skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the first time fair enough but I find it hard to believe after doing it the first time, and being called out on it, That they werent remotely aware of the timing the second time round.

even if they were completely oblivious, that doesnt make it right / fair.

It follows my original point, techcrunch are wielding the ability to do serious damage to companies and the best last.fm can hope for is damage limitation, no matter if they are completely in the right.
A product sold for 1/3 of cost is overvalued?
"it's more tokens if you write it as several lines"

As several lines or several statements?

x =

____(a = 7 *

________(b = 14))

____+

____(c = 9 *

________((d > 7)? e:f));

Same statement, same token count, multiple lines.
Google Wave + Corporate Directory Services + Local Backup Servers = Balmer gets his nuts handed to him by Bill.
What the hell are you talking about? This is ONE article written by ONE person and suddenly it's the Python community's fault for allowing it to exist? Spare me.

This victimization technique should added to the list of Logical Fallacies, if it isn't already there.
This is nothing like ODF support...

ODF is an incomplete standard. Spreadsheet formulas, for example, were not even mentioned when Microsoft started their spec and still aren't even final. It has been at least two years!

Microsoft created a new standard so that it could satisfy the openness demands of their customers (i.e. government organizations) while maintaining the existing level of functionality. Had they waited for the ODF standard, they'd still be waiting. I think the Office file format team did a stellar job without an ounce of malice.
Absolutely. There's a real culture problem at Microsoft that is hostile to search. I think its absolutely fair to say that Microsoft has treated search as an afterthought in their products, and it shows.

I recently saw Microsoft's Mike Gannotti speak about building Sharepoint portals for large organizations, and he said "if a user has to search you have failed them." The argument was that if a proper hierarchical navigation was in place a user should never have to search.

To me that's heresy, and I wasn't shy about saying so. The retort was that I saw search as a panacea, or worse as an excuse to be lazy about information architecture. Of course neither is true. I believe great IA begets great search and that both are important and worth getting right.

So I'm cautiously optimistic. I'm hoping Bing can work on both fronts, by applying taxonomy to unstructured information when it makes sense and staying out of the way the rest of the time. With the wealth of talent at Microsoft I think they are capable of building a great search engine, but only if they can really see search as more than an ad platform.
Will this work on sites that require a login to use?
It does read like a short story, but no, do a search and there are journalistic as well as other narrative sources. Also Thad's homepage if you want to check out his quantum field theory... http://moebiusgroupe.com/qst/whoisthad.html
Google Wave prototype to revolutionise email
It will. It records the tester's screen with a Java applet.
Agreed. This procedure isn't enforceable. So as long as it makes the other party happy, without making you liable for diddly squat, then go for it.
[P]eople's [...] first association with Microsoft will never be search.

Not only is this not about Microsoft, it's not about Search either. It's all about Decision now, in a sort of semantic landgrab.
> the developer is forced to keep business logic and complex constructs separate from the markup

Nothing I like better than having options taken away without any upside!
I think it will pop much differently. There will be enough PhD waiters and Home Depot employees that people will start to question if college was worth it. The recession also seems to be triggering a wave of self employment. That will reduce the need for the all important degree on the resume.

Attendance will just evaporate as people ask "do I need college?" Not in the smug 90's startup way, but in the cold, calculated "great recession" way.
This is dangerous advice. You can't possibly know whether or not it's enforceable without knowing where he is, or what the agreement is.
Have you heard David Allen (GTD) talk - he makes a good point that it's not "information" overload that the problem (otherwise your head would explode the first you walked into a library or logged into the Net) - instead it's the "potential meaning overload" - each little email may be very important and so pulls our attention.

I've always found it a good distinction
Another interesting tip from that session: how to tell if your market is real or is a niche. Counterintuitive, but true.
That piece Carr wrote about Le Web was a hack job -- yet another manifestation of the undying British national habit of badmouthing the French on every possible occasion.

Done by professional comedians once in a while it's fun. Done by an entire nation it's disgusting.

Compared to Carr's, Michael Arrington's article on Le Web seemed like a balanced critique, and that's saying something.
it's built on plt-scheme so Tail Calls are optimised
I'd recommend Sage. It is a math-oriented Python environment that includes many of the popular open source math packages. It also has a worksheet mode that lets you save an interactive session, which is something R can do but not python.

In fact, Sage includes R so if you really want to you can use R functions from within python (unfortunately, it's a little messy).

http://www.sagemath.org/
This seems entirely possible in a hypothetical case.

Energy source A costs $1 per unit and is sold at $1 per unit.

Energy source B costs $6 per unit and is sold at $2 per unit.

So long as A exists, B will be overpriced, even with that subsidy.
I really liked How to think Like A Computer Scientist
http://openbookproject.net/thinkCSpy/index.xhtml

A friendly way into programming in general and uses Python.

Also, there are ways to connect R and Python.
I agree. My bad. I appreciate the clarificaiton.
Google Climbs to New Heights of Arrogance with Wave
Canvas and SVG would kill silverlight instantly and that's why M$ will never implement any of them.

As simple as that.
Ads For New Microsoft Bing Search Engine…On Google Search
It's really unfortunate, because they have a terrible bitrot problem as well. If I try to find documentation on products older than 3 or 4 years old, at some point in the hunt for the correct documents, I'll end up at a 404 error. What makes it terrible is that I'll get that 404 from a page that I've been linked to from inside of MSDN, or from the search. I just use Google to search MSDN now, and it saves me tons of time (and frustration).
Hard to understand how a gaming framework without a scripting component could be considered "rapid prototyping".

http://love2d.org/ is a similar wrapper around SDL, but you script it using Lua.
What is "flexibility" from a technical point of view is "ambiguity" from a social point of view. Is the conversation real-time or only potentially real-time? IM is a real-time conversation, like two people speaking. E-mail is not. A single protocol and interface for both means people will be constantly confused about each other's intentions. I like the idea of combining and persisting all communications about a single topic, but in the screenshots it looks like all Wave messages look the same. "Draft" mode vs. keystroke mode provides a clue, but what if I don't see the message arrive? What if I have a real-time conversation with somebody, and then five minutes after it ends, one of us posts another message? We have to add some kind of comment indicating whether it is intended as a continuation of the previous conversation, the beginning of a new real-time conversation, or a one-off message (with the sender perhaps not available to chat at the moment.)

Everything that is currently implicit in the mode of communication (email, IM, etc.) and in mode-specific indicators (IM status, etc.) will now have to be communicated explicitly. That seems like a big step backwards. Google Wave will do well if it usefully aggregates many different modes of communication, but if it attempts to unify them then it will be socially unworkable, a total flop.
Google goes for the long term approach and not the short win.
First Round Capital: San Francisco Office Hours
Thrust: A high-level C++ template library for CUDA
this is a little silly because I think we're both in agreement. Brand is what matters in search, more than the (often minor) algorithmic differences. That's what that "placebo test" last week demonstrated.

And the reason I brought up brand is that Microsoft has to build one now. And for that task, the letters matter.
That's a stupid argument. Would people stop using Gmail if it refused to work for IE6/7/8? Yes. They would stop instantly.

Where the hell did Bing come in? Some people use Google Search and Hotmail. You're not locked into a company. Furthermore, this was never about search, this was about more complex applications. If Google Search told you to download Chrome or else you couldn't use it, you can fucking bet users would start using Yahoo. Laziness trumps everything else. That's why I use Mibbit rather than downloading an IRC client.

Hotmail leads Gmail by 13 million uniques. Gmail is the fourth-largest service. Just because it's the best doesn't mean it's the most popular.

Real enough for you?
My understanding is that this is just 'a' waves client, just as there are a bunch of quite different applications that let you use Twitter or GMail in a variety of different ways.
Social Web Blog: Introducing the Conversations element
Mostly looking to protect personal assets.
Programming Clojure (book by Stuart Halloway) is out of beta (here's a review)
I just downloaded the updated e-book last night and from a quick glance, it looks roughly the same as the beta one (with fixed typos and code bugs, I assume). I mentioned in a comment a while ago I'd do a review, so here it is.

For those who have never looked at any lisps, I'd recommend reading http://www.moxleystratton.com/article/clojure/for-non-lisp-programmers before jumping into the book, because the intro chapter has a lot of small examples that you can type in the repl as you go along to get a taste of the language. (this also helps get into the mood to drink the koolaid that the chapter throws at you)

The book then shifts into a more in-depth explanations of different aspects of the languages. The major chapters are: syntax and basic concepts, java interop, the sequences library, functional programming, concurrency, macros, multimethods, and a last chapter about how to go about some common tasks in clojure.

The book provides a pretty nice hands-on experience. As the book progresses, by completing the end-of-chapter exercises, you can gradually write an ant-like build tool. One of the chapters also shows how to write a simple snake game.

So far, I only have a couple of critiques:

1 - imho, getting comfortable with a lisp editor is a big deterrent for Java people, and the book doesn't explain much in terms of what sorts of weirdness to expect in the transition (granted, the book isn't about emacs or vim).

2 - I feel the section about destructuring could be longer and use more real-world code samples, as it seems to be a fairly important concept and, at the same time, fairly novel for the non-lisper.

Overall, though, I find it a nice introduction to the language. The e-book has links any time it references any concept (including the table of contents and the index), making it a pretty decent reference book too.

Has anyone else bought it? What do you think of it?
I agree. It's a pretty weak argument to imply that Arrington forgot there was such a thing as a weekend.

Graham's response also leaves hanging the assertion that TC is censoring unfavorable comments on their blog. If they're victims too, what are they hiding from?
Open sourcing benifits
I've recently developed some technology, and i'm having some questions about open sourcing it. Several people have suggested 'boxing' it as a product, but recently the idea of open sourcing it has come to play. Anyone have experiences on the matter? Can technology be open sourced, and one still make a living from it?
A couple of important communication axes: Receivers (number, type and level of privacy), Context (threads, or more generally things like being embedded in something like Facebook).

I like Roman Jacobson's work on communication functions, which wikipedia used to have a slightly better description of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Jakobson
Climate change causes 315,000 deaths a year-report
I posted this because I read the article twice and still don't understand it.

How can climate change cause so much harm when the temperatures are not increasing as much as forecast? If I remember correctly, there is still quite a bit of debate because the climate hasn't been warming that much overall.

I'm not trying to open this can of worms again; I'm just curious if anybody understands whatever methodology these guys are using. I understand there have been some local climate-related events (isn't a climate-related event called weather?) but how would one know that this was something abnormal that somehow could be stopped?

I find the logic here confusing at best.
I had a similar problem as the same you are having now... I was a successful game developer (considered by many as one of the field leaders in my country), but I started getting bored. After a lot of trouble, I could manage to start working in machine learning and other related areas of what used to be known as AI. I'm really happy to be working on this now, and I have a lot to learn. Almost every day I work in an interesting challenge, which is very different from what I used to do.

It was not so hard to leave my previous field, which I was bored of, but to get a chance to work on this new field. I got to do this by doing a slow transition, first doing work that was halfway between game development and different areas of AI, and every time pushing forward my objective. It took me a lot of time to do it but now I'm very happy with the results.

If I can give you my advice, investigate the many areas related to programming that exist, investigate what companies that you didn't even know that existed do, and find something that you really wish you could do too. Then start moving in that direction, one step at a time.

I'm not by far as successful in the new field as I was in my previous life. But hey, I'm having a lot of fun. And with time, you get your knowledge and experience back again.
I don't buy that. I've never been able to get any useful results out of live.com. It's just dire technology.
"on HN"

Indeed, but even here it has been increasing. This made it to #2 within a half hour of posting. Even watching this thread you can see people driving through down modding even mdasen's post. Another recently popular blatant nonsensical anti-rails/pro-django troll that comes to mind was the "Magic Sucks, Django Rocks!" submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=596833
1964 300baud modem surfs the web
You kind of need a mouse to play Doom.
via http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/05/28/1745203/45-Year-Old-...
Replican en laboratorio el inicio de la vida en la Tierra
Silverlight's killer feature is adaptive video streaming. The current HTML 5 draft states:

"
It would be helpful for interoperability if all browsers could support the same codecs. However, there are no known codecs that satisfy all the current players: we need a codec that is known to not require per-unit or per-distributor licensing, that is compatible with the open source development model, that is of sufficient quality as to be usable, and that is not an additional submarine patent risk for large companies. This is an ongoing issue and this section will be updated once more information is available.
"

Netflix, MLB, NBC (Olympics), etc choose Silverlight to enable high quality video streaming while simultaneously supporting lower end connections without requiring manual quality selection. As far as I know, Flash can't do that and I don't expect the HTML 5 video element to be able to do it cross-browser and platform.

Canvas and SVG are nice, but they are hardly enough to kill either of the popular rich internet application browser plugins. Add in video and ignore a large pile of existing skill sets; you might have a case against Flash.

Silverlight isn't doing so great because, in true Microsoft fashion, there is too much complexity. XAML/WPF is a classic inheritance vs composition design disaster and the learning curve is simply outside of the scope of the average developer. Blend, however, is an amazing tool and may be able breath some life into the ecosystem. Silverlight will be the death of Silverlight, not Canvas or SVG.
I think that's a bit like saying that there's no point in painting pictures when you could just use a camera...this is obviously a labor of love.

Incidentally, if you ever get to the Computer History Museum in San Jose, they have an original computer from the Apollo missions there...which is also a bunch of wrapped wires. Gave me quite a shiver to imagine 3 people trusting their life to that.
I posted this because I read the article twice and still don't understand it.

How can climate change cause so much harm when the temperatures are not increasing as much as forecast? If I remember correctly, there is still quite a bit of debate because the climate hasn't been warming that much overall.

I'm not trying to open this can of worms again; I'm just curious if anybody understands whatever methodology these guys are using. I understand there have been some local climate-related events (isn't a climate-related event called weather?) but how would one know that this was something abnormal that somehow could be stopped with appropriate legislation?

I find the logic here very confusing.
No, IMHO they wouldn't. What do you think the browser share is for GMail? I'd say likely 40% or so on IE at the very most. If that. If they stopped supporting IE, some of those would stop using gmail, but a large number would upgrade to a standards compliant browser. They'd still be left with maybe 80% of their original users.

>> That's why I use Mibbit rather than downloading an IRC client.

You have good taste ;) FYI, On Mibbit, IE usage is at 26%, and falling.

In webapps, IE is a very small minority, and falling fast.
Palm Unveils More webOS Details:  Palm Media Sync, Twitter Integration, etc
I have a few friends who work in OSO at Google and they most definitely talk to customers all the time. In fact when you first start in ad-sales at Google you have to man the 800-help line taking calls from frustrated customers. Or at least you did a year ago.
You shouldn't include www. in the submission form. A person who is submitting a web application probably knows what a URL should look like, and it's possible (likely) that the app doesn't start with www. (see the URL you're currently visiting)
I think the real solution is to stop overvaluing university degrees. Most of the folks coming out of universities don't have any particularly valuable job skills. (I'm thinking of majors in business, or liberal-arts fields, or for that matter most people with a BA/BS in the sciences.)

Will that happen? Not unless getting university grads gets hard.
Twitter API Explorer
I've written a simulator for one (not of my own design):
http://www.accesscom.com/~darius/hacks/pisa.tar.gz
I failed to make my point...sorry. A human rated 3200 would win more than 4 games even given the restrictions against a GM rated ~2550. Ratings are not as as transferrable as one would think, especially when a computer is involved.
Right, but you're one data point.
Cost has nothing to do with value.

Products that cost more than they are valued tend not to be produced (or rather, there are no buyers), but that doesn't imply that everything is worth more than it costs.
From what I understand, they have a real person sit through each song an classify it.
How Harvard University Almost Destroyed Itself
Sergey Brin On Breaking "Page's Law" Of Software Sluggishness (vid)
Perhaps the problem is that they're spending too much on the education.

BLASPHEMY! You may be thinking, education is PARAMOUNT to any civilization! We musn't cut spending on education!

Does anyone here live in the Phoenix, AZ area? If so, take a tour of ASU's recent campus renovations. The new dorms look like luxury-condos. The buildings around campus match. ASU has gotten into the habit of buying up the most expensive property available, and developing high-end real-estate on top of it.

Do we really need that?

What we need are desks, blackboards, and good professors. I could not care any less what the building I'm studying inside of looks like. Are campus aesthetics really that important, or even relevant at all, to higher education?

No. The answer is that no, they are not.

It seems cliche' for a geek to get bent out of shape about it, but lets also look at the sports teams. How much money is spent on this educationally fruitless endeavour? What is the return on it? How does it effect education?

Suggesting that post-secondary education should cost what it currently does is insane.

Private institutions can do whatever they please, in my opinion, but the state schools need to get back to their roots. That is: intellectual pursuits, not physical ones.
I never use %w for arrays and I never use %Q for strings. After years of schlepping through Python's regular expression support --- support not dissimilar from the regex support C++ has --- /regexes/ are a gift from god.

Also, your Ruby vs. Python regex examples aren't even equivalent.
> Do the top schools really need Olympic sized swimming pools, or gyms that would require a $100 a month membership in any big city?

I'd guess that students are less likely to use their college gym than members are to use their gym. If I'm correct, the per-student cost of a college gym may be in the noise.
Just another "I'm a PC campaign."
Is Flash the best choice to make interactive content spreadable?
We have developed an authoring environment for kids and novices that allows them to create games and animations (http://scratch.mit.edu). Currently, once people upload their creations to our website, they get rendered by a Java applet. We're considering switching the player to Flash but we're weighing the pro's and con's. Would having the content as Flash make it significantly easier for our users to spread their creations via Facebook, MySpace, blogs, etc?
When you have a scoop, you publish it. You don't think: "oh well, it's getting late on Friday, let's wait until Monday when every other news media outlet has a chance to cover this as well".

So the "Friday allegation", to me, is completely misguided.

The denials have been pretty suspicious actually, at least the way TechCrunch and the Guardian report them. Over the years, I got used to reading between the lines.

When a famous athlete says "the allegations about my doping in magazine XYZ are completely false", it's not a denial. It's a carefully crafted statement to avoid any legal problems. If the athlete says "I never took drug XYZ", then that's a much stronger statement.

In geek terms, the first statement is a "nop". The second one is either true or false (0 or 1).
Does it offer any advantage to consumers? (I don't drink coffee.)
"records the tester's screen"

Let's make sure the tester clearly knows this,
so he doesn't unintentially "record" a picture of
the half finished note to his girlfriend that just happens
to be in a separate window on his screen
Sounds like we'd be much better off with the actual report than with a Reuters article to answer your question. Couldn't find it from just a cursory glance at their site: http://www.ghf-geneva.org/ but maybe someone else would have better luck.
The Complexity of Songs by Knuth
I think that'd make a better URL for the main submission. Editor?