skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The microprinter, an experiment in physical activity streams and notification
You use this in an API or just personally? Is it possible to use these voices over an API (for non-commercial use)?
Maybe; http://www.google.com/trends?q=XR400&ctab=436060544&...

http://www.google.com/trends?q=rfid+reader&ctab=43606054...
The Wal-Mart You Don't Know
Nice to have. But doesn't it fly contrary to the Hacker News ethos of maintaining a barrier to entry into the community?

Heck, I'd pay a $5 bozo-fee if it boosted the quality of submissions and discussion.
Thats why you can't buy WindowsCurrent-1
Business would be perfectly happy sticking with W2k or NT4, there haven't been many breakthroughs in the technology needed to type a memo or update a sales spreadsheet.

The only way the money keeps flowing to Redmond is that new machines only come with WindowsNew and eventually everything else has to update because it's a pain managing a mixed environment.
Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich was first published in 2001 so presumably she worked at Walmart sometime before that.

So life at Wal-Mart may have changed since then. Also, he should have worked at the same Wal-Mart to help control for location.
For the rest of you, It's a Marathon
That's true, but the investment per person is much higher; you don't have to build land and protect it from pirates in New Hampshire.
Entrepreneurs five times more likely to suffer from dyslexia
That is a really eye-opening and interesting study.

I took the liberty of submitting it, since I'm sure other people will appreciate it. Hope you don't mind.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=462767
That doesn't seem to apply here at all. If education can really make a difference, teachers would be able to raise money from VCs in order to educate inner city kids for no upfront fee and a large cut of their future pay. If they didn't behave that way, you might have to suspect that since spending billions of dollars on improving those schools and improving those students hasn't had any significant effect on their ability to learn, the problem is not with how hard we're trying, but with what we think we can accomplish.
This is for lecturers. And, for students who want to advocate for better use of class time.

Morrison, the author of the first essay, is a famous organic chemist who wrote the foundational book of organic chemistry used in many programs. He apparently wrote it to avoid lecturing. Class time was for answering questions. His essay extols the virtues of the Gutenberg system he got from Frank Lambert, another organic chemistry professor, and the author of the second essay.

If you want to see the meat of the central idea, the elements of the Gutenberg method, the first section of the second essay is what you want to read: The Beginning, From Failure.
From the article: Mr. Su is a real-estate consultant and a former REO broker.

Maybe whomever submitted this article should have titled it: "Foreclosure helps real-estate consultants and brokers"

Basically what it boils down to is that there needs to be a smaller gap between cost of ownership and rents in an area. Diminishing this gap will reduce the "power" that 99.9999999999999 percent of real-estate people have leveraged during the last eight years.

The only way to reduce this gap is by paying people in the real estate profession less: get them to divulge their pay in dollars, not percents. Unfortunately, with the current "mortgage meltdown," people in real estate are the first ones getting paid! Whether a home is getting foreclosed upon or simply just "sold," Realtors always get paid. I studied their games. I know how they play it.
Is this true? The article mentions that the markups on coffee would be ridiculous for most other industries. And the market pretty much accepts this.

I know I'm not considering all the other business costs here. But, shouldn't someone be able to "Wal-Mart" Starbucks and copy their product but cut the margins to put them out of business?

Another example is the people with laptops who are buying $5 tickets in the form of cups of coffee to rent a few hours of de-facto office space. Are they going to quibble if it's $6? If the ambiance is a little cooler, or the coffee a little hipper, or the wait-staff a little cuter, an extra dollar might not matter to them, or might not be enough to chase them to the Starbucks across the street.

In short, part of the point of going to a coffee shop is to get away from seeing yourself as a "price taker." Otherwise, you can get your caffeine cheaper at McDonalds.

Do those of you reading this pass up one coffee shop over another for $1 difference in price? $0.50? $0.25? I'm honestly curious.
Note this thread:

http://getsatisfaction.com/twilio/topics/are_there_any_futur...

... says they are only evaluating SMS at this time but an SMS gateway would be much easier to find out there (someone in the thread even pitches an option, http://www.textmarks.com )
Skimming, it seems the essence of the Gutenberg method lies in:

1. Before class, Prof gives students an outline of the reading (a 'notesheet'), highlighting key points

2. Students do reading with guidance from the outline

3. Prof uses class time not to lecture but to answer questions and go into important details, rather than spend time outlining on the board
The demo video takes a long time before you see what the end result actually looks like. It's sort of a how-to video, and I think you need a straight demo video that lets you see the goods up front.
If there's no way to determine who is a good teacher, and no way to pay good teachers the right amount of money, it seems to me that we ought to cap teacher salaries at $30K plus a cost of living adjustment. I know a lot of people who want to be teachers and don't care about the money; I know plenty of teachers who complain that they're overpaid, but can't find any job that matches their skills and pays more than about 40% less than they currently make.

And if you pay for seniority, you're rewarding people who know how to make themselves hard to get rid of.
Thanks very much! For both the welcome and the compliments. :)

Sadly, I do not have a backup of the presentation movie; hopefully Bill Clementson has one.
Ask HN: How does the White House prevent Obama's emails from being forwarded?
A recent CNN article describing Obama's new email device had this line:
"According to a report in the New York Times, security precautions make it impossible to forward an e-mail from the president."

Does anyone have a guess as to how this works? Perhaps the emails are viewed through a web browser? In any case, it would seem that the analog hole defeats the purpose of the security measure.
Psyco, the Python Optimizing Compiler, is under Active Development Again
Of course. If you're not a felon, you're not a drug addict, and you're in good health, escaping a homeless shelter is pretty easy. [1] There are people (some of whom are my friends) who have full-time jobs trying to help people get out! [2] And there are a lot of incentives to leave. Nobody enjoys the homeless-shelter experience.

Almost all of the people who are chronic residents of homeless shelters have health problems (often, specifically, mental health problems), are current or former drug addicts, or have spent time in prison.

These problems tend to feed on each other. Mentally ill people often manifest erratic behavior that gets them sent to prison. Drug addicts get arrested and sent to prison. Prisons are a great place to be introduced to life as a drug addict, and can exacerbate certain mental illnesses. And sick people often attempt to relieve their own symptoms with drugs (a popular choice: alcohol). The technical term for the latter behavior is "self-medication", and it's a classic route by which an otherwise well-off person can get sucked into the poverty spiral.

Meanwhile, it also doesn't surprise me that a white, male, healthy, educated person with independent means and an active online life can really enjoy working at Wal-Mart. Slumming can be fun. Every grad student knows that. I'm told by reliable witnesses, however, that actual chronic poverty is an entirely different ball of wax.

---

[1] Note, of course, that "escaping a homeless shelter" is not at all the same thing as "escaping poverty". Being homeless is only one of the more desperate forms of poverty. There are many others.

[2] One of the key skills for escaping homelessness: The ability to fill out forms. Social workers spend a lot of their time just helping people stay patient while sitting on hold, send in applications, get to appointments on time... It's easy to forget, from our perspective as high-end employees of the knowledge economy, that not all of our fellow humans are born with the requisite knowledge and patience to do these things. And that you and I are exactly one stroke or car accident away from losing those skills.
Using an SMS aggregator such as CellTrust, you could send the user a code through a shared short code. Or, if you're willing to put up with short ads at the bottom of messages, you could try TextMarks.
Reminds me of the joke about the two women eating in a restaurant where the one complains about how terrible the food is there, and the other agrees and says, and what little portions.

Don't talk bad about about people whom's hobbies you know.
Or -f

As in:

ps axf
Probably Information Rights Management in Outlook (Office):

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA101029181033.aspx

I have no inside knowledge, though, but I doubt they built their own system.

And you can still take a screenshot with a third-party program, and myriad of other ways to get around it. If you read it on the screen, you can forward it -- just takes a little more work.
Social experiment: Start from scratch with 25$ and a camping bag
Are the only good articles that ones where we learn about a new shell command or where frameworks are debated?
At least from my perspective as an engineer, AWS in particular removes huge layers of nonsense, and there are no increased layers of communication.

It's cheaper than buying machines (by a huge amount!), cheaper than keeping them running, and I can make changes on the fly that would otherwise take a week to grind through netops.

If load spikes (as it did recently for one of our customers), the conventional answer is "we can't buy 20 more servers in 2 days"! My response was "why not use EC2?"

For a new project, rather than submitting a PO for $20k+ in hardware, I can say "it'll cost $140 for the first month". Much easier to approve -- I can put that through on expenses!

Finally, if you consider that most large companies outsource datacenter management, whether truly outsourced to a services company, or "internally outsourced" to another division, using a cloud system that at least acknowledges your right to remotely administer your own service is a step forward, not a step back.
Wow, I thought that because I was a bit older, I could appreciate it more.

If nothing else, everyone should have a zen-like hobby where they can disengage their mind and use their hands. Meditation has some tremendous benefits.
I worry that the criteria for successful teachers will instead be teachers that are easy or social instead of effective teachers.

I have definitely taken languages classes where I hated the teachers (the class was hard!) but I learned a great deal and actually have pretty good recall years later. If I had been able to bail out and go join my friends in the class taught by the easy teacher I would have, but I certainly would not have learned anything.

In fact, now that I think about it, I think such a system would probably encourage a trend toward treating schooling as a sort of nationalized childcare program, as the money and rewards would go to teachers (and schools) where students are allowed to float through. You can argue all you want about how much you enjoy learning, but I imagine that the vast majority of the people in my high school could have cared less. (There are similar arguments for why private schools do better than public schools: private schools are primarily composed of the kids/families that actually care about what said student is learning.)
"Nobody ever thought anyone would get hurt or die from a SWAT call," he said.

How could this kid possibly think that sending armed SWAT teams to someone's house would never end badly?
What is your strop?

For me, it's physical exercise. And, concrete coding (as opposed to reading specs, designing, modeling or proving). It's easier for me to not do them than to do them, but I'm always amazed at how refreshing they are.
Ritual doesn't have wifi any more.
Brewster Kahle (Archive.org) made a small fortune by selling WAIS (Wide Area Information Server), which made each machine a search engine, and used a protocol to request from all engines. Developed in the 80s.

Unfortunately, the Web has gone down this road of having centralised search engines which somehow know their way through a maze.

It would be better to contact several sites in turn (NYT, FT, Archive, etc) and pull information. If you have to pay, you go through the credit card paywall. Then you don't have to worry about NYT's dark kilobytes.

Why aren't we using it? I guess that's what happens when you sell something like that to AOL. ;-)

I should also point out that Google could have a stream for the NYT, where the NYT feeds all its stories to Google on creation, and Google doesn't enable cache for the stuff people pay for. But for all I know, that's already being done.

But service-push-to-server is better than Google's pull-service-to-server.
This is why I like EC2, as opposed to something like Azure. If Azure goes away, you're out of luck. If EC2 goes away... bring up your own Linux, Windows, or OpenSolaris instances, and run your apps there.

Granted, that's not true of S3, SQS, or SDB... but seriously, how hard is it to program against an abstraction layer? Easy enough to rewrite your own "store_photo" function to use a replacement for S3.
Its easy to train students to perform better on tests by teaching them things orthogonal to the actual material.

Further, you can "teach to the test" by giving students only classes of problems that will appear on the test and drilling them in that and little else. I imagine that you could end up with lots of functional-illiteracy type issues where students would only be able to do a task in the tightly controlled circumstances that they have been trained on but have difficulty generalizing.
The long-delayed epiphany.

Google's weakness with structured data and its weakness in cultivating third-party developers are mutually reinforcing and seem to have arisen from the same hubris. In other words, bring back the search API already!
Great post.

I think one of the few possible solutions to crime and poverty problems is having more volunteers doing exactly what you noted - helping fill out forms, getting people to appointments, etc. Unfortunately currently a lot of the load is taken by emergency services dealing with issues arising from these people not having the help they need.
>Web application development is made orders of magnitude easier with cloud computing.

Just curious: what exactly do you mean by this? i.e. - how does cloud computing help with web app development?
"but you run the very real risk of having a provider close their doors, forcing you to re-evaluate at a moments notice."

The solution, of course, is to build your own cloud atop the clouds from a few different providers so that you're never reliant on any one of them specifically. ;P
One unit test should have prevented Google from categorizing the entire internet as malware
The link is to an announcement that there will be an announcement and an invitation to try it.

If you don't have a clue to what the hell psyco is, here is the intro page: http://psyco.sourceforge.net/introduction.html

For those don't want to strain the clicking finger, Psyco is a specializing compiler, sort of a JIT compiler for Python, which can speed up your code 2x to 100x at the cost of lots of memory.
The reviews at Amazon for this book are a bit mixed:

http://www.amazon.com/Simply-Scheme-Introducing-Computer-Sci...
Thanks! I've been using a tool called pstree for the same thing (I didn't even realize ps had such a feature). It looks like the ps utility on OS X doesn't support --forest though, so pstree is still useful there.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/pstree/
wouldn't you still need to register to post?
There's something vaguely ironic about summarizing your heartfelt emotions in a form letter.
Yahoo Stops Serving Ads In RSS Feeds
I don't use their API. I just use the TextAloud program to occasionally read websites and documentation to me. (Don't do this at home folks - let's you surf the web without 'reading' it - it obviously is not at the 'generate your own audiobook level' [1] - however it's way beyond E.T. and that speech synthesizer)

API product page (iPhone version available now too!): http://www.acapela-group.com/acapela-multimedia-8-speech-sol...

[1] That would require bridging the gap from 'Dry eyes. dry eyes' monotone to an actor doing a dramatic script reading. Vocal variety, appropriate pauses, inflections, tone - wow - a lot of things. Possible startup opportunity here?

As an aside, it takes much longer to listen than to read (I'm thinking 10x for some material).
I was really surprised to read that every employee had access to profit margin data.

Kudos to Wal-Mart for a level of decentralization and transparency many startups and high tech companies don't even achieve!
The Blue Monster is, to me, symbolic not so much of MSFT but of the "change the world or go home" attitude the creator was trying to bring back to the company.

Personally, I agree absolutely with that attitude, and I salute the guy for keeping the tattoo :)
I thought it was pretty standard for accounts to be joint. If you can't trust your wife with a bank account, why did you marry her!?
Correcting the Billion Dollar Mistake
A bunch of ultra-libertarians with guns could probably defend against well-organized and reasonably armed pirates. The odds would be better if they trained, had defense shifts and/or patrols and did other militaristic things. Being purely reactive and without any kind of regimentation probably wouldn't work well.

I wonder if that isn't the seed for a form of organization that isn't as free as people would want it to be. Alternately, I'm sure you could hire mercenaries, but then you'd want some counter-balance to their opportunity to turn against you or go rogue.

Are there historical precedents for reactive and non-professional--note, I don't mean non-talented--defenses against outside forces that aren't a fluke (e.g. occur several times with the same defending group)?

You probably wouldn't want a big mutually-assured destruction style deterrent without the kinds of controls listed above, either.
IPhoneCTO is now on Twitter
It's funny - I used to say this about Windows 2000.
You point out something that is incredibly interesting. Walmart is a juggernaut of capitalism, but all we generally hear about is how evil they are.

I bet they have some business practices that are worth learning about, other than the oft-heard about exploitation of their workers.

As an aside, I've known a few people who have worked at Walmart and they preferred it to a lot of jobs they'd held previously.
(What do you mean by bringing back the search API? Isn't http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/ what you want?)
Wood and software have a surprising number of parallels. I like to tell people not in the industry that software people today are the carpenters and craftsmen of the 1900s.
You should see my wife
If you are interested in what he has to say about education, you might also like the writings of John Taylor Gatto:

* http://www.spinninglobe.net/againstschool.htm

* http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/
I would rather have the traffic and not need it than need the traffic and not have it.
Its so annoying to me that many people (esp in Bay Area) loath Wal-Mart, and then turn around and gush over how cheap they got this or that crappy chinese made product for at Target.

Both are massive big box retailers, both threaten smaller businesses by discounts and volume. Both pay their employees entry level low wages.

Target def has better marketing and gives money to school. But that hardly accounts for the difference in opinions people hold for the two companies. Its nice to see some other opinions about these companies.
Author: Antonio Socci

Name: "Indagine su Gesù"

Thank you.

Do you know Italian?

No. I know Google Translate. http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fpaparat...

Socci continues in this introductory chapter showing the positions of the greatest contemporary scientists, from Einstein to Hawking, by scholars of the Big Bang to those of DNA: all agree that the most reasonable answer to the mystery and the great dell'infinitamente 'infinitely small, as well as in front of the surprise at the amazing complexity of even the most minute living organism, is to admit a Creator. In short, something we call God But if science and reason - more and more, contrary to what one wants to believe - leads to the recognition of the existence of a God, the more dense is the enigma if we try to go down ' existence the essence.

Could you please provide the evidence (quotes, etc.) that Socci cites?
Fair enough, my question was unclear; I wanted to know what people saw in the article that I didn't.

Thanks for answering my question even though I didn't ask it well.
> English spelling is only mildly complicated compared to the romance languages or arabic.

I can't talk of Arabic, but within Romance languages there's a wide range of difference over how phonetic they are. At one extreme there's Italian, wihch is spelt so regularly that there's no verb "to spell"; at the other extreme, in French, letters are often unprononounced. Spanish is somewhere between the two, because while there have been many sound shifts, the language is still spelt the way it was pronounced hundreds of years ago.
I can't believe there are companies that are such suckers that they'd be willing to pay a Vista license and then an upgrade to Windows 7. But if there are companies like that, MSFT is right to treat them as bad as they do. They fully deserve it.
Crowd-sourced biology reading list from Carl Zimmer
I don't see an iphone version there.
That other guy didn't do too badly:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Petzold
A double edged sword - creating methods of 'too easy' submission will most definitely lead (in my opinion) to a downgrading of quality. I've been on HN, not on this username, since the first link from Reddit when it was a few months old it's grown relatively slowly but has attracted a core of decent members who submit. However on the other hand it's necessary to improve quantity of submissions. I'm trying to stop going to Reddit & Digg altogether but it's hard when the update traffic is light years ahead.

You have to make a decision at some point - keep this place on the 'down low' with fewer submissions or break it up a bit.
Andrew Myers has a shell script called mvsed that does something similar, using sed to specify the patterns.

Found it: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/useful.html
Please elaborate on what you mean by decentralization.
From a comment on Greenspun's site:

"First, to those who didn’t realize it. This is a patent application. It has not yet been granted. I believe your page contains a similar enough idea, such that it should be considered prior art. ... Finally, inventors have an absolute duty to disclose any prior art. If they don’t, the patent could be invalidated. Patent attorneys call this “inequitable conduct.” So, you could just look up one of the inventors and e-mail him/her a link to your page. They would be obligated to disclose this to the USPTO."

(http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/02/01/no-need-to-pat...)
There are no silver bullets.
My strop is a strop, and I use it on my razor before shaving.

Coincidentally, the practice of straight razor shaving tends to put me in a state of relaxation and reflection that has a positive impact on the rest of my day.