skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Being heavy can also give you the illusion of being "solidly built"
No, you can still telnet. It depends on how a block is done. If it's done at the application layer, you would still get an initial connection. Open up firebug and hit the URL. Try to see what if any status errors you're getting.
It's "amazingly unique" in what way? Is it as good as WP?
This is all great advice - thanks. Totally agree on the end-user-value-based pricing. Leap-frogging is certainly a strategy that could work since the design element of the smaller sites is good and we've a couple of e-commerce sites in the pipeline (for the smaller clients)
Writing - Top 7 Tips to Help You to Write More
And a real keyboard.
Strong upvote on that book list. If you want to learn from scratch, start with the "Programming Collective Intelligence" book, then move to "Collective intelligence in action", they're both quite good.

If you've covered and understand the material in both, you're probably ready to consider moving to some of the more academic texts.
And they already have a bazillion really awesome mobile phones too. The iPhone is nice, but it is actually behind many phones in Asia...
Have you installed the recently posted greasemonkey script:

http://github.com/brainkarma/hnreputation/tree/master

This may have triggered an automated block... It seems like a rather abusive script.
python and pygame can also be used for symbian, linux, windows, etc etc. Nokia love python :)
Capitalism is a great idea on paper, but completely ignores the realities of human behavior. It will never work, because people are not mindless drones. Why would anyone chose to receive "money" in exchange for their hard work? Why would anyone accept that people who prepare food and care for children should receive far less of what society creates (by being paid less "money") than people who organise other people into meeting other people who then build a rival to twitter?

Worker's cooperatives are a sensible system for organising labour. Notable in the UK are John Lewis (not quite a co-operative I think, but owned by its workers) which is doing surprisingly well ATM and the co-operative bank which survived the credit crunch with nary a whimper.

The pressure to sell out will always be there though, and given the essential fact that capital is winning, it seems unlikely labour can ever overtake. It is also hindered by the totally discredited communist movement and the fact it is deeply counter-cultural, e.g. against the protestant work ethic.

Also, the article you linked makes a fairly typical mistake of equating regulation, provision of public goods, and provision of merit goods with socialism, when really governments can do all of the above and still be deeply capitalist.

Also, in reply to "Only one system of government and economic theory has come close to delivering on the promise Socialism makes: the Republic and Free Market Capitalism found in the USA." Hey from Europe!
http://senseis.xmp.net/?Heavy

The meaning isn't exactly "important", more like "unwieldy". (Although I can't see how unimportant stones could ever be labeled heavy.)
WTF is Traction? A 6-Step Relationship Guide to VC
This is always a factor in people's comparison of iphone vs. palm pre.
I think you misunderstand my argument. I definitely agree with you about the importance of understanding your market. I'm just saying that YC does not choose teams this way. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that its hard to figure out if someone has validated knowledge about anything in a 5 minute interview, especially when you're trying to discuss a market that you likely do not understand personally.

YC's perspective seems to be that "launch early and often" combined with smart analytical teams will lead to successful companies. This seems reasonable enough, but does not always work.
Al3x’s Rules for Computing Happiness
AT&T just brought the internet into my new business. The default router they use has wireless which they left turned on with just WPA protection despite it having an option for WPA2. There will be WPA systems aplenty for some time.

(I turned the wireless off and blew open the firewalls. I only want packets to come and go through their router. I'll do the rest with systems I trust.)
My point is that I feel the things that C illustrates and the style of programming it enforces are not that important to learn if you are just starting to program. If you are approaching it from an academic math/CS standpoint, you'd be better off teaching something much simpler like Scheme, and if you're approaching it from a building-cool-stuff sort of hands-on standpoint, I suggest you would be better off teaching Python, Ruby, or one of many other languages with less drudge work (a lot of syntax cruft, manual memory allocation, not very abstract) to do than C.

There may be value to learning C, but I think it's not a good return on investment of your time until you understand many other foundational ideas about programming and CS.
Over the past few months, I’ve gone from some optimism that we’ll be able to solve the environmental and climatic problems the world faces to complete pessimism.

Even if everyone on the planet were on board with the fact that climate change is real, and it will be disastrous, that soil depletion is happening and is effectively irreversible, it’d still be a hard slog to change it before mass death and possible human extinction occur.

But given that half or more of the planet doesn’t believe it, or doesn’t care, then there is just no chance at all.

So, what to do? Me, I’m going to selfishly enjoy the good times that are left, and support activities like establishing seed banks and archives of humanity’s achievements (because we have done some amazing things) in case there is any resurgence of human life or other intelligent life in the future.

But the hope of humanity even beginning to turn the tide against what’s coming? Evidence suggests it’ll be impossible. There’s too many us -- far, far too many of us -- and not enough who care about what’s happening, or even believe it.

What’s next is a fait accompli.
Biggest additions I see here are the additional memory, cellular connectivity, and rear facing camera. The limited memory made multimedia application development a challenge on the N810, and the front facing camera was rather useless for photo taking. Now this will truly be a use-anywhere, do-anything mobile computing platform. Looking forward to developing on it.

Battery life was always a problem on the N810 with constant connectivity. We'll see how it holds up on the N900.
this != Hacker News && this.site != reddit
When it comes to pedagogy, the sigils and syntax of Ruby have always bothered me. The author notes the girls having trouble with dark red versus darkred, or getting the hash syntax right. I imagine a number of them wondered why "center" and "xx-large" went inside quotation marks, while saddlebrown did not. Furthermore, special string values like "center" and "xx-large" somewhat undermine the teacher's assertion that quotations demarcate "a sort of free zone for text."

Are there better languages or tools for this task? Has anyone here tried to teach programming to non-programmers using a visual language like Scratch or a simpler language like Scheme or Basic? How did it go? Shoes is an incredible platform, I just wish the underlying language had a more immediately comprehensible syntax. (PLT-Shoes, anyone?)
May be fun to play with, but rather limited, as tools based on natural language tend to be.

For more flexible diagram work try the Artist-mode/ditaa combination (http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/ArtistMode, http://ditaa.sourceforge.net)

Or course once you get really serious you'd use Graphviz http://www.graphviz.org

Diagrams in text = version controlled = win!
Yay native ISO burner! Also, the Windows Explorer built-in .zip file manager isn't freaking slow anymore (though 7-zip still puts it to shame with speed and compression ratios).
Self-Discipline Outdoes IQ in Predicting Academic Performance of Adolescents
This is a marketing post. There is no useful information here.
You joke, but... my work laptop (Dell D630) has some low-end intel video card, and it can't even drive dual monitors. The redraw when I switch between workspaces -- which I do a lot, especially when on the built-in screen -- is painful :(
The only thing I see as genuinely innovative their is the "problem solver" taking screencaps for every mouse click then creating a webpage and allowing commentary to be added. Seems like a nice little utility app - I'd like to see that in ksnapshot.

The other things, MP3 preview, recently used lists (now with added marketing-ese), window placement, .. hardly revolutionary.

They added a seamless VM to ease upgrade from XP, nice one (but not really innovation, I can have my virtualbox run seamlessly (but prefer it windowed)).

Any reasons there to upgrade from Vista or XP? I didn't notice one.
This is actually closer to the reverse of visual programming -- we create diagrams by providing their textual representation. I really like the idea. Every time I need to deal with some UML or diagram application I have an impression that generating diagrams from skeleton source code would be easier than the other way round. Tools like the built-in Visual Studio modeler, which updates the diagrams in real time, are also a step in good direction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_removed_in_Windows_7
Aren't BMWs German? And no one in China buys video games. They all play online versions. We could stop selling them Starbucks, McDonald's and Coke I guess.
Nobody should be forced to sell regardless of if they need to use it themselves or not.
:D

Due to the site's design, which leans heavily on its font, I mainly picked that based on numbers suggesting a lot of Linux users didn't have Helvetica installed. So I tried to pick the most popular Helvetica-like font that usage numbers suggested they would actually have.

And I still put it in front of Verdana. :)
Not impossible. Not sure how much you'd gain from it, but I certainly wouldn't complain :-P
The real power of UML is harnessed when the model actually generates the code. When that's a part of the process, then the model IS the code, and the model also becomes documentation that's guaranteed to be accurate up-to-date.

This also gives you the great benefit of mandating a comprehensive design phase. Once a model is complete (whatever that means in a given project) and reviewed, the rest of the coding is often trivial.

I also find that the mere act of learning UML is a tremendous education in architecture, even for developers who are naturally good architects.
Presumably they don't want to add bloat by allowing more than one compression type, sticking in a free tar.bz2 compression routine would break the bank too I expect.</thinlyveiledsarcasm>
The "more or less" is the important part here :-D
Apple's Official iPhone 3G Unlock
Ah, the spherical cow theory of human psychology. I believe they call that "Theory Epsilon".

Are you going to try to convince us that (e.g.) Steve Wozniak was lazy? Or are you going to try to convince us that the still-childless Mr. Wozniak drove himself furiously to invent the Apple I and II as part of a strategy to improve his procreative success?

Evolutionary psych is a field that has useful things to say, but only to the extent that it avoids being the 21st-century version of cocktail-party Freudianism. ("Of course higher mathematics is about sex! Of course classical music is about sex! Of course your relationship to your mother is about sex! Of course that hat is about sex! Everything is about sex!")
Yep, because they care about bloat.
This is a good case for the embodied mind.

[Those] who study the embodied mind believe that the nature of the human mind is largely determined by the form of the human body. They argue that all aspects of cognition, such as ideas, thoughts, concepts and categories are shaped by aspects of the body. These aspects include the perceptual system, the intuitions that underlie the ability to move, activities and interactions with our environment and the naive understanding of the world that is built into the body and the brain. (from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition)
Venom energy drink buying up bloggers' opinions of itself
"slave wages" is not exactly correct. If a chinese worker from the south of china goes to north china to work for a couple years making shower curtains, they return home and pay cash for a house.

What you consider slave wages is a lot of money to them. If you went there and did the work, you'd consider it slave wages, but they consider it very good money.
I find the design quite unique, at least for a web app. The widgets are definitely inspired by the Mac OS X widgets - just look at radio buttons.
The Best Books Never Written
meta-comparison website ftw!
It isn't just the paranoia.

How do you interpret this:

I was kind of hoping I could hand the blog over to someone else, who could release their indentity and really not worry about it. Plus, it would get some pressure off of me.

...want to place bets about the source of that pressure and what it consists of?
artist-mode to create maybe, but then how do you edit? Concepts such as "make this box bigger" or even "move this box over here" get kind of difficult when it's all just pixels or all just ascii chars.

Graphviz is pretty cool though. But saying that I tend to have to spend too much time tweaking it just so that all the labels don't overlap.
Private Capital Structures, Part 2
China is assembling most of those hi-tech gadgets, so its move is clear to encourage export of its goods rather than its minerals. Very smart move.
Would be great if you could export as Graphviz dot files (which it looks like it's using behind the scenes). That way it would be useful sketching out the basics but you wouldn't have to throw all that away once you needed more features.
Correction...atheism redditors go insane. The fact is r/atheism specifically is full of obnoxious hateful people with which the general reddit community disagrees on many things.
Here's something that I've always been confused about regarding P vs NP: It seems like what researchers are looking for is not necessarily an answer yes or no, but really a transform that would convert NP problems into P ones. I have a background in electrical engineering, where it is common to use Laplace and Fourier transforms to convert differential equations in the time domain to polynomial equations in the frequency domain, so I see the P vs NP issue to be somewhat analogous to that. Am I understanding the issue, or completely off?
I guess it doesn't matter that whatever weird font they're using is completely unreadable on Windows.
So you read Romeo and Juliet after quite a lot of studies in English (since the first grade).
No surprise at all. I'm reminded of the famous marshmallow test: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_...

The executive summary is that children's ability to delay gratification at age 4 was one of the best predictors of future academic success decades later.
If you have a bad IP address, why not disconnect and reconnect? On many connections that should give you a new address (unless you've got a static address).
This Just In: College Will Make You an Atheist
Reverse Aging: Easier Than You Think
To some extent everyone's beliefs are the result of what could, for some value of the word, be called "training". But that includes yours.
Americans Rate Government (1st), Self-Employment (2nd) as Top Job Choices
I wrote this article, and found these strategies to work for me.

http://procnew.com/10-cheap-ways-to-get-clients-for-freelanc...
I think we need an "X number of things every other popular operating system does that Windows doesn't" article. To start off:

* Multiple users on the same machine at the same time
* Software repositories
* Useful software pre-installed (windows doesn't have IM, office tools, or photo editing software)
* Advanced filesystems available
Here's my understanding of the Maccone paper. Edit: I only skimmed it.

Super-condensed QM intro:
In the formalism of quantum mechanics, the dynamics of physical processes are represented by unitary operators. If Y(0) is the state of the system at t=0, then the dynamics (change, movement) of the system is represented by a unitary operator U(t), such that the state of the system at time t is Y(t)=U(t)Y(0). The technical term unitary roughly means that it is time-reversible: there exists the inverse of U(t) meaning that the inverse physical process can also occur (the hidden assumption is that there is a 1-1 correspondence between operators in the formalism and actual physical processes). The problem is, if everything is time-reversible, why don't we see glasses unbreaking or gas that came in to fill the room through a little hole finding its way out again?

Measurements in QM are not unitary. If you measure something, you can't undo it. Measurements are in this sense an "add-on" to QM.

The following argument probably pre-dates the Maccone paper:
Take a room which contains a quantum system Q and an observer O. The observer makes measurements on Q, which are not unitary, so he sees time irreversible processes. Now take a superobserver O', who is outside the room. To him, the room (Q and O together) make up a quantum mechanical system Q', which may be described in a unitary way. This means that the superobserver O' can argue that even though the observer O only sees time irreversible processes, the inverse process can in fact occur (glass unbreaking), but they reverse the observer O itself (who is part of Q'), meaning that he "forgets" what he measured, his ink "disappears" from his notebook, and so on.

Maccone's contribution seems to be that he identifies O measuring Q with O and Q becoming quantum entangled and provides some formalism.

Substitute "time-irreversible" for "entropy increasing" for trendiness (eg. to pick up girls in a bar =)).
Looks fine to me on Vista. It is just Georgia. Unless you have Fertigo installed.
DOOM! GLOOOOOOM!

"Lucky for me I'd been off-planet on vacation at the time of the war. There wasn't much to do. All the bowling alleys had been wrecked, so I spent most of my time looking for beer. One day I was out looking for a nice place to build a city for my children when I spotted a mutant in the forbidden zone. I landed my vehicle to pursue and destroy this genetic freak before he could warn other mutants in the underground caves."

This sort of article seems to be what I'd call "reddit bait" in that it brings out these sorts of fruitless discussions.
Works fine here. Firefox 3, XP.
Interesting video of how their design evolved: http://www.taptaptap.com/blog/convert-design-evolution/
> simpler language like Scheme

I really think Scheme is only simpler if you have a really atypical kind of mind.
Downturn Squeezes Liberal Arts
The paper is available here [pdf]:

http://www.igroup.org/schubert/papers/jostmann_lakens_schube...

The experiment design has an interesting flaw: the values that the users assigned to the questions were indicated by marking a position on a line, not by writing out a number.

In other words, they might have simply measured where people who don't give a shit about answering questions in a stupid survey make arbitrary line markings on a sheet of paper when having to struggle a bit to hold up a heavy clipboard, versus when easily holding a light one.
something light that can easily be transported everywhere for a quick surf session

That's called an iPhone. (Or the alternative smartphone of your choice.)

Steve Jobs predicted three years ago that nobody would want a netbook if they had a pocket-sized object that was actually usable for web surfing. And this would seem to be evidence that he was right. [1]

Today, the "netbook" market has a higher percentage of people looking for low prices and laptop-style features, rather than people looking for extreme portability. So as netbook manufacturers figure out how to deliver larger, more laptop-like machines at similar rock-bottom prices, the "netbooks" creep up in size.

--

[1] Of course, the best way to predict the future is to invent it.
I could be misinterpreting, but I don't think this is an accurate characterization of what a lisp-2 does. Function and value namespaces are separate in CL because functions and values are of different types; also there's the struct, class, etc namespaces.

But still in Scheme the aesthetic is to put values of different types in the same namespace -- unless the values don't actually exist at runtime, which is the case with syntactic R6RS records, for example. But you'll still see a conflict at compile time if you attempt to use a name as a record type, then reference it as a free variable -- iirc, anyway.
Can you tether with other Nokia devices?
A lot of extra thought that goes into high-end cars. I remember reading an article about how the sound of the door shutting is carefully tweaked to make it feel substantial and expensive.

Edit: Found this: http://soundinthemachine.org/2009/01/21/the-swaying-car-door...

Few things sound like they actually do. The sounds made by technology are more a story about what it should sound like than what it actually does.

Because drivers don’t get the sensation of a “real” car in a hybrid electric car, speakers are now being placed in the cab to play synthetic engine noise for the driver. And, because it’s synthetic, the noise piped into a Prius can be made to sound like a Lamborghini.
Well, new copies are available from Amazon in the US, etc. as well, it's just a bit pricey because it was last printed in 1994. (There's not a newer UK edition.)
("is covers"? Oops. Missed the edit window.)

As an aside: There is a really good section on Prolog in Chapter 7 (Logic Programming) in CTM. Peter Van Roy is quite familiar with Prolog (including several published articles about efficient implementation), and he includes a good summary of its strengths and weaknesses. The chapter on amb/backtracking in SICP doesn't really do Prolog justice, IMHO.
But it won't let you mount an ISO to view files inside, or create an ISO so you still need the addin tools
Something can't be "quite unique". It's unique or it isn't.
I've wondered about why we think dense objects are valuable and whether this is a large contributor to gold's historical use as money.
Actual development in Scheme is a bit mind-bending, but sexps are wonderfully simple.

(fn arg1 arg2 ... argn)

Add quoting, and you're pretty much done explaining the language's syntax.

What sort of facilities can you build on top of that foundation to create an easy, accessible learning environment like Shoes?
I'm learning that launch early isn't enough. I'd even go so far as to say I think launch early is the wrong approach. You should try to ruthlessly prove that your product/customer hypothesis is wrong before even touching code. I have been amazed lately at how much time & pain you can save by "talking early" instead of "launching early".

As a technologist who has wasted years of time and hundreds of thousands of my own $ on launching early (multiple times) rather than talking early I am speaking from experience here as well :)
I've never seen it other than seeing the company's name that was trying to sell me wifi access (i.e. "T-Mobile" while in Starbucks a few years ago).

I would think that you couldn't switch the network name ever if you wanted traction though. (1) If you switch the network name on most routers, it kicks everyone off and forces them to connect to the new server. (2) If you want someone to be able to find you again, how do they know that you are really "Bobby's Place" (the name of the advertister) or "Booby's Place" (the name of Bobby's house)? I don't know if the last example translated well but the idea is that without the same name, there is no name/brand recognition...