skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Javascript is pretty much the new BASIC for kids these days.

10 print "BAH"
20 GOTO 10

<script>
for(i=0;i<100;i++) {
document.write("BAH");
}
</script>
Apprenda Closes $5 Million Investment Led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA)
I'll grant you the second point, though I think you developed it further in once sentence here than Carr did in his piece. (By which I mean to say, the correlation between that observed phenomena and the rise in emphasis on citizen journalism may be valid, and would have fit with the topic Carr was editorializing on, but he didn't do a very good job developing that supposed link.)

But to the former, I don't think Carr was trying to say citizen journalism is bad, but I do think he was trying to say it often fails us. Unfortunately (for his argument), the example he picked was one of a citizen's voice (not a citizen journalist's) being amplified by a mainstream press that had failed to properly vet those reports. So that failing was with the traditional media, rather than new media, imho.
The US model for everything involves getting into good cliques...
Laws cannot extend beyond physical territory. All sites hosted on European servers have to comply; EU laws do not extend to any sites hosted on foreign servers.
> Every professor in our math department drove an older subcompact except the department head who drove a Chevy Impala. Imagine, work your whole life, get to the top of your field, and drive an Impala!

Might this be cultural? Most of my professors in grad school also drove rather inexpensive cars. It certainly wasn't because they couldn't afford better. They would have been thought somehow 'unserious' to buy an expensive car.
ESRI ArcObjects under the hood:

if (random()) { crash(); }
else return UndefinedError;

Tongue in cheek, of course, and they've gotten noticeably better since 4 years ago. (I've been working with ArcObjects since their 8.3 release... shudder.)

If you're interested in how they implement vector operations:

- http://www.vividsolutions.com/jts/main.htm
- http://trac.osgeo.org/geos/

As far as raster operations go, I think that GRASS does all they do, plus more. All of the above are nice open-source implementations so you can go as deep as you'd like. ;)

p.s. Most of the algorithms ESRI (and similar) use might not be spelled out in blog posts, but they certainly are in textbooks. ;)

p.p.s. Out of curiosity, what have you been working on? ESRI tech is about as anti-startup as one can imagine. It's like using Oracle for your startup's database.
None taken. We actually had a discussion about this a week or two ago. I'm just glad that you linked to my GitHub. Thanks for still talking about Hackety.
i don't think blogs are beating regular news outlets because of some sort of unbias reporting. If blogs had the reach and power as mainstream news outlets they would suffer from the bias problem as well.

The true reason why blogs are beating regualar newspapers is because newspapers are trying too hard to win pulitzer prizes. Blogs give the same information but in a more convienent fashion that allows you to get the main idea with good commentary in a quick fashion.

So I think it has more to do with form and structure of content.
JSLitmus - lightweight ad-hoc JavaScript benchmark tests
Pretty much spot on.

I have a friend (a one-time business partner, actually) who used to work as a gym assistant in exchange for a "free" membership. Her job was basically to teach people how to use the machines and give some basic pointers on form. She constantly had women coming up to her asking, "You have a really great body. I need to know what kind of exercise I should do to look like you, but I don't want to sweat."

Her response was usually a more polite version of "WTF!!! You're not going to get any benefit from the exercise unless you actually DO WORK!!!" Suffice to say that once they realized how much effort (and sweat!!) she had to expend to maintain her rather muscular physique, they lost interest.
I wish Ruby would make the same promise. I'm kind of bitter about 1.9.
Say what you will about the tenets of national socialism; at least it's an ethos.

I wouldn't deny a Nazi deep thinker the title "philosopher" any more than I'd deny Erwin Rommel the title "great strategist."
hosted in the US, but accessible to the French:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/760782.stm

Similar laws have been used by the US against the owners of foreign websites:

http://www.freedavidcarruthers.com/
My impression is that professors get to work with industry on their terms: they only collaborate for specific projects that are of interest to them, and they do it in a non-corporate environment, with students to do most of the dirty work.
Well said, sir. Well said.
Yeah, diesel (http://dieselweb.org) takes this approach.
Happy 5th Birthday, FireFox
What Facebook Quizzes Know About You
A vast majority of modern people would die a helpless death relived of their modern inconveniences. You don't get time to "learn" how to farm when you don't have any food.

And farming is only 1 or 2 generations removed. Give it a few more turns, and one can easily see the world in the story becoming a reality.
Top C++ technical interview questions
http://bit.ly/cppans
Guy suing Sarah J Parker for stealing iPod idea previously sued Disney
Actually, I suspect you're getting downvoted because the article has nothing to do with 37Signals, and thus your comment was wildly off-topic.
It happens in Europe, too. Sometimes you could be forgiven for thinking that prescribing antibiotics is the only skill some physicians have.
They list it as "$50k - $1M". Their total fund size is $40M, so they will likely be looking for more smaller investments.
I don't think IBM invented this--hasn't google and Intel been doing something like this for a while now?
I had my home number linked to my account, but then a third person in the household got a GV number and linked it to our home phone. This caused my account to drop my landline as a forwarding number, but it still works fine with the Gizmo number.
I think that it has less to do with people needing to know assembly and more to do with making sure that when people need to know assembly the resources are still there for them to do so. And for people to at least know what assembly is.

To be fair, the story talks more about computers designing other computers. Once we get into that realm we get to the point where the product produced is not entirely understood.
My neighbor drives a BMW convertible, pays around 1700/month in rent and is a polisci professor at Stanford.
Anti-nicotine vaccine
In addition to the JITing and the computerization mentioned elsewhere, WalMart had a very specific strategy of geographic domination: they defined their service areas, and then ensured that no one in that area ever had to drive more than 20 miles (later 10, etc) to get to a WalMart. The wave of WalMarts started in the east and spread steadily west as the company expanded.
Exactly, although the list wasn't posted in its entirety, this "list" serves the readers a great disservice for its lack of context.

It's like saying for tomorrow, bet on sunlight, followed by darkness.
The name probably caused them more trouble than it should have. It's the same criticism being thrown at Bing (the idea that Google is a verb now, and you need a name that works well for that).

I can't just tell my friends "hey, try out Cuil", I have to spend a few seconds explaining how to spell it. That's no way to get the word out.

The technology is good, the site is very fast and relevant. But there's a lot in a name.
"Apparently Frivolous Stuff (facebook)"..? I'd love to hear more elaboration on that.
Also, why does the URL need to be human-readable? URLs are for computers. The content is for the human.

Disagreed. I can't stand sites with ugly, incomprehensible URLs: even if they're just appending parameters ad infinitum, it's unnecessary drag on the process of editing, sharing, and typing the URL. E.g., something like

http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Books/b/ref=sa_menu_kbo0/187-1539918-5044028?_enc
oding=UTF8&node=1286228011&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=left-nav-1&pf_rd_r=05
F7VG5R8T4MBDH7QQ6N&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=328655101&pf_rd_i=507846

is, near as I can tell, mostly equivalent to

http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Books/b/ref=sa_menu_kbo0/187-1539918-5044028?node
=1286228011

and could probably be made even simpler. Of course sites need to carry some amount of incomprehensible information (YouTube's video IDs, reddit's story IDs, marco.org's blog post numbers, etc.), but shoving as much as you can into the URL isn't the way to do it. I type specific URLs like en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic and news.ycombinator.com/newest all the time. If the site author neglects to even have this sort of basic functionality, I tend to consider it a bad interface.
Yes, they're up for debate, because at many times in the last 20 years people have had very different opinions on all those topics. People who grew up with the current trends find it hard to see, but read some late-80s business magazine articles for a different perspective. Back then, the trends were B-school, investment banking, investing in lowering production cost, consumer brand marketing, selling razor blades, etc. Few people thought you could make a huge business in software. Many of those trends changed. I think Paul's claim is that the trends he mentions are good long-term bets.
Not sure what you're trying to say at the end, but copyright's intent was to inspire Asimov to write stories in the first place. Copyright is supposed to give artists/creators the peace of mind to know that once they create someone won't just copy their work and turn a profit on their hard work. (i.e. If Asimov wrote this story, just to have someone copy the book and start selling it on street corners, making money on practically zero effort of their own)

I don't see how protecting Asmiov's work after his death is in any way supposed to inspire him to create more works (he's already dead). And I highly doubt that Asimov cared whether or not his works would be under copyright once he was dead and buried. The only real reason for works to be protected past death is to the benefit of corporations not to the benefit of the general public or the artists/creators themselves.
Better yet: let 'em fail.
Thanks very much for bringing up this subject, which has elicited several interesting replies.

My favorite book recommendation on the subject of career paths for young people considering pure mathematics:

http://www.amazon.com/Mathematicians-Survival-Guide-Graduate...

My oldest son is a math-liker who has been exposed to the pure mathematics research community through summer programs, and he (college-applying age) and I are currently pondering whether becoming a math professor is a better fit for him, or whether he will truly find paradise as a hacker starting a SaaS business.
lol if you're bored the actual complaint is an exercise in insanity.
(1) Politics

(2) Bernie Sanders

(3) Bare legislative proposal.

(4) Simple link to PDF without expert analysis.

Verdict: Badly needed post for Politics reddit. Bad post for HN. flagged.
I recently sparked my little brother's interest in programming by installing a Ruby interpreter on his computer. I told him I would install things like Shoes and HacketyHack so that he could do fun things at his level. I hope that this begins to pick up speed again as it is such an awesome project.
Just to reiterate, I totally agree with your points.

Also, I perfectly understand your frustration. I've had some opportunity to see the issue from both sides and it's unfortunate when someone refuses to see the value in your work.
According to _Good to Great_, that was also Walgreens' genius as well; packing stores within short distance of each other also simplies logistics.
He was saying that facebook on the surface seems very frivolous, its basically online gossip at first glance. But there is huge potential in it and that things that can appear frivolous can have huge potential. (twitter falls in this category too)
Obviously words like "software" and "innovation" are not by themselves very informative, because they're just titles. How do you feel about what I said about these topics?
You don't remember that Asimov had children?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov#Personal_life
Same reason most postmodernism and literary theory uses obscurantist language. People value more what they had to work harder for, whether it's understanding or a mug. Making something comprehensible to a broad audience doesn't do anything for the people whose opinion really matters to you, your colleauges, and it makes their work less prestigious by association, because its theoretically comprehensible.

[Rant about Edward Said, and how he said some worthwhile stuff, then made it virtually incomprehensible thought better of]
The Beatles offer catalog on USB drive without DRM
Ask HN: Best Time to Submit to HN?
Does anyone know the best time to submit an article to HN? The best time would be:

- When there are the lowest number of articles being posted

&

- When there are the most people visiting the site

Has anyone studied this before?

Thanks

Max
I've lived on a farm for a couple of years (in Ontario), and it is simply amazing how much hard work goes in to making a piece of land productive, even with modern tools.

In aerodynamics as applied to jet aircraft they have something called the coffin corner, a speed so close to the limits of the flight envelope in all directions that a small change in velocity will make you either stall or break up.

It's possible that there is such a thing as 'societies coffin corner', a speed of development so great that if it gets exceeded by a little or drops for a short time that we'll literally crash.
Note, before downvoting further, that those aren't my words: I was quoting Cuban. :-P
The problem is that there isn't a viable alternative vetting system. A college degree no longer vets its holder as competent, so to determine ability, you have to either go to your trusted network or take a risk. Risks are by nature dangerous.
Ruby's anonymous function syntax was pretty novel. I'm aware it was inspired by some syntax showed up in CLU, but it was fairly novel and remains a paragon of anonymous function syntax.

Actually, enough so that you now see it showing up (although some claim this is a resurgence) in Lisp clones like Clojure and appearing in common Scheme macro packs. So while it was "around for decades" it was "around for decades in a marginalized and primitive form that Ruby helped to popularlize and make mainstream."

In any event, this moratorium is stupid. Python already suffers from a paucity of modern language features under the aegis of "they are too complex." But it seems only hardcore Pythonistas seem to really feel this way, as the vast majority of other peer languages are–at the very least–adopting and embracing real lambdas and the elegant collection manipulation that follows from their reasoned use.
Are Too Many Students Going to College?
Refusing Flu Shots? Maybe You're A 'Denialist'
McDonalds also recognizes the power of the Internet and they make extensive use of it, but I wouldn't say anything fundamental has changed about their business. I think the government's in the same boat, just 5-10 years behind.
The article was about Dvorak ranting on how getting feedback was important, and sometimes you'd write just to tick other people off. So, that's where I took it from TC to 37s. On topic.
Stone Age humans crossed Sahara in the rain
They are recording the talks (big camera behind me) and I think they get posted after the conference.
PG is wrong on the subject of patents though: the problem with software patents is that if you are building a car the price of having a lawyer work out if you are violating a couple patents is a lot less than 1%, but it would properly make it many thousand times more expensive for a startup to develop a piece of software (assuming that we don't count the founders time).

PG has said in other essays that it often makes sense for a startup to not worry about whether what they are trying to do until they are sued. If they are still tiny it is unlikely they will be sued even if they are infinging, and if they are large then they will have the resources to either defend against the suit or make a reasonable settlement.

But that is a practical matter. None of that changes the fact that it borders on logically inconsistent to argue for patents of machines while against the patenting of algorithms (and a program is nothing but an algorithm that has been properly formatted).
if i outsource, who should i use?
I think too many students are getting watered-down educations in high school which necessitates further schooling just to get to the level of education they are aiming for.
People who Changed Graphic Design forever
Really, though, why shouldn't he? In for a penny, in for a pound:

TechCrunch is a new kind of publication. We don't fit into a neat little box like traditional media, who refrain from financial conflicts of interest with their readers and feel that they are therefore above reproach. They aren't, but they really, really feel that they are, and look down on blogs and other media as the unwashed masses. ...

TechCrunch is different. TechCrunch is all about insider information and conflicts of interest. The only way I get access to the information I do is because these entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are my friends. I genuinely like these people and want them to succeed, and they know it and therefore trust me more than they trust traditional press.

I am an active investor, board member and advisory board member with a number of startups. That isn't going to change. I also write about startups. That isn't going to change, either. Obviously people like what we write on TechCrunch or they wouldn't come back. But no one should think TechCrunch is objective or conflict-free. We aren't. We never have been. We never will be.
It's a convenience at best, and one that I would assume would be re-creatable by any number of mathematicians given the assignment.

But just about any patentable idea is recreatable by experts in that field if they are given that assignment. I do not claim to know whether or not this particular patent should have been granted, but I do not see why the fact that it can reverse engineered should be relevant.
The first copy I sell as the commissioner of the dictionary could be the last - an alternative printer can buy that copy and produce a far-far cheaper copy (no production costs except blind reproduction). He will have the market and I will have nothing but bankruptcy.

How many people will pay a few million dollars for a dictionary to be made and then allow copies to anyone else? Copies will be sold with contracts for very high prices and with no chance of entering the public domain except by breach of contract.
You could swap the words motion and action in this article, and it wouldn't change the meaning.

i.e. why not:
action: just doing something, whatever
motion: making forward progress towards a goal. movement

The words only server as placeholders -- they might as well be X and Y. Break out a dictionary once in a while.
The 'bike tree' can hold up to 6,000 bikes
People forget that Google had the same problem. Before Google, "google" was spelled "googol".
When I submit articles, I tend to submit them as a I find them.

Really truly valuable "news" tends to end up on dozens of channels,so there is little danger of an "important" topic being missed because I submitted it at 6AM instead of 11:30.

It also depends which version of "best" you are trying to optimize for... "Best" in terms of trying to get really good information out to as many people as possible, or "best" in terms of trying to find maximum karma-whoring potential, or "best" in terms of trying to get front-page ranking... and so on.
http://www.fluidinfo.com/
There's no need to be hostile. It's a famous Hemingway quote. See the first line of the post.
Loopt to Announce Biggest Update Yet for Blackberry at Conference
I'm almost sure that it was meant to be a joke.
making Cuil the neighborhood store stocking the hard to find antique and offbeat books.

Cuil's design is too slick to pass as a neighborhood book store. It needs more rough edges and needs too appear old and established. Instead it feels young and fresh and naive.
Penicillin basically started an arms race that we can't possibly win in the long term.

Pretty scary thought.
I tried a few times to get into programming but the amount of institutional knowledge required was so off putting. Learning the languages and APIs isn't too hard but I found all the reference material didn't teach me how to actually solve problems. I suppose this is something you need a mentor or at least a strong background in legitimate computer science to understand.
Can Google Chrome Frame really help?
Honest question: Can somebody explain to me why this is a bad thing? Ads can be served without cookies, right? Sure, (behavioural) targeting would break, but is that really a problem?
It didn't strike me that 5/8ths wasn't actually a huge amount until I thought about it.

If the ability to form troughs/ridges is the important thing then I think that the PCB etch/make mold technique would be just as useful. But I'm not sure what the smallest feature size is that you can make with this method:

PCB etch/make mold method:

Laser-print an inverse pattern mask on clear plastic film

Expose a UV sensitive photoresist PCB using the mask

Etch the PCB

Make a polymer mold (or mold the final part) using the troughs/ridges formed by the etched/unetched copper on the PCB

I know this method has been used for replicating fingerprint patterns in the past (Mythbusters!) and I remember hearing it being used for a few other things...
Reverse-engineering and writing a spec is one of the ways you can legally get around trade secrets and copyright infringement claims, so if the patent does not stand it is very relevant indeed.

Clean room development is usually (but not always) not enough to get around a patent though.
Cookies are by far the most prevalent system for identifying which user made a given web request. This isn't just about advertising. Pretty much every site that supports "logging in" (including HN), and many sites that don't, use cookies to track user sessions.
It still is, google is the misspelling.

As for CUIL, their crawler was such a nuisance at some point that I blocked their complete network. I doubt I'm alone in that.

And if those 'twiceler' guys don't start playing nice I'll do the same to them.
Is the header graphic meant to be ironic?
Addenda & thoughts since I do a lot of work along similar lines:

It's probably not a bad idea to have the option of a spatial index at the leaves of a geohash, as the geohash is necessarily of limited precision and will behave badly if someone inserts 100k points all within a 1x1 foot area. ;) (This is equivalent, roughly, to a plain quadtree only with the first N levels of the tree pre-calculated and cached locally.)

I'm guessing the riddle at the end ("Does it remind you of anything?") would be gray code.

Quad-trees can be used for polygons, although they are less than ideal, by storing a list of polygons for each quad. If a quad is entirely contained by the polygon, add the polygon to its list; if a quad is part in and part out of the polygon, add it to its list if length(poly-list) < heuristic_value; otherwise split the quad and redistribute its list among its leaves. (The same arrangement can be used for line segments only, too.) The "query for a region" image shows how this would work, just change the caption to "insert a region." ;)

A reference for this type of index, which is called a PMR-quadtree: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hjs/pubs/NelsSIGG86.pdf

Another good option for points is a KD-tree. You can't turn it into a hash, at least not straightforwardly, but it gives you some nice queries like n-nearest-neighbours, and can be done with as many dimensions as you like rather than just two. (Example use: accelerating the k-means clustering of big multivariate datasets.)