skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe this just looked like a good idea to Google at the time. Sometimes you have to make acquisitions to look progressive to your shareholders. Now, I'm betting they're glad they didn't make this purchase.

Look at Google Ventures and you might see some questional investments as well: http://www.googleventures.com/portfolio.html
Why the hell should I quit..
Add Memrise to the list!

We just charged happily out of TechStars Boston, and we’re eagerly looking for people to join our team of neuroscientists, Grandmasters of Memory and software developers to help us reinvent learning:

- Python/Django

- lots of jQuery

- iOS

Hit me up at greg@memrise.com

Shout out if you're in New York (and potentially remote) too!
(Sorry-- Off-topic) HN Powers That Be: How did this get submitted twice? The URL is the same as far as I can tell... except a trailing slash? (see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2790700)
Can somebody post a screenshot for those of still in the emoji-less stone age?
The linked article seems to indicate current efforts toward cheaper DNA sampling for use by government regulators. Handheld detectors might be a decade or two away as solid-state DNA chips come of age. I think all that is required is a population that demands a properly labeled and inspected food supply -- I'm bullish about the technology getting there.
Anonymous Issues Statement in Response to FBI Arrests
I think a more detailed solution is here http://www.wonderquest.com/candle-out.htm
For something as basic as an index lister, the resource use is a bit over the top imho. It is nice though.

Load to Render Completion Times:

- - -

Un-styled - Apache Default | 374 ms

Styled - Javascript Off | 1.44 sec

Styled - Javascript On | 10.6 sec

- - -

URL used:

http://larsjung.de/h5ai/sample/file%20types/
"But when people are assessing how big a problem the debt is the question they are asking is how much it will impact our overall standard of living when we inevitably have to start paying it off"

Fair point but will we have to pay it back? That's the funny thing about Government debt, while it's definitively a drag on the economy, the larger it is the larger the economy has to grow but as long as you stay ahead of the interest and roll it over (when bonds expire replace with other bonds...). There is no payoff date or whatever. The gov has infinite life (theoretically) and get take forever to pay it back. The debt can exist (and has existed) forever. Slowly grow forever as long as it's not growing faster than the economy can bare. (this is why I think comparing to GDP is valuable)

Having a deficit every year isn't the problem, it's the size that matters. Surplus are definitively better, not arguing that but paying off the debt is never going to happen, making it smaller is also probably not going to happen significantly for a long time. Until better time show up.

And with the economy right now, you won't manage to get a surplus without completely destroying the standard of living you speak of by eliminating a huge number of gov programs.

You do cuts in good times not bad. The government needs to be able to borrow during the bad economic times. (Unless my understanding of Keynesian economics is completely faulty or you disagree with him completely.

"Just so I don't get accused of making ad hominems let me explain my contention above." I wasn't seeing anything personal in there but thanks for explaining your view. I hope you will see my post the same way.
The little players on a foosball table probably think mirrors flip up and down, since that is their normal method of turning around.
$200 million. For the domain!

At the rate the value of that domain was rocketing, seems like a decent investment at the time. Too bad no one's going to want to be associated with it after what team Color did to itself.
Another discussion at the top of the page already: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2790737
Tangent warning:

The most successful satire is indistinguishable from the real thing. Either way, I tip my hat.
Git wasn't included out of the box in Snow Leopard.
Yet, as you say, they are nonprofit. Are they therefore actually making any profit?

I guess that they are not a public company, therefore unfortunately perhaps we can not have any access to the revenue data to determine whether they are making any profit and how such profit is being used. In that case, most probably the safe bet is to decide that they are making profit. If, however, they are in fact not making any profit because their archiving and maintaining of these documents is paid off by the subscription charges, then this torrent does a disservice to science rather than acting as a liberator.

Without that information however I do not think it is easy, or indeed possivble, to rationally decide.
Tell HN: Perl + Lion got you down? Have no fear.
Immediately after doing a clean install of Lion yesterday, I sat down to work getting my environment back up to speed.

tl;dr - Homebrew, check (few formulas are tricky, but basically good); rvm, check (haven't tried to build 1.8.7, which was a problem but maybe no longer); Perlbrew + newer Perls, boom.

There is an issue with /usr/bin/nm and Perl's configuration and OS hints scripts. After some discussion, it turned out that the p5-porters were already on it (in blead-perl) and a quick patch has been made to Devel::PatchPerl.

See here for more gory details of what to do: http://www.perlbrew.pl/FixLion.html

(A big thanks to Gugod and Bingos!)
These deals often faul through at the last minute. Much of the time, the company making the offer just wants to get a look 'under the hood' of a potential competitor.

Think of all the companies google has made these offers to and the deal didn't happen. Strategy at this level is kind of like macroeconomics, it just doesn't map to what makes sense on face value.
So what? I have an aisle seat and I'm not in a particular hurry to get to it (remember, only one bag, and it's ideally small enough to go in front of my feet).
I feel like their target market should not have been the US but rather Europe or Japan. Both much higher population densities where location/presence based technology does much better (see 3DS Street pass feature).
Old Analogies Don't Scale or Why the Discussion on Swartz is Broken
Is this just pure greed? Did Color think they had a billion dollar idea? From my understanding they're a public photo album. What revenue source did they target?
Nearing 100% of GDP. The only time it was higher, not shown on the chart I am linking to, was during World War II.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Federal_Debt_as_Percent...
It’s a Troll World, we just live in it.
Please don't conflate the pay walls with public domain, these journal articles are clearly in the public domain. And they should not be behind a pay wall.

Locking in of the worlds historical knowledge is even worse, I think, than locking in current research. The economic return to the holders of the keys to the garden have no moral or legal right to assert control over the this knowledge, when their articles of incorporation most likely expose the oposite of their actions. These organizations are greedy wholesale hypocrites.
Sorry, the forced rape part must have gone past my eyes.

Lets see if I can delete my comment.
I truly think you are a brave person for doing this under your real name. I most likely couldn't do that.

Godspeed, good sir.
Brightcove is also hiring a RoR dev, a front-end architect, and many other software engineering positions: http://www.brightcove.com/en/company/careers. hollar at me.
From my iPhone 4:

http://i.imgur.com/owBxH.jpg
We have a space program. NASA isn't going away. It puts probes on/around planets and asteroids and advances science (but not SCIENCE! which is what people tend to get miffed about). If need be we could even start using our own rockets to get humans into space, it's just more cost effective to pay the Russians to do so.

Of course, throwing more money at NASA is actually a pretty good idea, even if the sexier things people want to do are unlikely to get off the ground in the near term (say 50 years or so). But a reusable shuttle was never cost effective for manned spaceflight at the scale that we did it at.
Opera displays an empty rectangle and when I click the link it doesn't allow me to go there saying it might an "attempt to trick you into visiting a website which you might mistake for a site you trust."
(wild, uneducated guess)

Google is addicted to social because it seems to be the only game in town that can bring in magnitude times more people than a typical product could (e.g. Basecamp)

Color was founded with this power-team of folks that had proven records so when the Hyposaurus came stumbling down the block and Google saw it coming with the potential to snatch up an amazing team with the potential to pull in millions of more users into the Google ecosystem and then direct them not just towards ads, but all their other offerings... it looked like it had every indicator that it would fly.

Unfortunately it looks like some air got let out of the tires and things slowed down considerably for them.

I don't know that I have all the faith in Color staying around, but Path I believe has staying power. They have a really cohesive/directed vision and purpose that they are executing really well.

They may not launch with a billion new accounts a minute, but I think there is so much solid product/story there that once they pass that event horizon, they'll have people pouring into them.

Sort of like a Tumblr or Posterous growth curve -- really focused, really solid products so once people start taking notice, everyone likes what they see.

Just my 2 cents and I used to eat a lot of paint as a kid... so take this all with lots of salt.
Google Kills Toolbar For Firefox
Link to manifesto
http://pastebin.com/KudE4bWr
for people who don't have access to the pirate bay.
The small guy is sort of at a disadvantage if the big company just tries to jerk around. Is there break-up fee as part of the letter of intent?
What's so good about these articles?
Maybe your rape can reach all the way back in time from 1923. You are seriously advocating rape of another human being? Please leave.
Thanks for linking that, I find that very useful. I'll try to find a chart showing change in GDP during those years, I'm going to guess the debt was growing the whole time and GDP was the thing fluctuating.
Where Ideas Come From: Inside SoundCloud's Headquarters
This is exactly the wrong sort of visualization. It provides no information other than "big number is big, lol."

The US debt is a big number. So big that people have a hard time wrapping their head around it. They need a point of comparison. So what's a good point of comparison for the US debt? Hmm... we could use the federal budget, or GDP, or the world GDP, or the debt of other large nations. Or we could break it down per capita, and compare it to other per-capita things, like income or tax burden. Or... I know! We can convert the thing to hundred dollar bills, and put it next to the statue of liberty! That's a meaningful comparison!
Other than YouTube and Android, nothing Google has set out to do approaches how seriously they are taking Google+. Bigger than gmail, definitely (which, for acq, is tied to o Grand Central I think)

Wave had its own issues, mainly due to being political and inviolate, from what has been written outside google. It was really sad to see etherpad get caught up in that.
What happened to global warming?
Confessions of a recovering engineer (2010)
> Are you suggesting that my distain for LulzSec and its methods are some how the result of brain washing or extreme trama?

Yes. Absolutely.

If such an organization did not exist, such that you weren't conditioned to accept their abuses, you would be appropriately horrified to hear about the abuses that are currently being committed.

By exposing you to ridiculous premises like a color-coded terror threat level and lies like Iraqi nuclear programs, terror connections, etc, you've been conditioned to think you need an abusive security apparatus. You're so intentionally self-deluded about the nature of the world that you can't understand who's stepping on your neck.

Whatever good our security apparatus may have originally been created to do they are now unacceptably corrupted in that they refuse civilian oversight ever where obvious crimes have been committed from within their ranks. That you fixate on minor website inconvenience to these organizations ("vandalism") while ignoring the scale of the injustices going on shows you're hardly able to even think ill of these organizations.
Legalizing Marijuana: Political Suicide or Opportunity for Success?
I suspect Wikipedia's massive page rank helps with that. Pretty soon wikipedia will own most keywords.
Using jQuery Data for Easy Data Associations
It's a mix of a bunch of websites. Can you guess which ones inspiration was borrowed from?
Thanks for the fan noise explanation...I was going crazy.

I agree with your review. I'll add:

- It's fun just to update and play around and see what's new.
- X-Code is free again in the Mac App Store! (requires Lion)
- Backwards scrolling is driving me crazy, but I'll get used to it.
- Worth the $29.
Best Practices for Virtualizing High I/O Driven Applications...
Post-Paywall New York Times Boosts Digital Ad/Sub Dollars
Please seed. If you are on a mac you can use transmissionbt.

http://www.transmissionbt.com/

Configure the bandwidth management to acceptable always on background levels and minimize to the dock or put on a different desktop with spaces.
I agree with all of that, I just think both options equally meet those objective criteria. The only difference is how the recipient perceives the message. I think it's largely a difference in culture between academia (my realm) and business.

A professor, for example, might assume that you have particular reasons for selecting the time slot you have and wonder whether he should clear room in his schedule to meet your expectations. In this case, selecting an exact time before hand provides a minor inconvenience to him.
Less true if you are the kind of startup which could get talent acquired in the first place.

In the bay area at least, it would be really hard to be working on something worthwhile and remain totally sequestered from a network. The bigger problem is not getting caught up in it to the exclusion of spending time working.

I'm sure it is different outside the bay area, and is absolutely different outside the USA.
This may seem an unfair and ridiculously large amount of money to hoard, but there's one reason it isn't. When Bush came in his admin just took Microsoft off the hook. The US is so capitalist that it's quite happy for monopolies to subvert the whole point of capitalism - competition. So Apple, and every company, including Microsoft, must hoard as much paranoia money as it can, because the US government's willingness to be corrupted is obvious to everyone, especially if you're Apple, or say, Netscape. They got away with destroying it, didn't they. They wish we were all still using IE6. When the government is on the side of your competition, no amount will make you safe. They will crush you, while paying their friends soft money to look the other way.
Can mathematical toys close the math gap?
TMZ is to Lindsay Lohan as TechCrunch is to Color. Constantly reporting upon (and clearly enjoying) the precipitous demise.
Yet he does not mention what the boring and lawful means are. Perhaps he is too bussy of a man to spend his time educating us.
What a load of shit. So the argument basically reduces to:

"You can't be a startup founder and date, therefore it's better to do a startup if you're already in a long-term committed relationship."

Ummm... how about "I'm single and I'm willing to forgo dating for 'x period of time' until my startup is established and running" OR, even better, "I'm single and I'm willing to forgo dating for now, until my startup exits, I'm rich, and I can live the billionaire playboy lifestyle and take my dates on exotic trips to fun places, etc., etc. yada yada."

Doing a startup means making sacrifices whether you're single or not, this article contributes nothing to value to the discussion of who should and shouldn't be running a startup, IMO. Then again, my take on this discussion is that there really isn't anything to discuss to begin with: You should run a startup... drumroll If you want to run a startup.
most people are not developers

Most people don't have a copy of Mathematica lying around either, and it appears to be a requirement for authoring CDFs: http://www.wolfram.com/cdf/faq/ .
We're in a period of open ended hiring at TripAdvisor. If you're interested in travel+Facebook, or travel+mobile, or possibly just like traveling... contact details in my profile.

Some of what we do:

http://www.facebook.com/instantpersonalization/

http://tech.tripadvisor.com/2011/02/augmented-reality-on-ipa...

http://apps.facebook.com/tripadvisortravelmap/

http://www.whereivebeen.com/
Which is a pretty big issue. Local sources matter. For example the King Crabs in the Barents Sea are really invasive and are spreading like wildfire. In Norway they are trying to hinder it's advancement and reducing it's population. Russia however, is currently more protective. After all they introduced them in the first place.
Congrats Austin!
Depends on the letter.
LulzSec: We won't publish News International emails
Content Placement – An Overlooked Web Usability Rule by HSBC and P&G
When Management Misdirects Employees (response to Ben Horowitz)
Apple appstore broken [wild lion release]
Possibly the apple servers are overwhelmed. Hm. Maybe this 'everybody download everything' silver cloud has a gray lining.
Remember Microsoft offering to buy Yahoo for $45 billion back in 2008? It is worth about $18 billion now (less, actually, especially if alipay goes badly)
Indeed... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2684803
Oh, and pythonistas should check out Django Zoom (Heroku for Django) - they sit about 50 yards away in Dogpatch, and they offer an amazing 1-click deploy for Django.
How about everyone just leaves the ocean alone for a while?

Eat jellyfish.
3G connections don't work well at large events.
First of all take it with a grain of salt. That said, there are at least a couple of ways to look at it:

1) There are reports that Google offered some of its product managers tens of millions of dollars to keep them from joining Twitter. If that's how they're valuing talent, then $200M is in the ballpark for Color's "superstar team" combined with some very interesting IP,

2) Smart investors described Color's technology as breakthrough and potentially "the next Google". Even accounting for some hyperbole, suppose that it really is groundbreaking for reasons that us mere mortals can't fully grok. In that case, adding it to Google's arsenal and combining it with all their other assets (and proven engineering and operations strength) could be a multi-billion-dollar win and a big addition to Google+. Or not, as the case may be; but making a risk/reward tradeoff, it could have looked attractive.
And that trailing slash is exactly how it didn't get caught by the dupe filter.
The issue is, university professors already have access to these papers. They are among the few people that want, need, and can understand the science behind it. It looks like it makes sense that universities are willing to pay for that privilege.
Andy Hertzfeld on Google+, UI design and how Bob Dylan influenced the Mac
Coli, at least you are learning on this site. I can't say the same for Reddit.
This is similar to a URL shortener my friends and I wrote a few years ago: http://get.emo.gd/. Emoji TLDs are even better.
Cynical, maybe.

But looking back at the history of the airlines and their increasing fees over the last decade or so doesn't make it seem so far fetched. It's no secret that airlines are looking to tack on fees in every nook and cranny possible to squeeze much needed money out of customers.

This could simply just be another nook, wrapped up in "research".
Ask HN: Learning movie CGI
After watching movies such as Harry Potter and Avatar, I became interested in the CGI effects used in movies. I realize that these are done by huge teams, but I want to learn about how the effects are created and how to create simple ones myself. I'm a fairly experienced programmer, but I don't know much about graphics programming and absolutely nothing about 3D modeling. Can anyone suggest some resources to learn about this? I don't even know where to begin.
Gotta say that you really get to know whether you want to work with someone after going through a hackathon with them. Would be a great standard interview process!
You aren't going to get anywhere close to what you can do in CDF via HTML5 and JavaScript without a truly ungodly amount of work...

The same argument was being made in favor of Flash a few years ago. Eventually it turns out that someone does that 'ungodly amount of work.' Why shouldn't it be Wolfram? He would have a leg up on everyone if he embraced the new standards and opened up the Mathematica walled garden a little.
This Cube made in Germany is Straight out of Minority Report
I wonder what would happen if this happened to Westlaw, one of the 2-3 industry standards for law firms. Incredibly expensive.

The irony alone in the law profession would be tremendous. It'd be interesting to see if law firms would illegally access it: It would be obvious they were if they previously only subscribed to Westlaw, but the reality is most law firms subscribe to more than one database for emergency backup.
Without looking too closely, would h5/pytables suffice?
I'm against the wars - but IMO there's a good reason the US has a presence around the world in places like Japan. The entire point of being a superpower is being able to project this power in any corner of the globe.

China is investing heavily in its navy right now since it distinctly feels the lack of ability to do the same. When Chinese shipments came under pirate attack off the coast of Somalia, it took forever and a day for any forces to be dispatched, compared to the US whose naval and air presence is available within hours around the world by virtue of having bases in foreign countries.
"Have you never been to rural areas? I assure you they are not lined with industrial warehouses and artificial lighting systems."

You are aware that Farmville != rural areas in the real world? There are movies and books depicting the industrial rising of cattle (for example "Eating Animals" does a nice, graphics job). You can spot the "pink lakes" which result from the waste output of industrial pig farming on Google Maps. But these are indeed not the areas you would visit on a weekend trip to the countryside, because these areas reek for miles.

Just because some chickens still roam outside, doesn't prove that the majority of them does.

The article about pig farming was on HN years ago, but I can't find it atm. But Google provides a lot of info "factory farming".
Being able to control the HVAC of your home is also a plus. Take my office as an example: In the midwestern US, we are in the middle of a heatwave, and the A/C has malfunctioned in our part of the building. With temps pushing 85 it's impossible to be productive. If I were at home, I would be comfortable. Even if my A/C were out at home, I could always take my work to the coffee shop.
Is it simply a way to acquire talent?