
"Google cone of learning." I am not familiar with this phrase. Can someone explain?
I had a very satisfying few moments destroying that annoying box with "Kick Ass":

http://erkie.github.com/

I was so pleased with myself I didn't even bother reading the article...
Sun never made Alphas. Those came from Digital (Equipment Corporation, not Research).

But I agree it's sad. Sun's accomplishments were something to behold.
Ricky is a great guy - good work Ricky!
Mihi cordi est legere de lingua Latina temporibus recentibus reanimata. O tempora, o mores, quibus litterae antiquae flocci aestimantur! Qui sese ad pecuniam adipiscendam vehementer pellunt nullo intervallo excepto, cum ad summam divitiarum demum adveniant, bene vivere non sciunt. Ut ait noster Lucius in Epistulis Moralibus: "Otium sine litteris mors est et hominis vivi sepultura."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistulae_morales_ad_Lucilium
I can't help but wonder which free mail / pron site / forum spamming tool that "free half-a-bitcoin if you'll just solve this captcha for me" website is exploiting.
Twitter & Apple.
you're right, I appreciate the honest words.
i'm just having difficulties in being serious - this is a personal trait and part of my very way to learn since it enables me to stay distant and see more of the bigger picture, thus not easily changed. I'll try to be more serious however.
also, since my english is rather poor, I apologize for my bad grammar and unstructured sentences.
Top 20 Mobile Startup Ideas For 2011
Active reader here, but I avoid commenting.

Whenever I do, I seem to find myself caring too much about the responses. This leads me to returning again and again to a thread I've already learned from and replying to responses in an attempt to clarify my position. Before I know it, a half-hour has passed to no benefit.

Since arrows tend to be clicked to reflect a worldview which conforms to a reader's own and not to promote posts of substance, I find the result is more poking a hive-mind than learning through discussion. That agitates me far more than it should and, for myself, it's best by far to simply lurk.
While liberals do often hark back to idealized good old days of big manufacturing, high taxes, unionization and everyone having health insurance, I think it's a little unfair to portray conservatives as idealists looking toward some future utopia. For the most part (libertarian fringe excluded), they seem to simply lack vision of any sort, forward or backward.
On Amazon, the headphones are closer in price... $85 for the HD555 and $150 for the HD595. Still paying $65 for one less piece of foam.
hmmm? not that it is the slightest bit relevant, but I dont think webkit is a core component on mac os x, unless you are using the word differently than I would have expected?
Why do these types of market partitioning practices anger people so much?

Because it makes them feel ripped off.

Enthusiasts were likely having positive feelings about their purchase of Sennheiser products and now they feel like an idiot. Psychology is a big part of the audio business.

Isn't it a good thing that these companies are offering different price points for people to choose from?

That Sennheiser is taking headphones and expending extra cost to muffle them in order to sell them at a lower price indicates that they do not consider themselves to be in an efficient economic market. Likely they are selling the muffled headphones in order to artificially inflate the price of the normal ones.

It also raises the question of in what other ways Sennheiser might be intentionally degrading the quality of its products.
Negative self-talk. Stop that. Thinking it reinforces it.
And I think the need for engineers in smaller companies is the unwillingness of management to sacrifice expediency for purity. :-)

Regardless, that's beside my point. It sounded like the person I responded to wanted to work on better code, so I was just pointing out that startups aren't necessarily any better in that respect. I'll leave it to him to determine how good or bad that is as I'd really rather not get involved in this old debate again.
What arrogance. Perfect optimizers are an illusion. They are guaranteed to fail and to fail at the most inconvenient times. It is not only possible to do better than the optimizer on complex queries with hints its a given. Now that I know hints are not possible in PostgreSQL I will strictly curtail the kind of projects I will apply this RDBMS to. If you haven't found the need to use hints you have not explored the full range of what SQL is capable of (or worse yet use an ORM).
It's just a great example of how capitalism leads to do things that are utterly perverse.
K-12 isn't generally about learning. It is a daycare for children and young adults.

(I am 23 now. I left school when I was 17 to pursue a career in the gamedev industry. Daycare was not the place for me, and I haven't regretted dropping out.)
i.e to bum it for a year in India.
Cobol, PL/1, spss, modula-2 and fortran.
Maybe a laptop shell that when you place your phone in it, transforms into a full featured OS? Imagine an MacBook air without the guts.
Of course it is not a strict coders forum. Even simply being female makes me very much a minority here and I have seen a number of posts from women who cite that as an obstacle to effective participation.

I like getting a diversity of views and feedback/information. It is one of the reasons I work hard on coming across politely and respectfully when speaking with people who have strongly different views from mine: It is the only way I have found for such interactions to be really good opportunities for growth instead of pissing contests. Pissing contests rarely have any productive value.

As for speaking English as a second language: Stating up front "please forgive my English" seems to work pretty well to smooth things over for some members here. Practicing your English will improve it, possibly quite a lot in a short time. (I have seen that with foreign friends who chose to speak with me in spite of sometimes having very poor English and me not knowing their language at all.)

And I apologize if you don't actually want solutions. Many people don't. I am often annoying in that way.

Peace.
Innovation: novelty in context, or novelty period?
Poultry the most interesting birds for human being all over the world
Can we get a "2000" on this? :)

Still an amusing little project.
Would people feel a lot better if instead they just went and changed the circuitry to produce lower quality sound?

Yes, as long as there was a halfway plausible explanation that it cost less to produce.
Actually, the article notes that there are aesthetic differences as well. Are those worth $150? No, probably not, but they aren't identical items.

(Also, FWIW, the "$350" headphones are currently $145 on Amazon and the "$200" ones are $85.)
Definitely write another blog post.
Hey Sean. Are you in San Francisco? Do you want to start a company? I will be moving to San Jose in a couple of weeks. Maybe we could just hang out. I could use some friends.
I was going to post the same thing, but then I thought: what would it have been like to actually attend the Homebrew Computer Club and witness the birth of the PC industry?
But those features cost them time and money to put them in place originally. A piece of foam didn't.
The video lectures at the Khan Academy are terrible.
I never got this argument that "Nokia is a hardware company, they don't do good software." That's a shallow argument which doesn't really mean anything at all.

After all, most of their R&D budget is in software development. They have developed two dumbphone OSes (S30, S40) and two smartphone OSes (Symbian, Maemo), which are feature-by-feature the most complete software in the market. There's lots more of course.

But their software sucks.. Why?
When someone who has 1.3 million twitter followers can't grasp the concept of following on your site, then there is a clear communication problem that needs to be resolved ASAP.
http://twitter.com/#!/google/status/36521734542868480

"We're incredibly proud of you, @Ghonim, & of course will welcome you back when you're ready - cf. http://goo.gl/2BDGp

I don't understand why anyone would think Google would fire Ghonim for taking personal time to help bring democracy to his homeland. That just isn't the kind of company Google is.
Make your idea so out-of-the-box that the people with immediate skills to implement it, won't (or can't).

What does that mean? Pick an idea that is either inherently non-technical or requires significant non-technical work to launch. Your idea can't be stolen if it takes a massive amount of research and pre-programming work to launch. Most hackers (typically the people most capable of executing quickly) will try to solve a problem technically. So, don't solve the problem technically.
It seems all my comments appear as a blob, despite me adding line breaks.
I'm not doing that on purpose, do I have to use a different system or editor in order to get more visual structure into it?
but he continued listening lectures - he just stopped paying.
Apparently he was smart enough to realize that the knowledge is worth much more than the degree.
Apple Works on Line of Less-Expensive iPhones
It's funny you mention this. I'm a fledgling programmer, early into my college career. For one of my first projects ever, I'm beginning to write a web application for college students to share and collaborate on ideas, hopefully helping people creating startups.

Just this past weekend, I taught myself enough Ruby (on Rails) to get the basic application down. My next steps involve designing a nice UI and to add more connection features.

I don't really have enough done to post anything here yet, but if there's something you'd really like to see in a web app like this, your advice is most welcome.
The Real Internet Censors: Unaccountable ISPs?
According to a new report, the Internet police are coming… and they’re not wearing badges. Instead, governments are devolving enforcement powers on the ‘net to ISPs.
Whereabouts in the north of England? What are you doing here? ;-)

I thought most of the north was a relatively hacker-free zone.
Which policy dictates that he must be fired?
The logo is by one of my fave internet artists - http://goopymart.com/
I don't think they're all bad, but they are slow. I do have gripes with some of the VC and investments vids. Having built and sold a startup, I know first hand that some of these concepts aren't just over simplify but some are just dead wrong or severely lacking information that could have easily been included. Of course, Khan was a hedge fund manager but never actually built a scalable startup or was an investor so I can't really fault him entirely since books aren't the greatest coverage in this area.
Guess the questions is, what determines if you've "added value". Certainly there is value in adding to information (said article talks about Y, but you might also want to consider Z depending on your application), but there is also value in adding entertainment (at least the RIAA and MPAA think so), and even a well executed troll or Meme addition can be of some value to some people.

So I wouldn't presume that you are not adding value unless you just enjoy putting yourself down (in which case you are still adding value to some folks I am sure). :-)
Personally, even though i'm quite particular about punctuation, grammar and general writing etiquette i find your style to be more personable and therefore a hint of fresh air.

After all, provided you can convey your thought and emotion to me successfully, that's all that matters right?
Fortunately in Chrome the reader can inspect the node and delete it.

I think the big secret about these recommendations is that it doesn't really matter _that_ much. Lots of people use different development environments, languages, and they get stuff done. I can scoff/smirk at Java ("Java. Heh.") but then my favorite web application is written in Java. My favorite text editor is written in a disgusting, horrible language. As for the PHP/Ruby/Python/Perl decision, it turns out that all of them work. Even PHP works. It turns out that the vast majority of time is _not_ saved by being able to write anonymous functions.
For what it's worth, I picked up a pair of HD595s back in early 2007 for $150, refurbed. They're still in absolutely perfect quality (despite more abuse than you can imagine) and by far the best headphones I've ever owned. Worth every cent, no questions asked.
The "Ask Question" button is a horrible, horrible UI thing and I'm really surprised it hasn't been fixed yet. The reason it's so bad is because its next to the search bar, and the expected UI for a search box is there is an (optional) button next to the box you can click on to perform the search.
I don't think Elop was speaking about actual money changing hands when he spoke of "monetary value".

Check the Reuters news report:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/13/us-mobile-fair-nok...
There's a problem with that though. I think one could write a ton about choosing a startup that will be successful from a strictly economic standpoint. But I can't write anything to tell you what kind of startup you want to work for. That's something you're pretty much on your own with. As Carl Jung once said:

"The secret to your vision lies in your own heart. Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakens."
Agreed it's not fraud... But wouldn't it be (morally? commercially?) better to sell one product at the mid-point?

I know in a limited range it's good to have a better and a worse to sell the median, but that doesn't apply here. They have many models above and below these two.
Parses fine here.

"Here are some emails that show this company was planning to use Stuxnet"

Stuxnet is a distributed bot. It can be commanded. The post is saying this company planned to do that.

I don't know whether that's true or not but it seems easy to understand.
The concept is occasionally, regrettably, extended to include any mention that there may be performance differences between races at all, regardless of whether that comes from genetics, culture, or oppression. "Culturism," it seems, is often mistaken for racism.
Forget about imposing certain languages on kids; I question the practice of trying to get kids into programming.

Why not let kids get into programming through curiosity or simply a desire to make things?
Hmm.. why not use something similar to like Django/Jinja syntax? {{ x }} for variable related items, and {% %} for logic related if/else/ifnotequal etc... things.
It's "couldn't care less". When you say "could care less" you are endorsing the claim of American Kids Getting Dumber. If you still don't get it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw
Hit enter twice.

Like so.
On the off chance you're serious (and I know folks sometimes have a hard time differentiating between very subtle sarcasm and true newbiehood):

You are being directed to go to Google (or other search engine of choice) and enter the phrase "Cone of Learning".

You should get a result similar to the following:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cone+of+learning&ie=utf-8...
Maybe I'm just cheap, but $200 for the cheaper headphones sounds ridiculous to begin with, and well into "anyone paying that much probably deserves it" territory.
Also see:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2208093

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2213591
In a well-functioning market, the price should be driven by competition towards a level a bit above the production/R&D costs, at least over enough of a time horizon. Of course, plenty of markets aren't well-functioning, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if high-end audio equipment were among them.

I agree it's not fraud, though, at least unless their advertising materials made false claims about the products' differences. For example, if they claimed that the higher-end headphone removed certain artifacts, but didn't disclose that they had created those artifacts in the first place, that would be misleading at best...
That is a pretty bold claim. It sounds ridiculous to me.

Also, how can someone consumed with an idea finish school? It is that singular purpose that drive Zuckerberg to succeed. You can't just put that on hold and finish up a degree.
I sincerely doubt that there is a moral obligation to set price points in any other way.

and who claimed that? there is however a moral obligation to not lie to your customers.

if anything, the crippled version is actually more costly to produce, since some R&D went into making it crippled.
> Psychology is a big part of the audio business.

It's a big part of most businesses; you want the customer to have positive emotions regarding your company/product.
Ah, I get it.

Thank you.

(replying to myself since reply function is deactivated at that level (as a feature))