skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even the 'free' service might make money based on people-served, or recommendations-delivered.
It's pretty clear that Wikipedia's eventually death/massive reorganization will come about over four easily recognizable flaws:

(1) rejecting articles for notability.

(2) no advertising

(3) reliance on a tiny population of unpaid editors.

(4) allowing anonymous edits.

Google tried with Knol but they focused on (2), (3) and (4) when in actuality the biggest weakness is (1) due to Kryder's Law.

What Google (or Microsoft or some startup) should do is create a third party wikipedia extension, call it notapedia (or whatever) and have it spider wikipedia and keep a fork of any page deleted for notability reasons.

Of course that's just the tip of the iceberg. People will be able to make their own (notable or not notapedia) info pages. Notapedia will hit a critical mass and the killing blow will come all at once as wikipedia is forked and most of their editors enticed with revenue deals.

Having swallowed it's father (patriphagicide?) notapedia grows even faster. Info pages are created for nearly every person on the planet, becoming the anti-facebook that Zuckerburg envisioned but replacing the real facebook and twitter and flickr and linked in and everything else as well. Businesses and government agencies will check your id against the datestamped photos of you on notapedia. An enormous network of private and government databases will be setup to work as extensions of notapedia.
That's an awfully cute straw man, but not really what's being discussed here. My calling for some basic human decency is no more "oppressive" than my remarking that hey, people who kick puppies or don't say thank you to waiters are pricks.

Lots of people actually, voluntarily, want to participate in social networks based on people's real names. You don't want to let them do that.

Cramming people who are unable, for their own safety and well-being, into a ghetto cut off from the larger world is hardly a kind thing to do. For one, it deprives them of the ability to open communications with allies whose circumstances allow for help or resources to begin flowing.

No, it doesn't, because there are lots of places online for people to "open communications with allies whose circumstances allow for help". In fact, most of the web is accepting of pseudonymous or anonymous socialization. (You're on one of many such sites right now.)

Facebook (and now Google+) are an exception, and Facebook, at the very least, is popular. That doesn't make it a public utility--it's still a private service that people are free to use or ignore. No one's obligated to use Facebook and no one on Facebook is obligated to truthfully divulge any more information than they want.
I have this book as well has "How to Prove it." They cover virtually the same material, however I found the prose in "The Haskell Road" to be stilted and sometimes confusing. I got much more out of "How to Prove it."
A band director in middle school once said something that stuck with me to this day. "Practice doesn't make perfect - practice makes permanent."

If you keep practicing the wrong way, you'll never improve.
Also you're not female. Have a feminine name in a male-dominated environment adds to suspicion (is that a guy masquerading as girl?) and (mostly harmless and unintended) gender-bias comments or, what I feel is even worse, special attention.

The larger reason I don't post publicly with my real name is that, quite frankly, what I have to say in public needs to be in context. If you google my name and it comes up with a bunch of comments, and you don't take the time to read the context then it's very, very easy to come to a false conclusion of a person's beliefs.

Disclaimer: I use my real name in g+ but I don't post publicly and disable my posts to be shared. I'm no dissident but I value my searchable-privacy and so do my friends. I post more in g+ than I ever did in Facebook because of the circles feature.

Last quick note: I've had seemingly innocuous content that was searchable on my name used against me, a long time ago. I've since taken great care to remain anonymous and have found that my use of public forums is far more free and enjoyable and I have no issues at all speaking with others whose names I do not know (HN as a case).
The downside to that is that if you click through all of the images, pressing back in your browser won't take you to the previous page; instead you have to press back many times, cycling back through all the images, until you eventually are taken back to your previous page.
I'd wager it also has much to do with nerds not knowing how to be 'dumb', and thus, not being able to forge meaningful connections with people of lesser mental capacity.

Having interests and vocabularies that are alienating to people who struggle to keep up can often do just that.
Hmm, it took me about 6 months to get through SICP the first time. I worked on it probably about an hour a day and more on weekends. I wouldn't worry about trying to understand everything the first time through. I got much more out of subsequent readings.
Does Ctrl-C and so on not work in Gnome 3 anymore? Maybe I misunderstood what the OP was trying to say. I thought he meant a key that changes the menus.

Also Ctrl-C and so on are only keyboard shortcuts. Most "normal" people probably don't know about them.
See also ZFlow for a JavaScript Coverflow:
http://code.google.com/p/css-vfx/wiki/AboutZflow

Demo:
http://css-vfx.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/examples/zflow.html
Good article, well sourced. Thanks.
Booooooring. I'd much rather just battle against dystopian strawmen as a cover for my lack of interest in voting or knowledge of civics.
A much better understanding of what the computer is really doing, a much bigger bag of tricks to pull out when faced with a hard problem.

Post SICP, I have no fear of recursive algorithms, or closures, and a healthy understanding of asynchrony. So the kind of JavaScript programming that a lot of people find advanced is very natural to me.

A few months ago I implemented a JS library to parse a certain format using some fancy recursive JS combinators. It's fast, it's innovative, and it will be used on a few top-50 websites pretty soon. Internally, the thing is all about the techniques I learned from SICP -- the intermediate format is basically Scheme in JSON form.
First, don't be afraid to fail and make stupid mistakes. Then, after you've made those mistakes, examine them and eliminate them. I think the author is talking about the latter part, and that often this process of removing mistakes is all it takes to be good at something. This idea could be reassuring to you if you tend to think that you need a certain genius that you do not have in order to excel. All you need is the ability to recognize your mistakes and the will to get past them.
Can you please elaborate this statement that "Cookies disappear all the time for reasons that have nothing to do with users nuking them"? I'm genuinely interested to understand in which cases cookies disappear.

EDIT: But it is possible to detect case when cookies are intentionally deleted. Correct?
My vote is for the furiously masturbating idea
The real freedom of choice is that some people can choose to use websites that enforce the real name rule, and some people can choose to use websites that don't enforce the real name rule. If you don't want to allow any website anywhere to enforce the real name rule, you're taking that freedom away from people who want that environment.
It's interesting to me that almost everyone here is using a pseudonym yet discussion in Hacker News tends to be civil, constructive and informative.

The issue clearly isn't anonymity. Hacker News does several things to weed out the trolls. First, user names are unique (which causes many to pick out a pseudonym even if they don't want to), allowing comments to be tracked by identity. Second, HN uses a reputation score to downgrade habitually unconstructive commenters. As a result, people who would be rude on slashdot are more restrained here because the culture doesn't reward name-calling or opposition without reason.

Facebook achieves the same end by allowing its users to limit what they see and from whom and not really caring much what they call themselves unless they offend for another reason. Google has the same mechanism but has chosen to concentrate on the least important aspect of social networking - the names people use - forgetting the most important aspects: fostering a culture of civility and allowing users to control what they see.
This is coming from a non-biological background, and hence may contain ridiculous ideas:

Would it be possible to devise some sort of virus which could somehow 'checksum' a given cell's DNA, and trigger cell-death if it doesn't match?

I've no idea if that is even possible, or whether it'd require a custom virus per-person (or whether you could add some sort of 'training stage' by introducing it to clean host DNA first)

Another tricky problem would be making sure it hits every/enough cells to kill the other virus, but slowly enough that there's time for the body to replace them.
And of course, that the virus checksums itself regularly and self-terminates on mutation.
It might be easier to take 229 (Machine Learning) after 221 (this class), since 221 is intended to be a lead-in. and less mathematically rigorous. It's still definitely worth a look but may be hard to understand without a background in algorithm design.
I think I will just do a DNS lookup, unless I can think of anything better. If a domain name hasn't been resolved then it probably hasn't been registered.

I heard that same urban legend... actually years ago that seemed to be true, but recently I've noticed that not happenning.
Twitter to open source Hadoop-like tool
Could an anonymizer such as Tor help get around this?
If you want lots of examples of really stupid shit that software developers (and other IT people) do, go read The Daily WTF (http://thedailywtf.com).
What are you doing on Hacker news? This is all about disrupting industries trough a better product. Android is free so this is obviously an improvement to something you have to pay for, or do you call Linux unfair? When Microsoft can't build a product that justifies a higher price that is their problem, Apple figured that out so it isn't impossible. Unfair (or use another word) is in my eyes trying to beat Google in anything other than the Product itself, for example forcing Android producers into paying extra with a broken patent system.
This is what your normal immune defenses already do. While some white blood cells (neutrophils, monocytes) fight bacteria by "eating" them, viruses are too small to be directly attacked this way. Instead, they cells they infect have to be destroyed before they can release their viral burden. That's what cytotoxic T cells do. They recognize antigens on infected cells, and kill them by triggering apoptosis (programmed cell death).

What is truly unfortunate is, this doesn't always work. Some viruses are able to "hide" in their host cells, preventing them from activating the immune response, and persist idefinitely in a latent state. This is why you can't really get rid of herpes, once you have it.

What looks promising about this development is that it seems to target a form of RNA that is simply not found in healthy cells. Human cells store their genome in double-stranded DNA, and use single-stranded RNA for transcription, but make no use of double-stranded RNA. Apparently, only certain viruses do, so the presence of dsRNA in a human cell should be diagnostic for viral infection, regardless of its sequence. In other words: see dsRNA, kill it!

Would that all viruses were that easy.
It seems to work fine on the default Android browser (running 3.2 on a tablet). Looks great, too! Would be awesome if it worked on Opera as well.
People who self identify as nerds never nerded out on being likable and sociable. They're skills that are easy to learn as anything is.
Fukime - The Mobile Cloud Platform
TaskRabbit Has a Great Idea; Can It Work in This Economy?
http://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/f80/the-singapore-ghost-...

So the apparent visual indicators might not be meaningful, but the oversupply is probably a real issue.
For me, "hitting it" was several different things:

~ A steady job paying $1500+/mo. I rewarded myself with a $250 netbook to replace a stolen laptop.
~ A straight-A report card for the first time since starting college. I rewarded myself with Hostess for the first time in half a decade.
~ I plan to reward myself for a steady job out of college by completely paying off my credit card and closing the account. I might also fix up some of the cosmetic problems with my car.

I just don't care enough about stuff to buy stuff. I've got walls of video cards, a half-dozen computers, a full bookshelf... What do I really need in life? Not stuff.
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I watched the lectures and still find the intro song stuck in my head every few weeks.
I think the difference is between trying stupid shit and doing stupid shit.
I see this more as an alternative way of saying "master the basics".

I can't count the number of times that I've seen developers (or classmates) try really complex things without understanding what's going on underneath, and then not be able to understand why it doesn't work.
Glad they are running the poll. But the set up where you have to choose 10 books out of 100 and there is long, long scrolling list seems biased in favor of the folks at the top of the alphabetically-ordered list.
Mindful practice.
Or get a job at any software shop that does a lot of work with abandoned projects (e.g., "Help, my previous developer left me in a lurch, can you finish up this PHP e-commerce store customer management system database driven enterprise solution?")
I don't think I'm going to go to my reunion. Nobody there will be interested in seeing me, and I don't feel like convincing people that I do anything worthwhile.
I think if the internet has done anything for our society, it's taught us that we don't all have to live in a huge monoculture where everyone watches the same three TV networks.
|Sometimes you need _directed_ learning to push you past that plateau.

That and practice. My chess improved noticeable with timed play. Putting a time limit on a game forces you to do 'something', if only to stop losing. In my case, this forced me to eventually develop a strategy and focus my game on actually attacking particular areas of the board. This really improved my game.
Yup! Went through 2-3 iterations of SICM.
Opportunities for AI in Hypertable to be presented at AAAI 2011 Workshop
How to disassemble a skyscraper but not its neighborhood?
when would they announce their co-location (and/or AWS cloud type) services? It can be a nice additional revenue stream (colo/cloud revenue is 5-10x electricity, ie. hundreds of millions per year in this case) that would ease US federal budget problems.
"Stop doing stupid shit." It would have been a lot easier to just stop playing the chess prodigy.
I do not believe that's true. If it was, somebody would have already dinged Facebook for millions of dollars.
jleader, I am the author of this post and the 'programming languages who have driven past Boston' article. I literally laughed out loud when I read your comment. I was surprised when that post was on Hacker News myself (I knew it wasn't my best). I promise to do better :)
"Working" is a bit of stretch. Super sluggish for me on an i5 MBP in both Chrome and Safari.
Because it means that they will pursue cases irrespective of its usefulness to society, which means that many of these cases are actually net damaging to society. That is a problem.
Great name, uhm...
The journalist here was Nicholas Schmidle -- who was interviewed by Newshour and talked about how he got the information: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DGwWg4hlK0#t=5m04s (deep-linked to 5:04)
I'll say it. There's no icon for "penis".
You misunderstand me. The non-contamination argument is offered reflexively to any proposal for work on Mars - from sending more landers to manned exploration. It's an obstruction to funding and research, rather than to terraforming directly - just as news like this is an encouragement.

I do not think terraforming need be terribly expensive, incidentally. We already map a great number of asteroids and comets out of awareness that if a sufficiently large one were to hit the Earth its impact would be devastating. Our best understanding at present of how to deal with the possibility of such an impact is to give the item a slight nudge that will alter its trajectory during a non-terminal interaction with Earth's gravitational field. We have already matched speeds with and made very close observations of asteroids, and our observational abilities are constantly improving. So to begin the work of terraforming Mars, I would begin looking for asteroids with large quantities of ice (or ammonia or other appropriate compounds) that are likely to intersect closely with Mars' orbit, and give them an encouraging nudge.

It annoys me that since the two rovers we've sent so far have worked so well, our response is to spend years developing a New and Better Rover at great expense, rather than launching launching a large number of rovers that use the existing design which is already known to work, and which can be done without any additional research whatsoever.
Given the minimum-time requirement for the phonecalls, I'd say it's a DoS attack on the companies.
This. You want to be consciously practicing things that are hard. Once you find yourself getting comfortable, get uncomfortable.
How to stop doing stupid shit: minimize your unknown unknowns. How to minimize your unknown unknowns: learn the correct way to do things. Without guidance and mentorship, which is largely non-existent in software, you're stuck flailing around until you attain enlightenment (either by discovery or invention) on each thing you do. When you start the next task, you start the process all over again. Over time, you gain wisdom, at the cost of neurotic self-doubt.
> Lots of people actually, voluntarily, want to participate in social networks based on people's real names. You don't want to let them do that.

I certainly don't want a bunch of privileged western jagoffs to enjoy a marginally better online experience at the expense of anyone else not similarly privileged. Ya got me there. I'm just not impressed by the tradeoff.

I'm reminded of a favorite book:

"Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws — always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: Please pass this so that I won't be able to do something I know I should stop. Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them for their own good."

I think when we optimize around what the group wants at the expense of the individual, we're on our way to misery. Let each person do what is best for their own needs, so long as it doesn't come at the cost of any other individual. That's a good rule for any human community, including one built on the internet.

And that includes companies. If these guys want a completely homogenous platform where everyone is perfectly marketable to advertisers, that's ultimately their decision and their right. But it's a damn waste of a lot of power.
Excessive meta programming.
First, minor nitpick - Apple is going after Android with various lawsuits as well. But let's keep that aside.

Contrast these arguments - back in the 90s, MSFT was accused of killing off Netscape by essentially giving away a browser for free using the revenue from Windows and Office. One could argue that Google is doing the same thing, funding Android with its revenues from ads.

Let's forget Android for a second -look at turn-by-turn navigation. That's an expensive product to build but Google, by giving it away for free (again, subsidized by its other revenues) and is causing serious trouble to other companies which have the misfortune of not having an alternative revenue source.

Is it 'fair' that Google can basically disrupt industries by giving away things for free just because it gets money through another source? You can see how that argument could be made, whether it is right or wrong.

I personally don't think any of this is either 'right' or 'wrong'. It's all business between corporate behemoths.
That's definitely the standard way to solve it. He did something unnecessarily clever (and no faster). The tail-recursive version of your loop would look about the same structurally as his bizarre change-of-variables solution.
There is one exact position in Google Chrome where it get stuck for half a second.

I think it happens when the card gets inverted horizontally.
Should You Care About Your VC’s Investors?
I would be interested in this, I like to think Im a pretty good designer, and I write fantastic markup (portfolio of some work here: http://twogiraffes.com) Can you link to your work so I can see what you have built? Or a github profile?
Ask HN: Call for (short) Boston-area demo presenters
Hello HN, I help to organize the Boston New Tech Meetup, which is structured like the New York Tech Meetup (nytm.org) but occurs in Boston.

The meetup is a monthly demo event where each of 6 presenters give 5 minutes of tech demo and then take 5 minutes of audience questions. The intent is to let creators show off their technically interesting demos, and to let audience members in on stuff they wouldn't ordinarily get to see, as well as to let people compare notes and ask tough questions :)

We've been going strong since January, but summer is a little slow so I'm putting the word out for anyone in the Boston area, if you have something cool you can demo for 5 minutes, drop me a note and I'd love to include you! The next event is Aug 16 (need one more presenter), but we have them every month so there's always room for more.

http://www.meetup.com/newtech-73
could you expand on that? What would an excessive meta-programmer be thinking or doing differently?
IDC confirms Apple as world's top smartphone vendor in Q2 2011
Agreed, should have specified that in my response.
Needed: No, what is an SICP anyway?

Having read a few pages of Structure and Implementation of Computer Programs, available for free at http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/, I quite liked it and thought it was well-structured and well written, and have added it to my disturbingly large reading list.