skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have this set up on my local machine in an appengine dev environment. I'll try to push it to appengine now. (Full disclosure: this is my girlfriend's project at Google.)
Uh, pretty sure most democrats are much more nuanced than the description in your first graf there.

Also, unless you were outraged for the entire Bush term of office, and I mean really outraged to the point of voting for Kerry in 2004, you're not a libertarian, you're a Republican. Sorry.
yeah, me too. i hate blackboard. everyone does. but this thing isn't nearly fully featured enough (yet?) to be anything more than a blip.
https://cloudcourseio.appspot.com/ demo from Google I/O
that was one of the best full disclosures ever.
Will you be talking about your Kiva/social entrepreneurship experiences in this interview?
Scoble Interviews Zuckerberg on Privacy
Isn't the D in ACID for 'durable'? The blog post implies that this is an in memory store only ... I feel I must be missing something.
Nop, happiness is about having $10M in assets and earning $1M a year in royalties.

Believe me.

Until then, keep coding...
Yeah, but you're making a total straw-man argument unless you get into quantity and kind.

It appears that the republican website is 99% populated by nutcases, split pretty evenly between republican nutcases and liberal/moderate trolls. That's the point of the original article, along with the insinuation that these sentiments represent the republican base and tea party movement.

The existence of 1 (even hundreds!) of nutcases on my.barackobama.com doesn't invalidate the original point or insinuation, even if they're wrong.
Thanks for the answers rjett.
FREE Online Vocal training, could be the biggest singing lesson in the world
http://bit.ly/PROSINGERS2newsycombinator

(If you've never heard of an online workshop before, it's a live training session you can attend over the internet)

NOTICE: There are only 1000 spots available and you MUST RSVP below to be guaranteed a seat

http://bit.ly/PROSINGERS2newsycombinator
I find it hard to believe that anybody could just accidentally pick up English from TV, but maybe that's where the "diligent application" comes in. On a related note, I think Indonesians might have an advantage over speakers of many other Asian languages when it comes to learning English. The Indonesian standard vocabulary has (IIRC) 10 or 12 thousand words borrowed from Dutch and the language uses a Latin alphabet.
Ballmer MUST go!
Thanks branden.
Everybody hates Blackboard, any anybody could blow them away if it weren't for one thing: Blackboard sues most of their competition and buys the rest.
For more on this topic, see Hanson's writings on uploads: http://hanson.gmu.edu/uploads.html
Shazam - I really love this, you play it a music clip and it'll tell you the artist and song title.

Last.fm - To listen to music whilst jogging

Notes - Very handy for making todo lists etc
The only thing you have ignored is the fact that individual drugs are not part of discrete markets. If a dealer loses a revenue stream in cannabis why does that mean he will not continue (and start) in other areas.

While we are on economics there is another issue you've ignored. The fact that legalization removes a revenue stream for the drugs gangs. They will want to expand markets - that means new drugs and new problems.

If they cannot supply cannabis why is it illogical to imagine they would not expand the heroin/coke markets.

If you want some "insider info"; we did a couple of investigations into drugs gangs last year. There is already a lot of market control within the gang infrastructure - they use fairly sophisticated market strategy to expand usage of underperforming drugs in an area for example.
Oh, please God. I hope Google does to Blackboard what Rome did to Carthage.
SPLINE - Interpolation and Approximation of Data
Agreed. Blackboard offers a bazillion (unnecessary) features, and institutional buyers crave features, not elegance.
Blackboard may just be the only piece of software I despised more than ExpertsExchange...
Can anyone suggest problem domains where it is useful to have the ability to do 100K writes per second, but not have durable transactions?

I can see the in memory story for read only queries, or transient data.
They were in the thick of their antitrust battle with the federal government, and needed a competitor.
"Apple has removed GNU Go from the App Store, continuing their longstanding habit of preventing users from doing anything that Apple doesn't want them to do."

No GNUtards. They removed GNU Go because you threatened them with legal action.
I'd love to read about Blackboard's sales process. It's mediocre software at best, but nearly ubiquitous in US schools.
Well, a quick read of their white paper makes it look like they just copied the kdb design (http://cs.nyu.edu/shasha/papers/hpts.pdf - which they actually reference in one of their papers).

But perhaps they did something new as well?

edit: citeseer link was broken; replaced with link to shasha's website.
tl;dr: flashcards, tv and books
Apple is only worth MORE than Microsoft because of all the idiots buying Apple stock, just like the housing market in California before the housing crash!

The USA department of justice is going to put a real hurt on Apple soon, so you better dump your Apple stock before it crashes!
Forget Google, Blackboard, or any player looking to personally benefit from dominating learning management systems. This is the project we should be supporting: http://sakaiproject.org/
I hold the same philosophy with regard to cigarettes. I'll decide for myself what's carcinogenic, thank you very much.
If anyone is interested in a more 'comprehensive' guide to R, take a look at http://www.davidrosenberg.me/academic/ . Towards the bottom of that page are six chapters I have written for an 'Intro to numerical programming' course I've been teaching with R. My text is targeted towards first year graduate students and medical students, but (if nothing else) provides a large number of problems and solutions.

The Sweave/LaTeX source is also available if anyone is interested.
Obama and I - Do we Run in the Same Circles?
I was very surprised to find that my Linkedin profile featured President Obama as a person which users also looked up on Linkedin while checking me out! Of course I immediately thought of complaining to Linkedin customer service since they omitted to feature me on Obama's page along with Hillary Clinton, Kevin Bacon, and Bill Gates. What is wrong with these people?! ;-)

Then I sat back closed the draft email to Linkedin customer service team and realized this might be a bug ; or maybe everyone had Obama in their list. Do you? I feel flattered but I have a hard time understanding how such a great feature (obviously made to foster new relevant links between members) can work if it features popular profiles at the top of the list. Everyone is going have the same people on their list. Anyone knows what algorithms Linkedin uses?

Maybe Steven Stegman, Research Scientist and Senior Product Manager at LinkedIn can tell us.
Agreed, the part about immersion not being helpful was strange. He was immersed in English, both in school and probably in large parts of daily life. He simply turns on the TV to get English at home, all signage, newspapers, documents, are in English.

More importantly, being immersed provides an emotional reward for learning. If I learn these words, I can express these ideas and talk to people! This is different from just learning at school.

Edit: One thing I find odd about your post is the emphasis on confidence. It sounds like a correlation/causation fallacy.
Phonebooks can't be copyrighted, and databases can't be copyrighted (exactly) but if their terms of service state that usage is restricted, and they're the kind of company I would expect them to be, you can expect a lawyergram as soon as they find out. Unless your pockets are deep, this will be a Bad Thing.

Unfortunately, the exact same thing applies to scraping their site for that data. If you scrape somebody else's site generated from a paid use of that database, then ... maybe. Maybe. It's an awful risk.

It would be better if you could figure out a way to scrape other publicly available data sources - even using that database as a guide.

Don't get me wrong; there are really three questions here: the moral, the legal, and the practical. Morally, I consider scraping a site to be OK because it's really available to the public; just grabbing the database from a site that says, "don't do this" - not so much. Practically, I just went over that - it's a risk. Legally? I'm not a lawyer, but I suspect that the legality is more or less cognate with my moral feelings above - but a lawyer might be able to tell you.

If I were trying out an idea, though, which was your original question, I'd download the damn database and get it running. Then I'd try to find a more plausible data source, but that is a task that could be assigned a couple of months and be somewhat lower priority.
Ah, having just enough money to not think about money sounds about right :)

I like this blog post that says that money can buy you happiness... if you spend it right (like being with the right people like another poster suggests, or spending it on "positive experiences" like this suggests):

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ulterior-motives/201005/...
Republicans make website, get trolled hard, news at 11.
The huge rise in Objective-C's popularity isn't natural; it's only a result of Apple basically forcing all software targeting its popular mobile platforms to be written in Objective-C.

Maybe the Perl community just needs to trick Apple into making Perl the default language for iPhone and iPad development. It's marketshare will shoot through the roof overnight.
Why? If a single node fails, you still have the data on 2 other nodes. Nothing is lost. Of course, assuming you have a reliable UPS.
Transactions ARE durable if you use replication.
> We had a touch-screen, Wi-Fi handheld device that we showed in 1995. That was a decade early. By the time it was time to do the iPhone, we didn't have any business anywhere near the handheld devices.

Unfortunately, engineering needs customers. Sales. Not just for money, but for reality checks, feedback and encouragement.

Bill also talks about "believing in" products, and I think he means for management, and especially marketing, to believe in it (assuming engineering already does).

Clayton has this great idea of spinning off these types of products in entirely separate and autonomous business units (aka startups). This is because those little guys can get really excited about $100,000 worth of sales, whereas it's (literally) a rounding error for megacorps. This enables the business unit to get started even with near-zero market.

Another facet is that if you have a small number of people, it's more possible to select a subset of people who really do believe in it.

also: he's right that Sun had great consumer products - like Java applets - but only in terms of hard engineering, not in terms of usability or the user-experience. Not exactly marketing's fault.
Yep I've worked through the first couple chapters of Rails tutorial and launched my first rails app. I'd just like to learn more specifically about RSpec.
> I think that you were be hard-pressed to find someone that believes that the majority Democrats believe that God put their leaders into power.

This is a perfectly well formed sentence, and I can see how it fits into the present discussion, but I have a bit of a poor reaction to it; it seems that I shouldn't have to discuss what I, or anyone else, believe that someone believes.

Some Republican politicans have said that God puts their leaders in power (and I wouldn't be surprised if Democratic ones have, too); why does it matter whether or not they believe it, if their constituents do?
Moneybookers.
Video: Investor Brad Feld on the Changing Dynamics of Startup Investments
Hey, environmental destruction isn't something to take lightly. Spewing huge amounts of corrosive chemical pollution into the air as a byproduct of energy generation, irrevocably altering the environment, causing mass extinctions world-wide, all because of--eh? What? Humans? Oh, I thought we were talking about cyanobacteria.

(For details, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_catastrophe )
Create a Falling Fantasy Photomanipulation using Painting Techniques
In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create a falling fantasy photomanipulation using stock images and some digital painting techniques. You’ll learn how to extract, preserve and recreate flowing hair, and you’ll learn how to manipulate twirling vines.
I own a fund that owns shares of every public company on the market (VTI). Does that mean I have to say "I own this" any time I talk about stock?
Exactly, they are different products.
I suspect this is a case of using a metric (money) to explain a complex fact (what makes us happy).

Yes, $60,000/yr may make you happy. But I suspect that is about being comfortable and able to live without concern (over money issues, for example). I expect that if you gave a control group a comfortable life / success and just $1,000 a year then a large part would also be happy. Reverse would apply to a group with $100K but put through merry hell :)

A better conclusion would be that happiness is probably being comfortable and feeling successful etc.
Ruby on Rails Tutorial Chapter 12 is out
Here's a direct link to the new chapter:

http://www.railstutorial.org/chapters/following-users#top
HTML5 in Gadgets on iGoogle
I was going to say. Doesn't Blackboard own like a bazillion patents?
What would you guys recommend for

- non US based company

- selling to companies

- subscriptions of $100 - $1000 per month

I care more about reliability and customer experience than a few % transaction costs (it's nothing compared to taxes ;)

Ogone [http://ogone.com/] seems like the only option...does anyone have experience with them?
since doing a startup isn't a zero-sum game; the market for startups has been growing since the crash was 10 years ago; I would hope we would have fully recovered to previous levels and then exceeded by now

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
"Durability" in that sense has nothing to do with how the data is stored, or how long it's available for.

It simply means that after a transaction has been reported as having been committed successfully, it won't ever be rolled back.
The host seems to be down. Here is Dancer up on CPAN http://search.cpan.org/~xsawyerx/Dancer-1.1803/lib/Dancer.pm
Perl makes me happy every day.
it is not Google but two Google engineers working on this in their 20% 'side project' time
This is just from your personal experience.

I've got a large number of friends who smoke pot everyday. They're far from non-functioning.

Two of my closest developer buddies smoke all day long. Like, literally, all day long, smoking as soon as they wake up in the morning. That's about as extreme as you can get in the realm of the pothead.

They're fine. They've held their jobs for long periods, been promoted, given raises... all of the things you expect from a "functioning" member of society.

I don't really hang out with very many non-functioning member of society and I know a LOT of people who smoke pot... maybe you tend to hang out with a lot of non-functioning people for some reason? A rather larger percentage of people smoke pot around the world, so it would tend to cross a number of socioeconomic boundaries.

To me, this issue you have with perceiving that pot is making people in to listless sacks of flesh seems to be a personal problem and entirely subjective.
My demo is here, but it's not working fully: https://cloud-course.appspot.com/. I'll need to figure out what's going wrong. As posted, a demo that actually works is here: https://cloudcourseio.appspot.com/
Freight Trains Double Fuel Efficiency Since 1980
Well, to begin with, it's set theory, which is notable for driving at least one person mad, and further, it's one of the more unsettling parts of set theory. And I mean actually working through it, not just knowing about it. But reading it over, "mindbreaker" is clumsy; perhaps "disturbing" or, better yet, "unsettling" would be better.
The inverse seems kind of obvious - poverty sucks
As a language to write large systems in, I agree, but I still haven't found a better shell-script-replacement language. Perl as a somewhat cleaned up superset of bash/sed/awk/grep still seems better to me than the alternatives--- when I try to write those kinds of scripts in, say, Python, it ends up feeling clunky and verbose.
compared to a paper map, iPad's screen is hard to see outside during daylight hours though
It makes sense why he's saying that. The people responsible for large, important data sets usually have lots of money to spend storing that data. Since they care about their data, they know better than to get involved with NoSQL databases, and actively shun anything that claims to be a NoSQL database. The real money will flow towards those providing real databases.
In other words, ignorance is bliss...
Onion: Entire Facebook Staff Laughs As Man Tightens Privacy Settings
Last time I read the number was 12,000:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07...

I must say, I got by with 12k (what I made in 2004), but if any emergency would have happened I would have been in trouble.

60k is very comfortable here in Texas.

I also know some very miserable millionaires who are depressed no matter how many pills they take.
Blackboard's biggest feature is document and grades management, which this does not provide.
I think the caveat is that the money is earned doing something you enjoy. I'm sure most of us here can attest to that.
FTR, it wasn't so much an "investment" as it was part of a settlement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company

IIRC there was supposedly a private payment upwards of $1 billion as part of the settlement in addition to the $150 million but I can't find a reference right now.
Are you sure about that? I've seen co-workers suggest the use of Coq, only to see a room full of managers and peers burst out in laughter. Coq won't catch on in many places where it'd be very useful solely because of its name.
Things To Hate About API Terms of Service
Another advantage is that nearly everyone in Indonesia speaks at least two languages, Indonesian being a second language to whatever local language is spoken in your home region.

You're certainly correct about the alphabet though. In my experience, another big challenge for Indonesian speakers of English is correct grammar - Malay-style grammar is quite simple and usage conforms pretty well to its few rules. Although that applies to most people learning English as a second language.

Indonesian has also picked up many new or specific terms from English. I got in trouble with my history professor because I couldn't pronounce "historiography" correctly as "historografi".

(EDIT: Ok, this one might via Dutch. Recently terminology pretty much always come from English, though.)
On a related note I think the world should all switch to English as the default standard language. So much less wasted effort, ink, paper, miscommunication, cultural opacity, etc. We might lose some things, but I bet it would be a net win.
I agree, but I don't think I am being romantic - I do realise jobs always have those boring, etc. elements, it's a matter of whether overall you are happy with it.

And I certainly don't accept the contention that there aren't jobs programmers can be really happy in (as some contend, not saying you are necessarily), I think that's lazy thinking...

In any case I certainly don't think it's something fundamental as it's not the work itself that bothers me so much, but rather the pain of working in a negative situation.
Indiana University uses Sakai (http://oncourse.iu.edu/). At the time I used it ('04-'08), it was...better than Blackboard, but still generally a pain. The design was poor, the UX was awkward - just a deeply unsexy experience overall.

It might be better now, but I have a feeling that most LMS software is doomed to being, well, LMS software.
I'm working through this now. As an experienced ASP.Net developer it's a great intro to how things are done in the Rails world.
> That sounds more like a primer on how completely awful (in the gas chamber/gulag/killing fields sense) political ideas come about.

No, it's how all large-scale political ideas come about. It's just that 90% of them are crap, just like everything else.
Let's include the preceding sentence to your quote:

"We would've liked to see Apple do the right thing and remove these limits, but it looks like that's not going to happen."

The FSF threatened them with legal action because they were violating its copyright license, just like any other entity would do. You can play by the GPL's rules or you can play by the Apple App or iTunes Stores' rules, just not by both.
how many time have you heard someone saying BSD is not dead!

Do you think the folks working an using (say) OpenBSD care. Compared to Linux OpenBSD is a lot less usable, yet the passionate coders behind it still offered us PF, OpenSSH, OpenBGPD

How popular do you need to be, to be undead?
Hey David,

I've just started using R and one thing that I've been looking for is a way to display discrete events on a timeline. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, all I want is to put hours/days on one axis and then put a marker and some text above it. Do you know of any built in libraries that do that?

Something like this: http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/

but it doesn't have to be near that nice..

Thanks in advance
Yahoo's Chase to the Bottom
Ask HN: Help/FAQs/documentation system, like Google's help?
Does anyone know of a system (SaaS or self-hosted) to run a help/FAQs/documentation system?

We're looking for something simple, in the style of all Google's help sites (e.g. http://mail.google.com/support/) - basically a simple CMS, with categorisation and automatic generation of multiple levels of index pages, search, "did this help" style widgets for feedback, list of most popular articles etc.

What I'm _not_ looking for is a GetSatisfaction/UserVoice -style "community-powered" support.

Not rocket science.. but surely a common problem. Anyone know of anything ready-to-go?

Cheers!
-- A