skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Well... no, because that was violating copyright like mad.

That's the point. By doing so, it allowed users to discover music in a new way, like a traditional "mixtape." It's no accident that "muxtape" is extremely similar to "mixtape."

I'm familiar with opentape, and while it's a great project, the appeal for me with muxtape was simply the fact that I could go click on some random tape on the front page and hear new music... analogous to finding a random mix tape on the floor of a concert, with a track listing.
How about work for a year, save as much money as possible while working on your idea. Then quit to start your startup. If that tanks, go for the PhD.
If you're going to nitpick over something, nitpick over the link being to the front page of the blog, not to the blog post.

(Maybe by the time people reading this tomorrow follow the link, Google will have posted something else.)
Flower: Zen gaming
I'd have to recommend c++. I own an iPhone myself, so they are definitely fun, but c++ is more ubiquitous. Personally I know C far better than c++ (which is a superset of C). The main difference is c++ has classes and more "object oriented" concepts. For the long-haul c++ I think will have more staying power than the iPhone - who knows, maybe the iPhone will be not as popular in a few years, but c++ will still be here.
I think it's about time that we renew the institution of capitalism.
"Making sure absolutely every ambiguity is eliminated from a mathematical proof is perfectionism."

Oh, I don't know about that. Mathematicians obsess over the "beauty" of a proof as much as hackers/programmers obsess over the "beauty" of their code.

For some proving it the ugly way is insufficient.
Because they get compensated for the risk they are taking. Now if the shareholders want to sue or overthrow the management they have that right.
Along the same lines as Freecycle you might sign up for Kashless.org. They are based here in Seattle and are promoting the same free giving and receiving lifestyle.

I recently got in to the alpha and have ten invites if anyone would like to try it out.
its a typical case of multi level marketing
The "new" VB is called AutoIt
http://www.autoitscript.com/
In the meantime, strike small blows here and there against bad patents by helping examine them:

"Help the USPTO find the information relevant to assessing the claims of pending patent applications. Become a community reviewer and improve the quality of patents."

http://www.peertopatent.org/
Space flight is one area [where not shooting for perfection can be disastrous].

No. Perfectionism has been the single leading cause of every spaceflight "disaster". http://www.dunnspace.com/leo_on_the_cheap.htm

http://www.dunnspace.com/leo-7-10.pdf

A final area needing cultural change to achieve lower launch costs is one that cuts across virtually every part of government and the aerospace industry that is involved in space system development and operations. [...] Fear of failure, and the consequent lack of tolerance for it, dominates the thinking of many engineers and aerospace managers to the point of having major effect on the design and operation of space systems. [...]

Today’s space leaders in this country need to recapture the spirit and vision of bold adventurism and risk acceptance to open avenues for reductions in space system costs and new space program starts. This will require strong courage by space managers as well as politicians to weather the storms of inevitable failures and continue to press forward. To help ameliorate the emotional, political, and financial impact of failures, the launching of cargo and the launching of people should be forever separated as soon as possible. As the cost of space launch comes down, launches (at least those that are unmanned) will become more routine and more plentiful. This frequent and common unmanned launch activity will allow any occasional accident that does occur to be treated with no more significance than any other accident that does not involve a loss of life or injury to people, or damage to the environment.
But the ubiquity of HFCS in bottled, jarred, canned, tubbed, and boxed foods in the US cannot be explained by the sugar policy, for so many varieties of groceries didn't contain sugar in the first place. (I'm pushing 50 and have been reading food labels since childhood.)
This is undoubtedly great work from a technical standpoint, but I see the real value here for other types of web apps. Since gmail already supports imap, you could've been managing your mail from a number of free mail clients offline. Just like how Google Maps touched off the ajax craze, this may be more about ushering in a new archetype of offline apps beyond email.
Consider the acres per person that America has.
Wrong. The lack of tool support for DSLs is a real issue. We've barely scratched the surface of what IDEs can do. We often have to deal with lackluster editing support (especially so in the case of DSLs) and I find this deplorable.

As an example, if a DSL's function C references a lisp function F, the IDE should integrate the two languages enough that when you ask who calls F the IDE will list C among the calling functions.

edit: Suddenly I have a feeling people will have to see the power of a "real" IDE for themselves before they see that all the seemingly small improvements are really worthwhile. It's a bit like explaining Lisp macros to a beginner: the simple examples are easy enough to understand but aren't very compelling, while the complex, more worthwhile examples are too difficult to understand. So let's talk again in a few years when I have an implementation ;P
Does that matter? For every person who wants to view it, they add their bandwidth. If the average viewer is bandwidth-neutral, then it will work.

Certainly you can get an unlimited number of broadband users. My upload rate is more than enough to watch a good quality stream and upload at least as much as I download.
The best part of that was hearing Steven Levitt say 'bling bling'
Besides it's rather pretentious & I only tolerate that from myself.
Just wondering if we can cite total numbers from where we are at in the counter, or if there are some empties in there...
Dziuba says "In Java, static typing makes the method signature into a recipe: it's all the shit you need to make this method work."

What definition of "work" are we using?

He also write "As a programmer in a team, you need rules. You need structure. You need order."

Some of us think that the rules matter, that it's not just having rules, but having the right rules.
You think widely available eInk displays will bring improvements in code?
And why would anyone disable javascript?

Sometimes I follow links to poorly implemented or managed sites, some of which pass along unfiltered content. I disable all executable content by default to ensure those places don't inadvertently screw up my browser state. For me executing javascript as a privilege I'm only willing to extend to sites that have earned my trust.
I cannot believe I read all that!
Did anyone else get the feeling that it took 2 years of porting Bugzilla to Java for the OP to figure out you don't need to install Perl to view a website?
.. and yet if you are to believe the NY Times (I also read something from Google that says the same thing, but was unable to find the link) that TV will be dwarfed by people using the internet in the not too distant future.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/25/technology/25drill.html?_r...

Then again, Nielsen shows that the average American household watches significantly more TV than uses the internet?

http://www.nielsen.com/media/2008/pr_081124.html

I'd say that while this might be currently true - given the shift in eyeballs from the TV to the Computer Screen amongst the younger people, then costs for content producers should invariably become lower as time marches on - so cuban's point is a bit of a moot point.
Apache Lucene, Solr and Wicket are all great, light-weight open source Java projects.

Ted Dziuba's argument doesn't seem to be Java vs. Python for large projects - it's more statically typed vs. dynamically typed languages and checked vs. run-time exceptions - or compile-time error checking vs. run-time error checking.

There are several large companies that use Python for X and Java for Y. I don't think either language has significant advantages for large projects that the other doesn't have, assuming that developers can utilize the strengths of the language. I was working with someone who wanted to implement a prepaid card application (the ultimate enterprisy app) and his biggest objection to using Python was the inability to find Python developers in India. He was going to pay the bills, and I didn't have a counter-argument.
It sounds like all he needs is a VM, such as the JVM.

For example, the JVM gives us:

Java, Clojure, Jython, JRuby, etc.

All of these languages are compatible with each other and can easily extend each other. Especially with Clojure, it would be trivial to implement another DSL on top of these, but the platform has always been there.
I'm wondering when Amazon will bundle Audible's digital audiobook tech into the Kindle. Amazon acquired Audible last year and for some markets, like children's books, it's a no-brainer to sync narration with the written word.
My former employer also had an AML solution. You entered the name of the person as starting point, and the solution tried to fetch all related persons from the web by analyzing the name where the person was matched. These names were then associated with different keywords to create a ranking for each person and for the original person itself.

One problem will be getting the contacts. Also different banks have different systems. Maybe you can work something out with avaloq (their system is used more and more in different banks). Banks will never transmit data outside of their servers, and even people working there will not access any web service at all, if their computers are connected to customer data.
So you have to sell the hardware as well. I think the biggest problem will be to integrate into the existing system.
Great - can't wait to upgrade when I get home.
Location-aware software on Linux (Gnome)
consider the acres per person that the American lifestyle requires.

Progressively less over time. http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHAR2...

If Americans, engaged in their current lifestyles, constituted the entire 6.7 billion head population of the world, less land would be required than is required today.
One of the beauties of startups, as labeled by pg, is that they can be begun with almost no capital but time -- because they don't require almost anything in the way of external equipment & services. They can be very self-contained, rather than interdependent; no supply chain needed, etc.

So I suspect that your suspicion is wrong.
It's not illegal to ask a question which in answering, the applicant may offer such information.

In all of the examples you give, the "legal" question is askking something directly relevant to whether the applicant is able to perform a job. What someone does with their free time may give you some insight into how well they would do a job, but it's far less directly connected.
As he stated in the submission's text, he is not starting a website for the average web surfer, but a system that detects money laundering in bank transactions.
Would your mom narc on you?
The comments here are disappointingly one-sided. Nowhere did Brooks suggest that he wanted to return to the good ol' days with all its warts. Incremental evolution of systems is a known good strategy. There's no reason whatever to believe that that doesn't apply to institutions, too. If you find yourself unable to see how tradition can transmit useful information through a society made up of people of varying critical thinking abilities, you may be letting your politics unreasonably bias your analysis.

Considering what value traditions and institutions may serve can be an intellectual exercise. It doesn't mean you suddenly want to rescind female voting and return to slavery. It seems impossible to have interesting discussions with about 99.5% of the population, because they show not even the remotest ability to avoid emotional reactions to words.
I think there is a distinction to be made between perfection and adequacy for a given task. The proper solution for Arian 5 problem lies in adequately accurate math, not in math of infinite precision (perfection).
I've been waiting for this feature for a really long time.

Reminds me of 2005 when I was waiting for them to come out with Calendar and waiting for someone to come out with easy video publishing. Was so happy to see these products get made.

The fact that Google controls all my data makes me less happy.
Because that's the point of being a shareholder. We're not punishing anyone. The real question is why should the government reward people who bought bad equities?
There is one thing about c++, it scares me more than iPhone programming. I tend to be the kind of person that vigorously attacks things that scare me. I get a lot more satisfaction out of it and feel more alive...
I have been working on iPhone development for the past few weeks. The entry level to learn obj C is actually quite high because I really cannot find any book that helps me to learn obj C. Most of the books that I stumbled upon require me to learn some sort of C or C++ before learning obj C.

After I finished the iPhone project, I am learning C++ now because I believe that it will definitely helps to understand more about obj C.

P/S: I used Beginning Iphone Development, Cocoa Programming For Mac OSX, and the Apple Iphone documentations to learn obj C.
So you'd rather punish the US taxpayer, who very likely has no direct investment in the company (outside of index funds), and has nothing to gain if the company does well? Sure, it sucks for the shareholders, but that's exactly what they signed up for - a share of the companies returns in good times and bad.
Am I the only person who doesn't have this as an option?

I've had other Labs features for awhile, but I did a find of the Labs page for "offline", and even manually looked through the page, and found nothing!

I have gears installed even.
Okay, that made me giggle! :D
One error is a nit, but five in one article title? That's just sloppy. Proper punctuation, capitalization, and spelling are de rigueur here at Hacker News, and as one of its more wizened denizens I was doing my part to enforce the local culture. (It was also an implicit message to the editors to fix it---which they did.)

N.B. This is a record number of downmods for me (five as of this writing), and I find it alarming how something so trivial can do so much to distress my fragile primate brain.
This solves my biggest problem with managing my GOogle account over iMap. When I tried to set it up with Apple Mail I ran into the issue of each label being treated as a folder. This meant that for each label a duplicate of the message was created meaning that I could have up to 4 different copies of any single email.
They should have used Google Guice! I haven't used it, but it sounds like an interesting framework:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2948853912335655747&...
The UI screenshot looks like a Vista knockoff. For the love of FSM, why would anyone knock off Vista's UI?
We probably have different definitions of "slick". Nevertheless, I'm curious where I can find this slick code just in case...

BTW, I'm not just randomly bashing Java. I've actually been using it since 1995, worked briefly at Sun/Javasoft, started one of the largest Java projects at Google, and used to like programming in it. However, the trend that I've noticed is that I like Java less and less because the culture has fallen into a degenerate process of building towering abstractions. Put simply, their metric of "good" seems to be very different from mine.
A cynical take: saying you are in the market for a pay dating site is a way to get inside information about running a pay dating site. He is going to have all kinds of small sites sending him their numbers on signups/conversions, etc. It would be nice to see all that and know which models are working best. Heck, he even says "I’m going to have a lot of work to do to figure out how to run a paid site properly."
His definition of "work" appears to be "compile".
That's the exact opposite of what I think. If you can read code on a monitor, surely you can read a novel.

(Personal taste! Personal taste! Don't flame me!)
It should be available to everyone this week; I don't have it either.
After several years of development, Jetbrains released a beta of the Meta-programming System for implementing this vision:

http://www.jetbrains.com/mps/index.html
"I don't know about Saudi Arabians, but I knew this Iranian guy..."

Is about the cultural equivalent of saying:

"I don't know about the British, but I knew this French guy..."

Except probably more different. And that's just culturally. Politically Saudi Arabia is an order of magnitude more oppressive than Iran and women's rights are also similarly incomparable.
Lessons Learned: Three freemium strategies
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2009/01/20/ap5943395.html

Since the government didn't insist on stricter terms, Citi is paying a 1 cent dividend. Blame the government for not negotiating stricter terms. If Citi didn't pay the max dividend it could under the terms, its shareholders could sue the board in a shareholder class-action suit for violating their fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder returns.
it's

(* (/ (- (realscore s) 1)
(expt (/ (+ (item-age s) timebase*) 60) gravity*))

where

(= gravity* 1.5 timebase* 120)

and item-age returns age in minutes
This is a good comment: its suggestions were accepted; it improves the look of the top story on the front page.

But ideally it would disappear from view as soon as it is addressed, and even before being addressed, it shouldn't interfere with other on-topic conversation.

I would like it if articles had a separate 'meta' thread for comments like this. Or, for comments to have an extra 'transient meta' flag that lets them be deleted indefinitely in the future, once they're addressed or otherwise moot.

Only people who choose to view meta -- or those with the power to change the target, like the original author or admins -- would then need to see these comments.
Theo Jansen: The art of creating creatures
Indeed, but that doesn't make it illegal.
Regexps alone are a really poor fit for dealing with recursive structures, such as finding matching pairs of braces. You can use them for a lexing step, but you're probably better off using something like yacc or LPEG for the parsing.

Forth, Factor, and other stack-based languages also have this same property of "syntax agnostic representation". While on the surface they're kind of a backwards Lisp (due to postfix notation, with intermediate results pushed on a stack), both are dealing with nested lists of symbols, and very adept at dealing with things expressed the same way.
Also, the title of the submission is poorly worded, suggesting that the Arab producers were asking the question.
I call BS too. I've been to the Middle East several times. Uhm, "Women can swim!?" is about like one of those stories Europeans like to tell about Americans not knowing if Europeans have refrigerators. I'm also assuming you're referring to the Middle East from the tone, but let's not forget that the countries with the largest Muslim populations are Indonesia and the countries of the Indian subcontinent.

The views of women within various Islamic cultures varies widely and in some cases are quite disturbing, but the four countries with the largest Muslim populations (Indonesia, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh) have all had female presidents / prime ministers. There are other odd data points like women's suffrage having reached Iran a decade before Switzerland (1963 vs. 1973).
Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it.
Outstanding. Now I have a much better video to use when demonstrating Brownian motion than that grainy smoke trail video.
I think a lot of hair-trigger downvoters have arrived in the past few weeks. (Or maybe old hands have just gotten grumpy.)

I've noticed quality comments being pushed initially down to 0 or -1 simply because they have a strong viewpoint with which some people would disagree.

It's unavoidable that one-dimensional moderation votes will often be used for expressing disagreement. OK. Still, comments should only be pushed below 1 -- faded out as if they were a punishable offense -- if they're bad for the discussion.
Yeah, the Blue Shirt is delightful. They just expanded into the space next door and added free wifi. If I didn't have an office for work, that would be my target.
Agreed. I really don't like driving.

I'd also say that maintaining a car costs more than maintaining your feet, but compared to rent, both are small.
I didn't bring up Lisp machines. I'd like to see a Lisp OS of some kind, though.
Thank you thank you thank you!
Its a great series!
Google's audience for reader and docs are in the millions and could hardly be described as "small", just like Gmail has a lot more than "thousands" of users :)
first thing that pops out at me is the mention of a task scheduler for appengine:

(from http://code.google.com/events/io/sessions.html, under "Offline processing on App Engine: a look ahead")

"App Engine was designed to run request-driven web applications, although this will change in the coming year with the release of a number of offline computing components. In this session, we'll explore the task queue/executor model of computation and some of the more interesting applications"

awesome
No, that bit about dividends can't possibly be right. Relatively few public companies pay a dividend, and basically none of the other companies face shareholder lawsuits about the absence of a dividend.

And if Citi were a poorly programmed automaton then it might make sense to avoid blaming its board for politically boneheaded moves; but its board is made up of directors who _ought_ to be spending some energy not pointlessly offending a public on whose dole they now find themselves. The shareholders will be (rightly) for more offended if the board so pisses off Treasury that the public assistance dries up.

I agree, however, that the (then-) government should have negotiated (decreed?) better terms for the bailout money.
Anybody else see a problem with 1) the government propping up companies that should be reorganized by bankruptcy 2) taking over these zombie corporations like head crabs 3) and then interfering in all kinds of business decisions?

Air travel post 9-11 is ridiculous in this country. How Citi spends Citi's money is between Citi and Citi's shareholders. Except when the government intervenes.

Now we have a giant mess. Now every interference can be made in the "public interest." Why do employees get free coffee? Why do employees get gym memberships. What about education reimbursement?

What is in the "public interest" now?
The problem with managing your email from other clients, at least to me, is that other email clients have workflows that don't work with my expectations. I'm so used to using the Gmail key bindings that I find working in Apple Mail or Thunderbird slow and painful. The lack of a native Archive metaphor in those clients causes me further pain. I funnel almost all of my email into Gmail and gave up on local email clients some time ago. The only way I would revert is if I could have a local app that approximated the Gmail workflow. Offline Gmail is a welcome addition.
Do you know if anyone has tried abstracting out the elements of a good IDE? Your list looks like it could be implemented with a table structure. All languages have similar dependency structures (as far as I know), so the IDE would just need to know the right syntax elements. I'm probably way over simplifying though. I'm not broadly experienced in many languages.
Polaroid fans try making new film for old camera