skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Information overload is a mater of discipline. If you let yourself be enveloped in random facts you'll eventually become a little scattered.

This isn't really a new concept. In the first Sherlock Holmes story (A Study in Scarlet published in 1887) Watson mentions to Holmes that the Earth revolves around the Sun and is shocked to find Holmes doesn't know that. Holmes' response is that not only did he not know it but that he'll try his best to forget it now that he's been told because it does not serve any practical purpose for him.

Clearly that's a little too extreme but the lesson is there. The argument of how humanity's increasing knowledge is become detrimental has been on people's minds for a long time. Easy access to that knowledge just exacerbates the problem. Yet society hasn't collapsed and I don't think our brains are going to rot anytime soon.

The trick is just realizing your brain has finite resources and it probably isn't best to get to bogged down in minutia.
sure as long as you don't care about stuff like unicode..
That was on purpose, designed to produce an "ugh" response.

The more embarrassment, the better.
That will only work if there is a sufficient number of competitors. I'm sure "none of the aboves" are overrepresented in women's olympic sports but I am still skeptical they constitute a large enough population to create a whole new category.
Another confused UK resident... are you saying that there's no system in place in the US to automatically do a direct debit when your rent is due?? Surely not, there must be.
>Too much information

Yes. I believe it is thinking too much that spoils our recall (not speed-dial and suchlike as the author claims). There's been an explosion of content and communication in recent times. Too much noise makes it harder for minds to rest.

I've noticed that calm, alert people tend to have full heads of hair and excellent memories!
I totally agree. Write and let yourself fail. Many writers will talk about "vomiting up" material before going through a process of revision. You have to get words down on paper, and frequently, that process will be blocked by being too critical of the words you are typing. Don't be too critical. This may go against our tendencies as programmers to write worthy code from the start, especially from the TDD perspective. When you are writing creatively, you don't have to generate fully functional (i.e., beautiful) prose right away through micro-iterations. (Write a line, look at it, does it work, refine the line, does it work, look at the paragraph, etc -- that's not the way many pro writers work.) Spew it out, then refine.

After I wrote the above paragraph, I recalled the recording of pg working on an essay (http://etherpad.com/ep/pad/slider/13sentences) and how different it would probably look if it were Stephen stream-of-consciousness King. There's a lot of backtracking as pg hones his words, sentence by sentence. It would be really interesting to see how authors of different backgrounds approach the creative writing process, and whether target work length (essay vs novel) and style (argument vs entertainment) dictates your approach.
This is a really good point and I'm actually familiar with the concept. It avoids profitable departments dragging along unprofitable ones in a large corp for extended periods of time (Pretty sure BCE is a good example of this).

So I can agree that handing out bonuses to a successful department while the rest of the company drags the entire bottom line down can be a very good thing.

However, here you have an unsuccessful business deciding to use their bailout money to keep who they believe are talented around by handing out bonuses. This reeks of mismanagement. There do exists companies that have tightened up their spending a great deal at the moment. Letting their employees know that they don't have extra coin to throw at them right now.

If you are a crazy talented banker, and have confidence in the company you work for, and agree that they deserved to be bailed out, then you wouldn't take a big bonus. You would rather it goes back into the business so you could gain higher returns down the road (like long term employment and future real bonuses).

On the other hand, if you are a crazy talented banker, and you have no confidence in your company succeeding, then you're probably going to take that bonus because you know you'll never see it again anyways.
Yeah, it inspired me to spend an hour at lunch messing around with canvas. I can see some really nice uses for it as a tool for progressive enhancement—for example, you could replace a table of values with a histogram in browsers that support canvas and have JavaScript enabled.
And, pray tell, what is the problem you are trying to solve?
How do you determine "verifiably female?"

What if you have a "female" with high levels of androgens? Do you just say if you are 2 standard deviations within the mean of females you are verifiably female? Which is the cutoff?
Oh, I realize that. It will show how totally pointless measuring people by some yardstick is.

So what if you can run 1 second faster than some other human on a predefined course. You are still better than 99.99% of the rest of the humans.

Humanity is multi-valued, what your abilities are in one narrow (and ultimately useless) field should not in any way degrade the people lower in the 'ladder' and it should not reward those higher up.

Competition sports are historically good for two things only (and 'good' is up for debate), inspiring nationalism in people and paying exorbitant salaries to the competitors because of the media spectacle.

edit: Our capability to measure time is what drives this crazy competition forward, if we were limited to say 1 second intervals plenty of women and plenty of men would be able to compete just fine (only not in the same race, but for instance simply against the clock).

The differences between all humans competing in these races and the 'rest of us' is essentially so small as to be meaningless.
What's Wrong With the Modular Pebble Bed Reactor?
No, your language limitations don't have to force the rest of the world to accept them.

As I alreay said, some languages use the simpler construct:

For i=1 to N

And C could easily use:

for(i=1;i==n;i++)

just by changing the way the loop condition works.

So as you say, it is all about the language.
> I didn't make a case that 0 was odd, I asked how I should look at it: as element 0, or as the first element.

element 0, aka the 0th element..
Web Developers Are Stupid
"I didn't get that impression at all."

Sorry - as mentioned in my other reply at this level, I really was imagining a certain type of person (in fact, a certain person) as I typed that, and kind of went off on my own.

Still:

"you might notice that the parent comment referred to people wanting to avoid execution of code from the Internet on the machine"

I maintain this is a largely irrational fear. The very phrase "execution of code" is very blurry when it comes to the web browser. And one hitherto unknown bug in an image or (closed source) PDF library and you're "executing code from the internet" too, and at a far more dangerous level of access than anything inside the JS sandbox.
This is pretty sweet; I have a 50 degree PCM vest I use for motorcycling in Florida, but I had no idea it was used architecturally--let alone in mugs.
But hey, in that museum we also have his telescope.
And in Santa Croce there's his entire body, minus the middle finger I guess.
Some stats on that please. And some definitions, what do you mean by "cross-gender"?
"Consider now the subsequences starting at the smallest natural number: inclusion of the upper bound would then force the latter to be unnatural by the time the sequence has shrunk to the empty one."

Maybe it is too late, but I don't understand this sentence.

A sequence starting at the smallest natural number would be: 0, 1, 2. The variant Dijkstra is arguing about is: 0 <= i <= 2. How can the latter be unnatural? And what does he mean with "shrunk"?
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/usjewp...

http://www.hrc.org/issues/9598.htm

The first lists the number of Jewish people in the US as roughly 6.5 million (2.2% of total), the second lists the number of transgender people as between 0.25 and 1% but warns that may be under counted.
Check clearing is ridiculous as well. Congress passed the Check 21 bill to make checks clear faster and prevent people from "floating" checks.

Of course, now banks electronically clear the checks very quickly but take another week or so to actually deposit the money into the client's bank account. During this time they make money off of your money without you having any access to it. It's ridiculous.
"People who want to appear clever rely on memory, people who want to get things done write things down."

I haven't been able to find it again, so I'm not certain, but I think it was from the Lairds' 1947 book http://www.amazon.com/Technique-Getting-Things-Directing-Lea... which I reviewed on Amazon:

This is a very useful book on getting things done. If you need hand-holding and specific techniques you can apply without thinking too much it's not for you. It gives few specific techniques, instead it focuses on general methods applicable to almost anything and on many inspirational anecdotes. Very readable.
At the Dawn of the Augmented Reality Industry (Bruce Sterling video)
I feel like ours does a bit better. Here are the sample searches they suggest:

http://pedia.directededge.com/article/PHP

http://pedia.directededge.com/article/Flower

http://pedia.directededge.com/article/Bee

http://pedia.directededge.com/article/Albert_Einstein
So, your average female sporter would probably blow you away in most contests then. But that should not degrade you just as it should not degrade her when competing against a more capable person, male or female.

It's the personal achievement that counts, you against the clock or your sense of self worth, not you against somebody else.

Unless 'racing' someone will spur you to work harder.

What about number 4 then, he never gets to be on the podium either, why only 3 top spots ? And if you make 4, what about #5 ?
Tyler Cowen's new book http://www.amazon.com/Create-Your-Own-Economy-Prosperity/dp/... is about managing information; he suggests looking at how autistics manage the mass of details they tend to collect for pointers at how neurotypicals can do better. The book's thesis is more complex than this, but I think he was a bit sloppy at developing it.

EDIT: He also wrote a similar webbed article http://chronicle.com/article/Autism-as-Academic-Paradigm/470...
This was discussed on HN some time ago; I was going to include a link to the discussion but the WebMynd search was taking way too long.
Technology isn't hurting our brains. It's evolving them to deal with a different set of problems.
Openness is goodness
Thanks; I suspected documentation might have something to do with it. I wasn't aware of the specification-vs-implementation issue though.
Proof - Einstein was Wrong
"I am starting to think Dijkstra is about the worst thing ever happening to software development."

"0 based for spatial coordinates, 1 based for lists and character positions."

Sums up my thoughts pretty well.

The real reason we do zero-based counting in computers is because of bits, speed and laziness.
Check out this: http://arcfn.com/2009/08/arc-arduino-arm-temperature-monitor...

The guy is running an Arc (pg's Lisp, currently implemented in mzscheme) web server on his Arm-based SheevaPlug.
thats because the people with > 10k to keep in an account keep it in a brokerage account or some place that pays decent interest.
That's rather judgmental of you... I thought the whole point being driven by every crunchy, sandals-wearing startupmeister here was that clothes don't matter. How bigoted to immediately dismiss someone for dressing differently.
I think this is far more likely to be used to exclude people who disagree with you.

<post on agile>
Do you think waterfall is stupid? y/n

Posters don't get to influence the score their post gets, that is the perview of the community.
"No-one has really thought that falsifiability is a contentful constraint on scientific theory formation for some time now"

This quote is a textbook case of someone parroting the fashions of philosophy to make noise instead of a point. To wit: it talks about undefined general opinion, it has dropped a "name" in lieu of evidence, and by focusing upon a vague "formation" of ideas instead of the "methods and intention" as quoted above, it could be interpreted as being being confined to a narrower scope than the original statement and thereby attempts avoid the statement it is attempting to supersede.

Most importantly, it digresses from what goes on in reality without bothering to consult it. Within the scope of the original statement, which is talking about the scientific method, the community is actively engaged in this discussion:
http://www.google.com/search?q=is+string+theory+falsifiable
Why We Copied Posterous
The tricky bit is that once you have a law in place for public projects, the people who pushed for that first law will probably try to extend it into the private sector. So even having that first law (which is a good one!) paves the way for more invasive laws later.
Human Lifespans Nearly Constant for 2,000 Years
Maximum human lifespan, often confused with life expectancy, has remained more or less the same.
Can't someone "just" write a Skype app and offer it for download? Or is there something in Android phones that makes this impossible?
Users should have some qualification to have the right to vote.

This may be high iq, knowlege of the submission topic, etc.
I think its pretty certain the articles were manually removed, they all went at the same time along with every new submission almost immediately.

I dont disagree with having them deaded though, although my site was one of the ones that someone submitted, and I actually think it was submitted because it was useful.
But you could easily lie in this case.

Since anyone can lie, this could become a psychology game.
At work in the past few weeks, I've been expected to document some parts of a large system I've been designing, so that other people can use it. I've now produced tens upon tens of pages of documentation, which still only scratch the surface and have massive gaping holes, some by design, some by sheer necessity. Meanwhile, this stuff is just basic state I need in my head to do what I'm doing, it's not even a full explanation of what's going on; even the code is only covering the what and for a third party to extract the "why" could take a long time.

When it's all in my head, it doesn't seem too large, until I try to get it out on paper and I find that it's a simply huge amount of state.

I'm not feeling too guilty about not having Shakespeare memorized. I've got a lot of things going on in my head that very few people of past eras had to contend with. Sure, if I didn't have a job and didn't care about world news and didn't sometimes do my own writing and have programming projects on the side, I'd be left with tons more time to memorize poetry. But... so what?
Do you use source control? I think this stuff is very cool but I have misgivings about my production code not being in a VCS.
Ask HN: I have a good idea for a startup, but I don't have time.  What to do?
Recently I’ve come up with an idea for a website that I think is worth implementing to make money. The problem is that I am in college and that takes up all of my time. I don’t feel like I can just put it off until after college because, like my last idea, I’m concerned that someone will do it before me and then I won’t be able to make as much money.

I’ve run in to this problem before and last time I enlisted a partner to help with development. However, things went south quickly with the partner and while we had the core of the idea done, it would have been difficult to move forward since we weren’t really partners anymore and it would have been tough to either start over or just use his work without fearing he might later try to lay claim to it. Perhaps a partner is the way to go? I wonder how often partnerships go bad and ruin ideas? I wonder the best way to handle partnerships, especially when the idea was basically entirely only one of the partners.

The second thing I’ve thought of is getting a freelancer to do most of the work, and then putting any finishing touches on the code myself. However, the problem with this route is that it’s going to cost money I don’t have. It solves the problem of flaky partners, but already being 20k in debt to student loans, I’m nervous to borrow money from anyone to hire a freelancer for an idea that seems like it should work, but since I’m new at this sort of thing, could easily get screwed up.

So far, these are my only two ideas. What does HN’s collective wisdom advise?
It does, but that doesn't handle anything that's variable ;(

If there are any that do, I'd be happy to set up an account with them, just for that purpose.
"I think the biggest obstacle for aspiring artists is not scheduling, energy, location, etc., but the perfectionist mindset. In my experience, it's easy to become paralyzed by trying to create the final product from the start."

Interesting observations on the road blocks to creating in the book, The War of Art.

http://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Through-Creative-Battles/dp/04...
New Technology Discovers 100 Foot Ship Sinking Waves Are Common
1) I get it. If your array is that big you already have code dealing with array indices approaching MAXINT. Since it's already a special case it's not introducing extra complexity to change your test in that one place.

Edit: When I say "test it inclusively" I mean when last==MAXINT you test i<=last rather than i<last+1. It's a special case.

2) I was assuming the upper bound in your 1-indexed array was inclusive, since it's necessary for your previous point. If that's the case, then when iterating over subseqs you can't just assign the previous upper bound to the next lower bound. That situation occurs frequently, and Dijkstra mentions it in the memo.
Speaking of Sinatra and Python, have you seen http://github.com/breily/juno?
Are you sure about that? I've read that the Dual-Link DVI connector can be split to power two same-sized displays, e.g: http://pc.pcconnection.com/1/1/100710-tripplite-cables-dvi-d...

Not that I've tried it yet on my mac
That's what I noticed. At almost the same time, all erlang links were gone. Did the admins remove it?
I'm approaching this from a news.yc community perspective. Feel free to tweet about it :)
It all comes down to correct utilization of technology. If you want to recall something, then memorize it - it`s not a difficult task. If you simply record it via chosen medium AND you wish to recall it at a later date, then you're doing it wrong. I think it just comes down to common sense..if I need to call a number once, I won't memorize it..it`s a waste of time. However, I am more than likely to memorize a friends number who I call often.

Personally, I can recall old passwords, tons of current passwords, tons of phone numbers, student ids, credit card numbers, bank account numbers and tons of relevent IP addresses I use frequently..come to think of it, I have a lot of things stored in my head. How can the author assert that our ancestors remembered more than us? Heck, do we not recall THOUSANDS of domain names?
The Perils of Perfectionism
Few reason's why i will vote for HSR:

1. It's safer than car, very few or no accidents compare to highway accidents - so you can't put value to human life.

2. Compare to air and car drive, weather conditions doesn't impact HSR.

3. Peace of mind: Compare to driving car, its a peace of mind as you may relax rather than stressing out due to driving itself or weather or traffic jams etc.

4. Compare to air travel, there is no hijack like situation possible. i.e. peace of mind to government.

5. No matter how fast you drive a car or bus, you just can't beat HSR's speed and time saved due to speed. Plus no speeding ticket :)
not quite. "foo"[2] is a char, ("foo"+2) is a string.
I know a few people (myself included) were busy flagging stuff about that time - so it is quite possible a lot of it died from flags.
Einstein was wrong is a minor academic industry http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHMA_enUS338US338&so...
What makes you think people who 0-index arrays and prefer half-open intervals count any differently? Is this argument directed at a four year old?

4+1=5 never enters into it. What a rubbish argument. I might as well complain that your [a,b] has (b-a+1) integers in it. (5-0)=5 so the half open interval has 5 things in it.

What's the measure of a real interval 1<=x<=5? 4. 0<=x<5? 5.
Agreed, but for the same reason it seems like that means it is a good place to meet other ambitious people if you are looking for cofounders, the children or possible investors, or other forms of networking in general.

Of course, that is my opinion as someone who has neither founded a startup nor gone to a prestigious school.
The perfectionist mindset isn't just an obstacle for artists -- it also can be for programmers, engineers, and others. I actually wrote a post about it called "The Perils of Perfectionism" (see http://blog.seliger.com/2008/01/16/the-perils-of-perfectioni... ), which I just submitted to HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=778408 .

The basic problem is that almost any creative process is iterative and recursive. When you think it has to be perfect the first time through, it by definition can't be. You've set yourself up in a loop with no exit conditions. Get to the rest of the program.
http://libre.adacore.com/libre/

Not really that far. The tools are already there, and available to use.
We just have to gain a culture of quality.

Which is the real problem. The technology industry has a culture of cowboys and constantly forging ahead rather than sober introspection (masturbatory blog posts aside).

My background in aviation has had a huge effect on my life in technology. Every pilot has been in a "situation" over their flying
career, some more than once. When we do our hanger flying we swap stories about how to safely get down every time. This just doesn't
happen in technology. It should.
That's ordinary in Italy. Many Catholic saints have there appendages and organs distributed and on display throughout the world. Most of the parts are in Italy. As another poster mentioned, in the cathedral they have the tongue of a saint on display. (Actually,I've been to Padua, they have a lot more than just a tongue.) Galileo is a bit odd as he's a secular scientist not a holy figure, but it's not that odd.
Sup - mail client with search and tags like Gmail without loss of control
This is a little meta, but to what extent does the fact that companies die like this prevent adoption of new services? If I had a business, I'd hesitate to make it dependent on or spend a lot of time integrating with some small startup that stands a fair chance of going belly up next year, and as a user I'm not about to do something like, say, spend a lot of time picking my favorite music for some music recommendation site when they might die at any time.
It does provide something of a "slippery slope" problem, but there are ways of handling that.

One step in a direction does not always lead to the next, especially if there are definite plans at the beginning to avoid it.
I'm afraid my impression of _why from what I've read lately is that he wasn't exactly happy. Adding to that.. has anyone read the last few pages of chapter 6 of his guide recently?
Apparently his sister was drinking and got alcohol poisoning or might have been on drugs. All in all it seems he was deeply troubled by this and by his deteriorating relationship to his sister.
When did he write this and is this stuff about his sister true? I really, really hope it isn't and that he or his sister didn't do something tragic.