skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You might want to look over some of the frankly racist and reactionary stuff on Charlton's blog before buying into this simplistic thesis. Or the story about how he got fired from the editorship of his flaky pseudoscience journal: http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/03/elsevier_to_medica...

Hm, actually you don't need to read past the linked post for obvious indications that the man is a complete crackpot. Molecular biology is trivial?
I was extremely surprised at the tone of the blog post, given that it doesn't really confirm much:

"we suspect that this competitor is thwarting efforts"

"GoDaddy appears to be"

Suspect, appears to be... none of these are exactly definitive terms.
Festive medical myths
There's a fine line between devil's advocate and astro turfer.
Ask HN: Is there something similar to "Learn Python The Hard Way" for C++
I've completed LPTHW and I was hoping to move onto C++. Is there anything similar to LPTHW for C++ because I've found it the easiest to learn from. I get bored from books and learning individual features of a language but it's easier and fun to learn by projects and examples.

Can you help me out? :)

Cheers.
That was a remarkable video. Thanks for posting it.
Yup, same issue here. Transfer has been hanging over 24 hours now.
Edit: Transfer in Process - Acquiring Current Whois for Transfer Verification
Kidsruby - Learn Ruby for kids
I also have a similar project. http://www.whatsoninstant.com

It allows you to sort all movies available on Netflix instant by the rotten tomatoe scores.
Was there ever any doubt that it was all about the money? If it wasn't then what is it- suicidal malice on the part of Samsung?

The point isn't that it's "about the money"- every decision a major company makes is. It's that it's short sighted- Samsung may yet lose money because people don't trust them any more.
"called a war on drug lords in Latin America"

This is exactly what I'm talking about. Humans fighting humans. That is a war. The War on Drugs also includes locking up 16 year olds for smoking pot in their own houses. Calling the general concept of drug control and prohibition a war generates this very confusion.

"claiming that it's a war on an abstract principle trivializes the very real combat"

Claiming those 16 year olds are part of the war is what trivializes it. Theres bloodshed in Latin America? Oh well that's just part of the war on drugs. Got caught with an ounce on you at a party? Oh thats just part of the war on drugs.
If Samsung and the others see the updates as just a zero-ROI cost for them, then they are really short-sighted. They keep scrambling to develop the skins that many say they don't even want, when there is a differentiation solution right in front of them: offering updates to all their phones for a much longer period. Now that's some real differentiation, that even non-techie people will want. Who wouldn't want to go with the company that supports the phones for the longest time?
That's a plausible concern to me, but I wonder if it's practically any worse than other party destinations. E.g., New Orleans during Mardi Gras or parts of Florida during spring break.

Here in San Francisco marijuana is effectively legal; friends tell of walking past cops smoking joints. I'd much rather deal with a thoroughly stoned stranger than a thoroughly drunk one.

I think the weed vs booze distinction is really a distraction. There are plenty of cities that sell alcohol that don't end up party destinations. It seems like the right solution to public nuisances is enforcing laws against being a public nuisance.
He misses the point. Focusing on the customer IS maximizing shareholder value. Its just its focusing on a much longer timeframe. If you want the most money this year - you play the stock market or accounting games. If you want the most money the company will earn this century... well, you focus on very very different things. And customer's loyalty is one of the top.
The number of iOS examples using Objective-C++ is pretty minimal, IIRC.
Ask HN: What registrar are you using?
I know a lot of people are switching to namecheap, but honestly, using this site feels almost as cumbersome as godaddy did. Is there a registrar that caters to technically competent people specifically? I don't want to feel like I'm navigating a BUY THIS! minefield every time I need to modify my domain information.
Of course real life is not like this -- but it's not that bad either. You could say the same thing about anything -- why teach kids play basketball, as it might create false illusion that they will master it after few games? Why teach kids art, as their drawings will be crap judged by adult artist standards? Why teach kids anything?

The educational programs serve the purpose of accustoming kids to challenges that await them in real life, and I believe that the prepared ones will be served with the less severe blow.
I run a Literature in translation publishing company built on top of Ingram's Lighting Source. I also am deal with publishing issues at Los Angeles Review of Books. Few authors have any desire to self publish. The barrier to entry to write is so low there is tons of crap.

Look, what would be useful is new author discovery tools. Or anything that helps find talent. Or tools for independent publishers who are not tech savvy. Non cryptic book sales analytics. Easy to use EDI systems.
"I don't think it's unreasonable to compare Nexus vs. iPhone and leave many of the other Android phones in a separate class."

I agree, but not even all Nexus phones get upgrades to the latest version of Android.

The Nexus One was released on January 5, 2010. It won't get an upgrade to ICS. Apple's iPhone 3GS was released on June 19, 2009. The latest version of iOS, 5.0.1, gets automatically pushed to it, over the air. It works great, even though the iPhone 3GS is a 2,5 year old model.
Samsung Omnia W 3.7-inch Touchscreen Windows Phone 7.5 OS (Mango)
This is much nicer than weka in my opinion. Less bloat (not java, and doesn't have the full range of algoritms), more emphasis on difficult problems (non-linear) and practicality (random forests and neural nets and automating everything out). The main creator is working on practical computer vision and not machine learning research directly.

Weka is more suited for teaching than practical work.
...and nostalgia isn't what it used to be either.

The world is a much, much, much better place now than 35 years ago. We are healthier, happier, richer, and better off than then. The world is a freer, richer, more democratic, more connected, more diverse, more tolerant place now:

http://www.gapminder.org/world/

The author can't see the difference betwen focus and capability. We're spreading all the human capability more evenly now, because we're not stuck in a myopic and monomaniac cold-war world where the only thing that matters is beating the other guy.
That's an interesting comment, it sounds like you've experienced the frustrations of programming first hand. Basically what you're talking about is the issue we want to solve. There will always be frustrations around getting your code working (some would say that's the fun of it) but we hope to create something that will eliminate a lot of the other non-code problems that stop people from moving on to the next step.

What we want to do next is add in a way to publish your code to the web through our app (which may morph into a web app if that turns out to be more appropriate). At that point, in my opinion, a user would be doing real programming since she or he would be creating something in code and distributing it to others for use.
Eames: Pioneers in humanizing the information age.
Charles and Ray Eames are foremost remembered for their contributions to advancements in furniture design in the 40s-60s. But much of their later life was devoted to films, architecture, and exhibits as PR for advancement of the information age, esp their multiple contracts with IBM. It's interesting to note that Charles Eames passed on right at the Apple II began to take off. Having recently watched the new Eames documentary (http://firstrunfeatures.com/eames/) I was struck by how similar Charles Eames was to Steve jobs, both in vision and attitude.

Some of their work for IBM:

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/vintage/vintage_4506VV2085.html

http://www.ibm.com/ibm/ideasfromibm/us/powers_of_ten/20101010/index.shtml
Pictures of office of Vkontakte.ru
Gnome 3 is a set of libraries that provide various functions on top of X. On top of Gnome 3, you need a graphical shell of some kind.

Shells include: Gnome Shell uses mutter as its window manager and Unity (Ubuntu) which uses compiz as its window manager.

If you want a standard Gnome desktop (e.g. Fedora 16) then you don't need compiz, but you will end up installing mutter.

http://askubuntu.com/questions/87287/can-i-uninstall-compiz-...
This seems rather disingenuous. A map that is missing major areas is not only not well mapped, it clearly "does not work".

This sounds to me like the age-old argument us techies make to laymen. Use open source! If there are problems you can fix them yourself! Except these people are not programmers, nor do they have any interest in being one.

I'm not a cartographer, I have no interest in being one. I certainly am not signing up to integrate OSM into what I'm building and be on the hook for user complaints about missing map data, and have to do that myself.

Not to mention, contributing to OSM in the strictly legal way is not at all trivial - for legal reasons you simply cannot consult any other map, so basically you'd have to go out, walk/drive/bike around your area with paper and pen in hand and "map" it yourself. That or trust you have perfect memory w.r.t. your city. The bar for contributing back is high, can we blame people when they'd rather just have a map that worked?
I'm a product manager/developer and find myself wanting to know the real-time and historical usage of the products I manage so that I can proactively address issues and prioritize future development. Some kind of combination of google analytics for the client side and NewRelic (or http://amon.cx) for the server side.

I'm going to play with this over the holidays to see if it would help me with that.
I will never understand why anyone would want to teach little kids to program. Especially those who barely know how to add and subtract. I know of no upwardly mobile, reasonably successful adult, 18+, who knows how to program. This makes as much sense as teaching them brain surgery.
I think programmers themselves have a bias against getting started easily. Everyone knows how much they had to struggle to get their environment set up so they expect it to be a hard problem and don't consider it necessary to solve when building an OS. I imagine it's simply not a priority although I wish it was.
Ebook on street photography [pdf]
You're most welcome. Please feel free to contact me if you have questions about setting it up. Also if there's changes you'd like to make that would benefit the application in general, I'll be happy to accept pull requests on GitHub.
Apollo was way bigger than the LHC, $200B (today's dollars) vs $7B. The engineering of the LHC is impressive, but a lot of it is scaling such as bigger semiconducting magnets. With Apollo everything was unknown, huge rockets, space suits, life support, space rendezvous, cameras, pens, even Tang.
"Why don't Apple, Microsoft etc. package the stuff you need to get start programming with their OSes?"

They do, or at least Apple does with the inclusion of a version of Ruby as standard in OSX, various shell scripting options, and Xcode available for free from the Mac App Store (although I would question how easy that is for a novice to get started with). Windows? Not so much.
I have nothing to do with any domain name company or interest, beyond being a consumer (as many here) of a company not related to any in the story. I endorse samlev's caution. Given past history with GoDaddy, I'm willing to believe they're not being above board, but I'd like more evidence before I join the lynch mob.

Let's be a bit less in a hurry to sling around accusations of astroturfing, OK?
This is really stupid. While purporting to clear things up, it's just bad mouthing the bill and taking quotes from others who are against it. It's similar to anything I've been sent.
The last time I checked OSM was based on US Census TIGER data. The TIGER data format is extremely quirky and importing the full dataset is non-trivial. I'd imagine they only do it periodically. Add to that the lag between new construction and appearance in TIGER and it's easy to see why OSM has not yet caught up.

The good thing is that, unlike Google Maps, you have complete power to update OSM with the correct information for your locale. Get mapping!
The IMF disagrees with Wikipedia.

"in recent decades, nearly one-fifth of the world’s population has regressed. This is arguably one of the greatest economic failures of the 20th century"

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/20111130121...
How do you even go about making a UI like that? It's beautiful.
Exactly! The fact that it seems so unattainable to you is the problem we are trying to solve.

Being a programmer myself I know that it can be a challenging field but I also know that it's definitely something kids can do and enjoy as well.

I like the analogy to Legos- not every kid who plays with Legos will grow up to be an architect or civil engineer but they can gain a great deal of enjoyment out of doing a simpler version of what these people do professionally.
From the masthead: "An Orthosphere Blog. Ortho-sphere = orthodox sphere = reactionary Christians (Christian = 'Mere Christianity' of all denominations)"

That was enough for me.
Same. I hate hate hate GoDaddy, but Namecheap assuming malice in this case might blow up in their faces, and honesty, just for speculating (with a pretty sure-sounding tone) that GoDaddy is doing this on purpose, I hope it DOES blow up in their faces. This is really just dirty business.

Move to name.com instead because they don't practice this type of distasteful PR.
LG’s World’s largest 55-inch OLED HDTV Panel
Very short-sighted indeed. It seems Samsung believes more in next-quarter revenues than in life-long customer value.
Why is this linking to reddit, that links to rapidshare? Flagged.
I don't know AppHarbor's stance but they're doing some really cool stuff - you just do a git push and they'll deploy it for you:

http://appharbor.com/
Out of curiosity, what made many of you even use GoDaddy? I've always felt it was a bit sketch due to its:

- Commercials

- And it's shady ability to add $60 worth of crap to your cart when you want to buy a $9 domain.

I found Namecheap and never found anything simpler and less sketch. Even looking for domains on Namecheap 3-4 years ago was much simpler.

Was it just the registrar you had heard of first?
GoDaddy not only helped write SOPA they are also exempt from it
In the domain industry, that's par for the course. You can almost never get 'proof' of what they are doing. You can just see patterns and changes. You can hypothesize based on trying something again and again, manipulating the inputs and seeing what changes. Sounds a bit like a science experiment? Often seems that way. There's a ton of NDAs going to all sorts of people and companies to do different stuff. The inner workings of a lot of stuff is never legally allowed to be talked about publicly. So you end up with this type of hypothesis.

The actual transfer process can be nearly instant given the EPP code and the registrar's permission. What happens in between is somewhat fuzzy and I am not sure there are clear rules on how each company handles it. The longest I've seen (that I recall) is 7 days, but I could be wrong.
Anonymous: Stratfor Was Us And More Is Coming
You can only transfer so many people into other duties (on the same job) before you reach a point where people are now just getting paid to sit and do nothing.

So the real question is how many people are employed by the war-on-drugs, and how many of them can be re-asigned, and how willing will they be to let this happen.
Not "pushing on you". Just very interested in this question.

So this is about performance? But that is a separate issue. The claims in the OP are that a language can be "too powerful" because programs written in it, although shorter, are too hard to understand. I'm looking for evidence of this that doesn't simply reduce to "intuitive is just what you've seen before". The interesting thing is that there doesn't seem to be any.

(Performance is a separate issue because it has to do with the gap between abstractions and the machines they have to execute on. I think this may be the Achilles heel of the highly mathematical FP approaches. Still, it's a change of subject to interpret "too powerful" as "too powerful for the machine" rather than "too powerful for the brain".)

The underlying problem seems to be that abstraction is hard. That is, for any complex system, it's hard to come up with a set of concepts that can express the system with less overall complexity. This is true of programming in all languages. The problem is masked in lower-level languages because the abstractive weakness of the tool provides an excuse to produce the usual reams of code and thus the usual runaway complexity. But that doesn't mean the task is easy in a more powerful language. The hardest part -- coming up with a good set of concepts in the first place -- remains. Faced with that, people do sometimes rush to apply the technical devices offered by, say, a Lisp to a not-clear-enough set of concepts. The resulting programs can indeed be hard to understand. I've done it myself.
> The drugs that you are prescribed and the drugs people consume recreationally are not fundamentally different.

That is not true.

> In fact, in many cases, they're essentially interchangeable from a chemical perspective

This is true.

In a sane society, both would be true. But they are not. The "war on drugs" is not an innocent mistake. It is calculated and it is doing precisely what it was designed to do.

Its purpose it to line the pockets of the politicians who support it.

By prosecuting drug dealers and users, you bring the cost of using illegals drugs up. Significantly. In other words, you make illegal drugs less competitive vs legal drugs. This allows the pharmaceutical companies to maintain or increase prices for legal drugs. The additional funds the pharmaceutical companies get, they do not get to keep. They funnel that into the regulatory apparatus and more importantly, into the campaigns of the very politicians who support the system.
Anecdotally, speaking as someone who knows a number of young people from Singapore, they certainly smoke weed just as much (perhaps even more) than people I know from the UK. Have you considered that perhaps a zero tolerance approach just drives use further underground? I doubt the official figures are accurate, and it's probably not sensible to compare an authoritarian dictatorship with liberal Western democracy.

Japan just has a low crime rate across the board, largely for the reason you mentioned. Again, this probably isn't helpful - inducing a general respect for the law into a society is a difficult proposition, or every nation in the world would be doing just that.
Dyn.com. They don't cover a lot of TLDs, and aren't the cheapest if you have 100s of domains, but they are competent have some nices extra features and browsing their pages doesn't feel like walking through a Bangkok market.
I have an iPod Touch that I can not update to iOS 5. I fail to see how the competition is faring so much better. Apple maybe has it the easiest with their limited selection of devices, but even they can't support old hardware indefinitely. As for Windows 7, are the requirements for new phones really so tight that they won't have that problem? And if the requirements are so tight, is it still attractive for hardware makers?

Also it seems customers just don't care. If they do (as I do), they could just stick to the official Google devices (as I also do). Problem solved.

I wonder about the driving force behind that article - just one concerned journalist, or maybe there were other incentives...?
GoDaddy has dropped its support of SOPA with a little help from Ben Huh
What if they are telling the truth?
I think you'll find plenty of upwardly mobile and reasonably successful adults on HN that know how to program. Many of the best started as little kids. And as software increasingly touches every aspect of our lives, knowing the basics of programming will be useful for understanding how things work in the world.

Brain surgery is a highly specialized discipline that takes years of preparation before the surgeon makes her first cut--Daisy the Dino is specifically trying to make programming less intimidating to learn with a lower barrier to early success.
That's not really all that differentiable, and it costs money both short and long-term.

First, on the differentiation angle, things like length of maintanance are not things that usually sell devices. Especially not since the lifetime of the average device is just a tad longer than two years.

Second, it's not as if Samsung can rev every device for free. They have to go through the carrier to test each update and the carriers have finite resources. Therefore Samsung may have to stall the release of a new phone in order to test all of the other phones that exist, including that phone that only sold 10,000 units. And these tests cost the OEMs a pretty penny.

At the end of the day the Android model really is kind of broken. Updates are not just some ad hoc thing, but it really needs to be planned. Everything from how many devices each carrier has, the number of devices each manufacturer has, to the update rate, etc...

Feature phones didn't really have the update requirement so the Samsung model of a million phones made sense. But now it actually hurts their ability to deliver customer satisfaction. Due to the nature of Android, there will never be a cohesive update strategy. What you see now is what you'll have in the future with Android.
Hey Namecheap, since I know you're on here (Anthony?): did you try contacting some engineering folk at GoDaddy to try to resolve this delay for your clients? I hope you already have, and that they told you to sit on it, given the tone of your last blog post.

If you're just slinging non-verified mud at a competitor, kicking them when they're down instead of focusing all your effort on actually fixing this, how are you better than GoDaddy and why would a potential new client choose you over them if you're both shady?
I think there was a certain comfort in their size. You assumed that, because they were so prominent, nothing bad would happen because they were small.

Also, there is definitely a momentum effect -- it was the first registrar many people heard about and just kept using them, because that was the path of least resistance.
Competitor Accuses GoDaddy of Delaying Domain Transfers
Not really.

We just are positioned to "better understand" the market and the people. Why not invest in something you love where you have a strategic home field advantage?
Well, it might work for them. They'd lose the HN crowd and other "techiphiles", but Mr. Average Joe going into the phone store will still pick up a Samsung if the price is right.

Not saying I agree with it, but there is a possible logic in there. A dangerous game, though, and it's not like Samsung is teetering on bankruptcy- I don't see what would warrant them to behave this way.
What? Unless I'm misinterpreting http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/12/25/sports/25ivy-GF..., it seems that a 4.0 GPA and a 2400 on the SAT doesn't even get you a 240. How is a 240 AI "laughable"?
Godaddy Detector - Chrome Extension
Well it was the registrar I heard of first, and if their ads had been less offensive, I probably would have gone with them. As it was though, I just went with the second registrar I heard of, http://Domain.com/ I had a coupon code from the Hak5 podcast, but I don't really know if it was cheaper than other registrars.