skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh! very useful to me now.

I've to teach my mom how to use the computer after my exams are over. And everytime I tried to teach her before, I failed.

"Don't take the keyboard"

I noticed that I made a basic mistake. I try to use the keyboard and teach her how to do things by telling her. And she used to freak out that I don't let her use the computer and teach her vocally. But my point was to let her watch me do it first and then let use the keyboard.

So this holidays, I think I'll be a better teacher :)

The last time she asked me for some information...
I just told her to "double-click the 'orangy-blue' icon (firefox) and click in the empty white box to the top-right-end of the screen, type whatever you want to find about and press the Enter key. Then click on the blue underlined links on the page to find your info"
Touch-enabling apps just got easier
http://equationater.com/
You're comparing apples to oranges. You could also say, "Whereas Cocoa is still philosophically crippled by Apple's intent to create a platform for Mac development and not a true cross-platform development platform."
You don't understand the situation. Flickr was created by Ludicorp, a start-up that was acquired by Yahoo. George worked for Ludicorp. Whether you think Flickr is valuable or not is irrelevant. She was there in the beginning and now she's been fired. That sucks.

Regarding the reference, Jeffrey Zeldman is widely and well respected. The reference is notable because it provides context into how ridiculous the situation is.
I don't know about Goldman, but Morgan Stanley is reducing total comp (base+bonus) by 10-30% for the people who still have a job.
Ok I'll bite. By the very fact that you'd take it, it means it has some value to you. Of course you are going to take something for free that you believe has non-zero value. If you are taking something for free that has value to you, you are profiting. How is that not stealing?
I'm not suprised.

I've gone in to several stores and taken a look at their netbook line-up.

The Windows netbooks are given glossy posters, with screensavers showing their specs and other marketing babble.

The Linux netbooks sit at the end, with the screen blanked and with no marketing whatsoever, other than a bold price tag.

Netbook manufacturers and retailers in general are failing really hard at marketing the selling points of these machines properly ("Comes with a free Microsoft Office-compatible Office suite and hundreds of other applications" and other benefits of the platform, better battery life, shorter boot times, etc..).

What worries me is that people will see this half-assed exercise and conclude that the Linux on consumer machines experiment has failed, when in reality it was never really given a chance in the first place.
I think it works quite well, although I avoid voting on comments on the iPhone, as it seems far too likely I would accidentally hit the wrong arrow. Otherwise, grand.
Nation's first full face transplant performed in Cleveland, Oh using cadaver tissue
You maximize your profit as a proxy for maximizing your utility (and some people choose less profit because "helping others" boosts their utility more). Since we're both maximizing our utility in a free market, it's arguable that the outcome of our transaction is maximum fairness, or at least a local maximum of fairness.
Programming can be fun. Playing is also a form of learning. At 8 I had little interest in programming but once I figured out how to draw graphics using QBasic I was hooked. Point, Lines, Loops, a little math, and now my rocket ship has smoke rings as it moves across the screen.
Do you have a reference for this?

No I don't, but it seemed logical enough to me. If inter-family credit is the only credit allowed, then for a family to survive financially it cannot merely earn enough money to eventually pay off all expenses -- it must earn and save enough money to pay any expense immediately. (Triplets? They'll be going to college one-at-a-time.)

If each family needs to stockpile more resources to survive, those resources can't be used productively by the rest of the economy.
InfoWorld Noise
Since I cruise the New page fairly regularly I've noticed that one user is submitting a lot of InfoWorld stories that rarely get voted up. (See http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ccraigIW)

There are some gems there, but perhaps we should encourage this user to slow down a bit and submit less stories after considering which ones are likely to be a hit.

For example, there's a story on New right now about haptics (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=400944) which reads like a press release that's been reformatted into a story. This has little value to HN.

In fact, it is a press release reformatted into a story: here's the press release http://www.sensable.com/pr_20081216OH3/news-press-detail.htm.
But Apple never set out to create a cross-platform development, erm, platform. Java did set out to be a general-purpose language particularly suited to "enterprise" development. As did C#.
The main thing that local developers have in their favor is they get to partake in the evolution of thought that takes place in any long term product strategy...

Yep, that's it. It's not that the people are all that different. It's that a person twelve time zones away is a lot harder to communicate with than a person living next door. Especially if they're not from the same culture.

The cultural and distance barriers aren't impossible to overcome. But they are a handicap.

I used to work for a semiconductor company with a substantial factory in Malaysia. I'll never forget the first time I took the long, long flight to meet the engineers there. It was like removing a blindfold. You got into the factory with those folks and suddenly all their problems -- which had seemed so obscure over those damned conference calls -- became clear, and their personalities snapped into place, and you could start getting things done.
Is that a problem though? Do they deserve less help than the recently unemployed?
Ok, I tried it and it converges much faster. My dna data is all integers so the update function is something like
constrained update( int existing_value, int limit ) {
new_value = random( limit )
constraining_value = random_float
difference = ( new_value - existing value ) * ( constraining_value * constraining value )
return difference
( apologize if code doesn't format correctly).

I also tried randomly replacing a poly with a new random shape and color poly 5% of the time to get away from local minima... didn't seem to help. I'm still doing a bit on this in my spare time if anyone is interested.

Later.
> If it takes 100 hours in PHP, then people will start asking for 20 hours in RoR. And maybe now not everyone knows RoR, but those outsourced developers will pick it up if they have to. They will pass the cost savings on as well. And yet again, we're back into this cycle of code and applications as a commodity

The author of the piece addresses this. He's not claiming that outsourced developers can't learn Ruby/Python, but that by hugely reducing the time/cost to build an application, an X% savings is much smaller than it would be in Java. So if you save less, it's not worth the risk of outsourcing.
What is the definition of "traffic" in this case? Page views? Regardless, "traffic" is not a basis for determining the value or even the popularity of a site.
Two if you count Linux. Are you complaining that Silverlight doesn't run on BeOS or something?

And saying "no one uses it" is brainless. In 1996 did you dismiss Macromedia Flash 1.0 because no one used it?
The part about web apps -- meh. The part about gobsmackingly good imitation human animation: cool.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLiX5d3rC6o&fmt=18

Two years from now we'll be seeing that, or not seeing it as the case may be, in movies. Another two years after that it will be in the AAA video games with 9 figure budgets. And another two years after that you'll be able to do it from a Japanese cell phone.

God I love technology.
Sure, if the pirate just stored the file in their collection as a trophy (as many do). However, if the pirate is actively using the product and deriving value from it in their work, they would have paid for the product (or another like it) to receive the same value.

Having a thief (sorry, 'copyright infringer') take your software rather than pay for it may eventually provide some word-of-mouth advertising, but they're likely to tell other pirates and repeat the cycle of revenue loss rather than become vocal advocates for a purchase.

Outside of edge-cases like Microsoft (whose Windows dominance was arguably helped by piracy) it seems that 'piracy is good advertising' is a fallacy used by pirates to make themselves feel better about denying income to people they otherwise like.

Can you name three small software producers whose revenue grew stronger as a result of piracy?
If the definition of stealing is "taking something for free that has value to you", then I steal with every breath.

If copying is the same is taking, then telling a story is the same as burning a book.
Off the top of my head I haven't heard of such a book. It's too specialised to have enough of a market, I imagine. Advanced Rails Recipes did touch on some techniques that would be useful in that context, though.
How much did the otherwise empty computer and operating system cost?

Value doesn't materialize out of good thoughts. Actual work has to go into it.
I guess you could assign pomodoros to "taking a step back and looking at the big picture"?
Wall Street institutions are wings of the government. They live and die by the Fed and regulation. Universities also live and die by government support.
Been using Twitter for two years and.. while I'm tolerant of these messages, ultimately I don't like them. DMs are typically used very sparingly on Twitter and getting one as soon as I follow someone reeks of automation and a lack of sincerity. If I get a specific, personal comment, awesome, but a totally obvious automatic message gets ignored.
IIRC, this was one of the design principles for ErosOS. Everything was transparently persistable and undoable, so you could reverse closing that document, or editing it, and so on.
I run to keep in shape. I would spend some of my extra time making sure I was training to my potential rather than just enough.

I would build a small workshop and/or apprentice with someone to learn how to do some modest woodworking. It appeals to me as a nice hobby, but one which time and resources do not allow me to pursue at this point.

I would practice guitar more often/seriously.

I would read more often, and spend more time in quiet reflection.

I would continue to develop applications, as I love many aspects of it.

I would take a vacation per quarter rather than a vacation per year.

Basically, commit more time to improving myself and my skills rather than committing more time towards improving my financial condition.
I use AdBlock Plus and if I right click on the status bar icon, I get two menu items, "Disable on <domain>" and "Disable for this page only". It saves this preference across sessions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

Thinking of it in terms of morals is rather unproductive. It's just one of the ways markets fail.
What? No "Skynet"?
Swiss watch found in 400-year-old tomb
Is this made up?
Granted, Scott Adams does have an Economics degree and an MBA, but it is much more convincing (and productive) to attack his arguments rather than his qualifications or credentials.
Hm, what do you mean by "status bar icon"? I also have Adblock Plus (installed via apt-get on Ubuntu), but I don't see those options anywhere?

Edit: Oh OK, found it - had to enable the status bar icon in the settings. Thanks!
They don't mention that, at least on amazon.com (haven't looked at .co.uk), the XP machine also happens to be the top of the line vs. the ones sold with Linux have half the specs (1024 vs 512 MB ram, 6-cell vs 3-cell battery, tiny SSD vs. 120GB+ hard drive).

I bought one with WinXP, and immediately threw Linux on it. I'm willing to believe I'm in the minority in doing so, but to say the _only_ reason people might be buying Windows is for Windows' sake, and not even mention this possibility to debunk it seems disingenuous to me.
Yup... or being able to upload an image into a rich text editor by dragging it from your desktop or other folder.
Yes most universities believe graduate -> graduate training programme, percentage thereof is measure of institutional success. Maybe that was true the last time the admissions officers were in the job market, but it hasn't been for 20-30 years.
"Even the skill difference won’t be a risk. A low skill developer will be able to churn out 80% of the project in the same 100 hour time frame as a skilled one."

I thought this notion was quashed a long time ago. The author seems to suffer from a form of myopia where the only development he can see is web development.
New Very Relaxed PHP Framework Released
StudPHP is a little, fast and very relaxed PHP MVC framework. Some developers would even say it’s not a framework but a collection of libraries and coding practices. It’s ok to call it that - the most important thing is it helps you build PHP/MySQL applications really fast.
You could only improve on this by having a picture of the developer with his kid or something :)

Shame is a good motivator in this case. Shame works as a motivator for people who probably could pay, but aren't (or just want to "test" the software). Shame does not work as a motivator for criminals or heartless freeloaders, and they'd never pay anyway.
No wonder it is waning in popularity (and mostly only old people and the "business" types like it).

Broad generalization. Gotta call BS on that one.

[Edit] I looked it up, and I found some evidence to support it. But I'd like to see it indexed against economic indicators (unemployment) and the overall decline in outdoor activities. http://tinyurl.com/59xpea

Af for hackers, I really don't know a single good programmer that knows golf. it's like they are way to impatient for that sport. They'd rather hack :)

See above.
Stealing is when someone has something that they value, and you take it from them. It doesn't matter how much you value the object. What matters is that they value the object, and that after it is stolen, they no longer have it.

Are you really saying that if you profit without paying for something, then you must be stealing? What if you have some wood, and you make a table out of it. You've profited by the difference in price of a table and a pile of wood, but you've not paid anyone for anything. Who have you stolen from?
Transifex, a new translating start-up
Gas memory could send spooky messages the full distance
Why not just link directly to the actual blog post?
No mention of parrot? It's absolutely trivial to write a compiler using parrot.
Elected Officials Score Lower than the General Public
Ask HN : What article should I print ?
At the university, we get a hundred page print credit, and this credit is reset every semester.

I've got fifty pages left and I'd like to print out a valuable article about AI, or Lisp, or general computer science.

Do you have any suggestions ?
It's these kind of intuitive things that I love. The only problem is being able to guess what is intuitive to whom. Else you'll end up with a ton of features that no one ever uses (read: waste of money).
I don't think the Uncanny Valley can exist with regards to user interfaces. They were created from scratch. And they've changed, and are still changing. And neither a desktop interface nor a web interface is set in stone.

See, the valley can exist because humans stay the same, at least to our brains. We don't madly change form or shape every 20 years. But user interfaces do. So how do our brains know a web interface looks too much like a desktop interface? It can only know because we know what both are "supposed" to look like.

But kids being brought up on web interfaces that look like desktops will not have a valley because to them that looks normal. There is no set "desktop" look or web interface "look." Its only what we've created. Create something different, and the valley will go away.
I would love it if someone qualified could explain this article a bit more; specifically, they're NOT talking about faster-than-light information transfer, correct?
Is there any other tool with a similar focus?

I'd love to have an iPhone/mobile specific social news site. I like the slinkset, HN and reddit type engines.
if it's in color print about Paris Hilton
I find most InfoWorld content worthless. Either it's shallow or formatted over multiple pages you have to click your way trough and the site as a whole just doesn't seem to have much of substance at all.

Good job on confirming the press-release. I've had that suspicion for quite a few "articles" there.
The pirate bay would be a good choice :D
The rise of "retail blogs"
That's fine, and you have every right to do so.

I will then use the 'adblock detected popup message'-blocker.
http://people.redhat.com/drepper/cpumemory.pdf
I read the whole article. It is designed for certain types of task, and it is not appropriate to others. For example, sometimes my tasks involve, "travel to the city and speak with Joe." "Travel to the city" takes 40 minutes. It should not be split into two work units with a break in between. Further, "speak with Joe" would not be splittable. How am I going to say, "Joe, when the timer rings, we are going to get up and not talk to one another for 5 minutes."

However, for desk-work it might help me. I have to stop every 20 minutes and take a 5 minute break anyway due to RSI. Using this interval as an atomic unit for task completion, recording, and estimation may be useful.
MySpace Quietly Begins Encouraging Users To Use Their Real Names
'Nullable types' doesn't seem something to be proud about: it goes in the wrong direction. Much better to enable removing null, like Scala and OCaml.
Colonoscopies Miss Many Cancers, Study Finds
Hmmm, I don't really know how well this actually works in the real world (rather than on a University campus, where people are quite a bit smarter than the average population).

For example, text messages. I can be sitting there with the person that I'm trying to help - the computer spits up a dialog box. The user immediately, reflexively, moves to click on 'yes' or 'OK' or whatever button seems most likely to make the box go away (but is actually going to lead them straight into the problem that they called me for in the first place). So I tell them to stop, and read the dialog box. Then I ask them what they think the computer is trying to tell them. They think about it, and most of the time come up with the correct answer, and their problem is solved. You would have thought that this would teach them the value of reading dialog box messages when trying to resolve problems, but no... The next time they have a problem, you have to go back through the whole thing again...

Another example: the other day I was helping a friend set up a home network. It was a moderately complex setup, and he wanted me to explain how I had identified the problem, and how I found the tight way to fix his problem. But how do you explain the difference between a computer being able to ping a network drive, and the drive icon appearing on the computer's desktop? How do you explain to them that you just guessed that the ADSL modem's config page was available at http://192.168.1.1. You can't, it's the result of years and years of working in the field. The only way to learn that stuff is to play with it yourself, instead of calling in the IT guru to fix it for you.

Anyway, this is an overly long post simply to say that to truly be able to resolve computer problems, you need to be able to understand what is going on underneath all of the UI abstractions presented to the user, and that these things are complex, and difficult to learn.
I thought "Not Yet Announced" was pretty cool. Who were the faces behind those question marks? It probably doesn't matter to me at all, but I want to know just because they wouldn't tell me. Ahh, human nature.
3 Ways To Hack Facebook
The reporter once again demonstrates that the worst thing about reporting is reporters, as the reporter clearly is talking FTL communication. A little knowledge...

It sounds like this person is researching communicating actual qubits, instead of conventional ones and zeros, over a communication link. Basically, a networking technology for quantum computers that remains quantum. Interesting, but with no FTL communication implications.
I hate it when people register here and just start spamming submissions without ever commenting on anything. It seems like the people who actively participate in the community here are the ones most likely to have solid submissions.

On the other hand, this submitter seems like pure SEO BS.
Finally a reasonable explanation of why I've been feeling unproductive over the past few days!
The best way to handle bad submissions is to simply ignore them, which is what seems to be already happening. Don't comment on them or vote them up.
a micro-loan bank that lends only to college graduates in the tech sector would probably be ultra competitive because default rates would so much lower than average that they could give awesome rates.

who wants to start a 100% reserve bank, make profits in this manner and start the honest banking revolution?
Ask HN: How do I go about PHP?
Hey hackers,

I've a background in C#, Java and JavaScript but don't know a thing about PHP. Couple of questions

a) How do you recommend I should go about learning PHP?
b) Any recommended Editors (I've to use Windows)?
c) I spent sometime looking for frameworks and CodeIgniter seems promising. Your thoughts?

Any other tips, books, libraries, frameworks and goodies you would recommend? Any help is highly appreciated.
new Thread()
{
public void run()
{
System.out.println("I'm in a Thread");
}
}.start();

In C#:

new Thread (Go).start();

static void Go()
{
Console.Writeln("I'm in a Thread");
}

...C# isn't especially elegant either, but the general uncleanliness of inner anonymous classes is one example of Java's problems.
Save the trees, keep it digital.
Jessica Fridrich Specializes in Problems That Only Seem Impossible to Solve
Amen. That's exactly how it was for me. I think I was 10 or 11 when I got the Vic-20 I'd been begging for. I was hooked immediately.
Then large companies will just set up small straw-companies to do non-regulated deals with you.
I have to say, if Microsoft were to come out with an entirely new operating system based on the ideas behind Singularity and BeOS/Haiku, it would be game changing. Competitors like OS X wouldn't be able to match it for security and responsiveness. Everything, even including significant parts of the kernel could be implemented in C#.

Imagine something with the productivity leverage of the old Lisp machines, backed by a corporation the size of Microsoft. (People used to ask how big the development team was behind the Symbolics Lisp machine, and their jaws would drop when they found out it was an order of magnitude or two smaller than they thought.)
Why mix-in the 100% reserve idea?
Intelligence without Reason by Rodney Brooks. Popular paper in AI (so you might already have read it). 28 pages-ish.

http://dli.iiit.ac.in/ijcai/IJCAI-91-VOL1/PDF/089.pdf
I do not know if we are talking about the same thing. But I configured my debit card not to be able overdraw my bank account and I make sure that there is always not too much money in it.
Ask HN: Extreme, but workable cost-cutting measures?
Looking for new cost-reducing ideas that have been prompted by this economic crunch?
Frugal business operation is a common theme here, but to be honest, until now I’d never considered power-saving light bulbs. Odd, even off the wall ideas have been circulating in my head - reselling windows licenses and moving to Ubuntu, gas/bike powered generators, positioning for tax breaks, creating a non-profit offshoot company, relocating from MA to NH etc.

Anyone had strikes of brilliance prompted by necessity recently?