skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh no I understand that we could now be in a matrix-like reality, which is what I meant by "setting the question aside", and I'm arguing that there's nothing wrong with trying to use science to find out stuff under a whole load of assumptions, because that is essentially what we are doing all the time, whether or not we are talking about something philosophical like free-will.

But when you think about it, under this reality, how could free will possibly exist? Everything I do is a direct consequence of the past, modulo some possible quantum randomness if you believe in that, but even the randomness wouldn't give me a free will.
Broadband tax 'to be made law'
How i met your mother season 5 direct download free
nicee .. kick ass
What mandatory insurance scheme is not a tax on the fortunate to subsidize the unfortunate?

Without a mandate, how do you provide any reasonable coverage to the unfortunate without falling prey to adverse selection?

This argument just doesn't seem well thought out.
Learning Big Things From Small Ideas
COBRA is a ticking time bomb. But it does have the nice property that it keeps your "continuous coverage" which is very important in the face of any pre-existing conditions. That can be a very big deal.
BBC iPlayer users should be charged "micro payments"
We had COBRA coverage when we started Matasano. Continuous coverage or not, insurance company beaurocrats refused coverge for us. I'm not sure what continuous coverage does for you once you obtain coverage, but in Illinois it doesn't do a thing to help you get it in the first place.
so you're going to... nuke yourself? yikes.
Wow - parselets.com is amazing. Thanks for sharing.

I think 80legs can do some level of parsing now, but Parsely seems like a great way to describe the analysis for targeted crawls on predictable data. If it supported the combination you've described it would really open up some cool possibilities.
It should be noted that the 4chan macroculture's rather divided as to whether or not Anonymous as protestors should really be considered Anonymous as representative of the *chan culture as a whole. 4chan's founder, Moot, has expressed a rather large level of disdain for the protest movement.
"JavaScript is widely used only because it's the only game in town for non proprietary programming on the client side. Also, most people that do heavy js try to bolt typical OO features on to JavaScript and are even pushing to add it to the standard."

Be that as it may, OO lends itself very well to UI programming. widget, containers et al. lend thenselves very well to becoming encapsulated black boxes that notify the larger system through defined event contracts to publish out changes.

I believe that the problem has historically been between the UI and business logic. UI is a natural fit for OO where as business logic is a good candidate for procedural services based workflow that expose their functionality to the UI.

The problem is alot of developers try to solution the entire problem domain with one tool a.k.a the gold hammer.

This is why I think Ajax and JavaScript coupled with toolkits like Dojo are a huge step forward they allow the UI developers to work with in the best toolthat fits their problem domain while the service developers can do the same with the best tools for that problem domain.

The nice part is that their is a hard contract between the two and you cannot cross the barrier with the other tool. As their are built on messaging JSON or XML contracts to and fro.
The distance between Michael Jordan and Joe Klein isn't the difference between #1 and #2. It's the difference between #1 and #15 on a 5 man squad.

I'd be totally happy being Scottie Pippen or even Horace Grant.
What's college all about?
Hi David -- There are a few sites like that. You could try travbuddy.com if you are interested in meeting travelers by location or showing them around your hometown, although it has less of a tech slant. couchsurfing.org has more of a backpacking focus, but they also have regular meet-ups around the world.
I'm not sure I'm going to have the stomach to watch this.
If you knew that everyone used four different digits for keypad locks, that would dramatically reduce the number of possible combinations you had to try...

How about "use something random, change the keys before they wear down, and wipe them before and after use if you're paranoid."
The twentysomething "freeriders" are overwhelmingly the source of startup founders. If you want to force them to subsidize older people, that's fine, but it's not going to have the effect of increasing entrepreneurship, which is ostensibly the point of the article.
Mike Berkley: Preparing for the next web boom
LISA 2009 Call for Bloggers 
USENIX is looking for 12 experienced bloggers to help us promote and
cover LISA '09 taking place November 1–6, 2009, in Baltimore, MD.
Everyone from university students to blogging professionals is
encourage to apply.

We're looking for bloggers with experience in technical writing and
who have an understanding of system administration or software
engineering.

In exchange for being a part of the LISA '09 blogging team, all
participants will receive a complimentary conference registration as
well the opportunity to post a bio link on the LISA '09 blog team bio
page. A dessert reception will also be held at the end of the
conference week to show our appreciation for your efforts.

http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa09/bloggers.html
"Apple's 'iPad' is the harbinger of the ebook revolution" is just speculation
This is a legit rejection. There IS a difference between building for Debug and Release and you CAN'T reference the full version.
Simple solution: Palm should make the USB ID field a text box in a preferences screen somewhere.

It would default to the correct "Palm" ID, but hey, if the user wants to change it...
He played less than a season for the Lakers. He played three seasons with the Bulls, winning three championships next to Michael Jordan.

I wonder how much correlation there is between attention-seeking behavior and high salaries among professional athletes. Do Terrell Owens and Chad Ochocinco actually make more money than equally talented but more workmanlike wide receivers?
Did you read the article, or do you just have strong opinions about health care? Either way is fine, but the point of the article is that one of the reasons twentysomethings are a huge fraction of startup founders is that they aren't locked into jobs by health insurance.

(It is also, by the way, simply not the case that twentysomethings are overwhelmingly the source of startup founders; what they do seem to be is an overwhelming source of YC company founders. Go make a list of 10 VCs, read their portfolios, and go look at the "Management Team" sections on their websites.)
Mu.

There can be no such thing. Both fonts accomplish a purpose. Many like one because they feel it is easier to design with. Any reputable designer will instantly recognize both. They are two of the most used fonts in the world. There is no way to perform a blind test.

The closest thing to reputable researchers in design are designers. They spend their lives experimenting with fonts, and most prefer to use the one to the other. Some of them are following popular opinion mindlessly. Many aren't. Until some metric can be made for good design (fat chance. Also, note that readability is not the only important piece of this puzzle) no journal-worthy piece of science is going to come forward.
>have they set a release date yet? Until they do so, I will say it's vaporware.

Okay, fine, but that's not a useful/meaningful definition of vaporware.

I certainly have my doubts about Milo. That's being developed by Lionhead though - Peter Molyneux is well known for making unrealistic promises.
Am i the only one who hates these capitals Mashable seem to put before every post title...
Not exactly a great article. The author seems to imply that there wasn't an mp3 player market before the ipod - a factually false statement. I still even have my 125mb AAA battery-powered player lurking somewhere in my closet. And as many college students can tell you, there is QUITE a collection of pirated textbooks and latest releases floating around the various IRC channels...
Basic Flaw Reveals Source Code to 3,300 Popular Websites
I think the trouble with teaching mostly Java-only courses early on in CS curricula is that it makes it difficult to catch the subtle middle ground where OO actually makes code more readable/maintainable instead of more bloated.

Granted, a lot of that comes from experience in OO languages, but I think using C or another language helps people see that middle ground a lot easier. It helps make it more obvious where OO would help and where it would just be needless obfuscation.
Santa Claus in Erlang from ROK:

http://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/staffpriv/ok/santa/index.htm
EDITED ;)
Will Cuil’s New Streaming Feature Put It Back on the Map?

probably not.

FTA:
The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company received $33 million in funding from Madrone Capital Partners, Tugboat Ventures and Greylock Partners last year and has a valuation of $200 million.

How? Who is going to pay 200M for a fifth-rate search engine that showed it was better at self-promotion than technology.

In fact, the only thing i remember about cuil from last year was this register article (nsfw):
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/29/cuil_launch/
Where the revolutionary algorithm that put unrelated photos next to text search results managed to match up a CS Ph.D with gay porn.

I would also suggest they change their name to something less cuil-sounding.
Hi, I work for 80legs and wanted to address this--we will be building an "App Store" over the next couple of months that will allow you to use Apps written by other developers to do some pretty cool stuff. We already have several of these 80Apps (as we call them) available, many of which have been written by the semantic search engine company swingly.com. You can view descriptions for them on the "Create Job" page if you sign up to use our Portal.
Did you see some hack two guys in the audience were working on? They basically bound 2 iPhones together to do some similar things using the built-in accelerometers.
I don't think it's so much a matter of research or blind tests in this case. Like a regular user may not notice that a website loads .1 second faster because somebody optimized the database queries, a regular viewer will not be able to tell the difference between Arial and Helvetica. Designers, who are trained to be sensitive to those details will have an automatic response and be able to pinpoint what the reason is.
Good article, but the well-worded headline and the article point out that release early, release often won't work here.
Probably about the same as the correlation between attention-seeking behavior and money for pop stars :)

I think the system works similarly - a face gets turned into a trademark and a 'flavor', which is used to sell stuff to people. But poor people don't make good flavors, which is why they have to be paid a lot.

Being 'different' certainly has something to do with it. If the loudmouth-alpha-guy market is saturated, maybe by addressing the totally-insane-guy market you can get picked up to fill that niche.

It's much like high school social dynamics, to be honest; everybody has to find their own part to play, with the price of failure being utter insignificance, and (low) compensation to match.
The Real Problem with the Economy Is That It Doesn't Need You Anymore
4 presses out of 10 options, allowing duplicates, and order is significant: 10,000 options.

4 presses out of 10 options, not allowing duplicates, and order is significant: 5,040 options.

It's less certainly, but not dramatically.

4 presses out of 10 options, not allowing duplicates, and order is not significant: 210. That, I would call a dramatic reduction.

In a typical 10 button number lock order is not important, and you can choose from 1 to 10 presses: 1024 options.
Even suggesting that Anonymous by and large takes any interest in what Moot thinks shows just how misinformed you are. There's more to a spear than just it's point.
Combining guaranteed-issue with an individual mandate may make the actuarial math work out profitably for a lot of scenarios. It would never happen in a free market--the marginal cost of accepting someone with preexisting conditions already exceeds the marginal revenue--but if each insurance company has to take on enough healthy people for each sick person they can still profit.

No system is perfect. I think there are a lot of pieces of reform that have been proposed that would be an improvement, though.
Actually, the album is this (by the same user): http://www.vimeo.com/album/126865
What mandatory insurance scheme is not a tax on the fortunate to subsidize the unfortunate?

If you make healthy people buy fairly priced catastrophic coverage so that if they have an accident they don't declare bankruptcy and stick the rest of us with the bill, that's not a subsidy. It becomes a subsidy when you force them to pay the same rates as less healthy people, or force them to buy comprehensive policies that go beyond the coverage that they actually need.
This is rather off on a tangent, but it's rather entertaining watching people try and discuss the nature of Anonymous. I don't think there are any two people who have exactly the same perspective on the thing. They almost always end up completely talking past one another, heh.
Also very strange to complain about the bulkiness of something that's twice as heavy as lead.
Is not a mistake is design is correct, it seems that we need Apple to rethink what exist to make people realise that other worlds exist. It happened with the touch in Iphone(a phone without keyboard is a huge mistake...), and it will happen with the Apple tablet.

Take into account that actual UI are designed for mouses, but there is not such a need. Humans find way more natural to use pens and fingers than keyboards.
Having re-read the piece, I don't see anywhere that he defines his point as being that "one of the reasons twentysomethings are a huge fraction of startup founders is that they aren't locked into jobs by health insurance." I'm sure from your personal experience you think this is the case, but the author doesn't assert that it's the case, or try to provide evidence that in countries with universal coverage there are more older entrepreneurs.

I personally think that health insurance is pretty far back on the list of reasons older people are less likely to found startups than young people. I'm willing to be convinced there by some sort of evidence. Regardless, in order for it to be the case that "[u]niversal health insurance, far from suppressing entrepreneurship, could be a boon to it," it would have encourage more older entrepreneurs than it discourages among the young.
Mobile Core i7 920XM (Clarksfield) review + benchmarks
This is bad for startups (although we don't have any evidence yet that TechCrunch is intending to break all startup embargoes).

Part of a successful launch is getting the news out to several outlets -- you hit one particular reader on TechCrunch, a different one VentureBeat, etc. And by hitting multiple news sources, a single reader is much more likely to remember your story when presented with it multiple times.

Also, startups tend to have very specific launch cycles -- you are most likely scrambling to get everything out the door, and might not have a working product launched before 4-5am the night before. Sending users to an non-functional site not only gives them a bad impression of your service, but massively detracts from the benefit of the news coverage in the first place.

Without an embargo, it's more or less impossible to coordinate coverage from multiple sources -- once a story has "broken", other sources don't want to cover it.

There's the problem of journalists breaking embargoes, and we've had that happen to us in the past with lame excuses like "I thought it was EST instead of PST" when it was clear otherwise -- we don't talk to those journalists anymore. If people were a bit more stringent enforcing that, it wouldn't be as much of a problem.

An industry-wide no embargo policy doesn't seem to be in the reader's interests (as others have pointed out) -- an embargo leaves time for the journalist to get properly acquainted with the product, ask questions, and formulate their own opinion. It also enables multiple news sources to post about the topic, from different points of view.

It's certainly not in the startup's best interest. But it is in TechCrunch's best interest: by not following any embargoes, they are forcing companies to aggregate their news around the highest-value source, which, having the highest tech blog readership, would be TechCrunch.
A plea to KDE developers
Microsoft study says white spaces worth over $100 billion
The Negotiator Magazine - Articles Subject Index
"For example, a+a+a+a can become a*4 and even a<<2 if a is an integer. But if one creates a class with operators, there is nothing to indicate if they are commutative, distributive, or associative. Since one isn't supposed to look inside the object, it's not possible to know which of two equivalent expressions is more efficient."

But it is ok (expected even?) to look inside the implementation of every function in a non-OO language?

Explain how I am to know which to choose from the equivalent C code of add(a, add(a, add(a, a))) or multiply(a, 4)?

There are reasons to dislike aspects of C++, but the "omg operators are hard" meme is the biggest dumbest straw man around.
Another factor to consider would be the domain name of the site. Would you want to build your company on top of the domain name? Is it suitable for the broader niche that you want to apply it to.

If the site is a good fit, buying an established but underdeveloped site can be a great way to gain a foothold in an vertical without toiling for months in obscurity.
I can't agree more. If we must discuss things at the heartless, what's-in-it-for-us level: Just because you may get sick doesn't mean you'd be a bad entrepreneur. One of the best mobile programmers I know has gout, and it's pretty difficult for him to get coverage.
The subtitle here should probably be "Why my startup failed (and some tips to avoid making the same mistakes).
One important point is that the data is for households, and the US have (i) bigger households than most other industrialized countries (ii) definately have more tvs per household than any other country. So these things might skew the numbers in favor of the US.

But we definately watch a lot of TV.

I think one reason is that the US is probably the biggest homogenous TV market (in temrs of advertising dollars) which allows marketing people to spend a lot of money to craft advertisements and TV shows more specifically to the audience and make them irresistable to us. You definately do not want to be in the cross hairs of marketing people.

But I would advise all my fellow americans to do what I did .... do not have a TV or if you have one do not connect it to a TV signal (connecting it to a bluray player or netflix online is fine). You'd be amazed of all the free time you get to waste on the net. Also you get to be that pretentious a-hole that mentions he does not own a TV whereever someone mentions a tv show they like so much. It's a win-win situation.
I reached out to the primary author. He was not aware that it was online.

While the paper has some factual errors and conclusions (I do not think that anyone within the Atlanta technology community would call it "rich in venture capital" as an example) I do think that the conclusion that Atlanta's tech sector lacks social structure is dead on. I wrote an article for the local paper to this effect last month: http://blog.weatherby.net/2009/08/startups-are-hard.html

I also think that a main point is missed within the article. Companies that leave Atlanta are not doing so for social structure reasons, they leave because the venture capital factor is based elsewhere and requiring the companies to move in order for a funding event to occur.
if you decline maternity coverage you have a lot better luck.

As a Canadian I'm left saying, WTF America?

I've had two children in the last 2 1/2 years, wife delivered both via C unscheduled. Total cost directly to me: $0.
So Google owns http://dropbox.com ?
Classic video game Elite turns 25
I tried 80legs a couple of weeks ago when it was still in beta. It works well if you're willing to write Java code to process HTTP responses (see http://80legs.pbworks.com/80Apps). You can issue new requests in your processing code and write processed data to files which you can download once the crawl finishes. Even without Java, you can perform basic keyword/regex matching on crawled data literally by filling out a web form. And they have an API of course. Very impressive.

However, if you want to run crawling on your own infrastructure, I recommend Scrapy (http://scrapy.org/), a python crawling framework introduced on HN last year. Scrapy solves some of the more time-consuming problems involved in writing a crawler from scratch (multiple simultaneous requests, pipelined processing, raw caching, duplicate URL filtering) and comes with nifty development and administration tools. More importantly, it has an active and helpful set of core developers and good documentation. I am comfortable with both Python and Java but I chose Scrapy over 80legs because I can crawl for free on the machines I already have and I can afford to spend more time crawling from a single IP compared to 80legs which will let me crawl much faster but isn't free. Also, with Scrapy my bot can be 'naughty' - 80legs jobs obey robots.txt and limit the crawling rate per domain.

When my crawling needs outgrow my infrastructure, I am going to look at 80legs again.
How about if we meet/test in room "HN"? http://www.mathim.com/HN
I tend to agree. Arrington asserts that "This is a good thing for readers", but doesn't back that up with anything.

In the comments someone made a point very similar to yours, but Arrington's response isn't particularly coherent:

counterpoint – they write the news on their own blog with lots of videos and other information for press to digest and then write their own stories. it works. and it’s not like the bias in their blog posts isn’t there in the pre-briefing anyway.
I hoping the resurgence of functional languages will drive this point home, but I'm certainly not sure that it will. I've worked on large, well-designed OO systems, and I've worked on awful, convoluted morasses. OO languages are a tool, but they are no replacement for competent software engineers. Conversely, I've worked on both types of systems written in imperative languages as well (that's where we get the concept of "spaghetti code"). OO just seems to make it easier to make a big mess.
It's the greatest thing since ThirdVoice.
Has Microsoft completely lost it?