skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Anything we missed? While these failures are big, we have restricted them to the modern-day Apple, and ignored the Jobs-less wilderness years of beige boxes and overpriced printers."

Didn't I see the Quick Take somewhere in the list ? As a matter of fact Steve Jobs "steved" (as we used to say at the time) those when he came back to Apple, with all the printers, the Newton, and everything that was not, well, a Macintosh (or the softwares running on it).
I've been using Back In Time for some time now. It works well and has been very stable. I thought it would choke when my external backup drive was plugged out, but it handles such circumstances well.

It creates hard links (just like Apple's Time Machine I believe), which means that snapshots can be quite small.
If you think it's an important issue, read up on it. Read arguments from people on as many different sides of the issue as you can, and be sure to read up on the responses to those arguments from different sides of the issue.

Pay attention to peer-reviewed studies and meta-studies - look for data that you can study and verify.

Pay attention as well to the manner in which arguments are made. If an argument resorts to informal fallacies like ad hominem attacks, cherry picking data, bait-and-switch and so on, be even more highly skeptical.

It's also important to understand whether the person making the argument has any conflicts of interest (e.g. their own paycheck depends on a particular point of view taking precedence over policy). However, it doesn't automatically follow that such a person is being dishonest just because they stand to benefit from the adoption of their particular stance.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=772639
Oh, please. iTunes is not a music manager. It's a simplistic, slow and badly built jukebox app.

AmaroK is a music manager. Windows Media Player is a music manager. But not iTunes.

The only thing I've been missing on OS X is a good music manager that can take care of the gigabytes of MP3s I have lying around on my disk.
It shouldn't matter up until the point where the results of your customized development environment cannot be (readily) replicated. Part of the reason for standardization is to help avoid "it works for me"-type issues.

This isn't an issue for independent development efforts but it is critical in team and enterprise settings.
the market works.

Sure. But that's like saying "gravity works". As I jump off of a ledge, I do so with perfect faith in gravity: There is almost certainly a time T after which I will be on the ground! [1] But whether I will be happy at time t > T depends crucially on the actual shape of the terrain in front of me. A 1% slope would be good. A ski slope, perhaps tolerable. El Capitan, not so much.

It will always be possible to buy some quantity of oil at some price. For example, although it turns out to be far more difficult than you would think, we can almost certainly synthesize oil from carbon and hydrogen. In theory. But you wouldn't necessarily want to burn the result: It depends on how much effort it took to build the stuff.

The important question is: What does the demand curve for oil look like? How much oil is available at each price point? And how long will it take to come online?

And even if technology will someday make it possible to run a society of 7 billion people on oil shale, or nuclear fusion, that won't necessarily be any consolation to us. Transition can be a bear. And real-world technology research doesn't work like Sid Meier's Civilization: It doesn't arrive on schedule, and it might not arrive when it is most needed. If a genius tech commentator of the 19th century had gone to famine-stricken Ireland and told the starving farmers that their problems were solvable, that there were technologies that could produce orders of magnitude more food than their current technology, he or she would have been correct. But it wouldn't have come as much consolation, because the agricultural revolution was a century in the future and their kids were starving right then.

---

[1] Unless I jump into a hole drilled completely through the earth. Or I manage to put myself into orbit.
From Facebook to Apple: How to Fix the iPhone App Store
"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer."

- em forster
Doing your job well != churning out bug reports, which was what you said was being incentivized and measured. That also seems like a pretty bad fit for the original scenario we were discussing, but that didn't stop you from trotting it out anyways.

Bottom line: people do respond to external motivation, all the freaking time, as long as its appropriate to what they're being asked to do. Refusing to be paid to do what you'd be doing anyways, no strings attached, is, plain and simple, irrational. But, in reality, very few people ever get the opportunity to exercise that irrationality, because when someone pays you, there are pretty much always strings attached, and the strings are what are demotivating.
ahem

Newton / Cube / Lisa / Pippin / 20th Anniversary Mac
I hope this thing doesn't use the iPhone OS. That thing is an abomination, an insult to hackers everywhere.
My collection of large dial and square dial watches
I think after a long time in the wilderness, the people who are in charge of Yahoo! have finally figured out exactly what their strategy is and where they're taking the company.

Instead of investing their time, effort, and money trying to compete in search where they can't possibly hope to win, they're focusing on strengthening, investing in, and expanding their already-popular core brands and services. I think this is a really good move.
I tried reading up on global warming, but it seems surprisingly hard to find any information. The only "big" web sites on the topic were run by anti-global-warmists, naturally they were full of charts and stuff.

How does one even find peer-reviewed information - by looking into "certified" journals? And don't the revisionists have peers as well?

"If an argument resorts to informal fallacies like ad hominem attacks, cherry picking data, bait-and-switch and so on, be even more highly skeptical."

Agreed, these tend to be fairly clear signs. My favorite is the inevitable claim that "faction x can only resort to personal attacks", which is of course also a personal attack ;-)
^ iTunes: Great in 2001. Now it's bloated, slow, doesn't handle large libraries well,

What is considered a large library? I have about 3500 songs, and I am not having problems.
"Be yourself because everybody else is taken." Good for him that he does what he feels is right regardless whatever is the judgment of the pundits.
The proper approach to these debates is either (a) rational ignorance [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance ], (b) study up on both sides.

I dislike the word "revisionism" as a slur against the standard position. Revision is good. When more data comes to light, one should reevaluate what one things one knows. "Revisionism" is another word for "the scientific method" ; it should not be a slur.

I've done a fair bit of reading on all of these, and I am convinced of the "standard" position on all, except two. Anthropogenic Global Warming and Peak Oil have a lot less solid science behind them than the others, and replace it with (IMO) dubious modeling.
Tell HN: Public apology to dcurtis
Yesterday, I jumped on dcurtis in his hn post "30-day flight" here...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=782512

I said it was foolish and selfish. I was wrong. It's neither. A little over the top, but that's all.

As a frequent flyer, I'm always concerned about being able to get the seats I need and not getting bumped, so maybe I was a little sensitive. Also, sometimes I double book, then cancel, to keep flexible plans and feel guilty about it. (So who am I to criticize?)

I talked with alaskamiller last night and he reminded me that this was a great chance for the 2 of them to have an adventure, learn a few things, and share their experience in their blog.

I just didn't read that it yesterday's post. I should have known better.

I look forward to seeing dcurtis and alaskamiller in Pittsburgh if we're there the same time. Other hn'ers may want to coordinate their schedules with them too. Who knows, buy them a drink or dinner and you may be the subject of a blog post.

Have fun and keep us posted.
Yeah? I always thought there were hardly any start-ups in these countries. Can you name some?
By "Nightmare", I was thinking more of the dysfunctional tender + waterfall process that some large contracts (especially public or government) are prone to. If the development is so very painful, requests for change are not going to be looked kindly upon.
The main reason poor people tend to suffer from obesity is because it's much more expensive to buy organic vegetables than it is to buy some McDonald's. (Organic food stores don't even tend to open in poor neighborhoods.) Running around in circles burns very few additional calories; certainly not enough to deal with this fact.
Ask HN: How about having 'lost password' feature in HN?.
I thought hacker news doesn't need a forgot password option till I lose mine. I accidentally deleted some files on my machine and unfortunately my firefox lost it's memory of my passwords with that. I can't remember the password I used for HN coz I've only used that twice.

The next mistake I did is not using clickpass feature to attach my account with another account.

Anyhow I'd like to be me on HN again. It's uncomfortable having 2 attached at the end of my ID.

And this is not the first time someone lost the password. I've seen a lost password thread where the best answer was to email PG to get the password back. I think this is nearly impossible since PG seem to have loads of mail. (well he is PG :) ). And how he can manage to live with the password recovery requests in his inbox?

So what I suggest is Lost/Forgot password feature. I know it's not pleasant having lost password threads time to time :) .

PS: I hope PG will come across this and will be kind enough to send my password to the email mentioned.
Better Firefox Searching
The purpose of mentioning the Big-O in that document wasn't to inform about what it is. Rather, it was to note to the candidate not to go into technical detail during the interview (i.e. we like the intuitive version).
I don't have time to sharpen the saw, I'm busy sawing?
From their introductory page:

It covers time complexity, hash tables, binary search trees, and some other things you might learn in 6.046. However, most of the time is devoted to topics you won't learn in class, such as crafty bitwise logic and tricks to solving problems.
In my experience, offering API access is a great way to massively increase developer workload. If they don't want more money, and they don't want to hire lots of new developers, what's the incentive for offering an API?
The closest competitor to OneApp appears to be Opera Mini (http://www.opera.com/mini/) which is a full web browser for the same kind of small cheap cellphones which OneApp targets. Opera Mini is also client-server and pre-processes and compresses web pages on the server side, amongst other things, before the client sees them. The major difference would seem to be that Opera Mini provides access to the whole web, whereas OneApp is more of a walled garden, just running the 'apps' written for it's mini-platform.
What if Obama’s Health Care Plan’s Most Dangerous Enemy Was… Twitter?
I think this nails it. If you're part of a conscious diet and watching calories, diet soda can be a good choice, because you're _explicitly_ controlling for the effect the study is about - the false sweet causing cravings and ultimately more calorie consumption. It might follow, though, that the diet soda makes the rest of the diet more difficult.

If you're just subbing in diet soda for regular and not paying particular attention to overall diet, though, this study argues that you'll overall lose, as the diet soda increases your cravings for sweet and, left unchecked, you'll gain weight. Seems plausible.

(I don't worry too much personally, since I'm part of the population to which artificial sweeteners are not palatable. I'd rather drink water, and I do quite often.)
Just finished reading it a couple of days ago. It wasn't my first brush with Clojure, but it was still very useful in re-framing what I knew, and filling up the holes. Overall it has a very good ROI for both time and money.
Branding for web professionals: An introduction
My only compliant is categories and searching.

For example my side hobby is old Volkswagens. Since they have no way to categorize vehicles that are for sale, I have a few bookmarks with crazy search strings. VW + (1951|1952|1953.. etc)

Add to that fact that you can only search one section of craigslist at a time, I have crazy search string bookmarks for like 5 sections of craigslist. I'd like to see a craigslist central where my searches span states and regions.

Other then that I love the dead simple UI and no ads.
OK,

I must be missing something.

The guy kept his EBay equivalent, he kept his PayPal equivalent, he kept the Arabic search tech, and arguably most crucially he kept Tahadi, the MMO games equivalent.

I mean think about it, try to make an Arabic Twitter, without Arabic search tech.

So Yahoo gets the 'portal' part?

What exactly is the plan here?

Why is this a good deal for Yahoo?

Because it SEEMS like a slick, young businessman just sold a boat anchor that was slowing him down, to a Western sucker who was in the process of drowning.

If anyone has a better idea of what Yahoo might have been going for here I'd be interested in what you have to say. I'm just having trouble putting it together on my own.
The Holocaust deniers are definitely wrong too, just as are the people who don't credit the evidence for biological evolution. And anyone who thinks that medically administered vaccines are more dangerous than measles, pertussis, or seasonal flu is crazy. The harder case is vaccination against chicken pox, a disease with lower mortality and morbidity.

To answer your methodological question about how to tell the difference between competing ideas, learn to read the peer-reviewed scientific journals on each subject. Now that the Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals all have open online access, it's easier than ever to practice reading scientific literature. See Peter Norvig's guide to reading scientific research

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

for what to look for while reading.
So much of what you are saying is a combination of honest, reflective, and wise, however I disagree with one main point: "As strong-willed as humans can be, we cannot voluntarily sustain a state of suffering." As a person familiar with emotional masochism I would have to disagree. I think that the majority of people do sustain a state of suffering for a whole host of reasons that range from self hatred, a mirroring of ones past without awareness of personal responsibility for the imitation of parental emotional patterns (and perhaps even out of a loyalty to the family mantle of martyrhood and pain), to the simple desire to be in control, and so forth. With that said you are right: to yield is the only way. But (to play the devils advocate) I dare say that sometimes yielding is the very thing we forget when we become caught up in the cycle of playing the ever obstinate victim. To refuse to yield becomes the unhealthy obsession, and so we are lost to ourselves, lost to ourselves, lost to ourselves.
The Latino infant mortality rate differs from the non-Hispanic white one by 0.1 per 1000. This is largely attributed to methodological issues around getting appropriate records and the selection bias of immigration.
This is a great development. And another win for the Jordanian tech scene (Maktoom is based out of Jordan). Hope to see more news like this.
http://www.realclimate.org/
You can just email me, you know. I check my email. I argue for killing the king in my latest piece on this subject: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/savealife
Pinoyran
World of Warcraft : Cataclysm – Before/After Shots.
Post this in the feature requests thread (link at the bottom of the page).

On a side note...you can probably recover the deleted password file from Firefox if it hasn't been too long. If you're on Windows, there's a program called GetDataBack that is very good for recovering deleted files. On Linux/Mac, you'll have to search around for whatever data recovery tool they use.
Well, you can do at least that last bit fairly easily. http://www.google.com/coop/cse/
Good for CL for sticking to its guns. It may sound ironic, but profit maximization does not have to be the sole purpose of a business.
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/multimedia/2008/01/gallery_...
What makes you so sure, though? I think there are definitely cases of too much vaccination, for example (though I personally don't think the major ones are superfluous - but I have so far never vaccinated against the seasonal flu...). There is a lot of money at stake, too.

Holocaust: well it's impossible to discuss, and to me personally it has little relevance. Whenever I tried to look for more information, I hit on a lot of question marks. So I think the details are very unclear, but no doubt a lot of people died. Thing is, it was before I was born and there are hardly any traces left, so how to ever be sure?
I laugh at your puny human 'objects'
I've sometimes stumbled across newscasts from the 70's that are available on the publicly run Danish broadcast station (it's like the BBC) and really noticed the difference. The news would contain maybe 4 or 5 stories spread across an hour. The anchor would spend 10 minutes explaining the current political situation in Russia, and have a 10 minute interview with the foreign minister about how this would impact the country. The people interviewed actually got to tell us their opinion instead of speaking in soundbites. Very different to todays news.
There's another problem no one has raised here, which is the problem of recruiting the best people. If you have the most exciting business, sure you can recruit great people. But for a lot of important-yet-boring businesses, incentives are the only place you can compete. So do you sacrifice your current employee's productivity or your recruiting potential?
Does everyone here get their facts from political columnists and movie directors? Poor people have more kids because their kids are more likely to die. It's the same reason people before the industrial revolution had more kids: it's how you keep the species from dying out. Look up "the demographic transition": as the death rate in developing countries falls, birth rates also fall.

I personally don't think we can help other countries develop by giving them charity and I don't think I said that. I think we can help them develop by stopping our policies of stealing from them. Right now we saddle them up with debt, have large companies steal their natural resources, force them to adopt trade policies that prevent industrialization, and domestic policies that prevent them from educating their people. Let's stop doing that.
The Hacker Survey
Yes, I agree that a lot about how to structure code is subjective, which is also why I am very interested in having better terms to describe this — thanks for the book suggestion!

Giving it some more thought, I think it boils down to realizing when one is solving more than one problem, and then being able to write the code so that each problem is solved in isolation, yet without introducing complex APIs between the different pieces of code.

Often though the sub-problems are subtle and hard to predict, plus realizing that two problems are being solved is not in itself enough to figure out how to actually split it up (sometimes splitting things up contributes to the perceived complexity)…
If the poor are obese, they are already spending more on food than they need to be. They could simply purchase fewer big macs, right?

But I really don't buy this theory. If it were true, it would imply that graduate students should be fat too (which they usually are not). The fact is, big macs are cheaper than most other foods per calorie. They are not cheaper per meal.

Incidentally, Harlem has plenty of produce (organic and non). But (based on my anecdotal observations) it's mainly purchased by the yuppies.
Look at what happens in cultures where they regularly eat crops which decrease fertility. The fuck like rabbits, having sex with anyone and everyone without any cultural inhibitions like shame or marriage, starting at puberty, so they can get their birth rates back up.

The only proven way to get birth rates down is to get death rates down; cultures will do whatever it takes to reproduce themselves -- the solution is to make reproduction easier, so they no longer have to err on the side of caution.
For example the immune system is under brain control, and placebos can affect it.

Then it would be the act of taking the placebo that cures, not the actual placebo itself. My theory was simply that by taking something with the expectation of a cure, many people can already be on their way to wellness because, as you mentioned, a lot of healing begins within the brain.
This is contentless. A touch of irony perhaps.
> force them to adopt trade policies that prevent industrialization, and domestic policies that prevent them from educating their people.

I feel rather naive, as I have no idea what you're talking about. The only thing I can think of is NAFTA, and I've heard that had the opposite effect (damaging the Mexican agricultural sector.)
I wouldn't put it past Derren Brown to have represented that situation on the subway somewhat differently than it actually happened - he is an entertainer after all (his program about faith healing and religious beliefs was amusing). Your point about influence still stands of course.

I found 'Meaning, Medicine and the Placebo Effect' to be rather good: http://cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521000874
Here's a Coding Horror article with more content:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000003.html
The evidence for the Holocaust is so complete and wide-ranging that to question it almost instantly puts you into the "loony" category. Just because it happened before you were born is not an argument for believing in it or not. Otherwise, %99.9999... of the knowledge that you have would be useless. The number of eyewitnesses to the Holocaust alone is evidence enough, but the documentary footage of it is also significant.
How does this compare to environments such as Symbolics Lisps Genera, Smalltalks Squeek or Factors listener? They're all written in their respective languages, afaik, and provide some pretty powerful features (I'm only familiar with Factors, which has a REPL, integrated debugger, code browser, help browser and a load of powerful editing features).
Thus, the candle problem, when placed in the real world, would have three groups: a control group which is paid 'decently and fairly', and a group that is paid 'decently and fairly' and is given financial incentives beyond that, and a group that is payed 'decently and fairly' and is given autonomy as an incentive.

That's fine, but you still need a control group that is given no compensation at all as a baseline.
Humans need calories, it's true, but more than that we need nutrients. McDonald's food is carefully processed and stripped of its natural nutrients, so that you need to eat much more of it to get the nutrients you need. It's also packed full of calories, so that it tastes good, so eating enough of it not to be malnourished requires eating a lot of calories as well.

I rarely see grad students eating at McDonald's.
It always amazes me what passes for news on Techcrunch.
Uh, one word: paycheck.
You may want to specify the currency you're going to use for the income question. US dollars, I assume?
There's a subreddit called hardscience dedicated to only scientific papers. I've seen a few on global warming there. So that might be a good place to start.

http://www.reddit.com/r/hardscience/