skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understand and appreciate that you don't find value in their products. That's your call and not anyone else's to make.

But where you're making a mistake is assuming that value in the market is tied to Apple's internal costs of making a product. That an Apple laptop is not a good value, because its price is 30% above the costs to produce it.

That's not a useful definition of value. Value is the utility people get from a product, relative to the cost they incurred in obtaining the product.

Suppose a computer manufacturer produces a real stinking pile of garbage laptop. It's hard to use, the screen flickers, keys break, you name it. But it's half the price of the existing lowest cost product, and they're only making 1% gross margins on it. Is that a good value? If you value your ability to get anything done on it, probably not. What their margin was on it really doesn't matter.

Similarly, many people value the product attributes of an Apple laptop so highly (they see fewer bugs, ease of use, productivity, etc) that the fact that it costs so much more than what they could get elsewhere doesn't translate to a poorer value, because they get so much more out of it. Imagine a professional, for example, who is 10% more productive on a Macbook than a Dell laptop. Their time is worth $100 an hour. Suppose the price difference was $1k. In as little as 100 hours of work -- two weeks' of use -- they begin realizing better value from that MacBook than the Dell.

Now, those numbers are facetious, but the principle stands: it's quite easy for a more costly product with higher margins for the manufacturer to be a better value to the buyer than a less costly product from a manufacturer with lower margins.
Linux Kernel NULL Pointer Vulnerability
I agree, but didn't want to be a complete downer since these guys no doubt worked hard on the app and are emotionally invested. (I'm also a hyper-critical person, so I try to censor myself. My wife would have divorced me already otherwise.)

Maybe this first iteration is really just a starting point for them, and they will rethink their approach? Releasing something is more than most people do. I think some of the praise they're receiving is because people respect their effort and their GENERAL conceptual direction.
It's interesting that a lot of them are up and running until now...
patch is here: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6...

This has been giving us headaches from clients all day so I figured it made sense to post it (as no one else appears to have done so) - seeing as it affects pretty much everything since the 2.4 kernel.

Might be a good moment to update those kernels people :)

(elreg blurb: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/14/critical_linux_bug/)
Firefox extension liberates US court docs from paywall
You can't prepare yourself for all the sizes and shapes created by the user. The minute you give up control of content you will end up with crap that like. If he had used tables at least the layout would have adjusted accordingly. It would not have looked pretty, but it would've been usable.
A good teacher is one who can perceive where the student already is (what skills or interests he or she is bringing into the classroom) and can then lay out paths from that point to whatever the goal of the class is.

A mediocre teacher knows what he or she wants to teach but doesn't make that connection with the individual students. The result is someone who teaches a curriculum, not a person.
Good point on the feature-creep leading to innovation. Maybe it's not all bad then!

But how can I find the one product without all the useless crap while others pay for the mistakes on the road to innovation? These features are still useless.
Judah Schwartz, my physics professor at MIT, used to end each lecture by saying "Comments? Questions? Puzzles?"

Usually there would be dead silence from the class.

And then he would say "I don't believe you." And he waited for someone to ask a question.
I'm waiting for the post: "How I got sued by the RIAA from scratch because I had no experience" . Let's do something that helps artists move away from the RIAA's clutches, and not add more fuel to the fire with things that will just get shut down. TheSixtyOne is a perfect example of how to do it RIGHT when it comes to consumer facing site. (work WITH artists, offer monetization, easy to use,etc.)
The easy way around that is to repurchase stock to hold in the treasury. Returns cash to the investors through a higher stock price and eliminates the tax delta.
Ask Mom if you can come upstairs and use hers.
What exactly is sharepoint anyway? ;-)

A whole roast hog with an apple in it's mouth, served on a framework of enterprise buzzwords with a side order of idealists's tears. ;-)

In case any of you are interested in this area, you can download a pre-installed Sharepoint demo virtual machine from Microsoft here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=67f...

You can see what your competition is in this sector - complexity, limited features, limited browser support... there's a lot you could cut out and a lot you could improve on.
Penn and Teller - TC50 - launching a product
Google Caffeine: What You Need to Know [video]
This has a great deal of potential to make knowledge of the law and an understanding of the way government truly works more widely available.
This article would be just as interesting without the linkbait title.
In fact, that is time travel. In the same way that you travel into the future every day, since what was the present when you woke up in the morning is now the past. In this restricted sense, yes, time travel is possible and proven.

But when people refer to time travel, they generally mean arbitrary travel to nonsequential points in time. Going from 22:00 today to 17:00 yesterday to 10:00 today.

The difference here is between floating down a river with a strong current and being able to slow down or speed up your progress a bit (the restricted sense of "time travel" that you mentioned), and taking a ship out onto the ocean and going where you want (the more typical use of the term "time travel").
Hanging around the hacker dojo and spending a little bit of time at open source world, there are definitely people who think this is true, that all programming and applications are web apps and they're all going to move "into the cloud." I find amusing the lack of acknowledgment that your web app requires an operating system, a web browser, network equipment, etc. to run. Unless all these "just work" and there is no more development left?
Theory != Evidence

"Evidence" is by definition empirical; it's generally described as 'the result of empirical observation' or something substantially similar.
I highly recommend you stop recommending Primer when time travel is brought up. The movie is better viewed not knowing anything about it. It could be a character drama before the weird shit starts going on. By the way, this is an awesome timeline http://neuwanstein.fw.hu/primer_timeline.html
A good teacher betters the student's ability to learn by themselves.

This involves a great many things, and sadly is contrary to the way 90% of teachers - not just the pros - are taught to imply knowledge.

That's it, and it's applicable to every situation, from Kindergarten to a personal mentor. Almost all the other comments here voice preferred methods of achieving that objective, but the objective remains.
TC Article he is responding too: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/13/yc-funded-graffitigeo-f...

Here's the app: http://www.graffitigeo.com/

It's basically (it seems) a text version of this existing service: http://www.geograffiti.com/

I think the claim of "rip off" does have some validity :P
I believe a good teacher is one who adapts their teaching styles to both meet individual student's learning styles as well as expose them to other learning styles in order to broaden their learning abilities. A good teacher tells their students what they are doing and why, so that the student is more involved with the process and sees where the teacher is coming from. A good teacher does not believe that notes are effective for all students, same with daily work, or tests. A good teacher uses pretests to decide what subtopics they need to focus on or skip, as well as to track individual students progress. A good teacher does their best to get students invested in the learning process.
I prefer the theory of the parallel universes over the self-correction of the time.

Most movies go that way too, since otherwise, the plot would be fatalistic (eg: '12 monkeys'). So they aren't really wrong.
Can someone explain why this is better than a real profiler, or something like YSlow?

I'm not criticizing - just trying to figure out what I'm missing.
Fresh Live Lobsters
Fresh Live Lobsters deliverd to your door!
Ah, okay. Most of the stuff I've worked on adds events through a library (eg. jQuery.click(fn)), and there's no reason for that library to use onmouseover etc.
I'm glad to see someone put some thought to what is obvious- that nutritional research (or at least the recommendation that people create from it) are broken.

What is one to do?

"BMI between 20-25"

OK advice, but others have pointed out that BMI is a misleading number.

"only follow nutritional advice if proven to be safe and effective."

Unfortunately the advice that meets that criteria is extremely limited.

"Practice moderation in nutritional matters"

This statement is meaningless, as people will define moderation to fit what they want to do.

"ingest enough vitamins and minerals, especially vitamins B-12 and D"

Good, if vague advice.

Kudos for tearing down modern nutritional research. However, the author seems to end up making the case that there is nothing we should do to improve our diet- that we must sit and wait decades for things to be proven.

If you don't have good enough modern research one idea is to look to history, to examine traditions and see if there is value in them. Here is one example of someone doing that.
http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library/price/pricetoc.html
The best teachers teach humility toward the subject matter.

For technology in particular, there is always so much more to learn that by not having humility there is no incentive to want to learn, which is arguably the strongest point to make. Teaching is not one-way. Students have to want to learn just as much as teachers want to teach.
I'm interested too if its better or worse... I just made it to be browser/platform agnostic.
TypePad Activity for iPhone, Pre, and Android Phones
Like.com team shuts down visual search site Riya
Punk Radio
DumpServer.co.uk Radio is a online punk radio station which pwns the rest!
I think his point is that this is like having a debate about how hyperspace works in Star Wars, or how phasers work in Star Trek. The tech is a plot device best assumed to be far outside the reach of today's science.

Part of that assumption is that the current version of physics we understand is incomplete and at worst wrong. There is little use quoting a source proven wrong within the world of the story.

Besides, I came from the future to write this comment, so the article is prima facie wrong.
Government contractors are vastly, vastly different from most private enterprises.
My comment above was code for "truly a dumb post". Geez.
It's probably hard to sum this up in any law, but what you basically want is for products and services to do exactly what they seem to be designed for, with absolutely no other effects. At the very least, a product with "side effects" wastes time, because you're dealing with details that you shouldn't have to care about. In the worst case, of course, the side effects cause actual harm.

And this isn't limited to PCs; for instance, I'm really annoyed when my gas pump throws up a prompt "do you want a car wash?". Why no, actually; since car washes have absolutely nothing to do with gas pumps, you can safely assume that if I'd wanted a car wash, I would have gone through other channels to request one.
Fantastic. Doesn't have all features of PS, but it is way easier to use.
This is indeed what will happen, you will arrive at Earth finding the planet and the people much older than yourself. (It can be by years or by millions of years, depending on speed and duration of travel.)

If you wish to call that time travel, you may. I guess people just reserve the term "time travel" for travel backwards in time, since that is so much cooler.
I had concluded just the opposite.
Reading your comment. I can consider myself lucky to have it. Have seen Cosmos two times.

Sagan was a wonderful man!
>> "then we can abandon the doomed effort to somehow cobble together huge, powerful apps like Maya and Photoshop out of a mess of JavaScript and XML."

Or, you know, we could develop better tools for the web.

I'm amazed that this discussion always takes the stance that we're stuck with what we're using for web development now, as if nobody could possibly develop better languages and tools for web use.
Even better - Design stolen in Germany:
http://gizmodo.com/343641/1960s-braun-products-hold-the-secr...
I think it is interesting how simplicity is a benchmark for the very best in so many different fields.

Science: Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein. (actually an abbreviated version of a longer quote - go figure)

Writing: Brevity is the soul of wit. - Shakespeare

Mathematics: Consider Euclid's proof of the infinitude of primes.

Architecture: Consider Frank Lloyd Wright's work over his whole career going from relative complexity (prairie houses) to relative simplicity (Guggenheim Museum). Or the work of one of my favorite architects, I. M. Pei.

Comments on web pages: ... I think you get the idea ...
I certainly don't want to judge based on a first cut, but I don't see any of the fundamental problems solved. AR has been around a long time, and has never been as everyday popular as first impressions have suggested. Show me usability improvements, a compelling subject matter, or at least a superior implementation given the hardware limitations. I see none of that here, just another echo of flashy AR demos (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=670645). To me, this is the result of web programmers hearing about augmented reality for the first time, or realizing that the iPhone is the first everyday computing device capable of AR, and hacking something together over the course of a couple months.
Well, there are certainly 2 schools of thought; the "there should only be one way to do it" school of thought and TIMTOWDI.

I don't think you should write off lisp just because it's too flexible. If anything, that makes it much more interesting to learn - there are lots of ways to do things. Clojure currently says there should be one obvious way to do it; so maybe you should check that out.

Idiomatic Clojure wouldn't really embrace an object system anyways since it's meant to be pragmatically functional.
The title might be linkbait-y but I thought/hoped it would immediately counter the assumptions of some readers that conspiracy theorists are atypical kooks.
RockMelt. Is it Just a Facebook Browser, Or Will It Break The Mold?
That's a binding alright. But it's not easily installable: one has to install the scrypt library manually. I'm not sure how to do that because last time I checked scrypt is a program. Scrypt is also not packaged by Debian at this time. All in all, I think it's not the right time to use scrypt yet - at least not until there are easily installable libraries.
Mine (in the US) was filled with noise. (never got over 26k using a 56k modem) I still had to pay per minute for local calls, there is all kinds of crazy fees and extra charges and I barely ever use it. I'm way too far for DSL and forget fiber or anything else wired.

I'm not much of a talker, nor liked to be tied to a device, but when the GF wanted a cell phone, it was a no brainer to add another line for $10 a month and ditch the landline. (Not to mention the landline company is in pretty big trouble http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:FRP )
Truely confusing :-D but excellent movie!! :-P Very cleverly done.
Did you actually read the article? Beyond the fact that the aforementioned line is obviously tongue-in-cheek, the author has seemingly implemented an extremely powerful new object system that isn't anything like a rehash of what was there before.

In a truly powerful language you're not straining against your bonds to get profoundly cool things to work. Sure, sometimes that means code evolves into something even a mother couldn't love. But that fact in no way establishes a basis for arguing that somehow languages should be more restrictive to protect people from bad habits.

Bad coding is a universal solvent: you can't make your language into a bottle to hold it.
features aren't everything. I'd prefer to buy a better designed tool that does less then a poorly designed tool that does more.
This is an interesting question. Great teachers seems to be universally great across almost all students. So finding what makes them great and spotting it early (and eventually teaching it) would be great for the society.

I really enjoyed the bill gates Ted talk where he talks about this topic and (remember?) malaria.

http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_unplugged.html
Honestly, I'm pleased to hear it. Nobody likes it when Microsoft (or any company) tells people how they ought to run their computer, or doesn't live up to its own obligations. I don't see why so many developers think it would be okay if Microsoft actively forced users to upgrade, regardless of what the developers themselves want.
Building and Monitoring the Department of Energy 100 gig network
When basic things are hard, you have fun challenges addressing basic things. When basic things are easy, you are free to do more interesting things at a higher level. Web apps are easy. Making interesting web apps that do really cool things and solve serious problems - its as hard as any kind of app.

Your problem is that you're focusing on the same challenges and finding them easy, instead of thinking about what new things this simplicity enables. Step up a level, use the higher level tools to build better things - and you'll be challenged again. And you'll make better things.
If you could travel back in time (not saying anything about forward), would we not have seen evidence of it by now? If you can travel back to a different "time stream" of sorts, then I'd argue its not really the same "time", but rather another one that happens to mirror the one you intended to travel back to (except that you're there when you shouldn't be and any changes you make).
Whenever I see arguments like this it makes me wonder if the author just doesn't like the laws of economics as we understand them and then proceeds to suggest that we should disregard them because they're inconvenient. For now there is a lot of scarcity and until that changes we're bound to our fate that we have to work hard to build a future for ourselves, our families, and our community. We've tried printing a lot of money to build prosperity to give us a short cut and now we're paying the price for that. We've also tried centralized planning on a massive scale (e.g. in the Soviet Union) and that didn't end well either. It seems like we need to get over the fact that we all need to work hard.

The notion that the market isn't reflecting our values is silly it seems to be the only reflection of our values. The title of this article is correct in that economics is not a science on the level of physics or chemistry but it's not exactly something you can just disregard entirely either.
What you've witnessed is merely an appeared acceleration of time, but you didn't "leap" through time, in the traditional time-travel sense.

Technically, we're all traveling through time. In your case, you would simply be moving a little faster.
I'm too tired to explain it here, but I like the explanation of time travel in the book Cowl: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowl_(novel)
The financial arithmetic of Woodstock: peace, love and profits
And other people to work 60h+ a week for Chinese minimum wage (a dollar a day).
The United States is not the nation of small businesses
That's fine, but even the ability to link one distinct user to your behaviour on the site may be valuable data for the site.
I fail to understand how time can slow. So way beyond me as an HS grad.

If two people program 60 lines of code per hour, one does so in a spaceship traveling nearly the speed of light and one does so on earth... after 1 year/365 days/8760 hrs they make a report on their progress and they don't have the same results? If a watch ticks every second, the faster you go the slower it ticks? Why? How?

Will people be buying a 2100 model Bugatti, hiring a driver, and working in the passenger seat to be more productive?
Thank you for posting this again, fleaflicker. I have not seen it before. It's now on my bulletin board. I have a feeling it's going to make a big difference.
It's an article about how representation, behavior, and taxonomy are distinct concepts that can be handled separately, despite the fact that object-oriented languages tend to confuse them.

I don't think "confuse" is the right word. A class-based object system is not an affirmation that behavior and taxonomy are the same thing, just as a hammer is not an affirmation against the existence of screws.
"...with a set of underlying assumptions that have little to do with anything resembling genetics, neurology, evolution, or natural systems."

There are some fascinating studies that have come out in the past few years demonstrating that many of our economic intuitions and biases as humans actually have an evolutionary basis--basically, that the same behavior can be reliably elicited from chimps, birds, etc. Another thing that comes to mind is Tversky & Kanheman's work on prospect theory, which showed that humans are irrational in very predictable ways. Anyways, my point is that the essay's main argument, which is that the laws of economics are not universal or immutable, is only true in a limited sense. There is no universal truth about economics, but as long as it's us humans who are doing the creating and spending of wealth, we're going to continue to act according to some very deep-seated principles. It's these patterns of behavior that have resulted in markets, selfishness, and all the rest. So things are going to continue to look very much the same. It's sort of like the way a few axioms can give rise to an entire geometry.
The Network's Role in Cloud Computing
Disclaimer: I work for the company that develops the grid technology Digsby's using, so I suppose I have some bias.

I think Digsby has recognized user's feelings on this issue and their latest update addresses these feelings directly. The new version makes our grid technology apparent to the user. I think the fact they addressed the issue head-on counts for something.

I also feel that it is important for "free" software to find a revenue stream. While there are several examples of truly free software being sustainable, there should also be a place for alternative revenue streams for companies that want to make software available to users at no direct cost.

Yes, users need to know what's going on. This is uber-important. But assuming they do, alternative revenue streams are a good thing for everyone, IMO.
See here also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=763039
You feel that the linkbait title somehow improves the article?
Varian's point is that you get diminishing returns after a certain point with more data. Norvig was writing in what, 2004, and I think he was referring to the period around 2002-03. Google's search traffic back then was many times smaller than it is now, and significantly smaller than Bing is today. And yet there was plenty of data to come up with new algorithms back then...
Evidence that people with Asperger syndrome lack a theory of mind.
Yea, I'm having trouble figuring out what's going on in this article too, maybe I'm slow or something. Are they going to webcast this or do I have to show up in Virginia?
starts at 8:06 (before that it's about malaria)