skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't even buy the "draining the bandwidth" argument anymore. Craigslist results take up very little space compared with even a small photo.
PadMapper currently uses 3Taps to access Craigslist data, which piggybacks on search engine results. Craigslist can't prevent this but by a) setting the whole site to Disallow in robots.txt, removing the whole site from search results on Google & other search engines, or b) legal force.
OrionVM in Australia.

We do alot of async and evented I/O in Python/C/Cython using Gevent.

Python is just one of those languages that is so easy to extend with native code.
NBC are streaming all the events live at http://www.nbcolympics.com/ , although you need to have a cable/satellite TV subscription to access the streams. The complaints about them not showing events live on TV are legitimate (not to mention their editing out the tribute to the victims of the 7/7 bombing during the opening ceremony), but there's an easier solution for most people in the US than the one in this article.
Absolutely. So wouldn't it be neat if premedical students and business majors had already seen a thorough stats class in high school, so that their college-level stats classes could spend less time on the basics and more time on those subtleties?

(Speaking as someone who's taught calculus-based physics to premedical students, I think it's important to recognize that most folks who've taken a year of calculus really have not internalized those concepts enough to be fluent in applying them. I think it would take a particularly strong math background for someone to really understand the mathematical justifications for statistics, so I suspect class time would be better spent warning students about pitfalls than on hoping that they will draw meaningful conclusions from formal derivations. Heck, medical students are required to have taken calculus, but lots of them (evidently including a journal editor, peer reviewers, and 163 followup papers) apparently don't even know what an integral is: http://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researche... .)
Do you have to resize it in the script? I think you can just set GNOME to scale it down by itself.
I just checked out your drawbang. It's pretty neat!

http://i.imgur.com/IeiQB.gif

You should add some tooltips on the buttons though, as some of them aren't immediately all that clear.
Resist The Allure Of The 'Sexy' Startup Idea
I don't know that it's a big problem, but it's the wrong direction to move a free society irrespective of the amount of damage it will do. Maybe it will not end up being a big problem but I completely disagree with your assessment of the situation.

> People will make efficient choices depending on the context

Except they won't and don't. I know it's nitpicky but this kind of economics pseudoscience of rational actors and market utopianism is not based on evidence. It is, in fact, in direct conflict with the evidence. People will choose the option with the best marketing, with very little consideration of their own interests. Anonymity is too far removed from direct consequences for people to make this decision rationally.

That's why setting a strong social norm that anonymity is strongly tied to free speech is important. It's both true and it might be effective since even though most people don't actually want free speech they at least think they do.
I've wondered for quite a while if this was possible.

Thank you for sharing.
I'm ALWAYS down for perpetrating a Rickroll!
The size of the image is statically defined in the script:
RESOLUTION_X = 1680
RESOLUTION_Y = 1050

Change them to your screen's resolution.
As someone with a BA in English and wrapping up an MS in Computer Science, I really think anyone who considers themselves an "intellectual" should know both the theory of probability and Foucault. I'll be the first to agree that probability will land you more jobs, but from a purely intellectual angle I woulds say these have equally helped me undertand the world around me.

I've been in rooms of really smart technical people who have a child-like understanding of social and cultural issues that effect them (discussion about gender on HN can be a great example of this). At the same time I've been in rooms of extremely well read humanists who cringe at any attempt to understand the world through mathematical models. Both of these groups exhibit a clear intellectual poverty that limits their overall understanding of the world.

The worst part isn't merely that each group has such ignorance of the other's domain, but that each will proudly defend this ignorance. The "enjoy working at starbucks" and "buzzes like a fridge" comments are equally anti-intellectual. The first thing that needs to change is this attitude.
Never gets old http://jamplify.com/nv2rBf
OT: Wow. That's such a great way to avoid website links you don't want to visit. I never thought of that! Thanks!
They don't "own" all the content. For example, they need to pay royalties for any music they use to the local collection societies (ASCAP, SESAC or BMI in the US).
One thing that makes it not so black and white is that it's not Craigslist's data.

I'm curious about this point. The article says that Craigslist disrupted the newspaper classified section. Does this mean that one could type out the classified sections from newspapers without any worries? I'm curious that no-one I'm aware of during the dot-com boom and bust did just that.

The other is that Craig has in the past stated publicly that they didn't take issue with other sites using this data except when it caused increased bandwidth costs for CL.

Taking it at face value, what's so bad about changing one's position? Don't we all have the right to change our minds, especially if we think our initial position to be incorrect?
"Software is eating everything" even traditional employee roles in organizations. People who can automate will always win, because they can do more in less time.

I remember once when I was consulting, I was on the bench for a few days and the marketing group contacted me to help aggregate and validate multiple lead lists. They had been working on it for days, copy/pasting record after record from multiple excel sheets into one big master sheet. They asked if I could help.

I wrote some algorithms that matched records on several criteria and put them into one big list. It took me a couple hours and I was done. Emailed them later.

The marketing group emailed me back -- ecstatic! I saved them so much time, they sent me all these promotional gifts meant to give to clients and potential customers. A thermos I use to this day full of starbucks bucks that I shared with my friends. I was king for a day.

These kinds of problems exist all over corporate america and now that programmers have automated many of their daily tasks and accelerated them where they haven't, they have more time to help more people within the organizations that employ them. Their new tasks show their immense power to people who normally think software is just something to get in the way of their daily tasks, slowing them down, making life worse. Much software out there is awful to use and built by engineers of the old days who were overworked, underpaid relative to their contribution, and perhaps angry and antagonistic toward coworkers.

There's a new breed out there and we are taking over! :)
I'm sitting at the airport to leave DEFCON and regretted not participating this weekend. I can think of a few ways for a one-man team to compete effectively, mostly involving the GPU instances at EC2. While the competition is over, the files are still available, so I hope to poke at this idea this week and see how it goes.
Hey, I'm just forking it right now to have that to you. I have it mostly working, I'm just installing PIL. But apart from resizing everything works. Check back in 15 minutes.
I have talked to a fair number of Foursquare employees, and know a few others from outside Foursquare. It really seems like one of the less dysfunctional tech companies, and a bit smaller than I thought.

The only negative anyone ever mentioned isn't really a secret, and some people consider it a positive. They have always been pretty open about not wanting to sell the company, which might be great (Facebook was the same way), and is fine if you already have money, but reduces the chances your equity will be worth $100k to $1mm or so; it may increase the expected value (due to a lower probability but huge success event). It does mean the company is less likely to get bought by a company which marginalizes the product and team, too.
I also have an idea. Since reCptcha has so much traffic, why not just pair off users and get them to verify each other as fellows humans? Not quite sure how you'd do that but it is one approach that could let you break out of the pattern recognition arms race.
> “People behave a lot better when they have their real names down.

I've read plenty of mailing lists where real names are used and people behave appallingly. See also fidonet; Usenet; some wikis; some web forums.

And do they actually want a real name, or just something that sounds like a real name?

"Ivor Trotts" only makes YouTube videos about bowels?
Sure you can. Shoot me an email on akshay@sugardoctor.in

I am presently working for this company in reinventing their business model for the scaling/ growing up of operation.

And yeah the guys I'm referencing, neither I know any of them nor they know me.
I'm still tickled by the fact that object oriented programming in elisp is just part of a standard library you can import.
Learn a little at a time. Don't compare your knowledge to other's or to the total amount possible, just to what you knew before. Keep it up and you'll slowly get better and better over time.

I also find it useful to keep a short file of features I want to learn and features (1 or 2) I'm currently learning (trying to use as much as possible even if it slows me down a bit so that they'll stick in my mind).
WUWT press-release on study of upward adjustment of NOAA temperature data
I should have been more clear. I don't like browserID because there is no route for this to become widespread except for "a significant portion of sites implement this".

You know that saying about any spam solution that begins with "well first we change email" is a stupid solution? Same issue here.

First you need a good password manager front and center in the browser. Then you start augmenting the experience by allowing better integration with the password manager through some standard. If the user already uses the functionality for every site and the experience is better on sites that implement the standard then you might actually see real amounts of integration.
Wait, can we get a link? This sounds pretty epic, I haven't heard about it before.
> This is a bit of a curious post. I'm not sure the antidote to people being proud of ignorance in science/math (which is a problem) is to be proud of ignorance in the humanities (which is also a problem).

I don't think you really mean ignorance in the humanities, you mean ignorance in philosophy. Being able to distinguish all the various cantatas of Bach is the most trivial of trivialities. More broadly, I suspect talking about "the humanities" as a category is worse than useless, because you get passionate defenses of literacy in reply to weeping and moaning over the sad state of modern dance.

Talk about literacy, philosophy, history. Talk about theater and dance. Talk about visual art and music. Talk about rhetoric and economics.
Well, B&N, Books-a-Million, and Indigo won't stock anything published by Amazon. So as far as absurd comparisons go...

http://business.time.com/2012/02/06/in-latest-moves-barnes-n...

http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2012/0206/I...
Some days are so hectic you have no time to procrastinate.
At http://hollylisle.com/apple-made-its-decision-my-turn/commen..., she doesn't show anything else then Apple's complaint:

Book file contains links from competitors: Amazon,
in the chapter Q&A 6, under “Question 9″

From there, She claims:

As noted, however, I HAD changed the lesson, HAD removed
the links, HAD complied with their request. Since the
links were gone, their only possible objection—NOT STATED
—was content.

There is no way for us to verify whether she removed all those links. Even if she did, I can think of explanations that are at least as likely (e.g. human error on either side) as the conclusion she IMO jumps to.

Disclaimer: I have zero experience dealing with the iBookStore.
I think this misses the point a little bit though. I believe he acknowledges that that is probably not a good thing but he is trying to point out the phenomenon of it being "acceptable" to well-trained in humanities but be prideful of not knowing mathematics but the reverse is considered strange.
Microsoft spent many years on WinCE before learning that a mobile UI should be different than a desktop UI. I wonder how long it will take them to learn that a desktop UI should be different than a mobile UI.

It's not that windows 8 is terrible - I actually like using it on the tablet they gave out at the build conference, but it's very difficult to use with a normal computer (i.e keyboard and mouse).
While this post is very informative, it has the potential to be quite dangerous. This type of marketing is like gasoline - it can take a small fire and make it huge. You almost want to conclude that 99% of the fire was due to the gasoline, but that isn't the case. Most of the critical work is getting the initial fire. Once it starts burning, you 'earn' the ability to add gasoline and see a big effect.

Long story short - don't try to growth hack until your product is ready. Every shining example of engineered marketing begins with a product that already had engaged users.
It does seem to prove that blogspam links are not limited to blogs.
I doubt they're actually paid, but it's wise to remember that Hacker News is intimately connected with Y Combinator. It's partly a vehicle for the companies to get feedback/criticism, and thus to some extent, promote their products. YC companies are allowed to post job listings which aren't able to be flagged or commented on. It's just a part of the culture here. Whether it adds value is a personal matter. For me, it generally doesn't, but the overall discussion is of high enough quality that the small amount of noise those generate is worth it.
There's a difference between what is legal, and what is technically capable. It is illegal for me to go into someone's house without an invitation, but I'm technically capable of breaking a window and letting myself in. Now, a lot of people will make the argument that this is very different than breaking a window, because there is no physical damages. But all damages don't to be out of destroyed property. What Padmapper is doing, is effectively trying to sell hamburgers inside of a McDonald's: They are leveraging someone else's hardwork in developing a user base and repeat customers, to further their own goals.

This isn't anti-competitive. This is Craigslist saying, "go across the street and build your company on your own merits, not our captive audience". If Padmapper is that great, and I believe they are, then they will have no problem building up their own user base. They just happened to lose their shortcut.
Fair point - it was hacked together in just a few hours. It's hard to allocate time but I will address this over the next few weeks.
I've used PHP a lot, work at a name-brand startup that uses a fair bit of PHP in the stack, and have an OSS PHP project I'm proud of (https://github.com/shaneharter/PHP-Daemon). That is to say, I'm not a PHP hater. I see many flaws in the language, many many actually, but I'm not a hater.

But I really disagree with some of this.

First, why call variable references "pointers"? You're just breeding ignorance there. Understanding pointers is a valuable skill for a software engineer, even if they'll never use the skill directly in their day job as a PHP developer.

Second, you're introducing concepts that are a little sleazy like variable variables without any commentary on downsides or best practices. There is effectively nothing you can do with a variable variable that you cannot do with an associative array.

And fine, if you don't want to editorialize, if you want to just teach facts of the language without adding opinion, why invent the term "pointers" that, as far as I've ever read, is not used in any official PHP documentation.
I think gittip fills an interesting niche. Rather than supporting a particular project, gittip allows me to support a particular developer.

By contributing to gittip, I am saying I trust that developer to manage their time appropriately. I don't expect a specific amount of work every week; I expect a professional, long-term commitment to the project.
Financial planning for SaaS startups
The curse of the highly successful
Neat demo last week on alternative to word captchas -- cartoon catcha, eg drag hat on top of head, put eyeglasses on face, from Mitsuo Okada of Osaka University, at Founders Institute, he's at mitsuookada@gmail.com
Some people do.

Some people do wolf-whistle at women, or shout things at them from moving vehicles.

Some people do stare at disabled people; or laugh at the learning disabled, or mock those with facial disfigurement.

Some people do chant abuse at those of a different race or ethnicity.

Some people deny others jobs (or equal pay) because of the sexual preference or gender or disability or race or religion or age of the employee - even though many countries have had anti-discrimination laws for years.

Here's examples of real people, in the real world, with real identities attached ("The licence plate was ..." or "the company was...") with real penalties attached (sometimes) and yet these people are still being dicks.

I'm not convinced that asking someone to pick a realistic sounding name is going to stop someone from being a dick.
I agree. It just goes to show you that marketing and self-promotion only make you look like a sleazy used-car salesman when you have nothing interesting to say.
Wow, I assumed libsvm was already really fast. That is awesome you could improve on that! Any chance you might opensource it in the future?
Data of 8.7 million KT subscribers hacked in S.Korea
At around 27MB download, this notes PDF is more of a medium sized book. I browsed the first few pages and it looks great. Will need a few hours to study it and get into Peter's head to see how he sees the world.
Announce: Tao Presentations release 1.12 available for download
How we use GitHub Flow at Incuna
The threshold for hellbanning at HN is way too low. I browse with showdead on, and I regularly see a good post per topic of a hellbanned user. For example, the very last topic I was in had this guy:

http://news.ycombinator.net/threads?id=Of_Prometheus

As far as I can tell, he was hellbanned for 2 bad comments. Both are bad, yes, but he's regularly been posting well since. Having other users tell them to email PG or make a new account is not a sustainable solution for this.

We should have an "unflag" option for wrongly hellbanned users if they can be autobanned. The community of HN generally drives away trolls by its very nature. I rarely see banned troll posts, because they simply don't bother here. I do see banned posts by decent posters who simply made a mistake or two at the start.
for me it's the casual way to import prolog that does it
I found the original notes much easier to consume: http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup/

The pdf has a very big font, probably for reading on the Kindle.
Craigslist (and Silicon Valley) Greatly Offends The NY Times
How does one determine whether Foucault's statements are true or not? At any rate, why should I accept them?

If the answers to these questions are negative, then in what way can Foucault be put on the same level as the theory of probability, so that it is a shameful thing not to know anything about what Foucault says?
The last thing the tech world needs is people walking around calling themselves "growth hackers".

Actually, the last thing the tech world needs is stuff like this, from the article:

If a startup is pre-product/market fit, growth hackers can make sure virality is embedded at the core of a product. After product/market fit, they can help run up the score on what’s already working.

Stop making up "markets" and "niches", then making crappy products to try and be "viral" in these areas, then calling yourself a "growth hacker" or something as ridiculous and valueless.

Build something because you love it, not because a "growth hacker" determined that it was a "pre-market fit".
This is certainly a good argument against the position we've sometimes seen from Apple and its fans that Android is a ripoff. On the other hand, the history of product design is full of examples of brilliant but flawed designs followed up by someone else producing a commercially viable refinement. Apple, especially has a history of taking technically interesting ideas that weren't developed enough for commercial success and refining them to the point that they can sell.
Wait, I thought I was the only one who realized how important design was!
No, not for curiosity. That robot is expected to drive many kms as part of its planned activities. Its nominal speed is 30 m per hour.
Helpful template, many thanks!
Crappy article but I enjoy the sentiment.
Any realistic method of signing off with your real name make you very traceable via the identity provider.
I would absolutely love this for osx. Good work!
Honestly I don't really see how it is hard to use on a desktop/laptop? Sure it is different and a little bit odd at first but basically all they have changed is the start menu, something which I hardly ever use these days. The 80% of applications I use are pinned to the taskbar, the other 20% I did have pinned to the start menu but on Windows 8 I just have them "pinned" on the start screen. Not hugely different.

The whole Metro thing I have kept away from as I have no real need for "full screen apps". It is a little annoying that it is pushed into your face now and then but with the RTM it is possible to load to the desktop rather than the start screen which, while only a small change, is very helpful at making the upgrade to Windows 8 less jarring than it was in the previews we had before.
I agree with your true write-once-run-everywhere dream, but I disagree with the conclusion that we build an abstraction over existing frameworks. This is essentially what wxWidgets or QT is for desktop.

While these things were great, in the end what most of us wanted was actually HTML/CSS/JS and the freedom to create beautiful things that it gives us. I would argue that default looking iOS apps are already stale and we want more control (which CSS is great at giving). I am banking my business on the same thing happening long term in mobile.

I agree that webview apps can't compete with native in certain situations, but devices are becoming more powerful every day and web technologies have already proven themselves with a large developer audience.

Also, I think there is low-hanging fruit just in the mobile web space: making more websites work well on mobile devices.
Hacking the senses is a side interest of mine. Some thoughts and questions:

- Do people who get these magnetic implants actually develop different "qualia" along with their new perceptions, or do they just add different interpretations to existing qualia?

- With respect to this specific device, does the buzzing change intensity proportional to the field, or is it an "on/off" thing?

- My understanding of nerves like touch receptors is that they activate in response to a stimulus, then send an electrical response to the brain. It sucks that you have to directly implant these little magnets in your fingers to get the actual stimulation. Is there anyway to wear the magnets on or outside your skin (say, embedded in a glove) and still get the nerve stimulation? I'm thinking of something like magnetic induction or some other resonance effect between some target and the nerves.
Is Algebra Necessary? Absolutely.