skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Remember Paul Graham's "Things You Can't Say?"

A lot of you here probably suspect what the real problem with education is. Everything else (such as the textbook issue) is merely a symptom of it. Hint: consider what country it appears to be almost entirely confined to, and exactly when it began. I'll leave it at that.
Ask HN: Merchant account and payment gateway for subscription-based web apps?
I'd love to hear people's thoughts on merchant accounts and payment gateways like Authorize.net, Paypal, Braintree, etc.
As this was mailed to developers, anyone who cares should already know. Also, why the sensational title? No serious rewrites are required to support 3.0.
Common Lisp, Erlang, Javascript, and ... Objective C.

I am slowly adding Clojure to this mix.

The most dissonant cognitive shift is going from Lisp to Objective C.
When I write them down I'm surprised at how few I actually use on a daily basis. It boils down to (in order of decreasing frequency):

1. Matlab
2. C++
3. C
I've noticed lately that listening to music with headphones helps me focus more than listening to it through speakers. I'm assuming this is because the headphones make the music the only thing I hear, where as with speakers the music is just another thing I hear.

I couldn't agree more! My hypothesis is that it sort of seals me off in my own little world.
it's funny:
"a U.S.B.-stick version, which cries out to be snapped off by a passing flight attendant’s beverage cart."

since when could you use satellite wifi on a plane?
"A URL invoked by cron is subject to the same limits and quotas as a normal HTTP request, including the request time limit."

The request time limit is 30 seconds. Yes, that means that you have to break your background processing in to 30 second chunks.

The GAE team is promising better support for background processing "soon".
Also, why the sensational title?

It's a TechCrunch article ;)
You have a third option, and its build a product you can afford to bootstrap.
These are interesting devices. I've been working on utilizing them as a data transfer option for non-cellular handhelds used for data collection in clinical drug trials. The device has an API for managing the ExpressCard connectivity.
Children are not automated business processes.

Textbooks should have character. We all have so many cherished technical, or otherwise, textbooks as adults that we refer to them by nicknames. College-level math students often refer to "baby Rudin", and it's a rite of passage for many a mathematician. Same with GH Hardy's "Pure Course", it's just "Hardy." Why can't all other subjects have authoritative texts written by experts of the field who have excellent exposition AND .. style? taste? personality?
That's a bit depressing, but, hey, look on the bright side: now we may get strong AI out of people trying to generate and parse C++.

Though my bet is still on spam and anti-spam, they have better incentives.
Uhaul Storage
Finding a great storage location is what Storage Concierge is all about.A search by state will return a complete list of our locations sorted by states.
¿sʍǝu ɹǝʞɔɐɥ sıɥʇ sı ʇnq
˙ʇı ǝʞıl ı ˙sɔıd ʎsʇɹɐ 'ǝɔıu
NHL, for sure
This is the first time I've seen the claim that B6 will significantly increase serotonin production outside the brain when taken in combination with 5-HTP and an AAAD inhibitor. It certainly does without the AAAD inhibitor, and it seems possible that it would even with.

This backs up my previous point though - do your research if you're considering self-medication.
This may seem really "out there", but I keep all the code of a package in one file. Not only does this reduce or eliminate asdf/defsystem maintenance, which I loathe doing, it also helps avoid the kind of habit you described. After all, the edits are all in one place.

To borrow a quote from the movie Highlander - "There can be only one (file)!"
It is actually 3.0 or die for all iPhone Apps. (Those that fail 3.0 testing will be removed from the store).

I really hate the timing here. I was planning to submit a new app yesterday, but it got pushed to today. And now this. Though the 3.0 support looks fine so far.
Matlab? What is a HackerNews reader doing with Matlab?

(I ask because I also use Matlab all the time, but I am curious what others are using it for.)
really? I've come to find a huge relationship between combinatorics and analysis (and hence pde) and thence with group theory. There's some really cool problems that can only be answered via a funky fusion of technique.

http://www.amazon.com/Additive-Combinatorics-Cambridge-Advan...

the additive combinatorics book by terry tao and van vu give some amazing examples of this
Having leadership in your field as a goal implies that one makes that a strong part of one's self-identity. Or more simply, you need to self-identify with your work, that you feel you are the work you do.

However, work is not the top priority for many people, particularly those with families and significant life outside work, and nor should it be.
If they got into YC, I'd assume at least one of them is a developer.
Merchant Account with local bank + Authorize.net has been our choice
Facebook always errs on the side of the publisher. Their guiding principle when it comes to user privacy is that if the publisher of some information doesn't want it to show up, or if they change their mind, applications must respect that preference immediately.

So, anyone who has worked in this space could've seen this coming a mile away. Anything that indexes even potentially private information, or makes it indexable by third parties, is inevitably going to be shut down.
Also: Previous Thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=175186
This is one of the best VC blog posts I've read in a while.
About a month ago, I presented their 2007 paper in a seminar class, so I'm familiar with their work. The biochemistry of how HDAC inhibitors work is over my head, but the neuroscience is quite intriguing and promising.

Here's what they say about HDAC inhibitors in the abstract of the 2007 paper: "Moreover, increased histone acetylation by inhibitors of histone deacetylases induced sprouting of dendrites, an increased number of synapses, and
reinstated learning behaviour and access to long-term memories".

That paper showed that the effects of HDAC inhibitors were similar to environmental enrichment in recovering and preventing the loss of memories. The interesting part is that they do not prevent neuronal loss by brain atrophy; memory improves in the mice despite severe atrophy.

If you're interested, the article I'm referring to is: Fischer et al. Recovery of learning and memory is associated with chromatin remodelling. Nature (2007) vol. 447 (7141) pp. 178.

Edit: Their experiments used mice, not rats. Oops.
Thanks a bunch for the info and the link to the older thread.
I love wireless for the last few metres of a connection - the last mile though - I'm not too sure of. When you've got 2 desktops, 3 laptops, 2 smartphones, X360 and a Wii sharing the household connection - I'm not sure I want to run that over 3G.

Still - wireless "broadband" speeds are increasing faster than I can get in the home..
Those are some very nice examples.

However, is there a better/more respected metric for comparing how two datasets are related? Mutual Information perhaps?
Thanks for the smaller image. While it was more of a surprise to me than an annoyance I'm sure all the dial-up users will be much happier with the smaller image.

I am genuinely interested in knowing what tool(s) or possibly sequence of events led to such a poor png generation though.

Can't wait to see future posts expanding on the four legs of the pyramid and measurements thereof. It certainly does seem like an interesting and useful way to think about it.
Comparing college level with children seems bit much. Perhaps some children have nicknames for literature books, they are children they like tales. How exciting can maths be in grade 7!
Econometrics In R
I tried to contact Rushkoff after the first posting about Craig Bucks but got no response. Its sad that he will talk about the general idea but not about possible implementations and their pitfalls.
Feel free to look at any of the plethora of past threads about this.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=526517

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=200920

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=175186

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=344030

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=389692

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=198502

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470128

Also, you might find the site http://searchyc.com/ useful for finding answers to these and other common questions.
It's a mixed bag. Yes, C++ forces you to slow down and be deliberate, but you're slowed down when you're on the wrong path and trying to get back to the right one also. I can't tell you the number of large C++ code bases I've seen which are nearly unsalvageable because the language makes it too hard to move back to goodness when you've strayed.
Yes. Some folks do not have the aptitude to be serious programmers. That's not the tool's fault.
It's not so much a matter of capability as it is a matter of carrier restrictions. The carrier restrictions keep an app that does this for the T-Mobile G1 from being easily distributed (and I think it requires rooting your phone, last I checked). So the amazing gadget already exists, it's the contractual agreements that need to be made amazing.
It's dead now, but I thought it was. Beautiful. человеческих, слишком человеческих :-(
Yeah, and that he would already have a preference for rails or django... not both.
Keep track of your information
Mathematics is enjoyable at any grade, but to answer your question: I think "even" children's school books should be written with love. What the article above described was just sad.
Pedantry aside, thanks for the links.

No pedantry intended, friend. Every single one of those threads is in my bookmarks folder because each of them provide a variety of options. And searchyc.com is always nice to bring up since the primary way new people find out about it is by reading about it in a comment.
why not do mysqlbackup + gzip + s3sync? this can't be hard
Reminds of this lil' snippit from Stargate SG-1. The Daily WTF did a bit on it a while back.

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Stargate-Code-of-the-Replica...
or + tarsnap
How Fortune, Forbes and BusinessWeek Can Save Themselves
I really like the idea of doing Econometric work with R. Currently, I've been looking for a more hands on way to run some regressions and test data, this guide looks to prove immensely useful.
None of the above. Don't deal with all that hassle (and a major hassle it can be!) and use http://www.zuora.com instead - they are cheap for what they save you!
Scientists have created the most beautiful and useful artifacts ever made. Think "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica", "On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection", "The Nature of the Chemical Bond", and "The Principles of Quantum Mechanics". Unfortunately, most people are too dumb and lazy to appreciate them.

Picture Francis Crick, putting down his pen after writing, "It has not escaped the attention of the authors that this structure suggests a mechanism for replication."
What database would you use to store (min) 10 billion objects?
I'm building something that's going to store 2 billion media objects in the short term, with each object having 10+ related objects on top. Think crawler with some interesting extrapolations/filters/etc applied.

Would want to be able to power multiple views on data, mostly in aggregate form.

This is all greenfield: the data exists but i'm starting from scratch to crawl and reformat it. I'm interested to know how you might consider storing the info?

Thanks :)
Braintree has a very high monthly fee (200 a month min) and so does not seem good for startups (they seem to forget about the fact that startups grow).

I tried to negotiate with them... They came down to 100 min which was still more than double my other options. At this point when I said it was higher than I was comfortable with, the sales rep started asked me "what would you propose?"

I wasn't sure how to answer that, but when I finally answered "how about matching or nearly matching the minimum given by x" (which was around 40 a month minimum) and I'll sign up today. At that point, the salesperson sent me a miffed-sounding response saying they can't go below the 100 a month minimum (why ask what I propose, then?) and walked away from the negotiation. YMMV.

edit: checked my emails with them and edited for accuracy
Forgive the comment then. :) Seriously, thanks for all those links!

btw, I'm not actually new: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pius ;)
Love the comment on Chrome. I'm really enjoying that browser. Unfortunately some FF extensions are just too much to break away from and so I use FF and Chrome simultaneously. Also liked the fact they welcome competition.
For all you C++ fans out there, you will find this enlightening.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
Great info, thanks a bunch.
Maybe the other developer is working on hardware, or an iphone app, or a desktop app. I've been the sole "web guy" for a desktop software startup before.
How big is each media item? That might make a difference.
the first thing I do with any new project is create a directory for it, the package.lisp file and the .asd. That much I do (though I should automate it, like weblocks does with defproject, hmmm)

but after that it's one file, until it gets too bloated and redundant, then i break it to two small redundant pieces.

Thought sometimes its too tempting to do everything in the repl: cramming a fat piece of code into one form and save the result as (setf foo *) if I like what I see :-D usually for experimentation with a new library I'm using for the first time.
20KB - key/value data.

Associated objects might be in the 100s of kb
Isn't this sort of question how Nedry got "found out" as to what his super secret assignment was on Jurassic Park?
Software as a Service with Amazon FPS using Remit for Ruby
If I am debted for what I get from someone and go into bankruptcy, why would anyone care? Purists would say that I am a "taker" and not a "giver", but if I provide value to who I do give to, then why does it even matter how much I "take"?
I haven't read this paper, but I have read the 2007 paper they mention in the article. In that study, the mice were trained in a Morris water maze task. Then, different groups are tested either immediately, 3 hours later, 24 hours later or 2 weeks later.

Some in each group were given a histone deacetylase inhibitor, and they were compared to controls that were not. All these mice were transgenic knockout mice. When put on a diet containing doxycycline, their brains begin to atrophy. (Edit: all the experimental mice were on this diet)

I assume this paper uses a similar procedure.
Start with Tokyo Cabinet and only switch when you hit a ceiling.

My system can do 300 transactions per second over http and I use a lowly Common Lisp library called "rucksack". I also keep a plain text "log" in a memory queue that gets paged to disk routinely, from which I can recover the database in case it gets corrupted.

You can't believe how much time you can save using the easiest solutions. You will get plenty of mileage from BDB or TokyoCabinet, upgrade to something beefier as the need arises, if and when you have that many users.
Are there updates to the data, or is it append/delete only?

Does each object have a fixed size? (Or can be a fixed size with padding?)

What kind of index do you need? Do you need advanced SQL commands, like aggregate data, and complex joins?

MySQL can handle billions http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/features.html of rows - but it may be overkill for you. Pretty much any database can.

But that's the wrong question. The right question is what do you need the database to do. Mainly what kind of index, and what kind of joins.

PS. If all you need is the aggregate data, why store the details? Just store the aggregate and update it on the fly. (Presumably store the details offline, so you can regenerate the aggregate if needed.)

Read this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=594889 for updating the agregates on the fly. And this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=587723 for one type of system for storing large numbers of objects.
Bill Gates:

“Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight“.
I don't see how one can read this and not laugh. It is a marvel of obscurity.

No one doubts that C++ has been used to do hard things. They doubt that it was really better than using C++ with some higher-level language.
CouchDB.
Every couple of years the part of my brain responsible for making good decisions shuts off and I start looking at what all is required to parse C++, and in particular how you parse it in, say, yacc. As far as I can tell it is done by magic.

With the operator suffix extensions, though, I think C++ has broken new ground again. It is now the only allegedly serious language that requires a symbol table to lex.
Either you're going to need tons of cash to pay for tons of servers, or you're going to need to rethink how the data gets used. Is it really completely random access that you need? Or is there some way to pre-process or pre-order it so you can at least get the indexes into memory on one machine?
This was beautiful.

I'd mention the Feynman Lectures on Physics too.
It can't be exciting at all because the kids are fed this bland Frankenstein crap soup we just read about. But it _could_ be exciting. Bertrand Russel said this is his autobiography:

"At the age of eleven, I began Euclid, with my brother as my tutor. This was one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love. I had not imagined that there was anything so delicious in the world."

Granted, maybe Russel is a little smarter than average, but we're denying that same pleasure to kids everywhere through mediocre books and education.

Also, I think it is more important to have good books for kids, as when you're older you are better equipped to adjust for and handle crap books.

Another issue is that we don't give kids anywhere the credit we should. One of my favorite things is to 'play math' with my kids on my whiteboard (8 and 5). We play with things like graph theory and other math concepts that they wouldn't normally see until later grades. It's simplified to be sure, but they get a kick out of exploring a graph and seeing simple results and puzzles.
That's approximately 200TB of data. I suggest sharding the data across multiple machines because a single SAN doing BDB lookups of a single file of that size is still going to be a tad slow. Most large databases nowadays are divided by sharding, but since it's key/value data, a BDB is probably one of the top solutions. If you modify a lot of the same data frequently, memcache can speed things up (also a key/value in-memory solution), but the size of the problem in total bytes may be more of a problem than the actual looking up and indexing of the data.
Ha - I updated my SDK + iPhone last night - got everything ready to submit my app through iTunes connect and then got shut down (I assume they were setting up the 3.0 stuff).

That kind of sucked...
Can someone explain the significance? Sounds cool but I am at loss about the purpose and meaning.
B-b-but it's a free market!!
That line stood out to me as well.
Ask HN: Making money during college?
What did you do to bring in some income during college? I plan to take studies seriously but I also need to bring in some cash.
It is a good approach. The PLT Scheme textbook How to Design Programs walks you through a process for writing new code that more or less goes like that:

1. Write a comment describing the problem.

2. Write comments describing the form of all the data structures involved in the problem, and turn those comments into data definitions.

3. Then write a comment describing the input and output of a function, write the function header, use the form of the data structures defined above to sketch a function body with comments and a few bits of code; repeat for each operation.

4. Finally, fill in the gaps -- at that point it's almost obvious how each function should be written.
Mininova trials auto-removal of pirated torrents
Not by blood but close enough
In the self storage community we also have employees who handle calls day in and day out always with a positive attitude. No matter the caller’s complaint or situation they handle each call with professionalism.
hockey's boring, and NBA<<NCAA hoops. put me down for none of the above.
My advice is that you leave the information, any serious buyer will search "cherrypeel" and eventually stumble upon this thread, if you change your mind and take it off, it will make a bad impression.

I've never sold a web site, but i know for sure that incomplete information (and even worse, there would be evidence of it) only sparks mistrust.

Good luck.
That was my thought as well, but later in the article he mentions using the MiFi in a plane parked at the gate. I still think it's silly to worry about a USB modem being "snapped off".
looks like its new but very curious to see what kind of results this progresses with: http://transfs.com/
It's not from a satellite, it's through the cell network.

As for the flight attendant thing, lots of people leave their dongles attached to their notebooks. Also, the author discusses using the MiFi while waiting on the runway for take-off.

Given all that, the plane use case does seem pretty weak, though.
Thanks tom_rath.

That story is particularly apt in my case. The "sudden thrust" for equity seems to have come after we got a cold-call from two very large companies within the space of three days. But not to be a cynic, I plan to give him the benefit of doubt.

Perhaps I should give him two choices - work part-time (i.e. keep his day job) and get a commission on sales, or go full-time with no commission and get equity.
How to implement 'realistic' swordfighting in video games.
- Sports

- Try not to code on a Laptop or use a clever setup to avoid problems. E.g. see here for some details http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/workplacehealth/Pages/Laptophealt...

- The chair you sit in. It makes sense to buy a good chair if you spend all day in it.

- Sitting angle. Interestingly a angle of 90 deg has shown to have more "sitting pressure" than 110-135 degrees.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6187080.stm more details here http://www.springerlink.com/content/w3k042u614x16900/
I'm missing the point. Why this would be useful and beneficial for consumers? The article doesn't really go into specifics about why this would be a good thing. Neat, sure.

Personally, when I sell stuff on craigslist, I'm looking for cash I can use in the rest of my life, not just on craigslist -- and that liquidity issue is why I dont get it.

But I'm willing to listen. Ideas?
Vote for the Ruby project(s) you use to guide others.
...it's the contractual agreements that need to be made amazing.

I hope Google still has secret plans for entering the wireless space, or buying a company in the space.
Yeah, and Wyoming spends more per capita on healthcare than New York. That doesn't necessarily mean it's better.

Higher-population states can better take advantage of economies of scale. Overhead costs can be spread across a larger number of taxpayers, and for this reason alone, higher-population states will often have lower per-capita costs.
AT&T Plans for a Proliferation of Wireless Gadgets
Interesting, thanks for the info. Is their pricing still as high as the other threads mention? (e.g. $1k/month)
96% of change is append. 0.0001% would be delete.

Sorts of views might be: "show me objects that have lat xx and long yy but tagged "buttons" and created on mm/dd/yyyy" in the basic instance, but also "show me objects that my friends like" as a more complex example.

Makes me think that what I really need is a graph db- object relationship seems the key factor.