skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really enjoyed that article. The active M&A in business intelligence software companies shows just how big Big Data is for business, and how big the market is for new startups to tailor specific techniques for niche industries. However, now that the secret is out, its going to be more difficult to prove that your secret sauce is superior than your competitors. The winners in this market will be those who can deliver results fast, and be nimble enough to account for the elastic nature of Big datasets.
Zillow is a start but there is a ton of data that is tied behind MLS licensing and Realtor associations. That data should be free and public.
For those who don't know Balsamiq Mockups, here is the URL to the demo http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups

It's the best Mockup tool out there currently.
When Flash isn't rendering to the screen (i.e. via constant blitting), it hardly consumes any CPU at all. In my experience, blitting the screen 30fps causes a lot of CPU load even when you aren't doing anything.
Google Tasks
single page please http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/business/22sas.html?_r=2&#...
I haven't seen SAS code before. I'll take your word that it's ugly. However, if SAS can adopt new standards, I hardly see them waning. Companies will always be thirsty for better ways to understand their customers, and now with the ease at which new internet companies are started and more people become connected, the demand for those services is only going to increase. If SAS can continue to outperform by investing in R&D and adopt new ways to bring in fresh talent (ie use more open-source tools) to keep them ahead of the curve, they'll do just fine.
I'm into enterprise all in to recover fast
On a similar note, I remember reading a comment somewhere requesting a search interface for reality 'so I can find my damn keys when I lose them'.
Quantum computing, and why it’s exciting! (28/07/2009)
Seriously? Let's assume that it was timed for maximum exposure and maximum impact. Let's also ignore the fact that many oil lobbyists are now for a climate pact so that they can make billions off the trade of carbon credits. Don't you see an issue with the underlying substance of the emails if they turn out to be true?

I find it remarkable that there are so many people here who would argue against accountability - especially when public funding and the public interest is involved (per your previous comment, accountability and transparency isn't just for banks). If these emails turn out to be true, if anything this shows that these scientists are not disinterested empiricists but have activist agendas. But this also doesn't mean that they aren't right. The issue could be solved by publishing their data sets and code for their models for public scrutiny and yet they do not - despite being largely publicly funded. Do you not see a problem with this?
So your response basically boils down to "If you do everything else exactly right (and have since the application was designed), this won't bite you"? I'll agree that that's certainly true...
Some are unable to pay (app store i18n, etc.)
> The company shifted course earlier this year and modified its software so programs written with R work seamlessly with SAS technology.

I agree that getting them while they're young - like McDonalds - is an effective strategy, but if you can swap out the language for another front-end, does it matter? (it's a big "if").
Appliances: stove, oven, coffee maker, refrigerator. Various other household items: garage doors, locks, etc. This overly expensive, yet dumb, flat panel TV we just bought. Extending out to the driveway...my car. The energy meter on the side of the house (read-only access, obviously, just to keep the power co. happy). The most mundane stuff could use an API, if you ask me!
Ok, I'm as anti-censorship as the next guy, but do we actually know _why_ the ACM publications board requested their removal?
The only reason 97% of them are mined in China is why everything else is produced in China -- it's cheaper. There is a shuttered mine in the U.S. that is being restarted that has and will produce all of these elements. The mine closed because they were undercut by China. If China won't sell at any price, presumably they will be profitable again. IMO, the U.S. should embargo Chinese rare earths since they have been shown to be a politically unreliable supplier.
A solid global small business geo data API.

Fortunately there are a few different startups working on this, and a rudimentary way to hack it with Google AJAX API but there's still nobody who can allow me to simply punch in name+city search and give me the address, geocode meta reliably for any city in the world and without cache restrictions.

Google has it all but needs to open this data up better.
Hacker News API?
Take a look at the pages that are still up (which are for non-ACM conferences). They are a list of the proceedings, with links to freely available copies of all of the papers. Presumably, these papers are on the authors' websites.

Note that the ACM copyright form explicitly allows authors to put up a copy of their published paper on their own website. So, from what I can surmise, they requested he take down links to material that is freely and legally available.
The Examiner was not the source for the documents and emails, it merely picked up on the story after it had appeared on some climate change skeptic sites first. It had no role in this other than reporting on a story that already had legs. Therefore the organisation's background and corporate structure is irrelevant to this issue and bringing it up offers nothing new or of value to the discussion.
Yes. I got hired to integrate MLS data and man was that a nightmare. Many are surprisingly low-tech and almost all use different formats. There is a half-assed attempt at standards (RETS), but that's for accessing the data not the data itself. Not to mention getting and presenting the data legally--each MLS group has different rules about what you're allowed to display (and it can be incredibly restricting). tl;dr the project went down in flames.

I'd love to see Google get ahold of the data and make it available through Base.
As someone who uses these tools professionally and has used/tested most of them:

1. How is this better than what people currently use? (Omnigraffle, Visio, Axure etc)? Answer: it's not, it looks worse. Why would I use a product that's worse?

2. How is this different from what people currently use? Answer: it's not. If not, you stood a chance.

3. The website is really badly designed. Fire your designer.

4. I agree with the comments about the accent
(unfortunately). It's barely understandable.

5. Your pricepoint is wrong. If I'll pay 80$ for a tool, I'll pay 200$ for a much better tool too (see above).

Sorry, but I wouldn't use this and can't imagine a scenario in which anyone who is aware of the options would, at this stage. It's not better, and it's not different.
Because they are deeplinks to papers.

But that shouldn't matter, if the ACM wants to start putting those papers up in HTML for the world to read that would be my preference anyway.
I didn't want to leave this with just a vote. Thanks, this is fascinating and just the kind of thing I love HN for!
An API into the postal system of every country.
Petition your local system to get on it. BART makes the data available which is pretty slick:

http://www.bart.gov/schedules/developers/index.aspx
Nifty UML generator
VPSs are great, but I've never got the point of things like engineyard where you're paying masses to get people to do sysadmin.

Keeping a competent sysadmin around who will reliably respond 24/7 is much more expensive than managed hosting, in general.
One thing that's not mention prominently in the article is that while SAS provides many perks to its employees, it actually has a history of paying salaries significantly below industry standards.
"There are a few areas where SAS is unrivaled--it can crunch huge data and exploit parallel processing better than other off-the-shelf solutions."

Those also seem, to me, the only areas where you can justify significant profit margins for your product.
And yet rejection of evolution remains widespread, around 30%-60% of the population in most first-world nations, and evidence that demonstrates evolution's reality is still twisted and misused by those with ideological objections to it.

Of course, the core of the climate change premise is also pretty well established (the extreme alarmism and many proposed solutions, not so much), and plenty of evidence is out there, but unfortunately HN continues to disappoint me whenever the subject comes up.

The political groupthink around here is pretty strong and it's starting to sour me on the whole site. I know complaining about HN turning into reddit is cliche but seriously, all the threads about this story (how many have there been by now?) have been worse than reddit.
Vehicle telemetry: Calling all cars
Not exactly an API (just data), but it's cheap (USD20/year):

http://www.schedulesdirect.org/
See discussion here: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a6tsm/acm_censo...
An open Linkedin API.
"My dream: The big scientific journals would require everyone publishing a paper to upload all relevant datasets to a central repository which could be queried."

I work on a site that's trying to do that for the learning sciences.

http://pslcdatashop.web.cmu.edu/

Most of the data so far is from various studies in the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center, because the head of the PSLC can tell the researchers to put their data in there, but we'd like to convince others to share, too.

I also happen to be working on a web services API to this data at work right now.
In 2007, MLB even tried to claim copyright on player's names and statistics.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2007/06/mlb-tries-to...
Hulu, Clicker, Mixcloud, Comcast's "TV Everywhere", Spotify, Mog, iTunes store, Amazon VOD & mp3, etc.
"Google used to have a search API and it had horrible terms. Then they decommissioned it"

It always surprises me when people say this. Apparently it's not widely known that Google do make their search API available: http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/documentation/#fonje

(Before anyone says "that's just the AJAX API", please READ THE LINK, and scroll down to see the Java & PHP samples)
The Traveling Salesman Problem and Javascript Compression
Climate Change Inst. Hacked - Email Leak - Climate Change a Possible Farce
Check out http://www.cruxle.com. It recommends movies and TV shows available on TV you might love to watch. We are planning to open our TV guide recommendations via XML-based API. Please send us an email at info@cruxle.com, if you would like to access our APIs.
A OCR API. The Google Docs OCR API is a good start, but it's tied pretty closely to GDocs. I'd like to post an image and get back text.
Cruxle - World's first revolutionary personalized TV guide
Don't know what to watch on TV? Frustrated with the useless online TV guides? Cruxle will help you. It automatically suggests movies and TV shows you'll love to watch on TV and online by taking your Facebook account or MySpace ID or by knowing a couple of your favorite media. It recommends movies/TV shows on Comcast or DirecTV or available online.
Generally: I wish practically everything had an open API. It's incredible what people can build when they have decent access to an API.

Specifically:

TuneCore, as it would make my startup idea a whole lot easier.

School registrations. I really wish there was some standardized API for universities. That'd make it possible to plug in the classes you want to take along with when you want to take them and get back a personalized schedule. As it is now (at least for my school), you pretty much have to write down on paper the classes you want to take along with when they're available and do it all yourself. I'd prefer something like this be standardized so one could make one website that would serve all universities and their students.
Seriously, how many posts about this do we really need?
Shifting Blame Is Socially Contagious
They can sit and watch tv and still make their salary?

I would rather they do this than give GM money to pay employees for a job that is doomed to disappear soon as gov money runs out. The gov is doing no favor to these folks by bailing them out via GM because until they are with GM, they think their job is secure.

I'd rather these guys get a check for their GM salary each month from the government for doing nothing. Every check will be a reminder that before it stops coming(basically before the money alotted to GM runs out), the dudes better learn something that can pay.

The stupid executives are already wealthy

Very far from truth. There are many many stories of execs having a hard time finding a typical job, let alone another exec position. My Dad moved to Michigan couple years ago and the house market was full of mansion-like homes at fraction of a cost due to an exec who could no longer afford it.

you would have punished GM's shareholders

How would this punish shareholders? Last I knew, the stock market did not work under the assumption that the gov will bail out your company. In fact, the gov bailing out GM is punishing the hundreds of millions of non-GM stockholders whose companies are not being bailed out. GM stockholders made a bad investment if it goes down under. It won't be the first time or the last time that happens to a public company.

jobs and consumer spending to function.

Totally with you on this. I just don't think you need to keep GM alive to address this. In fact, I believe keeping GM alive is just digging a deeper hole for the near future.
I figured after three days of mostly climate and business related stuff it was high time for some bits...
Because it isn't a computation (in the 'transform data' or 'answer question' sense).
" So what if it goes down. What if they get hacked?"

For most people, this is more likely to happen to their local pc!

"This is why the US keeps uber-top secret stuff disconnected from the internet."

Are you suggesting that people not connect their computer to the internet? Otherwise, I have no idea what point you are making.
+1 for school registrations. My school only provides READ access to the courses catalog but not WRITE access to actually register courses.

http://courses.illinois.edu/cis/2010/spring/schedule/index.h...
http://courses.illinois.edu/cis/2010/spring/schedule/index.x...

I really wish that they will provide one in future.
Entrepreneurs: Stop Innovating, Start Minnovating
Reminds me of HAML.
This guy reverse engineered the google tasks ajax calls and created a perl module interface for it:

http://github.com/nickspacek/Net-Google-Tasks/

Works decently. Could easily be replicated in any language.
At first, I thought this was going to be yet another pathetic mock-up of an Apple tablet. Then I thought it was going to be some kind of Mac-specific touchscreen app.

It's actually just a Wired-specific magazine reader for a generic touchscreen device. They seem to be imagining a sort of jumbo iPod Touch.

I don't find their concept very innovative. It's basically just a paging interface to their standard magazine format. An ebook reader with graphics.
Has sci-fi run out of steam?
You're not the only one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=578999
Agreed. Also, nothing he criticizes here has changed since he wrote this.
The ACM does have a reasonable legal argument that his pages duplicate the TOC. Collections/indexes of information are copyrightable so long as they so a minimal amount of creative discretion in their contents.

That said, I think it's clear the ACM's stance in attempting to limit and profit from the dissemination of its journals will ensure it is surpassed by other publication forums eventually.
Things mobiles have made obsolete
Absolutely not. The old guard has mostly died, but there are lots of very good new writers, have a look at Charles Stross. Neal Stephenson writes beautiful stuff, there is Ian M. Banks, Greg Bear and on and on...

I'm sure Stallman will be psyched that he's labeled the creator of "GNU Linux" in the article.
Notice we have a pedal in the car called acceleration. We do not have 2 pedals one saying "horse power" and one saying "torque".

Increasing the torque of an engine at a particular RPM is the same as increasing the power output at the same RPM.
If you have experience with a stick shift, you notice that we shift to a lower gear to go uphill. We are simply changing the gear ratio. Now why do we do that? We want to make sure that all the hard work the engine is doing is transformed into something that moves us up the hill. If we do not lower the gear ratio, the tire will skid and some of that power will be transformed into heat and go useless (besides the real possibility of skidding into this side of the valley!) .

So we are not trading horse power for torque, rather we are making sure that we get all the power to convert into torque by using a low gear ratio. power --> torque ---> uphill. The thing that is causing the confusion is the low gear ratio, which has to do with Friction that the tire has with the road. Friction is the crucial component that transforms engine power capacity into torque. That's why we have treads in the tire. That is one of the reasons Army tanks and Bulldozers have continuous tracks, to increase friction.
The Human Penis

my_thing = Penis()

my_thing.start()

try:

my_thing.wait_for_her_to_come(time_out = 60*60*2)

except HardCookie:

my_thing.come()
The start and finish of the race are located at fixed points. If you're racing on tidal rivers near the coast, where most of our regattas were, the current varies widely throughout the day. Say it's a 5k head-race starting upstream and coming down towards the sea. At high and low tide you're essentially racing with no (or very little) current - much like a lake. When the tide is coming in, you'd be racing against it and a 5k race can take 20 or more minutes. If you're lucky and your race heat starts when the tide is going out, that same race will take 15 or less minutes.
You don't want to render stuff you don't have to regardless of the method you use.
New Business Models for News
I can't imagine what you would need other than HN's RSS feed. What did you have in mind that could extend Hacker News?
could that be a result of a lower cost of living in cary, north carolina?
Is that even possible at the moment? Most software I've tried just isn't ready for something like that (granted, I haven't tried any of the commercial products). Tesseract is pretty good, but definitely not perfect.
Ask HN:Looking for IR codes for Canon 500D/Rebel T1i
I'm looking for the IR codes because a friend of mine wants to help me build a custom remote control for it. Does anybody have an idea where I can find them?
Benefit of the doubt
Banks. Online payment processing is a mess.
Pattern recognition. When you haves 10s to 100s of billions of hands on record it becomes easier to spot anomalies in player strategy that would imply collusion.
I work for a sports data integration company, so you can get this data easily. Oh, you mean for free? Yeah, that's not gonna happen any time soon. Someone has to pay people to collect those statistics and then make them available.
Get something like tourny manager to manage your money and to watch overall how your playing and stats.

Get something like SNGEGT, SNGWIZ, or SNGPT to run through hands after a tournament to help you determine if your plays were really +EV. This will help you make better decisions in the future when at the tables.
I made it myself with audacity. Wearing earplugs at the same time, if I get the whitenoise to where I can just hear it this lets me work even in coffeeshops in almost pure silence. If you want the actual mp3, email me (email via profile).
Again, the company I work for offers this kind of data but you have to pay for it. We have lots of clients who run fantasy baseball web sites and make use of our real-time stats feeds to update their games.
How to Choose the Right Yoga Mat
comments for a given thread, score of posts and comments, and user information.
Corruption in textbook-adoption proceedings: 'Judging Books by Their Covers'
My favorite thing about Unlambda is that the creator added a new feature, in order to make the language harder to use. Let that be a warning to the rest of us.
The check wasn't meant to be deposited through traditional means. Checks like that give creditors some tangible evidence that the company will not collapse because of the imminent cash infusion.
If the index is broken then the brute force search is going to take too long.
I made no such point.
Ðat may be true, but what platforms do internally ſhould not affect ðeir flavours of SQL.

In oðer words, internal implementation as ſets do not make SQL ſet‐baſed.
I never quite got why a tab with a flash thingie embedded consumes any CPU while you are not watching it.

There is a cool factor in working off a laptop - you can carry it out of your office where nobody can interrupt you. That's a non-trivial benefit.
Can we please stop posting the same stuff over and over again, this must be the 10th (no kidding) submission of this material.
Unfortunately, I am not going to be able to read this whole thing right now. Some parts of it are looking rather good. I kind of wish he weren't using "losers" as one of his classifications, but perhaps if I knew more of the background, that would make more sense to me. We have to have words to sum up concepts and a lot of the meaning depends on how those words are used (kind of like some conversation I recall from elsewhere where someone asked "Is 'special' the new 'retard'?"). But, so far, I especially like this point:

So yes, this entire edifice I am constructing is a determinedly amoral one. Hitler would count as a sociopath in this sense, but so would Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
The general answer to the character recognition problem is negative (currently not possible). However, several important subproblems are solvable. For example, if you know that a particular image came from a printed text, or from handwriting, or a (printed) form, etc, there are some very good solvers. Not perfect (neither is a human, in case of handwriting or a poor fax), but good to very good.

For further googling, see terms ICR, OCR, character recognition.

As a user, I have had very good results with Finereader. Have not tried Tesseract. Parascript was good with online character recognition, but that market is small, and I have not looked at them for a while (disclaimer: I used to work in a previous incarnation of the company).
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=954121 - also posted here with comments
Arm is creeping toward bigger market share trough netbooks -- if if can succeed there, it will become more available as a desktop choice.

Lacking that, just go buy a Nokia n900 (or an used n810 or something), and code for it.
Limiting access gives Google a good chance of introducing a finished product. Something that will impress. I very much doubt that Google would impress all that many people with Google Wave as it is now. Me, sure, but not my dad.

Also: invites are not that hard to get to in this day and age. So you’ll be able to at least invite a few friends.
I think it's sweet that he managed to include a Nietzsche title without (apparently) realizing that he's describing the ubermensch.
"Why was a Japanese bank willing to risk that much on a bank that made bad choices?"

Imagine buying an Xbox for $30. (It was a bargain.)