skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Court decides "fair use": Turnitin.com not violating student copyright
Uhmmm, shouldn't the operator p be operating on some function? I don't know what v/i means either, but it looks like an operator to me: you apply it to function i and you obtain v, LOL.

This stuff is trippy!
These articles are fun to read for those hackers that are also basketball fans. That being said, I don't entirely agree with the author's reasoning. E.g., the author mentions reasons why a player is more likely to miss a shot after making one, but fails to go through a real analysis of "hotness".

Making one shot does not qualify a player as being hot by any definition that I've ever heard. So, what are the stats after making 2, 3, 4 shots? Does the likelihood of making the next shot rise after making several shots in a row? There are several other questions I would ask that would be more convincing to prove or disprove the effect of being hot.

Some of the comments below the article have interesting criticisms.
I don't think she was on Mixi -- she's been in USA for the past 6 years. Another one of my Japanese friends is on Mixi, though, and she simply never uses it. Interestingly, she (the girl who uses Mixi) knows the wife of a Japanese official who sent her a Hi5 invite. Not sure if she joined.
My forms typically go only a few days before they start getting form submission spam.

There are lots of captchas to implement in a couple of hours, and people are used to filling them out. It seems like a no-brainer to me.
Pregnancy and Child Care - Discussion Community on Pregnancy & Parenting
not really, who takes care of cold fusion development now? macromedia or adobe?
What made me choose Rails?
Explaining Newsconomy -- Chapter Duplicate URLs and a Little More
Seems there were many advocating real estate as a safe investment during boom times. Just goes to show that there is no such thing as a safe, high growth investment.
Exchange 2010 beta: Screenshots
http://www.rediff.com/news/2006/dec/10advani.htm
I'm a recent CS graduate.

1993: DOS Basic. Entered programs from 3-2-1 Contact magazine.
1995: Robot Battle (http://www.robotbattle.com/)
1996: Klik 'n' Play (http://www.clickteam.com/)
Hawala flourishes in India because 85% of Indians do NOT have bank accounts.
http://tinyurl.com/cj25dz
Gauging by my mostly non tech inclined friends list the average person is only interested in quizzes and top5 lists in terms of apps.

Still considering giving facebook a try for promotion of the site I'm working on but don't hold high hopes for a lot of traffic coming from it.
I had a good chuckle when that was essentially the first tip.
Internet Archive wants book copyright indemnity like Google
it seems the birth rate is simply outpacing the death rate as we are starting to hear about more and more people quitting

Though I have pretty much quit, I'm not sure how true that is, because most of my friends are still on Facebook, posting updates to it everyday, as far as I can tell. Of course, most of my friends aren't hackers and they joined Facebook later than I. So I'm wondering if we're ahead of the curve where social sites are concerned or if we're simply a biased sample. My reason for quitting: invitation fatigue.
I've really enjoyed all of this recent coverage about the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. If you're looking for more, Bill Simmons does a pretty good job discussing this. And if you see anything else, please submit to HN. :)

I submitted http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=515342 a while ago and got no love. I was sad that no one here had an interest in sports, but it turns out I was wrong. :)

Lately, too, I've been thinking how a lot of this could be applied to the NHL. :)
Fixed price plans are coming to Assembla
Please, can you rate my essay? I'm trying to practice my english writing at the same time I share with you some thoughts :D
Anyone interested in this subject should take a look at this article from TIME - http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1892376,00.htm... . It's eye-opening.
@linux_log : follow the linux kernel commit log
Enterprise Software Sales as Corporate Pathology
"Sun has too many irons in the fire. On one hand you have the few-core UltraSPARC processors that power the big iron. The servers are big, hot, and not clockspeed competitive with tier-1 x86 hardware costing 1/10th the price."

I find it interesting to see comparisons based on clock speed becoming common again. Different architectures behave differently and SPARC performs differenty (read "better most of the time") than x86 at the same clock. I thought people learned that from the PowerPC Macs. I find this supremely ironic coming from a person nicknamed "iigs". Any half competent programmer could make a 6502 run rings around a Z80 with four times its clock in the Apple II days.

"On the other end you have the T1/2/2+ many-core processors that are woefully anemic price:performers except possibly in trivially parallelized tasks."

Like... Oh! web-serving! And virtualization. And database workloads. You must be right: those T1/T2 have no useful purpose.

While Linux and x86 killed Sun on some workloads (it was Windows who killed the Unix workstation, BTW) being able to properly cast hardware to a given problem is a skill far too few people possess these days. Perhaps you should look more closely into your "legacy" Sun stuff and learn about the good parts.
Thanks for the informative reply, gmazzola. Could someone who doesn't trust random.org verify that the numbers are indeed random and impossible to rig? What I have in mind is a number that (1) nobody has influence over, (2) can be measured objectively, (3) is observable to everybody, and (4) is impossible to predict.

For example, I could tell my friend that I'll do his laundry for a month if Barack Obama's speech tomorrow contains an even number of words, and he'll do my laundry otherwise. This would appear to be truly random, but what if I secretly am friends with Barack Obama and can rig it in advance?

Is there some easy, practical way of producing a number whose randomness a large number of mutually distrustful parties can agree on? (I am thinking of something like asking each party to produce a number, and then publicly summing everyone's numbers together.)
Well... I find SPARC and ZFS much cooler.
All That Twitters Isn't Gold: A Popular Web Application in Search of a Business Plan
"Some browsers ship with default stylesheets that are simply horrible. One notorious problem, for example, is the <table> tag that forgets to inherit font settings from its parents."

That's not 'bumbling browser makers can't create sensible default stylesheets', that's 'pages in quirks mode duplicate the oddities of Netscape 4 as closely as possible'. Use a DOCTYPE that triggers standards mode, validate your HTML and you'll find a lot of CSS things get much easier.
That sounds promising, has anyone here looked at the data on more recent experiments? Do you know of any more technical reports on the current cold fusion situation?

60 Minutes is interesting, but not exactly in-depth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Gillette does it, right?
ContentLink ads - the chlamydia of the web
I remember Theo De Raadt pointing out several design errors in x86 chips that could be used as attack vectors. I am not sure how many of those SPARCs or Itaniums have.
Fair enough, but I think people often don't realize how much more a niche audience is worth over an unqualified, general interest audience.
Just to add to that, the other variable that I recognise as a player is your feel for the weight of the ball at any given time or night. Sometimes it feels like you're just guessing how hard to shoot and other times it feels like you could throw anything up and you know you're going to get close.

I don't think people do a very good job and explaining why players object to these studies.

Because rightly or wrongly the player feels like at different moments there are different probabilities that they will make the shot based on all sorts of things. It's not just a fixed probability you carry with you at all times.

Using season averaged statistics is useful and tells one story but it does not tell this story because it can't be measured. That's why to a player it feels completely wrong IMHO.
Much of it seems dated - before R7B. Just program as usual and measure in order to optimize. That works as a general formula for all languages. For more fun, look at the Haskell optimization guide! http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Performance
Something appears to be there. People are getting results. Mike McKubre and I were neighbors 20 years ago. I am amazed at his dedication to a field that has been called a fraud for so long. I hope for his vindication.
Did you even click on the link or are you trying to be funny?
"Of course, it would help if Sun could sell its way out of a wet paper bag ..."

Oh boy... They sure make selling good hardware look hard. Any decent marketing team would make them fly off the shelves.
It's not bad, but it's not likely to get too many upvotes. There's simply not that much substance.

Still, I'm looking forward to reading about your growth and experience with ruby/rails, and hopefully other languages as well. Be sure to branch out and explore other development environments as well, and keep us up to date!
don't assume they remember what you said in your application.

For interviewees, on the other hand, it pays to remember things about the interviewer or their organization. It is an opportunity to demonstrate both interest and competence.

My first job ever was as telephone order entry operator at a store that sold office supplies. At one point in the interview the interviewer walked me to the floor, past the section that was doing drop shipping. Then she started to explain to me what drop shipping was -- "It is when we take the order on behalf of the supplier and then the supplier ships it from their location directly to the customer's door, without the merchandise entering our physical control at any point."

I mentioned "Well, strictly speaking, you don't deliver it to the door. You deliver it to anywhere on the first floor or anywhere accessible by dolly if there is an elevator provided, for an extra charge of $35, with exceptions noted in the catalog."

That got me some googly eyes.

"Its on your website. I made it my business to know your business."

As soon as I said that I realized that a) that was probably the best line I had ever delivered in my life and b) that job was so mine. And it was. There is a reason they put "attention to detail" in the solicitation. (Incidentally, you can totally hack this. Learn five interesting facts about the opposite party, and steer the conversation such that you're able to use one or two of them. I certainly didn't memorize everything about the company prior to my job interview.)
This seems like great advice but I'd like to point out that IMVU has those horrible ads everywhere (I think that there are flash embedded ones unless I am mistaken) and I'd like to know how much influence this had on revenues compared to the earlier "No PR" approach.
maybe you can make it reversible by refunding it on the same terms, i.e the buyer has the right to return the good to the seller, and the seller pays 2X or 0 with prob 1/2 to the buyer.
Out-of-Body Experience? Your Brain Is to Blame
60 minutes, the ultimate authority in scientific research.
"I never saw in another technology I worked with, a community so dedicated, that provides you support for any questions and also provides extraordinary material for study"

You have never seen that many technology communities then. The Linux Documentation Project dwarfs anything that's "software support". MySQL and Postgres both have larger, friendlier, than Rails. PHP and Perl are both huge too.

Those are communities. Not individual blogs, not twitter feeds. Communities. Supporting mature, tried and true infrastructure software that runs the world.
This is a great story. SRI is an incredibly impressive research company.

For my money, they have found something analogous to the photoelectric effect or brownian motion. Now, we need an Einstein to tell us what's going on.
My first ruby script...Or...How I watch death
This is a ruby script(video/code) that shows the obituaries...it works on *nix and Mac OS X, however there seems to be an issue on windows.
I did. The interesting thing was that I'd been a Computer Engineering student for about 2 years and hadn't really developed a passion for coding until some guy was being a jerk in IRC because he was good at playing trivia quizzes. I decided to ruin his fun by writing a cheat script for the game and distributing it to the other regulars in the channel who were also tired of his bragging about being smarter than everyone else just for winning at trivia. I will always be grateful to that guy (though I still maintain he was an utter ass) for helping me to find my passion for coding.
I'm not so sure about that. In California (and in several other places I've lived) the odds of winning are written out on the back of the ticket. Sure, a lot of people believe in not-systems like studying past numbers or drawing numbers from their dreams or casting spells; but deep down I think most people understand 'odds of winning = 1 in 57 million'.

Lottery addicts certainly can't do math since they waste a lot of money on tickets. But a good many other people just buy one a week or just occasionally, eg when there's a particularly large jackpot on offer. This isn't so irrational; a regular player will make a few bucks back over the year on small prizes, and the risk/reward ratio improves for a big jackpot even though the odds don't.

It's worth recalling that while the odds on any individual ticket are awful, enough people are playing that people do win big prizes on a semi-regular basis. For small-spend players who can afford it, and may think of it as semi-charitable given the uses to which lottery profits are put, is it really any more irrational than certain kinds of insurance?
Pouring molten solder into a mold seems kind of crude; solder is rather blobby even with flux.

I'd have thought that using printer technology would be easier. You could print conductive areas and semiconductors and resistors directly onto an insulator. You could make 3D objects as papercraft.
It was my impression that SPARC, as an instruction set architecture, has been somewhat discredited.
Fascinating article on the spread of the global economic crisis
Ask HN: How much do you exercise a day/week?
How much time do you spent making sure you are healthy?

What type of exercises do you do?
Utility functions are nonlinear with decreasing slope. When you don't have enough money to buy everything you want, you buy the most important things first. A 50% chance of gaining 2x dollars is a worse deal than a 100% chance of gaining x dollars, with the difference in utility becoming more significant percentage-wise for larger x.

This rant used to conclude with "therefore, buying lottery tickets is irrational; period", but someone on Less Wrong recently brought up a valid exception: it can be rational if you're currently deeply in debt. Utility functions are actually sigma-shaped: they flatten as you get more deeply negative as well. Being two trillion in debt isn't very much worse than being one trillion in debt. So when you're in debt, your utility function can get steeper before it gets shallower.
Liberation through Data Replication: Unison File Synchronizer
So we have a problem. What's the solution? Use something like http://www.snap.com all over the place? Seems like that being able to see where the shortURL leads is one way to counter it.
Research on what robotics platform to use, and final decision to make my own.
There are a lot of robotics platforms to use. I was looking for one with at least semi-humanoid features, that was programmable. A lesser requirement was that a higher level language be available. This is what I came up with.
i dribble a soccer ball in the backyard every time i go out for a smoke, plus the occasional skateboard (yeah, i picked up skating when i was 27!)
And news.yc is the ultimate authority in [topic for topic in science]. ;)

I caught the segment earlier tonight. Found it fascinating and enough to send me on procrastination adventure; not enough to speak about. I don't understand it.

Sure, 60 Minutes isn't the be all end all, but hey, it's a lead on crazy good stuff.
I'm not sure how much scrutiny regarding application function (as compared to a quick test of whether there is porn etc.) there is in the Apple approval process but this is little more than a calculator. In fact, as far as I can tell it doesn't necessarily have to be used for killing people (could be used for accuracy, for hunting, for physics tests who knows).
This may just be me having a bad day, but I do sense a little arrogance in your response. It does not hurt anyone if you add your name at the end of a comment.
The problem isn't just the opacity, it's that url shorteners add an extra, and extremely flaky point of failure in the web request cycle.

The web is patchy enough already w/ domains expiring and sites rearranging their content (w/o a way to update 3rd party links elsewhere). Add to this another service that may or may not be around in 5 years to the opacity and you've got scads of links going dead if one service/domain goes dead.

If perhaps there was a common shared standard for how the hashes mapped to urls, that was reversible, then it'd be less of a problem, since then you just stick the hash into another service that supports minified urls, and you're fine. It'd be a good project for google :P
How about non-confusing URLs, and stop using query strings in place of URLs?

http://www.someone.tld/products/coolthing/

is better than

http://www.someone.tld/page?type=product&id=2386712&...

If you wanted to push this further, use your own permalink on your site, something like:

http://p.somesite.tld/23a44fd

It's not descriptive, but at least it gives you credit for the page.
Amazingly useless.
Google should use this as a precedent for storing the works of books in a database for search purposes.
Business Secrets Of The Trappists
Maybe you should use Python more often - then white space does perform!
I am wondering, what does "unison" offers over old reliable "rdist"? (which is available for various flavours of *nix, including Solaris, Mac OS X, and presumably Linux)
I've run workshops for clients on using new media for new leads. The consensus has been that Facebook is a neat way to give news to people who already know you (though the signal to noise ratio continues to lower), but a poor way to find new people.

That said, I would encourage most businesses to have a presence on there as part of their online content management. If it's quick to copy news from your site over to Facebook (etc), then the costs are low and it will support your brand.
Uh, zero, none, and, uh, N/A.

But I should do more!
I don't have any meaningful statistics on this myself, but I always found this passage from The Jargon File interesting:

Another trait is probably even more important: the ability to mentally absorb, retain, and reference large amounts of ‘meaningless’ detail, trusting to later experience to give it context and meaning. A person of merely average analytical intelligence who has this trait can become an effective hacker, but a creative genius who lacks it will swiftly find himself outdistanced by people who routinely upload the contents of thick reference manuals into their brains.
with exercise i've found benefit as a function of time to be crazy non-linear. there's a much bigger difference between 0 minutes and 20 minutes spent exercising than between 20 and 40 or 40 and 60. so when i'm busy, i do what i can, keep it short, but never cut it out. i try to do something every other day at least. it clears my head and resets my stress.

i like to run. simple. no gym membership. no complicated/expensive gear -- only necessary investment is a pair of running shoes (runs around $90). best of all, you can exhaust yourself quickly: if you don't have much time to spare, just run faster* for less time.

* i wouldn't recommend taking this to an extreme. i knew a guy in college who'd max out the treadmill for a few minutes, sweat like crazy and call it a day. odds are that's terrible for you. (he also had an anger management problem...related?)
Ask HN: Protection for iPhone Development
Hi!

I'm about to release a few iPhone games. Given that we live in a world that pretty much anyone can sue anyone for anything (and I'm slightly paranoid); I'd like to protect myself from being sued just because some one finds my iPhone app insulting or anything else.

I'm working alone in my app; I'm not taking any funding. At some point in the future, I may hire an artist.

What would I go with? LLC ? C-corp?

Thanks!
I usually exercise 3 times a week -- about 45 minutes of running/jogging each time.
If High returns require high risks, safe and high-growth are mutually exclusive.

The one thing that best mitigates risk is capability. The more capable you are at something, the higher return you can get for the risk you take. So if you're going to invest in anything, invest in yourself.
It's too bad he hasn't heard about Balsamiq yet.
Is it possible that it's just a chemical reaction between the Deuterium and Palladium?
Read the article. The reason why nothing like these huge gas reactors will be built again is because the enormous capital costs of building one outweigh the better thermal efficiency. It's more economical to build other types of nuclear reactors.
Ask HN: Equiv of MIT/BSD License for Artwork
Hi!

What is the equiv of MIT/BSD Licensing (or even GPL) for that matter for artwork? There are some art work in open source games (like those distributed with Linux) that I would like to use in a (for-profit) game I'm developing. I'm curious what licenses I should look out for, what I should avoid, what experiences others have had.

Thanks!
And until the authority of whomever asks outweighs the money they must be taking from TPB can you really expect the ISP to take any action.
Can someone post simple instructions on how to use PyPy to compile python to native code? I remember being shown how to do this, but could not figure it out after going over the documentation several times.
I walk from the sofa to the microwave and back to retrieve my hotpocket. Some days I go out to the mailbox to collect the pile of mail that has built up from the days I didn't quite make it out (but the sun hurts my eyes and burns my pasty skin so I quickly retreat indoors to bask in the glow of my monitor).

On those days that I manage to taste the fresh air I occasionally get the feeling, way in the back of my head, that I should get out and do something. Someday.
p90x. But I dont strictly follow their schedule, I usually do it 3-4 times a week. You can do half of their workouts anywhere, and the other half with a pullup bar and some free weights.
True. I've lived in the bay area for the past 15 years (Berkeley, Alameda, Oakland, San Francisco, Redwood City, etc.) and nothing compares to the madness that was the original dotcom bubble.