skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anyone know more about the author Erik Naggum? I have run into seen some old posts from him on the Python list and now this. A simple Google search reveals he is an academic/writer from Norway but not much more.
Check out affiliate marketing, if you're any good at coding, you can make a lot of money(4-5 figures a month) doing affiliate marketing PPC/SEO part time.
Who schedules maintenance during peak time?
If you don't like swearing for emphasis, I would suggest formatting your sentences in a way that doesn't require your readers to swear for you.

Most people will, after pausing to wonder why the shift numbers are there, just replace them with their favorite four letter word, which makes your sentence rather disjointed to read... Read, pause, substitute, continue.

English is wonderfully verbose and expressive. You can emphasize without pretend swearing.
Mine's not a programmer, but I once found a bunch of funny looking cards in our basement as a kid and I learned she used to work as a punchcard feeder. Maybe something rubbed off.
A friend of mine at MSFT has been working on some version of this for almost 3 years now.
Playing to the Strengths of the Academy
if students can figure out what the word is by looking at the picture

Oh gosh, that's terrible. There is a very great response to the whole look at the picture nonsense in the book Education's Smoking Gun by Reginald Damerell.

http://www.amazon.com/Educations-Smoking-Gun-Destroyed-Educa...

There is an illustration of a cat, not so different from this image,

http://spoilurpets.com/images/Thermal%20Cat%20Mat.JPG

and the illustration is labeled in Chinese. I burst out laughing as soon as I saw the illustration, because I can read Chinese, so I knew the punchline. The children are shown the illustration, and asked to guess the meaning of the Chinese characters in the caption. In the illustration that Reginald Damerell commissioned his graduate student from Taiwan to produce, the Chinese characters did not say "the cat is on the mat," but rather "the cat's eyes are open."

One thing that I really like about the book Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach, by an eminent linguist and an equally eminent lexicographer, is that the stories have no illustrations whatsoever. Indeed, the final story in the book, called "The Picture Country," is beautifully evocative and remarkably visual story told entirely in words, which makes the point to children that once they know how to read, they can see more beautiful pictures in their mind than one could find in all the book illustrations in the world. That is genuine reading.
It's 30M, not 300K.
I wonder how they manage the hinting in SVG, and translate that to canvas.
As someone who has spent countless hours looking for a good wireless point of sale system this is going to be huge.

Small retailers will snap this up and avoid the evil merchant companies. All of the inventory management and reporting lives in the cloud. Right now, besides opentable, all of the POS stuff is either really expensive or garbage.

The only comparable thing right now is a Symbol MC70 with Windows Mobile and an external swiper. Apple retail uses them and they are $3k+ a pop. You can get some knock of Pidion 1300s for $1200. All the software is "enterprise" garbage.

This device will be given away at cost. Pair it with an ipod touch and small business climb on board in mass. A whole new slew of small business, babysitters, and freelancers will accept credit cards.

They cleanup in merchant fees at the very least, and quite possibly create the holy grail of mobile-to-mobile payments -- all nicely integrated into twitter.
my interest isn't that high

That's too bad. I look things up when I am curious about things, which is often.
New web applications - Google Search
My mother was a programmer, she cut her teeth on a PDP-8 in high school. She met my father when they both worked at a database vendor in the early 80s, and they left together to found a PC software startup.

Her stepmother was a programmer too, who was an early employee of a mainframe time-sharing company that turned into a PC software company. When they were bought out by Intuit a few years ago, she was the president of the company!
I actually just spent a fair amount of time researching iPhone credit card processing for a client.

Innerfence's product is definitely the best of the bunch. However, all of the card processing apps on the app store , including Innerfence's, just talk to the Authorize.net payment system. Another one also supports paypal in addition to authorize.net.

As someone who has built both iPhone apps and built apps which use authorize.net for payment processing, I'll say that this isn't trivial, but it certainly isn't a huge challenge if you know what you are doing.

Thus, I can't help but think there must be something else to Dorsey's idea.
Squeak has a native VNC server, so you can use the development environment, without running a full GUI desktop on the operating system. There's also a Seaside admin app that you can use to start and stop the VNC server, so you don't leave it open all the time. On a remote server it's a touch slow, but otherwise it works great.
1. You're treating the future as an "us" vs. "them" - a common bias. We'll have human cognitive enhancers before we solve hard AI.

2. The richer we get, the easier it will be to make a living in a creative class.

3.We already have a huge chunk of society that are negative net worths.

I completely agree that there could be lots of losers. I also agree with another comment that the issue is the rate of change. Too fast, and you get disruption. But you don't get the bullshit in manna. That story is bad scifi imho
PG's thoughts _were_ that this is a bad idea because 90% of the problems being solved in this area of software aren't technical but rather bureaucratic.

At least, that's what he said to me and my co-applicant to explain our rejection in the first YC round back in the day. Perhaps he was just being nice, though.
Nginx, with apache as backend with mod_wsgi.
still learning how to tweak nginx
Journalism is Dead. But the solutions are not scarce. This because the solution is to simply "start telling the truth about the things you report on". Journalists refuse to do this so their current demise is a shot aimed squarely at their own foots.
This could be killer if it lets you do person-to-person money transfers like PayPal. If my buddy can pay me back for the movie tickets I bought him earlier with his iPhone and have it go straight to my bank account, I would definitely use it. Obviously there are security and other barriers to overcome but it's not an impossible problem. You don't really need the hardware for this type of thing though.
Don't forget, Twitter is used outside the US as well. Where it was already late evening / early morning.
What we do is run the RFBServer in squeak so we can connect directly to the running images on GUIless servers. This works pretty well.
Eliminate Credit Card Debt 
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think this is just a bit of Indian chest thumping, not sure what is the relevance to HN...?
So Factor is not at all what I thought it was. I thought it was roughly a modern Forth for the JVM...and I thought the point of it was at least partially the JVM. Not dependence, but the ability to use Java libraries. The realization that this is not at all the case makes Factor seem more interesting but less useful, to me.
Just fyi, there are other startups in Australia that also work on this spelling problem http://spellr.us/
Uh,

Sure, it sounds clever but taking the second derivative of noisy data is poor statistics as far I'm concerned.
My opinion is you are just a pessimist. They just have a slow ass system and his app is slowing it down even more. If their app was fast at the start of the semester, they wouldn't care. If he can figure out how not to add load to the system (not sure this is possible), he's good. Work with them, and stay positive. They aren't trying to be antagonistic, just trying to keep their out of date software running quickly enough to handle the load.
How Do You Identify Expertise?
"They just have a slow ass system and his app is slowing it down even more"

That's the thing: I don't believe that my app is slowing their system down.

(1) For the first three weeks, my app caused no problem
(2) This week when everyone was rushing to check grades, the entire system was slow...only this time, they have someone(my site) to blame. Of course, like I said, even after they blocked me they admitted they were having issues--like they have every year.
Reciprocity is a strong driver in an abundance economy but reputation is a better one. Take a look at http://stackoverflow.com/ for an example and check out the http://ploneglenn.blogspot.com/2009/04/whuffie-factor.html for more insight.
there are people out there that cant write in C. Does that mean good programs wouldnt have been written in it?
This week in startups: Episode 1
you havent even tried it yet. How is it possible το compare two different products? You can put two different people implement the same concepts in algorithms and you will get two different results and you compare a whole product because others failed?
i dont see luck being the determining factor for twitter success but yes you also need a bit of fucking luck in start ups although you would call it more like risk taking and Timing. Other than that just get over it.
Wanted: A New Home for My Country
Factor has not been related to JVM in any way for many years now. The core of the VM has been in C since 2004 and now it has been ported to C++.
Functionless event handlers in jQuery
I can appreciate Empiricism as much as the next guy, but Google Search, Cuil, and Alpha seem comparable.

edit: the dreaded homonym! I mean they can be meaningfully compared to each other, not that they are the equivalent.
> [Prop 13] has nothing to do with the volatility of income tax revenues, but it has everything to do with volatility in the budgeting process. By gutting the ability of local governments to fund themselves it pushed all of the taxation up to the state level

Prop 13 doesn't make state-level taxation volatile.
Yes, which is why I said it is not at all what I thought it was. I was wrong before, and now I know. How wrong my existing knowledge of Factor was surprised me enough that I commented on it.
if you cant say something nice...
Varanasi police disallow city’s first nightclub
About 18 months ago, I ported a project I was working on from C to C++. I, too, wanted a few C++ features to simplify life, mainly to use the STL, but also for inheritance in a handful of places. I got what I wanted, but I have since concluded that switch to C++ was, on the whole, a mistake.

First, don't discount the longer compilation times. After learning Lisp, I became rather addicted to the rapid turn-around time of compiling code at the level of individual functions. I can tolerate C because, with a relatively clean build setup, it compiles quickly. g++ on my project is between 10 and 20 times slower than gcc. This means that, as I make minor changes, I'm more likely to have to wait a while for a build to finish. This means I'm more likely to slack off in between builds. This kills (my) productivity horribly.

Second, auxiliary tool support on Unix leaves a lot to be desired. I sprinkle my code with templates in places where they promote readability, and I use STL containers. gdb, at least the version I'm using, does not support displaying data in STL containers. This means that when I have to track down a problem with data in a map, gdb can't help me. I have run into nasty problems for which I had to write custom print-this-templated-structure-to-log code. In addition, g++ error messages which involve templates absolutely suck. Luckily, I can quickly figure out what I need to change just by looking at the affected line.

After thinking through these issues, I concluded that C++ wasted more of my time than it saved. YMMV, of course.
underestimating Google? I place Google pretty high up on the scale of having smart people. Really high. Like #2. Actually, the only people that can beat extremely bright engineers at this game are mathematicians. That's what Wolfram does (remember, Mathematica?).

The complexity that mathematicians can compute is at least an order higher than engineers. Think of Linus vs. grandma struggling with 3 lines of HTML. The same gap is between the brightest of engineers and a good mathematician.

So that's why I place Wolfram #1 and Google #2, for that particular space (computation). But if you are a bright engineer and never got exposed to good mathematicians, you may just not even be aware that there is all this realm of knowledge above your head.
There's a "The Mental Health Services Tax Rate is 1% for taxable income in excess of $1,000,000." and there are all sorts of phaseouts that effectively create brackets above the supposed top bracket.

http://www.ftb.ca.gov/forms/catxrate_exmpt07.shtml
Ruby livecoding demo
This is some really high quality information. I'm kind of surprised they're willing to give it away. I'm sure people would pay for access to this kind of data.
Inquiry: Whats the most money you've won in a single grant?
Just curious to know. Whats the most money, whats the least? What type of grant was it?
20g's
That's what I was going to suggest as well.

From your posts, it seems that the University's IT people like your app, and there's really no technical problem anymore. So randomize your IP number, and if anyone wants an explanation you can tell them that you have optimized your system so that instead of directly requesting all their data, your application now behaves exactly like a real student accessing their site in a conventional way.
Like many/most CA homeowners, my CA property tax is going up this year even though the value is going down.

How? I've owned for a while, so the post-crash zillow-value is more than value-for-tax-purposes because Prop 13 limits the year-to-year increase in the latter.

I can't find the report now, but the Merc reported that Santa Clara county's property tax revenues would drop 2%. Counties with a lot of recent construction were seeing 10% drops.
Judging by the results it looks like they are using Hunspell or Aspell to do the actual checking. I applaud their well executed effort. AtD is more of a complete writing improvement solution that someone like spellr.us could use to provide their service.
Jewelry Lovers Get Wrapped Up In Bangle Bracelets
A bracelet is defined as an ornament designed to be worn on the wrist or arm. Specifically, bangle bracelets are rigid bands that can either be hinged or solid and are some of the most popular designs in modern jewelry.
<img src="http://i41.tinypic.com/2qki2kn.jpg">
I do understand that they are doing what made (past tense) money.
Write to the lowest common denominator. Don't make waves, please the national advertisers.
I think people do want to know what's going on. That why the newspaper is tanking. Circulation is in the toilet along with national ad sales.
People actively seek content and commentary and they find it on the internet.
Look at all the websites about cats(LOL) and fashion doing just fine.
I didn't know what was going on when I read it. I thought it was perl.

Maybe just use an inoffensive word like "garbage" instead ... but with emphasis.
Subcommittee on Communications, Tech, and the Internet hearing:The Future of Journalism
In my humble opinion, watching an interview by Charlie Rose is a better use of time.
At any point in time, there were always skilled technical people pushing the edge of their trade. I had the privilege of visiting a Viking museum in Oslo, where I had an epiphany.

Did you know that 1000 years ago, viking smiths were smelting iron from bog peat, and making swords from it?

http://www.hurstwic.org/history/articles/manufacturing/text/...

And then you have their outrageously sophisticated and evolved ships. I'd like to think that if I lived back there, I would have gotten involved with something like that.
(The lack of) abstractions in high performance computing
Getting insight into one’s own email
Is Jennifer Love Hewitt Pregnant?
Hostican uptime by HosticanReview.org for April 2009
StorageMart
Storage Mart Canada Self Storage Blog, for example now tells self storage customers in detail about the things to look for while getting storage services, safe practices, and the storage facilities most suited to meet their requirements
How changing the rules of the game, allows David to beat Goliath
I thought this was great fun when I stumbled on it, so if any discussions pick up, hopefully you will read the linked article first and enjoy the surprise :]
freelancers will accept credit cards.

Most freelancers I work with (granted: high tech folks, generally) already do. Paypal, how I love you, let me count the ways...

Speaking of which: if you want to be extra special nice to your favorite freelancer, pay them through Paypal's batch interface. It reduces the cost to receive the money from essentially 2.9% of the transaction to a flat fee of $1. When you're settling up $2000 invoices, that means a significant amount of money in their pocket rather than Paypal's. All it takes is for you to write a one-line text file and click a button on Paypal.

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_batch-payment-ove...
why wouldn't your buddy just pay you in cash next time he saw you?
Locations topics
Windows. Although I doubt using a Mac would change her mind, even if I could convince her to switch.

It's kind of ironic, but she is completely like the clueless mothers everybody else complains about when it comes to technology. She needs help installing anything and I had to even set up her iPod for her.

However, she is a phenomenal programmer because of her logical thought processes. She never planned on becoming a programmer, she wanted to be a mathematician and that is what her degree is in. When she graduated, there was a position for an "applied mathematician" and she was hired. Applied mathematics turned out to be programming and so that's what she became.
For personal projects I use Apache, not because of its performance characteristics, but because it's the most common and thus when I want to do something crazy I am most likely to find that someone else who uses it has already written up an explanation of how to do it. For development I also use the Django default/debug webserver a lot.

For work I use GWS but I suspect that is not helpful to you ;-)
This isn't quite the same juxtaposition as math, though. In math you just put single letters next to each other and it's multiplication. But in any programming language enforcing single-letter names would be crazy....
This git backup approach is crap. Pure crap.

Sorry to lower the tone on HN, and I'll get to the _reasons_ soon, but my brain overloaded at how over-engineered this problem is.

------------------

Deterministic SQL Output ::

For the delta set in git not to jump around, the ordering of the statements MUST BE THE SAME every time. git is designed for source code

Trivial Amounts of Space Saving ::

just creating a well known bz2 of the file is going to give you excellent compression, and then you can save it to S3 / DropBox, your home computer

ALTER TABLE ::

ALTER TABLE or any UPDATE * is going to yield a line by line delta... checking in the whole DB/Table again.
Given that this is app specific, WHY not just compress the whole dump.

Backup Complexity ::

You've written a cron script, validated that the whole db is being dumped, hdd space is cheap, so why involve another step that can go wrong?

Duplicating a tar.bz2 file is a lot easier to validate than a git commit. Much much much faster too.
I thought it would be pretty bad based on the first few minutes, but Brian Alvey saves it. He talks about a lot of really interesting stuff (CMS technology, project management..)
The Trends in Mobile Phone Market in 2009
This guy (Bret Victor) also wrote an excellent essay a few years back, Magic Ink http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/

Every now and then, probably about twice a year, I come across something so good I print it out and keep it. This is one of those essays.
I thought it was perl.

Then my cry of strangled frustration succeeded better than I could possibly have hoped for.

(I actually spent an hour trying to come up with executable perl code from them. Turns out that, jokes aside, its hard with just the characters above the numbers.)
Games - Play Games at AddictingGames
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nginx passenger
Your app has the same features as HanDbase. It is a better price, but there is no website to check out nor documentation. It would be nice to see both before I spend five dollars.
Also posted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=592043
Business Partners
Can't he do that from his bank website/app?
I suggest you take a look at Factor's standard library. You will be pleasantly surprised at how much it offers. It's not called "a practical stack-based language" without a reason.

(Note that I've only played around with Factor for a few hours.)
Your question can be answered by another question: why do we use credit cards? Why not use cash for everything?
RWW - Hands on with Wolfram Alpha
You say "the problem cannot be solved in classical electrodynamics".

Firstly, I'm not sure I agree.

I would be happy to be proven wrong, but that's what I remember from studying physics many years ago. You can calculate the motion of a charged pointlike particle in given fields, and you can calculate the fields produced by charged pointlike particles following any motions, but you can't calculate the effects of the interaction of a particle with its own field.

This said, I vaguely remember some tricks that involved arbitrary dropping of some infinite terms, a bit like renormalization in QED only not precisely defined in any way. Perhaps with those tricks you can arrive to some kind of solution.

Secondly, can it be solved at all? Can you give me an algorithm that will solve this problem?

The interaction of a particle with its own field is tractable in quantum electrodynamics or so I was told. However, as you are no doubt aware, the state of a quantum-mechanical system is not really defined in terms of positions and velocities of a set of particles, so your problem taken literally doesn't make sense in this framework. And even if you re-stated it in an appropriate language, quantum field theory won't give you the precise evolution in time of any system, typically the best you can hope for is a transition amplitude between non-interacting particles in time minus infinity and non-interacting particles in time plus infinity.
Slicehost API Notes for the Non-Rails Posse
I disagree with that.

Before Twitter came along, I would regularly change my IM status to a nice quote, a link to a nice news story or a link to a cool website. Many people do this. Twitter makes it easy to broadcast something like this to hundreds of people, makes it all searchable and encourages conversation. It serves as an outlet for random thoughts and observations that are too insignificant to fit into a blog post. A "stream of consciousness", if you will. Collectively, Twitter is the entire Internet's stream of consciousness.

I find Twitter is a great way for staying in touch, too. Why? Because it simple. Very, very simple.
I think the idea is what happens when robots can do the job of even the most exploited of humans on a lower cost scale.
This was brilliant. Now all we need is an entrepreneurial guy to come along and actually make/market it. I'd be the first customer!
What To Do When a Megacorp Wants To Buy You?
Juxtaposition Mathematica works pretty much the same way as in Fortress. When you multiply a number with a variable you don't even need the whitespace (the pretty printer will however make a "half-space" to ease reading).