skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The entire west african coast is made up of people who farm plots of land. The entire village system across the congo, through kenya, to sierra leone is made up of a chief representative system. There is very few instances of a hereditary "president" system in most of Africa. You pick a single example and then say "that is how Africa is". To be frank, it's just stupid.

Africans are completely different. An ethiopian looks very different from a South African, who looks different from a Hausa. What type of absurd extrapolation are you making when you claim your limited experience is representative of the entirerity of the continent?

What you are doing here is picking examples that can support your view of Africa as a continent of savage chiefs that kill people (and then boil them in large metal pots likely).

I don't want to continue this. It's making me angry, and people like you are not worth my being angry about.
Oh well then I guess we'll just have to give up on empiricism.
It means our subdivision of a year into months of 28-31 days is quite arbitrary and purely historical.
You may enjoy readinghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragons_Egg
Wake me when they release the data and the source code to process it.
I can tell you exactly why "That Alien Message" gets more attention: because it's a story, and a cracklin' good one. Human brains are hard-wired to be attracted to good stories. This is why mythology is so powerful.

BTW, there is a pretty well worked out theory of what makes a good story. Geeks tend to pooh-pooh this theory because it's associated with the "squishy" field of stage and screen drama. IMHO this is a serious mistake. The world today really needs a better mythology. Those in its current inventory are getting obsolete. Some of them are becoming actively harmful. Coming up with a good mythology is not so easy. The last person I know of who did a notable job was L. Ron Hubbard (at least, he's the last one who did it intentionally). Imagine how much better off the world would be if Hubbard hadn't been a psychopath. I hope some people reading this might start devoting a little time to thinking about this problem.
Chromium Software Updates: Courgette
have you tried this: http://www.mcsquare.me ? not sure if it'll fit your needs, that's my suggestion
http://rondam.blogspot.com/2008/10/reflections-on-being-ai-i...
I think they may have a plan B ready:

http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/Tera-Scale/1826.htm

It's not trivial to engineer a massively-multi-core general-purpose processor. I would try it with MIPS or ARM instead of x86, but I guess this is not an option for Intel.

AMD, however, doesn't need to preserve the x86 ISA's status as an industry standard. Quite the contrary: anything they do to hurt Intel will only make them stronger. And they have some folks with massively-multi-core expertise in-house.
Codezero Microkernel v0.2 Released
That's sweet. It _used_ to be $5 movie AND you got a free popcorn, but a few months ago, they split them up, and moved free popcorn to Tuesday.
Detecteaza cine este invizibil pe Messenger
That depends primarily on whether the patent holder licenses it, and for a reasonable price.
DSCM - A Move Back to Big Bang Integration
The Secret Weakness of North East Investors
In a speech today, Gordon Brown had the following to say:

"And from April next year ordnance survey will open up information about administrative boundaries, postcode areas and mid-scale mapping."

So that seems a bit less tentative to me. We shall see.
While there's some truth to that, I'm not aware of a de-facto standard 12V connector.

I guess SATA power could be interesting as it has 12V, 5V and 3.3V rails, but I don't think it's designed to withstand as many plug cycles as USB.

Firewire can supply power at 12V, but that's not standardised, so no device can rely on it.

Many devices use 12V, but they use a vast spectrum of different plugs and sockets - many are coaxial power connectors of different shapes and sizes, some are not. USB is a surprisingly good choice, as it's standardised at 5V with a minimum of 100mA and the option to draw up to 500mA. It's also vastly more popular than any other similar connector.
I personally use gregarius that I host myself. Not perfect, but good enough for my needs and my independence :)
Climate tools for Copenhagen and beyond
It's more entertaining
Hnsh - Hacker News from the command-line
Way back in 2000 at the Foresight Associates conference, Eliezer stood his ground against Marvin Minsky calling his ideas "rubbish". I was impressed by how Eliezer answered each objection with deep insights into the nature of AI.
Yes... I would like to think that no politician would dare back track after a strong statement like that, but you never know!
Mads Tofte - Functional programming and the Standard ML
The timing certainly makes it seem like a response to the recent email leaks. I kind of hope it is. The scientific community should always respond to skepticism with evidence.
On being an AI in a box
Øredev videos
I'd say the closest thing we have a 12v standard is the barrel plug used in a car cigarette lighter port. Of course, that's a pretty ugly solution for an outlet.
Nokia phones have this bar code scanner application built in. But I never had the chance to use it before :)

If you have a phone with such an app, you can try it out on images here -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_Code
Adventure Free Game Online ( 1 )
it would be really interesting if the government attempts to go after you for hosting that document.
The Supreme Case Against Sarbanes Oxley
sorry, didn't see those links.
Concord Computer Repair Services
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hmmm maybe some day google will pay for me to tattoo a bar code on my arm so if i'm at a bar a girl can scan me and find out all my dating statistics. Could link it to my facebook/twitter/linked in. :)
Same author says "Apple ditches 32nm Arrandale, won't use Intel graphics":

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/12/5/apple-ditches...

If this rumor is true, it is quite an extreme move. Is 3D graphics that important nowadays? I thought most laptops were bought for work, not games.
Ask HN: How to learn to web dev for real ?
Hello everyone

After reading all I could find on Python/Django/Ajax/JS/etc, I find myself able to write simple sites (blogs/etc). But I still don't know how to do a real project.

- Methods and tools to updating/patching a working server (with thousands of users).
- Creating scalable sites
- Setting up a testing environment
And much more.

Can any one recommend articles/books on programming that go beyond the "blog app" ?
I think the "suit to an interview" case is a good example because that quite clearly is not a case of dressing "well" or "properly" but rather of conforming to the irrational (neckties!) dictates of people who are going to give you money, but who would otherwise would never be considered fashion or style authorities.

Yet, most people offering it seem to be implying that the language you use at an interview is somehow "better", more "standard" or clearer.

I immediately think of the situation of two "dialect" speakers at an interview, both using a different form for "clarity". If these two (or two doctors etc.) can't speak to each other in their own dialect, which I'm guessing most folks of the above option wouldn't think proper, then where does that leave the clarity argument.

(I'll also note the circularity of excluding people who don't talk in a certain way from something, then claiming that you need to talk in a certain way to become part of that group).

But I have to wonder why this isn't just a contribution to the original thread.
there is a pretty well worked out theory of what makes a good story

links please
I really wish Apple would take a leaf out of Google's book on this. I'm getting quite fed up with 70MB+ updates twice a month.
Pop-up book about the Large Hadron Collider
His narration is virtually unchanged since he started about 60 years ago. Please do watch Life on Air: David Attenborough's 50 Years in Television. He tends to wear similar looking dresses for all episodes of a series, so that the attention of the viewer is not on the anchor, but on the topic at hand. And when his trousers start fraying near the ankles, he snips off the cloth with a scissor.
What Do Baby Boomers Want From Technology?
Password security for boneheads
It is true that cheerleaders when treated wrong will disappear and critics will weather the storm with you, it is with the caveat, in most context.

In the context of corporate culture and internal critics, I have seen numerous occasions when critics have left after weathering the storm when corporate bosses do not share the same passion towards users (employees and customers). In such scenarios critics have little to no control to implement fixes and are labelled negative under the definition of not meeting business goal (read: does not make the boss look good).

This may very well be because 'in American culture, that criticism and negativity go hand-in-hand', tho, I think this is unlikely.
Unless you depend on Mac-only software, I strongly advise you to try a modern Linux like Ubuntu or Fedora. You may encounter updates a couple times a month, but updates this size are very rare and so is the need to reboot after them.

I know. I am a Linux fanboy.
Google: A friend or the "new Evil Empire"?
EZUnsecured.com Review - Jade Rock Enterprises LLC - PPMP Group
Holiday Season Microsoft Patch Tuesday
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I wish Microsoft would take a leaf out of anyone's book. Even the silliest of updates (definitions and rules for God's sake!) require a reboot: Just yesterday an update to the timezone rules forced me to restart Windows 7 (on my Desktop).
The Art of Logging.
Hmmm... I'd say that you better start coding and stop reading. It will be a mess at first but you have to gain some experience.

I don't want to discourage you but you probably won't have thousands of users on your apps at the same time at the beginning so don't bother with creating scalable sites yet. One day, you'll have some slowness on your app and you'll learn it at this moment.
I would be interested in hearing cperciva's take (since he's the author of bsdiff ...)
Adobe Reader - Register
I am not sure of this - In the next years, any good book is going to be pirated in the net

There is so much junk published these days (how do they manage to make money with such junk, is beyond me), so if I find a good book, I want to spend money and buy it (assuming of course, that I can afford it), just to encourage the author/publisher. The quality of publishing is going to go down even further (just take a look at clickbank and other sites advertising "how to make money with ebooks").

Publishers/Authors can complain all they want, but the truth is we simply do not have authors like we had before (Frost, Dickens etc).

I can't speak for others, but if I find a good author/book I want to spend money on their books.
"Pretty ugly" is an understatement. I don't think I've seen a single plug design that is less reliable.
WebKit nightlies have been updating differentially for a few weeks now. It's nice to see a 2 megabyte download instead of the previous 50 or so. It remains to be seen, though, if Apple incorporates this into its more generalized software updates. (Edit: given another comment, it appears they already do.)
Yeah, I'm a Linux sysadmin and I run Ubuntu at home, but I have a mac laptop because the hardware is nice and my experience with Linux on laptops is poor. Also, Omnigraffle is awesome.

Maybe I should give Linux another go on the laptop, when I have a couple of days to spare...
Well there is nothing stopping you from getting a small host somewhere and put up a site of some sort. This can then be used to practice the skills you will require to manage a host. Make sure that the site is actually being used for something so that you will need to maintain it and do upgrades.

Then you only have to learn how to...

1) Install and configure a machine
2) Configure a web server
3) Set up ssh access securely
4) Set up your database securely
5) Do backups (and as a test nuke the box and rebuild it from backups)
6) Automate the deployment of your application
7) Keep the machine up to date with security patches
8) Keep the hackers at bay
9) Monitor the general health of the machine and services

Basically you will start to learn the art of the sysadmin. It is a useful skill if you end up at a small company without a dedicated sysadmin and even if you have one it will have a better idea as to what is required to develop and host a site. Empathy with the sysadmin is always good thing.

You will learn a lot of new skills, most of which do not involve coding. I have a little hobby site that hosts fan art for a web comic, I have learnt much about automatic deployment by keeping the site up with minimal disruption. I have learnt much more about the running of databases (as opposed to just writing sql) and loads about unix security (users, groups, permissions, jails etc) that programmers just tend to ignore.

All for around $9 a month. Money well spent if you ask me.
I would suggest http://prgmr.com/xen/ for 6$ a month.
Have we not all seen a version of this at some point on reality tv, namely Big Brother?
It's been hinted at in dan_sim's post, but if you have a "real project" in mind just go do it. Learn what you're missing when you need to. You probably know more than you think.
hnsh is a program I wrote to let you catch up with HN from the shell. You can browse the front page, open up stories and open up comments. There are a couple other nifty features, but they're all listed on the page for you to read, so there's no use re-posting them here.

Hacker News, all keyboard, no mouse. Let me know what you think, HN.

I'll have to head off in a while (it's just past midnight here in Australia), but I'll definitely get back to any comments I miss.
Apple does use bsdiff for a lot of their updates by default (just not for iTunes/QT) -- I think they were some of the first to use it outside of FreeBSD.
That's not nit-ting at all - 2 and 3 years is a big difference. Was a typo :)
Also, in my experience, I haven't been able to learn anything "for real" without using it on a real project.
The characters are artificial, indeed, but not particularly intelligent ;-)

Care to elaborate a little more?
Someone Stole My Startup Idea – Part 2: They Raised Money With My Slides?
The AI box experiment
Seems like they are aiming at a different target. This article goes very deep with very specific inside knowledge of long-span development projects. TechCrunch is more current events across the industry.
This basically boils down to

how can a dangerous entity in captivity use bribes to attain freedom?

which seems like a common enough trope between humans that any transhuman AI, having read all of recorded literature, and having accessed all of that person's conversations, would have enough data points to pattern match to the right bribe methodology.
I've had two kernel updates (40+ MB downloads and a required reboot) in the past month or so on the latest Ubuntu, but in general you're right, these updates aren't usually this common.

OpenOffice updates seem to be the worst in Ubuntu; a few years ago, I remember a 100+ MB update to remove a logo from the splash screen!

By the way, this is probably the wrong place but I really don't like the new way it notifies you of an update - instead of a small icon in the systray and a notification, you now get update-manager appearing on top of whatever it is you're doing. A backwards step.
America's post fast food era & Europe's oldskool land lovers
I have already created a few small projects (the biggest being 2 weeks of work).

But there is nothing to show me if I correctly handle my prod-server updates (Now I upload, move, restart)

My testing is very basic.

And there is a general feeling of lack of infrastructure.

I would love to learn how to do a few-man-year project (from infrastructure's point of view)
The key: "While the common wisdom said that our success was going to be determined by which company executed better, the common wisdom was wrong. In a startup success isn’t about just execution, it’s how well we could take our original hypothesis and learn, discover, iterate and execute."

Good to see these guys kept their head in the game, instead of getting wrapped up in lawsuits.
Can someone fill me in on what Aardvark is, what makes it so amazing and why it's worth $30 mill?
An Inside View of Wilson Sonsini's Fabled Investment Fund
Yes, they were saying that bsdiff produces diffs 10x courgette.
I have a few sites on Webfaction already.

While I figured out how to do most things you mentioned. I feel like I am re-inventing the wheel with most of them.

Surely there are advanced, open-source deployment / backup / version /etc systems in use in big projects.

Thus I am looking for guidance on where to start learning that part of the web-development process
Too many wanna be lawyers, too few law firms
Looks interesting, but it does defeat the distraction-limiting device of having the only browser in you office on the laptop across the room. With this, I can procrastinate from any terminal.
Checkout our "winter style" design. Like it?
What Venture Capitalists Like and Don’t Like to See in University Spinoffs
I heard once that NSA guidelines are to print out PDFs, redact portions with a marker and then rescan them into new files.
The point is that most customers in the Third World are not able to afford the price point that makes such medicines profitable.

The workaround since 2000-01 or so has been differential pricing or licensing for the Third World. But this took decades to get agreements for that to happen.

Here's a good page about the situation with HIV drugs. http://www.avert.org/generic.htm
if/else cascades will live as long as long as junior developers themselves. Jeez some of the code I've personally written when I was younger...
Bribes and/or threats-- there's more than one possible motivator here.
Programming Puzzles, Chess Positions and Huffman Coding
Taking a picture of a decal sounds like the same amount of work as punching in its name. And, bonus, I don't have to be standing in front of a restaurant to type in its name.

Some variant of QR Codes have been the Next Big Thing in US mobile for at least 6 years, but I'm still not quite sure I see the point. Clever new data input methods (like on-screen keyboards that actually work and GPS) make this more like a solution looking for a problem.
So this strikes me as a fairly common problem. If I was going to solve it I don't think i would use a "dispatch table" I wold prefer to use polymorphism. In C# maybe i would have an interface with the common method. An abstract class to provide a default implementation. Then several classes which either implement the interface directory, or inherit the abstract class.
Are All Natural weight Loss Plans Beneficial to Your Health?
Accessing a MySQL database from Node.JS
I think that, instead of hiring those who correctly figure out what happens in this code, you should hire also those who have strong, almost allergic, reactions against it.

Do you really maintain stuff like this in your codebase?
Most IQ test are made to be gender neutral so one can not use the IQ test as a measurement who is the smartest. That men believe they are smarter might just correspond to higher levels of testosterone.
or this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196691
I can see it now -- a switch you flip that makes the program print "Do your work" to stdout every time you try to open a story.
At least on Fedora, if you use the binary NVIDIA driver, on kernel updates you also have to make sure that you update your drivers to use the latest kernel headers. I typically forget this step so after the reboot I'm greeted by the console prompt. Recompile, reboot again. Annoys the hell out of me.
Google Books is a prime example

For the purpose of demonstrating that Google is an evil empire then Google Books is an appalling example.

But the consensus is the company fomented an avoidable
backlash by forging ahead with its controversial plan
without consulting the parties with the most at stake.

In the list that follows you may have missed that Temple fails to mention 'consumers'. His perspective stems from a common evil perspective - that the world should rotate around the interests of the current elite.
dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=981167
My iPhone charges from the home adapter that came with the phone, of course. I also have a 3rd party USB charger that I bought two or three years ago for my iPod. It came with both a home adapter and car adapter. The car adapter will charge my iPhone but the home adapter won't.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatic_theory

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetics_(Aristotle)

http://www.amazon.com/Story-Substance-Structure-Principles-S...
The only people who like Sarbanes Oxley are those who are employed in order to comply with these regulations. The costs to private business aren't justifiable. Any public company can go bankrupt at any time just like Enron did. There's no sense in treating every corporation like criminals because some people lost some money in the stock market. I think the lesson here is that people need to become better educated in just how risky the stock market is and consider that before investing anything in it.
does anyone know a chat server in scheme? It would be helpful for me.
What I found most interesting (apart from that) was the last bit where he basically lays out a "mind game" they played on the competitor.

It sounds like a much better way to get ones own back compared to litigation! :)
I also work at an e-discovery company and can confirm the use of TIFF files as the court-admissible format for producing any sort of document (especially if it has redactions).

Here is an example of the process to apply redactions to a PDF file (or any sort of electronic document). The document is opened in a third-party native viewer with redaction capabilities (and not in the original application like Arcobat or Office). The end-user draws a black box over the appropriate text using the third-party native viewer. This redaction is saved as a separate layer that can be rendered on top of the native document when viewed in the software, as well as printed out. Finally, when documents need to be produced for court, they are printed out to a TIFF-printer driver, effectively converting them to TIFF and "burning in" the redaction layer. The TIFFs are delivered to the courts and opposing council.
There's no HN API, right? So, you have to screen-scrape?
I like it. But I already use elinks in a terminal (most current Linux distros make elinks availble).

Here is how I run it:

$ elinks news.ycombinator.com

Then:

Select story/comment : "Up" and "Down" arrows.

Open story/comment : "Enter"

Go back to previous page : "Back" arrow.

Quit : "q"