skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, after they lost something like a third of their market cap and shrank, and reorganized and clawed their way back.

"""Gerstner quarterbacked one of history's most dramatic corporate turnarounds. For those who follow business stories like football games, his tale of the rise, fall and rise of IBM might be the ultimate slow-motion replay. He became IBM's CEO in 1993, when the gargantuan company was near collapse."""

From one of the reviews here http://www.amazon.com/Elephants-Dance-Inside-Historic-Turnar...
Totally agree - the lack of focus is what I think is killing them. It's like a giant insecurity complex that they have to be in every damn market. Taking a page from Apple in the days where Steve would draw a quadrant in his presentations and just say, here are the 4 things we do. Period. MS should do the same, make those things world class, THEN start to diversify again where it makes sense.
Had a look at the comments from the article and it looks like the ECHO guys have a lot of room for improvement. Nice idea though, at least in principle. I hope they manage to do a good implementation and sort out the problems.
Oops. 2 employees would be $42.99.

Yes, I should have used max(). I copied that expression out of my budget spreadsheet and I added that cell after we had 5 or more employees, apparently.
The first rule of Mensa is you have to talk about Mensa.
You can watch anything you want on that TV you bought form Sony though.
It doesn't suddenly decide to block any disney movies that compete with it's own studio or ban music from non-sony artists
Yes, their system is browser based.

Greasemonkey would probably work fine as you described, but I would be more comfortable with an actual API when committing funds.

Even with an API, I would probably still want to review the transaction on the web UI before committing.
You mean the guy who made this web site?
Common Lisp, {,S,O?CA}ML, and even C# also make the list.
C99 has snprintf() for this.
An excellent point. Of course, it seems that more and more that balance is shifting to other countries, largely because of their lower cost of labor.
For those who don't know Spanish: http://www.merriam-webster.com/spanish/mensa
The Paper Data Storage Option
Yeah, but your solution doesn't make money, and doesn't appeal to the average fat guy watching American Idol.
> but it's still great fun trumping an arrogant arse at a party

lol. to 'trump' with the score on an IQ test... i think i'd laugh so hard i'd shit my pants if someone says "hey, i have 150 IQ, i'm right dammit"
No. Mensa is about the intellectual level of a small regional SF convention.
You're on. Hopefully WITH city = "Mountain View" && N = 1.

Warning: I'm "ethically" required to disclose that I'll be ordering a double Goldschlager top shelf Long Island Iced Tea, so I won't mind losing that bet :-)
Why would it take a complete change of PHP's semantics? Accessing static members of classes follow C++ syntax, there's no reason why namespaces couldn't follow the same syntax and semantics. It would break nothing in the PHP language spec.

namespace foo1; function bar();
class foo2 { function bar(); }

foo1::bar(); // Namespace call
foo2::bar(); // Static method call

namespace foo2; // Syntax error; class foo2 already exists.

The problem is, the internals of PHP are that namespaces and classes are in different hashes and the call to either compile to entirely different byte code. The "correct" implementation would have namespaces and classes together and both calls compile to the same code. Now I accept that the PHP internals are perhaps too convoluted to resolve this issue but that doesn't make this any less terrible. It's a hack solution.
I use SurePayroll and recommend it. It takes care of all the tax stuff, and you can include 1099 contractors as well as W2 employees.
Yes, and a power chord is the root note and the fifth. Calling an interval a chord is nothing more than semantics.
My dad signed me up for MENSA and Triple 9 when I was seven years old (doubt I'd get into Triple 9 today). Never really participated in anything, so I don't have much concrete experience, but part of why I've never bothered is because I'd rather spend my time using my intelligence than sitting congratulating myself for it.

If you want to meet bright people, I guess it could be worth it, but keep in mind that they're drawn from the subset of bright people who are terribly fixated on how bright they are.
I unkilled this because it had a few interesting comments on it, but please stop submitting these gag sites that just have "yes" or "no" on the page.
I would think that any standardized measure claiming to accurately measure beyond 2.5 sds would be a very noisy measure, almost pointlessly so
Verizon just gave me one of their internet-breaking parking pages. Damn them.
I once had a girlfriend that had joined MENSA to meet smart guys, but gave up dating them because they were all such geeks.

She ended up with me. Talk about irony.
aaaaaw, what an irony :-)
No. My sister is a member (in the UK, but it's likely much the same) and I thought about joining too, until I saw their magazine, which is basically a heap of self-congratulatory wank... 'will asteroids hit earth, and what should Mensans do about it?' 'why the world would be better if it was run by Mensans', 'Why we are special' ...and so on. These were 1000 word articles at most, not even as interesting or challenging as something in Scientific American (after it went into the toilet).

It has as little content as any other kind of social club newsletter, but is vastly more pretentious. They do hold events and so forth, and they are much the same as the magazine with the addition of beer or tea, depending on what time of day they are held. Maybe it's like scientology, where the outer members talk about how great it is and promote it to everyone else, and the inner core enjoy a privileged lifestyle awash with drugs, sex and money, but I wasn't very interested in finding out the rest. Frankly, I was depressed by how petty and parochial it turned out to be, but perhaps that's because I had retained my childish impression of how fabulous a special club for only smart people would be.
What Would an iPod Cost to Produce in the USA?
How about getting people to release apps as source code?

Those who want to put anything we like on our iPhones pay $100 for a developer cert, but after that could install anything we want, without the hassles of jailbreaking. Just think of it as adding $100 to the cost of the phone.

This would open up regular iPhones to 3rd-party apps that bypass the App Store.
You did it wrong. I mean, everyone is different, so if that's the kind of thing you like, then whatever, but it sounds like you didn't really enjoy yourself. If you spent your time shuffling along with other tourists like cattle, then you missed what's really special about living in another culture. If you do it again, try going for longer (culture shock can last up to six months), learning the language, and living as much like the people of that culture as you can stand. Rent an apartment (or a room in one), not a hotel room. Eat at street vendors, not at western restaurants. Go to the food markets, the places of worship, the villages where real people live. Drink it all in, the good and the bad. If you're going to just go look at a bunch of tourist attractions and try to preserve your lifestyle as much as possible, save your money and go to Flickr.com.
My mid-2009 math reading list
Reminds me of this Feynman rant about honor groups:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3164300309410618119#...
Of course if there were an exponential rise in money supply

Then it still wouldn't matter. Some things only make sense when they are plotted on a log or log-log scale. These graphs are pointless.
I agree, looking at the thread it's simply a ton of noise. Given so many comment systems have voting mechanisms associated with each comment, I wonder if it could instead be pulling comments that are already deemed "worthy" by the respective communities they've been made in, say all comments receiving at least 5 points.
They don't know the emergent properties of botnets (which by definition are not obvious from reading the code) and clearly they took the saying "when in doubt use brute force" to heart.
All of the Wii games I am looking forward to come out at Christmas. Until then I am half way through the SNES Zelda (never played it before) which is plenty of fun. If there are no games I want, you don't get my money :)

Edit: For clarification it is an actual SNES cart (birthday present) for my SNES (also for my birthday, awesome wife), not a wii emulator game.
Buffett reaps $1 billion profit on Chinese carmaker
Could someone PLEEEEAAASE tell me what makes 7 better than Vista? Please??!!! The taskbar is changed to icons and there is a preview for each one. That's really about it. The interface is still a mess with menubars hidden sometimes and not others, there are still several hundred control panels, and the system is still based on DLLs and a registry. Network navigation is a total joke. Built in media viewing is not even a joke. And, yes, I've used 7 quite a bit for my gaming needs so I know what a turd it still is.

It's a fundamentally confusing, unsafe, and bloated OS with the slightest amount of polish added.
Becoming a programmer/developer
Last year, around April or May, I asked my friend (who is a very talented developer) how I could get started with learning how to program and code. He said, "Don't. It's taken me several years to get to where I am now and by the time you get up to speed, the industry will have evolved and you'll spend more time playing catch-up." Well, the interest has sparked again and I thought maybe he was just being an asshole. Is it kinda pointless to start learning this late in the game?
Other posts here seem to think ADP is expensive for their use cases. Just for the record would you recommend ADP for very irregular payroll processing? Like once every six weeks say? We're not really "on salary."
http://shoulditellpeoplehowjadediamaboutthisinternetmeme.com
That... is about the best and most down-to-earth description I've heard. Thanks. I will remember it.
I think it's part of our culture adapting from the idea of one career and a retirement at the end of it, to several, with breaks in between. The semantics are interesting: it probably would have been called a sabbatical 20 years ago.
> Will my data be on the WikiOS or on my hard drive?

The sandbox allows for OpenFileDialog and SaveFileDialog, so you can directly access user-specified files on the hard drive.

There is also an online storage, but it is currently in the alpha stage. For the moment we recommend using the open/save dialogs and work with local files.

> If I make a program, could not a competitor add a change that "accidentally" introduces a security hole?

A competitor may indeed commit acts of vandalism, just like on any other web 2.0 site. However, we work hard to ensure that such illegal acts cannot - by design of the system - lead to security holes.

> What would you define as sensitive?

Currently, all the classes that are involved in the boot sequence (from the startup to the moment you see the desktop) are marked as "critical" and can only be modified by moderators. Furthermore, the "Code Editor" and the "History" applications are also marked as "critical" so that it is always possible to undo vandals changes.

> Can a program on the WikiOS interact with host programs and if so, to what degree?

No, a program on Wiki-OS cannot interact with programs running on the host machine, except through the OpenFileDialog, the SaveFileDialog, and a few other very controlled features of the sandbox.
I once thought I wanted to join Mensa, then when I hit about 14 I decided, "nawwwwww".

I came to this decision partly because I discovered that it's often easier to hate intelligent people, something which has only been reinforced in my years at college.
You may find this information helpful in deciding; it's an article called "A Short (and Bloody) History of the High I.Q. Societies"

http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/history.html

An excerpt (Dr. Ware is one of the cofounders of Mensa):

At a 1996 convention celebrating the 50th anniversary of Mensa's founding, Dr. Ware (now 81 years old) voiced hope "that Mensa will have a role in society when it gets through the ages of infancy and adolescence ... but at least it has satisfied its members." Dr. Ware seemed disheartened by the Mensans' seeming inability to focus beyond self-gratifying pursuits and apply their collective brain-power to problems facing the world today. "I do get disappointed that so many members spend so much time solving puzzles," Ware said. "It's a form of mental masturbation. Nothing comes of it."
We've known how to wire jaws shut for a long time. This seems about how to make doctors' wallets fatter more than anything.

EDIT: typo
Interesting. With the most restrictive category, only 200 people in the world could be admitted. Most people are somewhat skeptical of IQ tests, but does anyone actually think that any test could be accurate enough to pick the 200 most intelligent humans in the world?
Sorry, but I have to disagree that it is always wrong to open links in a new window. There are many sites (and more to come) of the "web app" variety that carry a lot of state in the current window, and opening a link in the same window would destroy all of the state once the user clicks the Back button. On highly dynamic sites (like the results page on Twitter Search), navigating away from the page for even a few seconds will change the results when reloaded, so the user's "mental state" of the page has been destroyed. I contend that opening a link in a new window/tab makes sense in these cases.
Obligatory Dilbert: http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/1992-02-03/
I care more about the drag verbosity imposes on reading more than the difficulties it causes in writing.
As an interesting (as in "odd") exercise, go to the root node of the blog (http://angloaustria.blogspot.com/) and notice the phrase "Curse of Maturin Towers".

After asking yourself "WTF does that mean?", do a Google search for the aforementioned phrase (http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=Curse+of+Maturin+Towers); hmm, no useful results (that is, we could not find a definition).

Now do a Google search for "Maturin Towers" as an exact phrase (http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=Maturin+Towers) and notice we have 300+ hits for a rather odd exact phrase; all of which point to, or are directly related to, the AngloAustria blog (http://angloaustria.blogspot.com/).

Could this be an well crafted SEO blog designed to tell people what they want to hear?
Search Options now on Google Images
Has anyone ever been accepted and then turned it down?!
> I'm flagging this, there's lot's of conflated ideas here as well as some real trash.

Almost everything submitted to this site is trash: get-rich-quick pablum, braindead web 2.0 wank-tech. And what's left over has plenty of conflated ideas.

> this writer strikes me as somewhat of a conspiracy theorist

Because conspiracies cannot exist? The laws of physics forbid them?

Admit it, the man's crime is: making you think.
Srsly? 15-20 year? I think Windows will be dead in 7-10 years. It shouldn't still be alive today. Windows is an OS for physical media. It wasn't built for networking and security. Windows'core needs to be scraped and MS needs to come up with something fresh from the bottom up.

Actually, they don't need to do anything. Others have already. MS just needs to bow out. You can't be on top forever.
Google Adds More Options To Image Search
Wouldn't those with non-english keyboards already have a heckuva time with PHP given the abundance of the "$" character ?
I rant about my unit from Verizon. It's a DSL modem/router combo and it SUCKS as a router. It breaks xmpp. It dies when any upload is taking place. It freezes when two PCs are streaming anything.

Fortunately I can disable the router portion and use my own linksys model. Which works until Verizon changes a setting upstream and I have to reset the configuration to default and start from scratch.

Bleh.
Available for: iPhone OS 1.0 through iPhone OS 3.0

Could imply that it has existed since the beginning, and wasn't related to the MMS additions in 3.0 as speculated.
I think the notion of a (single) gene giving the ability to learn is already flawed.
I've been using it for years, but I guess I never had to download it again or update it, so I never noticed that he open sourced it in 2006.

I guess what's new is that it's usefully open source -- you can embed it as a view in your Cocoa app. Would be nice to see it built in to Textmate...
Indeed - but there is the language, the VM and the class library. He separates the VM - but lumps the class library and language together (or at least, doesn't explicitly distinguish this).
Specs don't matter like the used to. 6/7+ years ago an upgrade or a better performing machine was actually a big deal even for regular users. These days it's almost the opposite. Components perform at such a high level that consumers are willing to buy worse-performing machines because the experience just isn't any different.
Coming This September: Twitpocalypse Now Redux
2010 - iPhone 4G, Google Wave, Google Voice; Getting Work Done
A friend once told me that when he became a contractor, he gave up the illusion of security for the illusion of freedom.
Wow, means Twitter doubled in tweet volume in just a couple of months!
Does Eminem "Warning" Diss Track Make Him Really Seem Obsessed? | Hip Hop MVP
No, arguing about semantics does not mean what you think it does! It means arguing about what words mean instead of arguing substantively about the meanings themselves.
Ok, i'll bite... why does it matter? Why on Earth does it matter? What could you do better with the scope-resolution operator?
10 KICK-ASS MOVIE PREACHERS
Challenge Your Senses
Ok, I actually work with Ron and Don, so let me see if I can clear up some questions to the best of my understanding.

Re: wglb and wmf
"How can they not know how botnets work"--everyone knows that botnets "work" by collecting hundreds or thousands of other people's computers and controlling them remotely to do your 3V1L bidding. We also know that the human brain works by moving electrical impulses through neurons, but that doesn't help you predict what somebody is thinking. This simulated bodnet basically means they have a botnet in a bottle, and a big one at that. That should allow them to look into interactions among computers as the botnet does stuff and allow them to test possible countermeasures at will. As for "when in doubt use brute force", brute force would have been buying 1,000,000 Dells and stacking them in a warehouse.

Re: grinich
The machine room is really just a standard sort of thing, big air conditioners, raised flooring, and whatever the modern equivalent of Halon is. And white lights. The reason it looks so crazy is that the photographer came in with a bunch of colored lights and set things up that way. That desk isn't in there normally, because it's far too noisy (and cold) to work in there when you don't have to. Also, that's not Thunderbird in the background; Thunderbird isn't even in that room. It's just an exciting picture to keep the press happy.
I also have to recommend going to a local group meeting. In my area, hopefuls can go to one or two meetings for a small fee to check it out. Going to a meeting as a hopeful definitely opened my eyes - the crowd wasn't what I expected at all.

That being said, I joined and never went to a meeting as a member. I used the Mensa Member tagline on my resume for a few years until I had enough experience that it wouldn't make a difference.
dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=735506
the interesting bit is how the quality of the average tweet could be measured and whether or not there is a strong relationship between volume and quality.
haha OK, so it's still possible to make it funny.
Google continues to have its hand of the pulse of the online community. They continue to make technology available to the masses.

I would love to see how Google continues to drive all of this innovation. I think many companies could learn a lot from how Google functions.
Yes. Primary source for the quotation:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/magazine/12QUESTIONS.html
does anyone actually think that any test could be accurate enough to pick the 200 most intelligent humans in the world?

Not a chance. None of the tests used for admission to such high-IQ societies have ever been properly validated.
Since the exploit was valid for "almost all GSM phones" I suspect it's been around since the beginning.

(source: http://technologizer.com/2009/07/30/your-phone-is-probably-v...)
I would say it depends on your reasons for joining. I have a much older cousin who belonged at one time. We haven't kept in touch, so I don't know if he stayed. He apparently got a lot out of it socially, but I think that was back before the Internet became such a convenient hookup for like-minded individuals. He once suggested I try to get in because I wanted to go back to college and they apparently have a small scholarship program. I never got around to it.

But if you are looking primarily for a social experience, I think it's best to participate in something which happens to be "intellectual" in nature but is a genuine personal interest -- an astronomy club, an online forum with a topic of interest, etc. Although close friends and married couples (supposedly) tend to be within about 10 IQ points of each other, just being roughly equally smart doesn't guarantee you will have similar interests or compatible personalities. I have found that certain topics online tend to attract bright people. If you are genuinely interested in the topic and are there for that reason, it is one of the better means to find folks you have a good shot at hitting it off with socially. I even know of people who met that way and ended up married.
I guess it depends what you mean by 'quality'. A methodology for determining 'quality' would be awesome, some function of timeliness, authority, context, accuracy. I don't see that quality is correlated with volume though.
there's one incorrect logic in your statement:

You assume US can just slam on the brakes and the brakes would stop the car completely. When in fact, with the massive amount of baby boomers retiring/draining SS and medicare, the disappearance of our manufacturing sectors, the increasing commodity (food, oil) prices, and the need to pay back 100T+ debt owed to foreign countries and to ourselves, I suggest that it is impossible.
Damn, I've got to remember: "Straight face. No fooling around -- it's a slippery slope. We hackers don't appreciate that sort of thing." :)
That's what the significantly was all about. We're not really going to run out of silicon any time soon, but we actually might with copper.

At the moment, both those prices are strongly dominated by the cost of processing, I would imagine. At some point, it could well be the scarcity you're paying for with copper, though.

Scarcity increases price, and two orders of magnitude is hardly inconceivable.
It's also used in the ternary operator

x = condition ? if_true : if_false;
The real question is why the hell Time Machine backs up at a file level instead of at a block level.

Plan 9's Venti archival storage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venti and http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/venti/venti.html) stores data as blocks, which are referenced by SHA1 hashes. Since these blocks range between 512 bytes and 56 KB, a large file (like a mail file) gets split into many blocks. The brilliant thing is that a given block will only ever be stored once; your top-level filesystem then only has to keep track of which SHA1 hashes make up a file.

With this system, people have been keeping daily snapshots of their filesystems over the course of years, and the space consumption rate actually tends to decrease over time--see the graphs at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/venti/venti.html