skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing I was thinking about recently (though I know that I'm not the first and that some are already working on this, like Mozilla with Bespin) is a way to have my dev environment as a web-app, so that I can just login anywhere and find everything like I left it.

I'm using Textmate and GitX and would love to have everything working the same way. I'd also like to have the service hosting the app to just test the app right there and then, the same way I'm testing locally right now.

Does anything good already exist like this?
Do you have any citation for the statistic you edit to add?

The best I can find in a quick search is that maternal mortality in ancient Rome was about 10-15 per 1000 (http://books.google.com/books?id=6BOQZirLCWgC&pg=PA335&#...). I don't know the average number of pregnancies per woman, but 50% total mortality seems at odds with this.
Sure, but there's a distinction between the ideas that set the goal itself and the ideas that inform the strategy that gets you to the goal.

The article is saying that a creative strategy toward any goal is superior to to a mediocre strategy toward a creative goal.
Take a look at the EE380 video for May 5, 2010 at http://ee380.stanford.edu. Haiping Zhao from Facebook describes the HipHop Compiler for PHP: Transforming PHP into C++.
Pocco: Python port of Docco (literate-programming-style documentation)
Stack overflow knockoff for machine learning, NLP, AI, ...
Thanks for commenting on this, you clearly know a lot more about this topic than I do.
What you're doing is comparing risk-taking to fundamentals. I would argue...why can't we have both? Isn't a better-educated population always better for the society?

What kind of educated population you wanted? What is the fundamental?

You may want some basic mathematics and grammar, and maybe some courses in logics.

Science? That's a maybe to me.

You want to make an educated person in politics and governance too? Good luck with that. Government teaching civic education is like a criminal in jail teaching kids what's the law of the land is.

Beside, doesn't government plan the educational system? You gotcha do this and that or else we pull your educational money away.
Not sure if this has been done but..

The idea is TwitterNews. The site would basically scrape Twitter to find the most linked-to news articles.

Eventually, you could build a system to tell if the news article was being mentioned positively or negatively. You could build out that aspect loads of ways. Eg. this is what "ROCKS" and this "SUCKS". Hopefully, you'd be able to come up with some better marketing slang. I'm just spitballing.

Anyways, I'd love to be able to know what news the collective consciousness of Twitter is happy/sad/annoyed about.
I suspect they too know this "happens sometimes" with Greyhound.
Have you posted your ideas/issues to the Penumbra mailing list? Zach Tellman (Penumbra maintainer) might have some feedback/pointers for you, he's a pretty responsive and helpful guy.

Posting the main Clojure mailing list might bring up some interesting perspectives as well.
You're looking for me to bring a wealth of academia and research to the table to match your high knowledge of economics. That isn't going to happen.

I've never insisted that I know more or less than the average person.

I continue to explain that I am encouraged to see those who wish to seek out more evolved ways of thinking are doing just that -- thinking.

Likewise, I do not know a lot about the human body. Yet, I would be extremely happy to hear about a process that would eventually conquer cancer.

It seems you want clarification to my personal conclusion that "Capitalism is beneath us as a society.".

I say this because in the framework of Capitalism, there must always be an element of misfortune; which isn't just a byproduct, but a prerequisite to it's success.
Good presentation. TLDR notes:

Civic Hacking examples:

Aaron Schwartz (reddit cofounder) helped liberate millions of docs from federal court system two years ago. PACER is a database olf all Federal court decisions, which by law are all public domain. However, locked up in PACER, stored in PDF only, and cost $.08/page download. Tried an experiment where they gave free access for two weeks at public libraries. Aaron went to a library, and put a script on a lib computer that downloaded 20 million docs to his own server. PACER folks discovered it, panicked, and sent FBI after Aaron, but he was cleared.

More examples, list of links:

* Sunlightlabs.com - all public domain govt data should be available online, realtime, machine-readable. Open Source + Open Data = Better Govt. We reuse govt data, allow govt to reuse our open source code.

* OpenCongress.org - Rails app, what Congress.gov should be

* FlyOnTime.us - uses historical FAA data to predict flight delays

* QuakeSpotter.org - realtime USGS data to map and anticipate global earthquakes

* StumbleSafely.com - uses DC crime stats to tell which streets to avoid when stumbling home at night from the bar

* Wayfinder.com - augmented reality Android app that points you to nearest NYC subway station

* NationalDataCatalog.com - catalogs all govt datasets and api's

* CodeForAmerica.com - modelled after Teach for America, recruiting devs to work in 5 cities across the country to make open source software using govt data/api

* intridea.com - Creole->English translation app for Haiti relief workers, oil reporting crowdsourcing app for gulf spill
And even for PHP apps like MediaWiki that do support PostgreSQL the primary development target is still MySQL.

So it's not worth the trouble to use PostgreSQL in most cases, you'll eventually want to install some extension that only supports MySQL, or get tired of reading documentation that assumes MySQL etc.
Japan's high savings rate meant that banks had huge amounts of money to lend. The banks threw lending standards out the window because they had so much cash to lend. When the central bank raised interest rates, the bottom fell out.

Here's the important part, though. Because of the cozy relationships between banks and big industrial firms, the banks reacted by making _more_ bad loans to prop up failing firms. Plus, the government raised consumption taxes which fell disproportionately on the lower classes. The tied-up capital combined with the rising taxes on the people who spend the highest percentage of their income hurt a lot more than government spending on infrastructure.

Here's my worry about the U.S.:

1. The home buying incentives/modifications are just an excuse to keep trying to re-inflate the housing market much like the Japanese banks kept lending money.

2. Proposed cuts to social security and medicare will hurt the economy by affecting those who spend the highest percentage of their income.
Nice to know that age and experience count against you, as does the potential 2nd income that a spouse brings in.
I agree that a good idea is necessary but not sufficient for success. But I think the article makes an important point in calling ideas a "commodity": what is more fungible than the same idea in two people's minds?

You can get good ideas for free. Excellence at execution is much more expensive.
Business analyst walks into a car dealership - How companies select CMSs
I think the comment by MS on the original site is worth a read. Basically: you need both a great idea and great execution.

Being tall won't guarantee that you'll be a great basketball player, but it's very, very difficult to be a great basketball player if you are not tall.
'David After Dentist's Family Made $150,000 Off Their Viral Video
More likely it was a call like:

if (permissions["whatever"]) { Do code}

instead of

if (has_permission("whatever"))

And the first if was copy/pasted across the entire app. So when you have to change the logic of that permission, you don't have a central, official, way of figuring it, instead you have checks all over the app.
Technologies old and new played roles in cracking Russian spy ring
Rare find: readable Perl code
I know next to nothing about FourSquare, but it seems like you could make a pretty penny knowing the location of customers, and the businesses they regularly frequent. Coupons, loyalty cards, yellow pages (get paid for referring new customers), etc. It would be straightforward to implement technically, but you would need to have first-mover advantage and a sales force to get shops on-board...
It's like Monkey Ball, but in real life.
The title of this says it all when it comes to most (maybe even all) of the software patents I've run across (caveat: I've never dealt with serious software patents dealing with non-trivial algorithms like compression, encryption, etc.).

So many software and business process patents would have been thought of by so many different people, it only faced with the situation. So in that sense I think, yes, many, many ideas are really commodities. Where ideas are not commodities are, for instance, breakthroughs in logic like Haskell Curry or Kurt Goedel made.
Yes, in essence I want to learn all 3.

>>The world of computer science/programming is absolutely huge.<<<

That's precisely why I asked HN. :)

>>>There are so many ways to go about it depending on what you're looking for or the type of learner/person you are. Do you have the patience to sit down and study theory or do you want to intermix theory with coding?<<<

I actually really don't know what type of learner I am. On one hand I don't have much problem in understanding things. On the other I struggle with some issues that make it really hard to get stuff done. What I do know is that I need space to imagine things for myself, and work things out until I am absolutely sure that I understand something.

Whenever I study theory a million different ideas pop into my head. It's like, oh I can do this with this, or maybe I can make this with this and so on. I know it's not practical to chase down every path, but it definitely helps me to implement some of them. Whenever I fail in doing that I realize just how flawed my realization was. So, then I can go back to the drawing board and just start over again.

>>>It's a long road but clearly you're interested. If you want to chat further I'd be really happy and interested in helping you. If you have Skype or something we can exchange contact information. My email is in my profile.<<<

Thanks a lot!
Check out TECHdotMN. They have a Google calendar that is full of events. RubyMN, MinneBar, MinneDemo and CodeCamp are all good events.
Porting Aquaria to the PSP
How Obesity Threatens America's Future 2010
I literally googled "spherical goods market". This thread is the only reference :)
10 ways spam is like vuvuzelas (the World Cup horns)
How a broker spent $520m in a drunken stupor and moved the global oil price
I keep hoping that PostgreSQL will support an embedded version. SQLite only gets you so far, and it'd be nice to be able to ship PostgreSQL statically linked into your applications with zero-configuration at the user's end.

MySQL's working on this (http://mysql.com/oem/), but I've read that PostgreSQL is way too tied to their multi-process network architecture for this to be feasible. But I'd love to be shown to wrong on that.
Richard Gabriel was right. Unix is good enough and few people care whether HURD has some nicer features that can be implemented in the wrong layers through piles of clever hacks.
I think it's funny that people constantly are calling for innovation in education. We don't need innovation, we need basics.

Education, especially at the elementary level, is a solved problem. The big thing in homeschooling right now is "classical education," and it works quite well.

What also works well is just about any method where the student is involved with a caring teacher that measures progress toward a set of goals and adapts the curriculum to best fit the student.

Everything "innovative" already exists. There are wonderful online math games and numerous projects where you can get books online for free. Everything you need to educate someone through high-school is available for free.
Or a pi/tau wit.
Great story, but do you really mean you got your annual salary per HOUR? Perhaps you meant per month? Still awesome, of course, but within the realm of reason :-)
I score an 11. Damn.
Well, I'm one techie who's walking the walk. I'm building an open source social learning platform based on Drupal and starting a company to provide commercial support and hosting. See more at http://eduglu.com

But per Jacobolus's comment, I don't really blame other techies for not getting involved. Most of education's problems are structural not technological. My hope is that by providing really good social learning tools -- much better than anything else out there and at a much lower cost -- that by making it much easier to move to better teaching practices, the structural problems will work themselves out easier.

But honestly, I don't give myself a huge chance of succeeding. Others far more gifted than I have failed over and over. But I figure you can only be young and idealistic once.

Edit:
And to clarify what I mean by "succeeding", I mean by that succeeding at "fixing" education. As for succeeding as a company, based on feedback I've gotten so far, I think success is achievable.
Thanks for the feedback. Currently when you add a new company it does the initial crawl and brings in all of their listings. Future crawls only bring in the new listings, keeping the cmpany variety good and mixed. I haven't come up with a good way to get around the initial crawel yet, short of randomizing the dates for launch.

All the logos are from crunchbase. I will shoot them a message.
I used to think I could sum up life in a blog post.
"If the right order were given, and all these computers worked together in one concerted effort, a botnet with that much computing power could crack many codes, break into and plunder just about any protected database in the world"

Uh, no, it couldn't. A big botnet does not magically give you access to well-protected computers or networks. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute_force_attack for some perspective.

I don't care how big Conficker is, it's not going to break AES-256 any time soon (or really any large key based on an algorithm without a weakness).

Similarly, Conficker isn't going to be able to get into protected internal networks with a good firewall simply by virtue of having lots of machines.
Another good typography resource: http://www.typographyforlawyers.com/
Idea for my fellow Americans: we need to ask our bosses here for a 5-week leave of absence so we can vacation in Sweden. Once in Sweden start looking for a job and then citizenship. :)
Tell HN: AWS upload bandwidth free until the end of October
Amazon announced back in December that they were going to provide free upload bandwidth until the end of June (i.e., today) -- looks like they've decided to extend this, because the pricing tables on the AWS website are showing upload bandwidth as being free until the end of October now.
I like the message given about taking time for yourself - relaxing, etc. I do it far too infrequently and every time I do take a real vacation I realize how badly I need to.

But to walk in with no notice and tell your employer that you're disappearing for 3 months is unprofessional and unreasonable. You work for a company which has schedules and deadlines; just as you expect them to pay you on time, they expect to have at least a little bit of warning before you up and disappear on them.

3 Months vacation - great. Presumably you expect to get it unpaid (Your employer probably gives you 2 weeks PAID vacation) and many employers with a few weeks warning would be happy to accomodate you. But to tell them "I'm leaving - see ya!" and expect to have a job waiting for you? Come on.
In CA you can do just that. They are called Charter Schools. If you can convince parents and the local school board that your magnet school provides an exceptional learning experience forr all potential students, not just an elite, then the state will fund you with the standard per student-day grant.
Yup, that was pretty well it.
closely followed by the #1 hit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jMH_WRwOWs
Feds Will Retry Trade Secret Count in Economic Espionage Case
Don't cry over anything that can't cry over you.
And often someone else is porting the code - this is in fact code review, and this can only help codebase.
Great comment, thanks.
New Hadoop Tools May Boost Enterprise Adoption
> Berkeley people were also working on free stuff around the same time

The problem with BSD is that it creates (or at least doesn't remove) an incentive to take whatever you can and run with it that has proven irresistible for companies. Every proprietary Unix has appropriated large portions of BSD and, with few notable exceptions, none gave improvements back - or freely added original work to the common code pool because their competitors could take it and run - take whatever you gave them and compete against you with it.

GPL-like "viral" licenses negate the threat by ensuring any code you contribute cannot be used as a competitive advantage against you.

If it weren't for RMS and the invention of GPL-like licenses, I seriously doubt we would have a healthy open-source ecosystem.
No, I haven't attempted to seek outside help at all (I'm not explicitly seeking help here, either, more sharing an experience). It is probably a good idea though!
Yes the cover sucks, it sucks horribly, however, the book is by far the best book I have found for people new or intermediate to design.

This seems like a dichotomy but its not. The reason the cover sucks is that Williams is not naturally good at design. This means for her to get good at it she had to actually learn and understand it. This is why this book is so good. However, she never learned how to design with color. Most of the designs she makes using color I feel are bad.

That said this book ROCKS, is hands down the best book when it comes to design basics of:
Proximity

Alignment

Repetition

Contrast

Typography
Still in my 20's here:
1. Pareto's 80/20 principle is your friend. The closer you are to perfection the harder and more time consuming it is to get closer to perfection. There are big gains in enhancing weaknesses. At 80% I drop the ball and pick up another.
2. Prioritize: Big blocks first, pebbles last. Every block I put down, I feel lighter and I feel less intimidated and more motivated simply for the fact that no block will be bigger than the last.
3. Experience over stuff. Stuff are perishable but experiences are forever. Moreover, stuff will weight you down financially and emotionally.
4. Expect the worst and you'll never be disappointed.
5. Slow change is sure change.
6. Everything in moderation, moderation included.
7. Always ask "why" more than once and follow the money. Most people are not truly aware why they do what they do.
8. The truth will set you free but it will hurt like a b*tch at first. Be a man and take it.
9. You are not as good nor as bad as you think and things are not as good nor as bad as they seem.
10. Even the crazy has a valid point of view. You would agree with him if you had similar genes and past experiences. (caveat: opinions are different from facts)
Aren't things like this getting just a little tired and old?

You want readable Perl?

1) Go look at some better known modules on CPAN

2) Look at answers to questions on http://perlmonks.org

3) Read Effective Perl, 2ed

4) Check out chromatic's Modern Perl book ( free online in draft form at http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2010/06/modern-perl-the-bo... )
It wasn't announced on the blog, but the S3 pricing table says so: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing
My interpretation is, for example, he asked for "fifty-five" meaning "$55,000/year". They instead interpreted it as "$55/hour" which would work out to around $110,000/year assuming a standard 2,000 hours worked a year.
Riding Waves to a Healthier Life
A: What compensation...blah blah blah?

B: 80 would be great.

$80k/yr -> $80/hr.
Agreed, I wish more people charged back in situations like these, then the black mark would clearly be on the bad companies rather than the small% of customers who actually do it.

(Side note, I only skimmed the article, but a good piece of advice is to mention charge back a few times when you're in this kind of situation. I find that it speeds up the outcome, succeed or fail.)
how successful would skype have been if you could only speak to other people who already had skype?

Isn't that how Skype got started?
All the pricing tables say so -- this is what I meant by "the pricing tables on the AWS website are showing..." :-)
Schools are run by teachers, who were good students when they were in school. Its positive feedback, and it has got us into a weird situation, where school teaches how to be a good school teacher.
Programmer’s Bill of Rights
"Seven Amusing Things To Do With Bacteria" - Olivia Judson's last column
looks good, though it's a bit strange that the "n results found" copy reflects the results only on the current page, not all search results.
Now, that's interesting. What sort of incentive does the local school board have in selecting such an excellent school over keeping kids in their own institution?

Parents, probably does have more of an interest in making their kids goes to charter school.

But it still is up to the political process. I mean, parents who vote with their money still have a disadvantage to political voters who can make the state provide schools with somebody else's money.

It is an imperfect process but nonetheless better than nothing.
I don't think it'd be terribly infeasible from an architectural standpoint because of the multi-process network architecture, but there are other things to consider. The multi-process architecture is really in it's favor, as it already uses IPC primitives (shared memory, semaphores) to share cache and control access to shared resources. The biggest barrier (I think) would be the file format. SQLite stores all of it's data in a single file (plus one temporary file for the journal). PostgreSQL's on-disk format would have to be heavily redesigned to support this, which I think is a huge advantage for SQLite.
Subtract 5 points if you studied fluid mechanics and know what a drag coefficient really is.
> You want to plan for failure? Start by not caring about your customers. Be just like Greyhound and you’ll achieve failure soon enough.

> Quality and service matter.

> Those who care, win.

Well, maybe. I mean I see his point, but the fact remains that Greyhound is probably the most successful bus company in the U.S. Could it be that customer service is not as critical to business success as the writer claims it is? I mean I wish it were, but this is reality we're talking about.
There are about 2000 work hours in a year, give or take, so I'm assuming he said something like "55" meaning $55,000/yr but the CEO heard $55/hr which would be more like $110,000/yr.
Seeing Languages Differently
Towards Just-In-Time Partial Evaluation of Prolog