skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For those interested in a lighter weight personal or small scale static site with Haskell, I recommend Hakyll:

http://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/
Like I said in another related post, the Ludwig von Mises Institute is not the place you go for coherent discussions. The sooner we drop it as a source of discussion arguments, the better.
I got it yesterday, just after the free-ization announcement, had not heard of it before. I seem to have been able to pinpoint my (frequent) crashes: It crashes whenever I try to open the visualization for a data log that has a goal.

Is that what is happening to you as well?
That's a very interesting perspective, I hadn't thought of that, the media's coverage of this topic is so one sided and lacking detail as to be useless.

It's amazing that, unable to prove their case in court, they are resorting to deals with the ISP oligarchy to monitor and control the populace in this way.

Unanswered questions are what will qualify. Technically if I come to hacker news and someone has posted 5 out of 7 paragraphs from an AP news article in a comment, that is a copyright violation. Under the principles outlined, the poster and perhaps all the readers could end up being blacklisted from internet access, which for many people who use the internet to work would result in unemployment and homelessness. I know the response will be "don't be silly we would never do that for a small infraction" but who don't really know that at all. Criticize the wrong people in corporations or government and it's a simple matter to find someplace that you've quoted too many sentences from an article, and now your access is cut off and your dissent squelched. There is no judge to appeal the sentence to, and no proof required that the quote wasn't fair use.

This is about establishing a mechanism to control the populace and squelch dissent. Not copyright violations. Those are just the excuse.
Ask HN: Dropbox as a platform? (Yet or ever?)
HNers,

As I posted in another thread, I am looking for the best cloud backup option for a virtual team. I have been a dropbox user for a while, and while I love it - I think that Drew may be missing a HUGE opportunity of not (yet) realizing that dropbox is a potentially game changing platform.

Hear me out:

I have dropbox on my phone and my machines. I travel for work and incur expenses, gather project/client data, write proposals, share files with team, etc..

In one task, expense reports, when I get a receipt, I take a pic of it with my phone and upload to my expenses receipts folder in dropbox to submit.

When I want to immediately share proposal drafts, pictures from travel/client sites etc.. I upload the pics or place the files in shared folders with others on my team.

This works beautifully, but is very rudimentary as well.

The files arrive in their views as expected - but its then no different than flat data.

I would like to see DropBox as a platform, where utility apps that take advantage of dead simple file and data transfer.

Imagine an app that sat on top of dropbox and connected to it directly which allowed a more elegant data and photo sharing. With the ability to chat among users as well and keep revision control of documents between users.

This would work in the following way, lets call them DropChannels:

You create a DropChannel by placing a piece of content for sharing and inviting other users to it.

I post a pic, and say I want USER1 and USER3 to see it. They are notified of a new Channel and see the pic. They can reply in kind with a message (chat reply, like "Looks good - go ahead" etc), which gets archived into the channel's log file.

They can reply with a pic of their own, which ends up in the channels' pics dir.

Or they reply with a document, which is viewable in the same way current docs are viewable - but they get placed in the channel's docs folder.

Each channel is defined based on a topic, and all activity in that channel is archived in the channels folder which is synced between al lthe users in the channel.

The important thing is to allow chatting, collaboration and input from other users.

Allow a team to select a channel template, which will include a range of directories or files that can be tracked for a channel. For example, you could have the app have a tab for time tracking, which can be slid over to, data entered and that data is captured in a time tracking file for later billing.

Scheduling etc...

All based on the dropbox syncing API as a platform...
It's what you build, not what you buy
This is exactly what I have wanted for years. I'm willing to bet $100 on a pair of them, just to see how it works out.
News Of The World Shutting Down Amid Hacking Scandal
You are totally right! After using my iPod Touch for a while my computer seems so archaic, forcing me to do its work, when presumably I got it to automate routine tasks...
I live in a motorhome and use LED lighting all over the house. This is, perhaps, the least even power environment I can imagine. They're running off of batteries, which ebb and rise throughout the day based on whether the sun is shining (I have solar panels), I'm plugged into shore power (which causes the battery charger to cycle off and on through the day and night), or I'm driving (the alternator is charging the batteries).

I don't know that they're going to last forever, but I do know my remaining incandescents die about every 6-12 months, and none of the LEDs have burned out. Because LEDs are so expensive ($20 per bulb vs. $1 for the old style) I only use them for the lights I leave on for some length of time, so I still have enough incandescents to make a comparison. So, the LEDs are working harder and not burning out as fast as the incandescents.

I recently bought an LED that has a much more pleasant color than some of the older ones. I don't know exactly what the difference is...they all have yellow tinted covers, but the new one is a more neutral light. Still blueish, but not as harsh. So, I guess they're all getting better at a pretty rapid clip.
Well, I have a clever way to explain the relationship between areas under a hyperbola and continuously compounded interest:

dy/dx = 1/x

dx/dy = x

Hopefully that isn't too confusing. If you start with the second relation (continuously compounded interest), a reciprocal gets you to the first (area under a hyperbola) -- the connection between exponentials/logarithms and areas under hyperbolae isn't immediately obvious to most people. Implicit differentiation is kind of scary, but "draw a curve whose slope is its height" requires an art degree.

I like your essay on intuition, but I don't know if your interpretation of the factorial series is really deep enough to explain what is going on. A fully elementary treatment of Taylor's series is a really hard thing to achieve. This, however, could help:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_theorem#Series_for_e

The binomial theorem for integer exponents is easy enough to grasp, though Wikipedia's geometrical explanation is kind of hilarious:

"[...] if one sets a = x and b = Δx, interpreting b as an infinitesimal change in a, then this picture shows the infinitesimal change in the volume of an n-dimensional hypercube, [...]"

I'm afraid infintesimal changes in the volume of n-dimensional hypercubes probably aren't going to make exponential functions any easier to grasp for epsilons...
"Twenty years ago, before India opened its markets to the world, career prospects were bleak. Men might have been laborers or government workers, but even the most ambitious women often gave in to social pressure and stayed home."

My 70 year old Indian grandmother was a school teacher. She had five daughters and all of them became teachers or professors. None of them spent their childhood in cities.
To the author: you mention determination as one of the keys to success. Strongly agreed. If you want Flax to be successful, then stick with it and continue providing timely updates and support. Don't waste time worrying about whether each release is perfect. Just make sure that it is well-tested and reliable.

For me, the biggest barrier when choosing which HTML5 game engine to use isn't so much "is the feature set perfect?" as it is, "will this thing still be around 6 months from now?"
Yep, especially shitty since the project is so far along.

It needs to be said that JWST isn't primarily over-budget because of technical problems, but because they didn't do realistic cost and time estimates in the first place. Overall, the project has suffered very few technical surprises.
In this particular case, neither is Microsoft.

I'm from a Spanish-speaking country and multi-language support for Office behaves weirder with every release since I can remember using it. It likes defaulting to English or Spanish in a paragraph basis even when you already told it to use another default language for all documents, and it likes to do it in the middle of your writing. I believe that support for Portuguese is equally lacking. It is my hope that Brazil's investment results in better multi-language support in Open and Libre.
It doesn't really make sense to extrapolate future stock performance from past stock performance.

The market says: If you consider all publicly available information, we think that facebook will earn its shareholders the present day equivalent of 70bn dollars. Apple will earn its shareholders 330bn.

These numbers reflect expected future performance and expected growth is already priced in.
I agree. I think "Python-style comments" would be just as reasonable a term. My impression was that the comment I was responding to was objecting on historical grounds, since Ruby and Python borrowed that comment style from Perl, which in turn borrowed it from shell scripts.
I'd love to see where you got that idea

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=monopoly

weren't sanctioned by the government (eg, the guild system in Europe).

No, this proves my point exactly. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild. Here's the fourth sentence: "They often depended on grants of letters patent by a monarch or other authority to enforce the flow of trade to their self-employed members, and to retain ownership of tools and the supply of materials."
#5 seems like a very poor reason, but it depends on what your goals are.

I liked this story a lot: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2728167 (or, direct link: http://dirkriehle.com/2011/06/30/the-java-ip-story/)

If you're fine with using a tightly-controlled, patent-littered language environment, then yeah, Java is great! :D
Machu Picchu: Los cien años de una de las maravillas del mundo
Moves are afoot to extend copyright to fashion design
Can they close down Fox News while they're at it?
As soon as I read the title I thought of exactly what application I wanted to build with it. Upon reading the article, I promptly found out that my idea already had a name: "Sketchee". Oh well....
"You might think Google could deal with this by just not infringing Microsoft’s patents, but that’s not how software patents work. Android has roughly 10 million lines of code. Auditing 10 million lines of code for compliance with 18,000 patents is an impossible task"

There's a great startup in that sentence for whoever cracks the algorithmic challenges.
The national broadband network is a policy to introduce a single network to upgrade the country's internet.

I was thinking yesterday - this is a vehicle for censorship.

Once it is in, the government will be able to work with a compliant government-corporation to restrict access.
Apple Store Sets Secret Service on Spy Camera Artist
What You Need To Know About Foreclosure Investments
Yes, the About dialogs are usually there and are a convenient way to figure out what version of a program you're running.
I think this is expected if you were to work in a company like Facebook.

It's a startup. It's unstable. So things like this bound to happen. They need to quickly change directions if required. People that don't align need to be removed.

I'm quite sure those special hiree would potentially have their own team hence becoming a tech-lead or some sort so they don't necessary work as a bottom-liner.
As a complete non-exercise guy, I'm still trying to find ways (like a solid walk through SF hills) to try to get some exercise in - is there a good site / idea for working out "for the rest of us"?
Yes. If we want to buy an Amazon Kindle that will cost exactly 2x times the original price. It is the most expensive Kindle in the world (the second is India, with around 1.3x the original price). It is ridiculous.
Pusher Pricing
Quick meta-comment:

It is such a joy reading good, clear, expressive English in a public discussion thread on the internet! Thank you, George Grellas!
facebook is most likely more concerned about the facebook projects/inner workings likely discussed during an interview of this type more so then the fact that an interview took place
Protovis is no longer under active development. Spins off new lib, D3
How wheels go at three different speeds simultaneously
Marc Andreessen on whether there is a tech bubble
I still don't understand why I would want to pay for music through facebook.
#5 is a catchy way of saying there's an excellent complement of open source libraries and support. Though I sure get that for many HN readers the fact that many people are doing something is a cause to question, not follow!
Don't worry, that's exactly what we'll be doing. We've got a hard deadline of three weeks on each iteration, and a soft one of two weeks. After the soft deadline, we'll bugfix anything and remove non-working features. Hopefully this will keep us on track. Plus, when we put the progress bar in the header, we inadvertently gamified ourselves. Can't help but want to move it up. ;)

Don't worry, we've made a pact that Flax.ie will be around for nine more years (ten years from when we started), so as long as the internet doesn't explode, we'll still be there.

Thanks for the kind comment, it's appreciated.
Sweet, now that means Kik will get all the functionality other apps have and more (like location and contact sharing etc)
Many icon sets (on Linux, at least) use a picture of a hard drive instead of a floppy [1]. Which, though more correct, still worries me. Anybody who recognizes the icon as a picture of a hard drive isn't going to be confused by the concept of saving...do we need a similar icon that uses a picture of an entire computer instead? Should it be a laptop or desktop?

[1] - http://cshared.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Screenshot-xam...
>I once heard something that has stuck in my mind ever since: "servers are cheap, programmers are expensive." In other words, you have to carefully choose your battles: at what point is optimization worth a programmer's sanity? Java might not be the fastest language, but it will keep you slightly more sane than C/C++, and is usually worth the slight performance penalty.

But then, why Java? Why not a language that's even more high-level (like Python, Lua, or Haskell)?
The Art of the Selfless: Better Habits for Better Developed Applications
Brazilian government is using open source software for several years, and almost every software made by the government uses Java. The open-source initiative is nice, but the software produced use to be mediocre at best.
"…and then press a button that invokes Kik Messenger, which lets me send the drawing to you."

... So... Not "real-time"?

If Sketchee were real-time, you would both be drawing at the same time and each person would see the changes immediately.

This is a messaging system, not a real-time sharing system.
This. Also, equally important is the usability of the hardware. E.g. compared to the dot-matrix printers of 90s, it is far easier to feed paper to Laser printers.

Children normally find it easier to adapt to new things. E.g. "Hole in the Wall" experiments:
http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm

Not sure, if this is slightly off-topic, but sometimes users ask pretty interesting questions. Circa, 1997 I visited a computer training institute to meet one of my friends who was a Lab Technician. There was a batch of interesting people: only one of them would sit in front of a desktop and all 38 would line up around him, despite terminals being available for all of them. Now, this guy is trying to type "dir /s" and while hitting the Spacebar a question pops in his mind: "Why do you need to hit the Spacebar with thumb?"
I started thinking about how it is more efficient to hit the Spacebar with thumb, the notion of finger travel in miles per annum etc., while my friend replied curtly to that 55 year old student: "Sir, do you start your Scooter by hitting the `kick' by foot or by palm?" He gulped the tobacco he was chewing up.

During that year, I rolled out a desktop application in a smallish organization and was astonished to meet users who were typists-turned-computer-operators. I couldn't grasp as to why they found my code to be so user-friendly. Turned out that a key decision in the beginning of the project helped me: all labels in the application were in Marathi.

Re: parent's post, in the case of ATM machine, if they keep a microphone disguised in the form of telephone handset connected to the machine itself, driven by an AI program (without the press 1 for foo, press 2 for bar type of idiocy) might be of great help.
Somewhat OT: I am trying to get traction for my latest project: Ping Brigade (https://www.pingbrigade.com/). I have had a few visitors, but it seems that the price point is wrong. So far I have had very little conversion from free to paid accounts. Do you figure it's a matter of getting more exposure or changing the price points and getting better exposure?
Samsung releases code of WebCL implementation for WebKit
> Drug companies get money from selling ingredients for makeshift heroin, they should stop its use?

No, but if they receive credible reports that Joe Drugdealer is is using their ingredients to make makeshift heroin, they should look into those claims before directly selling their ingredients to Joe Drugdealer in the future. That's a more apt analogy to the situation we're discussing here.
you can do video notes sharing or audio/music/songs :)
But don't you see that if Google sells no ads, those people working to make your search better don't get paid either?
"I envisage a time when we can see when a person is visiting our website and we can invite them to chat face-to-face."

Sure, go ahead, invite them and see them run away :-).
The thing with video chat is people simply don't want to use it, at least not a lot.
Many have been pushing different forms of video chatting for so many years already. It's really not about the technology behind it, people just don't like it that much.

Sure, Hangouts are great. I think that's the best implementation of a video chat I have ever seen. Might even want to try it out. But I definitely won't be using it on a daily basis. And customer support using web cams would be a nightmare. In 5-10-15 year perhaps people will perhaps change the way they want to overact over the internet, but for now most like to hide behind their text.

So it's all nice, but 'the next generation of ecommerce' as a result of a great video chat technology? I guess you're pushing it. Big time.

Google Hangouts might be the first serious step to going beyond text-based communication. But most likely it will be the ideas made on top or around it that will bring about a real change. I think what Hangouts can do is make people actually like video chat a little.
Some choice quotes:

"Wrongdoers turned a good newsroom bad and this was not fully understood or adequately pursued."

"As a result, the News of the World and News International wrongly maintained that these issues were confined to one reporter."

"The paper made statements to Parliament without being in the full possession of the facts. This was wrong."

"The company paid out-of-court settlements approved by me. I now know that I did not have a complete picture when I did so. This was wrong and is a matter of serious regret."

Just read it, it is all complete bullshit, who honestly believes that he did not have the "complete picture" when those settlements were made... Let's face it, settlements were made precisely because they HAD the complete picture. Does anyone think that they did not have "full possession of the facts"? This is careful phrasing to avoid admitting to lying to parliament which is what I for one think they did.

"So, just as I acknowledge we have made mistakes.."

This is laughable, using double-speak in acknowledging mistakes that are not the mistakes you actually made is meaningless.
Ok, this is just ridiculous. I've really tried to do this right - I have Netflix, RDIO, Pandora, and Amazon Select, and by and large, if something's available on those services, I don't go trying to dig it up somewhere else.

If I'm not paying for something, it's because the media companies won't let me, not because I'm not willing.
Bitbucket: Redesigned commit history (with Mercurial revset-based search)
Well, Kinect owes quite alot to PrimeSense so I certainly wouldn't categorize it as a 'MS Research' product.
脱毛香川口コミランキングで比較！！
Their explanation about the transition from Protovis to d3: http://mbostock.github.com/d3/tutorial/protovis.html
Some (unknown) person registered the domains thesunonsunday.co.uk and thesunonsunday.com a few days ago. ( http://webwhois.nic.uk/cgi-bin/whois.cgi?query=thesunonsunda... )

And a few weeks ago Rebekah Brooks announced that editorial roles would be merged between the Sun and the News of the World. ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2011/jun/28/newsi... )

So I think Ken Clarke said it when he said: "All they're going to do is rebrand it." ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14070856 )
Will Americans be Able to Adapt to the Self-driving Car?
Recruiting Howto from Wealthfront - Hire the Best, Forget the Rest
s/startup/technological singularity/
Well, Sketchee is probably the simplest app imaginable. You can build out on top if it. For instance, a canv.as derivative app, where you could prepopulate most popular meme images and let people create and share photobombs with their friends.

Also, basic things like location & media sharing were intentionally left out for third party app developers to get creative with.
GoldenOrb: Open Source Pregel Clone
Quid pro quo
I would like to think that exchanging and sharing are an intrinsic part of our nature.
In medieval times, for example, the lord would provided security to their servants against marauders in exchange of work and loyalty.
Today, lots and things have changed. Lots of things remain the same.
Every time we surf the Internet we take and we give. We enjoy good designs (UI/UX), we are able to share lots of things, we are able to express ourselves. In return, we test apps (knowingly or not), we provided market research by being free test subjects, we submitted our personal information, etc.
They give us something. We give then something. We need each other.
They can build their multi billion dollar enterprise; in return, we can share files, photos, feelings, etc.
Give us what we want and we shall follow. BUT we are not theirs to keep.
FB gives as an ethereal place to chat, interact and do stuff BUT in return they can have a huge database with our personal information. With that information they do their business selling adds, etc. (provided some rules regarding confidentiality). Quid pro quo.
Thats the way things work. We all get what we want – most of the time ;).
The problem is that we are not theirs to keep. Myspace.com is the best example of that.
We are free to decide what and how we want to be.
Thats why we have the right to “suicide” our account, if we think thats the way to go. If the web does not recognize that right we will quit it and there is nothing about it no one can do.
If we prefer Google+ instead of FB, I think that they should not try to make the migration harder. Give us something better and we will be there.
When you start to control people by force instead of seducing their free will your are starting a very dangerous slippery slope.