skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
here is the feed http://feeds2.feedburner.com/tedtalks_video and shell script to download it in background http://ossguy.com/?p=26
I have grown very fond of the idea of charging users a small signup fee to join a freemium site. You can subtract this fee from the price of the paid service, giving users an incentive to upgrade, and the model gives you several other advantages:

- every user in your DB is someone who thought your service was worth paying for

- you devote zero time to spam fighting

- you can scale your site to handle medium-sized bursts in signups, rather than having to handle large numbers of only-used-once user accounts created whenever your site gets some publicity
I use Gmail because labels (specifically, that one message can have multiple labels) and easy application of filters has changed how I work.

When I have to use Outlook, everything seems so disorganized...
Postfix, Dovecot, and Roundcube. This poll needs a host-my-own choice.
These are just a collection of some raw tweets by someone who was at the event.
Two words: credit bubble.

The combination of government backing and preferential treatment for student loans vis-a-vis all other forms of credit in e.g. bankruptcy means that it is one of the few credit markets which has not catastrophically contracted in the current crisis. That is the system functioning as designed: the intent was to make it artificially appealing to lend money to students who, by nature, have no jobs, no assets, and no immediate prospects of repayment, all strikes against them for any other sort of consumer credit.

What wasn't anticipated was that the combination of the social prestige attached to a degree plus the extraordinary amount of credit available would remove any pricing pressure from colleges.

There are also some pricing transparency issues caused by this, much like insurance causes pricing transparency issues in health care. We've got a young crowd here, right? Many of you went to expensive colleges, right? Can you identify the total price of your college education within $1,000?

crickets chirp

Funny how that works. Nobody forgets what the price of their house was, or how much the angels invested, but when it comes college our best answer is "Hmm, good question. I think I got a scholarship or something? Maybe somewhere in the low $100,000 range?"

(Full disclosure: I'm as guilty about this as anyone else. I can tell you what the sticker price for WashU is and what my student loans ended up being but I can't reliably account for the hundred thousand dollar difference between those two numbers.)
Ask HN: Suggestions for cutting down new account spam
Hello, HN. I was just looking through the New page to see if there were any interesting articles. I have showdead enabled, so naturally I saw the large amount of [dead] submissions. (Out of 30 posts, 17 were killed, only one from a regular member.) Realizing that most of these were blatant spam posts, I checked out the profiles under which they were submitted, and I noticed a couple trends. The accounts had either been created within 24 hours for the purpose of the submission, or more common, the accounts were many days old (often over 100) but obviously used only for these spam posts, and only had 1 karma point.

If the server doesn't automatically identify and kill these posts, then it must be a lot of tedious work for admins to manually kill these posts (and maybe the server does find them on its own. If that's the case, then this post may be irrelevant). I thought about it, and came up with a possible solution. What if new users weren't allowed to post until after they earned 10 karma points? This would bring the level of work required for the spammers to make submissions above the potential return, reducing the number of attempts, clearing up the new page (for showdead users like myself), and hopefully ease the workload of our wonderful admins.

My questions for you:

Is something like this already in place? (I imagine not, because there are some users who create anonymous accounts just for a specific Ask HN post, but I could be wrong.)

Are there any other suggestions from HN users to clear up the number of posts from spammers? Is this a practical solution? Would it discourage new members? Would spammers just find another way around it?
What I learned from takesn
“Pattern recognition is what you fall back on when you don’t quite understand something…” - I've heard this one applied to neural networks.

“Startups rarely die from competitors. They die of SUICIDE.” (stupidity, lack of money, lack of customers) - I wouldn't call it suicide (misquote?), but it's a great point that you don't need to worry about relative market share when you're small. You just have to worry about getting some market share (i.e. some customers). There's plenty enough available if you're small and don't need that many.
My first test was "6.2.2009" and it said "June 2, 2009" where I expected "Feb 6, 2009". So it'll be only usable for an American audience.
another way of viewing this is: "we screen suitably for intelligence but have not thus far screened [effectively] for determination."
I actually use several email addresses. Hotmail is what I mainly use. I have a yahoo address that I got for playing chess online, but I never check it. I also have gmail, but that one is rarely used, mainly because I don't get a lot of emails there. I also use Outlook a lot because that is what my school uses. And of course I use mailinator for signing up for throwaway website accounts.
Amazon Offers to Replace Copies of Orwell Books
I'd be way into that. See hollywood robots, then see how far Anybots is...
too much time on my hands...

require 'open-uri';puts open('http://j.mp/3nqLRU').read.match(/<text>((\d|\.|\ )*)/)[0].gsub('<text>','').split(' ').map { |x| x.split('.').map { |y| ('A'..'Z').to_a[y.to_i - 1] } }
Posts are auto-killed after a sufficient number of flags by users. (I think the default threshold in news.arc is 7 flags or so.) This spreads the work out among many readers, and seems quite effective.

If you make participation a requirement for posting, you might just displace spam into comments...
How intelligent is the spam filter? I'm getting some spam from websites (like myspace) that I actually would want to get certain types of emails from, so I can't totally block them. Would gmail's filter be effective with these types of emails?
I don't really find the argument "It hasn't happened naturally so it could never happen artificially" compelling...
The logo now links to a search for unexplained phenomenon. So far I haven't gotten anything past that.

edit: link: http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en#q=unexplained+phenomenon&#...
No; no [programming] language should require two books and several months to be fluent in.
Is that auto-kill per post, or on the entire account? I don't think there's anything keeping comment spam from happening other than the downmod/flag system already partially applied to posts.
Can you link to any academic papers that dispute that?
It might be well worth it to take your new developers on a trip to the poor parts of Mexico to learn from your customers.
Wow... boatloads of data. Thanks all!
107 Add to Cart Buttons of the Top Online Retailers
Er I thought they did have some popularity measure.
I would like to browse the slides, but I am not going to create yet-another-account on a website-I-don't-care-to-use to access the "Get file"-link.

Why do people use such websites instead of simply posting a PDF?
Custom Fit Drivers and Fairway Woods
Forgan is the great online source for Golf Clubs, Golf Sets, Golf Trolleys, Irons, Golf Bags, Golf Balls, Golf Shoes, Discount Golf at low factory direct prices.
Overview for forward365
> What wasn't anticipated was that the combination of the social prestige attached to a degree plus the extraordinary amount of credit available would remove any pricing pressure from colleges.

What wasn't anticipated by whom?

It might not have been anticipated by students or their parents, but it's got all the pieces of a con. And like the best con, it's hiding in plain sight.
Why not? NumPy offloads all the heavy lifting to LAPACK and BLAS which is some of the most optimized code on the planet. Numeric work in Python is bread-and-butter for many people.
No really, hence the saying "only Perl can parse Perl". Despite its dynamic typing, Python is quite amenable to tool support because of its regularity.
The Boy Who Heard to Much Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoSRcrwFF9E
First Sale - Davidson v Internet Gateway (the bnetd case)
The statements "negative thinking feels bad" and "negative thinking feels good" are not contradictory at all, though they may appear so. The way in which it feels bad is obvious, but the way in which it feels good is not, and takes self-observation and honesty to detect. The effort is well worth it, though, because it provides a way out of the conundrum. If I'm only aware of how they feel bad, then negative thoughts are something that happens to me; but once I become aware that they also feel good, I see them as something that I'm doing (or at least acceding to), and I can withdraw that participation.

My experience has been that one has to persist with this concept until the initial indignation ("how dare you say that I'm enjoying this pain") dies down. Then a whole new array of psychological options opens up. It's fascinating. But challenging.
GTD (or other-methodology-X) is a how, not a what; it's a framework that lets you accomplish whatever you like quickly. You must figure out what you should be doing before you can Get It Done. If you're feeling stressed, make taking a nap your Next Action.
I thought this analysis might provide some useful legal understanding to those of us starting software businesses.
I've been reprimanded from on high for discussing how the ban system really works from the point of view of a banned person.

I now understand the motivation for keeping this under wraps as much as possible, please take that in to consideration while discussing this.
I have the somewhat incongruous vision of PG speaking like a 14 year old girl.
It would be very handy to have a flag link right on the noobstories (and maybe even on the 'new') page instead of having to first click 'discuss', then 'flag'.

HN can be quite slow sometimes and that extra click could save a lot of time, especially if the 'flag' call could be made an ajax call, that way keeping the noobstories page clean would be simply a number of clicks on spam stories.

This thread seems quite dead, if there could be some kind of response that this suggestion is useful or that it won't be happening then that would be appreciated.
The short version:

He hates C++ and C++ debuggers

Creating huge objects on the stack makes a program dump core due to a stack overflow, depending on the default stack size of the operating system. So a program that used to run OK might suddenly crash after an OS update and the error output wouldn't be very helpful.
Just stumbled upon this (Bryan O’Sullivan's blog): http://www.serpentine.com/blog/2009/09/04/slides-from-my-cuf...

And now for the direct link: http://www.serpentine.com/bos/files/cufp.pdf

Edit: What a wonderful presentation! (Even though there's not one line of Haskell in it)
Atkins? Seriously? 5 years later?

In theory, sure, we're with you. But in practice, Atkins is a diet for fat people. If you're 250 pounds and you want to get down to 230 and stay there, Atkins is your huckleberry. We all know plenty of fat people who are noticeably less fat thanks to low-carb diets, but I can't think of anybody I know who used to be fat and is now thin because of one.

If you're 250 pounds and you want to get down to 170 and stay there, it seems that "eat less and exercise" is still your best bet.
I know several very successful companies that followed this route, but you have to be pretty ruthless at the moment you realize that one thing has significantly more momentum than the rest, and you have to have a nicely filled war chest to get started.

Let's take one of them as an example. The company launched with 7 different websites, was self funded by a previous successful exit of one of the founders. After about 6 months it became clear that one of the sites was becoming the leader in terms of growth.

So they divested 3 of the remaining six and literally killed the other 3 to be able to focus on the one that mattered.

They ended up doing very well on the last one.

The catch here is that this company was started with a lot more money than most start-ups and could afford to run effectively 7 start-ups in parallel.

For most other parties this would have translated in on average three failures before scoring a hit, and even that figure is way above the industry average.
HN: Open Mike - Say Anything
Post any comment you want. E.g. quick comments which don't meet the bar of a front page post.
Fry Urges Apology To Castrated Code Breaker
The Cloud Hanging Over Skype
How did the A's and A-'s from other years do?
China's favorite Internet craze
The problem is that even the most aggressive combinations of treatments haven't proved to actually work in practice, and death rates for most cancers have barely budged in the last 30 yrs.

[citation needed]
You're in line with Roger Penrose here, who suggests that in order to generate consciousness we will have to look at quantum effects rather than at molecular level effects.

This is possible, but not a certainty.
People, Perspective, Process - It's not that simple
I wouldn't say "I know I'm not the only one" if I didn't consider myself a hacker..
>>For me there is only one phase here that you could claim to be successful or not with respect to the project as a whole, which is to have the thing become sentient, learning a spoken language or so and then to start asking critical questions.

Uhm, you argue here that it would be without value if you don't solve the hardest problem of all in ten years.

Have the Blue Brain project claimed anywhere that they aim for full human behaviour in 10 years?!

It would be wonderful if they can simulate a rodent's brain with nerve inputs and get it learn to run in a maze and do similar things.

>>If it would be that easy then it should be possible to restore dead people as well, but it seems that something crucial is broken when a brain is without oxygen for even a very short period. What that is is a big mystery. Religious people call it 'soul', technical people call it 'state'.

I thought the technical term was "biological damage"?

You really seems to argue that anyone with some biological brain damage from oxygen deprivation loses their "soul"?!

Either you're drunk, trolling me or you don't know anything at all about biology and damage to the brain and loss of partial function and therapy.

>>What if the state is more like 'RAM', and it needs the software running on it now to keep it going.

I think that argument was killed by electric shock therapy.

>>I don't think they are dishonest or idiots at all, merely underestimating the scope of the problem.

Uhm, (i) WHAT have the Blue Brain project really claimed? (ii) I'm not an expert (I'll read up on brain science in a few years, when it has stabilized... the field seems to move faster than light, right now) and the little I know is mostly on cellular level, but you really don't know anything at all about biology?
The new page is only 30 entries long, less if you have 'showdead' on, don't waste them with spam, or posts like this... ;)
They could have just made a crappy app, and sold based on a gimmick and an existing fan base, but they actually went and created a really great app with lots of extra features.

After having so much fun with this application, I'm left wondering why there aren't more karaoke apps for iPhone.
That dumps me on their 'paywall', pity. As for the whole ebay skype thing, I never understood it.

Buying paypal made perfect sense to me, buying skype was like Christies buying at&t, it made no sense to me.
Jay Leno thinks Social Media is useless babble
Nonono, not just a broken link. Something is confusing the inference engine and it's claiming "tensions" and giving "explanations" for them that don't make the slightest bit of sense. The files that define the "topics" are actually on the web -- they expose their git repository -- and there's one thing in the QM file that looks like a mistake, which might be responsible for the trouble.
I'm at the stage where the temptation to use PHP for something quick & dirty (a one-off script or so) is still very strong, mainly because I know all the details by heart and can pretty much realize the script as fast as I can type it in.

In python it would take me a bit more time and that time is not always available.

But the future is clear to me, no more PHP if I can help it. There are plenty of things that irritate me about python, but they are mostly things that you learn about, then it stays learned.

PHP keeps throwing up new ways to trip you up even after years of using it.

In a way I'm glad to have gone this route, in spite of the learning curve with python (and Django), I can already see it pay off when I see functions shrink to 1/3rd the size they were using PHP.

The only thing really still missing from the python under apache model is a multi threaded shared state environment.

That would really allow you to blow other solutions out of the water in terms of speed.

Now you still have to make that round trip to the database on the next page fetch.
Govt. Of India Public Grievance Portal
Similar to Govt. Of India's Right To Information act this is yet another powerful tool in public hands to wake up those sleeping babus and bureaucrats who ignore their duties or want bribe to get the work done.
I should get back into the habit of reading comments first. It would have saved a lot of time in this case.
Ehh, I know this thread's kind of dead but I just found it. I'm in LA, shoot me an email.
No language should require people to 'advocate' it to other people, a language should stand on its own merits, the free choices made by people that have those choices available to them are all that matters.

The more vocal the advocates the more the it feels as if the choice is no longer free, that will be reflected in a resistance to observe the language objectively, some of the feeling has already been spoiled by the abrasive attitude of the proponents. Erlang suffered quite a bit from that when people started spamming HN with Erlang articles to flood other items off the new page. It could be an excellent language, but in the eyes of some it is a language associated with anti-social behaviour.

If perl were easier to learn it would lose some of its power, so maybe it is not possible to have a language that fits the bill for everybody.

These trade-offs are to be expected and are in no way a detraction, that is why we have many different programming languages in the first place. One size does not fit all.
The remants of StackOverflow are kind of an important issue. The guy raises good questions (how do I post maps (say Google Maps) or do other industry specific stuff) and brings up good points about how applicable some stuff is to non-programming sites.
DEFUN 2009: M4 – Multicore Programming in Haskell Now
Yeah it will take off, but the discussion aspect may need work for certain communities (one example crafts, see crafster).

I can think of these sites I'd visit:

Car repairs/advice,
Graphic Design,
Business advice (freelanceswitch will probably be someone to approach),
Marketing,
Maths,
Food/Cooking/Recipes,
Cocktail Mixing

Sites that will work:
Crafts,
ESL,
Athlete/professionals training advice

The pricing will need to drop for smaller communities to make the port, and include a donations feature to help communities fund themselves.
Slides: http://www.galois.com/~dons/talks/DEFUN-Multicore.pdf

Sources: http://galois.com/~dons/talks/DEFUN-Multicore-source.tar.gz

via Control.Monad.Writer: http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2009/09/05/defun-2009-multicore...
Agreed. I have a bunch of pretty CPU intensive stuff written in C that was optimized as much as I could, given the time I had to write the code.

I re-wrote the same code using python on a lark to see how bad it would be, colour me very surprised when it actually beat the original code by a considerable margin!
Gold IRA 
American Eagle coins are a great investment for IRA's
I wonder why supporting TCO or not has anything to do with the language. I mean isnt it up to the compiler or interpreter? If a compiler can get the same final results with TCO, then why shouldn't it? And the definition of a language should not define how a compiler works internally only what the actual effect of the language instructions should be. Compiler writers should be free to do what they want to realize the defined effect.

BTW as someone that moved from Pascal to C and C++, I can appreciate the ugliness of a lot of C shorthand syntax. It is confusing and can cause a lot of bizarre and hard to catch bugs.
You must be old. Basic hasn't been a fad since the 80s.
> the latest Internet obsession began with an anonymous post on a computer gaming forum: "Jia Junpeng, your mom is calling you to come home and eat."

Original thread here:

http://tieba.baidu.com/f?kz=610537635

The thread is on http://post.baidu.com/WOW , it's kinda 4chan-like. Anonymous posting, reply, with pics.

When I went to check out thread that night, I clicked "Go to Last Page", but after the last page loads it's not the last page anymore, there comes up 10 or more new pages, it was crazy.
James Hong: What will the US be like for Asian Americans over the next 50 years?
The Sound of Science (podcasts & blog)
A data point.

I came to HN because I sent Paul Graham something that he thought was interesting, and he suggested I post it. If karma-less members weren't able to post, I probably wouldn't be here. That's just me, but I'm almost certainly not the only one.

Getting the majority of the work done by the members en passant seems reasonable.
The article suggests that a workaround to the P2P intellectual property would be difficult. But could a workaround be as simple as switching to standards like SIP? I think the real value in Skype is in its user base, not its technology. Switching to more open standards would enable more advanced functionality (e.g. Skype for offices), which could also be for-pay options.

Or is the Skype tech still much better than what can now be achieved with standards-based approaches?
I tried. Many times. I really did. I just can't be bothered to figure out and work around its rubbish interface and limitations. So don't.
Holiday accident claims
Huge spike in Google Advertising & Marketing Index since 22nd August
Indeed. How dare they advertise a book by giving advice that relate to it.

The important things to remember when reading books like Getting Things Done and 4 Hour Work Week is that they are not written specifically for you. If you read them, take the advice that fit /your/ life from them - then they're pretty good books.

I read this article as basically: If you feel unproductive at times then don't panic. Which seems like good advice.

Reading it and getting mad because it wasn't exactly what you hoped is not very zen. :)
Much discussion on this a month ago.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=739135

Interseting that Sky "News" has taken this long to pick up the story.
It's pure white for me. I thought it was NoScript but it appears to not be?
Interesting questions. I hope someone in the know can fill us in on the details.
Sarah Hall's Book How to Paint a dead man
A dying painter considers the sacrifices and losses that have made him an enigma, both to strangers and those closest to him. He begins his last life painting, using the same objects he has painted obsessively for his entire career - a small group of bottles. This is a luminous and searching novel, and Hall's most accomplished work to date.
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