skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
reading a bit through the history I have the impression that projects like these were taking resources but achieving little.

I doubt a plane like this with the technology of that time would have had any impact in the war, other than losing lots of pilots in an unstable plane.
MTV wants engineering students for reality tv show
Apparently MTV is doing a reality t.v. about student engineers who pull off clever stunts and hacks. They are describing it as Myth Busters meets. I just heard about it from the engineering department at my school so I don't know a lot about it, but it sounds interesting.
Apparently MTV is doing a reality t.v. about student engineers who pull off clever stunts and hacks. They are describing it as Myth Busters meets. I just heard about it from the engineering department at my school so I don't know a lot about it, but it sounds interesting.
The entire time I was reading this article I was wondering just what kind of data Cory Doctorow could have that is so important as to require this kind of thought be put into its encryption. Does he have access to some sort of nuclear secrets? It seems to me as though he's crossed the line between 'practical' and 'unnecessarily paranoid'.
Check out subtext: http://www.subtextual.org/subtext2.html
Dick Fuld was never 'one of the boys': Lehman had a tortured past, and grew up after its spinout from American Express as a bond house, not an elite investment bank, and only began rising in the M&A league tables in the 2000s. Until then they made money and were good but never had the social status of the GS execs.

To the other commenter: Lehman was too terrified of its own capital base to participate in the LTCM bailout, but yes they didn't win any friends with that.
Fair enough. It sounds like your view could be described as a utilitarian value system that you impose after the fact based on a preconceived notion of some ends you hope society will achieve.

You also seem to perceive that there exists a true greater good. I challenge you to introspect on that issue. I personally don't believe that the greater good really exists, and I attribute the creation of the meme to religious leaders who used their divine authority to declare what the greater good is so that the faithful would work to promote it in order to save their souls from eternal damnation -- notice the parallels with the modern secular notion?

More mathematically, every individual has a set of interests/preferences. You can consider a function that maps from possible choices (individual, state, etc.) to everyone's preferences and try to maximize the amount of utility generated. But the problem for planners is that sometimes what is in an individual's best interest is not actually what the person wants. So calculating the greater good involves myriad assumptions and fudges... and at its core any notion of the greater good involves making an aesthetic choice of how to transfer benefit/harm across some set of people.

For instance, any notion of the greater good applied to US politics probably neglects the harm inflicted on those who live just across the border who would be happy to work in the US but starve due to US immigration policies. Pretty soon the concept of the greater good (for any meaningful policy choice) conflicts with the idea of nationhood itself and becomes meaningless.
StockTwits builds vibrant community on top of Twitter
"there's an incentive for readers to withhold more valuable information to others (instead of spreading them and making money with Google Adwords)"

There are two problems. The first one is that you make an assumption here, that individuals choose what's in the best interest of the group (if it's only about the individual, the Adwords money might outweigh the information value...). Secondly, even if the assumption holds and people will behave according to this rationale, then still it takes only two or three odd, less-rational individuals to redistribute the information, thereby devaluating it back to free.

That doesn't mean your model won't work. It seems it will (and does already) work very well for something like The Economist - perhaps it simply requires a certain type of readership...
Designing with Psychology in Mind (AEA slide deck)
Awesome. I really hope this gets to front page.
I don't see why he doesn't approach, say, the national Olympic Weightlifting team or something like that. They would just win all the gold medals, break all the world records and I don't think anyone would need more proof after that feat.
Just make a program that takes a password, and then (if correct) sends two emails: One to your box, and then (a day later) one to whomever you're leaving your data to. Tell them the password and then if they use it before you're dead, you have a day to change everything.
I recognize upon reading your comment that it is really quite a cycle -- culture changes our opinion about what the greater good is, and then we all go and talk about how to reorganize the culture to get it! I'll think about this some more tonight.
I recently made the change from Macports to Ubuntu on VirtualBox. Things are much nicer now. My one tip would be to have any datafiles separate (ie not read/write files on the Mac filesystem directly - even though you can) and communicate between the two "machines" using version control.
The term "illustrative programming" seems a bit pretentious, plus misleadingly suggestive of visual programming.

I agree that the spreadsheet is (1) a programming environment, and therefore (2) the most widely used programming environment. Has there been any other tool that put comparable programming power into the hands of non-programmers?

One thing that distinguishes the spreadsheet, which Fowler sort of butts up against without mentioning, is that the user is never asked to formulate abstractions. Spreadsheet formulas always go hand-in-hand with concrete data, so the user can build a spreadsheet without ever having to think beyond their particular example. I think this is one of the keys to the spreadsheet's popularity. To put it another way, I think this is one of the things that makes most programming inaccessible to most people: they have a low tolerance for abstraction. If you asked a spreadsheet user to type in all the formulas before instantiating them with data (and there have been attempts to "improve" on spreadsheets which do just that), most users would recoil.
Sadly, one of the finest articles to appear in the News.YC river has been swamped by de rigeur articles on success, business, and such.

Thank you for posting this, absconditus. I was piqued because I thought music - and it was in a way, Margie Profet was a composer of original ideas, combining disparate but related ideas into a coherent, insightful whole.
Gosh, why go to all this trouble? Just have an unnecessary heart valve transplant, and have the doctor inscribe your password on the new valve. Then develop a serious booze-and-sodium problem (I guess margaritas are the most efficient way to do this) until you absolutely cannot live without that last remaining valve. At that point, nobody can access your password until you're dead. Or, at least, once someone can access your password, you're definitely dead, which is more or less the same thing.
I've thought about this and wondered if it would be possible to create an escrow service that would only give over the key when say an official death certificate is presented or something like that.
todd here, developer of parsekit. not a dumb question at all. i should def. put a note about that on the page.

answer is yes, it works on iPhone and the xcodeproj has a target for a static library suitable for including in your iphone app.
I think it's less that he doesn't trust his wife, and more that, as TFA says, "many countries's laws make it difficult or impossible for a court to order you to turn over your keys; once the passphrase is known by a third party, its security from legal attack is greatly undermined, as the law generally protects your knowledge of someone else's keys to a lesser extent than it protects your own."
And every day until you die, the person has to receive an email reminder from you? :P
mandatory ref to support your assertion:

http://xkcd.com/538/
This is such a non-issue I really don't understand why it keeps coming up. Write your passwords down and store them with your other vitally important documents like your checks, bank account records, passport, etc. Why make it so complicated?
I'm trying to dump XM and just use my iPhone in the car, but it's hard.
> reading a bit through the history I have the impression that projects like these were taking resources but achieving little

I also have that impression. There were loads of advanced weapons projects in Nazi Germany, but most never saw the light of day. For example, they had 35 projects to build proximity fuzes for shells and missiles, but didn't field a single proximity fuze during the war. America, on the other hand, had one such project and made millions of proximity fuzes.
If you want to get sophisticated you could use Reed-Solomon encoding to avoid this problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed-Solomon_error_correction
I'd go even further than that. I trust my wife with all of my passwords and as far as I'm concerned she can go ahead and use any of them at any time for anything she wants. It's really not a big deal. I married her, for heaven's sake. What kind of secrets do you keep from your own wife? Sounds like a Hollywood marriage.
I agree. And allow me to suggest this paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/0809.1393

It's not everyday that you see an algebraic geometer writing on CDOs ;-)
This critique is pretty lame, especially for some guy who claims to have been follower or student of AR for a time. He either wasn't paying attention or not very bright. The objections he raised are all addressed in detail by Rand in her writings. For example, the idea that Objectivism is against charity and helping the poor is one of the standard canards and misrepresentations. Objectivism has nothing against charity as long as its voluntary. Taking money by force to support a welfare class is immoral. Him and all his socialist buddies are free to give all their money to the poor if that's what they value. As far as the actually needy, i.e. those who are disabled or unable to care for themselves, they are literally dependent on those who are not needy and their need is not a moral claim -- not a moral obligation to be enforced by the govt. In a free society the voluntary charity would be generous and sufficient for these cases because unlike the ever growing need of a parasite class the actual needy is a fairly small and finite group and thus a marginal, side issue in ethics.

Now if these clowns really want to stop AR they should attack her theory of concepts. I'm waiting....
What to do when the .COM you want isn't available?
It definitely helps to start with an environment where tests are easy to write, so that you can focus on the principles of testing without having to learn a lot of mechanics.

Python's built-in "unittest" module is an example of that. While it's not perfect, you can quickly form good habits by using it.

And it is not limited to Python. For instance, I've written unittest-compatible classes that basically run other programs as test cases. Either way, you're forced to think about things like "how do I automatically detect that this failed?" and "is the purpose of this test clear?".
Kent Beck's book: Test-Driven Development

Don't just read it: Work your way through it. You need to follow the recipe to develop the discipline/knack.

Fairly quick and reasonably easy.
Generally the largest problem when MS buys a company or does interesting research is the transition into MS products. The various politics in the company force the the interesting tech to make compromises to utilize existing MS products. Often these compromises clearly make the tech less interesting from an outsider's prospective. The same thing happens at most(all?) large tech companies including Google.

This is a great idea along the lines of another thing I've wanted: OCR for math formulas when scanning documents or drawings (some really good computer science documents are out of print or are unavailable in a digital, searchable form).
IPhone OS 3.1 Beta And SDK Already Rolling Out To Developers
Twitter Rolls Out UI Changes To Simplify Your Social Connections
Before you take the plunge (on starting up)
Good catch. Here it is now, as I'm sure you've noticed:

http://blog.everyblock.com/2009/jun/30/source/

=>

http://www.everyblock.com/code/
America's Most Promising Startups
Just a minor nit, but selflessness would be doing something without regard for what you want, which does not necessarily preclude it from being something you want. Doing something which you do not want to do is still being driven be the self.
I'd say "stupid assumptions" assuming that the analysts cared about the company at least as much as about their own pockets.
I am pretty sure most law systems would not consider the wife a third party in this context (eg. see the US spousal privilege).

[By wife I mean legal spouse in general of course]
>I've thought many times, though, that Rand conveniently ignores the case of those who truly can't care for themselves: the sick, the insane, and perhaps the crippled as well.

There is an interview with Ayn on a talk show and was asked about what should happen to the "ungifted". She believes that first it is the parents responsibility to support them but if they are poor and can't afford to then private charities should look after them.

Found the clip if your interested (around 5-6min in):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUwTHn-9hhU
It should include a way for you to cancel the request, so if the person does use it before you die you don't have to reset all your passwords. Basically a dead man's switch.

I thought there were already similar services but only found this casualty of the first dotcom bubble: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/ar...
What you are looking for is Shamir's Secret Sharing algorithm.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamirs_Secret_Sharing
The real danger is terrorists with shovels that know their graph theory.

Anyone who knows graph theory is probably unfit to dig any physical holes.
I do agree with the point that it is possible to spend a lot of time fixing "broken" tests. The lesson that should often be learned is that certain tests are not adding enough value to warrant the constant maintenance. (Code alone requires plenty of maintenance as it is.)

One thing that works extremely well is to have a test environment. In other words, spend the time to replicate your entire production flow 100% (but in isolation), so that you can "deploy" changes and see if anything blows up. This not only catches stupid deployment bugs, but it also allows you to avoid some unit testing by simply relying on customers themselves: have them log into the isolated environment and do exactly what they would have done in production, and you'll know if it works.
I found that bit interesting too. A lot of people bring up unions as what killed GM, and the common rebuttal is that labor is a small part of GM's cost. If Konstantin's anecdote is typical of GM, it seems the cost of the union is a lot more than just labor costs.
Hope it's got a scatter guard around it. Yeesh!
Good, but overly long article. I have reached the similar conclusions in favor of functional tests over the last decade or so.

Personally, I have worked seriously used DBC, TDD, and automated scenario testing, and hybrids in that order of learning.

My conclusions about the sweet-spot (and this may vary depending on your area):

1. Automated functional testing in the large, and DBC in the small is a winning combo.

2. Special techniques for graphics intensive programming: I get my scenario tests to show what's happening on the screen, and I can slow 'em down and step through 'em

3. I never got a lot of dependency injection / mocks (like the author) -- not sure if I don't get 'em or application area is wrong

4. You need special techniques for intensive algorithmic code where there's a combinatorial explosion of cases and line coverage won't do; e.g. randomly generated test cases + compute intensive sanity checks

Bottom-line: Automated scenario tests exercise the code; DBC pin-points illegal states.

DBC = Design by Contract = pre-conditions + post-conditions + invariants. In practice understanding the method (this takes work) and writing explicit pre-conditions gives ~70-80% of the benefit. To do invariants well needs language support.
I know several computer programmers that do this as a side job. Their analytical minds are well-suited to determining the value of cars.
Ten years ago desktop hard drives were 4-8GB. You're off by an order of magnitude.
>> Gimp it still didn't support adjustment layers for non-destructible editing, which is pretty much a show-stopper.
Packages get used when they lead the way in a given field, most of the OSS design apps I've seen are just playing catch-up.

So which is it? Gimp isn't good enough because it doesn't provide feature for feature compatibility with PS or because it doesn't do something different? You just claimed both. It has a different workflow than PS so yeah as long as you try to keep using it like ps it is going to compare poorly.
Boxes-and-lines programming has been tried many times. It's enticing because if you look at simple examples it seems like it ought to work. The problem is that when applied to programs of any complexity the visual format quickly becomes unwieldy. There's a reason why humans represent complex information textually.
Ironically, he made the same assumptions that killed many CDO players- that past data was sufficient to predict future data.
In that case, cosmetic surgery would be just like dying your hair, which is extremely commonplace.
Well, what can I say? If you're promoting your product with pornography, someone has to just eat the down-votes and subtly poke fun at it. It's going to be me in this case.
100k rpm thats only 1666 rev/sec - that does not seem super fast or anything for something so small.

It has a turbine on it - direct coupled by the look of it - I wonder if it rotates the turbine at that speed - or if it slows down as it loads up - it's seems a big turbine to be doing that sort of speed - it would move a huge amount of air at that speed.

It's hard to see from the pic - but it looks like it only has one coil on it - it needs more than one to start rotating - so maybe it does have 2 or 3.

Anyway awesome - good to see the move to brushless technology in these medium size appliances - previously the domain of the old series wound universal motor.
It's interesting that the SAT-IQ "conversion" formula is (.095 X SAT Math) + (.003 X SAT Verbal) + 50.241 = IQ
and that therefore one SAT math point is "worth" quite a bit more (about thirty times as much!) in IQ than one SAT verbal point.

(The formula seems suspicious, though -- 800 math, 800 verbal converts to an IQ of 129, and 500 math, 500 verbal, which is supposed to be the average college-bound student, converts to 99. The average college-bound student should have an IQ higher than the average person.)
No, unit tests are the new API documentation.

If you're too lazy to write good docs, please, at least leave me some tests.
DM of the Rings - hilarious
FDA Panel For Eliminating Some Acetaminophen Products
It seems to me that the kinds of people who have data requiring this amount of security usually have a lot of other people working for them on just that task.
you want to use "unsigned" and "register".
Problem being government intervention can force them to hand it over. Unless the company is in a place with laws that prevent that sort of outside interference.
It doesn't protect her from people with a '$5 wrench' that want to get the password from her. This is assuming that 'they' figure that getting the password from her is easier/better than getting it from you.
I'll just get my passwords surgically implanted. sounds easier, and cheaper than dealing with all the lawyers. sheesh.
That's bullshit.

The key problem isn't if an application is open source, or even it's usability - it's the incumbency problem.

Name one general consumer application for windows which wasn't being used ~5 years ago - even if it is non open source. I can only think of Firefox, games, and maybe some IM client software.

Even usability disasters (eg Vista) win huge numbers of users when they are the default choice.

When new niches open up (eg, web applications), open source apps have proven to be just as usable as commercial apps. Eg Wikipedia and Wordpress.com are both in the top 10 sites world wide, and both are open source (ie, the apps themselves are open source, not just the infrastructure software).
I have read that Newton would not put numerical examples in his writing because he feared people would pick over some small error and use it to claim the whole work was wrong. I think that's what most of the negative comments here are like that - you guys are probably right about different ways to run the numbers, but you are missing the forest for the trees.

The investment in a college degree is so large, and involves speculating on payoffs that are so far in future, at a time when whatever you think you will do as a career will likely change several times, that the pay off has to be an enormous no-brainer. If the college investment pays off if the interest rate is 8% but not if it is 5%, the college loses just by a bird-in-hand rule. The college guy has to beat the non-college guy by something like 10 times no matter what back of the envelope estimates you make.

Some related personal observations:

-- Ten years ago online forums argued about how to get into the best college, no one even raised the question of if college itself is useful. Now articles and discussions like this are commonplace.

-- No one I know really uses anything they learned in college to make money. Even people working in the same field their degree is in, had to learn how to really work in that field on the job after they left college. College was a big time and money consuming initiation ritual.

-- Most the people I know who earned a large amount of money -- not those who inherited it -- either did not attend college at all or did very poorly in it; nad none of them admitts to using any college education to make money.

-- A handful of the most agressively and purposely stupid people I have ever met have advanced degrees ( medical and legal). I suspect that some part of the culture of those evironments educates people in the stupid direction, not the smart direction, in a kind of "reverse education", encouraging aggressive pronouncements of certainty on uncertain questions, for example.

-- Taking a personal sample of the people I know who have made a lot of money (avoiding those I hear about elsewhere -- just people I personally know, to avoid a media bias but replace it with a personal bias), the way to get rich is to fail out of college after one year of hard drinking, and inherit enough money to buy a small business such as a restaurant or retail franchise and work your ass off for about 15 years, expanding to a chain of those businesses.

-- Most of the people who I know who are going to college now, don't really actively want to go to college. They want to not be at home, and to be around people their age particularly of the opposite sex, and they are passively following the path of least resistence.

All of this sounds bad, but I see a great thing in it: if we as a society really only should be sending about 5 to 10 percent of people to college (perhaps half of them only after a few years in the work force), then we can hugely increase the productivity of our economy very easily. I think, like medical care, we spend a lot on education in this country to get something that is at best only the same as what is available in countries that spend much less.
Until the crucial meeting with your first customer/investor/partner happens and you're stuck on the side of the road waiting for AAA.

Seriously, it's not always just about spending the least.