skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Experiments Bring Internet to Remote African Villages
Tips for writing efficient Bash scripts
Neat, but unlikely to beat the popularity of the original cube. By my recollection, Rubik's has had several other puzzles in the interim, none quite as successful (although the Rubik's Magic was pretty cool).
kentosi, I wanted to talk to you about language learning. I am working on a site to help people learn foreign languages and am trying to find people to give me feedback. Would you be interested? I couldn't find your contact info. My email is my name at gmail.
I can absolutely see your point, but I tend to see them as two branches of one tree- You're inviting people into your service for free, and then trying to sell them a higher quality version.

The difference is that one transaction is a one-off sale, and the other is a subscription.
Looks like the Esc-. trick works in zsh as well. I didn't know about it. Cool. Thank you.

With regard to pushd and popd: these tricks work in zsh also. In addition, (again, zsh-specific) you can set these options:

setopt auto_pushd # automatic directory stack
setopt pushd_minus # swap +/- for pushd and popd
setopt pushd_silent # no output after pushd and popd
setopt pushd_to_home # pushd with no arguments goes to ~
setopt pushd_ignore_dups # no duplicates in directory stack

With these options set, every time you change directories using cd, the directory goes into your directory stack, basically executing an implicit pushd. Then, move around the directory structure a little, and try typing 'cd -<Tab>' (meaning type 'cd -' and press Tab for autocompletion). It'll list entries in your directory stack by number (so -1 is your previous directory, -2 is the one before, and so on). It's a handy wrapper for bare pushd/popd functionality.

Bash might offer similar functionality, but I don't know much about bash.
Thanks for the feedback. I stand corrected regarding the blogger request flood. I agree with the need for compellingness and a simple, short pitch. I believe if one cannot shorten his pitch, he doesn't understand his product: http://socalbuzz.wordpress.com/2008/05/28/getting-from-8-wor...

The bottom line is that you really need to understand your opportunity so well that you can reduce to 8 words and still have people understand what you are trying to accomplish. It really makes you focus. Save all the flowery language for when you have investors attention and can afford to use more words.
Definitely. I can't wait until gradients go out of style again.
Acapela Group's voices are already pretty good. I bought Lucy, the British one. She sounds almost like a voice-response automated phone system.

http://www.acapela-group.com/text-to-speech-interactive-demo...
The cloud is the most perplexing place on the internet. The cost savings are so dramatic, it's a waste of time to do ROI. Applications up and running in a week that used to take 6 months.

The Cloud seems too good to be true, but it's not. It's real and it is better.

I remember reading the Steve Jobs interview by Playboy and he said he was on the edge of the petroleum revolution, starting the PC revolution. Twenty years later, the internet revolution and now here is cloud computing that is going to make the internet just blow up.

Web application development is made orders of magnitude easier with cloud computing.

The cloud is an inevitability. FUD is holding us back. The Cloud is the way of the future.
I'm certainly a Haskell noob, so it's hard to say - most discussion is over my head. I am very impressed with how helpful everyone in #haskell is - from debugging code to getting Cabal (the dependency manager) installed, people in #haskell have really gone out of their way to help me out.
Famous Companies Born During Downturns
For me, a big part of the original cube's appeal is the aesthetics of moving the physical object around and also the cleverness of the mechanism which, on first seeing it, is a bit of a puzzle of its own.

A puzzle with balls banging around in plastic doesn't have either of those appealing aspects and there are plenty of other difficult puzzles around.
As clients and vendors we rely on each other for survival. If the vendor provides value, but goes out of business because of late payments, the clients relying on that vendor are going to be worse off too.

Pay your bills. Give money for good value. Give good value.
Ah! Gotcha.

I think that "human as machine" has some interesting implications, but I think that by the time we make machines as complex and sophisticated as ourselves, they won't be machines any longer. If I see a machine that's organic and that has a superpowerful mind, I won't think it's a machine anymore.
Some of the points are valid, but I'd like to see a follow-up post first once the author has learned about decorators (and maybe `with` statements).
Same here, actually; I use it primarily as a reminder. Some days I get a lot of value out of the anti-procrastination feature, as it will warn me when I've been here. I actually start my browsing on work days with HN, because if I get the warning, I know I should just stop.

Also, fairly frequently I open a few articles, and by the time I get back to click to the next page I've been locked out. Override is really handy then.
Wow, thanks for taking the time for such a comprehensive response/advice. I appreciate. Actually I talked to a few programmers already and no one ever has given me the advice to start with SQL. However, it seems reasonable to me.
The free state project mentioned is an indication that this is actually viable. They want thousands of people to move to New Hampshire to change the state to be more libertarian. 700 already have.

The fact that they can almost get people to move to a different state is evidence that they can get people to move to new man-made islands? Seasteading would be great, but actually getting it started looks really difficult.
>n fact, because of the points in the first two paragraphs here, there's good evidence that the more we muck around with the economy, the worse we actually make it. There is a large and growing faction of economists that believe that the actions of the Federal Reserve (and to some extent Hoover and FDR) made the panic of 1929 into a full-blown depression -- turned something that would have taken a year or three to recover from and turned it into the biggest panic the country has ever seen.

That's the Austrian school of economics my friend, and in terms of "growing field" there's a lot of internet libertarians and the like that are "growing" into the field, with Ron Paul as their champion of the anti-FED.

However, amongst actual economists, the field isn't taken very seriously, because of many of its adherents semantic arguments (re-defining "inflation" outside of the standard scope, to make their argument) and its ability to ignore lots of contradicting reality. (Like, the fact that no, the Great Depression wouldn't have ended quickly, because Deficit Spending != More taxes, and our debt ratio after WWII was MULTIPLE times our GDP, and yet, our industry was booming.)
No place to, uh, hear it?
Jacques, that's one of the stronger points made by those in favor of the motion, and I'm inclined to agree with them. If you nominate yourself for sainthood, you get judged by a higher standard.

I think that Google has done some incredible things that set it apart from other corporations. But they've also done a few things that do reflect abuse or irresponsibility in how they wield their power.

That doesn't make them worse than most large, successful corporations (cf. Microsoft, Wal-Mart). But it does mean they aren't living up to the standard that they set for themselves and to which they invited the world to hold them accountable.
How to use MacFUSE to make an Apple TV Boxee Torrent dropbox on OS X
You cite from 1929? There are many many citations, and often contradictory ones.

He certainly changed his opinion during his lifetime.

My source is a book (here in Europe, from 2008, not english). If you google a bit, you can find any kind of contradictory stuff, so internet and truth are not always friends (and we all know this).
TARP artificially goosed GDP - would have been much worse
A lot of people don't consider SQL programming. Usually we think of more traditional programming languages, but SQL is at the root of most information systems. A lot of programmers don't know SQL, it can be difficult -- it is difficult.

But I believe it to be the most powerful programming concept you can learn, simply due to the answers it can help you find.
A large number of ultra-wealthy people living on a vulnerable platform in the middle of the sea. And because they live in international waters, they aren't protected by any nation. Could there possibly be a better target for pirates?
He said/she said: Flash not coming to iPhone
Is it just me or do most of these seem like premature optimization? I would rather use one command for filtering lines (grep) and another for filtering columns (awk) than try to do both at once.
You could create an alias for it, like

alias eta='pv'
I think that by the time we make machines as complex and sophisticated as ourselves

Making of wetware was not intended to be implied.

If I see a machine that's organic

One of these?: http://images.google.com/images?q=flower Was that a Yes or a No?
> We aren't in a world where you can be fiercely loyal to a company anymore.

I understand where you are going, but surely you mean something else, such as: We aren't in a world where loyalty to a company is rewarded in kind, or perhaps We aren't in a world where loyalty to a company is an optimum career strategy.
>Govt regulation also reduces diversity. It says that everyone pretty much has to behave the same way. We know how that works out.

Um, we get Food and Drugs that are safe? Drinking water that's actually drinkable and not full of stomach parasites and Cholera?

We get stable deposit banks? Notice that regional banks like BB&T, United Bank, and PNC -- non-investment banks, didn't engage in predatory lending. Their growth was stunted during the housing boom, but their customer's deposits are safe, the banks are stable, and they're in no need of a bail out. And again, due to regulation and FDIC, your money is much safer than pre-Depression era banks.

>Govt regulation is also political in the worst sense. Wells Fargo took a huge hit when it stayed out of the subprime mortgages. Regulators refused to let WF enage in unrelated activities (acquisitions, opening branches, etc.)because WF didn't "play ball", activities that said regulators let cooperative institutions do.
Note that regulators don't take the hit.

I'd like to see some URLs, because (no offense) you're either being too concise or babbling non-sense. I'd like to read up more on it before concluding "regulation == ultra bad" simply from your paragraph.
We debated that question (of how to get coverage) at the latest TheFunded event. I'll give you a quick summary. Issuing a press release will not be picked up by anyone. Writers will write about you if you contact them and manage to actually interact with them. Phone is best.

Everytime geeks hear the word phone, they revert to sending a shy email instead. If really you can't be bothered to pick up a phone, then maybe paying thousands of dollars to have a PR agent do it for you makes sense. Just think of much you are paying for phone calls...

Shoot high and have a human angle, a story, some kind of connection (I do get Guy Kawasaki to reply to my emails, but that took 6 months).

Bottom line: if you haven't done any of the ground work and you need your news to come out today, you're out of luck. But if you have two months, plan ahead and establish those contacts starting TODAY.

Hope this helps.
At universities and colleges it is like that. While bad professors struggle with pathetic attendance numbers, "celebrity" profs have to book rooms far larger than their enrollment numbers just to account for all the others who drop in and listen.

It's a little bit of a chicken and egg situation. At the college level students are willing to go out of the way to attend a lecture that they know will be good. How many high school students have the freedom and motivation to do the same?
Macintosh: 25 Years
SUA seems to be what my windowsy friends talk about. It's in newer versions of windows. It natively supports many UNIX apps, and has source compatibility with UNIX.
5 Free Alternatives to Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office is one of the Popular Office Suite, but there are some more office suites which are also Best and Free too. So am here posting some of them.
Cygwin is a bloated piece of crap, especially if you run Vista/Server 200[3-8]. See my other comment about SUA.
As snow hits the UK the Twitter mashups storm in
I did an MBO 6 years ago and it was striking. All the people who were genuinely helpful did business on a handshake. All those who were ultimately a waste of time, space and occasionally oxygen, insisted on having everything in writing. It was a 100% correlation, and a real eye-opener.
Um, we didn't have a central bank point of failure. We had 5 large investment banks, most of which had the intelligence to survive the first great depression.

The major problem is that the American economy had become entirely dependent on consumer spending, which, because of a lack of real wage growth among the bottom 80% led to a massive expansion and dependence on credit. When the housing bubble burst, credit went cold turkey, and many defaulted on their debt because of their inflated lifestyle.

As a result, everyone suffered. Consumers stopped spending, which lead to businesses credit lines being downgraded, leading to a halt in manufacturing and importing. The global ripples of having a force (like credit) simply disappear are obvious, just as they were right before the first great depression.
I would suggest a 5 minute reminder before being locked out.
Everyone likes making cool new stuff. No-one likes deathmarches and debugging race conditions and writing documentation and sitting in meetings and dealing with incomplete or ambiguous specs or having their project cancelled after working on it for a year or having an idiot for a boss who doesn't understand what you do. But that's what engineering is really like for most people, most of the time.
I doubt it. One of the big features of zsh over bash is the tab completion is fantastic (arguments, URLS, etc). With a good .zsh and .zshrc, it is an amazing experience.
It's interesting that rather than building a micro-library they've chosen to use a compile time instead. I guess I'd prefer to see this integrated into my usual JS libraries (YUI, jQuery).

That said it's pretty interesting. Even if some of the syntax is slightly jarring.
That Buzzing Sound
That's charmingly idealistic, but unfortunately it simply isn't true. There is more to life than what you do to earn a living. There's having a family, traveling, whatever you can imagine. At some point, you will need a sufficient quantity of money to do stuff unrelated to work. And if you can't make that money doing what you love, then you're going to have to make some choices about what you really want.
Puxatony Phil Groundhog Day 2009
> This brings to mind the interesting question of micro-payments and distance learning - could an effective model for rock star professors be implemented, in an effective implementation of feedback-based distance learning?

There's another interesting question - what happens to the "not quite rockstar" professors/teachers?

As Sousa pointed out, recorded music reduces the number of people who can make a living playing music. (It may increase the amount of money spent by listeners.)

Note that only some things scale through distribution. Lectures may. Office hours don't. Thesis advising doesn't.
I'm pretty sure I've spoken to a number of these computerised voices at some customer service call centres.
If you want to grow faster than cubic in the long run, you need some different physics than the ones we currently believe.
I think it's reasonable to consider a business that does not make the investment + minimum wage a failure. IMO, it's more a question of how large the failure was. If you made 2/3 what you could have been making at a normal job and then quit it's a failure but not a major one. If you end up with 30k of debt then that's a major failure.
I don't see the game theory part? Interesting to learn about the "equal division of the contested sum" convention, but that alone is not game theory, or is it? From game theory I would expect to see some explanation of why that convention is a good solution for the problem? Merely listing alternative game outcomes in a table is not game theory.
They're creating new "money of zero maturity". If I have a CD I can't withdraw for one year, and that's used to create a loan due in one year, that's one thing. The problem is when money in my checking account that I can withdraw at any time, is used to make loans that can't be called in at any time. This is what creates the possibility of a run on the bank. Banks borrow short and lend long, which is profitable, but can with some justice be called fraud.
It's a reprint of an article (as noted in the header) from Python magazine. If you want to know about the GIL, it's near the end. The article is aimed at disseminating a large amount of information about threading in general and specifically python's implementation.
Young entrepreneurs still flourishing after 25 years
we get [...] Drugs that are safe

Not unless one overcomes the barriers to pharmaceutical access.
Google: "We're Not Doing a Good Job with Structured Data"
Hacker war drives San Francisco cloning RFID passports [vid]
Google Researcher Targets Web's Structured Data
Then you have to ask yourself should these great teachers be teaching average students, or should they only be teaching the best? Or should they be incentivised into going into science or engineering? These are tough questions, I honestly think the best scenario would be for top engineers and scientists (practicing) to mentor students, and help them see the big picture/inspire them while their teachers train them in the skills necessary.
Fraud involves deception. When was the last time you saw a bank advertise that it didn't lend out your money?
IMO, if we want to motivate teachers we should give them a bonus based on the change in students performance relative to their past performance. Teaching the Honors classes would not give them an edge because the students where already doing well and the teacher need to keep pushing them.

Anyway, your assuming all students make 100k, the average is around 50k/year and the teacher is already looking at a 60k/year pension. But, what about elementary school teachers they can wait 15 years before you are making any money. Retire after 30 years and only 1/2 or less of your students are working. In the end I think we need to recognize that pensions are really a tax on the teachers past performance as a group. As a group they get money because they did a good job as a group, but there is little direct connection.
Actually I talked to a few programmers already and no one ever has given me the advice to start with SQL.

That's actually a tragedy, and I've been guilty of not recommending SQL first, myself. Part of the problem is that SQL by itself is not flashy. It doesn't have a web interface that you'd like to show to anyone (you'd need HTML/CSS/JS skills for that). And once you build your database you generally can't just tell the public to connect to it over the Web -- you need some kind of server layer for that, written in PHP or Ruby or Java or C# or another of the usual suspects. So starting your web development career by learning SQL is like learning to fence by spending the first year doing legwork exercises, never picking up a sword until the second year.

But, as my fencing instructor once told me: That's what many elite European fencing schools used to require of their apprentice fencers. [1] And it wouldn't hurt at all to approach web development the same way. Learn the heart of the matter first, and save the ephemera for later. If you can compose a sensible data model (that you can drive using SQL queries from the command line or -- plug your ears, fellow Linux coders! -- Microsoft Access), you'll have a better understanding of the underlying technology of web apps than a surprising number of professional developers.

And you're a biz dev guy, so anything you can learn about databases will probably be a win for your C.V. Just be careful: If the word gets out at your company that you can wrangle SQL queries, you might become very popular among the other MBAs.

---

[1] They should have required it of me. As a fencer, I moved like a dump truck with one wheel missing. But it sure was fun swinging the sword around ineffectively! I swished through a lot of air!
You just described a top Collage like MIT.
if you don't mind me asking how much was "Lucy" roughly?
$100's,
$1,000's,
$10,000's,
more?
I couldn't find a price list on the site.
I'm overwhelmed by the amount and quality of responses. After reading them I realized that most of you are right. In the homepage is not clear what problem we fix. That's mainly because we were aiming the digital sigange industry and they already know what "ds" software is. Now we are aiming small businesses and they need to get a simple explanation right there in the homepage.

What s3mer is?
---------------
s3mer is a piece of software that helps people and businesses create and maintain digital signs using flat screens, computer monitors, TVs, projectors or even giant digital billboards as a display surface. Digital signs can display still images, animations, video and even live data from the web like weather, stocks, sports and even twitter activity.

With s3mer you can build a custom in-store TV network just like Walmart TV. s3mer was designed with small businesses in mind. Its affordable, easy to use and powerful. Business owners can sign up for a s3mer account and in a matter of minutes start displaying their own digital sign.

For the technical folks:
-------------------------
The s3mer system has 2 components: Admin website and Player application. The player application is built on Adobe AIR technology so it works offline after it has downloaded the media files from our servers. The player app is remote controlled from the website and you can manage as many Players as you like.

Thanks for the tips I will make sure they get implemented.
Even if you succeed, you will not be happy. Peace and porn are not friends.
>> Source?

> My source is a book

What is the name? Who is the author?