skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point of the article is very valid and concerning, but there are alot of factual problems with how this article represents the facts in its main case study.

> For years the Department of Justice had maintained that online gambling was illegal. In a spectacular about turn just before Christmas last year, it said that the law (the Wire Act) only applied to sports betting. They finally recognised the obvious- it takes some skill to win at poker and blackjack. So when it took action against Bodog, it wasn’t for its main activity of online gambling but the relatively smaller one of sports betting.

From someone who has the unique combination of having been a professional poker player for long periods, as well as having worked at Bodog as a software developer I can tell you two things that are very wrong about this paragraph.

1. There isn't any skill in playing blackjack online. The only skill component of playing live is in counting cards, and that doesn't translate online because you are getting a "new deck" with every hand.

2. Sports betting is far and away the most profitable part of their business. In fact, their poker room is nothing but a nuisance to them because it allows professional poker players to swoop in and extract money from the sports betters before Bodog is able to extract it. This is demonstrated by the recent changes to their poker software that make the site very very unattractive to play poker on for any thinking player (ie anonymizing the tables), not to mention their previous rules about limiting the number of tables played at a time.

And then the main point of taking action against the site for the minor crime of sports betting, which is "legal" in Canada. I'm not so sure about that, I know when I worked there that it was common knowledge that the founder of the company hadn't stepped foot in Canada since Bodog had launched. Also, what does it matter if sports betting is the main part of its business or not? If it's illegal to service US customers with an activity that the US government finds illegal, they are obviously going to take action.

Of course I believe online sports betting shouldn't be outlawed, but the US government has always been much more clear about this being illegal when compared to its sometimes wishy-washy stance on poker.
I disagree with pg's opinion in that case. I think what he describes is correct as far as it applies to his style of speaking, but there are many cases where a speech format conveys information better and is more articulate than reading an essay. Think of TED talks for instance.

It's ok for any one person to perfer words, but not everyone prefers reading to a face to face meeting. If that were the case, imagine all the VC pitches consisting of reviewing business plans rather than live pitches.

Even YC places a lot of emphasis on the 10-minute interview in the selection process . So there must be something non-verbal happening, otherwise an exchange of emails would give founders a better opportunity to present the case for their startup.
Yeah, definitely schedule an appointment with a counselor to talk it out
Kroll Ontrack paints a staggering portrait of data loss (and recovery).
Absolutely Mind-blowing New Prometheus Trailer - Ridley Scott
Would it be overly cynical of me to suspect that the original ban had something to do with the $5 charge for the seat back phone and the new policy has something to do with the $5 seat back wifi?
This looks great! Awesome job. Would love to read more about which technologies you used to build it.
ACDSee Pro 4 Plus Keygen Free Download ( Full ) - [./DeeJayHan-Blog]
You watched too much James Bond.

Learning any sufficiently foreign natural language (i.e. any that you can't understand simply if a speaker of it talks slowly enough) is significantly more time-consuming than for anyone who already knows one programming language to learn, say, C++ sufficiently to be productive in it.

You're comparing learning a natural language until fluency with learning a programming language entirely. These are very different things. Most people make mistakes speaking and writing their native language.
I wouldn't say that I'm a good speaker, but I'm certainly a much better speaker than I used to be. It's not just about transmitting a certain number of bits of information per minute; it's also about making sure that those bits are being received at the other end. I often throw jokes (and quasi-jokes, like my "purpose of cryptography is to force the US government to torture you" line) into talks as a way to help keep the audience's attention; and I watch the audience for signs that I'm moving too fast or too slow for them.

But for all of this, I don't think the material I convey has suffered in the slightest. One audience member told me that my cryptography-in-one-hour talk was the "most densely packed hour of information" he had ever seen. If being a good speaker pushed me away from having and conveying good ideas, my talks should have been getting progressively less informative, not more so.

I posit that while PG is seeing a real effect, it's not the effect he thinks he's seeing. Rather than style detracting from substance, it seems to me that there's selection bias: In order to be invited to give talks, you must have at least one of {good ideas, good style}. As a result, those talks which are completely devoid of interesting ideas are inevitably given very well -- we never see talks which are given by poor speakers who have no interesting ideas. This in no way means that speaking well is responsible for the lack of substance.
Ethernet is an interesting feature when it comes to ultra-portables. It's curious that we've come to a point where the rj45 port is actually thicker than the body of some computers (the air included). If you absolutely need it, there are some USB->rj45 adapters out there.

I have both a thinkpad netbook and a macbook air. I've found that 98% of the time, I'll grab the macbook air. Runs windows and linux just fine, and the hardware feels a lot more solid.
Fake WebCam 6.1.3 Plus Keygen - [./DeeJayHan-Blog]
Yes thanks - and if anyone watches it, be sure also to check out the stuff on Bob Barton. I learned about a magnificent part of computing history thanks to that talk.

Edit: here you go:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2855500

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2928672

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2856567

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2855508

The first two are teaser comments. The second two are the important pieces. Also the paper Kay praises at the start of the talk is short and very worth reading.
transcript: http://lesswrong.com/lw/8w1/transcript_tyler_cowen_on_storie...
yeah you are right
pg, I think you are a good speaker. Not in the classic motivational speaker sense but you do speak with conviction and have a unique voice...both literally and in what you say. You are one of the few authors that I literally have your voice in my head when I am slowly reading one of your essays. At least among your target audience, what you have to say is much more important than how you say it. So keep rewriting your talks minutes before you give them, even if it leads you to say um during your speeches. As long as you continue to say what you truly believe, that'll shine through and you will continue to be a good speaker in my book.
So no chance of a Token Ring making a comeback on Thinkpads then?
Not yet: https://github.com/strangeloop/clojurewest2012-slides

InfoQ taped it, but they may not release it for up to 6 months.

And yes, it was Bradford Cross.
Just like the OS X experience is trouble-free if you use a fully supported device (a Mac).

You obviously haven't tried using Bluetooth audio with a recent Macbook: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3200456

It's hard to believe, but I can honestly say that this is a case where Linux audio handling is much easier to deal with.

(I understand the general argument you're making, and agree with it, but "trouble-free" felt overly generous.)
I have the complete opposite experience, but I tried Ubuntu in 2008 (and stayed with it). I think the 8 series Ubuntu was really already a good Linux for the desktop and they kept getting better after that.

Installing for example was much easier than anything windows.

Linux was a mess in 2002 with nothing working out of the box in Red Hat, the UI was super slow (browsing the net was about half the speed compared to windows on the very same computer).

So maybe we can surmise that it got really good around 2007-2008?
not everyone prefers reading to a face to face meeting. If that were the case, imagine all the VC pitches consisting of reviewing business plans rather than live pitches.

That's the worst counterexample one could choose. The reason investors want to meet founders in person is precisely because they care as much if not more about the people than the idea.
Does that rule out almost all consumer market startups, because they aren't making anything and don't seem terribly interested in doing so ("We're focusing on growth")?
They would carry little weight in the USA. But, say, in the EU DNS servers and ISPs would have to obey it. It would a technical nightmare and complete headache for any sysadmin to have to "manually patch" in some values, but would be possible.

It would be an interesting time to live in.
Even Google has tried it and it didn't go anywhere.
Mapper.js allows you to add automatic area highlighting to image maps
This could be a good idea if its implemented similar to disqus but used for chatting.
I would be interested to read such research as well. I attend Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), which is also the location of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID). Anecdotally, the majority of deaf folks here report thinking in ASL. This is even the case with many English-speaking people who are hard-of-hearing or have cochlear implants.
You are not subjected to US law. However verisign have complete control over .com namespace, and they are subject to US law and US courts. Verisign will take your .com off you if the US counts tell them to.
Being a better speaker doesn't necessarily mean your ideas are going to get worse. (I said in the first paragraph that I wished I were a better speaker. Why would I wish for that if I thought it made your ideas worse?) It's just alarming to me how little being a better speaker depends on making your ideas better.
Why is this being downvoted? It's not the popular view in these parts but it's a legitimate one and did not strike me as trolling.
Unless you happen to know, factually, that he is guilty (and perhaps therefore a witness in the trial?) this is exactly the kind of thing that shouldn't happen before a verdict has been handed down. Kim's personality has little to do with how the law should be applied.
Fighting Stereotypes One Day at a Time
Fighting Stereotypes One Day at a Time by Facebook employee Sophia Chung
From the outside of Yaodong, actually it is very nice.
And you know, living in this place. It's warm in winter and _COOL_ in summer. And IT IS very stable and safe. Don't be misunderstood by word _CAVE_. http://i.imgur.com/2x7b4.jpg
I recommend using boost.thread. It's cross-platform, and simpler than pthread.
The LoveDsgn Story - starting up and closing down a design community
At first, my thoughts were wow, that's simple and potentially really powerful.

Then I opened it up.. and even on HN, the chat was a hard to follow trail of throw away comments. Chat is simply an extremely hard thing to moderate and present cleanly. Comments work, because most of the time, insightful/helpful comments are voted to the top.

The way I see it is that chat is useful in a number of scenarios but I'm not sure this is it. I would suggest it's much more useful when:

1) You know the other people in the room, and it's not anonymous. If facebook were behind this, it may be useful, but the probability of someone you know browsing the same page as you is slim. It could work if it used 2 or 3 degrees of seperation however.

2) Liveness is key. Take olark for example, live and direct chat to customer service is extrmely useful. Alternatively, if you are covering a live event, it's much better to have live chat. Even if it's hard to follow at times, at least you know everything is current.

Excellent use of a bookmarklet, and thanks for sharing, but it's going to be very difficult to make it usable.
It's a bit too easy and somewhat condescending to brush off public speaking as strictly inferior to written communication. In fact, I disagree strongly with Graham's stance. Sure, pure information transmission is enhanced in written form: there's less noise, the reader can skip and backtrack at will, and so on.

Speaking, however, gives you many more channels, and I refuse to consider these channels (inflection, speed, choice of words, prosody, emotionalization, what have you) mere baggage. Also, it's deceiving to propose that essays are baggage-free. Good style makes a huge difference, even in writing. Compare the great essayists to lowly part-time bloggers: the difference rarely boils down to just ideas. Delivery matters. Emotional content, something Graham appears to see as noise, distorts and enhances in written and spoken form alike.

All in all, I find it a bit too convenient that a mediocre speaker and good essayist happens to think writing is simply the better medium.
Yes, the american dream, the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Unless one day in the future you have to change planes in the US and suddenly find yourself arrested for running a used DVD site.

Or you can't fly inside Europe because the airlines share a no-fly list with the DHS and you are a US felon.
It's not an ultrabook, but the dell 14z is only 4 lbs and thinner than any laptop I've owned before. I got it for around $400. It was the only black friday sale laptop that had an i5 but not a dual graphics card (such as nvidia optimus, which you can get working in linux, but sometimes is a pain). Everything worked flawlessly with ubuntu, and when I dual boot to windows, plenty of games work fine, too, including the new microsoft flight simulator.
I grew up bilingually (Dutch and German, quite similar languages, but still). Did that make me smarter? I am not sure.

I do fell I have a natural talent to learn languages - I just don't make use of it. In school I was always too lazy to learn vocabulary. However, I feel like I just assimilated the grammatical rules of the English language, without ever having to do much exercises or making typical grammatical errors that other students made. Once I was past a curtain point I could just read a text with new words in it and subconsciously derive their meaning from the context, without even noticing them. (This can also be annoying from time to time, because sometimes I'd make wrong assumptions about the meaning.)

So, I would say I was able to learn English more like a native speaker learns a language. Is this, because I grew up bilingually? Maybe. It is certainly an interesting theory. Part of it might also be hanging around the internet and exposing myself to English more then other students.

EDIT: Maybe it's also because I started programming quite early. I started to program before I learned English, so I had to learn words like WHILE, IF, INPUT by hard (QBasic, eh). Do other early programmers among you feel like it had an impact on your abilities to learn natural languages?
"[A] person hearing a talk can only spend as long thinking about each sentence as it takes to hear it."

This is where discipline enters. When a speaker says something that fires a massive neuron in your brain, ignore the next five-ten sentences the speaker is saying and start writing.

When you're in school, you take notes on lectures to pass a test, so you have to listen to every sentence. School trains your brain to do this, and you need to untrain it.

When you're at a conference, you're listening to the speaker so you can do something (hopefully) excellent with the information they're giving you.

When the speaker provides you with a spark of inspiration, that's when you need to disengage from the talk and let your own brain take it from there. You'll only miss a handful of sentences, and you'll pack a thought-food lunch for later. You'll get more out of the talk then if you try to consume and register every sentence - many of which won't be nearly as useful.
I expirienced the exact opposite in Maebashi Japan circa 2003. We had to go to Tokyo to find a place to get some cash out of our foreign issued credit cards, and even the local ones were not universally accepted. For such a high-tech nation as Japan I was completely shoked.
Did the drug dealer happen to be a laundry detergent distributor?
OMG yes !!! And do you know how to interpret what you read ? I never said this was for experienced programmers, only to newbies !
I'm trying to do exactly that (embed a terminal, not make you pay for it) with https://github.com/wuub/SublimePTY, but the progress has slowed down to a stop lately because of humongous pileup at work.

You can also try SublimeREPL [https://github.com/wuub/SublimeREPL] / Shell for now, but it's good only for very basic stuff as SublimeREPL does not aim to be a terminal emulator at all.
Clicky link: https://www.chessable.co.uk
I think the attitude here is simply, “if people want it and can get value from it, here it is”. Which is fine. Not every code dump needs to become a living project with an active community. It's nice that they put it out there to allow for the possibility.
I would personally not put up with a spreadsheet where the GOTO cell function is rather awkardly hidden on function key number seven.
Just a nit-pick but soon as I load the page I see the twitter icon with "Facebook" underneath it - http://i.imgur.com/tFBOe.jpg

Other than that, I like the implementation of it :)
IIRC, studies show that if you learn a second language as an adult, learning a third one becomes easier (even if it is a completely different one) because you learned to learn a language. So yes, of course it is much easier to learn a similar language, but there is also an effect with completely different ones.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I agree with you. Natural languages are typically larger and more involved than programming languages, so it takes longer to attain fluency. But they do exist on the same axis. A programming language can be complex enough to take as long as a natural language to learn to speak fluently and idiomatically.
Why This Is What Samsung Is Calling Ice Cream Sandwich
But no middle click, which is something that the ThinkPads have and something I use every day. I also prefer the track point nub, as it lets me keep my fingers on home row.
Maybe ICANN should allow multiple parties to manage the assignment of domains that aren't country-specific.

For example, let Nominet UK, auDA, InteretNZ, and CIRA manage some .com domains. Why not?

As far as I can tell, the current arrangement is a historical accident.
> All in all, I find it a bit too convenient that a mediocre speaker and good essayist happens to think writing is simply the better medium.

Perhaps it is more the case that a man who thinks writing is the better medium has spent more time developing his skills as an essayist than developing his skills as a speaker. In fact, I see the essay as a justification for that decision.
Marginal Tax Rates and Wishful Thinking
pg strike me as a good speaker. Yes the "uhm" thing was a bit too much on the pycon video, but I think that is easy to get rid of with a little bit of training

"Sometimes I have to pause when I lose my train of thought."

A lot of people state this as a fault in their presentation skills, but is it really? It can be quite powerful and captivating with pauses in an ever streaming chain of talking, and I really don't think the audience mind.
I don't agree that good speakers make the audience dumber. There are and have been a lot of good speakers that can transmit ideas in an entertaining way without compromising on content. Christopher Hitchens and Neil deGrasse Tyson come to mind.

It certainly is hard work to get there, but it may be worth it. For example, I didn't watch the pycon video because I've seen the comments and can't tolerate bad sound quality or speech that is difficult to follow. Sorry.
I often hear that but it is no true in my experience. Maybe your run-of-the-mill flavour-of-the-month hipster web 2.0 app has a limited shelf life but most enterprise apps stay deployed for years.
Being a better speaker doesn't necessarily mean your ideas are going to get worse.

I must have gotten the wrong message from that essay. It seemed to me that from about the third paragraph onwards you were itemizing the bad things about good speakers.
Its just like what ChromeOS did to the Desktop/Laptop world.
Where I introduce devproxy
Nice. Very similar idea to http://bonfire.im which is only for use at Twitter.com. Would be cool if it grabbed HN usernames somehow.
I seriously doubt it, considering a) RPython is a strict subset of Python, operating on the in memory representation of Python objects and does aggressive type inference, whereas Cython adds additional features (and syntax) to the language and has it's own parser and no type inference (AFAIK), and b) RPython predates Cython, AFAIK.
There are ways to become a better speaker if you're interested... like toastmasters.
My experience is that the 11" is unusable and the 13" is fine. Definitely something to test in the store!
This is just plain wrong.

http://images.apple.com/macbookair/images/design_multitouch....

The | character is under the delete key above return.
The Effects of New Technology on IT Support
No silver bullet? Check this out: http://vpri.org/html/work/ifnct.htm

They already have some results: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf

To sum it up, they do "personal computing" in about 4 orders of magnitude less code than current mainstream systems (from more than 200 millions lines to about 20,000). That includes the self-implementing compilers. The only thing they left out was the device drivers (which by the way takes less than 0.5% the size of current systems).

Now the Complexity Werewolf just went from "Unspeakably Awful Indescribable Horror" to "Cute puppy".
Connecting to Wi-Fi on the run is probably not feasible most of the time. DHCP is slow on most residential routers.

Maybe it could work by cheating (e.g. sending UDP packets to multiple common IPs of routers, like 192.168.{0,1,2,3}.1, without waiting for DHCP), but the auth frame exchange alone would probably take too much time.
The concept of jurisdiction is complicated, but often comes down to "do you have the authority to make me care".

Any country in the world can make laws about whatever they'd like with regards to things they have control over. In fact, they can make laws about things they don't have control over, but in practice, you can safely ignore getting sued in Iran unless you plan on visiting Iran.

In this case, things are pretty simple: .com, .net, .org, etc are US domain names, administered by a US company, and the US has the authority to subject you to their jurisdiction (because so much of it happens in the US).

If you would like to use a US domain name, you are subject to US law. If you live outside the US and would not like to be subject to US law, then don't use a US domain name or a US web host.

The United States isn't doing anything special here that every other country in the world isn't also doing. If I buy and use a .fr domain name and host servers in France, I am subject to French and EU jurisdiction.
Derrida thought a whole lot about the spoken word vs. writing.

According to logocentrist theory, speech is the original signifier of meaning, and the written word is derived from the spoken word. The written word is thus a representation of the spoken word. Logocentrism asserts that language originates as a process of thought that produces speech, and it asserts that speech produces writing.

http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/derrida.html