skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yesterday's Office Depot flyer had 12 laptops and 1 desktop, exactly the reverse of 3 years ago. Who knows, in 3 years it may have 12 handhelds and 1 laptop.

One thing's for sure. If your software has problems running on smaller and smaller hardware, you're doomed. Just ask DEC, Wang, Qantel, Basic4, Data General, etc.

With Chrome, Google is attacking Microsoft's Achilles heel. If Microsoft's response is another Vista, it should be interesting.
I get up at 8AM and go to bed at 2AM.
I've long ago given up on google as a major source of traffic for anything that I sell and I think that if that is your main strategy you are stringing yourself up.

Just imagine, a 'regular' store that would depend on all it's business coming from a single source referring customers. It can switch at will to send that traffic to a competitor of yours, and your only guess as to why you are getting this traffic is a bunch of coffee-grind staring individuals that claim to have 'the inside track'.

If you have lots of google traffic because you have a premier listing in their rankings then good for you and now work like the devil to get rid of that dependency so that when - not if - the situation changes you are in control.
That's a healthy traffic balance. Contrast that with sites that depend for 90% or more on google for their income.
Ask HN: Hacker news in other languages?
Does anyone know of HN-like collections of tech/programming news in other languages?

I know a good hacker who doesn't speak English natively ought to learn to keep up, but for those of us who do speak English natively, but like to practice other languages, this info would be handy. I would feel far less guilty following random tech news if I was practicing my Mandarin at the same time.
Antec 300 Case

500 Watt Antec Earthwatts PS

2x 1TB HDs

Q8400 2.66GHz Quad Core Processor

Gigabyte EP45T-UD3LR Motherboard

8GB DDR3 RAM

--

If you have further interest drop me a message.
You can get a lot of flaky diet fads from women's magazines, too.
wow the one guy in the world who has worse penmanship than myself :P

In all seriously, interesting topic and the text book for that course is an amazing algorithms book. My copy is certainly well used.
RIP Freenode and Lilo.

It's a shame, but the extreme reactions of the freenode operators is destroying the server. Soon you'll need an encryption key, proprietary software and be forced to donate (which btw i wont be doing any more)
This is definitely ridiculous. It would be nicer to give the nobel peace prize to someone like kiva.org Twitter is just another communication medium - cool? yes, fun? yes, but hardly revolutionary
Slack and crud?
So the article talks a lot about the culture of Google - striving to solve the world's problems (or a tiny subset of them at least), rather than worrying about monetization. A culture apparently instilled by the attitudes of the top three execs, judging from the kind of things they say.

But does anyone buy this? I know many see Google as a threatening monopoly, not to be trusted, given the level of influence the company has on the internet. I could cite comments by many, say in reaction to the announcement of Google's upcoming OS - along the lines of "No way I'm moving from one overpowered monopoly to another".

On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be many ways Google could impose a vendor lock-in in the way Microsoft could for example.

Thoughts?
It's a spike, I'm not sure that was implicit in the post. I only get that kind of traffic when I get myself together and actually post something, which isn't that often.
Compare "The Evolution of a Haskell Programmer" (http://www.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html)
isn't this much higher than vista?
Twitter is not for teens, Morgan Stanley told by 15-year-old expert
> The European Union has sponsored a search engine project for some years now. I would rather trust them than a private search engine company.

Is there someone stopping you from using said search engine? If not, your complaint is not that you can't use it but that someone else isn't forced to do so.
great idea! HN is truly awesome.
Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.
--Redd Foxx

Being one of those Health Nuts, I practice CR during the weekdays, and let my self go (relatively) on the weekends, I'd recommend that anyone try it for a month. The first week is the hardest, but you will feel a lot more in tune w/ your body.
Those are very, very logically distinct, species and tribe, I mean. You can conceivably have people doing things for the good of the tribe because in a natural environment they're probably related to the other members of the tribe so if the behaviour helps teh sponsoring gene spread, on average it will propagate. "It's good for the species" is never a good explanation for anything, ever. The other members of of a species (of one's own sex) are the competition, the ones you want to fail in comparision to you. Group selection works fine if there's a guiding intelligence behind it, but there are no examples in nature, ttbomk.
Feel free to suggest any solution that does not require 24x7 oversight.

We've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on salaries doing that in the past and even then it is almost impossible to keep the 'jerks' out.

For every not-so-nice person you block two more will pop up.

And then we're not yet mentioning the spammers, the porn sites and all the other stuff you don't want on your site.

Hang around long enough on ww.com s homepage and you'll see anything that is possible in life (including people being born, dying, marriages and so on). It's got lots of fun stuff but the 'adult' angle is on some days a reason for me to just go and do something completely different for a while because I no longer wish to deal with it.
...not all people, and not even all smart people, devote much time to examining evidence and making sure that conclusions are supported by evidence.

I'm extremely guilty of this, and it bothers me. But what bothers me more is knowing how much time and effort would be required from me to be capable of making evidence-backed claims about everything I'm interested in. You make time for what's important to you, and the truth is definitely important to me, but so is family, building my django skills, learning Scheme, reading GEB, considering ideas for a possible startups... The choice then is what/who to trust, the majority of scientists? The smartest ones (identified how?)? My own perceptions and ideas? The government-backed scientists?

Sceince suffers because people don't have time for it, and because they can't necessarily trust those who do.
Cache Oblivious Algorithms are actually fairly old, 1999 to be precise -- Harald Prokop's Master's thesis: http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/papers/Prokop99.pdf (pdf).

Tokutek uses it: http://www.tokutek.com/careers.php
An interview with RVM, developer of Smplayer
Thanks for that link. I'm partial to Shannon's digital logic work, and the references in that page lead to the full scan of his seminal M.S. dissertation (a 3MB bitmap PDF here: http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11173 . Non MIT-affiliated visitors only get a 'non-printable' version, but different PDF readers ... are worth trying.)

There's also a Jan. 1948 paper, "The Synthesis of Two-Terminal Switching Circuits", Bell System Technical Journal, vol.28, pp.59-98. I don't think there's a PDF of that on the loose.
I'm paraphrasing because I'm not a scientist.

Slack = various sorts of resources, including immune resources.

Crud = inter- and intra-cellular unwanted buildup of proteins, failing cells, non-reversible damage, yadda yadda. It all gets torn up and coincidentally cleaned up by the body's panic for materiel.
Until they try to drag'n'drop, or include excel sheets, or use a reference manager, or define that page numbering should start 1.5cm from the right side and start numbering on the third page as if it was the first, or add a "printed date" to the frontpage. Or text in small caps or an end note, or any mildly complex reference or any mildly complex formatting.

I specifically chose those actions that a non-tech user near me had to perform int the past two days. These are normal tasks that normal users have to perform.
Ask HN: What sites, e.g. experts-exchange.com, would you remove from Google?
In Google's results, what useless sites do you notice coming up again and again?
Side business is growing - when do you quit your day job?
NSFW...
Is there a reason the link to the PDF file is not linkified? Karma seems to be high enough. (I recall reading that linkifying is enabled at a karma threshold.) Does linkification not recognize the https protocol?
"Colors are not what they appear, shapes are not what they appear...objects are not what they appear."

Nothing is what it appears.

This is a great metaphor for human behavior in general.

Ask 3 people, get 4 answers.
very interesting analogy but I still don't get the picture :-)
It's because they used to be the same country.
DSL Composition techniques in Scala
> There is no reason to suppose that dying under anesthesia is related to the diet.

If monkeys in one group were more likely to die under anesthesia than monkeys in a different group, I'd suspect that something is going on. (Being unimaginative, I'd exclude the possibility that dying under anesthesia causes a low calorie diet.)
I was not trying to speculate what people would do if they found a wallet full of money, I was just trying to interpret why they sent back a wallet with a baby picture but did not send back a wallet with nothing of value inside.
As a mechanical engineer may I say, "This is simply awesome!"
How many verions are you going to skip before you switch to something that is actually engineered well?
Well MS might just end the support on Vista someday and then companies would have to upgrade to 7 or end up with an unsupported product.
Or you buy some new office machines and they'll have 7 preinstalled (so you have to spend extra cash to "downgrade").
I think once you're locked in to Microsoft products it's not entirely up to you if you can "skip".
Also, regulations tend to lock-in the current market structure.

The article ignores that Google has a robust new competitor, Bing (as well as other new specialized options like Wolfram) and "search" itself is evolving in social forms like Twitter and Facebook.

Innovators, as usual, are already working on solutions to today's perceived problems.
Elastic CSS Framework to create layout web-based interfaces.
Here in Argentina, if you search in Spanish, todoar.com.ar comes up in the top 10 for almost everything. I'll hand it to the owners, they know how to do SEO. The problem is there's no useful content on any of their ad-ridden pages.
X4View User Interface Framework to create web-based application
If you include the 1st generation, you may well be correct. But the 2nd generation has been profitable.

And that first generation as a loss-leader was essential to produce the results of this current (and future) generations. So that seems far less like a loss than it does an investment.

Truth is, every company in the hardware space (Apple, Microsoft, Sony, and lesser companies like Tivo) all understand that when it comes to moving hardware units, we've got them in the cubicles first, then the home offices, then the bedrooms. The big untapped markets are the living rooms, pockets and cars.

And it seems obvious as anything to me that the xBox, PS3, etc, are not about gaming consoles. They're about getting a multimedia PC attached to your TV. Gates saw this as the next big thing 15 years ago. That's why they bought WebTV! Microsoft and a score of other companies have determined that the living room will be a very profitable market and they've been willing to drop a few dollars to get there.
trust me, end of support is no reason for some companies to update. I'm seeing Windows NT4 boxes all over the place in my daily business and it hurts.
Search was a "solved problem" before Google.

I doubt that something as basic as finding things on the web will lose all its innovators.
Yes, that worked well so far...

They'd have to end the support on XP first to get people to upgrade to Vista before such a threat would make sense.

August 4, 2014 is still some time away and anybody that doesn't like spending big $ on license fees supporting a large number of desktops or servers is looking forward to that day with a lot of fear.

For every x number of 'skippers' there is a number of users that will never come back.
Keep losing freelance work
I have a day job, but I'm looking to break into doing some freelance programming. However, I keep losing potential jobs because my price is too high. I have been saying my price is $50 an hour, which I don't think is unreasonable considering my experience. Should I lower my rate, is there somewhere I should be looking for work?
Not to mention... 40% of companies buying your product is a success no matter how you slice it. I don't care what anybody says. That's a success.
I am not sure how regulation is really going to help anyone except the black hat SEOs. If anything it will just make things worse by slowing down the ability of google to respond to black hat SEO and creating a more bureaucratic form of whose hand do I grease to get on the first page. I am not sure the author really grasps the scale that they are playing, or maybe he is sick of playing on that scale.

The author states that the only the large players can afford to reverse engineer googles current ranking algorithm.

However I don't see how forcing them to publish the exact algorithms would create any meaningful change for the "better". The big players will still game the system if anything they will be more successful as they will be able to move resources from reverse engineering to exploiting, and will have a larger time frame where an approach is viable due to red tape.

The little guys will probably be just as bad off with roughly the same rule of thumbs they have today.
All the stores that have been spidered
(amazon.com etc)

Googles own sites
(youtube.com, images.google.com, etc)

All the cloaked sites (sites that will redirect you after landing, or that show you different content than they showed the search engine)

All the spammers
(you've already mentioned experts xchg, but there are many many more)

Anything that points to or contains the word sedoparking

All the crappy blogs

I'm sure that google could do with several billion pages less than they index right now and their quality would shoot up.
I totally agree!, and... with that said, I don't think some people opinions should be taken as a majority, and even more if it comes from the web, internet usage is so low worldwide. Iran != US.

I posted my opinion about Honduras situation (which is very similar, and I would say worse than Iran's, and still didn't get much press... interesting ah?):

http://igordevlog.blogspot.com/2009/07/interweb-world.html
"Loux took the opportunity to introduce Echo - his new product that allows publishers to embed a simple JavaScript widget and aggregate social media and blog dialogue from across the web." - Gosh, I wonder if that was a a factor in declaring the death of comments...
That button isn't tiny, and is in fact very obtrusive. It makes creating designs and layouts hard enough as it is, and the file dialog isn't even used very often.

I'm pretty sure you can implement something like this on the web with some simple javascript, dynamically changing the input type from "text" to "password" and vice versa.
Hey, let's regulate "e-mail marketing" while we're at it. Pfft. Whatever.
I think it's much harder to memorize a 16 digit number rather than a (usually) mnemonic password.
Depends where you are, and what you're doing. That seems like a reasonable rate to me for a lot of things, but it's low in the bay area, and maybe it's high for other places.
Are the security problems with a "hosted service" really all that different than the security problems with a hosting center?

Rackspace (generic) folks have physical access to the machines and installed the OS or at least whatever you used to get the OS on the machine. How did you verify that they didn't install a trojan or root-kit?
Yes, that's the point. The bouncer doesn't need to check the old man, and the card player doesn't need to check the third card.

This is obvious when given the bar context, but less obvious when the same set of rules is taken out of any human context.
Where are you located? In Bangladesh it's probably on the high side, but in Copenhagen it's certainly on the low side.
Social Skydiving Days 18-20: Winners are Made of Fail
Good advice - Burn all the bridges you can, and then go off to work on a project that has a mediocre chance of success.

Sorry, but if you follow the advice in this article, you are an asshole.
Absurd? Ludicrous? Okay, maybe it's a bit of a stretch, but if you look at Microsoft's long track record of harming consumers, I wouldn't bet the farm against it.

http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepape...
This is the most stupid thing i've read in this entire thread.
I suppose you practice phrenology too.
It's also in the middle of a recession.
Founder of DreamIt Ventures - Steven Welch - Running For Congress
Its funny you mention experts-exchange. Whenever I see that as a search result, its usually a relief. I have yet to see an experts-exchange page that did not have the information I was looking for on it, even though they do make it rather difficult to find (You have to scroll all the way to the bottom to see the actual answer).

Compared to the huge number of real spam sites that usually come up when search for technology related questions, like all of those mailing-list archives/mirrors, and the huge number of pages that ripped old forum content, experts-exchange is amazing.

I can't really think of any pages I would want removed. I would like to see better pages for a lot of products, but that seems to have more to do with the manufacturers simply not creating the pages than with Google. Search results for physical goods seem to be fairly lacking, its always hard to find information about them and not just stores selling them.
"We sit in miserable offices where we are under appreciated, our skills are misused or ignored, and our passion for life deteriorates quickly. Why? Because we are risk-averse people that need to be assured we have the money to pay for our monthly bills. In return, our souls are sucked."

How can an article that cuts to the essence so well give such bad advice. I have tried all 4 strategies and they don't work.

"1. Stop caring."

Bad idea for anything. I have to care about what I spend time on. That's probably what makes me want to do my startup in the first place. Not caring about work is contagious. Next thing you know, you won't care about anything.

"2. Build up vacation."

This takes too long. Even if you only have 1 or 2 weeks to "plunge" into your startup, you never get enough done. Vacation should be for vacation, not your startup.

"3. Make a suggestion that HR should implement temporary paid leave for employees."

This is just stupid. If I'm not getting paid, why would I want to do this. Just quit and get another job later if you have to.

"4. Try to get laid off."

This is the same as #1 and just as stupid. Even if it works, $200 per week != $1000 per week.

My best strategy: Code every day. 5 minutes, 6 hours, doesn't matter. Just keep the damn thing moving forward every day until it's time to quit, then quit. It's worked for me before. It'll work again.
Aren't we just comparing apples and oranges here? Is it really that counterintuitive that people who get up at 5 AM tend to not be terribly mentally acute at 3 PM? Is it counterintuitive that night owls would be more mentally acute later in the day?

Let's see a study that measures the mental acuity of extreme morning people at 7AM and the mental acuity of extreme late risers at 2 PM. Better yet, let's measure mental acuity of the two groups immediately upon waking. Surely that must be just as significant as the study above.

Studying the mental performance of two groups when one group is seriously disadvantaged (and if you think people who get up at 5 AM aren't disadvantaged at 3 PM, I think you're not being honest) isn't particularly note-worthy if you ask me.
When thinking about it, the backlash came when an opportunist tried to create a political party around feminism...

Before that, we saw politicians in established parties trying to ride that hype wagon.

A pity such an important field has so much sh-t. To paraphrase a Swedish expression: Where pathos go in, reason go out.

Edit: On consideration, if you don't have honesty you don't have anything. There are so many more ways to be completely wrong than close to correct, so any flirting with idealists will generally create more damage than the idealists can ever solve. I'll take a stand on zero-tolerance of dishonesty. (That said, don't paint all feminists with the same brush. It is not like they are flat Earthers all of them.)
"we'd have bigger problems than Firefox"

It's not like win2K is super-secure...

Seriously, it _really_ scares me when I see medical equipment running any Windows (not only win2k or earlier) being networked in hospitals.
A piece of advice from a med student: focus on your studies !
Since you have a good computer experience, there is little chance that you lose your IT/Programming knowledge if you just focus on your medecine.
BUT, there are much higher risks that you end up with a poor medecine knowledge if you try to mix it with computing.

So, try to be a good or a very good doctor for the next 8 years, then you can try to mix.
here it is: http://media.ft.com/cms/c3852b2e-6f9a-11de-bfc5-00144feabdc0...
You could consider raising it. I did some freelance work several years ago and offered my services for what I thought was a very reasonable price-- $50/hour. I was losing a lot of jobs at that rate.

A friend told me how his father had been in a similar situation. He was offering a superior service that was, in many cases, lower than what the prospects were already paying. After being turned down repeatedly he finally asked why. He was told that he couldn't possibly be able to deliver the quality promised for the price he was asking. The low price created a perception of lower quality-- lower than what people were willing to accept for that price. So, they'd tell him it was too expensive or they just weren't interested.

I doubled my rate and not only got more work but better work. You could try it. The worst that will happen is people will still say no and you can always let them negotiate down a bit. Still, like others have said, it depends on the going rate where you're doing work.
There are a number of illusions like this - a checkerboard with weird colored tubes comes to mind - but this is easily the most dramatic of the effects. Even when zoomed in, I still see it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same_color_illusion
June TopRank News Roundup
Well... Looking into my disk and how badly it fragments, I see Windows is doing a lousy job.
Profanity Helps One Tolerate Physical Pain Better
I hate this comment, so maybe its true. Thanks.
You will notice his website is VERY interactive and has almost a hacker news kinda points system for user generated campaign agenda content.
As an Italian American who knows plenty of African Americans, I don't think it would have worked just as well with either group. I suspect it might have worked similarly well with Indians, however.

Not all groups have the same level of in-group trust and out-of-group suspicion.
Oh please. Not this again. Read http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/author/reeseerlich/ for the take of someone whose knowledge of Iran predates June 2009. Provides a lot more perspective than the social media wankery.