skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Those refs to Panini in Russell & Norvig blew me away a little -- context-free grammars and knowledge representation in 350 B.C.!

On Backus, here's what Google found at http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_Histo...:

Booch: And giving examples, and stuff like that. I had read you were influenced by some of the work of
Noam Chomsky, that led you to that.

Backus: Yeah, well, that’s a funny story. That’s what I said and what I believed, and yet… Who was it?
Somebody sort of proved that I was wrong about it, that I hadn’t got it from Noam Chomsky, because the
dates were all wrong somehow. But-- God, who was that?

Unrelated quote on the next page:

Booch: Really! Interesting. So as a programmer, what did you program in most of the time?

Backus: I never wrote many programs. I was not good at doing that. What kind of programs was I going
to write anyway?
Arduino + Etch-A-Sketch = Robosketch Drawing Tool
It is sad that wanting to buy high quality products instead of utter shit is considered snobbery.

You might be interested to know that while beer sales as a whole decline craft beer sales are increasing. One of the solutions devised by the large breweries is to create fake craft products.
PNG Optimization Techniques, Part 2
Ten Mac Apps That Make Windows Users Drool
Foursquare: Why It May Be the Next Twitter
> Perhaps it's because the dude himself claims, "I don't always drink beer..."

Not only does he not always drink beer, but when he does, he only "prefers" Dos Equis. So vague and non-commital. What an enigma!

Bill Murray's character isn't quite as cool, but the advert reminds me of The Life Aquatic With Steve Zizou.
Build your own Apollo Guidance Computer
You mean, like this?

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/
There is an implicit quantifier in the phrase 'sell their freedom'. You read 'any', I meant 'all'.
...an avid TiVo user, or rather Linux that is ;)
The cost of education TODAY is essentially zero. There's a huge amount of knowledge in the public domain, and libraries aren't expensive, and neither are computers, and then there's also the internet.

But you don't go to college for the education. Well it's definitely part of it, but a small mart. The big parts in no particular order are:

1. Social signaling that are you at least resemble a functioning adult. A college degree is a kind of societal hazing showing you're kind of OK.

2. Making connections with other people, other people who are very likely to be successful because of their education or their family's money or what ever, it's nice to have them in your social circle.

3. 3-5 or how ever many years of a fun and/or somewhat challenging experience that's shared with many other young single people all living and partying in close proximity. It's almost like a cruise with homework. Oh guess what they have those, you can actually take that as real college class.

How much would a 4 year vacation like that cost you?
What if a large section of society had taken that vacation and not shared the experience made you somewhat of an outsider. How much would the travel agency be able to charge you then?

Tuition costs make more sense now?
The author makes some claims I think are conflicting - specifically that software shouldn't be built by brute force and ignorance, and that the Chandler project should have used C++ instead of Python because more programmers know it.

Maybe they were hiring the wrong people (programmers who didn't already know Python), but I really doubt that the choice of language was a major cause of their failure.
Good observation. This is more apparent if you switch to decimal notation, (For want of a better term. I'm sure there's a name for it, I just don't know what to call the decimal point when you're talking about binary. Surely "decimal" point is wrong.)

In binary:

0.1 + 0.01 + 0.001 + 0.0001 + ... = 0.1111... = 1

In decimal:

0.9 + 0.09 + 0.009 = ... = 0.999... = 1
What's the LOC now?
Network Solutions: 573,928 possibly compromised in attack
I look forward to cheap machines that are smarter than man. I fear expensive smart machines which only the richest of the rich will be able to afford.
Right. If you're okay with selling it in increments, but not selling all of it, there's probably a cutoff. And your cutoff is probably lower than 99%.
Tips from a Small E-Commerce Owner
Iuf4irftgb4ffmfnbrturrffjjklpo
pg says it's boring. I'm increasingly inclined to agree.
About 10x that: http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/dca901c0cb59ebb533a511df3a84...
There are so many inaccuracies in that comment I don't know where to begin.

1) Contrary to popular belief, most prenups are not thrown out -- the only requirements for a valid prenup to survive legal challenge is that both the (future) husband and wife were separately represented by counsel, AND that both spouses disclosed ALL properties (real and personal) they possessed. The validity of a prenuptial agreement is measured at the time it was signed, unless extraordinary circumstances justify re-evaluating it at the time of divorce -- and in such cases, the re-evaluation takes into account the relative importance of holdings. For example -- a normal person selling a startup for millions is an extraordinary event. Warren Buffet selling a company for millions is not.
EDIT: Note that I am simplifying the requirements; the others involve a lawyer, so the lawyer will let you know what they are if you ever do a prenup.

2) Spousal support -- does not include money for the children. It is solely to "equalize" income between the former spouses, and can be readjusted on petition at any time by either spouse.

3) Child support -- the custodial parent may not use child support for their own benefit (unless that benefit is incidental to the benefit to the child). If the custodial parent does use child support for their own benefit, the non-custodial parent is entitled to reimbursement for that amount, and possibly a reduction in child support.

Interlude: Nas. Nas is a millionaire. He had a kid, with a woman, and lived a lavish lifestyle. B/c of that, on divorce, his wife and kid get to continue living a lavish lifestyle via alimony (wife's standard of living during marriage) and child support (child's standard of living during marriage). Lesson to learn: If you're rich, live a normal lifestyle and you won't pay (relatively) much in support.

4) Poor people -- whether black or white -- do not trust the legal system. The reasons are mostly obvious. However, a good portion of it is that poor people base their understanding of the law on shows like Judge Judy and Jerry Springer, not realizing that these shows are staged and/or not real courts.

5) The divorce rate for first-time marriages is less than 30%. (20% is the figure I hear most often). The divorce rate for people who have been married before increases by about 10-20% for each subsequent marriage. If you take out the multiples, divorce is actually fairly uncommon.
Note too, that the divorce rate amongst college-educated couples (both spouses) is less than half of the divorce rate amongst couples where neither spouse went to college (stats for first-time marriages).

5) Harsh divorce laws discourage divorce. Think about it -- the easier and less painful it is too divorce, the more likely people are to go through with it. Divorce rates jumped when no-fault divorce laws were passed.
I'm not sure how meaningful this would be; arc was basically written for news.arc.
Vi vs. Dvorak
Why my VC funded startup failed
I wish someone would create some benchmarks that were good for comparing code size. That would be a bit harder, because the problems would have to be bigger, and thus more likely to be ambiguous, but it would be a useful thing to have.
So we're back to my main argument -- minimalism is confusing.
richard,

I have a beta management site (http://www.launchset.com) that could be useful for your site. I'll drop you an email.

Thanks.
If open sourcing your product will destroy your business model, then someone else creating an open-source version of your product will also. If that seems possible to you, then you probably should do is to try to transfer your business model to something that is resistant to those sorts of problems, that way if someone does create a competitive program, you are still okay. And you may decide to open source your own program to get the any benefits for your own program, rather than losing it to an open source competitor.
Americans are more open about race b/c we recognize how fucking important it has been to the development of our country. Britain, too, is fairly open about race, for somewhat similar reasons, but have less "draw"
Actually, in the west, title held by a married woman in her name was considered her own property. Property held by the husband was considered to be marital property.
If the property was deeded to the "Husband and Wife", the wife's interest was the her 1/2 interest via the deed "and Wife", plus the marital interest held by the husband. This was called the Married Woman's Presumption; it was abolished in 1975.
Actually, the Irish were sold not as slaves but as life-term indentured servants. It's a crucial difference, legally (if not practically) -- indentured servants were treated as people, not property.
Very interesting. Can anyone recommend a good (light, if possible) introduction to game theory?
Some more links on game theory:

How Real People Think in Strategic Games: http://www.msri.org/people/members/sara/articles/expecon.pdf

Ten Little Treasures of Game Theory and Ten Intuitive Contradictions: http://people.virginia.edu/~cah2k/treasure.pdf
Who cares? It's not like they wrote or consulted on whatever was hacked, and there isn't enough time in the day to write every piece of software you use from scratch. This is what you get for writing your OS in high-level assembly.
I disagree with the summary line completely...

What do you mean by "humbling lesson"? If anyone finds an unpatched flaw and uses it to exploit some servers, then it doesn't matter who takes care of the servers. It doesn't matter if it's ptacek or a random admin. It's a new, unknown problem (if the claim about a 0day is real).

Also they're "hacking" the frontend web server. Is that post really interesting in any way? They didn't get to any sensitive information (or didn't publish it). They also didn't get into any personal system, so I doubt there was any real harm done. (otherwise they would brag about it even more)
*sigh, doesn't it ever occur to anyone that a company that still makes billions in a deep recession, has the largest market cap of any IT company, has a share of over 90% in its main revenue markets, was until recently led by the richest man in the world, and only hires the world's brightest people, might not be stupid?

If a company wants to stay alive it needs to diversify and enter new markets. It shouldn't come as a surprise that Microsoft doesn't try to create new markets. Its core competency has never been innovation, it has always been outmuscling the competition in growth markets.

Many of the diversifications have been a success, with Internet Explorer being the flagship. Netscape showed the Web was going to be big, Microsoft entered the browser market to make it so. Internet Explorer was for a large part the catalyst that put a Windows computer (with Office) into every home in the late 90's.

The same thing happened when RealPlayer showed streaming video was going to be big. Microsoft decided to give its WMP product a boost and made it so. The multimedia possibilities further catalyzed sales of Windows PCs and Media Centers in particular.

At this point IE and WMP are no longer important since there are plenty of widely available alternatives that other people are developing freely for Microsoft. It is shifting its attention to other areas that could further fuel its software line. Azureus will establish a firm presence of Windows in the Cloud, while acting as a catalyst for new features in their corporate products like Office and Exchange.

Visual Studio, .NET, DirectX, etc. have all been major catalysts for the development of the largest software legacy in history, which means Windows will be in business for at least another 30 years.

Finally, Microsoft has entered a number of markets in which the only "failure" is that it didn't become market leader. Otherwise, many of these products are a success (Bing, Xbox 360, Zune, Game development, MSN). The added value in terms of diversification and building new products and expertise is also notable. The MSN/Live expertise is what allowed them to build Azureus, Bing and Office 2010.

The only area in which Microsoft really failed to win its battle is handhelds. Apple outwitted them with religious marketing and some UI novelties, Nokia/Symbian always managed to keep a tight grip on the phone market, and Google decided that the mobile OS itself can be a catalyst for its web products. This is not only a missed opportunity, but may also come to threaten Microsoft's dominance in other areas.

Overall. Microsoft is not evil, stupid, at the end of the road, or sliding downhill. It's the #1 IT company and very good at doing business.

(No, I use Linux about 90% of the time, use Opera, VLC and Gmail on all my machines and I don't own a copy of MS Office. It's just that I learned not to ignore the business part of IT.)
Virtual currency in China being traded for real physical goods
So now, if I understand this correctly, we get to mix all the special treatment for IE6 in one messy stylesheet instead of keeping them in a separate one where we can jut throw them out all at once when that thing has died off? I don't think so.
John Dvorak's Second Opinion: Is the party over for behemoth Microsoft?
We might be rising into positions of power, but how many years did we spend without being able to vote or to even being allowed into universities, etc? In certain cultures or countries women have been always well considered, but in others it's not so clear.

Housewives being inferior? No way. Being a housewife requires a lot of skill, energy and certain sacrifices that most modern women (me included) don't want to make. Managing a house is like managing your own little company. Except you cover 90% of the job positions at once. And generally cannot fire your "employees". Housewives really deserve a lot of respect. And a honor spot in the entrepreneur comunity :)

Anyway, that's the issue, precisely. We have on one side, a lifetime job, where you will most likely have to depend on someone to provide enough money to run it properly. On the other side, you can be independent by getting a job you might change whenever you feel like. Wouldn't you prefer traveling, have different job experiences, etc. while you're still young? We women actually can now make this choice between committing early to family or wait some more years (I think sooner or later our genetic code will push us to want a family). It's more or less what the article says.
Reason #179 for why we need to upgrade our national grid system.
Not only does it distract from the speaker's point, as you note, but it's verbose in comparison.
Palm complains about Apple to USB governing body
Validating css (or html, rss for that matter) is a bit more than idealistic bullshit. It is testability and professionalism.
Yes, sorry. I should have said 'product that became Adobe Premiere' - my point being that it was another 3rd party app.
Combine that with a cultural norm in (a large portion of) the black community to not get married outside of one's race, and you'd expect to see this.

You'll notice that the author never suggests that black women look to men in the other 78% of the US population for a potential husband. I guess that would be worse than never getting married.
Meaning, Mapping, Panalogy, and Netflix
The first machines will probably be used to make money, and game the market.

...Well, those already exist.

Eventually a good part of our economy may become a capital war for silicon that makes money.
It's paying people to feed the information to you that's expensive.
I don't validate my CSS and could care less if there were a hack or two in them. But I use conditional comments because I find it more easier to maintain and debug IE's garbage than using embedded hacks. If I wanted to save on HTTP requests, I'd look at other things that most users would be hitting (images, scripts) than one or two files that only some users with inferior browsers would hit.

If the everything-in-one-stylesheet route works for you and you know what you're getting into, power to you. But don't start asserting that those who use conditional comments are wasting their time and clients money solely for some CSS zen bullshit. That's just a silly accusation...
The problem with Chandler was that the requirements were shit.

People talk a good game about Agility and Extreme Programming, but if you do not know what you want software to do, it is going to do whatever the developer feels like making it do.
One of the most basic 'games' in game theory is called the Prisoner's Dilemma:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

Basically, the idea here is to figure out your best strategy for the 'game' (which really means any situation where you need to make a decision), given that the other "players" don't cooperate with you in any way (i.e. you assume they are going to act in their own self-interest).

The most basic successful strategy for the Prisoner's Dilemma is called "Tit-for-Tat", in which you always choose the "altruistic" option, unless the other player chose against you last time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat
I also saw it here...and I need to learn how to proof read.
Who says it was a 0-day attack? Looking at the output,it seems they brute force the password of user adam...

So yes, even the pros sometimes can make mistake.
There's a trickle down market like everything else. A used-but-not-tatty luxury item is still luxurious, and while it won't impress the already-wealthy it will carry cachet with the upwardly-mobile or the general public. Thus, you might be better off buying a used Rolls-Royce or Bentley than a new Lexus.

I was surprised to learn from Mrs Browl that there are rental clubs for luxury handbags - women who want to make a fashion statement can check out a different designer accessory for different events. This made no sense to me until I considered it from a social engineering standpoint.
Foursquare looks pretty awesome. If only they had an app for the Pre!
If you're more used to complexity I guess :/
Since they are against disclosing vulnerabilities, it seems more likely that these intruders did not gain access through an unknown SSH exploit, but some other way. Once obtaining root, they could paste some proof of being on the system, and simply combine that with the top portion of their log which may be completely fabricated to appear as a 0-day exploit.

Again, if there really is a SSH 0-day, why is an anti-disclosure group revealing one exists?
They made it appear that the exploit somehow was able to determine that a user-level account with the name of adam existed. SSH shouldn't do this.

Then they made it appear that they were able to log in
as adam, and the logs don't make it look like a brute force.

Then they made it appear that somehow privileges were elevated from adam to root, but did not provide any supposed log of how this was done.
Flagged; this seems to be random gossip.
An entertaining comic which covers the basics well but throws in the complexities of reality as an afterthought stated as fact with no justification:

"Basic economic principles do not change with the size of the economy ... direct relationship between self sacrifice, savings, credit, investment, economic incentive, social and economic progress is always the same!"

Yeah right. As an introduction to basic economic principles this comic is great, but it takes a firm position on aspects of economic theory that are very much up for debate. I'd call this propaganda.
Great tips. I've built a couple e-commerce sites for clients over the years and all of these ring true to me.

I think the "Quality Photos" tip is the best. For certain products, allowing customers to submit photos is also great (think Threadless.com style) since it's both product shots and social proof.
I know it was a typo, but software that's sentimental as well as sentient is probably what we need, as opposed to the vast, cool and unsympathetic variety.
Great short tips but I would love to hear more about structure and flow: squeeze pages, landing pages, check out pages, cancelation pages.
Great link! I did my undergrad degree(s) in Math and Physics, with my concentration in optimization. Numerical analysis is a bit of a dry subject, but I think it's super important for programmers to learn, and it's not something that's mentioned very often.

For those readers of HN who don't know what numerical analysis is, it essential deals with mathematical algorithms, and how to deal with the errors introduced by using floating-point numbers.
Make Money Selling Short Reports… « SuperSway – Internet Marketing Tips
Fleet: a radically different architecture for computing
Difficult? It's quite easy to set yourself to private so that nobody can send you an invite unless (for example) they're a friend of your friend. This is how most celebrities use Facebook; they make their personal account private and have a public vanity page for general users.
Hotel Foreclosures Soar In California
; *** remove before flight
(hspace 30)
(intag (a href "kapow") (pr "kill server"))

lol..
The Algorithmic Trading Podcast
A List Of Fallacious Arguments
Really, Palm, is it that hard to write your own sync software?
Given that we currently have no testable hypothesis as to what is responsible for consciousness, but only speculations such as "it's an emergent behaviour", isn't Markram's assertion, "If we build this brain right, it will do everything ... I mean everything" a statement of blind faith?

I am all for this research, but I also wonder if we are not going down a blind alley, ignoring other possibilities that may well be testable.
Have you ever been to Japan?

The thing is, Japan has a relatively homogenous society and a population decline, which may better equip them to deal with social problems (although they encounter their own social difficulties, eg hikikimori, freeters etc.).

The same technological trends may play out very differently in a less diverse or younger population where competition for resources is more necessary, acute and violent. I'm struck by the fact that a lot of Americans whose careers were invested in manufacturing and who didn't have an exit or transfer strategy are now feeling unable to adapt and tend to become politically polarized as a result. Depending on their political affiliations they may place the blame on capitalism, globalism, China, illegal aliens, computers, or wherever...the underlying point being that there are a lot of people finding themselves in an economic dead end with limited future prospects, and they're very angry about it. Such people tend to be both pessimistic and confrontational.
The difficulty of writing sync software is probably not their motivation here.

Palm is getting tons of free press, and they come out looking like the heroes, fighting for openness against an overly proprietary Apple.

And it's working brilliantly. Just look at this story, with its 100+ upvotes: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=722294
PlantBot: Humans Provide Gift Of Greater Mobility With 'Skrodes'
There's a major typo, too. The image says

AP Protect, Point, Pay

I'm pretty sure they meant

AP Protect, Point, Pray
but the syntax of the dereference operation makes it clear what's going on

It makes it clear for trivial operations. Once you enter the realm of nested hashes (preferably with some arrays mixed in) the syntax turns into a royal pain in the ass.
iPhone’s Latest Hit App: A Sex Offender Locator