skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I listen to WAMU (the NPR station in DC) I hear some school coverage nearly every day. They have special school reporters, and school segments. I realize that these (mostly affluent and White) people just LOVE school. They think it's the most important thing in the world. There is no acceptable opinion (in the political sense) other than increasing spending and treatment through schooling. Some schools here are penalized by their local governments for failing to outspend their own budgets year-over-year.

It really seems kind of hopelessly entrenched.
Didn't know about this until NOW. The traditional Google knows what I want better than the Curriculum search. Also, a lot of students have enough to study from their lecture material -- what they would want are snippets to specific topics which they find difficult to understand (Again, Google does it pretty well too). In short, even Google can't beat Google.
I downloaded "Hotel California" via FTP from tamu.edu, set it for somewhere about the middle and did 10 seconds. I recognized what I heard and was thrilled.
You could also browse the projects on http://freshmeat.net/tags/python and try to find something that interests you.
The author lost me at "The evolution and growth of modern science has been accompanied by the adoption of a militant, materialistic, reductionist, and atheistic creed by many leading scientists and popularizers of science".
I think the euphemism is the other way around to: (1) remain legal, and (b) not sound discriminatory.
Hasn't Hulu had a LOT of issues getting permission to be involved with anything designed to be displayed on a TV? They've blocked Boxee and several other similar offerings. Last I checked their content providers wanted it to be a "everything BUT TV" service.
Apache Harmony is something to look at, although of course the Oracle/Android patent suit seems like it might have implications for Harmony.
Does anyone stay logged into their router when they're not using it? And don't most sessions expire fairly quickly, anyways?

Besides that, this appears to only work with wireless routers, based on how google is locating them.
Anyone (or Noah) know if we need to activate these deals within a certain time period - do they expire??
Ah! You are correct. Sorry for the confusion. So they're both 100 or less I guess.
Why no, as you can clearly see, I'm talking about talking about doing. It gets an order of magnitude easier with each derivative! (which was the point)
I asked the same question a few years ago:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6nc1h/im_in_col...

The responses were pretty good. Ended up looking into Rubinius, eventually started http://rubygems.org :) Good luck in Python land!
8 Things I Wish I Knew When I Became an Entrepreneur
I hide my communicator in the closet too.
I understand, though, that Backpack is something hard to define. They should accept once and for all that it's mostly a wiki.
There are two very good reasons why nobody should bother doing this.

First: browser Javascript is the most hostile possible environment in which to implement cryptography. From actual experience: you are better off trying to implement crypto in a microcontroller, with kilobyte-denominated space for code storage, no cold-start entropy, and a few tens of bytes headroom for negotiation. Seriously: do that first, before trying (and inevitably failing) to run the Javascript gauntlet[1].

Second: the security economics of mail drastically favor Google over anything you come up with, even if you're really good. That's because the cost of a sitewide compromise at Google is stratospheric. Google is maximally incented to protect their service and has the resources and mindshare to do so. Nobody cares about someone else's bespoke mail service. People who care about mail security but don't trust Google just VPN to a private mail server.

Incidentally, Fortune 500 companies grappled with this problem many moons ago, and have adopted the strategy of "things that need to be sent over secure email will instead send links to an HTTPS web application we run onsite and call 'secure email' even though it's really just 'private file sharing'". Which makes it doubly hard to pitch this as a product idea: most of your market has already rejected the model you're considering.

This is a bad startup idea. Avoid it.

[1] For starters: in browser JS, every function call can be redefined arbitrarily many times before it gets key material, web content is allowed to influence or even rewrite that code, there's no effective way to verify code before running it, code is pulled from multiple sites, there are browser "chrome"-level security flaws still being discovered, there's no solid secure random number generation, functions are timeable, there are solid implementations of only a very few algorithms, and what remains to be implement is hazard-prone. Writing crypto code in JS is hubris, pure and simple.
MongoSV:  MongoDB conference in Silicon Valley
> "since our karma scores reflect something else besides simply thoughtful comments."

You spend a lot of time on HN commenting? ;)

As num_comments->oo, karma->oo.
It looks like I'm such an HN newbie that I didn't know you have to actually visit the individual comment page to flag it. So they're probably are both the same. And they're probably both 100 or less.
Cool. Unfortunately I can't use it because I have this nervous tic where I click all over the page randomly.
You're Stealing it Wrong: 30 Years of Inter-Pirate Battles on Vimeo
S/MIME encryption on Mail.app is pretty close to transparent, once you grab a personal cert. It's what I'd recommend to a small team that wanted the easiest secure mail solution.

(We use PGP).
Gasoline prices and obesity
Actually this post from that same blog (to me) correctly summarizes the Kata exercise: http://pindancing.blogspot.com/2009/09/sudoku-in-coders-at-w...

Specifically Norvigs quote in the blog: "I see tests more as a way of correcting errors rather than as a way of design. This extreme approach of saying, Well, the first thing you do is write a test that says I get the right answer at the end, and then you run it and see that it fails, and then you say, What do I need next? that doesn’t seem like the right way to design something to me."
The article discusses half a dozen things that "improve" or "increase" brain function, without ever reporting on the amount of the improvement. Rather than with numbers, a finding of improvement is followed by a quote from the researcher making the finding, who shockingly thinks the results are important.
So many people don't understand that their browser window can be resized, so if you have text that spans the entire width, there might be 30 or 40 words per line, or even more. I've seen research that suggests reading is easiest with around 10 words per line.

Net result is that text is easiest to read with a small number of words per line, and the only way to ensure that cross-browsers, and for all window sizings, is to create a single column.

Here's a page using the full width: http://www.penzba.co.uk/Catastrophe/

That's quite hard to read compared with these:

+ http://www.penzba.co.uk/Writings/TheTeleportingTurtle.html

+ http://www.penzba.co.uk/Writings/TrappingATranscendental.htm...

+ http://www.penzba.co.uk/Writings/EnumeratingTheRationals.htm...

Personally I find those much, much easier to read.
Yeah, that is true. However I am of the opinion that things like this are similar to minimum wage (which is also not mentioned in the Constitution) but can be mandated by Congress (though I could be wrong, is it done State by State?)
True. It would be nice to be freed from needing a piece-of-junk cable box in the equation. Or from needing a cable subscription, for that matter.
Successful startup CEO's have a lot of expectations on their shoulders.

On the other hand, they have little to gain by telling the whole truth to a new breed of entrepreneurs. What will they gain, a little appreciation?

I really doubt that admitting that they have made mistakes in the past would really be appreciated by employees, customers or investors.

Risks vs rewards dictates that they would continue to hide some of their past.
How Carlos Slim made $150 million from the NYT
Christian Queinnec's _Lisp in Small Pieces_ is excellent.

ReadScheme (http://readscheme.org/) also has a ludicrous amount of good docs - I particularly recommend the Lambda papers, RABBIT, Orbit, and Dybvig's thesis.

There's also good Scheme-related content in Peter Norvig's _Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming_ ("PAIP"), but I'd recommend it highly even if you didn't care about Scheme. Its code samples are mostly in Common Lisp (inc. a Scheme implementation), but it's an excellent book about programming, period.

That should keep you busy for a while. :)

Edit: Also check out this comment from Mahmud (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=835020), with lots of additional suggestions.
Things I Wish I Knew When I Became an Entrepreneur
Again, why do all 12 people pay for 1 copy of this (insignificant amount of) data on their server? The model just isn't working for a small club.
... when someone makes money, it's because he's providing something of value to society. And the more money he makes, the more value he's delivering.

I agree that people should receive reward in proportion to the value they create, but I don't believe that people who make more money are always delivering more value. The main problem with that idea is the difficulty in determining how much value a single individual actually generates.

There are plenty of terrible CEOs who destroy the value of the companies they manage, yet still receive huge salaries and bonus packages, and there are plenty of great teachers/engineers/others lower on the totem pole who earn a relative pittance. Is this because of the value they've created, or due to the CEO's direct proximity to value creation, an ability to convince others of their importance, and a relatively small supply side? I'd say looking at the ridiculous increases in the CEO-worker earning gap over the last few decades it has been warped by factors other than deservedness.

It may be true that there is a correlation between value created and income, but I think there are too many other factors at play to say that it is a general rule.
Maybe you're misunderstanding - many of the new CSS3 properties that make life easier for designers implement features that IE has had since IE6 and even earlier. Standards-compliant browser developers are only catching up now.
honestly that is a pretty sick bundle. the fact you also get kissmetrics lifetime free account after as well makes it worth it.

glad it has chargify in it too, especially after we were talking about that here a few days ago.
There are statistical artifacts here that need to properly be taken into account.

First, there is only ever one first mover and many fast followers. Thus, it's not entirely surprising that at least one fast follower would dominate the leader.

Secondly, the failure rate calculations are highly suspect due to historical redactionism. If a first mover fails, it will still be remembered due to it's contribution to the field. If a fast follower fails, it becomes hard to even discover that it existed in the first place.

Think of this in terms of car companies. Ford was the first mover but, up until the 1920's, there were almost a thousand different car companies started by various people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_United_States_a... . 99% of them failed, some had moderate success and a few like Toyota & GM had enough outsized success to eventually beat Ford. Being a "fast follower" in this case almost always meant you were dead.
Auctioning The Right To Use Laptops In Class
My personal anecdotal experience from using it on Ubuntu is that Iced Tea isn't as reliable or compatible with Java code as the Sun java. Maybe that's changed recently?
Sure, we can do any number of things - Dropbox just isn't one of them. That's my point.
I felt that was implied. I didn't see it as "Leave with no attention to other commitments;" rather, as "leave to someplace better that will offer you this."

Indeed, your taking his advice far too literal.
I find this unlikely, sorry. I won't go deep into the pro-abortion arguments right now because I am unlikely to change your mind.

What is more likely is birth control will become better and more reliable (including hormonal bc for men), drastically decreasing the need for abortion.
Do you have any examples or links? I'm sorry, I'm really interested in what you're saying but I'm just having trouble imagining how it would affect my architecture or what I could do with it that I couldn't feasibly do without. Thanks. And, yeah, things were a whole lot easier back before all this silly security and memory protection, weren't they? :)
Awesome bundle Noah, as usual! Could you specify in which format the books come from?
Suvorov never misses a chance to point out that most of them are (paid by) Soviet political/military figures

There's plenty of criticism of his theories from Western historians as well.

Most of his major works are available in English:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&...

He's certainly a colourful and interesting writer and personality; fun to read while keeping things like grains of salt and critical faculties handy.
Hey, I helped put this one. And by put this one meaning I took orders from Eric like a waiter. Glad to see people like it.

There are a few time limits which are listed in the finer details section. If you have any issues or want them extended just email me, noah at appsumo
Automobiles. I think the future will be horrified that people transported themselves around in two-ton machines that polluted the air and fatally crashed into things (and each other) a lot, especially when both before and after the invention of automobiles we had safer and cleaner options, and especially when a lot of people spend hours a day sitting in their cars in stop-and-go traffic.

I have an SUV myself, and the freedom and joy and romance of driving appeals to me as much as anyone, but at some point, if energy is expensive enough, all of that will be forgotten, and it'll turn into a horror story.
I'd like to see customer involvement much earlier. You could start out solving a specific problem for a customer who will pay you to do it. If that particular problem seems to be relevant for other customers, you can make it into a product. This only requires that your initial contract with the first paying customer allows you to do this, but if you allow the price to go down this should not be a major obstacle. You should probably still go through the intuition and market analysis phases, but the benefit with this model is that the idea will have passed the testing phase already.
Glad you could be a part of it. This deal is definitely the best one we've ever done! Keep up the great monthly:)
Cortesi doesn't have a solution to this problem for unmodified browsers. If you get to modify the browser, you're no longer talking about "web mail"; you might as well just write a real secure mail client, and use HTML5 for your cross-platform UI.

I find Cortesi's promotion of his web crypto tools pretty close to the "dishonesty" line. He's not dishonest. But whether he knows it or not, he's coming as close to the line as he can. People keep telling him, browsers can't safely do the things he's telling people they do. He keeps disregarding them.
The future will condemn our coercive parenting and our irrational, exclusive relationships (marriages).

If you think that sounds crazy, that means they are at least candidates for things people take for granted that are bad (unlike, say, the environmentalism in the post which is an issue we're all aware of).

If interested, you can find arguments here: http://fallibleideas.com/
Go on campus. Do a presentation with a student group, i.e. IEEE/ACM programming SIG...

Join a professional developer organization... Plenty of Linux, iPhone, Android, .Net, etc. developer groups in most major tech hubs...
> Still, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth when I see us announcing things that are not even nearly done yet.

What? The blog post explains that devices running Google TV will go on sale this month. That is, within the next 27 days you will be able to buy a Google TV.

How is that "not even nearly done yet"? Dude, the product goes on sale in less than 27 days. It's probably done.
I didn't mean to suggest that you were interested in YC.
The font looks terrible and jagged to me on Chrome. It seems almost amateurish as a result.
I totally disagree. That may have been too open to serve Mark Pinkus's interests, but it was exactly the right openness for the common good. If other companies were equally open, we'd be better off.
Conversely, contraception technology may progress to the point that accidental pregnancy itself becomes a quaint impossibility, sidestepping the moral issues altogether.
The key is that you've got to have a driving desire to improve any project, else it's very likely that you will give up when you get to the complicated and messy bits.

Presumably, you use Python based tools whenever it makes sense. If not, fantisize about how great it would be if your favorite applications were written in Python. Search out useful looking apps in Python, some that show a lot of promise, but maybe the project is stalled or is not quite there yet. Install and use. Feel the pain of not having some feature.

Also, if you're feeling ambitious enough, look at applications written in other languages that you might rewrite in Python and make better.
Good question. All books come in pdf format. Eric's new hardcover gets mailed for Free to your door. Worldwide.
Patents and Copyrights :D for starters.
What are we doing today that our descendants might condemn tomorrow?

Over 1M deaths due to US-led invasion of Iraq:

http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/1-over-o...

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Casualties_of...
In those cases you're paying for a better TV not necessarily for the apps platform. You can also get a $250 Blu-Ray player with Samsung's app.

Samsung's approach is currently a walled garden - where they can subsidize the cost of the chips and support costs by doing revenue shares with the content providers. Google TV's flash enabled browser breaks this model which is another reason Samsung likely won't go there anytime soon.
Tomato firmware (and DD-WRT I think) allows you to randomize your MAC address, which I do weekly.
Multiple comments have suggested that this page has elements reminiscent of scam-related web pages, of the type where you are clearly being sold to.

Warning flags that come to mind: overuse of large fonts, very long pages with repetition of content within the page, copy clearly designed to sell (with particular emphasis on benefits to you the reader), big red arrows that guide your attention

I consistently warn family members to be wary of claims made by organizations using these tactics. The reason I do that is because they seem to work.

Does anyone have access to data or a link to research on these tactics?
FTA:

At issue are the varied processing fees that the card companies charge merchants when customers use different cards. Cards that offer rewards such as airline miles cost merchants more, and merchants who agree to accept a company's cards must accept all of them.

[and]

As a civil case, the settlement isn't likely to involve any financial penalties for the companies...

I like Amex a lot, and a lot of what I like about them is the club they very overtly wield with merchants. It's the card I feel safest using.
This article misses the main reason people omit information: to avoid embarrassing others.

I always talk about how Xobni Analytics failed, for example. Recently I've been talking a lot to others about my own weaknesses.

But by necessity most of the stories about Xobni involve other people, and the stories often involve internal conflict among some of the people on the team, and to tell those stories properly would require being honest about others' weaknesses as well. There's not a culture of doing that in public settings, and I don't expect that to change.

EDIT: the two exceptions that prove the rule are High Stakes No Prisoners by Charles Furgeson, and some of Steve Blank's recent blog posts, even though Steve doesn't name names. AFAIK, both of these guys are basically retired from the valley.
CleanTab launches version 2 - Guitar & Bass Tabs in HTML5
Hi Hacker News, I have become a huge fan in the last several weeks. I am proud to present my first submission. For the last few months I have been working on CleanTab a guitar and bass tablature site that harnesses HTML5 for an amazing playing experience. I hope you all enjoy.
Sex in the U.S.: New survey reveals our steamy secrets
It's PHP, but you could consider contributing to Drupal
Are Dreadlocks Unprofessional?
I have a submission link to HN on a Website. I'd really like a way to show two pieces of information in that link:

1. whether or not the page has already been submitted to HN

2. how many comments, if any, have been made in HN discussion about the page

My preference would be for a way to add that information to the page dynamically when the page is first loaded, on the server side, so that no client-side scripting (i.e. JavaScript) is necessary. If for some reason it is decided that it must be done with JavaScript, though -- well, I guess beggars can't be choosers, as they say.

As far as I'm aware, no reasonable way of doing this exists right now (short of something complex like automatically searching HN and screen-scraping). I'd really appreciate an API for this kind of thing being added to HN (and reasonably well-documented) so that I can make use of it on a site written in Ruby (not Rails, mind you).
Polls do not end up in the "Ask" section as well.

By the way, it'd be nice to have a QA for polls. The http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll is not easy to find when one needs it.
Wow! This is seriously cool.

Speaking of augmenting our sensory capabilities, has there ever been any work done on making hearing a voluntary sense? Always-on hearing had some evolutionary advantage in the past but it may be an interesting experiment to put this in one's own control.
Ask HN: Do you think Mobile Web Apps is the way to go than Native Apps?
Some of the reasons I came up with are.
1. One app works on all devices (except some layout and css issues). Write once, run everywhere.
2. Easier to maintain.
3. Don't have to deal with App Approval process.
NPR Gets it Wrong on the Rutgers Tragedy: Cyberbullying is Unique
It was announced many months ago. I'm using this opportunity to talk about how unfortunate it is that we announced it so long ago and are only launching it now. I'm not saying this current announcement itself is a fail. :)
I can understand that but in this case its just a timing thing. If this was a July launch they'd probably be more under wraps until closer to launch. But with the X-mas buying season coming up quick they need to get it onto consumer's radars earlier.
Proposal: best practices for writing PHP
A couple of things you might want to include:

The rule about having to be here for a year before you can even talk about if we're turning into Reddit. It's in the guidelines, but I think it's worth mentioning under "Is HN becoming like Reddit and Digg?".

It's also pretty courteous around here to note any edits you made to your comment with a brief footnote, or by adding the additional content as a footnote itself. The footnote should mention what was edited, not just that the edit occurred. That bit of etiquette might fit under "Someone edited a comment I replied to and now I look like an idiot!"
There are tons on GitHub.