skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember when schools were recruiting this guy and he said academics were very important to him. I chuckled when he went to Florida State (not a knock on FSU, but they're not a top public school). But apparently, he was pretty serious about academics. Great story. Happy for him.
Me too, though I don't really go there anymore.
Does this look obviously illegal to you? It does to me.

http://www.geenstijl.nl/archives/images/fosforgroot.jpg

I think this is a world record for number of different war crimes captured in a single photograph.
Before we had an office, the three of us worked in the Oak Park Public Library, which was excellent. Free wi-fi, very quiet, nice desks.
I actually like working from coffee shops when they're busy. The more noise the easier it is for me to concentrate. But if I can easily make out several conversations, then I find it difficult not to listen and it becomes more difficult to concentrate.

Comfortable, over-the-ear headphones are always a huge plus if you enjoy listening to music while you work (beyerdynamic headphones are very nice, although a bit expensive).

Everyone is unique. I work well in both very quite, and very noisy environments, but not so well in-between. You just need to figure out what works for you.
University of Sussex, UK
Certain libraries are good.. in some of them you can even get a private study room with internet access. I would look at college campus libraries before public libraries. And libraries vary a lot, so I'd recommend checking out a few of them before giving up on this option.
AE '91, MS AE '92
What they are afraid of is the idea of the free market not always and in every case producing the best possible result, so they need to aggressively attempt to demonstrate that 1) either market failure just doesn't exist, as they attempt to show here, or 2) that in no case, ever, will government intervention improve the situation, which is the topic of other libertarian writing.

In other words, this is just another episode of "Libertarians vs Socialists":

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=419503

For a serious treatment of the economics of digital goods and networked economies, I think Varian and Shapiro are a better read:

http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/7/information-rules-a...

(Edit: to be fair, it turns out the authors have a more scholarly treatment of the subject matter, which is a better read:

http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/harvj/harvard.html

Still though, I think it's pretty clear that they're coming from a point of view, and "backfilling" to try and get there)
What do you guys do when you have to go use the restroom facilities? I tend to bring my laptop in with me since the loss of it would piss me off more than the embarrassment of taking it with me.
If you want pure DB reduction, shotgun-type ear protection works but looks weird.

I find the Bose QC2/Audio-Technica ANC-7 headphones do a good job at reducing low-frequency noise disturbances (e.g. train noise) but don't really do much with random background conversation chatter.
Also interesting because it mentions PL/I as an antecedent to the Lisp condition handling. It says that PL/I had downward lexical scoping. I can't remember the details (I haven't looked at PL/I for over 20 years), but I believe that it means that the PL/I exception handler had access to the whole call stack, so you could make meaningful stack dumps from the handler, including variables. By today's standards the whole thing was quite clunky. A RETURN from the handler would resume execution. A GOTO to a label in the procedure enclosing the handler would unwind the call stack.
CS and Econ Alum here (graduated in 2006).
Colin, the SSL comment at the end of this is silly. There's no reasonable reason not to trust the security of SSL; there was one CA that was vulnerable to certificate forgery, and only with a couple hundred PS3s running custom tuned MD5 birthday code designed by Marc Stevens and Arjen Lenstra. And it isn't vulnerable anymore.
This story's hilarious:

"Hundreds of thousands of skaters, their cheeks as red as apples in the freezing temperatures, took to the ice, and hospital wards were filled with dozens of people with fractured arms, sprained ankles and broken legs."
I second the ear plugs... work well in an apartment or on the go.
This isn't about taxes at all but is a statement about how some who believe in "entitlement" think that if they don't get what they want they can threaten others to vote their way or face unemployment. It's also a jab at those he consider his inferior who have worked to keep his business viable while their boss has obviously become a well-funded lamprey ready to cut-and-run rather than to struggle for those who got him to where he is. If he thinks he got his success from pure hard work he's insane! There are plenty of businesses who struggle day to day to provide wages and work for employees and doesn't skim the cream away because he thinks he's "worked" harder. This crap would've cost him his head 220 yrs ago in France. This human garbage is about as un-American as one can become. The faster he leaves a nation that believes in equality the better for all. He's the diseased coward that needs to be cured. You either get it or you don't.
EngineYard releases Solo: Inexpensive, web-based platform for Rails
FWIW, structured exception handling (SEH) on Windows (and used by .NET etc.) does not use the approach described herein.

SEH scans the stack twice. The first time, it calls handlers in reverse order of registration (handlers are registered on function entry) asking them if they handle this particular exception. Any handler can return a condition code to tell the OS to essentially ignore the exception and continue with the next instruction (a bit like VB 'On Error Resume Next'); perhaps the handler repaired the error condition.

It's only after it has found a handler that indicates that it can handle the given exception that the OS goes back and actually unwinds the stack. That process involves calling all the handlers a second time, only this time passing them a flag indicating that unwinding is actually taking place. That's when 'finally' blocks get run. The OS keeps on going until it reaches the handler that indicated it could handle the exception.

That's how things work in Win32. The situation in Win64 is slightly different, as rather than FS:0 containing a pointer to the head of the exception chain, program-counter-based lookup tables are used instead. However, the two-phase exception dispatch is still used.
We hates the city, don't we, precious? Yesssss, we do... We hates it and all the nasty bright men in it...
Founder's Syndrome: Learning from Steve
Duke, BSE Biomedical Engineering (Exp. 2011)
What bullshit. There's a common pattern in Dvorak VS Qwerty: Dvorak advocates sometimes rely on history and sometimes on purely technical grounds to prove their claims, while Qwerty advocates always only rely on history because there's simply absolutely no way to prove Qwerty approaches Dvorak when it comes to logic.

Here are some facts about Dvorak that are easy to verify and the utility of which is obvious:

- Dvorak has the most used keys on the home row.
Compare: AOEUIDHTNS VS ASDFGHJKL;

- Dvorak optimizes for alternating hands, which obviously helps speed. Ever tried typing "street" or "states" in Qwerty, two common words with common letters that you have to type all with the left hand? On the Dvorak side the worst word is "joke" I think.

- Dvorak optimizes for typing a bit more with the right hand instead of the left hand, which makes sense because the right hand is usually the strongest.

- Dvorak optimizes for typing from the outside to the inside (try tapping your fingers in rapid succession on the desk from outside to inside, then inside to outside, and you'll see immediately which one is easier and faster).

- Dvorak optimizes for typing more with stronger fingers (index and friends) than weaker ones (pinkies and friends).

- Dvorak has all the vowels on the left hand on the home row (except Y which is conveniently on top of I), one beside another, which is great for learning. It also makes sense because you use consonants more than vowels, (see right hand argument) and since the most used consonants are on the right home row, it optimizes alternating hands.

No need to mention Qwerty makes no such optimisations and the result is correspondly atrocious.

See? No need to bullshit with biased reports about history.
Flow Tiles
I presume you mean: enter a job in mechanical turk to praise one's competitor's target, and then tip off a journalist?

Because otherwise, it's just dumb.
Me too. CS major.
I wrote an app called NoisePact that makes it simple to tell your neighbors to turn down loud music. I'm not really sure how far I got, but the idea and most of the functionality is there. If you want the source, I'll be happy to give it to you to improve upon (uses code igniter).

It works like this: you sign up, print off an invite sheet, stick it on your neighbor's door. They sign up, and you can login and alert their phone via SMS when it gets too loud. It virtually requires zero human contact, which is nice. But like I said, I'm not sure how far I got this. I did it on a Saturday afternoon to see how much code I could do in one sitting.

http://phunctional.biz/NoisePact/?welcome
Cornell University
If we were designing a keyboard from scratch:
What shall we do?
How about we find the most popular letters and put those under the strongest fingers.
then we favor hand to hand switch, since that is faster.
etc. etc.

Seems to me that the logical conclusion of such a study, would be a Designed Keyboard (DK).
Said GK has to be better than any alternative that came from a) Random arrangement b) being able to type 'typewriter' at sales demonstrations or c) designed to to avoid jams of moving parts. We would call this Not Designed Keyboard (NDK)

So we have DK and NDK. Almost by definition DK has to be better than NDK.

Now we all know that in order to do a good job we need to use the right tool for the job. If the job is typing which it is for 100,000 of people then the only logical conclusion is that we need to use the better keyboard in this case Designed Keyboard. (DK)

Next what if you had an organization with 1,000 secretaries that their whole work was to type documents day in and day out for the next 20 years and you could improve their typing in just 1% using a better keyboard. Would it be economically worth doing? Of course.

In conclusion switching to a DK is the smart choice, is the cheaper choice.

And the only thing absent from this article in "reason" magazine is precisely that; reasoning.
Help needed:
Maybe it should be obvious, but I'm missing it: what's the interest group that's "meetingup"?
HackNews fans?
Apparently it is common for an author to create fake reviews for his book on Amazon. Ethically this is the pits. Somehow we need to evolve a reputation system so that we can trust reviews.

A side note: a while back Charles Stross (SF writer) had a thread on his blog where writers posted the best Amazon 1 start ratings of their books. The 1 star guys can get pretty creative.
I should have clarified: I think online backups are a great idea (provided they're encrypted archives). The author of the article says, quote, I don’t want to mess around with personal storage. Personal storage on-device is like buying your own power station for your house. Anyone who carries round their data WITH them is living in the wrong century.

This is a different thing entirely. He's basically saying that personal hard drives are obsolete as a storage medium, which I find incredibly preposterous. The "century" doesn't matter; the Internet is nowhere near ubiquitous around the globe, and I imagine it never truly will be. Of course there are other concerns: bandwidth, security, fly-by-night companies, etc.

I'll be the first to admit that if you burnt down my apartment right now, the only stuff that would be saved is code for projects I'm currently tracking. I do hourly backups, but they're all done to a local drive. Everyone, including me, should have off-site backups if they have important information on their computer hard drives. That's something I think everyone could agree on.
For "real science" on keyboards go to:

http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/

From the site:
"The carpalx project attempts to find the best keyboard layout to minimize typing effort for a given set of input documents. These documents may be English text, programming code, or whatever you find yourself typing for hours"

Take a look at the studies from those results.
It just doesn't make sense that anyone could be that stupid. It's not like it would be hard to get fake reviews written. Doing it in a way that makes it obvious what your doing would just be stupid.
Agreed, the distance your fingers travel is shorter and so it would stand to reason that for any given person they could cover that distance faster.

A large part of this article seems to have a problem with retraining. That the retraining of someone to Dvorak will be inefficient compared to them just getting better at Qwerty; this may be the case. The analogy that comes to mind is that of someone who learns another language in adulthood. In almost all cases that speaker will have an accent in the new language for the rest of their life. But, when new languages are learned as a child this isn't the case. Perhaps if you just lean Dvorak as your "native" keyboard these inefficiencies don't show up and the cost/benefit changes.

One could do what is done with software upgrades. New students learn Dvorak in typing class and everyone else can stay with Qwerty. This would give a generation-long deprecation period where nobody has to re-learn anything if they don't want. Since the complaint is with having to "re-learn" to type, this would avoid that.
Precisely why only those who have purchased the product from a site should be allowed to post reviews for it.

I know there would be less reviews left, but I'd rather know that the review I'm reading came from a real person who really bought the product.
Fantastic.

I'll start posting stories about Hamas storing weapons in mosques, schools and hospitals. And firing rockets at civilian centres in Israel.

Then we'll have ourselves an old fashioned reddit party! first one to invoke godwin's law wins!!
Also in item http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=438210
Just kindly ask someone to watch your laptop while you're away.
Touch typists don't look at the keys anyway, so you don't need to scrap the keyboard. Windows keymap switcher, or the equivalent in your OS of choice allows you to quickly go back to QWERTY on the (very) rare occasions where what you need to do corresponds with the actual symbol on the keys.
I'm very noise sensitive.

With new technologies (including viscoelastic dampening compounds) you can cost-effectively soundproof your apartment. Ted White can help you: http://www.soundproofingcompany.com
i've been reading hacker news daily for the past few months, but haven't been an active poster (wanted to get the feel of the site before jumping in). i really enjoy the site and would be interested in swinging by tonight to meet some other HN fans if you don't mind.

just so you know, i'm a founder with a product in the early dev stages and live about 10 min from union square.
Yeah, just Hacker News readers.
University of Wisconsin - Madison
I actually installed Colemak on my computer yesterday. I played with it for a couple hours before uninstalling it. Most of what I type is programing code, not prose. It dawned on my that most my typing delays come from all of the parens and brackets and other programming symbols. Since all these fancy keyboard layouts have been computationally optimized for prose language, they don't address the primary cause issue. I decided that if I'm going to take the time to learn a new keyboard layout, then it will need to be one that has been optimized for programming.
more like use Mechanical Turk to have 100 people leave negative comments on competitor product
Hard Knocks.
Yeah definitely come. As with all sites, 90% of HN readers rarely if ever post so you're not even in the minority.
Hell, I chuckled when I went to Florida State. But I loved it.
How about noise canceling headphones? Bose makes them, but I think there are cheaper alternatives. I haven't tried them, but I would be interested in comments.
Is Ireland facing an economic meltdown of Icelandic proportions?
With an influx of immigrants, the country has been struggling to maintain what it considers its Dutch soul, and Gustafsson was one of many here who thought the skating experience enabled the Dutch to reconnect with their identity. "There were only Dutch people on the ice," he said. "I saw no people of Arab descent."

OMG you nazi! How dare you question the goodness of flooding your country with people who have nothing in common with you.
Qwerty is by default, but on any computer you can simply activate Dvorak from the control panel in your computer.

The problem with Colemak is that you need to download and install software to use it. It isn't an standard yet.

But yeah there are much better options than Qwerty.

PS FYI:
to activate dvorak on windows: http://www.microsoft.com/enable/training/windowsxp/keyboardl...

to activate dvorak on Mac
http://www.chimoosoft.com/articles/dvorak.php
That just makes my point even better. Experts set safe speed limits for non-experts to follow. Minimum reserves are set arbitrarily and experts that decide actual reserve levels will not pay them any attention.
It would be interesting to construct an experiment to see what kinds optimal solution a free market can and can't find (though I have no idea how this would be done).

In search algorithms you have to worry about merely finding a local maxima rather than a global maximum. In algorithms such as simulated annealing you perturb your solution randomly at the outset, trying to "bump" your solution off of one of those local maxima.

What if the free market is prone to getting "stuck" in some locally optimal, globally sub-optimal solution? Depending on initial conditions (price, number of firms in the marketplace, demand, etc.) we could end up with great solutions, but in others with terrible results.
Jaiku Founder: “We’re Not Dying, We’re Morphing”
So? What have you learned?
Upvoted for the craziest bad-ass suggestion in the whole thread.
I'm going to completely rewrite my comment:

That was a terrible article. While I applaud and wish this young man the absolute BEST of luck, this journalist did him absolutely NO justice by throwing in such random and completely pointless hyperbole, making knee jerk references to other NFL players who aren't living up to some imaginary line of a standard, and then she follows this up by insulting the readers, saying we are

"infatuat[ed] with talented athletes who are hopelessly immature and irresponsible prevents us from fully appreciating someone like Rolle and giving him the attention he deserves."

Mr. Rolle, I commend what you are doing, good luck thank you for proving this journalist wrong by your actions, not your words.
Thanks, your essays are excellent. I studied philosophy for the same reason you did, I thought it had something to do with finding wisdom. However, it wasn't my bread and butter option, thank heavens, otherwise I would have died of starvation by now. My own feeling is that if words break down after a certain point the next step would be the Eastern Philosophy's idea of insight into reality. Words do not really bring insight, words can only go so far in bringing insight. Words can only point in the right direction perhaps through logic and even poetry. To find the true basis of reality would be a step above words - I don't know exactly what that means - perhaps it is the sound of one hand clapping?
To me philosophy is basically a way to determine reality and it forms a building block of our quest to find the true nature of reality. It is a bit sad that in our present time people do not seem interested in the fact that there are ways that reality has been studied and that our lives are often only based on escaping the reality of the moment. Last is not my idea but I read it somewhere probably in some book on Eastern Philosophy. I am convinced that the day we all start living in reality is the day that we find God. Furthermore, the upside to philosohy and the study of it is to make sure you don't make basic logical errors in your thinking for example realising that there are things such as sweeping statements, generalisations, ambiguity, prejudice, bias etc. It is often a mind strain to get through the day surrounded by people who never realise the limit that words have and the limits that untrained minds have. It is heartbreaking to realise the lost potential and the absence of meaning that is in front of peoples eyes without them ever realising it. Quite painful . . .
A small nitpick: Al Jazeera isn't biased any more than mainstream American networks are biased. In fact, many right wingers in the Arab world call it a mouthpiece for the west.
It can't possibly cost that much to actually do the painting. The hard part probably has to do with the width of the road. All the bike lanes that I know of are on rather wide streets where there is enough width for the standard car lane and the bike lane beside it.
I grew up in Maine and have fond memories of skating on the ponds and lakes. We used to build bonfires in the evenings out of old tires and skate around in the warmth and light. I suppose if we tried it these days we would have the EPA, FBI, and DHS after us.

In high school we graduated to cars. It was great fun to go as fast as we could, cut the steering wheel, hit the brakes, and go spinning down the lake. (Don't try this at home. We were trained professionals. Not to mention the effect of global warming on the thickness of the ice.)
Missouri State University (previously Southwest Missouri State)
There is no reducing it. There is controlling who deals with it. Hiding gobs of details behind a single {loop} construct was probably a huge hassle. For the designers and non-coders touching the templates though, the complexity is gone. It isn't really, of course. It was only transferred from them to the programmer. But from their point of view, it is.
I am studying computer science as an engineer.
Stimulus plan: $32B for smart grid, $6B for broadband
Based on the distance your fingers have to move to type average words on qwerty and dvorak, it's really impossible that Dvorak wouldn't be loads better.

The first lesson that every experimental scientist is taught is: Never, ever write a sentence like this. It will only make the other scientists laugh more loudly when your theory explodes on impact with the actual data.

Oh, will you be teased!

I tried using the word "clearly" once in a lab report in junior year. Man, did I hear about that.
Sadly the journal reference isn't freely available.

My first question with these new discoveries is always how much do you need to use to get a reasonable effect.

Doses as low as 0.2 microM were effective, 90% lethality, against some of the tested microorganisms with 0.9 microM effective against all the gram negative drug resistant microorganisms tested. The results with gram positive were not nearly as good requiring an order of magnitude more active compound.

For comparison I found this paper:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19028617?ordinalpos=2&...

If we take the molecular weight for Cefditoren from wikipedia we get a minimum inhibitory concentration (90) of 0.03 mg/L (which is 0.04 microM) to 1 mg/L (1.61 microM).

This isn't my area of expertise and I'm not sure how comparable LD90 and MIC(90) are but it sounds promising.
sure! where you at? I'm in Arnhem working in Amsterdam.
Troubled Technologies: An '09 List of Things to Watch Fail
This is a repeat of

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=437321

where it already has many comments.
whats the differnece between this and normal EC2?
Nice - doing CS here now
How about noise canceling headphones?

1. They are for use on airplanes.

2. They do not work. http://www.google.com/search?q=noise+canceling+headphones+%2...