skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mewonders what's going to happen as people start calling about space insurance programs. Still a long shot, but probably faster than the government can finish scratching its head.
A very interesting essay about using some types of mathematical surfaces in architecture. The architect chooses surfaces with useful properties, like being able to walk between any two points without turning upside down, and uses them as floors, walls, and ceilings of buildings.

One question he didn't address was why he couldn't just create arbitrary surfaces out of NURBs or some other type of spline. It seems like that would give an architect greater freedom to mold things to his liking, instead of choosing predefined functions and playing with the free parameters. Perhaps he just likes the aesthetics of the rheotomic surfaces?
Google and Wolfram don't really compete, I wouldn't be surprised if Google ends up showing Wolfram stuff in their results, like they do with Wiki.
Interesting that they released this on the same day as the long-awaited Wolfram|Alpha demo...

Google has been slowly piecing together their linked data strategy, which includes things like automatically returning flight data, stock data, answers to natural-language questions, etc. However, until they release an API letting developers tap into some of these tools and return structured data, they're not fully getting it.
Develop Twitter API application in django and deploy on Google App Engine
Why would anyone downmod this? It's certainly not abusive, and it's a good point to boot: there are some definite similarities between what Wolfram Alpha is promising and the semantic technologies Google has been implementing over the past year or two.
That is what I was thinking, but I think telnet really does the trick. This is nice just because it gets around the by-hand formatting on telnet.
You'd think there'd be a pretty large market for professional internet headline writers these days since it seems to be all you need to do to get some traction for an otherwise absurd post
If Jyllands-Posten had wanted more Muslim readers, then they probably should have apologized for the cartoons.
porntipsguzzardo?
The space elevator can probably use some amateur innovatordom, although I don't know how if at all that is possible. I have the impression that no matter how good the amateurs get, boosters will always be a colossal waste of fuel. Cool factor 1, space advancement factor 0.
Found it on slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/mattetti/couchdb-perform-like-a-pr...

So it was one guys idea of a joke - big deal (and no actual nudity).
Creative creatives create creative creations,
with language!
The interesting thing about that post was this bit: "Since Google's acquisition of Trendalyzer two years ago, we have been working on creating a new service that make lots of data instantly available for intuitive, visual exploration. Today's launch is a first step in that direction."

It would be great to see Trendalyzer hooked up to google's data-crawling capability.
A friend directed me to this post, and here is what I have to say. The best decision I ever made was to quit high school when I was fifteen. I read Grace Llewellyn's "The Teenage Liberation Handbook" and, despite it being written a little simply, the ideas resonated with me. Compulsory schooling is about control, busy work, and, as Foucault points out, a type of discipline based on the penal system. School made me view education as an abominable chore, and it was only once I left that I was able to begin exploring academic disciplines in a comprehensive and meaningful way. If you love erudition for its own sake (as I truly believe most people are prone to do--it's only after years of schooling that we eschew the notion of pleasurable learning experiences), you have what it takes to educate yourself.

I recovered from the trauma of compulsory school, and I am now a college honors student with a 4.0 GPA. While there are still serious problems regarding "education" in the world of academia, college is significantly better than high school. A GED, well written essays, and outstanding SAT/ACT scores will get you into some of the most prestigious institutions without a diploma. Most people think that you have to be miserable for the next few years because they were forced to be miserable and they think it's the only way to find success in the future. I believe that they are entirely wrong about that. Research "unschooling", Paolo Freire, and Summerhill school and decide for yourself.
Is it supposed to be alerting my user agent string? I smell XSS!
This is the real map of Shanghai in 3D. If you noticed the three buttons at the top right of the frame, the first one is for 3D display. Second one is for 2D display. Last one is for satellite pics.

These are so much info that I can parse from the map.
I agree with the first part. As much as I disliked school, the best thing about it was all the free time - I've never had as much free time since then.

So my advice is if you really dislike the schoolwork, just ignore it and do the bare minimum to pass, and spend your free time on more interesting things. You can't really quite school because you are still too young and immature.

But don't feel guilty about skipping schoolwork as long as you are spending your time on something productive and worthwhile.
Ask HN: On Cities, Ambition, Centralization and Being Relentlessly Resourceful
This is a question about centralization, and whether being relentlessly resourceful could
help startups which are not in Silicon Valley.

In "Cities and Ambition", Paul Graham stated "Does anyone who wants to do great work have to live in a great city? No; all great cities inspire some sort of ambition, but they aren't the only places that do." But he also stated that "being relentlessly resourceful is a recipe for success", so possibly there are relentless ways of succeeding in "non-great" cities?

So how can technology startups be successful outside of leading high-tech hubs? Please share your experiences.
I was thinking the same about your link quality myself. What's your background (technical)?
The inappropriateness of the images is their context -- whether classified as porn or merely risque, their only purpose in this talk was to cloud a technological discussion on the state non-relational distributed key/value databases and their comparison to RDBMs systems, and in doing so unnecessarily offended a significant subset of the audience.

For example, compare slides 15 (RDBMs):

http://www.slideshare.net/mattetti/couchdb-perform-like-a-pr...

and 52 (CouchDB):

http://www.slideshare.net/mattetti/couchdb-perform-like-a-pr...
I do agree and recently read Atlas Shrugged and found it the worst book I ever read.

It used way too many cheap emotional tricks to push the case of being rational. I know Dangy is good and competent because she is described that way. The good guys are strong and beautiful and the bad guys are weak and ugly.

The problem with that book is that people and the systems described don’t work the way she was portraying them and after the 3 hour speech I wanted to punch Galt in the nuts.
That's a great question that had never crossed my mind.

How do you manage security in cloud? Can you even do it? Because someone else is administrating your servers, they can get access to everything you have. Is there a way around that? Or is there a way to write your applications to be secure even in that environment?
> If they can find some 'virtual goods' that have value beyond 'aww, that's cute,' my opinion might change.

I really, really wish people would stop boiling "Virtual Goods" down to "cute pictures of cats". If it were that simple, there wouldn't be a 9-figure virtual good economy on Facebook today.

What value do people get out of Virtual Goods? Good question. Let's ask Jeremy Liew - http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123395867963658435.html

He boils it down to three big categories - Doing More, Building Relationships, and Establishing identity. Of course, these are all things that we realistically lots of money for in the real world. Therefore it's not a stretch that there is a subset of people who are willing to pay money for these things online.

In the same way MySpace has proven that US social-network traffic can be monetized by ads, tencent has proven that Chinese social-network traffic can be monetized by virtual goods. To the tune of 800M and 1B respectively. The question isn't "is the value there", the question is - are you monetizing your international traffic sufficiently?
Ask HN: Best way to track usage of js widgets and buttons?
My social news site has a widget and external voting buttons a la Digg and Reddit.

What's the best methods to track usage? I want to know what sites they're appearing on and how many impressions they're getting there. The number of referrals would be great as well, but I don't think this information is gettable since the links are created in js.

Two approaches I thought of, neither seems adequate:

1. Both widgets and buttons make use of an iframe. I could embed Google Analytics code in the framed page that gets called so I can track these "hits." This seems like it might hurt performance on the sites that run the widget/buttons though.

2. Track requests made in the php logs to the image files used in the buttons and the widget. My issue with this is that I'd much prefer to track usage via Google Analytics so I can more easily compare the data and explore it.

Suggestions?
Tools -> Disable Natural Disasters
But probably less than a purposeful attack.
Also, have a look at elscreen if you haven't already. Most of the keybindings are the same (using C-z by default as the prefix), then you can switch between window configurations easily.

http://www.morishima.net/~naoto/software/elscreen/index.php....
(The tabs can be toggled, if that's a turn-off to anyone)
"Ubuntu's screen-profiles also offer a simpler set of default keyboard shortcuts for screen management that are intended to be easier to use and less likely to conflict with other programs and the user's graphical terminal program. "

Interesting - this would be a downgrade for me. For a while I used "escape ``" but have for years used the default of Ctrl+A. This is a pain for most users because they use emacs mode for the console and find that it gets in the way of their return-to-start-of-line shortcut. Whereas I did some time on ksh88 a few years back and now prefer vi mode for the prompt.

Last week I went to a customer site and for the first time met someone

Any theories on why vi is such a popular editor yet so trivial for console? I've been fluent in -o vi and -o emacs and genuinely think that -o vi is a better option, but know about the significant learning curve from my own memories.

I'd like to see tighter application integration with screen - being able to spawn windows, etc. It would also be nice to have a single hotkey combination that exactly emulates alt+tab under Windows.
By "messes with your brain", I mean it alters what your "normal" conscious state is. I don't think you can really argue with this, but have at it.

You mention reading, studying, etc. This is all well and good, but your approach to these problems comes from a state of mind that while dynamic, is quite predictable. A + B = A + B. What a drug like LSD does is allow you to use your mind differently. It isn't really worth explaining and is better left to experience, but I consider myself pretty well educated and I still consider taking LSD to be one of the best things I ever did in my life. It breaks down your ego and lets you see things in a completely different way. It's probably not for everyone.

Bottom line is: If you've never had the urge to explore what a significant change in consciousness provides, then it's not for you.
This is applicable to most sentences. For example: "Make Something People Want"
While we're on the topic of wordsmithing, "verbal" means using words. You probably mean "oral".
Hulu Now The Number Three U.S. Web Video Site. Soon To Be Number Two.
Well, that's a pretty decent analysis for not having thought about it before. I agree that as a child, it seemed that adults had a penchant for denying that they are anything like children, and I think that was a mistake on their part.

Anyway, I'm not too concerned with compromising my authority as a parent. I'm currently more concerned that my kids will be more on the aggressor end of conflicts, and my approach to that has been to tell them parts of my own story, and how I felt when people did mean things to me (they're pretty young, it doesn't get too involved). I suppose they could eventually come to see me as a weakling or something, but I don't really feel that this is a danger right now.

I have a feeling that I might start to feel the need to hide my weaknesses as my kids get closer to their teenage years, but at least for now, I think you and I are pretty much on the same page.
I think some progress is being made in terms of making workplaces more hospitable to women. Sexual harassment has been a recognized issue for a long time now, but geeks consider themselves too passive and harmless to harass anybody, so they have been slow to catch on. The underrepresentation of women in technology has stimulated some self-reflection about how the workplace atmosphere might put off technologically capable and interested women.
In theory trusted computing can solve that problem but it's not clear that it will ever become practical. I think customers are just going to have to trust the cloud providers.
For the opposite, a URL which stores what's POSTed to it: http://www.postbin.org/

For example: http://www.postbin.org/zfzfg2 (superhappydevhouse.com's pbwiki's webhooks point there)
Easy there, probably just a developer debug message checked into production by mistake.
Hog Bay Software: "while I really like new customers that's not really my goal right now"
> If it were that simple, there wouldn't be a 9-figure virtual good economy on Facebook today.

There's not a 9 figure virtual good economy on Facebook today.
I like how McDonalds gets its own button
if you apologize wihtout learning anything, your apology is an empty one.

Not at all. The apology -- which one should issue immediately and without hesitation -- is full of meaning. Very important meaning. Just not literal meaning.

What is the apology saying?

"I hear you and I understand that you were really offended."

"I am trying to listen to you."

"I am not trying to hurt you on purpose."

"I am not trying to deliberately start a giant flame war that tears our community apart."

"I am open to reconsidering what I said, and the way I said it, in light of your interpretation of my words."

"I have basic social skills and recognize the role of Apologizer when I see it." (See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=240170 )

What the apology is not: An admission of guilt, an admission that you did something illegal or even something wrong. You do not have to break down in tears. You don't have to agree with the complainer. You don't have to change your mind.

What you have to do is signal some sympathy: That you're a civilized person who is open to "trying to understand" the offended person. That you want to de-escalate the situation rather than start a fight. That you're not a troll -- that is, someone who (a) deliberately introduces a topic that is likely to be offensive and then (b) continues to push the buttons of any offended people until a giant flame war breaks out.
Except that everyone who spends a large portion of their time/effort on some issue will inevitably end up having a bias towards one side or the other, and so it's better to have it out in the open rather than falsely claim objectivity.
Well, if fully dressed women make you uncomfortable, I cannot help there.
In Arabic

انا لم اقل بأنها سرقت مالي

Ana lam aqul bi'anaha saraqat maali

If you stress any particular word, you will have to insert or remove parts of the speech in order to conjugate and decline words as necessary:

(1) Ana lam aqul bi'anaha saraqat maali

(2)Laysa ana man qal bi'anaha saraqat maali .. or
(2.b) Lestu ana man qal bi'anaha saraqat maali

(3) Ana ma qultu bi'anaha saraqat maali

(4) Ma qultu bi'anahaa saraqat maali

(5) Lam aqul bi'anahaa hiya man saraqa maali
(or "man saraqat maali" when implying an all female list of suspects.)

(6) Ana lam aqul inahaa saraqat maali

(7) Ana lam aqul inahaa saraqat maaliya (anaa)

Sometimes Arabic is way too precise and makes puns a little harder.
I always prioritize existing customers over new customers. Unless your lock-in is very strong, and your marketing is stronger than word-of-mouth, it's the only way.
Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 is out...
The cheat: hit F-U-N-D-S to get 10,000$ for free. But after you did this a few times too often, the game engine would activate all desasters after another. Is this just me, or does this remember me of someone at Wall Street?
TechCrunch on Al Gore's right to invest...
There are so many interesting ways to monetize maps. Very intersting stuff.
I hate this "fail fast" advice, and just about the only place I've heard it is from VCs, who (a) don't like slow success, and (b) don't mind failure as long as it is balanced with successes in their portfolio.

The problem with the advice is that it obscures two of the most important qualities that a startup needs: tenacity and adaptability.
Not fail fast, but more like know how to retool what you have into another business.

A friend of mine became a hugely successful used-laptop vendor because he learned the ropes of the industry while trying to liquidate the equipment of his failed business (he only had 20 laptops to sell and found the low prices buyers were offering for bulk used laptops vs the high street retail price for single units.)

If my current start up doesn't pan out, I have about 5 different business automation solutions I can take to the market .. or maybe even when it's successful ;-)
After Being Upstaged By Google, Wolfram Alpha Fires Back With A Leaked Screenshot
The thing I'm pointing out, is that given all the online newspapers, and startups probably to do it, I'm surprised Craigslist could take off.

You make it sound like craigslist is some recent newcomer to the internet classified scene. whois craigslist.com shows "Record created on 24-Sep-1997". Craigslist was most likely the first to do and popularize on-line classifies, and figured out all the tech and social changes to do it. Online newspapers never have concentrated on on-line classified and are just now doing that in order to have a decent on-line offering that keeps people coming back. There are even whitebox classified engines that companies like radio stations can stick on their websites to encourage traffic. None of them will beat craigslist though.

My second point about it starting as SF is: In 2005 or so, when I read about CL, the site was only SF, and was pretty small.

I'm sure craigslist has had city listings for places other than San Francisco since before 2005 (maybe not too long before). But San Francisco is a good place to build up a userbase of on-line users because the culture is welcoming to on-line interaction and everyone is so wired (at least compared to other cities).
You see, this is one of the things that make it so awesome to use a Lisp Machine (or Emacs on modern hardware).
Communication breakdown...

This congresswoman should've asked: "Are you completely unbiased on this subject?"

Instead she asked about his personal profit (too open-ended.) An experienced politician can get out of that one.

The last sentence sums up the gross misinterpretation that Gore set out to imply. How does one develop instincts like that?
it didn't seem painful from what I saw in Indiana Jones
I guess I have a pretty skewed view of high school because I went to a fairly good one, where at least the math/science classes were worthwhile. When I was talking about how much time it takes up, I meant on a day-to-day basis. It's something like 8:00AM to 3:00PM, and another maybe two hours for homework (max, its usually much less) and then the rest of the time is yours to play sports, do programming, read, work, etc...

All I'm saying is that though high school clearly isn't perfect, I have trouble agreeing with the apocalyptic pictures some people paint.
This is the first clue that Wolfram is not competing with Google
I just don't see the difference between feminists bitching about inequality every second and people who claim they are losing their jobs to immigrants.

There are always going to be people who are more interested in directing blame away from themselves for their failings and on to other people.

Of course the men vs women situation isn't fair, but they have equal rights plus they can't get drafted. They are legally given the same rights as men, and that is where the drive for feminism ends and the drive to blame other people for your mistakes begins. In my experience people who focus on griping about things beyond their control never achieve the way they could have if they spent more energy trying to succeed, and less energy pouting about setbacks that are beyond their control.

Women are really better off then a lot of other groups that aren't nearly so outspoken and full of rage.

And "There was so much estrogen in that article it was hard to read." Is just calling a clearly biased article biased.

And liberal arts schools are fine as long as you aren't going for a phd. If you are though you must truly believe you have the drive to become a real professor, and/or think that you deserve to do work for unreasonably low compensation to the point of not being able to pay back loans. And if they string you along and you never become a professor it is especially harsh.

I don't hate liberal arts, I just hate the way business people running universities take advantage of people interested in seriously pursuing them. Any person pursuing any phd out of college is going to be very poor unless they work super hard and never take any years off until they are like 27-30. And if you pursue a phd in something that isn't clearly needed by lots of people you can fall into a trap of never getting proper compensation for the amount of work and study you have done.
Interestingly, the domain was registered in 2004. That's what you call betting on disaster.
Apparently the presenter felt that it was not unappropriate, you feel it was. Why the big fuss - why not just ignore that presenter in the future?

I for one don't think there was actual porn in the presentation, only allusions to porn (none of the models were nude). Not saying it was the best joke ever, but not very shocking, either. There is worse on TV all the time.

I also think porn is becoming more and more mainstream. Maybe because of the internet most people are watching it anyway, so there is no use in denying it's existence anymore.
Look who Ashton Kutcher tweeted @aplusk: smart RT @greenboxny
I think this translation is more accurate and makes for a better proof: Я не говорил что она украла мoи деньги; otherwise, a great point.