skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What about the effect of bad students? Isn't education a two-way process involving a supplier and a consumer?

I got my highest grades in subjects I enjoyed (Business and Mathematics) and my lowest grades in those I didn't (English). Was my English teacher not as good because I got a D yet the Business and Maths teachers got an A or B out of me? Does the fact that other students got A in English and a D or E in Business or Maths show that actually the English teacher is 'better'? Or was it just an anomaly?

Sure, there are no doubt a tiny minority of teachers who (in the UK at least) have paid thousands for a degree, gone through some form of postgraduate training and accreditation (years in total) only to land a job and then throw it all away. However, my own opinion is that 'bad teachers' are an excuse for bad students and (anecdotally and just in my experience) poor parental/primary caregiver role models. I saw the same 'my son/daughter is performing poorly because of bad teachers' come from parents whose children were more adept at petty crime and drug dealing.
The President and the E-Word
I'm sorry, I have a hard time with articles that complain but offer no solutions (and the one line at the end about Akismet doesn't really cut it for me.)

I've seen some captchas that have you do simple math problems or other basic questions, which seemed to be a better alternative. I also remember seeing prototypes of a captcha that showed nine pictures and told users to select the three that were cats. Not sure why that never caught on, though.
well, if true, then that is a problem of HN, not DJB or Kaminsky's.

but I think you have wrong metrics for "attention" or "relevance" in the first place.
Why would it? Good marketing guys get paid boatloads and are worth their weight in gold. Far more startups fail for lack of good marketing (all of the pillars, product/market fit, advertising, and PR, nut just advertising) than for lack of good technical product.
I tried this, and if you don't enter any websites to include, you get the message:
You must enter 1 or more websites.
Efreedom is deliberately manufacturing links, whereas SO may be just hoping for the best.
It seems like every few months, EE tries to cloak its site in a new way ... then Google catches them and they revert to merely misleading people (by putting the answers several page-scrolls down) into thinking that they need to pay to see the answers.

Actually, I sort of sympathize with the predicament EE faces. They want to show up high on Google search results, because that's how they get new customers ... but they don't want to give away their content for free.

Here's an opportunity for a search engine start-up: Allow users to search (by default) for only free content -- but also allow them to search, if they so choose, for content that's behind a paywall. Pay-for-access sites would love something like this.
Well, in that case, my own intuition (and about 99.9 % of pundits) says shoot for the handhelds Get an imac and learn how to program for ipads, in your other set of spare time learn android. Set up a linux server with the database of your choice.
After you have all that set up and mastered....at least a few weeks :) start spitting out services for your doctor friends.

As an aside, I have friends in the embedded arena who get backed by doctors looking to invest some spare pocket cash. I think once you get hacking, your friends will bug you to let them in on it.

Most important, Have fun!
Depends on what you are doing. I sold out to greysuitland and ee is better for all my retarded vb, vba, c# questions.
PG "I think what really happened here is that someone at the Libyan domain authority decided they wanted the name and made up a story in order to seize it. I've heard of other cases of .ly names being confiscated, and for this reason we advise YC startups not to depend on them." http://goo.gl/O7NBm

Seems it might be best if we avoid .ly :(
There was a very interesting study done of the Shaker Heights school system in Cleveland that found parental involvement was the main determining factor of student success.

http://www.racematters.org/whyareblackstudentslagging.htm

Now, that's not to say that there aren't good and bad teachers out there and that we shouldn't find ways to reward the good and drive out the bad, but I think it's focusing too much of the attention on the wrong problem.
This is a shape from shading approach, which will only work if you're in the dark, with the phone as the only illumination source. If white dots are shown in different places on the screen, and assuming the phone and subject don't move during the process, surface normals can be computed from the resulting images, and once you have the normals then the shape can be approximated. Normals can be found by calculating the angle of maximum reflectance for each pixel for a series of images under different illuminations.

See this Google video for a similar technique. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxNg-tXPPWc
How many gmail accounts do we need to band together to lower the rank of stack overflow against our super-duper question-and-answer site QandAdsWithMe.annoying.com?
Global spam e-mail levels suddenly fall
Also a friend of mine built something similar for an art show a couple of years ago:

http://riccarvalho.com/project/global-warming/

Not sure if it was inspired by the MIT thing.
There is a very telling story in the great book "Bad samaritans" ( http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitali... ). Among other things -- the author explains how in the 1850s, American travellers in Japan were surprised by the Japanese laziness and inefficiency, so much to make it almost proverbial. Doesn't it sound funny? In the 1850s, Japan was terribly underdeveloped, and in an underdeveloped environment you simply cannot do much to innovate, undertake new projects. So people everywhere in underdeveloped countries just seems lazy to people from the industrialized world, that was true of Japan in the 1850s, Korea in the 1950s, and many African countries nowadays.

The impetus later came from the central government, and in 1905 Japan was not a negligible country anymore. The moral of the story is that free-market bullshit and Ayn Rand books are just make-believe stories without any solid backing.
Shouldn't the sites hosting deliberately manufacturing links also fall to the algorithm's reputation/inbound link values as well. We all know they don't, and that seems like that is one of the fundamental issues here. As much as I'd like to have a site black list, that doesn't really help the major issue at hand.
> Conclusion: George W. Bush == a duck.

You're probably onto something here.
2kb JQuery for animated list in circle
can you name private organizations that were involved in ARPANET build-up?
Most of what you learn in school is abstract and you'll never need in practice. What you learn in (collaborative) open source development, in the other hand, is mighty useful actual programming experience. Doing well in school helps, but having a portfolio of side-projects to show makes (in my experience, at least) more of an impression on employers.
Or perhaps, that's their normal traffic, and the first two days of january was lower than normal.
> Eat a bowl of cereal in the morning (and I mean something like oatmeal or raisin bran rather than some sugary crap) and it barely matters what else you eat (other than calorific content)

I think you are seriously overestimating the nutritional value of a bowl of cereal, even a relatively healthful one. You may not see the worst of the consequences until you reach your 30s but they will still be accumulating.
http://donttrack.us/ was on the front page of reddit for most of Monday (Tuesday?)
Shaker Heights is a very well off suburb of Cleveland. It used to rank in the top five cities in the country for per capita income.
Mac App Store opens with more than 1,000 apps
Motorola, Citrix and the Holy Grail – Updated (ATRIX with WebTop)
The next captchas will likely be "choose the animal" from a 2D picture.
given the small images across the screen, choose the dogs.

The people working to get through security measures will always be there, we might as well put them to good use. Get them to build innovative AI software to bypass security. The code to identify the animal in the picture will eventually find its way into the public and be put to good use.
Good question. Version 1.0 only saves/emails images, but trading 3D scans and exporting the raw mesh is certainly on the feature list for future versions.
No, but every year the class is filled with a new and different group of people who learn at different rates & respond in different ways.
So you don't have a problem correlating high marks with "lack of team work, communication skills, tactlessness, gigantic egotism, etc etc" yet you have a problem with NVidia correlating high marks with good devs?

The brightest kids I knew got 80% without trying. If you're bright enough to work at NVidia and can't get 80%, you're lazy. I'm sure they missed some talent but saved a ton of time not having to interview mediocre students.
Is it just me or is the .app an abomination of a UI?

Why does Apple now have three different window control styles? http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20635/Screenshots/r3da.png

Why are there back buttons ("like a browser") but you can't click hold to get the contextual drop down?

The navigation (Featured, Top Charts, etc) are so far away from the other controls (Back and Forward) its insanely awkward to use.

It feels kind of ... weird using an app store on my Mac. I guess because I'm fortunate in that I know where to look for Mac applications, I don't really have the burning need for a central place.
Okay, I'll admit found the [73] citation the first time I searched, which is hardly indicative of wrongdoing, but I'll repost what I said earlier about the Der Spegiel [72] article in a separate thread:

> "[That article] I have little comment on, because it provides no useful contextual information. Trying to read this account of financial engineering is like trying to read about a science study in the daily paper. All the details are left out, and a newspaper cannot be trusted to get the big picture right. The phrase "special kind of swap with fictional exchange rates", for example, might be accurate, but it just smells like the writer misunderstood a forward contract or something."

I did some more digging and apparently the financial instruments in question are actually currency swaps (which one paper incorrectly calls forex swaps). Currency swaps are a legitimate financial instrument used by governments all over the place, and they come in different flavors. What are these swaps, how precisely are they sinister, and why?

I actually kind this find of stuff fascinating and will probably do more digging today, instead of working. I'd be surprised, though, if it turns out to be anything more than just another swap.
not that those references are true, but the guy was part of the friggin Ayn Rand Collective.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism_and_Objectivism
List of interpreters implemented in JavaScript for various languages would be also nice. I think they can be useful for educational purposes i.e. writing interactive materials on the web.
Ask HN: The .me domain space to be considered unsafe?
Continuing on from this thread[1] regarding .ly, does anyone know if .me is as 'unsafe'? I'm considering using the TLD for my startup.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1763431
Creative icon... If it was black, it would fit nicely with iTunes.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1763431
The concept of streaming disturbs me, because I know I would have been streamed into a delinquent centre for always being bored and acting up (also, I'd have been killed during fascism, nazi times, communism, the inquisition, and the witch burning sessions - this is truly a great time to be me).
Actually, I sort of sympathize with the predicament EE faces. They want to show up high on Google search results, because that's how they get new customers ... but they don't want to give away their content for free.

I have no sympathy at all for them. All the answers are community-generated for free, aren't they? So they're trying to charge for other people's generosity. And plenty of sites on the web give away better content than theirs for free, with no attempt to trick people into paying.

Their business model is broken and I'm surprised they've lasted this long.
There are 2 ways to do this, either open up and do it more as a social b2b site and not so focused on JV's or close it down further and more specifically what type of JV this site accepts.

You are right that JV means a lot to different people and I think that the word joint venture probably has to go and I need to close this down further to only support certain types of joint ventures.

Any suggestions?

And thanks for taking the time to look at my site.
Why Are Taxpayers Subsidizing Facebook, and the Next Bubble?
You could also restrict it to people who buy, and sell, on Google Checkout. Putting real money/goods on the table tends to weed out the fake accounts.
YES. Like the useless chromeextensions.org

This would be an awesome feature.
I didn't say I didn't find it interesting. I said it reads like a telephone book. I actually liked that the information seemed to me to be compressed.
As long as this doesn't become the only way for me to put apps on my Mac. :P
expert sexchange was the first one I was thinking of blocking too.
That will never happen, if they ever did that it would be an admission that there is something inherently wrong with their algorithm. They won't do it.
Sure -- I guess in general it wouldn't be click through rates, but click through rates on pages arrived at via search traffic. Obviously a community where members of a niche frequented a given site and clicked on related links would be different. And you're also right that using the word proportional was sloppy -- what was meant was correlated in assumedly meaningly ways.

Really this was the front end of the question of, "Could some application of (negative) weighting based on the combination of search + adsense clicks help to remove some of the spaminess that is currently being lamented on the interwebs?"
The trouble is, those sorts of captchas are trivial to bypass. They're good against an automated fly-by attack, but completely pointless against a targetted attacker. Not even a good targetted attacker, just somebody who knows how to write a script which submits a form.

I could probably get away with using the cat captcha on my blog, but Facebook or Google wouldn't be able to use it. But the thing is, for a site like my blog, I don't even need to use a cat captcha. I just need to make sure dumb bots can't submit anything, eg using hidden fields:

https://secure.grepular.com/Blocking_Comment_Spam_Using_ModS...

So where do these image captchas have a place? Not on big sites, and not on small sites...
The importance of traction (guest post)
because iTunes is the most hideous part of Apple experience.

luckily it's only needed for music...

...oh wait
Gmail already does it, and the global system uses an algorithm to look at reported spam results in order to automatically move future emails from that party to the spam folder automatically, not just for the person that reported it, but for everyone.

If they're not looking into integrating that nicely into the existing search results page (not a separate form that the average user will never find or use), especially after all the internet chatter about it recently, then they definitely should make that a top priority in 2011. I definitely don't want them to do a rush job on it though. I don't want competitors to start reporting each other as spam in search results to try and game the system even further. I'm assuming they have anti-gaming measures in place for Gmail, so they won't be completely starting that from scratch...
Show HN: Paperadio - Listen to your Instapaper (a little MacRuby hack)
Just a little MacRuby app I hacked on last month, but you can listen to your Instapaper on your Mac.

Check it out here: https://github.com/arunthampi/Paperadio

Or you can download the binary right here:
https://github.com/downloads/arunthampi/Paperadio/Paperadio-0.1.zip
Added emscripten which to my untrained eyes seems like the place where a lot of gains can be made. You can gain a lot by removing the middleman but sometimes you can gain a lot by adding one.
Jeff Atwood discusses this in his most recent Coding Horror blog post (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/01/trouble-in-the-hous...), in which he states that he doesn't really mind people copying StackOverflow questions (and answers), but that he does mind that the copies get a higher Google ranking than the original.
It looks like it is just sending a total blank white screen while it takes a picture. Sure you can change the intensity-- use a gray pixel instead of a white one.
Also, I would like '[any widget] review' to take me to an actual review, not pages upon pages of spam. I usually end up looking at comments on a few trusted sites (e.g. Amazon). This seems broken...
What a neat idea. But I don't have a Mac!
One word for you: "cut". Turn out for the basketball team short, slow, and unable to shoot, and you will not be suiting up. Hell, turn up as a "project" and you may be cut. A kid at my high school did not make the team until his junior year (as I recall). He got an athletic scholarship to college, was in the running for NBA rookie of the year, and eventually picked up a championship ring, not as a star but as a respected bit player. When he was 14 he could be cut from the team. I doubt his Algebra I teacher had any such option.

Another word: "recruit". Even the public high schools end up with a lot of athletes who do not live within the nominal boundaries. The high school a co-worker's son once attended is now a power in football. Why? The parents of a star athlete concluded they liked the program and found an apartment in town. A city high school is a power in girls' basketball, with players from all over the city. And then there are the Catholic high schools, the private schools, etc.
Clickable Link: https://github.com/arunthampi/Paperadio

Binary Download: https://github.com/downloads/arunthampi/Paperadio/Paperadio-...
WebSharper lets you compile F# to JS (it's a commercial product though.)
Three of Kaminsky's seven arguments in favor of DNSSEC rely on "Phreebird", a strange thousand-line proxy he wrote and is pushing heavily. Before relying on any property of Phreebird for the purposes of argument, Kaminsky ought to disclose the extremely poor quality of that code.

I don't mean "bad" in the sense of "probably riddled with exploitable vulnerabilities", although Kaminsky himself acknowledged a double-free a few days ago on Twitter.

I mean more basic things, like, line 455 of phreebird.c which reads an NBO integer off the wire and feeds it directly to calloc() and read() as if it was HBO, or "bad" in the sense of "will fail if a request ever gets split between two TCP segments", or any other number of badnesses.

It's not a crime to publish bad code (it is, in fact, very good thing to do so), but it's irresponsible to urge its immediate adoption or to use it to settle an argument without pointing out that "this really works only in a lab setting".

Unfortunately, Kaminsky posted the most spirited defense of DNSSEC in recent memory on the exact day of our all-hands meeting. I call shenanigans! DNSSEC is evil and Dan hasn't vindicated it; instead, he's taken a small issue (that of online signing) and blown it up way out of proportion. Suffice it to say that online signing isn't the biggest problem with DNSSEC.
Great hack. You can also use this to make a pressure sensor for your doormat to warn you of intruders at night.
Now Hear This (Steve Blank's blog as a podcast)
Wait wait, this breaks file locking? Are you sure? It isn't in the linked page, and it seems too insane.
If you're running a "real" cluster (i.e., where you actually need multiple machines instead of just one big one running postgresql), then yes, the recommendations there are realistic -- not because cassandra is inefficient but because you will ipso facto be dealing with a large dataset.

Cassandra does scale down (I know at least one site that went live running Cassandra on a 256MB VM) but that's mostly of academic interest to the audience looking for a scalable database. Hence the recommendations on that page.
I'm pretty sure remember hearing that that microwaving removed more nutrients than steaming, but less than boiling. I suspect in each case it somewhat depends how long and intensely you heat it for. Attempting to propagate vague notions I have about things :)
As a Perl developer I'd say »More power to them.« Also, since Perl's => is basically a comma operator that turns a bareword on its left into a string, I'd say Ruby's move is a step away from Perl regarding syntax, but a step towards Perl regarding functionality.

Anyway, as a non-Ruby developer I can appreciate the move. Also reminds a bit of some Scheme's ability to prefix and postfix symbols with »:«.
iTunes is just fine on OS X. And yes, the second style is iTunes specific, I guess to keep consistency between normal and "mini" mode.
Follow the commit link just below it:

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6...

Quote:

The one exception is file locking, which is practically always
enabled and does a 'select BKL' instead. This effectively forces
CONFIG_BKL to be enabled until we have solved the fs/lockd
mess and can apply the patch that removes the BKL from fs/locks.c.

This is presumably why there hasn't been a big announcement by core kernel hackers. After all, reduction in BKL use has been an ongoing effort for the last half dozen or so releases and 2.6.37 is yet another milestone but not the end of the road quite yet.
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Curing Programming Language Anxiety
Website: Landscape and Portrait Layout. What do you think about the layout?
Look at my new site! What do you think about the layout? Give me some feedback plz. Sorry for the german content. :(
Thank you! Patches welcome though ;)
Great Job!!

To those wondering why not move to Clojure or Scala instead of this approach, here is why I am holding back:

a) I have a mission critical enterprise app that is in maintainance mode. I need to enhance certain features dealing with concurrency -- my team can ramp up Actor model implementation in functionaljava or Jetlang faster than they can ramp up on Scala.

b) No doubt that Scala is actually better Java , but I am confident that later versions of JDK would catch up. The concurrency features of JDK 7 are pretty good.

c) did I mention the team -- its hard enough finding a good java programmer; imagine how difficult it would be to hire good Scala programmers from the small eclectic community of Scala programmers.

d) most of the enterprisey stuff my team develops doesn't require functional programming -- just reliable applications delivered within drop dead deadlines. Plain old Java gets me there . JDK 7 concurrency and various Actor model implementations in Java such as FunctionalJava, Jetlang , Kilim are just cherry on top.
Good results don't necessarily imply good teaching either. If it's a class of 40 reasonably motivated and intelligent students they would all perform well irrespective of how they were taught.