skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
that's a great response! i think all too often, members of the hacker community view 'social networking' as somewhat of a slimy, schmoozy 'MBA-type' of necessary evil, but when done properly (like OP apparently has), it can lead to true personal connections and friendships which can benefit both parties
This is a good point that aligns with a lot of my experience. It's amazing how differently people define the word "do."
Of course it shouldn't have been implemented.

If they were going to actually try to implement national health care it should be done as constitutional amendment.
Business model? Think Mashable, RWW and co.

These sites would meta-filter startup news and present the most interesting cases worth analysing by a community
Not so amazing to me. I tried for 10 minutes to lead it to Kevin Bacon, no luck.
looking back, what aspects of your Ph.D. training do you find most useful now? was it deep expertise in one particular sub-field? was it a certain type of work ethic or approach to problems? was it the doors it opened for you professionally? etc.
Deploying Node Apps with Spark
I think this is more about the fact that Flipboard processes the tweets on their own servers. I don't think the twitter api throttling is a factor.
Unless you're being paid by the hour or don't care when the product ships, it's always a good idea to just to the simplest implementation that works.

Premature prevention of technical debt is the root of all evil.
Has there been any information released on why Dell was doing so badly in 2007 when seemingly everyone else was doing well? Is Intel paying other companies to be exclusive which is inflating their earnings? Makes you think twice about the top PC makers and who's really #1. Would love to read more about how/why it jumped to 76 percent.
How can you reduce your emails by 50% a day?
HP webcast with Jason Fried (37 Signals)
You could use the site as a way to promote the existence of your venture capital firm to highly intelligent people who are actually interested in start-ups.

Oh wait, it does that already.
Did they have to be rescued? We already have FDIC to ensure the little guy doesn't lose his shirt.

Sure, top financial experts claim that if some those big insolvent banks failed then the economy would die. Well, maybe or maybe not, but most of the top experts testifying to congress had an a tremendous conflict of interest with regard to their personal careers and holdings. We don't have any example of what would have happened... somehow I doubt people would just stop producing though.

Also, even if we accept that a bailout was necessary, then the taxpayers should have owned those banks. The government should have seized them, purged the toxic assets, and then re-privatized when the books were clear. This is, as far as I know, the textbook way that the World Bank recommends bank insolvency be handled, recommended over and over again to third-world countries, but somehow never got seriously considered when it's big American banks.
Sorry but Michael S. Dell's personal involvement in this seems minor considering Intel paid Dell 4.3 Billion (capital B for emphasis). This is bigger than just one or two CEO's.
Taking steps towards your dream can also help you realize that you want something different. I wanted to be an AI researcher throughout school. I also loved programming though, so I took a job as a systems programmer at a computer vision research lab with the intent of applying for Grad school later. It was perfect - I could cherry-pick good recommendations from people who went to top schools, and I would live happily ever after.

But now I'm glad I took this route, because working with researchers, I would clearly get more satisfaction in an engineering-style role than a researcher role. As a result, I have a new dream, and one that I work towards every day after work
Aeron chair. Happy butt makes for long and productive coding hours :)
Currently there are two ways to monetize: subscription fees or ads.

The first is not viable the second is already 'built in' by discussing and recommending various services and products on HN
Prevent your email tone from sending the wrong message
I suspect it's implemented using decision trees.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_tree
As someone else said before, we should expect mock-ups and movies showing this bright future soon. Real products may take a while. Successful products... well... I wouldn't hold my breath.
Vs emailed responses to plain text emails.

I.E. Do they email or call back about the job in question.
If it helps, I know plenty of people who do have families and who have the exact same attitude as the author.
Individuals are small businesses too. Consultants, contractors, lots of people. More people, yes people, file a Schedule C than you might be aware of. Hell, someone who does a lot of business selling stuff on eBay or Craigslist is subject to this I they're reporting their income from that activity. Many do.
(I haven't read over the entries yet)

A coworker suggests a Whitespace[1] interpreter which applies the recursion theorem and then interprets a Whitespace program embedded in the source code, characters which do not count towards the size limit. We're not sure yet whether that can be done in 512 characters.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_languag...

Edit: "Wait... can you make a Quine without using a string literal?"
The one thing about Linux is that you have full control. When you're with Windows or any other closed source system, you have to issue bug requests to the company to fix it. And chances are that they might not fix it. With open source, you'll just need to find someone smart enough to fix it. There's also limitless possibilities in terms of customization of the technology to suit the system you're trying to build. For that, I would pick Linux. And yes.. package managers and unix tools make it a breeze to deploy.
Typical boilerplate email response letters using plain text vs HTML email response using brochure type format, they even respond better to the generic HTML than to the customized plain text email.

These are emails to people posting job work available on any site, or "friends of customers wondering what we've done".

These brochures are based off email list type designs, such as would be used to solicit donations for a charity or to keep past customers informed of happenings at a retail outlet.
Last year a customer accidentally double entered my invoice in their system, and paid me two checks instead of one. I contacted them to let them know of the discrepancy, and never cashed the second check. Their system was never corrected, and I got a 1099 showing I earned double the actual amount. I'm still trying to iron this mess out, and it's just one 1099.
Say what? What about Cisco's IDS engine, which isn't Snort, and was originally WheelGroup? What about Intrusion's? What about Fortinet's? What about Enterasys' (Dragon)?

Two things happened to "intrusion detection":

* The concept failed, and

* The technology got rolled up into middleboxes as part of "IPS" (IDS plus filters) and "UTM" (all-in-one boxes).

There has been a vibrant "market" of IDS engines for over a decade.
Sure, I file a Schedule C myself (for a pretty tiny side business). But I also keep track of all the expenses for that, since I have to to report on the Schedule C, so it's trivial for me to determine if I paid anyone more than $600 this year (just export my expenses from Gnucash, grouped by payee). And yes, it'd be an added hassle to file 1099s, and I don't really support it.

My main point is that, contrary to the impression some people here seem to have, non-business expenses won't require 1099s. The discussion here (in particular the thread I was replying to) seemed to think that the law would require their grandmother to send Best Buy a 1099 if she spent more than $600 on her new computer, or that you'd have to add up all your Home Depot receipts to see if you spent more than $600 on home-improvement this year, which isn't the case.
META: Why did the title change? I cannot edit the title of my own submission anymore... Was it merged with a duplicate submission? If so, then there's also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1541336 (which was created just a few minutes after my submission)
You're right that Wall Street serves a valuable function.

The reason for all the animosity is because they did a piss poor fucking job of it and then used their influence at the highest levels to convince the government that a bailout was necessary, enriching themselves instead of taking their lumps. In 1929 wall street men were jumping out windows. In 2008 they were jumping out planes with golden parachutes paid for by the taxpayers while vast swaths of America were losing their homes and jobs.

Bottom line is, Wall Street fucked up and they should have taken their lumps for it. That doesn't mean everyone on Wall Street is to blame, but it means that generally yes, Wall Street does deserve our scorn (as well as congress).
"Essentially infinite" is not a very good way to say "intractable" or "infeasible".
Invested in myself by doing things that scare the shit out of me - Around junior year of HS I realized I had nothing to lose (I was pure white trash, still am, really.) so if something looked impossible, I went for it. I wound up in an ivy leagueish college, worked my ass off, I starved, went out with beautiful girls, photocopied text books because I couldn't afford them, I drove an old porsche I found in a junkyard, went on tour with my band, went to europe with $80 in my pocket. Made a lot of mistakes, but god damn it was fun.
ARP spoofing actually in practice not easy to do. Enterprise class switches can snoop DHCP traffic and prevent forged ARP packets.
I think that's a pretty fair example. But reddit is much less lean of an operation than HN.

Would Reddit be considered more successful if it was a leaner organization? They say in that post that revenues aren't great, but I wonder if that has more to do with the size/nature of the reddit operation.

If it isn't, then my questions is: are they just not doing a good job of monetizing, or is it just very difficult to monetize that kind of site?
Is Riak actually gathering steam in terms of real world production use, or is it just on gathering steam on HN!?

Serious question actually.

What's the real world use-case for this? How is security handled? If my browser was able to talk directly to my Riak cluster, all my data would be open?
Quantum mechanics is weird, alright. But we can still predict what's going to happen, as we have theories. Do we have such a formal theory for consciousness?
http://hangchillparty.com
That's a good point, but I meant this more in terms of taking YC out of the picture and just looking at the site alone.
Why would an ARM-based Windows server be desirable? What role would it take? Web server? Print server? File server? "SQL Server Enterprise ARM-cluster edition"? It doesn't add up.

Xbox-style devices would sound more likely. The Xbox360 was successful in showing developers can make a bunch of low-performance cores perform adequately in games. I think a multi-core ARM coupled to a decent GPU would be quite a nice gaming platform.
The "Error establishing a database connection" I'm getting on this link is incredibly ironic.
What I learned at the Emerging Languages Camp
There is so much bubble hype in SV though. iPad? Yeah most people don't have one, won't get one. Flipboard? what? why would anyone use that? They won't. But investors will invest in it, journalists will lap it up, and some silly media company desperate not to die will probably buy it. Few years on they'll figure it doesn't make any money, and sell it back to the founders for 1/10th what they paid for it... The circle of life in SV. Everyone is too drunk on the bubble koolaid to notice anything is amiss.

Not a game I'm remotely interested in playing
What I find particularly interesting is the sort of "superstition" many of these kinds of robots show. What I'm referring to in this case is how, after 50 tries, the robot arm here moves to its right before every flip attempt. I believe the same thing shows up with solutions from genetic algorithms and neural networks.

Seems like there is always some non-negligible probability that within the factors any learning robot takes into account as part of its success is a factor which is actually totally irrelevant. That's probably somewhat how our own brains operate as well.
FCC 0.1 is a compiler for a simple C-like language in 5kloc of D
Sometimes I feel as though my little, simple, apps' source will end up being a terabyte after packaging all their dependancies. It's a little ridiculous.

Regardless, this seems like it has some pretty powerful implications for big-data processing. The potential integrating this with Clojure somehow, and parallelizing the computation across those 10 (at least) servers with 1TB of memory is pretty astonishing to think about. (Though you don't need Clojure to make it parallel, yes.)

http://www.terracotta.org/ehcache-2.2?src=/index.html for the product itself.
People really want Hacker News to not turn into reddit. So much so, humor is almost always downvoted if not also true.
"The simplest implementation that works" is not the antithesis of "Code without technical debt." For example, code that has not been thoroughly tested can not be said to "work." Likewise, one form of technical debt is code that is not the simplest possible implementation. For example, Dick and Jane each implement their own versions of the same functionality, producing code that is not DRY. This has local simplicity, because Dick and Jane did not need to coördinate their implementations, but it does not have global simplicity.

"Premature prevention of technical debt is the root of all evil."

If you are wittily comparing the reduction of technical debt with optimization, I am confused. Optimization often increases technical debt by adding complexity, so "premature" optimization is a little like buying a call option rather than selling one. The word "premature" gives us an out, of course, but overall I would say that optimization and the reduction technical debt are not isomorphic.
I was thinking that they probably just simulated each individual patient by picking a random number and seeing if it's less than the death rate.

So the number of deaths in a hospital is just

sum([random()<deathRate for i in range(numPeople)])

and they can do the analysis without needing to know what a Bernouilli or Binomial distribution is, even though these both feature in the problem.
yes, don't let your browser talk directly to the riak cluster. put riak behind nginx or something like that.
From a financial standpoint, buying Apple shares in 1998.

Careerwise, spending all my time at university working on the uni newspaper instead of working on my degree.
Yeah, for the plaintiff though, he may run into some very real statute of limitation issues. Had he waited just 6 months less, he'd be in a much better position.
I wish he had compared the rats' performance to the current publicly available "best of breed" programmatic approach that uses technical indicators. Other than that, the interesting part of the experiment seems to be how it may relate to training human traders more efficiently. Starting a fund based on trading with rats seems a bit satirical indeed..
Huh? The stock market absolutely has to do with allocating capital. It, together with the bond market, is the place where large companies go when they need to raise funds.

Bond traders and stock traders alike both balance the risk and reward of a company's offering in order to determine a fair value for that offering. Valuing risk and reward is valuing the company and valuing the company is the most critical part of a stock offering. Any post on here about raising money from a VC will talk about the valuation of the startup.
I don't know whether you‘re going to like it, but the most obvious example of a problem that is undecidable even given an oracle for the halting problem is the next halting problem up: i.e. given a Turing machine that has an oracle for the halting problem, does it halt?
Http://webdevelopmenteasy.com/ Asp-Dotnet-web-development.php
Learning Statistics. I never would have picked it, but was forced into it thanks to my economics minor, and I've used it more than most of my CS courses.

I've never met anyone who regretted learning more math. It's the safest investment there is.
I am honestly amazed by the capacity these people have to spew bullshit. Apparently that was his answer to this:

Mr. Dell said, “We are pleased to have resolved this matter. We are committed to maintaining clear and accurate reporting of our periodic results, supporting our customers, and executing our growth strategy.”

How is it possible to say this with a straight face? I find this comment very insulting. Compare this to, say, the Toyota CEO.
If you can find 20 questions so that each question roughly halves the sample size depending on the answer, you can halve a big set of people 20 times, thus yielding a set of size 2^20 = 1 048 576 times smaller than the original.

So if you take a set of people of size 1 million and ask the right 20 yes/no questions you can almost always figure out the right person. Of course, the more questions you ask, the finer the result (with 30 questions it's 1 billion). Also, these questions don't have to be binary, thus they can cut a set in e.g. 1/5, not half.

Of course with real world questions this is much harder to do, but with a clever question selecting algorithm it could be done this way, I suspect.
Oops, I just failed at reading.

As the person below answered, there are less naive ways of doing it. Check out: http://www.tsp.gatech.edu/index.html if you are interested.
Contributing to Python
Free Full Layered Facebook GUI PSD Kit
Question number 2 really surprised me. What if the layout of memory is:

(s)(s+1)(s+2)...(result)

If `s` has no null bytes until `result`, then `strlen(s)` will terminate on `result`. However, if you change `result` while iterating over `s`, then `result` will be not null and the `strlen()` result will change. Or is there some rule in C standard that says local variables are not in the same memory range as external pointers?
There's also that horrible effect that your own ideas, however creative, original and interesting, can start to feel trite, shallow and old after a little while. Because, guess what, they've been floating around your head longer than anyone's, and you keep seeing them, picking over them, looking for weak points.

Whereas someone else's idea that they've been knocking around for a few months will seem breathtakingly new and fresh, and as if it had popped forth fully formed from their head yesterday.

The difference here is simply whose head you're in.

This can be a very serious problem for writers -- if you spend years writing a novel, by the time it's finally coming together, you want to rewrite all of the early stuff just because it seems so overused by now....
The R&D approach from the IIT's is a good one, but India, being India, I really wonder how much of that price tag is paying for the political "incentives."
Yes. I was interested in how many `manager'-types vs `doers' there are in the various militaries. I read in a recent Economist that e.g. the German Bundeswehr is relatively top-heavy with too many officers.
Can you describe APC's instability? I've had no problems, and in fact had issues with eAccelerator.
Samsung's New Ad Blatantly Mocks Apple
Owner Loans: opportunity for homeowners
Having worked in operations for two major banks, I can confirm the article. We used software in DOS emulation and old fashioned command prompts to process trades, which were essentially done by hand. This was during the wave of consolidation leading up to the financial crash. Why improve when you can buy the competition?
re: 1) Vision assisted robots can do some amazing things - http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-...

(I think re-enforcement learning was more the point than 'can we teach a robot to flip pancakes')
Everything about European startups is against them. Europe is so risk averse it's a joke. They (VCs and therefore startups) are under capitalized compared to US startups and have to try so much harder to get visibility of the "big 5" acquirers. VCs almost always favour revenue over customer growth.

Flipboard, Quora raised $10M. You think they could have done that based in the UK? No.

You think Twitter could have raised $200M from European investors? Not only is there not that kind of capital around, no one would go near it due to the lack of revenues.

I think a lot of this stuff goes back to two things: serial entrepreneurs becoming cautious angel investors rather than aspiring to build something huge and the lack of large LP (eg: Harvard) that tip money into VC.

What are some noteworthy - big - startups? Skype. Spotify. Who else?
I thought you said "pretty much infinite". Either way, neither "essentially infinite" nor "pretty much infinite" is a meaningful concept (I can just picture infinity, off at the nonexistent end of the number line, laughing at the puny numbers you describe as "essentially infinite"), so it'd be better to just rephrase it as "really really big", with as many "really"s as you feel is appropriate.
I'm thinking the exact same thing.
Oddly enough, a video game quote (Deus Ex) sums it up quite well:

"A system organized around the weakest qualities of individuals will produce these same qualities in its leaders."

Replace "leaders" with "bankers" or whatever you'd like. Greed isn't always good.
Advertising science has proven that you notice flowers when you hear gunshots? What sort of crazy experiments have they been doing, and what does it have to do with advertising?

And why have I never heard the term "advertising science" until just now?
Something similar to Twenty Questions? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty_Questions
What's interesting to me is that the robot has a little pan wobble at the end of the flip. I wonder if that has some sort of advantageous effect on the outcome of a flip? Or maybe the robot is just 'superstitious' because it had a more successful run once when it added the wobble.
Best Current & Future iPad Apps for Education
Often, they will move on to a large firm once they (or the large firm) have spotted the most profitable, low-profile loophole in the regulation.
Ask HN:Is fixing real complex bugs worth less than shipping shiny new features?
I joined my company at a stage where they just had a major release, so I was tasked with fixing bugs in the existing system. I was pretty good at tackling complex bugs that nobody else could, so the more bugs I fixed the more bugs I got assigned. I also worked with real customers who reported those bugs, and made sure the fixes got to them

After a while, new people joined the team, and some got to work on some new projects with some cool new features.

A couple years later, those working on new stuff got promoted faster and supposedly bigger raises.

They worked very little on the legacy code, if at all. They just implement new stuff, and ship, and get rewarded, even if nobody is really using what they implemented. Because nobody uses it, very little bugs are reported, so they can easily go on to the next cool new stuff. They have more visibility even though their work might not be that hard or valuable.

It seems this is the way things are, at least in my company. I wonder how things are in other places in the software industry? Is support/maintenance and keeping customers satisfied deemed less worthy and less valuable than shipping new features?
Does this offer anything that Wolfram Alpha doesn't?

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+calories+in+a+...
Last roll of Kodachrome film goes through last Kodachrome lab
Best mattress, duvet, pillows and sheets I could afford - makes a massive difference to the start and end of the day - no matter what else happens in-between.
I like the simplicity of using an alt email account that sends you daily digests. OtherInbox is an example, though I do not endorse that service in particular.