skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Recommend a Wiki that isn't MediaWiki?
Hey, I need to set up a random wiki. Featureset isn't particularly important, something simpler than MediaWiki is preferred. The main criteria is that it should look really snazzy. Rounded corners and such. What wiki are people using these days? Thanks.
what you have said is true. I mean im from oz and when we were all at uni there wasnt really much talk of startups and starting our own businesses, not in my circle anyway.

It was all about getting the best grades to kick butt at the interview. Because that was my circle thats all i knew at the time. Now after doing the grades and doing the 9-5 i know NOW what i would have told my younger self. I would have told my younger self that there is a better way.

The funny thing is ! i know that my younger self would just tell my current self to buzz off cuz a stable job is the way to go, its tried and tested.

I guess the lesson learnt is there are alot of things the computer science/engineering degrees dont teach because its not possible to teach these things unless someone has gone through the motions and their own experiences click in.

Comp Sci/Eng degrees can give ideas and direction but sometimes at the time you dont see them as ideas, you just see them as a waste of time cause you want to go to the next programming, algorithms or electronics class, not this stupid, project management or business for engineers class ...
The Ethanol Bubble Pops in Iowa
I just left awhile ago. Wanted to say thanks to those that organized it and showed up.
Miss USA 2009 Pageant Contestants
Crochet Send Helps FTW.
Try Tikiwiki. Quite powerful. Reviewed on MyTestBox.com.
I agree. I can recall a time when I thought I would never need a hard disk bigger than 20GB and went "meh" when 40GB hard disks came out.

upgrading from an iPod that stores your entire music collection to one that can store your collection twice is nowhere near as exciting.

It is, because my collection is now twice as large.
That's why the salaries are higher there and startup costs could higher.
Infy asks 3,500 ’bench’ staff to shift to its BPO
More generally what they don't teach enough about in university is knowing when to make time for certain people and knowing when to stop making time for certain people. This is a skill that I think is really key, and no program of intense academic learning will naturally lead to you knowing such.
Actually supporting the pirating of content isn't my position. My position is that producers/distributors of content crying foul when they're not providing an alternative service that comes close to other non-legal methods seems a bit pathetic.

I'm more than happy to pay them for that content, they just need to be able to make it easy, convenient, available and affordable for the consumer. Right now they're pretty much failing on all four points.

EDIT - glad you edited your comment after I replied, so allow me to reply to that too.

Oh man, this is just perfect. Welcome to our future, ladies and gentlemen.

This isn't the future, this is the present, and this IS something that they can change.

Unfortunately, they just don't have the balls to do so.
Granted, I'm with you there; however, just because something isn't readily available does not provide moral justification for its theft.
are you just putting a wiki page together? pbwiki is pretty cool =)
Beautiful Facebook inspired Login Form Panel using Mootools glass box technique
A Portrait of Doug Engelbart
Brain-computer interface. Once we get that, everything else (except power generation) is irrelevant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-computer_interface

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
I've been here a few years and FWIW it's pretty darn good right now. Unfortunately I was on the receiving end of it when I had to leave my lease due to things that were beyond my control. I was competing with 1bd apts in Sunnyvale for around $1000 a month. That is truly a steal.
Agreed. We use it in one of my classes this semester, and it's very handy.
I dunno.. I might be a conservative here, but if someone I'm interviewing starts doing all these things, I'm going to feel like he/she is just trying a little to hard and might come out as fake.

There's a line between showing genuine interest in the role, and coming out a little over the top. Doing these "not so common" methods might just cross the line for me.

I dunno, maybe I'm just weird.
I just dont see ethanol as a sustainable substitute.
arxiv is not a peer-reviewed "publication" and it's prone to being cooky at times.
Well that depends on your moral subset, it's an entirely subjective matter.

You have a group of film producers that glorify theft, violence, murder and other heinous acts (many of which are morally questionable) in their films for the "entertainment" of the end users. Do you really think consumers are particularly thinking about content producers copyright when they're getting images of decapitation and bloodshed force fed to them?

Or to use their own campaigns against them - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmZm8vNHBSU

"you wouldn't steal a car" - no, but stealing 50 (aka, gone in sixty seconds) is ok. In fact, Hollywood frames the car thief's actions as a noble thing.

Personally, I don't think people should pirate stuff (even though it's been happening for longer than the internet has been readily available), but the Pandora's box HAS been opened - it's out there now and we're only seeing filesharing becoming more widespread.

Rather than fighting a losing battle, they should instead focus on providing a viable alternative.

Instead of trying to stop those consumers who will never pay for content, why not make it stupidly easy for those who will to do so.

The music industry caught on, unfortunately the Film/TV industry's ships are still sinking.
From the perspective of the patients in this type of research and "treatment," I think you are correct. Looking at the effect on science and knowledge as a whole, however, the observer-expectancy effect is quite damaging and is not a mystery at all.

This team (and many other teams) of unfortunate researchers got caught up in a belief system that skewed their results. Ironically, the more skeptical one is of a particular belief, the deeper in love one will fall with it when it appears to be correct.
However, it is a) functional and b) massively easy to embed.
I'm using wikidot for my help & suport site:

http://help.memengo.com/

Loving it - simple to use and has built-in forums. Two birds with one stone.
No hatred or malice, just a desire to maintain the comment quality here. I voted down your first comment because it seemed pedantic and ignorant of common British usage. Had yours not been the top comment in the thread, I probably would have ignored it.

On the other hand, I voted up this parent question because I assume your question was genuine. I also would have voted up any insightful commentary on the actual settlement whether I agreed with it or not.
Sure they do afford. Most people in Africa have a cell phone. They just don't have computers.
Your QA guy (if you're lucky enough to have one) is you best friend in whole wide world. When he/she finds bugs in your code...hug them and buy them beer, because your users/clients could have found them instead.
In fact, you can go further: don't try to turn an already-created app into a game. Instead, when you're first working on a business concept, make sure that you create a game first and foremost, and then try to figure out how to let the user do some interesting thing (whatever your original app would otherwise be about) as a side-effect of play. This is how Flickr got off the ground: first it was just an MMO, and then people possessed and traded photos within the MMO, and then that started to become more and more the focus. It's still a game at heart—just like Reddit and, to some extent, Hacker News itself are—it's just shifted to achievement by means of photos, rather than whatever else it had people do before, because that's what interested them.

Let me clarify, though, what I mean by "game." There's this idea in pen-and-paper RPG game design called the threefold model. Basically, it states that there are three reasons people immerse themselves into a virtual, social world constrained by rules (a "game".) It's usually phrased, though, that there are three archetypical players, one to purely seek each goal, of which any individual may be a varied mixture.

1. There are Simulationists, who want to explore the "reality" of the world itself.

2. There are Narrativists, who want to feel that they're part of an overarching story, and that both themselves, and the world, are important and have purpose.

3. There are Gamists, who want to compete for resources, usually against the other players or the game's universe itself.

This model is useful for more than pen-and-paper RPGs, obviously; the three motivations people have for playing games are the same as the three motivations people have for doing anything, once they've sated their base urges: satisfying curiosity and feeling in control of the world (Simulationism), finding a sense of purpose (Narrativism), and feeling powerful and having control of the other players (Gamism). Whenever you're helping people to achieve one or more of those three goals, the means by which you're doing so can probably be classified as a game: D&D, Facebook, the Stock Market, Religion, etc.
Care to give references of any such algorithms? ;-)
13 Ubuntu Themes To Personalize Your Experience
I think if we ever get widespread, flat rate mobile data connections, that there will be lots of innovation in that space.
#1 - I keep hearing that over and over. As for lessons of the past, I try to read up on that lately.
I don’t see how credit crisis affect would affect the system other than that people have less money to send around.
The premise of this article indicated a massive lack of research or forethought. The author is absolutely confusing "what exists" with "what is readily made commercially available to the public". A few hours of browsing tech blogs would make it very clear how many significant advances are made. He talks about Blu-Ray like it's cutting edge. Meanwhile we have companies putting out 3D TV sets this year. Digital cameras really can't get any better? Last time I checked, there still aren't any small, inexpensive consumer 3D data acquisition devices yet. And the jump from dial-up to broadband is no bigger than the jump from our anemic 6-8MB connections to the 1GB/s service that Korea is building out as we speak.

The title of this should really be, "Why don't people realize that our tech still sucks?"
This is a short post mostly devoid of content, where the author argues that "Best Practices" are an oxymoron if everyone is doing them.

This is based on an assumption that at given point in time there isn't an ideal solution (or an approximation which is nearly indistinguishable) for a given problem.

I would disagree and say that while "best practices" can be a buzz word for industry consensus, there are plenty of "best practices" which are genuine best solutions.

This can be for a number of reasons, such as learning inertia on the part of users. You might be able to invent a "better" user interface convention but if it's unfamiliar or confusing to the majority of users used to an "inferior" convention it's not necessarily a better practice to use the newer convention.
Moin Moin. Python powered.
This is very true. If your mindset is not ready for it, it will just be noise much like your parents' advice when you were a teenager. I think entrepreneurial classes should be part of university curriculum as well as personal finance. I know way too many college acquaintances lured by credit card offers on college campus who now are oblivious maintaining credit card debt thinking it's normal.
how about holding them near public transportation? (ie caltrain) There were times I wanted to go, but sometimes they were just a bit too far.
exactly. However, I was thinking more that has the credit crisis affected enough individuals for it to affect this system as well. Meaning, do less people use this now than before? It also makes me wonder, do some people trust this system more than the well established one that most people use?
<i>Moving from video to DVD-quality camcorders was another giant leap, but the difference between 720p HD and 1080p HD is only apparent if your TV is the size of a bus.</i>

That's a bit misleading. There was never any transition from 720p to 1080p.
This is essentially identical to what happens when I put cash in the ATM at 7-11 with instructions to wire with my local bank to a bank in Tokyo which wires it to a bank in Washington which wires it to Bank of America in St. Louis so that I can move it into my IRA.

The yen doesn't physically get shipped to America, either.
GPGPU Processing - I find it amazing that you can essentially build yourself a personal supercomputer with cheap hardware that you can pick up at a Best Buy. This has the potential to do for research what the Web did for software startups.

+1 for Robotics and Augmented Reality. Met a prof last month that researches in AR, showed us some things he did with ARToolkit; it completely blew my mind.
My favorite variant on this is:

every 20 years, have science advance enough to extend everyone's life by 30 years

(doesn't take care of things like getting hit by bus, but takes care of 'regular' life extension)

(iirc, there was some ted talk on this)
It really isn't something you can study. You have to be constantly absorbing new knowledge. Have a huge amount of past knowledge at your fingertips so when you see something that is isomorphic with something else in the past you can use that knowledge.

To put it more plainly a lot of supposedly "old" business practices turn out to be the best. I keep on seeing people reinventing things that were common in the 1800-1900's and think to myself "Why bother? That's _just_ a $FOO problem.".
Stand on the shoulders of those before you and you have a better chance of success.
How long will it last? Graphic shows number of years left of various materials [pic]
Morality is not subjective. There is wrong and there is right. Stealing the toils of someone else is wrong.

Your argument is still nonsensical; just because Hollywood glorifies theft (which of course they would; it's the allure of the rebel mentality) doesn't make it rational or acceptable.

You bless weakness and the rationalization of cowardice.
The difference is that you gave your money to the banks and expected them to keep it safe. Instead, they took your deposit and lent it to underpaid Americans to buy overpriced houses, in the hope of making lots of money for themselves.
With Hawala, the money is quickly picked up at the other end and not lent out to whoever promises to pay the highest interest rate.
>Morality is not subjective.

You make a fact-like statement for what is actually one of the most debated arguments in philosophical history. I disagree, morality is subjective. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism
This will be an interesting discussion to have with your other self; "Who of us is the real me?".

The protagonist in Altered Carbon has this discussion, in the context of which set of memories are worth having, after he has to duplicate himself to another body to solve a crime.
The Long Road from XHTML to HTML
It worries me more that newbies who use this guide will start writing in this very un-Rubyish way and then wonder why their code doesn't get used as much or why they don't succeed at the job interviews.. There's an informal, but popular, style for a reason. This is also why books (should) have technical reviewers.

Consider the second example in chapter one that includes: name=gets() .. No true Rubyist codes that way. There's an example a couple of pages on that uses if .. then. No-one really uses then either. This is explained in the text, but why show it if it's confusing and rarely used? And why methods like get_name? That's not typical Ruby style either. It'd just be name.

That said, once you get beyond a chapter or two and ignore the quirky stylings, it's not bad and certainly has some value. I know people who had weird music teachers and learned how to play pretty well under them.. but they had to go back and relearn basic breathing and fingering techniques due to the way they were taught.
Hawala is based on the islamic financial system which does not allow lending with interest, instead the lender must participate in the risk of the business, taking his share of profit or loss.
Under a form of hawala it was possible to take a cheque from Morocco and have it cashed in China, long before such a system was available in the West.
Moral relativism is to disavow the accumulation of any generalizable logic during humanity's stay. This is trendy and foolish.
I am proud to use Comic Sans. On the small sheet of paper taped to the screen connected to our KVM-switch all the hostnames of the windows servers are written in it, so you know what to expect if you switch there.
>> in big, beautiful houses, with precious, irreplaceable objects.

> And what is stopping her from doing that?

Lack of money, perhaps? Even the non-material first part

>> among family and friends

can be difficult if everyone are busy making ends meet.
Awesome Procedural Terrain Generation
I'm not talking about a 'reading' of "no justice, no peace" in written, analytical form.

I'm talking about it chanted by a large group on the move with a grievance. Context, volume, and tone matter.

The chant is occasionally extended to "no justice, no peace, fuck the police" [1] and the phrase is celebrated even without that extension for its association with "fighting back" [2]. The phrase is also used euphemistically to predict riots are due [3].

In the protest-chant context, everyone knows it has two meanings -- both the cryptic threat, and the more cerebral koan -- at the same time. Indeed, that's part of its charm -- people who aren't quite ready to throw rocks and break things can chant emphatically along with those who are ready, and get a little vicarious thrill that some serious shit might go down... "even though we didn't really mean things to get out of hand".

[1] Many examples via http://www.google.com/search?q=%22no+justice+no+peace+fuck%2... and a nice graffiti example http://uriohau.blogspot.com/2007/08/steven-wallace-coroners-...

[2] as in this poster http://www.flickr.com/photos/seven_resist/3115883713/

[3] as in this blog entry, http://www.danteross.com/blogs/dante/2009/01/08/oscar-grantt... , where "...like I predicted it’s gonna get hot in the Bay….No Justice No Peace" is used to introduce a news clipping titled "Rioting in Oakland"
Affordable, reliable, universal wireless Internet access. The iPhone is a great start, but it's still far from truly universal Internet access being the status quo. Of course, this has a lot more to do with infrastructure and business interests than it does with pure technological advancement.

And I still want to have my own 3D printer.
Even if it is good enough, the perception of what is good enough is constantly changing. At a point in the past the steam engine was probably considered good enough.

I think it would be a dangerous thing for the technology industry to fall into the trap of thinking what we have is good enough and killing innovation. Even if the product is good enough there has to be a driving force to constantly improve.

There is lots of possibility for computing that just isn't attainable with current machines. Things that probably weren't even thought of when we were back a stage from where we are now.
At least in India, most forms of Hawala are illegal, as the money easily escapes the tax net and can be quite helpful in transferring black money. But that doesn't stop the practice from being quite rampant, and from what I know from a friend, a surprisingly dependable way of transfer, in fact.
The word is quite common in India. Here's a summary: Hawala transfers are mostly done by the underworld people (read gangsters, mafia, mob etc.) The most common application of hawala is in betting. In India, betting on sports is illegal but there is a huge underground network that takes bets on sporting fixtures(cricket being the fav.). To place a bet you have to know someone who knows a bookie, you speak to the bookie, ask him what the going rates are and place your bets without paying any initial money. If you lose you will be told where to deliver the money, usually it'll be to an agent in your city. After this agent has collected money from all losing parties, he is informed of all the people who won their bets in that city, he then transfers the same money to them, the difference between the two is the profit. This is just one application. Here hawala is mostly organized money laundering, reading the above comments I am surprised to see legal systems of practicing hawala.
Re: point 5, you might be interested in Mozilla Ubiquity - you don't even need to compile ;).
Simulating physics and chemistry to overcome limits of the Von Neumann architecture.

Specifically, using IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer to simulate neurons and synapses.

"Performance measurements show good scaling behavior on the Blue Gene/L supercomputer up to 8,192 processors. Several key phenomena seen in the living brain appear as emergent phenomena in the simulations.": http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1375994

Also,
"Massively parallel simulation of brain-scale neuronal network models": http://www.bgconsortium.org/Past%20Results/kth%20bgwreport06...
Ask HN: Best Info for Running own C Corporation
What is the best resource for running a 1 person C corporation? (I'd like to know the rules / regulations / prevent myself from doing things that cause silly mistakes or are blatantly illegal). [I suspect that even if I own 100% of the company, there are still certain regulations.]
The sweet thing is that it's only getting started.
Where you are right now is the best place to start.
Morality is not subjective? Can you explain how one determines, in an objective way, whether or not an act is moral? Is there a fundamental theorem of morality that I am unaware of?
Of course there is no silver bullet to help you overcome such things; they have no effect on vampires.