skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, I always wondered who was out there doing work like this. I have been aware of designing sites for blind people and have worked on some so that they are accessible, but have never actually checked their usability with an actual screenreader.

It is interesting to learn that his screenreader can read it to him at three times the speed. I never considered that this would be an option, but had thought that listening to such great lengths of jagged simulated speech must be tedious. This has intrigued me to test one out.

Here he is with that braille rubix: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSSLj3KvkbI
I didn't know that Crays could split timber!
My 2009 resolution is to sell better.
Here's a link I use occasionally:

http://www.zapreader.com/reader/index.php

Some older discussion on this is here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=156464
Well, what "is" considered a hacker will vary from person to person, and getting caught up in arguments about identity / group politics detracts from doing/learning cool stuff.
Python411 - podcast about Python
I wonder how many of these Windows-only software companies use Python ;)
True, but they are still behind.
Good point, but what I meant was picking what you want to focus on, apologies if the literal meaning confused you.
The government promotes home ownership because it's believed to decrease crime at a community level; I don't think they care about the amount of stuff that people buy. In fact, I'd wager that home ownership tends to increase a person's tendency to buy crap.
I really like FriendFeed for the fact that it doesn't try to suck people in. It is efficient. Unlike Facebook (which seems like it's trying to re-invent everything on the Internet inside it's little bubble o'beacon-tracking), FriendFeed unobtrusively allows each one of its services to showcase a core competency: e.g. flickr for photos, twitter for nonsensical tidbits, youtube for video, rss for blogs, SU for those random and great finds, etc.

By not nudging users into any one specific direction, it effectively aggrandizes collective genius.

Now, it just needs an option for HN posts. . .
# Here's a less crude rewrite

# It reflects conditional probability better

def boy_girl_problem():
from random import choice

families = {}
for i in range(1000):
families[i] = []
families[i].append(choice(['BOY', 'GIRL']))
families[i].append(choice(['BOY', 'GIRL']))

had_both_sex = filter(lambda f: set(f) == set(['BOY', 'GIRL']), families.values())
had_one_girl = filter(lambda f: 'GIRL' in f, families.values())

return len(had_both_sex) / float(len(had_one_girl))
After a bit of thought, most calls for regulation are unfounded.

I would start by emphasizing that things that can kill lots of people should be regulated. Cars and planes and buildings fall in that category. But how?

An airline should be forced to get insurance for the risk of bad pilots. That might be enough to align incentives and protect people from risk. It is a slightly irrelevant issue as laws will be passed within our lifetimes that mandate a human must _not_ fly a commercial airplane. Only robots.

Driving is similar, but much easier, so more people can do it. It's harder from a robotics front, but will also be solved soon. I've worked on robot cars.

Heart surgery is where it gets interesting. By mandating a certain level of quality, you essentially place a price floor above the market price on medical care. That means a lot of people don't get it. Would you rather have a shoddy operation or none at all? As desperate times often demonstrate (e.g. delivering a baby outside a hospital by necessity), people want shoddy care over none at all.

So licensing doctors is bad. Private accreditation is enough. I will trust a doctor that has received a credential or accreditation from an institution I trust. I certainly trust Harvard more than I trust the AMA or HHS.

You should read Capitalism and Freedom by the way. Milton Friedman is an excellent author. He makes this issue crystal clear.
English-Prime - English without "is"
heh. Funny thing is that I post or tweet this about once a week. It's my pet project to tell more people about this.
It doesn't, meeting someone anonymous for a few minutes isn't a real date. Once you've been on a real first date, you've already exchanged info if you plan on a second; no one in their right mind would pay someone after that point.
Velociroflcoptersaurus - Can Haz Velociroflcoptersaurus?
If you ask support, they'll tell you they've got some backup options in the works supposedly.
I really like his writing. He's asking questions that no one else is asking and doesn't pretend to have all (or most) answers, because they're the types of questions that take you to the edge of what your consciousness is capable of thinking.

Sometimes I amuse myself by thinking about how Overcoming Bias reads to your average religious American. It must seem like total nonsense. It's probably impossible to understand without having had a crisis of faith of some sort, at the very least.
He might like David Macaulay's _The Way Things Work_ ( http://www.amazon.com/New-Way-Things-Work/dp/0395938473/ ).

Also, libraries in general, including university libraries. Some books on homeschooling (such as Grace Llewellyn's _Teenage Liberation Handbook_) are full of pointers for self-study.
Airline recap: entirely focused on operations, always on the brink of collapse. Operations consist largely of optimizations problems, so lots of attention is paid to these problems (peanuts vs. pretzels). For whatever reason customers are not insulated from the volatility (pretzels, bag fees, route duration, availability, etc., in addition to price fluctuation).

Typically you see finely-tuned optimization in old and evolved markets, e.g., cola, where it makes sense, and where customers are insulated from changes in the product or service. Here though it reeks of over-optimization and misapplied attention. Nobody makes a fuss about boarding the bus. When the price of corn goes up I don't have to use a can-opener on my soda.

What's wrong with airplanes? Why don't they work like buses? Let's try to figure this out. Investors have long recognized airlines as a valuable service but a terrible business.

1.) We really like to fly but our technology is behind the curve?

2.) Irrationality of consumers has created government controls which muck too much with an already fragile system? (security lines, shoe removal, bomb sniffing, personal searches, over-training of pilots, too-expensive pilots, burdensome safety regulations, burdensome inspections, all of these perpetuated by expectation)

3.) The average passenger does not fly enough, and so he is inefficient?

4.) Dependent on fixed-location airports? And their regulation?

5.) There's no clear cause and effect, it's simply a manifestation of the system?

6.) ?

7.) Demand for flight is very volatile but the capital which supports it is very expensive and illiquid?

(one red-herring: fuel efficiency, planes appear to be more fuel efficient than driving alone)

(another red-herring: this google hit http://www.brookings.edu/testimony/2005/0928business_morriso... states the obvious but does little to explain what makes the airline industry any different from anybody else dependent on large capital investments. sure they have to buy planes. and cola bottlers have to build plants.)
Digg this, HuffPo: What's $200 million divided by 2009 reality?
As people slowly learn that having too much stuff can be more hassle than it's worth, I'm seeing a quiet trend towards simplified consumption. It is my expectation that rapidly developing regions like China will go through a period of outrageous consumption, but it is my hope that they will learn quickly from the American trailblazers in that area and settle into prefering quality and simplicity over conspicuous quantity.
Macworld rumors
Palm is dead
"Interface would be as simple as 'turn to channel me'"

Sounds like The Truman Show. That, and every scare article about Millenials being the most spoiled, self-aggrandizing generation ever.

Doubly creepy because that's basically reality now - a lot of us now broadcast are thoughts, opinions, daily activities, and so on to the whole web. It just seems a lot more normal when I say "Oh, I added the FriendFeed FaceBook app" then when you say "Turn to channel me."
Summary: assuming that your lookup patterns can be answered with a hash table, we can use scale-out hash table (memcached) in lieu of a database index.

I am pessimistic. For one thing author did no address how he plans to keep index fresh in the face of evictions or memcached nodes crashes. It gets really bad - if you did not find the data, is it absent or has it been evicted? Can you create a new user named "FOO" right now? You won't know until you scan the whole data set, which is a "size of data" operation.

There is a case to be made for a resilient RAM-only distributed databases, but using memcached is not it.
"I think it may make me act awkwardly if I try to consciously apply some techniques."

There is some interesting academic literature on the correlation between perceived intelligence and IQ. I read one paper where they identified the factors behind perceived intelligence, and then tried to get people to fake them to increase their perceived intelligence. IIRC the only factor they were able to successfully fake was eye contact, and the rest either had no effect or else made the people look less intelligent.

As for reading, my biggest problem is that every time I get excited by something I stand up and start pacing back and forth across the kitchen thinking about it. I don't think speed reading will help much with that.
Molecular Assembly Lines
Highly recommend Jane Jacobs' "The Death & Life of Great American Cities"

As someone who lives in the city but lived in the 'burbs prior, I think the article was fair. There is no perfect place to live - on my way to the train station I intentionally cross over a block to walk through a grassy courtyard. The thing I enjoy most about the city is walking around - when I lived in the suburbs I had to get in a car to go anywhere because you need a car to live in the suburbs. As a side note, one of the reasons public transportation does not work in the suburbs is you can't cut through people's yards to get to a stop which means a bus stop that is 0.6 miles straight line from your location might be 1 mile since there are houses (whereas in the city you have regular block patterns and established pedestrian traffic)

I don't go out as much as my friends but I think drinking more, more often might be more accepted here more because you don't have to worry about DUI.

I think it is ok to live in the suburbs; your priorities in life change. For example, the city school system is scary (both educationally and safety wise). Where you live is a big influence on you.
You are reading "me" wrong. I meant "me" really as in "we", like this is cool stuff you will enjoy based on our shared tastes. Not, a "look at me" vanity fair type of play.
Also, the designer of the C64's SID chip, Bob Yannes, co-founded Ensoniq, which is a very cool synth/sampler company.
More interesting, I think, is the story of how they got themselves out of there after their boat was crushed in the pack ice. Utterly incredible. Navigators still regard their voyage and successful navigation to South Georgia island as practically supernatural. They traveled for 800 miles in the most hazardous south seas with scarcely any light in terrible weather. They were only able to make three readings. But they got right there.

"Most unfavourable conditions for observations. Misty with boat jumping like a flea and no limb for early am sight. Noon lat probably correct within a 10m limit."

-- Navigator's log.
I just ditched slicehost in favor of http://www.vpsfarm.com

$80 per month, 10mb/s unmetered, 2048mb RAM, 80GB disk.

Slicehost gives 400GB, 1024mb, 40GB for $70, which isn't too bad but 400GB is a garbage amount of bandwidth, and they charge $0.30/GB for overage.

vpsfarm doesn't seem to have any way to set up a backend network, so you are stuck on the one machine from what I can tell. I haven't asked about it, but for me this is fine anyway.

I've used slicehost, gandi.net, and vpsfarm's xen, and webfaction's shared hosting. I have to say, slicehost is very very nice, but the amount of bandwidth they offer is garbage. gandi.net is ok, but they seem to use raid 6, and my '2 unit' vm had terrible disk IO (otherwise it seemed ok, they charge $16 per unit, you can dynamically change it from 1 to 16, for example to use more resources during peak times. you get 5mb/s unmetered per unit, which is pretty cool, but the servers are in France, so add 100ms of latency to something in the US).

vpsfarm however gives very good cpu and disk performance, unmetered bandwidth, and it is a fraction of the cost of AWS if you want to run a single dedicated box. It is super bare bones, basically nothing is provided but a root login. So far I am really liking it.
"In a study published last month, Berman outfitted undergraduates at the University of Michigan with GPS receivers. Some of the students took a stroll in an arboretum, while others walked around the busy streets of downtown Ann Arbor.

The subjects were then run through a battery of psychological tests. People who had walked through the city were in a worse mood and scored significantly lower on a test of attention and working memory, which involved repeating a series of numbers backwards. In fact, just glancing at a photograph of urban scenes led to measurable impairments, at least when compared with pictures of nature."

I'm amazed by how the effects arise so quickly, but it makes intuitive sense to me too based on my experiences.

Personally I like to go back and forth, spending extended periods of time in quiet towns where I can focus, and then traveling somewhere exciting to connect with people and be inspired by what's going on in the world around me.
Does anyone remember Peter Tattam's Trumpet Winsock?

Amiable guy - the organization I was part of bought a site license. It provided windows sockets support for Windows 3.x. It was made irrelevant in Windows 95 (and I believe MSFT baking in 32-bit Winsock support was a big deal - that leveled the technical hump of getting online)
Anyone else have a Commodore64? This was my first computer, since my parents got a newer PC leaving me with the Commodore. All I can remember was playing Skater Or Die.
Seems like it could be as simple as the pollution. The pictures simulate the same experience. For instance, if colleges students subliminally read words about old people, they'll walk slower.

Breathing car exhaust can't be good. Carbon monoxide is known to slow actions. Different urban environments are also more likely to have poor conditions (e.g., lead exposure) that leads to brain damage (smaller frontal lobes) and criminality (less rational decisions):

http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-docum...
I tend to try to recite all the names back to people, especially when I'm introduced to a group in a party. It helps a bit.
Just to clarify, once the plane is wo passengers, its a race against time, people clean the plane at the same time its being refueled, and as soon as it is clean you can board it, and as soon as its loaded you can leave. So any minute means money.
Which ad is your startup putting out?

Wanted. People (realistically, mostly men, but we live in enlightened times so we cloak reality in rhetoric) for programming. Low wages. Long hours, many in darkness, illuminated primarily by monitors. Maintenance of social life and health doubtful. Success extraordinarily unlikely. Riches beyond your wildest dreams in event of success.

or

Wanted. People who make things people pay for. Hours are not really remarkable. Engineering challenges are not really remarkable. Success is by no means assured but it is pretty likely. In the event of success, you'll do quite well but the honor and accolades will go to the one of the guys answering the other ad.

I kind of like ad #2 myself...
Minimize. Don't say 'great article' or 'great comment'; use an upvote. Avoid cliches of phrase and thought, especially emotionally-charged cliches.

Details from hard-won personal experience are always good. Armchair intuitions and snap judgments, rarely.

Use the 'delay' setting, set for a few minutes, and reread your comment just as the delay is expiring. Fix typos and problems with clarity at any time, but avoid adding or removing substantive points without acknowledgment -- especially if there are replies.

Read others' comments charitably. Think, "In what way could this make sense?", rather than "Aha, gotcha!" (Obsessively finding trivial bugs in code is a virtue; in conversation, it's rude.)

Also, read articles charitably and considerate of their original context. A mood piece, a blog post, a popular-media account, etc. is written by an author with certain goals and for an imagined audience. To savage such an article because, once removed from its original context, it doesn't meet other standards or please some other alien audience is cheap, empty, artificial controversialism.
Very interesting posts about the digital presidency - dig on his site.
Hyperbole and invective are the domains of politicians who use them to great effect. No need for it in a balanced press (wishful thinking).
One of the main studies mentioned took place in Ann Arbor, population 114,024 as of the year 2000 census. Downtown is fairly urban feeling, but nothing like a Chicago or a New York. I agree, seeing studies of different cities would be interesting, especially when trying to figure out which urban planning techniques are effective at avoiding overstimulation.
New trojan blocks Pirate Bay and Mininova
wonder if its RIAA/MPAA fighting back, or just some script kiddie having fun
One of my school's founders gave an essay-writing workshop when we applied to colleges, and told me about this when critiquing my essay.

IMHO, you should think of it as a good exercise instead of a writing style. You don't need to eliminate all forms of "to be" in your writing. However, thinking about how you would do so forces you to choose your words more carefully. You can add "to be" back in later once you've mastered E-prime.

You may want to try the same thing with adverbs and prepositional phrases. Eliminate them, and see how it affects your writing. Then reintroduce them only if they make your writing more clear.

In programming, you can perform similar exercises with mutation. Eliminate all assignment statements, and see how you structure your code in their absence. Then add them back as necessary.
Medicine and media today are very different. Also, stories like this get lots of attention. They skew perception about instances of events like this. Regulation's side effect is often inaction or inactivity. You don't really hear much about that.

Many real elixirs are killing people right now, by not getting on the market fast enough to save lives because of the lengthy FDA approval process. You don't hear about that.
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How would you translate "I think, therefore I am"?

"I think, therefore I exist"?
A computer revolution through a child's eyes
the logo still points to http://www.aductions.com. pls fix it.
Descartes meant the latter, correct?
Well, ABC's blurb is wrong. The model assumes 20 rows, not 40.

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0802/0802.0733v2.pdf
Neat idea. Perhaps you could implement it as a bookmarklet which injects a game-managing script into real Wikipedia pages, so that the article-viewing traffic is still served from Wikipedia. (I mention this because your site is glacially slow right now.)

See the 'Wikipedia History Contest' winners for ideas:

http://waxy.org/2005/06/wikipedia_histo/

(They used Greasemonkey but a bookmarklet could achieve something similar. Or, the MediaWiki 'user.js' functionality, where a user can set their own custom JS to be included in pages.)
You should read some John Dewey if you haven't, his philosophy meshes well with your's.
Interesting list. At a glance I recognize a lot of ruby people near the top which is a pretty good indicator of how popular git / github have been in that circle. Github has really become the code hosting source for ruby developers. I wonder how popular it is for other languages?

Also, looking at this list is looks like the quickest path to the top is to develop open source software for other programmers. Perhaps a javascript library or a web framework or software used by github itself.
> The free market would eventually fix all these problems

Saying that doesn't make it true, it's a belief, not a fact, keep that in mind.
The former sounds much nicer.
If it wasn't for Trumpet Winsock, I'd never have learned how to use Gopher. (I see your old reference and I raise you - now raise or fold - there is no call.)
Yeah, using a cache to store data you need to always have is a terrible idea. I used to store session data in a volatile region like this (Cache::FastMmap, if you care), until one day I realized that sessions were being deleted long before they had expired. Oops, I was using a lossy store for data that must never be lost. Now I use BerkeleyDB for that, and make sure that expired sessions are manually cleaned up every so often.
I do a lot of reading. I hate reading. However, I enjoy learning.

Sometimes reading is the best way to learn.

Sometimes re-reading is even better. Do this slowly.

Sometimes reading lots of different sources about the same topic is the best. Do this quickly.

Other times, I learn by listening. Or watching. Or trying. And more often than not, by failing.

Like anything else: Speed reading is a tool. Use it appropriately.
That's how it's usually translated in Spanish.

Cogito, ergo sum. -> Pienso, luego existo.
Sounds like a good A/B test.
Thanks! They got written about in the NY Times :-)
> Eliminate all assignment statements, and see how you structure your code in their absence. Then add them back as necessary.

Actually, I think removing points is the typical exercise. Removing assignment is too easy :)

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Pointfree
Live with less, but don't forget that time has inherent value as well. Opportunity cost. Ask yourself if your purchases are giving you less or more time to do what you actually want.

I also find that the best limiter for me is having a restricted living space. I spent a year and a half on the road as a software consultant, and my luggage got progressively smaller as time went on. By the end of my travel life last summer, I had managed to combine two weeks of business necessities with a camping mattress and stuff for the weekend, and hold it all in a single airline carry-on sized backpack. This didn't make me less of a consumer, though, it just directed the consumption in different ways. I consumed airline tickets, hotel rooms, restaurant food, etc. at a much higher rate than most people. But I enjoyed the lifestyle.

That being said, I would still really like to have a flat-screen TV and a couch of my own. Priorities, though...
I dialed into a VAX on a 1200 bps modem and used Gopher from the terminal.
plug.. You could also try on online SRS @ http://flashcarddb.com
Its easy to understand the algorithm. But that initial guess there is where the magic is. Thats what makes the algorithm work so efficiently.
Everybody has to start somewhere. Not everyone programs in Haskell. ;-)
While I agree that the stagnation of the product has been sad, what other metrics are out there to find how many RSS subscribers one has?