skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The evidence would abundantly suggest that merely being exposed to this idea in a course is not sufficient to guarantee that the resulting scientist will have any clue.

I see two problems here: First, by the time you get to that level of schooling, you've developed a "resistance" (for lack of a better term) to schooling. That is, you've long since internalized the fact that there are two worlds, the one described in school and the real world, and the overlap between the two is tenuous at best. Merely being told about this stuff in the school world isn't enough, you somehow need it to be penetrated down to the "real" world. Computer scientists get a bit of an advantage here in that after being told about this, their homework assignment will generally be to implement the situations described and verify the results. Computer courses are rather good at bridging this gap; most disciplines lack the equivalent and a shocking amount of basic stuff is safely locked away in the "schooling" portion of the world for most people.

This is a result of the second part of the problem, which is that the teachers themselves help create this environment. I went up the computer science grad school approach for this stuff, where not only do they show you the fundamental math, they make you actually implement it (like I said above). I got to watch my wife go up through the biology stats course, and they don't do that. At the time I didn't notice how bad it was, but the stats courses they do are terrible; they teach a variety of "leaf node" techniques (that is, the final results of the other math), but they never teach the actual prerequisites for using the techniques, and in the end it is nothing but voodoo. Students who consign this stuff to "in the school world but not real" are, arguably, being more rational than those who don't; things like confidence interval and p-values are only applicable in Gaussian domains, and I know they say that at some point but they don't ever cover anything else from what I can see. By never connecting it to the real world (very well) and indeed treating in the courses as a bit of voodoo ("wave this statistical chicken over the data and it will squawk the answer, which you will then write in your paper") they contribute to the division between school and real.

So, I'd say two things: Those who say this stuff is taught in "any college stats course" are probably actually literally wrong in that it is possible to take a lot of stats without really covering this, and secondly, even if covered, it ends up categorized away unless great efforts are taken to "make it real" for the student, which, short of forcing implementation on the students (impractical in general) I'm not sure how to do. Most scientists seem to come out of PhD programs with a very thin understanding of this stuff.
So in your country their could be a massive depression with everybody out of work and your FED won't lower interest rates?
Looks really nice. The month forward/back buttons seem a bit too small/hidden though imo. Took a second too long to find them.
Good article. Here is a tip to reduce Amazon S3 costs:

http://bit.ly/hn_reduce_s3_costs

:)
Multicore programming in Haskell : Simon Marlow of GHC fame at QCon
PDF file: http://www.haskell.org/~simonmar/multicore-haskell-marlow-qc...
Probably the fact that its frequency is close to the hydrogen line - which a number of people have suggested is a "natural" frequency that could be used for signaling over interstellar distances.
You could loan it out over Kiva, or at least a part of it. Just be sure whatever you choose, for any of your investments, that they at least beat the rate of inflation, else you are better of spending it.
We use Opera internally at my company because up until recently it was the only browser capable of keeping up with the realtime portfolio screens we render. With that said, both Chrome and Safari have improved their performance to the point where Opera may not be a requirement. I still think Microsoft should buy Opera and become standards-compliant overnight.
The word on the street is that we'll be moving to Sharepoint for some document management. I'll be curious to see how that goes.

My group (R&D) has been using a home-grown requirements management system for a few small projects, and ideally we'd move to that for our specs.
Best tip on the page is using CNAME's instead of A records. It's the least obvious of them.
There are plenty. Tethering is a good one, right now you're at you're carrier's mercy. Apps like Pandora that let you stream in the background, when my friend found out she could have Pandora in the car she was amazed. Instant messaging.

Homescreen/lockedscreen status apps--it drives me insane that the lock screen on the iPhone is nearly useless. I can at most see the time and read the latest text message. What about the number of emails, the current temperature, word of the day, etc. My dad travels a lot, he'd love an app that simply displayed what city he was in on the home screen.
I can't wait til legislation gets passed and the law catches up. It seems like a great way to weasel through anti discrimination laws.
>> "Most search companies want to identify you."

I'm not convinced they want to do it for any malicious/profit based motive.

They want to identify me to give me a better user experience, sure.

Being able to identify users searching on a search engine doesn't suddenly mean it's easier to monetize. Google would still make billions from the adverts next to search results regardless of how identifiable users are. It's not related to their bottom line.

I guess I just don't buy the conspiracy theories on it.
Out of interest, have you seen MusiXTeX?
Please try and be more civil in your posts here. Thanks!
Big brother technology updates
Aha, I did this:

find ~/.mozilla -name "*duck*"

Then I edited duck-duck-go.xml, changing http to https, and restarted Firefox.
Yeah. I was kinda hoping people actually used Twitter's geolocation service a bit more than they do and it would just be obvious. Austin is pretty decent today, with the first tweet usually one popping up within a minute.

Agree it could be more descriptive. I got to this point and it was working well so I deployed. (Thats a feature, right?) Any thoughts on how to explain whats happening that wouldn't interfere with the page structure too much?
Wave is and always will be a research project. It was only launched because Google doesn't believe in pure research projects, and mistakenly classified it as a "product."
Storing that much data about users isn't harmless just because the company doesn't do anything bad with it.

Even if that company would forever be good, they could still have their servers infiltrated into or stolen, or some government could decide that they want the data over night.
Modern market ideology does tend to assume people controlling the government and various agencies (for instance, Bernake) are motivated by selfishness.

It also assumes that the home-borrowers, politicians, realtors and bankers who created the housing bubble were motivated by selfishness, as were the hedge fund managers and bankers who helped pop the bubble.
Funnily enough, this is exactly what already happened to the USD.

The current greenback is worth approx 4% of its level in the early part of the 20th C.
I wonder how this applies to things like EngineYard Cloud which provides an IP address using dynamic DNS.
http://wikileaks.org/#us-intel-wikileaks gives a summary

this seems odd, given that cryptome has existed for years.
Maybe a "first time here? Check the FAQ" flash message like the stackoverflow sites?

I had no idea what was going on or meant to happen.
If you still want to use Google but want privacy, try:

https://ssl.scroogle.org/

What they do is explained here: http://www.scroogle.org/ and here https://ssl.scroogle.org/sslnote.html
Computable knowledge's killer app!
Javascript's dynamic scoping
what other service? Is it scroogle?
I would suggest caching some of the data server side, so there is some previous data on first page load.
Speaking as the owner of a small company, I think that the government has absolutely no basis for telling me that I'm not allowed to make one of the most important decisions for my company based on all the data I can get.

If a quick google of a candidate showed a blog post where he's railing about his current job "fuck this employer, I'm going to trash the database on my last day and put a lot of bugs in the source code", then I WANT TO KNOW THAT.

A law that says that I can't know that is BS, and I'll find a way to comply with the letter of the law while still getting the information I need.
Searching for "C# ASP.NET" throws a 404 error
http://pdf-tuts.com/C#-ASP.NET.html
Remember to escape special characters like "#"

Looks like multi word searches are otherwise supported.
"perl emacs" gives you http://pdf-tuts.com/perl-emacs.html

I particularly like that searches resolve to a pretty uri for easy bookmarking and sharing.
Not a great long article like this but I put my thoughts about Buzz together on my blog and I think HNers might like to see it. http://chanux.wordpress.com/2010/02/14/my-buzz-rant
He's been saying the same thing for at least 7 years:

Are You a Sharecropper? · If you’re developing software for the Windows platform, yes. Or for the Apple platform, or the Oracle platform, or the SAP platform, or, well, any platform that is owned and operated by a company. They own the ground you’re building on, and if they decide they don’t like you, or they can do something better with the ground, you’re toast. They can ship their own product and give it away till you go bust, then start charging for it; and use secret APIs you can’t see; and they can break the published APIs you use. All of these things have historically been done by platform vendors.

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla...
My point was more that some other thing like Etherpad, in the future, will be built directly on Wave instead of having to build AppJet first to be able to build a text editor on top.
Yeah, but that just gets you the smart disgruntled employee who trashes the database and doesn't say anything about it.

At least with the idiot, you can keep an eye on him.
Since when does anyone owe you information about how they make their decisions? If I dump a girl after four dates, I may tell her exactly why ... or I may say "I just didn't feel that spark". It's nicer, and easier, than saying "the more you talked, the more I realized that you've got a grating accent, I don't think much of your family, and your behaviors aren't in line with your stated life goals".

Giving a full length run down of my decision making process just opens the door for a conversation that I don't want to have, and isn't going to make anyone happy.

Now, if I can reject someone as a candidate for the position of my wife after four dates without a long discussion, then why can't I reject someone for the position of engineer after zero ?
There are also slides packed with the source download on Sourceforge (/doc).
Additionally, he probably doesn't even know which choice will make him money.

Most likely his money is managed in a blind trust, which means he has no control or knowledge over how it is invested. For all he knows, inflation will help his portfolio. In the most likely event, his money is invested in a mix of equities, stable funds and bonds, and all his money does is track the general health of the economy (with a smaller upside/downside due to hedging and diversification).
Straitjacket programming
I would suggest he focus on finding a professor at a university who tell the department "admit this person to our graduate program."
The 4 Types of Emails Programmers Receive
I quoted his own words. He's the first to say that Communism failed.

So, to you, Capitalism is nothing other than military spending??? Read some history.
Scrum Gathering 2010 in Orlando
You're all donating to wikileaks, right? Over here: http://wikileaks.org/
It looks cool enough, but I'm a little unclear what it's doing. Mapping your twitter friends? Is there something else here that I'm just not getting?
Even better would be to integrate the anti-shelving filter with a GTD app (I use Things) so that I don't have to create a separate task every time I want to create a followup reminder.

However, I would never want to send an auto-notification to the receiving party (often they're my customers -- how rude is that?).

I'd be annoyed if I was on the receiving end of the auto-reminder.
I have the same tic. It drives my boss crazy. I loathe the New York Times for this. Very frustrating! I also tend to draw squares with my mouse on my desktop. I don't know why.
Show HN: My Twitter/Disqus mashup that I threw together. (www.choip.me)
I disagree. Maybe it's not magic, but it's a very simple way to run things in Mathematica.
Kiva does not even pay interest, so I don't see how this fits the description of a potentially high-risk investment with the possibility for a large payout.
IE8 vs. Firefox: Four Things Firefox Could Learn from IE
Why You Shouldn’t ‘Launch’ Your Start-Up
I met some of the Willow Garage people at SHDH a couple months ago -- they are pretty awesome, even compared to startups. I remember they were looking for a great python developer at the time.

I love seeing the hardware part of robotics abstracted away so people who are better at software can build on top of that, sharing code, rather than everyone making their own hardware platform THEN software.
Speaking as the citizen of a country with a constitution, I have no comment about candidates who rail on their current job but I would be disturbed if employers started disqualifying employees based on critieria prohibited by law in my jurisdiction (Ontario).

For example, what if an HR employee can see from their public facebook page that they appear to be a fan of LGBT organizations and are interested in same sex people?

This exposes the HR person to information that is illegal to gather in an interview and illegal to use as the basis for job discrimination. You can also use marital status or interest in having kids if you prefer... Doing background checks that are not strictly work related is a huge issue. Your example is work related, so I empathize with your desire to know about it. But looking into non-employment behaviour opens up a huge can of worms... For employees and employers.
Unfortunately, if your search engine becomes important enough to spam, you won't be able to use logs as a signal . . .

Best of luck though. Seems like a good publicity strategy.
I get the feeling that this particular issue is probably being examined and this particular link has been provided based on the research someone did from when that guy flew his plane into the IRS building. (I forgot his name and do not feel like looking it up in the moment.) One of his major, even if it was strange, complaints was the inability for contractors to properly identify themselves as contractors when small changes to their working patterns can make them employees instead.
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

genbook.com seems to have some decent traction in the space
Please TechCrunch, stop using "dead simple" to describe every new app.
Okay, everything was fine and looked nice until I tried to book an appointment.

It's fair to expect the person making the booking to create an account.

However, to expect the receiving party of the booking request to also sign up for account is asking for too much and is unlikely to happen.

Also, why do you ask for people's contact details (address, phone, ...). Do you really need that info?. If anything just put the necessary stuff on the create an account form and put the rest of the info on a profile page that people can edit later.
lottery tickets
Loving this search engine! Even works great on my Samsung Jet mobile phone browser (webkit based).
its posting any geotagged tweet in those cities.
Italian Erlang User Group
Counting erlangers in italy
On the same topic, 'Baghdad year zero' is also fascinating:

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2004/09/0080197
For those who doubt the serious consequences of printing money, just look at Zimbabwe. When your own countries currency is no longer legal tender, it disadvantages the rich and not the poor. The poor in Zimbabwe barter, the rich use money, who really loses out here when the currency completely fails?
Pope with horns
Don’t confuse syntax with reasoning
Actually, most of the projects I work on are developed in a waterfall style. Not every hacker out there works in an Agile shop.
For me, I never respond to e-vites. Instead, I RSVP via an email to the actual person.

The Automated Invitation sites are very unattractive to me not for ease-of-use, reasons. I don't use those channels because to do so is not only sending an RSVP to the host, it's also telling the website that you'll be attending, as well as their advertisers, their business partners, and other downstream marketers, etc.

Let's not confuse social conventions and etiquette with usage of the Ad Revenue oriented vehicles through which were asked to attend.
I built an app last year for a client that included doing booking for dentist offices. One of the big things in getting people to use a new booking tool for their business is to allow them to block out times and business hours, before allowing others to just start creating appointments all willy-nilly.

Also, it's important to allow the business owner to set a minimum clearance for new appointments. E.g. if a dentist decides that they need at least an hour-block for a half-hour appointment (prep and cleanup time, etc), then the calendar shouldn't allow a patient to schedule an appointment in a half-hour opening.

But overall, I'm also unclear on how this alternative is better than Google Calendar? Is there a private-label version that could be integrated easily into my own site? Though, I guess Google Calendar now kinda has that as well.
It's also because the stakes are so high. Suppose the #1 guy is only 2% better than the #2 guy.

2% of $100 million is a lot. If you need to pay the #1 guy an extra $100,000/year to keep him, it's well worth it.
I see where you are coming from, but there are a couple of things I think you should consider.

First, that "unreliable online material" is likely a social networking site and can be tied to the person in question with a high degree of reliability. This is certainly not perfect, mistaken identity is always possible, as is impersonation, but on social networking sites you can normally say it is more likely than not the right person. I am not saying that it is right to make judgements on someone's employability based on those sites, just that you can often be pretty confident you are talking about the right person.

Next, the rational for rejecting an applicant is very frequently "We found a better candidate." Now, the reason they judged that other candidate to be better might be because they found something they didn't like about applicant A on the internet, but that is still often going to be the rationale.
On a somewhat unrelated note: there is a very interesting peak on spot history for windows instances on Dec 16th, they jumped up to $200
Look everywhere else for inspiration
Data Security and the Nasuni Filer
I thought he retired. Why are we seeing more from him? Isn't the come-back tour supposed to happen after a longer hiatus?
Sometimes the 25th time is the charm: A/B testing over and over again
Didn't realize they were limiting the information they release because of monetary concerns. Definitely a worthy cause to donate to.
Enter in contact with other angel investors, sometimes they group together in a fund and they will be happy to help you invest the $ 50,000.
1. Little over a year

2. No

3. No

4. http://www.hotindianstartups.com/
Sleep Habits Vary by Race
If an HR manager can deny you the job, it's not worth having.
I believe cuil (hee hee) has advertised their lack of logging.

http://www.cuil.com/info/privacy/
> That is not what I said.

Right, sorry, I should have been clearer that I was reacting to the article and not to you there. Or actually, I was reacting to what I thought the article said, because indeed that's not what it said! Thanks.
I would make a list of lesser known sites that I am impressed with, then sequentially contact them for an x% stake. If all say no, I would try and join the angel list on venture hacks. If they didn't let me in, I'd go to the angel investment network.
See http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/7037.aspx for a rebuttal of the baby sitting co-op story.
The question didn't mention startups at all. You can be a single founder without being a startup.

If a defining feature of a startup is that it's unprofitable and likely to fail, then I think these single founders should be pleased not to be considered startups.
For one thing, he completely ignores the fact that the US economy doesn't exist in a vacuum. Inflation can have a big affect on exchange rates, importers and exporters, the attitude of people like China to all the USD debt they own, etc etc.
Indonesia Java International Destination
Losses from Internet crime more than doubled in 2009
25 Years Ago Today: First Dot Com Address
The future of display advertising
If you're looking at risk though:

* Computer could have been compromised
* Wifi/local network could have been compromised
* Your ISP could have been compromised
* Some of the peers on the internet between your ISP and google "
* The datacenter where Googles servers are

And that's before the data gets to Google.

I'd guess that the most common privacy theft is at the first 2 steps - local computer / wifi network.

Any one of those could happen, someone could be logging all your searches + all internet traffic in some of those cases.

Personally though, "What I've searched for" is in the 'meh don't care if anyone knows this' bucket for me.
Instead of treating WikiLeaks like a threat, why not use it as a tool for feeding misinformation to specific targets?
I don't know the full details of the decision, since I don't work for that company.

As I understand it control was a major issue. The app was designed to monitor and control a hedge fund (i.e., automated alerts and kill switches while you are at lunch). Hoping and praying that Apple won't break things was simply not an option. Lack of multitasking on the iphone was also a problem.
I thought I would share this with everyone - after last weeks discussions around various security topics in this vein, I thought it would be good to outline exactly what/how/why Nasuni supports data security-wise.

For full disclosure; I am an employee.
> It's hard for me to imagine the "killer app" that can't be done on a platform that has a completely open web browser

I don't want to write yet another web app. I want to write actual apps that run right on the device (or at least on a VM on the device). And as a user, I usually only use webapps when no good alternatives are available.

> I guess what I'm saying is just this: all the cries of "software freedom!!" as though it were a revolutionary political struggle ring hollow to me.

There is a struggle going on. Now, whether or not people choose to see it is another matter.
Note: This article was written in February 2002.
The server didn't respond for me, so here's a Coral Cache link:

http://wikileaks.org.nyud.net/file/us-intel-wikileaks.pdf
Link to pdf of book:

http://www.cs.rit.edu/~ats/books/ooc.pdf
1) since 2007 on one startup, and since 2009 on another project

2) no, and I don't have any plans to apply for any of my current projects. while I definitely like YC's model and I think they do great things, I don't feel like the process matches my goals with any of my current projects. I'm more in it for the long-haul.

3) no, my projects have been entirely self-funded

4) http://www.ratemystudentrental.com/spp, http://www.leadnuke.com
My 10 development principles
Find a startup that interests you personally enough that you'd go on board as a founder who conveniently has $$$.