skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, but they're planning on rolling it out as a full service soon. They could yet beat Heroku to market.
UK Proposes All Paychecks Go to the State First
We've been here before. Present performance means very little. What is relevant is the rate of change. It seems perfectly clear to me that the HTML/CSS/JS stack is improving much faster than Flash. Unless that rate of improvement significantly slows or Adobe significantly improve their rate of development, HTML/CSS/JS will inevitably overtake Flash fairly soon.

Given that we're in the middle of a browser war, I don't see how Adobe could possibly compete. In order to beat WebKit in the long term, they would need to out-spend and out-think the combined forces of Apple, Google, Nokia, KDE, RIM, Palm, Samsung and a small army of other developers.

I have to give credit to Adobe - Flash is fast, easy and generally works well. There's a hell of a lot wrong with it, mainly the lack of standards compliance and how little effort they've made on accessibility, but it is undoubtedly a good product. That's not really the question we're interested in though - the relevant question is what will be faster in a year or eighteen months. I will be absolutely astonished if Adobe isn't comprehensively beaten by the end of next year.

That isn't to say Flash is dead, there are a lot of avenues for Adobe to pursue and they still have huge momentum, but they're going to have to either up their game, specialise, or face the inevitable fate of any technology that doesn't iterate fast enough.
My limited experience is unfortunately based on online banking: my bank can send me a tan sms faster than anything I've seen.
It's basically the same setup as iStockPhoto. There, you buy "credits" for some arbitrary exchange rate that you can use to buy photos from other members, who then exchange the points for payouts. There is a period of time where the credits are bought and not used for purchase, and a time where they are used but not redeemed. There are plenty of businesses who handle this without a problem, so I doubt he'll have trouble setting it up.
It's not that they're trying to make money. It's how they're trying to make money. At the start of the blog post, it sounds like the author was satisfied with scribd. I'd be willing to bet that he'd have been willing to pay them money had they approached him in the correct way.
Call For Beta Testers – Geospatial Components in virtual appliance
Thanks. It's not about anyone not caring. I can't remember if they had things that are covered by NDAs. Can't hurt to be diligent.

I was thinking of burning the actual platters, which would be part of option (2).
How to automatically test web applications in Ruby?
No, that's definitely not the same. There is no potential for fraud and / or tax evasion and / or money laundering in that situation. With a wallet system you have those in spades.
Happy to help... are you just looking or is this an invitation to be a tester, hit the URL, and post feedback here?

In which case some feedback:

(1) You need to pay more attention to the sign-up form. It doesn't show the full text I entered when its right-aligned. The height isn't enough when you focus on it.

(2) The form "Mobilize now!" button click state isn't too great.

(3) After submission I get hit with a PayPal window before I've had a chance to even get an idea of what the end result will be. In other words, I have no idea what I am paying for or if I will be happy with it.

Best of luck
This is amazing news; I feel like Apple's lifting of restrictions has something to do with modifying your phone's software now being legal in the US. It's probably only beneficial to them to have all of this content available through their App Store outlet if people can easily get it anyway.
I did a Bachelors in Commerce starting 1996. Had a nervous breakdown. Recovered more-or-less. Finished degree. Learned basic web design, did that in a half-assed way, loved it.
Had several more breakdowns over several years, alternating between menial jobs and illness-induced unemployment for ~10 years. Got into technology blogging in maybe '06. Became obsessed with Web technologies. Went back to university to to a higher diploma in CompSci in Sep. 08. Loved it more than anything I'd done. Stayed on last year to do a Masters. Loved that too. Now staying on to do PhD with fellowship. Work obsessively. Still very much in a learning phase (spent this evening dicking around with Django). Mentally, never been better. No money of course, but fuck it. Programming saved my life, mafuckers :D
To be fun at work there must be plenty of options to communicate with coworkers. Sometime to be slow is the funniest thing.
I set up a node server on AWS this weekend using a Micro instance. It took almost an hour to execute my install script (most of that was compiling the lastest Node) but in the end I was charged $0.37 for 15 hours of compute time and some disk usage. Step by step: http://dpritchett.posterous.com/get-up-and-running-with-node...
The parent was pretty clearly in response to, "An other option is to add features which are only behind a new paywall."
For one, it's our male role models who are using computers while our female role models aren't. Children are affected by such gender differences very early. They notice who drives the car when everyone goes out, who cooks dinner, and who works late.

Secondly, there are expectations about it. For example, if a boy takes apart a computer, everyone goes "such a boy", but if a girl does it, people say "hmm, that's odd." (even if it's good surprise, it's still surprise). I know when I was a child I was pushed to do things like ballet and cheerleading and orchestra when what I wanted to do was martial arts and read and become a scientist.
I’m Finally Joining the TED Royalty. (Sort of.)
Xerox PARC turns 40
All the bad things "infographics" do, but sliced into one image per "fact" and with a different bad font each time.
This is sometimes referred to as POD: Plain Old Data.
True enough. Archive formats like zip and tar preserve timestamps, but I wouldn't necessarily even trust your average power user to know how to reliably get at them.
Found: genes that make kids smart
Also, maybe someone does like the challenge to build things from scratch, just not companies.
PARC 'office of the future' - 40 years later
Communism much?
Jennifer is one of my new favorite people ever. She's going to be so happy to read your post.

for the record, I'm a/b testing the counter to see if it makes a difference. Thanks to some help from Hiten Shah, at http://www.KissMetrics.com, i was able to set up the a/b test in 5 minutes using javascript. Five minutes!!!
But I do think that Krugman's position has some merit. Watch the Sunday morning shows. The argument that cutting taxes for the wealthiest is not about stimulating the economy. It's about doing what is moral for the wealthy. And if you read the comments in the right-leaning blogs, you'll see a LOT, if not the majority of comments being about how these taxes go to the worst in society -- poor, Blacks, Kenyans, communists, illegal immigrants, etc...

I mean think about this. We're talking about an increase of 4% in the marginal tax rate for those making above $250k/year. A rational argument would be to look at the impact of where these tax dollars go versus what the wealthy might do with it. In itself this should be a very innocuous discussion. But look at what we have.

This is not about the best way to make the world a better place. But I do think it is more about "who _deserves_ to have resources".
Ask HN: Feedback on a site for discovering and sharing products
Would love to know what you think about something we're in the middle of building.

its a site which makes it easy to discover and share cool products.

using our bookmarklet or direct on the site, enter a link of a product we return the page data, you can tweak the info and then post it into your own product stream. others can follow you and vice versa.

we were thinking it would be great to help discover new products, i would love to follow scobleizer etc if he started posting new web apps, i would love to follow a friend whose a DJ if he started posting new tunes.

its kind of like a digg v4/twitter hybrid.

streams of products,

once we have data we can aggregate trends etc.

will work with online data through links or offline via apps - i.e. take a photo of something you like in a store, push it to your product stream

wanted to know your thoughts on the idea - any feedback - much appreciated
no, i'm not claiming you didn't put effort into exercising those aptitudes. that goes without saying. you were still profoundly lucky in having those aptitudes, in recognizing them, in having the opportunity to exercise effort, and so on.
your position that taxation in the US is wrong is an extraordinary claim

If you scan back up the thread, you'll see that I haven't made any such claim. My statement was that this is a valid moral theory, and can't be dismissed out-of-hand (as you are continuing to do).

That is, I haven't argued in agreement to the poster above, I've just called you (and others) out because you've shouted him down with negative votes, without actually addressing his viewpoint.

Now that I think about it, this just might be the heart of what Krugman was referring to. If people are so dismissive of these concerns, then it should hardly be surprising that others having these values are left angry and frustrated.
Adam Lisagor's trailer for Rands new book _Being Geek_
The future of ebooks
If all of your examples are too expensive then you are expecting too low a cost.
Downfall NoSQL/Hadoop Parody
I Forgot How Bad The iPhone Is
Seriously? Do you really read the entire terms of service every time you sign up for a new service? Besides that, just because you have the legal right to do something to your customers doesn't mean it's a good idea. I mean, did you realize that most stores aren't obligated to take back returns? And yet, the biggest company in the world (Wal Mart) is very well-known for taking back anything. There have even been cases of people bringing back diapers claiming they were all used beforehand.
You make a good point. It was mistaken to say "get rid of the dead trees", what I meant was "get rid of the idea that the main focus of your establishment should be dead trees."
It is still an open problem to do unsupervised or mostly-unsupervised part-of-speech tagging that performs as well as (or close to) the usual supervised models. For English in the standard domains for which there are annotated corpora this is not necessary, but if you want to apply tagging to a completely different domain or a resource-impoverished language this sort of technique is necessary.

This is relevant because it performs just as well (or better) than state-of-the-art methods while being faster and simpler.
I'd previously assumed that we just had lazy cleaning staff at the office. now I realise...:-)
mine is a boring story.

i was raised to be smart. i listened to classical music, read lots of books, and doing well in school was important to me. so, i got put into the local gifted & talented program, where one of the classes was about computer programming. i learned Logo for a year, and that kicked off an interest that hasn't really faded.
Their value proposition was to not lock documents away behind a pay wall. Even then they were not doing very well because of all the tag clouds and their irrelevant appearance on search results. They were the first though and do not have much competition. Quite an opportunity for someone looking for an idea.
So if I have a library of 10s of thousands of images of animals, shapes, things etc. that are all easily recognisable to English speakers -- e.g. cat, dog, house, drum, road, tree, book, horse -- and ask them to write in what is it, AND I constantly update that library and retire pictures that's been used many time -- what is your dumb script's success rate?

What if I combine three pictures in each challenge - e.g. "cat house triangle"?
My was Monty's daughter's name. It's also why his next database is MariaDB, that's his other daughter's name. The My as in ownership and My as his daughters name was just a good coincidence.
http://Awesomenessreminders.com is going to go out of the ballpark, I'm pretty sure of it.

There is work to be done (price points, the nuisance factor in some cases) but that's all doable.

The first imitations are already appearing which is always a sign that you're on the right track. Zack has a little goldmine here and I'm 100% sure he'll strike it big.

It's interesting how something that strikes everybody as 'dead obvious' at first sight has never been done before.

1K subscribers now, on to the second thousand, in less than another month ? If it goes (more) viral then it has every chance of doing that.

The bottleneck will then become to find good callers.
I don't see why libraries need to transform into community centers. Why not let them concentrate what they do best: collecting and storing information, especially books. While I think such community centers as described in the writing could even stand on their own feet, but imho they would also fit better to schools rather than libraries.

edit: While I think at it, opening schools for general public sound more and more better idea.
Ruby and Python guys can be C guys. Even Matz and Guido are C guys before they are Ruby and Python guys, respectively.

There is no one language, toolkit or framework.
He said once that he's not "private jet" rich, but he never has to think about what things cost.
I tried to read this, really I did, but the lack of capitalization makes me want to die a swift death. You're writing to the Harvard Business School. Man up and use the shift key already.
Im quite well skilled in IT Server support and related work but i cant seem to find any part-time contract work that i could do say 1 day a week that would tie me over beautifully

I currently have a need for a 1-day-a-week IT guy. If you're familiar with Amazon AWS (EC2,ELB,EBS), I could use you. Contact me at my HN username at gmail if you're interested.
I don't think that algorithms are for "The Book". For example the four colour theorem is an example that looking algorithms that are good looking is not the correct way to go. Is better to be flexible, Greek were sad when they discovered irrational numbers but we now know that real numbers are a good thing to have.
Sizing Up Consciousness by Its Bits
And Vancouver's.
I had a ZX Spectrum with a Multiface One from Romantic Robot. Prior to that I used to write little bits of machine code by hand using the opcode table in the back of the manual, but with the Multiface it made hacking games so much easier.

Then I started rewriting the loaders, writing trainers for the kids at school. Did a couple of demos, got a Sam Coupe then an Amiga, did some more stuff and ended up working for a living in IT before moving into penetration testing and forensics.
Lisagor (@lonelysandwich) was a video editor for commercials before striking out on his own; he also does "Put This On" (http://putthison.com/), a blog and video series about men's fashion with Jesse Thorn, who does The Sound Of Young America on NPR, and you can hear about all of this at Colin Marshall's "Marketplace of Ideas" Internet radio show (http://colinmarshall.libsyn.com/personal_aesthetics_and_inte...); Rands manages people at Apple and wrote the genuinely excellent _Managing People_ and also a blog series on strip club etiquette and see I just did a whole little thing there.

Watch this video, it is awesome.
Joyent -> $250/mo for 2GB RAM

Heroku -> $108/mo for the equivalent

EngineYard -> $85/mo for the equivalent

Not everyone can spend $100 per month in a server.
You should rename this to "Ask HN".
Microcontrollers for the masses. From ARM
I worked in an major academic library from 2000 until 2007. Libraries know about the changing landscape and it's the basis of pretty much everything librarians discuss these day. A number of the big academic libraries have added cafes and digital centers. At the university where I worked, most of the network of computer labs throughout campus were put into the library.

There are also services that people aren't really aware of. For example, the article's author mentions that he wanted an article from a 1978 issue of a neuroscience journal that his local library doesn't have. But doesn't actually matter if the local library doesn't have it because practically every library in the US offers an interlibrary loan service and will get you a copy of the article from a library that does have it.

Still, there are a couple things holding libraries back. One is that librarians traditionally have entered the field because they were attracted the old, book-centric library model. Even at the beginning of this decade at my library there were many people who were very much opposed to even the idea of google. There is very low turnover in many big libraries (academic libraries are filled with staff members who have spent decades in the same jobs) and the pay is so low that it's difficult to attract skilled technology workers.

Furthermore, libraries are usually strange, bureaucratic organizations. They operate sort of like businesses, but they have no revenue and, therefore, most metrics and benchmarks always felt somewhat contrived, and therefore office politics had a more prominent role in decision-making processes. It's also very, very difficult for most academic libraries to fire people, so they attract people who are looking for jobs with good benefits that they can coast in. I'm guessing public libraries are similar.

The result of all of this is that libraries often make bizarre decisions about technology. Librarians hop on mainstream technology fads in ridiculous ways. For instance, when I left in 2007, the most prominent issue discussed on library blogs was how important it was to have a presence on Second Life.
I see something that sucks, a process, education, something that could be better, faster cheaper through the use of computers and I want to improve it.
I can't help it I want to improve it, being part of the "solution" not the "problem".
"Make the world a little better" through the use of software.
A startup allows me to keep doing that, while paying for my expenses in order to sustain my life.
And hopefully if I create enough value, and with a little luck generate enough money so that I don't need to worry too much about the means to sustain my life and then find something else worth improving.
I see jasonlotito, you write about the main article author. As far as I understood, he tried to use the free university hosting but it was for him "cumbersome" to upload there and to follow the stats. His added values were only easier upload and easier following of the number of "reads."

Note however that he does "self publishing" experiment. Enough readers here would be able to make him one click upload script in less than 10 minutes. Ditto for parsing the logs. I don't feel sorry for him for choosing scribd and feeling how he feels now.
That's great, pretty much any home-rolled CAPTCHA will perform great, simply because it's not worthwhile for spammers to design an attack. If that, however, was the default anti-spam mechanism on, say, wordpress installs, it'd be automated against in minutes.
>Again, right or wrong, that is how the rich view the situation when they are facing increased taxes and dilution of their wealth through inflation. Whether you agree with it or not, it's not hard to understand.

Statistically, the rich are getting richer. The middle class are the ones who should be angry as they are the demographic who have suffered the most economically in recent decades.

This political cartoon nicely counters the rich's complaints about tax burden:

http://i.imgur.com/zehGy.jpg

I would attribute the recent anger of the rich, and their tea party proxies, more to greed than rational self-interest. I see the present greed as irrational because it creates the potential of political blowback that will likely imperil the greedy in the long term.
You seem to have been downvoted for expressing a true opinion[1]. I'm confused. Perhaps it's because it was in response to a differing opinion, and unsourced; but that seems like a disingenuous double standard when the equally unsourced and completely wrong parent was upvoted.

[1] http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/HealthIssues/1106591095.htm...
My spam script would always answer "cat", so among 8 options (cat, dog, house, drum, road, tree, book, horse), I'd get a 12.5% success rate.

Plus you constantly have to update your image library, which a huge pain.

Also, recognizing 10,000 images will take me around one day and less than $1000 with Amazon turk, thus giving me a perfect 100% success rate. After that you would have to completely renew your image database.
Followed by a template reply from the dean, which completely ignores any points maid in the original letter.
I think you missed the point. There is not even (yet) a de facto standard for concurrency on lisps.

There are bordeaux-threads and portable-threads, and they mostly work, but I usually just fall-back on limiting my threading calls to a small number of functions and then manually adding #+ stuff to get it to work when I want to port to a new CL.

People really expect some form of threading/concurrency to be standardized across implementations.

The CL community has been occasionally successful in making new de-facto standards (Gray streams, ASDF, and to a lesser extent MOP), so there is hope.
Pincus in title is spelled wrong, FWIW.
Not to mention in a rather crowded space.
Tonight Jupiter making closest approach in nearly 50 years
The ick factor is fairly large on this one.
The problem with statements like those is that they aren't falsifiable.

If someone does come up with an example there's the easy rebuttal: Whatever they did probably just hasn't come to light yet.
Thanks for the constructive feedback! As a point of clarification it is the same bad font every time.
An ethics lecture from a man whose company sells spyware (Zwinky toolbar) and highly profitable add-ons to games under the pretext of charity (Farmville "donations" to Haiti)?

EDIT: oh, and whose company essentially ripped off the idea of Farmville from someone else. Forgot about that one.
We get health care instead of transit.

That is in no means an opinion of what is better, just simply a statement as to how underfunded our transit systems are and how much we spend on health care overall, from a federal and provincial point of view.
It's almost like it's a whole other country.
I worked at the Clarkson University library for three years and learned the software used to manage library databases is a huge contributor to the problem. I'd love to do something about it if the chance presented itself.
That argument's not self-consistent, though. If people are still viewing the "stale" content, then what makes it stale? If people aren't viewing the content, then how can they recoup any costs by putting it behind a paywall?
Clause 6 of the GPLv2 says that you "cannot impose any further restrictions" on recipients of the software. One possible interpretation of this clause is that the App Store terms of service impose further restrictions on recipients.

Thus authors of GPL software might have a basis to object to other people distributing their software through the App Store, even if full source is provided. ...at least, this was the rationale given by the FSF when they objected to GNU Go in the App Store:

http://www.fsf.org/news/2010-05-app-store-compliance
He was also concerned that after leaving the university, they would take down the docs, and the links to them would then be broken.

I'm just wondering how the suggestion to use Google Sites or another free service is any different then using Scribd?