skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would advise any aspiring software developer to get their hands dirty with design as early as possible in their career. Hardcore programmers might deny it but interface design is as important to most software as the database structure, code architecture and algorithms. You can hardly call yourself a software developer if you are unable to develop a key part of software.

I am a programmer first and foremost (well, strictly speaking, a journalist first and foremost, but I won't go into that) and used to be terrible at design. But I worked at it, completing tutorials at sites like psdtuts.com and trying to keep up with the latest design trends at showcase sites such as webcreme.com. It was a couple of years before I could create anything I was happy with, but now I design all my software, and I have to say that it is so much more fun turning your own interface ideas into code, than doing it for someone else's ideas.
Indigenous Culture Demonstrates that Log Scales are Intuitive
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/ -- has lots of broadly useful material and ought to be accessible to anyone who's completed SICP. One of the very best technical books I've read.
Early look a Wolfram Alpha
Right, but with good heuristics it wouldn't take billions of years to generate a good piece of music. Anyway, there's a difference between something being impossible and something requiring a large amount of time.
Right, which are two different things
Yes, but a currency system based on intrinsic value would solve that problem, and have other beneficial effects as well, such as curbing runaway inflation (well, except that that's really the same problem, just official instead of unofficial counterfeiting).
Absolute rubbish. I can give you just as many anecdotes to the contrary, viz.: Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, all of whom had reasonably perfect offices two decades ago.
Oh, so you're talking about actually having teachers/mentors? That would be great, but (as a CS TA) it's very time consuming and...well, I wish you the best of luck in finding enough people with time to teach.
The LoC Misintegration
I wouldn't call it live yet, lots of the graphs aren't showing up and many of the features don't work.
Wolfram Alpha Live
As far as I can tell, it's great for solving problems people don't actually have and probably creating problems they didn't imagine.
I didn't say anything about forced! It's up to them to do what they want. I just find it strange that they haven't, and I think it's ridiculous that it's news that they "might be considering" doing what everyone else is doing.
Jeez, I hate this attitude... that the only way a company can succeed is if you suffer. You spend all friggin' day at the office. It doesn't have to be a coalmine for the company to succeed. On the contrary. When a startup gets to the point that it needs to recruit the top talent, it better have nice working conditions. Look at Amazon today... crappy offices, pride in using doors as desks, and huge turnover among the development staff. Where are the Amazon engineers going? Google and Microsoft.
Have you tried using materialized views (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialized_view)?
Well, it looks like they noticed they were letting people in and shut it down, as now it redirects to index.html
I don't think it's worth one's time to prepare strategies for how to deal with invalid arguments that would only be raised by people who aren't going to listen in any case (they either not seriously trying, or very stupid, or very ignorant of what constitutes a good or bad argument).
Heroku: Best money ever spent
Sheesh. I am so SICK AND TIRED of these articles that are like, "here's my anecdote, therefore, this is proof of a general pattern that's ALWAYS true." It's like people don't even have the vaguest grasp of science. Why bother when you can tell an irrelevant story about some time you spent a lot of time arguing about carpet, and then your company went down the tubes?
I would argue that he is a full-time slave. Part of his time goes to pay for his previous marriage, the other part for taxes, and the final part to the banking system.
i think the first comment is focussed on preventing battery power draining, and the second focussed on preventing background apps from slowing down foreground apps.

both separate and valid concerns. and the suggested solutions are compatible.
Apple thinks they know what people want. Their customers seem to agree. Shrug. This is nothing new.

They think most people would rather have no background processes than badly done background processes. They will allow it when they make it "just work". Maybe they are right, maybe wrong, but it's not an in-principle bad approach.
When are we going to stop defining "success" by whether something makes lots of money?
Thanks for the summary. They also listed Microsoft Vista (making 10).

And they left off: AOL Time Warner.
* CSC105 Using Modern Operating Systems
* CSC160 .Net I: Introduction to Windows Forms Development
* CSC260 .Net II: Introduction to ASP.Net Web Development
* CSC263 Advanced .Net Programming with C#

These all come from the "Computer Science Core". This is not really a CS program...
Not really I got the http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/ once and when I entered a query it redirected me to the normal launching may 2009 site.

Maybe they are transitioning servers or something but its not up yet.
It's a decent (though light) link-- it doesn't deserve #2 status, but I still upvoted it. It made me think a bit about what our own company focuses on for measuring ROI.

In the book Good to Great, there's discussion on finding a good "denominator". They give Walgreens as an example of maximizing "profit per customer". Any denominator choice tends to have different effects on your business style and this is another way to optimize. In a lot of workforce-intensive industries, I assume it really just mirrors your overall profit as labor costs could be your number one expense.
How to build a Universal Answer Engine: ten vital principles
Yeah, but I've been trying to avoid weighting votes. Partly just because I've been impressed by how long I've been able to avoid it.
Don't worry about that. The problem is not so much that it got submitted-- all kinds of stuff gets submitted-- but that it got so many votes so rapidly. Could just be a random statistical outlier, come to that.
oh no! ... i'm not in the list T_T
It could not answer my simple question: "Does P = NP".

Until then, it's useless :-P
I was able to get the results of a single query, "our solar system" in extensive detail. Trying another query redirected to a "launching May 2009", after which pressing back landed me on a working search field, but mostly with not found results.
They can have comfortable chairs. There is no reason, though, that they have to be new comfortable chairs.
Nothing says "I love you" like a prenup. There is a very good reason why they aren't that common.
Experience at Startup Weekend SF 2009
It seems his post was rhetorically enviable in the meta, as well.
My Alma Mater:

Input: Virginia Tech

Results: Wolfram Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

What is this?! Amateur Hour!
Thanks! I did not know there was the 2nd edition!
I'm completely underwhelmed. Chalk it up to hype I guess.

I couldn't get anything for "Most popular names in 2008," and when I clicked the "Examples" tab and clicked Socioeconomic Data->Countries and used its default of France, it gave me three pieces of info (country code, full name and something else) and apparently tried to load some kind of information underneath, but it never happened.

Maybe it's because it's launch day.

Edit: Here's another thing that bothers me. It doesn't give you the source of its info. So when I click "Names" and have it give me info on a specific name, when it tells me it's the 8th most popular (in 2007, nicely outdated), I'd like to know how it deduces that rather than take it as fact.

Interestingly, there's a "Source information »" link at the bottom that doesn't work.

Think I'll stick with well-crafted Google queries and more primary sources.
Patronizing required paying the producers, which did not happen. They did not found it valuable enough to pay for expensive goods. They just happens to find an unofficial illict source of goods.

That's just tough luck for producer on the free market. The producers did not produce enough justification for the consumers to sponsor them.

It is one thing to ask for people to pay for your product that you sold from your online store, it is quite another to demand payment on the whole supply chain of which you have no part in creating beyond being the source of the materials.(seeding, listing, describing, etc)
I entered over a dozen queries, and only got a meaningful result for a single one. All others were completely unrelated stuff.

Based on the bad results, I can see that this is probably only useful to someone doing math stuff, anyone else its more or less completely useless
Both "NYSE 1950-2008" and "Nasdaq 1960-2008" gave me incorrect values for the stock exchange volumes. Instead, the results were NYSE Euronext and Nasdaq OCX, respectively.
Every car that rolled off the line would be sold for more than it cost to make it. Per unit, cars are profitable.

And even considering sunk costs like automobile design, management overhead, blah blah blah, every car sold makes the company money. They weren't sold at or under cost to entice people to buy them.

Whereas YouTube's bandwidth isn't free and every time they serve a video, they incur a cost that they don't get recompense for.

Sure, the automobile industry may not have been immediately profitable in the beginning (because constructing cars is a costly business), but don't confuse per unit profits with overall profits. YouTube had neither for the longest time and is only now dropping ads into videos.

You cannot under any circumstances make money giving your product away for free.
I didn't claim otherwise; you'll note that that was my first comment in that little thread.

The fact that he went from "CS 101" to "major stock exchange" as the barometer seemed a little fishy to me, ya know?
Facebook Prepares To Launch Live Video Chat Product
I think you are being unduly harsh to the poor guy. Smug is the last thing he seems.
Oh, I didn't prepare it ahead of time; that's the most basic argument many people have, and I've heard it over and over since I first came to this viewpoint ~20 years ago.
Works again (well, on and off :/ ). I've found a "too many connections" error once so far, the rest of the time it worked smoothly :)
I'm afraid I can't not stump this. And yet I feel as though I was the one in error...
They drop the coin on state-of-the-art sites - the SOTA is a bit dumb right now, thats all.
Chemist Shows How RNA Can Be the Starting Point for Life
You guys need to go easy on the negativity. I think HP laughed at Woz's first computer prototype..
You are talking about messing up a tool that is used to perform economic calculation. Intentionally introducing calculation chaos into the economic system is a far different issue from who should have the right to copy, modify, and distribute digital goods.

It is obvious I would condemn counterfeiting as abusing the monetary system.
Generally agreed, though I can think of one example to the contrary.

The churches that rent are usually newer and growing. The much loved idea that a startup is a better place than a well established organization works for churches too.
I also heard that (IIRC) a church just about doubles in size when it gets a building. I don't know what analogue that has in the business world.

(Protip: Rent from a Catholic highschool, even if it's a Protestant church. Lower prices, smarter people.)
I have a similar problem.

When I decide that my old clothes are worn/stained/horribly unfashionable and set out to refresh the wardrobe a bit, I set out to buy a few new ones. After settling on which store to patronize (Am I too old for AE et al.? Am I too young for Brooks Brothers? Would I be just as happy with something from Target?), I go to that store. At that point, I browse around for a bit, get overwhelmed by the number of options, become unsure about what would look good (or even what's in style), and leave without buying anything.

I'd really like to see some sort of online or in-store system with a super-simple way of finding new clothes. Maybe three variables: age, desired style (hipster? MBA? stereotypical engineer?), and body type. The output could be something like, "OK, buy this, this, and that. You'll look good."
Fortunately for Woz, he probably didn't have all the hype in the world surrounding his product. Wolfrom might be an interesting experiment, but all of the Google-killer talk might make it into more of a Cuil.
Many news sites (e.g., TechCrunch) have been hyping WolframAlpha as a threat to Google, and it's natural that people are trying Google-style search queries. However, looking at the examples at the site (http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples ), it's clearly not intended as a direct competitor to Google, and it's not at all surprising that it doesn't perform so well on the Google-style queries people are trying. My first take is that it's more like learning Mathematica: you need to learn how to ask it the right sorts of questions, and the examples look like a useful way of learning to do that.

No doubt many of the news outlets who've been hyping WolframAlpha as a competitor to Google will now denounce it as having failed, when it wasn't meant as a competitor at all. It's the news sites which have failed.
so, this is live now: http://www.justin.tv/wolframalpha

but the video stream keeps dying after 10 seconds, for me.
Parkinson published his book in 1958 :)

One imagines that there were counterexamples even in his day, though. Can anyone think of some companies that were rising stars in 1958? Did they have nice offices?
If this were an easy thing to do, don't you think Google would have done it a long time ago?
I'd love background passive filesharing. Pandora meets napster meets dropbox. Pick songs from your peers that you'll probably like, store them on your phone, and backup extra to the cloud.

Loopt that actually worked would also be great. No one updates their location because you need to open the app. Background processing could fix this.
I gave it "unemployment rate in germany in 1928".

It correctly parsed my query, but didn't have the data.

Google gives an answer (8.4%) but it doesn't come from trustworthy sources.

EDIT:
"first prime greater than 1000000" gives 1,000,003.
Apple Is Indeed Talking About All Kinds Of Shit They Could Do.

Having talked closely with their Developer Relations Engineers before, Apple talks internally about all kinds of wild shit that never comes to fruition.

Over two years before .me was released, I was at a conference where Deric Horn talked excitedly about their plans to turn .mac into a worldwide directory system with free-ish accounts -- your local user account on your Mac would be tied to it, and you'd be able to add .mac users to local groups, all sorts of insane functionality. Needless to say, it didn't happen. The iPhone was announced a few months later, obviously they had plenty of shit to do.

I think it's fair to assume that this happens on a regular basis, cause sometimes you just have to work through your ideas before you know how tenable they are.
I think the standard suggestion amounts to women generally wanting to find a strong/smart fellow to contribute genes, and then a reliable sucker to raise the resulting children. So "bearing children with" and "having a relationship with" might have very different types of men as an ideal.
European Scientists Seek Origins of Universe, Launch Space Telescope
I'm sorry but I see no connection between my results and the ones in the demo. I'm tempted to go back and mimic the queries from the demo.

It fails to retrieve simple data, let alone conduct computations with it. Could not find the minimum wage in my state. Could not retrieve average income. Basic CIA Factbook stuff...
As mathematical queries give by far the most impressive results, this is essentially just a very elaborate advertisement for Mathematica -- just as NKS was.
Using it, you can tell there is some huge potential.

For example, these nifty queries:

us debt / us population / us life expectancy in days

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+debt+%2F+us+populati...

and

(MSFT net income / MSFT employees)

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28MSFT+net+income+%2F+...
Then just install Mathematica :-)
oz and russell, I took your advice and updated the original comment. I agree that it's not as simple as girls trying to please teachers - it goes beyond that.
But did we really expect this to be a "Google killer"? Nahh...
My problem is that even when compared to the pitch made in the demo, even as a tool for simply data retrieval, it seems to fail.
I am very surprised with how it can intelligently generate forms based on a question. For example, the search "Am I too drunk to drive?" (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Am+I+too+drunk+to+drive...) generates a form where you can input various variables to answer the question.
NKS? Just curious.
agreed, same behaviour for me.
This was also my first impression here. Try to compare things, it works beautifully!
-> http://tinyurl.com/qevs58
yes, it works also with "mars earth" but commands are way cooler :)
Obviously it isn't a competitor for Google search, or any other web search, but it might be a competitor for similar products being developed by those companies.

For that reason a search company may want to acquire them either before they get too big and expensive, or to prevent a competitor from performing an instant catch-up in this market by buying instead of developing.

Therefore, I was wondering what the market cap was of Wolfram Research, since they aren't exactly a small, pre-profit startup.

This isn't a complaint about a lack of data, since that can be updated after the preview feedback allows them to adjust the more important technology; I just enjoyed the irony of it having no information about Wolfram Alpha LLC, and only providing some useless web traffic stats for wolfram.com when asked about Wolfram Research.
Oh well.

It did manage to find Georgia Tech
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Georgia+Tech&asynch... (Even where I'm going next year, Emory University, is there...)

:P

But no impressive details or analysis for any schools. 'Tis all rather disappointing.
If Wolfram claims to have done it, don't you think he should have done it?
Using poorly-rendered (but 'designery') images to represent textual results is infuriatingly stupid.

Especially when there's a FOUC -- perfectly nice plain text is replaced with gross slowly-loading images.
A delicacy for Augmented reality startups such as Mobilizy.
Ah, but in a way it was a great example, because while the innovation still happened in Sweden (regardless of the tax base now), it was real innovation, disruptive and tectonic shifting. Whereas 99% of the stuff that comes out of the valley is cotton candy that wouldn't be missed if it went away tomorrow. There it's about "make something people want," not "make something people need."

In fact, it's a bit like the film industry. Yes, most films in the cinemas of the world are American films. And most of these are fun amusement despite being idiotic. But I wouldn't make the statement that the fact that "Angels & Demons" is an American film is an indicator that America is on the right track, and that's exactly what you seem to be saying: Twitter and Facebook are American companies, so America is on the right track. I know you're a Web 2.0 VC, and you see the world through such goggles, but I don't think it's a standard indicator of a functional, healthy society.

As for your second statement, sure, Bratislava has its millionaires. Wealth distribution is always power law to some extent (but not because of people, but because certain talent aspects are always more heavily rewarded depending on the culture, time period, etc). What I'm talking about is exacerbating that. A good example is the Ivy League system, which takes very bright kids and very rich kids and mixes them up and gives them both the same degree. Again, it's about mechanisms that make the rich richer and poor poorer and eliminating those to whatever degree possible.
Mafia Wars on Facebook
I hope no one takes offense, but I never really liked the idea of attempting to inspire a member of human subgroup X only with examples of successful fellow X-ers, or even just focusing on those examples. I prefer to emphasize that an individual X-er may be capable of accomplishing just as much as any human has.

If a member of subgroup Y is the first human on Mars, why should we have to wait for an X-er to step on Mars before we can tell X-ers they can do it, too? Can't an X-er be equally inspired by a Y-er, or indeed any human?

(Substitute in any racial or gender groups of your choice for X and Y.)
Bob wasn't his real estate agent, he was his mortgage broker. (He may well have made 30K off the deals, though, anyway).
Interesting that the results are given as an image: http://ff.im/2W5UQ You think they did that to stop screen-scraping?
I just followed your link for the Mars to Earth comparison, and noticed a cool detail: it reported the current sky position for Mars for MY location, which I assume means that I.P. detection is being used to geographically customize answers. That is useful.
So the phone can go into a deep power saving sleep mode most of the time, and occasionally come out of sleep every few minutes.
India election results 2009
us debt / us population / us life expectancy in days

What does that mean, to you, in everyday language? I see what WolframAlpha did with that, but what is the implication of that answer for a real-world concern?
I've got RAM I can send; will they let it into Cuba?
My answer would be that statistics work for a population but not the individual case. I feel that getting married and having kids would make me happier - I'm sure others feel the same regardless of what statistics say.
I actually worked on a site that did this way back in 1999.

It's hard because people get fatter and skinnier all the time (usually just fatter) thus, the clothing "refill" doesn't work. Especially for pants. In fact, most men only bought new pants because of a size change, not because their old ones wore out. It works for socks because people's feet don't change.

Another problem is that even for men, standard sizes aren't standard at all. A size 32 waist pants from Old Navy is about a size 38 in Levi's 501. Athletic cut dress shirts are much larger than slim cut dress shirts in the exact same size. For women, you can multiply this situation by the number of retail stores and brands in the world. Sizes even change in the same line from season to season. Finally, people lie about their waist size, even to their computer.
I am using Heroku for a few small projects, including Swinefighter, which seamlessly got to the front page of digg and Techcrunch'd on Heroku.

Once you get used to it, it really is amazing to deploy apps in 2 minutes and not do any sysadmin, and know that it can scale.
Elegant Corporate Gifts
Anniesuniquegifts.com sells gourmet gifts, organic and gluten free gifts, organic coffee, gluten free food, organic food, corporate gifts, baby gifts, gift for men, gifts for women, gourmet food, chocolate, wine gifts,
I think this is an idea that enough people that have had that I'm surprised nothing like it has come out. A few months ago some people launched a site like this for interior decorating. I asked if they were going to do it for clothing and they said it wasn't a focus because the margins/affiliate payments for interior decorating are so much better.
It is the amount of debt each American has to pay off each day.

Except, you know, it isn't.