skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Noting that the submitted article dates from 1987, I decided to Google around to look for commentary on or references to the article.

http://community.livejournal.com/radanthropology/2294.html

http://emlab.berkeley.edu/users/webfac/eichengreen/e210a_s09...

By the way, the Google searches I did reveal that this 1987 essay is often assigned reading in college classes.

After edit: seeing pg's post (same reply level as this one) reminds me of a very interesting book about pre-agricultural life, based on an extensive discussion of most of the available scholarly evidence.

The Nature of Paleolithic Art by R. Dale Guthrie

http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Paleolithic-Art-Dale-Guthrie/dp...

Guthrie is a paleozoologist, a bow-hunter, and an a visual artist, who uses his knowledge of Pleistocene times to draw a vivid picture of the life of our ancestors.
To Yield or Not to Yield: An Inferable Question
My problem with showing the point score is that it can lead to a share of the score being due to popularity rather than quality. Some people will uprate comments that they might otherwise consider too marginal to uprate, if they see that everyone else is uprating that comment. More commonly, moderators are also readers and will only want to read the highest valued comments if they are short on time, and then these become the only comments that they issue any ratings for.

Even without point scores, a comment's relative score can still be inferred from the system floating high-scoring comments to the top while comments with negative scores are displayed in a shade of gray. Readers are given hints to what the community currently considers valuable, but moderators have to read the comment to be sure.
Ruby NilClass and Nil Object
Patio11's talk on this:
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/03/26/software-for-underserved...

My comment when sharing this link to others:

"The premise is that while features are needed for your product to function in a specific way, you are selling the benefits of using this product and not the features. Focusing on the benefits of use, is fundamentally an emotional appeal."

Thoughts:

If you see the emotional appeal as verifying the benefits of the features, it makes sense. If you see it as them trying to sell you something by using emotion and hiding the features, it won't. I think the best way is a balance of the two where you show the features as linked to emotional appeal. It hits both groups well.
The Reason You Are Broke
Slightly off-topic
I couldn't find a free SSH Ios app.

not that 4-5$ is a big deal, but there are myriad of ssh clients for free on android, no doubt due to different clientele, and different developer sentiments.
JQuery is still javascript, so there's no worry there. JQuery is an abstraction of the DOM (a light one), not an abstraction of javascript. I don't think you're losing much by not having to know document.getElementsByTagName.

Coffeescript is an abstraction of JS, however, so I don't understand why the author wants to go there (considering he wants to move away from JQuery because of fears that he doesn't know JS).
Just wondering: Why doesn't a webserver encrypt the cookie value with a server-side key? This way, the information in the cookie (timestamps, pageviews, number of sessions etc.) can be safe from wireshark sniffers.
The problem with statistical significance is really not about weighing type I vs type II errors. It's much more about 1) basing decisions conditional on the data rather than the null, 3) dealing with nuisance parameters, 3) combining information from both from prior sources and through dependencies across unknown quantities and 4) having some flexible and coherent recipe for tackling inference when confronted with new applied problems.
I think that our settlements were semi-permanent as hunter-gatherers. We could move with the seasons. In this case, agriculture would give us a reason to stay put when previously we may have moved on.

But even these are distinct from "cities." A city implies a number of people in at least a few thousand. My understanding is that hunter-gatherer tribes were in the order of several dozen. I just don't see thousands of people living in one place without agriculture.
I just bought it. It is slow and unresponsive to me- I have to wait for the screen to catch up with my typing. I'm on an iPhone4- so it's not like I'm typing fast. Nice, clean design though.
Cydia doesn't count because Apple keeps blocking holes which allow jailbreaking, so with new devices, there can be quite a long time period before you can get back into Cydia.
For Chinese Men - No Real Estate, No Wife
The Amiga kicked ass at 2D games, but could not hack it in 3D.

The Amiga was effectively dead before 3D games became notable.
The correct terminfo for 256 colours is xterm-256color, not xterm-color (which is obsolete). Simply the 'xterm' terminfo is sufficient to indicate 16 colour support these days.
Jenkins' new look
No surprise at all, but we are all continually depending on things we have no control over, hardware, software, people, networks, politics, disasters, health, etc. In the cloud you have the option of a private cloud, which is a lot of control with a better operations model. There are several clouds to select from, some are less wild west than Amazon, so you do have control in your selection criteria, your negotiated SLAs, your negotiated support plan, your architecture and deployment policies, your disaster and recovery and redundancy plans, and your strategies for moving to another cloud. So you have a very high degree of control if you think about it, act to take it, and make smart decisions. What you can't do is just move an enterprise wholesale into the cloud, but that's a good thing.
You might want to change the name...
"On the same side" in the sense that I'd be opposed to file-sharing as it cheapens the value of the thing I own, not in the sense that I'm golfing with Warner Bros. executives every Tuesday.
I think the length depends on the type of website. For regular companies, community sites, and Internet memes having a longer name is OK. But whenever I try to think up a domain name for an Internet startup I try to keep it down to 2-3 syllables. If you look at the most successful consumer facing start ups, they may not all have 6 characters or less, but probably 95% do have only 2 syllables, or at least only 2 stressed syllables. Character length doesn't matter as much on the Internet because most people are clicking on links or copying+pasting, but having only a few syllables makes the name easier to say in conversation or when thinking to yourself.
Is Scheme Lisp?
Apple Releases iOS 4.3.2
I've noticed the same thing. AWS keys appear to actually be RSA keys, with a .pem extension.
Isn't the name for that “DRM”?
Boy Scout award promotes eventual Robot/Human Apocalypse
That's good advice on ncurses-based systems.

This is Solaris 10 (SysV curses, with a hand-imported xterm-color terminfo entry). :-)
They let me cancel the trip so there is no issue with LivingSocial having that as a part of their flow, but it would be nice to have a confirmation page between purchases over a certain amount.
Of course middlemen deserve a healthy cut.

The issue here isn't whether Amazon deserves a cut, it's whether their incentives are aligned with the developers who use their platform. Amazon's control over pricing allows it to make decisions beneficial to the platform as a whole but potentially harmful to the individual developer.

Incentives are never going to be perfectly aligned, but letting the developer control pricing would make them a lot more aligned than they are now.
Free Desktop Colourful Floral Vector Designs
Everything in the ios/webapp field has to be the fun! and easy! way to do whatever. "colontast.ic is the fun and easy and social new way to do colonoscopies!" Picture that page with sky blue background, happy cartoon characters and rounded buttons (3 easy steps!).

It wears me right out. Like those cheap painted "sale!' signs at car dealerships.
Everything gets tested at the extremes, but for the most part, email disclaimers are there as minor CYA measures for the sender of the email. Lawyers use them all the time, for instance, so that nobody misinterprets their daily chatter or off-the-cuff advice as constituting an official attorney-client relationship with the recipient.

Obviously you can't hide behind an email disclaimer to C your A if your A is blatantly violating the letter or spirit of the disclaimer.
It always strikes me how nice their website is. I really like the design and layout.
readline should really emit some character when it enters and leaves line-editing mode, so the line-editing can happen on the client side. It's not annoying to wait 200ms after you've finished your command and are waiting for the output. It is annoying to wait 200ms for your backspace to take effect.
Josh - if you are a UK resident and citizen, you should be able to go to college and uni for free or for very nominal fees correct? Why the $80K debt?

Here is one perspective:
9 out of 10 startups fail. So even if you do drop out and start your own company, you are not likely to succeed the first or even second and third time round. But you will LEARN A LOT! You will learn a lot of things that uni would not teach you. That said, you can learn this whenever you start your company - at age 16 or age 22, or 33 in my case. That opportunity will not just go away because you go to college.

On the flip side, if you do go to college (a must IMO) and further 3 years of university you will also learn a lot. You will learn how to think about ideas and build your own perspective on the world around you so you dont have to listen to people like Peter Thiel (who btw not only went to university but also to law school afterwards. in fact vast majority of the "thielians" as you call them have multiple higher ed degrees.) This oppty will go away. People do go to college at a later age, but believe me its a lot harder, less interesting and extremely infrequent.
Waterski
Performance Ski & Surf for all of your water-sports and snowboarding needs, with competitive prices and guaranteed customer satisfaction.
I'd take the risks and rewards of agriculture over billions of years of repetitive nomadic hunter-gathering, where no generation does anything different than its ancestors.
Does the CIA own part of Facebook?
It's a fine time if you are interested in it.

It's a great career path.

From your interests stated elsewhere in the thread, a CS degree will suit you nicely. AI is a popular topic in many schools.
They did publish guides on how to install Linux on the PS3.

http://www.playstation.com/ps3-openplatform/manual.html
Photoshop Styles Mega Pack Collection - only $29 (reg. $59)
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Pie Charts No Longer Considered Harmful
Some people do that already for libraries that work on the simulator and device. It's a bit of a pain in the ass to do manually, but it's not something that would take apple long at all to add to the toolchain.
Is K-Ar a reliable method for dating rock ages?
So, it's a good idea to punish people that are trying out your software by banning them from purchasing it? Sounds like the A/B testing phase was skipped on that one...
Liechtenstein is 160 km². That's only $437.5 per square kilometer!
Earthquakes happen. There is not much we can do- it is not economically feasible to equip every Japanese citizen with a 9.1-mag and flood-proof home and office.

Nuclear accidents on the other hand are something that we can prevent, either by more robust disaster planning, or by not having nuke plants in sensitive areas to begin with.

Don't get me wrong, the tens of thousands of deaths and missing persons in Japan is a tragedy of historic proportions. I have great sympathy, in fact I personally lost someone close to me in the tragedy and have many other friends over there who were affected. Just providing some insight into why the media does what it does.
There's a pretty lengthy section in the middle of "What Technology Wants" by Kevin Kelly that argues against romanticized portraits of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Here's the short version:

Lifespans were short, so there were basically no old people. Old people are key carriers of institutional memory. Without them, you don't have much culture, and you can't learn from the past. Every generation is forced to reinvent the wheel. That's why they didn't develop technology or art.

http://books.google.com/books?id=_ToftPd4R8UC&lpg=PT30&#...
<joke>
Good: comments I agree with.
Bad: comments I disagree with.
</joke>

And if I left it there, I'd rate my own comment poorly (#2, below). So, now I'll try to be serious:

1. Comments I consider to be high value tend to reference external sources (other websites or authorities), which tends to create a minimal sort of empirical grounding. External links that add information to a topic are valuable. I.e., new information usually == good.

2. One liners, quips, etc... tend to be low value.

3. Many other values are subjective. Clear, punchy writing adds value, as does insightful analysis, but what counts as "clear" or "insightful" varies by the reader.

4. I personally have a bias towards ideas that are new to me; at least then, I feel I've learned something. But again, new != good, necessarily.

5. IMHO, the worst sorts of comments cluster in the most controversial sorts of threads. E.g., anything political or mired in non empirical sorts of value judgments[1]. See PG's essay "Keep Your Identity Small": http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html. If I were to wager, I'd bet that the reason comment quality has been perceived to decline is mostly a function of the increased number of such threads.

[1] I personally find these interesting, because I enjoy debating philosophy & politics. But I'm also guessing that these things aren't so highly valued here.
AliceML is, AFAIK, more of an experiment in making a statically typed Mozart/Oz like system.
Chinese and US Electronic Hacking and Spying War
Does the author ever claim what language the code is in? Sure, it looks like JavaScript, but he could easily have just borrowed JavaScript's function syntax (which is easily readable to anyone who's used virtually any imperative programming language) for his pseudocode.

The potential "bug" you pointed out has nothing to do with the algorithm being taught, and is an implementation detail that's irrelevant for this application.
Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System
> There is way too much excitement over the simplest things ever.

Simple things done well are among the most delightful discoveries I can make in my human existence.

Have you ever had a perfect omelet? I mean, perfect? Fluffy, nice balance of tasty fillings, not overdone? I have. Maybe twice. Each time, it was wonderful. Wonderful for the fact that with just five ingredients, it created subtle, delicious flavors and enjoyable textures. Wonderful for the discipline and focus necessary not to overcomplicate it with unneeded flourish.

It's so simple, compared to some of the more elaborate meals I've eaten. And that's what made it so special.

Another parallel is tools. Have you ever hefted a really nice kitchen knife? Maybe one of those numbers where the blade and the shank are forged from a single piece of metal? Everything just swoops and melts together, and the blade feels like a comfortable extension of your arm. Just the right weight, perfect leverage, a tool that was agonized over by a craftsman desperate to make the best.

Simple, relative to a Swiss Army knife? Absolutely. And that's where its power comes from.

iOS has some things about it that reward simplicity and focus. It's really easy to make an overwrought, complex app on any platform, and iOS is no exception. With a lot of care and attention to detail, though, you can make something that's simple, not distracting, made from the barest components necessary and extremely good at solving a very specific problem with minimum fuss.

When that happens, it's so nice to see.

*nix rewards people who build their own stuff, which is fine, but the tradeoff in this is craftsmanship. It's easy enough to get system tools to the level of "good enough for you" without ever reaching good enough for everyone. That, I suspect, is the cultural difference you've detected here.
Can't you just give people 50% off coupons?
Have you considered showing the points on comment threads after a few days to facilitate search later?
How to Fix (0r Kill) Web Data About You
This gives me an idea. What if there were a virtual university that was entirely conducted via chat? Like Quora meets Convore.
Facebook Responds To Bullying On Its Site.
I do not mean this as cynical, simply straight: The customer of Data.gov is journalists, in their capacity as people who may write a sentence semantically related to "Data.gov proves the openness and transparency bona fides of the current administration." Not as users of the data itself, beyond pulling the site up and poking at it for ten minutes.

We've made progress in getting the government to care about appearing open, but the pressure needs to stay on to get them to truly care.
I'm not familiar with Android, so I'm not sure about the capabilities of its client side speech recognition algorithms, but the short answer is that competent speech to text is currently a very, very intensive problem.

SR is roughly divided into acoustic and language modeling. The acoustic model proposes words that might have been said given some chunk of speech and the language model tells you what the most likely actual word is given what's been said.

The acoustic model can be solved in a large number of ways — though production technologies use very large hidden Markov models — but decoding a word sequence from speech might scale like O(knm^2) with n being the size of your vocabulary (often large), m the complexity of the acoustic model (# of phonemes modelled, perhaps) and k the number of acoustic frames. The n at the very least can be parallelized (embarrassingly), but the m and k cannot.

The language model involves a search through an exponential search space of orderings of words in the vocabulary (n^l choices, but l is also unknown). Anything sophisticated also will have an incredibly large (in memory) model as it has to have parameters across words, pairs of words, triples of words, grammatical categories, topics, etc. etc.

Solving both of these problems well simultaneously is not a task for a consumer computer. Speedy algorithms with small vocabularies and simple models exist and are implemented (Dragon Naturally Speaking, for instance) but Google didn't go and record a million hours of GOOG-411 to produce Dragon's technology over again.

---

Finally, there's a lot of work on front end signal processing in SR. Before you get into acoustic and language modeling, you often transform your input into another representation (often spectral components from sliding 10ms frames). A growing camp in SR research involves finding sparse front end representations of speech though. If the client-side software is capable of quickly computing a sparse representation of the speech, that could dramatically reduce the latency and bandwidth issues.
Maybe if people weren't actually dying mysteriously when they were opposed to totalitarian / oligarchs, then we'd stop bringing it up.
There's a flag for that™
Data News: Week in Review
Cash Flows in Silicon Valley, but This Isn't 1999
Why not to become friends with prospects and clients on Facebook
That would have to be done on Google's end, that is not something webmasters using Google Analytics are able to do by themselves.
I'm very very interested in considering homeschooling. How did the article's method differ with your child, since the "class size" is reduced to one? Your child won't have the benefit of being "filled in", but maybe she feels that she owns 100% of the achievement?

By the way, "one-ten-two" and "three-ten-thee" is literally how the Chinese would pronounce their numbers (一十二，三十三）. In a way I think it's helped me understand place values earlier.
Rapleaf
Matrix Madness

We wish to find, for an arbitrary N, an N x N matrix with the following property: each entry in the matrix is the smallest non-negative number which does not appear either above the entry or to its left.

Write a function that computes the entry in a particular row and column. That is, complete the following:<p><pre><code> int entry_at(int row, int column) {

// ...

}

Can you write the entry_at function to run in constant space and constant time?
Can you prove that your algorithm is correct?

Please send your solution (and your resume if you have one ready) to challenge@rapleaf.com.
Sorting Algorithms as Dances
A folk dance troupe enacts different sorting algorithms. The videos are pretty entertaining.
From the 'arrays' page: A StringBuilder is nothing more than a dynamic arrays for strings with some extra buffer space. When it fills up, it too must be copied to a new, larger, memory block.

Pretty sure that is false. The builder will create a new string only for additional characters. It shouldn't create a new string entirely.
Uh... 404
April 14th. Hm.
No, the actual conclusion here is "for some simple problems, pie charts are more useful than bar charts or tables".

This does not show that pie charts are not lousy. It merely shows that they are not always the lousiest. Since tables aren't really much of a method of visualizing data and bar charts are almost as lousy as pie charts, this isn't saying much.
Where did you see they are banned from purchasing it? The article says the ban is in the forums. I don't think Garry or Valve would mind if people decided to then buy it.
Plato's Republic?
It is quite an odd beast, as the mouse is actually only used for selecting objects.

It's an interesting design. The mouse appears to be strictly reserved for establishing a source object and a target location on-screen. The action to perform using these two inputs is determined by physical buttons on the keyboard -- Copy, Move, Show Properties...

(It is slightly confusing because some operations don't need two inputs. Does "Show Properties" act upon the selected source object, or whatever is under the location of the mouse cursor?)

The mouse-oriented design that won in the market (introduced with Mac, adopted by Windows) ended up avoiding the keyboard in favour of much more complicated mouse action gestures such as double-clicking, drag'n'drop, right-click menus.

I wonder if the Star design would have been more user-friendly in the end. When I've helped older people with their computers, it seemed that they don't make use of drag'n'drop or right-click menus at all. With this limitation, they couldn't do something like duplicating a document without starting the producer application and performing a "Save As" from its main menu.
Bulk purchasing. It's a similar model to Groupon - if you can drive enough volume for a single product you can get it significantly cheaper. Walmart works the same way.
There certainly are such high status men. But compared to the world population, and considering they reign over only very small parts of the world, are they even statistically significant?