skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll agree that it's not a hack - that doesn't, in my mind, preclude it from being hacking. They're two different things. For me, anyway, playing with giant data sets does not fall into the first group, but does fall into the second.

That said, "is it hacking or not" isn't really a terribly interesting meta-discussion to have, imho, so I'll try and go in a different direction.

Please, if that isn't flamebait I really don't know what is.

The data appears to support the assertions you are calling flamebait. Provided their algorithm for calculating likeability actually works, then the data does support the assertions[1]. (This is all, of course, within the context of the pre-selection you noted in your post).

[1] Note that the assertions are of the form "Members of Set X are more likeable to members of Set Y than members of Set Z". If the assertions were "Being a member of Set X makes you more likeable to members of Set Y", they wouldn't necessarily be supported by the data.
But is there anything you can replace "ice cream" with to make it a workable example? What _real_ questions are you likely to see this kind of Hindu-Hindu antimatching behaviour on?
"We are sorry that Jamie feels the way he does..."

Classic non-apology.
Mozilla claims Chrome in IE makes for "browser soup"
I used to work with the new directors, and they're not the sorts to take a powerless figurehead kind of job, so I'm betting they have the authority to Fix Stuff That Sucks. Time will tell.
okcupid is pretty much considered the hip version of plenty of fish.
Electric dryers, even the high efficiency ones that are out SUCK up power. My 'rents got one recently and their power bill shot through the roof.

I wasn't surprised to see that they use so much power overall on that chart :)
Ask HN: Mapping Customer's Domain/Subdomain to my site
I believe some of you have done this.

I have a customer (customer1.com) who wants to map a subdomain or domain to its account on my site (mysite.com). Example is sub.customer1.com to www.mysite.com/customer1 or customer1.mysite.com.

How do I do this? Posterous and Weebly are doing this to their customers.

Thanks.
Recursive string permutation in python
Damn right it's a feature. This is why you shouldn't let physicists come up with sports rules

The point of the format is to give a team a chance to win even if they are not the best team. That's what keeps people interested - the chance that their team will win, even thought it is the 2nd, 3rd or 10th best team. When Greece won Euro 2004 against all odds, the psychic energy was just incredible. When Germany wins, it's like "Well, there we go, no surprise, let's go have a beer".
If you're going to make this kind of generalizing statement about large groups of people I simply think that you have the responsibility to do it properly, so with control groups and so on, or not at all, otherwise the results are totally meaningless.

The way it is presented right now is as if simply the size of OkCupid and their data gathering methods give them the license to make this kind of claim.

It's 'interesting' but not 'rigorous'.

The three I listed above are particularly galling, I really don't think any computing algorithm can give someone license to make the statements listed above (and as an atheist I have no dog in that fight), but without proper methods it's even worse.
Your story is very strange, the usual way the university patent system works is the following.

You ask them to apply for a patent. They either apply for it (eating the $20k themselves) or else they send you a letter declining any interest. If you get the "decline" letter, that means they gave up any interest or ownership in your invention.
What an idiotic headline. It's so emotionally charged that rational exploration of the subject of end of life care is impossible.
a) You didn't touch my description above. Enough.

b) This was the third trolled Perl discussion I read on HN in a row. And trolled in the same boring way. Why would I want to waste more time on language wars?!
s/ice cream/samsara/g
If this was true, the credit card companies would all be out of business.
You probably will have to deal with it in your scripting language of choice. You find the sub-domain and have that link to something in your database to link it to their account/data.
How is American football at all like soccer? It's much more like rugby, and you don't see rugby displacing soccer.
Sometimes, stories like this remind me of that scene in pretty women where Edward says to Julia Roberts : "I never treated you like a prostitute.", and she replies "You just did."
True, but I doubt anyone really gives a damn about the sincerity of the apology, rather people care about whether Palm will actually fix the issues raised.

The fact they've acknowledged and responded to jwz's post at all is a good sign.
Note: it requires iPhone OS 3.1.

If you're like me, and you've been holding onto 3.0.1 because it allows you to tether, you're out of luck.

Unless there's a material reason to require 3.1, I really hope they drop it down to 3.0x. Comments on the blog announcement seem to show a lot of people in the same boat.
If events like these help get more women involved and participating in the industry or community, then more power to them. It certainly beats not doing anything to attract minorities.

A cynical person could say that we already have minorities (e.g. Indians) - we just don't have the popular ones (e.g. women).

That said, I agree about "a man whining about not being able to attend a single tech event". Sometimes we should just grow a pair and suck it up. This really isn't something worth getting worked up about.
depends highly on your software stack that you're using to handle requests.

for starters you'll need to define a wildcard in your domain so that *.mysite.com all resolves to the same ip.

then you may have to configure your web server with the same wildcard, then once it trickles down to your application, you'll probably have to look at the SERVER_NAME variable passed by the web server.
I think I'm going to need to see a source for that.
Good point.

In case it wasn't clear, my premium-ish parts (e.g., 80plus power supply) were cheaper than Dell's low-end-ish parts.
That's a great story for all of the entrepreneurs that read HN, including me, but I was asking as a potential customer. So far the customer story for all three of these products has been pretty weak. I read the comments and I visited the sites. The thing that stood out for me most was that all three products think Campfire is bad. If I don't think that, does that mean your products aren't for me? I'm not trying to cause an argument, but wanted to give some honest feedback, that you guys could work on the customer pitch.
> My book is actually written for just those teens: the ones who have attempted to diligently follow school’s path but have only met disillusionment and boredom in the process. (Middle school is usually when this sets in.)

That was me. I firmly believe that middle school and high school did more damage than good for me, educationally. The only thing I really learned was how to get the A grade while doing as little work as possible. I could have learned and accomplished so much more in that time, and been better prepared for college.

However, I have a hard time asserting that I would have been better off skipping high school, overall. Education isn't the only thing you get out of high school. You learn how to handle yourself in a variety of social situations and with a variety of other people. High school might have handicapped my education, but skipping it would have handicapped my social skills.
I guess I'm either getting old or just have a different mindset. I think of chat as as enormous distraction to getting work done. I am one of those people who disables intrusive alerts from email and anything else that might lurk in the system tray and interrupt me. I check my email a couple of times a day, and generally sign off of chat services if I want to concentrate. Good luck to you though; clearly a lot of people have a different view on this.
skipping it would have handicapped my social skills

Don't you think you would have met other people wherever else you would have been away from high school?
Awesome, and free too. $9.95/mo now feels like a bargain.
Warner to return its music to YouTube
The reason is because at that point they already decided to interact with people of a different race.

If you want a more interesting result, take a look at my other comment for a diagram that shows response rates between different races. It illustrates a greater schism that one would come to expect.
Funny you should use that example. I remember mentioning to someone years ago that biologists had discovered that certain trees send chemical signals to each other through the soil- especially when they're traumatized.

He scoffed and laughed and said "Can you believe the stupid stuff people research? All this stuff with absolutely no application..."

I was frankly a little stunned. I was thinking that it could affect crop growth, depending on how you harvest the last crop, how if there was a trauma mechanism there might be a reverse mechanism that could cause revolutions in biological growth, etc. etc. etc. I couldn't believe he didn't see the potential I saw.

Which brings me to my point: saying "...no feasible way for them to monetize it" is, in my opinion, a symptom of lack of imagination. While it's not all monetize-able, I believe with the author that 48B of research represents a goldmine of ideas for someone with the proper eye for opportunity and business acumen.
You're right. It's infotainment. So? Are you incapable of taking anything at face value? They aren't making claims about how the world works; they're making claims about how people interact on their site. If that's not interesting to you, flag it and move on.
Why Women Have Sex: New Research
If there is only one company requiring this functionality, you don't need a wild card.

In the customer's DNS zone file:

mysite.customer1.com. IN CNAME customer1.mysite.com.

In your DNS zone file:

customer1.mysite.com. IN CNAME www.mysite.com.

Then, you'll need to decide how to configure the web server to provide the proper resource on requests for "customer1.mysite.com" In simple static situations, this could be as simple as a virtual host... more complex dynamic situations may require a redirector.
In your DNS configuration you have to put a line like this:

*.DOMAIN.com. IN A YOURIP

Where DOMAIN and YOURIP have to be replaced by the relevant data. (the asterisk character goes into column '0', the separators between the fields are tabs).

Then, when that works and whateveryoutype.domain.com maps to YOURIP you have to set up your webserver to handle this.

I'm going to assume that you use apache, for other webservers you'll have to do something else.

In the VirtualHost section, just under 'ServerName' for your webserver add this line:

ServerAlias *.DOMAIN.com

And restart the server.

Now in your language of choice you need to fish out the hostname, and load a database record with the specifics of that subdomain.

In php you would need to access:

$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']

good luck!
It will be for all my customers.

I just checked and my host supports wildcard domains.

Posterous is doing the same thing. They are using an IP address to map the DNS though. I wonder if you can use a domain (e.g. ns1.mysite.com) in case the IP address changes.
http://posterous.com/help/custom_domain
fantastic! thnx
Jonah Lehrer: Fasting & the decisions we make
How To Get More Twitter Followers Using The Power Of Article Marketing
Getting more Twitter followers to join your Twitter following is a trying task and it all starts around the same principals as someone trying to build an email list. You see essentially that’s exactly what your trying to do with your Twitter, and that is build a following. But in order to do that you need this….
I disliked almost everything about the tone and content of that article -- at first. His vitriol at the beginning is juvenile, bombastic, etc.

When he starts citing the case of the Belgian Congo is where the article becomes readable.

But when he writes in the imagined voices of Cromer et al -- well, that's good reading. He was making his points there, and not (just) bloviating. (<-- new word)

Then, carried away by the religious zeal that unpopular truths to often engenders, he drifts into 'papau new guinea people are neanderthals', and 'all third-world countries are dependent on foreign aid and protection,' etc. Huh.

The guy writes like a crank.

But, hey, some people call Wolfram a crank, and yet I'd rather have read him than not.
It's like soccer in that it's an outdoor game that we play on an open field in winter.

Doesn't rugby displace soccer? The only place I know where rugby is taken seriously as a spectator sport is Australia (maybe NZ and South Africa as well?), and sure enough soccer is a niche sport played by students and amateurs, only being seriously watched when Australia is competing in an international competition. In Britain, on the other hand, soccer is the main spectator sport in winter, and it's rugby that's confined to high schools and international competitions.

Is there anywhere that rugby and soccer are both equally (or almost-equally) popular?
A man whining about not being able to attend a single tech event is laughable. The industry (and the culture of the industry) is so overwhelming male dominated. It's not like you are missing out on anything.

Um, women aren't missing out on anything either. They are just as free to attend the same industry events as men.
How-To Guide for Descriptors [Python]
I agree with him very strongly I could easily have gone without high school but finding groups of my peers would have been much much harder especially since I did not live near enough to people my age to have met friends outside of school.

Sure if you move on to college you will go and meet other people but you may be more intimidated as they will be 3-4 years older than you and you have missed the social style that school offers.

I have run into a few people who were home schooled and this is apparent as they usually do not understand how both the social and classroom aspects work: these people were especially hard to deal with in class as they would interrupt the professors often with useless questions at inopportune times that hurt the flow of information and in exchange move the entire class off track.
And google doesn't have 9x% market share?
You raise an interesting point about how there are minorities and there are Minorities. Are Indians a minority in the IT industry? That probably depends on where you are, and how you are taking count.

When I used the word minority, I meant it purely in a numerical sense. If I was a participant in a female dominated industry, I'd say holding outreach events to attract more men would be a good idea too.
I dunno, I think middle/high school just gives you the social skills you might need in case you go to prison.
I installed doubleTwist some time ago, thinking the point was to unlock AAC content so I could play it on non-Apple stuff. (It was just an experiment; I have exactly 1 DRM'd AAC file.)

However, it seemed to come along with a whole social networking thingummy, and I couldn't really solve the very simple specific problem that - I thought - it was supposed to solve. After about 90 seconds, I uninstalled it.
That still bars the sort of guys who think discrimination against women in this industry is "hypothetical".

(OK, fair enough - that's no bug.)
I always just felt that I was waiting for the real world while I was in high school, I didn't create more than 3 lasting friendships (and thats all I can handle) ... so yeah there perhaps should be a option for alternatives that don't lead to discrimination based on that decision.
My experience was in the University of California system. I certainly would have preferred that they either declined it immediately or paid for the full application. It may be that they don't have much experience in software. Also, software patents are less valuable than those in other areas, like biotech. We didn't really care too much about the patent but wanted the IP ownership to be clear.
Exactly. I am not the least bit scared of heights. Top of the arch in St. Louis, hanging over the railing with my head pressed against the glass, looking straight down at nothing underneath me - no problem. Why? I am in zero danger whatsoever. If I'm not in actual danger of falling, heights are no problem. And so I love roller coasters. Pure exhilaration (Last one I did was New York-New York in Vegas. Outstanding at night.)

But put me on a 12/12 roof, and I can't stop shaking.
"We are sorry that Jamie ripped into us in public"

FTFY
There are some schools that specialize in offering admissions to students who haven't completed high school, such as my alma mater, simon's rock college. It's not quite what the author is advocating, but if there are any high schoolers here (or parents of kids) looking to skip a year or two of high school, it's worth looking into. Most students transfer to a more traditional school after 2 years when they get their AA. I got my BA and am now in grad school.
So... why should I invest in a platform whose app store is "beta" (which seems to be synonymous with unaccountable in this context) and haven't said when it will be out of "beta"?
Swap 1.8.6 for 1.8.7 and you'd be more correct.
Come to think of it, the differences on the race graph are amazingly small, given how strongly race is correlated with certain religions -- (e.g. middle-eastern people are much more likely to be Muslim, and almost all Hindus are Indian.)
Not at all what I expected. I was imagining some new explanation for why people some people copy blog posts and present them as their own. That, in my mind, counts as "getting ripped off". But the fact that a writer is not able to generate high advertising revenues--how does that constitute ripping him off?

In any case, I figure that, if intent harvesting is where the money is on the net, then those who want to make lots of money on the net ought to do intent harvesting, rather than complain about how whatever they are doing is not lucrative.

Or am I missing something?
Folks can get an idea of the gem migration situation here:

http://isitruby19.com/
Oh, the "social network included" syndrome...
I disagree.

"We obviously goofed..." is a fairly clearly expression of fault.

In your quote he's expressing remorse that jwz had given up hope that Palm would remedy the situation but make no mistake about it, they know they screwed up and explicitly say so.

Also folks, it bears mentioning again, this program is still in beta (and not in the Google sense).

They'll figure it out, have some faith.
At the least, "The data show murder causes death"
IMO Gilad Bracha is the best guy to listen to on types

http://wwhttp://www.se-radio.net/podcast/2009-07/episode-140...
digg us please? ;-)
http://digg.com/software/Dropbox_iPhone_app_finally_released
It says "Konqueror" in the title area.
Yeah, but I mean, if I took up a sudden interest in crocheting or something and the best way to get connected and start learning was to go to a crocheting convention that's 99% female, I'd feel a little awkward/discouraged.
> Then, carried away by the religious zeal that unpopular truths to often engenders, he drifts into [falsehoods]

This problem is endemic to MM's work, but I still consider him worth reading. It's important to read him critically.
This is a fantastic resource – it's taken me far too long to accumulate as many as I have now, and there are a few here I haven't seen before. I wish this had been around when I first started looking.
Where Twitter Ranks In Venture Funding History
"...in how we communicated with Jamie" is not an expression of fault in their policy, but rather an acknowledgement that they should have done a better job of explaining their policy.
Agreed. Ripped off implies something unfair or sneaky. There's nothing to prevent content producers from moving down the sales funnel.
20/20 - Arial has a lot of odd oblique angles on characters like "3", "r", "G", etc. where Helvetica has horizontal or vertical lines. Toyota was tricky, though.
The flaw here is that how people interact on their site has very little bearing on how those same people will interact in real life.

The plural of data isn't evidence, even for large amounts of data.

Sure you can do interesting statistical analysis, but the real action is after two people have found each other, and that's where the huge flaw is in all this analysis, the statements are about interactions in real life, the data is gathered online.

Any kind of statement about people being more or less likable would have to be taken out of the context of the website and into real life, without that statements as listed above are unsupportable.
Yeah I saw his post more as a HUGE hypothetical fantasy.

The premise of it is based on making money. While that is usually the end pursued by most commercial ventures, Craig Newmark has made it abundantly clear that optimizing money is never the goal at Craigslist.
Right, because the program is a work in progress and the only reason jwz got access is because he is who he is. Then Palm screwed up the communications (taking a long time to respond, making him sign a bunch of papers).
>Look at the evidence. Look at MIT or Stanford’s online admissions guidelines for homeschoolers. They don’t want high school diplomas. They don’t want some perfect equivalent of 4 years of high school classes. They want teens who have taken personal initiative and designed meaningful, independence-building activities for themselves. They want teens who have boldly explored the realms of business, international travel, and college-level research prior to convincing themselves that they actually need college. Traditional high school is very often a handicap in pursuing these character traits. And while not every college has explicit homeschool admissions policies like MIT and Stanford, the logic remains the same: colleges want dynamic, innovative teens who leave the cookie-cutter approach behind for greener pastures.

As an "unschooler" I received similar advice from advisors and admissions.

In the end I didn't go to college, I found it wasn't for me. I couldn't stand the thought of another four years of before cutting my teeth in the "real world." I just couldn't take anybody's word that they were going to give me the best preparation for what was to come next.

I just had to dive in.

It's not for everybody, but we can do more to help students whose time is wasted in school.

If one is better suited to jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire these are 4-6 years of experience s/he will never get back.
So did they say - here is how we are going to be:

1. 10 times more open than google in terms of empowering independent developers and the owners of phones.

2. 10 times better in terms of user experience than Apple.

Or did they just say "we are seriously second rate".
I don't know what that means, but I did think this was a brilliant marketing post from a company, and an interesting read.
A lot of that research is useless

How many major commercial breakthroughs started off as a "useless" little experiment in a lab somewhere over the last couple of centuries or so?

The road from scientific breakthrough to commercial viability is long and winding. Don't decry something as worthless just because you cannot find an immediate use for it. Who knows, in 60 years time a synthetic derivative of that specific yellowing agent in those leaves might be the cornerstone in some significant commercial product or process.
I argue that the traditional school environment is socially stunting.

It is a rare minority of the time in your life that you only interact with peers of your own age.

One of the touted advantages of alternative schooling is that the "students" have more natural relationships with peers of a wider variety of ages, better preparing them for the rest of their lives.