skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Since the late ‘70s, researchers have known that prime numbers themselves, when taken in very large data sets, are not distributed according to Benford’s law. Instead, the first digit distribution of primes seems to be approximately uniform"

This is a trivial consequence of the prime number theorem, which has been known for over 100 years.
My mom was hacking on a homebuilt Epson computer back in the 80's.
"Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man."

(snip)

"To this warre of every man against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be Unjust. The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice have there no place. Where there is no common Power, there is no Law: where no Law, no Injustice. Force, and Fraud, are in warre the two Cardinall vertues. Justice, and Injustice are none of the Faculties neither of the Body, nor Mind. If they were, they might be in a man that were alone in the world, as well as his Senses, and Passions. They are Qualities, that relate to men in Society, not in Solitude. It is consequent also
to the same condition, that there be no Propriety, no Dominion, no Mine and Thine distinct; but onely that to be every mans that he can get; and for so long, as he can keep it. And thus much for the ill condition, which man by meer Nature is actually placed in; though with a possibility to come out of it, consisting partly in the Passions, partly in his Reason."
Thanks, I'm going to use that Table Topics theme next time it's my turn.
Nothing bad about the Twitter Inventor, but there was (A LOT) of luck involved in the success of Twitter. His next project might be interesting, but it is 99.999% certainly not a new blockbuster like Twitter.
I got some...interesting results by exploring these terms; for example, i was able to get a scatterplot of infection rates vs size of population in Africa. On the other hand, I can't seem to pipe data into a map to save my life. Maybe that's not switched on yet, some things explicitly aren't. More info tonight or tomorrow, after I've tried running Mathematica at the same time.
Sounds like you're thinking of the visualized datasets in http://www.gapminder.org/ and the TED talk http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_be...

WA seems like a generalization of that. Instead of seeing it as a google-killing AI inference engine, you're saying to think of it as a way to do effortlessly what you could do already... if you went to the trouble to gather the data, put it into mathematica or similar analysis tool.

This is a very credible claim, and I can imagine it quickly finding unforeseen uses, as you say - provided it really is reasonably effortless (as in your four criteria).
Never attribute to cunning that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.
Google "paradox of thrift."
Well, the problem is that you can't take David Brooks' statements of "fact" at face value, as he's been known to provide rather one-sided arguments. I could undoubtedly read the original papers, but my interest isn't that high and I don't necessarily have the right background to appreciate them. What I need is a precis produced by a knowledgeable, relatively unbiased party.

That's not an uncommon situation. The idea that we should all evaluate statements "regardless of who made them" is naive.
Wow. Schools pay load-based licensing costs for registration systems? There's a niche just waiting to be demolished by some startup...

I think you have a useful idea here, and you should try to find a way to make it work. It sounds like your university's IT department thinks so too, but they have real limitations and good reason to ask you to cease operation because, unlike your service, theirs is required to be available.

It sounds like without the cooperation of that IT department, your app (at least at UNC) is going to be a big nothingburger. Do whatever you can to make them your partners in implementing this service rather than your adversaries. This could mean collecting data that explains how your service improves their service; helping them measure and upgrade their current system so the load is a non issue; integrating your code at a lower level (direct to DB); beta testing a parallel registration system that will eventually save them lots of money on licensing.

You have a difficult task with any solution. University policy may prohibit certain things, such as allowing a student or a student's software to directly access the real course registration data; or the timeline to have your app approved to run inside the security perimeter may be too long for you to bother trying. You may also want to check your school's invention rights policy before pursuing any tighter integration with their systems.

If this hiccup is not a showstopper for you, just keep building your product. You can work on displacing whatever is causing the problems at this IT department, but if that is too far afield from your core (proposed) business, maybe just move on and try deploying the app against other universities' registration systems.
I had this same exact app a few years ago. (dropmessenger.com) It only worked for the University of Utah, and they did eventually contact me about polling the server. But, they were pretty cool about it, and even asked if I was looking for work. :)

The reality is, they can't really make you take it down, but they can take steps to make your life miserable. Without any reliable API it will be difficult to scale such an app.

Good work though.
I'm especially interested in how/if you use one tool for load-balancing/proxy/reverse proxy, and another for more traditional page serving.
Richard Stallman Eats Something From His Foot
Well, I think we all have to accept as a basic precept that Mac is a cult, and once you do that then this all makes sense :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia
As someone rolling something out to the rabid masses on June 1st and didn't know which one to finish first: thank you. You just tipped the balance over for the API first camp.

And good luck to Tipjoy! :-)
At which point we will cease to cherish it.
One extreme fluctuation in property values doesn't disprove the general historical observation that property tax revenue is more stable than sales or income tax revenue. There are factors that can explain this, such as the fact that sales tax is essentially assessed in real time, income tax every year, and property tax less frequently. (My understanding is that it was every few years pre-Prop 13, and now only when a home is built, sold, or substantially rebuilt.) This lag in assessment will tend to smooth out revenues.

Also due to the way assessment is triggered, a 50% drop in home prices doesn't imply a 50% drop in total property tax revenue -- only for homes that are sold. [EDIT: But apparently one can appeal to have property reassessed without selling, which presumably many people will do with prices dropping significantly.] Furthermore, if sales forced by foreclosure are bias toward the lower price range -- as is the case -- that will further limit the effect on total property tax revenue.

EDIT: See also http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/25/... -- a little short on hard data, but suggesting that the variation in property tax revenue is not going to be anywhere close to the 40-50% drop in sales and income tax reported in the OP.
1) There's nothing that humans can't do that sufficiently smart robots can't, per the Turing Equivalence Theorem.

2) There are a lot of people who aren't smart to join the creative classes. Assuming that robots remain dumb and can only do the kind of work that people with IQs of, say, 100, do, that means people with IQs of 100 or less would be unemployable.

3) Goods and services would become cheaper so you probably wouldn't have to have a lot of capital to survive even if you lost your job, so the "cabal" probably wouldn't be tiny. But you would still have to have some capital or you would be completely dependent on the good graces of those who do, (or those who can coerce them, ie the government). Lots of people in the US have negative net worths.

The point here is not that there wouldn't be lots of winners, but that there could potentially be a lot of losers, depending on how wealth is distributed.
I work in the IT department of a major university and this is crazy. I'm also one of their students. You got a really cool service that solves a major problems for any large institution. Towards that end, this decision was probably made by a manager, who doesn't know much. All of the real knowledge is with the analysts. I'm sure that having an open dialog with them would get this changed. I doubt they'd keep you out with a little discussion.
(I work at flickr)

The problem is finding all the places that the language has changed and all the places you relied on the old behavior. The documented stuff was easy to find, it was the undocumented (or unintended?) changes that were hard. For example, strtotime($null) returns now in php4 but returns null in php5.

QA and automated testing will only get you so far in this process. Nobody had thought to test how we display the "Date Taken" on photos from before December 14th 1901 until a member pointed out they were displaying wrong (caused by another change to strtotime() behavior).

At some point you have to upgrade a subset of your servers, watch the error logs, fix the bugs as they come up and be prepared to rollback quickly. It wasn't a fun experience...
I don't know about those odds... It took an insight most people didn't have to come up with Twitter--to me the concept of twitter was not obvious at all until after I'd used it.

There are no guarantees, but one startling insight could indicate he has more. Plus, I like this idea...
or insanity

these people have way too much time on their hands
It's like APL all over again.
Interview with AMD Java Labs
Well someone just convinced me older news is cool as long as it hasn't been posted, and this isn't that old.

Fascinating podcast from the AMD java labs team (how many of you knew such a thing existed?). Some nice performance tips, and a must listen for anyone into Java.
In general, you are supposed to lock the database for a couple seconds, take the snapshot, and then unlock it. This prevents that kind of data corruption.
Ask HN: How do you do your health insurance in your startup?
My start up is about 1 year old now, and my partner and I are graduating this year, so we need to get our own health insurance. We currently only need health insurance for both of us.

We're debating getting corporate health insurance via the company or both just getting our individual plans. We both have relatively the same health needs(just major accident coverage). What do you do for yourself: corporate or individual coverage?
under a redistribution of wealth system you're relying on the top producers to pay for all the shiny social programs. If all those top producers have a bad year at once you're screwed (especially if you have commitments lasting decades).
Konami Code Websites
pg? ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konami_Code
It's a few weeks old, but as someone pointed out to me, if it hasn't been posted, why not :)

This is a fascinating interview (who here even knew there was an AMD Java labs?). Some nice performance tips, and just a great listen for anyone into Java.
My recommendation: apologize and drop the issue with IT in a vague and forgettable manner, use proxies (TOR, open proxies, a cheap VPS), set a normal browser or web-crawler user-agent -- and please, whatever you do, go easy on their infrastructure. Realize that schools sometimes (though not always) have substandard, under-funded IT depts.

Your best bet is to stay under the radar and let your app build momentum with your users. Don't fight IT, and don't beg permission.
I'd be very interested in hearing about things like this as well. Anybody know of a handbook-style resource for hackers doing startups? pg's essays are pretty close, but I'm looking for something more concrete.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=560169
I frequently wish that I was born a few hundred years later than I was. Then I remind myself that I'm lucky I wasn't born a few hundred years earlier. Which isn't quite enough to balance out my disappointment at being in this time.
I wrote my own. I built on top of NanoHTTPD and added the stuff to properly support caching and other features I needed.
Taking The First Step
So, you're considering a career in corporate aviation. Congratulations! This

particular segment of general aviation is one of the most exciting and well paying fields in all

of flying.
DB dumps exist for a reason

Indeed they do, and that is the "faultless" way of creating a backup. Depending on your RDMS (and luck perhaps), the backups can be fine or they can be unusable. In my experience, MySQL databases backed up this way almost always end up being corrupted. On the other hand, I've had good success with PostgreSQL. Sure, occasionally the internal registry indices will be out of sync and will need to be recreated, but it has never been a big deal.

Even still, I wasn't decrying DB-level backups since, obviously, they're far better (and sometimes necessary). But you can still start a cronjob to write the backup and let the snapshots take care of the rest. My point is, you already get heavy-duty compression and incremental algorithms and restoration, not to mention the ability to restore the complete system state in the event of a catastrophe.
How many times does it take before you don't call it luck anymore?
This seems like the hacker equivalent of the "people falling down" videos.

EDIT: And I don't think that's a good thing.
When people start making up ridiculous conspiracy theories about your company you know you've made it.
I won't deny that Rand was totally Emo. But regulatory power boils down to the power to imprison those who refuse to comply.
No but she is the one who bought me dos sesame street games and taught me how to use them, as well as email in the early 90s and I'm sure I never would have used a computer other than as word processor and for email without her early start
God, I'm so sick of hearing about twitter.

So, important people that I follow are no longer going to post on their blog, I have to follow them on twitter?

I've signed up for an account, and yes it wires you in to whats really short term hip and happening, and it certainly does have value in some situations. But with basically an infinite number of people to follow on RSS as it is, where there are meaty articles posted, I still don't see the point.

If it's important enough, it will be posted on their blog, and for most subjects, RSS is more real time than I'd like to see.

Is it only me that thinks that twitter is yet another supposed massive paradigm change, that will actually amount to nothing terribly interesting because the last paradigm worked just fine thank you very much?
Once there is no work that humans do better than robots, there will be no work for humans to do. This could be very good, or very bad. We're not yet to that point, however.
Self-Storage
One of the best ways to do this is to visit localselfstorage.com. Here, you will get access to the most comprehensive directory of local storage service provider.
OpenSolaris/ZFS?
Don't Discount the Power of Immeasurable Qualities
The Virtual Currency of Social Media: Gratitude
but there was (A LOT) of luck involved in the success of Twitter.

Actually there wasn't a lot of luck. Twitter is something that users actually wanted: a broadcast "status" update that wasn't just on their instant message client.

Twitter is successful because they remained positive and persevered while other people capable of making a similar system didn't do anything about it. Grumpy programmers just posted confused blog posts and forum comments about it. "Twitter? Huh? I don't get it." Nobody really tried to compete with them head on, and they still don't have any real competition. People say facebook is their main competition, and they are right, but Facebook has so much baggage of being something else that isn't Twitter that it seems unlikely people will ever consciously choose between one or the other. More likely people will use both services.

It's a bit of luck that anyone cares about posting their status online but it's not really luck that they are using Twitter to do so... What else would they use?
That was my opinion at first, but more and more I'm starting to be use Google Reader less and less to stay updated. Once you find some good people to follow on both Twitter and FriendFeed and hook them up in a desktop application with filters, I think that they are becoming more and more useful.
Non-hysterical?! It compares modern-day Britain to East Germany and the October Revolution, on the basis that Britain criminalises hate speech (lots of other countries do, too). The author is Australian, and doesn't live in Britain as far as I can tell, so I'm not sure why he's purporting to lecture about how life is here. Ironically, hate speech is also a criminal offence in Australia, and the Australian section is the longest in Wikipedia's Hate Speech article. The sort of trivial, tabloid-type stories he tells (but doesn't link to) aren't really enough to make a serious case that the UK is some sort of North Korea-esque totalitarian regime.

Anyway, I won't flag you -- I'd be interested to read what others think -- but I don't think it's a very good article.
All of your submissions are frame the same site, and all of the articles are 3-paragraph fluff pieces with inflammatory headlines. And ads.

edit: Just read more. Some of them have some stuff, I guess. Most don't, like this one. There's no way to flag users, so I don't know how long it'll take an editor to notice that the user account is being used to submit basically every new article on that site.
everyone is motivated by profit. in this case the people running the program are receiving profits in the form of feeling good about themselves. are the intended beneficiaries profiting? I'll take a "no".

Be suspicious of people who claim to have altruistic intentions. Their claims should be examined with 10 times more rigor.
You must understand though, that your paper is doing what makes money -- it's providing what most people want: stories about cats rescued from trees, this years fashions, and possibly commentary on local taxes going up or down. Ads about what sale is going on this weekend, etc.

The real shocker, IMO, is that most people don't want to know what's really going on. They actively resist getting roused from their peaceful slumber.
Rehash of my answer from that thread:

* Get high-deductable, low-premium insurance --- make sure it's a plan that qualifies for an HSA. You want to be paying low hundred(s) every month, but also essentially paying out of pocket for your doctor's visits.

* If you have a bunch of people on your team, get group coverage. The major win for group coverage isn't cost (you may actually pay a little more), but that everyone on your team gets covered regardless of preexisting conditions. On your own, you can get flat-out turned down for relatively minor problems.

* Ours is Oxford/United (Oxford if you're in Manhattan, United everywhere else --- Chicago, in our case). I'm not a fan, but it works.

* Carrying insurance has been a major hiring win for us. Again, there are A-players that can't effectively cover themselves, because of innocuous but disqualifying health records.
ICWSM 2009 - Presentations and Authors
It's easy to pick reasons in after the fact to explain why something happened the way it did. Just being able to find plausible reasons doesn't mean they are right, or that the event wasn't in fact a matter of luck.
2 in my book
An anecdote about hospital negotiation: I just got a bill for $7,000 for a two-hour visit to a San Francisco hospital emergency room. The bill arrived with a letter offering me a 20% discount if I paid directly (and claimed it back from my insurance or not, either way) versus if I asked them to submit an insurance claim, and another 20% discount for payment within 30 days. So the opening offer on the bill was to pay 40% less. This is probably in the neighborhood of what an insuror would pay, but the hospital saves a fortune in claims processing.
Is it just me or does this look really similar to Scala.
Factor VM ported to C++
Before I could complete saying "Just because you can doesn't ..." I read your comment. Voted up.
IIS - .Net all the way!
Tweetmeme: A Little Bird Told Me...
Rams' Law Of Enterprise Software Sales
i've always been surprised how much like simple programming knitting and weaving and similar crafts are. most of my friends go WTF at my knitting because it's so incongruous with the rest of my interests, until i explain/show them how patterns read like loops and things :)
I'm not quite as puritanical as I was when I was younger, but I still don't like swearing for emphasis and try to keep it to a minimum. If you had heard me speaking you might have heard one of those Bugs Bunny equivalents best transliterated as "strangled cry of frustration" or, perhaps, $(#$"). (Besides, more fun to type that way.)
As a Canadian, health insurance isn't an issue. However, it doesn't cover prescription drugs or permanent/long term disability....the latter being the most important. Also, make sure the insurance covers your current occupation appropriately. "Works with computers" might mean your claim is denied because you could still do data entry at 8 bucks an hour...even though 8 of your fingers have been severed.
AppStore Analysis of 30 Million Downloads
Colleges should be investing more in the open source Sakai project. Which has already produced an extremely functional and completely open learning management system. Sakai is by higher-ed for higher-ed.
...except for web 2.0 marketing gimmicks.

(I agree with you though).
Yup, my Mum got me started in TRS-80 Basic when I was ~5-6.

I didn't love "Outliers", but the Bill Gates story in there underlined how lucky I was to have someone give me a computer language in the early 80s.
It was scheduled:

http://status.twitter.com/post/104738920/planned-maintenance...
Know what? You run a red light and crash into my car or start firing a pistol in random directions because you don't feel like complying, your ass needs to be imprisoned.
Space Shuttle Endeavor being prepared to rescue Atlantis if necessary
In which case wouldn't the traffic overload issue be resolved? 1 request/min seems a far cry from ~130 requests/min, and quite a reasonable compromise.
For most of my career I have used Apache. Just recently I choose to run Nginx for a new project and I cant see myself going back to Apache. Just today I came across the Cherokee web server and that looked pretty slick. Does anyone have any experience with Cherokee?
I have heard a lot of talk about using Nginx in conjunction with HaProxy, but I don't have any experience myself with that setup.
I like this type of blog post. I'd much rather read stories about people solving real problems with real code than blowhards pontificating about their favorite design patterns.

Whether Rails is immature doesn't make it less interesting to see how people track down its problems and fix them.
Isn't there some evidence that hashing a hash is cryptographically weaker?
HN Archive of Health Insurance Topics http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive#t...
Convince them to implement push then work in cooperation to publicize your service?
To be fair to the kid, he does state that the value is in 2008 dollars. But 27 years on the same real wage is still a stretch.
So what's the best way to migrate a site that's using sha1 without salts to one that does use salts?

I expect it involves checking users' passwords two different ways (with salt, without) for the foreseeable future.
Local Self Storage
One of the best ways to do this is to visit localselfstorage.com. Here, you will get access to the most comprehensive directory of local storage service provider.