skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The BBC, which is renowned for the quality of its journalism seems to agree with you, they actively solicit contributions from people on the ground at the bottom of most articles.

And then there is indymedia.org which falls somewhere between the 'real' news organizations and 'citizen journalism'.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=477879

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=478433

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=478264

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=477885

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=477862
Just how healthy IS the games industry?
I don't agree that Twitter is a threat to Google, but I can see it gaining a foothold as a place for consumers, for example, to get direct user data on a product or company that is not possible through product reviews.
precisely, its pretty asinine, everyone else in the world uses the metric system, and USA is stuck using obsolete weights and measures
The original hitch hikers guide to the galaxy is the radio series as broadcast by the bbc on radio 4 in 1978, after that there were the books starting in 1979, the tv series in 1981, and finally the movie in 2005.
No, they are not. The symbols in the equation are simply numbers, and "9 ≥ a ≥ b ≥ c ≥ d ≥ 0" constrains them to 0-9.

You are mistaking the map for the territory, sort of. The positional aspects of the number system get encoded the equations and then the mere "numbers" don't matter anymore.
Thats what Product Managers and Project Managers do ..
I think that title should read 'everybody grows, AOL drops'.
Tinyrb: small Ruby VM inspired by Lua that's easy to understand and learn from
I'm currently using Tokyo Tyrant with Rails and the Memcached client (in production). It works great for my needs though I don't need to story binary data. Overall, TT has been extremely fast and stable. The dual master replication is a nice bonus.
Littlefox for Firefox: scrunches UI for small screens
* If a large enough number of people ever start using Twitter ... it'll be overrun with spam*

Too late. Whenever I've mentioned a single, specific technology product or stack, it has taken less than 3 hours until some totally random stranger with nothing but "related" spam updates adds me, obviously expecting me to instinctively add them back, like I'm some kind of follower-count whore.

Twitter is being heavily spammed and gamed already.
I used Slidy this past week. I needed to show some code examples, and it worked out well. However, I spent a lot of time customizing the look of it. I didn't look for "themes," before hand and ending up wasting a ton of time hacking CSS to get it to look the way I wanted it to.
I took a look at this once before, and it took me quite a bit of work to get it actually working. However, it works in a very simplistic manner, which may not be appropriate for you're use. In the basic case it just computes word frequencies and keeps the sentences which have the most frequent words.

The quickest extension to this idea would be to include WordNet to compute frequencies of concepts. Of course in reality you probably would use something better than WordNet...
interesting. i'm wondering now what resources to look at when flying in the winter to see what the ice risks are.
1.7 kindles per subscriber per year, you mean. It's probably cleaner to work out how long it would take to recoup that 'investment' assuming subscriber readership & ad revenue don't change. He also assumes wages outside the newsroom are all in printing, which makes no sense.

The article says 2 kindles over a year's costs, so his t=0.5 yr. If cutting out 4/5 of the dead tree edition doesn't do much outside raw materials, t=6yrs, which is crazy.

Thing is it's all irrelevant. The assumptions & lack of information make the calculations useless. We already knew t>0, that's not a surprise.
Serial Experiment Lain. You probably haven't heard of it, and you had to be introduced first to the anime subculture, then be not frightened away by the number of bad releases in that genre, then adjust to the japan mentality, take into consideration the fact, that it was basically pre-matrix (1998), watch the movie in a one night marathon, then start reading the mentioned, and omitted literature.
However, the sheer amount of mindfuck going on in each, and every episode vastly outnumbers every single movie mentioned above, and this makes it very worthwhile.
For all the comments about twitter being a money burning machine, you have to admit they are in many ways "upstream of revenue" (http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html - second paragraph under examples). They have a lot of users. That's only half the equation, but it's one more half than most companies have.
Autojump: easily navigate directories from the command line
Nah, you don't need any trees. Just use good old bin-lattice [1]. If it's good enough for Craig Reynolds :)

Interaction with Groups of Autonomous Characters

http://www.red3d.com/cwr/papers/2000/pip.html

Big Fast Crowds on PS3

http://www.red3d.com/cwr/papers/2006/PSCrowdSandbox2006.html

Seriously, I did a lot of such simulations (in graduate school) and usually the simplest thing is the best.

-----

[1] Let's say your world is 100x100 units. You create 2D array of 10x10 cells (preallocate each cell to be able to hold max number of agents, so that you don't fragment memory and waste time on allocations/garbage collection/etc.).

In each step of the simulation, you go through all agents and place them in the correct cell (that's O(N) and constant is actually really cheap => cell[0.1 x agent.x][0.1 x agent.y]).

Then for the interactions, just check agents in your cell and also 8 neighboring ones (that's practically O(N) because of repulsion forces).
Bunny1: write smart bookmarks in python
This is pretty interesting also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ablation_cascade especially considering the events of the last few days.
I'm going to try running firefox under wine tonight. Firefox under linux has been noticeably slower than its windows counterpart for awhile now.
I think this could work out really well for microsoft. They have tons of advanced technology that would really bolster their public image if it were showcased in a nice way. I'm thinking surface, photosynth, seadragon, hand writing recongition, etc...
Ask HN: Looking for a good name for a new url snapping service O_o
Hi,

We're just coming up with a url snapping service. Its takes a url and gets you a snapshot of it within 10-20 seconds. We're working on the API part which is almost done. Its a free service and with the API you can actually create services based on web-snapping, for eg. something like http://www.cssdrive.com/ could be made very easily with our service. You design the page, we provide you the snapshot functionality.

Now, the problem is, we're out of ideas for any cool names for this service... any good suggestions ?
People will pay. They care about hassle more than money. I absolutely detest the process of creating an account at a site to see content, and I use bugmenot all the time for free sites. However, I pay a decent chunk of change for a subscription to ft.com. When I find content I like, I want to subsidize the creation of more by the same creator. Micropayments and subscription models are the way of the future. Newspaper sites should support both models and let readers use either.
From the article:
http://adds.aviationweather.gov/phputils/wrap_image.php

Not that you should use it to make travel decisions. The odds that your plane goes down, even in icy conditions, are extremely low.
I agree with your points about Wal-Mart not translating to creative marketing, but something many news agencies are missing out on in reporting this is that he used to work for Wal-Mart but is actually leaving Dreamworks, where he worked in global product distribution. So he has at least had exposure to creative content marketing. Hopefully that helps, at least in terms of recognizing creativity if not in producing it.
Not only should they get him on the air, but they should get him OFF the air once he has said what he had to say. Keeping them on for the endless news cycle for punditry is one of the causes for the decline quality of news content.
Twitter's blog entry on this news:

http://blog.twitter.com/2009/02/opportunity-knocks.html
And concentrate on numbers over 31 -- many "lucky numbers" are birthdates.
"Whenever I see the slightest bit of ice on my wings, I disconnect the autopilot so I can feel what is happening to the airplane"

Well if feeling how much correction the plane is taking at this point is so important then shouldn't they have a prominent big red glowing light that beeps the ___ out when a threshold is reached.
I'm pretty sure Hans Reiser and the Ted Kazcynski would have aced any such tests.

Incidentally, yesterday I managed to stumble upon another such example:

"Nathan Freudenthal Leopold, Jr. and Richard A. Loeb were two wealthy University of Chicago students who murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924, and were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Leopold, age 19 at the time of the murder, and Loeb, 18, believed themselves to be Nietzschean supermen who could commit a "perfect crime".

The friends were exceptionally intelligent. Nathan Leopold was an intellectual prodigy who spoke his first words at the age of four months, and tested with an I.Q. of 210.

Leopold had already completed college, graduating Phi beta Kappa and was attending law school at the University of Chicago. He claimed to have studied 15 languages but in reality spoke four. He was an expert ornithologist, while Loeb, with an I.Q. in the 160s, was the youngest graduate in the history of the University of Michigan."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_and_Loeb
They can learn to write software to replace these so-called professional applications.
Officially, the US kind of, sort of, has converted to metric- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Conversion_Act
My god, it's amazing to see the vitrol here. It looks like a lot of people don't like mixing their politics with their software.
"You can't do that with electronics." - yet. Electronics have come in hard, bulky cases simply because they have to anyhow. Shrinking them a little bit still means you have a hard, bulky case.

But we're within spitting distance of being able to build something like the Kindle as a flexible, waterproof thing thicker than paper, but not too much thicker than paper, with a single bit of bulky electronics attached to the bottom for the battery. Not sure it'll ever work as a broadsheet, which wasn't really chosen for your convenience, but a nice 8x11 or A4 sheet of paper, sure.

Now, when I say "spitting distance", I still mean "5 to 10 years". But it no longer requires fundamental breakthroughs, just feasible advances.

(Also, don't read my specs too literally. We'll have to play with the design space before we work the optimal design out, but "something I can read over coffee" will definitely be a niche.)
Editing spreadsheets on iPhone brings choices
Let's not forget that it's only the expected return, i.e., the return as the number of trials goes to infinity. But, you don't have infinite money to spend, so there's a good chance you'll go broke before you win (depending on the variance). Another way of looking at it, it's a random walk with a bottom barrier --- once it hits zero, you're out of the game.
Because they understand and know the system and have connections. That's why. Why do you think rich people can get less harsh sentencing than poor people (unless there is a lot of media/political attention?), because they can hire lawyers.
I think this has been reliably chalked up to the fact that windows firefox is built using PGO, linux currently is not. If setting up wine becomes a hassle, you might want to just try grabbing the source and building with PGO on (or grabbing a bin of 3.1)
Corruption in developed countries is just significantly more subtle.
I've been using Firefox 2 and 3 on Linux (OpenSuse and Ubuntu) for over a year now on different machines with different video adapters, and I can confirm it is definitely the slowest browser I've ever used. I disabled all the unnecessary addons, but still it takes a long time to start FF, it eats memory and works slow with js.

I can't switch, because it would be more inconvenient to use Opera than getting used to slowness of FF. So I hope this is going to be fixed in future.
What would you (ie: anyone who thinks NY Times should do this) suggest for colleges that give away free copies of newspapers to students?
I think it's about time...If they decorate their stores half as well as they decorate their offices, they will be neat.
nameboy.com showing me these are available:

rocketsnap.com

snapgoblin.com

snapalistic.com

freesnapper.com
Unixtime  1234567890 -- We made it
> "The Thais and Maylays were with Singapore in taking aggressive anti-communist actions in the 1960s. None of the countries that escaped communism approached the Western liberal ideal of political freedom."

What do you think about the pre-civil-war human-rights records of Vietnam and Cambodia? Do you think they were more protective of political freedom before the wars than Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia?

> "If I were a resident of Southeast Asia, Singapore would be my #1 place to live. As is, I like the United States just fine."

I think infringements on human rights are less unpleasant in theory than in practice; maybe if you spend some time living there, you might have a more nuanced point of view about it.

> [Urbanity] "was a huge disadvantage in the early years." [economically]

Nearly all of world economic development during the 20th century was urban, if you measure by GDP. In industrialized countries, cities have been richer than the country for centuries — as long as there have been industrialized countries. It's true that cities can't be self-sustaining, but that seems to be an advantage when it comes to economic development.

> "I would be willing to bet that the average Singaporean is happy that their government..."

The average inhabitant of almost any country is happy about almost everything their government has done, especially a while back, and they would have been happy about their government doing the opposite if it had done the opposite.
The last major expansion of the Eurasian gold supply was in the 1500s and 1600s, due to the looting of the Americas, and I think it roughly tripled the amount of gold in circulation. There has never been an event since the advent of gold-as-currency that multiplied by ten the amount of gold in circulation within a century, but that happens to almost every fiat currency almost every century. Predicting which decade it happens in is tricky, though.

I think using a fiat currency is probably a good idea, though.
I think I've fixed this, can you try the latest release and see if you encounter the same problems?
A surprising amount of it works under WINE, actually.
Take New Brain Out (outbrain, poetically, indeed)
Okay I'm only replying to this one reply but my point is relevant to all discussion re meaning.

Always be suspicious of any statement about numbers that relies on the base. This property of 6174 is really a property of the number's representation in base 10. In another base, it's the same number, but doesn't have the same property. That's why it seems suspiciously meaningless.
If Pirate Bay Shut Down, Could Take BitTorrent With It
Fed Indictment - H1B Visas Used to Undercut Prevailing Wages
As Rod Serling would say, "Submitted for your approval":

Eraserhead
Forbidden Zone
Gaslight
Invaders from Mars
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Laura
Minority Report
Mirage
Rebecca
Suddenly, Last Summer
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
The Devil's Advocate
The Wizard of Oz
Total Recall
Vanilla Sky

Some are better than others, of course. And some fit the mindf definition better than others. Oh, well. These are some films that popped into my head.
doesn't look too bad. especially considering that this is new display tech.
http://www.e-ink.com/press/images/image_release_86b.html
Why is that bad? The query plans the RDBMs uses end up being slow.

I think it's simply not the case that people are using key-value stores because the query plans that a typical DBMS optimizer chooses are suboptimal for the kinds of queries most web apps use.
Maybe writing the JavaDoc helped them think out some design issues? Some of my most productive programming time has been sitting in a park with paper and a pencil. (Not billable, though, sigh.)
I'm a bit of a compiler neophyte but if profile guided optimizations yield such a drastic improvement, why doesn't Mozilla (or my distribution via their package manager) put out binaries that were compiled with PGO?
From the article, listing risks:

4. Too many people try to take advantage of this scenario
Yes they are. Where he meant 1000a+100b+10c+d he wrote abcd.
This principle doesn't make any sense to me. The severity of the sentence is (or should be) proportional to the severity of the crime. In this case, the harm that a corrupt judge can cause is extremely large, and society does not tolerate this.

The reason why arson has such a stiff sentence--and indeed why arson of one's own house is illegal--is because fire has the potential to spread, killing many people and destroying many properties. If you think back to the middle ages, when the common law principles of arson arose (think wood dwellings with thatch roofs and few or no fire brigades), fire spread more rapidly and was more deadly than it is even today. As such, the punishment had to be severe.
Yeah, I probably would have felt the same way. On the other hand, it's fortunate that five-year-olds don't generally decide major public policy issues; I can remember a lot of things I felt similarly passionate about at the time.
The consequence that it is better to close down the clubs than to let them encourage proprietary software usage is almost inescapable given the above premise.

1) cuban boys discovering hacking in computer clubs

2) something I'm too stupid to understand

3) clubs should be shut

Good work!
> That's not what I'm talking about.

Yes, you are.

> Stallman declared he'd rather see computer clubs closed than using Windows.

Your paraphrasing is out of context and switches meanings. I am not going to even quote as you conveniently didn't quote that paragraph.

> He wants to convert (I'm quoting the article) the "important resource" (read: people 'unspoiled' by Windows) to free software

Yeah, so? He wants Free Software. Nothing new.

> (just like Che Guevara who went to Africa to convert people unspoiled by capitalism to the ideal of communism).

This is a very pathetic and childish hyperbole. You are the equivalent of the Fox News crowd for software.

(That's a hyperbole pun.)
Global Shipping Industry Makes World Flat — Biologically
I think we are talking past each other. In base ten if you start with 1234 and cycle though asdf - fdsa > new number you hit a single stable number 6174 .

In base 11 using 6174 you cycle:

4808, 87A3, 7094, 9272, 3098, 9452, 7094 (cycle)

I was thinking of a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map for this equation abcd - dcba > might be interesting across different bases.
I realize this is, at best, tangentially related to this topic, but a few weeks ago I thought about formatting and printing my resume on A4 for a job fair. My thought was that if I wanted it to stick out from the rest of them, why not have it literally stick out? I decided against it, but I do wonder what sort of impression that would give an employer; as a US employer, how would you react to a resume from someone, also in the US, but printed on A4?
Fundraising 101 brought to you by Lil Wayne:

"Start with straight shots and then pop bottles. Flirt with the hood rats and then pop models."

Translation:

Do a few startups, then build a Google. Talk with the angels, then do series A with VCs.

Citation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQ3I4YY4YJA
public torrent sites maybe...but there are plenty of private torrent trackers that won't crash
No worries. I may have pulled the trigger too fast on the HN guidelines smackdown. Sorry about that.
Milton Glaser: How great design makes ideas new
I think my reaction would be the same as if I got a resume from someone printed on 8.5 x 11 paper -- I'd ask the candidate to send me an electronic copy via email. :)

Seriously, though, I've been the hiring manager for a number of positions at various jobs over the past ten years, and the main way of collecting resumes has always been electronic. This is for jobs in both the technical and editorial fields. On the rare occasion that someone mailed me a hard copy of his or her resume, I'd almost always question the person's technical literacy. Worse yet for the candidate, the resume was likely not to get looked at as closely as the others nor re-reviewed because it wasn't in the same email folder.

That's not to say there's no use for hard copies of resumes. During the interviews themselves, of course, it's helpful to be able to look at a piece of paper. But I would usually print out the resume ahead of time and take it with me when I met with a candidate. After that, if I didn't make any important notes on the resume itself, it'd go in the recycling bin.
Real Ultimate Programming Power
Twitter is just a well-designed little brand. It cannot be compared to Google, but it can teach us what google missed.
Twitter is a good example how name + usability + simple design works together.
Same ideas works for Facebook - design and usability and less ads is why they outperform myspace.
It seems like google cannot create entertainment services. They made almost perfect source code hosting, and their mail and reader are simple and usable, unlike stuffed with ads yahoo's mail, or that mess myspace.
If you're trying to invite people to some service "just for fun" it must be simple, stupid and usable, with few ads. Like iPhone =)
Ruby without blocks is like fat-free bacon.
You've gotta be kidding me.

I'd totally build one of these things if Apple would ever actually respond to me. It's been almost a month - anyone else experience this kind of delay?
I dunno, Google seems to have a penchant for re-inventing the wheel when it comes to UI. ;P
Highly recommended mindfuck films from across the globe:

El Método/The Method (Spain): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427582/

15 Park Avenue (India): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0449159/

Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi/Spirited Away (Japan/Animation): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0245429/

Moustache, La (France): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0428856/

Monday (Japan): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0239655/

Shutter (Thai/Horror): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0440803/

Gaau ji/Dumplings (Hong Kong): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0472458/
Cool. I figured it was just the Wired author spicing up the story.
don’t send or distribute documents that depend on external factors to display and print properly. So, no Word documents, no Quark XPress documents, no PageMaker files, no AppleWorks files and so on.

Isn't quite right. Sure, that'll be a problem if you're distributing your document for print, but otherwise of that list it's only Word that insists on reformatting the display for the currently selected printer. The other apps will honour the page setup the document was created with, and only give problems at print time.

It's surprising that .doc became the standard for resumes when the display for the recipient can vary so extravagantly from the display for the creator. Oh wait, it's not surprising; it's depressing.
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