skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I certainly think working in terms of expected utility is sensible. But the person I was replying to didn't argue in terms of expectations, and it's not obviously mandatory to think in those terms. (For instance, you might assign more or less importance to very low-probability events than expected utility maximization would suggest. If you do that, then in the very very long run you lose; but none of us is likely to live that long, and I don't think it's clear that "if you live for a million years and consistently do X, then you can be Dutch-booked" is much of an argument against doing X.) So I didn't put my argument in terms of expectations, and I don't think it depends on using expectations.
Certainly they weren't "famous". Their blog Signal vs. Noise was not that special a blog at the time, not even close to the biggest. I don't think I'd even call it "A-list", at the time.
Awesome idea. It sounds a lot like the 'Think and Grow Rich', in which the author (can't remember his name),sought to find and write about the common traits among successfule people at the time. Updating the idea for entrepreneurs, particularly for the sw industry, could be an interesting read.
Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker discuss evolution, language and Darwin
He's talking about criminal case penalties. Aren't all the big $ penalties from civil court damages? Jammie Thomas's was.

The US family median net worth is <$100k, so what does it matter if it's $150k or $150m? Isn't the net effect bankruptcy either way?

Criminal penalties are far worse for individuals: similar effective monetary penalties PLUS possible loss of rights and freedoms.
I'm not at all. I'm simply saying that the most driven people will go whereever they think gives them the most advantage.
Naming Leopard's successor Snow Leopard implies that optimization and refinement, not reinvention, has taken place. That's exactly what happened. The OS was not "stripped-down" as much as improved; there are plenty of enhancements under the hood, one of which is better facility for network installation of OS components (hence the smaller footprint). So I consider Snow Leopard a good name.

A pedantic tech writer who fancies himself a feline biologist might disagree.

This is a terrible blog post.
Hiring hackers (part 2)
"cattus domesticus"
Future of the Screen: Terminator-Style Augmented-Reality Glasses
Even as a git user I'd second that (blasphemy).

Git is the "real deal" but it also has a ridiculous learning curve when it comes to using it right (i.e. never commit to the master branch directly) and many sharp edges to frustrate you.

Start with svn or mercurial to get a feel for what it's all about. You can always step up to git when they don't cut it anymore.
Panzer don't mean panther, it means shell. Schildkrötenpanzer is a turtle's shell.
The U.S. would never allow this to happen because then U.S. citizens would be able to invest in equities in someplace like Hong Kong and pay much lower taxes. It would be very nice if this happened.
A lottery ticket is your best shot at riches:
False. Sadly, this isn't the no-brainer that it should be.
...Consider this: If you take that $150 a year and put it into a 401(k) or IRA at age 30, you'll have $28,000 by age 65, assuming a reasonable 8% rate of return

And $28k in the year 2037 (Age 65 for me) will buy you a round of golf. I play the lottery because it is the easiest way to get rich and, for me, $2/week is worth it.

Tell me another way you can become a millionaire with a dollar and no effort.
As a 30 something man with corporate career, a wife, child, house and mortgage I say do it. Do it now before you have something to lose.
Doing something like what you're propose, you may find a life path that you could never of dreamed of.
also, check out the life story Napolean Hill. He made a life out of writing about successful people...
CKEditor 3.0, formerly known as FCKEditor, released (WYSIWYG editor)
Uh? Apart from the Panther and the Tiger, none of the OSX releases matches a WWII panzer name. The Leopard I was introduced in '65 (and the Leopard II in '79), the Jaguars are either tank destroyers (introduced in '78) or fast attack boats (introduced in '58), the Puma is a not-yet-released infantry-fighting vehicle, and I haven't found any german war machine named "cheetah". That's 2 out of 6…
You're right, it won't: http://mashable.com/2009/08/26/ocho-cinco-tweets/
100% yes.

I've never found myself thinking "I wish I didn't have that version from before that big last change" but I have thought the opposite.
Ocelot would also be a good name.
"Armour" is a better translation I think.

More detail: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panzer#Etymology
We might be forced to put aside 2 weeks learning a new database

More like 2 days, likely less. Unless you're using MySQL specific functionality (fulltext index?) or rely on MySQL specific bugs there shouldn't be much of a transition to speak of.

(I'm ofcourse assuming you have at most one MySQL host in production and not terabytes of data to re-import...)
Well, you could pronunce the first one as "Ecks" which I think is the obvious, yet officially incorrect, response to someone unaware of the background.
Totally get you and you're totally right. I wish things like demo day existed when I was funding my company. Would have saved me from talking to 200+ investors over a 10 month time span.
Puma's already been used (10.1), Lion is unlikely (there's a bit too much mystique behind it).

They could probably expand their "big cat" selection to e.g. leopardus (Ocelot, Margay), the Serval, the Caracal, the Jaguarundi (a cousin of the cougar), …
Awesome is Not a Business Model
Won't last. The NFL will come to its senses soon enough. After all, the NFL isn't popular because of the games themselves, it's popular because of what it really is: gossip for men. The beat writers don't understand the game, the announcers certainly don't understand the game, hell, half the coaches don't understand the game.

But what are NFL fans really interested in? Who's injured. Who has the best statistics. Who's on the schedule? Can we get a good seat at the sports bar? What's the spread in the game? Who's dating a hot model? Did T.O. fart today? How's my fantasy team doing? (Honestly, go to any sports bar on a Sunday afternoon and see how many guys are watching 5 games at once just to see how their individual players are doing.)

When the players go on strike and unknown replacements play, no one cares. Fans care about the players and all their exploits, on the field and off. Twitter would be the perfect addition to the media phenomenon that the NFL has already become. Guys who pay $200 for seats, $100 for a day at the sports bar, and gamble away all their discretionary income will salivate over tweets. It's only a matter of time.
I understand your enthusiasm for Rugby Union, an awesome game. But you will never see me calling an NFL player a "pantywaist" or "overpaid", even in jest:

http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/people/8419.html

The level of angst that players live with was shocking. It’s something I’ve never seen in baseball or basketball. In football, everything is compressed. You enter the league right out of college; there are no minor leagues or places where you can apprentice. It’s 90 guys in the locker room fighting for 50 jobs. And the physical nature of the sport means that even if you make it, you’re looking at an average career of three years.

By the same author: http://www.slate.com/id/2200305/?from=rss

Professional football is an absurd proposition. Players collide, physicist Timothy Gay reports, with a force equivalent to the weight of a small adult killer whale. Injuries are constant, and players live with the knowledge that they may wind up crippled, depressed, or with Alzheimer's disease in their 50s. Coaches are merciless jerks. Contracts aren't guaranteed; you can be fired any minute. The media say a lot but know little. Fans scream and curse. The surprise isn't that a player like Quinn Pitcock quits the NFL. It's that it doesn't happen more often. "When I tell people that I left after five years on my own, you should see the looks on their faces," says Ed Cunningham, an offensive lineman with the Arizona Cardinals and Seattle Seahawks from 1992-'96 who's now a college-football analyst for ESPN. "Well, hey, man, it sucked. It was not fun. And oh, by the way, I was getting beaten up every single day at work."

With the possible exception of a few top-shelf quarterbacks and receivers, NFL players are indentured servants. Their whole lives are circumscribed by their employers and coaches. (Now they aren't even allowed to use Twitter, for god's sake.) And, though you don't always see the evidence onscreen, every single one of those players is sacrificing decades of their futures -- their brains, their joints, their very lives -- in order to entertain you.
Firstly they ask me to create a Google account, then they ask me to register, including giving all sort of details such as my address and gender, and I get partway through the process and just can't be bothered. I've proved I'm a human, why do they need all this other information?

If I don't win, they don't need to contact me. If I do win, I can prove who I am. Don't make me go through all this crap up front just to what it's all about. I can't bring myself to care.

It's been said over and over before - the same thing goes for your web site. If you want people to visit, don't create barriers. If you want them to participate, don't create barriers. If you want a dialog, make it clear why it's worth participating.

Interesting to see Google think it doesn't apply to them.
LG Chocolate Black
LG Chocolate Sink your teeth into the luxury and innovation of the Chocolate by LG. With its minimalist–inspired style and silky–smooth slide design, the Chocolate offers a rich array of features. Features include V CAST Music capability, glowing touch–sensitive navigation keys
Your user name is aptly chosen.
The Making of The Beatles: Rock Band
One of the most interesting things I have read in a while, thanks!
Why should lions get 15 hours a night and giraffes just 5...

Lions are carnivores who eat huge amount of raw meat intermittently. They need lots of rest to save energy to digest that meat.

Giraffes are herivores who must continuously eat just to get enough calories. They don't have much time to sleep.

What's so difficult to understand?
I have a funny story about Dropbox which happened two weeks ago. I have a friend who has been running a travel business for about 6 years. During that time, I've hosted her website, email, etc...for $5/month. I've also spent quite a bit of time upgrading her website with each release of the CMS, customizing things and doubling her disk space 3 times (for free) as her email ate up disk space.

Needless to say, I was losing on this deal. So, one day she emails me and asks how much a server would cost. In an effort to save her money, I ask her why she needs a dedicated server. Her response was, "To share files with a new part-time helper." OK, so you sure don't need a dedicated server for that and I recommended that she try Dropbox and if she doesn't like it, let me know and I'll spec out a server for her if that is what she really wants.

A week later she asks me to give her the login details for her account so she can move her email and files over to a new server. Surprised, I ask her what provider and how much she's paying. She signed a 13 month contract with a no-name, 1 person company for $750/month. Oh, and he's not hosting the website...just files and email, so I get to keep managing that.

Lessons learned:

1) I'm apparently charging WAY too little for services rendered.

2) Don't break your neck helping people for nothing, expecting some kind of return later.

3) Don't recommend Dropbox (j/k)
.. or "I'm still not sure I do"?
True, I called the qualification round the first round. I expect to fail the first round (I think there is only 2h time to solve the problem?).
Microsoft rejects call to fix SQL password-exposure risk
anybody interested should probably consider hakmem, too.
http://inwap.com/pdp10/hbaker/hakmem/hakmem.html

and probably alan mycrofts more useful c-interpretation:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~am21/hakmemc.html
Typically the lotteries' website will have who has won what from which scratch off.
What Wall Street and nature have in common
plus in construction, if you're late, you ARE penalized - I don't think there's a prevalence of such clauses in the tech industry
I'm guessing cocky isn't either, so the author may want to try something else.

I have most definitely paid people for being awesome. I'm a big fan of "Donate" buttons.
Startup Idea!

An extremely small proportion of file-sharers get stuck with massive fines. Illegal file-sharing insurance?
cheetah = Gepard

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flugabwehrkanonenpanzer_Gepard

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gepard-Klasse
It seems to me that the issue here is that storing in plain text allows an attacker to learn the passwords of users - and many users re-use the same password for many resources. So while Microsoft has a point about a compromised installation is already gone - this issue creates further vulnerability for an organization running the software.
Another related bit twiddling resource: http://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html.

The comments accompanying the code are interesting too.
It looks (to someone who has not done any of the necessary research to draw any real, useful conclusions) that they are proposing a balance of sorts. You are safest (in this theory) when sleeping. You are likely holed up some where, hidden from view, and relatively non-moving because you are unconscious. To cope with the inherent danger of being unconscious, you are especially alert to particular sounds which may signal a coming attack. While awake, you are out, moving around, and under danger of being attacked by a predator. However, there must be a balance between the two, because there are certain things you must do to keep living (find food, eat, create shelter for the next sleep period). Its seems fairly reasonable that there is a balance point in there some place, and that it would be different based on each animal, depending on the habits of not only their prey and predators, but also how much food they must bring into their body, what kind of shelter their environment requires for sleep, and all sort of other factors.
School kids measure distance to the Moon
Re the penultimate answer, inkscape has a shared whiteboard facility, never used it though.
How can people thing this big? I could never even think about such a service. I would be afraid. How do I keep up with free disk space, crashed, backups? I could never do it.
An exercise I use as the start of a math masterclass is to calculate the distance to the moon using a pendulum and a calendar. The answer is remarkably close to the one obtained by these kids using recordings from the Apollo missions.

If NASA really did fake the Moon landings, they did a bloody good job!

If you want to know how to calculate the distance, let me know and I'll write something about it.
The best upgrade for my Flash experience on Mac: http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/
Using Ruby Blocks And Rolling Your Own Iterators
I'll give this 10% of a thought the day you can subscribe to a twitter feed and not have it delivered via RSS...

Is twitter a new feed reader? Sure for some people, but is it replacing RSS as a delivery format? heck no.
Quite right. Here is a tutorial covering some of the basic tools.

http://software-carpentry.org/

I'd go so far as to say that every developer should know everything on this page, or at least some substitute (e.g. mercurial instead of svn, ruby or c instead of python).
Ask HN: Is there Hacker News archive ?
I was wondering if there is a way to browse every post that appeared on Hacker News ? An archive page of some sort.

Currently it is kind of possible by changing id in the thread's url :

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2
...
Would you be so kind and create a public archive of YC applications (with of course the applicant's consent) for us to mull over?

Regardless whether you oblige or not, all those applications, all those admitted (and rejected) to the YC, and the life-time of their startup or, if they're fortunate enough, the state of their startup would serve a most interesting entry-point for an essay.
Sounds like a target for some startup to topple.
Cool, I wish I could take part in YC too.
The reason why I said "SQL:2008" is that that's the dialect specifically mentioned in this example, which I believe is Fetter's: http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set . It may well be that earlier versions of SQL are also Turing-complete; I haven't followed the evolution of SQL anything like closely enough to know.
I've only bought one lottery ticket in my life, and that was when I just turned 18 (try out these new privileges!) I had bought one of the $1 scratch offs. It was a Winner too!! I won $1, when i got my $1 the person asked if i wanted to buy another... I replied, but I already won! Then bought a stick of beef jerky, which I remember as being delicious.
Wow, they claim to have had more than 3.5 million downloads since 2003. I have never even heard of this editor before.

Does anyone here use it?
Absolutely learn it now. I suggest reading "Pragmatic Version Control Using Git" (Subversion & CVS editions also available), from The Pragmatic Programmers. Excellent book. Short & straightforward.
TCS to hire 25,000 employees this year
This is clearly absurd. While revisions of patent law are certainly needed, and while Trevor Baylis may have a point that the current legal system is, due to the cost of litigation, unfairly skewed towards large companies, criminal law is a thoroughly inappropriate way to pursue patent violators.

The BBC [1] ran a similar article yesterday and included some responses from members of the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys, which I have excerpted below.

But the defenders of the present system say changing the law may not be the
right answer.

Patents can be extremely complex things and the criminal law is simply too
blunt an instrument to use when disputes arise.

Peter Jackson is a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys.

"First of all you've got to decide whether the patent covers the thing
properly", he says.

"And having done that you've got to decide whether what the alleged
infringer is up to falls within that strict wording.

"That can take days and weeks and months of deliberation by highly skilled
lawyers, and I'm not sure the criminal system is well-suited to that kind of
action."

Other members of the institute are more forthright.

One calls the idea of criminalising patent infringement "barking mad".

...

"Honest, decent people running reputable businesses infringe patents. They
might not know the patent exists, or their patent attorney might have told
them it was invalid or not infringed."

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8232130.stm
It's a joke. Sorry.
SQL:2008 is a language. MS SQL Server 2005 is an implementation, which includes some extensions to the SQL language (notably "T-SQL", use at that link). To me, at least, it's much more surprising to find that the official SQL language is Turing-complete than that someone's implemented proprietary extensions that make it so. Your mileage may vary.
I'm not sure moving from hg -> git would be a "step up". It would be a lateral move at best.
Used it for ages, it worked better than TinyMCE back in the early days (though I think they're probably equal now.)

Interestingly, I swear FCK was the creator's initials - I wonder if the app's name change is a reflection of a name change on his behalf? ;)
Yes, we do at www.bharatmoms.com and of all the rich text editors(js based) we tried, this worked out to be the best.
It's fairly popular as a "drop-in" wysiwyg editor in custom-made CMSes, afaik.
I'm very pleased with the accessibility improvements. Not just because it's the right thing to do, but it means that building interactive sites where accessibility is a project requirement will be a lot easier.
Augmented Reality, Steve Mann style

http://wearcam.org/industrial_design/
It would help if they didn't use the word salvaged (i.e. rescued -- like a baby seal.) It's reuse, people.
please, would you do me the favor of catching these printout-droppers and whacking them over the head for me?

if my school and work didn't interfere, i'd try the 28-hour day... http://xkcd.com/320/

also: http://xkcd.com/571/
your chance of winning the lottery by buying tickets is approximately the same as your chances of winning the lottery without buying a ticket (still non-zero).
Another great resource for tidbits like this is _Hacker's Delight_, by Henry S. Warren, Jr. It covers a number of other tricks outside of bit twiddling, as well. Worth checking out for anyone who finds this sort of stuff fascinating.

Link: http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Delight-Henry-S-Warren/dp/0201...
Could be implemented as contracts in a prediction market.
I think your problem is that you are trying to make it behave like a Linux machine. If you're going to live in Rome, you'll have a better time of it if you learn to speak Italian.

And the fact that the list has multiple editors isn't saying that you need to use all of them. It means that there are several very good editors and that you should choose one based on your needs / preferences.

I agree that you should choose one, use for all your editing and learn it inside and out. Personally, I just use Visual Studio for everything.
It also took me awhile to code the correct algorithm for B. I ended up with 60 lines of Python code, and 2 hours :/

All in all, this year's qualification round is much easier than the last's. No real algorithmic challenges, just boring debugging.
Point of order: Standardised termsheets are not the answer for startups
fckeditor code was such a pain to explore, hopefully this complete rewrite solves those problems. we use it over tinymce at work because of the free upload addons.
Jerome Siegel, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, argues that sleep evolved to optimize animals’ use of time, keeping them safe and hidden when the hunting, fishing or scavenging was scarce and perhaps risky.

IIRC a character from "Beggars in Spain" (a Nancy Kress novella that she later expanded into a trilogy) makes a similar argument for why her clever genetic hack for creating children who never need to sleep will have no negative side effects. It seemed like an audacious handwave when I read it; I had no idea it had the backing of a Real Scientist.
There is a “notes on the new name” section on the linked article:

“For years we have been fighting with a relatively important issue with FCKeditor. While its quality has been strongly accepted, its name brought us troubles, mainly inside English speaking countries. The fact is that the initials of Frederico Caldeira Knabben have an unfortunate match with the most used English bad word.”
I think the name is very appropriate. Snow Leopard is a "feature freeze" Leopard.
Reading lists: any suggested additions?
What do you propose as a better metric for decision-making? Or are you from the "if it saves only one child then it's worth it" school of thought?
First problem is that you'd have to put up quite a bit of capital as loss reserves. Then you have to worry about people who buy your insurance taking on extra risks now that they're insured against the costs. Finally, the RIAA/MPAA would do whatever it took to get your client list, then sue all of them, bankrupting you.
Whenever I need to do bit manipulations, I always check the Linux kernel source. I figure that any bit manipulation I'd ever want to do is also done in the kernel, and I'm usually right:

http://miller.cs.wm.edu/lxr3.linux/http/source/include/linux...

http://miller.cs.wm.edu/lxr3.linux/http/source/include/linux...

http://miller.cs.wm.edu/lxr3.linux/http/source/lib/bitmap.c?...
Characteristics of Great Companies