skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Edison : a Life of Invention, Paul Israel (terribly dense condensation of a 6 volume biography... but it has all the facts. I don't know if Edison was a "genius", but he had lots of ideas, and he did them. BTW Tesla isn't mentioned at all, and the AC/DC controversy only peripherally, in terms of Western Union)

Just finished iWoz, by Woz. It's extremely casually written. He comes across as ego-centric but sadly without self-awareness even here, in autobiography (incidentally, I think the appropriate comic strip to represent Steve and Steve would be Calvin and Calvin. But I digress). The guy is a genius, there's some funny bits, and he gives some great advice: being able to think objectively gives you confidence, and independence of the opinions of others. Worth being reminded of when the pressure's on.

now to join the long tail of comments
It's a balance that constantly shifts, everywhere. On the one hand, we want professionals (on the condition that they are honest), on the other hand we want politicians (on the condition that they are competent). Making a certain function politically controlled isn't necessarily a bad or good thing. On the one hand, it implies some level of accountability. On the other hand, it brings along the negatives of politics over professional concerns.

There's probably a paradox in there somewhere, like so many others in democracy.
Technical:

- Practical Common Lisp

- Programming Clojure

Non technical:

- Empire, Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt. A deep political and philosophical essay about the transition between modern and postmodern times.

- Various material about the International Situationist, an avant-garde political and artistic movement from the 60s.
Legal and economic systems can't depend on politeness.
Practical Django Projects 2nd edition
New Dell-ARM combo poised to take on WIntel netbooks?
HAVE SAFE DRIVING IN NIGHT
One of the main reasons for these crashes is the limited eye vision in night driving!
The color recognition, peripheral vision & deep vision all of these get compromised after the sunset & in the darkness the driver has to be depended on his eye vision which is for just few meters!
That book corrupted me. I've never had an innocent conversation with a salesperson since.
My basic CS stuff:

Still at 'Real World Haskell'...and still not through the Monads part

Programming Clojure, started reading

Chris Okasaki's Thesis on 'Functional Data Structures'

O'Reilly's 'Algorithms in a Nutshell'

'Collective Intelligence', T. Segaran, O'Reilly

Some old Isaac Asimov books I found in my Landlord's cellar

R. L. Stevenson, re-reading 'Treasure Island' on Google Books
uh, i didn't even see that. it probably looked like some ad banner. instead, i skipped to the title of the blog post.
Of course, but this thread is in relation to the founders at YC and the VC's who speak to them. There are a great many founders of all ages, but they aren't the focus on this article.
Random Walks and Electric Networks [pdf]
They only donate if you upgrade from IE6 to IE8 (or so said the site). People who are still using IE6 probably don't even know what's Firefox or Chrome (I know plenty of people that fits in here).

I don't think it's about the marketshare, they are targetting their own users. It's probably more about getting rid of the dinosaur that is IE6 and moving forward (about time).
Trivially little compared to the code base and compared to the advantages. It takes only a few seconds to type

if (object == null)
{
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Parameter 'object' should not be null.");
}

Whereas I could lose hours chasing after null values that were passed through layers of unguarded abstractions.

Sure, I'd love for DBC to be a language feature (Eiffel has it) but exceptions help me out here, too.
You're wording my thoughts 100% exactly. Thanks.
The road to a compiler
> Most people don't even know what the different is between a web app and an iphone app

Exactly! That is the problem. They don't know your web app is an iphone app. So, they get annoyed when it doesn't have all the functionality of an iphone app. They have higher bar of expectation that a webapp inherently can not reach.

If it was obviously a "web page" then user expectations are much lower and they are likely to be impressed by what it can do.

The key to success is not being good. It's being better than expected.
Why the implicit assumption that Google should be creating such things?
Dangerous Knowledge (vid)
Men bullshit to aggrandize themselves. Women bullshit to entrap others.
I'm crossing my fingers that Oct 22 will have a great release of windows 7 so that workplaces can finally upgrade. If they have another horrible release, then it's another 2 years of IE6 pain for us web developers!
No, he wasn't just that. Your comment says more about you than about Bill Hicks.

Bill Hicks has been quoted by more than one famous comedian as an example and inspiration. Among his repertoire was toilet humour, yes, but he also was a razor-sharp critic of society, beliefs, values. He wasn't just a comedian, he also tried to make people think.
John got me incredibly excited about Grand Central Dispatch. I'm almost tempted to start tinkering with Macruby to see if I can't get that functionality without having to relearn C.
Yeah, it worked for Nokia, who over the last year made less in profits from all there phones, to Apple and its 3 phones. Yeah, they sell many more phones, but make a lot less profit.

Yeah, it is working for Nokia.
Ballistic seat cover
Having the highest mass density (1600 denier) ever found in any seat cover making material, Ballistic seat covers for the PT Cruiser can easily endure any amount of mistreatment including those done by gun dogs and boisterous kids. Though the material is often used in luggage making and tool-bag making,
"La reine morte" (The dead queen) by Henry de Montherland.
Except he might actually like working there.
It would be consistent if everyone who was fit to inherit actually did inherit. But that is not the case. Some of those who are fit do not inherit and others do. What is the basis for this inequality? Birth.

She destroys the idea of meritocracy that she herself presented so eloquently and discredits libertarianism as yet another excuse for those born wealthy to keep their wealth.

If an hair is not equal to his money it destroys him? Come on, what does it even mean to be "equal to money"? And how can someone who does not inherit wealth even prove that he or she is "equal to the money"? That's just the kind of fluffy nonsense that moral philosophers are so infamous for.
You think I am using Alan Turing for some political end?
Securing the Other Side of the Cloud
PSA Baseball Cards - NateDSanders.com
Do you have PSA graded baseball cards? Consider consignment them with renowned auctioneer NateDSanders.com. No consignment fees on PSA baseball cards over $1000 in value. He does the work, you make all the money. View more info online today!
And the bowl of petunias said "Oh no. Not again."
Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.

See also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121063

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101255

Raised again in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=724524
then killed.
For every IE you download a fairy dies!
Worse what they bought was a name based upon technology they don't own. Someone just figured out that they can't move on and take it to the next level and are dumping it. Mistakes happen, they should have bought everything not just the pretty outside and user base.
Bankcard Empire
View Bankcard Empire's professional profile on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the world's largest business network, helping professionals like Bankcard Empire discover inside connections to recommended job candidates, industry experts, and business partners.
I agree that that blurb is a piece of poorly-written rhetoric, but the book is full of damning primary-source material that effectively support the author's points. If you want something less controversial perhaps, look at John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education. It is also available in its entirety online, but to spare you the huge download, I will link to reviews from hacker-friendly sites:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/7/27/215225/986
http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/06/1722203...

I don't see what's wrong with a conspiracy theory. History is full of conspiracies and any deep study on human nature will point out to you the tendency of humans to conspire.
XMPP and Social Computing: Let the Bots Talk
Why Girls Who Like You Don't Want You
Thanks for the comment, I assume that by not using proper English, you may be referring to a few typos on site. I may have never got the best grades in English when I was in high school, however, as the site is still going through a lot of improvements, believe me, the spelling errors will be worked on.

I (the owner) do speak fluent English, it is my native tongue, so I do apologize if, for some reason, through the cultural boundaries that we may have, if the native English language that I have spoken since birth, differs from your idea of 'the English language'. I may very well look at an additional plug in with the new script that we will be migrating to within the next few months, that allows many other languages, including other adaptations of the English language, including 'Bad Spelling English', 'Deep South English', 'Tasmanian English', and even 'Pirate English'. I hope that this plug in will eliminate any offense that others may have with my bad use of the English language, and will (as you put it), do the world a massive favor. In the meantime, I will have somebody look over my apparent bad use of the english language, which out of 20k views, 100+ members, and many uploads, I have only ever had one complaint.What a shame it was about my use of the English vocabulary.I will endeavour to make sure that the english used on site, is as easy as possible for all who speak this fine language to understand, regardless of where you are from, or what your idea of the English language is.

By Adds, we mean that we advertise on the site. (another typo, I apologize). A lot of people dislike advertising on sites, especially those in the crowd who have been testing this site for a month in beta, and approaching two weeks completed.

Thanks for checking out the site though, its much appreciated, I am extremely apologetic about my 'bad' use of the English language, and am also glad that you support my policy against Cyber Bullying. Because lets face it, cyber bullying is like OMG, rlly ttly like OMGZLOLZ! INORITE, its like totally so wrng, I totally kwym! So wrng to pwn ppl with cyber pics. :p
Actually, a very likely outcome of reading that book is that you give up the idea of getting rich. The book is good, though.
Tips to find the best Florida holiday villas
Florida is one of the best holiday destinations for both individual holidays as well as for family vacations. However, your holiday can be only as good as your accommodation. Today hotel accommodations are becoming increasingly expensive and in particular booking multiple rooms for a family can burn a huge hole in our pocket. Alternatively, you can rent villas in Florida to have a luxury accommodation within your budget.
There is a lot of empty retail space here in Boston as well. In one case though the owners tried to raise the rent of a local favorite restaurant/night club in my neighborhood and now the space sits empty. There's also an element of stupidity involved sometimes too :)
Your degree is worthless
My understanding is that it was simply a firmware problem. Reflashing the buggy drives fixed the issue.
I second "Programming Language Pragmatics" it is a fantastic book, and he is a very good writer, with illustrative examples and just the right balance between breadth/depth.
No such explanation is needed; in the lack of powerful motivating forces for education (or anything else) to be good, it will be mediocre. PG makes the point that school is bad, not because it was deliberately designed to be, but because the design spec was to warehouse otherwise potentially disruptive young people, not particularly to educate them: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

"""And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose."""
I know auction sites which set a smaller increment (5-10mins). I do wonder, why eBay hasn't tried it. 3 hours does seem too long.
Beginners guide to integrate Amazon Web Services in web application
Say Hello to Opera 10
I would imagine most people with a minimum of SEO exposure would have been able to get your friends page to be the first hit(unless Peter Dyreborg is a really common name...).
For one, Adobe's tools are much less important for Apple than they used to be. We are far from the days when the most significant market for Macs was desktop publishing and graphic design. Apple were very smart to diversify - on the pro side, in the last few years they have gained significant penetration in photography, videography, music, software development and science markets, to name a few; on the consumer side, they grew their marketshare and their mindshare significantly - so much so in fact that I'd wager they are making more money selling consumer level computers than pro machines. On top of that, Mac OS X has evolved to be very nice and usable operating system and as a result, if Adobe were to discontinue their Mac products today, there would be a good number of creative professionals who'd rather switch software than switch away from the Mac.

And for two, Apple have been accommodating Adobe's needs for years, with little to no reciprocity. The sole reason for the existence of Carbon is so Adobe and Microsoft wouldn't have to make significant changes to their products overnight. In return, Adobe dragged their feet with Carbonization, the switch to OS X, the switch to x86, and now the switch to 64-bit. In the last nearly 10 years Adobe had not put one iota effort into transitioning their core products to Cocoa. They had put the bare minimum of effort into optimizing their products for Mac OS X (in some cases, like the Flash plugin not even that).

Why should Apple go out of their way to ensure compatibility with Adobe's CS, when Adobe don't seem to care enough to test and fix things on their end?

(There is an apocryphal story about the reason for the rift between the two companies - back in the early days of Rhapsody Apple had a three way meeting with Adobe and Microsoft in which they discussed Apple's API plans and in which Apple tried to push the two biggest software vendors to port their products to Cocoa (née NextStep). Surprisingly, it supposedly was Adobe not Microsoft, who although not thrilled at the idea were ready to find a compromise, that put the kibosh on Apple's plans. They outright told Apple to go pound sand - they didn't intend to put effort and money in such a port, regardless of the fact that Adobe had a version of Illustrator for NextStep, meaning they had both the expertise and the code base to do it. Therefore Carbon.)
Interactive Clojure on Google App Engine
Because it's a stupid conspiracy theory. I do wonder whether some conspiracy theorists aren't suffering from a mild form of schizophrenia.
Another idea - viral marketing.
You should at the bare minimum add a link in a cell under the result set so that the user who gets the result set created with QueryCell will know about it.
You might consider a special landing page for those links
Cross referenced to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=794019
Amazon Multi-Factor Authentication for AWS Accounts
Drilling a Square Hole (with a rotating bit)
I'm bouncing between that book and "The Haskell School of Expression"( http://www.haskell.org/soe/ ). The second seems to be better at describing data structures and building the language in your mind while the first is more of a reference of useful ideas.
Gattaca is a great movie -- one of my favorites -- but genetics is not predestination. The environment plays a huge role in the development of children and many diseases are not genetic in nature at all. Many other diseases and conditions are a combination of genetics and environment.

Are we in danger of creating a society of a "genetic upper class"? Sure, as long as there are people willing to buy into the idea that genetics determines our future there will be people that want to exploit that for their own personal gain. But that is why it will continue to be our duty to defend the dignity of human beings and use science to improve the lot of all of us, not to exclude some in favor of others based on some pseudo-scientific eugenicist fantasy.
There was apparently some discussion before this announcement: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=787461
I have a similar completion rate and for a while I was really gung-ho about doing a Project Euler problem daily. Unfortunately, I discovered that there are sites which purport to have completed all 252(or maybe 253 now) and give out solutions.

That there are people who have cheated their way to high score, completely ruined the enjoyment of the site. It does seem a bit silly, that your own enjoyment of a problem is tarred by someone else's exploits. It shouldn't affect you, but it ultimately does, in some ways that someone else cheating in MMORPG affects one's own rat killing efforts.
Did it? Nokia is losing ground rapidly to Apple, particularly in the higher margin smart phone market, aren't they?
> # Line Length

> The maximum line length is 80 characters.

Ah, I remember programming on terminals.

edit: Most places I've worked/people I've talked to prefer 100-120 chars.
agreed. best explanation I've seen by a very long shot

http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.a... and http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.a...

Edit: you've gotta get excited when you see examples like this

before:

for (i = 0; i < count; i++) {
results[i] = do_work(data, i);
}

total = summarize(results, count);

after:

dispatch_apply(count, dispatch_get_global_queue(0, 0), ^(size_t i) {
results[i] = do_work(data, i);
});

total = summarize(results, count);

And there you have it: a for loop replaced with a concurrency-enabled equivalent with one line of code. No preparation, no additional variables, no impossible decisions about the optimal number of threads, no extra work required to wait for all the independent tests to complete. (The dispatch_apply() call will not return until all the tasks it has dispatched have completed.) Stunning.
One of the best moments in movie history is the swimming scene at the end [I should add, if you have not seen the movie and are doing a startup, do yourself a favor and watch the movie and do NOT click on the link!]:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWNRvRecE1Y
Snow Leopard vs Windows 7 - which OS is best? Review on Techworld
Why should Snapes be in the same sentence as Facebook or Twitter? Boy, the ego!
Steven Levy is a brilliant writer. If you want to read about computer history from the position of the hackers building it then I'd also suggest reading his other books, especially 'crypto' and 'insanely great'.
EBay wants $2B for a company they bought at $3.1B four years ago? They might as well have taken the "billions" that the NSA was rumored to have offered in return for being able to eavesdrop on skype calls ;)

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=522092
Ask HN: What features do you miss in existing calendars?
Hi All,

Are there any features or specializations that you miss in state of the art calendars (like Google or Zoho calendars)?
Lisp is sin
Counting the DOM nodes in a web page
Google Preferences are "no more"
I'd add at least another disk and build a raid1-array. With a single-disk setup you miss the greatest feature of RAID, redundancy.
A Computational View of Market Efficiency
[from the comments]

whenever I tried to explain anything technical to her, her eyes would cross and the she’d get impatient, flustered, and frustrated.

I keep hearing this bullshit, both on HN and on other news sites. Do you really choose to spend your time such vacuous people? Or is it just that most explanations given are needlessly complex, so that programming and computers appear magical?

If you can't explain something properly, you probably don't fully understand it yourself.

But anyway, computers are hard. Let's go shopping!
This seemed to lock up my rather elderly browser, so I attempted to get the PDF via wget from the command line and look at it offline. That got me a 403.

Clicking on the "scribd" link (reluctantly) I get

Access Denied

Sadly, your client "Wget/1.10.2" violates the automated
access guidelines posted at arxiv.org, and is consequently
excluded.

Any suggestions?
> Personally I think it is a bad development

If I may ask, why do you think so?

My family has a history of bad knees. Like, a third of my family over age 30 have had significant knee injuries. I had one at age 22.

My girlfriend's family has a slight history of heart troubles.

My family has no such heart problems. Her family has no such knee problems. If there was a way to ensure any children we had would take its general cardio systems from my bloodlines, and joints from her bloodlines - sign me up. I have better eyesight, whereas she has perfect skin. I have broad shoulders and a strong frame, whereas she has a cheetah's metabolism.

If I could ensure my children got the best traits of both of us, I'd do it happily and pay a lot for it. It seems like a fantastic thing to me, and the idea of it is pretty exciting. Thoughts on why it might lead to bad places?
Cute topic. Really though, they like you because you're nice to them, but they don't want you because you're a weeny who doesn't bathe regularly.
Yeah. What about the rest of the world?
The 'Linuxification' of Windows has begun
Maybe it's me or a seriously under performing sense of humour today, but I really can't make the connection between the HN title and the article.
Eliminating medical problems ought to raise no objections, but "broad shoulders and perfect skin" is surely an aesthetic preference only. It's not far from there to "my wife has blonde hair and I have blue eyes..."
I figure there is a lot of stuff going on that we haven't got a clue about yet and by selecting for some traits that are clearly visible to us we may be inadvertently introducing major trouble down the line.

I fully sympathize with those who would like to get rid of hereditary diseases, pretty much every family has their share of them, but you have to ask yourself if you think it is wise to second-guess evolution before having fully grokked the mechanisms and datastructures at work here.

As long as we refer to the majority of our DNA as 'junk' we have a long way to go in this respect.

You are exactly the person I had in mind when I wrote above that parents would like to have 'perfect' children.
The best way to apologise would be to commemorate his work. But the government has also rejected a petition to fund Bletchley Park.

http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page20409
The article is about neuropathways not dating. I may be particularly grumpy today but that is one strike. The second is that dating problems are best served elsewhere like okcupid or reddit. I flagged it. I'm sorry but this seemed poorly presented and offtopic and that is the only way to downvote.
No it didn't. Nokia doesn't have a successful app platform.
But the download link is broken for me. Anyone else?
Google's Orkut is popular among BRIC nationals.