skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I lived there ,the Tokyo PC Users group was about the closest thing I found. I don't know how active they are now but it might be a good place to make some connections to other groups. You may also investigate what Ruby groups exist as the creator of that language is Japanese.

Edit: Here is the link to the group's website: http://www.tokyopc.org/index.php
They do seem like they are still quite active since I last attended (over six years ago).
newLisp reverts 25 years of progress in the Lisp world. It is a disgrace.
The book he mentioned. Its worth a read if you are looking for a practical introduction of Machine Learning/Classification etc. (currently on my desk)

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529321/
It's hilarious that sites that purport to calculate IQ scores from other test scores generally don't mention error in estimation in either kind of test, nor do they mention regression to the mean.
Bad software is often better than none at all. Unfortunately, there are not enough good programmers available to provide good software to all.

What's worse, a database that screws up 1% of the time, or an army of paper pushers that costs thousands of times more and also has a 1% error rate which can't be fixed (if necessary) by some overpaid consultant?
# You don't want to be Tesla. He was one of the greatest inventors,
but it's a sad, sad story. He couldn't commercialise anything, he
could barely fund his own research. You'd want to be more like
Edison. If you invent something, that doesn't necessarily help
anybody. You've got to actually get it into the world; you've got
to produce, make money doing it so you can fund it.

The other Edison vs Tesla difference that strikes a chord in me is:

Edison: "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration."

Telsa on Edison: "just a little theory and calculation would have saved him
90 percent of the labour. But he had a veritable contempt for book
learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his
inventor's instinct and practical American sense."

Edison was a hacker - and I mean one who hacks, like a bad golfer or a bad novelist, but who actually gets the ball in the hole, and actually writes the novel.

When you are the only one who has done something, you are automatically the best. No matter how bad you are.

The second last quote sort of reinforces the "learn through mistakes" attitude of Edison:

# The thing that matters is experience. We have lots of executives
from failed companies; they learned a lot from these things. They
say, 'We can't do that -- we tried that and it didn't work.' So
failure is useful.
What's interesting is that just two or three years ago irc.macrumorslive.com #macrumorschat would have had ~1200 people, and this year there are 90 with less than a minute to until the keynote starts. I know a lot of that is due to the liveblogging software for the web having greatly improved, but it still seems like the hardcore fanbase is starting to lose interest and move on to other things.
Yes, but the human body is complicated. I would not trust a non-professional for any sort of nontrivial diagnosis. Enough people don't understand the fundamentals of medicine (look at the success of airborne and homeopathy) that crowd-sourcing is of dubious quality.

You can get second opinions, but generally it's smart to stick to doctors for them.
# You can try to control people, or you can try to have a system that represents reality. I find that knowing what's really happening is more important than trying to control people.

My take away from the whole list.
How-to setup your own virtualized Rails hosting environment with Xen
But do you really know if you could have until you've tried?

Almost every time a startup launches on TechCrunch, the comments are filled with "could haves" instead of "here's what I've done".
good point. and, yes, what a move that would be on the part of Dell!
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Really? I take your point to mean that two smart people can communicate better using obscure vocabulary when they are communicating only between themselves. High baud necessarily implies higher average information throughput, so there would have to be a significant number of these words in the communication.

Could you point to some examples of letters between two famous people using this method?

Most notable people seem to prefer simple vocabulary, and in fact, many of them go so far as to recommend it. The people who prefer complex vocabulary (cultural studies journals, intellectuals) do not seem to accomplish anything of value, and indeed they are routinely accused of being obscurantists.

(Ground rule: scientific jargon excepted, since it is not a part of the vocabulary. But, feel free to look at letters by Newton, Einstein, Godel, Hilbert, anyone really.)
Motorola Unveils World’s First Mobile Phone Made Using Recycled Water Bottle Plastics
PageRank is a tool used to rank web pages in search results. But maybe Google is a Ponzi scheme. Users create all the content, Google sells all the ads!
"...But, truthfully, I'm not saying anything really new..."

Been better if he said that in the first sentence, instead of 2/3 down the page.

I took the article to mean "I used to have all of these trivially constructed boxes and simple ideas for how things work. Then I got wiser and now I have a new set of trivally constructed boxes and simple ideas for how things work. Only now I get to blog about them"

The market exists and rewards code that is sub-standard by our judgment. Everybody's code but yours is crap -- you learn that the first time you manage more than 2 people. Your own code is crap too -- you just don't realize it until you look at it a year or two down the road. (If you don't realize it, you've got ego problems)

So instead of simpleton boxes for programmers, how about dealing with each person on an individual level. Nobody goes in to work each day thinking "Boy! I hope I can screw things up royally today!" Or least most folks don't. Work with people as a partner and mentor, don't label them, 'cause if you're sitting around labeling people, you can bet they have some interesting labels for you too.
MediaSentry may be gone, but RIAA tactics will live on
How about exchanging doctors with medical researchers and drug designers --- to make the analogy fit?
There was a bunch of pseudo-code in the deleted comment.
Eighty years ago, The Economist looked back on the disappointments of 1928
It's an exercise in inductive reasoning to say the least.
Could someone please explain what that creature thing eating the trees is all about? Maybe i'm missing something...
Universities: The Americans are Coming
I just read that. Wow. That must have taken a while.
"Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself
do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not. It is the first
lesson that ought to be learned and however early a man’s training begins, it is probably the
last lesson that he learns thoroughly." -
Thomas Henry Huxley
NOKIA N79 BLUE Unlocked 
Nokia, with the N79 manages to cram a ton of great technology into an easy to carry candybar model. Available in two colors, this phone looks great and functions very well. Anyone would do well to incorporate this into their mobile lifestyle.
Plagiarism would be taking credit for having written the article. But you're right that there is a potential copyright violation -- unless the copyright owner has given pg permission to reprint the article in its entirety without attribution.
Looks like a promising beginning to a recommendation-engine startup.

It's good to see pure machine-learning based startups get going. I'm looking forward to a lot of interesting stuff happening and massive growth in this area over the next few years. Will be fun to be able to shove a load of data through a variety of ML system's APIs at will.
I'm assuming PG did this for his own benefit, and then made it public. Having said that, this is a nitpicky and yet very serious charge - PG, you need to stick in a credit to the original source.
Replace that with "Unless you are reasonably smart (and I think he is) you don't get what you need with certain diets."

The issue with vegetarianism is that humans are not meant to eat just vegetables. Therefore, great care must be taken to get certain nutrients which are not found often in vegetables. Protein is the big one, but there are others.

However, with a properly crafted diet (an issue that most? vegetarians run into) you should be able to get everything. (possibly with the aid of supplements).
A Collection of Top 50 YouTube Tools and Resources on the Web
and now according to the macworld 09 keynote, iphoto 09 will have facial recognition and native flickr support.
My father (who graduated with a BS in EE in 1970), said he was only allowed one hour of computer time a week, so the students did everything by hand, including scouring for bugs, before they got near a keyboard.
A Ponzi scheme is where new investors pay returns to existing investors, but there is no actual trade made using the income.

EDIT: Oops. Explained adsense. Too much multi-tasking. Irrelevant anyway, since PageRank does not have any of the above characteristics.

Per prior comments, everything is not suddenly a Ponzi scheme.
The question you have to ask yourself is: what makes the bank think my company is good for the loan?

Banks like lending if they get collateral. For example, buy a house and the bank gets that house if you don't pay. Buy a dump truck and you don't pay, they get the dump truck. They can't really take bandwidth.

Part of the problem is that a start-up might try something for 6 months, fail, and then just declare bankruptcy. Since the shareholders/members of corporations and LLCs aren't liable for debts, the bank just looses the money. Would you be willing to be personally liable for the debts by co-signing?

It should also be recognized that banks are wary right now. They've been burned and are strapped for cash. Unless you can prove that you're safe to lend to, you won't get it.

In terms of rates, prime + 2.5-6.5% would be normal depending on the risk and size and such.

Do you really need it? Bandwidth and servers are cheap today unless you're doing a lot of video serving. Heck, you can even find Content Delivery Networks that will serve for less than $0.20/GB. If your site really takes off with traffic, don't worry because you'll have VC banging on your door. If it doesn't take off, you don't have to worry about bandwidth too much.
Jason Calacanis interview on Mahalo and more
Top 50 Internet Acronyms Parents Need to Know
I recall James Chanos talking about the huge oversupplies of things like aluminum and copper, etc.

But I'm in still using aluminum foil around the house, my question is how long could it possibly take for excess supply to clear out?

Is the world set with commodities for the next 3 years?
I recommend reading her book "Mindset" as well.
Twitter replies in your inbox without giving out your login data?
Anyone used similar packages for other languages?
Paper: Security Assessment of the Internet Protocol
Everyone thinks that an SBA loan is "easier" to get or that any business can go right out and get one. That is far from the case. The process of getting an SBA loan is the same with a standard bank loan, except you now have an added layer with the SBA application. You first must find a bank that is an authorized SBA lender (not every bank is, but all big banks are). You will then go through the bank's standard screening process (i.e. credit check, biz plan review, collateral) and simulataneously have your application submitted to the SBA for approval. If both the bank and the SBA approve your loan you get your money from the bank. Also, the bank may approve your loan contingent on the SBA approval.

SBA loans do require collateral (i.e. home, equipment, etc...). That is why typically businesses use them to finance equipment or buildings. The SBA loans, and bank loans for that matter, are not geared towards "web startups". You will have a much easier time convincing your friends and family to lend you a few thousand for the next great internet company then you will have convincing a bank manager.

The above is just my two cents, I have never applied for or received a SBA loan. I have, however, considered getting one a few years back. I had a lengthy discussion with my bank manager and decided after it was not worth the hassle. I just begged friends and family instead and the turnaround time was much quicker.
MacRumors live feed hacked during keynote
Backups almost seem to be a running joke. Whenever we've done a restore of a db from backup the plan is basically "try to restore from the latest backup, if that doesn't work, try the next latest one and so on until you find one that works".
First of all, we have limited resources. The resources we absolutely need, for example, food and water, however, exist in enough quantity for all the people that currently exist (otherwise they would die)

Err, people _do_ die because they don't have enough food. That's not to say that we _could_ have enough food to feed the world, but famine is a real issue in some parts of the world.

If for example, we were destroying farmland to produce in excess right now, and we know this will make the farmland completely useless in the future, then this is a scheme that will collapse. But we're not doing that in any significant quantity.

There are many who believe this is the case (see Wendell Berry, for example).
Invite HN: TeamPostgreSQL beta
I lurk around here all the time and respect the opinion of people here a great deal. I also know that some guys here are big PostgreSQL users, making this particularly relevant to you, though non-Postgres users are also very welcome.

I would like to invite you to try out an early beta of a product I have spent the last months building: TeamPostgreSQL.

In short, the product provides very user-friendly web access to PostgreSQL databases.

It is ideal if you need to share one or more databases across a development team or a larger organization, f.ex. when testers, managers or other non-technical people need to peek in the database or even modify data, run scripts etc.

The beta is available here:

http://www.teampostgresql.com/beta.html

Currently Windows, Mac OS X and Ubuntu/Fedora Linux are supported, let me know if you need it for other platforms

Needless to say I will be very thankful for any feedback you are able to provide.
No. What's needed (at least around here in Palo Alto) is companies that actually make profits!

Who said anything about limiting it to internet companies? There's plenty of capital out there that goes to businesses other than facebook.
Are they using twitter? ;)
Why the secret to speedier highways might be closing some roads: the Braess paradox
It's great to see a company's API lead engaging in a discussion like this. I feel like he's missing the point of the critics, though. OAuth may not solve the phishing problem, but it has demonstrable advantages over handing out your passwords:

- finer grained levels of access

- ability to block one app without blocking the others

- ability for Twitter to block an app entirely, across the userbase, if it misbehaves
OSNews has a detailed article that takes a deeper look into this new dialect of Lisp.

http://www.osnews.com/story/20728/A_Look_at_newLISP
That's what happens when you post a message 15 minutes after watching a football game, still drunk and excited. Should have known better. Answering your question, I'm on a Mac against my will [a number of reasons] and I rarely use anything else than Safari, Photoshop, vim and bash console.
Linking to a hacked site is not so nice, to be honest. What if the hackers put up some malware on the site?
Tog on Kindle vs. iPhone/iPod Touch
When Livestreams Go Wrong
MacRumors is down for me. Here's another liveblog: http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/01/liveblog-macwor.html

edit: I see, MacRumors was hacked. n/m then.
Screenshot here: http://richardlemon.com/2009/01/macrumorslivecom-hacked-duri...
MySpace Teens at Risk | TechJaws
Investing money based off a future IPO is speculatory and is not good for the economy.

Let me give an example - a lot of hollywood films are banked by people who want to get a good return on their investment. If you are an investor and you want to make money on your hollywood film, what you need to do is analyse the market, find out what the biggest consumer market likes, take a look at past hit films and create a derivate of that. If this type of movie factory turns out mediocre films with profits in the 10-20 million range, then just churn out a large number of them, and you'll make your money.

This type of speculatory investment means that the money tends goes in well known technologies that offer a clear path to returns. The investors are going to minimize risk as much as possible by avoiding experiment - and in my opinion, we are at the moment when we should experiment the most.

A web app does not need investment, it has a clear path towards profitability and costs can be kept very low. A robot building studio however, needs investment. A shoe discounter needs investment.

When an IPO is the goal of a company, it changes the very nature of the company - and it changes it for the worse. The company has to baloon its chest out and thump on how good its doing, and to do that, it cannot afford to be seen to fail in anything.

IPOs should become more difficult if anything, in my opinion.
They took it offline, but here's a screenshot. http://i39.tinypic.com/apdatw.png

May I guess unprotected admin panel, like Tumblr and Twitter?
The static portion of the site wasn't hacked, just the live feed. In either event it doesn't matter since the DNS is no longer resolving.

According to #macrumorschat, some 4chan kids figured out that going to macrumorslive.com/admin showed the source code, and that's how they figured out how to inject their own text.

It really sucks for the MacRumors guys since this is probably their biggest ad revenue day of the year.
People don't die because we don't have enough food. If there were not enough food, those people would survive a week or so, and would be long dead.

People are dying because they are restricted from moving to areas with enough food. They are not dying because we lack food in the world.

Be very careful with this line of argumentation, because the surface scratching articles in papers are different from what the reality of the situation in the world is.
Ouch Sales of Hybrid Cars Down 42.8% in December
Yeah. Have you ever seen the food schedule for someone who beat cancer? Surf and Turf. Steak and Potatoes. Salmon and Chicken. 4 or 5 meals a day once your appetite comes back.

Cancer treatments typically deplete the body of protein and lean tissue, and most doctors agree that eating meat is just the fastest/easiest way to recover.

Its possible/probable a macrobiotic diet could contain enough protein and still be 100% vegan, but if there's another "imbalance" (say GMO Soy or Legumes which contain Estrogen) that could create issues he's had to deal with during his recovery.
Commenter on TechCrunch says it was due to MacRumors leaving the control panel for the live feed open (not password protected).
I have to ask. What kind of weather is potentially lethal, and common enough that your software accounts for it?!
Open Steet Map team working hard to update Gaza map
Larry Page said it, right?

So, who is being plagiarized?
I think it's pretty clever. The memory fragmentation caused by incessant consing leads to gc phase after gc phase. Their ORO trick prevents this, and as a bonus improves cache locality. They report they also have a true mark and sweep phase to take care of the corner cases.

Does their ORO scheme have any significant downsides?
Me,

band t-shirts (zero)
"free albums" (zero)
albums of any type (zero)

Can we please spend less time talking about the music industry it's a small industry which most people don't buy anything from. Why do people find it so interesting?
I have a similar anecdote from a summer camp as a kid. We were asked to build a tower from various materials. Points were given for the height of the tower, and subtracted for arbitrary "costs" of different materials (eg. a role of tape may cost 100 points).

I immediately realized that the costs worked in such a way that it was infeasible to build anything and come out positive, so I convinced my team to not build anything while we watched other teams go into the negative, while we calculating their debts.

It worked great until the teacher caught on and adjusted the prices so that it was cost-effective to build.
If your boss walks in and fires you because of that, then you probably didn't want to work there anyway.
No, you need to be more forthcoming with your board of directors, some of which (Al Gore) are close personal friends and can keep their mouth shut to the press if it really is a "private matter".

The fact that Apple's board hadn't take any action was (to me) a clear indication that he was A-Ok. Steve might be exceptional, but the rest of the senior management has Sarbanes-Oxley to contend with -- meaning they could face jailtime for any intentional falsification or misleading statements given to the board of directors. And the board/stockholders have been extremely watchful ever since the backdating options/SEC Probe scandal a year or so back.
Towards the end of it I think the hijackers were posting fairly disgusting images (in the vein of 4chan). Could've been what the NSFW tag was.
IPhoto Gets A Facelift
Well the control panel was and but the source code wasn't and the .htpasswd wasn't.
Ah, gotcha. From the screenshot, I didn't realize they were able to inject images as well as text.
Customer service is everything. Almost.
The benefits of providing brilliant customer relations far outweigh the problems. Just give your customers a great experience doing business with you and you’ll end up with positive PR and ultimately more customers soon enough...
Except why the hell would Dell buy Red Hat when it already has a working partnership with Canonical to develop and distribute computers pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux? Dell doesn't need to buy a giant Linux vendor to have a well-designed Linux computer package; they already have that without buying anyone at all.
I didn't either- luckily!! Just read about it on TechCrunch.
Cool, but the rules were broken. I could add this missing rule: the plan should be able to go forward for at least one meter even if no force is applied to it but just released from an height of 2 meters. Well the two costants may need some tuning.
I can't actually try it out since I don't have a PostgreSQL installation handy, but from the (two) screenshots, it looks like a great product.

I'd suggest you put more screenshots & maybe a demo to help people like me get a better idea of what the product is about before downloading. If you can make this work with other database vendors, that will be really exciting.
You can (and probably do) spend 1 dollar in much worse ways.
Google is Working on its own router
Google never liked Cisco. Now they've gone sour on Juniper. They've decided to do it themselves.
The misconceptions that some technical people have about MBAs are kind of funny, but also rather pathetic. The program I went through put very little emphasis on manufacturing.