skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It was definitely not chosen for ease of implementation, as Apple had to modify core file system functionality, adding support for hard links to directories as well as files in HFS+ which is fraught with peril if not implemented just right. Users just don't want a backup utility to use any significant amount of CPU and slow down their machine.
Electrons split into two new particles, Holons and Spinons.
We may actually get some visibility into the embarrassingly capricious and opaque App Store policies.

I wouldn't hold my breath. This just adds a lot of busywork for Apple's lawyers. I'm sure they'll justify in detail every piece they want to keep private, and the FCC isn't interesting in pissing people off by blowing their secrets.
They have completely misunderstood what Markus is trying to do there. He wants a big box so he can do big joins because what he cares about is being able to match people across arbitrary criteria not, at sharding fanboys would do, separating them into separate pools by surname or a hashing function and then you never meet your perfect match because her records are in a different shard to yours... A modern romcom could be written about that.
Duplicate.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=730755

No dupe check on PG links? Hehehehe
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The spectrum is a natural resource, but what about the devices? It will be interesting to see the extent to which the FCC can regulate devices offered on a carrier. I'm hoping some sort of number portability / anti-compete clause lets them push GV through and force some openness on Apple's end in regards to app approval.

Unfortunately, the iPhone is NOT a publicly owned natural resource, but maybe phone numbers are.
This is one of the most profound pieces of short documentary I have ever seen.

Watch the whole thing on Netflix: http://www.netflix.com/Signin?nextpage=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.netf...

Or search for This American Life s02e01.

Mike continues to blog at http://www.lithiumcreations.com/.
eyestrain: optometrist said to focus on something far away every so offend. This relaxes the eyes. I also got some eye drops to help relax them (called "clear eyes" or something)

wrist pain: for me, coldness was a big factor, so I have fingerless gloves onhand, rub my hands warm when sore, and of course try to keep the room warm. Awkward posture and being tense were also factors. And, for the first time ever, I went to the trouble of automating my common tasks in vim (esp. mapping keys to macros).

Straining an injury can make it permanent. Having done it myself, I sincerely do not recommend it.
(warning: meta) We need more short, insightful comments starting with "oh, for fuck's sake" around here. Thanks :)
The story of ngpay
The site seems to be down so its a headline comment!

The next book has been 'almost ready' for years. I think its passed 8 years for this book(first half was released 2ish years ago).

Another popular fantasy author, Robert Jordan, died before the last book was completed in his 13? book series. I hope a successful tv series($$) is a proper motivator and I look forward to meeting him at worldcon in august.
I am reading the patent and it pretty much describes any large scale distributed multi-user application. Their patent is mostly "workflow" and "project" oriented, and I would think they would have had better chance trolling Google and MS for Docs and Office, not facebook. Even IBM for Lotus Domino.

Their platform "specs" are so widespread and so far ranging, it has every HPC acronym thrown at it. They even specify bits of the BIOS and EPROMs.

Who are these morons and why do they think FB is nothing but intuitive development dictated by growth and everyday contact with a huge user base? Anybody who is anybody would have come up with distributed caching of RDBMs queries, didn't someone implement Memcached at LiveJournal? and the rest of it is self-dictating.

Can you imagine being the FB engineers tasked with developing a platform for applications? the last thing you want to read are patents; they're mostly medieval sketches, and arm-chair monday-morning quarterback-engineering that you don't want your mental model cluttered with this crap. Instead, you poach competent people from your competitors (i.e. people who don't have the time to lay patent mines for posterity and instead have shit to do today)

A platform for managing information? get fucked!
This is basically a Keynesian Beauty Contest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
How did he download? Did he download via torrents or did he get full copy downloads?
In Harness
Some people argue that swapping ctrl and caps isn't good. See http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_pinky.html. Xah Lee says use a good keyboard... Not sure if this is true. I'm perfectly happy using the control key by reaching down with my left pinky...
In case anyone's still interested, actual spelling is Julius Genachowski.
Elephants can swim for miles, and lots and lots of other land animals can and do swim a lot. But that still leaves them far, far short of being aquatic animals.

True. This is why that unfortunate moniker "aquatic" is misleading.

And on your second point: warm water protects from cold, and even from venom if local venomous animals can't swim. And there is plenty of naturally warm water around. Regarding the other reasons to lose fur, I'm still waiting to see any other animal which has lost its fur for any of the reasons above. And yes, the world ran out of water; specifically, the immediate habitat of our ancestors at one point ran out of warm water.

You have to keep in mind that it has been scientifically proven that the modern humans had a few very close calls in their history, and that we are descended from a small group that at one point had no more than about 1000 individuals, who probably inhabited a small area. So all the effects could have easily be local to produce the modern traits.
Sadly, I think a lot of this isn't physical but psychological. The stress of programming for a job will express itself in your body, despite the best mitigating techniques (keyboard layout, editor choice, screen color scheme, typing breaks, posture).

During intense job-related programming sessions, I'd have all sorts of hand and back aches. When programming just as intensely on a personal project, no aches at all.
I get that they do that if you're fleeing the law, but if you're just avoiding paying damages awarded in a civil case, do they not let you leave the country?
Is "jQuery thru PHP to SQL" really all it takes to be a good developer?
Part of the reason why developers don't really focus in conversion optimization is that it requires continuous creative effort. It is not something like you do once and then be happy with it. Coming up with different variations which can perform well is hard and doing it consistently is even harder.

Another reason is that proper optimization requires a good amount of traffic, without which your A/B tests would never achieve statistical significance.

That said, optimization is pretty popular with online retailers and big web companies from whom even a 0.1% change in conversions/signups/etc can result into addition of tens of thousands, or even millions of dollars of revenues. For small-websites, the benefit of 0.1% may not be obvious. Hence, not much motivation for investing in optimization.
I wholeheartedly agree with swapping ctrl/caps. It also keeps other people from using my machines. :) Linux, Windoze, and Mac all have swapped ctrl keys.

Personally, I use command and option as meta. I don't like Aquamacs, they make it just different enough from standard Emacs to be annoying.
Cars? People still buy those things?

I wonder how much non-drivers' taxpayer money goes to subsidizing others' choices of transportation like this...
Tell me about it! When BSG ended I didn't know what to do with myself (other than watch it again from the beginning)
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Heh, cute example, but even being a technologist, I see the business reasoning here. If the logic of a program was described once, why does it need to be re-done when the next fancy language comes out? Why can't all languages/systems be backwards compatible?
That's a good explanation. I quite like the concept of calling a break between careers a mini-retirement. In this case, though, it doesn't seem to have been anything like that, but just a simple three month extended vacation.
This point was actually made in the book fwiw.
Fuck the patent system in this country. It's doing more harm than good these days, I'm afraid.
Such huge potential yet such underwhelming delivery. Just read their "Reading List" and was unimpressed by it:

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/History/21H-001Fall-2007/Readings/...

It's mostly academic, capitalist/liberal pseudo reflection and philosophy. And more than half of the people on that list are the dullest, most conservative and anything but revolutionary. The leftist literature has far more explosive, pin-point, HOWTO material.

Instead, read Gramsci, Camus, Marcuse, and Arendt for the philosophy. Then see Battle of Algiers and read the revolutionary struggles and biographies of Che, Trotsky, Mao.

Just studying Marxism is an individual act of revolution. The mental impact on one's mind, when you finally get it, is irreversible. "Class Consciousness" is a revolutionary virus of the mind.
I can't imagine it does any good for the environment, at least not until >five years from now. Producing a car isn't exactly easy on the environment, and requiring people to buy new cars isn't going to help.
Everyone knows that's what grad students are for... But in all seriousness, this seems like a neat idea with a lot of potential (both for overburdened professors and under-motivated students) that could have an impact on the current state of our education systems. It may not be a new idea, but it's application to higher education is interesting, to say the least.
Is this a joke? How old are you? You're feeling tired and injured using a computer? WTF?

Imagine you had a real labour intensive job, rather than our soft, easy, cushy 'jobs'...

Imagine digging fence post holes all day, trenches, laying bricks, anything else really!

Wow what a pathetic, meek, frail society we have become where people wing about how hard it is to sit on your ass all day long!

Edit: I guess I should add... sure I can understand mental fatigue; sometimes we work with mind numbing, brain twisting complexities. But that just means you should go make a coffee, go for a 15 min walk by the river, whatever.
But physically, if you're saying 'computing' is hard... surly this is a joke/troll ... !?
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And your iPhone, once you've paid for it, is not Apple's anymore. Its yours.

Congress has passed legislative caveats around the DMCA for cell phones. Meaning you can unlock them. Well at least I haven't seen Apple or anyone else yet sue someone or call the FBI for someone doing so. So I guess they don't want to test the waters around whatever legislation actually was passed (of course, I don't read hundreds of pages of legislation, so I'm speaking off stuff I"ve read about it). The purpose of such legislation is part of enabling consumers to not be bound to a carrier. I don't know what else exists, but its clear Congress has made some progress on letting cell manufactures know that carrier freedom is on the landscape.
I hear the final project's killer.
Tech industry unemployment stats would be relevant then. I only skimmed, but it appears to be talking about general unemployment.

By "general public" I mean that it's harder on everyone - not particularly hard on tech. I'm sure the stats show that the dotcom bubble was worse for tech workers.
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Well said.

Patents are so controversial and stifling. It's sickening to observe such hypocritical behaviour but, for example, my employer doesn't allow their employees reading patent texts (at least during work hours, IIRC) in fear of provable infringement -- yet they apply for patents themselves whenever they can, apparently just for defensive purposes!

How much more actual, productive work could we do if we didn't have to keep the best of our people writing documents for patent applications, occupying their minds with such frivolous patent games while still working our arses off to make a difference in the real world?
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This is interesting. I am currently contracting for a company in California, though, if I read this and grellas' comment correctly, I really am an employee. I wonder if this makes my position less secure or more.
I would read even more recent stuff. I agree on Che. How about reading about Kevin Kelly and Louis Rossetto? Bob Hunter created Greenpeace out of nothing. Petraeus revolutionized the most powerful military in the history of the world. It's through a mix of ancient literature, philosophy and political economics that one gains perspective on human nature. And human nature does not, has not, and will not change. But the structure of the world evolves, making modern revolutionaries much more interesting. When I know what Kolakowski had to say about Marxism, I'm going to go move past Marx and spend more time on Popper who hasn't really been rebutted (to my knowledge) yet.

Kolakowski -> http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=...
>> "People will pay very good money for those things, especially with the size of the datasets bit.ly has at its disposal."

Who? Why will they pay good money for it? How do they get a ROI?
Time Machine can be made to be "aware" of files that are effectively filesystems themselves - you can watch it as it backs up VirtualPC for example. It doesn't take the entire 10G virtual disk image every time.
For your eyes, you might want to check out F.lux:
http://stereopsis.com/flux

That helped me a little. I also bought a Kindle DX and use it to read PDFs and some web articles converted to PDF. Since the Kindle isn't backlit, it lets my eyes rest vs staring at the big monitors and laptop screen.
Pygame 1.9.0 released.  Lots of goodies for creative programmers.
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Summary of changes:

- many, many fixes and improvements. The largest amount of changes has gone into this release than any other pygame release.

- bug fixes for backwards compatibility issues introduced in pygame 1.8.x series. old games like solarwolf and libraries like PGU work again.

- experimental camera webcam module (still in development).

- experimental midi module based on portmidi and pyportmidi (99% complete).

- experimental gfxdraw module based on SDL_gfx (including AA circles, textured polygons and other goodness).

- python3, and python3.1 support mostly completed. Some modules still remain to be completed - but mostly it's working.

- nokia mobile phone s60 support.

- improved OSX support (dropped pyobjc dependency, improved installer, sysfont now works on OSX).

- pygame.examples + pygame.tests included with pygame. This makes testing easier, and also makes learning pygame more fun and easy.

- cleanup of examples, and addition of new examples.

- new tools to aid in development of pygame itself, better compilation documentation.

- py2app, and py2exe support improved.
i've never heard this before. how is it done?
The title is somewhat misleading; what's actually happening is that they finally observed spin-charge separation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinon
...and anything that threatens their platform, the quash, and refuse to say why

Isn't the answer already contained in your question? The real situation is that developers know that they are walking a fine line with applications that "threaten their platform". No big surprise there.

I get a feeling that banning Google Voice was an attempt to be more consistent, as some have blamed Apple for cronyism in relation to Google.
For offline use (in whatever sense that term might be applicable to YouTube) I like clive for ripping the full video and ffmpeg for extracting the audio stream. Does your service use any such tools under the hood?

clive: http://clive.sourceforge.net/

ffmpeg -i "$in" -acodec libmp3lame -vn "$out"
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Instapaper pro is actually the first app I paid for on the app store :) (btw it's now only $4.99)
I remember being excited when I saw that he was appointed. Ironically, being as the head of the FCC co-founded a YC-ish thing, it's entirely possible that he also reads Hacker News, and almost certain that he reads TechCrunch – so it's really not surprising at all to see that they're monitoring the nerdier channels.
Stealing A Penny From Every Transaction
If the title is misleading, so is the article.

A team of physicists from the Universities of Cambridge and Birmingham have shown that electrons in narrow wires can divide into two new particles called spinons and a holons.
No, he's using his 'powerful voice' to get more hits to his website.
I have to say it makes me a little uneasy how quickly this is happening. Isn't the market supposed to sort this out on its own?

I'm not familiar with the relevant law, so maybe I just don't understand. Is it illegal to run a proprietary phone platform and lock competitors out?. Isn't that basically what has always been the case in the pre smart phone era?

Don't get me wrong, I don't like what Apple/AT&T does and as a developer I'm not going to sign up to a platform that puts me in such a weak position. But I see that as an issue between me and Apple. I'm not sure why I need the government in it.
The results around 22 aren't too surprising: most people will probably quickly figure out that the target cannot possibly be above 66.67, but few will realize that this implies that the target will be below 44.44. If you assume the guesses will be randomly distributed from 0 - 66, you get a target of 22, which isn't a bad guess for most of the times this experiment was performed on the proles.
Maybe it's just me, but every time I try a new software solution for time management, I find myself on Wikipedia within 10 minutes. The most effective technique I have discovered recently for concentrating is turning the damn thing off. Sounds crazy I know, but you'd be surprised how productive it can be to take an hour or two with a pen and paper attacking your problem with no electronics present.
I'm not trying to feed the troll here, but I feel it should be noticed that this is a hacker community, and hackers don't generally dig fence post holes all day, trenches, or lay bricks all day. I'm sure some do, but programmers, who program for a living, need to be in front of a computer of some kind. Not all hard jobs involve labor. I'm guessing you've never had to sit in front of a computer and think logically for a week -getting very little sleep all the while. If you had, you would not only have not written that post, but would learn that thinking, and not moving while you think (limited movement), can be stressful and hard to say the least.

Well, that's my two cents, and from my point of view, and I am sure others share it, when you said "But physically, if you're saying 'computing' is hard," I dare you to do something some of the greater "computers" (people who computer) have done. You know, like make an operating system from scratch without ever seeing code of one, you know, like Steve Jobs did, for example.

Ok. I hope that didn't come out as a rant, and if it did, I apologize, but think about it, computing can be hard.
Save yourself a bunch of clicks: http://www.inc.com/print/91
Really? I ported an Atlanta number from T-Mobile to Sprint without a single problem here in Seattle. They did ask me for an Atlanta zip code during the process, but it never came up as an issue.
The whole civil system is an end-run around the Constitution anyway. The government can't take all the money you'll ever earn, but they can allow some corporate entity to. (Totally different, see! Nobody's rights are being violated!)

(Incidentally, the Constitution says "cruel AND unusual" not "cruel OR unusual". So if a cruel punishment is routinely applied, that makes it not unusual, and totally legal.)
Is this a fair shortening of your comment:

Because Apple sells devices that use the public airwaves, they are subject to regulation, and the agency in charge of that is the FCC?
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I am the same way. I'm far more productive when I draw/write any design/development abstract on paper. Once you have a finished blueprint it is far easier to stay focused on executing your plan.
The don't mod down if you disagree rule here isn't doing too good lately :)

Anyway, Yes, people still buy cars, that's for sure. Not as much as before, it is one of the industries that is hit hardest by the so called crisis. The theory goes that if the car industry can be rescued at least when we get out of this crisis the recovery will be a bit quicker.

Good point about the non-drivers' taxpayer money though, I hadn't thought about that at all. It's not an obvious point and - as a driver - I would feel uncomfortable about using such a subsidy but then again I have tried hard to stay away from subsidies as much as I can.

My theory is that subsidies are a subtle way of getting in to an unsustainable situation, it's living above your means by another name.

Sure, everybody else does it but that doesn't mean it is a good thing. Some subsidies I can see the point of, such as subsidized housing or food for people below the minimum income level required to have a chance to get out of that situation. But even there there are two sides to the coin, for some that works well, others lose their self respect because of receiving the money and give up altogether.

There are no easy choices these days, 'cash-for-clunkers', even if it is asymmetrical and will not have the positive effect on the economy that the pundits claim it will have has some positive side effects. Transportation is one of the major engines of the American economy, what with the government now being a large - and somewhat involuntary - shareholder in a car company you can't really blame them if they want to at least improve the market for vehicles so they can recover some of the money through the backdoor and create the right conditions for an exit.

Another downside of the cash-for-clunkers program is that it moves sales that would have happened anyway into a shorter window of time nearer to the present. The usual effect of such an activity is that it will be followed by a slump.
I tried this experiment a few years ago with a roomful of actuaries, who I suspected would be likely to "iterate" their response a few more times than the average person, and the answer came out at 14.
Mono notwithstanding, getting into C# culture and ecosystem isn't really feasible for pure-UNIX developers like me. Java takes the cake there.