skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
why? their benefits will run out (or the money will) and they'll be out of a job despite having had an offer made to them.

or maybe they'll find a better paying job.

point being, its a risk. they can't know for certain if they'll find a job or not in time. it was a risky decision, not a rational one.
Medieval Technology and Social Change. The title sounds boring, but this one of those books that just cranks your brain open. There is so much new stuff in it. Or at least, stuff that was new when it was published in the 1960s.

Carlo Cipolla's Guns, Sails, and Empires is a close second. His Clocks and Culture is also very good; the prologue is probably the best 21 page summary of the history of western technology that you could find anywhere.
Agreed, had the quality of their paper (or of the newspaper industry in general) been similar to what it was even just a decade ago, I believe this could have worked.

However, the newspaper industry has been losing quality at a rate equaled only by their loss of readers and one influences the other. This feedback loop they've developed is going to be their death, and unless they can stall this loop, they'll be gone for good, which IMO is a shame.

Unless this pay-for effort spurs new life and quality into their articles, I doubt they'll manage to get enough people to pay the prices required. They need to poach would-be payers from other newspapers and hold them as their own. The newspaper industry is entering an evolutionary state, only the hyper-competitive are going to survive this.
Brain 'entanglement' could explain memories
"When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management" is a pretty good one, though the books main focus is the people involved in the situation, not the technology they were using.

More info from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Genius_Failed:_The_Rise_an...
New York Times Website To Charge for Access [REPORT]
They're probably using the BDB Java Edition which uses a GPL-compatible license and does require all source code be released with program distribution. Looks like you're right, HyperGraphDB can't be LGPL.

More info: http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/berkeley-...
First: Acting in your own fiscal self-interest shouldn't be considered rational? By making this choice, the woman has both more income and more free time to continue a job search.

Second: Using a system for its intended purpose (income while you remain unemployed) is gaming said system? How?

Edit: this was a reply to what you had before ("i don't know that playing/gaming the system and breaking the rules should be considered rational."), not the current rewrite.

Edit to (snarkily, I admit) reply to your current comment: So you're arguing that taking a risk is somehow automatically irrational ... on a forum laregly focused on startups? ;)
Can you get pay as you go sim cards in the US? They're pretty common here in Italy and are a decent way of not getting too deeply involved with the carriers.
I feel bad for kicking the guy while he's down, but it strikes me as so odd that this is his only option, and I wonder what's going on.
You can do that in a search box by allowing advanced syntax. For example, Google allows 'keyword site:news.ycombinator.com', and there's no reason you can't extend this with full boolean logic and nested bracketed clauses.

We do this in my product, which is sort of a semantic web inspired wiki with very precise metadata. You can enter a simple query, and it uses everything at its disposal to get you good results ranked appropriately. But in the same box, you can write arbitrarily complex queries, even doing graph traversal across the linked objects in the store.

However, simple one or two word queries still work. The only slight concession to complexity that we've made is that when you start entering a complex query, the app draws a picture which explains how the query is interpreted, as a little aid to the user.

But it's still a simple text box with a button next to it.
I would say it's pretty good if you're really tied into Windows, and even better if you're a Windows developer.

If not, I'd go with a Nokia N900, Blackberry, iPhone, then Android, in that order; the N900 just has a ridiculous number of features, Blackberry has built their business on enterprise support, the iPhone has good hardware and is relatively easy to develop for (if you want to), and Android is just a bit "meh" for me at this point.
I think what he's saying is that classic Semantic Web linked data systems are great at handling the link graph, but only implement simple text searching.

It's complex, but possible, to do both at the same time, but the standard libraries for handling semweb graphs don't do it.
Shocking as in not such a big deal, in the greater scheme of things (this subthread was about victory hooting).

Not that I want to excuse sloppyness (was it deception, really). Maybe heads should roll. But still I am not sure why I should care much?
I always had a hard time remembering the del.icio.us domain. I knew it was a .us tld but couldn't remember if it was delicio.us or de.licio.us etc.
Neat, but the value axis in the plots should be zero based, or at least have that as an option.
China needs unionization to occur slowly, spreading through key agencies like health care and steel production, rather than a mass unionization of its manufacturing sector. Japan and South Korea achieved unionization of its workforce rather admirably as it happened in key industry first that didn't have a major effect on its economy. A fast switch to unionization could easily cause western manufacturers switch to other south-east Asian countries or even to Africa.

Also, I wasn't advocating treating China like a baby, but I believe it is delicate. The actions of its local human rights activists, and Google (even when it wasn't taking its current stance) were forces for good in the country.

The last thing we need with China is an economic collapse of the country, or a regressionist movement that forces them down a path similar to North Korea. However, I do believe Western governments have to start taking a more hard-line approach when dealing with China. The government can't be given the "Oh it's just China" treatment like parent's saying "Boys will be boys" that it is currently getting. It's almost like the country gets allowed to do what it wants because it's communist, but unlike the USSR was, it isn't militarily aggressive towards the west.
How many MBAs do you know who run their own business? Honest question.
I am chiming in on this Patrick recommendation. We use Formspring, but 6 of 1, half dozen the etc. Surveys have been extremely useful to us.

Particular for businesses that sell products to other businesses, here's what we've found about doing surveys:

* It's easy to drive people to surveys using Twitter.

* They're a fast way to build an opt-in list of people to contact in the future.

* Just asking questions about the problems you address raises awareness and generates leads; for us, more effectively than advertising.

* Most of your assumptions are broken.

* If you're smart, you can build surveys that will generate newsworthy results; survey stories are layups for trade reporters.

We've had a lot of luck incentivizing survey respondants with posters and refrigerator magnets. We're happy to spread those around anyways. Now that we have a solid base of respondants, we're going to look to drive responses with less tangible payoffs. For instance, we'll extrapolate assertions about our industry off survey responses, publish them, embed them in the survey, and wait for nerds like us to come "correct" us.
Agreed. The only situation in which I'd choose Windows Mobile in is if I were getting a HD2. The sense ui that HTC built on top of windows mobile is quite nice and the device is amazing.
Works on OSX, at least.
Spaces considered harmful
The problem with me posting one of these things at 1:00 AM on a Sunday night and then talking to my family, taking a shower, and logging in to HN "one last time" prior to bed is that keeping up with comments from 3:36 AM is kind of difficult. Oh bother.

Well, I hope y'all like it. In particular skip down to the bit about information scarcity -- I think that one is broadly applicable to most of the businesses here. (Capsule summary: You can use something which you can create in abundance but which your users/customers perceive as scarce/valuable and trade it to them in return for things which have business value for you.)
The Secret Life of Chaos
I am really sorry to see New Scientist behind a paywall. There is little point in posting articles that are behind paywalls on a site like HN.
Get ready for China's domination of science
World hottest news: US drone attack in Pakistan 'kills 15'
Perhaps not as polished as Wufoo, but Google Docs (Form) is great for creating user surveys and it's free.
I am surprised Kenneth Rogoff equates chess AI with "real AI."

"Real AI" is a long way off; my definition: ability for systems to learn from their environment (physical or Internet), change their internal models, and generally evolve their own abilities without requiring external help.

Off topic: I have never met grandmaster Rogoff, but I watched my friend Carl Wagner play him in a telephone San Diego vs. Boston match in 1975. My company SAIC hosted the San Diego end of the match, and I was very surprised to see my friend Carl playing number 1 board: Carl had been clobbering me at chess during lunch time for months and I was just about ready to give up the game since I had a long loosing streak, and I am a poor loser. So, Carl was an international master, and never mentioned it :-)
We have pay-as-you-go in the US, but not in the same way as it is in Europe and Asia. Here, convenience stores don't sell loose SIM cards that you can simply pop into your own phone and add whatever value you'd like.

The US carriers seem to market PAYG plans toward low-income customers who (in the carriers' eyes) would not be able to pay for monthly post-paid service plans. Thus they bundle the plans with cheap feature-low phones.

The carriers also don't allow smartphones to be activated on PAYG plans, instead requiring you to buy into an expensive (and profitable, for the carrier) data package.
sorry, the full article is coming up for me and I'm not a subscriber
> Probably due to a lack of understanding that an illegitimate government is an entity seperate from the Chinese people. They almost back the government as if it's a duty tof being Chinese.

Yes, most people back the government because they think it's a duty of being Chinese, even without any second thinking.

However, I don't quit agree with the 'separate entity' part. My theory is the Chinese government is not a singularity of Communism or stuff, it's organic instance of a class derived from Chinese culture. I assume even if aliens kill all Party members in a instance and establish a new government, years later the government will do no better than the current one. There are really some fucked shit in Chinese official-civil relationships. I can't explain it completely but there's definitely a serious problem there. The government can not be saved with democracy or whatever, it can only be cured by the Chinese people itself.
"I found that the best way for me to internalize a particular subject in hard science is to follow its history by reading the original papers."

I've often wondered why math programs (and books) aren't structured this way, explaining the historical context, reproducing the original papers (or explaining the arguments or proofs in the paper if the original happened to be in Latin or whatever), with a section on how the paper helped move the field forward and so on. It doesn't necessarily have to sacrifice rigor to do this, and a s amatter of fact I suspect a "walk the path (taken by the innovators)" approach coupled with strict rigor would make for some awesome books (and get more people interested).
James Beniger's "Control Revolution"
http://www.amazon.com/Control-Revolution-Technological-Econo...
here's why i think it's clever.

there are certain evergreen topics here that are always going to lead to heated debate. iphone versus android versus pre, mac versus windows versus linux, rails versus drupal versus php, ruby versus python versus c++ versus perl versus lisp, etc etc etc.

each time an article is posted here that takes a stand one way or the other, it prejudices the resultant discussion. it's sort of inherently understood that, if you want to comment strongly anti-iphone, you better wait until the posted article itself is also anti-iphone, or else you're going to face stiff opposition and downvotes.

by posting two articles, one pro-tab and one anti-tab, the submitter has neatly sidestepped that problem. if news.yc tilted strongly one way or the other, you'd expect one article or the other to get most of the upvotes, and the other one would sink. as it turns out, both articles have been running neck-and-neck for hours. interesting. it shows that tab lovers and haters exist here in equal proportions, which i really wouldn't have guessed.
> It's frankly astonishing that we, as a species, haven't figured out a better way to deal with dire risks in an unpredictable environment . . .

As a species, and as part of all animal life, we have. It's called flight distance, we as humans are skittish as anything. A completely wild chipmunk can easily be attracted to sit in a persons hand with time and patience. Wolves, Bears and even Lions will allow humans to walk amongst them if the person knows how to handle themselves without the predators fleeing. I've managed to approach birds to a distance of feet, and I've managed to get wild hares not to run at only a yard.

Humans, however. We're currently achieving fight/flight-like responses to stimuli we can't even recognize. The reaction to 9/11 was, biologically speaking, quite absurd. Humanity has invented a way to stimulate our base instincts that allow us to practice sheer terror to things that have no appreciable effect on our lives. Similar is occurring with the climate, people are physically worried about it, when realistically for 90% of the western population will likely not experience a drastic change to their environment for the next 100 years.

As a species humanity needs to act calmly and collectively, not as panicked masses. This is where science needs to take its place.
There are currently (to my knowledge) two working open-source/free-software implementations of the GSM stack.

OpenBTS (http://openbts.sourceforge.net/) puts everything, beginning at the modulation/demodulation of the radio-frequency, into your PC and uses a USRP (http://www.ettus.com/products) as the radio-frequency frontend (~$2000).

OpenBSC (http://openbsc.gnumonks.org) uses a different approach and starts implementing at the Abis-interface, which is what the Base Transceiver Station (the thing with the antennae...) connects to. Here you don't need the USRP but a surplus GSM BTS (currently around or a little less than $500/€500 and the necessary E1-interface (for the Abis-link) is $200/€200, afaik). OpenBSC has been successfully tested at https://wiki.har2009.org/page/GSM and http://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/wiki/GSM using officially allocated frequencies.
Yes, but pay-as-you-go/pre-paid is usually looked upon as second rate, or only for those who don't qualify for post-paid plans.

Plus, it's a little different that Europe. When I've been overseas in various European contries, they get free incoming calls. My wife would call from the States using Skype for a couple cents a minute and it wouldn't cost me a dime. Here in the US, it's an awkward system. You pay for all your minutes[1] and most the large carriers (Verizon, AT&T, etc) even charge daily access fees, up to $1/day whether you use the phone or not[2].

[1] Unless you get one of those hybrid plans, where you are pre-paid/off contract, but you pay for a certain number of minutes per month.
[2] All the carriers differ, some only charge on the days you use the phone. T-mobile seems to be the best "large" operator for pre-paid service in the US, though there are decent regional MVNOs with good deals.
Point of agreement with the author: China is doing very well (in urban areas) in the primary and secondary education that leads to sound knowledge of mathematics and basic physical science such that Chinese researchers can make many important observations in physical science, mathematics, and engineering. I have a lot of Chinese-language secondary level textbooks at home, and they are very good indeed.

Point of disagreement: "science" includes social science, particularly economics, and it is not at all clear that China's current political situation is congenial to further advances in precisely the "softer" sciences more connected to human behavior that are likely to be the big areas of advancement in the free world in coming years. As biology, sociology, economics, and other disciplines all harden up as they become more mathematically rigorous, China will be hobbled in advancing in those disciplines (compared to the West or to India) by scientists having to follow the party line on many issues of social policy.
In my experience, a rewrite is almost always the wrong course of action. The best course of action is to just quit piling more and more unmaintainable hacks on top of it. And pay down your technical debt. Every time you find yourself thinking "boy, it sure would be easier if I could do it this way", stop wishing and make it happen.

Sure, it's going to take you longer to get stuff done in the short term. But in the long run, you'll appreciate it.
Youtube channel for showing off bots: http://www.youtube.com/user/UCSCbweber
Doesn't work very well when the number has thousands separated with a space.
I have a pay-as-you-go and a Nexus One in the UK. I pay £5 pounds for 30 days of unmetered 3G.
3rd-Party Cookies, DOM Storage and Privacy
Zulu, Xhosa, Swati, Hlubi, Phuthi and Ndebele
"The carriers also don't allow smartphones to be activated on PAYG plans, instead requiring you to buy into an expensive (and profitable, for the carrier) data package."

This is crazy.
I agree. The most effective method would probably be to select various topics of practical usage for maths. That way the likelihood of finding interesting topics for all at one point or the other would increase very much. This would also help the kids to get a little more perspective of how the world actually works, which might benefit them.
BigDeal is a Swoopo clone. It's basically gambling dressed up as an auction.
Did You Mean: Google Maps?
This would be awesome to try and build my own magicjack femtocell. I wonder what hardware is needed and how much it would cost to do.
What if someone told you that between 2 and 3 seconds into Deep Blue's calculation it ruled out all the moves predicted by Nimzovich's opinionated twaddle?

How is this fundamentally different from a human player contemplating the move and then 2 seconds later recalling Nimzovich, etc.?
Does windows mobile system has future? Didn't know jokes were allowed on HN :P
Cheap glasses for the world's poor
Dependency Injection Inversion
you make the assumption that this is acting in your own fiscal self-interest, and i think that isn't necessarily the case. sure, she could make a little more money now, for another few months, and maybe find another job (or not). or she could have a job that will pay her a little less money for the long term. bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and such. unemployment isn't forever. it runs out, and sometimes it dies when it loses all its money. my father was on unemployment for one month before his state ran out of money.

its intended purpose is to help you find a job. you've found a job but you decline it not because it isn't a good job, not because it can't support your lifestyle, but specifically because the government pays you better to not have a job. sounds like gaming to me. do you consider mothers on welfare who have more children specifically to get more income to also not be gaming the system because the system is set up to help mothers with children?

no, taking a risk is not automatically irrational. for someone with a good plan and the means, its fine. if you have $1000 to spend, you can gamble with it and be fine. if you have no money and take out a loan to gamble with, you're taking a big risk and might get some broken kneecaps. if you're in the right position, a startup is a great idea. not everyone is in the right position.
I wish they mentioned any specific smart-meter vendors using those chipsets! Maybe this will get picked up by some greentech bloggers & develop into a real story.
I don't understand the article. I understand that the US mobile phone market is broken because there is too little competition between carriers, but in what way are the contracts perpetual?

You can get a cheaper plan if you extend your contract with two years, that's fair, the same kind of deals are common in Europe as well, but that only leads to perpetual contracts if you absolutely have to switch phones more often than every two years, right? So by being less tech-horny and waiting until your contract has expired, you will be free to switch provider freely, right?

And what's stopping people from always buying the phones full-price and refusing to bind their contracts? Are the talk and data-rates suddenly that much higher? Are people not valuing the freedom to switch more than saving a few percent on the rates?

Why are the US phone consumers consistently making the choice to bind themselves to a provider?
But spending on r&d, in absolute terms, increased in the US as well as everywhere else, which is a win-win-win for everybody. It just happened to increase the most in China, but the US lead over China (why pick on China anyway?) is still huge, as the body of the article describes. Nice scaremongering headline, WSJ.
How To: SSH Tunnel to the UK for Spotify Account
Something several of my friends have recommended for me to try, is to artificially limit my already free product under the premise that people want more of what they can't have. In this article He goes from 15 to 20 bingo cards for free, which makes sense since the alternative is buying bingo cards. But has anyone seen anything like that work effectively for a product that only has one level (i.e. everything is free)?

Some suggestions i've gotten is to say users can generate 15 widgets per month, but can get unlimited if...they follow us on twitter, facebook friend us, email us to a friend...etc. At the end of the day has anyone seen a case where limiting a free and unlimited product actually increase the number of users?
I don't really understand the privacy part. You feel compelled to say it's anonymous, and then torture yourself over it.

I'd be perfectly fine with telling users "This survey will be linked to your account.", except that it sounds weird/unnecessary.

Paying customers don't generally expect/desire anonymity. Most probably want you to know their opinion.

A survey like this is little more than a predefined conversation between you and your customers. You're not anonymous in your regular communication (email/phone), so why would you be for the survey?
Many thanks, Allen - you summed up (much more clearly and succinctly than I could have) exactly why I submitted the opposing pieces simultaneously.
I signed up for a SIM-only 30 day rolling contract with T-Mobile (UK) yesterday to stick in my unlocked iPhone.

For 600 minutes, 'unlimited' SMS text messages and 'unlimited' internet, I'm paying £20 a month.

I think the problem in the US is the lack of real competition. The GSM/CDMA thing splits the market and you just don't have enough players. The whole situation is very different in Europe.
Early Windows Mobile 7 build incompatible with previous WinMo apps?
New subreddit for open APIs and datasets