skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks Andrew,

I could add a few other things which were not mentioned in the blog post:

* Mailgun can forward cleaned up messages in MIME format to you as well, if you prefer to do your own parsing of some sort. By "cleaned up" I mean they're all UTF-8 and can be processed by your typical weak MIME parser (like Ruby's or even Python's)

* Mailgun can also store all incoming mail for you for debugging/archival purposes and you can query it later via POP3/IMAP

* Mailgun can also route messages to different email addresses, i.e. Mailgun routes aren't "parsing API" at all - they act as a proper mail processing engine and people are getting quite creative with their rules, parsing is just something they have to do. For example you can have multiple destinations for a route, i.e. by creating a route "sales@myapp.com -> [array of emails for your sales team]" you're essentially creating a mailing list without any coding on your end.
Of course. But they still want it.

A nice person would ask, but not press the point. A rare person would not even ask. And some will demand to know.
Hi, I understand what you are saying. But I couldn't really agree on how designer becomes less engaged as startup matures. I think that's the one big misconception a developer (and designer) gets when they think of startups. Because in reality, the amount of work one can do in any given startup is unlimited. If there are no work then you create work, it's do what's best for the company. It's a life-long cycle.
This is somewhat poorly stated, but a valid point. I'd phrase it as someone is being asked to behave as if someone were a personal friend, then asked to instantly stop behaving as if a personal friend. That's jarring.
Darpa Begs Hackers: Secure Our Networks, End ‘Season of Darkness’
Wow! Four-core Android Phone coming soon
Any discussion of so-called "meritocracy" requires that we specify a timeframe.

Short-frame meritocracy means that resources are allocated to people who will do the most with them now. Long-frame means that resources are given to people who will produce the most with them in the future (i.e. we invest in people whose short-term performance may be mediocre). Short-frame meritocracy is pragmatic and efficient in the context of a static time-frame, but doesn't produce growth or social justice in the long run. Resources (VC funding, jobs, educational opportunities) are allocated to those who don't need them. Long-frame meritocracy is fairer and more productive in the long run but much harder to implement because it requires a certain foresight.

Most business decisions are made in the context of short-frame meritocracy. People aren't hired based on what they might become in 5 years, but based on what they're likely to be doing in 3 months. Schools are supposed to take more of a long-term outlook, but they have no real incentive to do so, and plenty of incentives (alumni and parental contributions) to kowtow to society at large and rubber-stamp the preselected winners.

The truth is that iterated short-frame meritocracy is not much better than oligarchy. It's oligarchy with a tiny Brownian motion term thrown in, and the annealing rate is always calibrated so as not to threaten the overall shape of society.

For a historic analogue, one might consider that it was very easy for the peasants of medieval Europe to believe that the nobility were of superior "merit". Merit at the time was physical might (and this wasn't unreasonable, since it also conferred the ability to protect others). First, the nobles were better nourished and much larger. Second, they knew how to use weapons, because they were trained. Third, they could ride horses. Feudal Europe was, fundamentally, a meritocracy (of the short-frame variety) for some definition of "merit".
Be last to share before time runs out and win money
We just launched our new platform today (www.salesvote.com)-- we have a countdown timer and a deal. The last to share the deal before time runs out wins cash bounty. Every time the deal is shared, up until a specific cutoff time, seconds are added. No purchase necessary to share or win the money. Please try it and tell us what you think in the thread below.
Education and schooling are not synonymous. I don't think that entrepreneurs can help schooling but they can certainly help education. To be honest, most 'education' startups are really about 'schooling'. The problem that for the most part schooling is designed to educate people for manufacturing jobs in the industrial revolution and service in the military. That kind of education (aka. schooling) is completely inappropriate in the information age where ingenuity and critical thinking are far more important than blind rule following. We're not building nations anymore, we're building individuals. To paraphrase Wilde we're producing "people who know the answer to everything, but the meaning of nothing"

I think Khan Academy is honestly about education more so than schooling.

The general public can tell the difference which is why choice in education is a no-go, and the compulsory system remains in place.
It doesn't help that the requests for help were made to sites like HN where the demographics of those sites tend to consist of information-curious people.
This is a good program. I'm glad to see the return of the genre->artist->album browser that was trashed from iTunes some years ago. For several years now I have not been using iTunes as I find it too frustrating to find my music. I now realize that a big part of that was the loss of the 3 column search. Looking at a dozen out of a thousand 512x512 icons most of which are empty at a time to try to find things and hovering above them and jiggling the mouse to see secret sub views a la iMovie 6 just never did it for me. (Current iTunes is horrible UX IMO.)
You're exactly right... for the original purpose - hypertext documents - HTML and CSS work just fine. The problems arise from the fact that we've hijacked these documents to produce web applications which use the barest stub of a document to get running. And then we try to shoehorn a dynamic site into what was originally designed to be a static document. Dynamic content was originally the exception, not the norm.

Frames were actually a good effort to solve the problem of web-site "chrome" (navigation bars, headers, etc), and were somewhat useful. But they proved to not be flexible enough for designers (rightly so), and thus we have the mess that we have now.
Anonymous? Mossad, Shin Bet, IDF Websites Crash After Hacking Threat
Thanks, those links were well worth the read.
Perhaps I can summarize what I think are her real points:

The old system was an aristocracy, where people were born into positions at the top of society, and this was obvious unfair. However, this system was not stable.

The new system is (supposedly) a meritocracy, where people have to work towards high positions in society. This system is not obviously unfair. But it is stable, because parents tend to instill the qualities required to succeed in their children.

Her point was that what these two systems have in common is that who your parents were is a good predictor of where you will end up.
Now that we have ep.io, Gondor, and all the other PaaS things that support Python, the ability to upload an application and scale it as much as we want isn't limited to App Engine anymore. Whereas back when it came out, it was the only service of its kind for Python. (Heroku might not have even been out for Ruby, though my memory's a bit fuzzy at that point.)

And pretty much all the other vendors use plain old SQL databases and don't have everything as a platform-specific API like App Engine does. So when the prices went up, my guess is that people realized, "Hey, why should I lock myself in to this one vendor that could raise the prices again, when I can go with other vendors that would be easier to migrate between [or switch to hosting myself later]?"
Luckily Google hasn't quite yet nailed what I'm trying to do with my startup. If you want to contribute to a project in this space that could potentially transform the way we interact with businesses, contact me at contactsocialmarket@gmail.com.

It would help if you know PHP. I'm more business-minded than technical. I already have a prototype built and am willing to work out an equity deal if you are interested. Time is of the essence, as it's only a matter of time before somebody wakes up to what I'm doing. This is a huge opportunity, but I don't have the technical skills myself to get the project off the ground.

Sorry for spamming, but I don't know where else to go to find quality programmers who have the same entrepreneurial spirit as me.
"I don't care about income inequality. I care about the absolute condition of the poor--whether they are hungry, cold, and sick. But I do not care about the gap between their incomes, and those of Warren Buffet and Bill Gates."

The entire article seems to be about income inequality.
I'm unclear on just how bad meritocracy is; the author blames meritocracy for the recent economic mess, sure. And our meritocracy isn't "perfect"; it doesn't guarantee that "good" workers end up well-off, and that "bad" workers end up destitute. Everyone has a leg up (or not) from their starting circumstances, which unbalances their supposed merit.

But it's really hard to see what the comparison is. Was there more upward-mobility in the old aristocratic system? Were the leaders too stupid to make gargantuan mistakes? The article certainly doesn't have any good comparison to make, and there were certainly problems in the Good Old Days (like, say, the Great Depression), too.

The whole article looks like it's trying to pin blame somewhere, and it has enough facts to get a decent start, but it has too many holes to be convincing.
M83 Vocal Audition
Ask HN: Share your favorite web forms
Like many web developers, I spend a lot of time making forms. I'm interested in seeing some of the best combinations of beauty and usability. I'm especially interested in forms that have elegant solutions to validation, or that represent complex data but remain attractive and usable.
eh, I'm lazy. Removed it - thanks for noticing that.
I have 10.5 on this machine so I haven't been able to give this a try. Does the app import your date added to iTunes information? For me this is a crucial feature, because I like to listen to my music by date added, and I don't want to lose this information. One feature I really, really want is the ability to sort by album date added. iTunes imports tracks in a weird order.
I would want the ability to easily create opt in geofencing for geographic texting at any location - central park, a bar, etc. A bit different from your vision.
Like the new layout so far, though I loved the old one just fine too (customer here), but my big question is: where's the affiliate program? Did you can it?

We were just starting to pick up steam on our campaigns.
Some won't ask. We can't control the world, but we can influence this community. And I think it would be nice if people here chose to be empathetic and rational human beings.
huh. it looks like they fixed it. i didn't take a snapshot, but originally no value was under 100% and several were over 200%. and i checked the disk that was shown in the plot above.

oh, and they actually say so in the table caption: This graph was updated after publishing to fix the percentages. (although it's the table that was fixed, not the graph...!)
I think this does the same as mr (http://kitenet.net/~joey/code/mr/), though mr supports repository formats than just git at the moment.
I’m sorry – “Affair-proof” was not the best word...
Boincoid is a port of the BOINC platform to Android
Journalists @ the Guardian released the underacted cables.

http://boingboing.net/2011/08/31/wikileaks-guardian-journali...
Looking for Programmer for partner as a startup
Hi, im looking for a programmer/tech to be a partner for a startup idea that i have, i think i have decent outline, and can even provide beginning finance, anyone in the silicon valley or close by there, e-mail me thedivon123@gmail.com
Comparing PHP vs. RUBY: What’s the Point?
Needed to parse incoming emails for a project of mine and found Mailgun. Including the time it took to alter my DNS and write the script, it took just a few hours. I would say a good experience over-all.
Thank you for this reply. I am very interested in seeing data against the KIPP model - what sources would you recommend?

EDIT: just read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Is_Power_Program#Crit..., which is certainly interesting.
> It lost that moral ground when it released unredacted information.

If the NYT meets the standards of "journalism", Wikileaks sure as hell does. Better to accidentally release unredacted information than the government sanitized press releases of the NYT.

> It also lost that status when wikileaks became about Assange himself.

Is this not a big part of the campaign to discredit Wikileaks? Focus on the person to hide the idea. Ideas have to be reckoned with; people can be written off ad hominem.

I'm not trying to say Wikileaks is even near perfect. The main point is that the NYT, which many see as authoritative, consistently avoids mentioning the implications of what is happening to Wikileaks.
The fact that the 'best' idea in educational reform is basically just taking kids away from their parents for virtually all of their waking hours shows that America is on its last legs. We no longer have the cognitive infrastructure necessary to transmit learning from parents to children...

This is an exaggeration. At most, programs like KIPP show that our lowest performing households no longer have the cognitive infrastructure necessary to transmit learning from parents to children.
Actually, I think Codecademy used badges after Rails for Zombies did...so everyone must be copying Greg and crew right?

Who cares...no one really cares about badges anyway...except of course, VC's, who are already out of touch.
They could even go freemium by giving an option to be excluded from aggregate data reporting.
Or was in a car accident. Or had a heart attack. Or any number of other possible events which would result in someone being unconscious and treated at a hospital.
Pull Requests welcome for Last.fm/Spotify/rdio. :) Doing a centralized server was the easiest way to avoid the whole "I have a rare song on my desktop that I really want to play and now I'm mad I can't play it on the speakers."
Because we've learned from the Rosetta stone that having more than one language system is extremely helpful for translating things. Translating something like this with no knowledge of the human race is an enormous endeavor. By providing three bases (base 1, base 2, and base 10), it'll be much easier to extrapolate their meaning. Base 1 should be fairly universal, and since much of our world today revolves around base 2 and 10, having each of those present will make for an effective starting point.

Think of it this way - if an alien probe landed on earth today, wouldn't it be a nice starting point to know that they use a mix of base 7, base 342, and base 61 for their number systems?
> It's kind of quaint that we sent this record of civilization out as gold-plated LP record. Very 70's.

Now, we'd probably just send an iPad with instructions for recharging it (or a solar charger). Or even better, just send an e-ink Kindle... just make sure to turn it off first.
The world of synthetic biology is nothing short of amazing.

But isn't this more or less what Craig Ventor [0] has done by stripping a particular bacteria to the least amount of DNA needed to 'boot up' - in order to build variations atop that base 'code'?

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Venter
Yes, I am. And it is fine, either using ObjFW, GNUstep (which is essentially Cocoa) or just writing it raw with my own framework. It is a nice language, and the C apis to the runtimes are pretty nice.
I've been working on it. Smart playlist will probably be the next big feature that comes out.
Is your $25/mo plan unlimited? Is Virgin Mobile's coverage as good as Sprint's (the network this will fall back to)?

What's amazing here is they are offering a Voip phone with a $19/mo plan (cheaper than, say Vonage at $25) plus fallback to a large mobile network. That is a pretty good price point.
Is there historical evidence of the deflationary power of operating systems?

Windows has been on the market since 1985. If we're so much more efficient using Windows than not, one would expect a dollar to be worth more today than back in the old, inefficent days of... whatever we had before.

However... in 1985 US$1.00 had the same buying power as US$2.08 does in 2011.

Average annual inflation over this period was 2.86%.
Perhaps what really matters for accumulating wealth is not being transmitted in colleges?

Call me crazy, but if your assumption is that opening the doors to the unwashed masses and funding lots of education for poor people raises them up, and it doesn't? Perhaps you should verify your assumptions. Perhaps what really matters for accumulating wealth is the modeling of attitudes and virtues from an existing wealthy set of parents. Much the same way that watching a movie of a famous piano player won't help you play the piano, but working day-to-day with one might, perhaps all this structural, fact-based education actually misses the point of how wealth really accumulates? Perhaps wealth generation is actually more of a learned art, not an applied science. EDIT: I see pg says this could also be the quality of the schools, and I think this dovetails in with what I'm saying. It's better to be around folks who model and demonstrate the best wealth-generating lifestyles in order to generate wealth yourself. When we look at the word "education," we are measuring the wrong thing.

Don't know. Just putting it out there. I found this essay thought-provoking. Much better than the usual fare on this topic.
virgin mobile is sprint. the network is the same. as is boost mobile. also, you're an idiot.
I was shocked when a recruiter email came into my inbox all excited about my passion as demonstrated by a hobby project I had sitting in my Github account. It was so unique that I not only forwarded their message to my network, but also replied with a thank you.

The firm was Captain Recruiter. I don't know if that was a quirk of the particular recruiter who contacted me, or a company policy, but it was very cool.
There is more to this discussion (for and against) than this, but I think you may have missed the point.

Money is not really a resource in and of itself. It's kind of a 'point system' we use to allocate finite resources.

I do think that this is a very important concept that is very difficult for many people to grasp.

If you took 50% of each person's money on the planet and burned it in a fire prices would (eventually) drop by 50% on most products.

If everyone has less money, they buy less things, and so there is a surplus of things. This causes the price of things to drop so that an equilibrium is reached. It will also (ideally) cause a drop in wages, etc so that things are still distributed.

The purchasing power of your money depends on the amount of resources to be allocated and the amount of money the people that want the resource are willing to spend.

So if banks hoard money, it really does not effect your purchasing power negatively until someone tries to spend that money on resources you want.

This is the basic concept, it doesn't mean that there are no consequences to these actions. If you hoard everyone's money (same as burning, but it can come back) you basically get deflation.

Deflation is bad because things like salaries don't scale down easily. People get upset when you dock their pay and most companies would rather just cut hours and lay-off employees rather than upset the entire company.

This is bad because the company is now over-paying (and over-working) workers for their services and there are lots of unemployed that can't find jobs.

So these changes don't happen as easy as the simplified example above, but they are real and very significant effects that need to be taken into account.
I agree with your point on education vs. schooling. If you want to focus on building individuals then you really have to think about education in terms of being a part of the larger psychospiritual development process, rather than just an ongoing series academic content. Although people in the west like to make fun of gurus, and often rightly, I think there is good reason to reconceptualize education in a way that's more connected to the various life stages a person goes through, a la the four life stages of hinduism.

That's the problem I have with Khan academy. That is, the lessons are factually correct, but they have no soul, and at the end of the day I think that's bad pedagogy.
Does B&N have the marketing infrastructure to compete with Amazon? I don't think so, the Nook reader as a device is on par or better than Kindle, yet it has had only a fraction of success as the Kindle.
Most of the achievement gap actually comes from parenting, not schools.

John Hattie in his book Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement

http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Learning-Synthesis-Meta-Analys...

reviews a lot of research studies from a lot of countries and suggests that that view, although it is conventional wisdom, grossly underestimates the importance of schools. I agree with you, because the data agree with you, that the most stark differences in school performance are among different teachers in the same school rather than between one school and another, but throughout the Western world, students with tough home conditions tend to get the lousiest teachers and the most underperforming curricula.

Other writers who have important points to make about how to help learners with the worst home environments by improving schools include the collaborators from Teach for America who have put together the book and website Teaching as Leadership

http://www.teachingasleadership.org/

and Eric Hanushek at Stanford with his research on the effects of variance in teacher quality.

http://edpro.stanford.edu/hanushek/content.asp?contentId=60

There is a lot yet to be done that is very feasible (well, except for politically feasible in most states of the United States) to improve the education of the most disadvantaged learners and to help them reach significantly higher levels of academic achievement.
Common Crawl releases free 5 Billion Page Web Index
Wow! That is some beautiful artwork!
Google is being evil
Google ripped away my family's sole source of income by suddenly and without warning removing everything I've built for Android from Android Market without even saying why they did it.

Please send a quick email to android-market-support@google.com to tell Google what you think of that.

All I want to do is make a living building things that make people happy. Please help.
Bestbuy has QR codes next to their items in store. It takes you directly to the product's page so you can read reviews and whatnot. I think that's an effective use for them if you've looked at the BB URLs lately.
Type other commands than browse and search in the url bar
Use the Community-Maintained Ubiquity instead of the Mozilla Labs: Ubiquity, then Ubiquity in Awesomebar will work. Go to https://bitbucket.org/satyr/ubiquity/downloads/tip.xpi for the Community-Maintained Ubiquity, then go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ubiquity-in-awesomebar/ for Ubiquity in Awesomebar.
I have the same $25/month plan, but they upped it to $30/month ($35?) for new subscribers. Still best deal on a smartphone/data plan.

If this uses Sprint's network as well, then I suppose it comes down to minutes/MBs. I don't use enough of either so for me the math is simple: $19 < $25.
Why should it drop into a black hole? It'll probably just go into orbit. Black holes behave like normal masses, if you don't get too close.
Zypr API Provides Siri-Like Voice Tasking for Any Developer