skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's an interesting read from a marketing point of view, but as for our health, coke (oversweetened dilluted acid), chips (carcinogenic fried potato dough with monosodium glutamate) and sweet chocolate are the most unhealthy things one can inflict upon oneself.
I have never understood some of my friends, gulping litres of coke everyday, basically drinking nothing else.

I for myself prefer tap water (capital city, central Europe).
Thank you all. Please keep 'em coming.
What kind of session data do you store in MySQL?
With the turf wikileaks is treading on, does some authentication code really confirm that this is not a counter intelligence op?

I'm not saying that any of these things are untrue, it's just that there would be some very valid reasons for wanting to keep the details of the operation opaque. (eg. paying in cash, etc)

When you piss of the US National Security apparatus to that degree there is going to be some blow back. Yes, ideally they'd want to put him behind bars in a supermax, like other political prisoners, but he's fairly high profile and has a large amount of public support. You'd definitely want to kill the crusader for freedom aspect of his media image and promote an in it for himself persona. A hit piece in mainstream media is going to give him a better platform and have absolutely no effect on anyone with a clue. The spooks know this so they aren't going to do something like that.

This is super effective, cryptome is legit as far as hackers and others that would contribute to his cause. This isn't a money issue it's a technical expertise issue. No one is going to join wikileaks for the money. Yes, money will help buy servers, but it's more about the technical expertise required for the people you're pissing off not to be able to build a solid case. Wikileaks itself has nothing to fear from the axis of evil, but a lot to fear from the G8 (except Russia). They will never honour a chinese extradition request because Assange found a video of Chinese soldiers killing civilians. They will however put his ass right next to the shoe bomber for posting vids of army dudes doing what army dudes are trained to do.

Yes, Assange may be running wikileaks to embezzle himself $50 grand a year, OR it could be that he's gone dark and doesn't have time to update the site because he's brushing up on his waterboarding technique with Maher Arar.
not disagreeing with you, but you could say the same thing about gilt groupe, groupon, etc.

one man's "scam" could very well be another man's "deal."
This is why Feynmann disliked the social sciences, seriously, the Torrance tests is a perfect application of all of the problems with highly interpretative "tests".
Interview with Cheng Soon from Hacker Monthly
Why would that hold any weight at all? How do you prove you didn't just mail yourself an empty, unsealed envelope, into which you inserted the contents later... possibly even today?
Thanks for your suggestions!
News aggregators
Do you still check individual news sites on top of news aggregators?
For general news, is CNN.com the most reputable? And for those who follow the news consistently, does twitter opinion matter?
Thanks.
The reason it is annoying is that 5 hours later some HN readers who actually understood your comment have upvoted your post to 4.

Now your complaint is sticking around completely redundantly and this whole thread is taking up a lot of screen real-estate.
just like any big company
Apple would be a hard battle, I think. On the other hand facebook has the potential to actually enroach onto googles main revenue stream.

I see what you are trying to say but zynga are much more than a fad - at least for now. They have big profits and, more importantly for google, an instant social graph.

Google desperately wants to be your login provider and social graph. Really desperately.
vanishingly few people find something to do which is essentially compelling to them.
I see what you mean. That does make sense if a response is required for each notification. But in YourAM the notifications are send out together by different channels (eg. email and/or SMS) and no response is required. However, they have the option to respond, if they want to, to confirm the appointment or cancel it via email or SMS.
Thanks for your suggestion, I'll see to it that the team keep your suggestion in mind for future developments.
Something like a C64 would be nice. That's how I learned but I'm quite much a visual and spatial person. YMMV.

The C64 had a BASIC that is easy to learn, immediate evaluation for trying things out and failing fast, and direct control of various graphics (text mode, bitmap mode, sprites). And you could do all kinds of

Someone suggested HTML+JS but I think that a simple raster display is much easier to grasp than CSS layout or vector graphics. Pling: a pixel goes bright. Plong: a pixel goes dark.

First you want to have something on the screen and then you want it moving. Coordinates conveniently introduce you to numbers and basic algebra. If you want to do crazy things, you can POKE the hardware directly.

I can't think of anything this simple in 2010.
"...it also requires a great depth of knowledge and patience on the part of the teacher..."

Not to mention imagination and creativity. I'm not completely aware of the situation in U.S. schools, but here (Greece) it's utterly terrible, even in private schools/colleges.

But this essentially goes to show that education and culture (or lack thereof) can have an avalanche effect on society, yet we don't pay as much attention to it as we should (see the planned 25% budget cuts on education in the UK, and elsewhere).
No Hegel?
I asked a similar question a while ago, for a 13 year old: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=428095

Got a lot of great answers.
The professor mentions that 10 hours a week should be spent reading and, at a bare minimum, 6 or 7 particular journals should be read.

Is there an equivalent regular reading list for the computer sciences and/or software engineering? I'm aware of things like arXiv and a handful of journals but it can be hard to dig through the often extremely theoretical stuff to the things that better reflect useful modern and progressive thinking in these disciplines (though I admit I might be approaching it wrong).
Hackety Hack is trying to accomplish this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackety_Hack
"Back in the day"?

Most of the local cheeses you can get here (Austria) have holes in them.
It's the same article by the same author, of course. One is a preprint and the other is from this month's CACM.
Please don't crosspost Reddit discussions. If I want to read Reddit, I'd go to Reddit.
There is no industry left in USA

This is a myth. The US is still far and away the largest manufacturer.

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/CompanyFocus/...

Even if it weren't true, there are more opportunities to be create value with unconstrained creativity than ever before.

You can sit down and write code or draw designs and be creative with zero outlay.

Excuses excuses excuses.
This is getting ridiculous. Why doesn't Wikileaks just host all their content in a Git repository and use GPG to sign their releases?

Then it would be impossible to take down the site, and anyone could easily spin up a mirror.

Instead there's one monolithic distribution site which isn't decoupled from their submission network. The site is frequently down during a fundraiser, and due to how they run it other people can't easily directly contribute resources to run mirrors of the site.

I'm beginning to think that Wikileaks is not as interested in actually getting leaks out as it is furthering Julian Assange's personal indispensability.
+1 Ruby
No data is ever transmitted via quantum entanglement (at least, data from the perspective of the observer). Entanglement is simply when two particles exist in the same quantum state. (Or, to be more precise, in the same superposition of quantum states.) When the state is observed (say, an experimenter examines one of the particles), then the entire wavefunction collapses to a single quantum state. The two particles in the system therefore collapse to the same state instantaneously, but no information can ever be transmitted in this way.
"The European Union designated 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation" ...

I wouldn't be too worried about this.
I disagree; as long as Reddit discussions don't become a daily habit here, occasionally posting an interesting thread -- which this one was -- is not really any different from linking to any other site with an interesting discussion.
PUMA Speed Cat 2.9 Mid Premium
Guys, wikileaks is basically fighting for survival against the US government, among others. Can we really suggest they "just" use this or that, or complain that they're not handling thing so well ? They are basically trying to exist in a space that's almost impossible for most countries to exist in.

We're not talking about your average (or even uniquely scalable) startup here.

Seriously, do you have any doubt that anyone involved in this could end up secretly detained for years ? Assange is taking huge personal risks here, so yeah, it is about him, to a very large extent.
Why the downvote? For me the games I enjoy achieve this. And for whatever job I take on, I actually hope for the same (not just in game development).
I wouldn't agree with that, initial fun is important but over the longer term I think addictiveness can take over fun, to the point where the person feels obligated to continue playing the game to continue progressing even though each gaming session is in a sense almost dreaded.

I played farmville for about a month because some friends were, by the end of that I felt like I was wasting my time, the progression was for the sake of progression, the achievements were arbitrarily chosen to take more and more time and being better than your friends had a lot more to do with time invested then any form of strategy used. I had friends who admitted they were sick of the game and it frustrated them but continued playing just to finish off achievements.

Sure I'm not speaking for everyone but I do think it is a trend in Zynga games, they are build around user engagement and seek to maximise that for as long as possible.
FWIW, varnish apparently does not support cross-compiling. Kind of a bummer when I tried to do so the other day.
And this comes about 2 months after it's declared a national security threat by the Pentagon.

How strange.
Well, if you want to get a kid hooked on programming, or at least grab his/her attention quickly, you should also keep the coolness factor in mind: how easy is to create something impressive and how you can promote some algorithmic and/or analytic thinking with it. With that considered, I'd suggest:

- Python or Ruby: Their syntax is intuitive (don't mention significant whitespace though ;), they have lots of libraries to quickly deal with graphics, games or the web, they're well documented without idioms that would be encountered early on and could confuse a kid.

- BASIC. I started out with it on an Amstrad CPC when I was 6 or 7. Interpreted, interactive procedural languages just feel natural to kids that age. I also learned that GOTO isn't necessarily bad (really, it isn't), and I also understood why functions are better than GOTO at a glance (spaghetti code didn't look neat or cool).

- If he/she's playing a game with a scripting language involved (like WoW with Lua scripts), try going that way. Most such languages are pretty simple, user friendly, plus results are directly visible. Exciting!

- Lego Mindstorms. One word: awesome. No, two: perfect.

- C is a little advanced, but if (s)he's interested in the inner working of a PC or a high-level data structure, it's probably one of the best ways to get down to it. Not recommended for absolute starters.

Basically, avoid high levels of abstraction and abstract concepts. A kid under 12 will probably have a hard time contemplating functional languages (although learning recursion at that age is a must). Also, if you're considering shell languages, I'd recommend Windows Powershell over bash/tcsh/etc. at least for a starter.
Why do I see posts with negative or zero points if there is no downvote button?
At first, I thought you were talking about our obsession with dark chocolates. Then, I realized you were talking about candy bars. They used to taste much better, sadly, and I think the slow changes in the recipes have people remembering the brand and how it used to taste rather than how it currently tastes.

I think it was my first trip to Europe (Paris) that revolutionized my attitude toward food. It wasn't so much going there that was the issue as much as it was coming back and re-tasting the standard American diet. I was already starting to buy higher-end products, but it was a revelation to taste it after being away for two weeks.
you need a certain karma level to be able to downvote

edit: it used to be 100, I dont know if its still the current threshold
Using LLVM to speed up function invocation in a dynamic language binding
Creative Engineering Companies? 
Do you know of companies that are solving problems with robotics, digital fabrication, physical prototyping, and material design all with a healthy smattering of hacker/maker skills?

I've been freelancing in industrial design, animatronics, engineering, and machining for several years. I've gotten very good at what I do, but want to move into projects that have more substance and the potential for lasting impact.

Here's a portfolio of recent projects - http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1705690/MB%20portfolio%2006-10.pdf
Here's my resume - http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1705690/MB%20resume%2004-10.pdf

Suggestions on how to best present myself to these kinds of companies would also be incredibly helpful.
Just like birth is the number one cause of death. ;-)
Ask HN: what do you think about dangerous additivies in kids gear?
Yesterday I went shopping for a music box for my soon to be born child. At home we found a review of a similar music box from the same manufacturer, which got bad grades for containing aniline in a surface exposed to touch (toxic, absorbed through the skin).

I am also reading "ecological intelligence" (by the "emotional intelligence" guy), going on about similar topics.

In general, it seems very hard to find anything that is not polluted. I would be curious how smart people from HN think about this problem.

Is it maybe just overblown hysteria by some "treehuggers"? Perhaps a little toxin here and there won't kill you, not even if you are a toddler. Somehow most of us grew up mostly OK, and chances are 20 or 30 years ago the situation was even worse. There were probably even less "watchdog companies" around to at least curb the problem a little bit.

On the other hand, a lot of it seems just superfluous, which makes it extremely annoying to me. It's one thing to add preservatives to colors and food to make them last a little longer, but to add lead to colors to make them seem brighter just seems criminal (apparently a very common problem). It makes me want to avoid those products out of principle, no matter how severe the real danger.

The whole consumer experience is also extremely sub par. Apparently the companies mentioned in "ecological intelligence" (like goodguide.com) are at least working on an API and iPhone apps, but it seems unlikely they would help for my country (Germany). The leader in Germany ("Ökotest") does not seem to be that far yet. I seriously consider doing some work in this space - might be difficult to come by the data, though. I wonder how expensive it is to test a product? GoodGuide does not seem to test that extensively either, they mention some x-ray test that can detect a limited amount of chemicals on the surface. No idea about chemistry, but I imagine perhaps one could vaporize a product and then see what comes up in the spectrometer?

Back when I still read computer magazines, I eventually realized that all the tests just had to find some flaws. Even if a tested PC was really great, then the testers would suddenly start nitpicking about some minor detail. Naturally, all the buyers would run into the shops and nag about that aspect of the product. So I wonder if a lot of the "ecological tests" are a bit the same. If you look long enough, of course you find some flaws.

On the other hand, as a consumer, my trust into the industry has definitely been completely destroyed (they also sell us sweets, coke, garbage products recycled as food and what not and claim it is healthy - no, definitely no trusting there).
I think you need to read the article again, I assume you're talking about:

“We need to follow the example of businesses all over the world and take advantage of open-source technology,” Osborne wrote in The Times of London in February 2009.

You mean the quote from Feb 2009? A full year before they got into power? No commitment, no oversight, no civil servants actually assessing the plan, just a Shadow Chancellor musing about something.

So still a total and utter non-story.

You need to learn to read articles more objectively, see what they're really saying.

This one is saying a list of suggestions from the 600k civil servants included using OSS (big whoop, meaningless). George Osborne said while he was Shadow Chancellor we should take advantage of OSS (note no mention of MS or OSes).

That this got twisted into "Dump Microsoft, Use Linux to Save Money, U.K. Officials Suggest" is a travesty. No officials have said anything resembling this and they certainly didn't target MS.
That seems very much like saying "The best way to make sure your startup never fails is to not start one." Or "The best way to make sure you don't fail out of college is to not attend one."

It's odd how in so many other situations, HN readers would rather take the risky-but-personally-fulfilling path, even if the numbers don't quite work out. Yet when it comes to marriage, everybody seems to say "Don't bother because you may fail."
I really share this feeling especially during the past 7 months while the fund-raising was ongoing.

Now, to be more practical and maybe start an implementation of a distributed Wikileaks. There are two processes : the submission process and the distribution process. I think the distribution process is easy with Git or any distributed VCS. The submission process is more tricky as this is involving a human/social process to merge content into the distribution "branch".

The submission process could be "à la" HN where there is a way to up/down vote a submission. When the submission is reaching a defined level, the submission is released for distribution. In this is case, the submission network is still centralized but the distribution part is really decentralized.

For submission process decentralization, distributed ticketing (e.g. http://ditz.rubyforge.org/ ) could be used to show status of a submission within a same git repository but showing/merging only submission reaching a level in its ticket. Just an idea...

Update : my humble comment is just on some technical aspect. The social/legal/human aspect of Wikileaks is something much more complex...
Like this (if you have GNU Parallel http://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/ installed) to run on multiple computers:

find images | parallel -j+0 –trc {.}.out -S server1,server2,: “do_stuff {} > {.}.out”

Watch the intro video for GNU Parallel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpaiGYxkSuQ
My Cornerstones to Success
I think that remained true at least until the early twentieth century. My high-school Russian teacher said this was because wealthy Russian families often employed French nannies, who taught some French to the children.

You can see this in the film Burnt by the Sun, which is fictional, but perhaps historically accurate in this respect. It's set in 1930's Russia. A respected Soviet military officer is eating by himself while his wife's upper-class family converses in the other room. The maid asks why, and he responds, "I can't speak French." The purpose of this scene is clear: the inability of high-status Russians to speak French is a sign of broader social change.
I think it is more complicated than that. I see for example posters I can down vote and other posters I can not.
Double Rainbow: Viral Fun on YouTube
Comments On Feed for Wordpress
This plugin let you show post comments on each feed item.
Or TechCrunch posts, or PDFs, or self-posts, or posts about the iPad. If people didn't post all of the types of content people complain about, HN would be empty indeed.
This probably isn't the full picture, but you can't vote down comments left directly in response to your own comments (for obvious reasons), nor can you vote down comments over a certain age or that are already of a very low score.
You are looking at a very wrong graph.
This one is correct:
http://investing.curiouscatblog.net/2010/06/28/manufacturing....
Look carefully at China and Germany, and then to USA.
See - QED - USA has no industry left.

There is no business case, no economic pressure for creativity. Yes, you can create, but you do not have time - for your creation nobody is gonna pay money - so there is no incentive to be creative.

Excuses?! Any engineer knows that many good ideas appear as the result of interaction with production process, but if something is designed in USA but made in China then the loopback time grows very big and you end up with making same boring stuff year after year, year after year...
On the other hand I think it would be a blast to work on pixel art and be paid for it.
I've expected to use a find function in a paper text book. Also, when revising, thinking ohh it fine do not need to note down citation, will just Ctrl - F.

Very annoying when you realise you actually have to go through a lot of skimming instead :(
Free online time tracking system using jabber and rails
Anybody care to share some context for this article? It doesn't give any background into what wikileaks is and why it is being abandoned. It reads like somebody's personal email.

I'm sure there's an interesting story behind this, but the article doesn't attempt to provide it.
May be you need more vitamins, for energy? I am serious.
I upvoted you, but shouldn't this be a reply comment rather than a comment on its own.
In spite of the positive outcome for that woman, do you find that article having a depressing effect for you? She was on track for "six figure salary in 3 years" and worked for very reputable enterprises, and still she was not able to come up with any realistic business-model for herself.

An iPhone app while definitely an achievement may as well serve as a proof of a "normal" web-oriented startups going out of fashion.
I've worked in manufacturing.

I'd love to hear just how it is you think that "manufacturing-as-a-percentage-of-GDP" is any kind of an indicator for creativity in a country, considering that manufacturing is one of the most menial jobs there is.
Because it links up an incredibly long and incredibly hostile bit of territory, and essentially hooks the rail networks of Asia with the ones in Europe.

As a result, I can walk to my local train station here in the North of England, and ride a continuous set of trains all the way to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) without ever stepping off the platform. If it weren't for a few destroyed tracks in Cambodia, you could make it to Singapore. That's pretty cool.

It's also the cheapest per-mile transport on earth. Where else can you get a full third of the way around the globe for under $200?
Creativity does not appear from nowhere. Of course, it is great to foster it, yet, with loss of industrial knowledge, less and less is left to be taught to people. I do not buy fairy tales that there is abstract creativity you can teach people - there is engineering, artistic, scientific "creativities". One of important sources of creativity come from successful examples of its implementation by other people, and the more industrial you are the more way to use your creativity and get feedback from real, tangible, physical world.

And here is my answer - you want be more creative in engineering creativity increase you industry output.