skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's been done before an there is a UK site that has been running quite successfully for several years called My Single Friend - URL below for reference.

http://www.mysinglefriend.com
Lonely Planet for Languages
did you completely fail to notice the graphs and numerical data provided?
OK then http://www.isxkcdshittytoday.com/
How Insight and Epiphanies Work (New Yorker)
because many people don't like going on a blind date, its usually a very awkward experience. At least this way both people will know what the other one looks like
Shelf | Shelving
One of the things that I've noticed when researching this myself is that the majority of the time, people generally dont fill out their profiles too well - which I would suggest lessens their chances of someone finding them.

Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel regarding dating sites, why not create a webapp that helps people create good custom profiles for themselves to increase their chances at finding someone?

Perhaps have it so that it can export the blocks of information which are customised for the main dating sites - to make it an easier process, and also allow for data portability across multiple dating sites.

That would be one of the ways I'd approach this kind of problem.
Ubuntu was the first Linux I ever tried, on my previous computer.

It installed smoothly and I was pleasantly surprised. Apt-get was working its magic and it seemed like I could escape from Microsoft's clutches!

But then I made the mistake of getting a new computer which could handle modern games, and suddenly things weren't so simple anymore..

Long story short:

I've got a 8800GTS which required proprietary drivers etc, and for some reason the picture seemed somehow fuzzy.

The whole computer didn't boot up without adding "irqpoll" to the boot options, and Ubuntu refused to recognize my fairly standard Samsung 226BW monitor, or use its native resolution at the normal refresh rate, etc.

After "enough" googling and getting Ubuntu to refuse booting up by fiddling with my xorg.conf etc, I decided I'd wait for Hardy, hoping there would be fewer or no problems.

Along comes Hardy, and now the install-CD doesn't want to boot up even despite casting the "irqpoll" spell!

After installing maybe four different flavors of Linux (over a period of maybe less than a year), two flavours of BSD, I just couldn't get things to work, and finally gave up.

I'm writing this on a MacBook, and happy to be using one.

The thing is, I really wanted to use Linux, but as someone who just wants to use things and not investigate and fix them, Mac OS X seems to be a much better fit.

Besides, it's really pretty and offers a coherent, consistent user-experience! :)
Depends what you mean by enlightened I guess.

There was a time when IBM was the evil empire. For all we know it will be Apple next, with some sort of thin client lock-in based on safari and itunes.

Genuine innovation is a good thing even when it comes from unpopular origins.
I'm unable to downvote anything on this site as my karma score is too low, so I just vote everything up instead, even if I disagree, I upvote. Everyone who reads this comment will downvote it though. Weird.
Well if you actually had people with skin in the game, they have an incentive to make it work. This could mean calling people on the phone, going to visit them in person, etc. And in general I bet a really talented matchmaker could get someone to be a lot more candid than they'd otherwise be on a publicly visible profile. It's like a cap-and-trade system; by offering up a pot of gold to the winners you spur massive amounts of innovation. For example, if a matchmaker could increase his success rates by offering up dating tips and personal grooming advice then there would be a system in place promising him a pot of gold for doing it.
I've upvoted your comment, good luck!
Quick tip: how to convert tables to InnoDB
Be sure to scroll half-way down to see what Cuil thinks of our friend Paul Graham.
He's not a reporter, and actually seems like a pretty bright guy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Wu
DarcsEvaluation - GHC - Trac
I tried to post a comment on his blog, but it's inaccessible.

Short version: pick a systems programming project to learn C. I think implementing a memory allocator is a good one. You can code a brain-dead simple memory allocator in less than a few dozen lines. It will perform horribly and waste resources, but it's still functionally complete. As you learn more, you can make the allocator more sophisticated.

(Although I'm biased since memory allocation was a research project of mine.)
I think what you have described is a SRSN "Simplified Registration for any Social Network" based on Twitter.

Otherwise I do not really see what makes it so different from the other Me-too dating sites.
Dell designs music player to compete with iPod ... again
Hilarious! They should probably consider taking pictures from the same source as the info. I'm pretty sure that's not what goes on at the Mormon Missionary Training Center :)
Whois:

Registrant:
Mark Kaganovich
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
palo alto, California 94306
United States
New Facebook Design Confuses Many, Obscures Features
All these posts showing bad search results on Cuil are getting ridiculous. We all get it. Cuil sucks. Big time. The results are, at best, of dubious quality. The pictures don't match. The launch was a complete and utter failure.

How long are we going to beat this dead horse? For three days it seems like there has been at least one link to some random jackass blog with screenshots of crappy search results on the front page of HN. They're not even funny like the screenshots of questionably placed Google ads that you see on Fark sometimes. They're just inaccurate results.

I'm beginning to think Cuil is going to be the CueCat of this millenium... The hyped up startup that fails miserably and everyone talks about for years afterward. Is anyone else tired of this?
Wow. Groundbreaking! Never heard this before.
Humanizing Robots
This is a great idea. The target market for those who can't see it is - non-technical people. Our parents, siblings and friends... They don't have to deal with some crazy blog interface. They can just use their already familiar email interface and email posts directly to post@posterous.com. And on top of that it integrates with flickr, twitter and legacy blogs.

If you can't see the potential then you are either 1) in a family of all engineers and scientists 2) have no non-technical friends 3) don't see what it can do for YOU... their is a world outside of news.yc.
Google: "Complete Privacy Does Not Exist"
We use Ruby on Rails. I prefer Django but learning Rails was trivial after having practiced with Django for the past 2 years. We use Python for a number of tools internally. Lucene for indexing, Lighttpd webserver, MySQL db. Standard stuff.
2. Bridge

Replace with Poker for the younger hackers.

I know a lot of hackers that play Poker. I imagine it's dependent on age. It's en vogue for the 20 somethings to be a respectable poker player. I just don't know anyone in their teens - 30s that plays bridge. I'd love to give it a try.
Can you elaborate on why you think Apple does not have a healthy developer community?
Let's put it this way: I got heartily sick of the Twitter doesn't scale posts, and some of them contained morsels of technical substance within the speculation. Any asshole can write a blog post saying "Lookit! _____ sucks!!" It's just as tiresome for Cuil as it is for Vista.

Rare is the person who offers some insight into what could or should be done to compete with Google. Even rarer are the people who are busy hacking together their own ideas for how to do it right. That's the very best way to say something else is wrong: demonstrate how you think it ought to be done.

Roger Ebert has an excellent book called "Your Movie Sucks," it contains nothing but zero, one-half, and one star reviews. It's an excellent book because it shows the challenge of writing something more informative and/or entertaining than "Your Movie Sucks."

And of course, Roger has to write those reviews, because it's his job to review movies as they're released. Bloggers are under no such pressure, they can write what they choose, when they choose. Therefore, I hold bloggers to an even higher standard of writing "Lookit! _____ sucks!!"

Since bloggers have the option of saying nothing, they shouldn't say anything unless it is worthy of being read.
Balsamiq, a Mockup Creator in AIR, is on Fire
Thanks for submitting this. I might actually get in touch with the researchers at some point because this is something I'm interesting in. (Even though I think they're on the wrong track.)
Perhaps he envisions local communities forming groups like Home Owners' Associations and pooling their resources to create MANs, for fast, off-the-grid resource sharing. Once a few of these spring up in the same general area--say, a few neighborhoods in the bay area--it'd take a gross failure of imagination to avoid interconnecting them.
No, he is somewhat right. ;-) The "myth" that Perl is hard to maintain was "busted" by quote of Larry followed by mentioning some testing tools. ;-)
Perversion Tracker returns
It's more complicated than this, though. Copyright protects the direct expression of a game, but not the rules themselves. You can't copyright the way scrabble is played any more than you can copyright the game of "football" under the laws governing "the NFL rulebook" (an actual document).

What seems to have happened is that they decided they just didn't want to fight this, and I don't blame them. Ultimately though, it's not at all clear that Hasbro would have won this as a copyright case. Note that at least one other Hasbro property, the AD&D 1st edition rules, exists in a "free" form on the web as "OSRIC", using rules compatible with the original but without any of the copyrighted material. The Wikipedia page on the game talks about this in more depth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSRIC

And to be clear: "Scrabulous" almost certainly did have a trademark problem, as it clearly evokes the name of the original game.
The new unlocked HTC Touch Dual
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> But the whole case for cap-and-trade is that it's the most economically efficient way to invest in clean energy.

Is it?
Hidden horrors
I was sorting a list, actually. Using an array + some type declarations I got .45 seconds.
> However, the idea that we should design our energy policy around maximizing new energy creation even when it's more cost effective to make our current products more energy efficient makes no sense, assuming we take economic benefit to mean wealth created per dollar spent.

Sure it does. Even if we made all of our current products us 0 energy, we might want more energy for other things than the amount saved.

BTW - is it actually more cost-efficient or is that assumed because it's convenient for some other argument?
Actually, the results aren't half bad, all things considered. It's the photos that don't match up at all with the queries in a "so bad it's funny" sort of way.
I've gone a bit over the top lately. I have my laptop for most tasks, a Mac Mini for development, a Mac Mini for crawling, and then a suite of servers for further testing.
Hey, I was there for two months, I should be able to make that joke!
Why do we need to "save music industry"? The entire "industry" was a byproduct of inventing a way to record sound. Someone with money and equipment (the aforementioned "industry") suddenly was able to record something and make a profit on those who could not.

Soon, however, we invented ways to record sound cheaply, thus one didn't have to spend as much on recording/reproducing hardware, giving people ability to do it themselves, and the "industry" started to bitch about VCRs and cassette recorders.

Now we've come up with even cheaper way to record, copy and even manipulate (!) sound. And a way to distribute it for free.

The "industry" is clearly not needed anymore, there is no "product" behind it, just a bunch of useless "distributors" and "promoters". Why would we want to save THAT?

Nothing is going to happen to music, the music has been around for thousands of years, long before all these inventions took place, and the best musical creations happened without any help from the "industry".

We (engineers) gave them (the industry) an exclusive monopoly to charge for a short-lived privilege of storing and transporting sound, now we're taking it back. In that sense everything goes back to normal: nothing to be saved here.
I've got it, lets create a virtual experience dating site. That way you never have to meet the person - you can just do things together from a distance ;)
Don't worry, people will forget about Cuil by the end of the week (well, it's already Wednesday so maybe by next week).
Trying to upgrade from Vista to Vista SP1 is what drove me back to XP. I wanted to do a fresh reinstall w/ Vista SP1 and the installer told me "We're sorry, you can't install to that drive because Vista is already installed."

It had other foibles as well and managed to crash due to driver conflicts and other issues. All in all, I much more satisfied being back on XP even though I'm missing out on some of Vista's new eye candy.
"Got to be joking." Always a good way to start an argument.

I would say the main two problems I have with Safari and Opera is their unexpected actions. They are radically different from previous browsers, and still have strange, divergent keyboard shortcuts, etc. I think the main thing for me is that neither handles tabs as nicely as Firefox, and for a heavy user, tabs are everything.
Perhaps you didn't read the whole thing or simply enjoy trolling.
Discount Top Ten Toys for Kids: The Best and Most Innovative Toys of The Year
Firefly's chat-on-a-webpage goes live
I've seen results just as silly from Google images, and I'd be willing to bet Google's search wasn't nearly so solid as it is now back in the day.
I agree. The problem with copyright law is not whether someone can sue someone else for ripping an idea off. Indeed, that's the point of copyright law. The problem is the length of time a copyright can be held. It was short, initially, with the intent of keeping people innovative. It's now been turned into a way to hold on to cash cows.
Yuil vs. Cuil - The hack wins hands down...
I'm glad this happened, if only so that we will secure our systems better.
For the love of Jehovah... please, please no more social networks.
pointless idea + bored engineers + tenuous market = WHY?
In the sense that pure markets are the most effective known way to efficiently allocate resources. In reality they can fall short in any number of ways.

Cap-and-trade for sulfur dioxide is the poster child. It has worked well in reducing overall levels quickly and cost effectively: http://www.grinningplanet.com/2004/02-12/cap-and-trade-pollu... . But I don't know of any other examples of cap-and-trade so it's not clear it's an all-purpose strategy.
why does the music business need saving? where is it carved in stone that musicians must be rich?
Perhaps a feature like facial merging (a la http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=260642) of the couple to show potential cuteness/ugliness of babies is something to consider.

The crowd then chooses couples, and votes on results, and hence couples are connected/introduced by crowdsourcing.

hotornot + crowdsourcing + topic of common interest to break the ice.
Compared to Cuil, yes. But I still like the layout of Yahoo!'s normal search. Whose idea was it that stacked results didn't work for conveying amounts of information?
OpenSolaris is failing for reasons other than technology. They do not actually want it to be open source, they just want to snow people who don't know better that it is open source. If it was open source, why not make it gplv2 and make it compatible with Linux? OpenSolaris needs hardware drivers, Linux would beneifit from ZFS. In the end Sun would gain a LOT more than they would give up. But instead it is gplv3, there is nothing to share with other projects, and they don't receive many patches. So it is DOA.
Another one of those "Aha" interview questions: Long-running averages
Yes you do. Think about it. Was the object we know as "The mouse trap" the first tool used to kill mice? I doubt it. It simply was better than the current solutions. Sure, I know that being 'marginally better' isn't going to guarantee success, especially in a competitive market, but slight improvements can lead to widespread successes.
yeah i may have to start using this
How to Despam Your iPhone Email
Smart Trade Show Marketing Strategies | Tradetec Skyline
He says that "if American Universities are going to keep up, they need to switch back to ... using C in the classroom."

Unfortunately, he doesn't understand the goals of most American schools. The goal is not to give the students a well-rounded education to serve as a foundation of lifelong achievement. The goal is to get paid.

A lot of schools used C because it was popular, and because the industry would support a system that produced C programmers. Now Java is popular and the industry supports schools that produce Java programmers.

If Haskell becomes the next big trend in enterprise development, then kids will start getting good CS educations again.
Feedback on our latest spin: Qwili.com
I'm not sure I can agree with everything you said, but I definitely agree with your general point. Most of us spend our free time with passive entertainment, not real hobbies were deeply passionate about. I think it's because real hobbies tend to be more expensive, require more time, and more effort. Mindless entertainment has the upper hand on someone who already spends a great deal if their time working hard. It's the difference between fast food and a meal cooked from scratch.
We wanted to build a concept around our custom search engine solution for a potential client; one suggested the idea of a search engine for wine and liquor. That’s how qwili.com came to life.
We started using it ourselves and share it with friends.

The question is how useful is a product specific (real) search engine?

Any input is welcome.
Creating Power (The Youtube Avril Lavigne Lie)
Hypebot Infiltrates Columbia Records Site With Anti-Label Ad
I don't understand this. There are about 5 to 10 entry level to intermediate level Perl idioms that are just plain useful. (file handles, sed and grep commands, basic regular expressions, etc.) that can do most of what you need to do with typical quick and dirty Perl programs. It doesn't take much to remain fluent with these, though you may need a cheat sheet for keeping @ $ and & straight. (warnings and strict prevent the worst headaches, though.)

My first perl scripts are a complete mess. But my more recent ones are generally one-screen in size more or less... and are a few short (often lispy) subroutines followed by a short imperative program that does something to text stream based on the arguments that were passed in with it.

Decent perl code looks (to me) something half way between Ruby and BASIC. Maybe I'll find out before long, but I just don't see how people can suddenly stop being able to understand their Perl code-- unless they are completely sloppy and cutting all kinds of corners.... :evil:
raganwald, you'd ask that in an interview? I think it'd be a bit tough. Though I've never had a chance to really grill a candidate -- they usually get nervous with open-ended questions.
Google Acquires Omnisio (YC Winter 08)
You can do CPU-intensive tasks using a general purpose Python API with SciPy/NumPy. Yes, it's implemented in C.
Odd how in these situations no one ever thinks of simply funding companies that would generate the most economic growth. And yet if you diff present conditions against conditions 100 or 500 years ago-- even in the poorest places-- I'd bet most of the improvement came not from explicitly benevolent projects so much as ordinary economic growth.

Obviously the two are hard to disentangle, but even in a project like shipping vaccines to poor countries, think about how much better it is to have things like fridges, phones, aircraft, etc. To say nothing of all the infrastructure in the labs that make the vaccines, etc, etc.
Nope! And it's because Apple provides a better user experience. And Google can't fight back entirely, because they don't control the hardware, and - furthermore - because they need to adapt their software so that it can support whatever hardware wants to use it.

That's not to say that I think Android will be bad - just that the iPhone will be better. And as a result, despite programmers' gripes, it will have more potential and - much more importantly - far more users. People won't switch operating systems just because it's more open than something else, only if it provides something more. It's not like the Apple II, which lost to Microsoft's products because Microsoft appealed to a different market. That different market is already led by Blackberry and Windows Mobile, and Apple's aware of that.

It's possible that Android becomes wide-spread, if all the cell phone operators decide to pick it up. But that's a lower market than the one Apple appeals to. Their market, the "multiphone" for lack of a better word, is one that they created and they are leading. And I'd guess their goal is to make that market the dominant cell phone market. Whether or not it succeeds has nothing to do with Android. It has to do with whether or not the market shifts with Apple.
A thousand congratulations to you guys.
Another advantage of this method is that for data where the long-running average is meaningful (i.e., not a completely bizarre distribution) it is more numerically stable.
Much congratulations Omnisio!

First found out about Omnisio from the synced DHH talk at Startup School, and thought it was brilliant. Awesome that Google thinks it is too :)
I imagine it's dependent on age.

I don't think so.

Poker is very popular now among all age groups.

Bridge is not very popular among anyone except maybe senior citizens.

I've played a lot of both and there is no comparison - 2 completely different games. I think bridge is much more consistent with hacker-like thinking. (Maybe I'll say why in another post some day.)

I'd love to give it a try.

Then do it!

If you have a hacker mind, i.e., you like puzzles, logic, and problem solving, and even want to take it a step higher by building your own "framework" to attack those problems, you'll probably love it. But beware, you may end up like me, a bridge fanatic without a partner because no one else plays much these days.

If you ever want to give it a try, contact me off-line and maybe we can play on-line sometime.
How talented do you have to be to crack a system with no password? The really alarming thing about this article is the (apparent) insecurity of our military networks.
I think he misspoke. I think it's a healthy developer community with unhealthy restrictions. That's what he hopes Apple will realize they don't want.

Although I don't think anybody should think for a moment that Apple would keep this restriction if it ever seemed it might cost them something.
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned http://ping.fm which seems to do the exact same thing
Huge! Congrats Gentleman.
Congratulations. Omnisio was extremely well done. I hope YouTube will be as good for presentations soon.
Thats good to hear. I'm glad you guys are still going after that.