skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
but were likely used to wading in shallow pools and similar bodies of water

That's not disputed. There's food in them shallow pools and there's plentiful evidence of people eating tons of shellfish etc, all around the world. This is also indisputably NOT an aquatic ape. The swimming macaques in the Ganges delta aren't aquatic apes. They are land monkeys who can and do swim and search for food under water. Tigers swim, they are not aquatic cats. Elephants can swim for miles, and lots and lots of other land animals can and do swim a lot. But that still leaves them far, far short of being aquatic animals.

The reason is almost certainly that their environment has somehow provided them with equivalent protection

Really? Fur protects us from cold and venom but water replaces that protection? There's no other reason to lose the fur? Like parasites, and a tropical climate, and animal skins a.k.a. clothing? Oh wait, you say that clothing came after we lost the protection of water, because the world ran out of water?

Yes next time I jump in the pool and feel the cold water, I'll think boy I sure with I was fury like an otter.
Two Unfinished Ideas About The Future
Artaic: Robots That Make Artistic Mosaics
Wow, according to that link a "Class A felony (murder)" has a fine of up to $20,000, but he's getting fined $22,500 per song? That's disgusting. The tyranny of the RIAA has gone on long enough.
It depends on what country you go to and whether you want to define a civil trial's verdict as a debt now owed. Some places still do have debtors prison, like Dubai. And, while you may not be extradited, there are still ways to force people to pay up even if they leave the country.
Nanovor - Pokemon-esqe online game with an Augmented Reality component
Elephants and Humans aren't aquatic.
Death of Cory Aquino at 76
There is a Techcrunch article where AT&T disavows any actions in this regard. (As always, take with grain of salt. Gruber says its AT&T's fault, etc etc)

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/29/att-dont-blame-us-for-t...
"Half-ass Solution"

The PHP internals team could have pushed 5.3 out the door last November with :: as the separator. It was in the alpha. It worked. Except it didn't. If they had pushed it out then, knowing it broke down, that's a half-ass solution.

They changed it. They made it right. It pushed the release back by over half a year. That's hardly half-assed.
This seems like a bit of under-generalizing to me. Big law firms are taking it on the chin, but it's because they are big, fat and inefficient. It doesn't have anything to do with "Big law". It just has to do with "Big." In a drought the lumbering carnivores starve first.
Do you know what hyper inflation does to banks?
This is an argument that can fly with Skype and Sling, but not with Google Voice. When you make a call on Google Voice, you're still using your regular AT&T minutes (in other words, it's not going over the data connection).
it still can be referred to as that, except, in my experience, there's an understanding that with a sabbatical, you're arranging things so that you come back to the same job. i don't think thats necessarily the case with a mini-retirement.

semantics, i know.
When you need to consistently sue your customers to survive, you already know you're fucked. I can't even tell you how much I enjoy watching the RIAA slowly die. I hope they enjoy their skirmish wins because the war is already over.
But it sounded more like the heptatonic scale, no?
Corporations are just collections of people (except for the grant of limited liability, which is really an abuse).

Too often, I think, we judge 'harmful' by the impossible standard of "could I imagine things being better if I could force others to do things exactly my way" rather than "would we be better off if they didn't exist at all."

So that is to say, sure, if a company is actually causing a harm, in the legal sense of the word (committing fraud, breaking contracts, etc.), then they should have to pay restitution for that. That's what the law is for. Not to second-guess how companies could better serve their customers.
If they would be happy they'd continue these tactics. They are realizing that they are losing the PR battle fast so they've decided to stop these cases, new ones are not being brought. To avoid setting bad precedent they have to continue the ones that are in court (or they'd open themselves up to all kinds of trouble wrt to the fees they've already received in settlements, a good case could be made for extortion: "look, as soon as a case goes to court they drop it")

Or that's my understanding of it, maybe some legal whiz here can shine some light on that.
Attention management is an interesting / emerging space.

There are a few other Mac apps out there (http://macfreedom.com/, http://visitsteve.com/work/selfcontrol/), and a few Firefox extensions (http://www.proginosko.com/leechblock.html) that seem similar, although more web-connection focused, rather than web-and-application-focused.

I'm also half of a startup team working on http://monotask.com, which seems somewhat similar to Concentrate (we'll almost certainly ask HN for feedback / critiques when we launch).

I've only just downloaded the Concentrate beta, but it looks like a solid app. Also, I really like the name / icon.
Web App Sales Tax?
We are still in the process of finding a lawyer but just throwing this out there for any other web developers with a subscription based service:<p>Do web applications that provide a subscription service have to pay sales tax?
If you read all of Nielsen on the topic, he actually makes an exception for PDF's and the like: anything where users may believe they've opened another application instead of just another page. In that case they're likely to close the window to get back to you. If you didn't open a new window, they've now closed their way back to your site.

Working with users, I also have found that many prefer and expect links to other sites to open in a new window. This is 100% not my preference, and indeed I almost find it insulting like the author at trilithium.com, but only one of my users is me. With some reluctance I have taken to opening new windows for PDFs, Flash apps, and on some sites any external link.
Truly Free People Search - SWiK
Truly free people search. Search by name and results include: Age, relatives, city and state, street address, zip, phone numbers and photos.
Would we really be any better off if they never had? Even considering the App Store policies which are objectionable to some?
Unemployment in Silicon Valley higher than after dot-com bubble burst
Does closing roads cut delays?
Let's not bash MENSA too much. Their login page has a great new UI:

http://www.mensa.org//loginaction.php?action=error&acc=1... the new Mensa, now XSS compatible!')</script>

I sent them an email, let's see how long they take to fix it.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/02/how-to-adding-r/

It does, look at the installed ram and the sticker on it.

As for the theory that of many fits one, fact I feel that that is false. I could have bought my college's laptop which is gaurenteed to fit everyone, but I found it wasteful. Yeah the tech specs are better than the laptop I bought but it wasn't good for me, not enough mobility, too big, useless features such as the high end processor that isn't worth the cash tradeoff, etc. I don't need that. Customization is good, example Apple's displays aren't changeable to a higher resolution. That pisses me off 15.4 inch laptops should be able to handle 1680x1080.
Excellent presentation. David gives a very simple formula for all web developers to make money.

Actually first saw this in a business school course.
And in the wsj: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124908121794098073.html
Robot Band Plays Music, Obsesses About its Online Followers
New Cook or Be Cooked Teaches Kitchen Skills With Wiimote
6000 Chess Players Take Part in a "Beauty Contest"
I don't get hardcore linux types who go for Mac. Mac ports is pretty bad for porting things over, and there's problems with version handling. There are some nightmare development stories on the Mac such that programs don't compile because it's impossible to easily get specific dependencies.

Mac isn't Linux with a "more polished" interface, it's a closed system with the stability of *NIX but none of the benefits of decent package management, and a less developed system interface.
Radio Lab on music:
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/04/21
I was under the impression that the GV client also provides some degree of VoIP client functionality.

It would be hard to see what is controversial about this proposal if that weren't present. What, is AT&T complaining about more subscription minutes being used?
Why oh why did I ever think anonymous editing wouldn't be ruined by spam? Thanks for helping to ruin SWiK you bastards :(
Almost nobody knows I'm a member.

While my accomplishments are respectable from an objective standpoint, I joined to talk about my relative underachievement. Probably anyone outside of mensa thinks that's crazy.

The people at local meetings seem nice enough to me. Even if the local groups suck where you are, there are online SIGs which might be worthwhile. The online SIGs cover a very wide range of topics.
Every battle they win this way just makes them more likely to lose the war.
Not exactly, I named specific types of computers that excelled at delivering the features of the Mac. I called d Mac a jack of all trades.

Although they're rated at the top in customer-service and repair every year.

Depends how you rate it, in fact I'm not surprised at this rating because Apple makes a business out of it more than any manufacturer Not only that but for some things they don't even service things, such as iPods. iPods/iPhones are the most disposable piece of hardware never considering they just throw out the "broken" one and give you a new one. Some people would call that service, I call that waste. I will concede they have a great service plan, give customer under warranty a new one, repair old one and sell it for a smaller profit as a refurb.
I'm not sure how relevant this is, although heaven knows getting decent performance out of EBS is a worthy goal.

The trouble is that the numbers he's seeing at the high end have to be coming out of ram cache. This effect of "sometimes the my benchmark was served out of cache more than others" completely dominates the results and without WAY more testing to average things out the numbers are worthless.
Just about everything you build on the net has to be approached from the abuse angle. First figure out how jerks can break it, then make sure they never ever get a toehold.

It's a sad affair but that is how it is.

On a given site I'll spend probably 2/3 of the total construction time on making sure that the assholes won't be able to spoil it for the nice people.
Theses win's are especially pointless given that there never going to see the money.

I guess they feel that they need to pursue them as a deterrent to the masses.
Why not join a hackerspace instead?
Common Mistakes Made Marketing on Twitter
Banner Advertising - How to Make a Display Ad That Stands Out
I've done a project (50 k lines or so) in Leo and I miss it, currently using 'intellij'.

Leo helps you to go seamlessly from outline to documentation to code. And back if need be, clones are especially useful, think of them as alternative views of the same text.

A bug fix will document the fix, have the code for the fix and the test for the fix in one spot, but because they're just clones of nodes elsewhere that is also the active code.

very elegant. Took me a while to getting used to. I wished that the IDE makers would adopt some of these concepts. It would make for much more readable code.
Check out maemo.org which is the linux distribution for Nokia's internet tablets. Also look at http://maemo.org/news/announcements/intel_and_nokia_announce... and consider the implications.
They could have actually fixed the original problem that made it not work to begin with, too.
Unfortunately, this seems to be directly prohibited by Google Checkout's Terms of Service:

"The Service may not be used to process a Payment Transaction, or otherwise transfer money between a Buyer and Seller, that is unrelated to a purchase of a Product."
It didn't say they're blaming their revenue slide on the iPhone at all. Not even partially, as your edited title suggests. They merely mentioned them as part of the competitive landscape.

It's certainly interesting that a phone might be getting noticed in the gaming industry, but that really has nothing to do with the article at hand, and especially not the title.
Next Song of Ice and Fire book almost ready
gmail, hn
Ooh, this is the original statement of Parkinson's Law by C. Northcote Parkinson himself. It was later published as the first chapter of a book with other legendary humorous essays on management, including the one about the bicycle shed that led to the term "bikeshedding".

Later, "Dr. Lawrence J. Peter" (of "The Peter Principle") followed in Parkinson's footsteps. Nowadays the mantle is held by Scott Adams, of course.
I'm not sure that app store model would work as well for the DS. I think I'd go somewhere in the middle. Probably require a minimum of $5 sale price for every game (with free trials for sure) or something like that.

It's an interesting thought though. What if they opened up more? And why hasn't Microsoft done this? They are a little more open with Xbox Live.
o/` suse-suse-studio! o/`
You got the programming fatigue?
I've recently started programming a new startup of mine full time and found that I am severely limited to how much work I can do because of physical fatigue - notably eye strain (pain) and wrist pain (carpel tunnel).

I have started wearing wrists braces on each hand to help with the wrist pain and that helps. And for my eyes I often wear polarized sunglasses and switch between staring at my laptop screen and hooking it up to my LCD TV.

I guess I'm kind of wondering if you guys have the same problems or if I'm sitting on the computer way to much. Also, what do you guys do to minimize, eliminate such physical problems like this?
Bubble was a equity problem, not something affecting the general public.
shrug

My colleague does a twitter search on his subway stop every morning. A bunch of tweets complaining about crowded platforms means he takes a different route. I like the redesign. It's about time they recongized that using the great twitter feed is more useful to most people than personal microblogging.
I've read that link and I understand it. They treat namespace access and static class access as different things. If they were the same, and namespaces and classes shared the same hash, and static class access and namespace access where the same (like in C++) this would be a non-issue.

As for your ambiguity, it's a simple name clash. On the second declaration, you should get an error because foo::bar is already defined. You know, like you would in C++.
Explicit-Formulas Database
I find that a nice looking font face helps loads. A large, sub-pixel smoothed font is wonderful on the eyes. And nice relaxing colours help too. I keep my terminal on a salmon-y colour text on a dark grey background.

As for the wrists: invest in a good chair and use Vi :)
Corporations are also legal entities that are separate from the people that comprise them, so they shouldn't have the same kind of rights an individual would.
Java has made many design mistakes since C# was released. I keep thinking one day the Java folks are going to come out and say, "AHAHA, WE TROLLED YOU ALL BIG TIME", but sadly I doubt that is going to happen.
You completely missed the point. Yes, you can defend all those things individually. And individually, they aren't a big deal. But together PHP seems like a big ball of mud.

I'm actually a big user (and defender) of PHP; between posting this I'm working on PHP code. I've used it since PHP 3.0 and I'm pretty forgiving of legacy problems -- it's an organic language with pieces added when they're needed. The PHP 3.0 time was great because every release (which was frequent) brought some new feature you were wishing for.

PHP 5.0 has been great and PHP 6.0 with unicode is going to be a nice addition too. But it's like 2 steps forward and 1 step back. There's no reason for PHP to add namespaces in such a confusing and different way. PHP borrows from C, Java, Perl, and C++ and anyone familiar with those languages is going to feel comfortable with it. But this namespace implementation is just bizarre. And it can't be blamed on any legacy issues or backwards compatibility.
Indeed. Java and C# are some of the least flexible programming languages around. The problem, though, is that people like being told what to do. They don't want to wonder if they are implementing something correctly, they want to know that they are "following best practice". They don't want to invent their own features, they want to read a cool blog post about something "the experts" came up with and then try using that in their application.

This produces horrible code, of course, but since it sort of works and nobody knows any better, it's the norm. (Most programmers don't know programming. Why they want to be a programmer is beyond me, but it happens.)

The people that have a deep understanding of programming and know what they want to do and how to do it are not using Java or C#.
I've often wondered what I'd do if I got hit with a lawsuit that was worth more than my entire expected lifetime earnings and couldn't discharge it through bankruptcy.

I think I'd simply choose to opt out of the economy entirely - "If you're just going to garnish all the money I make, well, I just won't make any money." But I wouldn't just sit around (I'd probably starve if I did that...) Instead, I'd work on high-risk, high-reward projects and release them all as open-source, with an eye towards being as disruptive as possible. I could continue to live by bumming meals and places to crash off folks who benefit from my work, even if they don't actually pay me.

Much like Richard Stallman.
They made the easy choice -- add a character to the language so the parser has something else to grab onto so they can treat static class access and namespace access as different things.

I don't call that making it right. It made it "work". Adding another confusing symbol to a language already filled with symbols is not right.
He said something bad about your favorite language!!111!
"25% of sessions end in crashes" what kind of programmers are they employing there? Heard of scrum guys?
> RescueTime is too analytics-oriented

Maybe, but what gets measured, gets done.
If I recall correctly, Venti doesn't support "recovering space from deleted items" by design - it was designed to store data on WORM drives.
If your injuring yourself by using the computer where others aren't there's something about you, or the way you're using the computer that's causing you injury.

The best advice I've found is to just check, every 10 minutes or so, am I comfortable? How could I relax? Ask these questions of your fingers, wrists, arms, elbows, back, neck etc. Sit correctly (google for advice on that) but don't be tense.

I also found the Alexander Technique quite useful <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_technique>.
That story you link to is not proof. If you look closely, that sticker you mention is on the RAM the author is ADDING to the MacBook Pro, not on the existing RAM module. (Notice the existing RAM module is blue, and the 3rd party one is green, and the green one is the one with the sticker)

I have a new MacBook Pro (the SD card one) and it has instructions in the manual IT CAME WITH on how to replace the RAM and hard drive. Apple wouldn't give you explicit instructions to void the warranty. Replacing RAM or hard drive does NOT void the warranty.
Not sure what you mean by general public , but it sure did affect employment in tech industry by a LOT
Some examples? I haven't used Java for a while now, so I'm asking in earnest.
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Doctors Create New Nose For Woman By Growing It On Her Arm
Derivatives, overall, are a zero-sum game. Unless by some miracle of improbability all the liabilities fall on the US side, there is no way it's going to add up to 200T, unless US companies have been incredibly foolish - and I think the foolishness has been reasonably evenly spread around.
Tenenbaum said he was "not displeased with the jury considering how the trial went."

This is probably the first reasonable thing anyone involved with this trial (save the Judge, I suppose) has said to date. The RIAA really lucked out by suing someone even douchier than themselves, and then got an exponential boon when the plaintiff's counsel (Charlie Nesson) turned out to me even more of an asshat by orders of magnitude.

The plaintiff in the first case was a fuckup too, to a lesser degree. I guess you have to be a major idiot to still be using a Fasttrack client in 2008 at all, much less after getting infringement letters.

Why is everyone involved in the 'copyfight' so incompetent? Even Lessig has epically lost every single IP case he's ever litigated!
But he's not going to prison. For murder I think fines would be the least of your worries.
Not sure why you brought it up, but convention-over-configuration is characteristic of Rails, not Ruby.
At Black Hat and Defcon, hackers talk shop
Researchers find insecure BIOS 'rootkit' pre-loaded in laptops
I expect this is why the quantity is more up-front now. I bet it is pretty unusual for anybody to buy multiple copies of a given book at once, so defaulting to one and giving the opportunity to adjust later made sense. Now that they sell many things that are probably bought in multiple quantities (say, socks), customers are probably having to adjust the quantities more often.

All very well, but sometimes I wish they would spend a bit more time on their wishlists - not much has changed since the beginning and some more effort in this area is overdue by now.
Asbestos claim
When Novelists Sober Up
Last time everyone left for Austin... where's everyone going now. I don't really see the same kind of departure.
Unless it has been diagnosed as carpel tunnel syndrome, I would guess that the wrist pain is actually a more general "repetitive stress injury" (RSI). Proper posture helps a lot for this, as does taking regular mini-breaks to let your wrists rest. Software RSI break timers help; I use AntiRSI on my mac. The idea is to let your arms hang down for 10 seconds or so every 5-10 minutes. Take longer breaks regularly, and stretch your wrists, arms and shoulders.

Google 'RSI wrist stretches' (or exercises), etc. The book "It's not Carpal Tunnel Syndrome! RSI Theory & Therapy for Computer Professionals" is highly praised, but I haven't read it personally.

I've found that a trackball is much easier on my wrist when I'm forced to do any mousing. The Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 helped too, but I couldn't stand the space bar's noise and action -- it's worth looking into a more friendly keyboard anyway.

Edit: As for eye strain, try to focus on something in the distance while you're letting your wrists rest. Human eyes aren't particularly well suited for focusing close-up for long periods of time, so you should let them relax once in a while.
It took me a few minutes to get this story, but once I got it I laughed so hard.
This is not new, of course C# is the better language. What is the better environment is up for debate, but the C# language is better designed, friendlier, and more feature-packed leading to more concise code.