skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Everyone I know prefers to work with JSON over XML, but sadly there is a sore lack of utilities of the quality or depth of html-xml-utils and XMLStarlet for actually processing JSON data in an automated fashion, short of writing an ad hoc processor in your favourite programming language."

Actually there is just such a suite of utilites! See https://github.com/benbernard/RecordStream
That's not what's going on here at all. Read my post in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2430247
Like this?

http://www.adagio.com/teaware/triniTEA.html

There are a few companies that make similar brewers.
His version is explicit, sort of a C++ translation of the C algorithm (though still a bit longer than necessary even for C). I think he meant to imply "in simple C++ without STL." The awkwardness of partition() is not quite enough to overcome the LOC savings, but it's making a good effort.

The Haskell version also refrains from importing the equivalent Data.List, which would allow us to define `more` and `less` as simply `partition (< x) xs`.
It's only Self-replicating in the least useful way possible. The components it can create that are used to make more copy's of it's self could be vary cheap to buy in other ways. AKA if you used injection molding and sold it as a kit the overall costs would decrease (assuming a reasonable market existed for them).

I am not saying it needs to be able to use dirt, sunlight, and water to make another copy. Just that the components need to be a little simpler before the cost really drops.
Having lived in Kyoto for quite a while and going occasionally to Tokyo, I don't completely agree with you...

Restaurants for one are cheaper and better value for money in Kyoto than in Tokyo... The housing situation is also quite different... What doesn't change all that much though are transport prices (although, as soon as you go to a place with only JR and no competition prices are much higher) and every day items... All in all, I think for the same quality of life in Tokyo than in Kyoto, one would need maybe 30-40% more wage...

That said, I agree with you on wages, I was quite surprised at how low the salaries in Japan are. Young employees just don't get paid much no matter their level of education, their productivity or their usefulness to the company... Seniority is the biggest criteria for salary increases (that and being married and having kids).
It's always interesting reading about the preconceptions that newcomers bring with them to a new platform.

One of Ubuntu's features is that it'll install the proprietary mp3s and graphics drivers for you. Obviously something went wrong in this case (I believe "jockey" is the part that does this). Yet unaware that this feature exists, the user goes off onto the internet and downloads and installs drivers themselves.

I have to repeatedly tell people new to Ubuntu "If you're downloading stuff to install from the internet then 99% of the time you're going in the wrong direction". I was disappointed to see that Firefox 4 prompts for that kind of activity if you attempt to download with Ubuntu, rather than suggest a PPA. Though Canonical should really have systems in place for this. I believe they've been working on it and with Mozilla's faster release pace hopefully it's all hooked up.

Relatedly, my father just installed Ubuntu by himself the other day. I would have thought he would be touch and go even using it, so that's a ringing endorsment.
Previously posted by the same user 12 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2381780
Hey guys, we're coding feverish right now, so please bear with us. The site is pretty raw, but you get the idea of the concept if you read the docs.

Can't talk now... gotta code!!!

But if you can vote for us, between 6:30 an 6:45 Eastern time (New York time), it will help us tremendously! SMS text 56782 to 22333.

Thanks!
Ask HN: Where is the next Xerox PARC?
PARC invented much of today's technologies - from desktop computers to networking and even iPads. While the company didn't manage to bring much of that into market, it has shaped the whole world of computing we do today.

The question is, what is today's Xerox PARC? Is there a well-funded research lab somewhere that is doing such radical research that it will bring us the computing of next thirty years? Or is everybody doing just short-term applied stuff now?
The concept is mind boggling and very humbling due to the time scales involved. We can talk about an event that won't happen (we won't observe) till a thousand years from now although it already happened 6000 years ago by inferring from physical laws. Most of the universe around us is in snapshots from long ago.

It was announced in 2007 that the Pillars of Creation were destroyed by a supernova's shockwave about 6,000 years ago.[8] Because of the limited speed of light, observers on Earth currently see the shockwave approaching the pillars, and will not see the destruction occur for about another 1,000 years

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillars_of_Creation
And, how would one learn how to make their own tools, languages, and operating systems? You have to build them to learn how. So how does one build them without ever having built them?
All of the data presented here is consistent with the hypothesis of "pure dumb luck".

You would expect to see more answers like "My wife taught me everything I know about interpersonal skills" and "I never make an important business decision without consulting her" from the highly successful group, because they are the ones who make important business decisions and believe they have interpersonal skills. They get that exterior validation from their outward success. People who are only moderately successful presumably would be less comfortable crediting their mediocre success to their wife, so they answer with the little things that their wife does for them, like cleaning their shirt.

Similarly, the "propensity for creating value in non-obvious ways" may also reflect hindsight bias. People tend to get credited for their successes, and then rise to the level of the organization that their successes merit. Now imagine that two mid-level managers take identical risks, except that manager A's risk pans out and manager B's does not. Manager A will be thought of as a creative, original thinker and get promoted, but manager B will still be thought of in terms of his other successes, which were probably more ho-hum. If you look at the top executives, of course they're going to seem like they create value in creative, original ways, because that was how they got promoted in the first place.
I don't think there are a lot of these in the world nor is there room for everyone to devote themselves to something quite so theoretical. I'd probably rather go fishing with Joe the Plumber than Nigel the Physicist.

The point is that the world really needs essentially everyone to have a baseline education, the ability to contribute to their communities, and the skills to be gainfully employed or self-employed.

The world has a much smaller need in the grand scheme of things for advancement in theoretical astrophysics. As hackers, engineers, etc. I think we should take a lesson for ourselves and optimize education for the common case.
They gambled on winning a lot of money on it.
Talking to the neighbors: hacking the sun for interstellar communication
Spot on, "I'm never going to use this!" can be dismissed straight away as student use and see the results in their programs.

My own maths ability increased dramatically when I got interested in astronomy, likewise trying to write games in basic.
IMHO, now you've got 2 problems.
It's simply disgusting, how the government can simply harass people without bringing any cases against them, preventing them from defending themselves.
One can always argue "you're doing it wrong". People say the same about ror and perl. But in my experience, even with a good mvc and object model, and world-class folks, complex applications in jquery tend to become hard to maintain. I believe part of the reason is the tight coupling of state and events to the DOM.

I'm also very skeptical of the dozen-odd undocumented "extensions" to the selector language. They are useful, but tend to tie you to jQueryisms. I didn't realize for a long time that :first was not valid CSS3.
If only Tumblr would work well, I would love to switch, and move all my family to Tumblr, too. But somehow the fancy interface never works when I try it.
cat foo.json | python -m json.tool
Show HN: Stat Tracking website for fantasy baseball.
This is a web application for a class. Need feedback for it. After checking out the website, could you please fill out this survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/3Q829LX
NOKIA C5-03 TOUCH SCREEN WITH QWERTY KEYPAD SPECIFICATIONS
Fantastic work! But bug finds like this make me cringe. You can guarantee that your client, or your client's boss, only tests your app out when they get home - at midnight. And you're reduced to a mumbling, sobbing mess as you tear down and rebuild your code yet again.
I'm not sure I quite agree. Any time I read anything about space, black holes, relativity etc. (which is way outside my field, I'm a programmer) I get that same sense of wonder. It's not gone, it's just that we don't have to wonder about the little stuff anymore. :-)
http://www.rense.com/general79/tril.htm (short intro into Rothschilds and how they control things)

http://www.iamthewitness.com/DarylBradfordSmith_Rothschild.h... (timeline with narrative)

http://www.iamthewitness.com/DarylBradfordSmith_Bankers.htm (banking and usury timeline in general)

http://www.iamthewitness.com/doc/RothschildsTimeline.ppt (powerpoint slide deck on Rothschilds from the sources above)

http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi/noframes/re... (how Nathan Rothschild cornered the London Stock Exchange and became a billionaire in early 1800s).

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5352106773770802849 (Money as Debt - quintessential primer on fractional reserve banking and debt)

Money Masters - http://www.sprword.com/videos/moneymasters/

The Secret of Oz Trailer - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cq9yEVcGIU

A few more http://linkedtheory.blogspot.com/2011/02/world-economic-coll...
The biggest obstacle between seeing more hardware being built isn't the up-front price structure of manufacturing techniques, it's the twofold information gap between would-be entrepreneurs and manufacturing processes.

One gap is simply the body of knowledge necessary to spec and drive that process. The second gap is actually knowing who does what, and who has a good history of meeting their promises. Right now to bridge both gaps you need to go through intermediaries, but it's easy to immagine a world where technology solves both information problems. And to me that's a lot more exciting than 3d printing.
This is very important. The article ends on the note of "they're not even looking to hire educators; they're hiring software developers" as if that's an extremely poignant accusation of the misdirection of the Academy, but the stuff that Khan shows in the TED talk, which is what they need the developers for, is the real potential for the site.
Thank you, that works. I felt like an idiot for not being able to figure out how to actually navigate to my filesystem.
This is a web application for a class. Need feedback for it. After checking out the website, could you please fill out this survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/3Q829LX
I actually like Ko3 a lot better than 2.x. It just seems to jive with how I think and arrange things. The docs are constantly getting better too.
Tired of MLB.TV blackouts?
What may have been assumed here is that they could easily get a standard payout on finance-oriented offers through most affiliate networks. No special relationship needed. Scaling up traffic on these offers would enable them to bypass the network and negotiate better payouts from the advertisers.
Lost decades...
I worked on a largish jQuery application,
written by ninja badasses

I don't think those "ninja badasses" were as good as you're describing them.

If they were, they would realize that jQuery is not a framework that structures your application, but just a neat and light library that provides syntactic sugar for DOM-manipulation + dealing with cross-browser issues.

jQuery as commonly used leads, in my personal
experience, to hard-to-maintain programs. Just
like Ruby on Rails, or Perl.

Well, I could say the same thing about Java/C# or PHP ... in fact, the shit I had to put up with in those (more structured) platforms is far worse than anything I have seen thus far that was done on top of jQuery / Rails and Perl. And I thought Python/Django had immunity from such problems, until a month ago.

Newsflash: bad developers write bad code.

And yes, I've worked with Perl -- Catalyst and DBIx::Class are pretty good, you should check them out ;-)
social media = branding
search = customer acquisition
An effect of their rarity.
At least to me, the attack doesn't hurt any more coming from a facebook account than from anonymous. Either way I feel like a real person wrote it. In my experience, true online trolls are also true real life trolls.
Postereus is pretty much Tumblr for 20-somethings. From what I've seen most of the people who have blogs in Tumblr are the generation prior to Postereus.
I agree, and I thought of that too when reading the article. In some sense, it doesn't matter if Khan is just underlining and emphasizing the same word that the student doesn't understand over and over again, because the goal is for the student to still have that really important interaction with the teacher where that stuff is clarified.

But I think the implicit point in the article is that using Khan Academy in a school classroom is just one use case and that Khan Academy should still be useful for people who want to use it but don't have a teacher to talk to the next day about questions. And that's a difficult issue; while changing the education system is American public schools is amazing and all, the real humanitarian benefits to the site is that it can bring education to people who don't have access to other forms of education, and I have to agree that, as is, it doesn't handle that case spectacularly. I trust that it is on their minds and planned at some point, though (maybe though a better Q&A interface or something).
I would say it's Google in terms of the energy and caliber of people working there, but there's a fundamental difference between Google and Xerox PARC. Research is tightly integrated with production at Google; Ph.D's are expected to code to the production infrastructure, and their work tends get released within 6 months to a year instead of 30 years later. That means that there isn't a huge store of undiscovered prototypes to be discovered by Steve Jobs in 10 years.

There are some advantages to this, though. Personally, I like being able to visit a foreign website and have Chrome automatically translate it. Or talk (!) to my mobile phone (!) and have it automatically use my location (!) to make sense of my query and answer it (!). I like being able to virtually visit any place on earth and walk around on the streets. My e-mail inbox knows which messages are important and which are spam. I think it's wonderful that Google Search can give me straight answers to most of the queries I throw at it.

Most of these were virtually unimaginable just over 5 years ago.
Known Issues and Best Practices for the Use of Long Polling and Streaming i ...
Would definitely be interested.
The worst part about installing something from the internet is that ubuntu isn't able to keep a record of the install, and because of that it isn't simple to uninstall it. (I don't think this is applicable for a .deb package though)
Except isn't this Iceland asking its neighbors to pay for its losses?
Of course it does. Eg.

Fed creates $100 by buying a security X.
Bank gets $100, lends it out, earns $5 in interest, has $105.
Fed sells the security, destroying the $100.

The Fed created $100 then destroyed $100. The $5 used to pay the interest on the security wasn't created as a result of the Fed's buying the security, it was paid with money already in the system.
2011 Budget Pie Illustrated
I always found math to be problematic because it builds on itself, yet math classes vary so much by school and teacher. I ran into difficulty in a graduate level course simply because I had never once been shown algebra with inequalities.

Also, you don't get instant, positive feedback, and immediate indication of whether your solution is correct as you do when programming.
I'm going to post this as a reply to every nitpicker I see bitching about the subjunctive: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005515.h...

It doesn't matter. Get over it.

I also downvoted you for contributing nothing to the discussion.
Quoting Wikipedia: "Honey is a sweet food made by bees using nectar from flowers." "In the hive the bees use their "honey stomachs" to ingest and regurgitate the nectar a number of times until it is partially digested." "...the nectar is still high in both water content and natural yeasts, which, unchecked, would cause the sugars in the nectar to ferment." "...bees inside the hive fan their wings, creating a strong draft across the honeycomb, which enhances evaporation of much of the water from the nectar. This reduction in water content raises the sugar concentration and prevents fermentation."

Partial digestion, plus enhanced evaporation. That's not "slightly."

If you want, you can argue that there's a continuum. Orange juice comes directly from oranges, but most olive fruit cannot be eaten without processing to remove bitterness. Milk comes from cows (okay, and other mammals) and cheese comes from milk, but it's hard to say that cheese comes from a cow, since other factors are involved. Does beer come from barley? No. Beer comes from the beer maker, who uses various ingredients, including yeast.

So yes, honey comes from nectar, but the essential transformation which makes it be "honey" is done by bees. Therefore, honey comes from bees just like beer comes from the beer maker, and cheese from the cheese maker.
Is there an official Flickr App for Android? Seems an odd oversight if there isn't, since they apparently have one for iPhone, iPad and Windows Phone 7.

They do appear to detect Android and offer Flash based uploading, but that won't work with the inbuilt "intent" system i.e. I choose a picture from the gallery and select share and I get lots of options, both built in and 3rd party (Picasa, email, bluetooth, dropbox, twitter, Whatsapp).

Why wouldn't Flickr want to tap into that?
Marketer learns from unsuccessful campaign to deliver 75% increase in sales
If I gave bees sugar water would they make honey? No. At it's core honey is made by flowers, i.e. flowers do most of the work. Bees do some of the work, but a lot less than the flower does.

I'm not saying there isn't a distinction between nectar and honey, of course there is. But there is also a distinction between raw honey, and the filtered, cooked, version you buy in a store. So should I say honey is made by beekeepers?
Yep, thats why I said the post was relevant, implying I was reposting something.
Yes, but Khan academy also provides exercises to test your undestanding of the material, so I don't think it falls into this category.

Also, Sal doesn't write the exercises and the people that write the exercises don't use Sal's videos exclusively as far as what to put in a module. There are videos with no specific exercises and modules that cover multiple videos and bits that are left out of video that use the same techniques.

So, student can see if they really understood the concepts or just thought they did.
I'm interested in hearing more about this (failed) experience. The only stories I've heard about trying to integrate KhanAcademy into the classroom have been from their pilot program in Los Altos, which to my knowledge has been very successful so far. So I'm interested to hear what the difficulties have been for people that haven't gotten it to work so well.

Did you have pop quizzes or anything to test their knowledge of the videos? As non-students, we think of a "watch-this-video" assignment as being really easy and something that surely everyone will do, but to students they probably interpret such an assignment as "it's-not-important-that-I-do-this," and thus don't waste their time unless they're particularly driven or bored. But I wonder if somehow quickly testing their knowledge on the subject in the videos could completely turn that structure on its head.
"Land of the free , home of the brave" but the government prefer to defend freedom of speech in other countries not in USA. It's the same song in almost all the western countries, we talk about democracy and human rights , but we support dictatorships all over the world, and forget about rights when we want.
The use case is a bit different, but I wrote a little converter to TSV, adding in a header. I mostly use it for input into R, but I use it a lot. It only works for fairly flat JSON objects. https://github.com/brendano/tsvutils/blob/master/json2tsv
It's still heavy, but the newer ones are a breeze for attachments, bags, pushing it around, and all that other stuff.
I love that answer: "cheese from the cheese maker". Sure, if that's how you want to define "comes from" then honey from bees.

I prefer to define "comes" differently, and I most definitely want to argue "that there's a continuum".

As an aside "enhanced evaporation" just means blow air on it - that's enough to quality the bee as the honey maker?

Partial digestion means add some enzymes that break up the sugar. Again, it doesn't seem like much to me since I could do that too with saliva.

But I can't replicate what the flower does, and to me that makes the flower the most important.
The first phrase makes the second less likely to be true.

This makes no sense.

As for your links, they provide the same data my links provide, but with less granularity. Why do you feel it is proper to ignore the ethnicity data? Simply because this gives you a conclusion you want?
If you try to make your software perfect for everyone, then all you will create is a muddled mess. It's a good thing to acknowledge that some people are your audience and other people aren't.

I mean, if you were developing a new social network site, would you try to seed it with the Amish?
RecordStream seems more complete but requires much more dependencies. I really like the simplicity of jsonpipe and how easy is to use it:

curl -s "http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/json/adulau | jsonpipe -s "#" | grep "\#u" | cut -f2 | sed -e"s/\"//g" | xargs -d"\n" wget -r -l 1 –p –-convert-links

A simple example to take a local mirror of my last del.icio.us bookmarks...
Yes, but the parent copy has more quality (parent is text pdf, the link at the article is a poor scanned image pdf).
It's a pretty clever idea.

It's always surprising to me that technology-saavy people are so skeptical of the monetary system. Corruption aside (which undoubtedly exists), it's a neat solution to a complex real-world problem. Put simply:

Money is just a level of indirection. You could have a barter-based economy based on goods and services, but you introduce money as a proxy to simplify transactions.

The problem is: how much money do you have in the system? You want enough so it serves as an efficient proxy for the actual value of the goods and services. If you deviate from that amount, you're in trouble.

The problem is complicated by two things:
1) the amount of goods and services which money must proxy for is constantly increasing;
2) money must proxy not just actual goods and services, but enforceable promises to provide goods and services (ie: debt).

(2) is the most complicated issue to deal with, because it's highly dynamic. As society becomes more stable and secure people are willing to commit to obligations that are further in the future. There must be enough money to serve as an accurate proxy for those commitments.

The fractional reserve system is actually a fairly elegant solution to this problem: money is dynamically created when loans are made, and destroyed when loans are repaid.