skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
LG ME550 Cosmo Black Unlocked
LG ME550 attempts to steal some of the lustre of lg's Shine handset and serve it up in a more affordable package. LG has certainly made some impressive looking phones in its day and although quite up there with the Shine.
I use a crappy CTR monitor as a second. It's good for things you'd like to see but don't need to use at the same time - music player, tailing log files, etc. And keeping a todo list up on it keeps me from writing post-it notes all over my desk.
He's also behind the Beal Conjecture which offers a $100,000 prize for either the proof or counterexample:

http://www.math.unt.edu/~mauldin/beal.html

BEAL'S CONJECTURE: If A^x +B^y = C^z , where A, B, C, x, y and z are positive integers and x, y and z are all greater than 2, then A, B and C must have a common prime factor.
How do you measure merit?
While it is possible that Starling had been running internally before its release, this does not excuse overlooking rabbitmq. A software package that had proven itself in real-world scaling and been designed by people with real experience in the problem domain (c.f. the financial services world) is going to be much better at "alpha" or "beta" quality than Starling is going to be even after the twitter devs hammer at it for a couple of years. The twitter devs were starting from scratch, writing something that other people out there actually had some experience with, and decided to not take an existing solution and fix/adapt it to their needs.
Is it really responsible for a bank to back 30-year loans with demand deposits, at 25-to-1 leverage? I really can't imagine that happening without government intervention, and if it only happens when the government makes it happen, there's a good reason to expect that it's irrational.

Banks are hybrid companies in the sense that FDIC insurance means they are basically conduits for lending to the government. If I deposit $100 with my local bank, I don't care whether the banker keeps it in cash, invests it in penny stocks, or spends it on whores -- no matter what, the government backs my deposit.

This is for other promises from companies. E.g. if I pay someone $100 now for $100 worth of lawn care over the next five years, I make damn sure I can trust that person. If I pay the bank $100 for a CD maturing in five years, I don't.

This gives all banks an incentive to take undue risk, balanced by government regulation, which gives them a secondary incentive to find clever ways to take big risks (which they do by hiring clever people who would otherwise do more socially useful stuff).
It is zippy and although the full-screen view breaks Spaces it gets rid of the already minimal "chrome" (to access click the address bar arrows). Some standard options - even a Preferences menu - are grayed out so it feels very bare-bones. I keep getting the aw, Snap! error message (http://s3.amazonaws.com/2009/chrome.png) for no apparent reason and there doesn't appear to be any developer tools for the user yet. So I won't be using Chrome for demos anytime soon but it was fun to explore for a couple minutes what has been strictly a Windows phenomenon.
However, he does know that too.
I think reallytinyurl.com missed the point.
Mending the Bitter Absence of Reasoned Technical Discussion
Yeah I found it kind of funny too :)
Respectfully, your point is due to lack of proper execution, not the notion that very few amazing accomplishments are achieved by those who seek 8-5 work.
Why goofing off boosts productivity
Anyone remember SpeedScript?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpeedScript
Last week PG listed his 5 most admired entrepreneurs, all of them are to your definition "knowledge workers"...I doubt any of them would agree with your thoughts. Winners do what it takes to win, period!

Take JL's book Founders at Work for a spin and note how few place 40 hrs. working per week as the priority.
No problem.

(BTW I'm not sure bit.ly was a bad investment. Common sense might say so, but that has little to do with which Web companies get bought and for how much. If I was a VC I'd put some chips on a URL shortener, and bit.ly is one of the better (and hyped) ones right now)
If anyone wants to save five minutes and use the PDF I put together to send to my kindle, email me at adam at viratech dot c-o-m!
Thanks for reading my article. The topic rose out of a very specific situation among my circle of Twitter friends and acquaintances. I guess you're lucky if you haven't run into the kind of situations I cited among your own Twitter crowd. I hoped that at least by citing some specific examples, it would give people who aren't familiar with it themselves a sense for what I'm talking about.

I guess by claiming that wasn't basking in my own whining, I should have known it was a setup for somebody to look for cause to claim that I was. I still don't think I was or am, but I take your feedback to heart.

Daniel
To start with, you have to be what is commonly called an "accredited investor." This is a requirement because almost none of the "investments" sold as CDOs are registered with the SEC. The accredited investor loop-hole is the one you'll need to invest in hedge funds and the like: it means something like you're a big boy now, and you don't need the feds protecting you from crooks. Alternatively, your organization will need to be qualified as an institutional investor.

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

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

Ask your broker if they've got any they want to unload.
Add tinyarro.ws - they use a bunch of domains for the URLs themselves.
bit.ly's really interesting in that it comes out Betaworks - since it's so closely tied to Twitter, and so many of Betaworks' investments are built on Twitter (Summize, StockTwits, Tweetdeck), they can help push adoption. It's a nice little keiretsu of related companies.
And a lot more - blogger, picasa, google desktop search, google talk and voice, google mobile, docs... I don't see a way to clear cookies in Maps on the iPhone either.

I suspect there's a lot more that they can infer than we would initially think, too. E.g. When you email someone at gmail, your sending ip address and (typically) real name are in the headers - no need to use google checkout to get a lot of probable matches.

It scares me not because I think google are abusing it now, but that it will never be deleted no matter what happens to google management or what government gets in power - in any country they have data replicated - for the rest of our lives. That could be a long time to trust them, and it becomes more powerful the bigger the collection gets and the more we rely on the net.
how many people set up their browser to require as little typing as possible for normal browsing habits? I know I have.

I've considered going with voice recognition for typing but the software doesn't seem to be "there" yet.
Novell? Also isn't Corel in a completely different part of the world (Ottawa, Canada) than Wordperfect/Novell (Utah)?
I'm interested in what will happen to the SPARC line. I work at a medium-sized company, and we have 15 or so Sun servers.

This guy-http://blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/?p=1590 says that power-based servers cost 10 times what a Sparc costs, for similar capacity.

There is already a strong windows server presence in our company, so I imagine our upgrade path will be to windows server. I don't want that to happen, mainly because I would prefer using open source on unix/linux.
The part of this essay ( or blog writeup ) on How To Have A Reasoned Technical Discussion can be put up on the HN guidelines maybe !
We develop mobile voip software. In this regard, I tried to approach Android developers for a number of times (through their dev forum, as well as through some guys close to Google) to publish API for adding audio codecs and full-duplex audio (to let us develop these missing parts). Although my requests were seconded by many other ppl, no any response followed. Android is closed proprietary stuff. Dixi.
I'd say that the converse is also true: If one has no choice then even if one cares there is no reason to care.
How Andrew Hyde Hacked Into TechStars
BTW, it's up to 80 sites now (http://niryariv.wordpress.com/2009/04/04/list-of-url-shorten...)
By seniority, of course! Or that is what the teachers' unions would have us believe.

Is measuring merit all that hard? It's done successfully higher ed. The bottom line is that we shouldn't worry so much about the concept of merit b/c we don't need a one-size-fits-all system. For example, some people prefer to go to a large public university where profs are "meritorious" if they publish and are at the cutting edge of research -- while others prefer to go to smaller schools with more of a focus on teaching and small class sizes.

Chances are with widespread voucher availability, K-12 education would become less cookie-cutter and would better address the diverse definitions of merit that exist.

Of course, states/cities could require certain curriculum, teacher SAT scores, etc., but such things would represent a floor rather than a ceiling on what "merit" is.
2 years in to using Git and I'm still learning workflow stepchanges every week.

Scott Chacon touched on this in his SOR talk I think. There will be a vid up for it soon I think.
Unfortunately, the thoughtful, intelligent, facts-minded individuals are vastly outnumbered (or at least, out-shouted) by trolls and fan boys on the Internet. Even more discouraging is that the latter are the least likely to read an article like this and take it to heart.
Yeah, I suppose it would make sense for Twitter to provide URL shortening themselves, and they'd probably buy someone like bit.ly for this - so betting $2m on it makes some sense (as much as anything makes sense in this area).
Good point. Popular wisdom is biased by the fact that most people went to public school and tend to think things like "well I went to public school and I turned out just fine".

That's like saying "well wikipedia didn't exist when I was a kid and I turned out just fine" to argue that Wikipedia should be banned -- after all voucher proponents don't want vouchers to be mandatory, just optional!
I think one of the problems Alex is pointing at is when thoughtful, intelligent, facts-minded individuals act like trolls and rabid fanboys, for example when their favourite programming language or text editor is mentioned in less-than-glowing tones.

(P.S. emacs sucks.)
I'm a bit short of the wealth requirements to be called an accredited investor ... (1M net worth + 200K/year income).

That just seems blatantly unfair to me. It's the government setting up a different set of rules for the rich.
Good call on the typo - and Corel bought Word Perfect at some point or the merged/regurgitated into each other how ever you want to look at it.
I think the issue is even a bit more subtle -- if you have no choice then why bother caring even if you would care.

One great example is this: I never cared about china patterns until I got engaged and was asked which one I preferred. Suddenly I had all sorts of strong opinions.

With vouchers people would start caring a lot more about what they were getting, and schools would have to frame their role less as daycare and more as a value proposition... as in "come to school A and our research shows you will earn $10K more per year after college", or "our students learn three languages fluently during grades 6-10", or "we offer all vegan food and teach set theory before algebra, and 50% of our students end up majoring in math in college".
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The syntactic ambiguity between method calls and variable references is intentional. It's not about saving 2 characters. It allows you to swap one for the other without editing the rest of the code.

I would say though that Ruby is a bit more complex of a language that people advertise. A novice will be bitten by these things, but someone who's worked with it full time for a couple weeks will not.

A language that excels at everything is an incoherent concept. There certainly are languages that are adequate at most things however.
But you can drive off the road.
1) The "backend cost" cannot be much more than what it is in Japan. They have to develop those networks as well. You make it sound like all the Japanese are actually accessing US servers. I would guess that the vast majority of the traffic is internal to the country. Yes, the distance is greater, but running "a few" high speed cables between the East and West coast is way cheaper than wiring a whole city.

2) You argue that you can't have one price for densely populated areas and another otherwise. In effect, this is exactly what it's happening, except that in those less dense areas you don't get service at all.

Any way you slice it, you just can't add up the huge difference in what we're getting and what they're getting.
Not at all. There is both a market-based and a psychological explanation:

Market based: If the student didn't use the voucher but might use it next year, then the school will try harder to meet the student's needs this year.

Psychological: If you perceive something as simply mandatory, you will take it for granted. While if you had a voucher and choose a public school, then you have made the decision that you have the best opportunity in the environment you chose, and you'll try to extract value from it.
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"One comment that seemed particularly uncontroversial to me was at the core of this nerd firestorm: Ruby is slow. For the next several days, I could think of only one thing: why is something you can measure controversial?"

This is exactly what needed to be said, and repeated until it is fully and widely understood. Cognitive dissonance should not be assuaged at the cost of the rational and empirical.
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URL shortening is getting way out of hand. It's the worst get-rich-quick scheme ever.
FTA: "And so we roll our eyes, sigh, and quietly accept the idiocy, the opportunism, and the utter disrespect for our peers and ourselves that is technical discussion on the Internet."

As a great thinker once said, "I'm starting with the man in the mirror."
Perhaps but your conclusions are equally silly (and not based on logic).

Voucher programs are very new and rare. Why would you expect them to function at the same level as established (and well funded) public schools after a very short time.

For comparison, imagine if FedEx were allowed to deliver residential mail -- would you expect 100% coverage of every US address overnight? Of course not. The ramp-up will take time, and with voucher money entrepreneurs will invent better schools and existing schools will be able to ramp up due to network effects long enjoyed by the public monopoly.

Also, you are right that parochial schools enjoyed a bump in enrolment that they may not have deserved, but they benefit from having had (for a long time) other sources of funding, namely donations. Also, I think you exaggerate the "indoctrination" quite a bit. Are public school students not indoctrinated that FDR and Henry Kissinger were great men? I'm not sure why you have to draw the line and say that only indoctrination about the supernatural is distasteful!
Ignorant of what?
People think they're smart because they've "realized" that consciousness doesn't exist and substance dualism is false. But, everyone stops there and just continue to be substance dualists, or greater arity, of some other stripe. I.e. there is no consciousness but there are apples, and kittens, and rainbows, and pots of gold. The real takeaway is that NO abstract concepts exist. It doesn't even make sense to say "every thing is only itself" since this again differentiates substances of "thing" and "self."
Internet discussion, quite frankly, sucks. It's driven by emotions and not logic. People are crass, rude, and take snipes they'd never do in person.

It used to be people wrote long letters to each other, like with a pen and paper. In that format, you had to make a case and defend it. In the new format, if you're writing more than 3 sentences you're a regular Tolstoy. The format has gotten shorter, the response time more immediate, and the audience less educated.

I remember when C++ was finally overshadowed by newer languages like Java with fancy IDEs.. Old timers quickly found a lot of complete crap coming out from programmers who never had to do things "the hard way" If you never had to take the time to think about classes before you wrote one, everything is a class.

Likewise if you've never had to take time to think about what you're writing before you comment, everything is a short, knee-jerk response.

Combine all of the above factors and you get an endless stream of tripe. It's the uneducated talking to the uniformed about topics that make them unhinged.

It's interesting that somebody associated with Twitter would make that observation. The format keeps getting shorter and shorter, and the time frame more and more immediate. Can't he see the connection?
Ask HN: Hacker News related sites?
There have been a couple of peripheral sites intended to provide features that HN doesn't provide itself. What are they?
The following line in the post is the crucial thing. "Amazing how suddenly reasonable and transformed a person can be when they’re forced to look you in the eye"

And I think a version of that is included in the guidelines for HN. The power of Internet conversation is the 'detachment' which can work both ways. It can get the nerdiest of nerds to get to talk to large audiences without inhibition and thus contributing to the society at large. However, it can also get them to show their nastiest sides, which probably would have been hidden but for the detachment provided by the medium.
RabbitMQ was less than a year old, and significantly more fully featured than what Twitter needed. Fixing bugs in that would be a whole lot harder than fixing bugs in 1500 lines of code they wrote in a language they knew.
Basecamp is among the only applications I know of that were built on 10 hours per week (assuming that's true), and even then it was a side project.

Most successful start ups I know of were spending that much time in a single day.
How to Track Twitter Trends
I love it! It's $$ but it's a business expense. I get the full 50/10 they advertise: http://www.digitalsanctuary.com/tech-blog/general/comcast-50...

The only issue is you're still limited by the 250 GB/month transfer cap. My first month with 50/10 I did over 750 GB, and got a phone call about it:>
250K bps for as little as $24 - amazing.
Watch "A Taste of Armageddon"

http://www.cbs.com/classics/star_trek/video/video.php?cid=61...

http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/series/TOS/episode/687...

Many months ago when I first learned that USAF and RAF pilots in Las Vegas, NV were flying armed drones in a war zone "worlds" away I knew we were not far from the scenario presented in that episode.

War needs to be painful, it needs to be bloody and costly otherwise there is no reason to stop fighting and no arguments against starting wars and "nuke from orbit" becomes the 1st/easiest/best answer to every problem.
Ask HN: What can a hacker do about gun violence?
The recent news about shootings makes me wonder whether there is anything I can do to help the situation. Maybe it's naive to think that we can use the web to mitigate this problem. But this is a smart group - someone's got to have some ideas for how we can improve our society with the tools we have. Would anyone like to throw out some suggestions that some of us could work on?
Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessary_and_sufficient_condit...
As much as I would love to believe this, no specific studies are cited...
Alva Noe has simply demonstrated that he is uncomfortable with science and incapable of logical thought with regards to the brain. Neuroscience probably invalidates his career.
I suspect that many smart people do not troll but engage in a marketing game to preserve the status quo. It keeps the attention focused on the current leaders, away from newcomers that could potentially disrupt the status quo. Often the products or technologies of both sides resemble each other a lot. Their commonality is much larger than their differences.
The regexp engine isn't slow. The bignum support isn't slow. The development time isn't slow.

If you wonder why there's a firestorm, it might be because of sweeping generalizations.
Tips for starting a student hacker group at school
yeah, i see the twitter connection - definitely a good tech synergy there, but would it cost them that much to do it in-house?
Ruby is a particularly strong magnet for this kind of controversy. As he notes, many of its strengths are not easily quantifiable, while its weaknesses are. Add in stereotyping, tribe mentality and cynicism and it creates drama.
That makes sense; I have to admit that I haven't read Singer's book, but it seemed like you were telling a story about foreign aid being Africa's biggest problem. This story is very common, but it's just not true. Cutting off all foreign aid to Africa would, literally, be letting people die. Lots of people. That's a very sobering thought, but it's easier to accept it if you tell yourself a story about foreign aid turning Africa into a giant welfare state. Libertarians love to hide behind this comforting fiction.

Phil Greenspun's point is exactly the same. The bleeding heart types tell themselves a story about saving children for $0.30 a day which totally ignores the long term repercussions of their actions.

The story is infinitely more complicated than your first principles deductions, as we can see by looking at real world countries that have received massive influxes of outside money (Dubai, Israel, South Korea(?), Cuba vs. numerous African countries and oil producers.) I think the correct answer lies in the fact that giving aid to a government that isn't ready for it is a recipe for disaster, or at least, not a recipe for progress.
(Edit has expired)

The term for this is price discrimination. Once you start looking for it, it's hard to stop: especially in luxury products like wine, jets, and investment banking (millions of dollars for "Why, yes, that is a sensible acquisition!" is clearly a luxury product), the entire game is to find people willing to pay ten times as much for the same goods, and figuring out how to make them pay it.