skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The biggest issue with this design is that there's no incentive to put in effort for better predictions.

Take it to the next level; design this for Mechanical Turk (https://github.com/aantix/turkee), and make this offer; for each prediction received, get a nickel. If you're on the right side with your prediction, receive an extra nickel. If you're within 0.5%, receive an additional nickel.

Not enough people utilize the "bonus" feature of Mechanical Turk as financial incentive to increase the quality of data they receive. You don't have to pay everyone the same. Reward better input.
Why leaks are so toxic to secretive entities
Don't get me wrong, the stories themselves are perfectly appropriate for HN, it's the comments (many of them very highly rated) that worry me. Comments like:

- "Anyone surprised he hasn't 'disappeared' yet?"

- "I have a conspiracy theory that the day he does get rubbed out, he won't publicly die, he'll just be "hiding" forever. Some nefarious organization will privately fill his role and take over Wikileaks."

From http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1948734:

- "The value of Wikileaks is that it makes secrecy more difficult for governments [...] Sadly, much of what has been leaked shows simply that the government is putting on a show for the American people and that much of what is kept secret is done so for propaganda reasons, not security reasons."

- "If public release of this information is damaging to US interest, the answer should not be to suppress this information, but rather to behave in an agreeable way in the first place."

- "So, yes. I do say that governments should have no secrets."

- "Every time I hear someone criticize Wikileaks it just seems to me like they simply don't want to know what's happening in the world."

From http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1945352:

- "...the only reason for political parties is to have places where various special interests can line up against each other."

- "The government is censoring our means of communications, end of story."

- "While it no longer makes economic sense to manufacture buggy whips, perhaps there is a Renaissance in the construction and sale of jack boots?"

I'm not 100% pro-government, and I'm not at all pro-American (though I think America has not-completely-deserved bad reputation), but these issues are complicated and nuanced, and I get the impression many of these commenters think they know a whole lot more than they actually do. A lot of this stuff is on the same level of discourse I expect from YouTube comments, not Hacker News, and I find it kind of upsetting because this is one of the few public communities where I'm pretty consistently impressed by the level of discourse.

So my apologies if it seems like I'm lashing out, but I really don't like seeing this bizarre late-night-AM-radio underside of HN.
But more likely not. More likely that word is exaggeration, lying, etrapolating beyond one's knowledge, or a product of a myriad of other human errors. But let both be heard: the unedited and the edited.
Teammates think Derek
>If I were to choose a single inventor for Scheme, I would have chosen Sussman, not Steele.

Yes, I was disappointed too. Sussman should be there. He is one my personal favorites.
So basically you want a guy who knows how to make money to work for you? Am I missing something?
Big Nerd Ranch needs a loan
Good post.... I am a Java developer with almost 10 yrs of experience and I know I often make that mistake even on Job interviews:).... The problem is that people used to Java tend to think more about the intuitive consequence of passing by ref vs value. When a Java dev thinks of passing by reference he's thinking: "I can alter the state of the reference and the changes would be visible globally, including from within the calling context". In other words Java devs think about altering arguments in terms of altering their state as opposed to altering the reference which is just a numeric address to a memory location. People who program in languages lacking object/class-like structures are more aware of the need to use parameters both as arguments and return values, something that is foreigner to Java programmers.

I haven't done any serious C++ programming in years and I have to admit the examples you used to demonstrate your point; ie modifying the value of arguments appears very strange to me now, I obviously did a lot of that when I did C/C++ development but not having done it in such a long time it really does seem like an unusually way of getting return values:)
Woo! Thanks for the mention, man.
There are several reasons for having a criminal justice system; rehabilitation is but one. Others include deterring crime, incapacitating dangerous violent offenders to separate them from society, and yes, offering a sense of retribution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_law#Objectives_of_Crim...
How Does Solar Power Work? Photovoltaics Explained
You seem to be confusing revenge with justice. A fugitive is hardly getting rehabilitated.
Groupon would be Google's GeoCities. Not worth 2 billion and certainly not worth 5 billion.
Yeah, I was looking for Rich Hickey after answering the obvious and popular ones.
Crowdsourcing Movies: Can Amazon Really Change Hollywood?
Ask PG: What ideas are you tired of seeing
and which ones just don't seem to work in real world based on YC experience
Java is in good company. Lisp is also pass by value.
Perhaps 92% is poor in a lot of scenarios, but for this type of approach it's a good accuracy (within some 1-delta confidence). The unfortunate part is that it really was just a simple naive bayes bag-of-words, and it's not surprising that it did so well on one test case (apple). Extending that to help general NLP in any way would be much more difficult.
Well, you thought wrong. Or rather, you thought what a few squishy-minded idealists like to think. But that's not really what the criminal justice system is about.

The desire to revenge ourselves upon those who do us wrong is a perfectly natural and normal part of human nature -- as natural as curiosity or love. If you've ever been the victim of a crime or another injustice you'll know the strength of the feeling. Where there is no functioning criminal justice system, private vengeange is a major problem, often tearing societies apart in murderous generations-long feuds. So as a major part of civilization, we outsource our revenge to the state, allowing victims to gain satisfaction against their attackers in an ordered and sensible way.

Deterrence of future crimes, temporary removal of criminals from the streets, rehabilitation of bad people into good people (which, incidentally, hardly ever happens) -- these are all secondary goals. The primary goal is to enable our natural human thirst for vengeance to be satisfied in a neat and controlled way.
Translation agency EVS Translations blog
Replace "citizen" with "president" and you've stated actual U.S. policy (as represented in movies and novels, anyway.) The Iranian nuclear scientists who were assassinated on their way to work recently -- if we (the U.S.) killed them, Obama will never know about it. If, on the other hand, some other country did it without our help, the CIA might share that information with him.
Well, if an alleged rapist starts making a big noise about himself, then it's not too surprising that he suddenly finds his rape case on the top of the investigating officers' pile of cases.

I have no idea whether he's guilty, but he should certainly return to Sweden to stand trial.
Security. Speed. Control.
So... Chrome, then.
Wow, i had no idea plastic scm existed, pretty cool. No capistrano module yet?
URLs seem to be included too - my top word was "clicky" and that's because I use getclicky.com 's URL shortener - clicky.me
The Lightest Oxygen Concentrator
An oxygen concentrator is a device used for medical health to provide oxygen therapy to patients with respiratory illnesses.
+1 for this. It worked for me. Although (and there may have been other reasons for this), the effect fleeted with time.
The US actually came out of this looking pretty good. For example, everyone was convinced that the diplomatic office was strong-arming various allies in the middle east to take action against Iran, specifically their nuclear program. But the cables show that those allies were actually strongly in favor of action against Iran, sometimes even taking the initiative. In general, as Gates said, there is a "lack of any significant difference between what the U.S. government says publicly and what these things show privately", which as a US citizen, I am very relived to know :-)
Jonathan Harris: The Web's Secret Stories
This type of data structure is sometimes called a "rope". (get it?)
Wikileaks just made the world more repressive
Also, Fidelity's checking account: http://personal.fidelity.com/accounts/aong/sca_learn.shtml.c...
Ask HN: Best find-a-cofounder sites?
Any consensus on the best sites to find technical cofounders?

I've looked around a bit and most of these sites seem very young and/or don't have a lot of a traffic..

Any suggestions?
Since when is 'excellent' an emotion?
I'm a person currently battling Stage IV cancer, with a 30% chance of surviving 3 years, and which I got from a vitamin D deficiency (Advanced Nodular Melanoma). My Vitamin D deficiency was off the charts, attributed to an entire life in front of a computer (to say i'm "pale" would be an understatement, as i'm sure is the same for a lot of us on this site).

Every few days a new link is sent to me about "new studies" showing that Vitamin D in 'x' amount or 'y' amount is required/dangerous/whatever.

I see one of the best Oncologists in the country about my ongoing treatment, and he has had me on 3000IU a day over the last 6 months, and it has made me feel better in so many ways. Everyone says I look healthier, I have more energy, I sleep better, and I just feel more "alive", even as the cancer eats away at me inside.

I'm not knowledgeable enough to weigh in one what the perfect amount is, or what the limit is, as I don't understand most of it, but 1 thing I know is that the deficiency vs how I feel now is 2 different people, so it's definitely an important health aspect that needs to be better understood.
This classy response by Gates is but a brief glimpse of honesty from an otherwise hysterical, paranoid, and secretive government. A statement like this would never have occurred if Assange had not released these documents.

The standard rhetoric from Washington is that it's important to keep secrets, and that's why so much is classified, and why it needs to remain classified. Assange AND Gates have demonstrated that this is not true, that release of these cables and the earlier military leak (which DoD found did NOT reveal any sensitive intelligence sources or methods) do not seriously threaten our safety.

Contrast that with statements from Sarah Palin, Congressperson Peter King, and others, who are basically calling for Wikileaks to be classified as a terrorist organization. King in particular noted that the requirement seems to be met -- that Wikileaks represents a "clear and present danger" -- which seems to be contradicted by Gates' statement. Also, in academic political science, terrorism is generally defined as -violence- against a non-military target to achieve a political end, so there's no terrorism involved here from an academic perspective. If King is correct and that's the requirement, it is too broad.

Cablegate has thus been valuable in demonstrating hypocrisy among politicians and political hacks. If there's a story here, it's that politicians are trying to whip Americans into a frenzy over some embarrassing but not critical leakage.
Anyone seen an article about the alleged rape with more up to date information than this?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20101118/wl_afp/swedencrimeinter...
One would think that one's opinions on:

a) Whether wikileaks's recent actions have been good or bad, and

b) Whether one individual forced sex upon another individual in a hotel room in Enkoping last August

would be uncorrelated. And yet I can predict your opinion on one with quite high accuracy based on your opinion on the other.
There is never "anyone home" at Google support. Whether it be a non-payment, or other support issue, getting hold of a human being is impossible.

Business interests, consumers, customers all placed disadvantaged, inconvenienced as Google rakes in billions.

I hope some legal action is initiated to right these wrongs.
Facebook Looking for New Home in Menlo Park?
People don't do those in JavaScript?

when you have to add pagination to sorting, you have to send the sort column to the database server.
TTY-based group scheduling
Sure, every startup needs users.

However, Carwoo is a marketplace (for buying and selling cars), which differentiates it from other consumer-facing web startups. A web-based marketplace is scalable only if it reaches a critical mass. Without a critical mass, it will stagnate or worse, become irrelevant. As such, any service that creates a new marketplace needs to think of initial customer acquisition as a core value-add. Because, without the critical mass, it is not going too far.

Further, getting to a critical mass is the biggest thing that will differentiate CarWoo from any competitor, as making a functional clone of CarWoo (the web site) is arguably trivial.
I wonder how many other sites put in CSRF tokens but don't validate.
he's not been charged.
It's a great article. And your use of 'excellent' was warranted, because the article is, well, excellent.

Even folks who don't agree with it have to admit that it frames the issue (as Assange sees it) with genuine clarity. In all the hype surrounding Wikileaks, this was the first mention I'd seen of what Assange actually said about his intentions.
This doesn't really have anything to do with this case.

Look, there's a woman somewhere in Sweden who claims that Julian Assange raped her. Either he did, or he didn't. If he did, he should be hung from the tallest tree. If he didn't, she should be hung from the tallest tree. But it's an extremely serious charge either way.
If your biggest problem is not knowing whether the capital gains tax rate is going to be 15% or 25% in ten years then you don't have enough competition.

Whining about uncertainty is the signal that capital has run out of things to complain about.
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." — Brian W. Kernighan.

I think good programmers value simplicity and clarity more than the average person because they have more experience with and a better understanding of complexity and nuance. It's easy to build incomprehensible software: just don't make an effort to keep it simple.

I would think the same is true of diplomacy. Without a strict policy of honesty and open dealing, national embarrassment is practically inevitable. It's unreasonable to believe that you can build sound foreign relations on lies and deceit.

Diplomats, like lawyers, are effective because they are persuasive. Not because they are good liars.
>he should certainly return to Sweden to stand trial.

He hasn't been charged with anything.
I really believe that this is one of the greatest actions to happen to democracy in a long time

That's nice. Because it's not the greatest thing to happen to Afghanistan democracy for a long time, given the vigour with which the Taliban seem to be using it (and previous leaks) to identify and punish (ie, murder) Afghani informers.
Another interesting point is the generation of unique IDs that weren't cryptographic. The uid in src=<uid> shouldn't be guessable, right? It looks like it just went a simple transformation that was easily reversible.

On the other hand, if the CSRF tokens were validated, the uid field needn't be guessable.
It was actually a method of using wikipedia to build your corpus for any ambiguous word to automatically build some word sense disambiguation in your application. One word was just a simple example of using that data.
Learning about Botox training
As a physician, I would like to say one thing that this Botox training will definitely help to improve my medical skills.it will show how to evaluate the face properly and how to apply Botulinum to improve the upper aspect of the face.
As far as 'FRAGILE' markings making a difference I can assure you, since I ship UPS every day, that they treat every box equally (poorly). There is no preferential treatment for any package, and the heavier the packages are the worse they travel. I watched my driver knock over a flat-screen TV three times one day during a pickup. He had it standing on edge and it wouldn't stay upright, but after three tries at knocking it over he put it flat under a shelf.
Currently no. Hacker Monthly is *still all about the stuff that's been voted up in the previous month on HN.
I completely agree... I don't understand politically why the US is making such a fuss about this whole situation. I can tell you that there are only three groups of entities hurt by this: 1) Despotic regimes who are coming off as bad via the US intelligence leaks, and who are now trying to circle the wagons because they are afraid their citizens will feel empowered since the 'world's greatest superpower' has a compromising leak. 2) American lawmakers and media who are overreacting about so very little. 3) Hillary Clinton, who can now forget about ever becoming president.
Anyone who wants to take on the US government would be better off if they didn't have a visible figurehead.

Americans need to personalize the enemy. It's one reason China is so confounding - Americans simply have no idea who's in charge there, and hating 'the Chinese' as a nation has more than a whiff of bigotry... yet it's hard to get worked up about nebulous concepts like 'the Communist party'. Americans need their Hitler or Tojo, Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam, Ahmadinejad, or Bin Laden.
I wonder when Mudge will get off his lazy talentless ass and complete CINDER? ;-)

Whoa! --It's just a joke and pure sarcasm.

If you didn't laugh, you probably don't know about the complexity and difficulty faced by the DARPA CINDER project, or you don't realize how dedicated and talented Pieter "Mudge" Zatko is.

Automating behavioral profiling heuristics is a very heady task and well worth studying even if you only have a passing interest in the topic. If you like "undecidable" problems, you'll really enjoy it.

http://www.darpa.mil/sto/solicitations/sn10-68/index.html

Knowing a bit about the goals of the CINDER project will hopefully give a bit of enlightenment to some Sec. Gates statements.
I'd say it's a mistake to either reduce Wikileaks to Assange or reduce the leak-dynamic to Wikileaks. Technology has made leaking very easy. Someone is going to do it.

There are many justifications you could come up with, someone will use one of them.

Leaking, for example, seems inherently easier than file sharing and that hasn't stopped for a while now.
Except he's never been actually under threat of arrest until now. He's been "living as a fugitive" and "moving from place to place" for attention-whoring purposes, not because he needs to.
The list of textile-related terms which correspond to data structures includes string, rope, cord, yarn, weave, weft, thread, and even quipu. It's getting kind of ridiculous.
If a single actor can disrupt the system that much by releasing some information casually available to some 3m US military personnel, the system is broken.
I can't possibly imagine that an intelligent person who's basically got a huge target on his head from every government in the world would act in any way that could be considered questionable.

They're looking for some way to crucify him; do you really think he'd just hand them something?
Askers vs. Guessers
PG has mentioned before that anything which touches label music is almost certainly doomed.

But it's risky to make a list of things to categorically avoid. Things are too unstable at the moment. We don't have a lot of practice living in a future that hasn't happened yet. We know of a lot of things that have failed repeatedly in the past, but will they continue to fail?
Because unlike other people, most Americans drink their own kool-aid, and most believe the fictitious qualities that the government tells them to believe.

When we grew up in Soviet Union, we knew propaganda when we heard it or saw it. We didn't criticize it in public, but in private we laughed at it.

I am surprised at how uncritical Americans are of their own history, political issues, external relations, and media bias,

Most believe they have the most objective and free press and the most democratic government system (they are even willing to export it!).

So if most feel like they live in a democracy and feel like they can vote and their vote can really count, then they should be held responsible for the result of their vote (or lack of).
Http://www.tiket2.com/indonesia/tiket-pesawat-padang-PDG-batam-BTH.html
SimpleDesktops - some of the best minimalist wallpaper period
I'd love to see some more articles on the subject out there, definitely take the time to post something. Entity or sentiment would be my first choices :)
There has yet to be even one instance of this being shown. Lots of 'omg informers are probably getting axed,' but zero 'this dude who was named in the leaks died a grisly death.'
I am glad you found the comments helpful.

I think your response here helps develop the position more clearly. Nevertheless, I think you bring out a good point yourself, "HN is a more technical crowd", and as such, another reason for a poor response to the opening maybe a poor fit for this community. You may need to locate a better channel to acquire your acquirer.
Government handling of technology is often naive and ineffective...
I'm guessing there are a million tiny problems which now have to be papered over. Example: there was a public insult to the President of France, which no doubt then obliges the US Ambassador to Paris to bend over backwards to make nice with Mr Sarkozy all over again.

Meanwhile, a similar scene will be played out in every embassy across the world as the State Department is forced into damage control mode across a hundred or so different fronts.

It is, however, not nearly as disastrous as it was made to sound prior to the actual leak.
They think they live in a democracy and are even willing to export it, therefore they should be responsible for the actions of whoever they voted (or didn't vote).
With the Chamber of Commerce's lurch toward operating as an outright wing of the Republican party this year, I suspect it's only a matter of time before we'll start to see CoC boycott campaigns.
Whenever I go to a really old, really cool building, I think, “This building was built by men with chisels and hammers. How come the modern world, with all its power tools and advanced materials, can’t build such cool stuff?” The answer is “Banks won’t let you.”

That's a fantastic opening sentence if ever there was one.
Huge thanks to the hacker news community. I posted this earlier today as I normally do with my posts hoping to get 20-30 hits and ended up shocked when it climbed up to number 10 on the main page. Over 1,000 hits today from hacker news - muchas gracias.
Got a reference for this?
I've been thinking about getting into iOS development but I'm on the fence about diving into learning objective-c. I'm a ruby/javascript guy primarily and I think I'd rather go the js route than objective-c, but I want to know what the limitations will be? Anyone have any insight they could share?
So, if this secret passing-of-information did so much good, why had I never heard of Indonesian thugs torturing timorese until now.
Investigating Google For Acting Like A Search Engine
A reference for my opinion?
"If Assange takes away my illusion of having some say in the governing of my state, then he's effectively attacking the social contract."

Who you gonna blame? The one who gave you the illusion or the one who took it away?

... wait, don't answer that...