skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The blue dudes are very human-like, yet are not humans. Therefore, even if you saw them in real life, they would be in the "uncanny valley." The real uncanny valley only applies to attempted depictions of humans. Heck, a shorn chimpanzee is practically in the same uncanny valley as the blue dudes.
Removing the appendix would presumably take multiple mutations that would have other, possibly harmful effects as well. So it can't really happen overnight.
If you're going to worry about that you should have obfuscated your junk.
This is also actually a great book idea -- collecting war stories from older hackers that the younger ones might never hear otherwise.
To sum it all up: most "regular expression" implementations are actually powerful enough to describe context-free grammars, which are essentially regular expressions mixed with balanced parentheses. The fact that the author manages to never use the term "context-free grammar" leads me to believe he's unduly surprised at his discovery.
backups are for suckers. keep the data on a few different spinning disks. if you can solve data synch between two sites, just keep your data synched.

it's much better to ask yourself how long to replicate your existing system then how to back up. pxe boot to a kernel that you can install over the network with, bcfg2 to get the thing up to spec, start copying data.

a lot of machines can be back and configured in 5 minutes.

that said, i'm not you. i don't have terabytes of data to do statistics on. maybe there are other horrible details i'm forgetting. fast rebuilding is a pretty awesome strategy for a lot of cases.
You've got to be kidding me. And this justifies Microsoft, right?
Being the co-founder and lead dev of Plurk I can tell you this sucks :-( But we are looking at our legal options, thought legal war with Microsoft and especially legal war at Microsoft in China would require a lot of resources.

I think this will become a major concern for all startups that are doing lots of client-side stuff. If people have determination they can copy your code (even if all your code is obfuscated, which Plurk's is). And I don't know what the solution is - other than stronger IP laws in emerging countries.
There are so many better outlets, anyone who's feeling trapped on comp.lang.javascript should just go somewhere else.

I think it's a bold claim to say that David's understanding of the DOM is "significantly deeper" than John's. Especially considering that the DOM is not a particularly complex set of APIs.

One can only hope that he does actually improve Dojo, instead of destroy their community or credibility with his rants.
B&N nook rooted
"So politicians in the past were more informed because they had an easier time informing themselves."

I didn't mean that they were, quantitively speaking, more informed than they are now. I assumed it to be relative to the general population.

"Those capable of being more well-rounded may have found politics to be a better fit since it was still manageable at that time."

This is simply a related hypothesis to the selection of politicians back then based on the postulate that it was easier to be educated to a useful degree relative to the general population.

You're right, they can't be evaluated to an absolute, or even close certainty, without the necessary facts. But you can still come up with a hypothesis sufficiently close through deduction from facts we can both agree on. I was suggesting the latter for my argument.

Anyways I find this argument quite pointless. If you could do me a favor, let's stop discussing it.
Ask HN: When did Vim become "the cool editor"?
Remember back in the day, all of about 4 years ago, when men were men and all the cool kids were using Emacs? Seems like over the last few years Vim has climbed to the top of the Ruby-writing, Web 2.0-using pile, and I don't know exactly why. Admittedly, it does have syntax modes for many languages (just like Emacs), it loads fast, and you can run it on most any system (like Emacs). Why has the sysadmin's backup become the hep thing with the Github crowd?

Can anybody enlighten me? Was there a concerted digg-based PR effort for Vim or something? Just wondering how it got from "oh, that other editor" to "Vim! (what the hell is 'vi'?)". I generally use Acme myself so I'm a bit out of the loop.
Gaah. Only on Hacker News could I find so many objections to this straight-forward, widely accepted idea.

From the first two sentences of the linked Wikipedia article:

"In economics, a public good is a good that is non-rivalrous and non-excludable. This means, respectively, that consumption of the good by one individual does not reduce availability of the good for consumption by others; and that no one can be effectively excluded from using the good."

I think you would be hard pressed to find a better example than open source software.

Yes, obviously open source can be funded in a variety of ways, but supply falls short of demand due to the free-rider problem. How many more Rich Hickeys could we have if open-source software was a safe career decision?
His latest, on a bug report I filed against google closure:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.javascript/browse_t...

I'd like to see him write cross browser key-event handling code without doing UA sniffing. Honestly, I would like that. He committed an attempt to a branch of Dojo but it's not in service and doesn't actually work.
My guess is the Chinese team was facing strict deadlines and in the act of desperation they ripped off the code and layout from Plurk. It's outrageous and MS needs to straight up get sued for this.

Plurk has a very small team of less than 10 guys and in my eyes this is nothing less than MS bullying. This is not right.
So what if some people are free riders? What is that to you? Don't give up on a free society just because its costs are not equally distributed. By advocating government support, your saying that you want government to take by force from a bunch of people who couldn't care less about this software you like, so that you can continue using it for very little cost. You're exchanging everybody's freedom for your convenience. This is diametrically opposed to the attitude of the people who won freedom by giving up a lot of their own conveniences, like their property, the use of their limbs, and even their lives, so that their countrymen, most of whom they didn't know, could enjoy a little more freedom from taxation and other freedoms from government control.

Sure this is idealism, but it's idealism that's worth at least arguing and voting for. If you personally don't have enough money to support all the causes you want to support, persuade others to join you, don't try to force them.

Also, one reason for you having less money is that government has taken a lot of it to fund things that other voters have thought important enough to sacrifice your freedom for. Don't perpetuate the problem.

Besides, if Rick really wanted to, he could charge for clojure as he explains in his appeal. He could in effect, force his users to make the choice to fund him or forego using his product. Right now, users are not forced to make this choice. But that choice is still available to them. If he could get government funding by simply being open source, he would in effect be taking away users' choice to fund him. Users would be forced to fund him whether or not they used his product.
I put in $50 early on. Time for an ongoing contribution.
Unless I've missed further developments in the story, his business partner trusted the "backups" of the hosting company. Which did not properly restore.

So this is aimed one step farther up the chain.

Or, rather, it's aimed at all of us. It is a lesson that a lot of people need to learn.
Other way around. Darker skin in North America is correlated to more cancer, due to the consequent vitamin D deficiency.

Most of the population is now vitamin D deficient because people don't spend much time outside.
JSONView is my favorite here.
SSD Streaming at Last.fm
I think this was directed more at his business partners hosting company.
Not really. That's actually one of my favorite "health check" questions: when was the last time you restored?

Most places have very reliable backup procedures. Most of those have very poor restore procedures - I'd say about half fail when put to the test.
their design is a serious mistake that makes me question the vision behind the entire operation

IMHO, you're in the weeds about the vision of this device, the true disruptive potential doesn't have to do with out-designing Apple.

I also got to see a few of these throughout the weekend...there are ~15,000+ and they are unlocked. If Google goes to market (direct-to-consumer), priced above true cost & free from contract - instead of the absolute BS games that wireless providers have been stringing out - that is seriously disrupting the market.

To be honest, buttons are the last thing I would be worried about if Google turns the market on it's head. That said, they might, they might not, but the possibility has me curious until the actual release.
And in those situations, I just use tramp :)
I can’t think of very many objective criteria that would help someone choose one Realtor®¹ over another. They all get paid the same commission and they all have access to the same database of listings. So it makes sense that they would differentiate themselves from each other by using their handsome faces; what else is there?

¹That HN link to information about third-level keys has changed my life. Possibly not in a good way. :-)
Switching to a vi editor is a one-way trip. Once you have the muscle memory for vi's "normal mode", you become incapable of using any other editor. I started using vim back in 1997 because it shipped with BeOS, and my ability to use regular editors has been crippled ever since. :)

I don't think vim's ascendance is as recent as you think. Different communities might have been infected at different times. When I started working at Amazon almost five years ago, every engineer on my team was already a veteran vim user (as was I). And of course, vi has been a popular choice for Unix hackers for over 30 years. Maybe what's happening is that Unix tools in general are enjoying an uptick thanks to steadily growing use of Linux and Mac OS X.
Who chose them and what due diligence was performed? This is business 101.
I didn't see this for a week so you probably won't either, but here goes:

Productivity has grown a few percentage points a year, give or take, consistently, for a long, long time. One industry may boom for a decade, but the economy as a whole is relatively stable. I'm still not seeing anything wild.
You are clearly in the right. But a bit of advice: skip the whole look and feel issue* and stick to copyright infringement. Their code is exactly the same or highly derivative of Plurk code. This is pretty well-worn copyright territory, I don't think it would take much for Microsoft to back down.

* Apple sued Microsoft back in the day for stealing the look and feel of Mac OS, and failed. So that argument can be very hard to make.
If you think this post is about linguistics, you're missing the point

Since the restore is the important thing, that's the one you have to test. And if you haven't tested restoring, your backup is (quite possibly) worthless.
Read the article. They did.
> Do people choose realtors based on their photo?

Yes, but not consciously.

> Perhaps it's just some custom that's been passed down

I'm sure they have tested ads without photos, or with photos of something other than people, and found that photos of attractive smiling real estate agents work best.

If it surprises you that this works, I recommend reading Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini. He is a psychologist who has spent years not just studying persuasion in laboratory settings, but "going undercover", taking courses and even doing jobs in all kinds of persuasion professions - door-to-door salespeople, fund-raisers, recruiters, advertisers, etc. He noted hundreds of techniques that he was taught, or that he learned or observed, and categorized them into six principles of persuasion, each forming a chapter of the book.

The book is useful to entrepreneurs who need to market their startups, and useful to humans, who need to understand the techniques that are being used by sales people and marketers of all kinds. I recommend it to everyone. (In case you're worried, Cialdini doesn't recommend unethical techniques, though he does describe some so that you know what to watch out for.)
http://www.zimbio.com/Amanda+Knox/articles/58/Understanding+... makes a much better summary than the suggested reading posted to the original Less Wrong article. I hadn't heard about the bra strap.

On the other hand, http://knoxarchives.blogspot.com/2009/12/magical-bra-strap-f...
if you can solve data synch between two sites, just keep your data synched.

LOL! And if you get a corrupt block on your primary site, what're you going to do? All your standbys are instantly tainted!

Better leave this one to the grownups.
What if you hit rm -rf * and that gets synched?

I don't mean to be rude, I don't know anything about you, but if you were a system administrator working for me, today would be your last day.
maybe there are other horrible details i'm forgetting

Yes.

Why should I bother to write this? I'll outsource the task to the authors of High Performance MySQL, Second Edition, page 475:

Backup Myth #1: "I Use Replication As a Backup"

This is a mistake we see quite often. A replication slave is not a backup. Neither is a RAID array. To see why, consider this: will they help you get back all your data if you accidentally execute DROP DATABASE on your production database? RAID and replication don't pass even this simple test. Not only are they not backups, they're not a substitute for backups. Nothing but backups fill the need for backups.
By "their culture' do you mean China, or Microsoft?

I really don't think for example Google China would do this.
Replication doesn't defend you against deleting the wrong file, or messing up an update to your database, or any of a large class of PEBKAC issues.

It's also not useful if your main files get corrupted and you diligently propagate the corruption. See: ma.gnolia
Well said. I will include this in the article. Couldn't figure out how to say it well before because they are still not equivalent to context-free languages, they are just sometimes powerful enough to describe some of the context-free languages. Therefore I didn't include it. I think only the regex implementations with recursion are context-free. Others are not, therefore I wouldn't say "most" of them are.

You're right that I was surprised because I hadn't heard of recursive regular expressions in Perl before.

Update: I just remembered that extended regular expressions can even recognize recursive languages. Here is a regex that decides if the number is a prime:

perl -lne '(1x$_) !~ /^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/ && print "$_ is prime"'

This goes beyond context-free, therefore I couldn't just say "context-free" carelessly in the article.
I said specifically skin cancer. Naturally there's a balance between getting vitamin D and avoiding harmful UV. So the best skin tone to have differs in different environments (hence the gradual cline in skin tones over the world).
My father had appendicitis before the age of 25, despite a relatively simple diet. His father, who lived through WWII food rationing, had appendicitis, too. He wouldn't have survived without being cut open and treated with penicillin. For obvious reasons, I wish this were caused by culture, but genetics is almost certainly at work.
I'm a friend of the writer and we are actually looking at building something. "Wequi", or the original word for the game Go.
A real-time mirror won't help if your data gets corrupted (via a fat-fingered shell command, errant script, or a compromised system). When it's appropriate, it's awesome, but I don't think it's a replacement for a static "offline" backup,
Of course it would be his last day, he's a sysadmin and he just typed rm -rf * on /
Replication is not backup. It only protects against hardware failure.

Spinning disks are good though. A lovely spot for backups. Just put them in a different building.

Edit: In the time it took me to write this 5 other people also lambasted this poor fellow. Ouch.
I think that a lot of people think they have backups, but they've never restored them, so I thought it would be a good practice if everyone starting thinking in terms of "have we restored" rather than "are we backing up." Of course, there's no question that the thought process started when Jeff Atwood's personal blog was lost, but don't think for a minute that the only way I communicate with him is by blogging... we talk all the time, over skype, over email, over FogBugz, and sometimes, when there's something other people can learn, in public on the internet.
The axiis chart is based on traffic from w3schools.com: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

That's a site for an audience of web developers, so of course it's different from a general-interest site. But 24ways.org is also for web developers, so it's probably a useful piece of input in this case.

(As an aside, scrolling is perfectly smooth for me, in the latest Chrome beta on Linux.)
I shelled out $100 a while ago, after arguing with Rich over IRC that a donation system would be a good idea. He setup the sourceforge donation (now there's a different one) and on it went. I guess my insistence helped him take a decision that I am sure he had been considering for some time.

Rich was spending way too much time on clojure, but he wasn't making a living at all out of it. Just from what Clojure has taught me on concurrency and time management, it's been worth every dollar. I wish I was a company and I could dip my hands into deeper pockets.

[EDIT: Rick/Rich ... there are too many Rick/Rich in my life. Thanks for the notice.]
You'd be surprised how much actually gets done when being nice isn't forced and ranting once and a while is cathartic.

That said Go is a uglier than a dismembered hog. There's no beauty in Go.
A brief summary of the /.'d http://www.nookdevs.com/Rooting :

take off the plastic casing, remove the embedded microSD card, mount it as ext3 fs, `sed -i -e 's/^\(.\+\)adbd\(.\+\)disabled\(.\+\)$/\1adbd\2enabled\3/g' init.rc`, umount, put sd card back into nook, use android dev toolkit to connect to port 5555 and start a shell

This is kind of amazing to me. An open android device with free cellular internet access? If it has a mic this could replace my phone...
The myth of idiot proofing
You know, you tell yourself that you understand rm -rf. And yet somehow you always find a way to type it on something you shouldn't. Computers are perverse objects.

It's like reading an airline crash report, which I'm told often ends up sounding like a comedy of errors. Most airline crashes have an entire handful of causes, all of which are individually innocent, but on the one extremely rare occasion when they all happen at the same time they add up to disaster.
I have seen plenty of CGI pictures on the other side of the uncanny valley. The problem seems to be motion and lighting.
The weird part is not that you made a blog post about this issue now.

The weird part is that you didn't mention the 400 pound gorilla in the room. ("I've been thinking about this for a long time, but it really hit home recently when...")

To my mind, that's why the post seems odd or passive aggressive. (It's a relatively short post as well. It just feels clipped somehow. The reader inevitably says, "What's not here?")
Obligatory xkcd link: "Bobby Tables" http://xkcd.com/327/
It's a nice story, but it's hard to extrapolate from just one anecdote.

First of all, she undoubtedly became more experienced at her job as she got older. She does claim that she kept looking for work as both names, but we know that there's a huge element of randomness to internet success. Often the same exact article gets posted to reddit several times before one of them takes off, for instance. Also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_cascade

There are plenty of examples of successful female bloggers, so I'm not sure that her personal example really means anything. This really requires experimental data.

tl:dr The success of James could easily be attributed to an increase in experience and completely random elements.
[1]: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21153898/
Something is going wrong if your new page tab loads slowly. Perhaps watch your chrome task manager when you do it?
So, how does this work? Will everything be fine if they maintained the same look and feel and intentionally obfuscated/added more junk to their code to make the code look different?
He gets 10% of the sales from the Peepcode screencast on Clojure: http://peepcode.com/products/functional-programming-with-clo...

It's not much in the big picture, but I suppose every little bit helps.
To a lot of entrepreneurs, especially Americans, "taxpayer funded" sends shivers. It implies bureaucracy, paperwork, lengthy approval times and political correctness. In many ways, it is the complete antithesis of the hacker-entrepreneur mindset.

You're right that OSS is a great example of a free rider problem, but your cure is worse than the disease.
Even in Kernel programming, exceptions are useful. If you read http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/lkml/#s15-5, you'll see that goto's are used to reduce code duplication for error handling, which is essentially just a poor man's exception. More sophisticated exception handling in C can and has been done with longjmp as well.
The project itself would not be a free-rider, because it would need to provide sufficient value to justify its cost. In a government system, expert judges are the conventional way of making this assessment.

True, you would lose conventional market incentives, but you would gain all the benefits that history has shown come from open source: higher quality, lower cost, free exchange of ideas, etc.

For projects such as Clojure, which don't have an obvious business model, there is no better way to secure funding.

Force should be used when it will yield great benefits for society.
Just a niggling point but will people stop writing Rick, it's Rich ;)
Right now Google would have to offer at least 2 different handsets (GSM/CDMA) and would need to strike a deal with Verizon/Sprint

Curious if that becomes a non-issue once Verizon rolls out 4G next year? Sprint is the only provider not behind that platform (WiMax).

Verizon will flat out refuse your money if you want to use an unapproved, unlocked, phone
They've never had pressure from a 800 pound gorilla...could be interesting.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=VZ
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=GOOG
No, the giant bunny sitting next to me says you're the delusional one.
So, he's just explained Standard Deviation?
The Future: Gmail, Social Media, and You
I can only compare the UK and the US, but in the US realtors are more solo than in the UK. In the UK you'd typically go with a reputable firm of agents, and even then you'd not usually deal with the same agent all of the time. In the US, you would, so personal appeal stands for a lot more.
It may be difficult to remember now that Twitter is all the rage, but essayists often aim for that "timeless" quality. You want the essay to seem as relevant three years from now as it is today.

The web has more than enough content that feels stale after a week. Better to aim for something with a slightly longer shelf life.