skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There must a transport revolution going on in China.
It instantly reminded me of this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9Ig19gYP9o

These trains that never stop seem a lot more feasible than the buses. Granted it would require a massive amount of work from an infrastructure perspective but it seems like such a brilliant solution that would make public transport infinitely more appealing.
How North Korea could build a cyber army to defeat the U.S.
worst comes to worst, I can walk into frys and throw together something shitty. (note, I don't recommend running prod. on Fry's hardware... just saying, if you said I needed a server in two hours, I could do it.)

if your data is gone, well, I can't help you.
Definitely. It is actually dishonest of then to call this a challenge: I couldn't for the life of me find out what the actual challenge was when reading the article and when I came to their list of requirements I was scratching my head.

If it was an actual challenge they would accept prototypes or they would have a list of specs to build matching software to.
OCaml Meeting 2010
Agreed and beautifully put, but perhaps I can expand a little.

Gaining applied knowledge is not a spectator sport. I can say this both from personal experience (at least in math and CS) and from being told it by people far wiser than I am.

In math, I always try to figure out a valid proof before reading it, and it helps me understand it much better than just reading. In programming, I will read the example first, but then I try to implement it and modify it. No matter how well I think I understand it on first reading, I learn a great deal in trying to implement and play with it.
Technology is irrelevant. It doesn't happen because there are so many requirements and regulations that even if you had the world's smartest hackers writing in the purest Clojure/Ruby/etc, your software would still have to contain all this horribly complicated business logic and would take years to develop.
Really? Because I keep seeing articles on HN about how employees can't be motivated by pay increases, they have to be motivated by things like appreciating their work, sense of accomplishment, etc. etc.

Both of these things can't be true!
It's nothing to do with COBOL not being sexy, it has everything to do with the applications.

Bookkeeping in any form isn't sexy, but it is where the big money is when you're 'just' an application programmer.
why oh why people does not look around for dedicated host price before going into that much trouble ?

see this for example http://www.kimsufi.co.uk/ks/ (note: I don't work for OVH)

that's about 25$/month, look at the specs for yourself.

the pros:
* if the hardware go down in flame they replace it. period.
* a nice choice of distrib (Linux / BSD / Solaris / Windows)
* the fcking bandwidth (agreed it would be mainly fast for europe)

the cons:
you will have to do the admin yourself (for the lower prices), and that can take time depending on what you need/do.
* after using this you will find any broadband offer awfully slow
* you will not be able to live without a dedicated server ;)

I'm not trying to be negative here, but this kind of hosting is much cheaper than hosting the hardware yourself.
Ex-Apple iPhone Exec Invests In Mobile Payments Startup Payfone
You don't think that there is room for a new high-tech bank to step in and eat the lunch of the big banks? If you started a bank from scratch, built with modern technology, you could provide all kinds of valuable services and adapt to change much more quickly. Pretty much every service provided, particularly on the web, is some application that screenscrapes CICS screens or reads data from VSAM. These applications a tricky to build and take much more time than they should.
Thanks for the feedback.

Taskforce is meant to allow you to stop staring items, create tasks, eliminating them from your inbox (by archiving them for example).

Eliminating 'broadcast' emails is also another very useful feature, in our opinion.
UAE block BlackBerry e-mail, messaging and Web browsing services
I'll definitely yield to your experience. What exactly makes the mainframes so much more capable? How does it compare to something like an SGI Altix cluster with 2048-core / 16TB single system image capacity?
It really depends on what type of vim user you are. I used vi/m for 10 years before starting with emacs. Emacs works better for me. I know people for whom vim works better for them. It would be a shame not to find out for yourself.
It looks pretty much abandoned at this point; there's been no patches there since May, and nothing other than cross-tree cleanups for much longer than that.
Tuition is rising because loans are heavily-subsidized by the government, and universities (especially for-profit universities) are taking advantage.

It's a simple business model - spend a ton on ROI-positive marketing (especially online CPA marketing), get people who can't really afford it to take out huge student loans which they only qualify for thanks to Title IV, get the vast majority of your revenue directly from the government. Saddled with massive debt and useless degrees, the students increasingly default, but that's not the universities' problem - the risk lies solely with the students and the government.

If you want to short education, you could short companies like Apollo Group and ITT Educational Services, as well as the online marketing companies that service them, like Quinstreet. But this is risky, because the bubble's only going to burst when the government gets around to changing policies.
I wouldn't mind his first (fake) idea - creating operating systems for unmanned aerial vehicles is probably very lucrative given the right contracts/connections, plus it just sounds like it would be a very interesting project. Potential customers could include the DoD, North Korea or even the guys at Makani Power.
The thing that helped us the most were Paul Graham's essays:
http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html

My personal recommendations are:
http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html

I think these essays were both necessary and sufficient for making our start-up successful (in terms of reading, lol).
Android Now The U.S.'s Top-Selling Smartphone Platform
They're powerful, reliable, and compared to writing software for an equally-sized cluster or distributed system, easy to write for.

Of course a big SMP such as System p has the same advantages (plus the greater familiarity of Unix), so in my mind the question stands. Why mainframes?
I did the same a while back in early 2007, when FiOS was introduced in my city in France by Orange.

I needed a good server for a custom made webapp (8G RAM minimum, 500 MB with a spare, quad core 64 bit - that was a little expansive in 2007). The cost analysis revealed a low end Dell with a decent CPU, loaded with RAM + dedicated "home" hosting was the most reasonable option, compared to VPS or rewriting the app.

I paid 80 Eur/month for 100 Mbps symmetrical - add that power and lost rent costs (it was in a dedicated room of my appartment) for like ~ 150 Eur/month total.

The big advantage was a full control - I could do what the hell I needed with my hardware. It doesn't take too much time to do administration as you reported.

The only drawback was the Orange Livebox - a brain dead box sold to home users (100 Mbs/20 Mbs for 50 Eur/month) that had far too munch problems for any real use.

Seeing the downtime in the first couple of months was approaching 10 minutes a day, I did hook the optic fiber adapter RJ45 directly to the server. With some reverse engineering, running ppoe on a specific VLAN worked like a charm until this june, when I decided to pull the plug.

The project didn't catch up, it was very innovative in 2006, it is only moderately innovative now - time to kill it (parts of it will be used for a non profit help for Haiti)

Current hardware costs make it more logical to rent instead of build/host/maintain at home.
I don’t think that’s the point of the article.
Vim modal keys will always be more effective (and less painfull) to just edit raw text.
Emacs will always be more extensive because elisp, with all its problems, does great there. I also prefer how Emacs handle multiple buffers too (even with Vim's project plugins).

That said, I'm trying to use Textmate now. I think Emacs is what fucked up my left wrist.
I suppose this isn't at all surprising based on the iPhone/At&t tie up.

It would be interesting to compare other countries where carriers haven't locked up the iPhone (e.g. UK or France).

No doubt android is an excellent platform, but the barriers to obtaining an iPhone seem relatively higher than android.
One way to do something about it is to trademark the business name, that may force the new company to chose a different name for its business.
I think government subsidized four year research universities will be overtaken in the US by the community college system which will start to offer four year degrees. We can't afford to pay for professors that might teach one or two classes per semester.

In non top tier private colleges more and more non alumni revenue generating study areas will close. It won't make sense to anyone to spend $200k to get an undergraduate degree in education where you can expect to make $40k per year. Very top tier private colleges won't be hit as hard as their student bodies trust funds will absorb the cost.
I left mathematics 20 years ago (PhD, logic) by way of Prolog (logic programming) and then drifted towards relational databases (with some side trips into scheduling using graph theory).

You are in a good position - mathematics is a powerful tool for programmers.

I would suggest finding a real problem to solve, and then choose the appropriate language to work on it. Microsoft's .NET languages are a good way to get into programing (VB and SQL Server are my preferred tools).
When you're working at this scale, geographic redundancy of DCs is commonplace.

I know of several cases where entire DCs were destroyed, and production continued unabated.

There are commercial platforms that are explicitly designed for this sort of DC redundancy over 800+ km spans. Where you have 400 km between various volumes in your RAIDset.
His objective was to use Benford's law to test whether the data as tampered with. (This is a standard use of Benford's law.)
Haha! Just found this through our analytics, thanks for the kind words! I promise they are unsolicited astrofinch. Thanks to hackernews for the shoutout as well! Alex (Fivebooks.com)
That is a big number. This reminds me of the old adage about monkeys and typewriters eventually writing Shakespeare's plays (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem)
Google showcased a ton of this at Google I/O.

Android ties in really well to their webapps, Google TV (If that succeeds), etc.

I remember one example was that you can go to maps.google.com and click on a phone icon, and it just sends it straight to your phone which opens a map in the same place. That's really useful integration. I forget the rest of the examples, but they were all pretty 'wow'.

I think iTunes is an example of how not to do things. The iPhone is reliant on iTunes completely. With android, it stands on its own and can integrate with other things when you want it to.
Then, one day, boom--stack overflow. Civilization collapses in a cosmic recursion-induced segfault.
Starting a bank from scratch will have you worry about other things than the technology of your IT department, mostly to do with solvency and staying clear of SO.

Sure, at some level the technology will come in to play but nobody will 'start a high tech bank'. For instance, ING direct (one of the efforts of the banking industry to leverage the use of technology) was jump started from the legacy ING systems and as far as I know still ties in to them for all of their back-end stuff.

When I was the 'systems administrator' for the corporate division of a bank (in 1986 or so) we had daily rounds of getting the signatures of the various people responsible that the totals for the night batch runs were correct. That's the sort of responsibility you're talking about, I can't imagine that an MD5 or some digital signature would be sufficient today, it's all about procedures and accountability, emphatically not about technology.

I got one of the first PCs the bank bought on account of our project manager being very forward thinking but nobody ever thought of it as more than a curiosity and something that might be a handy replacement for the terminals.

That attitude has changed a bit but not by much and that's 25 years.
Very vague question (as there are a lot of sub-disciplines of programming). But one thing I would advise (which I feel a lot of people skip) is learn some of the tools of the field in addition to the field. In particular know that at some point you need to know "development" and the main tools of that or source control systems, bug trackers, build systems and deployment systems.
Actually, housing didn't inflate much either. Owner equivalent rent increased at a rate of only 1.4%/year between 1987 and 2008.

http://www2.standardandpoors.com/spf/pdf/index/House_Price_R...

(I took 130% as the mean increase from exhibit 2 on page 5, but that's just an eyeball estimate.)
This is pretty awesome. I'm starting to think about all the ways this could be extracted into a general tool for remotely controlling web apps...
All I can say is: thank god that this article isn't about diaspora and NYT's childlike wonder at those talented young kids.
Fewer and fewer people have been going to school for the money for a while now. My sister has a degree in fine art. I don't think anyone rationally expected that to raise her earning power.
As a regular vim user who explored the emacs world for a while, I have somewhat mixed advice.

emacs is worth learning. It highlights certain features, almost all of which you can pretty much get in vim -- it is just a different focus. One feature you do NOT have in vim is the ability to smoothly run a subprocess within the editor. That is why vimmers like to call emacs an OS; however, despite the ridicule, there really is something different about the SLIME experience that you ought to feel. There has been a lot of work on emacs to make it integrate in neat graphical ways.

However, if you are fairly competent in vim, emacs is not worth using regularly for editing anything that has to do with text. The biggest issue is that to make emacs usable, you have to remap just about everything. It is almost as if its designers did everything in their power to stop people from editing text. For example (and there are many), vim folks make their lives quickly easier by using (book)marks and macros; compare the key combos for these in vim to the ones in emacs, and you will see one reason why emacs editing is, by default, slower.

I avoid remapping keys because I actually work with other people sometimes within their environment, and it helps if the keys do the same thing. This makes for an unfortunate need for me to NOT get used to dvorak. :(

There are other nitpicks, such as the inability to edit/view large files (before some naysayer shows up again to ask what large files we might edit: genome files and log files come to mind).

Also, if you are told to try viper mode (and then told subsequently to use vimpulse.el with it -- definitely do this if you are using viper), these are good suggestions to get a fraction of vim's functionality along with some minor but annoying differences. Again, I point you towards macros. But also note that as soon as, for any reason, you open another buffer (for help, for an error, for giggles), you are in emacs keys world again and not in viper, so you will not be able to do your beloved Ctrl-W Ctrl-W immediately. If you are going to try emacs, just use the emacs bindings and forget about viper/vimpulse.

One advantage suggested by emacs folks is the configurability of the editor with elisp. It is true that it is very configurable. You will find, however, that some of the difference is marketing and FUD; vimscript is a rather powerful little language worth learning in its own right. Most people do not realize that vimscript has OOP. And elisp does not teach you Lisp that you can use outside emacs... just Lispy concepts.

All that said, I am not such a hardcore vimmer that I have a "set -i vi" configuration in bash. Learning emacs helped me learn how to do edits faster on the commandline. With dual experience in these editors, I sometimes use the wrong keys (try to move forward a word with Alt-F). Fortunately, in vim, undo is just a "u" away.

Try it out. Let me know if you come away with the same experience or find ways to make it reasonably tolerable.
Skype iPhone Multitasking Not Ready for Prime Time
Maybe this was your point, but it seems to me that, with these definition, wtallis's claim (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1567549) is correct; indeed, one simply needs to find 1 at some point, then find 4 a little later, then 1 after that, then 4 again, then a 2, and so forth. The indices where one finds the desired digits become the indices of the claimed subsequence of digits of π.
People who quit Oracle are going to work for other proprietary software companies where they'll be working on something other than Solaris. I don't see any business model to pay people to work on an OpenSolaris fork.
Broke Americans Buy iPad: The New 'Schizophrenic Consumers'
Apparently PayPal isn't in technologically fantastic shape either. Word on the street is that they still have their core offering written in C using a CGI interface.
We need difficult college courses which yield degrees. Its quite simple, really. If the course is hard and fruitful, very few unmotivated people will get through it. And a motivated person is sure to succeed (at least much much much more likely). This way having a degree REALLY will mean something. If 10/1000 graduate from this program, you graduating means that you really did accomplish something great. Also we need a way to snapshot your success. In other words if the school dies, it should not diminish what you did in school. There should be a way other than the name of the school to indicate that you passed through the blazes of academic hell and came out triumphant.
This article make some very interesting points, but I think it speaks a little too broadly at points. It does not sound like there is an overall education bubble, but rather a bubble in liberal arts education and particularly liberal arts education from lower tiered schools.

Even the article points out that engineering majors, especially those from highly ranked schools are doing quite well and that does not appear to be changing. Even on his point in signalling, it may be that having "a degree" will come to mean less and less, but it is unlikely that having "a degree from Harvard (or other prestigious school)" will mean less anytime soon.
Lawyer HN'ers: does Doctrine of Laches apply here?
There are also some screenshots in there:
http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/screenshots/...
Free Cake A story of remarkable customer service
Well, it's an obvious fact that we IT professionals... err, programmers... err, software engineers... err, code monkeys... anyway, we're all the same and are all motivated by the same thing.
What a pity. I spent two full weeks trying to get it to work when it was first announced, but I never could.
Note that PDAnet is actually trialware, and the full SOCKS proxy functionality is only free for 14 days. After that, you just get port 80 forwarded, so nothing beyond HTTP will work on tethered devices.
Presentation Mistakes
You can easily install bash on your BSD. But I get your point about writing POSIX compatible code.

I'll declare a bash dependency in the shebang if I've only tested the script on bash. Requiring bash is better than having the script fail on some non-POSIX thing that I wasn't aware of.

Linux distributions are getting a lot better in this department these days though, with dash being the default Debian/Ubuntu shell.
orgtbl mode is also pretty cool: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQAd41VAXWo
You have to remember that they use these systems to run their business and they've been tested for thousands or millions of hours so the system is extremely reliable. It is naive to suggest to switch to a newer platform or language. Those things are always changing. Also, once you are a seasoned software developer in multiple languages how long do you really think it will take you to learn cobol? Not much I can assure you. You'll probably be familiar with the basics in a couple of days, and maybe even enough to be dangerous. Switching to a platform just for the sake of switching is extremely dangerous and potentially quite costly. Especially when from the customers point of view it really makes no difference whether behind the scenes the business is using cobol, fortran, java, ruby or whatever new fad of the day. If the system is going to behave exactly the same whether you use java or cobol then what is the point of switching?
ah, but i would argue that if you are trying to maximize your income, becoming an experimental physicist is a horrible idea. You need a whole lot of education, and if you drop out before your PhD, it's all pretty much wasted. I've got a guy who does work for me sometimes who has both a math and a physics undergrad... neither of those degrees gets you a job. My understanding is that even if you do make it to a PhD you are looking at making about as much as a computer programmer or sysadmin with an undergrad or no education.
agree.. groupon used this same tactic to get their name. The story someone had the name.. they trademarked it so the other party was not able to do anything with groupon, and was forced to sell. You will either get paid at some future date for the .net name, pay for a trademark and force them to switch.. or possibly they will buy both the trademark and domain.
Ask HN: assets left after taking down a website
Is there any good service where I can put up a free ad for the assets left after taking down a twitter web app? The assets are: about 12 mln active twitter user profiles (~1,6 GB of csv data). The webapp's code base is for sale too.

If anyone here is interested, my email address is in the profile.
Agreed, the statistic bears further exploration and analysis. A figure like 99% percent does raise some eyebrows, and I would argue, so does 90%. But we shouldn't leave it there.
Wow, honestly this article helped :), I really did think it was a synonym and did not realize the precedence implications.
Aging Mainframe Hardware is horribly slow. A fast 5,000$ server built today (Raid of SSD etc) is significantly more powerful than any Mainframe built prior to 1998. But Mainframe Software is far more efficient than anything built for a modern PC.

PS: I suspect a large part of this is the mindset and experience of the people building the software. Well written Java code can be about as fast a well written COBOL code, but the average Java system is horribly inefficient.
Steve Eisman has written a very compelling presentation on why for-profit schools will likely have a sudden, drastic loss in earnings due to new government policies:

http://www.marketfolly.com/2010/05/steve-eisman-frontpoint-p...

But the risk is priced in. What's not properly priced is the risk that for the average person getting a marketing degree from Local State U, it would have been a better use of their time to work in retail or something.
No hypervisor host for FreeBSD, poor ZFS for Linux. If either situation changes, that's when I'll give up my opensol machines.
I believe that almost every "Major Package Shipping Company" uses mainframes in their operations, not just FedEx. My friend works as System/z administrator for DHL.