skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice. I live in Southwest MO, where I grew up- I remember when Wal-Mart was known as a regional company. I remember Sam Walton flying in on his own little airplane and landing at the airport across the street from our local Wal-Mart, jumping the fence, and running in to the service desk to say a quick "hello". I don't remember ever seeing his famous pickup truck, but I know people who did. They thought some red-neck had parked their truck in front of the store! (Until they went inside and saw Sam greeting people, then they realized it was his truck).

Sam Walton's autobiography remains one of the great classics in business leadership. Too bad Wal-Mart managers don't seem to read it anymore. If I were Wal-Mart. I'd make reading it a requirement to be a manager. I think if they did that, their customer service would improve drastically.
Your link is missing the ' at the end.

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Foldr_Foldl_Foldl%27
This is pretty interesting. How much would the price of gold skyrocket if it were adopted as the international currency peg/medium of exchange/etc? Divide all the money in the world on the amount of gold available. That's the new price per ounce of gold. It would be a massive increase.

With a gold price that high, it might become profitable to just synthesize gold in a nuclear reactor. Which would destroy the point of imposing a gold standard in the first place. Even if it wouldn't be profitable with today's technology, it would become a very lucrative field. Which you would have to outlaw. Etc. etc. etc.

What all the gold nerds are really clamoring for is an international agreement saying that no one will ever increase the money supply. This won't happen. A system of fixed currencies is as unrealistic as every nation suddenly deciding to adopt communism.
I think there's an opportunity to craft some sort of DIY degree programs, cobbled together from online lectures, assignments (with automated grading?), readings, and help forums. Perhaps it would just be a feature of a site like this, but I personally would love to see something like that.
Scientists Map the Brain, Gene by Gene
Botnet based on home network routers
I don't believe that they would be foolish enough to believe full rendering can be done on servers - it's just not a feasible solution with todays technology unless you are emulating j2me or something.

Perhaps they have something more interesting than that, or there has been some other innovation. I will reserve judgement until the public internet based demo.
Building on Tim Berners-Lee's TED Talk: Making the case for raw data
Could you point me to the free GeoIP database?
Diabetes Control with Diet | Recipes, recipe guide, diet, health guide
I have talked with Bo Fishback (VP of entrepreneurship) about this program briefly, and he certainly knows what's up. Kauffman Labs is going to be a mover and a shaker in our arenas.
Technically this is old news, Kauffman Labs was announced in January, but Ken's gives a pleasant non-press-release write-up of the program.
A search of google for this shows:
http://www.maxmind.com/app/geoip_country
I have seen apartments that advertised soundproofing, but we ended up renting a house instead.

Question about this soundproofing: How is it with 20-40Hz sounds? Out of curiousity.
IIUC one downside of the European monetary integration is that if, say, the German economy is doing fine while Italy is in recession, then Italy cannot simply loosen up its currency to boost demand while Germany keeps its currency tight. Instead, the ECB has to either keep the euro tight, screwing Italy, or loosen it, screwing Germany. And since other pan-European political institutions are not as strong as the US Federal Government, setting Europe-wide economic policy for everything other than currency is difficult.

The upside of the euro may be greater than the downside, but it seems to me that a new global reserve currency would be mostly downside, for this reason. Then again as a US citizen I have a vested interest.
A few suggestions:

1) I would have sent the tweet about your site IF I could have revised it, which wasn't working for me (not sure if it should have).

2) It would be great if you could expand people's stream to see more than one tweet (if wanted).

3) It would be great if you could show the score, and at the same time give many more recommendations (perhaps with a more button). That way, you can still claim it wasn't a great match (by showing the score) but still giving more to those who want them (like me).
China has made several statements in the last few weeks about their concerns about the dollar. However the real BIG news is not their talk, its their actions. China has been moving their dollar holdings into short-term bills out of longer-term notes. They are positioning themselves so that they can get out of the dollar quickly - and they are doing it in a way that won't raise alarms because they aren't (yet) cashing-in their dollar holdings.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/KC18Cb01.html
Actually, if you read all the way to the end of the article it says that it wasn't too challenging. The other browsers were just easier.
Thanks! All of these comments are great...I'll be sure to let HN know when I'm finished.
>I don't think we need licenses like the GPL -ESR

GPL is the glue that binds the community. Without that everything will fall apart. And ERS wanna go that way. So bad. I'm really disappointed of his view.
Folks... he gives us the database for FREE! We can use it or leave it. I would hope that someone downloads the damn thing, compares it against his GeoIP and tells us his findings. Otherwise, the discussion about accuracy is silly.
Gadgets that make you look like a jerk
An NYT commenter got it at least partially right: Something Awful, 4chan, and the like are the origin of a lot of the ephemeral web pop culture. Of course, by the time that content gets to the kind of people that send funny pictures through email, the original source is long since forgotten.

I'm not sure how you could make a site that collects this kind of thing without it being an echo of an echo of something that was never very good to begin with.
Check out http://www.insightcommunity.com/ run by Floor64. I saw Mike Masnick do a talk in Edinburgh and he explained that rather than do ads, they get companies to sponsor conversations - in return the companies get insights into the thoughts of the community - and it seems to be working for them.
You could tie the currency to energy, then individual people synthesizing it would be a good thing.
SuperMac War Story 2: Get the Hell Outside the Building
East Cleveland is definitely the worst, and I agree with you that it was deteriorating long before the days of easy credit. Perhaps the further decrease in property values makes it even less worthwhile to make repairs. I can imagine that a new roof might cost more than the neighbor's house with a 10 year-old roof!

I too have heard horror stories of seemingly irrational landlords. One problem is that many people watched too much late-nite get-rich-quick TV and bought rental properties they themselves couldn't afford to keep up.

Your experience in The Heights is surprising given that rents are relatively high there. One would think preserving a rental unit would be worthwhile.
This is part of a great ongoing series by Steve Blank, author of 'The Four Steps to the Epiphany'
"The set of 48 customers is divided into equal-sized communities, with members&nbsp;chosen at random so they may not be close in taste.

The recommender function chooses an item by looking at what customers in the same community have chosen. It recommends the one most popular among others in the community."

So first we randomly assign you to a group and then suggest items that has already been marked as popular. With an algorithm like that it is no wonder why he ended up with the data he did. This is the model where we all go and buy from the amazon top sellers list, not because they are good but because everyone else is buying it. There is zero surprise that showing this list to users would cause the items on the list to go up. This is also about the worst recommendation algorithm I could think of. His algorithm is the one used before the internet by the general population. You don't listen to every band, but see what your friends are listening too. You buy the same fridge as your friend because they recommended it. You did things usually because other people had, not because they were good. So according to his data what was happening before the internet should never have happened.

A good recommendation algorithm will present me with choices that I actually want to see. The key is that the choices presented me are only my choices and not choices that everyone sees. So as time goes by the odds that I will see the Nova episode on Rats from a few weeks ago will grow higher (really good one btw). But I don't think tivo will suggest that to all tivo's.

In a real recommendation algorithm as time goes by good items will get viewed more and bad items will not and the spread will grow larger. This is exactly what Netflix people talk about when they say they have been shown all sorts of great movies they never would have tried on their own. Netflix hates, absolutely hates monoculture because it means they have to buy 1 zillion of the blockbuster dvd from the summer. Which is part of the reason they do recommendations and sponsor its research. If they can find you something better to watch it means they can spread the que of users out to not be a monoculture. That is what recommendation algorithms do, they create niche's.
Two new improvements to Google results pages
A strategic business changes exactly 1 user behavior
I suspect that last 10% will be as easy as writing the last 10% of a software project.

Personally, I don't see any software solution here. It's going to have to be teaching by teachers, just organized differently. I'd be happy to be wrong.
ASP.NET MVC for RoR developers: do as locals do
Those are some freakish pictures. Makes me realize how insignificant I really am. Almost makes me want to just stop living cause one day they will have my brain on the table.

Where do I remove my self from the list of brains to be used? <--Joke.
Yef, check out this discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=529650
This bodes well for QuakeLive.

IIRC it's totally free and revenue is going to come from in-game advertising.

But then again, the environment lends itself to ads. In World of Warcraft, for example, you'd be breaking an illusion if ads for Jolt cola started popping up.
Can you see a scent? Today it is possible
Yes, generalising to the point that we see the very root all classes of problems. Inequality for example is vague and poorly defined as I said in beginning. Overpopulation is deceiving and looks very silly at the first glance but as deal with more data, it turns out to be a giant. Expanding to outer space is easily said than done even if we are talking long term, of course we can, if we last long enough without problems but one is ignoring so many minute details in such assumption. But I too hope for best, Companies like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic are already on ambitious projects. We must wait and see what will prove to be the optimal solution.
...more mundanely, countries with lots of gold available to mine could manipulate the rest of the world's economies by strategically deciding when to grant or restrict mining concessions.

It would be an interesting mathematical exercise to define a cryptocash-like token that could be subdivided indefinitely without being duplicated--you could use this token as the basis of a permanently fixed money supply. Not sure how useful that would be in real life, though.
Yeah also check out his book, quite a fun read ;) hit home many times.
Windows 7: The good, the bad, and the ugly (episode 2)
How to know that the programming interview is over
It probably won't work, though it's a reasonably good idea.

People develop "ad blindness" very, very easily and quickly.
Yes, that is the jist of the last sentence. However that was clearly not the message the bulk of the post was intending to express:

He [Charlie Miller] did mention, in his interview with Ryan Naraine, that Chrome was pretty much in another league. Their 'sandbox' makes it extremely difficult to exploit
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awikipedia.org+6zap

By choosing a name that floats to the top in an alphabetical listing :-).
In poor economy, more IT pros could turn to e-crime
It would still take two successive holes to exploit - one to get in, another to get out of the Chrome sandbox. And only 7% of users use Chrome, while 56% users use Firefox (my own web site statistics today ) - If I wanted to do something malicious, I'd get a lot better bang for the bug with Firefox.
So what are the criteria for getting a "good" reddit submission?
A linkbait headline and half of the article is quotes. Is this really news material?
What makes the Google Chrome sandbox better than the IE7 sandbox or the IE8 sandbox? AFAICT, they are all using the same techniques.
Another vote for One Hundred Years of Solitude. It's a great book on an almost utopian society grounded in Columbian myth that is finally enveloped by modern society. It's the one book that everyone in my family read.
What does "professional" mean in this context - matching the design of the shopping cart pages to the rest of the site? Some of those are better than others at doing that - my understanding is that Paypal is the easiest to skin and customize.
The Agile Jazz Band
There's no more NDA I thought ...
Showing the Obama-Clinton Divide in Decision Tree Infographic
This is the trend with anything that comes out.

The Hack-ability tends to be directly proportional to it's popularity. Nothing has been ever built that was 100% secure (if you did, more power to you). My point is, the the more popular something gets, more minds will be focused on it to break it, and more information be available publicly regarding possible attack vectors, and eventually it will break.

Chrome is a new player, people haven't had much time to play with it, or the motivation to since it doesn't have as much market share at the moment.
The banks I've talked with want the SSN of someone who can qualify for a revolving line of credit equal to your transaction volume. ie, you want to do 30K of money per month, you have to be wealthy enough to swing a $30,000 unsecured bank loan. The "reserve balance" thing is no longer being offered.
Well at least the IPRED legislation actually puts restrictions on prosecution. Companies will be forced to sue or not, and the use of any anonymity software to protect yourself will only make your chances of avoiding punishment better, because unless the company sues you in a short time then they won't be allowed to at all.

However, IPRED is only to enforce fair and just copyright laws. It protects people from being sued ridiculous amounts, but it will also likely increase the legal action taken. Possibly the worst part of this legislation is the overburden it will place on the legal system, there's enough problems with most countries court system that we don't need additional weight being placed by unnecessary and frivolous lawsuits.

Although on the other hand, I suspect most of these cases will end up going in front of a small claims court judge, which in most cases tend to be younger (basically it's where most judges start before going upwards), which may assist in beating the claims. If you get a 30 something judge then there's a high chance of them understanding technology, and equally a high chance that they themselves have 'pirated' something. They're less likely to tolerate BS and from what I know of the court system, if judges start seeing way too many cases from the likes of music associations it will start pissing them off, and when they're their decision is final it could end up good for the private citizen.
Internet marketing company with a difference
use netcallidus as first stop for your internet marketing company of choice
I'm not really an expert in education. I just get ranty about it. Go talk to John Taylor Gatto, or the people behind Frontier College in Canada, or Room to Read, or self-identified Edupunks... the list goes on.

I offered the martial arts metaphor not because I think graduation lacks pizzazz, but because in the martial arts, students learn at their own pace. Someone who walks in the door at the age of 50 is exactly where some kid is who starts at the age of 12. It is anti-pedagogical to label some students as stupid because they just learn a bit slower than others and aren't advancing in lockstep. It's similarly wrong to label some students as "brilliant" because they happen to master some subjects more quickly. Often what you are measuring there is just greater preparation and support in the home. Schools are a reward and punishment system for trudging through certain institutional expectations of potential (not even actual work or achievement). We don't have this concept in any other human institution -- even the army acknowledges that some people will progress through the ranks at their own pace, and that some people are specialists, others are generalists, some are leaders, others are followers. The expectation of standardized results of human development is a sign that the institution is not being run with the intent to develop real skills.

I have no idea what peer to peer learning would look like, but perhaps that is an interesting model. I disagree that there is limited teacher bandwidth. A society that can pay $5 for a cup of coffee could afford many teachers. A world where the most brilliant and hardworking professionals are confronting nearly 20-30 years of retirement could probably have a glut of teachers, if it wanted.

Do you think an open platform that allows this would be sufficient?

I don't know what that means. Books are a pretty open platform, and students haven't managed to teach each other using those. What about your technology is going to be superior to books?
Three20 project improves iPhone programming
Reason #4 for why I should name my kid "1Aaron".
I don't understand how this works. Any box that I ssh to with '-R' just listens on 'localhost'.
All but FreeBSD are proprietary (I doubt OpenSolaris commands a meaningful market-share for now) and the combined market share of FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD is dwarfed by Linux's, which is dwarfed by OSX's.

OSX has some parts that are BSD-free, parts that are GPL-free, other parts that are open-source and the rest is the most heavily guarded proprietary stuff in this industry. The fact it is hugely more successful than the combined presence of its competitors bears testimony to the fact that basing your OS on the work of others without giving much back is a winning strategy while contributing to products that can be used in such way is pretty dumb from a business point of view.

Markets are pretty good at identifying opportunities and the fact there is no Red Hat on the BSD space should suffice as evidence ESR is wrong in this one.
Offer HN: We do your accounting, You help us prove startup concept
I'm in the process of researching a startup opportunity focusing on accounting with a CPA friend of mine. Specifically, the startup we're thinking of launching would produce monthly financial statements (P&L, Cashflow, Balance Sheet).

What we're offering here is to produce the above listed financial statements for a few startups/small businesses (USA only, sorry) from the Hacker News community for free for a month (or more if it seems worthwhile), to test the process we've developed. The basic premise of the startup is to save small businesses the trouble of using Quickbooks or similar applications, and to enable them to upload a (hopefully pretty simple) list of documents from which accurate, third-party, objective financial statements are produced. In a sense what we're considering is similar to tripit.com, except the information will be uploaded via the web instead of forwarded by email, and we'll produce financial reports, not trip itineraries.

We know that financial information is sensitive and confidential, and we will treat it accordingly. Fortunately, there is a CPA on board to ensure that all rules, regs, and best practices are followed. Nonetheless, since this is such a sensitive matter, we'd like to request some time to talk with whoever might take us up on this offer to discuss confidentiality and security issues before any information exchange takes place. If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them here, and you can look up my personal email address in my HN profile. Thanks!
How the new toxic assets plan could be gamed
The free GeoIP databases are deliberately crippled with inaccuracies. Their business model is to sell you an upgrade to the good information.
And lies like the one you posted reinforce this inaccurate belief.

Well done.
Dear Mr. President, Two Wrongs Are Still Two Wrongs: On AIG and Excessive taxes
So, in face of irrelevance, ESR has to make controversial statements like this to retain some eyeballs.

That's sad.
That's (apparently?) the minimum amount of clean water for a person to survive a single day.

Water contributes to long term survival in so many other ways. You need water to cook, grow food, maintain basic hygiene by washing you hands. You need water to clean a wound. You need water for sanitation. You need water for industry, so you can actually work.

Even in the most basic circumstances, this is a lot more than 25oz (many, many times more). In urban circumstances it's vastly greater. And this isn't even accounting for losses, contamination, interruptions in supply.

Anyway, I can see we're not going to convince each other either way. I'd encourage you to do a search around on the topic though -- there is a lot of material on the issue.
NPR On Point: Banks, Bailouts & the Obama Plan (audio, 1 hour)
Everything I know about programming is wrong…or will be
If you'd change it, what would you use to determine the curriculum path?

I would abolish it.

If your objection is "but then how do we get standardized results" my response is: exactly!

Would it be a disaster if students entered the workplace without standardized results? After a few years in the workplace, they are evaluated on their individual resume anyway, so what's special about the student to worker gap? Why do we assume that society needs a standardized product there?

That said, I think some direction has to be made clear to the students, that math leads to these sorts of jobs and lifestyles, and English leads to these things, and so on. Institutions may want to set their own curricula which are also verified by government-standardized tests, for more easily measured things like literacy or mathematics skills.
Brain Wave Patterns Can Predict Blunders, New Study Finds
Mind the generation gap as well... as both men and women get older, language tends to civilize.
IBM uses the GPL as a weapon. Linux growth hurts Microsoft and provides them a platform push their own products without Microsoft's involvement.

Ordinarily however, IBM considers it's greatest asset it IP, and they see 'GPLing' their software as a threat to their IP. They are actually rather ambivalent towards the FOSS ideology.
You guys that are in startups, or who haven't worked in large corporations, probably wonder what the big deal of this article is.

But those of you who have worked in a high-formality, high-checklist environment and also an agile startup will simply nod.
Those arguing against the points in the OP seem to be following a goal of making Free software successful at the expense of commercial software. That strikes me as wrong (both in terms of efficiency and in terms of ethics).

We want Free software to succeed. If it succeeds at the same time that other commercial endeavors succeed, then that makes the software ecosystem richer, and gives us a broader set of tools and ideas to employ.