skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Except Amazon is being forced to stop doing that by at least some publishers now, hence the "price chosen by the publisher" blurb on the kindle book pages now.
Best language to learn for Big Data
I have been watching the trends that are occurring with respect to big data. I have read books - Numerati, Super Crunchers and now reading 'Singularity is near'. I am a programmer with about 12 years of experience.

I am just confused as to what language to pick to learn and write programs on big data. I tried Erlang - not many support libraries, looked at R, peeked at Haskell, heck even thought I would go back to Java!

Is there any specific language you would recommend that would enable to be process, analyze and write good applications using huge datasets?
Sadly this clashes with the London MySQL meetup that I'm already planning to attend, but this is just up the road from there so I may wander along later on.
Hey, I'm also a former DCI Tournament Organizer AND sometimes unofficial football judge (not FIFA approved or anything :) ), and I'd say that FIFA does look for consistency.

DCI actually "gets" the fact that punishments should vary according to level of play (look for Rules Enforcement Levels or REL for short), and so do the local football judge federations - when I played a small football tournament, the judge routinely overlooked some small infractions that would warrant a call in a high-level match (not throwing correctly the ball from the sideline, ball position for free throws, etc).

FIFA officiating was pretty bad, true, and I personally think that instant replay (sparingly used) could improve it a bit as well.

I also like the harsher leagues (someone mentioned the English Premier) over the more foul-prone ones (Italy and my own country Uruguay are egregious examples)
If the idea behind linking via facebook/twitter was to make things easier for users - that's a mistake. There are people who already are sensitive about their info on facebook - I bet they wouldn't like to expose it to yet another fledgling website with its own privacy fine print on what it can do with that info. I wonder if this is a surrogate attempt at privacy violation by facebook itself.
Never mind the fact that the entire business model of credit is based on assuming a risk the borrower doesn't pay.

Nonsense. The entire business model of credit is giving you money now which you give back later. Default risk is just an unfortunate side effect of that problem.

Some people were gaming the bankruptcy system, and the Personal Accountability Act tried to make that more difficult. For example, remember that NYT reporter who went bankrupt because of his spendthrift wife? Turns out she was a serial bankruptcy filer who strategically managed her debt/spending to exploit the system.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/05/the-road...

Maybe bankruptcy reform was poorly designed (if so, make that case), but it's hardly a giveaway to the credit issuers.
Here's a simple solution. The referee has the option to, if in doubt, consult someone with a video replay to determine a situation. He already has, and uses, the option to consult the line men, so it is not obvious to me why he shouldn't be able to consult someone who can watch a replay.

Another thing that for the life of me I cannot understand hasn't been implemented: A chip in the ball to determine off sides and whether the ball has crossed the goal or side lines.
> All those regulations over credit default swaps

AIG was heavily regulated. In fact the insurance was a creation of regulators so they could justify forcing regulated banks to hold MBOs as assets.

And then there's Fannie and Freddie - both creatures of regulation. And the bond rating monopoly granted by the SEC....

Regulation is systemic risk.
Regionally. They don't have national coverage at all, but I guess soccer doesn't either.
Consumers Consuming More Cancer-Causing Radiation Today
Hopefully, all the non-players (like news.ycombinator will come to the party :p)
Yeah, I submitted an answer to the first puzzler, and the comment was pending moderation until some time this morning. This seems to be a side project from the author of codeanthem.com, so I wouldn't expect to see fast approval of puzzlers / solutions by a human any time soon.
Does anyone know what he used to do and where to earn 100k a year ?
That was mistake #2 (second to not having decided to run the business on a more professional platform than Yahoo Small Business and a shared host like BlueHost), but regardless, the issue is still Yahoo's incredibly poor customer service.
Does anyone have any experience with old media launches like this?

My assumption is you don't get in the WSJ (or any widely-circulated publication for that matter) unless you have a PR company or the right connections. Is it really more than just having something cool to hang on the wall?
http://www.quora.com/Magnets-How-do-they-work?
Forwarded it to my buds down in that area (moved up north a few years ago). Good luck!
If there is another way to sign up, I can't find it. That's a turn off considering I don't want to use my facebook account or twitter anymore.
This is exactly the attitude why I get out of teaching!!!

Daddy already paid you loads and loads of money! How is it that you expect me to make, like... an honest effort? Yeah, whatever.

The article may be right or wrong, but you are so above it to discuss it in its own merits. No, you paid your money, so you must get your cheese, right? Sorry to let you down, son, but the thing they use in the MATRIX to download skills into a living brain do not exist. It is Science Fiction, it will never be true. You would know that if you grabbed a few damned books and read 'em.

And just for the record, I am not old enough to have forgot about all the hours that I wasted while in undergraduate school. At least I did never go crying to the principal office to complain that i did not get the grades i "deserved".
IIRC from an earlier article, Elon Musk actually did have a prenup, but his (ex-)wife's lawyer is filing to get it overturned.
> I agree we want regulation to be of the second type, but sometimes the first type is the only practical way to do it

You're assuming that the benefits of the first type exceed the costs.

Regulation is systemic risk. It's also always captured by the politically powerful.

> Bureaucratic love-ins aside, regulation doesn't need to fall any heavier on the little guy than the big guy

It may not "need to", but it always does. Walmart can always amortize its regulatory burden over more revenue someone else can. And with the savings, they can get special rules and treatment. They get to write the rules.

Yes, I know that you have good intentions for regulation, but reality trumps.
English is very germanic and the germanic languages are very functional as you say. However, it has both celtic and romantic influences (both formal latin through the Roman conquest and later French influence). It is this interesting hybridisation that gives it both functional power (I hear an anecdote of how the French do not have a general purpose word for 'get', instead it is strongly contextual) and (often unused) artistic extensibility.
The End Of The HPC Server (As We Know It)
Is the IDE required? For me, a command line tool (compiler?) would suffice.
I look forward to seeing this integrated into boxee.
Video hardware acceleration has nothing to do with, and can't be helped by, OpenCL. I'm just warning you in case you try to write it and fail.
I'm having a hard time with your premise. Your premise is that regulating nuclear fission plants is obsolete? Because nothing could possibly go wrong that might adversely affect society?
Press release:
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/apple-sells-three-mi...
They have a "postnup", which is very different.. Apparently, she still signed it even though they were married already (which was not that smart of her to do)
The IDE's have a size limited version, both of which have a limit larger than the chips that ship with the launchpad
And here we go, more people blaming a system of private enterprise when government fails them...so the solution must be more government, right? Because the government failed, we must need more of it. Sure, that makes sense.

>all liability will be handed to a wholly owned, but separate corporation, which will go bankrupt at the first sign of a lawsuit

So, if BP was a sole proprietor owned by Bill Gates this would somehow be better. You don't think Bill Gates could go bankrupt? No, you probably don't like any form of private business. It's not just big bad corporations.

Sorry for make assumptions about what system you're advocating, but you're not really stating an alternative. What type of benevolent (bankrupt proof) organizational structure should drill for oil?

The only think I can think of is the government. Therefore, you're proposing state controlled oil production. In this case, it would somehow be magically cleaner and less corrupt? Reality says otherwise.
Suppose Germany had spend the money used to wage WWI and WWII for science instead?

By the way, Britain's computer industry was on par with the American one just after the war.
Heh, I almost preceded the title with "Balko: ", since people like us know the "brand" he's established.

As far as it being on topic, I submitted it because this seems to be a topic of significant general interest on HN based on prior postings and comment threads, plus a Maryland resident in one of those about Illinois asked what was the state of affairs there. I gather that this is at least in part Balko's promised detailed followup on this state.

And, you know, there's some hope in Maryland, or at least a lot more leverage. The Illinois law is crystal clear (it was amended explicitly to protect cops), the Massachusetts state supreme court has established clear (or so I gather) case law on this, but as Balko has noted, this interpretation of wiretapping law has not as of yet been subjected to the Maryland courts.
Of course, MPC-HC uses GPU while VLC didn't until this version.
This seems a lot more extensible than what I've been told about Wufoo.
The way to stop "dives" is take every "he hit me" claim seriously by mandating a free substitution whenever a player makes that claim. Yes, the player can return with another free substitution after s\he's been checked out by an independent MD.
They mention this factor in the article as well as other IT technologies that may be helping students to make a better use of their time.

The authors grant that this may be a factor in the last decade or so, but since the biggest decline observed happened between 1961 and 1981 (in the order or 20 less minutes of study per year), they assume that the bigger trend remains.
I would highly recommend using an MIT license - I think everyone working at GitHub uses it for all of our OS work.

http://github.com/schacon/showoff/blob/master/LICENSE

It is very open and people that are interested in learning from or using your code don't have to worry about licensing issues. If you are a hard-core copyleft advocate, then great, use the GPL - if you don't care, please use MIT. It makes people looking at your code not have to worry about exactly how they're using it and it makes sure they don't have to beg you to ask permission in case they want to use snippets in a non-GPL program.
Very true, but I like my numbers to behave like... well, numbers. You can define consistent algebras but I'd argue with you if you tried to call them numbers.
Java's not actually a bad choice, considering some of the tools that are available. Hadoop[1], HBase[2], etc. Depending on what you are trying to accomplish of course, you could also include Lucene[3], Solr[4], Mahout[5] and Weka[6] in that list.

Of course cool Java libraries don't mean you have to work in Java. Scala[7] seems to be gaining quite a bit of momentum, as does Clojure[8].

From your reading list, it sounds like you may be interested in predictive analysis, machine learning, etc. If so, Python[9] is pretty popular in those circles and has some nice libraries available as well[10]. And you can do neat things like use a Hadoop cluster for map/reduce processing, even if you have a client written in Python (or whatever)[11].

Of course Map/Reduce[12] isn't the only distributed processing model out there. You might want to learn MPI[13] then explore the MPI bindings that are available for many (most?) languages, and look at other models of distributed / parallel computing.

Anyway, to summarize, I'd say that if you already know one or more of Java, Python, C, C++ or Scala, you're in good shape. If not, some combination of the above should fit the bill. And yes, R might be handy as well.

Not to take anything away from Erlang, Haskell, Forth, Factor, Scheme, Lisp, OCaml, Perl, or any other language of course. I'm just not as familiar with those so I can't say much about them.

1. http://hadoop.apache.org/core/

2. http://hbase.apache.org/

3. http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/

4. http://lucene.apache.org/solr/

5. http://mahout.apache.org/

6. http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/

7. http://www.scala-lang.org/

8. http://clojure.org/

9. http://www.python.org/

10. http://www.google.com/search?q=python+machine+learning

11. http://www.michael-noll.com/wiki/Writing_An_Hadoop_MapReduce...

12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapReduce

13. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_Passing_Interface
Millionaire In Three Years, Step 2
OAuth and Web2Py Part 1
Ask HN: Is iphone 4's gyroscope magical?
Though Steve Jobs termed the Gyroscope magical and awesome, was it truly a new feature?

I tried this. Opened Google Maps on Samsung Spica, zoomed in into New York map, switched to street view and turned on the compass mode.
Voila!
It seems to do the same thing as in the "awesome" demo from Jobs. Rotate the phone around yourself, the 360 degree views also rotates. Try this on your Android.
Though, it need not be the exact same thing technology wise, but it "seems" to do the same thing.
The issue here is not sharpening, but the colour output space, and yes MPC-HC uses shaders to do it, while VLC trusts the GPU so far.

And some nVidia GPUs have a wrong colourspace output, which makes the colour to be faded...
Why don't you ask the question on Quora?
As the parent comment suggests, information and education have real value in this space. At NerdKits (http://www.nerdkits.com/), we spend our time empowering our customers through the kinds of hands-on electronics & microcontroller learning experiences that you aren't likely to get with a pre-made PCB and a stack of libraries. Hackers, even the "newbies," shouldn't be scared of interrupts, registers, transistors, or even Makefiles, and you can see that we try to bring that out in many of our video tutorials:

http://www.nerdkits.com/videos/
Ask HN: Tools for estimating project hours
Wondering if anyone had any good tools and techniques on how they estimate the time in can take to complete a web development project, whether it be a feature or merely a tool.

Thanks in advance!
Very unlikely.

Here MPC-HC, uses shaders and special renderers, technologies that VLC doesn't use on Windows.

But Mplayer and VLC use the same technologies, same decoders, and same output modules technology (xv, x11 and plain d3d)
I do want to point out that Ruby isn't the only language that allows a function to redefine itself. Try this in your firebug console:

var foo = function() {
console.log('foo');
foo = function() {
console.log('bar');
};
};
foo();
foo();
It looks like gcc can be used (http://mspgcc.sourceforge.net/). I'll have to brush up on my C.
Things They Didn’t Teach You In School
I'd quit a six figure job... for a seven figure job. :)
I love craigslist as an apartment finding tool. Most of the ads for apartments include a google maps link, so I can figure out if it's really in the area I'm interested in.

But every time I move I wish constantly for a service that would let me search craigslist by actual location. My mental picture is a location and distance, but some kind of region-selection on a google-maps overlay would be even better.. or a location and a maximum travel time. A feed of those ads as they are made would be even more powerful.
I'm not saying you're wrong, as I'm not familiar with this stuff in the slightest, but the blog post mentions two supposedly free IDEs: IAR Embedded Kickstart, and Code Composer Studio 4.

http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/Code_Composer_Studio...

http://focus.ti.com/docs/toolsw/folders/print/iar-kickstart....
Same here, but I expect at least C code for those little chips will remain manageable in size.
It's averaging stuff across all apps. That has pretty much no meaning for someone who doesn't intend to be anything like the average.
I think a lot of us are instinctively reacting negatively to this article, and I don't think it is because it's news we just don't want to hear. There is one point that the author fails to take into consideration: future growth.

Anyone who has used iPad or iPhone or an Android device can tell that devices like these, not Symbian or WAP or Brew or whatever, are the future. Those other platforms might catch up, but for now they lag abysmally behind in terms of user experience. And so while they might outnumber iOS and Android for now, that numerical advantage can not last.

Walk around a Y-Combinator event (or CES, or E3, or anywhere else where leading edge alpha geeks congregate) and count phones. I'd be willing to wager a lot of money you'd see a bunch of iOS and Android devices, a few blackberries, and a smattering of ancient nokia and samsung free phones held by users who "just want to make calls" (and thus aren't going to be reachable by any apps at all, WAP or Java or otherwise).

So, yes, a company developing an app today for iOS or Android isn't going to make their money back on the platform as it stands in any reasonable amount of time. But a company or developer who positions themselves to be on top of a platform that is rising meteorically (and will displace literally billions of feature phones over the next decade and a half as moore's law drops silicon costs by a factor of 1000) is going to do well.

Hype is about future expectations. When expectations rise above exponential growth in our industry, those expectations usually turn out wrong. But the mobile market has a current penetration of over 3 billion people and I'll wager practically every phone on the planet will be a "smartphone" in under 15 years. That's a lot of headroom for growth.
Anecdotal evidence of real life application: my mother (Indian/Pakistani, born in the '40s) counts this way. I never asked, but presumably she was either taught by her parents or in school.
Don't you people know how to read!!!

The original data for the article is taken from 4 independent surveys, applied nationwide at different times between 1961 to 2003.

Since the wording of the survey may have elicited students in 1961 to over report studying time, compared with their peers in later years, an additional experiment was conducted. A sample of University of California students were taken and each applied one of the 4 surveys at random.

Results show that the wording of the surveys partially (20%) account for the differences in reporting time, but the general trend remains. 20 minutes less study each year, on average.
He's just looking for advice -- copying is copying and the guy has a right to feel more than one way about it. It's the action that matters.

That said, I would look definitely look at this as an opportunity to make contacts, get work, etc.
The free IDE should be adequate for this and there is a port of GCC for the controller.
It's on the 7th slide: "PHP was ranked No. 4 on the most recent TIOBE index"
Clojure and Simplicty
Regional networks' needs could be served by digitally replacing in-game ads with customized ads for the region, or adding small ads at the bottom of the screen (that's the usual way)

This is already done in some countries for football (soccer). The thing is, it's probably harder and a more difficult sell than just airing the same old commercials during a break. It helps that football(soccer) is wildly popular so advertisers are willing to jump that hurdle in exchange for guaranteed audience in the football-mad countries.
Also llvm ( http://www.llvm.org ) has experimental msp430 backend.

[edit] Found the real development site: https://www.fooe.net/trac/llvm-msp430/wiki
As the Arduino design is non-proprietary, there are a number of cheaper Arduino clones and variants.
You can count to 1023 in binary using both hands.
Interesting. When I write, I most certainly "talk to myself"; any passage that I'm in the slightest doubt about I speak aloud and see how it sounds to my ears.

"Talking to yourself" for writers block sounds promising, I'll have to try it sometime in the future.
Ok, help me with this please. The key to the problem, literally, is the recipient key. If I understand the challenge details correctly, and the OpenPGP RFC, a recipient key is required on the cloud side to decrypt the session key. How is this recipient key stored securely on the cloud?
The numbers, assuming his inputs are reasonably accurate, still mean something - most people trying to make money selling iPhone apps don't make a great deal. It's easy to distinguish between apps that are trying to make money and apps that aren't - apps trying to make money are not free. The sort of filtering you want is next to impossible - you're asking that only the apps that are trying to make money but really mean it are to be considered.

He doesn't address something that maybe you're touching on, indirectly - unlike the markets where someone makes zillions on SMS voting for a popular TV show or selling Tetris to feature phone users, the iPhone app market is very accessible to J. Random Hacker. Compared to the previous age of mobile development, it's a major improvement - same device (more or less), same screen size (more or less), same framework, no complicated permission needed from the carrier, payment taken care of, etc, etc. Plus, you never hear of anyone saying they program J2ME or BREW or Symbian apps for fun.
Indeed.. that's one big point. Maybe there could be a special review of the game for awarding those cards after the matches... (during the post-mortem)

Someone mentioned the English Premier League as an example of having a heavy stance on fouls and dives.
"In March, investors—led by Benchmark Capital—invested $14 million in Quora at a valuation of around $87.5 million, say people familiar with the matter."

3 months before going public, already worth ~$87.5 million?
Oh, I haven't seen the ugly font on the page. I use NoScript.
If somebody’s paying $150,000 for a law school degree

Colleges don't sell degrees, they sell educations - you have to earn the degree. Or you used to, anyway. Why not skip all the lectures, coursework and exams and save time?
Chrome skipping "http://". More minimalism?
Recent update to latest dev in Google Chrome seems to have brought a change in url display.
While browsers display URL's as "http://news.ycombinator.com/",
this builde of Chrome currently does it as "news.ycombinator.com".

The same happened in the Google I/O Chrome Web Store preview. The url was of the store was not prefixed by "http://".
Other protocols, https/ftp, are explicitly listed, though.

Is it another step towards minimalistic approach, as most url's have "http://" in them, so why not skip displaying it?
Or does it have some technological relevance?