skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It should obviously be replaced with Pitman Shorthand.

http://cyberspacei.com/englishwiz/library/stenography/images...

If you're in school and not allowed gadgetry and you need to write a lot, for years, often based on someone talking, why don't they teach shorthand?

It's phonetic - each part of a shape represents a sound and they are chained together, and they are designed to flow neatly when written unlike the awkward joining of ordinary characters. There are shortcuts for common patterns like endings ('ing', 'shun'). It's positional (high/mid/low per each line). Vowel sounds are dropped where not necessary, and where present they are the dots and dashes - positional (left/mid/right). It can make a distinction between light and dark pencil strokes to indicate voiced and unvoiced sounds.

In short, there are fewer marks to put on paper and the marks are simpler and more fluid to write.
The letter spacing (-0.03em) is awful with ClearType, so I fixed it with Stylish:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("progit.org") {
* { letter-spacing: 0 !important }
}
Everyone is claiming that Google lost $700 million in this deal, which is true, but I think it's more important to notice that by selling now they are avoiding future losses. It always sucks to sell a stock after you've lost money on it, but it sucks even more to ride it down further if there's very little hope of it recovering.
Depends on your market. I was recently at a talk from a Philip Morris executive who said the only way for the cigarette business to gain market share in its declining market was to win over consumers from competitors.

Doesn't sound unethical but are you ready for any backlash? Can you win a price war?
Monsters, mountain dew, iced coffee. Anything with caffeine when hacking. Not a healthful response, but an honest one.
This is what happens when you let a platform control the software that's released on it. Absolutely crazy, short-sighted anti-competitive practices.

I don't mind Apple having an official AppStore where only the products they sanction show up, but at least provide a method for installing applications outside of the app store.

I'm on my second iPhone (first 2g, now 3gs), and there's a lot to like about it. Specifically, if it weren't for the iPhone, I don't think we'd have an Android or a Palm Pre right now. The carriers exerted so much control over their phones that nothing innovative could really happen.

However, now that Apple has opened up the playing field, I hope Android or Pre wins the market.
I met Armin Ronacher (the author of Jinja) at this years EuroDjangoCon. He was actually hacking on Django's template system himself and closed one ticket after another (though he was told that he couldn't "just replace it").
I drink mate 2 or 3 times a day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mate_(beverage)
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Wow. Water is #1 -- and not a single mention of jolt or mountain dew. What a weak generation of hackers -- you know where the term "flow state" came from? David Lightman used to drink his own urine during long coding sessions. That's a scientific fact.
iDontCare

iJustWantOne
Top 250 microns of the ocean is a film ecosystem
I like my office a lot, with two full walls of windows. I have enough room for two desks, 5 monitors, and a couch/coffee table for sitting and thinking. I use 3 monitors for my main computer, and I find that it's the perfect amount of real estate.
When error messages go public: Funny dialog boxes in conspicuous places
that's probably due to the growth hormones that are injected into the meat we eat
who cares about seeming irresponsible?

The "students [expected to] graduate and walk into high-paying jobs with Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft/Cisco/etc".
Black tea, in mass quantities.
That's another part of the reason. :) If the hole is too big you won't be able to bucket out the water fast enough.
True: you just have to put the beans in quickly enough before you get to a boil.
I used to drink a few sodas a day, and I switched to tea about five years ago. I lost some weight during the first year, but I've found I have more energy with tea and no crash. I get most of my tea from Adagio (I'm not affiliated).
I think the word 'scientific' is one of the most abused or confused words around. Should it only be used for areas where relative certainty can be established or should it also encompass logical and evidence-based speculation on things that cannot currently be tested well? It doesn't matter what the 'true' definition of the word is when the majority of people use it differently.

From one direction calling evo-psych 'scientific' can fool others into believing there is more evidence than there really is. From the other side a well-reasoned argument with incomplete evidence like 'smoking causes cancer (in the 60s)' can be made to look like astrology by using the word 'unscientific'.

Perhaps a new words need to be invented so that people can talk about these things more clearly.
Well, I'm 37 and never have had good handwriting much preferring to type all of my life.
I use Wolfram Alpha for real on an almost daily basis - before I go for a surf, if you can believe that.

I've found that their tide report is far superior to the other offerings that I've found on the web. See here for an example: http://wolframalpha.com/input/?i=san+diego+tides
It only takes one or two votes to get a new story on the front page. Past that, of course, it quickly disappears if it doesn't receive more votes - as it should.

Not arguing for or against anything, I just think that "4630 Twitter followers" and "massive Twitter broadcasts" is completely overstating the issue. You only need a couple of friends who also read HN.
I recently found Viso Vigor which is pretty good for a quick, intense (300mg) dose of caffeine. It also has tons of vitamin B (6, 12 etc.), and feels less to me like drinking death than Red Bull and the other canned energy drinks do. I don't drink it often, but if I need a boost that tastes good and isn't soda it works.

I also enjoy yerba mate. It's very popular in Uruguay where I started drinking it. Especially so among students as an (ostensibly) healthy herbal tea with a good dose of caffeine to keep them awake for studying. My favorite part is the slow, calming ritual around drinking it in the traditional way.

Those two exceptions aside, generally I prefer water.
Attitudes like this are going to make people stop using their app store, already I think the frustration of waiting for apps approval is a lot
No soda! Yuck!

I drink water mostly, but I also drink some Twinnings Breakfast tea in the afternoon usually.
Buying a tea infuser is one of the best things I've ever done - real leaf tea by the cup! Moroccan mint is my favourite at the moment, but I like to experiment, and can't help but think that in tea I've just found one more thing to be geeky about.

I also find that the regular ritual of making tea helps to stop my thought processes from falling down rabbit holes, so to speak. It's sometimes good to step back and wait for kettles to boil and leaves to steep.
Ha. Old Greggs think alike. Old school programmers, those who created web servers, compilers and the universe, used to drink coffee, smoke pot and read man pages. Today's generation drinks water, smokes ground PG essays and watches screencasts instead of reading proper documentation.

:P
The only thing I really use Wolfram for is an integral calculator, but what an integral calculator it is!
Here's a thoughtful alternative take on Wolfram Alpha:

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/wolfram...
It's also important to consider the counterfactual where it was Microsoft who had landed that search/ad deal. If I remember the discussion correctly, many considered this a defensive move on Google's part. I can't imagine that Google had a high opinion of AOL's prospects, so I assume they thought blocking MS was worth the loss.
Depends on what you mean by "voluntary", but maybe half of the British Empire was ceded without bloodshed.
Why would anyone want to like a company?
Ice Tea (16 - 32oz daily) and water

I find that ice tea keeps my hydrated and keeps me focused. It's perfect for coding and it's also healthy.

My recipe

- Leaf Tea (not the boxed kind) usually fruity ones. (peach and cinnamon rooibos is my favorite)

- Boil 2-3 cups of water

- 2 spoons of tea in a container and pour water. (sit for 2 mins)

- Take a jar and fill it with ice, strain the tea over ice.

Bonus
+ Lemon
+ Fruits
I think the warts in the natural language interface and limitations in data-sets made it difficult to see initially, but I really feel like there is something very exciting about Wolfram Alpha.

Wolfram Alpha is doing something that feels almost like thinking. I give it input and it parses it, determines what I want, combines data in a novel way, and feeds me output. When it gets my query right and has data, it feels like I'm seeing a capability that was human-only previously now falling into the realm of AI.

Edit: Also, it is improving. At launch, I couldn't get it to understand 2 slices of bread and 1 slice of cheese (choked on the cheese) and now it does.
Exactly. And when we weren't playing LoRD on our own BBS we just spent hours rewinding Hackers for THAT ONE SHOT with Angelina Jolie.
Not just on their Ipods either. You also get a goofy cable on their macbooks and on the shuffle headphones. And now they cut the firewire from the macbook line (I think the mackbook pro still has it). One hand gives and the other takes.
Google's thin client distraction
because they make (for the most part) nice stuff.
I hope this is eye-opening...

It should be noted that a lot of medical practices - as opposed to biological discoveries - rest on no more real science than this...
A PAQ (Possibly Answered Questions) on Apple's tablet
I usually had success with an "addiction reset" by going cold turkey after every semester as an undergrad. As a grad student, I've found that even though I drink 3 cups of green or white tea per day, which is supposed to have relatively minimal caffeine, I get headaches on the weekends when I don't have tea. Do you notice withdrawal headaches with that level of consumption?
Copywriter Test: Write If You Want Work (Part II)
Interesting copywriting test devised by mystery writer James Patterson (Kiss the Girls). Flooded his then ad agency with applications. Possible to use for programmers too.
Mostly water, though a fruit smoothie in the morning makes breakfast compatible with working, and a 7UP every so often adds some of the soda flavor without being too sickeningly sweet (like Sprite), caffeinated (Coke), or having a heavy, sticky aftertaste (Coke again). Mix in some orange juice to perk you up and you're golden. Alcohol is strictly reserved for off-duty hours.
Personally I'd love to see more recipes that are
- cheap
- quick to cook
- healthy
- tasty

As it is, there's a hell of a lot of books that presume you want to make something fancy.
this is google's first response for that:

http://ocean.peterbrueggeman.com/piertide.html

and it's the exact same graph, except its much faster than WA.
A substantial part of why foreign flagged merchant vessels get easy access to ports is that they are "known" to not be armed.

We wouldn't let a <pick a foreign country not too friendly with us> warship steam into Boston Harbor. Same country's oil tanker or cargo ship? Come on in.
I don't get anything for that result. Or "Los Angeles tides" or "Santa Monica tides."

If I just put in "tides", it'll give me a dropdown where I can select a station -- I'm assuming the station that reports tides -- but after clicking a station near me, I still get nothing.

Wolfram and I have never really gotten along well.
In what way is this a visualization? It's more like a picture.
I thought through this with a friend a while ago.

The problem isn't getting the bandwidth to upload the content, the problem is getting access to content in the first place. In order to download PDFs of these papers, you need to have a subscription through your school/institution. The publishers will notice very quickly if someone starts downloading an entire journal's worth of articles.
physicians -- whose illegible handwriting on charts and prescription pads causes thousands of deaths a year

Holy shit! That sounds like a way more interesting article to write than this one. Is that seriously true?

"I worry that cursive will go the way of Latin and that eventually we won't be able to read it," says Garcia. "What if 50 years from now, kids can't read the Declaration of Independence?"

Reading these documents already requires some trouble, especially since (to today's eyes) they were authored by the "Continental Congrefs".
More perspective change: according to the 1903 Ladies Home Journal, half of people then died before they were sixteen. One in a hundred lived to 65.

Something else to mention to people who ignore science.

http://craigiest.googlepages.com/ThisWonderfulWorldofOurs.pd...
Wow .. I can't believe that site isn't more popular. It's awesome!
I don't think it matters here because rice doesn't really have 'nutritional value'. :p

I mean, the claim isn't about the speed of microwave cooking, but the method. When you heat something normally, heat hits the outside surface by radiation and convection of the surrounding gas, and the heat is conducted deeper into the item at a fairly slow rate.

When you microwave an item, microwaves travel straight through it from outside to inside, and as they do so they cause resonance in water molecules, which are taken from room temp to boiling or even superheated in moments when the surrounding matter is still cold and hasn't enough time to expand. This (is claimed) to be much more violent heating and consequently much more damaging than ordinary cooking.

Also, cooking does more than destroy heat sensitive vitamins - otherwise there wouldn't be any point in doing it if that was all it did. It changes enzymes and proteins and chemical bonds and all sorts. Of course there are people claiming much of this is less than healthy - and no you aren't going to eat raw rice as an alternative, so why would you eat cooked rice? Why not eat something you can eat raw instead?
Code snippets for web developers
Easy on those juices -- that much simple sugar can lead to a metabolic/alertness roller coaster, if not weight problems.
Even if we had designers, I'm not sure they should be writing templates.

I've never understood this attitude. Maybe it's just because I've worked for places which seek out talented people who know their stuff, but it feels way too much like unjustified territoriality on the part of developers.
One cup of espresso in the morning.

Freshly ground, tamped, and run through a home espresso machine. Add a bit of cream. The beans are: Café Awasa direct fair trade organic Ethiopian
What Generation Z will be like at work
Probably good advice, I'm not a doctor nor do I play one on the internet. For myself though, I stick mainly to water throughout the day.
Water or green tea!

Beware the Coke Zero, its sweeteners are quite harmful, according to some physicists I consulted (and to what happened to myself: got very strong stomach pain for months, and the reason was that I got a reaction to Coke Zero! Switched to Coke Light and it's all gone...)
I didn't come here to see mindless talking points parroted back at me.

If you want to actually talk about the complexities of debt and the problems on all sides of the issue, by all means do so. If you want to shout slogans, please go somewhere else.
Who wants to spend the time preparing quality food when you could be rushing back to work to build a company to earn enough money that you can break out of the ordinary working life and spend time really enjoying your life.

I guess what I'm pointing out is that you could skip all the work and enjoy your life right now by spending some time preparing some great food.

;)
Map As Homoiconic Basis
I think a lot of professors put up their papers on their own websites. But that would really be a pain getting the articles from different places.
Upon waking up I have 1-2 cups of coffee, minus the sugar.

Throughout the day I have close to a gallon of water. Also, I drink Weight Watchers soda: contains no sodium, no sugar, no calories, etc... Coke zeros contain sodium, no? If a drink contains sodium I always thought it defeated the purpose of drinking it - which in my case has always been to quench thirst... sodium acts as an agent to make you drink more never actually quenching my thirst - in my experience.

As far as alcoholic beverages, my handle speaks for itself. :)
All MacBooks have Firewire. Not really an issue though, Firewire isn't exactly standard on consumer level laptops.
I agree with the purpose and discussion of this article.

But I find it funny that, to help support its argument that forensic methods lack sizeable scientific support, it uses 2 wrong-conviction examples and an experiment with only 6 fingerprint examiners.

That's the difference between the media and science, I suppose. And it is a difference that needs to be clearer in the courtroom.
I'm not ready to jump on this one.

For one thing, I have an iPhone, and I have a car with Microsoft Sync. Every time I plug the iPhone into the car's USB port, it pops up "this accessory is not made to work with iPhone". And then it works anyway (except for the part where something is a little overzealous about reindexing the music on the phone, and I'm not yet sure which side that one's on).

For another, the DRM point may be more important than the author makes it out to be: there are plenty of systems where using the "wrong" cable will still work, but with significantly degraded access (I still remember the first time I had to buy an adapter box to use a DVD player with my TV). I'm not sure that "sorry, you can't do that" is any better or worse than "you can do that, it just won't be useful in any way".
Tea, Earl Grey, Hot
WordPress Plugin Developers To Boycott WordPress.org?
as far as I remember (please correct me if I'm wrong), old macs where buggy (and not easier to use) than machines with windows 3.1 or something...? Being usability a very important piece of aesthetics...

That and the fact that Apple's CEO in the 90's switched the focus from great user experience to 'attack all possible markets' with a dozen different (often competing with its other products) is, I'd say, the main reason why they fared so bad in the 90's...
This letter:

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/kana...

effectively shows that the original paper ignored endogeneity, mis-interpreted coefficient estimates and data-mined.
Microsoft releases STM for .NET
Firefox 4.0: Early Screenshots Released
MIT Kids Make Battery Powered Car - Charges in 10 Minutes
Apple Is Growing Rotten To The Core, And It’s Likely AT&T’s Fault
Why would anyone want to like a brand, a product, an ideal, a religion, a soccer team?
>>I'm not trying to be a troll, but how can we have behavior that wasn't caused by evolution?

We are genetically programmed (from evolution) to get most of our behavior from culture. That is what evolutionary biologists (and evolutionary psychologists) say, afaik.

So lots of behavior is based on evolution, by way of cultural evolution. (Then there is random noise etc.)

Edit: I might add that I believe the book about rape wasn't exactly seen as the best of research in the evol psychology area... But I've also seen lots of ideologically motivated (marxists and religious) attacks on evol psych.
Except for the 15" Macbook Pro, the only MBP that anyone actually would want to buy. ;)
Programming made Simple
The National Debt Road Trip [video]
No offense intended but are you overweight? If not, how do you keep the weight off with that much consumption? Daily gym?
When I was in Europe a few years ago I picked up a seltzer habit. Nothing is as refreshing as an ice cold seltzer. To me it rivals the effects of a coffee in the morning. It's a good alternative if you like fizzy drinks. You can mix some fruit juice in if you want something sweeter. Besides that I drink lots of ice black coffee in the summer -- homemade though because coffee shops use disgusting stale/burnt coffee for iced and it tastes really bad black. If you get some good beans, grind them yourself, and get the coffee off the burner quickly after brewing you'll get an ice coffee that isn't too bitter.
If you got a talented person who knows their stuff, then they should be able to handle whatever template language you throw at them. Gimping the power and expressiveness of your template language happens for 2 stated reasons:

1) To make it designer friendly

2) To force you to put logic into back one layer

If you have talented folks, #1 shouldn't be a concern. Any technical artist should be able to learn enough of any template language to be trusted to not break things. Just as one coder has to code review the work of another, someone should code review the designer's work. Maybe that's a developer, maybe it's a senior technical artist; it doesn't matter. Choosing the right tool for the right people puts a lot of trust in the fact that you choose the right people!

#2 is idealistic bullshit. There is HTML-specific view logic. If you have a view which fetches some data, that same view should be re-usable for an API as json or xml or whatever you choose. But imagine the case were you have an "Export to CSV" button. That is simply two different templates over the exact same data. The HTML version might need to do some smarts about grouping or human-readable adjustments. There will surely be some javascript that depends on particular elements and structure. Forcing all of that logic into template tags is just silly.
This reminds me a lot of a part of Randy Pausch's Last Lecture (http://www.cmu.edu/randyslecture/). One of his biggest pieces of advice was basically "if it's worth having, it's worth asking for". This is something that is surprisingly hard to live out, but the few times that I've consciously gone out of my way to ask for something I wouldn't have if I hadn't seen his lecture have paid off very nicely for me.
But, then it's no longer 100% fruit juice!
I got my first Apple product - a MacBook - in December. The only way to connect it to an external monitor turned out to be purchasing an additional Mini DisplayPort[1] adapter for something like $45 - from Apple, of course, since no one else was selling it.

The ONLY product in the entire world at the time that used the Mini DisplayPort, as far as I could tell, was the MacBook. (well, maybe some of Apple's new displays). Of course the adapter wasn't included with the MacBook, and it's expensive as hell.

Not quite as bad as the linked article, but that was my first experience with Apple as a company - left a bit of a bitter taste.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini_DisplayPort
What I mean is, in any practical task I'm sure your depth perception is fine. But if you were to do tests specifically for depth perception, certainly you would be at a disadvantage with only one eye, especially for objects that aren't moving relative to you.

On another note, do you think the missing eye harmed your peripheral vision, and does that affect boxing or ping pong?
And given that a meter is defined by CGPM / BIPM as "the distance travelled by light in free space in 1⁄299,792,458 of a second", then when time takes more time length gets more length.

http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/meter.html
This article is pure comedy:

"So far, one baby has been born on the island, but many more have been "assembled" there, he says."

...
I wonder if there's surf there.
This is a really creative way to turn the debt into a trip across the US showing the difference among presidents this century in miles per hour - great visualization.