skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Peregrine Worsthorne: In Defence of Aristocracy <-- an examination of the role of aristocracy (both de jure and de facto) in the modern democracies of Britain and America.

Michael Ondaajte: In the Skin of a Lion <-- a modern retelling of the Epic of Gilgamesh via immigrant settlers in early 20th century Toronto.
The example here (and the theory that the more the contrast, the more "female") is too black-and-white (no pun intended). It's not just contrast - there is a reason why women are called the "fairer sex". A face that is whiter, has no visible facial hair (and smooth skin) is natually perceived as female.
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Rise and Decline of Nations by Mancur Olson
Auto-hiding the dock has easily been the most productive change I've made to OS X.
I'd ask what happens to the folks that they invest in and what kind of folks/biz they invest in.

If the answers to those questions don't match up with what you're interested in, why would you pitch them? Do you really think that you're going to be their first success and that they're going to change what they invest in for you?
The world is flat..

From Beirut to Jerusalem (not done yet).

Both from Thomas Friedman.
Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco

Anything from Elmore Leonard
Thanks, the reading was interesting and maybe educational (to some extent).
I once worked at a car wash were most of the employees were out on work release. Anyway, the days were long and boring so I took the time to devise a way to get free sodas out of the vending machine. I was not interested in stealing soda, as I hated it, but only in figuring out how to do so. I eventually did so. I was so proud of myself that I decided to show one of the guys that I got along with pretty well. When I came back few days later the machine was completely empty and was never again able to provide tasty beverages for very long. Eventually the owner of the machine caught on and removed it from our site. I was very naive.
damn right — this is nearing the ridicule, people should stop thinking some app is the answer to productivity, and get on with the actual production.
I don't have any favorites, but the books I've read the most are "Notes from the Underground" and Walden. The last time I read Walden I didn't enjoy it much, so maybe I shouldn't mention it...

The first should be read by everyone though http://www.gutenberg.org/files/600/600.txt
The Brothers Karamazov

Gravity's Rainbow
This has been my biggest complaint. Some people around here fly without a parachute and when failure strikes its done. Its a worrisome feeling knowing you are out and alone with no backup.

That said people without parachutes tend to fly safer, and fly with more determination.
Yeah, a similar story here. Pumping the lock with your finger would pop it out, which, after unscrewing the bolt, granted me access to a world of soda beverages.
The trick of a good parasite is to let the host live and be a small enough nuisance that the host won't kill the parasite.

That is indeed the pirate's dilemma: how do I steal all my music, movies, and videogames while making sure Content, Inc. doesn't move to a business model where all the value is on their servers and you can, at best, rent access to it. It has already happened in China, and looking at the PC game sales charts in America it is pretty much complete there, too.

Oh, those weren't the parasites you were talking about? My bad.
Tired of twitter and facebook? Here is one of my idea's.
I would love some feedback on my project, GettingPopular. I don't want to make a bajillion dollars. I just like building things. I hate the fact that facebook shares all my information with everyone. If I want to do that I have twitter.

So, I built a system where you can add points to a relationship. NOT A PERSON. I know this sounds really bad at the start. But I think its a positive interface that actually helps you in the long run.

I created a video explaining my thoughts and showing how it works.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEMXHVX69vc

I am just interested in feedback about the _idea_. The site still needs work.

Just want to know if there is any interest out there.

Thanks.

Here is the site:
http://www.gettingpopular.com
zgware@gmail.com. Excited to check it out.
William Kamkwamba: How I harnessed the wind
I use OSX's Single Application Mode:

defaults write com.apple.dock single-app -bool true

killAll Dock

Has been a big boost.
yes sir agree with that. this thought did not cross my mind until you said it.

Now I think I've changed my mind. If I have to work. I will. And I would work just to fund my other ideas, like what I'm doing now by doing small freelance jobs.
Australian ISP on trial for copyright infrigement claims
Non Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny
The Mating Mind
"1984" George Orwell
"100 Decisive Battles: from Ancient Times to the Present" Paul Davis
Shogun, James Clavell - read it when I was 9 or so, put me on the course to live and work in Japan. Has obvious faults but changed my life at an early age.

The Brother's Karamazov. Pleasantly surprised to see Dostoyevsky mentioned a few times in other comments.
So far there's only one solution: "this can be done (for common lisp) by handling undefined-function condition and invoking appropriate restart (which is unfortunately implementation-specific)."

Before you go far and wide on speculation alone, you might stop and reread what has been posted so far, again. Both me and lnostdal submitted working CL solutions.

Example of a situation this feature might be useful: "I have this object with lots of properties which I don't necessarily know what they are. How do I define getter/setter methods on them?"

;; if you know the slot names
(slot-value object 'slot-name) ==> value
(setf (slot-value object 'slot-name) new-value)

;; if you don't.
;; let's define a class hierarchy first
CL-USER> (defclass foo () ((a) (b)))
#<STANDARD-CLASS FOO>
CL-USER> (defclass bar (foo) ((c) (d)))
#<STANDARD-CLASS BAR>
CL-USER> (defclass baz (bar) ((e) (f)))
#<STANDARD-CLASS BAZ>

;; use COMPUTE-SLOTS to get the class's slots
CL-USER> (closer-mop:compute-slots (find-class 'baz))
(#<STANDARD-EFFECTIVE-SLOT-DEFINITION A #x1A0F62C5>
#<STANDARD-EFFECTIVE-SLOT-DEFINITION B #x1A0F6305>
#<STANDARD-EFFECTIVE-SLOT-DEFINITION C #x1A0F6345>
#<STANDARD-EFFECTIVE-SLOT-DEFINITION D #x1A0F6385>
#<STANDARD-EFFECTIVE-SLOT-DEFINITION E #x1A0F63C5>
#<STANDARD-EFFECTIVE-SLOT-DEFINITION F #x1A0F6405>)

;; if you have an object and not a class, do the same
CL-USER> (closer-mop:compute-slots (class-of (make-instance 'baz)))
(#<STANDARD-EFFECTIVE-SLOT-DEFINITION A #x1A1202A1>
#<STANDARD-EFFECTIVE-SLOT-DEFINITION B #x1A1202E1>
#<STANDARD-EFFECTIVE-SLOT-DEFINITION C #x1A120321>
#<STANDARD-EFFECTIVE-SLOT-DEFINITION D #x1A120361>
#<STANDARD-EFFECTIVE-SLOT-DEFINITION E #x1A1203A1>
#<STANDARD-EFFECTIVE-SLOT-DEFINITION F #x1A1203E1>)
Lately I've been staring at the Codex Seriphinianus quite a bit. Worth finding a copy if you haven't seen it before.

From a technical point of view, The Elements of Statistical Learning, by Tibshirani, Friedman, and Hastie. Far and away the most illuminating demonstration that so many ML / AI techniques have a long-standing statistical foundation, and, essentially, everything boils down to the linear model.
Don Quixote

Shogun
For many years, jamba juice was running a promotion: buy a $25 gift card, get a free jamba juice. So one day I bought a gift card, got my free razmatazz, and was about to head out on my way when I doubled back.

Me: "I'd like another $25 gift card please."

Cashier: "That will be $25. What is your free smoothie?"

Me: "Peach pleasure."

And then I would pay with the previously purchased gift card, creating an infinite loop with a sunk cost of $25. I was only once refused. I netted at least 50 jamba juices for me and friends..I hope to incorporate this into a screenplay some day.
1984 and "the art of war"
I can't believe how long it took for me to internalize this
Should you disclose self-posts?
What do you mean there is no standard way to do this? There is a MetaObject Protocol which is supported by most platforms, and for those that don't have it, there is the widely portable CloserMOP.

Threads are not "standard" but the last thread-less Common Lisp just got them this month. Every maintained Common Lisp implementation today has Threads; and all support Bordeaux-Threads.

Show me a single mainstream language where threads are "standardized" other than Java?
> Should Google be able to do that without consequence?

What consequence should there be?

> I guess they don't because we would go over to Bing.

I'll bet that they wouldn't lose much search share and would lose even less search revenue if they ignored a huge fraction of the supposed "news sources". (1) News search isn't huge or lucrative. (2) Most news is "commodity", so it doesn't really matter where you get it from.

Cheap distribution (read internet) has put all the commidity news folks in competition with each other, driving prices down. A lot of journalists haven't figured out how that applies to them.

Note that Craigslist demonstrated that a huge fraction of newspaper subscribers/buyers weren't buying the paper for the news, but for the ads.
That should teach them about recursion :)

Brilliant to spot the loophole on the spot.
What a great story :)
Through the power of the internet, I can work on Sauce Labs and Selenium from Chicago. :-)
Liveblogging Oracle OpenWorld Keynote
Sunday really was Sun Day at Oracle OpenWorld. Scott spoke more than Larry at the keynote. Larry pooped on IBM.
A friend and I had a conversation related to this last night. We were speaking about how Facebook has seemed to become the dumping ground for acquaintances that you'd like to keep in contact with, but never will, and who you're not really comfortable texting. It's a problem I've had with Facebook for a while. They just don't differentiate the relationships I have with people enough. And because almost everyone is on the same level, I'm hesitant to share information and act as I would if it were just me and my close ring of friends. Often times, others will just post things to garner attention because they're posting to the world, and so my news feed is usually cluttered with garbage I'm not really interested in.

Anyway, I think adding points to relationships, or even people really, is a good way to go about differentiating friends. Come to think of it, I can see a Facebook app where you have 3 tokens to choose your top 3 friends to be pretty successful. Throw in an option to let people buy more tokens to add more best friends, and you'll have a bunch of teenagers buying tokens so as to not make the 4th and 5th best friends feel left out. :P
thanks. Is it one twitter account per customerfind account? Also I would love to be able to avoid following certain twitter accounts. Do you think there is a possibility you could add a field to input twitter accounts we don't want to follow? It would be useful to have some fields to follow only twitter accounts tagged with certain locations too, for eg, London, Berkshire, Brighton etc.
Renegade BBS in Ubuntu LINUX
post it, if it's interesting people will vote it up, if not who cares.
i haven't been to reddit in years. this is a lot more polite than i remember.
try the 'nm' program on your binaries.
Positive thinking can be dangerous
That must be one of the reasons why a stock install of a basic os takes up a gig or more of harddrive space and a similar amount of ram ?

If you want to see absolutely blistering speed try installing a 10 year old linux distro with X on it.
Winter classic boston bruins boston tickets
The Boston Bruins are a professional ice hockey team based in Boston, Massachusetts. They are members of the Northeast Division of the Eastern Conference of the National Hockey League (NHL).
I hacked a skydiver once.

I was a civilian/sport/fun/non-military jumpmaster in the eighties. Taught/supervised skydiving students from the second jump on. Sometimes sat in the plane and supervised/critiqued, sometimes jumped out with them for some task they were learning that involved another person in the air.

One student was having trouble staying stable when he left the plane. Tried everything I could think of, he was just tense and maybe a little tunnel visioned. He really wanted to succeed, and I really wanted him to.

However the student leaves the plane (there are many ways), you or the student would typically say out loud "ready, set, go!" and go on "go." Regardless of how he left the plane, he tumbled.

As we went up once again, near the end of the day, I had no idea what to try except some variation of what I/we had always done. We got to altitude, turned on jump run, and he climbed past me to stand on the step outside the plane. I still didn't know how to help him.

He got in position, looked in at me, and almost without thinking about it, rather than saying ready set or whatever, I took a big, obvious breath, slowly let it out in an exaggerated, relaxed way, and casually pointed at him.

Beautiful exit, and he had a big smile when we met on the ground. Helping that guy through that was one of the most satisfying moments in my life.
History of the KOM Computer Conferencing System
This ship has sailed. States simply do not have the money to fund more programs to help strengthen our educational system. Even if they had unlimited funding, the problems are not a result of a limited amount of money, but rather arise from a variety of complex, systemic socio-political problems. Christensen, Horn, and Johnson (2008) have applied the disruptive paradigm to education and have some really startling insights in their book: Disrupting Class: How disruptive insights change the way the world learns. Definitely worth checking out if you are at all interested in transforming education.

Krugman also highlights another problem. The financial crisis has resulted in real job cuts. Consequently, there will be less specialized classes, AP classes etc., especially in rural and urban areas. Christensen's point is that this is a great place to introduce an education based disruption. That is what we are doing at www.nixty.com. As a country, we have limited "teacher bandwidth" (David Wiley, 2009). Whether we like it or not, this bandwidth is going to continue to decrease. We need to find ways to harness the Web, informal learning, opencourseware etc. to create real learning opportunities for people of all ages and across different backgrounds. Many of these disruptive processes are already underway in the homeschooling and unschooling domains. It'll be interesting to see how they play out and impact the traditional K-12 and higher education systems in the coming years.

We are looking for people interested in helping us solve these problems. If you would like to join us, then shoot me an email at glen at nixty.com
Really? If I thought my chances were THAT good I would definitely play...
C++1x and Haskell'' are going to differ only in syntax.
Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion

The Power of Now
They're not the same service. Browsermob does load testing. Sauce Labs does acceptance (aka functional) testing. When you want to make sure every feature of your site works in every browser, use Sauce.

During our beta, we'll let you try sauce's service for free if you ask nicely (and answer a few questions).
"The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair

"When Bad Things Happen to Good People" by Harold Kushner
I don't know, it's only last year I was trying to squeeze a pixel shader down to 64 ARB_fragment_program instructions to fit on older ATI cards. The cycle of hardware reincarnation keeps giving me reasons to dust off the 8 bit skills. Writing for cell phones or even JavaScript environments often feels like old times.
I'm not sure I have two most favored books. But, I'll recommend two:

The Life and Death of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
I made a portrait of my girlfriend out of dice.

http://www.elusivesnark.com/2008/11/carolines-dice-portrait....
Here's a list we maintain at work: http://blog.greenmountainengineering.com/greenmountain_engin...

I contributed Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder and Desert Solitaire by Ed Abbey, among others.

For nonfiction: Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact by Vaclav Smil
Joel Spolsky: You cannot program parallel in C, period
Some forums (e.g. MetaFilter) have rules against self-promotion. The main reason is that the authors are not in the best position to judge whether their own work is interesting or relevant. Of course, MetaFilter doesn't use HN/Digg/Reddit-style voting to filter items after they're submitted, so it relies much more on contributors' judgement.
The guy is eloquent and honest for a tech exec; I found myself upvoting most of his replies
The A-Z of Programming Languages: Arduino's Tom Igoe
It's not a specific hack, but it has given me the same feeling, something I keep discovering: It's just a bunch of rules. Learn the rules and you understand it.

We've probably all seen it with computing; it looks mysterious from the outside but learn the logic and you can make it go.

Fixing cars is the same way (fuel, air, spark). Circuit design is the same way (a few types of component, logic gates). Power engineering is the same way (W = V*A, wire's got to be big enough). Music is generally the same way (very math-y in both the time and frequency domains). Dating is pretty similar (statistics play a different role here, but you can do well enough here "by the book").

We're currently learning that raising a child is the same way. Diaper, hungry, tired, hot/cold, {colic, teething, other age related issues}, doctor.
Interesting view of "the real world", where Python, C++, Factor, etc, are not used. This real world is contrasted with the desktop.

This is a pretty detailed comparison of Factor and Forth, insofar as I can tell (neither a Forth or Factor programmer). There is a little confusion about compiled vs interpreted--author of the paper claims that C is interpreted based on its use of the "%1" used in printf statements.
Broadband isn't just our web, it's our future.
I'd love to check it out: pete at carrotsticks dot com
similar post on reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9sjt0/rudebox_b...
The Dark
I really like client-side SSL certificates, I just hate dealing with custom root certificates. I'm excited about using the OpenPGP web-of-trust to add a "social" layer to applications. For example: "Allow any of my friends to log in to this server".
I don't think he's 'interviewing job candidates', he is simply being selective because he realizes that such a relationship is time-consuming and you can only spend your time once so it makes sense to try to pick someone that will give what you need.

Of course it is a two way street, the mentor would have to want it as well, but in my experience (which is pretty limited) just asking someone to teach goes a long way. Lots of people love teaching a younger generation and would see such a request as a compliment, rather than being selected for a 'job' to perform.

And being selected out of the large number of available choices would only further increase the value of that compliment.

Think of it as a dating problem: You have to choose a mentor that is not so busy that they won't be able to teach you, and on the other hand of a sufficiently advanced level compared to your own in the fields that you feel that you are lacking in that you can be taught. And then there has to be a certain chemistry, without that it won't work either.

Asking about that problem is totally valid. I haven't a clue how to go about finding an answer but I don't think that the question needs to be placed in the 'if you have to ask you aren't ready' category, in fact there are very few such questions.

There are no stupid questions, there are only stupid answers, and questions that were never asked.
GNU solved the halting problem[1]?

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem
I think it was far easier for them to achieve consistency through subtraction rather than addition.
* Cooking: Ramen can be used not just for soup, but for stir-fry.

* Travel: Any supermarket is your fee-free ATM. (cashback) (US)

* Travel: In the middle of your urban trek and have to pee? Hotel lobbies usually have clean, open bathrooms. (Specifically talking about the one you're NOT staying at, when you're wandering for 10 hours in a foreign city, and don't want to go all the way back to "base.")

* Travel: Hotel lobbies often have free wifi.

* Cooking: Peel an orange inside the produce bag. Makes for perfectly dry, not messy, not sticky experience. (your fingers can poke through the skin and tear it, and it doesn't tear bag. Magic.)

* Travel: I have so many Priceline and Hotwire strategies, but the short version is: use these sites to book hotels.
It might be possible to do a comparative study of countries/cultures which have codified educational requirements vs. ones that don't

Singapore is a good example in this regard. Its compulsory school attendance law is still less than two decades old.
For those who are unaware of who he is, here is his blog - http://www.covingtoninnovations.com/michael/blog
Some of the subreddits aren't so bad--the programming one and the lisp one are two that come to mind[
As Sandel points out, there are three classic ways to categorize justice: welfare, freedom and virtue. Although I doubt that we need to have a long conversation here, I think that what is great in America has not been that it maximizes freedom over all else, but rather that it has continued to find an appropriate balance between these conceptions of just government action. To dismiss the idea that promoting welfare--through education--is a worthy ideal of our government, and rather to say that freedom is the paramount ideal is short-sided, and naive.

Krugman's point may not be convincing, but neither is yours that unfettered liberty is the reason that America has prospered. Krugman's inaccuracy, in my opinion, is not that America's education was a driving force in economic growth, particularly in post-war America, but rather that the federal government was a driving force in the growth of education.

The sad thing is that the arguments we have today are not all that dissimilar from the ones that were had on the local levels during the common school movement in the 19th century. Some felt that certain segments of the population were not worth being educated, which is essentially what a lot of people today are supporting with a radically inequitable system, especially for those from poorer (both monetarily and 'culturally').

OCW is a laudable example of open education, but that does little to address one of the key points that Krugman is making. Namely, that on indicators of educational success far lower than college education, we are failing so many of our students. The fact that I can read graduate level micro notes from MIT doesn't help someone who can't properly add because they were provided with poor primary education in the Bronx.

I'm a firm believer in the idea that we rise and fall by our citizens, and it is sad that so many of our citizens are provided with substandard education. To that end, whether you think that federal government does or does not have a role in the educational system, I think we can all agree that something needs to be done, or we will continue to fall behind the rest of the industrial world.
Right-Wingers Believe Ayn Rand's Every Word, But They Forget She Wrote Fiction
Gödel, Escher, Bach

Infinite Jest
I'll pick 2 at random:

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Zodiac by Neal Stephenson
And 10 years later I'm still in the same boat.
I did this with Blockbuster a few years back. I believe it was a free $5 gift card for each $50 gift card you purchased. Most stores I've seen now have a policy of not letting you buy gift cards with gift cards.
Wow... this is beautiful!
Not meant to hamper your productivity.