skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I largely agree with your pen point, but I couldn't imagine (yes, I've tried) writing notes, for instance, without a pen. Perhaps, though, that's not really the best use of a tablet, which seems to be the premise that most tablets out there today are based upon.
Finally, an insider's explanation for how Leah Culver got so "famous":

#1. Ego

1. Ask yourself: Does this feature increase the users self-worth or stoke the ego?
I'm with you on video games, anime, and sci-fi/fantasy; for some reason, things targeted at geeks always rub me the wrong way. For instance, I can for the life of me not figure out why people enjoy Battlestar Galactica.

I'm not with you on TV. The best films I've seen in the past 5 years are nowhere nearly as good as The Wire or the first 4 seasons of The West Wing.
How do they know who "you" is?
Beautiful fireworks: Russian army playing wargames
Video games suck up lots of time and leave you with nothing when you're done. Two hours spent bickering on IRC or Hacker News at least teaches you things. I'm not sure if that's exactly what mahmud said, but that's my reasoning, and I thought his was close to mine.
You got an E36 for $1400? How many miles?
No mention of Ergonomics!

Gorilla arm makes touchscreens completely unusable unless you're cradling the thing (no desks!), and anything much bigger than pocket-sized is going to be too heavy and awkward.
This reminds me of a study my dad mentioned to me not too long ago...

Here's the key graph: http://imgur.com/bFcOw.png

And his explanation:

"They gave 77 white female Michigan State students several standard measures of racism at different times in their cycles. The "race bias" curve on the graph is a combination of the measures.

Their interpretation is based on evolution, avoiding outgroup fathers who won't be around to take care of the mother and child. One problem I see with that interpretation is that it is better for evolution to mix genes as much as possible. I don't really have a better explanation, though."

Also, this article seems relevant: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/ReproductiveHealth/Story?id=425...

"marriages between third or fourth cousins in Iceland tended to produce more children and grandchildren than those between completely unrelated individuals"
Why couldn't Adobe do this on their own? They have the money to throw at smart engineers if they feel the need to.

And its not exactly like a lot of what they needed was completely undocumented; ARM and Mach-o binary formats, how to link against frameworks, etc. I'm not pretending that I would be able to do something like this on my own, but, its definitely possible for a group of smart people who have the right background to do.
Thanks for the link. I have been meaning to buy this book, but I couldn't get over the mental overhead of having it shipped to me. Now that is not a problem, and I am just about to start reading it :)
Where did it say that in the FBI report? I took a look over it like 2-3 times and I can't find such mention.
Sure, people like that are deluded. Race, culture, gender, and religion should have no bearing on anything, but in practice, they do.

I'm not sure that a statement like the one you suggest would get you labeled racist, at least not among people who are capable of critical thinking. The fact remains that race is a predictor of academic success. It shouldn't be, but it is. To be a bit more socially sensitive, you might prefix that statement with "unfortunately," but I think that's one of the less-inflammatory things you can say that have a racial bent.
How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect
Presumably the same way the payola people do.
and if you're like me and use your wish list to keep track of your own future purchases, here is a link that lets you add the kindle version (since amazon still won't make these links easily visible)

http://www.amazon.com/Coders-at-Work-ebook/product-reviews/B...
There is, as I understand it, some evidence for the idea that people learn what's attractive in a member of the opposite sex by essentially averaging out all the faces which they see while growing up. This makes a helluva lot of sense as an evolutionary strategy -- you learn what your species looks like by observing as many other members as you can, and then you try to mate with the least unusual-looking person you can. Aside from protecting your offspring from the weird disability-causing genes which are sometimes signalled by unusual-looking features, it's also a great strategy if you assume everyone else is using it too: if you mate with a non-unusual looking partner you'll get non-unusual-looking kids, who will then be sought-after mating partners.

Anyway, if our brains really do use this strategy I think it goes a long way towards explaining some of this data.

edit: I don't mean to imply that this is the only criterion our brains use -- we probably find most attractive people who are slightly taller, more muscular and/or larger-breasted than the average we see while growing up. However in other things like facial structure where no particular face is objectively fitter than any other, heading towards the average is a pretty good plan.
Years ago I thought this as well. However, once I became good friends with people of different races, I started to become attracted to more people of those races as well.

So, I definitely do think that there is some component of "racism" to this, even though it may be subconscious.
Not just submarines--assuming that the beam can be as focused as necessary, you could even have lightspeed communication with the other side of the world, albeit at a very low bitrate.
I'm just puzzled by people who seem to think that this is so important or that mac ownership is a substantial hurdle to iPhone app development.

Because it is a substantial hurdle. The hurdle comes down to: Do you want to be able to test your app while developing it? Or do you just want to write it, make sure it compiles, and ship it?

If you just want the latter, then you will be able to get away with not owning a Mac to do a lot of testing and to sign with. You won't likely end up with a very good app. But you will have an app. OTOH, if you want to make a very nice application, that performs well, has a good UI and so on etc, you really should have a Mac. It gives you two big things: The iPhone Simulator and the ability to put apps on your device.

While the simulator might not matching device behavior for optimizations (if you need to do any), is fantastic for laying views out and testing if logic works. Its great for fixing small bugs that would exist also exist on the device. There is a caveat: not all behavior on the Simulator is the same as the device. This is frustrating at times. But, with a Mac, you can actually put your app on an iPhone. Codesign is (AFAIK), very much Mac-only.

Yes, you can develop on Windows or Linux, jailbreak and put your app on your device that way, but, you really do want to test your app in the same environment that a majority of your customers from the App Store are going to have. This means a non-jailbroken device. Which, again, brings us back to needing to Codesign. And needing a Mac.
> You called the OP out on calling white advantages "unfortunate" - I'm saying, it is.

Agreed, with an addendum: white advantages are unfortunate if they come via the exploitation or active assumption of disadvantage by other groups.

An advantage held by one group is not "unfortunate" if it doesn't hurt anyone else, or prevent others from attaining those advantages.

That might be a "well duh" statement, but I think the posters farther up the thread are (intentionally?) ignoring that in favor of a more academic debate.

Having said all that, most white advantages are indeed unfortunate.
Penn and Teller covered it pretty well on their Bullshit! program: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3025396475247394113
I sit somewhere in the middle. Unit testing GUI code is going to slow you down. Unit testing your core algorithms is essential. That is the stuff that must never break, and where breakages would not be immediately detectable. The unit tests ensure that you are always sure that that code works.

(Real world example; testing somewhat hairy parsing code: http://github.com/jrockway/moosex-runnable/blob/master/t/arg... I test every case I could come up with, so I could be sure that it works. Better to spend the time typing this file than to be hit with a weird misparse on the command-line, where you are probably not in the mood to fix the parser.)

On top of the unit tests, I do integration tests, to make sure sections of my app mostly work together. This is somewhere below "Request -> Response" and somewhere above the individual routines/classes. In the web app case, this is mostly "instantiate an object graph; call the methods that provide data to the rendering functions; make sure the results make sense". (I assume my template renderer and object database work; those have their own test suite, after all.) I also test stuff like typical sequences of actions that share some state (usually "the session"). I neglected that once and it caused me lots of problems.

But anyway, GUI testing == waste of time. As long as the buttons you click generate the right events, the GUI works. This is the sort of app Zawinski was working on, and this colors his thoughts on testing accordingly. Your mileage may vary.
3. Although I worked on it, I would be very shy about claiming "hypervisor" as a VMware invention

One of my fond childhood memories: reading IBM VM/XA manuals
http://www.vm.ibm.com/history/ . They had everything you ever wanted to know about hypervisors.
Response: Sacrifice your health for your startup
So what they want is something like Java Applets or ActiveX? Sounds reasonable actually. Everything's a fucking hack on the Web already, it can't hurt to stuff more shit into Web browsers :)
If a lot of people contact you, then you become more selective.
> It would be interesting to see the stats for Asianas broken down by - "American-ness" - do American-born, accentless Harold and Kumar do much better than FOBs?

I'd guess yes. "Blending in" can make it a lot easier to work with other people. Also being born in the US would make you more familiar with the US and how it works. Someone arriving in the US at age 25 would not only miss out on that intimate knowledge, but would likely have a bunch of misconceptions about how things worked based on their experiences back home.

Then again, you could also make the argument that the type of person who moves to a new country does so for a reason, usually because they think they'll have greater opportunities there. It's not unreasonable to expect that kind of person to be better focused and harder working, which may very well take up the slack.

But yeah, real stats would be interesting to see...
Frankly I kinda like the informal interpretative language. It's more entertaining and less clinical. I don't think these guys see themselves as there to just regurgitate statistics; they're writers, too.
Just who were the luddites anyway?
I think he is currently alive. Cursory googling didn't reveal a death date.
Sometimes the comments on HN are more interesting than the article. This isn't one of those times. This article is full of surprises, whereas the comments are fairly predictable.

I wonder what the pattern is. Which articles tend to yield boring comment threads? Ones that involve politics? Ones that invoke identity?

What I'd really like to find are simple, automatic ways of detecting boring comment threads. I know one that works: more comments than points. Anyone have any suggestions for others?
I've started barefoot running and I have to agree that it really helps you focus on running with proper form.

People interested in running barefoot should definitely start out slow and run somewhere safe, like a soccer field or park. If you decide you like it, I also recommend checking out the Vibram Five Fingers. I only just got a pair a few weeks ago, but so far I'm having lots of fun running in them, and they give your feet a bit more protection against debris.
Absolutely. Current latency from New York to Tai Pei is about 210ms. With neutrinos it would be under 80ms. And immune to earthquakes and undersea mudslides.

It would also be a lot easier to build emitters and detectors on land than in submarines.
Reread my comment... I never said it did, I just said that people tend to confuse the two.
That's fair, but remember that if you scrape HN with a 'sleep 3' your IP gets throttled quickly and then eventually blocked ...
>Pownce's failure had very little to do with it being "Twitter-like". It failed because it didn't solve a problem that real people had.

What problem does Twitter solve? (Not a rhetorical question)
tesla is one of the smallest things he's doing, have a look at this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk

specifically spacex.
This is about hypervisor performance. (Seeing the title and domain, at first I expected it to be about Ruby VMs.)
He was born in 1884, and passed in 1991. He was an avid mycologist by hobby, writing a few books on mushrooms -- the very food he used to credit for his longevity. I'm glad he was around long enough for me to get to know him. I'll concede the fact that in his era, things were done a lot more naturally than they are now if for no other reason than they lacked the technology to do it any other way.
An NSA.gov page hacked (defaced)
seems like most submissions that have more comments than points tend to be boring/predictable. not always, but its a good indicator, as controversial topics tend to have most comments fall into certain predictable buckets.
For some perspective on John Cochrane and his economic views:

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/02/why-do-we-economists-t...

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/01/time-to-bang-my-head-a...

Of course, the author of those blog posts, Brad DeLong, is also known as the author (only somewhat jokingly) of the Efficient Krugman Hypothesis (Postulate 1: Paul Krugman is always right. Postulate 2: If your analysis suggests Paul Krugman is wrong, see Postulate 1.),
Good agile vs Bad agile
No, they just want to add their own custom HTML markup (for proprietary features) and have others ignore it but leave it alone if they don't understand it.
The part about TDD in the interview with Peter Norvig really jumped out at me, too. A passing test doesn't always mean anything important has changed - like most other programming tools, there are circumstances where unit tests just create the illusion of progress. I also remember Norvig saying* that sometimes the scope of pass/fail tests may be too narrow, because sometimes having 18 of the first 20 results be reasonable is good enough, but typical testing packages aren't really structured to accommodate probabilistic thinking. Certainly more relevant for some problems than others, but interesting nonetheless.

I've seen major benefits from automated testing, and I'm convinced they're a net win (especially for maintenance), but I also think that being dogmatic about any particular testing methodology (TDD, etc.) is going to be counterproductive sometimes.

* I don't remember if it was from the same book, PAIP, AIMA, or something else - I've been bouncing around in several AI and Prolog-related texts lately.
Michael Jackson and the Art of Promotion 
How to promote your site utilising the latest trends
We're talking about bits an admin can flip to get fired, aren't we? To that question, I don't really see what you get from the distinction...
Luckily, the entire business is being run online from our homes.
Six 'must have' Design Tutorials for Businesses
Very useful tutorials
"How do I set the User-Agent string in Java?" - L. Page (1996)
True, but does that make it worth having two spots on the front page and two separate discussion threads?
Sorry, I was editing my comment to mention this while you were suggesting it. That does in fact work very well.
>"As a better example, I'm not interested in dating women who are old, ugly, fat, or have children, and that's perfectly okay. If I were not interested in hiring women who were old, ugly, fat or have children then I'd have a serious lawsuit on my hands."

If you looked at the other OkCupid chart, it shows that race has little impact on interracial match %. It's fairly certain that "old, ugly, fat, have children" are all characteristics that would lower the match %, therefore you argument of equating these different traits is debunked.

Your bit about hiring is also suspect. Think about 50+ years ago when minorities such as blacks really weren't up to standard due to years of slavery and persecution. Back then it was also seen as "legitimate" (using your argument) to not hire black people in the same way that people aren't dating minorities today.

>"Now personally, I think that refusing to date someone based on their race is both regrettable and closed-minded, but it's not detestable the way that actual racism is."

What is this "actual" racism? Since when is there "actual" racism and "fake" racism? I'm amazed at how many upvotes you have received with what is basically a No true Scotsman fallacy comment.
It gives them a way to quickly communicate feelings, and to see what other people are saying quickly. Because it's so short, you can follow a lot of news without being overwhelmed.
Blockquotes: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859888
True, I think part of the confusion stems from the fact that you can have "secular Jews," since the Jewish way of life seems to be a bit more than just about religion (not saying the religion isn't an important part of it). If someone were to say "secular Christian" I'd look at them funny.
Apollo is just making a joke.
... said the project manager
This Is a Photoshop and It Blew My Mind - Photosketch
What would be an appropriate delay for HN?
Plus, shocking or offensive comments are generally downgraded, even though they're not "boring" due to their controversial nature. It's also difficult to define what "boring" actually is since it has such a subjective meaning.
I'm mostly fascinated by their attempt to trick him to give up compromising information about his actions, by asking him for help on how to secure the system. If they would've asked me before reading this, I would've probably been too naive to ask for assurance that what I said wouldn't be used against me.
The MacRuby guys are doing this as well. (AOT) They are also using LLVM incidentally.

What I'm wondering about is how they do AOT for dynamic code. Do they have every possible path for a data type compiled? This would seem silly..maybe LLVM has some clever ways about this?
If you enjoyed seeing the contrast in approaches between Norvig and Jeffries, you may also find the following interesting -- calculating bowling scores in

1. OCaml, no tests: http://alaska-kamtchatka.blogspot.com/2009/07/disfunctional-...

2. Clojure with unit tests: http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2009/07/19/uncle-bob-j...

</amazon>
Interesting. The Kindle version of this title came out before "The Web Startup Success Guide" which was also slated to be on Kindle and was published in paper form before "Coders" but so far nothing even though they are from the same publisher. I wonder why.
He was brilliant until he stopped making Calvin & Hobbes. :)
Sounds costly.

Let's install video cameras in everyone's house so that the police can have video evidence of all murders and child abuse. Won't someone please think of the children?
While I've always run heel first when using shoes, when running barefoot perhaps unconciously I've always gone ball/toes first - I guess it really is what comes naturally.

There was also another article a while back that perked my interest with a bit about runners in South or Central America who would go ultra-long distance running with only a thin slice of rubber strapped to their feet.
Aircraft modelling. Particularly the executive jets. Time passes by in a whirl. Either that or Microsoft Flight Simulator.
How the heck is a preference in who you date "racism"? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. People have strong preferences over all sorts of superficial things - body type, hair color, hair style, breast size, height, etc. Is it really so hard to believe that someone's preference for XXXX skin tone is just as shallow as their preference for YYYY hair color? (I've yet to see a commenter to a survey showing men prefer blonds point to it as evidence of some deep seated prejudice/hatred said men have towards women of other hair colors.)
That's an awful lot of we're confident this six-orders-of-magnitude problem can be overcome. A six order of magnitude increase in the speed I could wave my hands would be well more than I would need to fly, at least if I could keep my hands from burning up.
> It seems to me that the same principle of equality that says it's not ok to have a preference in partners based on race should say that it's not ok to have a preference based on gender, assuming that discrimination based on gender in general is not ok.

Applying the "principle of equality" with a total disregard for the facts is fallacious.

Why stop at race and gender? Why do we discriminate against corpses (necrophiliacs) or even different species (zoophilia)? This is the ridiculous argument you are presenting.

A line has to be drawn somewhere and the tone of your skin should be a far less compelling characteristic than gender.
The two accounts were responsible for downloading more than eighteen million pages with an approximate value of $12. and estimated profit loss of $1.499988 million.

there. fixed it for ya.
Who said you have to sacrifice your physical health? Keep careful track of how many "mini-breaks" you take during any one session of "solid" work, and I think you'll see that we spend less time actually working, be it physically or mentally, than we actually think we do.

A lot of it really just boils down to basic personal discipline - a field I'm personally lacking at, but is certainly something that should first be considered before resigning oneself to an unhealthy spiral of midnight crams, cheap MSG takeout and a constant stream of coffee.
I was unaware the cafepress version was $10 cheaper (I overpaid!). This book is worth it at any price, via any link :)
The Norvig points were particularly thought-provoking. How do you tell if google is returning the correct result.

The other is that starting a unit test without knowing what you are aiming for (e.g., the puzzle solver) you may not get there, and TDD won't help you.
Yeah, the police are good at this. I was investigated by the Secret Service once. Long story involving a sarcastic non-anonymous slashdot comment that was misinterpreted as a threat on the President's life. (Yeah, America is a strange place.)

Anyway, the agents came to my house, made a vague accusation, and asked me if I knew anything about this. Having watched a bit of Law & Order, my answer was, "I think I need to talk to my lawyer". They persisted, and provided me with a lot of false information. At this point, I was annoyed at how wrong they were and said "yeah, I wrote this" and pulled up the comment in question.

(Resolution: they read the comment, realized that someone Higher Up totally overreacted, and went away.)

Basically, detectives are trained to extract information, and they are good at doing so. (Worth noting that after they got the information they wanted, they were generally pleasant people. Real life can be very much like television. :)
no worries.

just off the top of my head, i'd say that there's probably some sort of relationship between the points on the submission and the average points per comment in the comments.
Interesting. I have wanted to make a Kindle wishlist for some time; the best I have been able to do is to just have the previews sent to my device. Then when I want to buy the book, I do it from there. Kind of inconvenient.
I'm having a very hard time believing that this is real. If it is, they have just made breakthroughs in multiple domains in computer graphics, recognition, and composition at the same time. Here's hoping it's real.
That website is the Very First Wiki. And indeed, Ward Cunningham was going for simplicity.

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiDesignPrinciples