skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Easiest way to use new tools in old Linux environment
At the day job I need to use the standard Linux install that is on all our machines. Upside: its standard and supported by IT. Downside: it uses pretty old tools. "old" relatively speaking of course!

Compiling new versions of tools would be really tedious because of the web of dependencies that would drag in and reinstalling is not an option.

Can anyone suggest an easy way to use the tools of a more modern Linux distribution like fedora 10/11 or ubuntu 9.04 overlaid on a 2 year old centos environment? Is running a virtualized copy of a modern distribution the only way forward? That would still be a hassle because of having to try to 1) get it working in the environment (who knows if vmware or virtualbox will even run on the standard setup here) and 2) duct tape the various filesystems etc together.
It can't be too far off. Anecdote: In the last three weeks, I've hit a Stack Overflow site in a normal Google query three times, and an ExpertSexChange query once. Out of curiousity, I clicked the SexChange link for completeness, and the score is, StackOverflow 3, ExpertSexChange 0. (Yes, I know about scrolling to the bottom. No answers, just fumbling around and questions.)

Granted, I was searching for Erlang and Perl stuff, but that's still a change vs. two months ago. Average users, which I will define as "Googlers", will probably get there soon.

(I'm assuming you're not talking about "my grandmother", who will never know what Stack Overflow is. But that would be a very silly standard to apply, so I'm assuming that's not what you're getting at.)
or even adding an "n" in front of the function name goes a loooooooong (emphasis on the "o") way towards helping. nconc, nreverse ...
> you know that it only changes the state of this player, and nothing else.

This gets ugly when the state of every actor can potentially affect the state of every other actor, though. This is pretty common in games.

That's the main point the linked article is making.
I disagree. Making more information available is virtually always a win. It often causes organizations to moderate their own behavior, for fear of looking bad. When this does not happen, it makes it easier for those outside to know what needs to be improved and where to apply pressure.

All without actually mandating any change in behavior beyond publishing some data.
Science and Engineering:A Layer-Cake of Inquiry and Design
Researchers learn how mutations extend life span
PNGOUT (http://advsys.net/ken/utils.htm#pngout) and PNGCRUSH (http://pmt.sourceforge.net/pngcrush/) are similar utilities that can compress PNG files even further.

The idea is that you do all your invasive stuff (like reduce colors etc.) in Save for Web in Photoshop (or similar) and then let one of the two programs do its job, which will visually not alter the image.
in this case it's a good way of getting smooth animation specially in a dual core whatever whatever :)
Reply from Google:

http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/06/https-securit...
Well, I went to college in the '80s and they did teach us assembly and algorithms. And we had to program in BASIC for one of our labs. And then Pascal for another lab, and another in Prolog, C, functional programming, etc.

They surely can teach CS the same way today, no? Replace Pascal or BASIC with Objective-C and/or JavaScript, and it's more or less the same thing.
Six questions about Opera Unite.
This is for people, not hackers. When your friend signs out of chat, you don't complain that he's an unreliable service.
I can guarantee if they are ready to spend 400 Billion Euros, they have thought out these details. They have the very best minds working on this plan.
That is muddle headed. The crime is the sexual abuse. It is being photographed. Discovering the photographer and rescuing the children is a good deed. Hushing it up? Not so good.
Sure, I might not have used the proper settings, though generally I've clicked around all the setting until the lowest file size appears at the bottom (without losing image quality).

If you don't mind me asking (out of curiosity), if you run smush.it on one of your optimized pages, do you get any reduction?
Sure it is... we're entrepreneurs and you're pointing out something that seems to be selling. This is useful - even if it is a bit obvious - it helps guys like me think outside the iphone box a bit.
Inkling launches anti-bloat collaboration tool. "Email's just fine" - tgethr.com
Not that I don't agree with your assertion of scrutiny, but...

1) If you watched any of the videos shot by foreigners and Iranians alike, you'd notice that there were at least 50 across if not more. This makes your calculation wrong by an order of magnitude. The videos are there to prove it.

2) Mousavi being under house arrest and then let out due to pressure caused by so many people marching and protesting is a more likely scenario. Don't underestimate the stupidity of snap decisions made when the reaction was unexpected.

3) The president of the election committee can dissent with the Ayatollah, even if it were dangerous for him personally to do so. Also, Ayatollah went back on his proclamation a day later and asked for an inquiry into the elections. This makes that the president's claim that much more valid.

None of these claims are unlikely, but caution must be exercised anyway. I'd rather believe the people in the streets than what someone from the media can tell me. If you don't believe me, watch the Twitter streams. There's a lot of misinformation there, but also a lot of good information. Sifting through this is a journalist's job.
They really feel at home within this constraint. It's very important to them that it be compatible with the 160-char SMS limit because they feel Twitter is at its heart an SMS publishing system that has grown to have other uses.
The RISE and reach of Javascript
I love qalc. It's not really a command, but a command line application. It's a calculator with floating point arithmetic, knowledge of units (even exchange rates if downloaded) and some solving ability.

My top 10 commands is/are:

201 ssh
189 svn
90 sudo
84 rm
73 ps
70 qalc
66 mplayer
60 scp
47 less
46 cp

Interestingly, if I remove the ls and cd removal, ls comes in at only the fourth spot. (cd comes at the no. 1 spot, unsurprisingly.)

P.S. I had to change the $2 in the awk command to $4, since I store dates with the commands.
I feel the need to caution the OP that the average doctor can't be counted on to know more about messing around with neural circuitry than random people you find on the Internet. We simply don't have the scientific knowledge at this point to make reliable predictions about the effect of drugs like adderall on a given person.

From what I've been able to tell, all drugs that act as neurotransmitter reuptake inhibitors (including amphetamines like adderall) have a strong potential to cause unpredictable and undesirable side effects. It seems wise to use such drugs only as a last resort to treat a debilitating condition. Lack of motivation suggests you might want to find something more compelling to work on.
section for start-up related submissions -- must read articles for people that are just starting up start-ups
"Wow, @fermat says he's proved something amazing! Damn, it's too short to fit in 140 characters. Oh wait... there's this bit.ly link... oh yeah, bit.ly went out of business and took their URL map with them."

It's a bit hyperbolic but that's the basic problem, I think.
Coming out of past experience, the term "dashboard" automatically sets off my b-llshit meter. I've never seen an honest implementation and use of one.

In brief, in corporate settings there seems to be a strong inclination to "teach to the test", to mix metaphors. The dashboard influences how things are reported, more than it influences underlying behavior or generates true net improvements.

As for the government initiative described, if they want to produce some rolled-up summaries, fine. But I am looking for public access to the raw data, as much as this is possible. There will always be members of the public (and media, if they can get their houses in order) willing to put in the time and effort to produce their own, independent analyses. It's the data we need, and not (solely) some bureaucrat's summation, subject sooner or later to political influence and manipulation, whether at the top or in the inputs.
I've wondered what the real difference is between a parametric module system that allows you to substitute along common interfaces, versus an object system that allows "duck" typing, mixins, or interface inheritance. In practice, the difference is that the former comes with type inference. :)

I think it'd help if there were more books on OCaml. The French O'Reilly one is pretty good (and free online, http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/oreilly-book/), but the Joshua Smith one is awful, and there aren't many others in English.

Also, the OCaml syntax scares some people, and its error messages are pretty unclear, particularly if you haven't learned how to work with the flow of H-M typing. These (and other similar issues) aren't fundamental problems with the language, though, just rough edges in the implementation.
Cells are like robust computational systems
Yeah, and the iPhone started with OS X and went from there. Something tells me OS X can multi-task.

(Keep in mind: Playing music and txting / getting phone calls is multi-tasking.)
It seems to have zero clue that I have scripting turned off, so I see nothing interesting at all.

It is trivial to add script to tell the user, hey, this site is more interesting when you allow JavaScript. Why do so few sites do it?
As an ADHD-affected person myself, the above resonates strongly with me as a description of its symptoms, and indeed of my thoughts regarding ADHD itself. I have been on ADHD medication (first Ritalin, then Concerta; both use methylphenidate as their active ingredient, as opposed to Adderall) for over a decade now, and have suffered negligible ill effects.

One thing in particular I'd like to note is that my dosage has steadily decreased over the years, not just because my symptoms have become less severe, but because I have noticed there is a certain "threshold" dosage - not just of methylphenidate, but of stimulants in general - beyond which the effects of further medication or stimulants on me change. This change is not a complete reversal; a stimulant is still a stimulant. But up to this threshold, stimulants aid my ability to resist impulses and concentrate on things I may not be interested in, while beyond it, they make me hyperactive and give me the jitters without significantly aiding my concentration. Furthering the vision analogy, this threshold seems to me the logical equivalent of 20/20 vision. This threshold dosage has itself been steadily decreasing. (My actual vision, on the other hand, has been steadily getting worse.)
A Renowned Geneticist Analyzes Consumer Genetict Tests
IPhone developer gets a call from Apple regarding his app
I have to disagree here. I can't think of any incidents where anyone I know has gone to a doctor and requested a specific drug and not had it prescribed. All the doctor visit accomplished was to make it more expensive.

We'd probably be better off if the prescription requirement was removed from the vast majority of drugs and the advertising was restricted instead.
Fred Wilson: The Value Of Twitter Is In “The Power Of Passed Links”
Yes I do. Well, maybe not alarm clock firmware, but if I want to, I can easily rewrite a paragraph of a book (or even insert and remove entire pages if I like). I may be unhappy with the resulting quality, but it's my choice to make. If I want a deck of cards with five suits, I can easily add the extra suit. I remember a cut of Star Wars 1 surfacing at one point that omitted Jar-Jar; while distributing this cut was a copyright violation, creating it certainly was not.

Now, of course, this doesn't restrict Apple from building in mechanisms to prevent this sort of thing. I won't buy their device because of them, but I doubt this bothers Steve Jobs one bit.
Sure; there's no silver bullet. My remark about closures was more to address his criticism that packaging up and passing around state was too much work to be worth it.

Programming in Lua has a nice example of a maze game where state is passed around by emitting functions. It's a toy problem, but I think it's instructive: http://www.lua.org/pil/6.3.html
An old roommate of mine is a psychiatrist and he claims that 60% of his job is denying drug requests.
Relativly low tech, i.e. existing, working tech.

And I am not so much talking about costs, rather about whether photovoltaic is really sustainable.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/02/apple-says-jailbreaking...

If Apple honestly believed they would never go after someone for jailbreaking, then they wouldn't waste their time laying the legal groundwork to do so.
Nope. The future is hierarchical all over the place. Just like the present and the past.
As to the house arrest rumor, when I saw it go by on twitter it was usually marked as unsubstantiated, and it was quickly replaced by reports he was not under house arrest.

If you are going to focus on a twitter feed, you need to be a more critical reader, but it seems to be quickly self correcting.
Virtual Bowery
Disagree. I doubt many iPhone users really mind. You email people your pictures instead of MMS :/ they get them when they're at their computer if their phone can't do email.

(I'm in Europe, not everyone has MMS).
I have to admit that I'm a bit cynical about the accuracy of any of the tweets. How do we know for use that the tweets are actually coming from Iran?

My guess is that most are not, and that they are being written by people who are trying to sway public opinion.
"Why isn't all of an CS undergrad's education done via open-ended projects? Consider the requirement to take Physics 1 (freshman mechanics). This could easily be replaced by the professor saying 'I would like you to build me a simulator for my home pool table.' The professor doesn't say what the interface should be or how detailed the simulation must be. It is up to the students, who will organize themselves into groups of 2 or 3, to figure out what is practical to accomplish in a portion of the semester. It will also be up to those students to work through exercises in a standard Physics textbook as a subtask."

This is an interesting suggestion for changing the undergraduate curriculum. See a famous video series

http://www.learner.org/resources/series26.html

for a startling problem with the old way of education: "Why is it that students can graduate from MIT and Harvard, yet not know how to solve a simple third-grade problem in science: lighting a light bulb with a battery and wire?"
I am not sure if it is just me but I find that "simple" is not that easy. In a given problem (programming), I usually start with the obvious solution. I then try to accommodate my code to changes or features. The code will then be "complex" or not an elegant solution. In the process, I will discover a "simple" or a better way than the original one that I have.

Obvious -> Complex -> Simple

The author mentioned about a 20 and a 10 page solution to a math problem. It is possible that the person who has the 10 page solution learned from the 20 page solution and discovered a simpler way.
I'n not sure about building up a conversation up to the point. Could you be more specific? API is a good idea and it is in TODO list, but not a number one priority.
Where has it not reached? I wonder if they browse web pages from the ISS!
Things I have learned:

optipng: png files are often not optimally small, even for what can be done by an automated process. Run optipng on the png's on your site, you'll be suprised.

example (compare before and after idat sizes):
find /usr/share/gnome -iname .png -print0|xargs -0 optipng -o7 -simulate

advancecomp: a zlib implementation that tries harder to compress, but with output that is still totally compatible.

use like: advpng -z -4 $file

advpng should only be used after* optipng, since optipng won't want to save the file if it is larger, even if the idat is smaller. since optipng can only use the regular zlib, the smallest files come from optimizing the idat, then optimizing the compression.

Just going through a regular debian desktop install, you will see png files that shrink over by over 90%. This is, of course, a lossless operation.
That's also what I'm looking forward to see.
Personally my solution here would be distributed P2P: encrypted content dispatched through neighbours/servers (for some part of the content only, you could choose, for your blog but not necessarily all your shared disk).

I think this + some distributed P2P could well be the web3.0: a new way poeple could use and share their data (a huge open facebook killer).
Serious question: Is it common for professors to require the purchase of their own titles for a class?
Dude, the purpose of effort is to gain skills and confidence, not just getting things done. Start small. Progress slowly but steadily.

Taking drugs to solve your problem seems to be a way of solving the symptoms, not the root cause. If you don't want to take drugs for your whole life, you are better off going to the root cause of your lack of will power TODAY.

As for a better way of improving your will power and confidence, I suggest you talk to your friends, go to a doctor, try sports, meditation, play in a band, or do whatever you feel you need to be done. Get some professional advice if you thing it'll make you some good - making a diagnosis over http is not my mojo :) Just make sure you are on the right track.

As a side note, I'm not against drugs. Sometimes you need them in order to get pass some barriers, but I seem them like a kool-aid quick patch instead of a good code base refactor ;)
First Look: Object Oriented CSS
The Future of Email Marketing? Twitter.
It would have been much cooler if you'd included a picture of the stack of masonite inverted so we could see the actual topology. Otherwise, pretty awesome.
That's more permanently (and aestethically) corrected by ripping up the floor and re-leveling it... But I grant that would be more work.
you could say that about almost anything online, though. whoops, wikipedia went out of business and now we've lost a lot of information. oh darn, wordpress went down for good and took all its hosted blogs and the infinite wisdom found within their content.

that is an issue with the internet at large, not just with url shorteners. in addition, the only externally meaningful thing that would be lost is the bitly connection on twitter that connects that tweet to the content. whatever brilliance he linked to would still exist outside that scope and be accessible. unless his bitly link was to bitly itself.
The difference is that users aren't sharing data with each other, but rather companies are providing services by giving you data.

And a file is just a way to store a database in order to interface with the OS, not the way records themselves are stored. Point is, the Internet is a lot more nuanced than "file sharing".
Facebook takes Famed “Spam-King” Sanford Wallace to Court
The famed king Sanford Wallace faced a federal lawsuit by facebook at the starting of this year (February 24th, 2009) as well as Adam Arzoomanian, and Scott Shaw for crimes under the CAN-SPAM Act, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and the California Anti-Phishing Act.
And protect a developer's investment? Easily hacked platforms become easily pirated platforms....just ask anyone who developed games for the Dreamcast....
New Exotic Material Could Revolutionize Electronics
ScienceDaily (June 16, 2009) — Move over, silicon—it may be time to give the Valley a new name. Physicists at the Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have confirmed the existence of a type of material that could one day provide dramatically faster, more efficient computer chips.
I usually listen to the di.fm stations, without any strong preference to any one in particular. Some days chillout or ambient works best, while sometimes its goapsy which won't let you out of the zone.
I think people try and say this about Facebook, SMS, & Twitter. It is a new form of permission marketing. That is why companies spend so much time on their facebook page, and many do with twitter as well. They will not replace email marketing in the short term, but they reach a group of people that hate to give out their email, but aren't as afraid to follow or friend people.
>>without lots of pointless data copying.
Think tail recursion. It is easily optimized. It presents a nice uniform interface that forces the right thing. Just look at .net the generated main. It replaces general global scope with an application object global scope that rather encourages "cheating".
Setting up a chroot is often easier than virtualization, when the host and "virtual" systems are different distributions of the same OS.

On Debian-like systems (including Ubuntu) you can use debootstrap to set up the chroot, e.g.:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebootstrapChroot
Most hated business sayings
I wonder, were there any forecasts for the Iranian election (you know, asking a couple of people and interpolating)? It would be difficult to fake those? Could give a likelihood for the election results to be false or not.

Also, aren't there any satellites pointed at Iran? Couldn't they be used to estimate the number of demonstrators?
I like this post only because I can relate. When I launched my most recent project I had a pretty poor response rate even though I emailed a lot of folks individually. Fortunately I made a list of who I contacted and now I'm going to email them again and let them know about some changes I've made to clear up initial points of confusion. Inspired +1.
Love your new UI for selecting the search mode, so smooth and obvious. Except the icon for "Mostly Info Sites" didn't ring intuitive to me - it wasn't even immediately clear that those three things are books. I'm not really in a position to make suggestions because your project is so awesome, but... maybe use an open book instead?
MySpace lays off 30% of "bloated" staff, still has 1,000 employees
Apple's latest F-you to iPhone developers
AVR, 8051, 6809, 68HC11, 68HC05, probably more I don't remember.
How to a Build a Versatile InDesign Library
Is it just me, or I don't see anywhere in this interview that they actually paid up...
> I've wondered what the real difference is between a parametric module system that allows you to substitute along common interfaces, versus an object system that allows "duck" typing, mixins, or interface inheritance. In practice, the difference is that the former comes with type inference. :)

In OCaml, I can create a module with multiple types, hide information about both of them, and write code sees both of their privates at the same time. In OOP, this can't be done as elegantly (only through the use of inheritance, friends, or inner classes). And this is just the tip of the iceberg; there's a lot more flexibility.

Books would help, as would improving the quality of the error messages (which are literal translations from French). However, neither of these are problems with the language itself... you can improve them without changing a single line of code or iota of the specification.

Type error messages will with HM always be hard (I think understanding an OCaml error message is a PSPACE-complete problem). But, Haskell has great type error messages, so again, this can be improved.

However, I still stand by my claim that the language itself doesn't force programs to be awkwardly structured, as is claimed throughout this discussion.
My Drama Failure
"before I spend hours configuring some freeware, piece-of-crap application"

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