skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A "liberal" education was meant to teach you the tools you needed to grant yourself a free existence... including rhetoric (to both identify and fight against, and use for yourself), critical thinking, analysis, history (things to do and not to do), persuasion, philosophy (self-understanding), and so on.

EDIT: These are incredibly valuable, far more than any kind of job-training education. BUT, that's assuming that's what you actually get. Based on my knowledge of universities... that's not what you get.
We plan on providing some basic utility functions that will help our customers, but one of the great things is that you can use third-party code in your own code. I actually mean two things when I say this. First, you can use available Java libraries for parsing HTML. Second, we'll be creating an app store model, where by developers can sell/license their code to other customers.
San Diego Wedding DJ 
San Diego Wedding DJ. Pam's Productions DJs has over 15 years experience providing San Diego Weddings with professional Disc Jockey services. Call today at (619) 579-8192"
This is a number of total businesses started, not just technical/engineering ones.
They probably include blogging in Internet publishing.
Ida the missing link to human evolution
In the UK, I get an ad every 10-15 songs. I want weekly ads!
I would gladly accept a major library breakage for proper multi-processor support in Python. A better implementation is a significant enhancement.
productised over at http://www.ideeinc.com/products/pixid/ -- great idea, I think.

Countdown until they're bought out by Google or similar? ...
A fair number of quants use traditional valuation measures. In fact, one of the reasons that by-the-numbers value investing is so hard now is that so many funds are just buying the bottom 10% of companies by price/book, and shorting the top 10%; that compresses the price differences, meaning that value investors have to get more subjective.

To the extent that anybody was a quant back then, Graham probably counted: he did use lots of statistical rules, and he didn't use very much else.
I dunno how much consumers like AT&T nowadays. If I drive across town (Seattle) talking on the iPhone, I get 2-5 dropped calls. Seriously.

The apps are a "nice to have" in my book. If they nail phone, email, and web browsing (in that order), I'd jump.

Anyone have any experience with Sprint in terms of coverage/dropped calls?
Ditto. Good catch!
If you have a laser printer it is probably cheaper to print, or use your schools printer for hw, I remember doing that for isometric homework assignments because the paper was too expensive.
One of the interesting things about this to me is how this argues for Stackless Python (and likely Erlang and others, though I'm not yet well enough versed in Erlang to say) as a way to think about problems, not just -- or even primarily -- a solution for getting performance out of increasingly parallel machines.(1) Over time, it's become increasingly apparent to me how much I would love green threads (implemented with channels, etc.) in order to write software the communicates with other processes via blocking network calls. Being able to write one function that sends requests and receives the results as a normal function call, rather than writing handlers for each message and separating the logic out among them, would be a very powerful tool to have, though I'm sure there are many other places where logically concurrent designs would be simpler than the more serial designs I often use today.

(1) I know Stackless doesn't actually help with hardware parallelism, outside of being able to possibly pickle and transfer threadlets between processes, but a lot of people come to Stackless looking for a solution to this problem.
Allison Stokke?
This is always an interesting question for me. What exactly is a "startup" I recently created a technical services company (software design and development). I don't consider it a "startup" per se, mostly because I'm not creating a product so much as a service.

Anyway this report is about new business creation which is an interesting data point.
600 Banks Fail Stress Test
Check out @startupgossip on Twitter. I'm trying to post most of the events there. I also post stuff on my blog at sanjayparekh.com (altho I've been slack lately) when it comes to events I'm running. Start coming to events and you'll meet a ton of us who are in and around Atlanta doing startups.
I'm so glad I learned this lesson quickly.

I went to a liberal arts college to be an English major.

First term freshman year, I also took a math class. It took about 6 days to change my mind. Who knows what my life would have been like if I hadn't.
Hmm, spend most of your time in your cave. What Brian said is right. There are so many events that it's easy to get caught up in the scene and spend more time talking about startups than actually working on one.
Ask HN: Please give feedback on simple weather site: weatherfinder.info
http://weatherfinder.info/

This is a simple weather site with the ability to see regional comments. I'm posting it to HN for the heck of it as ya'll might appreciate it.

Backstory: I had the idea last fall after seeing umbrellatoday.com and thinking it needed IP lookup. I had a crude prototype up when the post about goingtorain.com was posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=378987 After that, I put it the idea the shelf because the idea "had been done", but I always wanted to finish it.

I implemented some features people had asked for in that thread and put this site together. It uses Rails, caches queries to the weather service, saves cookies with your preferences, and uses the Tango icon set.

Jeremy
A real link for your convenience: http://weatherfinder.info/
Oracle on Sun Java, MySQL, OpenOffice, and Linux
Great scoop, Phil.
Artificial Intelligence Cracks 4,000-Year-Old Mystery | Wired Science | Wired.com
Smith charts? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_chart)
10m ISSF air rifle/pistol targets?
Why doesn't HN enable links in stories?
It's a bet on an underwhelming Apple product launch.

They must absolutely do it before Steve Jobs comes back from his vacation.

If, however, in those two days, the Pre is perceived as a real threat to the iPhone, Jobs may experience a miraculously quick recovery.
Great article worth the long read.
True. Wouldn't you have to say that Steve Jobs has all those traits? Does anyone think he's dull?
from the HN FAQ:

How do I make a link in a question?

You can't. (This is to prevent people from using this method as a way of submitting a link, but with their comments in a privileged position at the top of the page. If you want to submit a link with comments, just submit it, then add a regular comment.)
There is no shortage of consumers wishing to be part of the elite.
Sure. I'm curently working ot cross platform desktop application, but that's all I can say.
You can see an informal list of the tech startups here:

http://www.atllogos.com/

They are showing 158 right now.
Even sadder is that IQ doesn't correlate to happiness or success nearly as well as the ability to defer gratification.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_gratification

See also the marshmallow test on that page. Too bad we don't (systematically) teach our kids stuff like this along with the regular curriculum.
Do you really think that the study of philosophy in "most universities fall[s] short due to some bad fundamental approach like postmodernism"? I am dubious about this, especially if we drop the 'like'. A couple of (hopefully) enlightening links:

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/10/the_myth_of_th...

http://el-prod.baylor.edu/certain_doubts/?p=453
Actually, for many commercially licensed fonts, every viewer must buy and install the fonts, if they are cheap for $30 for each of regular, italic and bold (and each other variant, if so desired) for every computer he wants to view the document on. Mark Pilgrim had a point with his "fuck the foundries" rant a few weeks ago, even if the tone was controversial.
anyone explored their sdk and/or the Palm WebOS/mojo documentation yet? i'm curious to see how low they can set the app-creation bar, as development without the app store curatorial process could be an interesting differentiator.
I'm not implying any malicious intent here; the author obviously didn't look at the 1.9 codebase and go "how can I pretend this is mine?" All I'm saying is that there has been a lot of independent discovery of Ruby 1.9-equivalent performance enhancements lately, is all, and this seems like a bit of a useless thing to do.

It seems that the techniques these bloggers are discovering have already been figured out, or at least equalled (in this case bettered, apparently) by the 1.9 team. I'd say fewer people should be working on enhancing 1.8 if they could just back-port the enhancements that already exist from 1.9. Instead, if they actually want to optimize something, start with the codebase that doesn't have huge, obvious, already-solved(!) performance flaws to begin with, and then backport the new optimizations you find.
I should have said, 'what is more important is what it tries to deliver', which is different.

But yeah, its UI feel and some layouts take inspiration from 37s more closely.

For me, this app though more than technology implementation choices is an example of business ingenuity.

Good concept, good market aim, running early, clear message and value.

It can stay alive through its analysis skills. Analysis of how to deliver clearly and enjoyably valauable information through good design and clever choices of ideas (not merely technologies).
"So how are errors distributed among these programs? It would be easy to assume that the errors are evenly distributed per 1000 lines of code, regardless of the size of the program."

WTF
This mixes up "startups" (leveraging, VC investment candidates) with "new small businesses". Hey, always good to see people doing the entrepreneurship thang, but terms matter. It's like the notion of a scientific "theory". Don't willfully misuse the term.
pj, yes and no...

If somebody thinks they're just going to go to SVN, take a winning idea, and copy it, and make big bucks, well, yes, they're not going to succeed. Just cuz the person ahead of you in line at the lotto bought a ticket and won doesn't mean you will -- in fact, it decreases your chances.

But when a whole town calculates the odds, forms a strategy, and chips in to buy a critical % of all tickets available -- and then hits the jackpot -- you can't just say "well they just bought a lottery ticket." (This has happened before.)

It's not just the act, it's the attitude, the legwork, and the dedication.

I've made lots of "easy money" (and publicity/fame/cred) off things that didn't take me much time at all. But the key is that I am the all-grown-up version of a kid who read business books for fun & spent all night mucking around with Photoshop.
I actually like it a lot. Here's what I really like about it:

Auto IP lookup. It pulls up exactly the city I would get using weather.com.

Clean & Simple. You give me the information I want and get out of my way.

Design. It's very well designed for what it is.

-----

Here's what I don't like about it:

The comments. They aren't really useful or relevant. I suppose if you ever gain "critical mass" this might start to be useful, but I have my doubts. There's no guidance as to what I should be saying and why.

4 day Forecast. I think this deserves a little more priority on the page. I also feel like a horizontal format is more appropriate, but go with your gut. What you've done now looks pretty damn good for a small project.

Indentation. The text could use a little more structure than just indenting everywhere. This could just be nitpicky.

URL. .info's make me cry. just find a small, 3-5 letter work that's easy to remember, tack it on to weather, and get the .com. I prefer to http://bustaname.com because my super-smart friend made it.
> The higher educational system is the only authority in America which is socially permitted to discriminate based on IQ

The famous lawsuit which resulted in this situation:

http://supreme.justia.com/us/401/424/case.html

That is when employers were officially prohibited from using IQ tests. Our current situation is a direct result of this.
Great idea.

Considering the great variety of patterns they offer, I wonder if they should add aperiodic tilings!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperiodic_tiling
Nice page. A couple of comments:

I would prefer not to have #000 on #fff.

Where does your data come from? That's not immediately clear or easy to find. Maybe this could go in a FAQ.

What does the "use Manhattan" part mean in "Leave Comment
use Manhattan" (for example)? Why do some comments say "said this about New York"? Are those related? Looks like yes, but now the site thinks I'm from Villers-le-bouillet when I comment. Go figure.

Comments are easy to use. Nice.

I'm not sure I'm going to remember the url. The .info especially throws me off. Maybe if you dropped some vowels or something...
No. because all Java desktop apps run like crap.
All you have to do is print it out!
Why do these cool new features always seem to take a while to trickle into the Google domain versions?
...a traditional liberal arts education is, by definition, not intended to prepare students for a specific vocation. Rather, the critical thinking, civic and historical knowledge and ethical reasoning...

It strikes me as obvious that critical thinking ability is best trained with math.

Civic and historical knowledge can be learned much like any specific skill can.

So it wood seem the humanities are a very round about way of teaching critical thinking. But I think the last paragraph strikes at a core truth rarely spoken out loud:

That may be unfortunate but inevitable, Mr. Kronman said. The essence of a humanities education — reading the great literary and philosophical works and coming “to grips with the question of what living is for” — may become “a great luxury that many cannot afford.”

Within the above paragraph is the hard truth that a humanities education is most often a way to show off class and breeding. Class and breeding are highly correlated with wealth.
I don't even feel like visiting that page ever again. It's SO full of ads to the point of chocking. I would rather buy a bunch of graph sheets from my local store.
By the way, I'm really interested in the answer to the question presented in the article -- why am I getting so many hits from Yahoo for searches of Allison Stokke?

I thought about posting it as an "Ask HN" article, but I figured it was better in a longer format. Plus I get to experiment with seeing if future searchers are actaully willing to pay ten bucks for more pictures!
Very Neat. I like the concept of making money through ebay sales leads rather than cramming your site with full of ads.
it's only a matter of time until i can write cron jobs on my rice cooker. then i will truly know happiness.
My computer science degree required I get a passing grade in a public speaking class.
I was skeptical when I clicked the link.

Neat, though. I like it well enough.

Comments:

* It incorrectly thought I was 1200 miles away from where I am. Probably due to another ISP recently acquiring my local ISP and GeoIP databases getting confused now. It doesn't seem like anything I do can trump the GeoIP when I visit the site-- it always sends me back to the wrong state.

* I like the look and the local comments, I suppose. Those might be more interesting to those people in big cities.

* I don't like the "updated 1 minute ago" in this case. I plan to leave the window up for a few days on one of my other machines and that won't tell me jack when I want to refresh it unless it's counting down or if it has the actual date.

* Would be nice if it auto-refreshed every 10-15 minutes or something.

Looks nice enough.
Layout Solutions To Improve Your Designs
My favorite just-so story about the roots of depression is that it emerged during the last glacial period as a response to extreme cold weather. It's a behavioral adaptation that would have made it easier for humans to remain indoors for long periods of time without going crazy/killing each other.
Who Said Taking the Train was Boring? Swinging on San Francisco's BART
TorqueBox: JRuby on JBoss
An article by this title would be more interesting were it hosted on playboy.com instead of treehugger.com. But that's cute.
I've run into some weird bugs trying to perform calculations in Wolfram|Alpha. For example, I cannot come up with any query for the general question "human height vs Empire State Building" that works, even though the separate queries "height Empire State Building" and "height average male" return answers with units of length.
FWIW, I've been on Sprint (by way of Helio) for 1.5 years in Northern NJ, and their voice service has been rock solid for me.

My top priorities are pretty much the same as yours (phone, email, web). Basically if the Pre has a great web browser I will most likely buy it.
Circular Logos
I like this comment:

Couldn’t $9,999.99 be considered high six figures in the most literal sense?
A new language that does not even make a minimal attempt at dealing with concurrency? Why bother?
I used the "like" because most folks only know postmodernism. I actually did my first degree in philosophy and while postmodernism was nowhere to be found, there's enough continental philosophy around to waste everyone's time. My school was very analytic, but from talking to other philosophy students online, analytic philosophy isn't all that popular or well-known among undergrads. I think analytic philosophy is great, though of somewhat more limited interest since it's less amenable to bullshit, grand abstractions, and other bad philosophy. It's also a bit arcane and technical at times.

DeRose is a good analytic philosopher and I always enjoy reading him, so thanks for the link.

Not that all continental philosophy is crap (existentialism seems interesting and worthwhile) but a lot of it is, and in many circles, a low opinion of Hegel gets you a lot of credit.
I don't expect to ever see critical mass on this so this is a problem. I think the comments are far more relevant if they are within a smaller range, maybe 10 miles would make them more useful.

Regarding the forecast: for a weather site this site doesn't really show it very well; feedback well taken :)
> Too bad we don't (systematically) teach our kids stuff like this along with the regular curriculum

I know of no evidence that delaying gratification can be taught with any degree of effectiveness. The original study used babies, who were later tracked through (well-predicted) success or failure in life. Control of one's impulses appears to be a very basic "brain organ" with rather limited capacity for training.
Sorry about black on white.. I'm not much of a designer, so this is what I came up with.

The 'use Manhattan' link will set your location. So if you click 'use Manhattan', when you comment, it will give that as your location in the comment attribution.

The data is currently coming from the google weather API. I wrote a parser for the wunderground API as well, but the latency is so high that I went back to google. I may swith to NOAA for US IP's.

Agreed, a FAQ is sorely missing from this little site.
Corey Doctorow has a thoughtful article on how ISP's are trying to limit internet access for their own benefit. (The title is a little over the top.) Some of these things happen in the US, but seem to be stomped on by the FCC and public opinion. The rest of the world, including the UK and Europe, governments are abandoning the citizens and getting in bed with the ISP's. Corey makes the point that telcos owe us net-neutral access because they are granted a monopoly to lay the wires.

I read a couple of UK nonpolitical blogs, and I find astounding the willingness to compromise what we in the US consider basic rights, like freedom of speech or unfettered telecommunications. I dont like a world with the worst of US IP policy and European speech, privacy and communications policy.
There is a lot of evidence that this is not the case.

People that only know how to program Video Card Drivers can make a fair amount of money. So, people who know how to program and also know about the big, wide real world don't make that much more on average.

It can probably marginaly increase their income, but once you make 90k there is not much room for meaningful improvement on average.
I'm required to use IE6 as this is a work computer and the company's standard is IE6 which can't/won't be changed. This web site won't allow me to view the content as I'm using the IE6 browser.
ok i'm in sfax and it showed up Tunis weather.

any way, it's simple and good, but i don't think i'll use a site to get the weather, i have it in my windows side bar, so why trouble with the website; I don't find comments really important.

What i want to tell you, you have thought about the need and that's good, but how to provide the solution for the need and the way to provide it, is the most important
There is if you rename it and market it correctly.
Nine games computers are ruining for humanity
"One of the reasons Windows won was by being open to developers. It was pretty common back in the days for OS vendors to put a price on the SDK"

Until recently, Windows development more or less required commercial development tools costing hundreds of dollars; how is that any different?

Even now, the free Microsoft tools are much more limited than their for-pay counterparts and if you use tools outside of the ones Microsoft provides, you risk lack of support, incompatibility and less-than-seamless integration with operating system features.
It's close enough for both to be similiarly monopolous.
i wonder what the ratio looks like for just midtown :)
Many do, but they don't have to. Look at Eclipse as an example of what can be done.

Also, there's no indication that the store will be limited to Java apps. Sun is basically selling slots inside its Trojan horse.
Awesome. Fresh off of the incredible non-success of our client-side Java Applet, Java Web Start, and JavaFX platforms, we're going to take advantage of our required JRE download to push out software that users probably don't want it. (I mean, if the user really wanted that stuff, they could just go to the vendor's web side, am I right?). If you thought the default Yahoo toolbar was annoying, we're just getting started!
I'm using the free maxmind database that is updated monthly, so it isn't a huge surprise that it got out of date.

You are right; you should be able to set your location.

The 'updated 1 minute ago' thing is also a problem because you can't do any caching of data that renders a date like that. I have thought about changing this for that reason, but yours is a good point.
From the article: The essence of a humanities education — reading the great literary and philosophical works and coming “to grips with the question of what living is for” — may become “a great luxury that many cannot afford.”

Good Will Hunting rebuts this quite well:

You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.

A humanities education is not a luxury that no one can afford. A humanities degree is.
See http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/01/clojure_production for an example of Clojure being deployed in a hospital.

(edit updated with description of link).
It comes roughly close with something like "empire state building height + average human height" but yeah, that's quite odd.

Edit: And hitting "Show details" for a breakdown.
I find that I prefer to look at the weather using my dock widget, and I wrote this site. So I hear you. :)
Adding "average" helps it parse the question.

height Empire State Building divided by average height human

= 235

height Empire State Building divided by height human

Fails
The gamer in me wanted to see a hex grid option - but the poor site design made me miss it the first time.

The left hand nav and the big Ad at the bottom made it not obvious that there was more below.