skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, that's why he puts scare quotes around "facts" and calls them "harmless fun".
Sun setting down on the core Swing
> So rather than fixing broken behavior of existing apps, we should instead bloat the platform with new features ripe for abuse? That seems... unwise.

Who, exactly, in that sentence is 'we'? Such sloppy wording does not give credit to your argument.

The first clause is talking about Apple. Apple does not have fixing this behaviour as its priority, and is consequently not fixing this behaviour. Neither is it bloating the platform with new features ripe for abuse.

The second clause is talking about the people who are annoyed by broken behaviour. It is infeasible for them to fix it, because they are not Apple; however, it is feasible for them to jailbreak their phone and tack on new features to work around this behaviour.

There is no 'we' here, capable of simultaneously shutting down the jailbreak developers and getting Apple to make the improvements that make the jailbreak developers' annoyances go away. If the above comment reflects your beliefs, then your beliefs appear to be poorly worded, and if it does not, then you are trolling. I am sorry for trotting out the T word, but your mode of discourse annoys me that much.
I find it impressive after Time totally drops the ball on being able to protect their web voting app, that they are still in touch enough to have Astley write about moot.

I enjoyed the article but I more enjoyed the notion of someone at Time having the 'last laugh'.
Mitochondrial DNA would give you female diversity and the Y chromosome would give you male diversity.

As to why the discrepancy? Male babies have a lower survival rate. Among the Amazonian Yanomami 40% of the men are murdered or killed in combat. That would lower your odds of being an ancestor.
ISM Data Signals Return to Growth is Near
Demoting a Programmer to a Manager
And (from purely anecdotal experience) it isn't true today either. I did not have a safe career with a stable income when I met and married my wife. One of my best friends dropped out of college and married his sweetheart (they started off living in a single room). Recently, another friend of mine was laid off. He's just got engaged.

IMHO The safe, stable, incomes make it easier to get married only if it is an "arranged" marriage where you are scrutinized by the parent and relatives of your wife-to-be. Otherwise it really doesn't matter.
Yeah, I understand the intent of the phrase, I just think it's a bad way of putting it.

By the way, I did enjoy the Optimism presentation. I didn't mean to take away from it with my nitpick.
Godaddy: DNS performances measured form North America and Europe
Does the Universe Have a Purpose?
Shawn is the author of Repo, Gerrit 2 and we use those tools and jgit quite a bit for distributing and developing Android. He's pretty awesome. (works for me, I'm proud to say)
Can you humor me and define your terms? What makes a company evil?
Good job with the interview. I know it can be a lot tougher than it looks.
the thing about this is, it's not like there's only 100 good companies that need funding, and once they're out no more capital invested is worth a damn.

let's say up to 100 your getting maximum exit returns. then 25 above that you're getting 90% cause more of the good ones have been taken leading to more that don't go anywhere. but you're still getting 122 exits. then the 25 above that you get 80% leading to 142 exits out of 150 investments.

i simplified the math to explain a principle. it's never that the max capital has been reached and there's NO MORE good companies left needing funding at all. set up programs like YC and techstars and you WILL find something good
>>> Computers [...] cannot pass simple tests of consciousness that a mouse can

>>Like what?

>Vision, for one. Also, running.

Um, ever heard of a digital camera? Or if you mean interpreting images, guessing what, they can do that too. Computer vision is a subfield of AI (arguably; I believe some say it's signal processing). Also, blind people are still conscious, so...

And running? Sorry, I hate to take this tone, but WTF are you talking about? Robots can run, and running has nothing to do with consciousness.

>>If they aren't computing, then what are they doing? You're looking down into the dualism abyss...

>I don't think dualism is what he was thinking of, but rather Searle's Chinese Room argument. Coming from a CS-heavy Philosophy-light background, it took me a long time to wrap my mind around what Searle was saying there, but it's a pretty solid point nonetheless. The best way I've found to explain it in CS terms is that while theoretically, intelligence could be modeled using Turing machines, in practice, we will never have a machine fast enough to do so.

You've totally missed the point of the Chinese Room. The point is that something can appear to understand without actually doing anything we'd call understanding. In other words, ~Ax(OutwardlyIntelligent(x) -> ActuallyIntelligent(x)). It's an argument against the sufficiency of the Turing Test, that's it.

And saying we'll never have a machine fast enough? The only limit on the speed of computation is the speed of light (and the physical size of the universe limits parallelization). But these values also bound our brains. In fact, iirc neurons are actually pretty slow relative to transistors.

>>When I make a decision I consult my values and my goals and attempt to make the decision that gets me closest to my goals without compromising my values

>We have no idea how you or I make decisions, and the notion that we can intuit how decisions are made is a huge road block in even beginning to think about decision-making. Lakoff, among others, does a great job explaining why "values", "goals", and "morals" are simply justifications we create after we've made a decision.

Okay, maybe my deconstruction is correct and maybe it isn't. Whatever. Unless you can explain to me why no such deconstruction is possible, I have no reason to accept that deciding is not computation. In other words, if it's not computation, then what is it?

>> And what makes you think we couldn't build a biological computer

>We can, and we should - but let's agree that it won't be a Turing machine.

Of course it won't. It will be less powerful, because Turing machines have infinite memory and the universe is finite. It'll be a DFA, just like all current computers.
Safe career is better? Not really. Given that a male is reasonably unlikely to be killed, most men will have wives, but the more competitive, higher paid ones, will get the more desirable women. Remember the company Christmas party? The executives didn't have dogs.

The men who dont get wives are those at the bottom of the heap: in jail, on drugs, homeless.
Ask HN: What are your must-have apps?
So, someone in another thread said something was one of their '5 must-have apps', and I was just about to ask what the other four were when I thought that now is as good a time as any to ask:

What are your Must-Have Apps? (can be more or less than five)
UFO Filmed Above London
Tutorial: An ARM-based web kiosk system
Yeah, well I guess it's a hard thing to really pin down, but I have always interpreted the less male dominated religions as seeing the female as the spiritual or guiding or creative force and the male as being the force which works to bring that creative energy into solid form.
Nowadays, many couples don't want any children and this trend will just increase over time.

As for long ago, it may be true that richer men had fathered more children. But you must also take into count the number of children fathered by the much larger number of men with average salaries.
You could define a new function to represent the answer where there would be none otherwise, but that's not particularly useful unless that function is important in numerous other contexts.

And btw, the algorithm has been extended to handle some non-elementary functions.
The physical scientists lean towards maybe, maybe not, while the humanitarians, theologians, and life sciences types lean towards yes.

Personally, I think multiple universes explain everything.
Twitter WTF? - Why is Twitter Called a Threat to Google?
I checked again and you are right!

This is also interesting in a way that twitter can actually support individual tweets to be private or public like LJ does for blogs. That would be a useful feature.
the universe itself has no purpose, that would imply that SOMETHING intended it to be this way.

however, humans find their own purpose in living (in the universe) so it serves that purpose for us.
I really like this map projection. But I'm having a hard time finding a real life use case for it. It's not very good at local items, so a walking mall situation (over a few blocks) doesn't work very well. The projection is inherently fixed to a point in physical space (ie, it's not very good printed and carried around, and relies on a certain orientation).

Does anybody have a good use case for this map projection?
When I was a wee lad, engineers became managers so that they could be promoted and get salaries sufficient to put their children through college and eventually retire. Engineers could be bad managers because there were enough layers of managers to smooth things over. These are not those days and the hierarchy has collapsed. There are no safe managerial positions for aging programmers to slide into. If you dont like the prospects of managing stic with the art. The money oisnt that much better.
The Nintendo Game Master
I found this interview really interesting, from a marketing and customer relations perspective. Nintendo showed such a deep respect for their customers, and it comes out in practically everything this guy says about the time.
The uni/muiltiverse is a computer, I believe that our universe is a subset of higher dimensional universes populated with matter and energy, so it seems very possible that the computational capacity of our universe is of some use to whatever matter and/or energy is populating the higher dimensional universe. I refer to these entities as our Higher Dimensional Overlords.
> Adblock developers escalated it into some sort of weird war

Some hyperbole for sure. Nothing gets around the fact that NoScript overstepped very clear and natural boundaries.

If I had been the target, I would probably overreact as well. NoScript's behavior is nonetheless well worth pointing out and publicly shaming.
This is a very well written article. However, I must admit I don't really understand the wide interest the (western) world seems to have in the men vs women viewpoints.

Perhaps (and I'm just guessing here), it is because the culture in the west has changed so fast that men and women are struggling to find new "places" in society. I don't know - it's just a guess.

I'm going to pick on one point to discuss - the WAW effect (Women are Wonderful).

>Both men and women hold much more favorable views of women than of men. Almost everybody likes women better than men.

leading to:

>perhaps nature designed women to seek to be lovable, whereas men were designed to strive, mostly unsuccessfully, for greatness.

Sounds reasonable until you see he has skipped over the middle:

>It was not always thus. Up until about the 1960s, psychology (like society) tended to see men as the norm and women as the slightly inferior version. During the 1970s, there was a brief period of saying there were no real differences, just stereotypes. Only since about 1980 has the dominant view been that women are better and men are the inferior version.

It seems strange to draw such broad conclusions that completely ignore the past in favour of present circumstance. Plus I can tell you, in India the bias is more towards liking men than women.

In any case, I wish I understood the fascination the west has with men vs women debates. The fact that men and women are different is obvious as is the fact that they tend to complement each other. The fact that men and women are similar is also obvious as is the fact that they tend to compete with each other.

So what??!
Nowadays a good developer on a contract can earn more than his full-time manager. And less stress, and less responsibilities, and also different projects and different people. Yes, some corps do not treat contractors well, so, well - look for another contract.

Management? Only for really good money and interesting project with people I love to work with.
Honestly, the technology sector is better than every other sector
Higher demand for goats leads to more goat breeding.
The one way to stay a programmer and avoid the tyranny of being 'managed' by a manager is to create a startup for oneself. Sure, you have to do more than just code -- but you can still code on your own terms, and it feels awesome to code for your customer instead of some requirements doc written by a manager with a pointy head.
Odesk
I have found so much luck using this company. If you need some help. Odesk is solid.
H1-B Visa applications fall below cap
Good programmers, need good managers. And the best software managers come from software development background. So do others a favor, don't be afraid to lead.
There's SIOC for read-only access to forums.
What are the other four?

For screenshot sharing there's also GrabUp, which is simpler and quicker than Skitch but doesn't have any editing features.
How To Build A Lean Startup Step By Step
In other words, our universe is a map-reduce... it explains everything!
Lithium in water 'curbs suicide'
This makes me dizzy... and I'm not really sure what the use case is.
Developers should get promoted but in a way that they don’t forget the difference between bit and byte. This means that a developer should be promoted to Senior Developer then to Architect then to Enterprise Architect etc.

I don't see what the 'etc.' could be, exactly, without being a manager. Even the title "Enterprise Architect" sounds like a stretch to me. The article's point may be valid, but the solution proposed is very vague.
I think, for a majority of people, it would be an easier way to study probability. Visualization makes things much more understandable than algebraic formula derivation.
Perhaps it's because the story's apocryphal, but the story of Perillos of Athens probably belongs here:

"The Bronze Bull, Brazen Bull, or the Sicilian Bull, is an execution/torture device designed in ancient Greece. Perillos of Athens, a brass-founder, proposed to Phalaris, the tyrant of Akragas, Sicily, the invention of a new means for executing criminals; accordingly, he cast a bull, made entirely of brass, hollow, with a door in the side. The condemned were shut in the bull and a fire was set under it, heating the metal until it became "yellow hot" and causing the person inside to roast to death...

Phalaris commended the invention, and ordered its horn sound system to be tested on Perillos himself. When Perillos entered, he was immediately locked in, and the fire was set, so that Phalaris could hear the sound of his screams.

Before Perillos could die, Phalaris opened the door and took him away. Perillos believed he would receive a reward for his invention; instead, after freeing him from the bull, Phalaris threw him from the top of a hill, killing him."

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazen_bull
"Learned Optimism," by Dr. Martin Seligman is going on my to-read list!
The original comment is simply an opinion so I replied with mine.

EDIT: Grammar
It saddens me that many people I've met would mistake your humility for weakness. I see it as a great strength.
Not to take anything from this, but there is Todoist.com for the lazy like me. I do wish todoist have a few more features but it does what it's supposed to do.
Alcohol Rehab Center in California
Our Alcohol Rehab is the most powerful, effective way to break the cycle of alcohol dependence. Alcohol rehab is the process of helping individuals overcome their physical and psychological addiction to alcohol. During this process, the individual will go through three different stages of treatment: alcohol detox, counseling and aftercare.
Freebase topic descriptions and AJAX in Mechanical Turk
Do ultravague questions have a purpose? There's a question I can answer.

Define "purpose".

I'm going to the store to buy some eggs. There's a purpose. Is the universe trying to get some eggs? If so, mission accomplished.
Nearly all of my "must have" apps run on either the Mozilla or the Emacs platforms. If you give me a java runtime, I know where to get a ssh applet and from there I will find my way home, including a remote emacs session running under `screen` :-)

Mozilla effectively functions as my desktop; I use firebug, scrapbook, chatzilla, Pencil sketching and prototyping GUIs, SQLite manager to design databases, and web developer plugin (along with things meant to keep the web safe and sane)

But other than that:

5) a PDF reader.

4) Skype.

3) Open Office, or similar package with good Arabic support.

2) the unix toolchain, including GCC.

1) A Common Lisp implementation (sbcl, lispworks, or CLISP.)

0) putty or any other ssh client. Without SSH I can't function.

[edit: readers may note that I treat GCC as a "tool" ;-]
1. A text editor that is powerful, stable, and basically good for programming. I rely on "vim" almost always, but Xcode is a nice fallback.

2. A powerful terminal. On Linux, "aterm" is the best I have ever found. On Mac, I prefer MacTelnet but Apple's Terminal is pretty good.

3. A suite of infrastructure tools. I've been in the Unix universe for many years, so it's hard to imagine anything except the usual suspects: ls, find, grep, awk, xargs, etc. all joined through shells, Perl and Python. These are definitely "must have"; even if they don't qualify as a single app, they certainly qualify as a single entity I couldn't live without. (And having stumbled my way through Windows' inadequacies, I now know this painfully well.)

4. A web browser, and by extension, Google. I like OmniWeb the most, though I use Firefox at work. I've even been known to use Lynx, or the occasional automation through "wget". There is simply no faster way to get information anymore; I'm more likely to web search for tools than run "man" pages, even.

5. E-mail. I prefer a trivial "send" interface (I like basic command line "mail" sometimes, though "pine"/"alpine" are my favorite). I do use Thunderbird and Apple's Mail quite a bit. I am not a fan of overly complex tools, but the ability to tag and search/filter mail by tag is a really compelling Thunderbird feature.
Or if you're using Windows Super Quick Link does this and is great!

http://www.superquicklink.com
I take 'purpose' to be a 'reason' or 'justification' for being. Therefore the question presupposes a reasoner or justifier, which one might assume to be a creator who needs a reason or justification.

So 'no'. ;-)
Management and programming are very different skillsets. The idea that one can take a good programmer and improve the company by promoting him to manager seems no more sensible to me than would promoting a manager to programmer.
How to Build Fantastic Engineering Teams
You'd think it'd give them pause that people actually studying the universe are so likely to say no.
I use RescueTime personally, if my workplace was to use it... not so sure how that will effect me. Rather not have it in the workplace at the moment.

Also missed the ability to view the all time aggregate data rather than the currently at most yearly data.
The AP is pissed because Reddit, Digg, Google, and others (Hacker News?) are using AP content every day... usually with full attribution and links back to the article. Let me put that another way - some of the most popular sites on the internet send millions of pageviews to the AP every day.

That's a traffic situation that most sites would love to be in - but the AP can't figure out how to make money from those eyeballs? So they're going to try to stop the influx of traffic, so that... what? Their content can wither and die in peace? Talk about cutting yourself out of the equation.
Thats the reality of the blogosphere, everyone uses linkbait titles now
Google Patents: Floating Data Center
"massive resurgence of real time chat this year" ... watch omegle. kind of ridiculous concept but usage is spreading virally.
But why are the anti-discrimination laws necessary?

You really have to try to step out of your own perspective for a second and realize that maybe not everyone is enlightened as you. That the whole purpose of feminism is to fight against those who are not as enlightened as y ou.

You saying "almost anyone would agree you should pick the better candidate" tells me that you can't see out of your own perspective long enough to realize there is discrimination out there.

Which is why you can't see my point. My whole point was that these people are out there and that reasoning with them is pointless BECAUSE they aren't making a rational decision in the first place. So the feminist who try to fight against them with rational arguments are wasting their time BECAUSE those people have choosen to disregard all rational evidence.
I see what you're saying, but at the same time, you're going to get a new appreciation for all of the "useless" managers, slimy salesweasels, and busybodies around the office. In a healthy organization, they keep the real world at bay so you can program.

At your startup, you're going to be doing your own marketing, answering your own phone, ordering your own supplies from Staples... I bet you'll spend less time programming, not more.
Metropolitan Area Job Gain/Loss 2004-2009 Visualization
Impressive: The Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine” (best explanation so far)
This is nonsense. When you transition from a programmer to a manager you don't give up an art, you trade one art for another. Getting a large group of people sufficiently motivated for a prolonged period of time to build great products is insanely difficult. I haven't seen evidence that it's any easier than writing good code. Just try it, and see what happens.
A Secular Case Against Gay Marriage?
Argh... you had me hoping there that MacTelnet might be an improvement on my beloved urxvt. Sadly, it isn't VT100-compliant: it fails to render my 'screen' status bar properly.

Who wants to write a better terminal app?
Emacs, Safari, iTunes, VLC and Terminal.app.
A number of programs which broke the iTunes DRM have received similar takedown notices. I'm not aware of any attempts to contest the takedowns, which is probably because they were completely justified. :)

My understanding, based on what I saw of the relevant pages before they got taken down, is that BluWiki got a takedown because their users were (possibly inadvertently?) attempting to reverse-engineer an encrypted metadata database on the iPod which used the exact same format as the FairPlay key database on the computer.
Yeah but is your wife hot or smart? Does she have good genes? I wonder the same about the other wives in your anecdotal experiences.
I believe the use case is "looking nice on the wall". :)
1) Fluid. The ability to launch work GMail in one window, personal GMail in another window, and Lala.com in a third window and have them all running in separate processes that can't bring each other down has been a great help.

2) Eclipse. It's an 800lb gorilla but I've been using it for years (shortly after it was open-sourced). It can do Java, Scala, PHP, and many others.

3) TextMate. Because firing up Eclipse to write a Python or Ruby script is overkill. I also like that I can type "mate ." in the terminal and get the current directory in the project drawer.

4) Safari/Webkit. I used Firefox for a long time, but on the Mac it just can't compare to Webkit, especially once the Developer tools were introduced.

5) Terminal.app. I currently have 3 windows open for a total of 12 tabs. What I really mean is the unix under-pinnings, but Terminal.app is how you get to those.

Nothing very exciting in the list above, but those are the apps that I spend 90% of my time using.
My top 5 are:

* Firefox

* Office Suite

* PDF Viewer

* Vim

* Winsplit Revolution

My other favorites (not "must-haves") are:

* Media Player Classic/MPlayer

* GNU Octave/Maxima

* Midnight Commander