skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Feynman and Erdős aren't modern? How about Hawking? I mean,"alive" would have to count for something in the "modern" department, right?
Why are you insulting zkz? Submitting an article doesn't mean you agree with it.
"Who says modern scientists are dull? Compared to when?"

Compare non-fiction books of the 70s to non-fiction books today. With the exception of a couple people like Ray Kurzweil, our books today aren't a tenth as creative or brilliant. I'd argue that in most fields today scientists are just refining models created between the 60s and early 80s. Linguistics, educational theory, psychology, and organization behavior are all good examples of this.
When did MLK call for violence? (I'm not disagreeing (I don't know enough about the topic), just curious).
I have the same problem. I have TONS of Mathematics (mainly) and Physics books, but I've not really worked through most of them. I've spent a fortune on them so far. I always keep saying that I'll take a couple of years off to concentrate on nothing but hard science, but I know that will never happen.

I actually have a theory that good programmers are frustrated Mathematicians and Physicists who couldn't stomach the real thing and chose the easier way out.
Airport Passenger Uses iPhone to Show Harassment by TSA
Unemployment is not necessarily a bad thing. Just think about all the recently laid-off people whose jobs absolutely do not benefit society in any way. Predatory lenders are a great example.
Cool, but just in theory because of IE compatibility issues.

Hmm, I wonder if you could have done this without :target, using a:active. Drop an element inside of a link that is the lightbox container (#lightbox_container), set to display: none. Then, a#lightbox_link:active #lightbox_container would be display:block;.

I'm on my way out, but maybe I'll try it out when I get back. Using position: fixed on the lightbox container, it'd be IE7+ compatible. Position:absolute would be IE6+.
A quick Google search isn't returning much, but it's hard to find a good set of terms to search for. I recall spending a lot of time in a class talking about it, though. At once point we were given quotes and asked to identify them as being either MLK or MX, and, not surprisingly in this context, all of the quotes about avoiding violence were from Malcolm X, and all of the ones demanding violent revolution were Martin Luther King.
The future of pedestrian navigation (mobile augmented reality ala Photosynth)
In the context of the article, I would consider modern to mean admitted into grad school later than 1985. It doesn't make sense to talk about people like Hawking because we're talking about the selection effects of school.
Hello, I'm the post author, the reason I didn't give a link was because the site shown was a closed beta. It is open to the public now so check it out at http://community.wacom.com
This is generally the case across the physical and life sciences too. Even "revolutionary" fields like epigenetics and genomics are effectively refinements and extensions of the pioneering work done in molecular biology during the 1960s and 70s. The same goes for particle physics, where the framework for the standard model is decades old. It seems that scientific innovation occurs in punctuated equilibria.
Not everybody.

I won't let them ruin my day.
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8u5dp/erik_nagg...
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The problem with math books. Succinctness. There you have it. This is the single most annoying problem with succinctness. When you go over a line of text sometimes it is justified to spend 3 hours with it. But sometimes its not, its just something that you are not seeing. The thing with math books is you cant tell if it needs 3 hours or 2 minutes because all the lines look the same and the succinct ones kinda jump at you without warning. Succinctness is Power, but if you are facing a powerful person in combat you wont be singing the glories of origins of your foes power.

The way I go about these books is to work the theorems myself. It will take a loooong time to get through the first few chapters because that is where you are getting oriented towards that kind of thinking. The second chapter is usually the hardest! Stick with it. Do not try to calculate how long it is going to take to complete this book at this rate. Because the thing gets faster as you read it. Some kinda exponential function at work, the more you read the faster you can read since you have an intuition for the succinct parts and you can sense them from far. Many times you don't have to complete the book since the later chapters are on a need to know basis and the fundamentals are covered in the first half of the book. Also the thing gets faster once you cross the second chapter since you know the language now.

Why you should work the theorems yourself: When you read them you feel like you know them, but this is a bias. ( I use that word as an umbrella term to refer to all unintentional consequences of the way our mind works ). Once you try to reconstruct the theorem, that is when you get to understand all the gaps, holes and whole craters in your knowledge with such clarity.

Clearly knowing what you don't know is the last but one step before you know it. This is like finding the exact line in which the bug occurs, 95% of the times when I have done this the fix is immediately obvious to me. The remaining 5% of the times the bug is a consequence of the architecture (fondly referred to as a feature). To think of a parallel to this in learning: these are the times when you feel an Ah ha moment where whole areas of darkness come to light.

You need a guru by all means to guide you. Not all the information about the difficulty of a topic is captured by a book. You wont understand the consequences of a particular way of thinking unless you have spent a few years doing it wrong. So find a person who has been down that path to guide you. Also a buddy group makes the whole experience much more manageable and fun.
it's that principle that is partly (largely?) responsible for the god-awful state of website standards.
Why did it fail? You can just ban mibbit if you like on the channel :/

We didn't want to ban an entire service! Unfortunately, it wound up being the easiest way -- hence, our attempt to avoid doing so failed.

I've used Mibbit as my primary client for a year. I take offense at your blanket statements about the "type of users that use mibbit".

You are an outlier. The "type of users that use mibbit" were consistently abusive, difficult to deal with, and ultimately detrimental to our communities.
There's no question things go in S-curves, but I really get the feeling that the kind of people who did great work in the 60s and 70s generally aren't allowed to go into academia today. I personally would probably get a PhD in another life, but there's no point because academia is generally designed to filter people like me out, so I would have to spend 2-4 years convincing the right people to go to bat for me and it's just not worth it.
So, they don't really mean "modern", they mean "young". And they don't really measure a baseline of "dullness" for any preceding generation of young scientists. And of course it doesn't make sense to talk about Hawking, if he is a counter-example.
Inventory is a buffer against scarcity. As there is generally no scarcity with books, perhaps one should keep no inventory?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiolytic

Perfectly normal people with anxiety problems take them.
Facebook quite intermittently displays careless amateurism in its conduct. However, what exudes more concern in their response is the 'possibility' of any random employee having the audacity to respond to a matter like this, without actual insight.
You sure about that? It sounds a lot like "Boy, this music these kids are listening to is just a lot of noise-- not nearly as good as the music when I was young...."
Most scientists don't publish books. They do research and publish papers.
I think you're taking it way too seriously. This is from someone who's never used Twitter.

I'd take it less well if he were in my family, but I'm sure they learned the news first.
I'm not making an argument. I'm making hazy observations based on feelings.

Everyone knows people who are their own people, but who do not impose on others. If asked, they will tell you. If pressed, they will stand up for themselves. But they sometimes show restraint where others might take the opportunity to "count coup."

It's also possible to be your own person and stand up for yourself while being abrasive, suffering no fools, and keeping everyone around you on edge. There's also a whole spectrum in between.

If my observations about certain subscribers to individualist philosophy bothers you, I suggest that might be salient data. You have far better access to additional data than I for evaluating that.

I find Objectivism, from what I know of it, to be remarkably self-consistent. It is an admirable product of its time. Some of what Ayn Rand said needs to be modified in the face of new evidence from evolutionary biology and neuroscience. (Humans clearly do have instincts.) A sign of a healthy philosophy is its ability to incorporate such new data.
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"... fixing bikes has given him 'a place in society,' as well as an 'economically viable' job that won’t evaporate or get moved overseas."

At least until telerobotics delocalizes skilled labor. Like it or not, there's no guarantee of job security even for the plumbers and electricians and carpenters. Keeping your hands dirty will increasingly be a hobbyist anachronism or affectation. Maybe unfortunate, but so it goes. All is flux.
"Most scientists don't publish books. They do research and publish papers."

But this is because they no longer get "credit" for writing books, which is exactly the point the article was making. Scientists used to write books all the time.
Shaspa grid is a home to a virtual home
Mathematician's Lament: An essay on math education and on how we view math
It's very possible that the employee shot some emails around internally, got back some responses from various engineers responsible for this functionality, and then replied with a slightly inaccurate paraphrase of the information he was given. I know that's how it works at my employer (hopefully without the incorrect/rude-ish responses).
I have no idea why you are being voted down. Your comments are useful and relevant. It's a disgrace that Mibbit is being given the benefit of the doubt here just because their founder is an HN member.
Maybe because none of them have mercury poisoning?
Has anyone considered the possibility that maybe the workhorse technologies in software development have begun to stabilize? C, C++, SQL, Unix etc. has been around for some time. Java and .Net aren't going to go away anytime soon. We may yet see some disruptive changes in Web development, but I doubt whether the basic Javascript/HTML/CSS scheme, or PHP/Python/Ruby set will become obsolete anytime soon.

My plan is to ensure that I can always deliver valuable software and maybe even create some that I can own. A lot of my friends are doing their MBAs - I just don't think that route is for me.
Is there a man page for the penis?
It doesn't need to be that complex.

For every million dollars the government puts into hospitals/medicare a bunch of lives are saved. There are diminishing returns, however, and at some point you have to say, okay, that's enough, let's put some money into education instead.

You have to find some kind of balance, and the more you put in education the fewer lives you can save in hospitals. The only sensible way (I can think of) to find the right balance is by crunching the numbers. Saving a life for $1000? That's only 20 text books, definitely a good deal. Saving a life for a million? That's 20 scholarships. A life isn't worth that much.

Unless you're Steve.
It would be good to read into Anxiety disorders[1] to get a feel of what sorts of coping mechanisms exist so you could benefit from the good ones, and avoid the bad. It's also helpful to monitor exactly what happens when you get spikes of anxiety; note the situation, your previous state, and any other details you can, even if you don't think they're pertinent. The more data you can obtain, the easier it will be to identify your ailment, chronic or not.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiety_disorder
Despite the sarcasm, there is a kernel of truth here. It is difficult to be fully compliant with every standard at all times. Bugs happen. Support people deny that bugs exist. If Facebook is sending some improperly formatted mail, that's hardly news.
Yeah, this is exactly right. To a decent approximation, I spent college and grad school just basically plowing through math and physics texts. In eight or so years, with extensive help from the faculty of two universities, I grew to understand the contents of several dozen thick hard science and math books, and for my efforts they gave me two degrees.

Since quitting school I've dragged myself through a small pile of classic CS texts, and have learned a ton (and, as a side effect, become nicely employable as a programmer). It is insanely hard (and rewarding) work. If it's hard, then you're learning something; keep it up!
Gandhi’s Top Fundamentals for Changing the World
What exactly do you mean? I hear a lot of people put this kind of conspiracy theory view of academia out but I never really get the details.
I don't doubt the memory just because there's nothing more dangerous than a teacher who can't recognize a Bible quote and who then attributes modern meaning to the speaker. MLK was a reverend so he obviously quoted the Bible a lot and the Bible can have some violent imagery.

But I can't see the man who said this advocating violence of any kind...

"Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love."
I haven't finished reading it yet, but I'd say I generally agree that scientists today are dull. They don't have a sense of mission. They have little ambition. They seem more like bureaucrats than scientists.

I am trying to separate myself from this trend. (I am currently studying physics independently.)

I can recall a few conversations with scientists that re-affirm this observation. One time I phoned a certain doctor of physics at the Hebrew University. (His field is something related to building a quantum computer.) We had a friendly chat about some things in physics, he seemed nice. Then we got to the topic of me studying physics independently, without trying to obtain a degree for it. He asked me, "Why are you studying physics then?" I said, "To discover the laws of the universe." He said, "Seriously now, why?"
I realize this comment is in the nature of a quip, but I've been saying for some time that China (and similar) is/was the prototype.
I don't see how the WMP fallback works, given that XP and Vista don't include Ogg or MP4. Maybe the author thinks it works because he has a codec pack installed.
This is a very interesting idea. I'd say pitching the idea to the Creative Commons people is probably the best way to go. In fact, one of the CC licenses might already work ... maybe.

By the way, the HN title needs improving. This post is not primarily about instructables; rather, it is pushing a new content-licensing idea.
When my sister died, the reality was that I didn't know everyone that was important to her, so I had to resort to emailing all those she had emailed in a mass mailing she had sent a while back. I also created a web page so that people would find when they searched for her.

If twitter had been around, I would have posted there too.

Years on, I still get email from old friends of hers who found out via the page and want to chat about her to me.
I would try to take them cover-to-cover and then use them as reference. Also, perhaps, if you really wanted to learn the material, you would simply check them out of the library. There's been an article posted on the frontpage recently about how verbalizing a goal makes it less likely to be actualized: I think a parallel occurs with buying books (I experience the same phenomenon).

Get'em from the library, yo.
It sounded pretty stupid at first glance, but the more I read, the more it made sense. These guys are natural bloggers -- of COURSE they need to tolerate each others' schtick. It's like being with a rock star and tolerating the ego, or being with a programmer and tolerating the tendency to be focused and inaccessible, or being with a salesman and tolerating the ADD, or even being with a child psychologist and dealing with their constant goddamn empathy and understanding that just won't shut off. Whatever makes your partner successful and interesting probably has an obnoxious downside that you will have to accept.
You could try out "ie4linux" (unofficial, of course) http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page

I've heard it's nice, I think it's essential IE files and wine slapped into a pretty package - but I've also heard/seen that you can have several versions of IE for testing stuff out. Might.. be nice. I dunno.
I can say I'm not very surprised to see these kinds of sloppy, hand-wavy, unscientific arguments proferred by an evolutionary psychiatrist.
You've clearly never seen Dr Brian Cox the "Rock-star physicist"

http://www.ted.com/talks/brian_cox_on_cern_s_supercollider.h...
It IS a feature. This is abused by most pure Javascript apps such as GMail. It's just carried over to this CSS implementation.
Trivia on Twitter Behind the Scenes Day 2
I would venture that doing original research should be given more weight than writing books.

Books contained calcified knowledge that can be disseminated by someone familiar with the field; a non-scientist as it were. This is the point of publications of popular science.

Original research that leads to new insights into a field are more difficult to obtain, require a higher level of skill and ability and therefore should be more important to a scientific reputation.
Yup. Hard science books take a long time to digest. But the trick to keep at it is to keep a self check: is this something you're really interested in learning? Perhaps you'll find out within a few chapters that it's not worth it. And that's ok.
I actually abandoned a PhD (after 2+ years) in favor of industry. The modern academic world -- at least in CS -- seems largely to consist of producing as many papers as you can, putting forth unimportant results, so as to get more 'points' and another funded project and more students. (British universities really are assessed on published papers, with different weightings accorded to international conferences and journals. It's a game.)

To do anything interesting means reducing or delaying your paper output (which your supervisor will not appreciate), and to get the results published requires you to write so as to persuade people with no vested interest in publishing novel output to agree with you... but without being able to have a dialogue.

I recall one amusing paper review by three reviewers which was essentially

1. "the treatment of X is great, but I'd like to see more Y",
2. "too much Y, not enough X",
3. "both X and Y are fine, but I'd have been really interested in seeing Z instead", where Z was entirely unrelated.

How on earth could an author anticipate the preferences of those authors and get three recommendations? Well, picking a non-controversial subject would be a good start.

Multiply this anecdote up to the size of the academic and industrial systems, and it's no wonder that so many people decide that academia is not for them. These people tend to be lumped in with the people "not cut out for it", but I think a significant percentage simply realize that academia has a different value system, and don't want to participate. Some of those people go on to do interesting or revolutionary things in corporate research, or even in mainstream industry.

Would the world be better if they were in universities instead? Probably not... but we'd have our interesting scientists back.
What I mean is that the best grad schools in the US are purposely designed to have an extreme bias toward selecting students with the best grades and the highest GRE scores. You can still get in without good grades and without taking the GRE if you've done very good research and have earned the trust of the right people, but it's very difficult. And even if you do get accepted, you'd probably face an uphill battle throughout your entire career.
Oh no! There's a third edition out now? I haven't cracked the 2nd yet!

EDIT: Ok, the 3rd won't be out 'til Sept.

From the book's web page:
"The third edition has been revised and updated throughout. It includes two completely new chapters, on van Emde Boas trees and multithreaded algorithms, and substantial additions to the chapter on recurrence (now called "Divide-and-Conquer"). It features improved treatment of dynamic programming and greedy algorithms and a new notion of edge-based flow in the material on flow networks. Many new exercises and problems have been added for this edition."
Man that's ugly. I thought the idea was to make this stuff simple?
Doesn't it loose one of the advantages of a JS version — the ability to lazy load, rather than loading all the full sized images on every page load?
There is a market for premium WP themes and plugins. And, now that people are using WP as a CMS more and more and not just blog software it will grow even faster. Take a look at themeforest.net or go to elance.com and see how many people are hiring plugin developers.
This is really sad, he was one of the greatest thinkers of the hacker community, certainly up there with pg.

This doesn't make him justice, but his rant about XML is one of my favorite rants ever: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/xml/s-exp_vs_XML