skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google Maps works correctly if you get directions to "Round Valley State Park".

Bing Maps still shows the error if you use the name of the park.

Mapquest, I couldn't get it to find the park at all (it kept trying to find locations near me). I gave up. :-/
There are NO shortcuts. This is a fantastic article, and he lists a lot of good examples- machine learning, "social", crowdsourcing, AJAX, real-time.

I would add to that list "create a forum." Maybe that's part of "social." In marketing I hear it all the freaking time- you get a half-ass mediocre idea and it always includes some type of "forum" your customers will recruit themselves into somehow, and start to form a community. Most of these people have never been on a forum so I can't blame them for not knowing how it works, but it is a challenge.
I think I agree that they should wait in the queue just like everyone else. That said I hate long queues and I would think that those 3 guys could probably go out and grab some lunch outside of Facebook if they knew there was a long line everyday.
Hmm.. maybe I'm wrong, but doesn't paypal disallow non-charities from collecting donations? And they often end up freezing the account?

Here's the link stating that google checkout does not allow "donations" unless you're tax-exempt:
http://www.reddit.com/comments/gx7br/google_emulates_paypal_...

I can't find the related news article for paypal offhand.
Yep, I agree. I think the system needs some human oversight, especially with the number of false positives I've seen.

(You're probably the 10th person I've contacted to let them know about a hellban.)
The problem with explaining machine learning is that it's not only complex, but it goes against the way that people normally think. Humans generally aren't built for making statistical calculations and going with highest probable outcomes. People are wired to understand narratives and compelling stories. To explain machine learning, you have to bridge a conceptual gap while also discussing a very technical idea.

Personally, I think that the benefits of a product should be so evident that people don't care if machine learning was used or not. The pitch shouldn't be "This aggregator is awesome because of machine learning", but "This aggregrator is awesome (oh and we used machine learning)"
The state of IDE support has pretty much changed since a year ago.

IntelliJ pretty much rocks, Eclipse is done by the Scala team itself (no idea about Netbeans, though). While Scala IDEs haven't reached the level of maturity or the wealth of features of Java IDEs, they have useful features even Java IDEs lack.

I guess the .NET port is mainly for people wanting to keep writing Scala regardless if they are targeting the JVM, the CLR, browsers with JavaScript/GWT or the LLVM.
The Amazon Cloud Drive and Cloud Player Get a Facelift
I have noticed this too. It is annoying. I just refresh the page and it works fine.
Students respond to incentives. If I give them opportunities to cheat and remain undetected, they will cheat. I do the same as a human. If I were getting a 50% increase in my salary for detecting cheating so aggressively, next year I would have tried to detect cheating even when there is none.

People do respond to incentives. That is an intellectual fact, and should be taken into account when designing systems. But to say that a given individual always should or always will is a moral absurdity. It is tantamount to justifying all criminal action.

If your moral axiom is "I am most important", selfishness is rational behavior. But that is only if that is your axiom. If it's "everyone is equally important" or even "other people are most important" things will look quite different.

It comes down to how you relate to the rest of humanity -- as an enemy, an equal, or a friend.
Absolutely correct. When a new user subscribes we get an email and check who he is on Rapportive and get back to him via personal email. We have established some great contacts this way.
Ogg can often achieve transparency at lower bitrates than mp3, but we're talking <128 kbits here. Above that, and certainly at 160+ very few people can tell the difference, and even then only with careful, focused A/B scrutiny.
There's a € 25.000 euro fine on every violation of the court order. Google doesn't want to take a chance to leave room for even the smallest amount of ambiguity, so that's why they've removed all links to those newspapers.
Review of Latest Gadgets in the Field of Medical Science
The bit about closing the door is a stroke of genius. I suspect Zuckerberg responded exactly as vaguely as he meant to, evoking the non-committal response from Williams and learning much about him in the process.
Hmmm ... interesting !
They're out there - we embed IronPython in our C# application, and are looking into using F# for some of the financial reporting our application creates. It is rare, but there are definitely uses to having multiple languages available on the CLR (and DLR).
haha, fantastic point :)
> It's not so much about writing the paper on your own, but providing an end product to the end user.

You can't outsource everything. One day, you'll fail to deliver the end product precisely because you never learned how.
Given that anyone donating is presumably using nginx somewhere would be very easy for them to restructure this as "paying a voluntary license for the use of nginx at a $ amount to be decided by the customer"
Force is at the point of a gun, and only in that case you (or, rather, the government as your agent) should point a gun at it (or in a case of demonstrable fraud). A business which does not defraud you or physically force you to do anything can only have economic power. If you propose to point a gun at economic power (possibly because you think that the business in question is a monopoly), then the issue is much deeper. You would have to think about what justifies "compulsion", about the source of monopolies, and, fundamentally, about the rights of the businessmen who own and operate the businesses you have mind (as well as your own rights, which are the same). This is a serious thinking process, but one has to go through it to understand why Wu is wrong.
You're right, I shouldn't have said "slightest bit worried". That was an overstatement. I stand by the rest of my arguments though.
I can corroborate with the author's story. I'm developing the BB app for a cross-platform group messaging app and I've also hit a wall of silence from RIM. I can confirm that they are deliberately not giving us access to certain parts of RIM's infrastructure that would make things a lot easier for us. Oh well, guess we'll have to engineer our way around those roadblocks and then open source it!
This is not a case of technical ignorance, though it's hilarious to pretend it is. The French-language newspaper association wants to receive money from Google (for the ads displayed next to their content) and figured it would be easier to pressure them through the courts than through other means.
Edit: (A few examples)

My brother went to West Point and got a degree in CS. At West Point people with higher grades get first pick the corps they go into. People with exceptionally low grades get saddled with chem-corp or transpo.

I have a friend who is a librarian. Librarianship has a huge bias towards degrees and a qualified individual without a degree will be routinely passed over for an unqualified individual with a high level degree, even if that person is antagonistic to the project.

I have another friend who is a school teacher, his academic credentials are checked whenever he has to change jobs and they are the major limiter in his ability work for better schools.

The people on this forum mostly belong to an exceptional segment of an exceptional industry. I agree that academic credentials really shouldn't matter as much as more objective evaluations of ability, but for most of the country, they do and not realizing this implies a certain myopia and failure to think outside of one immediate condition.
These aren't restricted to the old 7 bit ASCII character sets though, are they?

We've already had cases where people were registering famous domains with one character changed so some high unicode value that was graphically but not conceptually equal to the original character. Net result, new domain whose address looks and reads identically (to a human at least) to the domain it's trying to impersonate. Hopefully there are safeguards in place but that happening at a TLD level would hardly be pleasant.
> It's clear that TSA wants this programme to be successful. So do its critics. So let's support this effort and hope for the best.

The first part is clear. The second part is not, especially considering that none of the critics are quoted or cited in the article.

Farewell, journalism. You were kind of cool for awhile, but at this point I think Mira Grant's "Feed"* is on the right track.

* http://www.amazon.com/Feed-Newsflesh-Book-Mira-Grant/dp/0316...
They should do that and avoid the pain of a paypal frozen account.
I vehemently disagree - it's actually quite brilliant and easy to use imo. Can you describe how you came to this conclusion?
MySQL as well.
Sure, but they want the paper, so students figure out the most efficient way to get the paper. The fix isn't to catch cheaters, but to stop valuing the damn paper so much.
Google Prediction API - Google Code
New HTML5 progressive-enhancement select box plugin
Android Tablets Get an iPad-Like "2x" Mode with Android 3.2
I'm fairly certain there is no crisis. They'll come to some last minute deal, as always, after they've done all the theatrics for MSNBC and Fox.
Mindblowing Infographic about the Internet
The uptime is better, but the bandwidth isn't great. And the latency? Forget about it.
Amusingly (to me at least) the only thing Objective-J really addresses from that list is 'typeof', which we have a much better replacement for :).
Classifieds 2.0:  EverClassify.com brings new life to an old subject.
Did you do a well controlled blind test is? That’s, I guess, the relevant question. I don’t think you can trust your ears if you know what you are listening to.

I do actually recommend doing just that. It doesn’t matter who can and cannot hear what, what matters is whether you can hear the difference in a blind test. I did just that before I started buying compressed music. (I didn’t try 128kbps MP3s. I consequently don’t know whether I can hear the difference. I tried 256kbps AAC files – those were the ones I was planning on buying – and I most certainly couldn’t hear the difference.)

MP3 certainly is limited, it even has some problems that are inherent to it, not even a higher bitrate can fix those. Short, sharp sounds (think castanets), for example, are a problem.

Because of the way human hearing works, loud sounds mask quiet sounds. MP3 (and other lossy compression algorithms) use this mask to hide noise (the noise that results from compressing the audio). In order to be able to do that the algorithm has to figure out where the mask is and there is, of course, a time dimension to that mask. MP3 can’t have arbitrarily short masks, it is consequently possible that the noise that’s supposed to be hidden under a loud sound spills over to sections where everything is actually quiet. This happens when there is a short loud sound followed by silence. You know, castanets.

No high bitrate can solve that problem (it can only reduce the overall noise that has to be hidden) but newer compression algorithms (like, for example, AAC) are more flexible with their masks and don’t necessarily have the same problem.
How to use scenario's to improve your product's user experience
I wonder how long it will be before ssh scanners start routinely hitting port 443?
Yup, at first I was excited. They're gamifying and rewarding people for being aware of the world around them, and getting involved in the world! And then I realized that you could probably write a greasemonkey script to grab every badge in a single afternoon.

I wonder if there's a badge for that.
I don't think it's a problem at the moment, but it could easily become one when such tools become available to the public.

Though, I still think that an non-perfect tool as described above would bring much more value than what migrat.us brings with its 500~ users.
I don't think anyone thinks we shouldn't pay.

Instead, what everyone thinks is that we -have- to balance the budget, and this appears to be the only way to get politicians to do their jobs. They seem to be treating a balanced budget as if it isn't their problem. That someone else should be doing that.

I'm starting to wonder if that's right. Maybe there should be another body that has oversight of our ridiculous spending.
That still doesn't address the issue that no one will visit these domains except for phishing victims with incredibly poor spam filters. Even within ascii someone might register target.c0m or target.corn and be able to fool people in a void. Presumably search engines like Google use unicode and can distinguish the different o's.
Nice! Got a link to the implementation, or more info?

The only reference I found to it is this thread: http://groups.google.com/group/objectivej/browse_thread/thre...
Black/corrupt/illegal money in foreign banks is coming back to India via Hawala/FDI/FII/NRI/PIO investments.
This money is used to create jobs in the economy.
Your anti-corrupt agitation will not create new jobs in India.
I'm not sure about "stroke of genius". I gave the same noncommital "yes" answer when asked if I wanted sausages for my dinner, aged three! This sort of humour is very common in the UK.
ADP to Launch New Mobile Payroll App
yeah totally agree on that one - open source graphic design still only for solo act -
It wasn't really a serious NPR Interview. Biz Stone was a contestant on "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me," NPR's humorous news quiz program. I'd take it as a funny anecdote and not the literal, objective truth.
Another factor could be that the presence of the entertainment industry means there's another huge, highly entrepreneurial game in town. I remember Kathy Sierra's post about the "hollywood model", where you always get fired at the end of a project because that's what happens when a project ends. Your job security is 100% a function of your reputation and body of work.

While successful and creative software companies don't (necessarily) "end" the same way a film or album might, I have noticed a similar pattern among a lot of the creative workers in the bay area startup scene. I wouldn't call it "job hopping", since these folks typically stick around long enough to see the project through, but they won't stick around to maintain a project either. They will leave to find something in a more creative growth phase.

The film industry does provide for this kind of career (including in high tech)... and actually, it's pretty difficult to get "credit" for your work as a programmer (I suspect that this frustration alone contributed substantially to the rise of open source projects), whereas if you work on the tech side of a film in a meaningful role, your name will appear in the credits.
Can you cite a source for your 50% false positive rate? I found a source[1] that argues for a ten percent false positive rate.

What do you mean to "confirm" that the stars have planets? I could imagine, directly imaging them is confirmation, but, as I understand it, that's nearly impossible for the average exoplanet we've found. What types of data are Kepler and COROT lacking which you desire for confirmation?

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.5630
Polly.IM: A Case Study in Releasing a Product in 3 months
Realize that the blog mis-characterizes this as an "interview". It was an appearance on the NPR comedy show "Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me". While Peter Sagal and crew are a bright group of people, they are producing a humorous program. This Q and A moment aside, Stone was on there to "answer three questions" unrelated to what he does or is. (They're changing the format slightly, but the segment has traditionally been titled "Not My Job".)

Still, it was an interesting moment of apparently candid observation from Stone, albeit with emphasis of humor as an obvious aspect. Zuckerberg does come off as difficult to relate to.
Anyone listening to the actual recording should be able to discern that he was joking. He also says at one point in the interview "I would like to show you my crotch right now". This isn't TMZ. Chill out and stop looking for drama where there is none.
After starting out with Ruby, I now prefer Javascript to Ruby for a number of reasons, not least performance, clarity, ubiquity, and expressive power.

Sometimes I think the detractors are more upset with their own lack of facility in Javascript relative to their proficiency in something else, than with flaws in the language itself.

A penny for every "accidental global variable" and "ugly {".
My thoughts when reading these sorts of articles is that we are faced with essentially two choices:

* Keep building the house of cards

* Let it fall down

I don't see any points of view that advocate slow unwinding of the issues that got us here, and that's troubling.
Interesting article. One concern is that the steep cost of the new TLDs might make it more difficult to establish a domain name that has "credibility". For instance, second-level domains under .com might eventually be seen by some consumers as "second-rate" ("inferior goods" in economic terms, perhaps the way some users view non-.com domains like .biz now).

Sites with their own TLD might be seen as more credible consumer destinations, establishing 2 different tiers of credibility, and reinforcing the standing of incumbent e-commerce sites.

You can imagine that having your own TLD might factor into your search engine rankings at some point or might be given more leeway by spam detectors.

The steep $185K registration fee for a service whose cost to provide and maintain is pretty miniscule in comparison does not level the playing field.

Simultaneously this weds ICANN even more strongly to the interests of deep-pocketed clients and would make it even harder for non-commercial entities to get fair treatment.

Wealthy organizations should not have special privileges when it comes to naming rights. Especially when the supply of naming rights is essentially unlimited. This is a good example where a quasi-public good with nearly limitless supply is privatized and made artificially scarce for the benefit of a few.

And what about users who register second-level domains within a privately-managed TLD? Would they be subject to even more sweeping seizures and shutdowns for objectionable content? ICANN may find it easier to deflect both the responsibility and blame for such "oversight" onto privately-managed TLDs once the number of such domains increases. "Sorry your domain was snatched, but you'll have to take it up with .SomeTLD."

Hopefully P2P-DNS and namecoin will gain traction.
I fixed that for you:

http://tirania.org/tmp/enterprise-cat.jpg
It definitely came across as a joke. The interview was really, really funny (on an otherwise average wwdtm episode). If you listen to the show, you'll know how tongue-in-cheek it is. Both Biz and Mark came across as good people, just wildly different.
I'd rather have an HP-48G. Oh, I have two. And an HP48G emulator on my phone. RPN muscle memory runs deep.
The audio starts from 5:24 from the link above.

This is also a great example of how things can get 'lost-in-translation' when people try to describe situations/stories in text form. Listen to the audio and compare with TNW's post to see what I mean.

Edit: I mean this bit specifically "Both Stone and Williams looked at Zuckerberg and enquired as to why he wasn’t pushing to the front of the queue, only to be met with a “that’s not how we do it here” rebuttal. The duo from Twitter promptly left, Stone telling Sagal “we don’t like to be queued up”."
Very cool. I have talked to more than a few developers interested in connecting various hardware (cameras, legos, etc.) directly to an iPhone. The problem is always the impossibility for an independent developer getting hardware approval from Apple. Hopefully this sidesteps that issue.

Also, Redpark's product page seems to be having a hard time responding, so here are some of the specs if it does go down:

$79.99 + s/h

Features
-Enables development of iOS apps for private use in homes, schools and offices
-Connects iOS devices to RS-232 serial devices.
-Designed for use with iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPod touch (fourth generation), iPad 2 and iPad.
-Used in conjunction with the Redpark Serial Cable SDK and sample code. Together these tools enable you to write iOS apps that communicate with serial devices.
-One meter long cable.
-Male DB-9 connector.
-Supports communication at speeds up to 57.6 Kbps.
-Requires iOS 4.3.x or later.
-Mintronics Survival Pack.
-P4 RS232 to TTL board.

https://www.makershed.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=MSR...
Researchers Develop Proxy-Less Anonymity System: Telex
This Week in Location Based Marketing Ep34: Priority Moments
Why would anyone think that MS wants to crush Mono? Not only does it not make sense in general, but MS and Mono have worked together for years. Hell, the lead dev of F# is speaking at Monospace this weekend: http://monospace.us/
I think the whole platform-specific app development issue is going to cause increasing headaches for the mobile platform developers over the next year or two. All these rigid policies and semi-arbitrary and unaccountable decisions to reject apps and locked up technical details just make it hard for serious businesses to justify committing the resources required to write native apps worth more than an iFart toy.

Maybe some will and they'll get away with it, just as right now Zynga are doing pretty well even though they're almost completely dependent on Facebook, but the average app developer doesn't have the highly valuable and almost symbiotic relationship that evolved in that case. Meanwhile, much of what apps do could also be done almost as well using web-based software, which can run quite happily on any modern mobile, can be developed at a fraction of the cost of targeting each platform with a native app, and doesn't carry any risk of lock-in or summary execution by random platform developer/app store employee.
Yes, but the habital zone scales with star size, so a radial position less than the habital zone would indeed be warmer than desirable for Earth-like life.
Indeed. The stress associated with individual confrontations is orders of magnitudes higher than the stress associated with giving a general anti-cheating lecture.
Do you have some sources for this?
The black triangle
Crucial Elements of Startup Success