skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a risky move. I imagine a fair amount of sensible female spouses will veto its purchase off hand. Personally I wouldn't have it in my living room either. It's kind of embarrassing looking. I have the feeling I would be constantly asked about it. What does it do? Why does it look like that? Followed by a brief discussion where I have to explain that I actually prefer sensible, sleek, minimalist industrial design instead. I'm not interested in having this conversation with people so I won't buy it.
I'm not sure if "fundamental" makes much sense in relation to Lie groups. There are a lot of sets out there. Some of them are groups, others are topologies. Some are both. Similarly, there are people who have drivers licenses, and there are people who have blue eyes. Then there are people who have both blue eyes and drivers licenses. Those people are like lie groups.
When and How to Micromanage
Learning a new language to improve your programming skills is a cliché. I realized recently (and I'm into languages) that tinkering on a project in a different domain is hundred times more educational and fun.

E.g. if you mostly do webapp backends, write a ray tracer in Javascript. If you're a systems programmer, write a blog on AppEngine. Make a screensaver. Make an iPhone app. Etc etc.
Chrome OS uses X11. The idea that Chrome is running Windows Flash Player under some kind of Wine wrapper is ridiculous IMO.
As already pointed out this has pretty much already happened for homosexuality.

Is it a totally bad thing? (or rather is the "sacrifice" of a generation worth considering?)
ThinkGeek has two shirts which are highly related:

one features a drumset:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts-apparel/interactive/ac0b/

and the other has a guitar you can strum:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts-apparel/interactive/c498/

The negative part about them is that the gear is not extrudes a little bit from the shirt itself.
This is an interesting and under-discussed topic (especially among designers), but there isn't a huge amount of insight in the article.

Could anyone point out some good resources on threaded discussion design?
Agreed, but to mirror all of youtube is redundant, the vast majority of people only watch the most popular videos. By providing a selection of 'this weeks best' you will surely provide low latency for the majority of files. Similarly ISP's can start doing site caching for popular pages providing lower latencies for popular sites and pages.
Following evil laws is evil. Legality and morality are orthogonal, not isomorphic, concepts.
Just tried it here, I normally use Mail.app.

First impressions were "oh, this isn't so bad," but then I started using it. It feels very janky, the interface is a bit disfunctional (going to File > New Folder gave absolutely no visual feedback as to where it put it, and if you have the filters window open and make a new folder you have to close and reopen the filters window for it to notice the new folder). The one thing I saw that I liked was the "Reply to Mailing list" button, but that just didn't work, at all. The To: recipient was the person who wrote the email, not the list. Also, I couldn't figure out how to open a new tab.

E for Effort I suppose, but it's seeming less and less relevant, and if major releases are this buggy I can see why.
Gridded data from the Met Office Land Surface Temperature Record
Woah, the install process is absolute bliss.

Something for Mozilla to look at.

EDIT: and we have Xmarks! Chrome is now pretty much unbeatable for me now.
clickable link: http://i.imgur.com/GaXNM.png
I am currently using http://www.zotero.org/ on Firefox with Dropbox.
Historical Maps Overlaid on Google Maps
I haven't seen it myself yet. It's Google's new real-time search results feature http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/relevance-meets-real-...
thanks I guess I looked at the wrong google blog :/
The transparency is really really fun- make sure you play with the slider on the top right.
Not in advance!
ChromeOS is written on top of Clutter, which uses OpenGL via X11.
Boyd's Law of Iteration : speed of iteration beats quality of iteration
I automatically assume that if Apple are going to produce this rumoured tablet in early 2010, they're going to have clearly thought about what people are going to do with the device.

The biggest problem with selling a tablet is : "When and why do you use it in your life?" If the average consumer is going to drop $500+ on a flat monitor, the vendor is going to deliver a compelling story about where this device would fit into your life, and how the technology can be used to do something new, exciting, and compelling. IE, Marketing, which is Apple's forte.

I don't see any of that yet in the "JooJoo", hence my original comment which was intended as a commentary rather than a sneer.
I don't get it. What's the point of having bookmarks on a server? What if I need them while I'm on an airplane?
Searching for 'chronic heart disease' might be a bad idea if your employer or health insurer sign up to a future Google employee watch (tm) service
it's quite limited, though.
But it's worse than that, tc. Why do they keep the information for so long? Because they are required? No. They monetize it. Sooooo, in the future there will come great pressure to increase the value of Google stock. Not today, perhaps, but some day.

When that day comes, insurance companies are going to say, "We'll make it worth your while if you tell us who is googling for 'breast cancer;' 'diabetes;' 'melanoma.'" At some point in the future the major shareholders (think Carl Icahn or some such character) will make it awfully hard to say, "no." Just a more direct way to monetize the data.

As I said elsewhere here, google should, if they don't want to be evil, allow us to opt for a poorer search experience and not keep our data.
The problem being addressed is one of people choosing to do "insane" things in the expectation that they will be geniuses. It's mimicry. It's behavioral affectation. It's fashionable nonsense in every field, consumed and parroted not so much by the driven and the passionate as ambitious poseurs who don't yet have a strong sense of who they are.

It's just like our collective demand for "tips" and "hacks", except instead of focusing on the trivial details, we focus on glorifying vices and unusual habits as secrets of success rather than ways of coping with personality and mood disorders. Ways which were often not conscious or willful choices at all. Ways which were often sources of misery. Ways which were often ultimately failures. We forget these things and we forget that we are not so different from our fellow man that we are immune to the same fates.
Unfortunately, there are also large classes of interesting problems which are intractable even with quantum computation.
Your analysis is 100% correct.

I regularly work with Indians, and have plenty of Indian friends, and co-incidentally love Indian food. Race did not even enter my mind upon writing my original comment.
I am at a loss as to any predictions that Cringely has ever gotten right. In that regard, he is somewhat akin to the Amazing Criswell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amazing_Criswell)
I posted this because I was reading a quote of Paul Grahm, essentially saying that HLL's require less skill to implement your ideas in.

I was reminded of all of the research and work I did trying to learn to write lisp code that runs reasonably fast.

The point being that writing fast code in a HLL like lisp requires knowledge about the different techniques that are being used by your compiler to make your code efficient.

Anyway, this archive is definitely one of the better endpoints that I ran into on that search.

My personal favorites are Cheney on the MTA and the paper about a lisp architecture based entirely on destructive operations.
All Tarsnap profits for Dec '09 will be donated to the FreeBSD Foundation
VC chatter I have heard "let's see if the dog hunts" and "augered in" "he is making a crater" "flow me the document".

The author of the article seems to have a view of language that as subject to authority. This view fails to understand how language develops.
> Failure is not an option, because otherwise I completely blew it with a huge part of my social life, and will have nothing left.

That's the same logic that compulsive gamblers use.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Loss_aversion_and_the...

No matter how many friends you may have lost, there's lots of people in this world. And the internet makes it easier than ever to find people to 'socialize' with (though not necessarily 'hanging out' in the physical sense) outside of your immediate area.

There have been numerous times where I have basically cut all ties with everyone I knew (even family) because I felt I was in a bad position (failing classes, not 'making progress' towards 'success', etc). But I still have friends and family that I'm in contact with now that I've 'cut off' before. Unless you've really cut people off in the sense that you've pissed them off to the point that they no longer want to be friends with you, you may be surprised. Just reconnect with people, it's not as difficult as you might think. (I just suggest against reconnecting with old girlfriends/boyfriends unless you keep your expectations low though)
I downloaded it and tried it, and unfortunately it has the same two problems that I hate about version 2:

1) There is no option to say "reply using the same 'from' address that the mail was sent to." This means that you either have to set up an "identity" for every possible e-mail address you use, or you have to reveal your "main" identity to anyone who sends you an e-mail (and possibly confuse them in the process).

2) If you get new mail and read it on your iPhone or any other computer while thunderbird is open, then the status icon/indicator will get permanently stuck in "new mail" mode and you have to restart the app to get it to disappear.

On the plus side, the search is excellent.
With the new 802.11N WiFi protocol, HD streaming works great on a speedy internet connection.
you gotta admit, servers on the moon would be the perfect off-site backup.
Ok that's how securities markets work. So what's your point?

That there are ways to deal with it? That we've been dealing with it for a couple centuries now? That agent-principal conflicts are well-understood? There are costs and benefits to separating ownership from control. One of the benefits is that talented people can manage established companies; you don't have to be a Goldman or a Sachs to run Goldman Sachs.

No I am not talking about the S&L deregulation

That portion of the comment was sarcastic. I was making fun of your assumption that a regulatory regime that rendered S&Ls insolvent was somehow superior to one that didn't render the (much more leveraged) investment banks insolvent.

"The disastrous market manipulations of Fannie and Freddie." Huh? Another straw man argument.

Surely guaranteeing trillions of dollars of tax-subsidized mortgage loans had nothing to do with the real estate bubble! It was those perfidious bankers!
Start with qubit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit
The last time I noticed Matt Might's name, it was as a grad student advisee to Olin Shivers-- last surviving keeper of the CPS flame!-- writing a hairy dissertation on control-flow analysis in higher-order programs. So at some level, it amuses to see that this particular didactic-purposes toy compiler does /not/ transform its source into CPS or any variant, and does /not/ perform any control-flow analysis.

;; The purpose of this compiler is to demonstrate
;; the most direct possible mapping of Scheme into C.
;; Toward that end, the compiler uses only two
;; intermediate transformations: mutable-variable
;; elimination and closure-conversion.
You could promote some discussion on it at the social design patterns wiki:
http://designingsocialinterfaces.com/patterns.wiki/index.php...

The 'threaded comments' page is here:
http://designingsocialinterfaces.com/patterns.wiki/index.php...
Well, not quite perfect, you'd actually need a "server got hit by a meteor" contingency plan.
our example is an api not a language issue though. Theoretically you could create an equivalent api to your open(filename) example. There is no reason you can't and thus the API vs Language point my post was actually about.
Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) by Hoare (free ebook of a classic)
So, at what point does Google having all your info (e-mail, DNS, search, Google Voice, social network activity, etc.) become worse than AT&T / NSA tapping all your calls?
Study: Redbox Will Destroy the Entertainment Industry
Spam link. Flagged.
Google's official Chrome builds update themselves automatically while they're running without needing to relaunch.

The Mac Developer community has standardized on Sparkle, where the app downloads an update feed from the developer's site and prompts for an automatic update/install/relaunch.

To get the Chromium on Ubuntu behavior of manually-initiated centralized automatic updates, you'd have to use a package manager and the only viable one is MacPorts, which is just not a good fit for desktop software.
And doing other things to excess doesn't have an effect or your health?

Burnout from work is a real thing, and working "because you love it" does not inoculate you from it.
Having taken a class from Might in the Spring (not this one, but Programming Language Analysis), I can assure you that he is still very much interested in those topics. I can't really speak to this particular class, however.
Please tell me that the logo on the front isn't backlit by one of those infuriatingly bright LEDs.
vim : Muttator :: emacs : ?

Don't I wish....
Morality and law are not equivalent or coterminous for sure, but I'd hardly say they are orthogonal. Do you really think they are completely void of interdependency?
Maybe you could seed it with some feeds and then it could suggest others that have common topics.
‘Missed Opportunity’ In File Sharing Case? Don’t Believe It
Open Government Initiative
I doubt it will ever be cheaper. Faster perhaps, but not cheaper. Sending energy around space isn't all that expensive.
At my current job, I don't always feel the 'need' to go home, but that's especially apparent when I'm working on something and I feel like I'm 'in the zone' and being productive. I just want to ride out, since it's not always there.

If I hated my job though, I would just be biding the time until I could clock out and leave it at that.
V8 was i386-only for a long time, it's had x86_64 and ARM support for maybe 6 months. Android originally used Webkit's Squirrelfish, I think the Palm Pre shipped with V8 before Android did!
Freakonomics: Price descrimination and iPhone applications
I don’t see how it’s ‘discarded stuff’ when the backstory is acknowledged as fake in the entry.
How to steal from a pirate
He predicted the HP/Compaq merger (and, further, predicated that it wouldn't help). He also predicted Sun's march to irrelevance. And that the iPhone would crush Windows Mobile.

But yeah, most everything else has been wrong. This episode was particularly amusing: http://www.cringely.com/2009/03/the-neokast-mystery/ That was around the time I unsubscribed from his RSS feed.
Want major TV coverage for your startup? Hint: seize opportunities
That is pretty crazy. I honestly never would have thought that something like that would have existed... Telescopes yes, this... no. Very cool!
yeah, but you get rid of all those nasty weather-related contingency plans.
Unfortunately it's not truly blocking ads, they're merely hidden. So you still have the lag in downloading them as well as the "xxx per site" download limit.

-------

Why do I see ads for a moment before they disappear? Why aren't all ads blocked?

Because of limitations in Chrome (or possibly my knowledge of the Chrome extension and DOM APIs), AdThwart can only remove or hide ads after they have been loaded; it can't actually prevent the browser from fetching them.
Actually Franz Hals was my counterexample to your statement that no one painted alla prima till the 19th century. There are lots of others I could have picked (Fragonard for example) but I figured the most famous example of the style would do.

My support for the statement that oil paint allowed painters to blend and overpaint is the example I gave earlier:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentimento

http://www.escholarship.org/editions/data/13030/d9/ft1d5nb0d...

Van Eyck, who was such an early user of oil paint that for much of history he was considered the inventor of oil painting, is also one of the standard examples of overpainting to correct mistakes. How much more conclusive evidence could one want?
EDoorways Engages DPCI to Implement Drupal Web Content Management System
"Online" marketing = "Color" TV
This reminds me of the RJDJ iPhone app: http://rjdj.me/
Writers for iPhone Ap Company Join WGA
I think it's a very fair and reasonable advice. You don't have to use Google. This is the service Google offers. Your privacy is your payment. It's a great opportunity for someone to start a competing search service that focuses on privacy.
Whats with the versioning of Chrome for Mac.

"About Google Chrome" says 4.0.249.30 and AFAIK this is the only "Beta" software with a major version as high as 4.
The silver lining: moon computers won't need expensive cooling systems.
from the article: It should be noted that LAEDC’s mission is to “attract, retain and grow businesses and jobs for the regions of L.A. County,” so it has an agenda.
Heh, I've been wondering that too. Not that I need it that much, but it'd be nice to maybe be able to delete a bookmark folder. A lot to ask, I know.

Still, bar none my favorite browser on the mac. Love the fact that the dev tools are the latest webkit version. I'm done with memory hogs that are safari and firefox (though I still use firebug every now and again).
Bumper Stickers – The Hot Selling Products
There is no denying that bumper stickers are amongst the hot selling products today. That’s why most of companies and businesses are now paying close attention to custom bumper sticker printing for their marketing campaigns. Online sticker printing company is providing cheap bumper stickers printing service to its valued customers all over the world.
Storing search queries genuinely helps improve Google's search results. It's not inherently evil.

And I don't buy your slippery slope argument. Sure, Google could sell your search patterns. And your ISP could sell your browsing habits. And ask.com's AskEraser feature could all be a lie and it too could be selling your queries...

Ultimately if you don't trust Google with your search queries, then you should take Schmidt's advice and not query anything embarrassing.
I think there is a valid point hidden inside this flame-bait. GMail (and other web-based email clients) are making inroads against traditional desktop email clients. I used Thunderbird for a long time, but just found GMail's client much more intuitive and faster. The best part is that web apps are getting faster and faster as JS engines improve.

This isn't the case for desktop clients, at least from my experience. Bloat always sneak up on you. Sure, this happens on web apps too (e.g. Google Wave), but it doesn't feel as bad because we're used to web apps being "slow" (only to get faster the next year). For desktop clients, once you're bloated then you pretty much stay that way.

I loved Thunderbird and I was excited about Thunderbird 3, but really, I don't see a reason why I would want to leave GMail.

Of course, I'm not using "enterprise" email for work or anything. But even enterprise email will be web-based eventually.
I know it sounds like simple advice, but you never know where chance will take you. So take the path offered.
Version parity. It's done all the time when porting to a new platform. Why would you want identical software to have different version numbers on three different platforms.
Word up to completely random low-margin stuff that doesn't come across as promotional but succeeds as promotion anyway. Few companies are as good as Panic at this (not counting rock bands).
To be fair, you don't have a lot of choice in deciding whether or not to comply with a National Security Letter. I think "because I'm not going to go to jail for our users" is a perfectly logical reason.
"I've Got Nothing to Hide" and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy
Looking at this made me realize that the only news sites I really like, and actually use on a daily basis, consist essentially of a simple list of headlines.

The simple presentation makes it easy to select the stories that interest me enough to read while still giving an overview of the rest.

While the 'follow a continuing story' idea is interesting (and the presentation here is impressive), it's not something that I value. I find that I follow stories naturally, and often across multiple sites and even media types. I don't really need to see it all in one place, all at once.
Was a great success for the first meetup. Had over 20 people show up. Thanks @ajaimk for organizing.
I don't think anyone was implying that taking Amphetamines makes you smart. But if you are already smart, they may seem to have an effect at improving creativity, inducing new ideas, causing you to think differently. Most people don't use amphetamines to do their work though, or had you not realised that?
Ask HN: Ham sandwich theorem
What are your favorite famous/ridiculous theorems out there? I just stumbled upon this gem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_sandwich_theorem
Ah, the tumultuous calm before the storm.
Makes sense. Unless your work is a "higher calling," health and family should be above it.
Concrete example: http://livingstories.googlelabs.com/lsps/healthreform

Interesting...
well, if this article http://www.brightsideofnews.com/print/2009/10/12/an-inconven... is true, then the answer is no.

from the article: The problem is that Intel hired a 3rd party vendor called Tungsten Graphics [now a whole owned subsidiary of VMware Inc.] to create the drivers for the parts. Problem with those drivers is the fact that "GMA500 suffers from utterly crappy drivers. Intel didn't buy any drivers from Imagination Technologies for the SGX, but hired Tungsten Graphics to write the drivers for it. Despite the repeated protest from the side of Imagination Technologies to Intel, Tungsten drivers DO NOT use the onboard firmware of the chip, forcing the chip to resort to software vertex processing."
Ask HN:  I have a FaceBook Group with 100,000 People In It...now what?
The HP/Compaq merge wasn't too hard to see. Somebody had to buy up Compaq as the market consolidated, and it wasn't going to be Dell.

As for Sun, that's like predicting that the year will end in a few weeks. Mcnealy was one big pile of fail with his rapid course changes and bluster.
Actually, they will. Vacuums don't do shit for getting rid of heat. If anything, they'll need MORE expensive cooling systems.
Anyone have any ideas? I was thinking maybe taking the content from the group and making a 'Rules for Calling Shotgun" Pocket book (that people could keep in their cars). Everyday I get a facebook message from 1 or 2 people who want me to put their information on the 'group details' page... but anyone know of anyone or have any other ideas?

Thanks.
Clickable link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_sandwich_theorem
Apparently you can get stuff into space for as little as USD$400/kg [1] and a plain DVD weighs 16g [2]. Naïvely assuming ‘space’ to simply mean ‘Kármán line’ and discounting the cost of actually landing on the Moon, I estimate USD$24600 to get the DVD the average distance of the Moon [3].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator_economics#Costs_...
[2]: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_does_a_DVD_weigh
[3]: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28avg%28363104%2C+4056...
Duplicate submission
Actuallly HN's threaded forum is the best I've come across yet. It's simple and easy to understand yet very flexible and works well for conversations with many threads because the interesting stuff rises to the top.
It's the orange space rocket, one that launches from under a pool, right?
What the Open Government Directive Means for Developers