skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Mouse (stock Dell USB mouse), never did fix that, tried 3 different mice, dug up an old PS/2 mouse and made do with that, probably some obscure usb issue, but the usb hard drives and keyboard I had connected worked from the beginning

Strangely I never had any mouse problem under linux for ages, but the only windows computer -alas- under my management lost the ability to use any USB devices a long time ago. USB still works when the machine's running Linux, so the hardware is fine; the USB hardware is still listed in the "hardware manager", but for some reason, USB keys, mice, etc simply aren't anywhere to be seen.

Generally speaking, I almost never have any problem under Linux that I can't solve in a couple of minutes -- except a major hard drive crash maybe. Windows remain, OTOH, a complete mystery most of the time. So it definitely is a familiarity problem.
Sometimes, I may fall down to the mantra that "windows is total, utter shite". But I'm reasonable enough to understand that it's just me who just got completely unfamiliar and uneasy with it.

> Every issue I had was literally a major configuration issue.

That's quite surprising, since I hardly met any machine since 2003 where one of the common live-CDs wouldn't boot to a workable state out of the box.
I quickly skimmed the paper but did not see any references to the Symbolics LISP machine CPUs - which as I understand it had programmable or reconfigurable microcode, which supported the LISP machine features. Even device drivers could be written in Lisp.
The one slide your startup should never have in its deck.
I've seen nonsense upvoted, but typically whoever points out the nonsense is also acknowledged and upvoted. (Edit: when I posted, the above comment was far in the grey.)

Folks, the abuses of governments and corporations trying to enforce copyright doesn't make copyright meaningless and/or evil, and you will not win your fight by embracing lazy e-rhetoric over reason.
I want to point everyone to some videos of Adam Jacob (Opscode) at Velocity 2010. He talks about sysops, webops, devops, etc. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fx8OBeNmaWw

We as system administrators will never become obsolete as long as we continue to progress and develop our skills as technology evolves. This is no different than programmers learning to write code for this evolving technology.
Goldratt may be the only person I have ever regarded as a personal hero. My success is a direct result of his teachings.

He was a great man that has had a profound impact on many, and most certainly on my life. I only regret now that I never reached out to him to express my gratitude.

I too am unusually affected by the news.
An interesting look into that idea is "The Cross Time Engineer" by Leo Frankowski. The main character is an engineer, so he has extensive knowledge, but it's interesting in how that knowledge is applied to medieval times. It ended up being a series of many books.
Thanks for the recap.

Seems to me like matching up FPGAs with FP is a killer application for FP. You should even scale that out with multiple "cores" representing multiple programs running on the same machine. I'm just guessing, but seems like you should see an order-of-magnitude increase on similarly-specified chips. Plus power requirements should dramatically decrease, the O/S should simplify, etc.

Hope somebody picks this up and runs with it.
FTA: "the Apache MapReduce clustered data-processing architecture, ... is written in C++"

Really? Hadoop is pure Java.
However there are totally open formats which you could use on all platforms...

I'm not sure the popularity of the iPad is actually as high as everyone thinks. I think that's the Apple marketing reality distortion field. I see WAY more Kindles and Android phones than I see iPhones and iPads on trains in and out of London where I live.
It reminds me of a Marcin Jakubowski talk at Ted about "Open-Source blueprints for civilizations"[1]

From TED: Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that's only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village (starting cost: $10,000).

[1]: http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski.html
Yes, the following I recommend:

Advanced C++. http://www.amazon.com/Advanced-C-Programming-Styles-Idioms/d...

Any and all Herb Sutter books.

Effective C++, More Effective C++, and Effective STL ... all by Scott Myers.

With those you're 90% set. What you'll need to supplement with thoough is something that covers the 0x standard.
Um, this title is stupid. There's a difference between starting a comment with "I'm not a racist but..." and actually being a racist.
The problem is that there are now a pile more mediums to deliver the message on depending on how much you can afford to pay out.

The information should be uniformly available to all, which I believe is the point of the British Library.

However, having been there a number of times, it's a pain in the arse to use the BL anyway and copying anything for reference (like you used to do down your local library) is virtually impossible now. So it's literally sit and copy the work out.
Most of those are xenophobic, not racist. Most people are, /who actually have to live among the xenos/. Having said that, I'm personally xenophobic /and/ racist.
As the saying goes, "Unix is user-friendly. It just isn't promiscuous about which users it's friendly with." (Rob Pike IIRC). Yes, there is some elite, snob, warm fuzzing feeling about all this, and you know what? I'm elitist, and I think it's all right.
To be honest, if compass doesn't have it I just dont care at the moment.
Read Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. I think someone educated in science and engineering would do quite well, a dolt fully addicted to the entertainment industry, probably not so well.
I don't see the point of all the hype here. It's not exactly innovation. You can do that with windows by setting the shell to:

"iexplore.exe -k http://startpage/"

You have been able to do that since Internet Explorer 2.0 on Windows 95 back in 1995.
Seriously! When I first started hearing about Go, it was always in the context of Ken Thompson's new language (that he wrote while working at Google).
I was thinking of the Global Villege construction set too, they've come a long way (good summary vid) http://vimeo.com/16106427
Brain scans can be more honest and accurate than consumer surveys and focus groups but I don't think brain scans can be projected past the individual to nation-wide sales, unless the nation is made up of the same individual with the same experiences and associations...

To do such a thing would probably take a cross disciplinary approach with market researchers who can fragment society into similar buyer groups for testing and perhaps musicians who can identify different techniques and sequences in the song.
> the relatively small OEM Windows fee is compensated by installing tons of adware, browser bars, etc. from 3rd party vendors.

Now that is user-friendly; you must spend the best part of a day removing nagwares and spywares from a brand new computer.
I don't really see the need for a Compass version right now, but you can try to port it anytime. It'll be easy, since Gridless doesn't have any pre-made grid systems or classes.
Back in the past, we just made knives with what we had. Sticks, couple of nettle stems and a few minutes flintknapping and you had a perfectly good blade. I've actually done it myself.

Metal is way higher tech than is required to survive.
Maybe when it was first announced, Go was considered a language created by people at Google. Now it's more considered a language being written by Rob Pike and Ken Thompson.
With n employees the probability that any given day is a working day is (364/365)^n. So in a year you get 365n(364/365)^n man working days. Maximizing this continuously gives uniquely n=364.5, so either n=364 or n=365 is the best we can do. Computing both it turns out it doesn't matter which.
You'd be at a disadvantage whether you traveled back or forward in time, because you haven't yet internalized the world model of the destination time. Anyone who lives in a particular time takes for granted the ways to operate in that time, and doesn't have to think a) how do I do this, or b) is this even possible. They just do, or move on.
Awesome is composited (well, has support for compositing). You just have to use an external compositor. xcompmgr and cairo-compmgr are two that I know of.
5 principles that will help you succeed with your startup
The project's site is http://openfarmtech.org . I don't think they have their full 50 machines, but what they do have looks pretty interesting.
There is an app called something like Eucalytus which is designed to integrate with Gutenberg and which renders the books stunningly beautifully. It is designed by somebody with a streak of OCD so when you turn the page they snap in but they also react as actual paper would with regards to speed, number and points of curl, etc.

I don't know if there is an iPad edition, but it is really good for iPhone.
If users need windows, so be it. My wife, my mother use Linux being hardly aware of it; it surfs the web, read emails and run OpenOffice, that covers 100% of their needs.
Apparently he has had a mustache, so no guru status without facial hair yet:

http://www.xb360info.com/images/herb_sutter.jpg
I'm not comfortable with the connotation that "regime" brings, but I had the same thought as you.

This technology and equipment will find itself in the hands of Americans if the US government tries to shutdown the Internet Mubarak-style.

However, I think the difference is that, in America, I could walk down to Best Buy and build a reasonably effective "alternative Internet" today, at low cost.
Brave enough to defy Steve Jobs! And y'all said it was suicide. Refreshing!
The future of retailing is here… Almost.
That's quite surprising, since I hardly met any machine since 2003 where one of the common live-CDs wouldn't boot to a workable state out of the box.

Bizarrely, I was able to live-CD boot to my newer machine fine. I even ran Ubuntu as my main OS for about 3 months until there was something I needed to do that wouldn't run under Wine. It worked "ok".

- I needed to reboot it 3 or 4 times a day because the sound would just stop working for no reason I was ever able to resolve.

- I could never get it to use the native resolution of my monitors. I suspect it was driver issues with my perfectly normal nvidia card.

- Video playback, flash, etc. all ran unacceptably slow.

To be honest, I'm willing to accept that not everything will "just work" perfectly out of the box. But if it takes me longer than a 2 or 3 hours to resolve a minor issue, I'm done.

One thing that still befuddles me to this day is the plethora of perfectly earnest looking GUI configuration odds and ends in Ubuntu which seem to have virtually no effect. Anything that I was able to resolve had to be done by opening up an xterm and editing some config file someplace (which usually wasn't in the place pointed to by most of the online help I could find).

I'm honestly interested in what problems people have under Windows or OS X that drives them to Linux. I hear a lot about insurmountable issues with these OSs, hardware that won't work or whatever. But I've almost never had an issue I couldn't resolve by downloading the correct driver for the device, clicking setup.exe and rebooting. The few times I couldn't it was because the hardware was bad.

(though there was one time I was trying to get bluetooth to work on a laptop I had, I did the above, but it borked the machine and I got a bluescreen. 30 minutes of googling gave me the magic incantations to fix it and get me back up and running...turns out the laptop was one of the submodels that didn't actually have bluetooth hardware...meh)

Now finding the drivers can sometimes be hard, especially if the hardware is oddball or very old.
Man and God are having a pleasant discussion about the great advances Man has made in science.

God reminisces about how far Man has come since He first made Man from dirt.

Man gets a little boastful and says "Oh we can do that. Life from dirt? That's easy."

God smiles and says "Oh? I'd like to see it please."

Man says "No problem," and bends down to scoop up a handful of dirt.

God says "No no no, you go get your own dirt."
An axe made of wood?

That is what I do in Minecraft, at least.
Too bad one of the big tests of relativity was to check if gravity does indeed travel faster than light.

This was tested using the orbit of mercury. You see either mercury gets pulled to the location the sun IS, or it gets pulled to the location the sun WAS. In the latter case you will see an oscillation. We checked, and the predicted oscillation was there.

Funny thing is that that oscillation will get bigger the closer 2 objects are together, and this makes very low orbits possible around very heavy objects, and several such orbits have been confirmed to exist.
This is getting heavily downvoted, but I agree with it. I'm as big of a Steve Jobs fanboy as there ever was (seriously!), but he is much smarter/wiser today in some significant aspects than he was 30 years ago.

Apple today is really, really good about not ending up hamstrung because they didn't have a Plan B; part of why they control everything so tightly and don't make themselves dependent on other organizations is because they want to avoid ever being in a position where they're "stuck". If these guys hadn't surreptitiously worked with Sony, the Mac would have been wounded, perhaps critically.

It's good that Steve admitted he was wrong, and he'll go down as one of the absolute greate leaders in business history, but this story doesn't generally strike me as an example of great leadership.
How are defects related to entropy? I don't follow.
Even if it's "Google hype", so what? In the end, superior tools will win on their own merits. People are not idiots to be just blinded by Google's logo; Google is a teenager now, and the hype has worn off, IMHO.

Given _any_ language, I can find some non-empty problem set where that language performs badly (or is ill-suited). That does not take anything away from the language. There is no "perfect" language yet; maybe we'll get one in 5 years... [1]

[1] http://www.great-quotes.com/quote/63358
I just read the book "Way of the Peaceful Warrior". It was a good read. But for your issue, I would take a piece of paper, write down your old habits, then to the very right of them, right down the NEW habits that you wish to overwrite the old habits that you have now. Don't give into your old habits, replace them with new ones.

Then, only focus on the new habits. Don't think back to the past of your old habits. Even more than that, just focus on PRACTICING these new habits. By doing this, you will reinforce your new habits until you essentially forget how to perform those old ones.

In sports, good coaches fix problems with technique (since all of it is habitual motions) by telling their students to do something NEW. They don't tell them to fix this or that. Telling their student to do something new is more constructive than trying to tell them to fix something that already has some flaws to it.

Good luck!
Heh, yep, I'd love to see what the TSA would make of a lump of plasticine with embedded electronics.
What odd about this job posting is this line:

- Background testing in Windows (or other large org) and experience in WTT is highly desired

WTT is an internal technology. How could you have experinece with it if you hadn't worked in Windows before?

Also, the coding here (very possibly in WPF) isn't in Windows itself, its about using WPF to create UX for test tools and test automation.
What matters is not being employed to do research when he discovered it. Not what happens later.
Some pictures are missing from the site and Google cache.

You can see the pictures if you "view image" on the blank pictures. Hard reloading seems to pull some in too.
Not really. Bubbles can easily occur in the absence of credit. I'm not sure how many people were borrowing money in the south seas or tulip bubbles, but probably not that many. Even in the first dot-com bubble (how quaint it sounds to say it now) most of the investing was being done by folks who had money rather than folks who were borrowing it.

The recent housing bubble, on the other hand, yes.
> 4. Ask what is considered good code. Read it. Study it.

Any suggestions?
Not to mention the fact that most times, it's easier to go through the line with a check-out person running the register. Not only do they do the work, but the self check-out lines at grocery stores often aren't set up for buying a lot of items.

If you have more than five things, it's typically easier just to let the check-out person do it for you.
Awesome Cool Magic Lighting Text Effect Photoshop tutorial
Awesome Cool Magic Lighting Text Effect Photoshop few steps tutorial, in this photoshop we learn how to add cool magic lighting effect on text few steps photoshop tutorial,add cool magic effect with lighting text in this tutorial.
18 months for Scalien.
The Dare To Be Digital game competition from a student's perspective
Am I the only person that thinks that's a pretty complicated looking questionnaire to give a user when leaving your service, or does Netflix have unusually intelligent/savvy customers?
From the submitted article: "'The best people are already working,' said Bhoopathy, who said he pays 'above-market' rates for the right people"

In light of the quotation from the submitted article in the first reply here, "The University of Michigan graduates 8,000 engineers a year," how does any one graduate from a state university engineering program show that he or she is one of the "right people" who is worth "above-market rates" to bring on board a start-up's team? The one hiring heuristic mentioned here is hiring someone who already has a job. Is there more to look for? What do people with the best talent do to show their talent? What characteristics are tech start-ups looking for to make sure they hire really talented developers?

Edit to respond to a reply below. I'm glad to hear from one of the interview subjects for the submitted story. I'm not a dev myself, and I am still learning about this industry as a matter of curiosity, having an immediate family member who IS a dev. Sure enough, he has an active personal project in development that he contributes to on GitHub and is deeply interested in learning and education. I was drawn to HN because of Paul Graham's essays on education, and my own work is in the content-development aspect of gifted education in mathematics. I rely on my other family member (also an HN participant) for technical advice when he can cram it into his busy schedule.
Would suggest adding "In Python" to the title.

It's actually a bit amusing to see The Standard Reasons given for the desirability of functional programming when they really don't particularly apply to Python functional programming.

(To the extent that "modularity" and "composition" apply to Python functional programming, they aren't really all that much better than the usual Python tools, used properly, and to the extent that they are it is because they fit into the OO rather than the other way around. Python is an OO language with functional things appended as useful. This is not a bad thing, but it doesn't make it a functional language.)
Perhaps somewhat off-topic, but your branding seems inconsistent. Do you want to call it "Kickertape.com", "Kickertape." or "Kickertape"?
An average person would not be overly useful, but a skilled and knowledgeable individual would have much to offer. A chemist can make nylon, gunpowder, matches, or plastic from relatively easily obtained chemicals even in ancient times, for example. There are also lots of other little tricks that are just as or more valuable. Things like germ theory, medicine, cooking, electricity, etc. In roman times it would have been possible to build telegraphs, without much difficulty, imagine how that would have changed the world.
I wasn't saying that high speed internet is not good, just wanted to be careful in declaring that it'll make everything feel as fast as LAN.

Not to mention the fact that the other endpoint needs to be as fast if you want fast communication.
Well, no, the state that's shared, is shared across goroutines in Go, or across Posix threads in C. Those are not directly exposing the machine, those are exposing a particular type of abstract machine over the actual machine. Contrast Erlang processes which are built on the same machine but have different assumptions (message passing by copying, no shared state)

In fact there are hardware models that fit Erlang better, such as non-cache-coherent NUMA. So from a certain perspective, it's not that C is low level, it's that the CPU was designed to execute C. And the CPU is anyhow general enough to be used in non-C-like ways.

I personally think Go missed a trick when it didn't require channel data to be provably impossible to alias across goroutines. (It could be immutable, pass-by-value, or "unique" such that aliasing is disallowed.)

As for nulls, Go actually doesn't really have them, the poster above is mistaken - Go has zeroed values, and you are encouraged to make them valid-but-empty. That includes zeroed pointers.
I know three very bright, young graduates who have decided to enter the Financial industry (i.e. Algorithmic Trading). One has a Bachelor's in Physics & CS, another a Bachelor's in Physics & Math, and the other is finishing a PhD in Astrophysics. They view the Financial industry as an intellectually stimulating game (I don't disagree), and an opportunity to make 6-figures in their early 20s.

This really disappoints me. Sure, somebody needs to work in Finance for the sake of liquidity and other things I don't understand. But, 35% or so of my social group that are pursuing degrees in Physics are headed to Finance instead of research. I'd much rather seem them expand human knowledge than profit and live an easy life.

My perspective is that of a Junior CS & Physics major reaching towards grad school and some sort of research be it academia or elsewhere.
I'll have to check that when I get back (I'm traveling for a couple of weeks) - thanks!
Ha, you should have seen Alex Martelli while he still had a moustache: http://images-mediawiki-sites.thefullwiki.org/05/3/0/3/32378...
8000 engineers per year? Assuming four years to graduate, doesn't that imply about 32k engineering students? If you add up all three UM campuses there are about 58k students. Engineers make up more than half of all students? I find that hard to believe for a non-engineering school (ala MIT or GT).
I don't remember the last time I was prompted for, literally, any of that, with the exception of Windows Update--which is about as annoying as Ubuntu's nagging updater (that is, not very).

But, then, I don't install crap. Most people do, but most people who do also don't care so much about whether they see those popups or not. It doesn't register to them. So, yes, there is an edge case here where you can install crap and then be offended by said crap's tendency to annoy you...but personally, I rarely see it.
The most interesting bit is the way they even go and tell you in bold exactly how much all of the competing options cost.

My reaction: "Wait, I can get free TV episodes and free shipping with Amazon Prime for $79 a year?"

Not that I'd give up Netflix, mind you. Though I have recently downscaled from three to two discs at a time since I figured out I was watching far more streaming stuff than disc-borne stuff.
I guess the day when we don't have to restart a Mac everytime they update Safari is a forlorn dream.
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=327710
The Politics of Reason
Do you mean "Fire in the Valley", or is it a different book?
I am a biohacker too, actually. I just submitted a paper on how to build a Drosophila lab with little budget, for schools or biology lovers.