skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is egregious linkbait. The author acts as if Alex wrote the Times article. If he had, he would have disclosed that he was a founder of CO2Stats. But he didn't write the article; he was just quoted in it. Anyone who's been quoted in an article knows how little control you have in that situation. More often than not the reporter has some agenda and all he wants is quotes to suit it. So it is here: I happened to see Alex immediately after he talked to the Times reporter, and he was frustrated then that the reporter hadn't wanted to hear about anything except the carbon emissions caused by Google searches. Which, in typical reporter fashion, he then proceeded to present in the most simplistic and controversial way.

The author of the present article has done the same thing in the opposite direction, replying to linkbait with linkbait. If he'd really wanted to see what Alex had to say about these issues, he could have looked on CO2Stats' site.
You can buy "mind machines" for about $100. Or you can use get the sound component, at least, out of your computer using an online beat generator.
More Than Coding Mistakes At Fault In Bad Software
“The notion that the enormous cost of real news-gathering might be supported by the ad load of display advertising down the side of the page, or by the revenue share from having a Google search box in the corner of the page, or even by a 15-second teaser from Geico prior to a news clip, is idiotic on its face.”

The notion that newspapers are still spending money on multi-million dollar presses and bloated newsrooms is what's really idiotic.
Hormones' complex role in human sexuality
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maginot_Line"

Massive French government fortification program designed to protect their borders with Germany and Italy.

France knew perfectly well that the Germans were a clear and present danger. They just could not do anything about it - despite having that great protector: government military.
Ha, my cousin plans to build a huge fleet of zepplins that play Breathe by Prodigy as he nukes the cities of the world. I'm just hoping he's not serious. (Though that song would be fitting for nuking cities :-) )
I installed lots of disks in Raid 5 into my spare machine, stuck it in a cupboard and use it as a file/backup and UPNP server.

All my other machines use the drives on their for storage and backup and use small and fast drives such as the WD Raptor instead of something like the Spinpoint 1TB drive.

Improves the performance of my real desktop and puts my data under linux rather than windows making remote access possible if I want to take the risk,
Indeed, people do go abroad(independently of government decree) to fight for causes they believe in. Just look at the Spanish civil war.
From the google blog:

"We've made great strides to reduce the energy used by our data centers, but we still want clean and affordable sources of electricity for the power that we do use. In 2008 our philanthropic arm, Google.org, invested $45 million in breakthrough clean energy technologies. And last summer, as part of our Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal initiative (RE<C), we created an internal engineering group dedicated to exploring clean energy.

We're also working with other members of the IT community to improve efficiency on a broader scale. In 2007 we co-founded the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a group which champions more efficient computing. This non-profit consortium is committed to cutting the energy consumed by computers in half by 2010 — reducing global CO2 emissions by 54 million tons per year. That's a lot of kettles of tea."

Also they have a few solar panels

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...
Netflix are using Silverlight for their streaming service, see http://netflix.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=288 for details.
regulation leads to people suspending critical judgement about risks.

We have a name for that.

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

risk compensation is an effect whereby individual people may tend to adjust their behaviour in response to perceived changes in risk. It is seen as self-evident that individuals will tend to behave in a more cautious manner if their perception of risk or danger increases. Another way of stating this is that individuals will behave less cautiously in situations where they feel "safer" or more protected.
Related topic: who would you consider the Kay, Hillis, etc of today?

_why is showing that he's very good at taking what others have done and putting them together in cool ways. As far as world-changing foresight goes, Kay and Hillis were born late enough to see what's coming down the road in the computer revolution, but early enough to be a prognosticator. We may be at the wrong time in history to find others like them.

What is going to happen when memory gets a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper, faster, and more reliable? (That last may be the most important factor.) What's going to happen when we really start hacking our biology? I think at this moment in time, we're only positioned to prognosticate hazy shadows of things to come and only those of 2nd rate importance. Like how Jules Verne could presage something with the capabilities of the Nuclear Sub, but had almost no chance to predict the PC and Internet. E.M. Forster presaged the Internet, however.

http://brighton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~prajlich/forster.html
I don't know the specifics, but my parents said he changed after just once.
This seems fairly obvious to me; self control involves doing something extra. For instance, take the Stroop test (where a color word is shown in another color, e.g. "red" in blue ink). When asked to read the word, you don't have to do anything extra (assuming you are an experienced reader); you kind of automatically just "know" what the word is, it is your strongest identification with the written text. Identifying the color isn't any harder than reading the word, but you have to override your automatic propensity to say what's written.

Thinking of it in programming terms, you're not just doing "sayColor()" instead of "sayText()"; you always do "sayText()", but you also have to do "blockSayText()" and "sayColor()" in parallel.
"Temporary fix" can also be entertaining. I wonder about the age of the oldest temporary fix still in use?

http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=%22Temp...
The big problem is power consumption - do you really want that ~200W power draw, 24hrs a day, burning up the environment?

Giving it to someone who needs it for their main PC is the best bet.
My sister's a choreographer, actually.
Here's a satellite image from the pacific northwest:

http://local.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en...

There are definitely some issues with externalities there, too.
Because I got something like -4 just after your horrible ad-hominem comment.
This is ridiculous.. it just keeps loading and loading
How is this different from QR code other than being proprietary?
The Woork Handbook
Pink noise (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_noise) is good, too - it's white noise which has had its frequencies adjusted logarithmically, so instead of being mostly high-end hiss it sounds like rushing water. I made a 16ish minute sound loop somewhere, but don't have it on hand at the moment. (It's just the loop on wikipedia, concatenated repeatedly.)

Also, isolation tanks can be nice.
You would be surprised of the distances you can make in a bike without burning yourself.
Also, let's not forget, once upon a time, they had a pretty damn nice OS, compared to their competitors.

And IE6 killed Netscape at least in part because it was better in a lot of ways.

When I was entering college as a CS major, working for Microsoft seemed like a pretty awesome career goal. Now, I wouldn't even consider it.

What happened, Microsoft? How have you fallen so far?
Imagine you are trying to optimize your program.

Some questions:

What percentage (LOC-wise) of your program consumes the most time? (hint: it could be really small)

What do you accomplish if the part of your program that takes 1% of total time will run instantly? (hint: not so much)

What are your goals (10% faster, 2 times faster, 100 times faster)? What cost/benefits has each goal?

Are you using the right algorithm? What is time complexity of it; could it be better?

...

Similar speculations could bring light to the question: Are we right to assume that only the biggest producers of waste need to change.
Sure, I like Rails a lot, but damn, sometimes it's a lot of effort to keep everything up to date.
Doesn't that go for most public figures, though?
You may not remember it.

The technical term for this sort of thing is hypnagogia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia); if you want to dig deeper, that's where to look. It's sort the sensory parallel to when you're just starting to fall asleep and suddenly your leg kicks and wakes you up. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnic_jerk)

I've been on the edge of sleep and thought the gurgling noises from my radiator were mumbled speech outside my window.
I believe this is the back-bone of the GTD philosophy. Figuring out exactly what your next action™ is can help you get started on it sooner.
Broken Windows Theory of Software Development
I don't think that's correct: one can still be mostly lucid while having the drug affect some part of their mind. You can sometimes bring things back.*

Often it's not really sensory at all; it seems to work at a higher, conceptual level. For example, I once looked in a mirror and saw myself, but recognized different people, with different personalities, my mother, my siblings, my different personalities.

I looked out into a room, and I saw all the elements, but my experience of it was flat, as if someone took a picture and laid it out on paper. Then the shading in the picture implied lighting, which quickly implied depth. Objects rotated into consciousness. I saw a tree, and then suddenly the existence of leaves and branches screamed out to me, as if to say "we are entities too! we are not simply parts of the tree! we are objects of our own." A friend of mine was standing near, but still. At a conceptual level, my perceptual experience of her was of an extremely accurate statue of her. As in "my, what a life-like Sarah." And then she moved, and she was animate again, a real person.

A friend of mine studies perception. He tells me there's a lot of evidence for these kinds of 'perceptual layers,' and that a lot of the subconscious visual classifications that I was experiencing. Self, not self. Person, not person. Animate, not animate. Object, not object. Flat, not flat. One expects it's the sort of thing that we do naturally, for many other sorts of things. Male, female, old, young, intelligent, dim, aware, tired, happy, sad, etc. And it's the sort of thing that neural networks can do, too.

So I definitely think that there are things that you can bring back. I think if you try hard, you can hold on to the experience, and see how much of it makes sense in the real world. But I'm not sure this is the experience of most people. I hear lots about people seeing pretty colors.

* Note, all this happened on half a hash brownie, alone. This experience suggest that I stay away from anything harder.

Name changed to protect the innocent.
E-Okul Lise
But how often is a progress bar actually related to "progress" in the simplistic sense, like sorting through a bunch of identical items?

More often we use progress bars to represent progress through a multi-step process, each one of indeterminate duration. This IMHO is a mis-use of the progress bar.

A far better way to do it is to show the user the steps you are moving through, and have an individual progress bar for each (if performance is expected to be linear), or simply an activity indicator. Check/grey items out as they become completed.

[edit] Another note: A lot of times progress bars are not backed up by correct code. For example, if you are, say, compressing a bunch of files - the progress bar should not represent how many files you have finished, but rather the size of those files. Too often progress bars are used to signify a quantity that is not closely correlated with TIME.
Damn. You must have been making a ton of dough to save that much money. Kudos to you. I think I've got about a 1 month buffer, maybe 2.

You can survive on Lentils and rice, toss in a little Quinoa and a lime and you could go a few years on pennies. Of course, what you are outlining is that you have a life to attend to.

Well, then get a job that pays or demand pay from your current job.
Isn't this how any meeting is supposed to be run?
Stick to Superfoods!

Quinoa, Lentils, fresh veggies.

Jason Rohrer (of fame with game programmers) eats lentils for lunch every day.
I haven't either - but being in college right now I would say that a very large number of people have :)
Everyone wants to be a producer. The author intends to incite people into taking action and becoming producers, not stagnating as a consumer.
Standard Ramen pretty much has no nutritional value. Add some veggies (first boil finely chopped carrots & celery, add frozen corn, broccoli, peas) then put in the ramen mix.
I've had a quick play and set up an account.

There's a few usability quirks that immediately sprung to mind;

I didn't find it particularly intuitive to actually dive in use:

1. When you first set up account and start a workspace, the first thing it asks you to do is choose the people you want to share it with. This seems "wrong" to me. I would expect to be able to set up a workplace, add documents and wotnot and only then be bothered about who I wanted to invite in.

2. I then tried to work out how to add an item to a workspace... there were buttons on mouse over for Manage, Share and Delete - so I sat there trying to find 'Add document'. It wasn't until I eventually clicked on the workspace that I 'entered' it. I wasn't really expecting that 'enter to do something' metaphor. How about a mouse-over 'click to enter message'.

3. Add video resource - how about some clue as to the formats you accept. None that I tried. that's for sure. It's a bit distracting to see the Web page URL input go scrolling by on the way to the file chooser.

4. Thumbnails of the documents would be good.

5. The Black pallette really isn't to my taste.

6. The big one... without the ability to actually edit Word or Excel files (as opposed to annotate), it isn't really a collaborative tool in my opinion, I'll probably keep using Google Docs or Drop Box and I suspect others will too. Sorry, it's a lovely idea apart from that. I'm not sure I can even see myself using it with the free account.
In my mind, the definition of a social media consultant is someone who sells consulting services related to social media. This does not require that they actually know what they're talking about. Personally, I think it's a good indicator for who you can safely ignore. Give it a few months any they'll all be on to the next fad career label.
Palm's Pre gambit and the joy of starting over
The blogosphere is expanding to meet the needs of an expanding blogosphere
DH: You don't learn much by taking apart a dynabook, except not to do it. It had never hit me before, but the current generation of kids don't even get to hack the operating system.

Perhaps not in 1993, but now we have full open source environments to play in. The code may not always be very comprehensible, but at least it's possible to see what's going on under the hood.
Wow, incredible words of wisdom. I am myself at a startup (http://racy.com) and we had a little funding, but are bootstrapping and trying to make sales to cover our costs. We are only 1 year through and are very very close to breaking even.
I agree with you. I guess sometimes it's important to do a type check, but duck typing seems more appropriate for Javascript.
Flourish: A developer-friendly PHP library
'Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors'
Florid satire filled with clichéd tech references. Not really funny or clever at all.
experience a traumatic situation repeatedly, which is clearly preceded by a distinct sound.

That would be.... my alarm clock?
Also remember that they can afford to fail 100 times if time 101 is a winner. That's what they do best. Death of a thousand cuts.
I don't know whether to agree with him (it's not a depression until there are a whole lot of bread lines) or slap the smugness right off his face (he'll feel a whole lot different when he can't afford food).
Exactly. GTD gives a system of organisation, and says that each item on your "To Do" list must specifically be a concrete "Next Action". It's interesting to see this being supported(ish) by research.

It works for me.
I don't mind making Safari 'potentially crash more' - I only mind if it actually does crash more. Since Safari crashes are very few and far between, and haven't noticeably increased since I installed Silverlight some time ago, this potential problem isn't high on my list of priorities.

I suppose I can always go back to Lynx if these things really bother me too much.
From the article: "Ubuntu (pronounced oo-BOON-too)" -- intended pun or involuntary irony?
The people we bought our house from left an old P-333 GW2000. I turned it into a smoothwall (http://www.smoothwall.org/). The routers the ISPs have drawbacks like not supporting enough simultaneous connections (usually do to RAM constraints). So I dropped their router, put the smoothwall in its place, and never looked back.
That could also be because among countries of similar economic status, it has the highest number of secondary educated job searchers.
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/3533.html

"There are design firms out there that could come up with things we've never thought of," Jobs continued, "things that would make you shit in your pants."
...
"Screw the lead times. You don't have a great product yet! I know burn rates are important, but you'll only get one shot at this, and if you blow it, it's over."
An App Store trend that needs to stop: Single-serving apps
I have an old IBM X21 that served me well for many years, and is now enjoying its retirement in a drawer. I'm thinking about bringing it back and putting it on the steering console of my boat (Live on a boat) where it should perform the following operations:

- control lighting, I'm looking into installing RGB LED's and so it would be ultracool to be able to have a program that can actually control the LED's, with different shades of colors, turning down the light when the sun goes up, etc.

- monitor engine vitals. A friend of mine has done some really cool small wireless data recorders that can be used (http://dzl.dk/projects/electronics/102logger/102logger.html)

- power usage. When I'm sailing everything runs on batteries, so I really want to monitor how much power I'm using and how much I've got left.

- Charts. I'. thinlking about a webbased application that shows the boat in the middle of Google maps, so I know what's around me when I'm out sailing. There's usually 3G wireless when you're close to land.

- Music. Last.fm when I'm on the net, mp3's when I'm out to sea.
Joel on Software: "By installing Java, you will be able to experience the power of Java"
I really think the design is ugly, but Its just that (besides the few 1-5px gaps) ugly design. The page isn't totally horrible.

Hacker: "Oh my god, look at that 1px error"
Avg user: "what a soft, easy looking webpage - did you see those images move on the front page?" :)
How to Hire a Programmer - Part 2 - Improve This Code
Yeah, this is real. We put Hiro up as a joke, but I'll take him down now.
Microsoft Betting Big on ‘Touch’
This should be codified as a named rule on the internet akin to Godwin's Law. Ad Hominim is too general.
depression != "Great Depression"

I'm tired of explaining this. Yes, we're entering a depression. It's not this nation's first, nor its second or third.
Interior Design in Christchurch found on Gopher.co.nz
See also-- NYTimes Congress API:

http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/introducing-the-con...
This is a PHP 5 library I've been developing over the past year and a half. It's not an MVC framework, but rather a modular collection of classes to help with common PHP usage patterns and security. More like the Zend Framework than something like Cake, but at the same time simpler and lighter-weight than Zend.

I've spent a good amount of time on documentation and trying to make the code and the site as usable as possible. I'm looking forward to getting some feedback!
I'm posting this from my doctor's office using my iPhone. I also use it to check HN whenever my main computer is tied up with a lengthy operation. So yeah, I visit HN on an iPhone a lot.
Jeez, you're modding me down for questioning a 10-minute download for a 4.6M file?

What is this? 1995?
Perhaps I did not make my point clear. The media produces little of substance. The following, in my opinion, is not news: murder, abuse, or celebrities. These topics, however, seem to be what most highly distributed "news" consist of.
I don't know much about web design, but what I know is that a page that is not polished is perceived like this by users, even if it is just a strange feeling that they can't explain.
That's kind of the point of the article though -- they're just getting by with the bare minimum, because they don't really care about the web. The consumer doesn't care, but a web company should care.
Why I still prefer Prototype to jQuery
I wonder if you could take "micro meetings" even further? Can you replace many meetings with something akin to an open market? For example, instead of having a meeting to decide which database back end to use, if you can, just use all of them. Toyota took a trial approach with their hybrid drivetrain. They actually had something like 10 independent projects and picked the best one.
If you can’t think of anything to say, maybe you should just up.

Although Joel's writing a post about omitting needless words, I think this sentence needs an additional word.

Sometimes I wonder if blogs could use a "typo alert" button.
Go East, young man? Californians look for the exit
On the other hand, a few boxes running Fold@Home is a conscientious alternative to a space heater. :)
Touch doesn't make as much sense on a desktop. It's more awkward because it is less ergonomic. If you put the screen lower so that your hand does not get tired you end up looking down too much, bad on your neck. If you keep the screen where it is in a traditional desktop you end up leaning over and your arm will get tired.

Touch makes sense in hand-helds and tablet style machines not desktop screens.
Good idea. I've learned so much by setting up a dev server in my local network. We work at home and every Web projects are done on this ubuntu laptop that is hidden in a drawer (for silence purpose). It's connected to the wifi and i have setup backup-manager (http://packages.debian.org/en/sid/backup-manager) to archive the whole /var/www/ dir (and the databases) into a tar on an external drive every night. There are a lot of tutorials out there to do your own Apache server on Linux.
Notes on Computational Linguistics: LIN/CSE 475
Interesting, I think I may subscribe.

How is the photography in the online recipes?
Meetings should be kept short and to the point. Unfortunately, meetings in most companies aren't anywhere close to this. At my former job, some meetings took more than 2-3 hours, with way too many people at the table, many of them who didn't factor into whatever we were discussing. Most of the time, we ended the meeting being farther away from our objective than when we began the meeting.