skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's called skimming. It is possible to learn to do that, and it's a very useful skill. Actually, I tend to use it for technical works much more than I do for fiction.

In fiction I read at my slowest rate, to get the most out of the book that I can, as I don't want to miss a bit of atmosphere, plot, characters, or dialogue. I most enjoy reading at a relaxed, leisurely pace.

With technical work, I can skip around to get a good overview, and jump to just the parts I'm most interested in or with which I'm having most difficulty and slowly read those. But that's not a very good way of reading fiction, unless you're just reading the book for a book report or something where you don't care whether you enjoy the book or not.
A better example would have been the recent Air France crash off Brazil. While the real news outlets (even the BBC) are showing pretty graphics, reporting other reporters fabricated stories as 'sources' and making stupid technical goofs (the black box doesn't send messages to a GPS satelite)

Blogs like aviation safety network and askthepilot are reporting comments from people that fly the same type on the same route, designed the black box in use and serviced the exact aircraft in question.
The New York Times is a century and a half old. Techcrunch hasn't even passed half a decade. Blogging's ten years old. Give it another ten and where do you think it'll be?

Blogs already cover politics and technology more thoroughly than papers. I'll bet webcomics are catching up to newspaper funnies in popularity. By 2019, there won't be anything in newspapers that you can't get better online.

How is TechCrunch not a blog? Are the rules that if you're able to find advertisers and make money you're not a blog anymore? Because they don't make a magazine, they don't have print, and they publish exclusively online. That's exactly what a blog is.
Obsessive support
Post was boring, but listia looks like a really awesome idea.
I would just like to point my fellow hackers to ZapReader. http://www.zapreader.com/

Basically it will take text supplied (either pasted in or a link) and flash up either words or sentence fragments at a chosen rate. Using this, I am able to read long articles at around 800wpm, with pretty good comprehension since its not really skimming.
Thanks Niall this is awesome. Syncing right now for the week ahead :)
Ratatat usually gets me going.
often i'm a slow reader because a lot of times i'll get stuck on the issue of how something is pronounced, lose focus on what i was doing, and start daydreaming.

i also seem to have trouble reading when music with vocals is playing in the background.

but when i turn off the music and make an effort to stop sub-vocalizing, i read a lot faster and understand more.
yup, agreed. type inference for a dynamically-typed language is extremely hard to do well ... you often have to make people program in a restricted 'static' subset of the language, like what PyPy does with the RPython dialect:

http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/coding-guide.html#re...
Take a look at The Little Schemer series well worth your time/money.
I don't think mainstream media is dying, it's just becoming more and more irrelevant.
How is cloud computing free? Since they already owned the machines, Findory would've been paying for bandwidth and power only. With cloud computing you'd have to pay for this and CPU time.
Interesting, so do you wear glasses only when you need to be able to see distant things?
Actually TechCrunch is very much a blog, and not a "mainstream" media company, because it's not on print or tv or something people traditionally call the "mainstream", a definition that's changing rapidly.
m83, bach, buckethead's acoustic work

i.e. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJud5kqFEDU
I’ve tried Twitter three times and closed my account every time;

Why does Author care enough to close a twitter account, not once, but three times? This seems strange to me.

I threw a hissy fit when the blog service I use added social features.

I use tumblr, and am completely unaware of the "social features" which Author speaks of. Threw a hissy fit? Really? Isn't that caring just a little too much? This entire post seems to care a little too much over things completely unimportant...
Like gloob said below, a lot of Romania's population is old, poor and lives in rural areas. This particular segment probably drags down the average a hefty amount.

I do agree with the corruption being rampant, though. But I'd blame this on particulars of the Romanian society - there's hardly any aspect of it that's not touched by corruption.

Strange enough the system encouraged a lot of private medical practice which is both good and corruption free. Their income is both public insurance and direct pay.
recommend Boards of Canada
Andy Baio used Mechanical Turk. Positive experience.

http://waxy.org/2008/09/audio_transcription_with_mechanical_...
But that's also the experience of a certain percentage upgrading from Windows 2000 -> XP -> Vista -> Blah.
The rule for Windows used to be "always reinstall, never upgrade, it never works 100%"; TBH, I'd have trouble believing better than 75% real success-rate.

The perfect upgrade is impossible (i.e across all user's machines); my experience has been only Debian and Gentoo come anywhere near close to painless, but to be fair, that's probably mostly because I'm constantly doing micro-upgrades on these dist's (Deb "testing" track) and there are still some app's or packages that haven't been tested into oblivion by the time I get to them, and so require me to troubleshoot and fix on occasion.

If you care about stability more than being near upstream's head, you have to choose an LTS dist, and you have to vett every single upgrade the Vendor/Maintainer wants to apply. If not, accept that there's a percentage risk which you have little control over.
Mozilla had prototyped plug-in for IE - like chrome frame
That isn't an epidemic, that have been with us from the beginning of time.
The CodeJustin Programming Blog Will Be Back November 16th
Looks like a very cool language (I can't help but love any language with real macros), but it looks more like ML than Python to me. I wonder how this compares to OOC. I think I might have to run them both through some tests and publish the results (aesthetics, speed (although I doubt that'll be an issue), flexiblity, etc).
Like the lottery, extended warranties can be thought of as a tax on the mathematically-challenged.
Wow, I'm really liking Songite. Great work keeping it simple -- not enough of that these days.

Edit: Just noticed something playing around with it. Is there a way to correct its results if it doesn't happen to get them right? For example, I searched for All That You Are by Mudvayne, and the only result that gets queued is an 8-second intro.

I like the "I'm Feeling Lucky" simplicity, but there should probably be a way to fix the choice -- e.g., a button on the song for "not the right one" that expands a list of search results.
Oh, nice one.
Well I'm not gonna blame you for it not working in Firefox. I've actually had to re-write client-side code (generally just quick hacks, similar to your project) solely for Firefox patching some sort of quirk or behavior change into their browser. It can get especially annoying if you're always testing with the most recent version.

Nevertheless its a neat app. ;)
> Why does Author care enough to close a twitter account, not once, but three times? This seems strange to me.

I started one when Twitter started, got rid of it, tried keeping a "public" Twitter account for a while, got rid of that too, then had a private one for a bit with friends that I deleted when Facebook changed their feeds. I'll probably start one soon to mirror this new blog, too, hopefully permanently. (I also submit that if I weren't a strange person I wouldn't be writing about Twitter in the first place.)

> I use tumblr, and am completely unaware of the "social features" which Author speaks of. Threw a hissy fit? Really? Isn't that caring just a little too much?

Tumblr used to be my absolute favorite site, back when it was fresh and new and entirely basic. When they added the liking and reblogging I thought it was unnecessary, but acceptable. What pissed me off last year was their Tumblarity system. I can't fucking stand having numbers on web pages; it sets me off. (I dislike karma on HN, too, but this is a social site, whereas I always used Tumblr as a private engine.) It's what led to my ending the last blog I kept. I had a more freeform blog, and I'd started to realize I was posting more fluff content to boost Tumblarity and I was avoiding longform because it was dropping my score. Even now it irritates me that by blog is being "ranked" by such an arbitrary metric, and I wish there was an option to disable it and remove myself from the rankings.

I think it's a compliment to Tumblr that I got as upset as it was. Most sites are shitty enough that I don't notice when something's bad on it; Tumblr was such a perfect site that the addition seriously worsened it. It's still very good, but it's not what it once was; I was also upset because the Tumblr staff had seemed to share my design philosophy up to that point, and when they added that feature it confirmed the accusations facing them that they cared more about socialite frivolity than they did about the integrity of their design.
I really liked the demo of this, I wonder if any of the new e-readers will support this in the future. Come to think of it this would be a good app for either the iphone or android.
About 17 years ago I took instruction from a teacher of the Bates Method (as refined by some woman whose name I cannot recall). It’s a lot of work. You can expect to put at least an hour a day into it if you want any results. My results were a big improvement, but not an improvement to even close to 20/20 after about a year, so I lapsed and my eyesight eventually deteriorated back to very myopic. I went from -7.25d for 20/20 to -2.00d for 20/40. Not correcting your vision for perfect 20/20 with lenses is one part of the method, and I also tired of never having perfectly corrected vision.

"Outdoor seeing" has a big role in the Bates method with emphasis on horizon focusing and outdoor lighting, as mentioned in this article too, but as well as brighter light, Bates put emphasis on full-spectrum natural lighting. I went so far as to buy full spectrum light bulbs for my house. Unfortunately I could never come up with a good solution for doing computer work in natural lighting. Bates had some downright wrong ideas, so his entire work was never taken seriously by established medicine.

During this time I also ran across an Israeli teacher of his own method (pretty much the same as Bates), who liked to say he had a blind certificate from the state of Israel and a driver’s license from the state of California, and he didn’t wear any corrective lenses. However, when his son was born with the same defect he had, he had his son undergo an operation removing the lenses and making his son dependent on contact lenses. He said the natural vision thing was just too hard and he didn’t want his son going through it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYUdixQGF0w (Rossini La Gazza Ladra Overture Abbado Vienna 1991)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CMo_mLNz38 (Tchaikovsky, Piano Concerto No. 1 - Mov 1, Part 1/3 (Martha Argerich, 1973))

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG2hGSL345I (Rossini - William Tell overture (Part 1))

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU_QR_FTt3E (Rostropovich plays the Prelude from Bach's Cello Suite No. 1)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3B49N46I39Y (Holst - Jupiter)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLHj-eekdNU (Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 4, 4th mvmt)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0Sx5lbVlQA (Pavarotti Last Performance "Nessun Dorma" @ Torino 2006)
Right there with you. DI vocal trance has ushered me through many a tight deadline.
Here is a browser bookmarklet for your Youtube HTML5 video viewer : http://gist.github.com/229475
Consumers view these guarantees as conducive to lower prices. But in fact offering a price-matching guarantee should make it less likely that competitors will slash prices, since they know that any cuts they make will immediately be matched. It’s the retail version of the doomsday machine.

Fascinating read. This part in particular caught my attention. Interesting that price matching guarantees keep prices higher by dissuading competitors from slashing prices. I had never considered that. Hell, I've always been one of those naive consumers who thought price-matching generally meant lower-prices.
I wouldn't say it's "dying". Just being "reconverted", placed in another spot which is not the same than it used to be. Definitely not going to disappear in the mid-term.
Is the New York Times dying? I hope not - currently on the first 2 pages of HN, 9 articles (good articles too, mostly) are from the Times. That's 15%! I'd hate to do without those.
As someone who's worked with these systems, we faced quite a bit of this pilot-as-luddite resistance at first. Unfortunately this article doesn't really capture that many pilots are thankful that some flying computer will get blown away by a popup SA-6, rather than them. Nor does it convey that, while batches of UAVs can perform complicated tasks autonomously, they have not yet achieved air dominance.
Google App Engine is free if you use few resources.
I'm all for expecting due diligence from traditional media, but saying they're dying because Michael Arrington provided more exhaustive details for his very particular and specialized audience while the Times ran a puff piece for a much more generalized audience seems a little petty on Fake Steve's part.

Seriously. This is the same newspaper that helped legitimize a war by running Judith Miller bylines above the fold.

Mountains. Molehills.
This whole affair makes Zynga look much more shaky as a potential IPO offering, although I have in general been impressed with Pincus' response too the whole thing. Perhaps the strong response was to retain the IPO momentum.
A note about Silicon Valley
I've had to wear glasses since I was in preschool. Anecdotally, of course, I doubt conditions had that much to do with my poor eyesight.

Ah well. One day I'll get Lasik.
On my macbook, using this viewer causes Safari to take about 20% CPU. Same video using flash takes about 13%. Flash doesn't seem to be CPU-evil on my machine.
Thanks. I'm definitely thinking about ways to correct songs that are wrong - my current idea is a button next to each song that pops out a list of alternatives.
Before I formed my theory about myopia it progressed already to the point where I couldn't look at computer screen without glasses so not wearing them for most of the time is no longer an option for me.

Three years ago I bought myself new glasses but now I started noticing that they are no longer adequate when I have to look at distant objects. They are of course still perfect for watching computer screen. My plan is to buy myself new ones and use them only on occasions where I will need to look at distant things. For other needs I'll still use outdated ones.
Windows 7 Beats Vista By 234% In First Week Sales
I don't wear them in front of a screen because they reduce contrast an there are reflections - however clean they are.
But I wear them to drive home.

As far as I am concerned I have evolved from something that needed to spot lions on the horizon to something that needs to spot trolls 0.5m away
so I suppose many here can read Japanese since they vote it up?

ええ、判りますよ ^^
Compatibility tables for features in HTML5, CSS3, SVG and other web technologies
The problem to me is that most media outlets are still populated with J-school grads when they should be housed with experts.

That's why blogs are winning, because you can go straight to these people with laser focused insights that you just can't get from a j-school grad. In the past, journalists would have to go to experts for comments and structure stories around that, now with blogs you get to cut out the middle man.

A lot of the good reporting I saw over the last year has come from experts. Nate Silver at Five Thirty Eight was able to generate some really great analysis on election polls.

The crew at CalculatedRisk gave reported on the mortgage industry and financial crisis better than most mainstream outlets. Actually, Tanta over there used to have to regularly correct Gretchen Morgenson, one of the senior writers at the NYT.

With war reporting, Andrew Exum at AbuMuqawama was really really great on issues dealing with the Surge/Afghanistan/Iraq. I have to bet that one of the reasons is because he served as a ranger in Afghanistan and Iraq and then got a masters in COIN and a PhD studying Hezb.

These were instances outside of Tech where I saw some really good reporting. I think Tech media will always be ahead of everyone just based on the savviness of their consumers. You can really see that with the absolute embracing of video podcast programs by the tech crowd whereas in finance we still havent seen anything close to that for taking out trash like CNBC.
You mean somebody actually buys the extended warranty!!!!!!
You might also check out these Manga Guides:
http://nostarch.com/manga/
On the other hand, the problem with populating the air waves with experts is that it's hard to put on a good show and spin the story the right way if everyone on-air is authoritative.
On a large Javascript codebase these optimizations actually make a difference. It could take SECONDS off your page load time, which is huge.
I just updated my original post with a songite link. It's a very nicely designed tool!

(I had trouble finding a sharable version of Weather Report's Palladium. Any way you can give me choices when I want/need them?)
http://spreeder.com is another version of this.
The question I'd ask is whether DNS is the right place for a CDN - in some ways it seems like that should either happen at the routing level (e.g. anycast) or at the application level (e.g. http redirects to user-appropriate servers) depending on the service.
Lisp in about 200 lines of Ruby
You're An Idiot For Not Using Heroku
Anything instrumental and epic sounding. Right now my favorites are:

* Explosions in the Sky

* Red Sparowes

* British Sea Power's Man of Aran Soundtrack

I'd also recommend a band called Souvenir's Young America which sounds like the soundtrack to a zombie/western movie.
Didn't even know about the function.toString() method, but it seems to that actually the non-firefox implementations deserve the wtf. (javascript:(function(){return 2*3;}).toString() => function(){return 6;}). Can't an interpreter optimize anymore?
"local scopes ought to be simple to rule out"

If it's easy to do, it is probably only a matter of time until the major implementations include it. They seem to be competing on speed, after all.
air

boards of canada

burial

caribou

m83

memory tapes

mogwai

mum

ratatat

sigur ros
I've been using Win7 since it was first made available to the public and received a free copy of Ultimate for hosting a Win7 party. It's an excellent operating system but yes, there are a few things that seem to get in the way.

Nonetheless, just as you said Leopard is highly configurable and you can make a few modifications to get it exactly as you like it, the same could be said for Windows 7. It may not be as simple (have to hit the registry, or download an app to do it for you), but it's possible.

In regards to the reboot issue, I've never experienced that one (although the continued asking every 15 minutes gets annoying). What probably happened is you were busy typing away and the window came up, just a few keystrokes in that window and you told it to reboot. Definitely a problem - that window, being as destructive as it is, should never be the active window when it pops up. But, I'm pretty sure you can disable that window (I thought there was a "Don't ask again option" in the window itself) through a variety of means: registry, telling security center to only install updates at 2AM, etc.
As a startup founder and operator with a relatively large payroll, let me just clear some stuff up here.

First, you can look at the bill text on OpenCongress right here:

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h3962/text

You'll find that it does not require "you and two guys who just got $15k in seed funding" to purchase company health insurance. Employers with payrolls in excess of $500,000/yr are required to cover their employees. Most responsible companies with payrolls like that already do.

In fact, the bill does two things to make it easier for small businesses to handle health insurance:

* It provides grants to small business to provide health insurance, based on a dollar formula per qualified employee

* It allows companies with fewer than 25 employees to participate in the public health care exchange.

These are all just details, though, because the big picture issue here is that this is extremely good news for startups.

The fact that health insurance is tied to employers is a major challenge for the kinds of companies people on Hacker News try to start. For the first year or so of our company, we didn't offer health benefits, and that cost us candidates. Plenty of A-players need to cover families, and can't do it on the individual market. To understand how severe this problem is, work from the assumption that you simply cannot buy individual insurance at any reasonable rate.

The current system distorts both the health care market and the job market, and makes it harder both to start and grow new companies.
Rachmaninoff. Also, look at "pink noise" tapes: rainforests, oceans, all that new-agey crap. It actually works.
I'm a big fan of Terrence Tao's blog -- even though I (with a first-class undergraduate degree in Math) can only really follow maybe 20% of the articles he writes.
Two of my favourites as well. AIR are the perfect 'background music' and i don't get distracted by their lyrics. The Donnie Darko soundtrack is moody and atmospheric.

Also, anything by Sigur Rós. Not because they are a great band, but because they don't sing in English (or Icelandic a lot of the time). I find their music isn't distracting and really enthuses me.
> I've heard 0-day attacks to mean a vulnerability found on the day a new version of a software is released.

I've never heard that meaning. It doesn't really make sense - why would someone care if the vulnerability was the same day of the new version or not? (Except to show off.)

Zero day to me, means it's the first day after the vulnerability was found. i.e. it's a brand new vulnerability, and no one else knows about it or has a defense for it. (It being assumed that all vulnerabilities are fixed the day they are found.) Extending it to mean "until it's fixed" makes sense too when dealing with certain vendors who don't fix things very fast.
We have been using the Network Connection transcription services for the last three years and been very satisfied. http://thenetworkconnection.com/transcriptionservices.htm