skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=660729
Do you know what it took to get WEBIRC support setup with irc.mozilla.org? Rizon? efnet? slashnet? I popped in and asked. It's the same on most Networks.

They don't have any responsibility to provide it, they can do what they like to their users. But I think their users liked it - which is why thousands of people used mibbit to connect to freenode.

Freenode clearly has a closed management culture, which is why they want complete control of everything. I don't think that makes for a great community.
If a project developer, active user, or someone else with genuine stake in the project community complained, we'd pay attention ... but nobody has, despite the numerous venues available to them to do so. Your honour.

It's not our responsibility to account for, be accountable to, or be concerned for outliers.
Quite a few of my development peers sit behind such firewalls and yet can and do still connect using their desktop clients. It's not something we discuss, so I don't know what method they're using, but as a member of the community in question it's fairly readily assumed that you'd know how to handle such a situation. We're under absolutely no responsibility to provide "IRC accessibility" to all comers.
my point is that I've gone from knowing almost nothing about computers to being a programmer since I started high school. If I had learned about what I wanted to learn at 8 years old, I'd be digging up dinosaur bones in Alberta.
I think there is a tendency to get bored by repetitive tasks an find ways to do them better. No forward planning necessary.

One of my first jobs was maintaining a national phone book library: 50lbs of new books in and 50lbs old books out every day, just the kind of thing to keep a 15-year-old busy all day. Within a couple weeks I had redesigned my pipeline to reduce labeling errors and speed the whole thing up by a factor of 2 or 3, which meant I could do other work as well (which lead to me learning print design, then animation, then programming).

I was not planning ahead, just bored, and it seemed normal to me. I was shocked when I tried to train my replacement: she stared at me like I was from Mars. I tried to explain how she should sort the new books first by state, not size, rip through the label printing process in one shot, remember that the list is now backwards when you apply the labels, spot-check every tenth book (ie, when you hit a perforation in the label fan-fold)... etc. She just went on with print-stick-shelf process for each book, and it took her all day.
If AOL decided to proxy interested AIM users to Freenode, would it be Freenode's responsibility to provide the resources necessary to support those users as well?

What about Facebook? Google Talk?

As a member of several "community projects", I don't feel particularly slighted (and am, in fact, relieved due to decreased abuse) by the disconnection of Mibbit.
Can You Define Your Corporate Creed?
You can use that instead http://webchat.freenode.net/
Superfeedr Supports PubSubHubbub
You shoot them in the lake.
A new iPhone for a dime under $65. Makes it tempting to buy just to resell.
How To Give A Great On-Camera Pitch About Your Startup
worked for me, now i just need to install winterboard again
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> Hey guys, remember ColdFusion? ... Guys?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9Jp9L_6-BI#t=2m
I really would find this "deeply unintuitive" if I decided to try PHP with only intellisense as a reference. But by their very definition a language's idioms are not obvious. And this isn't my first rodeo, so I'd know that. And I'd read a little--just a little--before i jumped in.

Concepts and algorithms are universal. Operators and keywords are not.

Luckily, this is such a common need when learning a language that this information is kept all together in a tidy tabular way.

Because without it, I'd probably whip up an index.php and write something like print 'Welcome, ' + user.firstName;, get frustrated by parse errors, then by runtime errors, then write some impassioned comment about how deeply unintuitive it is to require prefixed variables and how using a dot for concatenation instead of a plus sign or ampersand is simply logic defying.

And that same table that explains concatenation and scope resolution is also going to give me a simple treatment on the == and === operators in this weakly typed language.

PHP is not an elegant language and given the choice, I'd nearly always prefer to be writing something else. But I took my time to respond to this because there's enough wrong with PHP that we don't need to resort to hyperbole to bash it.
Google has also released a full-web 5-gram corpus that contains "counts for all 1,176,470,663 five-word sequences that appear at least 40 times" Its fun to try training on that.

http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/08/all-our-n-gram-ar...
Yeah, I deliberately wrote "this aspect of health" (how "overweight" you are) and am avoiding commenting on overall health, it's a whole other issue (and I think it is impossible to get enough good data from a population of startup founders to even begin to say anything in general about them).
Those are some pretty crappy things to make kids do. I'm glad we stopped.
I know, I was just being pedantic :p
W. W. Sawyer

Mathematician's Delight
Prelude to Mathematics

What is Calculus About?
This is best intro to calculus I ever saw. When I taught introductory calculus, I recommended it to all my students.
SIM Free/SP Unlocked/Factory Unlocked iPhone 3G
This model of iPhone 3G doesn’t have an Service Provider lock (aka factory unlocked) and you are able to put any SIM card into the phone and get service.

Where can you buy these? Iphone + anyone but ATT would be heaven.
Code Agent: A backup tool for programmers
I found myself expecting a happy or at least somewhat redeeming ending. There was none. I suppose that reflects the reality of this man's life.
From what I gathered of the Opera unite stuff I read, it would be possible to issue server-server commands and chain sessions between each(?). I figured this could be twisted enough to make most authorizing protocols obsolete in light of framing the victims /server/.... dunno though, I was asking a genuine question to the community, I do that sometimes.... let's say for instance you frame/"clickjack" 129.168.0.10 which happens to be there router config page? could that actually be done and if so at what cost? do it on a large scale and you're bound to get the people who use their hotmail password for their router.... just winging it, but I thought it was worth learning about in open conversation
Ok, so you're suggesting that there is a correlation between how attractive a user interface is and the number of users/trolls?

Well then let's break it down to its most simplistic form, the Operating System, seeing as that affects every service.

How do you account for Windows and OSX, seeing as most of your trolls would come from Windows based machines and yet most people would agree that OSX has the superior/most attractive GUI?

Just curious.
That's a semantic quibble which I don't think adds a ton to the conversation. Besides that, it might just be WRONG. Just about every SEO professional I know would include copywriting, linkbait AND markup under the umbrella of SEO.

From Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_marketing )

"Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.[1]. The industry peak body Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), also includes search engine optimization (SEO) within its reporting, but SEO is a separate discipline with most sources, including the New York Times defining SEM as 'the practice of buying paid search listings'.[2][3]"

http://is.gd/16x87 (GoogleFight! ;-) )

http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-guide-to-search-engi... (intro to SEO article which talks about linkbait).

Note: Not being snarky. I've been an online marketer and spoken on SEO. I think client education is important-- but we should focus on what's important and not the subtleties of acronyms.
Especially good was Gian-Carlo Rota’s “Ten lessons I wish I had been taught” which is linked near the bottom of the post.
Right up there with "lean startups" for me. Or the 5-whys. Or six-sigma.
Chrome integrated to Sirikata virtual worlds platform
Except that for $1.99, we can't even afford to invest in writing a small, useful application -- and we're a very small, very low-overhead company.
I think it depends on what you are doing. If your site is something socially connected, where people are likely to want to share their activities with friends, then I think it makes sense.
If it is more of a stand-alone thing, I think it is disliked.
If you are doing anything in the enterprise realm, I would strongly suggest staying away from FB.

Is the login functionality central to your idea? Or can people use your site without the login?

At the same time, I think it gets confusing to have too many options for login as well. I sometimes go to a site and try to remember if I created my own login, used FB Connect, or OpenID or what.
You really need to join the community and attend some events. While there isn't much early stage angel investment going on right now, there is a rich network available to support you in your endeavor. You can learn a lot from others, so please connect with the community. Its no replacement for hard work, but attending events can really help you benefit from the experience of others.

http://academicvc.com/2009/05/entrepreneurial-atlanta-2/

Angels are more valuable for the experience and contacts they will share with you than money they might invest.
Right, because insinuating anyone who uses mibbit is incapable of installing an IRC client is not a sniping remark?

No, simply that as an initial barrier to entry for a technical community, "browsing to a web page" isn't very difficult and serves poorly as a first-pass filter.
Twitter: the perfect tool for manipulating public opinion?
Bye guys :(
If I had to venture a guess - you don't seem to understand your marketplace. I don't mean you don't understand online sales - I mean you don't understand small growers (specialty nurseries).

I grew up around small growers (Near Lancaster, PA). Most of the growers I know don't really use the web for sales (or much of anything) - you might think that's good since that's what you are offering but that means in order to sell to them you first need to educate them on the web and then try to make the sale.

Grower's don't live and breath the internet like we do...by trying to sell them through email you have cut your chances of a sale to almost nil - you might want to try snail mail, a phone call or better yet a sales call in person in this case.
Paul Tudor Jones on Failure - Speech to 9th graders
I think there are some interesting lectures here http://www.datawrangling.com/hidden-video-courses-in-math-sc... and I occasionally find something insightful here http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/ but I'm in a similar position as you, unfortunately...
It looks like modeling your parser as fn(str) -> (list-of (pair-of value remaining-str)) might work out as a more compact (in terms of code) and powerful representation. I did something similar when writing a combinator library for querying xml-like trees and it ended up quite powerful. (you can replace "str" with any sequence type).

For one thing, you can write parsers that return more than one value - i.e. parsers that are ambiguous about how they parse the string they are given. That lets you express "longest" and "shortest" as parser combinators rather than some special operation for each parser.
I couldn't find a link to a pdf so if someone can post it in here that would be great.
As Russell pointed out, we are about to launch something called EnterpriseLounge here in Atlanta. It will be an effort to bring hot startups to the table in front of Atlanta's Fortune 1000 buyers. We'll likely do it quarterly, like our CapitalLounge events.

We already have commitments from 4 of the largest companies in Atlanta, and we'll get that number up to a dozen or so in the next few weeks. My guess is that we'll do the first one this summer.

More soon....

Cheers.
Scott Burkett
A well documented effort, definitely!
> to make kids do

And now most people (including you) also deny that the "kids" possess free will. I argue that this act is far more cruel than hiring someone to sail. And once again you take our society's ludicrous definition of "kid" as a given, as though it were an obvious law of nature that we turn from livestock into human beings instantly at age 18.
Twitter: the perfect tool for tracking public trends?
Yeah, I'm trying to build up the nerve to do some calling and in-person talking.

And yes, many of them don't use the web for sales, but we're guessing they would if we could make it easy. We just need to convince a couple that it's worth the effort.

Thanks for the tip!
I don't have medical papers for the barefoot assertion, just personal experience with running pose-style.

http://nymag.com/health/features/46213/ and http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1170253/The-...

(a nice comparison in the second photograph of heelstrike vs. forefoot strike for Jurek vs. Quimare: more info by googling Tarahumara).

Discussion and links (including some to pose running). http://digg.com/other_sports/The_Running_Shoe_Debate_Barefoo...

EFAs -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatty_acid#Essential_fatty_acid...

Omega-9 is more susceptible to free-radical damage, that's just basic chemistry. Lipid hypothesis is well worth looking up, link from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega-9_fatty_acid -- the lipid hypothesis is what most people take to be gospel truth, despite, for example, well known bad-science (throwing out non-conforming data) shenanigans on the part of Keys. (A summary forthcoming in a "popular" movie called fathead).

If you are more interested, Mary Enig is worth looking up, she has an in-depth explanation of competing n-3 and n-6 pathways that is touched upon here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega-3_fatty_acid

Lastly Gary Taubes is a great guide to the debate.

Omnivore is descriptive, not prescriptive.

For the rest, try going to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez and searching for MRFIT, or googling Rotterdam study or the Lyon study. I believe paper summaries are not enough and that one needs to read the study, understand the methodology etc.

e.g. http://jn.nutrition.org/cgi/content/full/134/11/3100 is a link that turns up. They found countervailing evidence, basically, that fat-intake was inversely associated with CHD (bets are on fat-soluble vitamins like K2 being the agents).

This whole thing is very OT for HN, so I'll stop here, if you don't mind. cheers.
Google’s Peter Norvig Offers Kind Words for Bing, Exploratory Search
Most of these things save a few dollars in the short term, but actually cost everyone more money in the long run.

Example:

limiting them to $60 worth of free printing per semester. Next year, students will be limited to $50 per semester

Unless paper actually costs ten cents a sheet, this is meaningless. It will, however, convince each and every student to buy their own printers. Now the IT support line will have to handle more calls, and more hunks of plastic will end up in the landfills in a few years.

But at least they saved 100 sheets of paper!
I wonder how hard it would be to just merge these discussions together and re-rate them?
Its not that hard to do cold calls - if you really believe in the product. Here's a little about how I started if you're interested - http://troyyohn.com/?q=node/31 :)
or for 'engineering' trends? Viral marketing style?
The necessity of installing and configuring an IRC client to use freenode is an example of a good barrier to entry.

Doesn't strike me as good enough of a barrier. Then you still get a lot of idiots who think they are elite just because they can set up a client. Not sure that's improved the situation that much.
If the price of medical care were readily available, I believe the health care "crisis," as it has been called, would be considerably less of an issue. Once care givers responded to the transparency, prices would drop. Additionally, individuals would be able to determine the level of risk associated with purchasing more affordable high deductible insurance. Currently, most people just pick the insurance product that gives them the lowest deductible, never stopping to consider that the aggregate cost of their routine visits may amount to less than the difference between high and low deductible coverage.
Well really, trolling isn't trolling when it's done by a for-profit business...

At that point we start calling it by fancy terms like brand awareness, or, in general, marketing.

Aside from that, who is trolling more here? 37signals for writing the original article? Or this bplans guy, to whom we are paying attention only because he picked a fight with 37signals?
I'd say paranoid.
Someone's basic technical competence, and the effort they've put in to do something, is a pretty reliable guide to the quality of their contribution, whatever it might be. When I see someone has a free blog on wordpress.com or what not, I instantly assume they either do not care or do not know how to set up their own system.

What about actually looking at their contribution and judging it on its own merits?

Isn't this just like judging someone's talk by how they look or judging a book by its cover? Isn't this the same principle as racial profiling? You take a factor which seems to have a correlation but which is incidental to what you're really trying to determine?

For that matter, isn't it like, "that new VM can't be that much better. Aren't our VM guys really smart?"

The really annoying thing about the Pointy Haired Bosses is their constant use of such heuristics in evaluating technology. It's when we see how their heuristics are maddeningly wrong when they dismay us the most.

I propose that we techies would be better served by eschewing such sloppy heuristics and actually evaluating technology and technical expertise. We have big brains, so we can just reserve judgment on the rest until we have actual evidence.
The biggest waste of time were the honors/AP classes I took to "look good on my college application." At no other time in my life have I worked so hard to learn so little of actual value.
I was homeschooled, so I don't have any first-hand experience, but in my possibly flawed observation:

High-school has always seemed to me a very artificial and unhealthy sort of social environment, where the social hierarchies and rules are defined by other high-schoolers, who don't have a lot of maturity or experience. Is this wrong? Is high-school in general a good social preparation for 'the real world', or is it a matter of finding the right group of people to hang out with?
In some countries they have to sell the unlocked version by law (that is, paying full price of course).

I got mine from Italy.
== is not the equality operator. === is the equality operator.

== is the type coerce/cast and then compare operator.

I agree with you about the way strings get converted to int instead of the other way around. I believe this is a backwards compatibility issue, and if they could change it they would, but it's too late.

It's also because of 1 == "01" would be false otherwise. And if you think "01" is strange you forget that all input to a php program comes from web forms, and is always a string.
Musings on my contributions to and membership of the perl community
Ask HN:  Markets.com launches new investment site...but is it legal?
I mostly agree, except that I don't think any treatment explaining

NULL != "0" == false == NULL == 0 == "false" == true

is going to be simple.
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Ask HN: Universal libraries?
I have been somewhat fascinated recently with the idea of creating a universal library system. Essentially, the idea is to create library code in an extremely simple programming language (a high-level, assembly-like language?), and then write an interpreter for whatever languages that want to interface with the languages.

I realize that there may be quite a bit of naivety in this.

Problems I see:

1) speed vs writing a custom library. I am not sure exactly how to characterize this, but I can imagine (possibly) the hit being constant time, and not terribly high.

2) Interpreter-writing ability. How hard would it actually be to write these interpreters in various languages?

3) algorithm creation. People don't like writing things in assembly, and algorithms, by their nature, are hard.

Besides the assembly, alternatively a very simple lispy language could be created -- eval is widely known, and this does provide at least some support for higher-level constructs.

Is this a realistic project idea? Would it be useful? Does such a thing already exist? Am I insane? Any feedback is welcome.
I'm not a web developer, but I do like javascript quite a bit. The 'bit flags' are easily understandable, but they don't 'feel' like a Javascript API -> I think that was the point of the post. All things being equal, jresig's proposed API feels a lot more natural to a javascript developer. In another language, this API may fit right in.
I believe that what you're looking for is Parrot: http://www.parrot.org/
Eric Gilbert has analyzed facebook friending vs geography and found it also followed a power law distribution. Wouldn't the correct interpretation be then that we're indifferent to geography for anyone we're already friends with?
Wow, that's pretty cool! Funny, though, the first thing I noticed: There are a TON of small issues in the website design that should be fixed (at least in FF3 on mac), and the poor attention to detail in the website makes me skeptical of the company as a whole. Does anyone here have firsthand experience with these folks?
Liquidity For Angels, Family & Friends? Maybe.
Apache HTTP DoS tool released
The happy part is in the bio at the bottom where it say he holds a white collar job at a firm. Wow. When I grumble to myself about my ADHD again I am going to remember this man and realize what TRUE courage is.
Control theory may also be helpful - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_control lists some books, a few of them available online.

Many moons ago, I went to a presentation with a classmate whose advisor taught control theory. It was a seminar about neural networks, the new CS hotness back then. Her jaw dropped when she saw the equations the CS guy was presenting - it was the simplest control stuff she knew.

On the other hand, another former classmate with the same engineering background (control theory, etc.), has been doing well at CS in machine learning ....
There is a comment from his wife below the article:
http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/story/being-crazy-noisy#c...

my husband shows that it is possible to have a seemingly devastating diagnosis like schizoaffective disorder or schizophrenia, but to lead a productive, and perhaps even happy life.
Things like this combined with NATAL make me irrationally excited.
Robotics, mobile, and "green tech" are all pretty hot in the Valley. And I don't really see people who've stopped caring about the quality of the product and say "Buy Silicon Valley." So far, the Valley's proved itself fairly adept at reinventing itself with each wave of technology, much like Boston.

That doesn't mean it won't decline like Detroit - a lot of random events can happen in the future. I just don't see a reason to believe it'll go either way...