skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed, students and younger academics are often the ones making the breakthroughs, simply because they don't know what's "unsolvable".
It doesn't?

http://www.catonmat.net/download/bash-history-cheat-sheet.tx...

It does!

I couldn't include an example of each word designator combination in the article. That's why I added a cheat sheet listing all of them.
From the way he phrased it, though, it sounded like for much or all of the time the net change in LOC was negative.
IBM's 5.0GHz Power6 processor
I've done some work on machine learning and specifically document classification in a corporate behemoth. Send me an email to gmail.com and prefix that with osipov followed by an @ sign -- I'll get back to you.
It was an interesting deck of slides. For those of you who don't have time to go through them, the answer was "35.08% of users used tag clouds at least once in a while."
I think this is because your inner voice is doing this at late night:

"Dude, what the hell are you doing at this ungodly hour?"

"I am trying to get _____ done"

"Oh okay"

So, you are continuously conscious and aware. Naturally you are more productive. I create the same phenomenon during the day too by using a simple tool that I wrote for this exact reason: Smacklet http://www.smacklet.com

( shameless plug, but I mean it )
Aging acts account for most of the music industry's live performance revenue.
Why human children take so long to reach maturity
"you will get text message alerts of traps in your area."

Yes, let's have people checking text messages while driving. That'll make the roads MUCH safer.
This is the fundamental insight of the Austrian school of economics. Economists had fixated on finding predictable mathematical relationships between observable macroeconomic variables: Laffer curve, Phillips curve, etc. Mises said that ultimately the economy can not be modeled from data because human behavior is too dynamic.

History has proven him correct. The econometric discoveries once heralded as potential "laws" of macroeconomics have all faired poorly against the data over time. His own insights derived from praxeology have held up well.

This failure of econometrics is at the root of the current crisis. All the model based derivative valuations and risk management tools worked ... until they didn't. Same thing with the LTCM crisis. You just can't substitute regression analysis for thinking.
> How to sell books: attach vague, untestable doomsday claims to it

Perhaps true now, but not true three years ago. Three years ago all the people who saw a crisis brewing were completely ignored. If you wanted popular attention you had to crow about making fast money in finance or by flipping houses.
Ask YC: Which crypto hash should I use for a unique id?
I am considering which hash to employ as a unique key for a system I'm developing and I am interested in knowing what the communities thoughts are. I know SHA1 and MD5 are heavily used in this area.

My chief concerns are:
computation cost (should be language agnostic),
length of output hash (bytes),
ease of implementation,
collision (think billions or many billions)

http://www.hashemall.com/ is a fun site i found while kicking this around...
I use the Yahoo Term Extractor API. This probably doesn't meet your long term needs, but it's great for prototyping.

http://developer.yahoo.com/search/content/V1/termExtraction....
When Tech Innovation Has a Social Mission
The lack of emphasis on usability in a CS degree program isn't surprising at all. In a software engineering program, it would be entirely appropriate, but in computer science, the focus is intended to be, well, the science of computer software (and to a lesser degree, hardware), not how to develop real-world software projects effectively.
you may want to try, or match your results against:

http://opencalais.com/
"Why current event X supports my politics"
LSI - Latent Semantic Analysis is pretty useful in this field. Python has an amazing toolkit for it

http://nltk.org/index.php

Email me if you have any questions-I've been playing with this stuff for a while and it's really interesting.
The title is misleading. The 17 month period is an extension you qualify for ONLY if you have already filed for an H-1B. This means you must already have gotten enough funding to prove that your cash inflow can sustain your salary.

You can stay after the one year period even now provided you file for an H-1B and get it.

This 17 month period is primarily to do away with the period between your OPT expiration and start of your H-1B.
Talking about a large-scale financial crisis that you have long foreseen unlike everyone else and failing to provide any supporting evidence (or even analysis) makes you indistinguishable from a crank. If you are not a crank, you're going to have to provide more evidence or analysis to be taken seriously.
SHDH 24.5 after StartupSchool
I've come up with my best ideas at 2am but I've learned from experience that's the worst time to try implementing them.

In the wee hours typos, syntax errors and simple transposition bugs seem to abound and those take an annoying amount of time to track down and fix. Best to just write the plan out in detail and leave the implementation until morning, unless you want to peck at the keyboard for much longer than you would have when awake.
I've always felt that I was superbly productive at night, but when I measured how much I actually got done, I was working 3-4 times more slowly than I do in the morning or just before dinner. Sleep deprivation does weird things to your perception of time; it's easy to think that you've been busily coding away, only to find that you've written about 2 functions and it's 4 hours later. So without hard data, I'm a little skeptical.

I do find that having nobody around me is a huge boon to productivity, enough that it can sometimes offset the nighttime effect. It's not just the lack of interruptions: I've found that the mere presence of people makes me concentrate on the work less, whether they're talking/IMing me or not.
if you believe in your idea, just do it. Why distract yourself by asking opinions.
Just note that you are limited to 5k queries per 24 hours per IP address with this. Like Tony said, NOT for production.
"...try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful." - Warren Buffett
Only if he attaches a specific time frame to the prediction. In the long run, "we're headed for doomsday" is a tautology, if only because of the eventual heat death of the universe. But unless you can say "Doomsday will happen in the first quarter of 2012, and the market will continue rising until then", it's not much of a prediction. A broken clock is right twice a day.
If you help them save money in a direct demonstrable way in a short period of time, you could have a shot. A good example is ITA software that powers the online pricing engines for a number of airlines as well as travel sites. They have grown nicely while the industry itself has been in turmoil.
We cannot advise you without knowing more details, but here are some generalities:

- Yes, print media is undergoing a transformation (going from steakhouse to McDonald's, I'd call it), but what matters here is what role your product/service plays in the before/after. Is it going to be more useul when the transformation is complete? Is your market broadening or closing? The dangerous/risky thing would be if your product actually aims to STEM the industry, to keep it from undergoing the change. There are huge forces at play here, HUGE money at work (and you will only have success if you take into account the priorities/incentives of everyone at play). If you aim to stem the flow of the Mississippi, a plain old shovel ain't gonna do it.

- Have you looked at the international market for your product/service?

- Have you looked at all segments of the industry? Are you only looking at the woes at the L.A. Times and not taking a look at the community papers?

That's pretty much all I can think of without knowing more. Look at all angles. You ask about risk, but risk is what's left when you exhaust the possibilities.

The words you use: "industry in crisis"... They stink of opportunity. Be glad you can do something in an industry in crisis. There's nothing worse than trying to break into an industry that has everything going perfectly, there's little opportunity in that.
Ira Glass on a similar theme

http://youtube.com/watch?v=3qmtwa1yZRM
I've also seen it coming for a long time and can point to every friend and relative as a reference. That whole time, for the last year and a half especially, I was always thought to be a crank. Now that it's happening, I'm a crank because it seems impossible to predict?

Remember, a black swan isn't unpredictable; it's only unpredictable to the majority. The turkey spends two years thinking the butcher is the greatest guy in the world, until the last day -- the black swan. But to the butcher, it's not a black swan at all.

I don't know about agentbleu, but I don't have evidence to support my conclusion. I only read the news and used Google. I assure you that Soros has it right and this will end up being worse than the Great Depression.
"In the short run, the stock market is a voting machine. In the long run, it's a weighing machine." -- Benjamin Graham

There's quite a lot of evidence that people's attitude affects the economy in the short run. The whole investing discipline of technical analysis rests on this, as do the schools of Keynesianism and Austrian macroeconomics.

But in the long run, people's basics needs always win out. You may believe that prices are going to fall and so it's better to spend your money later rather than sooner, but eventually you still have to eat. Or you might figure that stock prices are falling, yet companies are now spinning off so much in dividends that it's worth investing just for the dividend stream. These effects tend to put a floor (or ceiling, for bubbles) on any short-term psychological movements.

The tricky part is figuring out where the short term meets the long term. If people could do that reliably, they'd be millionaires in short order. But it's very difficult to time the point where "Everybody else expects prices to go down, so they will" meets "But they're really low, so the fundamentals look too good to pass up."
There are times I need to get a lot of boring stuff done and I can just power through that in a night session. I find I can just run through mindless work at a really fast pace when I am tired and not thinking about it too much, or thinking about all the other exciting things I could be doing.
just read this for my CS class last week in regards to online cooperation and the open Source Movement. good stuff.
1) Black swans, according to Taleb are not predictable. That's what he keeps repeating. He doesn't lay any claim to superior prediction capabilities. He merely says that they occur more often than people think, and invested accordingly. He does mention that some are predictable for some people, but I don't think financial markets fall into that category outside of special cases like insider trading.

2) How can people vote up and take seriously a comment like "where inflation of US dollar outstrips that of zimbabway." [sic] ? Do you really believe that?

I too vote: "not hacker news". Other sites have plenty of "doom! gloom!" stories if that's your thing.
RailsSpace is a great learning book.

Practical Rails Social Networking Sites is also decent. It uses the RESTful approach which is cool.
Melvin - you can edit your profile to put in your signature information. It helps clean up these comments substantially. thanks.
Thank you for the very helpful post.

- The market for this product is broadening. More and more newspapers are considering the approach that this solution facilitates. The solution certainly does not stem the change, it would actually assist greatly in accelerating it and some of the challenges that they are facing would be greatly reduced.

- I have not investigated the market outside of North America for this solution, however it would be a universal solution, as the problem applies to any print media that sells ad space.

- I've taken a broad view of the industry within North America. The problem isn't specific to one particular newspaper, the cost cutting measures that have been taken that have created the need for this solution have happened in Ohio, California, Florida, Texas... BIG newspapers. I'm sure I could name a paper in every state who has considered the approach that this solution facilitates. As for the community newspapers... Well, the solution applies to them also. The beauty of this solution is that it scales. The LA Times could use it and a tiny community paper like the Southampton Press could make use of it, if they chose to take the approach that would call for it.

Thanks again.
I'd like to think that hacker news is an upbeat site. If the world catches fire, we're the guys who will be making fire extinguishers.

Perhaps it is me, but I like to think of starting a new venture to be an upbeat, positive, optimistic way of life. Observations about the state of the world or the economy are interesting only so much as they fit into startup plans, and time has shown again and again that you can run a startup in any environment.

Just my two cents.
I'm afraid that it will be a last minute decision for me as well.
In more detail:

3.78% said "All the time"

7.98% said "Most of the time"

23.32% said "Sometimes"

64.92% said "Never"
Non commercial use of patents is not illegal
Springtime for Django
What seems to drive a lot of these "sky is falling" stories are people's political or economic beliefs. "Look, Bush screwed up!", or "Ron Paul was right!", or "Marx called it all along, capitalism is broken!". So naturally talk soon turns to politics and economics, and you get everyone peddling their favorite weird theory, and the net.kooks who weren't really interested in startups or tech start popping up because they smell blood in the water.

That's my two cents, and why I would nuke it, and stories like it, from orbit - "because it's the only way to be sure":-) There are plenty of other places to talk about stories like this.
I'm playing with some code for this just for fun. There are two ways to classify a document:

1. You already have a set of keywords (categories) that the document can belong to. The objective is to match a document to its category. This is true classification.

2. You want to extract relevant keywords from a document. This is not classification in the true sense but keyword extraction.

Each one has different approaches to achieve it, but they are similar problems. (As an example of similarity: you have a set of categories each defined by a tag cloud. You extract keywords from a document and see which tag cloud it matches best.)

So how do you do each one?

Classification: I'm not well versed in this area and I'm interested in learning - it's next on my to-do list.

Keyword Extraction: Yahoo! has an API to do that, but honestly, it's rubbish. I don't know how it "works" but it doesn't really. Open Calais is really good but has a noticeable error rate (I didn't quantify it but after trying many documents with it, I regularly noticed minor mistakes).

Hope this helps.
What are you waiting for then? If the opportunity is there and the timing is right, what are you doing here asking about it?

Tick, tock, tick, tock... Time does not wait.

Maybe you have some hesitation because there are some things you do not know how to tackle, or maybe there is something else holding you back.

Put a team togther. Put a plan together. Get going. Action is what matters.
SHA1.

MD5 has been broken, researchers have deliberately crafted documents with different contents and the same MD5. So collision is a problem if you're hashing documents from untrusted sources.
Nah, it's the lack of all that unsupported unnecessary fluff that makes Paul's writing enjoyable. This is a critical step in good writing, stop trying boring your reader to death and get to the damn point already, and Paul does it well, Steve Yeggi on the other hand must have missed this lesson. If you had to read all that stuff everytime, you may not come to enjoy Paul's writing as much as you do now in the first place. Fans only want more after they've become fans.
Your chief concerns are not that important: the major hash functions are a) very cheap to run, b) already implemented in every language you can think of, and c) have collision rates of one in many trillions.

MD5 is not recommended for digital signatures since it's been broken. SHA1 is under suspicion. But in most cases other than digitial signing of untrusted data, collisions are not the end of the world. Just use SHA1 or SHA256 and move on to more important problems.
Have you tried NetBeans? It does a decent job of indexing your code as well as rails, and the Ctrl-Click takes you to the definition of most methods (it tends to get a little confused every now and then).
10 Reasons Why I Don't Go To Concerts Anymore

1. The price is too high. I can think of a lot of better uses for $300 than a couple of mediocre seats for 2 hours.

2. The price is even higher. Just try to pay face price before the scalpers overwhelm the ticket sites.

3. They never start on time. (Why do they think I'll like them MORE if they start an hour late???) Yes, we mortals have schedules, too.

4. The venues suck. 2,000 people in a theater: good. 20,000 in a hockey arena: bad.

5. The refreshments are overpriced and difficult to get. You really want to stand in line 15 minutes for that $8 beer?

6. I can get the programs and t-shirt without going to the concert.

7. The traffic is horrible. (What else is new?)

8. The Police, Billy Joel, and Depeche Mode were great concerts. The first 8 times. How about something new? (See #8)

9. Since disc jockeys don't tell you anymore, I don't know the names of many of the new bands. (Yes, I have an FM radio next to my terminal. No, I don't belong to myspace.)

10. Being surrounded by drunks and druggies is cool if you're drunk or high. It's hell if you're not.
One simple thing to do would be to download CRM-114 and use it.
If You Wanna Be A Phone Company, You Can’t Go Dead
I must be missing something. Is this still a question? The time for linux is well here.
FriendFeed API Plus Adobe Air = AlertThingy
If you had neither evidence nor analysis to support your prediction, then it's hard to distinguish it from being right in a "stopped clock" sense.
Where the Jobs Are (no surprise here: good news for hackers)
Thanks, cousin_it. Off to the optometrist tomorrow. My eyes still hurt.
Speak for yourself. Yegge was never terse, yet he may count me a fan.
I didn't say he didn't have fans, some people like all that verbal diarrhea!
Extract and Parse ODF Files with Python
Interact with R from Python
Good quotation: "Not enough is said, about the importance of dropping crap."
How Google's App Engine stacks up with Amazon's EC2 (nice graphic)
You probably already know this, but in case anyone doesn't...

Ctrl+F2 highlights the Menu Bar and lets you arrow-key around. It's a cumbersome key combination, but I use it often when I can't remember a keyboard shortcut.
TwitterTube: Videos For Learning, Using And Having Fun With Twitter
Its not so much that "programmers design for programmers". When designing a GUI we make assumptions about what the users knows, and how much we think they're comfortable figuring out on their own. Programmers I think, tend to err on people knowing too much, and being able to figure out too much.
Much of that doesn't apply to smaller acts. For example, I saw Saul Williams (http://niggytardust.com/) for $25 on wed night. The venue was small enough that he crowd surfed on half the people in the room.

As for drunks and druggies, if you can't beat us, join us.

I agree, U2 is probably not worth it. But lots of smaller acts are.
he adds functionality by removing code :o)
problem with the study: they surveyed consumers about their behaviour instead of observing their behaviour firsthand... a lot of details were missing too, like the demographics of the people they studied. not to mention the prominence of tags differs from site to site
Why not use GUIDs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globally_Unique_Identifier)? They're actually intended to be used as ids, while crytographic hashes are designed for different purposes.
I think writing is more about teaching others than helping yourself. pg can afford to write because he's made his fortune.

Simple notes to yourself should be sufficient for generating and refining ideas.
Admittedly there's often one app that makes MacHeist a good deal -- TextMate, PixelMator, each was more expensive than the whole bundle. But I haven't bought it. I would rather give a few more dollars to the developers of both apps.

Aside from the problems Gruber mentions in his post, I really don't like the man behind the curtain, "Phill Ryu". He takes advantage of a lot of goodwill in the community. His my dream app contest ended well over a year ago, and they still haven't even released the first app.
I'm not sure the Eee can crowd out an iphone (too big), but a Nokia N800/N810 might. It's a small, linux powered computer only slightly bigger than an iphone. The newer model even has a real keyboard.

Overall, I prefer it to an iphone. It's not as pretty, but it is more functional (especially if you spend most of your time near wifi). Unfortunately, the iphone doesn't come with a terminal or python.

http://www.nseries.com/products/n800/#l=products,n800
you have to generate a guid for every piece of data you want to store but the guid doesnt have any real connection to that data other than you linking it. the hash is always reproduceable given the same inputs.
The story behind Google's crawler upgrade
ya i read that somewhere, md5 is out.
Bloggers Out of Control!
What almost concerns me more is the fact that GrandCentral has barely been updated since Google acquired them.

I took it as a vote of confidence that they'd be around for a while when Google bought them, but I've been starting to wonder lately if they've been Dodgeballed...
Does your solution address a problem that is causing the contraction of the industry?
Since I work for myself (from home), no one sees when I work. So I code at night when they're not calling and emailing. I often just stick to communication and getting menial stuff done during the day. Sometimes people start to notice though, and some people I work with don't bother calling me until the afternoon, in case I sleep in a bit late after a solid night of coding...

On the one hand it might look less professional in some peoples eyes, but in others they think it means I must be some kind of super hacker. Either way, it's amusing for me :)
No sweat, guys. If you can make it, cool. If not, that's fine as well.
Interesting. So maybe people who call themselves "night owls" are maybe just hacking their body's cycle to their temporary advantage... Most of my family consider themselves night owls, but maybe we've just been habituated to staying up late and abusing this.

Still, I look forward to the alone time when I code at night too. I even structure my day around it a lot of the time.
ISO takes full control of OOXML
I had an N800 for a while, but it was just unusable. The software seemed sort of thrown together. The keyboard didn't work well, and the browser was pretty tough to use.

Having the multi touch on the iPhone also counts for a lot - zoom/scroll/etc
restful rails is a bit of overdose for beginners, I suggest use rails 1.1.6 to get started. agile web development with rails will give you the initial successes. then for spicing use rails recipe, advanced rails recipe, rails cookbook

for implementing full projects in rails 2.0
practical rails projects

for ruby, beginning ruby, ruby cookbook, The Ruby Programming Language
Digital Information 250 Years From Now
It's old, but it's a classic. :)