skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, my son and every kid I've shared these with loves them. Do you have kids? If so, please try it out and let me know.

Maybe flash cards is the wrong word to use?

The idea is not to make them memorize anything, i.e. not fun. The idea is to show them pictures of stuff they like, i.e. fun. The vocab building is just a by-product of the activity.
The one thing Apple would need for a tablet, that it can't provide itself, is developer interest.

There will never be a better time than the present to hook developers on another platform.
Has anyone here used Freeswitch?

Asterisk is impressive that it gives a customisable PBS of sorts, but peel away the hood and it's all duct tape and bubble gum, terrible documentation left in the hands of a run-down unmaintained wiki and extension libraries unmaintained since 2004 full of out of date warnings about which bits are and aren't working in various versions of Asterisk.

It works, but it's not pleasant or fun. Is Freeswitch better?
Yes, it's a new (mis)feature ;P
You might not want to hack on that project, but in all cases you have to install a runtime, be it a web server or xulrunner or whatever.

GTK+ can be a pita to install, but it's as cross-platform as anything else.
> Could this be the end of electric power cords?

No.
I've had the opposite experience, actually. Being a permanent resident usually sparks a short conversation during the interview about the difference in educational systems and my life experience - usually I've felt that the conversation was a factor in a successful interview.

edit: but then again, I haven't had much work experience outside of the US, and due to very different management styles in the US and elsewhere, that may be a key difference in our situations.
Reminds me a little of "The Last Answer" by Asimov...

http://destructionoverdrive.blogspot.com/2005/06/last-answer...
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.

That's not clear at all to me from the facts stated. There is a global recession going on right now, which began a while ago.

Best wishes to your wife in finding suitable career employment.
I've been on both sides of the employment fence and one big mental block for employers is having to go through all the legal paperwork to hire someone on a visa. As far as employment is concerned there is zero difference between a US citizen and a permanent resident so I am not persuaded that is the reason (unless it's a defense company and security clearances are a hassle for non-citizens). I can't really speak to the 'foregin' company experience though - however that's orthogonal to visa status.
Very nice. I'm guessing little kids will love it. I found some of the labels hard to read because there was too little contrast with the pic. To me the robin didn't look like a robin.
Now you get my joke. You see how ridiculous the feeling is!

Unfortunately immigration is the thing that politicians either don't know anything about it or don't care about anything about it.

Because until immigrants naturalize themselves as citizens, immigrants have no voting right and politicians have no use of immigrants (Of course politicians may still want immigrants to donate hard earned money to their campaign fund under corporate names)
Toledo, OH. The automotive industry is taking a hit around here, but she has applied all over the country.
Hybrid Approach to Crowd-Sourcing
The term "zero sum" does not really make sense here. Netflix obviously thinks they're getting more than what they're spending on the contest and the winning team obviously thinks they're receiving more than what they've invested. So between those two parties, there is a net gain as is the case in most voluntary transactions.

At best, what you're saying is that other competitors have wasted their time, but I don't think that's true either.
Problems that ruined my world
And add more textbooks. I wouldn't hesitate to buy one if they were cheaper and I could get all my textbooks on it for rather cheap (I'm not going to pay another $170 for a textbook just so I can have it on the kindle).
I think a site that was submitted here about a month ago has almost the same features except that they fetch news from everywhere, not just HN and order them based on several interesting scores like "popular", "controversial", etc.
They call it <a href="http://www.euraeka.com>All the news that's fit to read</a>. Pretty bold claim:-)
From what I can see on their site, when you register you can "save" your sorting preferences (click on Advanced at the top of the site) and the site also allows you to filter by topic and domain. I am personally using it for their recommendations system. Truth be told, all news sites are really just a portal so you can find what's interesting to you. Once a system is trained on recommending you what you like, then all the sorting, scoring, mashing up, etc becomes pointless. That's goal really of every information providing site - customize the information flow to every user to the point that every user sees a unique version of the site based on their unique preferences.
So, while I like the sortable HN concept ultimately it needs to be extended to a personalized recommendation news system in order to be truly useful. Euraeka and Google News are two sites that I like, Digg's recommendations frankly suck in my opinion.
Good luck to you though, good stuff.
Then I misunderstood, I thought it was a Gnome only project. GTK would be OK.
Cloud Brokers: The Next Big Opportunity?
Let us remember that DDoS attacks are the closest thing to normalcy that 4chan can have.
I don't think that is correct. The numbers on the leaderboard are not the scores on the training set.

The netflix prize uses three datasets: the training set, the leaderboard set, and the test set. The training set is distributed to everyone. The test set is totally secret. Access to the leaderboard set is only by submitting results (once per 24 hours) and looking at the results. It is not at all trivial to "overfit" to this leaderboard set. (It could be done by, e.g. submitting results with slight tweaks to the algorithm parameters, but this would take a lot of time since you can only submit every 24 hours. Also, you would basically have to do it consciously.)
I've been trying and experimenting with Freeswitch for a while now. I first tried it about a year ago and I can say it's come a long way since then, there's been a lot of improvement and everyday new people are coming on board (at least users). The development team is awesome and give great support on the mailing list or through IRC.

At my company we are currently using Asterisk, but are in the process of switching to Freeswitch. Everything seems very well thought out, and in my opinion, it is way simpler than Asterisk. There are many modules for a lot of different functionality, there's support for javascript, lua, perl, java, C, C#, ruby, python, php, a skype gateway, and many more.
Who said anything about force?
The aesthetics bug me a bit, too. I wish the screen took up almost the entire front of the device.
Computer logic. Having trits instead of bits specifically.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun
Make Reverse-Engineered KFC at Home
I bought a Kindle for my technologically-inept mom, and she loves it. Things like the font, screen color, etc. don't bother her, because she focuses on the bigger picture: thousands of books on a portable device that's supported by the world's largest internet book retailer. That is, she says, the next logical step for books to take.
Is this only interesting because of the desktop angle and how little code it takes with GTK/Python, or are Webkit and HTML5 making browser-based WYSIWYG editors better somehow too?
That's fascinatingly beautiful
And when your school requires a textbook that is only available on kindle so you can't buy a used copy or borrow one from the library, or share a friend's - then how much do you think they can/will charge for textbooks ?

I'm betting on some very large 'incentive' payments to schools to try this, along with some seminars in Hawaii to explain to college presidents how wonderful this will be.
Sales Tools to Help Sell to Big Companies
I never understood why anyone would have a desire to use any of these "web os" apps. Do we really need a desktop in the browser? Apps in the browser sure, but a desktop!?
As far as employment is concerned there is zero difference between a US citizen and a permanent resident...

True...the difference is in the perception.
Video: Preview of Spotify app on iPhone
BBC have announced that Spotify have finally presented their popular new app to Apple and now are waiting in suspense to see whether they are going to approve or not… Why wouldn’t they approve it since it is free, legal music?
Actually, I do agree with the nightmare control aspect.

"I either needed to make friends with the monster or kill him and that I had the power to do either one."

There is a third possibility: Let it catch you. That's actually how I got rid one of my recurring nightmares. I'd swear there was a second's pause as my brain asked itself "Uh, now what?"

I now fairly frequently get some imagery in my dreams that have the capability to spark nightmares, but they pretty much never get past the very beginning phase, because my brain knows from experience nothing bad can happen. Big scary monster with teeth chasing you? The best answer is to hop right on in. Another big scary monster with teeth inside the first one? Hop right on in again. Recurring dream involving fear of heights? Just fall. Eventually it'll all work itself out.
Or to build ammunition for an anti-trust case in Europe.
IF they keep their pace of innovation, music industry in europe is bound for a shakeup.

I'm not sure about this. I think spotify might become europe's YouTube merely because the benefits of the paid for model aren't that large compared to the free model. (though the iphone client will help)

Also there's already an open source spotify client for the iphone: http://github.com/nevyn/spot
That's not clear at all to me from the facts stated. There is a global recession going on right now, which began a while ago.

I don't have any hard evidence on why her job search is not yielding results, that's true. However, I've seen people with similar skill sets (or less) with multiple opportunities. I recently put some feelers out for contract work, just to see what the environment was like and she was astonished when I had 3 full-time and 2 part-time offers in less than one week. I know it's cliche, but I don't think being a woman in IT is particularly helpful either.

Best wishes to your wife in finding suitable career employment.

Thank you very much!
I have a 3 kids between the ages of 2 years and 11 years. My youngest would definitely enjoy these and I think it's a good start.

It's a very simple idea, so I think you'll need to add some features (pause button, music, more card sets, etc.) to encourage parents to visit often.

Also, I love the domain name and can see that this project was created while scratching your own itch (which is a great way to stay motivated).
Bizarre theory suggests time may be running out (2007)
Science Is in the Details
Friendster Shopping Itself Around In Asia
What you are trying to describe is transcription, the process of reading a DNA template to produce a RNA transcript. This is done in the nucleus for eukaryotes, and in the nucleoid for prokaryotes (which don't have a nucleus). RNA Polymerase is the protein that synthesizes mRNA (from the DNA template) and the nitrogenous base Uracil (U) is used in place of Thymine (neither are proteins).

In fact Uracil is less stable that Thymine and the hypothesis is that DNA uses Thymine due to its lower rate of point mutation. (Note I mean less stable in the sense that it can be mutated more easily due to functional groups).
Similar story - back in the 90s it was next to impossible to work on an international scientific project with the USA because scientist working in US universities had to apply for the same green card quota as MS/Intel/Google etc.

This year apparently it's much easier to get a green card but the feeling in academia is that it just isn't worth the hassle. In my field (nuclear physics), except for some weapons projects, it's becoming a bit of a scientific backwater.
Statistics of Two Years of Blogging (had over 1 million visitors!)
What You Learned About How Asparagus Works Is Probably Wrong
Before everyone goes crazy, I would like to know the standard procedure at AT&T to deal with a DDoS attack. Can they point to previous examples of shutting down sites because of it? Surely 4chan isn't the only site that has been attacked through their network. If they have a history of doing this and have granted access back to the site this is a non-story. If they don't ever do this and they can't point to previous examples, then my friends, they may well deserve the barrels of fun coming their way.
Writing a Book: Part One (Ambition)
A Visualization of Amazon Acquisitions
The Jail Inferno
How the Health Care Mess Affects Entrepreneurship
Because a $100k salary in NY is easier for employers to meet (that's closer to what they're already paying) than the same salary in Florida. Florida then gets fewer immigrants this way.
Has she considered using the phrase "Authorized To Work In The U.S." instead? Maybe I'm oversimplifying the issue, but that probably puts out a better perception than "permanent resident".
Well, if actually implemented by browsers, HTML5's contentEditable makes in-browser editors better. I’m not sure whether there are compatible implementations in all the major browsers yet... so you might not be able to rely on it for web apps.
> Netflix ... here

For the third time: I am talking about the abstract case, not 'here', and I am talking about the point of view of the competitors, not the entity running the contest.

> At best, what you're saying is that other competitors have wasted their time, but I don't think that's true either.

They haven't won anything, and unless there are externalities, they have wasted their time. How can they not have? They received nothing.

So, what I said is true: the contest is a "zero" or "fixed" sum game, and the other competitors gain only through externalities. You can downmod that all you like, but this more or less concurs with the definition of "zero sum game" in wikipedia.
To be honest to me it looks rather strange. Nonetheless it's a very unique glimpse we can get here. Thus I submitted it inspite of the lack of "beauty".
Windows 7 is still missing a unix terminal, last I checked.
Tiny tips for a better user experience: load the pictures in the background and display a spinner while they're loading; load the next/prev images while the user is looking at an image to minimize waiting.
Happy birthday! :)
Great job!
Security certificate warnings don't work, researchers say
Thanks. Yeah, I have about 20 ideas for new card sets--if you or anyone else has any I'll add them to my list.
The images don't need to be that big, I think. Or you could possibly have a resolution option (small/med/large). Depending on your monitor, 30" flash cards?
Yeah, I was going to say, the DDoS'ing has been going on for a while now...
The Kindle or any other reader should be free. They should earn the money by selling books.

I still cringe at the thought of paying money for a device that solely allows me to read. It's like building a device that allows me to breathe and sell it as the next big thing.

We already can read books without a "gadget" so forcing us to buy an expensive one in order to do the same thing we've always done for free sees bizarre at the core.
Pro Git - CC licensed book on Git by Scott Chacon
But this isn't an auction. You can't just conjure up a better result once you know you've been surpassed. Belkor etc was probably working just as hard all month & the ensemble just got lucky.
Why don't you buy some good children’s books with images of animals in them? A story is significantly more interesting than a flash card.
I don't get it either. This is the second build system done in python I come across (the other would be SCons) and both are utter failures.

Make has its quirks, lots of them. But it wouldn't be the most popular build-tool in the world if it was all wrong. So, my hint to the next guy trying to reinvent it: Take a very close look at Make first and then improve on it. Don't start in a clean-room because then you're doomed to repeat build-system history, including all the past mistakes (edit: unless you're Linus Torvalds, perhaps).

Also the build-system is an area where a sane DSL makes perfect sense. Don't make me write procedural code by default. I don't want to see lines like the following in my build-scripts:

objects = ' '.join(s + '.o' for s in sources)
You Don't Have to go to School. (Dmitry Orlov)
I stopped using MySpace except for IM on my phone. Twitter posts to Facebook, and I only use 3rd party twitter apps. If I have to use Facebook to reply to a message, I use the iPhone app. So I guess I use my iPhone to aggregate them all.
I already have tons of them :). It is a completely different mode of entertainment/learning. What you think is "significantly more interesting" isn't necessarily such to a baby.
They were almost certainly prerecorded. Or he could have composed some MIDI tracks.

But seriously doubt that they were synthesized in real-time.
Haskell on Windows is surprisingly popular
I think the biggest cause of this problem is the number of legitimate companies that don't keep their certificates up to date. I've received those warnings before from Microsoft, Sun, etc... and checked everything else I could to ensure that it was a legitimate communication before proceeding. In the end, the transaction was legitimate and no harm was done - they simply had an expired certificate. As a result, I lost practically all trust in the certificates.
Totally agree. In spanish there are 2 related sayings:

- "El que no llora, no mama", which translates to something like "Babies that don't cry, don't get breast fed" (very raw translation).

- "En pedir no hay engaño", roughly translates to "There's no deceit in asking"
Duh. What is a user supposed to think? If the cert can't be verified, the page should fail to load - the web site is broken. If company X can't figure out certificates, how is a user supposed to?
Does it really need one? It really doesn't. If there were one, the average user of this operating system wouldn't probably even know its existence.
You might want to check out tup. It uses the dependency tree in a fundamentally different way from make, in order to improve build times. http://gittup.org/tup/
Discover 5 Effective and Proven Exercises to Grow Taller Naturally
You can resize the window to your liking. However, the bigness was sort of the point--attracts and keeps my 4mo old's attention. Have you tried it big vs small with your young kids? I'd be very interested to know what happens.
They have the powershell. I hear good things about it.
The average user may not need one, but I, and many others, find them very useful.
"YouTube Can Be Very Profitable In The Near Future"
This is obviously a problem, which is why I said I'd like them rather cheap. I don't think will happen, at least any time soon, but one can dream.
Justin.tv Channel: Demos of Numbrosia, Numbrosia 2, and Numbrosia 3 iPhone apps.
Bay Area Science: Techs and the City
I just started using Justin.tv to broadcast today.

Any tips on how I can make these demos work well?

Currently, users are required to log in to chat. Should I change this to let people chat without logging in?
1) Subsidized office space. You can get an office there for about a grand a month that can house 4 people comfortably. Compare that with the rents in the rest of the building, and you'll find they are much more expensive. What this does is create a density of startups and a critical mass around which an ecosystem has formed.

2) Access to people like Lance Weatherby and other Venture Catalysts. ATDC companies have raised over a billion dollars of VC. The staff helps.

There are fringe benefits, but those are the main ones.
sorry if i was being nitpicky
Strange but beautiful, at least to me.
In the comments, Jeff writes:

I'm saying you should avoid using the rusted screwdriver which is liable to burst into fragments and cause a crippling hand wound at any time!

This is why friends don't let friends Comment While Defensive. XP is old technology but this analogy is absurd. It's not as if the code becomes brittle and starts to break down over time.

Incidentally, Vista is what finally decided me to get off my ass and switch to Ubuntu. Now that I've invested a fair bit of energy familiarizing myself with it and customizing my system, there's no chance I'll switch back to Microsoft even if Windows 7 is a huge improvement.
Not a bad idea, I'll suggest it to her, thanks.
Scout Labs (a SaaS dashboard) Now Features a Real-Time Focus Group
Sure, except as soon as someone mentions stock exchange your mind jumps to wall street. If I say peanut butter you think of jelly right, same thing. And as soon as that happens the TSX is not not the biggest in your mind. Same with Australia, you think wow that's big but not nearly as big as the US.
Ask HN: What software should I include on my budget request for next year?
Ok, so my boss asked our team to submit any software we want included on the budget request for next year. For a little background, I work on an Online Banking web application for a regional bank on a team of 7 developers. We are a Microsoft .NET shop with MSDN subscriptions, but I know there are a lot of good software out there that could probably make our lives easier. What are some tools/utilities that I should take a look at and consider trying to get into the budget?

Thanks!

Mark
Showing previous U.S. employment probably helps a great deal. Out of curiosity, where are you from?
Studies show kids learn best via repetition and pick up language faster the more you talk to them (surprise surprise).

Do those studies specifically compare flash cards to the children's books (which I like a great deal) already mentioned to you in another reply? Do they use an experimental rather than correlational study design?

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

What are the citations for the studies you have in mind?
Tell HN NYC: Hackers & Founders #3, This Thursday (7/30) at Shake Shack, 6PM
designMode is already implemented/used by a lot of rich text editors. Usually, they have an iframe with designMode turned on, capture the code generated and then run a clean up process to fix inconsistencies. That said, it's no panacea - the current implementations are not consistent at all - the code generated in designMode by the rendering engine can become quite ugly pretty quickly. Hopefully with the HTML5 execution there will be a bit more attention and care for this as it is really useful and a core part of Tim Berners-Lee's original vision - every page, editable.
Not really, I could see if they asked in person, but they just texted their question and Branson was asked it publically by someone else.
This reminds me strongly of the xkcd poking fun at string theory by summarizing it thus: "What if everything were comprised of tiny, vibrating strings?" -- "What would that entail?" -- "I dunno." However, the idea itself is so delightfully creative and "sci-fi" that I had to save it.
With this strategic change, we are going to be figuring out what services we now provide. But, historically, we did a few things:

connections: introductions to board members, investors, customers

consulting: provided strategic, marketing and other consulting services

office space: subsidized office space

programs: educational programs (like how to raise money)
Toshiba NAND flash ramping to over 90% capacity: new iPod? Tablet?