skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I've noticed that some of the really great mathematics
> work (e.g. Grigori Perelman) seems to come from
> outsiders,

That impression may simply be bias at work. Put together and successful do not form an interesting narrative; mentally ill and successful definitely do. We have a tendency to ignore, or take for granted, outstanding accomplishments that fail to involve weirdness. Within the circus of intellectual greatness, normality isn't interesting.

In fact, I'd suggest the opposite of your proposal. Breakthroughs do require obsession, yes, and a certain awkwardness comes with the territory. True mental illness and grossly maladjusted behavior, however, generally stand in the way of attaining them (except, of course, for a handful and thus famous cases). Don't look further than Perelman's struggles.
b) ...no, I think he meant "connect to PC -> copy music -> play music"
Yeah, it would be nice. Maybe they don't want to go through the hassle any more than you do. :P
C++ can actually be faster because it doesn't throw away as much type information. A good, typed C++ quicksort implementation, for example, will be faster than a C version using void*.
John Carmack is a C programmer coding in C++ which fits pretty well with sirclueless's point about that it is the C++ programmers that are the problem. All his games before Doom 3 were implemented in C.
Epsom Salt and Autism
Magnesium Sulfate, aka. Epsom Salts have been around for a long, long time. We’ve used them for aches and pains, join aches after vigorous exercise or for a child who is feeling sick. It can also be useful for kids on the autism spectrum.
Education System in USA
Education system in USA is what exactly do is that, they just focus on their each and every student from the very beginning stage, say, at primary level education.
When a technology company starts suing on patents, you know it's stopped doing something else: innovating and competing.

It's really sad to see Yahoo! becoming the SCO of social networking.
There was also another recent article in the NY Times about HIIT.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/how-1-minute-interv...
Education in USA
Education is the act of imparting or gaining knowledge, developing the reasoning power and judgments, and preparing oneself or others intellectually.
> It's also possible to plug the Cotton Candy into a conventional computer and boot from it like you would from a regular USB mass storage device.

How can you boot an ARM-compiled Linux in a conventional computer?
SQL Server Isolation Levels By Example
There is no way you can do exercises at a rate of 3 minutes per page of material, for material of any density. For many concepts, you'd do well to do exercises at a rate of one day per page; exercises that would be essential to a good understanding.

I remember first encountering tree views in Borland Delphi 2. Took me a good couple of days before I got the hang of them, and how they interacted with image lists, to fully get how the recursive structure held together, how the dependencies interlinked.

Similarly with OpenGL. Took quite some time to get the hang of the sequencing of matrix operations, world and camera transforms, etc. - all just the very basics, before getting into anything interesting at all.

For real learning, 8 hours a day is simply unrealistic. It wasn't until the third or fourth time I tried many things that I really understood them, to the point that I didn't have to follow any recipes anywhere.
After looking at LoseThos screenshots I started to wonder whether that is exactly how _any_ computer may look like for a computer illiterate.
My partner did the Amazon Prime trial last year and forgot to cancel it. He decided instead of contacting Amazon and sorting it out that we'd try it... we did about 95% of our Christmas shopping through Amazon which saved both time and money overall. It more than paid for itself & we plan on renewing this year. (The fact that we can both use the same Prime membership plan rocks my world!)

Interesting though - so many of you are talking about 2 day shipping... is that an American thing? Prime in the UK is next day delivery.
Does your 10 - 19:30 (9.5 hour) day also include time for lunch and dinner that twitter generously provides?
> A new button will not fix Github's news feed problem

But it will fix a problem a lot of people have: "I want to remember this project, but I don't care about news from it".
Charge money for it.

Charge money for advertising in it.
A sobering and timely read for me also. Lately I have been considering the cross-section between social-acceptance and creative work: we applaud the work of anyone who pushes the boundaries of creativity and innovation, but only if they stay coherent. That's just not something you can promise yourself as you start off on a new tangent, there is a lot of failure involved and much of that failure is how you will be perceived. Looking into this operating system reminds me of looking into the slightly-less coherent mind of David Lynch or Lewis Carroll. Fascinating and frightening glimpses of brilliance.
Kevin Allocca: Why videos go viral [video]
Boot2Gecko may be one of the next mobile revolution
This is a sensationalist article that reeks of pre-meditated biases. Yes the Facebook open-graph protocol has helped bring more traffic to Yahoo, but that wasn't an exclusive alliance. In fact nowhere in the Facebook press release does Facebook "congratulate" Yahoo.

If you read the NYT article, Yahoo merely warned Facebook about potential patent violations. There is no back-stabbing, this is business as usual. I wish Techcrunch would quit with the drama already.
Ask HN - why are more and more web apps requiring FB login?
I'm seeing more and more web apps requiring a Facebook account to log in instead of supporting OpenID - web apps which stand on their own and (other than the login) do not require Facebook to work. Is there a reason for this? Is it laziness, i.e. it's just easier to implement a FB login?

Or are there other reasons - are Facebook users are more valuable users to web app developers because they are inherently more likely to spread news about the service?
None listed in the specs; it has a MicroSD slot for storage.
Original drawings and blueprints from Brunel, Stephenson and Wren
Drew, did you build/help with it? If so, you guys did a great job on the UX, honestly really beautiful work. Getting a shout-out on twitter. :)
> Twitter has an "unlimited"—be respectful to your team—holiday policy. I've probably taken about 6-7 weeks off in my one and a quarter years here.

Curious as to how these things work in the states. I take it that you pay for the time off from your salary? (E.g. you don't get any for the period) Do you have any time off that is paid by your employer?
Why pension is deferred pay and companys get a tax break on their contributions as well as you.
That's so weird. As if there was some kind of conspiracy between health care providers and employers. I mean you probably take it for granted that health care is tied to a job, but that really isn't the case at all. Where I live (Germany) it is organized in a completely different way. If you lose your job, social insurance will keep paying your health insurance.

It's ironic because "your way" actually seems to be taking freedom away from you, yet the US seems to consider a model like the German one to be the ultimate slavery (socialism).
I'm glad someone has said this, I was looking at LoseThos's long, long list of dead posts on HN a few days ago, it is deeply tragic, a clearly talented guy that has lost his grip on reality. It would be interesting to hear from him the steps that led to his current situation. From some of his comments he seems like he is aware of his condition, yet his self awareness doesn't lead to self control, to me this is fascinating. Of course, if he replies to this his comment will be dead, so here's a question - are the HN mods right to silence an account from a clearly very talented technical guy because of his mental illness?
Didn't read all of what you wrote, just one question: if there is freedom of contract, why wouldn't an employee be free to negotiate a contract that can't be cancelled on short notice?
Neat, but the existing plug computers on the market (TonidoPlug and all the other SheevaPlug variants) seem to fulfill the same purpose at half the price. I've had my 3-watt 4-inch Ubuntu ARM plug running nightly server backups and a streaming music server for a year and a half now, and it cost me less than $99.
Wow that is a great example! Kudos Chris.

I would also like to point some of the commenters to (fluxus) http://www.pawfal.org/fluxus/. It is a very nice example of this concept of the same thing, only using racket/plt scheme.

Live coding/reactive code are fantastic little ideas which I wish had been exposed to me earlier in my career.
I think you may have reacted to what you thought he said here, rather than what he said.

The management within a company (considered as a class, rather than as a singular entity "the company") does indeed bargain collectively with the workers of that company. That doesn't imply they collude with the management of other companies.

I'm not sure what the consequences of that are, exactly. It does mean that it's very hard to get teams within the same company to bid on you, because they will collude to avoid that.

So I think you missed his point. I'm not sure that changes the truth of your main point, which is that the government supports employee unions and discourages corporate ones.

Though the illegality of corporations bargaining collectively doesn't mean it doesn't happen, and the illegality of suppressing unions doesn't mean that doesn't happen either. And it's pretty clear who has more leverage in the labor market: corporations. Replacing a worker is annoying but the corporation can usually afford to do without for a few months, whereas losing your job for even a short while can be devastating.

This effect leads to an effective monopsony situation for most employers.

But I've digressed from my main point, which is that while you're correct, I think what he actually said is much more interesting than the boringly wrong point you replied to. What effect DOES it have that the management of a company is united, and the workers generally divided without a union?
Full details are here:

http://blog.chromium.org/2012/02/pwnium-rewards-for-exploits...

Snippet of what reward for what sort of hack:

$60,000 - “Full Chrome exploit”: Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence using only bugs in Chrome itself.

$40,000 - “Partial Chrome exploit”: Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence using at least one bug in Chrome itself, plus other bugs. For example, a WebKit bug combined with a Windows sandbox bug.

$20,000 - “Consolation reward, Flash / Windows / other”: Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence that does not use bugs in Chrome. For example, bugs in one or more of Flash, Windows or a driver. These exploits are not specific to Chrome and will be a threat to users of any web browser. Although not specifically Chrome’s issue, we’ve decided to offer consolation prizes because these findings still help us toward our mission of making the entire web safer.
Try Camomile?
http://camomile.sourceforge.net/
I had a similar endeavor having it built on top of Express.js ecosystem: https://github.com/umbrellacorporation/umbrella/
Like facebook, watch button can have options when hovered.
From the original announcement:

"We will issue multiple rewards per category, up to the $1 million limit, on a first-come-first served basis. There is no splitting of winnings or 'winner takes all'."

Linky: http://blog.chromium.org/2012/02/pwnium-rewards-for-exploits...
In response to some of the comments:

In my experience, all variables are important, but on testing, using only the ones (i.e., the words) observed in the text to test yields the best effectiveness rates, following the implementation from Manning, Raghavan and Schütze (2008).

In addition, the considered Laplace smoothing is of utmost importance to deal with out-of-vocabulary words, thus avoiding the annoying 0's.

My implementation:

https://github.com/atrilla/nlptools/blob/master/core/classif...
The State of the Mac: Alive, Well, and Not Going Anywhere
Awesome Aromatic Free Flower Logo Ideas for Different Brand Mark Designs
Use of floral images in business marks design is sadly under rated even though they are one of the most flexible images. Here, we have some free flower logo design ideas for different businesses and their brand marks.
In meagre defence of the catastrophe that was Practical OCaml, I'll point out this:

http://blog.merjis.com/2006/11/08/practical-ocaml/

I'm reviewing drafts of Real World OCaml too, but after the sheer amount of work (and what went wrong) with P.O., I'm just going to informally comment on them.

OCaml as a language is extremely useful and practical. A good book on it really needs to be written.
This article - besides what was already rightly said that it lacks substance and is full of lame comparisons - is downplaying Stratfor's role and influence on many decision makers in governments and industry.

This seems to be in line with Stratfor's own defense strategy against the Wikileak email publications - make yourself small, discredit your opponent (next step / previously happened already by others), downplay the importance of the information revealed and doubt the accuracy / genuineness of the material - claim that it might have been altered (what nobody but insiders can proof right or wrong).

In general reduce exposure and get it out of the spotlight asap (see Stratfor's press release at: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/stratfor-statement-o... )

You can say what you want about "The Atlantic" - but the quality of their journalistic work has always been kept to an high standard at least in previous years. I would be (very) surprised if they don't have a subscription/copy of Stratfor's information services themselves given their interest and coverage of geo-political topics.

If "Stratfor is a joke" so why have they so happily quoted from their analysis material in the past?
Is there a plan to profit share with authors at some point?

Will the editor simply continue to rule out those that ask for payment for their work?

Presumably there's some reasonable profit that the editor must take out for himself to sustain and grow the magazine and there are reasonable costs beyond that. What after that?

I fully understand that authors opt-in. I understand that authors have varied reasons for opting-in. Just curious to see if there's a business model that feeds back into the community.
as usual, it's already written in the bible:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LordPalmerston.html

"There was a time when if you read one book by Peter Norton, you literally knew everything there was to know about programming the IBM-PC"
What an odd sentiment. There's nothing illegal about looking that up, or knowing how people do it. Honestly, I don't think I've ever met a good chemist that hasn't looked it up -- the kind of ingenuity in synthesis that is born from not having access to a laboratory (or good precursors / solvents) is fascinating. Very MacGyver.

Out of curiosity, what do you think happens if you look it up? How did you come by this information without having similar concerns?

(Although I have heard of room 641A, I honestly don't know very much about this)

Thanks

edit: for the curious... http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/meth/meth_faq.shtml
I'm positive it's paid time off. Heroku and GitHub have identical policies.
A few of his submissions:

"Need Start-Up Advice" A year and a half ago. Sad.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1782800

"Darwin Skeptics Believe Neaderthal Cannibals have High IQ" A revealing attempt at humor. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1366594

"New 64-bit Operating System released" From three years ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=491503
Stephan Paternot (theGlobe) shares open letter to Zuckerberg
I worked at a company that based a lot of stuff on OCaml, and since I'm working at Red Hat we use OCaml for a few things. In no particular order ...

* generating code, bindings etc in libguestfs (http://libguestfs.org/)

* analysing Windows Registries for hivex, using ocaml-bitstring

* virt-top

* virt-dmesg

* whenjobs
>>condemning the whole Palestinian "side" on the basis of unspecified "people"

It is policy/tactics from the Palestinian side to use terror. Not only Hamas. And glorifying murder of children at close range, etc.

You compared that with some T-shirts of individuals...

But you know exactly what I meant.

I stopped reading after you were dishonest in the first paragraph.
> was it ever possible, given how deep the rabbit hole goes?

You probably couldn't handle the breadth of it, but the depth of computing in the 60s was pretty shallow. You had maybe a dozen levels of (pretty shallow) abstractions, even "higher-level" languages (like Fortran) were pretty uncommon, so you mostly had assembly, an assembler, machine code and the hardware you were running on.

You probably couldn't hold the whole machine in your head, but you could hold a good idea of its cross-section.
That’s a non-issue for the vast majority of people. As an example, I have written games in Objective-C for the first iPhones. In a game running at 50 fps you have about 20 ms to get a single frame out, and still I could freely use message passing in the inner game loop without giving it a thought. See also some older measurements by Mike Ash: http://goo.gl/DBTPE.
Go for Free Drivers Download for Windows 7 to Keep your System Happy
What if one fine day all the devices on your computer start working strangely, say the graphics get distorted, sound goes mute, printer stops responding , LAN fails to provide you connectivity?
Yes, the author's observation is true, but I don't think it's particularly interesting for two reasons:

1) This isn't anything new. A complete understanding is not only no longer possible, it was never possible. What level of detail counts as a "complete" understanding? Even when computers were much simpler, you probably wouldn't have a thorough understanding of every layer of abstraction, from software to hardware to the physics of the underlying electrical components.

2) This sort of complete understanding is unnecessary anyway; these references exist as references for a reason. To do your job, you need familiarity and layered understandings of the relevant processes, and when you absolutely need to know the fine details of something, you can simply look it up.
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HTML is the most popular web development language in the world, Using this language designers can make web application more attractive and creative. HTML 5 is the advanced version of HTML and getting popularity among web designers with their advanced features and functionality.
when you charge $40k for a subscription

Whoah...what? If you're just receiving their memos, i.e. it's a one-way push relationship, you're paying a few hundred dollars a year at worst.

You start paying more when you ask them to * commission* you research. This is akin to you going to The Economist and saying 'write me a briefing or special report on Mongolia with a special emphasis on the PRC's influence'. It may turn out to be solely aggregated from open sources, but you're generally not paying for the raw intelligence - you're paying for analysis.

The Atlantic is basically asserting that STRATFOR is not Kroll or IGI, e.g. 'deploy assets in China and map out this individual's social and financial network, as well as a list of his beneficial ownerships and Party ties'. But it's not an Economist either. It's far more speculative, internalising the constant uncertainty and source verification involved in actual intelligence operations. I agree with The Atlantic when they say that STRATFOR is being plumped up by Wikileaks, and that comparing it to its image as a "shadow CIA" paints it in a bad light. But if you look at them as a firm of intelligence analysts it's no longer quite so insidious...or incompetent.

To further challenge the equating of publicly sourcing data with incompetence, take the asset management industry. This industry ostensibly bases its decisions on public information. But we pay them. Not because they're sleuthing around Chinese coal plants (some are), but because their analysis adds intrinsic value.
Why Anti-Authoritarians are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill
By "several people programming in it full-time" you mean "everyone who writes code in the company (IT, developers, researchers and traders) writes code in OCaml" right?. Yaron has said (perhaps in that video, perhaps somewhere else) that the founding partners (who were voice traders, not programmers) learned OCaml as their second programming language, after VBA. The language pervades the company.
How to get debt help when you are under the debt pressure
Is this illness or genius?

Anyone in Vegas who can get in touch with him in meat reality?

I e-mailed him. I'm interested in installing and playing with this thing. I have an Athlon x64 box that's currently experiencing crash-boom bios issues, but if I get it running I want to throw this on a drive and see what happens!

It's not every day that I run into a NEW OS!!!
Respectfully, I disagree.

Such a complete understanding is eminently possible. It is as easy to understand as any other complex system. You work at a high level of abstraction to understand the breadth of complexity, and then work down into the component level to understand the depth of complexity. Rinse, and repeat for every subsequent level.

The caveat is that it takes time and dedication.

I can't comment on whether it's necessary or not. There might be scenarios where it is. There might be other scenarios where you're better off studying kung fu, because that might be a quicker route to enlightenment.
are the HN mods right to silence an account from a clearly very talented technical guy because of his mental illness?

I've also wondered about this. It's OK to use the silencing for real spammers, but for people that are considered annoying/offtopic for other reasons I think it's better to confront them directly. At least let them know that they were banned and why. It'd be the human thing to do.
How about this:

Keep the PDFs free to download.

Have a Member's Support Brigade (stolen concept from thesurvivalpodcast.com) which includes free e-books from other people and coupons for other people's products.

Charge for print copies.

Sell a subsciption which gives you a special Ipad version or whatever.

Put in ads.

Sell a "best of" volume via Lulu.com.

Make our own spin-off e-books and sell.

Merchandise (t-shirts, stickers, etc).

Amazon store (books we recommend, stuff like that).

Use kickstarter.com to raise money for specific sub-projects (like "start a hackerspace").

Any more ideas?
What if you got paid to play games at work?
the first link in particular reminds me how much i despise the system of silently black listing people around here.
Quite possible, and the hybrid approach is practiced quite widely - e.g., robot packing machines, robot sorting machines, etc. One big issue with hybrid approaches that require robots to run around warehouses is that humans are squishy and present a significant safety hazard that will also reduce efficiency. Much of a totally automated solution's appeal is the dramatic efficiency increase that comes from not having squishy humans on the playing field.
Thanks for mentioning dotjs! I didn't know about that project. Basically its greasemonkey but easier to use.
I thought of the same as well, would really like some constructive discussion on the differences.
why so much sympathy for the first world poor? because they are visible? I find sympathy for "poor" people living in fantastic conditions morally repugnant. humanity has serious problems to tackle.
Sorry, yes. You are right, I missed that.
I e-mailed him months ago. The reply I got was a rapid chain of incoherent mails about conspiracies between government and his doctors and quotes from the bible. It's illness.