skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No argument that playing with new stuff is always a good idea, and doing it when laid off to keep your skills honed is a great idea.

However, 2 points here:

1) You're making an SMS backup / searching app, not a Twitter app (AFAIK). I don't know how you're getting the SMS in the first place, but that sounds incredibly useful to me. Dunno if it's commercially viable, but it sure sounds useful. As opposed to wefollow or twibes or whatever the flavor-of-the-minute twitter app is currently making the rounds.

2) The OP is invoking the popular myth that just making an app makes you rich. The vast majority of twitter, iphone, and facebook apps go nowhere. If your goal is to stay afloat financially, polishing your resume and hitting the bricks is a much better way to spend your time than firing up the text editor and making a new piece of Twitter trash.
Organized Information is the Next Moonshot
Madoff bill would charge rich NY inmates for jail
Your 3rd link is a study that contradicts the findings from your 2nd link, invalidating the claim that it's fake!

If you read all of the reports on the left-hand side of the page you link to, you'll see that about half of them are part of an argument between McCrone and Cahill on whether McCrone's analysis is valid, with some others pitching in.

None of the reports seem to give strong evidence that the map is fake. They are research indicating the possibility of materials on the map which are not consistent with the time in which it was claimed to be created. However, this does not eliminate all possibilities that could explain why the map contains those materials.
"Rational person" is an oxymoron.

A sufficient amount of harassing and violence (both mental and physical) can lead someone to mental breakdown. The threshold may vary from one person to the next, of course, but it can be done.

Furthermore, some studies suggest that depressed people have a more objective assesment of reality (specifically, their estimation of what other people think of them is spot on, whereas non depressed people think that the others see them in a better light than they actually do).

We developed through evolution an optimist bias that keeps most people afloat and allowed humans to survive despite their part of rationality.
Ask HN: Best javascript framework for a new project
I've been using javascript for the longest time (pretty much since it came out) but sofar I've always rolled my own.

The number of browsers that need to be supported and the kind of functionality I have in mind are such that I don't think that is an option so I've decided to use a 3rd party framework.

Which would you recommend, code size, functionality offered and ease of use as well as compatibility are the factors that I'm thinking are most important (did I miss any ?).

thanks for any replies !

Jacques
Yes! And for the times when you are in a mode that comment-dwim doesn't know the comment syntax for, you can use the string-rectangle (C-x r t) command to comment regions.
Hunter S. Thompson and the Death of Objectivity
About transparency vs objectivity in newspapers and blogs, and how it all harks bark to Gonzo.
This website contains an implementation of the algorithm you describe:

http://www.doitfuckingnow.com/
Paper: Parallelizing the Web Browser
It seems hard to define "offshoring" clearly enough to write a law for this tax. Couldn't you serve the same goal, though, by encouraging companies to hire locally, i.e. subsidizing job creation? There are lots of ways to do this, such as a tax credit based on how many full-time employees a business has. Many jurisdictions already have such a tax, so perhaps we need to ask:

1. how much of a local-hire subsidy would we want, and

2. how do we educate business managers about the cost advantages available through such subsidies, so they have a better understanding of the comprehensive cost of offshoring?
Ruby and Python don't have the problem.
Thirty Meter Telescope to be built in Hawaii
Nissan Plugless Electric Car (wireless charging)
Xeno's Paradox
Must say, for a parent & entrepreneur, there are many tasks on the plate that fit the focus, are in fact things that I like to do, and oh yeah, by the way, are things that I either absolutely must or really-really should do. And the time required to do such tasks still greatly outnumbers the time available, even after throwing away tasks that don't "really matter". This article really doesn't help, probably because no one can help you make the hard choices required every day in the adult life.
Google: Clouds, Curtains and Confusion
jquery. its just my personal preference, each library has its own individual strengths and weaknesses.
Yet perhaps many are frustrated by never having agency to make those choices in the first place.
I think the point of asking such questions is to see whether they have even thought of the difficult issues. It's not the answer, it's the thought process (just like the questions they'll ask you, theoretically).
I remember reading the stories about how his rhyming was able to circumvent his issues, and was very interesting to read this follow up.

I think it speaks to his nature that not only did he reject any opinion which went against his desired outcome, but also that he continued to be a father, business owner, cartoonist and so much more given his issues.
I find the new datastores interesting but I have my doubts.

Has anyone ever worked on a long project (1 year or more) using an XML storage or an Object datastore. They can be a real nightmare.

One reason: Users will always add new requirements:

* We want another application, with different programmers, to access this data. When you have problems good luck defending your choice of datastore. And although the problems aren't related to that datastore, the programmers on the other team may place the blame on you.
* We want to query tables that didn't have relationships in the beginning of this project, but do now
* We want to generate reports: Max, Min, Count, etc.
The article doesn't blame Apple as much as it blames the Chinese government and how it handled the matter. The article does state that it might not have happened in another country.
Your product is great, I wish I'd had it when I was studying Chinese in college. It's a great refresher now too.
I've used Prototype and Jquery fairly extensively. I absolutely loved the DOM navigation features of Prototype, they were shamefully easy to use. Jquery can do it too, but it isn't as simple.

Jquery works better with groups of elements rather than individual elements. In many cases, the code looks cleaner. There is also much more support behind Jquery... one of the reasons I switched from Prototype was because support for IE8 hadn't arrived, and it didn't support chrome properly -- checking the Prototype site right now, it seems the stable version still doesn't.

My vote also goes to Jquery.
I wasn't trying to imply that Wave is only email 2.0, and the part about "what would email look like if invented today" was straight from Google during the initial demo (a marketing pitch, maybe, but I do believe this was a real question they thought about). I think the email+docs+robots+etc idea is the easiest way to explain Wave initially, but ultimately, I agree with you - that it's completely new and different.
GvR on Progressive vs. Conservative corporate parenting
Luggage Advice Australia
@danw That is a damn good point. Of course, Gen Y is largely to blame because of its false sense of entitlement.
actual example of an app they built:

http://drc.ushahidi.com/
The title is misleading, but I'm not complaining. It should say something like:

Racially unbiased academic performance requires
that elementary school teachers to have better
mathematical ability that currently exhibited.

Too long, but more accurate.

A well-argued article consisting almost entirely of anecdote, but depressingly believable, and entirely in accord with my experience.
An Easy Way to Increase Creativity - thinking about distant things
I think working with your spouse is a special case, because if your company hits it big (or crashes and burns), then your spouse is likely to share in the joy (despair) whether or not he or she is officially a co-founder. So if the spouse has some talent that could make the company more likely to succeed, it's not necessarily A Bad Idea for him or her to come on board.

This is different from saying "well, Uncle Murray needs a job so I'll hire him to do my bookkeeping"--that's much more likely to be A Bad Idea.
The parent was originally challenging someone to get to the code in four clicks.

It may be somewhat confusing, but some tools are complex and take some time to get used to.
Another vote for jquery. It makes javascript not suck (or at least suck less).
This talk was already done on pycon, with much sleeker slides, in my opinion: http://www.slideshare.net/jacobian/django-in-the-real-world
I have to disagree some jobs are dead ends, change jobs or even careers may turn out to be a good thing
Nevertheless, I have many gripes with BDB which I'll write down some day soon

I'm considering BDB as the data storage layer for a new project, so I'd be very curious to hear your experiences with it.
I agree. I don't think his "future shock" explanation really holds water. If anything, the last few decades have demonstrated that most people are far more tolerant of change than they themselves might have even predicted they'd be.

Case in point: cellular phones. I remember when they first came out, first the wired-in car phones, and then the "bag phones" with the lead-acid batteries. And almost immediately you had a class of people saying "I hate those things, I'll never own one." Anyone older than 20 or so can remember a lot of backlash as phones started to get smaller, cheaper, and more popular. Very few of those people are still without cell phones. A few holdouts here and there -- I know a couple, we all do -- but fewer and fewer every day. The vast majority of people who initially rejected the technology as being too disruptive were brought around, sometimes grudgingly, into accepting it. The same story repeats itself over and over with many new devices or technologies.

We tend to vastly underestimate our own ability to deal with change, even very disruptive change. The whole concept of "future shock" was a manifestation of this underestimation; it didn't happen this way.

The explanation for the failure of the US space program, I think, is much more simple and is put forward in one of the comments to the linked piece: during the Cold War, Americans were content to spend large amounts of money on Apollo, in order to beat the Soviets to the Moon. Without that competitive aspect, public interest disappeared.

People are simply not as willing to spend money on pure exploration as they are on a meaningless competition between nations.

If you could frame the current space program in some sort of nationalistic, competitive terms -- perhaps versus the Chinese? -- people would probably be interested again. But since the public perception is that the US "won" the space race, and that nobody is currently that close (although the gap is narrowing), large investments like we saw in the past are simply not on the table.
I'm interested to hear about Rakudo releases too.

I'm sorta saving a future weekend where I can spend some time learning Perl 6 to try it on for size. Just waiting for the news that Rakudo supports most of what's in the Perl 6 Spec/Synopses/whatever ... just waiting to hear Rakudo does most of what it's supposed to do.

Using Python at the moment, but am keeping an open mind toward Perl 6. Perl 5 makes me work for things a bit too much for my taste (I want more modern features out of the box).
great idea, and execution.
I know a western family that lives in China working in import/export. They came to visit and said something that stuck with me. "China is a very big place. If you ever hear of something that happens in China, it's probably true somewhere."

I'm sure I've butchered their words, but the point is that because of how big China is, it is difficult to correctly assume that what you may believe is true for all or even most of China. I'm not saying that what you say isn't true, but I ask that we clarify and quantify our use of "the Chinese way" when making claims about it.
Or were pressured to be under that pressure - we're talking about seventeen-year-old kids here. But, still, it's nothing like this – and, flawed thought it is, there is support for students.
Of course.
Driving demands your full and complete attention.
From the second floor of a building I was in one morning recently I watched a young woman execute a perfect left turn at a major intersection . . . WHILE EATING A BOWL OF CEREAL!
We also know that hands free is no help because, unlike when you are speaking with someone else in the car, the person on the other end of the phone cannot see the shit happening in front of you in traffic and will not shut up when you REALLY have to drive.
But realistically nobody is going to be told what they can and cannot do in or with their automobiles. Driving is dangerous - period. So, as much as I hate SUVs, I recommend driving one, or else getting your vehicle armour plated.
the ladder, the ladder is on FIRE!

I wonder what will come after it? http://paulgraham.com/ladder.html
Haven't you just proved the opposite point though? The poverty is caused by a lack of mental healthcare, which is _not_ a personal disorder. Well, _both_ share the blame because people have a problem that cannot be resolved without outside influence.
Iran Blocks WikiLeaks
My thoughts exactly. How many Facebook widgets are actually profitable? Even just ramen profitable? iPhone apps? Twitter tools?

Seriously guys, just because it's hip and cool doesn't mean there's a boatload of money waiting for everyone who jumps on the wagon.

I like the general concept: go into business for yourself, but honestly, the un-sexiest fields are generally the best for profit. In any case, I would have serious reservations about monetizing off a platform that the platform owners can't even monetize off of themselves.
> Terrorists, downloaders and pederasts...

Pretty harsh to group all of those in the same group.
I have this problem with biting my fingernails.
It's like with musicians, for the longest time every wannabe rock star that could hold a guitar was going to make it big, and some of them actually did. But for every success story there are at least a hundred, if not a thousand failures. In twitter, facebook and iphone apps that is just as true.

So now that a few people have struck it rich let's give everybody and their brother out there the message that if they got laid off they should go and bet the farm on some wild hunch.

It's like advising all those that can hold guitars without breaking them and maybe play a cool riff or two that their kids tuition is in the bag, just practice a bit harder and that contract is just around the corner.

But don't despair, because the author of the piece has made it.

Not that I would want anybody to despair, a bit of positive thinking goes a long way to get you out of a hole, but instead of writing the next facebook app (do it, but do it in your sparetime) go find that job, any job to replace your lost income and cover the hole doing freelancing if you have the opportunity to do so.

That's not a guaranteed success either but it stands a chance.
Ah, but the really interesting parts aren't open source. (The server/client part.)

Perhaps someday.

I'm interested enough in Wave to consider reverse-engineering that portion. I think there are some once-in-a-lifetime opportunities here...
I completely agree that the author may be slightly out of touch with reality. The target audience are hackers and Silicon Valley types, but even then that group doesn't get so lucky. Widgets and apps certainly don't rake in a ton of money unless you get noticed - and in a market that is saturated, applications and widgets are pretty much a developer's lottery.

But the point of the article is to lift spirits where spirits need lifting. Even if the message isn't entirely true, it might prompt some people to be more proactive and do something if a lay off has them feeling depressed or reclusive.
Has normal center/blockquote ( don't know exact terminology) on Firefox 3.5x (latest).
Microsoft/Yahoo Search Deal Today? Not So Fast
Apple Sold Twice As Many iPhones As Macs Last Quarter
Evolution is nasty. Racial equality requires genetic engineering.

We'd all like to live in a world where mathematical ability wasn't limited by genetics, a world where every child had the potential to be the next Einstein.

We don't. The only people who think so are believers in the magical equality fairy. One look at an SNP map would cure most of them, which is why they do their best to philosophize from their ideals rather than evidence.
And, in fact, Rails translates NUMERIC fields in the database to BigDecimal values in Ruby. (You still need to be careful, though that you don't inadvertently coerce a BigDecimal to a Float in the course of working with it.)
Yahoo’s Revenues Drop 13% In 2nd Quarter, Announces 5% Of Employees To Lose Jobs
perl has bignums too.
"Many (most?) other companies have talked a product to death by the time it is actually for sale. There is no excitement at this point, it has all been dissipated away. Consumers don't see much of a need to buy it right away."

Are you saying that expo demos and previews for the media actually hurt sales? I always thought manufacturers do it to build up interest and excitement; this way when the product is released everybody is rushing to buy it. Look at the games industry, for example. It seems to work.

Why Apple thinks it works the other way around, is beyond me.
Proj: Simple project tool for Vim
I'm not sure how you show that the second triangle is half the volume of the first with that picture. With the Wikipedia proof, you really needed only the picture.
Engineyard SHA Contest Leaderboard I threw together
Yes but development of the Delta was 100% underwritten by the DoD.

Kinda like how the 747 was subsidized by the AWACS contract... And they've the nerve to complain when the French government bungs a few Euros to Airbus.
Please report any bugs and/or feature requests. Project.vim stinks so I'm set on finding a simpler path.
2009 Pwnie Award finalists announced
A very cute algebraic way to see this is to do arithmetic in base 4. In base 4 the series on the left is:

0.1 + 0.01 + 0.001 + ... = 0.111... (recurring)

Multiplying the right hand side by 3 gives 0.3333... = 1, and so the original series must have just been 1/3.
not only did he reject any opinion which went against his desired outcome

The issue here is: if the surgery had not been successful---or if he lacked the resources to pursue this so thoroughly and still be productive and successful---we might very well be looking at that same trait as a lamentable irrationality and out-of-touchnesss. We might even look at it as the least hackerlike of traits. Right now we can view it as an admirably entrepreneurial spirit.
I think there would need to be proof that Foxconn did something, which I would imagine will be hard to get out of China.
Barendregt on Consciousness: belief and hypothesis
Working Out Your Money Muscle
Yay! Not a fluff post about how "passion" will magically line your pockets with dough. Real advice from one of the true visionaries out there.
Since I stream most of my media I'm going to buy the 80GB as soon as they release it. Intel had worked through most of the problems with SSDs with the X-25 and with the price drop and improved performance this is a no brainer if you can afford it.
We don't need any more tax, thank you very much. It's called competition, just deal with it. If a company feels it can get a better deal (in terms of either quality or price), and they go offshore to get it, that's your problem, not theirs.

Either improve your quality, lower your prices, or both.
This title might have struck me as even more surprising had it read "Apple Sold Half As Many Macs As iPhones Last Quarter."
New high resolution simulation of galaxy formation
Even then, any editor worth its salt supports comment toggling with a single keystroke anyways. Good editors (vim, cough) can even toggle lines or paragraphs regardless of cursor position.

So I agree, this hack is more trouble than its worth.
"There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance." -- Steve Balmer.
Wow, alistapart has jumped the shark, I fear.

This article is just complaining about a whole host of non-problems. He's just made the case that there should be a microformat for screenplays, and a tool to convert the Final Draft XML format into said microformat, and some CSS to style it nicely. The <hr> tag is pretty much a perfect analog to the screenplay page break.

As for MathML, there are authoring tools that a) convert handwritten math equations to mathml and b) convert mathml to images in web pages. People are actually using these.

This article just made me angry. OH NO, I thought as loudly as possible. PEOPLE ARE WRONG ON THE INTERNET!

While people like Joe Clark decry the shortcomings of our tools, the rest of us are using these tools to get real world things done.

Also, the picture looks like a penis. Srsly.
Visualizing Sorting Algorithms Statically
aoeu
What are the 4 equal sections?
I am not sure that the subsidies really exist - labor simply is cheaper in some countries. Perhaps the best way to react is to accept the free gifts and transform them into innovation? That would be tax the own population that benefits from the cheap imports (subsidized or not), and invest the collected money into diversification and research? It seems unlikely to me that the industries subject to offshoring will ever fully recover. Or, if the industries seem likely to recover, maybe they should receive the tax money? After all, aren't the subsidies an attempt to squeeze competition out of the market, to come back with higher prices once the monopoly is established? So the tax money should maybe be spent on helping the industries survive.

For example lots of money could be spend on fancy software projects, that have no pressure to make money. Then, when India and other countries can not keep the prices low any longer, there will still be software companies in the own country. They can then turn back to producing serious stuff. (Just thinking for fun here). On the other hand, maybe the no-worries exploration phase yields some interesting results that bring in money later on.

Also, where to draw the line? Is it realistic to watch the whole world for "fair labor prices"? It seems more realistic to try to make one's own country "fair", you can't solve everybody else's problems, too.
I'm also a parent and an entrepreneur and there were some really tough lessons I had to learn about "everything is important". Because it isn't. Really.

If you can squeeze more than one thing at a time in your focus timeline, then all of those things are not "important". If you can focus on only one thing, that would be the only one important. And when you focus on only one, you can't possibly have the feeling of "not enough time"... It's all perception, in the end.
Essentially is the same one.

I'd say, this talk is amazing!, every one making a large size website should read it, and check that everything is being done.
I did that because of the usual reasons that are being trotted out whenever open wifi is discussed:

- terrorists might use your open wifi to communicate with each other

- downloaders are going to use your open wifi so you will get caught for their crime

- pederasts will use your open wifi to download child pornography
You can follow the conference call here: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/07/21/live-blogging-apple-e...

It's amazing they have $31 billion in cash, that should keep them floating for a while.