skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder if you could generate this automatically. Let me explain where I'm coming from. I made the Theory of Computing Blog Aggregator (http://feedworld.net/toc), and part of the reason I didn't set up more aggregators with the software was that you need domain-knowledge to create the blogrolls.

My idea was that you could start from 2 or 3 "seeds" on a given topic, find which blogs they are linking to, filter them by pagerank or technorati rank or whatever, and use an off-the-shelf machine learning tool to determine if they are on the same topic. I never got around to it; other projects I'm working on took up all of my time.

But if you can build this intelligence, you can create aggregators/memetrackers/whatever for an unlimited number of topics. And further create communities around each one and so on.

If someone wants to collaborate on this idea, let me know.

P.S. To build my aggregator, I started off with planet planet (http://www.planetplanet.org/), but made a bunch of improvements like automatic comment import. There is an unreleased version with a lot more features (including a google reader-like UI) that I will be happy to show anyone who's interested.
Oh, I understand and agree. I'm not trying to say that the current system of ad hoc "version control" is very good, let alone good enough.

I'm just pushing back against this the argument that using a real version control system will create a P.R. problem. If the P.R. problem is going to happen, it's going to happen. The changes are public. People like you are reading them, copying and pasting them, emailing them to each other. I wouldn't be at all surprised if various political professionals are taking snapshots of the site on a weekly basis. There isn't even a security-through-obscurity argument to be made here, because the edits aren't all that obscure!
I think his chart shows why Russia's economy is screwed up. All the criminals (who think they're smart) at the top trying to take advantage of everyone else.
Yeah I have-- I wasn't saying there was consensus on cooling-- but there was certainly a meaningful number of scientists who thought that 30 years of cooling meant something more than it did. Certainly the cooling was significant enough that warming doomsayers weren't too noisy during that period, anyways.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_global_wa...

Is a good read... Opinions seem more varied than a lot of people think. I don't really have an opinion. I don't have enough facts, but I have to say that the "torch and pitchforks" feeling I get from the scientific mob rub me the wrong way.
There is no silver bullet. It's a nice looking list but pretty useless, it says that you made an original mistake choosing Python, now grab a different technology and rewrite it.
the last one I remember are postgres specific bugs involving postgres datatypes.

my memory could be fuzzy but I feel that this would generally occur after a fresh rails release (2.2.2 is the exception)

well I am in the midst of migrating my rails app to postgres now - hopefully what I feel and reality don't match
I like to view netbooks as a supplement to my iPhone and MacBook rather than as a replacement.

Sometimes the iPhone doesn't cut it (coding and typing lots in general, and this isn't a virtual keyboard thing it's a smartphone thumbboard thing and generally keyboards for mobile phones aren't terribly great either) and the MacBook isn't something I can stuff in my purse in the morning and not worry about the additional weight and possible theft and things like that. I'll just take the iPhone alone when I need to, I'll take the MacBook when I need to, but for the average case a netbook will work for what I want to do on-the-go in a very small and light form factor.

I know they're inferior to a small regular laptop..but if I wanted a "small" regular laptop I'd take the MacBook. The netbooks on the market now are half the cost of the MacBook. Under no circumstances do I really want an Air since it's too thin, way expensive and underpowered for my needs vs. the cost. et cetera.
No. MS is not as committed to the OSX platform as Adobe. Look at what happened to the Mac versions of MSN Messenger and Internet Explorer.
In the case of a nonexistant title, I just grab a very detailing sentence from the post, and put it in with quotes.
Small side node:

I think it is very cool to have the comments here instead of his website. It is nice to have them consolidated and not some comments here, some there.
"Quality" alternative? There's a loaded title if there ever was one :)

How are these better than Silk in terms of "quality"? They're certainly not bad, and there's an awesome amount of choice here, but they're more anti-aliased and less obvious than the Silk icons. Visually appealing, perhaps, but we're talking icons, not fine art. The ability to pay to not give attribution is interesting, however.

So, great work, but it seems rude to call these a "quality alternative" to Silk, which remains an excellent set of icons.
Ideally a system should use greed (and other emotions) instead of having to guard against it.
I find myself enormously frustrated by this whole situation. I don't like many cars produced in detroit and I would never buy one. I don't want to prop up companies whose products I don't admire. At the same time, I don't want to see so many people out of jobs because the big three go bankrupt. I've never been to detroit, but I can imagine that if the big three went bankrupt the city would be in dire straights.

The people that are pondering these problems are going to have some very tough decisions ahead of them. Balancing what is better for the country as a whole and what is good for "detroit" (all the companies, people, and suppliers that are interwoven with the big three) is an enormously tough job.
I've always heard it as 'General Availability', essentially a synonym for the time/version of 'official release' -- no longer a beta/preview/release-candidate.

FCS, for 'First Customer Shipment', is a nearly-analogous term as far as I know, just preferred by other organizations.

(Both are very similar to the ideas of 'going gold', having a 'golden master', or 'RTM' [release-to-manufacturing] -- those meaning a final freeze of the intended release is available, and could be reproduced/'manufactured' as if on CDs or as box-packaged software. Though of course, the idea of physically pressing or shipping hard media is increasingly outdated.)
He left out one of the most important Google acquisitions: DoubleClick. Ugh, this article poorly researched and written.
Quality qualifies 'alternative', as in, this is a viable alternative to Silk.
I think what is interesting to examine is whether the bankruptcy of these three particular companies would leech all the jobs and potential to make money out of the Detroit Metro area.

Personally, with such an abundance of skilled workers I'd be surprised if other manufacturers didn't pick up the pieces and carry on. However the concern is say the Japanese car giants stepping into the market without reinvesting in that area or the US economy as a whole.
Agreed, it's a tough situation. An important question is this: are the big three on life support anyway and close to death?

If so, giving them bags of cash may only extend their life a few more years before they crash and burn. Then we (the people) are out bailout cash and the people that might have lost jobs have now officially lost them.
LG KM386 Unlocked
LG KM386 is a mobile phone in the clamshell form factor. The phone's dimensions and weight are: 108 x 48 x 13 mm and 79 g. The device is designed to operate on the following networks: GSM 900/1800/1900 . It is necessary to note the presence of a digital camera 1.3 MP.
How about just measuring how many bits it takes to describe the checks (perl code etc + informal text). Do not make any hard and fast rules - just monitor this metric.
Interesting, that seems exactly what my situation is. Legacy apps are on Debian and considering moving to Ubuntu for new app using Python / Postgresql.
A few I haven't seen mentioned:

http://blog.plover.com/

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/

http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/
Yeah I can always count on Debian to be dated but for the most part I have been able to work with it despite that.
"When it's done right" being the operative words there. When it's not you get the subprime crisis. Those bankers might not be getting a bonus this year, but they won't be handing back the millions they made when they were setting us all up.
A plan for better source code diffs and merging
Obligatory link: Peter Norvig's Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years:

http://norvig.com/21-days.html

Now particularly topical, since Malcolm Gladwell just made its thesis into a major meme.
And here's a color histogram/cloud of movie posters. http://www.discerniblepreferences.com/2008/06/what-movie-pos...
Ask HN: Clients are gone, lots of debt, what would you do?
Last October I left a comfy job at a marketing startup that had become very profitable (Inc 500, NY Times articles, and all that jazz). I had stopped taking classes full time to work with this company, so I never completed my CS degree. After leaving my job, I started my own company to develop some consumer site ideas. My partner bailed early to go to law school, so there was a bit of a gray cloud overhead from the start.

In order to get money coming in I began running lead generation and online marketing for a few clients. Over time, that grew to consume my entire working hours. It peaked at about $70k in revenue in July and has been steadily declining from there to a low of $15k in November, thanks to the economy and increased online ad competition.

On Monday of this week, without warning, my last two clients pulled the plug due to economic conditions. The deals were profitable, but they had too many account defaults. One client has seen his annual bad debts total double in November. So, to free up cash flow, they cut me loose.

I poured my entire savings into the company and had up to $50k in credit card debt at one point. Running online campaigns and lead generation, you pay for ads up front and invoice in arrears.

As the company made profits, I paid myself as little as possible to cover my bills. The rest was used to pay down debt. Early on, I tried doing contract work on the side to pay my personal bills. This worked until I was stiffed on a large project. Since the business was making money by this point, I focused on it full time.

As it stands, the company has about $13k in credit card debts. I have an additional $17k in personal credit card debt from living off of credit before the company was profitable.

The corporation is getting one last $6k check. There are no finished products to show for the last year, no remaining savings, an incomplete CS degree, and $30k in debt between the company and myself. The corporation also has contracts to keep its rack space until the end of January at a cost of $600/month.

I just sold my old (expensive) car and got a Toyota. I am vacating my apartment and bumming with parents and friends.

The corporation has an internal advertising and lead management system that I am tempted to lease to customers. There was talk with some local Austin marketing guys of launching that as a product a few months back, but it never worked out. There are currently four servers sitting idle that could be put to use. There are also three consumer sites in various stages of completion.

If you were in this situation, what would you do? Dissolve the company, get a job, and move on? Go back to school? Launch the advertising product? Launch the consumer products while bumming around to avoid rent? A combination of the above?

Has anyone been in a similar situation? I am seriously stressed out and likely not thinking clearly, so I would love an outside perspective.
Go to the place with the nicest area around campus. Then you can live right there and so will all your friends. This makes a big difference to me.

All universities have great and poor professors. Its just part of the ballgame. Once you reach the upper levels you will learn who is the best and worst and just take classes from the great ones and learn a lot about all kinds of things.
At best, the market's the place where funding originates. It helps others create wealth. At worst, it's merely a middleman, pocketing a cut of other people's transactions. This is accepted as it's useful to have a "market for money", but I would not say it creates wealth in the same way as something that processes ideas to sellable code or raw materials to finished product.
Norvig on Adaptive Software
I took at look at your last two links.

Let's be frank. Both of them are just too long. I went to physics grad school and am friends with some quantum cryptographers, and there's still no way I'm going to read the physics one -- not because it's uninteresting but because I have no time. (Indeed, I'm being dragged out the door right now.)

Ditto the software estimation one. It's a whole research paper. In the words of Bruce Sterling, it's like chloroform on the screen.

If you want to motivate folks to read and upmod on these subjects you have to do some blogging. Write a blog post that cites the paper. Call out some points and tell us why this paper is important. Maybe relate it to other stuff in the field that we know, or should know.

Take a look at an issue of Nature. At the front there are a lot of little articles that summarize the content and the significance of the real research papers elsewhere in the journal. Try linking to something like that, even if you have to write it yourself. It is hard to do well (I co-wrote one once, and it was a lot of work) but practice makes perfect, and even a quick job is better than nothing.
Awesome, thanks.

I don't mind paying a bit, although I'm more used to cheaper stuff around $4/set like http://www.istockphoto.com/file_search.php?text=icon+set&... or http://www.bigstockphoto.com/search.php?photo_name=icon+set&...
The foreign car companies are in a position to act strategically (unlike the domestics whose hands are so tied they can barely act). If the physical and human assets of the Big 3 went on the market, Toyota and others would swoop in and buy them up, bring it up to date, and hire those recently unemployed workers to build cars for the US economy and to export. They wouldn't be city patrons of Detroit like the Big 3 were, but the Big 3 have been broke for so long that their patronage is just historical anyway.

I bet Detroit would be much better off if foreign car companies moved into the space abandoned by the Big 3.
While it would be nice if people only voted for and chose articles with objective titles, the ones that mainly populate our front page are a hybrid of the two. A good title both states something objective as well as how it meets the interest of a general reader.
This is refreshing to hear compared to all of the "HN is becoming Reddit, omg!" comments and threads that pop up every couple weeks.
This is what I worry about. The whole SUV debacle is interesting because it showed the US automakers making a comeback, but then gas prices soared and nobody wanted a big car like that anymore. It shows poor leadership to me that they weren't diversified into cars that would be feasible after a gas hike. Even if those cars weren't best sellers, they would enable a faster retooling into cars like those now.

I drive a '96 subaru outback. There is nothing like it from american automakers. I used to live where it snows a lot, and I would only consider buying a subaru.
Also, Ubuntu has LTS (long term support) versions. The server versions are supported even longer.
Animals in general always tend towards two binary opposite behaviours, each of which is more successful in certain enviroments. It's a sort of hedging of the bets, in case unexpected situations spring up. As such, there will always be extremes of both behaviours - the bird that takes more risk to get the worm, and the other bird that takes less risk. Depending on the external situation, one of the two types will always dominate.

It's my belief that the concentration of genetic tendencies is what is causing the increase - people from universities tend to marry people from universities, and so there is a similarity in tendency among people who are reproducing, and so there is a larger tendencies for the extremes to manifest themselves.

It's like the sickle cell gene - when the population is diverse, this gene hardly shows up as a disease, but when the community is closed, the disease comes up very often.
there are a lot of hackerblogs over at http://advogato.org
The Wayback machine isn't close to real-time.
Evaluate what you're good at and start a new company? You have run a successful company, only got screwed by the economy. You basically have 13 + 17 - 6 == 24k in debt. If you go bankrupt with the company, that drops to just 13k (assuming that it's not secured with your private finances).

You say there are no finished products, then go on to say there's a good advertising/leads platform. Can you spend a few weeks pounding pavement and looking to sell or lease that platform? Start a new company, and go for it. Remember to sell both the platform and your knowledge as a consultant. You only really need to find one or two decent clients for that to work out well (rather than a dozen for just selling blackbox software).

You'll be in for a rough time, but a part time job would help smooth out the financial bumps while you get a new company up and running. It sounds like you have the experience in a valuable field to make something work.
They're largley intended for desktop application development... thanks to the OP - these'll certainly come in handy.
Austin, huh. Nothing concrete to offer by way of advice, but a couple of friends who recently graduated from UT launched an advertising startup. Maybe I could put you in touch?

Are you at conjunctured? I've been meaning to check out that space. I can swing by in a couple of hours if you're going to be there.
liuliu, we are at the same age and almost in the same situation.

I am 21 years old and now just started my college for almost half a year. And, I am in a public university too.

Anyway, you should not drop out if you are a foreign student. It will be very hard for you to get a VISA to work here without any proper education(diploma or degree).

And, assume that you haven't started anything, you should not drop out too. Many successful entrepreneurs dropped out because they have something urgent(their startups) to do rather than their educations.
- Mark Zuckerberg dropped out because Facebook was gaining traction.

Remember, college is a good place for you to meet various people. You may find someone as driven as you. And, you can always start something together with him/her.
Well it certainly does seem you get what you pay for - the icon drawer sets are of a much higher caliber than these... then again, both the Fugue icons (linked in story) and Silk are free and certainly of excellent quality...
There is no real way to get people interested in an article you think they should be.

That's not true. A good title will get an article several times more attention. I've found that the most effective titles (a) say what the article is about, and (b) appeal directly to the reader.

For example, the original title of "Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas" was "Copper and Tin." It was a bogus move to name the thing after a metaphor I was proud of, and I got what I deserved. Who's going to click on a link titled "Copper and Tin?" You can't tell what it's going to be about, whatever it does turn out to be about probably won't affect you.

The titles that seem to work the best are ones that to answer some question the reader cares about. E.g. "Why you procrastinate." The most effective of all seem to be the ones that promise (usually falsely) to cover all of some question, and embody this promise in a number: "The 7 reasons you procrastinate."

You don't necessarily want to sink to using such linkbaitish titles-- especially here, please-- but they certainly work.
My point still is valid.

Even these particular guys certainly would have written buggy code. A QA process could correct it.
Show me the study where a researcher feeds some animal deuterated water and then show how its life is extended by a statistically significant amount.

Before you can actually produce such a study, this entire article is sensationalist and the editors at New Scientist should be embarrassed to publish it.

The article says that up to 35% of body water can be heavy, but after that point it becomes "lethal." What exactly happens to make it lethal, and why has the author assumed that it is "harmless" to drink small amounts? Where's the study showing that small amounts are "totally harmless?"
While the test may give some indicators, I think this practice of trying to specialize kids for certain sports is just baloney. There are so many examples of athletes who are / were the best in their arena that certainly were not the ideal "type" for their sport. Just look at Wayne Gretzky - 6'/180lb. Barry Sanders - 5'8...

For athletes like a football quarterback, it's not even about being good at a single thing (fast-twitch sprinting). It's such a multi-dimensional position that just having fast-twitch speed is not going to guarantee you're the next Joe Montana or Tom Brady.

And finally, so many people have the talent but don't have the work ethic and drive to make the most of it. The people who are out there every single day for hours - throwing, kicking, sprinting, etc. That first 10% might be genetics, but the rest of it is blood, sweat, and working so hard some days you come home and puke.
Actually, I am sitting at Conjunctured right now. Probably my last visit, can't really afford to renew the membership. Come on by, I have visitor passes.
This is "Teach Yourself C++ in 21 Days" published by Sams and, I assume (apologies if wrong) is pirated in this instance. I own this book. It's pretty good. Uncool that piracy might be being supported here though..

Reviews and such here: http://www.amazon.com/Sams-Teach-Yourself-Days-5th/dp/067232... (not an affiliate link)
Sure, nice icons, but what's more interesting is the business model. I wonder if/how it is working.

(edit) Very nice small fonts there too - 5px, 7px, all in TTF - http://www.pinvoke.com/font
You can't do anything well without liking to do it. The difference between hackers and salesmen is that hacking is what hackers like most. Salesmen who have sufficient money seem empirically to prefer playing golf, whereas hackers with money tend to keep hacking.
This company has a great PR agency but not a viable business model. There is no way they can continue to generate enough sales to continue paying for top-notch PR. And the test itself is completely useless and meaningless.

The ACTN3 test is included on 23andme's test and 23andme will eat them alive without even trying. I'm sure they are laughing at this company right now.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html is as appropriate as ever.
Thanks for the reply.

The corporate debt had to be secured on my finances since this was a new company and had no credit history. That makes it hard to get away from.

The advertising platform is currently pretty specifically for internal use. No support for client data segregation and so on. Wouldn't take too much to fix that, though.

My main stumbling block is that I have no savings and no credit to fall back on while getting something ready for launch. I have mentally really been leaning towards starting a new company, but not sure how to pull it off right now.
Flagged for (possible) copyright violation.
Joel Spolsky was in a similar situation when the last bubble burst. Maybe his example would be useful to you.

You must have had something that worked, if clients were paying you. Could you turn that into a product instead of a consulting operation? I.e. something larger numbers of lower-paying customers could use, without much involvement by you?