skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like two books by Dan and Chip Heath called (1) Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (good summary here : http://www.veganoutreach.org/advocacy/switch .html ) and (2) Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (good summary here: http://www.engineerguy.com/white-papers/made-to-stick.htm ).
That's a noble quest.

It seems to me that the intelligent, sensitive and wise are the ones who kill themselves.

The blockhead, self-entitled, criminal, etc. never seem to.
Wow, didn't know magnetism also varies with temperature. Any simple explanation why?
Does anyone know of any command line spaced repetition tools? if not could be a fun side project.
I'd trust Paul Rand too.
As part of a larger system, removing the delay can cause other parts of the system to do their processing in parallel. While this doesn't reduce the amount of time that it takes that piece of the pipeline to run, it will reduce the total runtime of the system.

It can also be faster if you're searching for something in the file, because you can short-circuit reading the rest of the file when you find it.
JavaScript HTML5 Online Virtual Application
> When an english speaking reporter can't figure something out in a foreign country they often say "nobody knows ..." but really they mean "I couldn't find a source to tell me ...

Same is true in English-speaking countries with English-speaking reporters :)

"No one (that I know) knows..."
I'd guess that there is a distinct possibility that they work because people are told that they work.
I have been experimenting with spaced repetition algorithms for around two years now, and I've found that for me, an a simple exponent with base of 2.71828 (e) to be optimal for learning short question/answer pairs.

This means, every time I successfully recall the answer to a question, I increase the interval of when I will be challenged with it again by about 2.71828 times since I had seen it previously.

This is with a recall failure rate of about 5%, which I'm trying to maintain. (If it's nearing 0, then you're probably wasting time being challenged too frequently.)

This is on a data set used daily for 30 minutes, reviewing about 50 older questions and encountering around 3 new ones per day.
Found some photos of blue LED lights on flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/moondrop/4545137902/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/32936167@N02/4965682626/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/shibuya246/4172951919/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dannychoo/4391005173/
>My point being, let's also blame pumpkins for the obesity epidemic.

No. Let's blame over-processed and unhealthy foods (and in the case of McDonald's, meals derived almost entirely from corn).
Comprehensive, as usual. An obligatory nitpick:

> At least with physical fitness there isn’t a precisely dismaying number indicating how far behind you are!

Many sports are precisely measurable and in such sports, the measurements determine who has won, to various resolutions. Shortest running time over a given distance, heaviest weight snatched, furthest distance jumped and so on.

Athletes in such sports can very accurately track their performance over time. As of yesterday I demonstrated that I can clean & jerk 25kg less than my lifetime record, for example.
-- "Verizon wanted an iPhone Killer"

-- "How on earth did AT&T allow this ?" exclaimed an exasperated Lazaridis about the iPhone including a network challenging REAL browser

-- "Fortune 500 CIOs gathered...."

The one long running thread along all of this article is how clueless BBRY was as to who their REAL customers were. It was anybody but the people holding their handsets in the palms. The end users never mattered.
>You can rest assured of this as well: people will definitely submit to your contest--but none of them will be great designers, because all of them will be people who place the value of their work at somewhere around "maybe 500 dollars."

This would almost certainly be true if content participants had no connection to the business. In this case, participants my be considering their work to be pro-bono work with a value much greater $500.
I think that's convenient terminology but nothing else.

Suicide is what occurs when you don't have the option for life.

When you have a terminal disease, you've entered the state of being in the end of life. You're just choosing how that endgame plays out.

Not everyone has the fortune to die surrounded by the corpses of their enemies.
It may not be from a business perspective. But in terms of whether the market is working its wonders, I'd say it is perfect. Consumers benefit because there is a lot of fierce competition.

Exactly the way it should be for a hardware product like this.
in the end, the final decision is going to be made by you, someone "useless at anything artistic".

That's a fair point... but I do know what Tarsnap is, and it's not exactly "typical". I don't know how many non-tarsnap-using designers would come up with something which is consistent with the rest of the "tarsnap brand".
From what I remember of my rusty high school chemistry magnetism requires a certain relatively stable configuration of the valence electrons. I'm guessing that as temperature increases it's impossible for the atoms (or even just the electrons) to maintain that configuration because of the increased energy. The electrons might even get excited enough to jump to entirely different orbitals, but I'm not sure if it works that way.
I imagine it's similar to an old iPod's click wheel. Only tuned to be more precise, easier to click / press and overall more accurate.

With that said, I agree with the author in that I enjoy buttons on my controllers. I need to physically press something. Playing SMB, for example, on a touch screen just doesn't feel right. I'm also worried about how pressing multiple buttons on the same touchpad is going to work. Are the diagonals going to act as a combo-press?
I'm not sure what I'm looking at here... all I see is a giant zoomable grid of chromatic noise. Is it supposed to be showing peoples pictures or something?
My Nexus 7 is sitting in its dock, as it has been for the last six weeks except for maybe a few minutes a week.

I bought one of the original 16GB Nexus 7s; the battery life sucks; the responsiveness made my iPhone 3GS running iOS 5 look good. I commonly tell those who ask that the Nexus 7 is one of the worst technology purchases I’ve made in the last ten years (the worst before that would have been the Compaq iPaq in 2001; it didn’t even run Linux very well, although that ran better than WinCE at the time). I use my iPhone in preference to the Nexus 7 for just about everything. I bought a Kobo mini for $50 because the Nexus 7 wasn’t even a good epub reader, and that’s having tried four or five different ebook readers on the Nexus 7.

This is anecdotal, but I am not sure whether I’ll ever buy another Android product—regardless of manufacturer—and I say that despite feeling the need to stay on top of available technology from a friend/family recommendation perspective. (That, and I do like gadgets, but I'm much less willing to put up with crap these days.)
That's certainly an option. Whether that's the best option, I have no idea until I see what people come up with. :-)

But someone is going to get $500 (or $500 minus 99designs' cut), even if it's just someone who typesets "Tarsnap" is a way that I like more than anything else.
That's not how averages work. More $59 tablets will only increase the ASP if it's below $59.
Yeah, those 20-character long random strings are great until you have to type them into your iPhone. And type them again. And again. And again. With your browser window open on your desktop/laptop so you can read them from LastPass/1Password/Keepass.
A simple logo wouldn't hurt.

I'm certainly not opposed to having a simple logo. I want to see what people come up with. :-)
I'd note that it seems to be Chrome-specific problem. Firefox, for example, searches for any substring matches, not only prefixes (although they seem to reasonably prefer results that are matching on word boundaries).
at kenHub[1], we built an online trainer for anatomy. It uses a game-like sequence of exercises designed to teach and test you at the same time about anatomy structures and their terminology. We've implemented a very basic spaced-repetition algorithm, but there's always more to improve.

One interesting thing we've found early on, was that when we encouraged people to actually "take a break", not to repeat too much, but instead let your brain process and come back to it later, people didn't like it. They wanted the ability to keep training and training. This resonates well with what the article describe about students' cramming tendency. So some time you have to manipulate even a solid algorithm, to fit with reality.

[1]https://www.kenhub.com
Handy tip: the Guardian own gu.com - so you can type gu.com to go straight to theguardian.com (they also use it for their URL shortener)
> Do I have a scientific basis for using words like "madness"? Well, would "deranged" be any better?

No. My point was that words like "mad" and "deranged" are part of lay language, and in lay use, only expresses a personal opinion, rather than a medical diagnosis.

> Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must passover in silence.

The irony is killing me.

> "Deranged" suggests that he should be treated in a certain way

It doesn't suggest any such thing. I'd use that word for any brutal murderer.

> Why would I respond to something you're explicitly divorcing from context?

Wat? I questioned the context. Not the same as "explicitly divorcing from context". I asked the question, just so you'd make your bias explicit.
I'd still buy the crap out of a Desire-Z form factor with modern hardware (say Nexus 4 or better).

The touch screen is superior for lots of uses but when it comes to entering none-english text (code, operating a shell) it falls flat on it's face.

Of course if we are talking about fantasy tech I want the Psion 5MX form factor with a 1920x1200 screen and capable of running something like Raspbian ;).
same here i was expecting to see actual profile images..
Why I bike without a helmet
How much did you spend on him/her, if you don't mind?
High-frequency trading in a switch - 170ns latency
I second that. I wouldn't hire any developer delivering just CS, because it shows a "just wanting getting stuff done" attitude, as opposed to some commitment to the language used and its inner workings.

Example: Maybe the most beloved feature: anonymous functions

CS: (x) -> x + x

It's like "yeah, I want to get this block done here", and it obfuscates the workings of the language (e.g.: this is a function with all its inheritance and a shared scope, it returns a reference, which can be used as any reference and is interchangeable with a reference to a named function, etc – the construct essentially obfuscates that the expression is returning an object of type "Function").

I don't think that anyone would get away with it in a C-development position, who would be delivering a source for a precompiler using a construct like, say

loop(i <- 0 .. 9):

as a replacement for

for (i = 0; i < 10; i++) {}

IMHO, this is a very JS-specific phenomenon. And it's a bit strange, having something like a lingua franca nobody seems to care about.

(Edit: Sticking to the lingua franca issue: It's a bit like having Latin as a lingua franca in the middle ages and some community using "Habs papa" for "Habemus papam". Even if "habs" compiles to "habemus" and the forth case of "papa" is easily inferred by the context, it fails the whole issue of using a lingua franca.)
I figured that Tarsnap users had a head start on the "figuring out ideas and values" part, in that they generally know what Tarsnap is and how it works.

It's possible that I'll find that someone has a nice idea but a poor implementation and award them the $500 but go off to hire an artist to draw the idea better.
Having 'the' at the start is not ideal, but Guardian Glass (who own guardian.com) no doubt wanted a lot of money for it.

In any case, all the cool kids use gu.com
Use your scroll wheel to zoom in (like Google Maps) or click in an area and it'll zoom in.
Agreed. I don't believe there's any other blog that I've so consistently enjoyed reading as idlewords.
Thunderstorms like this are interesting to me because while surveys of the first two floors show the water rising, an inspection of the attic seems to indicate that not much water has actually come up here yet, at least not more than an inch or two.

And then you realize this flooding comes from several different storm systems and wonder why you just wasted your time with this linkbait article.
Yeah, exac- ..wait, http://i.imgur.com/j74SykU.gif
$400, or most of my budget. Still have same tired logo that I "designed" 8 years ago.
Great post!

Did anybody else have quirks in their vision after reading this?

I went from reading this: http://article.olduse.net/771@mit-eddie.UUCP to this: https://37signals.com/svn/posts/3633-on-writing-interfaces-w... and had some weird focusing issues.
It's definitely hurting Apple, their margins are dropping as well. They released the iPad Mini in response to the popularity of smaller tablets and they make less margins on that device. Their sales overall have declined as well: http://www.macworld.com/article/2045056/profits-dip-again-fo...
MPEG LA also collects for software implementations Who do you think Microsoft Pays for the h.264 decoder in Windows.

X264 is derived from the SMPTE Sample code that is provided by the standards body. It is Open Source but it is not Free.
The iPad 3 is pushing 4x the number of pixels as the iPad mini as it's retina. I'm not surprised by this at all.
Beeminder could help with the motivation:

https://www.beeminder.com/

https://github.com/muflax/beeminder-anki
Does "Greek" mean "lives in Greece" or "ethnically Greek"?
As a worker (not a recruiter), I found the same as you. I used to send CVs (that's what they asked for), and they replied me with more info, because the bullet list wasn't enought.

After that, I don't send CVs anymore. I write a text (like a blog post) about what I know, what I did, how I did, what I enjoy, etc. Like a letter talking about myself. It worked perfectly everytime. I know recruiters may find boring to read a lot of them, but that's what I do now.
AIDE keeps getting better. There are some things, like GUI-builders, that are devilishly hard to do in a cross-development environment. There is nothing fundamental blocking native development on Android.
Slightly off topic, but is there a way to have tarsnap back up to my own server instead of S3?
FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE will be out when the Release Engineer sends a GPG-signed email to the freebsd-announce mailing list.

Tagging a tree in svn does not constitute a release. In particular, there have been many cases where a tag has been created and then adjusted due to last-minute fixes.
It is one button that detects thumb position, so it can be split nearly infinitely.
Yeah, operating a shell, that's EXACTLY what I want to do on my smartphone. Jesus.
Or could it have to do with the higher intelligence, introspection and desire for order of Japanese people, versus for example people in Miley Cyrus videos?
Well shouldn't it have been the-manchester-guardian.com :-)

Will be interesting to have a look and see how well or not the in house seo/dev team have done the migration
Incremental improvements would break a Standard. We'd have HTML5 for Video. You'd have to upgrade your Bluray player every 2 months, and Disney Discs wouldn't Work In Sony Players.
No, the tarsnap client needs the tarsnap server.
http://www.one-tab.com/web/images/tarsnap.png

A castle and medieval font to convey security and resilience

Use of a font with a distinctive R to help it appear as TAR-SNAP and not TARS-NAP

A monospaced font with underscores to convey that this for the UNIX command line

Subtle gold/silver colors that convey a history of widely acknowledged value and future longevity

Font: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/metamorphous (free)
Castle: http://3docean.net/item/door-castle/4004680 ($32 licence required)

Please feel free to use/build on this concept if you like it, I waive my rights to this logo design.
I managed to hacked myself to build a habit of 30 minutes a day of spaced repetition, building off my momentum to consistently do khanacademy an hour a day(A project which I finished a while ago) in conjunction with my time tracking tool. The key seems to be a bunch of small repeatable goal that allow for small wins. It works for me, though I don't know if it will work for anyone else. Plus, it's only anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt.

(I wish there is a accessible book that rigorously about which habit building strategies work according to scientific research)
I don't have the original, it's the 2013. I've heard 4.3 fixes the lag issues with the original. Battery life lasts more than a day for me, and it only has noticeable responsiveness problems when I quickly scroll down web pages.
I never liked the keyboard, but for a while, it was the best thing around.

Blackberry was dead when they didn't recognize the iPhone's impact.

They could have easily have developed something to compete with it, while still having the keyboard line of products.

They scoffed at the iPhone, then ignored Android. Now they are paying for it.

Pride comes before the fall.
So this should make her a terrrerist then.
Pricing small consulting projects
> He didn't imply anything about Greeks in general.

I suspected an implication. Please read the comments he made later on.
Well I was taught at 8 or 9 at junior school how to write a basic letter.

These are not people whose second language is English they are native speakers.
Perfect. A much friendlier, much more social, much more corporate 1984.

(Another heartbreaking work of staggering genius?)

edit: Yes, it's pretty transparently a reference to Google. Zings sound more like tweets, though. And monitoring everything has turned out to be primarily the NSA's job, but I guess he finished the book before that scandal came to real light.
As the other poster pointed out, this paper is measuring nothing, or at least it is not written in a way to let us know.

I find it unremarkable that a sudden focus on quality and testing reduced the bug rate. It does not follow that TDD is the cause, nor that TDD is the best of multiple options.

Its a well known effect in experimental design - measurement alters what you measure. Get depressed people to watch and talk about a dog video. I can predict that they will be less depressed. Not so much because dog videos are great at reducing depression, but because all of a sudden so much experimental interest is being directed at them. It would be almost churlish to not feel better, if you know what I mean. So, we don't design experiments that way - if your hypothesis is that dog videos cure depression, you need to do exactly the same protocol, but with cat videos, or I don't know, truck videos, or whatever, so both groups get the same attention, both are trying to reduce their depression and so on (I'm assuming unblinded here because obviously the TDD paper was unblinded, obviously we have better methods for the depression study than my suggestion here).

Kudos for bring empiricism into the discussion, but I do find the paper lacking.

I wrote above that I don't use TDD yet achieve low defect rates and good design. I think it is because, no matter how you do it, if you focus on those things you will more likely achieve them than if you don't. I hypothesize (don't be mad!) that TDD works for some simply because it brings the issue of quality to the forefront of their mind. Whereas, I'm already always thinking "is this line of code going to kill somebody"; I've tried TDD, and it always seemed like it added little to actively inhibited me. Your mileage will vary.
You mean the ARMv8 processor that doesn't exist? How about the fact that the iPhone 5S includes a significantly higher capacity battery, but in any CPU usage scenario sees a sometimes significant longevity regression.
Yes because your use case is the only use case.

There are times when been able to login to a server via my mobile is really useful (generally to give a misbehaving process a good swift kicking) and any keyboard that would make a shell easier to operate would also make typing text messages, emails etc easier.
Now I have portlandia song stuck in my head. Dream of the 90's is alive in portland...portland.
I think spaced repetition software, which typically involves flashcards, is great for memorising a large quantity of facts. E.g. for learning foreign language vocabulary, anatomy, etc... For this kind of learning it can really save you time, especially when you have 100s or 1000s of items to remember.

Using flashcards to learn mathematics, computer programming, physics, or anything requiring more creative or analytical thought is not so useful. For these subjects the number of raw facts required is usually smaller, and the thought processes, concepts and problem solving ability are much more important.

However, spaced repetition could be beneficial to these more creative and analytical subjects if it was applied more dynamically. In this case the units to learn could be the rules, laws, concepts which can manifest themselves in different ways within different problems, instead of being static flashcards. Does anyone know of software which works in this way?

My interest in this stems from http://readlang.com, a site I'm working on at the moment for learning foreign languages. I use SRS to keep track of words, but in future it could be nice to think about applying SRS to grammatical concepts too.
After a short googling I found this saying there's a python 3 fork https://github.com/surfly/gevent/issues/38

No idea if it's getting merged soon or at all
Perhaps you mean it in a different sense, but it's not possible to not have the option for life, you can choose not to experience life, you can say the reasons against it are too much for you, but there's never a time when life is no longer an option.
Google's MillWheel, a fault-tolerant stream processing system
Well, part of the $500 would presumably be talking through the goals of the project, what message you want to convey with the logo, how you might want to extend the Tarsnap brand in the future, etc.

To put it another way, if you needed to roll out a new feature for Tarsnap but couldn't do it yourself, would you hire someone on contract, or do a contest for it?
Is there an emoticon for head shake?
Quick link for that:

http://geert-hofstede.com/national-culture.html
Actually an Android handset with some really solid, secure apps and no consumer cruft (copy of some movie you can't delete, Blockbuster app, etc.) would have been pretty killer back when I had a Blackberry through work.
I still have doubts about this controller being worthwhile but Valve has never led me astray before. I am willing to reserve judgement. Steam needs to release Source Engine 2 with multi-platform support baked in before they can ever hope to make a dent in the console market with living room gaming though.
my thoughts exactly. In my very non-artistic, unimportant opinion, the last thing tarsnap needs is yet another logo with a padlock / key / chain / castle / fortress / shield / guard / dog.

These security-related icons are so frequently (ab)used that I'm getting a strong urge not to use any product that relies on them to symboloze its security.
It seems to be a subtle critique of Google. I read it as Circle = Google, ad business where Mae works = AdWords, tablets = Android, zings = tweets / Google+ shares, new camera = Google Glass.