skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like the idea, but you have to pretty sure you know exactly who your customers are don't you? I would move on if I wasn't on the list. Features are more universal, which I guess is why they are also less effective.
Wow, I have a few cd32 discs in the basement somewhere - want them?

We would distribute burned CDs containing graphic, sound, and video/animation assets to the customers. This was '94, and if I remember correctly blank cds were something like $8-10 each (and the burner must have been close to $1000), and the burning process was so fragile that I'd burn discs at night just to try to prevent any possible issues due to vibration, or power fluctuations, or whatever other gremlins caused burn failures. I think we still had only like an 75%-ish success rate.

Fun time, though.
A cease-and-desist campaign goes awry and lawyers sued for malpractice
Unicahome hits London- Part Two
Right, I was talking about the quorum semantics as used by systems like Dynamo and Cassandra. Paxos provides a much stronger guarantee than simple quorums.
I'm not sure the point is to stifle industrial development as much as it's to show we've built our society on several "facts" that might not be entirely accurate. Further I think the author is trying to say people in our society don't question these supposed facts and that society is worse off because of it.

In this case his point is that modern society takes hunter/gatherer cultures that still exist and tries to change them to agriculture based cultures without questioning whether it's best for them.

In your very reply you proved the second point. Let me lay it out...

- His central argument is against the assumption that agriculture is proven to be better than hunting and gathering. He showed evidence of hunter/gatherers spending less time acquiring food and getting a better balanced diet in spite of that.

- You replied that agriculture is great without giving any evidence to refute his argument. The fact that modern agriculture requires fewer people than it once did is only relevant to his point if you have numbers that say modern agriculture's time to acquire food has fallen below that of hunter/gatherers. Otherwise it's irrelevant. Plus you didn't even address the balanced diet argument.

So you've proven the author's main point in that you fell back on the assumption that agriculture automatically equals the best solution.
I like it, but I think if it is not a top-level comment it should include whatever it is responding to for context. Maybe some sort of subtle (or not subtle) indicator of what is the best comment vs what the context is.
Excellent reasoning. I really love the way you fit your whole argument in a single sentence.

A lesser contributor would have made a list of reasons why people seem to want the points hidden, then picked those reasons apart with well thought out arguments.

Then the argument would likely move on to the benefits of showing points. Tediously explaining how much access to comment point totals provides the community.

But you, no, none of that for you. You've summed up the entire context in a single, incredibly efficient sentence.

Truly, a master stroke.
There is a lot more on spotify than the major labels. And even the majors put out a lot of good music beyond what makes it into the charts.

And it doesn't make sense to consider someone downloading 24/7 because unless you're on dialup, you can download a lot more than 24 hours of music in 24 hours.

However it is clear than the value you get from spotify and similar services is very much determined by your attitudes to music. If you cast your net wide and look for gems from across all styles and niches of music, then it's easily worth it. If you just want to listen to indulge your relatively static tastes in the one or two areas of music that concern you, then its a less obvious choice.

The question is, are there enough obsessive people who are into Music in the wider sense, and have a need for on demand "random access" to any and all artists/genres, to sustain spotify? Because they are the people for whom the service makes sense. People who want to listen to the same 50-100 albums on rotation are unlikely to be persuaded by the pricing model.

PS. Yeah, "tragically limited" was a thoughtlessly flippant thing to say. Didn't mean to be so condescending. Compare it to the attitude of a hacker looking down on someone who doesn't feel the need to learn anything except Java because it "does the job" :)
+100 Agree. Please PG.
Apple Adds Do-Not-Track Tool to Safari
Simplicity is something that comes to mind. Rackspace Cloud has relatively few products and simple pricing compared to Amazon's many, many cloud products and confusing interfaces/billing.
i agree, and thats something that i'll be getting in there soon. my "weekend project" dragged out into wednesday, and the visible site is only one step up from bare-bones text. i probably should've held it until next weekend and polished it a bit more. hindsight, 20/20, etc.
Reread the grandparent post.
Education is a Means Not an End
As unnecessary as any other URL shortening; and features like this belong to user clients (and not content) where they're always available for those and only those who needs them.
The typography demos are oddly tasteful. http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-star-8... seems like a dig at the Lisa - it does seem woefully inadequate there for DTP.
One of the more active previous discussions of this controversy, fwiw: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2328116
I started doing a quicksort, but I didn't feel it was turning out very good. It felt just a bit too complex for the paradigm I was using.

But, I might try again, or find a different approach to represent some slightly more complicated algorithms. Quicksort and some type of Btree would likely be next on my list, if I feel I can do them justice.
7 Things to Consider When Hiring an Intern for Your Startup
It would be interesting if Facebook let you show different versions of your profile to people and not just limiting what certain people can see.
I don't have an SE phone, but I still read through the pages and clicked through the assistant. At one point, you have to get an unlock code and to get that, you have to give them your phone's IMEI.

This probably means that they will immediately void your warranty, so unlocking and later re-flashing to lock again won't do you any good.

Now, I can kind of understand SE there, but is it really possible that installing a new OS can destroy the hardware? I thought these days are long gone.
> Supreme Court precedents that make software per se non-statutory

Got a citation for that? I didn't think so.
Major in math.
Sounds a lot like YouTube's opt-in solution, where copyright owners can submit a database of material to ID, and when it's identified, have it labeled as theirs and have ads slapped on it (http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=8...).
The article is based on a false dichotomy. Hunter/gatherers farmed, and farmers hunted and gathered. Some did more hunting and gathering, while others did more farming, but for most early societies the labels "hunter/gatherer" and "farmer" describe the same people. See a fantastic (and fantastically short) book on this by Colin Tudge: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300080247.
Bones Season 6 Episode 18
Sorry about not responding earlier to your comment back. I meant 'more' in the relative sense. And practically that does mean progressive taxation.

Taxation is a complex subject. I just wonder where on the laffer curve economists think the USA is on regards to the wealthiest.
Anyone who hasn't should check out his books, they're great.
This isn't the guy from "Best of the Best"?
Very few projects have a warning free compile these days it seems. So much so that I'm usually surprised when I see a warning free compile. I remember the first time I compiled emacs. I was seriously impressed by the lack of warnings at the time having become so inured to them everywhere else.
First, I conceeded 3rd party app selection in my post, so to spend half of your post pointing that out is... well pointless. It's important, but I already mentioned it.

So now lets look at the actual support:

1) AirPlay. Well WP7 does support DLNA and some phones expose it, such as the LG. So if you want it, you can get it.

2) Unified Inbox. That is missing, although I suspect by design. It's a feature that would be nice to toggle on, but default off is the right design.

3) HTML 5 browser. It's part of Mango.

4) 3G tethering. It works, just not a supported feature.

5) Visual voicemail. This is actually one gap. It's suspected that it may be in Mango. They've had a registry entry for it since first release.

6) Local notifications. Live agents give a superset of the functionality of local notifications.

7) FaceTime. Supports Skype.

8) Regular updates. Users do receive the updates. ATT is just taking longer than everyone else. What WP7 does do though is push the updates as they're ready. This obviously causes some pain for those whose carriers are slower, but its better than waiting for everyone to be ready and ship all at once, giving the impression that everything happened at the same time.

So visual voicemail is the biggest scenario I see here. And if you use Google Voice you get that for free too.

Again, at one point in time the holes were huge. Now, they're small and niche. You can no longer dismiss WP7 based on feature set at all. Sure, it has strengths and weaknesses, but the platform as a whole seems stronger than Android/iOS. 3rd party apps are the biggest gap, and I do think with the improved tooling we'll see their app store continue to grow (and its already the fastest growing app store relative to open date).
Farming beat out hunting and gathering because it was more fit. That doesn't mean it was "better". Evolution is not necessarily progressive. Evolution is "survival by that which can spread its genes", and agricultural people are better at that.

Agricultural peoples simply out-populated their nomadic, hunter-gatherer brethren. Both groups of populations stole from the other (and within their group) but agricultural people could raise more soldiers. Nomadic warriors were individually superior (better nutrition, more battle experience, more likely to have up-to-date battle technologies due to mobility) but were no match when outnumbered 20:1 by armed peasants. Also, to rob a farming population, one has to leave some of them alive, and that means that, 14 years later, they have a fresh crop of soldiers.

It's (probably) true that the average quality of life declined during 15-4k BC as agriculture spread throughout Eurasia and North Africa-- agriculture made severe and persistent social inequalities possible-- but the quantity grew, as did "energy capture", or the ability of humans to draw energy out of the environment. Thus, agriculture won. It couldn't have happened any other way. Also, it wasn't a single choice that happened suddenly. The transitions from nomadic to semi-nomadic to semi-agricultural to fully agricultural lifestyles happened over centuries. Agriculture probably began as a "last resort" in event of an ecological catastrophe (Younger Dryas) that depleted game but, as rising human population became a "constant catastrophe", overtook hunting and gathering outright.

At any rate, until one has agriculture (and religion, as a motivating force) one is very unlikely to see the written word, which is a necessary precursor for modern society. Whether one is better off in 15000 BC vs. 1500 AD, I would honestly call a toss-up, but I'd much rather be alive in 2011 AD than 15000 BC.
%{HTTP_HOST} isn't recognised for one, and lines like "Redirect 301 /foo http://www.example.com/ aren't recognised at all. However, I can't really use this as a tester unless it implements everything rather than a list of directives I give you - if I don't realise an unrecognised directive lies in the middle of my .htaccess, my test results could be misleading. It's a great idea, but it might be better to implement it by hooking into the same code Apache uses, if that is at all possible.
Fascinating. If you read the stipulation, you find out that these legal notices can now be served (itself a legal concept) via email to the principal parties.
I once found a manual describing the machine code for the Voyager computers (can't find it anymore). Recently there was a flipped bit in memory which caused serious problems:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-151

One of the things I find most fascinating about the mission are the RF systems -- the antenna on voyager is approx 40 watts yet the ground systems can read something on the order of kilobits per second -- and they are billions of miles away.

This is an interesting read too:
http://books.google.com/books?id=yws55Rx1orEC&pg=PA28...
I'm definitely sympathetic to this argument; I might even fall into the primitivist hippie camp. Whatever. Yes, I do think I'd be happier running through the jungle naked than sitting here debugging JavaScript to pay off the insurance, banking, and real estate cartels, so I can continue to occupy a 200 sq-foot box inside an ugly human anthill in a pollution-choked, overcrowded, violence-and-poverty-plagued megalopolis.
I did not know of the :erb/:plain formatters, thanks for the suggestion.
Forgive me for saying this, but I NEED to know what the hive-mind likes. I need the points. Without the points I might as well be reading some random blog comment that could have been created by a spam bot. I probably wouldn't know the difference.
Strikes me as a marketing spin on an old idea rather than an innovative new product. They've figured out a way to make playing 'pirated' music palatable to the studios (maybe). Good luck to them.
You need a written security policy, but that was pretty close to pro forma. The compliance firm wrote us one which we disseminated appropriately.

You basically just need to follow some reasonable security standards. Firewalls, ssh/ssl admin terminals, no shared credentials, and then follow a basic security policy.
Calling Minecraft "voxel" is sure to introduce confusion. The representation of the map is simply a regular 3D grid of block IDs. When we use the exact same type of regular grid to represent 2D maps, we do not call the grid cells "pixels", so I don't think it's very informative to call these "voxels".

Minecraft is also not a voxel renderer. Voxel renderers typically work by casting rays against the grid. Minecraft draws the blocks with rasterized triangles, using a hardware-accelerated 3D API (LWJGL), just like almost every other 3D game.

In other words, there is practically no interesting overlap between what NovaLogic was doing, and what Minecraft does.
> "Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to."

I think he actually mentioned a possible reason

Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others

that's engineers and artists and thinkers. They can completely specialize in what they do because they don't have to work to get food. Usually it was because they had a Maecenas who exploited legions of other people to provide (mainly) for himself and (a little) for people who he found interesting (or they provided him with entertainment). And those people created the most innovation, I believe. Innovative farmers would be concerned with how to work on the field so that their backs hurt less, but major advances required seeing the bigger picture.
If it requires a mental leap, then you are doing/teaching it wrong.
Every large leap is just a bunch of small leaps.
> It's funny, just a couple of hundred years ago, the belief was that the human race used to be happy and successful, and then declined.

This statement can be applied recursively all the way back to the dawn of civilization.
I remember being about 5 years old in primary school and learning about & watching Voyager 1 reach Jupiter. It's incredible to think that thing has been flying through space my whole life.

A beautiful story, Ed Stone's life would make a great movie.
In a hyperbole like this, access to alcohol, anytime you want it, should get more credit.
All discussions about his article aside (whether it's a valid viewpoint at all; whether it makes any real arguments), it's a little unclear to me exactly what he's doing. Can anyone clarify?

I've looked at uncollege.org, and the "What" page tells me that it's "a social movement support self-directed higher education." This means very little sense to me, and I'm sure I'm not unique in that.

Then he elaborates:

(1) "Writing a book about learning from life." Wait, what? This says absolutely nothing! In order to help you learn on your own, I will write a book about helping you learn on your own. But this is terrifically unhelpful; "learning on your own" is a massive area that needs to be specific in order to be of any use at all. As it stands, it's really no different from "PowerPoint for Dummies"--which, while useful for some people, is hardly revolutionary in sparking people to consider not going to college.

(2) "Developing experiential learning programs at existing colleges that are truly student directed." Again, this says absolutely nothing to me. Of course we all want students to have valuable, interactive college experiences. The problem is in determining how to do that, not determining that it should be done!

(3) "Building a platform to validate self-directed learning, allowing people to demonstrate their talents in an online portfolio and bypass the college degree." This gets somewhere, I think--he's finally coming up with some sort of idea. But it's unclear how this is superior to existing solutions (people already provide portfolios and examples of past work, and standardized tests exist to address this to some degree), and--as with the other cases--the execution is critical.

I don't mean to condemn everything about Stephens here. It does sound like he's motivated toward a worthy cause, and while I think college still has value for a lot of people, I think success in this realm would be fantastic. But it seems clear to me that his ideas are very undeveloped, and I'm very skeptical of the likelihood of his success based on what I've seen so far. Thiel might think differently--that the fact that he dropped out indicates some drive and initiative that'll lead him to success--but I disagree, and think that this is just a prime example of why it's good for many people to study for a few years.
Realistically the Amiga and CD32 were dead by the time 3D PC gaming came out (although it was still my main machine at the time, but I knew I was on a dead platform).
Facebook Places, Foursquare: Social Media's Tiny 2% Impact On Businesses
I liked this. The cool thing about reading intelligent people is that you do learn a lot, even when you don't agree with them.
... and still no deaths from radiation.
The basic question, as Prof. Diamond puts it is: "How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming?" One can extend this: How do you know the Industrial Revolution made people lives better (read Dickens to see the inhuman conditions), or the nuclear revolution (Chernobyl, Japan), or the Internet revolution (the ADD generation texting, sexting, etc). Prof. Diamond thesis seems to be that we made a huge mistake by moving from hunter gatherer to agricultural society, which, inevitably, brought about most of the evils we are fighting with now. Proof? Just look at the idyllic life of current hunter gatherers.

To back his claim, he puts forth arguments ranging from absurd

"As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us with leisure time, modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers. The whole emphasis on leisure time as a critical factor seems to me misguided. Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to."

to anecdotal, i.e. no proof at all

"Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well... Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of burden. In New Guinea farming communities today I often see women staggering under loads of vegetables and firewood while the men walk empty-handed. Once while on a field trip ..."

And the final stroke, the masterful FUD-laden last paragraph:

"As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture's glittering facade, and that have so far eluded us? "

Setting aside that there is no global shortage of food (does not mean that nobody's is hungry, but the reasons are complex and food shortage is not one of them), most of this is, at best speculative.

If you liked his point of view, than you may also like Prof. Eric Pianka's thesis that there are too many people on earth and if an airborne Ebola virus kills 90% it would be a good thing (http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/Everybody.html).

The problem with these views is that they resonate with a certain mindset, people who think we have too much science and technology in our lives and it would have been better to live like the "so-called" primitive people. One recent example that comes to mind is the movie Babies (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020938/). Here, the life of the two babies living in primitive (not so-called, really primitive) conditions in Africa and Kazakhstan is discreetly shown to be better and more free than their counterparts in the US and Japan.
What wonderful writing this was. I have been really pleased with some of these more pop articles recently: the Dan Plan one and the Snider huffpost piece being two examples. Very pleasant to read between hacks.
Just another wrong implementation of Binary Search, http://algorithms.openmymind.net/search/binarysearch, see this: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-...
Why do so many people think of patents and copyright as capitalism? Patents are an artifice created by the government, distorting the natural incentives of a free-enterprising, free-contracting capitalist marketplace. I never understood the European brand of anarchism.

I'm genuinely interesting in understanding it, if there was anyone who wants to explain rather than just downvote.
We're where we are today because of pioneers of previous generations. My eyes always water a bit when I think about how much they would have wanted to see what we have now.

Beautiful story.
I certainly don't disagree with your last point, but I take issue with your first one.

"We've only been doing this for a short while and already all these issues arose" isn't necessarily an argument against something. It could be said about a lot of things, for instance:

The early automobile was only out for a short while but already had a host of problems: It was loud, it required hard-to-get petrol, it couldn't go all the places horses could go, it was more expensive than a horse, and horses could be traded more easily than automobiles (more liquid of an asset).

And yet we worked through these problems. We built roads, autos are quieter and less polluting. They still have their problems, but they far outpace horses in utility.

I think civilization will be the same way. It has troubles at first, sure. Worse nutrition, class divisions, disease. I'll give that.

But its getting better. And my optimistic self hopes it will continue to get better as time goes on.

If industrialization has only been a tiny period of history, well, give it a while!
Would someone who can afford it try to do this and then find out if "they will immediately void your warranty"--- lots of possible FUD here with no proof that I've seen. Just to be clear, I lean in the direction of 'void', after all we are talking about Sony here...