skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't actually forbid either of my sons from swearing.

I tended to swear like a sailor when I was younger. When my first child was 2 years old and used some four letter word he had heard from me, I took a few seconds to think about the fact that a) he was wired to mimic me, that was how he was learning to talk, so it would be cruel and counterproductive to punish him for doing so and b) my language wasn't going to be miraculously cleaned up overnight. So I turned to him and said "That's a bad word and I shouldn't use it either. I will let you know what the bad words are and when you forget, I will remind you not to use them and when I forget you can remind me not to use them."

So my two sons spent their childhood trying to clean up my language. My oldest never swore and by the age of 11 had an extremely obnoxious superiority complex about it, looking down on anyone who used such language as being too stupid to come up with a better means to express themselves. (This led to me giving him a lesson in reasons why such strong language is sometimes the only way to adequately express something.) My youngest, who is more strongly emotional (just like me) was still inclined to use faux-swear words (like "darn!") when he was frustrated or what not but really didn't take up swearing until his late teens.

This off-the-cuff policy that I thought up in mere seconds was so wildly successful in discouraging my kids from swearing that I spent a lot of time wondering why. I ultimately concluded that forbidding children from using swear words and reserving it for adult use makes cussing attractive as a power play. It's a way of grabbing power and announcing you are all grown up or as good as the adults or some such. But telling mom to clean up her mouth was a much more genuine exercise of power over me, way cooler than cussing could possibly be. So I effectively removed almost all temptation, except for the intriguing detail that my youngest still found something emotionally satisfying in strong language even without the allure of defiantly displaying some forbidden social power.

When they were school age, I would explain what a word meant and that using it at school (and some other social situations) was likely to cause fall-out they didn't want, but still did not forbid them from using "bad" language (including words that aren't swear words but are considered simply "rude"). They didn't want to be hassled by a teacher/other adults, so they watched their mouths -- not because I required it, but because it was in their own best interest to not attract trouble.
A relevant example of a Supercool School can be found here: http://startup.supercoolschool.com - Excited to hear your feedback! Thx :)
This is precisely my concern, and I have talked to a lot of people regarding this exact point. I think node.js is really cool but I would love if this was just built into the language, such that code would perform asynchronously but not move to the next line.

var a = something_async(), b = something_else_async();

Upon calling something_async, the code starts waiting and blocks further execution until it is ready, going to the next statement. This is not a foreign concept at all, and is used in javascript as well with alert, prompt, confirm:

fries = window.confirm("Do you want fries with that?")

confirm is an async method (has to wait for the user), but the next line is not executed until it returns. I personally see no advantage to creating a system of callbacks:

do_x(function () { do_y(function() { do_z() }) })

when this would be much more readable:

do_x();
do_y();
do_z();

and would have the exact same perf characteristics. In fact, you could probably simpy code transform the latter into the former (I know this is what stratified JS does), although this is probably the worst way to do it. What you really want is to just auto-call "wait" on every promise (I believe wait still gives you the asynchronous benefits).

Of course, the main "drawback" to this is that you need language support to pull it off, so you need to implement a preprocessor of some sort.
This bites shareware developers in the hindquarters every once in a while. Typically, the payment processor that you're paying 8%+ to to represent your interests decides "Why charge $2.50 for this transaction when I can instead charge $2.50 and then get a $40 CPA from Scums R' Us?"

Astonishingly when shareware vendors call them on it, they defend the practice. This is one reason I refuse to do business with any of them. I respect that many folks have a visceral dislike of Paypal, but Paypal has never tried to steal from my customers and tell me its right.

Here are some blog posts about it. See, in particular, the comments for the justifications from their PR/CS people.

http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/07/04/swreg-customers-bew...

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2007/07/05/conflict-of-interest-pay...

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2008/03/09/regsoft-scam/

Every few months I get "reputation management" requests about that post. Apparently its on top of Google for something embarrassing to the company. Shucks.
Didn't Viddler do this like 3 years ago?
This seems like it would be really nice on a small tablet/netbook. Although, Moblin already exists and it's got a great user interface.
If you have a sense of unease, then maybe your gut is trying to tell you something.

How reliable is this person? How long is the work guaranteed for? What backing is there for the guarantee? Have you done due diligence on their business? What would happen if it doesn't work out? How does your work add value to their business? What happens after you sort out the current problems? or complete the scope of work?

Whatever you decide upon, make sure you document everything! The very act of minuting every decision, seems to improve the quality of decision making. Of course, you want to make sure there are unambiguous, signed-off specs for all work to be done.
I'd also like to hear the whole story about this. Was the Sid-prototype really created out of the blue, or had it been brewing in his head for quite a while? And so on... Not saying that Sid isn't great, just saying that the comparison might be a bit unfair. Also perhaps the junior designer was given a too specific task, whereas Sid can just create whatever he fancies (he probably has no "make a game where pirates shoot each other, but it also has to include a fun treasure hunt" directive to follow).
I appreciate it. The first link is coming up 404, but I'll check the other two. I think I'm superficially familiar with both, but I haven't actually read them in their entirety. Will do if I have time.

there is a substantial amount of overlap between these reconstructions and our actual instrumental record during the calibration period

From memory, I don't think this is quite the right conclusion. Rather, the instrumental record is used to calibrate the reconstruction, so the overlap approaches 100%. Worse, the accusations are that the correlation is even better because any trees not matching the temperature record have been eliminated as non-performing! I don't think either of these papers shows accuracy of reconstruction on an out-of-sample set for which there exists an outside measurement. I'll recheck, though.

None of this really changes what the comment says, which was basically "Don't use this to plot past 1960, because we know that part needs corrections".

I don't disagree here. In the absence of some overriding context, that seems like a valid reading of the comment.
tar -xvf infers the filetype from the file; obviating the need for the smart untarring script.

edit: Also, another useful thing is <command> | xargs -n1 -I{} <stuff>, which runs stuff once on every element of the output of command, replacing every occurrence of {} with the element. Then you can do something like "ls *.mp4 | xargs -n1 -I{} mv {} `basename {}`.mp3" .
Yep that's great I'm all for that. Just wondering if there are any practical applications that they hope to one day achieve, or is it more like sending a satellite into space without any idea what's out there, just hoping to find some cool stuff.
close enough that people think "I'd rather have this implemented as a static checking flag in my C compiler and a few libraries" - and promptly forget it

Cyclone seems to go a bit beyond that. I'd have more confidence in this as a basis for writing a highly secure kernel than just "a static checking flag in my C compiler and a few libraries."
Physicists hope that the LHC will help answer the most fundamental questions in
physics, questions concerning the basic laws governing the interactions and
forces among the elementary objects, the deep structure of space and time,
especially regarding the intersection of quantum mechanics and general
relativity, where current theories and knowledge are unclear or break down
altogether.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LHC#Purpose
I get about 60~70% of my new users from organic SEO. (I have not run that calculation in a while -- it may be higher now. It was certainly a lot higher in October.)

Almost every successful startup you've heard of which publishes lots of content has an SEO strategy. Slideshare, Scribd (good golly were they aggressive with it -- good thing they got big before they got smacked), Yelp, etc etc.
And this worked so well for music subscriptions too, didn't it?
Well, it runs on a CPU with mutable state. So you could claim that everything is all about mutation of state. But that's not a very useful position to take, because reasoning about, reading and writing code at that low level is too concrete.

When I say nondeterministic computation I do not mean PRNGs. I mean "give me all possible solutions to the N-queens problem". I mean "solve this sudoku puzzle with no explicit loop". Constraint solvers. Some classes of search algorithm. Proof systems. That kind of nondeterministic computation.

You'll probably respond claiming all this is state. Sure, fine, whatever makes you happy. Everything in programming is state. Everything is also lambda calls. Everything is Horn clauses. You can think about these in some very low level dungeon but that doesn't mean you ought to.
"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research." ~A. Einstein

To address your question, I am sorry, I don't really know if they have any practical applications in mind. But I am certain (=believe) that practical applications will come out of this.
End of the line for IBM's Cell
Payment should be easily taken care of, paypalx, etc...

The only shortcoming is just the speed compared to native apps and of course the missing features that you can't really access through safari.
Not so special, Chamillionaire is a web 2.0 rapper; he was at the Ad.ly launch party and he partnered with them as well.
Create Your Own Flash Adventure Game - Path Finding
SQL being notoriously poor at hierarchal data has been known for quite a while; he's obviously very correct there.

While SQL's difficulty with handling hierarchical data is well-known, he asserts that it is somehow a fundamental problem with relational databases, which I think vastly overstates the magnitude of the problem.

Oracle goes so far as to offer a non-standard CONNECT statement for tree traversal.

Standard SQL added support for recursive queries via WITH RECURSIVE more than 10 years ago, and most modern databases support it; Oracle is just anachronistic here.
Ask HN: Your opml file - what feeds do you follow?
In a huge mess of trying to reassociate a Google account to another, I ended up losing a lot of my Google data. Some of the data lost was my Google Reader subscriptions.

I figured the community here would have a real great reading list, so thought we could all share our favorite feeds and/or opml files. In the process I can get my reading list back by community, with (hopefully) a lot of new cool stuff I have never seen before :)
I love this sort of stuff. The first few "top ten" command line tricks articles I found back when I was enthralled with the power of the Bash shell have probably saved entire days of my life by now.
But I am certain (=believe) that practical applications will come out of this.

As any deeper understanding of the universe inevitably leads to practical applications, I should think.
I quite like using for loops for that. I use it a lot for batch audio conversion with ffmpeg:

for f in *.wma; do ffmpeg -i "$f" "${f/.wma/.mp3}"; done
Quite so. Blue sky research has a much longer payback cycle (and sometimes doesn't pay back at all), but often has an astronomically high rate of return.

For many years the laser was considered to be a "solution looking for a problem", yet today they are absolutely ubiquitous in numerous applications and have contributed to the well-being of human-kind in innumerable ways (surgery, communication, safety, etc.)

When Maxwell studied the theory of electromagnetism it was absolutely blue sky research with questionable practicality. Yet the fruit of that research served as the foundation of innumerable inventions in the 19th and 20th centuries, easily responsible for hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of goods and services to be produced and delivered to people.
obviously they failed due to the longer domain name.
Buy it from DigiKey for $6.65 - http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?WT.z_ci...

Looks like it would be useful to have one or two lying around for misc. projects.
The poor are used a human shield because if the article had said something like:

education is a good with almost-inelastic demand, hence
we can raise prices arbitrarily and in addition
eliminate government support for it :)

then they would not have been taken seriously.

Wrt "rich", other posts indicate that $70K/yr household income as the upper limit for financial aid in CA. That's hardly "rich".
Repost but if you have not yet read it:

My First BillG Review by Joel Spolsky

"He was flipping through the spec! [Calm down, what are you a little girl?]
... and THERE WERE NOTES IN ALL THE MARGINS. ON EVERY PAGE OF THE SPEC. HE HAD READ THE WHOLE GODDAMNED THING AND WRITTEN NOTES IN THE MARGINS.
He Read The Whole Thing! [OMG SQUEEE!]
The questions got harder and more detailed."

There is a nice little koan about technical management in that essay too: "he just wants to make sure .."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html

And another classic billg story (related by Jeff Raikes of Sales):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=553965
The understanding of the atom world lead us to nuclear energy and nuclear bombs, a better understanding of the quantum world might lead us to similar discoveries (for example, quantum computers or anti-gravity). The bottom line is the more we know the cooler things we can build :)
Huge respect for CEOs that regularly visit the front lines. Apparently Bezos swears by it.

http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-jeff-bezos-work...
Did you mean unintelligible?
Preface every line with two spaces to preserve
newlines.
I don't think it is a scam to sell products with different features and specifications and allow the customer to choose the product that is right for them. Could search technology improve this process? Sure, but it isn't a scam.

Furthermore, cameras used in the example are quite different -- the more expensive camera shoots 720p video, has optical image stabilization, and a larger display.
Shell code written in English
But he did ask a (relatively) expert - his video developer friend.`
Data is not simple rows. Data is complex, human generated stuff that has both implicit and explicit structure and it does not collapse down well to any single abstraction, not even object graphs. Fine, so we have to pick some abstraction. That doesn't mean the abstraction we pick is necessarily appropriate. Memory is an abstraction; we could just dump all of memory out to a file and call that a database (and folks used to, and still do sometimes). It has issues for persistent databases, like brittleness and pointer swizzling, so we adopt a more high level one.

The relational view of data is a higher level abstraction but that doesn't mean it's an especially useful one. Hierarchy is something that comes up constantly in the real world and that is something very awkward to represent in a relational database. You can try to use Codd's adjacency list, but reassembling the links is costly and drilling down a hierarchy requires a database query at every level. If you don't believe me, here's a use case: I want everything there is about a sub-part of a Bill of Materials with one query and without having to grope through the entire index. There's a reason why Oracle implemented CONNECT BY, which is abjectly non-relational.

Also the sheer amount of research and work that goes into making even a simplistic relational database responsive is enormous; when Baker wrote this it was not uncommon to lose two orders of magnitude throughput by going to a relational database from a custom written one, and if you were very lucky be able to claw back another order of magnitude by indexes. People today are complaining greatly about the inefficiencies of using row-structured data when you're usually interested in the columns. Even today the way to get maximum throughput from a database is to denormalize and in doing so virtually set the schema in stone.

A 1960s era heirarchial database could traverse a heirarchy as fast as the computer could request data from memory. The models were brittle and didn't always represent the real world well, but you could run an entire country's airlines in the amount of computing power your watch has now. The banks today rely on IBM's IMS, which is hierarchial.
Regarding the SSH tricks:

If you change the port of SSH, change it to still use a port under 1024. On most Unix systems these are privileged ports that require root to open. This ensures that if there is a process listening there that it was opened by root and not some intruder hoping to get your password to sudo to higher privileges.

Regarding removing reserved space:

Be careful doing this on some file systems. Some filesystems may need to write more data to a journal or are set up with copy-on write and will not be able to delete files if you have no space left on the disk. Reserving a little extra space for this can be necessary. A little extra space also lets you have some space to work with if you need to temporarily create or move files before you can free up the space.

Also, if you're going to use a non-standard port, set up your .ssh/config!

Host s
hostname server
port 666

That is a little more versatile than setting up an alias as it will work from any shell and you can specify any ssh daemon in there.

See `man ssh_config` for more info.
Nothing, it's a parody written fairly recently. Feel free to email the author to find out more.
I end up using this template for a lot of operations. Where rename really seems applicable is when you want to do complicated renamings such that regular expressions really are appropriate.
The problem isn't the backwards compatibility, it's the lack of features. If IE, the built-in browser for Windows, had correct support for HTML5 and CSS3, people would be far more likely to be using standards-supporting browsers, because IE users are more likely to upgrade their version of IE than to switch browsers.
That goes away if you clear your cookies
Yeah. I used to love Bash but these days anything that takes more than a couple of lines I just use Perl. Its ubiquity helps a lot.
I just went looking to see if the $114 camera did HD video, since I'm planning to upgrade my Canon five megapixel camera explicitly to get HD video and big enough storage to make it worth having. So, for me, that's a huge feature difference. I don't know if I'm an average digital camera consumer, but I'm definitely not a serious photographer or videographer.
I am reminded of the story about how the market for the Xerox photocopier was initially computed. # of secretaries x # letters / day * average # mimeograph copies of each letter. The potential of the technology to affect the use of its outputs was ignored.

My wife and I recently upgraded our crappy mobiles to Droids. We hadn't at all considered the value of geolocating each other, but we quickly realized that a significant portion of the calls we made to each other were for the sole purpose of asking, "Where are you?" or "How close to X are you?" The potential uses of a new technology are not always obvious before adoption.
Deploying A Web Application with Git and FTP
Classmates.com exec to PM in charge of CPA offers: "I don't know how you sleep at night."

Source:

http://customerecosystem.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/why-zynga-...
There is a whole world out there that is not dependent upon the internet and web sites. A few suggestions :

Advertise in insurance trade specific publications.

Attend insurance industry specific conventions / exhibitions.

Bulk mail (yes, snail mail) using rented industry specific lists.

Cold call using yellow pages.
I'm not sure about lingua franca but it does kinda want to be the language of the web. You're already running it on the browser. So there is a synergy in having it on the server also. GWT lets you do write sides in Java, but there really isn't any reason not to do both sides in Javascript.
See also http://rhomobile.com/

Rhomobile has a Ruby-on-Rails inspired framework to run a scaled down Ruby 1.9 implementation that seems to act as an internal web server, allowing iPhone/Blackberry apps to be written in Ruby and HTML templates. The code you write seems to have access to native phone capabilities like GPS.

The main drawback of RhoMobile seems to be the lack of a polished feel, looking like the browser application it really is. (Wikimedia mobile uses RhoMobile for its iPhone app).
Thanks James. I appreciate the info.

Right now, I prefer to upload to the local filesystem then process and store on S3 via DelayedJob. But I will give this a try.

Are there any plans for add-ons that allow EBS storage (or something along those lines)?
IPhone Web Apps as an Alternative to the App Store
Warming's impacts sped up, worsened since Kyoto
Right, but doesn't this effectively double or triple your bandwidth usage on S3? (since you're uploading, downloading, then re-uploading)
It doesn't actually damage it, it just gunks it up and increases the risk of heat damage if it isn't cleaned periodically. The real thing with the Apple employees I think is they didn't want to mess with cleaning it and whined about it.
That applies to standalone websites, not webapps-as-an-appstore-alternative, which is what (I thought) the discussion was about.

As a distribution outlet, nothing (yet) can compete with the app store.
I apologize if I've distracted anyone with the "industrial" reference. I'm much more interested in the science behind the climate change [insert synonym for industry here]. I am very sorry that any industrial effects are more interesting the the quality-of-science issues. But here we are discussing industry...

It's my understanding ( and please correct me if I'm wrong ) that the dataset in question is one of the core underpinnings of the findings of the UN's IPCC. And I'm not up-to-date on the policy implications in your country, unless you live in Canada. But in chilly Canada, I see our local carbon-tax lobby use the global warming meme in their effort to impose heavy taxes on our industrial base. Hence, the "de-industrialization" angle.

I'm concerned that this might involve more power-grabbing than scientific concern for our future. Hence the interest in properly designed and documented datasets.
Douglas Adams on the "Internet":

I don’t think anybody would argue now that the Internet isn’t becoming a major factor in our lives. However, it’s very new to us. Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people ‘over the Internet.’ They don’t bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans ‘over a cup of tea,’ though each of these was new and controversial in their day.