skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The most salient point I got from the article: an increasing number of people learning English are using it only to speak to others who do not speak it natively. A couple of illustrations:

- I have witnessed one student from Hong Kong and one student from Beijing use English to bridge the gap between Cantonese and Mandarin (as well as pen & paper).

- My French is very poor, so the only people that I can converse with in French are those with a really bad English accent. I can well imagine that English is worse, what with its crazy spelling and idioms.
Well, marketing propaganda aside, CoffeeScript is not JavaScript. It doesn't run in any JavaScript interpreter. Is it, in fact, an abstraction by every definition of the word. All programming languages are abstractions, and this particular abstraction compiles into JavaScript making it a DIRECT abstraction of JavaScript.
Supercut Genre
http://stereopsis.com/flux/ <-- It changed my life. (Automatically adjusts screen brightness/color/etc such that your circadian rhythms resemble that of a normal human being as opposed to someone who stares at an artificial sun for 16+ hours a day.)
Rudy Garza, G51 Capital: Flying with Super Angels [video]
You should read a bit more of Gladwell's works as well as his background before labeling him as a "relatively dumb medium".
So a ton of shop owners just installed CCTV cameras for the hell of it did they? No correlation with them doing that and shoplifting/other crime going down eh?

I'm sure councils also install CCTV cameras on the streets just for the fun of it, or to spy on people rather than to cut down anti social behavior, muggings, pickpocketing, knife crime etc.

Yes, we have a low crime rate due to our culture. But we have an even lower crime rate due to the private CCTV cameras, and council run CCTV systems.

I don't really understand how your privacy is invaded by shop owners videoing the shop to make sure people aren't stealing stuff. It's not like they make the tapes public or don't erase them after a few days...

How many breaches of trust have you heard of? Have there been cases of shop owners identifying people buying sausages and posting their mugshots online or something?
Navigation with "nibbles"
>Here’s the really bad news. No one has actually run out of drives yet. Most manufacturers have stated they have drives enough to last them through the end of November, meaning that the current price hikes are the result of shipment reductions, supply-side manipulation to reduce demand, and undoubtedly some degree of speculation by the middle men. This last factor has an impact on the total price, but it’s not what’s causing the problem.

>First off, the so-called “gray” market for hard drives is going to explode....DigiTimes reports that gray market HDD sales are already booming as panicked OEMs have tried to lay in additional inventory to see them through the coming months.

The world must be a scary place when you don't understand basic economics, with a boogeyman man behind every corner.
K&R isn't a good introduction to modern C programming. Even the ANSI edition of the book is outdated. There are better intros in the forms of books and web sites.
Innovation Framework for Early Stage Products
Yep. I find it fascinating why plain unsalted md5 hashes are as common as they are. Developers go through the trouble of hashing, but don't go the single necessary step further.
And you stop coding the moment it gets dark?
Solar is going to be a disruptive technology in the future. Something I'm pretty excited about.
why have they added 100% to all the percentage price increases? if something cost $100 and now costs $150 then the price increase was 50%, not 150%. grumble grumble.
How Heroku Works - Maker's Day
My child (11) goes to a school in a top tier CA elementary school, and he has never carried a single school book. Homework problems are all photocopies of typed up problem sets.

I take that back, the books he carries are the ones he reads for pleasure (the Harry Potter books are really huge, too). Once I get my Kindle Fire, I'm giving him my old Kindle, which should help with that.
No one wants to learn to program.

The question is fundamentally flawed.

People want to build something, not learn to program.

To teach someone to build something, teach them how to use the tools of the trade. No carpenter ever learned the physics behind wood in order to build their first table.

The answers to this question all come from people with a perspective that this is what they would do if they wanted to take a bright person and put them into a developer role at their company. And, they all have the defeatist attitude that unless you read these three theory books, and spend four months of intense study, you cannot be a programmer. What hogwash.

Most people cannot take four months off from work and intensely study programming. But, anyone can learn to tinker on something they care about with the right mentorship and using the right tools. Anyone can learn to use jQuery, Ruby on Rails or HTML if-and-only-if the point of doing so is not to learn jQuery, RoR or HTML but is to build something that inspires them. All you need is a path with baby steps and inspiration.
Learn Web Design, Web Development, and iOS Development - Treehouse
Well, I'm a PC gamer and I have to say that I cannot possibly see myself playing the majority of the games I play now on a phone with no solid control scheme and a 4" screen. Touch screens do not play well with non-casual games. I've tried some of the cute RTS games available for my Android phone and they're practically unplayable because my finger obscures my view of the screen.

Now, if you're saying that at some point in the future I'll be using my phone for gaming by plugging it into my TV via HDMI and using a keyboard/mouse combo via USB or Bluetooth, then sure. But at that point it's no different than what I'm doing now.
So Salesforce (CRM) made a "strategic investment" in this round. My bet is that this is just the first part of an acquisition which was unable to be completed at this time.

If I were a betting man, I'd say CRM will acquire UA (read: finish their acquisition) in the next 12 months. Think of this investment as a discount on the final sale price that gives the founders the visible exit they seek (which probably couldn't happen today) and puts SimpleGeo into the acquisition bag all at once.
Really cool, can one integrate something like Sinon (http://sinonjs.org) with this to get spies, mocks, etc? I didn't see a mention of this in the docs.

Edit: Hrm, my bad. Looks like you can just require() standalone file dependancies?
Doesn't do OO well enough? That's not a complaint I've heard before. What makes you say that?
Or you could just test 100 people and discover that X think of Goodyear or the Hindenberg and you're being a bit absurdist. :)
I think you have it mixed up:

nomoremongo posted the comment at 2011-11-06T03:43:48Z: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3201772

nmongo posted the story at 2011-11-06T07:05:13Z: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3202081
- Redshift/flux

- those fancy windowshades with pinholes

- laptops with antiglare screens, dammit!
Wonder what Salesforce wants with UA.
Salted md5 is still surely laughably weak in an age of GPU cracking?
Also: http://tsunami-udp.sourceforge.net
"No open source project has received more criticism in recent years than MongoDB."

[citation needed]

Suggesting that the 1.0 version number should have been reserved until more recently makes me think that what the author of this post is really saying is something like this:

"MongoDB wasn't really production-ready until recently. People who wanted to test something bleeding-edge out in the real world should have still been free to do so, but branding the product as a beta and giving it a sub-1.0 version number would have helped set expectations correctly."
After reading the article and skimming some posts on their subreddit, I think the idea generally concerns the capabilities of consumer electronics to 'replicate' the Internet in a completely decentralized fashion. By doing so, there's no central authority managing your packets, and if you want to visit a particular node (i.e., to visit a web site), the problem becomes analogous to the stochastic shortest path problem, which is NP-complete. So, wouldn't this system require P = NP for it to have any viability at all when factoring in the effects of latency and downtime?
The scripts from India has very consistent reading or pronunciation system.
Mobile Phone: The New Credit Card? [Infographic]
I would say "yes" if you're learning a language that has a REPL (such as the Lisp languages.) A REPL is already basically an interface for a text-based game and learning about one helps you learn about the other.

That's why I create a text adventure game in "Land of Lisp" and on my website: http://lisperati.com/casting.html
I post and correct on a language exchange site. One day, one of my Japanese friends there received a correction from someone with the worst English I have ever seen on that site, including that of people learning English. She immediately stated that she only wanted corrections from people who were fluent in English, and asked that he not correct her entries any more.

He blew up. He claimed he WAS fluent.

After a huge row, it turned out that everyone in his village in China speaks English like that and they are convinced they are fluent. I can only assume that's because they use it with each other, and don't try to communicate with people who are natively fluent.
Let's add an hour every year. I like that idea!
What people generally say is that the net was designed to be robust against things like a nuclear strike taking out some part of the network.

That is very different from saying that it can't be turned off, by a government with the power to legally compel infrastructure operators to do things.

I'd say that the US government, if it wanted to, could turn off the Internet, for most of its citizens, over the course of a few days.

What would stop this happening is the legal framework, and the business and societal infrastructure that depends on the Internet functioning; but not some technological property of the Internet.

The ability to knock domains out, at the DNS level, was demonstrated not too long ago - e.g. http://torrentfreak.com/feds-seize-pokerstars-full-tilt-poke...

Theres this meme out there that the Internet cant be turned off, because its designed in a 'decentralised' manner, and its just not true, in pragmatic terms.
Deadlines and Creativity
Problem is that English is the language of Globalization, power and gun.
I'd just like to note at this point that I find rmc's analogy personally offensive.

My apologies, I regret any harm caused.
My salary is $32k pre-tax. I live in Boston, pay $650/month in rent (and two other roommates) and don't own a car (I bike or ride the train).

I put away about 10k in savings/401k last year, so I'm going to say you can live on $20k/year. I watch my money like a hawk though. Buying a $400 refurb laptop was a serious expense for me and took quite a bit of thinking about.
You can't properly compare sales numbers between two products whose major purpose is quite different. Nintendo's products are for gaming only, they serve very little purpose otherwise. Every one of those was sold as a gaming unit. Most people bought their iPhones for purposes other than gaming. Sure, a large number, if not all, of iPhones users play games on their device but that's not a fair comparison since that wasn't always the reason for the sale. The fact that Nintendo has sold so many devices with one purpose as compared to the iPhone which has far more uses is the impressive part to me.

It's close to the same logic that a pirated game equates to a lost sale, which it does not.
A non-square grid would itself not be an issue but if you want to do multiple LED strings as would be needed for a 10x50 grid the code might need to be modified to have multiple data outputs for each string. You should be able serially connect the strings but at some number you will have issues with the data/power wires, and may not get your desired refresh rate.
Daily Mobile Minute #48: Start using QR codes properly
You 're not the only one. I too think speed of development and maintenance is key. It's just that lots of people live in (and on) the Apple bubble. I think Obj-c was one of Jobs' obsessions or else i can't explain why anyone would want to force people to write code like that in 2011. I have a feeling that Apple may open up their APIs now that he;s gone.
YOU try "coordinating schedules" with a couple of toddlers who now are up and raring to go at 5:00AM, thanks to a conspiracy of complete strangers to #^*& with my clocks.

As of this morning I hate DST 10x more than ever.
> What happens in that situation is a few people make all the money and the rest don't.

Or alternatively the economic force of competition kicks in and these goods become virtually free above the cost of the machinery and raw goods.
Black Friday 2011 TV Deals will be Extreme
Pinch of salt. Probably cost a few hundred grand to put together, but still a pinch of salt.
There was a tool which was used to trace forum leaks/mirrors, it was made/used by an Eve Online Alliance of all things. (If you can find a 2010/2011 mirror of the "Pandemic Legion" forums there should be a description of it on there).

From what I read it would introduce subtle changes based upon some identifier (either IP address, user account or both).

The variation was generated by using unicode characters which were either invisible or very close substitutions to actual characters. This could be countered by anyone who knew it was there however.

There was also the ability to write a block of the post in multiple different ways. With 5 blocks written 5 ways each you can get 3125 different variations of a post.

There is probably some interesting mathematics relating the level of redundancy to the minimum number of documents that would be required to make an un-tracable version.
I've been using MongoDB for well over a year now in around 6 apps (moved on from CouchDB) and I agree prior to 1.8 it should have been made more obvious that there were still some stability issues.

I have seen first hand some of the issues raised, we've had data disappear, recurring random crashes, ect. But I think the difference is 'everyone' knew that there were issues with MongoDB, you just needed to check in jira. Jumping to 1.0 too early is clearly part of the reason for this backlash as not everyone thinks to check the issues because they've come to believe 1.0 means its ready for mass adoption.

That being said, I love MongoDB and I would still use it in other apps, just got to decide if it's the right tool for the job.
Inspire them, forget the details. Show them how to get a computer to leap into life with their creation, and they will take it from there.

Showed my middle son how to animate a java graphic on a website. He never stopped. Now is a CS graduate student at CM designing/implementing the next internet routing protocols (and writing Kinect games).
It strikes me that if Growl were to disappear, there would be a chorus of users chiming in that they'd "happily pay for the software" as we usually see with popular free utilities that disappear. Here we have someone who finally decided they wanted to profit from their effort, and we see the flip side. A definitive lose-lose situation.
Light 'promising' in cancer fight
In some ways that's true, but the original Mac was far more user-friendly and, importantly, hugely cheaper in a way that seems very unlikely to have been doable with Smalltalk in the first half of the 1980s.
Smiley Slider
Math is taught wrong because school teachers don't understand what makes math important and beautiful. Changing the curriculum at the administrative level is not going to help so long as this persists, because it's always going to be easier for teachers to grade kids based off of terminology ("scalene" v.s. "obtuse") than actual understanding.

But currently, the only way to reliably get people who understand what makes makes math important and beautiful is to hire those with advanced degrees in a STEM field. But those people are expensive, and society pays them to do things other than teach.
it takes sustained and continuous efforts by a government to even come close to filtering/censoring the Internet effectively

Yes, and they (government) are the sort of people who sometimes want to censor speech & the internet. Some countries have filtered the internet before, this is not an abstract problem.
Existing storage technologies are insufficient to replace fossil fuels by multiple orders of magnitude.

Here's a nice summary: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8405

The bottom line: storage will need some serious R&D to find a secret sauce using fuel cells or nanotech or something.
> But we have an even lower crime rate due to the private CCTV cameras, and council run CCTV systems.

Don't stretch your assertions too far. From the reports I read (think it might have been a Home Office report) there was no significant change in crime rate, but crimes were less likely to take place where there was a CCTV camera. The criminals move on to unprotected areas, you could say.

n.b. the top comment in the thread is certainly BS. CCTV is installed in public (or quasi-public e.g. shops) areas where nobody has an expectation of privacy. If they made the situation worse, you'd have to define what 'negative privacy' could mean...
Sure. I guess there's not a whole lot of excuses to avoid bcrypt these days.

Bozo's idea was to show that unsalted MD5 is, for most passwords, as bad as no encryption at all. An attack doesn't get much easier than a lookup table.
Could you elaborate on your criticism?

I don't understand basic economics. It's something I regret and would like to change.
Thanks. I'll chalk it up to "on the internet, nobody knows you're an [X]".
Looks interesting, but it seems to be just a talking shop at the moment, without any actual goods to show yet.

it's hard to imagine that TDP will ever move beyond the conceptual stage. The group behind the effort is big on ideas but short on technical solutions for rolling out a practical implementation

I like the idea of using WiFi as hardware, since it's a technology that's almost everywhere now.
I use emacs with viper and vimpulse (http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs-es/vimpulse.el) and I'm very happy. This setup does support text objects.

I have not used evil, so I'm not sure how vimpulse compares with evil.
IBM training computer chip to learn like a human
MHP Supplements
Forget the power of the courts, the US government outright owns some significant pieces of the internet infrastructure.
You can buy a pouch to hold the sensor onto non-Nike shoes. They usually are no more than a couple bucks. I'm sure there are hacks out there too.
A few years ago my mother helped organize a literature festival and at the closing banquet was seated next to a famous author with several critically acclaimed bestsellers to his name. My mother introduced herself and added "I have to admit I've never actually read any of your books". "Excellent!" the author replied, "that means we can talk about something else". And they spent the entire evening having a really great conversation about all manners of topics. My mother said she could really tell how excited he was to get a chance actually talk about something other than his books.
I'm not a big fan of having version numbers have some type of special meaning. To me, your post implies that there's a line in the sand at some magic version number with respect to due-diligence (on everyone's part). Gmail was in "beta" for years...it didn't mean anything. I understand that wiki and history disagrees with me, but it's still how I feel.

Oh, and there's a chance that yesterday's drama was a hoax:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3205573

Edit:

Associating special meaning with these things has always been "gamed". Access went from 2 to 7. Heck, office went from 97 to 2000!
Chaitin's incompleteness theorem and the surprisingly small complexity barrier
If you spent months doing research, is there a way you could share your findings besides broad stroke sweeping statements? All these discussions get cluttered with people offering few details about their investigative process but offering their conclusions. It doesn't serve to move the discussion forward because there are anecdotal experiences on both sides.
I don't think it's demonstrating anything other than:

1) many developers don't use salts / HMAC
2) MD5 is popular
3) hashed passwords end up on Google

From these 3 points I don't think it follows that MD5 is horrible.

Any hashing function would have the same issues, simply because a hashing function is a mathematical function, so for any X from the domain of definition, H(X) will always have the same value, on every call. Therefore, if a hashing method is popular enough and developers don't salt their hashes, then hashes for common passwords will inevitably end up on Google. However, if you salt your hash calls with your own key, the hashes produced will be different from everybody else's.
Gem compatibility already causes a lot of headaches. Am I wrong to think that this would add to that?
3 Subscriptions to Ultimate Designer Toolkit’s 60.000 Designer Items
Richard Feynman: Testing Bloodhounds
25k votes needed for White House to reconsider the patent petition
I remember hearing about China usurping 15% of western internet traffic for 18 minutes. This was accomplished by having nodes report as being the next closest hop in the network path to the packet destination. In a decentralized darknet project, I imagine such an issue being much more widespread. In fact, I would imagine a darknet project would actually play in to the hands of the government. It would be perfectly plausible to infest the darknet with millions of your own nodes reporting as the next best hops thus inserting themselves in the middle of all darknet traffic able to analyze data as it flows through the system. Obviously, a darknet would utilize encryption for traffic but all bets are off when you potentially have a constant man in the middle and no centralized authority on trusts. What's worse, and more to the point of playing into the hands of the government is that a darknet would give them (the government) a concentrated focus area. If I were to categorize the percentage of traffic that was "interesting" for regular internet traffic vs. the percentage of "interesting" traffic of all darknet traffic then I would imagine the darknet having a much higher ratio of noteworthy to junk traffic. If I had a limited amount of resources to invest in analyzing and decoding secure traffic I would obviously point my tools at the most richly dense data source.
Most NP-complete problems can be approximated quickly enough for practical purposes.

Decentralized routing is a hard problem, but there has been a lot of research with pretty convincing results. I'm not sure if it scales to the size of the internet, though.
I didn't know that. Thanks for sharing.
Any relation to the Treehouse Agency?
Or may be if Raskin was able to had it his way, we would Apple would have brought a PC to nearly every home and has as much impact to the society as MS had.

Very true. Though the [lack of] success and interest in the Canon Cat, which was much closer to Raskin's vision than the shipping Macintosh ended up being, seems to belie this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat
I don't think we disagree much, then. But the origin of this thread was the assertion that 50% of the population would be permanently unemployable by next decade.
Perhaps the best design would allow both. A darknet which seemlessly routes over independent mesh networks and the Internet. Ultimately, the Internet is going to have to play a part in such a network. How else is data going to travel between cities and across oceans?
Giving Solutions to Dry Mouth at Night