skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree.

Journalism fuels newspapers. And newspapers/blog in themselves are essential. Without Techcrunch or ArsTechnica, you might have not been aware of "startups" at all. You wouldn't know about startup failures or successes, and might have less motivation to build a startup. Also, there comes a time where you were looking for employees and those are the only destinations where you could get the word out.

I have a friend that says that small towns have a symbiotic relationships with their local newspapers. With those, people cannot know what's going on in the community, they wouldn't be able to post small ads, economy would slow down by lack of information.

So yes, journalism might appear as "easy" but they are the blood of society.
Blog dedicated to new Arab technology startups
Do we really need that button on the front?

I would find it much cooler, if the front was symmetrical and without any buttons. It would probably be eays to put a little on/off switch on the back. I would like a switch, that shows in a physical way if the thing is on or off. Buttons are much more confusing.
Barely Alive, Seafloor Microbes Might Resemble Exo-Organisms
Bleh, I agree. But he links to an old post by Aaron Swartz with an intriguing Google critique that I hadn't seen before. Since I've slammed Aaron's blog in the past my conscience wants me to point this out.

Edit: it's at http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/googlife in case anybody wants to bypass the OP.
For the past 7 years, the federal funds rate has been around 2-6% while the monetary inflation rate has been between 4-8%. In other words, interest rates have been negative. This isn't a problem of "culture". People are responding to incentives.
E-Gold pleads guilty to money laundering, pledges to comply with U.S. law
Try throwing a period on the end of one of those bad boys. That should stop him completing them for you. ;-P
The cat is out of the bag - DNS spoofing details
Mutable default parameter values in Python
In Python, everything is an object. Variables are technically names for references to objects. Therefore, when passing an argument to a function, what is in fact being passed is the value of the reference. This leads to some useful techniques.
Very interesting metamorphisis. But what is up with the first "Pablo Picasso Facts" at the bottom of the page...
"Picasso was the greatest artist of the 20th century."
Kaminsky's DNS flaw accidentally leaked to Net
Monopoly on blogging?

No, of course not.
That wasn't the point. The original question was whether the journalism industry is less valuable than other industries. And I said yes because they aren't first movers; they are reactionary.

Sending a PR release to Ars is valuable but it's not like you wouldn't have a business if it didn't exist. They may enhance value, but they certainly don't create any on their own.

I have a friend that says that small towns have a symbiotic relationships with their local newspapers.

Absolutely. Newspapers are helpful in society. But the example you use just has the paper as a medium of information exchange. The front of a church door served the same purpose a couple centuries ago. As information becomes more fluid through other technologies, the newspaper will fall into irrelevance.
re: challenge #1. I saw something germane on the tubes, a stock exchange type structure (futures for artists or albums) with people choosing the right artists' futures being rewarded with music downloads. Can't seem to Google it, but thesixtyone sounds close

http://www.thesixtyone.com/static/about/
This may be the first service, but I'm pretty sure they've been doing this for a while in parts of the southern US!

/ducks
Can you explain what you mean by interleaving? My intuitive definition ends up being the same as multitasking.
What bothers me about both justin.tv and scribd (as an occasional angel investor, though not in anything related to those sites) is the mass of copyrighted content. I am not sure what PG feels about sites whose business model depends on illegally posted copyrighted content - I am asking in the context of his idea number 1 (RIAA problem) ...
"Instead of searching for some type of ultimate mission, you should try and figure out what makes you happy and where your skills lie."

Sensible, but I say keep searching for the ultimate mission too.

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

- Theodore Roosevelt, 1910

Is this too romantic? Because in that ethos I find food for the soul.
This is awesome! It's so great to see really useful things happening in the jailbreaked-iphone scene!

I'm sure this will turn into a beautiful app that does not require command line access. Hopefully they can also figure out how to turn the iPhone into an actual access point. Not sure if the chip supports that though.
That's a lithograph, not a sketch as the title would suggest. All of those were actually made by adding material back to the carving.

Here's a better article on the process:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_n3_v81/ai_136...
The last line concisely states what I've known I do for years: "[S]uccessful CS students are those who, given a set of facts, will instinctively seek a consistent generative model to connect them."
Cheap iPhone Apps | TechJaws
If most software patents suddenly stops being valid, then this could open up lots of new business opportunities?
This Blog is X-Rated | TechJaws
The Internet, Information And Changing The World
How David Remnick Saved The New Yorker
These are pretty cool. It also looks neat starting from the end and working towards the beginning.
Anybody know where you can get a print of this?

I found the final frame (http://www.artrev.com/art/detailview.asp?pid=8877781318&...), but I'd like to have the whole series.
"The Monk and the Riddle" by Randy Komisar
How do you interleave without switching contexts?
Does anyone know the deal with this game? I have seen it on various sites many times but no actual details on when the game will come out. Did I miss something?
"...people and communities learn and adopt different social standards."

No kidding. To give you an idea of just how wide ranging the standards can be, consider this passage from Gandhi's autobiography.

"...there was an unwritten law among the Porbandar Memans living in South Africa that death should be preferred to bankruptcy."
If software patents stop being valid, companies will keep many of their inventions secret and will protect them as "trade secret" from now on. With patents they were at least forced to publish them. Not good either way, although certainly this will put an end to portfolio-only kind of businesses that did only harm and nothing but harm to everybody.
Why music is loud in bars: people drink more
Flowering Tree
You can say it both now and later. :)
I think you are making this too easy. Yes, technically it is the people's own fault. However, not everybody is a supercomputer making perfect rational decisions. People look to advisors and also their neighbors and peers for orientation. If advisors tell somebody he can afford something that somebody can not afford, they are also guilty to some extent. And why does anybody have to be guilty anyway (I hate scapegoat mentality).

And why no sympathy? Be happy that you are smarter and maybe had a better education and smarter peers that enabled you to make better choices. Personally I feel that kind of luck could also enable you to feel with the less lucky ones.

Edit: I just saw your one submission to HN so far, "recommendations for investing books". So apparently you acknowledge that it is not a trivial problem. You may say that everybody is free to go buy such books. But believe it or not, depending on your environment, it may not so obvious to do such a simple thing.

Another example, to clarify what I mean by luck: occasionally you hear about "wonder investors" who started trading while in school and made millions before they came of age. But if you look closer, usually they have some family member who led them down the path of investing. To their peers, it does not even occur to get interested in investing while still in school. I say that kind of thing is luck on behalf of the young investor, not stupidity on the part of the non-investors.
You can patent anything that is innovative but it is still not what a product that people spend money to buy, time to use.

The good part is now everyone has to compete for users with what users wants. So a feature on product A can be quickly copied to product B by its competent competitors. At the same time, product A's creators has to keep on moving on or face replacement. While workers in company for product A may have tougher time in life.
"...that it captures the absolute essence of the creature in as concise an image as possible"

I'm not convinced.

(This is not an expert's comment, I know nothing about modern art)
Absolutely, the original justification of the patent system was to get inventers to make their inventions public.

However, the inventions which have been patented recently are often obvious and trivial. Amazon's one-click patent is not some amazing secret that we have been let in on by the patent system.
Hacker dad asks: How do I encourage my young teen son to learn programming?
If I understand it correctly, interleaving seems to be like cooperative multitasking, while being interrupted by the manager seems to be like preemptive multitasking.
I'm guessing the grandparent post is talking about working on multiple (2, maybe 3) tasks. While waiting for something from one task like a compile/test run to complete or a response from another developer on a question, you can work on the other. This allows you to fill empty time with something productive and lets you context switch at favorable times.

That kind of soft context switch is fairly easy to manage. A task coming and forcing a context switch in the middle of something incurs a much higher penalty.
This is your change to give him a proper education. There are some great scheme/lisp books to get started with programming. Even for smart teens :-)
The sad truth is that the majority of people would prefer the "verbose" version, no matter how genius is your cut-down version. Same in software engineering: nobody cares how beautiful and concise your code is, you are paid only for the results.
I never thought about that company may put software under trade secret. Then the consequence may be different from what patent reformers expected. And you are right that in that case, the patent filing may decrease. And I am wonder what this mean to innovators that is not affiliate with companies.
FireFox Video Bling
So you think the image could be even simpler and still convey the image of a bull?

I would guess that he made a plate XII where he simplified further by removing the balls or horns, and then realized that it was no longer the image of a bull.
I was getting responsiveness problems on my 8G iPhone 3G (apps taking a few seconds to launch, UI stutters etc.). It turns out it wasn't using the latest firmware. I bet DHH isn't either.

If you've got a 3G iPhone, go to Settings->General->About and see that you're using 5A347. If you've got 5A345, that's the old, stuttery firmware and you should back up your phone and do a restore (power off, hold the home key when you connect to your computer, iTunes will prompt to download the new firmware).

Usual disclaimers apply. :)
Good call, I upgraded from 3.0 to 3.01 on Leopard. And it doesn't crash anymore, though it doesn't crash Safari either anymore, so I'm thinking it could have been something on their end that's since been updated.
I like using the builder approach in Ruby.

x.html {

x.head

x.body {

for i in 1..5 {

x.div(:id => i) {

"yo"

...

but my designer likes the templating stuff better. With a good IDE, it does become pretty easy to tell the code from the template.
This is the best explanation of all the DNS stuff I've ever read.
Who cares? Do you think people writing about Twitter sucking actually makes them improve things? If this were so, then automated phone response systems would be history. So would off-shore call centers, and so on.

Bad Twitter stability will get fixed if and when it translates into lost revenue and/or market share. From what I have been reading, it already is (apparently to FriendFeed if I remember correctly. I am not at all into the Twitter thing, so please correct me if I'm wrong).

These are businesses. Profits, market share, revenues, that kind of thing matters. Everything else matters only when it translates into something that matters.
Harnessing GPUs for General Purpose Computing
You should probably not draw the analogy to software too far. Clearly users appreciate (and are willing to pay for) beauty and simplicity in user interface. Look at the iPod. But of course customers don't care if your code is minimal or a convoluted mess, as long as the app works.

20th century art is a little different because the process is part of the exposed product - the art piece here is not the last plate (which would be a bit boring on its own), but the whole sequence.
A mostly good article that shows little regard for reality in the performance section. "Ruby and CPython perform roughly the same." That is correct if you believe that 3x slower is roughly the same (http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/debian/benchmark.php?test=...). They are in the same ballpark (vs. Java or C).

If the author had left it at that, fine. He goes on: "It would be surprising if [YARV, the new Ruby VM meant to improve performance] didn't perform better than CPython." That would make sense if CPython and Ruby performed the same, but Ruby is a third as fast as CPython. In order to match CPython, Ruby has a long way to go. Ruby 1.9, using that YARV VM, still lags behind Python (http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all...). Throw in Psyco (an optimized Python JIT compiler) and Ruby 1.9 looks a good 3-4x slower.

Python is faster than Ruby in a significant way (3x is significant). Ruby is a great language that I really like. You don't have to stretch its performance characteristics to make a case for the language - especially when raw performance often isn't important at all.
Great article! This quote makes me grateful for version control:

Indeed, Picasso seems to have put into practice here an idea he had expressed a few months earlier when speaking of one of his paintings: "If it were possible, I would leave it as it is, while I began over and carried it to a more advanced state on another canvas. Then I would do the same thing with that one. There would never be a |finished' canvas, but just the different |states' of a single painting, which normally disappear in the course of work."(4)
I'm not going to say that you're wrong. Your approach is a wise one, and it's one that I follow myself.

But there is more to it than that. You shouldn't let society off the hook, here. The problem with a society where credit grows on trees is that it pushes the price up on everything. Why does that tiny house on the corner cost $700k? Because if you offer $350k in cash you will be outbid by the unemployed guy down the block whose bank is willing to loan him $700k.

If you won't take those loans... perhaps you don't get to own a house. That's okay with me, but I'm relatively well paid and can afford some fairly well-located rental housing. A less well-paid person like a schoolteacher or a librarian might have to choose a two or three-hour commute, or leave the city of their birth altogether, unless they're willing to become debtors like the rest of their peers.

Think about college. Does your determination to avoid debt extend to college? Is your desire to attend MIT evidence of your "sense of entitlement"? When you're interviewing with the Ph.D.s at Google and you show them your degree from the DeVry Institute, do you think they're going to congratulate you on your good financial sense? Um, no. But to attend MIT you're going to have to compete with the people who are willing to go into debt -- and, because the easy credit of the last decade has encouraged colleges to raise tuition through the roof, you will need lots of debt of your own, or a very big pile of cash. Colleges wouldn't be so expensive if credit weren't so easy to get.

Being financially prudent is smart, but it's hard to do it on your own when society is swimming in the other direction.
The inflation rate has not been between 4% and 8% each year;it's been between 1% and 4%.

Source: http://www.inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Rate/Histor...
Still sounds like plain 'ol multitasking to me, as does the other reply.
...instead of the data falling into the wrong hands.
Ask YC: Scaling and alternatives to simpledb
I want to store hundreds of millions of records and run some queries and calculations on those records. There would be millions of batches of calculations a day.

They are pretty simple records, it would just be one table in a database ( so I don't think I need a full relational database ).

I am doing some research on what it would take to build and scale this out. My initial idea was to use ec2 for the calculations and simpledb for the datastore. However, we might go over the simpledb size limit also simpledb is only in BETA.. so is there an alternative product or approach to simpledb with no limitations ( maybe something that runs over s3? )

Also if I have a lot of money, would it be better to do this on my own with a big oracle/db2/sqlserver db server, vmware, more servers, or is amazon the way to go for this?

I am totally new at scaling so any links to good articles or sites would be helpful!

Thanks!
Microspaces (aka Nested GUIs)
We're just about ready to release several products using our new technology. Essentially it's a new category called 'nested GUIs' (aka Microspaces).. With microspaces you can keep info in multiple GUIs and are able to nest them in each other.

I'd really like to get any feedback and signups for our private beta. Please take a look at www.nestedguis.com .. (especially the videos tab) and offer any comments. Thanks
Poll: Have you learned a software technique from a patent database?
For those who have used information sources such as books or the Internet to get algorithms or other software techniques, how many times have you found such a technique among software patents in the US patent database or another database? If you give an answer other than "never" please explain in a comment.
Two or three times
Four or more times
Lattes a Luxury for Startups ($36 per gallon)
"The best that we can say is that both approaches provide advantages."

The best we can say is that Fitts's Law says that the one menu bar approach is better, and I do not know of any UI research or design principles at all favoring the one-menu-bar-per-window approach.

http://www.asktog.com/basics/firstPrinciples.html#fittsLaw

"Fitts' law (properly, but rarely, spelled "Fitts's Law") dictates the Macintosh pull-down menu acquisition should be approximately five times faster than Windows menu acquisition, and this is proven out."
Finally, I see a lot of blogs that tear down companies, people, or ideas. I remember when the blogs always just were trying to uplift each other and put interesting ideas forward.

The same thing can be said about comments in general, and more specifically, comments here at hacker news.

This has always been a great place to get inspiration. I love Scoble's phrase "uplift each other". Probably the main reason I'm here.

There's also, of course, a lot of debate. Healthy debate can also be uplifting if there's something to be learned. But there's a fine line between "constructive criticism" and "attitude". Any good on-line community or blog will probably always have to walk that fine line.
tyme
July 21st, 2008 9:45 pm
Nate: as I understand it, the additional RR is the key. You can’t keep requesting the foo.com NS record and trying to poison with forged responses because it’ll be cached. You can keep requesting bogus_random.foo.com, because each different one will generate a new recursive query. Then mallory can reply with a foo.com NS record (or http://www.foo.com A record) as an additional RR.

</quote> http://www.matasano.com/log/1105/regarding-the-post-on-charg...

This is a good description of the attack.
Google Reader can be used as a pseudo-cache: http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/http://www.matasano.c...
EV1 Electric Car on eBay for $100k. Oh Wait It's Just the Manual...
"Napster was pretty big."

Then you could also include iTunes, bringing us back to the Apple discussion.
lol - well done!

I've often teased my "green screen" clients that I could rewrite all their software to run in a browser. (It's not really that much of a stretch.)

What would really be impressive on OP's webpage would be F keys and Esc that worked as advertised in the text. It's really not that hard to coopt them from the browser.
People cite their own recent work to try and encourage others to read it (and to boost their own personal impact factor). I doubt that the rise of technology has changed that.

I don't think self-citations don't boost your impact factor.

There is another non-selfish reason self-citations are very common; many ideas are developed in a series of papers, so the work which directly anticipates your work is your previous work. Also, a large project often has interesting subprojects which are worth wirting about separately (think: web framework spins off templating library).
The next OpenMoko.

I'm usually pretty excited about plans like this, but the way Arrington talks about this project makes me wonder whether he actually has any clue about what he is getting into.

Specially, the part where he said that they will put together a nice software stack and then see on what hardware that will run. It is a very wrong approach in my opinion. Software is not the limiting factor here. It is the hardware. There should be a fine balance between the hardware and software choices for this thing.

Ah well, they are probably having fun.
Sounds great, I'll check it out, thank you!
It doesn't capture the essence of the creature in the sense that it lacks certain elements that one can assosciate with it, e.g. power (it looks very timid to me).
Probably I misinterpreted the world "image", I did't take it literally as you suggest.
Here's a non-pastebin destroyed version: http://blogs.buanzo.com.ar/2008/07/matasano-kaminsky-dns-for...
"Graphic design is purely in the realm of the aesthetic."

This is not strictly true. For example, when designing for print, a good designer pays strict attention to information architecture and type readability and legibility (which are two different thing). These things are both form and function.

But then, as I think Donald Norman says, "Beautiful things work better..."
Unfortunately bloatware sells well, too - take Microsoft or Adobe.

Why this analogy: succinctness and beauty is not appreciated in our industry, whereas it should have been a standard, like in mathematics or physics, where it is appreciated and "standardized" so to say. In math and physics you have to express youself in the most concise way. And I have never seen beauty and succinctness of the code being a requirement as a part of making software, unfortunately.

Edit: "bloatware" pertains to both the code and the interface.
The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki
Takes a whole new approach to management, and solutions.

How to Win Friends & Influence People
by Dale Carnegie