skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good VCs vet potential investees better than the FBI does. And that is true without the risk of being blamed for enabling a terrorist. Think about how well a VC would vet someone coming in from outside the country. (How well they can vet such a person is a separate but important issue).

And at least one of the 9/11 hijackers came in on a student visa. The student visa program has not been shut down (although checks for all visa programs have become more stringent).
We recently discussed (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=556399) a similar [2009] article by the same publisher (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1890387,00....). I find the publisher coincidence (?) interesting.
Is it just me, or should this be a GM script, not a full-fledged extension?
I credit the article for giving me cause to celebrate on this 16th, but all past its thirteenth word is trash. The Elements of Style is an elegant book that has improved both my writing and my programming. It will improve yours. It would improve Pullum's, if he ever bothers to read it.

The meat isn't in the titles but rather in the content, the examples, and the writing itself. "Do not inject _irrelevant_ opinion" makes a poor title. So too does "Be alert for those needless words that you're bound to write". The titles are just reminders. Don't read just the titles. Read the whole book.

The 4 sentences mentioned are not examples of passives. They are examples of "there is" and "could be X" expressions that should be converted into a forceful active voice. Read the book carefully.

Criticisms of teachers and universities are irrelevant. How often do students read their texts carefully? Yet the book is short and clear. Don't get a second-hand account - not from a teacher, not from a friend, not from me, and certainly not from [this ignorant pedant] Pullum. Read the book yourself.

The book is a wonderful reference, too. Buy or borrow it and read it. Read it three times.
A doctor friend of mine told me about removing contraceptive IUD's from Chinese women who are living in the US and now want to have more kids. The IUD's are designed to be permanent (not the same as US IUD's) and the women are forced to get them after they've reached their child quota in China. The interesting thing is that some doctors outside China probably perform more of these removal procedures than Chinese doctors ever do.
The little rocks work if you're moving nicely symmetrical boulders across a hard, flat surface, but I can't see them working on a grassy hill quite as well...
Tell me how you prevent either of the two previous scenarious, short of having the gov't handle the entire recommendation/approval process...

Accredidation - similar to the way that Universities do.
The scroll for Hacker News is a bit ugly. For a cleaner effect that doesn't strip page style, change the "Content XPath" to:

/html/body/center/table/tbody/tr[3]
I'm sure this is honest, but it really strikes me as a random name generator attached to interpolations between the standard 16 colors :).
I don't know about all or even most of these colors but a few names to color combos I know from elsewhere. For instance 'cornflower blue' the default, was a color I was playing with the other day.
Thanks for public data sets! I like AWS in general, but public data is a very sweet touch.
Blogs for Online Entrepreneurs
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8551
Here's the main website from the guy behind it:

http://www.theforgottentechnology.com/

If you click through you all the pages you get some decent details on what's going on, despite the ancient technology theme extending to the design of the website :)
The issue here is that people are evading responsibility, not that they are using the passive voice to do it (though the passive voice is notoriously handy for this purpose).
Three years of on the job training is better education than three years of schooling in practically every field.

In CS, this is mostly false. You learn very different things in school and in industry. The former is useful in the latter, but usually not vice versa.
this would be a great addition to public data sets, though I imagine for that to happen it would need some sort of viable plan to keep the data in sync
I don't think that's quite it. The author seems to like languages that let programs be as close to provably correct as possible. He also admits that, for some problems, this is a mistake.

I used to hate static typing with a passion, and I'm still a pretty big Lisp fan, but I've recently taken up Haskell. Many of the examples in this post use Haskell as an example of the right thing, and I'm really starting to see the advantages. Certain common errors are caught by the compiler, and impure operations show up in a function's type signature, reducing the chances of any spooky action at a distance.

Ultimately, I think there's a tradeoff between flexibility and correctness. How much of each to choose depends on the parameters of the project. Some languages try to allow a choice, especially with regard to typing discipline. Haskell offers Data.Dynamic. Common Lisp has optional type declarations and compiler warnings for obvious type errors. There's a post about formalizing such things as "gradual typing" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=556794).
Column/hybrid datastore is about performance per dollar. He doesn't get it.
But you primed your first example with a disambiguating comma. A fairer comparison would be:

1. Don't eat the apples which are rotten.

2. Don't eat the applies that are rotten.

#2 sounds better to me (especially for spoken English) but the difference in meaning is not nearly as obvious.
There's a fairly obvious explanation that I didn't see mentioned anywhere in the abstract: assortative mating. People tend to have sex with people of roughly the same intelligence, socioeconomic status, and interests. As you go down the tails of the bell curve, there are fewer people of the same intelligence with similar interests.

If you have an IQ of 100, 68% of the population is within one standard deviation of you. Your chances of meeting someone you feel comfortable with in high school are pretty high. But if you have an IQ of 145 (3 stddev), only about 3% of the population is within one standard deviation of intelligence of you. Add to that the constraints of it being a member of your preferred sex, being reasonably attractive & socially compatible, and wanting to have sex, and it's no surprise that most such people don't find suitable mates until they enter college, which purposely brings together people of similar intelligence.

And if you have an IQ of 175 (5 stddev), less than 1 in 10,000 people is within one standard deviation of intelligence. (Though this is a bit meaningless, as IQ distribution has fat tails when you get past about 145.) Then add in that super-intelligent people often have very narrow and deep interests, and that males are overrepresented on both ends of the bell curve (there are both more male morons and male geniuses than female ones).

This also explains why the smartest men were most likely to hire a prostitute. If they had no chance of forming an emotional connection with a woman, why not pay her to leave afterwards?

Personally, I had about zero interest in 90% of girls in college. They were just inane. And this is at Amherst, which already selects for pretty smart people.
Lost some credibility putting ValleyWag on the list - especially alongside Dharmesh Shah, Fred Wilson, Eric Ries, etc.
An excellent rebuttal. Well done!
Also, would you call this site a blog?
Beyond the title, the newer article is nothing like this older article. The newer article is about a guy who built a Web site on the side. The older article is about picking mutual funds and investment strategies.
Nothing is static. Apple dumped firewire. Each generation of iPod has wildly different input methods. Even the default meanings of the function keys on Apple keyboards and laptops have moved around. Nokia's phone product lines have been around a lot longer and sell to a lot more people. Give it time, I'm sure Apple will release an iPhone that has something new or isn't directly compatible with a previous version in some way.
In order to produce a valid search tree, the code must halt. Therefore, an algorithm that can tell whether an arbitrary piece of code will produce valid search trees can tell whether that piece of code will halt.

This isn't really a good example though, because it's quite possible to examing an arbitrary piece of code and, assuming it halts, determine whether it will produce valid search trees. The Haskell and ML typecheckers are existence proofs for this, as is the static typechecker that Wadler did as a bolt-on addition to Erlang.
I'd just say, "Don't eat the rotten apples." Or, "Don't eat the apples, they're rotten."
To pull something like this off convincingly, you have to write better than E. B. White, which is pretty hard to do.

The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous
esteem in which it is held by American college graduates.

Ug. What a clinker. He sounds like Hector Dexter.

And he's not even saying what he means to. Undergrads like the book too; surely he's not deliberately excluding them?
He should have just written:

The Elements of Style doesn't deserve its reputation.
It appears that the creator of StalkDaily has admitted to creating the worm, and disabled it: http://www.bnonews.com/news/242.html
This actually reminds me of disneyland. In the hallway to get on the haunted mansion they have these inverted busts that seem to stare at you as you walk around the room. Interesting effect in person.
I don't buy that argument. Basic morals is just a minimum requirement for a society. We need to work together as a community, so for it to work there has to be a set of rules. You can see the same with packs of lions or other types of animals.

Anti-social elements will not survive long on their own. People/animals who work together has a better chance of survival. Those who can't work with others, are therefore removed (gradually) from the gene pool.

Anyway, it is very dangerous to base morals on religion. Only religion can make someone say "It's wrong to kill people, unless they believe in another religion"... What is the moral basis for that? If you removed religion from politics, they would not be able to say that.
Before the iPhone, some smartphone manufacturers (Microsoft) thought it was normal to wipe out the user's data with a mobile operating system upgrade.

The iPhone is a 3rd generation* product.

* Jared Spool's definition
1st generation - All about the technology. The Motorola brick phones.

2nd generation - Features - camera/games/ringtones/contacts/SMS/mms/mp3/games/voice dial/speakerphone/etc

3rd generation - Experience
To save money and resources: Opensim could sleep when no-one is watching
Microsoft cancels campus pub
He's right, in some ways. Long term, SSDs are going to have a massive impact on DBMS technologies. Disk latency is the dominant performance inhibitor for a lot of DBMS applications. The area I'm working in, RDF triple stores, involves large joins and relatively small amounts of total data transfer, resulting in a lot of disk seeks per unit data transferred. In this area, SSDs will be a huge leap from disk techs.

He's missed the point by targeting column stores, however. Column stores are primarily aimed at data warehouses, which (generally) have the following characteristics:

- Extremely large amounts of data stored.

- Queries tend to involve very large, unpredictable scans (aggregations, etc).

- Since queries are relatively unpredictable, there's a limit to the effectiveness of caching.

While SSDs can have blistering transfer rates and are very suitable for large scans, they're still vastly more expensive per gig than conventional disks. The kinds of queries being done are good for disks: they involve long continuous reads, so disk's primary disadvantage of slow seeks is not so relevant here. Column stores are aimed at this market by aiding faster effective transfer of data, since you're only reading data from the columns you're interested in off the disk. There's other claimed advantages like better compression ratios, too.

Data warehouses are one of the primary growth areas for the DBMS market at the moment. There's a bunch of small players, who all have a chance to grow because the major heavyweights like Oracle and MS don't have overly strong products in the field - although that'll no doubt change with MS's acquisition of DATAllegro, one of the aforementioned small players. I'm sure Stonebraker and co will be keeping an eye on SSDs, but they're safe for some time to come yet.

edit: formatting
I find this amazing... I've been interested in Stonehenge for as far back as I can remember but I'm no expert on the subject- I'm just in awe of it.

What I find interesting about this video is the claim that he "is not a scientist" - I beg to differ. I do not know his formal education background, but that should not diminish his ability to apply the scientific method which he has clearly shown. After all, he is an expert in the field of moving large objects, if there is such a field.

From wiki:
"A scientist, in the broadest sense, refers to any person that engages in a systematic activity to acquire knowledge or an individual that engages in such practices and traditions that are linked to schools of thought or philosophy."

From the video, it's quite apparent that he applies a systematic activity to achieve his goal, that being knowledge in our case, and it's linked to a school of thought - construction, and not to mention mathematics and physics (it's obvious there's math involved here whether he knows it or not) for the application of the scientific method.

Thus, without formal education, I feel his demonstrations clearly prove he a scientist in the broadest sense- I'd welcome opinions for or to the contrary if you're interested.
17 Years, poor boy, hope his dad has a good lawyer.
I went to a liberal arts college where 50% of students never take a math or hard science course. Many of them are lawyers or financiers (well, ex-financiers ;-)) now.

I don't think this is at all a rational response to economic incentives. There was just a thread among a bunch of young lawyers in the alumni network, giving advice to another alum who was thinking of going to law school. They seem significantly less satisfied with their jobs as lawyers than I do with mine as an engineer. They don't make appreciably more money either. Many of them would love to do engineering - if it didn't involve math. If you ask them why they didn't learn more math in high school & college then, almost all will say that at some point, they fell of the train and just "didn't get" math.

I think the problem is more that good engineers are too successful. They have every incentive to remain an engineer and zero incentive to train the next generation. This has gone on for about two generations, which means that the pipeline of home-grown American talent is just about dry.

I would kinda like to teach. I come from a family with three generations of teachers on my mother's side. I like working with kids. But there is no possible way that I could rationalize giving up a six-figure Google job where I can get in to work at 11:00, the feed me, I get cool data to play with, and everyone sees my work, for a $30k/year teaching job where I work from 8:00 AM to 4:30 PM, have homework, and deal with parents who threaten to sue me.

I think a major difference between Asian cultures and here is that teaching is a high-status profession in Asia. Here, the assumption is that people become teachers because they can't get hired anywhere else, and they're paid accordingly. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as everyone who can get hired elsewhere chooses to work elsewhere, and the only math/science teachers you get are the ones that can't hack it in industry or academia (& a couple saints that just don't want to work there, for any amount of money).
I've actually long thought that Google's YouTube acquisition wasn't purely to get into the online video market. It was all about the huge corpus of video that they acquired.

Let me explain. Google's general game plan is this: massive compute clusters + massive datasets + Phd CS brains trying to do something cool. My bet is that Google thought that having the world's largest video dataset was well worth the $2.5 billion they spent to buy YouTube. It's still worth $0.5 billion a year for them to keep maintaining it.

I don't think that they are going to be panicking about monetizing YouTube any time soon. That's not the reason they bought the company.
He lists his sources, so there's nothing random about it as far as I can tell.
He's missed the point by targeting column stores,
however. Column stores are primarily aimed at data
warehouses, which (generally) have the following
characteristics: [...]

He is not missing the point. Quote from the article:

"My conclusion is, on the whole, no. The column
store, when used to support existing petabyte
OLAP systems may be worth the grief, but for
transactional systems, at which the TRM is
aiming and from which column stores would extract,
not so much."

OLAP = Online Analytical Processing = Data Warehousing,
i.e. he primarily questions the use of column stores for
transaction processing (OLTP) and recognizes the
usefulness of column stores for large data warehouses.
And the domain is "www.full360.com" as well. Perhaps they originally wanted to be a games blog :-)
Though they have mentioned ycombinator, I would say PG's essays is one of the best resource.
'If there are really "lots of great programmers" in the US where are they? I know a lot of companies around here who would gladly pay $150k+ for a truly "great" programmer, if they could only find them.'

They already have jobs that they're happy with.
Total US Debt so far: $301 Trillion dollars. $1.5M per person
all with the latest data

9.8T in bailouts
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=washingtonstory&sid=aGq2B3XeGKok

11T in government debts
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

17T in corporate debts
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/04/business/economy/04charts.html?em

1T in credit card debts
http://www.opposingviews.com/articles/opinion-americans-1-trillion-in-cr...

11T in mortgages
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=washingtonstory&sid=aGq2B3XeGKok

52T in social security/medicare obligations
http://www.bio-medicine.org/medicine-news-1/Medicare--Social-Security-Ow...

Like other government trust funds (highway, unemployment insurance and
so forth), the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds exist purely
for accounting purposes: to keep track of surpluses and deficits in
the inflow and outflow of money. The accumulated Social Security
surplus actually consists of paper certificates (non-negotiable bonds)
kept in a filing cabinet in a government office in West Virginia.
These bonds cannot be sold on Wall Street or to foreign investors.
They can only be returned to the Treasury. In essence, they are little
more than IOUs the government writes to itself.
http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba616

200T in derivatives in banks
http://www.occ.treas.gov/deriv/deriv.htm

Not including derivatives; 101T. including it, 301T

Can't really pay it off anytime soon....

2.3T budget deficit this year. 10T in the next 10 years.
http://www.cnsnews.com/Public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=45528
As an SV and US outsider I can definitely see a dismissive-ness towards other platforms. However rather than blindness I see it more as a group phenomena like a 'collective subconscious' that can often drive a meme towards a self perpetuating dominance. The group senses that if they all push together they can create a new dominant platform and benefit from being early adopters. For a time this can lead to the kind of sustained dominance that SV is experiencing but of course nothing lasts forever - just look at the US automotive industry.
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This is really misleading. Much of that "debt" is in the form of obligations to U.S. citizens. For example, the $52T in social security/medicare is only an obligation because the government has promised to pay people like you and me. That's $52T we have to pay, but it's also $52T that we'll be receiving.

The same goes for derivatives. Every liability on someone's books is an asset on someone else's. The real problem is that with all these financial firms going belly-up, we don't know who's holding the debt and who owes it.
Then he's criticising the applicability of column stores to a mode of use for which they're not designed. While there have been suggestions that correctly implemented column stores might provide acceptable OLTP performance, I don't see many people advocating them as a replacement for Oracle, DB2, or MSSQL. That seems to me to be missing the point, rather.

"My interest is this: given the Next Revolution, do either a TRM or column store database have a purpose?"

His post minimises the significance of data warehousing when it's a significant growth area, particularly for new players in the market. Column stores are applicable to DWs much smaller than petabyte scale - and indeed, I haven't seen any figures that suggest that Vertica has been scaled up that far yet.

He's also ignored the impact of physical storage layer design on memory organisation and CPU cache performance. The use of SSDs is not a panacea that renders physical storage layout irrelevant.

edit: quotes, and the realisation that 'minimalises' is not, in fact, a word.
S4 - Super Simple Storage Service.  Read Only Cloud Storge
No beer for you!
A year ago, I looked into writing a simple application and getting it published on Nokia etc platforms. It was slow and expensive to get anything certified. And you seemed to have to redo it all for version upgrades and even bug fixes.

Apple's app store is the best thing that ever happened to Symbian (Nokia, etc) developers AND users, since the App store is soon copied by everyone.
Cornflower Blue is truly a storied color.

It is the default rendering clear color for the XNA Framework. Everyday, many budding game developers take their first steps into programming with this soothing blank screen: http://images.google.com/images?q=cornflower+blue+xna
Lessons from great depression
This type of stuff gets voted up here all the time, and I don't really get it. If you need someone else to tell you how to be an entrepreneur, you're doing it wrong.

Imagine Ty Warner trying to find online gurus to guide his cloth animal business, sold through mom and pop stores...
Small Biz Now Can Fight Back Against Inaccurate Online Reviews
There are reasons why compilers for static languages complain so much for those uneducated in their type systems: because the constructs they are rejecting have, on balance, been determined to be unsound by the languages' designers.

And most of the time, these decisions are correct. In each language, however, there are usually a few exceptions, most of which are the result of learning over time. For example, Pascal over-uses nominal type equality, which is particularly pernicious with arrays, and, in classical Pascal, strings (fixed-length arrays of chars).

And in Java, requiring most possible exceptions to be part of the interface specification is a flaw resulting from a misunderstanding about exceptions: Java seems to feel that no exception should be ignored, while they should actually almost never be caught.

And then there are abhorrences like C++, where historical forces have combined to give the language user more power than they can comfortably wield, or can be comfortably implemented in any given compiler.
ReactionGrid announces contest to win a hosted virtual world for a year