skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree the Federal gov't is all 5 year plans and new deals wrapped in golden chains.
Try holding your computer upside down
No iPhone bumpers here, NASA revamps historic 9 million lb Mars antenna
Having recently returned an AT&T 3G MicroCell after a 30 day exercise in futility and "support" horror attempting to activate it in a rural location… I want one of these![1]

If AT&T won't utilize the spectrum through my land for which they have been given stewardship, then perhaps I ought to be allowed to exercise it.

[1] Except I wouldn't get incoming calls, which is more important to me than outgoing.
That's fair enough. I suppose you might have some clues, like "Get the hell out of Germany when Hitler came to power", but yeah, you can't predict the future.
You're right, it's not relevant, I just thought it was coincidence to see a rails post at the top of HN while I'm taking a break from my troubles.

It looks like there is light at the end of the tunnel though.
Oh I think it is, I'm not convinced most executives do...
Surface Questions are useless
Games Make Up 40% of Time Online for Half of All Facebook Users
Having used flash on my nexus one a few times I can say that there are plenty of other reasons to kill flash on small touchscreen devices.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Fields

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Jong-il

Thats why we were so scared of socialism when it was right at our doorstep.
My favorite example is in "The Good Shepherd," when the list of members of the on-campus Nazi-sympathizing organization is typeset in Times New Roman and printed on an ink-jet printer...in about 1935.
While I was getting my econ degree, all of my game theory classes and most of my classes that discussed game theory used this as an example.

There is no way to win if the cost of bidding is 0. If there is a cost of bidding and that cost is 10 cents for example, the only way to win is to bid $19.90.

However, if you're required to play, the most efficient outcome happens when you're the first to bid and you open by bidding $20. You're neutral on outcome and have satisfied your requirement to play the game.

I think there is a psychological problem with the game when the prize is so small and the incremental losses/bets are so small.

If the prize was say, $10,000 and the minimum bet increment was $5, people are more likely to bet higher and higher because losing $5 (at a minimum) is psychologically more defeating than losing $0.01 (at a minimum).

EDIT: Didn't realize the site was 1v1. It would work better if there were several people. There is absolutely no incentive for a player to bid beyond $20 if the losing player doesn't have to pay their bid.
Seems like row-level permissions seems to be a better paradigm to make this work. Last I checked, Django had some support for it - recently improved in their 1.2 release.

Here's a Django Advent post, published while they were ramping up for the 1.2 release about row-level/object permissions:

http://djangoadvent.com/1.2/object-permissions/
Twitter scientist's startup school to open
The current administration didn't do themselves any favors by picking such large legislation, letting congress do most of the writing, and not clearly communicating how these large programs would bring down unemployment and reduce the overall cost of owning a business. The whole handling of GM / Chrysler doesn't inspire confidence. People need to calm in a crisis, but it seems people from both sides of the isle are more interested in soundbites and demonizing groups of people.

Big movements don't make people feel easy about stability.
Don't blame a tool for being misused.

This isn't actually that bad anyway... the animations suit the business. I've seen far worse HTML.
In your post you referred prominently to the one-click patent. I fail to see how your proposal would have even slightly curtailed that patent.

> Because it (also) places indirect costs and additional onus onto the submitter of the patent;

A developer for a day, as I demonstrated.

> Because it also provides (some) tangible results for the community.

> Because it means all of the patent-covered source code eventually gets exposed and licensed

An implementation of an obvious process isn't a tangible, or even particularly valuable, result, as any member of the community could produce it in very little time.

> Because even if your organization doesn't produce a product (and for whatever reason), you still have to produce functional source code.

No, you just have to throw a $500 project on e-lance. Or about what you pay the lawyer who's writing the patent for you every hour.

> And because it means that most closed-source organizations probably won't choose to patent their software.

No, at best it would keep the stuff that's actually patent-worthy from being patented (and thus "out there", inspiring others, which is the whole idea behind patents), while the obvious crap gets patented (what does Amazon have to lose from spending a day writing a simple PHP cart?)..
I agree with most of what you said, except for the Google App Engine part. The App Engine free quotas are great (Python support and free quotas are basically the main reasons why I chose App Engine).

The App Engine free quotas allow you to operate at zero cost while still getting (on an app that accesses the datastore a couple times every page) about 1-2 million pageviews a month (not as much as the 5 million Google advertises, but it's still pretty darn good).

Now I don't know how long the free quotas will last, but with the amount of traffic that support, revenue isn't an issue when starting out.
Are you sure?

When I think on this, let's say TIAM-A is

[1, {a}], and you add [0, {}]

that's [card({a})+card({}), ({a}U{})>>1], or [1,{b}]

so that can't be the neutral element.

I think that there must not be an identity element, because the >> operator forces a change under any circumstance which is dependent upon TIAM-A's contents.

Similarly (I haven't thought about this enough yet), I suspect that the operation is non-commutative, because unions can change the number of elements (deletion of duplicates), and the shift is involved (which changes elements, as opposed to just combining them). So let's say you shift and then union, you could get a different result than if you union and shift.

I'm gonna see if we can get a concrete example here...

at somewhat random:

TIAM-A (now referred to as A): [0, {a,b,f}]

TIAM-B (now referred to as B): [1, {b,c}]

TIAM-C (now referred to as C): [2, {d,e}]

A+B+C=T1, A+C+B=T2, if T1 != T2, not commutative (pardon me as I riff on notation for ease of writing)

A+B = [0, {a,b,f}] + [1, {b,c}]

A+B = [3+2, (abf U bc)>>3+2]

A+B = [5, (abcf)>>5]

A+B = [5, fghk]

A+B+C = [5,fghk] + [2, de]

A+B+C = [4+2, (fghk U de)>>4+2]

A+B+C = [6, (defghk)>>6]

A+B+C = [6, jklmnq] = T1

then:

A+C = [0, {a,b,f}] + [2, {d,e}]

A+C = [3+2, (abf U de)>>3+2]

A+C = [5, abdef>>5]

A+C = [5, fgijk]

A+C+B = [5, fgijk] + [1, {b,c}]

A+C+B = [5+2, (fgijk U bc)>>5+2]

A+C+B = [7, (bcfgijk)>>7]

A+C+B = [7, ijmnpqr] = T2

T1 = [6, jklmnq], does not equal T2 = [7, ijmnpqr]

hence, non-commutative - but I could have misunderstood something entirely here
Only one of my favorites that hasn't already been mentioned: The Nerdist Podcast, with Chris Hardwick (half of the comedy duo Hard 'n' Phirm). Lots of good interviews that intersect the Venn diagram between nerd culture and comedy.

http://www.nerdist.com/category/podcast/
It's surprising that the guy who heads the organization that owns the banks, regulates the banks, prints the money, and appoints the guy who sets the prime rate would be held to account for economic matters involving primarily those organizations.
"Coming to work in Israel:

Migrant workers can work in Israel as specialists in one of the following trades:
Nursing care
Agriculture
Construction
Welding and industrial professions
Hotel work
Ethnic cookery"

http://www.gov.il/FirstGov/TopNavEng/EngSituations/ESMigrant...

I would really appreciate to work there. What are the special conditions for Jewish families?
Very interesting problem:

On the afternoon of May 19, in a single chaotic hour, more than a thousand wind turbines in the Columbia River Gorge went from spinning lazily in the breeze to full throttle as a storm rolled east out of Hood River.

Suddenly, almost two nuclear plants worth of extra power was sizzling down the lines -- the largest hourly spike in wind power the Northwest has ever experienced.

And some potential partial solutions, if they can get them implemented:

Part of the problem is that utilities buy more capacity than they need, and hoard it for emergencies. If that capacity can be freed up, BPA estimates the lines could transfer 10 to 15 percent more power.

Another issue is that utilities are required to reserve line capacity an hour ahead of time. By allowing them to adjust their orders more frequently, utilities could accommodate unanticipated ebbs and flows in wind generation and maybe free up another 25 to 30 percent of capacity on the power lines.
it's just a matter of time when such websites will appear using HTML5. The root of the problem is not the technology, it's misuse of it.
Asian Men Have The Highest Salary
The iPad as a great PDF book reader
Clearly, Apple was right.
I had several bad experiences with uptime and configuration wackiness with a client's site on Dreamhost. No problems with WebFaction. Linode is my current favorite and default generic platform.
I'm not a Ruby programmer, so I'm interested to hear your view on this: as a non-Rubyist reading Ruby code, the "assign variable to a new array" method is much more readable to me than than the .shift(n) method and is only 2% slower. Is shift(length-of-array) an idiomatic way to clear an array in Ruby? From my perspective the site looks like a great way to encourage confusing code for little gain.
Most Israelis get drafted at age 18. They get out of the army at ages 20/21 or so. People out of top quality computer related military units have a lot of experience both as hackers and managers. There's really no being 'whisked away by the military' once you've served your term (Other than reserve duty, but that's relatively minor).
Yeah add my recommendation for RH. I've been with them for about 3 years, they've been fantastic.
Who builds those luxury goods? Do some searching on the luxury taxes ( http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,973305,00.h... , http://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/21/nyregion/new-luxury-tax-tr... ) and find out how normal people make money off people who are rich.
Oh, please. We've had extinction-level policies before, right here in our own country:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears

Some put native American genocide as on-par with the Holocaust in terms of lives taken. So, perhaps it wasn't the political policies we were afraid of, or in fact any policies in general. It was likely the Cold War.
How about an RSS feed for the recent benchmarks?
Nikola: Embedding Compiled GPU Functions in Haskell: PDF
Perhaps it's time to upgrade your IE5/Win95 PC
I couldn't even read that article because of the multiple font sizes and line spacing issues. (I'm on iOS4, Mobile Safari)
Amen on no math/process/software patents, but I'd have to say that the design patents alluded to in your comment are just as subjective as any used today. The legal criteria of the "casual observer" sounds just like the "I know it when I see it" use with porn.
Do you have any more information about the startup scene in Auckland?

I live here and I was under the impression that most tech businesses and startups crop up in Wellington, or "Silicon Welly" :)
My god that was horrible. I was listening to music and that crap came up.

I was looking for an article, closed it in disgust when I figured out that the site was the example.

Speaking of the misuse of technology, Flash seems to have a culture of this sort of crap (remember shockwave?).

HTML 5 seems to have more of a culture of nuanced integration with the rest of the web page.

Of course the more successful usages of Flash seem to trend toward seamless integration.
Although he learned his lesson and that's the biggest thing to take away from this, his original mentality pretty much sums up why 75% (or whatever number it is nowadays) of startups fail.

The moral of this article is a pretty basic, common-sense parable. Not sure why the author had to fail to learn such rudimentary things as "no market = no business" and "no research = bad" but at least he learned his lesson.
go terps
Seoul, Korea. I know I am in a minority when suggesting this

Some Amazon competitors like NexR http://nexr.co.kr/ are coming out of here
If you're entirely new to the ecosystem, I would not be running Ruby 1.9.x or Rails 3. It may seem counter-productive to learn 'legacy' software, but these version will be around for a while I'm sure, you'll not hit nearly the snags you currently are, and you won't have /that/ much to learn when the later version are ready for you (and you them).

also,
ruby != rails
;)
Friendship Is Like Sound Health; The Value Is Seldom Known Until It's Lost.
Ask HN: What's the equivalent to Python, Compiled?
Setting aside the obvious grandaddy of cross-platform compiled languages, C, what would you use if you had to quickly create a suite of commandline utilities that had to work on several platforms (mac, windows, *nix)?

The main criteria is that the final binaries must start fast and the programming language must have good libraries for HTTP/Web io
I don't think it comes anywhere close to this old classic

http://www.richswebdesign.com/flashintro.htm

Arguably still the world heavyweight champion of terrible flash.
eh, I know at least one small, revenue free startup that is in to app engine for a grand a month hosting fees. (If you own your own equipment, a grand a month supports maybe 100Mbps and around 10 sockets. 20 if you find someone who doesn't rip you on the bandwidth, but that's hard.)

/if/ you could buy app engine compatible service from more than one company, it would be great; it's just that googles current model with app engine /can/ result in some rather high costs (either re-writing your code to run off of google, or paying through the nose) once you reach a certain threshold.

Now, for some things, that's fine. It would be perfectly acceptable for my business model, for instance, for me to do the signup page and account management stuff on app engine. everyone who sees that stuff is paying me. but there are many business models for which it's current price structure is not very good, namely if you plan on being both big and free, it is not suitable.

the real problem, I think, is how difficult it is to move off app engine. If you are doing something in your own VPS, it's fairly trivial to move to another provider, or to your own hardware if you need to scale and save some money. this, I'm given to understand, is /much harder/ if you built for the app engine platform.
I had an idea, which could fit in with a future phase of this app. Grabbing links from twitter lists and reposting with page title, link, and underlying tweet. It's about surfacing what's hot in certain user circles, for example, you might find twitter lists concerning the topics already displayed on Firetweets. The final display might end up somthing like: http://hackerbra.in/links -- some lists of interest http://twitter.com/tlrobinson/hackernews http://twitter.com/DHS/hacker-news.
Sadly, it's the same people whining about the bank bailout who can't see why voting with their savings and loan dollars will do the most good. Sadly, most people are all talk.
Make no mistake: patents are monopoly rights given to justify R&D.

The "revealing" doctrine is largely obsolete. Modern patents say virtually nothing of how a invention works that can't be found by easily in a product description - or at most cursory reverse engineering. The true secret-sause is kept behind closed doors.

However, more and more it appears the societal value of patents isn't realized, and in fact the majority actually decrease competition and research in a field.
Looks like it's featured on the MagCloud homepage:

http://www.magcloud.com/
Several VPS providers also offer managed VPS accounts. They secure the distro for you and just give you root to install a few additional items. Most of the initial setup is done for you already.
This reminds me of OpenBTS, the project to create an open-source GSM interface. A full dev kit costs about $2000.

http://openbts.sourceforge.net/

They've been using this system at Burning Man to operate a free experimental cell network:

http://pagalegba2010.wikispaces.com/PublicInformation
I grew up in Vancouver and lived in Toronto more recently, so it's possible things changed significantly. You're probably right about real estate, but that's generally not a factor for startups. Food is definitely not more expensive (unless you're shopping in Yaletown). You can find all you can eat sushi for $10 (that's decent) and for $13 that's better than the $20 places in Toronto (and Montreal). Also, there's japadog and delicious korean / indian food.

There are other factors at play: you can bike regularly because it's much more prevalent and safer in Vancouver. In Toronto, you need to have a car or at least a TTC pass ($121.00 vs $81 in Vancouver, $70 in Montreal).
Looks to have been fixed(?), perhaps the 2 day old project wasn't ready for the HN frontpage.
Founder's myths, and why so many of them involve garages
There's only been 1 RC, unless I've missed something.
I remember laughing my head off when it hit the papers.

In my opinion no in their right minds should never ever reveal publicly what their security apparatus can't do. They might as well have shot themselves in the head.
This. They also are running a "pools" beta for when you need to run something on port 80, but don't want to fuck with the overhead of a full-blown VPS.
In some cases the gain is more dramatic, and in other cases, that 2% gain may be worth it. If you're simply learning a language I don't believe looking at benchmarks is a good way to do so. Typically the most performant options are hacky at best (in most all languages), imo.
This is dumb but not really relevant to anything.

A real problem is that there is currently no up-to-date Flash available for any 64-bit platform. Linux had 64-bit support around 2003. Win XP 64-bit was released in 2006. Full 64-bit support in OSX was available in 2007. A vital web plugin with no fully usable alternatives cannot keep up with basic OS advancements.
That's an interesting idea. Somewhere on my hard drive lingers an app that grabs all the links from your Twitter timeline and is supposed to send you a daily digest. I hadn't thought of including the tweet itself, but it can't hurt to have some context and hadn't thought of using lists either. Before thinking about phase two, I'd like to grow the site a little bit, but I will certainly keep this in mind. Thanks for the suggestion :)
It's good problem to have.
Good for you. Check out http://help.tweetmeme.com/2009/04/07/api-documentation/ as well.

Also, check out this idea: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1556280 -- might be a new app for you to do..
Out of curiosity, I looked it up -- Israel may even be harder to immigrate to than the United States. Background: I am a US citizen, but my mom's family is Jewish. Most of my mom's family came over from Hungary during WWII, while the ones who stayed behind were killed in the Holocaust. While I am not a practicing Jew (my immediate family is mostly atheist now), this should actually allow me to immigrate to Israel as an Israeli national.

Here's the tricky part. First, Israel has an acceptance of dual citizenship, so that is not a problem. However, an immigrated citizen is also subject to conscription in the IDF, just like every other Israeli citizen (and that includes women). It seems moving to Israel and then having to do 3 years of military service would put quite a damper on your startup plans.

If you're not Jewish and of Jewish ancestry? You're screwed. There is no easy way to gain a long term visa otherwise. So I would honestly have to put Tel Aviv at the bottom of the list, not the top, for international startup cities.
snprbob86's point from another comment makes sense: it gives you more control. For example, doing staged rollouts of different features for different customers, etc. I'm not saying it's worth the headaches, but there are advantages.
It's not just misused, it's prone to misuse, it enables, encourages, and celebrates misuse. Flash deserves blame for many of same reasons PHP historically has and more (proprietary, not cross platform).

We blame crap physical products (in fact have laws against them, warranties and recalls to protect us from them). Crap software products certainly deserve blame.

If a car accelerates when the brakes are applied I'm blaming the car not the the user. When someone just wants to make an attractive website flash says lays on the "accelerator" and says throw some sound on that bitch, ya make it autoplay on pageload. What volume? ELEVEN of course! Blinking text? Ha! We can make animated graphics fly around the entire browser, spinning and flashing. Fuck yeah!

Flash sucks. And it deserving of all the scorn it receives.
I don't have a JS version, but here's a functioning HMM tagger in under 300 lines of Python:
http://gist.github.com/503784

(model loading doesn't work yet for some reason, but you see what it's doing in principle).

This uses a smoothed trigram HMM, so it should, in principle, be a bit better than NLTK's HMM tagger but not as good as serious POS tagging packages (e.g. hunpos, or the Stanford POS tagger)
Right, he was not a cheap bastard, was he?

I would say money well spent.
I wasn't aware that Tweetmeme has an API. Might be really handy! Thanks :)
Integrating DuckDuckGo and Wolfram Alpha: regular expressions
Those trying to hunt down the section, it says this:

"3 This camera module is known to be mounted upside-down in some notebooks. Applications that use the libv4l library should display the video correctly, as libv4l detects upside-down cameras and rotates the image automatically. See Hans de Goede's post on the linux-uvc-devel mailing list for more information. For applications that don't use libv4l, try holding your computer upside-down.
"
Your Decisions are Wrong.  Is your Methodology?
If you're caucasian, yeah - there will be a few people who will try to take some kind of advantage of your naivety. If you're a little careful and take some time getting used to it, you should be fine.

OP was asking for relatively cheaper, still plausible cities to start up in (he/she mentioned Chinese cities), so I just pitched it as a viable alternative.

I wouldn't recommend it straight out, as the last thing you'd need to worry about while working on your startup is to fit in with the local culture. Still - if you stay indoors you should be fine.
Desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones exist along a continuum of preference, price, and individual desires. It's not that desktops don't get respect—it's that the market for them is saturated and unlikely to grow, so few manufacturers focus much on them.

Look, I use an iMac and like desktops enough for their advantages (price, power, etc.) to have written a whole post on the subject: http://jseliger.com/2008/12/26/computer-post-desktop-or-lapt... . But that doesn't mean desktops should "get more respect" or that because most apps are dumb tablets and smartphones are any less useful.