skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It would be very interesting (at least for me) if some Eastern hackers here can share their point of view over these subjects, mysticism and modern science, yoga, etc.
Simon Phipps WebM: Missing the assurances open source needs?
In many ways I'd be flattered
I'm not sure what's so awkward about telling someone that you want a Prenup in the first place. If you're close enough to someone to consider marrying them then you're close enough to tell them that you need one.
I am sorry I have to 1-up that.

Spiritual text has a "goal" in mind. The text is then written very vaguely so that most text is open to interpretation. In the end people seem to make each scripture of any sort apply to current everyday life, even with new evolving views on life, society, new technologies, etc.
Making Django and NoSQL Play Nice
Read "Selling To The Top" by David Peoples.
From the Times obituary:

In fact he was so old his age was the largest number with only two factors, where the two numbers below it also have only two factors each.

This is a tremendous loss, I don't know anyone who can fill his shoes.
I might end up supervising students for Regular Languages & Finite Automata next year, in which case I must encourage them to play this game. :)
If it gets big, it will become the status quo! Look at what Facebook are trying to do with their attitude to privacy. Or what the internet and iTunes has done to music industry.
Official announcement: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/05/24wwdc.html
That is why I run a ls command before doing rm. (been bitten but accidentally hitting Return key instead of Shift on laptop :()

Also for Update/Delete query I run the equivalent select (rows or count(*) ) query first, just to make sure.

also make sure to write where predicate before completing the whole sql. (The sql does not go through by accidentally hitting enter, before the whole statement is written)

tl;dr - Run read operation before doing write/update/delete operations.
OOP is actually constructing solution code in a pattern that supports encapsulation, polymorphism, information hiding, etc. The idea is a conceptual tool, a code construction pattern of thinking.

Yeah except Alan Kay, you know that guy who invented OOP, says everything you mention there is the overly complex BS unOOP. OOP is late binding and message passing. It isn't the hair splitting you seem to think it is, it truly different philosophies about programming. What you are calling OOP is more like Structured Programming Redux, strong on the structure and light on the dynamic message passing and late binding.
Awesome - were the results interesting?
Actually, just realized you can do everything with monads.

(return [[10..20], [50..100]] >>= concat >>= classify >>= foldr getCount (0,0,0))

Just use the identity monad rather than the list monad.
One of the hardest things I ever did was walk away from an over $300k licensing deal with a major corporation. I was selling them my polymail email classifier to improve their anti-spam product. They had already done all the work and proved that it was way better than their existing anti-spam component for their personal security suite.

But they were unwilling to pay a reasonable price and I wasn't willing to be screwed.

Their product's anti-spam still sucks.
7 Keynote MBA: How to save two years and $100k
Youtube though is almost always reliable. The problem with P2P TV is that if you are in the middle of watching your favorite show and your broadcaster's computer goes down because their cat is walking on the power cables, you blame the service for its bad quality, not the broadcaster.
Stephen Fry to judge Guardian Hay festival's Twitter competition
My guess:

Killer phone hardware (improved speed, battery, display, cameras)

Nice iPhone OS tweaks (better workflow via faux multitasking, a background iChat client, some really nifty iPad features)

Some sort of content partnerships on the iTunes / AppleTV side

...and that's it.

Still AT&T only, still tied to iTunes, still locked down platform and app store, still no flash.

And I will be disappointed. But holding off to buy a new phone until I see what he's got!
This is so absurdly funny, it's worth all the stupid pop-up ads on the page.

BTW, the article declares
"The answers to them are known as "fatwas", which, contrary to popular belief, are not diktats but only opinions based on Islamic jurisprudence." This is not correct. Fatwas carry the weight of law, if given by a suitable religious authority.
I also think the 90% figure is misleading - but I think it's too optimistic. The number of people that quit their job and use their savings and/or family-friends-fools money to start working on a startup and never get to a point where anyone knows they even exist is huge. These people are never counted in any of the official statistics, and don't talk much about their venture because it's never nice to talk about your failures.

If you include this very large shadow group I'd argue that less than 10% even make it to ramen profitability. You never hear about the failures - only the successes. This skews the picture.
What are we doing to ourselves?
I am not versed in the Lean Startup methodology, but I will be doing some reading soon (but after work/gym). I like the concept of "validate your hypothesis" first.

Design to launch in 2 weeks is impressive. It makes me feel like I should set more stringent goals with my projects and reading.
Wow. This reminded me how much I miss eWorld =(
Please note that the article is four years old and, as far as I can tell, Maps API has been launched mostly in the same period (wikipedia:Google_Maps).

I don't know how much information was available at that time but it shouldn't be much.
E-Commerce Credit Card Processing Model
Nytimes Oracle (a Markov text generator)
The biggest legal mistakes startups make
I found Selling to Big Companies (http://www.amazon.com/Selling-Big-Companies-Jill-Konrath/dp/...) helpful.

A referral is very helpful. That's not always easy but it's worth racking your brain to try and find a connection.

It's also worth aiming as high in the organization as possible. In large companies most people don't have the authority to purchase anything of significance.

It's not just an issue of money. If buying your product changes the way they do business in any meaningful way then some authority will be required to approve those changes. Does the person you're talking to have that authority?

It's much easier to start high and then have that person push you down to someone lower in the org to do the leg work than to find out after months of effort that the person doesn't have the authority to consummate the purchase. If VP X tells manager Y to look into something at least you know VP X thinks it's worth the time.

This implies that you need to craft your value proposition and benefits in a way that is appealing to someone further up the food chain.
I wore an xkcd tie to prom with overwhelmingly positive response. Of course I go to a math/science magnet school (which really is just the high school where most of the smart people in the state go, regardless of their interests)
Just yesterday I saw a child in a local park who clearly had measles. It was a pretty rare sight not long ago, but in the part of London where I live it's trendy to not vaccinate your children.
Ejection Seats
...routinely gouging their patients ($5 for a single Tylenol)...

Items like this quickly vanish from your bill when you tell the hospital you don't have insurance. It's the insurance companies they are trying to gouge, not the patients.
First, you say building replicator is pointless without giving an argument. This is clearly wrong. I have already given you one example of the use of creating replicators, and here's another: weapons.

Second, you say it is difficult with many failure modes. So was going to the moon. How can you possibly think it's so difficult that it will never get done? In a thousand years?

Third, you cite Drexler to claim that we underestimate the difficulty. (Who underestimates it? Me? The irrational people who Drexler is afraid will take away his funding, or the handful of academics who seriously consider the issue?) The argument for extreme caution does not rely on it being easy to build run-away replicators, only that it is reasonably possible and that the results are catastrophic. Can you really argue with 99% certainty against the feasibility of future technologies without any sort of restriction based on physical law?

Fourth, you say you are aware of the wheel argument...so...what is your reponse? Should we also consider the laser argument? The computer argument? The space-ship argument? Or the argument from any of the nearly countless things that humanity has created in the past 40 years that never existed in the previous 4,000,000,000 that life was around?
It's not that it's their responsibility to DO it, it's that it's their responsibility to stop going out of their way to stop other people from doing creative, innovative things.
Ben Goldacre on badscience.net has a lot to say on this sibject, including a new related post today. http://www.badscience.net/2010/05/a-staggeringly-weak-interv...
You can read why that happens in the paragraph titled "Scale".

Here's an excerpt (given that Google tiles are 256x256 and at zoom 0 one tile covers the whole world):

"Intuitively its easy to see why the scale changes. Let's think about Google Maps zoom level 0. At zoom level 0 the world is fit into a 256 pixel wide image. But we know that the earth's circumference is the largest at the equator and dwindles down to zero at the poles. So as you move north or south away from the equator, the Earth has to be "stretched" to fit into the 256 wide bitmap. Thus as you move north or south the scale gets larger and larger because the same number of pixels on the screen are showing you a larger and larger percentage of the Earth's surface."
A much simpler theory that explains why the public doesn't trust public health pronouncements is that people have been both crying wolf in the doctor's name and declaring various unsafe things safe in doctor's names for a very long time now. The corruption of the doctor down the street may be a hobbyhorse of yours but I don't think that's what most people are thinking of when they consider a public health question; they're thinking about the fact that eggs are a mortal menace, then good for you, then eat the white but not the yolk, then eat the yolk but not the white, then good for you again, then a mortal menace, then good for you again. Then take that and multiply it across numerous issues.

Medical journalism's credibility is pretty low. (Although whether it is lower than journalism's in general I don't know... that's a high bar, or perhaps rather a low bar, to meet. And I don't mean that sarcastically, I mean that measured public trust in journalism is extremely low and sinking.) I don't think that has much to do with the stuff you talk about, which is not widely recognized.
Organizational Thinking
Just curious, how many apps do you have installed?
I spend maybe 5 minutes every other week doing the updates.
Stuff like this, especially if posted on here should carry a warning. "Caution: nerd sniping"!!

This cost me half a day yesterday, and I am preparing for an important exam. Not good.

Great game, though. The only issue I had was that it seamed like conceptually many of the problems were quite easy to solve, the hard part was fitting it all on the board without the conveyors overlapping. Being able to mirror the gates would be nice, for that purpose.
There's a Microsoft Case Study on the site here: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Windows-Server-2008-R2-...

Based on timelines, it looks like they developed in the first version of MVC.
I think this post get at least 2 things wrong:

(1) Even if decentralization is not a panacea, it remains the only solution for a host of problems. Including privacy on the internet. Also, personal server as easy to use as Facebook itself are definitely possible. When such servers actually ship, they will be worth the hassle.

(2) Everyone should quit every centralized services on this planet, including Facebook, provided there is an alternative. The logs they gather are just too scarily comprehensive.

That, and 2 most disturbing points:

(1) This post actually encourages us to stay dependent on a big corporation, in the hope that we could influence it for our own good. No, we can't. If we are dependant, they can screw us, and will do so as soon as it yields money.

(2) It fears that more free systems could be used to do child pornography, among other crimes. To me that's FUD: even if she's right, that doesn't mean that the criminality will rise, nor that the criminals will be harder to catch. And we already have Freenet.
Surely you noticed the part of the article where Wakefield falsified data? That the paper he submitted to the Lancet was at odds with the actual clinical records at the hospital? And the fact that his damning financial connection was not disclosed to the journal?

What is the journal supposed to do? They certainly couldn't have predicted that a tiny 12-person study would blow up in the way it has. In the end, they retracted the paper, which is exactly how it should have worked. Sometimes bad papers get published--peer review can't catch everything.
"This industry is well suited to independent contractors with the skills to install environmental gear such as wind turbines. . ."

This doesn't sound right. Installing wind turbines is in the domain of huge energy corporations, as far as I know.
Except that doctor was in the UK working for the NHS.

I've never heard of anyone feeling that they were ripped off financially by a doctor in the UK, so that doesn't explain the problem.
That you haven't been caught yet doesn't imply that they won't start trying in the future.

With the vast uptake in smartphones and those smartphones now coming equipped with tethering, carriers just might find it's worthwhile to crack down.
I would actually like to see more information on features, but at a higher level. A good 90% of what was shown in the video can be achieved in an Excel sheet. The invoice generation was the only truly interesting thing in the video. Not only are there already 100 apps that let me make a list of projects and under each a list of tasks and under each a list of todos, I can do that myself in 15 minutes in Django or Rails or even Excel. What makes your product different? That's what I want to know.
Upvote for this. The reason people are so quick to distrust real life-saving medical advice (e.g., about vaccinations) is because the medical world spouts with implied certainty so much garbage that later turns out to be false--nutritional advice being the most obvious example.
Wouldn't a traditional delivery model for video work as a failover if the P2P traffic is not high enough and have that always acting as one of the P2P video seeders?
And, in fact, the way (the way I know of at least) of going about realizing that at a deep, fundamental, instinctual level (instead of just agreeing with it on the conceptual level), is to turn toward your emotions and observe them directly.

There are lots of Buddhist meditation techniques, but, from what I understand, the most fundamental technique is simply observing your experience. It's not about trying to change your experience or get to some idealized state, but to really just look at your experience as it is, rather than how you wished it to be.

Many people have the misconception that meditation is supposed to be some peaceful, blissed-out state. That does happen sometimes, but a large part of it is also sitting with emotions raging inside of you and turning your attention to look at those unpleasant emotions again, and again, and again, resisting the urge to get the hell out of there and find something, anything to distract yourself.
All of the things in your second paragraph are true enough of U.S. medicine, but not so much in the U.K., where there was just as much (or more) public acceptance of the vaccine-autism link.
Plato thought that true reality lay in universal abstractions called Forms, or Ideas.

The Buddhist sutras take the position that "objects of mind" are just leaky abstractions created by our limited minds, which struggle to make sense of the world. The greatest fallacy, in this view, is conflating the "objects of mind" with the real objects (+) they supposedly represent.

(+) Buddhist philosophers in India developed a concept of atomism, which leads to existential riddles like, "If I look at this pile of atoms, and see a chair, is the chair inside my mind, or outside?" (If you answer either way, you're wrong! ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_atomism

http://deoxy.org/koan/76
What happens after someone steals your Facebook Profile?
That was a terrible article. It was all over the place, spewing nonsense in all directions.
I sure hope the future of consuming video content is more similar to YouTube than TV. There are still obvious economic problems, that’s why I only hope, not predict.

The continuos nature of broadcasting always seemed like a big downside to me. Being able to watch the same content whenever you want – not whenever the broadcaster wants – seems like a obvious advantage to me. That just wasn’t feasible until a few years ago. Maybe it still isn’t feasible. But I sure hope we are coming closer.

P2P TV might still be the future for all the stuff that really should be broadcast live (breaking news, ceremonies, sports) but I don’t think we will need more channels in the future. What we have now might do.
In Poland price online is not even an offer.

It's request for offers of purchase from customers. When buyer puts item in the online basket and fills in his details he is making an offer to the seller that he wants to purchase the goods at the given price. If the seller sends the buyer confirmation email stating that he actually wants to deliver the good (automatic notifications about registering buyers offer do not count) then the contract with all the following obligations is formed.
The big blip
Winner of The Attention Contest
tl;dr:

1) You can use javascript: in the url bar! holy crap!

2) You can insert arbitrary scripts into the DOM, and trigger a function to run when they load!

3) Using jQuery, you can build UI stuff with this!

Any JavaScript developer worth half their salt knows this stuff. Wondering how it has so many upvotes. It's hardly novel or all that interesting...
Printer (& Human) Friendly Version: http://www.inc.com/print/579
The author only cites songs from 1967 through 1975. A larger sample size would be nice for such a title.
I'd say this is too little, too late, but not in the obvious way.

People are not leaving Facebook en masse right now, nor will they likely any time soon. But the Facebook vs. privacy meme has broken into the mainstream—I mean, it's literally on the cover of Time. Whether they realize it or not, a lot of people are reacting to this. They won't do anything as drastic as quitting Facebook, but they'll become more self-conscious. They'll start to post a little less and text a little more.

There won't be a Facebook exodus. Just a gradual weaning-off by users who don't even know they care about privacy, but are simply reacting viscerally to a vague mistrust of the company. Facebook won't implode, it'll just become less relevant. Like Yahoo, it'll be around for some time to come, but just as most of us haven't expected competitive search results from Yahoo for years, most of us will never really expect Facebook to safeguard any information we give it.
I think he's spot on when he says "The aha! moment with Veetle is when you realize it is just like having a cable TV system with a million channels."

However, what Cringely doesn't address is how these programs will be discovered. Discovery and search on TV is still in the Stone Age although there is abundant metadata. The situation is already bad with the current ~200 cable channels. Having thousands (or millions) of channels will necessitate a Google for TV.
It is not so much OO that is receding as inheritance. Although that is not recent -- it must have been around 1995-2000 that doubts were becoming popularly known. Inheritance is somewhat interesting though: it is a formalised mechanism or pattern for changing software function -- there doesn't seem much else like that. Why did it not work very well?

As to OO, Bertrand Meyer gives the best rationale: it is about organising software around data instead of procedure, because data is more stable. That yields a rather abstract definition, but in that sense OO is perhaps more alive now than ever.

What has happened is that the developer's canvas has expanded enormously. We think and write for the WWW first now. The data types are the various sub-parts and relations of web standards. Our software is very much organised around these, they just don't map to small language features.
When you say bending over… is that bending over backwards or forwards?

One important point with selling to large companies is to understand their price points. At some price, lets say $1000, a middle manager will have to go through several layers of purchasing approvals. Below that price, and they can make and act on the decision without approval.

Once you've gone over that price, you should go waaay over it to make it worthwhile. This is one of the reasons why you see so many corporate products that throw in the kitchen sink. They've gone over the purchasing approval limit and having a lot of features helps drive the price up, which in turn helps support the steak-dinner sales cycle.
They must have recently added this. I found the same ("so-and-so who you never, ever contacted on Pandora, ever likes this artist"), and had to go into Facebook and remove Pandora as an "approved" application.

Actually, the ONLY reason I even knew it grabbed the info from Facebook was by the profile picture they automatically used, and would not let you change or delete.
Brittany Murphy Husband: Simon Monjack Found Dead
When it comes to robots it's roll, fly, walk, and then run.
Tell HN: Add a '+' to the end of any bit.ly link to get the full URL.
Not enough people know this. If you're wary of a bit.ly link from a stranger, just add a "+" to the end. This will take you to a bit.ly page that has the full URL and a list of how many people have clicked it, who's tweeted it and when, etc. Also, if you're sharing a link, you could just add the + yourself to make it a bit less opaque. e.g. this link to Diaspora's Kickstarter page: http://bit.ly/dgpnNs+
Plus, the tiles are rendered once, no need for heavy calculations on-demand.
> No rhetorical trick intended.

(I suppose you refer to the "just a tool" sentence.) I'm sure of that. It's just that its an easy sentence to throw up while not really thinking about it. I see it often, and it rarely actually says something. And its effect, whether intended or not, is often the rhetorical trick I spoke of.

About the rest, I agree: when (if) disagreeing parties manage to set definitions straight, they often find that they actually agree.
Is their an open-source EULA available? Paying even $1000 right now for a lawyer is untenable.
I don't know about the US, but here in Europe there are huge numbers of small wind and solar installations going up on residential and commercial property. Architects and energy experts are calling it "eco-bling" - largely useless, but a highly visible and expensive way of signalling how much you care for the environment. I've lost count of the number of solar panels I've seen fitted on the north side of a building so as to face the main entrance rather than the sun.
Crowd sourcing vs. Sole sourcing
Alan Kay? Well gee, you should have said something. Here I was using working definitions and Alan Kay already had the answer.

Either you understand how silly you sound or you do not. I suspect the latter. Perhaps you and Alan could continue the discussion.
New business ideas for business plan
is.gd uses an appended - to throw you to a preview page, as well.