skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It may be better, but it's not beautiful.

The grey gradient drastically reduces contrast (grey text! grey buttons! black logo!) while making the whole thing feel "muddy." The antialiasing on the big logo is whacked out, & makes me feel like I've got an astigmatism. Similar is true of the small logo at the top left: the grey/red contrast is of the type that causes a visual distortion similar to motion/line blurring.

Reflections are so 2007.

The body text is too small.

Links aren't underlined.

None of the blog items or updates are actually links. Neither is the feed icon. Neither are the Featured App, Github, or Chat blocks.

What's up with that?
Sorry for asking, but how did you go about finding an abandoned website?
How about doubling the number of entrances/exits on a plane: have one on the front that boards the first half of the plane and one on the back that boards the rear half of the plane? I'm sure there would be some way to "thread" passengers once they all go past ticketcheck, perhaps with a re-engineered variant of something like: Rows 1-20 to the left and Rows 21-40 to the right. Only potential families sitting in rows 20-21 would have to be separated at boarding time, but they'd meet right back up in the middle of the airplane.
UK Police Legally Allowed to Hack into Computers. Without a Warrant.
Video of a very inefficient concrete drill (read description)
Interesting. Do you know if you can make a living out of it?
FileMaker 10's Fresh New Face
Anyhow, I prefer threaded + n/p myself. For complicated discussions (like at work) it's much better to see exactly which mail is in reply to which (not just time based).
Not quite. The Y combinator does real work. Its not just an extra point attached at the end. Furthermore, getting rid of implicit recursion does not make one a better programmer (imho).
The current group on the receiving end did pay.

Noam Chomsky wrote a great essay on this non-issue: http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20050601.htm

(Hey, the guy's from MIT, don't down-vote me that much, please! ;)
Complicates as in ... ?
A shame it is impossible to down-vote stories.
I'd like to see some competition in the "metrics for your feed" space. The other stuff, I can live without.
MYOB Indonesia Community - Menghapus transaksi yang telah direkonsiliasi
The problem with an obvious things you don't know wiki is that everyone doesn't know something different that's obvious. Putting all those things in one easy to find place makes them hard to find. And if you didn't know what you were looking for in the first place...

A wiki with "middle click opens in new tabs" would be noise for me. Nice thought though.
SS has collected trillions more than it has paid out. To deal with the post baby boom reduction in the work force. A true Ponzi scheme can't be stable over hundreds of years but SS could be.

PS: I would like to see SS start at ~75 which seems to be the time when most people are incapable of meaningful work. And it's the age where most people who retired young start having major problems with their savings keeping up with inflation. I would also increase benefits slightly because it would be the only source of income for many people. I fear a lot of people retired far younger than the would have because of SS and ended up far poorer because they outlived their savings.
Click on the "Account" link (upper right) and look for the section "Email settings". It's the checkbox labeled "Send me my friendfeed every..." with a daily/weekly option.
Steve Jobs Skips Macworld Because of His Health
Lots of ways. Vegans are an extreme minority. I assume most medical diets are designed for the majority of people. They probably had to formulate a special diet for him that was vegan, and it may have taken a while to find the proper mix.

Also, statistical outlook data for cancers, surgeries, etc, are based on statistically average populations. Vegan people deviate that from that population, and that could mean their outlook/treatment be different.

Jobs' whipple surgery drastically changed his digestive system. And because it's at least sort of rareish, I am not sure any good data exists for proper procedure on vegans who have undergone a whipple surgery.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancreaticoduodenectomy

And: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veganism
"* Hire an Indian/East European company on eLance that specializes in internet marketing. Pay them $3-5 an hour x 10 hours a week x 3 months to do their thing. Or, you can pay them by the task."

Could you explain what their "thing" is?
The point being if he was secretly sick and about ready to die, Apple not saying anything would amount to fraud. Of course he'll die, but there's a difference between randomly being hit by a bus and knowing about a deadly disease for a year without any disclosure. There's room for improvement for the regulation in this space, but it's a sad reality. Luckily this doesn't appear to be the case.
I'm a little surprised slideshare didn't make the list, but I think it'll be there by next year.
You just said the same thing he did.
I'm going to have to point out the obvious here, that nobody lives in a city.
People lives in houses and then neighborhoods.

For example I lived in a very small town and my bedroom was directly above the one and only biker bar in the town. Needless to say concentrating was hard.

But I was born and raised in quiet green island in the middle of an urban jungle and it was quiet yet exciting and wonderful.

The bottom line is if you live in a hell hole your life will suck and it doesn't matter if that hell hole is a tiny village or a huge city.

But any big city should contain tiny islands of heaven and hell within it.
I'm sorry Paul, but the article is just plain wrong. My wife and mother-in-law both easily read at least three or four times as fast as I do. I don't have actual measurements, but I've seen them in one afternoon plow through a book that would have taken me several days to read. That, and living with them has given me more than enough opportunities to be convinced.

My wife's story sounds much like lincolnq's. She taught herself to read by the time she was two, and didn't use the clunky phonetic system that most of us (myself included) are taught in school. The article suggests that these people aren't really reading, but in fact skimming. Well, if you define reading as saying each word out loud in your head, then no, they aren't reading. They're assimilating the content in a much more efficient manner that doesn't result in the loss of comprehension suggested by the word "skimming". I don't know about you, but that meets my definition of the word "reading".
It is in Steve's best interest

Really? Why?
Any particular niche within the construction industry?
Downloading plugins and shit is a real pain... hence why I have a mac partition on my MSI wind. If you dont care about plugins then its really not a huge deal. I use SVN too for personal code repository. Much easier.
I'm not trained as an economist, but I understand microeconomics to be concerned with the behavior of individuals and macroeconomics to be concerned with the behavior of the economy as a whole. The first 4 of the 10 principles are micro, but the later ones are certainly macro.
A Ponzi scheme is an investment system where the payout of current investors comes from the payin of future investors. That's the definition of ponzi.

Does SS meet that definition or not? If so, it's a Ponzi scheme. The fact that it lasted longer than other historical Ponzi schemes does not change it's nature.
I would love to force writers of academic papers to use this style. I believe that the formal academic style removes the voice of the author from a work is dishonest. I'd much rather see "I think X because..." than "X is because...".
I really don't like the treatment of his health. It's just kind of low class that thousands of people are paying such close attention largely because they'd like to maintain the value of their stock or short at the right time.

I certainly agree that Apple without Jobs isn't as good. But this treatment is morbid.

The note at the end about saying more than he wanted is really sad.
Possibly a stupid question, but what does "guernsey" mean in this context? Other than the island I've not encountered the term.
Joyent has very deceptive sales tactics. Stay away
maybe we should do one at proto.in as well. why don't you send me an email? Thanks!
Emphasis on the short term. Look at Apple's top team. The people at the top are all incredible. I'd guess some of them are just as anal and headstrong as Jobs himself is. If Jobs dies, Apple goes on, probably more-or-less the same as it did before. It'll just find a new evangelist, and Apple absolutely has them to offer.

This wasn't about sacrifice for the company. This isn't Jobs working a week without sleeping to get a product launched, or his leaving his own company because he thought it was going downhill. This was rumormongering. Jobs had a history of cancer, so people thought the worst; while that's partly understandable, the people who accused him needed to assume that Jobs was enough of a dick to just not tell people about a life-threatening disease for short-term growth. This continued after Jobs called that one reporter, insulted him, and then promised to tell him about his health condition off the book.

As such, it's pretty shameful that Jobs had to come out and tell everybody about the state of his health. Media types, even tech media types, care more about a dramatic narrative than they do about accurate reporting, and that showed itself here.
The justification is contained at the end of the sentence you're quoting.
Planes usually arrived about 40-45 minutes, sometimes up to an hour before we started boarding.

In 2 of the 3 flights, that might've been the case. But that other one, we were actually late, so I don't think they delayed boarding so we wouldn't have to wait. Actually, we started boarding about 15-20 minutes after we were scheduled to start boarding.

Cleaning seems like the real bottleneck, but assuming they can't get the flight attendants to work any faster, any time saved on boarding shortens the deplane/clean/board cycle.
But Apple isn't just about powerful computers. It's about the Apple way. And for better or for worse, that means focusing on the complete package of the computer.

"Completely uninteresting" in exchange for "expandable and powerful" is not a good one for Apple to make.
'Objectified' movie trailer: New movie from 'Helvetica' guy about gadgets, design
This discussion is going of the deep end, but... are you sure?

Pax Romana had little to do with common muggery.
The Eastern Holy Roman empire, a.k.a Byzantine was still doing OK.
And for that matter the barbaric peoples at it's border, like the ones I am descendant from were as the above poster described, mostly peaceful and friendly.
IMHO FreeBSD is really starting to shine. I've been using it solidly since 5.x where is was stable but slow and I've deployed 7.0 many times and I quite frankly love it to death.

The BSD's don't have the fan boys that linux has but FreeBSD really is an excellent and highly organized unix variant.
The second sentence has a lot that could be cleaned up about it - it is overly wordy, a bit pretentious, and may not describe the right details. But if I saw the first paragraph in a published novel I was reading, I'd be very disappointed. It doesn't immerse you in the story at all.
SS started as a scam and will end as a scam.

SS was set up with rules based on actuarial tables, used by all insurance companies.

The rules for 65 as the start of collection were because the actuarial tables at the time showed that only about 25% of the population would reach that age. And since white women live the longest, black men were paying for a benefit it was unlikely they would ever receive.

SS did not originally have survivor benefits and disability either, those were added by FDR in the years after SS originally passed.

Unlike either term or whole life insurance, SS pays nothing if you die before your time for payments to start. With term, you would get paid, with whole life, there would be other investment benefits involved, like the ability to borrow against a certain amount of the policy while still alive.
Like Vim?
If the pilot finishes 20 minutes sooner as a stable number you can send out a new pilot and keep going or reduce airspeed and save fuel. If nothing else you can have a large cushion so delays don't propagate though the day. AKA your 10 min late at 10 am and your still 10 min late at 10pm. I suspect most large airplanes fly fairly complex routes so you can consider 30 min a day as 1 / 50th of a virtual airplane if you change which route each plane takes.
Now there's an opportunity for a startup search engine.
A guaranteed rise in stock price!
He and I share salient properties,
as you and he share salient properties,
as you and me share salient properties,
and we form a cohesive unit.
See how they run like pigs from a gun, see how they fly.
I cry.

E-Prime lacks metaphors, and robs fuzzy language of all its indeterminate power.
I'm not so sure. Last time he was ousted from the company it dodn't go well at all...
Nobel Lecture by Mother Teresa
OK, so he has now upped the ante. Either he's being completely truthful -- and AAPL stockholders have less to worry about -- or he's lying outright. If he's lying, people will go to jail. If Steve dies, the SEC will find others complicit in this lie and they'll do serious time.
The most obvious and easy thing I can think of is Penicillin.
If you can somehow identify which moldy bread is it, that with the basic knowledge of human health any modern person should have, will make a great healer.

This is a time when people were still sealing wounds with boiling oil.

So yes, even if you have no formal first aid training you can be a great healer.
would have come in handy at the GT vs LSU chick-fil-a bowl where disheartened Georgia Tech fans were bored and made paper airplanes out of BB&T fliers on every seat.

"The second half so lacked in drama that fans began throwing dozens of paper airplanes from the second and third decks, cheering when a plane reached the field." - AJC.com
He can die tomorrow of any one of many causes, one of which could be cancer. But unless every stockholder is also in the life insurance business they have no way to properly gauge the risk of Jobs dying on any given day.
Markets with greater freedom don't have as many shitstorms as markets with less freedom. Example: Chile, the most capitalist country in Latin America, and the one with the most economic freedom, is also close to being the richest per capita (...I have my doubts about Argentinian GDP reporting) along with the similarly free Costa Rica. Sure, Chile has a lot of mineral wealth, but so do a lot of other Latin American countries.
Public works spending as stimulus: How come we’re not already rich?

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2008/12/09/public-works-s...
I think the dubious assumptions in the two versions of the Mona Lisa one are equivalent; what's implied by "being overrated" is the same as what's implied by "really deserves".

If you think "false impression" is bad because "the impression is false" has a copula in it, then congratulations: you just abolished adjectives. "... the red bicycle ..." -> "the bicycle is red". Whatever the problem is here, it isn't is-ness.

I completely agree that rewriting what you say in a restricted subset of English (or whatever natural language) has value for seeing what assumptions are slipping in unobserved. It's totally not clear to me that "is"-less English is any better for this purpose than, say, adverb-less English or e-less English; I suspect that most of the gain comes from forcing yourself to write with a strong constraint, which makes you think more. It's not so very different from (one reason) why poetic and musical forms (sonnets, sonata form, haiku, fugue, ...) work well.

I wouldn't be surprised if forbidding "is" were a bit better than those, for various reasons. But I suspect that the bulk of the winnage comes from the mere fact of being constrained.
There is a case to be made for a resilient RAM-only distributed databases, but using memcached is not it.

Agreed. With the risk of sounding offensive, these kinds of ideas seems about as informed and rational as some of the arguments I hear from MySQL-advicates about why their database is the best RDBMS on the planet.
Not goal related directly; I've found this lecture by the late professor Randy Pausch regarding time management to be very interesting. I'm not sure I agree with his hands-free phone + bike use tip, but I think his talk has a lot of good points.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTugjssqOT0
It's basically hand-made custom EC2, right? Is there an open source project somewhere to package up the tools to do this on one's own servers?

There's two that I know of that support the EC2 wire protocol: Nimbus and Eucalyptus.

I am the primary developer of Nimbus. We had an EC2-like system released before EC2 existed, only later adapting to their protocol because our users wanted to use the EC2 client tools.
People certainly read at different speeds. I can read a book in an afternoon if the ideas aren't hard. The myth is that it's a skill that can be taught, multiplying everyone's reading rate till you get numbers up in the thousands of words per minute.
Crowdsourcing an Ethical Dilemma
I'll have to try it out, thanks. A quick search doesn't turn up any bonnie tests or similar, so I'll do them and put them online.

(edit) this suggests that EBS is slower than the virtual disk for open/seek/write/flush:
http://bizo-dev.blogspot.com/2008/11/disk-write-performance-...
Protein folding is a great problem to work on.
We know it happens in linear time in every cell in our bodies.
And if you can find a way to do it in linear time in silicon, well there's your singularity right there.
Mark Bittman's _Food Matters_
It happens both ways for me. The city certainly gets me going, but it also wears me out. I have a shorter temper, and it takes a lot more discipline to maintain a productive routine.
"EC2 is the strange one to me. I'd only ever known "DYI EC2", so to speak."

Those EC2-like systems do have their place. There is a lot more to do and think about when you are allowing others to run VMs on your infrastructure. That is often not the case and not your situation either, it sounds like.
Holy crap. I did. Wow. Shows how well my brain works after being up for 30 hours.

Can I use my get out of jail free card now?
Syntax is usually not much of a worry to me, compared to other problems (how will I lock this object for access from other threads? what should be the interface for such and such callback?) It doesn't take long after starting to program in a language for syntax to become second nature, and often it can express something more concisely, or even elegantly than plain english (point-free haskell is an art... when it's not overdone, anyway).

Being able to find commands in the API is nice, but that's basically intellisense or hyperspec made automatic.
A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to investors out of the money paid by subsequent investors rather than from profit.

SS does not hide the fact that it pays money from dead investors to the living so it's not fraudulent. It does use some money from new investors to payout money but so does life insurance.

PS: While some people get far more out of SS than they pay in many people got zero benefits. With a SS their will would still "own" their money but with SS it diapers into the void. I don't mind calling SS a period scheme, but a lot of 22 year old's are going to die before their 60's so the math can work out just fine.
Thanks for submitting, Anon84! And thanks to everyone who liked the article! :)
Zed Shaw - The ACL is Dead - CUSEC 2008
Recorded almost a year ago (before the bank busts, and shortly after Zed’s first famous rant), this presentation was given to about 400 Canadian undergraduate software engineers and computer scientists. Zed talks about management and his ACL-killer at a bank job accompanied by Factor-powered slideware. Also: steaks, strippers, and statistics.

N.B. This video might damage your vision of Zed swearing all the time and may make it seem like the last year of ranting was a terrible joke gone wrong. Oops.

P.S. - Check out this year’s lineup (Ingalls, Stallman, Bryant, Culver, Hwang, and Bowkett are just the keynotes). This is one of Canada's best kept secrets, and tickets are super cheap.
I don't know about him, but I'd go to DMOZ and open all the links in the relevant category.
I used to do a lot of AppleScript programming. When I initially learned about the "natural" syntax I though "this is gonna be so easy!" But ultimately it works against you.

Computers are very precise beasts, and they need to know exactly what you want them to do. The looser the "syntax" gets, the more guesses the compiler has to make to come up with a set of precise instructions.

What I initially thought would be easy and liberating turned out to be a total PITA. AppleScript programming is horrible. Ultimately there is an underlying syntax, but it's harder to remember because it's less consistent (ie "natural"). I had to spend way too much time trying to understand what goofy "natural" grammar I had to use to get it to do what I wanted.

Even if you assume an "ideal AI," I still don't think that a natural language syntax is a good idea, since language itself has a lack of specificity that requires even an "ideal AI" to make guesses that could be logically wrong.

I prefer well-designed languages or DSLs when I program to reduce cognitive load and ensure I know exactly what's going on.
One fun place to look is Yahoo directory. http://dir.yahoo.com/

It's full of abandoned "web 1.0" sites that may still get a sizable amount of traffic, but the owners don't care about any more.

Probably worth just spending a while and sending emails to several site owners and seeing if any bite.
I wouldn't say that they've abandoned monetary policy, it is that their primary tool in the past has been manipulating interest rates. Now that interest rates are effectively zero, they've painted themselves into a corner. Their only other significant tool, loaning money to "member banks" isn't useful because the funds needed to keep the banking industry afloat need to be largely astonishing numbers. I contend that the $700B bailout is just the beginning, and the final butcher's bill will end up being closer to $5T.
This is way way off topic.
Social Security isn't an investment system; it's a social insurance program. A Ponzi Scheme is an investment scam; victim investors are, for a short time, paid an unnaturally high rate of return based on the recruitment of an ever-broadening base of new victims.
One point that has not appeared in your dialog, in favor of identifying SS as a Ponzi scheme, is that the excess accumulation of Social Security taxes has been spent on other things and replaced with IOUs by Congress (this is how the Clinton administration produced a so-called budget 'surplus').
Ah, ok, seems to mean "Wins approval" http://www.willyourememberme.com/australia/austslang.html
> "... writing with a strong constraint, which makes you think more."

I agree. E-Prime was inspired by General Semantics ( see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Semantics , the "Overview" section on that page seems sufficient), though, and had a much more specific motive than just improving writing. While E-Prime can focus too much on just "is", I think it seems like an approachable introduction to the ideas.

I also thought they might be of interest here, because there's a neat parallel between them and e.g. thinking about is-a/has-a in OO design, the ways having quote empowers Lisp, etc.