skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is how it came to be:

Inside the Google Headquarters:

Marketing/Finance Guy: Hey we need "live" search, its hot right now!

Tech Guy: Go buy twitter!

MG: Are you crazy we're in a recession, we don't have the money.

TG: Ok I have this old new-way-of-doing-email sideproject, that was kind of "live".

MG: Great, can you make it even more "live"?

TG: (sarcastic)Well the users could see each other typing.

MG: (exited) Great! Make it so!

TG: (concerned) That would kill our server if we ever released it.

MG: Don't worry we wont release it, just prepare a demo.

TG: And if we eventually release it?

MG: We make it Open Source, so somebody else will run it and their servers will crash.
abundance creates scarcity. Now there are horse and buggies in tourist destinations providing nostalgic tours for couples in love.
Social Gaming Scores in the Recession (Zynga)
If Rives Controlled The Internet
http://siteboat.com/video-if-rives-controlled-the-internet/
You can let customers pay with a credit card while using PayPal as your gateway. If you're willing to pay the $30/month and setup SSL you can take CC payments on your page using the PayPal gateway, with no account needed by your customers.

PayPal still sucks, but if you're losing a lot of sales to the PayPal signup this might be a quick fix. I should be able to dredge up some PHP code if that would help you out.

But I hope Amazon Payments comes to Europe soon. Its silly to have so little competition in such a high-demand field.
Besides the fact that that this could all be completely untrue, it's a useless stat unless you know the number of burgers consumed/second vs google searches/second.
IMO, the only reasoanble way to deal with the carbon issue is a small "sin" tax at the point where fuel is mined / imported. There are still a few corner cases, but they represent such a minute fraction of output that they are ignorable. The advantage is automacticaly account for output on everyproduct and stage of production without atempting to calculate what it's carbon history is. [You mined/imported 10 million tuns of carbon x, which you can collect from the person you sold it to and on down the chain. They can ignore the tax as it's just an increase in fuel costs to be passed to the customer.]

I also suspect the impact would on coal would be much larger than that on gas. Which is a great thing because coal is far more replaceable than gas at this point in time. You can then subsidize non carbon energy production / carbon storage equaly and let the market deside what's most effecent. You can also ignore hybrids as the government focusing on a specific solution is less effecent over time.
OK, so which tone most accurately translates the English pronunciation of "bing"?
Here's a pic from the event. Trip is so much younger than the other panelists...

http://www.founderinstitute.com/posts/50
Better yet, you should just watch the Elizabeth Gilbert TED Talk, she has it right: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_geni...
Yes although I've heard Chinese are very sensitive in some respects.
Excerpts From the Diary of an [iTunes] App Store Reviewer
Try to ask him if he really wants it to be true. Everyone has a certain amount of bias, but if you want something to be true, you'd end up lowering your threshold of proof to believe something.
>You do not need a Professor who spends most of his time on research that doesn't benefit you teaching you.

I don't know if my math professor does research or not. But the guy is a fucking brilliant lecturer.

On the other hand, I'm at a community college :o)
Damascus steel blades were forged out of small pure cakes of steel containing around 1.6-1.7 per cent carbon, called wootz. Produced in India, wootz cakes were shipped to Damascus where expert sword smiths fashioned them into blades.
Why Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg are wrong about naming Web 3.0 “Web 3.0″
> how is it going to help the world?

Perhaps http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html will make for an interesting read.
But I have learned not to use ref books on them not because of the slow UI/search (it's not so bad), but because I require a physical book for memory "wayfinding," to flip back and forth

That's exactly what I'm talking about! If the Kindle 2 had better interactivity, there could be a highly responsive interface that could give you the same "wayfinding" feel. (Think of the flick-scroll contacts on the iPhone.)

Such is impossible on the Kindle.
I might give C# or VB.net a try
what about http://summize.com ? Instant, Pull (with twitter, +push), filtered, real-time notifications? :)
Yes. The more serious problem is: Google loves Hacker news. What happens in here does not stay here.
Yes. Perhaps "interesting and thought-provoking book" might have been more apt than "fun read".
Can anyone comment on why Amazon Payments still not available outside of US?

Amazon.com operates and accepts payments in EU and Canada. AWS is available in EU. Payments service is available for close to two years. There must be something some other answer than "it just takes time".
Ask HN: Link for the new Text Replacement Technology posted the other day?
I can not find it anywhere. If you guys could help me find the link, it would be greatly appreciated.<p>It was a post about a new text replacement technology that will allow users to place any kind of font on his/her website. It is supposed to launch this summer.<p>Thanks,
Ryan
As the price of eInk drops Amazon can start to make a lot of money by continuing to discount their eInk reader and making it up in book sales. An Apple iReader would add a middle man that would be able to quickly switch to another book store and cut Amazon out of the loop. There is no magic that let's Apple build at lower costs than Amazon so as long as Amazon is willing to take a minor hit they can keep the eReader market. As other company's start to sell laptop's with eInk they can transfort the Kindel into a solid tablet PC.

PS: Amazon does not think of it's self as a book store as much as a large tech company. It's trying to create large margine markets like the kindel not just sell more books. And they have great brand recognision to build off of.
Pragmatically, I would describe health care and education as commodities with some providers who sell a "premium" service. How much education happens at top tier, how much health care happens at the Mayo Clinic?
Furthermore, I think the kindle resolution is like 2x more dpi than a traditional lcd screen (and also this new screen) which is one of the reasons it is so pleasing to read. It sounds like this screen just turns off the backlight and switches to BW to save battery life?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630314 ?
If you can't do it in Fortran, do it in assembly language. If you can't do it in assembly language, it isn't worth doing.

Physics department guys in my university had this printed out and stapled to the wall. Pretty much all math modeling libraries they wrote were in Fortran with some bottlenecks redone in assembly. It was more than 20 years ago though :)
At Archivd we accept payments from the EU via FPS. Do you mean that non-US businesses cannot sign up for Amazon Payments?
I like the concept (unsurprising, since I write for a similar site), but I think the site needs to be redesigned to make it more user-friendly-as other commenters mentioned, it would be nice to be able to tell at a glance what the app in question does.Also, the "join" button is not working on my computer (not sure if that's intentional or not). I would also consider redefining some of your categories and adding a little bit of written content to the main page so that your visitors can immediately understand the benefit of visiting your site.

Also, grammar nerd alert from the "About Us" page: "User can submit, rate, and write reviews for web applications that they like." User should be "users."
The Secret Art of Futamura Projection
It's Time For Microsoft To Face Reality About Search And The Internet
You have a point, but what such comparisons do achieve is to introduce a very rough sense of proportion in a debate that is inevitably taking place and is equally inevitably irrational.
Thank you, I will look into these issues with Chrome.

I also wanted to get familiar with an MVC framework, so a URL shortener seemed the ideal candidate for this.
And it's from 2006...
The barrier to having a huge ebook catalog isn't the lack of scanned books, it's the lack of publisher cooperation. You think that just because Google has scanned millions of books (to the great consternation of the publishers) that they're going to relent when Google/Apple proposes that they start selling them for cheap in an iTunes market? Please.
Anyone can attend any university (with the exception of a couple of private ones, mainly within marketing and design). This includes medicine, law and business. The only requirements are high school grades and/or a public "university entrance"-exam.
> Thinking about the latest video streaming news, I thought about a feasible way to reduce the costs related to video distribution.

(1) Do you think that this idea is new?

(2) If it is not new (and it isn't), why did previous efforts seemingly fail? Is your effort going to have those problems?

WRT Flash 10, it's tied to Adobe servers, at least for now. On the other hand, it's likely to be installed on a large fraction of the web.

I'm somewhat surprised that Silverlight doesn't (yet?) have P2P support that is server agnostic. (This would give developers/sites a reason to use silverlight instead of flash.)

I keep expecting a "not-IE" browser to include a P2P javascript extension.

If either happens, I expect that the other will happen in short order.
There is another blog entry about Wolfram's ego, where the guy goes even further and proposes that the unit of "ego" be called Wolfram:

http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2009/04/monumental_egos....
Social networks die due to quick-fixing boredom
Thanks for the feedback, I will make some changes tonight.
Since, for the most part, "Perl 6" = Parrot + Rakudo [1], the big moment (IMO) will be when Rakudo hits 1.0. There should be a serious spike in interest at that point.

Hopefully the Perl community will take advantage of that spike. For example, it would be cool to see mod_perl6/mod_parrot hit stable at around the same time. Maybe even along with some key modules recoded in Perl 6 too (for webapps, maybe CGI::Application?).

[1]: Yes, I realize Perl 6 is the spec, but my guess is that Parrot + Rakudo will be the canonical implementation.
Only 2009? There's always hypeware. Remember Google's SocialStream?
It hasn't changed that much, at least not at the University where I got my Computational Physics degree in 2006. Instead of FORTRAN70 everyone was using Fortran 90 (using F70-era libraries) and I don't think anyone was doing any assembly language programming as the modern compilers even do autovectorisation.
Then you'd probably have a good $8.

We're in a tech renaissance. Lots of cool stuff is coming out, and they're all doing things in really different ways. It makes perfect sense that the game is constantly changing. It's exciting!
So Much For Twitter’s Trending Topics To Indicate Breaking News
> 2. Hedge funds exist (ostensibly anyway) to provide a return to their investors. Harvard does not exist to provide a financial return to its investors. Its endowment exists to fund the future operations of the school, not give the donors a good return on their donations.

The school is the investor.

I don't buy the "Harvard is a hedge fund" argument because it only makes sense if "hedge fund" is extended to include entities that don't have external investors. If Harvard is a hedge fund, it's a self-sufficient/independent hedge fund.

That said, the Harvard "hedge fund" internalized an investor with good tax characteristics. I don't know that the costs of maintaining that investor are less than the tax benefits, but it's at least plausible.
That demo video blew my mind so much that I'm having trouble processing all the implications of what I just saw.
I don't know if those statistics are really that accurate. They are often biased towards the desktop/laptop, & often the USA/English as well. Also from that Wikipedia article:

As of September 2008, usage data on English-language sites show Opera's share of the browser market as being below 1%. The browser has seen more success in Europe, including about 18–20% market share in Russia and Ukraine,and 5–6% in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Czech Republic.

Unlike any of the other browsers listed in those statistics, Opera is developed by a company based in a non-English language country. They have their own niche languages/platforms and I'm sure they're doing quite well in them.

That said, I live in the US and find Opera to be entirely usable on my laptop. In fact, I asked on another thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=622038) why Opera doesn't have a larger market share, and most of the reasons given were non-technical.
How To Build Something Real (In Your Spare Time)
>> "I always liked Opera's philosophy of "do what IE does" rather than Firefox's policy of interpreting the more ambiguous parts of the standards in a way that conflicts with IE's pre-existing way of rendering."

So Opera duplicates IE's idiotic bug ridden excuse for rendering, whilst Firefox does things properly. I'd rather firefox/webkit TBH.
He's saying design is trial-and-error, but it helps to have an approximately right model to start from. It seems to me that mathematics could lead us directly to the right model without mistakes... or is the truth that the same trial-and-error still occurs, but just in more abstract and general terms? Does that seem right to the mathematicians here?

... the nature of design, as they discovered, is so intensely cognitive, happening inside the mind at mind speed, the researchers could conceive of no useful tools to help in that process!

This is exactly my experience. The closest is diagrams with pen-and-paper, but it doesn't help that much. The more difficult part is not solving the problem, but showing that you've solved it i.e. a proof, for all possible cases. Finding a proof of a solution is as much work (if not more) than finding the solution in the first place.

It is by logic we prove, it is by intuition that we invent - Henri Poincaré

The article is talking about consciously formulated conjectures, not about instantaneous insight, discussed here: p.62 of Intuition in science and mathematics: http://books.google.com/books?id=qqGWlEwWj5UC&pg=PA62...
Interesting but not added to the article is that the rise and fall of the users of those swords, correlates in some ways with the rise and fall of the supply of the material used to make the swords. That is, when the supply dried up, they lost their power because the swords represented a technological advantage.
Apple is doing something is this direction. As far as I know, there is still neither Silverlight nor Flash available on iPhone. But you can implement some neat interactive applications with Canvas and JavaScript that also work on the newer IE-Browsers. So, in my opinion, the ice for Flash/Silverlight is already getting thinner.
And i bet it doesn't even take into account the methane that came from the cow that partly ended up in this particular statistic.
The academics in computer science have gotten into the "_____" rut over the past several years. They claim that programs are more easily understood if the programmer uses some special language constructs and techniques. They don't all agree on exactly which constructs, of course, and the example they use to show their particular point of view invariably fit on a single page of some obscure journal or another-- clearly not enough of an example to convince anyone. When I got out of school, I thought I was the best programmer in the world. I could write an unbeatable tic-tac-toe program, use five different computer languages, and create 1000 line programs that WORKED (Really!). Then I got out into the Real World. My first task in the Real World was to read and understand a 200,000 line program, then speed it up by a factor of two. Any Real Programmer will tell you that all the _____ in the world won't help you solve a problem like that-- it takes actual talent.

This paragraph still holds, and it does so for any quiche-eating,effete value of _____.
far from possible - it actually takes more energy to pull apart an O-H bond than you get from burning H2. it has to do with the polarity of the bonds (oxygen holds on the hydrogen stronger than another hydrogen atom would). I just looked it up and the heat of combustion of H2 (energy released from burning) is about 280kJ/mol. while the dissociation of H2O (energy to pull it apart) is about 920kJ/mol..... so 3-4 times more energy to pull water apart than released by making it....
now if you strapped a solar panel to the roof and a wind turbine to the front.... maybe......
...... nah that still wouldnt be enough..... complete bs
New Mac clone maker to open retail store in Calif.
Same thing over & over again.
The Online Social Network of Teens
Utterly silly. Note that the initial estimate of 7g/search is based largely on the power used by the client and includes the time to read the search results and possibly perform additional searches if the first one doesn't have what you want, while Google's retort of 0.2g/search is based entirely on the power used by their server to return one set of search results.

If the goal is to compare the environmental cost of non-essential browsing versus non-essential eating, you clearly want to use the first number. And, in which case, there's no need to single out Google, since they are probably one of the most efficient sites you could be browsing; your total server-side energy consumption will be dominated by the site to which your search results link.

(No attempt is made in either number to amortize the cost of running the internet infrastructure for an additional client, nor the cost of Google's constant spidering, which consumes resources on less efficient remote sites.)
Because Alpha's praise of Mathematica and Wolfie is like a rear world example of the incompleteness theorem? The limits of errr... I'm stretching this as far as I can, but it's not enough.

It seems like math nerd gossip.
Java SE 6 Update 14 Released
The "standing on the shoulders of giants" quote is a bad example. It was a jibe at Hooke. From Michael White's biography of Newton:

"In the last sentence Newton revealed the truly spiteful, uncompromising and razor-sharp viciousness of his character, for Hooke [...] was so stooped and physically deformed that he had the appearance of a dwarf"
Cow farts are carbon neutral. Grass sucks the carbon out of the atmosphere, cows turn carbon into dinner and flatulence, carbon re-enters the atmosphere. Get rid of cows, and you'll have grass fires returning that carbon to the atmosphere.
Little Dittle Children's  Web Site
Features online coloring pages. Use the mouse to color with the fun colors.
Need Testers
I need 10 or so people to help me test my new app. If you have a blackberry, windows mobile, or google android phone please email me at bradleyt.marsh at gmail. This application will work best for people who text or get texted alot, so if that's you please let me know.
SATA 3.0 Released, Solid-State Drives Rejoice
His full term is "representations of design", and he uses it previously in the following ways:

Languages aren’t design; they’re representations for writing down the design once we get it.

Quit thinking of external representations as what design is all about, and focus on mental process.

By representations of design, he means something more concrete and less fluid than mental models. Even mathematical notation is less fluid than mental models, because they presuppose the terms of reference, which is a solidification of a model, which makes it harder to even visualize the problem in other terms.

BTW: lisp is more fluid than java, but less fluid than mental models.
The part that surprised me was that Amazon hadn't acquired a patent for the screen technology.
Internet map in February 1982
This should be re-written as "Pentagon Plans Another New Arm to Wage Wars in Cyberspace".
Semicolons do denote statements, but that doesn't prevent you from clever use of line breaks. I still think my version is more readable.
Once I found out that my laptop could play mp3s, it was bye-bye iPod!
Such a huge ego, and I see that Wolfram is still at Alpha. Shouldn't we at least wait for WolframBeta ? Maybe he will have been able to iron out these ego discrepancies by then. ;)
Yes but not all carbon is created the same. The methane from cow farts has much greater greenhouse potential than CO2, CO, and soot from grass fires.

I can't believe I'm seriously posting about cow farts. Must get back to work. Must. get. back. to. work.
31 Fascinating Ruby on Rails Tutorials & Guides
I agree, though it will take some time before the price/hardware specs balance becomes reasonable. I'm not sure that will happen before "Windows 8".
And I attended the Nikola Tesla elementary school in a suburb of Belgrade called Rakovica. :)
In addition to AC generation, his experimental opus was very wide and includes rotating magnetic field, Tesla coil transformer, and the list goes on. One of the better known patents (among 700+) was also wireless transmission, which was unfairly attributed to Marconi for a long time. This is not to say that Marconi was not brilliant as well, but just speaks about Tesla's genius.
Altruism repays the best-connected individuals
+1 point for using the Wikipedia article on Scientology and the legal system to support your argument. I can imagine the court proceedings now:

"The Church of Scientology has a recorded history of filing frivolous lawsuits, all of which is documented in this Wikipedia article."

"This only proves that Wikipedia is biased against scientology!"

"Your Honor, please review the references to this entry. Clearly no further citations are needed."
Ouch.

Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.

Please, make it stop.

Actually, don't. I'd forgotten this stuff, and I've recently realised I'm using a form of it already. If I do it properly and use existing techniques it might go faster and more reliably.

Deep waters.
Methane is a much more dangerous greenhouse gas than co2 alone.

Eating less meat will make a bigger impact than driving less.
IE 8 & Ubuntu
They didn't invent it. They're just licensing it for use in the Kindle.
Agile's Natural Disciplines
I heard Jeffrey Sachs saying the same thing you say: tax at the point of mining, not at the point of emission. He then went on to explain that the current focus on emissions comes from the fact that some laws or proposals regarding CO2 (carbon credits) were, without much reflection, copied from corresponding regulations about sulfur, and for sulfur you are stuck with emissions because you don't mine sulfur.
And despite the obvious prejudice, they still do not succeed in making Wikipedia look like the bad guy. Which goes to show how evil those that wield power within Scientology are.
I can't reply to: "Semicolons do denote statements, but that doesn't prevent you from clever use of line breaks. I still think my version is more readable." for some reason.

I just wanted to say...

Edit: NM, reply is now working so I moved the comment.
The anecdote about the Chevy Nova sounds like a fabrication trying to explain a failure.
The people in México (where the Chevy Nova failed) don't associate the word Nova with No Go. If you want a negative association, we used to have a gasoline brand called Nova. It was formulated with lead and was discontinued for more ecological formulas.
Offtopic: I once worked on the yearly revision to a certain popular football game. We had a bug at one point where players would show up with one skin color head, and a totally different skin color arms.

I suggested we call this the "race condition bug".