skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't tell from the README - is your data fairly wide? I'm playing with using Postgres's new K-Nearest-Neighbor support to calculate similarity on 20D cubes, but I suspect my approach won't work well for an arbitrary number of columns (i.e. users x products) unless you first do some sort of PCA or SVD to narrow it down, and it isn't optimized for binary ratings at all. I started writing it up here: http://parapoetica.wordpress.com/2012/02/15/feature-space-si...
Buy-vs-build for an early stage startup
Replacing income tax with a national sales tax and a prebate check seems like it would make living in the USA 13% better just by making April a less stressful month on the whole. (Yeah, I speak mostly in jest, but I'm referring to the so-called "fair tax" which I like despite not really being qualified to have an opinion about it).
The World According to Newt Gingrich: Contraception Equals War (VIDEO)
This might be of interest: http://wikilocation.org/
Apple will never be the first "person" to do anything.

With that said, point taken.
I completely agree that it would be great, but it's not going to happen in this country. As you said, making people's lives dependent on working for large organizations is simply too convenient for the folks in power.
This might be true for some of them. But it is not for those, which I attended.
MDMA is definitely an upper, both in the sense of being a stimulant, and elevating mood. You're correct that street varieties are now mostly mixed with amphetamines.

…

I'll note that I wasn't referring to abuse in the sense of substance abuse. I meant morally questionable medical and non-medical uses.
Computer Vision is a very interesting domain. If you're considering taking this course, do.
As someone who receives a couple dozen 1099s from all over the country each year, you've got my vote.
http://onepagerapp.com/
Right, but to be the first mover you need to at least get most of the idearight. Just because you got a shitty landing page website up first doesn't mean you can't get steamrolled two months later by somebody who had his stuff together.
Valuing A Company Without Good Traffic?
We're in the process of selling our startup and our traffic stats aren't all that great to say the least. What other types of variables could be used to help value the company(registered users, proprietary market research we'd hand over, etc.)?
HN's "don't rename the article" policy

The guidelines state:

You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it.

I frequently write better headlines for items I submit to HN and they are not often changed by the editors.
SAP, Oracle Fusion, PeopleSoft, Oracle OnDemand, Microsoft Biztalk, Microsoft Dynamics, IBM Lotus Domino (may have wane off).

Quite possibly OpenBSD (sys-admin/net-admin).

Kernel hacker specializing in odd OS (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, the new Solaris distro, etc).

Ruby on Rails used to demand high compensation back in 2006.

Clojure and maybe Scala might be on the same spot where Ruby/Rails was.

Sometimes what it takes is to be the top #5 consultants in a niche field (i.e.: PostgreSQL guru)
The more I hear about your adventures with Candy Japan, the more I love it, even if the product is something that I would never be able to justify buying. (Replace candy with Gashapon–capsule toys–and I'd have a hard time not pulling the trigger).
I didn't know about /dev/tcp/host/port, has a nice Plan 9-like feel.
This makes an assumption of the purpose for a hackathon.

Frankly, I've always felt they were a great way for engineers to play product people, get the juices flowing and just try to get something created in a very short amount of time. It can be the equivalent of chicken soup for the engineering soul.
That comment wouldn't scare off female developers just feminist developers which isn't the same thing.
Guilty developer syndrome is arguably a good thing. The reason being that having it means a developer doesn't have Nothing's Wrong, Everything Is OK Syndrome. That's the one you have to watch out for.
Seems to be overloaded still, anyone have any luck and can comment on how well and what method it uses to work?
War campaigns do not create structural employment, only demand shock employment. Id est, we don't need 10e6 jobs next year, we need 10e6 jobs for the next two decades.
Way to set up a ridiculous straw man and then tear it down angrily.

Dave obviously saw something or experienced something that rubbed him the wrong way and then indirected a few too many times to post this nonsense rant. In general hackathons are mostly about programmers and builders having fun. Can marketing people abuse hackathons? Yes. Can marketing people abuse anything? Yes. So just tell us what's really bothering you.
Twice in the past month, I've participated in restarting a stopped heart belonging to someone over the age of 75. In both those cases, the patient never regained consciousness, and passed away in the ICU a few days later. This story repeats itself over and over again... I don't know what the actual percentage is, but the number of elderly patients who are 'resuscitated' only to never wake up again is surely north of 99%.

I'm conflicted about my participation in this process... CPR is a very brutal process, and all the interventions we use to restart someone's heart are equally traumatic.

So, why do we do this? In most cases, it's because someone doesn't have a DNR, or any other sort of advanced directive. In most (all?) states, if you call EMS and don't have a DNR, you need to actually threaten us to absolve us of our legal duty to start resuscitative efforts (in reality, most of us are human beings, and simply explaining the situation should be enough). The other situation is when a patient _does_ have a DNR, but the family is insistent that we "Do something!"

In both of my recent experiences, our efforts kept the patient 'alive' long enough for out of town family to travel back to say their goodbyes.

Was it worth it though? The financial, emotion, and physical costs are pretty high... I'm not sure...
Actually, I agree with you. It's just that "soul" is the name I give to that complex biological machine.

And I think it's only fair. Though the word "soul" is mostly used in conjunction with dualistic assumptions, it has a deeper meaning that is fairly independent of dualism: Your soul is whatever makes you who you are. Your soul is what really matters about you. Whether the soul is separate from the body and survives it is another question.

I also have a specific reason to use that word: its emotional impact. For instance, one reason I think we should stop death is because it means the destruction of the soul. Even a devout Christian would understand my concerns (and go on to reassure me, but that's another story).

I don't want to let religion hijack this word.
Having been party to this conversation for some time, I largely agree – MobileWorks (www.mobileworks.com) has been taking steps in this direction for some time, though I can't speak to what other crowd platforms are up to.
nevermind, sneaked a peek at the original code http://en.literateprograms.org/Merge_sort_(Python)
I added a link to an interface for trying your own mappings. It didn't get any notice, so adding it here as well:

http://dotsies.org/design-your-own/
In some ways, the labor-capital pendulum has begun to swing back toward capital domination for large-scale compute. You need a lot of capital to get an up-to-date web-scale index, today.

Of course, the "pendulum" isn't discrete and is really a result of the plummeting cost of computing equipment so that both the garage hacker and the mega-corp can deliver outsized value by leveraging their unique traits.
It depends, many voicemail system require a PIN, especially after some of the recent exploits.

BTW, this is talking about SMS, not CID spoofing, so your comment wasn't exactly on topic.
> This reasoning reminds me of the "nutritionist" argument

Except that in this case the before and after are both man-made.
Letter to Apple - Make the next iPhone ethically
Hi Brad,

Just wrote you back! You know, I actually don't see major publishers embracing responsive design, at least in the short term. I think mobile-specific sites and dedicated apps are much more inline with how they see the world. It's also a business opportunity for them to sell separate experiences as separate products, right? Merging everything into one isn't necessarily a win.
JS static analysis tools can help you find mistakes that are often more serious than a missing semicolon.

I've run into something like this before:

for (var i = 0, len = items.length; i < len; i++)
{
var item = items[i];
// ...maybe some more code here...
var subItems = item.subItems;
for (var i = 0, len = subItems.length; i < len; i++) {
// whoops
}
}

The inner for loop's i & len variables are really the same as the outer for loop's i & len variables (there's no shadowing going on here because they're all in the same scope in JS). Depending on the order of things and how many subItems there are, you could end up with an infinite loop, iterating over the same items multiple times, or skipping certain items. It seems like it'd be an obvious problem to see, but if there's a significant amount of code above the inner for loop, you might miss it. It also seems like it'd result in very obvious bugs, but if subItems are rare, most of the time this code will run just fine.

Most of the JS static analysis tools will complain about redeclaring i and len, which makes spotting this kind of problem much easier.
Hacker Dojos Aren’t Factories for “Idea” People
Have you looked at Ban.jo? (http://www.ban.jo) <-- sounds pretty similar, you might get some interesting insights from checking out their app if you don't know about it already.
Hackathons are good at creating MVPs. To create something more than an MVP, you need to go out and talk with the users and ask them what they want out of the product.

Personally, I attend hackathons because they are fun. It feels great to be surrounded by others who are motivated to do really cool things. Not to mention we are usually all armed with energy drinks and endless amounts of food.
It's one of the classes I regret not taking in college, so I signed up. But I remember hardly anything from my Linear Algebra -- and I never really developed an intuition for the grand significance of, say, eigenvalues.
While the developer deserves his/her fair share of criticism for the site being inaccessible, I think that this also reflects poorly on Google App Engine.

The quotas should be used to capture revenue from those who regularly exceed a defined level of resources. They should not be used to punish or extort from those who find themselves suddenly very popular, but will (in all likelihood) settle into a normal traffic pattern somewhere on the order of one percent of the spike.

I recognize that many, if not most, other hosting and *aaS providers operate the same way. Still, the second thing I muttered to myself upon encountering the traceback was "Don't host on GAE".

I'll also note that a significant percentage of the upvotes given to this HN listing occurred without having seen the site!
Does anything like this exist for Javascript?
I hadn't heard of Ban.jo. Looks great. Thank you!
In the real world, some battles are not worth fighting. Telling people that your way is correct, over and over again, doesn't necessarily mean that they'll learn, and even if you're right it doesn't necessarily win you any friends (even among people who agree with you). Sometimes you have to pick your battles and work around the incompetence, laziness, and sheer malice of others, and then vent a little to your friends, or to the internet at large if you have none.
"For instance, the Nationalist Socialist Workers Party, also known as the Nazis, were a pro-union, pro-socialism, pro-farmer, party. It seems that the accusation of "right wing" comes from using the term as a synonym for "authoritarian"."

No! No, you are factually wrong, and wrong in a way I think it's important to correct. I recommend reading David Neiwert's work - Mr. Neiwert is a journalist whose main beat is fascist movements. The inclusion of "socialist" in the name "National Socialist Workers' Party" is the most blatant kind of red herring. The Nazis were as anti-socialist and anti-union as you could get! Within three months of taking power, for example, Hitler banned trade unions entirely and imprisoned their leaders. There are gobs of instances in Hitler and Goebbels' own writing where they curse those evil evil unions, those evil evil socialists. Mussolini's Blackshirt squads, meanwhile, had nearly a full-time job assaulting and agitating against socialist activists, and Mussolini himself described fascism as "estato corporativo" - the corporate state.

Here's a good start on Neiwert's work:

* http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2008/01/responding-to-jonah.htm...

* http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2009/06/fascism-is-not-liberal-...

The rest of your argument is to be addressed on its own terms, but on the point I quoted, you are wrong, wrong, wrong, on the facts and it's important that on that particular point, the actual history of fascism be faced. The fascist regimes of Germany and Italy in the 20th century were no way, no how pro-union or pro-socialist: they were avowedly and forcefully the opposite.

(also: 'when fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the American flag and waving a cross' cf http://is.gd/it4zJ6 )
"Because the protein required to reconsolidate the memory will be absent, the memory will cease to exist. "

Not sure how that is a subtle difference? lol pretty explicit in what it is saying imo...which isn't what you are saying.
"Forbes pursues a dual strategy"

not convinced forbes is capable of a higher level of discourse
> "a proverb in my country says that 'you can't pluck feathers from a frog'"

The US version of this proverb is "you can't squeeze blood from a turnip".
Grune is most famous, by the way, for being CVS' original implementor.
Hacker News for Australia Launches
Honestly, if you bring this into a government area, then you will probably get shot on sight if you are seen by security. To be safer and a little bit more stealthy, maybe try disguising it as a soda can or a door stop.
That's a pretty narrow minded view of entrepreneurs. There are far more companies started by people who didn't go to Stanford and aren't working off their parents dimes than companies that are.
Using Rap to Teach Pithy Lessons in Business
Isn't this what CrunchBase does already?
I'll give this a shot.

No group by means that a Mr. Blair's project fails, and he gets fired, and loses his health insurance. Combined with his pre-existing medical conditions, he cannot get another job nor afford treatment, and dies a slow death of, say, bonitis.

Literally dead, for lack of a "group by" in an ORM.
Assume that the US is a fascist state and you're one of the beneficiaries: you'd see the same thing that you're seeing now. You would also see the same thing if we assume that the US is not a fascist state. So that argument is of null import.
With vices I suspect that it isn't just the activity concerned but the purpose, which varies from person to person.

e.g. TV can be used to educate but it can also be used to distract

That said, some vices may be worse than others. In the case of social networking, I guess the obvious alternative is going to parties which are OFC a gateway to alcohol consumption.
Isn't this what Vicarious is trying to do?
There is no law that requires anyone (least of all, a corporation) to be decent.

Which is why the parent comment about legal issues is apropo. That, is what will be, and only be, considered.
"My argument is that use of the word "fascist" itself prevents us from rational discourse of the trends and problems at hand by driving us to extreme positions."

I call foul: you say that now, but you're participating in preventing people from using the word according to its simple and straightforward meaning! You can't have it both ways there.

"Also, calling somebody on injecting the emotional baggage of that hyperbole is not making "rational conversation impossible"."

Like heck. You're derailing the conversation and quibbling.
When a site's certificate changes, Certificate Patrol shows you what has changed, including the public key fingerprint. So you easily detect the case when the site changes CA without changing their public key.
ATG Commerce (now Oracle ATG Commerce) is the niche I was speaking about, but the above list is 100% true as well. Lots and lots of opportunities.
Are other people in this "want to know more, but forgot most of the base material" level? I've been working on an education project that'll get you from probability and statistics through linear algebra up to machine intelligence and computer vision. It'll also have "normal people" tracks like nutrition/fitness and understanding happiness in our mad, mad world.

Think of it as those stanford courses, but more organized, better produced, less transient, and with in person office hours (weekly in palo alto and SF).

If you'd like details, or a trial, or if you're brilliant and want to help or make course materials, email me. The more people bug me about finishing it, the quicker it'll get finished.
Can I ask why you assume democrats and republicans are the only two possible choices within left and right ideologies?
This comment really bothered me.

1) Meta discussion is not allowed... unless started by a *moderator*
2) Downvoting to voice disagreement is not allowed... unless done so by a *moderator*.
3) The community gets to decide... except when the community disagrees with the *moderators*.

And the moderators views.

I can say that any community that projects itself like that is not worthy of your time.
I liked this post. It's easy to overlook a great job on AT&T/Starbucks part, it is very user friendly.

Another point on this - there are several other coffee chains that offer free internet, but for most you have to ask for a code and it expires after an hour or two. Starbucks avoided that issue altogether, and I think they benefit more from it. It might be an intentional culture thing - by offering uncapped free internet, you risk have people turn your coffee shop into their office, but the customers who are going to turn your store into their office are going to find a way to do it no matter what (even if that means they have to ask for the internet code every two hours).
Check the cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
Sure, but that falls right into the category of "a problem for the employee". The traffic still gets MITMed, so the employer shouldn't care.
Kazakhstan upgrades censorship to deep packet inspection
Easiest: Back when I was in school and not many had internet, and even fewer had a 2x CD Burner, I'd create playlist for people at school. They give me a paper with ~10songs, download them, burn them, sell the disk. -_-

Fastest: Invested ~10k in Apple stock during afterhours before they froze trading before announcing their earnings. 30minutes later, sold those with an 8% ROI. 800$ (-commission/tax) in 30minutes.
Big Data - Why All of the Sudden?
"First-mover advantage" is overrated and can be nullified by lack of resources, free-rider effects, and API closings.

EDIT: closures > closings
It's a slight upper. Compared to it's amphetamine analogs, it's very weak.

I'd agree with you on use, but I'm more liberal when it comes to these things. All medicines can have questionable medical/non-medical uses. Take alcohol for example. The real date rape drug, as opposed to the scapegoat GHB/GBL.
Clearly you've never worked at an all-male environment if you think that would necessarily by nag-free, gossip-free and rage-free. In my experience, an environment without women devolves into some "Lord of the Flies"-type shit pretty quickly unless you're super careful about who you hire, personality-wise.

Seriously, all research done on the matter indicates that women are just as effective as software development as men, so the lack of women in software development indicates it's far from the meritocracy you seem to imagine it is.

This "either you are qualified for the job, or you aren't so it's ok to act like an asshole" bullshit has gotten pretty old in 2012. Here's a clue: if you're a lead developer creating an environment that's hostile to a large pool of potentially highly skilled developers, you're not fucking qualified, regardless of your coding skills. Otherwise, what's the point of the word "lead"?
> Phone calls ensued

Pretty much what happened to me every time I sked a question in Japan. Extremely helpful people, even though some times the incompetence of the helper was too much to bear.
She’s calling it like she sees it and even ignoring the right or wrong of it for a minute, seeing the less than subtle mysogyny in some (if not most) of these comments I’d say she’s right. In gender as wel as in race issues you don’t go around telling people they’re wrong to feel they’re being singled out. Instead of being dicks about it we should strive to build a friendlier atmosphere for everybody so women, gay people or whoever else doesn’t feel they’re being targeted as a group when conflict arises.
I read the Forbes article and shared it amongst friends.

I wasn't even aware it was originally a NYT piece; I thought it was original to Forbes.

If you find yourself paginating your summary, you're definitely acting in bad faith.
Template Haskell, which uses an explicit mark at macro calls (a $), doesn't require marking macro definitions explicitly, so it can certainly be done.
It's an art piece, not a serious piece of espionage equipment, hence its form reflects its (symbolic) function.
I found out that I can program best to chillwave, ambient and/or electronic music, some recommendations:

- Sobrenadar: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwsAnTzdCNs, http://absentfever.bandcamp.com/album/physeos

- СВ Хутор (no idea what that means): http://sv-hutor.bandcamp.com/album/ep

- Goldroom: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKtJhYew4Hk

- Casa Del Mirto: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSJ07Aa1W38

- Booka Shade, or some other DEEP house-ish stuff

- Warpaint, best consumed as live performances: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EWiY9xXrug

- TRUST: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tc1xj7Nblc

- sloslylove: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IldogOjTxY

- Apparat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyZhzfgXHMk

- The National (his deep, deep baritone voice just keeps me somehow concentrated): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbFWAtFb18k

- Blonde Redhead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7FqUNlEdwA
Education !=== Accreditation. I think that if you offer cheap easy certs, it's a race to the bottom, but hopefully that's not the goal of the new wave of education sites.
"The idea that a young teen has a right to privacy online is a joke"
Probably not. But then, you're not being very consistent. First, do not conflate the current state of affairs with the desirable state of affairs. Second, if you wish for something for everyone, you wish it for yourself as well.

The current state of affairs is certainly abysmal. Some live over a century, while others die in their childhood. We age before we die. I'd rather die at 75 with a healthy body rather than dying at 75 with 10 years of senescence behind me.

So, a better system (should it be possible), would be to get rid of senescence. Even better, we could get egalitarian about death: no involuntary death before age X, at which point you die instantly. Sounds horrible? But it would be much better than the current system, where we let chance decide on the number of years we can live. Plus, you can actually make preparations for your departure.

So, what value would you chose for X? And of course, it would apply to you as well.