skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are lots of problems with the Mozart analogy. For one, Mozart was trained by his Father. His education in music began at a very young age (which is common among many if not most of the highly successful classical concert musicians in the world).

For another, despite the fact that Mozart's music was creative (I've loved every Mozart piece I've ever heard performed well and most of those that haven't), from a superficial perspective many of them are also remarkably similar. If you aren't ready to appreciate subtle differences you aren't ready to appreciate Mozart for many of the reasons his music remained popular for 200 years after his death.

Which brings me to the next point, which is that he talks about Mozart's music existing in a sort of historical vacuum, and doesn't bother to compare Mozart's work to the work of his contemporaries [1]. Most of his contemporaries have been forgotten by the mainstream, for various reasons, but while they were alive they still produced a lot of music.

Finally, while there is creativity in science and one can take a scientific approach to creating (or "discovering") music, it's difficult to argue that the importance of scientific rigor is not more important in a paper about Algorithms for Mesh Analysis than in a Piano Concerto in Eb Major.

[1] Wikipedia lists 64 composers in Mozart's era: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Classical_era_composers...
Petition to the UK government to apologize to Alan Turing
Wow, I have not seen these since I cracked one of my 70's era homesteading books. Then they were using an inflatable bladder and spray foam rather than prefab segments.
Perhaps you mean the straw that broke the camel's back?
People here in Taiwan can get PHDs without working knowledge of a second language, depending on the school and department.

Thank you for mentioning the example of Taiwan, the country where I have lived longest outside the United States. Let me first agree with you that I should have reported the book's statement as "earn a Ph.D. academic degree without being expected to gain a working knowledge of a second language," which more accurately represents what the book said, and takes into account cases in which the Ph.D. candidate does the bare minimum of what is required before giving up on language study.

Let me ask some questions about current conditions in Taiwan. Isn't 大一英文 (first-year university English) still a routine course for university students in Taiwan? And isn't English still one element of the college entrance examination in Taiwan? And isn't English still a compulsory subject in secondary schooling in Taiwan? (And, after all, isn't that the language we are writing to each other just now, although it appears we could both write in Chinese?)

But the situation of bilingualism in Taiwan is more nuanced than that. Most people in Taiwan in my generation learned a second language in primary school. They learned Mandarin (Modern Standard Chinese) even though their home language was either Taiwanese (in most cases) or Hakka or some other non-Mandarin Sinitic language, or one of the non-Sinitic aboriginal languages of Taiwan. Most people in Taiwan my age (Baby Boom generation) or younger are proficient in Mandarin, but two generations ago very few people on Taiwan spoke Mandarin at home. That's a major example of a huge amount of second-language learning in a Third World poor country.

Accepting your correction that some people get Ph.D.s without MEETING the expectation that they should learn a second language (which is how I should have said what the book said in the first place), I still find it baffling that in the United States there are large numbers of young people who pursue higher education who never even consider enrolling in any second language course, and who have not taken any such course in high school. Study of Spanish is quite widespread in the United States, with French, German, and now Chinese following behind, but there do seem here genuinely to be more people farther along in higher education who have never, ever studied a foreign language than there possibly could be in most other countries, where taking a test in an acquired language is usually a routine part of college entrance testing. I have had the appalling experience of meeting United States professors of Chinese history who can't speak Modern Standard Chinese well enough to talk their way out of a paper bag (I've met others who speak well), so I think the Ph.D.-ready standard even in related disciplines here is not high by world standards.
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It's probably worth noting that the point of the article doesn't rely much on the Mozart analogy.
Possible Meteorite Imaged by Opportunity Rover
The Opportunity rover has eyed an odd-shaped, dark rock, about 0.6 meters (2 feet) across on the surface of Mars, which may be a meteorite.
Who uses this overpriced Network Solutions nowadays? I needed to work with it for a client, registering overpriced domain names through them is a huge pain in the ass as they try to sell you all this other nonsense. It's really one long road with obstacles to get it only registered.
What people "ought" to do and what they do do are often very different, and you can either pretend that isn't true or you can try to understand it and act accordingly.
Because your code would be more difficult to read.

mountain.getLatitude() vs. dataClass.getDataElement("latitude");

It's the same reason I use XMLBeans (a schema-based codegen) for serializing/deserializing XML documents. Rather than writing mountainElement.getAttribute("latitude"), I can say mountain.getLatitude().
And your point is? Because it is written in Java and packaged as a jar does nothing to convince my boss and team members that we should write all of our code in Clojure. I wish it were that easy.
Google CEO Schmidt quits Apple board
As a former farmboy and current tech guy I found Omnivore's Dilemma to be quite evenhanded. This article is not. Both have good points worth contemplation.

This often gets lost in the shuffle. Pollan investigated four different modes of food production, and followed the trail from farm to table for each. Certainly, he made some judgments about what he saw (and what he saw affected how he eats), but he gave each mode its due.
See Tufte's forum for a discussion:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...
>> "Sony W880i which had cut and paste the day I bought it and allows me to run any apps I damn well like ;-)"

Shame it has a godawful excuse for a browser.
>I really don't see this being that much of a time-saver

I don't either, but I do agree with his argument that it will make code more readable. And, w.r.t. the auto-finally block thingy, badly implemented exception handling is a common cause of error in "maintenance mode" codebases. [Yes, code reviews SHOULD happen, etc.]
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Err, we just use TortoiseSVN for document management. The documents go in with the source code.

You can merge stuff, have multiple authors working on the same document, get a full revision history and do all that other junk that Google docs does. Plus it's in house, works over the web (over https) and can safely be delivered over our VPN solution without having to rely on a 3rd party like Google for security, storage and availability.

There is a LOT of benefit in being able to wake up our sysadmin and fix something that is down rather than wait on Google to do it.

Word costs us virtually nothing thanks to MAPS[1] from microsoft which gives us 10x Vista, 10x Office for $350 the lot (for internal use) and a couple of copies of windows 2008 server and an exchange license.

There's no point in fishing out $100 for mathtype - Word 2007 is very close now.

[1] https://partner.microsoft.com/40016455
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That's exactly it. You can't trademark "Sci-Fi" and you can't trademark "Domain", but these things, you can.

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2009/07/sci-fi-channel-reboot...
True. Opera Mini works fine though :-)
Thank you - my point entirely, albeit slightly more elegantly put.
http://www.askdev.ru/ - russian clone, not bad.
Indeed, iPhone v. Android was trouble enough. Add in ChromeOS vs. Mac OS X, and Google Apps v. their Apple counterparts and you begin to wonder just which parts of the board meeting after coffee and bagels that he could actually take part in. I'd imagine that GV was, at best, a side-show to this decision.
Good advice, though hardly cutting-edge; wasn't Unix doing salted passwords in the '70s?
Seems crazy to me, except maybe the $100 for the full article legally. I could see a few select, high quality pieces being bought in full for $100 to round out certain kinds of upscale sites or newsletters.
The $22,500 MP3: Does The Constitution Protect People Or Just Corporations?
Outlines in Word is excellent for ensuring that a document has excellent structure.

I use latex a lot (more than Word) yet people do not see its limitations. It would be best if Latex is replaced with something like open source Adobe Framemaker or something.
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I think it is wrong that modern society/government should apologise for the transgressions of it's predecessors (I feel the same way about the whole apologising for slavery business).

IMO a better way is to not hold those prejudices any more. At the end of the day that is greater than any apology could ever be :)
I fully agree

have you looked at gnome-do? its the gnome answer to spotlight / quicksilver, you invoke it, start typing and it lists matches in a somewhat similiar manner.

The current release in ubuntu is somewhat patchy, but I really hope they work hard on it and enable it by default in the next release, its an awesomely useful application that has at times replaced

1. the menu bars completely,

2. a lot of trivial stuff done in the shell (copying / findings files)

3. the awesomebar for firefox

4. navigational controls (alt+tab for window focus)
No I said I WASN'T new to the whole scene. I've written kernel code before, and I'm very familiar with all those mechanisms. However the networking code is extremely optimized, and a good walk-through of the code is necessary before one is able to associate each instruction with a particular action as it fits into the whole algorithm - and that's the kind of book I'm looking for. Thanks, though.
innumeracy is a far worse problem than you think. Here's an example that explains why most doctors are loathe to quote numbers to patients

http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes
Nominally, it protects both.

But because some corporations have vastly more money and resources than the people they wish to bully (individuals, in this case), the outcomes are distorted, not to mention the lobbying power of a corporation vs. that of an individual.
I couldnt agree more
The same thought was bouncing around my head while reading all of their new names.
You can argue this the other way too:

Why don't we return to older mechanisms of healing people. Why have hospitals for efficiency when we can have more traveling and local doctors?

Factory healthcare is harmful to humans, we know how to avoid these problems but it would be expensive to fund this way and money is money.
You want cheap healthcare, riiight?

Sorry to me mean and argumentative but I think you're adding some FUD to this debate. The issue at hand is bird flu and swine flu and prevention of these. However I note that animal rights is also being pushed as an agenda. I'm not sure _everyone_ cares about that.
I asked "who uses it", because I can't offhand think of anyone who has to. OK, there are the bosses who can't cope with anything invented since the 1980s and are too high placed to be told to suck it up. There are people in countries too backward to expect a reliable internet connection. And perhaps, some documents required by law? I don't know.

"Who uses it" is the question Google should be asking themselves - so they can turn their considerable market and political power towards obsoleting those uses.
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Techcrunch version of article has more inflammatory headline. Surprised?
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Apparently the shit really hit the fan when Steve saw leaked sketches of the new Google Tablet.
I think I feel the opposite - that this might make the code a little less readable, unless you know exactly what @Closeable (or whatever it's name was) does. But, to each his own...
Asian languages pose a difficulty to those of us only familiar with European languages, certainly. I cannot speak for Japanese directly, but at the highest level Chinese presents the (really quite large) challenges of a writing system where thousands of words are completely orthogonal and there is little (but not zero) connection between a word's written form and its pronunciation; a spoken language that depends on tonal motion to convey meaning at the word level similarly to how an English speaker modifies the connotation of a sentence using tone; and the concept of a language built around slightly different motivating philosophies such as outlining things chronologically instead of descriptively as English does. To my knowledge Japanese shares the first one, not the second, and has the added difficulty of an extremely pervasive system of honorifics which greatly modify the spoken language.

That all being said, if you keep an open mind Chinese isn't that difficult to learn. Characters will, after you learn several hundred, begin to form something which feels not unlike a vast alphabet (many people recognize the idea of radicals, but this extends to characters which are collections of other characters though not really radial/phonetic style). Speech is definitely going to be difficult for a long time and you will probably experience a lot of frustration if you think for any instant it'll be comparative to learning a language you've already got a foothold on. Finally, while you might have a slightly easier time than me with an Indian cultural background, I pretty firmly believe that language and culture are inescapably bound and if you don't have that and don't get a chance to experience it your learning prospects will be crippled.

So yeah. It's not easy. Then again, if I were in your position I'd pretty much jump into one immediately. If you learn Chinese (Mandarin/Putonghua) you could probably jump into some of the more common dialects (Cantonese/Guangdonghua) or Korean relatively quickly. I'm not sure if the same thing happens with Japanese.
Google aims at commuters with Google Apps ads
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In two words (and one link), "Gnome shell"

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=gnome%20spaces&oe=...
Although with some colleges, the advertisements imply strongly that you will get a job with their degree. Don't know in this particular case.
That's not my question... I understand the prevelance of Corn in just about everything in the supermarket. That's pretty much CW amongst those with a little brains nowadays I'd say.

But the OP said that the amount of naturally occurring Nitrogen is enough to feed 10bn people if we move towards a more vegetarian diet. That is, no need for artificial nitrogen.

Which brought me to my question that Corn is the #1 direct consumer of nitrogen. So unless livestock is consuming an awful lot of Corn, reducing the livestock headcount isn't going to reduce the amount of Corn per se.
I wonder if the GV thing was a result of internal politics with the aim being to force Schmidt to resign. I mean it seemed a bit too heavy handed even for Apple. Either way he had to go.

Hopefully this will mean it's 'game on' for full competition in the mobile space.
What’s The Storage Capacity at Google? « Bit Rebels
And a win doesn't matter if you don't collect. Yeah, I get how the semantic circle of logic works.

The point is that to get to the money, you have to start with filing a suit. If he filed a suit in the UK, why not throw one up here as well?
This article has a nice tone, but I think the author makes a lot of generalizations by simply applying his current job/situation to the world at large. Specifically, I disagree with the following:

1) The world is going paperless. Alas, this is not happening. While it's true that some areas, like technical writing and review, have made progress towards this goal, printer supplies remain a truly lucrative market.

2) People prefer software with fewer features. Yes, it's true that people prefer a simple program that does simple things, organizations have laundry lists of things they want and tend to buy the thing that does the most for the cheapest, even if there is overlap (insert long rant about organizational purchasing here)

3) The page metaphor is dead -- it's all web now. This would be great if it were true, but I seriously doubt it. Lots of people (like me) prefer a hard copy of work when editing. In addition, pages give reference points during conversation, stuff like "check out the first sentence in the third paragraph on page 3" which gets very unwieldy without pages

4) Superior collaboration software translates into superior document creation software. Wiki is great. Love it. But in lots of places, like law offices, when you create a document, it has a very specific legal status. It must be kept for a period of time. It must not be edited without a clear trail of edits. Etc. For folks in the healthcare, legal, and insurance world (among others) documents are simply electronic versions of printed pages that have a lot of rules associated with them. This isn't a societal convention as much as it is a legal one. Good luck on getting that changed anytime soon.

Word is a feature-heavy monster, no doubt about it. Nobody uses 99% of all that stuff in there. But there's a long way from making that observation to officiating at its funeral.

The rumors of Word's demise have been greatly exaggerated.
>> don’t use SHA256 for password hashing, use some algorithm that is designed to be slow (like bcrypt or scrypt) to make offline password cracking even more difficult. (dedicated hardware for SHA256 is really fast)

Has anyone ever actually bothered to try implementing something like this over SHA/MD5?
Don't kid yourself. It's far from Corn Syrup. Americans eat more Corn than other cultures, but Europeans still eat more corn than you're letting on. Even if there's a metabolism between the corn and your bodies, it's still corn you're eating. The Carbon 4 is still there, it can still be traced.
Pascal: I used to sign my comments on this site and after a polite argument I changed my ways to fit in better. It's just not the house style on news.yc.
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A Netscape moment for the commercial space industry?
Which brought me to my question that Corn is the #1 direct consumer of nitrogen. So unless livestock is consuming an awful lot of Corn, reducing the livestock headcount isn't going to reduce the amount of Corn per se.

That's probably true, as the corn industry, at least in the US, will find another consumer for its quantities (since, if Pollan's research is to be believed, the corn industry and the government essentially created and supported the market that exists now).
In this case it would probably be something like:

mountain.getDouble("latitude")

With at least two advantages: I'm pretty sure what getDouble will do, as opposed to getLatitude which may query google maps for all I know, and it can be processed in abstract ways. You can have operations which work on any structure: serialization, encription, logging, persistence, hash codes, sorting, raporting and a lot more.

Edit: It also makes for easier code reuse. You make something that works with mountains but could work just as well with houses, you don't have to play with class hierarchies to use it on both.
John Doerr and Jeff Immelt: US falling behind China On Cleantech
Why are we still programming in text? We spend so much time now with making fancy editors and IDEs that make souce code appear like hypertext. This shows that we have outgrown text. Why aren't we programming in some sort of hypertext that makes showing/hiding this stuff trivial? (Just for starters.)
Schneier on Security : Building in Surveillance
Jobless Grad Sues College for 70G Tuition
I would argue that Scheme fulfills the same purpose we discussed--getting out of the way and letting students focus on algorithms--except it emphasizes expressing those algorithms in a functional style.
I think there's probably more to the whole Google Voice thing than is, uhh, on the surface. ;-)

I suspect even if Google knew that the application would be rejected that they still would have developed it to start a PR coup to knock the iPhone off of its pedestal. I don't think Google really cares all that much about Google Voice in isolation -- it's of limited strategic value by itself. But if you see it as part of their overall mobile strategy of commoditizing the smart phone market (which Google Voice also helps), and if you look at how important it is for Apple that that not happen, I think the conflict of interest has more teeth.
The article says there is an expiration date in the body. Nowhere it says that it can't possibly be 'avoided', just that current and foreseeable medicine is not quite there yet.
Google CEO Resigns from Apple's Board of Directors
Just for the record, the Windows Vista start menu does this list thingy too. But you can still choose to have hiararchical menus à la w95 if you want to.
MRSA was produced in hospitals, are all these ideas bad?

Yes. MRSA is a result of bad use of antibiotics and bad hygiene practice in hospitals. Studies have shown that when a hospital goes above and beyond in enforcing hygiene MRSA, and all other infections, drop perspicuously. We also know that proper use of antibiotics almost never results in antibiotic resistant bacterial strains.

So the practices that lead to MRSA, and those include farm use of antibiotics, are bad and should be changed.
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Comparing the performance of IronRuby, Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9 on Windows
Duplicate of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=736494

Still, this submission is getting the attention it deserves, the other did not :-(
PerlMonks hacked, passwords were apparently stored in cleartext
A tale of two tablets: CrunchPad vs. iTablet?
I often wondered that myself, until I saw:

http://code.google.com/p/lambda4jdt/

It's quite an innovative idea. Just because the text is in java, why does it have to look like blub?
What effect is there on optimization?
Mozilla updates bug-tracking site
But Word's pretty terrible at that stuff, too. I've nearly thermite'd my machine when word screws up my styles or starts dancing with my inline images. I've stuck to svn/latex/emacs for real docs. Word tries, but it's just infuriating to make it put out a well-formatted, consistent document when you hit over ~150 pages.

If you can do it, you've got sk1llz I don't.
It's especially the latter that is the cause of a lot of problems.

Lobbying has its uses but for the most part it is simply a channel that ought not to even exist. I don't recall any modern democracy that includes a 'right to lobby' in its charter. Corporations already have an edge over us 'regular humans', they're immortal. Lobbying skews it to the point where there effectively is class justice, corporations can pay to get their laws passed and the general people get to vote who passes the laws.

It's like being able to inject something after the filtering function has already been applied.