skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is important, but more shocking is the fact that we've lost almost 20% of the DJIA since the first of the year.

Without getting too partisan, I think that the theory that "we spent too much money on crap and got into this mess; let's raise taxes and spend even more money on crap to get us out" is not the best game plan I've ever heard.
I think the best model at the moment for funding journalism is to allow people to contribute part of their tax contribution to a news organisation of their choice. Then the only cost you would incur is the effort of filling in a form. The news organisations become responsible to the population instead of advertisers whilst some sort of market forces remain. Effectively you'd be saying to anyone who contributes taxes "here's $100 dollars, which news organisation do you want to support".

Effective journalism is important to a democracy and it should be funded in as democratic manner as possible.
My college loans are by far the best investment I've ever made. I went to a good in-state public school (Purdue), and lived very cheap. If they weren't at less than 3% interest they would have been paid off in one year from the extra money it earned me at work.

I don't understand the blanket hatred of college; it appears to come from people who spent >$100k/yr and are now drowning in that debt. If doe properly it's a very good thing; I learned a lot, made connections and grew as a person. I would say it's worth more to me than what I paid.
I have a tablet pc I draw and design on and have though so many times that if I could just remove the monitor I could avoid so many heat problems. I got really excited when I saw this... Unfortunately this device just appears to be a touch screen based on the stats.
One of the links from the article: http://davidwalsh.name/backup-database-xml-php

Umm, seriously? All these years I've been using mysqldump (sometimes even with --xml!) I could have just been using a script that string concats XML fragments together. That's a waaaay better backup procedure. </sarcasm>
It's Sealand, not seaworld.
I would go further than this. Censorship is when the state forbids speech. Copyright is a state entitlement of monopoly on specific speech wherein the state forbids it to all but that monopoly holder. Therefore, copyright is censorship.

As for economics, I'd guess it's a loss. Copyright and patent are state subsidies for speech and technology. But while you generally do get more of something you subsidize, it's always at a greater cost elsewhere in one's economy.
you have to consider that people aren't voting you down because your humor is biting, but because it's not funny and doesn't add to the conversation

Maybe you're rig....nah! That's not it!

Ninny.
Out of curiosity, have you spent much time in China? More important, do you speak Chinese?

I've spent a lot of time in Southeast Asia, but only a couple months in China. One thing that struck me there was that it's one of the few places where you really can't get by in English alone. I mean sure, you can feed yourself and find places to sleep, but it's really tough to get to know the people because pretty much nobody speaks any English at all. I met some Chinese-speaking Americans along the way, and it was simply amazing to see what I'd been missing out on.

Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, etc. are much easier places to get by as an English speaker. They figured out long ago that nobody is going to learn Laotian, so they'd better start labeling things in English. China never had that problem, so it's still a bit painful to travel in unless you know the language.

So yeah, if you know what you're getting into, then I bet you're going to have a great time. If not, I might recommend looking south a ways. Hanoi is quite livable for a SE Asian city, for instance.

Regardless, you're on the right track!
So they're 16. They can still switch to something else. It's not like they're 75 and then turning 78 and holy shit their life is over.
Why the LoseThos Operating System does not Use Paging
Maybe it's the time for you to implement your own bookamrks service. :)

Great entrepreneurs do startups about things they needed!
works for me in ACL 8.1
Yeah, I never understood why most ORMs do things that way. Why the extra config file to define everything? You can infer everything you need to build an object model directly from the database schema. It's just as easy, if not easier, to read programmatically than XML. And it's every bit as descriptive.
Ask HN: Has anyone used the Freebase Wikipedia Extraction?
Has anyone used the Freebase WEX? Are there better ways to get Wikipedia article summaries easily? The Wikipedia API doesn't seem to have a simple way to extract just an article summary (i.e. the first paragraph).
This is yet another moment where I'm glad the G1 has retained physical Send/End buttons on the phone, so that I can always just know exactly where to press at any point to start and end calls. Fewer buttons does not always create a better interface...
Just keep in mind that the other major GUI available when 7 launched was Windows 3.0. It has multitasking, virtual memory and peer-to-peer networking. Quite impressive for the time.
DSLs in the Trading Domain
P.J. Plauger on copyright [comp.lang.c]
...if everyone is leeching and nobody is paying how will we get movies like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or a game like Halo (they cost millions of $ to produce)? ... I hope an alternative comes where you actually pay for the stuff you leech...

Really? I hope production costs keep falling as rapidly as they have been. If more people produce great content that doesn't cost millions of dollars to make, we all win.
I have similar issues. I'm working on a general solution to solve them, it's so hard to see questions like this. What I want to know is how do people quietly building things in the background contain themselves? :-)
May I know where you come from?
And it is open source. Based on the Beagle board and OpenEmbedded, this looks interesting. I won't order until it ships, but for $300 I am interested.
Thats right- Im in my first year. I really hope you are right.
Totally wondering about this myself. Not convinced Freebase is perfect for me.
jjx here. This is not propaganda, nor is it incendiary. It's the truth. I have been promoting App Engine to everyone I talk to, because of the ease of deployment and the promise of scalability. I have been waiting for months for the beta quotas to be lifted. My wait has been in vain. It seems that scalability to Google means it will scale on one little machine in their infrastructure. If 500 requests per second is the best I can get from "10 years of knowledge Google has in running massively scalable, performance driven systems", then the hype of Google is a fiction.
Slightly increased spending does not equal an economic recovery: "economists expect consumer spending to remain weak in the months ahead as the economy continues to deteriorate."
I'd argue that is a flawed analogy.

When you taste the ice cream, you get the full essence of it. All the subsequent bites will taste like that one. You know what you are getting.

When you hear a 30 second song clip or see a movie trailer, you get a selectively packaged subset of the full product. I have heard many clips and seen many trailers that are simply awesome, and then the actual song or movie ends up being terrible.

So the analogy would be better if you got to hear the song once for free, and then had to buy to own, which is kind of between the two extremes now (leech it or buy it unheard). Radio (traditional or internet-based) does a decent job of this now, but only for singles. There is still no way to try a whole album before buying unless you catch it on the headphones in Best Buy.

The trouble with movies is that generally you don't watch them many times. I can't really speak for everyone there, but I know I would be much more willing to pay for movies if I could get a good 720p copy of it for say $10-15. The reason I don't buy movies now is that I don't want a pile of DVDs in my tiny apartment. I could buy them, rip them, then resell them, but as I understand it, this is just as illegal as downloading them to begin with. So to summarize, give us some format options besides just a DVD that costs $23.
http://agent101.livejournal.com/5601.html <-- A ycombinator in Php. It can be done in 5.3, pretty it isn't.
Positive Economic News
Oops, messed my linux instance somehow. Works fine on the fresh instance of SBCL-x86-64 1.20.

As to Lisp-2, dude that's a debate that I don't want to get into. :) I'm just happy I can use any kind of Lisp -- the rest is just details.

Yarek
And a Network Engineer Shall Lead Them
The biggest question I have to ask myself is should I return to my studio in SF.

Tough question. I just spent 5 days visiting family in Guadalajara, MX, which is a fairly large tech center for Mexico. You can live very well for $30k a year. I had coffee with a software engineer that is building online education for the University of Mex, Guadalajara. They have 7 full degrees that you can get online. That's a bit different than the Central America I grew up in the Contra/Guerrilla filled 80's.

It would be easy to make the cultural transition. I don't know that I'd like to move there, but it's certainly an interesting option, isn't it? For the price that I'm paying for rent in Silicon Valley, I could live like a king back where I grew up.Hmmmm...
I'd say the opposite -- it's something which is useful in the real world, regardless of if I'd use the same labels for it as Paul does. There are some topics that tend towards people talking past each other. This is one of them. How many people do you think have read this thread and changed their opinion on the worth of college? Few, if any. Most people are just rehashing decisions they made years ago -- just like every two weeks when we have this discussion all over again.

Why does a group of people who by and large have already made this decision -- and won't be making it again -- find it so worthwhile to keep debating it? Probably because explaining the choice they made makes them feel better about themselves.
Blackberry 9000 Bold Smartphone Unlocked
BlackBerry 9000 Bold BlackBerry has made the move from a brand that benefited utilitarian needs to one that has the design and features of many high-class cell phones. Naturally, the ability to remotely access email.
I do too.

Michael isn't just any old tech journalist (although that would be fine). He's a startup founder. Tech Crunch covered startups when it wasn't popular and showed founders around the world that we weren't operating in a vacuum (all before he knew if there would ever be any money in it). The fact is he has worked his ass off writing about our industry and advocating on behalf of startups the past few years.

He's not just writing about us. He's one of us. Michael doesn't just deserve our respect, he deserves our gratitude.

Thanks Michael and welcome back!
Using WEX for a web application will require a ton of work that you want to avoid if possible.

Freebase does have a summary of each topic, typically pulled from wikipedia.
From the guidelines:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. "
I liked Atlas Shrugged quite a lot, but there were a few parts that seemed ridiculous. Specifically the idea that everything was about money. In the model society near the end the banker loans Dagny a car and says that it isn't free he's charging her for it. As he shows Dagny around he explains how they charge each other for everything. Even husbands and wives pay each other one way or another. I wouldn't want to live in a society like that. Making personal or even business relationships primarily about money causes all sorts of problems. People need to be paid fairly, but focusing too much on money destroys intrinsic motivation. I'll fix my parents computer for free because I want to help them, but I wouldn't do the same thing just for money. Even trying to keep track of how many favors I've done for my friends would cause too many problems. I help them when they need it and they help me, but no one expects that things be exactly equal.
I think ORMs don't infer everything because they want the "hard break" to know when the data model changes. (influenced by statically typed languages)
I too am in the same boat. I am not sure where the author was going with that, and yes, its a little hard to read.
There is a reason that nearly every book ever sold used black text on white background even in the 20th century when that was no longer the only choice. I only wish that websites would heed this advice more often.
advertising works on plentyoffish, because the visitors are looking for dates etc, and there are many paid for matchmaking advertisers who want those users.

What is the equivalent on something like the pirate bay? "Buy the movie from amazon"? I'm skeptical you'd get anywhere near the same revenue. People go to somewhere like the pirate bay for a specific reason - to get a specific file.
Content Tracking Service Tynt Scores $3.9 Million in Series A Funding
I think you're missing how clever this is. #skittles is the #1 trending topic on search.twitter.com. If you're at all plugged in, you can't get away from this.

Just how many bags of candy do you think they'll have to sell for this idea to pay for itself?

I don't think it's earth-shattering, either, but what does that have to do with anything?
The problem with that viewpoint, in my opinion, is that it's a throwaway: instead of figuring out the problem, simply categorize something as "unproductive to talk about" and ignore it.

Whether or not the conversation is boring is another matter entirely. Obviously somebody posted the article, so it means something to somebody. After a while, I'm going to stop reading all these college vs. no college articles. So will everyone else, I imagine. Nature will take it's toll.

I trust my fellow posters to come on here with an open mind. That's not out of any kindness on my part -- it's simply a practical matter. There's no point in posting anything at all if you're just talking past one another.

We're talking. See? Obviously both of us feel that there is some information that is being exchanged that is worthwhile about some tangential part of this topic.

I think I come at this from the standpoint of having to work with people all day long that have strong opinions about technology. If I had an option of simply ignoring subjects that my clients found difficult to come to grips with, my work would be a lot easier. And nothing would get done.

Yes. There are some topics that people tend to talk past each other. Those are the most important ones to talk about. What? You want to spend your time on things nobody feels strongly about? As long as the chat is productive, bring it on. If it's not productive, downvote it, ignore it, and move on. Just like anything else that's not worthy of your or my time.

EDIT: I don't want to look like I'm changing my opinion, so what I mean is that there are some topics that people tend to associate directly with their judgment and self-worth. Religion is one of those. Politics is another. But gee, it can be anything. This emotional entanglement is just a part of human nature and is part of real-world conversations.
Of three options, each subsequent is better than the previous:

1. Get angry and stay angry but don't show it. Conflict is not resolved.
2. Get angry and vent it, thus resolving the conflict (possibly by parting ways)
3. Don't get angry, but work on the problems.

Brought to you by the institute of common sense.
Obama Team Finds It Hard to Adapt Its Web Savvy to Government
"if these quotas are not lifted"

Did you ask them to increase your quota?

http://code.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=A...
Ask HN: E-Learning Startup
After being linked to this thread [link at bottom] on reddit which describes many college/university students anger at how bad the "blackboard e-learning" suite is I started to think about my experience with blackboard at my university. If you haven't used it, imagine web appplications from the late 90's!

This got me thinking, there are no 'really' good contenders in the e-learning market, of course blackboard has a few competitors in the open source and propietary markets but none of them are a great deal better.

I'm pretty sure me and a couple of guys from my comp sci school could create something significantly better than the current market leader (blackboard) within the space of 3 months (summer holiday).

Unless we go all out and run this like a startup business it will obviously go nowhere, do you think this is something we should run with or would getting other schools to use it be to much of an uphill battle?

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/81bk3/i_submit_a_paper_on_blackboard_called_hw_2docx/
How easy it is to live there without knowing Spanish? What are the safer parts of the country? Also can you please estimate the monthly expenses?
From the guidelines:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." "
I can see it now - I got New York Times coverage (once in a lifetime thing), the new users start hammering the site and I am sending an email to Google begging them to increase the quota. Which they may or may not get by the next week or something.

You know, this just does not look like a good plan for success. Whatever happened to worry-less scale that they promised?
@jjx, you should have known better than investing your resources into a platform that does not suit your needs. When buying a product buy it for it is today, no what it may or may not become tomorrow.
Google pushing IE7 to rid the web plague that is IE6
You're right that it's a publicity stunt. But is that a bad thing?

Yes, if their goal is to make their website popular in the longterm and a hot destination on the web. But what if their goal is just to garner some publicity? This did that.

Also, publicity stunt implies a lack of substance, but I think the near complete outsourcing of their site and image management really is an interesting event. (And probably other people do too, so in the next couple weeks people will write blog posts about whether this is a turning point on the web or whatever – and each one of these posts will mention Skittles. A few months from now there might be a newspaper or magazine article about it, which would reach a different set of people.)

So it is a gimmick, but a genuinely interesting one that didn't cost much and will probably sell a few more bags of Skittles.
I'm interested to hear more about how this works when you have multiple developers working in parallel on several branches. What you describe sounds like it would only work in a very linear development model.
I've done CodeIgniter and Kohana, and I've moved to Recess http://recessframework.org/ . New project website coming Any Day Now, or stop by #recess on freenode if you want to see what we're about.
He said something about being fully booked, but I offered to pay more than his usual rate and said I’d plug Surfboard House on TechCrunch (consider that a disclosure). He had (and still has) no idea what TechCrunch is, but the dollars did the trick. Schedules were juggled, I stayed.

I take "schedules were juggled" to indicate that other patrons were bumped, which would make MA a world-class shithead.
Now I know where I might want to stay if I ever go to Hawaii. Thanks for posting this.
Custom Reddit Site Builder?
I remember a startup on here a while ago that let users build their own custom reddit sites. I'd like to use this for an open source project to vote on which features to include for the next version. I know there's crowdsound, but there was another cool one that was more reddit like in interface. Anyone know what it is?
I don't think applications will be as much of a problem as you think. As with a lot of open source hardware project it's only a matter of time before you'll have a community backing it. That means, a lot of the Linux applications will be ported over.

Also as another benefit of this using an ARM processor and a lot of netbooks and other hardware going the way of Linux this is good for the OS side of things. Windows won't go away and I wouldn't wish it to as it has it's place in the computer market, but getting people away from the Microsoft way of doing things is a good thing. Either through Apple's hardware or these open source hardware projects will slowly eat away at Microsoft's market share. It's an uphill battle and won't be over anytime soon but I like where it's heading.
I think it really depends on what kind of university you get into. If you get into a university like MIT, Stanford, CalTech, etc, there's a good chance that you'll be surrounded by a lot of entrepreneurial engineers. Even if you don't get a lot out of classes there, you'll at least meet a lot of interesting people that you can found with, or at the very least, be friends with.

Now meeting hackers at other schools is also possible, and I'd say pretty probable, if you try hard enough.

Having a network of hackers is pretty useful, especially for founding, and I think people underrate the value of relationships developed in college. There's no other environment quite like college, and even if you don't agree that the relationships built in that environment aren't uniquely valuable, I think you can probably agree that they're unique.
None of this is true. Some ORMs demand complete control over the schema, but this is an implementation detail and not something intrinsic to ORMs in general. Try DBIx::Class sometime, it can handle almost any schema you throw at it.

With that in mind, most people don't want the availability of methods and classes in their application to depend on external things like the database schema. That makes error reporting and debugging tough. So, you dump the DB schema to some format your ORM understands, and then consider that authoritative.

Many of us consider the database a tool for storing and querying data, rather than a way of life. In our case, the way the ORM works is perfect. The database is abstracted away, and we can write our software in our language of choice.
I think the vast majority of Americans didn't notice any restriction on what they want to do in the 8 years of the Bush administration. The biggest impact for most was probably added hassle when flying or opening a bank account, but even that seems minimal in retrospect. If there'd been a terrorist attack or two every year, it might have gotten much worse, but it turns out that there are, to a first approximation, no terrorists who have the ability and desire to attack US soil.
No, tuvinh isn't Brendon -- I'm Brendon. And yes, this is a plagarism. Don't you just hate it when someone does this? Doesn't even ask and doesn't change a single word (his title is better though ;)).

I have sent an email to the blog author asking him to remove it or credit it. It was thanks to you that I found out about it -- Trey Philips posted a comment saying someone here had said it was plagarised, and quickly enough I saw the blog post referring "unusual" amount of traffic. It's great how social communication on the internet works!

-Brendon.