skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For an excellent treatment of how doing mathematics is a subtle and dynamic interplay of the "Greek" and "Babylonian" approaches I recommend Imre Lakatos' "Proofs and Refutations" (http://books.google.ca/books?id=EjQqJT4Z-VoC&lpg=PP1&...). It's presented as a Socratic dialog and is simply fantastic.
new and equally profitable means of monetization can and should be created

The mean has already been created thousands years ago, it's called performing.
I'm surprised that several provinces near Mongolia scored the best.
Why?
You're a stupid troll. That's much worse than being just a troll.
'He' refers to Brown today, the head of the current government, 'they' refers to the British Government in the past.

Apologies for being ambiguous. Not sure what the downvote was all about, whether that was because of Brown being a smooth operator (he is), him trying to spin this in such a way that he benefits from it (he did, especially some of the words could have been a lot better chosen for an apology), whether they disagree that nothing was achieved (it was, there is an apology where there was none before) or whether they disagree with that this in my opinion is a first step (it is, it's my opinion, I should know ;) ).
"P30 checking user input to prevent SQL-injections"

EPIC FAIL.

90s called, they want their PHP back.
For a real different coding style, more like a desktop development, take a look at Nagare (http://www.nagare.org), a continuation and components based web framework. And it also comes with an integrated HTTP server (and a fastCGI one) ;)
Hmmm - I counted six sentences. To summarize those six sentences: "I think if you’re tracking the right metrics, you’re not going to miss your next breakthrough."
Friends.

Most of my first contracts happened because of other developers I know recommending me to someone.

After that, the customers started recommending me to their friends.

Hang in there, and make sure that everyone you know is aware that you are available.
How Do I Lose Weight Quickly
This is the first time I've ever heard anyone say, "I wrote an app that didn't use a database and it worked out for the best in this instance." I would counter with suggesting that, for any app that you expect is going to either (a) grow quickly, or (b) be unsupported by you in the future likely should have a database, otherwise you will have trouble.
That report had no meaning, so I guess they're even.
I'm looking for a CMS - does it exist?
I get the idea, but I wish the blogger had explicitly defined the "'Babylonian’ approach".
I think he's saying that it's a mistake to take one theory, with one notation, and imagine that just because it is correct and covers all the cases, it is the one "truth". It sounds like solipsism: wanting a predicable and self-contained world that is safe and controlled.
But there are a few strange things about different notations that mean the same thing:

- notations have usability. Each one makes it easier or harder to do certain things. One notation might be good at one task, and poor at another; whereas another notation vice versa, even though both are equally "true". Notations also make it harder or easier to think/reason about certain things, in the way that language tends to shape our thoughts (not determine them, Dr. Whorf).

- notations are similar or different to related concepts and notations, making some connections easier to see, and some harder.

- notations generalize differently, having different suggestions for the "obvious" next step.

A particular notation is then just a shadow of the truth - a one dimensional projection, capturing only a plane of the unseen reality. It seems that mathematicians and scientists routinely invent new notations for new domains (not necessarily good ones). The advantages of different notations is what Alan Kay was talking about when he said that "point of view is worth 80 IQ points". Notation is a form of point of view.

It was based on a few things from the past like how smart you had to be in Roman times to multiply two numbers together; only geniuses did it. We haven't gotten any smarter, we've just changed our representation system. We think better generally by inventing better representations; that's something that we as computer scientists recognize as one of the main things that we try to do http://ecotopia.com/webpress/futures.htm
It's interesting, but "visualization" seems a bit overwrought. I believe most people would refer to it as a "map."
[Video Tutorial] Automating Windows GUI Programs using Programming Techniques
The best way society can support the Arts is to allow Art to spread, and to continue to encourage giving money to artists. That seems pretty natural to most people anyway, and it doesn't infringe on anyone's freedom.

That's her final sentence, I don't know what the take away from that is if it isn't 'People should give money to artists out of the generosity of their heart.'

Your solution on the other hand seems to be that art is outdated and artists should give it up if they aren't making money from it? Art = Buggy whips in your argument apparently? Not sure what motor cars are supposed to equate to but I'm sure most 'artists' would be willing to move towards making them if you could explain to us what they are in your analogy.

Everybody makes career and life choices, everybody gets to live with the consequences.
This is true, except that in the case of artists it's incredibly difficult to assume personal responsibility for their own success. Let's say some struggling writer's day job is a programmer (a not uncommon situation). If this person dedicates a good amount of time towards programming, enjoys it and sticks with it, honing their craft day by day then it's a pretty sure thing that those choices will pay off in the form of a decent job and comfortable salary.

There is nothing he can do to guarantee that his writing will pay off no matter what career and life choices he makes.

Now here's my main point: there is no fundamental difference between the process required to become a good programmer and the process required to become a good writer. The personal choices, decisions and personal(* ) rewards required to stick with and become capable at both are almost identical.

Why on earth is this woman trying to maintain that 'Art' is some esoteric special case that should be treated any differently from so many other identical processes?

(* ) By 'personal rewards' I mean that the level of self worth and enjoyment for engaging in any classically 'artistic' process is often exactly the same as that enjoyed by scientists thinking about new theories, architects thinking about beautiful design, programmers having a eureka moment with code or any number of similar experiences across any number of professions.

EDIT: I'll also just take a second to respond to this part of your comment:
Just like if someone wanted to work 2 or 3 days a week to spend more time with their kids, or take 6 month holidays every year to wander in the Andes.

The comparison between taking a holiday or spending time with the kids and engaging in some artistic process - as if 'doing art' is the same as taking a holiday is exactly what I think this woman is promoting and it's exactly what I think is so moronic about the article. Being good at anything artistic is f'ing hard work. Full stop.
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This is not Digg.
No mention of his contributions to computing at all :/
A Youtube for Hackers
So where are we supposed to put our money then? Especially with inflation becoming a big concern in a few years.
If anybody wants to get involved in DIY renewable energy then probably http://www.fieldlines.com/ is a good place to start.
Yes, I am very aware of Creative Common Zero and I am going to try to use it in latest release of my game.

Attribution has worked very well for me in the sense that all of my fears were unfounded. It only seem that copycats only copy when you're popular. At that stage, copycats are no problem at all.

Mostly, I am worried about frauds prepretuating lies that they're the authors of my work but they seem to be the rare type.
Schneier on Security: Eighth Anniversary of 9/11
Do you mean that art is as useless now as whips in the age of motor cars?
I think Apple wanted to play down releasing a security update so shortly after the initial release because the media went crazy about 10.6 shipping with a non-secure Flash player.

So they mixed in a few small improvements and shipped it as a point release. It played well, I haven't seen any articles in e.g. computerworld that Apple finally fixed the security problem.
NYC as seen from space on 9/11/01
It's instructive to review the comments from the original posting on HN (e.g., The science is rather sound on this...):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=813103
Dons, could you please stop linking to scribd.com? It's slow, it's bloated and it's overall an unusable pain whatever the platform you're trying to run it on.
I spoke at an AI conference about a system I built. A CTO in the crowd sent me an email offering a contract a few days later.
I'd be grateful if anyone could point me to the actual code for this. I'd like to give it a try for myself, but all I seem to be able to dig up is research papers.
This is really no surprise. I was just wondering the other day what pre-packaged, universally-accepted name would be given to the 9/11 attacks in history books.
Good point, but unfortunately that only applies to the performing arts.

And even then the issue of control comes to play. I know for a fact that if you want to play a certain big festival in my country you have to agree that t-shirts can only be bought at the designated stand, for a price that's higher than the price you decide and they take a cut of the profits.

Again, maximising profits by ripping of customers beyond your control...

Anyway, I wouldn't mind paying for a 3 hour live performance of Apocalypse Now (but only with the original actors, director and in the original location ;-)
How to add a mouse pointer to your Gosu window
Some of the anomalies of the map suggest overreliance on official figures that don't capture all the genuine economic differences among those various regions. The map is interesting in showing huge regional disparities among regions of China ruled by the P.R.C. regime. That issue of regional economic disparity is worrisome to social scientists in the P.R.C., as economic disparity among regions of the country is believed to be one reason for the disintegration of Yugoslavia.
They should increase it even more. It's not just elderly people who have poor eyesight or don't like straining to read things on a computer screen. Even if they made it 18pt, how much of your screen would it really occupy? Not much, and the usability benefits are huge. I seriously will leave websites for using small fonts. If I click a HN link and the font size seems below 10pt, I'll probably just leave. I've seen websites linked on here with fonts around 6 or 7pt. That's insane. No one can read that as comfortably as they could at 12pt.
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At the very least, I would require replication of the study by an independent researcher before I believed the study result as a settled conclusion about the reality of human behavior.
10 TechCruch50 grads: Where are they now?
Isn't it amazing that "electromagnetic" had 21 upvotes (here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=813103 ) saying "The science is rather sound on this; ..." and then proceeding to try to justify why this seems right with a bunch of nonsense? Or was he joking as well? I can't tell for sure...
Engineers running Engineers sounds like an Engineers paradise.
See quant18's comment. Combination of very sparsely populated steppe and an oil gusher or two.
Now with `s/less/fewer/g` typos!!
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Plus it makes money. What's not to love?
Everything Virtual - criticism of current trends in virtualisation
Ask HN: What license do the question papers carry?
Entrance exams, olympiads, exams I take after I join a course in a university or school - what is the license on these question papers? Can I use them, say on my blog (that has ads, and hence is commercial)?

or should I individually check for each university/school/organization, for their licensing terms?
Sacla: A Common Lisp implementation written in Common Lisp
It's still an interesting look at using wget and how powerful it is.
I found the article pretty much correct. After all mathematicians survive just fine without copyrighting their theorems, which are just as beautiful and divinely inspired (if you choose to think in those terms) and much more beneficial to society.
LispKit: building custom Lisp interpreters in Squeak
Coders at work is finally available
It used to be that there was a set deadline to respond because of a broadcast time or a printing run. A responsible journalist would call for a comment and if they weren't available they'd let them know when the story had to be done.

So here we are when the "journalists" are controlling the printing runs and in this case they thought 24 minutes was a fair time for a response. I think this speaks more about the level of journalism practiced at TechCrunch than anything else, and this Facebook prank actually goes a long way to show that.

What kinda baffles me is that all those old deadlines were set by management, the reporters always wanted more time to craft the story and get it right. There were epic battles between reporters and editors over time versus distribution. Now that there's instant publishing the reporters have the same itchy trigger fingers. Just like the before everyone's afraid of being "scooped".
Not sure, I always enjoyed the business and engineering running each other at Amazon.
Potential Quicksort replacement in java.util.Arrays with new Dual-Pivot
The Real Cause of Obesity: It's not gluttony. It's genetics.
If you use Wine with Silverlight 3 there are many Linux boards that would welcome your howto.

right-ctrl-f is easy enough, but it doesn't change the monitor resolution as windows sees it. Unless you were already running vbox at native resolution (meaning much of the virtual screen was cut off) then you also have to increase the resolution in windows. It's like a 3 step processes, which is fine for me buy not for my wife. She'd just always stay in virtual box, so I do her one better and just boot Windows, which I don't like but she couldn't care less.
Now go to google.com and view source, you'll see it couldn't have been output by the PLT webserver. :-)
I run a chat server dedicated to RE and we had our 'hoax' flag up just about immediately.

Kudos to Craig for taking the time and effort to put this one to rest.

Every couple of weeks there is some piece in the news about some renewable energy breakthrough by some teenager, and every time it is either a hoax, it doesn't scale, it produces piddly little bits of power, the economics don't work out or they misunderstood the physics (or any random combination of these).

I'm really happy that kids are interested in renewables, it's a fantastic way to get into science and it is also good to have consciousness raised about our 'footprint'.

But I really wished that the press would fact check this stuff a bit more, one of these days somebody is going to have a real breakthrough and the public will react with 'meh', just another hoax.

Looking for renewable energy source in unlikely places (the windbelt for instance) is interesting because there are plenty of opportunities to get press and sometimes even funding, even if your physics is lousy. The hope humanity has for solving our dependence on oil coupled with dirt cheap renewable energy is what fuels this kind of response.

In practice, engineering is hard and it pays off to do your homework.

I'm curious if the kids that did this will now go on the defense or if they will own up to what the did.

And if the dailymail will issue a retraction.
It's the first time I signed a petition on number10.gov.uk. I wasn't sure if anything would come of it, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that it worked.
Good point--I couldn't tell either. After I replied and questioned some of his comments in that thread, I began to wonder if I'd been trolled.
http://hackage.haskell.org/package/accelerate

Unfortunately, it seems to be just a reference CPU implemetation, but if the GPU code is ever released, I'd guess it will be here.
Jeff Vogel: Some Kind Words About DRM. For Once.
What I don't quite get: what is the point in making up such a thing?
Yeah quite cool, hope they'll roll out this feature for all of us!
If you're worried about inflation, then you might want to take a look at TIPS http://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/products/prod_tips_glanc...
Not sure why you got voted down.

Anyway, the problem with this particular case is that like most good hoaxes it is partially truthful.

If I had to make a stab at how all this happened it would be something like this:

Melanin really has some photo electric properties. They must have read that somewhere, decided to build a 'science fair' project around it.

After figuring out they couldn't get it to work they may have been tempted to fake it (since that is pretty easy).

The the press picked it up and they could no longer back out, maybe still believing that they could make it work, that they had just rigged the demo to cover the fact that somehow their implementation was faulty, instead of the basic principle.

If Pons & Fleischman could fall for that temptation I'm sure a bunch of kids can fall for that.

Same subject, after all. Cheap, free energy, the world a much better place and you in the spotlight.

edit: what made me especially suspicious was the source (I would expect to read this in a different spot first, rather than the dailymail, which has a bit of a reputation) and the fact that hair is not a semiconductor, which is something you will need in order to direct the stream of electrons excited by the photo-electric effect. Without a diode at the most fundamental level in the circuit somewhere all the free electrons will simply use the path of least resistance to restore the balance.
"4. Economic intervention is wrong. It doesn't matter if copyright give 50000% increase in productivity." -- I'm sorry, but though I can be sympathetic to the sentiment (libertarian here), the political reality is this will thrown out of window in a microsecond by 1) government 2) public. The first is always keen to get ever MORE money, MORE money, and MORE money, and the public is always keen to get more freebies. So both together will completely squash you (us?).
Judging by the artefacts in the video, I'd say this is actually a series of photo's morphed together. Very cool and all, but probably based on only a dozen photos.

EDIT: 29 frames in fact. Here's another version with less morphy processing done on it: http://science4grownups.com/archives/2009/06/26/news/iss-ast...
Awesome. I'm pre-ordering the second I get home from work... or maybe during lunch.
Okay, I was fooled. It certainly sounded feasible. Perhaps the only pointer for those not in the industry would be that he was inspired by "...a book by physicist Stephen Hawking, which discussed ways of creating static energy from hair"

That'd be the only iffy sentence that could have caught my eye. But it didn't. Caveat lector.
If waiting 24 minutes to get basic information for a story is a "pretty long time in the blogging world," then maybe there's something wrong with the blogging world.
...one of these days somebody is going to have a real breakthrough and the public will react with 'meh', just another hoax.

http://xkcd.com/570/ and its title attribute.
Why do we love to hate Techcrunch? I missed the memo, apparently...fill me in.
I totally agree with Simon's comment about experiencing the 'aha' moment. I had really been struggling to understand how Seaside worked, and then - all of a sudden - light dawned :-)
Yeah, most recently, I was asked on a sunday night at 7pm pst for a story that went to publication/web posting the following morning. God forbid I should skip email for a night, right?
When optimizing - don't forget the JVM
Mostly the poor dress-sense. I have a tendency to wear primary colors for my business attire.
Static != 2A current through a bunch of hair.

In fact, the whole reason hair will build up static is because it is such an excellent insulator.

edit: about the conductivity of hair:

http://www.rafischer.com/hairtest.htm

edit2: why people think hair conducts well:

Thomas Edison is often quoted as having said the first working filament was a human hair.

He did try one, but it didn't work, what did work was a filament made from a small strip of carbonized bamboo (effectively a 'carbon wire resistor').

This thread was 'thinner than a human hair'.

Thus reinforcing the words hair and filament together again.

much interesting reading on:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb
True - but no one planes for failed installations. You always think they'll happen to "other companies" and not yours.

An ERP, in order to be effective, takes a lot of buy-in from all your business units, and getting that buy-in will cost the IT people some serious office political capital if the install fails. So what does the average person in a large corporation go with? The big guys who have a proven record.

It's similar to the aphorism "no one's ever been fired for picking [IBM, Microsoft, FedEx]" - sure, there's a risk that the thing might fail, but when you go with the largest company around who is almost exclusively focused on this, that risk should go down (I'm not saying that's true - only that that's the working thought process), and even if it does fail, you can fall back on saying "well, it's the industry standard, so I didn't screw up by picking it."

Start-up ERP will not go straight into large companies, and it probably shouldn't. Start with small local companies, and slowly work up in size - and then pick a size and stop there. And look at FreshBooks: they're a Toronto start-up that's got some decent penetration into tracking and invoicing sector, which is traditionally the domain of much larger companies. They do that for a while, get small-to-medium sized businesses comfortable with them, and then in two years maybe release a module that does payroll and integrates into the existing one? A year after, once their customers trust both of those, release an HR one? There's your start-up ERP right there...
that's kind of cool. Ok, don't shoot me, but that is probably based on the CPI and folks on reddit say government published inflation data understates inflation. Maybe I should just stop reading reddit ...
GDP per capita has little meaning when the area is divided into specific areas. I.e, if you put a guy in a desert with an oil field, the GDP per capita is huge. If you have a very productive place that is productive because of the high population, you have a low GDP per capita.

People go where the money is. The more people arrive, the lower the GDP per capita sinks. In the end, the only places with high GDP per capita are mines and oil fields, etc.
Couldn't agree more regarding MobileMe/iDisk.

Dropbox is one of the most brilliant executions I've seen in a long time, and they continue to rock it. \m/

Standing ovation, the site redesign is gorgeous too.
Cuban makes a lot of good points in this series, but fundamentals do exist. Compare his philosophy to Warren Buffet. Sure, Buffett does often get better deals not available to retail investors, such as the recent Goldman deal, but Buffett also buys plenty of common stock as well. (There is plenty of overlap in the philosophies as well...looking over his 2008 letter, seems like he favors dividend paying stocks, but don't hold me to that).