skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This video is Poe's Law (http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Poe%27s_Law) in action. The video elicits vicious hatred from the Youtube commenters but is really an exceptionally clever parody. This one did fool at me first; Poe's Law holds.
Cocoa with Love: Animating a window to fullscreen on the Mac
It will be open for at least another month.
No. Passport was not federated, open or free in any meaningful sense.
I don't see anything wrong with requesting that someone back up their claims in a discussion. Your suggestion that the rest of us should just RTFM (or in this case google it) adds no value whatsoever.
Ask HN: I want to build/learn something this weekend - suggestions?
I have a free weekend and my ankle is busted so I can't do any running around. I was thinking of spending the inside time in learning something new/building something for fun, just looking for some suggestions....

I'm extremely familiar with php/mysql and asp/sql server so a change of pace would be nice.

Thanks!
> (and I can't think of a single example of non-forked projects merging).

Merb and Rails.
We're there.
Mentors are around, we have a couple of great ones, but you're definitely right that we could have a lot more startup types vs. Side project types.

The focus on partnering in this scene is fantastic though.
That is what I was thinking. Publishing a hash along with the listing of the article would essentially be free as far as bandwidth costs are concerned which is what is supposed to be the reason for the fee.
Thanks for the perspective from a national health care country.

I've come to the belief that the lack of universal care in the U.S. keeps workers from being less mobile and from taking risks.
MIT's Sixth Sense: Augmenting reality with personal projection
To expand:

The goal of the establishment clause, of freedom of assembly, speech, and press, is to protect individual ideological freedom from government interference, is it not?

What danger is there to religious or ideological liberty in allowing vouchers to be used at Catholic schools or Muslim schools or schools with Young Democrats cirriculum or schools with an atheist/skeptic focus? That the government would appear to be funding religious or ideological education? It is a danger to appearances only. The government is not paying more for the extra lessons, and the parents have freely chosen the school.

What danger is there to religious or ideological liberty in requiring--through legal or economic means--that children be educated in a school with only politically approved cirriculum? Two dangers: that the unconscious political or religious mores of a powerful majority will find their way into the approved cirriculum and that it fundamentally denies anyone with a minority view the ability to educate their children within their traditions.

It seems to me that the second case is far more destructive to our goal. The idea that we would like to economically prevent most Muslims from educating their children as Muslims ought to be repulsive to a society theoretically committed to religious freedom. Nor is there safety in sticking to a 'neutral' cirriculum; poli sci and civics have to be taught, American History has to be taught, and science has to deal with the evolution/intelligent design thing at some point. Defining neutrality on popularly divisive topics isn't easy -- and supposing the group that agrees with you will retain political control in the long run is foolishly optimistic.

There is the danger--nay, the certainty--that parents given the freedom to educate their children according to their whims will teach them destructive and false ideas. But this is simply an instance of the highest cost of maintaining a free society: tolerating certain evils because the associated liberty is worth it. It is not the job of the government to serve as a dogmatic gatekeeper, rather it is the job of free citizens to persuade one another in the public forums.

It is my opinion that allowing parents to educate their children any how or way they please, without bias for or against any institution except on the basis of its meeting a minimal functional standard, poses no danger to personal liberty and is in fact a great boon.
Haven't you got bigger worries if someone who invested in you once won't invest again?
Not sure what version of the Jawbone it is, but pg is giving one of these away at Listia. http://www.listia.com/auction/201

If you're going to register a new account, I could give you my referral ID so I get the bonus points... I'm going for the HDTV they are auctioning.
Read "restful web services" and "programming collective intelligence"
If you want a total change of pace, check out J. It's one of the two main successors to APL, meaning the primitives are arrays and you write programs by composing very general operators. I recommend it for two reasons: 1. it will open your mind and perhaps blow it altogether; 2. the software comes with a bunch of tutorials that are well-done and fun to work through. http://www.jsoftware.com/start.htm

p.s. Don't expect it to be like what you'd normally call a programming language.
Erlang is fun and a weekend read. I recommend "Programming Erlang" by Joe Armstrong.
http://www.overthewire.org/wargames/vortex/

It's a race against time and terror!

Hurry, CommieBob, Before there's still time!!
> If everyone could send their kid to a religious school, in some areas, the market would simply not provide for non-religious education.

The availability and quality of schools is already a key consideration when choosing a neighborhood to live in. Forcing every last kid in Chinatown to go to a school at odds with their traditions is an affront to liberty. Offering the one Jewish family in Hicksville, Alabama the option of (a) moving to a bigger city, (b) commuting to a decent school, (c) homeschooling or (d) putting up with local school they hate the least, is more palatable to me.

In most cases, the solution would be, "don't live in Hicksville, Alabama if you can't stand the schools." But even if you have to, at least you have options (b) and (d). Public schools don't even give you that much.
It's a tough call to come up with 'original thought' in a thread comment. But I can give some pointers about non-linear methods that work.

Time delay embedding is a common method to estimate hidden structure in the system. You can make short-term predictions about future state of the system if you look at its previous states and find ones that are similar to current one. You can analyse transitional probabilities between these states. You can also study scale-invariant properties of the system such as fractal dimension or log-time scaling. There is a separate discipline called 'chaos control' that looks at certain unstable moments when the system can be manipulated by a small external signal (very relevant for dealing with heart attacks, should be interesting for central banks as well).

So, most categorically, current mainstream economic models are by far not the best we can do with at the time. They are grossly inaccurate representation of reality. There is of course emerging field of 'complexity economics' but it is not even close to being accepted in the mainstream.
2009 Startup School, October 24 at Berkeley
Ok, here it is: http://startupschool.org.
Would you pay per-SMS for a very simple web service that takes care of this for you to all carriers? How much?
For Alanis Morissette values of ironic, anyway.

I've often thought that HN would be a great news/article filter if I could only remove the start-up articles, and I'm sure there are people who feel it would be great if they could read the start-up articles but remove the coding ones.
I am somewhat surprised that someone would want to remove both, but then there are often fascinating threads that spring up around security or robotics or similar matters.
I like to go back to places I lived long ago and "look" at streets that were once familiar - and see what's left of that, and of my own memory.

Also interesting is the places that aren't part of the Google agenda, whatever that is. The place I grew up has no photographs at all. But the photos of the place I'm living are constantly telling me about things I haven't seen. So - did I ever see the place I grew up?
Thanks for organizing this. I hope to see all of you there. This functions as the defacto international Hacker News meetup. Maybe, just maybe, Nickb will be seen in the same room as pg.
That is hardly a weekend read. It's a good book though.
I'm feeling the urge to apply. I'm 49 years old, but a big believer in lifelong education. I also feel the urge to mention hammers in the "what tools do you like" box.
The updated site has a list:

http://www.startupschool.org/speakers.html

2009 Speakers (so far)
Chris Anderson
Editor in Chief, Wired Magazine

Paul Buchheit
Founder, FriendFeed; Creator of GMail

Jason Fried
Founder, 37signals

Paul Graham
Partner, Y Combinator; Founder, Viaweb

Tony Hsieh
CEO, Zappos; Founder, LinkExchange

Mitchell Kapor
President, Open Source Applications Foundation; Founder, Lotus

Greg McAdoo
Partner, Sequoia Capital

Mark Zuckerberg
Founder, Facebook
Hey, now I don't feel so bad about the Iraq war anymore! We found a different boondoggle to waste all our money on.
And I thought that the speaker list couldn't top last years. Yeah, I was wrong:

http://www.startupschool.org/speakers.html

Thank you YC, Berkeley, St@b,etc. for putting this on.
UGC = User Generated Content
You're missing the point of the article. It's that the seed VC will essentially have control of the appearance of your startup's chances for success.

If they don't reinvest (for whatever reason, even if your company is in good shape), you will look bad. If they do reinvest, they won't be doing so at fair value.
I just turned in my application, then read the faq about getting responses.

...now, I'm wondering if I typed in my email address properly...no feedback until October...hmmm
By the time Apple are at iPhone 7 it should be good enough for anything more than sleeping cute dogs.

Unless the lens and the path that the light takes on its way to the sensor gets larger, I doubt this will happen.
Google loses 1.3% of the search market
that is actually a really good idea. if you could easily peruse previous "days" of hackernews. if an article is really worth reading once, it should be worth reading every few months.
I'm doing the Python challenge because my Python's getting rusty. So far it's been pretty enjoyable.

Edit: Don't waste your time. I stopped because you end up spending most of your time figuring out little well-concealed clues that have nothing to do with programming at all (after you get past the easier ones. I'd had enough at 6).
Try building a program on Google App Engine. I personally like python, but you could go with any JVM-targeted language. The particularly new part for you is the datastore:

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/datastore/

No joins (except for "self joins"), entity groups, sharded counters, and the mindset that computations should be on write instead of on query. At the end, you can work through this article that shows how to implement a YC-style decaying vote score purely on writing of entities (records):

http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/overheard.html
Do it.

So I'll know I'm not the oldest.
No, but when people bring up "C vs Lisp" or "Java vs Lisp" it comes up. I don't give it much due however.
Ask HN: Do textbooks help?
I can't say I'm exactly new to programming, but I'm new to writing algorithms that actually do something. I am a bit clueless at the moment, but I was wondering whether reading a textbook on the subject helps. I'm specifically considering "Introduction to the Design and Analysis of Algorithms (2nd Edition)" by Anany V. Levitin, or "Introduction to Algorithms (3d Edition)" by Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, and Clifford Stein. Or both. Are these books any good? Are there other books I should read?

BTW: As far as programming languages go, I'm pretty fluent in Java and far into learning Python with plans to learn many more languages in the future.
There is a map in the San Jose Diridon Caltrain station, placed right next to the door across from the ramps. After some searching I found someone who took a photo of it here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/54568662@N00/1489675763/

It is a very interesting map because it contains the lines of most of the transit authorities in the Bay Area(apparently not all because transit.511.org has more). There are so many that they have to reuse similar colors for a few of them. There are agencies that you probably have never heard of on that map.

That is a scary thing and indicates the true scale of the transit problem - so many overlapping interests, no central authority. And looking at the transit agencies alone doesn't even give us perspective on how many other bureaucracies are getting in the way.
One of the advantages of the rewritten application form is that you can edit your application. Just go to http://news.ycombinator.com/susapply again.
> There's a t-shirt for that...

... which is a little bit ironic, in its own way.
This app sounds cool. But lately I'm concerned about having tons of data on my phone and losing it. I dig that w apple mail I only have to worry about 50 messages, not my whole life.
This payment method is doomed to fail.

Once it goes over $10, maybe $20, it's dead. No growth. This is NOT one of those "everyone is doing it" kinds of services.

After this, their only hope is to turn to the current active user base and start all over at $0.05 and make it a mandatory subscription payment instead.

Reason being: once it reaches the "it's not worth it" threshold, a new clone will pop up and there just won't be any reason to use pinboard. At all.
$515 billion to shift entire world to renewables? That's got to be off by 2 orders of magnitude.
Indeed, looks pretty amazing. Thankfully we don't have to choose between which ones to listen to, as that would be quite difficult.

Since "(so far)" hints there will likely be more, what's the expected speaker count?
Anyone know approximately how many applicants get accepted?
Textbooks are about the only way to learn deep comp sci for someone (like me) who is self taught .

I don't know about the Levitin book, but the Cormen book is likely to be a little tough for someone just starting out. I would suggest Tardos and Kleinberg or Skiena's book (and once you are finished with those you can always come back to Cormen). Make sure you are comfortable deriving proofs before attempting Cormen. A lot of the value of the book is in its exercises and a lot of the exercises involve proving things.

So yes textbooks help, but in my experience they need to be the right textbooks in the right sequence. Good Luck!
That's funny. I'm talking about the Czech Republic. You are countering with some stories of some miserably poor country in Eastern Europe (yes a few of them still exist). I don't know where it is you're talking about, but God bless them.
a processing.js visualization.
How does Twitter receive SMS?
How does Twitter receive SMS commands from users?do they use a service?
"Python!"

If you decode to explore Python, try the Dive Into Python tutorial (http://diveintopython.org/) followed by the Django tutorial ( http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial01/) seeing as how you know php and two databases. Both are short and can be completely finished in a weekend of work.

Do let us know what you learned !Good Luck!
Meh. Does it even come with a Mail app? And it doesn't work with exchange. I know, I know, YC; release early and often.
I smell patent troll-ish-ness:

"Protecting your ideas is the cornerstone of building a technology company. With our in house patent and intellectual property attorneys, we enable you to address the IP hurdles early so you are secure as you go to market."
- from their blog, which is five days old.

and then there's this:

"The cube is home to a number of nascent startups a.k.a. “disruptive rebels” or “DRs” as they are known in the cube..."
I have better idea.

You could lower the price day by day when nobody registered and raise again if there were registrations in last few days.
Charles Simonyi: Intentional Programming
Twitter vs. Why we can't concentrate?
Damn this makes me angry. Look at all the awesome shit we could pay for if we had the motivation...arg!
Yes textbooks do help. The Levitin book is good start. I would recommend reading Cormen et al after that. If you want to get serious about designing algorithms you should refer Donald Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, at least Volume 1.
Gmail: Email dari Google
> I'm sure there are even more interesting kinds of time-travel you could come up with given a simulated universe. It actually could be fun to write some sci fi short stories with this in the background, unexplained.

I'm actually working with this exact idea, more or less, for a [roughly proposed] series of books, the first of which I'm procrastinating upon as I type this. :) Time travel, though, is a rather small part of what is possible with my metaverse model. I assume that the simulations are infinitely stacked, and each one has a 0:1 time-passage correspondence, so that for a "parent" simulation, the "child" simulation runs instantaneously, no matter the in-sim execution time, thus making Hypercomputation and such possible. All sorts of fun-with-philosophy falls out of that:

The protagonists are Star Trek-style "everything is science" types, who discover that magic exists (for "magic," read "simulation runtime bugs.") They go on "Hard Science-based Fantasy" adventures using said magic for ten or twelve books, before figuring out that it was (very complicated) science all along. They then care for their own sim for a while, hacking it to fix some kinks (such as the inevitable existence, given probability, of a malevolent entity who has the root password.) Bored of that, they proceed to "break out" of their simulation, repeatedly, visiting "higher planes" that each have radically different physics and sometimes even logic, but that all share the property that Turing machines can be constructed within them. Eventually, they get to the "root" universe (really just a chroot jail) and meet God—that is to say, an AI who was left to run for an infinite time on an analogue computer and thus became omniscient merely by evaluating all possible states of all possible universes (that it could detect from within the chroot.)

And that's only the first half of the sequence. 's called "Infinity's Tale", by the way. :)
I have lived on the east coast my entire life so I would say it is a popular belief elsewhere. My understanding is that when you consume organic food you consume less chemicals, etc.
because carriers want more control over this process and make it harder to use by other means in order you to use your beloved phone, which completely bounded by your carrier, more.
"The crucial thing it's missing is a large technical school".

100 miles south of Portland is the OSU. I hope they do something about this.
Followup w/ HN: Mixpanel API + Ruby on Rails = Funnel Performance Up 16.9%
Ask PG: Bursts on HN (the number of users online)
Could we have a new feature / just a hint how the number of users online are changing a day?

There are many interesting posts not hitting the frontpage posted at the wrong time of the day.

For example there is a burst around 1PM(GMT+2 timezone) when there are many new submissions and heavy upvoting.
For sure there are other bursts too important for the "natural selection" of posts hitting mass audience.
Upwards - It would probably take more than $1 per person!

I'm assuming the number was originally a guess at the money that would have to be poured into research to achieve RE < C, because less than $100 per person for a total switch to renewables is clearly wrong. That's a bit too handwavey to be included amongst other hard figures on a graph like this though.
Take a look at this MetaFilter thread about simple, useful skills that can be learned quickly:

http://ask.metafilter.com/125874/Simple-useful-skills
While that's a very interesting point, and I haven't heard it before so I'll look it up, my main point remains. Because of socialized health care, other countries can focus on prevention, which is much cheaper and effective then dumping money and effort at the point of crisis.

A quick anecdote: my friend and I here were laughing because in both cases our pregnant wives went to the doctor about a small concern and were put in the hospital for a week for testing. But I thought about it later, and that wouldn't happen in America. You're churned out as fast as possible. The great side effect, and I think you'll see this on infant mortality rates as well, despite what you've said, is that if health care is free, people use it earlier than the crisis point. And that's cheaper and better for everyone.
Hideho guys. Some weeks ago I wrote some OSS Ruby on Rails code for the Mixpanel API. The discussion was here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=749497

Part of the writeup included my app's core interaction, which is a six stage funnel which, at the time, had 48.5% conversion. Mixpanel showed me which two stages were screwing things up. I fixed them.

The funnel conversion is now 56.7%, where is a 16.9% lift in conversions. (Statistically significant at 90% confidence level, but it wasn't A/B tested.) For the detailed breakdown, see the submission link.
Yeah, I agree with you. I don't really see much personal benefit in using brick and mortar video rental stores. Going to one means that I have to take a half hour or an hour out of my day to get a movie. And I can't check the inventory of a store online, so if I'm looking for an older or a more obscure movie, I'm not really guaranteed that it would be available. Plus I would not go to Blockbuster because I wanted to get a brilliant recommendation from a staff member. But I would be more willing to watch something recommended to me by a recommendation engine. And most video rental stores usually charge more than I want to pay.

So I really don't see brick and mortar stores competing with kiosks and rental services like netflix. The single benefit a store has is that it is probably one of the fastest ways to get a physical copy of a movie because it is not mailed. But I would not be the least bit perturbed about waiting a day or two to see a movie.
Would it be in bad taste if we aren't accepted to camp out in hopes of no-shows?
Take a look at multitouch systems.

The rise of a new hardware platform is a rare occasion compared to the many fresh software products coming out on a regular basis.
> This is a problem in Germany. One of the reasons only big companies can exist there.

There are plenty of small and medium sized business in Germany. Ever heard of the Mittelstand? (Not to deny that those regulations can be a problem. On the other hand, Germany does not (in most sectors, yet) have a minimum wage.)
Yes, it's a bit hand-wavy. Though after RE<C the transition is essentially self-funding.
It's interesting in the domain of pro-electronics -- audio gear, photo gear, etc. -- you can often recognize the top of the line stuff by its relative lack of features. They start adding a bunch of junk to "pro-sumer" lines to make them impressive for people who want to look like a pro, but don't really know what they're doing.