skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That was the question posed by Jim Collins when he spoke at West Point to a group of 36 people-- 12 U.S. Army generals, 12 "Fortune" 500 CEO types and 12 leaders from the social sectors.

Specifically, he asked them, "Where’s America? Is America at an
inflection point? And if so, which way? Because great nations -- Athens,
500 BCE, Rome, Egyptian Old Kingdom, Egyptian New Kingdom, Minoans of Crete have fallen."

This question was the inspiration for his fascinating book, "How the Mighty Fall" -- you can watch his interview with Charlie Rose on this here:
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10565

He said his research team found 5 stages of decline that were common among all the great enterprises that fell. He said the first stage is hubris, but you can go through the first 4 stages and still recover before reaching the fifth and final stage, which is capitulation or death.
Female computers of world war 2, and first programmers of ENIAC
I like facebook, but I also like to quit periodically because I find it distracting when I need to get work done, and frankly, my fb friends, god bless 'em, can get annoying as hell sometimes in aggregate. Even if we leave aside the debate on the pros and cons of anonymity, there are a lot of legitimate reasons why people wouldn't want to use facebook as a web-wide identity platform. Creating a forced dependency for something as basic as blog comments on a site otherwise unconnected with facebook seems very dismissive of people's preferences in this area. Hope it doesn't catch on :-/
OK, thanks, I was wondering if maybe you were here on a visa that would require sponsorship for work or something.

Just trying to figure why there have been no leads before. I assume you have some sort of product you created and residue business stuff for the startup you did, right? It's not just that you spent 6 years in development and never released the product.

Well good luck, looks like you've got a few things lined up.
This is kind of like trying to op out getting into a car crash. Or better, getting robbed.

Hello Customer, Acct#6548856 we are not tracking you. No, some other company is tracking you. Were not doing it directly but we sure are buying data from companies who do.

Not getting tracked, I can think of a few companies that a large part of it's worth is by all the information they collect/track.

Facebook? - Last time I checked they don't pay employees minimum wage. When is the last time you had to pay Facebook to access it? Money is coming from someplace. Directly or indirectly someone is going to be tracking you.

</rant>
Oh, I guess jQuery-noise adds data-URLs to the elements on the page, so I guess I don't have to feel bad about inlining my images :)
Don't do it. Do this instead:

var self = this; function(){ self.foo() }
Forget Indexing Tweets: Google Is Pulling Them Directly from the API
It gives everyone a perspective on the entire business and also a sense of ownership and importance since everyone workso n everything.
This.

heh.
Lessee, a makerbot and some raw materials....Hmmm....
"Several commenters point out that long-running computations can be performed outside the main request thread without the server having to do anything special."

Then why am I using Node.js? Any language has been able to do that for over a decade now, without the other hoops Node.js's style forces you to jump through. As evil and bad as shared-state multithreading truly is, this is a (or possibly "the") task it can manage without blowing up.

This is all but an admission that Node.js actually has no concurrency story at all. Hardly surprising, since it doesn't, unless "We force the programmer to do all the concurrency work" counts.

"This can lead to very interesting designs."

Yes, in the "may you live in interesting times" sense of interesting, absolutely. If you're going to reduce yourself to manually scheduling everything yourself why boot an OS at all? (Yes, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but seriously, think about it for a bit, there's truth there. Runtimes/VMs/languages ought to be adding to the OS, not fundamentally subtracting from it.)
Only if the walls completely enclose the space.
really helpful, thanks for this Icrontic.
Do I understand this correctly? To comment on Techcrunch, one now has to become a customer of some other unrelated company, Facebook, whose main purpose seems to be tracking all of people's private activity across the entire web?

That's like telling McDonald's customers that they can't buy a Big Mac unless they first carry a Sears credit card with an RFID chip. What does one have to do with the other? Nothing.

I should start telling my customers that they can only buy my software if they buy my favorite brand of peanut butter.
The producer of this documentary was at the Computer History Museum in CA today. She was saying she could use help from anyone who would like to create interactive educational materials, especially to demonstrate fundamental concepts in programming. Also, please consider buying a library copy for a school near you, or (if in the US) ask your local PBS affiliate to screen it - PBS are just the distributors but this project is the work of a truly independent producer who spent seven years working on it.
IMO what is needed is a move away from controlling the message. It is fundamentally flawed and causes many problems, including on this issue.
Anyone notice the changes to the Google logo?
Original:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Googlelogo.png
Changed:
http://www.google.com/images/logos/ps_logo2.png
No, I didn't, but that would be appropriate, too. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/exobiology

And I would love to know what I was down-voted for. Please tell me it wasn't because somebody thought it really should be xenobiology (and, no, xd, I don't think it was you :).
This can be done really easily in userscripts (accepted in Chrome too).

content-area a:visited {display:none;}

Actual coding left as an exercise to the reader.
Steve Gillmor, Japan, and the Trojan Horse called Facebook Comments
Ambient light powered LCD released by Samsung
Video Smash terbaru
Setelah hit dengan lagu I Heart You, yang banyak diplesetkan seperti “Parodi Smash versi OVJ, kini group band Smash memperkenalkan lagu barunya diawal tahun 2011 dengan judul “Senyum dan Semangat”.
I agree, for reasons that have made me sad since the late 90s, when cookie-cutter FPSs arrived on the scene, clinging to the coattails of iD et al, soon to be followed by cookie-cutter MMOs, and finally, the miniature Dark Ages of the industry: sequels, sequels, sequels, and in-game advertising. Quirky, unique games and games that are very difficult just don't sell as well. I think it was in GameFan (RIP) that I read the quote that summed it up: "The hard-core are never catered to."

Game companies started to broaden their reach, to expand their demographic. The same is happening with Facebook. I watched my mother play game after game of Bejeweled. Facebook's reach is huge, well beyond the demographic usually thought of as gamers, that 18-35 male collective cash cow. I'm not on Facebook, but my mother is, my aunt is, the sort of person that kinda likes clicking cows. Zynga's games are close to their tolerance: easy, always there, not too deep. The gaming equivalent of a Will Smith summer blockbuster, the type that upsets the people that really love movies. A McDonald's burger, a Mariah Carey song, Marlboro Lights, Windows XP, Zynga: the suburbs of their industry. It may not be loved by critics, but damned if you can't make more money selling to a broader demographic than to a smaller group of devoted genre fans.

So, on a much larger scale, we're seeing the games market broaden and develop, the same way that we saw it happen 10 or 15 years ago. There's hope for the future: you can still get rich making an iPhone/Android $2 game or a Minecraft, so we still have some sort of vibrance, sparks flying from the souls of the passionate and creative. But the way things are, there's more money in Farmville. I've stopped being angsty and dropped my elitism: you can't fight basic laws of commerce or Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is crap").

I value my time, so I don't play social games (unless you count GitHub), but the customers have indeed decided what they want, or at least what they'll pay for.

...Where's my copy of Ninja Gaiden? I still haven't beaten it in two decades.
Google Tech Demo Slam
The question is not "are journals biased?" The question is, are more respected journals less likely to publish a falsehood? If the "better" journals have more accurate reviewers or more reviewers then yeah, they will publish fewer falsehoods.

Re: the formula (1-p)^n. It's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_distribution . If the observers are independent then the formula holds. If they're not then it holds approximately according to how dependent the different observers are.
Yes, thank you for providing another example of how easy it is to point at one group of entities in an effort to frantically handwave away the problems of another.

I see no great evidence that the international community of today sets great stock by treaties, either, at least not much past about five minutes after the signing ceremony ends. "Paranoia" about the UN is an effect of this underlying problem, not the cause. Nor am I even remotely convinced that "Bush did it!"; flouting of UN convention and treaties goes back a lot farther than that and it takes a very narrow view of history to somehow lay it at the feet of any one party, or even "the West" in general.
Web Development and Flex Development - A Fruitful Marriage
That does seem to be an excellent middle ground. The pseudonymity would eliminate the element self-censorship that the Techcrunch article seems to be hinting at, while the threat of banning combined with the high cost of creating a new Facebook account would (hopefully) still suffice to keep the discussion reasonably civil.

As a cryptography researcher I've come across numerous cumbersome anonymous reputation systems, but it didn't occur to me that Facebook is in a position to roll one out right now with a minor change if they chose to. The caveat, of course, is that it is centralized and controlled by FB. Whether they have the incentive to implement it is an entirely different question.
I really think there is a HUGE gaping hole for a competitor to step in and really hurt Facebook. If someone brought out something that had sane support for what Facebook calls 'lists', they'd kill it. The biggest problem with facebook is that using lists is really difficult. You can set a default that's really narrow or you can set a default that's really broad. Restricting status updates is really error prone as they provide very little feedback about what you're doing.

If someone built sane grouping with a nice UI to support and built that out as part of a larger privacy play....I think they could go a long ways.
WTF - I MUST sign in with YAHOO or Facebook to leave any comments on TC???

Fark that.

---

80/20... the 80/20 rule.

Its always 80/20 here on TC.

This is a fantastic piece, the subject and information provided is great -- but as with every single piece on TC, there is that last 20% that is lacking, such as the ever present typo in just about every TC article:

"...a very special version of the iPad while got him into some of the most amazingly comical legal trouble with Apple..."

and the horrid quality of the video.

Seriously, Paul -- tell your management to spring for a FLIP.

All criticism aside though, you know what would be AMAZING: Please see if Shed would do a how-to on getting something made and have TC fund something really interesting: Put up a contest where readers get to submit then vote on an idea of an object to make in China, take that idea and have Shed find a vendor on Alibaba and secure a sample.

Document that process - and have TC commit say $2500 to the piece - and show users how dead simple it is to have their ideas manufactured in China.
It looks like the compute situation in Node.js can be helped with a server side web workers implementation .. with the workers doing no IO and only computes. Any thoughts?
Maybe not on comments, but you can definitely segment your friends on Facebook itself.

If you put your friends into groups, you can click the lock next to the Share button and customize which people or groups get to see the status update.

It's a pain in the ass, but it's definitely possible.
Facebook is definitely doing it wrong, but how wrong they're doing it is a long and complicated discussion.

Apologies if i did not understand your intent in your previous post. That aside, i dislike the notion that the internet is somehow a separate kind of space from the other sorts of social interaction we engage in. There are people who masquerade and are different people IRL just as well as there are online. There are some differences, the sort of transformation and context switch necessary to go between identities/facets is different certainly. But that doesn't change the cognitive/emotional reality.

Besides, who's to say that internet trolls aren't a real part of a lot of people's identities? (I think this is where we agree) Facebook commenting may add a component of IRL social decorum, but imo that has less to do with notions of the self, as just trying not to piss off people who have social currency in your life.
As it is I think your passion gets in the way of seeing reality as it actually is

This is my soapbox issue, yes. But there's no invective here, just a bit of "why!?" b/c I hoped to see a YC company in this industry on the side of the little guys/gals, not the 500 pound gorillas.
"It improves the quality of the discourse"

That's a bold claim. Is there empirical evidence supporting it?

Topix did an empirical study and found that anonymity in comments increased the quality of comments.

http://blog.topix.com/2008/01/anonymous-comments-by-the-numb...
5 variations for visualizing scatter plot matrix (in R)
OSFaker - Simulate Android OS + Windows Phone 7 OS on your iPhone
ThisOrThat is a hoax, might as well be
There was a good article about SelectOut in Privacy News last month: http://www.privatewifi.com/selectout-founder-analyzes-1000-p...
What about me? I simply don't want to have a facebook account for any reason whatsoever.

I wanted to comment on the TC piece about Shed Simove -- but I must have an FB account to comment on TC? Fark that.

Certainly killing trolls is a good thing -- but to make user interaction 100% dependent on FB is retarded. I choose to have absolutely zero of my online presence traverse FB servers, so I simply opt out of using them altogether.

I am not seeking to hide my identity, I am just choosing to stay clear of anything FB.
You can also create a 'bind' that returns a function that when called applies the context you desire.

function bind(fn, selfObj) {
return function() {
return fn.apply(selfObj || window);
};
}

callback = bind(function(){ alert(this.hello); }, this);
Look at it from Apple's perspective. They want at least some great apps to float to the top and terrible apps to be tarred and feathered, while bothering users as little as possible. They don't particularly care about giving every app an accurate rating or capturing every user's opinion. Thus, they don't have much reason to push users to rate more apps.
I'm using Unbounce now. But they don't have a social/viral component.
I hate the over-use of the term "troll". More than often people call other people trolls just because they don't agree on their opinion.

Opinions and statements that disturb the cozy hive mind feeling don't have to be troll-posts. To me they are an essential part of the internet discussion culture.

Sadly karma and rigorous "anti troll" comment systems make it all to easy to flag inconvinient opinions as stupid troll posts.
Facebook stops people.

I have never, nor shall I ever, maintained an account on Facebook.

This means that I will forever opt out of commenting on TC articles.
Ask HN: How to start-up when you are not technical?
We are a group of girls in SF that are extremely excited about a start-up idea. We have bounced it off of a few YC alum, and they think it is a great idea too, but we cannot contribute technically.

This is our current plan, what should we do to make it better?

1) Learn Django (we have no python experience, but we can read).

2) Use that knowledge to post a marketing site describing the idea and start collecting email addresses.

3) Since we cannot program, jump straight to getting the marketing site on Techcrunch and seeing what happens.

4) Find a technical co-founder that realizes we are serious and will join us.

Do you think this will work? What else can we do to help see this company come to light?
Ask HN: How did you got your job recently?
I kept reading all these threads that seems to imply that there are plenty of developer jobs available? Is this really the case?
It's self-regulation, sponsored I believe by the Network Advertising Initiative. NAI is an industry group, analogous to the DMAI in the direct mail world. Most of the responsible advertisers work with them.
AngelList Connects Start-Ups With Investors
Yes, this is my concern too. I had no problems with giving Disqus access to my twitter account. But I won't use facebook comments.
Anonymity is not just a major factor in vitriolic comments - its also a factor in being able to comment at all. Ive seen on multiple occasions someone offer something really insightful on Slashdot as an Anonymous Coward saying something like - "My Employer probably woudlnt want be discussing this publicly". In the absence of anonymity current paranoia about "Intellectual Property", NDA's and employee tracking will ensure that a lot of things worth saying will remain unsaid.
Never had a Facebook account and never will.

So. How do I comment?
I don't think you're doing this right. The first .then receives a function, but the second .then executes function.apply at construction time and receives only its result (null) as the callback.

Also, after understanding what's going on, existing solutions might be better than rolling your own: http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.proxy/ .
Tutorial or reference of SQL w3resource.com
cute... $300/mo per month subscription = $10/day. bleh... a subscription is hardly the same as personal coaching.
I'm curious why you won't be commenting? What does the new interface lack that Disqus had (or vice versa)? Or is it merely your annoyance at Facebook for trying to build something better that drives your decision? (Keep in mind, no one is forcing the Facebook comment widget down publishers' throats. Perhaps it bothers you because it feels like it's more optimized for publishers than users?)
> We don't need humor everywhere on the net

Yeah, but maybe humor is the wrong term. I know that many of my friends (after they got some warning mails from facebook about profanity, etc) now watch out what they post and say on facebook. It's so sterile.

Posting on facebook feels to me like living under a facist regime where you have to watch out what you say because it can be always hold against you. And the judge and jury are one.
I totally agree with the observation that TC comments are pretty shitty. That being said, what good will it do to turn them off?

People like me who think reading comments on TC is a waste of time don't read them anyway. I won't be better off if TC decides to shut down comments.

On the other hand, people who enjoy reading the trolls (probably trolls themselves) will lose an enjoyable activity.

No one would really benefit from your proposal. (and no, I don't think anyone at TC is paid to read/moderate comments)
Window managers (including tiling ones) are so far from a dead end in research and potential large improvements, that I think that if you can't think of anything useful that any of them does not yet do, you must be unimaginative.
The first one is much bigger.
I suspect the reason that so few -- and such poor -- options exist is that the market is too small.
It's not. It's just the redditification of HN.
Web Design-Web Page Design-Website Designing Services-Web eXperts
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Err they did say they where using Disqus before so theres nothing new here.
It's a new product in a fairly untapped technophobic market for businesses with already tight margins. The businesses currently mostly only have paper solutions or crap homegrown access solutions. The key is that our product, although it has a cost, will lead to a good ROI.
There is an intellectual purity that is maintained through anonymity. I don't have to be consistent with my previous posts or any future posts I might want to make. I don't have to worry about what people will think of me. Heck, I don't even have to be _nice_.

But because I care about my post, I do have to try to be right. And because all of those other constraints are gone, each post exists independently.

A system that thinks vitriol shouldn't be _allowed_, that it should be actively fought instead of ignored, isn't taking the right tack.

Systems that allow anonymity and provide filtering for what the community views as trash are the right balance, because I get damn angry at things sometimes--we all do, there are a lot of things to be angry about-- and if I cross the line of decorum then at least I have the freedom to cross it (through semi-anonymity), just as y'all have the freedom to downvote me.
+ retroactively for all comments made already.
The problem is that B&O doesn't sell anything that young people are interested in. So they don't have the same amount of traffic (of people buying stuff) in their stores.

They have 2 major product lines:

1) Why pay 3-5 times as much for a simply rebranded Sony tv? In old days B&O made their own electronics, but todays B&O tv is just a standard display wrapped in a B&O plastic frame and is no better than a standard Sony TV.

2) hifi sets (cd-players, tape recorders, vinyl players, etc) are obsolete because young people have all their music on their iPod/computer.

B&O is a company that sells quality horse wagons in a time when young people have switched to cars.
Actually, IIRC, he's already spent the time with his family and dismissed them. He wanted the last moments with them to be clear and lucid, this is more of an after activity while he goes through his final hours before dying. It was a lot to do with creating good memories for his relatives, not choosing strangers over family.
That could be good. I'm fascinated by music notation software, but I've always found Sibelius and Finale unusable. Lilypond[1] is a pretty good notation language, but it has no interface. Perhaps the iPad app could generate LilyPond code.

http://lilypond.org/web/switch/tour
Kernel Development Using the Eclipse IDE
In ES5 you have Function.prototype.bind that returns a new function with this bound to whatever you want. You can also pass extra default arguments. On older browsers you could use es5-shim for this functionality.

See https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global...
Homeless children: the hard times generation
Agreed. I also think that Slashdot's policy of starting Anonymous comments at less karma can give most of the benefits of both sides; it would probably work even better if anonymous comments started at say -5 karma. That way, stuff that had to be anonymous but was really useful content could get voted up, but most of the anonymous internet dickwads (to borrow Penny Arcade's terminology) would stay relatively hidden from view.
My wife and I watched this heart-wrenching story tonight on 60 minutes. We started to think... can there be a software solution where we can highlight stories from families and connect them to donors? The challenge is to keep the thieves out of the system and verify money is used well.