skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://docs.python.org/dev/tutorial/controlflow.html#unpacki...
Wow, and here I though smilies pretty much indicated homour clearly...
Google pays tribute to Mahatma Gandhi
This demo reel was culled from our myriad online workflow demos. You can find them linked off of our main website or directly on the two analysis blogs:

http://www.palantirtech.com/government/analysis-blog
http://www.palantirfinance.com/analysis-blog/

or from the pfinance splash reel:

http://www.palantirfinance.com/

Seen as part of the demos they were pulled from, it will make more sense.
You accept credit cards do you? The OP stated that this was a person-to-person transfer.
I think I heard him say they are transitioning into lead-gen for brokers? Isn't that kind of anathema to the no-fee idea? I suppose you could try to do lead-gen only for so-called "no-fee brokers," but that seems hard to enforce. This seems like a complete shift away from their original philosophy.
There was a recent discussion in the econoblogosphere that provides statistical evidence to back up jsankey's argument:

Initial post: http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/08/least-surprising-corr...

Response: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/heredity-environ...

Conclusion: http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/08/test-scores-and-incom...

The summary is that for both adopted children and non-adopted children, the higher the father's income, the higher the resulting test scores. Hence, money makes you smarter.
We're hiring: http://www.palantirtech.com/careers/positions

We'd love to have as much help as we can get!
Resisting persuasion
Yeah, I apologize that the flash player is a little fickle. The direct link is a great way to get at it, too. Thanks for posting that.
While this sounds exciting because I love NPR and I think hyper-local news will be big, it seems a little strange to me that 2 large non-profits are giving a "grant" to another large non-profit. Granted, CPB gets its funding from the gov't ... it just seems like NPR would be on the giving end of such a grant ... and the receiver being a smaller, state broadcasting group or municipalities.
Google working on 'smart' plug-in hybrid charging
Making people move in slow motion
aw, c'mon, and I was thinking since when did Daft Punk == pounding music? Maybe I'm not that old after all...

[Edit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtdWHFwmd2o&feature=fvw]
I've gone through testing with a handful of these JS to Obj-C conversion systems and haven't found one that does a really good job of emulating a native app. Appcelerator seems to be the best option out there, but you write very Appcelerator specific JS to make things work.

While quite straightforward to work with, my main gripe with PhoneGap and QuickConnect (a similar system to PhoneGap) are:
1) the inability to have a native footer
(a fixed header is possible, just not the footer)

2) no keyboard views other than the standard (eg: no number pad)

Appcelerator gets you access to both of these things because it's actually re-writing your code as native (at least that's my understanding).

Basically, for side-project or pretty simple apps, PhoneGap seems like a godsend. But for a commercial app that needs a certain polish and a truly native feel, not sure they cut it. My 2.5¢.

Also, I did a quick write up on this back in June: http://DesignLitm.us/u/14 If things have changed since then, please ignore this entire response!
How and Why Glue is Using Amazon SimpleDB instead of a Relational Database
The key points about the visualizations are twofold:

- They're good, interactive, snappy, and compelling.
- They're general purpose tools backed by real data, where the data is application specific, not the tools.
Neither did the employees who got kicked out, but it isn't entirely within their or your control. You may simply lack the ability to stay out of the lowest performance bracket.
Hey, Google is also translated into pirate and latin!

http://www.google.com/intl/xx-pirate/

http://www.google.com/intl/la/

We have Klingon too -

http://www.google.com/intl/xx-klingon/
What makes cover-up preferable to error handling
"The ancient Greeks weren't trying to be us."
When the only way to protect knowledge is to make it secret then you literally get knowledge that die like Damascus steel did. It was so advantageous to protect how it was made that now a thousand years after it was first created we have no clue how it was made(or how we have lost nuclear missle secrets because the secret was to well kept.) Just think of how secretive Google is. If it weren't for the patent system how much would us lowly outsiders know about pagerank?
Will anyone from the Broad (MIT/Harvard collaboration) be there? If not, you should send them some invitations. They deal with petabytes of genetic data and certainly would have some insightful commentary.
Update:

Google said on Friday that an error caused the search engine to remove The Pirate Bay from its search pages.

"Google received a (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) take-down request that erroneously listed Thepiratebay.org, and as a result, this URL was accidentally removed from the Google search index," Google said in a statement. "We are now correcting the removal, and you can expect to see Thepiratebay.org back in Google search results this afternoon."

Later, Google updated it's statement: "The removal appears to be an internal error and not part of a DMCA request."

Separately, The Pirate Bay's site appeared down Friday afternoon at 1:15 p.m. PT, at least in many U.S. areas.
One difference between designing airplanes and govt regulation is that designing airplanes isn't prone to folks making design decisions to benefit to friends and family.

Political corruption is pretty much a fact of life whenever govt gets involved in money.

I don't see why folks who complain about corruption involving govt contracting believe that financial regulation will be any better.
Really? Because a Scrumaster or an agile project manager who doesn't post code immediately is irrelevant? That's an odd conclusion to make.

It seems clear to me after reading several of his posts that he manages people. While it is certainly true that there are a subset of managers who are also PHBs, I don't think you could highly correlate those who are and those who aren't by the number of posts they make about working code.

If a person wrote nothing but posts about code and how it worked, no one would ever disparage them because they weren't a manager. Why is it that people disparage managers who don't write about code?
I definitely did not say everyone. Probably better and everyone on the forum are two different subsets of the same population. That being said, if someone is on this forum they are more likely to be better at programming than average in my opinion.

Just giving a shit about what you do is a leg up on a lot of the people out in the world.
Both Adam and Dustin moved on to start their own companies, Quora and Asana, respectively.
I finally gave up on a wireless keyboard and switched to the same exact model, but wired. I was getting really frustrated with holding down the shift key, selecting downward several paragraphs of text to work on, only to have the shift key modifier released sometime during the movement, forcing me to start over again. Repeat ad nauseum.

Granted, I might have tried a different manufacturer, or even a different unit from the same manufacturer, but the gain just didn't seem worth the possible time spent.
Has anyone had experience utilizing memcached with SimpleDB? Were there issues?

In terms of price, after the free quota is surpassed, does SimpleDB make sense for relatively small sites? i.e. sites with fewer than 200k uniques / month
If the government is trying to head off failures, then it become a quasi-political game. Politics also happens to be a far more violent affair than the play-wars of businesses.

To be threatened with a gun for the purpose of forceful extraction of your wealth is FAR DIFFERENT than peaceful voluntary exchanges championed by capitalists.

Also you misunderstood failures(as in loss). Failures is a feature of capitalism. Failure play an improtant part of resource allocation by telling companies what not to allocate to.

Likewise, success(as in profit) tell companies that this is what consumers want. It could be that consumers want lot of trashy poor quality mass produced goods or high quality expensive goods. The market help companies decide what to produce.
> Why is it that people disparage managers who don't write about code?

Because it increases the probability that they don't understand what they're managing.

Look at Peter Norvig or Urs Hoelzle or Jeff Dean. They are still very, very technical despite managing many people. That earns them credibility among their troops.

By contrast, this guy has written about 70 posts on Agile with almost zero code. I could find exactly three lines of code on his entire site under the F# tag, though I didn't look that hard.

Bottom line is that he's unlikely to be someone who would earn an engineer's technical respect.
Maybe he didn't want to talk/listen to the group of people he was with, and was rolling his eyes to communicate that to you?
This sounds perfect for a native XML "database". Check out e.g., MarkLogic Server. That's what we built http://markmail.org/ on top of.
I agree that he's unlikely to be someone who would earn an engineer's technical respect. By any chance are there other competencies a manager of technical projects ought to have?
Absolutely correct. Much of their demise can be traced back to their refusal to provide their risk control group any teeth.
A Flowchart to Help You Decide When to Click Past the Security Warning
In some searches, Google put a special link that say "More results from example.com" that use site:example.com.
That tends to happen as you age. Values and priorities shift drastically as you get older and, presumably, take on more responsibilities (children, wife, etc.). This is played out pretty heavily in politics. Young people tend to be more liberal and grow more conservative as time goes on with the possibility of again moving back towards the liberal side of things at the end when responsibilities start to dissipate (children grow up, social security kicks in, etc.).

I think the key is to take risks when you have the ability to (i.e. when you're young). It doesn't mean you can't grow rich later in life, but I have a feeling that the longer you put off taking on the "big" responsibility, the higher the probability you will be to succeed in a financial sense. If your idea of "successful" is to have a spouse and offspring, by all means, pursue that as early as possible. If it's to be financially well off, you'd be better off pursuing that instead of a family.
There's a phrase for this, it's known as having Strong beliefs, weakly held.
Tipjoy wasn't actually acquired -- they hired Ivan, though there may have been a little extra on the table:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/22/facebook-hires-tipjoy-c...
Sure, but now we're talking about a programmer analog of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

The first trait of a manager in high tech (whether professor or product manager) has to be technical competence.

That trait is not usually sufficient to be a good manager. But I think it's necessary (you seem to disagree?)
I've known plenty of people that have risen to the top without stepping on everyone along their way. My father, for one, built his own small fortune without having to destroy others along the way. He happened to take the right risks, work his ass off, and became a leader in an industry. If you talk to anyone who has worked with or for him, you'd find very, very few people that have anything negative to say about him. In fact, his ability to do things without "taking advantage of others" has bred a huge amount of loyalty in those that worked with him. I'd reckon that loyalty is what made him successful more so than anything else.
Limit-Telephotography
Read in the file, then issue the appropriate CREATE TABLE commands through your database connection to dynamically create the appropriate columns. Keep a table with metadata on the tables you've created (you really only need the table names, you can issue a DESCRIBE to get everything else, but there may be a bunch of other metadata you'd like to store, like the original file name & format, date uploaded, etc.) Query as normal.

I've been down the row-per-cell route before. It seems to be one of those ideas that everyone comes up with, sounds really clever at first, and is the wrong solution in 99% of cases. Problem is that it's really hard to get efficient querying - almost every query requires a full table scan.
Part of being business savvy is working on the right thing. Most artists I know, and some of them are damn fine artists, aren't really working on the right thing because art isn't typically a good way to make a large some of money. Sure, you may end up catching a break and ending up becoming super famous, but that isn't the norm. If those incredibly intelligent people were to direct their interest towards business, my guess is that they'd be more than capable of making money.
Google does put a site-search box in like that sometimes.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=imdb
No I did not pre-order it
This is very misleading. It should really be called 'Building web applications with limited access to the iPhone APIs that somewhat look like native iPhone applications' :-)

There are a bunch of frameworks that take the html/css/javascript approach. You can do a lot this way but what nobody really seems to get is that your app will run in a WebView that is basically sandboxed with very limited access to iPhone APIs.

The APIs that you are allowed to use are those that Apple hyped when they came out with the iPhone OS 1.0. Basic Javascript hooks to access the address book, accelerometer, maps, camera, etc.

There is no way to access more native functionality.

I was at a conference last month (FITC Mobile) where this approach was also demonstrated. The speaker put together a simple app to take a picture with the camera and then upload it to Twitter. It looked like sh*t (because it is a web app and not a native iPhone app) and it was also not able to things that required native API access like scaling the image down. (Two lines of code in ObjC)
Distributed Integrated Circuits [pdf]
Any patent must satisfy three conditions:

* It must be novel.

* It must not be mathematics. Maths cannot be patented.

* It must be non-obvious.

Most software patents violate one or more of the above three conditions.
Interview with Andrew Viterbi (1999)
> have your investors deck be 100% complete, be prepared and be quick

Anybody know what this means?
This is a pretty crappy article. Aristotle was empirically wrong about a bunch of stuff, but he was also one of the greatest minds in history. If you think he's committing "elementary fallacies" every other page, then you're probably just misinterpreting his arguments (as I think the author does in the case of the concept of body). I mean, even our notion of what constitutes a logical fallacy comes in good part from his foundational work on logic.

The author is also a bit ignorant generally of philosophical issues. For example, he bluntly states that "refutability is one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific", ignoring the fact that (a) it has always been a minority of philosophers of science who have taken this Popperian position and (b) that defining what is actually meant by refutability in this context turns out to be a hugely difficult problem. (Popper never quite sorted it out.) He also has an annoying habit of committing the "elementary philosophical mistake" of referring to false hypotheses as "fallacious" (a term which is of course restricted in application to arguments).

I guess I am too easily upset by all this, and I think that Aristotle should be open to criticism like anyone else. But you can't get anything out of ancient philosophy unless you're willing to set aside your 21st century superiority complex for a little while and make a close study of the text, bearing in mind that the author (at least in this case) is not an idiot. If all you are going to do is point out that (gasp!) some of his conclusions were wrong, then what can be the point of the exercise?

I hope someone does the same to this guy's work in 2000 years.
Hasn't this effectively been proven wrong by the fact that Buffett has outperformed so many over time?
I would even sum up his advice as, "Do exactly the opposite of what these other smart people like Mitch Kapor have been telling you to do today."

Of course, as you mentioned, he arrived just in time for his talk, so he didn't even know that he was directly contradicting the advice of previous speakers.

He also scoffed at any form of testing when an audience member asked.

I was beyond unimpressed. Hopefully he redeems himself this year.
Hacker News is SO 2007.
Coincity
That's a pretty substantial service to offer for free and it seems you can access it from Javascript too. I wonder if it would violate their terms of service to write an application where each user had their own Simple DB account?
I got one of their free schwag shirts. It says, "You had me at hello world"
Ask HN: Check out my side project
Don't be silly. Doctor-patient confidentiality and attorney-client privilege are matters of state and federal law. NDA's are matters of contract law. Google and Microsoft are archcompetitors. Any number of things could happen that could cause MSFT to sue GOOG over violation of that contract, starting with tortious interference.
Umm, nope, that's pretty much exactly what you can't do.
I think it's a responsible attitude, but perhaps for reasons you're overlooking.

Communication is important in general, but vital in a start-up situation. If you're of a technical mindset and have a partner who is business minded, you two may have a significant communication barrier.

Any healthy partnership has enough overlap in terms of expertise that the ability of one partner to communicate to another using a language they understand.

Sometimes this takes a third partner who's somewhere in the middle and can intermediate and provide a more objective opinion when the other parties take opposing sides.

That being said, I'm sure there are start-ups where the founders do not have a lot of overlap, but I doubt they will succeed if they do not make the effort to find or create some common ground to have informed discussions on.

If you don't understand "business types", then perhaps it is responsible to not go into business with them. The "poor attitude part" may mean that you're not willing to make an effort to learn more about business, though.
Craigslist wins preliminary ruling in eBay lawsuit
I've been working on this for a couple months in my spare time, and I think it's turned out pretty well. It's a meal planning site. It's really simple, but it really helps when you want to eat at home more instead of going out. Check it out and let me know what you think. If you want to register, use this link (to avoid the 5 bucks):

http://mealfire.com?promo=hackernews

There's still a million things I want to add/improve, but it's at a point now where it's been working great for me and my wife (especially since we just had our first kid), so hopefully it can be helpful to some other people too.
Here is the boing boing post referenced in the original farewell message: http://boingboing.net/2009/08/22/fundable-rips-off-hu.html

Comments #5, #13, #23, #25, #30 and #31 between Mr. Pratt and Cory Doctorow are the relevant bits. I'm sure there is lesson here about mega-blog PR.
That may be, but the original statement said that one needed to be 'rich' to exercise altruism, and despite the downmodding of my previous comment that point still stands.
This appears to be the guy that makes acq decisitons, or works for the acq department. I know I read this intently.
I used to be an all tabs guy(sw=4, ts=4). Then I got hooked on Python and it was easier to go with the spaces only. Have configured my .exrc so that tabs get mapped to spaces (4 / tabstop). I don't even think of it any more. All my old C sources have morphed into spaces only as a result. Hey, disks have become huge and text compression is pretty efficient so I don't lose sleep over it anymore.
I would disagree. Many of the good managers I've worked under haven't had much coding experience. What they have had is the ability to trust the team to get them briefed on technical issues as they come up.

I could see this being different in other environments (eg I can't imagine a research team manager not being an alpha geek) but for most corporate environments there are a lot of other skills I'd look for before technical competence.

For example, one of my inspirations early in my career was an EPM (engineering project manager in the company's lingo) who had zero technical background. What she did have was an amazing ability to listen to everyone involved in the project, pick out the chains of dependencies, negotiate schedules with us, follow up relentlessly on any open questions and summarize what we'd just said better than we ever could. She made a massive difference, and the team's productivity dropped like a stone when someone less talented took over.
I've always dreamt of a big cardboard finger on the roof of my car that I could swivel towards the person I was honking at.
Building a Data Intensive Web Application with Hadoop
Retrobjects: OO Emulator Construction Framework
It's the name of a technique, not an imperative! At first I thought this was going to be a demand for laws limiting the taking of telephoto pictures in public.
Major Fail at XMLTeam Tonight
To date I've had nothing but good things to say about XMLTeam (http://xmlteam.com/), an alternative to high priced/low value professional sports stat providers like Stats Inc. I'm the last person who wants to see them go out of business, but sounds like today was a bad day to stop drinking if you're an employee over there.

This evening I got an email telling me that my password was reset due to security concerns, and any applications I have deployed have to use the updated password before October 5th.

There was only 1 rather large problem - the email contained the username and password for someone else's account. And I couldn't log into my own account. (No, I didn't try to log in with the other guy's credentials).

So, to summarize, someone at XMLTeam realized there was a security hole in their software (problem #1) and decided to reset everyone's passwords with barely any notice (problem #2). Then they sent the usernames and passwords in clear text (problem #3) via email (problem #4) to the wrong emails (problem #5).

In his defense, the CEO responded quickly to my email and assured me that I would not be charged for any requests that are submitted to my account while they get things worked out (I'm on a pay-per-request plan, which is honestly one of the best deals out there for this kind of thing). He sounded as rattled as you might expect.

Look, I sympathize to some degree, but this is a colossal fail. Get it together guys! Small companies like mine depend on you.
Smalltalk browser DSL
This would be perfectly acceptable, come on in!

You would have to ask each new user to create an AWS account (also free) and then enter their credentials (public key and private key). If you are building a browser-based app you need to protect the credentials from prying eyes/code.
Would you be happy if I changed the post's title to Limit-Telephotography?
For anyone who's wondering and not inclined to follow the link to find out: that's "telephotography at distances near the limit of what's feasible", not "please put restrictions on telephotography". Engineering rather than politics.

Unfortunately there's very little actual information on the site. A few pictures, with brief notes of what they're of and how far away the camera was, but no details of the "unorthodox viewing and imaging techniques" used. Or did I just fail to find them?