skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My Top Vegan Eating Choices in Los Angeles - Associated Content
I can't speak to the salinity, but I can confirm that your pee will stink terribly.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

-- Mark Twain
New Tutorial - Getting started with Android SDK and tools
RSS Summary?
Does anyone else wish the Hacker News RSS feed contained a summary?
Bleezer coder: 1/3 of his time spent evaluating incorrect APIs or fixing open source code
I assume "server" must be some internal developer terminology, because the article seems to be entirely about client-side rendering -- specifically about using SVG or JavaScript+Canvas to tweak the rendering of HTML/CSS, in custom experimental builds of Firefox.
An Attempt to Explain iPhone's Missing Copy/Paste
It tries my patience too, but we just have to remember: to the uninitiated, it's all rectangles. You and I see 'windows', 'buttons', etc, but to them it's all rectangles.

We are so far away from an actually usable interface it's disgusting.
Defender of the Favicon - Playable Defender Clone in a Favicon
It does, however, have the potential for being an employee's worst nightmare in the hands of a micromanaging boss. That's my concern with it being used in a corporate environment.

"Why did you spend 31 minutes 40 seconds reading 'Hacker News' today?!?" "Gee, boss, because sometimes I need a break..."

However, that's not Rescue Time's fault.
Unless you're quantified of course.
I have to say I find Alexa to be pretty accurate these days though. It's got lag, but it seems to get sites in the right sort of ballpark.
20 Asian and European Management Principles That Americans Might Learn From
Intro to OCaml (a little old but a great quick overview)
Oh, the WoWGlider case. I'm gratified to hear that the DMCA violation theory was rejected. I'm still worried to hear that the judge validated the copyright infringement theory. As sleazy as I find botting tools to be, I think that counting copying a piece of software into RAM in order to run it as copyright infringement is a dangerously broad interpretation of copyright law.
I also agree that "web 3.0" has already lost it's credibility and is reserved for random bloggers' stupid predictions about the future of the web.
Is there really a considerable portion of American (or we could say Western) society that is practically illiterate?

Yes. 21-23%. Or, higher, depending on how you count.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy

I thought it was hardly possible to function at all without a basic understanding of the written word.

Correct again. The wikipedia article notes the high correlation of illiteracy to delinquency and crime.

However, a counterexample. One of my first programming jobs was to create a data entry terminal in an industrial setting, replacing the giant paper sheets they used to fill out. When it was ready I beta-tested it on selected people from each shift. The interface was super simple, it just asked you a series of questions and you typed in the numbers -- I figured the guys in the plant would at least know how to deal with ATMs, so that was my metaphor. And it worked well.

The best foreman in the plant brought a friend along -- I shrugged and let them take the test together. He interacted with it in a really weird way and required multiple repeats of the entire session before he understood it. I only realized later that he was illiterate. And, let me just restate: best foreman in the whole plant. He knew what numbers were, and he'd trained himself to fill out the correct numbers in the correct spots on the paper sheet.

So that's when I added big icons and pictures to each screen, diagramming what bit of data we wanted at each stage.
Pandora Usage Stats Prove It’s iPhone’s Killer App
To restate part of this more positively:

People who are skilled at writing clearly or translating can contribute a great deal to open source software. It isn't all about writing code.
Google pushes towards 70 percent of all U.S. searches; Yahoo, Microsoft push towards zero
i've got a NYC startup that I can show-and-tell. whalliburton {at} gmail.com
I don't know what kind of cars your parents got, but they could have spent less. In 1970 a VW Beetle was selling for (I just looked this up) $1,874. The median household income in those days was $8,734, so that's 21%.

Nowadays the median income is $48,000 and the cheapest new car available is a shade under $11,000, so it's near-as-dammit the same.

Of course, even the cheapest car available today (a Hyundai Accent) is vastly superior to a 1970 Beetle in just about every way. Hell, it even has six airbags and anti-lock braking.
One thing to remember about Youtube commenters; many of them are not English speakers. Compared to my Filipino or Mandarin, their English is pretty good.

But if you want to criticize what they're saying, that's a bit different.
It's an op-ed. The point is to get the author's opinion.
Nice story, neilk. My favorite system development anecdotes have always come from factory floors. Not quite sure why. Maybe because producing vs. not producing was always so much more visible than in a typical office.
What's up with the sound? You just took a shit and can't reach your ass?
Picture This: Where does Google's revenue come from?
Scientists: Humans and machines will merge in future - CNN.com
I'd say this is a pretty big deal if they push it into normal SEO results. I'd welcome it. I'm tired of spammy grayhat results I get now. Just clicking [X] would feel good.

I think Google is finally realizing that the algorithms still have a way to go and that the massive amount of good stuff in human's heads is quite relevant.
"Except I really do want to invite my friend to this new photo sharing service I like."

That doesn't mean I want the invitation; it still sounds like spam to me.
Actually, I'd say that goes for all people, not just programmers...

I have never met anyone who can, with any regularity, write in monospace.
Huh. I never heard it called that before.

My background is in math so I always though of it in terms of the sign function: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_function

spaceship(x,y) = sign(x-y), for numbers, anyhow.
Web 2.0 = Small Business | My Philly Network
I know it's hard to tell in type, but I wasn't offended. I know people who fit the stereotype, but I also know gregarious, social, coders.
I wouldn't blame the designers directly. In my experience designers tend to be pressured into trendy styles. The 37signals look just happens to be what's in right now.
Actually, OSX people can deal with ftp:// urls just fine. That does not make using them any less stupid though.
"you punch a bully in the face"

The fun part is that it goes both ways.

In the end, both bullies will need reconstructive surgery.
Children should be required to watch "Idiocracy" in the classroom...
I Finally Understand Closures
Free Apps No Longer Dominating iPhone App Store.
Here's another one: http://www.reason.com/news/show/117328.html

It isn't news anymore, but I find it very heartening all the same.
"some people don't want peace; their agenda for how the world should be comes first."

The point is that those people are relatively few. Most people would rather live in peace unless taught otherwise.

Still, the cost of one missile pays for a bunch of schools. I think it's money far better spent.
Volvo and a Toyota Corona, IIRC (not counting the lemons that my dad bought in grad school...one of them cost only $99). They wanted to be safe, which I think is still a concern among young people today.

And yeah, it seems like the cost of a car as a fraction of median income has remained remarkably stable since 1918 or so. The Model-T's price dropped by about 35% in the first couple years after it was introduced, so it should also have been about 20-25% of a year's salary by then.
The newest "AI on the web" strategy seems to center around this stuff -- computers do 95% of the work and rely on actual people when the law of diminishing returns kicks in.

We have so many warm bodies on the internet with this marvelous (and mysterious) sense of intuition that we can't seem to make the computer machines replicate. Why not?

See also: the super cool reCAPTCHA project. Or the FoldIt! protein folding game.
It's slightly depressing to imagine that if our defense contractors could make more money building schools than weapons, we would not be having this discussion.
Price of gas as a percentage of household income is significantly lower now than it was in the 70s, even with today's $4/gal. Remember that in inflation-adjusted terms, gas prices in 1973 were about $3.30. Figure in 50% or so real wage growth since then and we'd need about $5/gal gas to equal then.
Bingo. My dad just bought a car last month. The dealers we went to all said "You can't get a Prius or a Fit with less than a 6 month wait - nobody has any in stock." Meanwhile their lots were completely full-up with SUVs that they can't sell.
Try that in Java:

class NullReceiver(object):

class SimpleCallable(object):

def __call__(self, *args):

pass

def __getattr__(self, name):

print 'unhandled method "%s" called' % name

return nullReceiver.SimpleCallable()
I have commented before on how offensive posts like this are for so many reasons

It's one thing to disagree, its another thing entirely to claim this post is offensive.

Plenty of people don't drink alcohol, or coffee, because they believe (with plenty of reason) that its not good for them overall. That's a choice they're empowered to make. But to be offended by people who do drink coffee, or do drink alcohol, is silly. If you let the personal decisions of the rest of the world offend you so easily, you'll never get anything done with your own life.

The same logic applies here. Nobody is, for example, advocating that you must take drugs to succeed in your startup. It's certainly interesting to me (and probably others) to know to what extent other people go to try and get an edge.
Many free applications also just seemed to be advertising, for example applications for news pages, that could probably simply be replaced by a news reader.
we were doing this stuff for a couple of years at a search company I worked for.
actually, it takes both
Technical Due Diligence - Biotech
I don't see many biotech / pharma posts on these forums, but based on answers to other posts I thought this might be a good place for this question.

Is there a market for technical due diligence in biotech investment? In other words, would angels / VC be interested in the services of a technical due diligence group to obtain a 3rd party expert perspective on potential biotech technologies?

It seems like this would alleviate some burden from the investors, and aid in the assessment of a broad spectrum of technologies.

I ask because I am fairly well-positioned to recruit a high-quality consulting group and have had this thought in the back of my mind for the past year or so.
I was basically joshing you. I agree with you on that hurdle though. Most people think of computers as machines. If you use a machine incorrectly, or in the wrong order, you can break it or even injure yourself. Computers, usually at least, don't work that way. It'd be pretty hard for my parents to mess up the computer more than losing that email they just spent the last hour hunt-and-pecking away at.
Or that (this one is in Ruby):

s = 'a'

class String

def rghize

return self + 'rgh'

end

end

puts s.rghize
We are so far away from an actually usable interface it's disgusting.

Tech interfaces are usable -- they're just not intuitive to those who didn't grow up using computers. Ironically, part of the problem is that the metaphors and shortcuts that some interfaces use in an attempt to make things easier end up make things more confusing:

- Operating systems: "Why is the trashcan on my desktop?"

- Macs: "If I want to eject the CD, I'm supposed to throw it away in the trashcan?"

- Cell phones: "So you're saying I have to hold down the off button if I want to turn the phone on?"

So yeah, we do have a long, long way to go.
I've made an Internet Law slinkset:
http://ilaw.slinkset.com
If you're allowed to talk about it, the data you get back is sparse, right? So how useful does the user feedback end up being? It seems like one of those areas where owning search share actually means something.
Why does it undermine anybody's point? In an area where millions of people live, a few dozen schools is a small number, yet thousands of them may make a positive difference.
Actually, what happened was that the Saudis stepped in and DID build the schools, houses, and infrastructure.

And then we're shocked, SHOCKED! that the radical elements would win out over the more moderate ones.
Aha, but walking is an inherent human capability, waiting to be learned. I honestly don't think that everyone can learn anything. we can certainly do better than the status quo, but expecting the average layman to grasp advanced physics seems a bit of a stretch. There's something to be said for raw talent.
Ask HN: What work have you done with stable distributions?
I come from a finance background, so bear with me. I am currently taking a senior level mathematical probability/stats class. The professor of the class has informed me that the frontier of mathematical finance has started to deal with Levy alpha-stable distributions. I've found some GNU libraries focused on this content, but I was wondering if anyone has any actual experience implementing financial software using this distribution? If so, what is your opinion of the difficulty level in implementing it? Do you know of any specific papers I could take a look at?

Any help would be much appreciated.
If we can't convert them to peaceful Western values then it's going to be missiles.

Doesn't this seem self-contradictory to you? What, exactly, is "peaceful" about a value system that advocates aggressive, ideologically motivated war?
The unfamiliar terms for me in this article all had to do with this guy's speciality: video encoding. I know very little about video encoding, but here are two terms I just learnt:

- "Motion search": Guessing where in a previous frame image data in the current frame came from.

- "SAD": Quoting Wikipedia, "Sum of absolute differences is a widely used, extremely simple video quality metric used for block-matching in motion estimation for video compression. It works by taking the absolute value of the difference between each pixel in the original block and the corresponding pixel in the block being used for comparison."
The purest hack serves no other purpose but itself
Or also with the cell phone: "Why do I have to press 'send' to make a call? On a regular phone, I just dial the number. I press 'send' when I send a fax."
I'd look at it more like chaos. Theoretically, there is absolutely nothing random in the shuffling of a deck of cards or the roll of dice, bracketing the human elements. It's just really really complex, so we call this chaos/random.
Interview With Evan Williams: Summize Acquisition, API Issues And Their Revenue Model
No longer? The thing launched less than a week ago!
I'm guessing he/she thinks it should be plural possessive - students' instead of student's
I was careful to use the word "almost" twice. The interpretation of "almost" is obviously up to the reader.

With that in mind, if you could teach many "average laymen" to grasp advanced physics, I really wouldn't be all that surprised. Of course, there is something to be said for raw talent, lots of which remains hidden because of many factors. The power of human capability never ceases to amaze me, even under the most difficult circumstances.
Centostrano 0.1 - deprec 2 port to CentOS released
On a Small Screen, Just the Salient Stuff (Web Surfing on the iPhone)
and they both look like the flying spaghetti monster. coincidence? i think not.
Amazon invests in Engine Yard's cloud computing
Search Twitter in Real Time
A SAD comparison is the following:

For all pixels A in a block 1 and B in a block 2, sum up abs(A - B). The total is the SAD of the two blocks. It compares each of the pixels of Block A with the corresponding pixel in Block B.

Its the simplest possible block comparison metric that still takes into account all individual pixels. Its popular not only because of its inherent simplicity, but also because of the psadbw MMX/SSE instruction that makes it extremely fast on x86 CPUs.

A motion search generally involves a whole lot of SADs, and since the motion search is the core of any video encoder, making the SADs faster has a huge impact on performance.
Amen. It smacks of the 'Oprah-watching, feel-good-book-reading, "let's hold hands and sing kumbaya"' bullshit that pervades society.

The fact is that people have differing levels of ability. but with everybody screaming for 'equality,' everyone has to have some 'special gift.' I'm not saying that some lives are worth more than others (although there's an interesting philosophical argument against this), but the idea that 'you can do anything you set your mind to' is false.
How old are you? The baby boom generation seems mostly literate, but my generation, gen Y, is basically incapable of constructing a sentence. In my senior year high school English class I had a teacher who liked me, so she had me grade papers in lieu of some other work. In particular, I remember proofreading drafts of my classmates' college admissions essays. They were deplorable. The best one was grammatically tolerable, adhering closely to the rigid five-paragraph "keyhole" format that we'd all had drilled into our heads, but was all about how much the author loved playing Counterstrike and the lessons it taught him about teamwork. The worst few were outright incomprehensible. I handed those back to the teacher unedited and asked her whether their authors spoke English as their native language. They did. And this was an honors class at what is generally considered the strongest public high school in Florida.
A Socialist CEO Grows Up
Why Microblogging Is Dumbing Us Down
Seven Reasons Why the New iPhone Sucks
I have a feeling that almost all three-year-olds could be brought (over time) to an understanding (by age 12-15) of a reasonable portion of advanced physics. However, after a few years of indoctrination in most schools, almost all of them will have become almost incapable of doing so.
My "lots of which remains hidden because of many factors" = your "few years of indoctrination in most schools".
The term "supercomputer" becomes meaningless unless its definition is periodically revised. IMO these days you need over 1 TFLOPS to quality.
Finding A Perfect Match: Twitter & Summize
I would reply that almost everybody is capable of becoming very good at many things. Unfortunately, we are often taught the opposite. Of course, becoming very good at something requires persistent effort, extended over years of focussed practice.
Some evenings, my girlfriend comes back home to find me stuck to my computer, and she asks "What are we doing tonight?" and I answer "well... I'd kind of like to work... but I'll spend the evening with you meek smile"

Surprisingly, she's still with me. I think it's mostly because I smell nice.
Yep. And if that illiterate foreman was suddenly required to pass a college English 101 class in order to keep his job... the world would lose a perfectly good foreman.

For some reason your story reminded me of Captain Bill Eddy, television pioneer of the 1930s and 40s. Here he is in his own words (from one of my favorite books: The Box: An Oral History of Television 1920 - 1961):

"I started losing my hearing as a kid and was deaf when I entered the Navy, but I had learned to read lips, so every time they put me through the audio tests, they said I had perfect hearing. With the great knowledge of the Navy I was assigned to be sound officer on the submarine. I couldn't hear the signals coming from the enemy submarines, so I went to Kresge's department store and bought some parts and devised an amplifier where the sound signals came out as a movement on a dial. By looking at the dial, I knew if we were on target for an enemy ship and could fire a torpedo. It worked very well, and our submarine was the only one that was scoring hits. Soon, so many people had these amplifiers and were scoring hits that the Navy Department heard about it, and they asked me to develop a model of this amplifier using the finest parts. I put it together and it didn't work. In desperation, I went out to Kresge's and bought these cheap tubes and transformers and put together the Eddy Amplifier and it worked. It became a very interesting patent because it only worked with Kresge parts. That's how I got into electronics."

"In 1934 the Navy finally tripped me up by changing to an electronic system of measuring hearing. I was sent to the Brooklyn Navy Yard for retirement."

Fortunately, the Navy's loss was Philo Farnsworth's gain...
Eat, Sleep and Drink Software Development: Finding The Zone
HN not finding already submitted stories?
Not sure if I'm pulling something out of thin air or what, but today I've submitted two stories that have already been submitted using the same exact url/title, whereas before it would redirect me to the original submission and upvote it.

Anyone else notice the same?
Working longer hours does not equal greater productivity
Borrowing money to buy a depreciating asset is surprising to me too.
it's called the Linux /kernel/
I wanted to mess with reddit (open source), and it's been a pain.

This is great.

But why do you required login before the test drive? Was this a technical issue?
At the risk of misinterpreting edw myself, I think what he is getting at is not at all that he finds people who use (or as the case may be) Provigil or caffeine or what have you offensive.

Rather, it is that he finds it offensive that posts that seem to glorify or encourage such behavior (the OP certainly hints at that with the closing bit) end up so high on the main page and, in his mind, take away from more valuable discourse.

Personally I agree that this particular post is more news than not, though the recent post about the Liberal Arts PhD who was advocating marijuana use was borderline at best.
"In some ways it makes the problem easier when you can assume the user is a good programmer. Language designers often find themselves worrying about the mess users might make if they were allowed to do such-and-such. Once you assume the user is a good programmer, you automatically have the answer to any such question: let the user do whatever he wants."

- pg

"About 12 years ago, Python aquired lambda, reduce(), filter() and map(), courtesy of (I believe) a Lisp hacker who missed them and submitted working patches. But, despite of the PR value, I think these features should be cut from Python 3000."

- gvr

Remember: Python's not broken, you are.
No, I did not. I'm not sure I understand it, either. Can you find me the paper that says that stimulant-using musicians sound bad? Or the one that says all stimulant users make bad decisions? I didn't see it, and I need hand-holding.
There's a type of machine learning called semi-supervised learning that can make use of sparse datasets like you suggest.
The robbers must have seen Pulp Fiction ;-)
Colleges should do whatever they can to reverse the trend of declining academic standards, or they will lose the money and prestige they presently have and command. Those running the schools may feel otherwise, but the outside world is pretty objective (if you can't hack it at your job, you're fired.)
Only one third? That's pretty good!

"How much time you spend fixing the open-source code" is the wrong metric. "How much time you didn't spend writing that open-source code from scratch in the first place" is the metric. (Open source sometimes fails that one, too -- there are times when you ask yourself whether you should have just started from scratch -- but it passes more often than it fails.)
Turn Your Servers Off at Night