skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The key is to come up with a well-formulated question, such as "I wonder if I can predict stock trends." Then in doing so, you'll search the web and come across predictive modeling, which will lead to machine learning techniques, which will lead to good resources. Within those machine learning sources, search for chapters on prediction and classification, and you'll come across regression techniques, support vector machines, relevance vector machines, etc. Then you'll wonder, "ok, how do I actually solve this problem" so you may search for "SVM implementations" and find Steve Gunn's for Matlab for example. Then after much codebanging, you'll realize that inorder to solve this problem, you need a good dataset, so you go to Yahoo finance and see if you can download some data for IBM.

This is usually the process one needs to follow, albeit with some intermediate steps switched out for others here and there.
It doesn't fall into any of the fair use exceptions. The USA fair use exceptions are far more liberal than in other jurisdictions. Simply because the use was not anticipated in the creation of the work doesn't mean that you are free (libre) to do it.

Is it parody? Is it educational? Is it news reporting? Is it an insubstantial part? No, not "fair use" in the UK.

In the US there's the notion of the use being incidental, which definitely works for documentaries but I think you'd be hard to swing it in this instance. With a good lawyer he should be able to win that case IMO.

This is not legal advice, I'm not a copyright lawyer.
That's where you're mistaken. In this example, because you didn't craft a meaningful cover letter, you disqualified yourself even if you were a perfect fit.

Had you read the posting and spent a few minutes explaining why you were good at the two things they asked for, you would have been called in for an interview.
Murdoch papers to charge for websites by 2010
Actual article here: http://scobleizer.com/2009/08/05/you-are-so-unfollowed/
While Snow Leopard is maybe not as big as most other updates to the Mac OS, please don't equate OSX versions with Service Packs on Windows. They're not just small updates, they're entire overhauls of large parts of the OS. For instance, Snow Leopard includes an entire re-write of the Finder.

I could also argue that Windows XP was a "minor upgrade" from Win2k, because Win2k is WindowsNT 5.0 and XP is 5.1. In a similar manner, Vista is NT6 and Windows 7 is NT6.1.

The numbers don't really have anything to do with anything.
Gawker blog network suffers denial-of-service attack
AMD reverses GPGPU trend, announces OpenCL SDK for x86
It just doesn't look like anything.

The first time I saw the logo was at O'Hare aiport. I thought it was an ad for Korean Air.
Sure I can see the single rigid schema view. But I'd rather see the K/V as just a persistence mechanism. I view the schema as being more related to the application.

meta-programming relationship:
Since you can store anything in the value part of a K/V store. You could (and I do) store the schema definitions for the other values in the data store. And while you are at it, you could store code segments.

So imagine the following key store (in pseudo code):

{ key: 1728273, value: { fields: { first_name: string, last_name: string } } }

{ key: 8274289, value: { type: 1728273, data: { first_name: "Bruce", last_name: "Saunders" }}}

You could stuff code segments in there in a similar way. So I think K/V stores are potentially highly related to meta-programming. Though certainly the two could exist entirely separately of each other.
Given the format (that voting for topics is "saving") it wouldn't really makes sense for that to be enabled.
I'm afraid that's unaplicable. If it were, the whole concept of "submarine patent" would not exist —at least not for famous things, like theora.
Some Treatment Options For Prostate Cancer
Agree with you. But, I believe creative people get bored easily except when they are not creating something and so they would get bored of too much gambling, drinking, dressing up, spending money, finding/buying sex. All these vices are mostly ways of removing brain clog (engaging the brain in trivial activities so that the creative part can sleep and start afresh). But there are better ways of doing this.
And why is this news?
merged? Nope. Just the usual svn style of moving stuff around.

Laurent had better not just experimented with git but actually used it. Aside of a small amount of very minor merge conflicts, he would have been able to actually merge.

What he has done, when I'm interpreting the message correctly, is reintroducing all the bugs that were fixed in trunk between the merge point and current head.

I don't blame him though. svn and merges don't go very well together (I hear it got better with 1.5 though)
what do people think?
Interesting development! One thing I don't get is if you are developing stuff for GPGPUs and you don't have one yourself that getting one is hardly a big hurdle.

The cheapest cards that will work are in the $100 range, hardly a major expense.

The GPGPU is probably one of the biggest developments in the last couple of years, it puts enormous power in the hands of individuals with a surprisingly small power bill and footprint.

~300W for a 480 core machine is not bad at all!
That's a good point, I had not looked at it that way.

I always figured it was Gates that had Jobs over a barrel, you make a convincing argument that it was actually the other way around.
Sneak Peak at  Brizzly, a Twitter App Now in Private Beta
True - I started programming around 1½ years ago, since it seemed like a good skill to have. Without HN I wouldn't have come as far as I have, and would be oblivious to a lot of core concepts such as the MVC model and recursion. So thank you HN for teaching me stuff I didn't know before.
I'm really having trouble understanding the value here. Is there something more to this company than line charts?
Watch out, developers: Here come the lawyers
The Delusion of the Perfect Product
47 now ;)

200 doesn't seem too difficult, it just appeared strange that when I finally got there it disappeared 2 days later.
Sounds like a good reason to move to SF

Many of the coffee shops in SF have already taken steps to limit laptop usage. Ritual removed all the power plugs. Four Barrel purposely does not have wifi. Same with the newer Blue Bottle in Mint Plaza. Certain cafes like Sugarlump and that one in Bernal which I forgot the name have very bad wifi that they do not fix, on purpose, to limit the number of laptop users. Mami Tobi's in Hayes Valley also does not have wifi, on purpose.

All the coffee shops in the Inner Richmond charge for Wifi, except for Martha Bros, which doesn't have any reasonable seating.

Reverie in Cole Valley removed the wifi years ago. Oddly enough the wifi removal was initiated by Craig Newmark.

Unfortunately in cities like SF or "college towns" the free wifi in cafes is severely abused. People will buy the cheapest cup of coffee and then sit there for 8 hours. When I lived in Cambridge, it was impossible to sit at the 1369 coffee shop at any time during the day because the seating was completely taken up by laptop lurkers. They ended up moving to paid wifi to fix the situation. Ritual in SF is crowded enough even with no power plugs. When they had the power plugs, the laptop usage there was ridiculous.

At this point in time the only draw of many of the coffee shops with wifi in SF is actually the wifi itself. For instance, Mission Creek Cafe has awful coffee, food and service. The only reason anyone goes there is because there are power outlets and wifi.

Any coffee shop that limits or bans internet usage will quickly loose trade to those that embrace it

Coffee shops lose money on heavy wifi users. Laptop lurkers are usually students and freelancers - people who take up space and don't spend much money. Coffee shops make money by... selling coffee. The coffee shop that has done the best financially in San Francisco is Blue Bottle, which not only didn't have wifi, it didn't have a physical space. It was just a kiosk underneath a garage door in an alley. Yet, it consistently has 20 people lined up.
IM/Skype-like clients with an added status message logger (side note: ideally OSS client and protocol, p2p (with async message buffer), encrypted).

Every time a user changes his status message it gets logged as if it were a tweet. It's more like facebook than twitter, though, in the sense that only mutual "friendships" would be possible (could be made configurable: "allow anyone to see my status updates, but not my online status, and only allow mutual friends to chat/talk to me").

It would be a pretty good signal to noise ratio for most people.
Murdoch signals end of free news
Three years in Europe with Trolltech
My two favorite orientations to what statistics is all about are two free articles on the Web. Both recommend books for further reading, and they are good books.

"Advice to Mathematics Teachers on Evaluating Introductory Statistics Textbooks"

http://statland.org/MyPapers/MAAFIXED.PDF

"The Introductory Statistics Course: A Ptolemaic Curriculum?"

http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=10...

Here's a list of the best beginning textbooks:

http://www.mrderksen.com/textbooks.htm
Microsoft diagrees with you, they think windows mobile is definitely core business:

They just launched a guide on how to port from the iphone to windows mobile:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/mar09/03-11wmm...

and

http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobilize/microsoft-details-how-po...

They may lose the battle (just like the zune has already lost the battle, I'm surprised they haven't cut it yet) but for now they're putting up a fight.
Being an American, and having been through American public schools, I cling to the belief that we were justified, that it was the humane thing to do, that a conflict with the Japanese on land would have resulted in a greater loss of life, that it was a swift end to Japan's malevolent ambitions in Asia, and that while we did something bad, they did worse in Nanjing. It's what they told me in school.

My wife and I argue about it; her being from New Zealand, where there is a greater population of Japanese immigrants, and where they abhor Nuclear technology (nuclear ships are not allowed in kiwi ports.) has given her a different perspective.

What was the alternative?

Relatedly, why do we never talk about firebombing? That's a pretty terrible fate too, and we all did it. Why do they not teach us of our own villainy in school, so we can learn not to revisit it? All I ever heard in school was what we did right and what the Germans did wrong. There was passing mention of Hiroshima, but that was the extent of our wrong. They never told me about our internment of the Japanese.
Vanessa Hudgens Leaked NUDE Photos 2009
Wasn't there also a part to not sue for code from Quicktime ending up in Windows? Which would have netted a large sum in court.

(As far as I can remember, Apple had some third company port Quicktime and after Microsoft saw that, they asked the company to make "Video for Windows" to not look like "Slides for Windows".)

Edit: (Some syntax fixes.)
According to this page, the Quicktime deal was the most important part. That fits with my memory. The article is a bad hack job. (The page also mentions that Microsoft tried to extort Apple to not support video playback on Windows.)

http://www.technstuff.com/windows/history-of-quicktime-did-y...

"Steve Jobs brokered a deal with Microsoft that dropped the QuickTime code theft case in exchange for a visible partnership that made Microsoft an investor in Apple and ensured regular new releases of Office for Mac."
One of the links in the comments was to a site to tell the phone company not to send you Yellow Pages or White Pages: http://www.yellowpagesgoesgreen.org/stop-yellow-pages/
No, students won't pay for anything -- because they can't. They might spin this, but they aren't riding a half broken down 94 Chevy Lumina because they hate BMWs. Most college students are earning well into negative territory, taking loans to pay basic expenses.

At some point you make money at a rate that you can pay your bills and some is left over. Suddenly it's not economical for you to spend 14 hours a week roaming around trying to score free wifi. When you are older, time is the most limited resource, not money. Suddenly there aren't enough hours in the day to do what you want to do, and you will pay for things that let you do things you want to do.
Oh the irony. For years people have wondered how they could curb the power of Murdoch, now he does it all by himself.

Bring it on, I would like to suggest $10 / article as a starting price, then increase the price to maintain revenues on a monthly basis.

I give it a maximum of three months before he'll come to his senses.
Based on the book recommendations I've been given by people who supposedly use statistics all the time, I don't believe that many trained statisticians have any idea what they are doing.

Many people working with statistics in their employment have never grappled with the issues of adequate descriptive statistics or reasonable inference. Besides the recommendations I just posted above,

http://statland.org/MyPapers/MAAFIXED.PDF

http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=10...

see

Statistics: A Guide to the Unknown 4th edition

http://www.amazon.com/Statistics-Guide-Roxy-Peck/dp/05343728...

for articles with examples of what statistics is really all about.
Devore is a very good author on statistics.
This event is featured in the tv movie 'Pirates of Silicon Valley', if I remember correctly.
Interesting article. I only follow 100 or so people, and there is no way I could catch up on tweets that happen while I'm sleeping or on a plane. Too boring.
Why awk instead of cut?
Apple might have cost MS some sales, but it is worth
~30x more today. Even if 150million was not a big deal the 4.5 billion ROI is nothing to complain about. Granted, I don't know if or when they sold that back.

PS: I also think Jobs might have gotten back into the computer bis if Apple had folded. He made a lot of money from Pixar and could have easly started something from scrach. IMO, Apple, NeXT, and Pixar are all technology companies with a focus on good design.
A downvote could be used to program a bayesian filter though, even if it would not be counted.
http://www.mrderksen.com/textbooks.htm

These books have good indexes leading to statistics issues in particular fields of research or applications.
No, quit thinking backwards. A new form of social networking will be championed by the young and early adapters, soon enough. I'm not going to suggest what is next, but I know it won't have annoying profile pages where users can list endless and pointless information about favorite TV shows, movies, books, etc. I have noticed that a lot of people have stopped filling in static profile data, or greatly shortened what they had - Gen-y moves fast and is too dynamic to be labeled/pigeonholed with static data.

Another idea that I have for the future of social networking is that it will open up again, or become less private. The problem with facebook is that it has become a glorified rolodex where you can list and keep track of everyone you know, but you don't find or meet anyone new, anymore, because everyone has private profiles. Thus, the only people you friend are old classmates, relatives, or people you meet in the "real-world". It used to be the opposite, I used to friend new people all the time by searching networks with like interests or by stumbling onto people through friends of friends. People will either need to loosen up, or use virtual aliases so that people can actually network and find other like-minded friends on "social" networks, again.
I always cock an eyebrow when I'm at the mall (usually dragged along) and I look around and see that everything has the same 25% off tag.

Of course, it should also be noted that 50 bucks was way too high of a price for L4D in the first place. Valve was selling Team Fortress 2 for 20 bucks at the time, if I recall correctly (and it was 30 at launch). So I feel they got the boon of the sale, and also the boon of the "finally, a reasonable price" effect.
Transparency: Who is Coming to America?
Very true and now that I have a credit card I totally forgot about those days. At one point I had a prepaid debit card that could be used, if only GameStop or Best Buy had them available co branded with a micropayment service.
I think it's more accurate to say that the set of YC applicants is close to 100% included by HN users, but I suspect that the set of HN users is much larger.

Does anyone have an idea of how many HN users there are? I know several users (in person) who have been around for several years, but have never applied to YC.
It is only a brief introduction and should be nothing more than a starting point, but "The Manga Guide To Statistics" http://www.amazon.com/Manga-Guide-Statistics-Shin-Takahashi/... is a good first book.
Don't you think they have spent a lot of time thinking this through, consulting with experts, and debating internally whether its been a good decsion? At least I hope they did.

If there's a chance they could successfully pull off a system where visitors pay a few cents for a quality article, why wouldn't it make sense for them to do it?
> "When I unfollowed everyone all my spam just stopped. Dead. No more spam. Not since Monday. Twitter is actually quite enjoyable. Not a single DM spam. Not a single piece of spam has come through the home page."

I don't think it's fair to call it "spam" when you have chosen to follow the accounts who are "spamming" you (it's certainly not unsolicited tweeting). It's not spam, he's just been sloppy in choosing which accounts to follow.
I think this makes broad strokes using a finite subset of people. Of course they won't pay for facebook if they had to, imagine asking your parents for your $39 yearly membership to facebook...

I do enjoy what I get for free, but if push comes to shove I don't see myself leaving gmail no matter what the final yearly cost is.
Respectfully, some context

http://hnn.us/articles/44729.html

I found this looking for the longer George Elsey quote, which goes something like this:

But perhaps George M. Elsey, a young naval intelligence officer assigned to the Truman White House, provided the best reply to revisionist historians and others who question the decision to drop the atomic bombs. Asked by David McCullough for his biography of the President (Truman, Simon & Schuster, 1992) about the decision, Elsey replied: "Truman made no decision because there was no decision to be made. He could no more have stopped it than a train moving down a track. It's all well and good to come along later and say the bomb was a horrible thing. The whole goddamn war was a horrible thing."
You can always flag...
On a realted note, any word when startup school will be this year?
HN gets about 30K visitors / day I believe, and I think that most of those are 'repeat' visitors.

There are a significant number of 'lurkers' though, plenty of them have never logged in.

A good rule of thumb is 90/10, 10% of your users creates 90% of the content. If HN follows that then there should be about 3K active members logged in and at a minimum voting once every day.

You can apply the 90/10 rule recursively, and the leaderboard seems to confirm that.
School Forces Boy To Chain-Smoke 42 Cigarettes
A Malaysian teacher forced a student to smoke 42 cigarettes - sometimes four at a time - over two hours as punishment after finding the boy had a cigarette and lighter, a news report said Thursday.
Serious Twitter, LiveJournal Outage Ongoing
Tiny Core: The Little Distro That Could
Enormous, but extremely specialized power.

I'm not sure if most people understand the kinds of threads/cores that GPUs actually have, and with that, the kinds of computations they're actually good at. A GPU's threads are extremely simple execution pipelines - nothing like the cores of an Intel Quad Core chip. Groups of GPU threads actually execute together in lock-step, executing the same code (but with different parameters).

Such devices are extremely good at handling data parallelism - where the same computation is performed on a large chunk of data - seen in areas such as graphics and scientific computing. But you're probably not going to, say, speed up your webserver with a GPU. If you don't have a computation that is extremely data parallel - that is, capable of having thousands of execution contexts working on data at the same time - a GPU won't help.
I've got a lot of respect for Seth Godin, but sometimes I feel like his blog posts are just regurgitating facts we already know. Yes, it's important to talk to whoever will be consuming your product. Yes, it's important to set clearly defined goals. He doesn't even mention fact that here are also drawbacks to heavy design up front.
Not really anything new, but maybe it helps to be reminded every once and a while...
Apache MINA - Codec Repository
Seems that doesn't even work anymore...Twitter seems to be completely dead...anyone else having trouble accessing it?
Because they're panicking.

Their business model is under threat from 'free' stuff and so their response is to do what worked in the past, close the gates and set up a toll booth. Only this time it won't work, there are 100's of little side roads now, and you no longer have to use the 'main' road to get the news you are looking for.

People used to be 'loyal' to their newspapers, that's why the payments rolled in. That loyalty is very low, as long as the writing is good I really don't care whether I'm reading my stuff in German, French, English or Dutch and from what newspaper or other outlet it comes. So many choices, it's a delight. The AP feed relaying to fill the newspapers was a clever idea to save some money at the time but in the long term it backfired, it meant that there was less reporting in general, not that the reporters that were freed up were used to go digging.

It's only a matter of time before google or some other large party will hire a bunch of reporters directly and gets them to make the missing element (quality editorial content) and with the trouble at the regular newspapers I'm thinking that it will be a buyers market when they do.
Well, if the jQuery library is loaded (file-wise), and nothing is used from it - well, nothing should init.

What I profiled as taking that long was the jQuery init functions, which I assumed were required (and called by) the plugin.

Then again, I'm not as familiar with jQuery as I once was. All I know is that I don't like method chaining (impossible to set mid-line breakpoints and try/catch blocks), the extended element (if it's anything like prototype) is extremely heavy and not needed a majority of the time, and if you use massive amounts of it (see: slashdot) the user experience is deleteriously affected.

And really, 500ms initialization (even if it's jQuery and not the plugin initializing, that's a long time) for a user-experience-worsening toy like this.. I don't see the point.
Del.icio.us starts to pay attention again
Businesses will. Older more affluent customers will.

Too many startup founders aim for their own age group. I feel like the term "target market" never caught on in Silicon Valley. Not many companies start out chasing the 14-21 demographic unless you want to lock in a brand preference for later (i.e. Abercrombie). 21-49 is a lot better, affluent is a lot better, enterprise or b2b is a lot better, yet for some reason the competition is at the bottom because that is what founders know. Find the problems elsewhere and you will be much safer.
This looks to me like a publicity stunt since ATI's original GPGPU offering was a flop. Nvidia's OpenCL SDK actually works on their graphics cards though it is in limited beta last I checked.
Good god, when will the madness end?

"Another developer who built an e-book reader received a recent rejection along the same lines. The application might be used to read copyright infringing books, so Apple will not let it in App Store."

But couldn't OS X also be used to play copyright infringing MP3s, software and videos?