skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's something to be said for stability too. I'm getting tired of losing all my friends every two years.

Also, if you ever try to get involved in your local community, you will find that nobody really cares about you if they know you're going to be gone in a year. The people that have influence in the community are the folks that stick around.

We live in a very young-thinking age, anxious to throw out established wisdom and forge our own way. However, I fear that we are too eager to discount the wisdom in established wisdom. I'm not saying that we have to swallow it wholesale. But there's a reason it came into existence in the first place.

My peer group has no concept of "community". We don't belong to one. Or rather, we belong to a new one every two years, which amounts to the same thing.

We pay lip service to the ideas of helping our neighbors and building strong communities, but we have no idea what those words actually mean. We try to fulfill these ideals through national politics, but it's not the same thing as actually helping your neighbor, personally, in real life.

So sure, people need to rent and move around when they are young and finding their way. But eventually it's good to settle down and belong to a place. In the aggregate, it builds a stronger society.

I went to a church around here on Christmas (I'm an atheist, but I like the carols), and it was startling to interact with people outside my peer group. Some of the parishioners had lived in San Diego for decades. They had known each other for decades. They knew who had children, and who was elderly, and who was sick and needed help. They knew who was widowed and who had children overseas in Iraq and could use a nice meal with friends. When someone moved away, it was a big event, and everybody was sad to see them leave.

When I'm sick or need help, my facebook friends send me nice messages. It's not the same.

Damn, I sound old for a guy that's 26.
Thermal Infrared Cameras : Making This World A Safer Place
Call it a grand reincarnation or a drastic transition or a sea-like change in its basic nature, how a simple and small looking gadget which was invented, years ago, merely to see things, and beautiful models too, printed on the glossy papers suddenly emerged into one of the most reliable electronic security devices.
Check out boulder.me for some local Boulder activity (not Denver, but shares some events). The Denver New Tech Meetup was tonight, generally a great event.
It is being done for the images. I assume no caching for the front page since it's assumed the front page changes enough to not warrant it.

ryan$ curl -I http://ycombinator.com/images/y18.gif

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 05:04:58 GMT

Server: Apache/2.2.10

Last-Modified: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 17:03:07 GMT

ETag: "7fa02b-64-42bf6725588c0"

Accept-Ranges: bytes

Content-Length: 100

Content-Type: image/gif
Nassim Taleb is a wonderful thinker and writer. The fall of Fannie Mae was hinted in his 2007 book 'Black Swan: The Impact of Highly Improbable' the following sentence is a from his book - "The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup". Not only Nassim Taleb, I remember George Soros referring to Fannie Mae and lurking troubled housing market long before the onset of the financial crisis.
Techcrunch comment from a Dreamit guy: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/22/the-nasty-exploding-ter...
The premier of China publicly spoke about his concerns for the value of the dollar recently: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090313/ap_on_bi_ge/as_china_us_...
I'm still not entirely clear on what the benefits of Django's ORM are. isn't SqlAlchemy far more mature and feature rich? Why aren't they moving closer to that?
The main reason why I eventually need to end up in an actual house is because when I'm finally able to afford my dream drum set, nothing is going to keep me away from it. The amount of soundproofing I would need otherwise is probably excessive.
Yeah, I see what you mean about blindness.

And just so we're on the same page, you're talking about this, right:

http://delicious.com/help/savebuttons

I just added it to my site but I don't see any option for displaying the statistics you were referring to - i.e. how many people have bookmarked something with it (except on the delicious website, of course). Maybe you're using a different button?
Paul Graham once wrote that "unprofessional" was the null criticism. It says nothing other than expresses your distaste. I wonder if "bad form" is the same thing, spoken with a slightly English Public School accent?
Thanks for the advice. Can you please provide links to some of your friends' sites so I can see examples of what their "successful" sites offer? Thanks again.
Other parts of the world lack water, but not due to the lack of freshwater sources.

I live, and have lived in numerous places that have a lack of water.

Water restrictions are commonplace in Australia - most major cities are facing the real prospect of running out of water. In many cities you can't water your lawn, wash your car, fill your pool, etc, etc. Some smaller town and regions are already in total crisis.

When I mention the Murray-Darling Basin in my other comment - that's a big issue. The federal government basically had to step in and take over the control of water from the states. This might not sound like a lot, but it was a big deal, one of the biggest uses of federal muscle in Australia's history.

Even in the UK and New Zealand -- which you'd imagine as having a lot of water -- have issues with water infrastructure and population. I've heard the Bay Area is also facing the prospect of water restrictions... If you do a search on "water restrictions" it doesn't look like this issue is unique: http://www.google.com/search?q=water+restrictions&ie=utf...

Technologies such as desalination don't necessarily solve the issue. It's simply not economic or feasible in most parts of the world. Australia is already heavily invested in water saving technologies - low flow showerheads, low volume toilets, grey-water, rainwater tanks.

There are large areas of Australia that have had their ground water massively overused - causing massive issues with salination (in some places you literally have salt forming on the ground). The fresh water sources in these regions is totally collapsing.

Sorry to go on about it. But where I live, water is a real issue. I can completely imagine it becoming an issue great enough for a country to war over.
It's just a good idea to always have a $20/mo vps unix account. Just far less headache for just twice the price of a shared host. For one thing, it will allow you to have a platform to test several versions of your app; you can run several instances of a web app and use a proxy to direct incoming traffic to one of them based on your own criteria. You have a full blow Unix environment, install every oddball development tool you want, it's just you.
Skype Marriage with SIP, Half Hearted
A starter level VPS account costs $20 a month, which is rounding error next to the amount of engineering effort you'll expend doing a changeover on a live site. I'd move it before you start beta. If it costs you $15 a month extra times a year until you "need" the VPS, oh well, cost of doing business.
So much potential in the title and the opening paragraphs, such underwhelming conclusion.

Summary: "Conficker authors, please destroy Facebook, MySpace and World of Warcraft so I can hangout with my friends face to face".
I'm using the button you can see way at the bottom of this page, which is right below instructions for implementing it. (Copy/paste a line of Javascript as I recall.)

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/articles/rails-seo-tips.htm
Please use Ask HN: in the title of future questions. This way users can instantly recognize when a question is being asked, rather than the default assumption that this is a link.
What's so great about helping the "community"? This is an honest question.

I am European and I moved to California some months ago. I find it both amusing and mysterious that people here in the U.S. talk about "community" so much. I really don't get it.
I've actually gotten a good bit of traffic from Delicious but didn't put 2 and 2 together about the button until you mentioned it. This is great.
How laziness changes thinking in Haskell
How is this different from any other VPN? I am assuming that VPNs normally don't keep logs or destroy them quickly. So I really don't see any major benefit, other than the price and the fact that it is being run by TPB.
Ah. Cool. Thanks a million.
How did you overcome NIH syndrome? my first reaction was to reach for Richard Stevens' volumes and write Etherpad over BSD sockets; a mix between (y)talk and nano (note to self, read up on the various buffer management strategies, roll a little transaction layer and shelf this project under "I'm sure I can do that with an emacs mode ..")
Linux Firefox in general has problems with always wanting to put flash on the top of the z ordering.
Human contact. A social safety net. Social capital. Taking personal responsibility for making the world around you a better place to live.

Civic volunteerism is an old American virtue. It will probably be gone in 50 years, for better or worse.
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Spelling test
Check our spelling test series and single word spelling series - from GL Assessment
Try a place like slicehost.com or linode.com where you can seamlessly upgrade your account over time. Both start around $20 a month, and both will let you instantly upgrade your account. That said -- if you have a good growth trajectory, you will know when you've reached the limit of your current hosting company. But honestly, the most you'd save is about $120 a year, so if your serious about your project, I'd start with a virtual server you can upgrade on the fly, it will cost you less than you spend on 2-3 months of your cellphone service (depending on plan).
I think there was an intriguing question towards the end: How DO you shrink special interest groups?
changing a (theoretically) O(N) algorithm to an O(N log N) algorithm and increasing the number of operations by a factor of 10 nevertheless resulted in the code running twice as fast

Your N is 10^10? That's a big problem.
Pittsburgh Penguins
Pittsburgh Penguins fan site.
I am from the Denver area. So I'm sometimes there during the summer.
"they might arbitrarily change the GAE rules, or prices, or capabilities, or even cancel the service entirely"

The risk of Google doing something to simply enrage GAE developers is very, very low. Is there any non-hypothetical reason why they would do this?
Perhaps we're having a slight misunderstanding as to what we mean when saying "lack of water." By that, I don't mean having to limit showers to 5 minutes or not being able to wash your car every week. I mean not having the bare minimum amount of water to drink and keep from dying of dehydration. There's very few countries that have water problems that are that serious.
> 3-4 of the best years of your life is a hefty price to pay

Those 3-4 aren't really going to be the best unless you're in an environment with young girls, beer, drugs, and class, where you get to meet new people.

What are you going to do, get a job instead?

Don't make me laugh.
From the article

"The weak link in any VPN/anonymity service is always their willingness (or otherwise) to hand over your customer data when pressured under the law. However, with IPREDATOR this should not be an issue since the service is promising to keep no logs of user activity whatsoever."
I'm skeptical. To get meaningful energy transfer in a heat exchanger, you need time for the two material streams to be in thermal contact with each other. This is done by either increasing the surface areas using some porous or tortuitous channel, or just making the channels really long. In either case, it means you have significant pressure drop.

Now, a significant pressure drop in the incoming flow is bad enough, as I like a strong shower. But more concerning, is the pressure drop in the drain, which is already only at atmospheric pressure.

I predict lots of plugged drains and showers that you're wading ankle deep in water. Or... more likely, they found all this out, reduced their pressure-drop, and ended up with a device that doesn't really save that much energy.
One of the great things about your own project is using technologies that you want to work with. Telling the "CTO" he's going to be using PHP/MySQL is going to diminish the attractiveness for some.
Don't friends provide human contact and a social safety net as well?!? Here in the U.S. there seems to be "pressure" for one to interact with neighbors and the surrounding community, and I find that annoying.

I think good will and volunteerism should not be expected of anyone. If good will and volunteerism become a norm, something one is expected to do, then "true good will" and "true volunteerism" (the ones which stem from one's heart, not from any social norms) lose their value.
The PirateBay is somewhat known for announcing new stuff which they don't do afterwards. So until I see the service I don't believe it...

see e.g. http://thepiratebay.org/blog/49, http://thepiratebay.org/blog/69
They need to show some actual Game Footage... I can't imagine that this is going to be any good. I HOPE I AM WRONG, but if when I ask my cell phone to "Call Mom" and it replies with "you said CALL HOME, is this right?" You know the world isn't there yet...
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No, that's exactly what I'm talking about.
Blackboard is awful I have one class that is based almost entirely in it and that class is one of the most annoying because of the website. First it is separated into 20 sections on the side, most of which I do not even use. Another issue if I'm using linux with all the prerequesites I fail the browser check and it tells me to try Firefox3... which I'm using because of the lack of support for other operating systems I almost missed an assignment as it did not attach my document.

Another Issue that really bothers me is the grades, you cannot sort them in any way there is no relative dating just however the teacher enters it in and most don't really care how they enter it, at the very least I'd like to be able to see my total points or perhaps even a comparison between my grade and the average grade, something all my other classes give is averages of large assignments/tests.

The main thing I would like would be something like a simple editor as default and a html editor that actually accepts html code such as bold and paragraphs.

An interface that didn't use massive amounts of javascript to fetch each page would be awesome too but that might be asking a lot.

Id like sections that aren't in use such as calendar or announcements or data kind of things to be unavailable if the teacher has not posted anything in them.

Another good thing would be a way for teachers to change .doc into pages too many times have I seen bullets and numbered lists just copy pasted into a document to lose all formatting.

Thats a lot of what I hate but probably hard to do and not feasable.
As a previous commenter pointed out, the device purportedly saves up to 40% in hot water energy, not consumption. My bad on the incorrect title
Celebrity Questions
Questions regarding famous celebrities
I admit there is some similarity there, and it might be because I didn't fully explain myself, but I would argue that it's neither a perfect conception nor iterative development that creates true greatness, but repetitive rebirth. When you simply build on the past, you aren't considering its true intentions. How many laws are there in the US that are simply reactions to British rule (i.e. safety from the quartering of troops)? Should those laws be held in as high esteem as those laws that are truly based on human rights? Descartes continues in Discourse on Method:

As for the opinions which up to that time I had embraced, I thought that I could not do better than
resolve at once to sweep them wholly away, that I might afterwards be in a position to admit either other
more correct, or even perhaps the same when they had undergone the scrutiny of reason. I firmly believed
that in this way I should much better succeed in the conduct of my life, than if I built only upon old
foundations, and leaned upon principles which, in my youth, I had taken upon trust.

The entirety of Discourse on Method is a very interesting read. You can read the whole document at project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/59). Wikipedia also has a decent write-up (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_on_method).
The two ends of the spectrum are "education for education's sake" and "education for the real world." You can't insist on both.
Lectures by Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg
If water wars become an eventuality, will that then extend to breathable air, as well? Basically, almost any finite resource, right?
Your approach to teaching a curriculum that is custom tailored to an individual's goals is one of those things that makes so much sense in retrospect, but at the same time an approach I have never seen discussed.

Here we have this vast repository of most the world's knowledge, all indexable and cross-referencable, and for the first time in history we have the chance to deliver content in a highly personalized way. All we're missing is that last 10% - a way to aggregate and properly present that data.
I took Applied Statistics 550 with all assignments in R. Caught me up on statistics real fast after I hadn't taken it in about 2 years. Concepts in Probability and Stochastic Modeling, Huggins and Keller-Mcnulty. Its good and short. Doesn't have the R assignments though.
I've had online classes that were (essentially) normal classes, just online. Classes were set for a specific time, Lectures, notes, files were broadcast and shared via Adobe's Breeze software (its name changed.. can't remember what to). Classes were still held on campus, but I was unable to make most of the classes. It was one of my better online learning experiences.

I guess this example is better thought of as a web-enhanced course rather than fully online,though.
Etherpad rocks. Just today I was thinking that it would be great to be able to use it as a platform - e.g. imagine a real time wiki.
If you had read through the top headlines on Hacker News before asking, you would already have the answer: http://spellr.us/
So what areas strike you as the worst? East Cleveland?

That area had big problems before the crisis started. For some reason, people seem to have given up on it long ago.

Also, I am not sure that having a professional landlord would ensure timely repairs. I lived in a house in Cleveland Heights where the landlord's philosophy was to wait to make repairs until a problem ballooned out of control.

Instead of fixing a slow washing machine drain pipe, he waited until it was completely clogged. At that point, doing laundry meant a flooded basement. My roommates and I had to go down there with buckets to bail it out until he had the problem fixed a month later. Every time we called him he would assure that someone was "stopping by next week."

We also had cracks in our plaster walls that spread so much that the entire wall crumbled to bits. This happened in several places. His "handyman" came buy and did the worst repair job I have ever witnessed. It almost looked worse that the bare lath!
Signals of selection in the human genome: important new paper
More likely: -- the content for the front page is served by Arc, whereas the static media is served from a separate Apache instance.

Arc's current HTTP server libary (src.arc) only supports HTTP/1.0.
The best first book on R I've read is Gelman and Hill's "Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models" (http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/arm/). It's more focused on regression and Bayesian methods than basic probability, but it's a great book that's priced very competitively (only $39.99).
Money quote: "This is the most important recent paper in the field of human evolutionary genetics - a thorough and careful analysis of the signatures of positive natural selection left in our genome by the last 10-40,000 years of adaptation, using a population sample that is far broader than those used in previous studies (53 populations rather than 4)."
Worm using Facebook Application?
Yep, You're absolutely right. I too am a bit skeptical about new claims of natural language understanding softwares; However we need to remain optimistic and expect surprises since NLP is still in its infancy.
How Skype gets round firewalls
Well written, humorous intro to statistics using R: http://www.amazon.com/Statistics-Introduction-Michael-J-Craw...
According to the Yslow developers, even thse replies could be made far mor cache friendly by using the correct headers, especially by removing the ETags-header that forces a conditional GET on every acccess and replacing it with an Expires-header in the far future that allows to reuse the cached version without server interaction (assuming the images are not meant to be highly dynamic, then ETags would make sense).

So from a caching perspective, HN has got it exactly backwards: it doesn't use ETags on the dynamic pages, where it might help, but uses it on the static content, where it might be detrimental. But I wouldn't bet on the gains you'll get from fixing this to be measurable.
haha, yes, I would think the CTO would be able to decide on the technologies?
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Cofounder Search (in Bay Area)
I am in search for a cofounder with the following qualities:

i) clearly communicate their motivation for doing a startup (because i've learned from the past that only rock-solid motivation can endure the challenges)

ii) clearly communicate what types of business models scale, what types DON'T scale, and why.

iii) naturally inclined to see large problems that need to be solved in multi-billion dollar industries.

iv) clearly communicate what their weaknesses are. and then their strengths. (because weaknesses are harder, it goes first)

a little background about me related to entrepreneurship experience:

i) software engineer who has founded a consulting company (quickly realized it does not scale) and co-founded a social-dating company (realized the lesson of being selective with partners as not every smart guy has the motivation for starting & scaling a business)

ii) i am currently focused on the mobile space and have 2 software engineers (staffed) developing a mobile solution for the iphone. The target customer is the online publishing industry.

iii) Weakness - Ability to identify large problems that need to be solved in the market. Strength - Solving the problem and rapidly delivering the solution.

If you feel you would be a great fit as a cofounder, feel free to drop me a line at ak2max@gmail.com.