skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
people don't like admitting that they don't know something. Especially that they don't know something when they're supposed to be very knowledgeable about it.

But come on! They could have rejected it as "incomprehensible" or "needing to explain what it was talking about better" or "not staying on one topic".

The abstract started talking about the Internet and OOP and ended up talking about digital-to-analog converters and e-commerce.

Just because you're smart and you can't understand it doesn't mean that it's smarter.
VHS tapes are now obsolete, the last big supplier stops production
Yeah, I think you're right about the screencasts.

(Still, the idea of a little 'ding' when you level up and unlock new commands excites the former Diablo-addict in me.)
NZ singer breaks world record by singing for 47 hours
Lots of potential for personalisation - doesn't everyone prefer their own?
Very interesting article. Should be a submission here.
Programming Perl in Vista
The abstract was craptastic but it is no different from the craptastic abstracts of several human-generated papers.

I think part of the problem is the people expect academic papers to be complicated/cutting edge/forward thinking, and therefore not immediately comprehensible.

Now I have to admit, the first sentence of the abstract sounded really good but it was all downhill from there. Again though, it was downhill in the same way as many other abstracts I have read.

Maybe this means that academics need to stop trying to sound so smart in their papers and just get the point across...or maybe it just exposes one (or several) of the reviewers as utterly incompetent.
My day job is knowing about more advanced companies, beyond common IT services.
Gulliver on the immortal Struldbruggs: "whenever they see a Funeral, they lament and repine that others have gone to a Harbour of Rest, to which they themselves never can hope to arrive."
Startup Interview: activecubes – Intelligent insights. Informed decisions
what makes Emacs fundamentally powerful: it's an emulated Lisp machine.

There's a big difference between fundamental power and actual usefulness. A volcano is fundamentally powerful, but good luck trying to convince it to build your house for you.

In practice, a useful fundamental power will sooner-or-later manifest itself as a big, complex, occasionally sloppy ecosystem of useful tools. We don't interact directly with geothermal energy. Instead, some people build generators that turn it into electricity, and then other people build factories to build fans that run on the electricity, and then shopkeepers build stores that can sell the fans. So, when I need to be cool, all I need to do is buy a fan, plug it in and turn it on. I don't need to start from scratch and build it all for myself.

What am I saying? I'm saying that you're welcome to start over with an emulated Lisp machine and a set of minimalist editing commands. And then you're welcome to build useful things like (e.g.) js2-mode on top of that minimalist editor. But then you will slap yourself on the head because you will discover that you've gone to all this trouble, but all you've done is rewritten emacs! Meanwhile, if I want to edit Javascript, all I do is download Yegge's js2-mode and turn it on.

But would rebuilding emacs in an innovative way be a good thing? Yes. It's not a bad idea at all. But it's hard to make it pay off. TextMate has made a very solid attempt, but I'm suspicious of the long-term merits of the closed-source, one-platform model, and an editor has to be built to last. (I note that the new fashion seems to be for TextMate users to try emacs!) And who is going to pay you to write another open-source editor? It is not a small project.
I took that job and for 5 years each day when I arrived at work I would have to go around looking for somebody that had carelessly wandered off to the bathroom and steal their chair. Eventually I just settled on one that was missing two wheels and an arm rest since it tended to not mysteriously vanish as often while I was at home sleeping or away eating lunch.
Especially wrong litanies. He likes to imply that the only people who call him on his attitude are biz people, as a kind of dismissive jedi mind trick. That's complete hogwash, a lot of engineering types and rubyists don't like Zed and have been fairly vocal about their disapproval for some time now.

Zed loves to be a complete jerk and then when people use the same strong language back at him suddenly write a blog post about how mean people are. At first I thought he was being deliciously ironic, but now I'm pretty sure that's not the case.
Laptops Overtake Desktops. This Time For Real.
We may need a new name for netbooks.
thanks...Materials Science. you can read my about for what i'm researching.
Forbes on possible alternate uses for bailout.
godaddy made me use a number generated from the server (rsa), but guess that doesn't mean I own the domain just the server
Alright, so if I understand you guys right, (1) the logo sucks, (2) it's not really a "startup" because it's not very innovative and it's running on open source that took me about an hour to launch, (3) the logo sucks, (4) the logo really could use some work, (5) it's just a website, and it's crappy, & (6) there's no reason for it to exist.

No worries, I agree with all of your comments. You're right, I should have put "Review my website." I think I might have been tempted to say some of the same things that were written, though I hope I would have been a bit more polite. I think I've been so antsy to make something public that I threw this together and it's been a great learning experience. I just learned SQL about 2 months ago & I just started with Java about 6 months ago. PHP is slowly coming into focus as well. Although I'm not writing out SQL queries by hand or anything as I work with this site, it has been cool to see how a database-driven site functions. For most of you, this stuff isn't exciting because you've progressed to a much higher level. But for me, it's awesome! And my wife thinks I'm crazy because it's all I ever talk about. :-)

I don't know. I'm fairly new to open-source software, so when I found out that I could launch this thing in an hour, I got excited -- didn't really have any great ideas, so I just went with something I'm really interested in (startups/venture capital/angel investing, etc.)

I know it will never become the next Google or anything, because (a) at the moment there's no business model -- although Google had no biz model for a couple years -- but they also had an incredibly simple way for solving a really really big problem, and I don't -- not with this site anyway, and (b) it sucks.

But for me it's a way for me to keep track of my favorite articles from the startup community, find articles that come from similarly entrepreneurial people but with a different focus, & organize them so that others can have access also.

P.S. My friends and I are working on a real startup also. When we have a functional prototype I'll post it here and let you guys give a crack at it.

P.P.S. I appreciate the honesty. I look forward to that for next time.
I thought about getting a MCP when I was 15. Then everyone I knew in the computer field told me it was a waste of time.

So I learned Perl instead, which honestly helped my career a whole lot more.
Thomas Friedman was able to get steady wi-fi on a bullet train running through the wealthiest outpost of a country of 1.3 billion people, 3/4 of which are rural poor living at or near the $1/day poverty level. Therefore, America needs a reboot.
You're right, not a startup. See my other comments.
So, this isn't info-emacs-manual, but rather a system that lets you actually invoke a command by first choosing a category of commands, then choosing from a list of possible commands? Interesting.

Note that the emacs module system accomplishes some of the task of organizing commands into subsets. I make liberal use of describe-mode (C-h m) when I want to figure out what my options are in a given mode. Other modes actually populate the menu tree, almost like a real Mac application! (I spent almost a week paging through the docs, trying to memorize the magit commands, before I noticed that the module had helpfully installed a "Magit" menu in the menu bar. I never look up there!)
Develop and Customize Templates using Django with New Book from Packt
Jeeblus, what's wrong with you people? If she'd gotten a high score on the SAT, would you be telling her how boring and useless the SAT is? High scores on adult tests at a young age, almost no matter the test, are something to congratulate her for.

But instead you're dumping on her because of "Microsoft" in the title? If you're going to dump on someone, dump on Microsoft! And even that is a backhanded insult to her. There are just some very bright 9-year-olds out there.
Chinese lawmakers consider tough penalties on hackers
Two points I pulled out of this article about Netflix:

With the hiring last year of Anthony Wood, founder of ReplayTV and Roku, Hastings reinforced his intent to deliver video straight into the living room. Originally, Netflix had plans to build its own boxes a la TiVo, Vudu or Apple TV, but Wood convinced the company that it could get wider distribution if it embedded its software in set-top boxes and gaming consoles.

This was very smart. By not trying to get the whole pie, they're getting a smaller piece of a much bigger pie.

"It's a good strategic move," said Andy Hargreaves, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities. "Netflix sees the world will go digital, no matter what they do. They realize there is more to be lost by waiting than doing it early."

The last line is crucial. Too bad other businesses don't understand this.
Facebook Folds In Face Of Massive Litigation, Bans Project Playlist
Hm, on second thought, I will amend my previous skepticism slightly. I wonder whether some emacs minigames might be useful. It might be that the best way to learn about, say, the rectangle commands is to play a little rectangle minigame.

What I envision is not a single gigantic emacs game in which you start at level 1 ("a four year old") and proceed to level
793 ("Yegge"), but a directory full of games that you can choose to play in any order, depending on your interests.

Clearly the next step is for someone to produce an emacs mode for writing wizard-ish tutorials about other emacs modes. ;)
poowsa was a troll that got kicked from the channel under several names. zed should probably have found someone else to quote...
Looking for a Few Good Answers Online
Print your own WoW character in 3D: Behind the scenes look at manufacturing process
Interesting video lectures from this guy on PageRank:

http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/?p=509

http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/?p=520
That book was a great read. Here's his talk at TED for a taste what it's about:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_par...
I'm disturbed by the thought that screaming profanities is the only way to get a hearing for your ideas, and would like to discourage anything that takes us in that direction.
How is this guy famous? Everything he has ever written sounds like something anybody's uncle might toss out at the dinner table. The guy is not original and has nothing insightful to say. Frequently, he sounds like an idiot. I'm just completely mystified at his acclaim.
The SAT is kinda boring and useless.
I'm thinking of something along these lines:

After pressing the relevant key (C-h something, also perhaps F1 or what have you, but definitely something listed on the startup screen), a prompt comes up, with a list of known keywords (basic, movement, file, buffer, latex, python, etc.). Typing filters the list for things that contain the substring (as in ido, iswitchb, anything, etc.); while this takes a bit of getting used to, there's immediate visual feedback, so it's reasonably self-explanatory.

When you hit enter, the first suggested keyword is selected, it brings up a list of everything tagged with that category. (The dialog would look like the result from apropos.)

Hopefully, most of the keyword mapping could be automatically generated, but it will inevitably need some hand-tuning.

I know to use describe-mode, apropos, apropos-variable, info, etc. when I am looking for / have forgotten about something, but that, in itself, means I'm over the hump in learning to use Emacs. New users aren't going to know what "M-x describe-mode" refers to (or even what "M-x" is).

Also, Merry Christmas.
A Mysterious Link Between Sleeplessness and Heart Disease
Sony Vaio Z Series Laptop
Anyone else notice it's hosted on Google Video? :)
Most of Zed's rants don't have much to do with technical insight, and a lot more about silly personality issues and bickering.
Obama appoints climate change expert as chief scientist
You skipped a step there. It seems you're mixing effects with causes. When you do that, of course it sounds ridiculous.
More task-specific tutorial games? ("You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike...")

A "how to use the help" game/tutorial/screencast would probably be the most useful, overall.
There are a lot of "somebody's uncle"s out there, and they all buy Friedman's books to give to their nephews.
I guess it's time to whip up my iFart clone for Android...
So it was post-modern cultural studies first with Alan Sokal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair), then theoretical physics with the Bogdanov brothers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair), and now it's the turn of computer science. As good CS people, the meta-authors of this article used a random generator rather than faking the text themselves. I guess the discipline is growing up. :)
These apps just emit flatuence noises or am I missing a much greater feature set?
Merry Christmas to you!

Also, I do kind of like your idea, and I wholeheartedly agree with this:

New users aren't going to know what "M-x describe-mode" refers to (or even what "M-x" is).

Half the battle in learning Emacs is to get really, really used to all the help commands. You need to play with all of them, and you need to use them a lot, and somehow the documentation didn't really get this through to me at first. (Yegge, to his credit, makes this point 8 in his list of hints: http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/effective-emacs)
Absolutely, I love it that Zed is putting himself out there and dishing the dirt, but I'm also glad not everyone is doing that. It reminds me a bit of the Howard Stern phenomenon.
Using Symbol#to_proc, the old Ruby

myList.collect { |f| f.description }.select { |d| d != "" }.join("\n")

becomes

myList.map(&:description).reject(&:empty?).join("\n")

which is even more direct: take my list, map each element to its description, reject anything empty, and join with newlines.
He's like House.
LG ME970 SHINE TITANIUAM Unlocked USA VERSION 
Like a bright torch in a claustrophobic cave, cell phones that are released after the ME970 would do well to follow its example in terms of features and design. The Shine provides a high benchmark against which cell phones made available after are going to be compared to.
How does this "search for my spouse" work? (Our google friends aren't yet doing face recog on images. When they do, lots of interesting things will happen.)
Zengestrom.com: Foreign Friends: from a service-centric to an object-centric social web
"But it's hard to make it pay off." Absolutely. Emacs is already out. Similarly, while Elisp has its flaws (the lack of a good namespace system comes to mind), it's probably good enough. Efforts to rewrite Emacs in Common Lisp or Scheme seem to stall out, even (and the thought of porting all that legacy code is rather off-putting).

I also think it's interesting how the author of the toplevel post has a textmate minor mode (http://ozmm.org/posts/textmate_minor_mode.html) to add TextMate features to Emacs that I'm pretty sure it already has (e.g. go to symbol, find file within vc repo). I know I've re-implemented minor features of outline mode more than once.
Isitchristmas.com
Man, what would we do without Zed? I love this guy.
Excellent. Right now then, we're at the point in history we'd be at if things had gone to plan for SGI with the Indy, a Unix workstation as a desktop computer for the masses. Which is, umm, 15 years ago...
The evidence Friedman marshalls for the "effect" he's writing about is inadequate.
Not everyone posts their picture, and not everyone posts their own. Most of the time, people swap emails and that's where their real picture goes.
He’s Just Not That Into You Social Media
Where we’re going with Activity Streams
As I am listening:

1- I agree there is still room for search and we definitely Microsoft in the game hoping that some of the smart guys there will come up with a better search experience than we have right now.

2- Bill Gates had a dream several years ago. Because most people hate Microsoft, they fail to recognize the magnitude of the impact Billy has had in their life.

3- I agree. We need different input/ouput. A mouse, screen, keyboard, is nice but we need more.
Microsoft Surface UnBoxing Photos
Meh, dumps exist for SJCP too... just not the whole test. Years ago when I took it for an employer about 1/3 of the questions were in dumps at the time. A co-worker said almost all his questions were from dumps when he took the SJCP exam. Sun does a better job than Microsoft but not much better.
Ow! my balls!!1
'Edutainment' Needs Entrepreneurs
For our great-grandmother we ended up getting one of HP's Presto printers. You pay a monthly fee (for the ISP) and the printer dials out on the phone line and downloads and prints any photos that have been e-mailed.

You set up a whitelist to avoid the spam issue, and then make sure you train people not to send all of those exciting forwards and 60-pic messages.

She loves it.
That's actually what I was expecting the first time I hit C-h t: Not just a verbal description of each feature, but a demonstration of it, perhaps in a sandboxed environment where only the features described so far were enabled, along with some command to exit or reset everything. I still haven't learned emacs, so I'd find that valuable.
NORAD releases a Santa tracker
Ask HN: What are the most in-need charities?
Indeed it is the season for giving. I don't have much, but I know there are others who have less. What charities are really taking a beating with donations this year?

Also, if there is some kind of searchable database of charities, please post it.

Happy Holidays.
I'm surprised Jerry Kaplan's book isn't on this list. It's called "Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure." I'm also enjoying "High Stakes, No Prisoners," by Charles Ferguson, who invented FrontPage.
That's just how corporate culture works. I am more disturbed by sitting in meetings where every 10 seconds I hear "that is great" or "good job" while in reality the product sucks, schedule is unrealistic, salespeople are poorly educated on what we actually do here and half of the engineering team are incompetent idiots and sluggish sales are clearly suggesting that's not my imagination.

I wish I had the luxury of hiring a contractor with nothing to lose, someone like Zed, to just bitch-slap these fake-smile wearing, strictly polite and always politically correct morons who are so full of this mandatory "positive attitude" that saying obvious things out loud had turned into a tabu. They use words like "good", "great" and "outstanding" so often that they lost any useful meaning. This is why you need to be Zed to be heard.

Word like "shit", "fucking", "morons" and "crap" are essential to every healthy business meeting because the world is full of these objects and ignoring them or using some kind of cryptic doublespeak isn't helping anyone.
Facebook Gives In, Cuts Off Project Playlist For No Legal Reason
It's weird how so many people are so paranoid. Why is he coming up with these elaborate explanations of why they dislike him so much?

Is his reasoning really something like this? Biz dudes needs rails to be popular so that they can pitch ideas while being clueless, but Zed has made rails less magic, so now the Biz dudes hate Zed because now they have to have real ideas instead of buzzwords.

Really an elaborate explanation for simple name-calling. Perhaps the rude guys are just that - rude guys. To over-think it is nothing but paranoia.
admin overhead ratios are controversial, not really measure of effectiveness/efficiency in providing services

http://blogs.asaecenter.org/Acronym/2008/12/impact_versus_ov...

http://www.charitynavigator.org/

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2004/0112/036_print.html

http://blog.givewell.net/?p=15
Merry Christmas to you all
Read, hack and enjoy with friends and family. Have a safe holiday.

Please post holiday projects :)
Does it mean that if 15 mastered Python, it says more about Python than a guy? If so, what it precisely says?
Buy gold and/or silver.

The US Dollar is in the early stages of collapse; it will be severely devalued, perhaps down to being worth 50 or 60 Yen or more.

This is not being political, it is not Bush's or Obama's fault, but the result of an entire generation or more of mistakes, which started back in 1913 with the creation of the Federal Reserve and accelerated in 1933 under FDR and then again in 1971 when Nixon closed the gold window.
All tests resulting in credentials are kinda boring and useless.
Shouldn't the practical test consist of misconfigured ActiveDirectory permissions to fix,spyware uninstallation, and a registry to clean? The general tip to choose whichever option requires buying more Microsoft licenses worked when I took the test 10 years ago.
The business masquerades as a way for men to meet women to have sex with. If all of the women are fake accounts made by employees, then I would not consider it to be a legitimate business. In fact, I might go as far as to say it's fraud, much along the same lines that shill bidding on ebay is fraud.
It's not that they do not understand this. It's often not in their short-term interest to go digital. Imagine being in Sony's position trying to sell their blu-ray products. Why promote an alternative form of content distribution?
Do you think the certifications have an impact on your freelancer rates?
I have been in enough meetings over the years where you hear all kinds of profanities, and you're right, the key to successful meetings is when people call it like it is. However, antagonism is not necessarily productive. Remember, you need to work with these teams, and even good teams roll our products that may not be good. I don't know the history here in its entirety so speaking generally, while it's good being a naysayer, there is a way to do it constructively. Reading what I have, I don't really see anything constructive here.
"Someone needs to watch these assholes."

So true. I usually agree with Lessig about most issues, but this one, not so much.

Media consolidation is bad. Why demolish the FCC? First of all, the FCC might as well not even exist for all it has done to "open up" competition or competitive pricing. "On June 2, 2003 the Federal Communications Commission voted to relax certain market ownership restrictions." (http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/fccchanges.html) That, coupled with the already sorry state of media ownership in 2000 spelled disaster.

http://www.mediachannel.org/ownership/chart.shtml

When the laws that had originally been implemented to prevent monopolistic behavior were relaxed, these media giants were allowed to get even bigger, things really snowballed downhill. I don't know anybody who has actually received cheaper service rates from any of the major telecoms. Fewer commercials? Not that either. Most of us have actually noticed a significant increase in the amount we're paying for everything from cell phone service to land lines to cable, and on top if it all, more commercials.
Goosh (Source Code Released)
With the global economy under siege, this is the kind of innovation we need to raise standards of living.
Ground Zero: a Google Maps Mashup that Shows Damage Caused by a Nuclear Explosion
Facebook is shutting down because of a lawsuit!? Oh wait. It's just a linkbait headline from TechCrunch.