skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm down with that. :)
"But, yes, organizations doing work far from most supporters (e.g., foreign relief organizations or missionary organizations) often can gain funds for years without having to show results. It's regrettable when a willing donor isn't giving money to best effect."

Not to be a shill for my own blog again, but the reason so few organizations run real evaluations is that it's really, really hard, expensive, and time-consuming to do. Consequently, funders by and large don't offer real money or incentives for it, and if they don't, there's not much of an impetus to improve, and I describe this basic idea in much greater detail here: http://blog.seliger.com/2008/04/24/studying-programs-is-hard...

Furthermore, some funders don't want real evaluations, even if they say otherwise; for example, we wrote a bunch of Community-Based Abstinence Education proposals for various clients, where the main purpose of the evaluation was to try and demonstrate that abstinence-only education works, and I described the problems with that in this post: http://blog.seliger.com/2008/10/12/what-to-do-when-research-...
A good book just came out about this very issue: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470454679/ref=ox_ya_os_pro...
No, he's spot on about the advantages of 'linear light' processing. It even makes a big difference to bilinear interpolation when you're doing texture mapping.

This is an incredibly confusing subject, thanks to the overlap of gamma as an encoding technique with all the other issues around color management. Poynton's Gamma FAQ is one of my favorite resources ( http://www.poynton.com/GammaFAQ.html ), but even after five years working on image processing software I still have to make an effort to wrap my head around it all.
There are some nice ideas here, but it's too different from what I'm used to for me to use it full time (I use Git). I am interested if there is a way to get bug tracking and a wiki and store it in a git repo somewhere in the .git directory. Might be a nice feature for git 2.0 :)
I am actually mostly interested in finding a data point quickly in order to get to the comments. Maybe just break out the comment link feature into a "(comments)" link next to the article titles?
Strange that no one is ever commended for preventing a failure, only attacked when one occurs.
you're already looking at HN, it's not like you're really gonna need that 25 for anything else right?
Treatment for Sleep Apnea
Treatments for Sleep Apnea, CPAP For Sleep Apnea exists to deliver the very best in personalized treatment. Our desire is to alleviate the anxiety of being intolerant to CPAP or the disruptiveness of snoring.
That's odd - most of the data is fairly linear, but as of right now, there's a very sharp spike for 5 stories at 10:30pm (with a corresponding drop in 5 other stores), which is reverted back to "normal" at 10:45.

Strange voting patterns? Or a bug in your script?
You're right. My apologies.
Steel 'Velcro' Supports 35 Tons, Heat At Up To 800 Degrees Celsius
Good point. I was thinking of the C-based languages, though to be honest I'm not sure all of them behave in the same way. I should have been more careful talking about languages, especially around here...
Reporting a bug through their bug report form worked. :)

FriendFeed has fixed the bug. There was a way to exploit this now-fixed issue as actual XSS in FriendFeed for certain browsers.
http://code.google.com/p/browsersec/wiki/Part2#Content_handl...
Interesting point -- I've never written a scheduler. Is it really true that writing a scheduler for the multi-socket, multi-core case is that much more complicated than focusing on single-socket, multi-core? Seems possible to me. However, doesn't the existence of hyperthreading contradict that? Even for the single-socket, multi-core case, you need to account for the fact that the virtual processors are not identical.
I was negotiating the total price of the car. I guess the missing bit of information is the term (both prices were the same) and the amount down (both were $0)....I also don't really finance.

Huh? If you don't finance and both of the cars were the same price, how does the difference in term mean anything?
What does one have to do with the other? If I'm going to spend the necessary 20 minutes to compile a new kernel using CK's patch, I want some evidence that I'm going to be gaining something.

Then perhaps you should pay Con Kolivas to prove the value of his freely provided no-warranty work-in-progress code for you.
I literally stopped reading after he spent an entire paragraph abusing all modern understanding of DNA. Stating repeatedly that it is made up of amino acids did not help his case.
getting a good deal on a used car is near impossible

Theoretically, and as predicted by a classic paper by Economics Nobel-winner George Akerlof, yes.

But practically, no. For various reasons the used-car market does not behave like the theory of asymmetric information predicts. Carried to its logical conclusion, the theory suggests the market won't exist at all -- and yet clearly it does! See the Wikipedia article for some discussion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

From personal experience: I've bought a couple used cars -- and always gotten great value. My sister and other members of my family have had success as well.

And plenty of personal-finance gurus will tell you that you should never buy a new car -- the premium over a reliable used-car is rarely justifiable, except on emotional/fashionable grounds.
Probably because Minsky rocks, and has a similar writing style to pg.
What if it is one of your children at risk for contracting H1N1? I know of a program that helps reduce the spread of germs between our kids. My daughter learned this great program called Germy Wormy Germ Smart at pre-school. It teaches kids to understand how germs spread and how to NOT spread them. It was so much fun for her, and amazing how quickly the kids learned healthier hygiene habits! The website speaks for itself: germywormy.com
I don't think it's quite accurate to call Twitter ephemeral, though. All kinds of third-party services are trying to index and archive as many tweets as possible, plus there's always the possibility that Twitter will cut a more formal deal with Google (or any other search engine).

Plus, there have been numerous documented instances where deleted tweets can still be found by Twitter's own search engine.

In short, the old rule of thumb still applies: if you don't want it archived and indexed and preserved forever, don't put it online in the first place.
I don't think you understand quite how the donor-charity relationship works. The donors are the customers. The charity earns money by pleasing the donors. The venue for pleasing the donors is by performing charitable acts.

If a donor is pissed, it will force the charity to conform to his/her demands. The recipients of the charity's services are usually an afterthought, b/c they are far more easily replaced than any donor.
Pertuity Direct closes, but social lending site Lending Club thrives
"...[A] study by a labor union for telecommunications workers"

"Of course, when the U.S. spends some of the $7.2 billion allocated to broadband development in the federal stimulus package, the union's members would benefit from job creation."

This should be setting off some alarm bells. I'd be curious to know how the data was collected and interpreted.
The Gates Foundation has been doing some research regarding this, you can find it here.

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/learning/Pages/december-2008-...
For-profit companies selling you goods and services often spend enormous amounts on marketing, advertising, and branding in order to convince you to part with your hard earned money. This doesn't mean their product is any better than their competitors though. It just means they've spun you into believing it is.

While I think it's a good idea to research your charity or donation to a non-profit, I definitely do not think they should operate like a for-profit business.

I think this is a great article, and there are some really pointed areas of improvement for non-profits. However, let's not turn to the free market gods for a solution please.
Personality can be a huge problem because the kernel and its parts are a long term project and I would prefer people that can work together for its entire duration.

Accusations like "/me sees Ingo run off to find the right combination of hardware and benchmark to prove his point." is far from the level of civility I would entrust my favorite OS's kernel. The proper response would be something in the line "it will suck on this benchmarks, but it will excell in these others and in these hardware configurations" and show numbers. It's always possible to act in a civilized way.

That said, CK seems only a bit off when compared to a couple others. There are a lot of people who like to be quite caustic from time to time. I must confess I have to refrain myself frequently and HN is not LKML.

And, more important: this whole discussion is more or less pointless. It doesn't matter how good a modern scheduler is, all of them impose a very little penalty on a modern kernel. Are we really going to fight this bitterly over a couple percentage points?

Would that be so hard as to include a "-scheduler=" switch in the kernel for it to be selectable at boot time (and so I can pick one that fits both my netbook and my SGI 4096 CPU monster when I want to)? This would pretty much end this discussion.
Not for me, or anyone at my office.
Note that this responds to the HN piece that's here: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/measurenonprofit (see the discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=809952 ).
Point of order: a female entrepreneur could just as easily put the child-rearing on her husband.* And there's no need for the negative connotation: is it impossible that one partner can happily take the lion's share of the child-rearing duties so that the other can focus on a business?

* applies for all two-gender permutations
You would expect that any organisation doing this kind of work would attract criticism. There is a taboo against harming a charities ability to raise funds.

Do you know of any organisation doing similar but better?
Maybe a little less blur. Cool though.
Singapore Wedding Photography
Wedding directory offer wedding photography, reception venues, designer wedding gown &amp; dress, Singapore wedding planning resources.
An alarming vision.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/nit
I'd guess that wouldn't be much different from the rank.
"Con's background as an anesthesiologist (rather than a programmer) causes him to understand feelings better than measurements"

I would be pretty worried with an anesthesiologist that disregarded his measurements... Either you can measure or it doesn't exist. If it exists and you don't measure, you'd better write something to measure it.
I think it really depends on the specific area/charitable cause - but where it comes to economic development, markets are a far better solution than charities and aid which have often done far more harm than good (e.g. food aid). In general, the potential for inefficiency and even fraud is arguably even higher given the lack of transparency and often weak governance).

Anyone who donates money to a charity should at least spend as much time researching what they're "selling" as they would a comparable product/service. The tax returns are available but some of these firms spend as much as 80% of their funds raised in administration and overhead - which is often far worse than most for profits. Yes, not for profits also "often spend enormous amounts on marketing, advertising, and branding in order to convince you to part with your hard earned money".

Fortunately at least anyone can look up any charity's IRS Form 990 that lists such things as salaries (which are sometimes as much if not higher than private market salaries). I usually start here: http://www.guidestar.org/ (using bugmenot for login/password)
Your People
I spent this weekend taking notes from Randy Pausch's talk on Time Management. Here's the video and my notes.
Tell HN: Solving HtDP extra problem set. Hosting at Github.
Hello, fellas.

I'm trying to solve the entire Htdp problem set, so I can move on to SICP.

The problems are found in http://www.htdp.org/2003-09-26/Problems .

My solutions are hosted here: http://github.com/psteiger/htdp-solution/tree/master .

I'm telling you because comments on my solutions and alternative solutions to the problems are very welcome

Note: I've written no README in the github repo yet, but the structure is self-explanatory
Noah Webster's 1828 or 1913 edition. Nothing else really compares here; in that time America was in many ways a more literate nation.

http://machaut.uchicago.edu/websters

Also the OED on CD, I wish somebody would make the OED web-friendly.
A Dynamic, User-Friendly Captcha With Pictures
The conference starts tomorrow (Tuesday)
Summary: For some reason Matt Mullenweg started paying attention to Dave Winer. It's one of the worst ideas he's ever had, and he's the idiot who wrote Wordpress, so that's really saying something.

After a year or so of uselessness and a few epic flameouts from Dave, they'll probably implement PubSubHubBub on Wordpress.com, and rightfully not waste effort trying to make it work for self-hosters. With any luck, they'll stop serving duplicate feeds and go pure Atom at the same time.
http://www.thatpoll.com
...according to the law that person is now the rightful owner.

Not in most (all?) US jurisdictions. A person who unknowingly buys/receives stolen property generally isn't considered guilty of a crime, but also has no right to keep the stolen property.
My father worked at Harwell in the 1950s. I didn't realize till recently that this had made him one of the first programmers.
Fullscreen version
http://www.hntrends.com/Plotter2.swf

Incidentally, I thought the lines looked blurry... in fullscreen it's clear that they are.

The pop-up only appears for the datapoints - not if your mouse is over a line segment between data points. In fact, it was a while before the any popup come up, for me. Maybe make it attach to the closest data point? (google analytics does it this way).
I'm not sure if this qualifies as measurable, but the ICRC does a lot of good in a lot of really bad places, and they produce testimonial and other documentation of what activities they can publicly document. (As you may or may not be aware, it's their policy to hold all reports of detainee treatment in strict confidence. Their site can explain why this is better than I can.)
You should overlay the last N stories that reached #1.
Well a lot of the spec work actually is illegal in terms of copyright infringement. As it grows, so does the infringement. This will create a loads of litigation. Eventually the market will most likely take care of it through some better form of copy protection or through laws. This is going to take a while and probably cost a lot of money and I can handle that as long as it isn't taxpayer money I guess.

As long as it's the businesses that foot the bill then I really can't complain right? However when it comes to free interns the consequences are either paid for by the people, or it's limited to those that can afford to go without a pay check. If I'm paying for someone's rent and food stamps while they get an education / experience / whatever as an intern, then I'd feel better if I knew it was a respectable education / experience etc.

I simply do not believe free internships will give me this piece of mind. On a case by case basis, sure there are probably plenty of great free opportunities, but this is shark infested waters imo. I think the majority will see very little benefit if the floodgates were opened.

It also sounds like the way you run your ship is very ethical and mature. While I'm sure plenty of other business would be just as fair, I highly doubt they would be the majority. In fact I think you would be part of a very small minority. The words Free Interns would attract a lot of attention. Maybe there should be a qualifying process that a company could go through to have this right? Similar to government grants maybe.
Hi, I think you'll lose a lot of potential users (like me) because your site requires registration.

Depending on your plans for the site, this may not be a big deal.
However, can you explain the reasoning behind requiring registration
This is one of the reasons why non-profit companies are flawed. There are no incentives in place for monetary gain. Non-profits are good at raising awareness, not being a sustainable entity.

If someone wants to make a difference and change world (especially developing countries), I believe there has to be financial incentives : social entrepreneurship.
Nothing is ever free unless your time has no value. I've published and contributed to a great deal of open source software, much of it successful. I've been among these communities for a very long time and understand the social expectations. One of them is this: if you want anyone to care about your work, then you'd better be prepared to defend it. I would find any contrary expectation to be unbearably narcissistic, and, whatever his other failings, I think CK would agree with me on this. Think of it this way: if you published an essay containing controversial opinions, would you demand that it be immune to criticism on the basis that you're giving it away for free? I don't think software should be considered different in any case, and certainly not in this one given that CK is representing his work as an improvement over someone else's.
Then I will definitely add that not every company is ethically irresponsible. I don't think opening up free internships is the right way to go though. I could be convinced that some sort of qualifying process to keep most of the bad out and let most of the good in could be worthwhile if it was not overly expensive to implement.
Indeed he has:

http://twitter.com/andrewbaron/status/35621952

Nevermind, i am on an intense fact-checking-spree tonight.
Grameen Bank, http://www.grameen-info.org/, one of the largest microfinance ventures which you all have been discussing.
I've been involved with a couple of music/culture related 501-c3 non-profits that had very quantifiable results: class enrollments, ticket sales, sales of music CDs, and awards won by participants in international competitions.

I would say that both of them do extremely well in the non-quantifiable quality department as well.
This will be useful until they're popular.
I don't know that it's a matter of difficulty, just design tradeoffs. For a single socket you can probably get away with a single runqueue; there will be contention but it won't be that expensive. For multi-socket you want to have multiple runqueues; this scales better but you have to load balance threads between queues.
This is pretty fascinating. The most important thing I notice almost immediately is that there are generally two classes of articles:

1. those which reach the front page by virtue of quickly getting a few votes while they are young and then dwindle

2. those which barely reach the front page and have some kind of resurgence (discernible by a large jump in front page rank).

It'd be interesting to group articles based on how they perform like this and see if there are any other correlated factors. My feeling is that the ones with resurgence are either long and require some amount of karma "activation energy" before people are willing to dive into them or that they're ones with long conversation chains which have a spike for similar reasons.
2TB iDisk
I was going to reply with some nice analysis, but then I realized how angry your response sounded, and it made me want to stop visiting Hacker News since this seems to be part of a growing trend on here lately.

This is a place for thoughtful and friendly debate, not some arena for trying to rip people apart.

HN may be a smarter version of what Digg used to be, but it has become just as unpleasant and nasty.
It's not blur, it's overlapping line segments with some transparency effect. Not great for visualization, I agree.
So we can keep your keywords apart from other user's keywords. I'm not sure what you mean!
Remotes and Connectivity: Reason No. 6 Why We're Fat
Companies go bankrupt because the customer has the power to discontinue their patronage if they deliver a product or service poorly

This definitely happens to many kinds of non-profit!

in the non-profit world the recipient of the service or products has very little power to motivate a market.

For 501-c3 organizations that provide classes, lectures, and performances, often the opposite is the case. Many non-profits have to be run much like a business. There can be something like a marketplace where the "customer" pays not with currency, but with their time. (And sometimes, both money and time are involved.) Also, very often, the "recipient" of services can easily directly involve themselves with running the organization. (KPFT radio in Houston is an example of this.)
definr doesn't have a definition for "triumphalism" :(
Creating thumbnails of images in PHP using pear libraries
This article made me want to go and re-read this one: "Confessions of a Car Salesman"

http://www.edmunds.com/advice/buying/articles/42962/article....
This article glosses over one of the key factors, perhaps the most important one: network effects. Your user-base, it's culture/community is every bit as important as the language and its implementation. Arguably, it's even more important.

One can say the following for many languages:

[X] is, in the opinion of many, not such a well designed language. But it's very useful to many people, in large part because of its community.

I think such network effects are responsible for the "worse is better" idea with regards to languages. Worse is not better. But a large active community makes better when it comes to a programming language.

So here's another reason why programming language design is hard: to be successful, you need to become popular.
Good tutorial...I used this method for the thumbnails on http://www.steves-digicams.com/
Marketing, advertising, and branding is a MUCH larger part of what non-profits sell than it is of what commercial operations with an actual product sell.
Also, anyone who goes to Japan notices, that they go for totally-over-the-top-ness

Strike Japan, replace with "America", and every last one of my coworkers would agree with this statement.

Here's the man on the street view: "When Americans build a car, you see, they don't think of putting it down a tiny little street into a big driveway. They think it is a covered wagon, travelling out west like you see in the cowboy movies. So they make it HUGE. And then you go to their cities and do they make little rinky dinky 10 story office buildings? No -- they make GIANT HUNDRED FLOOR office buildings. They're also culturally predisposed to liking swagger, because of the cowboys. That is why John Wayne and George Bush are so popular."
One useful way of thinking about nonprofits: a nonprofit fills a need that the free market on its own cannot meet.

For example, the free market will not provide free meals to homeless people with HIV in Manhattan.

Nonprofits should not be made into businesses. If a business can fill a need and turn a profit at the same time, great (in most cases)!
Quick update: There was a problem with the script which caused it to go down for a few hours. Should be fixed now. Graph might look a little off for a few hours until the logging catches up.
Really nifty! Really fascinating!
this one pissed a lot of people off, though i thought it was clever.

http://gothamist.com/2007/08/16/hangups_about_s.php