skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's so scary about the Neanderthals is not that they were bigger or stronger, but that their brain volume was bigger then ours and from the skull shape we can tell the brain was shaped just like our brains.

So they might have been smarter.

But here's where it gets interesting they lived in small isolated groups and didn't invent the fancy tools and jewels humans did.

However once they saw them, they could reproduce them exactly.

That's what we know form archeology.

Now the question is, were they dumber then us, or was it just our greater population densities that make us seem more creative in the archeological context?

And if they were not less intelligent then us, why did they go extinct?

If human cloning becomes routine we could perhaps resurrect the neanderthal, what if they turn out to be just as smart as us?
It's already cool to me as a potential non-worthless editor in a CMS for quick fixes (sometimes I have to write complex JS that lives in a CMS, and I inevitably end up with a copy-paste-save-refresh cycle that gets tedious once I need emacs).
Thanks for downgrading me! I didn't knew about CouchDB! I'm stupid!
This might be a better visualisation.
http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/5507/picture39fl7.png

Note:I used horizontal bars instead of vertical as I suggested in my other comment to remove the redundant labeling.
There's always bound to be something you think needs to be on these kinds of lists. Personally, I'm disappointed there are no Alejandro Jodorowsky films on the list. I certainly think those qualify.
Bike!
HN, wtf. Stallman is many things but would never, ever be "totalitarian/communist." Who is voting this troll up? Come on, this is supposed to be a hacker site.

He even talks about regime change in Cuba to open up.
Quality Follows Popularity
P2P Researchers Fear BitTorrent Meltdown
Seems like a language-agnostic heroku. Hmm, gotta wonder which would have been the most appealing.
He mentions both of them:

(Bruce Willis was balding the whole time?!)
I love The Matrix. But

However, I think both movies where actually vary straightforward. I suspect they where popular in large part because they felt like mind bending movies, but most people never felt lost. The Usual Suspects is another great example of this. "Wait that was BS?"
Tokyo Cabinet DB: Beyond Key-Value Store
That's a good point on both the Matrix and The Sixth Sense, but more so on The Matrix. I think the first one was very well done and while not an entirely original idea, it bent your mind just enough. Sadly, for me anyway, they ruined the whole thing with the sequels.
Good point - business issues and quality of life are not mutually exclusive.

But for me, I interpreted the statement as "When business issues and quality of life issues are in conflict and you have to choose one over the other, I choose quality of life issues". Maybe I misread.
An illustration of this point is that in the UK the regulations for electricians, and building contractors in general, actually promotes small companies. They're usually either a two-man team or a father-son op. In fact the largest I ever saw was a three man team, which was a two-man team with one of their sons.

The point is, is that the regulations actually keep the income evenly disbursed. Essentially everyone is earning between £60,000 and £100,000 a year depending on what you do and how well you do it. However, when you work for a company (companies seem to exclusively do large businesses like factories and the few that don't have very bad reps) you earn much less, some get paid between £40,000 and £60,000. You, of course, get you tools paid for but they're a one time purchase, I mean our most expensive piece of equipment was a £1,000 tester and it has a 10 year warranty on it, so there is literally no incentive to go with one of those companies.

The companies actually run a scam, they hire people who aren't certified electricians, which is perfectly acceptable and legal. However they'll never train them to be certified, they just use already-certified electricians to certify everyone's work is done correctly. Again this is unfair on the certified electricians because if anyone screws up and he doesn't catch it, he's liable and that can include a prison sentence if someone dies from shoddy work.

My point is that regulation can be used in many ways. Big business takes over the regulators, but when used effectively a regulator can actually promote smaller business and stop economic pyramid schemes forming (AKA big business, people work for minimum wage so that the people at the top can earn over a million a year).

The fact that software isn't regulated is a good thing right now. There's lots of competition and there's self-regulation going on. There's lots of virus' out there, but if you stick to the sites certified by Microsoft and don't go on any sites that google suggests may be harmful to your computer, then you're largely to be fine. However, if companies like Google and Microsoft weren't providing some form of assistance to users, then I believe the software industry would need regulation, which would probably kill millions of blogs and social websites.
Nah. They just slope over to http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4382165/For_Dummies_Ebooks_c... and stuff themselves like a basking shark feeding on krill.
This is bs. The first version was leaked and it was wrong, but it wasn't released properly.

Cringely is making this story bigger than it was.
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2009/01/22/51558/that-jp-mor...

"Apparently, the version we got was a “draft”. Oops."

s/Wall St. can't count/Cringely can't research like a decent blogger/
All of this JavaScript would be great to discuss at http://www.jsconf2009.com Mozilla Labs is releasing some amazing things these days with Ubiquity and Bespin. There is also a lot of there big JavaScript things going on in mobile (PhoneGap), server (ServerJS Group), and Desktop (Appcelerator). Come to JSConf and learn about all of them!
doesn't the U.S. sovereignty extend to something like 100 miles into the ocean?

And if you are going to float in an ocean...why U.S? Why not float in the middle of Mediterranean?
Hmmmm..... Maybe a not so horrible bad answer is as good as we can do.

I like the notion that productivity should be considered as rate of delivery of value. Unfortunately, this gets into the sticky questions of value to whom and for what purpose. An even more sticky question would be how to measure it if you can answer the first two questions.

On the "somewhat higher up" questions. Are we to hold the programmer responsible for such things as "conversion rates" which may be more impacted by advertising, quality of web site, and momentary media buzz than by anything the programmer did? If so, how is this measuring the productivity of the programmer. Its difficult to make the connection. That is unless you are the whole team from start to finish.

Perhaps the best we can do is compare present and past "productivity" to see what has improved and what has not. If there is a net improvement, then "productivity" has increased else not. Trying to put a number on it beyond plus or minus may be a hopeless dream.

Still, for something that seems to be driving the world's economy, a hopeless dream is not very satisfactory.
Getting (And Staying) Motivated to Code
why can't someone do the same to Kindle that they did to iPhone? Codebreak it, so it can play any non-Amazon stuff.

Or better yet, just have it read HTML/pdf/.lit stuff, so that you can get the eBooks for free and read them on there?
Personally I love working from home though I will admit there are days when the kids won't stop screaming and the dog is trying to hump anything it can get it's paws on and THOSE days I would give anything to just hide lol... But as frustrating as those days are... I still love working from home esp since it allows both me & my husband to be home with our children...

Christina...

p.s. I would really appreciate if anyone would be willing to look at my site I just finished designing last night and would love to hear any thoughts, opinions or suggestions...
$250K Microsoft bounty to catch worm creator
Anybody here seen Waking Life? I loved it!
Why would you want to delete your account if you like it?
Strategy:

1. Somebody has an idea that might be good.

2. Do something stupid. Give it the same name as #1.

3. When #2 fails because it was stupid, say that #1 is now a failure.

4. Continue doing #2, because if you don't try any new ideas, the status quo is what you get.
A massive and obvious and smug logical fallacy. Which is annoying.
Very impressive. Though I suggest you try it with Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 or Webkit Nightly (Firefox 3 works, but it's slow for large files).

I tried to create browser-based high-performance text manipulation application myself, but I never imagined to use Canvas.

For performance I used "contentEditable" DOM attribute [1] to piggyback on browser's native code. According to my unscientific subjective tests it's faster than Bespin's approach - a bit faster on FF3.1B2, a lot faster on FF3. Plus it works also on Explorer and Chrome (a kind of, it's buggy and freezes on large files).

Anyway, finally I had to switch to desktop application as the other parts of JavaScript/DOM/browser were not fast enough and also working with local files from JavaScript was very painful.

Still, after creating basically the same application twice, once in a browser and once as a desktop app, I can vouch for the bright future of fully browser based applications, once the performance would get there.

Going back from HTML+CSS+JavaScript to fiddling with widgets felt like going back from Python to C++ (and mind you, I fiddled with widgets in Python). You get the speed, but you pay the price elsewhere (my code more than doubled and user interface got a lot uglier).

Good luck to Mozilla/Opera/WebKit/Chrome folks, browsers as a platform are becoming awesome.

[1] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/2007-10-26/multipage/se...
p.s. to those of you complaining about the lack of human interaction... why not take your work to the streets? or fleamarkets? or the park? thats what I do when I need human interaction other than 3 boys under the age of 7 and a hubby who acts like a 4th kid lol
As I started reading the article my very first thought went to Lotus Notes (never developed in it, but had friends that did). I agree with you, that they are complementary models is probably a better approach to the comparison.
I sure hope that this isn't a one time event. If this gets popular, raising funding will get easier for all of us.
Why can't it be both? :)
unfortunately given history, patenting an idea doesn't mean an intention to implement the idea
Terabit Ethernet becomes a photonic possibility
Mind Game is a good one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_Game_(film)
SEO Traffic Spider | Press Release | Manual Press Release Packages 
One of the most cost effective ways to market your website once it is created is publishing a press release as this will help you to be in the news and limelight and also draw the attention of people and media at the same time.
Here are some other dataset aggregators:

http://theinfo.org/
http://infochimps.org/datasets
http://ckan.org [Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network]
http://www.trustlet.org/wiki/Repositories_of_datasets
http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/data-for-data-mining/
http://www.quantlet.org/mdbase/
http://datamob.org/
http://freebase.com/
http://infochimp.info/ics/data/ripd/www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/netdata/
http://infochimp.info/ics/data/fixd/
http://infochimp.info/ics/data/pkgd/
http://infochimp.info/ics/data/rawd/
http://www.archive-it.org/public/all_collections
Pirate Bay trial starts Monday; pirate bus en route
IDE in the cloud: Mozilla Labs' browser-based IDE prototype
Peter, any chance you could organize them, or tag them in some way? Otherwise, there is no way to know what any data set is until you click the link.
Easy polarization/Hard polarization
I think the effects of a few more people investing are probably minimal compared to N * 100 billion dollar stimulus package kinds of things, GM going into bankruptcy, etc... (Whether you view the effects of that as positive or negative).

That doesn't mean it won't lead to good things, I'm just skeptical of a smallish conference in terms of "saving the economy". I don't think that's really it's purpose in any case.
Hey Entrepreneurs: Want Some VC Pitching Practice?
does anyone feel like the App Engine isn't even trying to compete with AWS? They are just chugging along at their own pace, while AWS is leaving them in the dust
This is a pain to type in (which is why you shouldn't use PHP), but it's not at all hard to read.
> I remember reading about someone who described how he'd walk into airport book stores, lazily browse through their books, and then remotely download his favorites onto his kindle; that's powerful.

Instant gratification works both ways. If I really need a book on something, I will go the local book superstore, browse through them and read the reviews on Amazon.com while there and buy (price insensitive) the one that seems the best. Pre-iPhone, I would read the reviews on Amazon.com and then call around to hold it.
$200k won't buy you a shack in San Jose., which is probably one of the cheaper areas to live in the Silicon Valley.

But it's getting close. :)
Firefox 3 on Ubuntu: really slow and with a bug - can't scroll down when reached a particular line, scrolling seems to be broken.
Google's First Real Threat? Twitter.
> This does not factor in moving costs.

This shouldn't be over looked. My wife and I have moved twice and both times we had to cull our "library" in an attempt to save space and weight.

Figuring an average moving cost of 60 cents per pound and 1 pound per book, moving costs for books can add up very quickly. And forget about it if your moving across an ocean. With e-books this cost is negligible.
Don't forget the Dunning-Kruger effect. Mediocre programmers may feel productive when they get some nominal feature working, while great programmers may feel unproductive even though they've accomplished a lot.
Scanning this thread, everyone is looking at this question on a personal, introspective level. If you really want to know if you are productive, look outside yourself. Ask your employer. Or your colleagues.

Pointy-haired bosses notwithstanding, your employer has a stake in your productivity, and in my experience, they typically have a pretty good idea of who is productive and who is not.
I think he just forgot "unamerican"
Because it didn't work for me, I already have an existing way of doing this and I hate leaving stray accounts littered across the web.
There's numerous potential reasons why they went extinct. The main one is that they merely couldn't adapt fast enough after the ice ages passed and were out-competed for food, however it might have been that humans basically killed the Neanderthals through the spread of farming.

Homo Sapiens Sapiens (us) are keen users of fire throughout history, in fact we made the world we chose to live in. Through purposeful setting of forest fires we converted forest to savanna, which we could then use for farming and pasture.

The interesting thing though is that the first (fossil recorded) domestication of dogs happened in 30,000 BC in Belgium, and likely this behavior had been going on for some time before a dog conveniently died in a way to be fossilized and not used for food. Carbon dating suggests Neanderthals went extinct 30,000 years ago (from the latest remains, however again some will have lived longer without being fossilized), which is in fact 28,000 BC. So the question is, did Neanderthals begin the domestication of dogs? Because the next known domestication occurred around 7,000 BC again in Belgium.

So I wonder, did Neanderthals show humans how to domesticate dogs? Because throughout human history, invention spreads quickly, so why did it take almost 25,000 years for it to provably occur again in the same place?

The question of intelligence though depends on a number of factors. The human brain is about as large as you can get before signal delay gets too long (possibly a reason for Neanderthal extinction, they literally couldn't react fast enough), however the human brain has a high nerve density, which would just compound the problem if our brains were bigger. It's certainly possible that the Neanderthals were as intelligent as us, but that they simply reacted slower and when the environment started warming up and more dangerous animals started spreading back they might not have coped as readily.

An extreme example of the neurone delay is the Elephant. It's brain is massive, but they have relatively slow reactions. However their intelligence is immense for an animal, I mean it appears that they actually have the concept of revenge, which suggests an understanding of right and wrong.
> if you did it twice, it's time to start automating

Amazing how many developers, who spend all day writing code so computers can automate repetitive tasks for other people, don't think to automate their own jobs.
The text editor is impressive in its own right, but what really gets me excited is the possibility of window toolkits to start popping up. Nice responsive UI deployed though the browser - I can picture the future possibilities already :)
I think they aren't competing because they are doing different things. App Engine is a lot more narrowly focused.
Mine is bi^Better!

http://www.alejosanchez.com/projects/market-capitalization

It's unfinished but it already draws with HTML canvas.

Oh, and I did it when it this story was on ;)

I stopped at the glueing of info from Yahoo! Finance (got busy with other stuff) but it's all right there. The idea is to let you pick the stock symbol and get a live graph.
I'm hoping someone is going to post videos (if permitted).
Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit
What would you suggest they do if your browser doesn't support the things they need it to support?
If you really want a good time along the same vein, then watch "Let the right one in". BUT! You have to watch it without reading about it, or watching the preview. Just watch it without preconceptions.
I could argue that some of my books are definitely not clutter even though I don't physically open them very often. Sentimental value or 'I paid $40 for it' maybe.
How to write a spider
This will teach you how to write a simple web spider in ruby .
...though he was fired...

Are you referring about his leaving Condé Nast after they bought reddit? That seems more of a failure of their corporate structure than Aaron.

I also think that liberating government documents is not really a 'bad boy/alpha male' action (the type and quality of woman I assume (maybe) he is seeking) is seeking

I don't think this post is as serious as you take it to be... and although I don't really know him aside from his writings, I can't imagine Aaron liking a girl who doesn't appreciate his political work.
the long answer is in the classic:

http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html
Belle du Jour
Well,
Maybe Ycombinator should make a checker, that would check repeated entries, even if they are from various submitters?

So Ycombinator's hacker news system would prevent the repeteated submissions, or even would make it in the same parent node... or any kind of similar solution!!
Microsoft Going Into Owned Retail Stores; Hoping For Apple Magic
I don't see it replacing Emacs for me, at all.
The Anatomy of a Tweet: Twitter Gets a Style Guide
Another interesting example of the those who view job retention as the means to economic stimulus versus those who view job creation as the prefered means to that end.

I tend to agree with you. Funding make-work projects benefit the workers involved (and tangentially the businesses they buy from), but innovating and spawning whole new companies/industries seems like a better use of our time and effort.
I'm a bit concerned about the UI. It seems like they did their best to copy the Windows UI using custom Cocoa widgets, which is fine in its own right, but leads to some weird inconsistencies. Namely, the huge gap on the far left past the tabs.
Lies, Damn lies, and Statistics
Here's the NYT piece: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13records.html?scp=1...
I would like to suggest that showing changes in value as a square of the difference might be useful because they multiply over time.

A stock can drop of 5% that occurs 13 times is less important than a single 50% drop. 40 drops of 5% are less important than a single 90% drop. DryShips for example down ~95% from last year that's the equivalent of ~50 drips of 5%.

I suspect most people in finance understands the math, but at the instinctive level most people just don't feel it. So what's the correct way to display information like that visually? x, x log x, x^2
Is he ruining it for everyone by abusing the service?

I once requested my FBI record (I'm British). There was no file on me.

More interesting, I also asked for deceased film producer Don Simpson's file - to my surprise, he has no record.
Pre-crash, median home price is about $240K (not sure if it has fallen and by how much). Median condo price was actually higher (~$250K) because condos were generally only in more expensive metros.
"Technically you could also write a db engine that reads over HTTP, but this must be a terrible idea"

If you go to this url you can probably find some contact info to tell the NY Times people how terrible their idea is: http://code.nytimes.com/projects/dbslayer
Waking Life is a perfect example of something that sends out all the right signals for being artsy and deep to activate the GoodThink centers of your brain without having any actual substance. That movie made me want to punch the director.
Finally some reassuring news. Ever since last fall I've been wondering every two weeks: Where the hell is Chrome for Mac?
Not in the UAE/Dubai. It took a little to google up this story I read a while ago. The story of a guy who lost his job, fell behind on his loans and ended up in prison:

"She puts me in touch with Richard, a twinkly fortysomething who came to Dubai as a salesman with a multinational company. 'And then, in one month, I had a car accident, lost my job, and my marriage fell apart.'

Richard fell behind on his car payments, his bank loans, his credit cards. 'Everybody lives beyond their means here. It's all front. It's like Dubai - a totally false appearance to what it actually is.' He was charged by the police with defaulting on his loans and his passport was confiscated. 'So I couldn't get another job and I couldn't pay the debt, and I couldn't leave the country... and to cut a very long story short, I got 12 months.'

It's quite a story. He's only been out two weeks, but he's still managing just about to smile. But not even the judges are Emiratis: they're on short-stay visas like everyone else, and the only thing he had going in his favour, he says, is that he wasn't Asian. 'Tons of them are in for practically nothing: jaywalking or owing £10.'"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/05/middleeast.gende...
Microsoft Plans to Open Retail Stores
I'm pretty sure that the final polished version won't look like that.
Fun list! He's got some facts wrong (e.g. 2001 was not made as a companion piece to the novel, which came later), and he apparently never understood Jacob's Ladder (think Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge as a full-length movie). But who knew you could watch all of La Jetée (inspiration for 12 Monkeys) on Youtube?!! (Speaking of 12 Monkeys, why isn't that on the list?)
Speaking from some experience with the whole New York Times / government computer security thing (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07E5DB173FF...), it sadly doesn't make for the best pickup lines. Talking about whichever federal agency (or agencies) ended up coming after you might make for a good story once you already have a date, though.

Either way, what's really important is that Congress reforms 18 USC 1030 to make it safe for people who know something about computer security to report problems without the threat of being investigated by the FBI, USAO, etc.