skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many CS algorithms become less useful when questions start getting answered with "maybe".

Very true, although I conjecture that Many CS problems become more interesting when questions start getting answered with "maybe".
What specifically don't you like about the awesome bar? Just curious.
Findjango Redesign & Slides for django-nyc
I don't think that publishing research as open access will affect book publishing. The reason for the existence of commercial journals was the printing costs and distribution. With the internet this has basically disappeared.

Books, esp. undergraduate college texts will remain extremely profitable for the foreseeable future.
They're probably testing their register-and-post-spam software.
"A lifestreaming thing that let's you..." Such a shame. So much care into typography and layout, then they forget to check their grammar.
If you're interested in the Git internals, I'd highly suggest reading John Wiegley's "Git from the bottom up":

http://www.scribd.com/doc/6377254/Git-from-the-bottom-up-by-...
I'd love to learn more about how convertible debt (like this) works for early stage tech startups.
Robert, I'm very interested in how you got the rights to do this game. I don't see any contact information in your account here.

Can you please contact me- cdavis@darkenedsky.com?
This is a good guide for someone getting started with git, but does not really explain why you might want to use git instead of some other version control system, such as svn. The title of this work implies it's something more than an introductory tutorial, but that's really all it is.
Ours is not the first society to value an economy of words.
Care to explain "Baader-Meinhof phenomenon"?
{} means object
[] means array
So you would not be able to just drop them, since they mean two different things.
Morrant March press releases
Morrant’s March product releases
This looks like an interesting alternative for what I was going to be applying to YC with during the next round.

Especially with the New York locale, as that was one of the 3 areas I've been thinking about that would have the culture for what I'm attempting.

Interesting prospect that's for sure. I guess I'll have to keep it in mind as we're gearing up to get going.

That being said, is this only financing and nothing else? If so it doesn't look to be as attractive as YC in my personal opinion.
I'd really like to know what the hacker news community thinks of this letter. I was recently employed by a large investment bank in a situation similar to that described by the letter writer: working in a profitable business that was overshadowed by the losses generated by a few people in a group that was completely unrelated. In my case, approximately 50 people out of tens of thousands were responsible for many billions of dollars of losses, and the company was even able to report profitable quarters over the last year and a half or so because of the vast amounts of money earned by those in other business units. People need to understand that these sorts of companies are very diverse and that equity and commodity business lines have been profitable, even as a small portion of the fixed income business has lost tremendous amounts of money. As someone who has moved on to a much smaller startup financial company, I'm very happy to see the acrimony that is heaped on people indiscriminately because of their employer: this means it will be easier to recruit top notch people who are sick of the bullshit. However, as a taxpayer, I'm quite concerned that proposals like the AIG 90% bonus tax (which will apply to any firm that took, or was forced to take, government money) will end up destroying firms in which the government has invested significant money. Those employees have a choice as to where to work, and driving them to work for other companies where they will be paid appropriately will only leave taxpayers holding the bag; after all of the good employees have left, they will have invested billions of dollars in a company that only serves as a repository for shitty mortgage bonds or credit default swaps or CMOs or whatever the screwups decided to place big bets on. I'm not sure what the right answer is, maybe I should just accept that large amounts of money are going to be flushed down the toilet because it is a politician's job to react to whatever headline pops up on the media's radar instead of coming up with a well reasoned plan and executing it, but it sickens me to see how much this process has been driven by media coverage that can't afford to take the time to properly explain the complexities of the situation. Believe me when I tell you that there really are many smart, motivated people working in this industry and that companies will live or die by the quality of people that they have running their businesses, just as in the tech community. I guess that's all I have to say, take it for what you will.
They also tend to flicker on and off, I'm reserving judgment on this until some time passes.
I'm not an American, so I don't know what a 1300 score says about a person.

Here's a current chart showing how many students in the most recently reported high school class (students who graduated from high school in 2008) scored at different levels as a sum of scores from the critical reading section (200 to 800 standard score points possible, scores rounded to the nearest ten) and from the math section (same scoring) when they took the SAT for their best individual total score for one sitting.

http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/sat_perce...

Although you are not an American, you have a good understanding of what else college admission committees look for besides high test scores alone. Your other comments mention several issues that admission committees claim to look at when deciding on applications.

Stanford's most recently reported interquartile ranges for SAT section scores of enrolled first-year students are here:

http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.j...

Please note that a few years ago, when the student mentioned in the newspaper article was admitted, the ranges would have been a bit lower.
Well kids, let this be a lesson to you on letting your adobe flash loving graphic artist design a GUI.

Horrid, horrid, horrid. Would prefer to use Twitter through 'netcat | egrep' than this abomination.
Quote from Chris Blizzard:

"The proposed spec [...] is a pretty light wrapper on top of OpenGL ES 2.0, with some changes to support some JavaScript pleasantries."

http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=1207

So it's more like a port than a new standard.

I'm also not sure how much your complaint applies to HTML 5 since that was originated by browser vendors wanting to standardize the new stuff they were already implementing and to reverse engineer and then compatibly implement how old stuff was implemented in Internet Explorer.
Anxiety, Depression, Technology, and Me
Im sorry, but unless this 'math' is going to educate these terrorists, it's not going to do anything. How do you beat something that has no concern for self preservation?
Kind of sounds like the race to find psychics during the World Wars...
These postings look like spammers testing the curation of the forum to see what they can post.
Philly Emerging Technology For the Enterprise Conference - Tomorrow and Friday
Reading the article, it sounded an awful lot like this means we can have timing signals that run at 1000GHz. This doesn't mean anything at all about our ability to have other components actually running at that speed.
Clojure and The Robot Apocalypse
Conference Session on Clojure
I attend(ed? graduating soon!) a college where all students received a full tuition scholarship - regardless of socioeconomic status. Besides being an effective "carrot" to attract students to a new engineering school (or, in some cases, persuading parents to allow their children to attend a new school), it was developed to help alleviate such disparities.

Yet I see the same difficulties as Stanford - the school is very competitive for admission, and there is little chance for some students to attend simply because there is no way they could have prepared themselves to be competitive.

As a side note, despite a generous endowment, my college is investigating charging a portion of tuition. Unfortunately, the harsh economy makes for some harsh decisions.
Personally I haven't used Last.fm. But until recently I was a big fan of LaunchCast. Unfortunately Yahoo decided to shutdown it's own music infrastructure and teamed up with CBS: http://ymusicblog.com/blog/2009/02/21/the-new-launchcast-rad...

The new service is nowhere near as good as it used to be. I could rate the artist, the album, and the track separately and I could listen to My station based on my ratings. I used it for more than a year and really liked it. With a new service I can rate tracks only, my old ratings are not supported by a recommendation engine, and MyStation feature is gone.

Initially I thought it was a part of Yahoo! strategy change (they outsourced paid music subscriptions to Rhapsody last year). But now it seems to me that it might be a policy shift withing CBS itself. The Yahoo! partnership was announced just a month ago, the change was abrupt and totally unexpected.

I only wonder why not just replace LaunchCast with co-branded Y!-Last.fm altogether.
Provable security could still be a major selling point for a web framework. (If it were implemented in a way that didn't compromise other functionality.)
Downmodded because the tone of this comment isn't really appropriate for HN. Other than being Flash based, what do you find distasteful about the GUI? Answering that question would be both interesting to other commenters and helpful to the OP.
How Third-Party Licensing Can Ruin Your Launch
sounds like good advice to me
Tokyo is on my list. But it seems to have taken a back seat for the moment.

Getting a working visa in Japan is rather difficult (unless your an English teacher or highly sought executive). The process basically boils down to a company deciding to sponsor a foreign applicant.

I had plans on moving to Japan on a 90 day tourist visa once I graduated. I would use those 90 days to pound the pavement of Tokyo looking for a job. Obviously, given this small window of opportunity, I'd need to make sure to have all my cards in order. My success would depend on the strength of my resume as well as the health of the job market in Tokyo.

At this point, neither are where I want them to be. In addition to that, I've only passed JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) Level 2. I need to pass Level 1 before I am considered fluent. Thankfully, most of the cities I'm considering moving to have not only thriving Japanese communities, but also proctor the JLPT once a year.

So yes, sometime in the future I would like to eventually move back to Tokyo. But at the moment I don't see that happening.
Perhaps we may soon start seeing clockless processors entering the mainstream?
HN NYC: Spring Meetup at Shake Shack, 4/3
I'm going to be there. Anyone else going? Would be great to meet up.
Well, assuming a current cpu core is ~30mm square, you would need to shrink the feature size by two orders of magnitude... so current 45nm features would need to shrink to ~500 picometers.

According to wikipedia, a 'standard atom' is between 60 and 600 picometers in diameter, so yeah, you'd need transistors the size of atoms.

Of course, this is assuming the same general processor design. You could go 3D and get everything closer together without shrinking transistors as much... or you could change the design all together.
Yea, so the open/unix way is better than windows. I thought we figured this out about a decade ago? How is this news exactly?
Was planning on going, overridden by new sales opportunities. It should be good, colleagues went last year and they were positive about it. I went to the fall forecast they had in Malvern and it twas great.
From the point of view of a person at an instant in time, libraries are a concern. But when we're talking about Scheme being displaced by Python at MIT, where Scheme was developed 30 years ago, we really ought to ask what's been happening to Scheme during that 30 years.

The problem, at MIT and elsewhere, is that hackers don't like hacking Scheme enough. Python has more libraries than Scheme now, but that's not the main thing that made more people use it. People use it because they prefer the language. This is something that Sussman and others at MIT should be trying to understand, but it doesn't strike me that they are trying to understand it. They're just saying "Python has a better robotics library -- oh well!" as if this were something completely random that they have no control over. That doesn't seem like the sort of attitude that produced Scheme in the first place.

My point of contention with the comment I replied to is the idea that fixing the problem is a question of writing more libraries for Scheme. Writing or interfacing to libraries for numerics, 3D graphics, etc. is a trivial task compared to making a language hackers love.

Now, maybe hackers' distaste for Scheme is Scheme's fault, or maybe it's hackers'; but in any case, the issue is with the core language, not the libraries. And based on my personal experience with Scheme I would say that enough of the fault lies on Scheme's side that it's worth fixing.
Modern processors already run 250 times faster than the memory system is able to feed data into it. Caches can't help to cover this lag much. I wonder how that machine might run things faster than what current processors are doing unless this memory speed problem is fixed.

By the way, human brain works at 10 Hz only (not even KHz) and can still process information faster than all these CPUs.
wikileaks published the lists of banned sites used by Australia and other countries web censorship.
Germany and other Eu countries are doing the same.

These lists allegedly contain sites with child porn so listing the sites is the same as distributing child porn.

Of course since the list is secret, if the government was to slip a few other sites on the list - you wouldn't know except for wikileaks.
How Some Places Fare Better in Hard Times
Second version of the original book is available for free online too.

http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/
I think the "it is one line of code" needs to be challenged. If you want a reliable, white-listed mail service, it is a whole bunch of upfront and ongoing work with postmasters to deliver a high successful-delivery rate service to your users.

And that's just one example.
Yeah? Some quotes from the HTML 5 proposal: SQLTransactionCallback, UndoManager, RemoteEventTarget. My point stands.
First Spring get-together of 2009.

Looking forward to seeing you guys there!
That is a great demonstration that Scheme's problems are not Lisp problems. I'm hoping that we're about to see a lot more experimentation with new Lisp dialects.
Hmmm, do you really want to provide the username and password to all your social networking sites to these folks? I don't.
This article is inaccurate. It makes it seem as if YouTube is no longer blocked in Turkey when, last I checked, it still is...
Did you read the article? It's about the UNIX trademark.
Poor guy. Maybe he should take some of his $700k to a lawyer instead of crying for public sympathy. It's about the scales. He may have a legal right to be upset. But with presumably a few millions in the bank he should have the dignity to know that he 's still on the bright side of life.
Hopefully, this time we'll be able to get one common seating area, and not have to segregate people to small groups in multiple areas.
I hadn't read that OS X had become 'real UNIX' (trying to do a 'The Wire' reference there). That's a very smart move by Apple, as it will help them to attract OS X ports of traditional UNIX software, such as the big databases, and will certainly help establish them on the server market.
From Wikipedia: The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon occurs when a person, after having learned some (usually obscure) fact, word, phrase, or other item for the first time, encounters that item again, perhaps several times, shortly after having learned it.

In this case, after finishing the book I noticed several articles on news sites talking about the author. Perhaps this would be better categorized under the recency effect.
Don't be too quick to blame this on political fear - China probably just wants to increase productivity in the workplace. Next on the chopping block.. Facebook, Digg, and Reddit.
Simply saying "tumblr.com" isn't useful; better to say "startatspark.tumblr.com". Certain domains need more than just the primary domain listed.
I think modifying the nginx memcached module would have been ideal. Running a new server that does almost nothing does not seem like a great way to go.
IT giants back up open source 3D Web
Why can the public not understand that successful people usually have obtained a level of wealth such that their "getting out of bed in the morning" price is greater than most people's monthly earnings? Someone working at McDonald's wouldn't take an extra shift for $0.25/hour. However, someone starving with no other means to support himself would fight for it. Why is it so hard to understand that these incentives scale up?
What is the advantage of polling over comet? I guess the real question is how often is a user re-polling the same value, without it changing.

-Ben
wasn't this posted earlier? i can't find it... did it get deleted?

edit: yep. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=531424 anyone know why?
Food, Glorious Food Myths
>> "From what I have seen, all comet solutions are very hacky, quirky and very hard to scale. The scaling is especially hard since the whole web-platform is built around the request-response model."

I disagree about this. There's nothing hacky/quirky about comet, and it can scale really well.
Some numbers from a Mibbit backend:

Peak connected users: 4,000
Peak HTTP Req/s: 1,500

HTTP requests per day: 44 million
Packets sent per day: 42 million
Packets recv per day: 51 million

(On a single 1.4GB VPS). Using *OMG* java!

If you're not using comet, that HTTP req figure would be way higher, as a far larger number of HTTP requests would be unuseful (no data available). Wasting time, bandwidth, etc As well as obviously adding latency. With comet, the data is available in most instances as soon as the server has it ready. With standard polling, the user has to wait for the next poll.

Comet is pretty easy to scale once you understand exactly what is going on, and how best to organize things. Mibbit uses a keep-alive long polling XHR setup which works really well. The keep-alive ensures that most of the time, you just have a tcp/ip connection open from server to client, with some HTTP request/response spam every so often, and the actual packets.

Having said that, I wouldn't use any of the open source comet things I've seen out there.

(I do plan to open source Mibbit at some point, which might be useful for people).
Opening board meetings to the entire company
"I have enough cash in Swiss bank accounts that my grandchildren won't have to worry about paying for private school"

He probably has that much money, but there's no need for him to use Swiss bank accounts. It's not like anyone is accusing AIG of compensating employees under the table.

"He was shocked, absolutely shocked...."

Why does it matter if he knew or not. The janitors might have known as well, but we aren't attempting to garnish their wages as punishment. After all, he swept the floors as he was told. The issue isn't knowledge -- it's control. One might have a duty of some sort to report fraud, but poor risk management isn't illegal. So, how is this guy any different than the hypothetical janitor? The guy who wrote the letter claims that his business unit was legitimately profitable.
Probably because the discussion was absolute trash.
The thing that is frustrating about this to me is the following:

Imagine that two years ago, a giant hurricane hit somewhere and AIG's insurance business wasn't properly reserved/diversified. The losses were just too huge to absorb.

Now, since this is two years ago, the AIG Financial Product's CDS trades look immensely profitable, so Joseph Cassano screams about the fact that he had nothing to do with the losses and he deserves his full bonus.

I don't see how that situation is two different from the current one, just with the players switched around. Of course we don't know that this guy's trades are bad, but we also don't know that they are really profitable at the level he claims (hundreds of millions of dollars a year in his group).
I appreciate the comment. To be fair, this was intended to be an introductory tutorial--it was written to teach Git to a friend of mine. Its purpose was to introduce Git in terms of underlying concepts rather than as recipes of commands, as most tutorials only provide. I'm not particularly of the view that "understanding" is the province of experts; novices are perfectly capable of grokking a system, given proper instruction.
this one's going to be different? :)

i mean, thats why we have the ability to vote, right? to shape and fuel the discussion how we want and in the directions we want.

sometimes it gets "ugly". sometimes it gets divisive.
I'll see if I can get there earlier to grab some seats. Anyone else want to meet a bit earlier to help?
anyone know why?

The discussion was stupid and the article is completely off topic and uninteresting? It's more worrisome that it has been voted to the #1 spot at the moment. WTF, HN?
Don't tell me. Show me. Please translate the example into s-expressions.
flagged for being a duplicate of a dead article. you guys should know better than this.
And especially so when the article is off-topic reddit-bait, which is, after all, one of the reasons to keep that sort of thing out of this site. IMO, of course.
Part of the reason why that happened is because everyone got there at different times. When we ask for a table for 10 people, and then fifteen minutes later there are 15 people, and then another fifteen minutes later there are 20 people, it creates problems. The only real way to solve it would be to make the event reservation only with a $20 cover, so that way we could book a large table in advance and the restaurant would still get money for the seats even if some people didn't show up.
Entertaining. Yet the author of that op-ed clearly forgets that We The People are bailing out his company.

While I sympathize with his complaints, if AIG is healthy enough to be paying out bonuses, then they're too healthy to be needing any sort of bailout at all.
Remember, if you haven't already joined the NYC mailing list you can do so here:

http://groups.google.com/group/nyyc
I'm somewhat disappointed that the author doesn't recall Microsoft's XENIX:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2062
If you aren't Japanese, Japan is not a good place to further your career.
the information I have about the human brain is that neurons works at about 200hz (there is variability).

It's not faster than CPUs in many things, but where it is, it wins because it is massively parallel (so that helps for pattern recognition, but not to solve difficult linear equations).
37signals home page designs over the years
Though I like the concept..a lot! I actually think that the little images on the pictures is going to become annoying... real fast. It was due to come though.
Your sign-up page doesn't mention an email verification step. It took me a while to figure it out. I finally did figure it out because after I'd tried to login a couple of time (without a good error message), and tried to register the second time I was told my email address was in use. Then I used the password reminder link, which finally lead me to my spam folder.

In my spam folder was not only the password reminder but also the account verification. Not such a good user experience.

On a side note, the fact that your emails to me go immediately in my spam (on my @yahoo.com account) doesn't give me confidence in using your email service.
Unladen Swallow: Making CPython Faster Using LLVM