skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Europe is the battlefield of the world, and Poland is the battlefield of Europe. Old polish saying, from the time when the Russians and the Germans tended to waltz over the Poles from the east or the west, depending on the prevailing winds.

The west of Poland is doing quite well economically, the East much less so, which I think is a bigger indicator of the different voting patterns than what was german 100 years ago. Proximity to market and affluence is what it is all about.

Right now there are several strong economic zones in Poland, in the east around the capital, Warsaw, in the west around Poznan (sorry, I don't have the right characters on this keyboard to put the names in properly).

What you'll find when you are in Poland is that in the western parts of Poland the attitude and economic situation is quite comparable to the poorer parts of the countries in the west, in the eastern part of Poland the situation is much more comparable to Poland as it used to be before the collapse of the sovblock. It certainly is changing though, every time I'm back there there is another stretch of highway that has become operational, some noticable improvement in the average quality of the cars or the new construction that has been done.

I've been a regular visitor to Poland since '85 and it still is one of the most fascinating countries in Europe to me, and it has some of the nicest people as well.

Politics in Poland are a minefield, even today. The turnover years left Poland as one of the icebreakers of the collapse of the USSR over its satellite states with a confusing lead and no real good plan on how to progress, which led to some lost time. It will take another decade or two at a minimum before the last of the aftershocks from that transition have faded.

Going outside the major population centers in the east of the country (say north of Bialestok) is quite an eye opener, it is quite shocking to see the babushkas walking by the side of the road selling mushrooms they plucked in the forest to rich Germans in expensive cars. I don't think I've seen the contrast between rich and poor expressed so clearly.
Ad networks should have a standard way for me to query what my CPM was for yesterday, so that I can make an intelligent decision about which ads to show tomorrow. Of course that might not be wise for them to provide...
How hard would it be to implement a Clojure++ that is not dependent on the JVM and the Java class libraries, but emulates a JVM when necessary to run legacy code?
Is the keyboard really necessary? I would probably prefer to have bigger screen on its place.
I think we're talking past each other. You argued that heroin/opiates do not have a significant positive side-effect, and technology does. I disagree, because (in the historical period the article discusses) many people would have died without opiates, and while technology* can be a positive force, it too is a decidedly mixed one, and one whose side-effects we still don't fully understand.

My filter for what made me more or less productive (or an unclear mix) was whether it tended to distract me / take up my time. Spending time on irc when I meant to be working on my programming projects doesn't give me the shakes, but it's still burns up the finite amount of time I have.

Also, I was never suggesting regulation. I don't know where that came from...

* By which the author seems to mean computers and the Internet, specifically. Dyed fabric is a product of technology. So is bookbinding.
If you believe the small smattering of polls cited in this Wikipedia article people have actually become less religious over the last 10 years:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_United_States#B...

They moved from 94% believing in God to 73%. Might just be the small sample or differences in questions asked though.
"Nvidia is Definitely Working on an x86 Chip"
Why Sustainable Power is Unsustainable
Sometimes I wonder if our perceptions of things are different because we have easier access to information/people or whether things truly are more widespread than before.

For example, are there really as many Evangelicals and fundamentalist Christians as it seems, or do they just sound louder because they are broadcasting on more channels?

It is often times the case that people/groups with less power or advantage are louder since they are trying to draw more attention and have less to lose in doing so. But for those not well informed, that loudness translates into legitimacy even though it can indicate exactly the opposite. PETA comes to mind as an example.
Absolutely. He did the right thing at the moment.
5 Things I Hate About US – Part 4. Shopping Malls
Econ Solution: Grants to entreprenuers
Security and Data Risk in the Age of Social Networks
One of the founders, Barry Nalebuff, put his money where his mouth is: he cofounded Honest Tea.
Microsoft Mobile Tagging Service
I sure hate to "blame the victim", but unfortunately, what happened to him can happen to anyone, anytime, anywhere. Each of us must take personal responsibility to keep our wits about us and take the proper steps to protect ourselves before anything happens. By the time OP was accosted, it was too late; he had already made his mistakes.

A TED badge might as well be a bullseye. Just like an expensive bag, electronics, flashy jewelry, or a bulge in a back pocket. Walking alone in a secluded area is never a good idea.

People in urban areas have always known this. Looks like the rest of us have to now. Glad to hear OP is OK. It could have been a lot worse.
I wonder if you could do some automated A/B system here, and instead of every commit, just do it once a day: Every night, update one set of servers with the latest stable branch code. Route N% of your user to those servers. If faults start showing up, push N to 0 and notify developers. Otherwise, slowly move N towards 100 throughout the day. By end of the day you're either fully deployed, or rolled back.

(I already see faults with this...it's presented here as a thought experiment, not advice)
N73 Low Speaker Earpiece Problem
n73, n73 earpiece problem, n73 earpiece ways, n73 low earpieve volume, n73 low speaker problem, n73 low speaker volume, n73 no speaker, n73 speaker problem, n73 speaker ways, Nokia
Odd. The Half Bakery was doing this for years.

http://www.halfbakery.com/

One of their best ideas was the Creme Cheese Ring.

http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Cream_20Cheese_20Rings#122848...
They hate D&D on the systems you've seen them use. I've seen them use it for many years on an OS called RISC OS, written by Acorn, designers of the ARM chip. There, users loved it. Everything supported it on the desktop. You had `filer' windows, and to save an application would just pop up a little window with a file icon and a text box for the leafname. Enter `foo' and drop it on the filer window where you wanted it.

But better than that, you could drop it on another application. Consequently, you could create and edit a pixmap, and drop it into a vector drawing program where it would become an embedded object. Want to edit it again? Drag it from there back to the pixmap editing program's icon on the icon bar. Neither of these touched the disc; it was in memory transfers. And the program code didn't need to know the difference between saving to another app., or saving to disc through a filer window.

Other aspects of the desktop were also novel and worked well. It had a three button mouse. A proper one. No silly scroll wheel. The right button did what the left button did, but altered in some way. So you'd pop up a context sensitive menu with the middle button. Select an item with L and the menu would disappear. With R the menu would stay there. Great for when you want to do several menu items in a row, e.g. adjusting an object's attributes.

Scrollbars worked better. Firstly, the mouse cursor on the screen only moved in one dimension once a drag with L was started. None of this cancel the drag if you wander off orthogonally a bit. But if there were two scrollbars, dragging with R would control both; an instant `pan' widget.

Hold the `up' arrow with L and it would scroll up. Switch to R and it would scroll down. No need to move to the other end of the scroll bar. Same with `paging' by clicking either side of the thumb.

Drag a window by it's title bar with L and it'll come to the front of the stack at the same time. Use R and its depth is unaltered.

Double-click a folder icon in a filer window with L and a new window opens with its contents. Use R, the current window switches to show that directory. Close a filer window with R and it becomes the parent folder.

Note, you didn't need to know all these uses of R to use the system. You could manage with L. But the paper User Guide it was shipped with explained it and you soon got used to the productivity gains.

This was back in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, you can find remnants of it in the ROX (RISC OS on X) Desktop. http://roscidus.com/desktop/

Acorn did some smart stuff. Today, the main vestige is the ARM chip and its instruction set, designed by Sophie Wilson.
But hey -- it's not like TV gave you the shakes, or made you sick or killed you.

It does, just slower.

(Great essay, Daniel. If you write code as well as you write prose, you are a hacker's hacker.)
I personally do not see the attraction (I also do not use Apple TV, I use HP MediaSmart TV). Although Boxee is billed as a media server, and perhaps that was its role when it was called XBMC, it currently is mostly a media aggregator. Perhaps the infatuation with all things apple ( fueled in part by the Jesus phone), has gotten everybody enthused but to be a genuine cross platform media aggregator/server it must be able to stream internet content. In its current incarnation Boxee uPnP server comes in disabled, and even after you enable it, you quickly realize that it will not stream Hulu, Netflix, wb, cc, cbs. I can see how, when running in an Apple-TV aggregating media there, it can be appealing but until it can be used as an streaming server streaming all media (including Hulu, Netflix, ..., etc ) it is not even as good as Miro.
Unsolicited Advice is a Valuable Clue
Usa.Kaspersky.com hacked
You need to find your distinguisher. If you don't have one, make it.

Best advice you will ever get here. True for everything, not just freelance work.
Your existing customers are your most easily converted prospects. Surely, there's something else they need, right?
When I read that, I assumed there was an implicit "if all goes well". :)
All of science owes debt to Darwin
Oh man, this is going to kill a good bit of my Sunday morning... (Thanks!)
Yes, there is always a risk to anything. Walking alone at night can lead to all manner of unpleasant things.

Never the less, I think living in a state of fear is the wrong way to go. It depends on the exact situation but just because there's a risk to something doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.
"All major religions achieved their growth and status by becoming the ideological arm of state power." I wonder whether that's true. Because it seems hard to distinguish from this: "All major religions, because of their growth and status, acquired state power which fuelled their further growth."

To distinguish between the two, we'd want to look for religions that (presumably by good luck) got significant state power before they became widespread. Someone who knows more history than me may have more clue here, but the only example I can think of is that of the pharaoh Ankh-en-aten (= Akhnaten), who basically tried to introduce monotheism into ancient Egypt, with scarcely any success after the end of his reign. That's hardly conclusive, but it seems like evidence for the hypothesis that widespread belief matters more than state power in getting a religion off the ground.
Create a profile on LinkedIn (if you don't have one already) and subscribe to 'Ruby on Rails' and other specific groups. I have seen quite a few contracts (both full-time and part-time) on 'Ruby on Rails' group. May you will find some luck there. Good luck.
a friend of mine goes to conferences for free using all sorts of trickery. he finds out the name of guests at hotels by lying to the front desk, he get conference badges and alters them with his name and picture. he sleeps in bathroom stalls and lobby sofas and the like. i don't think he'd every hurt someone---more of the civil disobedience type. it's amazing what he can do in a "wow i'm free" kind of way.
At $699, the iRex also costs nearly twice as much as a Kindle and about three times what you can get a PRS505 for. I have no doubt the 8 inch screen is great, but that's a pretty big jump in price-- especially when you consider that the Kindle is already priced too high for many consumers.
Redeye VC: The Giving Tree and The New York Times
Jennifer Figge, 56, Becomes First Woman to Swim Atlantic
AIG Implodes: The Two Cows Version
I like reinventing the wheel. If someone makes a good wheel, it's not much fun or educational to just say wheel.roll();
It's much more interesting to write it and work through the issues. Guess it depends on the context, if you just need a wheel to roll vs if you need to know how it works.
Is the piratebay down/being blocked by ISP?
Something strange seems to be happening when I try to browse to thepiratebay.org; it comes up as "Page not found - connection failure". However I can ping it successfully.

I thought my anti-virus was blocking it but I have uninstalled that and tried it through IE, FF and chrome to no avail. I could access it fine yesterday. Googling it doesn't bring back anything. My hunch is my ISP (Virgin Media in the UK) is blocking it, so I tried it through my phone (Orange) and that fails too saying the page cannot be found!

This seems really strange, can anyone else access it? Any ideas why this would happen? I know some kind of virus was reported a few weeks ago that tampers with your hosts file but mine seems ok.
I think that for myself identity got formed by a progression of feeling-states informed by listening, writing, and learning.
I can't feel proactively. I feel re actively and am formed. I think these feelings are like polarized or fissile material. The big polarized feelings get shaped by reading and listening.(by great books, for instance)
Without identity, would a person have any motivation to act, is my question.
I've tried hard not to be co-opted by isms or identity politics, but to participate, to have passion, you rely on the polarized core. Or at least, I do.
In starting a business, or doing something for myself that takes passionate intensity I have always had to take a leap of faith. The faith is in myself and in the direction my inner polarized identity seems to be taking me.
This is akin to what startup advocates mean when they say:"I couldn't have worked that hard for that long if it was only about the money."
I agree with keeping a close eye on what you allow into your identity. keeping it small is a Tauist ideal that I find doesn't gibe with real life sometimes.
Ego and pride can be really useful. Ghandi had an ego, as did MLK. It's a high ideal to be and to remain an uncarved block. A very high standard. Confucianism has sort of displaced the Tau in general society. I think because rules make it possible for people with all kinds of identities to make agreements and find ways of going forward.

Any takers for the idea of identity being required for motivation?
This is an important point to understand. Otherwise you will grow up to be one of those curmudgeons who refuses to comprehend why all the kids today insist on reinventing your language of choice, only with a different syntax, a slightly different subset of the features of Common Lisp, and kernel-level support for Twitter. (Which is crazy, since Twitter is just a fad. We had IRC back in 1988! Grumble grumble grumble.)

The way to understand things is to take them apart and put them back together, repeatedly, preferably with slight variations each time. It was true with the wind-up alarm clock I had when I was a kid, and it's true with software, today.

Of course, you do have to be careful. The CW cautions you against reinventing the wheel, not because rebuilding something isn't the best way to understand it, but because many programmers consistently overestimate the utility of understanding something as opposed to merely shipping it and moving on -- or just skipping it and buying an off-the-shelf solution. Our personalities tend in this direction and have to be watched. A year or two ago I spent valuable hours figuring out how to configure a local Linux mail server to handle encryption. The resulting solution worked, but I feared it was a bit delicate. So I slapped myself on the head and started paying $30 per year to Fastmail. (Which has apparently since fallen to $14 per year. And, of course, Gmail offers much the same for free.) I don't have to understand mail server configuration! That knowledge adds nothing to my life!
Ouch. For a company like Kaspersky this is about as damaging as it gets. The screenshots suggest the author really 'did it', though I wonder why he chose to write about it instead of alerting Kaspersky.

One more reason to make sure you check each and every avenue of user supplied data for SQL injection. What really surprises me is that they don't use prepared statements.
Hmmm... If you don't like the eInk displays, none of those readers are for you, really... The whole point of these devices, their reason for existing, is the high contrast, non backlit, paper-like display that's much easier on the eyes than typical LCDs.
pg is not missing the point.

Protecting the identity is an act of securing one's control, and hence, power, and sense of survival fitness. Furthermore, groups sharing common identity strengthen the feeling of kinship, and hence again, stronger control. This is an evolutionary psychology interpretation (in which this topic has been discussed to great depths).

Notice that below a puberty it's much harder to find polarized arguments like the "wars" we talk about. One may argue that mental development is one reason, but another factor, closely related to development, is that at this age the brain is still highly malleable, and the identity is weak. A kid could argue vehemently about a particular idea (note this is different from preference, as in food). It is entirely plausible that if you get their parents and friends to influence them you could turn the entire idea around in a short time.

Not so with adults. They'd simply leave the premises and find people who agree.

That isn't to say you are wrong -- but that what you seem to think is an entirely different idea from what pg wrote is actually quite similar.
The Areca Palm is indeed available at Ikea (i know friends who have bought some from there). I suspect the Money Plant would also be available there or most garden stores. Home Depot is another one to check.

Picture of one of the building plant rooms -

http://greenspaces.in/images/pbc_greenhouse_1.jpg

http://greenspaces.in/images/pbc_greenhouse_2.jpg

One of the things that is done in the building is that air is passed through these rooms first, and then circulated through the building.
I'm still leaning towards the upcoming Foxit eSlick, unless the Kindle 2 has much better support for PDF programming books (ones not purchased through Amazon).
That's quite an amazing feat for a 56 year old, but I fail to see the relation with 'hacking'.
PG, I think there might be a typo: "is strongly held beliefs" should be "are strongly held beliefs:.
This is the same idea that is expressed in the concept of bike shedding on software projects. It comes up when naming things and other simple tasks.

When everyone thinks that they can have an opinion, then discussion degenerates into simple "mine is better than yours", same with politics and religion. Same with Vi and Emacs. Same with get_items() or retrieve_notes().

Look on some mailing lists for conversations over naming things for some good examples.

http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers/browse_thre...
I think the eInk reader market is in dire need of some simplification (pretty strange considering it's not even remotely mature yet). I know several people, myself included, who are still waiting for what we consider the basic ebook reader features:

- big screen

- adjustable font size

- left and right buttons

- DRM-free

- reasonable pricing.

I wonder how much of the price could be shaved off by getting rid of the other features like search, keyboards, image support, etc. I'd buy a cheap, stripped down eInk reader if only I could.
I suspect you are attempting to co-opt the term "user friendly" to mean the same as "powerful" the two are not synonymns.
Sure. I want to call the APIs from my iPhone. :-)
> though I wonder why he chose to write about it instead of alerting Kaspersky.

Probably for the "fame". I have to say I'm hardly impressed by the recent exploits that I've seen, the phpBB.com one for example.
> so offer them to do all the hosting and maintaining for them in exchange for free food every week

I do this with a local vegan restaurant. They're the only one in the area and although I love eating there, they are a bit expensive.

One day I was having trouble getting on their free wireless network, so when I went to the counter to pay for my meal I mentioned the problem to the owner. Recognizing that I eat there all the time, she asked if I wanted to take a look at the wireless router in the backroom. All I did was restart the router and it worked again. The owner said the $18 meal was on the house for fixing the wireless.

Now I'm hosting their website and taking care of all tech support in return for an open tab. I bill the owner but mark the balance as $0 and in return I never pay for food when I eat there. My good relationship with the owner has led her to introduce me to other local restaurant owners and now I do work for them too.
Plant Wars: Persistent Browser-Based Game
See also: Parkinson's Law of Triviality
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_of_the_bikeshed
Girl throws rock, busts open guy's head [video]
The Harry Potter books are deliberately designed to have a more "adult" outlook as they go on because Rowling's core audience was, literally, growing into adolescence and young adulthood as the books came out. The books were published over ten years. Anyone who read the first one at age nine would be nineteen when the last one came out.

Is this strategy blatantly commercial? Maybe. The first rule of being a professional writer (as opposed to a self-published wannabe whose Great Novel is found, posthumously, in a desk drawer) is to write stuff that people want to buy. If that's a sin, most pros would go to hell with happiness, as opposed to remaining stuck in their day jobs.

Commercial or not, Rowling's change of tone has a perfectly good literary rationale, because her main characters explicitly grow up as the books go on. The books are told from those characters' point of view. At the beginning, they're kids, and they see the world in a kidlike way. At the end, they're adults, and they see an adult world. The consistent yet evolving sophistication of the point of view is one of the things that makes the writing strong.

(For an awesome essay on POV, from a very successful commercial screenwriter: http://www.wordplayer.com/columns/wp41.Point.of.View.html )
Yet another Microsoft ad that seems to be aimed at cheerfully clueless newbies
Reinvent the wheel if you think you can improve the concept - but never just for the sake of doing it...
Toward Advanced Nanosystems: Mechanical engineering meets thermal fluctuations
A wonderful essay and truly a joy to read. This is very close to some stuff that I read in Gurdjieff's writings some time ago, and it's the first time I see the concept of "identification as a bad thing" outside of those writings.
Thanks for this insightful take on a very interesting subject for me.
I suggest you publish a really useful and re-usable .Net/J2EE/Android/FLOSS (for e.g. memcached) code on your website.
To quote: "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle
Ask YC: What are some good Geek Magazines?
What are some good Geek Magazines?