skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My favorite part of this essay is where he translates a verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Into modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

... which is identical to the style of nearly all modern research papers.
Nice point. It's backcompatibility with legacy uses (use is a synonym for application.) And so the familiar battle between current usage and backcompatibility plays itself out in this arena, with the familiar casualties of irregular special cases, unconceived foundations and unretractable experiments.
That's not true. You could have an arbitrary number of years that were colder in a row, with rising CO2 levels, and still have a world where CO2 causes a temperature rise. It would simply require a countervailing force that's stronger.

The noise level is irrelevant; I'm not sure why you would bring it up. If there are naturally forces that fluctuate up and down in a random walk, and CO2 is a much smaller but consistently up force, inevitably we'll wind up with increasing temperatures over time. You could argue there are larger climatic signals (not noise) that we should be concerned about, but what you actually said is simply wrong.
Interesting when a factually correct observation can be construed as an attack.
WordPress and WordPressMU to merge
On the plus side, robots stop our friends and family from getting killed.

On the negative side, the lack of consequence makes military and political leaders think it's cool to start blowing stuff up wherever they please (and not just the Republicans).

So whose lives are more important?

Also, can we start going with something more creative than _______ 2.0, please?
After I heard about him, I went to my campus library and checked out "Afternoon." It comes on one 3.5" floppy disk and couldn't be removed from the reading room. So I sat down (at the only machine left with a floppy drive) and clicked through it for about an hour.

It is certainly very different from a usual novel. For starters you have no idea how long it is. Hyperlinks aren't highlighted as we've come to expect and so I have to admit that I was doing some Myst-style random clicking at times. You'll often get back to the same paragraph but through a different path, these paragraphs are usually written in such a way that they would make sense by any path that you'd arrived at them.
Carter Catastrophe : Calculating the Probability of Doomsday
"Anarchy" should just mean whatever the writer intends it to.
Well, pretty simple: Google for the title of the paper. Some of the hits you'll get will be behind paywalls (like the ACM DL), but there are usually just PDFs you can freely download. Similarly with using Google Scholar and CiteSeer, which often keeps cached copies of the PDFs it finds online. Failing that, check the websites of the authors of the paper.
This looks the most promising so far. I can at least zoom in sufficiently. But there doesn't seem to be a way to set individual pixels.
The problem is that for every evolving "rule", you reduce (or have the potential to reduce) the clarity of the message.

Ergo a language with loose rules is a language with loose communication capability. (Of course this is arguable too, since a language that is too rigid is unable to adapt to a fast changing world.)

English is the start-up of the language world, apparently. :-)
This appears to be limited to 16x16 images, unless you pay.
I've been using Bing as my default search in FF all day today, just as an experiment. I can't tell if what frustration I am experiencing is just due to not being used to it, but I will say that any other time I've tried doing this (Yahoo, Live, Ask), I've quickly switched back to Google simply because I couldn't get my work done. The fact that it's been more than an hour and I haven't given up on it says a lot.
Even Toyota is not doing fine. They make good cars at a good price but that does not mean their market capitalization and spending has been/is in line with what the next few years may hold. If it was, they would not have had to take a loss this past year.
I agree.

- Which means I don't, because I intended it to mean that I don't.

Yes I'm being facetious, but you see the issue with your logic, correct?
give 'em money and you get up to 48x48
(Sidenote: Google search is not just PageRank. Many of the recent changes to search require more than just a better popularity metric. Obvious things are things like better stemming or stop wording which are quite tricky to get right.)
>Appeal is intransitive nowadays (except in America), so appeal against decisions.

Americans make up 67% of the world's native English speakers!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:English_dialects1997_modif...

Furthermore, second language learners get far more exposure to Hollywood and US television than they do to RP or whatever the Economist considers to be "standard" language. I can respect their pride in their language, but American, or more accurately North American English, is more than some minority dialect. It's the defacto world standard.
Having lived in east Asia, I have to disagree with the idea that the government censoring news media is without harmful effect. Restriction of free speech has the effect of keeping lousy governance lasting longer than it lasts in culturally similar places with more free speech. That, in turn, effects environmental pollution, rights of the accused in criminal trials (including show trials for political prisoners), the business climate for start-up investors, and even the availability of websites like this.
Local Motors: collaborative car design, construction, and purchase
Pity about the formatting.
Just wondering, why is it important to have a viable competitor to Google?

Are you worried about corporate shenanigans, or a single point of failure or something entirely else?
Lots of talk about GM recently, so I thought I'd post something about a really cool car company. I'm told that ~"At a design stage when GM has spent $10M, we've spent $10K"
A possibly contrary view, sourced to a Chinese official:

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/afx/2009/06/01/afx6487253.html
When I tried to pay, it gave me a Paypal page in French.
Yeah, in gaius' words 'you might have occasional successes'. African Americans are as much 'an economic and social underclass' in the US as Moroccans are in France.
I was thinking the same thing. One of the rules is that 'agreed' goes with 'on', 'to', or 'about'. But the Economist is the only place I can think of where I have seen something like:

"Only after a short truce was agreed were the envoys..." http://www.economist.com/world/mideast-africa/displaystory.c...

"A peace pact of sorts was agreed just days before the auction..." http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?stor...
Experience did make Toyota the company it is now. If you read about LEAN, it is all about learning from what you do, and performing constant variation to see if you can do things better. it is NOT about "disregarding that experience."

The present shape of the auto industry is complex, and not simply attributable to the hubris of its leaders. The outsourcing of parts manufacturing, a labour union that is too strong, a lack of funding for attractive design, a government that offered too many protections, and last but not least, the entitlement culture of the american auto industry.

The American auto industry was not competitive. I am not suggesting it was easy to make money, I am suggesting that we simply did not keep up the hunger for "new & better". To say that is merely the product of age and experience is foolhardy at best.
I wouldn't be surprised if the strong politics are part of the reason for their success. Since the Bay Area is such a Democratic/liberal area, parents who value politics over education won't apply, while those who value education over politics will seek it out. Perhaps you could have similar success with a "liberal school" in Kansas?
When is it right to do wrong?
What separates legitimate acts of resistance from illegitimate atrocities? Why do we celebrate John Brown, and condemn the murderer of George Tiller?
This is actually used as a plot device in Stephen Baxter's science fiction novel: Manifold Time

http://www.amazon.com/Manifold-Time-Stephen-Baxter
/dp/034543076X
I think the real original sin was the decision to be a dumbed-down C++, avoiding all the ugliness and hard to get right parts, in particular eliminating operator overloading. With operator overloading supporting the normal meanings of the operators (== means equals, not identical to). Integer would then work the same as int and auto-unblocking would have been there from the beginning. Remember Java overloads '+' for strings, so it isnt consistent.

Primitives made sense at the time, but with operator overloading we wouldnt be stuck with the mess we have now.

And methods should have been first-class objects. More messes that could have been avoided.
2009 Callan Periodic Table of Investment Returns
> Technically, no. (I've never understood how anyone got
> sequel from S-Q-L.)

Sequel is quicker to pronounce than es-cue-ell, so it's very attractive for that reason. For similar reasons, I generally pronounce /etc as 'etsy'.
He gets the stats from STATS Inc. They are pretty expensive.

The quote I got from them was upwards of $30K to start which includes the stats from the latest season as well as from the previous seasons.
I saw this 8 hours ago via this link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=635819

It took me ages to see what the point was, but when I did I was unsurprised. Perhaps that's a comment on my expectations and world-view, rather than on the actual content.

I wonder how they get these different results. Do they deliberately massage the results? Do they hand pick the searching? Or is it something else.

Answers on a postcard ... (now there's a web-app waiting to happen)
I like the semantics of a pipe-oriented flow. Combined with a sandbox[1] and you could accept arbitrary code from customers/clients/whatever.

[1] http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/28545.html
What do musicians and entrepreneurs have in common?
Would be better discussed on newmogul.com. As such, flagged.
If you believe in universal human rights, then it isn't very difficult to analyze the ethical implications of policy. Simply analyze based on your universal principles.
Or you could just register and then be cookied in for the foreseeable future. Choose your battles I guess.
Actually, I take that back. Pixlr does work. This looks like the best option so far.
Does anyone have experience using Flex Builder instead of the Flash "IDE" ? I have had to start using Flash a bit at work, and their IDE is just so painful to use. Here's to hoping this is a step in the right direction!
I know when I watch the Canadian version that a casual viewer would think that anyone going through their first round of funding has to give away half of their company to get funding. I think a LOT of people think this is normal just from watching the show, which is pretty dangerous if you're using that as a yardstick when raising funding from other sources. It's really surprising how many people give up half of their companies to get funding from the Dragons.
Except the most common criticism of C++ is for being "too complex" or "too clever", so it seems there's nothing inherently wrong in trying to be a "dumbed-down C++, avoiding all the ugliness". You're just saying it made the wrong trade-offs in places.
Is this a new high or low for XKCD?
But you won't be facing criminal charges for doing so.
What about Yahoo! Search? (I'd forgotten about it too.)
Not just methods -- classes should have been first-class objects!

Unfortunately, vocational Java programmers are terrified of anything that resembles metacircularity. There's a depressing tendency to just label anything mildly functional as 'closures'.
> I freaking hate prescriptive linguistics.

I tend toward being a little picky about grammar, but this particular style guide is a bit ridiculous. So, I have to agree.

Here's one that strikes me as odd:

> Demographics: no, the word is demography.

Seems to me that demographics is commonly accepted as a valid study.

The Economist claims this is a guide to "common solecisms." I wonder if their claim to solecisms is a solecism itself?

> a nonstandard or ungrammatical usage, as "unflammable" and "they was."

In their defense, they do highlight several words that are pet peeves of mine (among/between). Though, to outright claim that others are outright nonstandard or incorrect is a bit misleading.
Understanding Value
Functional purity is mostly unrelated to comprehensibility - comprehensible programs can be pure, or not, and the same goes for incomprehensible probgrams. The relevant background knowledge is some experience with programs.

If someone knows what both functional purity and abstraction are, they don't need to be told that they're different and one can have either one without the other.

"the abstraction of programming" is on the edge of bather and the part that isn't blather has nothing to do with impure programming.

And, if you don't understand that abstractions leak and that the real world (and machines) are stateful/not functional, you're in for it.

What part of that is hard to understand?
On Channel 4 News they are referring to GM now as Government Motors.
Turning Your Macbook Into a Better Ebook Reader
Indeed, and Tesla gets mentioned here all the time.
I've been using Bing as my default search in FF all day today

I must admit I've just started to do the same and am getting the same result. I quickly added bing and its not sucking...

.. as someone who wrote off Microsoft only a few months ago and still on my "Fuck yeah, open source! Fuck Microsoft!" high, I'm feeling a little conflicted.

Well done Microsoft.
For some reason I thought this happened years ago.

Wordpress never fails to surprise me with it's mediocre codebase and development practices: it's always a little bit crappier than I thought it was.
Business Blogging
Blogging about blogs in business, marketing, public relations, and search engine optimization for successful entrepreneurs
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less."

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humpty_Dumpty#In_Through_the_Lo...
How dare you question the inevitable success of the best and the brightest....
> The problem is that for every evolving "rule",

> you reduce (or have the potential to reduce)

> the clarity of the message.

--

I respectfully disagree. If we refused to accept colloquial usage of a word as valid, we would actually be reducing meaning therein.

Would you advocate using archaic definitions of common words from 100 years ago? 200 years ago? How about we maintain this purported clarity by reverting to Middle English?

I used to be anal toward the definition of words until I got a little older. Then I realized that, over time, language does indeed evolve.

Here's a good example for you. "The web." If we didn't accept the "evolved" definition of this word as a synonym for "the Internet," then the statement "Catch Hacker News on the web!" would be nonsensical.

You can be a purist to a degree, but to declare that such an approach improves clarity is a bit... misguided. :) (I'll grant that you did suggest it has the "potential to," but I want to assist in preventing others from making broad generalizations against the evolution of language, so this isn't necessarily directed to you.)
I don't see any error.
Microsoft maps is surprisingly good: they have a "bird's eye" view for urban areas, which is startling close. It also doesn't lock up my eeePC after a few minutes, like Google maps does.

I was shocked that the top-left options feel exactly as if it was google to me (though they differ slightly). It's as though I thought that layout was owned (trademarked) by Google.

Web Images Videos News Maps More
Web Images Video Maps News Shopping Gmail more
My wife is annoyed by my reluctance to speak in absolute terms. Expressing an estimate of likelihood seems much more precise to me than rounding a probability to "always" or "never."
The change to LEAN and JIT production was a radical new way to produce cars. That's what I meant by disregarding experience, not that they are completely fly by the seat of their pants all the time. They completely revamped what it meant to be an automobile manufacturer by trying a new process they had no experience with. They realized experience isn't a goal in and of itself and that sometimes it can be a hindrance.
This is a momentous event. This sort of story is the reason that sentence contains the word "probably."

Whereas the guidelines are very specific about not submitting comments of the type you just did. And this page shows why. Now we have an entire thread of boring metacommentary.
Did anyone try this? http://www.bing.com/search?q=google&go=&form=QBRE...

An ideal search engine should return exactly one result!
so what are the alternatives with good code and features ?
SpaceCollective
It got back to english once I logged in.
AWS Elastic Load Balancing Tutorial
I'm in the same boat and while I will ultimately design a web site for the project, right now I am using WordPress which has a lot of really nice themes.
A Journey from Ethnography to Design: Coastal Erosion Risk Mapping Project
The Economics of Star Trek (real economic analysis)
Really? What kind of icons are you talking about?

From the article ( http://simplebits.com/notebook/2004/08/23/anatomy.html ) written by a professional, I understood that creating an icon is a difficult process and you need a specialized tool. [e.g. You need to have two views - Zoomed in, Zoomed out]

And I doubt you can create an icon in less than 30 seconds. [Total time taken to download Paint.NET from http://www.dotpdn.com/files/Paint.NET.3.36.zip and install.]
It sheds light on incompetence and disingenuousness, which possibly creates an environment where things will start solving themselves.....possibly.
'No censorship' doesn't sound like a universal human right at all.
I'm actually thinking there's room there to make UI improvements that would benefit the user.

For example, with the live id and being logged in, I think it would be neat if these background images eventually ended up being something relevant to me rather than something generic.

Right now, there is definitely room for improvement, but I wouldn't say it's downright bad.
it's always a little bit crappier than I thought it was

It isn't my absolute favorite piece of technology in the world from a hackability perspective, but there are some big wins: the community is fantastic (i.e. other people have suffered so we don't have to), the thing you need has probably been done already, and the ease of use from both an installation and end-user perspective is off the charts.

I use mini-sites for my business and have a script which autodeploys them (had I thought this through prior to making the first three I would have MUed it up, but oh well). The deployment is consistent enough to automate in about an hour and easy enough for a semi-technical freelancer to understand that I can have a website ready for about $100.
Whilst playing around with Wolfram Alpha last week, I checked out Apple and RIM side-by-side:

http://www64.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=apple%2C+rim

It's interesting to note that RIM is about 1/3rd of Apple in almost every way, which makes sense given that they make only the BlackBerry, whereas Apple makes a whole lot more stuff.

Anyway, I expect both of them to keep doing pretty well for the next little while (as we all roll our eyes at the "ohmigod iphone killer, ohmigod blackberry killer" crap) with commodity handset manufacturers (Samsung, LG, Moto) increasingly having to rely on Android in order to have at least a chance of keeping up with Apple and RIM.
How to buy a Mac Pro the right way and save money
Drupal is great for some things, and it's great for a lot more in theory, but it sucks on a lot of levels. The main issues I have with it are a) the admin interface is significantly harder for normal folks to jump in and start using, b) it's really inefficient unless you do some serious tuning, and c) theming is a nightmare. I mean, once you get a theme all up and running, I'm sure it's great because it's easy to edit, but the task of converting an HTML mockup to a full Drupal theme is a huge pain in the ass.

I can take an HTML / CSS slice, convert it to a Wordpress theme, throw up a new installation, configure everything the way it should be, add some basic pages and content, and launch the thing in about 90 mins.
How do you know this? Are you implying that some of the Zed positive posts here were actually made by him?
You get better results by choosing US mode. Compare for example the google wave query for US and Canada modes.

But even comparing US modes across both search engines shows Google to be better. For example, try scala tutorial, symbolic algebra system, and iphone app reviews.
Amount of time required to install an icon editor program < Finding a web based icon editor application*

[Ignoring the actual time needed to use the application and create the icon. I can guess that a native application will further reduce this time.]

* As I wrote earlier, because of browser limitations, there are very few web applications geared towards icon editing/image editing.
Off the top of my head:

- You generally own the license to the installed software in perpetuity. Your application source art will always be readable.

- It will integrate better with your desktop user experience. Printing, drag-and-drop, copy/paste of complex data, input devices (wacom tablets), etc.
The question was about features and code quality, not ease of use. Drupal is harder to learn, but definitely wins on the other two.
Just goes to show you that many startups are really focused on the wrong things. Users don't care about your development practices, the quality of your codebase, or pretty much anything that happens under the hood. They just want something that works, is easy to understand and use, and does what they need it to. Wordpress fits all those, hence the huge community of loyal fans.
seriously? i was at least being a little tongue-in-cheek. very reminiscent of the recent "text editor vs IDE" thread.

most people don't need a fully featured editor to create a favicon or something similar and will only spend a few minutes on it, tops. for professionals who are getting paid to produce high quality work, of course they would use a higher quality product.
@apsurd, I am glad that you said it. This is my motto as well, don't explain, don't complain, true for an immigrant, even more so for any aspiring entrepreneur.
i think its mostly due to what facebook has implemented. Almost same functionality with already existing network.
NYT does not require a log in for google news referrals. Search the article name on google news and go from there.
Any chance of having someone record the meeting?
I think the press likes the Obama administration the same way they liked the Bush administration at the start.

Yes, indeed. The press is generally favorable to the group in power, at least since Reagan (I don't remember much before him). Even when much of the press was anti-Bush, much of what they reported toed the administration line. It's easy; it's good for the career -- why wouldn't they be pro-power?