skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's quite possible to keep discourse civilized, and at the same time honest.

> Word like "shit", "fucking", "morons" and "crap"

... are indicative of a limited vocabulary and lack of imagination. Yeah, once in a while they're useful for effect, but if you use them all the time, they lose their power to shock, and you just sound crude and uneducated.
Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to blogging.
This is a crime against god and man and I love every second of it.
The first Mac I actually owned was an SE. Since then I've owned five more Macs. I bought top-of-the-line Macs when people were telling me that Apple was about to go out of business. I developed a lot of software for the Mac.

I'm all about developing for .NET now; Apple is toxic to developers.
You could try:

http://www.networkforgood.org/Default.aspx

There's a "Crisis Relief" link off the home page.
Progressive learning for apps in general is definitely an improvement. That being said, I don't agree that roping off functionaltiy is the best way for advanced text editors to lower the learning curve. Contextual hints are a better way to introduce shortcuts for those sort of apps.

I also disagree that HN's downvoting feature is an example of progressive learning. It's more about controlling trolls and setting expectations in the community. You have to earn your keep before you can negatively affect change. It's a feature of the meritocracy, not of the usability.
PyCuda: lets you access Nvidia's CUDA parallel computation API from Python
Because they were adding that feature themselves in the next OS update.
Yeah, this book is great even if you don't have a formal math background. As somebody who didn't even finish high school I'm finding this book very easy to learn from because it is so well written.
I saw Zed Shaw in QCon 2007 before I had learned that he was an internet rockstar. Frankly speaking, he seemed like one of the least douchebaggy speakers of the whole conference.

Sadly, he wasn't invited (or didn't wanna come) to QCon 2008. Our loss.
Happy Christmas YC - from our IT team
Well, that's nice for him, but not so nice for us.
I'm from the same part of India that this girl is. This kind of crap is very common there. The kids who do this are not necessarily intelligent, they usually just crammed for years. Nor do they have a say in the matter. Everything is orchestrated by the parents. It's like a dog show -- the parents compete using their kids. Needless to say, the kid's childhood and normal development are completely derailed (I've seen it in person). The parents aren't evil; it's just a facet of the hyper-competitive society. The best way to describe it is that it's India's version of the contest in Little Miss Sunshine.

The negative comments here don't come close to capturing how messed up this is.
I can't even read this post, he's trying too hard to sound like Maddox.
One example of edutainment entrepreneurship from an earlier era is the Blaster series of products by Davidson Associates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_Blaster

The founders of that company cashed out at just the right moment and now fund a foundation promoting better education for gifted children.

http://www.davidsongifted.org/

Now that software has developed technologically a lot since that era, there are presumably new opportunities that would be similarly lucrative for a start-up.
Except House is actually intelligent.
He did something creative, she just passed a helpdesk test.
I always wondered why MS chose a title that abbreviates to MCP, which means Male Chauvinist Pig in the non-tech world. I once created an infamous 'Production Metrics Spreadsheet' which the female members of my team were justifiably referring to as PMS. Operation Iraqi Liberation comes to mind.
A couple of decades ago, a couple of us wrote a word processor. We thought a lot about the issues of novices and usability and came to the conclusion that users are novices for only a short time and spend most of their time as intermediates. True power users are few. So basic operations should be intuitive even if not strictly consistent. Everything else should be easily discoverable. Really esoteric things could be left to the manual, but still discoverable.

A novice friendly interface should not impede an experienced user, and there should not be experience based modes. You don't see much of these days. MS Word is an example of a crappy interface. Some non-esoteric functions are hidden away in non-discoverable corners and it does magical things as a default. Eclipse is another program with a crappy interface, because of different modes and views. I have finally accommodated my self because it eases the intense pain of Java programming, but on the whole I would rather use UltraEdit.

Of course none of this applies to emacs users. They are are a secret society unto, themselves, kind of like the Masons.
Like what? An SBD option?
internet ... rockstar .... bwahahahahahahhaah ....
In the beginning was the punch card.
I wish 3D printing tech was developing faster. I bet there's still room for someone to step in, improve them, and make billions out of it.
Actually, this gave me an idea for another app. In Japan, in the female restrooms (i'm told) they have these machines that emit sounds as cover for doing one's business. I think they are called "Princess Flush" or something. I could definitely see (hear?) a market for this as an iPhone app....
well said. from TFA:

> All I could think to myself was: If we’re so smart, why are other people living so much better than us?

he seems to have forgotten about hundreds of millions of Chinese living in poverty. how disgusting.
Or you could have titled it "Why using X makes me a worse software engineer" seeing as that's your conclusion.
I've seen this kind of thing a lot - it's not limited to India - and completely agree with you that it's almost always the parent(s) pushing the kid, and very sad. Every now and then you see some 11-year-old or 13-year-old finishing an undergraduate degree, paraded in front of foolish journalists who dutifully put out the next "genius" story. Same thing with most musical prodigies - the 9-year old performing with the local philharmonic or what have you.

Kids don't care about super-achievement of credentials. Mostly they just want to know their parents love them and to be like other kids. It's parents who perversely put their children through this, to fill their own ego needs. Your dog show analogy is unfortunately apt.
If he does decide to pursue this project, probably the most important thing that will affect whether it gets completed is how useful it is to him and how much fun he has while doing it. I'd definitely love to see a more generic system that's not tied to Apache, but I'm fine with him starting off with an Apache specific setup if that's what gets him motivated and interested.
They should really start pushing surface units in different sizes. As amazing as they are (they have one at my uni that i've had a chance to check out), they are pretty big. Right now the size that they are coming in are good for people sitting around the unit touching it and checking it out, but I would like to see what other form factors surface technology can be in.

They also may want to work on bringing the price on these things down too.
Because computers should be something that require four grown men to move between rooms.
Not true - otherwise self signed certificates would be pointless. #1 and #2 are independent.

And you can snoop WiFi, but you can't do MITM. (Not easily anyway, you'd need a radio jammer and other gear.)
Excellent,

I've been intending to play with CUDA compuation for a while, this seems like a great way to begin. It's especially nice that the documentation seems helpful. I'd be curious to hear peoples experiences with pycuda.
Actually, kids can be hyper-focused on credentials. That's why they're so susceptible. The very same behavioral triggers can create obsessions in videogames, especially RPG's. The nice thing about 'real-world' credentials is that they have a path leading out of that mess, whereas videogames often don't.
He's pretty forthcoming on how unsuccessful they have been in the search space. I don't think he is too worried though, he has his people working day and night trying to compete with google and during that hour interview he probably made $750,000.
The key point is not how many poor people China has and hence we should reboot; but that the rest of the world is sprinting towards new opportunities in spite of their handicaps. 60 years ago (after WW2), there was no real competition to America - we built cars, planes, trains, and the world ate it all up. About 40 years ago, the Japanese started giving us a run for the money in some sectors. Today the competitors are increasing in quantity if not in quality - there is Japan, Europe, China, etc. Friedman uses generic examples such as bullet trains and broadband access. But these are valid nonetheless. The larger point remains - we need a massive reboot.
While I agree with you that the corporate world is full of doublespeak, the idea that politeness is inherently hypocritical and that swear words are necessary for straight talking is, well, stupid.
I agree with you that the downvoting is a meritocracy, but that's my point. A user has to earn the right to use that particular function. The difference in learning how a piece of functionality is used and why or in when it should be used is two sides of the same coin.
Bias and Science, Get off of your religious soapbox
I definitely don't trust a site that veils their affiliate link. (Load their SEO optimized 'book links' in lynx then control-c really quickly. You'll see a link that looks like ttp://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fdp%2F0814473431%2F&tag=personalmba-20&l )

This site was designed solely to garner commission on book sales. At least when someone like Jeff Atwood tries to weasel his way into affiliate sales, he pretends to have read the book and gives a critique.
Dell Prepping MacBookAir Competitor, dubbed "Adamo"
What value is obtained from reading a business book that you cannot learn yourself? Not cocky, just curious.
Looks like a huge iPhone.
JavaScript Resources
You get to learn from other people's mistakes without having to make them yourself.
It's hard not to come with a very-long-title in an organization as big as Microsoft (last time I heard they have over 60k employees).

I don't see the title as a way to motivate him. It's just to show where his position in the ladder. If you compare it with Google where things are messy for managers because they have way too many underlinks... then those long titles/ladders/levels start to make a bit of sense.

Tagging doesn't seem to apply to corporate hierarchy (^_^).
Detailed How-To From Banned Digger
I'm unconvinced. Sure, children can internalize anything very quickly - the question is why this rather than that? I'm sure that little girl was very focused on achieving her Microsoft certification. But I'll bet you the task itself was originally handed to her by a parent, and that her motivation had everything to do with pleasing that parent.

As for "a path leading out of that mess", the only path I know is growing as a person. What's sad about these manufactured prodigies is that they end up having to do a lot of that the hard way, if they do it at all.
Greg and I talked about this last week, and it seems quite useful. I've been playing around with Cuda computations for dust temperatures and calling it from python would be useful. The biggest hurdle isn't the interface, though, it's rewriting your code to run on the GPU, so pycuda isn't such a big change since you still have to write the GPU code in C.
Well, given that Zed is a hacker, it's more qualified than some other things we see here...
hmm. interesting. i sort of disagree. experience is the best learning tool.
Grockit has been championing this idea of massively multiplayer online learning. I think it's pretty interesting: the idea is that you're encouraged to help teach your peers. But I think the implementation is totally off: right now it's just about studying for the GMAT. What a waste.

By contrast, the communities of Wikipedia, Flickr, TopCoder, FOSS, DeviantArt and a fair number of forums, all encourage participation in a genuine sense, and the communities produce quite a lot of encouragement just by themselves. People get very, very good there.
Maybe a common FFI would be a good first step.
Woz read a book about a ham radio operator and was so inspired he built his own radio and took the ham operator test. It seemed that he got a lot out of it.

My cofounder and his wife once took the Diplomatic Service Exam. She had wanted to be a diplomat, he joined for support. They got through the final rounds, and it was far from boring! During their time there, they witnessed some incredible undiplomatic behavior from an actual diplomat in the foreign service, freaking out in the cafeteria line. They were quizzed ineptly on the 'canon' of American literature. Finally, (if I recall correctly) they passed the test. It was, however, useless, because all of the jobs went to Reagan's cronies, instead.
How to Reach the Top of the iPhone App Store
This is just their reading list. You should checkout the forum and blog. And yes, those are affiliate links:

$ curl -I http://personalmba.com/books/cut-to-the-chase/
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2008 19:26:49 GMT
Server: LiteSpeed
Connection: Keep-Alive
Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100
Location: http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F %2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fdp%2F0385516207%2F&tag=personalmba-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325
$

Considering how easy it is to get around the affiliate link (just search for the ISBN in a separate amazon/google window) OK, he should probably have put a little disclaimer somewhere about the affiliate program, but other than that, I don't really understand the "he's using affiliate links" drama. If you were to buy a book he suggested, why not let him be rewarded for suggesting it? You lose nothing, and he gets his work rewarded. If you disagree with this, just buy the book without following his link.
I got intrigued how come I don't know about pooswa in french... Then looking at urban dictionary seems like they got it from the sentence 'voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir', which got transcribed to 'voule vu coche avec moi POOSWA!', so that's why the guy thought it meant pussy (never mind that the ce soir means this evening...)

Well, that's why one shouldn't always rely on user generated content :-)
Mirror's Edge (the only game in recent memory that looked interesting to me) seems to brag that it doesn't have you "unlock" features as you go along -- your character can always do everything, but you seem to gain skills simply because you come across geometry that allows it. They liken this to Prince of Persia, which I have not played but apparently was similar.

Many other classic games (and most of my favorites) follow the same pattern. I do not think Tetris or Pac-Man would be better if you "unlocked" features on higher levels.

I do wish my text editor was better, but I want to make programming more like other successful cooperative creative activities. Maybe a Brooks surgical team, or an orchestra, would be more appropriate inspiration.

Part of me is sad that our craft seems to be losing its "take 10 years to really learn your tools". Just because "Rock Band" is a hit doesn't mean the Seattle Symphony is struggling to find musicians.
It's a choice... I prefer to read a book to learn, say, how to read dangerous chemicals warning labels, than to try every single one of them to see which ones are poisonous... Some experiences you don't want to have, which doesn't mean you cant learn from them, though.
Thats a great attitude! Everything sucks your first 6 months and it's not necessarily your idea. Just keep launching projects, it's the best way to learn.
A company can't give off that aura when their products sell 100s of millions. Apple maintained it for longer than anyone else ever did though.
Wasn't the Indy $15,000? Even accounting for Moore's Law it would have been hard for SGI to go mainstream.
The Five Stages of Collapse
I think you underestimate the agency that a nine year old can have, and the influence of the extended family, friends, and role models. It's probable that the specific task was handed to her, yes. And it's often true that parents push their children too far. But I think it's also possible she decided to do it on her own after reading or hearing some inspirational story.

I am projecting my own experience as a child onto her, but when I was her age I heard about Microsoft credentials. I considered trying for them, but my mother's friend told me they were a distraction, and gave me a copy of Turbo C++ instead. I can't remember ever thinking about pleasing my parents. It never entered my conscious thought. I just knew I wanted to learn to program computers, and I couldn't, in that time, be interested in computers as a kid and envision Microsoft's credentials with the disdain that I do now. I suspect it's the same now, in India.

It's true that the only way out of credentialism is growing oneself as a person, and finding a way to develop a self-referent identity. The advantage is that one grows while striving, and one can often find oneself in much better place, with better social support, and deeper values. It's a lot more difficult to see this in the construct of an RPG, or in most public high-schools.
Well, obviously. But with business specifically, I'm not sure if that applies. Say you pick up a book about how to write a business plan, set up a sales team, put together an effective marketing team, etc. It seems those are more of an art form than a science, and those abilities strengthen with experience. And if a mistake is that costly, then maybe you shouldn't be running a business to begin with?

I'm still not convinced. However, I am definitely in favor of reading.
I don't know how it compares with its need for us, but we certainly all need it, so I give to FFRF. http://www.ffrf.org/
But don't people do things that they enjoy with their free time, even if they work shit jobs?

I mean, people seem to like their lives. They aren't committing suicide.

But if you have a choice between living 100 years or living 200 years, and you pick the first option, how is that not exactly like committing suicide.
Contemporary fully-loaded Macs were comparable.
Right - that's how open source works. Scratch your own itch, and work on things you like. If someone wants to see something not based on Apache, well, you have the source code, a compiler, and an editor.

Also, Apache is a perfectly fine web server. These event-based things have been around for a while. I recall moving the images and some other static assets on linuxcare.com to the Boa web server to save memory. However, Apache manages to have its own advantages, and stay relevant through the hard work of people like Paul Querna, even if, no, it's probably not the absolute fastest/smallest thing out there. Look at Rails - after going through a succession of various mixes of lighttpd, nginx, mongrel, etc.. etc... it's now coming back around to Apache and Passenger, and rightly so, Passenger is a nicer, simpler, more robust way of doing things. Furthermore, in terms of the other post's "him" and "us", there are a lot more of "him" (Apache users) than "us" (users of whatever other system).
Sony Ericsson Z558i Black Unlocked
Sony Ericsson Z558 is up to dated model of Sony Ericsson with its grandeur presentation with its features and its stylish look. Phone including 1.3 MP of camera allows you to take your favorable moments with camera resolution.
stop blaming greed. greed is universal. you think the baby boomers invented greed?
the problem was INCENTIVES. The federal reserve pumped up the money supply starting in 1995, then when the bubble popped in 2000 they pumped up the housing market in order to disguise the true severity of the crash. In an environment of practically free money you'd be an idiot NOT to grab your piece.
The article starts off with the premise that good edutainment software is needed to augment the abilities of intellectually challenged teachers. It then wanders off into promoting the cellphone as a delivery mechanism for third world countries. As a whole, I don't think the article says anything. Inexpensive laptops are a far better delivery mechanism, and if we look at our own educational problems, nearly everyone has a computer available.

However, the premise that there is an opportunity to provide supplemental educational materials is valid. If you have looked at your kids textbooks, they are mostly complete junk, almost comic books in content. What I see as needed are textbook supplements/replacements. For example, instead of a one page description of the Roman Forum with a couple of pictures, how about a 15 to 30 minute interactive video game that would allow the kid to explore the forum and its time, environs, and culture. Accompany it with a Wikipedia-like text that would allow deeper exploration of the topics.

I see entrepreneurial opportunities, but also a place for a collaborative effort like Wikipedia. If the initial efforts have to be monetized, a subscription plan for parents would be a good place to start.
to be fair Nixon's hand was kinda forced. the vietnam war combined with the OPEC problems practically bankrupted us.
NORAD Tracks Santa | TechJaws
an innovation designed to get around an artificial restriction is an artificial innovation that disappears once the restriction disappears.

a real innovation is something that universally increases standards of living.
There's nothing wrong with using affiliate links. Hidden affiliate links have nothing to do with you or to fool you, it's to stop the search engine from punishing them which again, there is nothing wrong with.
I tended to use fairly flat data structures in my own code, so the extra hassle with generics didn't often come up. I did, however, use delegates (closures!) all over the place. They're verbose, but I mapped the delegate definitions to a resharper macro and it only took two keystrokes. That helped while writing code. It still was a pain to read, though, and ultimately the macro language wasn't good enough to do what I wanted.

The thing I like about Fortress is that it's a grown and growable language, with almost all constructs first class and exposed. Just like Lisp. But it's coming from the complete opposite direction in terms of syntax. Lisp barely has any syntax. Fortress gives you the most powerful production parser in a programming language, plus extremely adaptable syntax (where spaces can be operators!) plus a wicked way to render code, plus the ability to make your programs platform portable, adaptable, and parallelizable. It can be looked at as a programming language, true. But it can also be fruitfully imagined as a powerful framework for building one's own programming language. This is what I like to do with it. :-)
> Of course none of this applies to emacs users. They are are a secret society unto, themselves, kind of like the Masons.

Dude. Using Emacs really isn't that hard, and mystifying it doesn't do anybody any favors. (I can understand if it's not your cup of tea, though.) It just does a bad job of "creating the illusion of simplicity" (as Grady Booch once put it).
Me too, until I saw the "Copyright (c) 1985" at the start.
I forget, what was your mongrel competitor named? ;)
There are plenty of things you can learn yourself, where books give you a head start, or give you some insights that might have taken you a while, and a lot of pain, to figure out yourself.

That said, many business books tend to suffer from a problem of having a fairly simple concept at heart, and needing to pad that out to make it into something book length. Thus, my site Squeezed Books, which summarizes them. I'd also like to foster discussion of some of the books in question, as I think there is something to be gained from the discussion and dissection of the ideas presented.