skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If "giving up" seems un-Google-like to you then you haven't been around very long.

The number of services, applications, and ideas they have shut down is probably nearing the hundreds.
Some IRC channels I'm in are great. (Hi Clojure! Hi Haskell! You guys are really nice!)

Some are like ##C which is a hive of scum and villainy.
AP News disagrees:

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_CONNECTICUT_SCHOOL...

"A law enforcement official in Washington said the attacker was a 20-year-old man with ties to the school and that one of the guns was a .223-caliber rifle."
[Spoons] themselves don't [make people fat], but they make it highly efficient. [Spoons] are tools, they create or enhance capabilities and as such they can be judged based on the outcomes of their usage.
Mobile First Or Mobile Worst?
Why put locks on your house when someone can just break the window? Why wear a seatbelt when the dash of your car will collapse your skull anyway?
I didn't mean to ignore your point- a good one, by the way- I've been out of the country and without wifi computer. I could have answered you on my iPhone, but....

To my defense, I wasn't citing numbers. The 95% thing sounds like a made-up number.

To your point: I don't know exactly what swiftkey is- but it's an interesting idea that these new devices may allow a touch-typing replacement to gain traction. That could be a game-changer, I agree.
Stallman disagrees: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.gpg.gnutls.dev...
The psychology behind the kind of people that could do a thing like this baffles me completely. Insanity doesn't begin to describe it. Parents should not have to worry about whether or not their children are safe in school. At the same time armed guards at school are not a solution either, then you might as well turn it into a mini prison.

What a sad sad day.

Even countries with gun control have instances like this (but they're arguably less frequent), and some countries with lots of guns have almost no problems like this at all (Switzerland for instance).

Just trying to imagine dropping a grade school kid off at school to find them dead in the afternoon from an insane thing like this I find that I can't do it, it is just too far from what I can still imagine. And I have a pretty rich imagination...

This world could be so nice, why does it have to be such a crappy place?
As an electrical engineer teaching himself to code, I found programming to be a lot more comparable to writing than engineering. Coding is at the same time a logical and creative process, and a lot like juggling how pieces of an essay or story fit together to a chosen goal for your audience. Engineering seems a lot more rigid - you have a set problem and a known best practice solution. In that sense it is more like solving a list of math problems. Yes I know the best math (and engineering) problems require creativity and an intuitive feel, but by and large that kind of work is only available to the top of the field. But, you can code and write whatever you like and ship it at zero cost.
No worries, thanks for the response. Just wanted to make sure I'm not overlooking a feature. No harm in giving a little extra karma to things I'm personally not interested in. :)
"It is not good for man to be alone" is a phrase found in LDS ("Mormon") theology, that was spoken, purportedly, in the Garden of Eden. I am more responding to the http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4905386 blog post. Don't know if this Canadian IT CEO who works alone in his office is single or married. As a man married nearly 33 years, to one wife, and we being the parents of 9 children, I have been self-employed all but a handful of months (at the beginning) of those nearly 33 years. And, for the bulk of that time, I too, have long worked alone in an office.

Now I work out of my home, and the bulk of that, too, now, I am alone for.

Like the owner of that blog, I am also (now) an extrovert. But I am a man of many interests. I take some time out during my day to respond online to such things, as this, that interest me. That helps me in a small way to connect to others in somewhat similar situations.

But, being married, and having the physical intimacy that that should include helps to carry me a long way through otherwise difficult to bear circumstances.

Perhaps you could use an assistant or some other way get the cameraderie you enjoy. Or, maybe, you need to get another job like you had before. Don't know how many options are viable for you?
True, but it's a community whose opinion I trust more than most others, so it's often enlightening to read comments about non-hacker news posts once and a while.
R12 was a thing of beauty.
Review: Google Maps puts Apple Maps to shame
The main problem with human memory is that read operations are also write operations.

http://koehlerlaw.net/2010/09/on-human-memory-and-eyewitness...

http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/sciam.htm

http://agora.stanford.edu/sjls/Issue%20One/fisher&tversk...

http://townhall.com/columnists/jacobsullum/2011/08/31/your_l...

Human memory is continually being reshaped, and is not a reliable archive of anyone's experience.

The other problem with the human brain's large capacities in general is that bandwidth to and from the brain constrains the brain's interaction with the environment. I have read (I'm sorry I don't remember the source off-hand) that human sensory organs have a huge information capacity, and the human brain has a huge capacity both to process and to store information, but the nervous system's connections between sensory nerves for input or between motor nerves for output are strictly limited in bandwidth, so you always have to ignore much of what you could perceive or do. A really good book about the built-in capacity for human self-deception is The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life by Robert Trivers,

http://www.amazon.com/The-Folly-Fools-Deceit-Self-Deception/...

which is full of interesting information about limitations of the thinking of all organisms, especially human beings.
When are we going to start talking about knife control in a serious way?
Gun control is the easy answer. I want to know how we as a society can figure out why people get frustrated, depressed, or angry to the point that shooting up a kindergarten enters into the picture.

We don't know the backstory here, but usually these events are all about someone whose life is spinning out of control for any of a dozen reasons, and either nobody has a clue that anything was wrong or everyone thought that the guy was a timebomb and did nothing.
What's so significant about that rifle? That it's black and scary looking?

Here's a semiauto rifle with the same calibre:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/Min...

Would that one be more acceptable because it has a wood stock?
The 2nd ammendment is not just about protecting yourself from foreign powers or your own government. You have a natural right to self defense from all threats.
Sure, the analogy is silly. The point really is that [Noun] Control is impossible. What about crossbows, knives and rocks?

Things aren't the problem. People are the problem.
Exactly - it's like the difference between chess and poker. Both are popular but poker is more widely played because differences in skill are less apparent (especially to an unskilled player)

People who don't like randomness mixed with skill just need to stop measuring themselves by the outcome of a single game.
Have you found any pitfalls trying to start a co-working space where there's a lack of an existing community? Did you do much research?
What if you wanted to learn something that is not related to programming? What if you wanted to know the best books/blogs/etc to learn how to make awesome tutorial videos?

Where do you usually go in that case (for validated/curated resources)?

(And event on SO these kind of questions get closed down. Some get protected, but is only after they get significant traffic. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1711/what-is-the-single-m...)
Interesting that you use the term "weave" which is so often associated with the construction of a good plot in writing/storytelling.

That said, I think maybe you haven't read good enough fiction :)
We're numb to them like we are all other kinds of deaths. Hurricanes, winter, car accidents, tornadoes, etc. There are ways to die are far more preventable than mass shootings that we should be focusing on.
We've had that conversation several times, typically in the wake of tragic and isolated events like this one.

As a nation, we've decided that we don't want to restrict the rights of hundreds of millions of law abiding citizens merely because a few people misuse those rights. This is why politicians have generally decided not to push for more gun control - it's an election losing issue.

Incidentally, I'm confused by the point of that tweet. Here are some other .223 rifles:

http://s845.beta.photobucket.com/user/OldColdWarrior2009/med...

http://media.liveauctiongroup.net/i/9380/10373165_1.jpg?v=8C...

http://molot.biz/product-e/vepr223-super.jpg

For most calibers, you can find guns with many different form factors that accept bullets of that caliber. So what?
You sound excited by the prospect. Personally I feel nauseous at your callous description:

'He will pull out his gun and kill the poor unsuspecting first soul. After that initial shot someone with a concealed weapons permit is going to blow his brains out...'

I truly hope that maybe we work towards a society where mass shootings aren't a monthly occurrence...
Lay off the "all you liberals" crap. If I want zealotry mixed with stereotyping I can go read the comments on any CNN or FOX news article. Leave that crap off of HN please.
Stalkers, prepare to be thwarted: Senate passes location privacy bill
Posted this because I think it's really cool to see non-embarrassing concurrency pushed so hard in such a highly-relevant area. Specifically, take a look at the "Strategies for parallelism" section; pcwalton informs me that basically none of the potential strategies there are employed by any of the current major browser engines, with the exception of JS parsing.

Very excited to watch this project progress--though do note that it's basically nothing but a glorified image renderer in its current state of development.
Google Mugs Father Christmas
Since the size of bit is known so we have KB, MB, GB and so on. However if we are not able to measure human brain storage capacity on the basic level (like bit in case of computers) how can we define a Humabyte?
Unless you get stabbed on the neck or get your stomach punctured, I think the chances of surviving a stabbing are high.
But why is it this such a problem or the potential for such a problem so big in US, though? It it because US basically has 10x the population of most European countries, and therefore there ought to be at least one person like this once in a while? Or does this happen because, while some people may be crazy, having crazy with easy access to weapons makes the danger that much greater? I mean I can't say I've heard about many such stories in Europe.

And what about that story that in 2011 there have been 85 bullets shot during the whole year by the police, while in US the police has shot one person alone with that many bullets. Surely the easy access to guns, and to automated guns for the police, has made this that much more possible? And that it also created a culture where if someone just pisses you off enough, you're then very likely to just go and shoot them?
It's relative -- among Seattle hoods, I would (anecdotally and out of my ass, of course) say there is more violent crime there than in others. I'm also a fairly big guy and I've felt uncomfortable plenty of times there at night when the streets are semi-abandoned.

In the past year I've seen ambulances taking away normal citizens who've been beat down (twice) and I've had a stabbing perp run by me as he was chased by the cops. And this is with me almost never going to Belltown. I've never seen anything remotely like that while I lived in First or Capitol Hill (although I've definitely seen plenty of car break-ins).
Right, because everybody with a concealed weapons permit is James Bond with perfect aim and cool nerves.

Reality is a little bit messier than your fantasies.
>That's not what prototype means to me

It is what it means in English.

>Bad ideas don't need scalable code and scalable performant code is not as fast to write as quick and dirty code.

Scalable and performant are two entirely orthogonal concepts. Neither of which are really relevant to the topic, correctness.
The reason we carry on as usual is because we don't believe gun control is the solution.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57559179/china-school-kn...

Guess we need to control sharp objects as well? It's easy to get angry at dangerous items but in reality it's the people we need to control.
Glad to see Page Rule helped. Some revision on cache-control headers would help further.
Oh, that is such a straw man. In America, the country in which I (and presumably you) live, what's the body count on the ol' oppressive regime-vs-AR15 wielding madman debate anyways? I'm thinking it's on the order of 0 to a couple hundred thousand. If everybody in North Korea owned a shotgun, yes, the world would be a better place. I don't understand why that means children should be murdered en masse, or that I should have to dodge bullets in my own neighborhood (yes, really), all so that you can sleep easier at night knowing that the far-off, nebulous specter of the 'oppressive regime' is held safely at bay by your Colt 45.
Neato

How do the students estimate the number of items?

Back when I was a student (we used to chase geese to get feathers to make pens in those days) my most difficult to manage possessions were books. Several hundred of them.
To some degree "it just works" today. For example, see the end of http://gisli.hamstur.is/2012/12/network-programming-in-haske...

By using Haskell you get multi-core support for free, so if you want to distribute the request handling over the cores in your machine you simply execute the server like so. Substitute x in -Nx with the number of cores you want to use. $ ./network-server +RTS -Nx

I don't think this gets you the same kind of fine-grained parallelism as the research compiler. But I could be wrong.
The Psychology of Cults and Marketing
A vim interface for gmail: Vmail
It takes a huge space. 1 kWh means moving a metric ton (a cubic meter) of water 400m of elevation.

Round trip efficiency isn't great, but also not terrible. It beats the fuel-cell/electrolysis cycle, but loses to batteries. It can be profitable though because energy rates can reach near zero (and even occasionally slightly negative) at night.

99% of installed energy storage is pumped hydro.
For all the rationale I ever heard about gun rights, the one you gave here might be the worst ever. If the government should fear it's citizens it's f* up already, you might as well have real diplomatic or military intervention, not let people die fighting in the street like happens right now in Syria [1].

The sad truth is, oppressive regimes exist in the first place because more powerful nations benefit from it. My own country lived for 17 years under an oppressive regime backed by the gun bearing, world's freedom and democracy flagship.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKsWGuLzsWk&list=PLC4FDC3...
This has nothing to do with gun control. Guns exist, that can't be stopped any more than preventing alcohol from existing (prohibition), and some bad guys will always have access to guns. Or knives, or diesel fuel, or explosives.

Was the Oklahoma-city bombing a wake-up call for "explosives control"? Was the 2009 Chengdu bus-fire (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Chengdu_bus_fire) a wake-up call for diesel control? Was the Osaka school massacre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka_school_massacre) a wake-up call for knife-control? Was the 2012 Toronto mall shooting a wake-up call for gun-control in Canada, which already has extremely stringent gun-laws?

It's all too easy to blame the gun in these situations, but guns are just tools, as are knives, and diesel fuel, and even explosives.

It's not the gun. It never was the gun. It's the person.
I would really rather we talk about mental health and brain chemistry. Objects are easy to vilify, but we are ignoring mental health in this country and this is the result. The number of people walking around with untreated Schizophrenia is seriously problematic. The shooter in NM set off so many warnings that were ignored by people in power that it should have been seen. When the dust settles, I would expect a similar narrative on warning signs.

How many times are we going to find out someone had a history of mental issues and nothing was done? How many people are reluctant to take proper medication because they view the effects of the medication worse than what it trying to treat. We have a lot of people coming back with PTSD, we need to get better at this.

I remember OK and that was farm products (which some companies still sell at automated machines). IEDs, pipe bombs, propane canisters, Molotov cocktails are all capable of killing a lot people and are easier to build or acquire than guns.
Something to be aware of

Ruger's 1 Million Gun Challenge
http://www.ruger.com/micros/million/about.html
> Schools need to able to have armed guards and better locked/secured entries IMO.

Yes, treating our schools like we treat our prisons is a great paradigm to adopt for our educational system.
Or perhaps, draw the right conclusion from the data: setting bad goals is really bad. Don't set bad goals.
You make the logical fallacy that just because they CAN still get a gun, that it's equally likely that they will get a gun. It's not. Having to go through hoops to find a gun will result in fewer insane people having guns, it's that simple. It won't prevent all shootings, and certainly wouldn't work very well in the US, since you guys have been flooding the country with guns for a century. In other countries it works quite well though.
Thanks for the link, I think there were some good insights here.

I'm a law school dropout myself, having left after the first semester (I got an MS in Engineering instead). To me, the big problem isn't that there are all these law grads, it's that you have to go through three years of law school in order to sit for the bar exam.

While I was only there for a semester, I did pass all my courses and leave in good academic standing. I just didn't want to waste (EDIT: spend) any more time on the subject. In my opinion, it could easily be an undergraduate major, or a shorter master's degree. Unlike grad school in Sci/Eng, where there's no way to take the classes without a specialized background, law really doesn't need to be a grad degree.

For example, my graduate course in Advanced Nonlinear Optimization, were you deal with optimality in equations with multiple variables subject to multiple (nonlinear) constraints, obviously required a certain math background. You need to know calculus, and you need to be able to deal with differential equations, or at least handle first and second order partial derivatives in equations with multiple variables. You also really do need a course in linear algebra, and you probably should have at least a couple of theory courses under your belt, because you are going to need to do some proofs. So, you know, grad degree.

While torts, civil procedure, and contracts do require the ability to read some dense material,make sense of it, and write about it, there's really no "need" for an undergraduate degree in English or History. I'm also highly skeptical that three years of graduate study are at all required. I think that top students are more than capable of mastering this coursework at a far more rapid rate.

The problem to me isn't that lawyers aren't finding jobs, it's that people have to spend far too much time and go far too deeply into debt to get this credential. Feel free to keep the bar exam and make it hard. If it were an undergrad degree, and students could graduate for little or no debt, they'd be able to either 1) work for less, and get legal services to people who actually desperately need them, or 2) do what a lot of people do - go outside your field and find a job. I haven't found a lot of call for writing proofs about convex sets. It's hardly some great tragedy that I instead learned about programming and found gainful employment that way.
This is exactly what happened. Although I am involved in product on 100% of the time, I don't deal with specific implementation details, the engineers working on the solution deal with that. So I tried to be a truthful as possible and answer all the questions I could, I simply got some details wrong. One of the engineers noticed and I rectified my answer.
VC is by definition not investing in black swans, since there is a long history of exits and failures to the point that PG & co can make claims like '1 company invested in per YC will pay for all the rest'.

VC is merely extremely risky but so far positive expected value.
Drawing and painting was the best introduction to programming that I never knew I got.
Xerox won a $72 million contract to the build-out of Nevada's state insurance exchange earlier this year. Accenture won one of the biggest prizes, a $399 million contract in June to lead the build-out of California's health benefit exchange

This is probably naive thinking, but does it really cost $400 million to build one of these? And I'm sure there are some quirks across states, but does each state really have to build its own from the ground up? It would seem to me that there is an opportunity for some company (startup? bigCorp?) to build it once and resell it to multiple states.
Linode increases storage by 20%
Then someone blows the old ladies brains out thinking that she is the shooter. Nice plan.
> This world could be so nice, why does it have to be such a crappy place?

Nice stuff happens. It just doesn't make (or sell) the news. But that doesn't mean the world isn't nice.
Apologies for the link bait style title (just using the original article title) but I think the challenges of projecting branding to consumers without this kind of faux pas (however subtle) are fascinating
Computer games started as implementations of board games. But they have gone very far from each other. This comment nails it:

*

2 points by b0rsuk 4 days ago | link | parent | on: Mining a 1993 game design for innovative game mech...

There's an insightful comment over here: http://crystalprisonzone.blogspot.com/2012/02/whether-they-l....

"""I think one of the very interesting things about modern single-player game development is that it creates exceptionally expensive content designed to appeal to everyone and be played exactly once for 8-10 hours. As anybody who plays European board games will tell you, making a game (read: the body of rules, the mechanics and dynamics) is cheap - all you need is creativity and a lot of playtesting. AAA videogames are entirely different, though - millions are spent on voice acting, scripting, graphics, etc. This is why I'm excited for moderate-budget games like Bastion that can publish interesting and challenging gameplay with a budget lean enough that it doesn't have to sell to absolutely everybody."""

http://crystalprisonzone.blogspot.com/2012/02/whether-they-l...

Board games don't just innovate in the rules department. Everywhere outside the computer "game" world, games ARE the rules. Rules is how we distinguish one game from another. If Heroes of Might and Magic III was a board game, people would call it an expansion to Heroes II. It has nearly identical rules. It has 3 extra towns and some extra units and spells ? The same is true for Munchkin Cthulhu. But no one is silly enough to call it a sequel or a separate game.

As far as I'm concerned, 90% of the modern tacticool shooters are the same game, not similar games. They are played in the same way. Weapons and enemies are slightly different.

Board games frequently have mechanics unheard of in the world of computer games