skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Their peripherals are good, but their "consumer devices" have a spotty track record.
I love Reg's writing. It's consistently good and well thought out.

But man do I cringe every time I see him do backflips to hack around the warts in Ruby. I don't understand why he spends so much effort trying to work around fundamental problems in Ruby.

Use a better language, or pull an rhickey and make another good language worth using. Reg is obviously smart enough to do it.
The color scheme reminds me of older Cray supercomputers. http://news.softpedia.com/newsImage/Cray-039-s-Supercomputer... I wonder if there's something about it that visually indicates "there's a ridiculous amount of parallel computing power in here"?

Edit: apparently the CM-5 supercomputer had a very similar color scheme as well. http://encarta.msn.com/media_461569032_761563087_-1_1/CM-5_S...
Looks like the thing didn't pan out for Nexia. IP has been sold for a percentage of future royalties. http://www.baystreet.ca/users/newswire/viewarticle.aspx?id=7...
If only they'd learned how to make it shoot out an infinite stream of web from little nozzles in the palm of your hands...
I don't think btilly is bike-shedding here. He's not arguing about whether you're right or wrong about labor unions. He's talking about whether or not your (new) first example actually supports your thesis (part of your thesis being that you have to choose between inoffensive writing and clear/concise writing).

You give two versions of the "labor union" paragraph. One of them does not say whether early union leaders were heroes or not (but might carelessly be read to imply that they aren't). The second states that they definitely were.

The second version is less offensive to people with pro-union biases. But it is more offensive to people with anti-union biases. If you wanted to avoid offending a particular person or group, your rewriting approach would work. But to avoid offending a diverse population you should instead remove any claims (express or implied) about unrelated controversial topics, or simply choose less divisive topics for your examples.
Prozac? I doubt it. The bulk of homicides have always occurred in the inner cities, and those people would be the last to get their hands on prescription pharmaceuticals.

Its possible Prozac had some effect on more suburbanized areas of the country, but I think its doubtful that any change from prescription drugs would be statistically relevant to the tune of a 12% total drop.

Any drop in homicide rates in the inner cities almost certainly comes from another source, and my money is on political manipulation of the data.

As an example, the Baltimore mayor's office came under fire in 2006 for tweaking their crime numbers, and I'm sure that other large cities aren't immune from the same pressures.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02...
Especially since Arial wasn't commissioned by Microsoft, it was designed in 1982 by Patricia Saunders and Robin Nicholas, commissioned by IBM for their laser printers. It was originally called Sonoran San Serif. Microsoft later shipped it with Windows 3.1.
"I cringe every time I see him do backflips to hack around the warts in Ruby. I don't understand why he spends so much effort trying to work around fundamental problems in Ruby."

Reasons to do backflips:

1. They're fun in their own right.

2. I learn something about the quality of good vs. poor tools by fixing shortcomings in tools.

3. Sometimes the backflip is an exercise intended to get someone who thinks in Ruby to think about things outside of Ruby.

4. Rule 3 applies to Reg as much as his readers :-)

And oh yes, I should be very clear that I am not ready to declare that everyone should be programming in Ruby with anaphora. They are interesting, and I am personally happy with String#to_proc, but beyond that... Hard to say...
The comparison to working on commission isn't useful unless that short-term, single-axis measurement is the extent of performance assessment.

Hypermeasurement doesn't require or imply that all firms will become short-term, single-axis focused.

So, while true at a high level of abstraction (we're all ultimately employed and thereby paid, based on our performance), at any useful level of detail the premise isn't very useful.
Crucial stages in designing your viral loop
My friend has been working on startup with a similar idea for sometime and they launched couple of months back. http://www.tiseme.com/
For that you can check out Project Archer:

http://sourceware.org/gdb/wiki/ProjectArcher
Basically, the XOR essay he wrote wasn't at all about Arrington. It was merely a starting point for the real point of the essay--why pg writes the way he does and the reasons for doing so.

However, there are certain things that just set people off--even if it has nothing to do with the main point--and go off on a berserker rant. In this case, people disagreed with the reason pg gave about why people thought Arrington was unfriendly.

So then the question is, does pg's essay still hold up and make sense about the reasons why he writes the way he does, if Arrington was unfriendly for a different reason than what pg gave?

One way to test it is if you replaced the entire section about Arrington with a similar analogy and see if the essay still holds up.

Pg decided to pick one about Parkinson's bike shed color as a nice little meta-commentary about how we are arguing about things that don't matter to the main point of the essay.
There are actually quite a number of (yes, relatively dead) projects that do this or something very similar: eventlet, gevent, cogen, concurrence, weightless, ...
Didn't use the plugin but used the code snippets on a site just to test it out and.. I think Google need to slicken it up a bit first. The installation overlay blocks out most of the site on IE6 and doesn't seem to be closable. I'm guessing this is really meant for sites that demand it be installed rather than an optional thing - but if that's true, why not just redirect?
I think there is going to be a huge tension in the future between two facts of the status quo:

1) There are vast productivity differences between knowledge workers. (Say, for the sake of argument, a factor of ten between best and worst.)

2) There are generally narrow bands of pay within a single occupation at a single company. (Say, for the sake of argument, a factor of two.)

My company has gotten the Japanese metrics religion. We track productivity for all of the engineers at the company -- it isn't an exact science, but the numbers roughly comport to my sense of who are extraordinarily talented and who still need seasoning. Since it is a Japanese company, all salaries are equivalent, to the yen, to the company's published salary standards.

It takes an effort of will for me to not compare the discrepancies between those two sets of numbers.
The $8k Personal Satellite (and Other Space Adventures)
I think you'll find a very low co-incidence rate of criminals getting psychiatric treatment, let alone psycho-pharmaceuticals on a regular basis.

Honestly, the very premise of the research makes me wonder whether this is an example of research ghost-written by big pharma.
No, I hadn't heard of him - that's sorta my point. World changing scientists are not, typically, well known. Famous environmentalists are ten a dollar. So, sure, it's an anti-environmentalist rant because I'm anti-environmentalist but I consider it a pro-science rant at heart.
FTA: "...to show what Mr. Peers and Mr. Godley — along with more than a million spiders and a dexterous team of intrepid Malagasy spider handlers — had accomplished."

"...an endeavor that, as he has written, always seemed to be 'imbued with metaphor and poetry, with nightmare and phobia.'"

Yes. That.
Speaking as someone who has been through the naturalization process, the current mechanisms for getting permission to live and work in the United States are ridiculous. But I'm not sure that adding a carve-out for an elite with access to venture funding is the answer.

Saying "let's let intrepid people come and work in the country if they want to start a business" is appealing in principle, but any implementation would be rife with moral hazard.

It would be far better to see this kind of energy (and money!) channeled in support of general immigration reform.
Schellenberg wichita kansas real estate
The perfect home is awaiting you in a Schellenberg community, conveniently located in West Wichita.
Consumer reports digital camera ratings
A true nature lover would want to be able to capture timeless moments and preserve them for eternity. The best way in which one can in fact do this is by making use of any super zoom digital cameras.
my last 4 webapps are made in 100% REBOL and it's cheyenne webserver. They are http://www.site-assistant.com , http://www.cebelca.biz http://www.qwikitodo.com http://www.qwikitxt.com (last two, first two I've made are more of miniapps)
From the premise, you could also suggest that it was written by a proponent of more federal spending for mental health (e.g. Mental Health Parity Act).

They only thing you can state with confidence is that it is not a good paper.
Oh they did it the old fashioned way, neat but sadly not as interesting as gene splicing would have been. Gene splicing would make it possible to produce spider silk fabrics for less then one million.

We have spliced some spider silk protein genes into goats, and their milk does contain those proteins, and we can crystallize them into large crystals. But that's not silk, spider silk is those proteins carefully assembled along with H2O molecules to create threads.

Another problem is, spider silk tends to rot pretty quickly.
This is silly. If your sponsored links and search results are indistinguishable but extremely relevant you still have the best search engine. And then there's the speed factor, which you've completely ignored. And better marketing? You can't be serious.
I don't know this for sure, but I heard you can put a consumer video card in a Mac Pro. You cannot boot from it, nor use it in OS X (due to both lack of drivers and EFI support), but it will work in Windows via Boot Camp.
Even if this comes out, I see it as being a flop. It's too far fetched from the traditional computer, only the upper echelon of computer users will take the learning curve to use it.
Rackspace Gets Behind Cassandra
With regards to the "infinite" program, I meant a DOS on YOUR machine, completely irrespective of network access. ...at least enough to force you to close the tab or the browser. I assume the sandbox is good enough to keep the process from causing the machine to become unresponsive, but hey...

Your conclusion is quite interesting, with respect to the possibilities of wiki-os. That's potentially a quite powerful feature.
Right. If you're going to push that sort of checking on to the type system, then at least have a smart one.
Lie detection techniques are a bit like secure software; eventually the best of the best will be good at reducing the reliability of the best expert. And once a technique is covered on enough episodes of CSI/Lie to Me, then the "script kiddies" might be able to fool them sometimes, too.

Later, though, liars will have to eventually beat systems like this:

http://noliemri.com/products/Overview.htm
How is the new HTM method different from existing one, for example, Deep Belief Network?
As someone pointed out recently (sorry, can't find the original blog post) this sort of plan really skews the power dynamic between the entrepreneur and VC/angel. If you really make this visa contingent on funding, then in addition to having the power of the purse, the VC will have the power of immigration.

One solution, of course, is to make it independent of funding, but then distinguishing between "founders" and "people who want to move to the US and might one day start a company" gets pretty hard, policy-wise. Now, I have no particular aversion to the latter group either, but plenty of Americans apparently do.

The real answer, as many have suggested, is to fix immigration policy rather than carving out exceptions for our preferred niche.

Edit: found original blog post referenced above - http://kirkwylie.blogspot.com/2009/09/founder-visa-ignores-i...
What exactly is new here? I thought computers could identify and track an object in video already?
Ah. Definitely insider knowledge, although no doubt widely known in appropriate circles.

Thank you.
Peripherals aren't consumer devices?

Sure, if we ignore everything but the Xbox, Xbox 360, Zune and Zune HD their record looks far worse.

But is that a fair bucket to build?
This would seem a less... sarcastic if the author had tried in good faith to find another real example, rather than woundedly choosing something deliberately boring.
Summary: Shaky 1983 experiment that is grossly misquoted as proving the absence of freewill is challenged by a 2008 experiment with results that don't outright contradict the 1983 but apparently manage to disprove the falsely attributed claims with new falsely attributed claims!

It's hooey on top of hooey basically. From what I can tell by reading up on Libet's work (the 1983 guy) is that he established that when we're anticipating an action (in the experiments case it was pushing a button, but could for instance be catching a ball or anything) our brain is aware of it's decision ~2 seconds before the person actually states they've made the decision, when the action is in the pre-frontal cortex it can apparently be up to 10 seconds. However our consciousness can kick in to stop the action.

Libet's research doesn't claim we lack free will, it's actually evidence of the delay our consciousness receives compared to our subconscious. It's been shown that our subconscious will pick up on a pattern three-times faster than our conscious; one example of this was a card game where a player was rewarded for turning over a black-card and punished for a red-card, it took the subconscious 5 cards before it started anticipating the results where as it took roughly 18 cards before the actual player announced the pattern (IIRC this wasn't a timed experiment, the cards were dealt as fast as the human player wanted).

I wouldn't say any of these experiments show a lack of free will, I'd say it gives proof of the incredibly complex machine that our brains are and that our consciousness is actually an evolutionary advancement to conserve energy. Libet showed that our consciousness has a veto over an anticipatory action, our biggest anticipatory actions are fight and flight both of which consume massive amounts of energy that if we used every time they were called upon would be wasteful.
From Wikipedia:

"In March 2004, during a consumer class-action lawsuit in Minnesota, internal documents subpoenaed from Microsoft revealed that the company had violated nondisclosure agreements seven years earlier in obtaining business plans from Go Corporation, using them to develop and announce a competing product named PenWindows, and convincing Intel to reduce its investment in Go. After Go was purchased by AT&T and Go's tablet-based computing efforts were shelved, PenWindows development was dropped.[21]"
This is a nice affordable piece of hardware, but I'd have to imagine that most of the biggest ISPs (e.g., Fios, Comcast, etc) would not allow you to basically run your own web services via your home internet connection. But, if your ISP allows, I wonder how web app performance using the tonidoPlug compares to shared and/or dedicated web hosting services?
Thanks for catching my error in the history.
Open Source Licenses Comparison
How is the lack of an anaphoric expression in Ruby a wart or even a fundamental problem?
Gene for memory and IQ gives students low grades
"Following through is the tough part."

I disagree with the sentiment of this post, but THAT statement is absolutely true. So much so, that "hacking" yourself to do so is a really good idea. As you say, it's easy to quit. It's ESPECIALLY easy to quit if you're doing it on the side. "Oh that side project? Yeah, I kinda lost interest in that" is easy to say and no one will care. It's a LOT harder to say, "Oh, the idea I quit my job over? It failed." because that makes you look like a failure.

Quitting your job is a similar psychological hack to fatblogging or announcing an engagement at a big party. Or burning the ships once you reach foreign shores. Being "desperate" is what can often push you through the crappy or boring parts of your startup.
Yes, for the foreseeable future I will very much keep the focus on getting teachers to sign up for accounts. A teacher using Eduset inside a school can be a far better advocate for an institutional purchase than I could ever be by cold calling.

As for Blackboard, Eduset certainly was not designed to directly compete with them. Blackboard is a vast and complex piece of software that teachers often require courses to learn how to use. Our aim with Eduset is to make it as easy as possible for even non-tech-savvy teachers to jump right in. This means that we will never have the range of features a solution like Blackboard provides.
Will Cuil’s New Streaming Feature Put It Back on the Map?
This is what "Trademark" is all about, for once: preventing consumers from being misled.
They were incredibly helpful in the application and integration process, and I've had no real problems with them so far, beyond this issue of yearly billing (which is understandable on their part). Highly recommended.
I'd appreciate some help here ...

I thought that cross-referencing two submissions to the same article would be of value, because it would help prevent duplication of discussion.

If I'm wrong, would someone explain why? Down-mod me as well if you choose, but help me to learn.

Thanks ...
Also here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=839447

Discussion seems to be there rather than here.
I wouldn't call the lack of anaphoric expression a problem, but I prefer that it be easier to add anaphoric expression to Ruby.
On the absurd advertisements for "Windows 7 parties"
Sorry He just got a hell of a competitor.

This will probably will end in something between reddit and stumbleupon.Lets see if it catch up.
Science lesson for baseball
The real problem, IMO, is that it's got some kind of closed-source licensing model. That may work for Microsoft, but not too many other people can get away with it IMO.
I've already done 4 of them at the age of 17! (1,3,6,7)
It isn't so much an issue of taste (or sentiment) as much as it is an issue of the design itself. Typography is about math/geometry as much as it is about taste. Helvetica was designed first, meticulously. Arial came later, resembling Helvetica, but breaking many typographic rules.

I'm a designer and I'm not particularly (at least not inordinately) impassioned about things like this, but I do find it important to recognize the difference between _design_ and art. It's often less about subjective preferences and more about purposeful/thoughtful solutions—in this case, what constitutes acceptable typography.
An introduction to Text-To-Speech in Android
A few years ago, I wouldn't have believed this URL would exist one day: www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Reality-Check-The-Presidential-Records-Act/
I had sex with my brother but I don't feel guilty
Microsoft poaching Apple store managers and sales staff
Correlating crashes with binary extensions or plugins
Which one should we use so that people don't feel bad due to our choice of minutely different font?
I don't see any reason you got downmodded. Maybe the slight editorial?
It comes with 512 MB RAM. Performance should be better than shared hosting
Interesting, but I stopped reading at "Sidewiki is part of Google Toolbar".
I always thought that free will is an illusion was just rhetoric from a determinist. I didn't know it was actually experimented on.
http://www.google.com/search?q=olpc+xo-2
Boalt Party Bus: Free ride, snacks, beer + wine from DC to Ignite Annapolis
This was published in Computer World on Spetember 8th (the day before this one at CIO) and linked to from here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=813368

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=820175

Significant discussion already at the first of those.

I'm not sure how the same article gets published on two sites.
Booting Linux over HTTP
I don't think people "missed the point" of the original. Rather, a lot of people prefer talking about Michael Arrington's personality instead of talking about technique in writing and communication. Essays do not come with Taser-equipped topicality guardians that electrocute you if you don't talk about what the writer thought you might talk about.
Especially if it is a whole group of he's.
Isn't this true of any OO language? I've seen former COBOL programmers write COBOL-like code in Java. As well as C-Like code in Java. Nothing stops you from having a single java class with numerous functions at the same level and static/global variables.
Doesn't remixing the article to eliminate a distraction from the main point suggest PG actually is trying to persuade with this piece?
Thanks for the reply - appreciate it - but I'm not sure what you mean by "the slight editorial". Can you elaborate?
Pakistan Building Robotic Army (TED)
For what it's worth I've never had any of the problems you've mentioned. Otherwise I wouldn't be posting such a glowing review. I think documentation + instant communication with the community is a strong point for any company as well, honestly.

But yes, as always, everyone has different needs and there is no one size fits all.
If you're going to annotate the web, please do it properly and have different layers. As in, let me select whose annotations I'd like to see. Order of importance of the annotations for me is: mine, site owner's, friends'/favourites'/bookmarked-peoples', everyone else's.

I don't understand why they flatten out the annotations and toss them into a universal dump.
The color of bike sheds has special meaning in the technical community.
Great calendar this was perfect
This has great potential for security researchers.
Also notice he had enough savings to live on for 7 months. This is important, as he had enough time to avoid rushing for immediate profitability.
Meaning, which is the higher quality font between Arial and Helvetica?

Helvetica is the winner. Geometry is much tighter, plus the kerning and hinting is far better, and you have the possibility of using the many faces in the family from ultra condensed, to wide, from light to black.
Can you elaborate on this? Are talking about the fact that some silly bugs like buffer overflows will be fixed more easily?
An alternate conclusion is that given the opportunity to discuss two ideas, where one is inflammatory and simple, and the other is abstract and nuanced, people tend towards the inflammatory. Conversations, then, are like physical systems: they tend to find the lowest energy point.
IIRC it isn't stronger than kevlar, it's roughly equal, however many of the properties of spider silk are more desirable. I believe the first is that it is more elastic than kevlar, allowing it to more easily absorb the impact of a bullet and spread the load. It is significantly more flexible than kevlar, meaning it can be used to make fully armoured bodysuits (instead of using overlapping plates), quite literally pants and jackets could be made out of it comfortably.

Spider silk also has one bonus benefit to it in that it's antiseptic, but it also supposedly binds into a wound preventing bleeding and acting as a natural gauze. This would mean that not only could it save your life by stopping the bullet, but if you got knifed you could actually use your body armour as a first aid kit.
Give a Beep and Make Streaming Audio Apps Better
Probably because they weren't done well enough to be of use (i.e. too small of a screen, terrible ui, wrong use pattern.) The use case of a book style tablet pc like this would be more akin to a moleskin on steroids. It would have a camera, internet, notes, etc.... Not too many people would use this as their primary device and if they did it would be a different use case than that of a power user.
When will people start to understand that req/s is not the full picture of how well a Comet webserver scales :/