skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you give far too little credit to most Internet users. Even among older users, the vast majority are aware of the difference between a client application and a website.

That was equality, not identity! It's a terminology thing. Yes, they know the difference between the internet and their browser certainly, but I know people who more or less refer to IE as "the internet." It's part of the name, after all. I think they generally call the net itself either "the web" or "online." Obviously I'm pulling from a small data set, but nonetheless, IE does give the impression on the outside that it's the authoritative browser, much as Google's homepage does for search.
Rhodopsin just like a photomultiplier detector has a certain noise level. The rate of noise counts decreases with temperature - so you would expect the performance of a person at this task to improve as you cooled their body.

This was actually done for toads. The experimenter would train a toad to lash its tongue at faint flashes of light and the performance of the toad at discriminating light from no light was measured as the toad's body temperature was cooled. As the toad was chilled the quality of its guesses improved. Interestingly it's error rate as a function of temperature matched the change in signal to noise ratio for the currents in the retinal cells. Bizzare! The toad's brain controlled it's tongue at the threshold of being able to statistically distinguish signal from noise.
ITunes 8 First Impressions: Pretty, Good
Golly. It's amazing that every single provider of healthcare would conspire to keep me sick, so I would never notice that customers of health care company A are healthier than customers of B. That kind of conspiracy would be a little bit totally unprecedented in all of human history and impossible to initiate, much less maintain. But I concede the possibility.

If that's true for private enterprises, why is it not true for the government? If a politician can make me reliant on him forever, why won't he do it?

If they develop a one shot cure that is cheap, and an ongoing vaccine that people need once a year, obviously they'll hide the cheap cure, and get you to sign up for once a year medicine, because it'll make them more money.

If there's only one 'them' (as in the government example) that is true. If there are many 'thems', and a new 'them' can be started for fairly little money, one would expect someone who developed such a cure to market it independently. Yes, a multi-million dollar lump sum from curing everything is less than the billions of dollars in revenue generated by health care companies. But 100% of that lump sum is more than this researcher could expect from the companies.

On a startup-related discussion site, it's pretty foolish for you to argue that nobody will ever market the cheaper, better solution, and that we'll always be beholden to the big companies. Nobody here believes that about software -- do you?
is that for express? isn't there a more advanced integration? i'm referring to the more detailed on.
ZyXEL ZyWALL 5 UTM Security Appliance With 1 Year AV+IDP Silver iCard
ZyXEL ZyWALL 5 UTM is capable of outperforming the current ZyWALL 5 by up to 20 times with just a ZyWALL Turbo Card. This new technology introduces a new all-in-one network security device that provides content filtering.
I think the reason it's frowned upon is due to tax evasion reasons. Imagine paying your employees in this town's currency and then having them spend it within the town.
Dear Robert Scoble, Please Slow Down with your Tweets
I like the look of the new visualizer.
The comics were good to me because they explained why Chrome should be exciting, as opposed to just being told "Chrome is fast."
Please let's not start turning into Digg.
Doesn't ruby only have green threads?
Collecting data on zebra striping (Jessica Enders, A List Apart)
I'm not quite sure I follow your reasoning here. How does paying your employees in the town's currency allow tax evasion? You would still have to report paying them the money.

You could pay them under the table (not report it to the government) in cold hard cash using the British pound just as easily as using a local currency. I can't see how using a local currency would make it any easier.
The thing with perl threads is that pretty much nobody uses them. They work fine, as far as I know, but with a default 16MB stack size and "share nothing" semantics don't start more than a few. Perl is more unix centric and people just prefer to fork and use the well baked IPC mechanisms. Various libraries such as POE make fork+IPC easy enough that it's hard to see the need for threads in the kinds of domains where a language like perl is applicable.
I heard about this a month or so ago on NPR. I don't see the benefit in it really. Unless they can back their currency with gold or something else it will continue to fluctuate in value with the pound.

Furthermore I can't see why people would really want to have this town's currency other than as a collectors item. You can only spend it in this particular town, and not even at all of the businesses there.

It's been said that this will help keep business (money) in town. Meaning that locals will be more likely (forced) to spend money at local businesses if they have the local currency. But why would anyone want to restrict themselves like this as a shopper? What's to stop them for refusing to accept change in the local currency or to trade it in at the bank for official British currency?
It isn't the developers who make the call on DRM, by a long-shot. Had it not been for pushback from EA developers the DRM on Spore would've been much harsher.
Universal currency sign
The problem as Twitter catches on is that some people seem to feel the need to ramp up their tweetrate.

IMO, the idea behind 140 characters is to share compact thoughts and ideas in moderately spaced intervals.

If you have 1400+ characters of updates in an hour, twitter ain't the platform...
British Airways: Don't make me fail
How could they tell there were imaginary flashes? It seems like a private experiment, you can't check it. (Maybe there were not expected flashes at all and they saw some anyway?)
It seems like Apple rebranded their old recommendation engine with something that has less "pushy" language.
Creating a Culture of Quality (Part II)
I'm pretty sure the algorithm has not been wholly (publicly) specified yet. Much of the hash tree structure is, as are parts of the compression function, but not the whole thing. Probably it will not be fully described until later this fall, closer to the NIST deadline.
Just unfollow him.
7 Rules Of Money For College Students
I only made an account for myself when I saw that I had friends that were having interesting conversations in there. I don't see how having an account for you alone could be useful if you have nobody to talk to (it's like having an msn account if you haven't any useful contacts... twitter is as good as your contacts so beware of adding random people).
Hey cool, I was wondering if that was only me, and if it had a name.
I like Twitter, but I think Facebook is horrible, a terrible waste of time, it's like LinkedIn for teenagers imo. This comes from a guy that has also stopped using chat tools (excepting for the days I might need them), so please excuse me for being on the very unpopular side.
Plan B for Fundraising (Guy Kawasaki making sense)
It was so long ago I'm not really sure, but I remember that Scheme48 was not very programmer friendly.
I thought we were making the point that hardware was slow and expensive much later than the 60s and 70s, not that Unix could be really small.
I don't know the answer, but if I were CEO, I wouldn't care if I wasn't the highest paid person - as long as I am happy with the % of the company I owned.

So if this view is reasonable, I don't think that the CEO's salary is a ceiling.
An aside, but I wonder what the stats are on the signal to noise ratio (as judged by upvotes?) vs. average indentation depth of a particular discussion thread....
even if you don't have funding how hard is it to get some old desktops that can have a couple of gigs of memory?
Buy the books. Understanding comics is just plain interesting. A good story, well told. Haven't read the follow-ups. Guys like McCloud break open the perception of what graphic storytelling can look like. More money to him = a good thing in my book.
Biologists on the Verge of Creating New Form of Life
stupid. unless they know something about monetary policy, they will either inflate the shit out of it and it will be worthless, or they will too tightly constrain it and their local economy will fall apart
posted my plug for rescuetime and tipjoy here:
http://garry.posterous.com/rescuetime-a-log-of-how-hardco

The dip is pretty big though. After YC you have to worry about a lot of other things. If I could code the same way I did 2 months ago, I would do it in a heartbeat.
Whether it's a good thing isn't in the perception but the reality. The reality is that costs within the UK NHS are significantly lower than those in the US with its $50-per-mile ambulance rides and $10 aspirins.

While paying for medicine from tax money makes it look like more of a free ride, and potentially open to abuse, it seems that having a cartel of medical insurance companies and hospitals all jacking up the fees works out a lot worse for users in the long run.
The threats to computing sceince
people just prefer to fork and use the well baked IPC mechanisms

Ahh, that makes sense. I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of perl code runs on *nix systems (I know that with the exception of one app, all the perl I've ever written was only run on linux servers).
Take a look at Journey through Genius by William Dunham. I read it after high school and ended up spending much of the summer with a straightedge and compass making geometric constructions. It's not all geometry, though; there's plenty of other good stuff, including some gems from Euler and Cantor's incredible diagonal proof of the cardinality of the rationals.
This is Grade-A brilliant.
You're only following 33 people... and one of them is Scoble. You have to expect your Twitter stream to be dominated by him. Especially during a conference.
It suggests, not enforces, you can still do boneheaded things like putting logic in the view or inappropriate logic in the controller that should be in the model. The presence of a model and controller doesn't make you write good code.
Trust me, already done - even so, and while I understand the thrills one can have at a conference they're really excited about what makes that many updates barraging other folks an 'okay' thing.
I see what you mean. Naturally, there are various uses for the system, especially with minor variations. But what I really meant was as a social news site.

BTW, do you have any sense of ceilings?
They double-up: Always Alluring Alligator
We had some views in our rails app that could be hit several times per second by our users, and they were uncacheable, so we implemented the views in c++ using libpg and fastcgi. So much awesomely faster.

If you've got some code that works well and you can solidify into c++ (ie - you're no longer tweaking it 3 times a day) - it's totally worth spending the time to rewrite.

I think C++ on rails would be a great idea, ie - some code generators to help you port your most used .rhtml views over to C++.
It's not just bad code, it's a bad language full of silly inconsistencies that don't make sense and trip up even the most experienced programmers.

That's what happens when you build a language by piling hack upon hack instead of actually designing it. Languages like Ruby and Python actually have a philosophy and style that keep the languages self consistent. Consistency is a critical core feature of any good language, PHP doesn't have it.
I fear change, and thus hate it.

These settings make it feel more like iTunes 7: http://blog.jacobbijani.com/post/49475624
These names are great for memory (vivid, matched letters) and search (rare enough that partnered with 'ubuntu', as in 'ubuntu jaunty', they make great narrowing query terms).

That they proceed in alpha order is also useful -- as noted by a previous commenter, moreso than Apple's confusing mix of cat names.
Guy is clearly coming around to bootstrapping. Welcome to the bright side.

Why We Must Bootstrap to Succeed

http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2008/06/bootstrapping.html
Another bogus argument... You assume that others know about the cheaper better cures.

Software is just building stuff. It's easy.

If you don't build X, someone else can. But if you hide cure X for an illness, there's nothing to say that anyone else will find that cure at all - ever.

The statistics speak for themselves. Countries with government provided healthcare pay less on healthcare, and have a higher life expectancy.
Looks like we'll find out tomorrow what they have in mind:
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080909/lehman_brothers.html?.v=19
Seems to be down now.

Here's the text-only cached copy: http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:http://abeautifulwww.co...

The original web page with the images looked better.
Unfortunately nobody recognises the universal currency sign, so from a usability standpoint it doesn't make much sense to use it.
That is very interesting!

Unfortunately this idea is impractical for warm-blooded creatures, whose body temperature is strictly regulated... at least until it isn't, at which point they're no longer much good for seeing photons because they're busy being treated for hypothermia.

Although I'm sure that Rutherford and Geiger, or their grad students, were quite happy to avoid the necessity of performing their human photomultiplier experiments while sitting in a chilled room.
If you liked this, you might also like Seth Godin's Bootstrapper's Bible. It costs two bucks as a PDF on Amazon, but I personally got a lot out of it.
I guess the point is that it's easy to not report when you are dealing with the town's currency.

If you take it to the extreme and consider a barter system. I can be a farmer and give a few tomatoes to the barber who cuts my hair. The government does not know what happened and you do not report the income as earned.

You are right that it's identical to paying under the table but I think there is a higher incentive to do that with these town currencies.

Thanks for making me rethink my logic.
Well, I left out the next sentence of the book, in which Geiger builds an electronic counter (perhaps you've heard of it? :) and uses it to cross-check the humans.

According to the book, after using the counter to confirm that properly trained and rested humans were as accurate as the electronics, the next step was to put the electronic counter away because the humans could also give you spatial information: They could not only tell you that a flash had happened, but could tell you where it was in the visual field. Multichannel PMTs or (god bless 'em) chilled semiconductor-based multi-element low-noise photodetectors were still dozens of years in the future...
Move over T9, here comes Swype
Your urls don't need to be in BDB. Just write them to a text file and stream from that. If you want to check for duplicates, just find a simple bloom filter library. There, now you're under a megabyte. :)
Seriously. Since when have coders adhered to "serious" naming conventions for their creations.
I think the fact that so many people follow him and don't seem to mind. If it wasn't an "okay" thing, then more people would unfollow him and Scoble would be forced to change his tweeting behavior if he wanted to retain his large network.

In other words, what's acceptable is whatever people are willing to put up with.
Yes - unless its jruby then they are non green (forget the term for it at this time of the morning).
Funny how these 2.0 young bucks consider a C-rewrite extreme, when for many coders is is the lingua franca, the bread and butter. I got started on high-level languages but I've made an effort to get familiar with C because it's small, beautiful, and fast as all hell. Fast is powerful.
Detect spin and bias in the stories you read online, with SpinSpotter
Computer crash brings LSE to a standstill
Google Offers More Privacy: By Purging Server Logs Twice as Fast
TechCrunch 50 Language & Platform: Swype Wows Panel
TechCrunch 50 Mobile Session: FitBit and Tonchidot Steal Show
I'm sorry. You're right, I didn't mean to be an asshole (this time). I was thinking, "this is a list of CEOs of tech companies who of course will say they like Twitter; it would have been interesting instead to see a list of executives from mainstream companies who found it useful."
By far the biggest reason that car diesels are not popular in US, while they are popular in Europe, is that diesel fuel is taxed similarly to gas here. In Europe it enjoys significant tax advantage. A small contribution is bad experience consumers had with GM's diesels 1978-1985, which were a poor product.

I also really don't get the obsession of mpg, when comparing different fuels. Diesel is about 30% more energy dense than gas. If I told you that the car got 100mpg on coal (which has even higher energy density) would that be exciting?
Huh? That would be a pass for cars that use more gas.

The federals standards are grams per mile. CA's testing facilities use parts per million gauges, but the threshold is model-specific so the readings can be used to identify grams per mile violators.
Project-Kenai (Sun's new developer hub)
I watched this live at Techcrunch50 and I had mixed reactions. First, it is a rather technically interesting way to do text input. Watching how the experienced developer was playing with it, I could sense how it could feel like writing cursive English letters as whole words.

For the average user though, I just don't see how it catches on. People are fairly split over whether they prefer phones with traditional button keyboards or if they love the touchscreen interface from the iPhone. I love the iPhone because I hated stencils. I get more screen real estate. Its easier for me to do typing on the iPhone than any other smart phone I ever used.

It honestly looked like the demonstrator was scribbling on the screen. I had to look twice a couple of times to make sure it was a live demo and not fake.
Unfortunately, human research isn't as simple - you actually have to worry about the health consequences as well as the benefits. But correlations can be very meaningful. For instance, cross-cultural studies w/r to diets can be illuminating even as there are no experiments being run. Still, I'd place my bets, and my life, on fresh foods - high in anti-oxidants - over processed ones. The beauty is it ain't rocket science. And better, good diets can control and even inhibit pathologies (diabetes, heart disease, etc.).
On another thread, there was a recommendation for Roger Penrose's 'The Road to Reality'. Haven't read it, but it purports to build from basic math through to advanced concepts and physics, step by step.
The new meaning is useful and makes more sense. I'm ok with it. Anyways, I think it's too late to go back.
RescueTime is nice, but if a majority of your time is used browsing a random number of domains (read documentation, blogs for problem x, procrastinate on slashdot etc) it's gets hard to separate "productive browsing" and "unproductive browsing" without going through a large tedious list of websites every day. And even then, the same domain may be productive one day, and unproductive the next. Eventually you just find the benefit isn't really there and stop checking the website. And then eventually you stop the watcher application because it interferes with your computer usage or sometimes pings to %100 processor usage.

If you guys could solve the 200 random domains a day kind of problem (put all domains under 3 minutes in a 'random browsing' category, or you could add a 'i'm procrastinating' button), it might make RescueTime a useful application for me.
One of my favorites:

http://www.amazon.com/History-Mathematics-Carl-B-Boyer/dp/04...
On that note--does anyone know where to find basic information on nutrition that's not full of bullshit?
Well then it might show ability to pick the right person for the job. Or more likely, the right person to pick the right person.
Swype, Truly Gesture-based Data Entry
Who said it had to be serious? A sense of humor is always something I enjoy in products I use. a Unix system just isn't a Unix system without the bsd-games package! Silly easter eggs just make programs more fun to use; it gives them a bit of personality.

So long as they don't get in the way of using the software, I don't see the harm.
qwerty evenly spreads commonly used keys between both sides so that you can type fast with two hands; seems like exactly what you wouldn't want with this tech.
Which is perfect, barter works, fuck the government and their theft of your income.
Ask YC: How to prevent email spoofing in web app?
I am creating a web application that accepts submissions via email from users. I use the From: line in the email header to pull up the user information in the database, but this can easily be spoofed. Can anyone offer advice, links, anything, etc.. for a way to fix this problem?

Thanks very much in advance.
Google Invests in Satellite Broadband Startup
Speed comes in two forms, execution time and development and maintenance time, C is only good for one of these. Python or Ruby would be better for the other.
App Store: "Air Sharing" (avg 4.5 star app) Free for First 2 Weeks, Then Pay to Download
See a nutritionist. They'll go through your diet and help to plan healthier, and often tastier, alternatives. The best ones are like diet coaches.
a quick, simple (hopefully temporary) solution would be to have them submit some sort of password with the email (not the same one they use to log in).

it isn't very secure, but its a level or two of security higher than what you're creating now without any protections.
I'm curious as to what you are storing besides the URL. Given the two figures, (200M RAM, 30k URLs) I calculate that you are using 7k per URL, which seems a bit excessive to me. Or does the 200M include other data besides the URLs?
I can say for a fact a small minority of my time is spent on domains I don't bother tagging as waste or dev.

If you are spending a lot of time on random domains, I think even considering rescuetime has identified a clear way to, err, rescue time.
Reinventing Comics is just about as awesome.

Making Comics is good, but only if you're interested in, you know, making comics. The others are fun and enlightening for most anyone who reads comics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaca_Hours
The standard way to do this is to use a randomly generated destination address which can be reset by the user.

If you want greater security than that you could have the user include their 'secret word' in the subject line or body of the message; which will work as long as they can reset that too.

Do not use this for anything where a single spoofed message could have dire financial consequences.
Actually that's not true. Qwerty is a very bad layout for keyboards. The guy who invented it was named Qwerty. It was originally designed for typewriters and to be difficult to use to force the typist to slow down to reduce mistakes. Many alternate layouts have been proposed over the years but Qwerty became the defacto standard because it was so widely used by businesses with typewriters. That's what people learned and we've been stuck with it ever sense.
Why do you think C is such a maintenance issue?
Not a fan at all. I understand how the creator might have put pressure on himself to develop a new relevant solution, but this is nothing short of counterintuitive. Why would you develop a text input method that forces the user to use one finger?
The fact that you can spell 'typewriter' with only keys from the top row might have something to do with the early popularity of that arrangement...

Of course everyone in the know prefers 'DHIATENSOR'.
Guerrilla Capacity Planning and the Law of Universal Scalability
Get the physical location of wireless router from its MAC address
Thank you! Your posts are always very good reading :)