skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People have been saying that for 30 years.

It's not. Not yet. We get closer each year, but we are not there yet, not by a longshot.
I actually tend to trust non-round numbers. Like 9, or 17. It indicates to me that author didn't try to fit the ideas to a number, but actually thought things through and came up with the number after the essay was written
Until the power goes out.
Uh,

You mean the manufacturer won't take steps without a call from the police?

Oh really, you mean they follow the law? and they won't let someone shut off someone else's machine just 'cause they've got some information on it???

I suppose the writer of this article also upset that it's illegal to set lethal booby traps for the purpose of 'protecting your property' too.

Come now, it's not hard to file a police report, even after the fact. The police should be the ones who have to call to get this kind of action and if they aren't calling, they are the ones at fault.

The alternative is a huge open door for social engineering...
No, 2^equations.
bc it sux

On a related note, here's how to abuse the concept of URL shorteners in order to produce messages in which embedding a URL costs zero additional characters:

http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/steganographic-typo-based-ur...
1. Remove Facebook from my bookmarks toolbar
2. Restrict myself to one time-leeching website (HN, Stack Overflow, Google Reader) open at any given time
3. Keep IM, IRC, and Twitter in a separate space so that I have control of when I see updates.
I've been gradually building an app to help me do a form of time-boxing. Plus have about 5 different ways to set reminders for myself.

One thing I got from the the Getting Things Done universe is that having a reliable way to offload notes, thoughts, plans, etc. is essentially, because it means you can safely forget about stuff. That allows for better focus on whatever it is you decide to do right now.

I wrote about some of my CLI todo/tasks/bugs hacks here: http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/posts/jamesbritt/James_wil...
Wow.

I don't live in the US, but I've traveled around... your comment about immigration comes out of left field. If there's any generalization to be made, it's that immigrant families tend to be more motivated to achieve something.

Maybe my view is just as skewed as yours, but I wouldn't look at immigrants as the main source/cause of unskilled labor in the US.
I think one of the most difficult things about this to manage politically is actually the reconciliation of http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html with the comparatively pedantic, very detail-oriented and exacting household maintenance methodologies of most women, and the expectations they have for you to participate.
"Software sold under the Sentry and FamilySafe brands can read private chats conducted through Yahoo, MSN, AOL and other services, and send back data on what kids are saying about such things as movies, music or video games."

If it can do that it can send back whole conversations as well, but the software company 'does not record childrens names or addresses' ??

They ought to be made an example of if this is true.

"In June, EchoMetrix unveiled a separate data-mining service called Pulse that taps into the data gathered by Sentry software to give businesses a glimpse of youth chatter online. While other services read publicly available teen chatter, Pulse also can read private chats. It gathers information from instant messages, blogs, social networking sites, forums and chat rooms."

Heads should really roll over this one, they get you to pay to be able to sell your kids chat logs. It's absolutely disgusting.

Parents installing such software should take note that it is better to invest in educating your kids than it is to invest in software to police your kids.

If your children are old enough to be online unsupervised then you have to educate them to the point where they are capable of dealing with that responsibility without you or a digital sentry looking over their shoulder all the time.

It's all about trust.
I think CK's reply just put me off for good from taking the time to try out his patches:

/me sees Ingo run off to find the right combination of hardware and benchmark to prove his point.

[snip lots of bullshit meaningless benchmarks showing how great cfs is and/or how bad bfs is, along with telling people they should use these artificial benchmarks to determine how good it is, demonstrating yet again why benchmarks fail the desktop]

So, to paraphrase: BFS is vastly superior, but not in any way that you can actually measure.

Con made a valuable contribution back when the choice was between staircase-deadline and the old mainline O(1) scheduler, but he's since turned himself into a crank.
> 0.08, 0.02, 0.01

What kind of 'production' is that ?
I dunno what you consider reliable, but I don't trust git in the slightest. 3rd link down on a quick google search shows an august 2009 date (1st 2 links are both from 2006 on the git mailing list):

http://pastebin.ca/1549372

I've had git fuck with my code/data one too many times to fully trust it.
A more interesting list would be for say ranking countries by there fastest internet available at say under $100 a month. I'd say the US would be very competitive on offerings? Just that the vast majority of the population probably wouldn't want to pay the extra or don't have the option in remote area?
There was for a time a program on UK TV (BBC) called something like "Don't get done, get Dom!". They'd use an earpiece to send people in to buy cars, he'd be listening via hidden mic and would tell them what to say / do. He was awesome.

He'd get the "best price" and then tell the buyer to say, "that includes the mats and metallic paint, yes" (or similar). Basically the guy thinks he's secured it, you hit him for that last bit.

He did a general buying show too.

Re the article - not all dealers are equal: You come back at 4pm, the cheapest dealer has had the alloys switched off or put on cheaper tyres (that's £50 at least). You've no time to go back to the others. You buy? If you don't do you think the other dealers will play your game the next day or just see you as a time-waster?
Just identify your critical path, remove it, and repeat forever.

Remove it? I don't understand; could you please explain?
Closing Time: The history of America is the history of the automobile industry
Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage is a great dictionary filled with just the words we mess up (either through spelling or usage). I'm a word geek & find it interesting just to flip around reading entries.

http://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Modern-American-Usage/dp/01...
A good dictionary will give you more than a definition. Maybe you want to know the etymology of the word.
Finally an answer to: "Who will think of the children?"
If you're anything like me, this feeling may actually go away in a few years. I consider 33, my age, to be young.
This article may have held my attention longer if it had been a list. It lost me after the 7th paragraph when I realized he was going to continue to ramble on about lists. So I skipped to the final paragraph just to be sure.
I was meaning if the designer sets "sans" (or serif or fantasy, etc.) then the user doesn't know the origin of the actual font choice (their browser default and OS installation) but will assume that the specific font used was that chosen by the designer. Most users won't compare a page on multiple OS, those that do may still not realise the source of the displayed font (they could assume the designer chose different fonts for different browsers or OS, say) and so would not know how to alter which font is used.
Could you flesh that out a little? Were they merges, broken commits, what? I haven't had problems with git, though perforce has gotten ugly for me on several times.
Just an idea: if you add "hacker news" as a keyword, you will get all the articles, and if you add your interests then the articles will be organized as well.
Andrew Marr: Why I've Given Up Shampooing My Hair
I guess I am just jaded about the state of media. But it doesn't matter much, as long as you pick the outlet that aligns with your opinion best...
That's why, when I write an article like this, I pick a number like that.
I don't need to read this to know that dictionaries are not obsolete. I love the The New Oxford American Dictionary that comes with my Mac. I use it constantly.
Here’s what Reed learned: everything done and said by a car salesman—the test drive, the patter about city mileage versus country, the talk about air bags and safety—is simply an effort to get the buyer into the room where my father went back and forth at Foley Cadillac. Everything said before the room is like the forgettable small talk around the keg at the frat party—upstairs, in the room, with the lights out, that’s where the true artist, otherwise known as the closer, is revealed.

The room is bugged—know that. A manager in back is eating a sandwich as he listens to every word you say. When a salesman excuses himself to use the bathroom, he is really going to talk to this manager: get orders, execute a plan. At the beginning of the process, the salesman takes out a piece of paper divided into boxes. This is called a four-square. He writes a number in each box: the price of the car, what you will get for your trade-in, the amount you will put down, the amount you’ll pay each month if financing, which you probably are. “[The manager] stressed the price of the car should be written in large clear numbers to give it a feeling of authority,” writes Reed. “He added we should always write ‘+ fees’ next to the price of the car…. Good penmanship is essential,” he said. “This makes it harder for them to negotiate.”
New York City banned trans fats (partially hydrogenated oils) in restaurants.

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/hscout/2009/07/20/hscout629180.h...
There is a special place in hell for these people.
Dictionaries are not obsolete. Google is just a really kick ass dictionary.
The trouble with non-profits
Hmmm.... when did the "p2p scripting language" tag get added to the general description? Ever chasing salvos when it comes to fads it seems. While E is/was pretty cool, the mental overhead required to jump to it from Java (given the general pool of java coders) seems to have been too high of a hurdle for any sort of critical mass to develop. I have higher hopes for Caja (the capability-security enhanced javascript that markm and a couple of others in this area are working on at Google.)
A proper amount of sleep, say 8 hours is usually creamy for myself, your mileage may vary.
For myself at least, I find that if I don't get proper sleep that the performance lost over the awake time just isn't worth skimping on sleep. That and I feel like shit.
No mention in the article that you can just do a "define keyword" in google and get the definition from a couple dozen dictionaries and in any language.
Dick Fuld on Lehman Brothers' Demise
Not bricking stolen toys is a form of price discrimination.
The fact that stolen toys are not bricked and therefore have a resale value creates an incentive to, well, steal toys. Manufacturers profit because people whose toys are stolen almost always replace them, so lots of theft means lots of additional sales. Service providers profit because cheap used devices mean more people can afford ownership, so lots of theft means lots of demand for connectivity, or electronic books, or whatever.
This is also interesting in how it relates to the study of airplane crashes and the strong, relatively immediate feedback that these provide. It seems that auto safety was much more slow to catch on, and required odd forces to bring the topic to the forefront.

This also has an interesting interaction with a small startup essentially searching for the important metric for its survival.
Welcome to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
Somewhere, there's a forum full of artists arguing the finer points of programming.
Nobody ever mentions the relative geographical area of a country in relation to internet speed

Nobody? If anything, I see this mentioned dozens of times every single time this discussion comes up, despite the fact that it's completely wrong.

Sure, the US is a big place, but if that argument were correct, I would be able to get Japan-level internet speeds in big cities, since the population density there is so high. The costs of running fiber between big cities is minimal compared to the gargantuan last-mile costs, so one cannot claim that it's because the cities are farther apart than in other nations, either.

In reality? With the exception of FIOS, most places in the US, urban or not, have atrocious internet speeds.
These are all great... but I want to know what the Japanese aesthetic is for totally over-the-top neon city streets and arcade designs. I love that real-life cyberpunk stuff just as much as the more traditional stuff.
Well - south korea does make and export an awful lot of cars.

"The South Korean automobile industry is today the fifth largest in the world in terms of production volume and the sixth largest in terms of export volume."

But the author may well have meant North.
Microsoft .net resource hiring
While we're picking nits here, n/2 is not an equation. It's an expression. An equation has an equal sign.
Yeah, CK came across as a major dick, but...

Ingo benched this on a two-socket, 8-CPU system. CK made it blatantly obvious he was targeting single-socket multi-core systems, or UMA SMP systems. Further, he's seems pretty adamant about not tweaking the scheduler for anything beyond single-socket multicore or UMA SMP, to say nothing of more exotic CPU/Memory architectures.
> 40 is old for a startup founder or professional athlete

Though I wouldn't really classify rock or mountain climbing as a profession, the really good ones tend to peak around their 40s.

The books I've read on the subject indicate that though the peak physical capacity lies in the mid to late twenties, there are many other factor at play that make climbers better as they age (up to a reasonable age limit).

Experience, more long-term planning, increased ability to endure pain, etc give older climbers (30-45) a much higher chance to complete or survive a climb than their younger counterparts. The same appears to hold to true for other expeditions (long-term sailing, arctic/desert fun, etc). Football and basketball are not the be-all-and-end-all of sports.
So what is the cost when your EmpowerISV program ends?
Chicken Parmigiana is my "safe-bet" food if I'm eating somewhere I don't trust.
Production servers should never reach 1-2 years without reboot, not if you care about security. Basically every time a vulnerability is found in the kernel you should update => reboot...
I used to think that, at your age.

Get over it.
Marketing hell shudder
We're working on something cool with Hacker News, iPhones, and SearchYC.com that we're going to launch real soon.
At which point a dictionary probably wouldn't be the first thing on your mind.
I take his essay to mean that, if you want results, measure results and hold them to it. Chess experts are experts because they are measured by their results. Political pundits are hit hit or miss because they are not held accountable for their results. Non-profits should be measured by their results, not their process, PR, or grants. Makes sense to me, but quantifiable results are often hard to get, witness the discussions here about how to to tell goo programmers from bad.
Everything's relative. XP was just released in 2001... that was ages ago. Relatively.
Building a scheduler that doesn't scale to an 8-CPU system seems like madness to me, given the very predictable trends in desktop hardware.
I think it's sort of a textual fist-bump to people who smile when they see n followed by n/2, because it means something's about to get logarithmic, and we like that.
You can play the Zeno game with this.

The first half of the items is actually an article of n/2 items - so you think of n/4 in the first 5 minutes.

So you never actually think of an item.
In at least one case a police report was filed. Filing a police report is the requirement for insurance claims, and works here as well.

Users are pretty cool about devices calling home. Isn't this a reasonable degree of customer service to expect in return?
how about an article on working full time, coding any spare chance you have, attend networking meetings and try to maintain a basic relationship with a gf.
Ask HN: Has Apple stopped approving apps?
Has anyone else noticed that no new apps have been approved today and almost nothing was approved yesterday?

Check out any category and you won't see much for yesterday and nothing today. I know it's a holiday weekend but things aren't normally like this.
This is a very common thing around here indeed, people don't like to admit to making an effort, at least regarding school, so lots just won't push harder, whereas others will just lie, saying they didn't study very much. Nobody wants to look like they made a great effort and then got an awful grade (fail).
> two-socket, 8-CPU system

Which is exactly the kind of machine that I'm sitting in front of at this very moment and have owned for more than two years. I realize this puts me on the leading edge, but any scheduler that can't cope with this in a reasonable manner is a bit of a joke.
"Not available in your area"
For profits have the benefit of having profit/positive cash flow as a guide that not for profits do not. These are probably much better metrics for small startups given that success in any stated altruistic endeavours are ultimately going to show up in these two metrics anyway (and must in order for a startup to be sustainable).
So, to paraphrase: BFS is vastly superior, but not in any way that you can actually measure.

From my understanding, your interpretation is not correct. BFS is about latency, not throughput. Ingo chose all the wrong benchmarks.

Also, it's a dick move by Ingo. CK hasn't even made a public announcement about BFS yet.

Finally, you should use code that has technical merit, regardless of the personality behind the writer. I imagine the kernel you're running on has code in it written by some pretty unfriendly people.
Quite true. But most of those a quite large.

I own one: http://www.amazon.com/Websters-Encyclopedic-Unabridged-Dicti... it's very big, and heavy.

But something smaller, with just hard words, for when you are reading a book would be nice.
I think you would enjoy the book "Megatrends"
http://www.amazon.com/Megatrends-Ten-Directions-Transforming...
WordPress Just Made Millions of Blogs Real-Time With RSSCloud
I don't think I'd immediately launch into a state of panic during a mid-summer brownout...I'd probably be even more likely to read, which is a time it's nice to have a thorough dictionary on hand. Also, I don't like the idea of being separated from references just because Comcast's screwing up again...maybe I still think like a student.
A bad writer does not bad ideas make!
Having worked extensively with not for profits, the biggest problem is the lack of accountability - this has as much to do with governance as metrics. Managers often have a say in the appointment of board members whereas at least power ultimately rests in shareholders in for profits. Then there's the problem of changing missions - take the number of family foundations that would have their original benefactors appalled (e.g. Ford, Rockefeller, etc.)

And then another problem with metrics is that there has to be a cost benefit at some point. Obviously some are better than others, but if the cost to measure is as much to achieve, is it worth it? Though this may say as much about the mission as it does about the metric (microfinance is an area where this debate is raging).
I'm using rt right now. I like using its interface, but there are others on my team who never log in through the web; they update tickets solely via e-mail.

It would be nice if they were able to change metadata of the ticket (new, open, resolved, etc) via e-mail.
The CTIA spokesman is completely wrong. Mobile phones are subsidized in the UK in pretty much the same way as in the US.

Just because the phone is subsidized it doesn't mean it doesn't have value. A $800 iPhone is still an $800 dollar iPhone even if you get it for less than that in exchange for a higher monthly phone bull.
That's down there too. http://miscellanea.wellingtongrey.net/2008/10/26/were-not-nu...
Android Market Now Over 10,000 Applications Strong
Bad Aussie!
Well, to everyone, thanks for all the responses. I really appreciate.

What I've decided is that I'm going to take the safest road I can. I have the option to apply to colleges, then wait for a response, and afterwards decide whether or not I want to graduate (or drop out). If I am satisfied with colleges' responses, I will most likely end high school after this year; otherwise, I will stay for another year.

As someone said in the comments, the truth is that in my situation, it will be good no matter what I decide. There is no use brooding about it for too long.

Again, thank you to everyone who responded. Hacker News is a great community for things like this.
Currently, the US immigration policies are skewed to accept unskilled immigrants. Read about the difficulties with the H1 visas and the near impossibility for skilled workers to get a green card. Immigration could be an amazing source of skilled labor, if the USA played it's cards right. Historically, it was one.

Sure, many immigrant families often are more motivated, but many of the ones that the process are skewed towards still come with few marketable skills, and, unfortunately, poverty tends to breed poverty. It's harder to pull yourself out of the bottom of the heap.
How Twitter Could Lose The Game By Design
If the uptime of any of your Linux servers is more than a month or so, you're playing with fire.
This is a good point, and it's also often reflected in Japanese websites. I think it has something to do with (oddly) a Japanese distrust of sparse information. In the US, my websites were always very simple with little ornamentation. Those sites never succeeded in Japan because if there is not an abundance of text and (ideally) graphics, it just looks like nothing is really happening.
Below are some vague, probably bizarre ideas, mixed in with terrible CS metaphores. I apologize in advance:

I think it's mainly about amortization. So you can prepare rice, a big vegetable curry, and a roast turkey on the weekend. These are time consuming but set-and-forget items (code and curry mix well).

You can then add JIT customization during the week - get last-day shrimp and make a stir fry (use a decent vegetable oil, it doesn't need much) with your rice.

This one sounds strange but is delicious - If you're feeling vegetarian, curry makes a great burrito filling (if you like cheese, melt a little on top).

I've got a market nearby where I can get lots of cheap tomatoes (most are slightly squishy because they're almost old. These are the best kind). Throw 'em in a blender with an onion, garlic clove, lemon juice, and chili, and you've got delicious fresh salsa. Takes 5 minutes, and it's delicious next to fish (like cod) which can be seared quite rapidly.

Get a chicken breast, just saute lightly. Then sear the sides - with oyster sauce for an asian theme, raisins and cinnamon for a moroccan one. Heat your salsa up and stew it with your rice to make a lovely spicy goulash (don't try this with canned salsa though, it's horrible).

Nothing is more decadent than a hot turkey sandwich with gravy and cranberry sauce when it's nowhere near thanksgiving, and turkey can be a good deal off-season.

Money-saving: spend a bit of money on: good breads (a sandwich is gourmet if served on sufficiently high quality bread), good sauces and toppings. Save money on veggies (buy last-day), drinks (drink water), starch (buy in huge bags).

What works well for speed is parallelism (clean while you cook, cook everything at the same time), amortization, and JIT compilation of add-ons :) Spend time on your amortized foods to get them right (so do soak your rice in cold water etc.. this pays off in delicious flavor, and the time cost per meal is tiny).