skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Kids need adults to show them how to play? Holy crap, what are we coming to?

From the article, it sounds like we're coming to, indeed are in, a first-world industrial and information economy where we've learned that children's natural levels of executive function may not develop sufficiently, in the presence of the gadgetry available, to allow them to compete in the workplace and cope with the demands of a technological society. We're also, apparently, in a place where we think we have some idea how to intervene in what appears to be a caring and benign way to direct children's play in a direction that fosters this key cognitive function.

Far from being unexpected, this seems very natural to me. We wear clothes because we live in inclement places. We cook our food because our brains need more nutrition than raw food allows. And now we direct the play of our offspring to better equip them for their expected environment. This is no more indicative of some untenable circumstance than the fact that we don't live in huts and dig for grubs on the plains of Africa.
Those certain adjustments are "paying the devil." The "devil" being the gap between the main deck and the hull; "paying" being filling with pitch. When you are doing that, you are hanging over the side, "between the devil and the deep blue sea." When you are between the devil and the deep blue sea, paying the devil, the sails are down. Adjusting sails has nothing to do with it.
You ask me what I think of the University of Waterloo? WATFOR?
I assume you've been down voted because Chrome OS as the name implies will be an operating system (not a web page) and a cursory investigation would have revealed that. Aside from that, the structure of your sentence is awkward and further implies a lack of thought prior to clicking 'reply'.
The problem is that in-person you can use body language and tone of voice to moderate the effects of using something like, "Fuck that!" but when you're expressing yourself completely in text you are at the whim of the reader's interpretation of your words.
No, I rather see Joomla users suffer.
"coming in CS5" is misleading.

CS5.org is not run by Adobe, who haven't said anything about this being included in CS5 products.
Becoming really rich with C#
It's not every day you get a genuine "what color to paint the bike-shed" discussion :)
Lions: a photo essay by Nathan Myhrvold (2007)
http://en.gandi.net/ is wonderful.
That's not what ownership means. Ownership means that they can deny you access for whatever reason they choose, usually money.
It looks like this is going to blow USB3 out of the water.
Article's headline is misleading. Facebook was the vehicle for good old fashioned actionable offenses of the "harassment/defamation/libel/slander/whatever" flavor.
Gyroscopic wheel as a replacement for training wheels
The Health Care Cost Shifting Myth
Can you provide a link to the series, I've never seen this and would love to take a look if you have the name.
The way I remember it: this is whatever is before the dot when you call the function.

E.g. for car.drive(); in the drive function, any reference to 'this' will get 'car'. If the function is called on it's own, as in 'drive()', 'this' will refer to the Global object (bad)

It's also possible to change 'this' by using the Function.prototype.apply() method, which allows you to pass a 'context' parameter that will become 'this'.
ah, I see. +1!
I've never worked with a Canadian programmer here in Austin who graduated from anywhere but Waterloo.
Particularly interesting is the further analysis done in the comments where similar statistical methods are used to analyse other polling agencies' results. Nearly every single one seems to line up to look almost exactly like the Quinnipiac results, further damning Strategic Vision. But what interests me more is the question of exactly why this distribution comes up; it's not Benford's Law, since probabilities aren't a power-law distribution, yet it seems consistent across multiple sources.
The discussion of the trade-offs between different internal implementations of closures, continuations, and lexical scoping was enlightening.

I'd like to hear more about the specifics joys and frustrations of building this all on top of the CLR. Are there any plans to compile down into .Net assemblies?
Sounds like an awesome idea. Having practical examples would really help hammer the ideas into your head as well.

I'm glad that people think the idea is good. There is so much goodness in SICP (I only read halfway through it). I really think adding some external context like your suggestion kind of brings new life into the discussion. A lot of the concepts in the book are ageless, and it's instructive that we are still making the same mistakes today!
> Is that better?

No, it's about the same.

It's not a problem with hiding/showing scores/hints, it is a fundamental problem with the voting model. As it stands, the process of voting is meant to re-balance the discussion tree to make it more interesting to an average reader.

IMO what makes more sense is to use votes to determine the preferences of an individual specific reader. If I keep voting up posts by a user X, then in all likelihood I will be more interesting in X's posts in the future. The same goes for downvotes. Additionally if X votes up Y's posts, then I may also be interested in Y's posts as well.

Lastly, the up/down voting score for a specific post is going to be equivalent to the score under existing model, and that can be used to sort posts for anonymous or uninitiated users.

PS. This is not a trivial change and it is a lot of work. I realize that.
Hopefully this means we can standardize data exchange on something like Ethernet so that if some faster technology is invented on the physical layer, it would be easy to upgrade. This scenario is what Bonjour is made for. Imagine plugging in any peripheral into any port. The peripheral would automatically assign itself an IP address with zeroconf, assign itself a name with mDNS, and advertise its capabilities through services discovery, all without requiring a DHCP server or DNS server. The backside of your computer would be one power port and a whole bunch of Light Peak ports. No more fudging around with USB, FireWire, BlueTooth, DisplayPort, DVI, VGA, all of which are incompatible with each other but do the same task of moving data around.

Here's an excellent (but long) video on this topic:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7398680103951126462
Is this supposed to be Ruby?

class HotDog:
condiments
def getCondiments
return @condiments // @ is a reference to the current instance of HotDog.
end
end
Right now, only PG.

But there were times I remember some people by name when certain discussions were going on.

I can remember some usernames when I see. and mixmax I can remember you :) for some reason.

PS: And If we had avatars on HN, things will be far different. But anyway HN is better this way IMHO.
Great Userscript for HN: HN Toolkit
Just wanted to make the members of the HN community who didn't already know about this great userscript aware of it's existence. It lets you save stories, integrates a search bar, and view stories in split view, among other useful features.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039
Orange? Apparently PG sees it red :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846123
I went to Waterloo - not for CS but for Systems Design Engineering. I very much enjoyed my time there in Engineering and now have a great job doing primarily web development in Django for a company involved in Green Buildings.

I agree with other posters that you learn a lot, potentially more, outside of classes than in them, but disagree that Waterloo has a poor quality of campus life. There are a ton of things going on if you look for them at Waterloo, and it's not a commuter school so there are a lot of people on campus.

The one thing I cannot stress enough is the value of the co-op program at Waterloo. I didn't realize until my fifth co-op job that this was going to be the only time in my life where I could switch jobs every four months without looking like a quack who couldn't hold a job. I got to see a bunch of different industries (Telecommunications, Power Generation, Green Building and term in Ghana, West Africa with Engineers Without Borders Canada) without making long term commitments to any of them. Not many other schools provide that kind of experience.

Good luck with your choices! Not an easy one to make.
That's actually a really good idea, but it seems a little heavy for a 4-year-old.
Don't watch it.
Regarding the trend: I think they're trying to kill two birds with one stone: they don't have to pay a web designer and they're part of a social networking. The last one helps them promote their music and keep in touch with their fans.

Btw, some MySpace pages look good enough/decent, at least when compared to full blown sites which don't offer too much info and are also implemented 100% in Flash.
Now I know where the term Y Combinator came from. Am I the only ignorant one here who had never heard of "The Applicative Order Y Combinator"?

JavaScript:

function Y(le)
{
return (function (f)
{
return f(f);
}
(function (f)
{
return le(function (x)
{
return f(f)(x);
});
}));
}

Trippy recursive function, but I don't think I quite understand what you would use it for. ;)
Just launched. I signed in and there was no one in my area yet. Looks slick, though. Hope it catches on. Facebook on its own might be an alright dating site, except for the fact that people don't expect to be solicited there, so Gelato is providing a valuable service.
Reinforcing the average makes good sense if your goal is to keep the community aligned, rather than simply please the widest array of readers.
Don't think optical can carry power though, so would need a separate power port or a hybrid port for devices.
Scheme: Developing a Memcached Client
Haskell success story
Yep, total minimum cost of all curves is what I did. I did it in Matlab, something I don't know much about at all, so it is definitely not optimized.
This article does a good job of explaining a concept I had trouble with when first using javascript. Now, I usually use the approach recommended in the article of setting a private variable (e.g. self, or my) to the current value of 'this' in a javascript class.

However, I think the article is slightly incorrect on one minor point. It states, "this wants to be window whenever possible, which is not always what you want." I believe the correct description is: the 'this' variable in a function called in response to an event on dom object is set to that dom object. For the example given in the article, this is set to the window object because setTimeout causes an event on window to fire, not because there's any inherent preference for the window object.
With newspapers suffering so much, it's refreshing to see a blogger taking the time to perform investigations like this. We need more of this.
I just downloaded Need For Speed: Undercover for phone, and I must say it is every bit as addicting as it is on Xbox 360. It has a career mode, multiple cars to be unlocked and upgraded, and a whole city's worth of tracks. Considering that more and more people are carrying smartphones, it makes sense that we're seeing the move away from console gaming.
There a a few I know from blogs and irc (raganwald, knowtheory, for example). More, I suspect, but I have to see them to recognize them :)

Oddly, though, I don't think I'd recall a name because that person had made good points in previous posts. Not sure why that is.

I read stuff, think, Oh, that's a good point, maybe reply, most likely up-vote, but don't seem to stash the user name any place in memory. Perhaps that's a good thing, as I don't start assuming anything about a post because of name recognition.

Yet on most mailing lists I do tend, over time, to make note of who is offering useful content. Go figure.
Why Concentration in the Banking Industry Threatens Our Economy
My sense has been newspapers have been suffering so much because they don't take the time to perform investigations like this. This is hardly the only example with the Acorn videos quite recently for instance. We do definitely need more of this.
Thanks for linking to the video. I'm 10mins in and loving it.
A successful strategy is to contact as many women as possible. Since women tend to be more picky than guys, let's remove the ability for guys to initiate contact. Now we have the eligible bachelor database, and there's no excuse for a lack of good guys, because they're all listed. Guys don't have to even visit the site except to edit their profile, and messages are forwarded to email.

I like the Facebook integration, because it will really cut down on the spam and speed up building the profile.
A true statistics hacker. I love reading his analysis--he was the go to source during the election for anything poll related.
I've been using name.com for a little while and they are very good. Free private whois too.
I was thinking along the lines of their decline in ad/classified revenue-which is used to fund their investigative journalism. Are you saying the quality of old media investigations has declined independently?
That's a good point, but it should be possible to have a hybrid cable--carrying power and the optical data.
Simons is worth several billions ($10 billion perhaps?) and the number of mathematicians with at least 3 articles in the Annals of Mathematics cannot be huge (1000 perhaps?). I am pretty sure that was what Simons was getting at. Seeing your smiley, I assume you knew that too!
In fact, one of the "latest snippets posted" is a work-around for that problem:

Search DjangoSnippets with Firefox

http://www.djangosnippets.org/snippets/1730/
It's more common than you might think. It comes up every time you design a website, brochure, and many other products created everyday.
I remember a few usernames of famous people, people that I know in some way, directly or indirectly, 99% of usernames are new to me every time I read one. This means that basically I (and IMHO most of the HN guys) tend to vote comments mainly by comment quality. Still I believe that it is very hard to avoid to be biased in some way by the ability to read the current comment score.
This guy is going to lose all his money.
sorry, that was typed up pretty quickly, and I'm not a rubyist... care to correct it?
Hahaha. Yeah. Oh, watch out for namesecure.com, its actually NetworkSolutions but with even crappier user experience.
F# adopted by Credit Suisse Global Modelling and Analytics team
There is indeed a preference for window (really the global) object. Try these:

<script>
alert(this == window);
function foo() {
alert(this == window);
}
foo();
</script>

|this| is basically a magical variable that by default is set to the global object, but can also be set by the caller of a function one of two ways:

a) by setting a reference to the function on an object, and calling it with object or bracket notation:
var someObj = {};
someObj.f = theFunction;
someObj.f(); // now |this| inside theFunction will
// point to someObj
someObj["f"](); // same thing

b) by using apply:
theFunction.apply(someObj);

You are right that in the case of event handlers, it is common in the DOM for event handlers to get their |this| set to the DOM node that fired the event. Since the default value of |this| is the global object, it isn't possible in the case of setTimeout for us to tell whether the caller (the host) explicitly set it, or if the function is being called without any value set for |this|.

Basically, |this| is an extra parameter to any function. It is controlled by the caller, and as such, should either be documented as part of the signature of the function, or else should not be relied on by the implementation of the function.

The common misunderstanding with people new to JS is that they expect |this| to be controlled by the callee, like it is in lots of other popular languages, and are surprised when calling convention can change its value.
So in 2012 can we be expecting iphone (as cpu) > 10Gbps > Keyboard Video Mouse Network?
That was a bit inexact. It's kind of a hard point to generalize, I gave it another go.
BTW, imo, the behavior of |this| is a really unfortunate design flaw of JS. The amount of time that must have been spent learning and teaching this edge case over and over to every person new to the language is ... well, it's big.
Those who know anything about JavaScript know that JavaScript WAS Scheme (plus Self). And then Brendan Eich was forced to adopt C style syntax because of the impending popularity of Java.
The dot actually kind of hurts the eyes. . . among all that gray, those little dots are almost distracting. Something a little less loud perhaps that could blend into the overall visual scheme? Smaller dot; gray or silver?
Most kiddie bikes are pretty heavy already since they're usually made of cheap steel -- heavier than some adult bikes, I doubt the kid would lug it around anyway.
Oh god no, Firewire is a particularly bad example of a keyed port.

When implemented cheaply using a split flanged socket, the plug can easily be pushed in backwards, spreading the flanges. Apple learned pretty quickly what a terrible idea that was, and switched to a design where there's a hard ABS ring inset in the aluminum exterior case. Unfortunately every other manufacturer continued with the shitty design.

On top of that, the power supply is 12v/1A, and is carried on one of the outside pins! If you shove it in backwards, power gets connected to data and fries the board. They should have used the central pins for power and ground.

I've personally seen at least a dozen cases of fried Firewire ports, including several epidemics where someone would fry ports on several computers using one bad device.
These were they guys back in the day, what they could do with an 8bit system was amazing. Sort of sad they do not offer up their old posters, fliers and software for the apple as downloads to those who are into emulation.
What's with these NYT fluff pieces where startup gurus tell their "story"?

While TechCrunch gets knocked for various shortcomings, the NYT sure doesn't seem to be trying hard with regards to tech startup coverage.
Silliness. A community far too self-aware.

By the way, suppressing these metrics is pointless. We are intelligent people who notice the difference between two comments with very similar upvotes and one that far outpaces the other and find these proportions to be of interest. The new portrayal of comment rankings keeps interesting information from users and will end up stunting the community's progress. If you're just trying to ward off users, maybe remove the nav and make the site even slower.

There are far more interesting ways to differentiate. I'd like to see this site be as light and fast as possible (would appeal to our hacker ethic) and allow users to customize the hell out of it given knowledge of Arc or similar (good chance to promote your language as well).
The trouble with the Acorn videos is that they're a partisan attempt to discredit the opposition. While the videos themselves seem legit, I'd rather not leave exposes of political groups up to their political enemies. Political enemies only want to discredit their opponents--they're not interested in truth, and for every Acorn video there's a Swift Boat smear campaign with no basis in fact.
What happened to it? Tracking it on linked in seems that it closed its doors in April 2001. Archive.org has web site still there in 2002.

"... What moves stocks ..." the average investor still wants to know. I've launched WhoMovedMyStock.com a year ago here on hacker news, seems to be very similar in concept.
USB's simplistic interrupt-driven host-client nature makes it unbelievably awful for mass storage or streaming data.

Those same qualities make it terrific for cheap human input devices.
Logicomix - A Comic Book About Logic, Math and Madness - Review
Isn't it premature to call it a Standard? Apple may have pushed Intel to work on it but getting it adopted as a standard is gonna take time.
hopefully, it wont last too long. The experiment with orange dot will fail and we will have comment score back.
Would you say that the GameBoy connector (on which the FireWire one is based) is a better design in that respect?
I googled it and found almost nothing about what came of the startup. That is really interesting considering some of the high-profile people involved like David Shaw, Andreas Weigend, Richard Thaler
The schmuck can't "turn over" the data and there's no conceivable way to verify that he deleted it, so this scenario just puts the blame on him if any of that data ever leaks and there's nothing he can do about it.

Also, I'm no legalologist, but I don't see how the rights of the bank's customers are being violated. Their agreement with the bank has been severely breached, but that's between them and the bank. Violating the schmuck's fundamental rights to correct someone else's mistake doesn't seem very balanced to me.
Not sure you've got your facts right on the swiftboating campaign: http://www.pajamasmedia.com/instapundit-archive/archives/017... (Glenn Reynolds isn't a conservative - nor am I). That being said, I don't know that you're right about the nature of the Acorn videos (though I would agree that they were ultimately used by partisans) - but even if you are, you seem to assume that journalists don't have some type of agenda (Jayson Blair, Dan Rather or even as far back as Pulitzer prize winner Walter Duranty).

On the other side of it, I'm not sure your concerns that false partisan attacks will win the day are justified - look at the "birthers" who have been thoroughly discredited and marginalized (ie the ones who claim Obama wasn't born on American soil).

At least with respect to Acorn, it has had a slew of scandals plague them and yet various levels of the US government had continued to trust them with rather important tasks - e.g. help at the IRS, census, etc.. In my view these were far worse offenses than the 'entrapment' that brought them down. There is no reason that larger media outlets shouldn't have pursued this story themselves - after all - the cost even of putting out the Acorn story was less than five thousand dollars. Meanwhile, supposedly reputable outlets like the NYT had trouble covering the story until the Obama Administration and Congress began to react and cut funding and ties to Acorn.

I'm all for disclosure. Let's be open to criticism/investigations from anyone and everyone and let them be judged on their merits.
Web site: http://www.logicomix.com/
You are referring to the wrong definition of "standard". The article is referring to a "technical standard", not an "industry standard".

edit: unless you just mean that the approval process for the standard will take time.
This was from a class for students in the UCSD "Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts" major. Presumably this was very on-topic for that class. In any case, it's hilarious!
I can't take a web site seriously when they have locally-hosted animated GIF ads.
Nice to see this made it out of the prototype stage:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9rSZ4-l3lo

Same guy, 2 years ago.
Interesting that Credit Suisse has already been using F# for a while even though it is not even "officially" part of MS's Visual Studio package yet.

(F# is an implementation of OCaml on the .NET CLR developed by the Cambridge Research Lab)
The WSJ runs an online column called "Best of the Web". Granted, it slants conservative (which again, I am not - but it does poke fun at various media outlets/stories) but have a look at his point on the lack of coverage by the NYT on the issues facing the current Obama Administration: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020448830457443...

I don't know if investigative journalism has declined independently. What I do think however is that there is far more investigative journalism happening outside of traditional media outlets which has made traditional media outlets considerably less important. For this reason, and the pervasive view that the media is biased (as many journalists themselves even admit on the Pew poll), I think they've seen readerships decline - and rightfully so.