skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a MacBook Pro with the 256GB SSD (it's a Toshiba drive, allegedly with their own custom controller, so be wary of people bashing on Samsung). After reading a lot of articles and using this machine for a while, I've come to the conclusion that the Intel drive would basically involve spending a few hundred dollars extra and voiding my warranty to get a speedup I'll never really notice.

Yeah, maybe I could boot in eight seconds instead of twelve, but I don't really care so much about that; this thing's plenty fast for everything I do, and outside of actually benchmarking it on non-real-world tasks (I don't routinely write huge files, for example) it's just not a difference that'll show up, especially when lost in the noise of other factors.
Or move to a country where said language is spoken for 3 months ...
Verizon’s Silly Commercial Against iPhone - Promoting Untouchability
Yesterday Verizon launched a commercial against iPhone.t highlights all the features an iPhone doesn’t have and then ends up saying "Everything iDon’t ... DROID does".Now what is seriously silly about this ad is "iDon’t have a real keyboard" i.e. iPhone doesn’t have a keyboard.
This is in fact a very powerful idea. It's been my rule for a couple decades now. I think I learned it partly from Rtm, who has always been a kind of code miser.

Curiously enough, there is one weird edge case where this approach can bite you: when you're launching something new that you're going to publish the source of, and which a lot of people are already predisposed to hate...
Plug your output into an external amp with a volume knob.

If it's still not loud enough, get a bigger amp and bigger speakers.

Old amps are cheap.
why all major browsers are written in C/C++?

Because they are all very, very old codebases.

Firefox's UI code is all JavaScript, BTW.
Academic Kakistocracy
Verizon Silly Commercial Against iPhone – Promoting Untouchability
I would say you have spun AIDS
The Most Important Language Feature No One Talks About
So, in your experience motherboards like this one, http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-det... that have regular SATA and support "RAID" do you getting 3Gbps total, or 3Gbps on each port?
"All Verizon smartphones will now have wifi. This is because all Verizon smartphones now also require you to get a data plan anyway."

WiFi does not refer to Verizon's wireless data offering, but to 802.11b/g, etc. Most Verizon phones do not offer WiFi. The iPhone offers both EDGE and WiFi connections.
Huh? Did you read your own words in your post right above?

..the hyperinflation fearmongers, the deflation fearmongers, Austrian economics true believers, Randists, socialists, And most of them are wrong.

And in case you haven't noticed from the recent bank and financial mess, economics and finance are related.
They may not be able to update the G1 due to the limited size of the G1's internal flash.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/17/t-mobile-g1-wont-see-any-...
I wonder what the author means by "learning a language". Learning to read simple documents within 3 months isn't that difficult.
I'm kind of happy with Ballmer actually. He seems to be a fairly crazy person, which is the best that could happen for the rest of us.

The last thing you want is competent management at Microsoft.

This video says it all:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvsboPUjrGc

I don't know what he's trying to prove but it sure didn't work for me.
I just don't see the advantage to dividing them. Isn't it easier to run in single-window mode.
It is a network protocol issue. Verizon and Sprint are CDMA, AT&T and T-Mobile (and the rest of the world) are GSM. Your phone will work on one spec or the other, and depending on the spec you will have two carriers to choose from if you were to get an unlocked phone.
KaChing in NYT: "Site Lets Investors See and Copy Experts’ Trades"
Excerpt / summary:

“The mutual fund industry is a $10 trillion industry that has seen no innovation for 25 years. The Internet has had no impact,” Mr. Rachleff said.

KaChing has attracted a roster of prominent early investors from Silicon Valley who have financed the company with $3 million. They include Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape; Kevin Compton of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; and Jeffrey Jordan, chief executive of OpenTable, the online reservation service.

The angel investors have also been investing their own money through KaChing during the pilot period. “The concept is great — the ability to tap into not just the wisdom of the crowd, but to be able to identify and invest with the particular geniuses in the crowd that stand out,” said Mr. Andreessen, who has invested $100,000 using the site.

Customers will be able to open a brokerage account with Interactive Brokers and link their account with their choice of investors on KaChing. KaChing charges customers a single management fee of 0.25 percent to 3 percent, set by each investor. KaChing keeps a quarter of the fee, and the investors get the rest.
Krugman: "Is This the [U.S. dollar's] Wile E. Coyote Moment?"
Your honor, I present exhibit A, and rest my case.
This is from 2007, but the question is still valid:

"[O]ne of these days there will be a Wile E. Coyote moment for the dollar: the moment when the cartoon character, who has run off a cliff, looks down and realizes that he’s standing on thin air – and plunges."
It seems as the market for content-creation expands, there is room for infinitely more products simply by taking the mid-point of any two existing products. e.g. Twitter, the mid-point of blogging and IRC. Tumblr, the mid-point of blogging and Twitter. And now DailyBooth, the mid-point of Twitter and Flickr (?). There's also 12seconds.tv, the mid-point of Twitter and YouTube, but I think that's a really stupid idea (Robo.to is also in that space).

So logically, the next product should be the mid-point of Twitter and email... oh, Google Wave.
Content is no longer king.

Content creation is the new king.
Congrats, Ryan! Your product is pretty awesome, I'm really looking forward to seeing where you take it next!
I wish I was old enough and had a good understanding of domains during the 90's so that I could have bought myself a good domain.
How I Killed My Signup Form with Rails
Even though the <a href="http://www.alistapart.com/articles/signupforms">gradual engagement meme</a> has been around for a while, and everyone just hates signup forms, they just seem to keep popping up like a bad habit. My site, <a href="http://newsforwhatyoudo.com/">Newsforwhatyoudo.com</a> was one of the guilty parties. We saw users coming back to the site repeatedly, but not signing up. The percentage that looked at the signup form and then bolted was uncomfortably high. It was time to kill the signup form. This blog post documents how we implemented gradual engagement using Ruby on Rails and restful authentication.
Modeling a black hole with a 300 GigaWatt laser
Congrats guys. You certainly deserve it!
I know many, many people who have lived in Japan for 3+ years who struggle at basic conversations, to say nothing of common goals like being able to read a newspaper, function in an office environment, or achieve fluency.

(Cards on the table: I think "fluency" is a poor goal because it is confoundingly difficult to measure. I tend to advice folks to phrase goals for language learning in terms of tasks they cannot currently accomplish which they wish to be able to accomplish in the future. "Am I fluent?" is hard to answer, "Did I understand the Deployment Instructions well enough to actually boot the server?" is easy.)
This is not quite correct, as jacquesm explained. Of course, pg makes the ultimate decisions, but a substantial number of parameters is available.
Yep, ad hominem is alive and well. The favorite tactic of the uninformed, the 'diverters' and haters.
> The following is an excerpt from Adam L. Penenberg’s new book

N.B. The journalist who exposed Steven Glass -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Penenberg
Um... I think you mean try not to?
The languages are different. Try to learn Tibetan, for example, or try to map Japanese writing system to English, without knowledge of how to read Japanese =)

Making and sorting lists is an essence of almost any science, so, making a list of most commonly used words, sort them and then try to memorize will lead you to know some words, but not an language.
Google delivers forecast-beating financial results
I've been trying out DailyBooth for about a month now. I like it. As a common user, and not a celebrity, I find dailybooth more valuable than twitter. I guess "a picture is worth a thousand words."
At least for students, a graphing calculator on an iphone won't be much use, since most teachers probably won't let students whip out an iPhone on a test.

TIs are standardized and profs know what it can and can't do. No professor is going let students whip out arbitrary applications to aide them on a test, especially one that can almost solve word problems.
I think that's a valid question, but the scope of it is a lot larger than just the US dollar.

For investors to get 'out' of one thing they have to be able to get 'in' to another thing, and most other currencies don't feel a whole lot more solid than the greenback.

Here is a hint of what might be going on:

http://goldprice.org/charts/history/gold_1_year_o_usd.png
YouTube - Drunkest Guy Goes Back For More Beer
I don't know. We're testing one drive at a time for now, so we don't have very much information on bus saturation. I expect to move on to RAID controllers/Motherboard testing in a month or two.
It's not fair to compare pre-antitrust Microsoft to post-antitrust Microsoft. They will never be allowed to be what they once were. What we're seeing now is the real Microsoft competing without most of their monopolistic advantages. That is a company producing mostly mediocre products & services that don't interoperate with non-Microsoft products & services all that well. When you're a monopoly that's a great business model. When you're just another player it's a disadvantage.

I also don't think it's fair to lay it all on Ballmer. Most of the current Microsoft flops were projects in development while Gates was CEO. I'm not sure they've ever really caught up after completely missing the boat on the Internet in the mid-90s. I envision most of the management structure at Microsoft as being comprised of a bunch of people who never really had to compete with outside forces other than deciding which company to buy and kill.
Perfect answer and many thanks.
I think Japanese is a bad example.

If you spoke English and moved to Spain for three months, and you spent an hour or more a day actively attempting to learn the language, you would catch on very quickly.
Painful Ways To Make Money Out Of Free.
How can it have 6 million monthly active unique users, when

Compete shows them having only 144K uniques:
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/dailybooth.com/

Quantcast shows only 15K uniques in USA:
http://www.quantcast.com/dailybooth.com

Why such a huge discrepancy?
Republican coders, the power is in your hands. And everyone else's, it appears.
Labs-on-a-chip that you can shrink to fit
Weird is a loaded term that translated in this particular instance means "deviates from the normal".

Although it is not the be all and end all of personality measures, I do find some statistics about the MBTI personality scale very intriguing, especially pertinent to this particular audience and on this particular subject.

The scale consists of sixteen personality types, here are some coverage figures for the most prevalent personality types:

* 64% population coverage in the six most common groups.

* The four groups that are referred to as "rationals" all put together total less than 10%. This total figure is outnumbered by any single instance of the top three personality groups.

* 75% population coverage in the "sensate" category (has trouble seeing underlying patterns / rules to reality, experiences things purely through their senses without deep analysis)

* Despite all this, and this is the most eye opening of all, check the relative distribution of types on this site http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=204240

This goes a way to confirming that the developer mindset is indeed somewhat rare, but people using loaded language like "weird" tell more about themselves than about their sociological target group.

I would posit that the relatively rare rationals really have far more of a reason to think that the rest of humanity is "weird" in the sense that they behave in ways that are not rational, rather than that they behave in ways that are not normal.
Far Infrared therapy for Arthritis Pain & Holistic Healing
Far infrared therapeutic clothing, knee brace, back support, shapewear, intimate wear, etc. for arthritis pain, weight loss and holistic healing.
Placebo effect caught in the act in spinal nerves
It is so funy. OK.

If you're comparing two operation systems, you probably should compare the code bases, availability and price of development tools, community and volume of information in google search, instead of comparing and images you can see on screen.

With that second approach it is possible to tell that, say Nokia Symbian OS is the same like Android or this absolutely different Maemo5 system.

For this particular sentence, iPhone OS and Android have nothing in common, except that they both uses some sort of GUI and runs on ARM-bases hardware. They have totally different code bases, different development tools, closed and open communities and different amounts of hype.

Excuse me, but I didn't see any reason to explain it farther.
At DeBord Polygraph Experience and Professionalism Counts
DeBord Polygraph provides vast services and makes the commitment to provide professionalism, truth and integrity to all those we serve.
Interesting. I guess I had always assumed YC was really aimed at more software startups, I'll take a closer look.
So, how would you grade your own Japanese ?
Do you use your whole hand/s to rotate the broom handle or just your fingers?
I second that, but only for countries where the language and culture are somewhat related to your own.

Two decades ago I lived in Poland for a while, and it took me significantly more than three months to get the hang of it. Compare that to Spanish, which I've never spoken, nor spent any extended time in a Spanish speaking country and yet I can read a Spanish newspaper without too much trouble, borrowing a bit here and there from French and Latin to keep going.

But when confronted with some Spanish tourist I don't stand a chance unless they slow down and are willing to use lots of finger pointing and pantomime.
I hadn't heard of them. They align pretty closely with some of my goals as well. Thanks for the link!
As the new Google, of course not. As a very excellent graphing calculator? Doesn't seem like a stretch.
CAUSE SHE IS A HORE BICHT
The Kidney Supply Chain.
Just to clarify about the fed quote: if I'm reading this right, the quote Romm wanted was: "The authors of SuperFreakonomics have utterly misrepresented my work". Caldeira did not give him this quote. Caldeira did write, unprompted: "The only significant error is the line: ‘carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight.’ That is just wrong and I never would have said it."

Caldiera updated his website to correct that carbon dioxide villain issue, but that's not the quote that was fed to him.
Biased samples?
What we need to do is invest in durable goods. It seems to me that the last economic cycle has seen the most idiotic waste of resources ever.

Disposable products made in disposable factories and sold in disposable buildings. It's all crap and all the energy money and time that went into it was wasted.

You can't borrow money to build a nice solid house and you are hard pressed to borrow money to fund growth as a small business.

But you can borrow money all day long to buy a poorly made overpriced house and a car that might last ten years.

Our passenger rail system is a joke, any day now another bridge is going to fall down because we have no money for our foundation.

Our foundation is our infrastructure, highways, schools, and a healthy economy which has a diverse mix a businesses, favouring the small and medium sized ones who can weather and change with the times rather than the enormous, too big to fail ones who are leveraged out at insane levels.
not to disagree with jacquesm, really, but this is my own opinion. what he calls 'heavy-handed' i call 'pretty close to perfect'.

this site is over three years old now. we have thousands of active users. can anybody name another site that's as old and/or as big that is as well-behaved as this? i certainly can't. if pg wasn't serious as a heart attack about curbing bad behavior, we would have been overrun by trolls long ago.

as for the thread jacquesm cited that shouldn't have been killed. that was far too negative. it would have led to a thread-full of mean-spirited bitching and moaning.

meta-discussion is almost never productive. it ends up being the same stuff over and over again. the news.yc way is to just observe for awhile, and see if you can come to your own conclusions.

i agree it would be better if there was a page you could view to see what the current rules and thresholds are: this many points to downvote, this many points to flag, you can't currently do thing because of condition, and so on. but pg is changing stuff so rapidly that building such a page would be a big undertaking.

people expect sites like this to behave fairly robotically, according to a fixed set of rules that rarely changes. news.yc doesn't work like that. it is closer to becoming a sentient being than any other program i've ever used (heh).
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Done the Deed
So, do you think this article would work for an American learning Japanese?
MS Project. Actually a very useful tool.
I'm pretty sure the school knows about it. After all, I'm not the only undergraduate around who's noticed these things and some professors have commented on them too.
As far as I can tell, its going to be permanent. The setup would require that a speaker system be ripped out of a wall for it to be taken down (a little drastic for a class experiment).
For a web app, what is the least painful way to achieve internationalization? What language/framework would you use if you were writing a fresh one from scratch?

I had tried to convert a php web-app to handle utf8 correctly through and through a few years ago and gave up after a lot of pain. Is life any better now? Any guides/resources? Is life in ruby or python frameworks significantly better in this respect?
So we can conclude then that games have many different facets to them and they can be loosely coupled enough that you can implement them using different technologies. The interface could be done in Lua, since it doesn't require intense computations when compared to graphics and physics engines.
I doubt they're lying about their numbers, I think this shows how inaccurate compete + quantcast can be.
Good points, but regarding that one item that got killed, office politics is something plenty of HNers are facing on a day-to-day basis and it is not as easy for some to deal with it as it is for others.

I've seen perfectly good people end up burned out because of it, and it's a valid subject for discussion. Better to ask the community that you trust for advice on how to deal with that.
Stop programming at home for now. I know, it sucks. TS.

For me, it seems to be tightness through my inner shoulder down to my elbow and inside forearm that causes the problem. But, yours will surely be different.

I really really really recommend going to see a physiotherapist. I was seeing one due to having had knee surgery, and when I asked about arms/hands/wrists he poked at me for about 3 minutes and was able to give me stretches that solved the problem. I'd been numb/sore for 6+ months before that! Totally ridiculous in retrospect.

I personally believe notebooks == bad too: smaller keyboard, trackpad, hunching towards screen on your lap, etc. Too easy to do something that's hurting you.
they have GA graphs to prove it
I've been wearing "computer gloves" for 10 years, and like them a lot. People made fun of me when I got to college; those same people asked me where to find them after a few semesters (cg/digital art school, so a lot of people going from little computer use to full days).

Sounds like your hands are pretty trashed, so I doubt these will be a magic bullet. Go see someone, start working out, take breaks, etc. But give these a try too:

http://www.softflex.com/

Note that wearing any wrist support sporadically will probably be worse than wearing none at all. You'll discover this the first time you need to type a bunch and don't have them on you (it won't happen more than once or twice, since it's acutely noticeable).
These things assume that language learning abilities are roughly universal, and that languages within the same vague groups are roughly as hard as one-another.

German, for instance, turns out to be a lot harder than Spanish, which I'd learned when I was younger. I've been in Germany for 7.5 years, have had girlfriends I only spoke German to, speak German with most of my friends ... and I still struggle with getting the grammar right.

Once again I find Tim's take on things horribly over-simplifying. It seems that he makes rather audacious points by redefining words (e.g. "work", "fluency") and then drawing a bunch of conclusions based on those redefinitions.
I think the song is clearly about Apple. My favorite line is 'One button coma'.

PS: sitting at my MPB right now. :)
I had similar issues three years ago. I immediately switched from the QWERTY key mapping to Dvorak and swapped Left-Control with Caps Lock. (For fellow Linux users, that means running "setxkbmap dvorak option ctrl:swapcaps" every time your system boots up.)

I also went back to using my (dominant) right hand instead of my left to move the mouse. (I thought being able to do things with both hands was cool but my left hand was so relatively weak compared to my right that I was holding the mouse incorrectly, resulting in severe wrist pain).

The third thing I did was take vitamin B-12 supplements based upon something I read online, but I'm not sure this had much to do with it.

As a result, the pain was gone in no time and I am still pain-free to this day.
Microsoft names Visual Studio 2010 dates
Firefox blocks insecure .Net add-on--awkwardly
Redesigngoogle: preto
I'm sure this worked for you, but for me a trackball made things much worse. It seemed to be more weird movements in my thumb/hand.

I do notice that if I'm not doing much work (i.e. more browsing with the mouse) things are worse than when I'm working hard (i.e. more Vim)
People aren't "letting the state do their thinking for them". More correctly, members of the anti-vaccine movement don't seem to be doing much thinking at all:

1) Why has the anti-vaccine movment failed to produce any credible evidence at all in the years it exists? Credible means peer reviewed journal articles that haven't later been discredited. It does not include discredited papers, poorly made websites exhorting readers to "do their own research", or statements by ex-playmates.

2) Why haven't they managed to produce directly reproducible evidence, at least in an animal model, of vaccination leading to autistic-type behaviours? Given they've managed to induce autistic-type behaviours in mice through genetic manipulation this should not be an impossible task.

3) Why would you trust a group of people who approach a problem in an intellectually bankrupt fashion? Rather than asking "what causes autism", and conducting research to determine this, they've decided "vaccines cause autism" and then tried to support this in the face of all available evidence. (A similar deception is employed by intelligent design advocates).

Listening to the overwhelming medical consensus isn't letting the state do your thinking for you, particularly when the alternative is so unimpressive.