skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's interesting how much of a disconnect there is between the Chinese Internet and the Western one, and not because of censorship but just the language barrier.

I have very little idea what's going on over there, just random tidbits, and they have more people online now than the US does.
I enjoyed this essay very much, but I think that presenting Apple as a hardware company ("the company that creates the next wave of hardware...", "If a new company led boldly into the future of hardware...") won't help to find the next Steve Jobs. Apple products success is based on the perfect combination of well-designed hardware and software. I think the next Steve Jobs will need the same holistic approach to product design.
Here's pretty much the same idea for Scheme instead of Python, which I wrote back in 2005, temporarily up again: http://wry.me:8080

An example of what I wanted to do with it:
http://wry.me:8080/page/Partial%20Evaluation (Only the early bits are working.)

Its own source as wiki pages: http://wry.me:8080/page/Underlying%20Source%20Code

Differences I noticed: in my system a page implements a module instead of a function. Code, evaluations, and commentary are mixed in a literate-programming style. Anyone can edit existing code, with a branching version control system for backup (which, er, I never hooked the UI into). It's awfully hacky. Maybe some of these ideas could influence this newer wiki, though.

(Edit: fixed links, added differences.)
Weather conditions as well. Black ice is one hell of a thing.
"You should write X in your contracts" is never a good idea. Putting every stupid detail in a contract is not the right way to go. The right way to go is to notice when you're working with idiots and stop doing that work ASAP.
You are contradicting yourself. On one hand, you state that a "killer app", i.e. something that everyone would use is cryptography. On the other hand, you state that the vast majority of people trust a squiggle on paper, rather than actual crypto. If the average joe doesn't care about crypto, why would a crypto email be interesting?

You'd need to find a way to make crypto interesting. Lots of email don't have crypto, so if you sell something that does crypto well, then you can corner the newly created crypto market.

A peer-to-peer system for sharing music/films that does good strong crypto (and faster than tor) would do the job.
How Many Words Do We Have For Coffee?
This was a very interesting read, but the Python code sample was painfully out of date. It might be worth it to create a modernized version of this post, with updated code samples for all the languages included, and additionally adding newer languages like Ruby and JavaScript.
Yes, I just received one yesterday. I got the same email from Amol on Feb 14th, noting that it was being shipped in the next 2 days. It's possible that yours in in transit I suppose.
Its not invalid. As a normal human who hasn't used that hypothetical drug, I find it repugnant. That was the point you were making: you will choose not to take that pill. No matter how enjoyable and good murder may be for you if you take the pill, your own self-knowledge and current utility function prohibit taking it.

The reason it is a straw man is that it is an extreme example that is not realistic. Here is a realistic example: what if you could plug a cable into your brain and experience your wildest dreams, as vividly as real life?

But thats starting to get off your original point. Heres a funny story about what happens when you reward specific productivity measures: http://highered.blogspot.com/2009/01/well-intentioned-commis...

Personally I think that we have evolved pleasure centers specifically to avoid the pitfalls of hardwiring us to do things. If we were hardwired to procreate, it would be too easy to hack, but since we enjoy the process, it keeps us coming back.
> It would be nice if we had a resource like "pitfalls to avoid as a contractor"

You call that a lawyer.

> with some real life examples

Walk for one hour in a single direction and these real-life examples stop being relevant. That's why you go to a local lawyer.
Is there any article/video (I didn't investigate) showing multiple autonomous cars interacting ? I'd be curious to see if there's any behavioral resonance leading to epic havoc.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/22/manufacturing_figure... -- seems relevant
A Day in the Life: iPhone versus Nexus
Google also does this I think. I remember reading a presentation somewhere about FlumeJava but I couldn't find it anymore. See pg 20 of http://www.slideshare.net/greenwop/expressiveness-simplicity... or http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~dongarra/ccgsc2010/slides/talk28-ko... for an example.
i see the word justice is blocked on weibo. Apparently the Chinese govt doesn't like justice!
Also http://sourceforge.net/projects/skwiki/ by Luke Gorrie, a Scheme wiki in Erlang. (It's even older.)
No, it's like being the mayor of a town but there's this one area you don't have control over but still had to give the OK to let build and all the burglars keep getting in through that ar—

On second thought, this is like a software vendor including a knowingly-insecure program with their product and then discounting exploits because they used that included program.
The problem is that for many recognizing mortality leads to think why go for it since in the end it doesn't matter.
>We do not have any control over how we build next generation.

Says who?

The author assumes uncertainty and exploits uncertainty to make a certain conclusion, when the uncertainty should just prevent him from forming a conclusion at all.

In fact it's fairly regular, I think, for singulitarians to let their imaginations run amok this way.
Chrome SPDY indicator (extension)
What if we made people in subsaharan africa as rich as europeans & americans? Then the solution to "brown outs" there is the solutions to brown outs here. Better infastructure.
Ask HN: Reddits or RSS feed for Cloud Computing
I was looking for cloud computing news feeds. However reddits /r/cloud and /r/cloudcomputing both gets new posts really infrequently. I am following ReadWriteCloud and Gigaom Cloud however I don't feed them technical enough. They are mostly writing about enterprise business and aiming exec people. Are there any good tech feeds on cloud?
Several Azure milestones Microsoft must hit
C is not CLOSE TO THE METAL.
It lacks concept of SIMD instructions and barriers/fences.
If you want to be CTM learn OpenCL / CUDA (unless you want to learn assembler for actual ISAs or SIMD extensions).
I mean no offence (I fully recognize that the UK is a sovereign state with rules that largely satisfy it's own culture and people), but I feel that if we universalize this idea ("Fair enough, but it's too late for some countries.") the result will be nothing more than a race to the bottom.
With roads and poor signage the citizens tend to "optimize" the Government (vote them out) if they fail to do a reasonable job on those issues given how much tax they swallow up on them. And with manufacturing defects the common law provides remedies and puts the worst offenders out of business (along with a free press providing consumer reviews for the milder cases). I'm not some foaming at the mouth libertarian but let's not pretend Government is the one that's responsible for common sense things (just look at the efforts Ford went through to get people to wear seatbelts, or SAAB's safety obsession that arguably put them out of business).

If you still don't believe me go compare the "optimization" of your local DMV and the Google labs where these autonomous cars are being created and see if you walk aways with any illusions of Government grandeur.
Avoid things that cost you right now and have only a small chance of providing a return later - I would argue that, despite hindsight being 20/20, both projects had a small chance of success. Sure, they did get notoriety for them, and that was good.

Oh, and Linus got money from Red Hat and VA Linux because they were grateful. I'd argue that they weren't optimizing for personal growth there, either.
It's a major frustration for me, too, as an Emacs user.

I'm still looking for a hardware dongle that does nothing but map the caps lock scan code to left ctrl. Sure, I can rebind the key (and I do) but as a contractor I move around a lot and having something that circumvents the OS entirely would come in handy.
You are right about "end-to-end verifiable". I misunderstood that.

About understanding what is happening, I have to say: No, I do not know every detail on how we do it in Germany. But I would say that I have a pretty good overview and trust in the system. We had minor election related scandals, but never on a larger scale. Everything happens under the eyes of many. Those many consist of volunteer. When I go to vote, I know some of them personally.
If somebody does not know how our system works, it is at least possible for him/her to find out and fully understand. There are some complains about our system, but none are about the risk of large scale fraud.

I don't know much about on how you do it in the US. I heard that it is more complicated than ours, and that using a computer would help a lot. But as I said, I would prefer to get the job done manually. It is possible. It worked before.

About online shopping. It is a trade-off.

I know I should not trust my computer. I know the current state of how we use ssl and our trust in different CAs is pretty bad. But I am still doing it, since I hate to go shopping in real live. For me it would be much more risky to get into my car and drive to a shop.
I would not want to trust my computer and the current state of how we use crypto with everything in any case.

I was more about bribing people to make mistakes during the implementation. And do you know for sure that there is not yet a quantum computer in some kids basement? :)

In some cases like "xor" with a random key, you can proof that the crypto is unbreakable. But the way people use it is often faulty. There are certain requirements that apply to the key and without them, the method is not secure any more. In other cases like RSA, there is no real proof that it is working. It is hard to proof that nobody will figure out an highly efficient way to do prime factorization. All we know is that many people tried and failed.

Public inspection of those computers is not really possible. How do you trust the hardware? It is more easy to show that something does something. But it is hard to proof that something is not doing something.
We would use computers to do the calculations that prove that our votes are ok.. so we need to trust those machines again..
The 2009 will support 6 or 8, depending on model. It is worth it.
I've been thinking about the 'Kill the state' idea for a while. It just makes sense. I have more in common with the average person in Germany than I do with the average person in Kansas or Alabama (not necessarily politically, but culturally). With online communities and instantaneous worldwide communication, I am also more closely in touch with my global counterparts than a significant portion of people in my own country.

In short, nation boundaries are slowly becoming outdated. We will probably have to wait for actual teleportation before this fully comes to pass :)
I just upgraded to 16 gigs and it's amazing. The time for a suspend and restore of a parallels virtual instance went down by a large factor; it's now just 10 seconds to restore and 5 seconds to suspend with 2 gigs allocated to it.
I'm not understanding where you figured my point was that the list was not exhaustive enough; my point was you left out robotics and kept search and email in.

Robotics actually, is an area where something huge seems right over the horizon. I'd certainly bet on the next game changer coming from robotics before any equally revolutionary activity comes from search or email.

I don't necassarily disagree with what you do say about the two, I just don consider advances in these areas terribly important in the grand scheme of things.
I have to disagree, sometimes it is a lot better to start over. For example, with legacy code with bad test or even worse, with no test at all.
> It has intentionally simplified the situation and problem down to a good guys vs bad guys paradigm

Pretty much every international situation that gets turned into a moral cause by some Western group - and even plenty of domestic problems - ends up being simplified, abstracted, and turned into something similar to what you're describing.

There are plenty of real problems in the world, and genuinely-motivated people probably can help mitigate them somewhat if they're willing to get involved feet-on-ground, but I'll bet that mass-media campaigns and 'raising awareness' often do more harm than good.
It's highly likely that any autonomous car will have something very similar but with sensor data instead of video.

If I were making said cars, I would not sell them without that feature. Otherwise, if something ever happened to the car I would have no decent record of what my software was trying to do in the incident. You would have no way of fixing serious issues, or absolving yourself of fault.

This is the reasoning behind airline black boxes.
Its not like assistance tools don't exist, but by squishing all the information in an image into a smaller visual space that I can distinguish, it makes everything look worse. Which is fine because I only really need to be able to distinguish difference in color that precisely about once a month so I only use a tool when I need it. Most colorblind people don't have enough need to even have a software tool.

I am always going to be using a computer with normal colors, as are my cohorts. You can accommodate us or not, the burden is on us. But that means we are going to think your website looks bad and/or maybe isn't even worth our time if we have to muck around with tools to be able to use it.

Heres an example of what it does: http://imgur.com/a/giSxg and how bad it can look: http://imgur.com/wlWgC The top is normal, the rest are transformations I'll use (the 2nd image is the one I usually need).
Client Request Generator
The Love Letter Game
"And most of us start with zero training."

I take from this that my life is atypical since both I and my three daughters took up negotiation training at about the age of 3 and worked hard to improve our skills from then on :-)

I liked the article, its true life is negotiation be it with your spouse, your partners, your kids, or even the taxi driver. I think a good take away is that if you have never considered all the negotiating you do, you might think about picking up a couple of books on it.

I can recommend "Getting to Yes" http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Yes-Negotiating-Agreement-With... as a great place to start.
Why I #WIT...and Why You Should, Too.
Will the New iPad Extinguish Amazon’s Kindle Fire? [OPINION]
Awesome tip. Thanks!!!
Where's the reasoning for this? Frequently starting over is a problem, but code refactoring can have immense benefits. Discovering a different framework or language may suit your work better, for instance.

Monkeypiling on top of old work is really advice out of the 90's.

These articles with a bunch of three word sentences and zero justification are becoming annoying.
A good point was made however I really don't like these blog posts which attempt to be a "negotiating for dummies" style resource. Negotiating is a well understood field and there are many textbooks and academic resources for people who would like to learn more. Normally these resources are meant for lawyers but the explanations about why people negotiate following certain patterns should be accessible to most people.
He's basically saying that constant reinvestment of your capital leads to ever increasing success (and maybe, one day, blockbuster success).

I took my savings from my first job, went back to university to learn programming, then got a job with over double the salary. Now earn enough to save money (not that much, maybe a few thousand a year), and also learn a lot of new skills on the job (finance). I've avoided things that take up all my surplus cash/time... But I'm not sure how to 'reinvest' at this point. One obvious choice is doing a CFA (company pays the bills but it would be a huge timesink). Or I could try iOS or web development and use my money to get outside help where needed to make a good product. Or i could invest in stocks/bonds or something.

Anyone else care to share their history of, uh, reinvestment success?
The Kubuntu Commitment
If I understand this correctly, I can only have a single Ruby active at a time, even if I have multiple terminals open, right?
heck I'd rather take a 'trip' with one little pill then have to down 3L of anything (outside of Maotai - 375ml's enough)
I like mailto on websites, since I don't like contact forms so much. When I click on the mailto links, Thunderbirds open and I can start writing, very comfortable.
DARPA Urban Challenge (2007):
http://www.google.com/search?tbm=vid&q=darpa+urban+chall...

Several teams competed, entering driverless cars which interacted with each other and some vehicles operated by real people on a closed course. Carnegie Mellon's Boss car completed all the DARPA conditions and won the grand prize.
Criticism and two-way streets
'Just Be More Productive': The Trouble With Coaching for Success
When I was in school, one of my illustration professors said to us, "None of you will ever be as creative as Moebius."

To hear this was not a letdown. Moebius was incredibly prolific and unbelievably talented, and his work represents the upper bound of what is creatively possible.
voila: http://hertzen.com/experiments/jsfeedback/
The fastest growing bank in the US is Facebook
How Twitter is Blurring The Distinction Between Ads and Content
tl;dr Don't negotiation point by point, get all the points first, prioritize them, and then negotiate.
The US is not the worlds police. No one but the Chinese let China do anything. It is the height of arrogance to believe noting in the world happens unless the US lets it happen.
The story is not really a parable, this is exactly what Communist economy looked like in Poland and other Eastern Bloc countries. Production levels weren't supposed to meet market demand, they were supposed to meet The Plan. As a result, there were shortages of virtually everything but—who would've guessed—vinegar.

Oddly enough Poland revisited central planning idiocy again when it joined the EU with its economic absurdities, e.g. production quotas not allowing farmers to produce more milk or sugar than the plan allows.

A friend of mine living in Poland now told me about a farmer client of hers who visited her company last year with a large truck and a trailer full of cucumbers to give away to employees. The cucumbers were either oddly-shaped or wrong size according to EU norms but perfectly good otherwise. He couldn't legally sell them, was supposed to dump them instead. Not being OK with wasting food he drove around the city to people he knew, trying to give away literally tons of cucumbers...
By default, yes. But you can also use your $PATH to select a particular ruby per session. The `fullpath` helper is for that:

export PATH="$(ry fullpath mri)"
Piccolo is a pocket-sized stand-alone CNC platform.
If you haven't read the story of Joshua Bell in the DC Metro, check it out:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04...

It is related to your observation in that I think it shows even once someone is extremely successful in their field, the context of social proof still matters a lot -- if nobody is around who "knows" you're successful, you're just some schlub in the Metro with a violin.
We received a bunch of code from another group in this Large Software Company. More than half the code consisted of extra do-nothing layers of abstraction; functions that merely did checking and assertions on their arguments and passed them down to lower layers. There were many redundant assertions (e.g., checking that pointers weren't NULL, many times, and that assignments had "made it"). Working in this code was awful.

One day it dawned on me: This other group had a requirement that all code pass a seventy percent code coverage bar before checkin. This extra "safe" stuff was padding to make it easier for them to pass.

We took this code, ripped it to shreds and shrunk it by a factor of three or four. Sped it up a lot, too.

I don't believe in blind use of software metrics as a method for improving software.
It's amusing for me that this kind of advice is taken as something novel and even inspiring, not for the advice itself or the person giving it but because it shows how deformed our post-modern perception of the world is. That most people out there actually believe they can get rich with no previous effort of any kind but a matter of "positive attitude" shows the western civilization has decayed a lot. 100 years ago the West was already centuries ahead of the rest of the world because 300 years before it refused to follow "tradition" and expect the "Gods" to provide and to taketh away. When water didn't come to us we built pumps, something as simple as that was an almost unheard-of mentality in the history of mankind, the only other exception being the complex aqueducts built by the Roman Empire. When the Romans stopped building they experienced a slow painful death, and right now we have massive infrastructure deficits which go unfixed because well, any serious infrastructure project is measured in decades, so how do you take credit of that? If you're a politician you won't be in office by the time it's done, and with the increasing instability of the markets investors will probably have moved on to something else more than once by the time the project ends. One would believe than with our average lifespan more than doubling in the past 200 years we should be able to think further ahead, but in reality the post-modern society its fixated on the present, as if the future, a time other than now, was a concept so abstract our brains couldn't process it.
You're over exaggerating. You can teach students about processor theory, assembly language and C without getting into all the extra stuff.

All the extra stuff is built on that foundation, and learning C helps you understand that foundation better than any other language.
Except when they don't work, like in healthcare, lawyers, research etc.

relevant recent HN stories:
healthcare:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3661731
lawyers:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3672815
Sailing provides an apt metaphor for your point, I believe. The wind is more-or-less random, and yet if you choose a destination you will eventually get there (assuming that you know how to sail and your gear holds out, of course).