skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Human children are the best learning machines in the universe.
It's generally applied where a 2/3/supermajority would normally be required for approval of organization-altering decisions -- a drag along allows a simple majority to force approval.

The concept is taken from partnership law, where dissolution can be forced upon all partners even if only a handful of partners vote for it -- the partnership assets are liquidated and the proceeds distributed.

A drag along basically forces the organization to liquidate if the majority shareholders want to -- and prevents the minority shareholders from taking any steps to challenge it.

Drag along provisions are generally unenforceable in America if they prevent the minority shareholders from filing court action to challenge the transaction, or otherwise prevent minority shareholders from exercising rights under the law or under the contract which are not expressly waived in the language of the drag-along provision itself.
What if we took advantage of the drag that the atmosphere exerted on the object as it ascended to change it's orbit or to move it into a useful orbit?

Edit: Never mind, that would only work if we wanted to lower the orbit.
I'd say it's more rude to touch someone else's screen than to ask someone not to touch your screen. Go ahead and tell them not to dirty up your screen.

The situation with the company laptop is a little more complicated because the property is, in some ways, as much theirs as it is yours. Still, you're using the equipment so you have a right to keep it smudge-free, whether by wiping off the mark or by asking them not to do that. Hopefully they'd take the hint if they saw you wiping away the smudge.
I've never heard things like this. Do you have some sources? Something like that would be a real hit to our social system that fired Larry Summers from Harvard for saying there may be differences in aptitude in the sciences between men and women for biological reasons.
Javascript is not the most awful, it is the most misunderstood :)
At the age of 40 now, I have a strong desire to re-learn math. Up until the age of 22 or so, I excelled. Now most of the knowledge is gone. Two days ago I was writing some code that required me to solve an equation. I picked up a pen and paper and thought I should be able to quickly figure it out. But my mind couldn't find the tools it needed to formulate what was a pretty simple problem. It took me a few minutes to struggle through what would have been easy when I was 18.

During the last 20 years, I gained lots of skills and kept up with software development. But the core stuff like math slipped away. I feel I can relearn major chunks of it and intend to. I think if your mind is constantly learning, you will always have the ability to re-learn the old things again.
IE8 reaches 80 million malware blocks
hahahahaha. I thought so
I think my long-term strategy for dealing with this is to amass enough wealth to have more freedom of time to be able to do some of these things. Perhaps I'm naive. Time will tell.

That's my strategy as well.
I'd honestly say that Drupal is better than Wordpress. Seriously, the extreme number of automated attacks and security holes in wordpress have made it a very dangerous game to play. They do fix problems quickly (a couple of days), but that's still enough time to get hacked.
> bad advice

Most reality-based advice is hard to listen to and sounds arrogant and demeaning. Too often HN is just a circle jerk session of smart people telling each other what they want to hear ... possibly on a thread about how the ignorant unwashed masses are so easily tricked by confirmation bias.
Disclaimer: Linked post was tl;dr. I only read the first quote and a paragraph passed that.

The debates regarding web vs desktop are all the same: The desktop has more power, concurrency, 3D, etc etc. The web has the advantage of working anywhere with a browser, persisting data in the cloud so any computer can restart where you left off, etc etc. Its a waste of breath to argue these points.

What I think is more important is that I believe computers ARE headed to a more web-oriented world. But to get there, there does need to be some changes. I think Google has the right idea with Google Gears and it will be interesting to see how Chrome OS plays out.

But web developer or desktop developer, I wouldn't feel threatened either way, since the concepts of desktop development aren't too far off from web development. Both of course have their differences that must be learned but if a software engineer understands the basic concepts of OOP, garbage collection (yes, it matters for the web too), memory usage, etc, then he/she will be fine on both camps.

Disregarding the web as a place where developers flock because they are revelling in their own medicority is a poor observation and a defensive argument by the quote in Tobias's article.
i don't know if you know, but there is a great quote concerning at least a partial aspect of the argument:

The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.
--michelangelo
Before looking at the schedule, I thought: you know, really ambitious schedules are impossible.

I've had periods in my life where I've had a very ambitious daily schedule. "I'm the Complete Man! There are 168 hours in every week! I'll get up at 4AM and study literature and religion and philosophy and practice my drawing and write one song a week and put in 30 minutes of guitar practice a week and write programs in at least one unfamiliar language a week and practice another language and make it a point to Win Friends and Influence People and be more empathetic and learn to surf and keep detailed metrics and work towards my life goals!"

I'd keep it up for exactly one week.

Some of the gains were sticky, because inevitably you'll discover things that you do want to add to your schedule.

Mostly, you discover that the important things in life can't be scheduled an hour at a time; they demand more.

Then I looked at his schedule.

It seemed reasonable enough.
It is not OK for others to smudge/grease/smear/taint/foul or otherwise violate your screen. No matter how expensive the screen is or who owns it.

I used to be one of those until I forced myself to take a pencil everywhere for if I could not hold back the urge. This keeps the screen clean and makes pointing more accurate.

My advice: Don't feel bad about telling them to back off - they may not even know this is not done. And if they do it again, compare it to if they had to use a (sweaty) friend's keyboard or mobile phone. So, limiting possible exposure to this is in everyone's favour.
We should grab a beer sometime...Mr. Oak Park.
The difference should not exist in theory. Both are programs running inside a computer, with the difference that the web application is a doomed version of the full runtime environment that the Operating System is able to really provide, for a reason: compatibility.

Imagine something like POSIX but much more extended, covering APIs for GUI, database access and so forth (basically what the Java VM provides), the "Application Browser" can just be an url in the form app://foobar.com/email.app that will run as native application. Still it can be a server-side application where all your data is saved server-side, and of course the environment can be smart enough to automatically download and install a new version of the program when available (actually the local copy can be just a caching business).

The web is going to offer all this in the end, but currently it's ridiculous stupid compared to a real environment. You can't do free networking, for instance, things like opening a socket and sending/receiving data using a non-HTTP protocol. In the end the web will provide all the stuff that now are trivially done in the desktop side, but my feeling is that this was the wrong path since everything is already here, the technology and decades of desktop applications capable of doing very smart things.

We are reinventing the wheel using the wrong foundation (HTML+CSS for GUIs, GET requests for all the kind of networking, ...).
I agree completely, people do this all the time, waving pens at my screen, etc. I think the easiest way to do it was the way you suggested, most people will get the hint if you just polish the smudge they left in front of them. You don't have to be rude or anything. You can even be discreet about it. People will still get the point.
Wyman's problems and suggestions read to me like a collection of the latest hip trends, and made me feel like he was someone who knows little about how a newspaper -- especially a small town newspaper -- works.
I am adamantly against narrow constitutional amendments, particularly those that take away rights rather than add to them.

I agree the tax code is a mess. The way to fix it is to fix it, not apply indirect pressure. Unfortunately, most of the proposals that I have seen hit me, as a middle class self-employed developer, right in the pocketbook, e.g. take away the mortgage deduction, or propose some kind of regressive tax, like a national sales tax.
Two questions:

1. Why does it need to be a constitutional ban? Why not just pass a law against it?

2. Why not make tax-return program publishers responsible for any errors their programs make, and make honest tax payers exempt from liability due to relying on what they believed was a correctly functioning tool?
Although giving money away seems counter-intuitive, when you consider these small sums in the context of abject poverty, it starts to make sense. And then if you look at the current model of large aid grants to often corrupt or inept governments, it makes total sense to instead give the cash directly to the very poor.
I agree. I'm very market-oriented myself, but I think this could be a good way to run things, if done correctly.

It seems to provide good benefits to the poor, while also being the least complex and least gameable welfare technique I can think of.
don't touch it
slaps with large trout
so sad a smudge
I remember getting chewed out when I was assisting in some training class for my company and accidentally touched this guy's screen.... I think it's a pretty common gripe and there's nothing inherently wrong with asking them not to do it, but if I were freelancing? I certainly would not be complaining about trivia like this. In social situations, I find it best to be positive, positive, positive!
Well put. And the UML at the end is the cherry on top. But the striking thing about the post, which I had to go read [~], is how insular it is. He's saying obviously false things, not out of stupidity per se, but out of a false worldview. He's embedded in an environment that confirms this worldview back to him, so it doesn't seem false. (There's a dim awareness of reality in one comment, though: "where are all those awesome WPF applications I’ve been waiting for?")

Viewed this way, the rant is fascinating. It's the Microsoft equivalent of an IBM mainframe guy in the 1980s ranting against PCs. Of course Microsoft are doing things on the web today, but IBM was a leading PC vendor then too.

The post is the best thing I've seen shedding light on MS culture vis-à-vis the web. Culture is a hard thing to change. If the post is representative, MS are in big trouble. Perhaps they will reinvent themselves. They did it in the past, as we know. But they had quite different leadership then.

[~] http://michaelbraude.blogspot.com/2009/05/why-ill-never-be-w...
I never purported that my life was special - I only stated facts relevant to the discussion that I was attempting to create.

Believe it or not, I am acutely aware of the fact that I lead a mediocre (albeit enjoyable) life, and I'm trying to prevent myself from falling into a rut of ignorant bliss.

However, I'd rather try and do that in a way that doesn't require me to drop the girlfriend, ditch friendships that have lasted for over 15 years and quit my job.

Maybe I am too young (23) to even care about this right now. Maybe not. That's part of what I'm trying to figure out.
Great Geek Debates: iPhone vs. Blackberry
Not really. A slap in the face is sometimes a good thing. It's very easy to get comfortable when you have a job and a decent apartment and a girlfriend -- enough of a life that you're no longer as "hungry" for more. You can coast like this for 5 - 10 years pretty easily then suddenly realize you've let a lot of time go by.

Better to go for the goals now, before you have a mortgage and marriage and kids and other responsibilities which while not bad things, definitely complicate decisions about what to do with your life.
Experimental Tech Turns Your Coffee Table Into a Universal Remote
I'd imagine nuking Washington wouldn't change the US as a whole (perhaps you'd get another post-9/11 terror obsession, but I'd think the economic infrastructure would still remain rather intact).

I think number of capitals isn't a very good measure of economic infrastructure: Monaco has some 30k people, but a non-capital city like Sao Paulo has 11 million.

One could say "ok, let's drop Monaco and nuke Sao Paulo then", and then maybe nuke Boston and Sydney too while we're at it. But you're going to run out of bombs way before you run out of large cities.
Original piece TC's responding to: http://paidcontent.org/article/419-the-fallacy-of-the-link-e...

1. The original piece rails against aggregators...and the only reason I found it and read it was because it was featured on Techmeme. I don't have time to read the 10-15 techblogs that are cranking out 20 articles a day...but Techmeme does and I'm thankful for that.

2. I thought about leaving a comment on the original story, but what's the point? I don't know anyone in that "neighborhood." It's not a community I hang out in. I'm much more likely to comment here or even on Twitter where folks will see what I say. Score another for the "aggregators" (it's fair to count Twitter as an aggregator in this discussion because of the broadness of the Paid Content article).

3. There is a fallacy of the link economy, but the PC writer didn't pick up on it. Jeff Jarvis and all the link economy people are right that it's more efficient to link out, however it doesn't make more business sense to do so in most cases because of search. If you create an "article" that's just a headline, 50 words, and a link, Google News won't index it. So it actually makes more sense to republish the same AP article everyone else does, basically pitting your Google mojo against that of the other papers in the AP. The other option is to write some original commentary around the link that will get you up over the length requirements or to pull a Gawker/HuffPo and just lift enough text to make your article long enough for search and detailed enough to keep readers from clicking through.

Simply linking to coverage you can't match in house may save you money, but you won't make any off of it. You're truly better off $$$-wise to just run the AP stories or copy-pasting your competitors stuff.
Why will a government-run health insurance plan perform better than existing non-profit health insurance? It seems pretty inevitable that tax dollars will end up being used to tip the scale in its favor, leading towards a single-payer system, which I think would be a bad thing. Monopsonies tend not to lead to the best outcomes.
I mean, sure, X over SSH is slow across the Internet, even with compression, but then MS Windows Remote Desktop is no blazing-fast, realtime operation under those circumstances, either.

Actually it is. I can work with remote desktop sessions over a cellphone link without having too much latency issues.

Remote Desktop is definitely a result of good engineering. Add support for local drives, printers, clipboards, USB devices etc and it's one of those very neat things which makes me love working with multiple Windows servers remotely.
What do you think about reading academic papers and posting distilled versions to a blog?

How about doing a reading course with a professor-friend of yours?
Odd from the school's perspective, where as far as I know, these approaches tend to be successful deterrents to "breaking up" any possible copycats. I was just working in admissions, but everyone pushing papers at a university gets the same e-mails from the higher ups about what's being done for the students in situations like this.
If you're coding for your job, why go home and code more on open source stuff? If you miss the discovery and excitement of learning science, you should consider putting the OSS time toward reading papers and working on problems.
TurboTax is a great piece of software and the price for using it is very reasonable considering the headaches it saves you. I agree the tax law is too complex and needs reform (I am a supporter of many tax reforms). However we shouldn't punish free enterprise due to bureaucratic mistakes. The Tax code created a market by being so opaque and complex, therefore the root of the problem is that the Tax Code is opaque and complex not that there exist companies in the market place.

I don't think destroying the business model of products like TurboTax will fix tax law. Fixing tax law will remove the need (or most of the need) for products like TurboTax. However even in a world of simple tax laws there will still be such a market, simply because for some people it is cheaper to pay a fee for turbotax (or an accountant or whatever) to help them do their taxes than for them to learn how to do it themselves in terms of opportunity cost.

There will be a market for these services forever for good reasons.
I keep my mind sharp by doing a variety of things. For example daily participation in programming contests/on-line judges (topcoder.com, spoj.pj etc) is a great mental exercise. Importantly I do this only when I feel like it... so daily for 2 months then take 5-6 months off is common. Also physical activity is a great compliment to rigorous mental activity. Lastly I take time off to just relax. These breaks range from 10 minute breaks throughout the day to month long breaks where I don't work at all (because long term mental clarity and growth is far more important than short term monetary gain... in most cases... some startups that are about to go IPO would be a counter example). Sounds like you're doing a lot of things (open-source, girlfriend etc)... try doing nothing or just walking... this could greatly improve one's mental clarity.
If it was lisp it'd be 200,000 lines of parenthesis, if it were python it'd be 200,000 of significant whitespace, perl? 200,000 of random punctuation

How do you know this?
I say, no. Not because "it's a dangerous infringement on people's rights." but because its not the root problem. The root problem is the complex tax structure, not the tools needed to navigate it.

besides, if your going to put in the effort to amend the constitution, you may as well go after the root cause of all root causes ;): "giving money to people that make our laws."
Its actually quite easy. As long as you know the timetable there is no guard at the door to make sure your paying. So if you stroll up, grab a seat on one of the lecture theater benches and just listen no one is going to kick you out.

Im pretty sure you could even go to tute classes because they just call out the roll to make sure that your there .

Some classes do roll just to make sure you dont truent more then X amount of times otherwise they may dock you 3% of your marks but your lecturers hardly remember everyones face to know you dont belong.

I would love to actually go back and do this too but i need to work. Hence i agree with one of the posters earlier that suggested to try to accumulate enough wealth to be able to spend your time learning things that you like.
I never considered either of those, actually.

I think reading & interpreting results from academic papers and posting 'distilled' versions to a blog would actually be pretty good, especially since I'd (hopefully) get some constructive criticism out of it as well.
Agreed. The iPhone is a good demonstration of combining a powerful development environment with always on connectivity (one of the more powerful reasons for being on the web in the first place).

It's also a shining example of many of the things that are wrong with downloadable software, though some of that is this particular incarnation (the app store) more than the whole idea.

There's no argument to be made that all computation should be done on the server and just rendered on the client. That model is on the way out for web applications (not to be confused with web sites). I happen to think Cappuccino is going in a great direction ;-)
Javascript is actually a quite good language: it has a dynamic object model and real closures. It has its deficencies, of course (like scoping rules).

It's really bad if you prefer statically typed languages, though, because on the client side on the web you have no other choice for the moment. Probably in the future we will see language implementations that use js as a target language become more mature and widespread.
Not trying to be racist here, but all three suicides were by Asian students. I just find that to be a little odd. I live in Pasadena and have been on CalTech's campus several times - I wouldn't exactly say that the majority of students there are Asian.
I have a pet interest in cuckoo quotes: lines that sound good that get falsely attributed to a famous person. (For example, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678282)

As an experiment, I'm going to say that this sounds like one of those to me. It feels too much like a modern species, not something from the Renaissance. Now I'm going to go check and report back. :)

Edit: here's what I found. Wikiquote lists it as "unsourced". Google Books shows the phrase as appearing in a few dozen recent inspirational and self-help books (Marry Your Baby Daddy, anyone?), but no scholarly or historical ones (http://books.google.com/books?q=%22greater+danger+for+most+o...). Google web search comes up only with reams of those awful junky quotation sites. It's possible that the wording is a modern translation of an authentic quote, but in general, if 5-10 minutes of Googling doesn't come up with an original source for a famous quote by a famous genius, the odds are against it.

It's still a great line.
Wow chromium is making awesome progress. Chrome is going to be my hands down choice for browser on the mac.

Is it just me or does the chrome theme stick out like a sore thumb in aqua?

One of the nice GUI features of chrome on Windows is that it abolishes the useless file pulldown menu giving you more vertical space. That's not possible on the mac.

And the new themes of chrome just seem like an excuse not to get it right the first time.
I played DVDs fine in Xine under SUSE. I think in this case, that he's not doing it right by using VLC.
The Trident missile is truly an amazing piece of kit. The most remarkable thing for me is that would be able to operate with zero external systems (such as GPS), so that in the event of a complete electromagnetic blackout it could still hit its target. It does this by fixing off the stars (http://www.nytimes.com/1982/07/13/science/trident-s-technolo...).

The Royal Navy subs only carry upto 48 warheads, even though they are capable of carrying 192, so I guess that's only 48 major cities from the Uk contingent :o (http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/uk/slbm/vanguard.htm)

One fascinating limitation (read engineering opportunity) of these boats is they way they dispose of waste gas (such as that produced in oxygen generation). It's ejected from the sub, but tends to form into largish bubbles, which when they hit the surface are sometimes detectable by spy satellites - so their location is sometimes compromised. (sorry, can't find a link to back this up - I wonder why..)

I believe the Vanguard class subs (the Royal Navy's Trident bearing subs) can carry ~4 months food supply, so that's how often they have to resupply.
Would you opensource an application like StackOverflow? Answer: Question closed.
Solve Euler problems <http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems>; in Clojure <http://clojure.org/>. Tough stuff, but fun too. :-)