skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the nintendo wii is the farthest thing from winning the actual living room. It created a new segment of gaming/consoles/etc and opened it up to the mainstream, which is awesome.

I actually had a Wii. I even waited in line to get it. I returned it within 24 hours. I wanted something more. The ability to rent movies, stream media, download new games, multiplayer over xbox live,etc. I'm not even a hardcore gamer. I only own the Halo franchise of games. The wii is best described as a very very advanced toy, rather than a gaming console. I don't think that's a bad thing either.
/saved

Documentation on what they all mean would be helpful.
A couple things off the top of my head:
-Web apps geared towards the emerging thin-OS netbook market

-I think Android apps will kick off in a much bigger way this year with more people getting their hands on phones supporting the OS. It's still early enough to get into IMO.

-On this page Veera suggested the Semantic Web, and while I have big hopes for the Semantic Web (I should, I blog[ged] about it), it's just not going to mature into what I think you're looking for in the amount of time you're looking for.

-Tichy suggested Data Mining, which I'm getting very into as of late, so maybe I'm not in the best position to give an impartial opinion but I think that will be taking off more. :)

Edit: fixed linebreaks
Data. R/Hadoop/Hive/Pig/Dryad, SQL Server streaming, Excel PowerPivot and the works.
Does anyone know how the economics of font creation work out?

This seems to take an enormous amount of time to create [what appears to me to be] a very niche product that sells for only $250.
WHY aren't there more consumer Internet VCs w/ graphic design skills?
Wow, that does make a lot of sense. I can see why you would think that way.

Well, that goes to show the joys of being self taught.
Yes, there are many advantages to a community bank or credit union. However, there is one problem that outweighs all those benefits.

No ATMS!

If you get an account at a huge bank like Chase, Bank of America, or HSBC, there are branches and ATMs everywhere you go. A community bank is fine if you're the kind of person who stays in one place and never moves. If you travel a lot, a local bank is useless.

What would be nice is if we could get the benefits of a local bank, but have branches all over the country/world.
Microsoft's business model (as with any proprietary software company) is to keep the user dependent on them. Since they exist since before FLOSS became mainstream, they do it by providing an adequate technology for a reasonable cost with incremental upgrades to existing technology, effectively preventing many legacy owners to migrate to greener pastures, and by providing excuses for the executives to use when a legacy-disrupting migration to FLOSS could be the best option.

It's been rather effective.
how about folks that disagree with (macro)evolution but have a Ph.D. from MIT and currently work as a Nuclear Research Manager for NASA?

I followed the link you kindly provided. I see this man's higher education was not majoring in subjects most likely to expose him to the evidence for biological evolution. Nor does the link list any peer-reviewed papers of his on any subject related to the evidence for biological evolution. Macroevolution is a fact

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

in the same sense that nuclear fission is a fact. Neither is routinely directly observed with understanding by laymen, but both sets of facts can be demonstrated by experiment and are consistent with broader bodies of verified scientific knowledge.
Also note that Wii's are sold for a profit, unlike Xboxes and PS3's
"AT&T says it's time for POTS to die, and it wants the Federal Communications Commission to schedule its funeral."

And then what will I do with my fax and answering machines?
I don't think anyone said GitHub is "the one true way".

I'm pretty sure the question was meant a bit more loosely, not as a direct challenge to someone's post here, but to the general prevalence of a meme that roughly fits that description. I certainly wouldn't suggest grepping for that phrase as a method of getting a feel for its virulence out "in the wild".

Instead, look or tacit assumptions, misattribution's of value, and conspicuous omission of alternatives. I guess good, old-fashioned "reading between the lines" is what I'm suggesting.

A pretty dramatic illustration popped up on my RSS reader this morning. Someone submitted a HN article with the title "Jeff Atwood's open source contributions", which was nothing but a link to http://github.com/codinghorror - which currently shows zero projects. It was quickly flagged here at HN, but it lives on over at Reddit.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1023696

The tacit assumption here is that if Jeff has zero repositories at GitHub, then he has made zero open source code contributions.

I don't mean to detract from how cool it is that your product is so successful. (Kudos!) But its fans often have a creepy blind spot to alternatives, in my opinion.
Full URL:
http://generalapp.newschallenge.org/SNC/ViewItem.aspx?pguid=...
Its nice that they are taking the initiative to experiment despite the low risk of the asteroid actually hitting Earth. However, I sure hope that they are careful and don't accidentally knock it into an orbit that causes a guaranteed Earth hit.
Out of curiosity, how are you using .NET for your webapp without using ASP.NET?
Alternatively, use the screening expenses to subsidize ticket discounts for (qualified) citizens willing to bring their personal carry piece on board with safety rounds supplied. :)
I use .NET to run my startup @ http://www.learnitfirst.com/. I was a VB 4-6 guy and moved to .NET in 2000 in betas and loved it. I probably prefer C# to VB but have projects in both. If I'm writing a new app today, it's almost assuredly C#.
What is /classic show?
You really think this guy is pushing $4.00 cellophane wrap? I'm sure he's getting a huge cut of the "computer nerds who run to Michael's and buy cellophane wrap to stick it to their wall for a whiteboard" market.

Worse case scenario (if you consider promotion inherently evil) he's a business consultant or something and the YouTube video serves as buzz for this. Either way it's a cool hack.
I'm not sure if they infringe on the infrastructure level now because all their examples are very basic (making calls, receiving calls, forwarding calls and etc.) These have been patented and their terms have expired. I bet that's one of the reasons they only have basic examples on their site.

I'm not a litigation expert but if you were to build a feature that infringes on a patent you might be liable.

Below is a link to uspto telephony classifications.
http://uspto.gov/web/patents/classification/uspc379/sched379...
The idea of some of these packages (Blog, BUGS, Church, HBC) is that you describe how you would generate synthetic random data if you had to. If you don’t know any intermediate quantities, you specify distributions from which plausible values could be drawn. This is a way of defining your model and your uncertainties in a way that is easy to critique (“Your synthetic data looks rubbish!”). Then given some observed images, complete with noise, the systems can infer what the underlying quantities that generated the image were. A simple example: “is that smudge of pixels one star or two, and how probable is each option?”

Some of the packages (Alchemy, Factorie) ask you to define joint probability distributions differently. Rather than asking for a sequence of steps that would sample from the distribution, you specify factors or soft constraints amongst variables. The product of the factors evaluated at a setting of the variables gives its probability up to a (often hard-to-compute) constant. The point of these packages is also to infer interesting quantities given observed data. The factors may have unknown parameters, which can be fitted to the data (“learning”). In the first set of packages unknown parameters are just variables, infered along with everything else.

The first group of packages let you define directed graphical models, the sampling schemes can be defined on a directed acyclic graph. Factor graphs, used by the second group, can be defined on undirected graphs. Infer.NET lets you express directed models, but internally for algorithmic reasons it converts to undirected factor graphs.

PMTK while not finished, seems to be aiming to provide special support for a variety of machine learning techniques, in addition to generic graphical model support.

Dyna doesn't really fit in with the rest. It is a programming language that makes dynamic programming easy, which is useful in some inference tasks.
"just out of law school": following, that is, graduation from Georgetown University, a Rhodes scholarship, and graduation from Yale Law School. There is an old gibe that a Rhodes Scholar is a young man with a great future behind him, but I suspect that most persons with those credentials do pretty well. Achieving the presidency of the US has so many chance factors in it--would we have heard of GWB had Ronald Reagan picked (say) Richard Lugar to run with him in 1980?--that it makes a tricky argument for political acuity.
I don't know about you, but my community bank offers automatic refunds for ATM fees from third-party ATMs.
Clojure 1.1 changes.txt
edit: see below.
It hasn't been all that effective so far. Microsoft has lost significant market share in browsers to FLOSS, and it looks like something similar is happening with its office productivity software too.
The font rendering varies wildly between browsers: http://i47.tinypic.com/1125ssp.png

From left to right: Firefox (Win), Chrome (Win), Safari (Win), Safari (Mac)

Firefox renders the font way too light, Chrome (this version at least) falls back to a default font, and Safari on Windows uses incorrect kerning and renders the some characters too narrow. Only Safari on Mac renders the font acceptably (except from the heavy diagonal on the capital N and the oversized apostrophe, maybe).
Software Preservation Group
Interesting fact: Mike Moritz was a journalist for many years before Sequoia.
Just to remind those who were too young in the low-to-mid 90s, I am not sure who invented the UMPC, but at that time, they were called Zoomer, Momenta, Newton, which is the real precursor to the iPhone.

Also, the whole anythingFS Microsoft kept announcing since NT4 was called Cairo never made it even to beta. It was, mostly, a very long-lived research project that kept getting fashionable features according to the age of the press-release they were announced.

"stuff like editing a Word file in a group, something really obvious, is so horribly broken and has been forever."

And would be really easy to implement on top of MSN or Office Communicator.
The Joy of Physics Isn’t in the Results, but in the Search Itself
When using math for real world applications, you essentially have three steps. First translate the problem into a math problem. Then manipulate the math problem as needed, then finally convert back the real world problem. But in most classes, the second step is the only part that is covered. This is the part where most people have problems, since people are wired to deal with the world around them, not some abstract math world. Trying to ground the math concepts to real world situation is difficult and complicated, which is probably why this step is skipped.
The new technology that interests you.

Seriously, several of the technologies emerging now are likely to be big (or at least grow substantially) over the next few years. But if you focus on the one you find most interesting it will help keep you focused and motivated which can be an enormous help. It will also help you enjoy what you are doing which simply makes the process more pleasant.
4  Jquery Tutorials For Beginner
there's a comment on metafilter addresing this - http://www.metafilter.com/87921/If-Potter-gets-a-hold-of-thi...

Lots of these banks are part of an ATM consortium called SUM, and so you don't really lose out on the main benefit of the big banks. If we can find a SUM ATM (they're everywhere) then there's no fee for using it.
That would be quite a feat.
Also note that the wii is more of a 'social' console. xBoxes and PS3's likely feature more in teenage boys bedrooms than in living rooms. Which would skew the data even more in Nintendos favor.
While that might be the case, Microsoft and Sony obviously make up for selling at a loss through game revenue and subscriptions (Xbox Live, Playstation Network). I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft or Sony made more money per console than Nintendo after accounting for game revenue and subscriptions.
As to docs /lists tells you what some of these do.

/noobstories - submissions from new users

/noobcomments - comments from new users

If I remember right, new users are 'registered less than a year ago'

/classic is the complement of /noobstories, submissions by users with accounts older than a year
[edit: mbrubeck below says this is actually all submissions but the ranking only takes into account non-noob votes. reply to correct any other inaccuracies]

/active is recently active submissions

/best is recent submissions with the most points

/bestcomments is same as above but for comments

neither /newpoll nor /saved are subdivisions really, the former is an interface to post a poll, the latter only works when parametrized by a username and shows 'submissions upvoted'.

It really wouldn't hurt to have a help link in the top nav bar describing most of this stuff along with the formatting rules, the relevant etiquette links, etc. It would cut down on their frequent reposting and indignant reminders to startled users ('You're not supposed to do X! Have you not read [obscure link unreachable from anywhere obvious]!')

I've never been able to figure out the reason for not having this information easily available - in more cynical and less charitable moments, when yet another 'L2post, n00b' article graces the top slot, I imagine it's some sort of infantile secret treehouse thing under the guise of 'well, a real hacker would figure these out'.
People in a hurry should add #t=5m58s to the youtube link, that is where he uses it.
Windows is still pretty much installed on every x86 computer sold and Office is the de-facto standard for business documents. Just about every company has an Exchange server (I am sad for them) and just about every server sold has an x86 processor because nothing else runs Windows.

This last part is what hurts me more: we can't really innovate in hardware because there is an economic imperative to be able to run Windows... Microsoft is dragging us down.
This post reminds me of a certain xkcd comic:
http://xkcd.com/538/

The difference being that wrenches purchased by the TSA probably cost $600. ;)

Well, maybe not but it's fun to say:
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1298/120798t1.htm
It depends on Nintendo earning significantly less per game than Sony or MS and Nintendo users buying significantly less games per console.

I seriously doubt this is the case.
Very much doubt it.

Also note that a large number of wii games are 'in house' through Nintendo. So Nintendo makes larger margins on games than Sony or MS.

Even if you just measured the profit from the game 'wii sports' vs profit from xbox live subscriptions, I'd bet Nintendo trounced them.

As far as I'm aware, Sony and MS have to share a large amount of each games sale with publishers and game developers etc. Nintendo does most of that themselves for the big wii games, so they get far higher margins.
1. I can't tell if you're saying that most banks now also credit my account instantly (none of the three I've used post-9/11 did), or if you're saying that getting access to my deposits instantly isn't really an advantage because... ?

2. Credit unions are insured by the NCUA, a federal agency backed by the full faith and credit of the US Government just as the FDIC, and in the same amounts with the same rules about accounts.
This is something I've been looking into and I'm becoming convinced that given the wide range of (expert level competency in) domains required (memory models, processor architectures, concurrent data structures) to effectively address the issues, it is likely that after a short period of language/software layer solutions, the issues will be addressed at the hardware level. Its an intrinsically hard problem that I doubt can ever be made practical for the general (IT level) programmer community.
So does this mean AT&T will provide better cell coverage? As someone who builds data transfer tools for handheld products, there are people who cannot use GSM/GPRS solutions because they don't have coverage at their homes. Accommodating POTS modems is painful at times, but it means a larger majority of our users can actually transfer data when necessary.
>>Wikipedia and BBC are NOT scientific studies.

Good counter to my argument that they are! :-)

Both Wikipedia and BBC referenced real studies.

You seems to claim that there is a conspiracy (with Wikipedia editors, BBC and the rest of the medias) against the tobacco companies?

I count all conspiracy theories as "extraordinare claims", so do you have any "extraordinary support"?
Ask HN: Best Review sites & features?
What are the best review sites that you have come across? And, Which particular review features do you like or dislike?
A Twitter app for Mac OS 6 through OS 9
It would be quite a weapon too!
Agreed - this article would be better titled "Nine startup dreams and industries Google released competing products for in 2009".
AMQP/RabbitMQ. I explained in more detail why in this post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006208
I don't want any of that. I don't want to watch movies on a games console :/ Rent movies? On a games console? Why???
Games consoles are the most locked down unexpandable things imaginable (For reasonably good reasons). Why would I want to use one to do things like that.

It won the living room, in that it's the console in most living rooms. You can happily play multiplayer on the wii against people in other countries (xbox live like I guess).

It does what it's designed to do - entertain.

The idea that one device will "win" the living room and provide everything, I think is an unrealistic pipe dream. And certainly not a device that isn't expandable or user modifiable in an easy way like a games console.

The Mac mini is actually an awesome 'living room' device. If they marketed it right they could really capture some market there. Frontrow movie previews, playing backed up dvds, music, etc. It does well for a small cheapish box.
No, it shows all posts, but the ranking uses only votes by established (>1 year) members.
So what would you recommend be the first step in learning about Data mining? Any resources/books you can suggest?

[I figured since you just got into it ... ]
[pdf] An Interview with Edward R. Tufte
Ask HN: Elements of hacker cultural literacy
A while back I sent my wife Rands's Nerd Handbook. She loved it, but then mentioned that what she could really use was a brief description of some of the stuff that my nerd friends and I talk about. Sort of like the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, but nerd-specific. So, I'm trying to compile a list of topics this might cover; right off the top of my head, here's what I have, in no particular order.

* Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
* Star Wars
* Star Trek
* World of Warcraft (and/or MMORPGs in general?)
* Real-world RPGs, e.g. D&D and Magic: The Gathering.
* Weird Al.
* Lego.
* Monty Python.
* First-person shooter concepts and history.
* Tolkein.
* Ender's Game. (Surely there's other crucial SF that belongs on here.)
* Office Space.

Please suggest/refute/discuss.
Military Academy
Within a few years? Who knows what other consoles will be out by then. IMHO xBox looks like a big fat failure.
Any details on pricing?
Analysis of Abdulmutallab (Christmas bomber) web posts data
Against yourself?
A Colorful Clock With CSS and jQuery
That's exactly what we do at Fog Creek. Our whiteboards are just glass panels held about an inch in front of the wall by six special clasps. For those of us whose whiteboards are mounted on non-white walls, the back of the glass is painted white. They look spectacular and are incredibly durable--but they're also rather expensive, sadly.
Sparking a Savings Revolution
True, but in practice this isn't what happens. What usually happens is that low performing teachers (or school systems) lobby to have the standardized exam watered down.

This is a fundamental problem of agency costs. The only people who gain from having a good testing system are the high performing students, and we obviously can't put them in charge.
Interesting, I'll bow to your greater experience that Java bytecote is better as a target than CIL..

That said, I think that my core point still stands, even if the CLR isn't yet quite as good as the JVM: Microsoft are hardly letting .NET languish.
Typical neoliberal bullshit from The Economist, the magazine who famously blamed the irish for their laziness during the great potato famine.

Let me address a few points:

- The apparently huge unemployment among the youth is meaningless due to the huge enrollment in free higher education. Basically, those 18-24 who are looking for a job are those who wouldn't stay in school, not those who couldn't afford like in the US or even the UK. Not exactly surprisingly, they are not all prime recruiting material.

- Unemployment is defined as (read this carefully) the proportion of people actively looking for a job. This means that if you want to reduce that ratio, you can either give them jobs, or convince them to give up looking, for example by giving them money for not looking. That's what they do in the UK or in the Netherlands (relatively speaking). Guess what we do in France? The exact opposite, we give you plenty of money if you look for a job.

- I'm not entirely sure how blacks in the South have it better than Arabs in France. I'm sure how they don't, though.

In conclusion, this yet another BS piece trying to extoll the theoretical virtues of wage slavery in the face of overwhelming evidence of the contrary.

They can pry my 35h (which have worked to create jobs) from my cold dead hands.
A clean desk. I'd like to achieve a minimalist workplace, but often fall short. Often, I'll clean up my desk before starting work for the day.
I gathered from the article it is only speculation that Twitter would charge for the 10x API.
Being unemployed in France is nowhere near as bad as in the US. You get free healthcare and good unemployment benefits.
What's strategic for Google?
This is very one-sided and nothing like what I was trying to say. It's not entirely the "fault" of girls that making them smile is not enough.

The parent was more even handed when they mentioned confidence and social status. Yes, some girls maybe care about confidence a bit too much, but just the same, guys like myself can often do a poor job of acting confident (sometimes due to lack of effort conforming to norms).

There are two sides to the story.
see also:

HN tricks

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=767275
Yes, I do think he is pushing it.

Your other two sentences are irrelevant to the fact that this video is a shitty ad.
Some people use what is apparently innate spacial orientation.to manage large volumes of material. E.g. the iconic cluttered professor's or researcher's office. But when they need something, they know exactly what pile it is in and about where within that pile (how deep). The surroundings provide a three dimensional environment rich in sensory cues, which they can readily remember and within which they can readily navigate.

There was a New Yorker or similar article on this, some years ago, that addressed the enduring nature of paper in the electronic age. If I can find it, I'll post the URL.
+1 It may not be sexy or glamorous but it will be in high demand.