skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's interesting that something that already happened at least once is suddenly much more interesting because it involves the Islamic world. This was done before in Moldavia (http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/04/inside-moldovas/) but it was not that interesting for the media then because it wasn't Muslims and nobody wanted to anger Russia at that moment.
>The smartest scientist in the world probably don't need >English Literature 101

I very much disagree. My degree is in mathematics and my day job is programming, yet by far the most useful course I took in high school was English lit.

Being able to critically read a text, understand and analyze it and write a well structured and well reasoned response in reasonably competent English is easily the most useful thing i learned in high school.

Far too many times have I (tried to) read papers by probably very smart people only to be completely bogged down in horrible structure, dire grammar and and badly constructed arguments that as written are logically flawed. I can't help but to think that these scientist would have been far better off if they'd paid more attention in English class.
well - Computer science is pretty damn vast too...
In the US? Wow.

In retrospect, do you think this workload was helpful or harmful?
The Psychology of Color in Webpages
Does the fact @TechCrunch is a suggested account mean
you are more likely to report favourably about twitter?

Isn’t it a bit like accepting a free gift as a
journalist? They send you lots of lovely free traffic
for example.

this guy is onto something
Bingo. If you're reaching, say, executives with buying power in a niche industry (and have a solid ad sales team), you can literally get 500x that amount.
The onus on "ethicists" is to do the work in what they consider to be an ethical way.

But all I see is people who've nothing to contribute to science themselves but nevertheless feel entitled to dictate terms to those that have.
You haven't run into crashes or been disappointed in its search feature?
Inability to resize windows from any corner except the bottom right.
IIRC cutting off SMS was one of the first things the government did. SMS was even disabled a day before the elections with the formal explanation of preventing last minute campaigning.

The article seems a bit hyper. "As the regime shut down other forms of communication, Twitter survived." - does Sullivan think Twitter has some uniquely resilient technology? Twitter will survive right until whoever's in charge takes the 10 seconds to put twitter.com into Iran's blocked sites list (or, you know, the next the fail whale)
That is really cool. I wonder where he got the hardware to pull that off? The tilt sensor and the multitouch LCD definitely make this an awesome piece of work.
I can't think of any common annoyances. I come from the Linux desktop world, so having a GUI that works right is great. It was hard to get used to the close in the top left and drag in the bottom right only at first but I don't even notice that anymore.

Under the hood it is Unix, includes Python and wxPython by default, Xcode is free and an awesome development environment so I can do as much and more than I can with a Linux box.

If you need to run Ubuntu, just do it in Parallels, otherwise your annoyance is going to be having to reboot into OSX.
This might help.

http://www.heliumfoot.com/mercurymover/
Very similar in style to "The dragon in my garage":

http://www.godlessgeeks.com/LINKS/Dragon.htm
The problem is that there are so many sites reaching the same broad demographics of consumers that the ad space is totally commoditized.

But if you run a site for well-off cat owners, there's no reason you can't command a higher CPM for expensive cat-related products, it just may take the efforts of a dedicated in-house ad sales staff.

Anyway, the trend is to move away from CPM ad sales altogether anyway. Ad agencies and big marketing departments want CPL. They would much rather pay you $XX per qualified person who fills out a contact/download form, rather than CPM. That way the pressure is on you to deliver.
Title should really specify that "video gaming" and "music" refer to their respective industries, not as a concept or activity. The music industry is going slightly downhill because more and more people are discovering how to download and doing so. People that know how to pirate music, however, don't seem to often look into how to pirate video games. Thus video games are still bought.
It's hard, especially at the molecular level where our knowledge is changing on a near daily basis. I have spent years in the world of structural biology, but know only a little about cell biology.

Having said that, Molecular Biology of the Cell (referred elsewhere) is a great book.
I transferred from a 200 school day per year charter school to a 180 school day per year public high school, and I found that I learned a lot more at the public school, so I have first hand experience with the differences. Also, the charter school's days were about an hour longer than the public school's. I found there were no advantages to going to the charter school for longer days and longer school years.

It's hard to stay alert as a young kid during such a long school day, with class times being so long. When I transferred to public school, I met a lot of very intelligent people my age, and I was surprised to see that. For the first year after transferring, I felt that I was too smart to be there, since I had just transferred from a charter school. It turned out that I had met people who were much smarter than me and just as insightful.

Sure American kids don't do so well on international tests, but maybe that's because they're not taught to take tests, they're taught to learn and apply what they learn. I don't know about you, but I'd rather my kids grow up knowing how to learn new things and broaden their horizons, rather than grow up knowing how to write answers down on a piece of paper.
just wondering... exactly how many thousands of years ago? designed?
Looks like the simulator that is running fullscreen.
I haven't. I use it every day, for a number of purposes from updating my blog to working on the Woobius codebase (in both Rails and Flex/AS3), and I haven't had any issues whatsoever. The global search-and-replace works great, too.

I'd quite like split-screen editing, that's my main bug-bear, but I've actually structured my use of TextMate around that - I basically just have several Textmate windows open. I've been meaning to switch to Emacs for that, but I suspect that managing buffers (and making sure they end up in the right pane) will take as much effort as dragging a few windows around.
I had tons of hardware problems.

It’s just that I could be an outlier, these kinds of stories are always so freaking anecdotal and not really a help when deciding what to buy.

My screen failed and was exchanged. Then my main board failed and was exchanged. Now everything seems to be working fine. Oh, yeah. I nearly forgot, my DVD drive was unable to burn anything so it was exchanged. The exchanged drive was also unable to burn anything and was exchanged again. After those two tries it finally worked. And I already destroyed two batteries. After mere 110 cycles both were unable to hold much charge (they lasted for 30 min or less). Both were exchanged.

All this, and the MBP is not even two years old. Since I have Apple Care I didn’t have to pay for labour or parts, but I had to pay for transport to and from the few places in Germany where Apple hardware is repaired and I didn’t have my laptop for several weeks in the span of those last few months.

I hope that’s all for now because I actually still like my MBP. I planned to buy a new one at the earliest in three years, but after all those failures I don’t have much hope that my MBP is going to make it.

But: it simply cannot be the case that every or even a big percentage of Macs fail like this. With Apple having to pay for two batteries, one whole screen, a main board and two DVD drives plus all the labour they certainly didn’t make any profit from my purchase.
As Marx summarised it, capitalism is characterised by a pattern of cyclical booms and crashes, generally crashing deeper each time.

He was not, actually, positing that it would eventually collapse but that it may survive its cycles so long as there are enough "willing" people to take the brunt of the crashes and least of the booms at the bottom rungs of society.

Of course, he probably had less of an idea about the resource problems we will be facing in the near- to mid future, complicating capitalism's crash-recovery.

Personally, I think it will take at least two more of these before there is anywhere near enough support for abandoning capitalism.
A look inside the fastest supercomputer in Europe
Ah, my use of "running" was misleading. That's just a crude line count of the "ps ax" listing. (And I probably counted the header line - d'oh!) Yes, most are sleeping.
No, I wasn't being sarcastic. If you want to use libraries written in Python in Ruby (just as an example), you need to be able to convert all the Pythonisms to Rubyisms and/or Rubyisms to Pythonisms. That is the case whether you are doing source-to-source rewriting or using a shared VM.

Note that the JVM and .NET runtimes do pretty much exactly what was asked--they run programs written in multiple languages on the same VM. Because the "native" VMs for Python and Ruby are so bad, the JVM and .NET VMs can even out-perform the native ones for most tasks.
The custom "framework" system for Ruby and Python is a minor annoyance when you want to customize or upgrade them. Apple puts python in one place, the python community installers put it in another, and neither is where you'd install it on your own. Although installing most things and building from source are pretty much the same as with linux, if there is already an apple-installed version you might find you need to so some minor surgery (make a symlink or two) after an initial install. In most cases, using macports works just like any other package manager and, as a bonus, keeps everything segregated into its own directory tree, so many people use that when possible.

Still, these issues are minor and infrequent. Linux installs aren't always painless and will require triage from time to time, too. But compared to doing the same stuff on windows, well ...
all but extinct

Microsoft Visual Studio seems to be doing OK
The only way I could see is through SMS using a low power satellite phone such as this: http://www.iridium.com/products/product.php?linx=0350

But in a country where people live on roughly $2 a day (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/25/afghanistan.terr...) I doubt many have $1,400 satellite phones that cost $6 a day to use.

Other methods are impossible...

Twitter is blocked through regular internet (see Michael C. McHugh comment here: http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0609/The_stakes_in_Ir... )

Cell phone towers are what's been cut so no SMS (http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jSPlmVgh-...)

Satellite dishes have been banned since '94 (http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=34407) so no highspeed internet that way.
I don't think it has anything to do with suggested accounts. TechCrunch figured out that when you write about Twitter, then Twitter users love it and talk about it. I think that's normal behavior (any story written by a major blog about HN would immediately get promoted and viewed here, for example).

The reason this doesn't work so much for other sites (writing articles about Facebook, for example) is because Facebook doesn't have the same meta-culture; Facebook users generally don't feel like there is anything special about their membership on the site. Also, sharing outside content/retweeting has not taken off on FB like it has on Twitter.
Microeconomics of the Consumer Web
Nothing directly involved in the call participates in GC. In VisualWorks Smalltalk, these calls are special. (These are only calls out through the DLLCC facility. I believe they are marked by pragmas.) They might contribute reachability roots, though that might be problematic. I seem to remember that objects created in that stack frame are not garbage collected. Since these methods are marked, the compiler can treat these calls specially. I'm pretty sure that the objects are spawned in a different space. I think this would mean that those stack frames can't mutate objects created before the call. (This would make these calls functional in flavor.) They should be able to refer to such objects, as this will only cause an exception if things go wrong.

The only thing that happens in these methods in VisualWorks Smalltalk is marshalling to call out to DLLs implemented in C.
Sussman is one of the authors of Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics. Free web version online.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_of...
One thing I miss from Windows-- the ability to easily access any menu item from the keyboard (not just items that have a defined keyboard shortcut). Yes, it can be done, but not "out of the box" using individual keystrokes to navigate each level of the hierarchy.
A lesson from Disney: Capture a user's imagination, earn a piece of their memory
M$ deserves some credit for supporting CSS long before other browsers did, as well as AJAX. But launching IE8 without canvas, border-radius, and web fonts is pretty sad.
For an example of how tantalizingly close researchers are to making real progress in engineering away aspects of aging, you might look at the MitoSENS project at the SENS Foundation.

Firstly: mitochondrial DNA damage is convincingly very important in aging. There's a lot of research to support this, and a great deal more research to show how greatly the composition and function of mitochondria determines lifespan differences between species:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/10/how-age-damaged-m...

Secondly, we can move that DNA into the nucleus where it will continue to work to produce the necessary components of mitochondrial machinery long after the DNA in the mitochondria themselves is ragged:

http://www.sens.org/index.php?pagename=mitosens

And lastly the work of Marisol Corral-Debrinski is basically demonstrating how to do this in practice. Here's a video presentation from SENS3 - she's much further along now:

http://richardjschueler.com/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=5717...

As an alternative approach, researchers back in 2005 demonstrated an approach to replace all mitochondrial DNA in an organism, doing so in mice. Out with the old, in with the new:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2005/07/slightly-inside-1...

One last item: the FDA doesn't permit the development of therapies to treat aging. Period. So there's little venture money for it, and all promising research is then shoehorned into becoming sub-par treatments for specific age-related disease or just abandoned. All meaningful progress will occur in regions of the world where regulation is less horrid.

http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/view_news_item.cfm?news_id...
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2009/05/the-portions-of-g...
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2008/05/envisaging-a-worl...
Definitely an outlier. They have long been more reliable than average and have often topped reliably rankings throughout the past 10 years. :-/
How to get funding from VCs and Angels
No cut and paste in Finder... you have to move your files from one window to another...
What do you think of Apple rewriting Finder in Cocoa? I'm happy about that.
Ha.. another trick to try out...
I think so long as 2.0 maintains backwards-compatibility with 1.x (possibly include 1.x with the 2.0 app?), and it doesn't hamper at all from the user experience, a re-write might be a good thing. Or, allow easy plug-in migration from 1.x to 2.x (kinda like what Python did going from 2.0 -> 3.0).

There are plenty of examples where complete re-writes, or partial re-writes, have led to bad things. Windows Vista and Winamp 3.0 come to mind.

Good examples include Mac OS X, Linux 2.x (I believe this was a major re-write over 1.x - could be wrong as my Linux history isn't up to buff). Starcraft was completely re-written mid-development (originally it was built on the Warcraft II engine, which didn't scale).

I would tend to agree with you, though, that major re-writes typically yield worse things. But, that depends a lot on the product, its audience, and the developer. Perhaps Allan, who has likely been writing code for a very long time, knows of some bottlenecks and what-not that he feels should be incorporated into 2.0, which necessitates a total re-write.

If worse comes to worse, the 2.0 codebase bombs and 1.x continues going on strong. That's exactly what happened to Winamp 2.0 when 3.0 came out.

And I should mention, to clarify any possible bias in my opinion, that I'm a very happy Textmate user. :)
It definitely sucks to be a outlier :)

(Oh, I nearly forgot, the "F" key on my keyboard failed, too. It – i.e. the whole keyboard – was also replaced.)
Asians rarely value individuality.

Evidence for this? (How much time have you spent in Asia, and how recently? As a reply above said, Europe has several different countries, and so does Asia, so what specific places are you talking about?)
And you can't really blame the teachers. They need to make a living, and they barely do as it is.

How does the living made by teachers compare to other employed persons with similar qualifications and ability?
IMO English speakers don't learn other languages because they don't really need to. If they do need to, and try to learn with a weak method, then they experience frustration and emotional resistance. (Affective Filter)

For most people, analysis of how a language works is not meaningful. Just like for software users, most people don't care how a program works. They just want to use it.

For highly analytical mathematical minds, study of grammar can be effective. Krashen's research shows, however, that grammar study in classroom environments does not help the majority of students to achieve conversational fluency.

So I'm not saying you are wrong. But there's plenty of evidence to suggest that what works for you might not work for everyone.

Personally, I don't believe that human language is purely analytical framework for thinking. I do believe, strongly, that language is also physical, emotional and expressive. I mean, what is the first word out of a baby's mouth?

Just guessing, but I bet the experience that sounddust describes has less to do with grammar analysis, and more to do with personally relating to the stories in the films and songs. He gets input that A) he comprehends and B) he cares about.

Guessing again, I bet sounddust's success with early output results from practice within a safe environment, where he has no fear of sounding like an idiot. It's a much different experience that being surrounded by peers in a classroom and challenged by the teaching authority.

Further, since he's vocalizing expressions from authentic films and songs, he can mimic not only correct pronunciation, but also mimic expression with real gut feelings, like glad, sad or mad. Feelings are meaningful.

So I agree with you, pradocchia, that early output (expressive mimicry within a safe and playful environment) is useful: 1) it helps us to hear and understand the new language, and 2) it boosts our confidence so we can talk much sooner.

And to sounddust, please correct my wild guessing about what you experienced while learning French!
Ditto, but I can't recommend Fusion enough.

Tried Parallels, and had too many problems.
Between sixth and twelfth grades I averaged about 4-5 hours of homework per school night.

What kinds of subjects were you studying, in what kind of school? What kind of university education were you aiming for with those studies in grades 6 through 12?
Third vote for Fusion. I'm on 4 gigs of RAM as well and I run XP alongside my other programs all day without problems.
Help hack the Zeo Sleep Coach data
I got the Zeo device after reading about it in an article linked off of Hacker News. I assume I'm not the only one, so I turn to other HN readers that got Zeos to help me hack the data stored on the device's SD card.

If you want to help, please submit your data (code / thoughts are always welcome, of course) at http://github.com/costan/zeo_sleep_decoder/
I took a screenshot of my iPod Touch just to see if it could look so crisp on a big screen. even on my 13" macbook it looks pixelated. I consider this video a fake. (edit: video appears to be made by HD production guys, explains why the interface is smooth even on 24")

also, arm != x86 instruction set.
You really want to run OS X on the hardware, to take advantage of all the details of the various hardware nooks and crannies (power management, wireless hardware, etc.)

There's no real downside to running any Linux distro in a VM. (Again, I recommend VMware Fusion.) You can put each VM in its own full-screen space and switch around between them (and Mac OS X) with a keystroke.

Highly recommended.

(BTW, the way that Fusion works it that it essentially goes "under" OS X, when Fusion is running; it becomes a hypervisor, running OS X and the other OS(es) as virtual guests on an equal footing.

I heard a great talk at C4[1] from one of the VMware Mac engineers, who said that the Apple engineers weren't very happy to learn the details of how virtualization works (since it replaces their precious OS at the lowest level), but they didn't really have any choice, either. ;-)
I think Greed seeds and stimulates Passion to some extent.
The idea is that he isolated the bacteria and identified conditions (i.e. temperatures) where the bacteria are more effective.

If you increase the population of a natural agent and modify the environment, then you should be able to significantly speed up the decomposition of plastics.
The Death of Twitter
You read it here first, folks: Twitter — at least as it is structured today — is going down. Oh sure, it’s easy to be a contrarian: simply watch where everyone is going and then head in the opposite direction. But the media attention on Twitter means we need to monitor its impact on social interaction — especially recruiting. That said, there are real reasons why the social media phenom Twitter is poised to become a victim of its own success.
I've never really used facebook much, but the few facebook friends I have (who are friends in real life, but live far away) seem to confirm the claim of the original comment: 90% of their "status updates" result from some Facebook game or other "take a quiz", "ten things you didn't know about me" and so on.

The 90% are taken straight from the Twitter study, so they must be true.