skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Invited to Oracle Open World.  What presentations should I attend?
A few weeks ago, a director at Oracle invited me in to talk to him about social networks and how they relate to his business. I talked to him about Twitter and we discussed security online and in the social network cloud. As payment (of sorts), I was given free tickets to Oracle Open World next week.

Do you guys see any presentations that look particularly interesting? I am bilingual (English/Japanese) so language shouldn't be that much of a problem.

The list for each day is available here (sorry, only in PDF format :( )

http://www.oracle.co.jp/openworld/2009/schedule/pdf/session_ENG_0422.pdf
http://www.oracle.co.jp/openworld/2009/schedule/pdf/session_ENG_0423.pdf
http://www.oracle.co.jp/openworld/2009/schedule/pdf/session_ENG_0424.pdf

I definitely plan to make a write-up of whatever I go see on my blog, and I'll bring a tape recorder (if nothing else).
Does anyone know how manufacturable is the new technology?
that feedback type looks alot like facebook logo
While it’s a neat experiment, you really should be using UTF-8 as your character encoding to mirror Hacker News. I’m already seeing broken characters.
> I note that "mother nature" weeds out most mutations

'Mother nature' actually creates mutations; without them, we wouldn't be able to adapt to nature's changing circumstance.

> And then there's the small details that humanities isn't all that diverse

I didn't say that humanities was diverse; I said that a diverse society needed to encompass the humanities as well, because that diversity is necessary for it to thrive.

I'd argue that Socrates and Plato (philosophy) are as well remembered as Pythagoras (maths). Surely that says something about the importance of the humanities?
Microsoft and Yahoo brewing advertising deal
This looks fairly obvious to me. And mind you I haven't really been an engineer for at least 10 years.
The NoScript extension avoids that.
Non-technical. 14 pages, 1 photo/device/oddity per page, and a topic structure manufactured to produce popularity on social news sites. What is it doing here?

It would be different if there were technical details about the add-ons themselves, or some insight into the thought process that brought them along. It has neither.

This article, along with the recent rash of articles on religion and politics, are starting to get annoying. I can't imagine I'm the only one who feels so.
This is another example of what-aboutery, but relevant I think:

Anyone remember the guy who testified to congress that the US Embassy in Iraq was being built with the exact same kind of slave labor as is apparently common in Dubai?

His testimony:
http://oversight.house.gov/documents/20070726115247.pdf

quote: "My statement will address labor abuse, human trafficking, and other concerning issues that I personally witnessed at the construction site of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad"

Another source, with a similar story.
http://www.antiwar.com/ips/phinney.php?articleid=9919
Yes, him. Generally rendered as "Plato" in English.

It is, of course, only because of writing that anyone now has even heard of Plato, never mind having available the substantial fraction of his work that we have.
Solving a hard problem
Quite right. The simplest solution at the level of version control is this:

>hg add PRN
Error: cannot add file named "PRN" - will cause cross platform errors.
>hg add filename.
Error: cannot add file ending with "." - will cause cross platform errors.
>hg add "-rf *"
Error: files cannot begin with "-" - will cause cross platform errors.

Most people will never see these errors.
Learn A Language 10 Words at a Time
Awesome. I'm forwarding that to my girlfriend.

"It has even learned, by means of brain scans, that introverts process information differently from other people (I am not making this up)."

Just as the rest of the article, this part certainly rings true for me. The fact that I don't think in terms of words seems to baffle people. I always thought this might be because I was raised bilingually, so my thought process might be happening on some kind of superset of the two languages. Maybe, however, it's this that the author alludes to and has no connection with language? It'd have been nice if he had covered more of this angle.
We allow any stroke order for 女 because a lot of people write it non-standardly in order to make it look better.

Skritter's deal is to make spaced repetition easy (premade textbook lists, no need to grade yourself) and efficient (taking advantage of domain-specific knowledge), while building writing practice into it. Certainly if you're making your own SRS, you probably don't need the ease of use. Your Nintendo DS app sounds cool--are you planning on releasing it, or is it a personal project?
Ioke E released - JVM Languages
We'll look at it shortly...
11. Health insurance, dental, 401(k)
These seem cool, but I don't know how affordable they are. Only the plotters/embroidering machines seem to fall into the discretionary category everything else would require some serious investment.
> A caveat: I didn't read through their financial statements, and I refuse to do so unless someone will pay me.

Upvoted for badass mercenary attitude. You should try consulting! :D
We could start with him.
Maybe it's just me, but i see a little inspiration from http://www.acrylicapps.com/times/ , one of the Apps in the last MacHeist, that is also a feed reader.

I added HN to my Times app. But i still prefer viewing it in Firefox.
Really nice Haskell tutorial. Comparable to "Yet Another Haskell Tutorial" by quality. Much more aproachable then "Real World Haskell" if you are new to the language.
Yes. Statistically the percentage values that wage takes of the national income seems to be fairly stable. I.e. capitalists take/get a roughly constant share. Productivity increases do not seem to change the proportions.
As an aside, if you ever go anywhere near Portland, Oregon, go to Powell's, and don't forget to visit Powell's technical too. I really miss those stores (I miss less all the rain that makes sitting inside and reading a compelling alternative so much of the time...)
Since the website is down, here's a research paper from him that I assume gives you the info from the video (probably more substantive as well)

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&...
Actually, does not tell how to stop procrastination, just how they might help people stop their procrastination in the lecture (offer early deadlines). How am I supposed to translate this to my real life (where's no professor who'll punish me if I don't keep my early deadline?).

Besides, made me procrastinate my work further by watching the video...
Hi All,
See details on how to Run PHP on Google App Engine using Quercus
http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2009/run-php-on-the-google-app...
Just download the file in the link and you can run PHP on app engine
in minutes.
Also see http://phpwithjava.appspot.com/webdigi.php
Regards
It's a bit of a misleading title, it's not all about procrastination and it's not much of a howto either.

It's about how you can do many things better than standard economics would indicated if you take into account the irrationality of human beings.

For example, everyone leaves reports to the last minute. Commiting to earlier deadlines makes no sense to a 'rational' human being, but can help actual human beings.

Here's a link to his research paper on this topic:
http://www.predictablyirrational.com/pdfs/deadlines.pdf

And his book site: http://www.predictablyirrational.com/
I'm going to take one last stab at this, and then let it go:

But he didn't repaint the signs. At worst, he convinced a few other people to call up the DOT and say "That stop sign shouldn't be there, please change it to a 55 MPH speed limit sign." If the DOT then goes and changes the signs without appropriately verifying, then it's on them...

I realize as programmers that we might think Weev's (purported) actions are directly responsible for the de-listing, but they aren't. It's ultimately Amazon's code that did the de-listing.
I wonder whether the benefits are for those being trained or those doing the training. It seems to me the greatest trick of waging war is to convince people to put their lives at risk against an enemy that did not originally threaten them. Some people might refer to this phenomena as brain washing.
Nice to see someone who gets noticed pointing it out. The blindingly obvious shouldn't need pointing out by anyone, of course, but hey, people as a whole are mind-numbingly stupid.
NUI: C++ x-platform app framework, OpenGL & Direct3D GUI on iPhone, MacOSX, Win32 & Linux
WTF kind of word is performant?
someone will have to excuse me, since I've yet to go to bed, but after briefly reading this + the toms hardware article, I couldn't help but chuckle at the thought of the "If Microsoft made cars..." jokes that circulated the web in the late 90s
How (not) to evaluate project management software
I agree... The times when the comments are a good indicator of when to skip something is when the article is pages of text, or a very long video.

This one's interesting to take a glance at, then move on.
I suppose one of its goals is to test the sandbox itself for possible abuses, so that it could be fixed later.

This is primarily intended to developers which are most likely to actually find a way to abuse the sandbox.
LambdaBeans: a Scheme IDE built on top of NetBeans
Short Review of Nokia N95 8GB vs Samsung INNOV8
EC starts legal action on Phorm online advertising methods
Twitter Like More Button with jQuery and Ajax.
Fly Unveiled Multimedia Mobile Phones in India
We could start with the Chinese. They breed like rabbits.

Edit: Downvote me if you like, but you know it's true.
Results From A Facebook Ad Test
I think you'd enjoy my favourite productivity blog:

http://www.doitfuckingnow.com/
This site is a really good idea, but I think it needs some work. The design is not all that appealing and the 3d avatars are soo 2004. Also, when viewing the website in any other language except english, it uses Google Translate. That seems kind of strange for a language learning site.
For example, online political fundraising has become increasingly more effective in past decade. By separating the development of the motivation to action from the mechanics of the action itself -- the political rallying from the card swiping -- effective politicians play to the strengths of both the online and offline mediums.
I encourage the author to read Cryptonomicon :-)
Finally, an understandable explanation of derivative markets
I am a Chinese, I'll say this app is awesome, esp with the animated Flash for stroke orders. You must have quite a large database & clever algorithm to do so.

The only website I know that could lookup Chinese characters based on strokes drawing on screen is http://www.nciku.com/

About GAE & GFW, I strongly suggest skritter to support httpS protocol fully
It's also worth noting that there are some fields in which you have to "have a job" in order to be taken seriously. E.g., medicine, academic research, etc.
A Django Development Environment with zc.buildout
With all due respect, I think you're missing the point. I did not mean to imply that the individuals you were referring to were of the "slacker intellectual" variety, I merely used the English Lit major example as a reference to the original article. (Personally, I wouldn't classify those people I know as slackers to begin with. Comfortable != Slacker)

The point is, if the education you received doesn't improve your ability to provide for yourself, then something is either wrong with the education you received or the approach you're taking to the job market. Let's take the first of those possibilities.

I know individuals who are working on very focused topics; things like "The anharmonic instabilities of zwitterionic heterocycles and their effect on fragmentation patterns" (I just made that up, so don't bother Googling it). For these individuals, if they can't secure a post-doc studying Mass Spec, or an industry position in a Mass Spec lab, then they're screwed! But really, is that the job market's fault?If your education is not sufficiently broad, then your education is broken.

What about the second option? What if you get out of school and there are no opportunities? Well, who was supposed to provide those opportunities? The Government? Yeah well, guess what...the government doesn't care so much about science and research any more. Really, though, whose fault is that?

I have the same issue with biologists who moan and groan, "whine" even, about the Intelligent Design movement. They always want to view the poor understanding of evolution by the general public as being the fault of the general public, rather than a failure of scientists to adequately explain themselves and their work. If you can't get a job doing hard science, why not look for work as a science writer? Why not start up your own science outreach program? I'm sure there must be a market for "traveling science shows" (I used to be part of one in high school).

The only way such opportunities wouldn't exist is if the population is just so apathetic to knowledge and learning that they can't even be bother to listen when you break things down for them. If that's the case, go somewhere else! Highly educated Americans are going to have to start thinking of overseas as a viable job market. What America has is a glut of educated individuals, and small demand for them. Trust me, there are plenty of places in the world where those positions are reversed. Why not "Scientists without borders"? There's already Engineers without borders...
Top 10 reasons not to have a job

1. Your boss ran out of Xanax.

2. You wait 3 weeks for specs then have to have it done in 7 minutes.

3. It doesn't matter when you are most productive; you will work 8 to 5.

4. Your project is a slow motion train wreck and you can't jump off.

5. Your boss's girlfriend got the promotion you were promised.

6. Microsoft Windows & Office

7. breakroom coffee

8. meetings where no one knows what they're talking about

9. You no longer read Dilbert. You live it.

10. cubicles
I wonder if you could include comments and make the headline fonts smaller? Newspapers are meant to be readable to everyone; but the mean hacker age will be much lesser (there was a poll on this elsewhere on HN)

Also, I think the goal ought to be to make HN more readable (which you do, to some extent), rather than mimic a newspaper down to the pixel.
Is it just me or does the article read like the author is calling Tiananmen Square a country?
The condescending and closed-minded tone detract from the author's obvious point (startup GOOD, job bad). A more serious consideration of both sides would have proved more useful.

For example, a very serious benefit of having a lowly 'job' is to have a set schedule and be able to make it to every one of your kid's baseball games. The debate is not a clear cut good vs. evil argument so it should not be treated as such.
I find that, personally, if I like something, but then get paid for it, I like that activity significantly less while I'm getting paid. I think it has something to do with the obligation and lack of free-will.
Is identifying hypocrisy distinct from or a type of what-aboutery?
He doesn't seem to have realised that the birth rate in most of the EU is _already_ below replenishment rate.
Uuuugggghhhh... not more of this...

Look, people, global over-population is probably one of the easiest, most straight-forward problems to solve, and the solution is really, really easy:

EDUCATE WOMEN

I'm sort on time, but I can dig up the references later today if anyone wants. The strongest correlating factor with fertility rate is the education level of a population's women. When women are educated, fertility rate settles just above 2 children per women, which is right where you'd need it to keep global population static.
should one be worried if they are working with a programmer who is not awkward, then?

Part of the article's theme is that the awkwardness comes and goes. When the author is not programming he doesn't feel awkward at all.

It's also important to realize the range of human variation. There are programmers who can code at top speed while carrying on a continuous patter. They're not common, but they exist. There are programmers who do all their work with an IRC session chugging along in an adjacent window. I can't seem to cope with that, myself -- I can't focus when messages are scrolling by in my peripheral vision. I also can't focus when there's music playing, but other people can't code without music.
First step is to determine how many world births are currently unwelcome. Do we know this? If the number is small then coercion to achieve this aim is unavoidable. That's a bit euphemistic. Better say, explicit or implicit (chemical treatment of the water?) implementation by force. Serious proposals to say the least. Shouldn't Attenborough tell us what he has in mind before throwing out such a suggestion?
These articles are mostly boring and they seem to constantly pop up. I think programming tends to attract less social people because you can do so much on your own. It's also a brainy activity and a lot of smart people are not particularly social.

It's a genetic fact that all personalities are different. Some people are more naturally social than others. That may lead them to careers other than programming. However, this shouldn't excuse the developer from being socially awkward. Humans are naturally social creatures and learning to be social should not be something that is ignored. I think people who are more social are more happy and lead more fulfilling lives. Why you may enjoy sitting behind a screen for 12 hours a day, I think you'd be a lot happy spending 8 hours behind the screen and the other 4 interacting with people.
Like a breath of fresh air.
Catalyst Professional Resources, LLC 
CATALYST is a building and construction consulting firm dedicated to providing its clients with detailed, comprehensive information about their properties and developing, producing and implementing construction plans that represent their interests in a fair, honest and professional manner.
Given the disparity in birthrates between immigrants and native Britains this is going to be politically impossible to advocate in any meaningful way.
Along these lines is educating couples that having a family isn't a necessity in order to be considered 'normal'.

My girlfriend (pseudo-wife at this point) and I get shocked looks from people when we tell them that we aren't having children, as if we need to have children in order to be considered a Normal American Family (tm).
Kind of hard given that their one-kid rule is 30 years old.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy
Averting Depression as Consumer in U.S. Fades
I didn't necessarily mean just in China.
Will the DiggBar instigator be fired?
This is actually lifted from a French 'joke' powerpoint presentation that was doing the rounds last year...
How to secure your wordpress blog
Measuring the immeasurable: New study links heat transfer, bond strength of materials
Cops, paramedics and firefighters all put their lives at risk going into situations that did not originally threaten them. Yet no-one would describe them as "brainwashed".
This is a very dynamic start-up. Two weeks ago they announced they changed their brand from thesixtyone to thesixtynine, because they thought it would be more memorable. (See http://thesixtyone.tumblr.com/post/91817637/reinventing-the-...) It looked kinda odd, having a "69" icon in my bookmarks toolbar.

Anyway, they appeared to have returned to the old brand now. Great site, though :)
Bloggers Be Warned: FTC May Monitor What You Say
Or, he knows full well but thinks that holding the population steady at 'too many for the world to cope with' is an issue that still needs addressing...
What happens to startup people who make serious mistakes and misjudge potentially debilitating risks to their companies and brands? What, for example, happened to the clever people who concocted Beacon for Facebook, the privacy debacle disguised as an advertising platform that comes once in a century? What happened to the folks who decided to build an architecture for Twitter that couldn’t possibly handle a real-time messaging system at global scale that nearly sank the company? Who at Yahoo thought it was a good idea to pay $5.7 billion to Broadcast.com in 1999?... The object isn’t individual punishment, of course. It’s a matter of ethics and transparency.

I call _bullshit_ on the statement that the object isn't individual punishment. If someone had a truly, tremendously bad idea, does that mean they are more likely to have bad ideas in the future? Maybe they just have more ideas, period, just as the programmers named in the most defect reports are often the programmers who write the most code.

Naming and shaming people can be important for cases of malfeasance. Although I detest the diggbar and other sneaky ways of eroding privacy, I am not sure that they are matters of moral turpitude.

And if you believe some things are deeply wrong, the author of this post seems to conflate creation of the Facebook beacon (a privacy issue) with creation of the diggbar (gaming a search engine) and with Twitter's architecture (optimizing a startup or speed to market) and with overpaying for an acquisition (behaving like everyone else during the last Tulip Mania).
Counting the ways that rev="canonical" hurts the Web
Ask HN: Review our anonymous networking app
Hi HN, we need help vetting our first product, socialface.com. A site to help people create and share anonymous networks.

http://www.socialface.com/

Anonymous networks are registration-free and may be open to anyone, or, secure, private, and password-protected so that only those in the know may see and use them (i.e. a secure virtual third space).

We think they're an excellent choice for new groups and communities but could also work well as an alternative hub or "back channel" for existing organizations.

Today's top features are:

- 100% registration-free
- completely anonymous (IP-level)
- constant SSL available
- supports .jpg, .png, .pdf, .zip, .dmg, .rar uploads
- integrated tipjoy payment service

The big picture goal we're working towards is to build an open networking platform based on three core principals: you have the right to be secure/private, to publish freely within the law, and to profit from your creations.

We're looking for feedback on all aspects of the site, but would appreciate extra scrutiny on the platform aspects:

- privacy and security issues
- rights of networks, admins, and users
- anonymous role-based authentication via downloadable codes
- monetization / revenue sharing

Our immediate plans are to deploy what we have today (early beta), work on feedback, add network admin tools, add customizable theme support, then hard launch in 10-14 days.

We believe the foundations of a truly modern network probably look something like this, but we need your help to guide and shape things, thanks!
> No way. Guaranteeing the integrity of Amazon's Customer Review data is not the job of the state

According to many theories, much of the point of the state is to lower transaction costs.

That's why states get involved in things like creating default rental agreements, setting up standards of weight and measure, inspecting pumps at gas stations, stamping out ponzi schemes, running courts to enforce slander laws (even when the target is a corporation), etc.

I'm a pretty extreme libertarian. I'd like 99% of the government to go away. Maybe more.

...but I'm going to assume that we're holding this debate in the real world, not in a science-fictional Heinlein-esque anarcho-capitalist moon colony. ...and if that's the case, then 99.9% of people think the job of the state DOES include stopping people from intentionally gumming up third party transactions.
Also I notice that he has two kids himself. Other people should stop breeding, tho', right? The wrong kind of people, perhaps?