skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is really cool. I ordered a DK2 to try out some similar things in a similar domain. The idea of a 120° workspace which can be expanded indefinitely seems like a reasonable alternative to getting bunches of physical screens on a desk.
If Facebook stopped promoting brands above my friends then maybe I'd stop unliking/hiding brands. Seriously, when I'm on Facebook I want to see people. One or two brand posts here and there is okay, but when I have to go through 10 brand posts to get to a real person that's a problem.

My friends aren't going to pay your stupid "Promote your content" fees. Stop asking.
This is the correct answer. Higher temperature steam allows a higher maximum power extraction potential.
After this, he gave a much longer, more detailed talk about social software and small group theory, "A Group is its Own Worst Enemy": http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

The talk is an accurate and accessible adaptation of 50 years of sociological research by Bion and others in "small group research" and "group dynamics."

If this sort of thing interests you, you might also like social interaction designer Xianhang Zhang's compelling anecdotes: http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-...

And my own essay on the Austin design community, with hypotheses about how communities work at the end: http://distance.cc/issues/01/01c-Vitorio-Miliano.html

There are about 150 footnotes in the essay, but I pulled out all the references into a separate PDF, and linked to all of the papers and talks that are available online or out-of-copyright, which would be a good starter kit for anyone looking to do social software correctly: http://distance.cc/issues/01/vitorio-colophon.pdf

( I follow up that essay with another one, talking about professionalism in design and the future of design practices, and Distance is on clearance now for $5 if you want to read it: http://distance.cc/ )

After I wrote my essay, a couple scholars produced a book called "Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design." I haven't read it cover-to-cover, but the parts I did read were very good, lots of well-researched advice for new social systems. http://successfulonlinecommunities.com/
I think the main cause is the stark choice Japanese women face: keep your career and status that you've worked so hard for, or give it all up and raise children for a man you'll hardly get to see.

About immigration: go look up "lump of labour fallacy".
This opinion piece articulates something I've felt for a long time... consolidation is the biggest problem in America right now, scratch that, in the World.

One thing that I can't comprehend is how right-wing free-market ideologues can get behind all the consolidation. Cant they see that consolidation is just like communism?

Only a competitive market with many players can ensure progress continues.
That's pretty much how I use facebook, though its in the form of a chat and related group, while I'm still in Uni. One or two chat threads with ten or so good friends each. Lots of great conversations, sharing, in-jokes, etc. Way more meaningful than my timeline or anything else on the site.
Not to be pedantic or anything, but what do you mean by "dept"? It's an honest question. Are you referring to debt or is it a different concept I'm not familiar with?
I am surprised that you are getting downvoted.

How are Japanese women doing outside Japan where they have similar opportunities as men? Given choice, do Japanese women prefer to work outside or stay home? Some data on this question can provide some insight.

From personal experience, there is some truth to what you said. My wife is Japanese. We live in US. Once we didn't need two incomes, first thing she did is to quit her $150K job with a major software company. She is much more happier staying home and taking care of household chores. Just today, I asked her if she misses her job, colleagues, and working outside. Her response was resounding No. I haven't seen her more happier, content and stress free until she quit working. We don't even have kids.

Even though it is preference of one woman, it makes me wonder if cultural upbringing influences the decision to work or not, more than the availability of opportunity.
Bridging The Gap To Artificial Intelligence
App based portal for exchanging books
Reference counting has an incremental performance burden because of predictable object freeing, while garbage collection has a periodic pause. On mobile devices you often must worry about response-times; it is a lot more easy to reason 'we need to ease up on such and such at this time', and be sure you solved the problem. Garbage collection pauses can be less straight-forward to tackle.
Show HN: A Dockerfile for self contained W3C/HTML5 validator
It's exactly this.

Congress in front of cameras is far, far different than Congress behind closed doors.

The thing people sort of gloss over for politicians is the Cantor Effect: These guys normally actually need to get re-elected, or elected in higher offices. They have to appease their base, even if that means asking stupid questions they already know the answers to.

FDR had a saying which I'm probably misquoting, "I like your idea, it's the right thing to do. I want to do it. Now go make me do it." You make politicians do stuff by convincing their base of support.
Well she's been out of school for a while so if she wanted to apply her degree with no experience she will be tossed around the job market and will probably have to either start her own business, which I applaud, or take the sadder route which is work from the very bottom again, maybe getting another degree.

I have been in school for a while to see older people return to renew their education, and while it's good that they are, it is very sad and cringeworthy sometimes. When they are using computers, or trying to work through material they struggle much more than their younger peers, and on top of that they have liabilities and kids/family to take care of, add that with age discrimination today on top of the ridiculous job requirements, you can feel their slight bursts of hopelessness, trapped in a world that has moved very far ahead of them. ='(
This is important because it increases generator efficiency.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_fluid#Supercritic...

Supercritical fluid in power generation

The efficiency of a heat engine is ultimately dependent on the temperature difference between heat source and sink (Carnot cycle). To improve efficiency of power stations the operating temperature must be raised. Using water as the working fluid, this takes it into supercritical conditions.[20] Efficiencies can be raised from about 39% for subcritical operation to about 45% using current technology.[21] Supercritical water reactors (SCWRs) are promising advanced nuclear systems that offer similar thermal efficiency gains. Carbon dioxide can also be used in supercritical cycle nuclear power plants, with similar efficiency gains.[22] Many coal-fired supercritical steam generators are operational all over the world, and have enhanced the efficiency of traditional steam-power plants.
Why does everyone think they're the only person who knows about lambda calculus? No kidding, lambda is turing complete, so yes, you can implement car and cdr with it. But just because you can do everything with lambda doesn't mean that it's actually done that way.
Engagement on Facebook involves counting "Actions" users perform on the page. The main ones: Like, Share, Comment.
> Not stupid, but brainwashed perhaps.

> ... End of story.

End of story indeed. I'm obviously too "brainwashed" to have anything of value to say.

But I would like to point out that I never said government debt was the cause of Japan's economic stagnation.
It seems like a typo.
You can expect a reasonable behaviour on HN unless it has something to do with Apple..
Depends on what you want to do with your knowledge. To @nostradeamons' point, learning C++ basically means that moving over to Java is basically near zero effort but if your main aim in CS is to learn algorithms and concepts that are the science part of computer science, you may want to concentrate more on the implementation of the thing in point rather than worry about the nitty gritty details of manual memory management. Personally, I would learn Java and I have found mostly because it let's you get to the thing you want to do much more quickly than C++ would.

For example, if you are implementing a tree traversal algorithm, you are implementing the tree traversal mechanism and are rarely bothered with the "correct" way to traverse pointers or manage memory. It helps (in terms of productivity) to have built in language features take care of these things. For a "new" student, java seems like a good starting point and once you get a hold of the things you want to optimize, you can look in more depth or maybe even figure out you need to implement some parts in a different language altogether.

Flexibility of C++ vs Java is a contentious issue at best, concepts and best practices (from a CS view point) would apply across all languages.

* I started with C, then moved to C++, then Java, then Go so I know how it feels to progress through the language-sphere. The above views are my own and YMMV. I find C/C++ to be the best starting place but I know a lot of students who found it too low level and nit-picky and java seems like a good way to start. Again, YMMV.
I find his engineering approach interesting, if heretical. He seems to dislike scientists as they have no skin in the game:

"The focus is on an Engineering Approach – where
data are critical and there are consequences for
being wrong; not the Scientist approach – where a
theory is the product and it can be right or wrong
without repercussions."
The EPA report shows combined cycle plants at about 52% efficiency in 2012. With respect to the above numbers, it means only 1/2 the carbon footprint, not 1/3. It doesn't play in the cost numbers since I worked from the sale price of the electricity rather than its input costs.
I knew all of them. Should I be concerned about my gender? ;)

The page links to an interesting vocabulary test. I probably scored low because I said "no" to words I recognized but did not know the meaning of.

On the basis of your results, we estimate you know 76% of the English words.
You said yes to 76% of the existing words.
You said yes to 0% of the nonwords.
This gives you a corrected score of 76% - 0% = 76%.
This is a high level for a native speaker. [!]
I think one of the hardest things to do, for both non-profits and volunteers, is to identify an appropriate project. One thats sufficiently interesting for volunteers to work on, but manageable within a limited time frame and requiring limited resources, and still useful to a non-profit.

I also think you may be underestimating the effort on the part of the non-profit to get a volunteer up-to-speed with necessary information and to be available to answer volunteers' questions.
I'm very, very well aware of that fact, kaonashi. And I made explicit reference to it in my original post.
I always get half-sad half-glad when I read these types of things.

Glad that I won't have to see this depressing end to the universe but still sad for humanity, that we won't last forever.
Warning: This is highly simplified and thus not exactly correct.

The temperature at which a substance freezes, melts, condenses, or boils is not fixed, but varies with pressure.

When a liquid crosses the "critical temperature" (at atmospheric pressure), it boils and becomes a gas with an obvious transition.

Less well known, when a liquid is subjected to pressure above the "critical pressure" (at a fixed temperature), it can actually become a compressible liquid.

The location on the graph where "critical temperature" and "critical pressure" meet is the "critical point" and that's where you can become supercritical. In that region, there is no difference between liquid and gas; there is no "boiling" or "condensing", because the substance effectively behaves like both at the same time. It has no surface tension, yet can dissolve things like a liquid solvent, but it can also diffuse through tiny holes like a gas.

Tiny variations in temperature or pressure can radically alter the density, allowing you to adjust for the exact behavior you want. Above the critical temperature, no amount of pressure can force the substance into liquid form, you can only solidify it. Some substances refuse to be made liquid or solid due to crazy critical temperature or pressure values required. Mixtures are another matter entirely, for example high pressure may force one component of a mixture to solidify and drop out of solution.

We think of matter as having "normal" properties because that's how it behaves at the earth's atmospheric pressure and temperature ranges but in reality the way we experience matter is just one of many different and just as crazy states.

To bring it back down to earth, the point of mentioning "supercritical steam" is that it means they can heat the water well above boiling by keeping it under high pressure. If they didn't, additional heat added to the water would just create more steam, not heat the water any further (and steam is vastly less efficient at absorbing heat than liquid water).
And yet I don't see Arizona contributing much to the US economy, social welfare, and/or higher education. They are contributing some, but below your average state.

Edit: Made the point more clear.
Yes, the ability to focus is one of the most important traits of successful technologists. How do you teach it? I think it has to be more a case of lighting the fire with-in. Any successful program has to have the learners start to ask and answer their own questions (sometimes with guidance, sometimes with the all-important persistence of focus) - not be guided by rote teaching.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
That's a good point. My feeling is that some non-profits are willing to put up with this inconvenience. It's likely that they will be the smaller ones with fewer resources. This won't be a good fit for everybody.

I'm imagining non-profits that need help with things like setting up wordpress being interested in this.
Prison labor’s new frontier: Artisanal foods
>I think the main cause is the stark choice Japanese women face: keep your career and status that you've worked so hard for, or give it all up and raise children for a man you'll hardly get to see.

This is part of it too. As is the migration towards cities (because that's where all the jobs are). Huge crowds and a lack of space has the same effect on humans as it does on rats.

Mix those things up with the younger generation's feelings of hopelessness and/or insecurity about their careers and it's no wonder they've stopped having children.

This can be reversed with a government funded jobs program / public works program, EXACTLY like the one Milton Friedman took full advantage of.

It won't be reversed with immigration.

>About immigration: go look up "lump of labour fallacy".

I never said that there was a fixed amount of work in Japan.

If you think that bringing in 3rd world workers as competition isn't going to drag down wages, though, you're dreaming.
People are not actually learning. They are simply "along for the ride" while memorizing for tests so they can land a job and forget most of the things they've learned. Perhaps we should improve our secondary education as we are lacking on that front in America instead of encouraging everyone to take 4 more years out of their working lives.
At university we learned a turing machine implementation in lambda calculus. Now while I will fully agree that it's a disastrously difficult programming language, but "big" (non-trivial) programs in lambda calculus both exist and predate the oldest LISP programs.

Likewise "big" Church thesis programs exist and predate the oldest lambda calculus programs. They're even more unreadable (although everyone doing cs has at least looked at 2 of them).

Before that you will find more implicitly written programs that are definitely programs, in the sense that they are explicitly checked to be finite computation steps.

Even these informal algebraic programs not only predate LISP, Lambda and Church but a lot of them are rewrites of algorithms out of pure algebra that are definitely programs, just less formally written down.

You can trace the history of those back to the renaissance European city states (I refuse to accept al-Khawazarmi as having done anything but compile external sources).

And frankly, is there anyone here that has read Euclid's algorithm and doesn't think even the ancient Greek version is, when it comes right down to it, a valid computer program ? He didn't have the notion of generalized calculation (technically nobody did that correctly before Turing of course), but he had the notion of calculating various things by counting in specific ways. It's not that different, really. And it's only one of quite a set of programs written by Euclid of Alexandria.

Obviously Euclid's programs were never meant to be programs, but they are programs. They have a trivial mapping in pretty much any programming language that exists.

Oh, and Euclid uses recursion. Didn't define it, just uses it. Even Euclid very likely just compiled knowledge, didn't invent/discover it. Likely these algorithms were taught in Alexandria for at least a few decades before Euclid, so you could reasonably accurately say that there definitely were computer programmers in the 4th century BC, maybe even fifth.

And with the comment relating to "car" and "cdr", well, Euclid uses those functions. He doesn't define them beyond describing their effects, but he uses them. In that way, of course, he's acting like any other programmer. The only people defining car and cdr are developing the language, not any real programs.
I guess you meant "prices have only gone up 30% if only buy imported goods"?

I think purchasing power has gone down more than 2%, because of the sales tax hike. Otherwise you have a point.
If you were, then you would also be aware that the Japanese debt will be rolled over in perpetuity at a rate of the BoJ's choosing.

Any inflationary pressures are going to come from real supply problems/limits, not monetary policy.
I was working on an HTML5 canvas pixel editor at some point. It was rather frustrating dealing with the Retina display, blurred edges, and anti-aliasing. I'm curious if this situation has improved at all.

See here for more info:
http://phoboslab.org/log/2012/09/drawing-pixels-is-hard
The future of journalism is, imho, oceans of random trash (think Business Insider or the Daily Mail) on the one hand side, and rock star columnists and investigators (think popular bloggers like John Gruber or The Macalope) on the other.

To succeed as a syndication platform in this, methinks you either need to be very good at satisfying yourself with a fickle audience looking for subpar content while making numbers work in your favor, or syndicate the rock stars in razor focused channels (The Magazine or Flipboard) that your quality audience will value enough to stay around.

Whether traditional newspapers will survive this transition any more than music publishers is anyone's guess. I'm not holding my breath for most of them -- quality is simply too low.
You seem to be of the belief that a) financial institutions never play the limited role of facilitator and b) entities which facilitate transactions are somehow less culpable when they know that the transactions they are facilitating are ethically questionable. You're wrong on both counts.

Many financial institutions facilitate transactions. Goldman Sachs paid over half a billion dollars to settle charges related to the Abacus deal it facilitated in 2007.[1] Goldman was paid a $15 million fee for facilitating that deal, a meaningless fraction of the $46 billion in revenues it earned in 2007.

As I noted, the vast majority of apartment leases forbid subletting without the landlord's approval, and you would be hard pressed to find a single landlord who allows tenants to turn their apartments into hotel suites. As such, one could argue that as far as apartments go, this isn't a "might" proposition. There's a very reasonable argument to be made that AirBnB can safely assume that apartment listings on its site more often than not involve a tenant breaking the terms of his or her lease.

If you don't have a problem with AirBnB facilitating apartment rentals in the face of constructive knowledge that many of them are taking place in violation of the terms of the host's lease, that's fine. But then you shouldn't have a problem with financial institutions when they merely facilitate transactions that don't pass your smell test. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, right?

[1] http://sevenpillarsinstitute.org/case-studies/goldman-sachs-...
If it's efficient breach than surely AirBnB sublettors violating their inefficient leases are compensating landlords for the breach making both parties better off. Right? Surely it's not one party secretly violating the terms of the contract and keeping all the benefits? That doesn't sound very efficient at all; don't think that's what Posner had in mind.
I disagree especially because the quality of everyone's education is not the same. While education may seem like the great equalizer, people have to enter school willing to learn, explore and engage with their peers, not just float through classes for grades.

There are tons of people out there with an education but not very enlightened about things. I hate analogies, but I've met several people over the course of my short life with degrees who have absolutely worthless educations. They racked up debt to work unskilled jobs, and complain why companies don't want to hire them with no experience, internships and lackluster academic records.

I know the paper makes people feel good, but at what point is our society going to start rejecting the feelgood, everybody wins attitude? You should not have to have a college education to have a good life or populace (look at America early 1900s and all the modern luxuries that exist today from that time period). Trades, entrepreneurship, etc are all alternative good paths that should be encouraged. College educations are nice, but there is a pretty long list of people who did not complete or even reach college who are successful and making contributions to society:

http://www.collegedropoutshalloffame.com
>I'm obviously too "brainwashed" to have anything of value to say.

That depends. Do you still think that hyperinflation is even a remote possibility in Japan?

>But I would like to point out that I never said government debt was the cause of Japan's economic stagnation.

Nope, you didn't, but austerianism IS still the default economic mode of thought these days amongst Japanese and western elites, and it is strongly linked to the belief in impending hyperinflation.
I only have two personal anecdotes: My own childhood growing up in Washington State, and my experience in Thailand for the last 7 years.

In the USA, we often hear about how our (USA) school systems are too easy/relaxed compared to foreign countries.

In Thailand, it's the opposite, in the most terrible way possible. Everything is about test scores, and thus "thinking outside the box" is severely penalized.

People in the USA might not have the raw-academics, but the applied problem solving and team collaboration skills absolutely crushes the competition (Though of course that doesn't help manual labor jobs much)
BMW products don't sell themselves, they are constantly advertised to push an image in your mind of their upscale luxury materialistic desirability.
ASU is the largest university in the US, that must make some type of impact in the US economy. Also ASU has a lot of cool research
It'd be fantastic to have an Oculus-based desktop environment! Imagine not having to drag giant monitors around. Combine it with xmonad and you're golden. I hope this becomes reality soon, at least for development purposes.

Shut up and someone take my money already.
I'm sure the Wayback Machine has you covered.