skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Private industry never had to spend that much on a Y2K fix.

http://books.google.com/books?id=QVAEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA17&#...
7 steps to storytelling success
The software for the space shuttle flight computers is produced using an incredibly disciplined process. Here's a very idealistic article about it
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff.html

The downside is that every change is prohibitively expensive. I didn't bookmark the article but remember to have read that the astronauts are taught lots of rules like "if the computer displays x and y, this means that z", stuff that would usually be a simple software feature. The new year bug seems to be quite similar.
Now it's down to about 1500 to 4000 visitors per day.
As you can see here: http://i.imgur.com/V5xMr.png the viral effect lasted for about a month.
Anas Marawai Founder of a Popular Arabic Android Blog Arrested in Syria
ESPN
ESPN cricinfo.com provides the most comprehensive live cricket available as well as unparalleled statistics, quality editorial comment and analysis
Naruto Shippuden Episode 220 English Sub
Naruto Shippuden Episode 220 English subbed entitle "Prophecy Of The Great Lord Elder!" will be released on Thursday (July 14, 2011).
Maybe a reminder on top of control panel's home could help, or an e-mail (but the owner sould have the option to disable such e-mails or to decide frequency).
sounds good, maybe something temporally, it can happend that an owner can be offline for some reasons (no adsl for some days or other problems), so it can be a malus for 1 week (or another period) and then back to normal .
Does he mean 'scripting' is something different than 'programming'? I don't see the difference. And why doesn't he just call it programming then? Because that's what it is.
A Logical Interpretation of Some Bits of Topology
Sounds like paranoia to me. Amazon is following their policies. Nothing to see here.
Running anynewbooks.com, this is only one of the abuses I routinely see happening on Amazon. Most of the other abuses are related to the review system. There are so many fake and spiteful reviews, that in many cases it's really hard to judge a book based on the reviews.

I absolutely love Amazon, but they need preventive measures against these forms of manipulation.

For example:

- Prevent people who haven't bought the book from Amazon to leave a review. People may still abuse the review system, but it will be less people, and they'll make the author and publisher slightly richer in the process.

- If you complain about a book not being as good as advertised, you need to provide proof. Explain in detail what is wrong with it, and provide photographic proof, a scan, or send the book back for inspection. Issue a refund by all means, but don't just trust them and pull the book from the shelves.

Right now, anyone could tank any new book published on Amazon with very little work on their part.
I agree. And he's talking -to- 'young programmers' and not everyone. Of course they need to be able to script.
I don't think it's paranoia, so much as it is someone lamenting a loss and looking for someone or something to blame. He's wants this to be a big deal, even if it isn't..

I'd say it's more about too big a sense of self-importance than anything else.
Steve Jobs: His Life In Pictures
At this moment, the #1 post on my reddit front page is complaining that the people who complain about spelling or grammar errors... probably don't speak two languages.
ie. Whilst fighting the good fight for gender-neutrality/spelling/grammar, please don't forget that some people (especially on the internet) might not have as a nuanced expression in English as you.
Things to Do with Human Ashes...Cremains
Yes.

But I'm not sure if I understand why they would need the flight control computers to stay on if it were to be permanently docked.

Of the reasons he listed, only the obstruction of docking ports strikes me as valid. In any case, I think it would have been really cool if they spent a few millions to retrofit the shuttle into a last-chance emergency crew return vehicle (so enable avionics to survive an extended attachment to external power). Then a few years later, if it's not needed, have it land on autopilot in Mojave (or ditch into the Pacific if something goes wrong).
Illuminati Game Cards, Conspiracy Theories and Recent World Events
What Hubbard Wrought [Scientology Founder's Story]
I think a lot of businesses are going to be looking at the profit potential of each product. If a large amount of people are buying the book & asking for a refund, eventually the overhead costs of processing returns & refunds will make it not worth carrying it anymore. This could definitely be abused if someone orchestrated a large purchase & return campaign. I highly doubt merchandisers want to get into the business of arbitration over the merits of the merchandise with their customers. Although there are less customer service inclined companies that make a business out of selling bad merchandise & haggling with the customer about returns, but that's not Amazon's business. They will probably just follow the money & if something is controversial they're not going to take a hit on their profits to stand up for it.
Domain Squatters Who Don’t Understand Themselves Are Horrible People
Counting On Progress: The Man of Numbers
Convore Review
MTS to AVI for Mac, convert MTS to AVI for Mac OS X (including OSX Lion 10.7)
MTS to AVI Converter for Mac offers an quick and easy way to convert MTS to AVI files on Mac OS so that you can play MTS with QuickTime player.
Our XMPP pub sub crawler - it's alive (well, almost)
Abmar, our GSoC contestant completed a working prototype of an XMPP pub sub cralwer/search engine.
The hardware is only the start, though. Unless the music is totally electronic you'll need microphones and someone who knows how to record those. Many guitar players will want to use their amps and speakers to get a certain sound. There's still a lot of craft in the front end that can't be learned in hours.

Also, a big part of recording is having a producer/engineer, who knows how to capture the essence of a performance in a recording. If you've watched American Idol's last season you could see how high profile musicians and producers zero in on strengths and weaknesses of a performance.

I think one thing the Love piece really pointed out is that there is a lot more to getting your music out there than recording. The distribution system is about to be solved but all the other problems, the really big problems, still exist.
"is there any way to support that syntax in an older version"

Nop, that is exactly what I meant with decisions haunting you forever. You better start a new language than radically change the current implementation.

With regard to my particular choice of ':' there are three solutions:

1. pick any of the 100k unicode chars for internal methods but imperative is to differentiate them to freely use attributes and methods as pleased.

2. force the compiler and the coder to disambiguate the possible same use as internal method: first assign then use n=a:length(), d={n}

3. design the language to use .. as slicer and {a=b} as dictionary assignment.

Again, we are talking about design decisions for a new language, not to change the core of an existing language which is not an easy task. That is exactly why language design is not an exact science an very few make it to stardom.
I think that requiring that you must have purchased the item before you can leave a review is key.

Of course giving a bully pulpit to people who can leave consequence-free complaints and negative feedback is key to Amazon's bogus sense of "community".
I'm willing to believe that WordPress was written through a process of 'scripting' and doesn't count as programming.
Yes, but it is easily disabled.
Propolis|Propolis Murah|Propolis Diamond|Madu Propolis
Quask: Best Question Answering App for your Phone.
7 reasons why women cheat
Welcome to HN, the "unfunniest place on the Internet".
Two Soyuz, actually. They need two because the ISS now has a six person crew and one Soyuz has only space for three people.

Also, I had no idea until just now that each seat is for a specific person, because the Soyuz seat is custom-fitted for its user to protect them against the forces involved.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/astronauts/journals_ande...
This piece is interesting to read 11 years later, amazing how much the distribution question has already changed.

My kids pretty much use Grooveshark, Pandora and iTunes to play music. CDs are only used in the car and even there we frequently use MP3 players. Even though we still have a vinyl record player for my old Blue Note records it's not used very often.

What hasn't changed is the fact that there's a lot more record companies do than distribute the final product. It's pretty clear that the reason these companies have so much power is that they produce and market artists. Without that power the distribution wouldn't be so valuable. Someone still has to pay for studios, producers, designers, publicists, etc. This is particularly true for bands that survive not so much on the musical skill of their members but the overall sound and image.
Amazon doesn't require a purchase to leave a review, but it's worth noting that if have purchased it through Amazon, they'll tag your review with a little "Amazon Confirmed Purchase" badge.

Requiring a purchase through Amazon would drastically cut down on the number of reviews they would get; lots of people own lots of books and movies and albums they purchased before Amazon existed and can give good reviews of them. I don't think it's reasonable to expect Amazon to shut those reviews out.
Steve Jobs isn’t our Dad
I learned about this when watching Avi Bryant's great talk "Bad Hackers Copy, Great Hackers Steal" : http://vimeo.com/4763707

He explains that dynamic languages are not inherently slow. It's their current implementation that's slow. Java is not fast thanks to static typing, it is fast thanks to the Hotspot VM, which builds upon the StrongTalk VM implementation.

Quote taken around the 13" mark (some trolling included ;) ):
"Ruby has the dynamic part, and Java has the fast part. And this has led to this assumption that people have that the reason that Java is fast and Ruby is slow is because Java is static and Ruby is dynamic. And that's just not true, that's just a myth. Nothing about Java being fast has anything to do with it being static. It's simply that the papers that the Java people read were the ones that told you how to make it fast, and the papers that Matz read were the ones that told you how to make it usable."
> Should "a = set([1,2])" be equivalent to "a = set(); a.add(1); a.add(2)"?

Why should it be? Adding elements one-by-one is slow and shouldn't be forced on the language model level.
I don't see how Amazon could possibly handle this better. Having somebody read every book before it goes on sale definitely wouldn't scale.

Perhaps they could offer to verify a book for a fee. Then again, the problem might not be widespread enough.

I think I would set up my web sites in the same way: as soon as users would push the red alert button for some item on my site, I would withdraw it from public circulation and mark it for reviewing. On the upside, once it is manually reviewed, it could not be flagged again. How else would you do it?
someone was looking for git-porn
1. Yes, but only after I was already making money.
2. Impossible to say for sure, but probably market rates/page.
3. Would definitely expect testing so I knew sales had actually improved.
I think that private companies need to establish due process just like governments, especially when they are among the market leaders in their field.

That means that they need to check accusations first, before they damage their customers.
The complaint is not that Amazon are intentionally blocking certain controversial material, but that their policies are fundamentally flawed and easily-abused.

This also isn't the first time that one of Amazon's policies has been abused... http://blog.seattlepi.com/amazon/2009/04/12/amazon-under-fir...
I meant it as a change for new books coming out, not for, say, your favorite Pink Floyd album. Existing products/reviews should be, for better or for worse, left in place of course.
Stanford's CS 101 course uses Javascript
My first thought.

"Twitter's largest user group still SEO/SEM people" would have been a fitting title too.
Natural hair styles
Black hair products for natural hair are on the rise, and there is an abundance of amazing new products to benefit our hair.
I have always found Twitter to be very useful, getting a lot of great links and news items from people I follow. That said yesterday I never visited Twitter until late in the evening. I was using G+ yesterday instead.

I find little value in Facebook but family members and some friends really use it a lot.

I hope that Twitter, Google+, and Facebook all do well because they serve different people's needs (or wants) and all three are platforms for developers, basically the ocean a lot of us live in.
30kloc and $0 revenue. Lessons from my failed startup (& code release)
May I know why it is a bit dated? because I'm thinking to buy the book and the year is 2005, which is good enough for me since 2005 means Python 2.5 at least (or even more).
New Free Bitcoin Pool
A good friend and I have created a pool, and we are in the very beginning stages. After over a month of testing and developing on the Bitcoin Test network, we have made it live production, and are looking for some folks to join and help us make the pool better.

Heres the connection info:
Signup and create workers here: www.bithasher.com
Point your miners here: bithasher.com port 8332

Some info about the pool and its hardware:
Proportional Payout
Zero fees as we grow
API data coming soon (We are working on it right now)
Our servers (yes, thats plural ) are located in a very nice Datacenter located in Knoxville TN.
We have 2 separate ISP's providing very huge pipes to our servers
HP Proliant main servers with IBM xSeries as a redundant backup

What we can offer you:
A good stable pool that is in a very reputable datacenter running very good physical hardware. We are not running this on some janky Dedicated, or VPS. We own the physical machines. We chose a datacenter that is within a very short driving distance for us, and we have 24x7 access to the racks if needed.
Zero fees as we grow.
We are also welcome to any and all suggestions you may have. We want this pool to be what everyone needs, and looks for in a pool.
We are coming up with ideas that will be special awards for the first few users.
We welcome any and all miners, regardless of how small or large your rigs are. CPU miners are just as welcome on our pool as the big 2 Ghash rigs.
We have a forum in the works, that we plan to grow as our users suggest, and we are working on a hardware guide for new miners.

Come and be a part of our pool, and grow with us. Help us make this the pool that you want.
As a Python programmer, would you guys recommend Google Refine vs FuzzyWuzzy vs Febrl (http://sourceforge.net/projects/febrl/)

Purpose: Find duplicates in mess data sets with names and physical addresses
Designer hand made Ribbons & Bows
When it comes to looking beautiful this is our job. Let us give your lil girl a make over with gorgeous Ribbons and Bows
Too Busy for Social Media Marketing Could Be Fatal
No wonder the kids who are gifted are going to excel--they have confidence. The "average" kids have already had their dreams crushed.

This hypothesis has been tested and refuted. When identical twins are separated at birth and adopted by different families, they often have wildly different environments. Some go to good schools, some to bad. Some go to families that nurture academic achievement, some to sports families. Nonetheless, the achievement level of one twin is predicted mostly by that of the other twin, not by the adoptive environment. The underlying cause appears to be general intelligence, as measured by IQ.

The effect holds even for highly intelligent people who are diverted from the university track. They simply direct their achievements in other directions.
No Flash? No Worries: Majority of Online Video Now Available in HTML5
They did---it's called a pension plan, and it's quite generous if you managed to play for at least 3 years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/sports/basketball/13pensio...
Triple Century Post
Don't pay so much for SEO work
Don't let these guys rip you off, SEO work is easy and cheap
I quickly made a bookmarklet to robotize HN usernames:

javascript:(document.body.innerHTML=document.body.innerHTML.replace(/<a href="user\?id=([^"]+)">([^<]+)<\/a>/g,'<a href="user?id=$1"><img src="http://robohash.org/$2?size=24x24">$2</a>'))()
Why Google and Android Must Deal with the Mobile Protection Racket
If I remember correctly, tmux has this feature where multiple people can connect to the same window (shared sessions?). Is this the feature of tmux being used? If so, what does the pair.io server do? Where is the tmux window hosted?
At my last job we used NLTK, Stanford NER and POS tagger, and some components from Lucene.
Amazon has eaten our beloved Book Depository
Is that the space exploration budget, or NASA's budget as a whole? Manned and unmanned space exploration is only part of NASA's mission. NASA also does a lot of Earth science.
ISPs Get Into the Piracy Policing Game
While there is no direct Copy/Paste on Kindle, if you just highlight the text and save it as a clipping, it will show up in a plaintext file called "My Clippings" (or similar, I don't have my Kindle there to check) in the filesystem root of your Kindle.
Nothing wrong with Google nudging people to make profiles so when they show up in search results the results look friendlier with a picture and possibly bio information.

Google is a business and they make money from search adds, a little money from charging for storage, Google Apps, AppEngine revenues, etc. They need to be profitable to keep the lights on. I make the same comment for all "free" web assets that we use - something has to motivate people and organizations to produce content, curate data and information, serve as a platform, etc.
I could also aim with a bazooka at my foot. Been there done that, lesson learned :-)
I think the author is missing the many orders of magnitude of the recent growth in computing power and corresponding drop in flash costs. Compilers and interpreters are often wasteful too, but the benefits were so great that we eventually embraced them and never looked back. As far as persistence goes, who is to say that flash memory in modern systems isn't just as permanent in the real world as their disk-based counterparts? There are many ways to lose data, and a corrupted database is just as corrupted on a disk as it is in flash.

I'd also add that it's bad form to ridicule the academics on whose shoulders your own career rests. Better to stick to the argument at hand rather than take things personally.
Ask HN: Machine learning/Data startups
Ask HN: Machine learning/Data startups

I'm a web developer working with Python and Django. Recently I've been playing with some ML toy problems and working through the Programming Collective Intelligence book in order to get an idea of the different possibilities available.

I realised there are a lot of different algorithms and a ton of different applications:

- Use social network data to identify users needs.
- Predictive analysis(e.g. model future sales, cash-flows and expenses, packages volume...)
- Find the best price of a product/service
- Market analysis.

And many more...

As I am a begginer in this field, it's difficult to me to know how I should proceed in order to start a startup and make money with it. So I ask you if you have personal experience or know someone who's working in this kind of startups, what are you/they doing, how they began, how they decided in which kind of application to focus...

Right now I'm thinking of picking one or two topics, start playing with them and after a while see if I'm onto something or if I should look for other topics.

Thanks.
FWIW, I have all my important stuff at Linode, but I also have a server from Hetzner in Germany. It costs €49 per month (about $60 I think) and it's a Core i7 with 8GB RAM. Their network has proven rock solid and the hardware totally fine in the last 6 months and I only got it because I had so many personal recommendations. I don't know how they can do it but clearly it's at least possible to offer serious power at bargain basement prices.
(using throwaway account for this because I'm disclosing details of my current startup)

Background as software developer, currently sole founder of another startup which is cashflow positive (monthly revenue in thousands) but doesn't look like it will scale easily, hence looking at starting a new startup.

Have an idea for a startup operating in the advertising space, essentially taking a product that's available to entreprise companies (and typically sold with consultancy as an add-on) and making it available as "self-serve" to small & medium size businesses.
Now all we need is a over-engineered and inconvenient dependency injection framework detector, and we'll be all set.
Tenacious C shows you what points to what
A new JavaScript pattern that saved my project
Ask HN: Internet Acess Options in a Wilderness Area?
Without getting into a long discussion over the "need" to access the Internet in such a place, there are large areas of Sequoia National Park and Rocky Mountain National Park where you can't get a cell signal or wifi. Short of petitioning for repeater stations (which I believe would be correctly seen as spoiling the place), are there any other options besides satellite service (which is very expensive if you want it to be portable enough to carry with you)?
Didn't know Steve Jobs was an arab.
I have been buying books online for pretty much as long as it has been possible to do so, and I have never even heard of Book Depository.

That'll be why Amazon is buying them and not the other way 'round. And presumably, the founders who worked hard to build up the business are delighted with the pay out. The only people not to be happy it seems are journos with an overblown sense of paranoia about "corporations".
Storage Wars: Web Growth Sparks Data-Center Boom
Fuel Law Looms Over Luxury Cars
The fee is based on the formula (number of users $0.001), so the earlier you join, the less you pay.*

The current price is $9.37 which indicates 9370 users, yet this post says 12,500 active. But if the first customer was $2.04, is it $2.04 + u * 0.001? So meaning $9.37 reflects 7330 users? Sorry for picking through the math but I'm interested in stuff like this :-) Did a big group of users get in free during a certain period, etc?

It's a beautiful business model in a way. It doesn't suit people who want to trial it out but the social proof of 12,000 people already being through the doors makes the $9 more palatable to latecomers. I'm wondering if I could apply a similar model to my e-mail newsletters (which people keep saying I should charge for).
A Handy Glossary for the Hacker Family Tree‎
This course is not the first CS course that most Stanford students (who take a CS course) take-- that's CS106A, which is based on Java. This CS101 class is a small, recent addition aimed at people in non-technical majors. I believe there's only one class of ~30 people, taught by Nick Parlante.

The full CS course listings are here:

http://explorecourses.stanford.edu/CourseSearch/search;jsess...
Oh, duh, I don't know how I missed that part :/
DeskMetrics' First Year in Review
I'd cut them a break on "badly managed", blazing the trail is much more expensive than following -- and I really don't see how you can say "they haven't done much to push the state of the art".

But it does seem that it's time to pass the torch to private companies for basic "get to orbit" flights. Would be nice to see NASA blazing the next trail, whatever that is.