skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"...then State governments will have to pick up more of the slack."

The sad thing is State governments are doing the same thing. I reference the illusory "let us fund education with lottery money" mentality many states follow forcing universities and colleges to seek funding elsewhere.

Case in point, Truman State University, the university formerly known as Northeast Missouri State University. Several years ago this institution embarked on a re-branding excercise to become a self-proclaimed "little Harvard" in order to survive. From a financial and quality of education standpoint it has been a successful exercise. "Truman State University's quest to become the nation's leading public liberal arts university" is a demonstrable success regarding national ranking and all the metrics that go along with that ranking. It is serving the nation well as an institution of higher learning. I don't know if the same can be said for Missouri's citizens, especially those of northeast Missouri, whose children are no longer admitted.

I predict that education at public universities will follow the path that their affiliated extracurricular sports programs have followed as they compete for corporate largess. Their will be a "Top 20" group of winners and everyone else. Unfortunately, the Top 20 cannot educate all the students in need of an education.
Hmm... if it's BDB, why is SDB lacking so many functionality of BDB then?!

After a cursory look, SDB has more in common with Mnesia than with BDB.

http://erlang.mirror.libertine.org/doc/apps/mnesia/Mnesia_ch...
I'm partial to http://www.rubystuff.com
Hah, I thought pg might like that one, but refrained from posting it myself because it didn't seem relevant enough.

It's a very accurate portrayal of what's going wrong there right now, and at the same time avoids being one of those articles that just seeks dirt and dishes it (it would be easy to paint any place like a dump if you only report the negatives).

It's all the more heartbreaking, because there really are a lot of people doing interesting, creative, entrepreneurial things, but they are completely strangled by incompetent or actively malicious bureaucracies.

I do think that, long term, they'll do ok, but who knows how long "long term" may be - 5 years? 10? 50? 100?
This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but the photo was protected. It is not protected by fair use because the video is not a parody of that photo, but of something else entirely. The photographer took the picture for Wired (where the video creator apparently downloaded it after a Google search), and Wired licensed the picture for use. In the page which includes the picture, there were several links to the original photographer's page.

The real lesson here is to ask for simple permission when including other people's content in your own. With e-mail, this is easier than ever. Either that or make sure that it's licensed under a "sharing" license. Failing both of those, you'll just have to find another image.

This is really how it's designed to work. It's not right to be able to just take someone else's work and slap it into your own with no permission or credit.
Nice that YouTube's player can finally skip forward.
You're not going to get a more up-to-date state of the field than from Hinton. Plus, their approach works on real world problems - they're consistently at the top of the Netflix leaderboard.
I never realized all you need is a favorable wind and hot air to make it to the top. Makes sense, I guess.
They lost most of my respect when my parents got a subscription during my high school years, and I read the articles.
Yeah, but making a new "most complex piece of engineering" is fire-and-forget (at least if you move out of state and change your name).

>apt-get install human-2.0
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done

After delivery $2.5 million will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? n
Abort.
"As a startup, the first thing that you'll need is a logo."

Umh.
I was talking about from a design perspective... I think that's obvious given the topic of the post, but I suppose I could clarify it. Jeeez. Nitpick much?
Yeah... it's dumb, but it's pretty incredibly powerful, in this case.
The point isn't when the domain was first registered. It seems that every domain which was never intermittently dropped from the whois databases shows the date of first registration, regardless of any changes in ownership.

academia.edu did change owners several times after the new .edu rules were put in place in 2001 (as evidenced by whois and nameserver history databases from several private sources and historic zone files which are widely available since verisign used to publish then until a few years ago, etc.). Due to change in ownership and Academia Inc not being an accredited educational institution they are in clear violation of .edu rules.

The grandfathering of existing domains in 2001 allowed non-accredited 'institutions' to 'keep' their domains but certainly does not allow a change of ownership.

Consequently, I find it rather unlikely that Academia Inc will be able to keep this domain once the powers that be take notice, or a competitor in their space.

Building a commercial social network named "something.edu" is therefore rather silly.
> funding an army of startups and small research-oriented firms, both with much lower overhead costs than academia

The big advantage in academia is access to prohibitively expensive equipment. What option was there for Google back then, other than using "free" university computers and bandwidth? No way they could've afforded it at 90s prices. Even though prices have fallen now for that, there's always something too pricey for a startup. What if your research involves a particle accelerator or something else you can't rent hourly from Amazon? Students can get access to resources they simply couldn't otherwise, especially in the hard sciences.

Nobody's going to rent $100k of equipment to a student with a $500 limit Mastercard. Not to mention, a week's rental would probably equal your tuition, so forget about having access to something for an entire semester.

Software startups are an anomaly. If consumer electronics didn't conveniently happen to make inroads for you (as it did with computers and video equipment), the barrier to entry for MOST technical disciplines tends to be as high as ever.
Don't they use large populations of possible solutions for this very problem?
Doesn't Microsoft do something like this? I mean when you type in a server name that does not exist.
Powerful? Impress? Sorry - didn't impress me
The author does not seem to appreciate the consequences of using the MIT License. I don't think he should be using any type of OSS license if he only intends to release his source as a reference.
Every time I see his name I think it's going to be something related to Futurama. :-/
this makes me want to figure out how to make a neural network.. of the 20% i understood, very interesting.
How do I prevent people from cloning my Numbrosia puzzle?
Are there any IP protections that might apply?

http://apps.facebook.com/numbrosia/
Perhaps my judgement is impaired by being a math geek who wants to startk something.

I am also interested in comp sci --- but I hugely prefer the math dep's gender ratio.
Google Streetview Available in Boston
MyBS plugs into MySQL providing direct HTTP access to/from BLOBs
:-)

I still say "umh" to that. Are you more likely to use an app by a company with a good logo, or an app with a good ui?
Flickr DBA discusses MySQL
news.yc is really nice looking if you install greasemonkey (ff extension) and the News.YC Enhancements script.

Also, I figure whoever wrote that script uses this site, so thanks for that.
If anything else interests you, try developing a non-hacking hobby.

I'm a big fan of Philip Greenspun's writing, and over time his love for photography seeped into my personality. I started buying camera equipment and found that I greatly enjoyed it. So now when I don't have anything good to program, or want an interesting break, I grab my camera and walk around taking photos. It gives me time to unwind and relax, but I'm still being productive -- just in a different sense.
Evan Williams: Will it fly? How to Evaluate a New Product Idea
Consider any "vocalizable concept" X. There are 4 directions you can move from X.

"Meta" - you can ask the set of questions "what can we say about claims about X?"

"Anti-meta" - you can ask the questions "what can X say about other things?" (make X a meta-concept of some other concept)

"General" - you can ask the question "do there exist generalizations of X?" (commonly known as abstraction, although the term is ambiguous - generalization is more precise)

"Specific" - you can ask the question "do there exist instances of X?"

Answering questions in these 4 directions gives you information about what you really want to know - what is X? What is "true" of X?

Philosophy is exploration and characterization of this "idea space." Nothing more. Nothing less. Very useful, if people would only do it once in a while.

---

Quick example:

"What is free-will?" = X

Meta:

Does free-will correspond to a thing? What classes of things is it in? What are our intuitions? What can we meaningfully say about free-will?

Anti-meta:

Suppose we define free-will well. What concepts does it enable? Are those concepts meaningful?

General:

Are there generalizations of free-will? How about just plain old "will"? What can we say about "will"? How about "freedom?" What's that?

Specific:

Are there any hard-and fast examples of free will? Are there any "thought-experiments" we can perform to try to shake out our intuitions? For instance, if everything were systematic/deterministic, what would this imply?

---

My claim is that this method is useful for getting terms to be well-defined in the way that PG requires of math. You just keep doing this sort of analysis over and over until you get down to essential definitions.

Best to start from the bottom, though.
Re: generous....

It depends on what the options are priced at and what the vesting period is.
Funny thing is, none of them (I think) are billionaires, in the sense of having at least one billion dollars in liquid financial assets.
ROR bio/internet startup, looking for developers
Our startup, built on Rails, is working at the intersection of biomedical research and search, with the ultimate goal of organizing biomedical information. We're looking for great developers to join us.

We've built a web platform that helps scientists find each other, share information, and search the literature. This is meant as a spring
board for organizing the world's biological information. We've received funding from a cofounder of PayPal, Peter Thiel, and people from Google and Amazon. Anyone interested should get in touch:
mark.kaganovich@gmail.com.
We're based in Palo Alto, CA, but location is pretty flexible.
And now - please repeat the same with functional programming metaphors.
Link didn't work for me.

http://blog.getpaint.net/2007/12/04/freeware-authors-beware-...
No, the law is wildly inconsistent. For example, using part of a song in another song is not protected. Using a photograph in a painting is protected. Using a photograph in a video may be protected, but this video apparently won't be the one to tell us.

I know wikipedia isn't the best source, but i think it's good enough to show there is no accepted standard across media types.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collage
I saw this around five years ago.
That color scheme still has got to go. Django needs a design that at least approaches reasonable aesthetic sensibility.
Google Makes Its ID Management Move - GigaOM
That post has zero real world examples of things that Vista DRM has prevented him from doing.
Getting started with Comet on Erlang
Python decorators in Lisp, Part 2
what a clown
Mitchell's book on Machine Learning is a great introduction.
the making of the 2 and 5 was pretty cool; how far advanced are techniques for content generation?
Wikia's Got A Truck Full of Servers -- 1,000 To Be Exact
Do You Use Google For Vanity Searching? You're Not Alone
Facebook Sues Porn Company Over Hacking Attempt
How Much Fuel Does Your Startup Need?
This has been asked a few times. I answered at length in this thread (our products all include source...some are Open Source, some are proprietary that just happen to include the source):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=81351
Django Performance Tips
Google Sneaks up on Identity Management
http://www.google.com/help/profile/
No, historically most food shortages have been caused by bad government.
Coding Horror: Our Fractured Online Identities
I think the point is that ground work is in place for future plans that will make use of such features. Whether such things pan out is another thing.

"Microsoft want the DRM themselves because it puts them in a position of power over their competitors. They want Windows to be the OS that can play movies and music and other OS's to be shut out in the cold."

That pretty much sums it up. No good can come of this.
Personally I prefer TCP/IP via bongo drums (http://eagle.auc.ca:80/~dreid/) or carrier pigeons (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt?number=1149).
Rails 2.0.2 just released, so what's new?
On Facebook, Scholars Link Up With Data
Nice thinly veiled attempt at spam, though I admit I like the game:

1) Why is it a Facebook app? I feel like people are making things into Facebook apps for the sake of making Facebook apps, even when there's really no good reason to.

2) You really need to make it ajaxy, there's no reason to force a reload of the page every move.
Python was the first language I ever loved. And I've defended it, and especially its whitespace for block structure, more times than I can count. (One Perl programmer I know can't mention Python without describing it as "that whitespace language", and I couldn't understand why until I saw some of his, ahem, "creatively indented" Perl code. I'm so anal about indentation that I really never noticed.)

But eventually I realized that whitespace is an Achilles heel in one context: using Python as an HTML-embedded template language---unfortunately, a very important case. Seeing this Django book, and finally understanding how they solved the template-language problem with Python, appears to confirm this intuition. They solve it the same way all Python frameworks solve it: they introduce a separate, template-specific language.

This is one big reason why I love Ruby, and Rails. Because Ruby uses an "end" keyword, it works great as an HTML-embedded language. This means that, in Rails, you always have a full-strength language at your disposal, and never have to use a watered-down template language.

It's possible that Django is awesome nonetheless---it does seem to be attracting some first-rate hackers---and I could certainly be convinced to switch, but being able to use embedded Ruby will keep me firmly in the Rails camp for the time being.
"I'm guilty of using code enhancing substances."
Online Ad Spending Growth To Slow, No Need To Panic
"On the other hand, it's also possible that they could shop the combination around to other sites as their own answer to Passport and OpenID - a universal web identity backed by a trusted brand."

[Sigh]

A universal web identity should not be "backed" by any particular brand. That's precisely the strength of OpenID (and not
MS Passport). You're free to use any OpenID provider which you trust (including yourself), but you aren't required to use anyone in particular, like this guy suggests Google could/should do.

For example, I recently set up my personal website URL to be my OpenID (very easy: two additional <link> tags), which currently delegates to an account I registered with the myopenid.com provider, but I could easily change it at any time to another provider if I found another better provider that I trusted more (or even myself using something like http://siege.org/projects/phpMyID/)

Now, if Google wanted to be an OpenID provider (like AOL, LiveJournal, Technorati, WordPress, and others have done) I would be all for that. What we don't need is some proprietary system.

I suggest anyone developing a web app look into supporting OpenID authentication. It's not too much additional work, and it would make the web a better place if it were widely deployed. Plaxo has detailed instructions on converting existing web apps to support OpenID: http://www.plaxo.com/api/openid_recipe

And for the rest of you, you should set up an OpenID and start using it wherever possible. Sam Ruby has good instructions on using your URL as an OpenID http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2007/01/03/OpenID-for-non-S... or OpenID.net has information on getting an OpenID from any number of providers: http://openid.net/get/
Machine Learning (classic book, by Tom Mitchell)
Get on CSPAN: Chris Dodd is Filibustering the Senate and Wants You To Give Him Things To Talk About
For me the opportunity is for an app that would allow a small group (e.g. of founders) to create an integrated view of their contacts: answer the question who knows someone at X? But I agree with gnaritas that turning over the keys to your on-line identity was too big a step for me. Which argues, I guess for a distributed model that could share results.
I really don't know what to think. On the one hand, that video killed a bunch of my brain cells and I don't care what happens to it; on the other hand I hope the plaintiff loses for the sake of copyright.
By popular demand, I will resist the urge to shill other code enhancing substances.
Yeah....even though those unmentioned substances ARE the best at coding enhancement.
Loren Feldman Trashes Seesmic
1) because I think I will get more users that way

2) yes I agree
I don't believe any of this hogwash . . . SimpleDB is clearly just a big memory-resident hash table.
Who Will Google Buy Or Clone In 2008?
Chris Anderson: "Free: The Past and Future of a Radical Price" (Video)
I like not having a lot of heavy code inside my templates. The only stuff I do there is displaying values, formatting, and some simple logic. Isn't this one of the core principles of MVC?
This doesn't look much like resisting the urge.
There are advantages to both approaches. Obviously as you suggested, only using indentation makes templating more difficult than have an 'end' delimiter. But for the 90% of code that I write which isn't an HTML template, it is pretty nice to be able to not have extra ends all over the place.

But, if it is that big of a deal to you, it really is a solved issue in Python. Mako is Python in a templating language with the extra ends to make it work. Another language which is all-Python and I think pretty elegant is Breve. It uses s-expressions to do the job.

Using Mako with Django would really be very simple. I think the main reason the Django developers use Django is not so much because they don't like Python but because they are very strict about separation of display logic and business logic. Django's templates really are meant for designers, not programmers. That isn't totally appropriate in all contexts, but like I said, using Mako with Django should only be a matter of writing a few wrapper functions.

http://www.makotemplates.org/
http://breve.twisty-industries.com/
Exactly. Having a "watered-down template language" is a good thing.
Not using/allowing Python code in HTML templates is a deliberate Django design decision. We created Django in an environment where the designers didn't know Python (or much programming, in general), and it was much simpler to explain a simple template language than to teach them Python.

Aside from that, there are some nice benefits to having a separate template language. One benefit is the extra level of security -- a designer can't bring the entire site down by making a syntax error in the template. And there's the benefit that it encourages you (rather firmly!) to separate logic and presentation. In my Django applications, I'm never tempted to give templates any logic that isn't strictly presentation-related.

Then there's stuff like the template system's automatic HTML-escaping, which we just introduced in the Django development version. Sure, I guess you could do that with a pure-Python-syntax template system, but it seems like you'd end up hacking things substantially to get that to work.

And, finally, if you don't care for Django's template language, you don't have to use it. The whole framework is just Python, after all -- import whatever external libraries you want to import.
Really?: http://www.rubystuff.com/shirts.html
The problem is arguably that the indirection is really, really costly. Just today I wrote a custom template tag I needed in order to factor out some functionality common to every view on my application. In RoR it would have been maybe 2 lines, but that custom tag was more like 15.

I still adore Django for its efforts to remove all the "magic" code, though.
Brand development is still deadly important. No one is going to use your site if they can't remember it. If your competitors are on par with you feature-wise, the one with the stronger brand is going to win.

That being said, if your opponents aren't on par with you feature-wise, well...
I hope they can get over their PHP addiction.
Gee, I'm glad that Startup/Hacker News limits topics to items of interest to startups.

Perhaps Sen. Dodd should just start reading the complete works of Knuth.
"These requests for information from Facebook generated error messages and were detected as unauthorized attempts to access and harvest proprietary information."

They're being sued for getting HTTP 403 error pages?

The suit alleges Facebook has suffered damages in "excess of $5,000" and has been "irreparably harmed."

D'oh, their valuation is now only 14.999995 billion.

IP fishing expeditions seem like abuse. Sounds like Facebook, flush with their +5 vorpal cash-hoard, are trying it out on lowly 1st-level NPCs.

Getting some practice throwing their weight around and bullying.
As Mike Vanier has noted (http://www.paulgraham.com/vanlfsp.html), "LFMs [languages for the masses] deliberately restrict the abstractive power of the language, because of the feeling that users 'can't handle' that much power. This means that there is a glass ceiling of abstraction; your designs can only get this abstract and no more." In this context, the Django template language appears to be an LFM. In Mike's nomenclature, embedded Ruby is an LFSP (language for smart people).

It may be that an LFM is the right design decision in some contexts. For others, an LFSP is better. For my purposes (and please forgive the pretension), I prefer an LFSP. And, while you can use an LFM in Rails (e.g., the Liquid template language), I don't see how you can use an LFSP in Django---at least, because of whitespace, not the LFSP called Python.
Best line: "The web is getting so damn big, what seem like niche ideas can be very decent businesses."
When Bad Acquisitions Happen to Good Startups
Angel: We mentor startups better than VCs do
I dunno, I'm a hacker and I thought that a senator using blog comments to feed a filibuster was pretty interesting.
Will It Blend?

http://www.willitblend.com/
Programming Collective Intelligence (O'Reilly book) also discusses this along with other AI topics. Everything in the book has fairly straightforward python code demonstrating it as well.
State of ECMAScript 4
"I think it's fascinating to note that there's 3 implementations that already have over 25% of all the new features in the language implemented." -John Resig
An interesting statistic here was that only 36 per cent of Italians trust their government. US's Congress currently has approval ratings hovering in the 20's. Do you think that a poll would show that even 30 percent of the US people trust their government?
"One benefit is the extra level of security -- a designer can't bring the entire site down by making a syntax error in the template."

What happens if there's a syntax error in the template language?
'Long term' will be never if they don't fix the corruption and bad government problems.