skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If people were merely assets then I might agree with this, but they are not, they are people. They are people who one day you will work with, have lunch with, and maybe have over to your house on the weekend for a BBQ. As such, I find that for my own sense of worth I need to know that I treated them like people from when I first met them.

There is a risk trade-off: risk of missing your target vs. risk of making people feel like an asset. I'd rather miss my target by a little bit..
What Sun should do
Lycos Europe To Shut Down; Is Recession Taking a Toll on Old Giants?
This is an interesting coincidence. A site I run recently became involved in a tiff with Apple over reverse engineering their new iTunesDB file (which was updated Sept 2007).

Backstory:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/20/201246&f...
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/23/017227&f...
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/11/apple-confuses-speech-d...
http://sam.bluwiki.com/blog/2008/11/in-defense-of-ipodhash.p...
Call me uneducated, but isn't the rock solid foundation for math the real world? To the extent that math corresponds to the real world, it is correct. The "halting problem" sounds like an attempt to predict the future with math, which seems like a futile effort. Maybe the conclusion from the "randomness" in trying to predict the future is that such predictions are simply not possible and a waste of effort?
No future for functional programming in 2008 - Scala, F#
with all that has happened in the world (south asia) today.. unfortunately there is nothing happy about it.
Rails 2.2.2 now on Heroku
Sounds a bit like Spivak to me.

http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Michael-Spivak/dp/0914098896
My old company offered exploding offers, and occasionally offered a variant: the sliding-exploding offer, i.e. $8k signing bonus if you join in the next 1 month, $5k in the next 3 months, $3k in the next 6 months. For most people this came down to whether they would travel after college, or go straight into employment (was in Europe).

They offered it in good faith, on the assumption that the offeree was a well informed and rational decision maker who would make the decision that was best for him in the long run. I always felt that students rarely have the faculty to make this decision rationally (cost of a $5k graduate loan vs. some time to travel before working). I know that I would have probably made this decision in a way that I would have later regretted, had I been offered a sliding-exploding offer. So in an attempt to make sure my employer's assumptions about the offeree's rationality were valid, I would sometime have a candid talk with the offeree to help them think through their options - I tried to be neutral wrt to the decision, and informative wrt to the facts they needed. My company didnt ask me to do this, but I suspect they would never have officially asked me not to do it.
The great pumpkin is Halloween. You want to tell everyone to enjoy their popcorn and toast.
Family, friends, and food are just the overture to the real meaning of Thanksgiving: Black Friday!

Anyone else preparing for a long and cold (Wisconsin here) night at [Insert favorite Electronics Store]?
How to check dofollow and nofollow blogs with Firefox add-on
What I want to see is Python or Ruby taking advantage of a runtime code generation library to start rewriting the VM or JIT'ing method calls.
Math has absolutely nothing do with the real world. ;) At least it's not constructed that way.
Ask YC: A way to get a European buyer on the Mechanical Turk?
I was curious if any of you knew a way to get work done by Amazon's mechanical Turk. When I try to sign up, the form tells me it's only for US citizens.
Any way around this? Alternatives? Or should I find a US buddy to help me out?
That was a different discussion, where I was simply pointing out the reasons I didn't like Zones. But this discussion is harder for Solaris to win, because you have to line Zones up against the very real and powerful virtualization systems Linux already has, like Xen.

We consult all the time for F500 companies with pools of Solaris boxes. Some of them use Zones. None of them virtualize Solaris. All of them virtualize Linux, and can move entire Linux servers from machine to machine from a UI. It is hard to convince me that Solaris has any kind of edge in the server market.
You are Not Even Wrong, in this instance.

Math is not a simulation of the real world; to take a simple example, both Euclidean and hyperbolic geometry are self-consistent and useful, and yet clearly different. So "the rock solid foundation" of math is not the real world, but rather sets of self-consistent axioms.

The halting problem is not an attempt to predict the future with math; it's a description of a property of algorithms which is inherently non-computable. You cannot, in the general case, prove whether an algorithm halts or not.

So as to your the question of whether the "randomness" comes from trying to predict the future...the answer is not yes, nor is it no. The question is not sensible.

The article was very poorly written though, so I'm not surprised it causes confusion. If you are interested in actually learning about Omega, I recommend http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/bignumbers.html which is an amazing introduction to all these ideas.
Zones are far less robust than Xen or VMWare. They're a short step up from chroot. Any Solaris kernel problem takes down all the zones, and there are a number of ways zones can influence other zones.
Another introduction to this same topic, that goes much further and is better written:

http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/bignumbers.html
You think the Great Pumpkin just goes away after Halloween?

Barbarian! : )
I must disagree with you on one part (a minor one, true).

The 70s were not the dark ages: the late 70s and early 80s were the golden age of the personal computer. As pointed out by other of the commenters, the Apple II manual even included schematics for the computer itself and listings for its ROM-based BASIC interpreter.

You can't be more open than that.

Openness ended more or less when the PC made big advances into the home computer market and DOS and Windows made the personal computer a standardized commodity device.

And that's why I dislike PCs so much and why I am so fond on "exotic" architectures.

I am all in for open standards for interchanging information, but I also want my hardware to be as diverse as possible. I find a x86-only world absolutely boring.
What he may be trying to say is that Apple is every bit as evil as Microsoft, except the monopoly part. They employ many of the same techniques to bind their users to their hardware and software in ways more enlightened hackers would consider revolting.

They make cool gizmos. But that's about it.
may be army should take over

I know what's wrong with this line of thinking.

Look at the history; and see if there is anything that can be learnt from nations that went in that route.
This is exactly the issue. Once some content on the page is not SSL, you can't trust what you're seeing.

Of course, it's easy to fix with an extension to HTML, something like hrefhash="DSKJsdfjsdfs234" so the browser can verify that the referenced resource hasn't been tampered with. Then you can have your non-private data served over HTTP, and cached by the browser and by proxies, and you don't need the extra server side computation of SSL.
At that time, you could look at the motherboard and figure out (or follow the traces on both sides) how everything worked.

I kind of did that with my first Apple II.
Perhaps you should be able to make the overhead logarithmic with clever coding.
You have fifteen seconds. Using standard math notation, English words, or both, name a single whole number--not an infinity--on a blank index card. Be precise enough for any reasonable modern mathematician to determine exactly what number you’ve named, by consulting only your card and, if necessary, the published literature.

Judging by the rest of the article, I would have won. I would have written "Ackermann function on Graham's number and Graham's number." For added enjoyment, add "Call this B_1. Define B_n = A(B_n-1,B_n-1) for n > 1. Now take B_(B_1)."

EDIT: Or I guess just:

Let G be Graham's number. Let B_n be G if n = 1 and A(B_n-1,B_n-1) if n > 1 (where A is Ackermann's function). Take B_B_2.
I would rather just go to work and hour later...
I actually heard about this a long time ago, you can apparently make a crude battery out of potted plants by connecting Plant A to the pot of Plant B and B to the pot of C and so on. With a common ground, like a national park this likely wouldn't work. However, connecting 500 trees in parallel rather than series could provide a high current, which you could then run that high DC current through an inverter and transformer and pump it up to whatever voltage you need.

However, I'm not sure how practical connecting hundreds of trees in series would be as you're going to get the problem of animals and what not. Unless you wedged your electrodes in good, or found a way to allow the tree to grow through them and hold them in place, you'd get trouble with squirrels pulling them out trying to run on the wires and other crazy stuff.
Warren Buffett's 10 Ways To Get Rich
I agree that this is annoying. It seems like web browsers are shaped by the needs of whiney "security researchers" and their 1-in-100000 attacks, rather than by the needs of users. Sure, it's possible that someone is injecting malicious images into your secure webpage, but probably not. It's tough balancing the needs of ultimate security and application usability, but I think the pendulum is a little on the side of reactionary security right now.
I think browsers should respect HTTP's caching headers, even if the content is served over SSL. If the server says "hey, it's OK to cache this", I don't think the browser should second-guess that.

If you want to be ultra-secure, get an extension for your browser that doesn't cache anything.
This was pretty invaluable for me early on, http://tryruby.hobix.com/
No encryption (or technology even) of any kind could protect against that kind of stupidity.

Seriously. You can't just interpolate variables into URLs without escaping :)
Nokia 1200-08 No Network Problem
1200, 1200 network problem, 1200 network ways, 1200 no network, 1208, 1208 network problem, 1208 network ways, 1208 no network, network problem, no network, Nokia
God enough: We should see the ceaseless creativity of nature as sacred
They didn't do that in my calc 101 class. Maybe at Princeton or something.
People living for a very long time could happen, but I doubt that the technology would be released to anyone who could not afford a few millions. No matter how cheap, whoever owns the tech can charge what they want for it, and people will pay tens of millions for it. It's better to concentrate on the high end market, than to go for the low end.
I agree. But extending HTML to use a hash for verification has additional benefits. One - proxies can see plain HTTP, but they can't cache HTTPS (I think). Two - you can share the same images for the HTTP and HTTPS pages on your site. And three - you can point to a resource (e.g. a Javascript library, a download link, whatever) that you don't control, but you can now trust that the other site won't change it to something malicious.
Thanksgiving for 10 blunders Apple didn’t commit
the YC headline is 10x better than the NYT headline
Put that coffee down!! Coffee's for closers only.
Just thought of another benefit - if the referenced resource is cached, the browser can save an extra HTTP request that it would have sent to check if the referenced data has been modified. Now it knows, given the hash, that it must be unchanged.
Roger Ebert: Celebrity culture is infantilizing us. We are being trained not to think.
That's one legitimate viewpoint, but on the flipside, realize that I truly believe I work for (and represent) a fantastic employer, and that everyone on the waitlist who needlessly ends up working someplace else in the parallel universe, in which we didn't use exploding offers, has been "harmed" by that outcome.

IMO, it's not just about treating your first choice potential employee as a person, but about treating your last choice potential employee as a person too.
why is this typo-riddled article, full of "folksy" tales, on the front page? "save money and reinvest profits"? is that so, cap'n obvious? :D
I read things to this effect in the internet, but then you have more than one Scheme system that runs (or is able to run) on top of the JVM - effectively making this problem disappear.

So, I guess I am looking for other differences, things that are essential to the languages - not just differences in libraries...
Psyco.
Top tech trends we're thankful for this year
Over a short period of time you'd never get the same amount of energy out. However, if you get an average ~20milliwatts of power from a tree throughout a 100 year life time, when you'll get over 17 kilowatt hours of power from a single plant.

However, the real question like with all green power sources is how much land it uses up.

As Kim Stanley Robinson pointed out in his Mars trilogy of books, renewable energy is actually a type of geoforming. The more windturbines we build, the more we effect the flow distributions of winds. Quite literally, if we supplied all of Earths power needs by wind then there'd be so many turbines over the planet that we would begin preventing near-ground airflow.

Equally, at current efficiencies you'd have to cover all the land on the planet to even remotely hope of powering human civilization and in the process you'd destroy all life on Earth. Finally, tree powered Humanity would be kind of cool, but again you'd cover the entire planet in trees and harvest power at much lower efficiencies than solar.

So, in the case of tree power you're much better off doing what some power plants are. Use fast-growing trees, cut them down every 6 months and burn them. It's actually been shown that growing and burning trees produces less CO2 than growing them sequesters, although in the long run unless you put all the leaves and what not in a mine they'll eventually rot and get back into the air or end up in a forest fire or compost or some such eventually making it carbon neutral.
Nokia to cease sales in Japan
You're absolutely right, no fundamental reason why it wouldn't work. It's mainly that some components need to be re-compiled for 64bit with some adjustments for Wow64. It's high up on the list of things to get done.
2004-8 VC Web investment ranking list
Yes, Twitter is a source of journalism
Hawking accepts post in Canada
All newsgroups seem to be subscription based. Any free newsgroups just for finding/downloading stuff?
Just to note, warrenbuffett.com is not an official Warren Buffett site. The front page does say this - but this article does not. This doesn't detract from the article's quality - just the provenance of this copy.
AskHN: Where to hold naming contest?
I'm planning to start a new web desiging firm, where can I hold a contest to get a rock solid killer name for my service ?
the same name might be the domain name too... is there a place where I can hold a contest over this ?
They make cool gizmos.

Not anymore, really. The iPod product line is really stagnant; the only feature that iPods have over the competition is that they come with an Apple logo. They only play proprietary music formats. They don't have a digital output. They require the proprietary database.

All in all it's not that great if you want your music player to play music, rather than be a fashion accessory.

The laptops do have beautiful cases, but inside they are exactly the same as what Dell will sell you.
yawn.

now everyone do something similar on your site so it becomes normal and expected and nobody thinks it's special enough to write about ever again.

and he's excited about getting an e-mail reply that is clearly a canned response? nothing more than "i am acknowledging your complaint."
Happy Hacksgiving to you
It's not obvious. Most of the people on this site, if they sold their website or whatever project for 100.000, will blow at least 20.000 on pointless stuff.
The question of the singularity isn't whether it will happen, it's if it will happen as the big overhaul of civilization people predict. I mean the best example I can think of for the 'singularity phenomena' comes from Charles Stross' book Singularity Sky in which a super-advanced race comes along and basically asks everyone in an entire civilization "what do you dream of and we'll do it for you?" Revolutionaries ask for self-replicating weapons and use them, the governments policy is to pretend the super-advanced race isn't there and lets the planet get destroyed.

Essentially the above is as predicted. However, what is likely to happen is that fundamentally no human being will notice a difference between now and post-singularity. It's like video games, people criticize the graphics today for being too fake or not realistic enough when if you look back even a couple of years the improvement is immense. If you look back to the NES the improvement is fucking unbelievable, just like looking back from post-singularity it will be fucking unbelievable but when you're in it you're still going to complain that computers aren't fast enough, that something in a video game doesn't seem realistic enough, etc.

We might have humanoid robots in 20 years time, but it isn't going to be holy crap they magically appear. It'll be like in the movie iRobot, each new model is better than the last just like with PC's, but it still took them like 40 years from the founding of the company before the supercomputer that ran them decided to take over things.
Society has big problems if 254 words is considered "too long." Should it fit into a single Twitter message to be worth reading?
The thing is, if you are following a thousand people on twitter, and you have this constant stream of tweets going by all the time, are you sitting there and watching them for significant news? Without a filter, the noise overwhelms the signal.
i pay $30/month for a high-end giganews account with 20 SSL connections.. simply put, it's fast, secure and maxes out my fiber line.

as for free newsgroups, sometimes your ISP has usenet server access but naturally it's not very fast and binary retention is only but a few days, if at all.
All good points. I like your idea.

I assume most people have frameworks that generate their <script src=...> tags for them, so this shouldn't even require developers to think about it.
IBM: Talking Web Will be Commonplace in 5 Years
Yep. I forgot about Psyco. Does it still work?
I think your number is the XKCD number:

http://www.xkcd.com/207/
I agree with Ebert's points, but I would put it differently: People who persist in reading newspapers are being trained not to think. There are fewer and fewer such people, because newspapers have long since abandoned the thinking person's market.

Fortunately, this isn't the early 1990s anymore. If I want to read (e.g.) Roger Ebert I don't need to force my local paper to carry him.
My ISP was slow, but its binary retention was still at 3 months. It wasn't good for any major downloading, but if you kept on top of your downloading it was easy to follow a half-dozen shows. Although the speed varied considerably, I downloaded Blade Runner in 720p in one day, and a 420p episode of Pushing Daisies in 3 days.
Yep!

Only my second example was doing that recursively...oh the horror...
You could specify that you expect the referenced resource to be served with a given ETag. Would that be good enough?
The ImJustCreative Branding Story - Part 2 - Logo Design
Hardening the Linux desktop
Mobuzz Folds After All
No. There are two categories of developers: one understands why this is a warning-worthy situation and would never do it, and the other, that shouldn't be trusted to do the right thing and this message is for. It saddens me that a site as reputable as 37signals would come down on this side of the issue.

When people see the padlock icon they expect uncompromised security. (that's not something we can provide, strictly speaking, but that's the expectation, just the same) There are innumerable attack vectors that letting part of the traffic avoid SSL and cache controls would enable. Here's what I can think off right off of the top of my head:

1) Unencrypted HTTP snooping Referral header info: base.css being requested by https://secure.lousy.gov/cgi-bin/home.pl?ssn=123-45-6789

2) simple http/https confusion or misconfiguration: http(no-s)://secure.lousy.gov/tempdir/nonce123456/taxes.pdf -- generated by a backend process on the server -- this could be an over-the-wire or cache issue

3) Assorted javascript injections. This would be a sweet malware attack vector, actually. Once you got people to download your .exe you could tend browser caches and update bank javascripts to download 1x1px images with encoded bank information from hostilesite.com

Long story short, just like with certificate warning issues, when the argument comes down to "this security error is too confusing for $target_audience, can't we just turn it off?" the answer is always no.
Show them you really care with an iPhone 3G gift card
Unsolicited advice: Provide choices. I held an open naming contest to name one of my blogs and the result was not great.
I've recommended Cal's self-paced online study guides
http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~selfpace/cs9honline/ to good feedback for an introduction to python and programming in general, while myself mostly relying on the books by Alex Martelli (Python in a Nutshell and Python Cookbook)
I used an older edition of O'Reilly's Learning Python and found it to be very accessible and well written -- I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned before: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781565924642/

O'Reilly's Programming Python is not bad, but it's not a great book, either for beginners or journeymen.

Python in a Nutshell is more suitable as reference book, although I suppose you could use it to learn Python. For a Python reference book, I found David Beazley's Python Essential Reference to be more informative and better organized: http://www.amazon.com/Python-Essential-Reference-Developers-...

As other people have mentioned, Guido's online tutorial is pretty good, and you don't really much else to start programming in Python:
http://docs.python.org/tutorial/index.html

I'm always puzzled by people recommending Mark Pilgrim's Dive into Python. I don't find it a good choice for Python beginners.
Apple makes some great stuff but I've been feeling more and more lately that I'd rather spend my time and money supporting open standards.
What is supposed to replace newspapers?
Internet advertising will be relatively unscathed in the economic downturn
why dont you just save money thats what i do