skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, I didn't want to do that for the beta. I didn't actually think anyone would buy it during the beta, that was a surprise. And then I wanted to spend all the time working on the book, not optimizing for sales... prematurely. ;)

There will be a sample chapter up next week.

Believe it or not, I wrote this post more to A) keep in touch with my readers, and B) turn (smart, non-sleazy, geeky) people's minds towards creating their own informational products than to C) promote the book. :)
That's a great idea, and bridges some of the gap between an ebook and a paper book that one could leaf through prior to purchase, or even the ol' Amazon excerpts.
I also heard said anecdote, along with the fact that it didn't actually effect Chevy Nova sales; it sold admirably.
He probably just thinks Moto invented PowerPC.
Uh, some of those 200 tweets per second are being sent to over a million people. Most are sent to hundreds or thousands.
You're absolutely right: simulating a human brain is the shortest path to solving problems that relate... to the human brain. No other guarantees exist.

It's going to be difficult to make a computer architecture that approaches the parallel ability of the human brain.
For what it's worth (which I freely admit might be nothing):

I'm not currently hiring, but I'm always on the lookout for someone coming from any of the fora I read regularly. I figure anyone that participates on one of them will be worth looking at, and possibly making an exception for.

However, your id was created specifially to make this posting, you have no history, no comments, no submissions, and no contact details in your profile. That's turned me off.

You may regard that as unfair and unreasonable, and perhaps its an indication that you wouldn't want to work for me anyway, but it's been my instant reaction, and I thought I'd tell you, rather than closing the tab and moving on. Others might feel the same, and you might profit from knowing that.
Maybe that's part of their plan for managing userbase growth
Database of hidden settings for Mac OS X
i think a lot of the discussion regarding this topic has focused too closely on famous scientists/innovators and whether they were insufferably arrogant or not. certainly we can all agree that many famous scientists were arrogant, and i believe your claim that many of the people you admire are arrogant. but these are the very rare people who are exceptionally talented and--i admit this with a sigh--deserve to be arrogant. it might be a little harder for me or others to get along with them, but that's who they are and if it helps them do good work, then so be it.

we seem to forget that the vast majority of arrogant people overestimate their abilities, are no better than their peers, and are mocked behind their backs or on the internet. One might term these the "fuck yeah" arrogants. Perhaps their arrogance is helping their work slightly, but I think instead its primary effect is to limit their capacity to learn.
PayPal has a Direct Payment option where the credit card is processed in the background, and the user stays on your page instead of being redirected to PayPal. Essentially, the user doesn't know that PayPal is being used to process their payment. Does Amazon offer something similar?
quit.

edit: to elaborate more, tell them that unpaid internships do the exact opposite of what they claim -- they unequivocally screen out good employees. then, quit. if you have to, put in 2 weeks or whatever, but do it ASAP. tell them that there is no negotiation, and if they wish to re-hire you with a salary, they know how to contact you.

/my $0.02.
it's probably a smart move from Yahoo -- brazil is known for adopting 'lesser' stuff (orkut instead of facebook, fotolog instead of flickr/similars), some video sites instead of youtube (although youtube is also popular here)

launching a twitter for the brazilian market is a rather obvious idea.

Although twitter is catching up real quick in brazil, so maybe it's a bit late...
But the ones that look like noise are compressed versions of brilliant longer tweets!

(If decompression does not yield a suitably brilliant tweet, try another algorithm until the desired level of brilliance and length is achieved. Generation and storage of the algorithms is left as an exercise for the reader; see Kolmogorov.)
local would be like billboards and whatnot, right? and hyper-local would be advertising on a person's mobile device when they're near the location of the establishment?

just a guess
The one thing I've noticed about comparing sci-fi future to the actual thing is the degree that humanity is changing, not technology.

It used to be you'd think of some future tech of a hundred years from now as being some normal guy, like you, except he'd have a jetpack, a phaser, or a cool flying car. But what really happened was that we didn't get all those cool external things, instead we got things that plugged into our minds and bodies more. So instead of flying around in a jetpack, you can imagine flying around in a jetpack. Instead of using your phaser to fight Klingons, you can imagine fighting all kinds of creatures. Instead of tooling around in your flying car, we're getting more and more realistic environments where you can pretend to pilot just about anything.

It's a rehash to say we're entertaining ourselves to death, but there's no doubt that as far as impact on everyday lives, technology is moving from big, cool, sleek external gadgets to small, integrated, multi-sensory ones.

That was unexpected.
Most of the evidence suggests that healthcare is a commodity product.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/02/what-is-medical-qualit...
1983? It's obvious this guy is just a kid. The stuff he talks about is new stuff. OS/370, 029 keypunches, Fortran 66, Quiche, for god's sake? I started programming in college in Fortran II on a 7094 running UMES (University of Michigan Executive System). The 360 let alone the 370 was yet to appear. Quiche had yet to make it across the Atlantic. My roommate told tales of his summer job in high school, programming an IBM 650 for NASA. The 650 didn't even have core memory, just a drum.

It wasn't "Real Programmers". It was "Real Men" programmed in Assembly Language. "Boys" programmed in Fortran. We had our testosterone unadulterated. Except an old coot told me, "Real Men do it in binary."

None of this Pac-Man stuff. We played baseball using the index register lights on the 7094 console and Space War on the PDP-1. We didnt use terminals or even the newfangled terminals, just the trusty 026 keypunch.

I tell you, we were Real Men, even the girls.
I think that your confusion here stems from your misunderstanding of the people who are in the market for the kindle.

They're not using it for anything other than reading books, and most of them don't want to. You know what demographic represents a large portion of kindle users?

The elderly.

While we geeks might enjoy envisioning kindle users as the sort of technical elite that salivate over the kindle's wireless distribution model, or its e-ink screen, the people actually using the device don't care.

It is a book reader, not a mobile computing platform, I'm not sure how hard I can drive this point home.

The people who really are geeks (people that use websites like HN), carry things like netbooks around because they have real keyboards on them. Putting a real keyboard on the kindle would ruin it.

The refresh time on the kindle's screen (kindle 2) is almost perfect. It is almost exactly the ammount of time that it takes my eyes to transition to the top of the page and continue reading.

For me, the experience with the kindle is better than experiences I've had with dead-tree books.

I (and I suspect the overwhelming majority of kindle users) hope that amazon never changes it.
Well, avinashv, have you every actually met an Indian? No? I thought not.
The people who care the most are people in fields adjacent to what Wolfram works on. They have an excellent reason to care: Wolfram has appropriated many things they've been saying far longer than he. Since their livelihood depends on their reputation for discovery, it's easy to see why they get annoyed and upset.
Myst was great because it strove for organic puzzles which the 7th guest and their ilk didn't quite achieve. I think that they achieved it in Riven (Myst 2) which was by far the best game in the series, and I would consider to be one of the best games of all time.
Forrester's Andy Jaquith Dissects Obama's New CyberSecurity Policy
By a long, long way the best analysis of what's happening here you'll read anywhere.
What about The Seventh Guest? Beat Myst by five months. Just sayin.
Offshore Banking |Offshore Entities | Offshore Trust
Due to "tax treaties" and other international agreements, often established by one (bigger) nation using simple extortion on another (smaller) nation, banks world-wide are forced to allow government to check their records, any time, for any reason.
Speaking of pinging you... you're a hard man to track down. Is your email address bprater @ BFL (abbrvd)? Or is there a better way? You can email me @ amy at slash (number) 7 dot com :)
It depends what your battle is. This guide is more directed to hackers who want to build something cool than someone setting out to start a business.
I'm voting vaksel's question up. Though I disagree that the price was too high, asking about choosing the price point led to a great, helpful thread. It was a fair question.
Sorry, I forgot to provide an example.

It sure is not a killer application, the example is only meant to show that there already are usecases where you do not need such things as Flash.

Flash:
http://www.engadin.stmoritz.ch/winter/berge/corvatsch/info/p...

Canvas/Javascript:
http://alpinforum.ch/m/
Thanks, much better.
From talking to a processor designer, popcount is expensive to implement, which is a more plausible explanation than "OMG NSA conspiracy". Also, some of the latest billion-transistor processors do have popcount.

Secret instructions wouldn't work on emulators such as Bochs or Virtual PC because they aren't in on the conspiracy and the resulting errors would raise suspicion.
This is quite genuine.

I don't particularly care about advanced maths and don't have any interesting questions to ask when faced with Alpha.

It's getting mentioned all the time. I've now seen may mentions of ways that it fails. Is there anything that it is actually notably good at? People are obviously excited enough to be giving grief - is there a type of problem at which it is strong in a way that hasn't yet been done on the web?

It's quite cool to be able to type in 'sin 5' and the like but google does that already.
My point was that the reviewers might actually be regular people who are simply doing the job they're given, and who don't spend their free time reading blogs that obsess about the products they have to deal with at work.

(Next time I'll remember to use Iceland as the rhetorical outsourcing destination because it's less likely to accidentally offend anyone.)
Why haven't I heard of the robot geek with the garage Johnny Five replica? Johnny Five was equally as awesome imho...
Finding Freelance Programmers
twitter does not

"INSERT INTO tweets VALUES ('me', 'new tweet', DATE())"

what mysql can handle doing a completely different thing is pretty irrelevant
Is Pornography the New Tobacco?
Hopefully Erica Sadun liveblogs it; I think she did it last year, I may be wrong though
It's obviously impossible to write bad code in Python, so clearly everyone else is wrong. Guido said so, and he works for Google!
I was the engineering manager at a small company quite a while back. A woman asked to work for us for free. She had some experience, but couldnt get a job. It might have been visa issues or something like that. I said no. We didnt have the budget for even a minimal salary and I felt it was wrong to have someone work for nothing. I still feel my decision was right.
I'm apparently not up on the news b/c I've only seen it for the first time today.
Wow. I was prepared to dislike this article but I find the argument extremely compelling and well reasoned.

Edit: An especially good point is his suggestion that permanent breasts would likely have evolved before men started to find them attractive. This makes a lot of sense and is consistent with how we think other traits evolved (i.e. feathers came first; then came flying).
It seems that:

1. You have skills they want

2. They believe the experience and knowledge you gain will adequately compensate you for their use of those skills

3. You disagree, and want paying.

If they won't negotiate, don't provide your skills to them.

Just say no.
I can't find any references that support this. Is it a joke?
You represent a very tiny minority of prospective kindle users.

The people using the kindle just want it to work (this is why Bezos worked out the deal with Sprint).

Have you ever tried walking grandma (Who is a memeber of one of the major groups the kindle is aimed at: The elderly) through setting up her ipod? Then transferring songs to it?

Can you imagine walking the same person through the steps required to convert whatever file it is she wants to view on her reader, how to plug the USB cable in, what hole it goes in, what buttons to press, when to press them, what it all means, where the books are, how to find them on her harddisk etc. etc. etc.

The kindle is good because it is simple. If you don't want that, get an old palm pilot or a nokia 770 (which is what I used before I got my kindle...palm back in early 2000 and nokia up until about a year ago).
What kind of 'manipulation'? They're basically routing messages, with a protocol change in the middle when the recipients' designated protocol differs (i.e. IM to text message). This can't be all that computationally expensive when the system is engineered right.

Knowing how little activity twitter has really makes them look incompetent in light of the service outages they experienced over the last year. Either Ruby on Rails is really really non-performant or the twitter code-monkies got the system architecture wrong.
Odd comparison. Number of Apple products <> Number of Microsoft products yet the article was written as though they were basically the same companies and one had a superior design.
I can't help but chuckle every time someone takes a human feature or habit and then attempts to force it into the massive speculative jigsaw puzzle that is biological Evolution. Not to mention the fact that we're conveniently trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle where we get to continually redefine the picture on the box so it suits our latest jigsaw piece that we just found or made up...

Talk about a self-validating world-view. We have absolutely no way of ever empirically confirming what the real picture on the box is, yet we continue to find and force only the pieces that fit our conjectured "picture on the box".

This article is borderline farcical given that these conjectures are so far into the domain of unempirical "science" I would hardly call it science or even presentable theory.

I'm all for science when it works on the authority of empiricism, but once this authority is borrowed for claims about the unempirical, that's when I get incredibly skeptical. This is an intelligent community and I hate to see such reddit-level "science" passed around here.

Another example of pseudo science from this website:
http://www.evolution-x.com/dumbgirls.htm
What does Portugal have to do with Brazil?
Precisely.

IE is and always has been the standard. It's only in the last few year that Firefox has captured enough market share that the W3C "standards" have any real bearing on the situation.

Of course, had the W3C simply used the box model in place in IE and Netscape at the time it wrote its CSS specification, rather than inventing its own, nobody would be calling the IE way of doing things idiotic. It would simply be the logical way of rendering content in boxes.
Golden Ratio, Fibonacci and Clojure
Tone 1: Ice

Tone 3: Cake/pie

Tone 4: Illness/disease
How to beat Page's Law? Pretend you're coding for a Vic-20
"Yes, but as you've noted it's for a good reason. This is really one of the few places where Django gets opinionated by default, and personally I'm OK with that; keeping people off the slippery slope of "well, I should write this in a cleaner way, but for now I'll just stuff some application logic in the template and fix it later" is a goal I can get behind."

Pretty sure Rails, via some plugin, lets you easily use Liquid templating in place of erb. Likewise for Ramaze and Merb.

If you want constraints, they're easy to add.
Yes. But apparently not a very good one.
When you agree to 'hire' someone for an unpaid internship, it's usually because they have no experience and can add very little value to your team.

However, if you, the intern, find yourself being taken advantage of, that's a sign that you have more leverage than the average unpaid intern. If you had skills that the company needed, and they refused to compensate you appropriately, I would actively start looking for a different place to work, and I would market those skills that I now had "professional experience" with.

I'd also let the company know you are doing so - a lot of times they treat the intern like crap because they think "you need us - you won't leave". If they know you are marketing your needed skills elsewhere, they'll think twice.
Ask HN: No-names, tell your story on how you got PR coverage
To all HN who aren't in YC: how did you go about getting PR coverage without the help of YCombinator's massive influence on PR firms? Did you get massive exposure in a different way? What tricks / advantages did you have?

And in the subject I mentioned no-names, people who have yet to have any coverage on anything they've ever built, how are you doing it?

For our site http://browseology.com, it's unclear if the idea is just not clear and understandable enough for PR to write about, or if they just don't care about our request emails because we're nobody yet.

Just wanted to see how the HN community is addressing this issue.
Isn't this the same thing Joost did, only in reverse? Why go with a desktop client?
direct link: http://gigaom.com/2009/05/28/meet-gigaom-pro-our-subscriptio...
Dr. Boguslaw Pawlowski of Wroclaw suggested a theory to explain permanent breasts in 1999.

I thought this was a dead giveaway that the whole article is a parody, but googling reveals that Dr. Bogusław Pawlowski apparently does exist.
Where are you getting Portugal from? Portuguese (the language spoken in Brazil)?

Clicking the "acesse"* link brings me to Yahoo's clearly Brazilian portal.

* which I think might be spelled "accesse" with two C's in Portugal (like acção->ação [action] changed from Portugal to its former colony)
OCR = 0nline P0ken 0pticaL Chanacter Recogrition
"You're a spy! Tribunaled!"
Link to single page mostly plain text version:
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090501/technology-finding-free...
If you'd prefer a more accurate and less misleading introduction to money, you can try these Yale video lectures:

http://oyc.yale.edu/economics/financial-markets/

Specifically, these lectures:

http://oyc.yale.edu/economics/financial-markets/content/sess...

http://oyc.yale.edu/economics/financial-markets/content/sess...

Or Paul Krugman's article on the gold standard:

http://www.slate.com/id/1912/
There is, however, such thing as a bad pizza place to work for. The last one I worked at didn't have that federal minimum wage poster up that they're all required to have. Immigrants, of course were my co-workers. (Not the kind from Italy).

http://www.laborlawcenter.com/t-federal-minimum-wage.aspx

And the manager wouldn't tell me how much he was paying my co-workers. And he changed my schedule, then had some woman (the only other more English speaker come in) and harass me repeatedly to sign a piece of paper saying I was no longer an employee because I didn't answer my (home or cell) phone after the schedule had been changed.

You can't pay somebody some pathetic hourly wage and expect them to be on call.

I don't know if I quit first or was fired, but when I got my first paycheck in the mail with my pay stub hand written (hourly wage * hours) on a post-it note written, I was really upset considering all the work that I did off the clock (you know, that redundant job application some companies require you to fill out even when you've just handed them a perfectly readable resume, tax paperwork, etc.)

But we know what they say: don't attribute malice to that which could be explained by stupidity.
Hi Amy, thanks for posting! You're helping me with B) -- I'm working on an ebook for my website (http://betterexplained.com) and your first-hand experience is really useful. Unfortunately many of the ebook tutorials seem to be of the "get rich quick" variety, it's nice to hear from someone interested in communicating with the community and helping people learn.
The correct metric is probably not "tweets incoming", but "tweets delivered". There's some multiplicative factors that start to bite.

I say "probably" because I'm an outsider guessing, but I'm reasonably confident about that statement. Just not quite 100%.

(In the colloquial sense of 100%, of course; I'm not mathematically 100% sure Twitter exists.)
so his books contained 8000 errors?
And so does a burning candle. Carbon nanotubes(CNTs) can be formed from just about any reaction involving an excess of carbon. It is the amount and purity involved that is interesting. If you look hard enough you'll find them everywhere.

I would like to know what volume fraction of CNTs and cementite (Fe3C) nanowires were present. If it was a significant fraction they could have contributed to the swords properties by the rule of mixtures.
Another way to extract this figure is to monitor the ids of tweets like the Twitpocalypse site is doing.

We've been monitoring Twitpocalypse for a while, and the data yields the following chart:

http://img.skitch.com/20090529-xhhnr83xsy67burr7w24kycp4u.pn...

From the slope, we saw about 200 tweets/second, sometimes peaking at 250 as well. The right axis in this chart is the number of tweets per minute. You can see it rising and falling through the day.
A more appropriate (though less-intriguing) title would be "How to Teach your Child to Reason and Communicate". I think it's a great technique - my university requires freshman to take a class on rhetoric - and it really changed the way I communicate. I was more focussed on what I need to do to communicate effectively rather than what my audience needed to do.
Nikola Tesla, the greatest hacker ever

The diversity of his inventions are truly remarkable (a good list is in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla)

If these were all his publicized works, just imagine the kind of ideas that he never told anyone and were just in his head in secrecy.
You should also offer a printed version for those people who want a hardbound copy.

Something like: http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/sell/books.aspx

So if you end up with 150 pages in the book, it'll just be something like 11 bucks extra. And most people prefer to have technical manuals in paper format. + You can charge a little bit more for the printed version, to make the ebook that much more appealing
Brazil is the world's largest population of Portuguese speakers -- 190 million in Brazil, compared to 10 million in Portugal.
Becoming a better developer, day 4: Lean a New Programming Language
Excellent article. Couple this with Dale Carnegie (the real stuff, not the manipulative fluff people try to peddle) and you get real people that you can discuss things with.
Hold on a minute. Are we talking about peak load or average load?

Saying Twitter averages 200 tweets/second is vastly different than peaking at 200 tweets a second.

Am I just being slow?

Edit: Nevermind, Robert is saying that the average is 200 tweets/second during periods of peak load. The headline here makes it seem like the maximum capacity is 200 tweets/second which is misleading.