skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Suggest/autocomplete. Well, it's not really enough to call it an API, since it's already just AJAX requests for JSON, but it'd be nice if the format was standardized and they all supported JSONP so that it can be cross-domain.
The house:

http://www.digitedimagecompany.com/digiTED_image_company/por...
That's a good way of putting it. For all his flaws, Card is an actual writer. Many of his contemporaries never were.

Of course, there's legitimate literate science fiction out there that's among the best literature of the century. Frank Herbert and Philip Dick are going to be known as some of the greatest forces in writing; Isaac Asimov wasn't a brilliant prosist but conceptually he was in a league of his own.
In the United States emissions regulations recently came into effect (2007) that mandated ultra low sulfur diesel and particle filtration for vehicle exhaust systems. I wonder if the particle filtration technology could be applied to ships, and what the implications would be.

Also, the fuel being burned appears to be a byproduct of petroleum distillation, and while ships are burning it "because they can", I wonder what the other options are for disposing of it. Legislating away all of the consumers of a byproduct does not get rid of the byproduct. I would assume that the petroleum could be further distilled out of the byproduct, to some extent, but that at the end there would be some waste sludge that might be unmarketable. If that's the case, then THAT becomes a disposal headache, and I'd be curious to see how that plays out.
In Python they most certainly are, since ultimately everything is a hash table in Python :)
Can payment agreements like this be used in court during filesharing lawsuits to show that if RIAA members are willing to value music at $167 per million plays there's no reasonable way they can argue that each mp3 someone shares is worth the thousands of dollars they sue people for?

I recognize that these are apples to oranges, but there must be some reasonable conversion. Artist gets X amount per Y plays, and given standard artist % breakdowns that suggests a song has Z value. if Z < W, where W is how much one gets sued for sharing one mp3, then either the RIAA should pay their artists fair value, which would drive more users to pay for music, or they can't sue people for so much per song.
YC Interview Decompression Unparty at the Hacker Dojo/Sun@7pm 2.0
Hey fellow XY and XX Ycombo interviewees...

Lets decompress at the Hacker Dojo on Sunday night! Say 7ish (till whenever). BYOB... (& maybe a little food, if you can.)

Lets get together and congratulate or commiserate each other on our respective YC fates... maybe talk about pitches, (without the rapid fire induced super-stress...) Give some feedback... Compare notes...

Maybe some of the unchosen teams can do some DNA re-combining of their own and get reborn as newly evolved startups hybrids. Maybe we can just do some commiserating about how our pitches failed to be understood! (We're just too advanced for them to comprehend...;)

Maybe we can just drink... talk tech, and compare battle scars of hacker venturing.

Definitely, if you haven't, you should drop by the Hacker Dojo and check out our hippyish Hacker commune, ala - shared hack-space! It's a great place to get cool things done.

Try to send me a heads up if you think you'll come, or want to collectively change the hour - so we can plan which space here to commandere.

(You old-school YC alumni, or YC'r yourselves, lingering in the area are welcome too! Also - if you can, pass the word on to other teams, as no one but the YCrs themselves have the master list of applicants here this weekend.)

-mark
(mark@kiputers.com)
I am aghast to log in to HN on a Sunday morning and find the "top topic" to be a post from the MailOnSunday site. This august institution of lies, half truths and mostly made up stuff is a British byword for scientific reporting - in every negative way possible.

Without doing any fact checking or research of my own part (just bitter experience) I declare this "absolute tosh".
Yes but that's not what the analogy jrockway used is pointing out. Cars put out plenty of pollutants, but that doesn't mean that car sized engines have the same problems with sulphur.

Basically its dishonest because it relies on people understanding cars as polluters - which they are, just not of sulphur - to imply that tankers are unbelievably polluting.

None of this means that I think sulphur emissions aren't a problem.
"An exception should be made for natural monopolies, but the price of that should be tight regulation, nationalisation, or (best of all) mutualisation."

Tight regulation and nationalization are rewards for growing a "natural" monopoly? This doesn't make any sense. That's not capitalism, it's fascism.

Capitalists would argue that complete lack of government regulation is how you "fix" capitalism.

Almost every point made in this blog post is, at a fundamental level, diametrically opposed to what capitalism is as an economic theory and ideology. The author had drafted a manifesto for an aggressively mixed economy which is ideologically identical to what we have in America today.
What quotas do they have, though? I remember people reporting to be blocked from Google for "looking like a bot". So I thought the search API will only work if the requests come from lots of different IP addresses, as would be the case for use in AJAX applications.
A Debate With Microsoft On The Departure Of Don Dodge
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You have to read the first article in the series to get his definitions, sociopath, loser and clueless have specific meanings in this context.

I agree that player, pawn and spectator would have been better.
In other words, now is the perfect time for them to put their ships in the docks and perform maintenance and upgrades without losing money from missed shipments.

Ships already beat (most?) other forms of transport on oil-per-tonnage-mile, why not fix the last few wrinkles that make them look bad?
All You Need to Know About Breast Cancer
Yeah. It used to be that SAS, like Oracle, was the only place to turn to when you had very large quantity of data. The internet has added multiple orders of magnitude to large, and people now use MR frameworks.
To be fair, SAS for stats has been dead for a decade. Their "state of the art" lags R by at least that much...
No, this goes beyond indexing, referral, and reformatting. This is copyright infringement, plain and simple; Scribd monetizes your content by showing ads on the same page!
Yes, I do. Are you aware people will judge the attention to detail to the rest of the OS by how it looks? And that people don't like unnecessary work?
Yeah, Blood Music was alright... not one of my favorites either.

If you read The Way books, do it in the order they were written (Eon, Eternity, Legacy). Legacy is a prequel, so some are tempted to read it first, but it would basically ruin all the mystery of the other two if you did so.
"plays" is misleading. Number of listeners would be a better metric. I play songs MANY times.

Assuming each listener played the song 100 times in 5 months (slightly less than once per day), we have 10,000 listeners. $167 for 10K listeners is 1.6 cents per listener (quite low compared to the 10euro/mo Spotify charges). But the number of listeners could easily be lower, if people listen many times to their favourite songs (like me).
Music. I'mm yet to find a good api which let's me query information about artists / songs etc.

And the good local events api someone mentioned would also be great.
Am I missing something about Old Man's War? Everbody seems to think it's a great piece of contemporary SF, but to me it read like it was written for people who read Heinlein as teenagers in the 50s, and whose worldview pretty much hasn't developed since.

The science parts are handwavey plot conveniences, the books drop their main interesting bit of looking into the psychology of soldiers with 70 or zero years of life experience by treating the characters as generic clever 20-year olds, and the bleak xenophobic backdrop mixed with the juvenile war adventure plots makes the whole thing feel like a weird, unironic war propaganda piece.
SAS is a couple things.

The origin is a stats system. For a long time, they were the only stats package in town that was good at working on data that was larger than available memory. This is still mostly true, but people's definition of large data has outrun what even SAS can offer and people are falling back on MR frameworks.

They make their money with BI. It's a language, database system, ETL, and set of premade programs that are all about BI and analytics. They have stuff built out for large clients, so if you are eg a university or a large manufacturing concern or a bank or an ibank or a casino, etc, there are large bodies of preexisting functionality.
This is only a problem if you think musicians need to be rich and famous.

That is, before feeling bad for artists, remember that the cost of producing and distributing music has also gone way down. A desktop computer with electronic instruments is sufficient to cut a professional quality song.

Artists who produce music will slowly become like bloggers. You will find them through the Internet and recommendation engines, not through MTV, just like you find bloggers through Google rather than the opinion column of the Washington Post or NYT. And just like with opinion, the best stuff will be done by talented amateurs for free (e.g. everyone here can name 100 bloggers better than Maureen Dowd).

Eventually, just like the NYT syndicates some top
blogs, so too will the major record labels pick up some Internet artists (Soulja Boy being a leading albeit cacophonous example of said trend). But this is just a stopgap en route to a new future where Google (via search) and Apple (via iTunes) and Amazon (via reviews) are the middlemen and respectively replace the RIAA's promotion, distribution, and quality control functions.

...two other thoughts. First, the role of the composer looks set to return to importance once a database of every possible sond and voice is compiled. There's definitely room for software to produce a "perfect" song entirely from the sheet music + sound/voice synthesis + historical data, without any live voices or instruments at all. For all I know, this is how Trent Reznor already does it.

Second, the analysis above places little weight on the experience of listening to live music. I guess if you are a big fan of concerts, the Internet will kill the (music) video star.
What it takes to be a Developer
The only money I've ever made off of music is doing live gigs. Give your music away for almost nothing (or dirt cheap) and then play your own shows.

Record sales as a way to profit probably should never have existed. I would not be surprised if music historians in the future look back on the 20th century record industry as an aberration that existed only in the time when live performances stopped being the singular way to hear music, but creation and distribution of recordings hadn't yet become trivial.

I have no problem with this model. For every musician that hit it big with a record deal and marketing promotion under the rule of the RIAA, a hundred or more went into debt after failing to sell enough records after signing their contract, and a thousand more never even got the contract. I'd much rather be able to work and see my effort pay off in a tangible way than play the lottery.
Blindsight by Peter Watts and Ted Chiang's short fiction are pretty good.
You can use polynomial time factoring to prove P = NP. Which means you have simultaneously solved a ton of outstanding optimization problems in science and engineering, and would allow for the creation of AI, clean renewable energy and practical space travel. Obviously those innovations would lead to the biggest change in the history of human civilization, and probably would cause lasting world peace.
All from something as "useless" as factoring integers.
True story.
Evolve your hierarchy
They forgot to mention that 6 is afraid of 7.
The Guerilla Guide to Game Code
What about the data that is searched? Where would it be stored for a quantum computer to access it without losing all the speedup on IO?
Good Climategate e-mail excerpts
Gameloft never really had any Android plans to start with - all their 'Android' games are direct ports of existing J2ME games, sometimes even with soft buttons.

In the Market, Gameloft games rate between 3.5 to 4 stars constantly, which is nowhere near the ratings that native professionally developed games get - compare these scores with with Glu Mobile or Hexage who are constantly 4.5 or 5 stars.
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Air moves. Pollution from one country /half way around the world/ can float to where you live. Most ships are closer than /halfway around the world/ to pieces of land as they travel from one side of the world to the other.

Where do you think all of the sulphur and CO2(also mentioned in the article) goes? It doesn't float off into space.

In London, I'd be way more worried about the air in the subway system. The London subway has some of the most filthiest air you will ever experience. It has that tar sulphur smell to it.
The Intel Random Number Generator (used by PokerStars)
I need cmd + z for my brain.
I'm actually a huge fan of scratch. It has a really neat programming model, it's implicitly parallel and uses events as it's primary means of inter-object communication. Through the use of components like the scratch board & lego WeDo it allows one to quickly build programs that interact with the real world.
This is a fairly serious issue in some free software places (eg. Slashdot). It seems that copyright when used by big corporations is evil and restrictions are good, but when the GPL gets weakened by them it's suddenly a bad thing. Unfortunately, you can't have it both ways, sometimes in life you need to take the bad with the good.
Actually I find my shiny all analog swatch watch much more of a fashion statement than an iPhone, probably because everybody has an iPhone.
I'm actually working on this problem. It's remarkable the amount of content we actually generate and the number of services/mediums we generate them on. Simply fetching all the data and hosting it centrally is a large enough problem, let alone indexing all of it.
Yeah, I do - that was bad phrasing.
Seeing those graphs I just see things going to previous years stats. Am I not reading properly or are they just sad that infinite growth has once again shown not to exist?
You know how sportscasters always have some sort of weird statistic to pull out of their ass, like "Brett Favre has never lost a game, at home, with the temperature less than 34 degrees"? Is there some sort of API or query system so someone at the networks can throw this shit together out of the raw data in real time?
One big issue with this is that fair use is a US concept and is much more reasonable than many other countries. The UK is fairly black and white about copyright.
Air moves

Yes, but it moves slowly.

Where do you think all of the sulphur and CO2 goes?

The lifetime of SO2 in the atmosphere is no more than a few days; before it can reach land, most of it is converted to (SO4)^{2-}.

I agree with you where CO2 is concerned, because CO2 is not rapidly eliminated from the atmosphere -- but the article isn't talking about CO2.
The Linked Data Police
Did you even read the article? The test was done in two cities in china. How is this statistically relevant for a population of a billion - most of whom are rural?
True, they are developer friendly. .NET is a good platform. It's extensive and well documented. There is innovation in C# as well. But the purpose of all that goodness is to make you sell their licenses. Where Oracle has their salesforce, Microsoft has their developers to do the selling for them.

Unfortunately their licensing is from an era that has come and gone. Building software that uses things like Windows Server, SQL Server, SharePoint or Office means to limit your scale to what they call "Micro ISV". You provide that package to your client and 95% of your revenues go straight to Microsoft.

You can build on their stuff but you won't scale and you won't grow, not because their technology doesn't scale, but because their licensing doesn't scale.
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The Android platform is new and it has it kinks alot of factors will play a role in its development such as how many phones are sold. It is harder to develop for the android there is no standardization within the carrier's versions firmware.Apple is closed and have there updates in order and they should and they have one source to update itunes. Until the Android OS gets older and works out its kinks it will attract more developers. Especially with Apple hanging around I have an iphone and I like the Droid might possibly get one since ATT is iphones only carrier #fail. #more customers for the Droid ATT u sux
A fictional coffeeshop discussion with a made-up employee of Microsoft, actually.
Part of the problem seems to be that executives tend to be empire-builders rather than profit-maximizers: that's one of the reasons M&A happen so much more than economists would normally predict. I think the solution is to make breaking up companies somehow profitable for the owners of the broken-up company, so that being broken up could even be seen as a success of sorts. Part of that is going to be cultural but part can be economic.
As for his question: Yes, I would like phushion passenger for python!
The only money I've ever made off of music is doing live gigs. Give your music away for almost nothing (or dirt cheap) and then play your own shows.

This is The Problem for the record industry - there's an almost infinite supply of very talented musicians that are thrilled to do exactly what you suggest. That makes it extremely difficult to buy the argument that we won't have music anymore if people aren't willing to pay for records. It just not true, all we'd lose is heavily produced pop music, and everyone else would continue to play because they really love it. I don't see live gigs drying up as an income source for quite a while, and they are (just barely) enough to let plenty of people play for a living.

I'd add "teach lessons" to that list, too, that's how most of the musicians that I know actually make rent each month; gigs are just beer money if you've got a full roster of students. Learn a few extra instruments, you don't have to be very good to teach most students - I know drummers that teach piano, pianists that teach guitar, etc. To optimize for income, find yourself a nice rich suburb with some cheaper (but still pleasant) areas to live in around it, and teach lessons to the kids in the suburb (you can charge probably 2-3x what you'd get anywhere else, even if you're not one of the best) while living cheap a couple towns over and playing gigs in the city that you're near.
Second the first comment.

Plus, why wasn't the original title "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" preserved over a much less representing while much more link-baiting one "China has a higher average IQ than the USA"?
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I can't believe that HN is linking to the Daily Mail... I can guarantee that everything said in this article is completely or partly untrue.

It's part of the daily mail's online strategy I think, increase traffic by using overseas social media whose users may not be fully aware of how utterly horrible and untruthful the paper is.
The author needs to learn some basic grammar before pointing a finger at others. The lack of coherent sentences distracted from his "points".
To put that in perspective, $167 for 1 million plays is the equivalent of a CPM of $0.16 for an ad-supported web site. A bit on the low side, but $0.16 is in the right ballpark for a site with low-quality traffic.

I think the question is: is there any reason to expect music to be "worth" more than other types of online content?
I've always wanted to break into CL's space due to their utter disregard for the garden of web APIs growing up around them. They could be doing so much more with their service for the community, and I don't mean going the big time corporate route obsessed with short-term revenue.

There have been many CL clones(kijiji), but none gained enough eyeballs to make an interoperating API work. I suspect these attempts failed because they didn't pay attention to the community and instead acted liked closed corporations right out the starting gate. I thought the CL killer would appear on Facebook, but that hasn't happened because of totally different dynamics in Facebook's ecosystem.

Actually, I'm surprised that I haven't seen someone one here posting a hacked up API wrapper around Craigslist as a mini-startup.
I can't believe people are still using these terms, like 'making 0 dollars off of pirate bay' -- That's like saying a free newspaper doesn't earn any money from giving the paper away.

It's a argument people often make that are so entwined in the thinking of "selling music" like it was a physical thing...

This kind of thinking needs to stop.

Artists have more ways of making money today then they ever did, because they can do it themselves (and/or hire somebody to do it) - Selling live shows, selling merchendise, selling music in a form that makes it a "collectable", even music for films etc... The possibilities are there, but you need more omph than just standing in the garage bad-mouthing the downloaders while nobody will sign you up...
I believe they got their numbers wrong for the investments in Spotify from the record labels. I seriously doubt Spotify is valued at around 50,000 euros.

Artists are generally short changed when it comes to this sort of thing, whether it be selling music or streaming it. Artists make the bulk of their money in ticket and merchandise sales. It would be far more interesting to see how much the record companies are making per 1 million plays. It might also be shockingly low, but I somehow doubt that the record companies would sign a deal where they made little more than a few hundred bucks per 1 million plays.
Hmm, as a Chinese, I think the Chinese education system is actually making people stupid. I have seen many talented people through out my education, but the didn't stand out in the end. Pretty sad.

Chinese has this kind of amazing potential, but I don't see a good way we can we exploit it.
If you work at the Times, do you mind sharing your email so I can shoot you some questions?
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This is already happening with smaller and more inefficient ships being scrapped. From one article: http://www.zawya.com/Story.cfm/sidZAWYA20091014053222