skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
fatal blow, no. is this definitely the best effort though and what's scary is how well they've implemented the idea. genius.
The Decline of Women in Computer Science
Video: Werner Vogels (CTO Amazon.com) on "Uncertainty"
New tool from Facebook extends its Web presence
"Hybrid" is a non-starter for an airplane. It spends 99% of its time running in the "sweet spot" of the turbine performance envelope, there are no starts and stops for which regenerative braking or a switch from the turbine to some sort of electrical propulsion would help. Electrical power is problematic because batteries and other forms of electrical energy storage still suck. There are solar-electric planes being developed for long-term station-keeping tasks, but they are slow and have almost no payload capacity.

Turbine jets are basically the best thing we know of for performing this specific task. We might be able to improve the fuel they are burning, but nothing is going to replace them for the next couple of decades at least.
Copy what features? If anything it's Friendfeed that has copied Facebook's minifeed feature.
I was joking. I wanted to see how downmodded I could get. It worked! Oops.
Do not be an ostrich, and follow the CASH ONLY rule. It doesn't make you any smarter, credit is something you should learn to control and take advantage of. Read/listen to this book: Philip Tirone - 7 Steps to a 720 Credit Score

Quick summary tips:

1. have 3 different sources of credit (amex, visa and mc)

2. use 30% of the limit (if your credit limit is 1000, and you put 900 on and pay off it every month, companies will see it as if you are using 90% of your credit, which will lower it)

3. Call every 4-6 months and ask to lower rate/increase limit

4. NEVER cancel a card, length of accounts is an average, and it will hurt your score. (If you don't want to use a card, make it pay your light bill automatically, and set up an monthly autopay)

5.

a. Quick tip to increase credit score: find someone you trust/that trusts you, ask them to put your name on their card. Don't get the actual card, if they have great credit, it will positively affect you.

b. If you cannot find anyone, go to Credit Union, open a savings account, put in 1000, take 3x300 loans out against the savings account, repay loans monthly, in 3 months your score will jump

* I am 24 and have an amex card with $25,000 limit, they send me promotions to get a cash advance for a fixed $3.99, great way to self fund ;-)
Those who enjoy this might also enjoy Shivers' Graduate Student's Guide to Automatic Weapons:

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/autoweapons.html

I'm not competent to evaluate Shivers' mighty comp sci skills, but I'm in awe of this sentence:

The tragedy of Galois is that he could have contributed so much more to mathematics if he'd only spent more time on his marksmanship.
Oh, deep math? Is that all?

How boring.
i'd hate to drive a car with a dashboard that had that much stuff on it
I agree. I think PG addresses that issue when he says it's difficult for the market's and the founder's needs to coincide. That is, to find something that (A) you love to do, that (B) a market also loves. It's hard enough to find something you love; or to find something the market loves - to find both is not just twice, but squared as hard. It's easier to find those two things independently: find something the market loves, get rich; and then find something you love.

But if you can find both (and people have), it's GREAT.
The arrogance/cockiness/delusion levels throughout this memo are off the charts. Worth reading for the description of google as a "white page with 10 blue links" quote alone.
Taking Time off from School
You can tie multiple OpenIDs to your account. Try it on OurDoings if you want to see how it works. There's a "forget I exist" feature you can use when you're done.
This article is both inspiring and depressing. Depressing because it reminds me of how little I truly know about computing. :(
Yah this. The one linked looks like ass.
Shirky’s Law and why (most) social software fails
I get "This video is not available".
I remember that stat and I can believe it. The interfaces on those cell phones sucks :S
U.S. Government uncovers oil price manipulation
When DHH gave his presentation I thought it was quite interesting that Startup School was hosting a talk that went directly against their principles

I get "This video is not available" for DHH's presentation:
http://omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hansson-...
Striking graph. Having been there at the time, I'd propose roughly the same explanation she does, though in less loaded terms. The decline starts about 5-6 years after microcomputers became widely available. Assuming 4 years to graduate, that means the decline in women CS majors begins almost exactly at the time kids started to be able to hack in HS.

Up till 1980 or so, CS was like other engineering disciplines in that it was something most students started to learn in college. Few students arrive in college already proficient in mechanical engineering. But starting in the early 80s, students started to arrive who were already proficient (or at least, experienced) in programming. These kids were self-selected, and they were almost exclusively boys.
$4 a pop? Go buy yourself a french press for $30 and learn how to make coffee correctly in it.

Give or take a week of getting temperatures and measurements correct and you'll have amazing coffee for yourself every morning for much cheaper.

But to be honest after reading that article the coffee from the Clover sounds ... nice :) I will have to try it out one day when I can
The Final Days of DRM: Yahoo Music Store Closing, Will Eat Your Purchased Music
Haven't played with scsh before, but the thing that struck me as interesting while flipping through this was just how similar Microsoft's powershell is in terms of look-and-feel. I suspect it [scsh] may have been a source of inspiration :)
The best way to get the fees under control would be for the major online ticket finders to start delisting airlines that were not upfront about their fees. It's a risky choice on their part, but as it stands the travel sites have the most to lose. Any way you look at it, a lot of people are still going to fly regardless of the hidden fees, so there is little incentive there for the airlines to back down. Travel sites, on the other hand, depend on providing consumers with convenience and value. If consumers can no longer trust the ticket prices that they find there, then they simply won't bother with them anymore.

In short, consumer behavior isn't going to change, and airlines have no reason to change. Travel sites have the most to lose from these fees and the greatest ability to cause a change. If this trend is going to reverse, it has to come from them.
Except that the example given was Air Canada, which the last time I checked was indeed a foreign-owned airline. This is a global problem right now, and it's based on fundamental economics. Airlines are selling a commodity product in a competitive market at a time where operation costs are rising steeply. You can't "compete" your way out of that. Things won't stabilize until flight pricing comes to equilibrium again.
Every iphone app allows running VM code(hack), ttf has a virtual machine
OpenID does not mandate consolidated identity. In fact, Clickpass uses separate OpenID URLs for each service by default.
It's spam for two reasons:

1) The default setting for a long time (not sure about now) was that you'd get an email every time someone new followed you.

2) For those folks looking to make actual social connections on Twitter, it's next to impossible to notice when someone actually interesting starts following you-- the signal-to-noise on the followers lists means that it'll get drowned out. I've had some really interesting leads go stale as a result of this.
The first paragraph is spot on, but the second is just wrong. Turbojets fly much faster than needed, for the convenience of the passengers. Drag goes as the square of speed, so per-distance fuel economy scales as the inverse of the trip time. One certainly can do much better than a turbojet simply by swapping the fan for a larger geared propeller and flying at half the speed.
I've got a bog-standard cell phone (Razr) and I still get tripped up by the interface. I hate it!
Great quotes from Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds
The Flip is a fantastic example. We need something like that for digital cameras.
And in fact, there have been news stories recently about airlines adding a few minutes per flight in this way to save fuel.
I totally agree with this analysis--it looks like they have a ton of money. But that just makes the investment they took from Bezos look even more strange. Any ideas on that?
Reading the comment makes it pretty clear why he left. The number of first person references and self-promotional statements there suggest underlying personnel conflict.

Whether the company is going up or down at this point will probably depend on whether it's a development play or a marketing play. Whenever core engineers bail you usually end up with worse people doing a more incompetent job. Sometimes OK if the value is all in the marketing, and technology is getting in the way.

I think they're all shark meat though.
Ego drives the collective hallucination part of the internet.
The test of a language is what it gives the user, not how many lines of code it is. JMC's original Lisp is about 50 LOC.

Imagine if I spent the next year writing an immensely complicated optimizing compiler for Arc, and succeeded in making it 2x faster than code generated by the compiler the MzScheme guys have spent so many years writing. A lot of people would be more impressed with Arc then. And yet I'd have pretty much wasted my time. Arc is already acceptably fast. So at the end of this exercise I'd have produced a language that was better in ways users didn't care about, and no better in the ways they do (language features).

Instead I work on language design. Like JMC's code, this kind of thing is easy to copy-- once someone has already shown it to you.

You know, when I write about how one should work on the problems that really matter instead of the ones that are prestigious, people read those essays and think "yes, obviously, that's exactly what I'd do." But it's not till you try working on unfashionable problems that you see how immense the pressure is to work on fashionable ones.

Just as well I've avoided saying most of the "things you can't say," or 90% of the people who read that essay and think "hear, hear" would hate me instead....
I'd sure like to read their journal article, but alas, I don't have a subscription to the journal:
http://journals.royalsociety.org/content/8l2w00468265262n/?p...

Here is the website for little b:
http://www.littleb.org/
I have observed Paul Graham making bold statements with no apparent backing whatsoever in the past (see my blog http://neh2.wordpress.com for a few examples); your quotes here are just more of the same. Oh well.
This was my thinking 2004-2007 and was my biggest mistake. Targeting late adopters has not proven to be a successful strategy.

http://friendfeed.com/e/41230d54-d425-07c8-38a3-4bada029126b
Agreed, I don't know what the author is smoking. But then, there's no accounting for taste.

I also use Vera Mono in emacs, and like it a lot. I really feel for the poor folks still using courier (which-way-does-that-quote-go-and-is-that-a-curly-or-paren?) as a code font.

To be fair, though, the linked font is a bitmap, not a vector font. So maybe a better comparison might be to the X11 9x15 or 10x20 fonts, both of which I spent years staring at and like very much.
Good news for all diabetes sufferers
OpenID does not mandate consolidated identity

By default, consolidated identity is the end result.

The reality of OpenID will surely fall short of it's aspirations.

mechanical_fish has a pretty good comment on this:

"You'll have your choice of big corporations to trust with your identity."
I hear you and do understand pg's point. While the first part 'doing what you love' is really easy to do, one simply chooses it, the second part 'finding something the market loves' (which is the 'security' point of pg's essay) is basically out of your control. The only thing you can do to be happy about that 'market love' is decide what your reaction is, keep your expectations completely elastic and be able/willing to live within the constraints of 'the market' reaction. The problem comes when there are preconceived expectations of what the market should return, or a sense of being entitled to a level of success (that the market may not grace you with) which leads to unhappiness on that second point. But there is a solution, since you set your response to the market, its easy to reset, simply chose to be happy with what the return the market is giving you (ie. support your life with in those means, though it can be more difficult if you're supporting a family), and scale appropriately.
I respectfully suggest that times change. A generation ago most "real world" programming platforms were closed. The idea of multi-billion-dollar companies routinely depending on free software stacks was almost inconceivable.
We don't really need to make airplanes that use other energy sources than petroleum, if it could be manufactured or acquired at decent cost. If it should happen that we can't, we're hosed - moving through the air at 800kph is a dream unless you've got something approaching the energy density of oil. Hydrogen could be made workable, I believe - energy density per volume is something in the region of 30% of gasoline when compressed. With radical airframe changes, we might be able to uphold the status quo.

We have a long way to go considering the efficiency of the airframes themselves. Fuel consumption could be reduced drastically if we could go a bit slower, or there would be some radical design change (think sailplanes). Most widebody airframes today look like flying buffalos, with the resulting air resistance.

Almost all air transport of people happens on the border of the transsonic regime, where air resistance is a lot higher than it could be. Reduce speed with 30%, and you'll reduce the total energy consumption by a considerable amount. One can only guess how customers would take this.

Market forces today don't look like they are convective to such change, but one can always hope that some startup is able to eat a big piece of the pie. Personally, I am very enthusiastic about companies like http://www.dayjet.com/, who specialize in slightly-expensive but pretty-painless transport.

Sadly, aviation is one of the most ass-backwards industries in the world, burdened by the largest amount of politics, subsidies, bureaucracy and regulation I've ever seen. There are definitely huge business opportunities here, but there are mountains and mountains of shit to wade through before we reach them. I believe that better personal air transport would be the way to go - better and cheaper GA airplanes. The competition and politics here are still in the world class, but not quite as cutthroat as among the airlines. And the capital requirements are survivable, and the existing airplanes are even more ass-backwards.

It says something about an area of business when the military has been driving the bleeding edge for fifty years.
It really depends. The theory classes are there, you just have to take them. My Discrete II & Algorithmic Analysis class with Professor Kalantari was great and and extremely informative. Other classes that I thought were really interesting, like Compilers and Formal Language and Automata theory sadly only had a few students enrolled. I guess theoretical classes are considered boring, although I guess I could see why others think that when compared to Computer Graphics or something that seems a little more hands on. Now that I'm out though, I do regret not going down the Math/CS route at Rutgers.
French press is too gritty for me--I hate getting the grounds in my coffee.

Lately I've been using an aeropress and have been quite happy. Not Clover coffee, but better than FP and unbeatable for the price.
Airlines in Norway openly and publicly reduced the speed of their routes by 10%, while attempting to make up for the lost time by improving their pre-flight routines.
My neighbour's startup - what do you think?
so why aren't you using Dr Scheme directly?
[edit in response to pg's edit]
to be specific, why don't you have arc include the various high level modularity and semantic abstractions that Dr Scheme exposes? eg 1) a powerful high level macrosystem 2) ways of specifying / enforcing module interfaces 3) everything else that i'm forgetting
Definitely. Pixel fonts are past their prime on a 24" LCD.
Yeah I had that too the first year. The prof got rid of her pretty quickly too. Thankfully though, that situation is not the norm. I had many good TAs while at Rutgers.
Tips for Software / Programming blogging
Google’s Knol - A Wikipedia Killer or a Blog Killer?
Facebook Connect Coming to iPhone This Fall
Who here thought shirky's was shrinky's for a second
At RubyFringe, Giles Bowkett conjectured "Maybe a programmer is a how, not a what." Although I'd read this before, it shook me. Things in a language's implementation are hows, while things in its design are whats.
I wonder how often they get to use the non-food facilities, in crunch mode.

This is all great as a marketing and recruiting tool, but the reality is that to do that kind of work well, you need to work hard.

I've worked at an "it" company where people lost sight of that, amid all the perks.
This happened to me too. Still using Web Payments Standard.

I have no need for credit because I live well below my means and save up furiously.

So I got a Capital One card (my first credit card) and on the 1st of every month, I buy a single donut and pay it off in full 30 days later. I have no idea how this affects my credit rating, but it's tasty.
Intel launches new Tolapai system-on-a-chip design (embedded x86)
So to get the terminology right, Dr Scheme is a "programming environment" (think of it as the IDE) for PLT Scheme. Arc runs on MzScheme, which is PLT's implementation of Scheme (plus a lot of other things too).

I haven't heard of anyone using Dr Scheme as an editor / IDE for Arc.
OnePage: An Easier Way to Browse Hacker News
I think the idea is that early adopters can evangelize your product and create its foothold, but it's the late adopters who play mass market kingmakers.
Why not a debit card?
The little green ebook
This is very interesting, but does having a high credit rating help you in any material way? Or to put it in other words, does it prevent problems down the road? What problems? How much money does your $25,000 credit limit save you each month, and how much time do you spend managing it?

For my own part, it feels like ass-kissing to prove to the powers that be that I am able to manage responsibilities and debt. It is not something I want to do unless it provides a considerable benefit.
Google.org project: RechargeIT - gathering data on plug-in cars
Doug Kaye: The second chapter of the book, which is in fact entitled Hackers and Painters, draws parallels between hacking and painting. In what ways do you think to program is more like painting than it is like some of our more common metaphors such as engineering?

Paul Graham: One big difference between painting and engineering is engineers.in buildings for example there is this distinction between architects and engineers. Architects decide what the building is going to look like basically and then they say to an engineer, "Can I do this? And then how?" And the engineer figures out how. So architects figure out "what," engineers figure out "how." Well painters do both. Painters decide what to paint and then have to paint it. And hackers in the best case also do both. They're not merely engineers who just figure out "how." The great hackers decide "what" and then figure out "how." And in fact the two can influence one another in a cycle in the best case. In the best case, you figure out "what" by trying various "hows."

http://www.thelinguist.com/en/en/library/item/10593/
Just In Case You Missed It...
this is also having a serious negative effect on SEOers ability to jigg results/
Starwood Express American Express card, in my opinion, has the best bang for buck. Plus they've waived my yearly fee several times now.

If you are having trouble getting a card (like I did when I first moved to the US), Amazon Visa was an easy card to qualify for, and has decent benefits.
Berlin: OpenCoffee / Business & Beer this week
What stops people from gaming this by creating automated posts to make money on adsense?
Facebook doesn't care about those people, though. They've got a big enough slice of the pie as it is.
by Dr Scheme in my case I mean plt scheme, which is pretty nice as schemes go
"We are far more perceptive when it comes to these link swarms that show up in a matter of hours or days"

With a little planning I'm sure it would be possible to regulate the link swarm over a period of a couple months to pass under the radar.
So you have that, you have a username field, a password field, you have a little blurb explaining that this is using OpenID.

Facebook, meanwhile, has a big blue button that you click and things just magically work.
That's for one site, though, if I'm not mistaken. Good luck on getting the rest of the web to allow for that feature.
Bit of an exaggeration to say "mostly fictional" isn't it? Boece published his fictional 900-year history only 30 years after Columbus set off around the world.

In any case, Trevor-Roper published some of the papers this book was based on back in the 1970s and Boece's work wasn't the only record we have of that period of time.
Computers have changed since the 80's. A lot. Micro-optimizations at the instruction level only help code that can run out of L1 cache. Typical tasks these days (c.f. web development, both server and client) use huge data sets, and are frustratingly resistant to this kind of trick.

I'm not a big fan of either scheme or arc, frankly, but pg's decision to leave the optimization to the underlying scheme interpreter sounds spot on to me.
All I can say is this: Told you so.

DRM was a broken concept from the start.

Let's move on.
"Until the 18th century, no one north of the Tweed had ever seen a kilt"

This is misleading. As noted later in the article, highlanders wore plaids, which are basically kilts with an over-the-shoulder piece that can be used as a cloak (it's actually all one big piece of cloth). If you saw a plaid, you'd say, "that's a kilt." Go to a Renaissance Festival and you'll see them all over the place.
See, here's the thing - no disrespect to you, but you voiced the opinion most succinctly. Most people don't care about walled or not walled. They care about easy. And because Facebook is easy, and because OpenID sounds like sawdust in your mouth, Facebook has a vast advantage. Especially once most sites add Facebook Connect over OpenID, because it has more users.

A noble statement, but it's not one that carries out.
Facebook Signs Search Deal With MSFT
Debit cards don't build your credit score. I learned this the hard way when I started my first job and couldn't get a reasonable credit card, despite 5 years of using a debit card (and a healthy salary)
Liveblogging Microsoft gadget guy Robbie Bach's speech at MSFT analyst day
What are the popular and good mp3 stores out there that don't use DRM?
yah, sorry about the confusion. i meant the comment reply on TC and not your comment!