skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
and he should know better than to respond in kind

It's the usual response he has; we should probably be used to it by now :)

I think poor programmer was a fair comment in the end; the code does demonstrate poor programming (rather than just poor code). On the other hand "snotty kid" struck me as too far; questioning programming ability is fair enough - even being rude about it isn't nice but at least reasonably acceptable. Personal attacks is just pram and toys throwing.
Here is the accompanying Mac app: http://pomodoro.ugolandini.com/
Replacing $100K diagnostic chip fab with Shrinky-Dinks and a laser-printer
A slot machine's payout changes all the time, but it's still not worth it to feed it quarters. If it paid out the probability-weighted average of what you would expect it to pay out every time (that is, slightly less than you put in), nobody would play. Introducing randomness makes it highly attractive despite still being a terrible deal.

Like car doors and ovens, there's rarely any marginal benefit from checking Facebook fifty times a day instead of twice a day, or at least no benefit that outweighs the opportunity cost of constant checking. It's a slot machine that you play with attention instead of money, which is just as bad if you assign any reasonable financial value to your time.
Vim - starting from scratch
Yes.

http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20....
Is he prolific. Sure he is famous. But the amount of code he has written is not much if i remember right.
I showed this to my wife. She tried to sign up, and is now on a "membership waiting list". Not good.
SVSR, Inc | Integrity in Every Aspect of Our Service
SVSR Specialty Vehicles and Power Generation Solutions.When it comes to power generation systems, we understand that you want the confidence knowing that no matter what happens, your poultry farm, dairy farm, or greenhouse will be secured and properly backed-up should the power go out.
personally, I would be willing to pay for news content. However I do not want to subscribe to NY Times, and wall street journal, and Forbes, etc I read articles from all these sites on a daily basis but I would hate to have to pay $100 a month in subscription fees... i wouldn't.
Google Wave Has Hit My Shores
And, as my high school Government teacher drilled into me:

America is not a democracy, it is a Republic.
The reason they don't program is that the computer is no longer a marvellous box of wonder. It's just a tool like a screw-driver or a book.
Basically the points that Michael Crichton made back in 1994 in his article "Mediasaurus" are now coming true.
Would you say many businesses in the new-media internet sector are equally oblivious to viable and sustainable revenue models?

Seems to be a gross sense of entitlement amongst consumers if you ask me. It kills off quality content providers in favor or knee-jerk social media and mediocre content generated by algorithms to maximize SEO/SEM juju.

My point is, there are two sides to this coin and somewhere in between is a happy medium. I don't feel either side has the best solution — yet.
Dropbox, awesome product! Probably a nice future!
I hope he carries through with this threat, because only actually doing it will provide hard evidence on who loses the most on this type of action: the content producer, or the content aggregator.

I think that News Corp will be the biggest loser, and I think it would be really good if they got to learn this lesson the hard way, but I also think the people in the blogosphere banging their chests and proclaiming the final demise of Old Media are wrong, yet again.
I was addicted to news feeds so I used a filter to block myself ( Procon Latte, a firefox plugin). I am clean for more than a month now.

For increasing productivity, use pomodoro or similiar simple/simpler techniques. Its all about creating a habit.
Netflix Instant Streaming on the Sony PS3: A review
There's a port for Ruby, Rubyful Soup http://www.crummy.com/software/RubyfulSoup/

Apparently it's slower, though. I've only used the python version, which works very well if you use it with the old SGMLParser.
What is Slipstreaming? | Web Technology I/O
Teach children to draw on a canvas in javascript.

You can easily make a page with a javascript editor and immediate evaluation if you wish, and simplified api.
One thing's for sure: this plan is so crazy it's either really smart or really stupid. Only time will tell.
I can only imagine but it seems like that is what is needed. It simply can't be the future that I have to go through streams and streams of data as some slave of the machine.

Human brains have 100 million MIPS worth of processing power and with that we simulate a reality around us.

If Real Time Web has to be of any value it will need to merge with our normal perception of reality and not require our active involvement unless we request it (i.e. require more information of a current context)
I don't accept that doctors believed they washed their hands 73% of the time. I think simply lied when asked that question since, as doctors, they knew full well that they should have washed their hands.
As I understand it, people with OCD are checking to subdue an anxiety. They fear that the oven is still on and can't convince themselves otherwise - but checking it over and over helps.

Repetitive Facebook checking is supposedly more like an addiction - people are chasing the endorphin rush that comes with finding a new message (or winning at the table) rather than trying to chase away anxiety.
Been there, done that.

"The [Michigan Keystone ICU Project] targeted a specific type of infection that ICU patients can get while in the hospital – catheter-related bloodstream infections.

These infections are expensive and potentially lethal. They add approximately $18,000 to the cost of care when a patient contracts them, and cause 24,000 deaths per year.

The Keystone Project sought to change clinicians’ behaviors when inserting catheters into ICU patients. To do so, the team made a checklist, measured infection rates, and changed hospital culture. The checklist’s components consisted of hand washing; using a cap, gown, and mask; cleaning the patient’s skin with a disinfectant; avoiding placing catheters near the groin; and removing unnecessary catheters.

These five steps were associated with a 66-percent reduction in these infections throughout the state, saving over 1,500 lives and $200 million in the first 18 months alone."

Source: http://www.healthreform.gov/reports/success/michigan.html
I don't know. We have this kind of health care bill in the Netherlands and I'm paying ~70 euros per month (not sure exactly).

Edit: that also includes liability insurance etc.
Nope it isn't.

I've heard about CL, know a few things about it, and it's a failure nontheless.

Its problem isn't the unpopularity between Blub programmers; its problem is its unpopularity even between geeks. Even language geeks!
Not if you have to sign & date it every time.
This is why I don't develop for iPhone. Have no time to waste for these commies from SF.
Do you mean basing a PageRank not based on Twitter's PageRank, but on the users' popularity or influence?
UPDATE:

For those of you doing .NET, the HtmlAgilityPack looks very interesting. You can search using multiple paradigms such as XPath, XSLT, and Linq

http://www.codeplex.com/htmlagilitypack
Plowing Detroit Into Farmland
discussed article: http://www.newgeography.com/content/001171-detroit-urban-lab...

-----

edit: wonder what fraction of this land is contaminated by previous industrial activity? (per: http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/plowing-detroit-in...)
To understand Murdoch's motivations, you must realize that the man has a true love for the printed word, especially in newsprint form. The only thing that makes sense to me here is that he is intentionally sabotaging the internet to make his beloved newspapers more appealing. It's not going to work, but bless his heart for trying.
I think this just may improve the quality of news on the internet! Hopefully more independent news outlets with forward thinking mindsets can take advantage of the reduced noise and actually start to put out material that will be of a better quality. Perhaps we will start to see more journalism from around the world with different points of view? more individual journalists and blogs with relevant and accurate information for a change.

I for one hope he does go through with this!! I think its just going to end up hurting his core business more...which is a good thing really. He is just accelerating the demise of the paper/tabloid and big media as we know it.

I think a lot of people will have a different opinion, but I think this is great news.
One principle to bear in mind: give customers multiple payment opportunities, even if it's just a money-order alternative.

Sometimes for PayPal-based payment there seems to be no way to pay without first signing up for PayPal. Not always -- many times I can give PayPal a credit card and say "No thanks" to a sign-up invitation. But sometimes that option just isn't there.

There's nothing for sale that's so valuable as to make me join PayPal. Lacking alternatives (i.e., not even a damn money order), I just won't buy.

(We can discuss PayPal in some other thread, not here).
Ask HN: Tools for teaching programming remotely
I'm teaching my little brother how to program, but he lives in a different state. Any good tips on tools to make learning more effective for him? I'm thinking of screen-sharing, or collaborative editors or something. I'm on Mac, he's on Windows.
You have a good point. Would "totalitarian state" be better?
I hope he includes MySpace.
For me it was exactly the opposite. I started learning programming at 13 reading the zx spectrum manual chapter after chapter until I came to sin and cos which I did not know. My parents hadn't studied, so they could not tell me. Instead of just skipping that chapter, I gave up programming. Much later I studied economics. Working as an economist I discovered the fun of programming with visual basic, and then decided to become a programmer.

If in 1983 I could have googled sin and cos or read about it in wikipedia, I would have wasted much less time.
A Slow Job Recovery in Silicon Valley
An important Linux fix
For me, it's not a questing of what startups I'd invest in. I run across a lot of people at the hackers and founders meetups that I host, and it's fairly often that I come across someone that I'd love to bet on. The question of what particular company they are working on at present is rather immaterial.
There are so many more options than when he was writing BASIC programs on a ZX Spectrum. Choose something straightforward and stick with it. Python is about as simple as it gets. PLT Scheme is also a great option, it has a fully self-contained environment that includes much better graphics options than BASIC did, and is well-documented. There are lots of others - this post has some good discussion on a similar topic: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/950619/summer-holiday-pro...
I don't know enough about spam on twitter, but can't most spam be recognized by how many people are being followed and how many followers they have? But as I said I don't know enough about it
The guy is definitely smart, but I think his hubris here is almost embarrassing. Don't want to wish bad on anyone, and I hope he gets what he wants, but I suspect he's not "getting it" here.
Underscore.js Grows OOP-Syntax Sugar (Have Your Cake and Eat it Too)
This morning, Underscore.js went to version 0.4.2. As a brief reintroduction, Underscore is a library of functional helper methods that fits in neatly alongside jQuery. It now has an option to use OO-style syntax, as well as sequences of chained operations on collections. Here's an example of chaining in action:

var lyrics = [
{line : 1, words : "I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay"},
{line : 2, words : "I sleep all night and I work all day"},
{line : 3, words : "He's a lumberjack and he's okay"},
{line : 4, words : "He sleeps all night and he works all day"}
];

_(lyrics).chain()
.map(function(line) { return line.words.split(' '); })
.flatten()
.reduce({}, function(counts, word) {
counts[word] = (counts[word] || 0) + 1;
return counts;
}).value();

=> {lumberjack : 2, all : 4, night : 2 ... }

The library has benefitted immensely from the opinions gathered on Hacker News from an earlier posting, and I wanted to see what y'all think of this addition.

The Array prototype methods are proxied through the chained object, so you can slip in a "reverse" or a "concat" without breaking your chain.

Finally, some speed comparisons with jQuery have been added to the bottom of the testing and benchmark page. Because Underscore proxies to the browser-native implementation, doing an "each()" on a thousand-element array is over 5 times faster than the jQuery equivalent in Safari, and over 3.5 times faster in Firefox. Your mileage may vary, so you can use that page to run your own tests in your favorite browser.
Gdb is a platform
Their pricing seems far too high, though.
This kind of company has to shell out a lot of money as they scale up, which means they may not be able to meet initial demand. It's a good problem to have.
Clickable Links

Underscore.js: http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore

Speed Tests:
http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/test/test.html

Development Code: http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/underscore.js

Minified Code (2k gzipped, fits on a screen): http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/underscore-min.js
Am I missing something or is this study about hand washing before patient contact, not hand washing after using the toilet? I realize this isn't the main point, but to me it suggests that the author didn't actually bother to read the study they're citing. I wonder what percent of the time the author would estimate they read the studies they cite...
At least you can do something useful with a house, even when its value drops 50%. The 17th century Dutch imploded their economy with tulips.
Yeah, but they knew that their offer provider has chosen scammy offers before.
Are you serious?

This man runs his news(!) organizations to spread his personal ideologies as opposed to actually providing news. The only thing he really cares about is maximizing profit (nothing wrong with that), to say that his action was a result of his love for printed media is pretty silly, really.
No it wouldn't if it were true for, let's say, 9 physicists out of 10. But then such a statement would probably be true for all of mankind.

Human beings can't surf.
Yes, I'm serious. Thanks for asking. And no, Murdoch is widely misunderstood. Profit comes first, not his political ideologies. He basically supported Barack Obama in the 2008 election. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8220054890220213491 is interesting.
It's his funeral.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Applied to Software Development
In reality, I'd wager there's a _lot lot_ more kids programming today than 30 years ago. How many people had a computing device at home back then?

This anecdote makes the point that a very specific kind of thinking was better suited by the tools of the late 70s, and maybe - I've never been much inclined towards it, so I dunno.

And what we consider 'programming' is blurrier than it used to be. Is HTML programming? What if you use a fancy editor like dreamweaver? Only when it becomes dynamic? Does CSS count? A lot of youngsters, when they aren't getting off my lawn, have done web stuff, and the fact that it's a gradual shift from being a user to being a programmer probably makes it even easier.

I find the whole premise of this blog post flawed. (Great Scott! Someone disagrees with someone else on the Internet!)
Unless he's trying to gauge what his advertisers will do after saying such a thing in public.
>personally, I would be willing to pay for news content.

That makes you an exceptional case. Most North Americans haven't paid for news content in well over a century. Since the advent of advertising-based newspapers, we've paid for distribution, but not the content itself.
This is probably the reason, but if he can throw a thought out there just to see what the response is without actually knowing he's going to follow through, why wouldn't the advertisers do the same thing?
Zynga explains why offer quality control is lacking
The Technology Behind the [Madoff] Scam
I dont like Arrington much myself; especially after the Last.fm debacle.

On the other hand had the last.fm story been true the fall out could have been as "big" as this.

In that case he made a serious and unacceptable mistake in reporting very dodgy "information received". But he reported it for the right reasons and deserves some respect for that (IMO).
dito, it's really his funeral, I guess they won't really do it, he obviously doesn't know what he's talking about, he'll find it out soon enought to change his mind.
Never underestimate the power of wishful thinking ... for shooting oneself in the foot with a bazooka.
I for one am still not convinced about the explanation Pincus gave for how the ads came back for everyone other than Mikey boy.
Seems to be a gross sense of entitlement amongst consumers if you ask me. It kills off quality content providers in favor or knee-jerk social media and mediocre content generated by algorithms to maximize SEO/SEM juju.

The situation you describe is what is generally known as "supply and demand". If low-quality content is all that many people actually want, the supply is nearly inexhaustible and so the value of content does exactly what you'd expect. There doubtless remains a smaller market for higher-quality content who can be convinced to pay for it, but that's not the mainstream and probably never will be--and while outfits like the WSJ and NYT may be the best of the old mainstream stuff, they're still on the wrong side of the shifting market.

Most of the traditional media is in the unenviable situation of being neither sufficiently high-quality to reach people who will pay, nor sufficiently cheap to reach the new mass market. The only sense of entitlement going on is the media companies bellyaching that the market has moved and left them behind.

Murdoch is a hack and doesn't have the cojones to provide real quality, but at his age he'll probably be dead before his mistakes fully catch up with News Corp. In the meantime, if quality is what you're after, have you considered buying a subscription to The Economist?
Air App - http://www.focusboosterapp.com/
http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/Encoder_Overvie...

Expression Encoder.

Free for BizSpark and DreamSpark users.
And I disagree with you here. Writing declarative HTML and writing a simple interactive computer game are two activities that could not be more different.

Like it or not, the act of programming has become much more difficult than it once was. 1988 I could reboot my Apple IIgs, hold down a couple of keys, and I could start writing a BASIC program immediately.
I had c-64 and one of the most frustrating memories from my childhood was that I couldn't get it to draw anything in a graphic mode. In manual the code to initiate graphic mode had error in it, or the manual was for different version of the computer, I still don't know.

Anyway - 8-bit computers were superb "teach-yourself-programming" machines, but I think novadays kids have internet access, so they will manage :)

PS. I would choose python + pygame to teach a kid graphic programming. It is simple, interpretted and has interactive console.
I would love to see a StackOverflow for controversial media topics, especially focused on environmental issues. e.g.

"What is the evidence for global warming?"

"What are the benefits and costs of recycling? Is it actually better for the environment?"

These are difficult questions with complex science behind them, and I think many people feel lost in coming up with legitimate answers.
Consider the Product
Does anyone know of a good tool like this for iPhone?
I highly reccomend PyQuery. It's basically the jQuery API on top of lxml.
Okay, that makes a lot more sense.

The author's conclusion, supported by the statement's context, is that viewers referred by search engines will get a paragraph and a subscription nag. It's certainly more reasonable than removing his sites from search indexes entirely.
The Home Page needs to be simplified. Try using less text and the ones that actually say what your site about like "A simple free site to generate maths worksheets". You can ask users to spread the word post worksheet generation. (Thats just a suggestion that might help making the home page less text heavy, but if its been working well for you, keep it)

Great idea and am sure lot of people out there will find it useful. All the best
Bend Windows 7 to your will
Well, I got one Saturday, and tried his techmeme test, and it works fine on my droid. ESPN works fine, other sites work fine.

I appreciate his input, but to call it a failure is really begging the headline.

Now I don't have an iPhone, so I can't compare, but the screen is astonishing, and the verizion service has always been better, so I think it is a great product.
I don't think the guy on the street buying a news paper thinks to himself "good thing I had a dollar to pay someone for distributing all this free news content to me", but rather "good thing I had a dollar to buy a news paper".

The economics behind the scenes may very well be that his dollar pays only for printing and distribution, but that's not what people think they're paying for.
So far, looks pretty good. Yesterday was heavy with browsing and used about half the battery, so I would say that it is as advertised.
I think you're absolutely right, and it would be interesting (though impossible) to see this same thing happen with piracy and music industry. If there were a way to stop piracy and see how much the music industry sales dropped (assuming that they would), I wonder if they would get the picture.
Having more options means you have to figure out what choose. That doesn't make it easier, that makes it's harder.

It's also important that there be a lot of reference materials which would be easy for a kid to teach him/herself with.

For example: http://www.scribd.com/doc/200861/A-Touch-of-Applesoft-BASIC-...

This was the book I read when I was 10 years old. It was also easy to find BASIC code at the school library and in computer magazines.

How many current general computer magazines still publish useful bits of code ("How to access your mouse from Apple Basic", etc) ?
I can believe that ESR was responsible for many cores on Linux.
And in 1995, I could write interactive (quasi) graphical games on my TI-81. Without rebooting. At the time, a TI-81 was pretty fancy, but I've seen plenty that leads me to believe that nearly every kid today has a TI-83 for their math class. It's not quite basic, but it's certainly programming, and it's just as easy and accessible as an Apple used to be.
This tool could be helpful if you are on OS X:
http://visitsteve.com/work/selfcontrol/

Page also contains links to other useful apps. I really like Spirited Away.

After rereading the post, maybe not applicable if the sites are crucial to get work done.
Under which lisp implementation do those forms work?

The definitions for CAR and CDR are identical and they don't make much sense (set the symbol 'car to the value of a function that takes angument xs, which is a function, and applies that to the symbol 'car)

And the definition for CONS is equally opaque.

How would you use those functions, CONS, CAR and CDR?

Since you pretty much nailed the uses of church numerals, monads and the y-combinator, I know you know what you're talking about, it just that Lisp's semantics is confusing me (it has common lisp keyword SETQ but none of its behavior)
Unless you count ads on TV, I suppose.
I somehow doubt even if one of Murdoch's papers went down he'd feel the pinch at all.
"viable and sustainable revenue models"

I don't know, but some blogs (like TechCrunch) seem to be doing fine. Maybe the big news outlets just need to find a way to operate more economical, so that they can survive off online ads?
Whoever upvoted this please reveal yourself ;)