skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are two levels --- the first is within the context of a class assignment, and the second is as a business operation.

1) The bike tire pressure check isn't bad, but seems to be cheating on the class solution by using outside materials. Once one can 'presume' a pressure gauge and a pump, why not presume further specialized equipment or further outside funding? As a business proposition I was happy with it when they were charging a set price, but I personally feel uneasy with the change to donations. This isn't clear cut, but it's guilt based and I wouldn't do it myself despite the effectiveness. Compare with the Hare Krishna technique of forcing free flowers and then asking for a donation: http://www.garyasanchez.com/what-hare-krishnas-can-teach-us-...

2) Selling restaurant reservations is probably fine within the context of the class, but is a violation of the expectations of the restaurant. If everyone were to follow their approach, the system would collapse and the restaurant would need to implement a policy of cancellation charges. My simple view would be that if the restaurant would change their system if you told them what you plan to do, it is immoral.

3) From the point of view of the class, the winning solution feels like a cheap trick. Yes, it makes money, but not under the rules that were officially given. From a business point of view, it takes advantage of a captive audience. What's really being sold is the time of a third party who does not benefit from the transaction, and yet due to social constraints is unable to leave. This strikes me as both immoral and dishonest.

I fear that my scruples here aren't entirely consistent, and I'm pretty certain that they reduce my ability to make easy money. But I enjoy being in a situation where I can make decisions based on the answer to "Would the world be a better place if everyone followed this advice?". And for me, on this criteria, the last two solutions fail, and the first is on the edge once the donation approach is taken.
As long as they either don't open the envelope until just before the presentation, I'm pretty sure they fit within the rules of the competition.
It's not that books are bad, it's that there is only one book. If it's not in The Book, you essentially can't find it anywhere, unless your mailing list spelunking skills are particularly good.
As an astronomer I basically fell on my knees and thanked bog when NRAO started rewriting AIPS with a python interface instead of some terrible ad hoc command language. PyRaf is also so much better than actual iraf. I don't even particularly like python but it's so much nicer than what atronomers normally write.
Ask HN: How to create a successful Hackathon?
First time organizing a hackathon for the upcoming SocialDevCamp Chicago (http://socialdevcampchicago.com). Lots of interest expressed in the event but struggling to get pre-registration for the Hackathon itself (to prepare network and get server space if necessary). Any HN suggestions for encouraging attendees to bring ideas out of the woodshed for the weekend? We have prizes, experienced coders available for guidance, and flexible guidelines already...Thanks.
Indeed. Sounds like he recently filed for bankruptcy too, so that will discharge all these judgments against him.

I wonder how much money he has stashed in offshore accounts...
I have often sat in coffee shops wondering what method of data extrapolation Shazam used to parse audio to be able to search it's music db. I would think about how I would do it. I use Shazam all the time so it's nice to finally know the basic idea.
You make valid points. My problem is less the specifics of the individual teams' solutions -- I don't dispute they were very clever and creative solutions -- but rather the impression that the greatest reward went to those who went furthest outside of the rules.

Team 1 were arguably entirely within the rules and made $200, Team 2 went a little outside (unless they were handed the envelope at 6pm) and made a little more, Team 3 ignored the 2-hour stipulation entirely and made $650.

Fundamentally, you're not rewarding creativity at money-making, you're rewarding creativity at rule-breaking.
Google Wave Invitations by Request
Yeah, I was considering this. One of the selling points I was thinking for this was "sponsoring this page will keep your competitor's ads off of it." Any other ideas?
I did used to have a more prominent donation request. I got a few dollars here and there, then one day a guy sent me $15! Maybe I should give it another shot.
caring about what's good for the planet

What the hell does that really mean, anyway? So the planet is harmed when old plants burn? Somehow this huge rock hanging in the sky is going to be hurt by some dirt?

I don't think so. I think no matter what mankind does the earth will continue along just as it always has.

And you'd rather just "kill the planet off now" WTF? Tell me, please, just how you would do that?

Look -- I'm fine with wanting "clean skies", whatever that means. But stuff is in the sky already. Has been for eons. So it's never going to be "clean". Never has been. If you're really pumped on "what's good for the planet" then you need to start explaining what exactly that means, cause for just words it doesn't make a lick of sense. In fact, it sounds like happy-happy-feel-good talk. The kind of talk which everybody agrees to but doesn't have much meaning.
Basically, being a man in the 21st century, according to this author, is basically not "being a man" at all. The entire article applies to women as well. It's just being "yourself", with no guidelines laid on you based on your gender.

I am not expressing agreement or disagreement; I just think the article beat around the bush and (probably not deliberately) went to great lengths to avoid the very conclusion it is drawing, which is that being a man has no particular meaning anymore, according to the author.
6k with pngout. They're probably stuck with gif because of IE6.
The problem with IA64 being that Intel designed/patented it so that they could bring in royalties if/when everyone went to 64-bit and used their architecture. I'm thanking amd64 for saving us from creating a new generation of processors where everyone was paying an Intel tax. It may have a superior design, but I don't want every processor in a desktop/laptop out there to be a revenue generation machine for a single company, even when the processor's manufacturer is different.
Are these experienced coders Tweeting about this? Maybe there's a specific project or problem that is planned beforehand for everyone to collaborate on.
The iPhone has only been out for a little over two years. The biggest challenge to Android is that they are taking a completely different route than Apple by allowing the carriers and handset makers freedom to do their own thing. This could be a good thing in the long run, but it's going to make it harder to capture mindshare when the UI and handsets are so variable.
Equity investing in superstar individuals (not their companies, them)
Facebook secret discovered
Go to facebook and type: "Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Enter" On keyboard for an awesome FB secret.

Press refresh to remove.

Gotta love the old school programmers there.
From what I can see, their customers were happy, they made money, and it was all above-board, let alone legal. Clearly, something must be wrong!

I have to say, I'm even more amused by people's outrage at these winning tactics than by the tactics themselves. I begin to understand why it's necessary to have an entire class in entrepreneurship. Perhaps it is largely about training people not to be pinned, like hapless chess pieces, by the force of trivial preconceptions.
If you control the website just use http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/jsMath/ and you're fine. Any users that want can install the fonts and will get a better experience.

Given how much harder MathML is to author, the jsMath solution is always going to be more popular among random math folks. Particularly since they're already used to writing TeX.
They have been promoting to their respective networks, but I like the idea of a community project. Makes "judging" for prizes more difficult but would rather have collaboration than winning. Thanks.
Interestingly, the majority of the users visiting are on PCs ( http://skitch.com/kadavy/nfcsa/content-detail-google-analyti... ). Not sure if that means they are still PC users, or are in the process of switching over. I'll have to try your poll idea.
The Cloud Performance Catch-22: CPU-I/O Balance
You're being emotionally fuzzy, because you are refusing to make value judgments, a grave cognitive hazard of the current postmodern philosophical regime. I say instead that there's more than one relevant definition of "value". Are old people less "valuable" because we have no use for their wisdom? It does not diminish their dignity and "final worth" as human beings, but yes, there are useful and valid definitions by which their value is less. They are not all the value definitions, but the set is not empty. Jamming a single-dimensional definition of value on top of my posts will definitely make them look incoherent; that certainly doesn't surprise me much.

Your way of thinking leaves you unable to understand why the 50-year-old in the article feels the way he does. Of course he's valuable, right, and you should tell him to buck up, right? Well, it's true that he's still valuable, but it is also true that he has identified a real problem that you can't solve by just telling him he's valuable. I don't know what the exact solution for this person is, but it's more than just trying to load up on empty self-esteem.

Emotionally fuzzy thinking is a great social signal ("man, shouldn't we just love everybody?"), but it's a terrible way to solve problems like this guy's; indeed, take this tack and you'll just further alienate him. There's a real problem here.
In the White House, before Drupal there was "the Tool"
Would love to click on that but those pesky little web-filter things disable URL shorteners here. Anyone care to link a full link?
Ask HN: Alternatives to Facebook Translation for crowd-sourcing localization?
To recap, a month ago, Facebook launched a new feature to let developers tap into their crowd-sourcing translation method: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/29/facebook-spreads-its-crowdsourced-translations-across-the-web-and-the-world/

It provides an API to upload strings, and then provides a UI for people with Facebook accounts to submit translations of your strings and vote up or down submitted translations, reddit style. You can appoint people as admins to choose the most promising translations, or you can just trust the community's votes.

This sounds great in theory, but there are a few problems. I don't want to go into too much detail, but to summarize:

- Facebook is extremely unresponsive to bugs and questions (admittedly, it's in beta).

- Facebook requires would-be translators to have had a Facebook account for a secret amount of time before they can translate. Many international people do not have an account.

- The Facebook UI is unsuitable for bulk translation.

So, are there any alternatives for crowd-sourcing translations, or is this one of those problems where every startup rolls their own solution?
Benidorm Things to Do
I enjoyed Lakoff and Núñez's section on this in their book Where Mathematics Comes From[1]. The relevent pages are available at Google Books[2].

1- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Mathematics_Comes_From

2- http://books.google.com/books?id=YXv6SEjTNKsC&pg=PA432&#...
Interesting parallel. However, I think this would be like the financial system if you got the commitments, and then created a market for these commitments, where they were freely sold as liquid assets.
Four paragraphs of fluff. The author makes one interesting point I would love to hear more about, "I think the biggest change will be in our perception of privacy." but, why? Sadly, they never delve deeper into that topic.
Tin: A database to tiny, its name had to be shortened.
Article Title: Google Wave to be opened for federation today! Yes, for you to host.

Full link: http://thenextweb.com/appetite/2009/10/30/breaking-google-wa...
http://thenextweb.com/appetite/2009/10/30/breaking-google-wa...
Isn't it supposed to be two blue leaves?
Yes, the alternative would cause different complications, but fewer of them. The pi-is-wrong pdf goes into it.

It was programming a lot that brought me to realize this. I got in the habit of always questioning the primitives I'm given, in the hope of simplifying the definitions built on them. It was a little boggling to notice that pi, something I'd grown up with, deserved the same kind of questioning.
The radius is only more fundamental to the notion of a circle because of the modern definition of a circle (set of all points exactly r away from the given point). One could also use a definition like:
"Continuous set of points such that each is distance d from exactly one other, and further from none." The modern definition is convenient because it's a special case of a convenient definition of ellipse, but there's nothing terribly fundamental about it.

And yes, every time you've done math with radians, that problem has haunted you. That's because we decided to use radians instead of "diameter-ans", to keep with the above definition.
No spikes here...

0-3% in IE 8
Windows 7 64bit
Core 2 Duo E6420 @ 2.14 GHz
Your mentor was spot-on in his recommendation in the first situation, IMO.
In the real world there aren't any constraints, but there are plenty of artificial limiters like the $5.
If you watch the video, all teams were handed the envelop at the start of the week in class. They were allowed to think an form a business plan as long as they liked. They didn't know how much was in the envelop. Once they opened the envelop, they had 2 hours to make money.
An evaluation of Major Lisp Compilers
Feynman gives the same explanation in his awesome Lectures On Physics, volume 1, the chapter titled "Algebra". One of the great works of 20th-century literature.
Github's postmortem on today's outage
You should read up on CouchDB. CouchDB actually helps preserve privacy. CouchDB supports P2P style applications- that is you only have to replicate the data you actually want to share with remote instances. Your data remains your own and private to your machine.
I wonder if they actually ran this by women. Images of feet are a little dicey for the fairer sex. My sample size of two brought back two creepy's.
Ask HN: Is there any excuse not to know Java?
I have complete buy-in to the idea that Lisp is an elegant computer language, and general buy-in to the idea that knowing a lot of languages from a lot of paradigms is good for perspective and for problem-solving. As Alan Perlis said, "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing." Any programmer can gain new ways of thinking by learning a new language.

But asking more for students whom I advise than for myself, is it at all expedient for a young person entering the job market today to be unfamiliar with Java? Java has its own set of trade-offs, but doesn't it continue to be employed in many applications in many industries?
I get much value out of this: http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays and it just wouldn't have the same weight of experience in my mind if it were some young person saying these things (it's possible it is just a young kid making this up but it has more weight in my mind thinking it's an older person).
"reduces the value of old people" This phrasing really sticks out for me.

You have value by virtue of being a human being. If the society you are a part of ever comes to lose sight of that, your very life would become endangered. ("Not considered valuable; make room for the valuable.")

People are not tools. People are not a commodity. People are not means to an end.
I want to address this further, because a couple of people have said something like this, and don't understand this thinking. Here's my position:

I'm sure other entrepreneurs can agree with me that you need to be resourceful - to work with your own strengths & experiences.

I did write this post initially to help others; but it has been a successful posts. I now consider it an asset that I can build upon and learn from. For now, it may be a matter of just increasing ad revenues; but who knows how it could be expanded in the future? "You can't connect the dots moving forward."

If I have a place that there is a big enough audience visiting that I can run tests and easily learn a few things about that audience, I can not only make that resource more valuable for this audience, I can also learn how to market things to that audience. I can then use that learning on future endeavors that will, hopefully have a larger audience.

Not everyone starts Digg overnight, including Kevin Rose. You have to work with what you have. You have to build your snowball before you can start rolling it.
Launch of the Ares I-X
That's really worth watching.
> We continue to work on collecting as much as possible from Guerbuez and Atlantis Blue (likely far less than the full amount) and have hired a firm to help with this.

I wonder how much they have collected and how money from these lawsuits factors into their profitability. Not that I don't think these spammers deserve the judgments... That line just made me wonder if this has some bearing on Facebook's profitability.
It only makes sense to know Java specifically if you have some use for it. The limited Java I know is only because I do some work with JVM languages and it becomes a hindrance to not know any. Otherwise, I could have gotten by just fine without knowing it at all.

I think it might be better generalized as knowing some object-oriented C-like language (C++, Java, C#).
Making and selling restaurant reservations doesn't strike you as dishonest? It's an honor system. What's to stop me from making reservations at ten different restaurants for my blind date tonight, and deciding at the last minute which one will make the best impression on my date? The system relies on honesty. It only works because few people are willing to abuse it, and those who do so only do it in a small way. This business would either be blackballed and frozen out by the restaurants, or the reservation system it depends on would be abandoned.

But let's say you could convince restaurant owners that selling reservations is a dandy idea. Sure, restaurants have long known (the idea isn't new) that they could, for a very minimal cost, sell reservations to the highest bidder. Sure, almost all have decided to go with a system that is perceived as free, fair, and egalitarian (with some discretion for doing favors for VIPs and accommodating glamorous people.) Suppose you can convince them. Why wouldn't they do it themselves? Restaurants manage their image very carefully and would certainly prefer to be in complete control. They could just do it in a notebook until (as the phenomenon caught on) their reservation software offered support for it.

The only plausible way I could see the business surviving is by charging lots of money (fewer customers limits your visibility) and kicking some of the money back to maitre d's as bribes.
Google Atmosphere Conference on Cloud Computing - Videos
"Total time used to make $650: a week"

You could use the "idle time" for other stuff.
The goofiest looking lacohol related Halloween costumes
I really want to build temperature monitoring sensors, but this seems REALLY expensive per-unit.

I was thinking xbee + the dalsemi temperature sensor. I don't think you even need a cpu of any sort in there, since the xbee can do a little bit of the work.
Ok, I'll bite. Why is staying at a company for 30 years so admirable?

If you enjoy your job and continue to for that long, great. There are plenty of people who don't want to be doing the same thing day after day for the next 30 years. I think the same can be applied to living in a city, sure plenty of people enjoy living in one place all their lives but I'd argue that they're missing out on opportunities to expand their horizons by staying put all that time.

That said, Lee Clow is in a league of his own - what he has done is simply awesome.
"And I don't seem to recall anything in the "constraints" about not being allowed to beg or borrow anything, nor any rules about not being allowed to use stuff you already own."

What if "stuff you already own" includes a bank account with 2 million bucks in it? I also thought the solution was a bit dishonest, but then the whole thing should not be taken that serious from the start.

The reservations solution seems even worse, though I am not sure how exactly it works (would it piss off restaurants in the long run, or is it really a valuable service?).

Selling the presentation time seems to be the only valid solution.
Facebook is cash flow positive (http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=136782277130), so the accounting related to the judgments probably has little or no impact on their profitability.
He didn't say it was admirable.

It's notable that our culture is changing. I think, on the whole, it's a good change. But one nice thing about 30 years is you have the opportunity to get really good at the job. Many people don't do that, but here is someone who, it sounds like, did.
Put it on red on a roulette wheel! Then you have 1 hour 59 to regret the 1 minute when you lost the $5.
"their customers were happy"

The people who got a reservation, maybe, but what about the people who didn't get one?

Maybe a good business idea would be to sell kidneys that one steals from traveling students. I am sure the customers would be happy, too.
Regarding item 1, in the real world analogy of getting seed money an entrepreneur certainly isn't limited to only using that seed money. They can use their credit cards or their house or their own equipment or anything else.

The point of the exercise quite explicitly was to teach people to look past constraints that do not exist, like the $5 limitation you're getting stuck on. There was no restriction on using outside materials, that is a constraint you created on your own due to your interpretation of the presentation.

3) You're also assuming that the students didn't benefit from being introduced to the presenting company. Another poster mentions that it was Frog Design, and if that's the case then it was probably to the benefit of the students as well; Frog Design's a good company.
For Facebook And Zappos, Two Divergent Views Of Its Employees
You could try a direct approach if you know who is attending sending them a personal (or seemingly personal) note to tell them you're excited they're joining and what the prizes are. Might also be more specific. You could win $50,000 (not sure how specific you are being). You could win "a new mac pro" versus "a new computer" might entice the developers.
You're asking (or implying) a lot of different questions here.

Is is expedient for a young person entering the job market to be familiar with Java (I'm changing this to a positive formation becasue negatives are confusing)? Of course. The TIOBE index answers this is two seconds. Java has over 18% market share, the most of any language.

Is there any excuse not to know Java? Of course. You don't care about the 18% of the market that uses Java. I think I could be happy knowing just Python most of the time.

To answer some more implicit questions:

Will learning Java affect the way you think about programming? Java is a great place to learn about unit testing, DI, and design patterns. The value of these is of course up for debate, but knowledge is power, and Java gives you a great chance to get this knowledge. Ultimately, I think it's better if you move on to more expressive languages, but Java is a good platform to learn some stuff on.

Should you know a lot of languages? Yes. While you may not need Java specifically, not knowing any C-like object-oriented language is not only career suicide, it's detrimental to your development as a programmer.