skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, just recently a new visa scheme has been announced that would allow people from the US to travel to Ireland and Irish people to travel to the US to work for a year. I'm not sure when it will be available but it seems interesting. The Irish Times did an article on it http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2008/0919/122177...
Seems like a gamble and some people are winning big. Gambling is not for everyone though.
If you're concerned, benzene smells like almonds.
Isn't competition nice? Hopefully Android will make them open things up even more.
At Swapalease we tried different offer combinations on our payment page including price ranges, price/offer packages, and free trials. Pretty much every price and feature combination you could think of. The point was that we needed to actually put those offers out there in order to understand what the market was truly ready for. When we ran surveys we basically got "we want to pay nothing". If we had gone off that feedback alone, we would have had a completely unrealistic idea of what the true price points would be. Instead we settled on $99 because we found that when an ACTUAL customer (not a survey responder) went to post their vehicle, that was the price point that had the highest take rate.

In regard to HOW we did it, we simply posted the pricing on the payment page. Prior to the payment page you only had to list your year/make/model to start your listing. We then tracked the number of people who went to the FIRST page (year/make/model) versus the number of people who went to the payment page (where the offer was presented) and got a sense for what offers had the highest conversion.

If you put in your year/make/model the idea is that you have interest. So theoretically the same person interested in listing their vehicle for free and the one listing for $500 are going to click to the next page. If we had presented price on the first page we would not have known whether users were bailing on the price or their intent.
http://web.archive.org/web/20010413020517/www4.enron.com/cor...

"From stock options to 3 weeks of vacation--all the benefits that Enron employees enjoy."
Let me know when I can write Free Software for the iPhone. Until then, it's just a toy.
It's rare for Science to form an opinion let alone for it to change it's opinion. You often hear single study's saying something, but Science only cares about what has been independently verified by several studies. The media presents controversy even with tiny fraction's of the community so that you listen. A classic case in point is "String Theory" which people compare to the "Standard Model" but it's still just an area of research that does not have the acceptance of the community of large.

A far more important case is the effects of low levels of radiation on cancer. It's been assumed my some people that there is a linear relationship between the risk of cancer and total radiation but there is still a lot of debate on the topic.

In both cased their are competing ideas, but the entrenched idea is just older and unlike evolution or the general theory of relativity it's far from accepted as correct.
"I agree there's much confusion about Erlang concurrency being related to it being a functional programming language,"

While the term "functional programming language" is sometimes abused to mean different things, isn't the canonical meaning "functional" == "no mutable state"?

If I've understood his rebuttal correctly, he's not adding mutable state, he's allowing a variable to be rebound to different (immutable) values. i.e. his multiple-assignement language is still functional in the sense above.

The difference is that if you have two bindings to the same value, mutable state means that both bindings see an update to that value.

This wouldn't happen with "multiple assignement and immutable values" (if you reassign the binding of one of the two, the other is still bound to the old value).
Evernote Opens Up, Launches API, Hugs Geeks
Scientific method serves to develop progressively more accurate theories by testing hypotheses and discarding those that do not stand up to scrutiny. It "changes opinion" because while scientific understanding is influenced by intellectual trends, cultural dogma, political pressure to manufacture evidence, etc., its fundamental emphasis on testing works as a corrective force in the long run. (As Kuhn noted in _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_, if the old generation refuses to let go of old models a generation may pass before new ideas are really accepted, but such change can be measured in years rather than millennia.)
Good advice.

My general policy is that if the ingredient isn't in my kitchen, I probably don't want to eat food containing it.

In the case of preservatives, it may benefit the company that uses them since their food won't spoil on the shelf -- but it doesn't benefit me in any way. So why risk whatever the long-term effects are when you are not even being rewarded?
At last! Though it did take them much too long to get around to it, they finally did the right thing.
Couldn't agree more,
I still don't trust them, Android forced them to change, it wasn't of good will, or even consumer pressure. Apple will still try to keep control over their products as a company policy
I agree, but I can't help wonder why they didn't drop the NDA on launch. It was clearly an big issue for many people and actively hurting the platform, so it's not merely a matter of laziness or oversight. And I don't buy their "protecting trade secrets" argument at all; with the developer program opened as wide as it was, it would be trivial for a competitor to get wind of the "secret", which as far as I can tell is the Objective C API -- hardly something a competitor would be in a rush to implement, and likely similar to the existing non-NDA Mac OSX dev tools.

There are only two reasons I can see for not dropping the NDA. One is that they didn't feel they needed to, believing that they owned the market, that dropping the NDA was an unnecessary concession of power, and that developer protests were largely symbolic.

The other reason is that they were perhaps getting so many applications that their quality control system was inundated, so they were doing everything they could to impose barriers to development. In this case, perhaps we may see the $99 fee vanish in the next year, as well?
Tim O’Reilly Course Corrects the Definition of Web 2.0
Infrastructure 2.0 is Cloud Computing
Netflix API Launches
Finally! The only people impeded by the NDA were Apple developers. Could Apple seriously believe that anything in the SDK was unknown to their competitors?

However, I think this highlights the mistake Google made in positioning Android as the 'open' alternative. The liabilities of Apple's strategy are all easily addressed by policy changes if being closed becomes a competitive disadvantage.
Now if they'll just allow data-tethering I'll buy one.
I agree with the "index fund" approach. Too many people get caught up playing the market or paying out the butt to some "financial advisor" who doesn't have much more of a clue where the economy is going than your Average Joe.

Just stick it in an index fund and let compound interest be your friend.
I've been a big fan of Evernote since beta. The only thing I was disappointed with was that the OCR didn't seem to work very well.
Honestly, I'm glad they did this, but the NDA was the least of my iPhone worries. App developers are still at the mercy of Apple for what apps they can develop and the public app store is still the only real way to distribute apps. Adhock mode is not enough.
Cthulhu for President. Why vote for a lesser evil?
Why not just give the $700b to healthy banks so that they can lend to businesses and credit worthy consumers?

If we have $700b to give, why use it to buy up toxic debt? I understand wanting to keep the markets moving, so why not address the problem there?
There is enough politics already.
Like he says in the article, you can't define success so you can't really answer this question.

A more interesting test would be comparing randomly sampled students from standard schools against students from alternative schools of thought(Home schooled, private schooled, new age methologies etc.)

You would then have to find a way of generating tests or activities that creates meaningful comparisons of their abilities/attributes. The problem in the end, maybe that boiling everything down to a few attributes is rewarding people for gaming the system, versus changing the system.
The problem with people whining about the content of social news sites...just be thankful the spammers haven't overrun this site like Digg and Reddit.
Wow this added so much to the Calacanis email...guess it proves you only need 10 friends to game Hacker News.
Not to mention the majority of it bounced back the next day.
RELATIVITY | BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS | WEB 2.0 MARKETING | WEB 2.0 ADVERTISING
There are TONS of RDF apps...On corporate and gov't intranets. For some reason or reasons, adoption has been very asymmetrical between public Web and private intranet when it comes to much of the SemWeb stack. For example, see this: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/sweo/public/UseCases/Nasa/ Which describes a production NASA application -- expertise location tool -- for the 80,000 person NASA workforce, which uses RDF extensively internally.
Ah, blog comments:

I’m afraid I must disagree, at least in part. While I agree that Thomson/Reuters should have put more effort into web interoperability, I am troubled by the use of federal dollars to support the development of a competitive product (even free ones).

We'd better tell the GHC folks to stop working on Haskell! It's cutting into Sun's Java revenue!

Anyway, I wonder what law they are using to prevent the reverse-engineering for interoperability? Last time I checked, that is explicitly allowed by the DMCA. If it is an EULA thing, I would be happy to take credit for reverse-engineering the file format; I have never used EndNote. (BibTeX + emacs is much easier to use.)
Does this mean open source apps are allowed now? I believe the NDA was the only thing preventing people from say putting the source on Google code. Of course it still couldn't be covered by a GPL I'd imagine?
He doesn't have ADHD, he's just a bit of a penis.

Admittedly HARO is a good idea though.
The Future of Widgets on Facebook: Dead
120 Ways to Boost Your Brain Power
Speaking up Pays Off. at Fresh Start After Divorce Blog
The value of Android's positioning isn't "open relative to Apple", although that's certainly a nice selling point as long as it lasts, but rather "open on an absolute basis" in that the platform can be picked up by hardware vendors, modified, and used in their devices. Likewise individual technical users can suggest changes to things they don't like.

We don't know yet how it's all going to play out with regard to vendor cooperation (will HTC let us recompile the code for their phones? somehow I kind of doubt it, but we'll see), but in an ideal case it would be a platform for ongoing improvement and maintenance, changing the device upgrade landscape treadmill, possibly quite substantially.
Vote this up if you agree with DarkShikari's missing downvote statements.
Over at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=320415 DarkShikari raises points about a lack of downvoting.

How much of an issue do you see a lack of downvoting being?

How would you stop 'Vote up if' posts on HN? (Yes the title is deliberately cringe/rageworthy)
I've written a post at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=320834 to see how people would react to a plethora of vote up if. It'd be helpful if people here could vote up to keep it on the front page.

I think it would illustrate the point quite well that as HN grows, a reddit element starts to appear. How that's managed is something for pg and co to work out.
I think the thing that trips people up is that the "semantic" in semantic web is talking about the semantics of the schemas, not the the data.

I think a) RDF is a pain in the ass to scale and b) fails to deal with public social systems, which almost always need to record the creator and time of a triple, and this is a pain to always represent in RDF (reify every statement?)

Very early on, I considered using RDF as a data store for delicious, but it was not even close to performant.
"We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work. It has happened before."

I think Apple was being naive if they expected an NDA to give them any sort protection for their technology. Am I missing something? Is there any reason to try to keep their documentation secret when anyone can buy an iPhone and take it apart?
The long view: The basic laws of economics aren't going to suddenly change, as long as a web service provides something people need or want then it should have a shot.
The biggest potential change here is that in an economic downturn what people want and need may change drastically. This may be disruptive for existing startups, but it will create a lot of space for new ideas to meet those new needs.
Things that are imminently practical like new and better ways to search for jobs, or ways to trade skills or items for other items could have real practical value in a depression. Sites that allow people to group their buying power and purchase a larger quantity of some item at lower prices, or sites that help you find carpool partners or generally make your personal economics more streamlined should enjoy increased success in a depression.
HN Feedback on Dojo Learning's new developer API, FB app, and major UI changes
Finding the average of two integers in C: not as simple as you might think
Today we've launched a ton of improvements we've been working on for the past few months, including a complete developer API (includes client libs for Ruby, Python and PHP), and a Facebook app to correspond to new social learning features we've added (and lots more).

I thought it would be good to get a fresh bit of feedback on our site from the HN community, who've been a great source of inspiration throughout our development.
How would you stop 'Vote up if' posts on HN?

I would hope that this crowd is smart enough to see the slippery slope they are embarking upon.
Apple Threatens iTunes Shutdown over Royalty Dispute
Oneseason.com Launch
This year’s IPO market weakest since 1977, and M&As are in the gutter
I'm not sure why he needed to write this. If I wrote a blog post every time someone upset me or disagreed with me, I wouldn't have time for anything else.

General piece of advice: take other people's opinions with a grain of salt. You don't need to be concerned about something just because someone else says you need to be.

(In this case, the proper response to the IM would have been "lol yeah" or something. Just make them go away, and ignore their future input.)
Given the subsidized upgrade paths that most mobile providers give you, the half life for a mobile device is less than for a desktop.

The experience gets better with each generation of new hardware. The killer app of mobile devices is that you DON'T have to be next to a PC.

People are willing to trade a heck of a lot of functionality in order to not be chained to a desk.

With apps living more and more in the cloud, the value of having connectivity anywhere will only increase.
I wish I had 10 friends. That's what I truly find depressing.
Temptation Blocker -  lock yourself out of specific applications for a period of time  (noprocast)
LOL

Ok, I deserved that. Upvoted. [sigh] ;)
Paul Graham: The 10 Secrets of Selling Online
Quite true. As mentioned in the article, the Boxes tab from Facebook obscures most of the "fun" stuff added to profiles. I've returned to Facebook many times in recent weeks, and I can't recall a single time I clicked the Boxes tab (on my profile, or anyone else's). Those apps were interesting when they were "in my face", but now I forget they even exist.
hope the Apple app store is opening up next, when they see that more innovative apps coming up to Android
So it's soon to be $0.15 instead of $0.09 going to the publishers NOT the artists? As an independent artist, I get paid $0.65-0.70/song (same ratio per album), which is great! Once you're on a label I've heard that drops to $0.05-0.10 and the vultures and wolves fight for the rest. Sigh...
FWIW, one could now open-source such an implementation that registered developers could build/install on their own (and at their own risk of breaking AT&T's restriction).
Actually, the reason why I put it on here was because you can use it with Netlogo, so you can do real life simulations of large number of robots.
Perhaps should not have a higher numeric resolution - but more dimensions.
Cool, Apple do something that most other software developers out there do (albeit with a much stranger timeline) and get the upmost of praise!

I wish I knew how to spin PR like this.

(Full Disclosure: Poor attempt at sarcasm, I'm not an Apple hater)
That looked like sarcasm to me. As in there secretive now they where secretive last year so why would a bail out change their mind in the long term?
Since the traditional media content providers have been slow to adopt internet distribution and there is no "One place" where you can find complete content from all of the networks and studios, API's are really an exciting development because if several of the content providers adopt them it should make it easier for a third party to allow an end-user to find the content they want regardless of what service it happens to be available under.
I learned about this after running into a guy in a Potassium Sorbate company in China. They are gradually taking over the market for potassium/sodium benzoate in soft drinks.

There has even been some controversy over how Pepsi/Coke has been taking it out of western industrialized countries due to health concerns while keeping it in poorer countries.
I wrote a response above that clarifies this misconception. I've talked with a lot of people in person over the last 2 months about the FDIC insurance, and I'm surprised as how many people actually get this wrong. In any case, you are incorrect when you said my article was mistaken. I may not have described it clearly (read other response above for clarification), but it was not mistaken.
Or, look at science for the answer, and discover that toxins off-gassing from products and homes are a largely underreported phenomenon with far-ranging effects on the human body.
Windows Server on Amazon EC2?
Cars also give off loads of nasty fumes (new car smell anyone?).

My sister cancelled an order for a Nissan Versa because of its horrible rating on healthycar.org (lists all cars and how bad they are for this) and didn't want to risk it with her newborn.
Reading uneducated users opinions about signal meters ("phone A is better because it has one more bar than phone B") gives me that same sad feeling about humanity that talking about politics with "low information voters" does. It makes me wonder how stupid I am in areas that I don't understand very well (say, chemistry or medicine).

I've had the fairly unusual experience of getting to sit in meetings about controlling the display of signal bars. It's interesting because you're doing a bunch of fairly complex math on real phenomena (signal level, noise floor, corrupt symbols or low level frames, and so on) to turn it into one of six messages to a human being, without any words. If you deflate the value (too few "bars") you get dissatisfied customers -- they think that your service sucks because they've never seen more than three bars, even on a sunny day. On the other hand, if you inflate the number, you end up with a lot of support calls -- people that have five bars and bad voice quality or slow performance.

Basically, I gathered that the messages that the bars convey to the user are:

0) The device can't see the tower or would be unable to place a call/data connection.

1-2) The device is on the network and believes it can perform but the user should expect degraded performance or connection failures.

3) The connection should be OK and performance should be up to advertised specification (full speed, no drops), but you aren't getting the best signal possible, and should pay attention as it could drop from here.

4-5) Your signal is very healthy and you shouldn't expect anything better than this. It most certainly won't be a problem for you.

I'm kind of surprised, given the marketing push for "bars" in the cell industry that we don't have 7+ bar signal displays these days -- it would be a pretty safe way to give more bars without actually compromising the underlying message. I was pleasantly surprised when I saw an iPod with a battery meter that was calculated to the pixel (a smooth bar, not three simulated LCD segments) -- it removes the ability to complain about being down "a bar" after listening to M songs when someone used to get N songs -- completely unscientific but the basis for tons of bad press about battery life. I'm surprised no one has tried this on mobile signal (that I know of).
Included in Revised Bailout Bill Wool, Wooden Arrows for Children, Race Tracks, Rum
Pandora targeting Wiz in open-source gaming handheld war
Also, ripens fruits!
I wonder how much the new Android phones and all of the Android buzz in general weighed on this decision. With a competing open platform out there, Apple was clearly at risk of losing developer mindshare and support.
On the plus side, Facebook can avoid going the MySpace route and maintain a clean, functional system by putting the myriad of applications in a cleaner place.
iPhone Inter-App Communication Using URL Schemes
really. Cuz that's the only reason I can see to use them.
Some people are never happy.
The only product in our roundup that is solely vendor-hosted, Viaweb Store 3.0
shines brightly amid the e-commerce crowd. You don't have to install any ...

http://www.google.com/search2001/search?q=viaweb&hl=en&#...
Live Free, Be Rich, Become A Millilonaire
The #1 Millionaire Business Maker On The Internet Exposes All Secrets To Making Millions of Dollars by starting Your Own Business.
I wouldn't write it off so easily. Assuming a sane licensing structure can be devised, F# code on CLR on Windows Server is going to be a very serious contender in the cloud space.
Yea, I like how they encouraged people to develop all these profile widgets, and then effectively created an "All the Extra Crap Here" tab and stuck every single application into it. I'm so glad I chose to sell off my apps before these changes came into play.

The purpose of the initial system was to allow people to spice up their profiles for others to see. Sticking them into another tab just wipes out that purpose and makes Applications an individual user focus.

And seriously, "Boxes"??? Even the name of the tab sounds like it's just a dump-bin.
Apple makes available pre-release versions of their iPhone operating system to developers. I believe this is what they will still cover under NDA.
Talk about a picture being worth 1000 words -- I read the article and thought "sure, it makes sense, that's probably a problem" and then saw the traffic graph. Wow.

Everybody knows that this is a risk of developing inside someone else's walled garden. I wonder if there will ever be a way to implicitly or explicitly calculate the risk of something like this happening with any given platform. As someone who might develop for a platform, I can't see myself signing up for one where that's likely to happen, and that's one major thing that has kept me from developing iPhone apps.
Quick! 5 business ideas built around the NetFlix API ... go
you're right, we are talking about 2 things, and your approach is more accurate - however. most entities will value an asset based off of a formula, not market price.
That's the benefit of owning the keys to the server room :)
He has a point, it's like gas prices. They jack them up in the summer and then come fall the small decreases seem like a screaming deal. Rinse, repeat each year.

Apple is just doing this with control over their mobile OS, albeit in a much shorter time frame.