skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're not aware of them yet StyleSeat is a VC backed company working in this space: https://www.styleseat.com/howitworks/pros
Before I proclaim that I'd love this I only have one question. How much will it cost?
Oh, I agree that for some, tenure means they can have an easy life for the rest of their career.

Another problem I see, however, is that tenure can be redefined and is changing depending on subjects. There are subjects where, realistically, your only chance is to either take that one job, whether it offers real tenure or not. The universities of course know that as well and are thus in a position where they can put significantly more into your employment contract than a tenured position would normally entail. If for example the above mentioned grading system would work, then it would get rid of the possibility of "just teaching", however, as can be seen in another reply of mine below to another poster, the grading system is fundamentally flawed.

As an aside: UArk has the above mentioned system of "tenure" in place for all professors
Well, why not confine history classes to those people?

Because, I mean, you don't have learn programing to use facebook. And we still have those people who wrote it.
> People change.

People can change; most won't. While I, like you, take issue with the fatalistic statement of "you would have started already" (how young a person would the GP say this to? 30? 25? 18?), there is a grain of truth to it. Most people, even if they want to, won't get much out of this. Not that I'd like to discourage anyone.
His code is art. And so is his book. It is beautiful, and at times insightful and fascinating. It is not "engineering".

E.g. take Camping (a micro-web-framework that fit in 4K of code) - it is fascinating as a demonstration of some of the things you can do in little space. It is beautiful as art. It has provided inspiration for a lot of us that finds Rails unnecessarily bloated.

It is also totally unreadable for ordinary developers, weird and quirky to the point that if someone had checked something like Camping into one of our work repos, it'd be a "ha-ha, now seriously where is your actualy code?" moment.

The Ruby community appreciates code as art, and is probably more than others inclined to blur the boundary between it and what we will accept or even embrace in production systems. But _why's stuff is mostly firmly on the art side.

There are exceptions, e.g. Hpricot was a nice first try that demonstrates some of _why's skill in terms of creating pleasing interfaces, and he deserves credit for that even though HPricot itself has been largely superseded by Nokogiri.
Thanks for the encouragement. I really just want to reach others with sedentary jobs, and let them know that they can do anything they want. Little things add up. I'm a far cry from where I was in 2009, but I still have a long way to go. I'll be doing more blog-posts soon, and I'm going to make fitness posts a regular thing on my blog.
Linux Libvirt on the server, Linux libvirt on the Macbook Air. You can use SPICE to connect to the server VMs. All built in, no setup, all as easy as VMWare or the like would be. I'm using that with Cinnamon on Ubuntu 12.10 and I'm in bliss.

Also, I think you will be very very very hard pressed to find anyone who owns a Macbook air who would tell you to get anything else. People who don't own them underestimate them and they're not anywhere near as underpowered as people act like.
That's not correct. If a woman/man comes naked in class, people WILL stare. And it's not their fault, nor is it "creepy", it's only natural.

Weird, last time I checked I actually could avoid staring at people. Naked people too. Must be a superpower or something.

I do agree on the second paragraph, though — this is most definitely not this situation, it's more comparable to person entering a stage and starting to crack jokes.
Yeah I get it. My point is just that a lot of people consider the movies to be fairly loyal to the books, and I have to agree with Christopher Tolkien that they really do "eviscerate" the story and aren't much more than action movies aimed at 15-25 year olds. That's not to say other people can't enjoy them, many do.

I've thought a lot about how I would do the LOTR movies or the Silmarillion as a TV series if I had the chance! And I really think the choices Peter Jackson made suggest (1) a weak understanding of the source material, and (2) not an especially strong film-making ability, and nothing PJ's done since LOTR has convinced me otherwise.
So its a rumor of a rumor. Interesting. Personally I don't think its a credible rumor but lets set that aside for a moment.

These guys are a derivative business, generally picking up the value between an idea growing in one market and its arrival in another. Its not a bad place to be but to the extent that it is successful it indicates that the capital system isn't enabling rapid enough expansion of successful businesses, this isn't a steady state.

Think of it this way, company A starts in market X and demonstrates traction, then r-i starts up company B in market Y with the same value proposition and gets traction there. The investors in A don't see this as "validation of our idea in market B" they see it as "we didn't move into B quickly enough". So instead of accruing that value to company A its been diluted into company B. This situation happens when capital markets become so risk averse they start crimping their own ability to capture value. Its an imbalance and lately it was I think enhanced by the questions about how the IMF monetary system is going to resolve out its current tension.

The situation is temporary as once the other factors of fiscal instability are removed, the investors in these companies will be push them to expand into those other markets and take that risk on. That will then make it very hard for R-I to continue operating the way it does today (well it will greatly reduce their success rate) and so they won't be a good candidate for outside investment.

I got to meet a guy [1] who took advantage of scared investors for a living, he bought (and sold) 37 single family homes out of foreclosure in the Bay Area, pretty much from almost every county but more on the peninsula/southern side than the east bay. He said he's on track to quintuple his investment in just under 3 years. He attributes his success not to some special gift of insight, just that he didn't believe that the Bay Area housing market was 'never' going to be the same, and where other investors were too timid to invest he stepped in.

[1] Like many neighbors I tour houses nearby when they are on the market, I met this guy when he was talking with the Realtor showing the house. The broker had been getting questions they couldn't answer about the solar power system on the roof.
Yeah, pretty much. Sweden is not poor; it is not uneducated; it is not corrupt; it is not dependent on the USA for economic or military aid; it's full of people who ostensibly understand that sometimes the USA should be opposed; and so on and so forth. They have means, motive, and opportunity to do the right thing at little cost to themselves, and they failed to do so.
I'm trying to figure out how to get Adam Curtis to make a doco about all of this political machination. It would be an entertaining and interesting watch.

Surely someone on HN has his ear? Whisper the idea would you, please.
Not saying you're wrong, but in my experience I only hear this phrase from technical people, and my understanding is they always mean base 10. Which was surprising to me cause in my CS education I was basically taught to forget base 10 and only think in 2s).
This article operates on the premise that the defendants are not guilty. But can someone explain how/why creating a site like the Pirate Bay that encourages or at least tolerates piracy is not a crime. I ask in all seriousness.
As countries become more corrupted, their "legal" system becomes less about the law and justice, and more an arm of the state to impose its will. I've seen countless examples of this, where the law was ignored, precedent and procedure was ignored, and obviously corrupted officials acted for their best interest in persecuting the people the state had decided needed persecution.

In fact, this tendency is so common, historically, that it is one of the reasons the US had its revolution, and one of the reasons the form of government created in the USA was so different from the rest of the world, at the time. Many protections were enshrined in the US constitution, designed to prevent exactly these abuses.

However, even in the USA, these protections have become meaningless... because at the end of the day all systems rely on people. When all of the people with power in any system are answerable to the state (And the state only) the system quickly becomes merely an agent of the state's interests... and not a defender of the public's interest.

We see this most starkly with the states demonizing of "terrorism" (when in many cases it isn't actually terrorism it is going after)... with its massive power grabs due to the "War on drugs" (after decades of demonizing drugs) ... and now, lately, after "piracy" (with decades of demonizing "pirates".)

Things will continue to get worse in this regard-- because there is no effective force to counter it. US elections, no matter which party wins, put "anti-terrorist" and "anti-drug" and "anti-piracy" people in office.

Note Obama who promised a "softer war on drugs" picked the Architect of the Drug War, Joe Biden as his running mate and his tune immediately changed after getting elected. Bush was no better, etc.

It has been decades since blatently unconstitutional asset-forfieture laws were enacted under Reagan. Further, in those decades we've had uncountable incidents of police outright stealing property under them, never charging someone with a crime.

I can think of nothing more corrupt than, for instance, florida cops stopping tourists to take all their money. (similar incident happened in texas.)

Despite public awareness and many appeals to the courts over the years, this practice is only growing bigger.

So, what is to be done? They're getting away with it, and show no signs of stopping.... and the alleged methods to hold them accountable: The law, the courts, the supreme court, and elections have all failed.
Amazon's Instant Video Finder Launches
His argument is based on one example?
That assumes that transactions are always processed immediately. This is not the case. Some gas stations, and convenience stores, for example, will wait up to a week before actually charging your card (they frequently just check to see if you have funds available at swipe time). This saves them money on batching charges. As a result it is possible, with a debit card, to run up charges that exceed the available balance. That's why a credit check is required to give out a debit card with a visa / mc symbol on it.

So, even in the US, if you have bad enough credit, you may not be able to get a debit card even though in theory you shouldn't be able to charge more than you have.

reality != theory
So, if someone made a webstie that was pro-marijuana, would you assume that was a crime? They're encouraging/tolerating piracy.

The pirate bay did not host nor distribute any pirated files. So where's the crime?
You needed to open the link to see that? The link called Sweden a banana republic.

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

A banana republic is a politically unstable country that economically depends upon the exports of a limited resource (fruits, minerals), and usually features a society composed of stratified social classes, such as a great, impoverished working class and a ruling plutocracy, composed of the elites of business, politics, and the military.

Who in their right mind thinks that describes Sweden?
There seems to be an assumption in this article that you need to adopt a typical command-and-control structure to run a successful company. There are several examples of very flat organisations showing this is not the case. Valve and Github are well known examples in the tech. industry. Ricardo Semler / Semco (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler) is an example from outside tech.

It's probably more work to run an organisation with a flat structure, but it seems to be more successful if you get it right.
thanks, subscribed in google reader
Siamo in trappola… della liquidità
Hu? I know quite a lot of people who run KVM & Xen at Hetzner without any trouble.. Care to explain what your problems were?
thanks, subscribed in google reader for the first 2 for the others I couldn't find RSS feed :(
iPad Mini hw >> Touchpad hw.

Now if I could have webOS and decent apps on iPad Mini hardware...
- Add an intro video or some sort of graphic intro, showing off the product. People don't usually sign in blindly, they want to have a sneak peak.

- Also, have a customized bootstrap theme, it's easy and simple

- Less text
In the engadget video [1], they claim it will be priced as a top end android phone.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnO0p5XAl9Y
I like it, but I want the screens to be stacked. When you turn of the LCD screen I would like to then be able to view the e-ink display.
As a long-time ThinkPad user, the new keyboard (which I have on my X1 Carbon) is not nearly as big of a problem as you're making it out to be. I got used to it fairly quickly, and I think I like it better now.

But more importantly, Lenovo has really raised the bar in terms of size and weight with the X1 Carbon. I don't think they are abandoning functionality at all.
probably not as good as a well written textbook with careful examples and exercises

Name one. While I agree that this document (probably) won't compensate for a more complete education, including textbooks, the truth of the matter is that most textbooks (even many highly regarded ones) are horrible for learning on one's own. Rigorous and sound, yes, but many are bad for pedagogy, and even worse for self-teaching. A good majority are muddled and unclear to the layman, with not a very good "big picture" or "here's why it's done this way" approach. Just look at the K&R C article from the other day.
>Got any pointers about how one might use it in practice?

The meta-circular evaluator is a prime example of mutual recursion. It consists of two functions, eval and apply, which call each other in a circular fashion until a result is reached.
Pros:
- A real linux OS phone, more open than Android
- Ubuntu getting more popularity
- Gives Apple, Google, MS less control/power, users more diversity

Cons:
- Canonical likes making big mistakes (mandatory Unity interface, Amazon search/spyware integration)
State of audio in browser games with jPlayer creator
> I can think of nothing more corrupt than, for instance, florida cops stopping tourists to take all their money.

That's the worst you can think of? Well, lucky you. Even so, a few bent cops don't mean all police officers are like that. Plenty of them are doing the best they can.

> So, what is to be done?

Well, now that you've laid it out this clear, the way forward is obvious: Revolution!!
A small, simple change that might help the initial wow factor when visiting your home page is to take that gray area behind "Simplify your salon." and make it one large blurred photograph relevant to hair salons.
"Try the demo to see what it looks like."
However I can not find a link to a demo anywhere nearby and even after a search around the page, this seems to be the only place where a demo is mentioned.
Yeah, it's not like he might have been making a point. Let's just latch on to one word's literal meaning and use that to dismiss the whole article.
> If GMOs[1] can enable the growth of more productive and nutritious food crops, it follows that they can enable more efficient agriculture.

Productivity only matters for large monocultures, like soy, corn, sugar cane, where the costs are fixed and profit comes from the output - exactly the people who do not produce to feed poor people.

Poor people depend on subsistence polycultures, which don't require high productivity because they don't profit off it. On the other hand, these engineered seeds incur higher initial costs they can't afford.

People starve not because agriculture is not productive enough, but because they can't produce themselves, for a variety of reasons: the government can't ensure they keep their land (they sell for lumber/mining/monocultures, or have their land stolen outright), food production is not local (thus too expensive), lack infrastructure (most of the times, water) or simply lack knowledge on better ways to irrigate, fertilize and handle the soil. GMOs don't solve any of those problems, they just reduce even further the amount of people who can produce themselves.

Highly nutritive crops is another BS. People just need access to a large variety of food (polyculture) to maintain health, not an engineered corn, rich in iron and full of pesticide, that costs three times as much to produce.
Android doesn't have a file picker. I can't open Random App and open a file from the internal storage or cloud providers.

I'm not saying Windows RT is perfect or even that good, I'm just saying that this one particular thing, they got right.
My vote goes to JavaScript. Yes, PHP has grown a lot in the last 10 years, but it hasn't made a big difference. Faster and more complete JavaScript runtimes have actually changed the applications we use. Some things would simply not be possible without JavaScript.
Two weeks a go, I purchased a MacBook Air. I leaned toward a 11" but found the 1366x768 resolution slightly too dense for the screen (135 ppi). I ended up getting the 13" MBA, which has a 1440x900 screen (128 ppi). This machine I can use at its native resolution, whereas with the 11" model I'd use it at a scaled down resolution.

Before, I had a MacBook Pro with a HDD. I would use my iPad whenever I could, because it'd be instantly on and feel faster in use. My MBA has a 256GB SSD and it feels just as fast as my iPad.

Back to the main topic: I keep Windows VMs, version management and backups at a dedicated server at Leaseweb. Local copies are kept on the MBA and a Mac mini at home (where it's also backed up to external disks by SuperDuper). This way, I can always choose to work on my iPad or MBA, files are accesible from everywhere.
Objective-C is TIOBE Language of the Year Second Time in a Row
This is the first headline I've ever seen that violates Betteridge's law of headlines[0], which states that any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by "no". But in the case of this headline, the answer is a resounding "yes".

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
Since when is bitcoin anonymous?
I'm not saying that publish or perish is an optimal solution, just that there's nothing special about it. Plenty of people have "file your TPS reports with cover-sheets or perish", but there's not special jargon for it.
I would argue that most people wanting to learn about javascript would be searching for "jQuery tutorial" or "nodejs tutorial" or "coffeescript tutorial" and not "javascript tutorial"

Ruby and Javascript are made infinitely more popular because of projects like Rails, jQuery and node. A language like Python has no obvious framework helping drive adoption, so most information out there would be language-centric versus framework centric.
"Sorry, but this documentation is shit."

Woah. That's way off the mark. I'm currently having to use both the Go documentation and the PHP documentation and I will take the Go docs anytime.

Yes, they are short of useful examples but, then, so are the PHP docs. Worse than that I find most of the user comments on the PHP docs are noise: self-proclaimed PHP gurus trying to out-clever each other.

The Go Library docs have one major advantage: you can click on the supplied link to see the simple, understandable implementation.
Well for marketing people it can mean '2' and for technical people it does often mean '10'. But it gets also lumped into people who use the term "exponential" growth.

As Gabe points out, decimal orders of magnitude are good sign posts because they often separate the space into meaningful chunks, what ever it is.

Think about your own earning potential, the differences between earning $100/month, $1000/month, $10,000/month and $100,000 a month. Those are very different places to be.
In physics and astronomy, 10 is the dominant logarithmic base. It's my impression that it's also the case in engineering circles.

An important upshot of the article is really the idea that you should think logarithmically about scaling. It's a scale-independent way to think. It's an easy way to get a website that gets 10 hits/day on the same plot as one that gets 10^9 hits/day.

An example is here: http://measuredmass.wordpress.com/2012/10/20/more-hn-numbers...
Why not just upgrade the W500? It'll be far cheaper than going to Mac and renting out a server. For disk space you could get the SATA HDD bay for storage and memory is simple to upgrade on Thinkpads (and better it doesn't void your warranty, because Lenovo doesn't assume your an idiot).
I read through the analysis and it sounds off. It assumes that the number of people interested in JavaScript correlates with the number of searches for "javascript tutorial". This is incorrect. Many people search for "nodejs tutorial" or other variations. There might be a growth in "nodejs tutorial" searches at the expense of "javascript tutorial" searches.

Similarly he does not see an increase in searches for "objective-c tutorial" and assumes the language is in decline. In reality there might be growth in terms like "ios tutorial" or "iphone sdk tutorial" which his metrics don't track.
So would owning a site called childporn.com and allowing people to post direct links to download child pornography without any attempt to stop it also not be a crime? Again, I'm being serious that I really dont know the answer. These are the actual issues at play. Can one really free themselves of legal responsibility by just saying we don't host or post the files ourselves?
>So, in my opinion, there is absolutely nothing special in this syntactic constructions, moreover, it is not that difficult to implement them using closures and macroses. In arc.arc you could see how strings and tables were implemented.

You're right, there is nothing special about what Clojure does; everything could be implemented in Scheme just fine. The real advantage comes from the fact that these things are there "out of the box" so that libraries are written to use them.

There is a lot of inertia when it comes to libraries in a language. In some sense, you only get one chance to get it "right" before everything becomes interdependent and you can no longer change anything. Clojure's advantage is simply that it presented a chance to start over and get things right from the beginning.
The analysis assumes that more searches for tutorials means the language is more popular where as it might just mean the language requires more tutorials to understand.
Falkvinge is a polarizing figure. He says these things to wake you up and make you think. If a left-wing do-good society such as Sweden can have a court case this perverted then likely in other countries it is even worse.

A charged headline will help in bringing the audience to the content, if 'one look' is all it takes for you to dismiss the data as illegitimate and/or suspicious then perhaps I can allay your worries by stating that he's 100% legit:

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