skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a most excellent vintage 1980s lecture by Robert Anton Wilson titled "The Jumping Jesus Phenomenon". The gist of it can be found at the rawilson.com website as well as elsewhere.

Wilson defines the "jesus" (small j) as the number of scientific facts known at the time of Jesus. Then he goes on to count how many years it takes to double that number. By his count, humanity accumulated 2j by about the year 1500. Then 4j by the year 1750, and so on. I forget the exact numbers but the point of the lecture was that our j-factor was increasing at an ever-increasing rate. By Wilson's estimation the curve would go vertical sometime around ... wait for it ... the year 2012.

This reads a lot like Kurzweil's singularity hypothesis (among others) but I'm not sure who developed the concept first.
classic example of how taking the time (or growing the balls) to ask for something is 90% of the way to getting it.
Its pretty common for big companies to have internal apps designed exclusively for various versions of IE, because they can control what browsers their employees use, but this is just plain ridiculous!

When you design and build a web app for public consumption you need to develop for ALL major browsers or risk losing business. These guys are nuts!
Penumbra -- OpenGL in Clojure
That helps you, but does it help Obama (assuming Obama's goal is to get re-elected) or the median U.S. voter?
You might be over thinking it. Maybe it's just something fun to do. :)
'Senator Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Senate immigration subcommittee, said in June that U.S. policy will aim to "encourage the world's best and brightest individuals to come to the U.S. and create the new technologies and businesses…but must discourage businesses from using our immigration laws as a means to obtain temporary and less expensive foreign labor."'

I'm curious for the opinion of Hacker News readers on Schumer's statement. Do you agree or disagree that this should be the goal for U.S. immigration policy? (and why)
Brilliant but Doomed: Technology's Most Magnificent Failures
Where does the revenue come from? Just ads?
IPhone Maker in China Is Under Fire After a Suicide
In the long run, one might suspect that it helps most workers (being part of the economy in general) to have a larger pool of skilled labor doing productive work.
Microsoft on the Cusp
New Car Buying
You don't need to enter in dependencies with 'make' either (suffix rules or makedepend). Don't get me wrong, fabricate looks great, but let's not misrepresent the power of make in the right hands. From the docs:

files.o : files.c defs.h buffer.h command.h
cc -c files.c

I don't know a programmer beyond the introductory level that still writes this in their make file. :-p
Eat Blueberries to Improve Sexual Performance | TechJaws
Two Beautiful Mathematical Documentaries
Amazon Faces a Fight Over Its E-Books
Apple Tablet Ready by Xmas, Served with Multimedia 'Cocktail ...
I want this pleasant summer afternoon to last forever. Can I upload that too? Because that makes about as much sense.
I'm not sure you can be for or against it, because it doesn't make much sense. How are you going to decide if a businesses is hiring the best or the cheaper? Isn't best a function of price? Aren't all business trying to maximize profits?
Why did no one see it [the crisis] coming?
Georgia Tech's Advanced Technology Development Center now open to more companies
Seeing as most of our society is divided into specialised jobs, perhaps there should be positions for some individuals who are jack of all traders but masters of none.
and the associated Georgia Tech press release: http://www.gatech.edu/newsroom/release.html?id=3183
The internet: Unfair competition for newspapers
This practice seriously pisses me off. I really hope it doesn't catch on...
Familiar mailboxes vanish into cyberspace
Not just a possibility, its an emerging method of taking the web technologies to the desktop. You can mix AS3 and HTML/JS for a very clean, and fast implementation of typical desktop UI features. Honestly, AIR is perhaps the easiest way to package these sorts of things.
I am a paying subscriber for Spotify, love the service, and very much look forward to having it on my iPhone. I would heartily recommend the premium service; it's reasonably priced, easy to use, and relatively comprehensive.
There's a lot of scale mixing in this. There's been a lot of inflation since the new deal. Does this factor that in? Australia's GNP for one year and the Canadian stock exchange don't strike me as impressively large. As soon as they mention them your mind jumps to the better known equivalents which are bigger.
Ahum, no civilization: no books, no music, no building.
The UI challenge: Windows 7 vs Mac OS X
I'd sell Green Cards, with a portion of the fee going into a background check (more to buy off the Republican Party than anything else). I think about $50k is fair, but you could calibrate the number as desired. Heck, if you want, impose a quota, issue securities entitling the bearer to one green card, and then auction them like T-bills. Transferable or non-transferable, your call.

This system is easy to understand, transparent, and offers certainty that the patchwork quilt of immigration statuses does not. You'd hear a lot less whinging from the nativist set if they were automatically $50k less expensive than the next guy. This would essentially eliminate any abuse of (legal) foreign labor, as employers would no longer hold any particular power over the fates of their employees, other than the usual ones accorded by contract law. (I can see Microsoft or whomever offering to foot the bill if they were guaranteed 3 years of service, and have absolutely no problem with that arrangement.)

It would also be easier for desirable foreign laborers to interface with. Believe me, I can tell you from personal experience, NOTHING scares me like a routine visit to get my visa renewed. It is the only time when I am ever totally at the mercy of a clerk who has a Destroy My Life button on his computer. Folks trying to fit an extended stay in the US into their near-term life plans must have similar emotions. This would quiet them. Pay the license fee. Get the green card. Simple, easy, fullproof.

Besides, you can essentially buy your way around immigration laws anyhow, so we might as well be honest about it.
AT&T vs 4chan - the aftermath
Check out http://www.semrush.com/search.php?q=mashable.com&x=0&... for a further breakdown.

They are also pretty close to being first page for "facebook" and "myspace" terms in google. Although most volume reported for those terms is likely to be navigational searches and result in little traffic to mashable
Making Firefox faster for humans
James Duncan's JSConf 2009 Presentation on the Joyent Smart Platform Posted
This is very convenient now that Java (as of 1.6) has JavaScript/Rhino built in as an implementation of the Scripting API: http://snipplr.com/view/17501/javascript-swing-application/

Execution is as simple as 'jrunscript app.js'.
Kindle and the Future of Reading
"The Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX), a subsidiary of the TMX Group Inc., is the largest stock exchange in Canada, the third largest in North America and the eighth largest in the world by market capitalization." (Wikipedia)

Also, from the same article: "As of 31 December 2007, the TSX had 3,951 listed companies with a combined market capitalization of $2.2 trillion."

To me, that seems impressively large enough.
Just auctioning off green cards to people who meet basic requirements (background checks, English fluency) seems to be the fairest way to allocate a scarce resource.

I'm not sure if residency (or even citizenship) is naturally or artificially scarce; I don't think rich retirees, or smart entrepreneurs, lower the quality of life for existing citizens, but an argument could possibly be made that lower skill employees might increase supply and thus depress wages for certain categories of labor (especially positions with an inelastic demand).

I would certainly prefer 100k immigration slots going to 100k predominantly indian and chinese engineers than 10k indian engineers, 10k chinese engineers, and 80k family members of existing immigrants from around the world of varying education, skill, and wealth.
A contest like this one (with such a large prize at stake) should have seen this coming and instituted a different rule for their deadline. Something like "24 hours after the last submission." Therefore you wouldn't have someone sniping the win like it seems has happened.
YASnippet Updated – Supports Nested Placeholders and More
Distinguishing Strings from Lists in Erlang
Is it just me that is gutted that this isn't available for the non-premium members? I would have quite happily continued to use the occasional audio advert experience on my phone.
This reminds me to ask, is anyone aware of any beginner-friendly books on audio synthesis? Be it using csound, supercollider, or chuck, just something that explains concepts reasonably well.
Make that a Sept. launch for the Apple tablet
evolution is not directional
AT&T Restores Access to 4chan
Make that a "maybe". Discuss more details from Mashable at

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=725691
An upgrade from G1 phone
Somehow, Hawking observes, "some of these atoms came to be arranged in the form of molecules of DNA. One possibility is that the formation of something like DNA, which could reproduce itself, is extremely unlikely.

Or it could be quite likely. There are theories that amino acids can form without life. Just get something resembling our planet's crust and they'll form and then they can form peptide chains and and so on. This means that any planet similar to earth could end up not just with carbon based life but with DNA based life.
Actually, the top teams have already started negotiating with other companies for the technology that they came up with. Knowledge is never zero-sum.
Cloud for small businesses/startups: Egnyte raises $6M more
Right. Make already knows how to convert .c to .o, all you need to say is

files.c: defs.h buffer.h command.h

and there are tools such as makedepend (for C and OCaml, off the top of my head) that generate those listings automatically, so you just add this to the Makefile:

include (autogenerated dependency listing file)

While the mandatory tab in Make syntax is a genuine wart, make has been around long enough that there are several other tools that know how to work with it.

(Now, having the scan for access time changes added as a warning to Make might not be a bad idea. "WARNING: You forgot this dependency")
Our national debt is going to go up.
Sure, if you're only weighing the cash prize. Contests like this often involve competitors spending more than the prize, certainly in total among all entrants, but sometimes even by the single winner.

But it's clear there are many other motivations at play: the excitement of the competition, the chance to learn based on a real-world problem and dataset, the fame available even to those who reach goals other than final victory. And many of the results can be published as papers or open-source software, as well.
I have a friend who studied Business (with a concentration on Entrepreneurship) at Notre Dame (2nd best in Business according to BusinessWeek). While at Notre Dame he could not get decent internships at big companies because these companies either had a policy to not hire foreigners (at least not for internships), or because it was such a hassle that they'd rather not. Many of those companies were also in the process of shutting down their "immigration departments" because it's become increasingly difficult to get visas for their foreign workers, hence for them it's pretty much like playing the lottery when they apply for an H1B visa for one of their workers, and having dedicated staff for this very uncertain process is a big cost.

While finishing school, my friend was unable to secure a job with any company, he had an offer from PWC, but it was finally withdrawn, while his friends were hired. At the end he decided coming back to Chile, where he now has a job at one of the top VCs in the country.

This is only one case, but I think it represents what a lot of immigrants in the US have been experiencing.
MySQL Sandbox: Treat MySQL Instances like Virtual Machines
Task.FM: Create Reminders Via Email and Twitter (useful tools review)
So, what do y'all think: Task.FM or ReQall?
My advice is to focus on a niche market filled with people w/ money, willing to pay for stuff.

Cf. Tom Lehrer's line about the doctor who specialized in "diseases of the rich".
Do I miss something? That example is like three times longer than an equivalent Makefile would needed to be, and I need to know Python, obviously. For a trivial project, I guess that Make would be easier to use, and for something more complex, I think I would have to do quite a lot of programming, with Fabricate…
Ask HN: Critique my startup - swagapalooza
About the site: I realize that it's not immediately obvious what makes this a startup as opposed to a conference, but ignoring the business model I'd like some feedback on the copy and design of the site. Is it clear what the event is all about? Does the site make you want to come?

My emacs is open so if I get specific suggestions of things that can be improved there is a good chance it will happen.
Its not the older people are generally negative about the future.

Its that the more experienced people of ANY organization are generally negative. The world pop is an organization, but you can put this idea towards any organization that exists.
Good article. The EE Phd mentioned in the beginning sounds like a very skilled person, and it's hard to replace someone like that. Hard to see how that guy is taking a job away from anyone, and he is likely creating wealth and jobs for others. We want him here, no doubt.

One factor - I was once a PhD student in engineering at Berkeley, and in my opinion, it's much a harder path than a JD or MBA, more uncertainty and lower pay. While the "100K" salary the EE PhD in the article was earning isn't bad, it's actually quite low compared to other professional degrees that can be earned in half or even a third of the time (with less rigorous undergrad preparation to boot). To me, there's little doubt that universities and employers use the desire for a green card to keep these spots filled without becoming "competitive" with other professional degree programs (the RAND institute recently did a study that supports this view).

What to do? Well, maybe we should just set a minimum pay rate for a green card. Perhaps a company needs to commit to a high salary to prove the worker really is highly skilled. Given that starting salaries at top law firms exceed $150 for a three year degree, I don't think that 100K is quite enough for the company to claim that the worker is "critical" and "can't be found anywhere". So I think this salary threshold needs to be very, very high.

If they were paying him 200K, I'd have no trouble granting the green card, because then the absence of americans would be easier to attribute to a "skills gap" rather than a desire to pay salaries that are not competitive with other (often easier) career choices.
I was under the impression that lots of people saw this coming. Obviously as credit and loans are used more and more eventually it has to reach a limit. I personally had no reason to believe it would happen when it did, but over the years I've heard a lot of people warning of an economic collapse, especially with reference to the housing market. Of course there were people that vehemently denied it, but that will always be the case.

Am I the only one that thinks we DID see it coming?
Technology in Learning--Is it really useful?
An article about using technology in learning using Scratch, a programming environment aimed at children, and a video as an example.
"Or just hack AT&T into oblivion."

I'm sure that it has already begun. ;)
It is 404'd because it is being blocked. That is the whole point.
Dynamic, Physical Buttons for Touch Displays
Ask HN: what do you think of these flash cards I made for young kids?
Works best full screen (F11 on Win).

My son (4mo) and his cousin (14mo) really like these. However, I'd love to get some feedback from a wider audience before I start making a bunch more.
From the site:

"I have not yet fully tested the capabilities (or potential dangers) of this system. The heating and cold air return ducts in most rooms in a house should be enough to relieve the pressure induced by large woofer excursions. However, if there are no ducts in a room for some reason and there are windows, be aware of the effect of the pressure on the window(s).

Very low frequencies travel well and are not easily absorbed, so if you are using this system at full or nearly full capacity and have immediate neighbors, they will hear it and probably call the police. Use good judgement ."

Nice.
All I need to do to have a lucid dream is simply go to bed very determined to have a lucid dream. Easy, but I have no plans to do it again, because it leaves me feeling mentally exhausted like I've been working instead of sleeping.
How to export HD video for the web
5 must-have google analytics apps
Obama will be painted as weak-on-immigration by the right regardless. So there's no up-side to him ignoring the larger immigration problem or H1B in particular.

(H1B should be a short path to a green card. Letting them be taken advantage of and then sending them home is a bad policy.)
A Wordle of President Arroyo’s Final SONA
President Arroyo gave her final state of the nation address, or SONA. It was her 9th address. I worked up a quick wordle along with some definitions of some of the Filipino words that popped out. It's worth a visit - seems the mood was one defined by "ours/everyone/everything".
Sad. This is a pretty cool idea, but it its already spammed.
Booyah’s iPhone app lets you record and share life’s achievements
René Descartes did that once. I don't think it turned out well.
What misses in my opinion is 'build by convention'. Most things that you want to build have recipes that are mostly the same. You have some sources that you want to compile and then link against some libraries. Using some platform specific compiler and linker flags.

So, instead of writing a program to do the build I would rather see a simple DSL that allows me to specify just the minimal amount of configuration to get things going.

For example building the example on the fabricate wiki page, should not be more complicated than:

:program programname : program.c utils.c

(This is actually an a-a-p recipe that will do the same. Throw this in a main.aap file and you get everything that fabricate does, build, dependency checks, clean, etc.)

I don't mind to script the build when things get more complex. But only then and only when there really is no simple built-in alternative.

Fabricate seems to be more like ant in the Java world. Where you specify in detail what your build should do. Most people have agreed by now that it is a waste of time and instead use Maven, which completely works on simple conventions and standard rules.
$23.48 shipped with some of the sale going towards literacy charities.

http://www.betterworldbooks.com/What-Makes-Airplanes-Fly-id-...
Yeah, I agree. I suppose now that the phone is out we'll be stuck with tablet/netbook rumors for the next half decade until the next big "wouldn't it be cool if Apple made a ____
" comes along.... probably something wearable...
I think that if the rate of genetic change increases then acceleration is an fair word.

If one defined the prevalence of each gene in the population you would get a vector were you could possibly 'change direction'. None of this requires any metric of 'goodness' to be defined if that is what you are worried about.
Ask and It Shall be Given
"Address Not Found"
Does it scan your entire filesystem for atimes so as not to miss the .h files over in /usr/include, and if not, how does it know which directories need scanning?
Have they not heard of lists:all/2?
It's anecdotal, but my wife moved here 1.5 years ago and before she quit her job to move here with me, she was a Global Application Manager for DHL International (Deutsche Post). She was responsible for a team of software engineers and support technicians whose app was installed in 9 countries, at 20 locations all over the world. She has expertise in Oracle and is fluent in Spanish as well as English. The software controlls automotive sequencing (just in time part delivery) for Chrysler, Volkswagen, Seat, Ford, and GM where the supplier can be charged > $10,000 per minute of downtime. We met through work and she was always the person who could be counted on to troubleshoot any issue even outside her area of expertise.

In one and a half years, she has had two interviews and no offers.

It's pretty clear that her resume is almost immediately rejected because she isn't a U.S. citizen (she's a permanent resident) and because her experience is with "foreign" companies.
SCARF: a brain-based model for collaborating with and influencing others
I wrote contest, not knowledge. The knowledge is external to the contest. Some contests, like this one, have lots of external benefits to the top guys, but "winner takes all contest" in the abstract sense seems to me to be a zero sum game, so I stand by what I said: it's generally better to sink your time into something where the "external stuff" is actually the main benefit.
Ask HN: Any experience with linutop 3?
Do people on HN have experience in using the Linutop 3? If so, what are those experiences.
http://www.linutop.com/linutop2/linutop3.en.html
CEO of NPR: News won't go paywall. Calls it a "mass delusion" in the industry
Good time to be in Georgia :)
How to build a desktop WYSIWYG editor with WebKit and HTML 5
If I was teaching someone how to program and wanted to get across the idea of incremental development, this is the first example I would use. You can just hear at each step how he's getting incrementally closer.
This really bothers me. It's like the U.S. is a football team, and we train one of these immigrants; we make them hit the gym, show them the ropes, teach them the intracacies of the game, let them know some good techniques, then say, "Now get out of here, we don't want you to play for our team."
Marin SF Bay Area general contractors design build Diamond Certified
Rose Construction, Diamond Certified full-service design and build general contractors who have served Marin County and the San Francisco Bay Area since 1989.
"To my ears this sounds incredibly bureaucratic and unnecessary when you work with competent people"

Here is my explanation based on my observations.

- The mass expansion of IT in India, particularly in its second decade (late 90's to the present) was the result of the series of credit bubbles in US. Similar to China's manufacturing export bubble. Without the US bubble, the expansion would have happened, but not in the reckless, pell-mell fashion it happened.

- As a result, Indian IT companies hired fresh-out-of-college people in massive, really massive numbers - 25,000 people a year in each of the big 4 companies. Private colleges expanded massively to meet that demand. The analogy is to the US housing expansion (ultimately both were caused by the credit bubble).

- Competence arises for a good part from experience. To visualize this, do a thought experiment: how would your team look if you substitute every team member with the same person but as they were starting out fresh. A good part of competence is simply knowing the skill & aptitude make-up of every team member. When everyone is fresh, that vital knowledge is absent.

- So the Indian industry came up with a "solution" so fresh recruits don't cause too much damage: create rules and procedures for everything. Bureaucratize. Alas, that "solution" imposes a long term toll on culture of the company.
Where in the US are you?
what happened in 2003?
In the US it is supposed to be illegal to discriminate in hiring on the basis of national origin, which sometimes prohibits discrimination on the basis of citizenship:

http://www.eeoc.gov/policy/docs/national-origin.html#VI

It happens all the time, of course.