skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the brightest people I know taught himself a good deal of what he knows. Nonetheless, he is a very precise speaker on these topics. He learned the language along with the topic. And he uses it to communicate -- exceptionally clearly, by the way.

The language is an important component of functioning effectively in the domain. And it serves as a thinking aid, as well; it's very difficult to manipulate complex fields without the use of abstractions. Language is part and parcel of those abstractions.

I am in agreement with SiVal. Accurate communication is a clear measure.

Perhaps somewhat akin with the current "brogramming" fettish, one... "Hollywoodism" is to apply some sort of slangy techspeak "bravado" to "elite hackers".

That's B.S.

P.S. I should add that "taught himself" means a combination of reading, doing, and collaborating with others in his fields of interest.

He might have entered some of those fields kind of sideways, but once people within them observed and learned that he really knows what he is doing and what he is talking about, that doesn't matter. (And that he quickly and thoroughly learns things he doesn't already know, when needed. Or... as often as not, before "needed", because of his driving interest.)
> In some places, the high octane gasoline does not have ethanol in it but some cars do not run as well on high octane gas because the gasoline does not ignite at the most efficient time for the engine.

I don't believe this is the case. Gasoline engines with higher compression need the higher octane fuel because it won't ignite at the temperature and pressure in the cylinder prior to the spark plug firing. Once the plug fires, the temperature and pressure are right for gasoline of any octane level within reason to combust.

There's no downside to running high-octane racing gasoline through a low-compression engine like the Atkinson-cycle engine in the Prius, but no benefit either. Other engines, like the 5.0 V8 in the Mustang GT, have different performance ratings for different grades of fuel. Still other engines, like the 2.0T I4 in the Volkswagen GTI, require high octane fuels for the extra compression they run.
I didn't find much but here is some:

* http://cad.sagepub.com/content/48/1/46

* http://books.google.rs/books?hl=en&lr=&id=3B4lTTZE58...

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contagion

They are cited as references on this page:

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_crime

As for other evidence, you'd need to look at crimes and if there is a large number of similar attempts of violence (not necessarily school, but overall mass shootings), grouped around highly prominent cases covered by media. That kind of research and evidence is sadly outside my scope. I'm not sure where you'd find sources, nor how to process them statistically correct.
They're the same image sizes we use today. And it was instantaneous, or relatively so in comparison to Photoshop 3 - which couldn't edit the images at all due to size. We would have to use a plugin to work on parts of an image most times.
I just finished the book three days ago, really liked it, and thought, that there must be a site to collect programmers checklists for different tasks to have a similar collection as the aviation experts. Turns out, there is not...
The intention was to make it really easy to play with the parameters (not that if you make a change to the html, it will be immediately reflected in the screen above).

If you have any suggestions, a pull request would be much appreciated! https://github.com/colin-scott/interactive_latencies
Also recommend Jeff Dean's tech talk Building Software Systems At Google and Lessons Learned which references those latency numbers.

Slides: http://research.google.com/people/jeff/Stanford-DL-Nov-2010....

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=modXC5IWTJI

Also, a previous thread on latency numbers:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4047623
How to Get Rich: One of the World's Greatest Entrepreneurs Shares His Secrets - Felix Dennis. The most life-changing book that I read this year. http://www.amazon.com/How-Get-Rich-Greatest-Entrepreneurs/dp...
The problem with the secrecy culture is that it not only protects the military secrets and the privacy of the dead, it also is useful to cover mistakes, abuses, bad conditions, corruption and systematic problems. Perhaps this is only a moron blogger, or perhaps there are some more problematic things to hide.

Here in Argentina, in 1994 a conscript was reported as a deserter. Only after some investigation he was found dead inside the regiment because he was beaten unintentionally to dead as a punishment. In that kind of cases it's easy to use the "protection of his family" the cover the crime.

Spanish version: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caso_Carrasco

English autotranslation: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&tl...
Since this was posted on 5 December and has a fair amount of attention now, I'm surprised that Expedia hasn't officially responded yet. Maybe because so much of the attention has come in the past couple of days. I sent them a Tweet asking what was going on, and I notice someone posted this on their Facebook Page.
You bring up an interesting point. I didn't qualify compelling but, you're right, it can mean many things and have many aspects. You can say both Rebecca Black's Friday and Bach's Goldberg Variations are compelling, but they are night and day different.

Software, like architecture, usually doesn't have the type of hedonism you're speaking about (as far as I can tell). What people like is what they enjoy using. They often may not even know it, but find they're using it all the time, for example. And that is exactly that quality/satisfaction that you're talking about.
One does not simply post something on a business's Facebook page. Either the page has to share it or the viewer has to make two clicks to see it.
Yuppers, idea taken directly from Jeff's talk: http://colin-scott.github.com/blog/2012/12/24/latency-trends...
The internet would still work if you had a faster database. 19ms is your hard drive seek, SSD is much faster. Thats the big change of the last 10 years.
1999: Description of the LCS35 Time Capsule Crypto-Puzzle
A good vehicle can be a non-technical character to whom the technical character provides a brief -- not disrupting flow -- and particularly lucid explanation.

You will need a fairly exceptional consultant for the brief and lucid explanation.

Your job, as the screenwriter, is to fit that explanation into the screenplay in a manner that seems natural and furtherw the storytelling.

Then, you get an audience that learns a bit, and experts who say to themselves, "Hey, they actually got that bit right." (Maybe they're even quietly impressed at that. And when their friends ask them what movie gets "X" right, they're more likely to cite yours.)
I also have had good experiences with Hotwire. One helpful note: if you do a little looking around on the internet, it's usually pretty easy to figure out which hotel they're offering based on location and amenities.
Sauce for Mac: Launch Any Browser Right From Your Mac
First, there seems to be a lot of agreement that the Metro interface is innovative. I think it's also a meaningful innovation, but each to his/her own.

Second, pretty much everyone would agree that the early Android versions were not really innovative and pretty much a copy of iOS (which is certainly not the case anymore). Also, history is littered with inferior systems with little innovation that eventually won. So, it doesn't seem to be the case that the consumer necessarily chooses for 'meaningful innovations'. There's also price, branding, luck, etc.

Third, it is very strange to compare RIM and Windows Phone. RIM is more like Apple: one operating system, one device vendor. Windows Phone is more like, erm... Windows ;) or perhaps even Android: one operating system, competing device vendors. The dynamics are completely different, e.g. a phone vendor might choose to push WP or Android more, depending on what is offered in terms of differentiation, royalties, patent licensing costs, etc. Also, like the grandparent says, Microsoft as quite a popular ecosystem to leverage WP (Windows, XBox 360, Office, etc.).
I am going to have to say that MPEG-4, and specifically MPEG-4 Part 2 and MPEG-4 Part 10 are indeed video encoding standards. The different individual parts even have their own ISO numbers.

Thus I do feel the "relevant XKCD comic" is relevant, even if some find the posting of such comics annoying.
54 ms for neutrinos taking the chord through the Earth (using 0.22 from your result). (That's only 4ms faster than light through vacuum along the great circle. Disappointing.)

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2+*+sin+%280.5+*+0.22+*...
I thought quantum entanglement was incapable of transmitting information, for reasons beyond my basic undergrad comprehension of quantum mechanics.
Ask HN: What have you learned in 2012?
Pertains to anything and everything, be it life in general or technical/scientific.

What I've learned:

1.) Simple interfaces made of white space, quality images, and clear information flow are ESSENTIAL KNOWLEDGE.

2.) I need to be great at one group of skills and have a general understanding of the others. Makes everything run smoother and gives each team member their chance to shine at what they do best.

3.) Humanity has replaced the geocentric model with the egocentric model. We have come a long way but this model is just as delusional and dangerous for the long-term survival of the species.

4.) Savor this moment in space and time, there will never be another quite like it. All the sights, sounds, and stories are similar but it's not about if you've seen it before or not, it's if you're enjoying them still and learning from them.

Just my two cents. Your turn.
mutex lock/unlock time is important for anyone writing code that depends on code that is accessing the same data structures at the same time. If you don't know that there is a considerable cost to writing such code, now you do; and this number can quantify it.
Ask HN: What material would you suggest go in a DIY CS education?
I'm 18 and taking a gap year to work as a mobile developer. I don't know if I'll go back to school afterwards, and I'm wondering what topics I'd need to cover to have the equivalent of a undergrad CS education?

Suggestions for books on topics from algorithms to discrete mathematics are appreciated.
The pot shots at LM are a little bit misplaced. Let's not forget that it was the DOD and LM, Rockwell, etc, that built all of this technology in the first place. The industry is now mature and ready for competitive, cost-focused companies, but SpaceX is riding some very long coattails here.
> The value of t was chosen to take into consideration the growth in computational power due to "Moore's Law". Based on the SEMATECH National Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (1997 edition), we can expect internal chip speeds to increase by a factor of approximately 13 overall up to 2012, when the clock rates reach about 10GHz. After that improvements seem more difficult, but we estimate that another factor of five might be achievable by 2034. Thus, the overall rate of computation should go through approximately six doublings by 2034.

Not many people are running 10 GHz computers; GPUs and parallel processing have taken a lot of work off the CPU. But that doesn't help with problems that are 'intrinsically sequential' - is anyone working on that?

I'm aware of some semi-obscure projects for parallelisation (Copocobana, etc etc) but I'm keen to learn more about fast non-parallel computing.
>Should really every programmer know it?

This lame comment comes up every time I see something like this posted. You're right. Knowing exact latency numbers is probably not going to change how you program, or how I program, or how most program. But why does it hurt to know? Why refuse to learn a few numbers that give some perspective on your system's limitations?

The other end of this is, for example, a programmer who is unaware that disk seeks take something like 100000x as long as accessing main memory.

(Anyway, the posted link is interesting since it shows these numbers over time.)
> Reporting these as KIA is better for the IDF

This is the crux of the issue. This a weak opinion. You jump immediately to 'propaganda' as the reason that soldiers who commit suicide are labeled KIA when there are many other possibilities.

1) Do you know if there are in fact different official classifications of active-duty soldiers deaths?

2) Do you know if they're labeled KIA for benefits purposes?

3) Wouldn't this make Israel's enemies look better since it lowers the civilians to combatant death ratio?

You, without qualification, immediately assume this is a propaganda. That's the problem I have and that's why it's a weak comment. It has nothing to do with whether I agree with you or not.
I just finished The Odyssey and it was also better than I expected. I'll move on to The Iliad next.
Ready Player One was the best book I read this year, and the best in recent memory. My wife — who isn't into video games or much of 80's culture — loved it as well.
Solr works great for english language, but once you want to have other languages support, you will want to use Lucene directly.

anyway, what if my hosting provider won't let me run Solr or any other java software?
Using 'su'[0] is the wrong approach. Setting HOME makes the home directory look different, while keeping all of the permissions the same as the current running user. This is all that's needed, as Dropbox (by default) uses '$HOME/Dropbox'.

0: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwi...
I think the consensus might be underestimating things like Project Glass and new directions in keyboards (microfluid haptics, perhaps even more radical designs). For example it seems like it didn't take long for people to accept in-ear headsets.
The Adventures of Lightning Ellsworth
Node.js - I've been doing only client side js for a long time (mostly via rails). Being able to do the client and server side code in the same language sounds really intriguing.
> By passing text to something that replaces new lines with br the implication is that it is now safe to drop into HTML

> I don't see how that's implied at all. After all, the function is named nl2br, not html2text.

Absolutely every example from the documentation http://php.net/manual/en/function.nl2br.php uses it exactly in this manner: taking the output and immediately outputting it to the resultant HTML document. I've already described why this is unsafe (take any of these examples, replace the string with something like "Everyone knows 4 < 5", and it breaks the document due to the inclusion of "special" characters).

Now you feel that the correct use of this function is so obvious that it merits mocking my belief that it may be misunderstood by users (despite the comments on that very documentation page describing how they use it as a simple text to html converter). So given that it is so obvious to you, I repeat my original request: just give me an example where nl2br isn't ultimately used to transform plaintext before outputting it to HTML.
I'm confident that the US cannot hold a candle to Germany, Russia, Cambodia, Bosnia, etc., when it comes to prolific murdering. If you only want to consider individual / non-cooperating killers, they exist in similar proportion across most societies.
I'm not using any of these services (expedia or booking.com), but have heard similar things several times ... "Genuine" reviews are a difficult problem to solve though, even if you have the identity of actual "customers" at your disposal. The price of one stellar review is then basically the cut of the referring website, when e.g. a hotel employee "books" a stay at that hotel just to be able to give it a positive review.
That depends if Expedia inform the correct closing time of Alamo or not, I had the same problem but Expedia say that the renting car company was open 24 hours and it wasn´t
No-one seems to have mentioned Iain Banks's Hydrogen Sonata so I will. It's not first rate but it's something of a return to form over his last few (at least for me).
People have a right to truth that affects them, even if it makes them unhappy or angry. It is utterly patronizing to lie about the cause of death. Yes it's unfortunate. So? Have you ever lost someone to something stupid? Would you prefer having been lied to? BS. Also, if the IDF cared so much, why not let people who don't want to be in it go? "They found him, he ran away" kinda sounds like they saw him, but didn't move, and he just leaped into traffic. Not having been there I wouldn't know either way, but couldn't you just as well have said "they chased him into traffic"? But that would make it rather obvious that the motivations for not giving out the facts is to save the face of the IDF, not to protect anyone. To me it just adds insult to injury.
I can second this. I'm your typical average terrible drawer.

Stepping through the first quarter of this book, following the exercises and going from being able to draw a barely recognisable stick figure to an actually respectable drawing within 50 pages was an amazing experience.
I wish we would treat cyberspace analogues of established property with the same respect given to the original. For example, your e-mail inbox is the online equivalent of your mailbox. Yet, one being "on your lawn" and the other "at Google's data-center," all bets are off. While I believe the Supreme Court should do better job at explicitly addressing this (for instance, "responsible expectation of privacy" established Katz[1] would be a fair test for e-mail, while Jones[2] and Kyllo[3] show the importance of taking modern technology into account), the government needs to firmly establish which techniques are important for security while protecting us from those which recklessly violate privacy.

[1] http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0389...

[2] http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/10-1259

[3] http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/99-8508.ZS.html
You are right! And it is perfectly possible to provide those public goods without European levels of taxation (or hell, Californian levels of taxation!). Hong Kong manages to do it with an 18% flat tax.
Seven Databases in Seven Weeks: A Guide to Modern Databases and the NoSQL Movement
http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Databases-Weeks-Modern-Movement/...

Not the kind of short cut book that it may lead you to think. The book is a brief introduction to modern database types and what are their characteristics, what are their use case, and why you should choose it over other database types.

Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages (Pragmatic Programmers)
http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Languages-Weeks-Programming-Prog...

Similar book as above, but introduces you to 7 different programming languages. The focus of the book is not on how to use each language, but to explore the different programming paradigms introduced by each programming language. (prototypical inheritance, functional programming, logic programming, object-oriented programming)
I'm Israeli, former IDF soldier and unfortunately had a family member KIA a few years back. I feel I have some idea of how the IDF treats families of KIA and have followed the story since Barak Ravid's first report. Here's my feeble attempt at hindering the redditization of HN:

1. Eishton story concerned fatality figures in the IDF's yearly Memorial Day press release. It has no relevance to KIA numbers in a specific conflict, as AlexMuir seems to think. Neither Eishton nor Ravid claim that.

2. Eishton's main claim is that the IDF didn't publish the fact that some of the soldiers actually committed suicide or died in car accidents etc. It's actually already known the IDF leaves the cause of death empty in case of suicide in order to spare the families' feelings (again, remember it's a press release rather than actual statistics).

3. Eishton was questioned about the source of the leak, which was apparently a soldier in active service. He refused to answer and basically that was the end of that (though I assume the IDF is still trying to find the leak on its end).

4. Eishton's original blog post had very little publicity. What initiated the investigation were complaints by families of soldiers who committed suicide, which were upset their sons' names and cause of death were now exposed.

5. Contrary to jacquesm's assertion, in reality Eishton faces exactly zero risk (even if he was "exposing propaganda"). He enjoys his newfound celebrity status and now gives the IDF "a 24 hour ultimatum" to release data and says he'd "proudly go to jail" if he was, but knows full well - as does everyone else - that he doesn't face any meaningful penalty. As a bonus exercise, you might want to google "Anat Kamm" and "Bradley Manning", or perhaps "Uri Blau" and "Judith Miller". Compare and contrast.

6. Nivertech's comment re: Judaism and suicide is correct, but only effective for the Orthodox (most of whom don't serve in the IDF anyway). It is not applicable for most Israelis - unfortunately, I speak from personal experience.

PS. Incidentally, the number of soldiers committing suicide has been shown to be within the average for men aged 18-21, and declining. There's a reason for this: In today's IDF it's enough to tell a military Psychiatric Officer you're contemplating suicide to be relieved from service almost instantly.
Well at least they are trying to band aid some of the self inflicted arterial stabbing wounds of fragmentation and incompatibility that the Linux ecosystem has accumulated over the years.
Thanks to all the folks offering support here and sharing their own stories of frustration with Expedia. We also wanted to note we are aware that our site is down. Our host server is having real troubles today and tell us things won't be fixed for 24 hours. If you need to contact us before then please email us at info@lunabluehotel.com or via our Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/lunabluehotel. Again thanks for the voices of support.
Tony & Cheri
Owners, Luna Blue Hotel
When microsoft released IE everyone considered it a joke. It had no marketshare, nobody wanted to use it, and the common opinion was that microsoft was doomed beause netscape was going to make windows superfluous. What could be learned from what happened after were two lessons: (1) public opinion is not the end-all decider of a product's chances, and (2) when microsoft hooks something on the windows train it has incredible momentum, even when it doesn't seem like it. WP8 is hooked on that train in a way that previous windows mobile variants weren't.
Beat the bad Wifi at dev conferences-start with this as your conference website
What host doesn't let you run java software? I did a dry run a long time ago with solr and ubuntu under VMware fusion in a half gig VM (or maybe 684 Meg), and it's my impression that solr won't run well in limited memory (sphinx works fine) but it's been a while
That's in fact exactly what happened (but not because of the religious reason - that's only really applicable the orthodox, who don't serve in the IDF to begin with)
Meet Rep. Bob Goodlatte, Hollywood's new copyright ally
The Brain Audit by Sean D'Souza
What might seem like a lame question to you might seem valid to others.