skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with this is always that they are "a few years away", or that we can run the entire economy from biofuels "in ten to twenty years".

It has been going on for what, 20 years now? It is never going to change until we ignore them until they actually bring about their ideas.
There are a lot of good reasons to read "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", but one thing I got out of it that I think is applicable to this discussion relates to our concept of "the classics". In fields of knowledge where they is progress the classics are often respected, but seldom read. Nobody learning about physics reads the original Newton[1] because there are better ways to phrase the same insights that are easier for students to digest. So we have fields that make progress like the sciences where students read modern textbooks, and fields that don't the original works of their discipline.

The classics have their place as art and as sources of prestige, but if you're looking to learn things there are usually better places to look.

Not that I disagree with everything Mr. Sanger said, but the truth is a complicated beast.

[1] Some people studying the history of science read the originals, but thats different.
>Did each bombing of London bring the IRA closer defeating the British?

The IRA's goal was never to "defeat the British", it was to force them out of Northern Ireland and unite the island of Ireland in one nation. After the Good Friday Agreement, the British withdrew troops, gave up many governing powers in Northern Ireland, and laid the constitutional framework for a potential future referendum to unite Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in a single nation. In short, the PIRA got most of what they wanted. The Good Friday Agreement was an (largely successful) attempt by both sides to end The Troubles, so to claim that the PIRA was unsuccessful is a bit disingenuous.
What lockin?

1. You can still do whatever you want with your files as they still live on your local machine.
2. You can sync with Windows machines (photos were mentioned as an example in the keynote)
3. You can turn off iCloud
Even if you never become a customer, watching Lean Designs develop via its blog is amazing! It's too bad LD will be a huge success because matt1 is a programmer I'd love to have on my team.
Firefox 4 and up have built-in password syncing (along with bookmarks, history etc). Everything's encrypted client-side, so you never have to worry about unauthorized access to them.
>The notion of disruption is not inherently anti-intellectual. The notion that whatever society or structure under discussion has reached a local maximum, and must be torn down somewhat to be built back up is not to say that a society is worthless, or wrong at it's fundament, but rather that sometimes, change is not possible from within.

I'm not really sure what you mean here. Tearing down what--books? Schools of thought?
Great Post! It's funny you mentioned the Startup Weekend because I just came from one in Durham, NC and instead of paying to be apart of the conference; I decided to volunteer. Based on my experience, I feel that volunteering at those types of events is the best way to meet people because your not burdened with staying in one place and working on one idea.
What’s Your Start-up’s “Bus Count”? Myths of Entrepreneurship and Programming
Telling people they're using a crappy browser is a service. Preventing them from using your site is a disservice.
Ask HN: Ads in apps, what can I do better?
I have an iPhone app and have about 3000-6000 users a day. I currently use mobclix and http://i.imgur.com/GzkDf.png is a summary of what returns I'm getting from advertising in my app.

Are there any ways to get a better return? Less than a dollar a day seems low to me, but I've never really put ads into anything yet, so maybe that's just normal for that amount of users.
Is there a new jock anti-athleticism?
thanks Immad!
Yes. This is why I use a password hash function. The exact Hash function is in my head (and only my head), although it requires a lookup table for random bits. The lookup table is typically a poem, (when I was younger, I would use digits of pi, but I consider that insecure now), but can really be any sequence of words about 50+ that I can reproduce pretty much instantaneously.

The exact hash algorithm is my secret, but the input to the hash is the url of the website that I log into. So, we have

f (the hash function, which is secret).
url
poem (think of this as the "secret key").

so at each password login I compute f(url, poem), to get my unique password.

This is secure against prefix attacks and other guessing attacks, although not cryptographically so (unfortunately, I am unable to memorize a 128 bit pseudorandom string and the algorithm to SHA2, so this will have to do.)

But I'm still paranoid, so my google account uses a completely different password that has nothing to do with any of the above, because access to my google account is protected by 2-step verification and my android phone, and it is a very weak link. If you compromise my GMail account, you can pretty much use "I forgot my password" on every other account of mine. (While 1 of my banks requires email AND phone, since my google account relies on 2-step there is an unfortunate correlation in the failures there. So GMail really is account-vulnerability-complete for me.)
I'd venture that someone could spend a lifetime attempting to read/listen to the 'classics' and still not fully accomplish that goal. So does this mean that we should all dwell in the past and eschew the future? Or that we should eschew the past and focus on the future?
cheers Ben. I'll be swinging by the Quid offices soon.
Being against "politics" in anything always seems to be shorthand for being against having one's world view challenged. This old meme gets trotted out by corpratists all the time: "X process has become so politicised, if only it were more efficient". It's becoming quite tiring and doesn't actually help advance anyone's argument forward - which I guess is the point.
I think you would see this pattern with every hugely successful company. Microsoft took the work that happened in the 70s to make personal computing possible and developed a business around it at the point it was ready for huge growth.

It is rarely good for a startup to be on the absolute bleeding edge of an industry, but if you can catch the tipping point[0] (and execute well), you have pretty much guaranteed success.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316346624/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
I make those all the time, and they are fantastic, especially with a bit of fresh-chopped bacon and a bit of Cotswald cheese.
While I mostly agree, breaking out a comment for every parameter tends to wordiness and to encourage you not to see and explain your purpose synoptically. Like, this:

> Perform an n-fold frobulation.
> @param n the number of times to frobulate
> @param x the x-coordinate of the center of frobulation
> @param y the y-coordinate of the center of frobulation
> @param z the z-coordinate of the center of frobulation

could be "Frobulate n times around the center (x,y,z)." (From http://stackoverflow.com/questions/499890/what-is-your-perso... )

So the example would go "Return text concatenated count times." I'd try rewriting the longer example from a diff message in the OP, except it didn't fit in its own snippet!

A wordy style makes writing and maintaining comments feel like a chore; feeling like a chore, it gets done less. People start finding reasons comments are bad, and taking them for the whole story.
Traditional "Great Books" academia, or even the liberal arts, has never made the claim to produce innovation. It's quite the opposite. They produce students.
E3 2011: Nintendo's New Console Is "Wii U"
iCloud and the demotion of the desktop makes me wonder if we will see a version of OS X that doesn't require a Mac to run. Apple is in such an interesting place at the intersection of software and hardware.
Can a Gmail Tool Make Us More Considerate Email Senders?
I'm quite sure I'm not the only one seeing traces of The Mentor's manifesto [1] here. "Damn kids. They're all alike".

[1] http://www.phrack.org/issues.html?issue=7&id=3&mode=...
An algorithm to read complex declarations in C
I agree with you. When the Wii originally came out, I could see the utility of the wii controllers. Just swing it to play tennis. You could see people demoing it and it just made sense. It was simple and you just go it.

You cannot swing this U-controller to play tennis. It does not lend itself to swinging. I guess it is tuned to a different set of games. I saw a golf demo where the ball was visible on the controller and the greens were on the tv (they were paired). With the controller on the floor, the person swung while standing near the controller. The ball disappeared from the controller screen and ended up on the tv screen. A very complicated/contrived demo (with an expensive controller on the floor). Gone was the simplicity.
My guess is that I'm close very close to your ideal intended reader. I'm a javascript programmer looking for better ways to handle and persist state in my apps.

I think you might be dismissing the above criticism too quickly. Arriving at the page there wasn't much that told me what problems Backbone would solve or what features it offered. It was also rather difficult to actually get to a working version of the Todos demo (it's not linked from the annotated source or the step by step tutorial, as far as I can tell).

In the same way that there's a bolded summary of the idea being expressed at the start of each page of the tutorial, I think a similar summary of Backbone at the beginning of the tutorial would be helpful.
Working without a clock
I want to really emphasize what the parent post says.

I'm currently an undergraduate and I am having an exceptional experience. Two summers ago, I worked with a professor one-on-one to build a compiler for a subset of Scheme. From last summer through to the fall of 2010, I was working at Intuit which is by no means the epitome of excellent software engineering, but I got to live in San Diego, experience a whole new culture, learn to sail, and experience software engineering in the "real world".

Finally, this summer and fall, I get to work with Olin Shivers (yes, him[1]) and some erudite, poignant grad students.

Even in classes, you can take advantage of having an expert to ask questions of, and believe me, I take full advantage of it. I've spent hours inquiring about the LHC, Mandarin idioms, and the history behind and intricacies of English grammar rules during my time here.

The school system is an opt-in, opportunity machine.

carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero

[1] http://www.scsh.net/docu/html/man.html
Kinda puts me off sitting here with my headphones on...
Germans love Groupon almost as much as they love David Hasselhoff
Portrit - Digg/Reddit for Photo Sharing
Startups needs to stop trying to solve boredom
Hi all, I am the Co-founder of Portrit. We released our iPhone app a few weeks back and now we are now ready to promote/show the world.

Portrit is a photo sharing service (Web app and iPhone app) with social filtering, think Digg/Reddit meets photo sharing. Portrit let’s you take a photo and nominate it for one of 10 trophies. These trophies mirror common themes such as Fail, LOL, Artsy, Party Animal, etc. Once a photo has been nominated, any Portrit user can vote on it. At the end of the day (12AM every night), the photo with the most votes in each category wins and is transferred to the owner’s trophy room.

We are very aware of how crowded the market is of photo sharing apps, but we think we're fixing a different problem than our competitors. We are fixing photo discovery and photo overload.

Please take a look at our Web app or iPhone app and let us know what you think.

Thank you,
Jonathan Eatherly
neither candidate is remotely fit for your vote

2 part reply:

1) The neither candidate is remotely fit for your vote argument is valid but should be only be used on a rare instance. For example, in the last presidential election, the 2 final candidates may have not been perfect but it's hard to claim they were both not fit to be presidents, especially given they were both chosen among many others during the primaries, which brings me to my second point.

2) At least here in the US, there are the primaries. Usually the 2 candidates are the products of early voting. If you don't vote, they don't have to appeal to you. If you vote, they have to appeal to you. Over time, the political "market" steers towards those who vote. "People get the government they deserve" - Alexis de Toqueville
I don't understand why changing the way rails does its routing provides any benefit to the application or its code base.

Any rails helpers that depend on default resource routes will break or require special decorators to maintain consistency. Experience rails developers entering your code base will be confused why their newest partial didn't just work, and will have to learn in one form or another the customization this gem provides.

So now you maintain an entire "system" on top of rails for the benefit of reversing the pluralization of models, something a well placed monkey patch could do with less lines and overall maintenance.

All of this of course is limited to my opinion, your miles may vary. Generally, I've learned from those more experienced that quick and dirty will get you farther, faster, than building things you will never use.
It doesn't communicate the same thing. It communicates one example, leaving the reader to guess how to generalize it. Examples are good, testing is good; and specs are good too. It's currently popular to valorize the first two at the expense of the third, but I think this was an overreaction to the older dogma.
Write a glib comment, get a glib response! What are the axes you think are better descriptors?
Candid straightforward talk that makes Amazon look really good to stock analysts.
I know this is 10 days late, but the big factor is not whether you type 'return', it's knowing that everybody else has. When you have implicit returns you can always know that a call to a function will return a value, this is essential to proper functional programming technique.
Why a JavaScript hater thinks everyone needs to learn JavaScript ...
This stuff is the reason I'll never hate google the way I hate Microsoft. Ok, hate is a strong word, but I just don't like or trust microsoft. I think the world is a worse place because of it. I Think the world is a better place because of google, but there's still a healthy portion of sceptisim that comes with that feeling.

The reason I mention this is because right now, it's all about google becoming the next Microsoft, but I don't think that's fair on google.
This is not true with Lastpass and Passpack. I highly recommend Passpack. Very secure.
I don't know how positive a picture this really paints. They had the uptick in the last quarter, but it's overall trending downward pretty seriously.
I wrote up an interesting comparison of Password Managers on this very thing: http://blog.danielfischer.com/2011/05/12/its-time-to-start-u...
In general, using a Taylor series approximation for a function near points where the argument disappears much faster than the function's value is a nice idea. You have to be careful to specify how much precision you're going after, though: using only two terms of the Taylor series isn't particularly precise.

I've gone faaaar the other way (using way too many terms of the Taylor series) to get stupid amounts of precision from such functions in the past. Here's an example in Scheme:

(define n1toN (fromTo 1 100))
; where fromTo returns a list from $< to $>
; 100 terms is insanely overkill
(define invFacts (scanl (lambda (y x) (/ y x)) 1 n1toN))
; scanl is foldl that builds a list of intermediate results

; use taylor expansion of e^x near 0 to reduce numerical error
; empirically, the break-even point for precision is near 0.19
(define (expm1 x)
(if (< (magnitude x) 0.19)
(letrec ((expm1Hlp
(lambda (expts iFacts)
(if (null? expts) 0
(+ (* (expt x (car expts)) (car iFacts))
(expm1Hlp (cdr expts) (cdr iFacts)))))))
(+ x (expm1Hlp (cdr n1toN) (cdr invFacts))))
(- (exp x) 1)))

A really fun one is the Taylor expansion of tanh(x)[1], which includes the Bernoulli numbers. Thanks to Akiyama and Tanigawa[2], there's a cool and simple (not computationally---it's O(n^2)) way of generating the first N Bernoulli numbers.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_series#List_of_Maclaurin...

[2] http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/journals/JIS/VOL3/KANEKO/AT-kanek...
If this is the best you can do with an HTML5 'app' then native apps have a long future. It's buggy, laggy, animations are wrong, graphics are low resolution in places, and user interface widgets are odd and non standard.
Web Real-Time Communication [YouTube video]
Fernandoprats - Immadencity, Buenos Aires Contemporary Architecture
Nintendo Celebrates Zelda’s 25th Anniversary in Grand Fashion
I've had situations where I'm calculating a ratio or something for each member of a result set, and needed a "safe_divide" function. Mine was much less complex than this one, but returned 0 if the denominator was 0.
WSJ and Al-Jazeera Lure Whistleblowers With False Promises of Anonymity
I actually comment even simple code because comments show up a different color in my editors. Comments for me are often an additional mnemonic trigger rather than necessarily a store of detailed information. It's like indenting or bolding text. It helps with "chunking" while skimming code.
I wish points were visible so I could see how many upvotes this got. Didn't point visibility get put to a vote by pg not long ago -- last I saw the "yes" votes were way ahead. (?)
The goal is very noble and I'm all for it, but there is this problem that the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow, and electricity isn't infinitely transportable, nor easily stored.
It's expensive to make things cheap. Usually when something becomes cheap quickly it's because demand is high and producing that thing is less expensive. In the case of new energy sources, reaching parity with the grid is very difficult: Not only are technologies like coal already operating at scale, they are also subsidized by the government.

If there was a strong public demand for renewables grid parity wouldn't be that far off. Unfortunately, we're a little too obsessed with other things at the moment, like politicians posting lewd photos online or which television shows to DVR.
Why Hangover II is a crash course in copyright
like Hangover I (not II) was a crash course in comedy, this case is a little crash course in copyright.[i] The tattoo artist, Victor Whitmill, says he has a copyright in Tyson’s tattoo, although it is not clear that he really does. Here’s why.
Jailbreaking will take care of the first issue (can't wait to jailbreak my iPad...).

I agree that there are some issues with it (it crashes frequently enough that I care), but, overall, I've found, overall, it is much better.

Features I use daily:

* Pinboard current page
* ReadItLater current page
* Readability
* Side-load to DropBox to pick up on my Mac
* Youtube inside the browser
* Ad filters

And so on...
Sure, i mean all of these things are about the process which produces stuff. So i mean the institution of the book. For example, that the majority of academic publishing be measured in books (some fields definitely do this). Or that the "great" works of literature are inaccessible to the vast majority of the public and that there are more worthwhile things that could be done with one's time than reading "War and Peace".

That is not to say that reading "War and Peace" is wrong, or that it has no value, but that we should reassess whether reading "War and Peace" is somehow a metric of serious thought. This is the same sort of bullshit that people doing pop culture research have had to deal with for years. Whether it's research into comic art (and yes there are research libraries for cartoons – i spent 3 years working in one), contemporary art, or journalists using twitter, their existence is not (inherently) a zero-sum game with the old order. It is a threat to orthodoxy, but it is not a threat to academic inquiry or knowledge.

It'd be like claiming that Martin Luther was a great threat to religion and faith, because he sparked the reformation.
They use VigLink to add affiliate tags to the external links of the sites that use them.

Some mangled affiliate links cover the cost for 10th largest traffic site nowadays?
Twitter Blog: Link sharing made simple
> but the chrome team is mostly reponsible for adding websocket, the file api, web workers...

Oh, so these features are comparable in effort and scale to an entire web browser and HTML5-compliant rendering engine then?

By your logic, Chrome is essentially KHTML + HTML5-fanboy-features. I guess that must mean Apple has been shipping a 2002-era build of Konquerer with each copy of Mac OS X then, huh? Because clearly WebKit itself is so minimal in comparison to the rest of Chrome as to be positively technologically inconsequential.

I hope you can see the irony of your remark in light of the original point I was making.
Interesting cadence to your comment, but the same could have been said of petroleum infrastructure before we had petroleum infrastructure.
I hadn't heard of that thank you for pointing it out. This does make things look more optimistic. I would still define it as vendor lock-in though. The iTunes binary might be available for Windows, but Apple still claims control over your experience and your data.

While they are in control of your data, you will be faced with a question every time you upgrade your hardware. Do you want to interact with your own documents and music using a clunky interface, or do you want to use an interface that makes you feel more in control and happier?

The above question is a little contrived, but I believe that it is fairly close to the truth, Apple has always been a company based on making you feel good.
We're really nowhere near it at all. The basic economics is that the app market and the exposure from actually being in the app market is just far too massive for that to happen.

I'm also amazed at how often the myth that one day we'll all be using really crappy Html5 apps continues. Html5 compared to native apps done by an average developer just plain sucks, no amount of 'HTML5 web apps == AWESOME!' pretending and wishing will ever change that.

We'll have HTML6 in, what, 2025 maybe? So maybe all the wishes will come true then.
Yes, but in the last 30 years, we've went from prohibitively expensive 4.5% efficency cells in 1954 and $1500/watt in 1955 to a test 500kW installation in 1977 to $9.00 in 2007 to, in an ideal situation, 8.5 cents per KWH today.

http://inventors.about.com/od/timelines/a/Photovoltaics.htm
http://greenecon.net/understanding-the-cost-of-solar-energy/...
http://www.reddit.com/r/Frugal/comments/hn7jn/while_were_on_...

We could start building a 100% solar/nuclear solution in the US today. The technology is there, and it would only be the construction time. Our energy costs would go up, but not significantly. However, if the technology keeps on this curve, unsubsidized solar will be cheaper than coal soon.

We aren't doing this today because the power companies know that the curve is coming soon. Why invest prematurely, outside basic research projects?
Rate my startup: CarSpy
Square Raising New Round, Joining Billion Dollar Valuation Club