skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sounds fun. I might even come up from Oregon depending on the day.
Welcome to the echo chamber.
One Tree Hill TV Show
The drama in the town of Tree Hill continues as the CW network gives out a sneak peek into the next episode of “One Tree Hill“. The episode 6.08 is entitled “Our Life is Not A Movie or Maybe” and it tells the story when the Scott brothers are experiencing success on what they do.
Because it's not necessarily in our interest to favor capital over labor.
That's fantastic! Thanks. <vader>impressive</vader> My esteem for Joel just went up a notch.
Security Flaw Is Revealed in T-Mobile’s Google Phone
Don't change the argument. I never inferred, let alone stated "it is impossible to have a stable economy or happy populations without government". I am saying that empirically you can see that governments in first world countries generally aren't screwing things up so much you can say taxes are completely wasted.

You can also feel free to infer that I don't think the free market would do a better job, but that wasn't ever my argument.
Regarding interesting open source projects, can anyone recommend an open source project that contributing to would teach me about real-life, effective usage of:

(1). git source control

(2). maintaining a medium sized/complexity Java project

I'm interested in the oral tradition i.e. the human operational aspects of how you use it, what aspect to use it in what circumstances etc, etc, etc - that aren't in the tool itself or its man pages or tutorials. Thanks for any pointers.
That was an amazing hack if you didn't have the ability to use server side includes with your crappy web host.

I can still remember the pain of writing document.write hundreds of times.
$700B bailout: Not just for Wallstreet any more.
Read:

http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html
Most politicians at the national level have law degrees.
Technically, it's the founders (Page and Brin) who bought the jet, not Google. The company itself has no financial links to Page & Brin's aircraft fleet.

Which makes it even less interesting as a story, of course. If two billionaires want to by an ex-military jet, who cares? It's their money.

Besides, the Alpha Jet's main role will be as a scientific instrumentation platform for NASA's use, as part of the agreement Brin & Page have with NASA for the use of Moffet Field. It was originally planned to place instrumentation on each of their executive aircraft (including a 767 and a 757), but this ran into serious certification problems. Being classified as an 'experimental' aircraft, NASA will have far more leeway in what it can or can't do to the Alpha Jet in terms of add-ons and modifications.
Connotea: satuketik's bookmarks
The market has got everything on special - whatever you do, DON'T BUY!

...unless you want to end up like Warren Buffett - who loves downturns because that's when he can stock up on his favourites, at discount prices. He hates booms, because everything is overpriced, and there's nothing to buy. He folded his first partnership because of that.

Of course, the advice for the stocks is the same now as always: don't buy unless you understand what you're buying (although, you might buy a little, as an educational experience). If you can't place a rough value on it (so you know if it's overpriced or underpriced) and are confident it has an enduring competitive edge (so it will compound, buy an index instead. (Scott recommends index funds in:

8. Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker, and never touch it until retirement.
If this headline is news to you, you need a new news source.
Introducing Rack::Cache
bet there are some Generation Z here (probably > silents or boomers)
My point was that performance is so far down the list of things I would care about in a framework that anyone who cares enough to put it as one of a very few limited options probably is not thinking about the problem domain in the same way I am. My surprise is that people agree with you that if you're listing a handful of possibilities, performance over other frameworks is a consideration. I'm just finding the whole thing bizarre, that's all.

Besides that, performance of widely varying frameworks written in widely varying languages usually can't be compared in meaningful ways. It's either a micro-benchmark of a few very specific test cases (and thus, not all that useful for predicting real world performance), or it is a "real world" example, but implemented with possibly wildly divergent quality and attention to detail--if you are a Java master and you build a test app, and then do a 1-to-1 port to Python, nobody would be surprised that the Java app outperforms the Python one.

Anyway, my point is that I simply don't understand how performance could be a meaningful piece of information in this context or how being "fast" could possibly make me want to use the framework over existing frameworks. Writing it in C would be "fast"...but I wouldn't use it.
um investing in a better server? goog cache: http://72.14.235.104/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.fool....
So in other words you have no problem with "double taxation" per se, your issue is with taxes generally.
How long is a 'long term investment'? (a brief analysis of S&P500 since 1950)
Afraid it might work?
Bauhaus on Cap Hill is pretty great, although a resto-bar would also solve the problems of having minors not being able to attend while letting some of us sip a cool beer.
Actually I would expect that people who already use RoR for example wouldn't really have performance a priority.

People using Java I think would be more sensitive to performance issues.

I agree that speed is not the top in the list for a framework, but having it in mind is important.
i remember my graduate level class on simulation (engineering course, not math/cs)

we had first assignment on generating 10000 random numbers

a guy fired up excel, generated rand in one cell, dragged to the bottom 10000, and gasp printed it

It was fun looking at flickering monitor, and humming laser printer - after a while, i felt sympathy for those devices

it took me less than 5 loc in matlab ... and being friendlier to trees as a bonus :D

and no, it's not a community college ... rather a top research engineering school ... but hey, things like this happen a lot
This helps to account for our optical “absolute pitch”, because the three types of cones are effectively “tuned” to respond to certain absolute frequencies.

no it doesn't, because inside our ear there are stereocilia "tuned" to each specific frequency one can hear. Yet we can not generally discern absolute pitch.
The headline seems to imply that the two are mutually exclusive.
Yeah, I only covered the positive scenario. The alternative is that cryptography isn't enough to preserve the privacy of needles in the haystack, and that all communications will be tracked or blocked. In that case, technology only helps an ever shrinking group of people control all of society, and we're boned.
ActiveQuant
AQ is a framework or an API for automated trading, opportunity detection, financial engineering, research in finance, connecting to brokers, etc. - basically everything around trading, written in Java, using Spring. All is published under a usage friendly open source license.
i highly recommend http://www.hopsandchops.com/.

thursday evenings @ linda's, great group of smart engs & entrepreneurs.

i had a great time this week.
Best Places to Launch a Career in 2008
Definitely too much to hope for, Bill and Mary have friends who "need" to be better than Bill and Mary. If Bill and Mary don't want more credit, their neighbours Mark and Kathy will get more credit.
If you want people to show up, you need to phrase it as a neutral event. If you invited people to an art gallery or a concert where they are not forced to sit accross from a stranger, more would show up.
Psh, haters.
Sticky tape is source of X-rays
Realtime wars pick up speed
Layoff Sign: Boss's Cold Shoulder
i looked up a sample code for single file upload, tweaking it to handle corner cases; however, there's a cgi library for that shrug ... better, simpler

but as a bonus, i now know http request better :D ... extending the cgi library, for example, uploading multiple files in one http request

library also has another use, for testing

for example, i got stuck char used as separator/ending in netstring, used in lighttpd's scgi

i looked at python scgi library source code, saw the output scgi variables etc, then readjust my porting code

but i strongly agree that building something from scratch is tremendously rewarding ... no matter how crappy it's - there's a beauty only u got the priviledge to enjoy ... FUN!
Your right. Some bits (like the last article) of Cubans economics might be interesting trains of though to follow. But this is pretty dumb.

It's either ignoring the very basic of economics (if you make vendors charge less for something then it costs them, they stop making it) or it failing to see that credit is just another thing you make & sell.
Robbie Williams Goodbye To The Normals
Memorabilia Collection
The Cambridge dictionary defines Memorabilia as objects that are collected because they are connected with a person or event, which is thought to be very interesting. A collection of items that bring back memories of past events, that takes you on a trip down the memory lane
1.) The money you've invested was already taxed.
2.) The money you received as dividends was taxed through corporate income tax.

I have no qualms about paying captial gains tax. But the blogger's comparison of capital gains tax vs. income tax is incorrect.
Senior Faculty member at MEST, based in Accra, Ghana
when i took math courses, we used maple, and R (for statistics)

engineering courses i took focused on matlab, and C (for embedded microcontrollers)

I never use java as 'domain-specific-language' for those projects.

The intro to CS was java; however, i took C for engineering course for uni requirement (counted as intro to cs)
I have no problems with double taxation. Just don't compare capital gains vs. Income tax. Which is what the blogger is doing. When in reality the equation is: Actual Tax Paid = (Income Tax + Capital Gains tax).
Is "Don't Be Obnoxious" the new "Don't Be Evil"?
How about the Laffer curve? Historically, whenever the capital gains tax rate has been decreased, revenue has increased due to secondary effects. That sounds like a pretty good argument to me.
Bzzzzzzt! Politics!

I think the most that can be said without much of anyone besides accountants disagreeing is that simplifying the tax code would actually do a lot of good.
How do these compare to the SICP lectures, for beginners? Can anyone who has seen them both give a comparison?

(I've always recommended the SICP videos to beginners.)
A few different possibilities:

Phase one: http://www.edmunds.com/insideline/do/Features/articleId=1099...

Legacy form factor mules with advanced technology in them.

Phase two: Performance tuning shops often pick up early versions of cars to start testing, looking for saleable mods, and adapting their lines to the new products. I would expect we'd start seeing reflashes for systems within a few months of a vehicle release

Phase three: As platform N depreciates and platform N+1 goes into production, N-class cars start falling into the hands of people more willing to cut them open and hack (track/hobby cars). If N and N+1 run the same code (project/source level, not binaries), features could be committed by individual hackers and could be picked up by manufacturers as desired.

Of course this is all predicated on this release being a real, public, open source project. If their desire/intent is to create an open source platform so that 2-5 manufacturers can share IP, it's possible that we'll never see the infrastructure to flash things ourselves, in which case this is all a big fat stinky dead end. :/
I have nearly 900 friends. I wouldn't call myself a friend collector though. The last 300 of these or so have all been initiated by the other party as I've moved and connected with different circles. This does prompt an interesting thought exercise...

My facebook timeline:

-May 2004 College Friending (200 friends): I finish senior thesis. Am bored. Hear about facebook hitting Princeton. I check it out. It's cute. I add my college friends. Zuck friends me as an early adopter. This probably gets me to 200 friends: the 40 or so people I considered friends, the 100 or so people I'd spent time with and then another 60 were people I knew through students groups, church or student government stuff. I believe at this point I had a detailed profile, was sharing my dorm room phone number and e-mail address.

-September 2004-August 2006 (200 friends): I worked as a summer camp counselor for three summers during time off from my first job, as a college admissions officer at Princeton. Facebook opened to HS students so my campers and fellow counselors wanted to be friends. It was at this time that I stopped sharing so much personal info, having begun to see FB as my personal address book, rather than an intimate conversation. I probably added another 200 friends during this period.

-September 2006-March 2008 Grad School (200 friends): I started at Northwestern J-school and we all friended eachother up on FB as an overture to getting to know one another. Subsequent arriving groups of students also friended me. It's not a huge program and networking is everything in journalism. This was probably another 300 people, 60% of them are people I've worked with. The rest are people I've had class with or corresponded with in some capacity. Being able to get on the horn with a reporter at Time or Newsweek is just plain useful.

- Late adopter pickup (150 friends) - Over the last two years or so, as Facebook has become ubiquitous, people I knew in middle school and high school have surfaced to friend me. Even a few from elementary school. During a moment of absolute boredom, I tracked down my 6th grade crush on FB and friended her. So FB became a bit of a link to my past. Friending these people would prompt a short exchange of updates, followed by radio silence as we followed from afar. It's fun to know I've got ooooold friends in places like Turkey and London.

- March 2008 - Present, Readers, local bloggers in Chicago (150 friends): The last phase of this has been recently as I've published an online magazine about Chicago news and politics. Readers have friended me as have other bloggers and writers in Chicago.

At this point, while I share about 200 photos on my profile (none sketchy in the least) I haven't really updated it in years. It lists my professional background and interests, and that's about it. I don't go on there a whole lot, maybe once a week for 20 minutes or so.

That's how I have 900 friends, for what it's worth.
Whilst I agree with your point, I am shocked at your courage to attempt to use the English spelling of "arsehole" in the internet. Haven't seen it written that way for too long a time !

I find myself giving up and using American spelling and terms.

Even Firefox doesn't know how to spell, despite me telling my OS many times my locale to an alarming level of detail.
It is indeed - but at what point are they fast enough and attention should be put on to (presumably) non JS items like DOM manipulation ?

(or are they related, I know nothing about browser design other then how to write for them or use them, a bit).
True, but it makes sense that it's easier to discern the 3 different rod responses absolutely than the 3000 (according to the article) different response functions of the ear.
F# by Chris Smith Due Out Next Year - with an interesting O'Reilly Cover
The title is a little misleading, isn't it? You can represent the colors without negative colors, that's what you do with the XYZ basis they talk about. What the article claims is that you can't replicate all possible color stimuli in the physical world with three monochromatic bases.

I finally understood why high-quality ink jets have so many inks. They split the visible color space up into a higher order polygon than the basic RGB triangle.
Alcohol Rehabilitation
Its all about alcohol addiction and its treatment.

----------

brianna

<a href="http://www.alcohol-rehab.cn" rel="dofollow">Alcohol Rehabilitation</a>
"I can’t stand having 60% of the work day tied up with: copy-and-paste chunk of code, then tweak for new field names, then make sure to update the correct database fields, add validation, ad nauseum."

no wonder with that approach (copy paste, field names, etc) ... one will get bored

a good approach is "do without"

how do i write better, simpler code w/o copy paste

how do i eliminate using field names (i don't know in php, but maybe use list and map ... nullify the need for temp variables)

maybe do w/o database? maybe use in memory persistence, load once, write every time?

how about javascript validation instead of php equivalent? better user experience

how about cutting the 100 loc (peppered with temp var, fn, loops and other nasties) to 5 loc (say using map, apply, lambda, closure -- again, i don't use php)

i do notice that codebase that has limits (like can't be > 1000 loc) is usually better than the no-limits equivalent

"do without" will force u to think and it's more fun because your code won't be similar to others' boilerplate

the code probably won't be 'best industry practice' aka code that coworkers/employers will appreciate; however, the beauty of your own code can only be enjoyed by you only ... and i think that itself is a great reward

but of course u can't hide from responsibility when the code breaks, otherwise one can always blame the copy-paste or legacy codes -- anyway holding the responsibility alone is a priviledge, not liability
How the Australian government tried to gag web censor critics
How cloud computing changes IT economics
Compare a recent car with one from 10 years ago, they seem nicer for the same money.

Computers are, obviously, better - more transistors in CPUs, much more cache, much bigger harddrives, cheaper memory.

Digital cameras are way better, not only higher megapixel sensors and larger, cheaper storage cards, larger LCDs but also more realtime processing than before with face-detection, Sony's smile-detection, and they're around the same price.

Broadband in the UK has gone from being a new choice for the leading edge, to being commonplace, to flattening out the choices so 8Mb is the standard, to ADSL2+ being available at the larger exchanges outside London.

Popular screen technology for computers and TVs has almost entirely switched to LCDs when it was CRTs for everybody 10 years ago.

The first iPod I bought was a 3rd generation 40Gb model. It would have been in 2003 or so, now I have one that's cheaper, lighter, smaller, faster, nicer screen, longer battery life, which is also a video player, phone, emailer and has 3d acceleration hardware.

What about the new Macbook's unibody construction? They couldn't mill cases out of solid aluminium in large quantities without CNC machines. They have been around for years, but presumably it's only a small number of years that it's been precise/cheap/available enough for Apple to use it profitably. I took a few laptops apart around 2000, there were lots of parts, widely spread out. Check the disassembly of the new Macbook - the mainboard is tiny. It's almost certainly largely built by very precise robots and designed with the help of a lot of computing power.

USB has gone from being a bit of a joke (in 2000 I had a USB Zip 100 drive) to being the file transfer and peripheral connection medium of choice with multi-Gb sticks for sale anywhere and everywhere.

Could you have bought a roomba in 2000 to sweep your floors for you? Or a friendly robotics Robomow? Or a games console with built in, low hassle, online ability? Or a BluRay player and a HD TV?

OK, my life as a day-to-day event is different because I work with and on computers using the internet, and that's where I can see the changes, but on a day to day basis it's much the same, the same sort of transport, food, books, consumables, etc.

Although I could now (had I the money) buy a car which would pre-arm the brakes if I was too close to the car in front so they will apply quicker, parallel park for me, alert me if there's someone in the blind spots, silence the carphone incoming calls when cornering hard as it would be too distracting to ring then. None of these things were around 10 years ago.

Nothing seems much different, but then most of my life is spent wearing woven thread, sitting on wood or plasticfoamy chairs, eating plants and being around brick buildings. At that level, how much change do you expect?
My skill at predictions is better. He tried to predict, I didn't. ;)

Meat brains aren't subject to the law (yet). We don't change ourselves so we don't get a growing return on our own improvements.

I ought to have the same skill at predictions (environment, nutrition, education, age, culture, upbringing, effort, normal human variations in ability and the quirk of ever increasing IQ levels notwithstanding).
Father of HTTP and REST: REST APIs must be hypertext-driven
I'm still trying to figure out what he means here...
Returning to, or redisovering Emacs
Yep, the cost was part of the reason my girlfriend and I moved to Vienna, Austria (in my case that was moving back home) - we couldn't afford to rent a flat in London despite both of us working full-time; it used up my entire salary and some of hers, and that was before bills, commute, food, etc. I was doing ~70 hour weeks and we were barely breaking even, so we decided to get out.

I think a lot of smart people, especially CompSci grads ended up working in the finance sector which pays (paid?) way more than classic software development, which pays more than game dev, so that probably explains the shortage.

With that kind of cost of living it really surprises me that there are a lot of startups in London compared to other parts of Europe.
I can't recommend a particular project, but looking through [1] for something which catches your eye would be a good start.

[1] http://github.com/search?q=java
One of the flaws in this is that since he's looking back in time he doesn't include potential investments in companies that go bankrupt. This would shift the whole thing somewhat to the left.

Interesting nonetheless.
Recursion, Misunderstood
They've been trying to censor the Internet in Australia for years (primarily the previous government, but the current govt seems to be carrying it forward) - to date every effort has either been ignored, badly implemented, reversed, revised or in some other way failed...

It wouldn't surprise me if they pressed on to save face, and then quietly shelved the idea in the background.
What's scary is most of the people I know haven't even heard of this and what it will mean for freedom of information.

There doesn't seem to be any reports on mainstream television at all about this AFAIK
> it needs to be gutted before any good can come of it.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
I agree in principle, but at some point you're done with don't-repeat-yourself framework wizardry and you're up against the basic task of translating fragmentary verbal requirements into a technical solution. Web frameworks (sometimes) make that process more productive but no less boring.
If you don't tax capital, then only the wealthy will own capital. Eventually the capital starts owning itself and then the people don't even own capital anymore.

Our tax system has to try and fix one of the fundamental flaws of capitalism -- the tendency for the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer. Without a capital gains tax, this very worst aspect of capitalism becomes even more emphasized, as capital will last forever.
My favored litmus test is if you can remember the Berlin Wall.
Ah, I made a mistake with compressing the real file - I assumed 2 Million 16 Bit numbers.

Using 1 Million 32 Bit numbers I still get down to 1891867 Bytes with 7zip. That's less than 2 MB but more than the theoretic minimum of 13511116 bits (=1688889.5 Byte).