skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi there... I am the article's author, and I hope I was clear that with regards to the first quote I was not talking about myself, necessarily -- although I sympathize with the urban-centric point of view, I also know that we have to have a diverse culture and country life will always be a part of it.

But more importantly, regarding the second comment: This statement is in response to real-world polls that show that a huge number of people lacking broadband specifically say they don't want it. Your experience proves my point that these polls simply cannot be correct. If anyone actually says they don't want broadband, they can't possibly know what they're even talking about. I can only suppose that they think there's a hidden cost to it (money, or maybe learning something new) and that the pollster is asking a trick question.
And they don't scale... (badum pshh)
I don't think it's possible to make any universal statement about it. We could make guesses at the ratio of how many people with this business model become successful with it or not (this depends on your costs and profit objectives of course). But it certainly can be done.

The "profit objectives" part of that is pretty important. What do you consider "real" money. On the low end, there are a lot of people making salary-level income on content driven sites + adwords. Personally, I'd be pretty happy with that as a start (freedom) and go from there.
care to put your money where your mouth is in a prediction market?
I use Ubuntu right now. It has the best support forums and frequent updates, and is the best distro I've used over the years despite some glaring bugs.

The most common apps I use are Firefox, gedit, Audacious, the shell, Brasero, VMWare (for testing Exchange setups in Windows), AbiWord, GIMP, Asunder, VLC and Pidgin.

I started out on Red Hat 5.0 (not RHEL) in the late 90s. Used it full-time for about a year, then switched to BeOS and dual-booting that with Windows. Over the years, I've also used Caldera, Corel Linux, Mandrake (before it was Mandriva), SUSE and some others I am sure I'm forgetting.

My desktop is Gnome, though it's not nearly as customizable as I'd like (used to be, though, before the developers removed it all). I don't care for KDE that much, though.

I'm going to try Fedora Core 11 when it comes out, but will probably stick with Ubuntu, I'm guessing.
Presumably, we disagreed with you.

The actual meat, for me, is thinking about how one goal interferes with another. Not news, but examples are always welcome.
As a person who does travel out of country from time to time for work, I've hated the idea of RFID tags in passports from day one. There are many parts of the world where broadcasting a signal that says "Hey, I'm an American!" to anybody with a 50-dollar RFID reader is a horrible and downright dangerous idea.

Security issues aside, gross invasion of privacy issues abound. Yes, I know that companies already know everything I buy with a credit card but I'd hate to get to a point where somebody simply has to drive a truck down my street and scan my house to see what products I've purchased.
SICP Prequel Textbook
Perhaps demand has spiked since this information has been made public?
Official Google Blog: Dive into the new Google Earth
This argument still makes no sense to me. Teachers are in an obvious and direct way responsible for producing the next generation of doctors, lawyers, and computer programmers. How can we then in good conscience refuse to pay them as much as people working in those fields?

Think of it this way: in private firms, employees who demonstrate mastery of both their own specialization and "people skills" are promoted to management, so that they can guide and support the next generation of workers. They are paid more for this than their employees, in part due to the fact that not everyone can do what they do. Similarly, teachers have to balance knowledge of the actual material being taught, and all the "soft" skills of classroom management: facilitating discussions, maintaining discipline, keeping emotions and energy on an even keel.

Any manager who could effectively herd 30+ techies would be lauded as worth their weight in gold; why then isn't a teacher who does the same thing with as many children (a harder task, to be sure) appreciated as the deft administrator they must be?
Microsoft patenting Philip Greenspun's design plans?
For more pipe tricks, check out bidilink:

http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/bidilink/
...and sorry for this annotation:

The US certainly suffers 'superficiality' more than any other country. If you want to find really scientific stuff about religion, you often need to go back to good old Europe...
I read stuff like this, and the same questions that I've put to Microsoft and Amazon come round again... can data placed in the cloud be kept within a geographic/legal set of borders through policy and how do we approach compliance rules for archiving, freedom of information and data protection?

To these questions, deafening silence or waffle. Never a serious and practical response.

The cloud is immature in terms of it's enterprise applications until these kind of questions are being addressed with multiple answers.

For small business the cloud may be a godsend, but to the enterprise the cloud is something for the small guys to play with that might make them better customers/partners.
http://curl-loader.sourceforge.net/ has solved my needs.
Welcome to news.YC! I'm a big fan of your work (well, jwacs and markdown.el) ... would love to see you as a regular around here :)

Aside: http://versions.tech.coop/movies/jwacs.mov server is down... do you have a backup?
I really am surprised not to have ever seen this mentioned here at HN, and I really am glad I found it.
Reminds me of something I'd see on Oprah.

I'm sure it's useful to some people, but this kind of advice -- for want of a better word -- just doesn't do anything for me.

Perhaps I am too old and jaded.
Thanks. I've switched plenty of distros (like most Linux users I guess). For now, I'm sticking with Debian. I find it quite fast and lean with xfce.

One thing that's frustrated me in the past is that after having been a Windows users for years, I suddenly tried completely switching to Linux without knowing much about the commands and file structure.

I still struggle with app updates and dependencies but I'm trying to switch slowly, one task at a time from XP to Debian.

Do you recommend any books or good manuals? I know I can find loads if I just google it, but that's also been my problem. There's way too much info and it's too annoying to look for one tiny thing in that mass of text.

Thanks for your help.
And when the wealthy districts are saturated, but there is still a strong positive return to education in poorer districts, where then does the next great-but-mercenary teacher go?

Your scenario only plays out if there is always a higher marginal return to teaching among the already-advantaged. Sorry, but lots of advantaged people are dumb and lazy, and even among those who aren't, there is a point of diminishing economic returns to their education.

Yes, the talented wealthy will be well-served under a 'human capital' system. But then teaching resources will find upside potential wherever it exists, including those areas with disastrously bad public schools today.
I believe this is a case of self-confirmation bias.

Checking for similar articles from 2003, around 2 years after the launch of XP, I found this gem: "Windows XP, the most current version of Windows, was found on just 6.6 percent of the [business] machines" (http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,39161686,0...).
Manufacturing is not much better. I worked in a lot of mfg companies during college. Starting pay with either at or a little above minimum wage.

There is no easy fix. Companies don't stay in business by paying people more than they are "worth" in economic terms.

Capitalism is the worst economic system, except for every other one.
As someone who spent most of my primary school years in "gifted student" magnet programs (like, I suspect, many other HN readers), this appeals to me personally. However, I have it on good authority from actual teachers that separating students according to interest and aptitude disadvantages the average and below-average students greatly, while providing only minimal benefit to the best students.
We are working on a classified site in germany I found some ideas in http://www.loquo.com/en_us which is a spanish craigslist only much better structured
I find the onslaught of posts with historical Steve Jobs interviews to be a bit morbid, the guy is alive and fighting can we please avoid a postmortem.
> Jamis is a cool guy, but his newfound obsession with wood carving is a little off-putting.

As a pretty hands on person (I do woodcarving, woodturning, and am taking blacksmithing lessons right now), I actually enjoy these sorts of digressions / riffs.
I really appreciate his idea on the responsibility of power/success: "I don't think that people have special responsibilities just because they've done something that other people like or don't like. I think the work speaks for itself." Pretty honest. Really implies the responsibility is in the achieving of the success itself. Which I guess contrasts with achieving success in less than responsible ways, and then feeling compelled to be responsible about it after the fact. Very unique approach, something I haven't really considered. I think it makes sense.
> What is the relevant difference between axe-handles and music?

Interaction: calling back to the singer, requesting a song. Fidelity: being right there. Shared experience: being right there with a whole bunch of other excited people.

I've had tremendously emotional experiences listening to recorded music, but none so potent as hearing the same song live.

You might extend this to teaching: a recording of even the greatest lecturer can't answer your question.

Further to the discussion, though: mass production increased the base quality of tools like axes and knives, and improved efficiency. However, if you want something bespoke, mass production doesn't care. I like my semi- and full-custom knives: they were made for me, according to my specifications. Modern tooling can bridge the gap, too, yielding full-custom items of the same quality as mass-produced items.
Be worth talking about and it'll happen. Not saying that PR effort isn't worth it, but it gets a lot easier if you're interesting/clear.

Read the book "Made to Stick" and ask yourself how sticky your story is (you don't HAVE a story-- that's the problem).

Look at Balsamiq-- that guy had a STORY that people wanted to read, so people wrote about him.

Nobody wants to read about a product with no angle. What's your twist? How are you surprising? What you can say about your product that blows people away? Have you changed someone's life? How are you going to effect the reader of this story?

Clarity (and speed) of the site is a problem, but I think your bigger problem (from a PR perspective) is that you just aren't telling an interesting story.
It surprised me at how many college grads were working in a mfg plant (on the floor, not in management, engineering, etc). However, a lot had history, poli sci, or econ degrees. It was a short term job that turned into a long term one because of kids, marriage, etc.
Andrew Ng's notes are excellent but I think it'll be wrong to characterize them as "non-theory" since by lecture 8, he starts going into learning theory stuff such as empirical risk minimization, structural risk minimization, VC dimensions..etc.

Even in his other notes, when he derives algorithms for regressions, SVMs, PCA..etc, they always include a healthy does of theory and math.

In fact, I think this approach to learning the subject is far better than simply "implementing a few common algorithms" since you get a much better grasp of what the algorithm is doing and you will be able to apply them much much better once you understand some of the theory behind it.

On the content of the cs229 itself, I think the course is overall excellent. His problems sets are good too since they are hard enough to be challenging yet its not completely impossible to solve them. However, the course is a little heavy on SVMs ( like.. 5 lectures on them? ) and also leaves out some of the more interesting topics in Machine learning such as graphical models, bayesian nets..etc. But, I'm really glad that they made this course available since there isn't an equivalent undergraduate course in machine learning at my school.
Sounds like they still have some trouble with phoneme cadence and blending.
Haven't you ever been in a club?

Heeding the wisdom of Woody Allen and Groucho Marx, I would never join a club that would have someone like me as a member.
Huge Block of text written as though someone was speaking it.

Can anyone who's stronger then I, paraphrase it? Thanks!
The URL isn't parsed correctly. Add a period to the end of the link or search for "O3b" on Wikipedia.

We don't know what the latency will be until they launch but, theoretically, since they're launching the satellites into Middle Earth Orbit, the signal only has to travel half as far as the current satellites up in Geostationary Orbit. Google is also offering Google Apps and perhaps the caching servers we've heard in recent news to the local ISPs.
Yeah, I think every Linux user switches distros over the years to find one that suits them best. It's always interesting (to me) to hear what path others have trod along the way.

I was lucky in that my girlfriend was much more deeply into Linux than I was when I decided to get rid of Windows altogether almost two years ago now. She was a big help. If I didn't know something, I'd just ask her. Unfortunately, I can't offer my girlfriend as a resource. ;-)

Even though I consider myself a geek (and you sound like you are as well), this book, Ubuntu for Non-Geeks, helped me out:

http://www.amazon.com/Ubuntu-Linux-Non-Geeks-Project-Based-G...

Since you're using Debian, a lot of that will apply, too.

I also just read a whole lot of man pages and used the great Ubuntu Guide site:

http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Intrepid

And I used the Linux command reference PDF here:

http://fosswire.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/fwunixref.pdf

And of course a lot of Googling.

It does bother me that Ubuntu is coming to mean "Linux" to a lot of people, but it is a good distro.

What do you like about xfce? Never tried it myself.
I just learned about the --forest switch for ps. If you use it, you'll get a tree representing all of the parent and child processes running rather than just a straight up list.
I grew up in the rural American midwest.

Your roads, electricity, and communications were subsidized by urban/suburban America. http://www.google.com/search?q=rural+electricity+subsidies What did urban/suburban America get in return for its investment?

My next door neighbor and childhood best friend lived on a 40 cow dairy operation

That dairy farm was subsidized (apart from the previously-mentioned rural subsidies) by urban/suburban America. http://www.google.com/search?q=farm+subsidies+billion Grain/hay/straw-fed cows can be raised in urban areas. They don't need to be raised in rural areas.

Food doesn't come from big glass boxes and isn't grown on trucks.

That is correct. Food comes from automated factories. http://www.google.com/search?q=dairy+operations+automated

End rant.

Why were you ranting?
Efficiency above is in the context of me reading, not in the context of a nation or culture's literacy.

Here are two more tangible examples: consider a traffic light that has no colors, but flashes "stop" and "go" in text. The analogous "efficient" in my comment is the colored light, in which you don't think about the phonology of the words but understand its meaning.

Other example: a digital vs. an analog clock. This doesn't apply to everyone, but it is plausible that you can tell "oh, it's late!" by looking at the shape of the analog clock, whereas in the digital clock you'd have to parse the numbers. "Efficient" would be the analog clock. Again, this example is suspect; it doesn't apply to myself (I read digital much faster).

But in any case I'm not using "efficiency" to describe the writing system; I'm using it to describe a mechanism in reading comprehension.
How-to: Craigslist phone verification type system
How would I go about building a craigslist-type phone verification system, which, when given a phone number, either texts or calls the number with a code that the user can use to verify that it's their phone?
37signals = landmark forum?
It's a wonderfully well-written and calm piece. Kudos to the author for choosing to let their piece rest on its argument rather than shock and awe to rile up a group of people.

However, there is one thing lacking: how we should pay for it. Should urbanites subsidize internet for the rural? Should rural folk subsidize rent for urbanites? More importantly, what is broadband? Does 768k DSL count? It's definitely way above dial-up.

Part of it isn't even a last mile issue. Part of it is that many people don't live within 100 miles of an internet backbone. It's physically impossible to get that far from a backbone in places like South Korea or Japan and a lot of Western Eruope. It means that you have to draw fiber a lot further in terms of distance and that costs a lot more.

That's partly why I think wireless will be the savior here. It isn't as fast as hard lines, but it can cover big distances (especially fixed wireless where you have a stable antenna on your roof which is what you can install for homes) and current technology could probably provide 1.5Mbps to rural areas today with increases coming at a decent clip. It's no 20Mbps cable modem, but it will allow them to use VoIP, video, etc. And it would be a lot cheaper than running so much fiber to rural areas.

I have a love/hate relationship with "great projects" and I think the internet is a wonderful thing and would love to see more have access to it, but I don't think rural areas can see parity. Likewise, I think we can work to close the gap. If we moved the USF (http://www.fcc.gov/wcb/tapd/universal_service/) to focus on broadband we could get the ball rolling and it's something that already exists for a similar purpose. Give the telecoms a little incentive to push 3G into more rural areas and offer fixed wireless (basically, the same as a data card only with a nice antenna since it's fixed). Verizon Wireless is already pushing into areas unserved by DSL and the like with EV-DO.

It's tough, but I think that wireless, especially with LTE, HSPA+, and WiMAX in the very near future (Verizon has said they're going to have LTE in a few cities within a year and AT&T is going to be aggressive about HSPA+) is going to allow us to light up the rural areas in a way that allows them to participate in the online community nicely.
That is definitely a disturbing thought, and one the author noted at the end. Still, you have to admit, "I DOS'd my cell phone" is a funny thing to be able to say!
Question, do you guys support h264 with AAC? I'm in the DS industry myself and tested over half a dozen apps based in the NA market.
What husband gives their wife access to the checking account? That's just begging for missing money... ;)

EDIT: I think people missed the sarcasm...
"However, a lot had history, poli sci, or econ degrees."

It may turn out that history, political science, and economics degrees felt like investments but actually were consumption.
But like I said, there are plenty of awful cafes on Valencia. I guess I conflated financial success and coolness: Mission Creek, one block down Valencia from Ritual, seems to get along just fine but it's a terribly dull place to go. The coffee there is just like anyone else's; the food is mediocre; the atmosphere is deathly silent. They've taken prime real estate and turned it into an office for people with no office -- and not a fun one. It's literally no more social than sitting in your living room, and the coffee and food are on par with what you could make for yourself. And the entire city is full of these decrepit little places that can only afford to offer mediocrity, because better food wouldn't necessarily bring in profits, and cranking up the music might drive away the customers who buy the most product. In the midst of all these mediocrity machines, Ritual and Four Barrel stand out because of what they've done with the same opportunities.

Okay, they do have one big real estate advantage: they bought giant spaces with room for a roaster. But is there any other way a cafe could serve something special that still attracts the high-profit foot traffic that turns Ritual and Four Barrel into community centers? I'd like to hope so.
I don't have any book recommendations, at least specifically with Debian. I've always been able to get an answer on the web.

Now, I usually start with http://www.debian-administration.org to get some better ideas of how I can get some task done.

I also find some good tips for Debian and Ubuntu at http://articles.slicehost.com
Ask and ye shall receive ...

http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/security/8cdd/

You can also make your own.
"I have found immersion necessary."

This is the only practical way to learn a language. There is an oft repeated cliche about playing quarterback in the NFL, that no matter how much you practice or try to simulate game conditions, the speed and chaos of actual game conditions is something you can't understand, really, until you experience it.

Well, learning a foreign language does not involve 300 pound men coming at you at high velocity, but the real experience of trying to communicate something you really want to say to a real human being is a very different experience than learning words or even grammar structure from a book, audio, video, or lecture. Even interacting with classmates is somewhat contrived, because you are probably trying to say something your teacher prepared for you, instead of getting own ideas across.

So, to summarize: learning a language with out immersion (or something close to it) will likely never amount to anything more than an academic experience.
Hey scott, I click my own comments link here on HN regularly :p

Yeah, just saw "categories" http://www.transmoggit.com/PHP/trim/Python

If you go to Google and type "site:www.transmoggit.com" you'll see what pages it has indexed. I just did and there's no "sub-page" indexed, just your domain name... but this is normal! In my experince, Google will show the domain index first and other pages in 1-2 weeks.

And since sometimes the pages Google shows are different between its datacenters, here's something that I use to see among them all:

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/multiple-datacenter-google-...

About Job ads, I don't remember the company name, but I did see someone who works with a referral program. You show their ads, and if it works, you get paid.

But anyway, if your site gets somewhat popular, you can ask for a lower price than Joel and 37s. If companies have to pay $250/$350 to ad on these sites, a $10 fee on yours will be an impulse buy :) And you can always raise the price if it works...
Literacy rates and speaking proficiency are slightly different problems.

Speaking proficiency is a combination of existing dialects carrying social and linguistic prestige in addition to their historical existence. (Can you imagine forcing the entire United States to begin speaking some other romance language? It'd probably be a hideous transition.)

Also I imagine there are economic and practical factors related to China's literacy rate. Compare for example Japan which has a literacy rate that is probably the same as the United States (I'm having difficulty coming up with any good statistics for functional illiteracy). To say ideographic languages cause low literacy rates and limit speaking proficiency in the national language is probably a bit silly ;)
Dude totally, and a Volva XC90 runs like $37000, totally a misleading premise.
Check out http://twilio.com for making voice calls programmatically.

e.g. http://www.twilio.com/docs/demos/appointmentreminder