skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know a few people who receive SMS from Twitter on their phone. I imagine there's more people receiving Twitter SMS than sending it.
No, they will all come here to Pittsburgh to work with Red Whittaker and the CMU Robotics department.

At least, I'm hoping... :)
SICP, hands down. If you have some extra time you can watch the lectures on google video.

Paul Graham's ANSI Common Lisp is a useful supplement but it's not as entertaining as his essays.

If you're learning FP, you're learning AI. Peter Norvig's Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming is the best book for applied FP.

Finally, the best way to learn Lisp is to write your own. It's the easiest language to write and in my opinion the only way to appreciate it.
Solving a Social Problem, Without Going the Nonprofit Route
More on TV and its future
I just thought using 'with' was an interesting hack.

Sorry if I sounded a little harsh; it is an intersting hack and I really appreciate that you shared it with us. In fact, I love hacking around with languages (okay, it's mostly Ruby) and do weird/cool things.
I think it's a really good idea but I wish they'd have chosen a better name for it, and maybe a better logo design.
iRobot, who were once a start-up themeselves, recently bought Nekton Research, a start-up that made underwater robots. I suspect that most start-ups are spun out of the research world and have the military as their primary customers.
If you have kids, not having a TV is plain cruelty.

You could just as easily argue the opposite!

Do you know what kids do (in my experience, at least) if there is no TV around? They read.

The main problem with having no TV is the risk of it becoming forbidden fruit in the kid's mind and thus becoming more attractive. We hit, inadvertently, on a nice solution to this: we always had a TV around, just a really crappy one. It was rarely on. The kids were welcome to watch TV at friends' houses or their grandparents'. At home, that time mostly went into reading or playing.

Edit: I don't recall any evidence that they felt socially out of step with TV-watching peers. I do remember that when Power Rangers were a huge deal, our daughter became passionate about Power Rangers, so we always let her watch it. Then one day she said: "I don't care about Power Rangers any more. The story is always the same." That was a proud day in the gruseom household! :)
Well, there is Trevor Blackwell (of YC), who started Anybots...

http://anybots.com/
These are interesting suggestions. There is much more about the arbitrariness of grading systems in a book I read in high school, Wad-Ja-Get? The Grading Game in American Education.

http://www.amazon.com/Wad-Ja-Get-Grading-Game-American-Educa...

That book makes the excellent point that EVERYTHING about grades is arbitrary. Having a uniform system of accumulating scores on class work to set a course grade, as the author of the submitted article suggests, leaves a lot of important improvements undone. How does any outside observer know whether, for example, Podunk High School or Elite Prep Academy has a chemistry class that really covers the fundamental principles of secondary-education-level chemistry? How does an outside observer know whether an English teacher grades mostly on the basis of thoughtful argumentation and carefully chosen content, or on neatness and spelling only?

Any reform of school grading will be hard put to eliminate the role of standardized testing for precisely this reason. Harvard's dean of admission recently commented on this:

"Q: You recently lead a high-profile commission that recommended de-emphasizing the SAT and ACT from admission requirements. A number of colleges have already made the tests optional. Do you see this ever happening at Harvard?

"A: We do not foresee a time that Harvard would be test optional. Only a few years ago we were receiving applications from about 5,000 high schools each year and now the number has grown to over 8,000. We need some common yardsticks that enable us to gauge in a rough way what is being learned in an ever-increasing and diverse high school context, not to mention the increasing number of students who are home-schooled.

"We continue to believe that the College Board's Subject Tests, along with either the SAT or ACT with the writing tests, allow students the best opportunity to demonstrate what they have learned thus far. Advanced placement and international baccalaureate results are also helpful."

http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2009/02...
So if I buy a domain, and don't use it for a few months... it could be blocked (since many registrars like godaddy put up a parked page if I am too lazy to change it)?

Then I would have to dig around and unflag it? What about people who don't use this service (like myself) that would never know the site they are trying to promote is being blocked?

From the site that keeps all the blocked domains:

"First, we're very sorry for any inconvenience this false positive may have caused you. Seriously. Second, find the domain in the list, using the alphabetical directory above. Finally, click the X next to the domain to report it as a false positive."

I realize this is unlikely, but it seems like a service that keeps a database of pages it considers spam should automatically check for this situation on a periodic basis....
It depends on your current relationship, but you should be as straightforward as possible. You should tell him that you think others work is being compromised because of the way he is doing things. The best solution is for him to realize what he is doing wrong and to improve.

The situation will not get better by itself.
Profiles of Panamanian Micro Entrepreneurs
Co-ops, or CSAs, are becoming increasingly popular, as are "buying clubs" for farms that don't offer CSAs. I could see something like this to work well with small farmers who don't offer CSAs but still hit the farmers' market circuit.
CSAs are one alternative in the US.

http://www.localharvest.org/csa.jsp

The above site provides a search feature to find local CSAs as well.
Also, here's a video of Big Dog's early predecessor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXJZVZFRFJc
I ended up giving a nickname to a coworker like that "destroyer of worlds" Then I got him bumped to a another team for awhile. Then he ended up back on my team and I eventually quit. In my exit interview I mentioned him.I am sorry but keeping an employee around that is pushed from project to project because no one wants him on his team is bad for the entire company. So I honestly would bring attention to it eventually.
It sounds like he's not incompetent so much as he isn't efficient. If he were better at prioritizing, would he be contributing value?

I'd first try to get the group to condense the 10,000-feet view into a single document, including priorities, and get the group to agree on it (presenting it as a 'helpful reference').

Then you'd have an easier time saying, "Hey Bill, whatcha working on?" "I'm really bogged down with <task>." "Huh, is <task> really that important based on the priorities in <document>?"

If "no": "Awesome, slash it and move on, dude. What's your next task?"

If "yes": "Huh. I'll talk with some of the others, see if they agree or if you can drop this and move on to something easier."
We are currently crawling all domains (in the tlds we cover) once a month, and so it should be resolved automatically at an average of two weeks. The feedback on the site is to help us detect false positives and get people unblocked quicker, where appropriate.
Marketing guide for small businesses and entrepreneurs
Oh, I didn't take it as being harsh. It just made me realize, that despite it being interesting, the only thing it really adds is "coolness"
That depends entirely on your role in the team, which isnt clear.

If you are the leader, its your job to get him working correctly or get him out. If you are not the leader -- ie you are his equal, its a little harder to go about, and it depends on his, the team, and the leaders personalities and operating style. There is no hard and fast rule.

But you should do something instead of being pissed off, certainly.

In my situations, I 'cope with incompetent team members' by firing them. But that is not always such an easy prospect if you are actually friends with this person, or you arent the boss. If you care more for the friendship than the job/project, then tell him what you think and help him yourself to get over it.
We don't have a TV... but we let our daughter watch movies and cartoons (especially Russian ones on rutube.ru). Her favorites are the ones produced in the 1950-1970 timeframe.
sticking to the limitations of SMS becomes unnecessary

I think the 140-character constraint is a huge part of Twitter's identity and success. It forces concision. It's one of those constraints that breeds creativity.
It provides credit score and debt repayment counseling.

It is like a "saved search" on the mortgage industry, automatically finding better mortgages that you qualify for.

It takes the confusion out of refinancing, points, fees, etc.

It requires no attention from the user.
Using Google Calendar while offline
I don't know where you live, but here in the states, an SMS costs 20 cents, for both the sender and the recipient, netting 40 cents for each message... It's a fucking scam that the clueless people put up with because they just don't care...
Ok great, I was hoping so but did not see it anywhere spelled out.

Good to hear!
You might also try understanding his thought process and give him tasks that he will excel at. Not everyone gets the 10000 ft view and it's probably not necessary that everyone in the group think that way. Try to figure out what his strengths and try to use them to the group's advantage. It might be that this guy is incapable of doing routine work but is able to complete the near-impossible jobs. It's very possible that the problem here isn't this particular person but rather the management style.

In the end, even if it doesn't work out someone should have the decency to explain exactly what the problem is. Alienating him to get him out of the group is a pretty dick move.
Not sure if this is old news, but I just noticed the option in my calendar.
Motorola RAZR V3c Verizon CDMA
Finally Motorola has launched Motorola RAZR V3c Verizon CDMA with extra slim size with nickel-plated copper-alloy chemically-etched keypad.
Sam Ruby Heading To Microsoft
You're doing nobody any favors by being passive-aggressive. The employee needs to know, management needs to know.

Talk to his manager behind closed doors. Be reasonable. Provide data. Metrics can be misleading, but if you have them, now is the time. (I recall one coworker at a job, when we looked, had done 12 CVS checkins during a given period where the average was close to 100 and the next lowest was in the 30s, or something like that. Illustrative!)

I have seen people improve if someone lights a fire under them! That's his manager's job. More often this doesn't happen, but it's not uncommon for the chastised person to start job-hunting and solve the issue fairly quickly anyway.

I wouldn't confront him directly unless you are his manager. If you are, talk to him ASAP. Set up a plan with measurable deliverables, and make it clear that he'll either make the goals or be asked to leave.

Little is as bad for morale as the crappy employee that drags everyone down and isn't fired. Good managers understand this.

If the company doesn't care, it's just a matter of time before more bad employees sneak in, and like a cancer the good employees start slacking off more (because why not? The idiots are never fired!) and you don't have a fulfilling job anymore. So, that's when you dust off the resume yourself.

Good luck!
At least a decent mail/news client will track and aggregate all of your unread messages for easy consumption to keep up with the topics. Explicit threading in mail/news is just icing on the cake to make conversations so much easier to stay on top of.

Twitter is the smoke signals of internet communication by comparison.
It's actually on the report a false positive page (http://www.ivegotafang.com/fp.html), but I agree it should be made more clear on the front page as well. Thanks for the feedback!
Sponty uses tumblr.
Would this have been worse (or better) if Iceland had not nationalised their banks and simply allowed them to go bankrupt?
Screen Shots: The New Facebook Home Page
Small exits are interesting, and overlooked. I see the following reasons for this:

- acquisition price for companies probably follow a power law curve, meaning lots of small acquisitions and far fewer large acquisitions or IPO's. Size of companies follow a powerlaw, so there's a good chance acquisition size does too. I haven't seen any research on the subject though. This distribution means that your chance of a small exit is significantly better.

- VC's invest too much money. If they invest $10 mill. in a company and expect a 1000% rate of return on successful exits they (and therefore you) have no choice but to go for the scarce big acquisition or IPO's.

- your life will improve if you make $ 1 million, but you won't get much more happiness from $100 million. So why gamble?
"Making the tenth of a percent from 89.4 to 89.5 worth immensely more than the 9.4 percent from 80 to 89.4 is idiotic."

I got an 89.4% in a CS class and asked the professor, whose office hours I frequented, if he could bump me up to an A since I was so close.

His response was: "If you truly understood the material and deserved an A, you would have earned an A by a large margin rather than missing it by a small one."
A rebuttal: http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/03/bubbles-and-sex.html True, but it's still a great article.
"These photos have won" is far below the fold -- I didn't see it until it was over. When it is over, the middle part of the screen is blank -- no game over, no thanks, nothing else to do. You need to follow up with the user to keep them engaged.

I don't know much about China, or these sample photos, though I got the impression that most of it was "popular symbol vs present-day life".

I am wary of what actual insights you can get with this kind of sociological game... seems to me pretty fuzzy, especially since you don't have any data on the users. "Pairwise" and statistics don't mean it's good science.
Study: Want a smart baby? TV's not going to help
I thought this article about early brain development was interesting. Sorry if it is not Hacker News-ish, I mean no harm ;)
Everyone who responded to you pretty much covered it. But, I'll add that integrating your blog with your website is important for a few obvious reasons: (1) keeping your blog on your own website is better user experience; (2) you can more tightly integrate the rest of your website; (3) it's better in terms of SEO (yes, SEO matters); and (4) you have more control over it running on your own servers.

By "looking professional" I mean "acting professional". Acting professional is simply a synonym for delivering a quality service, in my opinion. I'm not talking about putting on a facade here. I'm talking about taking everything into consideration, because even the littlest things affect a person's overall experience with your product.
I wanted to strangle the guy when he responded to you with "Yes indeed $.64 cents". Whoosh.
That's perfectly acceptable. I just think keeping it on your own domain -- as you mention -- is important.
JS-Kit integrates with YahooOS creating Major New Distribution Channel for Publishers
I like it. However, I found a site that breaks it: http://www.instigatorblog.com/the-art-and-science-of-the-sma... ... When I click my 'Readability' bookmarklet in Chrome, the main article is removed completely, and all that's left is the blog entry's comments. Here is the exact Readability bookmarklet I'm using:

javascript:(function(){
readStyle='style-newspaper';
readSize='size-medium';
readMargin='margin-medium';
_readability_script=document.createElement('SCRIPT');
_readability_script.type='text/javascript';
_readability_script.src='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/js/readability-0.1.js?x='+(Math.random());
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(_readability_script);
_readability_css=document.createElement('LINK');
_readability_css.rel='stylesheet';
_readability_css.href='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/css/readability.css';
_readability_css.type='text/css';
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(_readability_css);
_readability_print_css=document.createElement('LINK');
_readability_print_css.rel='stylesheet';
_readability_print_css.href='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/css/readability-print.css';
_readability_print_css.media='print';
_readability_print_css.type='text/css';
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(_readability_print_css);
})();
My work-in-progress Python web framework called Webify (http://github.com/jperla/webify/tree/master) uses decorators for URL dispatching. It's definitely way better than a separate config of tuples.
I thought this article about early brain development was interesting. Sorry if it is not Hacker News-ish, I mean no harm ;)
Exponential growth cannot go on for ever; at least not in an Universe with hard limits, like our own. My personal opinion is that in Nature, every time you find data with an exponential growth trend, it means you have found the slope of a sigmoid trend and you have not observed long enough.

Moore's Law is nothing but a myth now. In its original form, it was a forecast for the next 10 years... in the sixties!!!! Now we have people talking about infinite growth based in a prediction expired before they were born! Not even its creator thinks it's valid anymore. http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?newsid=3477
I agree. Trying to alienate one person can poison the whole group dynmamics. Others could get PO'd at you. People who don't have the 10000 ft view often are good at details or at administration. Best to find something that he is good at that helps the group. As others have said this is more properly the manager's or lead's job. If he ignores it, your hands may be tied.
That's funny. I left my family plan with Verizon to go in with 4 friends on an iPhone family plan. I wonder if Apple will make a CDMA iPhone or if the only way for Verizon to get in on the action is to switch it's network or buy coverage from another GSM provider (ATT).
Naive questions:

How does your data center look like? What is your web crawler written in?

I assume that your startup is fairly small - how difficult is/was it to get enough resources (funding) to scale up? (esp. datacenter wise)

I see that you do not just cover English and other (co.?? org.??) domains are covered fairly well.
It seems to me that learning material over a long period of time is better than just "crashing" for exams, which this author's proposed system would encourage.

It is easy to imagine that a student will skip an assignment at one point, then stop doing homework altogether. The student will realize he should have done the homework toward the end when he realizes his grade, but by then it will be too late -- his homework average will be too low to make a difference.
For those of us who want to target a small exit, it would be great to hear about small exits made in the last year and who made the acquisition. This article mentions a few. Does anyone on here know of more?
He needs a course in logical fallacies, the meaning of "ad hominem" and "straw man", and a sound lashing for using obvious and egregious link bait to advertise his also ran video startup.

I don't usually pick on early stage startups, but when you fail this hard and waste my time by convincing me to read it, well...all's fair.
3 new Cisco critical vulnerabilities
On 25 February 2009, Cisco has published three new security advisories, which can be exploited by malicious people to conduct a DOS attack or a Remote control attack.

1) Multiple Vulnerabilities in the Cisco ACE Application Control Engine Module and Cisco ACE 4710 Application Control Engine
The Cisco ACE Application Control Engine Module and Cisco ACE 4710 Application Control Engine Cisco ACE Module and Cisco ACE 4710 Application Control Engine contain multiple vulnerabilities that, if exploited, can result in any of the following impacts:

Administrative level access via default user names and passwords
Privilege escalation
A denial of service (DoS) condition
Facebook in 2010: no longer a walled garden
Cisco IOS: Attack & Defense
Surfing the web, I have found a nice talk on Cisco IOS Forensics and Exploits, explained during the 25C3: “Cisco IOS Attack & Defense - The State of the Art“.

What is 25C3?
The 25th Chaos Communication Congress (25C3) is the annual four-day conference organized by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC). It takes place at the bcc Berliner Congress Center in Berlin, Germany. The Congress offers lectures and workshops on a multitude of topics and attracts a diverse audience of thousands of hackers, scientists, artists, and utopians from all around the world.

Here a summary written by FX
“To summarize the presentation given at the 25C3, the work is aimed at the possibility of performing forensic analysis for Cisco IOS devices. We identified a complete lack of tools and methods for detection of compromized network equipment approximately two years back.
What perspectives do your other teammates have of him? Do they share your same views, or different views?

They might shed some more light on the situation. Hypothetically: "Oh, yeah, Joe's a great guy, but you're right. He doesn't really get the 10,0000ft view of things. He mentioned to me the other week that it hasn't really been explained to him clearly, so he just focuses on the task at hand. He doesn't get all of that business stuff either, and really doesn't want to embarrass himself by admitting it."

----------

His motivations, and incentives to work, might be different than you think too. Usually you really have to get to know someone, both at work and in their personal life, to truly understand what drives them. Money isn't always everything.

Maybe he's offloading work to other teammates so he can work on his startup instead, on the job! ;)

----------

But as others have said, it's great that you're friends! :) Talk to him about it in a non-threatening way (I know that's tricky sometimes). Ask him how he feels about things.

If you do the "we're going to have a manager/employee review" thing, and it comes off negatively from his perspective, that'll probably scare him. When people are scared they can become unpredictable.

He might start working harder, he might start looking for another job, he might complain to HR and fight back, etc... That all depends on the person.

Some sort of non-confrontational approach usually works best IMHO.

----------

Best of luck to you!
Observations, Complaints, Quibbles, and Suggestions Regarding the Safari 4 Public Beta
Researchers did not have data on what kinds of programs the toddlers were watching.
Sites With Focus Are Thriving In The Downturn
Semi-related: Burt Rutan's TED talk has a mention of early aircraft design and how many different designs there were (with slide pictures). Worth checking out.
Amit Ranjan the co-founder of Slideshare, called it an "inspirational masterpiece." I suppose I could have gone in and written something up but at this point just should leave it alone.
Offering prize money for discovering flaws is point #13 on the crackpot index (http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html). I've griped in the past that this criterion is too prone to false positives, citing DJB as an example.
Reasons Why Your Application Probably Sucks
I am Icelandic, living in Iceland so I know a thing or two about the situation. The article has some simplifications obviously but the overall picture is pretty much as he describes.