skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I first read about Adams' problem a few years ago. It was an enlightening to find because I had (and continue) to have a similar kind of issue, not with speech but with handwriting.

For the last few years I've been unable to write out the letters M, W, and 8. I absolutely can not make my hand move to draw the letters. Every other letter/character is no problem. My brain knows how the movement should go, but it's as if there is no connection between the part of the brain that can visualize the action and the part that puts it in motion. When it first started happening, I was really embarrassed. My first name is Matthew and it's really hard to sign your name on a check or credit card receipt when you can't make your hand draw an M or W.

I eventually found that I could write an 8 by drawing two circles rather than as one continuous line. Likewise I can now write my Ms and Ws in reverse starting at the end of the letter.

I'm not really sure how to describe the feeling. It's as if your brain has been on autopilot for so long that you don't actually know the muscle movements that make up writing an M.

I've also found stories of seasoned athletes who, all of a sudden, were unable to perform a common task in their sport. Such as a golfer who had to try for 15 seconds before he could start his backswing. Or the competitive swimmer who couldn't dive off the platform without several false starts.

I know these examples aren't scientific studies, but they fall in the same vein as Adams' vocal problems. It's amazing the things that brain can do (or won't do in this case).
The first principle you mention is, more or less, Kant's idea of the categorical imperative (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative)

Perhaps not the end-all be-all of moral reasoning, but certainly very influential (and there's a mammoth body of analysis and discussion around it), and personally I find that it's always a worthwhile perspective to consider.
I don't see how - if more people stop buying Chinese goods (e.g. shitty plastic toys that you don't need), then they might do something different than feed the West's desire to spend and consume.
From the article it seems he largely lives on stuff that he finds in nature or dumpsters. Occasionally he may be invited to a meal. Obviously he wouldn't have canned spam without a modern economy, but he would probably have a lot more wildlife to hunt & fish so it balances out.

The media is full of stories of the hyper-consuming celebs and millionaires, so it's nice to see a story on someone from the other extreme once in a while.
Remember that they are not just cramming themselves down, all of the common shareholders (like the employees) are getting a haircut.
That depends on what your meaning of the word 'is' is.
I always thought iPod a bit of hype. Either it should be iPod shuffle of the iPhone, others, even iPod touch are unlikely to survive
Silicon Valley Startups: find volunteers for your startup at mixer on 7/29
Not entirely true, If you own patented land then I believe that is tax free forever; at least under current US law.
Some feedback and thoughts on Picurio after playing with it for a bit
1) Sweet interface, looks very iPhoto-like

2) I like the fact that the interface is built with Objective-J/cappacino, it feels more "native" than flash, which is what a lot of similar apps use

3) At the same time, the interface can be "broken" sometimes in that it doesn't react like you expect it to, for example, modal dialogs don't close when you press the "escape" key and the alert dialog ( after registering ) don't close after pressing the enter key.

4) Right click doesn't work.. would be nice to have a context menu to do various operations.

5) Shouldn't the loader only allow image files? I tried to upload a .pdf and it seemed to work (progress bar showed up..etc ) but afterwards it doesn't show up in my library.

6) I don't know about the whole "room" concept, I mean.. whats wrong with albums??

7) Although the cappacino based interface is super awesome, I could also see this limiting what this app can do, I mean, if its done in flash, you could do all kinds of cool stuff like the rest of the functions in iPhoto..etc
I must say that http://www.mint.com/blog/ is incredibly well done.
Baseball’s Use of DNA Raises Questions of Bioethics
Well yeah. My comment was originally much longer, pointing out some of the things that money enabled.

But I was responding to his view that 'money is an illusion'. I was trying to point out that it's not an 'illusion' (whatever that means), and we didn't just make it up for fun or so some people could be rich and others poor. It serves a fundamentally valuable purpose.
avva.livejournal.com
Here's one from David Ackerman:
Not sure if there is a place readily available in your area, but here's my idea: Come up with a comedy act and perform at open-mic night of a club/bar. A couple questions for me and other potential commenters:What day are you planning on doing this? You might get better ideas if you are willing to do the challenge on a weekend (as you would have more free time), then if you insist on a workday.
And one from @snuff_man on Twitter:

@darkxanthos convince a stranger to go skydiving with you (the plane kind) or perhaps convince a stranger to start their own social skydive
I highly respect what this guy is doing, even though I don't yet have the guts to live like this myself. As Tyler Durden said, "the things you own end up owning you." The best I can do is smugly re-read Thoreau while sitting in a Starbucks and twittering from my iPhone in debt up to my eyeballs.

What I appreciate most about guys like this is how they make us face the mirror. Like fish unaware of the water in which they swim, American culture is so hyper-materialist that great numbers of us cannot even conceive of this guy's reasoning. Commercial interests can't have good, little fear-driven, obedient consumers dropping off the grid now can they?

The spiritual dimension to his lifestyle choice also deserves consideration. The article says he lived in a Buddhist monastery in Asia for several years up until 1999. He's obviously not even comparable to the typical crazy, drug-addled de-humanized homeless people we encounter in our day to day lives in our own urban zoo cages.
No, homeless people usually don't want a life without property; at least not the sane ones who aren't on the run from the law. Homeless people do have property of some sort; they push around a shopping cart full of their items and they usually have "spots" where they sleep at night. Even under bridges, tunnels, and underground homeless areas; every one of them has a little corridor to himself.

P.S. I am deliberately ignoring the much large population of working, "normal", homeless people. See "Persuit of Happyness".
Reminded me a little of Diogenes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope).

As Buddha said, suffering ends when our craving for material things ends. We don't have to be as extremely hardcore as the dude above, but following this philosophy in a limited pragmatic manner I think can be very liberating.
This was meant as an intro, but maybe it works as a quick reference too: http://cocoadevcentral.com/d/learn_objectivec/
Disregarding the last 5 characters, the 'bugs blank' and 'cows dirty' strings are exactly 64 characters (512 bits) long, as are many of the other leading entries. Savvy teams are checkpointing the hash at the 64 character point, then rerunning it from there with alternate endings.
"I asked my grandmother what her thoughts about the current financial situation, remember, she survived the great depression and she said, "I haven't seen anything like this.""

I'm sorry, but in what way does the current financial turmoil even approach the Great Depression?

As much as the media likes to say 'worst X since Great Depression', that doesn't mean X is actually anywhere near as bad as the Great Depression. And before you start digging up obscure values of X that actually are statistically worse in some way, point me to the 25% unemployment and millions of middle class folk turning into migrant workers and living in their cars.
Why do you describe this as India's leading Hindi daily newspaper ?
What makes it different from other Hindi newspapers ?
The approach is patently 'business school.'
Interesting article but it would have been even more interesting if the author had chosen to go more in depth about his daily activities and how Suelo copes with loneliness and boredom. IMO, these problems would be much more difficult than the physical hardships he faces.
I have a feeling that server-side js will eventually become a major player in the web world, especially if solid, reliable implementations are created. The idea of having a uniform language to communicate between the server and client with a decent data transportation format (JSON) has been something I've long for, enough so that one of my New Year's resolutions was to start contributing to a SS-JS implementation this year.
Dude, I am in sydney too. And in the western suburbs.

Would certainly be great to catch up. Let us know when and where. Im pretty sure id have seen you in Silicon Beach drinks :D
It sort of does - if the money came from existing investors in a follow-on round.

It didn't: "The money for this fifth Series E round comes from a Silicon Valley venture firm, Lightspeed Venture Partners ... [there was] interest by Ning in adding a top VC to its investor pool."
Protect Yourself from Online Coupon Scams
This is an absolutely fantastic game for learning recursion concepts! I'm going to give this to my nothin'-but-C++ programmer friend and see if it stretches his brain.

Many of the harder puzzles are both beautiful and challenging.
Social Bookmarking Service for guaranteed high traffic
Social Bookmarking for quality bookmarks: SubmitEra features submission to high PR sites with suitable pedigree
Open Source Database Magazine - Summer 2009 Issue #1
Cute:

To illustrate, let’s use an institutional algo order pegged to the NBBO with discretion to
pay up to $20.10. First, the predatory algo uses methods similar to the liquidity rebate
trader to spot this as an institutional algo order. Next, with a bid of $20.01, the predatory
algo goes on the attack. The institutional algo immediately goes to $20.01. Then, the
predatory algo goes $20.02, and the institutional algo follows. In similar fashion, the
predatory algo runs up the institutional algo to its $20.10 limit. At that point, the predatory
algo sells the stock short at $20.10 to the institutional algo, knowing it is highly likely that
the price of the stock will fall. When it does, the predatory algo covers.
The Best Things in Advertising Are Free
There is also this from awhile ago http://tomayko.com/writings/rest-to-my-wife
well even the hardware based drive encryption stuff comes with a bit of software that your IT department would have to support anyway, so I don't think the TrueCrypt software adds that much overhead to what you'd already have to support with a hardware based solution. Sounds like you just need a better IT department.
Generalise much? I agree that what the parent complains about is a MySQL problem but it's pretty disingenuous to just dismiss the whole "NoSQL" idea based on one misinformed comment on HN.
It was more of an observation about what is happening to people in my environment than a projection.

People are being laid off in droves (talented as wel as not so talented as well as those who were lucky to have a job) and it hurts them and their families for real.

Not everybody can move to chase the jobs and not everybody has a list of instantly monetizable pet projects on the shelf.

Nor do they have nest eggs. The fat cat bankers that caused this crisis are in a better position than they are and that is sad.

The articles suggestion is very misleading, see above (no point repeating my point in yet another comment) for a more realistic approach to getting out of this mess in one piece.
Ok, jquery it is then! Thank you all for your responses, that was most helpful.
Sorry to have misunderstood it. But i think we are talking the same thing. What u call 'a little bit of greed', i call need. And it might be a bit different for everyone, coz only the person will decide how much is enough for him.
Considering when you created your account, and the subject of your post, "troll" seemed like the most likely explanation. Sorry about that. (It's sort of a typical troll to make a technically incorrect statement and then watch people get all agitated as they correct you. In fact, it's one of my favorite trolls, right behind making a sarcastic statement which you know will be taken literally by half of the audience, a la "A Modest Proposal".)

Anyways, assuming that your comment was in earnest, the arrow is typically used for functions (or sequences). E.g.,

1/n -> 0 as n->infinity

You could write:

1/4 + 1/16 + ... + 1/4^n -> 1/3

But you would write

1/4 + 1/16 + ... = 1/3

You wouldn't write (or at least I've never seen it)

1/4 + 1/16 + ... -> 1/3

It's not really a mathematical issue, just a definitional one: the left hand side is considered a real number, not a sequence of real numbers (or function :N->R, or whatever).
Loneliness and boredom are not real issues. They're issues fabricated by the mind. With presence, they disappear. That's the whole point of his lifestyle: presence. The reason he dislikes money is because money indicates a distaste of the present and an obsession with the future.

I recommend reading Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now for more information.
Property tax rate in Moab: 0.00%

Effective tax on a $100,000 property in Moab: $0

Effective tax on a $500,000 property in Moab: $0

Effective tax on a few acres to grow his own resources: $0

Sound of another anti-government nutjob scuttling back to the drawing board in search of a new red herring: priceless

http://propertytax.utah.gov/taxrates/taxarearates2008.pdf
http://www.moabcity.org/business/index.cfm
Title should be appended with 'on zdnet.com.au' YMMV
There was a this American Life a while back about two guys who chose to be homeless in NYC for a while. IIRC the gist was: it sucks. I was shocked.

Yeah not sure what the media's fascination with voluntary homelessness is.
Why am I being downmodded? The source is the Wall Street Journal quoting a Deutsche Bank analyst.
Money is a unit of work. It is an almost universally accepted abstraction of the "worth" of somebody's time.

You could replace "dollars" with "bananas" if you wanted to, it is irrelevant.
"The equivalent to Java’s this is pretty much self."

Well no, the difference (inside a class) of:

this.foo = myshinyobject

and

foo = myshinyobject

is nothing in Java. In Objective-C,

self.foo = myshinyobject

and

foo = myshinyobject

are different. Particularly with regards to the @property (retain) magic; if you forget self.foo and use foo, then myshinyobject might get garbage collected. Which is not what you'd expect with a retained property.
"None less than Daniel J. Bernstein (currently visiting TU/e) took the time to write dedicated software for our cluster of Core2 Quad CPUs." Why am I not surprised that djb's team won a crypto speed contest? :)
I got some details wrong, but it's basically right.

Dijkstra spoke to Joel Aron (not Eyles), "head of IBM's Federal Systems Division which had been responsible for the software of the moonshot". It wasn't specifically in the lunar module, but somewhere in the 40,000 LoC. However, the bug was that the moon was repelling; and it was found by accident, 5 days before launch.

See Dijkstra say it in person, at 15:00 in this interview (context starts at 13:40): http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/video.html (I haven't linked directly to the 300MB download). Great interview BTW (dutch with subtitles).
Dijkstra interview (subtitled, 24 mins, 300MB) [mpg video]
You seem to be already doing well at the time of the application, why were you applying to YCombinator? Was it the money, the networking, or something else?
Craziest Bikes Around the World
Bondi here.
I'm in Newcastle, but in Sydney almost weekly though.. feel free to let me know about any meetups! matt.howlett at the domain gmail
"I asked my grandmother what her thoughts about the current financial situation, remember, she survived the great depression and she said, "I haven't seen anything like this.""

My parents and I lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is nothing. This is nothing compared even to the last 5 years of the Soviet Union's existence.

You can go to the store and buy cheese. We had to make our own. Wake me when you can't buy cheese in stores anymore.
Wow thanks. I had to look that up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_patent
Brilliant. I hope this ends up being used everywhere.
This is far from surviving. This is coming up with excuses and going to the extreme. Anyone with a psychology background want to diagnose this?
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Like photos?
Not a rigorous proof (I'll leave that to further investigation):

S(n) = 1/n + 1/n^2 + ...

= 1/n ( 1 + 1/n + 1/n^2 + ...) <--needs more justification in a rigorous proof

S(n) = 1/n ( 1 + S(n) )

Simple algebra from here:

n * S(n) - S(n) = 1

S(n) = 1 / (n-1)
It's a complicated problem.

Understated.
tragedy of the commons. wow, i just can't wait for every amateur web designer to take up the mantle of threaded coding.

get used to "kill -9", you're going to be using it to preempt all this amateur-hour worker code people slap together and foist on you
Why do you think your son was upset about the dogs harassing the cat? Why would it even matter him?

I think that's more interesting than the dogs changing their behavior based on his reactions.
99.9% web sites are CRUD, which don't really need full features of RDBMS, which is both an overkill and a bottleneck for scalability.

NoSQL is ironic word in that both Hive and Pig are gonna introduce an ANSI SQL dialect for scalable data queries :)

The NoSQL movement is really a NoBlindJoinsViaRDBMS movement, but the latter is less catchy.
i'll be happier when john et al push through the next major lang revision

this clinginess to js strikes me of stockhold syndrome. people are working themselves into a lather as to how awesome and powerful it is, but most of this power is rooted in crappy hacks. namespaces for example. or crockfords currying stuff. very hacky.

js will do. it gets the job done. would i choose to code on the server side with it over python, perl, or haskell? nope
I don't see the Classic going away anytime soon. People who buy it just want raw storage -- they don't care about cameras, multi-touch, wifi, etc. Being as it is the "iPod Classic" it doesn't require any significant changes. Just drop in a bigger 1.8" HD on a yearly basis and it will keep those customers happy. There are still lots of people who want to carry around their whole library.
machine trading has been in heavy use for a decade. a little late to wonder about its efficacy now
When I put in one of my most commonly used account names (mgrinich) a photo of David Hasselhoff comes up.

http://overtar.appspot.com/mgrinich

This is awesome.
i'll spend as much time on this as i did on opensocial : zero
"Money represents lack. Money represents things in the past (debt) and things in the future (credit), but money never represents what is present."

Spoken like a man who doesn't know how to manage money. Good article, though. It shows what copping out looks like.
As of right now (20090722 0700UTC) CodingCrypto has won. The programmer on both CodingCrypto and hashbreaker?

Why, none other than our good friend -- and my personal hero -- djb! I have no doubt that the race was actually between seibert and djb.

To the uninitiated: http://cr.yp.to
"Economics doesn't need you to believe in it or have any faith in it. Its grounded in real and concrete math." Oh?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=717293
Of course it does. Physics and math are objective, for instance.
Windows 7 has gone gold
Well it is not one computer but a network of billions of them. So they redistribute load when some of them go down. Still cool though :)
It's distressing how quickly we loose skills. Throw most Gen X/Y-ers back a generation or two and they'd be utterly lost - at least at first. We're also pretty adaptable.
Thanks for posting it. Very interesting to note that Dijkstra advocates that a program should have no version numbers!
Some thoughts on excessive text messaging
Some might argue that his commentary on culture is useful in an artistic sense

He's selling magazines. Just ask the reporter/publisher.
The Infinite Loop Mystery
Life of a full time employee
Why 2024 Will Be Like 1984: Amazon And The Kindle
I have no problem with people having to pay to maintain ownership of their land. Land ownership is a useful farce. Every land owner is in possession of land that was "stolen", for lack of a more precise word. If we're going to protect people's right to claim land according to the "finders keepers" rule, we should ensure that the owner is making good use of that land. Property taxation helps to do that. (With many side effects, like exacerbating gentrification. That could be fixed, though.)
Release notes :

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.1-beta-1/#re...

Proxy models, deferred models seem like awesome features.
When it's just a tiny percentage of the overall trades, it doesn't really matter.

As Goldman Sachs is now proving though, it can be wildly profitable. What happens if it eventually becomes the dominant form of trading? What does the stock market then represent? Surely not the value of a company, based on research and bets on the future. Doesn't it just become a high speed game where computers try to steal pennies from each other?
A Helium Shortage? (2000)
Official Google Research Blog: ACM EC Conference and Workshop on Ad Auctions
Buddy Media Unveils The Ultimate Twitter Client For Brand Management
Google not liable for defamation in search results, rules high court (in UK)
Serving content in multiple ways using Django
On Google Video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6873628658308030363...
Yes, I went through a similar thought pattern when I left high school - "I don't want to worry about money. Either I decide to never have money, or I'll put in the effort require to always have enough / too much."

Still working on the second choice. It's not easy, but I think the first option is much harder and never ends.
A 5.5x ROI? For who?

That's not how valuations work. If it has a current valuation of 750m on paper and sells for 750m, then the folks who participated in the most recent round don't make a dime (other than liquidation prefs). The valuation is the total value of outstanding shares (investors, founders, previous round investors, employees, options pool, advisors, board folks, etc). There are presumably some liquidation prefs for investors, so a 750m exit would result in a minuscule return for the recent investors and likely virtually nothing for folks with options. Of course it all comes down to terms.

Effectively, Ning just said to their recent investors with a straight face: "We think we can sell Ning in 3-5ish years for 4 BILLIONish." ... Which likely means IPO.
Not all of those are strictly true, either.