skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought this was a really cool idea:

Interviewer: A one-person, $25 loan can't achieve massive change, as did some American CEOs who, in one act, preserved 2 million acres in South America.

Premal: Let me talk about what you might see in the next 10 years: [A] website that takes photos of plots of land that need protection and sells the deeds to the Internet community. In $25 chunks, I can help protect the rain forest. Through Google Earth and GPS technologies, you could actually [see and] own one square foot of land in the Brazilian rain forest. Someone will do this.

Does anything like this sort of "micro real estate" model exist?
Nokia N900. Ok, so there's Mono for Maemo, so that's not a particularly convincing argument in itself. However, the point stands - replace Nemerle with Scala, for instance, and I'm stuffed (mostly).
my first though, after seeing this, is to write a vim mapping that will let me listen to a file instantly.
>the contacts it contains are often better ones than Facebook offers.

Really? That's not my experience. The contacts I have on Skype are the people I call from my computer, not all my friends.

For instance, I don't call my coworkers from Skype, because all their numbers are on my cell phone. I don't call my close friends, because al their numbers are on my cell phone.

In fact, the only contacts I have on Skype are the out-of-town people I video call (my parents, my sister, my niece) and the places I order food for delivery.
FYI, Ed's my co-founder at Memrise, and you can read his blog here:

http://edcooke.memrise.com
a very good read.
Twitter it should be 2015. Based on RSS+ (it's not misspelled)
Dear HN, sorry for my ugly English. Sorry for my hairstyle. Sorry for the noise in my video. In spite of all this, I still hope, that you will hear me. I'm start working on RSS+. Dear nerds, I need your help to specify all subcategories.
Aiming to create a multiplayer sim ant
http://github.com/rinum/openant
Apologies for shilling, but give us a try - this is exactly the problem we're trying to help people with:

http://blog.memrise.com/2011/03/why-chinese-is-getting-easie...
Sit down, pour yourself a drink, what dimension are you in?
Electronic Explorations
That is how I had to start. I just decided I would use it and be completely overwhelmed for a couple weeks. It also helps if you have a proficient Emacs use sitting nearby that so that you can constantly ask how do things.
Google Images with sorting
This thread reminds of those articles about how people without children are happier. Then a bunch of parents post how giving birth was the best decision they made.
Interesting! Is there any way to contact you?
There's no information in the article about how they did it - whether using EC2 was actually necessary (because they needed a lot of processing power) or whether they just used it to cover their tracks a bit further (using a stolen credit card, and connecting to the instance through a set of proxies). Without that, this is about as useful as saying that the attack was launched from a server running Linux.
Canadian Copyright Collective Demanding Memory Card Tax
Cool stuff. But, meeting with 10 other peers each time i want something downloaded is not sexy. Also, since BitTorrent speeds usually are not amazing, i might as well let someone download the whole thing and then ask from them to give it to me.
You guys do realize that SAP is at least one order of magnitude larger than Skype, right? It rings in at a $77 BILLION in market cap on the NYSE[1]. I'm not even sure that represents SAP's total value, either. There seems to be a separate listing valued at $55 BILLION that's traded on ETR[2]. SAP AG was the fourth largest software company in the entire world by revenue in 2010[3].

That kind of merger would be unique in Microsoft's history[4]. In fact Skype is already Microsoft's largest merger in history by a sizable margin.

EDIT: The ETR listing is valued in euros, where 55 billion EUR roughly translates to 77 billion USD. Although I still don't know if that fully accounts for SAP AG's value.

[1] http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ASAP
[2] http://www.google.com/finance?q=ETR:SAP
[3] http://www.softwaretop100.org/global-software-top-100-editio...
[4] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_merge...
They think that what's popular with consumers will eventually make its way into enterprise. Or in other words, their consumer efforts are the steps they're taking to (try to) protect enterprise dominance in the long term.
The single best thing I did to become proficient using Emacs was to switch my CapsLock key to Ctrl. Learning to touch type comes a close second.
Do you have any plans to share it on github?
Skype is now worth almost 50% of Estonia's GDP.
I agree. Anonymity is essential for honest discussion. Anonymity is almost required to know what people "really" think. That's why we created Spottiness. In our site, every "spot" has to be anonymous or won't be published. Our challenge is to weed out the garbage while we make it very easy for everybody to say what they think.
Hi. This only works for peers within close geographical proximity and I used the word social because there are many times when you want to download something that some of your friends also want. Note that the intention is not to download small files, but files of very large sizes and common to the peer group. Also, countries where high speed internet is still a luxury (like India), this works because lots of peers are downloading the same content and thus contributing their (limited) bandwidth to the download.
Personally, I prefer to discuss content on another site. Not because their commenting systems are better, but because I have a wide range of interests, and it is more convenient for me to discuss information where any content can come in.

Also, on a site dedicated to discussion, I don't have to worry about moderation or permission of the content creator.
Protect IP Act
Ask there: http://www.gfy.com. It's the largest adult industry board. A lot of content producers do business there.
Comment sections in exist to drive page views. Online publishers want flame wars to break out, because flame wars mean traffic.

There's no money in quality comments. Reddit is a vast money-pit for Conde Nast. Kevin Rose might have got paid, but Digg is going down the chute. HN serves as a recruiting ground for YC and I believe that Slashdot is treated as a loss-leader to support other Geeknet properties.

Personally, I think we need to take a lesson from the granddaddy of them all, WELL. Mandate real names and charge admission and you'll get quality interaction. Contrary to what internet culture might have us believe, exclusivity and accountability are generally good things.
Next big thing - reverse deal of the day?
There were thoughts, but they weren't about learning Emacs.

IMO, it was just another Emacs advocacy article. The only thing I learned is that there is an org-mode iPhone app.
I have a 15 year 4.0% fixed mortgage. Got it a few months ago. In Seattle.
If we practiced surgery the same way we practice psychiatry, we would be routinely trepanning people if they seemed 'resistant to conventional treatment'.

And if we practiced psychiatry the same way we practiced surgery, we'd give people MRIs, CAT scans, and plenty of other expensive tests every time they said they felt a bit sad.
Have you called The US from Brazil? They had some geolocation filtering that either made it complex or impossible to make a voice call. Not at all like using it from the united states.
Yes, I thought about it, it could be an interesting project to develop.
Anyone know what the long-term decade-scale plan is? Sooner or later we have to let the river move, because if I understand this correctly, over time it simply becomes arbitrarily harder to force through the same channel, without bound.
A Mask for All Kinds of Skin | east beauty|women health|beauty|women
Dear HN, sorry for my ugly English. Sorry for my hairstyle. Sorry for long video(03:41) and noise. Despite all this thing, I hope you understand, that I'm work out a RSS+. Dear enthusiasts, nerds, geeks and jornalists, I need your help to specify all subcategories.
> In the end Apple will probably beat both Google and Microsoft, but that’s not a story for today.

Alright, I stopped reading there. Unfortunately, it was too late.
No, your rent is a function of the supply and demand of rentals.
Reddit is a vast money-pit for Conde Nast.

Really? How much does CN lose annually on Reddit?
Looks very promising. Can I contact you?
America's License Raj
It will be interesting to see if Microsoft's behavior changes. I suspect it will get worse now that oversight is gone. Ballmer's the kind of guy who would want to take the lead in shady PR back from Facebook.

Perhaps I will be surprised, though.
Skype+Kinect+xbox can bring video calling to living room. Also, Skype could be a great addition to Windows mobile phones. I think these two might be the main reasons for Microsoft to buy Skype.

Now depends on how well Microsoft does Skype integration with their products.
I see a lot of node.js work here... I'll be the super-uncool guy in the group and admit that so far I've only ever released Java libraries under Apache 2.

I just released a CloudFront log parsing library:
http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/software/cloudfront-log-parser/

and a simple XML parsing library (speed of pull-parsing with the ease of XPath-esque expressions):
http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/software/simple-java-xml-parser-...

and one library that seems to be picking up is an image-scaling library I have made a few releases of:
http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/software/imgscalr-java-image-sca...

There are a handful of other libraries:
https://github.com/thebuzzmedia/

I just haven't finished the project-pages for them.
I know a guy who built a "tube site" software in PHP when tubes were still fairly new and he was making ~10,000$/month within a few weeks. He didn't spend a dime on advertising, just word of mouth and posting on adult boards with a link to his site in his signature.
Easy to describe is not the same as easy to do.

You should hack off 2-6 and describe step 1 in 7 steps.
Review – HP Microserver
There's a great method for learning the characters in the context of Japanese, described in a book called "Remembering the Kanji" by James Heisig. It helped me work through about 1000 characters in a month; doing it full-time, you could probably to recognize 2,000 in a month, and read them in another month. He's published a similar book for learning the characters in Chinese; you should check it out.

Taking a quick look at the memrise website, I don't think their technique is going to be as helpful as Heisig's. For a variety of reasons (discussed in the book), memorizing the character for "man" by associating it with a picture of a man is not efficient for learning more than the most basic characters.
So you think 4Chan is the epitome of honesty?
The blog post tells us a release has occurred, who wrote it, who the FSF is, what the relationship between Witch and Free Call is. However I can't for the life of me figure out what GNU SIP Witch is.
That's simply not true -- there is a reason why trades have apprenticeships, journeyman, and master levels. The fact that you can put a toilet in doesn't make you a master plumber. Immigrant labor floods the low end of the market and starves off the supply of new laborers to the higher end because there's no career path for an illegal, casual worker. That's why a skilled master plumber often can get away with charging $150/hr.

Frankly, white collar jobs like IT are if anything, easier than most trade jobs. Get me someone who can read at a high school level with a reasonable work ethic, and I'll show you a very good IT Pro in 3-5 years. Ditto for programming.
What Every C Programmer Should Know About Undefined Behavior #2/3
Node.js + Redis + Geolocation + WebGL Globe
Do you have any interest in a flexible discussion platform for your projects?
Kiva is a great idea executed really well. It is great to see social entrepreneurship gaining mass attention, thanks to inspiration provided by Muhammad Yunus.

Also, hate to be nitpicking but should point out that a rupee has never been worth less than a cent.One rupee was worth less than a cent at the time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_rupee
i go to 5 one hour sessions each week. the therapy and medication cost me over 2 thousand dollars each month, but i credit them with totally turning my life around. before this therapy i had zero emotionally intelligence; i would feel things so intensely that i would be overwhelmed with the emotion and unable to think about it rationally. now i am building the ability to step back and see what is happening.

another really helpful move i took was to build the website https://www.thoughtplot.org, which has been incredibly valuable for me in understanding my mood.

at cbt, i told the guy that i sometimes become convinced that i am supposed to trigger the singularity via a giant public sex orgy. instead of trying to figure out why that is or what i could do about it, he was like "why dont you make it a goal to eat vegetables today?" it actually helped, but it was adressing the symptoms (psychosis) rather than the problem (a feeling of lonliness and self hatred.)
The WSJ article gives a basic, but slanted description of how it works. Briefly: income earned by overseas subsidiaries is not taxable to the American corporate parent until those overseas earnings are sent back to America via a dividend. Here, rather than pay a 35% rate on their overseas profits, Microsoft chose to use it to acquire another company, essentially delaying taxation on that income until much later into the future, if ever.

Edit: There is no advantage to the reverse (MSEuro buying a US company), since the US-earned income is taxed in the US at the US corporate rates, which are much higher than the European corporate rates. The money would be taxed at a lower rate when repatriated to the Euro owner, but you would have ended up paying the higher tax rate first.
> Don't get into user-generated - too many legal and ethical issues.

I've seen some pretty disturbing content uploaded to even sites about video games... this is definitely good advice. Thanks for the tips.
In this case, I'm not storing void pointers in the data structure, but I'm using the void pointer as a direct address into "elements". The memory layout is just a sequence of items of length elem_size. vector_push copies the item into that memory (and doubles the size of "elements" with realloc when necessary).
Great, thanks for the link!
How to install and run Android on your Netbook or Desktop
I've waved the "What did Microsoft ever invent?" flag plenty in my life, so let me try and advocate for the devil:

Microsoft basically invented the hardware-agnostic software platform. Before Microsoft, there were a variety of hardware platforms, each with their own libraries and languages... not unlike the situation today with phones. Developers had to choose what to target... not only Mac vs PC, but different video cards, different sound cards, different network stacks, etc.

Microsoft took that fragmented market and unified it under a set of standard APIs for both hardware makers and software developers to target. I would consider that an innovation: the loose coupling that they enabled allowed much faster innovation in both hardware and third-party software.

Interestingly, Netscape tried to play the same game on top of them (unifying Windows, Mac, and UNIX under one standardized API), and though Microsoft was able to destroying them, Webkit has succeeded where Netscape failed, and it is slowly making Microsoft irrelevant, just as Gates feared.

Other than that, I don't think Microsoft invented much. But they did a good job copying, were ruthless with business executation, and so their one innovation ended up being a multi-trillion dollar innovation.
Does anyone know why is it "next gen"? And how does "peer-to-peer" mean in this case?

The only description of sip witch with some actual content (that I could find) is here: http://www.slideshare.net/gnutelephony/harvard2010 However it's missing some really important points and looks like technical issues are just skipped:

- How do users locate each other? (looks like user@domain is "known" somehow) GNU telephony blog mentions "peer-to-peer mesh calling networks" but I can't find any actual working prototype.

- Why wouldn't I just use Freeswitch which can support both nat traversal and ZRTP?

- How do they imagine the initial connection with both sides behind the firewall if no ports are mapped? (skype can do that due to known network of hosts)

If they don't have some great solutions here, I'm not sure why are they writing this from scratch instead of adding those "peer-to-peer mesh calling networks" capabilities as a standardised protocol to PBXes which are used nowadays (asterisk, freeswitch, yate).
My rent increased between five and ten percent every year the five years prior to buying my home.

Please check my math: using your numbers and averaging to 7.5 percent per year, that would be a cumulative increase of (1.075)^5 = 1.44 = 44 percent increase.

Did your rent really go up 44 percent over 5 years? Where do you live?

As an additional data point, I rented a house with some friends in Beaverton for 5 years and the landlord never raised the rent.
Another critique you can level against CBT comes from the thinking behind Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). I've read books on ACT that argue that trying to rationally challenge and control and manage your thoughts often has the paradoxical effect of making them stronger, and making them more prominent in your life. A common comparison is that a person trying not to have negative, depressed thoughts is like someone trying not to think of a red lion; you can't make yourself not think something.

The ACT approach to negative thoughts and behaviors is more mindfulness based and is about accepting the things that come from your mind without necessarily getting sucked into them or being controlled by them. Personally I think bits of several approaches can help.
I like the idea of having a single ID for Internet. It reduces the burden of creating accounts everywhere. The ID could be used in any site that would like a non anonymous comment or activity. A request for ID info could pop-up for an accept button. There are solutions in the market, of course, but they have not yet got critical mass, I guess. The Id together with karma and voting would help a lot to select interesting comments.

A lot of our browsing activity is not anonymous anymore, I can see the ads are tracking me! So why not use this 'system' for something else?
Ask HN: How do I find a software best practices mentor / coach?
I'm trying to find someone who can coach/mentor an inexperienced software development manager in software engineering best practices--source control, release engineering, security, backups, planning, development methodologies, code review, architecture, etc.

The manager was promoted from within, the most senior developer from a group of relatively inexperienced PHP programmers. Unsurprisingly, they don't follow any formalized practices and are struggling with a lot of chaos and poor software quality.

The company is based in the Netherlands (Noord Holland), and doesn't have the budget to hire an experienced, full-time engineering manager, and this kind of coaching is outside the scope of the services I normally provide, so I'm trying to find them a local consultant who can do some phone coaching and come in a few days a month to help with training and process development.

Anyone know such a consultant in NL, or have an idea how to go about searching for one?
signups are fine, karma is fine, but killing anonymity is not necessary. i read plenty of sites that allow anonymous commenting and the lynchpin for success here is the rarely-considered feature of user flagging. metafilter does great with this, though they don't allow pure anonymity.

if you have a way for people to flag what they think is bad stuff, you don't have to moderate every comment (a la boingboing and others) and you don't give people a free-for-all. additionally, it allows a user culture for the site to emerge as a collective tone is carved through the kinds of posts that get removed or downvoted.

this is a big thing. i think a lot of sites are jumping on the no-anonymity bandwagon because that's what third-party commenting sites push in order to pump up (i'm speculating) registration numbers. disqus allows (or allowed at the beginning) anonymous commenting, but i haven't seen any site that uses disqus to allow it.

i think this is a market failure. i saw third-party commenting as a way for sites to no longer have to implement their own user registration facilities regardless of whether they allowed anonymous commenting. they just figure hey, we can have our bloggers be able to log in, keep that part simple, and then throw the rabble to disqus for them to deal with. typically i've found this causes the commenting culture to shrink a great deal.

i think there's space for a third-party comment provider to allow arbitrary name/email(will not be shown)-type anonymity, while still implementing flagging, voting/karma and, perhaps most-importantly, IP-banning. it wouldn't be perfect, but i do think it would allow more freedom on both sides: to comment, and to be (more) free of moderation overhead.
Just a weekend project I'm working on. I thought it'd be interesting to plot the location of users on Google's webgl globe. Works on Chrome, haven't tried it on any other browsers though.
I am not getting what makes this any different from any other very large build then.
How to Create Facebook fan page for business
Fan pages are among the best causes of online traffic at the present time and several affiliate marketers are absolutely raking it in as a result. It must the stage where some underground internet marketers are reporting earnings of over five thousand dollars weekly.
What about Williams Tubes?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_tube
Brilliant! I've added an Update to my post. You also got mentioned here:
http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2011/05/14/amubose-new-ama...
That's a nice sentiment, but it doesn't really fit the case at hand. The multi-thousand line explanation is only necessary for people who don't know APL. Once you are fluent in the language, a one-liner like the one shown requires very little explanation-- consider it the APL equivalent of the Ruby/Rails "blog in 10 minutes" demo (especially if you avail yourself of the 7 minute video I linked to elsewhere in this discussion.)

Each glyph in APL represents a conceptual construct, so the language is quite expressive of programmer intent--much moreso than many other languages I've used.
If you play around with the rent vs. buy calculator at the NY Times for a while, you will come to two conclusions:

1) The rent vs. buy decision is almost entirely based on your expectation of future house price changes versus rental prices changes. Everything else is around the edges.

2) Regardless of your opinion on the first question, you should never buy a house when you think there is a significant chance you will leave in less than five years.

I think housing will go down another 20-40% from here (causing widespread bank failures and eventually the dissolution of the Federal Reserve) and rents will be stable to down due to the deflationary pressures we are facing. Therefore, I will not buy a house.

YMMV.
Thanks,
"He's published a similar book for learning the characters in Chinese" - Do you know the name?

Edit: I think I found it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembering_the_Hanzi
Mine is Ragios - Ruby based system monitoring framework: https://github.com/obi-a/Ragios

A good way to find recently started projects is to follow the keyword 'github' on twitter.