skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The whole manual isn't exactly a lot of help since I don't know what I am supposed to be looking for in there.

As a concrete example, can you walk me through how you can take a function that expects to receive objects of a specific class, and instead give them objects of another class? In particular imagine that you are implementing something like NSProxy, and are replacing objects that had lived locally with distributed objects that now exist on a different machine that you access with remote code calls.

The objects have to be usable within a framework that is expecting the original kind of object, and you do not have access to source code or the ability to recompile.

Thanks.
Also, it doesn't seem that strange that Apple would persist with their own "weird" language (good or bad). Apple is a classic vertical monopoly in a land of horizontal monopolies. Doing everything their unique way is desirable for them, not just when it helps them but even when it costs extra, as long it doesn't cost too much extra.
Do you have a link to the James Wood anecdote from 2 + 2?
If that's the email address a beta tester wants you to use then that's their problem, not yours.

That's easy.

It would be a different thing if you were using the resources of the company where you work to develop your own stuff and test it.
Apple need to move away from their current approach of seeding betas/RC to select developers and towards the open beta testing that Microsoft have successfully embraced in recent years.

As the number of users and potential hardware/software configurations continues to grow they cannot expect to cover a respectable percentage of scenarios with their current closed approach to testing.

See also MobileMe Launch.
Yeah, I saw the words 'design' and 'manufacture', and thought, "This is not Zappos for pants."
This is old by now, but you should be able to see from my profile that I am at a large, middle-of-the-road state school. Note that I haven't actually defended the authors position, only clarified what he said. I'm not sure if I agree with his position. But I've seen very little discussion on what he actually said. I've spent all of my time explaining what he did and did not say. I've spent no time (that I can think of) defending the position he took.

I also like to avoid long, drawn on point-by-point posts, and try to keep things focused by responding to a person's thesis.

Pointing out etiquette has nothing to do with this article, and everything to do with liking HN as a place for civil discussion.
The Role of Advisory Boards in Your Startup
Note that you can get UNIX functionality on Windows using (1) Cygwin and (2) Microsoft's own UNIX Services for Windows.

I'm not sure how compatible these two are with, say, Linux or OS X, but they ought to give you a starting point.
This reminds me about what I once heard about McDonalds and Burger King. McDonalds was spend millions in finding the perfect spot for a new location. Burger King would then open one up across the street.

I don't know how true this is, but a good little tidbit of possibly true knowledge.
From the same wikipedia article: "Theoretical work by Neil Ashcroft predicted that liquid metallic hydrogen at extremely high pressure should become superconducting at approximately room-temperature because of its extremely high speed of sound and expected strong coupling between the conduction electrons and the lattice vibrations.[33] This prediction is yet to be experimentally verified."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconductiv...
I can definitely imagine that it is not for everyone. Books are like that.

I have purchased about 5 copies of it over the last 25 years, and I only have one left. The others have been lent out and never returned. I have read it many times. Hence it was a candidate for the list of 2.

For me, I think that I read it at young age (I think around 13) and it had a significant effect on me at an influential time. Re-reading it over the years has recaptured some of the feelings I had when I first read it.

I loved the way that he separated someone who loves what they do and someone who is just twirling spanners. I loved how he dismissed the snobbery of considering things such as programming or technical writing as not creative. For me, it was the only thing I had ever read that said something like that - all around me were people who considered only painting to be creative, and working on a motorcycle to be something that didn't require conscious thought. At the time I was a programmer, and I had a motorcycle that needed maintenance.

Those things may now be self-evident to all, maybe in part due to Pirsig's influence. His book is probably less relevant and harder work to enjoy than it was at the time, like an old movie, but it is an old friend to me.

Some people (many people on this website, I suspect) have a hard time doing a crap job on anything that deserves a good job. They won't allow themselves to iron a shirt badly, or catch and discard an important exception, or park askew. There's things they consider to be important and they do them right every time. When I was young I (wrongly) imagined myself to be one of the few, looking at my peers, so it had a big impact that someone could put this stuff into words.

His refusal to define Quality and his split between Romantic and Classic realities still come back to me when I see large software projects attempting to ensure Quality. They do it by enforcing naming standards and implementing checklists and reviews, but they don't work yet we all know quality when we see it. You can follow CMM to the last letter and still produce crap. CMM (and others) tried to define quality to make it reproducible, but it only comes from the individual and collective minds of the good and great programmers out there. Pirsig was right.
It is entirely possible that he is just making it up. Far more high-profile cases of deliberate fiction have happened.

But it is more likely that the plots are real, that he really did make some high Tc material in his personal lab and do some measurements. It's not rocket surgery, to someone with a bit of training. It's just chemistry, electronic equipment, and liquid nitrogen, none of which is especially expensive.

The problem arises in the interpretation. He points at some random squiggles and calls them a Meissner transition. I see squiggles. It would sure be nice to have a control, yes? A curve traced from a piece of boring commercially-available YBCO, plugged into the same apparatus, and showing similar squiggles at the known transition temperature of commercially-available YBCO?

Similarly, if you take any data enough times you will get some odd discontinuities now and then. Your chart recorder software will glitch, you'll leave a switch in the wrong position, your sample temperature is changing during the measurement in a way that is being missed by your apparatus, your sample is in the middle of disintegrating, etc. The initial impulse is always to suspect that each glitch is an amazing new discovery, but they almost never are. So it would be nice to know if the results were repeatable. How many samples did he make? Can he show me the data from all the samples?

Where did the stoichiometry data and the structural data come from? Mixing up a batch of a compound is one thing, but analyzing it is something else: That actually does require equipment, and money. How was it done? Where was it done, and by whom? What is the margin of error in the results? Has this material really never been made before? If someone else has made it before, why didn't they publish this first?

I should stress that, compared to many cranky projects (cough cold fusion cough) this is a highly believable report. It's not as if high-Tc superconductors are unattested in the literature. It's not as if this guy's results require throwing out established theory. It's not as if he couldn't have gotten lucky and built a one-off sample with an amazingly high Tc in his basement -- most good physics is done in someone's basement, and most reproducible results start their lives as barely reproducible results. But, because he's an incredibly sloppy publisher, the author forces us to assume that he is a crank until proven otherwise.
Even if it is slightly incorrect, it's still my favorite one.
Investments in U.S. venture capital funds plunge
When it comes to important data users should mistrust everyone and everything. It is more difficult to backup data from most cloud sources. There's no easy way to backup my entire Flickr account, Facebook profile, or Google account for example. To backup Gmail I have to rely on desktop applications via IMAP. Is this really acceptable? Why don't we have more sites offering easy offline backups? No matter how you look at it the user has to be responsible for their own data. If cloud services are not making this easy to do then we have a legitimate problem.
A Quest to Read a Book a Day for 365 Days
I spent the next few days building a table with three columns: markets, applications, key customers

+1. Critical exercise for anyone reading HN and thinking about starting/joining/improving a startup.
There was one part of this that stood out to me, where Mark suggested that it might be worth it ask for token investment from those on the advisory board:

"Get some skin in the game. I know it sounds crazy that you’re approaching industry luminaries that you would die to work with and you’re asking them for, gulp, money! But if you approach them with a very fair valuation and ask for a small check (say $10k, which should be nothing to someone in this position) I believe you’ll have a reasonable shot at it provided that you actually have an interesting company."

It stuck out to me, because it harkened back to a post John wrote a few weeks ago - "An Entrepreneurial Counter Culture is Looming" (http://siliconangle.net/ver2/2009/09/18/an-entrepreneurial-c...).

In the post, as was backed up by several HN commentors and commentors at the site, John said: "I’ve estimated that the required amount for a "real" seed round in today’s open source environment for tech ventures is about 200-300k – that is unless you are young and can do the coding yourself."

Obviously, fundraising isn't the goal of assembling an advisory board, but it is interesting that should you not be able to get angel or seed funding in the amount you're looking for (not millions, but not $10k or whatever), the advisory board might be a middle ground to look at.
You know I think you are correct when I think about it actually.
Yeah, that's what I found eerie about it! It's close but not quite Chopin.

Maybe the Bach and Joplin pieces didn't bother me so much because baroque counterpoints and piano rags are already kind of formulaic.

I'd love to hear (or maybe be creeped out by) their program trying some jazz greats. That's a style I'm much more familiar with.
To Kuik, it's just not enough to sign some mysterious papers, say that you no longer own the site, and then continue to operate as you have always done; if you want to avoid liability, stop doing the activity in question.

Sounds like something a judge might agree with.
"It may seem like AI right now is just data mining using brute force search algorithms for increasingly specialized problems. However, AI is just a name for what we haven't discovered yet. Within 10 years we will have trans-human computer intelligence! Just look at these exponential graphs! You will be able to upload your brain and we're going to start unfreezing some of these rotting heads! The singularity will arrive much sooner than you think, grandson!"
More coders should be reading source code. Thanks for the idea, gonna spent a few hours reading the user account logins shit for GNU/Linux now ;p
Understanding Comics and King Rat
Thanks for posting this. This is something I really need, and the replies to your post were helpful.

OOC, why -MTurk? Because you knew about them and were looking for alternatives, or because you don't like them?
A weak lensing detection of a deviation from General Relativity
I don't think the analogy is very good. Whereas eating a twinkie is clearly not going to benefit your health, with information it's not so cut and dry. A stupid YouTube video might just set of a chain of associations that lead to a new creative project of your own, or useful observations about our culture/technologies.

It's as if you could occasionally reflect on a twinkie before eating it, and transform it into wheatgrass juice as it goes down :P
I'm not sure calling this project "Growl" is a good idea, given that there is a pretty well-known piece of software called Growl for Mac OS X (http://growl.info/)
Who knows, he/she might actually be testing it for the company.
The cut really is nice though. Far less baggy in the leg like lots of mens pants are these days. I recommend a pair for the times when you can't get away with jeans, or are outside California :)
Why can't it be both?

As far as I can tell, "cloud" generally means someone else stores my data and the only way I can get to it is via the Net. In that case it's absolutely a failure of the "cloud".

And if the data was stored on a SAN, it's a SAN failure. If someone didn't do backups at all, it's a backup failure.

What's with all the labeling? Look, if I pay someone else to manage my data, and they screw it up and I suffer data loss, it doesn't really matter what piece of gear or level of process is responsible -- someone still screwed up.
Please read the article, that title does not reflect at all what the rest of the article says.
why second guess the guy - it's not your problem and the company could have no claim against you.
You Cannot Be Serious
This must be a scam or at least a pyramid scheme, right?
If that were true, surely the Mac world would be dominated by Java applications written using AspectJ and the Java-Cocoa bridge?

As it turns out, that didn't happen - and not because Apple didn't try pushing Java as a Cocoa development language. What happened was users pushed back on slow launching, memory hungry Cocoa-Java apps.

So another reason for Objective-C's success is that yes, it does all the things the original article states, but it also does them in an Ahead-Of-Time compiled, non-Virtual-Machine language - and that combination is pretty unique.

My suspicion is that Obj-C's unique combination of features plays a large part in NeXT/Apple's success in producing a set of frameworks that are high-level enough to allow for rapid development, but are also able to create responsive applications on the desktop AND be able to scale down to mobile devices.
This must be a scam, or at least a pyramid scheme, right?
Advisory boards are window dressing yes but I would say that scoring good advisors speaks to the influence of the entrepreneur and the merit of the idea.

In general most investors understand advisory boards are more of show but to me they demonstrate the kind of "company the startup intends to keep".

Ultimately advisory boards are endorsements - plain and simple.

Totally agree with Mark in the post that active advisory boards will require more discipline by the startup teams and equity compensation for advisors.
"the only time im ever looking for a place to go to is when im already out and the present venue is lame"

That's pretty much the exact reason that drove me to create the site. I've been in the same situation more times than I care to remember and I couldn't find anything to suit my requirements - that is: to narrow down a couple of places that might be interesting in my immediate vicinity... now. Agreed it needs to be mobile.
Develop Effective Social Media Habits
It sounds to me like this poster is a little bit late to the party, since he basically described ActiveRecord from Ruby on Rails.

In my experience ActiveRecord is very nice for applications that require ONLY CRUD, but for more sophisticated data and queries, it doesn't hold up so well. LINQ, however, does -- and offers not only most of the benefits of approaches like ActiveRecord, but also generates good SQL, at least using the Microsoft provider for SQL Sever, AND supports IntelliSense.
Scientists Discover Teeth Have Stem Cells
all the kings men - warren

the floating opera - barth
This is one of the best discussion I've read about why Erlang is good for parallel processing ie, it lets you avoid threads and use messages and processes.

Nice that the article gives a good run-down of advantages and disadvantages.
Give me the shakes just thinking about it. What's the methodone equivalent?
Our feedback widget from http://featurelist.org doesn't require any login and the email is optional. It's modeled after the same sort of side-widget you see on a lot of YC sites.

The idea is to get the user feedback as quickly as possible before they get tired and their good will is drained. We liked this so much we made a service for this that we use on all of our sites (and is free for you to use on your sites, too).

That feedback is private and can be promoted as either an upvote or a new public feature request by a member of your team.

For users to leave a public feature request on a project themselves, they do have to create an account. But that process is like Reddit in that you create it just with a name and a password without having to provide anything else (email is optional).
This guy appears to have made announcements every few months with a Tc improvements of between about 8 - 20 K with various materials. Whatever he's doing, he's getting consistently "good results".
Surely this solution is still going to fail the walking/train test -- the icon will be on the screen permanently in those situations.

The phone will detect movement, the icon will appear, it'll fade after a few seconds, the movement will be interpreted as the "shake to bring it back", it'll reappear, then fade, and repeat ad nauseum.
How to Become an Independent Programmer in Just 1068 Days (2005)
Plaintext Wall of Shame
Well, a simple test for superconductivity at that temperature exists (if Kamerlingh Onnes could do it then so can he).

The bigger problem here is that his writing elsewhere that you found already indicate he's lost a few of his marbles, that makes it very hard to put much credibility in some amazing breakthrough he reports. Reputation really does matter.

I'm flagging this because I really think it is bull and until there is a report that is reviewed I don't think it deserves this kind of attention.
I think it's compounded as well by the fact that a lot of "geeks" struggle with being sociable, especially with women. In a lot of cases it really is not sexism; they just don't "get" people full stop and sometimes don't even really think about the concept that someone at the other end of the keyboard is a person too. As a result they come across as highly arrogant or unfeeling (and when talking to or about women as sexist).

I've noticed on the various forums I hang out a lot of the younger types have that ingrained mild sexism that young boys usually have - only they cling to it for just a little longer. It soon goes when they head off to college :D

EDIT( you know personally I find a large number of feminists as bad or worse than sexist men - they all need throwing into a bag and shaking about a bit :P)
I've read it twice. The first time was because the book was a gift from a friend.

The second time was for a philosophy class at the University of Chicago. I wrote an essay about Severian's memory and Nietzsche's cow.

Gene Wolfe is my favorite sci-fi author by far. I also liked the Wizard-Knight series.
What poker taught me, was that video poker sucks. That's basically the be all and end all of what poker can teach, beside perhaps the classic 'everyone is a liar'.
Ask HN: How do you motivate yourself to do un-motivating work?
I've been having issues lately trying to motivate myself to do mundane, or at the very least "unappealing", work (namely, [high]school work). It's not that I'm lazy — actually I'm afraid I'm a workaholic sometimes — but that I always find myself giving priority to another project or hobby I enjoy doing and find more worthwhile.

I personally find I have one of two reactions to tasks I have to do: either I'm completely engrossed in my work and won't sleep, eat, etc. until it's finished, or it is the last thing I would ever possibly want to do with my time and I will do everything but that task, even if only to say that I was the one that wasted my time, not somebody else.

The main problem I have is the pervasive feeling in the back of my mind whenever I spend time doing something that I could be doing something else. But this other work still has to get done, so I procrastinate terribly, which accomplishes nothing but adding more stress to my life.

In accordance with one of pg's essays (http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html), I'm definitely a type "c" procrastinator, only I'm not sure it's a "good procrastination" because I'm afraid it's going to cause me to fail school.

I suppose what I'm really looking for is the answer to the question: How do I make otherwise un-motivating work intrinsically motivating?
The only two responses I've gotten to this question when I ask people this is either a.) you're always going to have to do work you don't want to do, or b.) you have to do it because you need to get good grades / graduate high-school / etc. Neither of these answers help motivate me in the slightest — they just imply I'm going to be unhappy for the rest of my life if I keep doing this.
Electronics hack: guy solves infinite resistor puzzle by actually building one.
Ask HN: Is today global weird science day or did I miss the memo ?
First miracle water to live longer:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876711

Then a super breakthrough in high temp superconductors by a guy working from his basement who believes that there is proof in the bible for extraterrestrial life:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=877121

And now a 98% chance that general relativity is not only to be improved on but plainly 'wrong':

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=877436
Ya, I see that now, my error. I would delete my meaningless comment if I could.
It throws an SSL error for me in Chrome, so isn't going to be opened on my computer. There's no need for it to be in https, so the site owner just lost a reader.

Tip to the author: Don't alienate your readers before they can even read your work.
"MS is supposed know what it's doing"

I was in complete agreement with you up to this point. Microsoft's strengths have long ago shifted towards marketing. They once had a edge in technology - over Lotus, over Borland, over Novell, over IBM and even over Apple (in the OS7~9 days).

Sadly, after their market share - and dominance of the OEM channels - exceeded a certain tipping point, they had really no need to excel in technology. From that point on, what differentiated Microsoft was a careful management of the expectations of their core market (VARs, OEMs and CTOs).

At Microsoft, technical competency has taken a back-seat since the early 90s.

This entire mess up smells like "Management by numbers". When a manager cuts costs without considering the implications to data-safety, this is what we get in the end.

Seriously: how much data needed to be backed up? 50 terabytes? 500 terabytes? And why the hell the data resides in a SAN and not distributed and replicated in a bunch of front-end servers? The SAN should be the back-up.

I love the idea of having all my data on the cloud - It's a major nuisance to switch cellphones and port data from one to the next - and having the data on the cloud could make it easy to access it through a nice web interface not unlike Google's GMail, Calendar, Picasa or Documents. Implementing "back-up your data" and "restore your data" links somewhere would also be quite easy.

And yes. Never let MS near your data.