skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have to admit that this article annoyed me. Levitt and Dubner appear to think that the only environmental problem around is global warming. Having decided that it can be solved by geoengineering, they think that people won't have to try and change their habits.

But there's also overfishing, deforestation, biodiversity loss, lack of clean drinking water and the finiteness of natural resources to contend with. So even if we can engineer away global warming, we still have to change to survive.
SSL Still Mostly Misunderstood
Interesting how you get a more feminine face if you average (even if you average only male pictures).
I guess we need to start with the first cell, and then simulate the existence of the correct cells around it. A machine that produces the right chemicals at the right times and places.
The Three-Hour Formula
What it takes to hold my attention for three hours, it's pretty simple actually.
You mean the illusion of sex.
Sex and Gender are not the same.
me european, had to look up 5-paragraphs essay in wikipedia.

i've heard the basic "introduction, narration, .." - structure in school, but it sounds to me when you say 5para essay you really mean an essay with five paragraphs.
Viewing in simple list mode due to high traffic to this document.

I didn't realize Google Docs throttled you when sharing documents...?

edit: thanks for sharing this, found some new videos to watch today
Time Machine makes backing up trivial to the extent that you have a sufficiently large HFS volume sitting around, and don't need to back up MySQL databases. And if you're unlucky, it can also automate the process of losing all your data:

http://tomkarpik.com/articles/massive-data-loss-bug-in-leopa...
http://rondam.blogspot.com/2009/09/time-machine-time-bomb.ht...
I think this might be innocent on Google's part since they probably intend for the "sharing" feature to be used for colloboration, not necessarily for publishing to random visitors.
The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger

An Equal Music by Vikram Seth
I highly doubt the accuracy of the 4 trillion figure. Could anyone provide me with a detailed list?
So as long as your growth rate is that low you'll do fine. It's when your growth rate increases that you have to be careful.

> If we have a 15% charge failure rate (to put the approval rate backwards), that's normal, you think?

That's fine, really. Pretty much on par of where I am, completely different service but all the same mechanisms apply.

> Historically speaking, how many of your charge failures have been due to things that get fixed -- expired cards, maxed out lmit

Expired cards are the 'killer' of most accounts, especially if you charge a low amount, the sweet spot is about $20 /mo, so we charge (deviously) $19.95, that way we extend the total $volume per account at the expense of our short term income. 619.95 > 3$24.95.

Maxed out limits only happen around Christmas, and our IPSP takes care of that by retrying on the charge a few weeks later.

> and how many are signs of a fake/worthless account?

Hardly any. Those chargebacks we do get usually are attributable to identity theft and outright fraud. That sucks because as a merchant you have very little tools to combat this. VBV sure helps though.
"Beauty" is an aesthetic concept of the mind that varies between each person, not a property that you can give to an object. The object is beautiful because its perceiver finds it to be so; without the perceiver, there is no beauty. Therefore, it is a mistake to talk about beauty as an intrinsic property ("X is beautiful") when it is actually a perception ("Jim finds X beautiful.").

When we say "X is beautiful", it is actually shorthand for "Lots of people find X beautiful", or "The consensus is that X is found to be beautiful".

/aspie
it's always a different superset. not too bad, and you always have that with different interpreters / compilers.
I disagree. If you look at my comments on this site you will notice that I rarely use profanity. In this case, the claim the C was unsuitable for multi-threading coming, as it did, from someone as well known as Joel Spolsky merited a strong response.

I could have responded: "I strongly disagree with the statement in the title of this Hacker News post. It is simply nonsensical". I decided to use the word 'bollocks' as a short-cut to that meaning. To quote Wikipedia, 'The word is often used figuratively in British English, as a noun to mean "nonsense",'

I carefully decided to use that word.
OMG! glibc was written by aliens!
I'm fascinated by the contrast between North American and Chinese education. Chinese students are in class at 6:30 AM and by the time they get out, their American peers have been playing Guitar Hero and hanging out in the malls for perhaps five hours. And the Chinese students will probably put in the same hours on Saturday and Sunday. I'm not saying it's a better system - I actually think it's bordering on insanity - but there's a middle ground between the two extremes (and they are extreme) which is probably more sensible. Chinese students get no freedom to follow their curiosity and American students don't learn the value of hard work or even of education itself.
I am very surprised that your comment got upvoted. I have done little of significance (except, perhaps, the Alan Turing petition thing).
Sidewiki-defeat
Sun F5100 Flash Array - up to 1.92 TB of Flash in 1 RU
Haven't got to that one yet, but Blood Meridian was incredible and so I plan on buying the rest of his work. I also really liked The Road - have read it twice, each time in 1-2 days (I normally struggle to make time to read).
AJAX Frameworks – Comparative Study
Startup Lessons - Having industry momentum at your back
i'm not saying they do that, but one could:

* buy cheap copyright like 1940s movies
* make divx files, name after non-existing pornos
* anonymously seed to major torrent site
* startup your auto-legal-threat-software
* collect money

this might be legal?
With the traditional lock based (pessimistic) approach, writing reliable and efficient multithreaded programs is impossible given a number "n" of threads.

This number "n" varies with the talent and experience of the programmer as well, with a less significant factor, with the language used.

That's why people are working on transactional memory. When our customers will have 100 cores in their machines, it's not realistic to hope to achieve anything with locks.
How video games are good for the brain
Marten Mickos: Trust the Mighty MySQL Nation
LG’s Solar-Powered E-Book Reader
"Package management: Use MacPorts, which is something like Gentoo's portage."

I don't use OS X, but believe that Gentoo Prefix is portage, running on other systems, like OS X.
Microsoft wants multicore boost from Windows 7
"War and Peace" Tolstoy
"Wind< Sand and Stars" Saint Exupery
I don't think anyone is suggesting that this is malicious, and any compiler-only bug that didn't affect only compiling would almost have to be.
Art made with dead flies
Nah, just by gnus overdosed on crack and suffering from BSE.
Right now, Anathem by Neal Stephenson is my favorite.

I read through the comments before adding my 2 cents. I saw a lot of my favorite books, including a few by Neal Stephenson. But I did not see Anathem. Hmmm...

I also saw a few references to James Clavell's Shogan. Excellent book. But I liked Tai Pan more, and in fact, I would say that this is my second favorite.

Just to add another title that nobody here is likely mention, the first book that I read that blew my mind (admittedly in my very young days) was "When the Lion feeds" by Wilbur Smith.
If programming was easy, everyone would do it.
Fiction: The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, it made me realize that the things I wanted wouldn't just come to me if I waited around.

Non-fiction: Surely, you're joking, Mr Feynman! It made me realize that even the most highly qualified people are still just people and can just as easily be wrong as anyone else, a fact Feynman appeared to use to his advantage constantly.
When a Colleague's Mistakes Affect You
The Prize - Daniel Yergin.
Siddhartha - Herman Hesse

The first is a fantastic history of oil. It brings out the politics, economics and personalities that have lit up the history of oil very well. Especially relevant in this day and age, when oil is behind so many geo-political conflicts.

The second is a bit more personal. I could write an entire essay about this book, but suffice it to say that it was exactly the right book at the right time for me. Sometimes, a book just comes along and changes your perspective and way of thinking. This was one of those books for me.
The language is irrelevant, the model is what really matters, of course Limbo or any other language built around CSP will be better than libthread, but one can do CSP on pretty much any language.

One can use pthreads (or the like) in almost any language too, and it sucks infinitely everywhere.
Ignore Everybody & the Dip, double feature book review
Microformat standard for web analytics
"shipping is a feature"

Yes indeed, it's the most powerful feature your software have.
I'm an Operating system agnostic, although I've got a pretty strong bias toward the BSD Family. At home, I've got WinXP Home, Solaris, AIX, OpenBSD and Ubuntu Linux all up and running right now. I have a MacBook that I tote to and from work, currently dual-booting OS X Leopard and Ubuntu Jaunty. I've dealt with Macs quite a bit: this MacBook replaced a very old G3PowerBook (OS X 10.2) in 2006. I have several 68k macs as well, but they've been shelved for ages. My wife has Windows 7 (MSDN RTM release) and Vista dual-booting on her laptop, and Ubuntu/Win2K on one of her old gaming rigs that's past its prime.

At any rate, there are many things Linux could take from OS X. In just a few years, Apple built a very solid GUI with configuration tools that completely eliminate the need for a command-line interface in all but the most catastrophic of situations. Given how powerful the OS X CLI is, I'm surprised to find that a lot of Mac users never use it, and some don't even know about it at all. "Terminal" is just another one of those tools for the Genuis Bar technicians, like NetInfo Manager and Apple System Profiler, right? Still, people who are generally good with computers (take my dad, for example) are forced to learn about a whole new world of syntax and configuration files when using any Linux distro -- no matter how "friendly" people say it is.

I like having a rich background of operating systems, but I can easily see why people coming from a non-Apple background get befuddled when faced with a Mac. The learning curve is pretty easy, but it definitely takes more than a single weekend to figure out The Apple Way to do things. Of course, the reverse is also true: the Gnome, KDE and Windows interfaces aren't intrinsically intuitive for those who've never used them before, either.

Of all the OSes that I use regularly, I'd have to say OS X wins by merit of being mainstream enough that one doesn't often need to struggle in order to get things done. I like The Apple Way better than I like The Microsoft Way, but it's all personal preference.

While I don't mind the occasional need to hunt down dependencies and compile code, or edit a config by hand, it's preposterous to believe that anything requiring such tasks will ever be taken seriously among normal computer users. Linux is getting there, but it's been an insanely slow process compared to the competition.
The Seedcamp Entry
I have never seen any reason to consider if statements to be evil enough that I should absolutely avoid them in my code. AFAIK, this is one of those pointless movements.

If anybody can explain why ifs are supposed to be so horrible, then perhaps I might change my mind.
It's funny that GOOGLE isn't even part of that.
Ishmael - Daniel Quinn
> And for a company known to replace CPU architectures and their entire operating system, why does Apple persist with Objective-C?

Swapping out an architecture is way easier than rewriting hundreds of thousands (millions?) of lines of code. Orders of magnitude easier if there is any abstraction at all.

They avoid changing because the perceived benefits are smaller than the costs, which include large switching costs.
Ironically... you just gave me an idea. Why not keep an untouchable $5k emergency fund (if you have to keep with somebody you trust to make sure you don't spend it, do so). Then, if you fail and hit rock bottom, you know you can get back on your feet.
Different report here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8297764.stm

I prefer it to the one in New Scientist - YMMV.

I juggle and think it has loads of benefits. It's nice to see some concrete evidence.
Fiction: I am fan of The Fountainhead, though I still have fond memories of The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe from when I was younger.

Nonfiction: So many good ones, but I think Surely your joking, Mr. Feynman! is probably the top.
"Seasteaders" Take First Step Toward Colonizing The Oceans
I really enjoyed recently reading Snow Crash. Watership Down was great back in the day
Nothing big or special. I punched some holes into the bottle and made it drip onto the towel that was wrapped around the box that contained our snacks etc. Had a fan pointed to the towel. That is all.
Evaporative (heat) loss is the keyword.

What made me remember this, was the fact that I was in between about 2000 hackers who probably all thought about this.. but that I was (afaik) the only one who actually did it.

In Nigeria they use more or less the same trick to build simple air-conditioning. Imagine it as a wood box open on two sides with a lot of small brittle branches inside. Water dropping into it. And a fan blowing on one open side.

btw: although mixing up brought and broad is something that I could have found myself and is a result of being sloppy; I always appreciate input on my writing. As English is not my native language, I would guess that my grammar sucks more than my spelling. :)
Much agreed. Thinking of a second favourite is much less certain. Possibly 'The Selfish Gene' for me.
The Sidekick Failure and Cloud Culpability
If you enjoyed this slideshow, see Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: http://www.pragprog.com/titles/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-...

It yielded a productivity boon in some areas for me.
Beckett, on the other hand, who was Nabakov's moral and intellectual superior, developed his style as an antithesis to Finnegans Wake and cited it as his greatest inspiration.

Ulysses is similarly a masterpiece, but if I could only pick one it would be the Wake. It's a testament to the power of language. I've always seen Lolita as a lesser Wake, actually. It does nothing as original or quite as beautiful, though it comes close with its opening passage.
Moral of the story: us electrical engineers make better designers :D
Free ColdFusion/Flex Conference In NC - Oct 17-18
The Triangle Area ColdFusion User's Group, associates, and sponsors are organizing the ColdFusion in North Carolina 2009 Conference to be held October 17-18, 2009 on the Centennial Campus of NC State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. The conference will be aimed at ColdFusion and Flex developers and others who are interested in web design using these technologies.

Registration for the event will be FREE which includes entry to the weekend event and all presentations.
I've said this many times to many people, but I'm going to say it again. Don't upgrade to Snow Leopard! Install it from fresh!

When I upgraded from Leopard I had a smorgasbord of bizarre problems and bugs - with a fresh install, perfection. And I've seen the same pattern over and over. Stop being lazy and install it from fresh - it's worth it.
I bought Hackers thinking it was about crackers (which my 16 year old script kiddie self was very interested in) but ended up reading it cover to cover and it helped me realize that real programming and hacking was much cooler than cracking some system ever would be.
Smallpox was eradicated. If it wasn't they probably would have spent more, that's just one reason this isn't a valid comparison.
Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, Collected Works of Robert Frost
And make the patch widely available, rather than remaining silent.
This is a nice look over some of Objective C's plus points, but the underlying answer to the question posed is less positive. Why does Objective C survive in a world of alternatives? Because Apple makes it tough not to use it.
Programming Dynamic Models in Python
The Remedy for a Web Analytics Headache
According to "The Web Analytics War Reader Survey" by Unica, as published on eMarketer website (The Web Analytics Headache), lot of marketers have problems with their current web analytics solutions. Could our Web Log Storming be the remedy?
CalendarWarehouse.com 
custom calendars, promotional wall calendars, custom wall calendars.
This article is a year old, fails to mention jQuery at all and uses a survey from 2006(!) to compare the popularity of different libraries.
Motorola L6 TEAL Platinum
Motorola L6 TEAL is an great phone with all new design and style. It’s a phone for those who don’t want to spend lot of money but also not able to adjust without sleek form factor and superior functionality. Its price is low as well as weigh nothing to you.
Ask HN: What do you do to boost your creativity and/or productivity?
Hi all,
Recently I find that whenever I sit down to work, the ideas don't flow as freely as they used to. Whereas once I would be able to think of 3-4 solutions within a short span of time, now I can barely come up with one.

Also, by habit, it takes me a certain amount of time to get into my 'zone' before starting work. However, recently I have been taking more and more time to settle into this 'zone'.

So I would like to know what specific hacks you guys use to keep the creative juices flowing, and also how you manage to get more productive.

Regards,
chaosprophet
Evidently banishing the "new" operator (with dependency injection) wasn't enough.
hehe ;) Definitely take that baby back and get the store to figure out wtf happened. If it's either the optical drive or the subwoofer, my minimal knowledge of heat generation in electronics leads me to believe that those shouldn't be generating that much heat except from friction in in the drive or a short in the subwoofer.
Not that it is all that great, but filtering through it i do find things of interest.

Women's fashion subreddit? I had no idea.
I go outside
Ha Shu'al B'Lool Hatarnagolot - Ephraim Kishon. funny from page one & my first contact with the strange world, rules and absurdities of political systems (couldn't find the english title, sorry)

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering - Fred Brooks. introduced the concept of an essays to me, and that the software wolrd is really as strange as i always felt

of my favorite books, those are probably the two best fitting into HN, since they enlighten in some way :)
>> more friends, more family, more power, more skill, more social status, more life experience, more of pretty much everything

More of everything means more up keep for each of them, and less freedom to try something new. Have a wife and kids? Are you willing to watch your children be homeless because you decided to take a year off work to see Europe? An 18 year old could easily crash on friends'\families' couches afterwards until he got a place of his own making it not that big a deal. More skill? More to up keep so that it doesn't atrophy, also it means you are dedicated to whatever that skill is in. World class Software person decides he wants to do Mechanical Engineering? Sure his years of analytical thought give him an advantage over a complete green horn but it is a loss of status, ability, and pay.

Everything you do has initial costs and up keep costs. These costs limit freedom. Sure you can hide in your parents basement and only provide for yourself but that has certain costs as well.
It looks like the complaint is against using IF when type polymorphism would be more appropriate (usually of the form "if(x instanceof a)"). It is almost never a good idea to use IF in those cases, but frankly, this website does not do a good job of explaining the problem.
This test uses a variant of the good old "trolley dilemma" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem) where a trolley/train is headed for five workmen on a track and it asks if you'd pull a lever to divert the trolley onto a track where only one man is working. (This test then goes on to vary that situation somewhat.)

Studies have been run on this in the past and to my dismay most people would, in the initial scenario, flick the switch to save five but kill one - immediately becoming murderers rather than bystanders. I suspect this test is trying to weed out what could make people flip-flop from one point of view to the other, as when replaced with "pushing a fat man off a bridge to block the trolley" the stats have tended to swing the other way.
Try spending the first half of your work day in a different place thinking while keeping web surfing to a minimum and doing no programming at all.
Music engraving services 
cost effective & accurate services for entire music Engraving services for my composition which publishing compnies took seriously!
<grammarnazi>
It would be great if a site promoting better use of (computer) language, exhibited better use of (human) language.

Not 'less' ifs, people, 'fewer' ifs!
</grammarnazi>
Reservella: The shadowy company behind The Pirate Bay
All of Sherlock Holmes

Glasshouse by Charles Stross
Go for a long morning run (creativity) and then take half a modafinil (productivity).
1. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich
2. The Soul of a new machine
Not a new idea. Half of the first chapter of Fowler's Refactoring is about this.
Should your startup have an advisory board?
I like how the sending code totally ignores any response from the SMTP server. You have no idea if it even accepts EHLO, and you have no idea if your message is queued successfully.

I also hope you don't put data from the user into this class. If your email address contains ">\r\n" and some SMTP commands, your PHP script just became an open relay.
His problem is even more basic than that. Axioms+rules+theorems make up a formal system, not a universe. (I can see how it's easy to confuse the two.) At some point, you must use induction & associate/identify some of its elements with observable quantities; that's what makes it a physical theory instead of a purely mathematical theory. Deduction alone gets you nowhere in the real world. And in its own domain the most it gives is consistency, not truth. I can't for the life of me understand why it's desired, or why its absence is relevant.
That's a really tough question. Narrowing it down to two is almost impossible but I'd definitely name The Stranger. I'm less certain about the second one, maybe Nine Princes to Amber by Zelanzny, or Crime and Punishment.
Google's translation of the Russian text is "Redirecting".
I agree, after reading Fooled by Randomness, black swan was a let down, repetitive and ironically snobbish for a book thats about understanding the unknown
Its a nice article and the objective-C specific content was informative, but it fails to convince given the fact that it does not even mention aspect orientation.

In a language like Java, declarative application of AOP constructs (such as that of AspectJ) give you all the benefits OP cites for dynamic dispatch, with the further benefits of (a) being still able to reap the benefits of efficient look-up and optimization, and, (b) using declarative programming (which allows for clean decoupling and thus even greater reuse).

Objective-C lives because (as pointed out in another comment) your Mac OS programming life is much more difficult if you choose not to use it.
6 Year Old Faces Reform School for Bringing Cub Scout Fork/Spoon/Knife to School
SSL documentation in most major projects still needs a lot of polishing.

I also think there needs to be a push to separate the encryption and remote server verification parts of SSL/TLS. I'd love to encrypt all communication with the sites I run, but am completely uninterested in coughing up cash for an SSL cert.