skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Teachers can have a huge impact with online education.
That 30s show
It wasnt auto-killed. Very few domains are on the blacklist AFAIK.
VNC + Skype.
Any other tool can we add to work remotely?
At the moment it just has a threshold of 10 points.
Very true, but then much of the marketing and entrepreneurial fluff that gets posted here is neither news, hacking, or especially useful from a business standpoint. A few people treat HN as their personal viral marketing vector.
A plague on both your houses.

The industry has enough problems without the drunken antics of self-centered man-children adding to them. Take disputes to the courts or the market, in a fashion befitting civilized adults.
I am considering amazon fps for a project mostly because I'm using several other aws services and am comfortable hacking with those. I haven't had a merchant account before so I wonder with fps what advantages I'd be missing over authorize.net, braintree or paypal.
Follow Hacker News questions on Twitter
In my experience with touchscreens, finger 'hurt' only happens with large, flaky, public units (like ATMs and kiosks) that aren't always sensitive and precise. For better touchscreens, like the iPhone, pressure used quickly adjusts. While tactile response would help with usability, pain isn't a consideration.

There are more possible innovations in the direction of the Blackberry Storm's touchscreen (that depresses-and-clicks). Reports are it's a little uneven, but what if the resistance were perfectly tuned and consistent? That offers solid feedback about intentional keypresses while giving the fingers a place to rest.

There's still the issue of finding keys by touch. What if in combination with the above, a tiny amount of vibration could reward or discourage finger position, at the center or edges of active press regions? Or, longer-term, perhaps the screens themselves could develop subtle addressable rough spots and ridges as needed.
If you're interested in Django Design Patterns check out James Tauber and Brian Rosner's talk "Django Design Patterns":
http://eldarion.com/talks/2009/05/eurodjangocon_djangopatter...
What I'd actually most like changed is that dead links become unclickable. The fact that a link doesn't belong here doesn't mean I don't want to see what it was.
I'm not sure if anyone else mentioned this, but I think the "Chipper now on Mobile" and "Chipper now on Gtalk" is a great feature but I only realized what it did after I clicked on it. You should make the user understand that now "you can submit expenses to your mychipper account with Gtalk and Mobile SMS". Maybe look at how ping.fm organizes and makes the user understand this type of functionality.

I like the idea of creating a social aspect to it. Dont throw it their face, but give them an option to "share" their data and allow them to compare it to other mychipper users.

But I think you've got a dead simple app and good market to go after.
I have had to deal with third world programmers. I am not particularly interested in entrusting my life to the medical equivalent. US students are free to go to their med schools but prefer US schools because the quality of the education is so much higher.

The US has excellent health care, but there are two problems: availability and price. If you dont have employer paid insurance, medicare, or excellent health, you are pretty much shut out. The pricing structure is out of whack. My SO takes a drug that costs $700 per month. It went generic in February and in October full competition will kick in and it will probably cost $20-30 per month. Meanwhile we are paying for excessive profits, television ads, and salesmen. I dont know what the price is in Canada or Mexico, but probably much less.

Another example of a completely whacked out pricing system is hospitalization. Several years back I had a pretty routine routine heart procedure. The bill from the hospital was $80,000. The insurance company allowed $20,000 and I only had to pay $2000. Someone without insurance would have been hit with the whole $80,000. And then there was the anesthesiologist who didnt participate in the insurance plan and billed me $4,000. Nobody told me about him beforehand, and you don't do much comparison shopping in those circumstances.
Yeah, I recently had to post a completely irrelevant reply in a dead story to ask someone who had gotten there in time to paste me the link.
In Defense of Risk
I am not entirely sure that this belongs on HN, but it definitely made me laugh. It was very appropriate with the most recent XKCD.

God I hate Gillette.
The blacklist is here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=499044
Mind sharing your script? That sounds handy!
Some of the agendas around here: Open Source, No SQL, Anti-Microsoft, Anti-higher education, Programming language elitism, environmentalism, healthcare reform, pirating copyrighted material, and getting rich quick to name a few.

Yes, and as you note below that, not all participants here sign off on all of those agendas. I might characterize my view of higher education as "skepticism about credentialism," for example.
I know, I just thought it was a lot better before it became a platform for third party apps, and when it had built in features that were useful to the college student core community (like registering which classes you had and searching for other students in your section).
How tall are rock stars vs. country stars?
I'm setting up PayPal for payment processing next month. Is it really as awful as everyone on HN make it out to be?
From the guidelines:

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Stories about politics have a very high threshold to clear to be on HN, because there are many other places to discuss politics online, and few others to discuss the core HN topics.
Great, a bunch of little hipsters bitching about who can eat their pizza. Somehow they're trying to equate this to stealing music, but like the comments have already argued it's entirely different. The only way this represents the copyright problem as a whole is via the representation that both sides act like little kids who can't sit down and try to work things out. Instead they grab pizza boxes, run, and spill beer on each other.
I just tried submitting another article from his blog and again it was [dead] by the time I was redirected to the 'new' page, i.e. a few milliseconds. Here it is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=686436

Try posting something from his site yourself, like this one: http://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/01/illuminating-map.html
Apple buys parts in bulk so they can get huge discounts. if Arrington can't do the same, he won't profit from this.
Tell HN: I think the App Store is completely corrupt
After selling an app on the app store for a couple months (and climbing pretty high in the rankings), I'm convinced the app store is corrupt in the following sense.

Most of the 5-star reviews you read on the App Store are fabricated. It's pervasive, every successful app does it, and you basically need to assemble a review posse to compete at all.

In the end, the good apps filter to the top, because even though you can arrange good reviews, once you start selling apps fast enough you will get bad reviews that will drive you back down.

But still, you need to rustle up or manufacture reviews on each release to get in the game. You can immediately increase sales by doing so, and so everyone does it.

The result is a competition that encourages dishonesty, and people end up buying apps under false pretenses - because everyone doesn't know the 5-star reviews are all fake. I think Apple needs to take some steps to clean this up.

Obviously, Apple doesn't care about this today. You can tell because there are no controls or anti-gaming technologies in play here. Also, Apple has no interest in rooting out fake reviews (which increase sales temporarily, but on a regular basis, like a heartbeat).
Idea: Labels in OS instead of folders
Why is that OS continue to insist that I keep my files in folders and directories.

Instead wont it be more user friendly to have labels which you apply to files, instead of putting them in folders?

For example, I have a file which which I want to label as "mindmap, django, project31" so that one year later I can find them wheter I am looking for mindmaps, or django or project31 files. Instead if I am looking for a particular mindmap, I need to remember all details about it.

Essentially, labels are more user friendly(than folders). Why not use them on OS level?
+1 yeap yeap yeap
Not really, to have an impact a teacher needs 1-on-1 time with a student, otherwise the kid might as well use electronic material without any teacher at all.
What proportion of meta discussion here, do you think, comes from people who felt that, just this time, they had to resort to it?

Also, what proportion of student cheating do you think is by students who are generally opposed to cheating, but feel they really had to do it just this one time?
This is a perfect example of the dangers of such a tightly restricted but lightly controlled market. Monopolies suck.
PHP 5.3 YCombinator and other tricks
They do. Its called SimpleDB.
in a way folders are already labels...

documents django mynewsite applogic

documents/django/mynewsite/applogic

Removing a folder structure doesnt seem like an improvement to me: if I take 3000 files and tag them as LabelX it becomes useless for filtering. Conversely if I use 500 very specific labels for those files (i.e. multiple labels per file) filtering becomes a pain.
Soooo what happened then?
Agreed, however, I think everyone could see instantly that seesmic was a dud. As most can see that the Crunchpad is a dud. IMHO the idea of the Crunchpad is something that has already been tried many many times before, with the net result that there simply isn't a large market for such devices.
Yes. But the article is question doesn't seem to be about politics: http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/07/medias-bias-toward-englis...
Yesterday, I had a discussion with my doctor on this very topic. Her office visits take an hour not fifteen minutes. If you need more time than that, she takes it. She does not participate in any insurance plans because they pay $75 or less for a visit.

I think sarvesh has the wrong cause for assembly line medicine. It's not that doctors are doing it to enrich themselves, but that insurance companies are forcing them to do it with unreasonably low payments.

In another reply I objected to recruiting third world doctors because their training was not up to US standards, but I also object because I don't think we should deprive those countries of their services so we could pay them like janitors here.
Right now, yes. But throw in some resource constraints and random violence, and then you've got competition among the "intelligently designed" progeny. Then you're back in evolutionary territory. It's just an evolution that is more conscious of itself.
pg has said in the past that it's because of spam. allowing the urls to stay live in that case would give them unwarranted google juice.

EDIT: pg says it's because he doesn't want people following spam links. i stand corrected.
I suppose anything "premature" is evil. By its very nature, the word "premature" has a negative connotation.

I won't argue for or against "flexibilization". But I do think separation of concerns is never premature (any isolated piece of code should have as few concerns as possible). And code with properly separated concerns should inherently be flexible.
A Start-up Takes on Wal-Mart
You sound like a Verizon executive.
Interesting point. I wouldn't call it desperation; I think it's more of an interesting experiment. If you read Kent's blog, it sounds like he's exploring different ways that programmers can monetize their work. This is certainly one way for a very capable programmer; I can't even imagine how much I'd learn spending two hours coding with, say, John Carmack (or even Kent Beck :^). I could easily see spending a few hundred dollars for that.

I could also see this being a good way for a programmer to make money who isn't necessarily a rock star, but has deep knowledge of a particular library or some such. I once had to write a GUI in C#, and after working on it for a couple months I would have paid a few hundred dollars to spend four hours with someone who could have answered all of my arcane questions in one fell swoop.
Unshakeable self-confidence is in the genes
What about online university lectures? Isn't there potential for some of those professors to have a huge impact?
OK, I see what you mean, but I would argue that P=NP is a question of a very different nature than CH.

CH is a statement about the existence of an abstract infinite set, so it is not that surprising that its truth depends on your very definition of a set, an elusive object with multiple possible meanings.

On the other hand, P=NP is a statement about boolean formulas, Turing machines and polynomials. None of these are elusive, they are very cleanly defined, trivial concepts. So it's a very well-posed question.

Of course, we could still not be able to prove the (non)existence of a polynomial algorithm for SAT in ZF set theory. In that case, too bad for ZF, but whether P=NP is still a meaningful question.
There are a number of articles with this sort of tone:

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/051016_football.htm

"Or, possibly, the reason that teams with a higher number of white reserves have been winning more games is because whites are better team players about sitting on the bench without complaining about not starting. Perhaps white back-ups are less likely than black back-ups to poison the atmosphere and ruin the team spirit."

How could you possibly argue a point like that? It's pure trolling.

Anyways, I don't know if he's trolling a whole 90% of the time, but certainly < 10% of his articles are appropriate HN material.
"Sex between nonmarried straights was considered morally acceptable by 57 percent of those polled."

Or 43% say it is immoral. Since other studies have shown that 95% of people have premarital sex [citation needed], I would say we have more hypocrites than Republicans.
Chromium Notes: Windowed and windowless plugins
As a startup developing a lot of iPhone apps and having experience for more than 8 months working within the appstore system I wont go to the extent of saying that apple doesn't care. What I have realized is Apple takes time to implement anything because they want to make sure that whatever comes out is good.

I agree with you that everyone, I mean everyone asks their friends etc. to post 5 star reviews, and we did that too initially, but not anymore. We did it initially because competitors were posting bad reviews and we had to counter them.

I think the solution to it will be if the appstore review becomes a threaded discussion board in which developer can post comments to any reviews and everything is attached with an email. So, if a user posts a review and a developer replies to that review, there should be an email sent back to the reviewer stating the developers comment. And there should definitely be a system in place where any review posting on any store front for all the apps by the developer of that app should be alerted by an email. I have a lot more suggestions of improving it, which I will post a blog upon on our website soon.
Solving Sudoku using the NEOS optimization Solver
Mozilla Firefox 起始页
Windows 7 Welcome screen for Windows Xp
ming and speaker ？
and github repo http://github.com/uswaretech/django-design-patterns/tree/mas...
I suppose reasonable minds can differ, but it doesn't delight my mind. I should be deeply interested in such an article, as an American who reads a foreign language (Chinese) and has lived abroad, but maybe precisely because I have that background I've seen better.
i think "corrupt" is a bit too strong.

the iphone app market is still somewhat irrational. iphone users haven't completely gotten over the novelty of "holy crap, there's apps on my phone," so they're tending to make poor choices.

the marketplace will even out, eventually, and be somewhat more predictable. iphone consumers will develop thick skin about reviews, in the same way they are jaded about advertising now.
Try e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=686224
HN is an even tougher place!
Allen, everything from that domain is autokilled. Try it yourself. Here's one you can submit: http://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/01/reasons-for-being-cheerfu...
nice article (this is more or less a summary for myself to remember the highlights):

-AIG FP was created in 1987 when Howard Sosin, former Drexel Burnham, created a model on how to value and trade interest-rate swaps

-The company to make money insuring these transactions could not be a bank (which would be bound by law to hoard unreasonable amounts of collateral), but needed AAA status: thus... an insurance company

-AIG stops sub-prime mortgage insurance business in 2005 after realizing that 95% of their mortgage-related portfolio is sub-prime

-Other firms instead jump into the lucrative market after 2004/2005... Wall Street underwrites 1.6 trillion $ in sub-prime and 1.2 trillion in Alt-A mortgages from 2004-2007

-AIG is bound by contract to provide collateral in case they lose AAA rating; as such legacy business (built up until 2005) traps them into bleeding collateral in the 2008 crash on their sub-prime credit default swap business

-In result AIG runs out of capital reserves to provide collateral

-By comparison, no money is lost on their corporate credit default swap business
Lamson - email app coding without the palm sweat
First, Upper-Class Chad uses MySpace. Later, he switches to Facebook, but he doesn't delete his account. His acquaintance Lower-Class Rodney is his friend on MySpace. Rodney worked as a line manager for a construction firm until getting laid off a few months ago. Rodney still only uses MySpace, because Chad didn't post on MySpace about Facebook. Chad links to all his upper-class friends on Facebook; many had never joined MySpace in the first place. If Rodney were on Facebook, he would occasionally interact with them, but he doesn't. He also doesn't see when Chad updates his Facebook status to say that his dad's company is looking for experienced line managers in their bill-collection firm.

That's the sense in which social stratification denies opportunities, whether it's manifested through YASNSs or other means.
Sure, but the bigger differences are usually made while people are younger. It gives them more time to take advantage of them and grow with them.

*addendum: In short, if they can appreciate the university lecture, odds are they've already had some good teachers, and/or managed to work around the poor ones.
I stopped reading at the point he described the existing solution as "a custom blend of C# and .NET programs." He obviously doesn't have a clue about the platform he's bashing.
bing, bang, bung? :)
This comment shows you don't know the definition of the problem. The P?=NP problem is defined in such a way that it is either true or not.
P- the set of languages that can be recognized by Deterministic Turing Machine in O(n^k) for some fixed k, n-length of input.
NP - the set of languages that can be recognized by NON-Deterministic Turing Machine in O(n^k) for some fixed k, n-length of input.
Assignment Considered Harmful
UPDATE: We are now able to process Authorize.net transactions as of around 2:00PM CST both online payments and using the virtual terminal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX8MQ9TlpmI
I'm looking for some front-end web app development help for my revenue-generating startup. We are preparing to grow rapidly this fall and could use a hand for as short as a few weeks, or as long as permenantly.

We need some straightforward AJAX stuff for a relatively simple CRUD application - no super-fancy design, no strict requirements besides that it works great and looks at least OK. Platform is open source, MySQL, some Python, etc, but you can use what you like (as long as it isn't Microsoft : )

Interested in chatting more? Email me at cooper dot marcus at gmail dot com and let's meet up at the Meetup!
It's not page rank (links are nofollow till they get 5 karma) but traffic. I want spammers to realize they get so little traffic from HN that it's not worth posting here.
The difference between luck and skill is consistency.

Well, that and the ability to predict future performance. It seems like Bob has around a 55% success rate. How large would the pool of 'advisors' need to be before we expect at least one person to achieve this rate by luck? I don't know, but it seems like a reasonable question.

Note also that the article mentions that he has had consecutive 'off years', which is quite counter to '20 years straight'. The variance seems like it would be a good indication of the relative strength of luck and skill. Any ideas on how to model this mathematically?
I feel really lucky. Back in 1999, I was working in Zurich and found out Kent was living there at the time, so I figured out a way to have lunch with him. He talked about XP with such passion; it's a great memory.

Back on topic, I think it's a fun idea, and the winner will certainly get his/her money's worth at any amount.
The eventual ability to use a brain to reason about and change your own species's genes isn't evolutionarily selected for? The brain and human intelligence itself doesn't exist outside of evolution. If it turns out that humans being smart enough to modify their own genes doesn't work out, doesn't produce viable offspring, and ultimately loses out to undirected selection, would we say that that's a failing of our capabilities or that evolution didn't select for human control of their own gene selection? Does the answer to this question change over different time scales or if our evolution was to be studied by other intelligent species?

It ceases to be undirected natural selection, but continues to be evolution.

"Intelligent design" assumes an intelligence outside and other than humans. This is part of the "playing God" argument against research in this area. So while I agree that the term "intelligent design" may be more appropriate, that doesn't preclude it from still being "evolution" over the long term (which is largely what evolution is focused on). I'd also rather not have the terms get mixed up; calling this "intelligent design" serves to confuse the ongoing religion vs science argument/debate that is holding back innovation and laws in this area.
You come up with a price (value of your company). The buyer comes up with a value. If you can't decide on one or the other, get a third party, and the one that is closest to the third party wins. Works well, it's in the best interest of both parties to not under or over-value the company. Negotiators are a good thing to have.
I follow a ~350 people. Most don't seem to toot much. But I don't expect catch everyone's postings; that's not the point for me. It's more like being in a really crowded room, where i occasionally wander around and overheard bits of conversation. I can step in if I like, or like it flow past. Sometimes I have a twitter client running where I can change stuff via peripheral vision. Usually I just poke in to see what the recent 100 posts happen to be.

It's an ambient medium.

I'm surprised, then when people speak of using twitter to get news out on something (such as an upcoming local event), since there's a very good chance people will not see it (unless it gets repeated and re-repeated).

I have stopped following people who tend to not offer much useful info (I really don't care where you are eating breakfast, nor want to be reminded that you enjoy being a shill for someone's business). Basically, I prefer that any random slice of messages will have some actual information content in the mix.
wow I didn't know he was an investor in twitter
Surely this will be a problem for XML based template engines (Lift comes to mind)?
Or http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/47550