skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Microsoft basically stopped innovating around 2000"

Microsoft never innovated in the first place. The BASIC compilers, the command line, word processor, the spreadsheet, the graphical OS, the visual compiler, the browser, the graphics drivers... all were invented outside Microsoft.

Microsoft strength was not inventing tech, but on adopting tech made by others and riding the wave of hundreds of millions of people getting access to computers.
For history and bookmarks, I use xmarks to synchronize between Firefox and Chrome, on various machines. It works great.
HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla
>Inspired by Russian powerlifters, Todd trained himself to dunk the ball through rigorous strength training, as well as running and jumping exercises. Over three years, Todd gained 85 pounds of muscle before he was finally able to dunk the ball.
When I was young I attended a school for athletes. Some of them had to eat 6 lunches per day, to not lose weight. I'm very sure they would appreciate a tool like that.

I'm just asking myself where there is the secound part of the tool to clean the inside of the teeth ..
BitTorrent teases secure chat program
Here's an interesting project which uses DDP to talk with a Raspberry Pi: http://pijs.io/
None of the results in this article warrants the conclusion in the title.

The fact that "children from affluent families were starting to speak after implant surgery, those from low-income families lagged behind." can simply be explained by genetics. I.e., affluent parents tend to have affluent children, even if those children are raised by other parents [1, 2].

All the cited study does is measure how much the vocabulary of the _caregivers_ increased due to linguistic feedback methods.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_versus_nurture
[2] E.g., http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21425893
No it's not, but please feel free to list the literature to which you're so confidently referring.

Intelligence, like beauty, it is qualitative, not quantitative, which means at some level it is impossible to define.
The NSA probably is building profiles on many people. But so are Google, Facebook, etc. The real problem is not the NSA (well, not just the NSA) - it's the inherent design of the internet. We're trying to live private lives on public networks, and we're going to have to go through some serious growing pains before that is resolved.
This is a reasonable perspective. But people other than the parent sometimes read comments! I'll do my best at a level-zero explanation of "intelligence" in the literature:

Let's start by modestly noting that I routinely got the top score on Latin tests in high school (this was worth a small box of chocolates!). Someone applying the concept of "intelligence" might predict that I would also do well in math class. The traditional explanation for this given by Latin teachers is that learning Latin trains the mind to think logically, and getting high scores on Latin tests means that the training has taken. The intelligence-based explanation is that Latin and math are two of many tasks subject to the influence of g, the "general factor".

Moving to a more general level, the observation is that for many, many tests that appear to involve "mental abilities" to a greater or lesser degree, a person's score on any one of them is predictive of the same person's score on all the others. It's rare to find someone who is good at one and bad at another; instead, people tend to be uniformly good or uniformly bad (known in the literature as the phenomenon of the "positive manifold"). This suggests that there's one quality driving all the results, which we can call "intelligence", since that's the label commonly applied to people who tend to do well on those types of tests.

Corrections are of course welcome.
> Also that's different than Asperger Syndrome because repeat behavior and other symptoms aren't exactly the same thing as grit ...

True, but since both categories are defined only by symptoms, not causes, one can hardly call it knowledge -- it's anecdote masquerading as knowledge. It certainly lacks the substance required to either start a movement (grit), or diagnose tens of thousands of youngsters as mentally ill (Asperger's).
> I'm disappointed at the $500/person price tag.

Totally. That price seems to be based on a weird kind of "medical products should/can be expensive"-thinking. Also consider they priced the product at an equal amount of dollars or euros. Makes me think it's priced more towards what people might be willing to pay (and betting quite high) than as a function of its cost.
> Valve is poised to finally revolutionize things is pretty despicable.

Valve's announcement is only a few days old. Mir precedes it by months.
HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway ) landed in Firefox
2010. I went into a 2-day startup crashcourse with a rough idea that I didn't even plan on telling anyone (so rough it was) and went out with a prototype done by a google-employed engineer (I wasn't a programmer at the time) and a couple of investors ready to back me up. In the following months, I (me personally, not the situation neither anyone else is to blame) failed miserably and went through a very rough psychologic breakdown.
> you _sent_ the traffic to Google, when you emailed john.smith@google.com

How about when you emailed @guardian.co.uk? @specsavers.com?

Under the covers they're using Postini + Gmail. Did you consent to sending that traffic to Google?

Wat about people living in LA, who have no option but to send their traffic to Google when they e-mail their local Government at @lacity.org?

NOAA, State of Wyoming.. the list goes on.

http://www.google.com/intx/en_uk/enterprise/apps/business/cu...
The Underdevelopment Index
MIT vs BSD makes no practical difference. However, the license you have now is not actually MIT, but MIT+your extra restriction. That makes it not open source and a liability for anyone that would use it, since your extra restriction could be interpreted in any number of ways.

One way to keep the option of legal offense against clones is with differently-licensed assets. MIT your code, but choose one of the non-commercial or share-alike Creative Commons licenses. There are lots of them and you're bound to find one that fits your purposes.
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Please, calm down.

Things are working OK. The world is not ending and Ubuntu repository is working just fine.
> Grit is when you choose to persevere. Asperger's is when you have to choose to stop.

That's not based on research or even written anywhere, you just made it up. On that basis, you have a bright future in clinical psychology.

The difference between grit and Asperger's is truly in the eyes of the beholder, and what his motives are.

> While it was in DSM, there was far more to diagnosing Asperger's than simply, "refuses to quit."

The fact that it's been removed from the DSM (an honor shared by only one other condition -- homosexuality) proves there is far less, not far more, to distinguish it from other behavioral descriptions. In fact, that was the reason quoted by those who voted for its removal -- it was too vague to be useful.
I get the impression from that article that Gates intervening is rare, hence it's sort of shock value, and why it was taken seriously.
The most credible explanation for the lack of evidence is simply that no evidence has been found. You are literally working science backwards, making a perversion of the scientific process. This very literally is what many religious people do when attempting to reconcile unscientific beliefs that they hold. (And it should therefore come as no surprise that all the bullshit you see Jacobs spewing is bullshit that religious charlatans have spewed as well, though with their own prefered twist of course. Seriously, they used this same shit to justify the 'Satanic ritual abuse' scare not many years ago. "They?" you ask? People with PhDs, you know, 'totally unquestionably not quacks' /s Yeah right.).

Trust me, I'm not afraid of the concept of aliens. Far from it, I am damn near certain that we are not the only life the universe has ever seen. Other life visiting this planet though? Without evidence of it... there isn't evidence of it. No reason to make that any more complex than it is, since it is a pretty fucking simple concept.

Now, this idea of people rejecting an idea because they are afraid of it? I am sorry, but you are clearly not very familiar with the history of religion and cults. People dig doomsday shit. They love to be frightened, they love reasons to believe their life won't matter soon (for whatever definition of 'matter' they are working off of), they love feeling irrelevant. I mean, you clearly dig this shit. What, you think you are special in this regard?

This hypothesis of yours, that people "can't handle the truth, because it is too intense for them", but they totally dig Revelations? Give me a break.
Valve Trademarks Half-Life 3
NSA views due process arguments as 'adverserial propaganda'
> it was a dumb choice
On the contrary, I think it's a great choice. Ubuntu has one of the best, if not the best out-of-the-box experience, especially for unexperienced users. It's not a coincidence that it's been adopted by many big cos (Google comes to mind) or administrations. In particular, hardware support will be key to the success of SteamOS and there are only few contenders that compete with the friendliness of Ubuntu (especially a Valve-customized one).
> Yet despite all of your issues, Ubuntu is by now by far the smoothest desktop experience I've had

What else have you tried? I find the experience quite lacking and I've been using Ubuntu for over 4 years as my main OS.

> It's not app developers obligation to make things keep working on every bizarre configuration around.

Well it may not be their obligation but if they want their apps use the must support all common configurations. Adding 2 more just gives more headaches to developers.
I got a cease and deasist letter :)

Now doing a new startup. Launched on November, so help us grow: http://www.allthecooks.com/download
Sure, just read their professional literature -- it's a treasure trove of examples that confuse cause and effect. To a degree greater than any other field with scientific pretensions, psychologists ignore the possibility that they're reporting something that either has no objective reality, or is a case of correlation mining.

"Final Report: Stapel Affair Points to Bigger Problems in Social Psychology" : http://news.sciencemag.org/people-events/2012/11/final-repor...

Quote: "In their exhaustive final report about the fraud affair that rocked social psychology last year, three investigative panels today collectively find fault with the field itself. They paint an image of a "sloppy" research culture in which some scientists don't understand the essentials of statistics, journal-selected article reviewers encourage researchers to leave unwelcome data out of their papers, and even the most prestigious journals print results that are obviously too good to be true."
>But people other than the parent sometimes read comments!

Well I read it and I thought it was interesting. Thanks.
IFTTT can send texts, and also works with the Pushover[1] app (not free) which collates push notifications like this. You can also send it notifications yourself programmatically - check out their API to see if you can link it up to your python script.

You might want to check out iDoneThis[2], which send you an email at the end of the day asking what you did. (I used it for about a month and then gave up, and it's less random, but it does log your responses.)

[1] https://pushover.net/ (links to both iOS and Play stores.)
[2] https://idonethis.com/
"Making Money in Open Source" can have several meanings. Selling software is just what most people think of when reading the title. I myself can say I made about $150k in Open Source this year. But it wasn't by selling software, it was by doing freelance jobs and consulting that involved free software only. Money wasn't coming in on autopilot, I had to get up every day and go to work at several places. But for me, free software is the reason I live a very comfortable life, doing things I love to do. It just isn't selling software, but everything else around it. I always tell my friends that I am the perfect example that Open Source brings in more than enough money.
i'm not "complaining about being downmodded." it's funny.
nor am i "baiting" anyone, even though i am highly amused.

and i think it's ironic that you totally missed the point
that my "whatever" response is in keeping with the advice
being offered by the article which is the thread's topic.

while, at the same time, 87 comments have now been posted.
evidently, the "be brief" message did not register here...

and you say _i_ am the one who is "boring, tiresome, and
uninteresting"? methinks the lady doth protest too much.

-bowerbird
Indeed. The more interesting points to be discussed are

1. If the flow rate changes with speed, thus merging at 5 mph instead of 50 is bad.

2. What will prevent accidents. I suggest start-stop traffic causes more accidents than free flow.

3. Fuel efficiency, which would depend on many things, eg the percentage of cars in traffic that stop their engines when the car is stopped.
"So I can say the same thing, where is the undeniable proof that the abduction phenonemon is not real?"

This question betrays a very basic failure to understand the basis of science. I suggest you research on your own why I might say this. Research it, and make sure you really comprehend it.
I guess the debt argument is one that I don't have direct experience with, since I'm going to school in Europe, where the norm is not that you come out of school saddled with debt that you'll be paying off for the rest of your life. So in that sense, I guess I get your argument for the "moral cause", but I think that's more a problem specific to the US and the administration of colleges as opposed to the problem with academia as a whole.

It's true that you don't need school for a lot of things in life, but that's not the same as saying there's no value to going to school.

Again, what irked me was simply the statement in the blog that other than the odd stats class, there's no value in going to school if you're an aspiring data scientist.

I concede that there's a large difference between the added value of undergrad programs and grad school. I strongly disagree that you can substitute what grad school gives you by simply Googling it or by taking a few online classes. In particular, mastering your own research project I think gives you a lot of real-world skills and that includes working with real, unstructured data sets.
Again, Firefox has no portable way to remove window decorations like Chromes does. There are Windows-only extensions, KDE-only extensions, and unreliable Gnome extensions.
Alt.scientology.war (1995)
Assuming they make money on phones, it is. They can say "Look, mobile app development is just desktop app development! No special environments! Just cross-compile the Exact Same Code(tm)!" or maybe "It's Just Javascript!(tm)" and all of a sudden they've got a ready-made ecosystem of app developers who don't even need to install any new tools other than what they've already got installed on their desktops to provide content for their phones. More content -> more sales -> more money, and they must be absolutely desperate for anything that might draw developers' attention away from iOS and Android. If you start from the viewpoint that you need to provide a phone-specific display server anyway, you can see the thinking.

There are bits I think are wrong with this plan, but it's coherent.
Couldn't the camera even just focus on a face and then the neck as a point of depth? Honestly, all of these quick-check systems have countless flaws.

I'm ready to have a chip in my arm now.
Your website is either down, or taking a very long time to load.
TIL: econophysics is an actual thing.
Here's a blog post arguing that the iPhone wasn't disruptive, like PC vs mainframe - the PC was worse in every respect, but it was also dramatically cheaper.

Instead, it was obsoletive, like PC vs typewriters - the PC was way more expensive, but could do so much more, and once you had a PC it didn't make much sense to have a typewriter too.

http://stratechery.com/2013/obsoletive/
The fact that they were technophobic might have been what saved you, since instead of sitting in front of the TV or computers, people were actually talking to each other.
Except no one is shopping around for a display server. Lots of people were (and still are) shopping around for a DB.
I'm not in KDE, I'm in Mate which has no such feature by default.

Thanks for the second tip, if I try Firefox again I'll do that. Is it possible to get auto-updates at browser shutdown or in the background, when it doesn't interrupt my flow? I would probably forget to ever update them if it's completely disabled...
Word Lens doesn't do Japanese though.
Google's new concessions on European search will put rivals' logos into results
The Closure Compiler on ADVANCED_OPTIMIZATIONS mode is a terrifying beast and only works on carefully-crafted code. It makes some astonishing optimizations, though.

I encourage JS developers who strongly believe in distributing source along with their webapps to use source maps instead of delivering slow, unminified code. They are only downloaded when a user opens the web inspector (no overhead for regular users) and provide transparent access to source as if it had been delivered instead.
"The shadow banking system is vastly bigger than regulators had thought, say econophysicists who have developed a powerful new way to measure its hidden impact"

I had to read this a couple of times before I realised what was wrong, but apparently "Econophysics" really is a thing:

"Econophysics is an interdisciplinary research field, applying theories and methods originally developed by physicists in order to solve problems in economics, usually those including uncertainty or stochastic processes and nonlinear dynamics. Its application to the study of financial markets has also been termed statistical finance referring to its roots in statistical physics." [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Econophysics
Actually it does sort of help. It allows all locals across the program to have the exact same name, which compresses much better than only some locals sharing names.
Very cool. Here's some more demos: http://mozilla.github.io/shumway/
There are speculations that it will be SteamBox-only, to promote the sales of the new console.
One thing about Power Law distributions -- they work really great except at the outliers (ie, top 10). You can't always say that because incumbent #10 is x, #1 is 10x, especially when dealing with organizations that are huge conglomerates of different services, branches and sub-companies.

Look at Market Caps of companies (something that we have public signals about): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_corporations_by_market...

The difference between #1 and #10 is <2x, and #3-#10 all vary by just a few percent. Power Law distributions are great, but they tend to fail at the top end.
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Given that the answer links to a document on tax status for expat citizens, I wouldn't be surprised if it has more conditions that work out about the same as tax status. (i didnt read the linked doc to find out).
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=asp.net%20mvc%2C%20ra...

Assuming people are more likely to search for RoR than the Illinois public library system or a clothing store in LA, "rails" is still head and shoulders above the others. Not really sure how accurate of a measure this is as being the top used framework though.
I think this article is about much more than nature vs. nurture and it doesn't deserve to be trolled that way.

We can learn a lot about ourselves, language and how we learn from understanding a bit about those born deaf. It really is a big deal and Oliver Sacks gets to the heart of the matter in his excellent book 'Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf':

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0330523643/

A highly recommended read for anyone on HN...

The article also mentions nannies. A problem they have that the parents aren't ever made aware of is what happens when the child uses big meaningful words for the first time. The nanny wants the parents to be the first to hear these words rather than merely report back to the parents that said big meaningful words have been said. So praise cannot always be given by a nanny when praise is deserved.

Although the article says that quality conversation is important, the metric seems to be quantity of words. After a certain developmental stage I am not sure how helpful quantity actually is. There are plenty of adults that I have met over the years that can babble on and babble on. If you are actually trying to concentrate on something then having a constant babbler around is just so not what you need. I consider myself to be a bit of a rambler but not a constant babbler. However, I cannot engage with a toddler in the way a constant babbler can. I go quiet on the two year old whereas the babbler does not.

Further down the line I think that the dinner table offers an amazing opportunity for children to improve their vocabulary, engage in conversation, learn when to listen and when to talk. This is particularly the case when parents have adult guests and allow young children to be on the same table eating the same food. Here the nurture comes from extended family and friends. I feel slightly sorry for friends that did not get this during their formative years, even if they did have more time in restaurants (which are posh and grown up).