skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed, the friends and family sequels are dire however.
Ask HN: Pay For Privacy...Really?
If you're a free user of prezi all your presentations are public, and in order to make them private you have to subscribe and pay. That seems like a pretty genius business model that I'm sure has been used before. But is it a feature that successfully drives people to pay? Does it open too big of feature gap that competitors can differentiate against?

Facebook's privacy is a mess as it is, and it would never (hopefully) happen, but could you imagine facebook under a "Pay for Privacy" model?
I couldn't resist: http://startupdeathclock.com
Kurt Vonnegut has some good stuff. Slaughterhouse Five, Cats Cradle and I really liked A Man Without a Country.

The Discworld series (Terry Prachett) is good if you liked HHG
This means 10000 status updates that mentioned a break-up. I did not guess that at first and was surprised how many of 10000 random updates could have been breakups...
An image of the sun's surface covered in tubes of plasma
This sounds like a campaign by Ritz against HN.
Mesothelioma and Google’s content farm conundrum « Surfmark's Blog
They're somewhat better about that on the "pro" products. Although I'm still annoyed about removing the ExpressCard slot on the 15" MBPs, and that's why I'm still on my 2006 version. It will be able to support USB3 and Light Peak, unlike the top of the line model today.
Kasparov has a 190 IQ.

There are lots of people who play chess as much as Kasparov does. Few of them are even remotely near him in skill.

I'm not sure who the best poker player would be, but I've met most of the names that would be thrown out there if you asked the top people, and they're all scary smart. Piano playing is a different type of intelligence than poker or chess, but whoever the world's best piano player is I promise you has a lot of that type.
Maxima rocks for symbolic math. I prefer it to Mathematica, which is saying a lot. In contrast, octave always feels like "almost-Matlab" and I still prefer the latter.

Also see wxMaxima, which will (among many other things) produce LaTeX for you.
What is a learning community?
The world is US-centric.
I don't think it's really the "fair" price.. it's the price that he, the author, would consider buying the books instead of pirating them. Whether that price is really "fair" is debatable.

Now, I love freedom of information, torrents, open source, and all of that, but putting myself in any author's shoes, I think it would be infuriating to hear this kind of argument.
"I can pirate your book for free, so a fair price would be $1 dollar. I don't care how much work you put in it." (Yes, I know Ian Fleming is dead, but this applies to any other author as well)
Link to Prezi signup: http://prezi.com/profile/signup/
Dear metaphorical Japenese soldier stranded on an island in the South Pacific:

The war is over. You lost.

Love,

The Crushing Imperialist Juggernaut of Common Usage.
That's generally a no no in header files/libraries. If someone does that in a header it brings the entire namespace into global scope. IMO, I like very explicit code so I always use full qualifiers. Short cuts bother me, but that's just my personal preference.
My current feeling is that the culture barrier will focus those growing markets inward before long.

As China and India continue to modernize, their innovators will enjoy much more success in feeding their native markets. Simply: if you're a software entrepreneur in India, does it make more sense to compete with western software companies for western business? Or to sell software that runs on the kinds of machines Indians own, architected with Indian cultural preferences at the fore-front and can grow along with the growing Indian market?

You're hopelessly behind in competing with the west for western markets, but unbelievably advantaged in competing with the west for native markets.

They're only focused on us, for now, because their wages are so advantageous as to make up for the pains in bridging the culture-barrier. As they continue to modernize, those wages will rise well past the point where it makes business sense to continue.
The Undesigned Web
Q&A on QE2: What a Fed Move Would Mean
And as a physicist or mathematician, he would probably do base-e orders.
The ecstasy of Earth from heaven; yes, impractical for terrestrial route planning.
Python Libraries All Researchers Should Know About
Is it true though that politicians focuses on certain case? (With caste based admissions to universities and pandering for votes with these castes (by for instance welfare and job reservation)?)

IMHO, I think that is what China is doing right - no problems caused by special treatment of majority groups.
I do this for one of my webapps. I detect based on the user agent, and just pass off to different templates (I'm using django). So it doesn't really matter what url you use, it just matters what device.

I also have an 'm' subdomain that automatically goes to the mobile version.

I stayed away from the prompt, because mobile browsers are really terrible, and dialogs are that much more terrible.
You should have seen the size of the promo event they had here in february - just to sell it to snowboarders.
Cisco Software Monitors Social Network
People in debt do strange things.
Ask HN: Cassandra in the cloud?
Hi HNers,
I just came to an idea to make a cloud startup which will offer Cassandra DB as a scalable service.
Something like that alreasy exists for Redis and similar.

Since idea by itself is worth nothing it's more than great to share it with you HNers and see your valuable feedback.

Thanks,
B-Scan
Well yes and no, if they're doing their job right they describe the method in such a way that you don't need their code to reproduce their results.

Code should not be Documentation.

Further nobody trusts anybody's code anyway unless it's just a couple of trivial calls to a pre-vetted software package like IRAF, AIPS (to name some astronomy related one), or LAPACK. So generally they don't want your code. the exception is grad students trying to apply your old work to new data because they aren't in a position to be trusted with completely original research yet.

Yes it'd be nice if every one had great readable code and handed over the 2 terabyte data sets that it needs without batting an eye. but in practice code quality is pretty low on the ladder of "things that get in the way of collaboration"
Often languages are chosen based on already existing tools used in a specific research project. That's why it's good to be able to quickly pick up new languages. For example scripting languages integrated in some frameworks, like Scheme in the Festival speech synthesis system.
In the end, this often results in projects involving things like Python, Scheme, bash, R and a bit of tcl ;-).
That is exactly how github works, too: https://github.com/plans
This title is extremely misleading.

2 letter .co.uk, .net.uk, .org.uk, .me.uk domains are being released.

Which makes them 6 alpha char domains instead of 4.
A lot of people would take this opportunity to rant about hackers being dickheads. I'm not going to do that. It's unproductive, and it fails to recognize the contributions hackers and ex-hackers have made to society

Hackers in the first sense are dickheads, full stop.
The 80 chars limit has a justification: expressions that don't fit on 80 chars (or two lines using parens) are not readable anyway. In such a case temporary variables with meaningful names would both help respect the 80 chars constraint and make the expression easier to understand by the reader.

Furthermore having 80 chars is great to have vertically split editors with the code on one panel and the tests or the documentation on the other panel.
Damn, my comment is collapsed in the screenshot. There go my 15 minutes of fame...
Also getting phone calls and letters from your creditors are a psychological cost to most people. The snowball system minimizes the number of outstanding debts (and thus probably also the number of creditors) the fastest.
I hire people, not "programmers", or "managers", or "administrative assistants". From my perspective as an employer, his BSA experience is relevant to any job. I'm very interested in aspects of my employees' personalities as well as their specific job-related performance. Listing his BSA experience reflects his values and experiences outside of work. These are the things that shape who we are, and I want to know who I'm hiring.
XHTML in IE9
Website designed and maintained by
Rossie's & Scottie's Website Development Company

Awwwww
The voting patterns for this prop look interesting: http://vote.sos.ca.gov/maps/ballot-measures/19/

It's surprising that even Contra Costa and Santa Clara counties voted against it. Otherwise, the Bay Area seems to have been the primary driver for this prop.
Hearing you say that stirs the kind of flag-waving patriotism in my British mind that is usually reserved for Americans watching live sports.
When you DON'T need a technical co-founder
There are startups which I think can live without techie co-founders. It is my proposition that if your idea does not solve a core engineering problem then the need to bring in a technical co-founder diminishes. You can get away with hiring the talent as employees rather than as co-founders. Sure, you may need some help in putting together a demo/mockup, but that can be outsourced or done on contract.

Here are a few examples of startups that I think don't require technical co-founders because they are not that difficult to build (that is different from saying they don't need any technical help). AirBnB, CardPool, Fanvibe.
At least in terms of finance. People here may need tricks against procrastination, though.
Ability to experience mayn't align with actual experience; while radio could've increased music diversity, it's effect seemed ultimately homogenizing, and the same may be true of online content.
Digital natives are people that can see the benefits in spite of the architecture, not because of it. They see the world as iphones and gmail, not the TCP/IP stack. They assume functionality that is mind blowing to non-natives. It's not ageist to point out that younger people expect more functionality from technology.
I don't know if I can handle that kind of drama though. Personal issues with Jason Calcanis? Big deal. But I can think of nothing more dramatic than to choose IBM over a hacker. If we allow that, next thing we know we'll start seeing "C++ is better than Lisp" posts. Now that's a hacker soap opera.
Serco?
Disturbing yet wonderful logo...
Google Engineering Management Mistakes
Is this something people would like added to the HN iPhone app I built? I've considered it and built a demos, but I'm not sure it's needed.

http://michaelgrinich.com/hackernews/
If you haven't already, you might also want to check out Sage (http://www.sagemath.org/) It uses python to "glue" together other free math tools (e.g. Maxima) into a unified system with a nice interface.
According to his Wikipedia entry he apparently tried to buy MG Rover in 2005 - which arguably supports your explanation.
Fragmentation, in this case, is the result of an unmanageable amount of choices. There's a happy medium here, and I don't think the number of different Android handsets is anywhere near it.
While I agree there that sharing this information can be informative to entrepreneurs, really the onus is on us to do due diligence on the investors before taking money.
Python has sage and sympy for doing symbolic math. Although admittedly they're quite primitive compared to maple and mathematica (haven't used Maxima, so I can't really compare)
I'd opt for open sourcing it. If you don't want neither GPL, nor a BSD-style license, you might consider a Creative Commons license, something like http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/.
Excerpts:

* One of the key benefits of being bootstrapped is that you would spend, whatever you have pretty carefully and would most likely make right financial decisions.

* when your startup name is easy to say and type, it becomes a lot easier for Word of Mouth Referral.

* Culture really comes from the entrepreneur articulating and promoting their core purpose and core values and then hiring, training, and firing around them.

* Never launch a freemium pricing model until a company is profitable and it can become a paid advertising channel.
I would've called it a slightly anachronistic phrase more than a regionalism:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=%22ag...
There is an apostrophe in that link that HN is apparently stripping out. Just go the the front page of the wiki and you'll see the link.
Seven Languages in Seven Weeks Book
I think it should be the other way around. Elephant with an android hat, since the inners are PHP but the outside is android.
After revisiting this post, I think there is a simple way to state the idea:

The idea is to create a system that tricks email recipients into thinking they were not expected to receive a given message, despite allowing the recipients full knowledge of how the system works.

The first part, however (just tricking the recipients), could be done thousands of ways. For example, spoofed email from a journal service: "Here is a review of what you wrote in your personal, secret journal today: Bob in accounting smells terrible again today, my life sucks... if you believe you received this message in error, please let us know so we can correct our system." So I wonder why it is so necessary to give the recipients full knowledge of how the system works.
Christian Louboutin Boots for Every Occasion
Users who can't buy; customers who don't use
There's no such thing as a universal fair price. There's the situation when the price is lower than your personal valuation of the good, then you buy it, and there's case where it isn't, in which case you don't. (And don't forget opportunity costs when factoring in your "personal price", there's a lot of things I might be willing to spend $10 on in isolation but I can't actually buy all of them, and you have to factor that in to your personal price.)

It's not wrong to sell it for $10, it's not wrong for your price to be $1, the latter fact doesn't give you a license to pirate it simply because your personal price is lower.

You can sort of composite up a semi-universal concept of a "fair price" by looking at a suitably chosen large group of people but it's still just an approximation.
I am with you on Haskell.

It counts on Freedom, Readability, Documentation System (including lhs2tex which will turn your "integrate f 0 a" into \Int_0^a{f dx}), High-level vs low-level, Standard library (including hackage/cabal), Data structures, Module system, Calling syntax, Default arguments (currying), Multiple programming paradigms (there was a saying that Haskell is the best imperative language). It partially counts on most other points.

Myself, I choose Haskell for my research project, as it was best language on (expressiveness times safety) scale. Strong type system certainly helps sweeping out errors.
The background hurts my eyes.
From PEP 8:

> The preferred place to break around a binary operator is after the operator, not before it.

I'd be interested in hearing the justification for this rule. I think that leading a continuation line with the binary operator makes it super-clear that it is a continuation line. What is the benefit of the preferred style? Compare:

if (the_result_of_this_function(on_this_arg) == 10
and this_overly_descriptive_boolean):
do_stuff()

if (the_result_of_this_function(on_this_arg) == 10 and
this_overly_descriptive_boolean):
do_stuff()

To me, the first one is quite clearly a continuation line (no statement can start with "and"). The second requires closer inspection.
This is nice. I, for one, would like to see this enabled by default. It's minimally intrusive and has simple, obvious utility.
Adeo Ressi: How To Perfect The One Sentence Pitch
upvote for edw519 who really said something about this book. And an imaginary downvote for the guys who upvoted this advertisment!
So is there any reason this role couldn't be filled with a friend that you bounce ideas off of (assuming that friend was qualified to comment on them)?
I could care less about common usage!
Probably looked at relationship status changes. I'd personally be interested in seeing the opposite -- i.e., peaks in people starting relationships, as well as the inter-arrival periods of relationships.
The Google Traffic Pump System
"In his essay To Tell a Chemist (1965), Isaac Asimov [7][8][9] claimed that one could distinguish a chemist from a non-chemist by asking a person to read the word "unionized" aloud. With no context given, he said that a chemist will pronounce it "un-ionized", but a non-chemist will pronounce it "union-ized"." --Wikipedia
The guy is a comic -

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201011/ldhansrd/t...

"They decided to devote the words to the most obscene account of Hermann Göring having sexual congress with a lady kangaroo, which ultimately proved fatal to him because it would not stop jumping. After that, the Reverend Wynn decided that there should be no more of that."
I found it interesting that one of the factors mentioned as leading to the defeat was that "Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a law Sept. 30 that dropped the penalty for possession of an ounce of pot from a misdemeanor to an infraction punishable by a $100 fine." (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/11/02/...)
My wife is a Kindergarten teacher who has taught in one of the "roughest" cities in the country as well as "middle class suburbia". We've had many conversations about these topics over the years. I don't want to run on forever about this, but I'll drop a few relevant points I've learned over the years.

1) The comment I replied to above is pretty accurate, especially for younger children. The parents and environment the child is in are the largest influence on their academic success. If the culture of the area is not about education and success in learning, you've got a long uphill battle.

Honestly, you could pump all the money in the world into the worst high school in the country and it won't make a lick of difference if the students don't want to learn. Upping the school's finances won't change the outcomes on the level people are looking for. To get those kinds of results you need to change the culture and community around education. However, if a school/community is simply lacking resources, then it could make a huge difference.

2) Sending your child to Pre-K DOES better prepare them for Kindergarten and school in general. How much a difference one could truly make over another is not something I've ever actually asked my wife. Dinner conversation for tonight :-). I would also love to see the paper araneae had read and run that by her as well.

Education wise Pre-K will help your child with basics - colors, shapes, letters and numbers. However, the biggest thing Pre-K will do is help your child learn to socialize and interact with people their own age in a classroom setting. This doesn't sound like much, but it is actually a big deal.

3) Something not often thought about is WHEN to send your child to Kindergarten. Many schools have policies like "If your child will be 5 years old by December 31st", which may give you a choice. It is NOT always best to send your child to Kindergarten as soon as they are eligible to attend. If your child is ready, by all means send them. But if they're truly not ready, sending them is really not going to help them.
They could at least not stretch the images.
As a customer, I'm actually a fan of the idea. If you aren't paying for something, you are generally the product not the customer (see: http://www.information-age.com/channels/security-and-continu...). If I willingly become a customer, then I don't have to be a product anymore. I like that option.
People who opposed civil rights legislation called those laws "tyranny", too. The word appears to mean "law that I disagree with".
How to Make life Simple Again
> "It manifestly did leave open the question of whether employers would have to allow employees to take one-hitters to their smoke breaks."

Is that unlike the open question of whether employers have to allow employees to have a martini or two at lunch?
They could have won this time if they made decriminalization the goal, instead of trying to end marijuana discrimination. Most Californians probably don't want people going to prison over a few joints.
Video: Pandora Founder Tim Westergren, Unplugged
On the other hand, I love both Wodehouse and Bach.
internet | grep -v Calacanis
I may be out of date, but I always consider the C in B2C to be Consumer, not Customer, which I think makes the distinction much easier to comprehend. The maxim that "it’s B2B when the user is not the person making the purchasing decision." is a reasonable heuristic, but not completely accurate.
It's probably an automated script doing it if he's running any standard software. The person running it probably doesn't speak English and is only aware of smbc in a statistical sense.
Well, if David Bowie's collaborator on the Berlin albums believes it, that's definitely good enough for me!
If your system is complicated enough (which can be the case for complex machine learning or NLP algorithms), an 8 pages paper (common limit for many conferences) cannot describe all the implementation details but those implementation details might be very important to be able to reproduce the results.

Hence code should be both published, well documented and readable.
Generally it helps to bounce ideas off someone who is personally invested in the startup. You tend to value their inputs a lot more too.

Ofcourse, if the other person is a startup veteran, things are different but then they may not have enough time to go into details of your startup
Offer HN: Ride to Cloud Computing Expo
If anybody is headed down to the Cloud Computing Expo in Santa Clara from SF, I'd be happy to give you a ride. I'm departing SOMA at about 10am. (Same offer applies tomorrow morning as well).
This is a great post from a publicity standpoint. It's never a bad thing to put a human face on your business, especially if you're still small.

But, I'm afraid, the only real long-term solution to a security problem is better security. This isn't a people problem, it's a technical problem and will require a technical solution.
No, because unless you can get a medical professional to write you up as an alcoholic (in which case the ADA applies), you can be fired simply for handling a martini at lunch. That isn't an open question. Employment in California is at will, excepting:

* discrimination on the basis of race, color, gender, religion, or national origin

* discrimination over disabilities covered by the ADA (diagnosed drug and alcohol addiction notably included)

* termination over lawful activities conducted outside the work place.

Perverse as this sounds to me, you can in California be fired over a bad haircut, but cannot be fired for marching in a Nazi parade.
Lord James is small fry. This is a country where, in 1976, the former [thanks, zb] Prime Minister summoned 2 journalists to his office, and declared to them:

"I see myself as a big fat spider in the corner of the room. Sometimes I speak when I’m asleep. You should both listen. Occasionally when we meet, I might tell you to go to the Charing Cross Road and kick a blind man standing on the corner. That blind man may tell you something, lead you somewhere."
This is their logo ver2. The ver1 was way simple !
http://www.phpforandroid.net/artwork
It could use better publicity though. I've been here my whole life, and it's far too easy to get the impression that Baltimore is just a satellite to the fed contracting epicenter in DC. That's why I'm so stoked about this event! I'll be there for sure.