skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed is a very good article, especially advocating you focus on the right targets rather than items on to-do lists, which went well with me as I don't use them.

>It is very appealing to figure out how to squeeze more out of each 24 hour day.

This I thought was a spelling mistake, it should have read:

It is very appalling to figure out how to squeeze more out of each 24 hour day.
talks Chrome for Mom and Dad

no they don't! they talk BROWSER for Mom and Dad.
Would you really use Java, or just language X that runs on the JVM?
There are times I think the number of laws should be fixed... at say 1000. If congress wants to make a new law, they have to remove an old one.
I don't have a way to solve it long term. However I believe that it can be worthwhile to have a regulation that temporarily makes things better even if it eventually fails. For example I think that Glass-Steagall was a good thing for a very long time.
Wow, I liked it. Very cool.
I think that there must be an exception for certain crimes, but not all crimes. Otherwise, a murderer, rapist, thief, corporate spy, hacker, etc, could claim that they didn't know it was illegal and probably get off the hook.
I read that more as the fact that people've really been locked into the college-career-retirement mindset, especially as it seems to be the fact that you're dropping out of college that's driving the response.

There's such thing as viable alternatives, of course. But they're alternatives, as opposed to mainstream.Frankly, I prefer the alternatives myself.
The SIGGRAPH presentation video for this is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgKjs8ZjQNg
Thanks, Sahaj - just updated the title.
It's easy to have an emotional reaction to this. But maybe it's smart for us to think coolly and practically for a moment. This trend is probably unlikely to reverse in the short term. Until then, how can those of us in the USA protect ourselves and those we care about?

The two examples in the article were both entrepreneurs and small business owners. Would it have helped them to have better legal representation from the beginning? If so, exactly what form?

The article didn't mention their legal structures used; the fuel cell fellow may have been incorporated somehow, but I'd bet the orchid importer's vehicle was a sole proprietorship. Would operating as a corporation or LLC have helped?

I doubt this is something we can answer fully in this thread. But maybe we can get started.

-Aaron
That's a good idea, though the constant should be lower. Human societies survived for thousands of years with on the order of 10 (very popular) to a few dozen criminal statutes.
Brian, i said "a "from AppName" link that goes directly to the store site", i should have added "instead of to the developers site". I'm fully aware of what the links do today.

In regards to the payment, i just meant that if oneforty offers the payment (presumably via Amazon or Paypal) the developer has less to worry about. I understand that this will only work if rates are not much higher than through those payment providers directly.
My desk is covered with little sticky notes, with just about everything written on them - things I'm interested in(books, websites, music, etc.), restaurants, lyrics to songs, people phone numbers/email addresses, etc. Anyway, this just isn't a good system, since I never seem to have these notes when I actually need them (i.e. when I'm not at my desk).
Even if I don't tweet a lot I have Twitter open all the time since I like to keep up to date with what some people are doing/talking about. I also have Twitter on my phone, so a few months a go I thought it's be a good idea to create a system where I could create notes, just little ones, and access them from anywhere. Hence glunote.

The premise is pretty simple, just follow a user "glu" on Twitter then to take notes send a direct message to glu. The system then stores the note permanently, i.e, "d glu dicount socks 1-800-555-SOCK". You can then search notes by sending a direct message to glu with a ? as the first character. For example "d glu ? discount socks" would return all your notes that matched "discount socks" as direct messages (actually at the moment it returns the best match and a link to all other matches).

It was originally just for me but I've opened it up to anyone. I'd love to get some feedback on what people think, where there might be improvements, what's missing, that kind of thing.
Any feedback is greatly appreciated.
All of Peter Norvig's Python code is fun to read.
And I think the #1 thing that makes it difficult to compartmentalize is working longer hours than you should

i find that living and working in the same space is the the #1 thing that makes it difficult to compartmentalize for me. it's hard to "turn off" when your bed is 3 meters away from your desk.
What bugs me about all this is that the 'terrorists' so far have shown surprisingly little sophistication in the attacks they have made, mostly because they didn't have to.

That bugs you? I'm pretty grateful for it, personally.

The jihadists' greatest strength is also their greatest weakness: they're not very rational. If they were rational then they'd figure out that there are more efficient ways to kill random civilians than anything they've explored so far. On the other hand, if they were rational then they'd figure out that killing random civilians to please an invisible sky wizard is a pretty fucking stupid way to spend your life anyway.
ORMs and Declarative Schemas
I don't see how there's much you can do. It is probably impossible to go a day without breaking a law unknowingly. The law is so big that it is impossible for a single person to know all of it. In other words, even if you did nothing all day but study law, you could end up unknowingly breaking a law and going to jail. The problem is with the law, not with people.
Thanks, that's always nice to hear :)
Well, we do have a lot more to make laws about now. Internet privacy law was clearly not a concern for cavemen. If you make the law too general, you'll have the same problem.
>That sounds about right, based on my usage.

Based on my usage, HN would be #3 or 4 website worldwide.
I like the app's simplistic nature, but I think your explicit use case is not really correct. I can't see myself using this to take class notes at all. The sticky note format just does not work for that. However, it seems like it would work great for leaving yourself reminders. More of a "note to self" than capturing in-depth information.

The visual style is good conceptually, but needs polish. You need more than yellow rectangles for each note, the cork board background needs some kind of border, and your X buttons need to be more stylish.

Edit: I see that you really did intend it for the use I just described, but the language on the site makes it sound like it's for taking notes in class, meetings, etc. I think that a more descriptive phrase is "write notes" rather than "take notes."
the 2,400-page restricted document

Holy crap, are they serious? I can't imagine the mounds of BS that must be included in this thing.

Surely these guidelines could be slimmed down to say - 1 page - Stop sending/copying/telling people about classified documents.
What does the movie theater do to you when you enter BUT suppress your rights to sing/talk/shout/etc, on the terms that they will let you watch the movie? What does the military do to you BUT suppress your right to freely determine your life, on the terms that they will provide food, shelter, and training to you?
Nintendo, Google, Apple make up top 3 of BusinessWeek's World's Best Companies
I'd like to think those geeks are at least having fun. Seeing this article actually made me think I'm going to try my hands at making something like this—not for money, but just because it seems like a fun way to spend college.
I guess it's just the drive of being the strongest, or the richest, or whatever the goal of the game is. It's pretty satisfying to see your name on some sort of leaderboard. The text based nature doesn't bother a lot of people even now. The real problem is making a game that's fun, and that's the hard part.
Wasnt this posted a while back ?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=848889
So now that I've voted up every plinkplonk comment, my comment is that most people obviously haven't read the book. The post is pretty good, but the book is better. You should read it.

If you do read the book, you will see that the discussion begins with Norvig saying that he thinks one of the most important things is being able to keep everything in your head at once. Extra tools come in when the problem gets too big to do that, but here's the key: he saw right from the very beginning that the Sudoku problem could be solved with two tools from the AI toolbox. In other words, he saw the entire solution immediately, and it was never too large to fit easily in his head.

Seibel's analysis fine as far as it goes, but he misses the really important thing here, which is that this is not just an example of someone recognizing a problem that they already knew how to solve. It's a case of someone with the mental tools that allow them to dramatically reduce the (apparent) complexity and size of a very large class of problems that happens to include Sudoku. Seibel takes a bottom up look at the data structures Norvig used, but this can be misleading because they weren't designed bottom up, they were designed all at once. You simply cannot do that unless you have the necessary training in abstract thinking (read: mathematics/formal logic/language development/ai techniques/etc).

No amount of code centric techniques or tools will ever make up for not having these tools. There will always be (relatively trivial) problems that you will never be able solve without them, because you will not be able to fit everything in your head and your ability to reason about the problem will be crippled by that. Debates about TDD are not even wrong, because they are at the wrong level of abstraction. Spending any significant amount of time discussing it is premature optimization.
Why YAuth is not OAuth
For example: - Test driven development - Deploy, measure, iterate practices - High level languages

Most of which are rare in the games industry but seem to be very successful in the web industry.

HTTP is also successful in the web industry. Perhaps game programmers should use it to pass around all their information.

Less snarkily, there is a reason why those things are popular in web development: they're good at it. There is a reason why C++ is used in game development: it's good at it. High-level languages are commonly used in scripting and game logic, but, if used in the engine, would slow it to a crawl.

With respect to "deploy, measure, iterate": I have a suspicion that such a methodology isn't entirely feasible in an industry that ships product in the literal sense of shipping product. It's easy enough to do A/B testing on a website. It would be a touch more difficult to do it for Half-Life, given that the install base is approximately everywhere and you have control of roughly none of it.
Disclosing a conflict of interest is always a good thing.

I think some people are misinterpreting the rule. For example ..

>>The rule appears to apply to anybody who says anything on Facebook to their friends.

No, if you have no paid connections with the advertisers on your blog, the rule won't apply to you.

>>Taken to the extreme, this makes it more challenging for any private citizen to use any form of media, including blogs and social networks, to express an idea, opinion, or endorsement.

Why is is challenging for a blogger to disclose that his "review" was preceded by a payment from the company whose product he is reviewing ?
2 ways to have $1 billion:

1. Start with a game changing idea in a rapidly evolving market. Assemble a great team. Execute flawlessly. Take advantage of every opportunity. Minimize mistakes. Get a little lucky.

2. Be Steve Ballmer and start out with $2 billion.
Not the way they are taught by their proponents. Too many use the to do list not just to set priorities but to project plan at the micro level. They estimate it will take so long to do this item and then match that with an available time slot throughout the day. The to do list wastes more time than it purports to save.

Straw man. Who the hell uses their todo list like that? Who are those "proponents" who suggest playing this sort of silly "estimate the task and match it to a time slot" game? I've never met one.

Todo lists are for one thing only: to take the things you said you'd do out of your mind so you can focus on that one most important task.
It's a matter of playing the right games. I tend to play shorter arthouse games. Braid, Blueberry Garden, Everyday Shooter, and its kin.
Another point, though, is that the Internet is actually making harder to buy legitimacy -- and all to the good.

We know the successful story in Internet ads is not the banner ads but the Google text ads. Text ads aren't for buying legitimacy but for spreading information. Those with something of inherent value just want to tell you about it. Those who sell carbonated corn syrup they associate with a "life style" want to buy legitimacy. Which is better?
There's a legal scholar (and I'm blanking on the source at the moment) that makes a very convincing point that a small handful of laws (against violence, fraud [1], etc.) covers 95-98% of all cases. The other 2-5% of cases are necessarily judgement calls. What's interesting is that the percentage of cases requiring judgement calls doesn't decrease as you go from N laws to 10,000N laws.

[1] To your point: it's true that we have more things we can make laws about, but I suspect that it isn't true that we should make laws about every specific thing. Fraud is fraud, murder is murder. It shouldn't matter whether you use the internet, a telephone, or pencil and paper to defraud someone, in the same way that we don't need a separate murder statute for each choice of murder weapon.
So physics = computing?
Ha, true. FWIW, though, the character you're describing is played by Dustin Hoffman. Awesome movie, though.
Is that supposed to be a bad thing? High-school students are generally of the age where they [naturally, evolutionarily] feel most attached to people closest to their own age. I definitely would have skipped ahead in school if it didn't mean losing my friends.
I agree. How about six months? All the major issues have been festering for years, what's an extra six months of delay?

Remember, the government can't build a new road without three years of planning, community consultation, environmental impact statements, mandatory waiting periods, careful negotiation with all stakeholders, and whatever other bureaucracy might crop up along the way. But when the government wants to pass a bill to spend a trillion bucks or fundamentally change the nature of the economy, they seem to think that about twelve hours is the ideal length of time to spend debating it.
25 years of X
I think it's an interesting site, but I'm not totally sure why Google made it. There are plenty of other "upgrade" sites already out there. Maybe they felt that none were simple enough? I also wonder about the placement of the "under the hood" section. If I were them, I'd make that a little more hidden. Seems like it could intimidate and drive away Mom and Dad.

Out of curiosity, when you click on the "try a new browser" button at the bottom, do you get Opera, Firefox, and Safari? In the source code, IE and Chrome are both display:none'd.

I'm using Firefox 3.5, on a Mac.
The law can be fair or the law can be simple.
I know of a proponent of todo lists who happens to be a pretty remarkable achiever: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity
I'm not a linguist, but I'm pretty sure you're wrong.

<anecdotal_evidence>I've seen slang terms go viral at a party in minutes or through a social group in a matter of weeks. </anecdotal_evidence>
Yes, but I felt I did a really poor job of describing what I wanted to achieve so I thought I'd give it another go.
I just realized, we're all on a text-only site and getting onto the "leaders" page was a big motivator for me for a short while. Perhaps I should quit throwing stones in my glass house.. :)
NerdKits goes from beginners to way beyond... We actually publish lots of educational content -- see 18 free videos so far on http://www.nerdkits.com/videos/ -- that show off lots of programming and electronics concepts that push the limits of what most hobbyists are doing with microcontrollers. But we are definitely focused on education rather than selling products to professional engineers! (This is Mike from NerdKits)
Will either be overturned on appeal or they will introduce some clause into the Eula saying you agree not to sell them.

IIRC someone (the same guy?) got away with it before with ACad - but in that case the boxes were unopened so had never been licensed.

There was a similair case with MS in the UK. The receivers for a bankrupt company tried to sell their software licenses as assets of the company but were stopped by MS. There was a big deal about it because it changes how companies could write down software purchases in their accounts.
I am puzzled why you would think that my conclusion would change.

You've fallen into a classic mistake. Science focuses on tractable problems, not important ones. For instance no matter how wonderful world peace would be, as long as there is no clarity about what lines of research are likely to advance it, it simply can't be science. By comparison human happiness is unlikely to change if we find the last particle predicted by the Standard Model. However we know how to go about finding the Higgs boson, its discovery would confirm our understanding of how mass arises, and understanding it could help us towards reconciling GR and QM.

I fully grant the importance of understanding the human brain. I appreciate the effort that is being spent, and that lots of progress is being made. I've learned a lot by reading about what we have learned. However there is no coherent story yet, and no sense of which lines of research are likely to lead to fundamental improvements in understanding. As a result neuroscientists have less of a shared paradigm than the hard sciences.

Incidentally your comment below about learning is ironic. Researchers into memory learned a lot about how timely reminders improve long-term learning ages ago. They have been trying to shout the news from the rooftops for decades. There are computer programs that help people follow schedules that really improve how you learn. But has it had a practical impact on, say, classroom teaching?
Configuring a secure Ubuntu Linux Virtual Private Server
Thanks Steve, great feedback. Wish my design skills were a little better :)
care to elaborate? Red, Green, and Blue are the primary colors... the color models I know of are RYB and CMYK, and

>Without yellow there would be no blue!

in CMYK, without yellow, there is blue!
Microsoft may be large but last I looked it wasn't a democracy. The top management of any large company is paid to bring a single 'strategic vision' to the company. Microsoft's top management clearly considered attacking open source to be in their interests when they did it previous. Seems like an indication they'll do it again.
Yup, he is very selective in his sample. He sampled a bunch of "super-achievers" and some of them don't use to-do lists. He didn't say how much or what qualified as a to-do list. Then he ignores people who are successful and use to-do lists.

There's also huge selection bias. What about all the disorganized people who don't use to-do lists and aren't successful? I can assure you there are a lot of them.

To-do lists are probably very weakly correlated with success, if at all.
With a bit of innovation they can get it down to 0 clicks.
That's not the death of authenticity. That's oversaturation. That's a lot of people cynically turning marketing from something useful and benevolent into a wasteful game.

Organic growth is the real goal of advertising. When you make an ad, what you should be doing is figuring out what people need and telling them how your thing will help them. You get a customer, they find a service. Win-win. Advertisers do more than that, and they profit in the short- and middle-term, but that sort of thing is doomed to fail as people grow wiser.
Are you the developer in the story? Your handle "Torn", same as the game.

[Edit: Obviously not. Will leave this here in case someone else has the same question.]
Actually, to me, Linus comes off as a kind of angry guy in the Git video - very smart but more smirky than happy.
It's especially interesting to me, because my online game is far less successful financially. (I make a living at it, but it's not a glamorous one.)

To be honest, my gut reaction was initially "there's no way this game has 40k active users", but then I clicked the online tab and sure enough there were that many people listed in the last 24 hours. Colour me impressed.
Union. To my knowledge it's all there is in the Vancouver area.
If you're even mildly handy with a lockpick, the tiny little keyway on the back of the lock is easy pickins. Even the most ham-fisted of raking techniques should open the lock inside of fifteen seconds. Use it for good, not evil! (Or at least make it fun evil.)
Amazing. He really missed the entire point of the internet.
"Anyway, I would be interested in hearing your UI testing success stories."

For Web apps, I use Selenium. I use the Firefox plug-in to record scenarios,with some hand-tweaking to replace any odd xpath stuff with more robust references to IDs. I then periodically run suites of UI tests to see that things still behavior as they should.

Yes, there are times when page content changes and breaks a test, but it's trivial to see where that is happening, so I've not had a problem keeping them up-to-date.

And having automated integration tests is way faster and more reliable than manually clicking through a site. I've caught numerous bugs this way, mostly in pages that do not typically get much use in real-life (but tend to be the first thing a clients tries when showing off code. Go figure.)

So, with Web+Selenium there's not much overhead to creating and maintaining a set of tests. It's a big win to be able to kick off a full suite and automatically run through a site far faster and more reliably than I could by hand.

It's not so good for desktop apps. I've been looking at Swinger, which marries Cucumber with Jemmy, for integration testing of Swing apps. As far as I know there are no good tools for recording user actions, so tests need to be constructed by hand. This makes it harder to assemble tests that capture assorted complex interactions.

But, at some point, someone has to actually test the app itself, so while it's time consuming to assemble automated UI tests, it may pay for itself over time since it reduces the effort in manually walking through the app.

So far neither of these would replace unit and functional testing, and neither catch all bugs as experienced by the end user, but they do reduce the number of problems that make it into a release. For Web apps, the effort spent is well worth it. For desktop apps, I've yet to reach that balance. However, things keep improving.
Fly to Haiti and get a decent voodoo exorcism done. That took care of my pain++, it might work for your cobolitis.
And that's why you should never talk to the police. Really. Ever.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4097602514885833865

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/07/why_you_should...
It looks like the "Try a new browser" options are set based on browsers that are available for your OS. Since IE and Chrome aren't available for Mac (Chrome for Mac's not officially ready), those aren't shown to Mac users.
Less than 75 years ago, it was legal for parents to send their 10-year-old children to work in mills. But your point is taken; even with oppressive child labor, civilization managed to survive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_rand