skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I'm not thrilled at the way Jobs used his money to get himself on as many transplant lists as he could, it's still not anything I'd wish on anyone.

I have cystic fibrosis, which accounts for a really high percentage of lung transplants in the U.S. (something like 1/3 of adult and 1/2 of pediatric lung transplants, IIRC) and people with CF sometimes get other organ transplants as well. Transplant itself is really hard on the body and then you take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of your life. Sometimes it doesn't go well and people die after transplant. The stories are pretty heart-wrenching. I can't help but feel it is Frankensteinian and I wish there was more research into preventing and reversing organ degeneration/failure. My feeling is transplant is kind of "glamorous" and glitzy for the medical world whereas preventive medicine is boring -- if you avert crisis, there isn't any real "news" to report: "These people didn't get gruesomely ill and didn't suffer horribly. Film at 11". It just doesn't sell.

I don't envy anyone facing transplant, money or no money.
Roll your own LinkBait headline
BP has more roughly 3 times as many shares outstanding, so it's probably somewhat harder to move the price much.

Also, it wasn't clear at that point how bad it was. It was "just" an exploded platform.
I don't think it matters where you start as long as you think through design and architecture to be as cross platform as possible. You have got to start somewhere.
Nokia pulls plug on free music in most markets
7 Cloud-Based Database Services
What you are saying is plausible, but it does not match with my experience. Folks who are easily offended need to look away now: there is a porpoise show at the Nagoya Aquarium. At the end of it, the dolphins "bow" to the crowd. Everyone says "Aww, how cute!" because the important thing isn't that the dolphin bowed properly, it is that you just saw a dolphin bowing.

In this regard, foreigners are a lot like dolphins. You're going to be graded on a curve and that curve is going to underestimate you severely -- one can (judiciously) take advantage of this sort of thing.

My ex-ex-job was Coordinator of International Relations for a tech incubator, and I never saw someone lose points for trying their six word Japanese vocabulary, a bow, etc. It may actually be more difficult for those folks who are in the uncanny valley of between "fluent enough to be assumed competent" and "actually competent." (cough Oh the stories I can't tell. cough)

Tangentially related, it is occasionally to one's advantage as a foreigner to pretend ignorance of Japanese social norms. I am not generally a fan of it, but sometimes duty wins.
It is a holiday in the US, today, right? At least, the markets are not open. The timing of this announcement is almost certainly not a coincidence.

On a more personal note, good luck, Steve!
http://lesswrong.com/lw/10g/lets_reimplement_eurisko/
Many schools allow you to apply based on other factors. New enrollments at music schools (not the top ones, but still some very good ones) allow you to take a starter course the summer before school starts so you can learn to read music. Music has changed so much in the 20th century that a prerequisite in music theory isn't going to hinder you if you show the ability to apply your analytical skills.

Having been through music classes myself I noted I was initially wary of those who hadn't been trained musicians since the age of 7, but quickly realised that it really didn't matter and some of my peers really excelled at music having picked it up even as an adult.

Doesn't apply to performance/dance schools though, obviously - you can't get a degree in piano performance if you're just starting at 18, unless you're a rare genius.
But he's the CEO of a publicly traded company. And not just any CEO, but like the soul of Apple.
Don't you hate when your theoretical phisicist, mathematician, molecular biologist and rocket engineer friends do that.
Stop releasing prototypes
Scientific results fading over time
For others who did not see the article from ZDNet earlier, asking for help finding Danchev: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/we-need-help-with-the-str...
Influential Programming Languages, Part 1: ALGOL
Tomorrow Apple will announce (suspected to be great and record breaking) finantials http://www.tuaw.com/2011/01/14/apple-will-announce-q1-2011-f...

Obviously releasing this note the day before is meant to avoid $AAPL going to much into the red.
This might be neat, but it doesn't work and throws an error in firebug.
At least he's trying to solve a problem he faces. Imagine if he took a heatmap of all mouse movements during form submissions, ranked them as spam/ham, and then used that heatmap against new submissions to determine a confidence. Perhaps there is a pattern. It's difficult to know the answer to a question that isn't asked. Maybe during data entry, your analysis returns a fact that in human submissions, they press backspace at least once.

Sure it doesn't work for mobile browsers/touchscreens, but, on low-confidence submissions, you present a harder, second challenge.

Most recaptcha forms are solved by humans at $1/1000 from companies. You have caused them to use a human to solve it, which means your test worked. The fact that you still got a spam submission is a separate issue.

Ensuring a human, non-spam response is something that needs to be done statistically, not through a rules based system. Shared inoculation like Akismet or Typepad help, but, often miss new trends.

I don't think the real problem is determining if it is a human, I think the real problem is dealing with the contents of the form submission. I could care less if the form is automatically submitted, as long as I know whether to ignore that form. Captcha just erects a small barrier.

One of the best things I ever did to combat spam on inbound mail was greylisting + dspam + tmda. If dspam has a high confidence that it is spam, tmda sends a challenge/response. While I've never given out my gmail address, the amount of spam it receives is ridiculous. My own solution, even the spam folder rarely sees more than a few messages a week. My personal blog, discounting trackback spam has had 71 spam posts in the last week. I use RPXnow (requires one of the shared auth providers or someone needs to create an account) and recaptcha with Akismet. It hasn't stopped the spam that is received, merely what gets automatically published. I do believe that every submission received on my blog comes from a human, or has at least had some human interaction. Captcha doesn't solve the problem, merely erects a small barrier and just makes sure the spam I get is more likely hand delivered.
Show me one that doesn't fund terrorism.

I'll go first: US's Beirut Car bomb in 1985 that killed scores of women and children.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Beirut_car_bombing

You go next...
On a slightly off topic note, rockstars need a lot of skills to be successful. As you said it isn't only about music (I beg to differ that it does not relate to music at all), but a lot of different stuff. A rockstar has to catch the attention of millions of people and that is a skill which not everyone can master. This actually relates a lot to college professors. You might have noticed that there are some professors which just fail at catching your attention even though they might be expert in there subject while there are some which may not be the best in content but just catch attention of a huge student body in a lecture hall.
Who does Black Hat's Jeff Moss think he is anyway?
RIM going cross-platform?
He seems like a natural born showman because of the hours upon hours of preparation that go into each presentation:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/jan/05/newmedia.me...
When does the market not overreact to news? (Answer: when it's actually good news but hard to comprehend.)
This is a sad day, I wish all the best to Steve and his family.

Maybe this is not the best place to ask, but does anyone know about Steve's eating habits? I know he was a frutarian at a certain point and then changed to fish/vegan (particularly sushi), but would really like to know more.

The reason is that I am in need of drastic personal changes regarding diet/exercise and thus trying to incorporate a vegan/vegetarian diet, which has been very difficult for me. I know that cancer is a multi-factorial disease, but it still scares me that some apparently very healthy individuals (such as Jobs or Linda McCartney) have such tough health problems. I feel very well when I manage to stick to a vegan diet, but would like to know more about longterm effects.
The term "rockstar" is used across many disciplines for a top performer. Don't get too hung up on the analogy: a rock star programmer isn't one who's into sex & drugs & loop unrolls.

The main origins of this meme revolve around some studies done many years ago that show there's a productivity difference of 10x to 20x from mediocre programmers and the top performers. It's been noted that the salary range is much smaller, often in the 2x range. So why not hire top performers, paying them twice as much and getting ten times the productivity?

There is and has been ongoing controversy about this on several fronts. The most substantial criticisms have to do with the validity of the studies. The rest of the criticisms seems to revolve around pushback from people because hiring rockstar programmers is difficult and care and feeding of such doesn't fit within the management structure of most companies.
The article doesn't say who. I'm wondering as well.
Strangers in Our Midst
What's your point? Don't you think he should have some privacy? The man might be extremely sick, and at worst could potentially be dying. Why does it matter if he's the CEO of a publicly traded company? What does that have to do with his right to privacy when he's ill?
I wonder this about CEOs in general.
More at: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2112128
“[…] and it's very obvious on the rare occasions he doesn't like what he has to say […]”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWSRgsk2oaw#t=2m45s
Trust me, neither do I. Being on "the list" is a long and taxing and heart wrenching process.

I just don't like the fact that having money increases your odds.
One recurring theme in these discussions is that no one has actually seen Eurisko's source code except Lenat, so it's very difficult to know how much directed guidance was required to get the results in question.
I agree completely. Compared to any other public apology I've seen in Japan, well his simply doesn't compare. Unfortunately I think he comes off as the insensitive-to-cultural-norms American which actually does more damage in Japan than it does to smooth over problems, at least in my experiences living there.
Welcome to scam capital of world INDIA
> Link building has all to do with making content that people find interesting enough to link to/talk about on social networks

Shouldn't that be the aim of any website? Being interesting so people like the site and talk about it?
I really like the look of Clementine, but I'm still holding onto Amarok 1.4 because it works with Katapult. Does Clementine work with any launchers yet?
Just to be pedantic:

What exactly is the value that should be substituted for the variable $AAPL? :P
It's always inspiring to hear someone's launch narrative, but I don't agree with a couple of your conclusions.

Is Techcrunch that important to get traction? They sent a ~2 day traffic spike your way, but after that not much. Is it the sacred cow of launching?

I agree with your fix quickly mentality, but coming away with the conclusion that you should listen to the critic without context is a bit rash.

You changed your site for 1 blog post. I do agree with their advice, but what if you where told that the logo was terrible, or your navigation scheme was wrong? How much would you be willing to change for the coverage, and at that point who's site is it?

Wow this kinda turned into a rant. I don't want the groupthink to lend itself toward; bending to the will of a tech blog, because it's the only way to launch.
You had to jinx it ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2112128 ), hadn't you. :)

I'm almost like you - I haven't been exclusively a Mac user, but I've always had and used one Mac or another ever since the Mac SE. And I'm fairly confident that Apple will continue delivering products we'll enjoy. I'm confident because of one of Jobs' most overlooked qualities - his ability to find and attract to his company people that can create great stuff.
Do you have a sense what kind of lasting user base comes back from the TC referrals?

I was pretty impressed that we got a 25% conversion rate for signups on textWeight.com from a TC write up. This was especially amazing, given that you have to give your personal phone number. I think we've had about 10% attrition in the past 2 weeks, but otherwise a very healthy user base.
Public knowledge ( Q & A services comparision )
Springboard, Meet the Mentors Day
May I try to reframe your excellent suggestion?

I like the idea.

In order to take this to the next level, you need integration through the Twitter distribution system -- this needs to be part of TweetDeck, my Android app, etc (those are just the desktop / mobile clients I use, it needs to be in all of them)...

Great concept, but is it good enough enough that users will want to have a browser tab open to maintain it?
I'm not familiar with whatever the original "beatboxing hack" was. Could someone please provide a little bit of background?
Right -- this commonly comes up as a perk of Google, but (for example) I've dug into Python internals and I haven't yet found a reason to contact Guido about it. More to the point: if I did, he seems like a reasonable guy, and I expect he would respond just as well on python-dev regardless of my place of employment.
Maybe the idea is that he should have some privacy, but unfortunately that's not how the world operates ...
This is, of course, one of the old Soviet techniques dealing with "undesirables"...declare them insane and put them away in mental institutions.

Obviously without any details it's possible that he does have mental problems.
I loved how Matt's response was mocking shady SEO techniques where you keep repeating keywords over and over. He placed the company name / website 10 times in his reply!

I don't know if this will have much effect on the SEO rankings, but it was very funny, and I wouldn't be surprised if the first Google result for "better placements" in a few day links to this story (all the social media attention will also help).
Amazon SDKs Boost Support for Mobile Cloud App Development
I agree that he should have some privacy but as the CEO of one of the largest publicly traded companies the state of his health is something investors need to know.
the numbers of shares is not important. Apples Market Cap is about twice the size of BP but even this is not important if you look at a relative change (%), not an absolute ($).
White roofs OR garden roofs are good for insulation.

-Black metal pipes for heating water in the summer

-Running A/C vents inside room

-Setting refrigerators to take in outside air during winter

-Dehumidifying and reusing dryer exhaust for heating in winter

There are many hacks to buildings (homes in the list above) that can save a lot of energy per year.

A little more on topic: I think white pavement would be a little too bright for comfort while driving, and oil would instantly stain it and make it look much worse than equivalent blacktop.
$AAPL is used on twitter to talk about stocks, just like # is used for hashtags.
Like $AAPL, $GOOG, $MSFT ... etc
348.48 at the moment, according to google finance.
There is a whole lot wrong with conventional medicine. I wish there were more and better alternatives altogether.
Linux.conf.au 2011 going ahead in Brisbane, Australia
The programming world is remarkably and unfortunately geared towards only certain sorts of minds.

Could that be because it is in fact an extreme brain activity that only a small percentage of people is capable of doing?

And since men are over-represented in the extremes of society, both in good and in bad, they are over-represented in programming?
WikiLeaks to Release Secret Swiss Bank Account Info
I think whatever you may learn about well-known peoples' eating habits will be self-reported. It may be beneficial to appear as a vegan or vegetarian, but we'll never know exactly what do celebrities actually eat. Also, as you noted, their habits may change during their lifetime.

If you're seriously interested in healthy eating habits, I would suggest to look at sources or studies on the subject, rather than trying to emulate the celebrities diets.
"He" has been the default personal pronoun for a very long time. See the dictionary (second definition):
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/he
Steve Jobs to take another medical leave of absence, will remain on as CEO
I don't know Jobs' specific circumstances regarding paying or not, but I do believe you get liver priority if you are not an alcoholic. Since most liver failure issues are alcohol related, those patients usually have to wait to even be put on a list. In Oregon it is six months of sobriety.
Brisbane has been in the news recently because of flooding.

It was announced tonight "the lca2011 team and Linux Australia have made a joint decision that lca2011 will go ahead".

Further information see the main conference site: http://lca2011.linux.org.au/
Show / Hide files and icons in your Linux desktop
For most people, desktop gets cluttered with too many icons and files. At a simple keystroke, toggle your GNOME linux desktop to show/hide the files and icons in your desktop, allowing you to enjoy your background wallpaper in its full beauty.
Typo: The templating lib is called Jinja, not Jinga.
JQuery 1.5 promises a better future.
When you only link to the image you lose a very important part of xkcd's content (the alt text): http://xkcd.com/230/
I've been bitten by this a few times as pypi was down. I still do this, but I'm thinking about setting up some private hosting for the libs I need.
I love being an engineer. You have a chip on your shoulder. I recommend not using Facebook at all given your concerns. I do not maintain a Facebook account myself for anything but development.
But we are not talking about the Cold war era Soviet block. Bulgaria is an EU member and I'd like to believe that in the EU sane people cannot be thrown in the loony bin for political reasons.

Based on this and his barely coherent ramblings in the published email of his, I'd say he does indeed have some sort of mental problem.
Do SLAs really matter? A 1 year case study of 38 cloud services
And for those on an iPhone or Android phone: http://m.xkcd.com/230/
There are 8 RFS's, but the dropdown for choosing which RFS you're responding to only has 7 options.
Ask HN: How to learn programming?
First time poster, long time reader.

I have been a Product Manager for quite some time now generally overseeing strategy and execution for web (Flash/HTML) and client (C++) products. I'd like to learn programming but I have trouble finding the right starting place.

What language should I pick up if I am interested in creating a dynamic website? How can one get started learning something like Python or JQuery?
Great! Way to go. A very good looking website. Congrats on learning to code.
Ah, Twitter. What symbol will you appropriate next?
sincerity is his secret - he'd kill off a product if he can't truthfully sell it on stage (well except for a few cases).
Michelin Active Wheel Futuristic Technology
I know it has been. But I don't agree that just because that's the tradition means we should go on with it. I see nothing wrong with using "she" as the default sometimes, and quite a few reasons why sticking to "he" might not be the best thing.
True. But the problem with the recruiter still exists because they just need to give you candidates consider. There may be recruiters that do a better job at qualifying their candidates, but the paradigm is still the same.
Email Etiquette for the Super-Busy
"Slipstream" is a Mike Oldfield song, as im being told by Amarok devs.
It's a holiday.
I use my music player to play music. I don't sort through my filesystem painstakingly building a list, I just say "play songs in these genres" or "play songs in these genres that I've rated at least 3 stars". Technically these are DB queries but it's not like I'm typing SQL.

When I want a small player window I have that too. To each his own, but your arguments against music libraries are pretty bizarre and make no sense to me.
I know this is slightly out of topic, but since the author mentioned it, after seeing his presentation [1] on VP8 vs H264, I can't really agree with his conclusions.

WebM clearly outruns H264 on HD video. It doesn't lose color information and some image details due to compression, that can be seen quite easily on the HD video comparisons: the first one shows very different lighting, which can also be seen on the second, that is not to mention the "airbrushed" neck of the guy (and face, but not so noticeable).

[1] http://www.streamingmedia.com/conferences/west2010/presentat...
Wow, I'm glad you posted this question -- there's more of us deaf guys here than I'd realized.

I am also profoundly deaf, as a result of bacterial meningitis shortly before my fifth birthday.

That said, I have less of an entrepreneurial bent than you do, in that I work in a consulting/professional services role for a small company rather than starting my own. I'd like to start my own someday but I have some of the same concerns that you do, and I'm not sure how to address them either. :)

Groups are very difficult for me. This is partly because they tend to break down into a bunch of conversations that are really hard for me to follow, so I tend to be afraid to jump in and really say anything since I worry it will be off-topic -- so I generally don't speak much in groups unless someone asks me a specific question. Doesn't help that I tend to be really introverted in general, too.

As far as phones go, when I interviewed with my current company they were cool about doing the initial "phone" screen via IM, so that hasn't been a problem. We use IM heavily for internal communications anyway so it's not a big deal for me, and most of our external clients use it as well. We've used Campfire in the past in lieu of teleconferences, or at worst my project manager/account exec will be on the conference and relay any critical information I need to be aware of.

Anyway, if any of the deaf folks here would like someone to shoot the breeze with or whatever, feel free to drop me a line (email's in my profile, please mention HN in the subject line) -- I'd like to have more people in my circle of acquaintances who are in a similar situation as me and understand some of the unique issues (like teleconferences) that we have to deal with.
I absolutely love the idea and the look/feel of this app. When I first heard about it I thought... this is what I've been looking for.. an easy way to auto capture and generate all these important metrics!

So I got started immediately with integrating it into TweetSaver. Unfortunately, I ran into a show stopper pretty quick.

When passing a signup event, they require you to send a unique username. This was a major bummer since for the free level of my app, users are not required to give an email address and in general emails may not be unique to a user in the system. This essentially renders sunnytrail unusable for me.

The best part though is that co-founder Octav is always in the live chat on the site, so I explained my situation and he said they would take a look to see if there is a better solution. I'm anxious to see if they can make some changes that will allow me to use their service!
NASDAQ is closed, holiday. DAX (Germany) is in business hours though, and the stocks fell ~7% immediately http://www.finanzen.net/aktien/Apple-Aktie and then flattened out.

Expect something similar when NASDAQ opens again.