skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had an enormous amount of trouble setting that stuff up, partly because I also wanted to use Common Lisp. I also was unable to uninstall any package.

Everything about package.el and ELPA has always given me the feeling that it's a bit rough. My hope is that Emacs 24 will straighten it all out.
It didn't used to be like that -- you used to have to 'view source' to see it <facepalm>

Then I think they went through a stage of not revealing it at all.

But in any case, it's far less useful than SO/SF etc.
Anyone have any ideas why the clone sites like efreedom are ranking above Stack Overflow when SO's inbound links and reputation values are likely far better than efreedom's in Google's algorithm? I'm surprised that search engine optimization could do THAT much to a site's ranking. Also it's not like SO isn't doing the same kind of SEO themselves.

What I'm trying to get at is, with all things equal, let's say Stack Overflow and efreedom's SEO is on par with each other, shouldn't SO's reputation/inbound link ranks automatically trump things?
Some spam sites are simply for PageRank. No ads, just links.
I've seen the opposite far more than what you are implying.

It is a lot easier for the board to fire the execs, once you get to C-level it is practically a revolving door (and why a lot of them have contracts).

Let me tell you right now, the CEO of BP was not the one making bad decisions on the oil rig. He probably didn't have a clue about what was happening on any given day on any given rig considering they own thousands. But he was gone a heck of a lot faster than whoever it was that made the decisions that blew the place up and killed 11 people.
Wow, this takes me back - I spent an awfully long time tinkering with VB1 (the version for DOS, no less!) when I was a kid, later progressing to VB3, 5 & 6, diversifying into JavaScript and finally picking up C++.
Hello from Gondor -- New Django cloud hosting provider from makers of Pinax
this work was presented as a mini-talk at the NIPS conference workshop on "Learning Cores, Clusters and Clouds":

http://lccc.eecs.berkeley.edu/papers.html#mini_talks_i
Mobile Detection with Varnish and Drupal
Thanks for clearing that up (I've yet to try F# in anger). I suppose pre-generics F# did similar type wrangling to Scala's?
Looks like it just uses the reflected intensity to estimate the depth, then pastes the original colormap on top of that? Incredibly clever and simple hack.
pg's Rice and Beans for 2n comes to mind:

http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html#f1n
Cool app. But I have a pet peeve with information pages that only provide video as a description. Whilst I understand that especially for an app like this, the best 'information' is to demonstrate how it works via a video, it doesn't help people a. just want to get a quick one line explanation of what your app does and/or b. can't watch the video at the time (slow connection, work restriction etc).

If I hadn't been at home, I would have just left the page and moved onto to something else - missed sale.
5 Ridiculous Things Deemed Offensive by People
In our society, there are some things you just can’t say to people, because...
The 90 Minute Scheme to C compiler
The one issue I have with the concept is that "joint venture" means so many things to different businesses - it can be as simple as pooling cash for a marketing campaign (probably quite easy to arrange via a website like yours) or as complicated as setting up a separate legal entity after years of debate, due diligence and contract negotiation. Generally I'd consider things like sponsorship and donations (mentioned in your blog post) to be a different beast entirely.
Can't this be done with a browser plugin?
When I search for [2010 ira contribution limit], all the results are spammy. The real official answer (on irs.gov) doesn't even show up on the first page.

The first result I get is is irs.gov. Then again, we know what a bunch of shysters they are, so you still might be onto something. ;-)
Death to Captchas
Well, almost:

"Summary: Linux 2.6.37 includes several SMP scalability improvements for Ext4 and XFS, an option to compile the kernel with the Big Kernel Lock disabled"

It's still used in some old drivers and more importantly for file locking, which obviously can't be used when the BKL isn't compiled in.
http://bit.ly/blfSNz

According to Sports Illustrated, "Of the 120 athletic departments that play I-A football, 106 lost money in 2009"
2010 Venture Capital Year in Review
Good teaching is not something you can package up, and lesson plans are very idiosyncratic creative works. They are not readily transferable between teachers.

This simply isn't true. Direct Instruction (pre-scripted lesson plans given to all teachers) is well known to produce excellent results.

http://www.jefflindsay.com/EducData.shtml http://www.projectpro.com/ICR/Research/DI/Summary.htm http://www.mathematicallycorrect.com/honestft.htm

It's just fought against tooth and nail by teachers unions because a) it's boring to the teacher and b) it makes teachers easily replacable. But it works.

(Incidentally, I taught math for 5 years at the university level. I was flying blind - I probably would have done better if I had a script to follow.)
Failing Steve Jobs shows that context and trust is all in sales
A lot of this letter described what I felt like up until just a few months ago. I have also had experience with physical and emotional violence (no rape though) and felt absolutely worthless most of my life. One year ago I decided to seek out a therapist, which was one of the hardest things ever to do for me. Therapy has been painful at times, sometimes leaving me completely in shambles. But today I can say that I'm happy to be alive, and I feel worth of being loved and I escaped the dark cloud that used to surround me almost constantly for the majority of my life.

What I'm saying is: seek professional help. If you feel like you can't go on anymore, seek professional help. Talking helps. Let go of the secrets that keep eating you up alive. Share them with at least one person, be it a friend or a professional. But under no circumstance keep them to yourself until they kill you. Some of them weigh too much too carry them alone. Let someone help you.
Maybe because I'm in the UK.
Can the iphone modulate the intensity of its light via software?
A lot of schools charge admission to watch the sporting event, so even though the kids don't earn any money (and many times have to pay to play) the school makes a fair amount of money from the sports. The better the coach, the better the team. The better the team, the more people will come and watch. The more people that watch, the more money for the school.
I think the worst culprits are the ones that skim StackOverflow questions and rehash them into their own supposed original "question and answer" site
Burp is basically the industry standard. It's the tool most widely used by professionals on web pentests. I could do a detailed comparison, but it'd be 3-4 years dated; I used a lot of tools back in '06, but haven't looked back since then.

The thing that sets Burp apart from (say) Tamper Data in Firefox is the fuzzer (Burp calls it the "intruder"). The free OWASP WebScarab also has a fuzzer, but it's not as good.
That's the reason you can't compare charter to regular schools in a lot of cases. In all 3 of the states that I've lived in, charter schools have competitive entry, or at least an opt-in lottery.

If you took only the students who can pass a test or whose family cares enough about their education to enter a lottery for a charter school and put them in one room, and of coruse they are going to do better than a group of randomly selected kids.

Charter schools really only count when the student population is equivalent to the school it is being compared to, which is a lot less common.
Oh, and I almost forgot: How much would you be willing to pay for such an app?
My mother-in-law used to be an Oprah fan but she recently 'cut the cord' with the cable company. Personally I think people like her could really enjoy an experience like Digg or Reddit if all the stars aligned correctly.
I think your search terms are too short.

See "re-elect" -"reelect"
Terrible, shocking news. I knew Bill in passing, as we'd talked about doing a project together. He was a very nice, very smart guy. He will be missed.
You can also wait for the movie http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480239/
Thanks for the feedback. I was expecting to have this weekend to pull everything together but Apple approved the app in 2 days (which is great, but 5x faster than for my previous submissions).
I imagine at a high level software that is well tested an goes through QA is a lot like hardware (or other engineering in general). But my experience in software was at a startup where if it compiled an built, we all shouted SHIP IT immediately (and were only half joking). We had great hackers doing tough things quickly, but there were definitely times we cut corners on testing knowing we could just patch it later if need be.
(finally pro-tip, most airlines distinguish between miles claimable for status, and miles spendable on flights/services).

There are people on Flyertalk who churn through those Citi AA Mastercards like crazy, collecting hundreds of thousands of miles from each card's signup bonus (usually 25-75,000 miles depending on the promo used to open the account).

While AA can distinguish between qualifying flight miles for status, when it comes to redeemable miles they distinguish between flight miles and other earned miles from charge cards/etc.

Since you can earn lifetime status on AA by collecting 1MM or 2MM redeemable miles, you can conceivably get status for life this way.
HTTP Error 503. Video can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEZtiDrxh-E
scala != functional programming
http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/posts/scala-not-functional/

It does have functional programming constructs though

Clojure is a much better candidate for FP on the JVM.
A student is capable of flunking in-spite of being taught well.

Absolutely. This is why you don't evaluate teacher performance based on a sample size of 1.

If only teachers had a statistically significant number of students (e.g., 40+) every year! Then this process of evaluating them based on student performance wouldn't be so hopeless!
I assume it displays varying shades of full-screen grey. There's no public brightness API. You're free to do it outside the app store, of course. (you can find the private API calls pretty easily on Google)
I don't know about Scala, but yes, wrangling describes well what F# used to do.

I never used F# before .NET 2.0, but the techniques it used on 1.x could be interesting -- I'll see if I can find some old documentation...

Edit: There used to be a paper describing the technique. I can't find it now, but here's an old Don Syme announcement related to it: http://www.mail-archive.com/dotnet-rotor@discuss.develop.com...
Aspose.Newsletter January 2011 Edition is out now
Aspose Newsletter for December 2011 has now been published that highlights all the newly supported features offered in the recent releases of its JasperReports exporters, SQL Server rendering extensions, .NET, Java & SharePoint components. This month’s technical article explains how to Display barcodes on dataset-based reports. Also a demo to Integrate Aspose.Cells for SSRS with Visual Studio Report Designer & adding a picture frame with animation in a presentation in the technical tip section.
Set Google to return 100 results and then use a userscript or extension to filter them. E.g. https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ddgjlkmkllmpdheg...
I bet there's a lot of things that spam pages have in common with regards to things like page placement.

So, if Google gets better at quantifying "spammy-ness" there will be an initial drop in spam effectiveness, but then spammers would catch on and emulate the behavior of good pages.

Eventually, the spammers' behavior would be indistinguishable from genuine posters.

http://xkcd.com/810/
Getting to know the Thing-O-Matic
They have access to Big Macs, they are one of the cheapest foods ever. Do you think anybody would have cared about that cake remark (which she never said) if they really had eaten cake instead?
Doing that will make you run out of fuel before completing the objective.
SEM DIY - Do You Have What It Takes?
The fact that this only works in the dark made me wonder, how much of what the Kinect does could be possible on an iPhone, and what would be needed to get there? 2 Cameras? What else?
I'm not sure anybody is saying his suicide was the right thing to do - what struck me was the logical/emotional trap this highly intelligent person had gotten himself into. I mean, clearly reasonable problems trusting anyone (he'd presumably trusted his family, and his unnamed abuser - and look where it got him! - along with his friends who outed him when he thought he had a reasonable expectation of confidentiality), so how could he get the help he needed? He couldn't even reasonably tell anybody of the bind he was in.

It was like a real-life version of a Chalker novel, without the escape of knowing it's just fiction. Horrible to read, given that his extreme eloquence and rationality make it crystal clear what was going on in his mind.

I don't think he was brave to take his life. I think he was brave to continue living it as long as he managed to do so.
i ignored these "google sucks because of spam" articles until this one. i tried his first worse example [large sensor compact camera]. almost all the results on the first page are good. #3 is suite101 which is one of these farms, but it actually contains good content too. so i will go back to ignoring these "google sucks because of spam" articles, unless one shows up that has some quantitative results.
Google were experimenting with voting on results:
http://techcrunch.com/2007/11/28/straight-out-of-left-field-...

Also there is this form for reporting spam sites:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport

Integrating the above into standard search results would be difficult unless it was restricted to users with a good "karma".
That might be possible in our increasingly socially networked world
it sounds scarier than it is:

“all the critical Linux codepaths have been BKL-free for a long time”
The Lie Guy
Google's results not helping you? Make your own search engine
Maybe something like reddit, but presented through things like Google TV and Apple TV. If someone can morph social media viewing/browsing into something that emulates channel surfing, then that idea will easily be worth 100's of millions.

EDIT IDEA: If Oprah doesn't have someone doing the following for her, then some group with the right CV items should hop on it! Start finding or putting key moments from shows followed by middle aged-women up on YouTube. (Oprah will make up a lot of this content.) At the same time, launch a social media site tailored for middle-aged women and create APIs so that it can be integrated with TV convergence devices.

Not only will Oprah make more money on her own content this way, she will become the middlewoman for a big chunk of the other content aimed at this demographic.
I second Clojure for a functional programming language on the JVM. Why anyone would want to do functional programming in Java is really beyond my comprehension though.
Another story on the front page of HN today documents how the original paper linking vaccine to autism was a fraud (a downright lie).

Interestingly, when one searches for just "vaccine autism" in Google here are the titles of the first 4 results:

Medical fraud revealed in discredited vaccine-autism study

MMR vaccine controversy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

'No evidence' for autism-vaccine link (cnn.com)

Journal: Study linking vaccine to autism was fraud - Yahoo! News

There are zero results from content farms in the first 20 results.

So, curiously, on such topics, content from content farms is completely filtered out by Google.

(If one searches for the same topics only on ehow.com for example, the results talk about a "controversy" and say nothing about an actual fraud).

Is the filtering the result of general Page Rank algorithms (pages on eHow on autism receiving less links than pages on cooking or wiring outlets) or are pages already weighted by topic, by Google? ("important topic" => "casual content" bad; "casual topic" => "casual content" ok)
java -jar clojure.jar
Given that the hashrocket came from Perl to Ruby primarily, and that it changed to look more like Python, I'd say you're wrong :)
How to always have work
The Man Who Spilled the Secrets - Inside Look at Wikileaks
The War Against a Living Wage
Thaw Speaks – In 2011 you must Do better
I'm glad they have good results with this system. I recall a teacher in my high school who was very unpopular with many students. He was an ex military man and what I am about to tell you will sound like a cliché: He believed in strict discipline, penalized students heavily for being slightly late or having corrections on submitted work, and so on. He actually invented a new form of punishment at the school involving hard physical labour. I don't recall anyone having a Hollywood epiphany when subjected to his brutal style, no wonderful breakthroughs or students discovering their hidden depths.

He would never have been re-elected by students. But was he a bad teacher? I don't know! I entered the school interested in the material he taught and left it still interested. Was he a bad teacher? Honestly, I have no idea. All I can say is that he was an unpopular teacher amongst many students.
You are right. But scala does not make it any harder if one chooses to write functional code.
Oh, I wouldn't think to discount the wonderful things that others create.

I'm just a bit biased to complement his projects (and feverish work ethic) since I find myself using his work on a daily basis.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2068635
I don't understand how Kaminsky gets more attention. His "answer" to DJB gets attention in HN while the original presentation barely gets any. People will probably walk out with a very biased opinion.
It's the intensity of the reflected light off the face received by the phone that varies, not the light put off by the screen of the phone. As lliiffee said, incredibly clever.
Mountains Out Of Molehills: A Decade of Fear
If I wasn't skint I would right now buy the domain

fucktheglobalelite.com

Not sure what it would have apart from a link to the article and "seriously, fuck those guys"
I'm not sure if prioritizing links over keywords is really going to help matters.

I know a lot of 'little guys' who know something about a topic and can write prolifically, but who suffer under the delusion that 'If I build it, they will come.' Success in SEO is largely possible because 95% of webmasters have no idea how to promote content.

I've also developed 'digital libraries' for major academic organizations and a common thread there is a complete lack of interest in indexability. There's a lot of fantastic content trapped in the ivory tower because nobody considered the 'unwritten standards' for how the web worked.

A big part of the problem is that it's very hard to get legitimate links these days. You used to be able to get into the Yahoo directory for free, but now you have to pay a $300 a year bribe. Before 2000, it was common for people to create large collections of links they liked. Today, major players like Engadget have a policy of not wasting their PageRank on other sites. Afraid of spam, many blogs and forums are on a hair trigger to stop people from dropping links in comments, relevant or not.

If legitimate links are harder to get, that 'lowers the bar' for spammers.

A real answer to spam would be to strengthen the signal so it can break through the noise. It might be helpful to be able to get more feedback from web users about the quality of pages, but this is tough. The horrible truth is that there are more pages on the web than there are viewers, so even if you could get feedback from 10% of viewers, many pages would be badly undersampled. Spammers would also target any feedback channels that exist, and with low response and sampling rates, it might be easier to overload the feedback chanel than it is to create link noise.

Another answer is to beat Demand Media at their own game, the same way that Stack Overflow has beaten the spam sites that dominated programming questions two years ago.
I think his point was that being super smart doesn't mean you are a great entrepreneur. Nor is being super smart a requirement for being an entrepreneur.

I agree that money is not the only means to the end (I'll assume most rational people are trying to maximize their happiness which may or may not involve more money), but his post was about what makes entrepreneurs. And entrepreneurs need to put making money #1.
Did your degree teach you exactly how to work in your profession? Do you know any that does? Degrees teach you mostly theory, but applying theory to the real world takes experience, and that doesn't come overnight.

Obviously the concepts in math, English, or other subjects may not change much over the years, but the environment certainly does. Teachers have to learn how to tailor their methods to meet the needs of the whole class. That means being able to understand where children are in their development cycle, recognizing what learning methods work best for each student, and striking a balance so that the needs of all students are met. The good teachers are the ones that learn how to do this, and have developed the confidence to maintain order and discipline. --Providing support and mentoring can make a huge difference between having a new teacher succeed or fail.
Apple’s Mac App Store goes live
I'd ban eHow.
Mac App Store: Open for Business
I just want to point out two things:

1) Get instant access means nothing to me. Watch a video does, and if I take the time to actually watch the video I'm more likely to commit if I find your product worth my money. There's a disconnect on what 'Instant Access' really means and what potential customers think of it.

2) The first button is amateurish (design wise) in my opinion. There is something wrong about it, the colors, the composition, the blue line under it, and most of all the text on top of it just feels wrong. The second button is much much better and it has a bit of a resemblance to Amazon's buttons, which might be a good thing depending on your userbase.

I'm inclined to think that the button design has a much larger role on the conversions than the copy though.
The first question that comes to mind for me is: Is it possible to export the generated mesh that is shown in the stills?
Things You Might Not Know about jQuery
Like I said in the OP: "There are gresemonkey etc. scripts to do this, but they're tied to a single browser on a single machine. A global filter (like in gmail) would be so much more useful."
When I clicked that link I though you were making a clever joke.

But they did actually film it - and it only took them 35 years to get it done.
DDG's traffic tripled in last 3 days, reason?
http://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html

They got plugged on some major site or what?