skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Top 5 from Tokyo, London, Sydney, and "the Tube". I'm wondering is it because people outside of US tends to use twitter to stay contact with friends and family more or yc has gone global.
Yeah, the 1 in 20 number for attractiveness seemed a bit off. In fact, I'd wager that having unreasonable standards in this regard is probably the biggest thing hindering his dating success.
You can also get reminders through mint.com
# config/initializers/disable_mass_assignment.rb
ActiveRecord::Base.send(:attr_accessible, nil)

# app/models/some_model.rb
class SomeModel < ActiveRecord::Base
attr_accessible :whitelisted, :attributes
end
David Foster Wallace has a sort of fatalistic view toward the balance between freedom and safety, arguing that we ought to have just accepted that people will die if we are to live in a free society: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200711/wallace-safety

This kind of mentality has a lot more in common with the values of the founding fathers than the idea that perfect security is possible or achievable.
Online dating has two problems.

1. Limited corpus. This is usually the result of sites going after very specific verticals (i.e. race, religious, <some-other-facet> specific).

2. Terrible search. Granted, determining compatibility isn't easy, but you typically can at best search on dimensions to limit gender, sexual orientation, proximity and age. After that... then what? If you're using a site with a large corpus (Match, PoF, etc.) you end up subconsciously surrendering your standards and resort to "clicking on the hot ones".

I would liken search on dating sites to be similar to web searches before Google. Actually, before AltaVista. It really is that bad.

If compatibility could be determined quickly and reasonably accurately, on a large number of dimensions, one company could crush every other dating site like an ant. Especially if that score is used all over... for instance, your mail could be sorted by potential compatibility - so you don't waste your time looking at messages from individuals that aren't remotely relevant.

The problem is that sort of quantitative analysis is very computationally expensive in a high-dimensional space, especially for a large corpus (say, 5 to 10 million users).
Here's my number one problem with this approach: It's not obvious right away which day which day of the week a day is since the columns of the days of the week keep rotating. This is an absolutely critical feature for me. Maybe it's just me, but I think it's easier to remember something as "on next Tuesday" than "on the seventeenth".
Sorry, he screwed up the math.

Using rate of formation of people and fraction of people who are age appropriate in the same equation is not correct. The correct math would be rate of formation of people multiplied by the length of time they are age appropriate. Instead of multiplying by 0.2 he should be multiplying by 11. Which makes for a factor of 55 difference in the result.
Hmm, odd limit. I've never had more than 5 style tags on a page, though, and fewer since I got into using yuicompressor.

Has anyone here actually run into this in practice? If so, how? Just curious.
I agree. Experts may be interested in answering questions for wages around 10 dollars per question or problem. As you pointed out most questions and explanation sessions will not take a full hour.

In general I agree with tentonova2. Going rates are 10 to 20 times minimum wage. It's scary to imagine what sorts of people you'll get for minimum wage.

All this being said, If it's well organized and non-for-profit I would be interested in volunteering to work one on one with students. I am a strong believer that mentoring is a great way to train inexperienced programmers.

I imagine most of us have, at one point or another, ended up helping someone with their Math assignment at the local coffee shop. It would be nice to provide the same help to inexperienced programmers with the same casual relationship.
good interview but the sound was horrible.
Invite codes for HackerNews:

To buy: hnbuy

To work: hnwork
You open source the parts of your product that people won't pay money for. You keep proprietary the parts that people will pay money for. The open source portion promotes your product and fills the top of your sales funnel, and simplifies your marketing: you have a clear set of conversion steps and a very easy to way to fill the top of the funnel (nothing sells like "free").

Nobody wants to pay for ffmpeg. But clearly they do want to pay for slick UIs on top of ffmpeg, because ffmpeg is constantly having to threaten to sue people for violating their license.

Value-adds that people will pay for that scale like products scale:

* User interface

* Seamless integration

* Hosting

* Device support

* Content

* Extra features

Finally, it is always worth mentioning that (a) early-adopter home users are generally not willing to pay for anything but the top 1% of software titles, (b) mainstream home users will pay, if they're going to pay, whether it's open source or not, and (c) starting at around 500 employees, businesses will always pay for software, to the point of shunning software they can't pay for: the P.O. process is an integral part of IT planning for corporations.
The real answer is that you sound like you'd benefit from reading the whole damn article.
How so? If a site's UI keeps changing in me I'm going to get pretty annoyed unless each step is a clear improvement.
Good point, but this is something that would appear either on a refresh or with a little Ajax, which would make it stand out to people using it.
Psychic computer shows your thoughts on screen
Obviously this is just for fun, but the author screws up his reasoning pretty badly. For example:

a) He says .0014% when he means 0.14%.

b) He interprets "X% of Londoners fit my criteria" as "on a given night, I have X% chance of meeting someone fitting my criteria". Apparently on a given night he meets exactly one randomly-sampled Londoner?
Create a modular UI framework that allows modules to import their own stylesheets. You hit this problem really quickly.
I don't think it's completely awful - it's a matter of what you're comparing it to. If you're pitting it against a slick, non-technical consumer facing site, sure, it's a little text heavy. But if you're comparing it to a typical API doc, it's a pretty good combination of style and utility.
Yes, especially with a logo and tagline at the top.
If they're announcing the tablet in January, I wonder what kind of release date they're looking at. Does anyone know what the average announce to release cycle is for Apple products?
I don't think so either, but I certainly wouldn't mind lending a helping hand.
c) He hand-waves through very important parts of the calculation (how many women he gets along with, how many find him attractive).

d) He doesn't give himself any credit for being able to selectively meet people close to his age and education level.
We still don't know what consciousness is. So I think it's naive to state that it's "just a question of time" before we can simulate it.
Yes. This is one of the main ways to make money. Another way is being purely service-based like RedHat.
Ruby and C (Part 1)
The original iPhone timeline was a January announcement with an end of June release.
Now there's an idea! It would be like sitting in the Django IRC for an hour or two, but getting paid for each person who you offer advice to, regardless of the time overlap.
I think it's reasonable to point out that almost anyone could have made the same observations based on media reporting over the past several weeks; it took no particular skill or experience to note that no security system is perfect or to note that liquid explosives are hard to detonate.
Unwrapping Performable: Customer Development meets Marketing
Agree fully with point #2. Have you used OkCupid? I think it's better than most in that regard, but the people on the site tend to be a bit full of themselves. Also, compatibility has a lot more to do with what people do than with what they say, which is why surveys and "shared values" questionnaires fall flat.
Ask HN:Is it a good idea to use HN for finding Mentors?
In almost all companies(big companies at least) mentoring is a very important way of giving back to the company.Do you think that model would work outside the organizational boundaries too?Just like open source ,where people work on stuff and make it open and free because they just love working on it.Similarly maybe there are people who would not mind spending a couple of hours a month or fortnight just to give back to the community in terms of mentoring people in their area of specialization?

What do you think?

EDIT:Also if you think thats a good idea, what do you think of a stackoverflow type site for mentor / mentee matching?
also important to note: each stylesheet cannot have more than 4095 CSS rules, in IE. experiencing this limit makes for some mighty interesting debugging.
"In the US Gordon Ramsey is mostly known (unfortunately) for his vapid Hell's Kitchen show. "

But I like that show!

OK, I agree it's heavy on the vapid drama side. Still, it's oddly entertaining, and it got me somewhat interested in cooking.

One big complaint I have with Hell's Kitchen is that it fails to show enough about the food and cooking techniques. I bet lots more people could be tricked into cooking if such a show would mix in a bit of how-to and here's-why with the yelling and blustering.
Mass assignment is a problem that is not unique to Rails. People can and do write software that offer this feature. Last seen by me in some php code in production since 2003.. of course without a way to white/blacklist attributes. :)
Summary of MIT's Linear Algebra. Lecture 4: A=LU Matrix Factorization
Well, they don't have to: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/class/class....

Given that different conditions produce different crystals (see for instance the description for the "capped columns"), my best guess is simply that each of the 6 sides experienced all-but-identical growth conditions, and thus the correct question is rather why would they be different?

Someone else mentioned 12- and 3-siders, and trying to Google up those images is how I got to that site in the first place. See: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/unusual/unus... (Note you have to "-paper" in the Google search, or you'll just be hammered with instructions for paper snowflakes of varying degrees of scientific inauthenticity.)

Edit: Ah, the site addresses that: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/faqs/faqs.ht...

"While [a snowflake] grows, the crystal is blown to and fro inside the clouds, so the temperature it sees changes randomly with time. But the crystal growth depends strongly on temperature (as is seen in the morphology diagram). Thus the six arms of the snow crystal each change their growth with time. And because all six arms see the same conditions at the same times, they all grow about the same way. The end result is a complex, branched structure that is also six-fold symmetric. And note also that since snow crystals all follow slightly different paths through the clouds, individual crystals all tend to look different."

And see also the next question, "What synchronizes the growth of the six arms?". I'm hitting the limit of what I feel comfortable just copying and pasting into HN.
Anyone want to guess why the number is 30?
Well said. I blogged about this same thing about 3 years ago (http://web.elctech.com/2007/03/01/securing-your-models/). It's amazing how many application I come across that don't protect their attributes.
Rendering on the iphone isn't perfect either. There are some errors in the html. Fixing them might improve the rendering. See

http://vldtr.com/?key=runmelater
The fact that 30 is suspiciously close to 32 makes the impression that there's some unholy C black magic in the background of the bug. I wish programmers stopped doing stuff like that unless they really have to.
Option Pools Are Not Always Dilutive
Red Hat also starts out in some of the toughest software segments: operating systems and J2EE stacks. That's a side effect of when they were founded and the scale they are now forced to operate at.

There are plenty of software businesses that make money on services that are easier to sell and operate than entire operating systems (for which "service" is a fuzzy concept anyways). For instance: lots of security products require monitoring; in fact, lots of security products deliberately require lots of hands-on monitoring, because that drives services dollars.

Restating, point being, Red Hat may not be a particularly great example.
Ask HN: Any experience with AdMob?
Hello!

I've been quite successful selling premium Android apps, but I'd like to try my hand with AdMob. The problem is their website is extremely unfriendly and doesn't give any information about rates or CPM, and they won't pick up my phone calls. I can't even tell if you make money with impressions or click-through.

Has anybody here had any luck with AdMob, or are they a scam? If not, what kind of rates do you get?
VMware Likely to Buy Zimbra from Yahoo
Somewhere in Redmond, WA

PageStyleTagsW tags[

Thinks for 5 seconds

PageStyleTagsW tags[30]; /* should be enough for any page /

Goes and gets a free soda*

Sometimes imposing arbitrary limits in C is a lot easier than manually managing dynamic memory in the heap..
A bold move. And it now looks like a smart decision.

Summary: He bought it for 70k did 227k in sales after Apple's take. Spent 50k on marketing, though that's been reduced. Recent growth has been through internationalization. Side note - transferring an app to a different iTunes vender is a nightmare. (No surprise)
I still think there is much more work to be done on isolated systems and making them more adaptable than larger metasystems. I work on text classification problems and while the problem is still mostly implementation, I would like to solve the problem more robustly w/o having hand-analyze problems, construct models that are really hacks, etc. Basically work higher up the abstraction level in classification. What I am arguing is a bottom up view of AI.
This is possibly because we started our index crawling from one Australian (who lived in the UK for a bit) and one Chinese person so there is most likely a bias towards AU, UK and HK at this early stage of our crawling. As we hit a more critical mass this will even out and most likely become a typical US weighted result in Twitter.
Without knowing the answer, here is my guess: the way a flake grows depends on a number of environmental factors. Although these factors, like temperature, humidity and wind, all vary as the drop/flake falls down, the factors are nearly constant over the size of the flake. Each part of the flake experiences the same environment and as a result all parts grow in the same fashion.

My alternate guess is that snowflakes actually aren't symmetrical, although they display many local 6-way symmetries.

Edit: ah, the answer by jerf verifies that these guesses were reasonable.
See

http://blog.mhartl.com/2008/09/21/mass-assignment-in-rails-a...

and

http://blog.mhartl.com/2008/09/21/finding-and-fixing-mass-as...

for a much more detailed discussion of this issue.
My first web app (no longer active) allowed dynamic styles to be applied to different elements on a page. I used dynamically generated <style> tags to do this, and yes I did hit this limit on IE.

These days, I might dynamically generate a CSS file in that situation.
Perhaps, but if you're including 30+ stylesheets in a given page you're doing it wrong.

Every stylesheet is an extra (blocking) HTTP request. 5 is already too many, but 30 is seriously impacting your user's experience.
In a related vein, I wrote http://github.com/mhartl/find_mass_assignment to find likely mass assignment vulnerabilities in Rails apps.
I'd hope there would be server side combining of stylesheets. I have seen performance suffer from including about 10 stylesheets; don't want to imagine 30+.
Thanks for the suggestion. Definitely would consider it.

Setting up CRON jobs is not that easy for those people who don't have a lot of control of their servers.

I myself am not sure if this is good enough as a standalone product. I do have some business ideas for it though.
Well, it turns out if you look closely that usually the arms aren't exactly the same. Which is rather a clue: the coordinating mechanism isn't some kind of quantum magic that enables the structure in the centre to determine exactly what the arms are like. Rather, (1) the arms all start out roughly the same because the crystal structure of ice has 6-fold symmetry, and then (2) the way growth happens at any place and any given moment is largely determined by (a) the structure there and (b) the external conditions, which vary as the snowflake is forming because it's being blown around. But because the snowflake is quite small, those external conditions are generally much the same for all six arms; so similar arms + similar conditions for each arm --> similar incremental growth for all arms --> still-similar arms, so the symmetry is preserved as the crystal grows. See, e.g., http://www.ams.org/notices/200504/fea-adam-3.pdf .
This bug can be triggered by inline stylesheets as well which do not create additional HTTP requests.
I've seen this where I work all the time. I've also seen code where the developer created 25 different structures named structure_type_X where X is 1-25, the size of the structure's internal buffer.

How do you deal with 25 different structure types with nothing different but the name and buffer size? Why, a switch statement of course...
Perhaps it doesn't take much skill, but that observation doesn't really jive with my not having seen these points in print or on the news since the incident. Bruce's blurb was the first time I heard anything about either aspect of the case.
Many rumors have suggested a March release.
Is it really Rails specific? I seem to remember Struts working the same way and most other reflection based frameworks working the same way.

The particular solution outlined in the OP is quite incomplete. We need a check not see just which attributes can be edited by a user, but which rows can be edited by a user. attr_accessible offers no protection there.
maybe you can, but the rules currently restrict things to 1 job at a time.
"Sorry but you need a valid invite code to join."

Edit: I suppose you use the same form for both tutors and students to register. The hnwork code doesn't work there.
Several years ago I updated a particular Wikipedia puzzle writeup and included software to generate the (nontrivial) puzzle artwork. At which point I got my hands slapped (there should be a verb for that), and was told Wikipedia was not a code repository.

Evidently Wikipedia is also not a repository for original artwork.

I suppose there's some sense to that, what with the high price of storage and countless contributors wishing to upload original works.
Saving a few hours of time in exchange for $150 vs saving $5 in exchange for an hour (round-trip) of your time may be the right choice for the same person.

Moving is strenuous, boring physical labor with a relatively high probability of being hurt/sore the next day. Driving around for an extra hour may be a pleasant diversion, time alone to think, relax, listen to music, etc. It's not apples to apples paying $50 an hour in one case against being paid $5 an hour in the other case.
Make Your Game Easy, Then Make It Easier
I regularly tutor people in programming and act as a helpdesk, am considered a good tutor/helpdesk, and I would never offer my tutoring/helpdesk services at that puny rate.

I absolutely love the idea, but you NEED to let the tutors set their own rate. Anyone want to build such a site, possibly working with me? I own "software-shaman.com" and have been meaning to set it up for something like this, but haven't felt any urgency yet.

EDIT: Now I also have programmer-helpdesk.com (and both w/o hyphens)
What are we going to do with all of us average people?

The answer is of course obvious. Roll the dice and start your own business in the hopes that you can become the exploiter instead of the exploited.

The owners in a business are the only ones who cannot be outsourced.
Although, the iPhone had significant external schedule factors which pushed an announcement: FCC, AT&T, etc. Unless this device can connect to a cell network, I don't see why they wouldn't pull one of their patented "And it is available.... right now!" things.
Sorry about that, I stupidly made them single use invites. Should be fixed now.
Huh. A five bit range would give a max of 31, and if we assume that the default/built-in stylesheet knocks another off, that's 30.

I agree with you, though I think I'd prefer this to hint at the reason over it being an entirely arbitrary descision. Making such a choice for a bad reason is still preferable to making it for no reason.
Why encrypt the cookie at all? Why not just have server1 sign it and haver server2 verify server1's signature?
The 8-sided paper snowflake exists because it's easy to fold a square piece of paper into eighths (i.e. three times, one diagonal) and cut it. It's so kids can make snowflakes. The correct six is much harder.

I agree with the heart analogy.
just removed that. (was a premature optimization)
Ouch, I always try to make limits be 0, 1 or many - where 'many' is the limit of physical resources.
We had an import feature that allowed users to pull in their tracks from other services, but a migration to new code combined with a cease and desist letter from the big competitor led us to disable importation for the time being.

We are investigating our options and will proceed when we understand the implications of those options. With that being said, this feature was VERY popular, and I loved watching someone bring in 100 routes from their other accounts. People love the concept of data independence and are pretty shocked when they hear one of their favourite sites doesn't allow them to backup their information. So, we are hoping to bring this back in some way that doesn't tick off the other services, or at least does so in a way that doesn't have negative implications on us or our users :P
For ideas on how others have done this (including business model and pricing), check out http://www.webcron.org/.

Ah, this site takes me back to an online ballot box stuffing incident earlier in the year...
Can anyone confirm that this is actually going to happen? I keep seeing 'rumors confirmed!' but no one has shown an invitation or any actual confirmation from Apple. For all we know they may be reserving that convention center for a company retreat!
When using Drupal it can be pretty easy to run into this (and I have). Modules are allowed to add default stylesheets for their forms/controls/etc. so in a website with a large number of modules this sometimes happens. First time I ran into this it took quite a bit of time to figure out.

Drupal has a performance feature, which will take these CSS files and automatically aggregate them together. This can make for difficult debugging because problems will disappear when you move from a development to a production environment.
Escape to what, exactly? Subsistence farming? To an ownership position of the labor product of wage slaves, alienated from their work? To communal ownership of the means of industrial production and the division of labor by consensus? To a post industrial techno-topia in which machines do nearly all of the work? To "profit slavery" in an industrial/capitalist/consumerist yet anti-corporate economy (lots of small businesses, most people contractors, owners or co-owners rather than employees)? What?

"Humanity" is at least an interesting idea because, compared to other animals, we get to contemplate these various possibilities and, if we choose to, to work towards them.
Interesting, does this problem happen for you when using other browsers or just chrome? I'd love to help you out (or fix the issue for others!), however can't promise anything if the issue is only on chrome nightly. Send us an email to ridewithgps@gmail.com or use the 'Feedback' button at the top of the site.