skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
JOSHUA!!!!!

The gall. Seriously.

"Thus did Schachter come to believe that the deal was what was best for Del.icio.us. And it's pretty good for him too. If reports of a price north of $30 million are accurate, the acquisition puts his net worth (on paper) at more than $15 million."
( http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/busine... )

Yahoo sets this little brat up for life and he has the audacity to talk about them as a "sausage factory?" Frankly, I think Yahoo has done a good job with Delicious BECAUSE they have tinkered with it so little. And what they HAVE done with the UI is a vast improvement. Remember all the worry when Yahoo bought Flickr? Most Flickr users say it's far better and more stable than ever. I just have problems with his taking the kind of money from this company like he did and then turn around in 4 years and bitch and moan and say he wished he hadn't sold. Does anybody here REALLY believe that? Put him back in his old apartment surviving on Mac 'n Cheese without the luxury home, trips, cars, gifts to family, etc. and see how badly he wished he would never have sold.

Shame, Josh Schachter, shame.
Breast Cancer Awareness - Women's Health
I like it. I like the Twitter spam that will follow it. Thumbs up. :D
Take this test:
http://www.readingsoft.com/index.html#results
I did 464 wpm with 82% accuracy (comprehension is important with this one!). I do a blend of visual and "normal" reading. Visual gets auto-turned off for large words and numerical facts. I don't think I could breach 500 wpm without totally loosing my comprehension.
Repairs generally are not mechanical or rule based, depending on the complexity of the system involved of course. Picking heads of lettuce is, but there is no robot on the horizon capable of doing it without destroying them.
This is satire, isn't it?
The main problem with facebook as a search engine is that you need to be a member and you can only search in facebook. The great thing about the twitter realtime search is that you can actually just search right on their front page.

Another downfall of facebook realtime search for me and well for plenty of people I know is that facebook is blocked at my work so I will never use it, I don't use facebook now, though I do have a profile, but its not a good enough feature to bring me back to using it again.
Or least sexiest.
Why do some pundits attempt to make a search engine out of every successful website? Like "search engine" is the highest form of a website in an unofficial hierarchy?
Something like:

1. static website

2. blog

3. social site

4. search engine

"4" being the highest?

Is my blog a search engine because of the WordPress search function in it? Will HN become a search engine?
"An Introduction to Mathematical Reasoning" by Peter J Eccels. Teaches the vocabulary of mathematics, just the basics you need to think like a mathematician, not a mathematics user like most science texts.

"How To Solve It" George Polya. Heurists and problem solving skills, by a great mathematician.

Do a google search, specially in the sci.math newsgroup. Again, read books by mathematicians for mathematicians; they're often far more enjoyable and actually far more straightforward (I was often confused by the examples in my school work; I didn't care for "vehicle moving at speed X" or "object falling at from height Y". We all have a different internal visual mind and I tended to think in abstract patterns, usually colors, lines or nested bodies, without real physical objects distracting me.)
I've looked pretty hard into this, and the prevailing opinion seemed to be that the trouble isn't technical, it's social. Do you really want your friends putting your contact info in the cloud? In order for this to work, you really need a mechanism for people to approve sharing their info, control what gets exposed, etc. If you built such a mechanism, it has some obvious advantages - e.g. someone can update their own address and have the change be automatically propagated - but it also makes it much more complicated. It's doable, but established social sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, etc.) have such a head start that you'd have to worry about them stomping you from day one.
Yes it can, that's been done.
Yes, there are ways to break Amazon's review system

Why would anyone want to break Amazon's review system? There is no incentive to do it. There are gazillion review sites because they make money through ads, affiliate marketing etc, and lots of them are junk/spam.

The ROI in breaking Amazon's review system doesn't justify even trying it. That is why so many people trust Amazon's reviews than any other site's.
Or just open source your software and sell services to those that want to save time :-)
The site is owned by the WSJ.
An Open Source Blog Framework in Clojure
Sandy Springs
Basically high school stuff and up
There's an easier way to compete against Open Source competition:

Licensing and software patents!

Put simply, you can afford to license some proprietary format from a complimentary product that people use (ensuring that it is one of sufficient complexity such that will take months to reverse engineer).

Make your software compatible with any number of other proprietary software packages, using these proprietary formats and protocols that open source developers will never have access to without expending huge amounts of time and energy. Then, to really firm up your market share, be sure to invent some more proprietary formats and protocols that future developers can use to integrate with your product. Be sure to share your technology for free with other complimentary products so that you can claim that it's a "standard". Then, encumber your proprietary "standards" with the sorts of licensing or NDA requirements that put them beyond the reach of open source projects.

I'm not even being totally sarcastic here. If your entire business model is dependent on being able to compete with open source, then I think utilising all the hard work that previous companies have put into achieving vendor lock-in is more worthwhile than a good installation process, a marketing budget, or having more features than the other guy.
Such device can be great to ship your web products to customers. For example you can create CRM system or web gallery and ship it on SheevaPlug. So client will be able to plug it in his local network and have it working without any complex setup.
I turned my personal project into an easily setup blogging framework (albeit one lacking in many features).
That hasn't worked well for too many people. Most OS businesses that haven't failed tend to dual license, and cripple the installation/documentation(technical or product) in some way for the OS version.
Either there's an egoistical interest in articles or this sort or all programmers out there are desperate for self-development direction. If you can answer the question "what should I do next to improve as a programmer?" you're falling into the former category. If you can't, go on a forum/mailing list and ask some programmers better than yourself to ask that question instead of written one-size-fits-all articles on the topic.

There are good articles that fall into the "what is a good programmer" category but generally these have now all already been written. What's left is just opinion and should be taken with a large pinch of salt.
They arrested a homeless man in a shelter for being homeless.

Inaccurate and sensationalist. Earlier in the same paragraph:

It turned out that Mr. Szekely, who is an ordained minister and does not drink, do drugs or curse in front of ladies, did indeed have a warrant - for not appearing in court to face a charge of "criminal trespassing"

He wasn't arrested for being homeless; he was arrested for an outstanding warrant.

You may or may not be arrested, charged, or convicted for other crimes, but one thing's for sure: law enforcement seems to take it personally when you don't appear. Anyone with an outstanding warrant risks immediate arrest at any time. The reasonableness of the original charge doesn't matter.
I made something like this myself a while ago, albeit much simpler, for some crazy project. Generated a couple of CDs of data in not very long - the RS232 link was the bootleneck.

A couple of good links for those that want to give it a try:

http://robseward.com/misc/RNG2/

http://www.cryogenius.com/hardware/rng/

I lost track of the actual links that I used but it's all roughly the same principle. One of the links I lost track of had a paper describing how random avalanche noise is, had some favourable things to say.
Sensationalist headline. By period they mean in the order of billions of years.
Does anyone have familiarity with these types of online "health/fitness" trackers? I'd love to know more about the inner workings - whether they are profitable, and what their revenue sources are.
'Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea' by Charles Seif
There are good articles that fall into the "what is a good programmer" category but generally these have now all already been written.

"Everything that can be invented has been invented." - US Patent Officer, 1899.
Have you seen this thread?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=665029
Just be willing to learn.

http://www.nrc.nl/international/article2321531.ece/No_more_h...
If you want a cheap SheevaPlug-based network storage device, you should look at the Pogoplug at www.pogoplug.com
we are selecting for early births, with no regard at all to how long we will live.

No. The article says "...women who conceive earlier in life and reached menopause at a later age, all had more offspring" (emphasis mine). So it's trying to maximize for child-bearing years, on both the early and late sides.
After visiting Costa Rica I decided this was something I wanted to do. I wrote up my idea on my blog hoping to find a team interested in the same thing.

http://bit.ly/19Ot7a

Over the weekend I found another team that is already doing something similar in Europe & was planning to relocate to South America. They've already got a profitable product just a few months after launched. We hashed out a plan to get us all down to Costa Rica in early September.

I'm very excited about the opportunity & encourage anybody who is even considering something like this to do whatever you can to make it happen!
For proof based mathematics, I found "How to Prove It:A Structured Approach" helpful.
Well, let me put it this way, this article isn't as good as some I've read in the past. I'd love to provide links but I couldn't remember enough about them after 5/10 minutes of searching about and decided it didn't matter that much to me anyway.
easy tiger, happy "Mark of the Beast Day".
When zero tolerance was hailed by "scientists" showing off the "smashed window theory" and proving it by smashing windows poverty was just for the fringe groups. The "blacks", Latinos or other people generally discriminated against in the US. Now that the middle class descends into poverty rapidly the NYT starts to care?

Zero tolerance means a war on the poor. Like the "war on terror" or "the war on drugs" it does not solve the problem at all.

Poverty is always relative. You can be poor with the same amount of money the next guy is still OK with. Poverty depends largely on sociological factors. People who are embedded in some kind of social order, who partake in society, are respected and have human relations to other people aren't as poor as those who are isolated, spat upon and criminalized.

I'd recommend reading The Grapes of Wrath, one of the greatest works of American literature and written during the Great Depression for some solutions.
I always figured that the multi-megapixel camera phone, once ubiquitous, would upend the traditional porn industry. There's got to be a startup in there somewhere providing the shortest route from iphone to porn site, but not one you'd brag to your momma about.
There were just short of 17,000 murders last year. Are you seriously going to suggest that they were committed primarily by the rich?

I'd much rather lose money to Bernie Madoff than get killed in a botched robbery. Losing part of your retirement << losing your life.
Yeah, it's one solution. Freemium or paid versions for business is another.
[Fixing Tr.im with] Federated short URLs
WordPress 2.8.3 Remote admin reset password
I heartily endorse reading the classic works of geometry as a way to both the subject as well as a way of thinking about math, proof, and argumentation.

Start with Euclid's _Elements_, and then move onto Archimedes' short books on levers and floating bodies, Apollonius's wonderful treatise on conic sections, and Ptolemy's _Almagest_.

They are excellent for self-education, providing both geometrical knowledge in itself, as well as extensive training in sound reasoning. Don't be fooled by the antiquity of their origin: they teach more clearly than most modern day texts, and their content is timeless.
If you want to talk to Arrington contact him directly or through TechCrunch. Posting this here will only lead to a bitchfest with little to no input from the person with the information you're asking for. This is basically an invitation to talk behind someone's back.
Why The Brain Behind Hadoop Left Yahoo
G.M. Puts Volt’s Mileage in City in Triple Digits
As the child of a veteran, the part that offends me is that a guy who literally took a bullet on the behalf of the rest of us is now just a nuisance to be hustled out of sight by the police. Americafail.
You bring up a good point, although I think the pyramid applies to you as well. Whether you need to scale your app, or scale your organization (salespeople, trainers, etc), it's all 'scaling'.

As for Product/Market fit, if you have a product that 'people have no idea they want yet', then the author would probably ask you to at least validate your preliminary idea in some way.
If they had somehow involved twitter in this, it would have been okay. Also if it had come from techcrunch.

Okay, okay, kidding...to me, hacker news is "news for hackers" -> Things Hackers will enjoy -> not lolcats and news about 4chan -> not reddit.
Tell HN: An idea on karma
Hi All,

I was wondering about karma on HN and other sites, like stackoverflow, which are community driven. The essence of karma is to be a self-controlling mechanism which empowers users based on their past contributions.

One aspect of this is to award 'power' to users (like moderating and downvoting) after certain karma point thresholds. My idea is to speed this process up by promoting 'powers' in a more flexible way.

How it would work - a 'predictive karma algorithm':
Analyse usage patterns of members with higher 'ranks' (i.e. more 'power') and try to match those usage patterns to new members' behaviour to determine if they qualify for an early promotion in the 'ranks'.

This could entail giving dummy access to all functionality to new users, like downvoting and deletion. The dummy buttons would not actually do anything but the actions are stored in a DB to be used in the usage pattern comparison algorithm.

Some advantages:
- Members can climb the 'ranks' faster which satisfies peoples' thirst for power (who doesn't like being promoted).
- It would show full site functionality at an earlier stage so users can see the site's richness immediately.
- Speeds up members' site loyalty.

Some disadvantages:
- Could become complex to create a well balanced algorithm
- Measuring any comparative advantage over using thresholds is difficult.

It is just a seed of an idea but I would think some kind of a 'predictive karma algorithm' could further improve the user experience.

Your thoughts?
The solution is to tell the mentally ill, permanently homeless people about the rabbits again, then euthanize them as painlessly as possible? Ouch.
Worcester, England
Interview with makers of the first blackjack computers
More info on the (Google) Caffeine Update
This article has brought out all of the hang-wringing and self-hate that I can put up with for a while. I like realistic depictions of problems and solutions a lot more than I do talking about how miserable everything is. It's truly brought out the pessimist in most all of the commenters. Davidw is right -- time to flag.
What are you talking about? Your obnoxious "reply" has nothing to do with either the article nor my comment.
For a "popular" treatment of mathematics that does go into some mathematical detail "Journey through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics" by William Dunham is difficult to beat. It is by far one of the best "Math" books I have read that have kept me coming back to it. Also, try some of the books by John Derbyshire along similar lines.
Isn't it a little inside the box to assume that PPC is the way they're going to get into online advertising?
No - and I don't see how you could interpret my comment thusly. I'm contrasting murders to state murder, i.e. wars, which are of course started by the elite of the country/ countries involved.
And what was the warrant for? Was it not for sleeping on the sidewalk, i.e. being homeless?
Okay. After having five or so stories about this, I think we all know about the Google engine changes by now. Seriously.
Its a crime to be rich, the government charges exorbitant fees if you have some extra money.
Designing for Social Traction (slide deck)
Microsoft's Gates Opens War on Spam (2003)
Self-Enforcing Protocols
One comment suggests running the browser in a virtual machine and restoring from a snapshot at the beginning of each session, which is also what I do and has worked out well. Using Virtualbox, the bookmarks file can be separately mounted on a so-called writethrough image to allow persistent updates. There are some difficulties with the shared clipboard but ssh between the host and vm is a workaround.
This just in: someone writing for a newspaper thinks the world is moving too fast. Why am I not surprised?
If you go back and learn Algebra, Trig, Geometry, then I fully recommend the Cliffs Study Solver series of textbooks because they are very cheap and very thorough plus each day you do a chapter, you'll make cumulative progress.

You are introduced to a concept, given a set of practice problems to see the concept in action, then given a problem set to solve on your own.

http://www.amazon.com/Algebra-I-Cliffs-Study-Solver/dp/07645...

Each book is about 350 pages and you'll be up to speed in no time.
I haven't picked it up yet, but I remember reading about "The Princeton Companion to Mathematics" on here a while ago. It looks like a pretty complete guide to all of modern mathematics and sounded like it was easy enough for a beginner to get through while still being able to teach math experts some new things.

Thanks for reminding me about it - I think I'm going to order my self a copy!
you want me το believe that someone who "blows up" a linked list is a programmer? He may be able το serve other tasks but a programmer he/she is not.
I second the OCW reference.
Some of the Calculus for Dummies, type books are good.
Its good to remember that Calculus and Linear Algebra don't have to be that complicated.
I also recommend scan the books before you buy them, I wasted far too much money at college on txtbooks that I ended up despising
But it says the addresses in the vector are independent. What if they don't all point into the same cache line? You could have 16 cache misses.

What have I misunderstood?
maaan, I just started doing research into doing something like that... crap.
Yesterday's VMware acquisition of SpringSource suggests there is a very lucrative market.
Honestly I think Schaum's is pretty good because it does a bit of explanation, but you primarily learn through doing two dozen pages of problems per chapter.
I'm in the similar situation as you (OP).
My high school education was interrupted quite badly and 13 years after graduating I lack confidence in my comp sci endeavors because my maths sucks so bad.
I'd be interested to hear of any hackers who have missed education milestones (like high school maths) but gone and successfully filled in the gaps.
The reason I'm asking is because I'm kind feeling that things like maths knowledge is layered on year after year and if you lack the foundation its really a huge amount of work to repair each successive layer.

Passing on some wisdoms to the young hackers around here...
I wish someone had grabbed me by the face in highschool and told how important all these layers of skills/knowledge would be for getting the kind of jobs I want now. <I come from a blue collar background - by the time I realised how important education was (age 22) it was too late to do much about it>
Microsoft Acquires Greenfield Online for $486 Million
SVG based colaborative white-boarding app
Karma is a tricky thing. I've been playing around with a toy version of HN for a couple of days now to see if I can somehow find a better way to use the 'votes' in order to maximize the user experience on the site.

Karma is only one aspect of that.

Every time a user votes a submission (or a comment) up or down there is a complex relationship between the two users.

It is based on any combination of the following factors:

- quality

- like / dislike

- agreement / disagreement

- mood of the voting user

To mine all those from a single click it is necessary to track those clicks over many interactions. Only that way does it become possible to get a sense of what is on the users mind when he/she clicks that 'vote' link.

Votes on urls that are submitted are not subject to the 'agreement / disagreement' element, but all the others apply.

Allowing people to 'climb' faster based on click patterns is a very complex data mining issue. The 'dummy buttons' idea is an interesting one, to some extent this already happens on HN (the up/down vote buttons do not always work the way you think they do).

One hard thing to achieve is to get rid of the effect simply measuring karma has on HN. Because the users see the points and the karma they collect there is a feedback loop in HN that tends to get out of hand.

Comments posted early on in a thread will get some karma regardless of how good they are in the longer term.

Ideally a 'good' user (so one that in the long term will acquire access to all the features) should be identified early, but then that would open the door to gaming the system even further. The road up the hill is pretty quick anyway for most users, as far as I can see you get all the goodies from 200 points upwards (other than administrator privileges), an active user could collect that in a week, and by then will be reasonably well versed in HN etiquette to not abuse these powers.
Wow. Predicting a Great Depression 2 leading to a second American revolution. Overreact much?

They have a point about easy credit and debt creating a bubbles, but I think they might take the conclusion to the extreme. A good general rule to go by is "Things are never as bad as people tell you, or as good as people tell you"
Do you think you'll also be upset when the edge neighborhood becomes bougie? Or is that the general purpose of these kinds of businesses moving into poor places?
That's so disingenuous to not count the cost of electricity for recharging it.
[reposting my comment from the blog it's self]

The problem is, if you want to sell your software to large user base then the per-user costs become prohibitive.

For example, say the Open Source product takes 100 hours to setup (which is generous) which is $5,500 and server costs are $4500/year = $10,000

You have a hosting product that requires no set and no server the subscription is $36/user
so…

10 users = $360 (big win)

100 users = $3,600 (small win)

1,000 users = $36,000 (oh dear)

and it’s not unusual to have 10,000 users ($360,000)

You’d think that companies would get the problems with this model, but at least one company doesn’t:
https://www.yammer.com/about/pricing
Launch your product. Quit your job.