skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What an Obama Presidency Means for Technology
> I was surprised that we had text-to-speech way back then. I'd always assumed that came much later.

It's not surprising that that you were surprised. The "Macintalk" software that was part of that demo was a crude one shot that didn't get maintained regularly. IIRC, the speech synthesis was neglected by the time of System 4.1 and didn't get engineering resources again until about Mac OS 8 or so. (I started owning Macs during this time period and was disappointed that my first Mac couldn't do speech for almost 5 years until Apple got their act together again.) Macro/scripting support also had an abortive start, with System 6 using a "MacroMaker" system that was shelved for 7, only to be partially replaced by AppleScript. (With UI scripting only being reintroduced with OS X!) And don't get me started on how Apple abandoned Balloon Help and Apple Guide for the inferior systems used on currrent Macs... /-:
"Obviously compulsory volunteerism won't actually be mandated."

As I said earlier in the thread somewhere, it already is in some places at least. In my county you need 75 hours of community service (fluffed 'Social Service Learning Hours') to graduate high school. I'm not whining, because you have 7 years to do it, but I'm just saying: "This is America" won't get you that far.
What's with the Alaska hate? Oh, and that "little" state is nearly two and a half times the size of Texas. You may call it a "welfare state", but clearly, we have a very strong interest in making sure it's somewhat populated.
Researchers Hijack Storm Worm to Track Profits
Dude, have you read my comment at all before posting your random story of the day? I made sure to stress I mean dollars. I made sure to stress I mean dollars on top of a firm sale price. Seriously, which part of my post said shares to you?
Hmm I did not know that but thanks for letting me know. Well let me rephrase my question. Would those private companies have been so successful if the government did not allocated funding for space research or focus on it's own space program?

I don't know the answer but I think they'd be related.
but you'd have to type your password maybe, which would ruin the danger. Unless you'd been sudo'ing a lot.
Wuala's improved security
Can you assume that the next elections are independent of the current ones?
Summary of RubyConf Day 1
Slightly over a year ago I submitted a link to my critique of Wuala's security here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70823); since Wuala's security has improved since then, I thought it would be only fair to submit a link to my reassessment.
It has event bugs all the way back from IE6. It's not even close to compliant, except for the most complained-about things.
Stop being a perfectionist, build something and get it out there as soon as possible. Don't waste time making sure everything is perfect. Better to lose a few people who get annoyed, than lose the 2-3 months w/o any users
You're so right about Jerry that I regret not saving my entire week's allowance of upmods for you. But I think we're in violent agreement on the point. There is a difference between wanting to sell all along and wanting to stay independent. If he wanted to sell all along and he was just playing negotiating games, I have no sympathy for him and his board. They should face the full wrath of the shareholders.

On the other hand, if he wanted to make a go of it independently and it's a case of things falling apart to the point where he's going back to Ballmer on his knees... I have sympathy for him. In Apple's case, after rejecting the buyout they went with Plan B, engaging in one of the greatest "HR Acquisitions" in history. Jerry's Plan B hasn't worked out quite so well.
JavaScript Graph Plotting Tool (div not canvas)
yes you're right - i just made changes to the caption. thanks.
Microsoft CEO: Not interested in Yahoo acquisition
Stretching: The Truth
Also, let's just do the maths here: there's 10 million college students in the US. Give each of them $4000 a year to pick up trash from the projects, and that's $40 billion a year, or about 1.5% of the size of the Federal budget, or 4% the size of the deficit.

That's a helluva lot of money to spend in the middle of a budget crisis on paying people to do work, the nature of which is so far undecided.
JX: Layout manager for jQuery
Wow, that BayesianInvestor link is completely insane. According to the guy's own data, on Oct 1 Intrade predicted a 51% chance of Democratic victory in North Carolina, while FiveThirtyEight predicted a 50% change. In other words, their predictions were identical to within the margin of error. Here's how he characterizes that:

Intrade got North Carolina right on that date (just barely) while FiveThirtyEight rated it a toss-up.

Uh, yeah.

As for the fact that the trading markets are, to within a small margin of error, perfectly reflective of the best possible sources of empirical data (e.g. FiveThirtyEight, as of the night before the election): Yawn. Google "efficient market hypothesis". Or read up on the concept of "equilibrium".
Humans are superior to machines in several ways:

- we get tons of data, just not all textual. We have visual (~30fps in much bigger than HD resolution all day long), audio (again, better than CD quality all day long), smell, taste, and touch, not to mention internal senses (balance, pain, muscular feedback, etc). By the time a baby is 6 months old, she's seen and processed a lot of data. Don't know if it's more than Google's 18B pages, but it's a lot.

-we get correlated data. Google has to use a ton of pages for language because it only gets usage, not context. Much (most?) of the meaning in language comes from context, but using text you only get the context that's explicitly stated. Speech is so economical because humans get to factor in the speaker, the relationship with the speaker, body language, tone of voice, location, recent events, historical events, shared experiences, etc, etc, etc. Humans have a million ways to evaluate everything they read or hear, and without that, you need a ton of text to make sure you cover those situations.

-we have a mental model. Everything we do or learn adds to the model we have of the world, either by explicit facts (A can of Coke has 160 calories) or by relative frequencies (there are no purple cows but a lot of brown ones). My model of automobile engines is very crude and inaccurate while my model of programming is very good. Also, because I have (or can build) a model, I have a way to evaluate new data. Does this add anything to a part of my model (pg's essays did this for me)? Does it confirm a part of the model that wasn't sure (more experimental data)? Does it contradict a weakly held belief? Does is contradict a strongly held belief? Is it internally consistent? Is the source trustworthy?

This mental model might just be a bunch of statistically relevant correlations, but that sounds like neurons with positive or negative attractions of varying strength. Kind of like a brain. I believe Jeff Hawkins is on to something (see On Intelligence http://www.amazon.com/o/asin/0805078533/pchristensen-20), but there needs to be correlated data (like vision/hearing/touch are correlated) and the ability to evaluate data sources.

I agree that if humans can do it, machines can do it, but I think you're vastly underestimating the amount and quality of data humans get.
Make a list of niche areas of development. Find the communities for those areas and become an authority in those communities. Make sure there are buyers in that community, or find another. Take on work.

For example. Wordpress is a niche area. There are lots of Wordpress communities. Find the communities where people go to get help, share ideas and generally talk about development. There are probably people posting paid projects there. And that is your target.

Wordpress is a pretty big niche with lots of buyers and sellers. The problem is that those buyers can be anywhere from total jokers to people with deep pockets. This happens with free stuff which is highly popular.

A better opportunity is to find a niche that has relatively few service providers and lots of service consumers. Even better is if that niche is paid software which is used by companies with lots of money.

Big new platforms are big opportunities. If you are an Iphone guru then you don't even have to post here asking how to find work. There are probably few sure bets out there than Iphone development.
[video] The iPhone Ocarina: Link Never Would Have Allowed This
World's worst hacker deletes his own hard disk - real funny.
The iphone is officially the Swiss army knife of electronics (as if it were not already). So cool.

When my co-worker saw this video he exclaimed "the iPhone is the last thing, device, object, relationship you will ever need!" Hyperbole for sure, but hilarious and maybe even half true.
Insanely inferior to the Amiga 1000 which came out shortly after and cost 1/2 as much.
So, "slavery" then? Who'd have thunk President Obama would be the one to bring back slavery?

Seriously though, it's not actually _forced_, it's just encouraged via one of those offers-you-can't-refuse.

It really does make me very uneasy though. Why did people wait until after the election to start discussing the more worrying aspects of Obama's policy platform?

And how long before people start discussing Obama's triple goals of giving tax cuts to 95% of the population while balancing the budget and starting up many expensive new federal programs?
This link belongs on Digg, not on Hacker News.
CEO Caught in Email Scandal Nets 0K Settlement
Trojan Compromises Over 300,000 Accounts
Politics that matters should be on HN. Winning an election matters. He called it with certainty.
Land mass isn't relevant, it's little because it has a small population.
Other than making Windows a *nix distro, what would MSFT have to do to not suck?
POSIX compliance, the standard file system, and . . . what else? How many steps are on the path from where they are to where they need to get to, and what are they?
Is that with a dictionary password and a "top 1000" ssid as a salt, using CoWPAtty rainbow tables? Or a full brute-force of the pre-AES WPA?
Yes.

Which is not to say that this year's election outcomes don't influence future events, but rather that the information flow from this year's elections will be so insignificant compared to future information by the time the next elections occur that we may accept them as independent variables.

(Certainly as more independent than dependent, but I'd conjecture that the effects of the current election are so small that they may be safely handwaved away. Interesting arguments that this year's elections on any level are a major determining factor in future elections are of course welcome.)
Although the first rule of a startup is build something people want (after PG) more and more that something should solve some "serious" problem (after O'Reilly).

Please - no more social networks!

Cheers
I'm not so sure it was a mistake. If you want to put on a tinfoil hat for a minute we could speculate that Microsoft wasn't genuinely interested the first time. That botched acquisition was a media circus and effectively destroyed Yahoo. Since then, consumer and shareholder confidence in both the business and leadership has completely eroded to the point where Yahoo is simply unable to compete effectively. Perhaps that was Microsoft's intent all along. It certainly costs a lot less money than having to win with superior product development.

Even without conspiracy theories and speculation it is impossible to deny that Yahoo is a much different company than it was just six months ago. Top talent has been jumping ship. There have been layoffs. Marketshare and mindshare have been on the decline. Those are all of Yahoo's most valuable assets.

Not only is there now less value in any partnership or acquisition but public perception of such a deal will be much less positive than it would have been before. In fact, it could be seen as very negative. There were already a few naysayers asking why Microsoft would want the Yahoo monkey on its back. Since then, the situation has become much worse. It can no longer be perceived as two worthy competitors to Google forming an alliance to create something great. Now, it's more like Yahoo is having a going out of business sale. The point was to display strength and now it appears weak.

Microsoft may still acquire Yahoo, but the point I'm trying to make is that it's a different type of deal now and one that would be made for different reasons. I think they're going to weigh their options and not do anything too hasty. It's not like they have to jump on this right away. I don't think anyone else is going to be in a big hurry to buy Yahoo. Even at $18 a share it's a very expensive deal that not many companies can afford.

In the end I think Microsoft probably will end up buying them, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's several months from now. I think the first deal was more about marketshare and public perception than it was about technology. Now that that's no longer a viable strategy they're probably going to want to take a serious look at what they'd be getting for their money. Besides, Microsoft's shareholders need to be convinced it's for the right reasons so it's not such a bad thing if they let things quiet down a bit and then snatch up Yahoo for even less money next year. By then it will appear much more like they're taking advantage of a great deal than betting the farm trying to beat Google.
It makes sense.

Apple did not chose it because they are commie hippies.

They are a cut throat for profit company and they chose it because it is a free and good code base.

And that makes development cheaper and faster - good for any for profit company,

There is also no giving up of control to speak of. You can fork any time you like, and you can do what ever you like. You lose no control.

So why wouldn't Microsoft do it?

Pride, not invented here syndrome, internal politics, what ever, I just don't think we'll see it happen any time soon.
But I hope to be proven wrong.
* learn while/from doing
* continuously learn
* avoid planning paralysis
* don't be afraid to scrap chunks of code or whole projects.
Website Owner’s Manual Extract: Know Your Site
Both I and the author of that blog both know what the EMH is and equilibrium is, and the problem is not as simple as you claim it is. Please don't be condescending.

While I agree that he seems to have overvalued the 1% difference in intrade and 538 re:North Carolina, do note that he concludes that 538 was the better election predictor. That one sentence does not make the whole article "completely insane", and I'd like to know what else from the article you thought was insane.

Furthermore, your last paragraph is completely and utterly incoherent. For one thing, you claim that a complicated, proprietary, untested, statistical data model, whose data is gathered by a person of unknown sympathies, represented the best available model of the empirical data. (How can you even argue that now, after a single election result?)

Then you claim that markets should be efficient in reflecting that data, except that they had quite large differences in some states. Which somehow adds up to "yawn".

Color me unimpressed.
Face Time
Ask HN: What are the useful parts of agile programming?
It seems like the useful parts are:

1) Build and deploy the smallest useful part first. > Get's the project moving and not canceled.

2) Break request into separate time lines. > Give management choices vs. death marches.

3) When two coders are talking about a problem sit down together at a desktop and fix the code. > Avoid wasting time talking about stuff you don't really understand.

Anything else?
How hard is it to start a startup (for a hacker)
it's good idea to help the others like that. if someone downloads a book from time to time will not affect the Amazon budget.
Thank you very much dear friend.
Hmmm replacing if/else statements with a map/dictionary with pointers to either data or functions. A little off topic here but how do you propose to do this? Assuming we know what polymorphism is. Your map/dictionary style is quite interesting.
I don't see anything inherently wrong, really. It's just strange that, given the point of starting a business is to make money, there would be so many businesses out there running along seemingly without much concern as to revenue. If your aim is to build a large user base and flip, that's fine, but keep in mind that it's an unsustainable business model. It's basically a crapshoot.
I think never before in history has there been such a large number of businesses springing up and carrying on blithely with no idea how they're going to make money.

Ahem... web 1.0
La dent normal et pathologique
I'm sad to say it but this doesn't make sense. Strategically, the easier it is to develop web applications, the less people are dependent on Windows. It is to Microsoft's advantage to make web development as hard as possible. Therefore they will try to break compatibility whenever possible.
Aptana Jaxer criticism
Microsoft discontinues Windows... 3.x
Strands is a language written in JS; the language is javascript itself except with concurrency primitives added: http://www.xucia.com/strands-doc/index.html

I mention strands to say that you could do something similar: by using narcissus (a js interptreter written in js - http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/js/narcissus/) you could interpret a language that was a subset of javascript, with whatever restrictions you wanted. Though javascript's extremely dynamic nature would possibly make this challenging.

More pragmatically, lethain's right that you should look into caja.
It probably depends what you need. Livna is the showcase repo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livna, along with the fedora repos themselves. Also, FreshRPMs is good. http://freshrpms.net/

I'm using Open Office, Gimp, vim, and Netbeans. For any Java to work, I downloaded Sun's Java (not included in the repo). Music and video is just play for me, so I haven't chased that too much.

This laptop was originally just a way to test stuff in Vista. On a whim, I made it a dual-boot with fedora. Now it's my main dev rig.

There are still issues that would drive "mainstream" users batty, though, like having to fuss around to get wifi working, not returning properly after hibernating, etc.
That would require a group of humans that are non trivially genetically different.
Look at the flip side - if your small business provides a way for high school students to do something useful for you, and it is both somewhat fun and counts as "community service", then perhaps you have access to a nearly free source of labor.
DOM 2 event support and other javascript issues are easy to work around. If you use any kind of framework like jQuery then you usually don't even have to worry about them.
Does America Need a CTO?
Correct!

But lots of web development tools/frameworks are smoothing out the browser differences.

Dojo and JQuery are commoditizing the browsers!
Samsung Overtakes Motorola In the U.S.
iPhone tops business rankings, steals Nokia market share
Android: float GRAVITY_DEATH_STAR_I
Fourth entry from the top: const float GRAVITY_DEATH_STAR_I = 3.5303614E-7.
The average frontpage of the top 100 blogs is now 934k
FriendFeed auto-adds maps to the stream
I hear what you're saying. There's just a key point that I would like your opinion on:

So, for the first 4 years, you have no income as you pay off $50,000 of that $200,000 each year.

The assumption though is that it's a healthy company and will continue to grow, if not hold its revenue, otherwise the annual multiplier shouldn't be 4 and you shouldn't be buying it. However, for the sake of argument, let's assume that the above is true. Yes, you're not making an obvious income, but you are earning 50,000$ worth of a company at the end of each year with 0 investment from your pocket. Isn't that a good reward for your efforts? PLUS if the company grows, you keep the surplus in profits.

What I'm saying is it's subjective/relative. If you're a person who's making 30,000$ per year and you want to make 50,000$ per year, then it's worth it to buy this company at 200,000$ since you will increase your yearly earnings, even if the first 4 years you're paying off the worth of the company. It's an investment, like a house. At the end of 4 years, you own a company that's worth 200,000$ or more, if you run it well, PLUS you have a salary of 50,000. That's not bad, and I think you could find someone who'd be interested in that, no?

That's why I say pick your buyers. If you try to sell to someone who wants to buy the company and then sit on their couch while the company rakes in 50,000$ per year, then no, you won't be able to sell it for 200,000$. If you have someone who's looking for a new job and sees future growth potential in your company, then yes, 200,000$ is a good price.

Does that make sense?
It's more than 'mandatory.' It's compulsory.
Startups will fund each other :-)
Cable beating phone companies 2-to-1 for broadband subscribers
Thanks, definitely going to give this a read perhaps this weekend.
Two views on the importance of code
Is code relevant? What do you think?
What It Means To Receive A Term Sheet
Ouch. At least images can be loaded after the text, and broadband (>1.5Mbps) speed would still load them in a couple of seconds.
U.S. job losses soar, jobless rate at 14-year high
Why Startups Fail: A Top 10 List From Prolific Seattle Angel Geoff Entress
We needed 75 hours in FL for the bright futures scholarship. I joined the local volunteer fire station and got my first responder cert. from the county. It's not always boring.
CRT monitors implode with an impressive WHUMP when shot with a .45 caliber bullet...
Why is Oct 1 significant? On the night before the election Nate had IN as a 64% McCain win. Also, Nate, intrade, and betfair all predicted that Obama would win NC. See the link above for all the numerical details.
Jerry gets an unfair rap. I really hope Yahoo can make it through this rough patch without succumbing to the fangs of the big M.

First of all, Yahoo is still a young company, relatively speaking. There are a multitude of far worse examples in stock-price fluctuation and company valuations over time. For those who disagree, I'll point you to one of the pioneering (and free!) resources for such information: Yahoo! Finance at http://finance.yahoo.com/

Second, how can anyone blame him for wanting to keep Yahoo independent from Microsoft? It's Microsoft, for the sake of Pete. The number and types of stakeholders (which are technically different from shareholders, but still important) are a different breed. There was a time I had a stock portfolio, and I owned shares of both Microsoft and Yahoo! -- for very different reasons: I admired the formidable online presence of Yahoo, and I thought (at the time, in early 2005) that Microsoft had a great business in its console gaming business with the X-Box.

Third, Microsoft's bid for Yahoo is a reactive to the shift to changes in the market. And one of the (highly intangible) advantages of being a first-mover is bargaining power over distribution channels. Yahoo, being in its more formidable online position (as interest switches from desktops to the web) operates in an entirely different sphere than Microsoft and should be able to reap the rewards of their investment in the online sphere. If shareholders don't see it now, they will someday -- if they allow Yahoo! to continue independent.

Short-term greed kills innovation.
Agreed. Keep learning new things. Don't ever stop, but don't feel rushed if you feel you're behind. Someone out there is always going to be better and smarter then you at what you are doing

Engage people that are smarter then you (It's why I read Hacker News)
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