skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It makes a lot more sense to publish scientific results on the web than on paper. Hyperlinks, more graphs, more data, less costs, more feedback. Scientists still publish in journals because of inertia and an antiquated incentive structure (grant money is proportional to the number of published papers, esp. in high-profile journals). I hope we'll eventually make the transition, and possibly, so does the author of that blog.
Traditional object oriented programming is certainly easily at first, especially to those with a strong background in it. Unfortunately, in every app I've ever worked on, there's a dissonance between OOP and the browser environment that causes things to break down, at which point it becomes incredibly difficult to salvage without a re-write.

After working on some really complex JavaScript applications, my opinion is that the approach Yehuda's advocating in this post is enormously helpful when applications start getting complex, both in terms of the DOM as well as the behaviors that apply to them.
I’ve seen people do up to eight characters per minute

17.5 minutes per tweet. Yikes. Hopefully they can improve that with UI tricks -- prioritize the letters, choose a letter group and then a letter (much faster than choosing a letter if you have to go through options sequentially), predict based on what was previously typed, use a dictionary and allow autoexpansion, etc.
Can't support all open source projects. Django clearly has the momentum that the others don't.
Did the Ruby community just invent the term "evented"? I've never seen it used elsewhere until recently.
To Everywhere in 42 Minutes
Indeed it is. Check out this quote contrasted against the typical aseptic, fragmented prose of wikipedia:

Details of the closed-door negotiations are unknown, but it became apparent that by the final phase of the negotiation in early 2003, there remained two sticky issues: the War in Iraq and chewing gum.

That is by far the funniest thing I've read on Wikipedia.
That would be interesting, for sure. I like some of the design tools found in ps3 games - and yet again, I wonder why game consoles aren't made more expandable. I'm sure it would transcode video faster than my PC, though I've been disappointed at the scanty amount of code produced for Linux on PS3. I thought there'd be a much more robust hobby scene around it by now, but Sony's decision to wall off the GPU alienated a lot of people.
It is spelled correctly. It's just not a word.
Sun employes one member of the core team (Peter Eisentraut) and some other people who contribute patches, but that's it.

http://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/
This is what happens when Microsoft picks you up and says here this is how we do it.
I personally advocate a two-pronged approach, where DOM manipulation is done via jQuery (at which it excels), but abstractions are built up via classes (pick your favorite implementation). This avoids overextending either paradigm.
"..greatest computer science alive." lol

Apparently, an unscientific search brings up CSA 464 taken at Miami University (Ohio), course on algorithms of course... but I'm trying to find the professor. I had a professor once that was similar to this one, though not as brash... CS prof that was diligent about spelling and the correctness of English prose and/or phrases. In several homeworks and exams I pointed out fallacies in his questions- but again, nothing comical though like this one.
Relly funny..
Find some big technical problem to solve that's bigger than yourself, and get people involved. It'll all flow from there.
Broker != Investment advisor, by the way. This article has made the rounds I see, finally winding up here.

I'm also not an investment advisor, but let me give you guys a tip before the [dead] tag appears. Equities are finished. Money flows made the bubbles and money flows will unmake them. A whole generation of retirees will liquidate in order to survive and that means lower and lower prices. Just stick your cash in short-term bond funds. Unless you're a gambler.
A far more optimistic view than my initial take. The arguments are well reasoned. I hope it really turns out this way. Opening the JCP would be a VERY good thing and could bring some much needed life back into the Java language.
I thought I would post a practical application, FWIW. I recently applied edit distance to a problem I was facing on my free dating site. Being free, we attract an inordinate number of scammers. I've been developing an arsenal of tools to help identify and track suspects in order to delete their accounts before they do too much damage. The most successful to date has used edit distance.

Scammers tend to post identical or slightly altered messages to a large number of users. As you might expect, this has the effect of quickly polluting the valid ecosystem. The solution I employed was to delay sending messages between users long enough to capture spammer patterns and compare the messages to one another.

I use the Levenshtein distance algorithm (which has O(n^2) performance). If I get a similarity over a certain threshold. I quarantine the message for further analysis. To work around the performance, I bound the problem by capping the number of messages used for analysis.

It has been incredibly effective.
With this settlement, Google has essentially guaranteed that no other company or government or philanthropic foundation will ever create a rival digital library. Because copyright holders are being treated as a class by the courts, no rival will be able to embark upon the same digitization process without negotiating separately with each holder or getting embroiled in a similarly lengthy and expensive class action lawsuit.

So basically, anyone else wanting to embark on a similar digitization project would be in the same situation Google was in originally, with respect to copyright law? That hardly seems draconian. Any such rival project would have to compete with Google, but that's what the first mover advantage entails.
tight!
I thought this was an entertaining piece, probably very familiar to many.

My maxim has always been : I don't to hire a financial advisor who I can actually afford.

You either need to educate yourself on what you're doing or stay out of the market. I know a guy who is paid to give advice to retirees looking to buy funds by a main street bank: he's paid on commission and has very little idea about what is going on. He dresses in a suit and sits in a little office and hands out shiny brochures, but as far as I can tell, he has less money than me, so there's no way I would ever take his advice. Most of these people would warn against investing $5,000 in your brother's startup, but would happily recommend purchasing AIG stock, even now.

It's my take on the old 'I don't want to be a member of any club that will accept me as a member'
A great privilege, your experience that day, I got goosebumps just imagining it.

Is there a transcript, audio, or video of the event in existence?
Not really the kind of post for Hacker News. Besides, I saw it on Reddit hours ago.
Computer Spies Breach Fighter-Jet Project
Low Interest Rate Credit Cards
How to choose Low Interest Rate Credit Card
If it got the 'best product of 2001' at CES that pretty much guarantees it's 100% vapor.

Awards like that are a scam.. it's all about who you know + how much bs they are willing to absorb. Since that time most high end trade shows require the product to be shipping before getting an award, brought about because of absurd products winning that never had a chance of seeing the light of day.

Even if the technology existed, and it was ivory soap accurate, no one would use it. Those things you put on your hands just look lame, like you need hand braces or something. I'd rather learn morse code and just tap my finger...
Summer internship in php?
I am currently in my third year of CS Undergraduate degree and would like to work on a php project or similar.As this is the first time I am trying for a project outside college I would like to know whether there are any other alternatives to php which I should try.Also how does one get his first internship?
IPhone OS 3.0 to feature voice control and feedback
In this case, I'm glad for it. An unusually enjoyable read.
Usage of JODConverter
Hurricanes/Cyclones/Typhoons (all the same thing, just different oceans and hemispheres) are an important way to release heat energy built up in the ocean. That's why they happen at the end of summer.

I can't see how introducing more heat into the system from a giant frickin' space "laser beam" could work out well in any way.
Print media or blog? For a writer, there's often little difference
What a coincidence! I have been looking at the edit distance problem, because it can be applied to computer vision. One of the uses is if you have a stereo image pair you can figure out the depth of the objects in the scene, by matching corresponding features. The edit distance problem helps with figuring out which pixels in one stereo image correspond to pixels in the other stereo image.

I am hoping with a bit more effort I can understand the dynamic programming side of it better.
I don't know if the student was "brave" so much as "did not know how to demonstrate that you cannot find the median of an unsorted list without examining every item in the list".

A quick and fairly informal sketch of the proof: here's a three element list: 1, 2, N. If you tell me which of those three is the median without known N, then I can always surprise you with an N such that your guess is wrong (you guess 1 or 2, surprise, N was 0. You guess N, surprise, N was -1).

Now append negative MAX_INT and positive MAX_INT to the list.

The size of the list is now 5, and the median must be either 1, 2, or N. Care to take a guess prior to me revealing N? Whoops, looks like you lose again.

We can keep playing this game for any size of list you want to play with greater than zero: for any size of list I can create at least one list such that not knowing one number makes the median unknowable. (I could show you for an even number of elements, too, but won't for brevity.)

Thus, since you can't calculate the median of a list in less than O(n), you can't use "calculate the median and..." in any procedure you claim has a big-O complexity less than O(n).

Thought this would be much more HN-y if there was a prospect of the problem actually mattering in the real world, rather than being a pair of poor jokes on a CS exam.
Fun idea, but didn't everyone here have to work this out in their college physics class?
XP and Slackware. I mostly use XP, though.
Sounds great, thanks for organizing it!
I'm excited to see that someone is working on a high level database API. This will be very useful for hooking up non traditional databases like bigtable or couchDB.
I spent a year and a half as an undergraduate converting a custom C edit distance implementation into Java for a computer assisted language instruction system. This is a really nice article discussing the topic. I think the interesting facet of dynamic programming is how it shows the dynamic between space and time. In his creative book on algorithms, Udi Manber gives a nice description of a general approach to designing algorithms with dynamic programming.
Well you can include the sites you want to add so that it is restricted to what you need and tat wat i did "edu" for universities and added 6 websites for the other portals...
im not sure if im clear here....but all these are pretty apparent on the control panel
I have to admit that articles like the above make me feel somewhat better about my failure to accumulate any significant financial assets over the last 20 years. Not having enough salted away is somewhat worrying, but if I'd watched it evaporate I'd be going long on assault rifles right now.
Online Payment and Paypal
It’s an international company offering an online payment system. It is a system used on the Internet which allows you to buy directly from a website and transfer money between yourself and someone else via email or between merchants. The system breaks away from the traditional payment methods such as cheques and money orders. For corporate and auction sites as well as e-commerce vendors, PayPal also has a payment processing system wherein they charge a fee.
It seems to be the fashion to bash OOP these days, but I wonder in this case whether by "OOP" you are really talking about attempts to emulate classic GUI programming in the browser. In which case, I completely agree - and one of the things I love about jQuery is that it lets you work with the browser like it's a browser.

In this case I think Katz is replacing one kind of abstraction off of the browser with another one, actually an abstraction away from the natural call mechanisms of the javascript language. This is basically Aspect Oriented Programming by another name, and I've not actually come across a project where AOP made life less complicated.
Indeed. I, as many others I'm sure, have always wondered if my inability to concentrate was ADHD (although I'm sure it's not). I liked the other article today (link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=570893) about focus. I'm going to pick up a few of those books to see if I can get inspired, although I believe the key is doing concentration calisthetics.

Regarding other drugs and intellectuals, this article comes to mind as well:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/01/70015
Nuts, now I need a thermometer that goes up to 4 million degrees and another 3500kg of TNT to complete the experiment.
I'm not sure it's fair to summarize the Linux community's complaint about ZFS as the latter being "written for kernels that don't really have a VFS layer." Solaris very much has a VFS layer, and ZFS plays with it. What's different about ZFS is that, from most storage stacks' perspectives, it is also a volume manager. Linux people claim this is a layering violation; ZFS' architects claim that integrating traditional functions of filesystems and volume managers let them innovate, e.g., by closing the RAID write hole.
Notice NOAA's statement... When we have enough energy to fly at nearly the speed of light, we might be able to control hurricanes.

Given that the NOAA people are probably smart, they probably realize how difficult this is.
I say no. even the intense technophobia of man like the Unabomber indirectly generated a level of economic activity that would have astonished people of a pre-technological society, and when he issued his manifesto the Internet was using training wheels compared to today.
Interview With Digg’s Kevin Rose: The State of The Union
Since Friday, Feb. 11, 1966 maybe ;)
This and atmosphere hopping space planes both have the same drawback: a significant number of people vomit on their first weightless trips. Do you really want to ride packed into coach in that kind of environment?

I guess with enough frequent zero-g points you could upgrade to the "no hurling" section.

(The not-quite-straight-through tunnels wouldn't be fully weightless, maybe we should concentrate on those. Then we just have to solve the insurmountable temperature, pressure, and vacuum problems.)
Using Google App Engine to power Web APIs
Haha, I remember when you could get Windows NT on SPARC too... Not the same thing as being a real product tho'.
Facebook | Message: hello
When I read beadpig was involved, I became giddy. A product that combines two super awesome things into one... I want this book.

Also, seeing you referred to as "Mr. Ohanian" is creepy.

P.S. We've worked out a plan for that whole advertising thing. While I'm using HN as a messaging service.
Ask HN: No more Facebook Apps or Consumer internet
Are we here to build a company or to cash in on the next hype?

Both are completely different things. It takes ten years to build a company. You can go jump up and down or left and right but it really takes that long.

Twitter is 3rd generation product built on of hype (Myspace->Facebook->Twitter). The first two generation still have to make enough company to be called interesting. Twitter can become big but is it big enough given the hype? The latest trend seems to be building apps around twitter. Two years back it was building facebook apps.

<blockquote>New Moto: Build something people are willing to pay for</blockquote>

If they are not willing to pay for it, they dont really need it. Be it a virtual gift or freemium or clean ur toilet service. As long as people pay, you have a business.
I've been told by some folks who've interacted with Tegmark that some of those papers are really just elaborate pranks on his part to create radically implausible but logically consistent models, or something to that extent
I don't have direct experience, but on the purely practical level:

a. you could do worse than learn to use sketchup. I can't tell from your description how complex or mechanical your 'thing' is. If it's beyond your capabilities, advertise for someone to do it, but have them sign a 'work for hire' agreement which includes a rigid confidentiality clause.

b. it's hard to say because I can't tell whether it's a widget (handy-shaped thing) or a gadget (handy single-function machine). If the former, look into Rapid prototyping and/or 3d printing. If the latter, research similar products, find out what class they are described as, then investigate manufacturers in China.*

* Who will probably ignore your confidentiality clause, foolish roundeye.

I'm sorry this is so hand-waving, but I honestly don't know whether you're making a plastic resistor drawer or a self-regulating soldering iron.

It might be worth advertising for an electronic engineer to do some consulting, executing the above-mentioned work-for-hire agreement, and asking them to evaluate the functionality of your prototype. Best of luck.
0. Figure out if your market is B2B, B2C, etc.

1. Find a way to talk to your prospective customers according to their channels. Sometimes this is easier in B2B.

2. Talk to them about your ideas (ideally with some mockups) and see if it's something they are interested in.

3. If so, do whatever it takes to get money in exchange for something that you can build as quickly as possible.

4. Iterate based on their / market's feedback.

5. Worry about patents, etc. once you have an idea that you
can actually make money with.

Edit: this is my approach, anyway. FWIW.
It sounds like great fun until your rapid transit pod plunges into a bath of superheated magma. Vomitous fellow passengers would not be my primary anxiety about this mode of travel.
You forgot to mention one early step:

Research market/niche viability. Are there enough likely customers out there for what you want to build and sell?

It's a good idea to do this up-front before sinking hundreds of hours into a project, only to find that A: Few want it or (more infuriatingly) B: Many want it, but in a different form.
Several misconceptions in this articles, quite typical ones actually:

1) "I can’t imagine what led all of us to believe that we could regularly expect double-digit annual returns on our money, for doing no work"

You did work. You worked, exchanged your product for money, and saved it. But other people did work too. So you took your money, in effect lowered the capital cost of other people's enterprises (unless you bought in the primary market), and in return have a chance of participating in their venture's success (if). Those who are more discerning in their allocations earn higher average returns on their capital. It's not alchemy, it's capitalism! Whether the assets are fairly valued or not is a totally different question.

2) " Let’s say you own a Procter & Gamble in your portfolio and the stock price goes down by half. Do you like it better? [...] If you don’t, you’re not an investor, you’re a speculator"

Quoted like this, wrong! THe crucial condition is that you did an independent valuation of the asset and came up with a higher value. The price itself doesn't tell you anything other than what other people think or feel.

3) "An out-of-print guide to value investing, it sells for as much as $2,500 per copy on the Web."

Just for the record, these are collector's editions. If anyone is simply interested in the material (which is not all that original, btw) it floats as free PDF, just google it.

In general, I find it fascinating that people like to think that there is someone out there with their best interests at heart. Where does this come from? Where is their independence and responsibility? Balthasar Gracian, a Jesuit priest from the 18th (?) century, put it thus: You don't count on the kindness or gratitude of people but on their self-interest.
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G3 Offers Customizable Diamond Jewelry & Watches
I recently found a very unique online jewelry store that lets you customize their diamond jewelry on the web. For each piece you can choose different between 3 different diamond qualities and metals. Prices are great and reviews were very positive.
I have chronic case of ADHD (medically diagnosed) although I am not currently taking any drugs for it. Good habits help as do good tools (Gmail has literally lowered my blood pressure), but the most important aids are an understanding but challenging partner and/or employer. I don't think of it as a disorder but as a condition, neither good nor bad; I'm lucky enough to have a high IQ that allows me to exploit the upside and try not to use the downsides as an excuse for inactivity.

Good second link. I have nothing bad to say about Dr. Hoffman's 'problem child'.
> John Paulson is not an economist

Why does it matter?

Either he's useful or he's not.
One man's quest to honor America's Saturn V rocket
> Um, some economists really did see the whole market crash coming.

That's not enough. They have to also not predict crashes that didn't occur. (False positives and false negatives are important.)

And, it would be nice if they predicted somewhat smaller, more frequent events. If they can only predict an event that occurs every 50 years....
Watch true blood season 2 sneak peek online
Thank you for that link kqr2!

Now, I have not even finished reading the product page, but that is SO frickin' COOL! oh my . . .

I had not checked ThinkGeek for a long time (it drives me nuts in a way, as I don't have the cash available for anything that isn't strictly needed around here)

I hope this does not go the way of the awesome StingRay hardware firewall they offered once, long ago, and quit selling, apparently the company evaporated :(

Thanks man!
Unit testing (or the lack thereof) in Mercurial
Create mock objects in Groovy with metaprogramming
Several pharmaceutical companies are working on drugs that target nicotine receptors in the brain, in the hope that they can replicate the cognitive uptick that smokers get from cigarettes.

I can't count how many articles/studies/editorials I've seen on this topic in the past year. Here's the bottom line: Nicotine works. Caffeine too.

Let me ask you this: Why is it that Nicotine consumption is a globally universal trend? While it doesn't qualify as biological evolution, societies must compete with each other, and apparently those where nicotine consumption is socially acceptable are winning.

Of course, this should be obvious. It's a stimulant. It keeps you awake, alert, and focused (and was, consequently, distributed freely to WWI and WWII armies). On top of that, aside from slightly decreased athletic endurance, it's only major down-side doesn't even factor in if you don't care about living past 55-60. Considering that, even non-tobacco users didn't have hope of doing much better then that until recently, tobacco is a net win.

In other words, this isn't a new trend. It's a search for a safe tobacco alternative.