skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This might be going off the main topic here, but I'll address it: For someone who has the ability to pay outright, I agree that paying a monthly amount might give some flexibility. If someone is making a monthly payment because thats all they can do, its basically debt and holds you down. I agree though, that its not always black and white.

Back to the main topic: Should renters be indebted to home owners? Its all a case of supply/demand. I dont see renters having a shortage. Which means that more people are willing to rent out their home, than renters wanting to find a place to rent. In this market, homeowners need renters more than renters need homeowners. If say in a hypothetical situation all homeowners stopped putting out their houses for rent, more people will gravitate towards other sources of rentals like rental properties owned by companies. These rental property companies do not have an emotionally-vested interest in their home. They see it just as a service.

I agree when you pay off the money for your house, the renters give you free money. But this is close to the end-game and by this time you would have to factor in also opportunity costs. I am not saying the opportunity cost is huge, but usually a mortgage holds you down for 30 years (in most cases), and its too long a time to just consider what happens at the end of it.
I think Microsoft will leverage its relationship with facebook and use skype as their alternative to apple's facetime. Though I am worried about the future of Skype's linux client.
I was born in England.
One of the nice things missing in the presentation is the fact that ramaze bundles a lot of non-intrusive helper modules for many things (user management, authentication/identity, commenting, captcha, pagination etc).

Since this are simple library elements they do not bloat the rest of the code, but they still allow quick development without chasing external libraries or snippets found on google that may be outdated, uncooperative with each other, or simply untested.
Hello - we are in a phase of project when we gather feedback and are preparing initial prototype. We'll send details to the people who expressed an interest (submitted the e-mail).

I understand that you might not want to tell other people unless you know more details. I respect that. We'll share details with you as soon as we have something ready.
Hmmm: 2009 Bail out = $700B, investment in VC funds in 2009 = $15B
PlayStation Network outage vs. other legendary outages, 1996-present.
Nice. This might explain, why, I now feel physical pain when I have to use Windows XP :-D
Common Mistakes in C Programming
Open Source & Free Hosted Customer Service Software
Help test my mumu/listening room type website
Kind of weird that the article claims there haven't been any findings like this before. This sounds a lot like research done at the social cognitive neuroscience lab at UCLA...about 8 years ago (http://www.scn.ucla.edu/pdf/Cyberball290.pdf).
I think there are not so much people who will write a comment here about their project. However, I am interested in any project.
"Jeff Goldblum infecting them with a virus from his macbook."

Ugh. Citing that does not signal you as knowledgeable about computers, it signals you as profoundly ignorant. In the real world, viruses for Windows can and have been served by Unix systems running entirely different architectures via exploited websites. We don't even have to get into the theory of the matter, we can demonstrate cross-OS virus transmission in practice. Bits are, quite profoundly, merely bits. They do not have a Mac or Windows or Alien color: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

While I'm sure beyond a shadow of a doubt this was accidental, the idea that a fundamentally telepathic and possibly hive-mindish species of alien may have advanced computers and no concept of computer security because they have no concept or biological possibility of generating a computer hacker is actually a respectable sci-fi speculative idea.

Keeping around one particular instantiation of a DNA sequence because it might be useful against a low-probability event isn't useful, because in the grand space of potential DNA-based solutions to such a problem, the smallpox virus is vanishingly small and effectively no different from just deciding to hook a random number generator up to a DNA sequencer, shoving the results into a virus shell, and hoping for the best.
Add the possibility of sub-second timing errors, that way the music will feel more real, as performed by a human.
The problem with using void* pointers is that every access to an element costs one extra dereference operation. By using C++ templates, the compiler can create object code specifically compiled for each data type, without the need for pointers. (On the other hand, this can make C++ binaries much larger).
Can't wait till people are composing full songs as a series of YAML files and samples, then publishing them on Github.

After all, there's not a huge amount of difference, conceptually, between remixing and forking!
Also teaches a lesson to anyone who calls Perl a write-only language ;-)
4 Free E-Books on Learning Objective-C, the Programming Language of iOS and OSX
Yes, I can't imagine how anyone would expect people to take them seriously when they write blatant fanboy crap like this, while commenting about Apple's competition.
so if macros can operate on typed source and/or on the typed ast tree, do they (the macros) have a type system that guarantees that they will preserve correct typing? or are types still checked agan (globally?) after applying the macro?

what i'm really asking is, is there anything "smart" about how the macro works with the type system?
Needing a multi-thousand line explanation in English for one line of source code. Oh my.

http://www.literateprogramming.com/

"Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do."
Why I dumped my free Dropbox account and paid for SpiderOak in under 24 hours
Aquarium is a commercial proprietary web-based (GUI) for Linux.
If you think US rent-vs-own ratios is expensive than you have to check other countries. Every country from the developed western europe/canada/australia to the developing india/china to the thirdworld african countries have worst rent-vs-own ratio than US, yet the prices are still appreciating there.
Reflections on Data Science Summit 2011
If that's true, it would be a small price to pay for a green card.
If you buy a home for a lifetime, sure. But most people do move not too infrequently, and then it does make a difference. That's why the question is: how long do you have to stay in the same place for buying to be financially advantageous.
I won't believe you unless you post your birth certificate. Long-form please.
Allosphere: a fully-immersive 3-D environment for exploring data.
False. Your landlord could have purchased the place at an advantageous time many years or decades before you would have been ready to purchase a home. Thus the landlord could charge less than a current or recent homebuyer could charge while still profiting or at least covering costs.
As someone pointed out further below, though, the mortgage "term" is not the time it will take you to pay off the loan but significantly shorter. So you can most definitely be hit by increased rates.
Very cool! I was kind of confused at first, the page didn't feel like it conveyed information. Seemed more like marketing until I looked again. Thanks for the blog link
Code for America: Focusing on problems facing our communities.
VC Mark Suster on where great ideas come from.
What's interesting about this to me is that so few companies are going IPO. Is there more money to be made by staying private, or is it just that they're waiting for the right time?

Beyond that, I hope it's not a bubble, because if you ask me, this is the only thing giving me hope in the economy. When VC's stop investing, the whole sector is going to be in trouble.
> I would count the success of unleashing small pox on them

Unless they have cellular machinery that can reproduce smallpox, there is zero chance of such an attack being successful.

And the odds of an alien species having biochemistry compatible with earthlings is vanishingly small.

Besides that, our chances against a civilization capable of interstellar travel are a rounding error above zero. I would say zero, but they may be so alien as to mistake us for the rocks we live on.
Looks great.

Can't wait for the emacs mode.
Data Hero Awards
Removing anonymity discourages normal users who don't want to leave a permanent record that may come back to haunt them later ("The Internet's not written in pencil, Mark, it's written in ink").
paper.li and LinkedIn today, among others, solve a similar problem - but strictly related to shared links. It'd be cool to implement this using the Twitter API yourself and see what the results looked like
There's a way to keep yourself motivated
it has a lot to do with anonymity. simply look at techcrunch and what happened overnight with real names- quite large and homogenous too.
Yes, a very important point. This is the central idea of The E-Myth (i.e. doing a thing and running a business that does that thing require very different skill sets).

ref: http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-About/...
Stream of the opening of the Morganza Spillway (~2:30CT)
Require sign-up. Implement karma, with voting. Restrict user commenting to 1/day until karma > X. No downvoting possible until karma > 2X. Put temporary blocks on users who derail threads or attempt to people-please with one-liners, etc. Ban users who attack other users.

Most importantly, make downvoting cost one karma point per downvote.
TechStars - Is it worth it?
This is my first open source project...
It's an open source "LaunchRock"-type site:
https://github.com/JamesChevalier/Launch-Soon
Tldr: Cringely believes Google is the next Microsoft. Microsoft is worried about its future and bought Skype so Google wouldn't buy Skype. Cringely believes Apple, however, is a magical unicorn that Ballmer cannot even comprehend.
Getting the requirements right with object cases
How to build good requirements with examples and objects.
Additionally the 3% rent increase theory may be true in aggregate, but doesn't take into account the real world practices of landlords. It's exceedingly common to list a property for a low lease then jack it up after the first lease term. They understand the friction of moving puts them in a better bargaining position the second year vs. first move in.

As a whole rates may increase 3% per year, but individually it will look more like a 7-10% increase the first year followed by 3% increases thereafter, unless you move.
Burson-Marsteller Deletes Critical Facebook Posts, Spares Google-Smear Flacks
I am about to start a few small <canvas> game engines for my own use, chiefly a point-and-click adventure/puzzle game engine.

I probably won't start coding in earnest until July though.
Bill Clinton: Create Internet agency
I'm not sure whether it's a good idea to trust any magazine that includes articles on homeopathy: http://hbmag.com/category/6-holistic_therapies/homeopathic-n...
PGfb is an extremely nascent project (only one day of work), that started at a hack-a-thon at Berkeley.

Aim is to bring PGP encryption to facebook using browser extensions.

https://github.com/m0hit/PGfb
I don't buy that argument. We have about 2^70 bytes in the entire world. To collide accidentally you're going to need to approach 2^128 items in dropbox. That's not 'inevitable'.
Really interesting. Can you give some reference links about such methods. I am currently learning Chinese and trying to learn and remember 2200 Chinese Characters.
Score is a new open source project for fantasy sports gaming. http://scoreos.org
Indiana Supreme Court Rules Against Right to Resist Illegal Police Entry
Nice. One thing I'd really like would be the option only to see those tweets from someone that have been retweeted at least once - as a kind of filter for general interest. I've given no thought to whether that would be possible, though.
All it takes is a renter willing to call the bluff to prevent that. Nothing is more expensive than no rent for a month or two.
According to Cringely "Apple has no peer". I guess that depends on how you look at it. Apple's execution is unparalleled, but the broadness and disruptive nature of Google's strategy is hard to deny. The new Android Open Accessory Development Kit strategy, for example, is something I'd never expect to come from Cupertino or Redmond.
Its interesting to me and a testament to how the topic of housing impacts the psyche of Americans that even on Hacker News the emotional arguments take on a stronger conviction than the logical ones.
Federal antitrust oversight of Microsoft formally ends
Vtvcomedy.Com – Funniest TV Shows & Videos
I prefer to discuss a post on a site owned by someone other than the author of the post because that way, the author cannot spike comments that interfere with the author's communications goals and self-interest.
I recently started creating an SMTP server using Node.js: https://github.com/baudehlo/Haraka
I think they're opening the Morganza spillway around 2:30 CT today. http://www.ustream.tv/channel/morganza
Is the Domain Available? The MuckRock.com Story
Believe it or not, it was on a beefy workstation (I think the number of functions was tens of thousands actually). Of course I could have split the module or find some other solution, but the thing was, switching to C solved the problem. More importantly, I was able to switch on compiler optimizations.
I'm almost always starting new projects. One of my more recent undertakings is a client-side JavaScript implementation of a Hunspell-style spellchecker: http://github.com/cfinke/Typo.js
How To Use Google Music Beta On Your iPhone, iPad Or iPod Touch
I'd like to point out Hyde (github.com/hyde/hyde), it's a static website generator written in Python, and I find it pretty well executed.
Don't forget the mercury delay lines. A bit more dramatic from a hazmat perspective but gives you large amounts of street cred.
People in the chat are now saying 3 CT.
Man, this is a hacker project.

I wonder how well this would work in harsh environments... I heard once (circa 2006) that core memory was being investigated for spaceflight.
I came across this demo by the same guy, Chris Milk. It uses your home address to provide a personal experience. I think Chris is on to something.

http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/
Peer weighting.
I saw it. It's very interesting. I am working on flexible discussion platform for open-source projects. If you are interested, how can I contact you?
Just wrote a small native Node.js extension for displaying desktop notifications: https://github.com/olalonde/node-notify

Tutorial available here: http://syskall.com/how-to-write-your-own-native-nodejs-exten...

Node.js has a lot of potential but is still pretty young.
YouTube, Twitter, Facebook on frontline of Yemen uprising
They're still the ones who make the most used OS in the world. They're not the ones innovating and creating new markets and paradigms. But were they, ever ?
Parc Fires Back at New Yorker, Claims Gladwell Misses How Innovation Works
It's very interesting! Thank you very much.
I honestly can't believe this guy is a financial reporter and doesn't know the difference between TARP and the stimulus. I'm sorry, but you can't argue that he works in startups as an excuse to have misunderstandings about major macroeconomic policies that certainly, to varying degrees affect the business he work in.
GNU make also has -l (load limit) and make -j -l <number-of-cores> seems like better idea and in my experience works better. But still I tend to just run make -j without any limit which on modern systems works well enough.
http://thechangelog.com/
PlayStation Network hack launched from Amazon EC2
In the US, it's standard to have a fixed rate for the entire life of the mortgage. It's my understanding that this state of affairs is due to US laws and that most other countries tend to have floating rate mortgages.
"In addition, CBT has been enthusiastically embraced and promoted by insurance companies because it is considered an effective, short-term therapy. Owing to the hundreds of research studies documenting its efficacy in treatment for the above illnesses, CBT is the quintessential 'evidence-based treatment."

If it's more effective, then it should be the program of first choice. Why is this hard to accept? Can we not simply select the maximally effective treatment?

I find the article an appeal to irrationality.
I lived in China and regularly had to contact people in Europe. I tried a lot of things, but in the end, Skype was the best overall experience, far better than Google Voice, especially in video. I had a fairly low bandwidth (3 MBps), but quality was fine.
While I started it a while ago, Keryx for Ubuntu/Debian is pretty new to the Linux community and not near as popular as it could be. http://keryxproject.org

It's a GUI tool I built in Python to help offline users update and install new software on Linux.

I no longer have time to work on it and would love it if someone would like to take over maintaining it for me.
This doesn't sound promising: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/14/us-flooding-states...
I tried the same with a social networking site (Like Reddit/HN) about a year ago. When I asked users to pay even $1 to try it, no one was interested in doing so.

http://e1ven.com/2010/09/15/lonava-com-retrospective/
I wonder why set linespacing for pre tag to almost a average char width
I think in a lot of ways, CBT is sort of psychology's OOP. Sure it's useful and has its place, but that doesn't mean it should be used for everything.
How big is a googol?
I'm not so sure. Even instant messaging has not done much interop. Users on AOL and MSN cannot IM each other. This is a very popular, end-user scenario with network effects. Wouldn't that be the "same pressures" as email?

Why would "clouds", which are mostly a concern of IT and software implementation folk, get pressure to interop like email?

He's obviously smarter and has better perspective than me, so what does he mean? Perhaps API compatibility because everyone will adopt AWS and OpenStack APIs?
Dunno about Canada, but in the US a fixed-rate mortgage is, well, fixed. My rate will never change, and thus my monthly payment will remain exactly the same for the 30-year life of the loan.
Duality - A Social BitTorrent Client
Counterpoint to your counterpoint:

void foo()
{
typedef std::auto_ptr<Matrix> matAP;
matAP a(new Matrix(1000, 1000));
matAP b(new Matrix(1000, 1000));
}
I released kivaloo just recently.

As far as I'm aware, it currently has zero users (Tarsnap isn't using it yet), which probably qualifies it as "not so popular".
At least in the US, this is simply not the case. Fixed-rate mortgages remain the same for the full lifetime of the loan, e.g., 30 years.
Yes, supernodes are used to negotiate the communication trough NATs, the method's called UDP hole punching: http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&q=skype+n...
We open-sourced our fullstack application server for node.js at NodeConf last week: haibu. http://github.com/nodejitsu/haibu.

The project had been internal for a year and as such is pretty mature technically, but has a nascent community. If you're thinking about running node.js in production definitely check it out!
This. CBT works as well as any other talking therapy, but is orders of magnitude cheaper.

As the article states, most talking therapies show the same efficacy, whether they involve six one-hour sessions or a decade of intensive analysis. To me, this is a clear indicator that nobody has beaten placebo and we really need a different model.

If we practiced surgery the same way we practice psychiatry, we would be routinely trepanning people if they seemed 'resistant to conventional treatment'. There is no sense in psychiatry that it is unethical to administer unproven treatments without clear informed consent. This has to stop. Psychotherapy needs to develop a firm framework to prevent patients from being subjected to pseudoscience, or it should be abolished and reformed from scratch.

To be blunt, psychoanalysts are vampires, extracting huge fees from vulnerable clients with absolutely no evidence justifying the time and expense. I see them as no different to psychics or faith healers. They obfuscate the argument by debating the merits of various therapies with no basis in neuroscience and no strong evidence of efficacy. We look back at the history of psychiatry and are horrified at what we see. I fully expect that our descendants will be horrified at how we practice psychiatry.
Well, let's use that attitude in mathematics:

a*x^2+b*x+c = 0 -> x1 = (-b + sqrt(b^2-4*a*c))/2*a

Given an equation that relates given values a, b and c (which we shall hereby refer to as the "equation constants") and unknown variable x ("the unknown"), one solution to x that satisfies said equation is given by: taking the square root (which is the inverse of the square operation) on 4 times a times c subtracted from b squared, subtracting b from this result, and dividing all of this by 2 and then by a again.

Oh my. If mathematicians really thought that way, we would still not have discovered transcendental numbers.

APL is a mathematical notion for expressing algorithms. It does that quite well - as well, or better, than standard mathematical notation does for equations.

Have you ever met someone working in math or physics who would prefer english text to equations?
Motivation to do X often comes after you start doing X.

Purposeful / meaningful activity is a great way to combat depression.

Just my opinion, I'm not a subject matter expert.
And the $8.5 billion price? That was effectively set by Google, not Microsoft. Ballmer would have paid anything for Skype. $8.5 billion is just the price at which Google feels it is better for them to build rather than buy.

That's not really 8.5 bil for Skype. The cost to develop that would be a lot less. That's actually 8.5 bil for 140 million active users. That's about $60 a head. Not a bad deal for a big company in the telecom/mobile hardware space.
You no doubt know that that "interview" was a complete fabrication. Please don't present it as fact.
I'd like to point out that the author doesn't say it is more effective, only that studies have shown it effective. The human mind is more complex than traditional science is capable of handling. In particular, studies can only show you how people behave on average. The problem lies in the fact that there's no such thing as an "average" person. As Jung said, everyone is an exception to the rule.
We have inherited a bunch of "J" code at work (J is the ascii successor to APL). While I can see the esoteric appeal, I think J/APL is at best a concept language, useful for exploring a syntactical idea. The email list is full of hobbyists going on about how they shaved three characters off of a ten character program that calculates every other prime number... or whatever. The other favorite topic is why APL is "mathematical" notation for computers, even though you can't use it derive new theorems or simplify exposition.

If you ask me, APL was great in its day (1965-1985) because it was the only language that natively handled vectors and matrixes, but once Matlab and S came on the scene it immediately became an evolutionary dead-end.

Yuck.