skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The only problem IMO is it's not vary reliable without something to detect the fan is still working.
I agree. It is the lack of cohesion that is killing them in the 'cloud'. Not just in the sense that there isn't a unified UX for all their stuff (though that is also true), but they are so non-unified that they often have multiple products that do the same basic things, causing end-user confusion and quite simply too many choices. [eg. Sync, Live Mesh, SkyDrive... which is right for 'me' if I'm a non-techie and don't understand the subtle differences in each? Who knows... I'll just use Dropbox!]

(FWIW I'm a big fan of Windows Live Mesh, but I've known more than a handful of non-techies who were just confused by it when I suggested it due to the related-but-different products that pop up when they are trying to learn more about it).

This does seem to be a problem they are aware of given the unification work they've done with the products I used as an example, but they still have a very long way to go on this.
in other words, why apple makes such good looking products
wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole
There's an article somewhere about how the HN algorithm works. I think it ranks articles roughly speaking according to how many upvotes they received over a given time period. So you need sustained and concentrated interest to keep them up on the first page. I think I have also seen references to some topics which are made to "fall" faster than others because otherwise there is a tendency for them to get upvoted to such a degree that they clog up the main page (but someone may correct me if that is not the case).

But it sounds as if you might not be even seeing the front page. Click on "Hacker News" not "new". The latter is just a list of all articles that get submitted, many of which haven't made it to the front page yet.

To get it to the front page it should be on topic, it must have a catchy enough title that people will want to click on it, and the article itself has to be interesting enough that people will upvote it. I think there is a slight disadvantage for articles that are really interesting and take a long time to read, as by the time people have finished reading them, they will have already fallen off the edge of the world. But no one ever claimed the world was fair (I believe it is almost universally accepted that it is not flat though).
Big-O doesn't imply anything, it talks about functions, not algorithms. There are no laws of the English language that say a big-O bound implicitly refers to the function f(n) = max { T(input) : input is of size n }. Or with hash table insertion it's more like f(n) = max { T(h, input) : h is a hash table of size n, input is of size g(n) } where g is some Theta(log(n)) function. The proof that there's no guarantee that big-O notation refers to some worst-of-worst-case running time function is that people are using it in a way that makes you angry.
What I see as the big strength is how easy it is to set up mod_php - possibly in no small part due to how most Linux distributions have solid defaults for mod_php5 and keep it up to date. The things you listed I'm not so sure about.

I don't think it's the syntax that's forgiving as much as the type coercion. JavaScript is actually more forgiving syntax wise, for example - PHP throws a fatal error when a semicolon is missing at the end of a line, JS interpreters fill it in. Unlike PHP, though it will throw a ReferenceError and die upon referencing any undefined value. PHP just coerces that to something falsey... they'll both die trying to call undefined functions or methods.

I don't see how PHP is not more readable than Python or Ruby, either. There's really nothing about the language itself that makes it readable or better for beginners.

The docs are definitely good, I agree. I think they need to do something about the outdated and not-so-well curated comments on each entry though.

Near ubiquity is good, but it also makes a lot of good PHP resources get lost in horrible noise. WordPress, for instance - if you search to solve anything, you find scores of outdated tutorials offering solutions to problems which have been solved by the official branch for years. Then, you find more blogs blog-spamming the incorrect solution... so it's actually easier to search for and find Rails or Django help, in my experience. A large percentage of the PHP code out there is notably terrible, for whatever reasons.

The 'interpolation' would be called templating. You can do this in most languages (erb for Ruby, for example) but it's not always considered a good idea to give the template language logic capabilities. It happens that this is the default for how PHP and Apache work together, and I think the straightforward concepts of files, directories, scripts it's easier for beginners to understand and work with than framework style URL routing.

The large software eco-system centered around tools consumers use such as WordPress or joomla has helped PHP grow.

Set up is easy, but the majority of PHP users probably never set up their own Linux boxes with Apache anyhow. If they wanted to, though it would be easier than say, Django since last I checked Ubuntu was still providing Django .96 packages.

The ease of setup comes from every shared host offering PHP and MySQL. If they all offered Python, Django and Postgres support, with cpanel configs and PhpPgAdmin or the like, people would magically find Django really easy to set up. That's just how it goes when you have lots of market share.
without visible comment scores, this thread is not as useful as it could have been.

For computer security fact-wrapped-up-as-fiction, the "Stealing the network' books are very entertaining, realistic depictions of 'the perfect hack'.

For scifi, I enjoy collections of short stories such as the "new writings in SF" anthologies. But they're hard to get hold of, so any "best SF" collection of short stories will serve you well.

For postmodern fiction, Haruki Murakami's Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is a great read.
Local move of Singaporean - Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) Singapore
Galaxies are not actually moving faster than light. The distance between them is growing at a rate that would suggest FTL speeds because the universe is expanding.
My reply, I think it may not have made reddit as I've never posted before:

I'm calling BS on this whole thread. The reason for the breakage is in the green circles, not the red ones: http://i.imgur.com/EYSo5.jpg

The 2007 cables had small buttons on the sides that you had to press to disengage the connector from the device. This meant you had to pull on the body of the connector to remove it. The 2009 design removes the buttons and the catches, which means the plug can be removed by yanking on the cable. It's the yanking on the cable that is causing the problem in the image, you can tell because the wire sleeve is pulled back from the connecter rather than split horizontally, which is what would happen if it was a strain relief issue.
Yanking from the cable rather than the connector affects all cables. Apple connectors typically fit very snugly in their sockets (which is a good thing generally) which means it takes more force to pull them out, consequently pulling out the wires as well. It's not a problem unique to Apple by any means. Ever have a pair of headphones that start to crackle when you touch the connector? Same problem.

Apple cords do indeed have strain relief, and they are fine for typical use. They may not hold up as well as a longer relief when bent at high angles consistently, but generally they do the job they need to do when sticking out the side of a device.

Though I like the button design, if I were to guess why Apple removed the buttons, is because I'll bet people were still pulling on the cords to try to remove the connector and doing far worse damage to cord and/or socket due to the mechanical connection between the two.
But who trusts you or me, anyways?
How the heck do you hold the black hole in place?
> If there is a rigid/semirigid rotor head like on [sic] models

Like on what models?
After the big run up in early June, it looks like bitcoin prices in USD are drifting back towards 19. Today was a high volume sale that briefly dipped to 20, then back up to 24 within the hour.

Given that spot market prices can be very volatile, I think we need real-time bitcoin price widgets where ever goods are priced in bitcoins, or a futures market in bitcoins to provide stable-for-some-time-period prices for miners and actual users.
The compiler could've been compromised too, as said by Ken Thompson.
> With people like Lenin, Stalin and Jeltsin as your predecessors you don't really start off good.

At the same time, they did set the stage for a dramatic recovery.
How do I find the right technical development partner?
My name is Patrick Kelly and I am leaving my amazing job at a Goodby, Silverstein and Partners, (www.goodbysilverstein.com) an advertising agency in San Francisco, to pursue an idea and start a web based company. I have been running a department that I founded - but think the idea that I am playing with has some pretty fantastic potential - and I want to find out.

I have been vetting the idea with a number of people already and have gotten amazing feedback and it is time to try and build a company around it.

The rub is that while I have worked on building more than a dozen sites over my career, I have no real technical skill and definitely no ability to code or architect the designs and functionality that I think will make the company great.

As I head out and start to try and find the right technical person to help me in the process, I am working my network very hard but am afraid that I don’t know exactly where to find the right technical person/team to get everything off on the right foot.

Does anyone have suggestions of where to find, meet, source, scour, bribe, convince and/or kidnap someone amazing?

I have begun the process of signing up for meet up groups and will continue to network like crazy but would love any advice or leads that people suggest.

Thanks in advance

PK
They already have that. It can cause problems when the DRM circuitry screws up inside the laptop and causes the brick or the laptop to refuse to charge. It just makes things more unreliable.
Well reasoned article.
I bring my Air to and from work every day; at work I have a power strip under my desk, and it's easier to access from the front (and also less of a hassle to unplug and replug every evening and morning). At home I have a power strip under the front of my couch; when I have the laptop on my lap on the couch the cord goes out the back, but if I place the laptop on my coffee table, the cord comes back to the front.

Do I represent a common use case? Dunno...
Yeah, over ten years and five laptops between myself and my partner, and maybe seven or eight power adapters (we've had spare adapters for some of our laptops), we haven't had any problems with fires, sparks, etc. As the parent said, though, "Not saying it doesn't happen"- just not to us, apparently.

I will say, however, that the MagSafe design, even lacking strain reducers as discussed by the OP, has proven its value on more than one occasion. Besides the obvious advantages (i.e., tripping over the cord no longer sends one's laptop flying, nor does it cause catastrophic damage to the power port), I'm personally fond of the fact that you can step on the adapter all day long without damaging it. We had to replace an adapter once back in the day after accidentally stepping on the little round connector part, and bending it irreparably out of shape.
I had a 2005 PowerBook with the same adapter, and, despite the slightly better strain relief, it still broke after a few years. And, like another poster mentions, it caught on fire (tiny tiny fire, really just the next step up from smoldering). That was... not so awesome.
Bujagali - Rdio's javascript templating system
I guess I'm the only one who hasn't had any problems with a Mag Safe adapter in the 3 years I've owned a MacBook Pro?
Ask HN: What are good ways to come up with a domain name?
I've some ideas for Web apps. I'd love a pithy domain that immediately evokes the perfect image of what the app is for. However, picking a domain name composed of common descriptive words almost always gives me something that's already taken or a little too clunky.

How do you conjure up a good domain name? What are some good heuristics? I've a yak-shaving idea of writing a script to generate names from words, phonemes, and synonyms, but I bet there's a more methodical way to do this.

Likewise if you go the nonsense syllable route; are there any guidelines for inventing something striking yet not too puzzling?
Enterprise Ireland: Y Combinator modeled accelerator in Europe
As a college student, I've been thinking about working as a consultant so I can survey a variety of different businesses in a variety of industries and see how they operate. Seems like it might be a good preparation for being an entrepreneur. (See this comment of mine for further justification: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2635564.)

Does this sound like a good plan? What would the best consulting firm to work for be? Ideally I'd like to see as wide a variety of businesses as possible, and ideally they'd be well run businesses I could steal ideas from. But even, say, seeing a bunch of poorly run businesses seems like it could be really valuable.
Duh, Bor-ing
I love this essay too. When I was looking at security issues that were going to arise by creating 'executable content' with Java it reminded me of the sheer magnitude of the problem.

In re-reading it I was struck by this comment:

The moral is obvious. You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.)

Ken was one of the people Google hired who didn't have to get 'slotted' (for obvious reasons) and Bill Coughran held him up as the "the kind of engineer Google wants to hire." The juxtaposition is delicious.
Is this really an issue? I have never heard anyone say anything but good things about mag-safe adapters.

I keep wishing the patent would expire so that all consumer devices could use them.
[this reads like they copied a press release]

anyway, do error rates go up when you start removing the redundancy?
Removing context in order to make your argument more valid....real classy.

Actually, no, I was paraphrasing what my imaginary twelve-year-old self would say, based loosely upon what you claim to have said.

Regardless, what you claim to have said is, frankly, stupid. Cold showers will not prepare one for Navy SEAL training. A statement like that is precisely as dumb as what twelve-year-old me would have said.
better title: "microsoft employee doesn't like chromebook"
Los Pitufos:película inspira a pueblo español que se pinta de azul
Dawn is also quite interesting because it will be studying some of the largest objects in the Solar System that have never been visited by spacecraft before. We've studied the moons of all of the planets in detail, even the tiny ones. Yet Ceres and Vesta are entire worlds, with internal differentiation into a core, mantel, and crust, and complex surface features such as faults and perhaps even volcanoes. I suspect that there are many exciting surprises waiting for us when we finally get a good look at these dwarf planets.
That was just an example. Scrap paper was also mentioned, but I see that you ignored that.
No offense, but that response just makes you come off like a dick. Do you really think that he's implying that you work in the shower?

The opposite interpretation is that one is perpetually showering/tubbing in order to be in a state of relaxation. That is equally absurd.

You can turn back at any point.

That depends entirely on the situation. There are plenty of ways to climb, backpack, etc. where one has no choice but to continue. Less ridiculous climbing may involve social pressure to stay committed. Furthermore, all of these activities involve, as has been said elsewhere, real personal gain: strength, health, mental well-being, and real life experiences. Getting yourself chilly for five minutes in the morning is just playing around.
I don't see how it's any more difficult to set-up a printer with a Chrome device than it is with a regular desktop, especially for a random noob user. It's just not that hard, even if you opt against Cloud Print.
Unless you've actually used a decent newsreader like trn, It's difficult to appreciate just how much we've given up by moving most online discussions to the web. Loss of threaded discussions isn't the worst of it -- many of the web-based discussion boards I frequent don't even properly track which messages you've actually read, using a vague "last time you visited" heuristic instead.

I miss being able to catch up on all my discussion topics using almost nothing except the space bar.
I think that the whole concept of lectures is broken. Twenty years ago they were appropriate, but now we have YouTube and PDF files and Print-On-Demand. These technologies means that universities don't have to employ lackluster lecturers, but can instead create highly-crafted lecture videos (in the style of Khan Academy) and comprehensive lecture notes. Certainly these materials will cost a lot to produce, but they can be used year after year, with only minor corrections for the changing course syllabus.

If a university would create proper learning materials and drop the lectures, there would be a lot more time to have more discussion-based and hands-on learning.
Is "Business Accounting for Dummies" (as recommended in the accounting video) really the best book? It looks like it's meant for the UK, as well as being both out of print and not very highly rated on Amazon.. Maybe you meant "Accounting For Dummies"?
DailyLit: MBA Mondays, book by Fred Wilson
All Pages version: http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/how-i-learned-to-l...
Ironically, the cohesion has little to do with technical knowhow or marketing. Microsoft effectively lost a decade due to their anti-competitive practices and maneuvering in the late 90s. They were maneuvering to unify the desktop/Internet and easily could have.

Instead, the penalties resulted in a lot of backtracking and some very cautious positioning that cost them the competitive edge while tiptoeing through the legalese.
i actually prefere this connector because on the classic on if I and sitting on the floor crosslegged with my laptop on my lap the old cable pops out.
The work of the Data Liberation Front team is one of the big reasons I'm willing to use Google services in the first place.

I appreciate not having my data held hostage. Google isn't perfect but the DLF team represents an effort to continue to improve, and they appear to make good progress.
Is this the same idea as stunnel, but meant to scale to more connections?
I'd agree with the gravity of the problems described, but I sincerely disagree with the almost-inevitable turn to optimism towards the end. "Gilding insists he is a realist". Straightfacedly Friedman hands on the assurance that given the choice to trod on as always or change, we'll suddenly wake up and give up greed, sloth, consumerism for some happiness-based economy (which is bullshit, in a catatonic collapse nobody's happy, no one except a few mavericks I guess).

How is that supposed to happen? I get it, miraculously, so we don't have to get off our precious asses now and can wait it out till the crisis sweeps us off into some kind of all-together-now rapture.

Already the ice-caps are melting off, within my lifetime world population has doubled, food-prices are rising, life for very many people in this world is starting to get more difficult, bit by bit. Yes, there is technological advancement, yet the price of energy has steadily been rising, at the same time fundamental world problems are on the rise as well. It does not suffice to assume that we invariably will find technologies in time to mitigate all these problems. We are in for trouble and very many people will feel the consequences.

How harsh they'll be is hard to tell in advance, but there's reasonable evidence that they (and arising social dynamics, i.e. war) could be lethal to the social and economic world system du jour, when given several decades to do their magic.

So it's better to think ahead and take action, as individuals and as society.
Interestingly enough, I'm probably more likely than most people to draw that connection, having been a firefighter for a very long time... and something of a fan of the history of the fire service and related topics. I've read many accounts of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire... and the similarity between the two names never crossed my mind.

Obviously it does for some people... after all, you picked up on it. But I strongly, strongly suspect that very few people will look at Triangle Startup Factory and make any sort of connection with that incident. Hell, I doubt most average folks off the street even know about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
You really think so? I mean these are cables, there's no secret how to make them and they've been making them for decades, so they'll probably know what they are doing. There's no user experience on cables. It doesn't seem so far fetched to me.
Test for microwave leaks by putting a cell phone inside and calling it?
Are Kurzweil's predictions of human-level AI flawed?
> if I were to guess why Apple removed the buttons

Seems more likely that the ID people wanted a smaller connector, though that's just speculation.
I'm so with you and I happen to have a project where I'm creating a system that can "slot in" to this new kind of education mix I think we're heading towards. Death to mindless traditions! The future is now if we let it. ;)
Google Maps on Android has some offline caching now, so sometimes it does work. (Though as well as if it had the whole database.)
Before this "cloud" nonsense came along this was known as operating ones own services, and is still done by many.

However, it is a pain. I remember sitting in a hotel lobby in Saigon next to a guy who was trying to revive his ailing mail server in London while in the middle of his honeymoon. I myself am still serving web pages and forwarding email for a handful of friends and family. When things go wrong (despite many levels of redundancy) I have to sacrifice my valuable time for what could be somebody else's problem. It sucks.
This reminds me of a talk by economist Robin Hanson: http://www.vimeo.com/9508131

Although his presentation is pretty futuristic, a good chunk of it focuses on the economics of machines replacing people in tasks.

His argument goes like this: There's a range of tasks that need to be done in an economy. Some of them are more efficiently done by machines and some by humans. Together, all these tasks grow the economy, and over time machines have been able to do a greater portion of these tasks efficiently. Also, machines can be mass-produced, while it takes longer to scale and train people. While the growth of machines has augmented humans for most of history, it's certainly possible for machines to replace humans in many tasks, such that the per-capita income of humans goes down even as the economy grows.
I should pay more attention to the prices for bitcoin. I bought $10 worth back when they were roughly $1/btc. If these things are getting up to the high 20s in USD, its turning into a good investment. Should have bought more back then, but I didn't think it was going anywhere.
How to design a logo using Adobe Illustrator
Use it at work. I miss Exchange.
Yes, it talks about functions, and when used in the context of algorithms it describes the asymptotic growth of the function that describes the runtime behavior of an algorithm. There are no laws of English but there conventions of Computer Science that say when you say an algorithm is O(n), that implies that in the worst case, it will be linear.