skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"... Wouldn't competition - the invisible hand of the marketplace - also restrict abusable power? ..."

How?

I didn't see this invisible behaviour ( "an individual pursuing his own self-interest tends to also promote the good of his community as a whole" ) when stikkit, pownce shut down. They simply allowed you to download your data and suggested alternative services. Downloading your data while better than nothing, doesn't stop users loosing their subscriptions, disrupting their work flow. By having some sort of agreed plan at commencement might allow a smooth transition for users in the advent of closure or sale. The power unbalance is where at any time you can be evicted at short notice.
A map detailing the comparisons between pre and post Bush Administration
Sorry Apple. I am pretty sure the Mayans got to that one first.
"IBM does X" is pleasing to look at, but remember one person decided to make it happen. One person said "hey, I want to patent this idea" and everybody else got in line to help make it happen.

IBM has a patent culture. It encourages each employee to file as many patents as possible. When you submit a patent internally, you get a one-time bonus. When it goes from the internal lawyers to the patent office, you get another bonus. When your patent is awarded months or years later, you get another one-time bonus. If you file a certain number of patents, you get a certificate/plaque and more money.

(true story)
On the internal IBM blogs, I saw someone was frustrated by their email software. Their immediate response? File a patent for how they want it fixed. Their problem? They hit "send" by mistake before the email was complete. Their patent? A yes/no confirmation popup after hitting send.

Another way to look at the "IBM has more patents than god" issue is from a per-employee financial standpoint. Their employees may need extra cash, so they are filing patents as fast as possible.
"... Basically, Australia is offering to pay someone 100k to go to an island for 6 months, do a a little yardwork, do some interviews, and play for 6 months ..."

Also diving and the sharks are pretty active this time of year. The other way of looking at it is by taking a 6month setback for the opportunity of certain payment allowing for free time later on to work on your product - delayed gratification.
I feel bad that an article of this quality can onto news.ycombinator front-page :(

It maybe a little funny, but it shouldn't be here...

EDIT: I completely forgot about flagging articles, should have just done that
Really cool location aware app for the inaguration
YouTube Adds New “Click to Download” Feature
These Days Youtube is Busy in to implenting new Features in Youtube Videos, Recently they announced the Youtube for TV feature and Also Mutes Videos With Unauthorized Copyrighted Music. Now they are working on a new feature Download Youtube Videos. YouTube has started offering the option for you to download video
content off the site. A new “Click To Download” button has been added directly below videos such as Obama’s weekly YouTube address that are “consistent with principles of open government.”
I don't think you can use just one. A lot of people like myself block the analytics cookies. I have had problems with AWStats too -- recently some log entries have caused it to barf and quit parsing the file (they have no referrer or user agent string, and come from a site monitoring service that scans for vulnerbilities -- I may have to hack AWStats and submit a patch to fix that).
RM does not address inheritance but it doesn't preclude it. see the third manifesto.
I completely agree (even up-modded you!), but if you corner a rat, watch out.
An example of ATC handling a bird strike (10m video)
I meant a red herring in the sense that alternative medicine is not really an alternative to actual medicine.
In a number of the apps we've worked on, we've found that migrations are no longer useful in order to build a database from scratch (say, you're getting a new employee started and are setting up his development rig).

Mainly because the actual Model code changes so much in between someone running the "rails" command and the "mature app" stage - the validation logic and callbacks being the main culprit.

Eventually, it's easier to bootstrap the schema from schema.rb (rake db:schema:load IIRC) than it is to maintain migrations from a zero state.

Then you've just got to make sure you keep up with the deltas :)
EU Commission wants to sue Microsoft over Win+IE integration
"I kinda think that there are good "doctors" (be it traditional or not) who are up on their science and listen past the 30 seconds they meet you."

The best naturopathic doctors are only doing what an allopathic doctor would do if they were more competent. As it stands, the vast majority of allopathic doctors can't name a single medical journal article published in the last year-- not surprising considering how low job satisfaction among doctors is. Certainly not all naturopathic doctors are good, most are basically quacks. But the best naturopathic doctors, the ones who are super intelligent and intrinsically motivated, tend to be better than the allopathic alternative only because they don't have this huge bureaucracy telling them how to do their jobs and killing their intrinsic motivation to do a good job.
How would you replace trim? According to the text of the patent any method that removes leading or trailing space would fall under protection of this patent. The only way would be to manually remove spaces character by character every time you ran your query. I definitely don't like the sound of that.
php's popular because it's easy to get started. name a file .php and put it on your shared host and your code runs. unfortunately php doesn't get anything else right. i say this having used php for years. eventually you find that it wastes more time than it saves in the beginning. it is a terrible language with a terrible history, and i expect the future to be similar.
Yes, but I'm not an ND or MD so I don't know which journals are reputable and which are not. I get the feeling that research on botanical medicine mostly gets published in the same journals that publish normal pharmaceutical research, it's just that doctors only prescribe things that come in pill form.
How hard is it to create a startup when you have all the premium content on TV at your disposal?
AMERICA!
Your wish is my command.

Went ahead and updated the script (at the url you listed) to do so.

/me heads back into his bottle.

Edit: About half an hour after I posted this, I came up with a dynamic way to fix the pre tags, rather than use gojomo's fixed max-width value. New version is posted. Hopefully it works for everyone.
Hi Usair? I'd like one round trip ticket to the Hudson River...
when you have a billion people you can afford to brute force capitalism.
"So the lesson here, if there is one, is that if you product is mediocre or worse, you might just try to market it as ridiculous instead of trying to put lipstick on a pig."

This is a really good point. If the author do a little bit more research, expand on the premise further, and apply it to a few other failed products, this would actually be a valuable marketing article.

Maybe I will write.
Good points. Powerful battery operated lasers have a duty cycle of 30 to 60 seconds before you should turn them off so they don't overheat immediately.

The lasers (or a laser with a pattern to shine through) were mounted on the bike. They are probably safe as long as you don't ride over any mirrors or use overly powerful laser sources: http://www.wickedlasers.com/
So let me get this straight: we have this little problem here where a bunch of people borrowed money to buy houses and lifestyles that they couldn't afford and the resulting debt has choked up our financial system. Now it seems like a good solution for the government to borrow a whole bunch more money and spend it on things that we may or may not need? We won't have any of those nasty earmarks; instead, we'll just hand billions of dollars over to state and local governments to spend how they want. Yeah that sounds like a good idea, that way in five years the contractors and construction companies that benefit from this largess can replace investment bankers as the new national whipping boys.
Dear Mr. Graham,

Could you please give Harvard Psychology Ph.D Abraham Zaleznik, the old 3 Stooges Curly "nyuk nyuk nyuk"? Zaleznik must not be very happy publishing or perishing in his ivory tower, because on CNN's web site a few days ago he has this to say about entrepreneurs who want to start a startup:

-----------------------------------------------------------
http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/worklife/01/12/entrepreneur.p...

Research by Harvard Business School psychology professor emeritus Abraham Zaleznik has unveiled a darker side to the entrepreneur's psyche.

"Entrepreneurs tend to have a singular weakness that allows them to do things without checking their conscience," Zaleznik said. "Juvenile delinquents act and then try to sort things out afterward. I think entrepreneurs have this tendency."

-----------------------------------------------------------

Juvenile delinquency psychological tendencies? Oh good heavens, there is such a thing as spectrum. Entrepreneurs come in all sorts of flavors. And its not true those starting startups are immature or don't take their responsibilities seriously. It is very sad to see this commentary coming from Harvard.

Eddie
people from the wild mysql badlands may not understand your point. here you go: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/ddl-inherit.ht...
there is an email field in the hacker news profile, but it's only visible to the site admins. if you want other people to see it, you have to add it to the "about" field.
"This is a very good time to be 'breaking into' education"

Agree. The economy is done. People are losing their job. People are losing faith at the education system that promised them jobs. So they look for alternatives.

I have talked to a few home school networks in the Bay. The need for revolutionary change is pretty urgent.
Releasing features users don't like is not necessarily a mistake. You can never tell for sure whether users will like something till you release it. So the optimal plan for a startup is to keep releasing new stuff, and when something sucks, admit it fairly quickly. Which I believe is what they did.
Windshield Replacement Arizona
Offers cash and steaks for customers with auto glass insurance.
Fast, guaranteed windshield replacement, plus cash back for insurance customers.
I was reminded of this old essay: http://philip.greenspun.com/school/tuition-free-mit.html

I think education is one of the two biggest bubbles in the economy right now. It has become a bigger and bigger part of the economy, and more and more bureaucratic, and it is not clear that society is getting more bang for the buck than we did 60 years ago.
New internet shock image uses 3d, when will it go main stream?
It's not necessarily a mistake to focus on growth instead of revenue, especially in the business they're in. It was certainly right to focus on growth initially. At some point there is presumably a threshold where revenue becomes more important. Are you sure you know better than Zuckerberg where that threshold is?

I'm not. I wouldn't want to bet their strategy has been optimal, but I wouldn't want to bet against it either. At the (very coarse) precision at which I can judge, their strategy seems optimal. Can you judge with finer precision?
I like the out-of-the-box spirit.

But what if the biker is not biking on the right edge of the road? (Like when he wants to make a left turn from the left lane.) This will be confusing and distracting for the driver behind.
Cool. Now, what are the pitfalls?
I've never understood why patents include so much stuff without
practical relationship to the idea in question. In this case the
patent covers a computer implemented method of automatically removing
space characters from data being entered into a database and yet
the detailed description includes pages of gibberish like this:

With reference now to FIG. 3, a block diagram illustrating a data
processing system is depicted in which the present invention may be
implemented. Data processing system 300 is an example of a client
computer. Data processing system 300 employs a peripheral component
interconnect (PCI) local bus architecture. Although the depicted
example employs a PCI bus, other bus architectures such as Accelerated
Graphics Port (AGP) and Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) may be
used. Processor 302 and main memory 304 are connected to PCI local bus
306 through PCI bridge 308. PCI bridge 308 also may include an
integrated memory controller and cache memory for processor
302. Additional connections to PCI local bus 306 may be made through
direct component interconnection or through add-in boards. In the
depicted example, local area network (LAN) adapter 310, Small computer
system interface (SCSI) host bus adapter 312, and expansion bus
interface 314 are connected to PCI local bus 306 by direct component
connection. In contrast, audio adapter 316, graphics adapter 318, and
audio/video adapter 319 are connected to PCI local bus 306 by add-in
boards inserted into expansion slots. Expansion bus interface 314
provides a connection for a keyboard and mouse adapter 320, modem 322,
and additional memory 324. SCSI host bus adapter 312 provides a
connection for hard disk drive 326, tape drive 328, and CD-ROM drive
330. Typical PCI local bus implementations will support three or four
PCI expansion slots or add-in connectors.

What does any of that have to do with removing whitespace from text
strings before they are stored?
Q&A with a Twitter technologist: ‘Think: we’re a startup’
"Unfortunately, no scientifically rigorous evidence supports the claims of ­pre-­K’s impact on middle-class children. James Heckman, a University of Chicago Nobel laureate in economics, is one of the strongest voices in favor of early education for ­low-­income children, but here is what he says about applying the model to the middle class: 'Advocates and supporters of universal preschool often use existing research for purely political purposes. But the solid evidence for the effectiveness of early interventions is limited to those conducted on disadvantaged populations.' As Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Standardized Childhood (2007), explains, 'For ­middle-­class kids the quality of preschool centers would have to approach a ­nirvana-­like condition to present radically richer environments than the majority of ­middle-­class homes, or ­home-­based caregivers.'"
Ask HN: Which school do you attend?
I'm always interested in seeing who from HN goes to my school. Feel free to chime in and name your school, see who else from HN is going there too.
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Agree.

Why not make it so that if you want to save your composition you need to sign up?

Application like this, you don't need a video. Just let people use it immediately.
How well does Sphinx work for real time updating? Does anyone know how it compares to say postgresql + tsearch2?
A few things missed by this overly simplistic analysis:

Alternative energy investment, to name one of many examples in Obama's economic plan, isn't "make work". This sort of research is necessary if our society is going to survive the inevitable oil depletion problem, and will create wealth in the long-term. Improving our infrastructure, which is in desperate need of repair, isn't make work. No one that I am aware of is seriously proposing make-work.

Bush's war and no-bid contracts to his buddies look a lot more like "make work" than anything Obama is proposing.

Also, these problems are too complex to frame in terms of creation or destruction of wealth. Is wealth being destroyed as real estate prices revert to fairer values? Perhaps, but this is a good "destruction". Also, adding to the aggregate wealth while destroying jobs (without replacement; job "churn" would be a great thing if this society were better at training people up) and creating inequality is a very bad thing. Finally, the wealth of the wrong people (such as the uncouth trashy real-estate nouveaux who destroy culture everywhere they go) is a horrible thing and must be destroyed.
The point of the work is to make the number not graspable as anything but BIG. As in, "This number is so big, you should be morally outraged".

Effective as a political statement, maybe, as long as you're already receptive to the political statement. (The artist would, presumably, be less than happy to see a map of Africa drawn out of several million copies of Silent Spring, one for every African child killed by Western environmentalists causing DDT to be de-facto banned there. Bonus points: the presentation covers the fact that the factual premise of the statement I just made is controversial.)
His talk on Le Web 2008. Pretty inspiring. http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/932388
"Please Note: Java is required"

Somehow, I was expecting something more... shocking.
Totally agree with the conclusions:
"The science paradigm has not
been part of the mainstream perception
of computer science. But
soon it will be."

GNE, BS in Computer Science
It was the safe and easy install for shared hosting providers plus the easy deployment for web devs.

Really, it's a simple recipe. I'm still wondering why Perl/Python/Ruby/$fave_lang doesn't just mix together the same ingredients and do the same thing.
University of California - Santa Barbara
Sorry, but IBM is one of the largest patent trolls in the world. You just don't hear about it because they target corporations who don't have an extensive IP portfolio to fight back with and cross license.

Here's what's happened at the company I used to work at and what happens at many other companies:

1) IBM comes and says hey you're violating these 10 patents. Pay up.

2) Targeted company goes, hey we're not. Company spends X amount of money and tons of time to prove that they're not violating the patents.

3) IBM goes, oh ok, yeah you're right. So you're not violating those 10 patents. Well, here's another 10 we think you're violating. Now...we can do this forever or you can just pay us $1M/year and have us go away.

4) Targeted company does cost-benefit analysis of legal fees to continue to fight IBM indefinitely or they can pay this "license" fee. Company decides pays $1M to "license" IBM patents

oh and postscript, Targeted company wises up and decides to build up its own IP portfolio as a defensive measure and fills the patent system with even more useless patents.
Methane on Mars suggests possible life
I've read it several times and I think you might be right that it's trying. But if that's the point that it tries to make, then it's simply wrong. I assumed that the comment at the end was a counterbalance.

There's a tipping point for "dangerous airline". 0.5% more dangerous than any of the current airlines wouldn't be noticeably less safe (i.e. 20 vs. 21 crashes for an airline) and if they were competing on costs, the cheaper one would win. And if somehow one airline, despite only a 0.5% difference in safety gap did get branded that way and the rules remained the same, there'd be a market gap in there for a new airline with the same bad standards to come in and fill.
I have only worked in machine learning sub-domain of computer science.

People in this field are all about testing hypotheses. This make sense of course, considering it's data and result oriented.
Conways' Law
Hat tip to this YC Post - just wanted to bookmark this for myself and figured others would be interesting in reading more:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=436908
Amazing story. And I thought I started late.

I hope you succeed.
Dropbox is Linux friendly ;)
Interesting. http://www.modperlite.org/

The interview by chromatic was quite informative. Unfortunately, they say that they're forced to repeatedly reinitialize the perl interpreter with every request. This would seem to defeat the purpose of having a persistent perl, no?
The main problem the simulus is trying to avoid is capital destruction. At some point, if enough people get laid off, it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle. Now, instead of a few people being laid off for a couple of months, companies start to shut down operations for good because there is reduced demand (Google Austin, anyone?). Once you shut down an office (or factory, or mall, or whatever), it can take years before anything pops up to replace it.

There really is no benefit to having a bunch of unemployed people lying around.

I think it is fair to argue about the best way for the government to stimulate the economy, but doing nothing is not really an option.
If I had a 150MM users, I'd start worrying more about how to monetize them than I would about getting more. Facebook has been around 5 years, has taken over 500MM in funding and still requires a yearly influx of investor capital to keep running. To me, that signifies a problem (or, if not a problem, at least an early warning bell). I cannot judge with any finer precision, but from my perspective the strategy is no longer optimal.

I suppose sometime within the next decade we'll find out who was right. Although, given the choice, I will pretty much always bet against a bread-and-butter social network like FB. Statistically it's a really safe bet.
Boxee, Used to View Web on TV, Generates Buzz
Similar to your idea, if the laser wasn't rotationally stabilized, the image on the ground would jitter around as slight angular tilts of the bike frame would be exaggerated the further the distance the image was projected. Imagine standing to pedal hard up a hill - the lanes would swing wildly left and right.

How about a lighted fog beneath the bike (like those under some hotted up street cars), giving it the same visual footprint, and territory, as a car?
I think I met you today in campus.
Old-timers (the cool ones) also don't have stupid social hangups, so they really know how to have fun.

Plus, when it comes time to network for your start-up, old-timers tend to have a lot more connections and resources too.
Pre-K just sounds like adding another inadequate piece to the already crumbling K-12 system.

Just focus on K-12, heck, just focus on high school, and make it really good. One thing at a time.
Autostereogram -- Wikipedia (hacking binocular vision)
Taking the Sorting Out of Recyling
No.

Science is the study of the natural world and his argument that CS meets this requirement fails. Think about mathematics. Just because mathematicians are interested in, say, calculus, and calculus can be used to model physical phenomena, does not make mathematics a science. CS can be a tool used for science, just like math, but it in itself is not a science.
As you go down the page, there are a series of increasingly insightful and enjoyable examples. I particularly liked the animated random-dot autostereogram, the one illustrating binocular rivalry (I had no idea there was a way to experience binocular rivalry without a stereoscope!) and the chessboard one (where even the pattern is 3D).

Incidentally, I have poor eye accomodation (ability to change focus quickly), and so once I acquire the stereo perception of a stereogram, I can easily retain it for 10-15 seconds even if I close my eyes. On the flip side, it's been 10 minutes since I read that article and I still can't focus my eyes normally on the screen!
Purdue University
The well-known indie mac app icon designers have more work than they can possibly do. They're mining the miners, so to speak.
In a market where there's a tendency toward centralization, what matters is the percentage of users you have, not the absolute number. Facebook only passed Myspace in traffic last month. Surely it's at least reasonable to believe the threshold for when to put revenue first might be in the future.
And more startups fail from a lack of money than from a lack of product development.