skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Dates back to Fortran...

I would expect it is far older than that. Mathematicians and others of that ilk have long used i, j, and k when writing sums using the capital sigma notation (and when writing products using the capital pi notation).

Fortran almost certainly acquired it from that.
I don't understanding your pricing.

Well, most web based app subscriptions are based on time. Instead of forcing people to pay for time they won't use or need (e.g., a monthly subscription or longer), you can get as little as a day, and add more as you need it.

If I choose the basic plan, can I create unlimited e-books for one day

Yes.
Has HN had a thread where people share pics of their desks/work environments?

That would be interesting (at least to me).
...and just like that, Facebook revamps profile to add Twitter-like sharing, MySpace-like focus on pictures and media, and LinkedIn-like employment, education, and projects details.

This is brilliant. It's good ole Facebook with Twitter + LinkedIn + MySpace. Executed brilliantly!
This is exactly what I am doing. I am getting my undergrad degree in Molecular/Cellular Biology with a Computer Science minor; and am lining up going on to a PhD in Biomedical Engineering. After that, I plan on starting my own bio-tech company just about anywhere but the United States with a focus on prion and autoimmune diseases.

I would start the company now if not for the issue of funding. As I do not possess the correct shibboleths (i.e., formal education, published papers, etc.), the odds of funding are literally zero (you can stow the replies claiming otherwise, I've checked). And the no funding trend continues despite being able to show time and again that my ideas are congruent with, and sometimes predict, the latest medical research in the above specified fields.

Also, if anyone else is wanting to do a similar track, the key to having your degree be an advantage to getting out of the United States is ensuring your university (and specifically your degree) is accredited by a signatory to the Washington Accord.
Yep, looks like Tumblr has some issues at the moment.
http://blotbot.co/#28622622
I'd hate to think of the legal implications of hosting information the government deems confidential, within the United States. I imagine there will be some fallout over this for people mirroring in the US.
Related discussion on Slashdot ( http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/10/25/2230205/The-Futur... )
I agree that for most requirements I have, an SQL database can deliver the data I need, quickly, unless I am missing an index or using an ORM tool.

For Atomic, put all the related stuff in a document and commit it.

Your issue with home pages has a couple of obvious solutions:

1. Deal with the fact that some users don't have a home page and consider them not yet signed up.

2. Create the home page first, before you create the user

3. Put the home page in the user document, or put the user document in the home page document.

Going with a NonSQL store gives you more than speed, it gives you simplicity and flexibility along some dimensions.

We run our SQL database with replication and the replication is not synchronous. If we really loose our primary (bomb blast), the replica can be out of date and we can loose data. We are a very large company, and all the databases are configured like this. Many NoSQL solutions (Google) are configured more conservatively.
You used to be able to create a Facebook app with some viral hook and slap ads on it and make hundreds to thousands a day. Now it's much, much harder due to Facebook cracking down so hard on virals, but it can still be done.

Another way is to build some kind of content site and get into the arbitrage game. That is, drive a small amount of traffic to it, ruthlessly optimize your ad placements to max each visitor's returns, and then once you're paying less for traffic than you're getting back out, crank up the dial on traffic being sent to your site.
A third of all Americans dying of medical malpractice is simply a fairly bold claim.

Again, no offense - please feel free to quote the JAMA article itself that supports this. Atkinson does a bit more than simply cite actual journal articles, he's taking, to put it lightly, some liberties with information he compiles and personally interprets at will.
Remember this great article on the NYT (Zuck's most Valuable Friend)?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/business/03face.html

A few minutes later, Mr. Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-
founder and chief executive, walks into the company’s
headquarters here, says a few hellos and heads to a
conference room where he and Ms. Sandberg huddle for
an hour. The two executives end the week the same
way, with a closed-door meeting on Friday afternoon.
They discuss products, strategy, deals, personnel —
and each other.

Given he has no office of his own, it makes sense that they hold their daily meeting in the conference room rather in his or her office.
Yes nine women can make nine babies in nine months, but they're all going to be born in 9 months (give or take), which doesn't help you have a baby in 1 month. If you plan it right, you can have 1 baby a month with a 9 month delay, but again that's 8 months too late for a deadline.

The saying here is essentially akin to too many cooks spoil the broth. Put it this way: 1 brick layer can lay 9ft of brick in 9 days (no factuality here). If you're building a wall you can only go one row at a time. 2/3 brick layers will speed up the process. However 9 brick layers won't produce a 9ft tall brick wall in 9 days because 6 brick layers will be sat on their arses drinking coffee.

9 brick layers can produce 9 9ft walls in 9 days, but won't be producing a 9ft wall in a day 9 days continuously working as a team.

The statement doesn't preclude that work can be produced efficiently, for example you could easily have 4 brick layers build 4 9ft walls - AKA a house - in 9 days.

The aim is to find your fundamental limit and work with it. If you need a baby every month, sure plan ahead and you could have a baby monthly starting in 9 months, if you can account for that 9 month waiting period. You will never get a baby in 1 month with a team of 9 women and only 1 of them being pregnant.
200 years in 4 minutes
Web hosting for your clients can be an easy way to generate some passive income.
Am I the only one who, after upgrading, noticed that it stripped out all my previously filled in information relating to employer, etc? I suppose it's for the whole "projects" bit in work-related things, but last I checked we have these things called data migrations. At this point, leave the old info as defaults and let people enhance it.

I find it hilarious because, while I don't agree with half of Facebook's public/private settings, I also tend not to give a shit for my own personal reasons. Just sayin', you want all my info, I try to give it, you take it away...

The splash page for this also reeks of Apple-esque design. Perhaps this was done in other Facebook promotional pieces as well and I'm just now noticing it, but I wanted to point it out for the hell of it.
You'd think a "Mac OS X Scripting Language" would be an OSA plugin, but apparently not.
Usually (at least on reddit IAmA, where I'm a mod), verification is done by the poster uploading a picture of himself holding up a sign with the current date and something like "I'm Captain Crunch". If you want to do an IAmA there, I'd be happy to verify it (and, consequently, everything else), and it might get you some more donations...
Couldn't the other browsers yank the code from Chrome and use Google's servers too?
Considering what's been happening last few days; Is anyone at all surprised by this?

I am however intrigued to see where all this will lead..
Navigating Past Nihilism
On the contrary. A laptop with a small screen and decent trackpad (like the Air) is perfect to focus on whatever you need to work on at the moment. For some people (me included), having extra tools or real estate just makes it easy to find distractions instead of working.
OffLog : High volume reporting on a limited system
Google Chrome saved me $4,500
So my machine has been struggling for a long time - it's a Macbook Pro 2.33Ghz 3 gig RAM 320gig/7200RPM HD. I bought it in 2007.

I push the machine pretty hard, with ten to fifteen applications running, tons of tabs open for my web browsing along with multiple user accounts simultaneously logged in which I switch between.

The whole machine is sluggish and I often have to wait seconds for things to happen. Nothing is snappy any more.

The main problem is that Firefox is constantly bumping up towards 100% CPU and chewing huge amounts of RAM - around 1.5 gig.

So I decided that its time for a new machine - a new Macbook Pro with 8 gig RAM and a 256gig SSD. I specced it all out on the Apple store and the price - ouch - was close to AUD$4,558. Whatever I thought - it's my main work machine, I really need something that's fast enough to get my daily work done without grinding and chugging.

In the meantime I decided to switch to Google Chrome which I had been using a bit on the side for a while and it seemed pretty quick. So I totally switched to Chrome for OSX and shut down Firefox for the last time.

Suddenly - a snappy machine again! Even with large numbers of tabs open my web browsing is fast. Even better, CPU utilisation is generally low (often under 5%) and RAM is usage low too (often under 150MB).

I've got my fast machine back! Everything is working better, everything is more snappy. Applications switch fast, web browsing is snappy, and everything just works.

I feel a bit sad about leaving Firefox behind - I want to support it and I've used it for years. I don't want to speak ill of this old friend.

So the incentive to buy a new machine has gone. My 2007 vintage Macbook Pro is still doing the job well. I'm sure I'll need a new machine sometime soon but right my 2007 era Macbook Pro does everything I need, at a good snappy pace. Thanks Google Chrome!
One thing that's fascinating me is how they're letting this update deploy virally, by itself.

You sign up for the new profile and your friends are going to see you did. If several of your friends do it, you're going to see that a number of them did. This is bound to be at least somewhat convincing, given that you trust your friends more than the faceless evil of Facebook Corp, and therefore it might be worth doing, and your curiosity will be piqued.

Given Facebook's history with negative feedback around new features, this seems to me like the most brilliant part of the entire new profile - and it's very subtle, too.
GameJackal Enterprise 4.1.1.2 Final + rus
Using "Book" and "Burn" together probably isn't the greatest marketing choice.

My first thought was destruction a la Bradbury; a couple ticks later the "Burn a CD" analogy came to mind.
Favorite part:

"And we're proud of the fact that we don't load Optimus 7 with a lot of "LG apps" or a fancy animated UI which gets old in a few weeks. :-)"

Nice little jab at HTC there.
Varies from poor to amazing.

"I have met Jesus, he was a nice guy" -> "ice melt cheese"

"hacker news is amazing" -> "hacker news"

"are you afraid of santa claus?" 100% correct

"if a woodchuck could chuck wood how much wood would a woodchuck chuck" 100% correct
I'm a little curious as to what you mean by "Twitter-like sharing". Wasn't the old way more like Twitter?
Like others have said, WordPress themes are a good way to make some cash. I run one of those sites and need some help, so feel free to send me an email. adam [dot] barber 1 [at] gmail [dot] com
I'm actually very mildly worried (0.5%) that my parents might actually try to buy something based off that last entry.
I think this guy's comment (who says he works at Twitter on trends) is a valid explanation for this: http://studentactivism.net/2010/12/05/wikileaks-twitter-3/#c...

I'm not so sure it's a giant Twitter/State Department Consipiracy.
Now it's much, much harder due to Facebook cracking down so hard on virals, but it can still be done.

Bummer. I've got a viral Facebook app in the pipeline.

Is this what you're referencing?

"On September 21, 2010 Facebook took games off the news feed, limiting viral channels to discovery stories and invites." http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny/game-building-on-a-bud... ("Distributing on Facebook" section)

"Facebook is cracking down on free promotion | kills profile boxes" http://rooturaj.com/social-media/facebook-is-cracking-down-o...

Is there more to it?
For a new company being incorporated, how does this compare to an 83(b) election in terms of tax-relief benefits?
Twitter, don't you do it, don't even think about it.
I'm largely talking about where I see Facebook going, rather than just this specific update.

Overall, I think the Twitter-like feature updates have been numerous and obvious.
We always need to keep in mind the bigger picture. Sure he made some poor decisions wrt business and relationships, but he probably always had a roof over his head and never went hungry. In first world countries if your startup fails, you can always go get some corporate job. If your crops fail in some poorer nations, you'd starve.

Suddenly it seems a lot harder to truly "screw up"...
The icon appears in the right of the input box. Appears perfectly on Chrome 8.0.552.215 which my Mac shows is up-to-date.
It was rather good, but not even close to rely on it for anything practical. It felt a bit like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FFRoYhTJQQ
Because it's a Chrome feature? x-webkit-speech
learn about people in intricate detail - about their diet, habits, health history, etc. prior to diagnosing

It takes lot of time, and the patient won't remember anything. However, the device can know all that and with precision. The patient doesn't need to tell the device that he smokes, but it'll discover alone and with high accuracy. It can uses for example, a combination of radiographic images of the lungs, some proteins concentration in the blood....
Apparently 355 people have decided it's worth the risk. I would honestly love to host a mirror but I'd be hosting it on an AWS server in Virginia which would almost certainly get my account banned. If I had service outside of the US I would host a mirror in a heartbeat.
maybe this one
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1507695
Chrome 8.0.552.215 also works on Mac.
Yep, I'm in for a meetup in the Rhein/Main area, preferably Frankfurt.
Boycotting Amazon and Paypal
Hardly, this story is about the means by which established institutions and government agencies will stretch the law to try to thwart the impact of technological change.
This is not about sex. It's about the disintermediation of the traditional media and irreversible transparency of government and the exposure of truth being enabled by distributed technology.
Every hacker should care deeply about what is happening to this particular hacker, and the manipulative techniques being used to smash the technologically-driven freedom of speech impact that the organization for which he has become a personification represents.
Ecru Timberland Kids 6 Inch Premium Waterproof Boots
No offense, but your comment sounds like a glossy press release or a sappy existential introduction to a documentary. It contains little to no concrete information or positive claims, of the empirical or speculative variety. It has a communicative magnitude of nearly zero to someone reading the comments because they are interested in substantive answers to the OP's question.

For that reason, I downvoted.
+1 for Frankfurt.
I half wish I could walk through the parking lots near the papers which got early access to these. I wouldn't be surprised to meet some interesting people loitering in the area who happen to have some nifty gadgets.

Then again, they might have skiped all that and just had a chat with the local IT department, or even the upstream providers. Given that you can strongly suspect that they're being watched, anyone who wants to could simply watch the watchers.

Of course, I really doubt they'd appreciate that very much, so maybe it's just as well that I don't live anywhere near the papers in question.
I have to say though, that finding work is a skill of its own. You should setup a site, start posting all over the place, etc. You want to have a lot of channels to get work through, when you're starting out you'll have to spend more time looking for work than doing work. Also, get in touch with freelance professionals in your area. You can get a lot of business through referrals and the sale is so much easier when they've been referred from someone they trust.

As others have said, WordPress themes.

The market is crazy right now, go find a designer and partner with them to make themes. I found the whole niche by chance, I needed a designer for another project and saw on craigslist a designer looking for someone to create a theme from his designs for a new site in exchange for a free design.

I replied, did the theme and setup his new site, then we started working together. I ended up dropping the other project once I saw the demand. Saving that free design for something else now.

He's one of the best designers I've worked with, show him a few designs you like from his portfolio tell him a little bit about your company/project and he comes back with a stunning design in a day or two. A few days later I've got it turned into a WP theme. You can see his portfolio here: http://highendcustomlayouts.com/portfolio

We're working on a RoR app to take PSD files and turn them into WP themes in about 5-15 minutes.

Also, find a writer, if you can offer the whole package from copy to design to hosting it makes getting the deal that much easier.

We're starting to get pretty busy with work doing this so if you drop me an email I might be able to hook you up with some work in the future.
Well then you're missing something that some of us haven't seen. Could you answer his question instead of vaguely sidestepping it, please?
Las Cruces Small Business Development Center
Mostly the trainer's job to hone technique, despite not competing? That doesn't sound right. You might want to make your point more explicitly.
Shucks, you beat me to it, and with a better name too. Congratulations for being quick on the draw. I'm going to fork it and help work on it.
I had the same problem with firefox. Safari/Chrome use fewer resources on my macbook.
Air Force Unveils Fastest Defense Supercomputer, Made of 1,760 PlayStation 3s
Hmm, of the mathematics grad students I've met, I don't actually notice a huge correlation between diligent, hardworking students and the most successful students. Some of the most diligent are just... not great at coming up with independent, novel mathematics, though they can do okay on exams. And there are some vaguely slackerly types who do great, novel work. Of course, some effort is a prerequisite, so the most slackerly just fail out of grad school entirely. But past some threshhold sufficient to be able to do the work at all, it sure looks like some sort of natural talent, or aptitude acquired at a previous stage of life, is what differentiates the mediocre from the great grad students. I can't say for certain, but unless I know totally unrepresentative people, it doesn't seem to be a matter of who puts in 80 hrs/wk versus 40 (or even 30); some of those on the low end of hours spent are very good and produce impactful theses, while some who work all the time are just not great at it.
The question "Do you want to conquer all of he internet?" sounds like a line sprung straight out of Die Hard 4 movie script. >_>
Or the charges could be totally right...and he is a douche.
Why is that sad? As these get more and more autonomous they will be capable of targeted assassination. The same hardware accelerated face-recognition chip in your $50 point-and-shoot camera will wind up making point-and-shoot a taboo phrase.
Try putting a SSD in it. It'll bring back a lot of "snappiness". Hands down best hardware purchase I've ever made.
FYI: Your RAM usage is not 150MB, that's only for the main process. Each tab is it's own process and has it's own RAM utilization as well as CPU utilization.
Had you already uninstalled Flash, or were you running Firefox with Flash installed?

Uninstalling Flash seems to have had a salutary effect on my Safari sessions, though I can't speak to Firefox, having given up on Firefox years ago for anything except the occasional CSS/JS debugging session.
That could work. However, what happens when I'm asked to break down my report by whether the purchasers of the SKU were new customers or returning customers? (Also, a count is not sufficient, since someone might want the report run for a specific date range).

I could keep two counts in the SKUs document, of course. It doesn't sound very efficient, though, if the procedure when asked for some new report is that I have to go modify the database document layout to specifically support that new report, then do some kind of back fill, and then modify the code that processes orders to fill in the new stuff as orders are processed.

As I said, I didn't get far into NoSQL, so maybe it is a lot easier than it seems to me now.
Heh, I had nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon. :P
I had almost the same experience. I had a 2007 MacBook Pro and one day dumped Firefox for Chrome. the difference was amazing.

I eventually did upgrade to a 2010 MacBook Pro/8GB/SSD. It came put to just under $3k after taxes. Expensive, yes. But the speed difference is amazing. It completely changed my work and productivity. Using a computer 8+ hours a day, it is easy to forget how much time you loose a day/week/month waiting on app to load, files to open, etc. The 2010 MBP (with SSD) is the nicest machine I've ever worke with.
Leslie Stahl asks Zuckerberg more dumb questions on 60 Minutes
I would suggest using FlashBlock or equivalent on Macs. (Gruber even suggests uninstalling Flash, chrome has builtin Flash I guess.)

Also, keep an eye on the new Firefox 4 betas, they are much snappier.

That said, it is true that Webkit based browsers are currently the best choice in terms of speed and stability.

Opera is good on Windows, and has advanced on the Mac UI wise, however it is not as stable as Safari on my mac.
I'll have to give couchdb a look.
Well yeah, it's made from nectar, but there is usually a small amount of pollen, some amino acids, plant sterols and fats and so on.

That's like saying that banana-flavouring is LIKE bananas because it contains the same ester.

But you're right about the OTT reaction... The panicked, hand-wringing, "How COULD they?!" exclamations just show that someone doesn't really have a good grasp of the realities of being a non-human sapient.
Homemade Robotic Xylophone Plays Holiday Melodies
I've been considering setting up a mirror, and wondering about this is the only reason I haven't yet...
We'll need mathematics professors with neater handwriting if you ever hope to be able to distinguish one hanzi from another, though...
Ask HN: Is it legal to scrape a full text article from its source
Is it legal to scrape a full text article and present it on another website with credit to the original source?
Did you know Mac OS X ships with speech recognition
Evil PDFs...this time with feeling
I am looking for the security engineers on HackerNews. I know you guys/gals exist here somewhere...anywhere?

I have been doing research to find a better way to identify malicious PDF files. This topic needs to spread out further and gain some traction, so my results can be verified and testing in different environments. It would also be nice to maybe pick up a few more people to help handle everything that I would like to do.

Thoughts and opinions are desired!

http://blog.9bplus.com
Most politicians who have dealt with the usa internationally will have their dirty laundry aired.

There seems to be some pretty massive stories coming out in the news, for many countries on an hourly basis. I only see this snowballing, and the effects will be seen shortly and into the far future.

This is a massive attack on the whole political class. Not just a scandal in one country, but in most - at the same time.

Very interesting times indeed.