skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess no society can keep itself developing beyond a certain point without becoming a democracy. The point is simple: when the vast majority of population starts taking for granted that they will never face starvation (meaning: they never experienced real long-term hunger in their lifetime). For Soviet Union, it came in the late 1970s - with median age about 30 years back then, and last major famine with mass casualties in 1946, most people never knew the fear of hunger. They naturally moved up the Maslow ladder, demanding human rights and freedom, and while it took another 10 to 15 years to happen, it was inevitable. For China, that moment is probably still in the future, as far as i understand, mass hunger was still a norm in 1980s, so most people remember it, and they rather obey the oppressive government.
Because I think it can be done better next time.
Man clings to life after horrific Bessbrook stabbing
If anybody wants to further play around with this, I wrote the following script in python using matplotlib:

import numpy
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import struct

def power(x,p):
i = struct.unpack("i", struct.pack("f", x))[0]
i = (1-p) * 0x3f7a3bea + (p*i)
return struct.unpack("f", struct.pack("i", i))[0]

p = -0.5
xs = numpy.arange(0.1,100,0.1)
ys1 = map(lambda x: x**p, xs)
ys2 = map(lambda x: power(x, p), xs)

plt.plot(xs, ys1, label="Real function")
plt.plot(xs, ys2, label="Approximation")

plt.title("Graph of x^%d"%p)
plt.legend(loc="upper left")
plt.savefig("graph.png")

Change p to whatever you want (even values greater than 1) to see different powers.
> That's the boring part.

I dunno. I totally geek out every time Ars does a CPU core review, but still I find the claim that the A6 is 2X faster in so many real-world situations to be more exciting than any geeky technical number they could claim.
> I don't get your tuple example ...

The point is that it's a subtle syntactical difference but a dramatic semantic difference. I think most newcomers to Python hit this.
I wonder if it's actually true.
Retrospectively. For some what they would have liked to do more of looking back and what they wanted to do at the time may be different. As we live in the present, the question really is what we would like to be doing now, not what we would liked to have done looking back.
Here's a little confirmation bias at work... those with kids can't really undo that decision so spending time with the family is a knee-jerk "number one priority" (how many people would really come out and say they would prefer to work than see their kids? even if it's true, I doubt it would be socially acceptable).

Those who prefer the 100-hour weeks will no doubt say work is the number one priority. See "saving money for the future" vs. "spending money in case you die tomorrow" as other examples.
This "just works". Power line networking would require a wireless device plugged in the wall in order to control the lights from a phone.
Let's operationalize programming, of course. I will take your bet that I can teach someone at IQ 85 how to do hello world, and I can probably bring them through for loops and basic flow. I don't know about them being able to solve real problems, though.
Four strategies to selling hardware
I think that this is confusing domain applications of concepts (algebra, abstraction in mathematics) and the same concepts in everyday speech. Everyone gets Proper nouns as variables and understands stories where the two people get their brains swapped. (Identity of objects as behaviour, memory addressing or duck typing)

so, I think most people get writing and symbols involved and that stories carry most of the functions needed for even reasonably complex programming

and that's without teaching children lisp from an early age
Clearly a modern punk-esque counterculture would have to make radical anti-internet privacy a, or the, central tenet. The whole point would be to construct a totally invisible subdigital culture. What else would define membership is anyone's guess. (also, such a subculture, or multiple, may already exist, as by its nature we wouldn't know anything about it.)
Google Chrome is detecting malware on The Verge
As a matter of fact, doing both, i think you can.

But in my opinion, the question is more : does every single people on earth like programming enough to get into it, instead of getting into something they enjoy more ?

Reading is easy, using an Iphone is easy. Bladesmithing, or repairing engines all day long is difficult, as is programming, as is writing for a living, or any other activity you don't enjoy doing on a daily basis for about 40 years.

It all boils down to (minimum) enjoyment of one's job.
In order to make the connection between the two you have to apply a bit of abstraction.
He's not at uniloc anymore
That's a bit pessimistic. Actually, I don't think even the central government thinks they can control the backlash that will eventually occur if things continue like they are. Especially if there is just one recession/significant economic downturn, or if the property bubble bursts. The government knows its on very fragile footing now.
I say it's more like writing cartoon music
I read the book. It's a great read for the story itself (guy learns how to win memory contests) ... but the memory techniques, in my opinion, do not really work for everyday situations. I did learn how to memorize the sequence of a random deck of cards though, which is pretty cool.
Relevant to this thread, since the goats-vs-sheep study is brought up so often to add authority to the claim, Caspersen et al. were not able to repeat Bornat & Dehnadi's results. They discuss their findings here: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1268845
400Mhz clock? Brain is 10Hz.

Try random numbers from quantum random number sites http://150.203.48.55/RainHex.php or http://www.random.org/

God says...

saying, Why came we forth out of Egypt? 11:21 And Moses said, The
people, among whom I am, are six hundred thousand footmen; and thou
hast said, I will give them flesh, that they may eat a whole month.

11:22 Shall the flocks and the herds be slain for them, to suffice
them? or shall all the fish of the sea be gathered together for them,
to suffice them? 11:23 And the LORD said unto Moses, Is the LORD's
hand waxed short? thou shalt see now whether my word shall come to
pass unto thee or not.

11:24 And Moses went out, and told the people the words of the LORD,
and gathered the seventy men of the elders of the people, and set them
round about the tabernacle.

11:25 And the LORD came down in a cloud, and spake unto him, and took
of the spirit that was upon him, and gave it unto the seventy elders:
and it came to pass, that, when the spirit rested upon them, they
prophesied, and did not cease.
But can't they really? You just replaced the problem with an unsupported (supposedly self-evident?) assertion.
How would you explain the double-hump distribution of grades then?
interesting. any thoughts on where this dynamic might lead? what does a post-exclustivity world look like? how do people define themselves?
in 1999 Linux wasn't really used for big production, but sometime around then the .com/linux bubble happened with a lot of companies selling/using linux as their main product (VALinux/Akamai/Redhat/many others).
Here's the fake video produced by Greenpeace: http://youtu.be/NMUFci_V4mU
We're using that installer, and Group Policy. We're redirecting the user's "User Data" folder into their roaming "Application Data". We're finding that Chrome is storing 10MB of DLL files there (gcswf32.dll being the big offender). We're also seeing the same behavior as described in this posting: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/xvd0gSJ...

Chrome installs a gcswf32.dll file into "Program Files" but it appears to be downloading a new one for each user, stashing it in their user data folder, then failing to load it properly on subsequent sessions because it's stored on a network path.
We are using this version and having difficulties with it.
Who Gets Credit for the Computer?
The problem with comparing Hulu to cable is that with my cable subscription I'm free to record shows and play them back later - without the ads. Similarly, the on demand content rarely includes ads, and when it does they're sparse and extremely short.

I often find myself starting to watch live tv shows about 20 minutes late and playing it as it records so that I can see the show the night it airs _and_ avoid ads.

When Hulu will let me do this, I'll drop cable. (that said, I realize the premium I pay for these privileges and others with cable is steeper than it should be)
I totally agree. Actually, I only didn't make that point because the benefits productive/happy members of society are less obvious. So what if some of these kids become baggers at WalMart? That is much better than someone who can't live on their own or hold any job down at all.
I don't know if that's directed at me for not knowing to search for an "Enterprise" version of Chrome or what.

We're using the "Enterprise" MSI-based installer. We are seeing difficulties with it. It's storing large DLL files in each user's user data folder, which we're putting on a server so that user settings will "follow" them from computer-to-computer.
While I generally agree with your assessment, I suspect the phenomena of hipsterism emerged as soon as the development of agriculture allowed the rise of specialization. As an old man, seeing the kids these days unabashedly dressing like the Small Faces brings to mind Paul Valéry's old saw: "Everything changes but the avant-garde."

While I am not personally all that nostalgic about the passing of the cultural distribution channels that Gibson mentions in the OP's link, I wonder how the reduction of meatspace contact in cultural transmission will play out. Many of my long standing friendships were formed in prehistoric book and record stores. As a kid today, I might meet those people, even more of them, no doubt... but would the tight bonds that sustained those relationships over the years have formed in the absence of non-virtual presence?

I guess this problem, if it even is a problem (and not the distortion of my limited perspective), will sort itself. It could be that increasing arrays of relatively weak social bonds in conjunction with smaller sets of strong bonds are what the social meta-organism requires moving forward.
I also wish they would address:

1) why not open source the project?

2) why not look for someone to take it over and run it?

I also have a hard time seeing how something like this could be at the very least not break-even (unless they had less than 10 paying customers or something).
Bashttpd - An http server in bash
Sure anyone can program. But that doesn't make them a programmer.

Just like me slicing you with a knife doesn't make me a doctor.
I find that when I've been working late my mind is a mess of racing thoughts and it's impossible to get to sleep quickly.

What I have been doing lately is listening to audiobooks, which really help to prevent my thoughts from jumping around. My books of choice have been the Harry Potter series (the ones read by Stephen Fry, of course) - his voice is really soothing, and the books are (generally) not too loud, or varying in volume. I find that generally I fall asleep within about 10-15 minutes of starting.

The worst thing is that I struggle to get to sleep without it now.
The writing was on the wall, after they pivoted from Convore.

Convore even seemed like a darling at Hacker News at the time.
Emerging technologies usher in more fuel-efficient, comfortable aircraft
Just because something should have paying customers doesn't necessarily mean that it has paying customers. There are other factors involved.

Better put: are you a paying customer? If not, then most likely other potential customers are unaware.
Since it says "thanks to PoTe for fixing my terrible english" it sounds like English might not be the author's first language. Perhaps the impact of those words isn't as negative for the author.

I think the article would have been better without them, but that didn't get in the way of my appreciation for its technical content.
I think it's a bit like learning written language. Written language is quite abstract too.

There are of course people with severe learning difficulties who are unable to learn written language (at least within any realistic timeframe). There are also people with more minor learning difficulties such as dyslexia who can learn but do so at a much slower rate compared with their ability to learn in other areas.

The difference is that written language is almost universally required in society. It's going to be very difficult to get almost any job at all if you can't read. Therefor the incentive to push through the pain barrier is very high.

So it depends on what your incentive to learning programming is. People who approach it because they simply see it as a way to make some $ will quickly realise that there must be an easier way to make $ that doesn't involve learning this stuff and they are probably right.

When I was younger me and a few friends were obsessed with video games. We thought that the coolest thing that we could possibly do was to make video games, people who made video games to us were like rockstars or pro athletes were to other people.

So we learnt to do some simple BASIC programming to the point where we could make text adventures with bleepy soundtracks and draw static sprites to the screen. First on BBC computers (which were popular with UK schools at the time) and later on DOS via QBasic.

In fact we even released a game as shareware, which gave us a hard lesson in conversion rates. Something like 10 shareware versions were ordered from the shareware library that distributed. Unfortunately nobody registered the full version (probably because it sucked).

I'm fairly confident that none of us had any real aptitude for programming. We had simply decided it was something that we wanted to be able to do at all costs.
I will add to my point above that the people in question died in the range of 32-44 years old. What retirement?
The verbal elegance of Apple and Nintendo
Your existing switches still work assuming you just want to turn the lights off. Of course then you have to flick the switch back on before they can be controlled by the app again.

And what about turning the lights back on when they were shut off with the app? Perhaps cycling the switch will make them come back on.
This has been happening for at least a few months.
Why not using /bin/sh? Didn't saw a bash specific tool (except the function syntax which is easy to convert). And if you really want to use bash, please use #!/usr/bin/env bash so that it is more compatible.
Here are a few things that have worked for me.

* No soda - I found soda messed with my body chemistry quite a bit, also affecting my sleep patterns. I sleep and feel better without it.

* No caffeine after 12pm - I have most of my caffeine between 6-8 AM, with the occasional cup of coffee before lunch.

* Very little alcohol on work nights - More than two beers/one cocktail, I've found, contributes to a really poor quality sleep for me.

* Wake up between 5-6 AM, reading in bed by 9 PM (sleeping by 10 usually). Getting into a routine helps me set aside the 7-8 hours of sleep I need each night.

* Exercise - I go to a personal trainer 3x a week after work, and do cardio on the off days. This helps get me to sleep at night, since I'll usually be pretty tired after workouts.

* Eliminate stress at work - I found that for a few months, big projects at work were keeping me up at night. I had to consciously stop thinking about work in my personal time, which helped me sleep.
I would probably turn it off because I'm always dozing off on the couch with my phone going any which way. I'm sure some people make good use of it and there's plenty of iOS features that are irrelevant to me as well. But there are probably 100 more attractive things to me for the Galaxy S3 than this so I'm kind of stumped why they'd list 7 relatively different minor gesture ux and yet they fail to include major advantages like homescreen widgets and app integration (intents).
Interact and Learn from Webpages via Natural Conversation
There are a class of programming models that exploit that, and they aren't very expressive. At best, they are suitable for casual programs who need to write some code to solve very specific problems, say writing something in Excel. However, serious programming (done by full time programmers) really requires the ability to create new functions.
Unsupported and self evident assertion?

What about people with mild mental difficulties?

What about people who suffers from extreme mental difficulties?

What about someone who no longer has a concentration span due to past substance abuse?

What about someone who is still using drugs heavily?

Hows about a 5 year old kid who's brain has not yet fully developed?

Or perhaps a 15 year old kid who is in the middle of puberty and has little concentration as a result?

Or a 90 year old suffering from dementia?

Or someone suffering any level of depression?

Do all these different groups of people in society (and the many others I have not mentioned) have the same capability to learn programming (or anything else for that matter) as any other group in society?

Didn't think so.
I don't know if I agree about "never being able to learn programming," maybe with the right intense tutoring those people could.

But double-humping is easy to explain: some people embrace the mindset and problem solving approach of programming naturally, or with minor counsel; while some people simply approach their programming assignments as a bunch of solutions they have to memorize so they can replicate them on the exam. It's quite similar to the approach I've seen most engineering students take to Calculus and Physics when I was doing Engineering.

Obviously, wanting and liking to learn programming also plays a major role here, and I'd say that even within computer-related degrees many people end up avoiding programming courses, on the grounds they can still work in the field by going the IT route.
This is not medical advice. See a doctor to check for underlying illness causing insomnia.

1) Concentrate on sleep hygiene first.

(http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/insomnia/Documents/sleepdiary.pdf)

(http://www.cks.nhs.uk/insomnia/management/scenario_insomnia/...)

(http://www.papworthrssc.nhs.uk/sleep-services-hygiene.php)

You'll see that routine is important. Develop a "going to bed" routine. For some people that will be having a shower at wearing particular clothing. Others will have a warm milky drink then brush their teeth. The routine is important because it 'tells' your body that it's time for sleep.

2) You might find that sleep hygiene is still not enough. You could try one of the z drugs for a week to help kick your body back into a routine.

3) If that doesn't work you can try CBT for insomnia. It's hard to find quality CBT for insomnia.
The parent isn't denying that currently there are groups of people who don't learn CS very well, it is merely saying that CS is just like every other field, in that most people can learn it, but more slowly, or need some more help to do so properly.
So if you're saying that 99% of the US population is first- or second-generation...

No one besides you is saying this.

Incidentally, race is highly predictive even holding income reasonably close to constant. For example, Asian Americans tend to have income comparable to Europeans Americans, yet their test scores tend to be considerably higher (in the same range as other Asian nations).

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-well-do-above-...

Now, you are correct that given more granular data, a better comparison could be made. Do you have more granular data?
To paraphrase Gibson, "There have always been hipsters, they just weren't very evenly distributed." I offer up Jerry Lewis, Elvis Costello, Cosmo Kramer, Steve Urkel, et al.

And I may be going out on a limb, but googling anything before the Internet was pretty tough /jk
I speak Chinese, as disclosed on my user profile here. I have been reading the official Chinese press since the end of the Cultural Revolution, just after when Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) died and while Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong) was still alive. Chinese people have aspirations for freedom just like people in most parts of the world. Quite a few years ago, I heard a comment by a Chinese journalist that if all the people of China had full access to uncensored news, the Communist Party of China regime would last only a week.

Anyway, I've seen a culturally Chinese society living under a dictatorship turn into a democracy with a free press and free and fair elections that can turn a ruling party out of power. I've lived in Taiwan both under its dictatorship (a three-year stay in the early 1980s) and as it transfered power in a free election (another three-year stay, spanning the turn of the last century). People I know personally were imprisoned for leading peaceful street demonstrations on the way to Taiwan's democratization, but despite the dictatorial regime's attempts to stop diversification of political power, the people of Taiwan eventually gained an uncensored press, multiparty elections, and complete freedom to express their opinions in speech and by voting.

The presence of Taiwan as an alternative model puts as much pressure on the P.R.C. regime as the presence of West Germany put on the "Deutsche Demokratische Republik" regime to the east. China still has huge gaps in the common people's access to information. Provision of basic primary schooling, of mass communication, and especially of telephony and travel has been so backward in China for so long that according to an official Chinese government survey,

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...

barely more than half of the population in China is even conversant in the national standard language. But word about official corruption and repression of people speaking up about corruption does spread through China by personal observation and word of mouth in dozens of dialects. That is enough to prompt change. China has gone out of its way to study how dictatorships have clung to power even in today's era of much freer flow of information, but if it desires to be economically strong and to have "soft power" influence on the world, China has no choice but to change its political system and press regulation to be more open to pluralism.
Finland does a really bad job of egalitarianism, certainly far worse than in the US.

The gap between Finnish students and immigrants, for example, is more than twice as large as the same gap in the US.

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...
Everyone can count, it is necessity, but you need a certain kind of attraction to mathematical operations to be a mathematician, even an average one. The same holds for programming. Someone who lacks the quasi OCD interest in solving problems with computer language cannot and shouldn't be a programmer. And there is nothing wrong with it.
More evidence of the superiority of Apple marketing. A very hard game to competitors to match without looking like copycats. I am pleased though to offer my services to any company looking to leapfrog Apple. Call me.
I mostly agree with your message (intent) but you're using the wrong word, DRM, when you in fact meant Intellectual Property (IP).
Ask HN: What happens to my legal digital media when I die?
I've bought ebooks from Amazon. I've bought MP3 files from various places. I've bought videos from various places.

With CDs and DVDs and Bluray and dead-tree books I can just leave those to people in my will.

But what about the e-versions? Can I transfer the licence to someone else? Or does all that stuff effectively die with me?
"SolarCity, where Musk is chairman of the board, is a player in the residential and commercial solar markets, with more than 28,000 customers, and is expected to go public imminently at a value of about $1.5 billion."

We're valuing crap, err FB, at $50 billion these days. Why is a company with actually something to offer to society getting valued at only $1.5bn ?