skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been thinking about this a bit after the shootings in Norway, and the deadly earthquake in my city a few months ago. I think that I have two requirements in order to be able to die happily: that I have said everything I need to say, and that other people can understand me (think 'speaker for the dead', so that people can understand what was important to me and what I believed in). I have many things I want to do before I die, but if these two needs are provided for, I can honestly die without regret. Everything else is just dependent on me living out my convictions.

Certainly we should regularly tell people that we love them, that they are important to us, etc, but I think being able to say a final goodbye is an entirely different thing. I hope my brother understands how much of a role model he is to me (and I will try to make sure he does know), but even so I would appreciate the chance to say so, one last time. My parents know I love them, but I think they would treasure a post-mortem letter saying exactly that.

However, I agree with everyone who pointed out that emails are a bit impersonal. I would prefer to be able to hand-write letters, and have them automatically posted via regular mail. I think that would be a pleasant surprise.
Like justin.tv and teevox for Starcraft II?

teevox.com
To be fair, it can't have been long before that memo that he wrote The Road Ahead, which infamously made very little mention of the internet at its first release, necessitating a whole bunch of additions for subsequent printings. I don't find it as amazingly visionary as all that - for example, he barely mentions the importance of search which his company would later end up sinking huge amounts of money into.
googoolora :)

i'm quite fond of that new name.
Groklaw's biases are definitely obvious, but I would want to see documentation of Florian's accurate track record. I think what most people object to is his sensationalism, particularly the seeming crises he uncovers that turn out to be nothing much (with considerable indication that he knew that they were nothing much).

I pick where I get my news to avoid that sort of source, so it's annoying when they start quoting him.
This reminds me of a story about Herb Kelleher, one of the founders of Southwest Airlines.

One outrageous incident was his arm-wrestling showdown
with the CEO of Stevens Aviation in 1992. Both Stevens
and Southwest were using the advertising tagline "Plane
Smart." To settle the matter, Kelleher suggested an
arm-wrestling competition with the winner keeping the
rights to the slogan. Kelleher lost the match, but the
event generated so much good will and publicity that
Stevens let Southwest continue use of the tagline.

http://www.pbs.org/kcet/chasingthesun/innovators/hkelleher.h...
Maybe the real lesson is to look for lost-looking people in tuxedos carrying Morton's bags with steaks they need to get rid of.
This is the fallacy of long hours. You spend so many hours at work every day and every once in a while you have some late night inspiration or collaborative breakthrough or take advantage of some other opportunity, and then like any gambling addict you associate working long hours with the rewards. You ignore all the costs (stress, family strain, sleep deprivation, lower productivity, higher defect rates, etc.) It's classic confirmation bias.

Add to that the machismo notions that working long hours is working "harder" than otherwise and that working fewer hours shows less commitment and less strength. In reality it takes more focus, more smarts, and more discipline to work shorter hours effectively (sure, you can slack off by working fewer hours, but you can also slack off by working more hours too)
I remember reading somewhere during the post mortem that they did actually go some ways to start building it.
Skitch's blog post on it; http://blog.skitch.com/post/9083996519/huge-skitch-is-acquir...

Evernote; http://blog.evernote.com/2011/08/18/evernote-acquires-skitch...
Yeh, I kind of got the jist of that from reading recent posts, it seems that alot of upvoted are cynical kinds of comments. Assuming it was all true (which i am taking it as) I thought it was a great customer service story and empathising with what the OP must have felt when he saw the server in the tux standing there makes you feel kinda good.

Whether he is privileged or not the story was about the steakhouse and im sure many other businesses wouldn't do that regardless of who the customer was. I guess it shows, they know who their customers are, what their customers are saying, and improve on an already good service. I think lots to learn from that :) Excellant JOB by Mortons i say ....
Great work - I've got loads of non-techy friends who are looking for an intro to coding.
Could it be that Groklaw hates certain companies based on some principle? Or do you think they just randomly pick which side they're going to support?
Are you a blogger on tech start-ups?
I read that it would be a wise move to pitch to small(er) blogs rather than to the big boys like TechCrunch, who are more likely to ignore you.

As such, in preparation for the launch of my start-up (everyone has one these days. heh), I would like to request that you raise your (virtual) hand if you have such a blog.

Those who know of such blogs are welcomed to pitch (pun intended) in too.
Is there any reason to use a character encoding other than UTF-8 (for new content)? There is a (lot of) legacy content in non-Unicode encodings. Also, UCS-4 might be a useful optimization for processing text.
It's really pretty abysmal. I, too, have an MBP. There's 2GB free RAM left, and browsing is basically all I do, yet it feels continually sluggish. Makes you think you're using a netbook ;-)
Intrinsity does not "create customized ARM chips", they optimize existing designs. There's been nothing impressive so far in Apple's chips, they're pretty standard design though thought to have been optimized by Intrinsity's folks.

Innovative custom designs were expected from the PA Semi acquisition. Apparently did not pan out, since it's been three years and there isn't much to show for it.
The Law of Compounding Success (and a Word of Caution)
Harmful, not really. Sometimes UTF-16 is the most compact representation for a given string, and its semantics are not that confusing. UTF-8 is a better "default choice", but the algorithms for both are very hard to get right. Given an idealized Unicode string object, it's still hard to do things like count the number of glyphs required to display the text in font foo, or convert all characters to "lowercase", or sort a list of names in "alphebetical" order. But the problem is not Unicode or UTF-16 or UTF-8, the problem is defining what a correct computer program is, and ultimately, that's the job for the programmer, not the string encoding algorithm.

Think of UTF-8 and UTF-16 as being like in-memory compression for Unicode strings. You can't take a gzip file, count the number of bytes, and multiply by some factor to get the true length of the string. But, this complexity is often worth the space savings, so that's why these encodings exist.

The problem that people have is twofold: one, the average programmer doesn't realize that characters and character encodings are two different things. The second is, they don't realize that a Unicode string is a data structure that does one thing and only one thing: maintain a sequence of Unicode codepoints in memory.

A Unicode string is not "text" in some language; it's some characters for a computer. To choose the right font or sort things correctly, you need additional information sent out-of-band. There is no way to do it right given only the Unicode string itself. People are reluctant to send out-of-bad data and so other people assume Unicode is hard. It's not. The problem is that Unicode is not text.
This is very nice.

Some more informative messages would be helpful. Some errors are genuine errors while others are simply an issue of not typing in precisely what the lesson wants you to type in.
Small wins
If you're an HP engineer working on webOS, given the commitment level your execs have to that platform, why wouldn't you jump ship? Startups, Apple, Google, Facebook, even Microsoft, may benefit in terms of human talent.
Google buys android.me domain
Why is it better to host your own? Do you honestly believe a single cheap server running Exchange 2003 in an unlocked closet of an office secured with Kwikset locks, running on grid power with maybe a 5-minute UPS but definitely no generators, with maybe a single T1 but more likely business DSL, with no alternate location to fail over to, serviced by a company who might not be able to schedule a tech to deal with you for 5+ hours IF you're calling 8am-5pm on a weekday, is more reliable than a company like Google?

I'm not exaggerating. This is really what small business IT looks like.

If you have the money to do at least 2 geographically separate datacenters properly, secure them with guards, cameras, and biometric or at least electronic access controls, get redundant backbone connections from different Tier 1 providers, and you have enough talent to develop appropriate processes/procedures as well as properly identify and hire other talented people, and you can pay them enough to keep them happy and your equipment modern and functioning, then congratulations, host your own. But if you meet these criteria, you are more likely to be a competitor to Google than a consumer.

/rant. Sorry. All this talk about how the cloud is too risky for businesses drives me up the wall. I understand that it feels good to be responsible for your own failures, but when you are a business, it is not about what feels good, it's about what works.
Good luck with http://codemountain.org
Five Security Considerations for a Mobile Phone
Bring On The Google Hardware Labs
I'm using the Scipy superpack (http://stronginference.com/scipy-superpack/) on Lion and Matplotlib has given me no trouble so far.
It's effectively the exact same book as "Practical Cryptography". Get whichever is cheaper.
> he barely mentions the importance of search

To be fair, he mentioned 7 critical steps. Search engines are No. 5.
The patent portfolio of Palm is maybe not much worth. The WebOS was introduced 2009 and postdates the iPhone.

And Palm did in 2003 spun off their operating system (think of the Treo PDA/Smartphones), which was then bought by a japanese company (Access ltd). Microsoft did license last year a few dozen "Palm" patents from them. I guess any valuable patents date from that time frame but are not owned by Palm anymore.
It would be base72; they use all the lowercase numbers, all the uppercase numbers, and all the digits.
Court affirms the right to be nude online
No, that statement is an example of why the information is valuable, not the degree. There is still a whole lot of stupid hoops people have to jump through to get a degree.
I disagree. Consider people's first impressions of the iPhone when the iPhone 2G launched, or of Android when the G1 launched, or how almost every Blackberry device has launched with buggy firmware requiring users to update the OS only a couple of weeks after launch.

You're picking and choosing a specific example when, if you recall everyone else, it was pretty much the same thing. Buggy software was the sole reason why the TouchPad or even WebOS failed.
Very nice design. You can almost compete with the adult education colleges if you can get certification.

By the way, the design is very nice.
I've seen this at companies where the boss or manager either doesn't understand the development process or just wants to make money and doesn't care. So you have situations where a feature should take 2 weeks to implement, but they want it in a week (so you need to work extra hours to make up for it).

This is one of the reasons I hate working for other people. If I'm going to be wasting my youth away for something, I'm going to be getting all or the majority of the profits.
I agree with you, I don't think daytrading with bitcoin is practical at all right now, without trusting the exchange. (If any bitcoin insiders want to prove me wrong on that, I'd be delighted.)

Anyway, the point of bitcoin isn't daytrading. I think a service like this facilitates moving dollars to bitcoins for people who want to actually use it for bitcoin transactions, so the snide remarks about this service that I've seen are just unwarranted.
Good question. No, a given word may be used at most once.
Wow, downvoted, really?
Great news for Skitch and great news its becoming free.

I remember the trial, and how much easier it made filing bugs on my website for small UI tweaks and such. At the time, owing to the fact I'm cheap, I ended up switched to Jing, which was multiplatform and free, but I consider something of Skitch's ilk necessary for dealing with bug reporting of UI issues.
How to get your logos removed from LogoGarden.com
Size, perhaps? Remember, most of the world does not speak English. I bet you baidu uses UTF-16 for its indexes.
This is a wonderful start - kudos. If you're targeting beginners/novices, which it looks like you are, your current approach looks ideal. I wonder how this scales to more advanced topics/languages. I think there is a market (a much smaller market though) for advanced learning, and if done right a lot of beginners can be encourages to deepen/broaden their skills. Crowdsourced lessons, simplified to fit in with a successful learning framework like Khan Academy or Codeacademy.com is probably what will make this possible.

Any thoughts/plans to go that route?
It's incredible how Notch (the Minecraft creator) turned this lawsuit into a huge PR campaign.

The smartest thing Bethesda could do is accept his invitation. Make it big. Live broadcasting etc. There's so much to win for both companies, regardless of the actual outcome of the match.
The "access all pages" permission is required for "content extensions". That's any extension that interacts with web content. They can limit themselves by domain, but that's it.

Even simple UI tweaks, like changing how scrolling works, can often only be implemented by injecting into every page. Since Chrome doesn't understand the meaning of any web content, it can't pick and choose what an extension has access to in any useful way. As a result, the permission model is just not terribly useful for extensions, besides the site-specific ones.

Also, last I checked, reviews worked essentially like comments and I could effectively reply to issues on my extension's page. Maybe that has changed by now.
Court Ruling Opens The Door To Rejecting Many Software Patents
"correct handling of Unicode is best left to the poor souls stuck dealing with them full time, all the time"
Well, if you're right, and we can't excecise thought independent from our genes and external influences, then all our thoughts, mistaken or correct, are determined anyway.

So who are you to say that you're right and I'm wrong? Maybe your determined thoughts happen to be flawed, and mine happen to be correct.

In other words, a complete and utter denial of "free will" (which is vaguely defined, hence my "complete and utter" qualifier) is a self-defeating argument.
Negocios online rentables
¿Se puede ganar dinero en Internet? Descubra y entienda los mejores negocios online rentables de la red.
Huh, my PDF viewer seems to be failing to display a couple of pages towards the end. That's annoying.
I went to CMU and can confirm this. I coded a shell, filesystem and kernel just in that one OS class. To anyone who thinks this doesn't prepare you for something just because the focus was on the OS abstractions, algorithms and concurrency instead of "good coding design", you are mistaken.

Universities teach math-like computer science instead of OOP/Code style/Agile/etc because it is much harder. You can learn OOP and the rest on the job. College is meant to broaden you as a person, to teach you to think -- not teach you to do a specific skill set. Not all of them can do it, and not all students want to learn this way, but the dream is still pretty great.

Interestingly this is the opposite of what apprenticeships are for. They teach you a skill set from master to student. Perhaps these two systems have less in common then we originally thought. Should the comparison be between apprenticeships and vocational schools?
The end of the PC era
Agreed with all of the above points. Beautiful and easy to use.

The "You're doing great! To continue, you'll need to register or sign in. Otherwise all that awesome progress you've made will be lost. Sign In\Register (it's free)" dialog is most definitely a road block as there were no links available to go back to the home page.

Only two options were sign in or register. So yeah, there should be a cancel, or return to homepage
it's an illusion created by the visual system, which will persist unless you completely remove the corners. It's similar to why you perceive the edges on your ceiling to be brighter.
I can think of a few with ~$1B net worth that still find time to indulge their passions and still remain a regular human being.

The people I know who are highly successful work hard, and they take their work seriously. But they don't let their work consume them. There is still time for hobbies, passions, and human relationships once all the code has been written.

Continuous improvement, seeking out things you're doing wrong and fixing them, and generally paying attention to what you're doing and why you're doing it tend to trump raw hours any day.
I'm still sort of considering it. I already knew there wouldn't be many apps. That's actually fine for me because I'm buying it for the sole purpose of developing for. I use C/C++ and libSDL (which has support on all the major phone systems) for development.

I don't use that many apps actually. Typically I just use a web browser, an ssh client (yes I actually SSH out from my phone often), and the odd solitaire card game every once in a while.
It's not a pure hash; the same URL can be used many times to generate independent URLs. Using only the input of 'http://google.com generated the following URLs in a brief test:

aw9RP fzUmL n4UNp V0Nre
AYp1X OFw3w oQnRL RyICJ
eMioQ sUcjC mzmKE i8NyH
42R3d 9XYcV 6KpEd TCve2
tzNUd pRMdn QbmDx WYaqH
Ju74J gqmYd kilG8 AFe1P
HiyI8 uqJal qj5mZ MzzwK
WU8tK QJlwz vEqhL 1hdpl
bBWCx CQgWq 3avus m8S7A
ufJ4v YBlWF 7T4cX 1ypMQ
8zgUA Sslwf 9HTDt 7t8ji
AqedO qyJNj 6rdR4 zRzcv
0wkJ9 Zmf4l rV5aK af7cE
ix0TO bvNbb p4cKS m3vjc
SXAnj DcLA2 JRwiP IdTQK
yeah no worries, I just wanted to check that it wasn't someone trying to attack the site :)
Amazing stuff! Slow and buggy, but as a guy who can't program for shit, this is awesome!
Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate is a spirited and informed articulation of this view.
People like Notch continually prove and re-prove, to me, the fact that you don't need a huge company, 3 million patents, and an army of lawyers to make money.

Between things like this and his stance on piracy[1], it makes for a pleasant counterpoint to all the depressing stories on Techdirt.

[1] http://notch.tumblr.com/post/1121596044/how-piracy-works
Stealing ATM PIN Numbers Using a Thermal Camera Is Too Freaking Easy
HTC EVO 3D Now Available in Europe
To update my comment:

1.) You can port a number into a T-Mobile To Go prepaid account. However, if you go to a brick and mortar store, they'll likely tell you that it's not possible. I've had two stores tell me this. I called the T-Mobile toll-free number and requested a port to T-Mo2Go and it was not a problem in the least.

2.) You can utilize the Wi-fi Calling feature on supported BB and Android phones (any current phone). It will use your minutes. It's now automatic, if you connect to wi-fi. You can shut this off. It's much more robust on Android than it was a year ago.
Does a teetotaler still have a chance to be working for GitHub? (given he is great by the way). By reading your posts, I feel like it is a non negotiable requirement and that it's basically impossible to be awesome without drinking.

Other than that, keep it on. I really enjoy reading your posts!
Presidential Candidates on WP
Cell phone services compared to residential phone services 
Spending on Cell Phone Services Has Exceeded Spending on Residential Phone Services
Who's afraid of the "Big Bad Open Source" now? :)
Very nice. Really well made. Love the fact that I could just dive in and engage with the product from the homepage without having to dance through the usual annoying sign up routine.

One thing I'd change is this error message which is not really an error message : "ERROR: Sorry, that's not correct. Please try again."

It appears every time I try some command which is not exactly the next step defined in the tutorial. It kind of feels like an old school tutor forcing me to follow a rigid book exercise and discouraging experimenting.

If you want me to complete the tutorial, don't move the progress indicator until I complete the next step, but please don't scold me with fake errors :-)

One thing I've been craving for is a place where I can jump in and get a quick primer on some random topic from another programmer. Think SO in real-time. I know there's IRC, but it's not very user friendly and I don't want to hop around different channels to ask different language questions.

If you build a truly social and interactive site for learning programming, I'd use it a lot.

Good luck!
Thought that your link was pointing at the OP's site until I followed it. The parent's link is to code<b>a</b>cademy.org, the OP's link is to codecademy.org (No 'a').
I don't know about ops but all of engineering is about 600 or so, IIRC. Everything is automated to an incredible degree though, so I wouldn't be surprised if ops is quite lean.
Scum bags. LogoGarden.com harvests logos from pros
Just feed the Outbursts of Everett True into a Markov generator!
How do they make money? Targeted ads? Cemetery plots? Tombstones?
Maybe I'm strange but I found the sharp corners much easier to see.

The round ones were distracting, especially the rounded arrows. I also found the pointy circle much nicer to look at.

With sharp corners you have 4 things to look at and process - each line. With the rounded ones you have 4 lines, 8 spots where a line changes into a curve, and 4 curves.

At least that's how my eyes do it - they notice the curve for each corner and that wastes time.
You shouldn't care about UTF-8/UTF-16/UCS-4 except for performance, and that totally depends on what you are doing with what data-sets.

As someone who speaks multiple languages and has written a fair amount of language-processing code, the simple truth is that if you are not using a vetted unicode framework for writing your application--and if you're asking if UTF-16 should be considered harmful, you're probably not--you are almost certainly introducing massive numbers of bugs that your own cultural biases are blinding you to.

Do not underestimate the difficulty of writing correct multi-lingual-aware programs. These frameworks exist for a reason, and are often written by professionally trained linguists.
The demise of the middle manager