skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why AT&T loves the iPhone (again)
> The trick, of course, is that nobody's fast enough
> to do that kind of calculation in the middle of a fight.

Indeed. And not only that, but the time that it takes to observe an incoming punch and instruct your muscles to make an appropriate reaction (even if you know exactly what you wanted to do already) is on the order of 100-250 msec. If the punch comes faster than that, you are doomed.

Fortunately, there is a simple solution to the paradox: you learn to anticipate what your opponent is going to do so you can start your response before they even initiate their movement.

Chi probably helps too.
I think this is the marketing strategy of 4chan and most horror movies.
From the data available, it seems like watching Maury leads to an increase in programmer productivity.
Useless stuff is productive within the bounds of the existing economy. However, that economy is provably unsustainable.

Best to move on and try to build an economy that is sustainable. I suspect such an animal will have a far higher useful::useless ratio.
Do you know what - I've often wondered about cheating in the Higher Education context.

Is it really cheating? When you're spending $,000's a year to learn, does it really ever benefit anyone?

Maybe that's the thing - Higher Education is increasingly under pressure as a business. It's getting hard to fail/expel someone. On the other hand, universities trade on their reputation, so they need to walk a fine line.

Higher Ed is free in Germany - and someone can probably correct me - but they also have no entry criteria (I might be off-base, but it's less retrictive either way). So you can sign up for Engineering there if you want to, but you soon fail if you can't meet the requirements.
I'd prefer it if you'd tag links to sites that display NSFW ads.
If you want a "slow but steady growth, a gradual climb, giving them time to adapt" then you shouldn't be financing with VC money. That's not what they do.
Sounds good. A penny mutual fund with zero commission trades could be a good alternative to traditional money.
Its not just a "blessing that the biggest classified ad site in the US is run by a guy who cares more about user-experience than money," it is the main reason why it is such a success. If someone tried to make gobs of money doing this or didn't realize the true value of local-only exchanges, then they couldn't be nearly as popular as craigslist among so many people, geeks and non-geeks alike.
Google gobbled up 90% of all U.S. search growth in 2008
It is interesting to see "freedom" widening its lead. There are a lot of business owners out there that will tell you "hah, freedom, that's a laugh". I would argue most traditionally successful businesses are run by owners who put in much more effort and work than anybody they employ. There is no such thing as paid sick days or standard hours.

This is not to discourage anyone from running their own business. Rather it is to highlight the case that "running your own business" != "freedom" neither from a temporal or a monetary sense.

Just as in everything else, it is HOW YOU GO ABOUT building and running your business that matters. There were a couple good articles regarding "having clear lifestyle goals" relative to any startup and measuring the success of your startup relative to those lifestyle goals.

So to answer your question - I don't think it can be answered. There is no absolute path to said goal. Hard is subjective, therefore scientifically meaningless.

Can't you be financially free if your expenses approach zero? It is possible for me to get lost in some national wildlife reserve and spend my life living off the land. Is that being free? What if you rake in millions of dollars at your startup but you MUST put in 14 hour days to keep it running? Is that being free?

Maybe what I am saying is we can't plan our lives in terms of end goals. Rather we must plan our lives in terms of what kind of journey we think best at any given time. And then simply ACT the way we wish to be. Do I want to be free? Well, maybe I should ACT free!

Our life IS the journey...
Or maybe I'm just losing my sanity...
Amex is actually the only one who settled a dispute in our favor, but that probably doesn't mean much since I usually don't bother to contest chargebacks.
true, but when doing SaaS it's less of a problem since you can just shut down or downgrade the account.
Gmail well behind Zimbra in offline accessibility
Full-disk encryption for all computer drives, coming soon
How memories form, fade, and persist over time
Napping: the expert's guide
Won't do it again.

To the trusting souls who upvoted this show of sincerity: what he did next was write a program to spam the site with 545 identical comments.

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Arrington
Researchers examine behavior influenced by network structure
What's your problem? You seem smart, but there's so much anger.
I have a feeling constantly saying "retarded" is not helping your karma out that much. You would definitely benefit with expounding upon what you mean every time you fall back on just saying "retarded".
When it comes to code, less is more
tangible object cannot equal intangible state of being

Money is a tool toward practicing Freedom

Note I said practicing. Freedom cannot be obtained. It is not a static state. It is not an object. It is not a goal, a path, or a reward.
I can't figure out if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me :)

The OP asked why VC funded companies need millions, and you've said yourself, they do need.

You don't need to be on the top 1% to have 10 employees. If you do have ~10 people working, then your operating expenses are in the million range.

But let's use your Google example. We know that the search market is dominated by Google, followed by Yahoo and MSN. Who are the others? I've searched and all I could come up in 10 seconds in this:

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=4

Let's go with Lycos. 0.01% market share. They have 500-1000 employees. Huge costs there. I am ignoring Terra, and Daum.

I guess what I am trying to say is that even a 0.01% market share can make you profitable, or attractive enough to get bought. And depending on the market (I did "cheat" a little by picking the largest internet market possible, search), even a 0.01% share might cost you millions to get there.

These huge sums are raised pre-launch/build because they're essentially, bets. Educated bets at best, but still, bets. The thing is that the payoff (for the VCs) can be huge, so they gamble on dozens hoping that 3 or 4 will provide return.

It's not my cup of tea, btw. I am currently building my Micro-ISV and I am quite happy, aspiring at most a nice boat, perhaps a bigger house. But the VC world is a reality :)

It's like complaining about software patents. They SUCK. But the system is set up in a way that you need them. It's part of the rules. You can complain about it, but they're there. So what makes most sense in the business sense of things is to get them. Just like VCs when you're trying to dominate a market.
I don't think so. The nutjob that apparently threatened Arrington did so on his own blog too.

I really dislike the attention this is gathering, mainly because it just furthers the ego of the few people stirring trouble.

You can never sacrifice liberty and personal privacy for pseudo security. Do you really want a system where you have to login to an internet terminal with your SSN and it logs all the actions you do?
"I even know about Julia Allison , but really what has she done? Except for being a great self promoter?"

She's the Paris Hilton of the tech world.
Using a Polymer Implant to program your immune system to fight Cancer
the people that usually do physical labour, generally have lower IQ. (i know, I am heavy generalizing), so to them it is ok.

For a very smart person, just the thought of doing the same physical routine, everyday, will drive them nuts. Even the thought of it can be depressing.

Probably, for a blue collar worker, the idea of sitting all day in front of the computer, and thinking these wierd problems, will drive them nuts too.
I think the point (related to community) is that the community made bitterness, cheap laughs at others' expense, etc. acceptable. Now the nutjobs are only two standard deviations from the mean, instead of four.
While I usually don't think of it in such terms, I've found a good litmus test for me is whether, if I was Phil Connors, something would be of any use to me. Anything that Phil would lose at night, it's possible for anyone to lose, and thus I probably will lose it at some point. My activities tend towards acquiring knowledge, universal skills, and doing things that scare me.

A couple of businesspeople have explained to me that every part of building a business is about reducing risk. They talk about diversification, but then only apply it to money. As personal investments go, money (in any form) looks like one of the riskiest! It's much harder to forget a foreign language, or how to play a musical instrument, than it is to lose money. I'm trying to reduce risk by diversifying my assets to the point where money is a relatively small portion. After all, the happiest people I know don't tend to be those with the most money.
In Russian 'help' and 'aid' would in most cases be the same word, so I doubt Putin misunderstood the guy.
Git is one of those cases where something that begins life as an incremental improvement turns out to be such an incremental improvement that a qualitative leap occurs. New things become possible that you just wouldn't have thought of before - there wouldn't have been any point. Applications in completely unrelated areas spring up.

Sometimes I think that Torvalds may end up being remembered more for git than for Linux.
IMO, the core problem is that our whole concept of humour revolves around negativity.
“Science and democracy have always been twins.”
Speaking and writing as a journalist is what Michael Arrington does. That's a very specific type of speech -- so specific in fact that it's actually explicitly protected by the U.S. Constitution. There is simply no relationship whatsoever between an article Michael writes and, for example, a President's order to bomb another country, except that the two are in some way shape or form molded out of words.
In order for everything to be a search query away, you need to know what terms to search for; I've known students to do reasonably well without even that level of competency in a subject.
For starters, the literal and metaphorical are not mutually exclusive. He literally (in the text) said she "got the train run on her", and in the context of an outrageous troll it's a metaphor for her vapid self-promotion and the co-dependent nature of the 'tech' conference presenter scene.

She's supposedly a programmer, but she made a career out of giving the same tacky clipart presentations about generic PR & Marketing bullshit over and over. She fit right into the circle-jerk with Scoble et. al.. Some people found her constant paid presence at the conferences they went to obnoxious and wished she'd STFU, so they started griefing her. She was egotistical enough to think that anyone cared enough about hating her to make those "death threats" remotely meaningful, and she did exactly what they wanted.
Have you tried currying?
Hauling barrels? Luxury. How about licking the road clean with your tongue?
Reconsidering Relevance
Mencius Moldbug describes it best:

"Money is the bubble that doesn’t need to pop. As long as there is demand for indirect exchange, at least one asset will be stockpiled by hoarders, hence experience demand that is not a consequence of any direct utility, hence be overvalued. As long as the storage cost for this asset is zero and the supply in existence is fixed, you have a perfect Nash equilibrium - using any other asset as a medium of indirect exchange provides no advantage, and runs the risk of buying into a bubble which will subsequently pop as punters revert back to the stable standard." (source: http://www.interfluidity.com/posts/1233118501.shtml)

The story of the past ten years is that people started trading dollars for substitute stores of value ( houses, stocks, oil futures, etc). But those substitutes were not stable Nash equilibriums. In the long run, supply of housing is elastic and bubble prices cannot be sustained. Prices crashed, and people rushed back to using dollars as a store of value. When demand for dollars increases, it becomes harder to trade goods and labor for dollars, so the price of goods and labor in dollars decreases ( deflation). However, employment contracts and debts are denominated assuming a higher price level. Thus businesses are unable to meet payroll and pay creditors. Businesses fire workers or go out of business. That's the stage we are at now. The solution is to simply renominate the currency by mailing everyone checks, in order to restore/maintain the 2007 price level. This eliminates the frictional problem without creating massive transfers of resources from the private sector to the government.
An interesting essay, excited by President Obama's pledge to “restore science to its rightful place,” that considers the relationship between science and democracy and how the health of one influences strongly the other.

“If there is anything democracy requires and thrives on, it is the willingness to embrace debate and respect one another and the freedom to shun received wisdom. Science and democracy have always been twins.”
Is gold really any less arbitrary than paper money?

Couldn't advances in technology create cheap alternatives to gold that would destroy its value?
If you do not make money, you starve.

Also, it's not just taxes - there are tens of trillions of dollars of outstanding dollar denominated debt. Millions of people and corporations have contractual obligations to deliver dollars. If they renege on those obligations, their creditors will seize very real assets (buildings, houses, etc).
Isn't this lack of verbal nuance exactly why Putin could misconstrue an offering of "help" as an offering of humanitarian "aid" to poor computer-illiterate Russia?
See especially the last bit about whether you're a lark or an owl. (Owl definitely!)
You would need to back up the currency with commodities that have 1) minuscule storage costs and 2) a very high stocks to flow ratio. Also, all commodities used must have identical stocks to flow ratio, or the pricing between the commodities will be very unstable. As a result, using a single commodity is ideal.

As luck has it, such a currency exists. Simply log into your brokerage account and buy the GLD ETF. It's only been around for four years, it will be very interesting to see how it does versus the dollar in the long term. If I was a Fed chairman, I would be worried.
iPhone Push Notifications, dead and buried; How Apple erased pieces of history
The Fed & Bank Borrowing
I totally agree with this. My brother is a nurse. Although he works for 8-9 hours straight and mostly standing up, when he gets home, he rests and relaxes. I on the other hand work 9 hours a day sitting on a chair. When I get home I still think of work and other freelance projects. I can't relax and I get tired even though I work sitting down :-/
Use Windows Vista’s Parental Controls to keep your kids safe
"This spontaneous reaction was in response to a blog that attempted to be humorous by using the word 'fucking' multiple times in reference to Adobe’s UIs which were perceived as lacking a native look and feel."

I assume he means this hilarious Adobe UI gripe blog: http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/

If growing up means not appreciating that blog, then color me prepubescent.
A million bucks to make Internet users nicer? I think Flickr got paid a lot more for that.
How do you become an expert? Change your concept of expertise! Another excellent article from 30sleeps about thinking outside the box to achieve your goals
Will we still own our data?
My problem with encryption technology like this is that it falls into that gray area between theoretically useful and actually useful.

Equivalent software encryption has existed for a while (it's built into Vista for example). But when you read about these Government or Financial laptops getting stolen with people's private information on them they're never encrypted. Why?

Because any info that's valuable is too valuable to risk losing just because someone lost the password. I mean, he says it himself...

"it can't be brought back up and read without first giving a cryptographically-strong password. If you don't have that, it's a brick. You can't even sell it on eBay."

So when you deploy this kind of thing you have to ask yourself if there's any circumstance under which that password could get lost. I'm not against the technology I just don't know a lot of people who will be brave enough to use it.
Why Language Extensibility Matters
Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design 
Has anyone read this book, it's pretty old, but skimming the table of contents makes it look really interesting.
Has anyone read this book, it's not "new" by any sense of the word, but the table of contents looks really interesting.
Presumably, if an individual wishes to consume far less, they also work far less. There is no reason to work 50 hours a week just to hoard a bunch of dollars until the grave. If they work less, then the supply of employment decreases naturally, and it all balances out. Those who wish to work long hours and consume a lot of goods can still do so. There would be no need for involuntary employment.
A roommate of mine from college graded papers for an introductory astronomy class (a class commonly taken to fulfill a distribution requirement for those majoring in the humanities); one of the students in the class (after, apparently, not going to class between the third week and the midterm), copied his entire midterm exam from the person sitting in front of him, almost word for word.

It's not that the content of Physics classes makes it harder to cheat (although this might be true); students cheat when they don't love the subject (and believe that they will get away with it). This is why you see much higher rates of cheating in disciplines people often learn for money rather than curiosity (business, engineering, law, computer science, and medicine).

Unfortunately, people aren't likely to love these fields any more any time soon. Nor are they likely to stop pursuing them despite their dislike for the content (as long as the resulting job is respected/pays well). Which only leaves making it clearer that they won't get away with it, or making the penalty for getting caught outweigh the advantage of doing it. The former is a topic worthy of active research. The latter is probably not helpful, since (at least at the university I went to) the penalty is already so severe that I can only assume that people cheat purely from a lack of expectation of getting caught.
The last paragraph is great

"Be less concerned with the adjectives of success–good, great, world-class–and more concerned with taking a worthwhile next step. The path to expertise is the path to nowhere in particular. When you get specific, you get results."
I was kind of worried when I saw "Trusted Computing", but having read the article I don't think there's any DRM-related use for it. It's really just HD encryption.
I don't want to comment much on a story from a trade rag like Computerworld, especially when it ignores the fact that we already have better options than this press release product. But, I'll take a moment to correct you:

In many F-500 companies, disk encryption is already a corporate standard on all laptops; the organizations that are worried about losing passwords keep escrow keys. The problem people are trying to solve is, if you leave your car unlocked and lose your laptop, you don't have to cut a press release about how many SSNs you just lost.
democracy is social constructivism. this is diametrically opposed to science. it doesn't matter how many people disagree with you if you're right.
"Trusted Computing" is a bit of a bugbear; the technology behind it is totally inevitable and fundamentally innocuous. All it's saying is, the OS should be able to extract the promise of a secure channel to the chipset and the hardware. Without that promise, you lose your machine just once to a piece of malware and you can never trust it again.
I wouldn't agree with this summary. I think he was saying

1) Expertise is relative.

His example included the temporal nature of the "cutting-edge" in computing. What was consider best practice 10 years ago is no longer considered even ok.

2) Achieve things by setting an actionable next step instead of a goal of becoming an "expert"

A next step e.g. getting a patch into Rails Core will move you forward, trying to be an "expert" cause you to do things which make you an expert in the eyes of others. I.e. you'll work to fulfill the definition in 1)
Silverlight adoption hampered by economic crisis
Mark Twain's 'Is Shakespeare Dead?', told by Keir Cutler
Not really connected to programming, but: I used to always grab 3 quarters, 2 dimes, a nickel and 4 pennies. That and the M&M thing...
He needs the break. TechCrunch now has a CEO and can go on without him and focus on the tech community. Arrington has been distracted for a long time, seems he has posted some very random posts which lead TechCrunch toward a ValleyWag type site. The TC community was clearly not happy with that.

However, it is amazing that he had to put up with the kind of abuse he has. That's just horrible, and there is no reason he should be the victim of that kind of treatment.

Best of luck to Mike, he did a great job creating and building TC. I'm sure he'll have other great successes in his future.
I seem to remember the founder of American Body Armor performing demonstrations on himself by firing a .38 revolver at himself while wearing armor ... or something. heavily paraphrased.
What's new in iPhone SDK 2.2.1 ?
What do you have against people with Down's Syndrome?
So that's why a democratic Athens killed Socrates?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Socrates

There's a good reason the USA isn't a democracy.
There's a sliding scale between being the type of idiot child who thinks that anything at all, no matter how obnoxious, is funny, and being a boring goody-two-shoes who can't take even the slightest joke.

Mr. Cangiano seems to self-identify pretty strongly in the latter camp if he finds that site offensive in some way. "Attempted to be humourous"? Geeze, sounds like Cangiano wouldn't know humour if it was chewing his leg off.

IMO the far ends of both side of the scale - lack of judgement, and lack of humour - are equally problematic. Faced with a choice, I'd probably chose the former, since I fear restriction of speech far more than I fear being offended.

I also note that Cangiano's evident lack of any humour at all would probably be a pretty good reason in itself for people to want to play jokes on him. Sometimes these problems are self-created. Some of the most stable, respectable, mature people I know would find it hard to resist taking a self-important bore down a peg or two, given the chance.
Verizon Hub Touch Screen Home Phone Available on Feb. 1
n a dynamic move sure to rattle devotees of plain old home phones, Verizon Wireless will introduce the new Verizon Hub on Feb. 1. Only Verizon Wireless can launch a new touch screen home phone system designed to replace old-style home phones with a souped-up home communications system
Richard East | IS Project Manager
Richard East has tremendous achievements in Internet Marketing for this everybody wants to join his team for great results.
A typical day for me is entirely in front of a computer screen, but has over the past year occasionally involved physical work actually putting together a robot. I can attest, some time away from the PC doing mechanical work can be nice.
I wouldn't say it -revolves- around it, but the current popularity of things like FAIL are a good example of your theory.
My best 7 free JS model boxes