skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not over until you give up. Maybe you can get into the next group at TechStars. Alternatively, if you can grow in your current form perhaps these guys will help you in a series A (if that's part of the long term plan).

One of the most significant themes I've seen in this community is persistence. If you give up now, then the story stays what it currently is. Maybe if you keep trying, the current situation will end up being one of the challenges in your path to success.

Almost every story in Founders at Work seems to have point at which the founders could have closed up shop and ended up with an "informative" failure story to tell.
FireFox on Debian (IceWeasel) is not recognized as FF3 and I'm being asked to upgrade.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008122010 Iceweasel/3.0.6 (Debian-3.0.6-1)
Rube Goldberg Device [video]
Why Marijuana Legalization is Gaining Momentum
YouTube, Sony Pictures in talks over feature films
So give a little break down in each search window.... but do you think a more interactive and sophisticated search would help here? I was thinking of allowing users to target specific outlets based on the markets they desire to capture.
Just read your profile & followed the link to your company. I like the product you guys are building, and certainly understand where you're coming from now.

I just take exception to the name-dropping of big-companies as examples of companies that have decided against relational databases, when they've only done so in incredibly narrow niches of very large systems. It would be more accurate to say they've decided against traditional filesystems, yet we don't see articles proclaiming the death of the filesystem. This is the real straw man argument, I'd suggest.

I'm sure there are applications out there for whom graph databases are ideal; the only way to get real numbers is to try to bring a product to market, so I wish you well!
Why People Don’t Install Firefox - Part III
Japan child robot mimicks infant learning
It will be nice to see part two, but there is enough fodder in part one to talk about.

There is no doubt recommendation engines are a great sales generator. But are they any good at what they do? Plotting points on a graph based on user ratings has always seemed artificial to me. I may like a book because of its rhythm and someone else may like the subject matter; will we like the same books? This is why I think netflix created their competition. They're not looking for better math, but for a better approach all together.

At the end of the day, it probably has to be a combination of factors. For example, think of pandora's engine. It is based on analysis of the music, not just user preferences. And yes, math will be involved, which is why part two of this article will be worth reading.
Ha! I love comments from people who have never been landlords. Key here is even after 3-4 years the building is YOURS. Which means you fix it, you maintain it, and you deal with late/lazy/messy/loud/obnoxious tenants every single day. And when they walk out without paying the rent, how much success do you think you'll have in small claims court recouping your rent? (hint: not much)

Believe me, if it was "that easy" to buy and rent a place ... everyone would be doing it. Do yourself a favor and talk to someone who owns multi-unit buildings first.
+1 for The Atlantic. Excellent articles on a variety of topics.

Going to try Harpers.
I think it's just wrong to test for the type of the variable, unless it's really needed. Such checking detracts from what you are trying to accomplish and from relying on the exception backtrace to give you a clue of what went wrong when an error occurred. Also relevant is that if you are trying to pass in a new object that should work despite not being a direct descendent of a certain object, by checking for a certain type you restrict the usefulness of the API. Even "mocking" a certain object can be more troublesome then.

That said, whereas many Rubyists can make more use of respond_to?(), I can make a few uses of is_a?() every now and then. They usually make use of more idiomatic Ruby that way than me.

On the Spec/Test side, I hope everyone is testing more functionality than types as I am sure the type checking is just redundant in Ruby. Speaking of redundancies, a famous motto is all you need to follow to keep it cool: "don't repeat yourself".
I assumed that given the character of this website, and the italics, it should be obvious I meant that. But I guess not, there's a lesson here about being too clever.
Interesting article about newspapers, but touches on bigger issues of media in general. With real time media that you can access for modern gadgets that are almost always accessible, there's going to be a constant decrease in need for a paper based media. The only reasons for them would be in situations where gadgets are not usable, such as no wireless capabilities, running out of batteries on long flights and such. Will those situations alone save printed media? At some point it won't be, and we'd just live with the fact that we need to download news to read ahead of time, or get some outlets on all the seats in an airplane ;)
Being asked to upgrade from FF3 B4 Pre. Fail.
New Chinese Missile Can Destroy US Supercarrier in One Go
The mandated IDP program is yet another reason not to hire and take a chance on beginners. It really is a sad situation, especially for those students unlucky enough to get stuck in Architecture programs that are truly useless.

A good program mush have very solid engineering in addition to everything else. Students should be able to do the structural engineering for their own projects coming out of school (I did on my second house in the mountains), and have solid knowledge of mechanical and electrical engineering as well. This is a distant and impossible dream, it seems, for most programs these days.

And it makes perfect sense: the standard trendy philosophy in most schools is deconstructivism. And one of the tenets of that philosophy is that the real world is in flux and nothing really is knowable, etc etc. My experience is that Reality wins every argument put up against it.
Don't undervalue the benefit that search arbitrage provides. It finds inefficiencies in the paid traffic market (which they exploit for a time until it re-balances), and also serves as a "filter" or refining mechanism of sorts that helps consumers find products they wouldn't ordinarily.

Just because people are clicking an ad that leads them to another page with more ads does not mean there's any dilution going on. These websites are providing a service Google and other can't/won't do.
I've seen them used to create inline infinite lists:

(loop for loop-this in '#1=(:a :b :c . #1#)
for just-once in '(1 2 3 4 5 6 7)
do (format t "~S => ~S~%" just-once loop-this))
=>
1 => :A
2 => :B
3 => :C
4 => :A
5 => :B
6 => :C
7 => :A
NIL

This encapsulates the "loop over this list forever" at its definition, instead of making me use an array and using length/modulo where it's used. There are of course many other solutions, but this one is both short and perfectly describes what I want.

Many Lisp library functions take lists as inputs (no kidding!), so this is a very efficient alternative to actually creating a repetitive list. (Pythoners: think itertools.cycle).

Also, any time you want to build a simple-but-not-trivial graph inline (great for unit testing), these come in handy.
I can't believe they think a Windows version is pre-requisite to success in penetrating the server market

Taking websites as an example : The clear leader amongst web servers used by the million busiest websites is Apache with a 66% share. It has a 47% lead over its closest competitor, Microsoft-IIS, much greater than on the web as a whole.

netcraft confirms it - http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2009/03/15/march_2009_web_...
True, but I speak of which I know. If someone has such a comparison, I would love to see it. The real measure is tokens not LOC.
Thanks. Interested in trying it out? I think you might see us help your drinkingfor.com venture.
http://harpers.org/

To be honest, I don't read very many of the articles there - not my interest - but I love the Index.
California Lawmakers To Stomp On Small Business Owners
It's a surprisingly common fallacy to equate Java with Type Systems.

Type systems can be far more expressive than what is available in Java, and can and should be used to enforce program correctness, reducing the necessity for additional testing.

Type inference, polymorphic typing, structural types -- the available tools in a comprehensive type system are woefully under-explored by most practitioners who consider Java to epitomize type systems.
Sorry, we will open up the platform soon. Bug checking and time have limited the site for right now, but thank you for pointing these out.
Then your knowledge may be too constrained to derive sufficiently representative generalizations.

I can highly recommend:

http://www.xoltar.org/old_site/misc/static_typing_eckel.html...

The article (from 2003!) is an excellent treatise on the value of a proper type system as compared to Python, and moreover, how Java's type system (or C++, ...) should simply not be equated with "static typing".
This is a really timely product given the recent discontinuation of Google Print Ads system. Nice effort.

My only recommendation: I'd like to see what the My Inko control panel will look like before I decide to sign up for an account.
Since Amazon was paying these associates a percentage of sales, wouldn't it be more accurate to say that Amazon financed it?
The more I have thought about fully dynamic languages that don't allow any form of static typing information, the more I have begun to think that they are not very useful. Sure, polymorphism is nice, overloading is nice, but all of the programs I have written, have relied on some sort of typing discipline, be it dynamic, static or whatever. I can't imagine writing a useful function for which I wouldn't know what it's type is. Just because Java, C++ etc. implement static typing poorly, doesn't mean static typing has to suck when there are many languages that have inferred static typing, which in my opinion can provide best of both worlds.

EDIT: By "best of both worlds" I mean "concise code and the benefits of the program being well typed"
This is going to make installing a retail copy of Windows yourself on a Thinkpad a real pain. With the updater service you just grab the updater and the rest is automatic. The little bits of sofware that you need for things like the battery manager and the onscreen displays are strewn around in small packages that you otherwise have to install manually.
The second best hacker I've worked with has a PhD in Physics. (The best has a PhD in Math.)
If you're looking for what a CS degree would involve, why not check out a curriculum/lecture course list? (e.g. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/0809/CST/ - the one I did, a fairly theoretical high-level approach).

I'm not quite sure on your meaning though, it sounds like you're doing a BS in CS and want more..?
Definitely consider the strength of non-CS depts as an important factor. That said, I think CMU has some pretty decent non-engineering schools in too (e.g. theatre).

But what do I know, I went to state school :)
There is a group of state-wide organizations called the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts that help artists with issues like these. Unfortunately they do not have a New Mexico chapter, but there is a Colorado chapter if Jon wanted to counter sue in StockArt's home state. [ http://www.vlany.org/resources/vladirectory.php ]
Functions only work for a very specific set of input types. On all other inputs, something goes wrong, but that 'something' can take quite a bit of investigating to figure out. Therefore, an assertion that verifies that the input is indeed part of that specific set of input types is valuable: it catches the problem at the earliest possible moment and it pinpoints the exact problem.
Amazon only paid out if the keyword successfully translated into sales. Thus they only paid if it worked - the affiliate ate the cost if the keyword failed.
One thing I've always wondered about MapReduce...is what it's used for? I mean what kind of data do you put in, and what do you aim to get out?
Joel also has a book on the subject: http://tinyurl.com/dx4gyf
Flagged. Downmod me all you want, just flag this while you're at it.
Sure... We built MyInko to be extremely easy and intuitive... my suggestion is to create an account and go ahead and click on MyInko... there is a video you can watch in the very bottom of the Inventory screen... but the other tabs are equally as easy to navigate. Thanks again.
Here's a very brief overview of a few fundamental CS topics. It's by no means complete, but this is what I'm going to focus my energy on in college:

1. Programming (duh) - choose a dynamic language to begin with. I'd say Python or Ruby, whichever suits your aesthetics. Play with it for a while, and then learn C. With (Ruby|Python)+C, you're ready for anything your learning process might require of you.

2. Discrete Maths - not required if you just want to be a desktop/web programmer, but it helps in understanding more advanced topics. I'm not a mathie, so I don't know where linear algebra fits into all this, but I guess it's a part of discrete maths. Whatever. Learn discrete maths and linear algebra.

3. Data Structures - you might not need this knowledge if you're going to spend most of your time dealing with Python/Ruby, but it helps a lot when you drop down into C or when you want to optimize your code. Some of the more advanced data structures are also helpful when you need to come up with elegant abstractions for managing data in a program.

4. Algorithms - very important. Don't call yourself a computer scientist if you aren't familiar with big-O and some basic algorithms.

5. Object Oriented Programming - OOP principles are very handy when you're working in teams. Throw some design patterns into the mix.

6. At least one purely functional language (Haskell is pretty popular), one purely OO language (Squeak Smalltalk, maybe) and one stack based language (Factor is awesome). This will teach you how to look at problems from different perspectives. Of course, you don't need to master any of these languages unless you're truly interested in them.

7. One "enterprise" language. Java, C#, anything that gets you a job. None of these languages are especially difficult to master, and will act as a backup in case nobody wants to hire a Ruby God.

Besides all that, you might want to dabble in computer graphics, data mining and information retrieval, programming language concepts, compiler design, virtual machines, OS design etc. Your pick.
If you're a developer who thrives on competition, TopCoder might be up your alley. If you're the very picture of patience coaching your granny through a virus scan, chances are you have what it takes to be a CrossLoop "Helper" or a LivePerson "Expert." Elance, RentACoder, or Guru.com might be good choices for established freelancers looking to source jobs and market their services.

All sounds pretty dire. If you're a developer looking to freelance, go build your contacts with potential clients personally.
A.P. Moving to Halt Use of Newspaper Articles on Web Sites
You mean there's something wrong with writing this many times a day in Perl?

if (defined($foo) and $foo->can('bar') and $foo->bar ne '')

I really relate to the article, because I deal with Perl 5 sucking all day long. Perl 6 has types. Moose has types. I can't use either, and so I end up writing really lengthy code doing ad hoc type checks all over the place.

Types are important to have when you need them, and you would move to using more and more of them on a more mature system like twitter at this point, but I prefer that they be optional. Moose objects and Perl 6 give me that option but don't require it, and thats nice.

Does Ruby do anything like that? Thinking about Ruby for my next project.
I would say MySQL's response sucked plenty. No effort was made to document the issue for end-users in the release notes. No effort was made to document a workaround that end-users could implement. No attempt was made to provide a workaround in the code; if a workaround was truly impossible as claimed, then why not implement a killswitch to prevnt MySQL from running in such a configuration?
Fast Takeoff: Exponential, or faster?
Zecco says it was a bug, not a prank
This guy has some interesting and worthwhile things to say. However, his whole discussion seems to be predicated on the idea that, if the specs for the <time> element were changed appropriately, then everyone would follow the official standard.

A 10-second look at the web tells us this is not going to happen.

So, suppose some document is written indicating how the <time> element works. What reliable guarantees does that give us concerning the use of the <time> element on real web pages? Answer: None.

So, nice try, and an interesting article, but I really do not think it's going to work.
While I agree that search arbitrage can be good to smooth out imbalances in CPC prices, I also believe that it does Amazon more harm than good to pay people who participate in arbitrage.

In the best case scenario (bidding against an affiliate who is good at arbitrage), Amazon probably breaks even because they get good sales from those affiliates with whom they're competing for keywords.

But in the worst case scenario, Amazon is competing against their affiliates who are bad at arbitrage (people who are losing money) and are blocking Amazon from winning CPC bids without actually effectively converting those clicks to commissions.

And I would bet that there are far more people losing money to arbitrage (amateurs who bought some ebook from a spammer about how to make money on the internet) than people who are profiting.

The net result is that google and yahoo get more money.
Android Isn't a Phone OS Because in the Future There Will Be No Phones
Sentiment is an awesome space to be in, the linked article is a nice overview but doesn't exactly break any novel revelations.

If you're interested in learning about sentiment and the machine learning behind it, two of the early 'seminal' papers (somewhat outdated by current techniques, but really understandable) are Turney 2002 (http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/acl2002/MAIN/pdfs/Main425.pdf) and Pang and Lee 2002 (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1118693.1118704). Wiebe's work is also worth a look (she's quoted in the OP).

Good places to start, at least; ping me if you want some more.
Someone mentioned on Gizmodo that the US has "lasers' to shoot down these missiles. I'm no expert but this quote is from a NTY article published today re: the new defense budget:

"Defense experts say that Mr. Gates is likely to cut $1 billion to $2 billion from programs for defenses against missiles, and that Boeing’s airborne laser system, which would equip a modified 747 jetliner with a laser to shoot down missiles, might be killed."

Doesn't look like shooting down big missiles with expensive lasers is high on the priority list.

I think this missile scenario is one that is more FUD than anything at the moment. A country like China or Russia knows that if they open up this can of worms, it's not going to be who launches the first missile that wins (or is hurt the most)
Groovy allows you to specify types of method parameters, return values, fields and local variables. This was needed for Java integration, but has the benefit that you get runtime checks for types. So in Ruby you might do:

def foo(mystring):
assert mystring type_of? String
mystring.length
end

In Groovy you could just do:

def foo(String mystring) {
mystring.length
}
Bizarre. It sounds as if they want to stop appearing in Google search results. Boy do these people not understand the web.
The headline is horrible (not submitters fault), it should read something like: NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is Offering Digital Health Records
If I wanted to advertise in the US, I would probably use this to get ideas on what kind of ad spaces are available and what their ceiling prices are. Then I would call them and try to negotiate. In my limited magazine advertising experiences I've found that list prices can be a multiple of what you'll get after a bit of haggling.
I think his statement can't influence noticeably the bank's share price. But he is a respectful voice for me, because of his public position and personal success.
It's a slippery slope... should government employees (whose salaries are paid by taxpapers) be allowed to buy goods at church bake sales?

Should people be allowed to buy goods at church bake sales with the proceeds from US Government Savings Bonds?

Should recipients of Federally subsidized student loans be allowed to use some of that loan money to buy church bake sale goods?

These are all (in my opinion) equally absurd examples, yet they are perfectly analogous to your objection to vouchers being spent at parochial schools.
What To Know Before Debating Type Systems: http://www.pphsg.org/cdsmith/types.html

Something about type systems just inspires people to use imprecise nomenclature and logical fallacies -- If people just referred to "Type-Checking" when that's what they mean instead of using "Typing" to describe everything, they wouldn't ask stupid questions like the title of this link.

Of course dynamically type-checked languages have a type system -- you're using it every time you do any operation in the language!
Maybe. I tend to put it the other way around. Why would you need static typing if you're going to write unittests anyway.
Good idea, but the site is a bit busted. The registration lightbox wasn't dismissed after I signed up.

It would be nice to be able to easily compare the rate cards of different publications.
For every other type of error, hah, rely on what I said then?
Voice will still be the main function of most of these devices. Sure there are geeks who use it as an Internet device first, phone second (or third) but the majority of 'regular' people still need and rely heavily on the phone.

I liken this "phones will die" debate to the TV/Internet debate. People love their TV, they love being slowly fed this passive style of entertainment and no matter what cool stuff we invent for the web, there will (for the foreseeable future) always be a audience for one-way TV programming.
Wolfram|Alpha: Searching for Truth (Stephen Wolfram talks with Rudy Rucker)
I see. Thanks for the info. It sounds like you've got a great thing going there. Why not direct more energy towards growing it?
Graphs. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=549194
I've been wondering whether the sight of various big, classic newspapers going bankrupt was going to spark some confused and panicked moves.

This sure could be one of them.
I hear you, as a geek I read about it all day, and the last thing I want to hear when I'm out shopping/eating and socializing is "hey I started Tweeting" or "I was just on Facebook and found an old classmate"

To which I respond: "Amazing, I'm so thrilled for you, welcome to my 2007."

Shoot me now.
The UI is kindof cramped.

When I see the screen there isn't any statement containing information about the site. I see the info in the browser's title but not on the page.

The page doesn't fit in a 1024x786 monitor. Site gets an F(37) in yslow (too many files). Not a big fan of inner scrollbars when clicking on a state, it would be better to utilize the browser window's scrollbars. No easy way to go back to the map unless I click home again.

The login bar clutters up the screen. Might be better as a popup dialog.
Security Threat Analysis: Interview With Dino A. Dai Zovi