skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This has been done before. Yes, it's a blog post, not a whole online forum. The blogs by the admission officers have become an integral part of MIT's outreach to prospective students.

One of the most useful blog posts by a (now former) MIT admission officer is

http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/before/recommended_high_...

One example of important breaking news breaking on the MIT admissions blog was

http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/misc/miscellaneous/messa...

which must have been a very painful entry to write.
"I.P. addresses are digital tags that can identify a specific computer"

That's misleading. An IP address can't always uniquely identify the client computer. For starters, people can use proxies or anonymizers.

"Yahoo will also ... strip out any personally identifiable information, like a name, phone number, address or Social Security number"

Who is giving their SSN to Yahoo, and why??
If an e-mail is spam, the from address is probably forged, so sending a captcha is just spamming someone else.
This should humble the tech youth of today
Yawn! I hate it when people link anything from infoworld.
Ridiculous beard, ridiculous claims. This guy is a clown. I don't understand how he dupes so many people.
From the customer perspective paying month creates an ongoing incentive for the developer to continue to maintain and enhance the offering. If the application is something that you would foresee using every month, or at least most months, then paying for it monthly aligns incentives.

From the seller perspective it is normally easier to get folks to pay a smaller amount for one month's use than an annual or perpetual license fee. You can always offer annual and multi-year licenses with a discount structure in addition.
They probably don't like to give out the rate since that's negotiated between Yahoo and its insurance carrier.
Sorry, but the CS approaches have much to share with neuroscience even in these very early (and messy) days.

Machine learning is now used to analyze neuroimaging data and predict behavioral responses.

http://polyn.com/struct/NormEtal06_TICS.pdf

I also know of one group merging their intelligent tutors with fMRI data to predict types of confusion and offer better suggestions.
"We'll be wearing computerized glasses that let us simultaneously view virtual images and the world around us."

What about the dorkiness factor? Do non-nerds really want to walk around with virtual images in front of their face, 24x7?

This exists:

http://www.4hiddenspycameras.com/eyeglmo.html

Know anyone who walks around with these? Would you think he was a dork if you did?

Sometimes, the trouble for technologists trying to predict the future might not be understanding what's technologically possible, but understanding what people actually want.
ruby 1.9 does not run rails apps 3-5x faster. More like maybe 10-20% and slower on some things.
Yeah. I was wondering if you were serious or just playing devil's advocate. Apparently at least 16 people thought your semantic swordsmanship passed for a real defense :-)
Spawning: A flexible and gracefully upgradeable WSGI server.
svn export is also better than svn checkout whenever you just want to examine the code for something which you have no intention to use or modify.
What would you do with the information if you knew the answer? COBRA will be higher than your current employer's plan because your payment now includes the portion that they contribute.
Well I was serious. I've no way of knowing exactly how many times VWag burned people, but they're at least going after people in a way that few are. Like I said, its sleazy and low, but they're going after people, not puffing up their buddies projects and shrugging their shoulders when people complain.
Backtype (YC S08) launches google alerts for comments
Actual title: Startup Hiring: 6 Subtle Signs You Might Have A Winner
This is the best thing to happen to site hosting in a long, long time. It's possibly even the nail in the *forge coffin.
"Flying solo" was probably not meant literally.

The article's main argument was that some things are too risky without multiple supervision. The extreme and current example is letting financial institutions supervise themselves. How to use computers is just one part of the problem.

Many things can run unattended - but under what circumstances should they? What are the necessary safeguards? Pilots on commerical airplanes don't do much flying, they are onboard to make sure everything is safe and works.

Eventually it's all about acceptable risk. We already know automated trading can be dangerous. But the danger lies in bad human assumptions, bad human models and the widespread idea that somehow no human being remains responsible.

As a complete aside - I worry whenever I hear cheerful talk about "the drones we send to kill militants". That kind of convenient and unaccountable power over life and death in other countries is both morally suspect and open to abuse. Killing by remote is still killing and relying on technological quick-fixes to "solve" terrorism is a dangerous strategy.
IPhone Dev Spends $500k on Development, Still Not Approved by Apple
Useful app, I was just using txt documents that were getting unwieldy. Bookmarked.
We updated BackType Alerts today by launching BackType Subscriptions: http://www.backtype.com/subscriptions

With subscriptions we'll update you by email or RSS whenever a new comment is made on a post or HN thread you're following.
I hope this is obvious to most coders, plus the "Public" checkbox is unchecked as default.
Here are the original comments:

http://www.imminst.org/forum/My-Disappointment-at-the-Future...

I keep finding more predictions that are failed not because of technological limitations, but because they are technologies that people do not want.

"Keybords still exist but most textual language is created by speaking."

If I had perfect voice recognition set up right now on the computer I'm typing at, I would still use the keyboard. Copy paste is easier. Easier to hit "Enter" than say "linebreak" or something. I'm not even sure how much faster I can speak than I can type. If my office mate was still here, I wouldn't want to disturb him by speaking content meant for Hacker News (oops, just revealed that I'm on HN at work!).

I wonder how bemused Kurzweil must be at the amount of time kids spend texting each other, compared to the amount of time spent actually speaking into their cell phone.
Rather disappointed by the (lack of) progress of the Cell .. it has stood still while other architectures are marching on mercilessly.
If you didn't read SwellJoe's post carefully read it again.

This is so true...
If would be neat if you could integrate the wiki into the site, with matching style (just a simple HTML layout for the wiki plus control of the CSS). If we could do that, I would consider moving a whole open source project's site to this.
GM should put a brake on itself and save my tax money.
BackType Launches Backtype Subscriptions
I can't believe you put "simpler" and "make" in the same sentence. Most of the time you're better off writing a bash script unless you're doing something particularly crazy.
CakePHP has changed ALOT, and for the better to boot! As a 6 year php coder and a 2 year cakephp developper, I HIGHLY recommend it.

Yes, everyone thinks the docs aren't good. They're currently pretty decent actually. Also, the community is amazing and all of it (core code, docs and community) is just getting better.

It's a really good, VERY flexible framework and most important; incredibly portable, which I think is the reason why I love it.. I haven't had a hiccup with it since the latest versions have come out (1.2 RC3?). I've also done ALOT of client work using it, rarely on my on web host. It is the Madlib to rails' Timbaland.

That being said, cakephp 1.1 was REALLY bad. I can't stress that enough. This is probably why it gets so much bad press. There's still ALOT of information written on 1.1, alot of technical articles, howtos, etc.. and an upsetting amount of reviews and performance tests based on 1.1 or early beta 1.2 releases.

I capitalize ALOT. I'm REALLY sorry. I just really like cake...
ASK HN: How did they break in to my Gmail acct?
So I woke up today, checked my email and there's this whole list of undelivered mails, apparently someone or something had broken into my gmail acct and sent the following msg to everyone on my contact list:

Hey，
how are you doing recently?
I would like to introduce you a very good company and its website is
www.ele-stores.com. It can offer you all kinds of electronic products
that you may be in need,such as laptops ,gps ,TV LCD,cell
phones,ps3,MP3/4,motorcycles and etc........
You can take some time to have a check ,there must be something
interesting you 'd like to purchase .
The contact email: elestores@188.com. MSN: ele-stores@hotmail.com

TEL: 0086+13717782599

Hope you can enjoy yourself in shopping from that company !

Regards

They also decided it was a good idea to put that msg into my signature as well as set my account to vacation mode with the same vacation msg.

Obviously this was a very brazen thing to do, and they clearly made no effort to cover it up, neither was my password changed. So I figure this is more likely an automated thing, I left my account logged in with a firefox 3 browser at work (university firewall) overnight, which is when this occured. So all signs point to some sort of an automated attack through the browser, does anybody know more about how this happened?
" The code runs on the actual processor"

...as opposed to... magic?

(and yes, I understand what he means, I just found it amusing)
My startup idea is a web app that automatically generates startup ideas by randomly combining various inputs. I think this would be approximately as effective as throwing out ideas here and asking people to vote on them.
75 days?
Half of a million dollars?!
2009 KPDS SiNAV TARiHLERi
Are you using https://gmail.com and/or have configured your account to always use https? There are cookie based hacks.

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/33207/108/
mate that is not entirely true...

"There investment bankers from the largest institutions pleaded successfully with Securities and Ex­­change Commission (SEC) officials during a short meeting in 2004 to lift a rule specifying debt limits and capital reserves needed for a rainy day."

To me it seems like a lot of the models that the quants came up with were essentially a way to justify the above line of reasoning and to show that dependence on mortgage backed securities was sustainable (when in reality it was a path to a meltdown).. Ofcourse that doesnt mean the quants are to be blamed, when the directive had come from elsewhere...
I think that's just the result of people not closely examining the page and leaving a box checked, vs. deliberately checking it. Requiring users to do anything will almost always have a lower conversion rate than requiring them to do nothing.
This seems like it will suffer the same problem as Loopt and other location aware iPhone apps: you have to open the app to update your location.

Also, the way this works is Newber gives you a special phone number that people are supposed to call, and it routes it to whatever phone you want. You can then transfer the call between phones by hitting a button in Newber. This is fine for incoming calls, but what about outgoing calls? Do they have a way to intercept outgoing calls from yours phones or something?

I did like how the dude's business card said "Professional Silhouette" though.
Bush shoe-throwing game SockAndAwe.com sold for £5,215.00 on ebay
I see.. I wasn't using https before, I'll read more about this when I get back home. Is this really common? Why does gmail not set https on by default
In Gmail, Settings > "Browser connection", set to "Always use https"
True, but they could be a catalyst for someone who just needs a spark. Just talking about them here on your own time certainly isn't HURTING anyone.
They should accept advertisements from CMU, UIUC, and UMich.
I'm still not sure how that's such a ginormous amount of money.
This is horrible customer service from Apple.
There are plenty of opportunities in the enterprises. They're looking to cut costs and switching to interesting, powerful, cheap apps is one way. As a hacker you'll likely need to team up with a former enterprise insider, possibly someone recently laid off. They'll need to understand what tools are inefficient, what strange requirements enterprises have and how to sell to them. You'll need to price below the ceiling where middle managers can make spending decisions without committee oversight or prepare for long slow sales process.

One possible perspective.

Producing an ecosystem where normal 'sheeple' workers can be employed outside of the restraint of big companies is another opportunity. After these mass lay-offs people will see that working for one boss who can fire you is bad and that multiple bosses will produce more stability. These workers and the companies that use them will need sources of information[eg http://freelanceswitch.com/], tools to manage work and workers [basecamp] and ways of communicating with peers and customers[twitter].
C is "portable assembly". If you add some OO keywords on top of that, then you have "OO slapped on top of assembly".

The implementation language of the compiler is completely irrelevant.
Wow. This actually made me stop and think:

"Dude, I've been here for ONLY 19 years and I've seen so many things change so fast, its mind blowing"

Being blessed/cursed with living in Eastern Europe, I probably have witnessed change in a much faster rate than most HN readers from the US or Western Europe, because for the wast 20 years we had to catch up culturally and technologically. Imagine that, when i was 3-4 years old we had a color television which could support 8!! channels and you had to manually tune each one, and there were only 2!! tv stations in Bulgaria at that time(cable was just entering). A year later, we had cable and in another year we had a tv with 39 channels, the cable had 50, but the tuner could only pick up 20-30. two years later we bought a small JVC for the kitchen and it had TELETEXT!!! We could read news and see whats on tonight IN THE TV SET! WOW! I still use it sometimes, but its slow. Today i have youtube, and than is not just a technological change, but a cultural one too, i look forward to the future!
Exactly. It's kind of like nuclear-test-ban once you already have supercomputer simulations that make real world tests unnecessary.

After all, it's just 33 bits you need to identify a person.

http://33bits.org/about/
Compared to the average iPhone app budget, I'd bet that it is a lot of money.
It's easier to bash out a prototype solo. No mixed messages or communication overhead. Reuse existing tools like yahoo pipes if you can, frameworks like rails or symfony if you cant.

Once you've got some kind of skeleton show others. They can see ways of improving and fixing it or try out new approaches themselves. Let those enthusiastic [and sufficiently skilled] about your prototype jump in and help you build a next version.

Choose dictators over committees.
I'm surprised the link between neuroscience and economics has not shown up yet.
How about the average Joe programmer? Your typical PHP or VB developer?

I care very much about this group of people - they may not be wizards and ninjas, but they can certainly provide for a lot of needs out there.
I think most of the issues with your ankle are simply problems of mechanical engineering. Total ankle replacements exist now, they just aren't very good.However, I find it highly unlikely that in the next 10 years, incremental improvements to artificial ankles will not lead to ankles capable of jumping, dancing and jogging.
Conversion rates are low.
Q: How can you spot an extrovert mathematician? ...
A: He looks at your shoes when he talks to you.
OK. Mixed up the words. Should practise my english some more.
This discussion reminds me of Paul Krugman's argument for cartoon models. I personally think that we can isolate, and therefore explain, simple parts of aggregate neural behavior by artificial construction more easily than we can by doing careful biology.

Incidentally, you might be interested to know that restricted boltzmann machines are much more biologically plausible than backprop, and seem to work faster and better.
There's a group that practises a stronger version of Agnosticism. They say "We don't know, and it does not matter. (But it matters that it does not matter.)"
Considering what happened to Muxtape, it's no big surprise that Pownce.fm wasn't launched, even if the acqusition hadn't gone through I'd wager..
How would you commercialize my startup, Gifty.co.nz?
I put together Gifty.co.nz for a friend's wedding, but a lot of others have already used it and found it helpful. So I'm planning to commercialize it, probably through businesses (or shopping malls or whatever) rather than through individuals.

Any thoughts? If Gifty were your startup, how would you commercialize it?

Also, as most of you are U.S.-ites, is the New Zealand .co.nz domain off-putting? (I've tried finding more out about the squatted-on domain Gifty.com, but I don't know where to start trying to acquire that -- anyone have an experience there?)
HTTP pipelining support was added in curl and libcurl 7.16.0:

http://freshmeat.net/projects/curl/?branch_id=1612&relea...

So it should work with PHP as well.
For marketing and development.

My guess is that a large majority of that must have been marketing.
You mock, but there's something to be said for the idea of randomly combining unconnected ideas.. that's a hallmark of an original idea. There are many bad ones formed by such a process, naturally, but you can come up with some awesome ones too.
But what about gmail and google apps?
* Putting the field title inside the field is not a win. It looks elegant before you starting filling the blighter in, but it's a hindrance during. I fill in field 1, tab to field 2 (forgetting to look inside the field to note what I need to enter), guess it's asking for my email, shift-tab to check, find I'm correct, tab again and then fill in my email. Repeat.

* "Whoops" is the first word you see after you sign up. The context is, "Whoops, looks like you don't have any snipts yet", but it's still jarring.

* It won't let me save a snippet without tags.

* Can the type drop-down not be a text field where I can type a file extension? Way quicker. Perhaps default it to txt.

* You need to make the most efficient use of space possible for showing my snippets. The only vertical space taken up by snippets should be the text itself. Put all the other stuff (edit, copy, add, My snipts, Public snips etc.) off to the side.
Let me know if I'm wrong but I believe in 2007 Google Checkout introduced a solution to the problem you mention under "One big thing missing . . . "

See here:

http://googlecheckoutapi.blogspot.com/2007/07/introducing-di...

"Now merchants will have option of tagging an item as digital within the shopping cart and specifying details about how it should be delivered. You'll be able inform a buyer that their digital purchase will be delivered via email, or you can provide a set of instructions along with a URL and license key."
Merb's appeal to me is stability. A public framework API means plugins will stay working after upgrades. With slices, you'll be able to build up reusable components that will stay functional.

If you code Rails, try getting your 1 year old code run today. 99% chance is it will be broken by default. The goal on Merb is to maintain a stable, defined API so the code your write for it wont break down the line.

After coding Rails for 2 years, this is very appealing to me. There are lots of other benefits/drawbacks of Merb, but a stable API is what sold me on it.
Ask HN: What framework is best for someone with a C++ background?
So, for a person with a strong C++ background, what webapp development framework/language is likely to be the easiest to learn and use? And then, what are the 3 best books to introduce that framework to someone who doesn't know the language, but does have a strong C++ background?
horrid and butcherous hack

Obj-C, unlike C++, is a strict superset of C. All C code works in Obj-C (bar the new keywords), unlike with C++. I really think you're missing the point here. Apart from the controversial syntax, Objective-C's elegance sets it apart from C++ more than anything else. Objects and classes are really C structs. It's all introspectable, and it's all admirably simple (2.0 additions aside).

C++ is a convoluted, over-wrought solution to a problem which Objective-C solved with minimal additions to C. And Cocoa is leagues ahead of anything you have in C++.
Replace "hiring" with "dating" and the article still works. Replace the whole article with "establish rapport with" and it still works. People are good with judging people.
yes, i stand corrected.
It is indeed, but it's clear from the interview that they knew how opaque and unpredictable Apple's policies are. I'm baffled as to why they went and spent so much money before they knew they'd be accepted.
Erlang Web Development Frameworks
Perhaps because people are nervous about taking out their credit cards except when they are familiar with the reputation of the online vendor. It may be hard for blogger X to overcome that fear factor.
I agree with most of your points but I'd like to add that people seem to prefer one broadly capable device because of the nuisances attached to having multiple devices. If every piece of clothing came with invisible sensors that monitored our vitals and communicated them to, perhaps, a single hand-held device that we carry with us, I'm sure people wouldn't mind.

As things get smaller and smaller, it's less about what you're carrying as it is about the functionality provided. Think Web 2.0. Fifteen years ago, something like GMail wouldn't make sense because Internet speeds and browsers were not advanced enough to handle such features, therefore people wouldn't even think to demand them.

Think Virtualization. Even 10 years ago, laptops were too slow to handle a whole lot. Now I've replaced two desktops and a laptop with a single MacBook Pro laptop (Dual Core 2.4ghz, 4GB RAM, 320GB HD) and VMWare running Ubuntu and Windows XP. I'm no longer thinking hardware, but instead thinking about what I can do with all that power in one spot.

If the technology existed to put podcasts on earrings and listen to them clearly, then I'm sure the technology would exist to wirelessly sync all your earrings so they all contain the same podcasts.
And I'm willing to bet that the risk of getting your app banned before you are even off the ground will keep those budgets lower that they would have been, except for perhaps games.

That said, even with a 50% chance of getting blocked from the get go it can be still quite profitable, on average, to spend this kind of money on an app. I just wouldn't suggest funding development with credit cards.
Samsung NeXus Skin & Holster Case (Pink) by Speck 
The SkinTight case and holster provides rubberized protection for your Samsung NeXus for XM Satellite Radio! Soft rubbery feel gives great protection and grip. Deluxe Swivel Holster clips on to your belt or waistband so you can carry your radio on the go.
my .emacs.el and .emacs.d are under VC. Its very nice.
except that that will affect prices. specifically, things that tailor themselves to multi-centenarians will be much more expensive than other things.

can you imagine what 1000 year lifespans would do to the loan market?
According to Nivi, anything above $500K is Series A country:
http://venturehacks.com/articles/seed-valuation
I think it's pretty obvious that they both lack integrity (in the complete sense of the word).
i truly hope so. wealth in a post scarcity world will revolve around experiences that people value, i.e. fun.
ING Direct does this too. I feel like I've seen quite a few online-only banks lately, usually in conjunction with high-yield online savings accounts.