skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm an iOS developer, and I think $5 is a bit steep to simply try it out. I'm going to build from source and then buy it if I like it, but you may want to consider making some sort of free version that people could use to evaluate it.
That would bridge the contracts Visa and MC have signed with the processing bank.
Observation of LinkIn's IPO - Listing on NYSE & Comparison with Google
1. LinkedIn chose to list with NYSE instead of NASDAQ - Indicator of internet craze going mainstream?

When I read the news that LinkedIn has officially IPO-ed, I was expecting it to list on the NASDAQ. By oh boy was I wrong, it actually listed on the NYSE. Typically, NASDAQ has been the host to many tech-stars such as Google. I am unsure of the technical differences between listing on NYSE and NASDAQ that will affect LinkedIn’s returns. But one thing for sure is that NYSE is often = wall street bling. Is this a sign that the growth of Internet companies are becoming mainstream…and here to stay?

2. LinkedIn is not as experimental as other Internet companies like Google - Will it hit the same sky-high share price as Google and Amazon?

Unlike Google, LinkedIn is definitely not as experimental and broad in its offerings. Looking at the Google’s current share price (~USD500), I am wondering if LinkedIn’s share price will ever hit that price. Afterall, share price is an indicator of the public’s perception of its value. But comparing to Amazon, which is less adventurous in its projects than Google, perhaps LinkedIn does have a long way to its share price. Perhaps ~$200 by year 2013? Amazon gain pretige in the public’s eye with its expertise in online retail. Some say that Facebook will spark off the next era of recruitment. One thing’s for sure…I’m looking forward to how LinkedIn’s gonna push the boundaries of (1) managing professional contacts and (2) recruitment.

Where do you think LinkedIn will be heading to next? Or..more importantly..what else do you think LinkedIn is capable of achieving in the future?
Yes, I'm sure if we let government step out of the way and give corporations a free hand, everything will get much better.
Programming is a fundamental tool of computer science.

Sure, you can learn how paging in a virtual memory system works by reading wikipedia, but a computer scientist should really be able to write one of their own if they had to.
Red Bull makes 4 products.
The link is pretty scarce on details, basically just a bulleted list of abstract nice-to-haves for a theoretical anonymous network. More detail would be greatly appreciated; users shouldn't have to go into the code to find out how something like this works.

For instance, how is this an improvement over I2P? Phantom should really take a note from I2P's website on what constitutes an adequate amount of exposition to get people to learn about and try your anonymous network.
My winter break is only about a month before I begin another semester of uni. I will try to do as much of the following as possible:
- start going through SICP
- learn python+django
- read up on some of next semester's courses
- get closer to my blue belt in BJJ, maybe enter a tournament

- continue my 6 year streak of visiting Hawaii every year

- potty train my youngest kid and break my 6 year streak of buying diapers
Show HN: Namethrive has brandable domains for startups
Hi HN - We're a small team of domainers that made Namethrive to help startups launch with killer names for less than the cost of a Macbook Pro.

Our goal is to help entrepreneurs stop wasting time when it comes to picking out a name for their projects. So many startups and side projects that we see on HN (among other places) end up launching with poor names or obscure foreign TLDs, and we want to change that.

We're hoping to significantly expand our selection in the coming weeks and may also be doing some domain giveaways on twitter soon, so stay tuned if you're interested.
How much to you spend on cigarettes and caffeine per month?
Leather Luggage Store
Quality Leather Luggage for All Your Travel Needs
Clicky -> http://namethrive.com
Mashup TIE Conference 2011 #TIECon
HorseSense, Saddle, Tack, Books for sale
Books, Saddles, tack for sale, information
"So, I'm wondering how and where I should be investing to take advantage of this materials revolution."

Find out which schools are doing the most interesting research in this area, and then talk with the tech transfer people at each university. They should be more than happy to hook you up.
We focused on email spam because that's been our area of expertise for the past few years. Some of these programs are well represented in SEO spam as well - with affiliate programs like these, they don't much care how you bring them the customer traffic as long as it arrives. We haven't, however, looked into the programs that are exclusively advertised via SEO but it's definitely on our list. Most of our methodology will carry over, we just have to straighten out how to create some sort of canonical feed of SEO'd pharma links.

I'd also like to personally thank you for your employer's generosity in supporting this research :).
That backup is probably at more risk than what is in the cloud. Think about how many more people they have working on keeping that data safe and accessible.
But how many mid 40s through, say, somewhere in the '50s (which I'll pick as an end point due to the availability of PCs in the '70s and programming jobs in the '80s)?
Ofcourse, that was fanboy fluff.. thats why I admitted myself, its outrageous.. :)
Requires iOS 4.0 or later.
[edit: Is this untrue?]
Is IE8 already a legacy browser? Google thinks so.
We (and also I am pretty sure our lawyer) consider that to be defrauding the spammers, and even though some people might consider that ethical, we don't (also we're pretty sure it's not legal either).
Yes but I want to say to anyone who wants to do this

Give the money away!

Someone else can do so much more with it.

It really annoys me when people do the "I'm a billionaire who drives a pinto" thing.

Either splurge or give but don't just sit on it.
Charging $5 for HN app - that's giving back to the community? Don't think so. Quite much just for a different interface.
This is wonderful. Fantastic work.

Long live native apps + robust APIs. Apps that do one thing, and do it well. Apps that are beautifully tailored to the single experience they were created to provide.

Good riddance, Web.
I think the suggestion was that a client integrate encryption functionality locally, generating and using a key that exists only on a user's computer (or, alternatively, is backed up with AES (or similar) using a passphrase the service doesn't know). You don't have to have access to the key.

A really cool application would be one that allowed you to contact your home computer from the web and use that to decrypt stuff transparently on its way to your final destination, then you could still offer web-accessible decrypted files any time the user's main computer was powered on.
That makes sense. I just didn't understand what the article was getting at.
But I tore down that wall and sold those 10 bricks so I could build an addition to house the 5 new kids I'd like to have soon and grow my family.

It's not as important that my remaining 150 bricks are more valuable. I can't sell those right now. But I could have built an addition 2X the size if I had gotten 2X cash for the bricks I sold.
Awesome passage, thanks for sharing it. Maniacs exemplify "the anatomy of determination" - http://paulgraham.com/determination.html
Mongrel2 and Tir Now On Github
If this was non-trivial its because Zed has been using Fossil SCM for his projects.
France lobbies G8 for Internet control and censorship
There is a nice white paper and other pdfs in the wiki.
The official blog post of why: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2571499
I like the analogy to music, but honestly, I think programming itself, divorced from knowledge of operating systems, theoretical computer science, mathematics, web design, or other complementary skills, is not on the same level of technical difficulty as music. You don't need to start as a child to become sufficiently competent to become a computing professional. You do need practice, though, and that is what is sorely lacking in the curriculum. His concern about the lack of sufficiently engaging practice problems is spot on. When all the programming assignments are about CS topics, they're trying to teach CS and get programming as a freebie, instead of teaching programming as a skill in itself.

I agree with you about teaching programming in high school and lower grades. Programming would be much more beneficial for most kids than advanced algebra, trigonometry, and calculus. Average people today need to understand their computers, their taxes, their employers' benefits policies, and other logical and algorithmic systems much more than they need to understand radio waves, flow rates in pipes, or falling objects. The standard curriculum should include some programming at the expense of sequences and series, trigonometric identities, possibly any math beyond geometry, basic algebra, and using a calculator's sine and cosine functions to compute the sides of a triangle.

(Actually, I would be hesitant to suggest such a thing because many college-bound kids need as much math as is currently offered and more. If a kid is going to take freshman calculus in college anyway, you might as well teach him some programming in high school instead of pushing all the way through a math class he's going to retake in college. On the other hand, every high school needs to offer a complete calculus course for kids who will be able to ace the Advanced Placement test and skip calculus in college. There are so many ways for educational reform to go wrong, and I have so little faith in the people who would carry it out, that sometimes I'm glad the system is unlikely to change significantly any time soon.)
As far as I can tell, this is the problem with science eduction. People who become teachers or professors do so because they just love the subject. But, in general, whether you're talking about math or literature or foreign language, the people you encounter aren't going to love the subject, so saying you ought to do something out of love (or fun) isn't a selling point at all. And someone who loves something tends to make it more boring for those who don't, I think; for example, I took a class in complex analysis, which I'm not interested in and the instructor spent nearly all his time on proofs that he found excited which made it even less interesting to me.

I've tutored 100s of people in math and I think that I can say that the argument that math teaches you how to think better isn't practical, that is, people do not practice it. Of course math is very tight logical thinking and you can apply that way of doing things elsewhere in your life. But, to students, math, e.g algebra, is in the box of stuff they don't like and won't use, and they're probably right and they just throw it away when they're done; they don't use it and they don't learn how to think better.

I know for me, I had a lot of trouble with math until I found something that I liked that used it. It wasn't until there was a definite, concrete use for it that I took it up. Math seems kind of like shopping for hammers. If I need to build a house, then I'll go get a hammer, but if I don't, I'm not going to stand mesmerized on the hammer aisle.
Agreed, but HN could upgrade to html5 and do what nytimes did. Compare nytimes.com to nytimes.com/chrome (requires a web kit browser)
7 Not So Obvious Habits To Maximize Your Productivity
Broadly speaking, the field is Computational Science and Engineering (CS&E). It occupies the space between applied mathematics, engineering, physics, and software (high and low level). CS&E picks up around where physicists write the equations they would like to solve and handles aspects like discretization, solvers, optimization, and uncertainty quantification. Software is needed for each of these steps, and it usually needs to be high performance, scale on diverse parallel architectures, and be extensible to accommodate new problems. Something that I find especially interesting is adjusting the discretization so that it is better suited to the hardware that is available (e.g. reducing memory bandwidth requirements in exchange for more flops which are relatively cheaper) while maintaining scalability and robustness.

Looking at the plenary talks [1] for the upcoming ICIAM meeting might provide some perspective on the field (perhaps slightly biased towards applied mathematics).

Part of the difficulty in finding qualified people is that there are few universities with courses aimed at the core of CS&E. Instead, each discipline teaches a subset as viewed from their own corner. The whole is definitely greater than the sum of the parts. The status quo curriculum is a recognized problem that will hopefully be resolved in the next few years.

[1] http://www.iciam2011.com/index.php?option=com_content&vi...
Yup. It's always sobering to remember that there's already plenty of higher-performance materials than silicon- but silicon is so much cheaper to use, it simply outperforms everything else in performance-per-dollar by an incredible margin.
This seems like a cool idea. Have you considered expanding it to schedule anything? Trying to schedule boardgames with friends can be quite painful. You can play most of my collection with 4-5 people, but with 6 or 3, your options are quite limited (plus, I am typically trying to play my new 5 player game).
agreed. to the dev: make it free, man. with this app you should have no problem getting that internship you're looking for
Being a non programmer I try to build my first web app in RoR, but as I am learning from scratch it will take some time. Any others starting from scratch here?

On the other hand I am completing a project I am really excited about, a long kept idea, using external developers, which I hope to reveal in June - http://www.mindthebook.com . Stay tuned.
As important as this is, I know people whose lives are so consumed by their quest for immortality that they go without much of what makes life worth living.

Pursuing the life of an ascetic and munching on supplements in the hope that you'll still be around when the singularity hits - it's not too far from giving yourself to religion.
I prefer to have spring courses hard, fall courses harder.
I also think the first year of CS should be read straight out of Knuth's The art of computer programming.
I have an encyclopedia from the 1950's at home with a page entitled "Asbestos - the new wonder material".
'Like' Button Follows Web Users
Ask HN: How does one chase away Mentors?
This is the flip-side of the usual question. However, I think it's a good one to ask, as persons who are chased away aren't available to explain why.
Another one? I have 3 iPhone HN clients already.

What's your unique value proposition?
Optical computers, genetic catalogs, nanorepair modules--forget all of that. It's when you see a megaton of steel suspended over your head by a thread the thickness of a human hair that you really find God in technology.

* Anonymous Metagenics Dockworker - MorganLink 3DVision Live Interview
This change has been made. Thanks!
"I have written some scripts for code analysis needs via git/grep/awk/ruby. code metrics, top committers, frequently committed files, duplications etc"

That's exactly what I was looking for, something that shows my commit habits. Any chance those scripts are open source?
How is making it free going to land him an internship?

Do you have any good reasons for lowering the price? Making it free seems like an absolutely crazy suggestion. Why would he? To appease entitled brats?
"That said, few companies are as good at gathering, refining, processing and shipping gigatons of carbon"

That's abstracting too far. The food industry ships around gigatons of carbon too, which is just as "graphenic" as oil, namely, zero. Pencil manufacturers actually use graphene, but it seems unlikely they're going to lead this drive either.
From article: "The mass of Earth dimples this fabric, much like a heavy person sitting in the middle of a trampoline."

I will never imagine general relativity the same way again.
It is an art form, but the work is commissioned. When I commission a sculpture, I get to give a lot of input about what I want, but I want the artist to make it beautiful.

Just like in software, if both sides don't respect the other, the output will be atrocious (which appears to be ok with Red Bull).
This seems to be an organization rather than just a one-shot video. Does HN perhaps want to distill it's criticisms and suggestions and forward them to weusemath.com to try and actually be helpful? The goal is certainly laudable.
Yes, it's called "The Indefensible."
Gamer Insights Survey
relevant: http://modernl.com/article/how-viagra-spam-works
Actually, I started down this path by creating a site that lets you schedule anything: www.DecideOnADate.com. You may want to try it out. With Scrambl we wanted to be different from other invitation sites and focus on a niche, which is golfers. The 2 apps may seem very similar at the moment but we have some cool features planned for Scrambl that are directly related to golf.
What's the best one in your opinion? I have been using an online one, but it's kind of rubbish!
I survived rapture 2011...Did you?
white-paper describing the protocol (from the wiki)

http://www.magnusbrading.com/phantom/phantom-design-paper.pd...
I'd have been thrilled in college to even have 15 weeks for a CS course. My school had quarters instead of semesters, and I found the density really off-putting (for example, going through all of SICP in 8 weeks).

By the end of your freshman year, you had taken:

CS1005 (which was basically learning C)

CS2005 (Object-oriented programming)

CS2135 (Scheme)

CS2137 (Prolog)

More importantly, when you were taking 2137, you had pretty much forgotten everything you learned in 2135 (as you're basically just perpetually cramming).
On Family, Cranking and Changing.
Those are some pretty darn good names. Do you guys actually own these or are you an exchange service for the real owners?

I definitely see the benefit in offering straight-up, no-nonsense domains for a reasonable price, although I do think there's a chance that the owners will not get as much as they could have if the names were auctioned. Have you thought about a "Buy it now" type feature in addition to an open bidding/auction price? Seems like it would provide a chance for the owners to get more money out of the sale if the demand for a name is particularly high.
Interestingly, things like this won't happen with the git repository model because it is persistent. New commits doesn't overwrite the old commits in the repo in any way, so you can always get back to a known state.

The only destructive packing operation takes great care in making sure it has stable storage before deleting stuff.

No, it doesn't save you from a dead disk, but at least you can at any time ask for the consistency of the repository.

And finally, it is good to see Zed learning from the experience :)
He was not physically dependent on amphetamines. Whether he was addicted is a completely different question.
"The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."

This is assuredly true, on the basis of replicated research, with regard to IQ. There is essentially no correlation between IQ and rationality.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stanovich1/Engli...

High-IQ people can be every bit as irrational ("stupid" in the language of the submitted article) as low-IQ people, and worse still, not notice that they are being stupid. There are whole books on the subject.

http://www.amazon.com/Why-Smart-People-Can-Stupid/dp/0300101...

http://www.amazon.com/Blunder-Smart-People-Make-Decisions/dp...

http://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Make-Mistakes-Without/dp/076792...

http://www.amazon.com/Sway-Irresistible-Pull-Irrational-Beha...

http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expande...

All we can do about that here on HN is take other people's comments seriously and try to see ourselves as others see us as we ponder our decisions.
I like the idea, but I won't use it, because I don't think "enough" people will use it.
One important difference of Phantom from systems like Tor is that it doesn't seek primarily to be an anonymous way to access the Internet, but to be an anonymized network separate from the Internet. You can do this with Tor as well, but that was never really the emphasis.
http://hackerne.ws
I think joakin is referring to the Election Silence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_silence
People are complaining about $5? Really? Someone has put months of effort into this app, more than justifying the "high" price. If you think it's too expensive, just don't buy it.

I just bought it and think it's great (nice icon too).
Not really. It's a pretty reasonable judgement based on that fact that most people see the positive things, rather than concentrate on the small details which are intentionally hidden by the big gestures. The small details slowly encroach on our privacy, our human rights and our ability to function without such things as social networks.
Jay O'Callahan: The Power of Storytelling
The vast majority of jobs out there, from flipping burgers to fixing toilets, involve nothing except the most basic arithmetic.

I remember working as a busboy in a diner in Alaska in the early 90's and applying queueing theory and Little's Law. Miraculously, I efficiently had tables ready for the waitresses when they needed them, and they liked me for this and gave me great tips.

A girlfriend of mine told me about doing the same sorts of optimizations intuitively while working as a take-out order taker at McDonalds. Her manager loved her, because she always cleared out the queue quickly. She later went on to medical school and is now a doctor.

I also remember trying to order from a McDonald's some years later on a road trip and noting that everyone behind the counter was consistently waiting 2 or 3 on line on the same station. It took me a full 15 minutes to get my order!

If you want to see the result of people being sheep and losing out because they aren't applying such knowledge, just go and take a drive during a busy time on a Houston freeway when people are merging and taking offramps. People consistently make the worst choice. A small minority do egregiously bad things.
Who says it's an accident? Are we looking for competitive, dominant nurses and compassionate, caring enterprise sales staff?

"Job ads should be gender neutral" is an awfully large thing to take as an unexamined axiom. Should they really? Or should they reflect the desired position? And if the latter, if someone writes a bad job position that scares off some good applicants, does it really matter on what dimension they are scaring off good applicants? Regardless of how they're scaring them off, they're hurting themselves quite directly far more than the diffuse effect on the applicant pool.

It just seems like the more you drill down into this and actually think, the less interesting this becomes.
My 2005 reaction to the original Summer Founders Program
Completely agree. I really don't get why some people complain about being charged any money for months of work. Do they expect it to be free? Reminds me of the ridiculous comments on the app store.