skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The way I've transitioned between languages was to first do a syntax comparison:
http://merd.sourceforge.net/pixel/language-study/syntax-acro...

Then take a crash course:
http://cs.metrostate.edu/~fitzgesu/courses/ics325/summer04/C...

Then learn about database interfaces:
http://www.kitebird.com/articles/php-pdo.html

Then learn about programming patterns:
http://www.rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Solutions_by_Progra...

Then learn about security:
http://www.owasp.org/index.php/PHP_Top_5

Then learn about error handling:
http://www.w3schools.com/php/php_error.asp

Then learn about debugging:
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2004/08/12/DebuggingPHP.html

Then learn about idioms:
http://www.cybersprocket.com/wiki/index.php/Eric's_PHP_Guide

Then read a comprehensive book:
http://www.ubookcase.com/book/Sams/PHP%205%20Unleashed/

Then learn about optimization:
http://progtuts.info/55/php-optimization-tips/

I've used PSPad, Komodo Edit, and Aptana Studio Community Edition for PHP editing, and recommend them all.

I've tried CakePHP and Drupal, but had trouble with the documentation and syntax of both compared to pure PHP. Wordpress has great documentation, community support, and readable sourcecode.
Trade between nations is so much different than trade intra-state. The biggest difference is laws and enforceability. "free"-trade is not completely free. Intra-state trade has the benefit of being more civilized (i.e. laws do have weight). Between nations, its the wild, wild, west and there are many externalities to this lawlessness.

I've lived in Shanghai for 9 years. China is still trying to figure out how to make the "middle class" a reality before the general population starts to lose faith. Up to now, this belief has ridden on the great rise in trade. The China government has already set things up to blame the U.S. for what will be a slow 2009. Right or wrong, things are going to get rocky; and the lawlessness and uncivilized externalities?..its only the beginning.
In Sugar whenever you join a group activity the application is downloaded and run from the group. Whilst their security system is fairly untested I think that this is a more sensible model than moving everything into the browser.

There's some more information on the security system here:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bitfrost
Markopolous' (ignored) complaint to SEC describing Madoff's fund as Ponzi scheme
I stumbled onto that ladies twitter page per EV and thought what a great way of promoting your service!
Actually, this isn't so true anymore.

A friend of mine is a web developer and he's got a shocking dynamic site that the server treats as entirely static. He accomplishes this with JSON callbacks.

http://iancollins.me

(P.S. For a good time, click on the white background box or the "3N" logo when you're using are recent webkit nightly. Ian has a... ironic sense of humor.)
Hi EastSmith,

Here is the feedly privacy information:
http://edwink.devhd.com/2008/06/18/feedly-and-privacy/

There is a section on search:

Question:
Does feedly search keeps track of my search history?

Answer:
The answer is no. The integration of the search result is perform directly on the client. Feedly does not track at all what keywords people search. The search integration component only tracks at the global level what percentage of users disable the search feature so that we get a sense of if it is valuable or not.
How to synchronize login and manage orphaned user
Yep, on a related note I was wondering recently if there is any website which lists currently hot and buzz-worthy research papers in CS or other fields. I know faculty of 1000 does that for biology but is there any other website?
Click Collectors Blog - Pay Per Click Campaign Management 
Click Collectors services include Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising Management, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Assistance, Web Consultation, and more.
When you start a startup, are you really thinking, "holy shit I only have 44.9 years of life left! Better make the most of it!" Your old age and death are pretty abstract concepts if you're young and healthy. I think for most of us, the thought process is more, "holy shit, I could spend the next twenty years working on shitty enterprise software in Cobol! Better work my way out now!" If you're making every decision now in the context of a death that's decades away, that's a bit sad.
Anyone know what GMail's revenue is? It must be millions...maybe enough that it's profitable?
Peter is a lovely fellow so I wish him all the best with this. It's great to see Clickpass moving forward. :)
There's a great arguments for trade regulation that apply to international trade only - that in internal trade everybody must play by the same rules, but in international trade other sides don't follow the same regulations, so regulatory race to the bottom can happen.

For example there is highly free trade in financial services. Banks can easily increase profits by decreasing reserves, as reserves don't earn them any. All countries force banks to have some reserves and avoid certain risky behavior, as they might wreck havoc in case of an economic downturn, but they set limits to different levels.

Unfortunately as banks from less regulated countries earn higher profits, they outcompete banks from more regulated countries. So countries increasingly lower their reserve requirements to keep their banks in business or their banks are forced to get out of international financial markets. This free market is extremely competitive, and very big, so even a tiny difference in regulation results in much higher market share, and alternatives like subsidies aren't really practical.

End result - almost all banks are a lot more leveraged than any country would consider sensible if it wasn't for everyone else getting overleveraged and outcompeting them. And then a downturn comes instead of being absorbed by the reserves it becomes the world's biggest recession.

You might dispute to what extend this is an accurate description of what just happened, but to the extend that this picture is correct this is a massive failure of free trade.

Other examples would be pollution standards, fishing quotas, and other regulations where producer country makes regulations, but they affect everyone.

This argument applies to a small but non-negligible portion of economy, not most of the trade. You can mostly work around it by making binding international treaties (on bank reserves, pollution, fishing quotas etc.) a prerequisite to free trade, what should work better than either race to the bottom or trade barriers.

Similar regulatory race to the bottom happened between US states too - federal government allowed credit card issuers to follow laws of issuers' states instead of customers' states, so issuers found states willing to let them do highly abusive things in exchange for setting their businesses there. This wasn't a good thing for anyone.
It's A Dirty Job, And I Love It
The Blue Waters project (http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/BlueWaters/) is being done in the building across the street from me, I can see it right out the window from this CS room. It's one of those "off limits" things, although you really need to have a use for it first.
The Electric Car: Born, Killed and Resurrected… Again
An informative and detailed review of The Electric Car
You require "NZ $30" for the service of creating a list, and sharing it with my friends. You also require filling out 8 different fields before people can even see what the UI for list-making is like. That's a pretty high barrier before the user even knows what you are offering.
There are plenty of sites that let you make a wedding registry for free. You seem to have the same service, but you are charging $30 for it. I think in order to commercialize, you would need to offer something more valuable.
They became the wealthy tribe once they were free of the mainstream Malaysian class system.
Quick, hackers: what the algorithm for the maximum amount of money he could earn in 365 days?
Adobe AIR 1.5 now available for Linux
ComScore: YouTube Now 25 Percent Of All Google Searches
I believe there's a quote somewhere in Stranger in a Strange Land, where Jubal Harshaw comments that an author doesn't write because he can, or likes to, or because it's the best way to pay the bills–many can't, few do, and it usually isn't. It's just something that must be done, like breathing or defecating, and it's about as glamorous.

It's hard to say whether programming makes me happy, per se. I do know that I can't escape it. I can avoid putting my fingers on a keyboard for a while. But the brain, it keeps going. It's how I'm built, and you may as well ask me if I like having two hands instead of 4 or one head instead of 7; but it's the shape of the brain we're talking about. I find it hard to imagine what life would be like.

I program to pay the bills, and it keeps me comfortable. I also program because I have ideas for programs that don't exist, and it's the only way to make them exist. I program because I want my computer to do something that it doesn't already know how to do. I program because it's more engaging than television and less pointless than video games.

Sometimes, it's frustrating or challenging. Sometimes it feels like a lot of effort for hardly any reward. Sometimes huge amounts of work have to be scrapped because it's just wrong.

But other times, things click, and it's perfect, like a symphony. And in those moments, "happy" seems like an understatement.

No, programming doesn't make me happy. But programming is part of what makes me me; and, in general, I'm happy about that.
Distributed computing will be the next huge thing. I can see it right through the window too.

Anyway, the BlueWaters project will be done by 2011. It will be the fastest computer then.
Great idea and implementation.

There may be some risk with allowing arbitrary-content (including Javascript) on subdomains of github.com. I tried a few trivial cookie/script/iframe tricks, and was not able to reach logged-in user info. However, my skills are far from the state-of-evil-art. Note that even Google put their page-hosting on a separate 2nd-level-domain, googlepages.com, rather than a subdomain of google.com.
Not without switching around the address lines, at the very least.
Getting stuff done makes me happy. Programming is a means, not an end.
quick, person who doesn't read articles at all where it states that amount a few times: 66,795
It is a wiki, if you treat it like one. That's what's so cool about it.

Two years ago, we moved the Philadelphia LUG website (http://phillylinux.org/) from a set of static HTML pages to a subversion repository. I dropped in a post-commit hook to update the DocumentRoot after each checkin, and the site instantly became the best wiki I've ever used. Revision history is handled by diff, and svn blame. Updates are made with your favorite $EDITOR. And, as an added bonus, you get to use real HTML rather than some silly wiki markup language. I love it.
GitHub cookies are restricted to github.com and gist.github.com domains (using a redirect trick to allow cross subdomain cookie sharing). You can use all the JavaScript you like on your Pages.
How to bribe bloggers for coverage?
I think that bribing influential bloggers by sending them gifts can be a good way of obtaining coverage since it clearly differentiates you from the other email pitches. A $30 or so book is a lot cheaper than a hundred dollar adwords budget! What I don't know, however, is how to go about doing this. Does anyone have any suggestions? How do you find out where to mail the gift to, how to tactfully ask for the favor in exchange, etc.
Singapore had no resources other than the brains of its people; they were the underclass who were booted out of Malaysia

Han Chinese are not Malays. From Appendix 1 of "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" by Lynn & Vanhanen (p218):

Singapore

In 1974, data for a representative sample of 147 ethnic Chinese and 190 ethnic Malay 13-year-olds for the Standard Progressive Matrices were collected (Lynn, 1976). In relation to the British 1979 standardization sample, the Chinese obtained a mean IQ of 106 and the Malays a mean IQ of 90.5. ... The population of Singapore is 76 percent Chinese, 14 percent Malay, and 7 percent Indian
I don't know about buzz-worthy, but here are a few buzzword-y ones : semantic web, ubiquitous computing, context-awareness, study of social networks, feel free to add more...
They became the wealthy tribe once they were free of the mainstream Malaysian class system.

Malays have little to do with Singapore's economy.
>I believe there's a quote somewhere in Stranger in a Strange Land, where Jubal Harshaw comments that an author doesn't write because he can, or likes to, or because it's the best way to pay the bills–many can't, few do, and it usually isn't. It's just something that must be done, like breathing or defecating, and it's about as glamorous.

I'd be interested to know which passage you mean. I've read that book many more times than is really necessary and I can't remember Jubal saying that. The closest I can think of is a passage where he says "I want praise from the customer, given in cash because I've reached him--or I don't want anything."
The 12 Biggest Tech Stories of 2008
No, it won't be. There was a while when we had 200mhz computers. Then we moved to 2Ghz computers. Looking at all the innovations that happened within that time period, very few were due to the super computers getting faster.

Distributed computing just means computers getting faster. There is no killer app for this. Yes, you may say cancer research or flight simulations or so on, but there are not the next big things - not the way the web was.
In my opinion, it's obvious what the next big thing is going to be. Image recognition, accelerometer integration, multi-touch and so on. Basically, we're looking at the death of the mouse and keyboard a few years down the line.

It's starting now, and it's starting the same way the web started - working poorly, very fragmented, cool but not yet practical. This will change soon.
I could be thinking of one of Heinlein's other books, or even just something he said randomly. I've read a lot of his stuff, and it all starts to blur together.

If I come across it, I'll make a note of it.
He was asking for the _algorithm_ not the solution.

The constant time approximation is (count^2) / 2

365 * 365 / 2 = 66,612.5

I'm sure there is a constant time exact solution as well :-)
1. Build something great
2. Monetize it
3. Profit

This area, free website builders, has a rather established business model. See Weebly and some competitors with more aggressive payment plans.
Ask HN: Where does consciousness come from?
I've been pondering this with several other friends. If you take a psychology class, you learn all about the brain, neurons, and neurotransmitters. But at some point, do you wonder how do we feel a sense of "personality" and consciousness based on nothing more than electrical signals firing off?

For example, I know we have an amygdala and frontal lobe where our personality is formed. But what about the chemical make up of neurons? How does that cause us to feel certain ways?

Does anyone feel like the field of neurology fails to explain a lot of the low-level fundamentals?

EDIT: At birth, when does the first neuron fire, and how does it sustain itself?
You're wrong. Android is already dead. When people talk about 'when' with a product for more than a year, the product is dead. And Google actually got a phone released with Android - what happened? Basically, they killed the excitement in their platform. The phone looked terrible.

The REAL death knoll was when I heard that all phones are not required to have all features. So if you develop a game, do you or do not use the camera feature when all the phones may not have a camera? Do you or do you not use the accelerometer?

Google may have made a good product technically, but they made mistakes, and because of those mistakes, Android is dead.

Android will become the OS of choice form phone manufacturers in Guangzhou because it's free. But the big companies will not jump on the bandwagon for quite a while. They already have their existing OSes, and the customers don't care about Android.
lambda the ultimate, no?
There is one called Morpheus Ventures, which looks like A YC clone to me
You're right, there are quite a few free ones. I did a fair bit of hunting 6 months ago, and I have yet to find one that's free, good-looking, and doesn't require a big sign-up process for the guests. (If you can point me to some I've missed, fire away.)

So I figured I'd try for good-looking and not requiring the sign-up process, and make it inexpensive. :-)

Edit: something that makes me believe I'm not too far off is that plenty of people have already been quite willing to pay the NZ$30 to use Gifty.
It's a South African product. The CEO is Vinny Lingham [http://www.vinnylingham.com/], although he lives in the valley now.
If we mechanically understood how thinking or consciousness worked, we would have AI. We don't understand, and don't have AI. I hope I was helpful :)
It's quite possible I'm unclear, but I made it so you can start a list and try it out for free ... you only have to pay when you want to share it with your guests. Also, you can try out the demo list as much as you want (either as the bride or groom, or as a guest).

In short, you can try it out with one click ("demo list"). What do you think I can improve on to make that clearer?
Intelligence != Consciousness
Consciousness is the brain sensing the mind of the world. But that's just my speculation :)
1 network? It's incredibly easy to buy an unlocked iPhone in certain countries, and I mean... Unlocked by Apple, not cracked.

Whilst I understand that you're referring to North America you should consider that the iPhone is sold in a lot of other countries.
Free trade does not automatically equal good governance - that sort of thing requires cultural and political changes over and above the changes made to accommodate freer trade.

But the rapid economic rise of Taiwan, China and a host of other countries over the past forty years has undoubtedly been due in large part to the reduction in trade barriers and resultant increase in international free trade. It works.
The protagonist in Heinlein's The Cat Who Walks Through Walls says
something very similar near the beginning of the novel.
In the academic world, the semantic web is pretty much taken for granted. Curiously, it appears that people in the real world have been saying for so long that the semantic web will never happen that they have failed to notice that has already happened!

Look at this diagram: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Linking-Open-Data-diagram_...
All these datasets have already been interlinked and are available for you to use. This is the linked open data approach (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_Data) The opposite approach is to use data from a single already-interlinked source through an unified API, exemplified by Freebase (http://freebase.com), which is more straightforward but perhaps offers less control. I've found these resources invaluable in more than one project that I'm working on, and every hacker should at least keep abreast of what is available so that you can use it if you need to.
Even if I did hit the wrong button on a hyperdimensional panfibrillator, I'd just be restored from my S3 backup.
Given that multitouch has been around since the 80's or so (at least the technology), I don't think we're going to see the death of the keyboard. It's just too good of a method of input.
Consciousness isn't special. And neurology can't satisfactorily explain what it means to exist because English itself can't describe how a bunch of chemical reactions add up to cogito ergo sum.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/04/zombies.html seems a little relevant.
I read about this a few years ago but didn't know the source had been released. Thanks for the link.
I call it hyper-cynicism, both of those points exist in a kind of quantum superposition.
I'm surprised how soon they get a reply (for admission next fall, right)?
I applied for grad school there recently, does anyone know if the chances are better or worse? :)
"do you wonder how do we feel a sense of "personality" and consciousness based on nothing more than electrical signals firing off?"

This is one of the central questions of cognitive neuroscience today, and scientists aren't even close to a convincing answer. It is exactly the wrong question for an ask HN post -- it's like a bunch of sailors speculating about quantum mechanics. Please read the papers. Here's a great introductory video for a lay audience -- Dan Dennett's TED talk: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consci...

I do sympathize with your point that the abstract scientific jargon seems to leave one wanting for a "real" answer, but since the science itself is way incomplete at this point, any attempt to pare it down will result in something that's no better than random guessing.
The word "consciousness" doesn't mean one single thing. To the extent it means anything definite, it seems to refer to a collection of self-referential thoughts.

I'm sure everyone who studies the brain wonders very much how neuron firings correlate with these thoughts or any others. I'm equally sure everyone who studies the brain would be surprised if they weren't "based on nothing more than electrical signals firing off."
Android Diary I
The 3D Web in 2008
I think this might be the wrong place to be looking for such answers. Anyway, you might like to do some research on Emergence and Chaos theory. The fundamental aspect of emergence is that individual agents (ie neurons) follow simple rules, and through interaction with other agents also following these simple rules, a system emerges which is greater than the sum of its parts, with its own goals and intelligence which is not known to any of its individual agents. There is a brilliant book on this entitled "Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software" by Steven Johnson.

Another interesting author to read is Brian Fay. He argues that the conscious 'self' does not exist as a concrete thing, but rather, it is dynamically created through interaction. He gives a very interesting analogy of an eye traveling through space, and can only become aware of itself by seeing its reflection. He then explains that we see our reflection in others, and eventually that becomes internalised.

The reality is that the brain is the most complex structure we have yet encountered, and it will be a very long time before we fully understand how it works and how the mind is thus constructed within it.
This is great info, thanks for all these links.

Angie's List is interesting -- very high quality, I'm sure, with that "Consumer Reports" style business model. But they also lose a lot of traffic going subscribers-only. No doubt they're rolling in money, but I'm glad to see it's not the same monetization idea I had.

Seeing all these has inspired me to throw together a prototype. I'll post it on HN in a week or two when it's presentable. =)
Stop the addiction
Ah, yes. This:

>"Yes, dear. Richard, do you enjoy writing?"

>"No one enjoys writing."

>[...]

>"But you don't enjoy it and we don't need the money. Truly we don't!"

>"Thank you, my love. But I did not explain to you the other insidious aspect of writing. There is no way to stop. Writers go on writing long after it becomes financially unnecessary...because it hurts less to write than it does not to write."

Thanks!
I tried to create one for news.ycombinator.com:

http://buildasearch.com/news_yc

The UI is very confusing; modal light boxes pop up often leaving it unclear if changes have been accepted. It didn't seem to accept 'http://news.ycombinator.com' as a single-site limit; but it did accept 'ycombinator.com' as one domain in the 'multiple site' option.

It appears to be backed by Yahoo's search. (A search for [desktoppy] found the exact same results as [desktoppy site:ycombinator.com] at Yahoo, while missing results found for the same query at Google.)
Socialmedian Purchased by Xing