skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's one hell of a bet. I'm actually surprised that Buffet didn't want to buy the bank's debt offerings (if there are any).

I haven't read past the first couple paragraphs (too much legalese) but is there an out clause? If BoA tanks in the stock market, Berkshire could stand to lose a lot of money on the common stock.
That makes me wonder about the Fermi Paradox - if economic growth is nearly exponential then presumably there should probably be a large number of civilisations that have been undergoing exponentional economic and technical growth for a long long time.

So where are they?

After all, if you believe that economic growth will definitely get us to the stars one day why hasn't someone/something else got there/here first?
In my experience, you could make a similar argument about going to college for business vs. actually understanding anything about business. A lot of recent grads I've encountered don't know much beyond buzzwords and overly abstract theory. College also seems to frequently have the unfortunate effect of instilling overconfidence and a sense of entitlement. That said, if the goal is simply to get a job, college is clearly the path of least resistance.

Personally, I'm glad I didn't get a degree, or at least that I didn't follow the common path of high school-college-entry level job, even though it has made life more difficult at times. It cut me off from the easy route of getting some comfortable, dull job at a big company and becoming stagnant. Instead I've had to carve out my own path and I think the experience and confidence I've gained from that are worth a lot more than a degree. Frankly, not one of the clients I've worked with has even asked me about a degree. When you have solid work you can point to and enthusiastic references, whether/where you went to college becomes completely irrelevant. If a company won't hire me for a job I'm qualified for because I don't have a piece of paper, it seems to follow that they are likely to hire unqualified people who do have that piece of paper, so it turns out that their filter actually works out a lot better for me than it does for them, and I'm happy to be filtered.

I also don't buy the notion that without college you won't be 'well-rounded' or 'generally educated'. When I was in school, I always felt like I had a lot less time to devote to reading and really learning because my days were filled by tedious work and usually dull classes. Going to college isn't what makes you well-rounded and educated, it's a thirst for knowledge and the time to fulfill it.
Is there a specific YUI widget you're unhappy with?
Lessons from Facebook's Security Bug Bounty Program
Hey Heroku, please get yourself PCI-DSS Level 1 certified! BTW does anyone know if any of the ruby cloud providers offer that?
The key word about economics in your comment, for the reasoning by Charles Stross (the author of the article submitted to open the other thread), is "nearly." I used to read a lot of science fiction about interstellar travel when I was a kid, so I understand why HN readers suspend disbelief about interstellar travel, but economic growth at any rate is not going to answer the arguments of Stross (himself an experienced author of science fiction) about the absolute resources needed to send a group of human beings off on a voyage to another star, uphill for millions of expensive miles. As Thomas Sowell has commented, the first principle of economics is scarcity. And the first principle of politics (or of science fiction fandom) is to ignore the first principle of economics.
Don't you get that by FTP'ing your WAR to Tomcat, whether running on a dedicated server, VPS or in the Cloud, or am I missing something and overly complicating my life?
There's already more oil on Titan than there is on Earth. :)
Prior Art
Time to end software patents.
good suggestions! I'm implementing those now...
Jython's pretty far behind other Python implementations from what I understand.
harvesting it from another planet

You raise an interesting idea here. I wonder how difficult it would be to harvest diamond from a diamond planet. Diamond can be cleaved if you hit it at the correct angle [1] but if the entire planet is made of diamond then what would happen? Would a wrong cleave or heavy force shatter the planet into nothingness?

Rather, I think the planet is made of many small (relative to an entire planet) sized diamonds embedded in dirt.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_cutting#Cleaving_or_saw...
The Revue hasn't been discontinued.
Google App Engine for Java is another PaaS option for running Java in the cloud. I wonder how these two compare?
Their Hello World example looks awful... And the majority of the article is spent apologising for Java.
Although pedantically correct, it is quite common for people to use thee term "Apache" to refer to the web server. The folder for settings is "/etc/apache2" on debian based distros for example.
beauty and the beast
I definitely agree. There's a difference in "nitpicking" for true product excellence, and "nitpicking" because of some deeper-rooted insecurity.

Everyone believes they're doing the former, but many are really doing the latter.

Then there are those doing the former that are simply wrong - their customers don't actually find their nitpick all that important or valuable.

I've dealt with all three kinds. And I've tried to emulate attention to detail for product excellence, but I'm sure people thought I was just a nitpicking insecure jackass.

My hat is off to those rare individuals who can do it very well.
Good link. It's a super old story [1982] but the information in it still stands the test of time. It's a great read into how the PR departments of DeBeers influenced entire countries (e.g. Japan) where diamonds previously held little/no value.
Comex, iOS hacker, to start internship at Apple
The headline is obviously link bait. The story doesn't totally follow. In fact, the story doesn't really make much sense. But if that's truly the author's sentiment, I do feel for him.

How cool is it that we can celebrate a maker like Steve? Would he prefer we idolize celebrities, politicians, criminals, odd balls, imaginary figures?
tptacek has already noted the earlier HN discussion of the problem, kindly providing a link to the thread. Because there was discussion in that thread about the price of gold, relative to the United States dollar, I'll just mention that the latest news is that gold can go down as well as up in price relative to the dollar.

http://blogs.barrons.com/focusonfunds/2011/08/25/gold-points...

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110825-710588.html

The general advice on investing still stands: "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent," so no investment, however reasonable, is 100 percent sure to be profitable.
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So you're saying that people who are good at maths are good at mental arithmetic? If that is true, then it doesn't follow that teaching people mental arithmetic will make them good at maths. In fact since mental arithmetic is hard and time consuming to learn, and a decreasingly useful skill, teaching mental arithmetic might turn people off maths!
Disclosure: I have a CISSP (previous employer paid for study / exam).

I would agree that within technical circles, the CISSP is not worth much at all (in certain crowds, it's harmful). If you're well-connected in the industry when job hunting and you have a known body of work, there's little benefit.

Rightly or wrongly, though, it still holds pull with recruiters and management. Getting the current de facto seal of approval from a third party saves them the effort of having to make an initial skills assessment themselves. Buzzword-filtering corporate recruiters lap that stuff up.

I know that I've seen a lot of job ads which (wrongly) ask for a CISSP as a requirement. Additionally, when I went to work in Japan, the CISSP formed the centrepiece of evidence in the work visa application as to why I was an "expert" they needed to go overseas to hire.
To the YUI team -

First - thank you for your amazing work. I've put YUI to use in many projects.

Second - tiny bit of feedback about yuilibrary.com - I know you have your own CDN but can we have back a "Download" button? I hate it when I have to search for 5 minutes to find out how to download something. It really makes me feel like the whole project is going to be a pain in the ass when even downloading it is hard.
"What I want from the CISSP or any certification program is that it be hard to pass."

On exam difficulty, try CCIE certification. There are two parts, the written ($350 per an attempt) and then the lab part which cost $1500 per an attempt. The lab part has a 26% pass rate over the history of the exam. In comparison, the CA Bar exam has a 35% and 55% pass rate, which is the lowest in the US.

You also can't just take it anywhere, you have to travel to a designated lab testing center, and depending on where you are that means cost of travel and lodging.
"Summary: Neither dead nor God, Steve Jobs’ has been praised to unprecedented lengths in the past 24 hours. Is the praise always on the mark or does it go too far?"

similarly, apostrophes mean nothing to the author.
Happy 5th Birthday to Amazon EC2
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I think people would generally appreciate you summarising your post and then perhaps quietly noting you'd blogged on the subject in the bottom line. (Just for future reference)
I used to live in Seattle and walked by the Real offices fairly regularly. I can't help but wonder what the employees feel when their company does something so overtly evil like this.

Thankfully I've never worked for any company that's so blatantly evil. Sure, controversial decisions, but not like this.
You're missing the bit where you run Tomcat on a VPS. Deploying RoR isn't much more complicated, but still infinitely more complicated than dropping it on Heroku and having it just work. Plus scaling: breaking a sweat on Heroku? Push a button. On your VPS? All kinds of trouble, just when you probably have other things on your mind.
I'd have to say I agree entirely with dave.is. The only point I would add is; college is for those who know what they are using it for. Most people are just funneled in for whatever reason and really have no solid understanding of why they are there let alone which classes are the best for absorbing knowledge.

People funneled in could be the definition of a slacker.. they don't know why they're there - so why care or try?

Studying on your own is definitely the answer if you have the passion and drive to stick with one thing. If you find yourself competing with a lot of random "passions" (like me) understand every aspect of how college will benefit you (career, socially, etc.) before jumping blind into the stream.
Apple Patents Show Steve Jobs’s Attention to Design
From a user's perspective, after describing your company as the "Airbnb of pet sitting" you may have to follow that up by describing what Airbnb is. My parents (the benchmark by which I judge all potential customers) would have know idea what Airbnb is...but they do know that their golden retriever needs a cheap place to stay while they go on a cruise next month. So the best way to describe it to them is:

Stayhound - we use social connections to help pet owners find pet sitters for less than kennels charge

I can't speak from experience with investors, but to me describing your business as the "X of Y" makes it sound derivative, like the old style of movie pitches (e.g. "it's When Harry Met Sally meets Beetlejuice...on the Titanic!"). I think it's better to succinctly describe your product or service, while avoiding marketingspeak or names of other companies. Of course, investors may think otherwise.
That is a great control. Which reminds me that I should go back and re-examine extjs for an internal app I'm building at work. Thanks!
I did something like that (on an LED sign) during a weekend a couple of years back: http://op9.com/latest/226/alphabrite-v1.0-released

Here it is in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goQFce5cqLs

Also hitches onto a website to allow for real-time messaging. The day it hit Reddit's front page in 2009, oh god.
One of the most famous mathematicians of 20th century? What about Einstein, Turing, Feynmann, Russell, Erdos, van Neuman, Gödel?
Hi Potatolicious,

I work with the Machine Learning team at Ness. Thanks for all the feedback! Please email us at support@likeness.com as you have more thoughts, especially about where Ness does and does not work for you.

With regard to only teaching Ness by rating restaurants 4-5 stars, this is a great point, especially for the first 10 ratings. There are a couple particular ways we address this today:
1) Which restaurants you pick tells us a lot. Did you rate hole in the walls vs. expensive places? We have spent a lot of time working on our collaborative filter to address this. Wikipedia has a good article for a starting ground on this, and the papers that came out of the Netflix Prize are great [http://www.netflixprize.com/assets/GrandPrize2009_BPC_BellKo...].
2) On the personalize page, there are multiple stages. One of them is to confirm that the system is correct about places you don't like, which is obviously also very informative.
3) Sometimes, as with your Chipotle example, we won't be right. Telling us where we are wrong is particularly helpful in correcting the system, which in some sense gives us more information that confirming what we already know. Think of it of correcting a person, who misunderstood what you like from examples you gave. In a metaphorical sense, this is like providing results that have more entropy.

-Jeremy
VP of Product & Machine Learning
Personally would like an Android version.

Edit: what about a web version or even mobile web version, etc.
Mailing Lists for Sale
This is disgusting. I wish we could have a world where you do not just get suddenly sued for doing no wrong. This could easily be you or me. Is there anything real we can do to stop this type of stuff from happening?
i so want to code this app in Java...NOT!!
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One of the best ways to wet your creativity is by browsing another talented artist’s handiwork. Digital art is one of those artistic areas in which many can gather inspiration and certainly everyone can at least appreciate. The amount of details that go into a completed digital artwork reveal the vast amount of time it takes an artist to complete a single composition. The best of the best seem to almost know intuitively what it takes to bring an illustration to life, making the completion of a digital image look both easy and hard at the same time.
What is a Digital Agency?
A ringtone that can give women bigger breasts
Raunk.com - Rate anything. See best-of lists.
> If BoA tanks in the stock market, Berkshire could stand to lose a lot of money on the common stock.

When Buffet made similar bets post-crash, the US govt made sure that he made money. (Of course, GS also had other things going for it, like much of the top-staff at Treasury.)

Obama and Buffet have been very good for each other.
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Years ago when I had to download Real Player for one reason or another, they wanted me to register my email with them. Not wanting to give them my email, I put in a rather snarky bogus email. This was the result: http://i.imgur.com/3tIav.jpg

One of the happiest moments of my life.
Tim Cook: my first-person impression of Apple's new CEO
Opa is definitely something, but isn't going anywhere without the support of existing database servers. I don't really need that much of automation to create a prototype - and that's what Opa is only good at in it's current form, unfortunately.
Wordpress Ratings Plugin 2011
Git Today: a git script to show you what you've done in the past day
Can PostgreSQL pickup where MySQL left off?
Cheap designer jeans
2 Years, and 50 Million downloads later... Bump is back at YC
Steve sold NeXT to Apple for $400 Million. You're some guy with a blog.

What are you so smug about?
Among the top-tier CS schools, there's a mix of private and public. Several of those private schools (MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, etc.) have extremely large endowments that help make college affordable for those that get in.

If you fall in the dreaded "middle-ground" for financial aid, your options for an affordable education are somewhat more limited, but nonetheless existent.

A rough estimate for the United States could be that ~30 states have good to excellent public universities.

The group that seems to be in the toughest spot are the students from states without excellent public universities and in a bad financial position for aid or grant money.
Nokia C2-02 Specifications
Nokia C2-02 Specifications : Nokia c2-02 Toucscreen, For fans of Nokia cell phones that require information about the Nokia C2-02 could see articles this is.

Nokia C2-02 is a mobile phones S40 with resistive touch screen features QVGA resolution, 2-megapixel camera and 10MB internal memory expandable to 32 GB via microSD card.
Most? No.

Some, a few? Yes.

Also, stop trolling ##C with your Haskell stuff, nobody cares.
This is a good example of what I really think we need:

Testing, static analysis, and help from the type system.
Great feedback, everyone. I've pushed a few quick changes to address the low-hanging fruit:

- We're now using Maven Pro for headings (no more Trebuchet).

- Replaced Lucida Grande with Helvetica in the nav bar (sorry Windows users, you get Arial).

- The site now has a max width of 1200px instead of expanding infinitely. This seems like a reasonable compromise, since any purely fixed-width design draws the ire of people who hate fixed-width designs.

Keep the feedback coming!
It's all over the map. Some people like equity. Some people (I'm in this camp) think early equity is too risky to compensate for the salary cuts demanded.

Say I take a $10,000 pay cut. Say your company is worth $1,000,000. That means I should get 1% right? No. I should get 1% this year, starting immediately. But wait. My 1% has only a very small chance over ever turning into money. That means I need, say, 5-10 percent to compensate for that. Don't know many startups willing to give someone 5-10% for a $10k salary cut? Neither do I. Maybe I'm too conservative.

Or, if you want the short answer, I'd say between 0.25% and 5% is normal to go along with a 20-30% salary cut. That's what I've seen, at least. YMMV.
It says a distance of 1200 miles but a ping of just 3ms, which means they're breaking the law. Speed of light in a vacuum: 299.8km per millisecond.
Only somewhat relevant, but comex (developer of JailbreakMe and a Dev-Team member) is starting an internship at Apple in a few weeks: https://twitter.com/comex/status/106863873952448512
I disagree that being less shitty than the other shitty certifications is a vote for getting a CISSP.

Whenever people ask me if they should do it, there are pretty much two instances where I recommend it:

1.) You work in corporate security (maybe a CISO, or work for an internal security group within an organization) where you will actually have to deal with security across the many domains that the CISSP covers. Depending on where you work, it might either be required or strongly encouraged. In which case, I'd say, knock yourself out.

2.) You're looking for a job. There are a lot of places that list it as a requirement for a job, as it's one of the few things a recruiter or HR person can flag a resume for. Now, you might say to yourself "I'd never want to work for a place where they actually considered having a CISSP a requirement", to which I'd reply "Good for you, you've moved along the path of security zen". But the reality is, people need jobs. So if you need a job, and this is something that could get you a job (even a job that grizzled security veterans would sneer at), have at it.

Infosec is a young industry (birthed from a very anti-corporate community), and there isn't anyplace that any large number of people consider authoritative enough to offer a certification that isn't considered laughable. That may change in the future (it'd be nice), but I wouldn't bet on it.

If you're really just looking at getting a CISSP to get a job, however, I think you'd be much better off becoming a PCI QSA. You'd pretty much never be out of work. Weigh that against what doing PCI for a living does to your soul. Everybody needs to make that decision for themselves.

So the plus-side of having a CISSP is if you're looking for work, and the downside is attracting the ire of the security community (which may or may not bother you, depending on where you hang out at nights and on weekends). Also having to pay to keep it current, and not associating with any evil hackers (while at the same time having to submit CPE credits for attending conferences put on by evil hackers).
Well, once you get past this, which is its very own beautiful flower:

http://www.macnews.de/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/MacBook-Air...

you find some pretty netbook-line innards with a big, flat battery. I've certainly seen laptops with less attractive innards, but the main thing I see when I look inside the MBA is non-replaceable components. I actually had the white plastic Macbook in mind in my original comment. Those have more stuff in them and a lot like a PC laptop with a bit more reinforcement than average.
How to be a free thinker
Ah, fair enough! Sorry for the misread.
Given that making diamonds in a lab is cheaper than mining it right here on earth, it's hard to see how it could be cheaper to fly hundreds of thousands of miles through outer space to mine it.
Using only Windows is very limiting.
also Amazon Elastic Beanstalk.
I'm not sure if HP is trying to sell Palm/their mobile division or not, but they should. They've just pushed out all of their WebOS devices into the market (at a big loss), so now people are actually using their OS, which makes it much more valuable to a prospective buyer than it was a week ago. There was a huge frenzy over Touch Pads, sure it's only because it was cheap, but at least people are using it now. I don't think HP should continue making them, but it wouldn't be such a bad buy for another company.
If you want "here is a war file" then aren't you looking for beanstalk and appengine?
A Short Rant About Hosting
This is just a wrapper around "git log --since" that doesn't seem to actually provide any additional features.
Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk is a good compromise in this regard. I've been using it to develop some JRuby/Sinatra backend services, and though it's not quite as simple as Heroku, it's pretty close. Since the applications are just EC2 instances underneath the hood, you can tweak the server image quite a bit too, which is nice when you need to run some odd binary programs along side your web application. I haven't played around with Beanstalk's autoscaling feature yet, but that might come in handy for processing background jobs that fluctuate a lot.
I particularly like this nugget:

> Quick quiz: can your entire sales staff be replaced by a nicely formatted HTML table? If the answer is 'yes', then you are subtracting value and wasting my time.
I authored a Mobile Payments Ecosystem Study 
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