skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If they make it as ubiquitous as apt-get on Linux/port on the mac, I think people would use it almost on a daily basis. There are lots of good reasons for apps to be published on a distribution network like apt-get or potentially ninite in the future...
a red signup button would result in more conversions
Sure, listening to one piece before taking a standardized test doesn't help, but I would wager that truly appreciating Mozart, and certainly playing an instrument of any sort, does.
> There's a lot of it about, attacking evolution, global warming, tobacco research, HIV, vaccines - and now, it seems, flu.

One thing that seems strange to me - whenever there's one of these pan-denier arguments, the arguer tends to choose topics that the Starbucks crowd would agree with, and nothing that the Starbucks crowd might deny in the face of evidence.

For instance, we know really firmly that there's a larger standard deviation in intelligence and success in men than women - men are overrepresented at the top and the bottom. That is, men reach the highest levels of business, science, and leadership more often than women, but also are victims of homicide, suicide, and are incarcerated more often than women. This is thoroughly proven, but even at Harvard the university president lost his job for saying something like this!

So how come these "look at these idiot deniers!" arguments never look at denial of the fact that men and women have a different hormonal mix, different cognitive mix, and that leads to different patterns of behavior and results. I mean, that's so bloody obvious just from a casual observation of the world, but it's now also proven, at least to a much higher standard than global warming is.

Or hell, the New Scientist article uses evolution/creationism - yet a lot of people who believe in evolution reject the fact that natural selection and sexual selection would make groups evolving in different circumstances evolve differently... that comes hand-in-hand with evolution, but people are often deniers about that, thinking that everyone evolved to be the same in all meaningful ways, and any differences in wealth, aggression, preferred behavior, even musical ability must be due to culture. Which is obviously nonsense - but this kind of denial of something obvious is never mentioned in a pan-denier argument, it's always a bunch of mostly proven things with a vocal, ignorant minority, plus global warming.
Hit the arrow-looking button on each column heading to sort by that column.
Ask HN: Free book database?
Does anyone know of a book database that is perhaps opensource or free?

What I'm looking for is how to access book titles, authors, ISBN, et cetera ;and if possible descriptions and covers.

If there isn't any open source or free ones are there non-free options?

Thanks.
Such a policy would only apply to non-engineering staff, obviously.
http://tinychat.com
Olin isn't free anymore.

http://olin.edu/admission/costs.asp
Mac OSX is inferior from a security standpoint, but enjoys herd immunity so the actual risk of infection is lower.
There's a few reasons to do it:

1) Provide an additional time-consuming, potentially slightly costly and hard-to-automate barrier to negate spammers (like Gmail does during signup).

2) Verify that someone controls a number before using it as an interface to your app either through notifications or control (adding appointments or tasks, etc).

Like you mention there's no way to use this method to verify someone is who they claim to be. But there aren't really any methods for this type of thing that can't be spoofed.
The best chefs always leave something out of the recipe they teach (is this true?) - but they are still teaching valuable cooking skills, just not their signature dishes.

When my business was starting out, I read that the best way to get a high ranking on Google was to provide something valuable. So I published the results of my research (in my area), competing products and so on, and tried to explain the field and the issues, as I best understood them. Not with the attitude of promoting my product, but of promoting the field (I happen to really enjoy teaching and explaining, so this was a happy coincidence). I got massive pagerank from this, in that I always beat institutions and world famous brand-names that happened to have the same acronym as my product (unbeknownst to me).

tl;dr teaching is SEO

I once asked a law professor who specialized in IP law, wrote the standard IP textbook etc (in Australia, a "professor" is the top academic position, not just a teacher), about the best way to protect ones copyright in something (I was thinking maybe: get it certified, post it to yourself, register it somewhere etc). He said to publish it as widely as possible, so everyone knows it was yours.

What I gained from this video is that people will like you for teaching them. They would have formed a sort of emotional connection with my business/me because of that - which explains the good reactions I got. This makes sense, because when someone teaches me something valuable, I tend to want to have a talisman or token of them, to capture their mentoring of me. A mentor is a powerful concept, that taps into our notions of parent-child, doctor-patient, teacher-student, god-man. In movies and books, they are prominent; audiences really like them.

tl;dr mentors are loved
I have been following their blog since the beginning. While they improved a lot in compare to their work on previous versions, I still think they are no where close to being in the same level as the other three popular browser in terms of standard compliance.

Few things to note:

- They are cherry picking on what standards they want to implement. While other browsers have already done it.

- They are apending more time spreading PR BS against chrome and FF and how they are less secure than IE.

- They recently declared a 2 year release cycle for IE. With IE9 expected to be released in the end of 2011. Can you imagine a browser release cycle that is ~2 years? They have learned nothing from the days of IE6.
we could definitely make that change.
My fave quote from the article: A book exists at the intersection of the author’s subconscious and the reader’s response
We've been had! It's a shame that we will have to tell this to all the kids today who are constantly listening to Mozart.

All jokes aside, when I was a little bit younger and took my first philosophy course, I remember the professor saying something like "Garbage in, Garbage out." So let's say that listening to Mozart doesn't make you smarter. This, however, has no bearing on if other forms of music make you less smart (which I believe is very possibly true). Besides that, I find the most amazing thing happen when I listen to great classical music: I can actually think without the music interrupting my thoughts 95% of the time. The 5% of the time it does happen is only if I accidentally chose something to listen to that has vocals (Opera, which is amazing how great it sounds even though I have no idea what they are saying), or if it is something particularly raucous by Stravinsky.
Jobs dropped out of Reed.
Security contests are poor measures of security. A "new" windows flaw is a valuable commodity and most people who are aware of such things are not going to use them to "win" a contest. In the real world there are three issues, systems that are not up to date, systems that are more open than ideal, and unknown issues.

The ideal contest wold take a reasonably permissive system that's 3 months out of date and see how long that lasts under normal usage.
I'm not sure of the overall security level of Linux & Windows, but Linux ASLR is weak: http://jbrownsec.blogspot.com/2009/07/beating-linux-aslr.htm...
Are you working on Goby?
This is a great idea.

It reminds me of daf yomi in studying talmud, "a page a day".

A page a day is barely a burden, yet in 3 years you can have thoroughly read Misner's Gravitation, Programming Erlang 3 times over, and any number of grad-level textbooks. In 1 year, you will have read a good-sized textbook at almost no perceptible time cost, and with very high comprehension.

If he can give this a 43things style UI with publicly stated goals, integrate it with book lists and codebase repos worked on, it could be amazing.
Are you serious? Have you read the direct quotes from their email? They're clearly colluding to change the data and get the report out there. Furthermore, on the subject of the peer reviews, it's almost possible for someone's peers to review their data and find flaws in it if they didn't do the research themselves and the data has been changed (as in the case of ClimateGate), to say nothing of a persons inherent laziness and desire to rubber stamp the work of their peers.
Listening to Baroque music might: http://brainbasedbiz.blogspot.com/2007/04/baroque-music-help...
IA & Design heavyweights argue iPad, columns, nav & metaphors
Dunno if they sent the right message. "You will be able to get away with it for half a lifetime but will have to pretend to be sorry when we find out."
Thanks Jeff, this is exactly what I've been looking for. I found out about twitter killing basic auth today, but all the documentation seems to assume you have a web app. I just run a simple RSS scraper to twitter feed script on a cron job, so this is helpful.
I like everything up to but not including step 7. (http://tryhaskell.org/#7)

The syntax

let villain = (28,"chirs") in fst villain

is not obvious to me, and the tutorial doesn't explain what each piece of the new syntax means, and quickly moves on to something new in step 8.

Only through experimentation, I find:

fst (28,"chirs")
=> 28
snd (28,"chirs")
=> "chirs"

So I gather the let is equivalent to:

(let ((villain '(28 "chirs")))
(first villain))

But without parens, line breaks or semicolons I have difficulty determining where one expression ends and another begins.

Plus, the arbitrary shortening of "first" to "fst" doesn't help, and should probably be clarified.

You seem to only check the return value to determine when to skip to the next step in the tutorial, since in step10, you want me to type:

['a','b','c'] == "abc"

But it skips ahead when I play around and return True from a different expression:

'a' : 'b' : [] == "ab"
=> True
Mozart may not make you smart, but maybe it's that smart people listen to Mozart.
That's like saying Windows is UNIX-based because it conforms to POSIX.1.
I agree that technology, in general, aides the cause of public trust in science. In some cases, such as the case of ClimateGate, the data itself -- the specific sample values -- were manipulated before their interpretations of it were even written. How do you see technology aiding in this case?
Depends on the question.
And let me guess, I read the source code out of context too?

; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
That only describes the interface, not the implementation. It says (almost) nothing about the kernel, or security.
Good to see Jaaga (http://jaaga.wikidot.com/) here. I work here and its an awesome place to be in. Would love to see more Bangalore hackers turn up.
Good, Linux could use some sales & marketing help.
Great. Found a space in Bangkok I wasn't aware of and a python presentation this Friday.
First Interplanetary Solar Sail Voyage Launched
My Dad, in his late 80s, is redoing the Watson family video. About 1 hour of media. Dad (still a member of the US National Academy of Science) has a quirky sense of humor: he likes to mix in Poser 3D animations with his videos so his favorite virtual character, 'Hank' an acerbic gorilla, keeps chiming in to my family history. Fortunately, Roger Ebert will never see this :-)
Also relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKAROS
Christian Louboutin Slingback shoes
Rock, Paper, Scissors in Strategy Games
@pook Hope this means you're in…? I'm going to start on it for a redesign of my site, but with one change. I'm doing 15 minutes a day (105 a week).
Student fined for bringing university into disrepute with FitFinder site
I think this underlines the fact that distinguishing "real" science from psuedoscience is a matter of professional judgment. It's not enough just to be a reasonable person who knows modus ponens and some statistics. To distinguish good physics from bad physics, you need extensive training as a physicist (and likewise for any other science).

This is unfortunate, because it means that independent scrutiny of science is extremely difficult. Virtually no-one outside a particular scientific community is competent to evaluate the quality of the work within that community. An argument that seems obviously flawed to an outsider can seem compelling to someone who has the relevant background knowledge.

It would be nice if there were some kind of solution to this problem, but I doubt that there is.
Alot of random stuff is down today:

- Gmail (but not Google.com, iGoogle.com, Reader, etc.)

- Blogger authentication API (can't login to post a comment on emacs-fu.blogspot.com)

- Border's account sign-on.

- Mozy's login page.

:/
The thing about just pulling the number of packages on Hackage is a large number of them are actually applications. I am lazy so the first section that proves my point is AI 9 entries. 3 libraries, 3 programs, 3 that list themselves as both program and lib. Other sections are similarly app full. Depending on how well separated the app and lib are in the app+lib category you could be looking at more than half of that package count being applications not libs.
I'm a member of Noisebridge, and I think it's pretty great. If anyone is in the San Francisco Bay Area, drop by some time.
While technically true (although Hyde Park/Kenwood, home of the US's current first family is part of that south side as well), I think that misses the point. If anything, the south side of Chicago is a more specific counter-point to the claim since the south-west side generally poorer than the south-east side.

Here's a 1999 map of median per capita income by census track: http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/maps/percapitaincomecity199...

Note that Chicago proper is outlined in bold. While the southern shore is poorer and more easterly than the south loop/downtown/north shore areas, I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that the east side of Chicago is poorer than the west.

Also of note, the north and east is not only where the rich people in Chicago live, it is simply where the people in Chicago live. I wasn't able to find a raw population distribution map, but here's one showing multi-unit vs. single family homes: http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/maps/dwellingtypescity2000....

(FWIW, I lived on Chicago's south east side for ~15 years. Depending on what you are looking for it is one of the best and most unappreciated areas of the city.)
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The idea was good. The execution was pretty lame, though.
http://www.cvtinc.com/products/keyboards/prime.htm Alps, metal base, not $300. I've been using one for 9 years now.

I also have a "Siig MiniKey" or something acquired new in box from a cheap/used electronics reseller, with Alps switches.. for $5.

Actually my friend bought it on a whim. They had a huge crate of them there, all new in their boxes, recovered from a sell-off from some corporate warehouse or something. I got it from him later, when I saw it, and I could instantly tell it had Alps switches in it. He said it was only $5 so we ran back to the place immediately -- but someone had already scooped up the entire crate of them. The place selling them had no clue they were worth a bunch of money. Otherwise, I would have bought all of them myself. I guess someone else had the same idea as me.
I was running money for a socially conscious Catholic hedge fund a few years back (they used monks as traders) and asked this question to the fund manager. Specifically, I wanted to short a 'culture of death' video game company which I thought was overvalued.

The fund policy was to hold no positions in any firm that violated Catholic doctrine in any way.

His response was something like this:

"Shorting and derivatives like options tend to reduce the volatility of an asset and hence, tend to improve the credit rating of the firm. So shorting can actually help a firm receive funding from banks that are reluctant to lend if the stock price is more volatile. That being said, I would not condemn anyone for shorting securities of firms engaged in immoral behavior."
We have ... their FAQ

And it's a pretty useless FAQ, at that. Most of the questions are about Kickstarter. (They sure do like raising more and more money, don't they?)
Could you clarify a bit, not sure what you're looking for exactly.

On one extreme, it doesn't sound too hard to build your own db schema for this in MySQL or PostgreSQL. On the other, there's Google Books.
opens mouth and raises finger

closes mouth and walks away
I think that's an example of things on "the list". (Things to do in the far future after they finish other things that they have to do)
I'm joining, definitely.

I just started my own similar project: One Month Codebase
http://zipwith.blogspot.com/search/label/one%20month%20codeb...

The idea for my project is to focus exclusively on a single codebase to study, experiment with, and contribute to, each month. And write it up in such a way that those who haven't yet gotten the courage to jump in, can try their own hand at contributing to OSS.
Open Library, perhaps? It's run by Archive.org and has a developer API: http://openlibrary.org

ETA: I see they also offer raw JSON downloads of their entire collection: http://openlibrary.org/data#downloads
Your point is well taken.

Here's a quick script. Libs that also ship programs are counted twice, but we get:

2139 libraries
455 programs

So, no, its more like 25% programs, 75% libs.
I think for Chicago it is less about "developing recently enough that the effect would be negated" and more about Burnham's "forever free and clear" plan for the lakefront (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnham_Plan) which, unlike many cities, kept the waterfront from becoming industrialized.
I side-hopped to Neal Stephenson. Only, he seems to be writing one book each about large areas of possible future, rather than a series. Or a hyper-series, like C. J. Cherryh where sets of stories are told from different parts of the same over-arcing time-line.

Neal Asher has the same thrill of technical what-if, but is not yet of wide enough breadth. And hopefully, Daniel Suarez will keep going.
Amazon Vs. Apple Be Damned: Publishers Pine For A Universal E-Book Format
I think that last bit was kind of the whole point.
You speak exactly of the problem: Having outside service providers. When you have an outside service provider you are now, and will always be, dependent upon the service provider. The only solution is to not use service providers and to distribute your own data (as you have described). When you distribute your own data, you can have nightly encryption key updates sent to all of the friends you trust. If you remove a friend from your list, they do not get the nightly key update and no longer have access to your information. What I describe in my article that I published on Saturday is that we are not at the point yet where completely distributing all of your own content created by you is plausible. The use of third party "service" providers is simply a necessary (for some people) thing in this transition period.

Here is the article I speak of:
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=williamjames
I guess this explains all http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart_effect
I myself likes Canon in D by Johann Pachelbel. It help me think calm and clear (it's the peaceful and fun feeling).
With fewer people and cheap plentiful living space, it's probably just more likely to have an informal garage, basement, or attic 'hacker space'.
The IE team can never seriously pursue standards in the long term as long as they are part of Microsoft. They have done everything in their power for years to undermine standards and especially torpedo the viability of standards-based browsers and cause them to stagnate.

The real push should be to get everyone else to support it, and Microsoft can choose to support it or be left in the dust. There would be far more progress if all the others didn't have to continuously fight w3c kowtowing to Microsoft. W3c is as bad in this regard as ECMA. There is a real reason the html5 push started outside w3c, because w3c killed this sort of thing for years and then, when it started getting real steam on the outside, w3c promptly does everything it can to bring it inside and place Microsoft officially in charge so they can sabatoge it.

If Microsoft supported it, they would implement it, no questions, as with any number of other standards. They only game this sort of standards process.
They will almost certainly still have some windows machines around, if only for testing against IE. Some Google employees almost certainly use Windows at home. I really don't think they're going to lose anything major in terms of familiarity.
You could use a service that works internationally like http://tropo.com/, http://cloudvox.com, or any voicexml hosting company.
I've started a Slinkset for this project as well. If you're participating, add your blog posts and such to it: http://wywof.slinkset.com/
True. A very strange decision. How to you develop products for the majority of people when you don't use their OS and can't relate to their 'pain'.
>but will have to pretend to be sorry when we find out."

Uh, they fired her. So the message is "you'll get fired when we find out". Which seems like exactly the right message, given their goals.
Full text of article: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.25...
You are right. I just double checked my facts and OSX kernel is actually a hybrid kernel and not a direct descendant of BSD flavor (which was my impression).

My mistake.
Google doesn't validate because they need to serve the page millions of times a day. Hacker News is not a startup, it wasn't funded with $200,000, and its goal is not to create a web application (Diaspora's is.)
Now that long distance service is essentially free for everyone and mobile phones (and VoIP) have nationwide networks, more people are choosing not to update their phone numbers when they move.

This means that there's a good chance my phone might have a Chicago area code but I live in LA now.
Undelete Lost Files from Recycle Bin before It's Too Late
This article talks about how to undelete lost files from recycle bin after you delete important files or programs from recycle bin.
Interesting. But to be honest, I don't really like the feel of Alps or Cherry keyswitches. I know they are well made, but not as well made as Topre. It's hard to explain, so I'll just say -- take apart a Happy Hacking Keyboard some day, and you will love Topre forever. I knew I sort of liked Topre keyboards until I did that, but afterwards, it was easy to buy another HHKB (for work) and a Realforce. They are just so well-made, that you can't not like them.
come on now, we all know cygwin sucks :)
LB is an Indian company. If a US company and Indian company invent the same thing regardless of chronological order and if each company takes patents in their respective country, this can prohibit each company to operate in other's country.

But you may be right. LB being hosted in US might well be qualified as 'operating in US', which might prevent FB getting patent in US.

In any case, if LB was so paranoid about someone stealing their 'photo recommendation engine', they must have at the very least filed patent pending applications in India and US.

LB's outburst suggest they are thinking of this as an infringement of some sort, but these things won't work in web startups. How many countries will anyone run around getting patents to make sure nobody else does it? Maybe, in future we have better governing stuff for the web,
SEO and WEBDESIGN
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I did redesign all day.
Check it out http://seo4whitehats.com