skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: a standard microblogging format?
What does HN think about a standard microblogging format, that both clients (like Twitter apps) and providers (like Twitter and Facebook) could implement? It could include some mechanism of universally qualified usernames (like @aplusk would translate into twitter://aplusk), and maybe some provisions for realtime search.

This way, I could get use one application for receiving both Facebook and Twitter updates, and have an improved user experience. This could really be a good move for Facebook; their status updates would become a push technology, instead of pull as it is now. It would also fight against Twitter's hegemony.
Elementary Theme and Docky
Not really. There is some out there but not much yet. More people creating those sorts of things are needed while the core seaside team concentrates on their job.
Some thing I made sure to not mention publicly: The exact domain name I planned to buy for several months before getting around to it. Anyone could have bought it and squatted on it if I had mentioned it publicly. Only a few people close to me knew what it was while I developed a new site without having a domain name. I did spend some time wondering if that was really the right name while I worked on developing the site idea and eventually decided it was.

As I have stated here previously, one of my plans is to learn a programming language and write a simulation for my health site. I don't think it can be stolen because it will be rooted in the things I do for my own health -- ie it is rooted in first-hand personal life experience. Even if someone stole the general idea to create a "game" to help people with wellness, I don't think they could really steal my idea to create a game to help people with my diagnosis get healthier. I know plenty of people doing alternative stuff and seeing better than average results. I don't know anyone who has had the kind of results I and my son have had. So I don't think anyone else knows what I know, therefore any other simulation would not contain the mental models I have in my head. Thus, I don't worry about that.

On the other hand, I mostly talk about that plan here and have also mentioned it in passing on a health list for a different type of medical condition. I don't think I have mentioned it on any of the CF lists I belong to. I think it would get point-and-laugh type reactions: "Yeah, sure, you are going to cure my deadly medical condition by having me play a video game. Har-dee-har-har." I also have no idea how long it will take me to implement. I have yet to even learn any code. So that is another reason I am keeping that plan to myself in the communities where a few people might be interested in it. I don't want people to be tired of hearing "empty promises" by the time I actually implement it.
I have a BA in philosophy and do software stuff.

I always found school pretty easy and went to a 'name brand' type of school, where the philosophy department was one of the hardest departments there.

Some who graduate with philosophy degrees go on to PhDs in philosophy or to be well-paid lawyers, but the majority do not. I was nearly on track to be a Phd myself, but thankfully my advisor kept me from doing so.

(The lifestyle of a career professor is not one that I would have done well in, and he, thankfully, realized it where I did not).

What you have to understand about a liberal arts college/degree is that you are not learning a bunch of skills that you are going to go out and immediately apply. If you want that, just go to technical college and save yourself a bunch of money.

You are never going to /need/ to know about Epicurus or Socrates or Wittgenstein (or history or psychology or economics). What you should be learning about is how to learn. Getting knowledge, applying knowledge, and thinking critically, keeping things organized in your head.

Knowing about philosophy stuff isn't the point of a philosophy degree. Philosophy stuff is, for the most part, useless. But it is also hard, and requires a lot of thinking.

Computer science is one of the most abstract, thought intensive fields that you can go into. If you can work hard and really improve your thought process before you go into computer science, it will be a great boon to your career. A lot of bad software has been written because the person writing it wasn't able to think clearly.

(However, the art of thinking well is applicable everywhere).

To me it really sounds like you need an end behind your philosophy degree... and I hope that I can convey the idea that if you push yourself and actually study and try, in the long run, the lessons learned will be a net gain.

With respect to the actual degree, you probably already realize how helpful it is to have a college degree on your resume. You probably already feel guilt about how huge a waste of time and money it is to give up on the degree.

So my suggestion to you, is not to think about /what/ it is that you are doing, but /how/ it is that you are doing it. It is the /how/ of the work that will be ultimately gratifying for you.
New Model of the Universe Says Past Crystallizes out of the Future
I see that some of the spam stories I saw earlier this Central Time Zone morning are now flagged to death. But it would still be good if the direct link to noobstories that you have kindly provided were configured to allow direct flagging of the stories, as is possible in noobcomments view.

http://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments
I have asked a candidate about Fibonacci numbers in interview. We discussed a number of different implementations, the possibility of memoization, the practical differences between machine integers, machine floating-point, and bignums, etc.

Incidentally, if you want arbitrary-sized bignum results as quickly as possible, you might do better with a "matrix-squaring" approach (equivalently: use the recurrences that give you F(2k) and F(2k-1) in terms of F(k) and F(k-1)) so that you stick with integer arithmetic.

If your bignum library isn't clever about multiplication, I suspect that the simple iterative solution is about as fast as anything else, but most bignum libraries have at least Karatsuba multiplication.
I like to ask candidates to write real code (not pseudocode) on paper, but emphasize to them that I don't really care about superficial syntax errors. Most of the point of this is not in seeing the code they produce, but in watching them think and seeing how they react to questions and suggestions.
Man, what have they done to right click on the new york times website? Something screwed up going on when you highlight words, they're popping up a question mark to search for the term on NYT.

It's interfering with my standard highlight, right-click, search.

It sucks. UX thumbs down.

I know, not really to do with this, but hey, I gotta moan somewhere ;)
Not following the ACORN example: The district court tossed out their funding cut due to Bill of Attainder and the MA-AG cleared them, complaining that the unedited videos didn't support the claims illustrated in the edited videos.

If the shoes dropped they found their way quickly back on ACORN's feet.
Palm's Ares IDE builds on bespin
First step in web application development, web based IDE!
"the Graun has a near monopoly on public sector job ads, so is effectively State-subsidized."

Cobblers. (And a lazy Conservative Party talking point to boot.)

The TES and Times Higher have more education jobs, and local papers get a far higher local government spend in aggregate. And in the Guardian that's only Tuesdays and Wednesdays (having bought them before I can tell you that the Saturday job supplement is merely a repeat and I never paid more for it).

In fact the vast majority of advertised public sector jobs are not advertised in the Guardian. Under what bizarre definition of 'monopoly' would this fall?
Does one need to be an expert to follow the argument and form an opinion about it? If that was the case then why don't we let the experts make decisions, not just provide information.
Time-travelling browsers navigate the web's past
Tamas K Papp's blog: A tour of xarray: part 1
Sounds like you had a bad experience. Unless you're completely fed up, I would try finding a lab doing stuff that truly inspires you. They are out there and with some folks pursuing ventures simultaneously - see folks like Ed Boyden and John Donoghue, for instance.

If you can't find any research you still find exciting, then it may be time to cut the cord and flee the tower.
I'm not sure; I mostly just read the clojure.org website itself and looked stuff up on its index page and went from there.

I did buy Programming Clojure: while it offered nothing new with regard to what was available on clojure.org it was, nevertheless, a good introduction. However, it greatly helped to have experience in functional programming and other Lisps so I'm not sure how it fits to a Python programmer's experience.
Show me a BBC ad in the Daily Mail, then.
In the arc version you can navigate to the same url in multiple tabs, and each of those tabs will work independently. In order to make that work you need, in addition to the per-user session, a per-page session.

It probably makes more sense if you look at an example. Take a look at the multicounter example for seaside:

http://seaside.st/about/examples/multicounter

Notice the automatically generated k parameter that appears in the URL when you press one of the ++ or -- links. That is the id string for the per-page session.

Scroll to the bottom of that page and you will see the code. I would love to code web pages like that. Compojure is not up to the challenge, and I don't think that weavejester is interested in changing that. Compojure is designed for REST applications, and we are talking about the polar opposite of REST.

Edit: Of course I also should have included seaside's answer to the arc challenge:

http://www.lukas-renggli.ch/blog/take-the-arc-challenge
True but it is better than popping up a window every time you double click on a word or phrase. That was annoying to me and my copious highlighting and clicking that I do as a subconscious activity while I read. I mean automatically looking up the word "The" or "and" is kind of insulting.
> And processing language is a hard problem for people (and computers!)

Processing of some human languages (like English)...
Compare and contrast:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=480957
It seems to me that this article is not saying anything at all. Instead of the commonplace "the future becomes the past" it says "the past crystallizes from the future", which is arguably the same thing.

Just another example for the importance of selling your research in the right way. Marketing wins.
Google Translate is not bijective. ;)
Preventing mission creep in your (MVC) Views, or, ignorance is bliss
I don't get it. You can know fool google by stealing content, then rendering it jibberish to a reader.

1) Couldn't you do this before?
2) What is the point of doing this?
Pay wall 8(
Book Review: Intellectual Property - Read this to grok the Bilski case
This is exactly how I read, and yes, this site is really annoying because of that.
It sounds like what is being described in the article is more or less the intuitive understanding of past and future which I imagine most people have. Is there a better summary of this model that someone can provide?

Anyway, the title made me think of this passage from a lecture of Alan Watts. He's describing the universe as you experience it when you are first born (the universe in its truest nature to a taoist):

" When one experiences oneself and the universe as happening together, the other illusion one is liable to have is that what is happening now follows necessarily from what happened in the past. But you don't know anything about that in your primal ignorance. Cause and effect? Why obviously not, because if you are really naive you see that the past is the result of what is happening now. It goes backward into the past, like a wake goes backward from a ship. All the echoes are disappearing finally; they go away, and away, and away. And it is all starting now."
Kind of like ranking virtue amongst whores.

Really doesn't matter how you do it these days.
Blekko pre-launch page
No, they are probably not looking for that answer - but failure to accept them (with working code) would be a negative corporate indicator. An interviewer shouldn't look for answers like that because it requires some amount of fibonacci domain knowledge, which, unless the company specifically works with fibonacci (or similar math), would be a pretty odd filter criteria for programmer quality.
The important question is: how likely is this to change the results? In recent decades there's been a trend for the Best Picture Oscar to wind up going to films which may not be all that good but which are seen as "Oscar-worthy" due to weighty subject matter or otherwise "seeming smart". Historical dramas have made up something like twenty out of the last thirty years' winners, including such so-so films as Braveheart. No comedy has won since Shakespeare in Love (which was acceptably smart-seeming because it had Shakespeare in it) and before that it was Annie Hall (which, incidentally, beat Star Wars).

I wonder if preferential ranking will improve the quality of winners by better reflecting the true preferences of the voters rather than the preferences the voters seem to think they ought to have.
That can't be correct as written because if I could magically extract everyone's scalar utility function from their minds, a mixture of utility functions would satisfy those three criteria.

You need an additional requirement, "The citizen's true ordering of preferences is the only data presented to the algorithm." In other words the algorithm can't access the scalar utility function, only the ordering, and every similar ordering has to result in the same social ordering - no mixture of utility functions will satisfy this, obviously. If you want to prevent "strategic voting" that would impose other requirements as well.

Impossibility theorems often aren't as impossible as they look, and indeed Arrow's Impossibility Theorem makes a good illustration of that, especially as the evasive answer is pretty obvious if you walk around thinking of expected utility maximizers all day long. Doesn't work for non-mind-reading applications because of the strategic voting problem, but in terms of whether it's possible for a society to aggregate the true utilities of its citizens, no sweat.
> "The arrow of time arises simply because the future does not yet exist,"

In other words, we eliminate a philosophical dilemma by saying meaningless gibberish and obfuscating the meaning of ordinary words.
Did you really get that response? Like any place, NYC has its share of jerks, but since coming here 3 years ago I never encountered anything like that..
XMPP and Bosh with Strophe - hit a XMPP server with Javascript instead of a web server. Realtime Javascript Push on an established base (XMPP). Real cool stuff, just need something to use it on.

Sinatra - Very fast/easy ruby framework. (Similar to Cherry.py in the Python world).

Jquery - Can't imagine using any other framework after a year working with this.

Facebook Connect - Much more robust than I thought possible due to things like FQL and FBML.

Heroku - Super simple ruby hosting
Can you give an example of an OO system that can't be refactored to a data-driven system later?

The systems I was thinking of are ones I've worked on or consulted on. Mainly, they were just big and hard to change. The OO aspects didn't help, mainly because of their tendency to object-graph spaghetti.

There was an inaccuracy in what I said (mainly for brevity). It's not true that you can't refactor such systems to solve their design problems. Technically, you can refactor anything into anything. What I mean by "can't be refactored" is "can't be refactored at a cost less than writing a whole new program". Even then, that's too strong, since you can't prove that. So strictly speaking I should have said "There are many OO systems where nobody who works on them can think of a way to refactor them to solve the problems the OP is talking about in a way that is easier than just rewriting the program." :)

I agree that test coverage makes this easier, although it also adds a maintenance burden.
Yeah, that would work pretty well. There are no options I could find for switching the UA on the iPhone that are provided by Apple. There are a couple of apps that claim to do that but they cost money, don't have clear explanations of what they do, and don't have great reviews.
I'm inherently suspicious when someone says something like "conveys information", but then says "logic and reason" don't work.

Would it be fair to say that the particular phrase, rather than conveying information, causes a particular emotional reaction in the hearer? I may not experience what you experience and some particular phrase might simply be a short code for that feeling.

But that doesn't mean the information cannot be conveyed. I can explain fairly easily what 'orange' means to a blind person: "Objects and parts of objects are associated to unique colors, which humans can distinguish via vision. [geometric optics skipped.] One particular color is orange."

They haven't experienced orange, in the sense that the "orange" set of neurons in their brain hasn't fired. But that doesn't mean they lack information when I say "object X is orange."
Tenacity Versus Failing Early (and Often)
Star Crossd Lovers: Aquarius with the others… (video)
Hmmm, nothing big here either but I was learning anyway so I didn't set the par too high. Since you asked, let me see:

A bunch of various throwaway programs or clones of small utilities I had already written in other languages. An utility to update metadata in my oggs, a command that finds similar files, a little solver to answer questions about a given set of different relations (I actually needed such a solver to make some decisions at work so I programmed myself one), bunch of other file/text based unixish tools. Conclusion: 1) Java's I/O APIs are from hell. 2) Clojure can do a lot in only a few words of code.

Some GTK applications via libjava-gnome-java. Works much better than AWT/Swing used in many sample applications, and is much Linux friendly. Lots of Java interop training there :) Will try out LWJGL soon, in an attempt to port a small OpenGL game to Clojure: the game is mostly about experimenting some gameplay ideas so the OpenGL implementation is rather straight-forward and anything but time-critical, thus, the OpenGL backend is great candidate for porting to a new language. I've already learned that Clojure is a great help in transforming my thoughts into code so I prefer to do any prototyping in it these days.

A simple gravity simulation: a friendly way for experimenting with parallel features and transactional memory, agents etc. as you have lots of dependent things moving independently, and I got to "optimize" some Clojure number-crunching as well. And there's ants.clj and other parallel sample programs already so I could compare myself to others.

An evolutionary algorithm aimed at the travelling salesman problem, one of the very first Clojure programs I wrote that introduced me nicely to basic data structures and abstractions in Clojure such as the ubiquitous seqs. I used Swing for the GUI -- crap.

A small Reddit clone. I actually wanted to prototype a few nice ideas I had with regard to news aggregators like HN and Reddit in general so it was mostly not about Clojure. But it offered me a very welcome chance to experiment maintaining global state in an efficient and functional way (server application), got to think about how would I create a live disk-backed database hopefully mostly in Clojure, wrote some basic html generator macros in Clojure, and got some taste of Java interop by hooking the thing up to Java's http server. Excellent project and still ongoing whenever I feel like it.

A simple attempt at Casino (the card game) AI. I probably wrote a sudoku solver too although the most recent I can recall was in Haskell. But I always write a sudoku solver in a new language so I probably did one in Clojure as well.

Oh, and a small layout library for GUIs. I have a thing for those. It's rather incomplete as it was one of the very first Clojure programs I ever wrote; I could rewrite it now and make it much more shorter, faster and idiomatic should I actually come up with a _need_ to have a layout library of my own :)

That's about it, more or less. Might have forgotten something.
(Disclaimer: I've not studied any of these languages in detail; the following is a mix of what I have studied, personal knowledge, and logical conclusions derived from both)

Structurally, Japanese and Korean is almost identical. The morphology system are similar, they have the same word order, are both tonal in a similar way, and there are even parallels that can be drawn in terms of their phonology; some words are even phonemically identical. However, their core inventory of phonemes is quite different: there are sounds in Korean that just do not occur in Japanese. Like Japanese, the categorization of Korean is debated; Wikipedia is helpful here if you want to know more.

Now, Mandarin Chinese is entirely different. The tonal system is different, it lacks an overt inflection system, word order is different, and the phoneme inventory is, again, different. While there is vocabulary sharing going on, it's hard to see any technical relationships between them.

I've heard a number of different stories on how the Korean peninsula and Japanese archipelago were settled by the Chinese, from the Chinese, but it just doesn't seem plausible considering the linguistics of the regions. What history I did study in Japan simply never mentioned it. And, to be honest, that is the extent of my historical knowledge of the languages.
Accidentally the first commercial lunar satellite.
I didn't even know that existed until now. How many other cool things here are not exactly obvious?
I love the way this was declared a write-off by the insurers, and then the engineers found a way to boost it around the Moon, and bring it back into a usable orbit.
As Fred says, there are both good and bad reasons why trading deals has gone downhill.

I think what matters is that the VC is always transparent to the entrepreneur about it. They can recommend their partner by saying "I think they'll be good for you because X, Y and Z, but I also owe them a favor because they let me invest in Foo.com."
Rails and JQuery. It's amazing how quickly I can build rich, interactive applications. I can do with two or three lines of code what would require 20 just a few years ago.

Also, GIT. Best source control hands down.
The sample code for reversing a string in Java reminded me of why I can't bring myself to use Java-the-language anymore. Clojure FTW!
Yes, "the future becomes the past". But I think the point of this article to to reconcile this concept with experiments that affect the past.

From page 17, discussing such experiments:

"Many of them in fact assume that the future already exists (if the future did not already exist, it would of course not be able to influence the present or past). Our claim, by contrast, is that the future does not yet exist; at present the future is merely a set of possibilities."
OBAMA, Let The Money Begin In , 2010 Hooded Pullover from Zazzle.com
What did you build with it?
You might be able to get away with removing most of the explanation if you had a simple animation of the game play looping on the page. All I needed was to start the first level to understand how the game worked (having played drop 7)
What was the reason you didn't use haskell and cocoa touch together? Was it due to a particular deficiency of one of them? Difficulties combining them?
What's Blekko?
I thought it was a theme for the set of widgets of enlightenment : http://trac.enlightenment.org/e/wiki/Elementary