skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Examples of suicide attacks which had no religious motivation:

- the Luftwaffe carried out suicide missions against the Red Army during the Battle for Berlin.

- the Japanese Kamikaze inflicted great damage in the U.S. Navy fleet in the Pacific.

- the Vietminh / Vietcong who used suicide bombers against the French Military and then against the U.S. Military.

Examples are abundant. It's true that many suicide bombers are motivated by religious fanaticism, but if we look further back in History, the pattern seems to be that suicide bombers are motivated by other kinds of fanaticism (e.g., nationalism) or simply by desperation. When one can't defeat a stronger enemy in conventional ways, suicide attacks can be a good option, as they inflict tremendous amounts of damage with little resources, and have devastating effects on the enemy's morale.

To cut a long story short: not all suicide bombers are created equal. The ones who carried out the 9/11 attacks are quite different from the palestinians who blow up a bus in Tel-Aviv, for instance. Failing to understand this reality is a serious mistake.
Having read the article, I didn't get "old", "bitter" or even "woman" from it. She talks about getting a Mac when she was 19, so that would put an upper limit of 40 on her age. My guess from reading the article would have been early 30's.

I don't think that most people enjoy learning to use new things as much as you. I'm personally still a bit upset with Nokia for abandoning the perfect UI they had on their 9000 series phones in the late 90's. Having typed my share of unintentional avant garde poetry on an iPhone keyboard, I can somewhat sympathize with the author, even though I otherwise dig the shiny interface.
zaph0d, if you know the author please tell him to put a summary of the project in cliki, http://www.cliki.net/chronicity, that way automatic tools like asdf-install can see it.
I can't prove it, but I will assert without much fear of a counterexample, that, for most if not all systems, linear models describe most of the variance with the fewest number of free parameters. This may be as much as 90% in some cases, but almost certainly more than 50%.

In other words you get the most bang for your buck. This is not to say that a linear approximation might not be very inaccurate on important parts of the problem domain, but the variance that a higher order model would describe would be less, perhaps much less, than the portion the linear part describes.
There's a link in the TC article with a 20% discount to the full conference pass (€600 instead of €750). It doesn't apply to the single-day passes.

But even with the discount, I'm still on the fence. Maybe I might just go for the drinks.
He is partly right, but if you think about what you are doing it shouldn't be such a big issue to scale reasonably well later on. Rails is properly more difficult to get to scale since that was never a concern of DDH when he made it, something like Erlang scales because it was made to do that.
You say upgrading every 6 months is low maintainence? Not to mention having new versions of everything pushed to you every week. Sorry, but I just don't have the bandwidth for that kind of thing.

If you had said Debian, I would have agreed, but Ubuntu is just a pain to maintain.

I use PCLinuxOS on my PC. So far, I don't have any qualms. Simple, easy to use and new releases come out when the developers feel the time is right.
On the 3g internet usage, Apple didn't invent that with the iPhone. Or improve on the experience that much.

What are the benefits of the iPhone, say over a laptop, over the blackberry? Or the other phones from Japan, Korea.
One new language per year is too fast a rate. And it's really about learning new perspectives, not so much about the language themselves.

It would probably make you a better programmer to master all of purely functional programming, syntaxic abstraction, pattern-matching and logical inference, distributed and fault-tolerant computation by message-passing, stack-oriented programming, etc.

It just happens that some languages are predominantly based on each of those principles so the act of learning those languages in depth make you master those useful principles for free.

Haskell = Purely functional programming
Lisp = Syntaxic abstraction
Prolog = Pattern-matching and logical inference
Erlang = Distributed and fault-tolerant computation by message-passing
Forth = Stack-oriented programming

(completely unexhaustive list of language/specialty mappings)
It definitely has two meanings in the same way that "hacker" does and it is all contextual. If I hear hacker outside of this website I usually assume it is being used derogatorily.

In the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" context there is no confusion what PC means. In Hacker News context I can understand how the term PC might be ambiguous. I am really arguing that at this point though even hackers are calling Windows machines PC's. Although I have always wondered why everyone refers to them as PC's I have never found myself being confused when I hear it nor have I ever been misunderstood when using the term.
> No, some schools really are better than others. Schools
> are paid for with property taxes. If you have richer
> people living around the school, the school gets more money.

Is this actually true within a school district? Is it common for the taxes to apportioned geographically all the way down to the neighborhood level? Police and fire services don't work like this, I hope!
And just because it's "from birth" doesn't make it "hard-wired," and even if it is "hard-wired," that doesn't mean it can't be rewired and worked around.

Neuroplasticity FTW. The human brain is a most adaptable tool.

But that said, how many infants are 'incurious'? They either are curious, or there is something wrong with them. No baby is incurious without some kind of pathology.
I wrote my little web app without caring about scaling. Now it has about 20000 visitors a day and an average of 8 request per second.
The uptime command says: load average: 0.16, 0.19, 0.15 (on a dual core machine.)
Should I have any problem with the load, I think it would be feasible to find someone funding me.
I understand it depends of the type of the service, but I also think that most of them could afford to think about scalability when they actually need it.
I would call it a Linux box/machine.
I guess to be a master you need to focus a lot, so it takes much hard focused work. The time you spend with other languages could be used to go more deep in at just one. So the point is

HOW FREAKY ARE YOU READY BE TO GET THE POINT OF MASTERING 2 OR MORE LANGUAGES ?

Most part of programmers are good at some languages, but not masters ... being a master of one is difficult, what if master of two or three.

So the answerer is : depends of the freaky behind the try !
Not sure what this has to do with anything.

If you're trying to compare the difficulty of the sports, nobody would argue that the catches in that video are more difficult than a fly ball. However, there are plenty of difficult catches made everyday in the major leagues. And hitting and pitching are significantly harder in baseball.
Ask HN: Startup House?
I'm thinking of applying to Startup House:

www.startup-house.com

Any thoughts? Does this look like a legit place?
His primary example of how Google is big and evil is actually an industry-wide problem, The issue of internet royalties for musicians has been contentions, largely because most internet radio sites aren't making very much money in the first place. Pandora, for instance, has revenues of only about 25 million, 75% of which is going to music labels. An increase in royalty fees would put most companies with a similar business model out of business. Just because Google makes a lot of money on search doesn't mean that they should have to pay above market royalty fees for youtube plays. The real issue is that music just isn't worth all that much to internet consumers at the moment. The days of paying 20 bucks for a CD are over. So, until someone comes up with a better monetization model for online music, I don't see the royalty fees going up.
http://www.startup-house.com
Battlebots didn't end because it was ahead of its time. In my opinion, Battlebots ended because the ruleset created an optimal robot ("spin as much of your mass as possible as fast as possible and hit the other robot before they do the same") and it became boring to watch the two resulting fights: "Optimal robot utterly destroys non-optimal robot in one blow" and "two optimal robots charge directly at each other and in one blow the match is resolved". Note the "one blow" in both descriptions... which of course is not to say it was "one blow" in literally every fight, but it often was.

If they're going to succeed, they're going to have to tune the rules better, but that causes its own problems as people start to feel Battlebots is stacking the deck against effective robots... which is in fact exactly what they are doing, after all. Maybe if they are open about what they are doing and tune the rules carefully after each competition, they can keep the fun factor up, but no matter how you slice it, they walk a delicate line between actually effective robots and interesting-to-watch robots.

I don't know that there have been any terribly interesting technological advances that would change the equation about whether Battlebots is "ahead of its time". Under the scenario in question, putting any sort of clever logic on board of any kind (autonomous or human-assisted) is just adding a complicated part that will die on the first blow, so where a lot of the advances have occurred isn't really relevant to Battlebots.
Agree with you ChrysXYZ. In fact, I think you could replace spouse and relationship with co-founder(s) and startup very easily.

The article is fundamentally about human relationships and how they fall apart or stay together.
There's a difference between learning a language and mastering it.

Every little bit helps. Read one book and you've learned a new point of view. Read that book and build a sample project and you've learned more. To really understand a language or framework requires still more work. To master it might take years.

You should master one or two things (or more, if there are enough hours in the day or if you are superhumanly good at mastering languages). But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't also have lower levels of expertise in a broad range of other subjects. Half the battle in life is knowing what to master at any given moment, and the only way to figure that out is to sample a lot of things.
You Can't Take The Paper Out Of The Newstand
So all Geico needs to do is convert people who are looking for cavemen into paying customers and they can stop paying $90 million a year to AdWords?

Honestly, your article doesn't make any sense. You're title is that Geico "wastes $90MM" a year in paid search. Yet you offer no evidence that Geico has a negative ROI on this spending.

If your point is that Geico isn't concerned with organic traffic, they are ranked #1 for "car insurance" and #2 for "car insurance quote". I think they seem to be doing alright.

What do you think the point of the Caveman commercials were? The appeal was "it's so easy, even a caveman could do it". The cavemen were an added benefit of a recognizable character. While Geico probably could have spent some time and money getting higher ranking for "cavemen", you don't provide any evidence that doing so would actually covert sales. Missing this is huge because common sense tells me that folks looking for the Geico Cavemen are probably more interested in some quick entertainment than car insurance.
Pirates often signal something is wrong in the market, this much I agree with you.
Yes. You can donate to a particular school in a school district, so you can have somebody give one school 1,000 computers and a new baseball field while the rest of the schools in the district get nothing. And, teachers usually fight for the chance to work at the better, safer, richer schools; the poorer neighborhoods will tend to have worse teachers and a lot more teacher churn. Parents will use open enrollment or request exceptions to get their kids into the schools in the better neighborhoods.

When my school district implemented open enrollment, the schools in the richest neighborhoods nearly doubled in student population. To accomodate the overflowing student population, they (mostly) centralized special education to the poorest school. In turn, attendance shifted further as nobody wanted to go to the "special ed school on the poor side of town."
I doubt they mean just using xcode, or no one would be able to distribute Macintosh apps. Linking against Apple's iPhone header files would be a clear violation, though.
I'd like to know a little more about the end... he says they switched back to private salaries and then a bit later half of the team left and half got merged into another company. Uh, that sounds like a bad result (but may have been totally orthogonal to the salary change).

And he's right. This works really well for programmers who like things to be algorithmic. It doesn't necessarily make much sense to the non programmers. That doesn't mean it's wrong, just "different" for them.

We do audition style interviews... meaning when you come to interview for a programmer position you write code all day. If you come to interview for a sales position, you will be selling all day during your interviews. If you come to interview as an office manager, you will be doing those tasks during your interview. We don't sit and have long conversations about where you see yourself in five years.

I can tell you that we've never had a single programmer that thought this interview style was strange. We had two office manager interviewees walk out during the middle of the interview. That style of interview was just strange to them and freaked them out.
I don't see anything on HP's website about an "n series". Link?
http://php.net/strtotime/

I don't mean to be a troll, but the fact that a simple function that has been available in other languages for years is only now making it to CL is a red flag for people considering learning Lisp.
See, that's what I thought at first. But then I the text would talk about code "using Apple APIs", not "developed using Apple software".
You're not trying to be the master of a programming language. You're trying to make solutions happen in the best, quickest way possible.

Seriously. I could care less the order of constructor evaluation in a multiple inheritance language. If that becomes a problem, I'll look it up.

This isn't like school where you try to pick one subject and become the complete overlord of it. This is about building a toolbox: learning how different tools work and being able to switch instantly between them when the time is right. The meta knowledge of languages is infinitely more important than the abstract details of a particular one. If you're a good programmer, you'll naturally optimize the code you write.

Thinking about writing a solution in an imperative language is fundamentally different than thinking about one in a functional language. Thinking about a web solution in terms of Javascript/client-side/jsonp is fundamentally different than in terms of client-server, or in terms of post-response. It's the thinking about those problems, before you start hacking, that gets you the most mileage. And the best way to learn how to think using those paradigms is to write solutions using them.
Don't cloud the issue by juggling words to say it's not a menace. It says amoral menace, which means regardless of morals, is a menace.
Forex Robots and Expert Advisors Lose Money For 2 Simple Reasons
What confuses me about YouTube is... The Web was designed to be hosted anarchically, by anyone.

What is needed is a standardised video tag like HTML, ported to all browsers, so people can host their own videos.

See a video as a HTML document or a GIF image.

I look forward to a W3C video standard crushing YouTube.
I would have to add "The Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula K. Le Guin.
http://puny.sapo.pt/ or http://澥.sl.pt
I was happy to see that other commenters where very little impressed with this article either, with the one above probably most to the point.

People don't see yet how instable these monopolies really are in the age of the internet. Once Google would really corrupt it's core product, search, someone could just go, download the clones of Googles software over at the apache foundation and upload it into a little EC2 cloud at Amazon. There is not even this network effect which allows Ebay to run successfully despite looking quite dated nowadays, because people feel they have to stick with them because eveybody else does.
New Deal Revisionism: Theories Collide
Anyone who calls a search engine a parasite does not understand how the Internet works. A parasite attaches to a host and extracts whatever it needs without giving anything in return. Google and other search engines organize information on the Internet. Having a world wide web of information without a search engine does not make sense. How would you discover new nodes?

Since they are the organizers of information they are also the de facto gatekeepers for users who do not know how to discover knew content without them.
Usually saying "that list was missing X" type stuff is pretty silly, but with a title like that, that list seriously needs some Verner Vinge.
I find learning each new language is easier than the one before it; the concepts of software development are largely the same from language to language and are often transferable from language to language.

Then again, I started out on C, so pretty much everything besides Haskell seems like a piece of cake.
I agree and I held out as long as possible, but I am weak...
What Edison has to teach us about innovation
Guardian journalist complains about someone making money. Who would have thought?

FYI for non UK readers: "Editorial articles in The Guardian are generally in sympathy with the middle-ground liberal to left-wing end of the political spectrum" (http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/The+Guardian). UK print media has ~10 national newspapers, which are politically segmented (and income segmented). Hence editorial articles benefit from being fairly political, since they address a readership that is both homogeneous in its political views, and different to the national average in its political views. Tribalism..
I'd like to hear from people who live in New York City how readily the public schools there accept parental involvement. My main volunteer work here in Minnesota is leading an organization of parents concerned about gifted education in this state, and local school districts here vary quite widely in how well they encourage parental involvement. This state was the first in the country to have statewide open enrollment for public school districts, the first in the country to have charter schools, and the first in the country to have a statewide program of dual enrollment (college-level study for high school credit) for eleventh and twelfth graders, and all the hundreds of parents I know locally have to continually think and rethink about how to shop around for the best educational fit for their children. Some parents can make meaningful changes in their local school district, and some cannot. But in New York City parents have substantially less shopping power than parents in Minnesota have, so the school districts may be correspondingly more inclined to blow off parental concerns. What do those of you in New York observe about the situation there?
Is this actually true within a school district?

Schools can certainly vary in the quality of their staffs within any one school district. If parents can't shop for schools within the school district, they may want to go to another district entirely.

Request to residents of New York City: please correct me if I am wrong, but if I correctly understand the public school system in New York City, there is an overall public school system run by a chancellor for the entire city of New York, but within the city there are multiple "school districts" that each have their own attendance boundaries and some degree of local governance under the overall leadership of the chancellor. So I think what the newspaper article describes is parents trying to move to different neighborhoods in the same city to have a claim for their children to attend a particular local group of public schools, right?
There are countless books that could go on this list, but you have to start somewhere. This is a good place to start. The books on this list are all worth reading, though I'm sorry to say that I found that the Foundation Trilogy had aged really badly :-( I'm glad I read it 3 times as a child, because I doubt I'll be reading it again...

I'd add a couple of modern authors to the list. Vernor Vinge has been mentioned. Another interesting one is Charles Stross (I recently came out of reading Accelerando... full of interesting ideas). I found Paulo Di Filippo's short stories generally great too.

Ultimately, you have to make your own list, from your own personal tastes and journeys. This is definitely a good starting point, though (at least as far as Science Fiction is concerned).
There are the versions that are supported for 4 years. Boradband internet is good if you are running Ubuntu, that is true, but the actual effort of updating is not so bad (you could also automate it).

I have not yet run updates on my MacPort installation, but I would expect similar updates to Ubtuntu, except taking much longer (as MacPorts seems to compile everything on my Notebook, rather than downloading binaries). Or what do you mean by "everything"?
From the article:

"...Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time."

This journalist appears to know little about the WWW. He's writing for an audience that (mainly) know equally little, but who care passionately about other things (artists' rights, privacy, etc), which are inevitably affected by the WWW. So they only see the bad side of the coin.
On Design Minimalism: Why JSON Template Doesn't Need an Include Statement
Obie Fernandez: My Reasoned Response about Scala at Twitter
Philip K. Dick has some great SciFi works as well. Any of his short story compilations are great reads.
This Time, Slump Hits Well-Educated, Too
Interesting idea about using colors and sizes.

I have two teams that are using Second Life as a Scrum/Agile platform. I like the idea of using the features of the VR world in new ways.

The problem with VR is that you're still missing body language and non-verbal cues. But with distributed teams more a reality, we're going to have to figure all of this out.
This is just a bunch of jibber jabber. Boo hoo piracy happens on the Internet. It happened long before Scribd and long before the Internet became popular. Newspapers are going out of business because of the Web ... Boohoo. So because of all this Google is an amoral menace? Give me a break.
Exactly! When interviewing for hedge funds for a quantitative analyst / trader position one should expect to be asked about poker / blackjack / backgammon.

A classical interview question / challenge would be to invent a new card game and ask the interviewees to devise an optimal strategy for that game.
Ext burned a lot of people with their license shenanigans in the past.

It won't soon be forgotten. I will never touch a piece of code that comes out of that project again if I can avoid it.

Being "talented developers" is not an excuse for being untrustworthy.