skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What isn't wrong with this logic? Any scam calling itself a bank that went badly now parallels real life?

There is no parallel whatsoever; the crisis and these scams have no commonality.
Online Airline Tickets from Thailand
Mox Travel in Thailand is proud to announce the launch of its new website that allows you to book your air ticket conveniently online. So should you ever need an air ticket from Thailand, visit Mox Travel's new website.
If TeXMaCs were more stable it would be a pretty good step in this direction.
There is a little problem with Fluid it seems: it shares my Google session with Safari. So, if I'm logged in in one, I'm logged in in the other.

So, that doesn't help at all for the problem at hands...

As far as I'm concerned, I try to use Firefox for Gmail only and Safari for the rest.
We can't emulate complex brain models on a computer because we don't have the power. We shouldn't because it's incredible inefficient.

IBM proposes finding a hardware model or some material that can be used to properly mimic synapses in the brain. The academic term for this would be neuromorphic engineering.
Infinite Scalability with Amazon Web Services?
From a startup junkie, but a non-hacker:

Is it possible to build a truly scalable application with all of the Amazon's Web Services? What would be the biggest problem? Is it a technical problem, in that Amazon's services just don't cover everything or is it more that we don't have perfect foresight into where the bottle necks will be?
How would you design a validation procedure for anything that is output by the Myers-Briggs test?
Turbaconducken - A Turducken wrapped in Bacon
The recommended site is good in general, links to a lot of scientific literature, and is especially strong about fallacies in psychology.
Scalability isn't inherent to Amazon's architecture. It depends of your app. A poorly written app won't scale.
Super Micro Computer - a One-Man, or at Least One-Family, Powerhouse
Not sure why anyone would doubt IBM's commitment/understanding of cloud computing - the author of this article included.

IBM has been pushing the "On Demand" brand/thinking for years - since 2002 in fact... On Demand has a lot in common with cloud computing today.
I went ahead and bought a review. I just spent a few hundred dollars launching a mini-site, what is an extra $7? Rounding error -- if they catch a typo I'll consider it money well spent.

I'll let you know about the quality of results. One request: my results should not be available on a publicly accessible URL. It doesn't bother me, personally, but it will bother some people.
Right now, I'd say that the biggest limit to scalability with AWS is the lack of load balancing. They've said that this will be coming in the future; but it's not here yet.
"Designer Diaper Bags" is not a stupid idea. Christie Rein was going through a problem, she solved it and started selling the solution
So I guess that most programming languages would qualify as bad tools to you then? Seeing as how they force you to spend a lot of time "understanding" them before you can be productive.
Start-Up Takes on 'Patent Trolls'
The name "live.com" is awful for search, and yet Microsoft has poured millions into it. I don't understand why they don't just buy "search.com", "find.com", or something similar. The high price for the domain would be, on the scale of Microsoft's cash hoard, a reasonable marketing expense.
Not only that - but certain classes of problem won't scale (linearly).

If you wanted to produce a site that outputs static, immutable, invariant, fixed content... then yeah, probably would scale (approaching) infinity.
They definitely do seem to have a pretty nice platform built. But my product will be more passive in interaction and there seems to be a pretty big cut taken out from using their service (looks like you're only getting about 45% of the total sales).

I guess I would need to weigh out using a full featured service like that or piecing together my own for a better value.

I'm currently delivering the text messages via the phone number email that all phone's are assigned. Obviously this will have to be analyzed soon to make sure it can scale, not to mention I'm not sure if sending that many emails a day would make me spam-list worthy.
Thanks for the reply. That certainly explains some clear benefit. That's the first time somebody's laid out for me in that fashion.
is this only newsworthy because of the pretty charts?
Choose E-Cigarettes and Smoke Anywhere
Are you tired of seeing the ‘No Smoking!” signs? Does the number of places that add up to the ‘no smoking’ zones frustrate you? Does your own family ban you from smoking in your house because of the smell that settles on the couches and the curtains?
Blog of Jan Chipchase (Nokia Design Researcher)
Developers: New Live Sports Scores API Released
any techies / sports fans?!
I tend to gravitate towards its competitor

Me too - which is one paths that led me to Bazaar. Like your experience with Mercurial, Bazaar has done the trick on the smallish (<10) teams I've used it with, and the bzr-svn plug-in means you can still go out to play with your SVN using friends...
What are you using now for your SMS gateway? I think the easiest way is to have the user choose their service provider when they provide their phone number and then you can send an email to phoneno@serviceprovider.com or whatever the text message email address is for their provider. I'm pretty sure that's free and easy to do. That way you could also use an email marketing platform and just make your ads tiny enough to fit in a text message.
Want to read the article, but its behind a subscription wall.
But then again karma is no indicator for intellect or sanity, is it?
Mad Hockey Fan - Funny People from GooglyFoogly.com ,Funny Videos,Funny Pictures
social constructivism is at odds with science. democratic politics is social construcivism by your own admission.
We'll see what happens. I'm watching everyones results like a hawk right now too. You may see a few responses at night (someone who just did a request already has 2) but I find its during the day when they come the quickest.

If you're interested in catching typos you should specify that to the reviewers. The reviewers are good at doing what they are told.

Do you have any suggestions on the publicly accessible URL? I don't want to force people to create usernames/passwords. I think its a hassle for a quick-use service. Or at least its a pet peeve of mine.

How about specifying a password with the request and requiring that password in the URL to access the feedback later on. This way you can subscribe to the results in any feed reader but still have some protection in case people try to guess your URL to see the feedback.
Personal Development Coaching
Where is this API?
Just came across this too, and found Teeworlds, which looks promising and has clients for Linux, Mac and Windows!
I've really enjoyed Catalyst when working with it in the past. I used it extensively at my previous job, and for a few personal projects.

I really like the extensibility of Catalyst. It's a very Perlish framework. It's not opinionated. There are many ways to do things, and if something doesn't work how you want it to, you can easily write a module to do it yourself. It's designed to be an extensible framework, instead of all-in-one, as many others are. For example, it was trivial to get all the appropriate ORM magic working with my existing databases with DBIx::Class. Catalyst really does keep models, views, and controllers separate. In many other frameworks I've looked at, there are things as absurd as requirements on how your DB tables are named.

Another amazing web framework for Perl that doesn't get much media attention is Jifty. Jifty is absurdly powerful and has scary dark magic, but it's negligibly documented. Jifty is really my choice for all-in-one perl web framework. It does everything for you, and then some. One feature that impressed me is that you can describe your dynamic actions in perl code, and Jifty will automatically fall back to loading a new page with the modification if your browser doesn't support javascript, but will do inplace dynamic updates if you do. Graceful degradation built in. I can competently use all of my Jifty apps from elinks or my old treo. It's still rather opinionated, though.
Thanks for the encouragement. I've been meaning to play with mechanical turk for awhile and this seemed like a good idea. I'm going to hire a professional and get a snappy design going as quick as possible.
Personally, I use Git and hg at home and for small work projects.

But, for the main work projects (console games: lots of code, but also many large assets), none of the alternatives to p4 are reasonable. (Yes, I'm well aware Perforce has vast and sundry problems too).

Might be worth doing some testing on hg, if it can handle your data sizes reasonably, it meets all your other requirements I think.
Finance Has Lost Sight of Its Role
Ask HN: Why use semicolons to terminate statements in modern JavaScript or ActionScript?
I hope the question doesn't come across as flamebait, because I'm genuinely interested in the response here. My background is mainly in the largely semicolon-less Python and Ruby. This may have impeded my understanding of the issues involved. :^)

ECMAScript-derived languages have inherited many syntactical conventions of C-style languages (e.g. braces to demarcate blocks). However, while semicolons are required to terminate a statement in C-style languages like Java, they are optional in modern variants of Javascript and Actionscript, where a line feed is considered to imply a semicolon if the statement on that line is complete.

Being able to leave out semicolons is blissful as far as I'm concerned. When coding in Java, I frequently run into compiler errors because I have neglected to type a semicolon, whereas I can't think of a single time when omitting semicolons in Javascript or Actionscript has caused me problems.

However, the code style of others (e.g. website Javascript, or Actionscript open source projects) suggests that my opinion mustn't be widely held; I see semicolons everywhere.

Now, Javascript on a web site has to run in many different browser environments, and I can understand how fear of incompatibility could keep coders locked to semicolons (although like I say, I haven't seen any browser problems myself). But Actionscript gets compiled, removing the uncertainty about how syntax will be interpreted on the client. So why are semicolons still being used now that they are optional in Actionscript 3.0? Do semicolons provide a secret benefit that I'm not aware of?
Here's what I use:

- LaTeX if the document will have a bunch of equations.

- Word for everything else.

For me, it's a question of efficiency. I find that I can typeset equations much faster with LaTeX than with Word, and I find that I can typeset general text much faster with Word than with LaTeX. The other issue is with shared documents: if I need to share an editable version of a document with somebody, there's a far better chance that they will be able to use a Word file than a LaTeX file.
Has anyone used this, and was it useful?
This was a regular old bank run, nothing new here. There was a financial collapse in the game and in real life, but the parallels seem to end there.
Sorry about that. I went through Google News and got the whole article.

Just do a search on RPX
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&tab=wn&ned=us&...
US Govt. rescues Citigroup.
Not to be confused with the Broken Window Fallacy:

http://freedomkeys.com/window.htm
You can do software load balancing, but you'd eventually be bottlenecked by the 1 Gbps per instance limit. You could use round-robin DNS for multiple load-balancer instances, but that feels a little kludgy.

Lack of geographical distribution and impossibility of decent HA might kick in before you had to worry about load balancing gigabits of traffic, though.
There are various levels of Scalabilty, AWS being one of them in a chain.

Hosting > AWS > CDN's like Akamai > building out your data center similar to google.

AWS is a good start, and if you start doing 100's of Gbps of traffic you should probably start looking for other options.

As the other HN commenters have mentioned, you have to architect you application with scalability baked in. Some applications aren't good candidates for scalable applications such as many 1-1 live streams.
Google  G1 Multitouch Proof-of-Concept Video
Users should be encouraged to not share their password with anyone or anything, but twitter. 3rd party apps could use OAuth.
I'm using the exact system you just mentioned. What email marketing platform would you recommend if any?
Why America Feels Like it's Been Ruled by a Foreign Occupier
they allow copy/paste with other C syntaxish languages

edit: Sorry, I forgot to include caps, and full stops for that first sentance.
If you passed, post here; I've been doing math all night so I kinda cheated. ;)
Git Isn't Hard
Where Google App Engine rocked and where it dissappointed
Two areas that I can come up with:

1. Minification -- If you want to minify your JS, you might run into problems if you don't insert all necessary semicolons.

2. Convention -- If you wrote js code with no semicolons and then showed it to other JS programmers, you'll get a funny look, a slap in the face, or a free copy of "Javascript for Dummies", depending on the context.
uh, link?
How You Can Use Social Media to Help the U.S. Auto Industry
ah yes, links? info?
Google CEO Eric Schmidt on Plans for 2009
A valuable resource comparing major scm's that I point people to when they ask me is the FreeBSD project's wiki page:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/VersionControl
Hope it helps. Regarding specifically SVN versus GIT, be sure to look at the VCSWhy link at the bottom.
Abuse of geometry is popular these days.

But hey, pseudoscience sells. Makes the reader feel smart when he "figures it out".
Hmm, I hadn't considered the minification context - good point. That said, doesn't HTTP compression make minification largely unnecessary?

As for convention: yes, I have indeed had some funny looks when asking this question in real life (no slaps yet, though). If you're working in a team, you obviously need to conform to one coding style; I'm coming from a mostly sole-coder perspective. But why does the convention persist? (Is that a strange question to ask?) Is it simply the weight of tradition, or are there other benefits?
I wish I could help with your questions, but I'm more on your side of the coin (about to build a Django site with some social functionality) and so I have some questions of my own for you, if you don't mind.. :)

How have you found Django for building your site? How long did it take? Were there any specific tools / Django apps / guides that helped you out along the way?
Hah, do I detect a little light jab in your lack of punctuation?

I guess it partly depends on how you view the relationship between programming languages like Javascript and the typographical conventions of natural languages like English.

I tend to think of a series of statements in a programming language as more akin to a to-do list of imperatives than a paragraph from a recipe book. If you are writing a to-do list, you don't need to mark the end of the instruction; the end of the line functions for this purpose. Something like this would be sufficient for understanding:

break eggs into pan
fry the eggs
remove the eggs from pan
eat the eggs

As opposed to the recipe approach:

Break the eggs in the pan; now fry the eggs; next remove the eggs from the pan; now eat the eggs.

More syntactical marks are required for clarity (including many semicolons!), but the first approach (the to-do list) is arguably closer to how code is actually written.
Google Seduces With Utility
Russian investment firm ONEXIM to acquire Forbes?
Twitter have said they are going to implement OAuth (which would solve this problem) on their API page. However, they have shown no progress to my knowledge of doing this. It would be great for the community to push them towards it.

Twitter seem to have been so busy fire fighting that a lot of interesting stuff has seemingly dropped off the roadmap (such as XMPP).
grr. I may agree with the sentiments of the article; however it belongs elsewhere. This is neither news, nor of particular interest to hackers.
Very nice UI.
What I learned about "how to make ideas stick".
Mike Arrington is wrong about Google search
It took FB forever to launch their marketplace...and it's been a total nonfactor. I don't know anyone who buys or sells stuff on there.
You won't be disappointed. The only things I'm a bigger snob about than beer and women is music and movies ;)
I have a good, interesting job, started working on the age of 14, have saved some money and have no debts. The only thing I would say to myself is:

Don't forget your friends. They are important as well.

Because sadly, I think most people do forget them, including me...
I've heard this question a lot when people ask me about what Yahoo are going to be offering in the cloud.

A lot of people don't understand the difference between Amazon's and Google/Microsoft's approach to cloud offerings.

Amazon seem to be providing a lot of infrastructure pieces, from virtulization to storage and CDN to RDMS. However how you connect those pieces or which you use it's pretty much up to you.

Google on the other (and Microsoft judging by the current descriptions of Azure) have provided a platform which guides developers towards good practices with constraints but is more limited in the possible applications. That said they won't make your application performs, they'll just make sure it fits in their scalable architecture.

So the short answer is yes. You can build a truly scalable application on any or all of these cloud services if you know how. If you know how, though, you can probably do it without them.
I think there is a lot to be said for intuitive tool design. While the article was particularly single sided, for something you should use as much as version control it should be low barrier.

I rather like the Bazaar single binary approach with inline help on commands.
I like basing my life on theories that are not complete speculation.
Ask HN: what to do with a colocation contract?
I have an extra server that I cannot justify colocation for anymore (everything it runs can fit on a slicehost $20/month).

I have about $600 in payments left in the colocation contract and they want half that to cancel early.

Are there any good ideas for softening this cost (I don't need to "make money" just not spend so much)? It would have to be some arrangement that was very low maintenance for me.

Some kind of "sublet"?

Thanks
Los Angeles vs. San Francisco Startup Communities
I highly recommend James Hogan's Kicking the Sacred Cow. He very persuasively shows the baselessness of some of science's most strongly believed "facts." This applies not only to global warming, but also things like Darwinism, AIDs, environmental scares, even the big bang and relativity.
Minification has already been mentioned, but I wanted to re-iterate as it's such an important point. You can reduce size over the wire by as much as 30-80% by minifying and obfuscating (something like YUI or Dojo compressors do this).

Not having semi-colons risks a lot of code breakage. Doug Crockford's JSMin has an aggressive mode which always strips line breaks and another which doesn't to avoid breakage when semicolons don't exist.

Personally I would just say that if you don't use semi-colons you should think hard about why you code at all. I'm not the anal-retentive type but sloppy code isn't awesome. I would put this in the same category as naming variables $whatever or $x. If you've never picked up someones second hand project you may not appreciate why a pleasant coding style matters.
My oldest code still running
I really love Bazaar.

I love that it's distributed and I can version a local folder with a single command. I love the simple integration with Launchpad.net (which is annoyingly mediocre). I love that it's a single command which has all the inline help built in. I love the conflict management.

However, people with a much better understanding of the details wrote comparisons with each of the popular DVCS currently in use. I suggest if you use another VCS you at least read the Bzr side (http://bazaar-vcs.org/BzrWhy).

Specific comparisons:

Subversion: http://bazaar-vcs.org/BzrVsSvn
Git: http://bazaar-vcs.org/BzrVsGit
Mercurial: http://bazaar-vcs.org/BzrVsHg
Ask HN: Feedback on my startup and advice for the big pitch
Our startup is preparing to pitch at StartupCampMontreal3 this Thursday and I am looking to the HN community for some feedback and advice. We are a bit of an odd duck since we are not a web app but I have taken some marketing ideas from the web2.0 world to use to our advantage.

Our company mission is to bring the benefits of LED lighting to mainstream consumers. We have a 5 minute pitch this Thursday in front of an audience of several hundred investors, entrepreneurs, etc.

Any feedback and advice would be greatly appreciated.
Our startup is preparing to pitch at StartupCampMontreal3 this Thursday and I am looking to the HN community for some feedback and advice. We are a bit of an odd duck since we are not a web app but I have taken some marketing ideas from the web2.0 world to use to our advantage.

Our company mission is to bring the benefits of LED lighting to mainstream consumers. We have a 5 minute pitch this Thursday in front of an audience of several hundred investors, entrepreneurs, etc.

Our closest competitor is a lamp made by Philips called Living Colors http://tinyurl.com/2g8ruv

Any feedback and advice would be greatly appreciated.
I think it's silly to put a limit on "how long you're in the game for" at all...
The fix for this sort of thing is pretty simple. Just keep a nonce on a user (the "user version" if you will) that increments every time a user makes a change to their login credentials, store that nonce in their cookie, and if the one in the cookie is lower than the one on the server treat it as a logout.

That said, this is sort of an unserious security "issue" for most people between not really caring about the security of their account and reasonably short cookie lifetime settings.
I assume you've seen the plugins that'll let you typeset equations within Word using LaTeX syntax?

http://texpoint.necula.org/
Why isn't iphone.com optimized for the iPhone?
www.iphone.com
I wasn't intending to come across as being anti-code-conventions! I love coding and I'm a bit shocked that my questions suggest to you that I might have a sloppy coding style in general. :^) I agree that conventions and shared idioms are extremely important. My question is, "why is this a convention?", not "why should we use conventions at all?".

I'm all for adopting the semicolon convention myself, even in sole-programmer projects, if there are reasons for using it; that's basically why I asked the question in the first place. (And of course I adopt it if contributing to a project which already uses it - no need to rock the boat.) Things like minification are exactly what I'm interested in, although I was under the impression that HTTP compression does a better job than Javascript minifiers at solving the size problem. Obfuscation is, of course, another matter entirely.