skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd be more interested in looking at the overall income of businesses under 500 people compared across countries. According to the US Census Beaureau that category of employers plus all nonemployer firms account for about 42.19% of all annual receipts. What's it like for other countries?
Tr.im's Brief Demise and the Privacy Implications of the Bit.ly Monopoly
Clickable: http://adhocracy.cc
We should hook up politicians to MRI during debates to see which one is bullshitting.
Yi is more of a Vim/Emacs hybrid. It's supposed to take the good from both, and hopefully come out with something nice.

From the little I used it, the frontends are supposed to be transparent replacements for Vim/Emacs. It is, however, a work in progress.
Reading this article I wondered why it is published in UK by an American economist and what is the point of publishing such an article. If this academic economist lived a little bit in Europe he should know better.

I made some research. The bottom line - an American economist supporting Hugo Chávez.

Weisbrot has been cited as the architect of the Bank of the South.

The Bank of the South (Spanish: Banco del Sur, Portuguese: Banco do Sul); or BancoSur is a monetary fund and lending organization first proposed by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

Some comments on the artice:
"...being the only "no-vacation nation"..."
I have been working in West Germany for 4 years and can tell - yes indeed Germans have up to 12 weeks in paid vacation. The question is who is paying for this? You can look at the taxes Germans pay and understand the German government is subsidizing it. In Germany grocery stores, etc. still close at 18:00 PM - the debate is still going on to remove this or not. Most probably not - because of the unions.

"...we have a broken healthcare system that costs about twice as much per capita as that of our peer nations and delivers worse outcomes..."

I agree here in US healthcare payment via insurance is not the best solution. From other side in Germany (I know Germany best) the government is subsidizing it. Guess who is paying this?

"...the French could not afford their welfare state..."
Again - who is paying the bills. Somebody has to pay the bills.

"...half as much energy per capita as the US does. A big part of this difference is because Europeans, in recent decades, have taken much more of their productivity gains in the form of increased leisure time..."

Increased leisure time? So what is the point?

"...We estimated that the US would consume about 20% less energy if it had the work hours of the EU-15. This would have a significant impact on world carbon emissions..."

Carbon emissions - this was invented by Europeans academics to get more grants for research, then supported from interested leisure oriented parties as a way to extract money from big businesses - e.g. who has the money.
I don't think I am discounting how much of a difference it makes. My point is simply that without the 1 million documents Malamud handed over, the tool would be largely useless for many months if not years. What Recap does is make Malamud's documents accessible to lawyers (they are presently stuck in massive tar files at bulk.resource.org), and the combined efforts of Malamud and the Recap people, nicely complement each other.
This is the time travel I like to think about: Suppose we actually are simulated ancestors of an advanced civilization. Then time travel can take all sorts of interesting forms.

For example, suppose our simulation is run sequentially. Then someone traveling back in time would travel back to an earlier state in the simulation that is already out of "RAM" and stored. This agent is "dead", the simulator does not bother to re-simulate the past just for them, they just disappear.

Suppose instead the simulator is more flexible; then there's no reason they couldn't "fork" the timeline and let the gal do whatever she felt like and change the past going forward on their own. Since this would take vast computational resources, it would only be worth doing if you changed something big so maybe time travel wouldn't work unless your plans were grand enough.

This also resolves the grandfather paradox; your grandpa is dead, you are never born in this timeline, but your simulated agent is just fine since it was copied from a different code base. You live out your life, reproduce, share technology, do whatever you want to do and life goes forward normally. In fact, it'd be likely they wouldn't bother simulating the whole world but just pull a Truman Show kind of thing and only propagate the changes, and copy from old data elsewhere.

I'm sure there are even more interesting kinds of time-travel you could come up with given a simulated universe. It actually could be fun to write some sci fi short stories with this in the background, unexplained.
New Born Bhuvan vs The Mighty Google | Modern-Gadgets.Com
There are a lot of services that do some variant of geotagging. We've even funded one before (Flagr, in 2006). This is one of those domains where winning is a matter of getting the details right; the general idea has been around forever.

I'm guessing what the OP is responding to is the similarity between the names. But that was not intentional.
I don't believe you are making genuine, thoughtful statements here.

Apple has made real, substantive progress in design. There was nothing like the iPhone when it was brought to market. Nothing even similar.

Their aluminum notebooks use a manufacturing process that has never been used in notebook construction before, and the result is a product that feels more solid even than my Thinkpad.

Their original iPods brought a simplicity of interaction (the touch scroll wheel) that had never been done before.

You may find the prices they charge for their products, or elements of their business conduct, to be distasteful. That's fine, and they are valid points. But to argue that people buy iPods because they are 'brainwashed,' or are 'zombies' blindly following the brand, or that it's a 'cult not a company' is so thoughtless that it makes one believe that you are not prepared to engage in reasoned discourse because flippant comments are easier.
I don't know the GraffitiGeo guys, but I really doubt they "stole" the name. I think we're seeing convergent evolution at work here - it's a logical combination of words to describe "leaving digital marks on the real world".
When these discussions come up, focus drifts towards the "all apps should be browser apps" contention. That's silly, but it's true that more and more apps can benefit from networked components. Would I want to run photoshop in my browser? Hell no, not for a few tech generations. But, would I like photoshop to automagically backup my assets and edit history onto some highly-available, redundantly stored file server? Defintely.
Book Review: Release It - Get an operations perspective on your code
Jeff failed to point out the most absurd aspect of the blog post he quotes: balking at new technologies because they make life easier. Isn't that the entire point of technology? How can you be in a tech field and maintain that attitude?

I think that Braude feeds his ego by assuring himself that his ability to program a computer must prove that he's smarter than everyone else. Now that programming has become easier and anyone can do it (which is not even close to the reality of the situation), he feels less special. It's so ironic when technologists resent technological advances for this reason.

That all programmers don't need to know about "virtual methods, pointers, references, garbage collection, finalizers, pass-by-reference vs. pass-by-value, virtual C++ destructors, or the differences between C# structs and classes" is a very good thing. Lots of that stuff is ugly and overcomplicated and poorly designed and error-prone. The reason that large classes of programmers needn't pay any attention to any of it is that the state of the art has advanced and newer, better designed technologies are at our disposal now. As technologists, how can we do anything but celebrate that?
I've been using Yammer for my startup. The members of our team are in LA and NY. When two of the three talk, the third member can catch up when he can.

We put notes, links and documents on there. It's also a group Getting Things Done system. We try to finish every meeting with next action steps.
It's not about making compiler implementations easier -- it's about protecting template authors against having someone write:

class MyBadClass {
static int bar;
};
foo<MyBadClass> y;

By writing "typename", the template author can indicate that "T::bar" the template author can indicate that "bar" is expected to be a type, not a variable. This is explained in more detail here: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~driscoll/typename.html.
Interesting article, but the google trends he uses are quite noisy. It might have been better if he could have gotten trends from one (or several) of the many meyers-brigg test sites out there.

Google trends only track how "interesting" a topic is... not how many people have a given trait. So the second half the post is fairly bunk.
1960s Braun Products Hold the Secrets to Apple's Future (2008)
Both of these posts, Atwood's and Braude's, are complete messes.
Braude tries to compare the development of entire desktop applications with the UI development/document presentation of web applications.
Web UI development should be compared to UI development on the desktop. I wish I could use Swing/GTK/Qt for my web UIs, or write my blog with Word, but instead we have to use HTML and DOM scripting. The web is a crappy UI framework with an excellent distribution method. The internal differences of desktop applications and web applications are typically a matter of scale.

"Atwood's Law: any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript." Dear god, no! The browser is not the web. The future is not photoshop in a browser, it's a photoshop UI (hopefully developed with a rational desktop GUI framework) with a network connection (HTTP?) to a processing server. Of course, that's not particularly new, it's X11.
You can kill your grandfather. You just have to make sure to impregnate your grandmother so that your parent will still have your genes.
"The salt needs to be known in order to validate the password, probably stored in the row with the password."

But it is not enough to know the salt. A correct implementation also includes a (lengthy) pepper, stored in the application code. If you've got that as well, and also details of how the particular hashing setup works, then it is indeed probable you would be able to brute force the hashes.

But my point is, if someone has enough access to get all that, then they can probably just silently suck off the passwords in some way anyway. They are obviously in the machines and are probably root. They could probably insert code right into your app to email them every new password coming in, pre-hashing, and you wouldn't learn about it for months.

And if they only have the user table - well, 700m hashes a second is very impressive indeed but that's still 2.7 × 10^36 seconds to brute force a 32-character pepper.

You might still think it's worth it - defence in depth and all that. But considering the price you pay, like its slowness - 0.1 seconds might sound fast but if the server's running at load then it will be more - and the hassle of having another gem, especially one with a C dependency, I do not agree.

update: actually, upon further consideration and research, fine. I'll switch to bcrypt too from now on. That's a huge gain and the cost is not that high. I guess it hadn't sunk in just how fast SHA1 implementations were getting.

I still maintain it's not the weakest link - the weakest links numbers 1 through 50 are staff - but it's a definite improvement with little cost.
Google Doodled: Hans Christian Ørsted (1777-1851)
I support health care reforms, but the only reforms I support involve reducing the government's role, not massively increasing it. Things like policy portability, a greater ability to create risk pools, the ability to buy policies originating in a different state and the simplification of red tape and bureaucracy.

The currently proposed health care reforms try to ignore the laws of supply and demand because they don't seem fair. But as we found out in the 70's with gasoline price controls, it is better that 10% of people don't get a service because they can't afford it than 60% of people not getting a service because it isn't available.
Primer is an excellent film, especially when you consider that it was made for a total of only $7,000. That's not a typo: only seven thousand dollars!

Hollywood could really learn a lot from this movie.
I agree. I went into the movie knowing nothing and it was the biggest mindfuck ever.
This may help:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_special_relativ...
Ah! Now I know where the crap from M$ comes from.
The point of this article isn't so much to prove some theories incorrect or impossible. As time travel doesn't really exist we cannot say anything about it and say its a fact. Its about logic. If you are making a movie about time travel, than do it the way it makes sense.

There are to many movies this days that employ some kind of time traveling mechanics which make no sense at all. Instead of using time travel as a good plot device, it is more and more used as a deus ex. Writers aren't able to think of better ways to resolve the plot. Don't you just hate it when that happens. Oh, no, the main character died, its all over, the ship is destroyed and the world has ended. But no, wait! What's that? Oh, its OK. We managed to go back in time and prevent the tragedy, and now we can all go on with our lives forgeting that we just found a way to travel through time.

Now that i think about it, there is not a single movie including time traveling that hasn't got some kind of a plot hole. But that's ok, as you said, its a movie and it doesn't have to be all real. But it has to have some sense and meaning. Using time travel as a main plot device where it is not necessary or even sane, is a serious crime.

The actual act of time traveling isn't that important, or the science behind it. There are many theories and no one can say one is the best. A far far more important aspect is how you handle the story and the world after the actual act. Its easy to think of a functional super cool futuristic time machine, but it is hard to think of what to do with it once it is actually there.
Wasn't trying to completely dismiss Cuban on this. I simply do not see enough wealthy not using loophole that are available to them. This is why I say he's living in a dreamworld. Your right, to fix this, you have to legislate out all the loopholes. And this would take considerable social alignment.
It is Plura, and while you can technically get paid for it, it's not really worth it for an individual. However, if you can bring hundreds or thousands of computers to the grid by embedding it in an application, then the payments can be significant.
I would add a comment about Europe (Germany in particular which I know best) - just try to start a small business in Germany. If you are foreigner - forget it. OK who can be a German citizen - 2 ways - 1) you a German by blood - it does not matter where are you born - blood comes first. 2) you are foreigner trying to get a German citizenships - even if you get it after 15 years or more stay in Germany you will be always 2nd class citizen. Reasons - a ton of reasons - too much to list it here. France - the same. Probably Netherland is better - but no much business opportunities there. England - forget it a closed class society - you have to be from inner circle.

In Germany - there are several big companies working with thousand subcontractors. Siemens for example. There is a saying in Germany - if something happens to Siemens - the same will happen to Germany. So basically to have a small business there practically you have to be a subcontractor to some of the big companies there AND better be a German citizen. Big companies there a heavily subsidized by the government. Besides Germany-Russia are so heavily interconnected so you can imagine the subsequences. The pact Molotov-Ribentrop is still not widely known but the European Union wants to make it official data of victims of fascism and socialism because again they are so close. Recently it was discovered German banks with filials in Luxemburg washing money for Iran government - this is a big theme - where the money come in Europe and why this leisure and welfare theme.

Here in US - you can register a business the next day you got your stamp in your passport if you come with a business visa. If you are born here - it is much easier of course, but not much different. I can comment about California where I came not so long time ago but enough to tell - once you understand the US specifics and have a drive you can have a success here no matter what. Opportunities are everywhere even in these hard times.

The financing possibilities - there is simply no comparison.
Small business friendliness - beyond comparison. Business opportunities - beyond comparison.
Couldn't agree more. Great teachers, at least in my opinion, easily recognize all the common pitfalls where people get stuck and help them accordingly.
Oh, very clearly, and not just recently, either. I think the ability of people to connect peer-to-peer via the Internet is one of the forces driving the rise of evangelical Christianity in the US. Those forces were always there, but they were deliberately suppressed back when the media was dominated by a few big companies.

I remember once watching an NFL football game on TV, probably in the 90s, where at some point a group of players spontaneously knelt in prayer. They switched cameras off them instantly. It occurred to me that this probably happened quite a lot during games, and that the network probably had a deliberate policy of not showing it.
The more things change, the more they stay the same...
Definitely agree, but I've had lecturers who take this too far. My intro. quantum physics professor was a brilliant and accomplished researcher at the bleeding edge of this field whose most basic concepts were deeply mysterious to us students. We appreciated the passion and keep knowledge that informed each of his tangents, but they were pretty impenetrable and very frequently distracted from the material at hand. I left the class thinking he was a brilliant man but fairly poor teacher. Then I had had him the next semester in thermodynamics and he turned out to be great! Certainly he had plenty of knowledge of the field, but he kept the class somewhere within the scope of the syllabus and relayed the foundations to us much more carefully. He focused on teaching, not the material itself.

The GEB lectures you linked are an interesting example in themselves. The early tangents that the teachers launch into on their own are certainly helpful, especially in such a free-form class. But student questions and tangents soon dominate that class too, to the point that I found it quite unbearable. When there is interesting material to be discussed they continually relapse into tired speculations of the "well maybe the universe is just a giant computer simulation" sort. The last lecture in particular is completely dominated, and in my opinion ruined, by questions from the most persistent student. A teacher needs to take charge and keep the class on track. Perhaps in a real class Justin would have.
SfCube launches to seed fledgling startups
This brings up the interesting question of "natural genius".

World population for the last several centuries has exploded. Suppose 500 million people lived in Plato's time and there were 50 "natural geniuses". That means 1 per 10 million. Even disregarding technological or social progress and assuming linear scaling, that implies at least 650 "natural geniuses" today. Where are they? Who are they? The sheer number of most-capable individuals has grown enormously.
but a relationship is != causation which CEPR obviously attempts to argue.

I love the way they put it in their executive summary:

One plausible explanation for the consistently higher shares of self-employment and small-business
employment in the rest of the world’s rich economies is that all have some form of universal access
to health care.

Sure, and one plausible explanation could be the lack of the quality olives that the Greeks have (Greece heads the chart in small business whatevers that the study is measuring) Taking a look at the chart http://www.examiner.com/x-14795-Page-One-Examiner~y2009m8d5-... , does anybody seriously think this is an ordered list of countries with the best small business numbers?

As a side note, I initially didn't pick up the tidbit that the author is director of the institute that created this study. A list of his recent articles is interesting. http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/markweisbrot
http://www.blogcdn.com/de.engadget.com/media/2009/08/2066969...

that might be 'shopped' ...

the image at the bottom of the article looks realistic though. Hard to tell these days.
I've actually been considering going up for a few weeks, because California's tax structure, high cost of living, and overall lack of decent public infrastructure is seriously unfavorable to small business.
Information Addiction [Cognitive Bio]
A Wiki of Social Media Monitoring Solutions
> As I flipped through, I realized, this isn't a book of home plans, it's a catalog for plans that you can buy.

Actually, it's a book of dreams. Most folks who buy that book will never build a house, but they'll look at that book and dream about doing so.

Many books/publications are much the same.
Kids' top 100 search terms of Summer '09
Contradictory things are being advocated. Health care reform at least intuitively looks pro-small business. But mandatory vacation days and high unemployment benefits? If they are paid out by the hiring company? I doubt that is helpful for small businesses, who can't shift around workers as easily and will be discouraged from hiring if the costs of firing are so high.

And France isn't a nation of small businesses. Their best industries seem to be those really complicated infrastructure ones that require a lot of state intervention (bullet trains, nuclear reactors) and luxury goods (LV). It may have been nice to have that welfare cushion during the financial crisis, but that's a separate and potentially contradictory goal to encouraging small businesses.

And then there's Taiwan. It has always been a country of small and medium sized businesses, and to my knowledge, there was no uptick in this when national healthcare was implemented in the 90s. It could be high at a percentage for other reasons, though, and that it was so prevalent made it difficult for there to be any additional uptick.
Agree. Asking questions in a class of 250 students is counter productive. But, here in India, it's against regulations in many colleges to have classes larger than 60 students. So, perspective :)
it keeps resetting me to the US no matter how I try to scroll sideways.

FF 3.0.11
Time is relative to the coder in question. Neither programmer will be any more productive.

So, each person experiences 1 second ticking as normal, but if you were to look at both watches together, one would be much, much slower than the other.

This has actually been proven by syncing atomic clocks and putting one on the space shuttle. The one on the shuttle comes back showing a time a few milliseconds less than the one on the ground.
10 tips for sensible systems administration
Someone should check the copy on these guys' website. The investors page has a few grammatical errors in first 5 lines.

Verdict: I'll pass.
You got it backwards... person A's week is much faster than the dude in the spaceship. (Hence person B "travels into the future")
Note that this is a local exploit, not a remote exploit. I guess that means panic but not too much.

Nice ad for trustix!