skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you very much, both for your feedback and praise!

Your idea is very very good, and there are many things we can do, especially with document clustering (grouping similar documents), automatically generated keyword clouds, etc etc. We are trying to get the service to a good, stable level for now, and then we'll devote more time to playing with new ideas.

One such idea we're considering is have the search interface be a filter, where the results are continuously decreasing, in real time, as you type more and more keywords.

We already have Twitter integration (as in, posting things to Twitter when you historify them). We also want to add Facebook integration, but its priority is a bit lower right now.

Thanks again, we add all ideas to our wishlist and are very happy to implement most of them (it just might take some time)!
Are you sure? I just found this saying you can browse anything:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090506230833AA...
Gittorrent: Peer-to-peer Protocol for Synchronizing of Git Repositories
Aydin and Dave are a real pleasure to work with. I've co-invested with both of them, as well as their funds.
Nexus One: This phone will always allow you to test out the newest updates with the least amount of pain. You'll always have the newest updates soonest.

Downside, however, is that any particular advantages / disadvantages won't really reflect the broader Android install base, since there are so few Nexus Ones. But there are relatively few serious problems that come with fragmentation when you are considering the 2010 crop of Android phones -- between all the big names, everything should work pretty well.

Getting a Droid (the original Motorola one) can give you a taste of what many, many people have and are using, same can be said if you got an Evo, DroidX, etc... And it can be a worthwhile experience to see how performance might differ when burdened by the skins (MotoBlur, Sense) that are on the phones as well.
Simple.
Shitty Governments/Leadership -> Inadequate infrastructure -> End of story.
Well, that's hard to say, really, and I'm certainly not saying it was the only factor. But if I look at other small Indiana towns I know, I can think of several with central squares that are still doing well (Paoli springs to mind, or Winchester), and New Castle's downtown died when the state closed down the street for construction for a year. (Statewide mandates for width of state roads - they took out trees along the street, one of which my kindergarten class had collected money to pay for. Oy.)

And certainly Richmond's overall economic decline started in the 30's and hasn't really gotten any better since then.

But my overall point is that pedestrian zones don't automatically turn into cafe-laden paradises, as much as we'd all like that to happen, and in America in particular that's less likely to happen than in Europe, largely (imho) due to our much lower density of population - itself due in part to automobile addiction.
Is there a way to get to the previous application form? I had an unsubmitted application that I'd like to copy-paste from.
As someone who uses Opera with its own native bookmark manager and synchronizer, why is would I choose your service?

I haven't wrapped my mind around your concept completely yet, and I didn't get any hits by searching on your demo, so ... :)
From talking to iOS engineers.
Would I be breaking HN etiquette by pubbing it in this thread? Would be easy to find out by looking at my submissions (most from my website) and following my linkedin from there.
Very interesting, but a few questions:

1. Really one in three orders was a scam? How big is the sample -- how many times did you ship to Nigeria? How long ago did you stop?

2. You list two problems: determining if a customer really can pay, or as a startup, having customers trust you with financial data.

In both cases, the problem is trust & reputation. Foreign customers do not trust Nigerian businesses or customers. So the missing piece of the puzzle is either better police enforcement and government regulation, or some kind of third-party who can engender trust and verify identity to and from African businesses and customers.
Lots of people live within walking distance of the Promenade - unfortunately they're all unemployed. It's the absolute worst of both worlds here; all the endemic poverty and crime of a big city, without any of the cultural and economic advantages. So the Promenade was doubtlessly doomed to failure anyway. Sad. I actually lived on a third-floor walkup above it for a year or two. I'm almost positive we were the only people who actually lived on the Promenade at the time. I certainly never saw any others. But there is a fine historical neighborhood two streets north and five east (the one where my current mansion is located) - populated by drunkards, the mentally ill, and drug dealers. Along with a few working poor, and me. Sigh.

Sometimes, a place can have too much character.
James Gosling: Quite the Firestorm
I think that exposure to new cultures and places can be stimulating and lead to creative new ideas and strategies. Perhaps less so if the company in question is just laser-focused on a consumer web product for the USA, but, in general...
I have difficulty understanding the rather sudden and drastic change in regard of "the West" for Dubai. None of what is brought up in these articles was unknown or much hidden. I can only suppose that the marketing of Dubai's brand was simply that successful, as suggested by Syed Ali, an author cited in the article

"Ali [...] accuses Western journalists of buying too easily into the Dubai myth".

Could the poster or any upvoters comment on why they find this to be compelling?
you have to wonder if Dubai is Islam's deliberate way of showing their followers that the western world is messed up?

My comment is not an attempt at being racist or judgmental, but even the "highest class" Americans probably shake their heads at what is going on there.
As someone who has used Opera since version 4, historious is much superior. I have never been much into bookmarking, I have about 50 bookmarks now and the list is already unwieldy, even though it's categorised and synched. I just never look at them.

In Opera, you can see the titles, and you're lucky if you can make out the title of the item you're looking for. On historious, you just search for "nginx ubuntu" and it finds the document, even though the title may be "So and so's blog | Webservers".

Another thing is that, with historious, I don't have to think about where to put the bookmark. I just click the button and it's done, I can look at it later or not, it's always going to be there, even if I forget about it. I find myself searching historious first and Google later, as I usually find things that relate to what I want to do now which I had found interesting before but then forgot about.

Do give it a try, it's really changed the way I bookmark, and I love Opera to bits.

EDIT: Not to mention that I can create a custom search where typing "hist <keywords>" will immediately take me to the first result in my historified sites!
They may want to rethink the thirteen step registration process. A bit much, IMO.
I'm not sure why this is getting down voted. There is an opportunity here to build a web application to help the peer review process. Whether the academic community wants such a thing is beyond me, but the observation is perfectly valid.
About the demo, we should make it more obvious, but there's a hint that says "try searching for historious". We can't include too many things in there, as everyone searches for different things and we'd never get it all :/
The information sharing agreement with the NSA?
Twitter will backup/delete the account when a user dies
Interesting commentary on CNN too:
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/08/11/twitter....
I've been there a few times, most recently in the summer of 2006 or 2007. I do not like it. If you do not like gaudy things and rampant superficiality, you probably would not like it either. I intended to visit once Burj Dubai reached full height, and also after the metro was launched, but in both cases decided seeing those things was not worth the trip.
I think people were willing to ignore the exploitation of workers and human rights abuses when Dubai was still a money train. Now that it has crashed outrage can be expressed without financial impact.
The Abilene paradox
"The original one was never over."

Do you mean the collapse of the economy or the stock market crash? They are different. The article is about the stock market which is up close to 50% since the March 2009 lows.
It's true I don't know BSD, I always thought I ought to investigate it and Minix. But well, there's only so much hours in a day :)
Supporting Socially Innovative Tech Startups
Obama is a government official increasing govt power. That's easy comparatively, govt has the guns and the pulpit. Going against the flow is hard.
To an extreme approximation, problems in P are easy and problems in NP are hard. This is important for e.g. cryptography: its security relies on hard problems staying hard. If it were found that P = NP, it would mean that we would have an easy solution to hard problems. On the other hand, if P != NP, then we could rest assured that the hard problems will stay that way.
I looked into this a while back for a project I was considering. These sites came in handy:

Flash Video Bitrate Calculator: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/apps/flv_bitrate_calculato...

Video storage and streaming: http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/ and http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

Video encoding: http://www.encoding.com/pricing/

Basically you just have to figure out how much storage will cost for all the videos (take the bitrates times the length times the number of videos), and bandwidth (number of videos viewed per visitor times the total bandwidth viewed per video). You'll probably see that it is very expensive if you are not charging for access.
Clever hack. But this is one of the key differences between Python and Ruby. In Python, you're not supposed to hack the language like this. The benefit is that Python code remains readable without having to understand how the language has been "altered" in each specific project.

If you want to do this level of hacking with the language, why not just use Ruby?
I've been there off and on in the early-to-mid 90s, and kalmar's point above would've held even then - it was (and evidently still is) a tad too opulent for my taste.
I downloaded his Excel sheet (which has more recent numbers than Wikipedia). I'm not sure what he means by "real price" and "real earnings" (as opposed to "reported earnings"?). But if I add a column for "real P/E", it puts us at just under 20, which is on the historical high end. So, following the trend in his data, I would expect the P/E to gradually decline to 15 or so, maybe even down to 10. (Under 10, buy like mad.) However, his data show gradual rises and then declines over a period of 20 - 40 years or so. These are punctuated with sharp drops, but according to these data, I would expect the next correction to drop us down to maybe 18 at most.

From some cursory chart exploration on yahoo, it looks like large-caps might not follow the market moves as much. Mar 2009 was about 50% of the S&P 500's current level, but KO only differed by 30% and JNJ only varied by 10%. I'd say solid dividend companies are not necessarily overpriced.
There are some success stories like http://softtribe.com from Ghana. This story gives some of the http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/it/the-african-hacker background. The opportunity that SoftTribe went for was unique. In Africa every country has different pay roll taxes, and it is too expensive for the likes of the multi nationals to keep up with each country, SoftTribe fills this niche.

I worked with them for a year. I was the only non African. There where challenges like fending off kind hearted westerners who had less skills then the Ghanains and wanted to come over and be boss. Competing against NGO for staff (Western NGO's have the highest salaries).
He's right. You (historious) could market that to the academic and legal world, where citation is a big deal but URLs can be ephemeral; the other day I was reading a brief less than a week old, filed in a current (and very prominent) case, and two of the hyperlinks in it 404'ed. If historio.us can get a reputation for having 'certified copies' then everyone will stampede towards the service.

For bonus points, a button to search for the current version of the same page, which may be at a different address from the original one.
The War Over Plunder: Who Owns Art Stolen in War?
I use http://wheatt.com

It has tags, but nothing social about it, a more nerdy command line type interface, and because its mine :)
I think his argument is that such a proof would represent a significant advance in human knowledge. At its time of origin, the special theory of relativity didn't give anyone nicer cars, either.
SongKick founders moved back to London after YC's 3 months ended. Is it perceived as a generally good strategy for people from the UK?
Writing with a GPS 'pen'
Gosh when did risk-taking and failure become so objectionable? Dubai made some bad mistakes just like the rest of the world during the credit-fueled binge.
For a minute I was hoping the author was going to suggest that "business geeks" learn programming. But this is what he does say:

"You may get a software engineer to start something for you, but they won't stick with the project when it gets difficult. I learned something: technical co-founders are a myth."
Not everyone has the luxury of picking the language they work in. Organisational constraints etc.

It's useful to know how to achieve these things without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
FreeBSD VirtualBox Image for Port Maintainers
Pretty much, yeah.

A bunch of my friends are traders, and it seems that the consensus right now is that as far as the stock market is concerned, nobody knows where this is going (either way), and is scared to take any real position (that's why volatility has been up lately, volumes are down (and not just because it's August).

My take is that we're most likely headed for a period of Japan-like stagnation. There are huge structural employment issues in developed countries to take care of, properties are likely very much underwater for many homeowners that do still have jobs in the US, and governments are taking the knee-jerk reaction to the stimulus needed in 08/09 by introducing austerity measures, which will only serve to slow the economy further than it is at the moment. The debt levels in developed economies are still waaay too high, but there is a very real risk of taking the crutches away before the economy can walk again (hence Bernanke returning to easing measures: he sees the writing on the wall).

So, while governments worldwide go about trying to tackle the debt problem, growth will slow and there will be little job creation in many sectors. But the real change has to come from the people learning that, fundamentally, they can only spend what they earn, and that debt is not a bottomless pit.
By all accounts I've seen, WebOS is a great platform, and failed because of marketing and hardware, not software.
I think that is a bit too extreme of an approximation. What if someone proved that all NP problems could be solved in n * 1000^1000 time? That is in polynomial time (linear, in fact), but completely intractable.

Edit: removed Big O notation, since my point here is actually that the constant might be so large that you'd never get to a point where the limiting case would matter. Sorry to set off a firestorm.
Meh, he stole that from my post on Techcrunch:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/13/google-net-neutrality-video...
By which wifi can cause illness? No.
... that we would pay for ourselves.
Removing the NGOs from the equation wouldn't solve the fundamental problem of African entrepreneurs having little probability of significant rewards. You have to consider the possible upside of NGOs offering the ambitious an easier path to money as well.

What if instead of learning English and working for an NGO, these brightest and best learned English and emigrated?

What if the individuals who work for NGO, learn skills and earn cash (paid for by foreigners) that encourage them to think much bigger when it comes to enterprises in future?
Valley Investors Look to Southern California
I actually removed that point from my comment - that problems in P may be intractable, so it may be academic anyhow. But a way of turning NP-complete problems into problems in P (i.e. P = NP) would hopefully mean that intractable NP problems would be tractable P problems, even if only for relatively small values of n.
Hopefully true, I agree.
> Fecebook

Pun intended?
Tell HN: $75 coupon for Google AdWords in latest issue of Wired Magazine
There is a $75 coupon for Google AdWords in the August issue of Wired Magazine, between pages 70 and 73. Enjoy!
Citi Millionaires' Heirs Get Website for Allowances, Donations
This sentence makes me cringe: "There is enough fragmentation among Android handsets to significantly restrict the freedom of software developers."

It uses the word "freedom" in that doublespeak-y way that is used in the "Handmaid's Tale" when they talk about giving citizens "freedom from" social deviants by establishing a totalitarian state.
It's not as difficult as one might think to get a O-1 visa or EB-1 green card. Lack of a Nobel prize does not preclude one from successfully obtaining these visas, although having one probably increases one's chances.
O(n * c) = O(n), the whole point of the O-notation.
Barrkel: thank you!

Edit: so with this in mind, is it safe to say that the NSA's mathematicians are probably the few individuals in the world most interested in this recent development ? Or, are there other types of problems out there that this proof attempts to address? (Commercial etc)
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/10/international-kindle-...
I've seen startups handle the "all my options are vested" motivation problem with what's called an evergreen program. An evergreen program keeps issuing options such that your monthly vesting rate remains constant after the initial 4 years.
Hm. So if there are say - 5000 customers like you, the business is sitting on a potential annual revenue of $300k. Sounds good!
Are there 5000 such customers?
P is the set of all problems that can be verified in time polynomial to the problem space. NP is the set of all problems that can be verified in time polynomial to the problem space with the use of a non-deterministic oracle.

Hold that thought.

If you have a list of n elements, you can search through the list and check if an element is in that list in n^1 time. If you have a list of n elements, you can check some property on a triplet of numbers in (at worst) n^3 time, looping once for each member of the triplet.

I can check that there's a triplet that multiplies to 1337 mod 31337, in a set of n numbers, with three nested loops, and doing the modular multiplication in the inner loop, in n^3 time.

Now! What if there were a magic box you could use? Whenever there are three such numbers in the set, it picks them out; whenever there are none, it just finds any three. You can use that magic box, get the three numbers it picks, check it, and voila, you find your answer immediately, in 1 step instead of n^3.

So if a problem is in NP, you need a magic box if the problem is going to be solvable in n^1, n^2, n^3 steps based on n inputs. (They recently showed that Primality-Testing was in P; an n digit number can be factored in n^12 steps. Large, but still polynomial, and better than the exponential-time 2^n.) If a problem is in P, you don't need the magic box to find it in polynomial time.

The magic box is the non-deterministic oracle. The polynomial that expresses how hard the problem is, that's the polynomial of polynomial-time.

You know "https"? The security of "s" is based on how hard it is to factor two large prime numbers multiplied together, and we know it's in NP (just give me the two numbers, and I can check), but we don't think P=NP, ie we don't think there's an easy way to break all online commerce. (See the RSA algorithm.)
Ask HN: How long did it take you to pay off your student loans?
I'm entering my last-ish year of undergrad study, and I'm approaching 20k in student loan debt; I am optimistic about paying off my loans (a friend paid his in just under two years), but with all of these scary articles about the "loan crash" coming, it seems like it might be a harder thing to do than I expect.

note: I'm a CS student from a Canadian university, but I'm interested in US and other responses too
Real vs reported means that the real numbers have been adjusted for inflation from some base year (and looking at the CPI from his data, the base year is mid 1983). The problem with looking at such a huge data set (this goes back to the late 19th century, is that the companies, industries and the world that we live in shifts significantly over time. So the 'real' numbers are extremely important, but I'd have to do some more research to find out how his CPI calculations change from one era to another. This is important because (to the best of my knowledge) there is nothing that says that the P/E ratio of a major industrial company in the 30s (thinking like Rockefeller, etc.) is equivalent to that of a big tech company now. So as industries change, investment attitudes, etc. change, which will affect the overall P/E.

And as far as the market being expensive in relation to historics, again you have to compare apples with apples. There are more people investing now than 50 years ago, and there are more big companies. Both of these facts will drive up the price of the mainstream companies' shares.
call me a unicorn then. I wrote/built a startup this spring and needed a biz dev / marketing co-founder.

Maybe the author isn't going after very technically interesting projects!
typically when you need arbitrary many-to-many relationships or multiple range queries, it's hard to use a document database.
Think of it as a personal notebook with as many pages as you need, that takes up no physical space, that you can search, and that you can have with you everywhere. You need it so that you can keep things you need to remember outside of your head so that you can use your brain to think rather than remember a million little tidbits of information.
Understood. YMMV. However, I have a couple books on Python, plus the official docs, plus Google, plus the REPL shell, and between those I found more than ample information on how they work and what they're useful for.

I hope we don't reach a point here on HN where the home page is filled with questions like, "How do 'for' loops work in C?" because that would make my K&R C book cry, among other things. :)
Among other things, we've based electronic commerce on the difficulty of factoring large numbers, which is in NP. If P=NP, then lots of people are going to be very surprised

First, thank you for the explanation. However, regarding your quote above, how would electronic commerce change if it was proved that P=NP ? When you say electronic commerce, I think of the process of buying and selling goods. Are you speaking of the analysis of that process?
3quarksdaily.com, aldaily.com
Indeed, but remember that there as long as the collectors don't come knocking, whether or not you can pay at any one moment is irrelevant. In this case, it would take China calling in its US loans to adversely affect the States' ability to maintain, and even extend their levels of debt. For various reasons (the least of which is not that the US is the largest importer of goods from China) this isn't likely to happen. At worst China just moves away from holding US Dollars and more reasonably distributes its holdings worldwide. This will likely move the dollar lower, but is unlike to cause any long-term distress.
It's not question of can or can't. The probability is just low, at least for the near future.

The dynamics of the economies and governments are just not aligned with that outcome.