skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It has its ups and downs. But it was engaging enough, socially.

This is one of the biggest cultural differences between Americans and Russians. In the Soviet Union, households in which women also worked arose a lot earlier (1920s), on the back of socialist reform specifically directed to the effect of women's equality. Obviously, certain things had to be done to make this logistically possible.

Meanwhile, Americans, despite their willingness to send their children to school-as-daycare at later ages, are notoriously unwilling to "have the state raise" [their children] at a very young age, and make much of the importance of supervising them prior to school age, in principle, even if they have to resort to expensive and largely useless daycare sometimes.

This approach doesn't prepare the children for the realities of their subsequent abandonment once they reach school age, whatever one thinks of it. In the USSR I remember it was common for 6 or 7 year old children to be latchkey kids, and they were generally deemed self-sufficient and functional, especially when backed by a community in which they certainly knew some neighbours and had somewhere to turn if they needed help. In contrast, the statutes of most US states deem it "child neglect" to leave your child unattended at home until 10 or 12, usually the latter.
> Aug 16, 2009

Inspired by yourworldoftext.appspot.com ?
Git not being centralized helps a lot in the initial-development scenario. Two developers can pull changes from each other without polluting a centralized repository.
People probably shouldn't be up-voting meta discussions.
In order to be original, you have to be, well, original.

Fail.
An article complaining about a single failure mode, which I personally have never experienced, and how that makes all of Linux completely unusable. I have to wonder, if the author is happy with Windows and its gold plated video stack why does he feel the need to try Ubuntu?
After you take out s-expressions and macros, what's left is no more Lisp. What really sets Lisp apart is the ability to easily manipulate code programmatically.
I don't think your father's income has anything to do with how much he would have had to pay out of pocket. And since I understand you object to the government running things, do you have philosophical objections to the USPS delivering your mail? Or receiving Social Security benefits when the time comes?
(These are serious questions, I really would like to know)
Why No “New Einstein”?
YouTube - Armağan - Kaçak
Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold: A review
The page even says that the "First screen is for internal use, not for sale" lol
Ah, but remember that the net present value of an annuity is based on what that annuity truly turns out to be. If there's a point even in ten years where oil has severe scarcity, it will pay off quite well.

But I don't think it's about that. I think that, unlike most countries, the American infrastructure is utterly and completely dependent on oil. It's its lifeblood. In my opinion, it's about concerns for the future and securing a resource that's vital for the survival of the entire nation.
Convention, Convention, Convention ...
That's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof
I like itunes, my main issue to date is that it is godawful slow. Which is why I switched to songbird, which is still pretty slow, but not as slow.
Not really. I used to manage to read fairly successfully in a Tom Horton's once near me during the small hours.
"The universe has a speed limit. And light moves as fast as it is possible to go."

My question has always been, how sure are we? Any room for error?
A comment—complaining about an article that complains about a specific X in Y, and compares it to a better X in Z—suggesting that the poster use Z instead of Y. (I have a theory that this template covers about 10% of IT-related blog post replies by weight.) I have to wonder, haven't you ever used something that's better in almost every way, but worse in one important one? You don't spend time writing a blog post about Y's failures unless you love Y, and want it to get better (or are getting paid by Z, but that's only applicable to very well-known bloggers.)
Garrett Lisi (the E8 guy, aka surferdude) and dare I say Stephen Wolfram (the mathematica guy) like types would fit the bill nicely, if they are ever proven right in their outlandish theories (which remains to be seen).

That's exactly the reason why nobody in the field will take them very seriously, if some outsider would come along with a working theory of the universe and en-passent come up with a GUT that would pass inspection a lot of people would look pretty silly.

I think the chances of that happening are very small, but every now and then one of these guys comes up with something that is not trivial to dispose of.

If there is one thing all great scientific discoveries had in common then it is that when they were first posited a number of people thought 'rubbish'.

That does not mean that all rubbish will eventually be accepted as the new established theory.
If you're going to think about it in terms of social 'cost', you may as well think of it over the span of a person's life. Society has invested a lot of... capitol? ... whatever it is that society invests in these people. University students in particular have been a social burden for most of their lives. But the reason society bears this is that the investment will pay in increased social benefit once they graduate.

So students, at least, shouldn't kill themselves. And society should protect its investment by keeping them from doing it. A cold hearted analysis, but that's the name of the 'social cost' game.
Get your job done faster with pyPdf
500,000 lines isn't a lot of code. The compiler I work on has almost that many lines, but the larger product (IDE) has many millions.
I like Kobe very much. It feels like a very 'international' place downtown, but it's not overly large. Once you leave downtown, things can get very local. It's also also just a hop away from Osaka and two from Kyoto, which makes it a day trip away from a good chunk of Japanese culture.

I'm afraid I can't compare it much with other cities, as I've spent much more time in Kobe than anywhere else, and it's only been a few months so far.
You don't know that the majority of the X drivers for high-performance hardware are closed source and proprietary, and are developed independently of X, at times going in conflicting directions with it (take the NVIDIA proprietary driver), you completely disregard the huge amount of work that's been going into modernizing X and the free software video drivers in the last five years, and demonstrate a disinterest in where the problems actually are and just demand that they be fixed, and top it all with nonsense weasel words such as "Microsoft has shown us how it's done, now all the X world needs to do is follow" (Shown what? Where is the code?) and expect to be taken seriously? Sorry, the standards for what passes as good criticism have surely gone down, but not that much.

This is unmistakable web forum pseudo-technicalism: rant about your pet bug, dress it up with some technical jargon as if you had an idea about what's actually going on under the hood, flat out refuse to get educated on it, "support" it with some other unrelated issue (here, Evolution), add a comparison to $OTHER_OS, and there you have it.
But it's not a single failure mode. Indeed, any time the X server crashes, every open X app is lost.
In the US, I had to wait 1.5 weeks to see an orthopedist when I sprained both my ankles, with an excellent ($550/mo) PPO insurance plan. In a suburb. Not in a state you'd list in the top 15 for population.

It's a damn good thing I was lucky enough to have the opportunities in life that helped me get a job where not going to work for a month was OK. If I'd had a slightly less flexible situation, I would have been totally over the barrel. You cannot walk with two sprained ankles, but it's not considered a temporary disability either.

Cuz, along with universal healthcare, we're missing worker protection laws too.

On that note, you "hear" about people dying while waiting for surgery in Canada, but where's the evidence?
What seems funny to me about these screenshots is that even though they appear they are on a desktop computer, if you look in the bottom corner of one of the screens you can see what appears to be a battery meter(as you would see on a laptop).

But who knows, maybe its just a laptop hooked up to a monitor...
He clearly has no idea what he's talking about, but he does have two points.

1) Resizing a window shouldn't cause a crash - this is true, but very specific to his setup; most users will not experience the behavior he saw here.

2) If X crashes (which it inevitably does from time to time), it should not also kill every app you have going. This one is a huge huge problem.
Thanks for your response, but many things don't compute.

"time running slower for things moving at an appreciable proportion of c" - Time doesn't slow down, perception of time changes from the observers point of view.

Mercury's orbit is easily predicted with newtonian laws, again, perception of it changes due to the strong gravitational effect of the sun on it and its light we use to measure it.

In other words, I really don't accept things like time travel, infinite mass, getting younger if traveling at the speed of light and bullshit like that.

I don't know if they use that stuff to make it interesting to the unwashed masses but it is an insult to our intellect.

Going back to the speed of light as a measure of energy, I take as you say, it is the speed of all electromagnetic radiation, but why related to energy and mass?

And what if there is something faster? say like hypothetical tachyons?
By actually writing it down and tweaking the idea into an oppotunity, doesn't that constitute as action? Is it smart to skip this whole process altogether?
Oh, come on, you're just jealous ;)

I don't know how often this has been done again, the first time it was a pretty good thing though, one of those 'why didn't I think of that' things.

Makes you wonder though, there must be some other immensely viral idea that can make you money in a short time lurking somewhere waiting to be discovered.

It would help if he made it readable though...
Any more details on svn update being especially bad at killing your data forever? We've been using svn for 5.5 years now and I've never personally lost data with any of the available clients. (I can admit that svn revert does irretrievably destroy client-side changes, but that's what the command is designed to do, so...)
How to kill your community
"500,000 lines isn't a lot of code."

in Java. Not to spawn any language wars, but imagine 500,000 "lines" in something like J, FORTH or even Factor.
My view on a "New Kind of Science" (NKS): NKS is not a theory (at least not in the sense physicists used it pre-string theory), it's an idea (with a misleading, non-informative and sensationalist name). It's also not a discovery. Nevertheless, I think that it's a very interesting idea (nobody is saying it's rubbish) and I and many other physicists have, after reading the book been playing around with and talking about related ideas. I also think writing 1000+ pages about it was complete overkill, the relevant scientific result (the Turing-complete CA) could be presented in a 10 page paper while the more general argument in 100 pages.

I personally think S. Wolfram fits the bill in terms of being a fiercely independent thinker and being financially independent. I meant to write that he does not follow through with his ideas, but that would be untrue, as he has spent large amounts of time simulating his CAs and examining their output. So I won't say that, but I will say that he seems to prefer publicity and sensationalism ("New Kind of Science"), ie. short-term success over discourse with scientific peers and coming up with actual physical theories that withstand the test of time. (He has written physics paper when he was young, but not recently).
leave the sink out of this!
Partitioning Your Hard Drive During A Linux Install
It looks like git / bzr / hg have better mechanisms than svn in the case you mention.

Those same mechanisms break just as badly as svn when you need to coordinate 10+ developers. The communication overhead of the developers dwarfs the way they sync files.
I fully agree with the sensationalist impression, he really is a sucker for attention (recognition?).

Also, to name your book 'a new kind of science' takes hubris to a whole new level.

It would have been a lot more classy if he would have simply written up his findings in a 2 or 300 page volume and left it to others to give it its place.

But that's what you get when you don't need an editor because you've already made it.

Still, if you cut all that out you're left with some pretty neat and insightful ideas about cellular automata and how some things could work.
Dvorak has been a professional troll since before it was popular.

Does no one remember his writing 10-15 years ago? I do. It was trollish even then. The whole "Mac continuum" hated him.
Something I want to try; get on the "no fly" list, legally change my name to something completely different (in a very small town, of course), legally get updated ID, and see how long it takes before I am on the "no fly" again.

(My guess is never.)

Incidentally, my credit report thinks my name is "Johnathan Rockway", which is a name I've never used on any credit card, nor one that appears on any ID I have ever possessed. Accurate!
Dude must have cash enough, that's $40K down the tubes right there.
This has happened to me as well and, for lack of a better term, it sucks. Especially when they've executedso much more brilliantly than you could. The way I try to deal with these types of cases is to try my best to not get emotionally attached to the idea until I at least see the opportunity.
Hmm interesting when you try to follow one of the links in the article you get to http://lubos.motl.googlepages.com/crackpot-not-even-wrong.ht...

Sorry but I really can't afford to share readers with that particular person who produces so many untrue statements and who parasites on the work of scientists. I've had huge problems with the people who were being sent from that website to my weblog. I apologize if you're not one of these aggressive and extremely ignorant problem-makers but there's no way to distinguish.
>maybe it just wasn't as hungry, and thus less motivated.

Jerome Klapka Jerome: "People who have tried it, tell me that a clear conscience makes you very happy and contented; but a full stomach does the business quite as well, and is cheaper, and more easily obtained."
Food is important. And he was probably eating with people http://www.amazon.com/Never-Eat-Alone-Secrets-Relationship/d...

In Defence of Food (Michael Pollan) suggests that the cultural labouring over lunch didn't just emerge because it's enjoyable it may actually improve nutrition too.
But threads that point out the intolerance of pun-threads are well-tolerated. I feel like The Collective has saved me time! Or something...

(More interesting is how these things fluctuate. At one point, the "ur gay" comment was around +8, and my "die in a fire, rtard" was pretty close. Now they are both -4.)
The Perfect Desktop - Kubuntu 9.04
It's a simple referrer check, cut & paste to a new window and they work.

Interesting way of making a quality statement about a page linking to one of yours.

Who said that you couldn't strike back at those who link to you, apparently there is a potential cost!
I can't avoid hating everything that is for pure money making and no user value creation. It is also an advice for startups.
But has anyone fixed this in Java yet, or does every large app still consist of thousands of nearly-identical methods?

Things like parentheses and whitespace don't affect the ongoing maintenance of your codebase; a bunch of code that your IDE typed for you does.
> 200,000 of significant whitespace

Significant whitespace does not occupy its own lines in Python.
Compared to, for example Programming Reddit, HN has:

1. Good quality links (less fluff, and good links are often more visible here)
2. Good quality comments.
Consider the (common) case where you modify some files, want to commit them, get the "your tree is out of date, run svn update", run svn update, and then have the svn update merge fail; some files updated, others conflicted.

Once you run svn update, your working tree is gone forever. And often, you can't save your changes until you risk blowing them away. That is Very Bad.

In git, you can't destructively update your working tree (via a merge, anyway) until you have committed it. Once you commit, you can "git pull --rebase", fix the conflicts, and push the resulting tree. This is svn's workflow, except that if you don't like what happens you can just say "git reset --hard HEAD@{0}" and try again later.
Let's not forget that the OP does not reveal what women think, it reveals what women who went to Harvard and live in Manhattan think.
I was one of the many that said to myself "why didn't I think of that" the first time.

Not this time.

I'll give you one original idea to make you instant millionaire on the web.

- Start with a thousand dollars

- Every week, ask the wisdom of crowds for a way to double that purchasing, reselling, investing in anything the majority decides.

- Repeat ten times till you get to a million dollars.

- Keep the crowds amused with your vicissitudes in a daily blog.

- Profit!

Remember the red-paper-clip guy? something like that but the audience decides what to do with the money, and the whole intent is to double it every time.

Show the world we can be millionaires by investing wisely following the wisdom of crowds.

For example, first week buy $200 t-shirts for $5 and resell them for $10.

Second week, buy an old car for $2000 and resell it for $4000.

Those are just stupid examples, the audience should decide wiser.

Imagination is all you need to be a millionaire.

And originality...
I just stick with HTC

You mean WM, but yes, this was a nice feature. Too bad nothing else on the phone was usable. (If you really want to tether, just get a dongle for your computer and save yourself the hassle. I find that Wifi is pretty much everywhere, though.)
He did not have a microwave back then.
I challenge you to execute your idea :)

It's a good one but I can see a pitfall:

You might buy something that you find is unsellable, killing momentum.

A friend of mine - Joyce - had a good idea and put it in to practice, it was called jam-trading.

In the Netherlands the traffic jams are terrible and people end up next to each other, often for long times.

So she devised this game (not without danger to passing motorcycles), take anything from your car and try to trade it with the people next to you for something that you value more.

When the cars move again you get parked next to your 'next victim', rinse & repeat.

They started out with a fairly squishy apple (the food kind, not the digital kind), and managed to trade it all the way up to a notebook and a pretty neat pen over a stretch of about 5 kilometers.

A 1:20 fold increase in value or so.

Not bad for a simple idea...
Very interesting article. I wonder how does it work in the EU. Have to get some legal friend to have a look at it! Perhaps I could have exchanged air tickets with people couple of times already...
No doubt there's still an additional cost, I just don't think it would be high enough to make it more expensive than running an air conditioner, given that you're going to be running the freezer regardless (depending, of course, on how much we're talking about. I'm picturing a window unit vs. a window fan with a baking pan's worth of ice).

Any ideas on how to be more rigorous about thinking this through or running an experiment?
Not more than there's room for error in Newton's laws: Newton's laws are still an excellent framework for physic in most `normal' situations. Anything that dethrones General Relativity will incorporate it as a special case.
I've been using X for about 5 years straight now, before that other versions of it (mostly SGI stuff).

I've had exactly one crash. In all that time. This machine is on 24x7 and on average has 10-15 (large) windows open on two screens (soon to be 4).

X is absolutely rock solid in my experience, but as with all anecdotal evidence that doesn't mean much.

When you start playing around with custom window managers and all kinds of other esoterics I don't doubt that it is possible to crash X (the time I did it it was when I tried to set up an X server across 4 displays on 4 different computers, http://pics.ww.com/v/jacques/projects/screen/dscf1072.jpg.ht... ).

I was pissed off but I was really asking for it.
The most interesting thing to me is that his ostensible basis for rejecting Woit is purely authoritarian: Woit's publication record is weak and the leading physicist Susskind doesn't like him, therefore he must be a crackpot. Seems likely that the real reason for the rejection is that he finds Woit's skepticism regarding contemporary theoretical physics personally threatening.
Right, and every time Microsoft Windows crashes you lose all your applications as well.

Sorry, but Vista does not solve that problem, I don't have any experience with windows 7 so I can't comment on that.

All I know is that even if I do something simple on a windows box it requires a reboot. Which pretty much happens every couple of days when you really work a lot with windows, which will reset the counter but will not count as a 'crash'.
Did anyone else notice this is from 2006? Anyone know if this is still possible? Was it ever possible?

The reason I ask is: http://www.lookingglassnews.org/ does not look like the pinnacle of journalistic integrity. The author of this story certainly sounds intelligent, but all of the conspiracy theory crap on this site makes me wonder.
Why do not lobby for legislation that allows you to drive over a red light? Instead of arguing indirectly against applying that law.
I disagree. Techmeme is better for quick news scans.

And the level of discourse here is better than most places, but the time decay of stories (and comments) leads to quick bursts of discussion near the top, followed by dead silence.
Free e-copy of Robin Hobb's Assassin's Apprentice
Indians are intrinsically good followers and not leaders.
Heh -- Well, it seems to have gotten your first initial and last name right at the very least. Maybe you go by John? Jonathon?

Either way, I enjoyed your idea and your tone. "Accurate!" he says...
Yeah, undop is pretty half-assed, compared to leechblock. If you don't want to be looking at a site, why not block it all together? Simply dimming the screen sounds pretty ineffective. If you want to set up some sort of aversion therapy, tell leechblock to use goatse.cx as its block page. :-)

(If you haven't seen goatse.cx, don't.)
I tried to set up an X server across 4 displays on 4 different computers

Maybe Vista 7 should learn a few things from X...
Yeah that's what i was doing too :). Makes shopping like playing a game.
* Community
* Quality of Comments
While the technology and idea behind Wave is indeed exciting, the implementation of it as a product (in the Dev Preview) is sorely lacking.

It's one of the most buggy and frustrating user experience I've ever forced myself to go through. To be honest, I don't know how they'll pull it all together in six weeks.

Having read all the positive reviews about Wave that don't mention its glaring problems, I wonder if the Reality Distortion Field around Google is worse than it is around Apple.