skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I could be wrong, and I certainly don't want to speak for anyone else really, but I think he's talking more in general principle. That you can't assume that more improvement isn't possible, that sometimes it takes a radical change of direction which can't be seen from a position of orthodoxy. I don't think he was suggesting the death of books or similar, more a reflex towards an open mind.

For what it's worth, the conflation of some extreme "post-modern" views such as "Experts do not deserve any special role in declaring what is known. Knowledge is now democratically determined, as it should be.", with some quite distinct and by no means dependent views questioning the value of forms of rote memorization was to me quite insulting. There is a world of possible nuances between views like these.

I am aware that the intention of that particular section was to (in my opinion clumsily) provoke. However to avoid engaging with the issues with intellectual honesty seems to me to be as anti-enlightenment as anything he ascribes to the anti-intellectual movement he apparently sees.
Somewhere the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. I can guarantee that Google will have at least one data center somewhere will one of these two cases will hold true.
I have been running my site through it for some time now as well as testing an uptime monitoring script via Google App Engine someone on Reddit wrote.

If anyone is interested in the very limited data, it is at http://isitupordown.appspot.com/v/urbad with "ActualServer" being the VPS itself, and CDNCache being CloudFlare.
That's why I'd rather just have the regular old "Web" for stuff like this. There seem to be a lot of experiments to 'appize' Web sites for tablets and the like, and while most of them look better than typical Web pages at first glance, they're usually laggy and less immediate than if you'd just seen a regular web page in the first place (a common issue is scrolling.. if I get the dreaded 8 frames per second effect, I'm outta there).
There are serious hurdles to decoupling ourselves from coal, but none of them are insurmountable. At least not hypothetically. :)

One interesting idea I've heard in regards to storing electricity is using electric cars as batteries. Granted, this would require a massive retooling of our grid and our transportation system -- not to mention the question of where we will find all the resources to make so many batteries -- but it's still interesting.

What's troubling to me is all the sensationalism surrounding nuclear, which seems to suffer from lots of near-religious objections. Nuclear is dangerous but even in the worst scenarios (like the Fukushima Daiichi plant) the damage is far less onerous than the continued operation of coal plants.
Looking for some feedback on my project of the last six months or so. Basically its used car metasearch, based in the UK.
Groupon 1% conversion rate for salons
I've seen this particular sentence structure before. It seems to be an American English thing, though the seminal example comes from Shakespeare:

"All that glisters is not gold".
Beautiful comment. There might be some parallels between the entrepreneurial culture of the Valley (drop out of school to go conquer the universe, etc.) and the warrior culture of Sparta and Athens. The spirited youth that Socrates seduced were bent on fame and fortune on the battlefield, and had little time for long-haired hippie freak philosophers.
Suitable Technologies is hiring to build remote presence robots
It is pretty clear that nothing in the Constitution matters to these people. Even when laws are stretched to an absurd degree to accommodate them, they still ignore and break these laws with impunity.

You can't beat corrupt governments inside their own institutions. In our system, the legislative branch is not actually a tool of democratic participation, it is a tool of placation. It has no effective control over the security apparatus. It's Democracy Theater.

It's a sad fact that we won't get our freedom unless we fight for it. No government gives up its power willingly. We see the terror and bloodshed of the Arab Spring and recoil, but that's what it takes to bring real change. Should Syrian protesters stay home because they may be shot or tortured? It depends on your perspective, but telling them to stay home because the government has machine guns and tanks is completely missing the point. Ignoring the law and going to the street is the only way they can win, even if it comes at a tremendous cost.
Apple is playing with fire, they have built an incredible platform for others to build on top of, but a platform requires a level of trust from developers and businesses in order for them to invest in it. Apple seems to be doing their best to destroy that trust. What Apple's greed seems to blind them to is that while, yes, companies gain a lot by building on Apple's platform, Apple also accrues a lot of benefits just by those apps existing, without having to take a 30% cut.
Hard Drive Tear Down (Video)
I think a lot of people are missing the bigger picture here, which is Apple is unwilling to just hand over user details, which the Financial Times and the likes want. The 30% cut "gripe" is just what they are telling the public to try to get you on "their" side. If I recall, Amazon actually had (has) a larger piece of the pie for subscriptions, but they are will to give out User Information.
I think that it's really interesting that all companies that experience explosive growth, harp about their mantra to "keep the startup environment", but 99% of them fail, because they eventually give power to the management and not the engineers.
Too bad they can't be bothered to put any pricing information online. I have a project that needs an editor, it looks really good, AGPL is not even kind of an option, and I'm willing to pay for a license. But heck if I want to deal with "contacting" somebody to start thinking if it's worth looking at.
I use Keepass, but thought it took care of encryption for me. Is there a compelling reason to use additional encryption...?
I'm the person who wrote the comment on Troy's blog about the common 3 password approach, which I suppose inspired the title. What PC Magazine did not write was that I describe how hackers easily exploit it, here:

http://www.filterjoe.com/2010/05/14/the-usual-way-to-manage-...

It's part of a password series with the following central advice for typical home users:

"Use a password manager to assign unique, random 15 character passwords for all accounts, protecting them with a strong master password."

This guide gets them started:

http://www.filterjoe.com/2011/04/14/passwords-guide-without-...

While I'm sure the typical Hacker News community member practices far-above-average password security, the vast majority of people don't see any reason why they should - or if they do, they get overwhelmed by too many complicated rules. From feedback I get, the above referenced guide works for the "average Joe."
Surely you're joking. This has to be the most odious of the objectivists' canards. Just because "doing good" was used as a pretense or excuse doesn't mean it was the perpetrator's actual motive.

I suppose you also believe that most violent criminals were individuals that had only the best of intentions for their victims. Or that Nazis and Stalinists had little interest in power and influence, which were but side-effects of their selfless altruism. That Pearl Harbor was an act of charity, and that the Gulf Oil Spill was caused by attention to detail and an overabundance of interest in the common good.
Slow Furniture
I'm not there any more, actually, but say hello!
"Amazon innovates through optimization of new markets, while Apple innovates through creating new markets"

Well said.
That's not NATO and the Army, that's DHS/ICE. It is entirely possible for portions of the "government" (that mythical monolithic entity) to protect the internet while other portions attempt to destroy it.
ah bless. Apple product announcement and all the websites and bloggers and journalists are scratching their heads.

"How can I turn this into page views. Gee the overview of what he said - been done a million times. What about slagging it all off - well it is pretty interesting stuff though. I know. I'll come up with a trolling headline and use some tricksy language making myself look cool so it's not really slagging them off at all. hmm. got it. Redefine innovate to mean first one ever to think of an idea. Bingo. "

"Damm. Better start thinking about the next release......"
Ask HN: How do you say "Geiz ist geil" in English?
As CF is a genetic disease, how does a game help ?

To teach lifestyle changes more effectively than the written word can.

Genes don't determine outcome by themselves. Environmental factors play a role, a more significant role than most people seem to realize. Ants and bees know this and use this information to create queens from normal larvae -- ie ants and bees are adept at taking the same genes and getting a vastly different outcome. So it can be done.

(EDIT: There's a website listed in my profile which might give you some idea of what I do for my health. It doesn't convey enough though, so that's where a game would come in, assuming I can ever get there from here.)
The choice is often between a shaky regulatory structure and a melee between profit and common good. I usually prefer to take a chance on regulation unless someone comes up with a better option.

Sometimes the third option of going to an industry and asking them to do something does work, but not always. I'd always try it first, but it's not always going to work, and the consequences of inaction can be pretty bad.
My 30 Days Without Drudge Report
It's valid to argue that systems which allocate resources based on political processes rather than market processes ARE in fact less efficient, with the caveat that government intervention can produce either positive or negative externalities (or both). This is why it's a good idea to have the government subsidize scientific research which is not imminently monetizable (positive externality) but it's a bad idea to use the government to enforce domain monopolies (credentialism, cartelism, negative externality).
Yes I agree. I was thinking the exact same thing when I was reading it.
If FT fans expect snappy iOS apps and all they can get is a substandard HTML app don't you think they'll considering ditching iOS when their contract is up?
Quick & dirty deployments on EC2 with Python, Django, Pip, and Git
I believe this is an article you were looking for (written by Joel Spolsky):
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html

The gist is that even though most people only use 20% of the features, everyone's 20% is a different set of features. So by creating a 'lite' version of your software, you actually end up alienating a lot of your users.
My experience the vast majority of the time trying to get people to change away from Word is not that Pages doesn't have the features they want, but that they have to learn a new way to do it in Pages.

This is not to discount that as a valid issue. Taking time to learn new software is time taken away from the real business of the company.

I think Apple could help itself by having a rather large "I used to use Word, how do I do XXX in Pages?" help section inside of Pages (and Numbers and Keynote, though Keynote probably needs it less).
Rubinius 2.0 Preview Release
Thank you for that suggestion.

Here are the two books from that link..

Lean Startups by Eric Ries out mid-september

http://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Eric-Ries/dp/0307887898

and

Little Bets by Peter Sims

http://www.amazon.com/Little-Bets-Breakthrough-Emerge-Discov...
I have also got the same problem within FB: Most of my friends don't care about tech/startups so I'm hesitant e.g. about commenting on Techcrunch.

Your approach sounds interesting, and it corresponds well with how you take on different personalities in different settings in real life.

Do you know of that is what Diaspora is trying to do?
Video: Beginner's Guide to Android
Almost nothing in technology is drawn out of thin air and developed from scratch. If you tried to give credit for every single stepping stone you used to develop anything, all you'd do is confuse the end users, and that's the whole point of what Apple is trying to accomplish: simplify for the user.

Honestly, if I developed rsync, the fact that Apple was using it to power Time Machine would be quite an acknowledgement to me.
mediabistro

"I consider myself lucky. That was not the case with our new owner. Alan Meckler is very much an entrepreneur and he told me early on he learned the hard way to listen to the instincts of the founding entrepreneur after an acquisition. "
I understand that you're trying to say that jocks are to athleticism as geeks are to intellectualism. Your tone indicates that you believe that jocks cannot be anti-athletics. By your initial analogy, geeks cannot be anti-intellectual.

However, I disagree with at least the analogy. The word "geek", in this context, refers to a computer programmer, not an intellectual.
3 Steps to a Great LinkedIn Invitation
I would've liked to have seen this been test driven - I think that's what a lot of people don't necessarily make the connection on with Backbone, and how that affects logic and view separation.

Otherwise, nice.
Husky Starcraft: From Burgerville to 500K YouTube Subscribers in 2 Years
App Engine: Google's deepest secrets as a service
I love their signature:

We are Anonymous.
We are Legion.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
Expect us.
geeks aren't opposed to knowledge or the life of the mind

we're opposed to large organizations that empty out our pockets before we start our career and that old out the empty promise of the life of the mind, finally revealing that it only exists for people whose parents are professors.

the modern criticisms of higher ed are similar to those that came up in the 1960s but pecuniary issues are much more important now because higher ed has moved away from being subsidized by the government towards being financed by private loans.
You are not a student of history.

"No government gives up its power willingly."

We used to sanction treating people as property. We don't now.

We used to sanction discrimination. We don't now.

We used to draft people into the military. We don't now.

It did come to violence once in our history, and I like to believe we learned from that, we've not had another civil war since.

We voted a bunch of folks who were trouncing on the Constitution out of office. The process takes time, the time is built into the system to prevent wild oscillations.

At least in the US, the government's "power" springs very directly from the people, its not up to the Government to 'give it up' or not.

People who cannot convince the electorate that their cause is just will seek to take power by deception, do not be fooled.
Socrates recommends in the Republic that youth spend time in military service and business, and hold off on doing philosophy until they are around 40 and know a bit more about how the world works.
>Oh, so these features are comparable in effort and scale to an entire web browser

Didn't Apple take the KHTML (Konqueror was a full fledged browser) code and then had to release their code because it was GPL. I remember reading about a complaint from the KHTML that Apple was releasing the code as a big blob and this was hindering KHTML integration.
A system like this of sorts is already in place in the UK at theyworkforyou.com. Each MP has a page like this http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/edward_balls/morley_and_out... - which shows their voting record, most recent appearances in public, donors, committees and so on.
This isn't the actual algorithm I am using, but was just an example to make my point.

But true, this isn't perfect, but just makes one step more complex, without having to use an external password manager...
I moved the site to a new name, it now resides at http://www.tiris.org

Tiris is a play on Thales, the first scientist and Iris, messenger of the gods.

I added follow tags feature, like you suggested.

There is a lot more work to be done, but I think at this point most of it is in getting new users and squashing existent bugs.

Maybe one last thing would be the use of the Mendeley API, but that is really one of the last major features I'm seriously considering.

If people will like and use the service, then I'll talk to them about what features they are missing.
The future is often the past repeating itself, but most aren't aware of this.
"And we have the Pentagon recently saying that by policy a 'cyber attack' will be considered an act of war."

I've been wondering about the insanity of this declaration. Surely the Pentagon hasn't the slightest intention of picking a meat war with China over industrial espionage.

Maybe they had Wikileaks and Anonymous in mind. That would make Go To Jail, Do Not Pass Go much more straightforward, and scary.
>Apple currently holds one trump card with Safari on IOS devices though. By restricting HTML5 Audio controls, and rendering engine speed, it prevents games and music web apps from being viable inside the browser.

Relevant link: http://blog.millermedeiros.com/2011/01/ipad-is-the-new-ie6/

It's more than 14 months since Jobs wrote the blog blasting Flash and espousing HTML5 and Safari still has all these egregious issues. I think HTML5 is not a priority for Apple except to pay lip service to it when someone asks for Flash support. After all, it will threaten their lock-in with the App-store and the tithes on Apps and content and makes Apple the middleman. They have achieved what Comcast could only dream of, tax content sold over the internet.
Yep. After using the NY Times Chrome "app" for a while I've gone back to using the web page. I can take in more information at a glance and spend less time paging. It's profoundly ironic that progress in user interfaces in the 21st century is construed as making things look more like their real-world counterparts.
> Didn't Apple take the KHTML (Konqueror was a full fledged browser) code...

WebKit has vastly evolved from the original KHTML library, to the point of being almost an entirely different product. The KHTML team has been pulling changes from WebKit (http://trac.webkit.org/browser) for many years now.
We do this in Australia. The Electoral Commission and its state-level equivalents publish "Informal votes" as part of the results. They are counted as part of the total turnout, but obviously do not go to a particular candidate.

In practice many Australians use these to lodge none-of-the-above votes.
I've sent it to some of my coleagues an article menting this ("Steve Jobs does customer development" [1]). Still, people refused to accept any evidence that getting facts is better than going with your gut.

This is the problem with people that don't believe in facts: they don't believe in the fact that this belief is bad for them.

[1] http://venturehacks.com/articles/jobs-customer-development
Part of "move fast and break things" is a willingness to take big risks. The walls here at Facebook are lined with posters that say things like "What would you do if you weren't afraid?". Far from this being a meaningless platitude, Facebook is constantly willing to make massive changes to their product and potentially alienate users. It's quite a contrast to companies like Amazon and Microsoft which only experience change in a slow, evolutionary, and risk-adverse manner.
Or he never really meant it. It's an alternative hypothesis at the very least.
I don't drive so it's f* all use to me :D, however…

• I can't select "Any" for the manufacturer so doing a simple search based on price isn't possible.

• Having to specify the model is similarly restrictive.

• Clicking through on the popular search links doesn't return a results page but instead pre-filled inputs? WTF?

• Search is chronically slow…

• Logo & tyre/spyglass @ bottom are inconsistent in style.

Good luck with it!
Really cool idea to open this data up to the masses.

A few ideas:

Maybe you could do some sort of "introduction" video or tutorial so that a new visitor can tell what the site is about, use cases, where to find help, etc.

Could you maybe create a master list of "issue" keywords and then scrape the legislative text for these keywords, and then use this to tag each bill? Tags would help with discovery.

*Similarly, scraping the data for Legislator names would also be interesting.
What? MS lost to linux? The server (enterprise) market is the ONLY area where linux competes head-to-head with MS (or anyone really). And even in Enterprise there are plenty of MS shops.

If you bring up the fabled "linux desktop" I'm gonna start laughing. Though I am impressed at what the folks at Ubuntu are doing.

Also, when the iphone was first released Apple had no developer kit (API's). You could download guidelines on how to write a proper web app for the phone. But developers barked (and why not - look at the result) and here we are.

Actually Apple sort of fell into the app markets. They got damn lucky. Of if you want to believe that Steve Job's is divine, he's manipulated the whole transition from web app => dev kit => app store.

I'm glad to see us move fill circle. But you know we haven't. You could always design specific web apps for ios. Just log into the (free) Safari dev center and download the guild lines. How do you think smaller companies who can't afford a distribution agreement with Apple (did you know you can privately distribute your own apps? Of course you have to pay.. ;) ) did it? We wrote the apps in html5/js/css3 (based specifically on Safari) and host them on our own network (intranet & vpn).
I don't imagine that the people with "invented rsync" on their resumés are exactly struggling for income either.

Being able to tell people about your achievements is a lot better than having everyone pre-aware of them anyway IMO.

(Also it should be pointed out that time machine doesn't actually use rsync at all, or anything like it. It uses a totally different and much simpler system, seemingly built on their own FSEvents API and a load of hardlinks.)
Change your thoughts, and you can change your world.