skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going to skip past the Java bit and get to the comb-over bit.

The fact of the matter is that too many people think that projects can be run through the interface of stories and feature lists without paying attention to the quality of the software underneath. And, when you don't pay attention to it, it suffers. This, really, is _Joel's Law of Leaky Abstractions_ applied to process. Business wants to see features, and if that abstraction is their only view of the project, they will be blindsided by creeping quality issues. It's nearly inevitable.
Really, they could have tossed Pierre "Planet of the Apes" Boulle in there, if they knew the name.

Although my favorite Boulle story was "Les Jeux de l'esprit", where scientific rationality takes over the world, and, for entertainment, contests between physical and biological science teams are broadcast. They quickly progress to all out war ...
A Life Underwater
Celebrating Excellence in Data Visualization and Information Design
Some buildings are even literally made out of garbage - a wire frame encasing garbage covered in a thin layer of plaster.
"I think some of those examples are interesting points although the SF mentioned early seemed to predict an even stronger Japanese influence than what we see today."

Definitely true, though I think we may see increasing Japanification over the next 30 - 40 years as the education and health of the average American decrease.
The old UI had its issues, but it was much faster than the new one. Issues I see on a daily with new Twitter:

- There're a lot of little weird inefficiencies if you use the keyboard - for instance, if you expand a tweet, space bar no longer works to continue scrolling down the page unless you tap over.

- Scrolling can be slowwww. Can't scroll back more than 3 hours or so in my timeline, without getting an infinite loading animation or no option to continue viewing at all. This was especially a pain for me when I was on PDT, it meant I basically couldn't catch up with the early EDT news unless I switched to my mobile client.

- "You've already tweeted that." "Sorry, we couldn't X, please try again later." and so on...

Then there's the search overhaul, which actually bummed me out a lot more:

- Now, search results continually default to "Top" instead of "All," requiring a manual change.

- Tweet translation's been removed. :(

- Interface suffers the same issues (infinite loading spinner) that plague the new Twitter interface. The old search interface was really stripped down and fast.

I love Twitter, it's been super-important to me both personally and for my business; but I really would pay a subscription fee to get some efficiency back into my daily morning Twitter routine (i.e., ++scroll-speed, at least 48 hours of search history, bring automated tweet translation back, multiple account support). $5/month would be a serious bargain, especially considering these features would give me an extra hour or more back every day.
http://www.monster.com
Agreed about Gene Wolfe. Wolfe is also much better (in literary terms) writer than most of the entries in the list, and New Sun ranks much higher than Dune in my opinion.
Show HN: Insync - use GDocs like Dropbox
The problem is real, you are not the only person on the Earth that needs a solution, but ...

Aren't you worried that it takes few weeks(days?) of coding for dropbox team and one update for your solution to become obsolete?
Well considering the rhetoric from Apple & Adobe regarding iOS and flash, it's definitely been an "us vs them" scenario. Adobe were very quick to publicly criticise Apple for not supporting Flash in iOS, and Apple were very quick to respond with equally stern comments. So I think the author is correct to frame it in those terms.

As for the article, I think it's very balanced. Yes, this is a "win" for Apple, because Adobe have adapted to iOS, not the other way around, and Adobe have been very clear on this issue. They wanted iOS to support flash.

But the article also goes on to say that this is a big step forward for Adobe. Which it is, and that's a positive comment for Adobe.

And finally,

"we support Flash is a pretty decent incentive for the average consumer who isn't caught up in the HTML5 vs. Flash war"

Wh.... wh..... what?
It's the EU Working Time Directive:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive
Power came back about noon on Tuesday. That meant Tuesday morning was spent building bridges, trap shooting, and racing one another in go carts that we ended up crashing in practically every race. =)
ParentheC: Transforming Scheme to C
This is very difficult because the carrier can/will apply various signal processing algorithms to voice streams, these will really screw with your modulated data.
And what if I turn off my computer with Windows 8 and add/remove/swap PCI cards? HDDs? It will crash when booting and corrupt my data, isn't it?

In Windows 95 I had two options: reboot and poweroff.
In Windows 2000 I had three options: reboot, poweroff and sleep.
In Windows XP/Vista I have four options: reboot, poweroff, sleep and hibernate.
Finally, in Windows 8 I will have five options: reboot, poweroff-which-is-not-really-a-poweroff, poweroff-which-is-really-a-poweroff, sleep, sleep-and-then-hibernate-if-battery-is-low.

True Microsoft Way. It remembers me funny examples from Alan Cooper book 'The Inmates Are Running the Asylum'.
Everything "at the bottom of it all" is just "text", a sequence of octets. The point of a type system is to make sure you adhere to the structure inherent in that series of octets.
Invites: https://insynchq.com/signup?code=hn
A couple ways to prevent X11 keylogging/screenshots/actions:

* If chrome/chromium are doing it right now, most parts of the browser should not be able to access X11 directly.

* X.org provides for two compartiments, trusted X (the default) and untrusted X (now used by ssh -X, also sux --untrusted). There are still a number of applications having issues with untrusted X (e.g. Skype doesn't work), also copy & paste don't normally work (for that you can use "xsel -o | ssh otheruser@localhost 'DISPLAY=:1 xsel -i'" or converse, bound to a key combination or panel widget), but it works well enough that I'm running Twinkle and xchat that way.

* let the apps go through VNC (Skype has issues with this, too, though, but then Skype doesn't run smoothly in a VM either (realtime audio issues))

Of course the kernel (and suid apps and apps with tempfile races etc.) are still offering a broader attack surface than a VM, so the above should be complemented with some good intrusion detection mechanism (to catch intrusions before they exploit root), for which I don't have a good suggestion.
Squatters can't use your email if they can't read it.
Old Man's War is pulpy fun that manages to also explore some interesting aspects of what it would mean to be able to swap your consciousness into that of a wholly redesigned younger "you".
Even if the automatic trading becomes a majority of the traded volume, the impact of human trading might still be higher. That is, it could be that most of automatic trading doesn't move the price much in average, while human trades make the price jump more (in reaction to news, mergers, etc). Human trading can only be eliminated if someone develops strong AI.

Besides, a lot of what is called algorithmic trading is driven by human, "manual" decisions: say a fund manager wants to buy $10 million worth of stocks someone composing the S&P 500 today, without raising the price of ACME too much, so they use a piece of software that does that automatically.
Out of all the scifi I've read over the years, one really stands out to me. Lilith's Brood by Octavia Butler. The reason isn't that I enjoyed it, but rather that by the time I finished it I was inherently disturbed by it.

I've often read stories I enjoyed. Sometimes I read some that are boring. But it's very rare to actually finish something that makes you physically uncomfortable most of the way through.

The story is excellently written and I recommend anyone willing to experience scifi in a different way to read it.

Would also throw in The Windup Girl as another first rate recent novel.
Wow. This is an extremely well written document. I wish other lawyers would write in such "plain" English.

Assuming (hopefully) that this leads to a better understanding of the claims by judges, juries as well as the media, do you folks see this document significantly helping Google in this case?
"Neal Stephenson really matures between Snow Crash and Diamond Age. I read snow crash after some of his later stuff and it's almost hard to believe it's the same author."

This happens with more writers (and other artists) than many people think. I read Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel's Game and loved both: they're incredibly rich and detailed yet driven by plot; they have the action that a lot of unsophisticated readers crave and content that can still satisfy someone who's read 10,000 novels. Oh, and it made me laugh out loud.

U.S. publishers are now releasing his young adult novels. Two so far, two more to come. And they're terrible. Almost unreadable bad. No plot, cardboard characters, wild improbability poorly embedded in a paranormal universe. You can see flashes of his later skill, but his early stuff is lousy.

I said this in another comment, but I'll say it again here: I just started reading David W. Galenson's Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity, (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691133808/sr=8-1/qid=13150...), which is where Malcolm Gladwell stole / sourced his New Yorker article "Late Bloomers - Why do we equate genius with precocity?" (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_...). Galenson says that there are two basic modes for artists to follow: the experimentalists who try many things over long periods of time and eventually reach fullness, and the "conceptual innovators" whose sudden insight into a field fuels their work, which is often done at a young age. Under your reading, Stephenson would be the "experimentalist."
666 pages.
Relevant to note that the keyboard here was a detatchable dock.. so its 'default' form was closer to the ipad.

http://img.tomshardware.com/us/2003/06/02/the_digital_writin...

-2003.
People seems to forget that Adobe is a company that makes tools. For Adobe, it has never been Flash versus HTML5. It's about giving tools that people are willing to buy or upgrade to. Even if the iPhone had never existed, Adobe would still be adding HTML5 and mobile support for their products.
There's a good chance that it cost them less than $400 to travel to YC, so there might be a tiny kernel of truth to the statement.
Depending on your country, opening lettermail intended for another recipient is a crime.
> That said how does this all fit in to the stats I keep seeing that say computer use in school doesn't improve grades.

Unless those grades are in computing, they aren't really relevant to this project.
Google docs might have not gone down for everyone, but when we used it, twice we had instances where entire documents got nuked. Eventually two week old backups were restored, which was essentially useless for the type of documents they both were.
Back to the Future's Nike Air Mag Shoes Officially Unveiled
Does peak Wikipedia mean the Internet has stopped growing?
Google Web Trends shows Wikipedia traffic flat to down since spring: http://trends.google.com/websites?q=wikipedia.org. Is this just seasonality, or could this be an indication that secular growth on the internet has come to end...?
Wow, no classics that so far stand the test of time.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (unbelievable at 18 in 1818!) and as others have mentioned Verne, HG Wells(his insight inspired physicist Szilárd's neutron chain reaction).

Still an interesting list that shows what the mob is looking at. I guess I'll have to give neuromancer another chance(i only skimmed it) also hated heinland's stranger (the jesus complex was unconvincing).
And it's easy to see how a list can be skewed by something like hitchhikers (which is so funny & readable)
But in 200 yrs how many from this list?
That's interesting. It's similar technique to all those iphone apps/games that ask you to rate them in appstore after playing for a while.

Did you measure the conversion rate of this rollover (that's how I call that stuff on websites)? How many people actually use it among those who seen it? And maybe what percent of people exits your game when you show them the rollover?

I would really like to see some numbers :)
Windows8 Boot Time
One omission that may fit this crowd well is "Daemon" and it's sequel "Freedom(tm)" by Daniel Suarez

http://thedaemon.com/

These books are very well written and billed as a 'techno-thriller'. I think they are also near-term science fiction, and have a lot of very interesting ideas.

The books chronicle the rise of a very digital culture and a revolution driven by technology. The technology is amazingly well researched and believable, and the writing is entertaining and fun. At the moment they are quite recent and the technologies aren't there yet, but I wouldn't be at all surprised for some of the technology to fall into that 'oddly prescient' category within the decade.
High Productivity and the Re-engineering of the Workforce
> As the author said, this book is NOT about Java.

That's what it says, but the concepts covered are so java-oriented it may as well be.

It uses generic language to describe most of the concepts, but the underlying assumption seems to be that you need to understand these concepts because you need to program in Java, C#, C++, or some other closely-related language with no dynamic typing, no first-class functions, and explicit java-style semantics for abstract classes, interfaces, public vs private methods, implements vs extends, and such.

Much of that is invisible in a language like Python, and a book that laboriously covers each concept in the context of a language where you have to specify everything explicitly probably isn't going to make you much better at writing classes in python. Or if it is, it's going to be a lot of work for minimal benefit.

> Interestingly, It's the same author who teaches how to design programs with Racket, a lisp dialect.

Indeed, that's partly why I'm surprised the book takes the approach it does. However, it does seem to be a good, thorough book (ignoring the missing sections) if you need to design classes in Java or C# (which covers a lot of people).
It's been more than a year after Jobs' post disparaging Flash and promising that HTML5 can fill much of the gap.

While it has improved, HTML5 on iOS still lags behind a lot. Apple wins the Flash fight when Angry Birds can run on HTML5. Maybe that is what they're afraid of.
> Personally, though, I wouldn't put Dune or any Gene Wolfe on my Top 100 SF novels. Could never get past the first pages.

Try Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus and see if you might change your mind. It's very readable, and it's pleasantly short. It's half Borges, half Sturgeon, with a pinch of Ray Bradbury.
Oh sure, there are good reasons for a language to have support for lambdas. Thanks for the link. My question is not whether they offer benefits, but whether those benefits are going to sway anyone’s decision one way or another.

This is like asking whether any product should have feature X. We go out and do a survey, and find some number, “C," of our customers would use the feature if we implement it. But this is not the number we need. We need the number of existing customers we would lose to competitors if we don’t implement the feature in the near future (“L"), and the number of new customers we would win away from competitors if we implement the feature (“W").

The salient number to consider isn’t C, but rather (L+W). That’s the number that tells us the return in market terms of implementing the feature. In my comment, I was asking if (L+W) is significant. The reasons given for lambdas speak to C and perhaps L.
Loyalty Platform for Small Business- Thankyuh
1Password goes Lion-only, debuts on the App Store
My favorites are The Invincible and Fiasco
Ideas Are Overrated: Startup Guru Eric Ries' Radical New Theory
Perhaps they are being added just because current Java programmers believe it will make their lives better?
Show HN: jamcloud - turntable for video
Seems like the author is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The key is to be thoughtful about what traits you learn from, not to give up on learning from others altogether.
I loved the miniseries (after hating the first film - a travesty). After watching the miniseries, thousands of people chanting "Muad'Dib" came into my dreams and I still remember it today, years later (as luck would have it, my son attends a Jewish school whose day begins with a "Modani" ceremony - guess what that makes me thing of . . .).

The theatrical tricks of this miniseries obviously worked very well on me.
The Damn Small Linux project is dead; there hasn't been a release in 3 years. One of the primary developers is now working on Tiny Core Linux. Tiny Core sounds like a good fit for the OP; its extension system fits the description "a packaging system built around single-shot apps".
"either convergent evolution, or things that just flat out come from different sources"

I more or less agree with this. At the same time, when you look at Japan everything just looks better -- even though it isn't. So while I think much of it is convergent evolution or things that come from different sources, just having Japan being the way it is vaguely over there seems to be giving US leaders more self confidence to make these sorts of reforms.

Part of it also though is that Japan has a history of taking ideas from other cultures and then perfecting them. E.g. germany invents scientific management, Henry Ford popularizes and commercializes it, and then 60 years later it's getting shipped back to us as TQM and Kanban. So yeah it's definitely all tangled up, all I'm saying is that we're becoming more like Japan currently is, regardless of why we're becoming that way or why Japan is that way.
Unlike most people who grumbled about Flash, Apple actually made the strategic decision not to support it any more on its mobile OS. I'm not a huge fan of Apple, but I admire and respect them for taking this calculated risk.
>Maybe that is what they're afraid of.

Who is "they" in this statement?
Personally I found vim easier to memorize than emacs commands and that's one of the reasons I went with it. If you work in vim day in and day out for a year (with a little curiosity and exploration) you should have most of this cheat sheet committed to muscle memory and move on to formulating more complex macros and using more advanced vim plugins to their potential.

I agree that emacs is more elegant in its implementation, but then again I think the very foundation of building an editor in lisp creates a level of elegance that is almost impossible to reach by any other path. In other words, vim is less elegant, but I don't think it's bad.

Fundamentally I see vim/emacs as unequaled peers. Vim is optimized for raw text editing potential, and emacs is optimized for customizability. Vim is still richly extensible, and emacs is still powerful for raw editing out of the box, but they lose out to each other on their respective strengths. I think the vim expert will be more effective editing disparate files on vanilla systems, and the emacs user will be more effective customizing his environment for his particular workflows.
I've been racking my brain to try and make sense of why som many people seem to have forgotten just what Flash did to the web, and that's it. Pro-Flash is the polite face of Anti-Apple.
You've kind of hit the nail on the head right there. We made precisely the same mistake with CopterKid, believing it to be virtually faultless in every regard. It's all about being sensible enough to decipher a well-wished constructive/negative criticism from a downright trollish one.
What? No mention of Lois McMaster Bujold and her excellent Vorkosigan series? Bujold won four Hugo awards for her work, just behind Heinlein (who won five), and I'm always surprised that she isn't better known.
Isn't that the point of the article? Apple sold enough devices to get Adobe to change their content delivery strategy?
This was built by my buddies, including the author of the Gaia Flash framework. It showed up on lifehacker today so I figured it was as good a time as any to brag about it here. It's pretty damn cool. Yeah yeah, it uses Adobe AIR - logical choice given their expertise. Hope that's not too big a hurdle for y'all to give it a try. Thanks.

EDIT: changed "authors" to "including the author" - Steven built Gaia by his own bad self, really. Should clear that up :)
I couldn't agree with this more.
I find this a little ironic as today Apple also chose to highlight a Flash app as its iPad Game of The Week: http://yfrog.com/nxvz8p

Machinarium is a popular flash game that runs on iPad through Adobe AIR for mobile. My guess is we'll see a lot more native Flash games on the app store as processor speed increases, and even more impressive work when Flash 11 ships its Stage3D GPU acceleration for mobile (part of the Molehill project).
Well you have to understand that this was something the church was doing and Christians have a thing for numbers, 7 being one of them.

That being said, I always assumed that it was because it would create conversational tension, that it encouraged people to keep engaging in conversations. It seemed to work well in that regard in my experience.

I'll ping the organizer and see if there was any deep significance here or if it was just "I don't know, how about 7?" kind of thing.
Why is that necessary? Angry Birds works just fine as an iOS app.

For Flash to become obsolete feature parity of HTML5 is not necessary. If most use cases are covered and if the number of devices without Flash provide enough incentive for content producers and publishers to do without Flash it’s very possible that Flash will disappear slowly.
I highly recommend the science fiction of Eric Frank Russell. Especially Wasp (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0575070951/)

Russell is a great writer. And funny.

The Great Explosion (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/088184991X/) is another good one.
I am located in the Bay Area. Thanks again for the info.
Angry Birds already runs on HTML5. http://chrome.angrybirds.com/
Strides: A New Way to Work
Group shows botnet threat in the future may come from the sky
New iPhone App Shows Kids the World, With Flat Stanley
Supercomputer predicts revolution
Deer Hunter is an incredibly good movie and I have no connection to Vietnam. I was born in 1977.
The Fundamental Flaw in Sharing Applications Like Airbnb
Glad to see that this time someone else is recommending this too, full of interesting ideas and overall a good hard sci-fi novel. We need more novels about these themes.
If Google does link Dart to the Android I think that will be exciting. Currently at least the apps are running off of XML and Java I think that if it had its own language. Though the second link went to an article with a tagline "...new programming language for structured web programming". That would be interesting but everyone and their mother is coming out or working on web programming languages.
Django-delegate: chain Django ORM queries queries with no runtime dispatch costs
Awesome Imperial Desktop
Found this wallpaper today, totally rad:
http://super7store.com/new-arrivals/wallpaper.html

Wanted it as a backround for my desktop, but couldn't find it on the artist's site or anywhere so I made one w/ their pic. Looks sweet tiled on a 30" monitor:
http://i.imgur.com/9zTEV.png