skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yea it allows you to create playlists, and then link to them. So another person with spotify can open them.
It's been a while since I read Demon Haunted World, but I'm pretty sure that the Dragon wasn't even supposed to specifically be a metaphor for God. Instead, it was supposed to be a metaphor for all supernatural claims. In particular, Sagan had previously spent a large amount of time in the earlier parts of the book discussing claims of alien abductions, and relating them to historical cases of "demonic possession". While this story can certainly be used as a metaphor for God, I believe that focusing on that misses the overall point of the story.
Because most of the time asking a hypothetical doesn't produce the same results as an annoying @#$% buzzer.
From a strategy point of view it's a problem of motivation. The moment the people on-site were motivated, even a bit, to solve the problem, the problem was solved.
This is interesting to me. I recently wrote an interpreter for a parsing language (similar to the one in the article) in common lisp and also a recursive descent parser generator for an almost identical language (to my previous one).

I went back a few articles and found this: http://alexicalmistake.com/2008/06/scheme-parser-combinators..., to which I've concluded that I might be using combinators in my interpreted parsing language because every operator (such as 'repeat' or 'find-next') returns a function that performs the operations, but I am still a bit unclear.

If anyone is interested, I wrote a bit about them and gave an example of the parse tree created here: http://ioreader.com/2009/01/01/common-lisp-recursive-descent... As I am new to common lisp (reading ANSI CL, actually, although I've been playing with things not yet mentioned in the book!), the code leaves a lot to be desired.

Otherwise, very interesting article. These are the subjects that interest me most and approachable articles like these help me a lot.
/joke/

Still, there's an argument to be made that people can be better convinced of a need if there's something they think they have to buy.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lest_Darkness_Fall
Didn't the ancient Chinese mine coal? Not a bad map to bring with you: surface coal deposits. Still, start global warming 500 years early?
What would you do to prepare if you knew the journey back in time would start in one hour?
This is awesome. If you use a proxy server in the UK, you can fool it. It will allow you to sign-up with a UK postal code.

I hope this doesn't die. I am having so much fun listening to all the music.

I haven't been able to stump it yet. Anyone have a good test artist. Mainstream enough that it had a record, or album.
He had over a $100,000 in revenue, which is pretty cool for 6 months. He says he's started paying himself a bit, but all that money is his, so its all income as I see it. Other than a bit of server space, what are the costs? Obviously he's going to use some of it to pay for server space for his future prospects, but thats a pretty penny nonetheless.
This crude simplification may indeed become as prevalent as the opposite "fat tail" simplification.

It would be nice, however, if people looked at this discussion and started to realize the "fat body" or "fat tails" often depend on the yardstick that we use rather than either case being "the reality".
there are a few series that cover that area.(not exact mind you, but close enough)

First you have the Assati Shards series(1632, 1633, 1634)...basically a town in Virginia get transferred to Germany in 1632.

And then you have the Conrad the Engineer series, where you have a guy transported to 13th century Poland, just before the Mongol invasion.

But chances are, no matter where you wind up...you'll be dead within a week. Why? Simple...language barrier. You won't be able to understand a thing....even if you wind up in the most civilized English speaking country. So you'll probably wind up getting burned as a demon who is speaking in tongues

For example...this is what Beowulf's first few lines look like in original english.

Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
I left Joyent several years ago for much the same reason. Their shared hosting was unusable for Rails. Joyent's Accelerators look like a nice solution, but they are significantly more than a VPS. I've been with VPSLink for several years and am very happy with them.
Pray that I'll be transported to the Middle East, where it is warmer, and where the arabs of the time were vastly more enlightened and tolerant than most of Europe. They might keep me alive long enough for me to learn Arabic and learn to blend in..
The Daily Buzz - Business Trends & Technology Trends - News Visualizer
I can fully respect someone who simply doesn't wish to support an organization they don't like by not purchasing their items. One, however, is not morally justified in then simply taking the items they are otherwise unwilling to pay for.

The artists voluntarily agree to release their music through the RIAA. If you don't like the RIAA, but you like their music, you don't have a <i>right</i> to their music by virtue of the fact that you simply <i>want</i> it.

This my beef with the comments. Regardless of the legality of it, redistributing an artists' work without their approval.

Piracy is wrong, whether it's software or music. But a site like "TorrentFreak" is certainly going to be crawling with people who have absolutely no respect for property rights.

A service like Spotify (with agreements with the record companies) is offering the music in a free-as-in-beer streaming service, which, although they're not MP3s, they are still free music in a much more highly customized format than radio broadcast (and even web listening services like last.fm), and that's a sign that the RIAA is at least willing to support modern services.

But the pirates on TorrentFreak remain vehemently opposed to the free music on Spotify simply because they took the legal route of <i>working with the content producers</i>.

This is why I am appalled (though not terriby surprised) by the comments on the article.
Backpack full of seeds. Potatoes, corn, etc etc. The agriculture of that time was pretty much non-existent. You'd get something like 20x the output from your seeds.
Not if that sort of optimazation means that you can ONLY run it on a single server!
While I love this conceptually, cooliris.com hasn't had very rich support for varying types of RSS feeds. For instance, they fail to support basic MediaRSS constructs like groups, even though I pass it perfectly reasonable / compliant MediaRSS tags for multiple images in a post gallery.

I got (a very polite) brush off here:
http://developer.cooliris.com/dev_forum/comments.php?Discuss...

Being a startup founder / engineer myself, I totally understand that one can't really accomodate every request immediately... but if the life of your product is to extract images out of RSS, I'd consider it pretty important to handle galleries as intelligently as possible.

"Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send."
-- jon
RFC-1122 (originates in RFC760)

Cooliris desperately needs to be more liberal in what they accept.
In fairness, the author did say that Apple needs Yahoo because iTunes search needs improvement. That doesn't exactly make the piece more persuasive, though.
Superman can't really fly, but he's still fun to watch.
I would have bet good money that this story would turn into a flame fest, you could see it coming from a mile away.
Hi Maximilian, here's a breakdown of my top expenses:
- Salary: 13,500 (46%)
- Equipment: 5,400 (18%) I bought an iPhone and a 23'' Cinema Display this year
- Contractors: 3,500 (12%) I hired 2 devs for 2 different small projects
- Lawyers: 2,780 (9%) I hired a lawyer to help me incorporate and with the EULA

The rest is small stuff.

Yes all the money is technically mine, but I have started paying myself because I want to keep the rest for taxes and to re-invest in the company.
heres another list with some links i found via google
http://www.rohitab.com/discuss/index.php?act=Print&clien...

movitz looks interesting too.
I think I'd grab a gun and some ammo and maybe get some jewelry and gold. And then I'd grab a history book.
"Alright you Primitive Screwheads, listen up! You see this? This... is my boomstick! The twelve-gauge double-barreled Remington. S-Mart's top of the line. You can find this in the sporting goods department. That's right, this sweet baby was made in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Retails for about a hundred and nine, ninety five. It's got a walnut stock, cobalt blue steel, and a hair trigger. That's right. Shop smart. Shop S-Mart. You got that?"
Congrats Peldi! I'm surprised how dominant the desktop version is over the other web-platform versions. I think I read in one of your blog posts that you were too.
The question is wrong
Ugh. Reddit has an atheism subreddit for this kind of stuff.
Why couchdb is better than mysql
It belonged to the nobles.
I wonder if SourceLabs spoke to any VMware folk and asked how well being owned by EMC was working.
Thanks zhyder. I think the percentages will change as people move to the web, but then again, perhaps desktop/phone clients that sync to the web coupled with web apps to access the same data when you're on the road might be the solution. OMG I just realized I just described Outlook and Webmail...yuck! ;)
We shall see.
Perhaps I can help you.

I have a technology company that is focused on helping non-profit organizations and it is VERY rewarding. I'm in need of a partner that is a good coder that REALLY does want to do good for others. The person that helped me get this off the ground is now too busy with a J.O.B.

I'm not looking for a volunteer but someone that wants to improve the tools that we have already been created, help those that are using them and work with new organizations as I add them for equity and immediate share in the revenue.

We are about "Helping Others Help Others!" Too often a charity gets a donation or hand from a kind volunteer. That's a mistake. It's like giving someone a fish. You need to give them tools that are easy to use so they can do it themselves. Our easy to use tools have helped raise over a million dollars by just a few organizations.

I'm willing to give equity in the company to the right person. You can live anywhere you want. You can code a few days a week. You can help shape the company.

I want this people who do so much for others to have a great organization behind them and I need help.

Want to know more?

Please check out http://www.GivingTechnology.com and contact me.

BTW.. Anyone else looking to do good? What are your skills? I need a Graphic Artist and Marketing. Again, interested in sharing equity to get this out to as many non-profit organizations as possible.
hypocritical == irrational Yes, my mistake. Thank you.

clearly Not so sure about that.
I am not a parent, and I do not advocate sending "parents to jail", of course. I realize now that I should have been more careful with the words I chose or, at least, indicate more clearly what I meant as a joke, and what I meant seriously. My mistake.

Having said that, I would like to add that I went to high-school in Europe, so I don't know how bad or soul-crushing the default American high-school is. If it's like in the movies, then a cram school might not seem that bad an idea, after all.

I read the NYTimes article, and it seems to me they're trying to "copy" a kind of school usually found in Asia. A friend of mine taught English in Japan for a few years, and his opinion on cram schools is very, very low. In particular, he witnessed that many students would simply burn out too young and lose any sort of curiosity and creativity they might have once had. I hope Hunter High School is not THAT kind of cram school.

In the article, they mentioned that 11 year olds were skipping meals and drinking coffee to keep up with the demands, and I find that disturbing. First-generation immigrants would certainly find it useful to learn English vocabulary and the like, but what about the old-fashioned approach: here's a book, here's a dictionary. Read one, and check the words you don't know in the other. It worked for me. But then, many parents probably work long hours and simply lack the time to educate their children in a more old-fashioned way.

Certainly, not all kids would be able to stay focused growing up and being educated in a rather unstructured environment as I did, but maybe there are other ways of creating learning opportunities for kids. A "hacker school" where kids would learn some programming, electronics and build some LEGO Mindstorms could be a great idea. Kids could chose projects they're genuinely interested in, and work with each other, thus developing social skills along the way. A sort of NYC Resistor version of Hunter HS. Would that be too irrealistic?
The language barrier is an interesting point.

I wonder if there are any places with languages that haven't changed that much?

Do you think I might be able to get along in the Middle East in 1000 AD if I knew modern Hebrew?
I litereally just, JUST. Like two moments ago, paid for a year of a 1Gb Accelerator.

What has Joyent done thats bad? I know their control panel is a tad clunky, but their support has always been top notch - sure its slightly pricey but I feel really confident they wont fuck up.
I love the idea that we can have a ball going backwards
in time by creating a ball/anti-ball pair. Using the
idea from quantum physics that an anti-particle is just
the particle going backwards in time is cool, especially
when quantum uncertainty is used to justify the energy
requirements of E=mc^2.

Fun!

Does it actually help you juggle?
I'd find a bookie and make a bet on the Battle of Hastings.

The Normans are my lock of the week.
I agree - they can present many nuances and present a higher density message.
This is quite interesting when you take into consideration what the author was doing: haggling. It's usually a mute point, as many don't talk about how/where/why they haggle as the action is under the radar - particularly here in the US.

Certain cultures outside of the States embrace haggling as a predominant means of exchange, i.e. in China via tuangou: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuangou
Now why would they do that? Apple's proud of their technology. They're proud that they give you what THEY think is best and it's up to you to agree or not. I don't see the company changing any time soon.
Ask HN: Did you work on a personal project over the holidays?
If you did, tell us about it! Post a link if applicable.

I'll get us started. I wrote a iPhone application that lets you load up an image from the camera or your photo album and point around in the image to find what color is at that point. Right now it breaks the color down to it's RGB value but I may include an option to see CMYK instead.

I did the project because my girlfriend is an artist and it's embarrasing when we talk about color and I don't know anything about it. I figured I can use this to figure out what color things are around me more precisely. As a side effect, I now have a much better understanding of CoreGraphics which is nice.

Between family fun, friend fun, catching up on sleep and catching up on movies I didn't find enough time to really finish and polish the app but I did prove the concept to myself. I'm hoping to find time over the next month to polish it up and publish it to the app store as a free app.

Hope everyone had a happy holidays.
Cars all have SIMILAR usage mechanisms, similar to how all word processors have a field for you to type in. But that's as close to standardized as you'll get in either field. Cars all look and act and feel different. So will word processors.

Linux's standardization I see as a bad thing. They've copied far too much from Windows. I have Ubuntu running in VM and I dislike that it seems so blandly pasted in.

But I still don't understand what you mean when you say that they'll virtualize across platforms. As I said: there are already Apple-owned systems in place that do this. How would your idea be any different?
FFS Machine
Asian packing machinery is one of the most reliable players in the industry to satisfy this huge world-wide market by providing these complete food process plants & supporting them with a team of dedicated service technicians.
So visit on http://www.asianpackingmachinery.com
I don't know about Hebrew but I bet Arabic would be the language to know in 1000 AD if you were in Spain or Persia or many points in between.
Have you read Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"?

http://bulfinch.englishatheist.org/yank/86-h.htm

Audio book: http://librivox.org/a-connecticut-yankee-in-king-arthurs-cou...
I was always was wondering how much user attention data companies are sitting on without any real use! If they release that data lot's of interesting stuff might pop up.
Amazon/Google/Microsoft/Myspace/Facebook have a lot of these - they should give people access to it, so hackers can start thinking of ways to use it. Both sides win!

For example twitter/friendfeed stream from Amazon browsing and you can share that stream with your friends or public. Bought items, considered items, wished items, reviewed items, songs/books etc. Privacy put aside - it will be a lot of fun to explore some of this data. And yes, you should have the right to sell this data to interested parties.
Nice essay. Thanks for providing something that reversed the complete waste of time the original "article" was.
It does not matter what is superior

It does to Apple users, and to Apple itself.

It's not problem free till I can click and icon on my mac select what I want and click buy.

The problem is that by doing that Apple would be shutting out other venues. Did you see my link to Apple.com/downloads? It does basically what you're asking for.

People will indeed make such a purchasing decision based off 1 feature. All other things balance themselves out, so one snazzy thing makes the world of difference.

What about the people purchasing the other way around? The people who'll buy a Zune instead of an iPod because it doesn't have the same crippled feature?
TANSTAAFL is a pretty good model. If a situation isn't comprehensible or doesn't seem to be sustainable, don't invest as if it were.

The Golden Rule is another thing to keep in mind: If your gains seem are so outsized that they seem like robbery, there's a good chance that they are. Two questions ensue: Do you want to gain that way at another's expense? Are you sure you're the one who's gaining?

I guess particularly in this site's environment, rich in innovators, there would be a significant amount of gain where the cause is the replacement of outdated business and technical models. But then hopefully that is taking place in fields that you understand; the transfer isn't "magic".

I've mentioned before, but watching Chicago real estate prices rise into the middle years of this decade was unnerving. The rest of the economy was not accelerating to match. It didn't seem sustainable, and it wasn't.

Not that I'm any expert. Just my $0.02, while I still have the pennies to rub together.
Teeth. I would show off my teeth as a start to my entrepreneurial apothecary business. Our average dental hygiene is way way better than what they had then, and consequently our teeth look like divine pearls in comparison. Hopefully, their amazement will allow a perceived transference of my expertise to other medicinal areas.

Also, knowing more math might help me make coinage with some simple engraved code that needs to be combined with the name of the bearer in order to be verified (only feasible for inter-medieval banks). This would be impetus for trade across greater distances.
Ah! Thanks for the fix.
Your Culture Is Your Brand
Nah, it just means (for example) instead of putting function X out to tender, they just gave it to a friend or a family member. The work still gets done, it just could just be done quicker/cheaper/better with more transparency. I don't believe it's literally the case that Neil Kinnock is socking away a billion Euros a year into his Swiss bank account. Interesting to note that practically his entire family are EC employees tho'.
Pack a latin version of the graduale and as much church music as I could cram in a bag. If the bag wasn't coming with me I'd read up on the survivalist websites. Making a compass, that sort of thing.

The thing I'd be most worried about is dental hygiene. How do you look after yourself if you don't have a toothbrush and floss? I suppose there'd be less white sugar, which would help. What food you could get would taste bland and generally be awful.
Yeah, I complete agree with that. I'm probably one of 5 people who still pay for music.

Additionally, I would like to purchase one of these mystical triple-edged swords, when available...
The counter-argument is as follows: what better subject group for a study about learning than a group immersed in learning activity (i.e., students)?
I don't think they've done anything bad. But, as the article mentions, EngineYard hasn't let go of the after-burner trigger since it's launched.

If nothing else, it's a great way to see how an underdog can quickly push ahead of a entrenched prize fighter.
Arabic's a good bet because the Qu'ran is still written in the original Mediaeval Arabic and people learn it in order to read it in its original form. The accent might have changed over time but Arabic's going to be good for any time in the last 1300 years.
Here's someone looking for that exact feature: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/408202/what-collaborative...
One or two spaces between sentences?
Tailpipe Harvest: Putting All That Hot Air to Good Use Charging Battteries
I am starting a Hip Hop ad network. I did all the back end work and website development over the break.

MapJak.net
Latin would be your best bet in Europe. The general populace wouldn't understand you but you could endear yourself to the clergy with it.
All of these folks have a lot of such data, but they're hardly just sitting on it. Amazon uses it to push product; Google uses it to measure and improve both organic results and paid advertising; etc.

It would be great to have broader access to this data, and I believe the privacy concerns can be addressed. But it would be asking a lot of these folks to share what may be their most valuable intellectual property: what they've learned from their users.
In the correct version of this story, the mathematician says "I have two children", and you ask, "Is at least one a boy?", and she answers "Yes". Then the probability is 1/3 that they are both boys.

See here for why I think this problem confuses people: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/03/mind-probabilit.html
I agree with your first point, but I'm having trouble seeing the "advantages to size" you speak of, at least on that scale. Things like "setting the global agenda" or "military is twice as good" sound like advantages to the bureaucracy itself, not to the people it consists of. (Per your examples: at no point during my lifetime did I feel that any President spoke for me, nor did I feel our gigantic military made me any safer.)

I've seen this commercially, too: large company buys small-medium company because it's good for both companies, even though it's demonstrably bad for employees and products of both. It's a tail-wags-dog situation.
Ha! Thanks for the link johns, I replied there as well.
While I don't agree with qqq, this has turned in to a witch hunt. Come on guys, he has a history of posting good stuff. Down modding everything he writes in to oblivion isn't going to help.

PG's right though...politics bring out the worst in everyone.
The best explanation for how the optimization works is actually in the patch itself: http://bugs.python.org/file12524/threadedceval5.patch.
It's a shame because the article is really interesting and the discussions on HN are normally even better.