skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The fact that is has been approximately constant over such a long period of time is what I find most surprising. I would naively expect many of the improving factors that you mentioned would lead to an increase in free throw percentages as well. Clearly, there are some teams which hit >75% and even occasionally close to 80%. I like the idea that there is a tradeoff in that every hour spent training for free throws leads to a decline in other skills. But still what's special about the 69% number? I would like to see how much time the 75% teams spend doing free throw drills compared to their competitors.
Anybots said yesterday during their live demo / Q&A session that they were going to use their QA bot to schmooze with folks before/after the conf.

Does anyone have any more details? I don't remember them mentioning a url or anything...
> Celebrity obsession is a foolish passion that I've never understood.

I think it's a form of escapism. Not everyone does it all the time but enough people do it that it's acceptable.
"If you have to ask..."

But catch up here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon

We'll see you in Sealand.
SEC charges E*Trade, 5 others, for front running
I don't see anything particularly dark about the excerpt quoted. What are you criticizing in particular? Maybe I missed it.
In Firefox, View -> Page style -> No style does the job.
Doesn't look like Wolfram|Alpha is even breathing hard.
Tangible virtual goods.

It's something I can hold in my hand. It instantly crosses the barrier from "that's something I've seen on the internet" to "that's something I can show you in my hand right now" without having any duplication cost. All kinds of win.
Should We Do "Computer Science"?
Not that I am against giving people a second chance (and hey, abused youth and all), but to explain it by saying we are all criminals anyway so it is no biggie doesn't really raise my level of trust.
That's sort of the best thing one could say about this
Yes, that's true. Presumably it will be on the Anybots stream.

http://www.justin.tv/anybots
Ok, that was completely unjustified. How did he turn it into "linkbait"? He has stopped blogging except for the occasional post which he deems enough to re-post to his blog. It seemed like a very insightful entry showing compassion and understanding for others -- something your comment was not.
Knowingly having a hacker in an organization is a very difficult predicament. Yes people should be given a second chance, but is it worth all the possible negative press. I would not have kept him on. I don't know the guys though.
This is sort of brilliant. Presumably Apple vets know how to get through Apple's legendary red tape, and they should know how to make the most of the hardware and the devkit.
Not Lisp again....
I don't find it much of an issue. Maybe your graphics card/monitor's gamma value is too high?
Dont' worry about being that guy. You were very much in the right.
Ouch. $2 an episode would be harsh for me.

Our cable bill is like, $80 and that includes internet. So maybe $40 of that is for TV.

And I watch a bunch of different shows. CSI x 3, Law and Order, Bones, House, NCIS, Fringe, The Mentalist, Psych, Criminal Minds, Numbers, Law and Order, Lie to Me.

At $2 a show, per week, that'd set me back.. about $110 a month!

Far more than I pay for cable right now.
Calacanis' reaction is an interesting one. As he states himself it was the risky, not socially acceptable, decision to make. His telling of the story makes it seem that he made the right decision. I would agree. A little grace, which by definition can only be shown to someone completely unworthy of it, is encouraging. I am fascinated by my own reaction when I read stories like this. Why is it that justice waived produces such a positive response in me? I think it is because my experience shows that I too need grace more often than not. Whether its something as small as being allowed to turn in an assignment late, or a boss who overlooks a broken rule that they had every right to enforce, I need a measure of grace on an almost daily basis. So to Mr. Calacanis: Thank you for reminding us that there is grace out there when we need it.
Where are my $2 episodes that I can download legally?

I can't tell if this is a rhetorical question. Most shows I want to watch cost $1.99 at the iTunes store...
Scratch has been used with great success in the 5th grade computer class at our school. Last year they were slogging through Logo with little motivation. When we switched to Scratch, they loved it.
Honest Question: is this at all helpful as a hack for starting on a new language?
I am using http://labs.peritor.com/webistrano to deploy my php stuff. It is capistrano + UI. I am very happy with it.
I'm sad to think that they would have cut him out of the process if they had known.

I sort of hate our culture which demonizes anyone who has ever been prosecuted by the justice system and quickly shuffles them into a corner of "people who we can't legally round up and gas but are just as worthless". It's really unhealthy to think that decent, worthwhile people can't ever make mistakes in judgement (and learn from them!) and to presume that the law is always morally correct. It's really a great disservice to the idea that we are trying to rehabilitate people.
It's sort of sad how technologically uninformed most people are, considering how important this stuff has become.
The Real Reason for Microsoft's TomTom Lawsuit
Q4 VC Report - 45% "Down Rounds" in December
How to Turn Cloud Computing Into Big Business—A Peek Inside Amazon Web Services
Oh, please. Jason Calacanis does not need my compassion.

It seemed clear to me that the title was deliberately worded to be provocative. This is a common characteristic of linkbait.

Given Calacanis' past history of search engine spamming, I'm far less forgiving with him than I would be with someone else. Forgive me for "misinterpreting" his intent.
Whither The Fart Apps?: BlackBerry App World Paid Apps Must Cost at Least $2.99
Ustream Launches Mobile Video Broadcasting Apps
Social Web Blog: Creative Uses of Google Moderator
I wonder if he feels differently about point #16 in his famous "How to save money running a startup" ( http://calacanis.com/2008/03/07/how-to-save-money-running-a-... ) from last year:

16) Don’t waste money on recruiters. Get inside of linkedin and Facebook and start looking for people -- it works better anyway.
The only reason is because it was 1997 when they hired him
Automating LaTeX Beamer with make and sed
I know 'innocent until proven guilty' and all that, but I'm still pretty surprised that a judge would allow someone who is about to go on trial for computer fraud and hacking find work at a computer company and use the internet.
Why Most Corporations Fail at Technology
Readability: http://lab.arc90.com/2009/03/readability.php
Open Source Prediction Markets - $1,295 prize
I wish I knew. They're usually the same people who buy Apples made by MAC
I used Vlad for a while and liked it okay. It's a bit simpler (using 'real' ssh instead of net-ssh, and rake for running tasks instead of its own thing).

I ended up going back to Capistrano for git submodule support.

They're pretty interchangeable from a user perspective. I just use Capistrano everywhere now.
Better Grades Through Cash
Tap Tap Revenge 2 hits #1 on third day, nearing 500k downloads
Care to elaborate?

I see people are saying that the hierarchical address-assignment is to some extent going out the window, but apart from that, how is IPv6 routing going to be a bigger mess than the current IPv4 routing?
Two quick and unfiltered thoughts:
Host photos of actual high profile events (i.e. a conference, a concert) and link to this on the front page to show unregistered users what the site is capable of.

Add a tagline to the divvyshot logo in the top left.
I don't see it as the fault of individuals, more the fault of the industry.
I loved this same course (spring '87 for me), but I wasn't impressed with the speed. I came away thinking Scheme was for fun and C was for practical programming. I've come around since then, and I don't have any performance concerns about my Scheme-based web site.
YC'S Angel Conference @ 1.30pm PST on Justin TV
I would say this article is discussing two separate problems: (1) the gulf between research and practical software development, and (2) low-quality C.S. graduates.

IMHO, the first is not really a problem, or at least not a big one. Part of the way a field advances is that researchers are free to try out any old idea, to see if it is any good. Most of them aren't, but we don't know which are worthwhile until we try them out. So it helps that researchers are disconnected from the process of making salable products. "Make something that sells in two months" is not a good way to get people to try out interesting new ideas.

The result is a slow filtering of ideas from research into practice. Occasionally, a university researcher comes up with something that the programmer on the street can immediately pop into a product (RSA encryption, bump mapping, Introsort, ...) but this is not the norm; nor, I think, should we expect it to be.

The second problem (low-quality C.S. graduates) is more serious. The writer's suggestions are not particularly new; they amount to putting more of what is often called "software engineering" into the C.S. curriculum. And part of the problem there is that it is difficult to do large projects in a university course setting. When you don't do large projects, all that stuff (teams, complexity management, ...) is not really needed. So, while this second problem is worth pointing out, I don't think there are going to be any quick fixes for it.
Isn't it interesting that this country, which was filled up with everything from very low skilled to very highly skilled immigrants in the 17th, 18th and 19th century, that owes EVERYTHING to immigrants now has such a trouble of letting people from everywhere come in and live their American Dream?
Removing the cap on h-1b visa is a very good first step.
what about all the other people that would not qualify for h-1b but are still very skilled and/or ambitious?

Of course people are afraid of losing their job to foreigners, but if you look at the big scheme of things: every worker is also a consumer. Meaning every immigrant and his family will also buy more American products, go to the hairdresser, pay taxes etc. and thus indirectly create work for other people.

I really hope Obama is free market enough to make the moves in that direction.
Roughly equivalent to PayPal: https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/about?nodeId=6022

You don't have to settle up immediately, though. We see this being really useful for people who pay each other back and forth. Run a tab with your friends, and only settle up when one of you needs the cash.

And yes...the Amazon Payments setup is a little rough. We're giving them feedback to see if we can smooth it out a little.
What does the name mean? I don't see it on his site.
There are things that I don't understand about this story.

I don't understand why Calacanis' choice was between firing his trusted CTO and retaining a convicted computer felon.

I don't understand how Mahalo could have checked any reference, let alone 3-5, and not found out that Schiefer is one of the most famous computer felons in California.

I don't understand why Calacanis is characterizing something that Schiefer did in 2005, in his mid-20's, as the actions of a "stupid kid".

I don't understand how Calacanis arrives at his estimation that Schiefer did only 0.0000001% of the damage he could have with his botnet. Schiefer stole random Paypal accounts and used them to buy things, and passed stolen Paypal accounts on to his acquaintances. What's the "worse" thing you can do with a botnet? At least the DDoS extortion botnets target gambling sites, and not your mom.

For that matter, I don't understand how Calacanis can equate what Schiefer did to the dumb things lots of teenagers do on computer networks (and, for that matter, on conference room floors). Schiefer wasn't a "hacker". He's a carder.

(As a side-note to Calacanis: sniffing people's passwords at conferences? Also illegal!)

Calacanis says Schiefer was supervised in his work at Mahalo. Is there someone who isn't supervised there? I don't understand how Mahalo believes they had the capability to supervise someone who can manage a 250,000-host botnet.

Unfortunately, I do understand why Calacanis thinks he doesn't handle sensitive information. He doesn't see the link between tens of thousands of email-password pairs and those people's bank accounts. Just a wild guess, but I'm thinking the guy who steals the Paypal accounts out of bot-infected Windows boxes can make that leap.

This is just such a weird post. I guess I can understand not seeing "contrition". But Calacanis seems proud that this happened. It's just head-explody weird.
Trends on Twitter
That Old Master? It’s at the Pawnshop
Alternate headline:

"In the worst economy since the Great Depression, the median fund-raising startup is worth more than ever."
The thing is, it's not important for the users. I still have to use IE6 occasionally while at college (although this is only the case on the ThinClients, everything else is on IE7) but apart from lacking tabs there's not a lot (on the face of it) from IE7.

Important for web developers and those that use the internet frequently but not for those that only use the net occasionally.
"Due to high demmand for this content we are unable to connect you at this time. Contact your ISP and request that they peer with justin.tv to increase service. You can still access this content if you pay for a subscription to justin.tv."

:(
They talked about this a month ago with the new CEO, and it is an interesting move, but I wonder how much it'll hurt them from a branding perspective...

omgpop is definitely shorter and easier to remember than iminlikewithyou, but I wonder how far along do you have to be into your startup before it becomes hard to say how to get mindshare plus pagerank from an old name back? should be interesting to see the compete graphs: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/iminlikewithyou.com+omgpop....

does anyone know of any other startups that have done this successfully?
Rehabilitate people? He was sentenced this week. The investigation started in 2005; he didn't even cop a plea until 2007. I'm all for rehabilitation, but if you can't make a judgement call not to put a convicted computer felon in a sysadmin role when he's still pending sentencing, when can you? The relativism here is just dizzying.
Who uses Cyc?
What makes it a good name? Personally I think its pretty terrible. Does not mean much of anything, makes me think of a celebrity blog or something. The domain is hard to pronounce. If you don't use the OMG acronym its completely meaningless. Always amazes me when companies with millions in funding put their sites on such crap domains.
Robot Programmed to Love Goes too Far
Actually, people with a criminal past (or general oddities that are looked down upon by corporate americal) are often a good choice for a small startup trying to save money. My company often would be someone's 'opportunity' to prove themselves after a major setback in life.

They are motivated, willing to work for cheap, and appreciate the opportunity so much more than someone 'willing to take a paycut' to join your startup. And when times get tough they will be your most loyal employees.

In a startup where cash is tight and the outlook is 'hazy', an employees loyalty is priceless.
[O'Reilly] Bulk Data Downloads: A Breakthrough in Government Transparency
I don't understand how the contrast -- using category theory to derive notions of computation and something attempting to patch up Perl's object system -- relates to the rest of the essay.

I don't mean to be coy, but what's the point? Is it that business skills are important, too, and that universities (and their CS departments in particular) are underserving the computing industry? That's what one of the comments (http://use.perl.org/comments.pl?sid=42485&cid=67709) seems to indicate. The American education system needs some work, but I think it's a mistake to see a university education as vocational training: the "fields" in a university don't correspond to "fields" in the world. It's a coincidence that computer science roughly corresponds to a field in high demand these days.
It's chat speak, clearly. OMG = oh my god. Pop is popular and happy.

It could also have been JAMLOL or KTHXBBQ, though http://ohai.com is taken by another company I'm looking forward to tracking.
Will there be a download available? Justin.tv never works smoothly for me.
I would consider this smart P.R. John Schiefer was sentenced yesterday (3/4/09), and the story seemed to break today.

John was actually convicted for identity theft, fraud, and stealing bank account info. So the charges were pretty serious. Infoworld makes it sound like he just used the bank account info to pay for domain registration and web server space. It seems from the report the biggest victim was a company he scammed 19k out of for installing software on people's computers. So while it looks like the damage could have been a lot worse, the charges are very serious.

But anyway, for whatever reason, Jason decided to keep John on as an employee. People deserve second chances, so I'm willing to believe that John might be a good guy who just really screwed up. So I could accept that Jason might have good reason for keeping John on.

Since the story just broke, the information is pretty basic, and right now the only link between Mahalo and John is from Jason's blog. But of course that would change. Soon journalists are going to be mentioning that John was employed at Mahalo. And now Jason has taken charge of that bit of the story. He has been relatively open and defended his decision. So I see the blog has a good attempt to minimize the negative P.R. from John Schiefer getting convicted.

Info World:http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/12/17/50FE-busted-botmen...
I wanted to make a funny remark, but Urban Dictionary is way better:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pta

BTW I think the original term is PUA = Pick Up Artist:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickup_artist
How Much Does a Decent Designer Make?
The title is misleading. I had thought he was explaining how people should give felons--something I can relate to personally, though I'm not a felon--a second chance. But like the OP said, it really was a story about a hiring mistake bordering on fraud.
google did pretty well out of a weird name
Let's put Wolfram and Lenat together; maybe their ambition will reach critical mass and create some sort of black hole.
I do agree that the industry plays a large part in the continuation of bad practices. I'm always amazed at how apathetic some browser developers have been in responding to developer requests. It seems that, ultimately, the browser developers would benefit from more websites working on their product.

At the same time I'm optimistic that as users become aware of some of the great plug-ins that are available for Firefox and the great speed and usability of Safari and Chrome, they'll be more inclined to finally make the switch.
Most likely not. My employer (and me, by extension) gives preference to applicants with advanced technical degrees. The specifics of what courses you've taken are far less important than how well you understand the coursework or how you've managed to apply what you learned if you're not fresh out of school.

I expect you to be able to explain theory or practical concepts with the depth of someone with an MS as opposed to someone with a BS.

IOW, if you just cruised through the program to get a piece of paper that says Master of Science on it, but have no understanding of what you supposedly learned, you ain't workin' here :-)
An idea for combining chatbots with social networking and getting everyone "programming" in the process.
I'm thinking about a new version of the Chatbot Game based on social networking.

In particular, when you chat with a bot, only chatbot rules created by you, your friends or forwarded by your friends would be active.

These chatbot rules would be like those used in the Chatbot Game and simple AIML. Example: if the user's text includes the word "why", then reply "Just because.", etc.

Advantages of using social networking for rule creation:

* Chatbot replies would be more relevant and rarely offensive -- they
have been approved by your friends after all.

* Encourages most people to actively participate in the creation
and/or forwarding of chatbot rules -- not just in chatting with bots.
If they don't, the chatbot(s) will have essentially nothing to say.

* Chatbot rule creation can be viewed as a simple form of programming and so this app might get more people interested in programming and computer science.
Information Technology = A degree for people that can't cut Computer Science

So, it is basically a watered down CS, with some business classes/marketing, and policy. Perfect for corporate drones/politico types, that love powerpoint. Don't expect anything really innovating out of it.

Get an CS degree, and maybe a minor in business, and you will be set.
This reminds me of high school when people would safety pin dollar bills to the birthday boy/girl's shirt... but 'web 2.0'.

Great idea. Probably the best marketing ploy since Burger King's Facebook Whopper campaign, and Shaq was the perfect choice.
Some people on here are just outright ridiculous.

It's a website of poppy glossy Flash games for teenyboppers. How is this not a perfect name for the site and its demo?
Bravo Jason, I’m glad you let John keep his job; we need more understanding and forgiveness in this society. We’re all human we all make mistake.

Just one question, Why use John real name in your post? That is one more Google entry into poor John record book.
Bloggers Paradise: Rob Benwell Scammer or Entrepreneur?
So make it more expensive for the company to do the work in the US than simply offshore it to the H1B applicant's own county.
Maybe. I learned a long time ago that degrees mean nothing. One of my best hires had no degree at all. Another had one in education. However, all things being equal, I would go for the candidate with a masters in CS over one in IT. I probably would prefer a musician. I know this is unreasonable, but I tend to regard business sounding degrees as the triumph of form over substance.

Also, is there a difference in quality or reputation between the two schools?
>“It’s very discreet,” said Ian Peck, a co-owner of Art Capital.

I'm not sure how "very discreet" and NY Times go together.
If it's not fair that a foreigner can come here and take my job - what about people from other states? Why can someone from Idaho move to Ca and compete with me.
There should be a quota on out of state workers and they should pay a payroll tax to work in Ca.
Humorous that a search company doesn't run a search on their hires but still believes they have a "rigorous hiring process".
Can you tell me what browser you're using and from what country you're connecting? An IP address would be especially helpful.

Backchannel me: tim -> justin dot tv
Seriously? I'm pretty sure this is a fake news site. If I want fake news, I'll go to Reddit.
Winer on: If you could go back in time, would you have used JSON instead of XML for RSS?