skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There have been quite a few examples of patent trolls taking exactly the opposite approach. They know they can't win a court battle against Microsoft, so they do a distributed shake down for a smaller amount on all the small vendors infringing on the patent.
Presently I'm in 12 channels on 7 servers. IRC fills a need for "semi-synchronous" communication in group form for me. part crowdsourcing, part water cooler gossip, it's entertaining and educational. It's real-time enough to satisfy the feeling that, as a teleworker, someone else is there, but not so real-time that I must devote my full attention (like a phone or video chat).

The big benefit to IRC for me is its ease of setup (apt-get install ircd-hybrid), end-to-end ownership of the communication protocol and infrastructure (ability to ensure privacy and anonymity, if necessary or expected), ease of extension and long-term stability. Or, put another way, "my server, my client, our channel, my friends, our bots." good times.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the (former?) long-time ircd-hybrid developers. I started a PhD thesis on education through IRC studying its social dynamics, but am considering dropping the effort.
I think it's a really powerful concept, and like religion and superstition, I think it's fine in fiction (books and movies would be boring without that imagery). But in the real-world, it's just plain bad and we need to do something about it.

Nobody is in favor of malaria or smallpox, but most people turn a blind eye to the diseases of aging even though they kill a lot more people.

The real question is: If dying of old age didn't exist (if everybody stayed physically as fit as 25 years olds indefinitely, until they get hit by a truck or whatever), would we miss frailty and decrepitude? Would we invent death by slow diseases that make our bodies and minds fall apart? I kinda doubt it.
I am currently idling on:

freenode/gearman

freenode/memcached

freenode/drizzle

freenode/mongodb

freenode/mysql

freenode/phpc

freenode/hiphop-php

freenode/facebook

freenode/twitterapi

freenode/jquery

YMMV.
Feel free to jailbreak your phone.
Thanks for the advice, but we are not concerned with ruining the prospect.

We are ramen profitable and are going to succeed with our without an acquisition. We would just be on a different path.

A large reason we put this post out there, is to determine if it is something we are actually interested in.

Also, being able to be open with the world about what we are doing is one of my favorite parts about being in a start-up. One of our main goals with our startup is enjoy the experience. If YouTube really doesn't want to work with us because we mentioned our meeting publicly, it is an indication that it is not somewhere we want to work!
I'm in #slicehost on Freenode most of the day. If you want smart people + plenty of humor, come on over.
On a daily basis I frequently get my hands into any of the following: emacs lisp, java, ant, drools, python, jython,
sql, jsp, make, clojure, javascript, xslt, velocity, hibernate hbm, hql, bash, antlr, freemarker, scala, html, css, confluence markup, xpath, regular expressions, and countless APIs all of which are themselves little languages.
Behind the scenes with OpenAppMkt - reviving the iPhone Web app, sans Apple
Great question, I'd hate to be revived and then stuck with a 2 million dollar bill for previously paid out life insurance.

My guess is that insurance companies haven't bothered to write that fine print yet, but who knows.
going to the grocery store. why doesn't food just show up at my house automatically by now?
Ask HN: image scaling on the fly
Hi,

I've built some mobile sites & apps the last few years and rescaling images keeps popping up.

Ideally I would want something like this:

http://scal.er/w40-a1:1/http://path/to/image

this would generate a square thumb, 40x40.

I would be willing to pay for such a service.
People can say whatever they want about Zed, but they can't say he doesn't get things done.
I can imagine the experience, as I'm part of the team integrating Trovix into Monster, from Monster's end. Definitely interesting, but not fun indeed.

I've often wondered how much in the real world, technology and the associated costs affect due diligence.
Wow, it's just blatently ripped off! Wonder what else they got "inspired" by...

Direct links to the images:

taptaptap: http://taptaptap.com/img/screenshot/whereto/1.jpg

the patent: http://www.unwiredview.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Apple-... (upper right "mockup")
I pretty much live on freenode in all the dev channels, but I keep the terminal on a fairly isolated place so that I don't get distracted. Keep a shell on my linode, /lastlog to check to see if anybody was lookin' for me.
It's not a Martingale system because at very short time-frames traders can predict price movements much better than 50%. I think the fancy term is statistical arbitrage.
Email Marketing tips for Reducing your Unsubscriptions
Ah, right. I spent a while drawing up a proper plot of the likelihood of the difference and the normal approximation of the difference, and saw that the normal had too small a variance. The effect is still pretty credible in the OP, though.
Yeah, I agree that there are some academics who are really not good or suited to teaching. In fact many academic jobs that aren't specifically "lecturer" jobs don't even ask about teaching experience. I'm going into my 2nd post-doctorate and the only teaching experience I've had was back before I was doing my PhD and tutored undergrads for a bit of cash (I didn't even learn how to prepare a course!). I'm actually a bit annoyed about that because I actually really enjoy teaching, and although I also enjoy research I think I would really quite like to be a bit more well-rounded on that side. But I think that a lot of this can be solved through education of faculty staff in how to actually teach. Some universities actually have this, the university I am going to be working at from next month has a course I can attend that will teach me how to teach, and although I've done it ad hoc before, I think I will definitely get something out of it, since although I enjoy teaching, I don't really know how to plan a course. And I think these sorts of courses really should not be a one-off either: people do get "stale" after a few years if they're continually doing the same things every year.

However, I think you're being a bit melodramatic about the system. Or perhaps the US system just really does suck, because I really enjoyed doing my undergrad degree in Australia, and really felt as though it gave me more than "a piece of paper" for a job (I wasn't really originally going to go into academia, I wanted to do other things, and sort of fell into academia sideways). I also felt as though the teaching was really vital: if not just in content, but in imparting enthusiasm and interest in a particular subject.

Anyway I can't really comment on the credit stuff since I have NFI about the US system.

Sorry you've become so disillusioned by universities and such, because around the world there are still some academics who actually give a shit about quality teaching and research. Perhaps you should broaden your horizons and look outside the US?
Because of its searchable Knowledge Base for customer self-help, we also chose to use Tender (the SaaS platform used by New Relic).
I know that most prices at Nordstrom end in .95 whereas Nordstrom Rack prices typically end in .97.

They have a very liberal return policy so it's a simple way to encode where the product was bought so customers can't pass off outlet store items as if they were bought from Nordstrom proper.

That's one beneficial use to psychological pricey but I too would rather pay nice round numbers. It makes it easier to calculate sales tax too.
I Used BlindType, Virtual Keyboard of the Future
BAD PARKERS annoy me so much.

a) People who can't center their vehicle within the lines.
b) People who park SUVs in compact car spots.
c) People who parallel park in the middle of two driveway openings (as opposed to an edge, which would open another parking space!)

I have seriously considered creating stickers with various versions of "YOU PARK LIKE AN ASSHOLE" printed on them, so I can distribute them at will.
Solar Powered Mobile Phones Launched In India By Vodafone
You know, it's like suggesting someone who got out of ghetto after spending lot of time and work to make it possible to go there again and to try again escaping it. Sure it gives a _lot_ of motivation, but the _wrong_ kind of motivation.
I'm Jeff's business partner / fellow programmer. We do both algorithms and infrastructure. The markets continuously adapt. It's a constant balance between writing the code you need right now, managing the code you wrote a bit ago, tweaking your existing strategies / finding new ones. We have to know how to trade, come up with new strategies, and write fast solid software that can adapt to get a new strategy to market in very little time. After that we have to analyze our trades constantly to stay in the competition.

We are market-makers (MM), so we don't care all that much about forecasting / direction. We want to fill order flow at the cheapest price that we can make a profit on. All the competition in our little MM niche of High Frequency (HF) trading revolves around a fight amongst market makers to give the best price possible to customer orders. This leads to very tight markets. That works out very well for customers.

I don't fault previous employers for paying us what they did as the article mentioned. It's a lot more than I ever expected to make coming out of college. The article seemed to have a programmers versus industry slant that I don't quite agree with. In my opinion industry is being taken over by programmers. Companies have a natural upper bound they can pay any employee.

After that, and I have been on both sides of this, either you can accept the comfort of a regular paycheck or you can throw that all away to take a risk and grow in a different way. If you take the risk you're throwing away a sure thing for upside. I don't have a family yet so to me it was the right time to do this.

The `programmers revolt` has been over for years. Programmer's won. Markets are all electronic or will be soon. It is inevitable and good that this happens, in the same sense it is good that we put robots into factories, use statistics to optimize business processes, etc etc.

It's been a longer road to getting to this point than the article mentions, my first bit advice for someone who in the trading industry and wants to branch out on their own, is it's going to be hard, just like any startup. The money you see the company you are working for making is the result of a lot of work, that you just can't appreciate until you have to do it all yourself from scratch. Which we have, twice. The article was a bit off on this, we already had our first `failure` and are trying again. This time we learned to keep our IP.

With a startup, we've had to wear all the hats that as employee we didn't have to think about at all ourselves. It's a combination of awesome, daunting, miserable and satisfying, like any challenging endeavor. Personally I find creating something from the bottom up a lot more rewarding than grinding out a paycheck.
People blindly stopping at 0.05 is doubly worrying given that people tend to stop an A/B test as soon as it shows significance. That gives them multiple chances to be wrong. Furthermore if you are getting close to significance very fast, then strong significance is close behind, so why not wait?

That said, if a test has been running for a while and you don't have an answer, it can run for a looong time before it finishes. In my A/B testing tutorial I explored that starting at http://www.elem.com/~btilly/effective-ab-testing/#slide59 (just use the arrow keys to move forwards and backwards through those slides). I found that depending on whether random fluctuations took you in the same direction as the underlying bias or the opposite, there tends to be an order of magnitude difference in how long the test takes to run. Furthermore whichever is leading after many observations is usually really better, and in the worst case is overwhelmingly likely to not be much worse. Therefore there are times when it really is better to declare an answer and move on.

If you wish to formalize this, you could use the strategy used by some medical trials where they decide in advance what confidence levels will cause them to cut off early after 100 trials, 1000, trials, 10,000 trials, or to go to (say) 50,000 trials. And then they arrange that the sum of the odds that they make an early mistake are below some acceptable threshold.
I spend most of my time idling in #riak on irc.freenode.net

I use an IRC bouncer too.
I've come full circle on Assange as well. After being shocked and disappointed when he first came out with the propagandistic bias and spy-vs.-spy schtick, I realized that nevertheless, the guy is devoting his life and considerable intelligence to the cause of transparency and whistle-blowing. In an age where even so-called liberal governments continue to inflate the national "security" state and propagate fear and secrecy, we need this badly. Assange et. al. have moved the needle perceptibly in the direction of a freer society; that is no small achievement, and in return for it I've decided to cut him a ream of slack.

Besides which, even if he is a media hog, he's a media hog with a brain who speaks superb English and has no interest in dumbing or toning anything down. Who else can you say that of? Listening to him on flaccid NPR the other day was a blast of fresh air.
We've had a lot of great support requests and chats with customers on IRC (Freenode, #newrelic).

Like others have mentioned, it's great to have a few rooms open for projects/services you care about, where you can check in every so often and read the backlog. While some rooms are archived, I've never read them that way, but keeping IRC idling in the background can be a great way to keep tabs on things.
Could open source tools make Facebook the next AOL?
Jokes are often based on broad stereotypes and generalizations (whether they are based in truth or not). Dumb blonde, nerdy engineer, and guilt-ridden Catholic jokes use the same mechanism as this panel. Are nerdy engineer jokes grossly misleading and do they perpetuate stigmas we could be rid of? Or are they just jokes?

That said, it's interesting that you make the assumption that Calvin had ADHD.

The strip works because Calvin doesn't have ADHD, and medicating someone who doesn't have ADHD is a tragedy.
You don't get wealthy working for other people. Unless you're in finance.
I have the opposite complaint. My school's dining hall meal plan works out to $8+/meal and it's infuriating. I now spend almost half as much by shopping at Trader Joe's and cooking.

What do you count as good food? I find that it doesn't take me that much longer to make something good and healthy (maybe not gourmet delicious) than it would to wait in line at a cafeteria.
Small companies can't afford to fight the big ones, so they tend to either back down or fight and go bankrupt before the case is concluded.

Apple has done this in the past -- one example is IIRC NuTech, assuming that I remember the company's name correctly. (They duplicated the mac.)

PIXAR did it also with their patent on Catmull-Clark subdivision surface algorithms.
The OpenAppMkt app has a nice interface for being HTML only -- wonder how they got the fixed position buttons on the bottom while allowing scrolling in the body of the page?

As far as I knew, that was impossible due to Safari Mobile on the iPhone not supporting fixed position elements.
I had a great experience with Brussels Airlines during the volcanic ash thing - unlike a lot of crappy airlines, they put me (and the rest of my flight) up in a hotel in Barcelona for 2 nights, then organised a coach for everyone to drive back to Brussels. The only slight quibble was the dropping us at the destination airport at 2am with no other transport connections (apart from taxis) running, but that was small potatoes against what a lot of others suffered during that period. Still, their customer service was top notch, and they were quick with getting information out.
Yeah I know of a few YouTubers who post here.
The banjo is no more a "hackers's" instrument than any other instrument. All of the article's points apply to musical instruments in general.
One work-around for that is services like Mint.com which will do the polling for you and alert you based on your own criteria.
Audio streaming applications don't need the the voip setting. The somewhat tricky idea is that as long as a background-audio-marked application keeps playing audio its process won't get suspended and so it will be able to do whatever networking it needs.
Since you're not a language implementer what you can do without is irrelevant here.
Game Design Programs for Teens Create Innovative Learning Experiences
That would be a goalpost on the opposite end of the field, not the same goal.

An example of an opposite goalpost on the same end as RMS might be Bruce Perens.
Mars site may hold 'buried life'
Have you actually done any HFT work? I know that's what most people believe, but the HFT outfits I am familiar with have algorithms that are extremely complex, and while they need to be fast, just being faster than them with a dumb algorithm won't get you anywhere.
Become the Master of Any Subject or Pen Your Own with a Suite of New iPhone Apps
very interesting - thanks
Not to recurse on your comment, but can we build a web app for this some weekend?
Branding Mistake by Chrysler Hurts Consumer Confidence
Guns N Roses - Sweet Child O Mine Free Guitar Backing Track
You're supposing total information. You're supposing that no one can be screwed unaware.

Actually, most people don't know a thing about the issues around proprietary and free software. If they did, I am confident that most (more than 50%) would rather buy free software.

Now of course those who sell proprietary software happily buy proprietary software: they often don't have a choice. They can't use GPL software. They can however, use BSD licensed software. And I bet they prefer that over proprietary products.
1Password has an application for the iPhone
Ask HN: Should I leave academia and jump to Silicon Valley?
I'm a long-time academic who has tenure at a major university. However, I feel that academic life is not as satisfying as I'd like it to be. There is a lot of overhead and I hardly get to spend any time hacking. Being in the ivory tower also feels pretty isolating. Recently I've been offered a position at a major Silicon Valley tech company that you have all heard of. It is an exciting opportunity but it is a one-way street: returning to a tenured faculty job after leaving for industry is going to be almost impossible. So it's a pretty serious decision.

Have other ex-academics here on HN made a similar switch, and what has your experience been like?
Idiocy and brilliance of American policy toward entrepreneurs
We can extrapolate their intentions based on their history of actions, just like you can with real people or any other corporation / group of people. We can't predict with 100% veracity but we can have an educated expectation.

Still, I'm more saddened by the fact that if Apple didn't do this, patent trolls probably would, so taking a stance here is a matter of picking a lesser evil.
Will you provide some sort of note taking web app we could use from anywhere? Want!
Not sure about that, I did enjoy Inception as well as Iron Man 2, but it would be nice to see more original scripts being pumped out of hollywood.
If you're a good C++ programmer with a mathematics degree, what else do you need to know to get into work like this?

Is it worth taking "MFE" style classes, like the ones offered at Baruch and NYU? Are the systems Windows or Unix? How much "advanced" math do you need to know? How much high performance infrastructure do you need to know? (networking, specialized storage & I/O, etc.) Is there a way to go directly to a startup firm, rather than first working at a bank or larger hedge fund? Are languages other than C++ used? Is it easier to do this in New York or Chicago? What bars should I hang out at in order to bullshit my way into an interview or partnership?
Introducing 360 Panorama
Its a cheap off-site back-up solution. Think about it: Back up everything on multiple PCs for $20/mo. Access from anywhere, even the web.

I haven't converted to a pay using yet, but I'm at 50% of my 3.5GB. When I hit my space limit, I will likely switch.
It took me a minute to realize I was reading an interview. Make this more evident, please!
If this is an analogy to sport and say the sport is baby killing. Then I can hate the game and the player. You have a choice to get involved in the game.

If this as an analogy to drug dealing. I agree that you should not hate the players, as they have no choice.

However, I am allowed to hate the drug lord(s).
Former poet laureate of the US, Charles Simic says, the secret to happiness begins with learning how to cook.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/magazine/03wwln-q4-t.html
You should probably start by looking at Apple's history, which suggests that the alternative isn't likely.
Let us not forget that MBA programs are one of the biggest, and quickest growing, forms of graduate education in the country. They're also one of the most expensive, offer few scholarships compared to other para-professional training, and cost very little to operate. And questionable online-only programs are sprouting up, and not just from bullshit schools.

Training high-paying MBA students is a huge financial gain for the school doing the teaching. Yet, there are few standards and core concepts to ensure quality education, leaving a huge spread in the quality of graduates.

Your MBA, oftentimes, pays off more for the school more than for you.
From what I've read, iPad owners aren't really the unemployed, etc, they're mostly the still rich, powered types.

"Tech geeks" supposedly are avoiding them.
We are? I thought the thread was about Nokia, not Symbian.
it annoys me when people come up to me to tell i shouldn't be using c++ for project X. Like I don't know exactly what I'm doing or exactly what C++ is for.

I mainly do game development, but if you've made a game you know how time consuming it is to actually get something usable/playable/fun at the end.

Between projects I like to take brakes and work on other smaller applications. some of those applications are in c++ so I have some testing grounds to come back to so I don't loose my edge - and too often I get some grade-A BOZO telling me I'm using the "wrong" language and the falling into his diarrhea diatribe about his favorite language X and how it's SOOOOOO COOL and SSSOOOO HIP and SSSOOO EXPRESSIVE as if those are things I care about.

it's such a handicap being a c++ coder in an environment like that, it's like I'm not eligible to hang out with the hip kids/zealots because they have some religious animosity against something they never use. what a joke of a culture that becomes.
Dilbertesque robot boss coming to a cubicle near you
Please make it sync with notational velocity, simplenote etc. A clean lightweight (optional interface view of app?) would be to die for.
HTML5 Canvas feature, add Graphics, Videos, Animations to your website
A year with Toy Story 3 and Scott Pilgrim (directed by Edgar Wright) can’t be bad.

Hollywood has always produced those movies that make me queasy – over the top visuals, artificial sound, mindless story. The solution to the problem is to just not watch them.
I'm on Reddit all the time, but never on HN. I just visit occasionally (just now created an account to post this). I'm so happy I found this post (until it gets lost in my sea of bookmarks and I don't get to try any of the solutions).
Wow--had no idea they were generating those kinds of numbers--no wonder Google's concerned.