skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He's written for this blog, if you're interested.

http://www.settingtheworldtorights.com/
Until Google gets significantly better at handling accidental account suspensions, the idea of using this (whenever it arrives) is just too scary for me.
President Obama’s inauguration, as seen from space
The exercises are actually scattered throughout the text. Definitely don't skip them, some of them are a lot harder and more mind-blowing than they look.
It's a different kind of database. If you think wikipedia is not a complex database then you're sorely mistaken. The SQL schema may not be complex, but everyone knows that wikipedia is made from a wiki -- a different type of database.

>>> issubclass(wiki, database)

True

>>>

"""Ward Cunningham, the developer of the first wiki software, WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as "the simplest online database that could possibly work"."""

The SQL is just the datastore. The wiki is the real database. Now to show that the wiki is a complex database, you would show a diagram of all the hyperlinks between pages... and the many other ways the data is linked (categories, tags etc)
Anybody who would want to get rid of this book is insane. This is a book worth keeping your whole life whether you have read it yet or not.
There's some sort of lesson regarding information overload to be learned here... I'm sure of it. :-)
Pandora Radio Starts Serving Audio Ads
I agree. This was an opportunity for the true believers to be astonishingly helpful. Perhaps the girl was not ready for college, but that's not the point. The point is that people in a tough situation shouldn't be attacked for things that have nothing to do with them--namely, being PR for the Linux community.

I'm a long-time Linux user and use Ubuntu and only Ubuntu on my home computer. I feel like I need to say this so I don't get slapped for dissing the almighty Linux. The article is right: Ubuntu is not ready to replace Windows for people who don't have the time or the inclination to deal with unlearning Windows. And there are a lot of those. And, that does not in any way downplay how much the rest of us love and appreciate Ubuntu.
... starting trillions in the hole? No thanks.
I'm shocked that nobody mentioned Ron Eglash's talk on African Fractals: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ron_eglash_on_african_fra...
Top 100 Best Software Engineering Books, Ever
I've always loved this one, great message and a good speaker

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/robert_ballard_on_explori...

"NASA's 1 year budget would fund NOAA's budget to explore the oceans for 1,600 years"
I've always loved this one, great message and a really good speaker

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/robert_ballard_on_explori...

"NASA's 1 year budget would fund NOAA's budget to explore the oceans for 1,600 years"

Really eye-opening talk about ocean exploration, or lack thereof. This guy has discovered some amazing things.
China battles rising terrorism tide within
Hungry start-ups (Anyvite & TicketStumbler) on a drastic diet
Self-diagnosis is a whole other ball game, and it's a dangerous game to play. While a good expert system could help doctors significantly, in the hands of the general public it could also cause great harm.

Self-diagnosis delays consultation with an actual expert. In addition, many symptoms (especially neurological ones) can only be seen or elicited by a trained third-party.

PS: I have a friend with Coeliac disease, so I know something about it. It is hard-to-diagnose conclusively, but that's often not necessary. A key feature of the disease is that treatment, elimination of dietary wheat gluten, is harmless and usually causes drastic improvement. In my friends' case, it didn't, but that's an exception. I strongly recommend talking to a doctor and dietician about it.
A Bird’s Eye View Of The Inauguration (First Satellite Image)
It's making some people register; here's a link to text only:

http://tinypaste.com/pre.php?id=ddb2e
It's not the opinion of yourself, it's the honest appraisal of whether your current efforts are worthwhile.

There are some that will tell you that you are doing a great job without thinking critically through whether you should be doing what you're doing.

I think the distinction here is whether you take the praise or criticism personally or just as a reflection on your current effort. If it's meant personally then sure, it's kind of hard to have too much praise.
this is the main reason libertarianism is seen as the ideology of abrasive misanthropes as well.
Sorry, I'm taking that back... I was thinking of Obama's campaign site where you could actually access stuff like /includes/footer.php (at least for a while, seems to be fixed now)
Microsoft Should Buy Palm, Not Yahoo
The One Day iPhone App Experiment
u: muellernews
p: 50505050
If he doesn't put a lot of effort into hiding his writing style, it should be pretty easy to tell.
Twitter is my Village
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi + James Fowler
Congrats on the coverage. I haven't seen many YC startups in the FT.
"Every day TicketStumbler.com scours the web for the best deals on roughly $1bn (€750,000, £670,000) worth of concert and sports tickets from secondary sellers."

Okay, so the dollar exchange rate is low, but not that low. I'm guessing they mean $1 million?
Is this just a blog, am I missing it?

If it's a blog, I'd recommend changing from the default wordpress theme; at the very least make a custom banner at the top.
Malware infestation responsible for credit card data breach
Yeah. BSD used their own CMS and ExpressionEngine I think. Kind of surprised that this is in ASP.NET. Wouldn't be surprised if it changes later on.
me bad.
hangs head in shame
bullshitMe, which takes as parameters my SSN and returns a load of political crap geared especially for my demographic.

Could eliminate a lot of political grunt work and save money come the next election. It would also provide excuses for practical things, like why the potholes aren't fixed or the budget is still unbalanced.

I'm also all for simplifyAgency, which takes an Agency name and returns a list of functions that the agency does. So I could call simplifiyAgency("IRS") and receive a list of APIs the IRS exposes.

Or how about something extremely practical? Give us access to all of that GIS and USGS data in a simple format. You know, the data that is in the public domain but companies make a killing re-selling us.
A couple interesting points in this article. One, this market is really spiking if Atom chip sales were up 50% in the fourth quarter of 2008. Two, soon computers will be free with the purchase of internet?

Broadband providers around the globe are expected to start giving away netbooks in exchange for commitments to wireless network services, Mr. Richard said.
"This change seems to go against the theme of transparency and progress which has taken Obama to the highest office in America."

I know I'll get downmodded for this, but, pleeeeaase. Don't you think you're getting a little bit too dramatic??

It is entirely possible that it is being required by the white house IT team.
Their calculation was wrong. The interview was during the NFL season where we had roughly $1 billion (with a B) worth of tickets. It's a little less than that now since the NFL regular season is over. It'll be over $1 billion again as the MLB season draws near.
I find it distracting. The other one was much more discrete, which is better in my opinion.
A live feed of who gives funding to campaigns or any politician would be great. Thanks.

What if ALL contributions were reported on a public twitter feed-ish service? (and a timeline)

Oh, and an api for that data would be sweet too.
Might not work for everyone, but removing ?nclick_check=1 from the URL made it work for me:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/59d78f42-e713-11dd-8407-0000779fd2...
Yep. It's a bit self-consciously whacky, but he had a serious point to make and brought it across really well.
Change the "false.html" to "true.html" in the URL.

eg - ft.com/cms/s/59d78f42-e713-11dd-8407-0000779fd2ac,Authorised=true.html

(doesn't work if you click on it, you need to manually change it)

edit: this used to work on ft.com for me, but doesn't seem to be working at the moment (at least on FF3/OS X).
I'm sure a ton of people will. In fact, I would bet that the whitehouse blog may introduce lots of people to RSS for the first time ever. The concept of a more transparent government where citizens are informed about the happenings inside the white house will be heavily at play here.
"It looks like a thirteen year old cobbled it together while working his or her way through a "Learning Ruby on Rails" book."

Then followed by a backhanded compliment:
http://smoorg.blogspot.com/2007/12/crowdvinecom.html
Wow, good going! $1m seemed a bit on the low side but I wasn't expecting that much!
Dean Kamen tech talk wasn't elegant but meaningful
> However, it is part of the nature of business to be full contradictions and exceptions.

I agree with you on this point, and so I voted you up. I disagree with the implication, though. There are two possibilities that come to mind when people encounter contradictions and exceptions in a system:

1. There is no unifying model. The exceptions are truly exceptional, and have to be dealt with as their own case apart from the main logic and rules of the system.

2. The existence of a unifying model is unknown, because no one has thought to look for it yet. Additional cases that need to be resolved are assumed to be exceptions unless it is blatantly obvious they are not, and are immediately developed as such.

Experiences I and others have had suggest that the latter case is far more likely. So I agree that the nature of business as practices is full of exceptions and contradictions, but I disagree that being so is inevitable.
I'm pretty sure that alternative currencies are illegal in the united states -- wasn't their a big fiasco with the FBI raiding the people making liberty dollars?

I think this makes it illegal: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/514.html

Also, there may be tax issues. If you have an alternative currency and the us dollar is inflated do you have to pay capital gains taxes on the growth in value of the alternative currency?

There are also probably issues with money laundering -- in other words I don't think we can say that they exist, without a caveat about the legal limbo in which they exist.
"Mediasaurus" article by Michael Crichton. Nuff said.
In summary: don't use stuff you don't trust (in this case the cloud) and don't trust stuff you do trust so much you don't have a plan B (e.g. backup your data yourself).
I think he's missing the point. "The Cloud" is not some magical faraway land where we ship our data for safekeeping. The value in the cloud is convenience, the ability to have one calendar, one music library, one book of contacts that is available ubiquitously on any device, anywhere in the world.

There's no real reason to use the cloud for data backup anyway, since uploading large files over DSL is a pain, and hard drives are holding steady (not!) at $100/TB.
It wasn't all that long ago that many Palm branded phones being sold were actually running Windows Mobile. I suspect that commentators are way too quick to write off the Windows Mobile platform most cause they don't really know much about it. Sure the UI is a little clumsy compared to the iphone but I don't see what will make it so difficult to incorporate most of the techniques in to the OS. There are actually a huge number of apps developed for the platform and still it has a large user base around the world. I suspect the much of the reason for the platform being written of is their lack of a mobile carrier 'deal' in the US.
Cache seems to have been updated now. Anyone have the contents to repost or another cache?
Yahoo has a cache :)

http://66.218.69.11/search/cache?ei=UTF-8&p=site%3Awhite...
We got pretty chewed out about our acquisition by Monster.

http://www.cheezhead.com/2008/07/31/monster-acquires-trovix/

My favourite two parts:

"(Sidenote: Trovix ownership has to be farting rainbows and burping unicorns in complete bliss as I write this post.)"

and

"And as far as buzz goes - which does matter - Trovix is on no one’s hot list. Ever heard a company brag about its experience using this service? Me neither. They don’t exist. I don’t care how many company logos or Wall Street Journal clips Trovix puts on their site."
A crisis immune to rhetoric
Honestly, me either.
Eclipse, how? I don't even understand that statement.
Transcript of Warren Buffett's Dateline Interview with Tom Brokaw
Jeff's so dreamy, it's hard to say no.
Better pictures at http://venturebeat.com/2009/01/20/pictures-president-obamas-...
Looks like RIM has begun accepting applications to their store. Has anyone gone through the application process yet? I'm glad they got it out, and its not the much past their original December launch date.
This exists already to some degree already - it's called a gift card, although gift cards are missing an important element of being able to be traded at multiple places.

This is interesting to read, but I don't think it will work. First, forcing people to spend seems immoral, second his "negative interest" is called inflation, and it already exists in ordinary currency.

Presumably stores will be able to redeem the scrip for regular money right? So I can just imagine a store allowing currency exchanges, pay a small fee (less than the monthly fee) and get real money.

The whole thing doesn't seem right to me. And I think the examples don't prove anything - I bet those recoveries would have worked if they used regular money, and on top of that cities can issue IOU's right now, which effectively do the same thing.

And finally the economic problems are global, not local, fixing things locally might not do enough.
Congrats to Condi Rice, Joe Biden and Obama, all of whom became President today.
Instead of just using good markup in the first place?
He really is, isn't he?
And just so for the record, so is that other founder of Ticketstumbler:

http://multimedia.heraldinteractive.com/images/f9833f0a6c_ti...
Do you plan to sell this device or is it just for fun?
This article is 10 weeks early.
Because it really was just a demo and was generating no direct revenue for Google, so why antagonize 37signals?

Why risk PR problems for a silly sample application?
The following had an impact on me:

Tony Robbins

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/tony_robbins_asks_why_we_...

Daniel Gilbert

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_...

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_o...

It's hard for me to pick a favorite. I hope at least one of them is useful to you.
Living outside of the Bay area fit into our calculations when my co-founder and I started TrailBehind.com too. We moved to a 3-bedroom cabin in Truckee, which costs us about as much as sharing a single room in a 3-bedroom apartment in SF.
That was the first thing that jumped out at me as well. One might have thought "change" would get that, but no, it was a balanced speech. Regardless of what happens in the next few years, a great start
That actually sounds really sweet. Working in the mountains on your startup with decently close proximity to the Bay Area if you want to come into the city for events. Great plan!
Another Presidential Transition: @TheWhiteHouse on Twitter
Wish I could change the URL I posted!
Surely she would find a different excuse to quit if her computer was running windows. What is the point? If it is that capricious people may make up excuses for their whims using things you care about, there is nothing new under the sun my friends and I am afraid we are powerless.
GVR - Python: A Personal History (Part 1)
Rhomobile, http://rhomobile.com, is taking a cross-platform approach by building a framework to develop ruby applications from mobile phones (with html interfaces). They use xruby a java complier + a tiny web server to make this happen. The apps will work on iphone, blackberry, symbian and windows mobile. It might not be as powerful as a native java/j2me app but its has a lot of benefits over a mobile web app in the browser.

It launched recently and it looks like it might have some potential.
2nd Johnny Lee's Wii hack: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/johnny_lee_demos_wii_remo...
Because some people like to commit a lot...I once had a project where I committed after every red/green cycle. If specs were green and there was uncommitted code, I committed.

That's only useful for me, during tight development loops, not to a historian looking back at what I actually did. So before I push to others, I squash it to a changeset, possibly keeping all the commit messages in the single commit.
GetGeek@Boot is a compelling idea and I like it. However, I'm inclined to feel that this would fail for two reasons:

1. There is simply a cultural boundary between the geeks and the non-geek population that would cause such an idea to fail. I suppose there is a self-selection process involved such that geeks who are willing to help will have a greater natural ability to communicate to non-geeks than those who aren't. Then again, the non-geeks who are most likely to give Linux a try and call in may have higher-than-average technical skill and therefore the gap would not be so large.

2. If the gap were large (given that these are Linux geeks volunteering, above all), how would we incentivize geek retention? This would be a challenging, time-consuming job that demands a high amount of patience--much more than CD burning--for no reward besides karma and the satisfaction of a small handful of potentially new Linux users.

I am fan of Canonical and what they have accomplished with Ubuntu. They could spearhead such an idea, if they haven't already. Obviously, they would be inclined to support Ubuntu, but any Linux distro beyond that is probably too much for non-techies. A real financial backing could make a significant difference.

Not trying to bash your idea; like I said, I like it. Rather, trying to provide some criticism to evolve it. Anybody else?
"Dear Sir:

If you wanted to discourage us, you probably should have done so BEFORE we became fabulously wealthy. Please remember this for next time.

Regards,
..."
Beatrice's underlying problem, if genetic, will probably either be a new mutation, or will be caused by having two recessive alleles inherited from each of her parents. If the former, then comparing her genome with her parents' genomes would (I would guess; IANA geneticist) isolate it pretty quickly.
How about "risk-taking"? I like that Obama frequently mentions it as a virtue, but am not sure if it's common among presidents.
Not my list. This list is derived from the SWEBOK project, an IEEE Computer Society list. It is a very process oriented list. Seven books on UML. I don't know anyone who uses UML. I've never worked at a company that actually used it. At least as many books on Agile Programming; how many do you need? A book on CORBA. Really! Knuth is there; I guess he is mandatory. No other good books on algorithms, but lots on patterns.

The author said that he explicitly left out books on technology. Sure there is a lot of technology cruft out there, but surely there a few language specific books that a good software engineer should read. Or maybe I'm just a hacker.
This one by Phillipe Stark is my must-watch TED talk.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/philippe_starck_thinks_de...

He talks about how he approaches his work and about what drives him to excel. I watch it every few months, it gets better every time.
Recollections of Obama’s Ex-Roommate
Just what I need, another hundred blogs to follow. I did notice however that Richard Branson is going into the railroad business. Am I missing a big opportunity there?
If Obama was not president because he wasn't sworn in yet, then certainly neither Biden nor Rice were president either since they hadn't sworn in.

Per the 20th amendment[1], the new president's term begins immediately after the old president's term ends. This means that Obama became president at 12:00, even without being sworn in. He couldn't "enter on the execution of his office" until he was sworn in, but he was nonetheless president.

[1] http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html#Am20
I dunno. I figured I'd done my job in providing a link to a funny picture on the Internet. If you ask me any more hard questions, you're gonna get a picture of a cat fixing a computer. I don't think either of us really wants that to happen.
I quite like Brian Cox's talk on the LHC.

Whenever anyone has asked me what the big deal about it was, or if I knew anything about it (I'm the "go to geek" it seems) I've always referred them to that particular talk.

He has a very eloquent way of putting it into perspective that has a very romantic view of science which I found inspiring enough to share.
Nice to see a link to the city paper; that's my favorite little rag around here. They did some great journalism on the Thomas Sweat serial arson story a couple years ago...I'll have to look for the online versions of some of the better articles I read in there and post them.
Yep, it passes. But it could be much, much better:

1) It's clearly not for the dial-up users, even though there's still a lot of them
2) Semantic IDs and class-names would really be nice. I disagree with some of the choices made for elements and headings too, but whatever.

The main issue I have with it is that they were too lazy to check their site with YSlow and correct some of the basic issues: minifying JS and CSS, settings up ETags and Expires Headers, and bundling those CSS and JS files for the deployment version of the site.

Other than that, great! A really, really nice site for those of us on faster connections. :)
Not sure if it's my favorite, but the one the hooked me was Bjorn Lomborg's talk on what kinds of projects could cause the most positive change most efficiently:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global...
I should note that when I say "we", sadly I was not a cofounder.
Compojure was created by James Reeves, who said:

"The language I work with from day to day is Ruby, so Compojure has a lot in common with lightweight Ruby frameworks like Sinatra, and less with existing Java frameworks. It's designed for impatient, lazy people like myself, so it's quick to install and quick to start developing in."

http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/...
I mean no disrespect, but that "half-self-diagnosed" isn't "self-diagnosed" for a reason. I don't need your approval of my decisions. I was simply using that as an example of something hard to diagnose. As you say, it's even hard to diagnose with medical resources, so it's not as if there's a choice. The whole "don't self-diagnose" speech is misplaced when diagnosis is not reliably available!
At a different level of government, I'd like a real-time public transport api. Tell me where all the buses and trains are right now, and let me make sense of it for my website's visitors.
I agree. The constitutional lawyer was just blowing smoke.
This trend was examined in Zuboff's 2004 book "the Support Economy". I've commented it on my (fledgling) blog. www.efficientfactory.com
http://efficientfactory.com/2009/01/17/the-support-economy-b...
I partly dropped out of CS over windows. All the teachers where dead-set on using it.
Ask HN: How to handle a potential sudden huge traffic load tonight?
Hi guys,

My little-known Mac app ShoveBox just got mentioned by Andy Inhatko on Macbreak Weekly, according to this site:

http://www.mbwpicks.com/2009/01/20/picks-from-mbw-124-the-warmth-saturation-of-analog/

The podcast has not yet been posted, but when it does, I imagine I will be getting a lot of traffic that I'm NOT prepared for.

I'm worried that Dreamhost will not be able to handle it, and that I won't have time to make a DNS change to another host (I also have an MT account).

What should I do, both:

1) To make the site stand up to the load

2) To make the site not suck as much and make a better impression when it gets traffic (if it survives)?

I'm already moving the downloads to Amazon S3 to lessen the load.