skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From the video: The most important program on your computer is your browser

What about text editing, programming IDE's, etc. People just assume that the web browser is the most important these days.

That said I do approve of Google's movement to make the browser more known. It makes a lot of sense and I remember when they were first talking about the fact that most people don't even know what a web browser is. That's sort of surprising, and I guess they are trying to remedy that.
If bloggers and twitterers want to hide behind shield laws that protect journalists then they get all of the baggage that comes with that label. They don't get to decide that they are journalists one day (when they want the protection that comes from that label) and are not journalists on the next (when they want to chat up the movie they just saw for free without mentioning that they were paid to do so.)

I would be more than happy to proclaim that nothing mentioned on the internet is journalism unless it came from someone that would have been classified as such before the internet came into existence, but I think that a vocal minority would bitch and moan about such a distinction. The internet's chattering classes created this problem in the first place by proclaiming blogging to be journalism and worthy of the protections provided to people working in this field and I am enjoying the prospect of watching them being forced to live up to the responsibilities that come with these rights.
When Bush was in office, it was the Dems, including Obama, making similar complaints.
Drug companies are a special case due to extreme regulation, research grants, and tax breaks.
this goes along nicely with the new CarlHProgramming reddit

http://www.reddit.com/r/carlhprogramming/
There are some lessons to be learned from this article. Namely, John Cochrane demonstrated the type of knee jerk, incensed reaction that has landed many otherwise upstanding academics in the bad graces of their peers. His piece was much more inflammatory than it needed to be - in fact, I would argue that the tone invalidates his position.
To me, the piece sounds like it is coming from a man that has simply had enough of his institution being attacked for its historical tendency towards a particular party of economic thought. Understandable, but highly disappointing in its effect.
I've seen several of these now, but I like the way the information is presented here, usually its just a straight block of text, which is hard to read.
It sounds like Yahoo was still in its infancy. Just to play Devil's Advocate, could Ballmer have talked down the role of search engines to get the Jerry et al. to concede Yahoo or its technology at a cheaper price?
I don't know any game developers, so I can't really speak to their production quality/speed, but this quote just jumps out at me as a really bad thing:

"For game devs, they know from the beginning on that the console they’re developing for cannot handle the raw 3D data, so they need to find optimization patterns right away!"

I understand trying to find the optimal pattern/process for completing a task, but this seems like it's trying to say pre-optimizing is a good idea. I couldn't disagree more.
I used the development version of Chrome for Mac but it has bugs and shortcomings still. I will be glad when they finally finish it.
BetterExplained explains some of the math concepts in simpler terms:

Link: http://betterexplained.com/articles/category/math/
Not necessarily. It would take ~10-15 minutes of straight work to get this (more for your first few tries), so you can't really open a lock in a public place this way. On the other hand, it means you can pick up locks that the owner doesn't know the code to, and make them usable again by "recovering" the code.
Well, the information has been out there for more than a decade, but this is a really cool way to represent the process. There are also a lot of faster ways to get past a $5 Master combination lock, so this method is really only useful if you want to deduce the combination of a lock -- for instance, if you found one on the side of the road, or you cared about not only opening it, but being able to open it in the future without leaving an obvious sign of breach such as would occur using bolt cutters or a hacksaw.
That clause is unenforceable, but not necessarily the entire contract.
If Microsoft were smart, they'd use the free cash flow that they throw off to outright buy businesses in areas outside of tech that are run by really bright people. Imagine Microsoft going conglomerate. With the right capital allocation they could be an awesome company.

Unfortunately, they probably lack such visionary ideas and will end up throwing good money after bad while their FCF gradually declines as they're made irrelevant. A slow and sad death.

Look at Henry Singleton as a bright leader of a tech company who allocated capital well enough to grow shareholder value by expanding into non-tech areas like insurance.
You know what Super Achievers don't do? Blog about the secrets of Super Achievers.
Hmm, that "old way" is wrong. The way it would have been done in 1998 is something like

<li>
<a href="..." onclick="this.style.backgroundColor='#FF6633'">BBC</a>
<a href="..." onclick="this.style.backgroundColor='#CCCC00'>NYT</a>

and so on. With no further Javascript needed. Except I wouldn't have trusted "style", and the browsers without styles probably wouldn't have been able to change background colors for links at all, but that's obviously not the point here.

...

To be honest, this is probably how I'd do it today, too. The natural objection about it being not "semantic" or whatever is something I'd fix in the generation code, where it would be perfectly "semantic". There isn't a single one of those techniques that isn't an amazing pile of code to accomplish something very simple. Yeah, I understand this is for didactic purposes, but I'm finding it hard to see past this point. YMMV.
I mostly submitted because I liked the infographic aspect of it, not so much the information. That, as you say, has been around for a while.
On the other end, it can be hard to "turn on". My main reason for working away from the apartment.
Freakonomics: Do We Need a 37-Cent Coin?
Incorrect the contract is not enforcable; individual clauses are - most of them fall under civil law; I doubt it would be found "unconstitutional". But certainly you could challenge it.
This argument is a slippery slope. If you take a third-world country and allow child factory labor, children demonstrably work in factories. Clearly, if you disallow factory labor but allow truancy and neglect, children demonstrably become garbage dump scavengers. At some point you need to have the political will to decisively address child welfare and education, rather than allocating rupiah to cronies and paramilitaries.

That the complete solution to this problem involves more than simply outlawing child labor doesn't mean that outlawing child labor is itself ineffective. There are child labor problems in economies that can otherwise provide for children --- even if you have a stable economy, you still need the rule of law.

Finally, it seems hollow to argue that, after 70+ years of regulation of child labor, repealing child labor laws would not change the facts of child labor on the ground in the US. While the economy certainly has more to do with the end of child labor than the law does, the law still plays a significant part. As a society, we've eliminated child labor and adapted to that circumstance. That is, at least in part, a victory of child labor prohibition.

To say that child labor is simply an artifact of outmoded manufacturing practices misses the fact that plenty of modern companies do engage in child labor, in jurisdictions that allow it.

At any rate, you can have the last word, because this conversation is devolving. I think the idea that society can get along just fine on 10, 100, or even 1000 laws is naive; child labor is a simple example, but I could come up with many more vivid examples as well --- for instance, the fact that marital rape has only been addressed within the last century or so.
Technically, that depends on the individual judge's ruling, but either way, the relevant result - the ability to re-sell DLC - remains. Which (in my opinion) is a good thing (if we can get there).
Another Gender Generalization
Uncle Bob defends his "No TDD == Stone Age Programmer" comment
Making of the Computer Graphics for Star Wars (Episode IV)
Additional information about how this was created:

http://www.evl.uic.edu/core.php?mod=4&type=1&indi=341
How the hell did this get to the front page?
Yes, I should have written, "Based on what evidence I encounter of other people using the site as I use various sites."
Or, even worse, "oh, you mean AOL?"
That is assuming a lot, including that they won't flub the release of the Pixi. Also, I thought the Pixi was going to be Sprint-only.

Even if the Pixi is available on all carriers, the only key differential is availability. With Apple's contract with AT&T expiring next year, your only horse can't be availability. They'll just continue to pilfer MS from non-Apple phones and not stop Apple's growing share.
The offer for one of my first programming jobs I landed was due to my having listed game development on my resume. The job had nothing to do with game development (though I later went on to build a 3D data visualization in DirectX that was a cornerstone of the software), but the people who hired me had the same mindset as this article.

The idea is based on a few aspects that game developers almost universally share: they are trained to think of new, innovative ways to solve problems since each new game has to push the boundaries of what was possible before, they tend to be passionate about development and doing cool things with code, they are hardcore about optimization, and they are used to constantly learning new technologies and algorithms.

That said, not all aspects of game development are ideal for other projects, especially on the web. As others have mentioned, web development requires a very different mindset than game development. One major example is that game developers often build components from scratch, rather than re-using existing ones. One of the hardest skill for me to learn was to avoid "reinventing the wheel" and using pre-made off the shelf and open source components in projects.

I am definitely biased, but my own experiences have caused me to pay more attention to resumes I get that list game development experience, but not to the point of excluding others.
Nice Article. Good post, Linux can seem tricky to many people with all the flavors, options and settings, ect...

One thing to watch out for when picking a Linux flavor is compatibility with your backup system, or intended backup system. For instance to hot back up the actual operating system of the server Retrospect supports only certain packages such as Red Hat and Suse, plus a few others, many are not supported at all.
Interesting read. The part where they started to break components in the code to see if people were still using them made me raise my eyebrows a little.
Portable Contacts in Ruby
Facebook is in fact profitable.

In the AOL sense, or in the Walmart sense? I thought the latest reporting still suggested that there isn't positive return for any of Facebook's investors yet.
Why can't these projects leverage work done in the "Crossbow" project?

According to the Crossbow website(http://bit.ly/3xu47z): it can "analyze an entire genome in one day on a 10-node local cluster, or in about 3 hours for less than $100 using a 40-node, 320-core cluster rented from Amazon's EC2 utility computing service."
Chicago Y Combinator?
I guess you should also define 'laws.' Some 'laws' do things like levy taxes or tariffs. Because they are 'laws' they make it a crime to avoid then, but by themselves they are not something that seeks to make criminals.
You seem to have it out for "bloggers". That's a class distinction so worthless I'd say you should discard it; it's just people, talking, as silly a classification as "phoners". You want to talk entirely about journalism, then go pressure the rule makers to limit this to journalism. (The fact that you can't work out a definition of journalism, which you allude to, is your problem as someone who wants to regulate it, not mine. I'm underwhelmed by the need for this law even in old media.)

Meanwhile, a Facebook user who doesn't give a shit about whether you consider them a "blogger" and wouldn't know what an "A-list" was if you hit them with it, and ultimately isn't worth your derision for the mere fact that someone somewhere thinks it should be called "blogging" instead of just "talking", is going to incur liabilities for a crime they have no reason to believe is a crime. Again, this law isn't limiting itself to "journalism" anywhere that I can see. (I say "liability" because clearly the government is not going to be able to perfectly enforce this, but I consider a poorly-enforced bad law worse than a well-enforced one; a democracy has ways of dealing with the latter.)

Letting someone split your world into "bloggers" and "nonbloggers" is a terrible move. It's just people, talking. Some use the phone, some talk over the air, some post comments on Hacker News. There isn't a separate division of people called "bloggers" that are some sort of separate species that should have special restrictions placed on them. It's just a power ploy by people who want you to let them impose their power trip on just folk.
They only used a 500 student set for their model?

The metrics they arrived at aren't exactly shocking, either - students who live below the poverty line, who miss 42% of their classes, etc. It almost sounds like someone just needed an officially approved reason to concentrate efforts on these kids more than others, without it looking racially biased.
Your comment is total rubbish.

This is not JUST for beginners. It's enough stuff to get you going on real AVR kit without having to fish out for very expensive dev tools and compilers.

Arduino is not the same. It's more akin to a commerical dev board.

Experts buy expensive $2000+ programming hardware and in-circuit debuggers.

Those who do not value their time build their own.
The Python standard has some pure Python modules may be worth looking at. Doug Hellmann's Python Module of the Week, http://www.doughellmann.com/PyMOTW/contents.html, is good place to start.

I'd recommend looking at code that interests you. It will make reading the code more interesting and perhaps more useful. Here are some popular projects arrange by interest:

Web framework: Django, Pylons
TCP/IP networking: the official Bittorrent client, Mercurial, Tornado
Database: SQLAlchemy, SQLObject

Past HN submissions are generally a good place to find interesting projects too: http://searchyc.com/submissions/python?sort=by_points
I just use a shim.
I do not think my statement, and the supplied link are contrary at all. Any individual needs people of similar intellectual curiosity and capability, which is what your link entails, basically saying that you need to actively seek out those people. My case is more against a homogeneous situation, where everyone you deal with as a peer, on a day to day basis, is of a similar intellectual level.

The link does not expound on it, but it touches on a similar flaw in the school system. Curricular material should only cover the basis of education. There's plenty of debate as to what should fall into that base, but that is all it should be covering. Rather than giving an advanced student a more advanced curriculum, they should be encouraged to take part in extra curricular activities.
And the original list of security tools maintained by Fyodor: http://sectools.org/
> The law is so big that it is impossible for a single person to know all of it.

You're also forgetting case-law here too. It's possible for someone to read all of the laws on the books, but not realize what the current interpretation by the courts of those laws is (or will be).
Opera, Chrome, FF, IE, Safari on FF 3.5, Windows XP.
Here is more information about the system used to make this:

http://www.evl.uic.edu/core.php?mod=4&type=1&indi=34...
I don't think that's really a fair criticism. This isn't aimed a technical audience, and the vast majority of computer users don't even have a clue what an IDE is. I'd guess that the majority of time spent on computers today is spent in web browsers, which would to justify their statement.
The article makes a good point, but I don't think I'd call it the death of authenticity. A deceptive banner ad is just the new version of a fast-talking door-to-door salesman. It's the method of reaching consumers with the lowest barrier to entry, and that's why it is so popular with the inauthentic.

That is a good point. On top of it, it is merely a matter of choice: you can still make "authentic" ads online, but just because the internet doesn't require you to do so, you see so many inauthentic ads online.

I personally still vividly remember that Nintendo WII ad that ran on youtube about a year ago, which played a youtube video and after a few seconds the whole page started to fall apart ("shake it", see: http://mikeabundo.com/2008/09/25/shaking-wii-youtube-ad/). That is quality online advertising, and it has just as good an effect as quality TV advertising.
72 hours? Six months? How about a year?

What we need is a better process for informing people about the issues involved in legislation. But we don't run congress by referenda, and whether or not legislators "read" bills is irrelevant: they're voting based on political calculation and personal principles, and nothing is going to change that.
Is the the Xbox 360 profitable by itself, or are they still using the Mac BU to cover the losses?
Cashflow positive.

ROI for investors will have to wait for a bit I think, given the sum of money involved. Still, I found it quite surprising that they were already in the black.
Honda’s New Electric Car Includes a Robotic Unicycle
I've been toying with an idea like this (quickly and easily take notes from anywhere) and using twitter didn't even come to mind. I like your implementation and I see myself using it.

One feature I would love is a reminder system of some sort. I'm an extremely forgetful person and I could tweet notes all day long but would never remember to check time-sensitive ones. Could you add some functionality to retweet me reminders for time-sensitive notes?
e.g. I could tweet "d glu meeting @6:30pm", "d glu do so and so @tomorrow @12:00pm" or something similar that could be parsed easily and wouldn't misfire.
Metrix Create:Space opening Oct 15
There are many things CPU designers could do to improve high-level language performance. (See: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=46) However, they will do none of them. The "we shall build C/C++ machines forever" dogma continues to rule with an iron fist.

There "is no market" for high-level-language-friendly silicon, because there is no software for it, because there is no market...
Maybe there are some HN readers who are part of small teams trying to build profitable businesses from scratch and they need to figure out how to wear 10 different hats and get 100 hours of work done every 24 hours and still have time to sleep.
I don't understand where you get the notion that Arduino is not geared towards beginners.

Arduino centers around pre-built, (mostly) solderless modules, included libraries for doing almost everything complicated, and a high level development environment that abstracts away everything the libraries don't; this is hardly "intermediate level" microcontroller development.

I am in no way disparaging Arduino, by the way! I'm actually friends with one of the guys who develops it, and I'm convinced it's excellent. But "intermediate" it is not.

I'd say, if you want to establish a taxonomy of microcontroller development skill, beginner would include pretty much any pre-built kit that uses a high level language, intermediate would be people who either build their own boards or program pre-built ones in assembler, and advanced would involve discarding both pre-built boards and high level languages.

As good as, e.g., SDCC is, most microcontroller ISAs are just not designed with compilation in mind. When every instruction counts, incurring gobs of overhead to accomodate a calling convention just won't cut it.

EDIT:
By the way, I've done a lot of development with Atmel AVR, Microchip PIC, and 8051 processors, and though the more modern RISC architecture of the AVR is leaps and bounds more friendly to compilation than the PIC, I can regularly beat AVR-gcc and SDCC for code size.

EDIT 2:
I meant to comment in the above that I'm very pleased to see that the Nerd Kit doesn't try to abstract away most stuff like the Arduino kits do. "Just magically working" is fine when you want to bang something out and don't want to know how it works, but in terms of microcontroller erudition nothing beats having to bootstrap yourself.
That's an incredibly ridiculous argument. Because we might want to simplify our legal code to, say, not make it a 2-year-in-prison federal felony to misplace paperwork about orchids, with no criminal intent, we're in immanent danger of decriminalizing child labor?

Seriously?
If you are at all handy with a lockpick, you can pick the little keyway on the back of the Master combo lock in about fifteen seconds with even the most brutish of raking techniques.
I guess that is true. Most people just use their computers for emailing or web browsing. Even regular text editing is done less because people don't send as many physical letters, instead they send emails.

Still it seems a little bit of a stretch to say that the browser is the most important program on your computer. But that's my opinion obviously.
Sorry just a coincidence - I've been using this handle for eons though.
Holy crap, it's so weird to read something that articulates feelings I've had about ORM systems for years.
My biggest problem with Ballmer is that he seems defined by what he hates as opposed to what he loves.

Also, his tendency to enter markets for no other reason then to have a product in every market is painful. The Zune is a great example. What the heck did it bring to Microsoft?
I was not trying to downplay the submit, I was saying the infographic was an interesting way to display, it, one I hadn't seen before.
I don't think you're missing out on a lot, and that's coming from someone who uses both Spring and Django daily. There are a lot of Spring projects, but just to give you an example:
- Spring Security --> django.contrib.auth
- Spring MVC --> well, Django urls, models, views and templates.
- Spring Core/Beans (the dependency injection part) --> do you think you need it?

In the average JEE project, that's all you'll be using as far as Spring goes. Or maybe add Spring Integration or Spring Batch.
General Electric 2.0 -- the market may not like that
Terrorists' [presumed] goal is not to maximize body count per unit effort; it's to maximize terror (perhaps per unit effort, but it's not clear to me).

The reason to target someplace like airport security is precisely because the TSA is standing right there and everyone's been to an airport and stood in that line. If you firebomb a nightclub, many people just shrug and think "Hell, I don't go to nightclubs."

If you blow up a security line at an airport, people freak out, because nearly everyone can put themselves in that situation and therefore become fearful that you could have killed them within a dozen yards of a cadre of TSA staff and there's nothing we can do about it. Terror is the goal; killing people is merely incidental or secondary to that goal. Think about how many more billions of dollars the Western world has been "forced" to spend on security post 9-11. Think about how large a factor that is compared to the actual damage done on 9-11.

If you believe that the TSA stands ready and trained to identify and thwart such an attack, you have vastly more faith in them than I do. (Not specifically a slam against TSA, but more an observation that it's a very difficult problem.)