skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Practically one-dimensional? Have you bought a video card in recent years?
I wish I could give you +10 for this one
I have always believed that to be successful intellectually, you should be driven by curiosity rather than fear.
Thanks very much for this. I appreciate text more than audio.
"Chameleons are pretty good at camouflaging themselves..."

Perhaps it should be said that, like a chameleon, Lisp has remained pretty well hidden against the background of current languages.
no, they should be given the worst possible machines their application is still expected to run on, then it will run like greased lightning and use very little resources for everybody else.

The main reason I see for code bloat is because developers have too powerful machines.
I thought that was catchy somewhat, although quite weird.
He claims to start with one assumption, but actually starts with many. For instance he implies "any species which could colonize the galaxy, will". I don't accept that all possible intelligence would try to take over the galaxy.

He also says that it's not in an alien's interest to leave one planet (Earth) just in case we develop - but he doesn't consider that they might have colonized the galaxy but left Earth precisely because they did find life on it. Even the slightly unimaginative at times Star Trek had the idea of humans only colonizing 'empty' areas and leaving anything with existing life on it alone.

Also, he states that colonizing the galaxy takes ~110,000 years because humans took 10,000 years to evolve + 100,000 years to cross the galaxy. He completely ignores that humans actually took many tens of millions of years to evolve from scratch not from existing life forms.

Also, he assumes zero chance of catastrophic accident leading to exctinction as an explanation for why aliens might not exist. Maybe they did exist but wiped themselves out.

Also, he assumes 100,000 years to cross the galaxy, but that means traveling pretty much at the speed of light, which is currently not possible/forseeably practical. Yet he doesn't consider how aliens would stay as a coherent civilization when a light speed ping response starts taking years, let alone tens of thousands of years.

Also, he doesn't consider any kinds of future technology, IT, AI, singularity or similar. Maybe any culture which gets a thousand years past where we are now does not become a galactic conquerer, but a Matrix-style virtual reality.

Lastly, what if aliens decided the best way to colonize the galaxy was to spray terraforming machines and life seeds, and we are the 'alien' intelligence colonies? Who says alien ideas of 'colonize' have to be like human Earth colonies of the last thousand years?
My favorite theory about why the West and China diverged starting in the 16th century is that entrepreneurial capitalism thrived in the West. The ambitious acheived success by finding a competent master, learning a trade, and then making stuff people wanted, whether that be clocks or caravels. In China, the ambitious were sucked into the civil service exam system. They were judged by arbitrary tests rather than by producing useful things. The result was centuries of stagnation.
Helping the Terrorists
I don't see why they don't simply give the lively team a chance to spin it out and run with it, that way at least they have a fighting chance.
A4 paper doesn't fit well into typical folders and binders sold in America, and I didn't see A4 paper at all until I went to another country for a while. US universities tend to just have the printer set to scale pages to fit the paper by default. You end up with wider margins when printing A4 journal articles to Letter paper, but those can be handy for notes.
Parents should push their children to succeed through positive reinforcement and good example, not through fear.
What I do to research which video card is the best deal, is to check the latest Tom's Hardware graphics card charts:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/graphics-cards,1.html

That really eases the comparison between the loads of cards to choose from! :-)
It's really depressing to read articles like this, partly because it does seem like there's no way out when you're in the middle of it, and partly because there are significant parts of the American educational system that are really little better. I did not have abusive parents or extended family members, and I did not have to endure the suffering that this author did in a far-away boarding school, but I certainly can relate to the notion of school being a prison. The idea of teaching to tests is really damaging, and it's unfortunate that the past eight years in the United States anyway have focused educational policy on testing scores alone.
That's a very narrow definition of vector vs raster, the end result looks very different from a photograph. Vector-based drawings have a certain swoopy hand-drawn style to them, vs the realism of altering and recombining photorealistic images.

An example of the opposite style is the giant pencil in the new stopdesign layout:

http://stopdesign.com/

It's obviously sourced from real life, rather than generated from scratch.
Oh man, don't get me started! I wrote some PDF processing software last year -- it was supposed to extract pinout diagrams from integrated circuit datasheets -- and to extract the text was a ridiculous task. Since characters can be specified in any order, what I had to do was look at their positions on the rendered page and then clump those into words with some overly complicated graph algorithms. Working with PDF should not be this hard.

If I were making a PDF successor, this would be one of the top problems to fix. At least make text selection work properly! And simplify the format a little, would you please? To get any sort of compatibility with my PDF processing program I had to write it as a custom rendering backend for the Poppler PDF engine. It should not be this hard.
Thefts puncture Paris bike scheme
I've never seen a convincing refutation of the argument [Richard Kulisz] presents there.

He seems to simply be restating a typical resolution of the Fermi paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Explaining_the_pa...
This kind of goes back to pg's "Cities and Ambition." Even amongst top CS departments, I think the atmosphere of the surrounding area does influence what the students want to do with themselves. Entrepreneurial spirit isn't necessarily something that's ingrained into CS students by default; students need to be exposed to it, and more importantly they need to see how far they can go with it (which you would see constantly in CA) before they start taking it seriously.
One more piece of evidence that it only takes a very small percentage of jerks to screw it up for the rest of us...

The same goes for the internet, nowadays if you design anything at all that has an end-user component you'll spend at least as much time at making it jerk-proof and doing all kinds of abuse analysis as you spend on doing features.
Sony Ericsson unveils the iDou (er, Idou), an iPhone-like phone w/12.1m camera
Don't try this at home.

http://transcenmentalism.org/OpenStim/tiki-index.php
What can I do now?

Learn how to program, drop out of school and start your own startup. At least that's what the kids do here in America.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22teaching+to+the+test%22

By the way, some committee leaders think it's a great idea: http://www.greatschools.net/cgi-bin/showarticle/823

says Nancy Grasmick, Maryland's state superintendent of schools, in a recent article in the American School Boards Journal. "If you're teaching to the test [...] then we don't see anything wrong with that."
Test scores are like democracy, they're the least bad option. There's simply not a better way to measure progress, or one more accurate to life.
I'm glad to see SELinux finally available as standard. This is one thing I've been missing as part of my security hardening on my Debian servers. It gives better peace of mind.

Oh! OpenJDK is now included as well. This just gets better and better.
I'm not sure why Schneier fails to mention this, but cryptography helps terrorists, too. Of course, a lack of cryptography would help them (and organized crime) even more, but logic has never stopped politicians from wanting to ban things.
Fatal US plane 'was on autopilot'
yeah, it sucks.

Like I think Twitter says they have <30 people, and 2 of them are dedicated just to handling spam accounts. That's ridiculous.

Think of the features it could have if those 2 extra people were actually getting stuff done.
There is such thing as too much routine for creative types. An analogy: think about it like . . . genetic mutations sometimes arise from too much routine. Not all genetic mutations are bad; sometimes they contribute toward survival of a species.
Look for "doctest" and "unittest" in the Python standard library. You can run pydoc on either of those names for more, and find tutorials online.
Lisp has been very successful at avoided notice, but I wouldn't say that it has done that by looking like other languages. Rather, it looks completely alien to people familiar with other languages -- but it escapes notice because it looks like a very small and unthreatening alien.
I can't wait for the ILC2009 in March!
This article is by a kid who is still in this situation. I can't speak or write Chinese, but if someone can reach him via the comments on the original article, please tell him to leave there and explore the world. It's much bigger than the silly schools he's in and there are plenty of opportunities for him to become successful.
This is exactly what I do. Tom's Hardware charts are so very helpful when comparing benchmarks for graphics cards (and CPUs for that matter).
Performance Rules Of Thumb
StreamFocus Expands the Team and goes Stealth
They should figure out a way where you rent them with a credit card, and if you don't return it and scan your credit card getting credit for returning it, they charge you to replace it.

They could still get damaged and returned as such, but at least they couldn't get completely stolen, which is the most valuable thing for criminals to do since that actually gets them money.
I'm not sure I agree with this sentiment. Surely there must be a better way to show proficiency in something besides testing (in the conventional sense).

Besides, the US isn't a Democracy, it's a Republic, albiet a democratic one. The founders really hated the word and made sure it wasn't in any of the founding documents.

"Democracy: A government of the masses. Authority derived through mass meeting or any form of direct expression. Results in mobocracy. Attitude toward property is communistic negating property rights. Attitude toward law is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether it is based upon deliberation or governed by passion, prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard for consequences. Results in demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy."

-1928 U.S. Army Training Manual
How exactly are they going to sell analytics, when they have a completely open API?
This has similarities with the Prisoners' Dilemma:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma

Although we'd all be better off if we all cooperated, there will always be those who take their personal advantage and screw everyone else.

It's too easy to label them as sociopaths, and in some sense they are, but game theory ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory ) predicts this behaviour.

It sucks, but you won't change it.

This also has consequences for social networks, such as Hacker News. It's OK when everyone shares a common purpose and common interests, but get enough newbies and the culture won't propagate.

The various car share schemes that require significant buy-in and have penalties for non-compliance and that shifts the game theory into a configuration that works. Maybe something similar will eventually be required for social networks too.
No, you don't get to play with "preferred definitions". here.

In 1989, the companies came in and put an extreme back into balance.

In 2009, the government came in to put an extreme back into balance.

In fact, it has been the government that has been saving a complete collapse of Capitalism by bailing it out. I think no one knows if it will work, but they key indicator here is that Wall St. turned to the government for help.

And look at health care: Americans spend much more than other countries yet the indicators show much poorer performance than those other countries. Socialized medicine has been shown, in the hard numbers, to simply work better.

If it was really "American Socialism" that was failing, you wouldn't be seeing government stepping in everywhere. So, no, it's not about picking a definition; it's about trying (finally) to find a balance.
The thing that helps the terrorists the most is all the 'false security' and the money spent on that. "Feel Good" security... lots of movement but no improvement.

Try traveling from one continent to another while keeping track of how many people you see employed in this kind of dog & pony show, then imagine how much better it would work if they were engaged in real security.
I have 4GB on a regular old Macbook and I've never had any trouble whatsoever keeping not only Xcode and Firefox running in the background, but also a VM running XP, VS2008 and Google Chrome on it, among other programs. 8GB is useful if you need all of your (many many) programs ready to go at once or if you're dealing with HD video, though.
Actually I "hate" Windows because after 15 years and 6 major version it is still crap. There are so many errors, bugs, crashes in Vista that you wonder if the developers of Windows are all retarded.
This goes beyond madness into the realm of Sparta.
Too bad the tor server for elettra looks dead -- or is it just me?
For me, testing is the sweet spot. I have run a mixed Lenny/Sid (mostly Lenny, with the occasional package pulled from unstable, currently it's all Lenny) for a long time now and not yet had a serious issue that was not my own fault.

Testing is also a rolling release, but you've got one more level of protection in unstable for serious stuff to get worked out before packages get to you. There is also a useful tool called apt-listbugs which will display information about serious bugs during the upgrade process before packages are upgraded and allow you one last chance to abort the upgrade.

It's pretty commonly thought in the Debian community that if you're running Debian on a desktop system (as opposed to a server) then there isn't much reason not to run testing.

I will continue to track the new testing in due time. I'm kind of going to miss Lenny though. :)
"If Apptism is accepting money from developers, they ought to say so prominently at the top of each paid review."

That should read AppCraver, not Apptism, right?
For those people wondering if they should commit the time to listen to this I encourage you to do so.

I will say that the title lead me to think that the talk would have to do with marketing strategies, but instead it has to do with product direction and user support.
nowadays if you design anything at all that has an end-user component you'll spend at least as much time at making it jerk-proof and doing all kinds of abuse analysis

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22always+blames+his+tools%22

Echoes of Kozmo: http://money.cnn.com/2005/09/14/technology/kozmo_redux

No more 50-cent deliveries [...]

Customers of Kozmo.com who fondly remember getting single pints of ice cream delivered on a whim won't get off that easy this time. MaxDelivery has a $10 minimum order, and there's a $4.95 delivery charge for orders under $50. Siragusa said this is to keep customers from abusing the system, as they did with Kozmo, and he says MaxDelivery's average order size is much different than Kozmo's.

"Someone ordered a pack of Mentos. Then two hours later they'd order a pint of ice cream," said Siragusa. "People did this because there was no penalty. Kozmo had a number of orders that were unprofitable."

Kozmo's founders designed its system to reward customers for making frequent low-value orders. When the customer base responded in a way that should have been predicted by the Kozmo founders, instead of recognizing and fixing their error, those founders instead called it "abuse".
Here's the thing I don't understand. You cannot rent the bike unless you use a debit card (credit cards are very rare in france) or a monthly/yearly metro subscription. So they actually must know who rented the bike when it disappeared.
Good find. I'm pretty amazed at the fact that Charles Darwin used to work only for 3 hours. I think 3 hours of work without any interruptions is better than my 8 hours spent on computer (plus at the end I always have a feeling I couldn't complete the stuff today---yet again;( ). Amazing. I'm just guessing that these guys must have settled on such routines after lots of hit and trial. Not sure, what should I do with my routine as mostly I'm tired of my sleeping routine and I've almost given up on that.
I felt it appropriate to post this followup to the Mob Wars lawsuit a month ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=415574) where I adamantly stated this exact thing wouldn't happen (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=416037). I was wrong.
游爱网页游戏_webgame无端网游门户 - UI265.COM
幻想PVP世界——充满光荣与梦想的大陆！_游戏资讯_游爱网页游戏 - UI265.COM
There are 8 enginers at my startup. Four use Lenovo laptops (1 with the write on screen), 2 use Mac Book Pro's, and 2 use desktops. In terms of power, we're all on Linux or Mac OSX and we have enough power for most stuff, if we need more there is a 16 core build server we share. In terms of interface, we all have 2 monitors and nice keyboards and just put the laptop on a stand during the day. The productivity of being able to just grab your laptop and take it home for late night hacking, or on an airplane to a conference, or in a meeting you just don't want to pay attention to outweighs giving up 20% more power.
You know, I went to a top-tier private school in the US, followed by a top-tier private university, and I never understood the obsession with getting As in everything. I certainly wasn't, especially once at university, but I didn't feel like less of a person.Even in the US, there is a stereotype that Asian parents drive their kids in a similar manner, although I have never heard of them treating them like property like this father does. Then there's the cram schools in Korea and Japan. I have to wonder why that, culturally, seems to be linked to Asians?

Culturally, though, this is the most disturbing part of the article:
One day I brought in a book, The Collected Stories of Guy Maupassant, and it was confiscated. The head teacher said this book was useless in improving my grades and that these kinds of books only lead students into decadence and depravation. The next day after class I was flipping through a book of short essays and it too was confiscated. The head teacher would not even let me write small articles on my own because she believes that it is a waste of time to write anything unless it is required by the literature teacher.

One message I was always sent during my education was that the point of education was to become a whole person, not just to make money; literacy and humanism were an integral part of that. (I think a couple of Asian kids that I went to school with ended up in the humanities against their parents' wishes because of this). That attitude seems to be quite common among hackers as well. The shells of people that the Chinese system will turn out, if this is any indication, scare me.
It's a lot easier to hire passionate engineers as employees if you're trying to change the world, however.
I'm perplexed by your implied comment that having to spend time making your product jerk-proof and performing abuse analysis is only done by poor workmen.

It seems to me that work must be done to create value, and work must be done to make the system idiot proof (despite the continuing ingenuity of idiots), and this is true regardless of the talent and abilities of those producing the service or product.
I get the feeling that Chrome will look similar on Windows and Linux. This would not come as a shock to Windows or Linux users, as there are no real "standard" user interfaces for those systems. Obviously, on Windows and Linux, there are unspoken guidelines and the usual GUI toolkits, so you have many applications that do look similar and a few that look different, but on Mac OS X, an application that doesn't look like it fits with every other one is simply unattractive, distracting and harder to learn. Of course, that ability to learn quickly is detracted from by the non-standard controls that are already in Chrome.

A great strength of Mac OS X is just that -- that it's UI is consistent.
I agree it doesn't make much sense with the current setup. But if twitter did decide they really wanted to sell twitter analytics, would you want to be competing head-to-head with them? Open API doesn't have to mean replicate-our-whole-database.
A big problem is that the whole "spare the rod spoil the child" mindset has become so much a given that people have a hard time believing any "softer" approach for anything other than babies and infants might work, even in the face of evidence that the current approach is not working.
The Toyota mindset revealed
oh, that's weird. You'd think they'd just charge them for it then.

Also,

>credit cards are very rare in france

You mean you guys don't generally allow yourselves to get deep into debt at absurd interest rates? I can't imagine living in a country like that!

Next you're going to tell me that when you have
"Western managers think their job is to get results. Toyota thinks managers’ job is to design and sustain processes that generate these results as a matter of course. Western managers think they employ workers to do a job. Toyota employs workers to learn how to do the job better | to keep improving that process, and therefore the results. Western managers think management is about knowing the answers and telling other people what to do. Toyota disagrees again: if managers tell staff what to do, they take responsibility away."
Sharpen the Vim saw
It's not that test scores are somehow the least bad option. It's that they're the cheapest least bad option. Actually assessing a students comprehension would require a verbal examination.
If you can figure out how to trick the system, you get unlimited access to $500 bikes.

That's a much better incentive than the guy who built the system had.
> The result was centuries of stagnation.

One of the factors, yes, but making such an attribution overlooks a lot: the Tang is often regarded as a renaissance in China. It follows the Sui, when the imperial exams started. General characteristics of each of the dynasties, and each of the rulers, have large effects on the policies and the culture of the era.

Simple example: if Bush was an emperor, and held power for a few generations, it isn't far fetched to see a dark age of bio research.
The patent trolls know that the rational (in the game-theory sense of the word) decision for the victim company is to settle, because the cost of taking it to court (in both legal fees and lost time) exceed the cost of the settlement.

It's like an asymmetric game of chicken. Both players know that the troll has the advantage of having less to lose in a "collision" (a lawsuit), so the troll can count on the victim to "swerve" (settle). If the victim was able to eliminate the cost of a collision, and the troll knew that the cost of a collision to the victim company was eliminated, it would make more sense for the troll to swerve (drop the claim).

(More chicken strategies here: http://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2009/01/20/4-tips-for-winn... . This strategy is most similar to #3.)
One paper on the site describes experimental enhancement of numerosity [being able to more accurately count the number(~50-150) of shapes displayed on a monitor for ~1.5 seconds].