skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Stating cooking "underpins all other [human evolutionary changes]" sounds interesting if corroborated. I perused the web for some more information on Richard Wrangham's research. Wikipedia provided this:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=cooking-up-bigger-brains

http://artsci.wustl.edu/~hpontzer/Courses/Wrangham&Conkl...

...and the evidence points against him. Fire doesn't appear to have been controlled until far after Wangham assests. Not only, but:

The mainstream view among anthropologists is that the increase in human brain-size was due to a shift away from the consumption of nuts and berries to the consumption of meat.

makes more sense. The transition from primitive food sources (nuts, berries -- chimp food now) may have catalyzed the transition to a regular high-calorie diet. Take this article with a juicy fliet mignon, topped with a generous helping of salt.
"he thinks that cooking and other forms of preparing food are humanity’s “killer app"

Am I the only one that thought killer app was only used in reference to web/technology platforms :)
This is called an analogy.
I know. I just found the analogy interesting, since I didn't think the killer app term was mainstream.
it is never completely safe to use software update on a hackintosh. certain files have been hacked to make it work. what if apple sends down a newer version of one of those files, undoing your hacks?
Please consider revising your comment.
The stupidest things I’ve done in my programming job
Recorder is an important part of load testing, but it sounds even more useful for functional regression testing. Record common or expensive behaviors for load testing. Record obscure or complicated behaviors so that loadimpact can tell you when you accidentally broke something.
The only solution is to start clicking on submissions with boring titles like "iPhone app developer makes money, pays bills".
Something about this Cringely post leaves me rather nauseous.

Oh, the drama building up over Bob's "grafs"... and thanks to all the "insider info" about Steve's personal chat status... leading into the gradual decay (as Bob paints it) of Steve's ability to use his computer.

And then it's followed by Bob's boilerplate "listen to this post in Bob's sexy, sexy voice."

With friends like this, anyone would do well to become a "control freak."
Thanks for coming back after reading Death of Modularity to examine the matter further. I've certainly heard such good things about (properly used) Smalltalk, but while many people compare Ruby to Smalltalk (and Ruby is the language I've used most, lately) I haven't really experienced these Smalltalk systems themselves, so I tend to refrain from saying too much bout Smalltalk (lest I make an ass of myself).
I hate that this is the fourth or fifth time we've had a story about the guy on the front page of HN. The first one was nice, all the others are pretty much differently worded copies of the first. (Wish I had more karma so I could downvote stuff like this. -ed. Nevermind.)
Or for people to start writing more "How I wrote a successful iPhone app that doesn't fart, belch, or jiggle"
More karma wouldn't give the ability to downvote a story, which is by design. If you want things like this off the frontpage, help push quality to it.

After reaching a certain level you get the ability to flag stories but its one of those Peter Parker things, not to be trifled with just because the story isn't quite your favorite of the day.
You did a very good job of paraphrasing much of what I said. I wonder why you phrased it as though you disagreed with me.
I probably should have said "Avoid Java" in there somewhere, too.
Ah, I guess I was wrong... thanks for correcting me. (But it does give the ability to downvote other people's comments, no? Or am I going crazy... ?)
Gee, it would be nice if this little essay had a date. Yeah, a bit off topic, but it always bothers me when there is some article, blog entry, or whatever and there is no date so I can put the author's words in a temporal context.
Flex vs. Silverlight: The Elephant in the Room
I purged my dell laptop of xp and installed ubuntu over it. Love everything about it except the loss of wireless. It even gave me 9 extra gigs on my hard disk, 6 more than the advertised disk space!

If the linux community could step it up on the driver front for wireless cards it would be a beautiful thing.
Steve came online each day and remained there for hours and hours as you’d expect a Silicon Valley mogul to do

I'd expect a Silicon Valley mogul to be on iChat very rarely.
Are you talking specifically desktop apps? - As it would seem to me an App Server provides quite a bit of what you are talking about.
Yes but the question is did it increase your productivity? If so, then why do you think it did?
Stimulus Spend Data Coming via Feeds
I'm tired of articles and blog posts like that. They give a strawman-ish definition of (say) "expert" and then claim that "experts don't exist" or "we don't need experts".
Godaddy works fine for domains.

I also used them for hosting for the 18 months of my business, on a rinky-dink $4 a month shared hosting Linux account. It looks like its $5 now. No major complaints over that period, although for 10 days there were sporadic issues with an EXE getting corrupted on disk.

I'd still be there if I hadn't caught Rails fever, which is not that feasible on a shared host (even if you can do it, the other people on your server can't, and you'll probably suffer for it). If you also catch Rails fever, run, do not walk, towards getting a VPS -- I recommend Slicehost.
Ok, great to hear that.
Maybe Steve is on a walkabout, traveling the country by foot, meditating.
Ok. Angels _rarely_ take a board seat. If they're taking one, it's not really an angel deal.

(I'm speaking now from both having taken angel investment -- and been one.)

You really shouldn't be giving up that much control in the first go, anyway.
Anyone else amazed at all the single-monitor set ups?

When I'm doing any web coding, I go crazy if I have to constantly switch between code and browser(s).

As cheap as monitors are these days, I'm amazed anyone still programs on just one.
You're right.

The last comment was too harsh. If I still had editing capabilities, I'd revise it.

Oddly enough, I'm guilty of the very point I was trying to make.

Thanks for catching it. Apologies to the group for my poor taste.
Additionally, the Air uses a Core 2 Duo, which is faster, clock-for-clock than the Atom.
Showing Your Startup Mo’
If that's the kind of discussion you're looking for, you might be happier on some other site.
> Ubuntu aims to keep free software at the forefront of cloud computing by embracing the API's of Amazon EC2

cold.

> The Eucalyptus project, from UCSB, enables you to create an EC2-style cloud in your own data center, on your own hardware.

warm

> The desktop will have a designer's fingerprints all over it - we're now beginning the serious push to a new look. Brown has served us well but the Koala is considering other options.

hot!
Programmers and Sadomasochism
Guess you didn't read to the end:

"Note: This is an appendix to 'Computer Hacking and Ethics,' a position paper I wrote for the ACM Select Panel on Hacking in 1985."
Actually, I think you'd be surprised how often this happens:

1. New episode of favorite show airs

2. Forget to record.

3. Look on network site, not up yet.

4. Look on Hulu, not there either.

5. Pirate Bay and done.
Scaling Up: Baby Steps (a.k.a. Asking The Right Questions)
Great piece! I know this is not the article is meant to say, but envy is inevitable. But using that envy as a drive may not be a bad thing.
The Programmer's Paradox: Building in Quality
The quote in the article should continue on because the feeds are not strictly required is the way it reads to me from the PDF (the article states they are required).

"If an agency is immediately unable to publish feeds, the agency should post each near term information flow (major communications, formula block grant allocations, weekly reports) to a URL directory convention suggested below"

(something that is likely scrapable into a feed by someone else)

But anyhow, open data: word up.
Ubuntu is really moving ahead now. It is a far superiour system compared to osx. osx has packaged up 2 year old stuff, and ubuntu is within 0 months to 6 month old wares.

Apple missed out on netbooks -- where ubuntu is ahead again. Looks like they'll hop onto cloud computing before Apple too.

Ubuntu is just much more agile, compared to Apple... which seems to be a bit stagnant.
When Consumers Cut Back -  A Lesson From Japan
With the irony, sadly, that it was not that easy to use and sacrificed functionality for "beauty" which was not even skin-deep.

Damn amateurs.
what a great blog, nothing will make them lust after you more then swatting their week attempts back, human nature meets capitalism.
Why shouldn't resolutions be as high as the technology allows? Every OS that I know of offers scalable fonts, and a higher resolution allows for nice smooth fonts without hacks like anti-aliasing and cleartype. My 13.1" laptop has a resolution of 1600x900, my 4" Nokia 770 has a resolution of 800x480, and my cell phone's 3" display is 480x320. I don't think anybody's complaining about not being able to see their phones or tablets, and I certainly have no trouble using my laptop.

In what way does a higher resolution hurt anything?
I gave this a try and the change in color temperature gave me a splitting headache in approximately 3.2 seconds... until I finally managed to stare at the monitor long enough to kill the app.... a splitting headache that has remained with me all night long. And sadly, no, that's not an exaggeration in the least. :(
He mentions someone from the 1300s he considers a hacker. I think he was referring to the term Hack.
High Performance Php My Sql Scaling Techniques
Yes yes, hackers are just "young and immature", and just need to grow into "moral" adults.

The hacker aesthetic that he's talking about includes challenging preconceived notions. The result might be at odds with what is currently thought of as ethical, but it's not precluded from having ethics.

Stallman most certainly has an ethical basis. Torvalds is the free software pragmatist.
I would say so because its very portable. You are not stuck at one place. Especially, everything can be wireless now it's very easy to work anywhere else as long as you have your core system.
Andreessen in realtime
OS X is quite clearly inferior to your average Linux distro.

Fixed that for you.
we need viable alternatives, simply for the fact that without competition Google would have no reason to innovate.
While the author does bring up a good point, I feel that he just skims the surface of the major drawbacks of a permissive parser:

1. It is hell to write a new parser for convoluted standards.

2. permissive parsers have to waste more CPU cycles trying to fix everything (admittedly this is not as big of a problem in the current day and age)

3. Weak standards leads to badly coded pages. Badly coded pages generally have bad design. Badly designed pages don't help anyone.

4. It drives the people who care crazy (Ok, maybe that's not a real reason :))

5. I'm sure there are others I can't think of.
When the entire world starts using a word ("hack") in a way that you think is wrong, at some point it is you that becomes wrong. Language works that way.
Google court ordered to remove a bunch of websites (essays/termpapers)
Good analogy but I think one aspect of VC is missed in this piece and it's the VC's connection to the rest of the world. When a company gets funded by VC, it's growth potential increases because of the VC's network and connection. When you get a mortgage, the bank doesn't introduce you to a high bidding buyer.
Share your haskell experience (reddit.haskell)
Add to the top of it a properly installed Radeon videocard and you get 30 hours in total.
But where are all the dishes?

Seriously these are way too clean :)
What Problem Do You Solve?
Start Up the Risk-Takers
I think a lot of the items listed can be solved by implementing existing open source solution. I've learned my lessons too.
Fast Iteration versus Elegant Design
Because most web site designers assume 96DPI and set font sizes in pixels?

Guys with 15" 1680x1050 laptops, can you tell me if you're comfortable reading dpreview.com with default font settings?

Every OS that I know of offers scalable fonts

There are more to it than just scalable fonts. Windows is essentially hardwired to 96dpi, only fonts scale, everything else does not: there are virtually no vector graphics involved in traditional Win32 UI API, even icons are fixed bitmaps: 16x16, 32x32, 48x48 or 64x64 pixels. They have some logical units of measurement of dialog boxes, but everything else is measured in pixels, see GDI/GDI+. Switching to 120dpi on windows is downright painful: a lot of applications either start to look ugly and disproportional or sometimes even break down: UI layouts fall apart.
Thanks for sharing. This info is very helpful.
Mark Pilgrim did it better:

[1]: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/08/postels-law

[2]: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/14/thought_experime...
Personally, I love pair programming because I feel like i'm learning more faster. Some of the more experienced engineers I've worked with passes some insight and knowledge, which has been a huge benefit to me.
'BT Yahoo Mail'
I think it is a bit more pressing than that. They haven't stopped innovating, but their pricing for AdWords is maddeningly non-transparent (its an auction, except when Google decides its not an auction) and only constrained by the availability of other viable contextual ad platforms. Of which there are, essentially, none.

Anyone who disagrees with this assessment of Microsoft and Yahoo's offerings should be sentenced to actually using the things. The interfaces are garbage, the traffic is low-quality, and most damning of all there just isn't enough of it to make dealing with the other headaches a viable use of your time. Google can routinely find $600 worth of inventory for me in a month, Microsoft struggles to find $30 -- and I'm in about the most non-technical niche you could imagine using a search engine.
Microsoft wants refund from some laid off workers
Well, if you're going to play trump cards, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=447086.
How much would people be paying to spend the opening week of a tour with Metallica or their favorite band?

Gene Simmons says he can make a million dollars a night for doing a concert, but he could probably get another million for just letting some people hang out with him on tour, and I think everyone on the planet knows that Gene Simmons would do virtually anything for a penny.
Marriage Proposal Using Custom iPhone App & Scavenger Hunt
Some guy named Bryan proposed to some girl named Jeannie using a custom iPhone app that gave video clues for her to follow around San Francisco that when connected created a giant “<3″ on the map. Cool.
It is an illustration that many people only concentrate on ideas when the ideas are spoken with perky voices combined with snappy graphics. The video had less substance than any of the reasonable essays on the subject out there.
How the stimulus is being spent
Yet even though 'cool' means having a low temperature nearly everywhere, in some places it also means 'awesome' or 'snazzy'.
Marc Andreesen on Charlie Rose. Something for everyone here.
10 points for arguing that while a current well-established theory predicts phenomena correctly, it doesn't explain "why" they occur, or fails to provide a "mechanism".

this one can be legitimate. I suppose they could all be legitimate in the right context (actually being right) but this one shows up fairly often in non-crackpot science. we are still trying to find the mechanism for gravity for example.
The Dell is sold with a maximum of 1gb of RAM, but it can be upgraded to 2 gigs for OSes that aren't limited during compilation to only deal with 1gig (hint: OSX). I know this is true, because I spent thirty bucks and upgraded mine today. It works well.
I knew this was a Steve Gillmor article before I even clicked on it, just from the meaningless headline. This guy is awful.

First sentence:

"At a time when many people are saying innovation is dead along with the economy as we knew it, I can’t help but feel the hot breath of a surge in the power of the network."

1. He's got his verb tenses mixed up!
2. Surges don't have hot breath. That personification makes no sense.
3. What is "the network?"

Second graph:

"Now we’re at the threshold of the realtime moment, and history seems to be repeating itself."

What....does....this....mean?

One more:

"The numbers are adding up — 175 million Facebook users, tens of thousands of instant Twitter followers, constant texting and video chats among the teenage crowd — a semi-secret economy of interactive media that is sucking the chewy chocolate center out of the one-way broadcast sector."

Is it secret or not secret? There's no such thing as semi-secret.

What is an economy of interactive media? That also makes no sense.

And how does a "one-way broadcast sector" have a "chewy chocolate center?" If he's going to compare the broadcast sector to a candy bar, can't he at least carry out the comparison in full?
don't jump to conclusions then follow that conclusion with more jumps until you have a whole article that precariously hinges on your suspect notions...
Honestly, I suspect that Steve Gillmor writes all of his articles high. I don't mean that in a derogatory sense, I mean it in a literal sense.
File Downloads Done Right
I just started a related experiment: I disabled SMS on my phone. We'll see what happens.
Been lurking HN for awhile, and I just had to up this because I thought I was the only one.

Steve Gillmor has no business writing about anything.
Why You Should Invest in Pamp Suisse Gold Bars
Both the linked article and the sci-am article show that this is hardly a settled matter either way, and that Wrangham's thesis isn't unreasonable.
"An interesting one this. Unless this got misprinted somewhere, they must have gone to 64-bit arithmetic to issue bills this big."

I really hope anyone handling money isn't using standard floating point numbers.
How To Build An iPhone App: A Guide
Is RezV Safe For Me To Use?
RezV is an all natural Anti-Aging formula that will help you lose weight and look younger at the same time.
The term "cracker" is doomed to never catch on. However, I don't think it's out of reach to change the meaning of hack in the public's mind. A few viral videos or some mainstream media/pop celebrity attention could quickly change the meaning of any word.
Nevermind - I'm an idiot.

I just came back to HN, and looked at there's [my god, typing "there's" feels so wrong, even though it's actually right] comment again. It was clearly satirizing the sort of inane iPhone-centric articles that get voted up.

Don't know how I missed that ...
Original paper was written in 2003.
How do you monetize a video sharing website?
Golly. That took six commands, history unwinding, a rebase, and a few obscure flags. I'm beginning to see your point...how in the world would the lowly subversion user surmount such a catastrophically complicated conundrum without the raw power of git to save him?

Hmm....

svn copy ./my_code ./my_new_feature; cd ./my_new_feature

...hack hack hack...

(user interrupts! a bug! oh noes! must fix!)

cd ../my_code

...fix fix fix...

svn commit -m "fixed a bug! i rock!"

cd ../my_new_feature; svn merge -c HEAD ../my_code

...hack hack hack...

Oh well. Guess it wasn't that hard, after all. Nevermind.
Join the Google group http://groups.google.com/group/vancouver-startup-meetup
Lets face it, its always best to accept poor formats. If you write the program to handle it and clean it then your fine. If one program before it has a bug and forgets a quotations then instead of your whole system failing and you needing to go through a long process of testing debugging documenting releasing you save everyone time and money.
Windows iPhone Simulator
Is it much of an improvement over multiple desktops? I hear leopard has them now.
Language may work that way, but RMS is not likely to concede the point. Thus his continuing battle over "GNU/Linux". He's a principled man, perhaps to a fault.
The Greasemonkey extension for Firefox with the 'IMDB Pirated Version' script is great, you go to IMDB read about a movie and the script puts a link at the top of the page to any website with a torrent of the movie.
Video: The credit crisis simply explained
so sick of seeing "don't use apache for static files".

apache is more than capable of saturating your outbound connection for static content. there is no point trying to do better than saturating your outbound link.

and if you use thttpd, lighttpd, etc now you have two codebases to track cracks and updates against, two configs to maintain..

for static content you use a CDN.
3Different Ways To Monetize Your Blog « Micha101’s Blog
Explain usain bolt.
Noobs engaging in advocacy. Is there anything more annoying on the internet?
I don't run an ad supported site, but am interested to know: has everyone seen a reduction in advertising dollars?
I spent 4 hours troubleshooting my neighbours computer (it's full of spyware). We basically got no-where with it in that time.

The task of getting Windows to run right is not trivial.
Right. I'm of the opinion that human evolution was influenced by a combination of these two factors, in addition to many others. However, given the evidence, I do not think that cooking is the preeminent contributor to cognitive/human/metabolic development.
What modern OS doesn't support ~3.5gb ram at minimum? Or have a 64bit version of it for that matter.
How do you disable SMS? I've wanted to do this for a while.
Oscar Halo: Academy Awards and the Matthew Effect
I'm currently using T-mobile and was able to disable SMS from my account settings on the T-mobile website (My account -> Change services).

I'd bet there's a similar feature from other carriers, mostly for parents to limit their kids' phones...
The CDS were underwritten by other large financial institutions for relatively cheap premiums. These institutions thought that "safe" assets will never go out of money so the insured event will never occur.

CDS is the reason AIG went bust. It gets trickier, they did not go busting having to make make payments for the CDSes that they had written but the likelihood of them having to pay increased in light of increased defaults, so the rating agencies cut the rating of AIG. Now, whenever CDS or similar derivatives are written they are done looking at the ratings of the parties involved and with caveats that any fall in ratings would translate into the parties making additional margin payments (money to safeguard against parties defaulting); getting back to the AIG story, when the ratings fell, they were obligated to pay additional margin money to the tune of billions.. which they did not have.

A small facet of the big big story.
As with most things I read on the net now, I consider it internet gossip until there is confirmation from someone who is an actual authority on the matter.

For all we know (assuming the story is true), Steve has just unplugged to take some time to recover.

I know first hand how quickly internet gossip can get out of hand.

Last year I wrote a blatantly untrue story on a blog I ran during October - it was a message directed at MTV employees who I knew read the blog on an almost hourly basis (I worked this out from grepping the logs and cross referencing that with MTVNE ip ranges).

Within less than a day, this blog post had gone from rumour

http://www.bestactever.com/2008/10/28/rick-to-perform-at-ema...

To being reported on an MTV owned blog

http://www.bestweekever.tv/2008/10/28/while-you-were-changin...

To frontpage news on both Yahoo UK and cnet (I only have a screenshot of the Yahoo site) and it was the top story on Yahoo's site for more than 16 hours.

http://files.marklancaster.org/images/yahoo-page.jpg

Moral of the story - don't believe everything you read on the net.