skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe wolves could have started the domestication process. I mean wolf pups have similar (but not identical) behaviors to dogs and any abandoned or orphaned wolf pups would easily become attached to a human as the alpha. Actually, humans are pretty well suited to the alpha role, due to the fact that in wolves the leader is generally the best at leading (not necessarily the strongest or fastest, just like in humans) and the alpha always gives out the food. Early human societies would have likely had the similar behaviors as alpha wolves.

Neanderthals may have had a stronger alpha than human societies do. It's likely never going to be provable unless we clone a ton of Neanderthals and dump them on a small island, but if Neanderthals had a more leader dominant pack, similar to what Silverback Gorillas have, then this would have made perfect pack-leaders for orphaned wolf pups. However, from what I've heard is that the process was only ever started, IE wolves were found to live within human populations with signs of domestication (likely curious docile ones), but it was never completed meaning they're unsure if we bred the docile wolves until around 7000 BC.

The one thing I've always wondered is if Neanderthals simply grasped the beginning of concepts. They adopted tools they never invented, but learnt to make. They possibly began the domestication process, but never completed it. They obviously understood how to make clothes that no other species of hominid ever did, because they lived in the UK and some of their sites are behind the glacial lines for most of the period they were in Europe, so they obviously lived close to the glaciers to establish settlements as the glacier retreated. However, they never appeared to advance far on any of these, whether this is merely a symptom of technological development (IE since humans began it's been on exponential growth, however in the beginning things were on the order of 10,000 years apart) or if it's the limit of the Neanderthals brain structure. A lack in neural connectivity may have inhibited creativity and original ideas.
true, i think click-through rate increases as quality of tweets increases and also i think frequency of tweets matter a lot.

ps: I like your books :)
Philip Greenspun attends the American Securitization Forum in Las Vegas
COM are the best domains, so I ignored .NET, .ORG, etc. Maybe I will try dictionaries for other languages next.
Stimulus Plan Imposes Much Tougher Limits on Exec Pay
Lynch's latest, Inland Empire... not only the biggest mindfuck I've ever seen, also includes the most scary imagery.
FoxyFemaleCelebs.Com - Female Celebrity Wallpapers & Hot Female Celebrities
You've covered most of the things I like about the two companies. I don't want to be "just" a developer long term for the sake of the work itself, but the stability of MSFT is nice (which is not to say that Amazon isn't stable). Ideally I'd like to save enough to have the ability to do less stable things down the line.
Private trackers are much more protected then public in many ways:

a) Its invitation only, if users give an invitation to a leecher/bad person then they themselves get banned, this creates an incentive to screen users thoroughly. Any person could go on a public tracker and have a list of the IPs of people sharing a particular torrent

b) Finding the trackers is usually difficult

c) Private tracker admins go to great lengths to anonymize data and protect their own identities

The law enforcement guys would have to be directly involved in these communities to gain privileges and also be on the edge of technical advancements. But given the fact that there are thousands of people for each law enforcement user (maybe hundreds of thousands) its nearly impossible for them to keep up. There are many similarities to drug trafficking.
Thanks for the list.

The Machinist is up there with Memento and Vanilla Sky.
The Butterfly Effect might be in that league (directors cut only - different ending than the theatrical release).
Was that for reviewing an App, or just accepting you into the actual program?
I suppose if you just purposely leave #2 off of your list of the top 20 you could come to that conclusion.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/thepiratebay.org+mininova.o...
It is unreasonable.

Just imagine the amount of wealth that has been created in the past couple of decades by using proprietary software.

Though one could argue the same could have been done with free software, he's saying (as you paraphrase) that it's better to have no progress at all than to have progress at the cost of using proprietary.
Moreover, I understand A-series paper — especially A4 — is slowly becoming the norm in US colleges and universities, if for no other reason than making it easier for students and staff to photocopy articles from (inevitably A4-sized) journals.

Has anyone actually seen this? I can't say that I've ever seen people at any of the US universities I've been to using A4, with the exception of some Europeans preparing some paperwork to send to the EU.
I used to sell a PalmOS app for the Treo.

My app for the iPhone is much different, but I find the support to units sold ratio to be much better. It's probably something like 1% of the users need support.
We are not over the horizon. We can and should reverse the private prison trend. Putting people in prison is a hardship on society and should be. Turning prison into economic opportunity perverts the ability of society to "feel" and fix its problems.
Certainly possible, but the difference is is that regulatory capture by small biz creates an even playing field and can prevent dominance, however when big biz does it you end up with few choices and extreme difficulty.

I mean this is quite an ironic example of regulation in big business. I mean look at the Big Three in automobile manufacturing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Three_(automobile_manufactu.... Now which one did I mean?

Look at what happened in the UK, the companies were making an inferior product (not many British car enthusiasts would agree, but I've managed to have a look in a few of the old cars and motorbikes and they're shoddy. Some old British bikes had the serious problem that they'd drip oil in front of the driving wheel). What happened? Well all three became one, that one became nationalized, that one ended up getting handed between multiple companies before being renamed to the Rover brand and ultimately ended up as part of Ford. Who won out in the UK for vehicles? All the more efficient foreign ones.

What's happening in the US? Well Ford seems pretty stable despite the crisis. Chrysler says they seriously doubted they'd make it past 2009 without outside help. GM was planning to merge with Chrysler, however now GM is up shit creek without a paddle and are hoping subsidies will help them survive. If Chrysler and GM get significantly weakened, well Ford will likely buy them out. Can anyone see where this could potentially go?

I think the serious problem with big biz, is that when there's problems an entire industry can move to a different country. The only US owned car manufacturer in 10-20 years could be Tesla motors probably only because a bunch of silicone valley guys understand the importance of competition.
These people aren't going to be buying clothing either. 50 cents is your daily meal.
I use IRC channels to ask arcane mysql, asterisk, and other tech questions, on the freenode channels. It's kind of hit or miss. However, a couple of times I have found good help on the #asterisk channel, and ended up talking with someone via private message who I recommended that my customer just pay to do the work instead of me.
why the hell would the judges die with a hard-on? that doesn't even make sense.
Anytime you raise capital by selling shares of your company, you're doing so because you believe with that money you can make your existing shares worth more, in some reasonable amount of time.

With this infusion of cash they can now expand much quicker and, in turn, increase the overall value of the company. The goal when taking VC/investor money is to either raise your remaining shares' value by more than the money taken (even better: more than you would have increased it without the capital), take some cash for yourself, or some mixture of both.

It works both ways. The folks buying the shares believe that Twitter can put that money to good use, thus increasing the value of the shares they've purchased.

While it's easy to hate Twitter because their idea is so simple, yet profound, and because you personally aren't involved with them, they have a lot of options ahead of them and their growth is phenomenal.

Finally, it's easy to criticize when you're not putting your own money on the line. VC's, if they want to stay in the business, need to put their money where their mouth is. They wouldn't invest such huge amounts at a high valuations unless they thought it was worthwhile. They likely demanded details on plans for profitability, and/or know a lot more about what's going on than you (or any of us) do.
Google took quite a while to figure out how to make money too. But yeah, it's kind of silly to say Twitter is any threat.
Android Beyond the Phone (Android Meets E-Ink)
Microsoft's Unlucky Breaks
Federal obligations exceed world GDP
submit it to http://newmogul.com Fred
Is Mininova actually a tracker, or do they aggregate other trackers?
Open Source Tools for Web Developers
Samsung S850 Digital Camera
I liked the movie, however it didn't need comprehension. If I was reviewing at the time this move came out, this is what I'd likely say: I thought the plot was simplistic and prayed on a naive thoughtless audience, it didn't explore any truly remarkable metaphysical ideas that hasn't been thought by teenagers watching too much TV with poorly defined goals.

Honestly, I don't think I'll ever need to see the movie again in my life because it didn't take a single iota of thought to connect the plot elements.
If there ever was a crime that deserved a death sentence...
This is really easy to add on top of BDB, though, that's why I ask.

(As an example, we implemented KiokuDB on top of BDB: http://www.iinteractive.com/kiokudb/. We haven't added full-text search yet, but we plan to do it soon.)
The reasons you hate Donnie Darko are why it's good.
Did you "get" the part about having to let go in order to get to heaven, or nirvana or whatever you call it? I had to watch it twice to get that.
What about Canada, we officially use the metric system. Kids are taught metric, roads signs are in kilometers, temperature in Celsius, but almost no Canadian can tell your their own weight in kilograms or their height in meters!

If the US ever went all the way metric, I think they'd still end up using all their legacy measurements for decades. Certainly the US letter paper size isn't going anywhere -- everything is designed for it. The chicken and the egg are both well established.
One question though, if the Korean movie did in fact 'cause' the Virginia Tech shooting, like I've heard before (I like that IMDB plays it light), then what happens when this movie is recreated in English and thousands of emotionally unstable white kids gets a hold of this?
Good point, idk facebook? :/
"HA!" - Edna Krabappel

That was my initial thought at the headline.
Ubuntu 8.10 here with Firefox 3.06, got 238 on that benchmark:

Score: 238
Richards: 211
DeltaBlue: 309
Crypto: 246
RayTrace: 203
EarleyBoyer: 309
RegExp: 180

My Firefox is not custom-compiled. However, I am running the profile in a temp filesystem that runs in main memory (nothing gets written to disk till logout or reboot).

On Windows, where setting up a RAM filesystem isn't as practical, I get far worse performance.

I have no idea if this is the difference, but my score is 100 points lower on Windows.
Google had the significant advantage of starting when the internet was relatively small. They had fewer users and likely low bandwidth costs. Twitter doesn't have that advantage, if it takes twitter and identical amount of time to figure out how to make money as it did google, then Twitter could likely be in so much debt they go bankrupt.
Of course cows can fly. It's pigs that have a problem getting off the ground!
WordNet is actually quite good. If you're looking for some accessible NLP tools, NLTK (http://www.nltk.org/) is nice. It's written in Python, and uses WordNet in several ways.

The author of ots isn't really interested in working on it anymore. A couple of the features are deprecated, but this isn't documented.
Companies Building the "Internet of Things"
Implementing a perfectly detailed spec isn't really programming per se. It's more like merely translating or codemonkeying. I think that having significant unknowns in there is an inherent part of programming, and the actual cases that don't are either rare or ridiculously trivial.

And it's pretty hard to quantify any unknowns. Somebody said that programmers do know when they're productive. I know when I am and that's basically whenever I write anything at all that I _know_ will contribute to the functional or algorithmic completion. Merely that constitutes productivity!

That means I know that "if I keep doing this I will finish the program at some point". Writing boilerplate doesn't count. If I keep slamming getters, setters, and a like into my source file twelve hours a day it won't make the actual program ever ready. All I'm typing in are effectively prerequisites.

Boilerplate doesn't count even if it's mandatory in the language I'm using: I'm not sure if I could ever feel productive with Java eventhough I know I would really, really have to write a hundred setters/getters in order to finish. The logical step that would make me productive on my own scale would be to scoop power from a better language.
Thinking biases are uncorrelated with IQ [pdf]
Europe’s Recession Deeper Than Expected
Firefox appeared at a great time in the browser wars, but it has shown its age. Its UI paradigm (cross-platform XUL) gives it a disadvantage in speed and size for individual platforms, which is unfortunate. It seems like FF 3.1 will show marked improvement, though.
Sensors Help Keep the Elderly at Home
They're taking equity financing, not debt. Equity doesn't have to be paid back (well, presumably the investors want dividends or an exit, but they can't force the company into bankruptcy if they don't get it).

If you figure 33 employees @ $200K/year, they're only burning $6-7M/year. With $55M in cash, that's like an 8 year runway. Granted, they're not going to stay at their current size forever, but they hopefully won't stay at their current (lack of) revenue forever either.
I googled without luck, but I remember reading a study awhile ago that demonstrated that Imperial is easier for a human to estimate. Of the the experiments was asking for people familiar in each to guess the length of some objects. The people who gave an answer in feet and inches were more accurate than people using centimeters.

They postulated that it was because the values in the Imperial system "evolved", and are they way they are because of their convenience for measuring objects in a human scale. Eg, when eyeballing something hand-sized, its easier to pick out a few inches than it is dozens of centimeters.

I'll post a link to that article if I can find it.
Drug Erases Fearful Memories
I was slow warming to twitter, but really I've found that there's a pretty huge overlap between my LinkedIn contacts and my Twitter followers. It's largely my online-geek-entrepreneur persona and it's a nice way of letting other folks in the world keep tabs on what stuff we've got coming down the pipe and doing the same for other startups / geeks.

Available in full flavor and low fat:

http://twitter.com/scotchi

http://twitter.com/directededge
French top-model LaetitiaCasta
Free site with streaming videos of French top-model LaetitiaCastaFree site with streaming videos of French top-model LaetitiaCasta
Neat. Not mentioned in the wiki, but there is some support for bash completion as well (I was going to post a feature request...)

http://github.com/joelthelion/autojump/commit/ff5c9780791c75...
Scott Polakoff, from the Office of Thrift Supervision, said “what we need to do is reduce unemployment and raise housing prices.”

What? Raise even more? The cost of housing is still way to high.

Basically all major attractive US cities are closed shut for first time home buyers. $400K and up for anything you'd like to live in. And what's an average starting salary after 4-year degree? $40K? $45K?
The base of ten is the most natural one (if I remember well, we all have about 10 fingers), and it is the most important one.

Remember that math is only of use if it can be applied to real world problems.
Other bases than 10 are only interesting for computing machines, but even there the result have to be human readable (again base 10), otherwise nobody would be able to understand.

I see the base 10 as the only really important base to us humans (machines may have different preferences...).
Fast ballpark conversion that's easy to do in your head that works for most outdoor temperatures -- F -> C: subtract 30, divide by 2
On reflection (too late to edit it), that makes it sound like I'm leaning towards MSFT. I guess maybe I am. But I really admire the energy and efficiency of Amazon, as well as the innovation. I can't imagine MSFT ever launching something like Mechanical Turk, or any of the AWS stuff...I know they launched some me too stuff after Amazon, but that's not the same as being the first to do it.
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-us&... - not very hard to find. Or get into according to the top hit.
If there are two programmers and they both produce exactly the same output, but the differences are as follows:

The first programmer has spent a lot more time in doing it (like 5x the second programmer) and carefully verified each line to make sure the code and algorithm are correct both conceptually and in practice, and tested that the code won't fail in any of the imaginable corner cases.

The second programmer wrote it over the weekend, didn't test much else but merely cross-checked the code with a few working test cases similar to what the program will be used with for starters. He maybe followed his intuition to guide how to write or let his creative flow dictate the details of the program but he really hasn't had time to verify why.

There seems to be no clear notion of which programmer was more productive. It all depends on what perspective the project is viewed. On the other hand, I believe there's always some absolute value underneath and productivity isn't entirely an subjective property.

(Mandatory car analogy: If you want a Trabant and I sell you a Mercedes-Benz for the price of a Trabant and you still treat the car like a Trabant, the Mercedes is still better built regardless of how you extract value out of it.)

When the project was deployed, both programs worked correctly as they are similar. The cost per line/token of the first programmer is five times the cost of the second programmer. On the other hand, had the second programmer undergone the same rigorous verification it would have taken 2x the time of the first programmer.

Apparently the first programmer's code has a lot more value simply in being well-thought, and the programmer knows exactly why he has arrived in the solutions he wrote in the code. If the code broke the programmers would be on very different levels with regard to how to start debugging. On the other hand, the second programmer produced the same program in 1/5th of the time which may greatly please the management. However, the second programmer might easily become a grand failure in the next project as in this project he already reached the same solution if not by accident then at least by luck. Both programmers produced the same comments as they wrote it mainly for the future maintainers, as usual, instead of as a record of the whole mental process they experienced.
Happy Co-Valentine’s Day
Twitter Files for an IPO
Imperial units also tend towards being more division oriented, for instance a foot divides cleanly into halves, thirds or quarters.

A gallon divides into 4 quarts which divide into two pints, which divide into two cups.

That same series would be (starting from 4 liters), 4l, 1l, 0.5l, 125 ml, 62.5 ml.
So let me get this straight: to be valued in a startup you have to actually do the coding or design? There's a lot to be said for the value of vision and passion. They are probably the only two things you can't hire.
It's been said before: Microsoft's Apple (or Google) envy will be the end of them.

This seems like a misadventure waiting to happen. I feel like Microsoft strategy is a blunt object that they hurl at anything their competitors touch. It's almost a little painful to watch. You kind of want to lean over and whisper in Microsoft's ear, "You're too old to be wearing that."
You know that if you started off with metric, metric would feel intuitive too right? (Aza Raskin has a video where he basically says that what most people call intuitive they really mean "familiar".)
Gnutella and other protocols seemed to be pretty good at distributed searching, couldn't you just plug one of those protocols into the BitTorrent clients for distributing the torrents?
If you watch the movie with French subtitles, it says "CP Charge A4".
I don't think this fits the "mindfuck" label. It's not hard to understand, it's simply absurd.
4. Scalable. (Don’t laugh)

HAHA.
I found this interesting as the line between a reputable news source and a blog has become significantly blurred. Especially in Europe where the most read printed news sources are tabloids, it's difficult seeing something that tends to be high quality like ReadWriteWeb being shortchanged. Honestly, I've never even really thought of it as a blog; it's a tech news site run on a blogging platform.
This person wants to pay someone money to create a product. He's not forcing you to "rip off a site" or divine his intentions.

While I generally appreciate the cantankerous developer, there's no reason to go on the warpath here.
Five bankruptcies? So that's where large New England investors are putting their money.
Personal opinion coming up ...

I find this attitude an incredible strength in the hacker community, but also occasionally a real weakness. It leads to a complete dismissal of a source of information, and that, surely, can't be right - namely, the mindset and knowledge of the person making the statements. When making decisions you should use all the information available.

Yes, some information should be tagged as "hearsay" (you can't check the person's credentials) and some should be marked as "suspicious," but simply throwing it out is wrong.

When you teach or train it is critical that you know people's background so you can pitch the explanations and demonstrations at the right level. When you listen to someone, you should assess what level of confidence to place in what they say.

Work since Shannon has shown that the most efficient communication of information (as opposed to data) is achieved when the sender has an effective model of the receiver, and the receiver has an effective model of the sender.

Certainly many advances in breaking ciphers are achieved by knowing more about the source. Cryptographers know not to throw away information, even when it is suspect.

You can dismiss this, or go and research it. Does it sound interesting? Should you ignore it? Modern information theory says you shouldn't. You don't know my credentials, so you have to make that decision in a void. If I told you my credentials, would your opinion remain completely unchanged? Modern information theory says it shouldn't.

Yes, be skeptical, but use what information you have.

All of it.
What's really going on with music on Twitter?
Does anyone have ideas on things I can do with the music data on twitter?
This crap is still going on?

Also, did anyone notice that Jeff didn't bother to link to the responding blog? It may have been a mistake, but still an oversight that merits correction.
Why You Can't Buy a New Car Online