skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes it is! Good eye :)
Great talk! Thanks for pointing this out.

"You superimpose the notion of cloud on a series of related cloud values." Whoa!
Google Ventures unveils $100M annual investment goal
I think it was the risks they didn't understand, not how the instruments worked.
>Google has a much better revenue model since it is not tied to there being a conflict of interest between them and their users.

I wholeheartedly disagree. Google is also in the business of using any tracking data it can gather on users to deliver ads. Google's primary money maker is advertising, whether in search results or in banner ads. Their customers are not their email/chat/docs users, their customers are the companies that buy advertising. Email/chat/docs users are the product that they sell to advertisers when they promise that the ads will reach an audience. The free services they offer are the honey pot to convince the users to get an account and be tracked. Google is in the same precarious position as Facebook, people just talk about it less.
Someone posted an NYT article that linked to a good study.
1999 was more than 10 years ago, and during the Internet boom, when the US economy was doing rather well and the country even had a budget surplus.

I think you'll find Americans today are working much longer hours. That is if they're lucky enough to have a job at all.
We've standardized on a Pool hall. It's large, it serves beer, it's a lot quieter than a bar and they're open late. The crappy wifi is an issue, but it's the best alternative we've been able to find.
Does the look and feel of the site remind anyone else of a Microsoft site?
I hope it's fake and the circulating of it amongst Wall Street is for lolz.

That they think their gratuities and luxury car purchases mean more to an economy than fast food and Honda purchases, perhaps explains why their industry melted.
...also, google's not going to take this lying down ;)

Why I say that... Open Graph is part of Facebook's strategy to use its 400M-user social network as leverage to take over indexing and navigation of the web, and serve ads with it.

Navigation of the web has been almost entirely Google's territory, because of Search (which also equals 90% of their revenue, from AdWords ads).

Therefore, Google has to counter Open Graph somehow...
http://www.pirateparty.ca/ ?
Probably random mutation that happened to turn out beneficial for us. In evolutionary sense, a larger brain doesn't seem to be of utmost importance for reproduction.
Humans aren't robots. I'll skip the philosophical discussion about whether or not will power exists (as you'd clearly need it to) but the fact is that if exercise makes you lose 200 calories worth of weight, but then makes you consume 250 calories, it's not helping you lose weight.

It's helping you in a number of other different ways perhaps, I was certainly not saying someone should not exercise. It's just not an effective weight loss technique.

Also when you add up the calories burned, even vigorous exercise just isn't that much. It's FAR easier to cut calories out of your diet than to exercise them away even if you assumed exercise did not make you hungrier or affect you in any other way adverse to weight loss.
It is sad that this article is so true.

For me, the terrorists have now won: I won't fly to most places any more.

I won't fly because the security theatre now makes it so unpleasant, time-consuming and indirectly expensive that I would rather forego my holiday to those destinations I can't reach by other modes of transport that actually make me feel comfortable on the journey and welcome when I arrive.

That's a shame, because I would have really liked to visit places like the US and Japan some time in my life (I live in the UK). But how am I supposed to enjoy a holiday when my journey starts with my other half and me being virtual-strip-searched by sometimes dubious characters we can't even see and ends with having biometric scans taken to go into a database as if I were a criminal?
But it's on the internet. It must be true.

Also, it has pictures, some of which are attractive females. I'm sold!
Steve Jobs is Right, Adobe’s Tech Is Flawed & Should Change or Die
Some apps he missed but are also very very good are..

Aldiko: Excellent high quality ebook reader, with automatic download from feedbooks, gutenberg and import your own.
Thinking Space: mind mapping
Instafetch: instapaper integration.
Mint: Mint.com's app

Android is really developing.
Apple's restrictions are above and beyond anything that any console maker requires. Requirements on the end product are to be expected, requirements on the specific tooling used to create the product are more unusual and potentially represent anti-competitive activity.

With respect to game consoles, Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo have their own acceptance processes, but they do not require you use a particular compiler or code in a particular language, all they care about is the end product. A lot of the multi-platform games these days are developed using tool-chains specially built for the purpose, so that, for example, the PS3 release and the 360 release are just different builds from the same code base rather than awkwardly separate development efforts as they would be otherwise. Such tools vastly ease the burden of releasing to multiple consoles and in many cases enable developers to do multi-platform releases that they would otherwise not have the resources to do.

Apple's licensing restrictions make this sort of thing impossible. You can't reasonably build a tool-chain to target, say, both iPhone and android development from the same code base. Not and live up to Apple's licensing restrictions.

And that's very much anti-competitive on Apple's part. It means that more and more people have to choose, have to be "locked in" to one particular platform.
Many VMs are designed to run from bytecode. This is true for Squirrelfish (Safari) and TraceMonkey (Mozilla), though V8 compiles directly to machine code. The bytecode isn't compatible, but it's not a stretch to imagine a JS bytecode language would be similar to these current IRs:

http://webkit.org/specs/squirrelfish-bytecode.html

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/spidermonkey/internals/trac...

Anyways, I still believe that shipping an existing VM, be it .NET's CLR, Java's JVM or Python's bytecode isn't the right way to go. There's a lot of innovation left on the current web platform - both in terms of the performance work that browser vendors are pushing out and the new desktop APIs that the admittedly slow web standards committees are publishing. In the case of a platform as wide as the web, it makes sense that browser vendors sit back and built something from scratch.
Awesome. I like your ranking system too.

There was an analogue to this that had a list of the top articles on HN from the previous week... is that still around?
This is clearly marked as speculation in both the title and the body of the article.

It cites a fact from a totally non-questionable source (Arrington himself says he's moving) and then explores the potential implications, based on tax law and market analysis.

If we're allowed to speculate on HN, why can't SFGate speculate as well?
LLVM is not an alternative to JVM/CLI in any interesting way. It's too low-level. It doesn't provide memory management, introspection, loading, etc. It's just a compilation target really. LLVM has no dynamic features either.
2012 Survival Guide - Research and Prepare
Wozniak on Mass iPad Sales
Perhaps, but I would have put understanding the risks within the scope of understanding the instruments.
You can do this in OS X's preference pane. All my tabbed applications, even Terminal, now use Command+Option+Arrows.
Citrix in Cambridge, UK, is offering internships. We work on hardware virtualization. Our software is open source.

Drop me an email (matthias.goergens@gmail.com), if you are interested in more details. (Sorry, it's too late at the moment for me to write more.)
it has to do with California state taxes, if his residence moves to another state sale of assets will go to that state. And we know California has high state taxes he may try to avoid.
Palantir Tech in Palo Alto: http://www.palantirtech.com/careers/positions
Ask HN: Good javascript graphing libraries
Quick query from a long time lurker... I'm working on an app that helps people make informed financial decisions. As part of this I need to draw graphs to help users visualise the data. I'm currently using the google charts javascript library. However I'm slightly troubled by relying on a company's ongoing support and traffic issues if my site ever takes off (http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/terms.html). What other libraries have readers had success with? I'm not looking to do anything too advanced, think along the lines of bar and line charts with annotations but I want it to work with older browsers (ie6). Thanks.
If you assume that's a causation rather than a correlation do the world a favor and don't go into science.
> We have this already: <applet>. As we all know, it didn't work out so well.

I hear that a lot, but I think Java applets didn't gain widespread traction more because of the arrival of Flash as an easier format for simple animations and interactions than anything else.

Java applets remain a useful tool for browser-based UIs today; one of my current projects involves writing one. The biggest technical hurdle is that not everyone installs a modern JRE with their browser any more, which is a downer for casual use because it means there's stuff to install locally. For tools you're going to use every day it's no big hurdle, though.

The primary alternatives are Flash (which is well-established but looking more awkward and proprietary with all the current politics, and somewhat limited in its applicability) and JavaScript (which has potential, but isn't even close to being a good language for developing serious UIs of moderate or large size today, and no amount of HTML5 canvas/multimedia hype is going to change that).
Songwriters: piracy "dwarfs bank robbery," FBI must act
Ubuntu user here. I am a bit wary of this change because it breaks the visual consistency from a desktop POV. In theory this idea is great if people used the same icons and conventions. Sadly consistency is not one of linux'es strong points. I fully expect java, tk, qt, gnome, wxwidgets to each design their own window decorators which behave / appear ever so different. Perhaps it would have been better to expose some inbuilt "Windicators" via a DBus service and applications that wanted to show a windicator could set a message to the DBUS service. To be fair maybe the Ubuntu folks have a perfect design for this, but since they havent released it its hard to be optimistic.
edit to add more pessimism - This will only make life more difficult for tiling window managers like ratpoison, xmonad, awesome that dont support window decorators, because many apps will go ahead and just assume the presence of a window decorator on every window.
In Visual Studio if you hold alt-Tab it'll pop up a quasimodal dialog that you can navigate through with arrow keys to select the tab you want, or hop into one of VS's panes (properties, ReSharper unit tests, etc). It's much less ideal than being able to just switch to the one you want, but if (like me) you often get stuck with too many tabs to cycle through easily it's at least a way out.
OTOH, I paid the one-time cost of some 3oz bottles and quart-sized plastic bags, and don't find traveling to be much of a hassle at all. The biggest hassle when traveling in the US is that there is almost never any public transportation when you arrive.
> indirectly expensive

Just curious - what do you mean by that? Taxes that sponsor the theatre in the long run? Or... ?
I found http://startuply.com useful. I found my summer internship through there.

Also http://jobs.mashable.com and http://crunchboard.com/jobs/
The thing is, they actually got users. Yes, us nerds get really mad when we get our zillionth "what kind of floor cleaner are you?" quiz request, but these are numbers of people actually using those programs, right?
Yes, exactly. It's really not much different than an employer trying to maintain the highest quality employees by using race as a hiring decision.

Apple already has an extensive quality control process for iPhone apps. If they can't come up with objective criteria that they can test apps against in the approval process then they shouldn't just use prejudicial BS to try to filter out so-called low quality apps. It's anti-competitive and anti-innovative. It's nothing more than a big company throwing around its weight trying to be a bully.
Having used OpenBSD as a desktop for a bit, I realized, after waiting 24 hours for Amarok to build, that it is not a desktop OS. It's for your router. Use Linux for your desktop, it's just easier.
Is it wrong that I hold HN readers to higher standards when it comes to titles than miscellaneous news websites? :)
What Entrepreneurs Should Know About Raising Money From Google Ventures
I agree. While I like Reddit, I think they've missed a trick by not just using tags. It'd much rather see all posts in the Reddit ecosystem tagged "Ruby" than just those that were directly submitted to the Ruby subreddit, for example. That's a bit like Delicious, though, I guess.. just with commenting ;-)
I'm a fan of VirtuaWin myself: http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/
I'm not a big fan of GS, or the current finance setup. That being said:

"These bastards are reveling in their financial mischievousness – they’re enjoying explaining exactly how they fucked us."

If you go up against people who are smarter than you, and greedier than you, and who know more than you, and you trust them not to fuck you, they will fuck you.

That's capitalism.
A supercar parked up there!
http://gigapan.org/gigapans/48492/snapshots/137629/
"I have it wired into my fingers that Super+<n> takes me to desktop 'n', and then, typically I'm on the window I want. If not, it is a constant number of "Super+n" to get me to the window"

So you have turned your workspace into a hash table.
Especially embarrassing when somebody addresses you in your native language, and you expected something different.
The author of this article talks about how Google's advantage is "intent": people who see Google ads are typically those that are searching for something. The problem is the author then utterly fails to make the case for how Facebook can tap into this, and ends up talking about Facebook's advantage over AdSense, not AdWords - and of course, it is AdWords that are geared towards intent.

> If Facebook can use my interests, sex, age, location, who I’m friends with and their age, location, interests etc. to infer that when I’m searching for a ‘bobbin’ it’s probably because I want to tie steelhead flies with it, then it makes more sense for every publisher on the web to use Facebook’s ad network than Google or anyone else because they will simply make more money.

The problem with this statement is, how does Facebook know that the person is searching for anything at all? After all, they are searching on Google, not on Facebook.
Tell HN:  Presenting trick.ly
Why? Perhaps your genes have been trained (=evolved) on big datasets to produces good speech recognizers.
I don't know about you, but my Tab is on one side of the keyboard and the PageUp/Down are on the other. Pressing this keys would require me to have both hands on the keyboard, which, after I uninstalled Vimperator, I don't have anymore.
Perhaps they had better (and now forgotten) techniques back in 2001?
The Common Language Runtime (CLR) is Microsoft's implementation of the Common Language Interface (CLI). It's not unlike CPython being the "official" implementation of Python.
This makes me think that it's a shame we'll never have a modern equivalent of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, because nothing new will ever enter the public domain after the 1998 copyright act.
Clickable link: http://www.dexpot.de/index.php?lang=en
One obvious example: the rules about liquids require me to throw away perfectly good drinks just to go through security, only to buy identical perfectly good drinks at inflated prices on the other side.

A slightly different example: IME it takes several hours to get through security and passport control and all that jazz at both ends of a journey, even flying to another country in Europe from here in the UK or back again. I am a contractor and I bill by the hour for some contracts. If I needed to go on a business trip to a client's office elsewhere in Europe, it would cost me more in lost income for the time spent going through the checks instead of working than I would pay for all the flights and accommodation for an overnight stay. (Edit: Or, for contracts where travel takes place during service hours, it costs my clients more. But someone is paying more for the downtime for checks than they are paying for the legitimate expenses for the trip.)

Final example: Yes, I very much do object to spending large quantities of taxpayers' money on measures that make those same poeple's lives less pleasant, when there is little if any evidence to show that they actually make us any safer. Indeed, things like the liquids restrictions or the virtual strip search machines are textbook examples of introducing measures under a climate of fear that would not have been viable otherwise due to popular opposition, where the benefits of those measures are doubtful at best.
what was Microsoft thinking when they coined a name whose acronym was already used and very well known in the field?
I think it shows either a little contempt or ignorance, or just bad taste, to do that without first exhausting any reasonable alternative. The title and article confused the hell out of me due to their hijacking of CLI.
HENRY's (High Earners, Not Rich Yet) feeling the pinch . . .
Not really...I was imagining holding it so the center square with pacman was flat in front of one, similar to the old tabletop arcade machine. Topologically I guess this is inside out, but with the open loops upside down seemed more appropriate.

Edit: oops, I just realized it reads as if I were still talking about the torus, in which case inside out would be correct (but there would be no edges).
Fascinating prediction and I can see it happening, but 3-12 months is way too ambitious IMO. I'm not familiar with the inner-workings of the business, but I think they are still pretty lean, and their open reqs don't seem to indicate any plans to grow an AdSense like business anytime soon.

http://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=online-o...
"Why can't your email client remember that" - Gmail can figure this out, its a lab feature. Enable it. (See how I assumed you use gmail :), its probabilistic reasoning in action!)
You buy a kindle to read books. You have to have books. Plenty of them.

You buy an iPad to play games mostly, to surf the web and to read books.

I bet you the iPad has a better ratio of games/iPad than books/kindle.

So, my nailclipper clip my nails and my toothbrush brush my teeth.
Unfortunately like many others Jason is mis-informed about what was really behind this crisis. Let's not forget that the Federal Reserve has been maintaining exceptionally low interest rates for much of the last 10 years, with a few exceptions, and that both previous presidents cheered the rapid increase in home ownership rates seen in the early parts of the new millennium.
Is the build in replication support able to correctly replicate schema changes to the slaves? That was the biggest issue with the existing solutions for most admins I talked to.
> Google’s data on each visitor pales in comparison to Facebook.

But how useful is Facebook's data really (serious question)? Apart from age, gender and maybe location (which is likely accurate). People like/share/become a fan of so much random stuff, things that don't tell you anything about what they might want to buy or actually be interested in. What do they learn when someone joins a group like "Can this pickle get more likes than Steven Harper" or "I hate when one string from my hoodie is longer than the other?" How many people keep their fan pages or interests up to date? When people have 1000+ "friends" how many of those connections actually mean anything?

Let's ignore intent for a moment, how good is their targeting right now? Has an ad within Facebook ever been for for something that you are interested in (purchasing)?

I'm not trying to say their data is useless, but I suspect there is more noise than anything else. Not to mention Google probably also knows your age, gender, location, didn't they used to require this information when you signed up for a Google account?
Does anyone know how this differs from the Ruby that is a native part of OS X 10.6? Is it just a newer version?

MomBook:~ hackermom$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.7 (2009-06-08 patchlevel 173) [universal-darwin10.0]
Why I hate the term consumer
Microsoft had a similar project called Volta:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Live_Labs_Volta

It worked at the bytecode level - it wasn't just compiling C# into JS or something like that. I seem to remember that it had a full runtime in Javascript. It was terribly slow.

But, this kind of approach might not be so bad going forward, now that JS engines are faster. If the browser doesn't have a .NET runtime built-in, fallback to JS emulation.
Self promotion: "Edge Finder" applies an edge detection algorithm on the camera preview. Falls into the useless (but neat in my opinion) category.
Also source is available :)
<script runat="lawyers">
alert('Microsoft can pull the plug on your project at any time');
</script>
Hmm this sort of shows what copyright laws do... cut out a lot of crap, but you lose some good stuff too.
If you have a fast VM and <canvas>, you can do all your UI that way (see Mozilla Thunderhead) with virtually no cross-browser problems.

(Edit: I see that you already mentioned this further down the thread.)
The tradeoff between open and closed
Caffeine? :-)
I'd like to see a poll of HN users created. But before someone does, it would be nice to figure out a good set of questions.

My suggested format:

1) Do you own an iPad?

1a) How many books have you purchased from the iBookstore?

1b) How many were books that you already own?

1c) How many free books have you got from Apple, other than Winnie The Pooh?

1d) How many books from another source have you transferred to the iPad?

2) Do you own a Kindle or use a Kindle app? (Please specify.)

2a) How many books have you bought from the Kindle store?

2b) How many were books that you already own?

2c) How many free books have you got from the Kindle store?

2d) How many books from another source have you transferred to the Kindle device or app?

3) Did DRM influence your purchasing decisions?

My answers:

1) Do you own an iPad? --> Yes.

1a) How many books have you purchased from the iBookstore? --> 3.

1b) How many were books that you already own? --> 2.

1c) How many free books have you got from Apple, other than Winnie The Pooh? --> 0.

1d) How many books from another source have you transferred to the iPad? --> 8.

2) Do you own a Kindle or use a Kindle app? (Please specify.) --> No.

3) Did DRM influence your purchasing decisions? --> Yes. Very much so.
The cost saving argument might not be that much of a stretch, if you consider that

(a) as human-vs-nature struggles go, playing at subsistence agriculture might be less arduous than trying to imitate a British lawn in the Southern California desert climate

(b) the people in Farmscape’s target market are probably people who would otherwise be hiring a gardener to maintain their lawns
I've heard good things about gRaphaël

http://g.raphaeljs.com/
That's a fair point -- might have been better to say "Starts Sharing What Readers Highlight on Their Kindles"
IPad: A dead end sign for Microsoft?
There's really no correlation. You can do pretty dangerous things with vanilla options, and some exotic options are pretty tame.