skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Douglas Adams 1999 on 'The Internet'

Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.

http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.html
In another article about the same report.

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/health_science/daily/20091028...

"In the last decade, U.S. colleges graduated three times more scientists and engineers than the number of jobs available, the researchers said. The data went through 2005 and did not reflect the recession."

It sounds like this research was "Hey department of education how many science or engineering graduates are there in the US every year?" and "Hey bls.gov how many openings are there that match engineer or scientist for entry level positions each year?" Now divide and we are done. Conclusion, there are way to many people with science and engineering degrees.

This is drawing conclusions about the labor market with a data set that includes a wide range of degrees many of which are only prerequisites for graduate degrees in other fields.
How GeoCities Invented the Internet
Building up thunks carries some overhead. In languages without TCO, virtual machines are usually written with e.g. a big switch statement with everything in one big function just because any overhead there will impact every single operation that runs on the system. Not every VM needs to be fast, of course, but it's a common requirement for production versions.
probably not a good idea to comment authoritatively on a company you haven't worked with, but no, kernel management is part of rackspace's job. performance and monitoring is part of their job. they have an SLA and this is absolutely part of it...
Actually, when Reddit first added comments, I read many meta-comments about grammar/punctuation/spelling. I remember being surprised by how much people cared considering they were comments on a website.
UK to get tough on file-sharers
Be interesting to segment off the "bell curve" of IQ into the small lower and higher segments, and the large middle segment, and then be able to find the amount spent per student.

My guess would be that spending on getting the lower-IQ into "middle" performance would be far higher than what is spent on helping the higher-IQ advance even further.
Hmmm, there are several very significant differences between the two situations though:

- open hardware was critical to the success of the PC platform, allowing functionality such as ethernet, better video, changing disk drive configurations etc. In the mobile phone world, the hardware is locked down for all players.

- computer interface devices (screens, keyboards, mice, touchpads) have all been designed to optimise for ease of use. In the case of mobile phones, the interface devices have been optimised for small size. Concretely this means that both input and output are difficult - writing useable software that runs on two screens with different aspect ratios is a momentous task on a mobile phone, having to allow for the existance or not of a physical keyboard or multitouch screen, same thing. What this means is that a diffuse hardware platform, such as Android is offering, is going to be very difficult to develop high quality apps on. Unless hardware manufacturers can agree on a common platform, this problem is only going to increase. Of course, such a common hardware platform doesn't seem terribly likely to me, as the example of the PC industry shows that this approach quickly reduces manufacturers to commodity providers, with razor thin margins. I suspect that the Samsungs and Motarolas of the world are in no hurry to go there..

- Apple never had the dominance in the computer market that they currently have in the smartphone market - they never got over about 14% of the market with the Mac (although if it continues it's current trajectory, we may see this level beaten in the not too distant future). In the smartphone market however, they are well above this level of marketshare already, and still rising. If you add in iPod Touch sales, the platform is massacring everybody out there.

- At the time when Apple lost market share, home computers were only a small part of the market compared to office computers. Purchasing departments have a strong preference for cheap over quality, provided that a minimum level has been achieved. Consumers are far more discerning. In the mobile world, personal sales are more important than business sales, or to say it another way, you are more likely to have a personal mobile phone than a work phone. All of this acts to reduce one avenue of attack on the iPhone platform - you probably aren't going to be able to win just by doing things cheaper - you're going to have to do things better too.

- phones are far more mission-critical than PCs. If your computer breaks/starts functioning weirdly, you aren't too badly affected. If your phone goes down these days, it's a disaster. There is going to be a premium on reliability, and it remains to be seen as to whether the Android platform can deliver that reliability when there are numerous hardware manufacturers, and a large uncontrolled application base.

There are other differences, but I think these are the important ones. Globally I find these differences big enough that I'm dubious as to the validity of using the PC experience as a guide to the future of the smartphone market.
Honestly your tone stings a bit, jacquesm. I guess i shouldn't have titled it 'don't trust rackspace' but my larger point is exactly the opposite of what you wrote - take responsibility for your servers - don't trust anyone, even the most expensive hosting provider, to do it for you.
Companies do value SEO, though often for the wrong reasons.

There is a combination of SEO companies selling vague and expensive services, plus promising unrealistic results. On top of that, many small businesses think they can buy their way to the top of Google and get significantly increased sales through "SEO".

The vast majority of SEO boils down to creating good content and making your webpages compliant and robot-readable.
Well, if it's google I think the answer will likely be 'inaccessible'.
خطر لقاح انفلونزا الخنازير h1n1
It all comes down to what I paid for. Check your contracts carefully.

Some places basically just give you a computer and make sure that it always has power and network and that the hard drive is backed up, and everything after that is up to you. Other places give you 24 hour sys-admins that continuously monitor everything and basically manage every aspect of your server. The former obviously costs a lot less than the latter.

It's perfectly OK to outsource responsibility, but you've got to pay top dollar for someone to take on that responsibility. You cannot go for the cheap option and expect all the services offered by the expensive option.
Is it really that hard to tell whether or not a call is in a tail position? It's like type inference - it has a major impact on what kind of code is idiomatic, and if you know the language, you'll need to understand it. Still, TCO is a lot less complicated than pointers or all of the conceptual baggage necessary to design OO class hierarchies well.
JavaScript Best Practices by Christian Heilman
Yes, it's called BPM (Business Process Management) and Workflow Engines. There are some open source ones as well.
I thought that I'd let you know, I got so addicted to Reddit once that I had to block it in order to get my life back. Good luck with your new ventures! You've done some awesome stuff.
40 Creative Design Layouts 
That’s not a big surprise as they serve the function that faceless, shiny, glassy 3D-buttons completely fail to deliver: individuality and personality.
It's funny how our standards change. I've seen a lot of internal-to-the-organization hosting providers be down for days and not seem to care much.

It's good that we demand more, but in retrospect the service we have today is pretty good and much better than it was in the past.
Wait, your friend called to give you a heads up and you thank twitter for it?
MI5 comes out against cutting off Internet pirates
When Am I Dead?
Things just really don't work on human time/relationship scales anymore, especially when it comes to internet services. Communications can move in milliseconds now, diagnosing and fixing complex issues is still on the order of hours/years/lifetimes!

It doesn't help that your customers often know about issues you are having before you do. So say ~30min to get notified of an issue (Which is not unrealistic for a non obvious issue that isn't something you actively monitor) - Quick 10min investigation to assess what the scale of the issue is, another 3-5min to post a couple notifications, and that is the better part of a hour gone, and you haven't even got around to trying to come up with a fix.
14 million ways to skin a cat - web programming
My wife loves that movie something fierce hence the name.
Does anybody know how this compares to Allegro Graph (in price and/or performance)?
Online Coupons | Online Discounts & Deals | eShoppingDiscounts.com
Zombie killing on the iPhone!? I bought a copy.
Maybe not in 5, but in 15 years, there may very well be no Web.
I'm a neewbie to computing, old[63], on minimum wage , and not tech-savvy at all. However I've managed to install Mint Linux on 2 elderly pc's and Ubuntu on an early Asus eee. All can be downloaded for free quite quickly and easily. An installation disc for Mint costs £3.99 in the UK. After XP Linux is a joy to use, go on, have a go.
Finding people that are interested in your topic, right now. There is certainly a value for that -- especially if you want to sell something.
Did you do a clean install (via "Erase")? [Just checking.]
Summary: rankings are zero-sum games.
I think the real question is who is someone to suggest that X is more "worthy" than Y? Without the benefit of hindsight and ability to see all the possibilities with and without X and Y there is no evidence behind the statement.
There is always some way to monetize web content. We just didn't find yet how to. It is the same situation of search in 1998. No one knew how to monetize it correctly. An Adwords algorithm later and we have a multi-billion dollar company.
Common Lisp does this with labels, so it is not anything new in Clojure.
Past a certain point, numbers don't matter. People stopped caring how many videos are on YouTube a while back.
I thought this a while ago with Basecamp. Although I'm sure they use it internally to manage their own projects, since they don't do client work anymore they're not using it for its primary use case, which is collaborating with clients.

It's not as huge a gap as with Haystack, to be sure, but anyone who's tried to get non-webhead clients to grok/use Basecamp will know what a struggle it can sometimes be. People have been asking for years for the app to have more help/guidance that's geared towards client end-users, rather than the agency account owner.

As for Haystack, I sort of see it as a (reverse) extension of their job boards, which seems to have been pretty successful for them despite not being something they themselves use very often.
Janino: an Embedded Java Compiler
Well the Pakistanis certainly weren't complaining. They were expecting to be greeted by armed policemen scrutinizing their every move (or atleast that's how one of them put it in an interview to a newspaper).
this seems a specious argument. bernie madoff made a lot of money, too. does that mean what he did wasn't illegal?
In-browser mini IDE and Programming Language
SMB Internet phone systems become cybercriminals' tool
Use credit unions for your everyday checking and savings. I got tired of being treated like a rounding error at my local corporate bank and opened a checking account with a credit union. Some benefits:

- $1000 overdraft loan

- No $30 charges for overdrawing $0.25

- Interest earning checking account

- Automatic foreign ATM fee reimbursement up to $30/month

- personal service

- ability to vote out directors

Not saying that an error like the one in this article won't happen at your credit union, but I doubt they would let you leave the building without resolving the issue.

I can't say enough about what the credit union has done for my financial health.
I have a laptop harddrive that is about 5 years old. I backup to a USB drive every other day. It is inevitable that this drive will fail at some point. When is the optimal time to buy a replacement drive? I have always assumed that I should just get one when my current one fails, but this could come at an bad time (when I'm travelling etc.) Is it ever better to just buy a new HD when I have a chance to mess with doing reinstall?
see:
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/UrbanInst2.txt

http://www.urban.org/publications/411562.html

I've not verified or looked into the issue beyond requesting the ucdavis document.
Google are not beyond reproach. If a Google service drops the ball and people have an alternative they'll move on.
And, amazingly, you managed to get through this whole list without mentioning igrep-find, which is what I've been using:

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/igrep.el

A lot of people have attacked the grep problem in emacs.
Requires Silverlight 3, eh?

How does it compare to: http://research.sun.com/projects/lively/
Want 50Mbps Internet in your town? Threaten to roll out your own
I'll vote +1 up for the .tmproj support. It would be the next step up from the awesomeness then :)
Ask HN: How to Analyze Coder Contribution
How can I analyze the contribution a team member has made to our code bases?

Some of the work is open source, some not.

Is there a way to get a general feel for how active a person is and how well the contributions aged. E.g. were the contributions in an active area of the code base and stood the test of time?
We use Basecamp constantly. We have about 25 active projects running at any one time. We also use Backpack, Highrise, and Campfire all day and every day.
Bioidentical estosterone replacement | low estrogen doctors
Bioidentical hormones are again shown be superior to synthetic hormones, and this is continuing proof that bioidentical hormones are not associated with breast cancer while synthetic versions significantly increase the risk of breast cancer. Unequal risks for breast cancer associated with different hormone replacement therapies: results from the E3N cohort study.
It's trying to do something totally different from what I can tell. It uses a limited form of interaction that works well with the web instead of trying to replicate the desktop on the web. It's also much more responsive. The dependency on Silverlight is somewhat disappointing, but this is really cool.
If Chinese starts to dominate, I'd expect to see great strides in automated translation research here in America. Us Americans are freaked out by the prospect of a world that doesn't speak English.
I'm in SB and would love to meet up. Email: alchemistae-at-gmail
I always installed AboutTime sntp client on any Windows box. Even XP. http://www.arachnoid.com/abouttime/
WWII had some real interesting research into using animals as weapons. The "Bat bomb" (thermite + timers + bats) was far cheaper than the nuke but about as effective as a physical weapon vs a city. However, it would have been less effective as a psychological weapon and would not have killed as many people. The other notable use was using a homing pigeon to guide bombs. They would peck where the ship was.
Looks like javascript...smells like javascript - only without the cool stuff that javascript does. I guess the in-browser thing is kind of neat?
I'm not sure why the homepage is search-enginey and I'm not sure why so many of the examples give syntax errors, but this is a very cool thing, or rather it has the potential to be very cool. I love the idea of generating simple GUIs for web apps from code. I also love the idea of being able to develop and use programs from within the browser. I would like to see this broken free from Silverlight (there's no reason it can't all be Javascript on the front end) and cleaned up some, but ultimately this is really freaking cool.
The Death of the Teapot Effect
Post-WWII has trained dolphins, which're still used so far as I know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_dolphin
It's all about the money. Why would someone intelligent want to work as an engineer when they can make way more in finance or law?
Other post saying they will improve their process.

http://www.linode.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4768&start=...
I was under the impression that ours was one of the weakest of the mammals...
this compilation of video links uses real player (.rm) and .wmv and every godforsaken format there is. If you are on windows, you can convert them using winx which is free this oktober. http://www.winxdvd.com/specialoffer/sep0902.htm
or you can use ffmpeg (linux/mac).
Peace.facebook.com -- slacktivism: feelgood vacuous "activism"
I sent this over to a friend who was an Applied Mathematics major in college, but then realized that most of these aren't for real hardcore math geeks who could probably already teach at an undergraduate level.

However, I'm horrible at math, so many of them are a great review for me. Its just not as hardcore geeky as I'd hope.
Apple Tablet Will Restore Comic Books To Former Glory
Their beosfrance link doesn't seem to be working, so here's a mirror: http://remi.grumeau.free.fr/BeOS//Qt4HaikuDemoPack_a1.zip
FuseBox - Web Application Framework
Ask not what contribution people have made to the code - ask what problems they solved thereby.

The person who makes the largest contribution is often not the person who writes the most code: In the extreme case, it can be a person who figured out how to increase functionality by removing code.
Greater noida yamuna expressway, yamuna expressway plots
Yamuna Expressway Industrial Development Authority introduced Residential plots to be developed along the Noida-to-Agra Yamuna Expressway with many diversified projects under construction. It is also in close Proximity to Eastern Peripheral Expressway
> Gray explains the different results as arising from different levels of complicity.

Or as Upton Sinclair famously put it, it is difficult to get a man to understand something if his paycheck depends on his not understanding it.
Jquery Basics Series 
Hi Friends, if you really want to learn jQuery follow basic series on 9lessons. Jquery is an awesome javascipt library, it’s help you for developing dazing web projects.

In this tutorial I want to discuss very basic level jquery and working with Click() event.
This statements makes no sense to me either.

I'm not going to learn chinese; you neither, for most values of you. So we'd still have our web for a small group of maybe one billion english-speaking (FSVO) users. Maybe there would be more content in Chinese, but we will never know because we won't bother to read it unless they translate, to ENGLISH.
I think the jury's out on Google wave.
My ISP Internode always says when they expect the next status update to be. Usually there's a deadline of 2-3 hours between updates and recently there was a period of 72 hours with several cascading issues ( http://advisories.internode.on.net/item/6611/ ). There were status updates all the way through and staff communicating with users out-of-band to discover the extent of the issues so they could resolve them.
I'd prefer a goto function or call with no return statement, personally.
"Five years is a factor of ten in Moore's Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today."

Remember PCs five years ago?

Exactly, not much changed except for multicore, and it's still underused. I'd not expect an average PC in five years to be anything unusual.

Mobile devices, on other hand, have a lot of way to grow. Maybe we'd see phones with HD screens and 1GB RAM in five years, and those would run whatever you'd wish.
As for financial sector, so much money is floating around these guys that they can earn exorbitant wages almost effortlessly without having any skill at all.

Fail.

I've been through the interview process at a couple of such places, and you don't get in without having some skill.

In fact, I'd say the typical financial job is more technical than the typical engineering job. A large number of engineering jobs consist of little more than the electrical/mechanical/chemical equivalent of CRUD programming, but not very many finance jobs fall into that category [1].

[1] The financial industry requires many CRUD-type jobs to be done just like any other industry, but those are usually outsourced.
Messenger's Error(s): Chris Wilson's flawed rant about Drupal and whitehouse.gov
From the TM FAQ:

Q: Will TM2 be a free upgrade?

Yes. Except for users who got TM1 as part of the MacHeist package. The MacHeist TM1 license will require an upgrade fee in order to upgrade to TM2.

When I read this, years ago, I saw it as a sign that the author of TM might not stay in business for very long. I can't imagine a paid TM user who would balk at a $39 upgrade, let alone a $29 or $19 upgrade -- we're talking about the kind of software that you use for 8 hours per day -- and yet the guy has left that money on the table. In advance. (Once you've announced a free product, you'll have a hell of a time charging money for it later.) I can't help but wonder whether the endlessly delayed TM2 ship date results from the author's having surgically removed all of his own incentives.

(Actually, it's odder than that: Even if TM2 doesn't collect upgrade dollars, its release would drive the marketing of new licenses, so delaying it is costing the author money no matter what. Perhaps money doesn't matter to the author. In which case the project is even more likely to be doomed.)

If you're going to be in the paid, closed-source development tools business, be in the paid, closed-source development tools business. The business is "we give you money to work on the software, and the software gets better." It is not "we don't give you money and the software sits frozen in time." That niche is already thoroughly occupied by emacs and vi. ;) [1]

---

[1] Though, joking aside, the universe of emacs tools has been steadily improving, especially now that TM has helped to increase its userbase by teaching people the power of a decent text editor. (vi may be improving too, but I wouldn't know, since I don't really use it.)
Very interesting. The really smart part was the bit about ranking real-time content.

If anyone here is working on a real-time tweet-ranking algorithm, good luck. Google's going to be there too.

It would be very useful if search.twitter.com had a mode which returns tweets ranked not just by posting time, but also by the quality of the tweeter, and the quality of the specific tweet (may be gathered from RTs, etc).