skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Stealing an image from the other person replying to you it pretty much looks just like this: http://www.ski-epic.com/amsterdam_bicycles/pm3s_amsterdam_bi... in many places. Block after block with bicycles although there is room on the sidewalk for people to at least in the parts I've been in.

The most frustrating thing about Copenhagen is all the bicycle repair shops take up the business locations that should be small food places. :P
Whether this particular mistake was avoidable or not, the event raises bigger issues.

The military is building more and more lethal, radio-controlled robots.

No networked device can be guaranteed to be secure. Computers have been hacked since they existed. The hacking of satellites is endemic. A civilian hacker was supposedly holding a military satellite hostage a while back.

Thus this strategy makes it likely that hackers will get the ability to command a lethal device sooner or later.

The risks of this might be worth the rewards in terms of avoiding casualties, projecting power, etc.

But there hasn't been much public discussion of the choices that are involved here. There should be.
Thanks for mentioning SuperMemo, I've known about some competitors but not this one. Currently I cannot answer you, I've have to look SuperMemo in more detail. Does it support cross-word puzzles? That's something what I did not find in (other) competitor products.
a friend was asking today on twitter what το blog about. I ll go recommend το him skribit.
Even that is a mediocre bug at best. Since wa deals with the infinitesimals as standard practice it could follow that they are showing the gap at 1.5 but it is so small as not to display correctly or that the gap is smaller than the step size of the graph.
So what is the actual solution?
How ecosystems make for good clouds
When I worked in software Engineering (big E, giant processes) the developers left at 4:30pm every day except Fridays, when they left at 12:30. (Thanks to flex-time and a 7:30 start.)

That environment was remarkably un-geeky. A median engineer was about 45, university qualified, with a house, husband or wife and kids. They had very little interest in programming but a quiet pride in Engineering.

If you want to write software in that kind of environment you don't even need to mix with the comp sci geeks at university - you can get a masters in maths, physics or any engineering field instead.
Another competitor which I did not know about. Does it support cross-word puzzles? (I try to emphasize the fun element of this, in the future I may try to include other games also.)
Ask HN: Pricing Help for Web Application
The Premise: I have a widget and my customers are owners of ecommerce sites and my widget would help them save on returned orders. The widget would have to be installed on each product page.

The Problem: I'm trying to figure a way to differentiate pricing for different sized ecommerce stores. Right now I can just charge say $19.99/month to use the widget, but that means any store from the small niche to walmart could use it for $19.99/month, which just doesn't seem right.

Is there some way, that would make sense to the customer, to tier the pricing? Say charge some small amount like .5 cents per click on the widget? I would have to correlate the number of clicks to money saved and price appropriately but I am just wondering if it is worth it or am I just confusing the customer who just wants to pay a set monthly fee?

It would be nice to be able to say there are four packages (19.99, 99.99, 199.99, etc) but I just don't know how to differentiate that fairly.

Any help is appreciated.
Watched his Christmas tree lecture, and he said the hardbound vol. 4 (not the facsile) will be out in 2010. I consider that the true vol.4...only, what, 5 or 6 years later than he originally proposed.
As a male, computer science major, and avid coffee drinker, I too am repelled by energy drinks. That aside, in my experience I see two mostly-exclusive classes of "geek": people who are much more fascinated with producing technology and people who are much more interested in consuming it. Departments should be targeting producers irrespective of gender issues because they make better computer scientists. Increased diversity is a bonus.
Ask HN: Migrating geographical areas
Hey, long time lurker here, but I thought I could get some good advice.

I'm a senior with a major in CS and attend a decent regional university, but I would like to move, either to California or the Boston area. I have high grades, a technical internship with a prestigious institution, and excellent etceteras. Unfortunately, we don't get many national companies recruiting on campus. What is the best way to get an outside position? Just spam the resume? Or is it best to move and then apply?
You're right...normally that's not a big deal, since amateur films, trailers and rough cuts are often scored with 'temp music' from a similar genre and this is tolerated inside the industry.

They did credit the original composer so no harm, no foul - he'll probably get offered the job if a film goes on to be made, or else get a credit as 'music consultant' and a gratuity check without actually having to do anything.
Accelerating K-Means on the Graphics Processor via CUDA - Source Code
"'Socially mainstream means leaving work at 5pm and going to the pub, that’s what “normal” people do,' says one commenter.

Honestly, I fail to see how this sort of argument differs from asserting that black people are lazy or Latinos are stupid."

It's different because, as far as I know, it's not actually true that black people are lazy or that Latinos are stupid (on average). Whereas that comment as quoted is technically (more-or-less) correct.
If you're in an environment where energy drinks are strewn all around, it gives the place a certain atmosphere that's off-putting to certain people — and not just to women. I can't stand the stuff myself.

This isn't necessarily because they hate energy drinks, it's that those in combination with the other things paints a certain stereotype that people find off-putting upon first glance.
Actually, Clerks cost $27,575 to make. With most of the budget going to licencing music for the soundtrack.
While coding apparently: http://www.xkcd.org/323/
> The entrance fee to a computer science career is membership in geek culture, and that’s way too restrictive. If any other field had a cultural barrier to entry like that, no one would stand for it.

I find this almost bigoted and hateful. Like the author wants geeks to change their behaviour, to enforce some sort of thought police. For us all to become bland, souless replicas of average joe. So we've no place to fit in anymore.

No thanks.

I wonder if they'll ever do the same study of why there are so few male hairdressers or nurses. Or perhaps so few female plumbers. Same conclusions I imagine. And will the suggest forcing hairdressers to stop reading magazines and talking makeup too?
Before, during and after work. Sometimes especially during.
I think that you can quickly add a commenting system to static sites with disqus.com. I would also consider adding Google Analytics or piwik.org to better understand the hits you are getting.
It's not just the graph. The solution given in the third box -- "x > 1" -- doesn't mention the gap either.
There is more than one potential conclusion to draw from this.

The conclusion drawn here seems to be that geeks somehow exclude non-geeks from certain fields.

Another conclusion would be that non-geeks self-select themselves out of certain fields.

Another conclusion would be that being a geek is still looked down upon in our society, and there is an unconscious effort to maintain status by not becoming a geek. There is a certain air of superiority (and ignorance) conveyed in saying that geeks don't shower.

Another conclusion would be that the traits exhibited by people who are interested in geeky things are related to the traits exhibited by people who want to go into geeky fields.

Geeks tend to be at very least obsessive about things.
It follows that they might be better about doing things which require obsessive traits, like writing code.
(Or maybe geeks are just better at everything...).

Also, I love the pub.
I found my wife on a local dial-up Bulletin Board System and she's a fully certified geek. She does WOW raids two nights per week, she digs Fringe, sci-fi and fantasy fiction. She dual boots Ubuntu and Windows 7, and when I was stranded without connectivity and one of my clients munged their IPTables rules, she only needed to ask me the hostname, my username, my password, and if sudo was installed in order to flush the rules.

I think maybe she's the one being discriminating, but she really doesn't want to do geek work for a living. She'd be okay doing data entry (not that it's geeky but it's the geekiest job she's had). She'd much rather do more traditional jobs such as taking care of animals or dispatching emergency responders.
This is the best explanation I've seen of why building a partner ecosystem around the cloud is so important.

The knee-jerk reaction when Microsoft's name is mentioned is to think of the "evil" company of later years, but they played a big part in building our industry largely by virtue of their partner/ecosystem strategy.
Whether or not you get affiliate links highly depends on the queries you do.

For instance when I search for 'webcams' it starts off with 3 affiliate links.

I really think google is on the wrong path with this, I remember clearly when they launched that their biggest selling points where in order the quality of the results and the fact that they did not pollute the results with paid links.
Well, we'll see.
I've heard of instances - specifically in legal recruiting - where there's also a top limit filter. That is, some firms (top level of the second tier) won't interview graduates with a GPA over 6.0 (I'm in Australia - GPA ranks to 7.0).

I spoke with a legal recruiter about this once. The logic is that the very high GPA students are almost certainly too interested in academia, likely to go back to academia (and so leave the firm), and those that don't want academia probably worked hard for that GPA because they only want to work for a soul-crushing top tier firm.

When I pointed out exceptions to this (including my beautiful, smart and focused lawyer wife), the recruiter just shrugged. It's much easier to miss the occasional exception, than waste time on the majority where the rule applies.
"If any other field had a cultural barrier to entry like that, no one would stand for it."

Plenty of fields have cultural barriers to entry. Frinstance, I wouldn't want to be a car mechanic, cuz all they talk about is sport. I wouldn't want to be a secretary, cuz all they talk about is American Idol. And I wouldn't want to be a Wall St trader cuz all they talk about is... I dunno, golf and hookers. Of course I'm exaggerating, but the point remains that these are three fields where I'd be turned off by the culture even if I were interested in the actual work.
Jimmy Wales is not appealing to altruism. As a practitioner of Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism [1], he would hold that altruism--the doctrine that one has a duty to sacrifice oneself for the "good" of others--is evil [2].

He's asking you to give money because you value Wikipedia, you want to see it continue, and you genuinely want to show appreciation for it--that is, for selfish reasons. Those things are more important than wanting a "donor badge" or something else to show off.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism_(Ayn_Rand)
You may get flagged for posting rather than blogging & linking, per the submission guidelines.

But I like your idea and think it adds value.
Google to launch Google Editions in 2010
> And the very best can easily achieve a 3.5 without trying
> and still have time to do everything this article suggests.

Yes, but why not spend that time they're investing in classes on more productive things?
I found this interesting:
http://www06.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=50%25+of+60%25+of+%24...

Whereas it gets this completely fine:
http://www06.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=60%25+of+%2420

It seems to forget what % means..

edit:

And then http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=60000%20percent%20squar...
Heartily agreed - I see that one of replies below already demonstrates your point all too well, the unfair (and in my experience grossly elitist and simplistic) characterization that anyone who doesn't have a high GPA simply didn't try hard enough. This is especially relevant in our field.

For one thing, I've only run into a handful of software companies who have a hard grade cutoff anywhere. None of the big names (MS, GOOG, etc) do it, and IMHO if you understand what makes a great hacker, you wouldn't do it either. NVidia was the last company of note I dealt with that had a hard grade cutoff. I didn't make it - and many other talented programmers I know didn't either... their loss I suppose. I do know the people who were selected, and none of them can really be called good hackers - at most competent coders.

I've seen this pattern time and time again - in college the ones with the highest grades were the least employable. I had the pleasure of being in a program that required internships, and invariably the people with middle-of-the-road marks (3.5 is well above middle) had a much easier time finding employment than the ones at the top. The amount of effort it takes to stay at the top precludes one from doing the side projects that invariably makes the main difference between a merely competent programmer and a talented hacker. The top marks had no problem landing interviews, but had trouble converting interviews to offers.

Sure, you can claim that a truly elite individual can make the grades and do all the side hacking projects and make it home to cook dinner. Reality of the matter is, these guys are exceptionally rare, and odds are you're not paying half as much as you would need to hire one of them ;) By hiring in that range you're getting an unproductive mix of academic overachievers mixed with a handful of pure geniuses. By targeting a lower grade bracket you're getting a much more even mix of people good at the job you want them to do, but aren't so good at academics.
Woo hoo!

I've found it!

This is the first article that give me a ghost of an idea of how to effectively organize my life.

It might even knock the procrastination out of me for a little while - but hopefully, just long enough to organize it effectively....

Thank you for posting it, seriously
I'm thrilled my graduate program doesn't require that I take any courses for a letter grade. Grades don't matter, research does, it's nice to finally have that reflected on my transcript.
Actually,

My impression is that different fields of study are becoming more and more "culturalized". Aside from the example above, there's obviously a whole cultural barrier for any art related activity.
Kill-A-Watt, WolframAlpha, and the itemized electric bill
Not a bug. Alpha is right. There is no singularity.

let a=1.5 for brevity and let f(x) = (x-a)(x-1)/(x-a).

Relabel f(x)= N(x)/D(x) (N for numerator, D for denominator)

N(x) and D(x) are analytic and so tend to zero as x--> a, so f(x) tends to the indeterminate form 0/0.

In that case, according to L'hopital's rule, f(a) = N'(a) / D'(a).

N'(x) = (x-a) + (x-1) by the product rule. D'(x) = 1.

Plugging in x=a:

f(a) = (a-1) / 1 = .5

Which is what Alpha implies.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27H%C3%B4pital%27s_rule

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

http://xkcd.com/123/
The reason that it is a desktop application is that it is able to run in the background, and pop-up a question dialog periodically. On the internet lots of things (for example advertisements) are competing for the the attention of the user. (Sometimes in distracting ways.) This program is also competing for the attention of the user, but it is very useful for her.

Thanks for the warning about the Einstein branding. While I like the Einstein branding very much, it seems that I will have to get rid of it as soon as I get any serious traction.
That was probably the most egregious line in the article, with the exception maybe of comparing work schedules with racism.

To me, the challenge is finding a field without some sort of cultural barrier to entry.
Woot for startup jobs
I too use OpenSuSE, though lately I upgraded to a mbp. I might switch back to Ubuntu (I used it for 3 years). Everywhere I go, whenever I say I am a linux user, the first thing people say is, "Oh, Ubuntu?" When I tell them I use SuSE a lot of them are like "what's that?"

Which is surprising given that SuSE used to be big...and I thought it still was, sort of.
That's true. I had a near 4.0 (one A-, gah) as a senior before I said "fuck this noise" and dropped out. I also had a family, was active in a couple campus clubs, and held a full time job as a developer. I was busy, but it's not impossible.
Blu-Ray 3d standard finalized
your wife sounds rad.
If the widget is hosted on your server then you could bracket your plans based on the traffic. So you could say $19.99 for up to 50,000 page views a month, etc. How valuable your widget is would determine how much you can charge (be sure to factor in your bandwidth costs as well if the widget is a decent size).

One other comment, encouraging people to click on anything other than the "buy now" button on a product page isn't going to be very appealing to most e-commerce people. Returns are expensive, but the last thing people want to do is deter orders.
Former investment banker here. I got the feeling that my ex-coworkers were at the center of the social mainstream. But when I was at the office late on a Sunday night, I could see that they were hard workers with a focus on getting things done when it mattered.

The biggest difference between a banker and a computer geek is that the banker drinks more and has a better looking girlfriend. Both of them work hard when the success of a project depends on it.
Asustek plans educational Eee-branded robots running on Android
How is this HTML5 specific? Everything written there applies to older versions too.

And the title is wrong - they are not using HTML5 to do anything, it's about how to reduce latency by lazy loading modules in the background.
Oddly enough or not,

It seems that this environment has had a mix of women whereas the "three-guys-and-a-dog-startup" generally hasn't.

Make of it what you will.
I think that is is a perfect example of a company that is chasing hyper growth of analogous models without an understanding of what led to the growth. I realize this is a contrarian perspective, but as the macro environment improves and the need for liquidation models declines on the supply side, the type of growth Gilt, Rue La La, etc... have experienced should slow...i wrote a whole blog post about this a few weeks ago: http://bit.ly/5oPMM8
If you replace "independent study" by "relevant experience", my advice in http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2009/05/13/being-a-new-cs-grad-... is completely identical.

To paraphrase: optimize for GPA first so you are in the acceptable range (>3.5), but then, focus on optimizing the second most important criteria: project experience.

I was a hiring manager once.
Rooted Nook now has a web browser, some Android apps
If anyone is interested in following the court filings, they're available from Justia at http://news.justia.com/cases/featured/california/candce/3:20...

I don't know how frequently Justia polls for new filings (the page currently says "Last Checked: December 16, 2009 16:47:00 PST") but it's one of their "Featured Cases" so I assume they'll stay approximately up to date.
I'm a little surprised by all your upvotes for this comment. I spend at least as much -- and maybe more -- time with car mechanics, natural gas technicians, secretaries, administrators, managers, electricians, and so on as I do with "computer geeks".

While I tend to find that people from most of those other sectors enjoy talking about a wide variety of subjects, "computer geeks" (those working in the field as technicians or programmers especially) are far more likely to conversationally hover around technical minutiae or other stereotypically geek interests, like sci-fi.

Case in point: I recently attended a professionally-attired holiday dinner party with a corporate client, where most of the employees are scientists or engineers, and many of them are PhD'd in one subject or another. Conversation wandered from ice climbing to traveling to diesel engines to raising kids, and so on. Anything "tech" was strictly verboten.

On the other hand, whenever I meet my geekier climbing buddies, it's usually only a matter of minutes before the conversation is about their latest gadget, toy, or other interesting thing in the field.
Real Estate Agents likely do not run Real Estate marketing firms.
Philedelphia to buy abandoned Earthlink wifi infrastructure, offer for free
Because it doesn't take time. I have a friend here at Carnegie Mellon that has a 4.0 GPA, got 3rd at ACM ICPC World Finals, and also took the 3 hardest classes this university has to offer, as well as double the average course load, all in the same semester. And he still got 9 hours of sleep a night.

By all means, I'm nowhere near as smart as he is and I personally can't do that, but if you plan your semester well, you will have time to do "more productive things" and still have a 3.5
...and I'm responding to what you said

No, you're not, you're actually ignoring my words. Please stop.

Note: You have made one lifetime submission and it was flagged and marked 'dead.' I will not call you a troll, but please stop.
Golden ratio in GUI design
Does anyone else try to use the golden ratio in their GUI components? I've been doing this for awhile now and it does make them look better, I think.

final double goldenRatio = 1.61803399;
dialog.setSize(
DIALOG_WIDTH,
(int) Math.round(DIALOG_WIDTH / goldenRatio));
Written as a joke, but in my line of work (embedded systems) this is a big problem. Because most of a product's operation may depend on external inputs, it can be impossible to write a suite of unit tests that are useful without also building and automating hardware to generate the external stimuli.

We've come up with some creative responses to this, but nothing remotely like what's possible when you're just moving data around and not, e.g., testing the hardware's ability to start a 300hp diesel engine at it's low-temperature limit.
The mainstream works harder!?

My whole love of all things math and computer has been based on the slogan "the other guy works harder, I work smarter"!

If geeks aren't thinking that way, they're losing something.

And like the procrastinator, of course I'll work really hard in order to work smart.
It's great to see a third party provide engagement metrics on an emerging space. This is a welcomed move from meaningless speculation based on Compete numbers. Thanks for the analysis Jon.

It's interesting to see how FourSquare continues to dominate Gowalla.
As a side note, this works with IE and Chrome too.
Because an EMP gun would be so cool.
The notion of "people who are much more fascinated with producing technology" vs. "people who are much more interested in consuming it" really strikes a chord with me. I'm in grad school for CS and I've never really been a "geek" except that I've always loved programming and the like. I've always felt "different" from what is normally called a "geek". This is a start at explaining it.
I'm just being honestly direct. You cannot completely throw out GPA because it is a measure of something. And you cannot completely rely on GPA because it is, as in all things, somewhat biased.

The people with the low GPAs will continue to say GPAs do not matter. The people with the high ones will continue to say it does. All I'm saying is that, at a target of 3.5, it doesn't preclude you from accomplishing other endeavors during your university years.
Will you be doing it the right way or the wrong way? http://www.matasano.com/log/958/enough-with-the-rainbow-tabl... is a good basics guide.