skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's important to realize though that the article leaves one of the most important things out. It's just a happy coincidence that the metrics used at the pyramid were representative of the metrics used in the industry as a whole.

It's just /just/ about finding a place with metrics and concentrating--the most important part is finding the venue with the RIGHT metrics, and that takes an understanding of what the industry metrics are.
People may not appreciate Zed's bluntness but he does tend to make useful stuff that people want. A web server for rails, a non weird-1970s-era framework for email, and now a 'just-works' mailing list system for end-users who, like most, don't really care about the hoops majordomo makes people run through to run a simple mailing list.
All three astronauts believed there was a real chance such a disaster would occur. Armstrong thought his prospects were only 50-50 of making it back to Earth. And so did Collins, the pilot of Columbia and one of the world's most experienced aviators.

Kinda puts the word "hero" in perspective.
I don't know that it would have made much difference, given the lack of harvestables on the moon. We don't even know how much water is up there, and there's no shortage of its main mineral elements - silicon, iron, calcium, aluminum - here on earth.

I'm deeply saddened that manned space exploration has atrophied - it was so inspiring to me as a kid (b 1970), then I grew up and realised that the spacefaring sci-fi I enjoy most is just not going to happen in my lifetime. I suspect I'm not alone in feeling cheated out of the promised future. At the same time, I'm unable to come up with a good economic argument for why we should go back to the moon or establish a moon base.

>Gloom<
Whereas in a socialized system, we can let the government decide when you are old or sick enough to not be cared for.

America drives the rest of the world in health care, from the best doctors to the best equipment to the best drug company research. Where would we be without that?
I agree with you that Mike Collins is not forgotten.

Wouldn't it be interesting to know what proportion of the population can name all three astronauts on Apollo 11, both of those that walked on the Moon, which it was that was first, or none.

But then again, how many here on HN can name all twelve who walked on the Moon? Does it matter who they were? They were, after all, as Neil Armstrong says, just the most visible of the half million people who made it possible.
Designing Emergent AI, Part 2: Queries and Code
Meme Agora: AML (Arbitrary Modeling Language)
Particularly when you compare him to the engineers who designed that engine that, the very first time it was fired on the surface of the moon, worked and brought the astronauts home instead of marooning them to listen to Walter Cronkite narrate their obituaries on national television.

Yikes.

Except in certain special cases, engineering is not actually a job for rock stars. When you succeed, the projects usually get the glory, not you. From the article, it sounds like Collins understands that perfectly well.
Designing Emergent AI, Part 3: Limitations
I'm not worried about it, and I realize it's a digression. I'm just saying that if every time you face one of these decision points you go with the technology that you already know, then you're optimizing for something different than career longevity, and it will come back to bite you. The point is that there's always a tension in this industry between learning new technologies and being maximally productive.

That said, it isn't "premature optimization" to diversify your portfolio of technologies as much as possible. It's premature to try to guess the Next Big Thing and use it for your project, but that isn't what I'm suggesting. And in any case, five(-ish) years ago, you might well have faced the choice between using Perl and using Rails for a similar project. That decision would have proved fateful.
sure. but more irresponsible is that gmail doesn't recognize that the secondary address expired. It's fairly easy (with most MTAs) to structure a smtp session to discover if a recipient still exists. Google should be doing this regularly so they can alert users that they have a potential security risk if that email stops working.

more fundamentally, the idea of being able to reset passwords like that is kind of insane. I'm a fan of one of the paypal models- they verify credit cards by sending a unique verification pin to the registered billing address. Not saying that would work here, but it's a nice example of mixing online and real world, and institutes a time lag.
The input (1k of play money) and the output (a change in % on a table) are both fairly ethereal. Aside from claiming the benefits of market efficiency, I don't see a reason to call a system where you get 1,000 different votes a market.

I agree with gtzi that the terminology is getting in the way of my use of the widget. The idea that this kind of system gives a more detailed view of user preference than polling is great, and I don't think you need to make it do more than that. You can also probably cut the votes by a factor of 10 (or 100); don't imagine there's a way I can be mixed up about 4 options that requires this granularity to express.
Outlook Web Access can be used with IE, Firefox, Chrome, or Opera without any problems or loss of functionality. If you are experiencing differently, the problem is on your end.
Why Athletes Keep Making the Same Mistakes
>Update: I should add that the two biggest deciding points for me are development enjoyment and speed of development.

This is subjective. Try both of them for a while.

If you need to decide first to buy the hardware keep in mind that the iPod Touch ($229) is essentially an iPhone without the phone/gps capabilities. So you can use it for testing if you're not going to use the phone functionalities.

You have to add $100 (it's a yearly fee) to apply to the developer program in order to upload your code on the device and to make your app available (even if for free).

The iPhone developement tools are pretty good, too. Haven't tried to develop on Android, yet.
Poll: How many people here use dopplr?
Do you use dopplr? If not, why not? If so, what do you think? I've just found it and have my own opinions, but I'd like to know what you think ...
Have heard of it, never bothered to look.
Looked at it, never tried it.
Signed in, never told it of my travels.
Told it of my travels, it was no use.
That post does not contain any advice. It contains facts, none of which were contradicted by your post (a typical property of facts). I never told him not to study calculus. Given our current education system, that would be impossible anyway. I guided him more toward real analysis and suggested some other areas of math that might interest him. Since his only background is high school math, I felt it would be best to introduce him to something where proofs play a central role. If he can't stand that, then he probably shouldn't go into math.
Optimizing 30,000+ Ships In Realtime
My point is that DRM is a technology that should remove the annoying requirement of having to back up songs -- I could see having to back up songs downloaded via bittorrent, etc.

Apple offers the worst of all worlds by imposing DRM and also not allowing a simple re-download option.

I really don't want to spend $100 on a backup drive and then have to back up my iTunes folder after every purchase. That is totally not how things should work in 2009.

Notably, all my other data (code, documents, etc.) is easy to back up (documents on google docs, code on github)... so the only thing I ever need to worry about is music.
Any statistics you have to back that up?
Clickable: http://www.dopplr.com/
The Making Of An Online Business - The Projects
Yeah, this story gave me a powerful 1970s flashback...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGopVkivrOg
Fence Wire, Flying Bedsteads and 36KB: What Got Us to the Moon
Costing out Google App Engine
Now is the time on Sprockets when we dance.
Either-or is ridiculous. It's a false dichotomy and they're practically the same language. With 11 years of total experience, if you found it impossible to fit Ruby and Python in the same brain, you'd have to be a complete fucking idiot. I understand why newbies a year out of college might consider Ruby vs. Python to be a question at all, but you are not in that position. It's a language. It's good. Go ahead and use it.
Clojure is another important dialect which has recently arrived, has good reputation and a growing following. You can start with the following resources:

http://clojure.org/ is the place to keep track of the language progress (maintained by the creator of the language).

http://jnb.ociweb.com/jnb/jnbMar2009.html is a great introduction in the language.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Clojure_Programming and http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Learning_Clojure are also helpful resources for a beginner.

Offline, there is a recent and very good book from the Pragmatic Bookshelf, http://www.pragprog.com/titles/shcloj/programming-clojure. Another book is being prepared by Apress, http://www.apress.com/book/view/9781430272311, obviously I cannot say how good it is going to be at this point.

On a more general note, SICP (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/) is a classic and a great introduction in the world of Lisp, functional programming and programming in general. It uses Scheme as the basic language material. A more recent book, Practical Common Lisp (http://gigamonkeys.com/book/) is an introduction in Lisp on the basis of the Common Lisp dialect.

This is just to start, there are more resources for all levels.

Good luck!
I'll admit to throwing a paper out the window for including the phrase "occluded feminine matrix", but I expect things I haven't studied to be hard to understand. Focusing in computer science has some unexpected dividends in related fields (math, physics, even economics), but that doesn't mean every field must have synergy with our career choice. Is the idea that postmodern literary criticism is hard to read because we're untrained really that toxic?
Works great. No problem.
yeah, i wonder if they're just systematizing the YSlow suggestions
Bingo!!

This is an awesome method IF you're in an industry or area which is close enough to this description. AND IF your up-and-coming talent can fit into this kind of process.

Albert Einstein did not appear at the academic equivalent of a Pyramid Club (A major university).
Should eMusic have given up so much to get Sony on board?
From wikipedia: "Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, truth, beauty, law, justice, validity, mind, and language." So why should philosophy be married to science? It is your mind that is married to science, so you look at science to prove or explain your existence. I tend to do this, as well, which is why I'm on hacker news and I highly respect all of the mentioned scientists, but I would never confuse science with philosophy.

Furthermore, can science or any scientist explain the complexity that was Michael Jackson or is reality television, both of which were/are true Baudrillardian hyper-realities; or the complexity of image-based wars (like Iraq) and street riots (like Iran) that are fought/waged through the media/twitter/etc. Our expression/lives in postmodern times is what shapes these events and how they are lived/delivered/executed/etc, but the philosophy is the language/concepts behind all of this, and much more of the, often complex, phenomena in our society/existence.
Me too.

I don't think issue is exclusive to teens. I think it's more an issue of previous Facebook or MySpace users switching to something as "basic" as Twitter (and many of those users just happen to be teens). Since there is a greater variety of things to do on Facebook, at least at first glance, I think many people feel Twitter is too simple, especially when most of their close friends aren't active on it.
i never had a problem getting stand-alone dsl...the phone numbers are secret because local carriers never really integrated into Bell Mobility, and Bell Mobility never really integrated into ATT...they are basically separate companies all named ATT to confuse you.
The Patriot's Guide to Legalization
It's good, but it's still many requests over network latency and could be improved if it was one connection, one download, for the whole page.
And in addition -- it greatly enhances ones ability of abstract thinking. At least in my case it was true :-)
I disagree.

I think it really comes down to motivation. Everyone knows you have to practice and practice to get good at anything. It's the motivation to practice that is the hard part. It's easier to stay motivated when you set goals that you actually like as opposed to goals that you think may lead to success. That's how I learned to program. I told myself that I wanted to build Z. I didn't try and practice first by building a bunch of little A's, B's, and C's instead. I shot straight for Z from the start. Yeah, I screwed up a lot and had to redo everything like 100 times, but I was motivated to get to Z. I could care less about A, B, and C, but I ended up knocking them down along the way anyway.

If your dream is to write a novel, make it your goal to write a novel! Why would you be motivated to write in some literary journal instead? (I'm trying to write a spy novel myself, and I sure as hell don't care about my college's literary journal. I'm 100% certain that trying to get anything published in something like that would suck all the motivation out of me. Plus, how can someone honestly tell me that would help toward my original goal? I think you get better at writing spy novels by... writing spy novels.)

If you've ever been in a band, you know the hardest part is keeping everyone motivated enough to stick to a consistent practice schedule. I've been in bands where a leader-type thinks he knows some guaranteed method to getting 'discovered'. Every time we would try to follow that method, we would all burn out because it wasn't fun and it was demotivating when the method would inevitably turn out to be flawed or unrealistically demanding. We would have had a much longer life span if we stuck to setting goals that kept everyone motivated instead of trying to follow some unproven method.

So, I say target the motivation, not the method.
Digg Accused of Twitter Traffic Bait and Switch
Ask HN: What's the Browser Distribution for your site?
My site is Launchset.com. According to Google Analytics, here's the breakdown of browsers used by my users.

1. Chrome 37.50%

2. Firefox 34.53%

3. Safari 22.50%

4. Internet Explorer 3.59%

5. Mozilla 1.09%

6. Opera 0.31%

7. Camino 0.16%

8. Konqueror 0.16%

9. Mozilla Compatible Agent 0.16
Innovation, restrictive non-competes, start-up's and engineer mobility
As usual, it is available in Europe first, even though it is an American invention. Thanks FDA and U.S. trial lawyers!
Some data seems to back up the kid's claim (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/nielsen_twitter_was_fas...), which is not to say he arrived at his conclusion in an scientific way.
I quite liked Stewart's Calculus. http://www.stewartcalculus.com/
And it is really helpful to use some CAS (like Maple, Octave or Maxima) to visualize problems.
Yes, because many internet companies benefit the companies you use off-line.
A response to criticisms of astroturfing by the Microspotting writer:

http://www.codexon.com/posts/the-sad-state-of-microsoft-adve...
Mike Collins has a marketing problem: his name's too boring. He should have immediately commissioned someone to name a Tom Collins derivative drink after him when he got back from the mission.

I mean, seriously, you go and do a job with two guys named Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. And you wonder why people forget your name.
Since the discussion is about toolset and compilers, it's worth noting that 4kb intros on windows platforms are nowadays built using a "compressing linker" called crinkler.

Instead of compressing the binary code of the original executable as data which then gets uncompressed when the real executable is run (in that area, kkrunchy is the state of the art on windows), crinkler produces a compressed executable directly, at linking time.

--

http://www.crinkler.net/

http://www.pouet.net/nfo.php?which=18158&f=none -- description of crinkler's operation

http://www.farbrausch.de/~fg/kkrunchy/ -- kkrunchy, a packer which does a code transformation pass before actually compressing it.
Apparently he would disagree. :P From the article:

"At age 78, some things about current society irritate me, such as the adulation of celebrities and inflation of heroism," he said last week. Neither description fits him, he added. "Heroes abound, but don't count astronauts among them. We worked very hard, we did our jobs to near perfection, but that is what we had been hired to do."
Interesting game but it hardly seems like Hacker News. Also, the domain holding the high scores is "for sale."
Video Goes Open Source on Wikipedia
I wrote about this in 2004: http://al3x.net/2004/11/14/emergentcollaborative-catagorizat...
(I tried to upvote you and I downvoted you instead... sorry)
Why are so many people disillusioned with the web?
There is a conflict between letting people use tags for whatever meaning is natural to them, and mildly enforcing a 'consensus' meaning.

I'm currently working on a system where starting a tag with a specific character implies 'consensus definition'. Each such tag has a corresponding wiki page where users can hammer out the common standards for its use/meaning.

For now, the special character is ':' -- the '#' of '#hashtags' presents problems mapping into neat URLs.

So for example, the tag 'photowalk' would mean whatever each user individually intends it to mean. There's no expectation of common meaning, even though in many cases a useful concordance may occur (as in any mixed personal/public tagging system). OTOH, ':photowalk' means exactly what the matching /wiki/:photowalk page documents it to mean. If you use it incorrectly, people and the system will nudge you to clean up your usage. (In particular, later users can essentially nullify your mistaken tag in a manner analogous to correcting a wiki edit, by applying a '-:photowalk' tag.)
Or they could, y'know, put it in their wallet. Like their SSN and their credit card number.
From what I've heard, not at all. Basically, this is making bike riders go slower so that they can ride longer and put some small amount of power into a bus.

However, what some gyms are doing is hooking up essentially the same thing to their stationary bikes, and hooking those up to their power grid. This has apparently saved them decent chunks on their power bill.
I wonder if NASA's current problems are not due to a lack of superheroes.

I'm not trying to disparage the bravery of the Apollo astronauts. But: No. Obviously not. We've still got a lot of brave people. Ask a New York firefighter.

As the astronauts themselves would probably have hastened to point out at the time, there were half a million U.S. troops in Vietnam even as Armstrong was stepping onto the moon. Some of those troops lived with much higher stress, for much longer, than any astronaut. The same is true for many soldiers working today.

No, NASA's problem has everything to do with gravity and economics and little to do with a shortage of heroes.
I felt tricked by the article. The article does not mention Steve Jobs or the quote. Slightly ironic that the article pulls in gullible beginner's minds with this cynical and manipulative approach.
Be advised: this should not be used if you need it to interop with everything and deliver all the mail it receives. The author is on record as being willing to discard mis-encoded messages.

http://lamsonproject.org/blog/2009-06-14.html
Can you point to any postmodern philosophy papers that are useful?

How about some that merely make non-obvious true points?

Or some that are at least interesting?

It probably seems like I'm bashing postmodern philosophy, but although I expect this line of thinking to end at the conclusion "postmodern philosophy is useless," I've never actually followed it myself, and I would honestly be very happy if you could answer "yes" (with examples) to at least one of the above questions. It's just that from my vantage point as a relatively uninformed outsider the field feels vacuous.

And your logic in the last sentence of your post is terrible.
Yes, this is funny. The existence of random paper generators for a discipline doesn't say much about the rigor of that discipline. You might be able to make some kind of argument based on how long it takes for someone trained in the discipline to detect it as randomly generated.

Of course, you could imagine building a program that creates perfectly compileable, yet randomly generated programs. These guys actually did it to test gcc's handling of the volatile keyword:
http://www.cs.utah.edu/~regehr/papers/emsoft08-preprint.pdf
Wordpress 2.8 putting the real time web to a halt? 
In an attempt to reduce the numbers of outbound pings a a new undocumented "feature" was introduced in Wordpress 2.8.
Instead of notifing ping services every time a post is published or edited, pings are now sent once every hour, at the most.
What's the joke about the Medal of Honor recipients meeting? They all think it's a mistake for them to be around all these heroes.
Heroes are heroes precisely because they don't find their actions heroic. My take anyway.
The blog's layout truncates the useful information in his post:

Call shlwapi like this:
PathCreateFromUrl(pszUrl, pszPath, cchPath, dwFlags);
http://www.deviantart.com/

Firefox 50.29%
Internet Explorer 32.74%
7.0 74.10%
6.0 14.93%
8.0 10.92%
Safari 8.05%
Chrome 4.40%
Opera 3.53%
It seems that a somewhat flippant comment has ended up with us talking around one another and me appearing pro-war in some weird way, which honestly couldn't be further from the truth. I'm not sure what is to be gained by continuing this discussion, so I will concede the point. I probably could've avoided this whole thing by quoting the word war instead of science. Mea culpa. All I was really trying to say is that I'd love to see a space race to Mars.
I am not a developer so cannot tell you which platform is more fun to develop for. I have heard that developing for iPhone is relatively simple and easy.

But, I can tell you that I have 2 same apps on android and iPhone and the number of downloads differ by a factor of 500.
> Try both of them for a while.
That is what I am doing now. I have an iTouch as well as a mac book so the only purchase that has to be made is the yearly fee.
An Extremely Dumb Break In XMLDSIG Signatures
You have an extraordinarily high proportion of Chrome users.
Ask HN: Does the website design matter?
One of my friends said that he does not care what a site looks like as long as it has what he needs. I have been designing and redesigning mine to make it look well good and I am just wondering whether I should bother at all.
>I don't know where you got the idea that I believed that wealth is fixed and that we need central planning to work

I'd say the statement "Jobs are not created, only reallocated." did that. Whatever your beliefs and intended context, your statement is completely incorrect.

You are describing things backwards: Jobs do not create wealth -- individuals seeking wealth create jobs.

Individual 'A' hires individuals 'B through n' to realize their vision to build wealth. Jobs do not spawn themselves spontaneously and seek out individual 'A' to bestow upon them the wealth generated by the working individuals 'B through n'.