skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
She didn't trust the specific evidence presented by the US surgeon general. It wasn't an issue of not trusting any kind of statistical evidence. She was actually very pro-reason, pro-science, etc.

I haven't read that book, but while I'm sure there are many facts in it, the overall tone (and motivation for its writing) is a giant (and dishonest) character assasination. Supposedly this is documented extensively in the book, "The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics" (by James Valiant), though I haven't read that, either.
Those two examples... wow.

A cluttered, unusable homescreen (is a ridiculous 3D cylinder of icons really an option?) and a weather widget where most of the text is unreadable.
If only Sun had thought to include those magic words "You agree that you will not take any actions that may cause or result in the fragmentation of Java" in the JDK/JRE download web pages then Sun v. Microsoft and Oracle v. Google would have turned out differently?

If not, then what does this wording even mean in practice?
Xylitol pills? I'm pretty sure it recommends diluted crystals + gum/mints.
p4merge
Awesome media queries with Sass and content
It's important to point out that he wasn't arrested merely because he posted a message on Facebook. That was just a tip that lead to concrete evidence of the crime, namely his damaged vehicle. Cops follow leads all the time, and Facebook is a part of the ecosystem now.
Groklaw's editorializing has gone way downhill since the SCO days. E.g.

"I know the USPTO doesn't want to hear that software and patents totally need to get a divorce, but since most software developers believe that, maybe somebody should at least mention it to them, if only as a future topic for discussion. Most developers I know believe software is unpatentable subject matter."

Ask software developers who work in defense, aerospace, medical devices, telecommunications, video/audio processing, and other capital-intensive, R&D-intensive fields. I think you'll get a rather different answer. Indeed, as Google is finding out with the Motorola acquisition and the resulting patent situation, software engineering culture is far from uniform on this issue. The guys who write software that implements radio waveforms don't have the same views on patents as the guys who write software to optimize ad display, or for that matter the guys who write the search engines. Ironically, Google's PageRank is the subject of several patents, and Stanford's interest in the IP netted them $335 million in Google shares when they exclusively licensed it back to Google.

Although, I think this sort of round-table is a pretty good forum for figuring out more about the consensus view of software engineers...
His doctor got the patient to quit. One week of lost productivity is a low price to pay for successfully turning someone's life around.
Working From Home Again: 2 Years Later
Why can't you compile from source that is under Apache 2?
I think that you will have to keep that sbt line there because akka-actor comes with the distribution but is a separate jar. So you will have to pull that dependency yourself in sbt.

"For Akka users this change does not have visible effects (you will continue to depend on the same artifacts)"
http://letitcrash.com/post/37716546018/2-1-spotlight-akka-ac...
Check his blog again in a week, or tomorrow. His last post was five days ago, so this post probably took at most five days to write. However, he obviously is interested in telling the story, and likely knows what he wants to say in part 2, so I'd be surprised if it took more than a day or two for him to write that part out. I'm very interested in part two as well.
To be honest I haven't been there for more than a year, but I remember it being a cumulative effect.
Xtreme Makeover: Legacy Codebase Edition
If you like the music from the game, check out the remixes at ocremix. The Mega Man remixes tend to be really good.
> You mean private litigation which employs gov't judges to adjudicate and the gov't police to enforce?

No, I mean private litigation and conflict mediation that is private. There is a lot of that already.
I expect the followup description of the 'cold-turkey' period to be harrowing. Quitting from even a much smaller daily intake can prompt a several-day withdrawal period of strong headaches (and other symptoms).

In my experience, it's best to taper off for a week (or several) before eliminating caffeine entirely.
What REPL do you use for Perl?
Perhaps Thiel, Arrington and the author are taking too much of a top down view of the issues.

To stick with Thiel's hyperbole, I think we don't have flying cars because we still haven't fixed the issues with the road bound ones. Its great to have grand aims at revolutionizing the world, but lets not forget the big impact something as small as 140 characters can have. There are third world countries where entire economies have grown out of the ability to text message. Only a few years ago we saw entire swaths of the Middle East get big quality of life improvements thanks to wall posts and tweets.
> And what other bacteria does it kill off?

I don't think it's that Xylitol kills off bacteria, just that it makes it more inhospitable. To be fair, it should still be cause for worry; while some bacteria do cause acid production that can lead to tooth decay, other bacteria are part of our immune system. There is little reason to suspect that a mouth inhospitable to bad bacteria would still allow the good bacteria to thrive.
What a nicely transparent spam post.
We're all talking about the Galaxy Nexus, not the Nexus 4. I'm sure the Nexus 4 is much better.
I find it amusing that a woman who chose not to go into technology says the the root cause of women not being well represented in technology is something other than "women choose not to go into technology".
That is false, and I don't understand why you think conflict resolution works better when it is violent and compulsory.
Erlang OTP Tutorial For Beginners
While technically true, he was arrested some time after posting "drivin drunk," he wasn't arrested because he posted on facebook.

His facebook post gave LEOs a clue into a hit and run accident. When they followed up on the facebook post clue, they found corroborating evidence matching the crime scene.

What is newsworthy here?
> we've been spoon-fed baby food at
school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip
through were pre-chewed and tasteless.

It's called "curriculum". It's prepackaged knowledge. It's put together in a predetermined order. It's handed down by an authority figure in a compulsory way. It's an education style that can shape how student's view learning.
I'm going to second snapping, even if it's just snapping to other elements on the page.
Metal Gear: http://unoriginal.org/people/cybern/metal_gear.html

Solar Jetman: http://unoriginal.org/people/cybern/solar_jetman.html
Somewhere long ago someone raised the point that the GPL doesn't actually give you the right to use the covered software.

Is it conceivable that a company could offer source via GPL yet demand a separate license for the right to use it?
What's great about this post is that it's a win/win: the author gets a lot of value out of simply crystalizing his thoughts on paper, and readers share that benefit.

I'd encourage everyone to write as much as they can (especially periodic reflections), as writing something like this probably gives you 10x the value of reading it.
Rbenv 0.4.0 released with .ruby-version file support
Right, but in the provided example what was null doesn't seem to matter. Only that there was a null reference.
Best Company Website Ever
My guess is that the AHA moment happened when he ran this: "watch -n x.xx cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail"

Which itself appears to deplete entropy: http://strugglers.net/~andy/blog/2010/06/06/adventures-in-en...

As others have said, there's good evidence that nothing in android touches /dev/random these days.
The world has changed a lot since then. It doesn't feel hollow to me, but it definitely feels like a time capsule, some kind of historic document. Man, there was a printout of this on my dorm wall. My hair is going gray now. So it goes.

It was such a different world back then. Linux was new, and most people I knew bought it on CD-ROMs because it took too damn long to download. But it beat paying for a copy of Windows or...well, Windows. There was open source software, but nothing on the scale like you see today. And it was hard to get information on how things worked. Today, I can download the service manual for my TV in a handy PDF. Back then, I would have had to know somebody who had a copy and was willing to photocopy it for me if I paid him a few bucks.

Billy Idol paraphrased The Cyberpunk Manifesto (http://www.sterneck.net/cyber/branwyn-cyberpunk/index.php) when he said "information is power and currency in the virtual world we inhabit". Back then, information was scarce. So was access to hardware and software. Not like today. It's probably cliche to say it, but I have a 1GHz Unix machine in my pocket. That still blows my mind.

It's much easier to learn how to program now. It's much easier to quench that thirst for knowledge. And it's much easier to own a decent computer.

I wish this link was presented with more context of what it was like being a geek in the 90s. Maybe there's a book I can write some day.
Some private litigation firms will probably always be bloated and inefficient, but that's just great news to their competitors. It's no different than private retail stores: some are inefficient, but the more efficient ones tend to do better (or pressure the inefficient ones to improve).
Having worked in security & federation for years I can say, there just aren't any women in the field. There was one woman I meet during a conference who was into federation but she went by some weird name like Mrs. Federation or Authentication, something like that, I can't remember.

What I just glanced over is ridiculous, even though Rebecca J. Rosen is worried about it I can 100% say that I'm not. When I'm actually spending my time listening to someone talk, I'm more interested in what that person is saying, not what sex they happen to be.

It's unfortunate but most women at technical gatherings seem to be more marketing types, and if you're technical you know, there's nobody you'd rather NOT listen to more than some marketing person babble.
The number of short sighted software decisions made by scientists seems to be eclipsed by the number of ignorant comments made by lay people.

Fortran continues to be faster than C on certain types of problems and libraries like lapack continue to use it for that reason. Changing languages just to be "hip" seems to me to be an awful thing to do.
How 3UK are bringing Chinese-style political censorship of web to UK
The second I opened the web page, I said "nice new design Mr.Stallman!" then I suddenly noticed it's not him.
Ask HN: Any hackers in small markets working on any local projects?
I've been wanting to work on a side project for some time now, but would like to work on something that my local community can use. Have any hackers out there in smaller markets <= 100k had any success in launching a local product/project?

To make things more difficult I work for a newspaper. It seems like every time I run something by my department head it's a conflict of interest.
The most bare bones is: 'perl -de 0' CPAN has a few others
Is this supposed to be a joke? Why in all seven hells would you use a
proprietary, hosted service which brings you zero advantages over a
time-tested, open and simple network protocol which you can extremely easily
host and extend yourself?

I don't get you people. I really don't get you.
Eh, that's pretty much what BNCs or tmux/screen is for. The number of hours that I haven't been connected to IRC in the past 10 years is probably low-double digits. (I'm on several networks so a network outage won't knock me off IRC entirely.)

Plus with IRC you have the assurance that it will never go away. Worse case scenario is you just write your own server and do it yourself. There is no RFC for skype though.
Code contracts might be enforced using assert macros, I guess this would achieve more or less the same effect, right?
I went ahead, opened a root shell on my Gingerbread phone, and symlinked random to urandom.

No noticeable difference whatsoever.

I agree that the "speedups" reported by some users are either (1) because they had to reboot their phones, or (2) because rngd prevents the system from going into deeper sleep states which are costlier to recover from. There must be a very small number of users who truly run specific apps that drain the entropy pool, on Gingerbread, and who are helped by this hack.
I stopped drinking coffee about 3 months ago, until then I had undergone different phases with sometimes 2-3 cups/day (recent years) to 20-25 cups/day (last few months at university). I stopped because I simply couldn't stand the "routine" element anymore, I felt there was probably no real purpose, just a habit behind my coffee drinking.

I did expect to sleep more, be more tired during the day or even become less choleric and more approachable, but none of these actually happened. Needless to say, I do not miss coffee at all. ;-)
I enjoyed your story up until adderall. While I'm sure the added pep it provides now is great I think its potential for addiction and health problems make it a bigger burden than caffeine ever was. Synthetic productivity is not sustainable. Take care and watch out for your self. Speed is not to be taken lightly.
I experienced the same deficencies using Python 2 and Python 3 for years in projects at work. If you're just even a bit like me, you should find much delight in the programming language Go.
PhoneGap Developer Directory
Seth Godin's Key to Success: 'Do Something Ridiculous'
On the contrary, intel made significant changes to their CPUs court apple's business: the low power core cpu was started specifically to enable the MBA, as well as the focus on a powerful integrated graphics chip for laptop CPUs. Yes, you need to be a major player to have this kind of relationship, but the same goes for if you want to design your own arm CPUs.

Intel's plan continues to be to make up 30%+ of system cost-- but they don't do this by simply providing a powerful CPU-- they integrate more and more into the CPU silicon, and that is their mobile/atom strategy too (see digital baseband integration, etc). It is not abnormal however; battery/digitizer etc are all commodity parts now, screens are quickly getting there too, the SOC is the only area that is so loosely bounded in terms of it's improvement potential.

Things have rarely looked better for intels fabs either, they almost totally dominate the desktop/laptop/server space, and have a serious prospect for significant expansion for the first time in a long time. There may be a small decline in PC sales, but the overall $ spent on processing systems (ie add phones and tablets) is rising a lot more.

I do agree with your broad point that intel will have to be noticeably better to get higher revenues for their chips, though. But if they get atom onto their leading CPU process (as planned), as well as out-of-order, then they are very likely to achieve this.
It's a Microsoft thing. It took me years after I left to stop saying it.
Open source gives away value (in effect, destroying it for the previous owner), sometimes for very little benefit. Why would pg open source the site and open HN up to a myriad of competitors? HN needs a large user base so that YC companies can promote themselves here. HN is not like the Linux kernel. The code is not complex. It doesn't need thousands of contributors nor would the benefits of extra features be worth the business cost.
I'm basing it solely on the amounts of caffeine he was taking. If he feels he needs that much caffeine to be productive it is a very large hint.

If you are concerned I suggest the book "Delivered from distraction." http://www.amazon.com/Delivered-Distraction-Getting-Attentio...
Ayup. Nothing else does rerouting as well as Waze.
But it's not triviality - it's noise - Signal: Good - Noise: Bad, got it?

If you REALLY need end of line markers, any half-way competent text editor can display them for you.
I'm so glad I never got into coffee. I stopped drinking soda as well in high school. I'd hate to be dependent on a caffeine just to get through my daily life.
Announcing the Engine Yard Innovators Awards
I had a very similar experience, although not as acute; used to drink a lot of coffee in high school (not as much as you), had chest pains, cut the coffee and switched to tea. Now I have a cup of coffee a day, and a cup or two of tea a day, both before noon. As the saying goes, everything in moderation. Apart from the heart arhythmias, though, you might have been doing your health a favor: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3439152/
I'm sorry to say this, but all issues you describe are instances of PEBKAC.
I started to reply last night when there were only two comments, but then decided to stfu and leave the discussion to real hackers. After skimming what real hackers have said, I think my observation is still relevant:

A) There are plenty of people already tweaking hn in the form of "add ons" like hnnotify.com. That piece already exists and without being the kind of problem that this approach would become.

B) People seem to routinely miss that hn is part of the yc business process. (I honestly don't get how anyone can miss that but posts like this one clearly do. I was a homemaker for eons and I get it.) You know, that is just slightly relevant to how and why things get done the way they are (aka central to the decision making process). This doesn't make good business sense, for reasons other more informed members have already covered.
The entire world is increasingly using Facebook
Why on earth should quitting be the desired outcome here?! If he's more productive on coffee than off it, he should just reduce the quantity to something that doesn't kill him... Just take care of the medical problem that gave him the "gut pain", check your cardiovascular health, and considering these two, adjust the caffeine intake to highest maintainable dose... Wish you happy sipping!

EDIT: Ok, I read about the ulcers now. Yep, listen to the doc then, at least until they heal, and then keep antiacid pills handy :)
The words "Design" and "Art" are suffixes
Superdry – a non-technological success story
In practice (I write Scala every day) compilation speed is a problem. I just recompiled a work projec, just under 28kloc. 124 seconds is a problem.

Admittedly, we do make heavy use of the type system.
That is partially correct. Intellij doesn't use zinc, but it uses the same compilation system that is at the heart of zinc. From http://blog.jetbrains.com/scala/, there is a section showing how their new system relates to zinc.

It would have been more accurate for me to say that this release the Scala team developed an SBT incremental compiler that is used by Eclipse, Maven, and, most recently, IntelliJ.
I'm curious why you say that the code would be simpler in magma or gap? The post doesn't actually implement any group theory, it just applies it, which is exactly what you'd have to do anywhere.

Of course, it's possible that the internal code of the library would be simpler, but I'm a little skeptical.
Can the iPad Mini make phone calls? Can it fit in my pocket? The Mini's surface is 23 in^2 larger.
Have a Macbook Pro for a couple of years.

I had an Iphone 3 once i liked it very much. Now i have a lowly ZTE Aqua with Android 4.0.3 and i'm very satisfied. Tried an Iphone 5 at a store and Ipad's and found the UI, boring.

In my opinion, Apple's "chromed" UI is getting old and would really love something more fresh, either on iOS and OSX.
Kanban and the Importance of Equanimity
actually, Meteor is not like Derby. For one, you don't need to deal with callbacks when data is changed. Meteor can automatically figure out what data sources are bound to certain containers in the template being rendered and when you make a change in the database, the data is pushed to all the clients. Here are some good details on the differences: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3842525. Also, Meteor now has a REST package built-in https://github.com/crazytoad/meteor-collectionapi and additional modules that you can install, like https://github.com/tmeasday/meteor-router
Hire Athletes
Not to mention all the other crap that's in soda; at least coffee (and tea) have health benefits.
Click the "+Follow" button that floats at the bottom-right of the page. You can subscribe to his posts by email there.
Thanks for this post. I expected a fluff lunchtime read here; a quick bulleted list of platitudes that you see over and over again this time of the year. But it really was a very well told, personal and clearly authentic story of your year and the hard-learned lessons you learned along the way. It reminds me of the power of a story. I think we tend to jump right to the TL;DR these days, but in a rush to condense everything into concise take-aways, we lose something along the way.

>> ...stick with me, this’ll be worth it.

Glad I did, and I definitely think it was.

I don't have much to add regarding the actual content. Some of these lessons I've learned as well (salespeople are surprisingly great, right?), some I haven't. I just felt like this post deserved more praise than a simple upvote.
Low doses of adderall haven't been shown to have long term negative effects. There are side-effects to all medication, but him being treated is probably far healthier than the depression that can come with untreated ADD.
Here is a french blog post providing more information on this explanation which, according to this post, was indirectly confirmed by Xavier Niel, the founder of the ISP.

http://www.generation-nt.com/blocage-pub-freebox-revolution-...
Soon: Caffeinated-Sushi snobs
That is not a very good analogy to 'incitement' in the parent comment.

A better example would be explaining to the police that you loudly and publically encouraged your buddies to start a brawl in the pub but then left the scene before the fists started to fly.

I'm not sure where free speech legally becomes incitement though but I'm pretty sure it involves encouraging other people to do something rather then failing to convince yourself.
Crap. I thought of that already. I was hoping for something my brain damaged memory didn't have to work for.

But thank you and have an upvote.
Good Collection of Enterprise IT Feeds
Yeah, I realized the other day that in a year or two I'll have been using IRC for half my life. Not adult life mind, my whole life. That would be impressive ...were I old.
I would argue that a person's wealth, corrected for socioeconomic factors that give some people more opportunities than others, is probably a more meaningful indication of intelligence than a score on an IQ test.

(I'm not saying there aren't smart people that choose other things over $$$, but that there's more smart people than that who score poorly on a formal IQ test.)
I find it interesting that JARGON defines hack as "to carve furniture with an axe"; and that the author of the Hacker Manifesto made a living in later life by selling handcrafted furniture.
Post-IPO, SolarCity plans to ratchet up solar roofs to 250MW in 2013
I see your concern and I share it, I make sure to temper my use of it to lessen dependence and addiction. I got my first prescription of a relatively low dose of Adderall 5mg IR 2x/day.

Realistically, I only use it once per day ever, and then not all days- just when I really feel that i've got a good laundry list of things to get done. I never take it on weekends or on holiday (don't even take it with me). My ADD is pretty severe, but it was just formally recognized as ADD recently for me. If I don't have anything specific to do, then I don't take it and I suffer no ill effects (didn't take any to California & Burning Man for example)
Choices aren't made in a vacuum.