skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
[nic@columbia-23 nic]$ uptime
10:00:33 up 1609 days, 21:24, 2 users, load average: 0.08, 0.02, 0.01
I wonder what the U.S. ranks in terms of median income? The United States has a much larger unskilled work force than most countries- something which over the past 100 years has been a blessing, but over next 100 may be a curse.
http://andrewtrusty.appspot.com/readability/

Combine the "readable" feed + Google Reader = iPhone HN
> You think of n/2 of them in the first 5 minutes.

The word that leaps to mind here is "half". :)
According to the website the RX version is listed at US$13,995 which is a bit closer anyway.
Ingo Molnar: BFS vs. mainline scheduler benchmarks and measurements
I agree. I did the original colossal cave on 8.5 floppies on ISIS In Circuit Emulators at AES back in 77 or so, when I was first exposed to UNIX, I had to examine the sectors to see the solution - the program was written in FORTRAN, by the way...
I'm using GitX daily, though only for looking at the history.

I would love to see blame support though.
The parallel LWN thread: http://lwn.net/Articles/351058/
What's the point of a Scheme standard?
1. Turn off sound/visual notifications for email.
2. End long running compilations/tests scripts with 'say "compilation done"' as a cue to stop browsing the web.
4. Making plans public. I used to have an accountability partner where we both used to tell each other what we'll achieve for that day. And then check up on each other at the end of the day.

That is a genius idea. Nothing like peer pressure to help you achieve stuff.
So, you believe judging quality boils down to how popular something is?

If you'd like for popularity to be the point of comparison, then Microsoft loses on pretty much every front in the war for the web server. PHP is more popular than any MS language for web development, MySQL is more popular than SQL Server for web development, Apache is (dramatically) more popular for web development, BIND is more popular, Postfix and Sendmail are more popular on the Internet at large than Exchange, and Linux is more popular on web servers than any MS OS. Apache runs 47% of the web, while IIS runs 23%. The remaining space is mostly taken up by other Open Source web servers, like nginx and Lighttpd.
I live in London and these Brits cannot make an honest, decent hamburger. The good ones are ones in fancy dress. The simple ones are dry meatballs of a pale sickly color. They've got a nice sandwich chain called Pret a Manger that make consistently good food however. And a very strong café americano.
I don't think its PG's account. Probably just the RSS feed tied to a bot.
Paul Graham has managed to set himself up an army of nitpickers (free editors).
Are you now saying that all you did in the first place is affirm that something exists -- something we all know already exists -- in the midst of discussion of whether it should exist? WTF is the point of that?
I really like the idea of no wasted time before lunch. Trying to remove reader/hn for the entire day sucks, but maybe knowing "only" after lunch would help increase my rate on my already more productive morning time.
That protocol is cracked.com's livelihood.
The foil that's providing the lift is pretty big in terms of surface area, and so is the drag. On a normal board at speed on flat water, probably only about a foot of the board is in the water, and the fin is tiny by comparison. So the idea seems to be reduce drag by getting the hull out of the water, but the size of the foil required to do this seems to have more drag than the hull did.

It does look very smooth through the chop though.
> Strawman in a sense were the party offering the unpaid internship distorts the value of the compensation through gaining experience. So the argument of the first party not being paid can be refuted by saying that compensation occurs through gaining experience.

That wouldn't make it a strawman fallacy -- it would just make it refutable.

> in my opinion

I don't think that the fact some people have that opinion is justification for the law.

> A person on a full-time internship should get enough to cover basic living expenses.

I haven't heard of many full-time internships. People who take internships generally don't have the time for full-time without pay, and the organizations that offer those internships tend to know that.
Used van buying guide
It's interesting that you mentioned your prices in monthly payments, rather than the pre-financed total. What precisely were you negotiating?

This article has a fascinating discussion of the "4 square sheet" that dealers use to fudge negotiations. Two of the squares are price and financing (included in your monthly amount), and the others are trade in and warranty. People generally get a better deal if they're negotiating solely on price:

http://www.edmunds.com/advice/buying/articles/42962/article....
Why does everyone seem so insistent on ignoring the claim that it's too expensive to pay regular employees for this work, and as a result, without interns, the project won't happen at all?
Must be the addictiveness of caffeine creeping in :-(
While playing Daft Punk's 'Veridis Quo':
1. Read about Lisp.
2. Open XCode.
3. Code in Objective-C.
:P
The different attitudes of computer scientists and economists
It is only natural to switch to γ = 2.2, but mainly to agree with the rest of the world. Neither is particularly “better” for image viewing – the difference between the two is trivial and irrelevant, except insofar as it makes images look different on two different machines.

γ is mainly a way to align the metric in our color space with human perception: humans adapt to varying light levels, even in small areas of the visual field, and our judgment of color differences is relative (i.e. relative to magnitude, logarithmic) rather than absolute (linear).

Any operation that requires interpolating between arbitrary colors (e.g. image rotation, scaling, or compositing with transparency) will have errors introduced by any γ ≠ 1.0, so careful image processing applications should convert to γ = 1.0, perform whatever operation, and convert back, but in practice none of them do, because with sufficient pixels, especially if they're mostly opaque, users don’t know they should care.

But storing colors in 8-bit color with γ = 1.0 would be a disaster, because we’d be devoting half of our storage space to the very bright colors, while leaving the dark colors only a few levels of distinction: the darks would end up extremely noisy.

Incidentally, this last is the reason that digital cameras, even though they collect 10 or 12 bits per channel of data, end up with noise in the blacks: cameras gather photons and store them linearly, meaning that the light parts of the image are silky smooth because we can make many fine color distinctions, but not the darks. Hence the general advice to “expose right.”

Soon enough, we’ll just be storing and manipulating images in γ = 1.0 floating point, and thereby get the best of both worlds: operations are technically linear, but the encoding space is assigned logarithmically.
Yes, in all large shops a weekly/monthly reboot cycle is a requirement.
Duly note that this requires several hours of overtime from sysadmins, adding additional cost.
Ghostly Compatibility: Cross Browser Transparancy with CSS
and you can also use guest/guest as a dummy login
Shady is a simple programming language which lets you define images
Assuming caffeine/cup is linear (2 cups =~ 2x caffeine), the second graph you made shows caffeine consumption vesus age. Since average consumption goes down in the last age group, your sample does not show a steady increase with age.

edit: Think of it as an increase in the 7+ category being counterbalanced by a bigger drop in the lower categories.
I think that's only sometimes true. There are a number of well-written proscriptive essays where the author chooses to ignore paths that proved fruitless during her time drafting the essay. Furthermore, even personal essays can leave out sidebars that prove to be meaningless distractions. If I used Etherpad, I'm sure I'd write three times as many words as there are in the finished product; I remove more than I write, and I think that's the case for most people who take the craft seriously (regardless of skill, of which I have little beyond passion).

On the process of writing, however, you're spot on.
I always find these things funny, because there is a belief that all dealerships are the same (that is, the variable is simply the price of the car.) It turns out that dealership location is a HUGE variable driving both pricing and decision to buy. Some people need a car sooner than others; the dealership with inventory is more attractive. The one close to your house or work allows you to get service and still get driven to your destination; buying from a dealership 100 miles away, even with the best price, may not help if you need service that only the dealer can provide (either free or something a local shop can't do).

No question, there is much one can do to shift the power. But there is a reason why no one has yet gotten the car purchase process totally online: the dealers do indeed have some power. They control the distribution of the car to you, and they have location-based impact that, for some people, is important. At the end of the day, you are buying from one of the dealers, and if they are all above your price but you want the car, well, you either pay more than you think you should, or change your car choice.

If you don't care about the "free oil change" services or other post-sales issues involving the dealer, and have the time to deal with multiple dealers and a potentially extended process... then go for it. If you are in an area with few dealers for the car you want, however, you may find the negotiation requires a different approach than merely a PDG assuming multiple equal competitors.
I think a more interesting statistic would be the median internet speed. Considering the rural populations in the US which have terrible speed, an average is not a very reliable statistic.
Whoosh.

Jesus, people. It's not like he refuses to pay anyone for anything at any time. The core of his complaint is that a project won't happen and people won't get work experience (how much you think he weights each of these relative to the other is your own affair), and not that paying people for projects that can happen that way is a problem somehow. It may seem like a fine distinction, but it's pretty much central to the whole discussion.

If you think I said nothing at all, you aren't listening (or maybe you just refuse to think beyond your intense desire to believe Cuban is eeevil).
Why use four characters when you can use three?
On pre-Snow-Leopard systems, all of the UI is going to look dark and contrasty, contra system and application designers’ intent. If you like it, go for it, but I think it looks terrible. With Snow Leopard changing the default, developers will of course design their apps to fit γ = 2.2, and will lighten everything up, so that it looks right.
control your thoughts. no daydreaming.

turn off the music.
As soon as browser vendors decide to add this, it will happen: it’s in CSS3, but the standards process will neither encourage nor prevent browsers from doing this themselves.

Note that Firefox does (or can) actually do proper color management of CSS/HTML colors, unlike any other browser.
Looks interesting. A lightweight (fully self-contained in one <2mb file) distributed version control system, with built-in wiki and bugtracker, written by the author of SQLite. Since it stores everything in SQLite, the entire repo can be copied around as one file, and solid transactions are already implemented. (It's probably quite portable.) It doesn't look like it has a library/API to use it as a storage backend, yet. Oh, and it's released under the GPL v. 2.

Word of warning: fossil open (checking out a project from the repo file) tarbombs the project into the current directory by default.

At a quick glance: it looks easy to use, the bug tracker and wiki look decent. It seems to be focused heavily on reliability (never corrupting the repo), at the possible expense of speed. It seemed slower than git, but likely still faster for day-to-day usage than non-distributed VCs. I don't have any pressing reason to switch from git, but I'm curious if anybody else here has comments from more than a few hours experience with it.
The 3 Reasons I agree with tptacek's statement:

1. It puts everything in perspective. After all, essay is just another one of several devices to convey a point through writing.

2. He clearly states that any one of these devices can be abused. Surely anyone can write a crappy and spam-filled essay with a catchy title just as they can do so with a list.

3. Clearly many people surfing the Internet do have A.D.D. Perhaps the cause is the Internet itself but it doesn't matter, the end result is the same - namely, reading material for A.D.D. Internet users is in high demand.

EOL
"The list of n things similarly limits the damage that can be done by a bad writer."

I have more things I want to do than I have time to do them; why in the world would I waste time reading something if I expected it to be by a bad writer? I have quit reading writers before when I came across strong evidence of bias or incompetence in their writings.
The beginning of that sentence is: "Inc recently asked me who I thought were..."
Right now we don't support multiple sessions a la Gmail, except the demo/demo user, which is read-only, hence this is not an issue.

If you open a new session with the same user (eg. in another browser) the previous one will be logged out. If people use the guest/guest they will keep kicking each other out.
A nice way of suggesting what I have felt, and that such articles are quite often hastily prepared. Most importantly, how do we as readers have any confidence that an article titled "The 7 ..." is really inclusive or even instructive?
I've eaten some amazing cheeseburgers at really bad restaurants.

Maybe they serve bad cheeseburgers so you'll tell your friends -- that way, they'll avoid having any customers who regularly converse with someone willing to admit he orders cheeseburgers.
It will be the downfall of the country. The numbers of unskilled are increasing as a result of immigration from the poorest parts of the world and from the offspring from those people who migrated here from those poorest parts of the world. There's a large imbalance of people who pay the taxes and the people who consume the taxes. It's fracturing now, and soon, it'll all come down.
I don't actually know the numbers. We don't keep track. But I know there haven't been any with founders in their 50s, and only 2 or 3 with founders in their 40s or their teens. Most founders are in their 20s or 30s. Completely guessing, I'd say 15-20% have founders in their 30s.
I didn't read the article but I assume it's about flipping the appropriate bits on the disk using a small needle? No? I'm shocked :)
Perhaps this guy has a bright future as a Nigerian scammer!
> it's pretty hard to argue that he wouldn't have been better off with a paid internship.

. . . if the internship existed at all.

Your argument seems to take the form "The downside you suggest is doubtful to me, but it's pretty hard to argue he wouldn't have been better off if he did everything exactly the same and magically got money."

Well, duh -- if people give you money, you're likely to be better off, if all else is equal. This whole discussion started with an "all else is not equal" set of circumstances, though, where Cuban stated outright that the project cannot afford to exist if the "internships" are paid with hard cash. Period.

Thus, the "doubtful" circumstance is a reality in this case -- and, given that state of affairs, talking about whether they'd be better off if Cuban would just pay them for these jobs that don't exist is nothing but wanking.

Let's discuss this in the on-topic world for a moment: Do you think these potential unpaid internships that have been prohibited by government could have benefited some people who are now worse off because those opportunities don't exist, or not? If you think they could have, perhaps you can explain why you want to deny them those opportunities. If you think they could not have, perhaps you could explain why not. That's what's relevant here -- not whether or not everybody magically having more money would be nice.
Every equation included in an essay will halve its readership? ;-)
I actually had to check.. I haven't rebooted my server on Slicehost since I got the account, so it's been up 357 days.
Gadget Makers Can Find Thief, but Don’t Ask
If your brain is in algorithm mode, n/2 might actually be easier to process.
Wabi-sabi is worth a look.
What kind of caffeinated drink does each cup represent?

A cup of coffee has 2-3x times the amount of caffeine a cup of tea has.
>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.

I agree there will be unexpected good benefits associated with biotech research.

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

None of those were designed to be harmful.

>Almost as soon as we invent the nuclear bomb, we also invest nuclear power.

This is not an example of symmetry. The nuclear bomb gave humanity the power to destroy itself forever. Nuclear power has not given humanity the power to preserve itself forever.

>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.

Are you sure you aren't exaggerating? You call that cosmically improbable? Remember, we are talking about things that haven't even been discovered yet.

Let me put it this way. If you had such extraordinary predictive power about which technologies will be invented in what order, you could make a lot of money in the stock market. And extraordinary predictive power is what you need to rule scenarios that are compatible with all formulations of the laws of physics as being "cosmically improbable". I agree that such predictive power may exist in astronomy. I disagree that such predictive power exists in technology forecasting, or pretty much anything involving humans for that matter.

If you continue to stand by this position, I will decide that you're not worth convincing and unlikely to be convinced and leave the discussion.

>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.

"Mother nature" has no quest to kill us. All the damage that's been done by naturally-occuring viruses has been by accident. So someone who was consciously optimizing to create a maximally harmful virus might be able to do a lot more.
Certification is much better than licensing, because one can always choose to ignore certification, or shop around for the best certifications. This, in turn, is important because licensing and certification both sometimes fail utterly to accurately reflect someone's capabilities -- which means that sometimes you're better off avoiding the licensed or certified individual in favor of someone else who doesn't have the same license or certification but knows his or her shit better and more thoroughly. In the case of a licensed industry, though, you're not allowed to make that kind of decision for yourself.
I use online dictionaries when reading Jack Vance books. I don't think they are obsolete at all - printed ones are.
It was self-reported.

It'd be much better to convert to mgs of caffeine, but that seemed a little much to ask HN.
28th is not bad for something as ultimately trivial as internet speed.

(Compared to healthcare, human rights, carbon emissions, adult incarceration, child mortality etc. etc.)
I can't believe they removed creator code support deliberately. What the hell were they thinking?

Or is the better question: What the hell were they drinking?
I think that gadget makers are underestimating the intensity of the emotions involved when a gadget is stolen. We have a strong sense of justice that's disproportionate to the actual value of the gadget.

I know that I feel better about my iPhone because of the stories where iPhone thieves have been tracked down and arrested - and I don't even have MobileMe!
Nobody ever mentions the relative geographical area of a country in relation to internet speed. In countries with a high GDP proportional to the area of the country and/or population, infrastructure is much cheaper to build out, so they can move much faster.
Have you noticed any correlation between age and failure?
Absolutely. Loses credibility by not discussing what he got wrong, and then calling this a prediction:

"Predicted China’s reclaiming of Hong Kong and the exact manner the handover would take place, 12 years before it happened."

Britain had a 99 year lease which began in 1898. Predicting it would end in 1997 requires slightly-more-simple math than game theory. I would posit most people could have predicted that more than 12 years before it happened.
Wabi-sabi is an incredibly relaxing mindset for a designer. Shizen is something I try and stick to. I hate things that pretend to be what they're not.
Exploding offers
Unique Baby Gifts
Baby Depot - Baby Gift Online Store offers Unique Baby Gifts and Baby Shower Gifts: Baby Gift Baskets, Diaper Cakes, Personalized Baby Gift, Baby Blankets, Nursery Decorating, Baby Clothing, Baby Bedding, Baby Toys, Baby Jewelry, Baby Organic Products, Birth Announcement E-cards, Potty Training for New Baby Boy, Baby Girl, and Parents. Also Provides Baby Shower Gift Ideas, Baby Shower Favors, and Baby Shower Decor Ideas.
Wow, this sounds great - the Pirates of Silicon Valley for the UK.
The sample size is unfortunately woefully small.
I played around with e a lot back in the day. There were a lot of really interesting ideas in it.

If you're in to capability security check out the Cap-Talk mailing list: http://www.eros-os.org/mailman/listinfo/cap-talk
They typically have six to ten years of work experience and real-world ideas.

That's a bit low for 40-year olds, isn't it? So, on average they start working at 30-34 years of age? Or they start early but take really long vacations?
To generalize: why use n characters when you can use n-1?
Final readership = Original Readership / (2 * Equations)
paper is obsolete.
"many photorealistic paintings are not mere copies of photographs, but interpretations of reality based on the artist's vision"
That's what photographs are so a photorealist image is unlikely to differ. A photo is not itself reality.

I've seen videos not unlike your F111 ("Timing is Everything").

This artwork undoubtedly takes huge skill - I think that it is deprecated because it doesn't appear to say much beyond the actual image. It doesn't appear to convey deeper meaning, resonating with something of the social climate and the person of the viewer as [I consider] good art should.
They make dictionaries with the x most common words, and then there are unabridged dictionaries.

I always thought they should do the opposite: a dictionary with only the rare words.

Do I really need a dictionary to tell me what "down" means?

Anyone at that level of english is not using a dictionary. So who is the target audience?
Because the moment I read n/2 I wondered which kind of distribution n has, for t.

It could be (cumulative) exponential. Ideas would then be independent and random. That doesn't feel right, because ideas are very much related, but a better model doesn't immediately spring to mind.

Had he said half, I would never consider the distribution of ideas over time. And I bet pg considered the distribution while writing the essay, and he probably also realized it wasn't really all that interesting, and consequently left it out.