skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember brining up a theory on reddit about how rice agriculture had a profound influence on Japanese culture, and this idiot chimes in with "Japanese like to cooperate because they had AGRICULTURE?" Basically, his entire concept of agriculture was a point in a tech tree in a strategy game. (Hence no differentiation between agriculture in the wheat fields of Western Europe vs. rice paddies in Japan.)

In some ways, modern life does leave us out of touch with the complexities of the world and nature.
Evidence that 80-90% of the claims made by epidemiologists are false [pdf]
congratulations, you have good taste in science-fiction

More like, congratulations, you can be conditioned like Pavlov's dog.
Well, he could have included Software Engineering in that.

That said, I don't think the engineered part of Nokia's software was bad. In fact, from what I understand Symbian was/is fanastic. But the UI was absolutely awful.
"You must use your real name here" is not discrimination and it is not illegal. It may be something you disagree with, but that's another matter.

Discrimination would be a "whites only" social network, and regardless of legality, I'm sure they exist.
MixRead Weekly Startup Events
There are many things that one does not have to use, but are big parts of our culture. I think that social networking is becoming such a thing. As such, I think the "you don't have to use it" argument rings false. It means either using it in a way that you are not comfortable with, or not using it and being left out.
Thanks that puts everything into perspective now, very helpful.
I can't believe Microsoft is licensing all of them, otherwise they wouldn't care about them as much. In fact, they probably wouldn't have even bothered to buy them, especially if they thought the DoJ would rule in the way that they did.

The DoJ ruling merely means they can't really leverage those patents against Google to stifle them more, which I'm sure the legal departments of Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle would have loved to do. It means those patents are less of a threat, but it wasn't a win for Google either.

I don't agree that the DoJ would have made the same decision in the case that Google had exclusively won the patents. I think the litigious nature of Apple, Oracle, and Microsoft, especially towards Android, had quite a bit to do with that decision.

I feel like Google is pulling the same thing they pulled with the FCC's 700Mhz Spectrum auction: Highlighting the faults of the system, advocating for consumers, getting some help from the government and trying to get their way without actually paying for it.
Press release:
http://www.ll.mit.edu/news/DRACO.html

Journal article (open access, hooray!)
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...
IP addresses were already preserved:

> (E) telephone or instrument number or other subscriber number or identity, including any temporarily assigned network address; and

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/usc_sec_18_00002703----...

The new law explicitly amends the previous law so that IP address records are stored for 18 months, as opposed to 90 days.
Live now: Technology News
And it's a pretty decent way to learn some basic programming skills, irrelevant of the actual language.
Google: MSFT (and others) have a cache of nuclear warheads pointed at us, and they outbid us when we tried to get our own stockpile for deterrence.

MSFT: We gladly would have been part owners in a stockpile that can never be used on us.

It would be like fighting the cold war by investing in nuclear stockpiles that can never be used unless both the USA and the USSR put their keys in the launcher. That's not how deterrence works.
VMware Raises Controversial vSphere 5 vRAM Entitlements
I think it goes a little overboard to say that racial minorities aren't safe using their real names online. As for people who have something controversial to say, I generally avoid saying it in public under my real name anyway. Such is the human condition.
Seen this before (on here I think), but it's an incredibly useful tool.
Load testing Mono/Nginx/FastCGI stack on EC2
Why Apple Even Now Is Still Very Cheap
I look forward to the VOTE FOR THIS IF YOU LIKE COOKIES ACT of 2012.
Here's the response to this response :)
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/04/gentlemen-take-this-outside...

On an unrelated note, this is a very different kind of MSFT PR, and almost completely brought about by Frank Shaw. In the old days, MSFT would have put out a boring press release filled with corporate speak. Frank has brought a real-time, plain-speak, slightly aggressive approach to dealing with crises like this one and the earlier Bing/Google toolbar spat. Interesting shift in PR strategy.
Your cynicism is not well borne out on this message board.
Iirc, the multiple-sources requirement came in because of some cases where there was exactly one "reliable" article on a subject, but it was hilariously bad, like an article on a fringe physics theory in some popular-press magazine that made the mistake of taking it seriously, or an article on a person that paints them in a very negative light. So the worry is that without more that one source, Wikipedia just amplifies bias by parroting what one source says, because the one source gets cited, but the rebuttals don't exist in a citeable form. That can happen with more sources too, but at least there's more chance of sources disagreeing when they're >1.

Despite it being phrased as "notability", to me it's the "verifiability" requirement that's a better argument: there should only be Wikipedia articles on things where there exist enough good sources to write a reasonably well sourced article. That's more of a pragmatic than a philosophical decision; not "this subject deserves/doesn't-deserve an article", but rather "we have/don't-have enough sources to write a good article about this subject".
Ask HN: Rate name for our startup or propose your variant!
We want to bring web tasks automation to everyone.

* You will create your first script in 15 minutes using drag and drop right in the browser.

* There is absolutely no requirement to know how web works!

* Afterwards, you can schedule the script to be run on our server or you can try it from your browser.

* You also can share scripts with your friends on our market place!

Technically, we target web2.0 Internet with heavy use of JavaScript (as in Gmail for example) and pay strong attention to make things intuitive and easy (using clever programming and ML)

Think of us as Needlebase combined with Mozenda without annoying need to install programs; cute interactive web2.0 UI for complete dummies ;-) and cheap price tag!

With that in mind what do you think about name antsurfor.me for our product? :-)

Edit. Please, see description in comment below.

Also, feel free to propose a cool name. If we decide to take it, your name will be credited on our main page forever! :-)
Looks like this will actually take advantage of the screen real-estate on a 24"+ monitor. Great!
I'm reading it right at the moment.
It's a bit of struggle coming from a Oracle/Ruby background - particularly with some of the high level (for me) maths background required.

I often think of working thru HTDP instead, but finishing SICP has become somewhat of an obsession - I will not stop til I have worked thru the thing from start to finish, no matter how long it takes . . . (and so far, it's taken about 6 months)
Prima facie notability only gets you so far when someone is determine to squelch a certain kind of information. I once worked on a WP article about a guy who had written dozens of books, had several biographies written about him, was the subject of any number of articles in major media (e.g. BBC), was generally acknowledged as one of the leading people in his field etc etc. The problem was that he is in an area which is (with some justification) called "pseudoscientific". Now it shouldn't really matter whether or not he's a kook, whether his ideas are valid or invalid because he is, for better or worse, an obviously notable person.

But there are people editing WP who just loathe the idea of anything that's not mainstream science staining the purity that is Wikipedia, so the article was nominated for deletion and had to go through a tedious process which should never have happened.

If a couple of people hadn't had the time or energy to defend the article it would have died, not because it wasn't notable, but just because a bunch of people wanted to censor it.
When I was reading the article I had the impression I was reading a screenplay, since the author didn't mention specific interviews I was assuming all along that there was some embellishment going on.

I'm surprised too that the NY published such a weakly fact-checked account but a lot of the Christine Fair commentary reads like scoop envy.
Why Nashville, TN is the best place to launch a Health Care company
Video from Our International Meetups
I am actually thinking that you are in fact correct here. Though most articles on the bills in question describe them as 'Tracking internet usage' (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/07/house-committee-approv... , http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2011/07/29/congress-child-p... etc) what the bill in question (and previous bills on the subject) states is the mandatory storage of assigned IP-addresses.

Now I guess one could assume that our ISP's save our browser history, however there is no mandate in this bill for access to that data.

I will look over the blog post and make edits to clarify this.

Thank you very much for pointing this out!
What I meant to say...
Twitter Psychology for Marketers
I was just about to switch to the new Mail in Lion and now this comes out. Thanks Google ;)
I think the implication is that his children would also have to use their real names (but I don't know how the bill actually deals with minors).
Google+ and Facebook are two websites. There's the entire rest of the internet for pseudonymous discussion and "fellowship", and no one's trying to take that away.
> My goal is really to add math to my diet, ...

I've started reading "The Haskell Road to Logic, Maths and Programming", maybe that's something for you or some other lurker here that would like to improve on math.

There is a review [2] that gives an interesting impression on the book. The other ones at amazon might also be interesting.

The table of contents + first chapter is available as a postscript file[3]. This should give you an idea what to expect from the book.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Haskell-Logic-Maths-Programming-Comput...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/review/R3CL50MCVEO7UA/ref=cm_cr_pr_per...

[3] http://www.cwi.nl/~jve/HR/HR-27.ps.gz
Can you please reconcile something to me: Kissmetrics operates in a most ethical fashion but they prevent deletion of cookies in order to track my browsing? Do they think I'm stupid?

Or let me ask the other way: Is it ethical to prevent deletion of cookies in order to track my browsing and intentionally hide the fact that they are doing that?
Microsoft Responds To Google’s Response To Microsoft’s Response
So what? Does that automatically make everything he exposed false?
Also, don't have been in business long.

If you bootstrap, quietly doubling year after year, remaining profitable or break even, then decide the market is now ready for what you do so it's time to go big ... you likely won't get funded. You've proven ability at the wrong model, when investors want a blowout. A lack of history lets you sell the exponential growth story. History makes them ask why you didn't already have it.
HW patents are useless against Android. Android is just software. If Apple want to attack OEM on hardware patents, good luck to them. Samsung, Motorola and even HTC (with S3 and even their own) have tons of HW patents, this is a game Apple cannot win as all OEM could block Apple from shipping their devices, remember, only only one patent from these OEM has to be valid to block Apple from shipping. Actually, the same can be said about software patents too...
We (BakedCode) built http://prompt.im a few months back as a bit of fun (took us about 1-2 days to build) which sounds like what you're after. Here's an example: http://prompt.im/hackernews
anyone remember when AAPL claimed "we just wish to protect our innovation" (i think it was about the HTC suit).

well, how does buying novel/nortel patents protect your innovation? how does joining with MSFT to keep patents away from GOOG protect your innovation?
I don't see what's silly about the explanation considering it's about efficiency and performance. As a KISSmetrics customer I can tell you the focus is on funnels and key data; not on an internal cookie ID so that we can collude with other companies.
There are certainly aspects of this movement to which I'm sympathetic, and I see lots of ingredients in their campaign that give it a good shot of taking root. But I wonder if there's really enough passion in anonymous sympathizers or if it's mostly just entertained on-looking.
Ask HN: How do you hire technical writers? Or do you?
Hi:

I'm looking to get back into the freelance technical writing field, and would like to work for the type of startups I see on HN. That said, I never see any tech writing jobs on those companies' sites.

Is there a glut of technical writers? Do founders know someone who knows someone? Or is there just not a lot of technical writing being done at these startups?

Any information would be greatly appreciated - as well as any insights you may have as to the right way to approach such firms and folks.

Thanks.

Note: I'm writing under a pseudonym because I don't want you to think I'm trolling for work.
This should end up as a good case study - we just got featured on the front page of the App Store. Thanks again to HN for the support. Will let you know how things go from here..
White supremacy did not invent hegemony. It's a fallacy. There are people who say that places like Africa or North America was peaceful before the europeans. Unfortunately they were both very active places where people would kill their neighbours. It's a part of humanity, one we need to fight against.
Yeah. but emacs' artist-mode has a lot more features, like drawing more shapes, filling, copying/pasting, spraying...
Oddly enough, a lot of who used to be "white suprematists" are these days are more of the non-hegemonic cultural-separatist types, heavily influenced by postmodernism and postcolonial theory in the "right of Peoples to self-determination" sort of sense (at least those associated with the 'New Right' theorists). You end up with strange spectacles like French nationalists getting along well with right-wing Turkish nationalists, Japanese nationalists, or Israeli nationalists--- they all agree that they'd like to observe each other peacefully from a distance, in each group's pure, mono-ethnic country, each with their Glorious Histories and whatnot, maybe with the occasional bit of tourism, but definitely no immigration.
I think it's more to the point that the existence of Facebook and Google+ didn't stop EJ from telling her story. You have the whole rest of the internet to be pseudonymous.
> "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be."

--Kurt Vonnegut
HW patents are useless against Android. Android is just software.

It's HW patents against devices running Android.

If Apple want to attack OEM on hardware patents, good luck to them.

If? Those patents I shown are part of actual lawsuits against Samsung/Motorola in court now. This isn't a hypothetical -- I'm telling you what is happening.

Samsung, Motorola and even HTC (with S3 and even their own) have tons of HW patents, this is a game Apple cannot win as all OEM could block Apple from shipping their devices, remember, only only one patents from these OEM has to be valid to block Apple from shipping.

Apple has taken that plunge already. Again, this isn't a hypothetical. All three companies you note are in court already. All three have countersued.

I'm not saying this might happen. I'm saying it is happening. Apple has already asked, and in at least one country received, injunctions on devices.

Apple isn't sitting around saying, "Lets just use SW patents to stop Android the operating system proper". They're using HW and SW patents and trade dress, and trademark to go after Android (indirectly by targeting OEMs and devices running the SW).

Google supporters seem to think this is a fight against the evil empire of Microsoft, and want to ignore Apple exists. It would be convenient if they didn't, but the fact of the matter is that Apple is likely to be the real fly in the ointment. MS might slow Android down, but it'll be Apple who crushes it.
Maybe the CTM book might be something for you as well. See my other comment[1] to learn more about it. Norvig says[2] the following about it:

Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming (Van Roy
& Haridi) is seen by some as the modern-day successor to Abelson &
Sussman. It is a tour through the big ideas of programming,
covering a wider range than Abelson & Sussman while being perhaps
easier to read and follow. It uses a language, Oz, that is not
widely known but serves as a basis for learning other languages.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2848027

[2] http://norvig.com/21-days.html
The Pentagon Is Hiring “Internet meme trackers” But Probably It’s Not Uber Job
Experiment with CSS3 animations via westciv.com tools
I actually am aware of this, it is very true, and have been moving more away from it as I am getting older. I am in the (well, constant) process of updating my online identity. For example, my website is shit, haven't got to that yet.
Creating Firefox web apps that look like native apps
What Kiss does is explicitly violating user intent -- ethical people assume that when cookies go away, the user is making a decision.

From the paper summary : "The cache cookie method used ETags, and is capable of unique tracking even where all cookies are blocked by the user and “Private Browsing Mode” is enabled." Resuscitating cookies the user has cleared is simply wrong.

And you have an expansive definition of "ethical".
As an entrepreneur:

That Java is what powers major companies (including Google) would be interesting to know.

What's the benefit to installing this? If I install it, how am I going to find someone to work on it? That is is based on industry standard, easily modifiable Java that I can easily hire developers to work on would be good to know. Maybe even pitch it as a first round product to build a prototype or proof of concept rapidly. Would need to find some target customers and ask them what they want, though.

How many developer hours am I saving? Showing that "most developers estimate around 100-200 hours to set up the basic framework for a new application" lets me work out in my head how much I'm saving.

I don't care about HTML or CSS or BCrypt or SQL, but that I can save X00 hours reinventing the wheel and get straight into implementing just the logic of my app is a big draw.

If it were me, I'd probably give this product away - you have nothing to lose. The target audience will have no idea how to use it anyway, just that it can save them money. And that's where they contact you for help, as the World's #1 Quickstarter expert. Worst thing that can happen is that other developers download it for free and start building products on it, in which case you've built yourself an ecosystem.

Case study: Wordpress (Wordpress.com), Drupal (Acquia), all built themselves into multi-million dollar companies on this model. For a smaller case study, Lovdbyless.com is a free RoR social network framework that some friends of mine gave away and that led to millions in consulting work.
See, in an ideal world there would be an internet with lots of web sites, some that make people like smokinjoe happy by requiring real names and others that make you happy, by providing a forum for people to speak out anonymously.

If anything, your viewpoint--that every single website on the internet has to be run the way you would run it--is the more oppressive one.
Thing is, it's not like a non-technical person is going to download this and say "Awesome, no need to pay a developer to build this now - all I have to do is implement a few SQL tables and forms and I'm done" - they'll still need the developer, just now they can get more done for their small v1.0 budget.
I have occasionally been accused by previous bosses (and some customers after I switched to consulting 12 years ago) of lacking drive or passion because I tend to not work very many hours per week. I disagree since I am totally into my work while I am doing it. I just don't do well working for 8 or 9 hours straight, but I am happy when I do a few hours at a time sprints, with hours off in between the sprints.

I believe that people as individuals just need to do careful thinking about their activities. I know people who work for long periods of time, totally focussed, and seem to really be happy. I know other people who don't seem to like what they do for their careers, and I don't think that they find much contentment from work except for appreciating their pay.

One thing that I think is very toxic in work environments is if people feel inadequate in their jobs and work too hard to compensate. Double bad on managers who try to use this.

Useful article.
Proxy overrider
i want a basic override of the internet at my location so i can go on utube i dont wanna get my computor scrubed in it so i want outside help
Me too. I have a signed copy of his second album that I bought from him directly, by handing him cash, in a club. That's about as independent as it gets.
Agreed. I'm curious about what kinds of tasks they were asked to perform.
I thought so at first but artist-mode is way superior in most features and the feature set is a lot larger.

The table drawing is better but still has a very long way to go to match anything in org-mode. And then you can only draw and don't have any real spreadsheet capabilities.
Google Plus Revolutionizes The Feedback Loop
Are we going back to Client Server technology
I was just reading about Parse, a new startup on Techcrunch. There's kinvey that is doing similar stuff. While the idea is cool and definitely brings speed to creating mobile apps. But I feel we are going back to client server, except this time the client is Mobile. For now they are offering APIs or SDKs which let you store data in the backend without ever building a backend yourself. My guess is they are using key-value data stores that enables dynamic creation of data and attributes. They also offer APIs that let you build a query to fetch the data.

The problem with this approach is i.e not owning backend piece, soon your app will need some kind of backend business logic and not just data storage/access APIs. And when this logic is needed you will be left with no choice but to build this on the client, you mobile phone. So if you building for multiple mobile platforms you will have to replicate this business logic across all clients. Not very efficient in terms of cost, developer resources and time. This is exactly the reason why client server technology failed and could never scale.

While this may still work for apps (games may be) that are light on backend-logic, I feel there will be some duplicate work that will still be done if you develop across multiple mobile platforms.

Not sure how other folks feel about this.
Dow plunges 513 points; Worst fall since 2008
No more features! Give it away to the first 5-10 people in your target demographic you can find who'll take it, and see what they do with it. If they don't end up using it, why not? If they do, what is it missing? Stick to those 5-10 like glue and they'll tell you exactly what you need to build your business. (Read: Four Steps to the Epiphany)
Watch Captain America The First Avenger Online Free
Watch Captain America The First Avenger Online Free
The film is also a good idea to cast the best all around in every Marvel movie so far Main actors in each bring something to the table which is really to promote the film and to throw this big