skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apparently investors were fond of thinking that Greek debt was as safe as any in EU because it was backed by the Germans.

This seems not unlike the belief that Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac were effectively backed by the US Treasury. In the the US scenario these investor beliefs have been upheld by bailouts.

But in the Greek situation, this bet was just now shown to be wrong. The open question is just how big of a house of cards has been built upon this assumption.

Tomorrow is going to be a busy day for a lot of people.
Distributed Proofreaders already has some infrastructure set up for proofreading and editing OCR'd documents. It's not quite the same as your proposal, but they do track stats and have levels of participants based on skill and experience. Might be worth checking out.

http://www.pgdp.net/c/
In general, Google has not aggressively patented things. They have been issued ~300 patents. Compare to IBM's over 26k patents in the US alone. Essentially they showed up to a nuclear weapon fight with a bouquet of flowers.

EDIT: I realize IBM is 100 years old and Google is 10.. they're still way ahead in patents-per-year, and the 26k is only active patents.
Oh, this so reminds me of all the ass coverage at my wife's last place of work (also in academia).
I wonder what is holding automatic apk dependency downloading back. I'm sure the licensing and cost issue is tractable.
The headline isn't dramatic. Credit rating agencies likely will consider this a default. The article explains it pretty plainly:

But that won't stop the credit rating agencies giving Greece's bonds a default rating — this is a coercive deal, which clearly reduces the value of banks' Greek debt. (After all, just look at those haircuts.)

A default is when you fail to fulfill your obligations. If I owe you $1.00, but instead pay you $0.80 (1 year late)...I didn't fulfill my obligation to you, and it's fair to consider me a credit risk.

Or, put another way, people who declare personal bankruptcy don't do so because they can't pay _any_ of their debt, they do so because they can't pay _all_ of it.
To make space travel more common there must be an economic reason to make the trip. Solve that problem, otherwise we'll always be confined to one off stunts. Once the cost of a moon mission is a substantial net gain you'll see the real space race.
If you really want something to change the way you think, I would suggest Scheme while reading SICP "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs". I believe MIT makes the newer version of the text available online, and the old MIT Open Courseware lectures that go along with the old version are very good. Also, the book "The Little Schemer" is a great way to get a handle on recursive thinking. Scheme is also very similar to the low level abstract syntax tree format of some kinds of compilers, so if you are interested in compiler theory it may be useful to know.

Erlang can be sort of considered a "Scheme with syntax". However, it is also somewhat weird, and if you're just starting with a functional language, you might as well go for Scheme.

I personally don't know that I'd recommend Haskell as a starting functional language. If you want to learn Haskell, I might suggest stating with Erlang as a baby untyped Haskell, and then move up to Haskell.

Also, Javascript is more functional than is generally realized, however, it's functional flavor may be more obvious after you have been exposed to an explicitly functional language.

One last thought, if you are interested in Web programming, Clojure is a functional flavored version of Lisp that runs on the JVM, and has a web framework called Compojure that seems well regarded.
Memberly - helps creative ppl run subscription programs
Great article.

This is another reminder that I should really read the HTTP/1.1 spec someday.
+1 for the trails. Have fun. Do what makes you happy on your own site!
I need to check my web cache. I have no problems hosting a copy of the essay.
Where this will catch on is with people who need a world-class CAS or some other features of Mathematica and want to publish documents with live graphs in them, for instance interactive textbooks. I use Mathematica for studying and in my research and I can definitely see myself using this to publish simply because there's no other tool that comes close. If we're lucky it will inspire an open-source duplication effort like SAGE.

That said, I agree it probably won't catch on like PDF. Wolfram has a terrible hyper-proprietary attitude that just doesn't resonate well with the developer community at large. It's unfortunate because Mathematica is an absolutely stunning piece of software.
Bieber Takes A Picture Of Traffic, Instagram Usage Explodes
There are benefits to delayed actions..it helps people/banks/countries prepare for when unpleasant actions are required. In this specific case, it seems (from reading) that they are trying to buy time to make sure Spanish banks can mean newly set (and much needed) capital requirements.
try shutting one eye and see if you still believe that
Barcelona vs Hajduk Split live Friendly Match 23 July
Barcelona vs Hajduk Split live Friendly Match 23 July
I guess the only logical policy for a professor is "don't ask, don't tell, don't talk about it".

You there, academic! Back into the closet!
http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#...

Hm, I see a dip caused by the Iran-Iraq war. Who made and sold the guns to the Iranians? I'm not sure! Then in 1991 something seems to have gone wrong. I think it was something about the US ambassador shrugging at Iraq when Iraq asked permission to stop Kuwait's slant drilling. Hm, then a massive dip followed, not sure who caused that.

But luckily the US showed up and stopped whatever evil world super power was suppressing the Iraqi economy! And just look how well off they were after the US got involved for the first time in 2003.

We boosted their GDP to $65 billion! Which seems a bit low considering we've literally lost $12 billion shipped into Iraq on pallets. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1

All hail the economics PHD and his Jolly Green Giant.

And oh hey, let's talk about death rate!
http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?v=26&c=iz&c=us...

Hm, that stat seems to say that it's safer in Iraq than the United States. Perhaps you want to pick a more specific stat to mention?
And they could have benefitted mightily from acquiring Sun, moreso than simply owning Java. How was Groupon worth 6B in their eyes and Sun not 7B? Maybe hindsight is ruining my perspective more than I can see.
That's actually insanely frugal--- $381,000 total budget! JSTOR is very reticent about their budget, but from IRS filings it appears their annual revenue is in the ballpark of $55-65 million, with about $8m of that going as payments/revenue-share to publishers, leaving somewhere north of $40m for JSTOR operations.

It's hard to say how necessary a budget of that size is, made harder by the fact that they publish absolutely nothing about who they are, what they do with the money, how they plan for it, etc. The only source of financial information is their legally mandated annual IRS filing.

There's an attempt to sort some of it out here: http://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2011/jstor-where-does-your...
I wonder why Marc Parry chose to call him "Mr." instead of the correct "Dr."... a total of 12 whole times.
There's Going To Be An Implosion And A Major Shakeout In The Industry
Big Content's latest antipiracy weapon: extradition
One thing that I hope doesn't get lost amidst the jubilation is that I do not think that this changes the recommended way to create Android applications. Generally, developers should write applications to allow the same code run in as many different configurations as possible. Using the compatibility library should help developers create applications that are designed to scale from low-end phones to high-end tablets.

If anything, I believe that the biggest boon is not so much in creating device-specific builds, but being able to leave out some things that are unnecessary to keep application sizes low. If you know that a particular package is going to be used only on small, low-resolutions screens, there is no need to include the artwork for tablets.
ITunes music store and iPod's days numbered
I think we all saw this coming. Reading his blog post I had that weird feeling of, "How is he actually writing this?" I guess it was cathartic for him but of course NYU would want it taken down.
yes, so pathetic
What does work is talking about an exec's kids coming home from school to find daddy hanged from the ceiling by his own guts

Ok, Stalin / Kaczynski.
And previous discussion of the post removal: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2784002
US Mil Unix Distro
This post seems to be based on the belief that everything adheres to the spec. Historically, 302 has always been interpreted like 303 is defined, and never like 302 is defined. For example:

"If the 302 status code is received in response to a request other than GET or HEAD, the user agent MUST NOT automatically redirect the request unless it can be confirmed by the user, since this might change the conditions under which the request was issued."

Does the browser you use do that?

As with cookies, developers go with what works, even if it isn't exactly what the spec says.

History aside, it could be that there is now a difference in how 302 and 303 are interpreted by modern browsers, and I would love to see definitive tests. Any volunteers?
Oracle Acquires K-splice For an Undisclosed Amount
That equality holds globally.

It only holds for a particular country if its trade balance is 0. Otherwise, you have to add in the trade deficit/surplus in the equation.

In the case of the US, the trade balance is pretty nonzero. So part of the US public debt is counterbalanced by public assets or private saving in other countries, not private sector savings in the US.

And you do see people worked up over other countries holding US bonds as assets, in fact.

(Or put another way, the Chinese government has a policy regime that forces Chinese consumers to oversave and at the same time does not issue enough of its own public debt to absorb that savings, so part of that savings ends up absorbed by public debt in other countries. Same for Germany and Japan.)
Welllll, I can see why a person or company or country benefits from ability to borrow, and I can see how investors benefit from being able to lend with interest, and I see how we all benefit from a society where developments happen faster because borrowing/lending is an allowed trade.

But somewhere between that, and the large scale results of that, my comprehension fails, and instead it feels like a bad idea.
I'm assuming as people much smarter than I will comb through this for back doors, that this is a great thing?

I'll download it and see what the wise folks say in the morning.
More information on this unfortunate precedent-setting litigation is available on Turnitin's Wikipedia entry. I was very much dismayed but not entirely surprised by the rulings.
People with Ph.D.s are not that frequently called Dr. Also, if there is one source that I am pretty sure would know how to refer to professors and Ph.D.s, it would be the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Might be wishful thinking, but this crossed my mind:

The only winning move is not to play...
Since when can you not anonymously quote part of an email that was sent to you?
China's new web browser from Baidu
Oh get real.

The university has the right to ask you to submit your work however they want as a condition to course completion. If you don't want to submit your work to turnitin you don't have to complete the course. Nobody's forcing you to.

If the extent of your objection is that turnitin robs you of potential financial benefit of selling your work, then that's by design: that's exactly what the educational institution wants to do! It doesn't matter that selling your work to a paper mill is legal. It's against the interests of the institution, so they're not going to let you go through their programme and keep that right.
Hey all - I am the writer of this piece on startupnorth - my name is Dan Morel, I am at @dpmorel. Annoyingly I caught it on Hacker News probably too late to have an impact on the comments.

Probably all of you folks complaining below find the arguments absurd and abnoxious because they discriminate against you (being a single, young, male doing a startup).

Well, guess what, most of the entire startup eco-system is discriminatory and proclaims similar absurd arguments against people with family... and its doubly so against women.

So if you don't have the mental capacity to appreciate irony, than go f yourselves.
3rd Time a Charm? Simplton
My app., Simplton http://simplton.com, has been through the hacker news feedback flame-thrower twice already:

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1282132

2. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2093427

Looking for feedback. Please, be THAT guy!
From the vice dean of faculty, quoted in the article:

> Stern faculty members are obligated to support the University and Stern honor codes and are never sanctioned in any way for doing so.

Ha! Nothing wrong with that, except that I thought he meant "faculty members who are stern". Here's the interesting bit:

> Moreover, the course evaluation input of any student who has an honor code infraction is removed from consideration when evaluating teaching performance.

How in the world can you do that, when student evaluations are anonymous? (Maybe they've switched to online evaluations, which would allow this while preserving anonymity.)
Head JS Loads JavaScript Files Like Images Without Blocking the Page
When you've got some kind of duty [in the legal sense] towards the person sending the mail. For example a doctor quoting a patient's email would be problematic. Just to be clear, I don't know the law in this area and I'm not saying what he did was illegal (I have no idea), I'm just saying that I can certainly see why NYU wouldn't want to step up to defend him on this issue if something came up.
It's not cheap, and it's done for free by academic professionals in the corresponding fields. Please understand, the publishing houses like Springer or IEEE provide no added value except for their printing and administrative services.

Closed-access publishers are a relic of the print era. They have been carried this far by momentum of their brand names. They impede access to publicly funded research.
Chinese Regime Developed Space-Age Weapons Against Taiwan, US
http://web.archive.org/web/20101213212354/http://blog.ksplic... this is the last snap-shot (i think) from internet-archive of the above set of pages. not sure how large the delta is. but anyways.
"Adobe Laziness", that pretty much sums it all up
> If the extent of your objection is that turnitin robs you of potential financial benefit of selling your work, then that's by design: that's exactly what the educational institution wants to do!

I know of no university that explicitly prohibits students from selling papers to paper mills (although I haven't checked). Prohibiting students from using papers from paper mills is a different thing entirely.
One Silicon Valley venture, Moon Express...

Hark! Do I see the ancestor of Planet Express developing before mine own eyes?
It really depends on what sort of plugin you're making.

How does the functionality of your plugin differ between browsers?

What I was getting at with Firebreath was that you could just write it once, and target all browsers at once without writing any extra code.

Chrome and Firefox for example all use a common plugin system (so the same plugin can just run in the same browser).

IE uses a different plugin system, but the Firebreath tool makes it so you just compile once and it just works across all platforms.
Show HN: Convoy iPhone app for driving in groups. Backend uses NodeJS/MongoDB
JSTOR: Where does your money go?
It's probably precisely because SpaceX is practical. They are approaching space in a very businesslike fashion, which is very poor for generating hype & interest, which is sorely lacking right now, and very much needed if we are going to launch another "space age".
See also a look at the 2009 filings: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2011-July/1092...
I apologize if showing mobile apps is frowned upon (I rarely see them discussed here, so I thought maybe they were, but couldn't find anything).

Here's the links:
Website: http://convoyapp.net
App Store: http://budurl.com/ConvoyIOS
The problem is that many business models in that industry work by impeding access to publicly funded research.
I wonder if there is any sort of correlation between the dumbing down of science and people's interest in learning more about some complicated topic. Are we killing some of the allure for people who want to know more about a subject because maybe at some level they are driven to be an expert in something no one else they know is?

</oddthought>
Google+ expands circle of friends by 20 million
HN thinking TC might not be perfectly right every time? Why I never!

- Still bitter about the TC/Last.fm/U2 story
This is a really great wiki entry. I was searching around after reading it and came across this pic from '92 which is really amazing:
http://bit.ly/qxaxrC

Both Carmacks, Romero, Tom Hall, Kevin Cloud, etc in startup mode :D

I used to read their .plan's.... :o
Innovation, Humility and Genius
I think that the point that baguasquirrel is making is that if Greece cannot pay their debts now, how confident should anyone be that they'll be able to pay the debts years down the road? It would appear that the larger day of reckoning is being postponed.
手机短信拦截软件
John Romero's blog has a lot of good content on the making of Doom and other classic id software games too: http://planetromero.com/
Out of curiosity, what do you do for PLoS?
Seo工具
Markets will respond upon opening.
JSTOR does not get them for free, but it gets them for a lot less than you think and they make a lot more than you think they do. Here are two analyses of their finances based on their mandatory IRS filings:

- http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2011-July/1092...

- http://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2011/jstor-where-does-your...

Summary: they take in >53m USD. Publishers get 8m of that. Their IT infrastructure costs 4m. All the new material and scanning old material cost 5m.

(Notice how many millions are left over. They all go to staff, travel, and other goodies like that. The management is generously compensated.)
Fighting Viruses, Defending the Net [video]
The important piece of this is that something has had an 'Event of Default' : That will cause all the Credit Default Swaps (CDS) written against Greek debt to trigger.

Banks (mostly European banks, as I understand it) that held Greek debt, but insured it using CDS (written mostly by US banks, ditto), will be able to hand the problem to their counterparties, in exchange for 100%.

There may be some very interesting consequences about to unfold...
The issue is that the FAA has a procedure for anyone who wants to launch a pilotless balloon (or rockets, etc) that involves getting pre-approval, then clearance on the day. It is to allow them time to issue the appropriate NOTAMs.
I've noticed older versions of Firefox trying to resubmit form data when refreshing after a 302 redirect.

Granted there aren't many people running old versions of Firefox, but why risk it? Even if 302 is generally interpreted like a 303, it's safer to just use a 303.
I agree that this makes development suck. I run a fairly popular Android app in my spare time, and I do everything I can to make it the best software possible. Now that I can generate an APK for specific device issues is just an overwhelming amount of/annoying work for a side project.
what about sagemath.org ?
it uses python on the backend, and rst for the document
format.
and it's opensource.
Seriously? I am 100% certain that selling papers for other students to use would have violated my university honor code. I would be surprised if there are any schools where that isn't the case.
Is it even laziness or just pure incompetence? We must be careful, if we say mean things they may take away out 64bit builds for Linux, again, for the third time. And then bring them back again.
Why does Google use a blacklist of characters and not a whitelist? Only letters, numbers, punctuations in targeted languages should be allowed.
No, the other way is to sell articles individually. Why are you being obtuse?

Why is purchasing by subscription bad, but selling articles individually good? There are benefits to both. Personally, I'd rather pay a subscription because I read a lot of articles and buying them individually would be a pain in the ass.
I think Cython/Pyrex might be cool for this. Python(ish) syntax that generates C code when run through the compiler. I wonder how hard it is for that generated code to be portable, or if it is already optimized for the architecture that the Cython/Pyrex compiler is run on.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Doctor_%28tit...

This wikipedia entry seems to indicate that it is common to address someone of his stature as "Dr.", with the possible exception of perhaps in social settings where doing so might cause confusion (with MD).
blitz.io node.js client
Cyber Weapons: The New Arms Race
How interesting Adobe keeps getting kicked, especially from the Apple crowd. It seems just a decade ago, people bought Mac's explicitly for using Adobe products. Not defending either side: I just think it's an interesting turn of events.
They are really far behind Olympus/Panasonic with this. And if their sensor is smaller than micro four thirds they are removing the main reason people prefer Nikon/Canon systems in comparison to micro four thirds.
AFAIK there is a micro four thirds adapter for C mount already. There is a micro four thirds adapter for almost everything.
No... These passwords will not work as login on Google's website. I just generated a one-time-use password. You can not use it to login on Google.com properties.

"""
Please use your account password instead of an application-specific password.
"""

And obviously it will then prompt for your OTOP. Again, this is absolutely no worse than someone getting your Google Account password anyway... and even if they do, they can only use it for select things that are allowed to be used via one-time-use passwords - it's just that we happen to be discussing email and IMAP is a rather large exception. Presumably this isn't the case for other Google services.

(Uh, guys, did you have a different experience or something?)
Guangzhou florist
On paper, universities disallow helping others cheat. In reality, it doesn't seem to be enforced.

If the helper student has already passed the class, the professor can't take disciplinary action against them without making a major case about it. It's easy to simply fail the cheating student or give them a zero on the assignment without making a record.

Additionally, if it is brought to a committee, it'd be much harder to prove.

So although it's officially not allowed, there's not much universities are doing to combat the providers.
Ask HN: Analytics at a glance?  Or beat the stats habit?
I'm sure I"m not the only person with this problem.

The GAnalytics profiles, the server logs, the sales reports, the ad networks--the measures of success and all their enticing details--amount to a huge productivity suck.

I can't go cold turkey, but I can imagine a one-page dashboard that could satiate most of my stats cravings in about 1/20th the time.

How about a programmatic executive summary? Is there some sort of modular OSS package that will interface with my various number-churners? I see that there's a Google Analytics API, but to learn that and then to figure out how to grab stats from all the many other sources is pretty intimidating. Is there a configurable prefab?