skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having worked with a lot of ML guys who were ahead of Google on numerous fronts I have to agree. With Knol's death Google failed to control Wikipedia, arguably one of more important ML datasets. People can fire up the common crawl on demand from Amazon. Anyone who thinks Google is the real bleeding edge just isn't browsing recent academic papers.

I've got no formal CS training and if I get funding for jkl.io the objective is to have (most of) a Google News (English) competitor implemented in a year, part-time. Google has thousands of ML employees but there are three million users on Github. If I need facial recognition, it's on Github. Topic modelling to layer on top of my NLP, or to aid in entity resolution, on Github. Crawlers, got it. Next gen databases (http://hyperdex.org/), got it. The jkl.io site is only just over 1000 lines of code written by me at the moment, but it probably uses tens of thousands from just the python libraries before we even talk about the DB and the OS.

The more people understand the filter bubble and the information diet concepts the more personalisation will be a thing only for side interests and friendship networks. I don't think people want black box advertising-oriented algorithms manipulating their political and economic news. The computation required for me is therefore so much smaller and cheaper. I know it's not HN's focus because people want their exit money but donation models, as Wikipedia beating Knol shows, can actually be the most efficient solution in many domains where you can't trust a corporation with a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder profit.

People might say "but what about really huge data like location services using not just GPS, but mobile data and wifi response times, pictures from Google's new alt-reality game and street view"; they might say "Google just can't be caught up to" and point to the failure of Apple's maps. But I worked with some guys who scaled a solution using SIFT features => Lucene that could geo-locate instantly on massive datasets of images. You can prove an algorithm can scale theoretically without having 10,000 machines to run it on. One of the key points separating computer science from just programming is the analysis of algorithms in theoretical terms. Apple's failure was because they are primarily a luxury product company not an ML company but people just think "technology". Even so Apple can get stuff done, or buy companies that can (Siri). Microsoft, Yandex, Yahoo, Amazon, huge rising data powers in Asia, thousands of computer science professors, tens of thousands of post docs and doctoral students, millions of Github tinkerers are not going to fall behind. Google isn't even the major search engine in a lot of countries.
Remember, most of our countries formed in the 19th and early 20th century. Before that Germans for instance were Prussians, Bohemians, Moravians, Bavarians and so on. (39 states)

The French for instance only commonly adopted the same language in 1914. (When literacy rates were high enough for everyone to know French instead of regional languages).

Most countries in Europe were the same less than 200 years ago. I can easily see us being Europeans 100 years from now.

I know Slovenians (where I'm from) still considered it a novelty to think of themselves as Slovenians as late as the 1840's.
> Being a programmer is fucking boring ... They want you to spend your time ... optimizing their databases

Honestly, I really fucking love optimising databases. I can't believe my luck that people want to pay me to do that sort of work for 8 hours a day.

To me, hell is having to define and defend my own problem. I would loathe running a startup - I love the feeling, instead, of having people come to me to solve their problems. Fortunately, I've managed to arrange a situation where enough of those problems are reasonably interesting to my apparently unusual tastes :-).

This is not meant as a dig against those who run startups, just a note from someone with a very different perspective.
Reading British newspapers for Eurozone financial commentary is like reading Soviet Pravda for its poignant analysis of American life. The rhetoric is so thick and the motivation so obvious that it's easy to forget that there's always someone who will take it seriously.
From fbme.com (large bank in Cyprus):

16 Mar 13
2.00pm 17 March 2013

The authorities in Cyprus have announced the delay of a Parliamentary debate on the provisional agreement signed by European Union finance ministers for a bailout package for the Government of Cyprus. Though there is considerable media speculation on the detail, some of it no doubt unfounded, the Cyprus authorities have yet to confirm arrangements within the agreed package and the implications for the banking industry and its customers. These are under discussion at the present time.

FBME Bank is in close contact with the authorities in Cyprus and is monitoring the situation with regard to Parliamentary and Regulatory Authority discussions. We will keep our customers informed as to developments and expect to update this statement each day in the coming period as soon as information becomes available. Please refer to our website www.fbme.com for the latest statement, which we expect to update during the course of Monday, 18 March 2013 and thereafter.

At this moment, we wish to assure all our customers that the financial condition of FBME Bank is sound and depositors’ monies benefit from the strength of the Bank’s dynamic and well diversified Balance Sheet, which at all times meets European Capital Adequacy and Liquidity Standards. It continues to be the Bank’s intention to keep a very high liquidity and strong solvency position. If there is further information required please email pr@fbme.com
I have bouts of getting out of this cycle, but always seem to return, how did you get out?
They're not sending people to sit in the corner and wait until they die.

It's about building a colony. Regular supply missions and growing stuff on Mars would be part of the plan.
I would say Computer Science education (K-12) in the United States is far from uniform and that the author unfairly generalizes.
I moved around a bit as a kid, and these were my experiences:

Grades K-1 (Lincoln, NE): Messing around and playing with Apple eMacs (think stuff like Kid Pix Studio)

Grades 1-2 (Fremont, CA): Pretty much nothing

Grades 2-3 (La Habra, CA): Pretty much nothing

Grades 3-5 (Palo Alto, CA): Using some older Apple hardware, by this point we were doing written assignments in Word.

Grade 5-6 (Irvine, CA-stayed here through high school): A dedicated "Computer" class (met maybe once a week) where we learned the Office suite and practiced touch typing. I learned from friends that they had actually been practicing touch typing from a very early age, so it was probably standard to be at about 50 wpm in Grade 5) This was the first time I recalled having very large computer labs in school.

Grade 7: A daily class period (for one trimester) where we learned very very basic html (FRONTPAGE - LOL) and other things. As a kid who had a budding interest in computers at this point, I felt this class to be unbearably slow paced and rudimentary. So slow paced in fact, that I don't even remember what else was covered because I didn't learn anything new.

Grade 8, 9, 12: Nothing, but basic computer literacy was necessary for things like writing papers and presentations.

Grade 11: Took AP Computer Science, which in my opinion
condenses much of the "early start" CS the author mentions into a single year later on. I'm not sure which is better, but I'm pointing out that if you have an AP CS course, it's likely going to cover all of the rudimentary stuff very quickly anyway. For those unfamiliar with AP CS, it covers the rudiments of OOP (inheritance, polymorphism, etc.) as well as some of your basic sorting algorithms and easy recursion.
Also took a C++ class during this time at a local community college (transferable units), which in my opinion, was even LESS rigorous than AP CS.
I second the need for an RSS feed. I was actually a bit surprised when I couldn't find one.
a chrome /firefox plugin that finds plain text links (without <a> tags) Easy and pretty usable instead of highlighting copy -> paste the url or email. If you don't make I will :D
"...the EU shouldn't and doesn't really care if they go under."

The EU should care. Do European officials and politicians think they are immune from the opinion of people in their own countries?

I expect this measure will generate a lot more hostility towards the EU among the European populace.
And that is why Netflix customers freaked out when it was announced that they had to start paying for Netflix Streaming.
I'd probably go with no, at least in this case and how it was done.

While dens can certainly take it, I don't see any way this was designed to "help" him, or really do anything but be a cheap and mean way to earn buzz for Keith.

Keith managed to eke out a successful "Hail Mary Bebo-style outcome" from Slide, so there's some hypocrisy here, too.

It's fair to criticize someone for doing something wrong when you could probably fix it (e.g. I think Refer.ly was doing it wrong in paying small amounts of money to contributors, and I told dmor this repeatedly and made comments to that effect; I cared because it seems like an awesome team who will do awesome other things). It's not really fair to criticize someone who can't fix things (e.g. telling a 2 year old that his painting sucks because the sky is not yellow), or where there's no real way to fix things (e.g. I know a company where the CTO suffered a skiing accident and major TBI, telling the CEO that they are probably fucked is not so helpful).
I think what apunic is noting is our natural tendency to track movement. If you try to read something too close to the leading bright letter, your eyes get hooked by it and get dragged along for the ride. You have to stay a safe distance back to be able to read anything.
Who knows: there are too many variables at play, and it's not worth doing experiments with lest people raise a stink.
I don't quite get it, what can be seen in those graphs?
It is a job listing by a YC company, one of the perks of being part of the game.
It's something I thought about for a while and just decided it wasn't worth it. I just switched away from Posterous (c.f. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5388857 ) and when I was building the new blog, I looked at my RSS subscribers and realized only 15 people actually use it. Just wasn't worth building.
> The Cobb and Dimond mammary ligation studies show better than any drug study just how powerful the placebo effect can be. Angina is potentially debilitating. Yet the placebo effect brought pain down to manageable levels in people who had sham surgery, 80+ percent of the time. Is it any wonder acupuncture works for so many people? Or hypnosis? Or Prozac, Paxil, Celexa, Zoloft, Effexor, and all the rest?

Or, for that matter, psychological treatments, whether drugs, therapy or both.
There is no a thing as code-pollution since every program written express the genius of someone in at least some particular area which can be useful for anyone. NIH Syndrom is not a shame, it's not shame to reinvent the wheel, it is the way of learning, it is the way of rethinking problems and providing new solutions which at least solve the problem for the one who created it. No footballers learn football/soccer only by watching other programs kicking the ball.

Writing software is never a shame. Some softwares are successful but one should dive the ins and outs to understand their success. Some have historical power like Windows or in the hardware space QWERTY keyboard, or marketing power like Apple and Intel. Another comparison would be to compare software to languages not computer languages, Latin was codified by some people, English by the people, and I think everybody will agree that English is easier to learn and speak than Latin. Todays softwares are Latin. While still remaining as useful and as powerful.
Yep, but that's why data would be valuable (although I don't think anyone will have any, due to the reasons you mentioned).
Sure, you can check out some of my stuff on soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/sk0re

It's somewhat mixed, but there is a good amount of ambient stuff in there as well. (Also note that almost all of it - except for the one remix - is CC licensed.)

Would sure love to help out any way I can!
To be fair, It's really hard to make 1/6g or 3/8g environments.
Another person chiming in to say that these exercises are a lot of fun and educational too. Feel like I learned more than in some online cryptography courses.
Not mine, but homesick is a nice little gem that seems to also do what ghar does. I have no opinion on whether one or the other is better :)

https://github.com/technicalpickles/homesick
I get paid less then half what I would make working in industry. My hope is that I can continue my work developing new materials.
This is, in my opinion, a very very good idea for someone with the guts to crack it.
I like how a company that is actually competing in this space, with an existing, operating product, has posted a blog article[1] essentially asking for their new, fresh from Google Reader, users to help prioritizing the missing features and this hacker says just build your own, as if it's a couple of hours or something.

Instead of writing this, he should have made a Google Reader clone and got rich this weekend.

[1] http://blog.feedly.com/
Tripod is still around, but I haven't actually tried to use it in ages. Shame about geocities though.
Now is also getting built into Chrome.

https://plus.google.com/100132233764003563318/posts/idTrXBfo...
> Practically speaking, how do you ensure that the new government doesn't become corrupt in a year or two? Or more importantly, how do you restore the people's faith in their government so that they participate?

Here's how I'd do it: pass laws specifically forbidding these actions by government officials, the punishment being death. And then when someone violates the law, you kill them. You wouldn't have to do this too many times before the problem magically disappeared.

I think this would both fix the corruption problem as well as restore faith in government.
Regarding talks about russian mobs: there is indeed a lot of russian money in cyprus, but not all of it are from criminal activity. The way business works in post-USSR countries forces businessmen to never keep money in the country. And Cyprus banks happened to be most friendly with russian business.
I feel exactly like you, friend.

If you haven't already, I highly recommend hitting the gym. The amount of self-confidence you get when you look in the mirror and see yourself in good shape is priceless. That, and the number of hours you'll be sitting in that chair will pretty much require if it you don't want to suffer any health-risks =)

Everything goes from there... you talk to people better, you posture yourself better, eventually you'll look at yourself better and maybe even start believing that you could do it.

Daryl Teo - also a loser like you. But that only makes victory more sweet.
Cool iPhone 6 concept
This is an inspiring project. It would have taken me far more than five weekends to create this, so you can feel smug knowing you're about ten times as efficient as a random HN member!

I have a couple of criticisms. First of all, strange things happen when a semicolon is omitted from the end of a function definition. In the following example, there is no output. What's going on?

square = { n |
n * n
}
println(square(5));

Second, according to the rules for omitting parentheses, it seems like this should output "25". Instead, it outputs "Function5":

square = { n |
n * n
};
println square(5);

It seems like it's passing "square" and 5 as separate parameters to println, which is unlikely to be the intended behavior in most cases.

Lastly, is recursion possible?

factorial = { n |
if (n < 2) { 1 }
{ n * factorial(n - 1) }
};
println(factorial(5));

That code generates the following error:

Error: function identifier expected ('Exp() :3:5' found) at line 3 char 5

Anyway, I don't mean to nitpick! Do you plan on developing this further?
You do realize that I quoted numbers for the last 10 years? Since the Eurocrisis started, the Euro has losses of around 6-10% against the other major currencies, so your deflationary argument isn't really sound.

All I wanted to say is that in the long run, foreign exchange rates express some form of judgment about the soundness of a currency. The markets still consider the Euro a very sound and safe currency - at least more so than the USD and the UK pound. A weaker exchange rate might be preferable, but that is not a way Europe wants to go. Instead of printing money, the idea is to restructure the economy. In the short run this will of course be super painful and allow commentators to shout "Look, austerity has failed". Let's talk again in 2025, bond yields for Greece,Italy,Spain are already down...
Twitter is more of a status thing, which is annoying. RSS is more like a newspaper where you choose what you want to keep up with.
Note: If it's plausible is obviously a second...
Seconded. You'll find a lot of people on here saying about "never to give up" but IMO, programming is not that glamorous only outside looking in. To give you best sense of this, it's like people not in academia thinking that it's great to have tenure and be paid to pursue your own passion in an academic community.

The truth is most people in IT do very mundane stuff; most web-stack stuff glorified have nothing to do with C pointers. And most people are applying commonly used open-source technologies as users than making original contribution to algorithms. A lot of people have the vision of becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg but it's like winning the Nobel Prize, a lottery; especially in today's social-media infused tech scene, it's about being in the right place at the right time.

Ultimately, this is not to discourage you from going further into tech. But to short-circuit a lot of the BS floating around. You'll get pretty far if you work hard in IT; meaning if you sacrifice your free-time for the start-up treadmill, in 10-15 years, you can get to $150-200K as mid-level manager, saddled with a mortgage, kids and high cost of living in socially-eco-conscious city. For the average-case, it will not give you extreme wealth, it will not give you friends/family, and it will not be novel after a few years of the mundane work.

Take original replier's advice, "live without regrets." If you want to get over the hump of some kind of perceived technical inferiority, by all means, go for it but don't go all in thinking that any field will validate and solve all life's problems. That is very personal and not even your mother would even know. Some people here are happy just being a web developer, a "part of the revolution"; some people here see themselves as tortured young startup artists in struggle to be a triple threat of "a creator, an influencer and a monetizer"; some people get off on the rush of show & tell of weekend projects and their technical prowess and pulse on the trend.

Don't let the community dictate who you are.
Well, if this goes on for long enough, with open borders and such there's going to be a lot of mixing..

I'm not sure what we're going to call ourselves, but if nothing "explosive" happens in the next 2-3 centuries, I predict we'll be mostly brown-skinned and speak some sort of English.
Thanks for highlighting our product happytables, you're bang on with a lot of comments relating to SEO. We'd be doing a disservice to small businesses if all we did was give them the tools to create a website (as opposed to also helping them grow their business).

I'll try to get a post together in the next few days summarizing our latest iteration and lessons learned.

Cheers, Noel
RSS is like client side Javascript. There may be better solutions but it is the only one that is truly open and free.

All these twitter facebook whatever are not based on open protocols to share information freely and anonymously.

Twitter or facebook can kill any app that relies on its API. and Yet some people keep cheering at the death of RSS , these people deserve the distopyan future that's coming.
Cute. You are the smug one, aren't you?
Thanks for that info.

What was the potential impact of doing nothing? As this action "makes the collapse of the EU financial system... much more likely" -- what would the impact have been to the EU financial system had nothing been done at all.
The linked article is about ECB buying government bonds. But the ECB also buys bonds from Eurozone commercial banks, and this is where new money is being created.

It does end up on the central bank's balance sheet, but there's no event that would force the bank to ever write it down. Those hundreds of billions in loans can stay unpaid for hundreds of years if necessary.
Then I guess it'd just be a problem of dedication. Or outsourcing the job somewhere
From the demo code: $scope.Russia = true

I'm guessing Russian
There once was a guy who, at the age of 24, wrote a short text moaning about how he seemed to have been accomplishing little in his life, and how his peers were having a better start.

His name was John Milton. That text was Sonnet VII, "How soon hath Time the subtle thief of youth..." And it wasn't until thirty-five years later that he published "Paradise Lost", the work that made him widely regarded as one of the most outstanding English poets of all time.

You never know when your prime time -- the time for your opus magnum -- will come.
Clearly we should be campaigning for great-tasting health care ;)
Hilarious! Thanks for supporting numpad keys. I'm no good at all with vim keys. Might want to note that; it took me a few tries to figure out I could use numpad (and arrow keys don't cut it with hex movement).
This sounds like an amazing win-win scenario you've got here. People can have fun and learn more about security and cryptography, and you guys get a channel from which to hire the best and brightest.

I sent Sean an email. Even if I'm not in that latter category, it still sounds like a great chance to learn a little something about a field which intimidates but interests me.
You should probably try the latest build of Chrome, Google is now integrated into the browser, and that navigation bar would break away from the seamless UI integration.

Not to mention it was ugly, and never contained the options I needed.
A mobile device that's meant to be used ONLY in one VERY specific way that is in no way mobile friendly at all.

Masterbation. Fun but pretty useless.
First: thanks for even trying it out!

Yeah, if you don't leave off the final semicolon, it doesn't return the last value. In that case you would have to use a normal "return" statement. It's definitely a bug, but I left it in there for some time because I thought it was weirdly interesting. I'm going to get rid of that bug though in the next version.

> Second, according to the rules for omitting parentheses

Ah, I'm doing a bad job with the tutorial then. Parentheses don't work like they do in C-like languages. It's more like Lisp in that regard. Your last statement prints "square"="Function" because you're not invoking the function but getting the function pointer. The correct way would be (again, somewhat Lisp-like):

square = { n |
n * n
};
println (square 5);

Again, this would also be the solution to your last example.

I should probably make a general syntax paragraph as part of the tutorial, especially for people coming from C-likes where invokation goes function(a) instead of (function a).

Edit: there's a section on the site now to explain this, I hope this will make it easier.
Which gives the local retailers a chance to come back, right? Or are they all gone forever?
The world’s cheapest cell phones are now just $10 each