skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, but it's a Russell's Teapot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot) kind of argument. You're rejecting the survey results because they go against your prejudices, not based on evidence (or at least that seems to be what you are claiming, if you have evidence that Apple's performance vis-à-vis it's clients is sub-par, you certainly haven't presented it). And no matter what survey results that anyone could present to you, you'll always be able to respond by "ah yes, but you haven't disproved possible explanation X for these results".
whatever happened to the "focus on the business" mindset? It seems building your own blog past the basics a frame work can do would eventually be more work then just using wordpress.

Unless your businesses is blogging perhaps your efforts are better spent elsewhere.
Some of us are old enough to have used ed(1) out of necessity. :-) These days, `sed -i' is also useful for quick one-liners.
Just download the files direct:

http://mit-ocw-thai.eng.chula.ac.th/OcwWeb/Global/OCWHelp/he...
Will Peek's $100 Lo-Fi BlackBerry Take Off?
What about the "Hacking Death" lecture? I'd really love to find a cool hack to make death a little more palatable ;-)
27. Parrots, and
Most Philosophy departments have something like this, although with more wordy names. At Rutgers, there was (01:730:371) Philosophies of Death and Dying.

http://catalogs.rutgers.edu/generated/nb-ug_current/pg20657....
Yeah, you can allow Google to share your stats, and then you get to see other's stats anonymously based on what Google determines is for sites just like yours. I'm not sure, but it might be aggregated, which makes it somewhat less useful.
In all honesty I've found that just ignoring the non-value-add stories seems to work pretty well. Not upvoting them and not commenting on them seems to allow gravity to take effect fairly quickly.

The solution is not any sort of downvote mechanism, by any name. The solution is simply restraint :)
Overview: C++ Gets an Overhaul (C++0x)
Need application security? Add a module/gem.

It would be nice if that were possible, but experience has indicated that security cannot be bolted on after the fact.

If you're going to try to add security after the fact, you might as well build your application and plan on adding "what people want"-ness after the fact... it just doesn't work.
It's the type of humor (culturally Russian/culturally Jewish), not the actual wording.
I've heard some people suggest that at 18 you should be allowed to get either a license to buy/drink alcohol or a license to drive, but until age 21, you can't have both.

I'm lukewarm on this idea because it seems so easy to evade: get a driver's license and then ask a peer with a drinking license to get you your booze. But the current system certainly seems broken to me, and maybe a split-license system would be more politically feasible than simply lowering the drinking age to 18.
JustHackIt: It’s Like a Dating Site For Hackers
This post is best subvocalized with a heavy Russian accent.
A startup requires more than technology talent.
How Technology Managed From India Is Changing the Complexion of Outsourcing
Google Puts $10 Million Into Geothermal Technology
Dying is easy to understand, and you won't fail to accomplish it. Living well on the other hand...
> I like making classes which abstracts the underlying work, hence improving (local) code readability.

Where did you get the impression that scripting folks don't do that?

> Code which can be compiled, and errors which can be caught before a single line is executed.

I find that most of the errors caught by compilers is in code that I had to insert to make the compiler happy while I worked on the actual problem. Yes, it's "just a little effort" to write stubs, but much of that work is wasted and it has to be done at the wrong time.

It is much better to simply allow missing methods, etc. and trap on use.
8 Ways To Make Money Online
I can easily believe this. I'm at university, I have electronic access to a host of journals.

There are some I don't though and for these I'll first speak with friends at other institutions before contacting the author.
I think it should be raised to 28 - because I'm 28 now and nobody younger than I am should have any fun.
That's not very fair. "Worthwhile" can be judged in lots of ways. I agree that math and economics are very practical, but that doesn't mean philosophy is without value.

I was a very interested in philosophy in college, and if I had chosen anything other than CompSci, that probably would have become my major. I have a lot of respect for people exploring metaphysical questions. While it's easy to dismiss them as "non-practical", I can't think ill of people who try to seek underlying meaning behind the day-to-day sciences/morality/etc. and improve our understanding of truth and logic.

Those questions are really far harder than the ones I tackle day-to-day or even in my highest math/CS studies. I still feel like a wimp sometimes for not trying to attack "deeper" questions and paradoxes.

In a sense, philosophy asks questions that all the sciences, ultimately, try to get us closer to answering. I don't think there's as much glory in asking the questions, but there's still a whole lot of them to ask.

That being said, I understand your position entirely. Had I become an engineer without being introduced to philosophy first, everything there (sans the logic/fallacy discussions) would seem impractical. Now I see it as a fundamental that helped to start most of the major branches of science, and keeps growing discussion around some of the tougher problems we've yet to solve.
37Signals: Voting With Your Wallet
The reason alcohol is regulated while lots of other things aren't (hey, tree-climbing isn't safe either) is because it's easy to regulate and it has easily quantifiable impacts on those who use (abuse?) it and those around them. "Good judgement" more generally can't be regulated and can't be so easily quantified (or even identified, if you're a politician).

And re: 45-year-olds - there are less of them in combat for very practical reasons:
a) they've already retired (45-20 is 25, and most people join younger than 25)
b) they're promoted into ranks that don't get into direct combat.

I think the notion that a 45-year old would have a lower survival rate is just silly, unless you've got some particular set of facts to back it up.
i myself stopped using my language of choice because it generated this assembler for a simple function:

org 100h
jmp start
table1 db 97 dup (' ')
table2 db 97 dup (' ')
start:
lea bx, table1
lea si, string1
call parse
lea dx, string1
mov ah, 09
int 21h
lea bx, table2
lea si, string1
call parse
lea dx, string1
mov ah, 09
int 21h
mov ah, 0
int 16h
ret
parse proc near
next_char:
cmp [si], '$'
je end_of_string
mov al, [si]
cmp al, 'a'
jb skip
cmp al, 'z'
ja skip
xlatb
mov [si], al
skip:
inc si
jmp next_char
end_of_string:
ret
parse endp
end
Hey, congratulations on the write-up. That was quick :)
Forbes misses the point of the 4-day work week
game theory never seemed that convincing (I'm a theoretical biologist). Most people just don't seem to be that mathematically inclined and they stop iterating through some decision problem well before where logic should take them. As such, it makes a lot of the points that the field is making m00t, as they try pin the results derived from Homo economicus / logicus onto Homo Sapiens.

see http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=1518&aid=-1 for an example of this. The result seems to be an outcome of people only thinking one step ahead, and those thinking superrational (i.e. estimating how much steps ahead people will be thinking, and chosing according to that).

Philosophy (reading transcript 23 now as well) might in general be more useful to a human mind then some theoretical system on how a non-existant optimal human would behave.

Just read it. It's nice I think, especially if you've never been exposed to the ideas in there and if you are willing to seriously consider the questions raised. I'd rate it as more useful than game theory by far.
Erik from TechCrunch doesn't have to do work anymore, he just reads hacker news :)
I think that for some user types and in some applications sacrificing capability for simplicity can actually be a good idea in product design. It seems that most humans experience "decision fatigue" when dealing with extremely feature-filled products and find their productivity decreases when using it.

By decision fatigue I mean that it seems that on average, people make worse decisions if they've had to make a lot of other decisions recently. Furthermore, it seems that accepting that a certain option will not be chosen also contributes to this. [1]

Relating this to product design, each new feature represents an additional decision that must be made when a user attempts to accomplish a task where the feature is presented as relevant -- "should I use this feature, or shouldn't I?" Even if the feature is not used, it's presence as an option contributes to decision fatigue.

I agree with Prof. Norman's point that good design helps alleviate these issues by giving us the mental models to avoid considering irrelevant features during interaction. The problem is that both the users of these designs and the designs themselves are imperfect, leading back to the fatigue caused by consideration and decision making about irrelevant details and options.

Maximizing capability is as incorrect as maximizing simplicity. I believe that the ultimate goal should be one that balances simplicity with capability in a way that takes the user's humanity into account such that productivity (whatever it means for a certain product) is maximized. [2]

[1] http://www.chicagogsb.edu/research/workshops/marketing/archi... -- The title is: "Decision Fatigue Exhausts Self-Regulatory Resources — But So Does Accommodating to Unchosen Alternatives"

[2] I was going to say "productivity and enjoyment (...) are maximized", but I think that maximizing the latter is required to maximize the former.
My startup project: Playground - a requirements capture tool
Yeah, and at Rutgers I think this is usually a summer class taught by a grad student and taken by nonmajors trying to fulfill a requirement. Probably for good reason.
Are there any legal options to buy non DRM'd Blu-ray content? I mean new 1080p movies?
What’s All The Buzz About? | TechJaws
someone downvoted my accidental upvote :)

wow.

there goes a loser.
Why people pirate software
You're right. Classics are such a waste of time. Let's throw out Ovid, Homer, Dante, Bach, and Mozart while we're at it.
i don't know what you mean. could you provide an example? let's take lisp and python. in which "axis" is python more powerful and how? (i'm talking about core language features).
forget 4-day work week - think about the sub-culture of 4-Hour workweek...

read the book "The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich"
Visualization techniques for networking (and not only) data
I'm curious how journalist measure happiness over time. Especially how they assess the happiness of people who lived in a time before social anthropologists to study the well-being of a society.
The perfect website design: 10 golden design rules
Er. Who forgot about those, they're trivial web capabilities I suspect every web developer knows. That's like saying "Some programming innovations you probably forgot about: functions, variables, assignment"
Augmented Reality Blog
Hey, that's why I asked - to learn how others see Russian culture from the outside. What's the defining quality.

?
Firstly, not everyone has smartphones, and not everyone text messages people enough to justify even $5/mo. Secondly, I said "slow" not because transmission is slow, but the typing of the message (or finding and selecting templates) is a rather slow process, especially for those of us who don't use smartphones. Thirdly, you can always set your phone to vibrate and/or let the voicemail take the message if you're in either situation...
My personal mantra on this is to focus on upvoting.

If you see something you like, upvote it! Also, if you're not happy with the stuff you see.. by all means, submit some links that you think are interesting.

A couple of times I've submitted stuff that was perhaps a little off topic or not explained very well.

The frustrating thing was that when a submission got upvoted by other people who obviously found it interesting as well, all the comments were from people who just wanted to point out that the article was not interesting to them.

I'd much rather people just ignore stuff they don't like. Leave it for other people who do find it interesting to discuss.
Good insight. Surprisingly deep when you start thinking: it shows that sometimes marketing becomes a negative-sum game due to externalities. Will it lead Seth to question his career choice?
Free Will vs. the Programmed Brain
It's about time to ban everything from TC. I think I remember a Greasemonkey script for it, no? What about us Safari users? Please.
Blockbuster has enough clout to force movie companies to "water down" their product so they don't have to sell "unrated / NC-17" editions of movies, why can't they negotiate a much better public screening rate? Also, if it is so un-economical, why do the electronics stores that sell home theaters do exactly this?
Jesus, we're linking Steve Sailer now? This place really is getting worse than Reddit.
I've used a ton of smartphone keyboards. I guess it comes down to personal preference. The keyboard I can type on fastest and with least effort is the iPhone. Yes occasionaly it pauses for a second when the keyboard first comes up, but then it's responsive and registers everything you type.
A Small Empire Built on Cuddly and Fuzzy Branches Out From the Web
Get good at iPhone app development
This is part of the beauty of HN. By not having an explicit mechanism for combating trolls, it encourages the very best way of fighting them!

Recently, there was a thread both on reddit and HN about Danish energy policy. Though I favor environmentalist policy (I drive a car on Biodiesel, and I'm switching to a pure solar/wind/hydro electricity provider) I was downvoted on reddit because I mentioned that Denmark is a lot smaller than the US, and everyone assumed that I am anti-environmental. By contrast, there was a very well reasoned discussion on HN where I actually learned something. It seems obvious to me that something is happening right here. No need to change right now.
Getting stressed isn't just a state of mind. It can also seriously harm the body.
Oh don't turn this into a TC hating thread. Someone's site just got a lot of press. Be happy for them. :)
I'm generally inclined to agree with you. That's why I was never really in favor of any downvoting schemes. But what I'm trying to suggest is not downvoting; it's only slightly more than a placebo for downvoting.

(An "irrelevant" flag that didn't even display a vote total would be purely a placebo. If it weren't for the fact that the users here would immediately figure out the trick, I'd semi-seriously propose the placebo idea. Restraint is easy to preach, but sometimes difficult to practice, and one way to make it easier is to offer a displacement behavior. Instead of getting angry, you can forcefully click a button and depart. ;)

And I wouldn't have even brought up the idea of a formal Cold Shoulder system if I hadn't seen so many users -- including myself -- doing it anyway, using comments. Perhaps this ad hoc comment method that we currently use is actually better than a formal system for feedback. I'm not sure. But I figured I'd at least discuss the idea for a minute.

Why don't people show more restraint and just have faith in the force of gravity? I just discussed the irrational reason: they could use a better displacement behavior. The rational reason is that, as the number of off-topic submissions becomes a greater and greater percentage of the submitted stories, one fears that new submitters are increasingly unable to tell the difference between a story that dies because it is offtopic and a story that dies because it's lost in a sea of other submissions. So, they keep trying. I'm not sure I blame them. Why shouldn't users submit the kind of highly-crafted linkbait that works so well on sites like Reddit and Digg? The answer is that many such links don't work well with the culture we're trying to foster on HN, but users aren't born knowing how HN culture works. Experienced folks have to teach them. And one good way to teach people is to have a means of providing subtle corrections: One that's more gentle than a stiff-arm to the face, more polite than a cutting insult, and less work to create than a well-crafted post.

Anyway, perhaps you are right and I just needed further encouragement. I will return to the "restraint" tactic, and we'll give the whole thing another three months and see what transpires.
Most philosophy questions are a result of language not abstract ideas. When someone says something 'blue boy dry kite' you try and extract meaning so when encountering an idea that lacks meaning you still try and parse it. Some words even imply a world view that could be wrong. So: Q: What is ethics in a random universe? A: They are not compatible concepts. (In other words the question is wrong.)

PS: As to the few big questions like life after death there is nothing in philosophy that let's you tackle such questions.
First look: All-new Google News with a bunch of new features
Usually when I try to read a philosophical text, I find it very unsatisfying. The philosophers are just not rigorous, effectively invalidating all their own thoughts.

Take chapter 23 from the lecture. It is about "how to live life in the face of death" and possible ways to maximize "value". But it seems to dodge the question what is value in the face of death, which would be the only worthwhile question. Instead it dwells on ways to optimize value, which could be better done with solid economic theory (it is "how to invest actions and time to maximize results").

Why does it matter what value one's life has? The lecture doesn't seem to give an answer. Will there be a judgment in afterlife, depending on our lives value? I don't think so. I think the "value" is strictly a subjective, individual thing, and therefore Philosophy can't help much with it. Perhaps what is useful is to get a better idea of the effects of our decisions (will people be harmed by my life style, that kind of stuff). But then again it seems "hard sciences" would be much better suited to answering that question than ancient poems and philosophy.

Even if you believe in a judgment after life, I guess then you should assign a probability to the kind of god you will encounter and align your actions accordingly. I just don't see how philosophy could help.

Except if you say mathematics is a special kind of philosophy - I could accept that. So in theory there could be useful philosophy, but I have never seen it (except for maths).

Take that lecture: I actually new I could safely skip most of the chapters because they are obviously irrelevant (like the one's about "is there a soul or not"). They are just WAY too shortsighted. I bet they don't have a proper definition of what a soul would be, to begin with.
My friends don't pay for individual texts, but I see your point. (Even though an app like this would likely have to use SMS in the background anyway. And if you're friends aren't hip enough to have an SMS plan, what are the odds they are all going to have smartphones and this little app running? Approaching nil.)

I do take issue with the slow and inconvenient part. It's real time and much less distracting than a phone call. If you stick with it for a few days you can type messages at a surprising rate and it really is faster than a phone call. You don't stop what someone's doing and take over when you send someone a text message. SMS has the convenience of email and the immediacy of a phone call.
Interesting essay, but it sounds like to the author, programming is merely glueing together things that someone else has written, or writing a few pages of code to translate some text from one format to another.

For small-scale projects like that, scripting languages are great. But on larger projects, the advantages of scripting languages turn into disadvantages.

For example, say you're writing a short program in Perl that just has to work right now. If you discover that in some corner case, you need to shove another data member into one of your objects, you don't have to go back and fix your object definition -- you can just cram it into an instance and have done with it.

But large programs are very hard to understand if objects don't have a coherent identity over time. Scripting languages give you the freedom to "just make it work now", but they don't give you the ability to make decisions about your program's inner structure and enforce them. This inner structure is what makes a large program understandable and maintainable.
Now, if we follow the covert purpose pattern of Redux, we need a hacking site for dating.
The most interesting aspect of Game Theory I have encountered are the "Evolutionary Stable Strategies". Not sure if they are even officially considered Game Theory, as I read about them in a Dawkins book.

But I think the concept is extremely important when trying to understand the world around us. It makes the "people are just not rational" aspect irrelevant - evolution in the long run is rational, or rather mindlessly testing all the relevant strategies, so we still need Game Theory to figure out which strategies will be the most likely to prevail.
On my Mac, it's just "md5". There's no "flaw" in a 128 bit random password. You use the word "weaker" as if to mean "not unbreakable", though "unbreakable" is what it is.
By not having an explicit mechanism for combating trolls, it encourages the very best way of fighting them!

Well said. I will endeavor to keep the faith.

There's no question that we must be careful not to break things that seem to be working. I haven't been to Reddit or Digg in over a year, so I have no idea how bad it is out there, but it sounds like HN is still an unusually sane place.
cocoamysql and phpmyadmin can easily be replaced by navicat or navicat lite (free), which is available for linux, osx, and windows. ive found it pretty handy.
How can you not figure out how to make a new Wordpress theme (HTML/CSS) but yet roll your own which will obviously include a theme of its own (HTML/CSS)? While I agree a basic blog system is not hard to write, I think the author just wanted to write his own to be able to talk about it. Making a new theme was one of the first things I did with Wordpress years ago. It took all of five minutes to see how it was done and put the design I had into its own theme. His design is very unoriginal anyway, there's probably even a pre-made theme for WP that would have worked.
Why A Four-Day Work Week Doesn't Work
You're comparing oranges to apples, and depreciating philosophy, which is more science than art. No one seriously discusses papers of guys who believed odd scientific theories from XVI.
Thanks for clarifying your argument/points.

One of the other things that I think HN has going for it is that pg seems to pay active attention to the site and wants to cultivate it to a particular end. Given some of his previous work in bayesian spam filtering techniques, I am inclined to believe (hopefully not in vain) that the HN algorithm will continue to be adjusted over time to weight down the useless stuff and add buoyancy to the interesting stuff. Because it is still very hard for a program to gauge the nature of comments, the best approach is likely to assume that comments and active discussions == good, while lack of comments == bad.

So, I might have too much faith in "the system" (which is a rarity for me), but for now I am trusting that this issue is being managed transparently, and we can all do our part by acting intelligently. I'll also add for good measure, that there are times I have to remind myself to take my own advice ;)