skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting. The parallels between ML and Scheme, two languages invented in the '70s and in an academic setting, are striking: the core language is great, but the community is divided into ever-so-slightly incompatible implementations, so, in practice, there's very little sharing. Therefore, it's impractical to do most "large" projects in the language, due to lack of critical mass of useful libraries. ML/Scheme end up being learning languages, for the most part, and then everyone moves on to {OCaml, Haskell}/Common Lisp to get real work done.

I would say these similar outcomes are a repudiation of the idea that multiple implementations of the same language is a good thing, but that hasn't hurt C's popularity. More likely, it has something to do with their roots in programming language research. Maybe ML and Scheme are too good for their own good, and other academics can't resist using them as a basis for their own pet ideas. Perhaps a truly successful (read, "widely-adopted") programming language has to be flawed just enough to discourage anyone from trying to improve on it. Worse is better strikes again?
Thanks for detailing out your approach! I wonder how many times you zigged when you should have zagged to get to this point of clarity...
>"The most important number is search advertising revenue."

The effects of that kind of thinking at Google is why I often use Bing - too often Google's results appear to be skewed toward ad impressions rather than usefulness.
This has also bothered me for quite awhile. I think what nails the ridiculousness of graphical calculators is illustrated in this comic: http://xkcd.com/768/

Seriously, though, as a student in CMU, and as a astrophysics major, I can attest to how unnecessary these calculators are. As long as it can perform trigonometry and logarithms, it satisfies the need.

I like the author's idea of using "locked-down" netbooks instead. After all, a netbook installed with Mathematica or MATLAB will be much more similar to academia/industry level calculators.
"Haruki Madarame, chairman of the commission, which is a government panel, said it has estimated that the release of 10,000 terabecquerels (a trillion becquerels) of radioactive materials per hour continued for several hours (after the quake)"

http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/04/84721.html
EFF to San Francisco Entertainment Commission: Don’t Turn SF into a Police State
The problem here is that the mathematics education industry is bought and paid for by educational vendors in general and Texas Instruments in particular. My wife's school has its own TI Vendor who makes sure to come by every month or two with free goodies for the teachers (and frequently hosts events with free drinks for the teachers and give-aways, including free calculators.) TI also has an educator conference that it encourages member schools to pay for teachers to attend.

In return, the school pays for classroom sets of calculators, training for teachers and proprietary software and hardware that interfaces directly with the calculator for use in math and science classes. Given the number of high school math textbooks with extra sections for use with calculators and recommendations of a particular brand of calculator, it's hard to imagine that TI isn't marketing to the textbook companies as well.

With regards to education, the involved parties operate much like Oracle and the other "complete systems" vendors in the enterprise world: buy influence with the decision-makers and their subordinates, keep up the hard sell until the contract is won and then maintain the sell to ensure future business. That's not to say that the educational vendors give bad customer service, but at the same time, providing the end-users (the students) with a quality product at a reasonable price is hardly the primary concern.
Right, I would stick with the E.E. major if that's what you are more interested in. You don't need the CS degree to be a programmer and the E.E. degree would be enough to show that you got the brains.

As for start-up building, all the more reason to give it a go. As with anything, you learn by doing. You know nothing about building your ideas, but once you take a shot you learn a lot more about it. You don't need to shoot for the stars. Try something small.
And if all an investor knows is that you're a founder or team that wants to do a startup, the odds are that you're no good.

So the investor's knowledge about your project determines the founder or teams quality? YC applicants disclose more than that they want to do a startup, does that the automatically improve the odds that they're good? What specifically makes them "good" anyhow? YC Rejects would be disclosing more than they want to do a startup and in fact it's been noted that the angel would review applicants and determine who gets in.

The problem is that the prior probability that you're good is already low, not that the conditional probability that you're good given that you're rejected by YC is any lower.

Based on what exactly? Why is it more likely that your not good to begin with?

So the real question here is, can these people learn to first evaluate their applicants, and then support the ones they fund, anywhere near as well as YC does? I think the YC formula is nit going to be anywhere near as easy to duplicate as they seem to think.

It doesn't have to duplicate the YC formula in order to be successful as even YC proves that their formula doesn't automatically lead to successful startups. I do think that the YC staff and alumni network is a huge asset but that doesn't preclude others from providing valuable resources. The rest remains to be seen.
No Innovator’s Dilemma Here: In Praise of Failure
Adobe Tries New Business Model For Products
Very, very cool.
Rosette Entity Extractor
Ruby has a little different mentality (duck typing), for example both of the following work:

"10".to_i #=> 10
10.to_i #=> 10

I can see how dynamic typing, lack of interfaces, etc. can seem to cause a bunch of confusing to someone who's used to static typing, but in my experience lack of code readability is far more troublesome.
MAGIC DVD RIPPER – DVD ripping software tool
Magic DVD Ripper is a user friendly and strongest DVD ripping software tool, copy the all functional and fundamental hard derive from a protected DVD with 4 different types of mode are available in the market.
As best I can tell StatCounter counts traffic (page hits). It still has IE at around 45% worldwide, and slightly higher in the US.

Of course this neglects things like bandwidth via Netflix and Youtube, but still a decent proxy.

http://gs.statcounter.com/
I have reasons to believe this, but none I can present here.
People just use Bing to search for porn so Google can't see that. Then they use Google for pretty much everything else, which is not much.
I've been reading some blog posts here http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/ about the curriculum at Carnegie Mellon and I've been very impressed. I can't believe they're phasing out object-oriented programming! Here the faculty seem to think object-oriented is the only way. Actually I can't think of any functional programming we've been introduced to. (Or any other paradigm for that matter)
Yes, but you earn interest on the deferred tax. Look at a tax rate of 35%, take your 8% gains take 35% off of that and you're left with 5.2% compound 5.2% against 8% for 40 years and look what you're left with. I'd much rather pay a higher tax rate later than now.
Static page websites - proxy service needed?
College ROI: What We Found
Obama is a illegal alien -SSN 042-68-4425 was stolen by Obama
I usually skim the threads for high vote-count comments as well (and feel safe in upvoting them even higher).

So yes, I'm biased by the vote count as well, but I'm not sure if it's negative (I want/need a way to filter when I only want to read some comments!)
"I can't see if people are liking my contributions. I can't tell so I can't adapt."

On the one hand it's nice to see feedback so that you know to adapt to the social norms of the site. On the other hand, I think it's great to not care so much about what others think and just focus on making your comments accurate, informative, helpful, kind and enlightened.
You confused me, why not to donate to your own charity directly and not to write it off the same way? No need for revolving door.
I wish there was a section where people could only submit things they wrote, created or had a hand in creating. I can get news somewhere else.
Adobe Warns of Critical Vulnerability in Flash Player Being Actively Exploited
AI and robotics, which covers everything from device drivers to database systems to physics simulations to highly parallel data processing jobs running on clusters. I work with so many domain-specific languages that it's not even funny.
This is a really great post. Have you considered posting this as a blog post and submitting it?
The problem I see with this is that upvote distribution across comments isn't linear. Just because you are at the 1/2 way mark doesn't, in any way, mean that the comment can be considered middle ground. A thread with 100 top-level comments might only have 2 or 3 which the community considered insightful. In which case, the 4th comment isn't really any better then the last (it might be a difference of 1 or 2 votes).

Maybe a way to indicate that a certain branch represents X% of all votes? Dunno, stupid idea probably.
Meet Clojure
I don't see anything on their site about where the statistics come from (though I barely looked) but Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers ) cites the 45% statistic from StatCounter as "usage share" and defines "usage share" as "the proportion of users of all web browsers who use that particular browser."

Can't say with any amount of confidence that Wikipedia is defining it correctly and/or using the statistics correctly, but there that is...
IANACPA - but I would surmise this to be blatantly obvious tax fraud - where the other version is much easier to hide as "normal" activity.
Problem: joy gone from life.
it's sorta like how now Yahoo only gets all the Google-rejects
Apple patents hybrid e-ink/LCD display
This is fairly obvious to any one that has had to put up with invasive and/or painful DRM.

I would rather buy my software legitimately (if only for the support and feel good factor), but at times it seems like they're going out of their way to make it as painful as possible for the users that have paid for the product whilst the pirates who dont pay end up with a much nicer user experience!

This is nothing new though . . . even going back to the 90's where you had to keep game manuals handy so that you could flip thru to page 27 and find the 38th word in the 4th paragraph. (Very frustrating when the manual eventually got lost!!)

I don't think there's a good answer to this though - clearly the producers need to put some effort into stopping people from stealing their content, but eventually the copy protection will be broken (usually sooner rather than later), and any effort they require on the part of the user is there after only going to be impacting on those users that have actually given them their money.

(This is similar to the anti-piracy warnings that you see at the start of DVD's that only people that have paid for the movie ever get forced to sit through)
I strongly prefer links to the abstract:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.4282v2

This lets you:
(a) read the abstract before deciding whether or not to read the paper
(b) easily find earlier (or later) versions of the paper
(c) easily search for other papers the authors have on the arxiv.
What about something like "netflix for comments?" Ie. your votes would endow you with a profile (a sparse vector) that then tailors HN so that you see more of what other similar users also upvote. This would also encourage people to vote more.

I originally thought in terms of one uber-editor that fed (votes to) a machine learning algorithm, but then why not allow everyone to be their own editor.
Hah I had the exact same feeling of relief upon learning that this was an actual thing. But yah, don't tell anyone that.
lesson: if you want to influence your kids, treat them as peers.
Amazon is doing some interesting work to drive an EC2 hosted Android simulator with a Flash front-end, letting to you test drive apps in the browser.

http://gigaom.com/mobile/amazons-testdrive-is-the-real-stren...

That being said, it is ridiculous that there is no built in way to take screens of an app on an Android phone (like the power + home iOS combo). Since Android has the concept of a secure canvas (e.g.sensitive content), this should be stock.

Lack of easy screenshots makes it harder for normal users to blog about and help review and promote an Android app.
There are a lot of good programmers that don't code for fun outside of class. I didn't code in my internship interviews, but I certainly did during my 12 week internship, and the two conversion interviews I had at the end of the internship. Whether or not that was harder than that guy's interview process is debatable, but that's the way I looked at for awhile.
Yup - honestly, it's the truth. Most freelancers DON'T pay for Photoshop. They don't have to - because they don't work in a corporate office, where software piracy can easily be enforced by BSA.

I know a lot of people 'want' to pay for the software, because they feel it's the right thing to do. A system like this will help them to do the right thing.
more like.. "and take a vacation."
Japanese Declare Crisis at Level of Chernobyl
We're at 26% in the business review space...
ah yes that does seem more accurate. thanks!
Ask HN: Points display on comments gone?
Was there just a change in whether points are displayed next to comments from other users? I now see point values only next to my own comments.
How does a purely flat organization lead to no constraints or accountability? In a flat organization every member needs to be responsible for actively upholding the organizations vision in the same way that this article is advising the managers need to actively uphold their companies vision.

It's the lack of an active vision that creates problems not the hierarchical or flat structure of the organization.

For example a democratic process can be used to maintain an organizations active vision including resolving disruptive people and processes.
I suspect the same. It would be really interesting to see an analysis of search terms on Google vs search terms on Bing. Bing's video search also lends itself to porn searches.
I've used both, and I found that Pentadactyl was MUCH faster. In addition, it handles passthrough keys more sensibly. Vimperator required a plugin, pentadactyl uses the passkeys setting.
My pentadactylrc: https://github.com/bingaman/dotfiles/blob/master/pentadactyl...
I just quit my job to work on my startup ideas. I'm very interested in the area of Health. Email me at railsnoob at yahoo dot com - I would be interested in hearing where you think the pain points of the industry are and your ideas.
It's about access to technology: SpaceShip 2 includes a lot of technology which can be used to build less benign things like ICBMs. In order to fly it, you need to understand the systems. They can only teach you the systems if you have a proper security clearance, which you can only get (in this case) if you are a U.S. citizen.

I had the opportunity to tour Scaled Composites about a year ago. None of their astronauts were former NASA astronauts. All of them were former test pilots, mostly (but not exclusively) military. However, they were also in the process of growing their own: with the exception of the former test pilots, most of the engineers working on the design were young. Many of these young engineers were also private pilots, and some of them were just as proficient at flying the SpaceShip 2 simulator as were the astronauts. They also have the advantage of being very familiar with the system. I'd be willing to bet that some of them will cross over to Virgin Galactic as operational flights get closer.
If you need a Node platform, it's a difficult choice indeed.

On the other hand, if you want one platform for all your projects, whether they're Node, Ruby, Python or PHP apps... Then the choice is easier :)
pg is experimenting with stuff.

See:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2434333

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2434975

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696
No need to worry, nuclear power is just fine and perfectly safe for day to day power needs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_Arrangement
Are you sure his name isn't Buckaroo Bonzai? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckaroo_Banzai_%28character%29
Webstock '11: Marco Arment - Contrary to popular belief
How a laser HUD can make driving safer (PDF with pics)
Webstock 11: Steve Souders - Web Performance Optimisation
Rand, I thought one of the providers (Hitwise or Comscore) started to separate out internal v. external links. Perhaps those were just pure links, like when a link at MSN.com went to a search results page?

I also don't get the Facebook reference. Google has distribution deals - Google searches in Firefox still count for Google, for example. Is it just the fact that web results are at the tail of the page?
Webstock '11: Tom Coates - Everything the Network Touches
Placeholder Services for Web Designers
Probably best to just wait until the experiment is over and then explain what was tried, what [seemed to] work and what [seemed not to] work. Especially since some of the changes are having short lives (orange dot).
Webstock '11: Josh Clark - Buttons Are a Hack
Empowerment does not mean letting everyone do whatever they want.

A real gem (describes many "ghosts of employers past"). Most employees don't even want to do "whatever they want" since they know at the end of the day they have a job to do and if they're doing "whatever they want" it means they're flying blind and hoping they don't crash.
Well, it's not necessarily true that RoR is prescribed for most projects. A more general statement, which seems in my experience to be accurate, is that $shiny_hot_language_popular_with_the_kids_these_days is the prescribed language/platform for startup applications.

I am old enough to remember when Java was actually in this exact role, with "legacy" web apps written in C( via cgi or nsapi ), perl, or c++/com/asp( via asapi )being seen as uncool and dinosaurish by kids who shat their pants after reading the servlet/jsp 1.0 spec.

Nowadays, I'm seeing more chatter about clojure/haskell/node.js startup technology stacks than RoR, so my guess is that the shiny new thing is moving yet again.
I agree that the tone of comments is quite "mean"
Webstock '11: Merlin Mann - Scared Shitless . . .
But is this another sign of a bubble, particularly on the investing side?

Can it be a bubble if everybody is asking whether it's a bubble? This metabubble stuff makes my head hurt.
This makes for a good lesson in marketing and measuring things. In marketing, if you change the name of a thing on an arbitrary scale, that's newsworthy. If it hits the best/worst thing on the arbitrary scale, that's newsworthy. No actual human being gets a banana worth of radiation more or less because this is a 7 as opposed to a 6 -- it is totally a marketing event.

In terms of measuring things: scales with < 10 points on them do very, very poor jobs at compressing certain distributions. It's kind of like saying that someone is in income quintile 5 -- the same quintile as Bill Gates! If you didn't know that the underlying distribution of incomes looks like what it looks like, you might assume that second person is omg rich. (Quintile 5 starts at about $90k a household.) Similarly, the scale of nuclear accidents from "non-event" to Chernobyl to "hypothetical-end-of-the-world" has an awful lot of very consequential dynamic range in it. The overwhelming takeaway among lay people from this marketing event is going to be "Fukushima is about as bad as Chernobyl" -- that is objectively, dangerously false, just like "X is about as rich as Bill Gates" is likely catastrophically wrong and would lead to terrible decisions if you acted on it.
I figured the costs before I went to college, but coming from a wealthier family (we were never poor, my dad made sure we lived within our means, but a family of 6 as a single parent meant we were by no means rich) I couldn't get any Federal loans, having a green card also added an extra step on top of it in that by getting a student loan you have to sign up for the Selective Service System which my country can consider another countries army thereby possibly having me lose my citizenship.

I took out three student loans (3 years, 3 semesters each year) to cover all of my costs, tuition, housing, books, living expenses, and when I graduated I had 120k in student loans. This is for a software engineering degree.

I have so far paid off about 40k (mostly through money I got from my grandparents for graduating), leaving me still to pay 80k. That is a lot of money, finding a job wasn't easy either, the job I am working at now is certainly not paying a whole lot (it's below the 50k mentioned in the article as what people are earning with a bachelor degree, but I am at a startup and I love the atmosphere ...), so I am going to be spending a lot of time paying off all of my student loans.

So maybe I had the deck stacked against my favour, maybe if I had done better in high school I could have gotten more scholarships and the like (many of which BTW, as I found out, do not apply to foreign nationals/green card holders). I chose a degree in which I will eventually be making a lot of money, but for now I definitely feel like that debt is looming over me, it is holding me back from doing what I want to do (get a newer car, my beater is really on its last legs), find a place to live on my own rather than with 4 room mates.

It hasn't given me the freedom yet to purchase new tools and equipment for my woodworking hobby. I can't afford to go on a vacation to just take some time off, because I need the money I am making to pay off my loans. I am currently paying just over $700 per month for my student loans, that's a lot of money, especially compared to what I have left over after paying bills (water, electricity, gas, Internet) and rent.

So yes, I know what I got into, I knew it was going to be hard, what I wasn't expecting was that it was so hard to find a job mainly because the IT sector was hit so hard with the recession thereby causing a flood of engineers to the market, and a fresh out of school kid getting a lesser chance to find a position.

I should have done what my brothers and sister did, and that is go back to Europe and get a free education courtesy of the governemnt.
Fascinating, and a really neat hack!
Are there patents that prevent competition? Why do TI's overpriced calculators have to be the standard?
Johansen found the public keys to allow you to stream music to an Airport Express... now we are talking about the private key, which lets you emulate an Airport Express with any hardware that is capable.
Is your real name really "Green Circle"?
Obligatory link to Vi Hart's YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/Vihart (try "How to Snakes" or anything in the "Doodling in Math Class" series) and blog http://vihart.com/music/ and discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2390801
It's interesting that he noted a number of times how his wife disagreed with him. I wonder how child-rearing responsibilities were shared?

The cynic in me sees a working husband coming home tired to a exhausted wife who has been at home looking after twins all day, and then justifies his lack of interest in getting the kids out of her way as a premeditated parenting strategy rather than exhaustion/laziness.

It's true that he says Someone had to feed our infant twins in the middle of the night, and that someone was me. - but as someone who did work part time to take care of my kid I'm very much aware that nigh feeds are very far from the hardest thing to do.