skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Got an email reply from the ACM folks:

The issue here is copyright, not censorship. All of the author versions that were linked to on these pages are still available -- ACM explicitly grants individual authors the right to post their own versions of their papers on their own pages. All ACM bibliographic data, and tables of contents in the DL, are available without cost to anyone in the world. If you want the copy of a SIGGRAPH paper and an author has posted it, you can still access it without an ACM subscription. Also note there would be no problem with these pages if they linked to the ACM version of the papers. Other lists of papers, compilations that Ke-Sen Huang built (rather than copying the table of contents from a publication) are not affected. Furthermore, the SIGAsia2009 pages Ke-Sen Huang makes available are still there until the papers are available in the ACM DL in the interest of promoting the conference.

The copyright issue that applies is described in this link:

http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/copyright_policy#Li...

" ACM treats links as citations (references to objects) rather than as incorporations (embedding of objects). Permission is not needed to create links to citations in The Portal (ACM Digital Library or Online Guide to Computing Literature). ACM encourages the widespread distribution of links to the definitive versions of its copyrighted works in the ACM Digital Library and does not require that authors obtain prior permission to include such links in their new works.

However, someone who creates a work or a service whose pattern of links substantially duplicates a copyrighted work should get prior permission from the copyright holder. One example: the creator of "A Table of Contents for the Current Issue of TODS" -- consisting of citations and active links to author-versions of the works in the latest issue of TODS -- needs ACM permission because that creator is reproducing an ACM-copyrighted work. If all the links in the "Table of Contents" pointed to the ACM-held definitive versions, ACM would normally give permission because then the new work advertises an ACM work. To avoid misunderstandings, consult with ACM before duplicating an ACM work via links."
You can do this with the Evernote API. It was designed for search, and does a good job with both print and handwriting.

http://www.evernote.com/about/developer/api/evernote-api.htm...
I think the main problem with science fiction today is that it's really, really difficult to write believable hard science fiction. It's relatively easy to write about the future as seen from the 1940s to 1960s (and lots of SF writers continue to do that... Bova, Niven, Pournelle, even Varley, these days), but it's really hard to write about a medium-distance future that plausibly follows from our world. The only book I've read recently that mostly managed it was Halting State, and it was set only ten years from now.

More and more, the kind of "SF" I find myself reading is stuff that doesn't even try; it's just fantasy with science fiction trappings, and while that can be briefly entertaining, it doesn't have the "something like this could really happen" of the midtwentieth SF I used to read.

Edit: awkward flow of text
The weird part for me was that Halting State took me more than one read to feel like I 'got' what the book was about, much like Neuromanancer did. Science Fiction of the rocket ship and little green men variety is easy to imagine. A realistic world ten years from now, less so.
Image processing API? http://urlimg.com
...I guess being more interested in science than ideology puts me in the minority around here...

When engaged and offered to take the conversation offline, replied with:
...Your condescension is duly noted...

The best way to try to cover up your tracks when you're doing X? Point it out in other people. That always works!

If you're going to make generalizations about the entire board, people are kinda stuck having to downmod you because it's obvious you've already made your mind up and don't have a lot to offer to the conversation. It's an ad hominem on anybody who might want to talk to you.

Not such a good move.
Or are you just deciding in advance that all books about business are just worthless fluff?

That's probably closest to what I think. "Worthless fluff" is a little harsh, but nearly every business book seems to be full of untested generalizations based on very limited/biased sample sizes. Influence, by Cialdini is one exception that comes to mind.

To really learn something in the sense of creating a model that represents reality with a reasonable certainty takes an enormous amount of effort - several orders of magnitude more than effort than self-declared business experts put into their books.
tldr; herd mentality will ebb and flow, but there will always be some sheep on the edges with their own moral compass. some good, some bad. but the herd perceives them all the same.
Okay, you're right.

No matter how annoyed I am with the discussion the least I can do is not make things worse. My apologies.
End of carrier exclusivity & Wider distribution lifting iPhone sales in Europe
"I can’t believe how foolish I was to start my first company. Just me in my bedroom with no experience, making a little website."

Just like Bob Moog in his basement, with no business experience, no business plan, no PR or HR department, no idea where he was headed, little idea of what happened before him, out in the middle of nowhere, tinkering his parts together, invited to conferences he'd never heard of, asking his customers what they wanted and actually listening.

If you're not making mistakes, you're not trying hard enough.
It looks clever, but I don't think I'd use it. I don't really want another layer of abstraction between my keyboard and my HTML -- I'd sooner write it directly, closing tags and all.
Courtney Cox family matter - Gvke
My wristwatch runs for years on a single battery, and is literally always on. You can pry it from my cold, dead wrist.
can someone who knows explain what SAS is and why it is useful( without buzzwords )

Is it a scripting language that deals with data?
How is it better than SQL?
PubSubHubBub Security Concerns
Wolfram Alpha's api?
It doesn't seem to be as low as you suggest.

http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/SAS-Institute-Salaries-E3807...
Simple explanation: Most database indexes are forms of B-trees. Insertion into a binary tree isn't constant time O(1), it's usually O(log n).
Objects are not Hash Tables
This isn't very accurate. Antonius accepted durrrr's challenge in early 2009 and the 50K hands are just a little over halfway complete.

http://www.fulltiltpoker.com/durrrr-vs-antonius

The others lining up are still waiting.

I don't follow online hs poker that much, but I think durrrr is far from the unbeatable icon the article portrays. He gets plenty of action online outside of his challenge which suggests many do consider him beatable. Looking at the highstakespokerdb.com stats, it appears he finished up around 6 million in 2008 and is now down nearly 6 million in 2009 (not all to Isildur, presumably).

In turn, Isildur is down nearly 3 million in the past 24 hours alone (after this article was published, which listed his total winnings as "well over 5M"). With variance like that it is way too early to tell how lasting the effects of his successes this week will be.
Not really. IBM has a huge presence, still over 8500+ employees I think and has traditionally paid at the higher end of software developer salaries on average. And until Nortel imploded this decade, they were also in the mix as a top-paying, always-hiring type of place here.

Basically, SAS has always paid significantly less than others in the park (RTP). I think it's always been pushed as more of a lifestyle place - SAS is still privately held, so it was supposed to be a little more "sane" than big, quarterly focused IT companies.

I do know folks who have worked there and have enjoyed significant work flexibility (eg, working from home from other states) but also have worked with ex-SAS'ers who left because of what I understand to be a laid-back to the point of not getting work done atmosphere.

While cost of living is good in NC, here in the Raleigh/Durham/Cary/Chapel Hill area, it's definitely significantly higher than other places in NC. It's much cheaper than the biggest metro areas (SV, Boston, NY, DC) but after that it tends to run higher than you might think, particularly if you are shopping for homes in areas with "good" school districts.
I think it's closer to a language for easily expressing and computing statistics, like R, with a very powerful set of existing methods. Anyone?
Gustavo Duarte's blog posts are excellent. Clear, readable and detailed explanations of things like what actually happens when booting up and how memory management works. He links to relevant parts of the Linux source code for added context, but also covers how other OSes differ from Linux, and covers how OS design and CPU architecture work together.

http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/

http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/kernel-boot-process

http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/how-the-kernel-manages-...
At its current state of development, the Volt is an extremely refined vehicle.
How to fix capitalism
The $6m is almost all to Isildur1.
I think Ted Chiang is amazing. His ratio of awards won to stories written is impressive.

One of his short stories, "Understand" was recommended to me recently. It's fantastic:
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm
Science Fiction as a genre came to life during a time when science was making enormous changes in people's everyday lives within a relatively short time. Railroads, electrification, long distance communication, mechanization, flight, etc. all either appeared or went "mass market" in a few generations.

This may well have been the first time when science and technology were brought to people's attention as something that actually had a direct effect on what they did. While before you could live in the same village for your entire life and not see much change, now everyone saw the impact of science when a railroad came through your town, or when you got an electric light.

Because of this, there developed a large market of people who were interested in both producing and consuming the "what if" scenarios and analysis provided by sci-fi. Today, the idea of change brought on by technology and science is not only an accepted idea, it's pretty much a given. Sci-fi hasn't run out of steam, it's just that the function that it provided has now diffused into every single other form of media.

It still reappears as a distinct form from time to time, accompanying major inventions such as the internet(Neuromancer, etc.) but more and more I think that it will just stop being a distinct genre and blend in with everything else.
BI software and enterprise software in general is a huge opportunity for startups - I know PG and YC had it as one of the RFS listings at one point.

I'm not sure that the winners will be those can deliver results fast and exhibit quick adaptability. In general, I agree that the Hacker News community is more than technically capable enough to do better than the big BI offerings. But I've been surprised (or shown my naivete if you prefer) at how much "old school" networking still accounts for sales in this space. To succeed, you are aiming at mid-level and higher execs who are used to (seriously) being wined and dined in a way that I think most hardcore tech companies would be surprised at.

Figuring out how to circumvent the normal sales channels is probably at least as important as whatever tech you put in front of people for enterprise software. I've seen how successful some companies are at simply pushing software out to their existing customer channel and making $$ off of that.

All that said, and I still have my eye on a little slice of that pie chart . . .
Crap. I accidentally down-voted you. Somebody give him an upvote for me?

My apologies, I agree with you.
Chromium Notes: Monster UA string
Restoring a polyphonic synthesizer from 1940
sleep(3) will be exact natural time three seconds, and you can't hack the system clock like SpeedGear to speed it up or slow it down on a quantum computer.

And this leads to some encryption applications.
Please search HN for this topic. I've probably answered it 10 times here at least, and other have answered it even more.
Actually, because of the inherent uncertainty, most computations are exponentially slower on a quantum computer. There are a few algorithms that manage to take advantage of entanglement and superposition to be faster, but quantum computers are not inherently faster than classical computers.
Does this mean before Isildur1 arrived he was just about breaking even for 2009?

In any case, my primary objection is that defeating durrr over two weeks does not mean "He has cemented his name in the annals of online poker as one of the strongest players of all time."
If you don't see anything wrong with Ender's Game, for your own sake, don't read anything of Card's past Speaker for the Dead. I loved Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow - but it gets harder to read them the more you're aware of Card's, uh, political stances.

There's such thing as knowing an author too well. Namely, when it starts effecting your interpretation of his earlier works.
You make a good point. But I wonder, why would the scientists be paranoid? Why aren't they releasing their data and analysis algorithms as part of the package?

I mean, shouldn't the process be something like this:

1. Gather data
2. Analyze it
3. Publish results.
4. Make data and analysis methods available for other to scrutinize.
5. Others review data and methods.
6. New insights from others are realized.

Carl Sagan, my hero, went on and on science's strength being being that although mistakes are made, they can be corrected through the scrutiny of others, and the picture of truth improves. That process hinges on data and methods being available for others to review.

Of course, data will fall into the hands of idiots who will misrepresent, lie, and deceive. Also, your data will fall into the hands of someone who will find an error, or legitimately refute your claims. And that's a good thing.

Some years ago, some astronomers who had previously published evidence supporting the existence of a new planet in another solar system, presented at a conference that further analysis of their own data led them to reverse their conclusion. Their presentation was about a minute long. They received a standing ovation. (I believe I saw this on an episode of Nova - I can't cite a source)

That's how it's supposed to work.
When you say "UI position" do you mean designer, front-end web developer, or user-experience expert?
I would love to have a food nutrition info global read write api
Amen. I've always wanted a way to "diff" the different states that my body has been in.
RSS Readers Dying? NewsGator Whats Up?
So whats one way BlogPickup make things easier? Let us ask you... Are you tired of ending up with 10 blog tabs open in your browser? Or are you tired of having to maintenance RSS readers? One thing that is needed here is a service that will inform you immediately whenever one of the blogs on your list of favorites was updated so you don't waste time opening each one daily only to discover that it hasn't been updated. Many websites have taken an initiative like this but have too many pressing ads, cost money, and does not have TRUE simplicity.
BlogPickup takes the cake.
Selling a Business on a Note
Ouch, polling every second? How often did the data actually change?
A lot of people really enjoy keeping track of sports stats. Maybe some sort of a wiki would work well for this purpose?
Yes. In my view it probably did so about 20 years ago. Are there any works from the last 2 decades that could be even mentioned in the same breath as dune, foundation, ender's game, neuromancer, hyperion ...etc.?
Chat en espanol con la mejor musica latina
chat en espanol con la mejor musica latina para los amigos de todas partes del mundo
Interestingly, since the failure of OFX, many many banks in North America prefer screen scraping because they can guarantee the web interface has accurate data since their actual customers use it. Conversely, these banks find supporting APIs to be highly fragile since no one is watching them.

I find that logic amazing, but considering how old the online banking software is and the high risk of changing it wholesale, I don't think they are in a position to fix it in the short term.
My guess is that some day students will use e-readers to view books that are created under the Creative Commons license. When will that day come? Not soon enough...

Two things are required for this to happen:

1)There has to be a Mark Shuttleworth of text book collaboration.

2)e-readers need to have color, be 8x10 and some what cheap.

Part II is basically done. Any successful founders want to do part 1?
In the article Shawn Liu says he doesn’t enjoy going to conferences and panels where the speakers are mostly (white) men. He also asks in the article "How is our industry’s lack of diversity affecting our ability to design for a diverse audience?"

My response is:

1. Our industry does not lack diversity. The federal government standards are being met.

2. I doubt more than a handful of users care who designs what as long as it works well. Case in point this example video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yavx9yxTrsw&feature=playe...

3. Going through all the applications looking for female web designers as Shawn Liu says he does is sex discrimination plain and simple.

4. Successful businesses look to hire the best person for the job without regard to age, sex, color, etc... Preferential treatment in hiring went out with the dinosaurs.
I would say that science fiction has run out of steam in the sense that hardly anyone reads real SF anymore.

Just go down to Border's or Barnes & Noble to see what I mean. You will find some titles by Heinlein and Clarke, but a lot of the shelfspace in the SF section will be devoted to various media tie-ins, such as Star Trek, Star Wars and X-Men. There will also be plenty of fantasy novels, mostly dealing with vampires or with settings that Tolkien first created more than half a century ago. You will need to look very hard to find something interesting.

The situation with short stories is also dire. For example, Analog went from 115,000 issues per month in the early 1980s to a little over 30,000 in 2006 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_Science_Fiction_and_Fact...). In recent months, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction had to switch to a bimonthly schedule in order to rein in their costs.

Part of the problem is that people don't read for pleasure as much as they used to. Editors and publishers want to print what they think the public wants. Right now, it seems that the public wants Tolkien knock-offs, manga and Batman. The average person's exposure to SF is through the movies, television or video games, not the written word.
Spotify artists earn $167 per 1 million plays.
Article in one sentence: You can fix capitalism by moving the real world closer to the theoretical capitalism of micro-econ textbooks.

One of the frustrations I have with politics and economics is the absolute refusal of many people to actually look at how our economic system diverges from capitalism. We hear so often about how theoretical capitalism's mechanisms fix things, but no one ever takes into consideration how well theoretical capitalism is implemented in the real world.
Gmail.

But more than a specific API, it would be cool if websites simply provided an XML(/JSON/etc) version for every urls. Eg, http://news.ycombinator.com/item.xml?id=955077 would return the data in this page in XML format. This would be pretty simply to create (at least as read-only API), handle the situations where people resort to HTML scraping and effectively remove the need for API docs.
I really want an API that provides info on TV shows. Ever since I heard about the Tommyverse[1] I've wanted to build an application that automatically maps it and lets you play around with the connections between shows, and while it's technically possible to do it with the data IMDB does make available, you can't easily make it public and it's a real hassle.

[1] http://home.vicnet.net.au/~kwgow/crossovers.html
I wonder where they are getting their statistics from.

It says that Digg's front page ads get only 500k-1m impressions daily with around 150k unique visitors daily while Slashdot is getting 1M-2M impressions with daily with 35k unique visitors.

https://www.google.com/adplanner/#siteSearch?identifier=digg...

https://www.google.com/adplanner/#siteSearch?identifier=slas...
I've found stats from adplanner to be very accurate
anathem. There are some decent scifi in the last decade or so but not on the level of foundation and friends. Also there has been some amazing scifi in other mediums, like television and movies.
“and I’m thinking of incorporating some XML functionality” - is it still 1999? =)
It seems that the all of these problems could be eliminated by giving every client, feed server, hub and actual feed a UUID, and swapping them in a handshake. (A feed having the same UUID would be a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to consider it the same as another feed; it would still compare the URLs.) This would reduce the actual message transmission, in cases of mistaken identity, to a few (16-32) bytes each time. Then, clients, servers, or hubs which repeatedly return incorrect responses to identity queries would just have to be throttled.
to teach me what I'm missing

You're being annoying. Nobody wants to screenscrape, it's awkward and fiddly and fragile and verbose and requires reverse engineering and is wasteful of bandwidth.

It really doesn't matter if you can get the information by screenscraping. The thread topic is "what would you like an API for?", not "scorn people about what they want an API for."

Care to explain why I'm being downvoted?

Because I want less of this sort of thing on HN. I want it to fall to the bottom of the page, and to discourage it in future. I cannot articulate precisely what it is that I want less of, it's a big vague fuzzy blob of things, some of which I even agree with, and your few posts here and above here are within it, so down they go.
GMail has APIs - POP3 and IMAP.
YouTube - MINI Extended Motorer Protection
Amazing Essay on free will and god. Recommend read to the end.
"Published August 24, 2004"
I think it would be a fantastic idea be able to hold up a cameraphone, take a picture of a sign in a foreign country, send it to the cloud and have the text recognised and Google-translated.

"Not perfect" would be fine for many non-life-or-death signs.
lots of good info, but you somehow strike me as the kind of guy who will kill a fly with a nuclear bomb...
I suspect what you're thinking is a "perfect market", i.e., an optimally competitive market with several (implausible) characteristics, such as no barriers to entry, all participants being fully informed,

A good rule of thumb to keep in mind is that, from a "competition is the ideal" perspective, profit margins represent market inefficiency. In a maximally efficient market, no one can make more money than the absolute minimum required to make participating worth their time, because otherwise someone else will come in and undercut them.

A simple, relatively free market is sometimes a passable approximation of a perfect market, but not always.
The updated example would be "incorporating Cloud API".
This post was the precursor for http://www.tradetricks.org/, which used to publish user-submitted tricks every day. Start here and click through:

http://www.tradetricks.org/archives/001915.html

(I can't find an index page.)
The amazing thing about SAS is that it makes R look like a beautifully designed language. (R is great, but has a LOT of idiosyncracies related to silly type conversion defaults.)