skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The edit distance and the algorithms to solve it have been of great use in my research work in neuroscience. The places where I can apply them are as surprising as 3D mesh reconstruction from a stack of outlines ( http://www.blender.org/community/blender-conference/blender-... ), to neuronal recognition (I'm currently finishing a paper on that; see some images here: http://albert.rierol.net/doodle_programming.html#11 ).

I know of other labs using edit distance to compare people's timelines (to estimate cost of shifting from one lifestyle to another). And the most widely use application of edit distances is in the comparison of any DNA/RNA/protein sequence for similarity, both for identification purposes and for the study of their evolution.
Q1 2009 Venture Realities
To Pay Or Not To Pay To Acquire Users?
I'm not sure if it's being more critical or just being more honest (or less tactful) when talking to or about people.

I think people everywhere in the world are also critical of others but don't show it because it's not politically correct or tactful or whatever reason...

A bit OT, but I find it rather interesting how much the definition of being tactful when talking about people changes according to countries... In Japan for example, it's considered a bit tactless to point out your mistake in Japanese whereas in France or in China, they are much more likely to correct you whenever you make a mistake without considering that as being impolite.
Cloud Computing: A New Horizon
It does if the URLs match exactly. These don't. It's a common mistake. Don't sweat it.
Print your own Atomic Force Microscope
Looks as though there are many Windows specific chapters and not-so-many *nix chapters.
Cloning does not work (yet) - period. If you remember Dolly the sheep had strange complications with aging process, cellular abnormalities ()short telomers). And look, the older mother becomes the higher probability of Down syndrome:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Trisomy21_graph.jpg.
(by the way this diminish doubts that Sarah Palin is a real mother of that poor kid, not her yonger daughter), bacuse with age number of mutations and defects in dna grows up So, it is never clear what is the quality of DNA is going to be used for the clone. We need to take responsibility on that.
You seem to be in denial although your point about correlation not meaning causation is well taken.

However if we take the case of smoking we may say smoking does not cause cancer it only seems to be an ingredient which is found when people die of cancer. I mean technically correlation does not imply causation, but practically in some cases as the one the article is talking about it kinda does. Sure enough there might be something else which causes people to seek friends and that very same thing causes people to die earlier, however what we know is that having friends is a good thing and it seems they prolong your life. Now the way I formulated the last sentence it sounds like correlation but really it implies causation.
And mathematicians turn it into theorems!
“People go to Wall Street out of greed. When I was interviewing for jobs, frequently some form of the question came up: How much do you want to make money? If my answer was something like—and it wasn’t—but if my answer was, ‘I’m here for intellectual betterment,’ their response might have been, ‘University is a great place for you.’ They want people who think ‘I’m greedy, I want to be a billionaire.’ That was viewed as a really good thing.”

I think this quote symbolizes what's wrong with Wall street. There's too much of a focus on making money by any means necessary rather than doing what's best for your employer and clients in the long term. No matter how your incentives work, there's simply no way to have an incentive-based compensation system that can't be gamed.
I'm taking a course right now in operating systems, a big section of which is on security. All of our required readings for this section have come from metasploit/phrack/insecure.
indeed.

i invest my own money, have had success even through this down market, and i only follow one simple rule: i invest only in what i personally understand.

i learn about a company, see that they're a good investment, understand what my money is buying, and then decide on whether to invest or not. if i can't figure out where my money is going or what its doing, i don't invest. simple.

i refuse to put it into a black box or have any black magics performed on it.
I think the misreading was you misreading gtufano.He disputed the unsupported statement that income differences within a nation are mainly because of intelligence differences
Ask HN: Please review my MVP - Instant Drop Box
What, was this originally written in 2006 and just posted now? Way to get the late-breaking scoop buddy.
Is she being set up for the Carly Fiorina award?
I agree.

On one hand I think it's great that they are trying something new and that trying is the only way they are going to find something that works better. In the case of the ribbon however, I think it falls flat. The reason for this is that it breaks many user interface conventions without significantly changing the context in which these conventions are used.

Imagine making a fundamental change in the way a car works without changing the roads the car drives on.

I disagree that productivity software should be designed to be easy for new/casual users, especially when this design potentially decreases the productivity of regular/professional users. This has somehow become the standard in user interface design in the last ten years and why we have seen little progress in the productivity gains these applications are supposed to provide.
How to became an authority blogger
Study finds pirates 10 times more likely to buy music
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Plenty of smart people will take unpaid internships because they really like the company and because the position fits their lifestyle in between school years. You just implied they were subpar developers.

The two lowest-paid positions I've taken (obviously not counting the zero-salary founder role) were the two most lucrative --- in straight up dollar terms --- in my career to date.
When I was a kid, I had the capacity for boredom. I really don't anymore. I suspect that's about it. A child is always looking at the clock, waiting, waiting, itching to get onto the next thing, feeling like the next sensation is too far away.
Particularly enjoyed this quote:

"All this fits with the trend toward Opinion TV. Less and less of our information flow is devoted to gathering facts, and more and more is going toward popularizing opinion. Twenty-four-hour news channels have been replaced by 24-hour opinion channels. The chatter is the story."

Also, I had no idea that many people considered blogging their primary profession. I was under the impression it was more like 1000 tops.
The industry standard answer to that question is "The Shellcoders Handbook", though I think you'd be better off with "The Art Of Software Security Assessment" and a lot of man pages.
I have been thinking this a biological thing...consider another similar example, e.g. seeing a movie, commercial or something for the first time. Regardless of age, subsequent times have always felt faster than the first one to me.

From this, I entirely unscientifically surmise that the extra time experience comes from the creation of pathways and whatnot in the brain--which occurs less often the older you get. The more specific explanations could be actual spare cycles in the brain that are only used then encountering something new, or more plausibly, the ratio of conscious vs. unconscious cycles or plain stimulation of the regions responsible for time comprehension.
The state of the art in reversing is more advanced on Win32 than under Unix. Pretty much the only reason a normal person would break out assembly under Unix is if they're a toolchain developer, whereas direct x86 programming is part of Win32's cultural heritage.
innovative.

i'd brush up the design usability. you're on the right track, but i'd avoid the float right/left on the form labels/inputs respectively on a flexible layout, because it makes it harder on the eyes.

also, perhaps set a cookie or something to allow someone to possibly go back to their last created dropbox from the main page. would be more convenient for the people who lose their urls. and/or an option to enter their email address and have the urls emailed to them, and maybe new comments.
Shellcoders Handbook

Was one of the textbooks in my cs security undergrad course. Good overview, very technical, gdb will come into play.
It's probably true that projects like JRuby/Jython/Scala/etc won't die (especially Jython what with BEA and all); I'm more concerned about things like invokedynamic and friends from JSR-292.

Hopefully Oracle will be friendly to Sun's research-like teams that may not be making direct contributions to the bottom line.
I just hope they add a new feature that fixes all the network connectivity issues I have when my phone isn't connected to wifi. Maps, mail, browser ... they don't work more often than they do.
I think Vladimir Vukićević is right - SQL definitely is not the best persistence platform for the client side.
I like their checklist of items they're looking for in a web app. It seems like a good list for anyone developing a product. This item stood out to me as insightful:

"If you’re selling your product then it must have at least a 10% conversion rate. In other words, if ten people download it, or trial it, then, on average, one person should buy it. For us, this is a sign that you’ve got a product that works. We don’t care how many customers you’ve got - the fewer the better, in fact. It’s the ratio of trials to purchases that counts. If your not charging for it then we’ll look for a sign that a significant proportion of your users are actually using it regularly."

I haven't seen so much emphasis put on conversion rate before. Since they have a lot of experience with this sort of thing I think that means it is a better indicator of success than I've previously thought. From reading articles online, I had thought of conversion rate as more related to shiny buttons and A/B tests. That stuff matters, but it really does come down to how good the product is.
Permit me to geek out for a moment and point out that this trick goes back more than 10 years:

http://bit.ly/1kQu07

What's more, in 1996:

* amodload worked under the (then) closed-sourced SunOS

* it was written in SPARC assembly

* it shimmed its own kernel module loader through devkmem

It's basically the first real Unix virus. What's depressing is that almost everything it did was pedestrian for virus authors 5 years prior to it.
Decrease the size of everything. Or if you're set on the size, at least increase the contrast.
"In addition, while the spies were able to download sizable amounts of data related to the jet-fighter, they weren't able to access the most sensitive material, which is stored on computers not connected to the Internet.

I hope this practice catches on. Really, how hard is it these days, when you can fit your whole OS on a thumbdrive, to work completely disconnected from the internet? If you work as a team then put a bunch of workstations in a room on a LAN, but lock the room and monitor who goes in and out. Then we're back to the quaint old cold war threats: sexy female agents trying to seduce our scientists.
I just wrote a simple python script to test whether this holds only when all of earth's mass is concentrated at its center, or in the slightly more realistic case of constant density.

My numerical experiments point to the latter.

Does anyone care to derive an analytic solution?
What exactly is a distributed keystore? Google's 1st result on this is the linked article.
The exact number is right. The depth is R(1-cos(theta/2)), where theta is the angular distance between the two cities and R is the radius of the earth. (Draw a cross-section of the earth.) Let d = R*theta be the distance on land; then the depth is
R(1 - cos(d/(2R)). (For short distances this is about d^2/(8R), so the depth varies quadratically with distance, which makes sense. But Moscow to DC isn't that short.) The radius of the earth is 3963 miles, and DC and Moscow are 4850 miles apart; the formula gives 719 miles for the depth of the tunnel, which is close enough to the claimed 716 that I blame rounding errors.
> What's interesting is that, now that life past 60 is a very real possibility for some societies, will smoking still remain advantageous.

Or folks will start smoking later in life....
This is why I use and support as many open-source technologies and apps as I possibly can. Not a great way for anyone to make money, however.
You might be surprised to hear there was extensive user testing when designing the ribbon. Jensen Harris blogged about some of the design work here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/tags/Why+the+New+UI_3F...
Here's a presentation from MIX:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/the-story-o...
My experience is the same. I really feared Vista, to the point that I put off buying a new laptop. Then I started a new job, and behold, I have Vista on my work machine. It works fine. It's not amazing, but it is not even close to the nightmare the Mac ads or the rest of the rumors I'd heard would have me belive. It just works, and that's what I need.

That said, I'm probably going to get a Mac for my next laptop. My XP laptop died a week ago and I've heard so many developers rave over the Mac, I'll likely give it a try.
Twitter brain interface
The last time I heard doctors and lawyers were pretty well off, the roads seem quite good, the trains still operate, there is still bus services, telly still gives news and my lecturer still lectures while doing research also. Until recently plenty of jobs were out there and people were really quite well off so well off in fact that they were willing to spend billions in a pointless war and still continue to spend billion in some other war. And dude if you do not think that in the past 10 years we have had a lot of growth then I do not quite see how you explain the bust?

Sure, I get it. To become a rich lawyer, yano in the 7 figures level you have to work real hard and be well smart and have loads of connections, same for doctors, same for academia, intelligence is not everything you know nor does everyone posses the qualities to go up to the cream of the cream. So you see it as the fault of government I personally would like to narrow the fault of government to failing to keep an eye on the bank, as for the lawyers they really are able to look after themselves, after all the president is a former one. If you think finances are dominant then well yeah that's true but if you think that is to the detriment of other fields I think you are a bit wrong. There is no lack of eminent research being conducted, nor any lack of entrepreneurs being made out of such research. There is no lack of doctors, lawyers, academia. Is there a lack of positions? I do not know, these people are sort of self employed, the academia, well the phd researchers get grants, the barristers here are self employed, the solicitors have plenty of positions and so do the doctors, so really I know it is fun to take it all out of proportion and picture a country in doom and gloom, but really we are all humans, as are the bankers, they experimented with something, they failed, that's how life works, if you fail to experiment, you failed again. Hopefully they learned their lesson. No one got hurt and that is because your country is a rich country and was able to recuperate the bankers losses. Lessons were learned and we move forward, perhaps that is what some people would call progress. Next year we good again and the news will be dominated by who knows, war, climate change, terrorist, bullshit in other words just so as to make people like you see this world and this country as doomed and full of gloom. Nothing personal btw. :)
Parallel Universes?

Could anybody here please bring some credible experience from this field?
You know, just like the Christians, who are able to report even daily experiences (see Medjugorje).

I never ever heard of anything less proven than parallel universes in my whole lifetime.
I largely agree with the author, but I think the reason for the "failure" of the object oriented model has more to do with the promises it made. Object Oriented Programing was supposed to make programming more understandable to the average human brain. In this respect, it's largely failed.

If functional programming is thriving, I feel that it's only because FP has been more honest with its goals, and has done a better job achieving them. FP is supposed to be mathematical in nature. It's uncomfortable to learn, but once you do, FP languages, for the most part, live up to their billing.

What is really needed is a new paradigm that is what OOP was supposed to be: programming that matches the patterns of human thought. In this respect, I think the author's suggestion of OOP-style modularization with FP-style pattern matching and function mapping is the future of programming.
If the acquisition cost of a customer is less than life-time value of the customer you should pay. Otherwise not.

Generally the life-time value of a customer (how much money you make on an average customer in the time you do business together) is an important metric that you would want to estimate anyway.
> On a broader level, it's worth considering that something like 40-50% of tobacco sales in the US are made to mentally ill people, who find chemical relief therein, but aren't necessarily better off from doing so.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Perfection is rarely an option. Instead, people get to choose between what's available to them and "chemical relief" beats their alternatives. It's not like someone is going to solve their mental problems if they'd quit smoking.
Yes. And FP may even go so far, and uphold this segregation at the language level. I.e. Haskell's type system and IO Monad.
Interesting question. It's a pity that the author only considers ways that cloned Neanderthals might be mentally inferior to us though. Given their larger brain size, it's conceivable that they could have had greater mental capacities but were out competed for other reasons. One of the linked articles mentions that Neanderthals took longer to develop (possibly due to their larger brain size) and this might have put them at a disadvantage. Perhaps homo sapiens were simply more aggressive?
Finding the next best iPhone app
I like the concept.. suggestions:

- the URL of the dropbox and the admin page should be human-readable

- some way to find my dropbox if I have lost the URL (see suggestions by noodle)

- some way to integrate it as a widget in my own site
I share the article's author's sense of confusion about this deal. If Oracle were keen to buy Sun why did they let IBM almost succeed in buying Sun first?
Erlang/OTP R13B has been released
Quick-UX & Credibility: Do you believe?
Why are all these NYT top articles showing up on here? I can read the NYT myself. Don't really need HN to mention them. Just my two cents...
I would guess somebody or something need to catch the passengers from the other side of the hole; otherwise, it would fall back and forth forever like gigantic pendulums..
The derivation in the original article (Paul W. Cooper, Through the Earth in Forty Minutes, Am. J. Phys. vol. 34 (1966) p. 68) relies on the assumption of constant density. (It's hard to say this for sure because some of the details are left out, but Cooper at least states he's making this assumption.)

In the case where all the earth's mass is concentrated at the center, a point mass starting on the surface of the Earth would just go to the center and stay there.

In the opposite extreme where all the mass is concentrated on the surface, (that is, the Earth is a hollow shell) it actually turns out that the gravitational acceleration at any point inside the shell is zero, so it wouldn't work in that case either.

I suspect that for some reasonable class of spherically symmetric mass distributions (that is, the density only depends on the distance to the center of the Earth), tunnel systems like this are mathematically possible. But I'd be surprised to learn that there are mass distributions other than the uniform one for which the travel time doesn't depend on distance. But I'm not going to work this out because I have Real Work to do. (Now I wish I were teaching calculus so I would have an excuse to work out this problem...)
The dismissive tone of the article makes me think that the writer is just another member of an anointed establishment (newspapermen in this case) that feels threatened by a new paradim made possible by new technology.

"Journalist" and "blogger" are not mutually exclusice
terms. A journalist is one who reports the news, a blog is merely the medium.w
I like it a lot, quick and simple. I've been looking for something like this for gathering quick feedback on small sites, instead of forcing users to go through the whole getsatisfaction & co process.

If you'd add some JS snippet for including it on a web page (popup etc), it would be very helpful. Also, email integration (both for mailing the admin URL so the user won't lose it and for sending user feedback) would be great.
I didn't notice that at first, and when the Time article mentioned that this was in the current issue of a journal I actually went and looked at the May 2009 issue. Of course it wasn't there.
This isn't really news. There have been reports like this since Napster. The Recording Industry ignores them and the media soon forgets.
Damn, I thought they were talking about 'real pirates'. Arrrr, matey...
Unclear what I'm presuming. But are you actually saying:

1- the world needs more people who write like arrogant assholes (even if they're not actually assholes)

2- it's better to be pompous than to actually have a conversation

Because that's what you're up-voting. In case it's not clear.
YAWN!

Meh, more nucleotides. Why all the hyperbole? A, T, G, and C haven't been the only game in town for a while now. What of Pseudouridine?

A novel derivative base is interesting, but it's not ground breaking on its own. The effects it might have would be interesting, but I'm really tired of this sort of overhyped science reporting.
I agree with the headline but didn't find much in the article to back it up.

For my part I look at Perl (or Ruby) and see an expression of Unix traditions. Building on those can make you very productive. I'd say the same is true of Ruby on Rails where it's really a distillation of best practice in web app design and deployment.
Pitching Hacks at Stanford
I know, right?

ReMail does this.

It's actually not hard and was in an internal version of Gmail for years. I guess the problem with it is then people learn to ignore any message not highlighted, so that when you get that one urgent email from a new sender you're prone to miss it.
I thought it was news because every time someone posts about The Pirate Bay, etc, and someone says, "Piracy increases sales of most media," someone always comes back (it happened with the last major TPB thread on HN) with, "But no study has ever shown that!"

Even though there are quite a few of them, and this recent one.
In a combat/police role, you might always lose your glasses/meds/cyborg suit and end up fighting hand-to-hand, naked. Such requirements make sense there.