skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The new SkyWalker is a men's Barbie. It's not tougher, it's just more sexually attractive to the oppossite sex, and a physical model for boys.

That's how I see it, at least.
I think it's a "Read like math" not a "Read like prose" situation. The best learning mantra is "See one, Do one, Teach one" and I think they've conflated the first two parts of that. They give you the information, but force you to work through it to achieve understanding.

Beyond that attempt at helping you to find the right attitude with which to approach the book, I no further advice.

I'd be interested in hearing why you're catching up on electronics of this type. Maybe we really should have a London meetup.
Well,

It could also be a demonstration of the limitations. The question with Wave is: will it live up to the hype and replace a wide swath of other communications protocols or will it just be one more protocol? Everything I'm hearing makes it seem like it will be the latter, which is fine, especially if you like D & D.
There's Something About Redis
Microsoft's Multitouch Mouse Prototypes
When I act as a hiring manager, I take a slightly different tract from this essay. Professionalism (by which he seems to actually mean craftsmanship) and "getting things done" are certainly important, but they are neither enough nor necessarily the most important things.

If it is a large project where the new developer will have to work on a team, than being able to work with and coordinate with that team are almost more important than just being able churn out the code. After all, if he writes beautiful code that no one else can interface with than it is of little value.

Also, in technology a willingness and ability to learn are vital in a long term employee. The technology will continue to change, if the new employee is not willing and able to change with it than they will not remain valuable for the long haul, and with the difficulty of firing people in large organizations that can be a major problem.

Craftsmanship and an ability to "get things done" should certainly be criteria and high on the list, but they should not be the only ones in most cases.
23 could be a bona fide mid-life crisis in the 17th century :)
There's a lot of research available now in education that says that positive reinforcement works, but not when it's talking about intelligence.

For example, students are much better off when you say, "you worked so hard on that project, it really shows that you cared about what you were doing" as opposed to "your project was great, you are so smart".

Children understand the difference between hard work and smarts (where smarts are natural ability and hard work is a virtue).

Later in life those students that were positively reinforced for working hard are better off than those that were simply told they were smart. Which is a nice reference to what it takes to be a startup founder (smarts are great, but only when paired with strong work ethic. However a strong work ethic and tenacity could overcome a natural gap in ability).
This kid's real problem is [insert projection here].
Zuckerberg Makes Video To Prove An Employee Actually Works At Facebook
"Joel is giving his software to these students for free"

The last thing Joel needs is students getting used to and/or turning software like Trac or Bugzilla into direct competitors. Having noticed this, its pretty obvious why Joel would give away FogBugz.
I think his advice is: find facts. You can't make decisions without facts - at least, not well-informed ones. Facts about the world and facts about you. Facts that aren't written anywhere. Things you can only learn by experiencing them. Know thyself.
WW2 "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" declassified [pdf]
Some highlights:

"Anyone can break up a showing of an enemy propaganda film by putting two or three dozen large moths in a paper bag. Take the bag to the movies with you, put it on the floor in an empty section of the theater as you go in and leave it open. The mothts will fly out and climb into the projector beam, so that the film will be obscured by fluttering shadows"

"When possible, refer all matters to committees, for further study and consideration. Attempt to make the committees as large as large as possible - never less than five"

"Cry and sob hysterically at every occasion, especially when confronted by government clerks"
a human with a servere case of the farts...
I've had the pleasure of meeting Paul a couple of times -- he gave a presentation to our local Linux User group and attended a few meetings. He's a very interesting guy, here is his main page: http://www.arachnoid.com/index.html check out his yearly boat trips to Alaska, and his Java based HTML editor.

Also note that the article is very old :)
Yes, sorry; I thought it was a standard abbreviation. Or maybe I've looked at too many rental ads. Perhaps there's a better one?

I guess "per month", "/month" and "monthly" all work well, though I'd like a shorter one. Maybe "pm" or "/m". Or perhaps convert it to years, and use "pa". I'm fussing over this a bit, but I agree with pg that in some cases, conciseness helps readability.
Yes but I remember when computers weighed 16 tons.. today people stick a better one than that in their ear....
I'm not an expert in these things, and appreciate the opportunity to learn more.

It seems to me that a transactional database necessarily requires all sorts of locking and waits to ensure that everyone using the database sees the same, bang-up-to-date version of the data. This is probably essential in some applications.

The point of CouchDB seems to be that sometimes the system doesn't need the most up-to-date version of the data, and that data that's not-very-old will do, especially if it was valid at the start of the process. CouchDB then has a different set of invariants, a different collection of guarantees.

CouchDB seems to work on the idea that changes will propogate, and that the system will settle, and that processes will never get inconsistent data, although the data might sometimes be old/stale. These guarantees might then suffice, especially in places where locking and the delays/bottlenecks threatened by locaking would be unacceptable.

Is that a reasonable summary?
Despite the surface appearance that the gender divide in the workforce has narrowed, it's actually amazing how deep it really is. Men still dominate the "making things" segment of the workforce - manufacturing, engineering, construction, agriculture, transportation. Women are still concentrated in education, healthcare, human resources, administrative, and non-profits. Part of the reason for women doing so well in the work force is the continued growth of government and psuedo-government bureaucracy that generates more education/healthcare/administrative jobs.

In the 19th century, the model for wealthy families was that the man would be the bread winner, and the woman would live off the man's support and would work in charity or the arts or reform movements. Now the pattern of work is the exact same at the 19th century. The difference is rather than marrying a man for the income, women vote to tax the income away, and then women get jobs in non-profits or government agencies. Then, to add insult to injury, you get articles like this claiming that men need to get with the program. Would society benefit if the machinist or truck driver who drops out of high school, instead continues his education and becomes a civil service paper pusher? I don't think so, in fact, it is the reverse.

(Note, these two paragraphs are observing very general, aggregate trends, obviously there are a gazillion exceptions on the individual level)
I thought they were leaving due to it being the end of their vesting period
"URL Shorteners are evil"

That's why I always use http://www.hugeurl.com/
Sure: pg@ycombinator.com
Similar Image Search: GazoPa ,SAPIR ,TinEye
The Human Body Is Built for Distance
Examples of minimum viable products
You could just as easily connect a 42" screen to the laptop, as I sometimes do. My laptop has an HDMI out
The disaster of that plan is you may very well figure it out 3 months in, and then have a multi-year effectively prison sentence to serve out.

I have deep respect for those who do serve. I just don't think that recommending it as some kind of default "until you figure it out" is remotely a good idea.
Khosla on Failure: Take More Risk
You're contrasting Ruby as an upstart and Java as an established language, but they're basically the same age. They both had their first public releases in 1995.

(Of course, this doesn't invalidate your point about relative popularity.)
Well said. I've stated before that in the end, life is a series of aesthetic choices.
Well , based on research articles I've read , mosquitoes are attracted to more stressed people or more precisely to the chemicals that the stressed person produces. Living a calm life in the outdoors will definitely reduce the stress levels, so I guess it just takes some time to become invisible to mosquitos.
It's not a new development, either. The action figures for He-Man looked just like the updated Luke, if not more exaggerated, and they came out around the time of the old Luke.

("He-Man"... There's a subtle product name. I bet it won only narrowly over "Male Role Model Plastic Toy Adventure Hour".)
For some background on this:

http://searchyc.com/extradition
You could just as easily connect a 42" screen to the laptop, as I sometimes do using my laptop's HDMI out. It will still end up using less power than the Mac Mini.
At the Startup Bootcamp, I thought he was alluding to this.
What they should have said was, "Press down the key marked CTRL. While holding it down, press the B key. Now release these keys and press the key marked RETURN."

I understand the "where's the 'any key'?" argument, but we shouldn't all be designing for recluse luddites.
Your Friend is now dead.
In other words, if a baker keeps baking better-tasting bread, and a piano maker keeps making better-sounding pianos, the economy will grow.

This is true, but only to a point. Market saturation also plays a role, plus the theoretical and practical limits to quality in both of those cases. Costs do not scale linearly with quality increases. There is a limit to the quality differences people can differentiate, so at some point people will stop paying for better bread and pianos because a) they better versions are too expensive, and/or b) they can't tell the difference between that and what they already have.

How many people do you know who wish they had a piano but they can't find one that's of high enough quality?
Excellently cool. Nice find. When was this declassified?
Invent with Python 2nd edition
I used Mailman for the discussion group for beta testers of my app, and people were always confused about how it works or why they were suddenly getting emails from other people. But once I switched to Google Groups, people get it and participate a lot more.
True in a way, although much of those things follow naturally from creating wealth (i.e. creating value in the world), so much so that if we focus on that, the rest of it works out pretty well. It's like how you can work on building a better app and getting it adopted... vs. fighting piracy/maximizing revenue from customers/trying to beat your competitors.

Of course, an organization can do both; but it can't skip the first one.
Kaizen and Software Engineering
The 'I want to make video games' for a living is like hearing a teen girl enthusiastically brag about having great style sense and wanting to be a fashion designer or a poet because the things she writes are 'deep'(depressed with loaded words). These statements are so common it can feel disgusting. The counterstrike neckbeards of my generation would always go into CS half assed, learn java and usually not do it as a hobby. The new WOW generation are doing the same thing now. If someone wants to be a game programmer I think it's better to have a passion for programming and math first rather than a passion of games. As far as programming the internet is a better resource than any school could be. As far as game companies hiring people I think there's a better chance in getting a job if you're really great at art and creating environments. People have always been full of shit, but the only one you can blame for letting it affect you is you.
Natural Effect of the Holidays on Conversion Rate
i'm not so sure lutus could be called a luddite. oh, and this is 1976...
> It is interesting that you assume PHP is the perfect level of abstraction.

It's interesting you assume I said that, but I did not. In PHP you can have all kinds of levels of abstraction (and I use a multitude of levels). It is just as interesting that you assume most levels of abstraction are not possible.

If you call that a complicated a database query, we're clearly working at different levels. Get back to me when you hit 100 lines of SQL.

> I think that is called "blub". You should try deeper abstractions some time... Don't think that pounding on your keys as fast as possible makes your productive -- it doesn't.

The self-righteousness and ignorance here is absolutely astounding.
I'm arguing relative importance, so I'm not saying that the facts aren't important. What I'm saying is that understanding the scientific method and having decent critical thinking skills are more important. Science is more than a bag of facts.
the post itself has a more logical explanation.
D&D and all RPGs are still most enjoyable when played around the table with friends. I know that's not possible for everyone, but no technology will ever change that basic fact.
Setting up django and Amazon's new MySQL service
Zuck wearing a tie? What's going on...? I was led to believe he only wears t-shirts and sandals at all times.
Funny, it doesn't seem like that long ago that Aaron wrote that post about going out to celebrate Halloween right after they were acquired.
Google cache is not dead.
Well-educated students would be able to visit a site like this: http://creation.com/ and realize that their conclusions are flawed because their methods are wrong: http://creation.com/about-us#what_we_believe They would be able to clearly and persuasively articulate why the conclusions are incorrect.

If we teach science as a collection of facts that you believe because the authority (your teacher) said so, then we aren't preparing students to think for themselves.
I'd be interested in hearing why you're catching up on electronics of this type.

Mostly because I like making physical things and electronics is something that I know some things about.
It was a thing for 2009, to get serious.

This year people at the party noted his tie and he explained
that he was wearing it to denote that this was Facebook’s “intense” year.

http://scobleizer.com/2009/01/29/zuckerberg-facebooks-intens...
> If you need a quick knock off, just copy the files, copy and paste a bit, and you're good to go.

That's a style of programming, it really has nothing to do with the language. I can cut'n'paste code in any language and I can write nicely abstracted modular code in PHP. Why are you confusing the two?

> PHP makes it very easy to get trapped like this.

Really? Why is that? What is so different about PHP than every other language in existence? You don't even know, do you?

> Unlike others though, PHP makes is very easy to write bad code. I don't know why... perhaps it's that the learning curve is _too_ low.

I'm not sure how the learning curve would have anything to do with it. If you already know how to program well, PHP isn't going to break your legs. You're not suddenly going to stop doing good design because of a few dollar signs, are you?
Facebook tinkering with big changes that may weaken app virality
How about this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Concise-48-Laws-Power/dp/1861974043/...
There are also doubts internally about how much of this stuff will be actually useful to the rest of the world.

This seems the wrong approach. If it's useful to google, it might not be useful to the rest of the world in exactly that form, but I'm sure outside kernel devs would have opinions on it and could suggest a version that helps everyone.

Google makes a lot of use of the out-of-memory (OOM) killer to pare back overloaded systems. That can create trouble, though, when processes holding mutexes encounter the OOM killer. Mike wonders why the kernel tries so hard, rather than just failing allocation requests when memory gets too tight.

This is something that really bothers me about Linux too, and I'm not google, I run a workstation and some servers. Processes with runaway memory allocations can easily grind the system to a halt by causing crazy amounts of swapping. If you don't catch it in time, you basically need to hard reset. This shouldn't be possible from user space.

Mike concluded with a couple of "interesting problems." One of those is that Google would like a way to pin filesystem metadata in memory. The problem here is being able to bound the time required to service I/O requests. The time required to read a block from disk is known, but if the relevant metadata is not in memory, more than one disk I/O operation may be required. That slows things down in undesirable ways. Google is currently getting around this by reading file data directly from raw disk devices in user space,

Ouch!

but they would like to stop doing that.

No kidding.
The dude is not nearly as brilliant as he thinks he is. I've seen better.
we have decided to not highlight the complexity of our technology. most users think it is bluetooth or magic (seriously). for most people understanding doesn't add value. for those it does, we made the faq. :)
Universal phone charger OK'd
Designing for the iPhone is like a hybrid of print and web design.
You mean, in the same way that Hacker News, Slashdot, Reddit, Digg, etc., is evil for allowing side-channel discussions of other people's websites? Give me a break.
A 23 year old in the 17th century would expect to live nearly as long as a 23 year old today- the depressed life expectancy statistics are largely due to the fact that 3 out of 4 children died before they hit the age of five.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
Brilliance isn't particularly difficult. A lot more people could be brilliant than are brilliant now, if they only put a little work into it.
Sidebars = Evil?

We've come a long way 'Evil' from Nazis to sidebars....
Am I the only one who has the opposite impression of Reddit? Maybe I should read more of the humor reddits instead of the "serious" ones, 'cos my impression of Reddit's userbase is a group of judgmental, yet poorly informed people, yelling and screaming at things about which they know little.

I actually installed a Greasemonkey script to filter for words like tazer and Sears :S

It's still incredible how much throughput reddit can push for content of all types - but I've long since given up trying to read the comments (Slashdot on the other hand, seems to be maintaining its quality of discussion fairly well).
And by extension, so is their usenet archive.

It's really puzzling, since gmail already has a decent spam filter - can't they apply that to groups?
This is perhaps slightly off subject, but does anyone have any Google Wave invites? I would love to be a part of Google Wave but I haven't been invited yet.
An argument can be made that adamantly stating "don't be evil" is in itself a grab for power by imposing your moral standards on others. If you were inherently not evil, why the need to declare that to the world? This argument is actually in the book, Preface, XVIII.
What's a good alternative? The spam problems in Google Groups totally suck, especially for very active groups, but it's a familiar system, so even non-techies can sign up and post fairly easily.

Is Yahoo groups even worse?
I hope your side note is representative of many people, since those are the problems I've solved.
I was speaking of webapps that had actually replaced desktop apps.
we have been amazed how much people love the bump interaction. lots of people bump just to see it work and then don't transfer anything.

most mobile wlan chipsets (including the iphone's) don't support adhoc (so would need router) and bluetooth sucks, it is inconsistent and unreliable (even between identical phones).
When the linkee dies, the linker can't fix that either (short of linking to, say, archive.org -- which works regardless).
my advice would have been: think harder
Quite so. Here's an article about a long-running strike that recently ended at an american factory specializing in trumpets, which has been unable to compete with those made in China: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/25/...

I have no doubt that years of experience can lead to a superior instrument, but the market for such a device is limited to the few musicians who are able to play at a superior level. you can also see this closer to our home in the commodification of computer hardware; the resolution ability audio technology (as used in soundcards) passed beyond the threshold of human hearing ability some time ago, so competition has shifted towards features, design and branding.

I do agree with the article's suggestion that economics should adjust to the idea of energy as the fundamental quantum of value, but given the general public's poor understanding of economics it might be argued that there's insufficient demand to drive such innovation in the shot term.
As an academic, the ability to read PDFs is absolutely critical. I like reading books, but the vast majority of my reading is conference proceedings and journal articles. While I understand that they're hard to transfer (in particular, the two-column LNCS/ACM format), just writing them off seems like a missed opportunity.
Video games fill the role that any art does. They help us find ourselves and fill us with a static strength that we can't get from people, who are constantly changing as fast as we are.

I've actually always had the opposite reaction as that teacher in the article. I've never felt interested in science or technological process. It fascinates me, but I shudder at the thought of spending my life dedicated to it. I want messier things to spend my life achieving. But then, I also identify a lot with the person that wrote this, though I don't feel as beaten as he does, so this might not be a particularly unique perspective on the matter.
Dupe of:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=833443
Why not do what's easy? It's a lot more fun, and as you do it you learn. Never assume that just because you're drifting through life you're not growing as a person. I find that I learn and progress just as much in my idle states in life as I do at those critical moments that throw everything in relief.

I also think it's very, very bad advice to tell somebody to follow a dream that they don't entirely understand. I've had both: Dreams where I only vaguely felt I wanted something, and dreams I couldn't help but pursue because I understood them so completely. The latter dream is valuable and absolutely worth pursuing. The former dream isn't really a dream at all, and pushing too hard at it will only make you feel that maybe dreams aren't worth following after all. Following the wrong kind of dream will burn you out in the worst way.
I would love an e-ink netbook, with 2 week battery life. No colour graphics, just an xterm. Not high speed, but what PC's were like 10 years ago.

Of course, that won't find a mass market, so it won't happen. :-(
Ask HN: Feature request: Notification when I get a reply to my comment.
Similar to the orange envelope in reddit.
Apologies if I missed it.