skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can see that on the scale on individuals? But governments? They make a habit of going against what the previous incumbents did or said, just so they look like they are doing something different.

As such I don't see how this apology will make one jot of difference to the UK governments future actions (it already has openly gay MPs, I can't see them backing legislation that criminalizes their sexual preference).
This guy neglects things like... car insurance (which is required in some states), health insurance among other things.

His advice is in the right direction, but fairly blind - telling everyone to jump off the cart, right now.
Nothing wrong with the basic gist, but read closely the statement I quoted. Just because something takes a long time to kill you doesn't mean its treatment is expensive. Similarly, just because something is expensive to treat doesn't mean enough people have it to make it worth targetting from an overall cost perspective. That's all I was saying.
Have you looked at Augeas http://augeas.net ?

Augeas is:

- An API provided by a C library

- A command line tool to manipulate configuration from the shell (and shell scripts)

- Language bindings to do the same from your favorite scripting language

- Canonical tree representations of common configuration files

- A domain-specific language to describe configuration file formats
Working for someone else is not scalable.

"Trading time for money"

My creative/artist friends amaze me because they have mastered the art of income diversification (freelancing, multiple P/T jobs, selling stuff on CL, babysitting). While not in the realm of Pavlina's success, they seem to be unafraid of the two things most white-collar professionals may be most afraid of: 1) being laid-off or fired and 2) quitting your job (because they have done so many gigs). Yes, they squeak by but they get by.
What did Gordon Brown do to Alan Turing?
This apology was long overdue. I'm glad that Britain finally came out with it.
I'm going into graduate school next year and I plan on pursuing this exact topic or something similar to it. I believe that consciousness can be achieved if in fact we can analytically explain what consciisouness is.
Technologies like GWT and pyjamas aren't the solution because, right now, they are leaky abstractions (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...)
I think Kurzweil's books and pronouncements have been a powerful mover of even critics of AI.

Has anyone written an intelligent, thorough critique of his ideas? (Not that I'm necessarily against them but it would be good to hear both sides).
Shame that some of the comments on the Telegraph article are so bitter and irrelevant. Glass half full, people!
Is this really suprising? A boxed release has to be done weeks (months?) before it ships. Its not like they stop working on it after it gets done.
For the most part, "Chinese food" (served outside china) is an attempt by Chinese resturaunters to cater to the tastes of locals. So a better description of what you had was "American Chinese Food".

If you ever have the opportunity, try Indian Chinese Food. It's fantastic.
I agree. Though with your stew boiling for 3 days you should begin to factor in energy costs.
Creating an IT department means creating a new business partner
This isn't advice for everyone - not that the author said it was, of course. But it probably makes sense for the top percentiles.

We say the best programmers are 10x better than the worst, right? But they don't get paid 10x as much. If you're in the 10x ability club (or you think you are) you should be looking for ways to get paid on how productive you are, not on how many hours you put in. You can't change the number of hours in the day, but you can always find ways to boost your productivity.

If you can set up ten web sites in the time it takes someone else to set up one, you need to start getting paid per site, not per hour. When you get paid per hour, every increase in productivity goes into your boss' pocket. When you get paid per project or per work unit, productivity gains go into your pocket.
One? More like 20+.
Reading everyone's reasons for not implementing SSL, I'm wondering, how do you handle user logins? I'm building a site right now, and I need to create user accounts, and allow them to login with a username/password. Seems irresponsible to have them pass their password as cleartext when they log in. What do you do instead?
There were some blog posts by Google explaining the results of some of their changes. For example apparently they don't even deliver valid HTML to speed up loading time, as that has been shown to retain more users.
The Perfect Healthcare Plan (and why it will never happen)
sour grapes? (hoping we are allowed to joke with PG)
You say that as though an apology is preventing "us" from doing "more important stuff". Like the apology would somehow consume resources or be a distraction.

If you don't like it, feel free to not read the article.
That is my point exactly. Did Gordon Brown kill him or condoned his killing? Furthermore, if he apologised on behalf of the government, is it the same government that killed him (seeing as how the parties/people in power changed).

If the latter is true, aren’t there bigger things he can apologise about? The UK government did quite a few dastardly things during its long rule (as most governments did). It would be nice if they start apologising to every country and group that they oppressed during the colonial period.
A Changing Threat: Al-Qaeda Eight Years Later
That's what I thought. If the government is apologising, then they are essentially saying they are shouldering some of the responsibility for the mistakes of previous governments. If that's the case, they shouldn't be pleased or proud, but regretful and reflective.
Nouriel Roubini: Don't Believe The Optimists
And if you get less deaths per person-years, you might also save money (per person-year).
wow, yes - they weren't there when I posted the link. Swivel-eyed loons :o
At the minimum, a lack of physical activity has to be included as a factor in this along side diet.
MIT Finds the Molecular "DNA" of concrete
Didn't they learn a lesson from Titan's Quest?
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=426...

If you must use DRM, make sure the user knows that the DRM failed, not the product itself. Don't silently make the game unwinnable or dump to the desktop with no explanation. Otherwise you're going to hurt your product's reputation.
Sounds like a guy selling some kind of pyramid scheme.

Oh wait, he is a motivational speaker, one level above the "get rich quick" folks.

I found his post to be almost insulting (I'm rich, I'm making plenty of money and you are an idiot for not listening to me).
i wonder which way the causation is. maybe people who crash faster tend to be early risers because they crash.
Twitter is in trouble because a website with more features (photo albums, apps, blah blah) and a larger community has been consistently adding all of twitter's 'killer' features to their own site.
Question: What's to stop facebook from adding public status updates or any other distinct twitter feature?
Answer: nothing.
Modern-Day Gadgets that Annoy Us
Haven't you heard? The new wisdom is that exercise makes you even fatter. Well, I exaggerate, but I'm referring to a recent Time story saying 'exercise won't make you thin' (the idea being that you still need to eat less or you'll just get hungrier and never lose weight).

You are quite right, but 'pin the tail on the donkey' seems to sell better :-/
Why, did some people not click on the Search button before because they couldn't see it?
Congratulations to jgrahamc on making this happen. This apology was long overdue and would not have happened without your effort.
>Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

"Andy" Tanenbaum,
Computer Networks, 4th Ed. p. 91
Given that neither Gordon Brown nor any members of the current government are culpable in the brutal treatment of Alan Turing a lifetime ago, they are not capable of making a sincere apology for that treatment. The only thing they are capable of is in making a self-congratulatory statement that amounts to "Look how much better we are today than our forefathers!". That is what this is, and that is all they can give us. Anything else would be dishonest.
If they don't survive, it will not be because of damage to their quality, but because of an outcry. There would be in outcry in that case because it is bad and obviously.

There is not a perfect marriage between what is good for Google and what is good for the world.
This reminds me of a self-healing concrete I read about not to long ago. This new stuff can take a strain of 5% tensile strain without breaking, as compared to the .01 breaking point of regular concrete.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090422175336.ht...
Why does knowing friends' past events cross a moral boundary?!
Facebook Ordered To Turn Over Source Code due to "Patent Infrigement"
"Alan Turing, the man who knew too much", by David Leavitt.

The speculation goes that if Turing was a homosexual he was a security risk. I'm not sure what to make of that though, after all he was no longer allowed to work with the machines which were advancing very rapidly indeed.

Similar rumours keep cropping up about David Kelly.

The problem is that with such a lack of transparency even if these are nonsense there is no way to debunk them, that alone gives them a semblance of credence. As you said, we'll never know.
The singularity stuff has always raised my bullshit detector enough that I never paid any attention to it, but after watching the video I'll admit Ray definitely has some really intriguing ideas about the exponential development of technology worth paying attention to.
I don't think there's a limit on the number of startups. If the economy can absorb the output of arbitrary numbers of people working in cubicles for big companies, why can't it absorb the output of arbitrary numbers of people working in little companies they've started?
For anybody who's read the black swan, fixed income is mediocristan & variable income is extremistan which means that the upside to the variable income lifestyle is a relatively small proportion of people living the glamorous lifestyle that Pavlina is selling but the downside is the much larger number of people who are barely scraping by making ends meet on the same system.

We'd all like to believe that we could be winners but the main thing stopping us is the mostly sensible fear that we might actually discover how much of a loser we actually are.
As a freelance designer myself, I can see exactly what you mean @wallflower. One of the up sides of all the economic woes of late is that it's helped me build a resistance to the normal fears that creep in, ie. being laid off or fired. Lose a few clients and you'll quickly learn how adept you are at filling the gaps. Trading time for money is just working for someone elses dream.
I doubt the world even knows enough about Richard Branson's personal subjective world and internal wiring to know if "desperation" is even the right descriptor. (I certainly don't.) Whether that kind of pressure motivates or demoralizes a particular person depends in part on the person. In my own case, I am very risk averse and only take risks when that is the conservative answer. My oldest son loves it when we have some crisis because he knows I will rise to the occasion and find some creative solution I would never try if a more conservative option were viable. I hate, hate, hate it and feel tortured by such situations. But I am trying to make my peace with it because it is obvious that some of my best ideas come out of gambles made when there was no sure thing available. Other people seem to perceive me as combative, risk-taking, and so on. I don't. I see myself as forced into such choices at gun-point and someone who would far prefer to NOT have to make such choices.

Another thought: If you are dramatically more competent than almost everyone you meet at some things, no one can realistically tell you what you can or cannot do. You have probably been told a jillion times "you can't do that!" when you already had done it. I know I tend to find my limits by falling on my face because failure is the only sure measure of what I genuinely cannot do. I have been told so many times that I could not do something when, in fact, I absolutely could do it that I just can't take the word of other people concerning what is a reasonable goal. I also loathe this aspect of my life. This is not how I want it to be. But it would be insane to behave more "conservatively" when there is a mountain of evidence showing that what other people believe is "impossible" is often just difficult for me but not impossible. This gives other people a certain perception about me reminiscent of what I am hearing about Richard Branson but the public feedback I get about how people see me is very different from my own view of myself. So just because outsiders look at Branson and view his life as lived in a "desperate" state does not mean that is how he experienced it.

PS -- My computer is back from the shop. Woot! :)
Just the light touch of Marissa Mayer and her "Studies prove people prefer bigger fonts" ickery.
I Greasemonkey'd almost everything away from Facebook as-is. The one thing I didn't like was the right column, which is gone now.
as opposed to the general view, i think the new ui is an attempt to compete w/ twitter's ui
Just an amusing note - I used to call 3.5 inch disks 'hard disks' because unlike 5.25 inch disks, the shell around the disk is hard!
Get it out of your head that Facebook is competing with Twitter. Facebook is enormous compared to Twitter, and it and Twitter overlap on only a small subset of features.

Fact is, right now Facebook doesn't have to compete with anybody. In what they do, they're ahead of everybody else by margins that are almost baffling. Hell, the closest they come to having a competitor is Google against Facebook's Bing ads.

I think that what's happening is more simply that Facebook saw Twitter had something cool, and instead of making a set of features that were similar but slightly different in irritating ways to set itself aside, it took Twitter's ideas wholesale and credited them instantly. But that has nothing to do with Facebook Lite, which is targeting people with slower computers.
> Number Two: The Automatic Hand Dryer

Just recently, this has been Done Right. I don't remember where I saw a good one, or the brand, but good ones do exist now.
A sample size of 31 is not necessarily invalid. See http://www.isixsigma.com/library/content/c000709a.asp#small
Public status updates were already introduced.
(I'm rich, I'm making plenty of money and you are an idiot for not listening to me)

So, like a pg essay?

Don't get me wrong, I think pg offers great advice after all. I do find it ironic though that there are several "defenders of the religion" here on YC that don't seem to see the similarities between the messages that pg conveys and every other self-help guru out there. (Yes, boiled down, Paul Graham is basically a self help guru.)

pg speaks to hackers, Pavlina, Orman, Godin, 37signals and others speak to people of different persuasion. Each is not selling snake oil, rather the lessons learned from a particularly successful experience. You can discount them or choose to learn more at your leisure.

There's nothing wrong with that, and suggesting he's somehow unethical, or otherwise insulting him because his methods are not particularly of your persuasion is like a Christian berating a Muslim for worshipping the wrong god.
I think that statement is incomplete. It should be 'do what you love [that users will love too] and the money will come'. Also, I think it might help to try and find partners that are strong in areas you are weak, for example, someone great at sales/marketing.
Ask HN: iPhone copy/paste library for web?
Is there a (jQuery?) library for the web that operates mostly like iPhone copy/paste? It would let you select one or more areas of text, potentially modify an existing selection, provide contextual buttons, etc.
People seem to forget that he's been around for decades making predictions - and he's been pretty accurate so far.
We are digging our graves with our teeth.

Caring for diabetes and related conditions consumes about 1/7 of all US healthcare spending (could be a little more or less depending on how you count).
http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-statistics/cost-of-diabetes...
The vast majority of type-2 diabetes cases could be prevented with better eating habits. If the incidence of preventable chronic diseases was greatly reduced, healthcare costs would be so low that we wouldn't be arguing over how to pay for it.
Can't a site copy another site without it being an attempt to destroy that site? Facebook and Twitter are used very differently, and it would take a lot of backpedaling for Facebook to begin to usurp Twitter's userbase—which is doesn't have to, since the average Twitter user has a Facebook account.
They may not want you to know. They may have had a reason for not telling you about the event (i.e. they're going to a party thrown by your ex-girlfriend). There's a number of social reasons people don't generally let people know everything they do.
First Palm Pre App Rejection
Well, even more, the pattern he points to is not complex. It is simple exponential growth. And the mechanism is not magic, it is the power of miniaturization.

The main thing I'd question is whether the results will be ... uh, good. There are some serious downside that one might imagine - the intelligent, autonomous, killing machines the US army is working on - I know it's cheesy to say but what could possibly go wrong? Seriously, technological shift makes nearly everyone nearly all-powerful. There might be toes that would wind being stepped on.
Obviously it's beneficial, we can see much easier in the daytime which is a considerable plus when it comes to searching for food.

As a night person, I find it harder to explain why I feel more productive after the sun has gone down. There is some support now for the idea that this can be an actual medical condition in some cases (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_syndrome) affecting <1% of the population, though about ~15% of people are thought to be night owls with a general preference for the evening hours but not inability to sleep earlier if they choose.

Though it's not something I, um, lose sleep over, I do think that society inadvertently discriminates against people with an evening orientation.

I find it horrific that many American schoolchildren are expected to begin lessons at 8am - unless I am working really long days where I'm worn out physically as well as mentally (so I sleep early), I generally can't function at all before 10am. In Ireland school starts at 9am and my childhood memories are dominated by difficult wakening, rushed breakfasts and persistent lateness. I have major reservations about how I'm going to handle this when we have kids, which will be soon.
Eddy, I respect your position and the work you've done, but we're in two different worlds here.

For one thing, I just don't see distributors as a necessary evil to large-scale success and I certainly don't think they are necessarily more capable of promotion and advertising around properties than a particularly-driven filmmaker/producer in the modern era. I don't think this has been the case for some time, and certainly not in the five+ years you've been doing your pro work.

And for the kind of people I am talking about, yes, 5000 copies or less is the goal, and $3000 is terrible, terrible money to lose. That's the "indies" I mean, not the "indies" I read about in Entertainment Weekly or on the Sundance weblog.

BBS Documentary got reviews in Wired, Film Threat, and a pile of other locations without paying for a distributor or out to other such organizations. As a result, I sell a bunch less, but all the non-production costs go to me, not to someone who gave me a nice dinner four years ago.

I'm going to give you a pass for indicating IF enthusiasts would tolerate a standard definition film because they once or currently liked games with scant graphics.

Like I said, different worlds, and in my world I really do think Blu-ray is a cancer and that this sort of treatment needs to be pointed out.
The templating system they developed looks pretty sweet http://github.com/facebook/tornado/blob/master/tornado/templ....

Just played around with it a bit and it's basically what I want:

1) Simple and clear syntax (e.g. they use 'end' not endfor, endblock, etc)

2) Assign template variables to anything (including functions)

3) Don't over-restrict the author (e.g. they allow list comprehensions in if tags)

4) Block and extends statements.

Error handling seems to be a little clearer than other template languages though still not great:

http://gist.github.com/184934

Clearly it's not going to be for everyone but after slogging around with Mako for the last year (<%namespace:def /> tags anyone?) this is like a breath of fresh air.
It will be interesting to see how Palm deals with the sorts of issues that have upset iPhone developers so much.
If you're CPU bound in pure-python computations then the GIL (Global Interpreter Lock) will cause you to only make use of one core. This is intentional: threads are hard, processes are simple.
Pigeon transfers data faster than S. African ISP
Get it out of your head that Facebook is competing with Twitter.

Please note I said they're competing with twitters ui, which is different from competing with twitter.

That said, I think facebook is competing with twitter's growth rate. Not in absolute figures but relative.

The fact is, twitter is growing faster than facebook did in its early years. and no one knows better than facebook how a smart team can build a business out of early momentum.
If authors only sell first digital/online rights, then they retain the opportunity to publish the material online later on.

There are any number of writer's handbooks that advise authors which rights they can sell / not sell.

Very good resource: SPARC: http://www.arl.org/sparc/author/addendum.shtml

e.g., ONLINE Magazine's author guidelines point out:
"Authors will be asked to sign a publication agreement prior to the editing process, granting to Information Today, Inc. the right to publish the article in ONLINE magazine in print and electronic formats. (Information Today, Inc. will copyright the issue to protect the entire issue as an entity.) The agreement also stipulates that the author not publish any version or excerpt of the article prior to, or for 90 days following, its publication in ONLINE."
http://www.infotoday.com/online/authors.shtml
Yeah, the guy sounds like a huckster for sure.

And much of his logic is flawed:

"If expenses rise unexpectedly and surpass your monthly income, then you have no choice but to draw money from cash reserves or investments or go into debt. If your expenses later return to normal, this debt may be temporary, but you’ll still end up paying extra interest or losing interest on your depleted savings/investments, which takes money out of your pocket."

The same thing could happen if you earn a variable income: what if you had some large, unexpected expense and also had a bad month for income? Same result, maybe even worse.

The only solution is to live consistently below your means and save up a good-sized emergency fund - that advice works whether you make a "fixed income" or not.
Presumably startups produce more/better per head (that's the point, right?). On the other hand there may be a limit to what can profitably be produced by small teams. We don't nee 30 different invite or calendar apps. There are good reasons why large organizations form, and there are things that only large companies with a world- or nationwide footprint can do.