skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My ancestors gave their $1 to the Knights Templar shortly after they were founded in 1129. Using innovating banking techniques (for the early middle ages) that locked in exactly 5%, no more, no less, every year, that $1 grew to $5,630 by 1307 - when the Order was arrested by the French Crown.

Now by this stage, French Royalty had overthrown the Merovignian traditions, and the Carolignians had implemented primogenture, which prevented that $5,630 from being split among the heirs.

As such, growth continued (remarkably, at a consistent 5%), so that when Louis XIV ascended to the throne in 1643 my family had claim to $70.6 Billion dollars. Several key wars, the revocation of the treaty of Nantes, and the Sun King's lavish lifestyle did not affect my 5% at all.

So much so, that by the time his grandson was beheaded during the French Revolution in 1789, my ancestors' $1 was worth $834 Trillion dollars.

Now Napoleon, on crowning himself Emperor, probably should have used that money to buy Europe, instead of invading it. But mindful of the powerful miracle of compound interest he was manifesting for my family, he did not - in fact, his wars of conquest were largely driven by the need to find that 5% each year.

You can imagine the relief in France in 1940 when that amount (which by now had reached $119.8 Quadrillion) was handed over to the Nazis. US Troops located the amount shortly after the landing at Normandy, and decided only the great US of A was able to continue the miracle.

And so the money grew, through Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan et al, until by 2008 it was worth $3,149,637,318,314,090,000. In one of his final acts as President George W Bush handed control of the money into my personal safe keeping (as with Social Security, he firmly believed I would be able to do better investing it myself).

And so it was that on this day, 12 months ago, I invested that entire amount in Lehman Brothers stock.

I should probably check on that soon to see if the 5% came through for the 870th consecutive year.
How to build a Twitter extension for Chrome
Hi Yan,
Yes, we're planning to open source the backend. I will also try to post snippets of AtD functionality into blog posts as this will be easier to digest. As a researcher I think the ideas probably have more value than the code.
I remember reading somewhere that one of the latest generation of the Du Pont or Rockefeller family were somewhat surprised to find out that their trust was just a few million dollars, due to the fortune being spread across so many descendants. And I would guess that many family wealth managers focus more on capital preservation and income than growth, so inflation eats away at fortunes over time.
Free IBM tool eases JavaScript development
Indeed, as I understand it starting a record label is exactly the one thing which Apple Computer is forbidden from doing, thanks to an earlier deal with Apple Records.

I remember the story that this caused a little bit of concern in Apple's legal department when the first macs with built-in microphones were released. This, supposedly, is the reason why the update of the sound software released with those new macs included the new system beep sound "Sosumi".

I also remember in those days when I read the story how ridiculous the idea that Apple Computer would start a record label sounded. Just a sign of how much things have changed.
Author here: Excellent point. It fits with the story.

With Yoko's late confirmation on Twitter that the Beatles will be on iTunes tomorrow, the last hurdle is clear. The Apple Records/Apple Computer debacle will be put to bed at last as Apple turns iTunes into a label. Yoko, EMI, and the MJ Estate see a fat pay day in exchange (probably no cut taken by apple).
I think it will be an awesome case study to have an essay on what went behind choosing every startup@YC till now and more startups can be added after every funding cycle. Then talking about the YC funded startup success/failure stories with lessons learned. So, a separate essay describing what was YCs initial thought process/criteria in choosing them, how that startup developed and lessons learned depending on success/failure
Humorous, but I think you missed some digits for the 2008 figure, as $3,149,637,318,314,090,000 is "only" 3 quintillion, and it was $119.8 quintillion back in 1940.
altgr-sysreq-r, then -e -i -s -u -b (spells busier backwards). This will do a safe shut down and reboot including sync, even sometimes when ctrl-alt-del won't work. Also you can use altgr-sysrq-k like ctrl-alt-bksp to kill the window manager. Try altgr-sysrq-h from a console to see a terse help message.

Note altgr is the right hand alt key, the left one should work too but I find the combos harder to do then, and sysrq is "system request" the same key as "print screen".

IIRC Ubuntu now defaults to disabling the "magic sysrq" key combinations so YMMV.
JavaScript Framework Matrix
Git from 10,000 feet (My non-Django talk from Djangocon)
What would life be without 10 ad exposures a minute?
I love a good story:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sosumi
Where did she confirm?
The results of a poll don't mean squat.

The only thing that matters if people will use or pay for your product.
Yes, but that makes a lot of assumptions:

1) that it is possible to break out of the c64 emulator into the app, then from there into the Iphone os

2) you'd have to download a malicious C64 program to do that

3) that program would have to be written in BASIC, which is inspectable

I find this a pretty implausible vector of attack.
Was that in response to my comment - I'm intensely aware of the pitfalls print designers fall into having remonstrated with several against static design and over specification of visuals.

Nielsen is good (perhaps a tiny touch purist for me), I seldom disagree, however, with the overarching theme of the Alertbox posts.

The web in theory is a user-controlled medium, in practice it is controlled by a mixture of web designers and browser makers; browser defaults of appearance and behaviour are pretty convergent. Like I intimated, the common user barely knows the term "browser" never mind where the font settings are. Whilst one can overload a pages CSS with one's own stylesheet nobody appears to do that.
Yes, my bad - should have been $119.8 Quadrillion in 1940. Corrected.
Ask HN: Your primary source of inspiration?
Gah, I feel like I know Python 2.6.2 enough to make something I'm proud of, but I lack so much inspiration it's fairly pathetic.

Thus, HN, where is your prime source of inspiration?
I agree. Might as well just read Popper and Hume and cut out the middle-man.
Earlier today: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/yoko_ono_leaks_beatles_...
What if both of them would agree to buy something you don't need ... but on your behalf?
Maybe I'm ignorant of the proper way to do A/B testing, but I shy away from it because of the prospect of presenting users with inconsistent/volatile interfaces.
I agree it is a complex operation sheerly due to size.

I'd say a condensed version (contained on say a 16/32GB USB drive) should contain at least the top 1,000 articles in their entirety for their 12 main categories: Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Film and television, Genetics, Geography, Internet, Language, Law, Libraries, Music and People. A fair percentage of the drive is filled with text-only versions of the next 9,000 top articles in the 12 main categories. I'd say 30%, if possible, should be left for user added articles (using a history ranking service for registered users).

I'd say a standard version (contained on say a 120GB mini-portable HDD, say iPhone sized, or an equivalently affordable sized drive) should contain the top 5,000 of each category in their entirety and it should be possible to store the rest of the database text-only.

A deluxe version (contained on say a 500GB portable HDD) should contain the entirety of Wikipedia, if capable.

I think a large part of an offline Wikipedia would require some effort by wikipedia itself to aggregate page visits for thousands of pages. The core pages should be auto-updated whenever an internet connection is available (with user definable choices if a user doesn't want an auto-update, say when they're using a dial-up or a 3G stick). Updates could easily be zipped to compact text updates for the main pages; picture updates should be rare. Wikipedia would also need authorized versions of pages, so a user doesn't need the histories clogging up their drive, which would mean a requirement on a lot of trusted editors and an editorial process. Someone should never be in the middle of nowhere and check their offline wikipedia to find LOLZ as the only thing in an important article.

I think the hardware and software can likely be done, I believe it would just require a lot of effort on part of Wikipedia itself. Someone just attempting an offline wikipedia on their own HDD is always going to have to go to serious complexities unless there is some form of back system in place to access.
Your Post Box Is Too Small
Seems like the logical extension of another cute trick: Dropping a trojan'd USB key in the office parking lot and waiting for a curious employee to find it.
"Not all that revolutionary for anyone firmly grounded in the real ins and outs of probability"

The fact that those familiar with the subject matter do not think this is revolutionary is exactly the problem Taleb is pointing to. He is calling it "the great intellectual fraud" for a reason. Domain experts obviously do not believe "intellectual fraud" and "bell curve" should be in the same sentence
> the difference between e.g. a Software Engineer (certified) and a programmer is abundantly obvious to anyone to anyone who does the research?

What difference is there objectively between 'a certified software engineer' and 'a programmer' ?
How about "dbNG" for next-generation database?
I always enjoy the wholly baseless wild speculation that arrives during the week before an Apple event.
Not really a trick, but something not everyone knows

appending & to run as a background process

./some_app &
Agile Estimation and the Cone of Uncertainty
How to predict Apple product releases
ASP.NET MVC & Twitter Integration - getting inside 'Hello'
Did Yoko Ono And Sky News Just Ruin Apple’s Beatles Surprise?
Nathan Myhrvold’s Evil Genius
Did Popper and/or Hume write about markets?
EU Investigates Oracle Bid for Sun
HN is pretty usable in w3m / emacs-w3m.

To log in you will have to patch your w3m to send "Content-Length" instead of "Content-length" (see http://arclanguage.org/item?id=4419 )
The Foursquare Announcement
Sure Jay Z has his own record label, but he still doesnt tie into the Rock n Roll theme
So much for "thinking different".
Evan Ratliff caught in New Orleans
Microsoft Patent Checkmate
Machine Learning in R, in a nutshell
Welcome to the family, Raffi. :)
I have been using iPhone tethering for almost a month now, and it rocks. I am not going to update to any new iPhone OS unless I am sure I can tether.

Paying $45 for HSI at home and $30 for iPhone is a lot. I am not looking forward to add more to it for tethering.
Apple already allows you, if you are an artist, to submit yourself for consideration to be featured in the iTunes Music Store.

Many, not label signed, indie bands alreay do this. They go through a similar process as the app store aproval, and yes, many are refused.

Not mentioning this process in his post, the author shows how he doesn't know what he is writing about really well.
Don't start a startup.
3G phones only have ~14% market integration, cell phones aren't universally owned, actually some countries have ridiculously low adoption rates for their internet infrastructure. 3G infrastructure is severely lacking compared to 2G infrastructure.

There's plenty of cities here in Canada without any 3G access and have over 100,000 people and no current plans for 3G. Even areas with 3G, rarely have usable 3G everywhere, especially around cottage country here in Ontario. The valleys seriously hamper even 2G access, especially anywhere near the water.

The majority of people don't live in metropolitan areas, so I believe this would sell hugely. I also believe most people don't want to pay for internet twice.

Edit: http://www.coveragemaps.com/gsmposter_world.htm Yellow is 3G. It certainly isn't expansive access in NA and considering offline access would likely only be required outside of major populated areas, this generally means outside of 3G areas. Offline is kind of the point of an offline wikipedia.
My favorite zip code to give out: 90210
Jelqing - The New Penile Buzz Word in  Enlargement
Here it is 379 days ago on HN first. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=286162

Congratulations.
It's the classic tautology: if more than one person knows something, it's not a secret.
(*Clueless) Author here: This process isn't streamlined, you need a hearty foundation of financials to accept payment and there's not a whole lot of relations or management support. PLUS: most of the data on this program is no longer in Apple's support. As of last week I couldn't find any process on their site, even with Dev login to iTunes Manager.
Django SQL Profiler
Would you ride it if it could hover?
http://www.rentoid.com/
It'd be dumb not to.
Www.tennesseeanytime.org/labor - Directory
If you are running the 3.1 beta on your phone and you turn on tethering, it kicks you back out and the tethering option is removed :)
Sick and Wrong: How Washington is screwing up health care reform
Anytime I hear a friend whine or experience a major inconvenience, I am inspired to find a solution:)

I rarely succeed. But most recently I hopped across my new startup idea through this process.
It is a sad sad state of product design that the people who spent so much time designing and making it never rode a bicycle.

If they had they would know that even getting on this contraption would scare the daylights out of a seasoned cyclist(like me).

Not to mention that it is everyone's dream to look like an idiot at speed.
I don't think he could have consulted on anything that would be used by hundreds of thousands of content producers (bloggers) around the globe. I could be wrong. But I doubt it.
I thought they were going to tell us to omit the pointless drivel and get right to the crux of your argument, which is always in italics here on HN.
Agreed. Here's the data to back you up: http://www.aomonline.org/Publications/Articles/BSchools.asp

There's nothing you need to know about business you can't teach yourself via reading or mentorship. Here's the list of books I used to teach myself: http://personalmba.com/best-business-books/
Why is it OK for someone to randomly bring their preference for bacon into the conversation but it is not OK for me to mention my preference against it? I actually thought my initial comment was pretty innocuous. The voting response to it at the time genuinely surprised me. Somehow it improved markedly since then, as if to invalidate my second comment.

Some people can just accept what they perceive as injustice. If someone had casually denigrated black skinned people in the fifties in southern US I like to think I would have found a way to let it be known that I didn't agree. Even if it wasn't the main topic of conversation.

> I'd love to read more about this.

> I don't really give a damn about pigs.

These comments appear to be self contradictory. Much of your post is nonsensical. The fact that so many people are prepared to agree with it astonishing.

> and either way it's irritating and a teeny bit hurtful to the community.

The fact that it causes such a level of fuss for such an initially innocuous comment is telling.

> Cut it out.

No.
> Someone just attempting an offline wikipedia on their own HDD is always going to have to go to serious complexities unless there is some form of back system in place to access.

Not necessarily. The problem is that if I wanted to do a full offline version of Wikipedia (sans media) there are no incremental updates. IIRC, you would have to re-download the whole thing, even for articles with no changes (or minor/insignificant changes). That's what makes the 'on demand' aspect of a 3rd-party offline Wikipedia app the best model from a bandwidth conservation point of view.

I agree that Wikipedia could do something like this with at least the text-only portions of the site. I feel that they would run into a lot of legal troubles with the media though. Lots of the media is user-submitted, but things like logos, trademarks, 'fair-use' of copyrighted material could get them into a lot of legal battles if they tried to sell/distribute an offline version.

Even with the text portions of the site, I'm sure they would end up with a few lawsuits from large contributors here and there. Even if the lawsuits were frivolous.

Even on an official Wikipedia product, you'll have to think about the bandwidth consumption that would happen from these devices phoning home for updates. While it might help them cut down on actual page hits to the site, it might not as people will probably have to access this from a laptop, and would still use the web browser on their cell/smart phone to do a quick lookup on a spur of the moment topic.
As a russian, I can add to this. Lettershapes in cyrillic cursive look nothing like printed ones. When I started school I could read perfectly, yet handwritten notices on the door looked like greek; I had to ask adults to read them.

Admittedly, there is a good reason for cyrillic cursive's existance: shapes of printed letters are just not suited for writing them by hand. Whereas in latin most letters can be printed with just one or two pen strokes (even disallowing retracing), cyrillic letters take two or three at minimum. Probably related to the fact that cyrillic mostly developed after printing was invented, and changed by acts of kings and church, while latin had a much longer and gentlier history.
Mloss | Machine Learning Open Source Software
If you ignore the pomposity, http://www.ted.com can be wonderful.
Of course I'm talking about those subset of problems which are CPU bound and also use huge data.

As to why streaming is slow: I don't know. It just is. Check it out. C++ streaming performance is the pits.
What would you do more of on the web if it didn't take so long, and wasn't such a hassle?

Now make it fast and easy.
You read this article and get the impression that Myhrvold hires people to sit around saying things like "laptop batteries that get 40 hours per charge!", which he writes down and files patents for.

But from what I understand, from being involved in several patent filings, you can't just patent an idea. You have to patent an enablement of an idea. A patent that can't be used by someone skilled in the applicable arts to implement the patented concept isn't supposed to be defensible.

Commenters on this post repeatedly argue that engineers do all the real, hard work, and that the ideas themselves are trivial. That's probably true. But all that hard work is also patentable; if I'm dumb enough to file for "40 hour batteries", and you file for the chemical process that makes 40-hour batteries work without melting through the floor, you win, right?
In the ideal model, you:

1) Have an automated tool to build OS images.

2) Configure the OS image to automatically fetch and install the software/configuration required for your deployment.

3) Simply reboot instances to upgrade them.

At that point, your need for a sysadmin is very low -- especially if you use software suites that are standalone, rather than requiring extensive OS integration.

Instead of hiring operations staff, you've invested in the software necessary to pull off the above.
That goes for HN as well. After a first 'add comment' you get a second chance in a larger textarea though.
The big grocery chain around here recently introduced a new program where shoppers get $0.10 off a gallon of gas for every $50 they spend in the store, tracked of course through their "Advantage" card. You show the card at participating stations, and they take the discount off there.

The actual savings are nominal: spend $150, fill up w/ 20 gallons (the limit), and save what, $6.00? That's only 4%!

But wow, people have become much more serious about using their own cards. Participation must be near 100%.
Reddit makes some changes on their comments pages
And people have been wondering why Apple was hoarding so much cash...
Why is it OK for someone to randomly bring their preference for bacon into the conversation but it is not OK for me to mention my preference against it?

What wasn't okay was that you ignored his entire point for the sake of stating your beliefs. If you'd stated what you did and then followed up with a counterpoint, then you wouldn't have been downvoted, wouldn't have had to bitch back at him, and I wouldn't have involved myself.

These comments appear to be self contradictory.

I'm willing to give a damn about pigs if you're able to convince me to. As it stands, a damn is not given but I'm willing to change my mind.

Much of your post is nonsensical.

No it's not.

The fact that it causes such a level of fuss for such an initially innocuous comment is telling.

I hate any and all derails as obnoxious and self-inflated as yours was—not the original post, mind you, but the follow-up.
NY artist turns trash into cash with good packaging
Registration Open for CPOSC: Central PA Open Source Confrence
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=810877
Ask HN: Clojure/Hadoop vs Python/Dumbo/Hadoop
Hello all,

I'm planning to shift some of my operations to hadoop, and given my intense dislike of Java, I'd prefer to operate on either one of Python or Clojure.

In order to use Hadoop with them, I have the option of either using Python-dumbo or a JVM based language like Clojure to directly use Hadoop. While I appreciate that the latter is likely to be a far superior option in terms of performance, I'm not very well versed with Clojure.

Can someone who's used Python-dumbo comment on whether it is something that can be used with reasonable performance on a production system? I don't want to have to spend time and effort learning the intricacies of Clojure if I can avoid it (for now!)..

Thanks!
Genetic Programming for Prevention of Cyberterrorism
My prime source of inspiration is promising other people I am going to do something cool really soon. Then I feel obligated which forces me to become inspired.
Work.

The software sucks so bad, I know I can do better.

And I have.

And I will continue to.
Clojure has mutable data structures now. Apparently it was too hard to write a compiler to figure out what could be mutated, so now it's up to the programmer to perform that optimization.
That was an exceptional comment. I just felt I needed to tell you that.
Tell HN: I'm frustrated with Snow Leopard
Probably like many of you, I was excited to hit "purchase" when I heard the news of Snow Leopard's release. I did and now I wish I waited for 10.6.1.

Small bugs are annoying me, i.e. Transmission hangs when closes, Cyberduck won't load my server, Expose randomly shakes windows at times, etc. Apple certainly had me sold on the under-the-hood bells and whistles for the OS, but certain applications don't like to play nice.

I imagine an update will be coming out in the next few weeks and solve these initial woes. I guess what I'm trying to say is - why did I need to move from Leopard to Snow Leopard when it was working perfectly fine?

Are you frustrated with your results thus far? Am I the only one?
The World Bank Launches Intranet on Open Atrium
Brilliant! Thanks for a brief walk, with your fortune, through the tumults of history.