skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Teachers unions have way too much influence for anything to happen within the establishment. We're in a downward spiral. Government is only getting bigger and if anything the unions will only strengthen their position. The establishment will largely contribute to the end of American hegemony largely for personal gain and power. Don't believe for a second that the heart of people who run the academy is demonstrably any different from people who run every major corporation.

Obama is in the process of punishing large "Republican" institutions like banks and the military industrial complex and shifting the balance of power to more favorable institutions like the academy. You're naive if you think it's anything more than polishing the brass on the titanic.

I have much more hope in programs like YCombinator -- hopefully regulation won't prevent hybrid/apprentice programs from being created in other disciplines.
You gotta give him credit tho. As unbelievably annoying as he can be, he's got ppl talking about his yet-to-be-launched startup on other sites and whats more, have his startup's name actually be recognised!

I prefer http://venturebeat.com/ these days
If you only counted stable substances as "elements", an awful lot of things would have to get a different name. Uranium wouldn't be an element at all, because even U-238 (the most common isotope, more than 99% of the stuff found in nature, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_uranium) will be reduced by half in a few billion years.

You could set some time limit of half life, below which is considered "completely unstable" and doesn't count, but what purpose would such an arbitrary division serve?

Yes, you can slam particles together in any combination, but the special thing about elements is that, for at least a few microseconds, it didn't need any external force or containment to hold together. A few microseconds is a long time at the subatomic scale.
It's not a zero-interest loan, but the Kiva "field partner" pockets the interest, so there's no possibility of return. From their website:

"Lending to the working poor through Kiva involves risk of principal loss.
Kiva does not guarantee repayment nor do we offer a financial return on your loan. "
Consequently, event and information need to be excessively exaggerated to get the appropriate attention and emotionally packaged to get the expected assimilation.

I think this is true, but rather depressing. When you excessively (as in: more than is warranted) exaggerate to get attention, you might succeed in the short term but ultimately you just breed cynicism. You also desensitise your readership - think of it as crying wolf. If your emotion (anger, enthusiasm, whatever) is always dialed up to 11, what do you do when something actually important happens?

While the odd rant and rave can be entertaining, I find the cumulative effect rather draining. When a blog goes that way, I just stop reading it. The more emotional noise I find, the more I appreciate quite mature reflection.

Also, to comment on the experiment - that blog post should have been more along the lines of "Arrington is a censoring Nazi" to really investigate whether excessive exaggeration gets more hits. It was really too reasonable to prove the point :-)
I think you accurately represent the male and female perspectives on singles bars, but there's a hitch: singles bars only work for sex. People at singles bars don't act remotely "themselves." The guys are puffy and douchey. The girls are silly and giddy (or drunk and slutty.) There's no point in picking someone up in a singles bar unless you don't give a crap what they're really like, because they're acting completely differently than they would in any other context. Basically, singles bars only work for the people who are in heat, hook up, and have sex. If you don't get laid, then all you get out of it is the name and phone number of someone who is essentially a total stranger whom you know nothing about.

That's why people give up on singles bars, except for guys who are hot or slick enough to get laid and the girls who are actually looking for sex and not a boyfriend (or who think that having one-night stands is a good way of looking for a boyfriend.) Most guys are disillusioned when they figure out they're not getting sex, just phone numbers from girls who look a lot less interesting in sunlight and sobriety. Most girls are disillusioned when they figure out that the only way to get any attention is to act like they're in the mood to put out if they meet the right guy. Both sexes are disillusioned when they realize they want their sexuality to be an integral part of who they are, not an entirely separate aspect of their personality, an inner douchebag/hoebag that comes out at night and does embarrassing, tasteless things.
Yeah map sized apps are about the only things that will be remotely convincing given the accuracy of the sensors.
Agreed, experimentation does not a business make.
could you write about the reason for naming it 'duck duck go'? I see there is a game called duck duck goose. Is there a connection?
Yes, they are pretty good actually.
Both falling asleep and using the bathroom are similarly unusual because they don't really involve anything except staying still. So I'm not surprised that you think well in the bathroom.
She is one of my favorite writers, someone who has actually been an entrepreneur, echoing a lot of what I have written recently about struggling entrepreneurs, especially the part about ... "How do you fund an early venture?" The answer is "You don't."
Perhaps you are right about the title. I tried, but as said a commenter on my article, I do not have Michael's sixth sense for drama.
"Professor Hofmann began his quest to add to the periodic table in 1976."

This really seems like a poor scientific imperative.
When the business is your own, experimentation is not only easier, but also much more meaningful.
Clarity's in the eye of the beholder, yes. I had to scratch my head over the original to deduce that, ah, for each token before END, there are 0 or more attempts to reduce, until we can shift (exactly once). To me, that's a clearer description of what we're trying to do: more declarative. It directly reflects a grammar: (!END reduce* shift)* END. If we can "parse" that grammar, we get ACCEPT, else ERROR.

But it's true that different expressions make different things clear. Structured programming helps most when it gets you to mirror the data's structure in the code.
California State Controller: Out of Cash in 50 Days
Former Apple exec Jon Rubenstein to assume CEO position at Palm
He gained his "Freedom to create" via his own company and that made him happy, but the "Freedom to create" isn't tied to having your own company. It can come as an employee or intern of a fortune 500 company. Really all depends on the cult around you.
Of course not, the appropriate answer is:

"I'll just Bing it!"
Because every other small business loan on the planet (that isn't between family members) involves interest and the possibility of profit for the lender. It's not necessarily the case, which is why I said "slightly" misleading, but it still needs to be pointed out much more often than it actually is in media coverage of Kiva. This might be partially because reporters are sympathetic to Kiva and don't want to say anything that would rain on their PR parade, but I think it's just as likely that the people reporting don't realize these loans are complete charity.
Twitter Peaks To Media Overkill. Is Real Time Search Doomed If Twitter Fails?
Computer Consulting, Service & Repair,
Looking Forward To Streaming Live Video From Your iPhone 3G S? Not So Fast.
Scale Your Business by Streamlining and Focusing On Your Core Competency
Yeah Bing that shit dude!
In case anyone is thinking about buying the book: Buy it. It's very good, and it's always nice to have a copy you can leaf through.
That's frickin sweet, I've been waiting for this. Boom!
I would say that online lectures and current video-conferencing provides about 80-90% equivalent experience while the class size is above 50 or so; once you get to smaller classes the online lecture becomes about as worthwhile as a lecture on DVD. Beyond general survey courses it is of marginal benefit to anyone who is not an autodidact. Some of the current high-end video-conference setups come close (e.g. the ones that are basically multiple cameras and a screen that is wall-sized) but these are really only suitable for point-to-point remote learning and not situations where the "class" will be distributed in hundreds of locations.
This starts to remind me of the 6th Sense project demoed at TED - http://www.ted.com/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.h.... We have so much information available that would be a lot more useful if it is intuitively and seamlessly available WHEN its most useful.
Here are some (more interesting) stories about tiny housing:

http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/

http://smalllivingjournal.com/

http://thistinyhouse.com/

http://tinyhouseblog.com/
Not so for my son's start up Caustic. :-) I guess it helps to think small.
Personally, I greatly enjoyed the post because it embodies many of the concepts I've come to agree with. When it comes to humans, perception creates reality.

However, I think it's an idiosyncratic point of view (not ironic!). It's not the recipe of success for everyone, which I think should be obvious. The man doesn't own a bed for chrissake. But I do think it is a concise summary of the philosophy that motivates certain people to great success, and that makes it a good read.

Upvoted.
Kurzweil usually makes predictions about things that have strong trends over time. His favorites are the trends that increase exponentially, because most people extrapolate the early, slow growth linearly and come to a completely wrong conclusion. If you watch his TED talk, he explains his technique. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ray_kurzweil_on_how_techno...
Twitpocalypse and Facebook landrush to happen at the same time...
http://www.facebook.com/username/ - On 13 June, at 05:01, Facebook opens for vanity urls.

http://www.twitpocalypse.com/ - Currently prediction is on 13 Jun 2009 at 10:45:09 AM: Twitter's database for new tweets potentially overflows.

Within 5 hours of each other! What will happen? Will social media explode?
MicroPlace: Ebay's attempt at ending global poverty
Latest Firmware Update for Nokia E-series
In my youth (which was like...1 or 2 years ago) I used the far more naive "I'm not sure" or "I don't know" instead of "I'd Google it", and responded to the follow-up "So how would you find out?" question with some vague account of my research method (which included Google).

It turns out that a lot of problems require far more specific researching skills, say, if you're writing code to automate some type of proprietary system that Google knows nothing about. How do I automate a functional test? I talk to the people who run the test manually. How do I learn how to do this and that with a given box? I talk to the engineers who designed it.

"I'd google it" is the wrong, right answer. It's the right answer because you should have some ability to research things you don't know. It's wrong because there's no way Google will teach you what you need to know. Sometimes you need to read a book or make an appointment with an engineer in the other building, or run controlled experiments.
I am left to wonder though: what is the possible use of this?

I realize it's basic research (and as such am all for it), but it would be interesting to know whether any practical uses are even planned or theorised.
I don't believe rarrrrrr is advocating ending medical research.

Most people with hypertension are not in the situation that you are. Diet and lifestyle changes are effective cures for many people, but they don't come in pill form.
Seattle 2.0 Startup Index for May 2009
bet you didn't know Seattle has more than 300 startups!
I think the last point was the most interesting.. data substations. Every suburb/town could have a data substation that all connect to form the cloud. computing as a service, exactly the same as electricity. shit is about is get interesting.
Ask HN: logging in with openid - clickpass
Anyone facing issues logging in using clickpass. I have been trying to login using a google account and All I get is "Unknown" on HN. This is the second time, I have faced this last 6 months, I am writing this because my session is 'saved' on my other browser.

I wasn't able to overcome the earlier error I got 5 months back, in the end used a new userid/openid to login. Later I found that clickpass had done some kind of reset and I had to manually tinker with the url. I could do that because I was using claimid as a openid url.
This time with a Google account, I couldn't figure out. I tried changing to https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id to no avail.

I also have to mention- I wrote couple of times to the "send feedback" at clickpass. I am still waiting 5 months down for a response.

Anyone? with similar experiences?
I like it. Simple, clean, affordable, useful. I'm having a little trouble with the name, but I'm sure I'll get over it.
As far as their operating systems are concerned, I postulate that "steamrolling" independent software vendors is one of the key differences between Apple and Microsoft.

It seems to me that Microsoft takes great pains not to add features to their operating system that are implemented by independent software vendors (Windows Security Center), whereas Apple will just add the features (Leopard Application Firewall v. Little Snitch).
Linux Plumbing on the Palm Pre
"Good enough" instead of "absolutely perfect"
All true, but unless you already know enough about that topic to know where to look then you need to start with a general search on that topic. Google is often a very good place to start to find out where to go next, even if that next involves books, experts, or even original research.
You are assuming we will only use the iron once. But actually iron is reused multiple times, the same can be true for rare metals - especially once energy becomes cheap enough that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_arc_waste_disposal becomes economical.
A Love-Blog for Programmers? Written by a Guy? WTF?
The title is incredibly inflamatory and a vast overreach, but the contents of the article are much more moderated.

The actual contents of the article talk much more about university's need to adapt and use the new technology and never says they will be fully irrelevant.
I was on a team of three building a compiler for a microprocessor. I was writing the code generator which included register allocation and other hairy stuff. We had to produce pretty good code, as assembler was being replaced by our compiled code. Well, register allocation can be pretty hairy, and we were under a deadline. I had stayed up very late working on the problem, but didn't really finish when I crashed. I was half dreaming nonsense most of the night, but had one flash of inspiration in the middle of the night that solved the core of the problem.

It was not exactly restful sleep. Not sure it was really sleep, I would say.
is the favicon of this site lifted from that of http://smashingmagazine.com/ ?
Smart, hard working softare dev sought for angel backed startup
I'm looking to hire a developer to work on a location based services startup. I have a good prototype built and a huge library of proprietary content - and I am looking for someone to put some finishing touches on it so we can alpha test and decide if we want to pursue VC financing.

I'm looking for developers with experience in building scalable, secure web applications (mobile a plus). There are several interesting problems to work on, so a CS degree and algorithmic experience is a plus. The majority of the system has been built on PHP/MySQL, j2me and Objective C (iphone).

Comp is flexible - can pay cash or equity - but either way will look to start with a trial contract to ensure it's a good fit for both sides.

I'm a very well connected former entrepreneur (sold first company to Nokia) / current tech executive, looking to break out and do another startup. If you're interested and live in the bay area (or Seattle potentially), I'd love to grab a coffee/beer and talk. Email me (include CV)at techxc(at)gmail.com
What will happen?

My guess: Nothing that matters.
When I click "add to chrome" nothing happens.
http://www.collegebellhop.com/

College Bellhop does this, but with long-term pricing: you pay for a term, not for a load of laundry. There were a few people that used it where I went to school.

It always seemed overpriced to me. I realized early on that the card-based laundry systems tended to have very simple control outputs, so all you had to do was pop the cover off and short the right connections--bam, free laundry. Errr, not that I ever did that.
...like a freetard suggesting GIMP to windows users.
Unfortunately for you, I don't think many people here use Clickpass to log in. In fact, I'd be surprised if more than 1% of HNers used it.
I know that we want to keep HN focused, but is all humor going to be down voted from now on?
What do you mean by public branches? Can you clarify a little bit since we're trying to evaluate Redmine and see if it will work on a fairly large sized team of Rails hackers (15+)
I bet they got drunk, and threw darts.

Also explains why they haven't replied yet, they're probably hungover. ;)
This is just watering down the idea to the point where it's meaningless.

The degree of freedom is what's important. Not even the CEO of a fortune 500 company has the freedom that the owner of a company has.

If you must ask permission, or answer to someone else, then you don't have the kind of freedom I want.
I completely agree with this statement. Further, what scares me about this article is that he's basically reasserting every programmer's mindset in a different context: "Writing new code is awesome! Maintaining this giant mass of code sucks (regardless of if it's good or bad code)!" I don't have anything against the article or its ideas, but yeah, that maintaining a company of 86 of even the most self-sufficient employees is less fun than creating a web application you have complete control over is unsurprising.
What are the regulatory obstacles to running a business that does offer a small return? I have to assume there are some, no, or else you get loan sharks.
Man, I know the "and other right wing radio hosts" bit clarifies it, but I wish you'd written "Bill" to avoid confusion with Tim.
Me too. There has to be some sort of psychological shift. Kiva has been a way to help the poor in the theoretical the developing world, That place with starving sad ad children that's plagued by everything & $1 a day can make such a difference in a child's life.

When it's US-2-US, you are going to be associating this with something more real. I have no idea if it'll be associated positively or negatively .
I found the toolbar to be useless at best. I uninstalled it after a week.

It blocked maybe one "junk" domain and false positived on three.

And really, it's an even worse idea than NoScript - what harm is seeing ads on a parked domain going to do you every now and then?
Tips for Choosing Canadian Storage Facility
Canadian storage business is almost as developed as self storage business in the USA. One can find a number of facilities such as climate control facilities, boat storage, and mobile storage facilities in these store units.
An Introduction To Canadian Property Management
Canadian property management companies offer a host of services ranging from residential property management to commercial property management. They act as a bridge between the landlord and the tenant. Property owners hire these agencies for a fee.
Owning a domain name sounds like the best choice for one's online identity, but realistically it's not the best choice for about 198 million out of the 200 million people who use Facebook.

First of all, for many people, the only online presence they have is their Facebook account. Why would they buy a domain name? So that they can point it to their Facebook profile?

Secondly, owning a domain costs money and requires work to maintain (a lot of work if you are not tech-savvy). I'd guess a very small percentage of Facebook users would be willing to pay $10/year to use the site. So why would someone expect them to pay $10/year for a domain name?

Finally, what's to say that a facebook vanity URL is not a better choice than a domain name? Musicians often advertise using their myspace URL because it's easy to remember than a domain - you only have to remember a single word. It's entirely possible, depending on the success of Facebook, for people to be asking each other in 5 years, "what's your facebook address?" as it's easier than the current method of searching Facebook by name and sifting through 100 people with that name
Maybe one that can be answered by 5 minutes of Googling is not an acceptable interview question.
What's so WTF about this?
Yes, please spend your talent and energy destroying value and undercutting any innovation that others create.
Climate-Controlled Canadian Self Storage Units
Canadian storage units have been around for many years and are undoubtedly one of the most effective and convenient storage solutions available today. Canadian storage is particularly noted for its high-quality, climate-controlled units.
I thought Anil's piece was hilarious. However, I think he and others have missed out on the significance of the 'URL on facebook' as opposed to the 'real domain that you can own'.

The reason that people are excited it about it is because it's starting from scratch. That is, I may actually have the chance to get a username like 'scott' or 'sdt' rather than scott-siliconvalley94043. Since facebook is already a fairly canonical place to go for personal contact info, interests, etc, this is fairly huge.

The other important bit is that because facebook is a fairly canonical reference point, and it has very good search rankings, having your name established is going to be important. If some random 6th cousin of mine got the facebook.com/my.full.name and started ranking higher than my personal site for googling "my full name", I'd be pretty pissed. Of course, nobody really knows how Google is going to treat these vanity URLs.
Indeed, those aren't even really startups, just small businesses. Startup implies some sort of innovation taking place.
Except you don't buy a brand new MacBook for every employee every year. So if you figure the cost of a MacBook is likely amortized over 4 to 5 years this is much more expensive then what you spend on a MacBook.
Also, there is no content.
The two main features I depend on in org-mode are the todo functionality (dates and agendas, mainly) and the easy hyperlinking. I find that incredibly useful for development notes.
We're not gonna get there using purely modeled AI or purely modeled machine learning.

It's too much work to do it that way. We need a biologically inspired computer architecture... one that's non von Neumann; where the stored data and computation aren't separate.
Of course now they can cut the price by 50% in 6 months still make a bundle and make it look super cheap by comparison. Always better to revise down then up.
Corewar Tiny Evolver
Introduction to the Visual Studio Shell
Tell HN: Arch Linux logo copied, issue resolved
This is a follow-up to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=648603.

From an update to their newsletter:

After this very article and the publicity it gained, the Arch Linux developer team received an unexpected e-mail from the operator of the company using our old logo. He has made a formal apology and has removed the logo from his website. The Arch Linux developer team considers the issue thereby resolved.

Apparently he received several threatening e-mails from members of our community. Honestly it was not our intention to motivate such actions. We know people tend to get out of hand sometimes when it comes to defending what they love, but for the future, please, that kind of behavior is not encouraged by any of us. Thanks for your support once more Arch Linux community.