skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Could have a better name. App pirater? Sounds like a cracking tool.
What you're really addressing is the issue of incentives, as economists call it, and so is the original author of the story. I wrote this comment on his blog:

To my mind, this isn't news, but that might be in part because I've worked in my family's grant writing firm for so long. The real issue you're discussing is one of incentives: nonprofits don't have much incentive to measure how well they're doing because funders don't demand that they do, or at least don't as a large group.

If the funder is federal, state, or local, the funder doesn't have the resources (or the brains) to really measure effectiveness; if the funder is a foundation, the funder probably cares more about the appearance of doing good than effectiveness. I've addressed this point in some detail here: http://blog.seliger.com/2008/01/04/more-on-charities and here: http://blog.seliger.com/2008/01/23/foundations-and-the-futur... . The blow, which I contribute to, deals with the issues you raise on a regular basis, and if you want to learn more about why things are the way they are at the moment, take a look at the archives.
As a guy living in one of the small countries which does reasonably well on internet speed rankings, let me tell you --- high domestic speed is useless if your country only has a tiny pipe to the places that have all the content you'd actually want to watch.

The in-country content I browse is primarily textual --- the local newspaper, classified/auctions sites, etc. You only need high bandwidth for those if you want to watch all the stupid flash video ads they attach to everything.

The video content producers are all in the US, S. Korea, or China. In the evening when everyone's trying to get on the same overseas sites, it doesn't matter if the "last mile" into your apartment is all built from fiber-optics. So instead of sitting around waiting for Youtube to load, plenty of people choose an alternative method to get 150 megabits/second bandwidth --- walk fifteen minutes to the bazaar, buy ten pirated DVDs, and walk back home. Horrible latency, massive packet sizes.
Blame Apple if you have an iPhone. This sort of presentation also couldn't work on a small phone, though a text list version should be provided for mobile users (is it?).

I hope the author checks out something like Raphael (JS SVG library) and converts it though, because Flash is definitely tacky.
I can't help reading this name as App-Pirater rather than App-i-Rater.
Yeah, the server is down at the moment. Check out a cached or archived version, or wait until tomorrow.
Why "The trouble with nonprofits" involves incentives
Can anyone think of a dumber/more offensive thing done by marketers?
Less information, true. However, you can't downvote submissions, so the graph will be rather boring. Just a ton of upwardly sloping lines, some sloping upwards faster than others
I think the article perhaps means to say printed dictionaries are obsolete in the face of the new technology.
Early Color Photography: Making Color Images from Prokudin-Gorskii's Negatives
Awesome! The logs trick is one I hadn't seen before. Why were you using 32-bit registers instead of SSE registers? The CPU you're targeting doesn't have SSE? And how did you structure the demand-driven part — by 8×8 tiles, or a bounding box, or what? (I assume you didn't leave in multiple levels of function calls per pixel.)
It may be better, but it sure is taking forever. The original bay bridge took 3 years to build, but the new one is taking 24 years from the time of the Loma Prieta Earthquake which caused a portion of the original bridge to collapse. Think of it: when the old bridge is finally retired, a third of its lifetime will be occupied by building its replacement.
I'm not condoning this company's actions but since it is almost certainly a completely automated process, how does this differ from, say, gmail reading kids' conversations to display ads? Should gmail be restricted from doing such for minors?

How about online communities like Habbo Hotel, et al? Because if they don't collect general marketing information from the activities within their pages, I'll eat my hat.

And how about if the software was free and marked as marketing-supported?

Just food for thought.
How about just a black list? As the current legally connected owner of the phone you should be allowed to put your phone on a do not connect list BEFORE a new user connects it.

With such a list in place the new owner, be it legal or illegal, can do nothing with the phone. If some jurisdiction allows the new owner to keep it then so be it but it'll just be a brick.

In cases you state the victim won't be able to recover the phone but that's not the idea. The idea is to devalue a phone so it'll be worth far less thus making it less likely to be stolen.
The causal model that the writer speaks about, the one economists try to construct, is susceptible to story-telling because such models intrinsically rely on more than just the data for their construction, but the constructor's intuitions about the world.

The writer's reductio ad absurdum example of predicting land value based on size of house is illustrative. Producing predictions like "build smaller houses in rural areas" to increase their value are only absurd because humans have existing intuitions about why land is so expensive in urban areas. It is a lack of data that makes the naive black box model so poor; its lack of access to human insight.

This weakness of statistical predictive models has an exact analogue in economic causal models, though. The intuitions being appealed to do not necessarily need to be based on fact, observation and statistics, or they would be amenable to predictive models too. Instead, at the margins they tend to be politically and ideologically driven, giving "intellectual backing" to social and political policy positions that benefit various interest groups.
I'm impressed - we killed the server - how very slashdot!
China Mobile use 200 phones to DDoS China Telecom, and was caught by police
You can visit this site for the text version: http://news.ycombinator.com

Enjoy :)

In all seriousness though: I simply wanted to learn Flash. As an iPhone user myself, I realize its frustrating that it doesn't show up. That being said, even if it did show up you wouldn't be able to make much of it because of the screen size and the sheer business of the chart. It's really meant to be viewed in a normal browser.
Revised title: "Launching a start-up and having a family life: It's possible if you're a man and can dump all the child-rearing on your wife."
Compartamos in Mexico is a for-profit bank making microloans. There's some controversy about that: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/05/business/worldbusiness/05m...
That doesn't resolve the problem for code relying on stable behavior of these functions. Given the following code...

srand(CONSTANT);
n = rand();

...the scenarios I mentioned benefit from n being the exact same number in PHP version X and then version X+1, X+2, etc.

If PHP swaps out both rand() and srand(), backward-compatibility is broken, and along with it some kinds of quite-reasonable code that relied on srand() initializing rand() to give the same deterministic stream of numbers (rather than just a deterministic stream).

It might still be worth taking that hit -- I don't have a strong opinion -- but there are good reasons not to break backwards-compatibility, even to improve PRNG quality.
Is the original photo in the story? I think all the images are of the painting.
As a matter of personal opinion, I prefer lists to newspaper style layouts. With the new york times site, my eyes wander, never actually reading anything. I lose focus very fast and move on. With HN, though, I will invariably read every title. Lists are not overwhelming to me like many other layouts are.
For those interested, I found an answer to one of the less-frequently asked questions in a recent mailing list message.

Q. How large of an individual file is Fossil designed to comfortably work with?

A. Under 10 MB.

http://www.mail-archive.com/fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.or...

So, as you would expect for an SQLite-backed system, it's only useful for source-code-sized files. Look elsewhere for archiving and versioning your data sources unless they're tiny (< 0.007% of a MacBook hard drive).
A bigger difference is that the donors aren't the customers. A charity has positive cash flow so long as it pleases its donors, who don't necessarily know what's really happening with the people who receive the charity's services.
China alarmed by US money printing
All good kernel micro-benchmarks will involve a ton of volume, and thus be exercising throughput. All the micro-benchmarks Ingo used are extremely latency-focused: a few processes blocking on Pipe I/O or messaging as frequently as possible -- the only subject of the test is how fast the scheduler can toggle between the processes.

BFS was dramatically worse across the board in all the benchmarks, except curiously when the # of processes == # of logical processors -- to me that's evidence of extreme naivete in its design.
Ask HN: Review my web app, thatPoll.com
I've been wanting to learn RoR(or any framework outside of php/flex), so I picked something to actually build.

http://www.thatpoll.com

It's a quick and easy site to create and answer polls/questions. The main use I see for it is in blogs, where you can easily embed the poll into a blog.<p>I rarely comment on somebody's blog, but I read a ton of them and I figure the majority of people do something similar. With a 1-click answer poll, you can still get some sort of feedback from your audience.

Here is an example of one of my polls in tumblr & blogger:

http://markdimarco.blogspot.com/
http://icepack.tumblr.com/

I'd love some feedback on it.

I'm rubbish at web design, but I've been hearing "Release early and Release often" a lot lately, so here's to that.
You could show the rate of voting instead of number of votes.
Do you mean that the original owner puts it on the list when they are still in physical possession of it? If that's so, then will they still be able to connect to it?

If the person is blacklisting it only after they notice that it is missing, then it is too late. Under the aforementioned cirucmstances, it transfers ownership once it the bona fide customer buys it from someone, not once the bona fide customer tries to connect it. They could purchase it on eBay before the owner goes from thinking it is misplaced in their house to thinking it is stolen, and it becomes theirs as soon they pay, and then the victim blacklists a device that they no longer own while its still in transit. Even if the owner notices that it is gone before it is bought, they have no way of knowing if it has been sold yet, and neither does the manufacturer.

The legal issues are just too nebulous for these types of things to work.

The best that they can really do is keep track of what credit cards are used to activate phones or buy books on a Kindle, to trace it to the new legal owner, with a subpoena, who may be able to provide a lead to the thief or a reseller that the victim can go after for cash.
I'm fond of Children International. They're very good about letting you know exactly and specifically what your donations achieve. I suppose any evidence of the effect on people is anecdotal, but in such a well-established relationship, it's also self-evident.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/886535

He did it again on a single-socket 4-CPU system with HT. He got relatively the same results, including the curious marginal win for BFS on kbuild -jN where N == the # of logical processors.
No, the other one is sort of a horse race, which is neat. Maybe show the top sites and their ranks over the past five half hours/full hours in a narrow table that would work in any browser.
Replacing pieces on a pre-existing structure has to be more complex than building from scratch.

Besides, they are optimizing for high availability over speed. You have to remember, the bridge is only unavailable for -5 days-. That's a feat in and of itself.
When do you have files that large in a project?
suggested that the ideal remote-teacher-to-remote-student ratio remains one to one

I don't think that follows. Nell's Primer was only a prototype. As a practical matter the kind of infrastructure that went into developing it would over time be replaced by something more economically and socially efficient. The story itself suggests that neither Miranda or the Primer's designers anticipated Nell's needs.

If you still need a human teacher, and that teacher has to be paid, what exactly have you gained by interposing the Kindle between the teacher and the student?

It's likely that little is gained in that limited student/teacher/employment context but in my experience[1] I think there are considerable educational opportunities once people step outside that traditional box.

1- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=226987
Good concept, and very simple to use (which I believe is more important than web design, at least in the early stages).

Not having a website, I can't test the usability. I imagine you might encounter some resistance to inserting the look & feel of your polls onto the look & feel of their site, but you're serving a niche seeking a quick & dirty poll tool and I think this does the trick very nicely.

The public / private poll was also an excellent thought.

Edit: Created a poll - http://thatpoll.com/questions/14 - and I like how readily it shows which polls you've answered, and how.

Is there a way to see the results of polls you haven't answered (say, aren't qualified to but are interested in?)
"What bothers me is not that he claims that what he has done is art --- it is. "

Well, perhaps, but it's border-line kitsch.

"What frightens me is that he claims photography is not art."

Lots of people think that way. Often they prefer kitsch and schlock.

Technical skill for it's own sake is pretty worthless. It's impressive, to a degree, but what matters is to what it is applied.

It's the difference between being able to recite the whole of On Lisp from memory and being able to write innovative software.
Try the SkyFire browser if you have a Windows Mobile or Symbian phone

http://www.skyfire.com/
You can see this principle at work in how 2ch/4chan's ephemeral nature shaped the behaviors of their users (and thus their culture).
Totally and 100% different- we're talking algorithmic analysis versus actually honest to god selling the contents of your email.
Which should be familiar to any experienced software engineer. Initial product = 1/10 or less of the total effort.
Are you kidding me?

Internet speed is trivial? I just find that ridiculous. The internet is an essential service for most businesses in the world today.
Back in the day, they assumed that [x] number of workers would die and worked that number into the calculations. The St. Louis Arch, for example, assumed 13 people would die. Thankfully, we don't put such a small price on human life any more.
The Uninsurance Solution (Startup Tries To Fix Health Care) [video]
Seriously? That sounds odd I'm running the latest version of Flash in Firefox and it is using between 0-6% CPU with 8 tabs open including this Flash chart.
Ask HN:  Anyone know what ended up happening over in Iran?
I know this is borderline NOT meant for HackerNews, but I can't find information anywhere! Are people in Iran still using Twitter and or social networks to notify individuals of what is going on with their election? Has Iran shut down all access to it? Are there any HN members in Iran?

Thanks
Indeed I have. I began using it even before their major tipping point at SXSW and was there in Austin that year when it all happened. It was the U.S. digerati that all had the ah-ha moment together at once, due to the number of like-minded people within close proximity, in the wonderful outdoor spring of Austin, Tx. If not for this perfect storm, Twitter may not of ever hit the big time.
Photoshop mockup of a page?

On one hand "don't store binaries" on the other, it's a work product for the project, and it makes sense to be stored and versioned.
Too many too list :)
Fuck that noise -- if you'd have even bothered to google their name, you'd have found that Givewell are total scumbags:

http://metatalk.metafilter.com/15547/GiveWell-or-Give-em-Hel...

Summaries: http://mssv.net/wiki/index.php/Givewell

They got caught out because they were blatantly astroturfing for themselves and slagging 'competing' charities all over the web. Then it turns out that even by their own generous accounting, more than half of their funds goes directly to their own overhead. On top of that, their 'research' is at best based on getting charities to rigorously assess themselves.

Their rubberstamp board publicly (in the NYT) pretended to fire one of the founders, but less than a year later he was quietly back at his old position.
Is cooking really such a hateful activity? I kind of enjoy it, sometimes. It can be relaxing .. sort of like programming with edible code. And chicks dig guys who can cook (not to mention that guys obviously dig girls who can cook).

Which means: cooking is probably the most effective way to use programming skills for romance :)
Yugen - Profundity or suggestion rather than revelation.

Whenever I try this in conversation with most fellow Americans, they assume I'm just muddle-headed and don't complete thoughts. I have to club them over the head with the idea explicitly. Europeans tend to clue in quickly, however. I wonder why? My foreign friends and acquaintances are somehow selected?
Indeed, it's former NGO that aggressively went for-profit. That's a good article and sums up some of the major debates around latin american microfinance.

The problem with for-profit microfinance is that, as a general rule, financial performance increases with loan size, and that's why commercialization is a cause for concern, along with a lot of the other baggage that comes with commercialization like pressure to increase profits and employee incentive programs that negatively impact service toward small clients.

Compartamos accounts for the problems of the small loan market (notably the inability to determine which borrows are good or not) the same way moneylenders needed to before them, by charging very high interest rates. But this ends up screening out lower end borrowers, hence the discussion of "mission drift."

Commercial banks have long dabbled in elements of microfinance, but there are fairly concrete obstacles, mostly operational and information-related issues, that make it tough to be profitable, and even tougher to approach it as strictly for-profit while continuing to be actual microfinance.
Bingo!

I totally don't understand why people hold this divide online/offline in their heads. Things aren't online or offline. Everything(for approx values of everything) is moving online. Dictionaries dead? No, moving online. Newspapers dead? No, moving online. Social discourse dead? No, moving online.

What's dying are people / companies with heads in sand vainly and stupidly trying to prevent/slow that move to online. But that's not a sensational, advertiser friendly title.

btw best dictionary I've found http://definr.com/dictionary
Getting pretty close now though.

People always complain that the 'paperless office' never happened but for me it did - I don't have a single piece of paper on my desk right now. Hell I don't even own a pen. All our invoices are sent to clients via email only. I don't get snailmail from my bank, my utilities, my internet supplier, my phone company, nor my family. All electronic. I don't read the papers in dead-tree format. I don't get junk mail.

Right now I can't really think of anything I'd miss if I decided not to touch another piece of paper for the rest of the month.
A lot of start-ups fall in love with their public image
My phone's battery will last at least another 10 hours.
JacobAldridge, thanks!
Regarding the look & feel vs. a persons blog - That's a good point. I've only really played around with thatPoll on black & white sites(I'm a bit of a minimalist). A minimal theme'ing mechanism will be in the works.

There isn't a way to see all new polls yet. With a history system, that should definitely be an option though.
Am I the only one who's getting a 404 error on this link?
How do I make ringtones for my BlackBerry Pearl
Making your own BlackBerry Pearl ringtongs is easy for iMacsoft BlackBerry video Converter. It can helps you to make ringtongs for your BlackBerry Pearl from any video and audio files by converting them to BlackBerry audio format in few clicks.
No, I'm seeing it as well.
Young Author-Philosopher Launches Credo
I read it that way too.
Wasted experience, when Microsoft decides to totally change their dev chain/libs for business/marketing reasons. VB, .net, activeX. Last 20 years of MS dev is littered with them.

Wasted time upgrading / relearning OS because MS has end of lifed it and requires new OS for tools to run.

Wasted opportunity when you discover there is market outside win32 but it's too expensive to target cause all your products/libs/experience is invested into a proprietary stack. Vendor lock in is expensive in other ways as well.

Inability to find/fix bugs in stack cause it is closed source.

Inability to tune/add feature/etc stack cause it is closed source.

Those are some of the first that come to mind. There have been essays, articles, papers, and blogs galore written about how and why closed, proprietary < open / standards compliant. I'm sort of stunned anyone reading HN needs to schooled in that.
"Making a bad prediction isn’t like that... it’s months or years before your prediction is proven wrong. And then, you make yourself feel better by coming up with some explanation for why you were wrong: ...And so you keep on making predictions in the same way — which means you never get good at it."

I think this also applies to many macro-economists
Huh, the link is missing an apostrophe. How did this get on the front page that way?

http://www.kbsc.com/WhitePapers/1982%20-%20Marvin%20Minsky%2...
Learn How To Save Money Effortlessly
Youngmaze dot com
Seo,Tech,Lifestyle,Current Events and Interesting Stuffs.This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.
I wonder if smoking prevalence among "hackers" is higher than in general population (about 20% aggregate in the US) and over standard deviation over the mean.

Anecdotally and completely unscientifically, my experiences suggest yes, first and foremost as a former smoker who tended to take notice of the distribution of professionals who also took smoke breaks in the half a dozen or so places I worked in three years. Seems like the same sorts of tendencies that make nerds responsive to caffeine probably apply to stimulants in general, especially noting the long-held poetic association between creative, focus-based tasks and tobacco. I also know more than my fair share of ADD types (in a noticeably classical kind of way) who sincerely regard it as a form of viable self-medication.
Wow turn down the text-shadow there buddy. Alpha to 0.4 or something similar.
Choosing a Great Resume Service Just Got a Lot Easier
All of us understand today the importance of using the best resume for finding our dream job and some of us get help from a professional resume service company to get the best resume written. There are hundreds of resume writing services and all these companies claim to be the best out there. We wish that we could take their words at face value and we wish that all their claims were true. Unfortunately, some resume services do not deliver on their promises.
Time Management 
I spent this weekend taking notes from Randy Pausch's talk on Time Management. Here's the video and my notes.
Nice. I have trouble finding the data points instantly. Not a huge gripe, it's just precarious moving the mouse along the line.

Maybe make circles there? Make a vertical line for each 15min interval where they show up?