skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The pessimistic assumption would be that they are smarter, because if they are they can beat us in war... which is what happens when two different species collide (heck, it even happens for differences in the colour of the skin... i cannot imagine what would happen if is the full shape)
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The phrase "Eating the seed corn." comes to mind.

Also the old anarchist saw:

"Libraries will get you through times of no money better
than money will get you through times of no libraries"
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I was thinking of their move to 153 Kearny.
Most US libraries have huge collections of videos (VHS, DVDs), most of them are entertainment, like regular crappy action movies, and there's no real good reason for them to be in the library.

Many US libraries have audio (CDs, cassetes). Most of them are just as senseless.
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Whenever you outsource make sure you watch the code very, very carefully. At least 90% of the people I meet (at least here in Bangalore) would store passwords in clear text and not know why this is a bad thing.

Microsoft fully deserves the blame here, for not asking basic questions. Besides, the rest of the code is likely to be smelly too if the entire team failed to notice the issue.
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Ask HN: Looking for HR people as beta testers
I am looking for feedback from recruiters for my new startup http://www.fastcandidate.com

FastCandidate helps you find the right candidates, faster and I would like to test this assumption with people who matter.

So I need some quality people to tell me what works and what does not. If you are not in HR but recruit people a lot, don't hesitate to participate as well.

I will need your email address so I can send you an invite. My address is mail[dot]]girish[at}gmail.com
Doesn't this mean that all public libraries will just shut down or do public libraries in california have other sources of revenue (federal money perhaps?)
Great post Leo. There are some great comments here, but I have a feeling you did not intend for people to think they are smarter than they are.

Rather, I think the point you may perhaps be trying to make is that we should all be very pragmatic about sharing our lessons, no matter what stage we are currently at. This is something I believe in very much. I feel far too many people wait until they have achieved something they perceive as substantial before they share their lessons or achievements.

I think we can all benefit by sharing our lessons much earlier and more frequently. If we do it in an open way, where we acknowledge we are on a journey and will need to make adjustments to reach our goal, then this humble approach can really bring some fantastic advice from others who are just a little further along. And, like you've said, there are without a doubt people not as far along who can benefit too.

Cheers Leo!
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all i need is a windowless experience. minimal UI please? I've been a VLC user for 4 years until I realized I wanted a minimal UI footprint. It's video! UI is secondary.

I've been using MPlayerX, anyone else tried it?
I don't know about libraries in California specifically, but traditionally libraries get most of their funding at the municipal level (funded by the cities).
“If you’re a smart Ph.D. from MIT, you’d never go to Wall Street now,” says a hedge-fund executive. “You’d go to Silicon Valley. There’s at least a prospect for a huge gain. You’d have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. It looks like he has a lot more fun.”
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When you do a SELECT * and with a join or two, you get the chance of field name conflicts which can cause logic errors. You either have to alias the conflicting fields, specify each field you want on the select, or prefix field names so they never conflict.
If you are using PHP without a framework and mysql_array_assoc, there can be collisions / inconsistencies / problems in joined columns that have the same name. I've run into it a few times. Most decent systems don't choke in that case, but there are cases where it's simply easier to prefix column names instead of writing AS everywhere. If you're working with really long SQL queries generally it can also help make things more explicit.

I don't do this usually but I have run into a couple of occasions where it would have helped out.
Hubris actually works great for me. It makes me say yes to projects way beyond my league and I have to learn and work much harder.
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> Actually trade means opposed interests, which is the fastest way to get into a war.

Actually, trade means a joined interest in making an exchange, since if both sides didn't see the exchange as in their own best interest they wouldn't be making the trade. Moreover, trading relationships are not usually based on one-off trades. Which means that you'll want to trade again. Which means that getting into a war with the other party would be a bad idea.

All this reminds me of a quote by the late philosopher Robert Nozick, who defined "Marxist exploitation" as "the exploitation, by Marxists, of people's ignorance of economics."
Ask HN: Organizing information on the web (startup idea)
Hi HN,

I've been working on a web idea the past couple of months, and I was hoping to get some constructive feedback.

I want to try to make a site where people can create, update and share collections (databases) of information. Essentially, I want to make a 'Wikipedia of databases', where content is completely driven by individuals who want to organize information on the web. One of my goals is to centralize a lot of redundant, factual information, and to create comprehensive data sources which can be consumed by other sites through an API.

What do you think?

http://curio.org
Amen to this. A skilled designer adds a lot of value by setting the type weight and kerning properly, choosing a decent color palette, giving you the right options for light / dark backgrounds and so on.

As important is a basic style guide/manual for the rest of your stuff (use these styles for h1, h2, h3, bullets like so etc).

As a formerly design-blind hacker, I've come to appreciate that consistency in visual design is significantly under-valued.
I have the best luck staying on task by doodling--keep a pad of paper and pen on my desk, and while waiting for compiling/whatever, just draw.

It's like being bored in class but still needing to pay some amount of attention.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1017270...

There was also a TED talk that was pro-doodling, so it must be awesome, right?

http://www.ted.com/talks/sunni_brown.html
Are you saying that libraries should only have sensible holdings? Which ones are those?

I once checked out le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. It was something of an action novel, and it was entertaining. Was that one OK?
It depends on whether you consider the purpose as technically enabling the spreading of information/books, or actually encouraging people to go and read and study. Sure people are able to go and buy or download each of the books in there, but IMO kids still gain a ton from wandering around the stacks until they find something interesting. It's also a good way to impress upon kids the huge amount of gathered knowledge out there, and how important it is to make use of it...
The price of information: Academics begin boycott of journal publisher.
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Yes, I'm getting something in return, I get to take the desired action on the publisher's site. That's the case with any CAPTCHA. With the old CAPTCHA, I was at least helping convert printed books to digital formats. How is Double Recall different from Solve Media? It's obviously the same business model.
The search space a lot smaller, since you can cut many incorrect branches very early.
What a sad, sad statement of a government.

The most important resource any country has is intelligent people. Cutting library funding is cutting general education for the masses. It is actively dumbing down populous.
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Initiative to curb phishing in Twitter.
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Inspired by the cliche of a business plan scrawled on a napkin, I decided to spend my evening making this silly graphviz wrapper. Sometimes its output reads like the basis for a plausible pitch.
You make no distinction between actively hurting children and copying photos of someone else hurting a child in the past?
Big news for me is: MITx certificate.

Last Fall Stanford took the initiative to organize live online classes. I took "Introduction of DB" and got a certificate from the professor. Some students complained that Stanford name was not on the certificate. Stanford apparently did not agree to distribute free certificates to online students. When you have a few CS students paying a high price to receive education, it's hard to give an official document for free. coursera.com was created by Stanford teachers who thought they would be better in a startup mode.

What makes MIT initiative unique is that its certificates will be MIT branded ("MITx"). This is a winning strategy, as more people will turn to those classes. Some may continue by applying to MIT itself. It will also help MIT brand reach. Note those certificates will only be free for this pilot course.

You can argue that having a certificate is something that matters or not vs actually learn something. I think a lot of people around the world will feel very proud to receive an official document that proved they know those skills.
1. Those who believe the world is the way they see it.

2. Those who realize how limited their perspective is.

That's a good point. I suspect that the first one isn't so much a lack of humility, though.

Naively, it seems that you're just perceiving how the world is, as if your eyes are just windows into the world, and that your judgments (e.g. such and such is being a jerk) are simply reflecting the objective nature of how things are.

It takes time, learning and effort to really become aware of your perception of things as something in itself, that it is a process which takes in limited information and makes judgments on the basis of various assumptions, and that it is something which can be turned in on itself in a critical fashion.
using duckduckgo for not to be tracked by google (as one of the reasons), but with chrome by google?..
If you're using postgres on Heroku you can get a fork of your production db to test things like these:

http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgresql#fork_...
I think libraries (as buildings) aren't really needed anymore. Switch the library model to digital, it would be orders of magnitude cheaper, and you only really need one large website instead of 120,000 buildings throughout the country.

If you need to save money right now, ditch all videos.
It isn't quite as simple as saying that forging produces a stronger part since a monocrystalline casting of a turbine blade would be stronger than a forged polycrystalline one.
> • DuckDuckGo's bang syntax (!jquery, etc) isn't any
> better than search keywords built into Firefox and
> Chrome.

Having never used DDG, the advantages that I can see:

1) You don't have to set them up, because they are already there.

2) You get them from whatever computer you are at. You don't have to setup or sync the keyword searches with every computer you use (or public terminal).

3) If you use DDG as your main search engine, it's right there, so you can use a singular search interface.
Support for websocket is not yet fully baked into Mongrel2. The handshake etc needs to be done on the handler side. So gevent solution is a better bet at the moment. The alternative is to have a separate Tornado/Node.js to handle websocket alongside Django/Pyramid app. Mongrel2 does look promising, although it seems zedshaw is pretty resource tide at the moment.
The question here isn't whether or not this would 'work': clearly, the physics are sound. However, will it work efficiently enough to be of any use to anyone? I'm a little rusty, but let's try and run some numbers (feel free to jump in and correct me if I go wrong).

Estimating some spring dimensions (0.7mm wire diameter, 13mm outer diameter, 30mm free length) and looking up comparable springs from an online supplier (http://www.leespring.com/browse_catalog.asp?rbunitOfMeasure=...) seems to indicate a spring constant (k) of around 0.2 N/mm (200 N/m).

Hooke's law states that the potential energy stored in a spring is equal to (k(x^2))/2, where k is the spring constant and x is the displacement (distance squeezed/stretched). If we take a wild, optimistic guess that each 360 degree rotation of the battery head produces 1cm of compression in the spring, that means each rotation stores a nicely round (200(.01^2))/2 = 0.01J of potential energy in the spring.

Let's continue our optimism and say that the mechanism connected to the spring is able to quickly convert that compression into rotation, spinning a tiny generator which converts the kinetic energy into electric potential energy in the battery at, let's say, 80% efficiency. Each twist therefore stores 0.008J, or 0.002 mWh, in the battery.

A decent NiMH AA battery stores around 2500 mAh. If we assume the cell in the design maintains the same energy density as a normal NiMH battery, at ~30% of the size, we can estimate a fully charged capacity of ~750 mAh. Since AA batteries operate at 1.5V, this gives us a total energy capacity of (1.5 x 750) = 1125 mWh.

This means that, to fully charge the battery, you'd need to twist the top all the way around (1125/.002) = 562,500 times. Based on my home experiments fondling the top of a normal AA battery, I estimate that it's possible to rotate the top approximately twice per second, which means that fully charging the battery would take (((562 500 / 2) / 60) / 60) / 24 = 3.25 days of continuous twisting. (note: this ignores wrist and elbow fatigue, which I started to experience after only a few hundred twists)

So more than 3 straight days of twisting one of these suckers, for a third of the power of a standard AA battery. I'd call that unfeasible, unless you had some serious time on your hands and were absolutely desperate for a few milliwatts.
They could have at least drawn a torsion spring rather than a compression spring, and a generator with a more realistic aspect ratio, and I think that would have given them more space for the actual battery.

Overall the idea seems like "sound science" (engineering really) in the sense that there's no reason it would be impossible or even difficult to build. It just... has no practical value at all.
Shouldn't this page be on SSL, in compliance with Stripe's rules?

http://www.hackerengine.com/orders/new
Best quote in that article, by far. I just gave up trying to fit that in a tweet.
I'm sorry, what? Chrome does not send your info back to Google, unless you have the anonymized usage statistics (not sure what it tracks) option turned on, or are using Google as your search provider with Suggestions enabled as-you-type.
I think modern kids are online already, and are exposed to all kinds of information. No library in the world can even come close to Wikipedia + Google image search.
I think the point is that this is the sort of thing people should buy/rent for themselves, rather than demanding other people to rent it for them.
Does anyone know of any downsides to enrolling? Like others, I'm doing school/work full time already but I'm letting my curiosity get the better of me (enrolled on Udacity only so far). Is it wrong to assume that if you pass, you pass, if not you can just try again when you have the time (and it's being offered of course)?

Edit: add MITx and some coursera courses as well... this semester's been gentle so far, why not liven it up?
Don't run on your whole app on gevent, but only the part which needs streaming/long poll. By decreasing the surface area, you can pin point the bugs arising due to monkey patching.
Yes but problem seem to be that a surprising relative small number of academics start companies around the globe I hear.

In Denmark it's less than 5%.of those who start companies. I wonder what number is in the US.
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I think we have to be careful with using the term "property". People are very familiar with the concept of property. So when they hear that word in the context of this debate, they (understandably but mistakenly) assume the copyright makes artistic works the "property" of the author. From there, one automatically begins to draw analogies to stealing, etc. However, none of these terms are in keeping with copyright law, because copyright law is not about property. The law is very careful to draw a distinction. Here's the correct terminology:

- Copyright law provides authors a financial monopoly. It gives them exclusive rights as to how a work may be sold, displayed publicly, or performed publicly. It does not make that work the "property" of the author.
- Copyrighted material is known as "infringing material", which is not the same as stolen goods.
- Violators are said to have "misappropriated" a copyright, or to have "infringed" upon the province of a copyright, thus committing "copyright infringement". This is not the equivalent of piracy.

Even trespassing doesn't seem like a valid analogy. But I would argue that we don't really need to analogize. Why not just look at the law for what it is?

The point is incentive authors to create new works by granting them a financial monopoly on their works, but to protect public interests and the freedom of speech, information, and ideas by making this monopoly limited in time and scope. It wasn't designed to prevent people from accessing an author's work. It was to prevent them from profiting off of it.
I agree! Libraries should only stock reference materials. To hell with this "popular culture" BS.
Ugh, another link to w3 schools? It possibly only ranks so high for JS searches because everyone is linking to it as being an exemplar of horrible JS information. Please stop linking to W3 schools.
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> This isn't about compressing data, it's rather the opposite: expand the data so that even if a certain portion of it is affected by interference, the original data can still be reconstructed without errors.

The two problems (data compression, and noisy channel coding) are tied together quite neatly by information theory though: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/book.html
> Are you saying that libraries should only have sensible holdings? Which ones are those?

You're being facetious, but this is precisely the question libraries have always faced, through thin times and fat, regardless of the social and political winds. They have only so much shelf space and face the simple fact nobody will come to a location that doesn't offer them anything they want.

There's a very old political debate at bottom: Should a government institution give the taxpayers what they want, or should it focus more on giving them what the better-educated types decide they need? Go the first way and you're competing with Wal-Mart and Barnes & Noble; go the second and you have a wonderful temple to Sanctioned Knowledge that, to a first approximation, nobody really cares about.

So, yes, what are 'sensible' holdings? Do you have any answers?
While we are at the topic of Python web frameworks, I seriously like Flask's design better than django's. True that django came out before SQLAlchemy or Jinja2 became popular/existed, but I would have loved it had they re-factored.

Django is great, with good re-usable components, but I like Jinja2 more than Django's templating. The argument for SQLAlchemy is more on the lines of I would prefer a standard ORM compared to everyone baking their own. SQLAlchemy used to be verbose, but the declarative extension now takes care of it.

Other things I like about flask are explicit app object, and context locals.
They are offering MITx certificate for free for this pilot course because, I quote from their website "In this prototype version, MITx will not require that you be tested in a testing center or otherwise have your identity certified in order to receive this certificate." As I see it, this certificate will be more or less of equal value as the Stanford online course certificates, since their is no way to ensure authenticity of the student.

Their plan in (near)future is to charge a small fee and conduct tests at authorized testing centres(ETS centres for example) where ones identity can be confirmed. Since that way they can confirm that their is no foul play involved, the student will also be given course credits from MITx(Discussed here: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/mitx-faq-1219.html ). That for me is really exciting.
A singled out logo looks pretty good in some cases, but I'm afraid scrolling through multiple entries beats paging for many users. A segmented control in the top-right corner that lets you toggle between the two modes might be the solution. You can be generous with the whitespace in the scroll view and it will look just as good.

Regarding current desktop usability: Please capture scrolling and interpret it as swiping. I have to click twice to 'swipe' to the next one. I don't want to click unless I'm leaving the page or POSTing something.

Also, I suppose you might like to earn some money with this. I found an interesting typeface but wasn't even able to Google it at first, because the spelling was wrongfully auto-corrected. A button with an affiliate link to buy (or simply download if the typeface is free) is what would make this app really useful.

Thanks for sharing this, I'll be keeping an eye on you. Good luck!
Because if we meet them, it's because they got here thus they're a lot more technologically advanced than we are?

(Though there's a fun short story from way back that ends with aliens who have FTL travel wanting to buy our high-reliability computing/robotics tech, because they've never developed any for themselves :-)
It's about time. That's what should have happened immediately after the crash several years ago, but the bailouts stopped it.
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In theory you are right, in reality most kids probably don't move off Facebook other than to cheat on their homework.