skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Has anyone read the structure and interpretation of classical mechanics? Is it good? It's free as well. I only studied first year physics. Sharing any experience reading that would be appreciated. :)
understanding that not doing something right doesn't necessarily mean you're doing it wrong

But it might; that is the other half of pragmatism. Being pragmatic is not just a softer way of saying self-defeatist.

And don't be so dismissive of theory. To quote W. Edwards Deming: "Experience by itself teaches nothing...Without theory, experience has no meaning. Without theory, one has no questions to ask. Hence without theory there is no learning." Just doing what you discover is done in practice provides absolutely no room for improvement outside of rare flashes of intuitive brilliance. Theory is not just an abstract description of what has been observed concretely so far; by far the greater value lies in the ability for theory to predict what has a likelihood of being observed in the future. Having a theoretical basis to work off of will give those experiences context, and will give you the ability to do a much deeper analysis. And analysis, if the comments Sara received are any indicator for, is something we need to be doing a lot more of.
And, of course, the iPhone--open source in every way except for revenue and distribution.

What?
Humor and Consensus Building
"It's extremely frustrating to work with individuals and in scenarios such as these. [...]

My strong point is that I communicate well with people, and I'm not afraid to take an issue up with someone"

Reminds me of Office Space: "I've got good people skills, damn it!!!"
It's much harder. E-books don't have a huge analog loophole.
To clarify, I meant the finer distinctions between UTF-8 and unicode aren't as important. I wasn't advocating just using ASCII. UTF-8 just works for most things. I wasn't saying character encodings and knowing how they interact isn't worthwhile. For the average western programmer, UTF-8 is generally the answer.

The author of the article wants everyone to be full aware of the the significance of alternate encodings as well as how they relate to codepoints. That knowledge, while useful (and not really hard to learn in a broad sense), isn't useful for many software developers.
I think they just want to make it as hard as possible to prevent as much bot script account creation as they can.
Yes, that's exactly what I've suggested before:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=214521

I know it'd be a challenge to work in without clutter/confusion, but by -- (1) achieving some visual separation from up/down (perhaps by placing to the right, or near 'reply'); (2) keeping it faded/invisible until mouseover; (3) displaying the total subtly, as with a sparkline -- I think it could work.

The controls on Twitter web pages for favorite/reply/delete are an example of the state-of-the-art for unobtrusive per-item operational controls.
"By whom?"

Obviously by anyone hosting the feed for republishing full content without copy permission. I'm not happy with the current trend in copyright law, either, but it is was it is.

"I don't think it's as cut-and-dried as you say."

It really is.

Edit: your downvotes and personal opinions won't stop you from getting takedown notices and losing lawsuits. Ignore the legal reality at your own peril.
Steve Jobs Announces iPhone 3G S Flies Off Shelves
The compensation for speakers depends on the cost of the conference for attendees, and also things like how many speakers they're bringing in.

I've helped organize a couple [small Perl workshops](http://www.frozen-perl.org) where we charged $20/40 for the early bird rate.

At that cost, we really barely covered the workshop costs (venue & food mostly) with some additional sponsorship. There was no way we could afford to pay speakers at all. People come to support the Perl community and because it's fun.

OSCON, OTOH, pays airfare, one hotel night, and $500 per tutorial to tutorial speakers. But for "regular session" speakers, they just get in free. Of course, OSCON costs $1740 with tutorials, and speaker can attend tutorials, so it's not like you're getting nothing!

I would assume ORA did something similar for RailsConf. If you think the conference is worth what they're charging, then free admission is a significant value.

ApacheCon is a bit odd. When I spoke there way back in 2000 they paid airfare, hotel, and something extra for all speakers. They can do that because it costs about the same as OSCON but they have less than half as many tracks.

So each conference has a different value proposition for speakers and attendees. Personally, I love the small community conferences, and will happily pay out of pocket to go speak at them, because it's fun.
Apparently at one hundred and one karma.
I'm hoping we'll see an easily-hackable high-quality hardware trend, much like the iPhone. Its a very solid product for 90% of users, but enthusiasts can mod it out with just a little effort.
Cannot edit, but I left the link to the presentation out: http://fisl.vidanerd.com/palestra/30
Oops, I just upvoted your comment because I agree with you. Someone please counter balance with a downvote.
Like a photocopier/scanner?
My internal version:

Upvotes mark signal
Donwnvotes mark noise

That said, I do think I have a non-linear response. If I see a comment at -1 which I think has genuine signal I upvote it, even if I completely disagree with the point made. However if the same comment is at +10 I will not upvote it if I don't agree with it.

I am more worried about the duplicates though, I wish there was an easier way to figure out you are submitting a duplicate story besides conducting a prior search. Something like "Thank you for your submission, here are some stories from HN with the same keywords in the last few months, are you sure you want to go ahead?" would be nice.
Why are you against shell scripting languages ?
Throughout school they're ranked against their peers. This extends to a National ranking, where only the top n% can get into IIT. Their high schools are also heavily basied on rote memorization-type learning.
That's a good point, but it doesn't explain why they prevent you from typing "mallinator.com" into a post. To me that's taking it a bit too far -- bots don't read other posts.
Any DRM-crippled device is for chumps.
Yes

- College Student
I find that the corellary is that it's this pain and these lessons that give you such a leg up on the recent graduates just getting into the business.
They don't know how close everyone always is to the line. This relates back to the old "don't spend money on office furniture" (in a startup) advice.
d) create and sell cool new ebook reader gadgets
Nokia denies giving deep packet inspection technology to Iran
Isn't there a quote along the lines of, "Only ignorant consumers make decisions solely on price"?

When non-technical managers decide how they're going to build/maintain software and aren't able to differentiate between a good developer and a guy with a TLA-filled resume, they're going to gravitate to $20/hour/head.

My frustration as a software consultant in the US has been how to differentiate myself to people who don't know what questions to ask and ignore anyone singing his own praises. So far, what's worked best is if someone else who's worked with me and knows the client makes a recommendation. And, I'm not really competing against offshore resources -- it's mediocre on-shore folks that are the issue.
I don't know what the surprise is. These are pretty widely known limitations of the Kindle.
That's a great point. Although I trust the guy who runs it (it's a small project run by an independent iPhone hacker/developer), there's no question that a service run by Apple is more trustworthy.

From my view, however, the cost/benefit analysis strongly favors installing the app. Benefit: It has saved me $500 once already. Cost: 14€ + (chance that the data on my phone will be used maliciously) * (average amount of financial damage that would be done in one of these instances).

But in my opinion, the "Find my iPhone" feature of MobileMe is not comprehensive enough. For example, it should still work if the SIM card is swapped. It should work even if the only available connection is Wi-Fi (such as being indoors) and should report back to the user the name of the hotspot. It should work if the OS is wiped/reinstalled.

iLocalis doesn't do all of these things, but it's much closer.
There is a lot of hype and falshoods about this on Twiter at the moment. For example someone earlier was warning everyone to remove batteries and sims from cellphones because "residual charge" can be used to track you. And that the authorities could turn on phones remotely and listen to what you say.....

Twitter has been great in getting news out but just as bad at propagating over the top panic myths :(
Anything that helps!

I was lucky because I got a teacher who took a lot of pains to separate the book from its context, and who got us all reading books without wondering at first why we were supposed to be reading this. Teachers like that are sadly rare, though.
Funny you should mention that. Timur, Chris, and I have been puttering around with a better Unix debugger interface for awhile now; Timur just wrote some of it up:

http://www.matasano.com/log/1799/ruby-for-pentesters-the-dar...

Debuggers want to be programming environments. Or, trivial 20k command line programs. GDB is stuck uncomfortably in the middle, I agree.
When I said "experience", I was trying to differentiate between a capable person who hadn't done much with one who had been around the block a few times. It's usually easier for the second person to avoid pitfalls and use all of their resources to make a good decision.

Adding experience to a person who is not smart or capable, stubborn, lazy, or has other personality "issues" is generally a waste of time and resources. Looks like you've met a few of these people. Most of us have.
"User friendliness is suddenly a bad thing? Give me a break."

You have to be a little careful with statements like that, user experiences are highly subjective, and different people find different processes more appealing.

I personally have no desire to deal with Apple's support for my MBP, or going to a packed apple store in my spare time (if this is part of the friendliness thing you were referring to, if not, my misunderstanding), but I can easily get my Dell serviced on site while I'm at work at no cost to me, and within 2 days of placing a service ticket.

If it's less about business friendliness and more about UI design and user experience, that's also highly subjective, I've met people who think at least one platform "just feels right" to them.

Bottom line, with all the choices we have available today, why is it even debated with such rigor anymore? Choose what feels good to YOU.
Well I use dreamhost.com but not sure if it's the best. I used to be on mosso but too much downtime and too expensive.
I was interested in Clojure before, but the critisism I found in the two recent posts here on HN make it even more interesting. I feared something substantial might turn up that really defies using it, but to the contrary: if issues listed in the blog posts are the biggest problems people find with Clojure, then that is quite promising.
perhaps "say nothing rude you wouldn't say to my face".

There are lots of constructing things you can contribute here which you might not want to say to someone in a live debate (Im thinking, for example, the drugs discussion that went on a while back) :D
HN only publishes links and, often but not always, headlines. Most publishers are OK with this, but not all. Recently the AP has reaffirmed that they consider copying headlines to be copyright violations and are threatening to again go after sites (notably google).
RSS may go away, but something better will take its place.

People put RSS on their blogs for multiple reasons. I use it on mine because it greatly increases the usability of my site. Another way it helps is that it makes sites "stickier"; without RSS, people would not have something automatically telling them "Hey, that site you liked updated! Go check it out!". They would have to either remember the URL, or remember a link path to the site, or bookmark it, and they'd have to periodically check back. (Not that I particularly care—while it is nice to have readers, I write mainly for my own amusement, and my site is not commercialized at all.)

And I think that these two factors are a net win for most sites, whether commercial or not. There are ways around the advertising issue—offer truncated feeds, put ads in your feeds, provoke comments, etc. Plus, I thought that the known wisdom was that regular readers don't use ads much, it's the ones that stumble onto your site from Google, etc.? I haven't seen a study, though.

Also, for the record, I basically don't check sites that don't offer RSS. If it's particularly good, it'll get bookmarked, and maybe I'll come back to it in a few months when I've got some free time. But most sites don't even get bookmarked. On the other hand, if I find a site that had a good article, I'll often add it to my RSS reader on a trial basis.
Sex Tips For Geeks
"Sex Tips For Geeks", by Eric Raymond http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/sextips/
Opensim Linux Series – Installing Mono and MySQL
Forging 134.5 Billion dollars?
Is spellcheck and a once/twice over too much to ask for in blog posts? There were a couple times in that article I actually couldn't make out what he was trying to say.

I'm not suggesting that you have to have an editor review your blog but at least reading it would probably do wonders. Joel Spolsky is great about doing this: I very rarely find myself jolted out of concentration by his writing style, grammar, or spelling.
My Life In a G-String: Assessing the Stripper Memoir
RETINAL SCARRING HAZARD. Flagged.
There are a couple of implicit fallacies in the follow up comments that bug me.

1. Someone asked if the badly written code was really causing any problems, and then everyone thereafter seems to just take as an assumption that badly written code does not create any real problems. Well, badly written code often does cause performance problems and disguise bugs. I have inherited code bases where things were taking ridiculously long because the code was a convoluted and almost incomprehensible mess. Making it simpler and more comprehensible was a necessary prerequisite to make it operate at a reasonable speed.

2. There seems to be an assumption that you can write code rapidly or comprehensible code, but not both. In my experience, programmers who write incomprehensible code are not more productive than the programmers who write comprehensible code, often the opposite. There is no polite way to say this, but incomprehensible code is more often the result of less knowledge or intelligence than it is the result of a desire to get a lot done. Furthermore, stopping to think before coding can often lead to much shorter development times than just diving in and typing the first thing that pops into your head.

When I have been in the role of technical person with non-technical management, my implicit approach is "evaluate me on what I produce and how quickly I produce it, but stay out of the code." If I am being hired because of my knowledge of how to make computers do what you want, evaluate me on that, and let me figure out the best route to get there.
No, not like a photocopier/scanner. A song with DRM can be played and rerecorded in real time. So ~4 minutes a song. This can also happen without human intervention.

A book can be scanned in hours at best, with a human involved the whole time. (I am sure there is specialty hardware that can do this, but that isn't quite the same a a commodity PC)
Exactly. Laboriously scanning a whole book is far more effort than ripping a CD.
I think it should work with another sim and wifi only, as it also works with an iPod touch.
Give 'em something for nothing (providing you can do it quickly and cheap). Make sure it nails them right between the eyes on a significant issue. Once they see what you can do, you just may become their go-to guy.
You should use old style "dating^H^H^H^H^H^Hmatrimonial".
great job on the article, guys... (i met these guys a few years ago and they are very cool)
I had a good experience with DiscountAsp.Net. However, if your site gets a lot of traffic or if you want extras, I think it could get pretty expensive. You need to pay extra for subdomains, domain aliases/pointers, or additional sites. Disk space is only 1000 MB and bandwidth is 80 GB for the base plan.

They have a bunch of 3rd-party extensions that is included in the hosting plan but if you leave DiscountAsp, you will need to get licenses for these extensions yourself.

I have since moved to Mosso. Great service though a little expensive ($100 a month + $5 SQL Server db). I can host several web sites though under 1 account.
Tesla Motors' history, according to Elon Musk
I'm not an architect, actually, I just run a service/product for them (http://www.woobius.com), and I've learned a few things about their industry those last few years...

I agree with your point about competitions vs proposals, btw - that doesn't make it nice though!
Paul's second algorithm, as stated, is exactly equivalent to the following:

1) Choose a random parent with exactly two children

2) If that parent has two boys, announce that they do not have two girls. If that parent has two girls, announce that they do not have two boys.

3) If that parent has a boy and a girl, randomly announce one of the above results.

It's easy to see that this has the same results as the first option. Counterintuitively, if that last step is nonrandom, you get the more intuitive result. Say, for example, that we did this:

1) Choose a random parent with exactly two children

2) Announce the gender of the eldest child.

This way, you get even odds that the other child is male or female. It's really counterintuitive, but that's how it works out.
There's a deeper point here beyond the Nokia/Iran drama.

We've built an entire cottage industry of "network security tools", many of dubious operational value, that all depend on being able to indiscriminately peek inside of TCP streams. It's easy to justify deployment of wiretap appliances inside of enterprises, who after all own the network connections they're snooping on, and have legitimate reasons to want to inspect what comes in and out.

But note well: when we started designing these tools, the Internet was much less important than it is now. Almost all digital communications happens over IP nowadays. We weren't anticipating a world in which things like Twitter and Facebook would be the key lifelines political movements in repressive countries.

So I have to wonder whether:

* The engineering teams that continue developing wiretap appliances (like SourceFire/Snort, or Arbor's DPI product line) have dedicated real dev cycles to building controls into their products to ensure they aren't abused, the same way "Lawful Intercept" engineers for Motorola and Nokia have to for their products.

* The sales teams for these products have official company guidance on what applications they'll sell their products for; will the EMEA regional sales director for a deep packet company sell wiretap appliances to resellers who aren't contractually prohibited to sell to Iran?
There are platforms which use UCS-4 or UTF-16 (or even UCS-2) by default. You don't get UTF-8 unless you ask for it, which involves knowing not only that exists but that it's different from what you already had.
Why has no one phrased the answer like that before? That makes way more sense then talking about "adding information". I never grokked the solution until you described it that way.
I totally agree with you. I was going after the author's pooh-pooh attitude toward Apple's design philosophy, not claiming to know of some mythical objective standard of user friendliness.
I stopped using USENET in the 90s and then only searched it on deja-news for tech questions.

I do remember when Google moved the tab I got angry but as time went on I just stop caring as it had gotten more and more useless.
Great story.

I found myself doing just about the same thing (eerily similar settings in my neighborhood in Brooklyn) when my girlfriend's iPhone was stolen just a few days before WWDC and the Find My iPhone announcement.

At the time I wished for nothing more than this exact technology, but days later when we were reasonably sure we had found (through a few degrees of separation) who had stolen the phone and were still unable to get it back, it dawned on me that this might be one of those social issues that will go mostly technologically unsolved at least for the time being.
Probably because they have the one filtering engine across their entire estate.
I got 1/3 of the way through the second paragraph and bailed out because it became incoherent.

Joel and PG both set good examples to follow.
Hear, hear! I get flyers in my door all the time talking about "fast broadband" where fast == 1-3Mb. I'm moving soon and will be switching to NTL (cable) and getting 10Mb/1Mb for less money. Death to Eircom and their €26/mo line rental charge!
Ah, right. I wasn't thinking of C++ destructors, since I usually program in C these days. In that case, you're probably right.
From the Jeffrey Rosenthal paper that Jeff Atwood suggests
(http://www.probability.ca/jeff/writing/montyfall.pdf):

<Quote>

Nebulous Neighbours:

Your new neighbours have two children of unknown gender.
From older to younger, they are equally likely to be girl-girl, girl-boy, boy-girl, or boy-
boy. One day you catch a glimpse of a child through their window, and you see that
it is a girl. What is the probability that their other child is also a girl?

Solution.

The probabilities that a glimpsed child will be a girl for each of the four possi-
bilities (girl-girl, girl-boy, boy-girl, and boy-boy) are respectively 1, 1/2, 1/2, and 0. Since
the probabilities must add to 1, the probabilities of these four possibilities are respectively
1/2, 1/4, 1/4, and 0. Hence, the probability is 1/2 that the other child is also a girl.

</Quote>

Can someone explain how glimpsing to one child and seeing that is a girl is different from hearing the parent saying that one child is a girl? How come and getting the same information from your eyes instead of your ears changes the probabilities? (1/2 for the other child to be a boy when seeing, 2/3 when hearing).
Resurrect your dead blog by importing it to Posterous
My strong point is that I communicate well with people, and I'm not afraid to take an issue up with someone -- be it colleague, manager, or client. I will take initiatives to get things done. And even if I'm going to do it just once, I'll get it done _RIGHT_. I am decent developer, but some people take issue with me because I'm not as fast as the hack... I mean other coders. ;) I've heard people remark that I could be a Project Manager, but too bad I feel they don't do anything but useless admin work. (And get in the Developers' way!)

this paragraph smacks of "I do it right, everyone else does it wrong." my point was that the "right" way, as learned "in theory", is not necessarily so in practice (and in fact, often isn't when the theoretical right way involves spending client money that will add no value that is immediately noticeable to the client). i wasn't dismissing theory as useless--if you read my comment as tilting to that extreme, i probably wasn't clear enough. theory has its place, but if a dev goes through her career expecting her clients/bosses to agree that spending time refactoring so-so code (that works!) is worth $XXX/hr, it's no surprise she's getting frustrated. in my mind, her role as a developer is to apply sound theory as much as possible within the constraints of her job. when other people are signing her paycheck, she either does it their way or finds a new job (or applies to YC)--but complaining about it won't help her situation.