skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is another old series by Leventhal about learning assembler, he basically wrote the same book for many different processors.

And the x86 series reference manuals from Intel, if that's the CPU you're working with (a fair assumption).
Here I am thinking that it's a required nowadays that browsers are huge, hulking monsters because of the multitude of things that need to be parsed and rendered on a web page. A minimal and unix-y browser sounds wonderful.

I've been enjoying Arora lately because of how small and lightweight it is, it runs blazingly fast on my old 64mb/333mhz:
http://code.google.com/p/arora/

How does Uzbl match up to it in terms of memory usage? I'm (probably wrongfully) assuming it runs slowly because it's written in python.
> Apparently the editors are TC have the weekend off.

Since when does TC have editors?
Copenhagen Consensus: ranked solutions to the world's biggest problems
I think if you really know then you'll be using it without even consciously thinking about it. You'll make sure that you don't allocate storage units across page boundaries, you make sure you access your arrays in the right order and so on.

The cumulative effects of that are huge, and it's more of a method of working than something where you take the assembler manual out. Just like an engineer is not going to go and re-learn the ins and outs of materials science when building a bridge, it is the solid background in materials science that guides him in his choices.
Not really an unlearning situation. No one I hang out with spends much time fiddling with CDs. Every time a CD is bought it's ripped to disc for actual use.
>> What I wonder the most about is why they don't try to bring a command line interface to firefox

See http://labs.mozilla.com/ubiquity/
I lived in Canada for three years and frequently called and occasionally traveled to the United States. The Canadian cell phone plans are so overpriced that I found it significantly cheaper to have a Verizon plan (the "North American plan") than a Bell, Rogers, or Fido plan. This is after taking into account the US/Canadian exchange rate when the Canadian dollar was trading at 85-90 cents per US dollar. How can it be that Verizon (arguably the most expensive US cell carrier) offers a better priced plan than a domestic Canadian carrier? Consider the fact that Verizon must include in its variable costs any additional fees it has to pay to a Canadian carrier to provide coverage on a Canadian network (Rogers or Bell).

Note that the cell plans in Canada at first glance look somewhat affordable relative to plans available in other countries. However, the pricing for Canadian plans is often deceptive. Not only are there additional "access fees" and taxes (more so than in the USA), but many standard features must be purchased a la carte, such as voicemail and caller ID.
What I was saying there was that you can't find a cure for a disease you haven't discovered yet. Do you disagree?

Absolutely. Many drugs targeting one disease have been found to cure others. The list includes cancer drugs, antibiotics, antiviral compounds, etc. And that's just drugs, what about the research itself, isn't it obvious it has implications well beyond any one single thing. And isn't that the case for every kind of research, not just medical? To me this seems obvious.

All we need for disaster is one person who's intelligent, driven, and wants to destroy the human race.

Again, we already have that, it's called mother nature. HIV, Ebola, 1918 flu, current flu, etc, all natural.

Here's where I see the problem with your argument, it assumes great asymmetry.

Here's what I mean by asymmetry, I think you imply that if we have the technology to create super viruses on demand that does not mean we'll have anywhere near equivalent knowledge and technology to fight them.

I happen to consider that an extraordinary claim. To me the symmetry of knowledge is self evident. Almost as soon as we invent the nuclear bomb, we also invest nuclear power. Almost as soon as we can gene splice, we have gene therapy for humans which has already been successful applied.

If we have the ability to create super viruses on demand, then we also have the ability to create drugs for them, to detect them, to stop transmission, and most obviously to create vaccines for them. If you can manufacture the virus, it would be one hell of a cosmic improbability that you are also NOT able to manufacture a vaccine for it.

Alternatively if we don't have the knowledge to make viruses and vaccines on demand, that won't stop mother nature from her never ending quest to kills us all.
I really don't think that two simple regex examples are worth cluttering up the front page for. There's nothing here that wouldn't be surpassed by a quick Google search.
There's no vs here. :-)

SYDNI and YAGNI are 100% complimentary. I just chose the name partly because I think YAGNI gets a disproportionate amount of attention due to having a catchy acronym.
Use a spell checker next time, each typo makes your articles less appealing.
One and two years previously ...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16521

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=132630

Still relevant, still brilliant.
This was posted 5 days ago; 3 days before this reposting. At that time I left the comment: I thought this might be something like Eliezer's arguments against developing a GAI until it could be made provably Friendly AI, instead I just got an argument exactly like the ones in 1903 that said heavier than air flight by men was impossible - go back and read some of them, some of the arguments were almost identical. Some of the arguments are currently true, but some of them amount to "I can't do it, and no one else has done it, therefore there must be some fundamental reason it can't be done".
For Teens, Has Texting Replaced Talking?
Solar crisis set to hit in 2010, 50% of solar manufacturers may not survive
Quick, get the FBI to harass some of those gene hackers and put some more regulations and restrictions around med. tech, that'll help.
The default handler is a python script. Part of the design philosophy is to keep it separate from the browser itself.

There is an alternative: http://www.uzbl.org/news.php?id=14
I have used Gazzin's(http://www.gazzin.com/) Reseller account in the past and it worked without any issues. However, the interface was clunky and not your ideal Web 2.0 but this was back in 2003.

Currently, I am using Dreamhost and as it has been mentioned before it does have outages but my blog and other simple sites do not have a lot of traffic to deal with so it is ok for the time being.

For any sort of professional deployment, I am using slicehost's VPS. Linode is also a good one. However, with slicehost I built the entire server myself so it gives you a fine grained control which I miss with dreamhost.
It's true that a film titled with Trajan shouldn't be retitled with Action Jackson (stereotypically 'classic' and 'hip, funny' fonts). And after perusing the 2010 catalog, I agree it looks considerably uglier in type terms, and that this is a mistake for a firm whose brand is partially built around the democratization of good design.

Then again, perhaps the lowering of aesthetic expectations will help to reduce the mild disappointment that accompanies appreciation of (most) Ikea products as ersatz and disposable substitutes for a level of aesthetic and manufacturing quality most of us can only aspire to. Verdana, then, may be regarded as a more truthful form of typographical communication, and signals a shift away from a petty-bourgeois dialectical proposition towards a more proletarian [You may purchase the rest of this article for $59.95]
Sorry, I did not answer your question completely. I would only go for a hosting site that gives me complete SSH access to my account.
Behringer's Clone of Apple's Homepage
Follow up article detailing Behringer's history of lawsuits here: http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/09/06/on-behringers-track-record-value-and-copies/
Iphone making worldwide loss (for carriers)
"You appear to be suggesting -- I can't tell how seriously -- that WordPress is deliberately made insecure so that when Automattic (ugh, I hate that name) want people to upgrade they always have a security issue they can use to scare people into doing so. Sorry, but that's absolutely nuts"

No, YOU said that. I just said they don't care enough for security. Otherwise they wouldn't spit out new versions with holes so often.

So there is no reason to insult me.

Also the WordPress people pointing out all the time how wordpress.com hasn't been hacked is just obvious advertising for their hosted services.
I've never encountered a site I needed to solve a captcha to READ. They are used to prevent spamming comments by bots.
How To Improve Your Blog
1-13 are about treating the symptoms of failed states. How about we treat the disease itself instead? Politics and state building sure are a whole lot more complex and difficult, and don't make you feel nearly as good, as feeding children. But unlike food, and all kinds of other aid, they would actually solve the problem once and for all.
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=805184

Also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=806381
Yeah, good question. I almost switched to the more secure MovableType when they went open source but MT still does not support pingback, that is you can add a plugin which enables receiving pingbacks but you can not send them.

This makes your blog a dead end. Pingbacks are crucial to spread the message througout the blogosphere.

Another issue is the backend interface plus the frontend templates/themes. MT has a decent backend but you barely get any templates you can use.
The same problem arises with S9Y. Is just installed it and both the default templates like the remaining choices are awful. So basically you have to design and code everything yourself.
Yahoo Password Helper
Facebook Development Environment
I am looking at the best way to start developing for Facebook. I am leaning toward using PHP, and would like to eventually add Flex or Flash to the mix. I have looked at the .NET kit on Codeplex as well, but it doesn't feel right to me. What is the best IDE setup for a newbie like me?
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=788788
http://developers.facebook.com/opensource.php
Maybe putting the gist of what you want to communicate into a story context is a hack for making what you want to communicate more memorable. Because most stories, as Ira Glass says, are action, action, action, then how you felt about something you did. However, personal stories are much more effective because you are sharing part of you - anyone can tell stories of people like Ray Kroc or Sir Richard Branson but I believe when you tell a 3rd party story - you're not putting yourself out there. And you can argue that the value of Y-Combinator is the private founder's dinners.

I'm not the best at remembering names but I remember many people's personal stories. I love personal stories. And some of the best are told by the storytellers of The Moth.

"The stories range in length from approximately 5 to 17 minutes. Sometimes funny, occasionally sad, often poignant, we hope you will find the stories memorable and representative of many aspects of human experience."

http://www.themoth.org/podcast
there has definitely been backlash against the unnecessarilly scare-mongering of the earlier swine flu coverage- but, it is worth taking notice because of how easily transmittable it is. a slight mutation and this could in fact be a seriously dangerous pandemic
How anticlimactic. Based on the title I thought the sun was due to slam into the earth next year.
It's the new way to get free coverage on TC:

1. Create a study based on your users without having any background in statistics or economics

2. Make a ridiculous and outrageous claim

3. ...

4. Profit! Free PR on TC!
Then your point is moot. The context is startup. Eric does a good job for a post-startup, which is already very profitable with a revenue of $86m in 2001 (http://investor.google.com/fin_data2003.html). As a matter of fact, many think that Eric is more "lucky" than "good", given his track record at Novell.
I think it buries the lede. They point out that the solar manufacturers who don't survive are the ones who sell at >$2 a watt (ie more or less obsolete as far as tech goes) but then there's this:

"Average selling prices could drop below US$1 per watt in 2010 and US$0.50 in 2011. As many as 50% of the more than 200 solar manufacturers, mired in red ink with current selling prices above US$2.00 per watt, may not survive, The Information Network stated."

That's pretty exciting. $1 is supposed to be the magic number when it becomes more cost effective to build solar than coal at an installation level and there's no cost for the "fuel".
Here's some more colour on this from a US (investor) perspective:

http://www.distressed-debt-investing.com/2009/09/possible-eq...
Its interesting to see consumption so low. Its my understanding there is a "last mile" problem with providing solar to homes and small business. There are not enough companies making it easy for the small adopter. Its certainly not at the home depot DIY level yet. Maybe panel costs is still a factor. I know of a company going after this space in EU and U.S. I'm sure they're happy to see price competition on the supply side.
H1N1 is going to be a really, really big deal this fall and winter. It's time to set up your H1N1 website, and start selling "I survived the swine" t-shirts.

I work as an ER nurse, and hospitals all over are expecting a huge influx of patients. It's going to be a miserable winter for me. :( The CDC is expecting 50% of the population to come down with it, close to a million hospitalizations and 90,000 deaths in the US alone. This out break already meets the WHO definition of pandemic flu.

Most people that come down with it have a bad case of the sniffles, a cough and feel miserable for a while. But the problem with this virus is that it randomly hits younger people (age 25-50) really hard and sends them to the ICU. We've had 10-12 young people in our ICU this summer on ventilators with H1N1. Two of those people were pregnant mothers.

<PSA>
So, get your flu and swine flu shots this year. Wash your hands. Sneeze or cough into your elbow instead of your hands. If you're sick, for the love of health, please stay home and isolate yourself instead of sharing your germs with your coworkers. And, if you're having a hard time breathing, come to the ER sooner rather than later.
</PSA>
Ikea is a huge company, they surely have good reason to do this.

Not quite sure how the latter follows from the former...
Edsger W. Dijkstra: Answers to questions from students of Software Engineering
or use something like 'set noclobber' (at least in tcsh)

jcs@smug:~% echo asdf > file
jcs@smug:~% echo fdsa > file
file: File exists.
jcs@smug:~% echo fdsa >! file
jcs@smug:~%

this has saved me quite a few times when accidently typing > instead of >> or similar.
yes that is really cool too but no, i meant an actual shell interface to communicate with the browser
Well, technically the headline says "an iPhone user", not "the average iPhone user"...
Well put. It's this intuition that I am feeling the lack of. It's wrong to imagine that one can create arbitrary abstractions for free in high-level languages and let compilers and fast hardware take care of the rest. That approach takes you so far, but when you run up against its limits you are really in trouble. That is most true when what you're working on is computationally hard somehow, but it also manifests itself in the reality that most software is simply slow (a handy example being the browser I'm writing this in, FF 3.5).

This is changing my view of programming languages. I'd like an environment where abstractions are built up in transparent layers that don't hide the underlying architecture, but still give you powerful operators to compose things. The standard options mostly require you to pick one or the other.

Put differently: rather than thinking of expressive power as being built up in layers that move the highest level ever further away from the lowest, is there a way to keep high and low relatively close together while still providing lots of expressive power? The closest thing to this that I know of are Arthur Whitney's languages. The latter are notoriously cryptic, but unless I'm mistaken they do provide both of these things: an execution model that is close to the hardware and a very high-level, logically scalable language.
Thanks for editing the title, this time the number in front was not "gratuitous", it really had a hook in the end (there are 101 ways in the list, not 100).

Appreciate the attention, though.

Peace. :-)
"Swine flu is "the one that we're most concerned about," Frieden said.

"Because if it does become more deadly, it could cause a very severe scenario"

It could, but it does NOT. Swine flu is by far less deadly than seasonal flu. In Germany we have 15k swine flu cases and not a single death in 4 months. In contrast there care 20k flu related deaths in Germany each year.
Something like this: http://wiki.github.com/bard/mozrepl ?
Dijkstra has been mentioned before on HN: http://searchyc.com/ewd
Do I need to manually uninstall things like mysql, apache, and imagemagick before installing the 64-bit versions?
> but many standard features must be purchased a la carte, such as voicemail and caller ID.

In the implementation I'm preparing I will take those things (Caller ID, Call forwarding, Call waiting, voicemail, etc...) into consideration as well.
Vint Cerf was talking about this back in 1998: http://www.webreference.com/outlook/column26/index.html

More here: http://www.ipnsig.org/press.htm
Well, there is a pretty deep solar minimum in progress, if I remember correctly. Least sunspots in a century.
Mapping the Genome of Collective Intelligence
I agree, it is better for learning independent thinking and really might be closer to how one must learn in a workplace environment. There is the social and teamwork that might be missed a bit but also it teaches how to virtually be social and a team member. Again, more closely aligned with real-world type work where it is largely independent and you must learn to virtually communicate well to succeed. Many times clients are nowhere near you and all they know of you is a virtual representation.
I know people who cheat like hell with their online courses. Like byoung2 said, I think it depends largely on the student.
The problem with H1N1 is that the general population has little immunity to it, so containing and controlling it is difficult. Had it been more virulent, this would be very serious.

Why this thing is tracked and scientists take it very seriously is that influenza can rapidly mutate and H1N1 _could_ become much more virulent than it is today. The extremely deadly 1918 flu had a first wave that behaves like most flu outbreaks before coming back and killing tens of millions of people.

That doesn't mean that will happen this time or that people should get panicky. Catching H1N1 in its current state is probably beneficial because it would confer stronger immunity to what might be a family of influenza that could be around for a while, but its spread is newsworthy. If the news leads to more people staying home when they are sick, even if the symptoms are more minor for them, and we get more herd immunity through increased vaccinations, that's a good thing.

EDIT: I just wanted to emphasis that vaccination is definitely preferable to catching the actual disease, even if the latter would give strong immunity to future, similar strains.
Here is an idea:

A graphical environment where you can see the program as it is running, with the memory map displayed in an arcade game style window.

I can imagine that such a tool would be a great eye opener.

Show hotspots in real time, move your cursor in to the memory map to get the 'hint' to display the label of the memory location at that spot.

An advanced version of it could show you the two layers caching next to the main memory and how data is flowing in and out of the caches.

I'm pretty sure that something like that is doable.
A friend of mine, a college teacher whose specialty is online education, says that one thing that makes a forum/discussion board more effective than a traditional classroom setting is increased student participation. Students are more likely to voice dissenting opinion in a virtual classroom than a physical one.
Having 2 completely separate VPSs, in different data centers, secured with different passwords, seems pretty much more secure than having a single server to me.

Yes, there could theoretically be a way to punch through from an insecure VPS into a secure VPS on the same host, but I think the chances are pretty slim there.
Uzbl is actually written in C. Many of it's companion scripts (for cookies, etc...) are written in python however and can be slow.
or like this: http://surfraw.alioth.debian.org/
(works fine with "minimalist" browsers)
Apple approves Commodore 64 emulator for iPhone
Who's crazy enough to try to compete with the government on something like that? As long as the government looks likely to do it, private efforts probably aren't going to happen -- unless it turns out that there's strong public dislike for the government version.

Now that government appears to have bowed out of the market niche, there's a possibility that private efforts might move forward. Of you're a Canadian with entrepreneurial spirit of your own, maybe you should look into making something like this happen before someone beats you to it (or even before some major telco manages to create a biased version of this and manages to convince people it's objective "enough").
Ever wondered how "business types" who sell enterprise software come up with impressive looking "bullshit diagrams"? Yeah, those where a SQL Server instance becomes a "data cloud"?

This one certainly beats them all: it includes every single buzzword known to humanity and is shaped to resemble a flying saucer emitting religious looking beams from the middle:

http://i.zdnet.com/blogs/web_os_2009_small.png

And yeah, it features Web 3.0 too, just to make sure you're looking at the latest and greatest.
I came here to post this. The solar "gold rush" of 2006-08 was precipitated by companies like HelioVolt claiming they could achieve panel production for under $1/watt.

Cheaper solar panels won't kill the industry, it will make it economically viable on the large scale. If this article's predictions are correct, it's probably time to invest--if you know the right company, that is.
Why I don’t buy Apple
True. Think of this as a case of pure win, though:

1. Government won't get its fingers into something it should (have to) do, and thus won't spend tax money unnecessarily.

2. You have more ways to evaluate the corruption and dishonesty of specific representatives and corporations.

It's not like the corruption didn't exist before you found out about it, after all.
Slide 34 where you find out that the improvement was only a little better. 03.hs is a fairly simple program and I would guess that one would run into a lot of these problems developing "real programs".

I would prefer if the compiler / runtime system were smart enough to figure out where parallelism could be applied - - and I would had guessed that this would be a lot easier in Haskell since there are no side effects. Are there anyone playing with the idea of JIT parallelism (i.e. apply parallelism while the program is running)?