skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd argue that institutionalization was simply reintroduced in many cities through 'quality of life' policing. For example, there's a reason why Manhattan in 2010 is pleasant and safe - it's because Giuliani's policies turned Rikers Island into the de facto mental institution for New York City.

Heather McDonald's 'The Jail Inferno' has some information on this, although it's not the primary focus of the article:

http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_3_jails.html

I suspect that Rikers Island is not much better for the mentally-ill than the mental institutions of the 70s, although I haven't researched it and may be wrong. I strongly suspect that one way or another, the mentally ill will remain institutionalized in New York. The improvement in quality of life is so stark, not even the most liberal New Yorker will support relaxation of law enforcement.
The name was a tough decision. We want to still instill the atmosphere that a Camp provides, basically energetic hackers eager to learn, while still being promise some kind of gain if you do attend. The cost was as low as we could make it, we still may lose money. You will notice it is still much cheaper than similar conferences with similar content. We are really hoping to make this a community event more than anything.
If we start thinking about what archaeologists will be able to find after us, then I think we're probably done.
If by 'dead' you mean like polaroid is 'dead', then I agree. (Someone independently re-started polaroid film manufacturing after Polaroid shut it down.) The physical book has too many fans for it to be left to die.

I can believe that ebook sales will soon surpass physical book sales. I got the Kindle app installed on my iPad & I've spent more on books in a few weeks than I previously did in a whole year combined.
Portable high resolution color displays might do the trick. How exactly would a fine art book, or even Tufte's books on visually presenting data, look good on a current Kindle?
Because internet education should be enough for anyone...

Now, seriously, Gates has a very weak track record on predicting the future of technology. That's why Microsoft was never known to be a first mover into any new market. It's really hard to predict the future - I was watching 2001 with my 14 year-old son last week and couldn't help but laugh that in an enormous space station an what seemed high orbit you would have AT&T phone booths.

"Mobile devices will be able to send and receive messages, but it will be expensive and unusual to use them to receive an individual video stream"

On ordering flowers online: "You'll be able to watch the florist arrange the bouquet, change your mind if you want, and replace wilting roses with fresh anemones."

"I believe that we’ll not only be using the keyboard and the mouse to interact, but during that time we will have perfected speech recognition and speech output well enough that those will become a standard part of the interface." (this is from mid 90's, IIRC)

"I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time," which is right in a sense that NT was once OS/2 3.0

"Spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time,"

"We will never make a 32-bit operating system," (that was when he introduced the MSX in Japan)

The low-end of the education will sure improve with the internet. Kids with mobile phones and computers can quickly google stuff up and browse the wikipedia to get some deeper information beyond their textbooks offer. It will augment, but it won't replace physical schools anytime soon.
Here in the UK the welfare budget is nearly 6x the defense budget. Healthcare is around 3x. We're talking serious money here. Probably we spend as much on welfare and healthcare as the US spends on the military. And the results speak for themselves: chucking money at it is not the solution.

Often in London a homeless person will ask for money to stay in a shelter overnight, but the shelters are free, funded by the local councils, and always have spare beds.
25B6 could be used as play.
Ask HN: Twitter apps for something useful
I'm interested in collective intelligence so I thought about using the twitter API to begin the learning process.

I think popular apps(twitaholic for example) that are using twitter information don't give useful info.

Do you know some great and useful apps?
5 Minute Delay Scuttles Chance at $40 Billion Air Force Deal
My 2c:

#1 Try cutting down on blogs. There is really no need to read them daily.

#2 Try to include open-source patching into your actual fulltime job (of course, management has to agree with this, etc). If you already work 12-16 hours per day, don't burn yourself by trying to do open-source on the side.

#3 Follow the good programmers nearby. This means move the the team that has the best coders and best practices. Externally, go to user meetings and occasionally have your company pay for big conventions.
Maybe in your world (and mine). But in pourer countries, many people will prefer a surgeon who read the course online, than no surgeon at all. Mlearing and mhealth will be huge in developing countries.
Well, tastes differ, but I tend to get bored pretty quick and can't stand verbose texts. In my mind they have to be briefly worded and exact and that's pretty hard to come by. Uwe Schönings "Theoretische Informatik- kurz gefasst" (similar to: Gems of Theoretical Computer Science) is an example of what I have in mind. It's hard to find something like that, most books are a pain to read (in my opinion).
But the Kindle's screen is friendly on battery life, as it takes no power to refresh - it's static.
I'm trying to remember who wrote it, but there was an assertion that as our lives become more digital, the physical will becomes more valuable.
I'm going to play devils advocate on the environment claim. Producing complicated electronics take a toll on the environment. Sure you have one ebook reader that consumes many books, but it will be obsolete in 2 or 3 years and you will most likely upgrade.

Also when I buy a book and have finished it, I sometimes lend it out or even give it to a charity/reused book store.
In turn its very nice to go into those shops and buy a book for 10 pence that was printed in 1979!
Hacker Newsletter Week 31 plus interview with limedaring
Then you also need to tape the questions and answers and assemble a video FAQ accompanying the lectures. Or let other people support the lectures and answer upcomming questions.

I think that its a collosal waste of time and ressources to make great lecturers repeat the same lecture over and over and over again to a small, limited number of students, instead of letting them record a larger number of one-time lectures. My favourite example is Salman Khan. If he had to repeat a few chosen topics over and over, he would never had the chance of creating a body of work as large and comprehensive as his academy.

He said about that: "With so little effort on my own part, I can empower an unlimited amount of people for all time. I can't imagine a better use of my time."

By the way, in the recorded SICP lectures, there arent actually _that_ many interesting questions asked. If Abelson and Sussman thought your way and prefered live interaction just in order to be able to answer more questions, thousands of people during the last 25 years would have not been able to experience them _at all_. It is not fair to reduce great lecturers to mere question answerers, IMO the accompanying Q&A sessions always account for a very small part of the value of a lecture, i.e. just to fill a occasional gap.
If HP Really Wants To Be Apple, Here’s Their Shot.
Is Negroponte still banging on? And is anyone listening? He was wrong all through the 90s and he's wrong now. And I say that as a proud iPad owner!
By "dead," he of course doesn’t mean completely dead.

So don't say dead. As a reader, I hope paper books are always available. They are much more enjoyable to read. Maybe it's just because I spend so much time on a computer, but it's nice to read something without a device attached.

A paper book is a real thing. It's crafted. E-books seem to have many more typos and bugs. The only bugs in paper books are the kind with legs. Paper books have a user interface that does exactly what you intend: turn the page, insert a bookmark, make a highlight if that's your thing. With the kindle I always have to worry about if it thinks I mean what I think I mean when I press the back button. E-books are based on software, and software's natural state is to suck. I don't have to worry about my codices running out of power.

Also, devices are expensive. I don't have to worry about most codices getting stolen if I take them out in public. I have to be careful with my Kindle. When we have cheap, disposable e-readers, paper books might be in danger, but until then I think they're fine.
It depends. For a nice linear read (fiction, biography, etc.) I don't see many compelling reasons to buy a print copy even now. But there are some: giving as a gift, getting signed by an author, the physical experience of having a real object, etc.

But electronic readers have a long way to go before they're useful for other types of books. A textbook or reference where you might constantly flip around the book would need better navigation or a way to use multiple synchronized displays to view a book.

Art / coffee table books need a better display and physical experience. In the future I can see something like a leather-cased super-sized iPad sitting on stuffy coffee tables, loaded with amazing visuals.

Kids books still need a cheaper, sturdier reader and color. Electronic readers can never replicate books with popups and textures, but the sound, video and interactivity they can offer could blow that away. I don't think electronic books can ever really replace coloring books for kids, but they should be able to replace workbooks.
Australia Immigration Law Changed, Skilled Worker list Reduces to 181
Top Ten Wireless Bluetooth Headsets
7 Hints About Upcoming Android 3.0 Gingerbread
7 hints about Android 3.0 from Lifehacker's interview with Android's Product Manager.
I looked at Amazon and the Kindle prices were almost always a bit more than the paperback price. I don't see why this is so (given that books are supposedly more expensive to produce, etc).

I can share physical books, give them away when I'm done or have a yard sale with my library. What's the resale market like for ebooks ?

I can have multiple books spread in multiple rooms / places or even compare two side by side. If I forget a book while visiting my parent's it's no biggie. If I forget my Kindle I can't read anything else until I get it back.

The big advantage of ebooks is that they weigh nothing, so moving my entire collection to a different city doesn't involve the movers. Also, I don't have to wait for some rare book to physically get to my bookstore, I can just download it (although retailers might still try to limit this artificially with something like DVD regions, etc).

So I don't see ebooks entirely replacing my books any time soon.
Yes. Money buys you time.
"They had been accused in the complaint, but the case had not gone to a grand jury nor had they been indicted"

Yow. How could the Feds even get this far without observing that minor detail required in beginning of the Fifth Amendment???

And giving up (hopefully this is a dismissal with prejudice), let alone so soon is ... very uncharacteristic of the Justice Department. Just what happened here?
Customer Development: 6 Things I learned in 2 days with less than 10 Users - August 6, 2010

... Rob's a pretty savvy guy. He is only 27 years old, and has been a video game junkie and using the internet for over two decades. ...

Something seems fishy. Anyone who found and downloaded video games for DOS (there isn't much other reason for a seven year old to be on the Internet back then) via FTP without the advantage of Archie should at least grok what Facebook Connect is. Or Facebook's branding of Connect really does suck.
A Snowball's Chance In Hell : IronRuby
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1583135; not surprisingly based on your and adam_lowe accounts the Feds have filled a motion to drop all charges (I hope with prejudice). See the link for a bit more editorializing by various people including me, but when you compare this to their usual behavior it's very clear the Feds never had a case.
How is OLPC going? I had the impression that it had turned more or less into a dead end.

The paper book has its problems. A lot of those printed from the late 1800s on used acid-pulped paper, which become brittle and disintegrates. On the other hand one has to wonder about electronic publishers commitment to maintaining usable formats.
What The Sale of Barnes and Nobel Means To Reading
I hardly wait to see Android 3.0 live
Which three worlds? After you have picked one envelope, there are two possible relative outcomes - 2 and 0.5. The average is 1.25 - there is nothing wrong with the math, the only problem is that taking an average of two relative quantities is intuitively not useful for decision making. Putting the intuition on a formal grounding is not something you succeeded with.
Rule 6: "Bonus points if your submission fits in one tweet ;)"
I'm really happy this happened. Hashrocket are a bunch of great people running a great company and they went through a lot in the past few weeks. Unfortunately, though all charges are dropped, some damage to the reputation is inevitable.
That solution would aggravate people who view the police as being part of their "tribe". Assigning some police officers to admin work lowers their status, and in effect the status of your entire tribe. This would aggravate authoritarians on both the right (e.g. Gonzales) and left (e.g. Biden).

This is also the objection to giving free stuff to the homeless - it elevates the status of another tribe (do-gooders/bleeding hearts, the people handing out the free stuff) at the expense of your tribe (hard working/god fearing).

You could almost certainly get conservatives behind such a plan and get liberals to oppose it, if you did it in a way that elevated the status of a right-leaning tribe (e.g., boot camp/military living for the homeless).
The prosecutor didn't know what a sweep account was according to reports from the initial bail hearing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1482497.

You might be surprised at how totally incompetent prosecutions can be at times, especially those that aren't motivated by a real desire to get bad guys.

E.g. Reagan's NASA administrator (removed from his position before the Challenger disaster). This was WRT to the version of the DIVAD that actually worked, the problem was that the contract was a hybrid cost plus/fixed cost beast. The prosecution team had to admit they didn't have anyone on their team with experience in federal contracts (!!!).

For some strange reason the judge wouldn't let them move dismiss the case without prejudice (i.e. with prejudice means they can't give the case another try later, it's over for all time).
You could certainly build things that were possible before, but I'd rather suggest entrepreneurs go towards that, which wasn't. And if you do build something that was possible before, ie- Dropbox, then I suggest you use the building blocks to build an iteration that wasn't possible before. Dropbox was started as a small project by Drew and eventually a YC funded company with a small 25k in capital. It wouldn't have been possible to do Dropbox before AWS,etc. without spending a ton of up front Capex in hardware you may or may not use down the road.
It's probably because you're an animefag. I mean, look at that emoticon.
Well quite! A 20-30% premium for an electronic version is just plain ridiculous. A few books recently I've bought have been available for iPad or hardback on Amazon and the hardback was cheaper so I bought that.
What do you use? Are there any other good gateways? I haven't been able to find anything that doesn't require a huge setup fee (for my volume of business).
If Money Is Your Goal, Don’t Be An Entrepreneur
http://diydrones.com/

I've seen the Arduino drone guys report they've been able to land within 6m of their target. Not perfect, but considering the whole shebang is built by hobbyists for a couple hundred dollars, I'll excuse them.
Components that Make a Bad Term Paper
Knowing about a bad term paper helps students to write a good term paper. If the student knows the ingredients of a bad term paper he/she can avoid using them and write a good paper. This short article lists out these ingredients and shows how to write a good term paper.
If its sufficiently large to allow you to refine and improve on each iteration, then you will still improve and learn from it. For a while, anyway.
Awesome book. I ran into a friend the other day who told me: "I found a very interesting book that you might like. Godel something. Actually, you've probably read it since it's a legacy book."

I think he meant a book which as "been around".

I've read it twice and found it awesome each time. You get more out of it reading it again. (One wonders: does it continue to be so? :)

What's even more cool is the bibliography in the back. The books are starred according to how useful the book was to the writing of GEB. So it's safe to say that the book and the pointers it has to other books is a treasure trove of wonderful ideas.
Paper books add to the reading experience in the same way text editors like WriteRoom[1] add to the writing experience- they're less distracting.

[1] http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom
Wikipedia's Lamest Edit Wars
Can you earn money and be rewarded for using free classifieds?: GoArticles.com
I think you are underestimating the complexity of coming up with an analogy that works. For instance, solving the same problem for 'How many numbers are needed to exceed 2' is already much harder and I don't think there exists a similar 'easy' proof.
When you enter a department, you have to engage the social environment of the staff. Find the researchers, volunteer to do some tasks for them. Join some projects. Don't take classes from profs that aren't emotionally engaged with students. And for goodness sake, get to know them. If this isn't successful, you need to find a college where you can feel at home. Do you know who is doing research? Do you know who is getting funding? If you don't, you aren't doing your job as a student.

You also have to take a serious look at your fellow students and see what they are doing. Ask yourself if you would enjoy teaching them. Are they interesting and engaging? Do they even talk about computer science?

Here's a therapy suggestion. Offer your services to researchers in the sciences and you will find a practical outlet for your frustration. The budget for programming is the first thing to be eliminated from a research project and the postgrads, having taken a single course in C devote a ridiculous amount of time to programming. You, of the other hand can knock out a program using Python and negotiate payment of some sort.
>people want to see pictures of the food they're about to eat

Cookbooks and cookery programs aren't called cookery porn for nothing.
Direct link to Demand Media's S-1, which is the real document of interest:

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1365038/0001047469100...

Surprised to see they're still not profitable on almost $200MM in revenue in 2009. Also surprised to see they've been getting >$10.00 CPMs on their owned & operated sites (likely +90% eHow) for the past two years.
Credit Cards: Who Wins, Who Loses?
stackexchange.com is the beginning of highlighting featured questions from all the "stack" sites.
Tell HN: Very exciting project looking for new home
Hi HN Community,

I'm writing this post after a long hard talk with my business partner. We've had this project for around half a year, and initially started out with huge excitement. We did research, found no true competitors, and saw a huge opportunity in the market. We proceeded to plan the whole project, got it designed, and found a coding team.

Outsourcing to India was our biggest mistake, we tried a company, and they produced nothing. Terrible results. We got no where, and it's been many months.

Since then, we have been very dis-interested in the project, due to moving on from it. We've started working on projects that mean more to us, projects that we can successfully complete. Projects that we have knowledge in.

The project at hand was called CrowdTutor, a way for 'the crowd' to teach anything they want. We initially thought this would be a fantastic learning and study resource for tutors or teachers to teach courses online with an interactive video and whiteboard utility. (Targeted at students, esp. for exam prep and ongoing study).

Here are the designs, which will give you a better idea of the concept:

- Home / Inside: http://fruda.com/port/ct.html

- Teaching Interfaces: http://i.imgur.com/aVhZr.gif / http://fruda.com/ct/studentview.jpg

We're looking for someone, or some team, to take over this project from us. We know this is a great opportunity for someone to enter the startup scene / get an accelerated project. We'd be very happy to help you get really into it, and provide all the info you'd need (and work with you to get it to launch).

Would love to know what you, the community, thinks. And would love to talk to anyone who's interested

Lachy and Josh (HN: joshbuckley)

P.S. Check out Bill Gates talk - http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/06/bill-gates-education/, this really the right time for this sort of site.
I'm not really an expert, but my understanding is the cracking groups do have quite a code of honor and do what they do for the credit. Of course who knows what's in any random torrent after it's been released.
Why Google should lower Gmail's attachment limit.
That's true, but what te_platt said was "two people (A and B) choose two positive integers at random"

If two people, A and B, have chosen -- that's choose in the past tense -- two positive integers, there are not infinitely more positive integers B's number can be greater than A's number. Why? Again, because B has already made a choice.
I don't understand this paper. How does the merchant credit card fee change the price that users pay? I understand that they implicitly markup to make up for their loss, but everyone pays that markup, whether they pay with cash or card. This paper makes it seem like those who purchase with credit cards are paying slightly less than those who purchase with cash, and that's how it's being interpreted in the blogosphere: (links listed by closest-to-the-real-paper)

http://modeledbehavior.com/2010/07/27/are-credit-cards-regre...

http://motherjones.com/transition/inter.php?dest=http://moth...

http://kottke.org/10/08/cash-is-expensive

I understand how credit card users make some money due to the rewards programs, and that those reward programs are funded by the merchant fee and thus the markup that everyone (including those who pay with cash) pay. But the paper explicitly mentions the rewards programs, and seems to point to the merchant fee as an additional, separate factor. Anyone understand this?
Is this the world's first blog post?
Family Room Approaches And Wood Floors Flooring New Mexico
Most students today realise that reading lecture notes n the course website is often an entirely adequate substitute for actually attending the lecture.

But that misses the point. None of the knowledge or experiences I gained at university that have value to me today were obtained in a lecture theatre; nor could they be readily substituted for by a website.
Clickable links:

- Home / Inside: http://fruda.com/port/ct.html

- Teaching Interfaces: http://i.imgur.com/aVhZr.gif / http://fruda.com/ct/studentview.jpg

Bill Gates talk: http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/06/bill-gates-education/
Perhaps a Ruby User's Group? They exist in many places.
I bought the game because of your comment, but I really really want to add it to Steam, otherwise I'll lose the files and I'll have to download it from piratebay or something... I emailed them twice so far, I wish I had a key I could add...
MapReduce, Hadoop: Young, But Worth A Look