skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A bigger problem is the ongoing, secret, and unaccountable knocking-off of contributors who've done nothing wrong, often on a loose suspicion of them being other people. This is doing an incredible amount of damage to this site.

I mean, really, what percent of HNers would've wanted time_management banned? Less than 5%? 2%?
For more meta, and a bit of recursion, notice that the site covering the launch of this site is itself in the list of sites being launched.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has quite a thing for Linux and OSS in general. Check out his articles here: http://blogs.computerworld.com/sjvn

I mean, I derive no pleasure from using bloated MS software myself (cough Outlook cough), but this guy clearly has an agenda that guides his reporting.
Yes but among those who survive, is the common cold virus more successful than ebola? I don't think there's a good answer to that.
ouch, ok sorry your right.. Looking at his material it looks like he qualifies for the stringent blocklist guidelines.
No to all possible interpretations of that question.
You're probably thinking of PayPal Website Payments Pro--I'm talking about PayFlow which is a straight payment gateway (almost exactly like Authorize.net). You process credit cards on your website and the funds go into the merchant account at your bank. You can't accept PayPal with PayFlow.
It would seem that popular software practices are trending away from certain types "premature flexibilization." Conventional Java coding practices - things you might have seen everywhere a decade ago - might call for a number of interfaces, class hierarchies, and perfunctory design patterns (getters, setters, perhaps factories) just to declare a SINGLE concrete class.

These days we're much more accustomed to succinct code in dynamic languages and looser structural rules. Maybe some of this strict enforcement has shifted off into test suites.

The author's observation that anticipating changes / future requirements in software is often misguided and ill-informed fits right into this trend toward simplicity. Concise, readable code that's easy to shuffle around is much better suited for adaptation than a big, bulky "framework" that tries to anticipate every contingency.
In some cases, either could be necessary in order to improve a situation.
I wonder what Twitter would have already become if they had early adopted an architecture like this?

I'm not trolling. Erlang is clearly ideal for this kind of thing. I wonder what kind of advantage it will give them?
Just because I'm a programmer doesn't mean my progeny automatically are. Nothing I learn is passed on through my genes.

Hawking and yourself aren't describing evolution, you're describing learning and education.
The reason why idiomatic Java is so verbose is because if you don't write it that way from the start, you wind up painting yourself into a corner because Java doesn't have any way to add flexibility later without breaking things.

It's one of the reasons I really dislike Java.
They mean that they way it works couldn't work in a non-quantum world.
What about columnists? Shouldn't they be affecting a lot of people, but get a disproportionate income.
Here's an attempt at distinguishing a truly quantum effect: can the same thing happen in a universe with classical physical laws and also keeping the other relevant variables fixed?(the latter part is important because the classical universe is, of course, turing complete).

Also, there is a similar programming qn. Suppose you have a program P running on a machine Q, and the api for a machine C is implemented on Q, so that programs for C can be run on Q. How do we actually figure out if P is really a C program running on Q?
I've posted a reply to you on my blog (cause it's too long for here): http://bjclark.me/2009/07/03/how-do-you-redesign-something/

Excerpt:
The biggest thing to manage in a redesign is risk. Risk you alienate your user base or do something that negatively impacts revenue, or whatever you're most afraid of.

The easiest way to manage it is to shorten your feedback cycle (not user feedback, any type of feedback) to the smallest possible interval. When talking about design, this means you need to spend the least amount of time on the design you can before you put it in front of someone that exemplifies your average user (persona).
it's not created today and also you can check its status, they are handling errors and problems of clients with Twitter.

+1 for twitter!

Edit: I doubt about you, your account created 2 hours ago!
Lebanon's drug barons vs the law
light and thin touchscreen pdf reader / web browser with durable battery and wifi is something I always wanted - I like where this is going.
$250 Desktop Runs Ubuntu, Windows 7 and OS X?
I can't help but notice that the existence of these tools suggests that Java is the new COBOL.
Politcal Hack(er) Palin Resigns
Indeed. The simple lack of a hardware keyboard means the iPhone isn't really an option for me. If there were no phones available with hardware keyboards I would be very disappointed.

In fact, I'm disappointed that there are no upcoming Android phones with decent keyboards, so I won't be getting an upgrade any time soon.
Comments on Comments on Zeldman's XHTML WTF
> This could go Really Wrong (ex: extremist pacifists take control and turn off the aggression bits in everyone) but it's an interesting scenario.

Which isn't a problem until we encounter the Kzinti...
Interesting that this has gotten something this kind of attention already, the project has only just started. I suppose that it owes a lot to Zed being Internet-famous, but still.
Teachers have a huge impact becasue they deeply effect the few students they have, who in turn shape the world.
- Stop the INDUSTRY (or not stop it, turn it Green)

- Good and healthy food

- Practice sport?

This should be enough
Agreed. I've been helping customers onto AuthNet for over ten years and I've never seen anything like this. Their services are always very reliable, but apparently not currently geographically diverse. I hope they learn a thing or two how to improve for the future.
I think the point is that for every wildly successful company out there, there was surely an early group of naysayers who could see instantly that it was a dud.

Arrington might fail here, but you have to give the guy a lot of credit for how he has moved forward on this thing.
AIM transactions or up for most processors (inc Concord), but CIM still seems to be down for now.
I wouldn't be so sure that P=NP not provable <=> de facto P!=NP.

It's at least not obviously inconceivable that one might stumble upon an algorithm for SAT or traveling salesman whose running time on all known inputs appears to be polynomial but for which a proof of its asymptotic running time might prove extremely elusive (in much the same way that so far as we know the riemann hypothesis appears to hold but proof remains elusive).
We should not ignore, once in a while, that we only talk about hypothesis here, quite nothing about his (certainly very interesting theories) can be proven empirically -- so it's far from universally acceptable, real, concrete science.

Sad to say this, but this kind of science has much more from fiction than from concrete science.
Ask HN: Does decreasing the size of a touchpad makes it better?
I just came across this http://www.handstalk.in/ and was wondering, if it sounds useful?
Yes, compared to early life 1-on-1 teachers online university lecturers make a small difference. Compared to baseball players they make a large difference.
Of course you don't have to vote it up. But why was it killed?
I wanted to elaborate on why i posted it here...

Mostly that the high signal to noise with this community and the way it better expresses the stuff i'm currently thinking about. However, in specific regard to this thread- and as others have pointed out - the topic for me specifically highlighted the hacker like work ethic that MJ seems to have exhibited, which I very much enjoyed reading.

I do feel that some of HN has turned into a first post mentality, which is a shame - especially as i've seen on front page two posts which were essentially cnet and yahoo both posting the same story.

So I'm all for more varied content - God knows an echo chamber would suck - but with the knowledge that we're here to share information and knowledge that has improved or enriched our lives. Anything else is just showmanship.
It's definitely not free software. On the other hand, it does use an open protocol. It's not for everyone, but it does a good job at what it does.
But is that the cause or the effect?
4 is a great idea. It would probably make us healthier.

Apart from that, we simply do not have enough data. What I'd like to do is repeat the RAND experiment. Take a large group of people at random, and give them different amounts/types of health care. Measure their health outcomes.

This will at least give us some data to make a more informed choice.
I watched the ad a couple of days ago and couldn't help but wonder: what in the world is wrong with Microsoft?! For a company with vast financial resources available (in 2008, cash reserves, short-term investments and cash equivalents totaled $20 billion), MS has been fumbling royally with their ad campaigns recently. Seinfeld, anyone? Unbelievable.
Which item in the guidelines does this blogger's writing violate?
Making Broad Strong Claims About Extremely Complex Stuff Is The Root Of All Evil.

Where's my place in dictionaries? :P
There are plenty of folks who do that. And some clients do support that behavior. But the problem with an etiquette based solution is that there is a fair amount of bandwidth consumed by discussions of what is and is not appropriate etiquette.

Client-side filtering does break the implied 'I read your every brainfart' contract that makes twitter appealing to so many, but come on; this just moves the filters a little ways outside your head.
Web Design Trend Hunting - Fluid Grid Layout
also, the impact of a teacher on a single child can be a lot greater than the impact of a celebrity on a single person. this is not to say that the reverse is not also true, especially if the celebrity is inspiring a young musician or sports star. ultimately, this is entirely subjective. what does "impact" mean, anyway ;-)
Kent is obviously not trying to pay the rent with this ebay auction listing. It's just a fun way for him to market himself. It seems like people haven't used ebay for cute stuff like this in a while.
This insight already has a catchier name: 'YAGNI'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Ain%27t_Gonna_Need_It

http://c2.com/xp/YouArentGonnaNeedIt.html
Samsung L400V White Pink Unlocked
Samsung L400V has been selected by different mobile users who love surfing phone and trust upon it. The features like 2 MP of camera with dual screens FM radio and MicroSD support for data storage which gives you the new experience of enjoyment it.
Maybe we could make it illegal for drug companies to advertise directly to consumers.
IndieGoGo is helping to centralize the process of legally raising money online. We have almost 2000 films/projects on IndieGoGo and filmmakers have been able to raise $10s of thousand at a time. Including Sundance Award winners. Please email info [@] indiegogo with any questions.
Switching a forum from a narrow to a broad interest is a problem for people who have narrow interests. You have an alternative (use several fora), they don't.
"MBSCAECSITROAE" Just doesn't have much of a ring to it, sadly.
Billions stolen in online 'robbery'
You've Got Blackmail: The AOL Account That Wouldn't Die
The authors 12+ years of java development and no objc experience renders this comparison mostly useless.
Wow. His talk was 226 slides.

This muddles so many different things. Banking != Finance != Investing != Monetary Policy != Currency... and so on.

It's the dangerous combination of businesses that are the challenge. There are plenty of credit unions that aren't in trouble because they didn't try to profit in dangerous ways.

There's so much wrong here it makes me tired to even think about speaking to it.
I know, but I linked to that post as a good example.
Your point 1, foreign doctors, already happens. It is called the J-1 visa. Doctors on this visa are required to serve time in an under-served area.. My father is a GP in a rural area, his colleagues are from Pakistan, Nigeria, Uruguay, Argentina and the Caribbean.

Point 3, this is what insurance companies have done since the dawn of the "actuarial sciences."

Point 4, if 24 hour fitness is too expensive, there are YMCA, YWCAs and nice parks in every US city I've ever been in.
Hierarchical file systems were great when you had a limited number of files that you personally had to deal with. The desktop metaphor was great when your hard drive was 4 megs. When its 500 gigs, its just plain broken.

The Be File System had both a hfs part plus the far more interesting queryable database part where the user or an application could attach arbitrary data to fs entries. so you could have contacts stored in the fs that were searchable, email 'folders' that you could interact with via the OS and far far more. Alas, that more or less died with with Be although every now and then something else pops up but doesn't get any traction.

Another interesting idea was lifestreams which represented all your data as a series of versioned documents stretching back through time. you could search by creation or modification date or search based on content. See: http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html

Hopefully sooner rather than later, we can ditch the hfs altogether or at least hide it and keep for backwards compatibility.
When are these people going to learn? AOL has reached the point where their original product does NOTHING except detract value. Just drop it AOL because the fourteen 85-year-olds that are still using it are going to be dead soon anyways.

People still use AIM (still not sure why), and sometimes frequent some of your other media outlets. Focus on those, and stop charging (former) customers for services they don't use or want.
Thanks for your comments, I agree that something automated is more efficient and robust. However, I was also thinking doing something manual might be a quick way to build and launch a site, even if it has poor accuracy. If you want to discuss it further, send me an email. Its in my profile.
I don't think this is that clearly a dud. If it comes in at a decent price point and has a convenient charging stand I could easily see one in my living room.

I think it's more likely that the market wasn't ready for such a thing.

Like netbooks, which were not possible at a price point that made them attractive to consumers until a year and a half ago, when they suddenly emerged as a market category.

But hey, the great thing about being an entrepreneur is that you are responsible for estimating the market conditions and executing credibly.
There are two problems with this. First, it's not perfectly flat at all. The people who get the new currency first will get to spend it first, before the market lowers the value of the currency. This is a transfer of wealth to them from other currency holders.

Second, as tome suggested, the government would have to take measures to force people to use the currency. This has all kinds of bad effects.
Evolutionary architecture and emergent design: Emergent design through metrics
Saying java IDEs are better than XCode is not a valid point. It's an opinion (and an arguable one at that).

As to memory management: given that Cocoa's retain/release/autorelease is not painful and my most agonizing debugging sessions with java all seem to revolve around theorizing WTF the garbage collector is doing and why... Well I think the productivity opinion is arguable as well.
Good tips. I've noticed that I'm doing the same things on almost every new Django project that I start. So I created this sample project which I now serves me as a starting point: http://github.com/arthurk/django-exampleproject
To be really successful, XHTML requires that both authors and tool vendors get everything right, virtually all of the time. Otherwise...

* If authors get it right but tool vendors don't, XHTML offers no feature advantage.

* If tool vendors get it right but authors don't, XHTML is non-functional.

Of course, expecting the necessary level of compliance is unrealistic, especially given how complex the required stack of specs and interactions really is; actual practice so far seems to consist mostly of people ignoring the parts that are hard and so compromising the draconian processing XML was supposed to bring with it.
Maybe. I've gone to school (not college) on two continents and 3 countries and I've had great and bad teachers and everything in between.

But none of them was unique or had an irreplaceable life changing impact on me.

Obviously that can happen for some children, but then again it could happen with your neighbor or any good figure of wisdom.
If Proust was a neuroscientist, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an astrophysicist
LSE's trading platform, TradeElect, was written by Microsoft and Accenture.

http://www.onwindows.com/Articles/LSE-TradElect-system-goes-...

Microsoft used TradeElect as a centerpiece in their "Get the Facts" Linux bashing campaign.

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/getthefacts/lse.mspx

Microsoft should get a share of the blame, but it sounds like a borked implementation since NASDAQ runs on Windows.
I clicked in thinking this was going to be an interesting topic but your four bullets are idiotic. Why does everything have to be about sending things overseas or make the government deal with it?

Why not start simple, teach better preventative care. What I mean is that the US as a whole is very unhealthy. Rather than having people wait till they get sick, get people to take better care of themselves through eating, fitness, etc. Even have means to reward these people. It's proven people that eat healthy and workout visit doctors/hospitals much less. An article I recently read stated that an obese person visits a doctor 10 times more in a year than a healthy person.

Beyond this I think health plans should be revisited and restructured to make people more aware of their spending. Force people to watch their health care spending and limit it only to procedures that are necessary. It will make you reconsider visiting the ER with a cold rather than calling around, finding a family doctor and seeing him the following day.
Interesting. I wonder how it deals with library dependencies and the like.
Ask HN: Opinions on proper business structure for sale?
I am posting outside my regular account to get an opinion on a sensitive matter. Short background: I started with a small web app for fun 8 years ago as a side project. It has grown into a pretty nice sized business that I run full-time and it's till growing rapidly (and spinning off other related web apps).

I finally decided that it was time to become a "real" company and ended up creating an S-Corp as the operating company and an LLC to hold all the intellectual property (trademarks and copyrights to source code mainly).

In finishing up the paperwork, I had to meet a new attorney and when I looked at my situation, he thought there was a good chance that somewhere down the road, I would have the opportunity to sell the entire business for a big payday. I currently own 100% of the company and don't need angel/venture investors as it's generating good cash flow on it's own....but I might want to exit someday.

He tried to explain to me that I would want to structure things so that a "Stock Sale" would be attractive and so that I could avoid trying to need to do an "Asset Sale" He also wondered what Business structure would offer the best tax situation if a sale came to pass.

I'm sorry to ramble on but here are the questions:

1. Does anyone with more experience in these matters understand if a different business model would be advantages tax wise in selling the whole company for stock?

2. Would a different business model make a stock sale more attractive?

Thanks for ANY guidance/help you can provide.

PS - I've asked my CPA and HE can't imagine why anything other than an LLC or S-Corp would have any advantages, but admitted he's not put a lot of business sale deals together. Also - the business could easily "merge" at any point into a single entity by having the S-corp purchase the LLC (to create one s-corp) OR by disbanding the S-corp and having the LLC take over all operations (to have 1 LLC)

Thanks again
Ok not sure why I am getting downmodded. But this warning actually pops up with AVG on betahouse.org everytime same with chrome. Anybody from betahouse bothered to check if AVG incorrectly blocking their website and issuing warning?
According to the Time Hierarchy theorem ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_hierarchy_theorem ), for each number k > 1, there exists a problem in P that can be decided (solved) in O(n^k), and not decided (solved) in O(n^j) for each j in [1, k).

This was the first time I heard of this theorem (was googling for something I thought would weaken the author's point), and it really strengthens the authors argument - I thought his example of O(n^10) algorithms was sort of a fallacy but it appears not. If I'm properly understanding the Time Hierarchy Theorem, it is a very strong argument for what the author is suggesting (and somewhat disappointing for me, because I wish he were wrong).
run while you can. Seriously, if you are at this level of trust between partners then nothing good can come of it, 35k / year is laughable for a company with that kind of turnover.

Having your name on a patent is not synonymous with value, stock is, if you have no stock then you have nothing.

I know this does not sound too positive but I've been in that exact boat myself one day long ago and I stayed in longer than I should have hoping things would get better. They didn't.

best of luck,

Jacques
PyPEG - a PEG Parser-Interpreter in Python
People use AIM because their friends use it. What IM protocol people use seems to vary from locale to locale (among the non-nerd types), probably just depending on which got used first.

I'd happily switch away from AIM (by that, I mean the protocol/servers, I use Bitlbee/irssi and Pidgin), except that a lot of the people I know use AIM exclusively.
I remember reading a USENIX paper on doing just this, by mapping each filename-related syscall to different semantics. Essentially 'ls /foo/bar/' would list the same files as 'ls /bar/foo/'. This paper on 'TagFS' is not it, but close enough:

http://semfs.ontoware.org/pubs/2006-09-iknow2006-tagfs.pdf

If I am going to be opinionated this is not done to OSes because of all the applications written for the current semantics.

If I was given funding to make file tagging happen, then I would forget retrofitting the OS-level file system. My attack angle would be in the GUI making it appear as files are tagged. Perhaps by changing the popular applications to connect to a daemon that handles persistent storage and tagging of blobs.

The regular user wants to know as little as possible about the file system anyway. Their concept of stored files are those that can be seen as icons in their desktop. Pure hiearchical paths are a thing for programmers and power users (sadly?).

Oh also, while going for tagging things, RDF is even more generalized, allowing you to classify tags them self. Each application might want to tag files they create or modify with an application-class of tag. (date-class tags, format-class tags, author-class tags,...)

Each application should implicitly add as many tags as it can when saving things (application name, resource kind, content-type, author, date, icon, etc).

This would allow you to get files by recalling "that image i shopped up in gimp last month".
How Not to crowdsource
Well, they still use COBOL...

Guess what, we still build houses out of bricks! Haha, that's so obsolete. Instead we should be building houses out of... Java?