skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Online high school diploma program
Earn a real high school diploma online fast and at home. Enroll in our free high school diploma test program and receive your diploma in a matter of days.
I'm sure the EU who have took MS to task over Media Player and now IE would just love them to bundle a word processor or photo editor

You mean like Wordpad or Paint?
If technology manages to solve scarcity

When has it ever failed to do so? http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource

people won't have to do any chores any more.

http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm

"So how do I earn the credits?" I asked.

"Earn?" Linda asked back.

"No no no..." said Cynthia.

"Do you give me a job? The reason I am here is because I have no job," I said.

"No. You see, it's all free. By being a shareholder, you already own your share of the resources. The robots make products from the free resources you and everyone else already owns. There is no forced labor like there is in America. You do what you want, and you get 1,000 credits per week. We are all on an endless vacation."
Maybe. I think it may work in computer graphics applications. Most calculation is done for only a single frame and then discarded.

If it were a little off there would not really be any bad effect.
I love how two vacations a year, at a total of $16,000, is considered a "living expense."
>You mean like Notepad (or the other one in accessories, I forgot its name) or Paint?

Well, no, because Wordpad, Notepad and Paint aren't really comparable to iPhoto or Pages and their commercial ilk, as the parent made clear.
NY Post calls Apple TV and Boxee "the future of television"
“Numbers that fool the Fermat test are called Carmichael numbers, and little is known about them other than that they are extremely rare. There are 255 Carmichael numbers below 100,000,000. The smallest few are 561, 1105, 1729, 2465, 2821, and 6601. In testing primality of very large numbers chosen at random, the chance of stumbling upon a value that fools the Fermat test is less than the chance that cosmic radiation will cause the computer to make an error in carrying out a “correct” algorithm. Considering an algorithm to be inadequate for the first reason but not for the second illustrates the differences between mathematics and engineering.” footnote pg. 53 SICP
I agree. But, even if there was, say, a uint16 type in C, it wouldn't be the grammar that defines it as 16 bits.
I so wish this were true. Sadly, there are innumerable corporations that are dishonest and have been around for decades.
Server monitoring, monit and munin
The DigiCert Wildcard cert does work on the iPhone.
I love Colloquy! It's a great app. The only change I would like made is to have some way of disabling all of the popups (though I think that's due to some Mac OS X extension I have installed). Anyway, I just bought the IRC iPhone app to support ya guys.
Hey, nothing wrong with charging for open source! It's win-win: you get compensated for your great work and we enjoy the benefits of having the source code freely available.

Thank you.
Not an option.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point#Accuracy_problem...

An annoying problem for distributed/grid systems where the compilers are different across nodes/sites.
The 500k limit is only on executives of banks that receive future extraordinary assistance from the government--the execs are free to find jobs elsewhere if they don't want the restrictions. The banks are free to not take the assistance if they can maintain a healthy capital level without it. With fractional-reserve banking that is the condition they implicitly agreed to in exchange for the ability to conjure money from the (almost) ether.
Scientific American Mind.
The Economist (Not geek per se, but I challenge you to find a better analysis of the world).
The Edge (edge.org)
Google Next Victim Of Creative Destruction?
That's not completely true. Almost all certifiate providers issue chain certificate (even VeriSign) because it is better security practice. You simply need to install the inetermediate certificate on the server and none of the visitors will receive errors.
Outsourced tech support can mangle French just as easily as English.

If you have designed your site so that it doesnt need telephone support, then foreign language support will indeed help you. However it is not easy or cheap to do it well. It is particularly difficult if the textual parts are undergoing continual change.
It also only applies to the top N executives at those firms, where last I checked N was 5.
I don't think the article was trying to make you feel sympathy; I think it was playing with subtext.
Booken's Cybook [1] has all these features except for the first one, it's screen is just 6". Nevertheless, it's a great sexy-looking reader.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybook
The ethical issue here is that a review should convey the good-faith impression of an unbiased user.
They could add a noise generator to it. Brabus has one for the Tesla Roadster. So you can still have your umpteen mpg motorcycle that sounds like a rocket.
You can find reviews and ratings of SSL vendors at http://www.sslshopper.com/certificate-authority-reviews.html
Paint I'd partly agree with, but regarding Wordpad I guess that really depends on your interpretation.

Wordpad and the Word Processor component of Google Docs are comparable in features and lots of people laud Google's offering as good enough, so where's the difference?

Microsoft already has it ingrained in people to pay for their Office product, even though they give away a good enough offering (in comparison to Google's Docs). Why should they give away Word?
Yeah, this is along the lines of my worry. Sorry, I know I included no context.

I plan to offer tech support (predominantly email) for the inevitable holes in the documentation. And I think it would be insane to presume I could (without years and years of work) make the docs perfect or the UI etc. "perfectly obvious" (the no-docs-needed ideal).

So if I translate the marketing to other languages, this would have to, what, be accompanied with a "tech support in english only" warning?

This is a micro-isv, cannot hire tech support yet. But the application would certainly be useful for people who only knew a bit of English. Offering them lower prices would be fair on some level, but that doesn't seem feasible tactically.
You could also see emotion as heuristic behavior guides that were calculated by evolution. Many decisions are so computationally complex that reasoning isn't useful.
I am hoping this would be "read-only".
I think it's interesting that it is difficult to tell the distros apart from the screenshots. Regardless of whether they are running KDE or Gnome, they all have similar panels and window themes.
It's not a political issue if you choose to ignore it.
I use my own domains and Gmail through Google Apps. I also backup frequently with an IMAP fetcher.

This setup gives me the best web mail client without vendor lock in, I can switch to my own server any time I want and keep all email addresses.
I think it's clear that none of the currently released products are anywhere near ideal and are all lacking basic features and poor design trade-offs. One company needs to come in from left-field and shake up the market with an overwhelmingly better product.
> Nanny: $45,000 a year.

Of course, no banker would dream of paying his nanny less than $500,000 a year, considering the difficulty of surviving on such a salary in NYC.
I would go one further and say that if you see a corporation that has been around for decades the odds are better than even that they have been / are dishonest.
Hmmm. I don't think the problem is just with design. The problem probably lays with fabrication.

Intel is large enough to both upgrade their fabs and CPU design alternate years. Fabs are becoming more capital intensive to build each year. Furthermore, Intel can afford to make mistakes. This is the reason why AMD is being killed - its 45nm process was way behind Intel's. AMD is now being split up into a foundry and CPU design company (but the future is bleak).

nVidia will never be a serious competitor – it is a fabless semiconductor company (its stuff gets manufactured by TSMC).

The looming Intel monopoly will be worse than Microsofts monopoly. IMHO the only hope for competition is for for companies such as Via to manufacture low-end CPUs at foundries.
Flashmob of ATM crooks scores $9 million in 49 cities
Ireland not open for business, says Twitter innovator
Can you? Yes, certainly.

Should you? Most likely not.

Unless you have a very new, or wildly successful widget, support via Twitter is likely to be more frustrating than beneficial. It's a little like trying to get investment advice by talking to someone on the NYSE trading floor...
Wasn't the Post's vision of the future John McCain? Are their predictions here any better here? It's a low word count review of Apple TV and Boxee. All I came away with is that Boxee is not ready for prime time. I can't tell if Apple TV is any better that the poor reviews it got when it came out.
nVidia is a fabless semiconductor company that is entering patent-mine field.
I've wondered how one (company) gets into a really high tech industry. Wouldn't they have to do an awful lot of research - basically reinventing most of Intel's wheels for the past decade?

I guess hiring an x86 processor development team would give them a jump in, but without lots of existing work, documents, schematics, etc. would a team of people know enough to rebuild such complex work from scratch?
Ask HN: Would you choose Cocoa or Qt for a desktop application, and why?
I know that Cocoa is not cross platform and Qt is, but suppose you have to start from scratch, which one would you pick, and why?
It would be more interesting if he talked about the details of his lifestyle, for instance showers, etc.

Also, it seems like sneaking into youth hostels without paying crosses some kind of ethical line; sleeping in your office at university is a different situation altogether.
I'm assuming you are writing your desktop application for the Mac because you are considering Cocoa, if you're starting from scratch that's an excellent reason to pick a platform independent library.

That choice is one you usually make only once in the lifetime of an application, you'd better make the right one. And I'd widen the field a bit to include other options not limited to Cocoa and Qt. If you have a success on your hands you'll really regret not being able to easily support other platforms.

Let's turn it around, what compelling reasons would you have for choosing Cocoa over a platform independent solution ?
I think it overlaps closely to what are usually called "bondage and discipline languages": they have some grand underlying design idea (everything-is-an-object, stack-based, etc.), and if you're working on a problem it fits poorly, tough. In other words, languages that strongly encourage you to program in a certain style.

"Authors of BondageAndDisciplineLanguages believe their concepts of the Higher Principles of Computer Science should apply to how you say 'Hello World'."

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BondageAndDisciplineLanguage
How hackers drive innovation
I just thought it was an interesting idea to think about. My friend has Boxee on his MacBook Pro and uses it instead of his TV already. No need for DVR or TiVo when you can just watch whatever you want on demand.
Pixar's Brad Bird on fostering innovation
Use a bigger font size.

I am a violator here. I have emacs set to 6x10 on a 25" monitor, the result is 104 lines on a screen. And I like it.
Boxee has nothing without Hulu/iPlayer/Last.FM
Heh. I almost qualified that to say "unless it's their company." But since the article is for those interviewing, it's a given that it's not their company, so that happiness won't be theirs.
No Slackware? I declare the list incomplete!
A bigger font is better for your upper back, too. Take a look around you and notice how many of your fellow developers--or anyone working with text at a computer--slouch forward every few seconds to peer at the monitor. Then notice yourself doing it. Bye, bye, chiropractor.
"In testing primality of very large numbers chosen at random, the chance of stumbling upon a value that fools the Fermat test is less than the chance that cosmic radiation will cause the computer to make an error in carrying out a “correct” algorithm."

Where are the numbers for that ?

If the fermat test already fails for 255 numbers out of 100 million input values then that would make it one in about 400K numbers.

I would really be surprised if computers were that susceptible to cosmic radiation. Or should I start shielding my machines with u-metal ?
The article says: Help is on the way, however. The American Civil War saw the first use of morphine for pain relief. It's impossible to overstate what a difference it made. The opiates were truly miracle drugs.

This is a really remarkable level of historical inaccuracy. To quote from http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/pagerender.fcgi?artid=46725... :

There is general agreement that the Sumerians, who inhabited what is
today Iraq, cultivated poppies and isolated opium from their seed
capsules at the end of the third millenium [sic] B.C. They called
opium “gil,” the word for joy, and the poppy “hul gil,” plant of joy.
It appears that opium spread from Sumeria to the remainder of the old
world.

At first opium may have been employed as a euphoriant in religious
rituals, taken by mouth or inhaled from heated vessels (4). Knowledge
of its use may initially have been confined to priests representing
gods who sealed the sick and gods of death as well. It was given
along with hemlock to put people quickly and painlessly to death, and
it came to be used medicinally. The Ebers Papyrus (ca. 1500 B.C.),
for example, includes the following description of a “remedy to
prevent excessive crying of children" (see ref. 2, p. 35): "Špenn, the
grains of the špenn (poppy)-plant, with excretions of flies found on
the wall, strained to a pulp, passed through a sieve and administered
on four successive days. The crying will stop at once." This remedy
and others containing opium (such as spongia somnifera, sponges soaked
in opium used to relieve pain during surgery) were dangerous because
they varied in potency and rate of absorbance. Consequently, many
physicians were wary of using them.

...

In 1806, Sertürner (8, 9) isolated the active ingredient in opium and
named it morphine...

The same paragraph of the "Technology is Heroin" article also makes the error of calling cocaine an opiate.
I like the ideas expressed but I'd rather see them enforced by the language than by coding convention. For example to simulate type checking you could prefix _typename onto each of your variable names. Then

i_int += j_filehandle

would stick out as wrong. But luckily many languages support type checking so we don't have to do it in those languages!

I wonder is it possible to avoid mixing safe and unsafe strings (for example) using some new language feature (or a new use of an old one)?
Speed up your JavaScript, Part 4
"Waste of money" is a loaded term, especially when considered in the context of necessities. If you reword it as "quality of investment" and "could your money have been put to better use spent on something else (or saved and not spent at all)", then it's a little easier to discuss and compare.

The assumption with buying vs renting is that your money isn't "working" for you when you rent. When you buy, your mortgage payments are going to build equity, and the logic used is that it is a "forced savings plan" compared to renting, where once you pay your rent, you'll never see that money again. The inverse, which is implied, is that you will actually see the money you pay for the mortgage at some time in the future. As everyone found out, that's not necessarily the case.

In my case, I lost money on the sale of my house, for various reasons (economy, improvements, agent fees, taxes, buying to live in it vs buying it as an investment, some of which were under my control, some of which were not), such that I would have been better off renting the whole time. I, personally, lost about $10k. Had I rented in the neighborhood instead, the savings would have been even more drastic because I wouldn't have needed to spend so much, per month, on housing, despite being able to live in the same area and have the same amenities.

The real value in buying a house though was that I learned exactly what it means to own a house and exactly what is important to you (in my case, location is much more important than size), which I don't think you can learn any other way. There really needs to be a perfect storm of positive variables, in the last few years especially, to make money on owning a house. My home buying years have not, and will not, be marked by such an increase in demand and rise in prices that the sale price offsets all the other, financial and emotional, costs.

I joke about setting a personal requirement of 80% down on the next home I purchase, if I ever purchase another.
Indeed, in these times China had a monopoly for silk production [1].

It would be also interesting to know prices of spices, other luxury product driving international trade in ancient times [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_silk

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incense_Route, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road
Would the grammar define it as a reserved identifier / keyword?
He mentions that he'll write those 'details' in another blog post, but I agree that it would've been more interesting if he said how he handled that.

Yeah, the part of not paying for the youth hostels just for the sake of not paying comes across as a cheap person and not really as a things-just-own-you kind of guy.

Anyway, after reading some more of his posts, he just sounds like someone who is full of himself really, with all the stuff about attending underground groups, 'urban exploration' and ninja stealth/lock-picking -- that just reeks elitism...
It says for very large numbers. Presumably it's a reflection of the amount of computational power required, if a bit of your memory gets flipped every year by cosmic radiation it's not a serious problem, unless you're doing a calculation that takes 10 computer years (eg with 1000 machines over 3 days).

Kind of like Google's terabyte sort test where each time they ran it at least one hard drive died.
Lensless high-resolution $10 microscope for cell imaging
Some eccentric people are very cool, but this guy seems a bit of a poser. A cheap poser, in fact. Sneaking into dorms does not sound very noble to me. The other students pay the rent, and this guy thinks he's too smart, so he lives off the others. That's being an opportunistic parasite, IMHO.

Paul Erdös was eccentric, for sure. But he was a genius, so he could afford to be eccentric. Some people try to do the opposite: act eccentric, so they will be perceived as geniuses (Caltech undergrads are a prime example).
"Let C(n) denote the number of Carmichael numbers less than n. ... The upper bound C(n)<n*exp(-(lnnlnlnlnn)/(lnlnn)) (4) has also been proved (R. G. E. Pinch)."

So that ratio isn't constant.

Key is "...of very large numbers...". Clearly larger than 100,000,000.
If that were a real concern it would be far more efficient for the Feds to make up the lost taxes than to continue having these clowns take home tens of millions of dollars in tax payer money.
History of Drug Use and Drug Users in the United States. http://www.a1b2c3.com/drugs/gen003.htm Halfway down the page, the section is titled "Opiates: The New Nineteenth Century Habit" Also "Opium in the Civil War: Marching Through the Opium Fog" http://www.4thus.com/opium

Obviously opiates were around before then. Geesh. They were natural substances. The point of that section is about the social evolution of drugs.

And yes, Cocaine is not an opiate. It made a better example -- the available graphics were better -- so it was used. It was an editorial decision. It's an essay, not a science book.

The article is about the social parallels that led to drugs being severely restricted and how it compares/contrasts with modern entertainment technology taking more and more of our time and energy. Counter-arguments based against this thesis are welcome. (speaking as the author)

Your comment looks a bit like nit-picking, at least to me.
Electric bikes will be silent. [...] Riding one of these is even more dangerous than usual, because car drivers [...] won't [...] hear riders.

Source? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=453184

Only 35 of the 4,727 motorcycle drivers killed in 2007 were driving sport-touring [i.e. the quietest type] motorcycles.
Note that the article is talking about _Northern_ Ireland, not the Republic. There's a VERY large difference to the people here. :-)

As a new resident of Dublin I'm very interested to see if the transatlantic cable mentioned makes a difference in Ireland's ISP market. I'm lucky enough to have DSL with SmartTelecom which (almost) lets me escape Eirecom's iron grip on Irish telecommunications. I still have to pay €26/mo "line rental" for the copper pair to the exchange but EVERYONE not on wireless/cable has to pay that. Such a racket...

The article also notes that many businesses are incorporated in Delaware which has no income tax. But don't most states have laws which force the corporations to pay taxes in the state where the office is located? There must be other reasons for the Delaware incorporation.
You say that as if the right to operate a fractional reserve bank is granted by the government. Without a government, fractional reserve banking would still happen, and people would put their money in banks that had good reputations.

I find the aversion to fractional reserve banking that is frequently displayed on the internet quite odd.
How about a $500K salary cap for presidents of universities that accept federal grants and loan subsidies? Heh heh.
They could add a noise generator to it.

FTA:

While Harley riders like to say "loud pipes save lives," the evidence for this is thin. If riders still want a rumble, North says he can always add it. (See "Teaching Cars To Sing.") http://www.forbes.com/2008/08/21/singing-prius-lotus-tech-sc...
Not to mention Erdos was crashing at people's places with their express permission, and "paid" his rent by working with the people involved, which I gather was a big professional boost at the time. He was not, by the author's description, a parasite.

The author himself, though, does seem like a freeloading parasite. The lounge he sleeps is for work, and on most campuses I've been to there are rules about sleeping and squatting in student lounges. It makes for poor hygiene and disrupts other students' access to the facilities.

If you have to break into a building, odds are you do not have the building owners' tacit permission to sleep there.
Mint CEO on how to build a startup
I don't get that feeling of copycatting from something like Ubuntu with a few Compiz bells-and-whistles turned on. Instead I get Windows and Mac users drooling at the eye candy. Granted, that's just eye candy.

Netbook remix looks awesome, for what it is, also.
I think Slack went through a pretty dry spell in 2000.
None of these people are leaving NYC. Of course they're going to complain because they want people to think that it's inhumane to limit their salary. But if things get tough, they have millions of dollars in savings accounts, assets, vacation homes that they can sell off to keep up their lavish lifestyle long enough for the economy to recover.

Besides, considering that most of these people should have been going to jail, I don't mind if we end up making them to move to New Jersey :)