skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
AirBnB and Couchsurfing both do pretty well with mixing strangers; the bigger problem is probably that the users would have to keep updating a rideshare site with their own plans, and the site would have to battle jitney drivers' attempting to take over and spam quite often (I would guess).

More to the point, though I hate playing the fearful American, when using Couchsurfing or AirBnB, you know the host's address. When you get in a car, you could end up anywhere.
This is a real deficiency in any rating system. A one-star review (or a five-star review, either end of the bell curve) should require a short review as to precisely why the user thought the app was so terrible (or so outstanding).
Destructuring extravaganza
They use crowdsourcing:

We're a collaboration of scientists at UC Berkeley and UC Davis and our image labeling engine can take any photo and accurately label it. We use computer vision and an innovative crowdsourcing network to recognize images, and the architecture learns over time, so it gets smarter with each search.
These "reviews" are clearly from people who removed the app and were prompted to rate it by the iPhone OS.

This system really doesn't make sense (you wouldn't remove a great app) and might need to be removed from the OS, or revised.

The OS could for example, prompt the user the nth time an app is launched. But that would probably be annoying.

Or Apple could send an email every now and then to invite users to rate all their apps (or the recently bought) with an easy to use interface, where they can just rate by number of stars (à la Netflix) and possibly add a comment.
Really? If you mean 'your version control and build systems can handle more load than his blog,' perhaps you are correct. But the expression 'scale' refers to the rate at which increases in load places increased demand on resources. Unless you have a very specialized infrastructure for VCS and builds, it probably doesn't scale at a lower rate than his blog infrastructure scales.
My awareness of Opera comes mostly from the fact that their people are always the ones complaining to the European Commission about Microsoft. "Not that Microsoft isn't loathsome ...", but that's not the sort of publicity that's given me a great urge to try their browser.
So if I get this right, it means that sites running this protocol will submit to Google right away? It's RSS in reverse?

So this means that instead of random search engines coming to you, the search engines have to rely on the sites knowing they exist. Brilliant way to keep out small-time competition.

EDIT: Nevermind, I got corrected.
BZZZT!

He said something to the effect that brokerage accounts at Bear Sterns were safe, not that the firm, its stockholders or bondholders were safe.

That's what "don't take your money out" means, vs. "don't sell your Bear Sterns stock or bonds".

A very different thing, and from what I've heard in the worst case he still would have been right. And you'll note that he called the subsequent buyout correctly ... and that very statement shows that he's not saying the firm "is fine".
This is really a garbage submission (sorry).

The 7" tablet has "ARM 11 chip by Samsung, 2GB of storage and 256 MB of RAM" with a "price point" of $100. Yeah, sure, and I have a "price point" of $100M for the URL shortening service I wrote in BASIC. Any interested buyers please contact me.

This article/link has about as much useful and accurate data as a 1000 word stream of blogtext from a random word generator.
revealed about a month prior to the iPhone... shipped a few weeks before the iPhone...

If only the cause-and-effect were so clear. The iPhone was rumored for years before it was released; it was surely in manufacturing prototype for many months before it was announced, and then it was announced months before it actually shipped.

Apple is legendary for keeping its secrets well. But even major government agencies can't keep secrets perfectly. Espionage works. And I'm sure that lots of people in China were in a position to figure out Apple's plans in advance. (Note how poorly the iPad's secrets were kept relative to the iPhone. The biggest advantage Apple had with the iPod and iPhone was the element of surprise: Nobody thought of Apple as a music-player company, or a telephony company, so nobody was focusing too hard on Apple product espionage. They're focused now, though.)

So the argument that these various contemporaneous iPhone-like devices would have happened without the iPhone is pretty weak. For example, just because Google and Microsoft announced iPad knockoffs within days of the iPad announcement [1] doesn't mean that those products [2] were going to happen with or without Apple.

---

[1] Microsoft's pad was announced earlier! Of course, I'm told it also didn't look much like an iPad. In demo-theatre, as in curling, it pays to move last.

[2] If products they are. Demos are at least one order of magnitude easier to cough out than shipping products are. Of course you can build a demo of a pad. That's a couple weeks of work or less.
Relational databases are not limited to hierarchies. You can create complex graphs if you want. It's all how you model your information. They were created due to the limitations of hierarchical and network db systems.

There was an interesting discussion on Artima ("Software Development Has Stalled") last week that touched on the schema-free idea. One of the participants suggested that computers could use inference to determine data relationships. (In his words, the computer is hypothetical and would need to be infinitely fast.) Presumably by computer he meant some agent doing machine learning on top of the "infinitely fast" hardware.

If your idea is along the inference line, then it would be interesting to see how far inference could go. However, if you mean to simply encode relationships into each program (or into a library), then it's just a re-invention of a schema.
I wish he'd include a margin of error, mean, and median in his graphs. Quotes like this make me very leery of the reported result:

Since this is a stopwatch test, the 0.3 seconds longer it takes Opera to open eight tabs than it does five could very well be human error.

Load times for Yahoo! fluctuate in Safari by a full 100% during the tests. Beside the Facebook variation on all browsers, this is the most significant aberration during the page load time tests.

The load times for Facebook fluctuate the most out of the Web sites tested during our page load time testing. This was experienced across all benchmarked browsers.
Police are for cleaning up crime scenes after the fact and trying to catch the people responsible. There's almost nothing they can do before a crime is committed. Even if a crime is in progress, they're more interested in protecting their own skin than in protecting yours. (Ever notice that a dead cop is a tragedy and a dead civilian is just another day at work?) I've known people who were attacked around the corner from a police van and the police did nothing, if they even bothered to notice at all.
Took me a minute to realize he meant paywall when he said firewall. But yeah, I'm not sure I see a paywall working for him.

If I were him, my first attempt to monetize would be a Netflix affiliate program.
You know, I agreed with you (and even upvoted you) but as I think about it I think you might be wrong. I think the meta point to the article is that our entire idea of what the written word should be is about to change now that the last vestiges of print are reaching the end of their life.

In other words you don't see pagination going away because it's part of our mental model of what a document should be like. I think the article is saying that mental model itself is becoming obsolete and we won't have documents as much as we'll have formless information. That's not going to happen overnight (and the article points out there will probably be a hybrid period where print exists beside electronic). But eventually I think it's probably inevitable.
Teachers Feel Ignored In Education Debate
"In all things legal, should we not get what we want? It’s only a matter of time before the free market attitude of Google creates an open forum for creativity and gives the people what they’re asking for. I expect profits will follow."

While there will always be a proud happy class of tinkerer, I think more and more users want something that simply works without headaches. I've felt from the day the App Store happened that it was at least a moderate threat to our ideas of open computing and information sharing, but talk to nearly anyone, and what they want isn't necessarily more choices, more Freedom, or more control over their device. What they want is something that works and supports them, not something that requires their support.

Predicting profits from ideological lines is a dangerous game.
In three years desktops will be irrelevant - Google sales chief
“If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.
I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.” --Nikola Tesla
I don't see how macros should make everything depend on everything else. When you want to use a macro you (should) still need indicate somehow where it comes from.
Yes, it's fun. PLT Scheme editor supports similar "block style" parentheses highlighting, and it is useful for reading large data sets or machine generated code.

http://plt-scheme.org/screenshots/french-profiler.jpg
"Anybody can rationalize anything to his own satisfaction"

... but smart people tend to require a bigger rationalization to be satisfied. And they also tend to be more capable of creating a rationalization of that magnitude.

The question is whether they've developed the habit of "reality testing" and discarding flawed rationalizations.
Sounds Great!! Good Job..
Ask HN:Product Focus Help
Hi HN,

For the past couple of weeks, I've been working on a couple products in the event/ticketing market. I need to buckle down and focus on one specific area, and I'm having trouble deciding which. Let me know what you think, or if you think of any other opportunities to explore.

1) Build a Search Engine for Facebook Events. Localize/Categorize the events. There isn't an official API to get ALL events, but there are a couple workarounds that could probably be used. Build a facebook app/website as a frontend for the events.

2) Build a Native Facebook application for creating events that you can sell tickets to. Essentially a "super" events app. Ticketing is built into the app.

3) Build a web app that integrates into Facebook Events. ie. You create an event on my website, I ask you if you'd like a facebook event, then I create it for you.

4) A Subset of (2), build an application solely for Facebook Pages that allows you to create events and sell tickets within the application.

I don't have a huge amount of time or resources, so I'm trying to figure out what the best MVP would be. I'd like to keep the product as simple as possible (obviously).

Please let me know if you have any suggestions, critiques, or ideas.
What I take away from this is that it pays to be director of a nonprofit? (I guess they get there by contacts with their more successful peers they met at Harvard?)
Why Oracle is the World's Largest Open Source Company
I suspect you completely missed the point of the parent.

The "Check for yourself" part is only in the editorialized headline, implying that the READER of the article is capable of drawing his own conclusions. This is obviously dishonest, because you can't draw your own conclusions unless you do the research yourself (like the independent researcher who wrote the article did).

The No Spin Zone (O'Reilly) uses the "We present the facts, YOU DECIDE" mantra. So do most conspiracy theory movies: "We'll just show you MONEY IS DEBT, and AMERICA is due for RUIN. But is this bad? YOU DECIDE!"

And so on.

But for any scientific work this is unacceptable, because the way in which you present the results matter. Pick one scale on a graph and people will assume the problem is huge, pick a logarithmic scale and people will conclude there is no problem. It's the responsibility of the researcher to both present the facts and to explain what they mean.

The you-decide tactic is manipulative, and it doesn't belong in HN titles.

- I should note that I don't have any issue with the article itself. I liked it, and I commend independent research.
Users bend and round up
Funny.. a bunch of people upvote what is clearly labelled by its own author as amateur and naive number extracting, then downvote a link to rigorous statistical analysis saying that last month was the hottest on record.

It's not about the methods, it's about the conclusions? If they agree with me, the methods are ok, if they don't, they're a biased scientist conspiracy?

What the hell.. if someone was linking to an amateur analysis saying that log n was more expensive than n^2, would we be getting all of this philosophy about how everyone's perspective is valuable?
Thanks, i hope it will work out !
According to dictionary.com, evil means: "1. morally wrong or bad; immoral; wicked. 2. harmful; injurious". Microsoft harmed competitors (and their shareholders) in the marketplace with questionable ethics at best, and was convicted of illegally using their monopoly powers by a U.S. court. "Evil" applies to injustice as much as it does to gross immorality. Sociopathic corporate behavior is just as evil as sociopathic personal behavior.
eBay is being too strict with replicas, i do not agree with their policies, so i came out with this.
The scientific truth of the matter is that last month was the hottest on record: http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE61O02C20100225

There is room for scientific doubt about whether this is caused by CO2 -- it's a greenhouse gas but correlation != causation and all that.

But if you conclude that the earth isn't actually warming, you're doing it wrong -- there's no doubt about that.
I think line numbers are better than page numbers for navigating an electronic document.
Also look into openx. Community version and hosted version.
Will you ship to India?
Through March, we'll have a special introductory rate of $4.99 for a year's membership. After April 1, the price will shoot up to $5.

The humor value of this sentence sells itself.
The Future Will Be Captioned: Improving Accessibility on YouTube
Yahoo Learning to Rank Challenge
Many thanks... blush

Yes I was deeply honoured to see Larry's comment. The shock of it took me over a week to compose a good enough reply :)
You completely missed the point. The soldier was using the knife as an analogy for intelligence, not his dodging/punching. The robber had the knife, which gave him a false sense of superiority, but he didn't know how to use the knife, so he ended up losing the fight.
I think it's both-and, not either-or.
They also mention that they do not have a Alphas-only population, because Alphas don't want to do menial work. And then they mention than they also had an experiment, where a lot of machines were used on an island to get rid of menial work, but it did not work, because people had too much free time on their hands.

Why did they not try both together?
Hacking a crowd
Yes of course.thanks for asking!
We use it for some other ads, and its the sole reason why decided to make our own, its the definition of bad ui, and a real pain to use.
Google celebrates Vivaldi's birthday...Wikipedia page vandalized all day
Ubisoft’s Uber DRM Cracked Within a Day
I have been using Opera for a year or two now, and yes, I wasn't very impressed by their complaint to the EU. I don't even think Microsoft is loathsome.

If you don't know anything about Opera, I suggest you install it and find out.
This particular execution - a lump sum of $600k for a lifetime's earning percentage of a successful non-profit entrepreneur - seems absolutely insane to me, but I've wondered about a similar arrangement under more narrowly contrived circumstances: Invest in promising (18 and over!) students by paying off their school for percentage of their salary, rather than dumping huge loans on them that demonstrably reduce their opportunities.

Right now, the armed forces in America regularly engage in a similar practice by paying for school in return for a commitment, and maybe their agreements could provide a model for a more entrepreneurial version down the road: We'll invest in your education plus a start-up stipend, in return for a stake in you and your projects during college + x years after, with a clause that you can leave at any anytime and assume your debt with a high level of interest.
Clojure won't win the battle but may win the war
Is it really? Perhaps I'm missing something, but this service appears to have nothing to do with the blog author's post.
Very stable, until it isn't: http://www.bbc.co.uk/climate/impact/gulf_stream.shtml
These types of schemes are not even worth discussing, they're horrible for investors, and if the first venture doesn't work then does the investor buy more of the person? So that their their initial investment isn't lost? At want point does the person having sold 80% of their future earnings just stop working because they don't see it as worthwhile.
Insurance, no, because that's going to happen to the users, not the operator. When someone crashed and the driver is sued for everything by his insurance company because they found out it was a for-profit-ride, it doesn't matter where the service is run from.

Taxi boards, sure, formally. Although, I've heard that the primary deterrent for running a pirate-taxi-service in Copenhagen Saturday night (that's ridiculously under-served by taxis, thanks to the taxi-board) is getting beaten up. The problem would be less for such a pre-arranged service, you'll look like you're picking up a friend, not soliciting, but it's still a bit of a risk to take, IMHO.

Don't get me wrong, I like the idea very much, I'm just a bit pessimistic on the systemic challenges.
Sukhvir Housing Agency
I think the financial pressure of bootstrapping is such a powerful motivator that I dunno if giving an unproven entrepreneur 600k is such a good idea.
Thoughts on MongoHQ pricing - /dev/mull
Steven Shingler gives his thoughts on the recently release MongoHQ pricing structure - with responses from MongoHQ peeps! MongoHQ is a MongoDB hosted service.
I wouldn't say never, but I think there are times when ignorance can make you stay the course while rationality would have you quit.
Item 2 is just wrong. Even something as (comparatively) well understood as an El Niño event causes wilding differing effects from region to region. Every time a scientist goes on TV to explain this stuff, they have to explain this very point: local measurements don't cut it, you have to look at and correlate very complicated global data sets. Apparently you didn't listen becuase of...

Item 1, which seems to me to be a completely unsubstantiated ad hominem. You could use that same argument to reject any science you don't want to hear.
Nice work. I built the Hacker News iPhone app and just pushed login/reply/voting/ last week. Reverse engineering a site like HN is fun, especially dealing with FNIDs.

I'm hoping to open-source some of my stuff too, once I clean it up. I think it would be great to see apps built on top of HN.

For reference: http://michaelgrinich.com/hackernews
You can leave at anytime by not working.
Yea I feel like I've seen at least a dozen sites that attempt to do this. Problem is none of them ever really took off
That particular visualization wouldn't show an average global temperature increase until after the artic was quite dry.

As the author says, a picture is a story. His story is "at an extremely high level we have seasonal temperature fluctuation."

Your entire second point shows a complete misunderstanding of well, everything.
Ask HN: Rate my startup - A way to rate anyone by email or phone
"If Google can implement an Indexing by PuSH program, it would ask every website to implement the technology and declare which Hub they push to at the top of each document"

and they all choose google, making google, like, permanent supergod of the internet, instead of just a presently dominant overlord.
No, applications using private frameworks are allowed on a case-by-case basis, e.g. http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/12/steve-jobs-interve... and http://www.macworld.com/article/144963/2009/12/ustream_iphon...
I smell fear.

The iPhone app development community must be trembling in its boots as CS5 gets closer. In just a matter of time, anyone with a computer and some elementary Flash skills is going to have an Apple dev account and will be submitting apps to the app store that they made in Flash.

There will be so many apps that the indie-game developer or small business iPhone app development company won't be able to make any money because the amount of free-app competition will be overwhelming.

Hell, it's going to suck for the consumer too. There will just be too much in the app store. Too much crap to filter through, too many poorly built apps to the point that downloading apps will be a chore. We'll need to try 20 before we find one jem.

Oh the humanity. When Flash apps start entering the app store, a lot of businesses will come crumbling down.

At least now there's the Objective-C learning-curve barrier, and you have to have a Mac. For Android, it's Java. But Flash. Oh man, a few hundred bucks later and anyone can create something.

I wonder how many Towers of Hanoi games the app store will have as the new Flash developers finish their tutorials and then try to sell their app?
My degree is in math too.

I think the article is bogus and kind of dangerous.

Math is a matter of exact calculation. If the axioms are true, the premises will follow. Statistics seems like math but involves a group of hidden assumptions about "the world". It's crucial to know the difference between the two fields.

Like mathematics, statistics offers an array of machinery producing results. Unlike mathematicians, statistician should be "gate keepers" as well as technicians. Ideally, a statistician should be there to say "just because you can your stock market data into a heat equation, it doesn't mean you should plug your stock market data in a heat equation".

Unfortunately, the article seems to entirely neglect this aspect except in banalities that a non-math person would be entirely incapable of applying ("dig deeper" won't help you if you don't know why normal distributions matter and why not everything is normal).
I recall my University days when I had to wake up early in the morning to take an hour-long bus ride to attend a Calculus class at 8:30am. What a waste! Classes should have started at 11am...
Since the author quoted me a few times in this article, how can I not like it :-)

For certain types of problems (e.g., graph theory, circuit design, general layout problems, planning) Prolog's built in backtracking and flexible type system does make it a very good programming language choice. My favorite example: I once spent over a month writing a planning system with nice interactive graphics in Common Lisp. After I was done, I recode the whole thing in Prolog in less than a week, adding lots of new functionality.

There are many good programming books, one of my favorites being "The Art of Prolog" by Sterling and Shapiro. Also, Bratko's, Clocksin's, Mellish's books are all very useful.
Official Google Enterprise Blog: Disaster Recovery by Google
I thought that the big drm issue was that the game saves on ubisoft's servers vs your harddrive.

To me that in itself is very unappealing, but that is what is "missing" from the game. If that has been cracked already then that just goes to show that good DRM can at best delay cracking the game, meanwhile there is a saying "Whenever DRM prevents a customer willing to buy the game form buying it, a pirate gets his wings"