skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It would be interesting if Obama were elected President, and Tory Leader David Cameron beat the current PM Gordon Brown. Both Cameron and Obama are young, charismatic, in touch with the "zeitgiest" of the day, etc., and I think share some similarities in policy points of view. Both, for instance, put the environment high on the priority list. I think an Obama - Cameron dynamic would be fascinating to watch, perhaps one which would rank with the Thatcher - Reagan dynamic that ended the Cold War. I think the principle underlying both individuals or their rise in prominence is "change". Both their nations have economic struggles and both promise "change". I think Cameron and McCain could work together fine, don't get me wrong, it's just from a generational kind of perspective that makes me think Cameron and Obama are on the same "wave length". Obama met Cameron during his European tour and I think the meeting went well. Certainly would be interesting to see them win their respective elections.
Yahoo Pipes!
Paul Kedrosky: The Looming Deflation/Reflation Whipsaw
> There is an election on Tuesday, with historic implications.

What US Presidential election doesn't have "historic implications"? For that matter, what US national election doesn't have "historic implications"?

This is just another US presidential election.
I agree.

As long as it's not an echo chamber.

I've seen boards with intelligent, long-running discussions that were very interesting. You'd think with a bunch of smart guys here we'd be able to figure out how to replicate that.
RankManiac-ing by a Teenager
CMU has a SEO challenge. A high schooler is on it. Link the page if you want to help a high schooler defeat the undergrads ;)
Crocodile tears?

I made an observation about human nature. It's true regardless of the current situation.

Aside from the Krugman Wars, I haven't really gotten involved aside from making some observations.

To me, your comment sounded like "But you do it too!" with the appropriate tongue sticking out. I didn't call you on it, because I assumed better of you. If you could return the courtesy that would be good. If not, that's okay too. No harm mate.
I am not on the list and my acct was here then.

I feel so ignored ;)
Back in April, a number of papers were running a story on the Monty Hall problem in primate research. The NYT ran a story with a detailed explanation of how the problem works, and even provided a flash-animated demo so you could work through it yourself.

Nonetheless, it was amusing to read the wild-eyed diatribes in the user comments. You couldn't explain the problem in a clearer way, and yet plenty of people simply refuse to accept a result that seems counterintuitive.
Log scale probabilities are a lot easier to grasp, but we still do not have a unit name for them :(
http://www.lyx.org/
If the iphone is the jesus phone.

Is the gphone the God phone?

or is the android phone the agnostic phone?
Yes, it's very frustrating to watch. I have a sneaky suspicion that politicians, or at least their advisors, are well aware of the bare statistical truth. But they can't take the counterintuitive but right stance because they would alienate their voters who don't understand it.

This is one of the downsides of democracy.
I, Cringely: Azure Blues
Well you can always have a better technology. At some point you'll need to be able to scale up but you'd definitely be an acquisition target for someone with large processing capability.
From the release notes link you posted:

Users affected by this issue can install the linux-backports-modules-intrepid package, to install a newer version of this driver that corrects the bug.

Calm down.
Want to put $100 on that?
The immediacy of the conversation on Twitter is a big reason why people like it. It feels much more personal. The limit in length means normal people can write as well as popular bloggers, and everyone is forced to edit their writing.

If only all bloggers/comments were as constrained.
Sure. Go ahead. Check into it -> http://paypalsucks.com/forums/
I don't know about Kubuntu but I wish linux had something like Microsoft Update.

apt-get and yum are a bit too "no, it's your decision, do you want to update libobscure-2.4.6.so and risk breaking everything?"
Still nothing here, either ... so don't feel alone.
There's a forum bashing every popular company. That doesn't mean anything.

What does mean something is that millions of people do have PayPal accounts and it's a trivial and inexpensive way to transfer small amounts of money.
Climate != Weather
http://research.microsoft.com/TERMINATOR/
But if it's not uniquely interesting to hackers, it's already done to death elsewhere.

As per the guidelines: "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." There is nothing more covered on TV news recently than elections. It's the national reality game show.
Boom there goes my bandwidth ;).

It's from: http://www.breckyunits.com/statistics/2008/05/08/analyzing-t...
looking at the course number 193P, it's probably a seminar or special course. maybe just once.

are there more tutorials or videos available?
California Computer Professional Exemption - updated for 2008
They may have millions of users, but with Google's searching, you can never be lost in the crowd, er cloud again.
If you attach dates on a page like this, you risk looking flaky whenever there's a big gap between posts. Leaving his entries dateless might mitigate the pressure to update regularly. That's just a guess, though.
Am I on it?
Lisp50 Notes part I: JonL Recalls How Sussman Revealed the Nature of Intelligence…
Doing a clean install. Was running Hardy 32bit. Anyone know if flash 64bit works yet?
Productivity is winding its way higher and higher up the meaningless words list, soon to join "natural", "selected" and "actually".

In fact, I may propose a pseudo-Victorian movement for Natural Productivity. Motto yet to be determined, actually, natch.
Gmail Adds SMS Chat
Materials for Students: Table of Contents
I've used SimplePie to parse over 20,000 feeds an hour on very modest resources, but there are memory leak issues (in PHP, not SimplePie) that aren't easily resolved in all PHP installations (even with the recommended fix).

You will probably end up having to spawn separate PHP processes to get the throughput if you ever need to parse that amount of feeds (or higher - easy to do once you've solved this problem of course). An upcoming release of PHP is supposed to fix this problem but we'll see.
"hire slowly, fire fast"

sounds like good advice to me. I'm surprised how hard most people seem to find firing people. I mean it's usually pretty clear within the first month or so if you made a mistake, and at that point it's not like they have a lot of company-specific knowledge, so I think at that point, often it's best to apologize to the (now ex) employee for the hiring mistake and part ways.

Hiring good people is hard, and you are bound to make mistakes. It seems to me like you need to have a procedure for correcting same.
How to Write an Abstract
Now that the use of on-line publication databases is prevalent,<a href="http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/essays/abstract.html" rel="dofollow"> writing</a> a really good abstract has become even more important than it was a decade ago. ...
Free as in beer, or free as in paid for by taxes?
RepRap: Open Source, $500 3-D Printer (And Self-Replicates)
What do other countries use instead of checks?
Pandora's ad platform rocks It reaches nearly one of every five iPhone users
Exatly. Political leaders are rarely leaders at all, they are followers. If you want to change how politicians act, you almost have to change the rest of the voting public up to some significant portion.
"human qualities"

You need to be careful here... turning away a good programmer because she has a touch of auspergers usually means you end up with a mediocre programmer. If programming is core to your startup, hire the best programmers you can get, and then hire other people who are compatible with the programmers personalities.

Of course, if your startup is largely marketing focused, a mediocre programmer who can deal with your marketing guy might be a better choice. But my point is that you don't need everyone on the team to be socially skilled or friendly- but you do need to make sure you have compatible personalities.
This is just another US presidential election.

I agree that "historic" is a terribly over-used adjective in this context, but I find it hard to believe you could live in (and love) this country without feeling that this election is more "historic" than most.
'Delay-o-tron' to iron out commentary glitches
Do you own your social media identity?
Solving the problem of "... how can you listen to the radio commentary while you watch the match on TV? ..."

You can read the technical bits here ~ http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:vRdCFZOdsM8J:www.endeav... search for "JE2: The Gerard Whateley Synchrotron"
I read the print edition of The Economist and only check my snail mail once a week. I would likely have missed this endorsement were it not for Hacker News. But it looks like my side is losing the poll; pity.
Outdated site scrape. Flagged.
From the FAQ in http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/downloads/Handout-0-Ove... :

Q: Will the class be televised?
A: Yes. This year’s class will be offered via SCPD and will be available online. There is no broadcast on campus cable, it will only be available online.

However it doesn't look like its posted yet, there's no videos on http://scpd.stanford.edu/search/publicCourseSearchDetails.do... - without knowing anything whatsoever about Stanford's policy on SCPD, I'd guess that they'll be posted once the course is over.
I was under the impression that no apps on the iPhone could run in the background.
Ooh, they finally launched. Congrats Alex!

Edit: some feedback...

1.) It doesn't seem to work on IE6. I added the bookmarklet according to the instructions (some of the formatting is messed up there, BTW, like the vertical "Feedback" link is overlaying the center of the page), but clicking on it doesn't do anything.

2.) Is there anyway to get the green snip bar to disappear once you've clicked the bookmarklet? I guess it goes away when you navigate away from the page, but it's distracting until then.

3.) For better browsing convenience, it'd be neat if the Snipd bookmarklet toolbar didn't disappear, and followed you around as you surfed. I don't see a way to do this, though, short of proxying pages through snipd.com and using the hash URL trick like TheSixtyOne does.

4.) I'm glad that snips are easily unhighlightable.

5.) It's clever that you put the vimeo tutorial in the bookmarklet, but it'd be even cleverer if it wasn't necessary at all. I'm not sure what to do once I've selected and snipped something (and I guess I'm only aware that I'm supposed to select first because I've talked to you in person), and users tend to have their fingers on the back button. If you could make the value proposition for the snipper immediately clear from the text & appearance of the bookmarklet bar, that'd help new users immensely.

6.) Grammar is off on the blog - "You can follow blog". Clever that you're using Snipd itself as the blog. How about renaming it as "The Snipd Blog", so that the sentence reads "You can follow The Snipd Blog." Also works better with the next sentence as well.
"... Anyone know if flash 64bit works yet? ..."

No 64bit but try http://wiki.ubuntu.com/FlashPlayer9 (Adobe Flash Player Non-free plugin installer) and more FOSS alternatives System->Administration->Synaptic & search for 'Flash'.

"... Was running Hardy 32bit ..."

You can keep your home partition or data if you want.
Why don't you get your own email address @stormpulse.com instead of gmail?
Wow. And this find is amazing. Really interesting analysis there. The one which was the most interesting was the bivariate fit of karma/joined by joined. Avg karma earned per day does not distribute over the length of existence.
Ten Ways to Avoid Disaster When Your Web Services Disappear on You
I would like to hear some REAL opinions about iPhone...will Blackberry Storm be better? Should I wait for it? Should I wait for Android phone? Or just go ahead and get the iPhone?
I also found some good videos on the subject (uses the Arduino):

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2007/11/make_a_reprap_robot...

http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/RepRapVids

http://technorati.com/videos/youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DYt52V...
Excuse me, but if a story appeared here that had significant impact upon foreign hackers, then I would upvote it, personally.
Well, if property q is important enough, it's wise to adjust expected outcome on it to some degree even if you don't yet know if the rest of set X has that property.
Errors By Bloggers Kill Credibility & Traffic, Study Finds
2 Days with Google Gears
Upgrading Phusion Passenger when Apache is installed from source
Throwing around "self replication" only hurts the cause. There are no microcontroller factories that make other microcontroller factories.

But I love the idea.
The only use I've seen for Twitter is the ability to follow companies for status updates or important announcements. The local university here is looking to do this for students, and I've seen several online services use it for downtime/updates.

But an RSS feed does the same thing already, and is in a format that doesn't make me have to subscribe to yet another site. With feedburner, there's no worry about feed traffic getting out of hand either. So I don't really see the point, except maybe as a marketing tool to the Twitter crowd...

Then again, my startup uses it too (in addition to our blog/RSS), and my business partner really likes it. So maybe I'm just clueless :)
When you combine things like your first point and things like your third, it's hard to tell if you're being facetious. I'll assume you are for now.
Definitely a novelty. It cool because it is different, but it is also less usable because it is different.
Just to clarify, I don't mean conversation is useless, but I see other sites enabling that in a better way already. As a conversation tool, Twitter seems more like a feature than a full service.
and trashed my damn xorg.conf
Ask YC: Feedback on our new app.
True, I should have said the goal is self replication and each RepRap version intends to get one step closer to achieving process. All the parts that are within the limitations of the machine are replicated and a community has been established to trade such parts. I do apologize for coming off as trying to push a sensationalist headline.
Electronics Arts reports loss, will lay off more than 500 workers
Given what we learned from our last app and what we gathered from the many of you we've talked to who built them before, we decided to try another. Your feedback was helpful last time, so I thought I'd ask once again.

It's a football game in which you build up the best team. Any thoughts would be very much appreciated.
a graduate stipend can be a great basis for doing whatever you want. In my case, I used the last year of my fellowship to get back into programming.

Man, that is my exactly experience! The thesis I eventually handed in bore almost no resemblance to the work I was doing and interested in :)

I'd definitely echo the "prolonged dark night" comment too. Sometimes, you just have to accept that and keep on plugging away, albeit maybe taking the night off to recharge a bit (it's like debugging, it's hard to see how that's going to achieve anything but it can make a huge difference).
Apparently the grass is always greener on the other side.
Don't apologize. Usually those behind the effort really try to play this up. I personally think the approach is flawed.

I would start with a real factory that can make everything in the factory. It would probably be the size of a big building.

Just like the first computers.

Refine the components, and make it smaller and smaller.

The initial goal shouldn't be a tiny maker, but something light enough to send to Mars or the Moon. I've been told (by one of Hod Lipson's students actually), that NASA estimates such a factory today would weigh in at 100 tons. That seemed small to me. They should try to make this.

It's the first thing you'd need to make if we knew of a big asteroid that couldn't be stopped.
Ok now I'm the one who's officially freaked out now.
Top Five Historic Online Social Networks of All Time
You know that the iPhone has both a GPS and a camera, right? It also has some RAM.
I don't particularly have any use for snipd, but the idea of a bookmarklet which loads external javascript backed by a central site feels like it's full of potential.
This has been unsupported for years
Linux Mint (based on Ubuntu) has MintUpdate:

http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/?p=71

It rates packages by criticality during updates and hides the riskier ones by default. This is more important for Mint than Ubuntu proper, though, since Mint is a remix on top of the original packages and is more likely to break during a regular package update.
It causes open sores :(
Do you have any demos or other ways of seeing or learning more about the application without the use of a facebook account?
I like it. The simplicity and privacy settings are great.
I guess this has to do with the spam funding offer that was going around a couple of weeks ago claiming to be from PG. Maybe that whole bayesian mail filtering thing wasn't such a great idea after all..

Sorry, I just couldn't resist :)
200 words? my application was telling me 120 words...

i was ROBBED
IT is different, but im lazy and thats more to fill out then username and password, which is too much as well.
1. Subscribe to TechCrunch RSS

2. Submit every possible TC post

3. ???

4. PROFIT!
What would some of the best ways be to go about making an automatic backup system for web services? Are there currently backup systems on the market?
It's more like "submit every TC post that announces a just-launched YC startup". YCombinator startups have always gotten lots of upvotes here, because, well, it's news.ycombinator.com.
TiVo and Netflix finally consummate union
Wow, this is really cool. It won't really enable person-to-person transfers, but person-to-POS in a mobile format is slick. I'm a liiiiiiitle bit leery of having someone punch in all of my card data to their iPhone. It would be a bit too easy to hold on to those numbers for too long. But then, I'm fooling myself if I think that those sorts of things don't happen with standard card readers as well.

Mobile handheld card processing will be fantastic for a lot of small businesses.
We've thought about it, but it's never been a priority. I guess that's strange, eh?
In honor of the election, we should be allowed to make hyperlinks instead of being forced to paste URLs.

/ducks
It is an interesting strategy to somehow make the registration page news worthy. Unfortunately, assuming visitors sign up, they don't know what they are signing up for.

The content or features need to be the main draw to your site.
I think Sun is doomed, but I've been saying that for the past 15 years.

Has anyone here seriously recommended any Sun purchases in the last 5 years?

Of those who answered yes, would you make the same recommendations now?
Oh come on, I can't be the only one worried about these things eventually evolving to be the basis of the robot apocalypse.
I don't see it as a major issue. The election will be over in less than a week. I'd rather allow stories about it, because all being equal, I favor fewer rules over more.
I read about endorsement on twitter & friendfeed.
Why is Video Laying Off?
It happens once every four years...makes sense to allow coverage. It's highly relevant and a high volume of political stories suggests a high level of interest.
You find it hard to believe he loves this country because of an opinion on a subjective matter of semantics? Please...

I'll give you a one liner why this election might not be 'historic': neither likely victor has any intention of making the federal enterprise smaller than $3T.

But don't mind us libertarians in the corner :)
Not really, sorry. If it takes off, we'll probably make a front end for the web and OpenSocial though.
Ask HN: Whatever happened to the SocialBias guys?
I remember reading the SocialBias blog and a couple of those articles be pretty interesting reads (and some controversial!). It says that they were working on a YC stealth mode startup. I'm not sure if I missed anything, but does anyone know anything about it? Did they launch anything?
Anyone know if his analysis of solar panel economies is at all plausible?

A lot of debate in the comments on this article:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20081030_0055...
I saw this at OSCON. It was pretty neat but pretty slow. It's nice to see people homebrewing though.
By the same reasoning you could say that humans are not self replicating. Even humans require some basic inputs (essential amino acids) to function. The same goes for the rep rap, and in this case it needs a microcontroller or what have you.
I find it interesting that the best model we have for how the brain operates is a Bayesian inference engine, but most people can't even apply proper Bayesian reasoning.
In Taiwan 10 years ago, they had checks, but instead of signatures they used "chops" -- an ancient Chinese identity system based on small square stamps with the characters for your name carved in them. The ink is red. The system is thousands of years old, but was still used in an advanced Asian democracy for checks, receipts, and practically anywhere else you might use a signature (except for passports). I even had one (made out of metal, I still have it lying around somewhere) even though it was based on a Chinese name I made up in Mandarin class. I mostly used it for accepting registered mail and "signing" some official documents, but for other types of transactions they had foreigners use their real names and scrawled signatures.

They're still used there, google chop stamp taiwan and you'll get a bunch of results.

And yes, chops can be forged, and when I was there, there were many criminal cases involving forged or stolen chops.
I'm not judging you for talking about politics. Do whatever you like -- it's my opinion that intelligent discussion of politics is fair game, even for "hackers".

The point is, if you're a regular participant in the political discussions, you can't very well post about how you wish they'd all go away.
CachedExternals: managing application dependencies
I'm very interested in election news, but I get plenty of it elsewhere. Allowing the two or three biggest stories of the day would guarantee that anyone who cared would already know.
thanks for posting. Will keep my eyes on this.
Six tips when buying enterprise software
193 series are normal undergrad courses. None of them were required (and probably still are not) for a CS degree, but they are an acceptable choice, along with many others. I think I took u (Unix programming), d (C++) and i (Internet programming) back in the day. 193 series is explicitly industry oriented, but the whole point of Stanford CS education is to get the practical experience at the same time you learn the fundamentals. The two are complimentary.
Military Investigates Amnesia Beams
Selecting your Wedding Planner and DJ
Planning a wedding can be a long and interesting task. For that reason you may decide the best course of action is to choose a wedding planner to handle the details that you just do not have time to handle yourself. A wedding planner can handle everything in an efficient way that can seem so overwhelming to a novice.