skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It reminds me of those Powerthirst videos on YouTube.
Hey this is HN, not Something Awful :-)
One of the reason's it's dead are headline fails. Who's going to subscribe to a blog if the headline is bad or misrepresentative of the article? I'd rather pickup an item on Twitter that's been pre-read by someone I've vetted, and who can prepare me for what to expect.
I think there are companies that bundle this stuff and do it cheaper than the big 3. But like I said in the OP they all look a bit "oily" so I'm looking for referrals from HN.
It's funny how angry average IQ people get when you talk about these issues. If you don't have it then how could you possible know what it is like? Why are you so offended. If we ran fast or slammed basket balls better then you wouldn't mind me saying that. We don't walk around telling everyone that we are smarter but it comes out. We have two choices talk down or talk normal either way it will be seen as an insult. When we talk normal, we are not trying to sound smart we are naturally. That's what it means to have a high IQ. When we talk down people get offended. If you have an average IQ say 100 and everyone else had a 50 IQ (retarded) how happy do you think you would be if they were offended by the way you talk or didn't understand you ideas or were mad at you because you understood that you were not retarded. I'm not saying that average is retarded or making fun it's just the way to explain. If you don't have a high IQ how would you know...
China weather "magic" conjures blue sky for parade
Free SDA | Free Seventh-day Adventists - Free SDAs
Official Free Seventh-day Adventist website. Free Seventh-day Adventists, or Free SDAs, have a rich history that dates back to the early 1900's. Please visit our history page to learn more about us.
I dunno, I'm pretty interested in playing with it. I'm a little cautious of trashing this based on the claims so far without seeing where it goes. Anyone remember the iPod thread on Slashdot that declared it as a useless product that would never take off? For all I know there was a similar one about Rails.

It does make some big claims, but I've been looking for a reason to mess with Erlang for a while and this seems pretty neat.
Things I’ve learned deploying PHP app on Amazon EC2 WAMP/WIMP stacks
And few if any of them abandon their blogs. They just try to get their readers to follow them in both mediums.

Besides, nobody makes money of twitter directly. It's just a platform for sending people to your blog...where you make money.
The examples given seem more like inattentiveness than stupidity. Which makes sense. Attention to every detail requires effort (a lot of effort). Sometimes one person may not have all of the resources required to pay enough attention to every detail. The ones you pay attention to (e.g. aircraft maintenance) account for fewer problems.

Throughout my programming career, I've noticed a strong correlation of bugs with code that was given less attention (it was deemed to be an easier problem to solve, or compartmentalized and solved later).

I don't think it's fair to claim people were stupid just because a detail was overlooked. Perhaps they could have allocated their attention differently, but without knowing all of the trade offs it's hard to say they made a bad choice.

I think that people have a finite amount of "attention" that they can devote to things during a day. Furthermore spending attention on a task seems to consume energy. It's reasonable to think that occasionally some items get less attention than they should.
the class references on these two are strikingly similar:

http://www.pushpin.com/api/1.3/docs/

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/reference.htm...
I really hope this turns out better than DOM (both design and implementation).

At least good libraries should arrive more quickly given that the number of good Javascript developers out there is so much greater than it was in 1998.
Tool of the Day: Test Your Trivia Knowledge With Triviaburst
Announcing the TypePad Platform and TypePad Motion
The Mythical Customer Problem
I have a lot of respect for Pownce. I had an account, even if I didn't use it as much as Twitter, and I was really disappointed when they closed down.

So I want to be excited about this, but I find the "community microblogging" idea really confusing. I was clicking through their example site for FOWA, and I just don't get it. And this is coming from someone who just read an article explaining how it works!
It's 1997 all over again!

Going to LAN parties changed some olfactory wiring in my head. Specifically, whenever I smell Red Bull, I think "LAN Party".
Call the last employer but one for an honest assessment of the reasons your prospective employee left and how easy they are to get one with

Most employers will not give detailed info to protect themselves from defamation lawsuits. Usually HR departments at big companies will just confirm the start date, end date, and position. Occasionally you can get more, if it is quantifiable (87% attendance, 2 promotions, 1 writeup).

I got a voicemail once that said something like this:
"We're interviewing John Doe for the position of general manager at a widget factory. If you believe he is a trustworthy employee that you would hire again, call 213-555-1234. If you wound not hire him again, call 213-555-5678."

Pretty sneaky!
Great article.

Incidentally, that other 'dead' language (Latin) is still very much in use, precisely because it is dead. Being 'dead' (as in no longer under aggressive development) can actually be an advantage. Plenty of branches of industry prefer stability over sexiness any day.
The Failure of Code Reuse
Over the years, I had several requests for my approval to check if I have a criminal record, but I don't remember any about my credit report.

Plus a potential employer could use the information from the credit report in salary negotiation. I don't really like this idea. Credit report are easy to obtain if you have consent, just check the major agencies, the ones I have dealt with in the past (not when hiring people) are TransUnion and Equifax.
As far as I can tell the article Google hasn't so much lost to Baidu as simply decided the cost of competing wasn't worth it. If censorship and government blessing is the key to china success then I'm not so sure I want success in that market.
Seriously. I wrote this comment, which (unfortunately), verges on feeding the trolls:

I'm skeptical of the (provocative) title: individuals will blog to the extent they want to, as they always have, and those with something to say will find a way to say it. As for "professional" blogging, I think to a large extent it's a myth, as I described in <a href="http://blog.seliger.com/2009/06/17/youre-not-going-to-be-a-p... not going to a be professional blogger, no matter what the WSJ tells you</a>.

When people tell you a medium has died, it usually means that medium has matured, at least somewhat, but the idea of being able to speak to anyone, anywhere, anytime, anyhow (as long as the receiver cares to listen) is going to stay, probably in some form that resembles blogging.

"blog reader-program development has ceased"

Shoot: <a href="http://www.macworld.com/article/142407/2009/08/gruml.html... forgot to tell the developers of Gruml and Byline</a>. Alternatively, someone isn't paying much attention.

Regarding Twitter, I like the comment in <a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/17/why-i-dont-use-twitter/... I don’t use Twitter</a>: “What can be said in 140 characters is either trivial or abridged; in the first case it would be better not to say it at all, and in the second case it would be better to give it the space it deserves.”
Could you elaborate on how this relates to the article? I'm sure you have an interesting point to make, but I find it difficult to extrapolate.
It's not even an immediate either. They are paying to stand in line.
Venture Exits Still Anemic In Third Quarter, Down Nearly 50%
Oracle has very reasonable license terms for virtualization. It's a gold mine for them.

When you license a host CPU, you can run as many oracle instances on as many VMs as you like. Oracle likes it that way: people spinning up "free" VMs for small projects drives demand.
Cosmic Rays Hit 50-Year High
Learn how to put text on a website.
The Final OOXML Update: Part I
Why should Photoshop be distinguished from the retouching, etc., that have gone on since I suppose photography has existed? Google for "Pfeiffer Esquire Harpers" and look up what happened about 1990.

And "misery"? My own waist is hardly tauter than Sarkozy's; what misery is inflicted on me when a French magazine redacts his flab?
California Redwood Forest Management/History
Just to clarify, are your referring to a specific group of people as "everyone" or do you actually feel that every human being should know these things? If the latter, what purpose does knowing what RAM, storage and the CPU have for anyone who merely uses a computer to email and "google"?
Such a great pitch for a web framework.
Example of a good YC application video: Directed Edge
Please do vote for the Banking theme.. That which will help millions of people to get access to various financial products and services

Mouli
Or maybe just that people are more careful, don't go to work or school when they feel sick etc. Or something else. Or I'd at least wait till the end of the year to make statements like that, but then again my job is not to get people's attention.
Hmm, I've had google wave for some months now, and I somehow don't see much a use for it at the moment.
Find threatens to 'turn evolution on its head'
The “Free Public Wifi” conspiracy
it solves the classic c10k problem.

Of course, this is the problem you get once you've solved the hard problems already, which is how to get that many visitors in the first place. At this point you have the money to buy a bunch of servers, typically, so this is aimed at people who are really great at getting incredible numbers of hits, but really poor at monetizing them.
I totally agree with you there are millions...billions who have no access to banking...We are working on how that can change...and how the millions can actually get on to a platform which will enable democratization of the entire banking and other wealth creation processes

PS; So request you to take a minute and vote for 'Build better banking tools for everyone' at Project10tothe100.com
I encouraged Scott to let people see this, to show that it's better to just sit down and start talking than to spend a lot of time trying to make something carefully scripted.
First Round Capital opening NYC office
As depressing as it may be, evolution is not something that is going towards anything. It is simply what remains. I find that the best direction metaphor is that everything is falling down, and occasionally passes a sieve. The maximum complexity (minimum local entropy?) may grow somewhat, but at best that's a side effect.
I agree that some of the ideas look quite wide and too daunting to be taken on...

But do consider 'Build better banking tools for everyone' for your vote
Anderson Speaks at Google: “Free Harmonized Data to the People”
They're a waste of money at any price. I hear from a friend who activated his wave account this morning, that you can't create a wave account that has the same name as a gmail account. So it seems very likely that all gmail accounts will eventually be wave accounts someday anyway.
The smugness in your blog post devours any point that could have come across as useful.
We only use 10% of our brains?
Letting Go - An Irish startup goes from idea to sale
Solver for KenKen puzzles
The making of a crowd sourced book.

Unfortunately, they are planning to pay the crowd with copies of the book.
"Bigulo started off as 800 lines of broken code, that we were always told that "anyone could have written". But we did, and that's usually the difference."

I can't underline those words heavily enough. Anybody could do such-and-such, but somebody actually did and that is the difference.
This is by Evan Miller, whom this crowd may know from what was once titled the "Balls Out Guide to Nginx Module Development":

http://www.evanmiller.org/nginx-modules-guide.html
It was delightfully playful, yet very concise and informative, which is how I imagined it would be based upon the writeup posted yesterday.

I wonder if this will be a catalyst for people to be more informal with their videos, just speaking freely about what they are trying to do.
Please see my comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=854928

You are putting a lot on the line when you hire a SysAdmin, Accountant, and certainly anyone with check-writing authority.

The employer that uses financial distress to bargain someone down is getting what they pay for. The employee will jump as soon as they can. I am not that kind of employer.
OOPSLA Debate: Cloud Computing for the Wrong Reasons
London Stock Exchange in talks to buy startup Turquoise. Fire sale?
Book review: Bob Walsh's Web Startup Success Guide
I'm using Matplotlib with the Agg backend to generate PNGs, great quality, easy to use and fast.

http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/

http://www.antigrain.com/
Watch Toulouse v Club Brugge Live, Group J
After winning 3-2 at FK Partizan on Matchday 1, Toulouse FC should be on something of a high going into their Group J home tie against a Club Brugge KV side under pressure to make amends for a 4-1 loss to UEFA Cup holders FC Shakhtar Donetsk in their opening fixture.
The article is contentless, except for this link that explains it: http://billkosloskymd.typepad.com/wirelessdoc/2008/01/free-p...
> If censorship and government blessing is the key to china success then I'm not so sure I want success in that market.

google.cn is censored but google.com is not. And at least till now both of them are accessible in China. Although Google is providing a censored version, but one fact is important: a contrast. And a growing number of Chinese people are beginning to notice the difference, which I believe is the key of awakening brainwashed hive minded people.
It may be alarmist, but I don't think only libertarians would object. One of the authors points -- admittedly, not his most vocal point -- is that in the British case government action seems especially unnecessary. This is my main objection (although I am roughly libertarian). The number of people who actually do not know that models are not retouched does not represent a large percentage of people. Expending real energy to solve non-problems seems like a universally bad practice.
Durant Versus Sloan
If the wave invitation is sent to one's existing gmail account, that shouldn't be a problem. Still, people are crazy with their money!
Doesn't the fossil fuel energy cost of the flight overwhelm any energy savings from living on renewables?
you might want to post this on NANOG/SANOG mailing lists.
The problem with using the JVM is that it has been designed around the Java language. This doesn't make it a great fit for languages that don't use Java's object model, or that require functionality like tail call optimisation. It's possible to work around these problems, but for implementing languages, it's less flexible than something like LLVM

The advantage with using the JVM is that you get a lot of libraries for free, which may be worth coping with a Java-centric design.
Yes I agree that this is unnecessary, but the article goes a lot further than just saying that it's unnecessary. The claim appears to be that any attempt by a government to increase the happiness of its citizens is inherently wrong. It is not as if labeling shopped images for what they are would actually do any harm.
I got forwarded to a porn site from the sandbox.
The first 30 seconds reminded me of beavis and butthead. It turns around after that for the better.
Previously discussed at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=802883
i like where this is going if only because i wish more processes were transparent. i want to know how the products and services were made so that i can both respond and learn from them.

by respond, i mean support authenticity, passion, risk and avoid poor social and environmental practices. we've all happily bought software that was super cool and built by a single person or small team, and just as happily pirated ubercorps ubiquitious whateverware.

by learn, i mean that how-things-work shouldn't be so mystical. why is that junk food shaped that way? what planning process lead to those awesome features? what were the intentions behind that ad?

most importantly, let us not forget that advertisements are intentionally deceptive, even malicious. it's one thing to want to buy something and to do a suitable amount of research to make a decisions. it's another thing to create a need where there isn't one. if you have kids, then you know how horrible advertisements are, and how insanely they play with a person's emotions and identity.

we need more advertisement transparency and honesty, and that means regulations or a superior ethics than currently. transparency is vital for a healthy free market. regulations that promote transparency are probably a good thing, though of course there are numerous ways to go about solving this larger problem. after working on a consumer empowerment startup for a couple years, i'd say that data collection is a huge problem, not least of all because companies expose nada, and that getting information to consumers at the point of 'caring,' which is somewhere between finding out about a product and purchasing it, comes second.

better advertisements would go along way. how to make brief but objective advertisements is a tough problem. my imagination wants a solution that automatically aggregates information across the internet and public resources and then provides a succinct summary overlayed on top of the advertisement or brand logo that i'm looking at...and only when i want to see it. i'm rooting for AI but i'll settle for wisdom of the crowds meets poorly-paid turks.
U.S. Moves to Lessen Its Oversight of Internet
Peanut Butter Programming
Windows Azure Is Not Cheap
Just today I went through the process of associating my gmail account to my wave account.

As for whether or not it's a waste, if you were a developer looking to leverage the Wave platform, and have not already gotten an invite, I'd guess $100 is a very small price to pay for access.
wear gloves
Cranking up the volume on my MacBook I could barely make out every other word. That and the crappy 8fps + terrible lighting was a big turn off. Putting in the tiniest effort to production value goes a long way and shows you care a lot about what you're talking about!
There are actually many 'underwater' efforts at making the JVM play nice with other programming languages besides java.

For instance, for java 7 there is supposed to be support for dynamic languages.
Javascript as Compiler Target: Clamato, GWT Smalltalk, Python, Scheme...
They won't probably fly you alone and not in an executive jet.
I think that's the point he's trying to make. He's basically just saying "buzz words suck" and then riffing on the term Cloud Computing for a few minutes. It only seems contradictory because Techcrunch framed it as commentary on cloud computing rather than the silly joking around it's supposed to be.

In fact, Techcrunch actually misquotes him. The Techcrunch article opens with "According to Larry Ellison, it’s nonsense and water vapor" when in fact what Ellison says is "[The Cloud] is NOT water vapor" (the point he was making is that the cloud is just actual computers on the other side of a network not "a cloud" which is where water vapor comes in)
For every situation I can conceive of offhand where this "worlds" abstraction could be useful, I can immediately think of a simpler way to achieve the same results. Perhaps I'm being naive?
I like the point about keeping the HTTP GET or POST request in a single packet to avoid the round trip from TCP slow start.
Scripting your browser - an alternative to GreaseMonkey
The overly dramatic headline of the interesting submitted article and the back-and-forth among the scientists quoted in the article is largely explained by this passage from page 332 of the new book Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters by Donald R. Prothero:

"The study of human fossils is one of the most crowded and contentious of any scientific field I've ever seen. Although the human fossil record is now quite impressive and includes thousands of specimens (fig. 15.2), there are also thousands of physical anthropologists who must 'publish or perish,' and who need to make a career somehow. Most of the best fossils are typically studied by those who have the funding and the access to key sites in Africa and elsewhere, so the rest of the profession has to make careers whatever way they can. Consequently, every idea and every specimen in hominid paleontology is challenged and restudied and reinterpreted many times . . . "
> If you're thinking about using aids (Modafinil), you're
> probably comparing yourself to others in an attempt to
> catch up or keep up[....]

There's a certain amount of that behind this question. I'm 38. The talk on the news and YC pages about 18-24 year old founders being the norm, and 28 year olds who have already founded four or five successful startups--those don't help either. Then I start seeing these things about Modafinil and it's hard not to hear that little shoulder-demon whispering "you're past it...give up!" I don't intend to listen to him, but it's still daunting. I figured I'd get a reality check by asking here.

I've been very successful at a number of jobs because I'm smart, able to focus well and learn quickly, and willing to work as hard as needed. When I was 25, 100 hour weeks weren't a problem. But I'm 38 now, and I literally can't do that any more. I need to "work smarter" as they say; it's a hard and uncomfortable process to learn, since the old way has been so successful (and, honestly, so much fun).

>[...] constant and continual self-improvement [...]

Yep; been doing that for years. To mangle an adage: "Today in the workplace: the team of Age and Experience beat Youth and Endurance 5-0 in straight sets."
The YC application specifically asks you not to do that.

The sound was fine, and they did pretty much exactly what the app asked for -- no post-production, no fancy stuff, just a video of you talking.
I'm disappointed to see that each of these TypePad Motion deployments will be closed on it's own, instead of hooking into some kind of distributed TypePad Motion network.

At any rate it's open source... looking forward to what comes out of the community's development on this.
This is something I keep bringing up with my fellow PHP developers. I like the simplicity of PHP in some respects, however the syntax and various frameworks seem to be constantly evolving around my projects. I have friends who are constantly having to adjust their code to comply with the newest release of CakePHP. I find some syntax (pseudo-)rules and best practices in PHP have changed enough to make it a constant struggle just to keep on top of these changes along with trying to improve my abilities in other areas. I'm all for new features but I'm beginning to grow weary of the time spent staying on top of trendy languages (PHP vs Python or Rails, SVN vs git). I would much rather spend this time learning better security practices along with design and architecture. I would never state that change is bad, I'm merely stating what I now see as a drawback of these constantly evolving languages.

... I really hope I'm not becoming one of those really old dinosaurs who refuse to learn anything new. ;)
brapse at googlewave