skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are (it seems intentionally) ignoring the point that Mercator's area distortion doesn't dangerously mislead in navigation, quite the contrary. Or, if that isn't true, please name some cases where navigators were messed up because they thought Greenland looked bigger than it was in area.

Unless you use a globe, every projection onto a flat rectangular surface distorts.

Now how does that make more plausible the claim that world map makers are inflating the area of Taiwan on purpose?
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Ecommerce Tips for Black Friday 2011
Ubuntu Linux on tablets?
Una nueva dieta...
So, I picked up this book on a whim from Half-Priced Books about six months ago. I've since loaned it out to a mechanical engineering friend of mine, and he's finished it; I'll be loaning it out again soon--it's one of those books that I consider essential for spreading the good word of CS/EE.

ACTUAL REVIEW/SPOILER CONTENT:

So, the book does start pretty slowly. It considers the case of signaling with flashlights. This motivates semaphores (not the concurrency type!), which in turn motivates telegraphs. The telegraph repeater and its automation is used to motivate logic gates. Around here (forget exactly whether it's before or after) the author diverges for a chapter or two into boolean logic and counting mechanisms. Then the idea of storage is brought in, then the idea of state machines. Calculation is brought in, and soon the author has a simple little ALU. The author talks about wiring up an interface for this, and then there is talk about interrupts, operating systems, and also real embodiments of this sort of hardware--6502 or 8086 assembler is introduced and discussed.

The writing is geared such that someone in highschool shouldn't have trouble understanding anything, and there is enough history thrown in with the light style that it isn't a chore to slog through.

WHY THIS BOOK IS NOT A WASTE OF TIME:

So, I've already taken the introductory computer engineering/CS classes during my time at university. I've already read a lot in high school and a lot after college on computers and their architecture. This is not a new subject to me. Why is this still a good read?

Folks, our professions (whether you are a mechanical engineer black-boxing gear trains, a software engineer black-boxing Java/Scala/JVM bytecode, or a Perl hacker black-boxing the very mouth of madness) are all rooted in abstraction. Everything we do, everything we touch, is a slice of a pyramid of (sometimes shaky/leaky/smelly) abstractions.

The great thing about Code isn't what it teaches you about programming (it doesn't cover much other than assembly, if that) or computer engineering (no help soldering or designing ring buses or whatnot) or even mathematics (boolean algebra is pretty straightforward in its presentation); instead, Code focuses on bringing us to a functioning microcomputer from a flashlight in our bedroom, without ever skipping a layer of abstraction.

Even if you already know each slice (in broader detail than presented), seeing the entire journey is at worst enjoyable and at best extremely educational.
Well, you can connect to webspace via SSH. Which reminded me of a phenomenon I almost forgot: Back before facebook, I can remember multiple situations where people made the mistake to think that things on their public webspace are private just because they weren't linked.
Japan's Former Computer Lag
2011 Online Reputation Management Study
I would think he'd have a problem with China's track record on freedom more than any anti-USA connotations.
Bad Day
Ask HN: Recording of Marcus Pincus at Startup School 2011?
I watched through all the recordings of Startup School 2011 on justin.tv [1] but I can't seem to find the Marcus Pincus interview. Does there exist a recording?

[1] http://www.justin.tv/startupschool
Why such an elitest attitude? We all have to start somewhere.
My observation is that simplicity tends to cause polarization. This (having lovers and haters) is actually quite good, IMHO. More conversation means more chances to learn from your users/customers.
As far as I know it is still under copyright. Anders Hejlsberg's name is in the comment headers; it was largely rewritten in 1986 and 1987 for TP4. I believe it belongs to Embarcadero, the company I work for, after they bought the developer tools division from Borland.

I have no idea about releasing it. I'm entirely the wrong end of the company to ask about it.
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I am sure their $450k in lobbying helps too.

https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00005517...

And the fact that their VC firm was the CIA.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125200842406984303.html

They are a very shady company. Taking big checks from the .gov to "fight terrorism" never works well. But it usually makes a few people very wealthy.
Clickochet - An Ad-Space Trading Community
Openness doesn't sell phones to non-geeks. If they cannot do something unique then they shouldn't spend the resources. Also, on a phone, how many of those drivers are going to be closed? Right now it is pretty much video, on a phone it will be interesting.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto
Where were you 6 months ago? :)

Thanks for the comment. Following the spinout from bitly, we're assuming a more ambitious vision for the app. Stay tuned...

(ps we're big fans of pro publica. keep up the great work!)
Anyone else have a few issues with this story?

1. Thinking that Google owed them a higher level of customer service for a free account. They're already offering a much better email system than almost anywhere else, for free!

2. Letting the backup email address expire.

3. Not backing up important messages. You can't leave backup to other people regardless of who they are.

4. Not using two factor security for an email account with so much important data.

5. Sending important personal data over email?? "At some point over the past six years, our correspondence would certainly have included every number or code that was important to us" WTF? E-mail, regardless of the provider, is not secure! Why would you send these things plaintext across the Internet??

6. He alludes to the fact that his wife's info may have been on the Gawker release. . . and they were just hacked now??

Granted. . . maybe we cannot expect a nontechnical consumer to know these things. So how do we get them up to par?
(edited for formatting)
Agloves have been around for a while: http://www.agloves.com/

[edit] No relation, just a happy customer. Last Christmas I bought a whole bunch as presents for my family.
They are still using Borland Turbo series is still used in many colleges to teach C,C++,Pascal and maybe prologe
Clearly it can't apply to everything but certainly some of the things Ashton said can be taken as solid advice without having to fail first.

I'm not making a comparison between knowledge and experience as they are two different animals. But there is certainly a lot to learn from another person's experience. It's the reason a boxer study tapes of their opponents fighting other people, although it by no means ensures success it does increase their chances.

The thing is in the real life you don't get unlimited chances to learn from your own mistakes. In somes cases if you fail once, its over. You don't get a chance to build a new product everyday, or write a book, or play for a championship ring, etc. If you can find sound advice that saves you the time/pain of failing, take it. Winning is better anyway.
Stop Making Excuses and Start Building
I found this blog post that seems to provide a more in depth look at what is covered in the screencast: http://lostechies.com/derickbailey/2011/10/25/rebuilding-my-...
This is basically everything I wrote during the event, edited for clarity. I'm not usually one to take copious notes, but I felt compelled to soak up everything I could from all of the speakers.
I have seen Steam pop up a dialog that says what they collected and asks if you would like to submit it or not. It does not seem like they submit the information without your explicit consent.
Steve Jobs' memo to startups
Another happy fastmail user here, of about 9 years. Agreed, it's worth paying for.
Congratulations. It looks very polished.
Yeah, i think it is google's fault! hehe
I echo the other comment: there is nothing currently on the front page that tells me exactly what this site does. Is it a chat room? There's not an obvious link for previewing, if such an option exists. I just don't think the average user is going to sign up for another service without knowing what it offers
> Berkeley, sadly, is perhaps too large and diverse for an overall characterization.

I'm hoping that the author means sadly in the I wish I could properly characterize the school but can't rather than sadly the school is unfocused.
Video Marketing Problem: Solved.
Great idea and execution. Now you just need to link up with some costume/craft sellers for monetization. You of course have the seasonal problem of extreme interest for a few weeks, but maybe it can be an active site.
How long will you be able to pull this off? 2 weeks?
Maybe 3 weeks at best.
And you'll be suffering from burnout so bad you wouldn't want to look at your project ever again.
Like responded to sibling. Run away, get caught, hope that border guards you find are not paid by the same people. Alternatively walk into the biggest place you can find crowded with enough police people that even the corrupted one wouldn't be sure they can act as they want and claim you've got information and need protection (of course not knowing the situation well, I'm not sure how reasonable the second way is)
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Mozilla Releases Firefox With Bing
Don't obsess over size guys, its how you use it is what matters at the end of the day.
Whole Earth Catalog revisited: "Steve Job’s Google of the 60s" by Lloyd Kahn
Your complaint seems just a little bit ridiculous considering that most Americans, yourself probably included, use computers made in China or made with parts made in China. In fact, it's probably easier to find and computer 100% free of proprietary software than a computer 100% free of Chinese components. Considering that, national security concerns aside, free trade between countries is usually mutually beneficial, I see no reason to fault Stallman for this.
Where is YT in the Diamond Age?
I did this (for six months) up until recently (quit my job) and I can say that it's a great means for getting your project started. If you're in a situation where you don't have a lot of money saved up and need a job, nothing beats spending time in the evenings and weekends working on your idea. The only caveat that wasn't really noted by the author is that it's NOT EASY. When all of your time is occupied with work (even if you view your project as fun/something you enjoy, it's still hard work), you can get worn out very easily. Be warned that this requires a lot of dedication and focus (sometimes you skip going out on the weekend to build a new feature). It will suck at times but once you get into a flow, it gets easier. What's more, make sure you explain what you're doing with any significant others (girlfriend, wife, boyfriend, husband) as this will detract a lot of time from your relationship and you'll need support for what you're doing.
"you can't rely on the market to weed out inaccurate maps" is a misleading statement, particularly in the context where people are contending that the size of Taiwan has intentionally been inflated worldwide for political reasons.

THAT kind of inaccuracy bears almost no resemblance to gripes which emerge about the tradeoffs in 2d map projections regarding inevitable (as opposed to highly arbitrary, political) shape and area distortions.

Maps which have south at the top ARE sold and do just fine in the Southern Hemisphere.

The point actually remains that the market has not rewarded any maps which have the kind of distortions which would be required to specifically and artificially inflate the size of Taiwan relative to China, without much affecting anything else.
If this is a flawed idea you can let me know (and I'm open to your thoughts) but this is what I'm operating under right now: I, nor no one I know, uses FB events for casual get togethers. Want to get together for drinks at the bar tonight after work? I wouldn't use FB events. I could send text messages to friends sure, or I could call them sure, but this is a fun easy way to accomplish that. That's what I want, and I don't have anything else that fulfills that.. if there is something else it hasn't made its way onto my desk yet. So its just a simple way t odo that, that's the value proposition at the moment.
Thanks Danso, duly noted. Will change some wording today to make it clearer and will think about longer term fixes as well.
What the author says is wrong is the fact that you can't opt-out of this service, and that it is too difficult to determine what is and isn't publicly available on social networking sites.

The author has a point, but he's just going in the wrong direction (and should be focusing more on twitter and Facebook and less on Klout). He should be arguing in favor of more transparent privacy options, opt-in instead of opt-out by default, and more secure defaults in social networking rather than saying someone is doing something wrong with publicly available info.
The Quantum Boiling Pot (never boils)
I checked out news.me when it launched and you guys were very gracious to give me another free trial so I could try it again. However, I didn't get into it then...but I'm definitely not someone who uses his iPad for reading outside of the browser or kindle app, so take my ignorance with a grain of salt :)
While I agree - in different words - that it's probably just a projection error, it is always extremely off-putting when the Overbearing Defensive Cyber-Army makes its appearance to defend China from any and every possible criticism.

It really does much more harm to China than a simple misunderstanding about projection errors.
Either is sufficient.
Why the ever increasing sales target is the wrong goal
This move is only disruptive if it replaces a good chunk of current usage... without handling common and higher margin items, this is not going to disrupt anyone, just streamline Apple Store processes.
Indeed, Sniffnoy - thanks for sorting out my terminology. Great circles is exactly what I meant.
Elephant's Dream: CC Animation made using only Open Source Software
That link is just a blog with a quote.

This appears to be a much more authentic source:

http://www.w3.org/html/planet/
It was useless on my MacBookPro (with Chrome) because the menu bar was white text, on a white background. And some white text had over-written the title. And a bunch of other stuff.
I fed a game of Dwarf Fortress into Perl and my computer became self aware
This pattern simply isn't sustainable and should not be maintained for anything other than short bursts.

The level of those short bursts is variable based on your own individual conditions (i.e., single college kids vs. married fathers of two), but the end state is the same if exceeded: burnout.

My advice would be to find a method that works well, and do it longer. The world is not going to end because your MVP wasn't released in three months.
Goodbye HTML5 "time", hello "data"!
Gloves like this have existed for a while now. Other solutions go back even further, as Koreans have taken to using sausage styluses to fix this problem: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/02/korean-iphone-stylus-...
Since I can remember, I've visualised time as a set of continuous spirals - years are the largest, with Christmas at the top and early summer at the bottom. The years lie on top of one another and fade off into the distance, like a slinky viewed end-on. I see days, weeks and months separately, but in continuous spirals of their own. I don't know how common this is, but I vaguely recall reading that it is a form of synaesthesia.

I've always found this pretty useful. I can see the positions between events and intuitively judge their distance. I can see how recurring events are 'pinned' through multiple years. I see time periods - like months, or vacation times, as segments of the coil that are somehow 'different' (like being a different colour, except not). If I'm trying to remember when something happened, or is going to happen, I mentally flip through the slinky layers.

Does anyone else think this way? How do people regularly visualise time? I've always thought it'd be a pretty fantastic digital calendar UI, since it seems so intuitive to me - how does it sound to others?

Edit: Here's an article I just found. There are some people with similar visualizations to mine, and someone who perceives a year as a giant numeral '7'! Interestingly, the article talks about this perception underlying unusually good memory - but my memory of the past is actually pretty atrocious.

http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2009/11/the_cognitiv...
SINGULAR OF FACT (ANECDOTE):

I just thought I'd mention this as well.

As my ME friend (at that time, roommate) was chugging through the book, he'd randomly come up and ask me questions or points of clarification. This culminated one evening during dinner.

He, my other roommate (a Linux sysadmin/applied mathematician), and I (software developer and former ME) were enjoying some Indian food, and the ME began bugging us about interrupts. He couldn't understand quite what they were useful for.

So, over the course of four or so hours, we probed him with questions geared towards increasing his understanding. Something along these lines transpired:

ME:"So, what are interrupts good for?"

SD: "Well, they're good for getting the processor's attention. How would you handle checking if a button is down?"

ME: "I could have processor check a line in."

SA: "And if that check happens to miss the button press?"

ME: "...erm, I could have something else check it, faster."

SD: "And how would you check it?"

ME: <thinking hard> "You...could have the switch be controlling a bit of the memory, I guess."

SD: "Congratulations! You've invented memory-mapped I/O!"

SD/SA: <give brief spiel on MMI>

SD: "But you still haven't told us about how to solve interrupts."

ME: <several more suggestions that are basically around polling>

SD: "Let's think about the problem. What you want to do is have the processor poll the button, right?"

ME: "Yes."

SD: "And only do this when it's needed, right?"

ME: "Yep."

SD: "So, what if there was some kind of way of signaling the processor that data was ready?"

ME: "...oh. I guess you could use a pin for that."

SD: "What would that pin do?"

ME: "I think it would have to tell the processor to go handle input."

SD: "And how would that work?"

ME: <several suggestions about dedicated copying logic>

ME: <converges to idea of setting program counter to interrupt code in memory>

SA: "What happens if I want to go somewhere else to handle my interrupt code?"

ME: <suggests looking up equivalent of jump instruction to trampoline into handler>

SA: "You've just invented the interrupt trap vector!"

...etc...

So, by the end of the night, with proper questioning we'd gotten him to come up with MMIO, with virtual memory, with paging, and eventually gotten him to consider how to implement concurrency via scheduling and his newly discovered virtual memory mechanism.

It was delightful, and wouldn't have been possible unless he'd been getting the lay of the land from reading Code.

edit: oh god the spacing
edit2: processor's, not processors
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Anonymous Threatens Mexico’s Murderous Drug Lords
Happy?!
Scheme Defeats Facebook's Defense Against CSRF Attacks
Haskell web frameworks are maturing rapidly and the language is a joy to work in, once you learn how to approach problems in it. Haskell has probably not reached the peak of it's popularity yet (and frankly it's overdue for some mainstream love).
His/her comment seems pretty critical of EA and Origin. The Battlefield 3 comments I'd agree with.

Infact I'd agree with pretty much the entire statement and I've been around here for along time.

I'm not sure why you think liking a video game and begin critical of the company who produces it would mean the poster is an employee of the company.
Fully Functional Siri Port  Release To IPhone 4 & iPod touch 4G Refused
If people based their buying decisions on whether or not they like the producing country, it would kill US exports.
I suppose that depends on the individual, their life situation (single, married, college student, full time job, etc), and how long they can stay excited about their idea.

I'm curious about how long the OP specifically has been pulling these 49 hour additional work-weeks.
If you get bored with a project in 2 weeks then I would not try to build a business around it. If your current job is not overly stressful, then you should be able to do this for 6 months to a year.
Not only will you quickly burnout but that kind of intensity makes you very susceptible to getting sick. A couple of sleepless nights from stress and one crowded bus ride -- wham! -- you have a flu bug.
Really? Seemed like he was simply pointing out an error on my part. Don't see where Taiwan enters that at all.

More to the point, there's a big difference between distorting scale in a way that's mathematically consistent throughout the projection (i.e. one in which you preserve shape or position at scale's expense), and simply fudging the scale in a particular spot.
That's a simile, not a metaphor!
It's always nice to have another point of view within a subject. Would like to know more.
From Xoom to bust: how Motorola's tablet failed to conquer Honeycomb
Fukuoka, Japan: From Ruby Community to Ruby Business
>If a Python shop was looking for somebody technical to make them a pile of money, the fact that I’ve never written a line of Python would not get held against me.

>Much of Fog Creek uses the Microsoft Stack. I can’t even spell ASP.NET and they’d still hire me.

A bit presumptuous, perhaps?
Yeah, that blog post is a companion to the screencast. The purpose of the post is to provide some additional thoughts on the high level refactorings that I did, while the screencast is intended to show _how_ to do the refactorings instead of just why.
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