skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am jumping through hoops right now so that I can work for a startup based on technology I developed (that has already created 3 jobs).

It's pretty frustrating.
Career advice for new college grads - 7 tips for standing out
Everyone’s talking about Haskell
"News is a commodity; I'm sorry to say."

But quality, unique content is not...

There are many viable solutions that have yet to be tested & they might not resemble "paywalls."

Media outlets need to understand & appropriately segment their customers i.e. people willing to pay for specific products/services.

Regarding who might pay and how much, if content providers can tease out WTP across their viewer base, they are much more likely to build a paid model that could work.

Finally, what's that ubiquitous phrase..."And from viewers like you"? Oh that's right, NPR is kinda free - it's just that without paying viewers it would cease to exist. Strange how that works...

On a side note: The rest of the article about NPR.org was useful to see how a radio oriented news org is moving content online.
Files Vanished, Young Chinese Lose the Future
In other words, the outline of the shadow should be a circle projected onto a sphere.
My brother is a Canadian evolutionary biologist and he personally has no interest in going to the US to study for the same reasons - funding and insular attitudes.

He also happens to know many peers who have fled from the US to countries like Canada and Australia, where funding is actually attainable, and you don't get harassed by the pious brigade.

The impression I get talking to him is that the US is fast becoming a scientific backwater, especially when it comes to basic research. Sadly, I think the "they're takin 'er jerbs!" crowd is finally having an effect.
The hackers and founders meetups have been great. They consistently bring 30-60 people. I have made a ton of great connections and met some really interesting people. Its worth checking out if you haven't been! See everyone Thurs.
It's called not cutting corners and doing things right. It's long term thinking where profits don't immediately follow - but in Apple's case, thankfully they did.

The history of both Apple and Pixar has the companies dangling very close to the precipice of failure, only to be turned around because of love. Love for their products, users, whatever. And it shows, now.

Note that I am not an apple fanboy. The only apple product I own is an iPod - but I like the way they operate.
It's unlikely. Most democrats oppose this (protectionism) and many republicans oppose it as well (anti-immigration stance). It's lose-lose for immigrants.
The word on the street is 4chan was being hit by a SYN attack. The ACKs were directed to various ISPs, one of whom was AT&T, who all blocked 4chan in response.
My old roommate was recruited to write one of the chapters (on language internals and his CocoaCollider bridge), but last I heard MIT Press had dropped the project.

IIRC it would have been the first supercollider book.
That's not bizarre, that would be a brilliantly simple explanation of a bizarre phenomena. My brain hopes it's true, but has many questions. I guess the key question is a pretty old one: what determines time?

Anyway, assuming this is true should be an interesting thought experiment. If time is slowing down universally we shouldn't notice a difference (relativity). The suggestion seems to be that time is going slower in our older part of the universe than it is around the "edges". Making it seem to an observer in an older part like the expansion is going faster and faster, despite the fact that no energy is being added. This also seems to suggest there should be (even older) parts of the universe for which the perceived acceleration is negative. I wonder whether that's the case. A tricky bit is that if they are in fact moving towards us and we're moving away from them at a faster time pace, they would still appear to be moving away from us at an accelerating rate.

Another question is what would be the difference between those parts of the universe. One might argue that the older galaxies that have attracted more time-slowing mass, but that's shaky. Another idea might be that the speed of time is driven by the amount of active energy itself. Perhaps a new definition of entropy would help us there.

Hoping to hear more.
Add one more to the list: The Definitive Guide to Django: Web Development Done Right (http://www.djangobook.com/)
It uses strace, a Linux-specific file change notification hook. It's not available on BSD or (IIRC) OS X, though ktrace is, so it could conceivably be ported. (The page says something vague about cygwin having a comparable hook to strace. I haven't developed for cygwin, though.)

It looks like it checks for files modified specifically by its subprocesses.
I think that immigration to Canada is still on the rise. I can't source it, but I think I heard that immigration to Canada from American citizens has tripled in the last few years... As an educated professional with a college degree and whatnot, and one who speaks fluent English (or French), entry into Canada is almost a no-brainer under the skilled workforce immigration policy.

This is really an attitude thing. In the beginning the US was the place to be, so as non-Americans we all put up with the rampant bullshit you had to go through to get in the door. Now, there are choices, and the xenophobic attitude and the circus-like hoops you have to jump through to get in are no longer as attractive.

Not to mention that the US is now dealing with some major social changes (read: problems) that other countries have managed to avoid... health care for one...
Symbian Foundation crowdsourcing UI design
Would you claim, from a programmer's point of view and also from a user's, that Apple is usually doing the Right Thing?
Whatever happened to the Conficker worm?
Startup for sale. 
I'm selling my social network that I developed. Basically the idea is a social network for young entrpreneurs to discuss, learn about business, post their projects and find members and obviously the other social network features such as following a users, updating your status, sending messages, etc...

Please contact me at hajrice@gmail.com for more info...

Thanks,
Emil Hajric.
How to create a traffic jam
My view is that a lot of contest type things are not a good deal for the participants, and that it's a good idea to recognize that, going in. If there are external benefits, well, then it may be worth it. Otherwise, you're probably better off investing your time in something that's positive sum, such as, say, a startup. I would have thought that people here would get that.
I am so glad I barely pay any taxes anymore (income and spending)
And young artists.
The first thing Apple would do is not put any stock in "what would Apple do".

Sure, an 'Apple-like' startup would study Apple's approach along with everyone else's. But they'd draw their own conclusions and make their decisions based solely on what's right for their customers at that time.
Twitter Not Outlawed In The White House, And More Tweets Are Coming
> also the headline seems a bit over-dramatic it's not running out it's slowing down.

Good point. Time is only relative. I'm not sure if there would be any nasty (human) consequences to time going infinitely slow. It's still going at the same pace for the observer.
Your numbers are a bit off. New York Times circulation:

1,039,031 Daily

1,451,233 Sunday
Vote gamed: http://twitter.com/andrew_chen/status/2873238341
Not quite -- the money for the bailouts comes directly out of the taxpayers' pockets, in the form of taxes. So debtors, who are nominally also taxpayers, are effectively having to pay these companies twice. Once, because of their own poor decisions, and again, because of the lending companies' poor decisions.

In this case, I think that not paying is more a form of civil disobedience, Thomas Payne style, than anything else.
You might not need two fixed point objects. An equivalent approach may be to find the approximate average of movement with a high degree of measurement over all objects and map this out. If the total movement is greater than zero, then everything would be expanding, less and things would be moving closer together, and at zero matter would be static.

Check out the Friedmann equations for average density of the universe.
"DMCA".

Much as I'd like to just leave it there: Step 2 of this plan would be to sue people for circumvention. The DMCA contains a clause that copy protection must be "effective", but "effective" is not itself defined. This could go either way, although personally I'd argue the people "penetrating" the DRM would be the online newspapers that publish the articles in HTML without being protected, rather than the readers, since that is the point where the DRM is actually getting stripped off, not by the users copying and pasting.
When banks give loans to consumers in the form of credit cards, they charge 25% interest because it is really risky - note the 12.5% default rate mentioned in the article.

When consumers gives banks loans in the form of deposits, they get very little interest because it is so safe - with the FDIC around what tiny percent of deposits have been lost to consumers in the last 50 years?
At that point, the credit becomes a risky investment--a significant percentage of people paying 25% interest will never repay their debts. If there isn't any return on the ones that do, then these people will just get outright blacklisted from credit. (Maybe that's a good thing.)

If you bought junk bonds backed by high-interest consumer debt, you'd get a high interest rate too. Unless you got nothing. But you're probably a safer investor than Bank of America.

It's also a bargaining tactic for when these people finally wisen up and renegotiate their debts through a consolidation agency.
"It is said that papers in string theory are published at a rate greater than the speed of light. This, however, is not problematic since no information is being transmitted. "
The Paid Vote Paradox
I fell into one of these with one of my hobbies--nature photography.

A couple of years ago I setup JS Nature Photos (http://photos.jstechs.com) basically how it is now as a branch of another site at the time. Soon traffic to JS Nature Photos dwarfed traffic to the main site. The other site was fizzling anyway. Practically all of the revenue from JS Nature Photos is from ads (people don't buy photos online). It brought in some pretty good money through the first half of 2008, till the economy tanked.

I don't have time to do much with it with school, etc., posting a photo every week or two if I'm lucky, but it still pays the rent each month.
Depending on how much you think, of course.

Champion chess players, for instance, can burn something ridiculous like thousands of calories during a day of matches.
Couldn't agree more!

I wonder if we can break a record with this week's event, maybe 70? Come on NYC!
Why not come to this week's event for a different change of scenery and people?
I've never heard of digital dumbo but I see now that it's sold out. Doh!

I probably won't be at the HN meetup though. I haven't had any experience there that wasn't better replaced with the actual site.
Will VCs steal my ideas, email my deck to my competitor?
Very handy! Nice work, Sean. I like being able to quickly jump to threads with high comment counts.
Don't both of those cost much more than $6.99/mo?
Actually Canada actively recruits US immigrants. Send an email about H-1B visas using Gmail and soon you'll see an ad on the top saying something like "Stuck in an H1B visa? Canada will give you an expedited residency if you are a qualified immigrant". And it's goes to a Canadian govt. website with a form asking for your phone number. THEY contact YOU!

If I could bear the cold I'd skoot over to Toronto in the blink of an eye.
I wonder how much students who are poor look in high school like medium-achieving students when they would really be high-achieving students if they were in a more resource-rich environment.

See

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

for an example of what I am concerned about.
It's a good question. In my experience as a designer, I can't say I've seen a ton of quality shops that specialize in the web-entrepreneur market. I'm sure this is due to my own ignorance, but I'd say that the general lack of responses in this thread is telling. That said, as for comprehensive resources, I don't have much for you. I can think of a few specific vendors, though:

- Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain of 31Three is damn good:
http://31three.com

- Newism does excellent work:
http://newism.com.au/

- You could do worse than my own shop, General Projects:
http://generalprojects.com

- Weight Shift is hiring, so you know they're doing pretty well:
http://weightshift.com

- Airbag Industries did the Postbox site, which is excellent:
http://airbagindustries.com

If you've got a monster budget, The Barbarian Group and Huge Inc are some of the best in the web design business. Very savvy, very effective.

http://www.barbariangroup.com
http://hugeinc.com/

37signals uses an in-house designers. Fairly certain Wufoo does too.
I learned both CVS and SVN from their canonical, free books. (I barely remember their names. They're "the CVS book" and "the SVN book", and you all know how to find them. ;)

So it's no surprise that folks are now trying to create canonical, free books for the next generation of VC as well.

I will start forwarding this to people I know at once.
FYI: the equivalent English expressions are "The squeaky wheel gets the grease" and "There's no harm in asking."
> Saying a winner-takes-all contest is "zero sum" in any sense is utterly nonsensical

I thought that zero sum just meant that the total score of all players is a constant, regardless of the strategies chosen?
I didn't think it was government supported, so I checked - from http://www.npr.org/about/privatesupport.html :

"A very small percentage -- between one percent to two percent of NPR's annual budget -- comes from competitive grants sought by NPR from federally funded organizations, such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts."

So I was wrong. That page also says that NPR's revenue mostly comes from membership dues and fees from stations, sponsorship and retail sales.
Right. I briefly used R for research while I was in school. It was definitely a valuable tool for generating sets of random numbers, doing some statistical operations on them (PCA and SVD if you must know), and outputting them to a file that I could then pipe to my C program. It was a good example of doing one thing and doing it [pretty] well.

That said, I only learned enough of R to get it to do what I wanted. The help in the interactive mode was all I really had to go off of then, and that was very helpful with plenty of examples. Being a relatively uncommon, single-letter language name, google wasn't giving me anything useful at the time. I see that is now much improved now, but this tutorial - mapping it to other languages and explaining syntax gotchas - would have saved me several hours of ramp-up for the simple tasks I wanted to accomplish.
Some good hard core stuff here. Conrgats on the numbers.
Ask HN: Is learning algorithms and datastructures really important?
Yes I know this is a dumb question, hear me out.

(I am a regular here on HN, using an alternate id to avoid my history "polluting" this post.) A student going through her Bachelors in Comp Sci asked me a simple question which staggered me a bit and I wasn't able to give a coherent answer, which disturbs me a little. This was the question

" Why do I really have to learn algorithms and datastructures, (beyond the basics) Most (almost every? ) professional programmer's work involves gluing libraries together and/or debugging or maintaining existing codebases. Granted, it is important to have an overview of the important data structures and algorithms and understand the O notation and so on, but the impression I have is that a deep knowledge of algorithms is not important to the vast majority of programming work or to be a goood programmer or Open SOurce contributor. Is my impression correct?"

What do HN ers think? Do you have to use formal algorithmic analysis in your work? What kind of project would demand deep knowledge of algorithms?

What would be a good Open Source project where an algorithms expert would be able to add significant his expertise (assuming he is a good programmer/ debugger etc)? (This was a followup question).

I always assumed that deep algorithmic knowledge would be a great skill to have, and now I can't justify that assumption to my satsifaction! It freaked me out a bit and I thought I'd tap HN.

How should I answer this young student? Help!
(Assuming this submission get some traction, I'll ask her to read the comments on this.)

Any comments greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
It's an interesting concept - but I'm still apprehensive about it. I mean, you are talking about two non-trivial things that are currently well outside Twitter's competencies:

- creation of (yet another) online currency and (yet another) micropayments platform.

- a "matchmaking" platform that's completely unlike the "following/follower" system that Twitter has going right now.

The question at this point would be: why Twitter? Since the question doesn't go out to your followers (rather, to the general public), and since the response system is unlike Twitter feeds at all... what makes this a "Twitter" idea? This completely fails to integrate with their present service offerings. You won't be able to leverage much (if any) of their existing technology... I don't see a compelling reason for this to be a Twitter thing to do, as opposed to another startup (like, say, Vark?)
> [complicated tool ...] Lots of obscurely-named variables, for starters.

Are you talking about make or just GNU make? The $< $* $$@ stuff comes from gmake. Make itself is pretty simple. Here's a good tutorial: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/pmake/
haha, I'm hardly saying that "you'd be miserable otherwise anyway."

I'm saying that death and birth together, but only together, allow new starts. Any wild deviations in individuals, be they bad, such as depression, or great, like genius, end with that individual. We lose some wonderful and some damaged people, but the steady stream of endings and beginnings permits us to continuously renew and reassess our values and direction as a society and species.

Yes, you will not get to live forever, but it also means that human beings are healthier for having had so much variety of experience.
Both issues are symptoms of a country without effective governance.
Does the use of digital restriction management respect the first-sale doctrine?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
Are you comparing powershell with Unix terminal ? :O
This appears to be ongoing improvement; Wolfram Alpha was very poor on nutrition information at introduction, but seems much better now (although still with a long ways to go).
It absolutely is.

I've witnessed this debate a few times now, and every time it is absolutely two groups of mostly-correct people arguing past each other about the definition of the problem. Half of them are assuming the runway is a treadmill going backwards, but otherwise the same, and the other half are assuming that something is physically preventing the plane from going forward (and, presumably, backward) while we run a treadmill beneath the plane and wait for it to take off. A much smaller group of people want the treadmill to run backwards fast enough to counteract the forward force of the engines, but this just involves destroying the plane or the treadmill so I tend to ignore it as an uninteresting problem.

Long, tedious, mostly-correct explanations of why the other side is wrong tend to follow.

Personally, I give the nod to the first group of people since the problem is never specified with anything holding the plane, and consequently that's an added entity not in the specification. However, you are free to frame the problem any way you choose, and it's perfectly valid to say there is such a thing. But you should be aware that you're not arguing the same thing as the other guy.

This one is unique among the "world-killing" problems I know, in that there is generally a right and a wrong side. In this case, both sides are usually fairly right, just talking past each other.

Which, IMHO, makes this a rather intensely boring HN debate, all ye in the other thread.
would love to, but we are on the panel this month and giving away a few prizes via our Rolladeck application
I find that when I am learning something new, memorizing some facts is an important part of the process, kind of like establishing a set of axioms before using them to prove something. As I build more expertise, I can revisit those memorized facts later with greater understanding instead of simply being able to recite them. I find flash cards to be useful for that purpose.

You definitely have a point: you can't exclusively use flash cards to develop a good understanding of any subject. However, I think that they are one of many useful techniques that you can use for studying and question whether using flash cards automatically means that you are a "DUMB" kid.

It's great that you were able to learn outside of the classroom by reading books and newspapers on your own, but I don't think that incident means that flash cards are in ineffective technique. Relying on outdated flash cards to teach the children geography means that the teachers were not up to date on current events and that the school did not update their learning materials frequently enough.
World Facing Food Crisis In Second Half Of 2009
did you know that you can only photograph Steve Jobs from one side

Image search shows both sides:

http://bit.ly/13hFil

Perhaps that's hyperbole.
Arizona State University to try out e-textbooks on Kindle
To be fair, get ready for a rude income shock. I am one of the (few?) Canadians who recently came to the US to work. Why? Honestly, because I got an offer that was double what any Canadian company was willing to offer me.

Software in Canada is second class - salaries are nowhere near the US levels, and much of the work is "scrap" from Americans.

Everywhere I look in Canada I see satellite offices to large American software companies. Invariably these offices do the boring, mundane code that nobody wants to pay $150K to a Californian to do. That's what I mean when I say "scrap" - monkey work, not real dev. It's hard to find a Canadian shop that writes real, meaningful code.
There's a great quote from the article:

"most of your peers wouldn’t even get into the game due to some unspoken belief that in a meritocracy, good things will come to those who wait. Perhaps if you have a union job based on seniority, but not in any startup I’ve ever seen."
"Arizona State University to try out e-textbooks on Kindle"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=726389
Fortunately, they just opened up a few more spots. If you want to go, here is the link:
http://www.eventbrite.com/event/383305477/

If anyone from HN is going to be there, our team will be wearing the white My Bank Tracker shirts. Come talk to us.
They should just get a phone where you can set unknown numbers to have a silent ring tone.
When I was more of a window user, I used 'virtualisation' rather than loading cygwin. Now when I'm mature enough I still use virtualisation to run some window programs which are not happy on fedora/OSX :)
Rosetta Stone Announces TOTALe, Language Instruction With A Social Bent
I find the whole idea of the scenario this article describes horrifying, is this portrayal of highly centralized sans backup documentation true? Is there a technological solution to this that can become culturally accepted or is deeper reform needed before even this problem can be fixed?