skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What worries me about this post is that the most salient solution to one of the main complaints (roaming fees) is to have one giant worldwide provider of mobile broadband. And it's not hard to imagine why that might not be so good.
Exactly. And at any one point there are only a handful of high performers. The rest of us get by just fine with basic math and skills borderline literacy. This is true in all fields, even the hard sciences, if there even is such a thing. The vast majority of research organisations are desparately copying what a few standouts discover.

The few truly innovative and driven students will self-select as long as they are given a chance. I'm not endorsing the dumbing-down of education but it doesn't really scare me either as long as a reasonable baseline is maintained. Looking at my 10 yr. old daughter's public school curriculum for math and sciences I have to say that it's not so different from mine, which was German public schools of the 70s and 80s.

By the way, "could care less" is ok in common usage now - heard it on NPR so it must be true.
Research In Motion Acquires Professional Contact Manager Gist
You don't need a designer
it's in the post
Incorrect. I periodically have clothing fail. Typically, of course, I throw away crashed clothing, rather than rebooting it. :)
I'm glad they touched on the idea that this is actually a "Human vs Human" competition... Really good Jeopardy players vs. a team of humans that built their own "Jeopardy Player".

Watson winning the tournament is a triumph for humanity, not just for machines.
Your view of this whole subject seems to be completely upside down.

There's no such thing as a 100% guarantee when it comes to email (Interwebs 101) but it should be completely obvious to any sane person that you are getting much closer to those 100% if you don't use any "super-special characters" in your e-mail address as opposed to people "asking for it" by using an address like {^|~!}@gmail.com - which will obviously get you into some kind of trouble, sooner or later, whether it's Facebook's validation rejecting it or mail applications which can't handle it properly.

So of course, while there can't be 100%, from the perspective of an application that deals with e-mails, you'd want to get as close as possible. And like I said in an earlier comment, I wouldn't expect problems with characters such as - _ . but yeah, who knows?

And actually, there's no way anyone could ever have that obscure example address used above, as hey surprise, GMail won't allow you to register it (same for Hotmail). So, I am not sure what this means now:

GMail only allows alphanumeric characters and dots in mail addresses because...

a) ...their coders don't know the RFC and hardly anything about that whole e-mail thing in general, so they provided us with a heavily flawed product, according to your definition.

b) ...their coders have already been doing this whole development and e-mail thing for a week or two and it was obvious to them that "super-special characters" could lead (and have previously led) to trouble, so they're saving less 'techy' people from registering addresses that are basically "asking for it".

Ever since the first comment I left here, my whole point is that everyone who has built applications sending a lot of e-mails just knows that it's insane to assume that everybody else "does it right" and that combinations of special characters, escaping and UTF-8 often result in 'lots of fun'... not. That's far from being fully RFC-compliant but that's how it is, out there in the wild.

One last example: according to Wikipedia, Hotmail "refuses to send mail to any address containing any of the following standards-permissible characters: ! # $ % * / ? ^ ` { | } ~". (And being aware of this, you'd be "asking for it".)
The royalty-free MPEG video codec is currently vapourware.
You've market-tested this approach to fund-raising for a non-profit, then, I assume?
Yet another way to browse App Store
IIRC, they said they fixed that.
“There are all these great programmers out there who think starting a startup requires esoteric business knowledge." - Paul Graham
AeroFS - http://www.aerofs.com - although it's in alpha and you'll need an invite.
Anyone can vote on whether or not an article should be deleted but how many people actually do? I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of Wikipedia users don't know, and don't care, about Wikipedia politics.

If something is in the process of being deleted that I don't know about then I can't vote on whether or not I want it to be kept around. Wikipedia is great for jumping from link-to-link to find out new things and if the content is being deleted it's that much harder to learn. I didn't even know about the programming language Nemerle before and now the article is gone.

Knowledge shouldn't be voted on.
Good luck. I did the same a coupla months ago (except I didn't even "Tell HN").
Bloomberg Interviews Vicarious Systems (an AI company) [video]
Signs You're a Bad Boss
You're right. I could hardly believe my eyes when I first saw it.
The color combination is just plain disastrous - have they gone completely mad (or perhaps colorblind)?
I felt like the middle of the post wandered around, but the final tirade felt suitably Feynmanish to satisfy me. It reminded me of some comments made about processes in his Challenger analysis. For instance, the bit about claiming a 3x safety margin on ring erosion while not establishing how it actually works to know whether that was a reasonable assumption.

Also, part of the assumption of these dialogs is not that Feynman is actually proposing these solutions, but that he is using them to Socratically establish to the listeners the flaws in their layout of the problem.

http://www.ralentz.com/old/space/feynman-report.html
It looked like they were using Java. (Unless that was just fabricated for the screen.)
It can always be "awesomer". However, calling it half-assed I think is a bit harsh. The truly novel aspects of Watson are that in its abilies in to answer questions in a truly domian-free way. It is not trained to be an expert in a specific domain, but instead to calculate what it believes to be the best answer from any domain. This is truly novel and amazing. That it can do this with Jeopardy questions, regardless of how it is given those questions, is truly remarkable. Jeopardy questions are often times laden with puns or other literay devices. Watson can understand and answer better than the vast majority of humans on this planet. That it can't currently "see" or "hear" is, IMO, less interesting given the advances it makes in deep QA.
I think how Gmail handles the problem is they keep multiple instances of the server-side software running, one for each version of the API. From my experience, whenever GMail rolls out a new feature, I don't see it until I do a refresh and frequently that's what GMail tells me I need to do to see the new feature.
Its not a counterpoint. Unless you're trying to pass off that new editor intimidation is caused by too many articles.

Heres a tip: I'm not an editor anymore and it didn't have anything to do with intimidation from the size of wikipeida, it had to do with intimidation with the huge stack of wikipieda policies I was going to have to master to try and navigate around the busybodies running the place just to fix up some articles.
Ask HN: Is Google's VDay logo an eye sore or am I missing something?
Usually, I love Google's special edition logos that celebrate special dates. They are creative, and beautiful. But for today's valentines logo it seems like they really phoned it in. The color scheme is really off putting. But, it is hard for me to believe that they would do something of such poor quality so I'm left wondering if I'm missing something. Is there something special about the color scheme that justifies its usage? Could it be colorblind safe color combinations? (even still cant they find color blind safe colors that look good?)
Marginal cost of an if statement: $0.
Knowing where to place it: $29.95
To me, Quora is almost the ultimate non-story. There's nothing technically noteworthy about the idea or the platform.

The only thing Quora has done well (and they have done really well at this) is to get Valley insiders to use it.

Replace "Quora" with "Hacker News" and you'll see how valuable getting Valley insiders to use it can be. It's the community.
EBay Instant : Sell / Recycle old gadgets easily
What's amazing to me is NPR, PBS, CBC and BBC haven't gotten together to make their own public domain codecs. It's kind of their job to do this stuff. I guess if you take contributions from "The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation", you got make some compromises.
This -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Indiana
In case anyone is interested to know Watson's opponents: Watson will compete against Brad Rutter, the current biggest all-time money winner on Jeopardy!, and Ken Jennings, the record holder for the longest championship streak [source: wikipedia]
In case anyone missed it the first time around, the nytimes mag had a pretty good writeup on Watson back in June -- might be worth instapapering and reading later if you're going to catch the broadcast this week:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/magazine/20Computer-t.html...

As an AI researcher I'm excited to watch this week. Even if it's not the most elegant artificial Jeopardy player imaginable, it raises the public profile of a lot of AI & ML topics and might encourage and inspire other groups to tackle ambitious projects.
Most of those materials are reverse engineer-able, though. This has a significant impact on the big manufacturer's bottom lines... they derive most of their profit from materials, just like regular printers.

I'll just leave this here: http://open3dp.me.washington.edu/

Specifically: http://open3dp.me.washington.edu/2009/10/plaster-based-powde...

See how cheap that is? Crazy...
The point is to illustrate that even in big companies, stability is an illusion.

It was fine, actually, since my manager knew the score. The HR software we are forced to use only lets you set a person's goals once a year, and then you (the manager) confirm if they reached them or not, then it calculates their bonus. So that's fucking stupid, but he just ticked them anyway, who's to know?
I'm in a similar situation. Mail me (profile) if you want to exchange thoughts or ideas.
Zed writes: "I have registered notnotable.com... Just put up the same software, get some free hosting from some of the companies out there that I know, and start filling it in with anything that's not on Wikipedia."

There've been a few abortive attempts to create a repository for deleted Wikipedia content, or a more inclusionist Wikipedia with the same software... and they've all proved moribund.

The trick is not just the name or concept, but the entire community and mission. Reusing the same software – while attractive for a quick start – could present problems. Part of the reason Wikipedia has resorted to deletionism, in my mind, has been weaknesses in MediaWiki, and having the same general appearance and workflow is likely to just walk a new project down the same paths. And defining an alternative solely as "what Wikipedia isn't" puts a rather hard and low cap on its growth as an independent identity.

With these problems in mind, I've started working on a reference knowledge-base to complement Wikipedia that will loosen the 'notability' requirement in favor of 'true and useful'. Otherwise, it will share the same licensing and a wiki-centric edit model.

The project codename is 'Infinithree' ('∞³'), and I'm discussing it pre-launch at http://infinithree.org and (Twitter/Identica) @infinithree.
SpotCloud.com is now open to the public
Artificial Intelligence Advances, Bringing Wonders and Fears
Sometimes you just have to say no. Being open to ideas is great, but it can shift your focus. Make sure you have your priorities in line before you start taking on more projects.
Oh dear. Don Norman has discovered why free software is about freedom and what the cloud business model is really about.

"One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control," he said. "It's just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software."[1]

He dismisses GNU/Linux right off the bat, even though the very reason why GNU was even born[2] is the very same problem he is starting to admit (given where he worked, I think he saw this ...but now that he no longer seem to profit from it enough to even get his blackberry roaming payed for him by The Company Overlord -- welcome to the reality of the majority).

Just visit http://www.debian.org/ and download http://www.libreoffice.org/ and do something about it, instead of musing and whining (I am awaiting a functionality he would need that is missing).

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.compu...

[2] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Actually, Google also seems to have a negative price for Android. As a device maker it's possible to get paid a percentage of add revenue on the devices you build.
Everything that matters and is going somewhere is using JSON.
One issue is that from the question screen there seems to be no way to get back to the categories. You can get a new category list, but not the one you came from.
Janet Jackson may disagree
No worries, I've got one now! I'll get to work.
RailsPlayground offers VPSs starting at $20 per month with optional management service that costs $15 per month [1]. They offer VPS images that include control panels: cPanel ($12 per month) or Virtualmin (free).

That said, you will need to familiarize yourself with the OS, control panel, and the other software that's included in the VPS image that you use. With this in mind, I think your time would be better spent learning how to set up a server. One of the biggest regrets of my career is the time I wasted trying to take shortcuts (e.g., using text editors other than Vim and Emacs).

[1] http://railsplayground.com/plans-products/vps/
Obama's Budget: How $3.7 Trillion is Spent (Treemap)
As RiderOfGiraffes notes, it's there. This article is just drenched with emotion-laden terminology and turns of speech to gin up a controversy about something that is actually still worth writing about but does not deserve this treatment. It's not totalitarianism, it's a company that has grown very quickly having some growing pains dealing with its customers. Certainly very on topic for HN, but this framing is ridiculous and unnecessary. TechCrunch at its finest.

I've been on the Internet long enough to know that getting accused of being a totalitarian is almost a rite of passage more than anything else, but every once in a while something like this still manages to stick out despite my general desensitization to the accusation.

Further, watching my original post bounce up and down, I'm impressed at how people either can't see it either because they are desensitized far more than I am, or are somehow offended at the idea that it's wrong to use this imagery or something? Or are ignorant of the provenance of the phrasing being used? I'm at a bit of a loss to explain the number of people who seem to think that not only is this just peachy, it's not acceptable to have a problem with it or something.
> They'd also have a better understanding about the kind of crap that gets regularly deleted

Most of it isn't crap.

For example, I looked at the top 5 articles listed on 13th February -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...

#1 is an internet marketing company. It has a website which verifiably exists. People considering doing business with them would find this useful. It should be kept.

#2 is an academic. That makes the article useful. OTOH, she's hasd death threats and wants the article down. I'm not sure what I'd do here.

#3 is a sportsman. Should be kept: even if he isn't well known, those who do know about him will likely find the article useful.

#4 is about Swiss people in Sri Lanka. If I was Swiss and was considering relocation to Sri Lanka, I might find this useful. Should be kept.

#5 is about "XMLmosaic", something I've never heard of, and has been speedily deleted.

A majority of these articles (at least 60%) are net-useful to humanity and should be kept. If I did a larger sample, I'm sure I'd get similar results.

About 100 articles a day are posted on AfD and most of these (75-80%) are deleted. What good is served by destroying tens of thousands of useful articles every year? None.
They took a lesson from Dr. Soong, skipped Lore and went straight to Data.
I am interested mail me at vishal.kr@gmail.com.
I loved the comparison of Watson to Deep Blue as a "bigger steamroller".
Christopher has posted this update on his profile:

Dear internet,

You guys win. I will stop nominating pages for deletion.

I wasn't doing this to troll or to slam any language community. I was just trying to help -- I read the WP guidelines for inclusion, and whenever I came across a language that didn't seem to meet said criteria, I nominated it for AfD. I think, with respect to Wikipedia's established notability guidelines, my arguments for deletion were airtight, which is probably why the articles were eventually deleted. I'm not sure my actions warranted the kind of internet-hatred I received as a result. If anyone thought what I was doing was wrong, they could have just sent me a friendly message and I would have politely discussed the issue. Few took this route, and I am sorry that due to time constraints and an overwhelming amount of invective I could not reply sensibly to everyone.

Since the internet seems to care more about keeping these articles than I care about deleting them, I'll stop. I personally think a lot of the articles should have been deleted. I think that ALL articles I nominated for deletion fail to meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline. Here's a challenge, then, for the internet: instead of spamming my Wikipedia talk page (which I don't really care about), why don't you work on fixing WP's notability guideline for programming languages? Otherwise, some other naive editor will eventually try to delete them. Perhaps they won't have as much experience dealing with trolls and flamebait as I have had, and will become very hurt and confused. Nobody wants that :(

This was fun. Now back to real work, I guess...
Ask HN: Who do you use to sell your ad space?
I'm considering buysellads.com but would like some other recommendations (as 25% seems expensive). I don't need an agent, as I have interested advertisers, I just want a hosted SaaS solution that can supply the code and handle the merchant processing, CPC/I and inventory etc.
I plan to do the same this May. Good luck to you!
Hiring Freelance Audio Transcriptionists. https://callgraph.biz/freelance-transcription
I am looking for artistic input on handful of animated "intros" with soundtracks for a smartphone app. These pieces would last approximately 5, 10, or 20 seconds and would be used to introduce or preface user-generated content in the form of photos, documents, or event invitations. We are looking primarily for the right artistic touch and the flexibility to produce work for hire in specific genres or styles on demand. (Currently looking for electronica and 60's spy movie styling.) We will pay excellent rates for a commensurate level of talent.

Please send rate info and online portfolio links to ooghamist at g mail dot com.
I guess that's interesting, but it isn't too surprising that some software security firms have pitched a rootkit product at some point in their past.

It's a fact that the FBI has used spyware to catch bad guys: http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2007/07/fbi_spyware
Meet the Company That Records Your Calls for Quality Assurance
Then you are unfamiliar with email address formats, which have a specific formatting that allows for "comments", and it is kind of hairy.
Write Internal Tools: Business in the Front, Party in the Back
Shouldn't the spammers have figured out the "+" feature by now? Just remove it and the suffix to get a valid address, for gmail or any other provider that uses the syntax.

return Regex.replace(email, "([^\+])°[^@]°(@.°)$", "$1$2")

° should be * but HN eats it as markup.
I'm sorry that you're incapable of taking the 5 seconds to realize that the overabundance of specific Wikipedia policy pages are the reason why people have given up trying to fix it from within and are content to lob stones from outside without digging into the rules.

Just because you know so goddamn much about policies and the like, doesn't mean anybody else cares.

Since you mostly seem to be interested in seeing yourself further existing bureaucracy and not IAR to create the best a resource for wikipeida users, I will engage you in a futile attempt to point out the reason that people are not doing what you ask.
I assume this is pre-recorded and IBM would have cancelled it if they didn't like the outcome.
agile always works, it's a magic bullet that will synergize your life!
There are also some excellent ones here: http://www.junauza.com/2010/12/top-50-programming-quotes-of-...
Ken should totally go for the Bobby Tables response if there's a Daily Double he doesn't know.

That or the Star Trek self-destruct sequence.
What's Better, Hacking or Sex?
Yeah, so what? No harm is done. Revert bad changes to articles people care about, and ignore articles that nobody cares about. If people actually someone start visiting these 'bad' articles, that means nothing more than you've just identified another avenue for expansion.
Yes, that's right. Infix function names (anything made of symbols or delimited by backticks) are allowed on the LHS of a defining equation. An alternative syntax for this function would be this:

(|>) f x = f x

The parentheses just serve to denote an infix operator being used in a prefix way.

A type signature makes this clearer:

(|>) :: a -> (a -> b) -> b

As you can see, (|>) is a function which accepts an argument of type a, a function which takes an argument of type a and returns something of type b, and returns something of type b. In this way it's just a flipped version of the application operator ($), which has this type:

($) :: (a -> b) -> a -> b
Maybe it's part of their long term strategy. For now just require validation of fake sounding names. But as soon as you have critical mass, roll out the requirement for everybody to validate their names with valid IDs in order to continue using the system. That would make sense for the current state or requiring IDs for fake names.

Then they can go to advertisers or just blatantly sell the data if it doesn't work out.

Regardless if their intentions are good or bad, this data in the wrong hands can cause nuisance.
The Google Instant Blacklist: Why Google Censors BitTorrent, Not Pirate Bay
> to the point where people are calling me a Nazi/asshole/whatnot on my user page

If someone calls you a Nazi, they're probably a bad person. But if lots of people call you a Nazi, that should suggest to you that your behaviour may be at fault.
I registered real first name, real last initial and they demanded I change in a couple of emails. Sorry, not gonna do it for a site I'm still on the fence about. I promptly deactivated my account and don't plan to return.
When Hackers Become Makers
How Real Can a Fake Mars Mission Be?