skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The obvious problem here is that there is an oversupply of news.

In an age of electronic worldwide distribution, do you need 938 outlets reprinting the exact same story? No. But that's what you see on Google News.

Oversupply means that weeding has to happen. Those outlets that survive will be those that provide unique information (either local news, infotainment, or big budget national/international news).

The newspaper as an institution is no more sacred than the Broadway play (which was destroyed by movies) or the family farm (which was automated and scaled up).

The only reason many people believe it is somehow different is that a significant fraction of what they read is written by newspaper writers (as opposed to, say, playwrights or farmers).
My dad works for Intel and can vouch for his rock star status. Intel makes money by selling chips and standardization makes adoption go through the roof. They have bankrolled many things, to then open them to all (USB, moblin, WiMAX).

USB certainly was a huge step and made them a lot of money, much of which Ajay is responsible for. This makes him a rock star.
That is good! I like the bit about unselfish writing. I tr to do that but can't always pull it off.
Swap values in 2 rows SQL
I really have to disagree with this. Piracy will not be moving to rapidshare - it's just not anonymous and decentralized enough. More likely bittorrent protocols will keep improving with more privacy features tacked on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_Anonymity_Protocol
http://www.stealthnet.de/en_index.php
Here's a true story involving theft, pregnancy, heart-attacks and ruined friendships. Definitely my worst failure...

http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2009/06/worst-case-scenario.html
It's hard to evaluate your own work objectively. There's a bunch of psychology around sunk costs, etc. that don't affect you when you're looking at someone else's project.
Deciding to join the laboratory of a really shitty advisor. I managed to survive, graduate, and even thrive.

But just a little bit less laziness at the beginning during my advisor search would have helped a lot.
42 was obvious ;)
Access denied | FoxieWire.com
I hate this argument against Michael Moore, especially when there are legitimate ones. He's not being hypocritical or ironic - you can play the game well and still think the rules should be changed.
The Genius of Play
The sad (but very real) part of this is that there are a lot of people that wouldn't do anything constructive with those 13 hours anyway. Not to mention, there are a lot of times during the average person's day where they could cut out coupons while they are doing something else like watching TV.
Saying "I shouldn't bother with trying X because of reasons XYZ" is indeed a bad idea, but I try not to do that, and I think I've been decently successful. Is there anything that I should do for any of these projects, which I haven't been doing because of some convenient excuse? (This is not a rhetorical question, it would benefit me a lot if I realized I had been making some excuse to not try some new course of action.)

Privileged? I do have some privilege, in that I was born in a first-world country and not a third-world country, but that's about it. My parents aren't rich or famous or even upper middle class. My mom constantly worries about the bank foreclosing on her house because she can't pay the mortgage, my dad works as a salesman and lives in a junky 2BR apartment. I myself am flat broke, I actually have negative net worth because of the student loans I had to take out.
The Uneducated American
This guy sounds like a douchebag. Is hoarding money en vogue now? It's one thing to be frugal, but it's another thing to be a greedy miser. If everyone did this, it would choke the financial markets and drive the world into stagflation. The free exchange of money is vital to the economy and health of the world. With any luck, he'll leave a bunch of money to his kids who will promptly spend it on booze, hookers, and blow.
Say that I wasn't happy with the salary that Google is paying me. It's a good salary, but I want more. After all, my labor has already generated more revenue for the company than I am likely to make in my lifetime. I, of course, don't have to work with Google - I can quit at any time. But in reality I can't, since my competition is also willing to work for the same wages and I have to eat. So I have to play by Google's rules, even if I believe they don't pay me enough for the value I am making.

Do you have much sympathy for me?

Why, then, do you have much sympathy for Rupert Murdoch and his billion-dollar corporation?

It's an analogy, and like all analogies, it's imperfect. But it's perhaps more apt than you'd expect. You might argue that I could easily quit and get a job at, say, Yelp or Facebook. But News Corp could easily block Google and form a partnership with Yahoo or Microsoft - heck, there's rumors that they are doing just that. Or you could say that I should quit and form my own business - well, News Corp could easily go hire a crack team of 100 programmers to build their own indexing engine. Except they probably won't find the good ones, since everything indicates that Google is a better place for a computer scientist to work than News Corp.

You might also argue that I'm already paid for my labor. Well, News Corp is already paid for the their headlines and their brief teasers: they're paid when people visit their page and advertisers put up money for that privilege. They just want to be paid more. It's not all that different from me wanting a higher salary because I generate far more value to the company than I cost.
Defending Fluff
OpenPDC - Open Source Data Router of the Smartgrid
A subjective rant: I tried to get into Python about 5 years ago - worked through 'Dive Into Python' and used it for several projects.

Once I tried Ruby for a few projects, I never looked back: I now only use Python when I need a library that is only available for Python.

So, try both for a few small projects and take your pick.

BTW, I think that being proficient in just one scripting language is enough. I split my work time between Ruby, Common Lisp, and Java - perhaps not an optimum choice, but flexible enough for most problems that I need to solve.
What is interesting to me is the inconsistency in the arguments of big-L libertarians, which basically boils down to claiming that self-interest will turn into a virtuous result when a person's job title is "corporate executive" but a vicious result when the job title is "Congressman".

In theory, democracy should exploit the same effects as unregulated or lightly-regulated capitalism: politicians act in their self-interest (pursuing power, prestige, etc.) but in order to do so must provide tangible benefits to voters in order to keep getting elected.

In reality, of course, politicians run all sorts of schemes on the side to their own personal benefit, but to the detriment of the larger body of voters. In much the same way, executives run all sorts of schemes on the side to their own personal benefit, but to the detriment of the larger body of shareholders in their company (the analogue of the voters).

Yet in the politician's case this is heralded as a failure of government, and little additional discussion takes place (since the presumption before the fact was that government must always fail); in the executive's case all manner of arguments are advanced to try to explain that it is not a failure of capitalism (since the presumption before the fact was that capitalism must never fail).

In a very real sense, then, this turns into the fallacy of begging the question: capitalism does not fail because it is postulated that capitalism does not fail, and government fails because it is postulated that government fails.
I think that you can do this under "fair use", but "fair use" doesn't exist in all countries in the world.

And google has to obey to local laws and local copyrights and not just to US law.

The google book case is just another thing that's going to backfire at google. The ignorant attitude of google making foreign books (books written by authors where it is clearly illegal by the law do scan in the books and make those freely searchable on the net) available to all US citizens, even though the authors don't want their books to be available trough google, will only create more hate against google.
That's the situation I'm in right now. The co-founder is of the "Let's get it working now" mentality, while all I want to do is slow down, take out a notepad, and really think through how everything will eventually fit together.

And it causes some friction, especially when working remotely. I'll wake up, look at a checkin, and think to myself "this isn't going to work in the long term."

But you know what? It does work today. And without my co-founder, I'd still be stuck theorizing on how to make things work.

So we've adopted a routine where he forges ahead, and I look at his checkins and do cleanup. It works really well. Instead of trying to conjure a perfect design out of thin air, he delivers a rough approximation, and I steer it towards a "better" or "more maintainable" place when it needs it.

It helps him work, since I'm no longer trying to slow the process, and it helps me work, since I'm now dealing with concrete items.
Hey rmoriz,

could you tell me the name of that provider? Seems like a delicious option.

Thanks
Have you used android devices not made by google?

Of course all devices released by google will be consistent. As more players enter this space, and each takes liberties with what libraries are available or how well they're implemented, android development will get progressively harder.

With regard to sources, everyone who's worked on a non google android device is probably under NDA.
My Dad lives pretty frugally, but he spends like $5K every year on a great trip somewhere

There's research indicating that experiences produce more lasting happiness than possessions:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090207150518.ht...

This seems plausible to me.
"Rubberized keys"?

I've got a couple-of-years old white plastic MacBook and the keys certainly aren't rubber. Have they changed to be like calculator keys now?
I believe that Google does obey local laws. I've certainly had to jump through hoops because of inane restrictions that the Chinese government puts on web content. A bunch of the stuff I've worked on simply isn't available in other countries because of various laws and restrictions that have to be cleared before we can launch.
'What exactly did Google steal? Very exactly, Google steal "Headlines and very brief teasers". From the perspective of copyright law, yes, it can be classified as quoting, so they can't sue google, but those "headlines and teasers" do carry news value and in some cases took large amount of resources to produce. Now, Google took it and provided link as a payoff. Is that payoff adequate? Murdoch and many news producers don't think so.'

This seems very much the same as walking past a newsstand, glancing at the headlines of assorted newspapers and magazines, perhaps flipping through one or two, to see what's happening. The stand owner is "giving away" the headlines, but how else are people going to know about the publications?

By similar logic, a newsstand owner should have to pay just to place a newspaper on display. Where has Murdoch been all those years while this robbery was occurring?
'How to express your thoughts clearly' is the more honest title for his presentation.
Very interesting talk, but man vimeo sucks. The audio interrupts every 3 seconds.

Thanks anyway!

It should probably be pointed out though that swarm isn't so much a programming language as it is a modification of a large subset of scala to allow live thread migration to different machines at will.
sans sequitur/sine sequitur? - "nothing follows"

Ex nihilo nihil fit - "from nothing, follows nothing"

ab indeterminato nil sequitur - "from that is indeterminate, nothing follows"
Indeed, Will does a great job and is very passionate. Have met him on a couple of occasions.

Having said that, Flourish isn't (and isn't trying to be) a framework like CI or Kohana.
But why are thoughts jumbled, mostly?

Is there anything to be learned from the structure of the jumbling?

No answers, just getting it out there.
Intellectual Masturbation
Soros to Invest $1 Billion in Clean Energy
Google could simply remove them from their index for a week, see if a 25% decrease in traffic for a month will make them think twice.

I bet that they would change their tune by the the 3rd day and beg google to re-add them.

EDIT: Also as someone said further down, google could even charge for their indexing of the news, IMO they are providing a service to the news companies.
How do you know what else you need to learn? The best way I know is to try doing whatever it is, and see what's hard. Sometimes you can fill in the gaps in real-time, sometimes you need to go back and study.
It's unfortunate. The Sidekick II was the best smartphone I ever had in terms of usability, keyboard and speed, and I am still highly partisan to it.
Should Google be able to do that without consequence? I guess they don't because we would go over to Bing.
J2ME didn't fracture because it was open source - that didn't happen until 2006 - it fractured from the same issues bensummers points out below with Palm: too many differences in implementation between different manufacturers and devices (including bugs).

Phone B supports 1-bit alpha, phone B supports 8-bit alpha, phone C has a bug where alpha is corrupted in images under a certain size. Once your code starts looking like a nest of if(NOKIA||(MOTOROLA&&!MODEL910)) you're doomed.
Facebook facelift
In theory this is akin to holding someone hostage, but isnt this what the media companies want? I doubt google would ever pay to license the links so the only other option would be to omit them...
What a nice gesture.

You could try monetizing the domain name that way. Branded emails. Or even sell the sub domain, w.ww.com, for big bucks.
A description in the headline of what the Git wrapper does, or a link to a blog entry or some other description of the wrapper would be helpful.

As it is, currently the website has no information other than the raw source-and a google search reveals no additional information.
The site is unclear as to whether you can do anything without paying first.
I agree that it seems like an odd practice, could be a mental artifact from using the scala interpreter. When you create objects in the interpreter w/o a name it is starts enumerating at res0.

Welcome to Scala version 2.7.5.final (Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM, Java 1.6.0_15).
Type in expressions to have them evaluated.
Type :help for more information.

scala> "hello"
res0: java.lang.String = hello

scala> "world"
res1: java.lang.String = world
I don't recall if I ever tested out shmux when I was looking for terminal multiplexers. For interactive usage, the best one I ever found was Omnitty. Unfortunately, I was never able to get it to compile for Mac OS X so I normally use it by first sshing in to a remote Linux machine then using omnitty from there to fan out to the cluster I want to play with.
Please do not confuse efficiency of directing money with being able to realistically address the problem.

I grant that well-run charities are much more efficient than government. However not nearly enough money is voluntarily donated to charity to realistically address the problems that exist. Based on http://www.givingusa.org/press_releases/releases/20080622.ht... we collectively donate about $300 billion per year. That's about $1000 per year per person.

But to bring up one example, about 1% of the population gets schizophrenia, and about a third of those we do not have effective treatment for. In a country with 300 million people that's about a million people with an untreatable mental illness that is very expensive to deal with. At a minimum that would take 10-20% of the total available for charity for a cause most people haven't even heard of. Once you take out all of the money donated to causes donators care about - such as museums, cancer research, third world poverty, and a million splinter causes (such as the Electronic Freedom Foundation), there simply isn't enough left to address a lot of very real and expensive needs.

Moving on let's look at your claims about education. I won't disagree with any of your criticisms. I've said the same and worse before. However I'm aware of one fact that you are probably not. Which is that, after controlling for parent's socioeconomic status, students who go to public schools in the USA do better on tests measuring their academic performance than students who go to private schools. (If you don't control for the large correlation with parent's socioeconomic status, public schools come out worse.) So as bad as the public option is, the private one seems to be worse!

Not to mention that the big problem the public option solves is delivering education to those who are poor enough to not afford it for themselves. Not doing that would limit how much of an educated workforce was available in the future, to the detriment of everyone.

But why does private education deliver a worse product? Part of the problem is that parents aren't as good of judges of the quality of their children's education as they think they are. So private schools are incented to do things that make parents think they are doing a good job at the cost of actually doing a good job.

Incidentally education isn't the greatest illustration of the problem. Public health provides much better ones. For instance patrons of a restaurant are not in a position to judge whether sanitary procedures are being followed in the kitchen. Residents are unable to judge how good the water they receive is. Which is why public health was one of the first areas where economists came to understand why the invisible hand of the market didn't do a good job of provisioning the need.
> very little of practically important things (scheduling, personal finance, establishing habits, interpersonal skills, critical thinking, problem solving), and a lot of nonsense.

That's the best description of what's wrong with education I heard in a loong time. Just, congratulations.
It was these guys: http://www.centraltexasangelnetwork.com

Their pdf says you get a 10 minute pitch, maybe that's right instead of the 5 minutes I rememembered: http://www.centraltexasangelnetwork.com/Resources/CTAN_Fundi...
The homepage link on the github page is basically a README with intro, instructions for use, etc...

http://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive/blob/master/doc/fugitiv...
I attempted to start a mobile software company(Symbian, well before the iPhone). The biggest mistake: attempting to start the thing without adequate funding. We attempted to bootstrap, and despite the fact that we built a great application we simply didn't have the money to drive traffic and build the exposure we needed. We had quite a bit of critical success, but that just didn't translate to sales.

I'm a strong believer in proper capitilization of your start-up (not a popular opinion on this board).
Too light. Not enough contrast/information density. I like some of the things, like the photo display, but this makes Facebook look generic and cluttered and "trendy". The best thing about Facebook's design is it so thoroughly denies trends.

EDIT: Also, the lack of pointless gradients.
Perhaps yes, but it is must remember that you can be cheap and spend money when needed. The problem comes when you are always cheap and never not so.

I am cheap but I will spend money on things that matter. I will not buy something so cheap it must be replaced when more expensive would last longer.

Being cheap is not always buying as little as you need, but buying the things that truly matter and not frivolous.
This first part is pretty obvious, I have a long list of such names, but I'm not sure how to go about an actual sale, the auction sounds like a good idea, thank you!
In 1998 my brother and I sat down and planned a web service which would allow travelers and writers to write journals and upload their photos whilst on the road. It would focus on simple image uploads, short chronological posts and then notifying your friends/family of new content through a subscription service. I wrote a functional prototype which included the ability to post/upload via email. We bought a domain and had plans to launch the service at some point. Looking back on this now, we had really started to develop a part of a rudimentary hosted blog service (chronologically arranged posts which facilitated discussion via comments) with elements of Flickr (image uploads and comments and social discovery of images uploaded near your current location) and the ease of use of Posterous (email all your content directly into the publishing system).

Beyond a working prototype we never pursued this in any serious way. Of course the execution is what matters and I think it's a failure that we never executed on this service to see if we could have created something that users adopted.
Be very careful with these type of opportunities, especially if a lot of time has been wasted on stuff that adds very little value in terms of getting the company traction. If the company has customers already that's one thing. If the company has just some standard incorporation stuff, an idea, some failed prototypes, a bunch of sketches, etc, think long and hard before jumping on board because the other "original" founders will always hold this over your head and in one way or another you'd be second-class. A smaller percentage is one thing, but look out for any vesting or other provisions they try to bring up that may severely impact your leverage and position within the company.
You have a good analogy, but the you take it a little too far. Broadway plays have hardly died. From what I hear, they are doing relatively well, and I have watched a number of them as they left broadway and toured into my city at the time. They have fallen somewhat in prominence though.

Similarly, family farms have lost their former prominence in society, but they are far from dead. My grandparents ran one until my grandfather retired due to health problems (recently deceased), and even then they leased their land to another family farm nearby.

There will be a winnowing in journalism, but this does not mean destruction for any of news, plays, or family farms.