skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Doesn't the idea that there are thirty million piano-playing Chinese children imply that there is also a massive impending expansion in total addressible worldwide market?

The era of the 6-figure starting salary for MBA's may be drawing to a close (though it is not, as my little sister will tell you, for law school grads), but the forces that demolished Big Auto are specific and concrete; no similar force applies to "white collar" in general.
There is nothing and I mean nothing that a smart team of 20 somethings can't build nowadays.

Define "team", but I think you are overgeneralizing.
Science is primarily about trying to explain the world. That's the theoretical, reasoning part. The explanations aren't derived from data; they begin as guesses.

What makes science special happens when two theories conflict and reason cannot choose between them. That's when experiment is used. (The theory which least explains the results is then rejected.)

Scientists use reason more than they use evidence, and most theories are rejected without bothering to test them.

What isn't widely acknowledged is that evidence itself isn't pure data but rather data + interpretation. Sometimes a better explanation can completely reverse the conclusion initially 'drawn' from a set of data.
http://www.matt.cc

http://whatilearnd.com/

http://www.marco.org/
That is a really really good idea amichail.

I've been playing around with applying pagerank to people to figure out if there is a way to really use it, I think you have really nailed it with that idea.

You'll have to somehow make it 'multi-valued' so someone can be endorsed in multiple topics.

Now you need to follow through and work out how you'd implement it.
I appreciate you taking the time to reply, but I'm not sure I understand you. You seem to be claiming that what I've outlined has a flaw, but I don't understand your objection. I don't just pull out any sentence with (for example) "tail" at the front, I have to find one that has the hash I sent you.

Could you expand a little further as to why the scheme I've described doesn't work?

Thanks.
Prince of Persia source code documentation [1989] [pdf]
Two out of his first three quotes are not actually in some form of future tense. "We are", and "I am getting ready" are both present tense, albeit of differing forms. Of course, he's correct that they're talking about things that will materialize in the future.
The added benefit is that even if your app does eventually fail you have learned a bunch of new things that you can now apply to work, your next app, life and the broken plumbing you've been meaning to get to.

This is how I learned CSS and jQuery -- working on http://take3.movielandmarks.com (which is nowhere near complete, and needs a rewrite in Python to keep me happy).
How PlayClaw works with Multicore Processors while Recording Video from Game
Bruce Schneier literally lives by his reputation, to dent it due to carelessness is sloppy, that's simple.

What bothers me is that this has now been up for hours, and the comments there even mention the source but Bruce has so far not felt the need to place a link to the source.
Are there any open source-style projects underway yet to fix up the code & data? I keep thinking this is the next obvious thing to do.

The climate models must be specified somewhere in the literature. Data can be munged. What stands in the way? Is the data in some legal netherworld that prevents redistribution?
Curious to what are the various topics you covered under the facts-of-life conversation?
Mechner has also taken the liberty to share his old journal entries from the Prince of Persia era. A lengthy, inspiring read, and highly relevant to people trying to build something.

Check them out on his website:

http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/
What a waste of money for a company that isn't making any. Also, from the photos, it seems way too dark. I think I'd be depressed by about the 2nd week of working there.
What powers, specifically, do you think the WP elite are wielding against the newcomers?
One really important point, that is not mentioned, is that even if a great app exists, you will not be able to make any money off it. That's why it makes sense to build and own the app your self.
Ask HN: Which Firefox add-ons do you use?
Just looking for some interesting firefox add-ons and was wondering what other people use. At the moment I only have add block.
I have a prepaid phone, and it has one of three-- sort of. It's got a browser that opens occasionally when the phone's in my pocket and drains my minutes, but I wouldn't describe it as any sort of actual internet access.
If they did write that down in their lecture notes, that would actually be an instance of the Liar's Paradox.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar_paradox
A History of the Table Fork
I wish some of my friends got this. So much we could have done!
Mandriva Stuff, OOo4Kids Now as Sugar Activity
Black Friday Is for Suckers
Ask HN: Help me find the right font
I'm a web developer with a severe visual impairment. I'm legally blind. Until recently, I've been using a fairly standard (9pt) font size in my editor, because I liked having all of that space when writing code. However, it forced me to sit rather hunched over and close to the monitor in order to see it, which has started causing neck problems.

A simple solution is to bump up the font size (I already work on a 24in monitor). I can get used to not having as much real-estate to work with, but now I can't find a good monospaced font that looks decent at larger sizes (say, around 14pt). Everything I've tried either looks pixelated, which I find very distracting, or is still too thin to really be that much more legible to me.

I need a medium-weight, monospaced font that won't look terribly pixelated and jagged at larger sizes. Does such a font exist? Any suggestions?

Thanks!
Is it urgent or important?
Really interesting, but where / how is the user's session data stored? client side or server side?

From the article:

There are two ways to do this. Firstly, each time a web page is requested, embed the entire context of the session into it so that the context is returned whenever a request is generated from that page. Alternatively, the application server has to maintain a list of all the contexts of all active sessions and associate each context with a session identifier.

[...]

I chose to implement a web session library based on the second concept.

That would make it server side.
The original blog post is not responding, presumably due to traffic, so I am going off the screenshot provided by Ajaxian. The quotes from Ajaxian say that the original author suggested that the V8 and Nitro engines were faster at doing JPEG encoding than the AS3 VM. The times given in the screenshot list 703ms and 504ms which I take as the same test with 2 different results. Using the size of the image from the screenshot as 200x255 image I used a AS3 code test, made in Flex, that compares different encoding libraries speed in AS3. The slowest of these libraries encoded a same size JPEG in 270ms and the fastest at 16ms. This test only shows that the JPGEncoder class from the as3corelib library is slower than his JavaScript implementation, not that the AS3 VM is slower than Nitro or V8.

Without the blog site being up I can't do any further testing though to use identical JPG source images but I do take notice when one engine is claimed faster than another. JavaScript and ActionScript are very similar so I suspect most of these libraries, other than the C/C++ based ones, can be ported to JavaScript as he mentioned doing based off the as3corelib implementation, JPGEncoder.

You can see the source I used to compare AS3 JPEG encoding libraries here http://segfaultlabs.com/blog/post/asynchronous-jpeg-encoding

Edit: He said that the Nitro and V8 engines were faster but his test proved otherwise. His conclusion was that it was only slower because JavaScript has no static types, vectors, byte-arrays and is not pre-compiled.

Additional Edit: Cool! JPEG encoding in JavaScript :)
Firebug: http://getfirebug.com/ - The single best add-on for Firefox I have installed.
... the fact is, everything we know about carbon dioxide
indicates that it has a greenhouse effect, because it is
more efficient at passing sunlight through to the earth,
than at allowing that energy to reradiate back into space
as heat.

As much as I hate to beat a dead horse, I find myself compelled to spell out, for those that may share her confusion, that there is no "indication" that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. We just know, for sure, that yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas. That has never been in debate, by anybody. Monkeys know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. The debate is, and always has been, whether the 3.2% of atmospheric CO2 emitted by humans, which comprises 0.28% of the greenhouse effect on earth (counting water-vapor) is actually significant enough to be the cause of measurable extra warming, above and beyond the warming that would occur anyway, here in the waning years of the latest ice-age. It's never been about whether CO2 was a greenhouse gas or not.
As said above, this is well known in crypto circles. There's even a quantum coin flipping protocol to address the possible future case where these sorts of factoring-based bit commitment schemes are insecure. (see the seminal BB84 quantum cryptography paper or a recent experimental demonstration of a "fair" quantum coin flipping protocol by F. Bussieres.)
I don't personally use this at a large size, but I have found that it looks pretty nice even when large. http://damieng.com/blog/2008/05/26/envy-code-r-preview-7-cod...

I hope you find something that suits you. Best of luck.
What's more off-putting is the up-front refusal to use a spellcheck. It means that he's aware he has a problem and refuses to fix it.

If there were more of an explanation, it might endear me to the guy. If he dug into some of the haphazard history of English spelling conventions and refused to adhere to illogical paradigms, I'd give him credit. If he mentioned something from communications theory, I'd give him a pass. But the explicit statement that "my idiosyncrasies are higher priority than your user experience" is not a good statement to make. It's a significantly worse impression than a simple typo, and a stronger one because it's intentional instead of an oversight.
Lovely

Total RAM: 127.75K

Total Diskspace: 252.5k
The bigger problem with posts like this is that they fail to appreciate a very simple truth: Either humans are affecting the climate or they don't.

If they don't then it doesn't matter, if they do then we should study to what extent.

Reduction to extremes shows that we do, after all, every organism affects the biosphere simply by being alive, and we do a lot more than just being alive.

So the question to answer is not whether or not global warming is 'real' or not. If it is we'll find out eventually.

We need to find out long before it becomes evident whether or not we have a positive, a negative or a neutral effect.

If the planet is heating up and we can't influence it we can stop the debate. If the planet is warming up or cooling down and we can influence it we first need to ask ourselves if influencing it is a good thing, and if we can we need to figure out the best way to go about it.

The current 'fix' to me looks more like development aid in disguise, where rich countries give poor countries some money so the rich countries can continue to pollute much like they did before. That certainly won't solve anything, in the words of Douglas Adams, it isn't the green pieces of paper that are unhappy. It is us that will be unhappy if we do not take these issues seriously.

One of the bigger issues with the climate science emails is that anything that is developed outside of the light of day usually can't stand the light of day. So we need transparency and really well performed very well checked science, where each and every result is available to all parties.

With the adversarial nature of the subject I don't doubt there will be plenty of interpretations of the data so we don't have to worry about finding people to 'peer-review' the data. The upside is that by the time that the truth will be out it will be unassailable, whatever it is.

Open source is a great model to apply to science, many eyes works well for finding bugs, whether it is in software or in climate models that shouldn't make too much difference.

And then once we all agree on the facts we can look for a solution, if we have to, and if there is one.
In 2.5 they made try/except/finally possible.
Inconsolata is amazing. It looks amazing at larger sizes. Also it is free.

http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html
If I could turn my urge to strangle developers into pure energy, the US would be off Oil :/
The pager network was/is more like a twitter stream. Messages are sent in a plaintext stream of the format [date][time][network][destination #][msg type][content] and individual pages just pull their own messages from that stream.

I don't really think there is an invasion of privacy, and in any case I think it has sufficient historical value as to override privacy concerns. True, someone will probably get divorced due to the revelation of some old affair, but I am not going to lose sleep over it.
You truly believe that no matter what you try to get good at, it's equally good?

I agree that you need to get past the initial total incompetence, but redefining "passion" to mean "something you worked on for a long time" is ignoring or denying the idea that passion means enjoyment.
Whoa, that looks great. Thank you so much!
OK, HN is fast and awesome. Both of you have suggested great looking fonts that are far superior at the bigger size to the ones I've been using. Thanks a bunch!
There were some stories published recently how difficult it is to gain access to the raw data. CRU and organizations like it have exclusive access to it and as referenced in few of those emails(they refer to people asking for access as "loons trying to disprove") are quite reluctant to give the control away. Why give something so valuable away when by just creating pretty graphs out of it you can secure government funding, place in most reputable science journals and hundreds of citations a year from people having to cite YOUR papers instead of the real data which they can't access?
Reading the 9/11 Wikileaks is a Little Like Reading a Twitter Timeline
VC-Backed Co. Pushes Envelope With Postmarked Email Service
It really is beautifully designed isn't it! Weirdly I still enjoy doing all of my designs on paper which makes this even more tempting!
By camera phone pictures he means amateur porn. Rscott is just trying to be modest.
Yes. If you listen to what everyone is telling you without evaluating it for yourself, you are indeed a fool.
EVE is great, but WoW is way more profitable.
Product design debt versus Technical debt
I'm trying to find the article, but I think it's zuck who said something like:

"A company/team is getting a group of really smart people together to work towards the same common goal and vision while making a living. "

That's all it is to me. Have a goal/vision that is so awe inspiring that it attracts really smart and great people to work together with you to achieve it.
It's missing Geelbe.
Apple Unveils ‘Live Music’ in iTunes
10 Platform Games for iPhone with Amazing Design
Irritation makes an oyster grow pearls.
I have worked remotely a lot and I've always tried to reduce the overhead of communication by actually doing stuff rather than saying I'll do it, etc. I.e. rather than

I'll look at it

....

Looking at it

....

Working on it

....

Done.

I try as much as possible to do

<longer delay>

Done.

Mostly because of "The Mythical Man-Month." Some people don't deal well with it, though.
Well that is how they are designed technically, but I doubt most of the senders and recipients of the pages were aware of this.
Firebug

Web developer toolbar

Selenium

Colourzilla

Measureit

Delicious bookmarks

Diigo bookmarks

Accessibility Extension

HTML validator

Pencil

Fangs

Adblocker

Inline Code Finder

Chatzilla

Screengrab
I wonder how that would function, ie whether a collaborative tool could be set up to sort through them. I can see easy analysis possibilities employing spreadsheets, but it would be most useful for historical research if there were some way to tag them, filtering out automated status messages and the like.
The link is up now.
Thought it interesting how the programmers hinted in their code at problems with the climate model. These were not informative comments. They were disclaimers. I see them all the time. People put them in their code when they are too lazy to properly figure something out. They often say something like, "Yeah, I know. This is an awful hack. Fix later."

Quote from article:
Programmer-written comments inserted into CRU's Fortran code have drawn fire as well. The file briffa_sep98_d.pro says: "Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" and "APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION." Another, quantify_tsdcal.pro, says: "Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend - so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!"
Tense is surprisingly difficult to nail down in English. By some definitions, it doesn't have a future tense at all, it has a handful of future 'aspects,' the difference being that a tense uses verb inflection and an aspect uses auxiliary verbs. The examples show how the distinction between an auxiliary and lexical verb can blur around the edges, which is actually how auxiliary verbs formed in the first place.

Sorry for the nitpicking, and you are correct that there's a mismatch between the title and the content (an increasingly severe problem). I was hoping for a linguistics discussion.
I didn't actually notice the date until after I'd posted it. A lot of the information still seems relevant now though.
Yes, this is something I always say when others tell me that someone else has already executed my idea. If I have a problem and am not aware of a product out there that solves it, then there MUST be others who are no more aware than me. Those are the potential customers you can grab through great marketing. Not all business owners are aware of 37signals' products, and there are many other markets where a portion of them are unaware of even the mainstream and standard solutions available to them.

That's not to say you shouldn't research your target market for competitors, but don't be discouraged by pools full of sharks. There's enough prey for everyone, I think.
It's hard to believe this actually happened, and if it did, you should be able to provide a link to the conversation. I'm guessing "Special:Contributions/chaosprophet" is you (after looking at the "chaosprophet" on Twitter and the associated blog), and I don't see any argument about cats being fungi.
RackspaceCloud.com sites is exactly this. You create sites, they come with uber-simple control panels, stats, email and databases. I really think you should look again at RackspaceCloud.com sites.
> whether the 3.2% of atmospheric CO2 emitted by humans

313 ppm in 1960 to 383 ppm in 2009 is 3.2%? Or is there indication that this increase isn't human caused?

> which comprises 0.28% of the greenhouse effect on earth

It's 9-26% for CO2, according to Wikipedia. (Which is a surprisingly large range.) Why the disparity with your figure?

I don't know anything about climate science, and I don't have an agenda, but I'm just wondering if your figures are based on anything.
Why don't people focus more on the benefits of global warming? The scenarios I've heard of are on the scale of 10s-100s of years, plenty of time where we can plan a good response. Plus, there's the question: mightn't the earth work better when it is warmer?

There are so many different ways to go with global warming, even if it is true, but we're constantly just told to be scared out of our minds about it and do whatever the experts tell us will save our hides. A sure recipe for manipulation if there ever was one.
I understand their concern.

It's easy to imagine loons (or worse) getting access to the data, publishing findings that prove the warming is indeed caused by the decline in the pirate population, getting airtime in Fox News and other similar media outlets and making, thus, it true to a large chunk of the populace.

We don't need people, deliberately or not, spreading disinformation.
I don't really understand the argument that Google is profiting off news sites. Google is driving traffic to sites that wouldn't otherwise have it, and as far as I've seen they don't even place ads on Google News. Google should be charging the newspapers for access - not paying them.

It's also a bit rich for newspapers to argue that they're providing much of value, when so many stories are blatant ripoffs from their competitors or lightly rewritten wire articles. Public consumption of the news is shifting to a 'singles' model, like the music industry, but newspapers persist in acting like they're on an 1890s Vaudeville circuit. The industry should shrink to the point that the only survivors are producing original, valuable content.
I prefer this gem: "I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870457620457452...
I'm not sure about your SEO policework here, Jacques. I'm pretty sure pages on Wikipedia do benefit from the cumulative pagerank of WP as a whole.
is this common practice? why would someone collect all this info at this point in time?
I think the problem comes when you start to stray from objective facts, which really are inherently neutral, and get into more subjective evaluations of those facts or outright personal opinion.

On the tricky pages I encountered, often the problem was that the material was presented as a description of something, followed by advantages and disadvantages sections, and while the description may have been factual, that's where the objectivity ended. Perhaps from Wikipedia's point of view that means the pros and cons simply shouldn't be featured.

Realistically, however, someone researching a new field will probably be interested in such information, and many pages on Wikipedia do have this structure. Rather than trying to push water uphill, it might be a smarter move to adapt to the reality and do it properly.
any word on what swipely is doing?
"Why don't people focus more on the benefits of global warming?"

Think about it: if we realize the Earth will turn into Venus 2.0, we will see a lot of money being invested in the development of cheap and reliable space travel...
It was measured via nominations and votes, surprisingly Geelbee did not receive a lot of popular support.
The goal of Wikipedia isn't truth, it's verifiability. Whether it's possible to be truly neutral or not is besides the point. NPOV isn't a policy designed to converge on truth. It's a policy designed to converge on a set of verifiable statements.
In your opinion, which are the most interesting?
How does that verify anything? You still flipped the coin, then wrote the sentence. The two do not have to be related (say you flip the coin and get heads, then write tails, what happens then?).
Well, that page says "The Wikipedia Usability Initiative is realized by a grant from the U.S.-based Stanton Foundation." So I'm not entirely sure if this explains it. (Nearly a million dollars seems a lot of money for a redesign + usability study, as well.)
The main verbs are pretty much unconditionally about present actions: "We are in talks", and "I am getting ready". Of course the complete phrases certainly look to the future, which is the author's point. I'm just being nitpicky.
I think Ikea is great, but I hope this is not replicated massively by other brands.
How about Mac Vs PC ads from apple? Does that make apple "against Microsoft", whatever that means...