skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the comments. I'll definitely improve on the documentation.

I decided to release it on HackerNews first because I know you guys would understand what I'm talking about.

I wanted a service like this when I was using a shared hosting account for my website. The host doesn't give you a lot of access to the servers and set up CRON jobs.
But the scientific reality is aesthetics too. Seeing how the snowflake is a textbook example of beauty found in nature, I would personally find myself obliged to represent the snowflake according to it, even for the purpose of your application.
Vatican Admits Perfect Security is Both Impossible and Undesirable
I uploaded a tool I've written in SML for generating space-filling curves (Hilbert, Peano, Sierpinski) with postscript output on github: http://github.com/soeren/snippets/tree/master/spacefilling/
Author of Torture, Spy Memos Was Just Doing His Job
Seems pretty cool actually. I'd break up the page and add some navigation. I'd recommend the jQuery UI Tabs plugin for this just because it's so fast. You could have a Home tab, FAQ tab, and Examples tab, perhaps?

Do you have a business model or is this just a resume bullet point?
a couple of thoughts regarding your app:

* unfortunately, the html does not render correctly in my chrome browser, e.g the first url on the left overlaps with the right column.

* depending on what you d like to do with it, you might want to consider to revamp a bit the UI?

* what's your intention with this service? Is it a side project or do you plan to commercialize it?
Also, it trumps pedantic by being funny.
Okay, so the crystals tend to follow a 6-sided geometry. Why are snowflakes symmetrical? Why does one arm have to fall into the exact same configuration as the opposite one? Why not have 6 different arms, all following the same 6-sided geometry? What mechanism communicates between the arms to achieve 6-sided symmetry?
How about a micro-coating. Not applied like paint, deposited on the surface like an integrated circuit layer, microns thick. SUre you can still call it paint, you can call the layers of an integrated circuit paint but its deposited differently, is a differnt industrial process, mechanically different, different thermal characteristics, lots of things.
More significant in my original comment was this: the color can be "dialed", kind of like "digital color". Paint is imperfectly mixed material with wide color/reflectivity variation over a surface. This new method of coloring a surface is uniform. Imagine the efficiency of a color filter, absorbtive surface, radiative surface etc if the optical properties could be tightly controlled over a wide area.
Wow, those are truly ugly.
Please consider enhanced duplicate detection as outlined and discussed here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012215

Simply compare the "title" field of the referenced page. If it matches, perhaps compare the domain name, ignoring any "www". Or perhaps not bother. The number of occasions the title matches when the page is different should be sufficiently small.
Curious Man Buys $3 Billion CD-ROM For Windows 98 On Amazon
Craigslist is bizarrely closed and out of touch. I don't know why they won't release an API, they'd multiply their revenues by 10.
I'll buy drinks if I can just sit there with my mouth shut and listen.
> You are making an effort to eat cheaply

It's more about convenience and I what I like, actually. No real effort to each cheap. I like eggs and I like whole fat dairy. And in truth I do often eat cod or flank steak or whatever, so up the daily cost by maybe 50%, but it's still peanuts compared to eating out.

> a glass of half and half? Really?

I go through half a stick of butter, a glass or two of half&half, and some whole fat yogurt daily. First, it's delicious. Second, dairy fat is frickn diesel. You can run on all cylinders for ages.
Ruby on Rails: Secure Mass Assignment
TellHN : This is my new app, AzankaLyrics
I created a minimal lyrics formatter (http://lyrics.azankatech.com). It's a "scratch your own itch" kind of app and I implemented only the features I needed.

No more scrolling or tiny fonts while you're singing a song, your lyrics will be formatted to be the biggest possible for your screen.

What do you think of it?
Let me design a better website for you. Not mindblowing, as I don't have much time, but better.

EDIT: For free, by the way.
Let's give these douchebags all the attention they're asking for! No way did they think this could cause a media storm that would land them on the front page of ABCNews.com! Let's make sure we put them there! That'll show 'em!
FWIW, it renders fine for me on Chrome unless I make the window quite small
More new planets discovered, our knowledge of our Universe expanded by a large percentage. And I find I can't get very excited. This syndrome needs a new name: Cosmic-mindblowing-discovery-burnout syndrome doesn't roll of the tongue.
With respect, I think you're wrong. I believe that active work by the regulars can slow down the problem, but that will only ensure that the site remains popular, continues to grow, and eventually the newbies won't get enculturated.

I believe that technical means must be used to ensure that the enculturation works. I do not believe the current level of technical means suffice. But I do speak largely from ignorance of the exact nature of this site's features. I've only been here 410 days (or so), but my experience of other sites suggest that the degradation is currently in progress, and needs to be resisted with technical as well as cultural means.

I agree that active up- and down-modding is essential, but newbies without sufficient knowledge of how the site is supposed to work are more numerous and have nearly equal rights. More needs to be done.

Personal opinions only, of course. I'd be pleased to discover I'm wrong.
"Shallow people have shallow standards" - what a surprise.
The reason the author does not have a girlfriend (if that's really true) is more likely related to the fact that he's spending his time writing stuff like this instead of meeting people.
Danny this is awesome, good job!
Nice! :) But you forgot to include parameters like "spatial proximity". You are more likely to find university educated women in a university. Also, a lot of women in the university are around 24-34 (graduate students? -- they are trained to talk about anything on the planet!). Physically attractive -- hard to find, computer science dept is probably NOT going to help. Try the physical training dept. Humanities would be a better bet.

Congratulations AlphaMonkey, you'll find the love of your life in the closest university's Humanities department. Since you posted the document at the warwick website, you probably are not too far away from her ;-)
fL is not right - in the Internet age, its unimportant where the women are.
If you control for portion size (instead of just eating what the fast food chains give you), your meal plan is just barely cheaper than Domino's Pizza, Chipotle Burritos, Subway Footlongs, and Wendy's Spicy Chicken Nuggets value meals (and those come with not one but three different kinds of peppers and savory spices).

I agree, don't eat Wendy's (it will also kill you), and I salute you for operating almost entirely on dairy fat, but I think my point stands: it isn't necessarily or even likely cheaper to cook than to eat out.
This is the same in every profession though. Once you know the rules, and the reasons behind the rules, and the consequences of breaking the rules, you can consider the trade-offs of not sticking to the rules in this specific case because it buys you some big benefits.

Then, when it burns you horribly, you can write a informative blog post about why even the experts should follow the rules :-)

(Btdt, although in my case it was with documented project scope. It was probably the right decision, but that didn't make taking the kicking any more fun.)
That's true, but are "unable to find better work" and "expert tutor" largely disjoint sets?

Even those who don't have time to contract will generally have more productive outlets available (... which is often how they became experts).
Will talent scouts transform this into "Interview a demonstrably capable programmer for $8.95 / hour"?
Limit to brick buildings is 20 stories - after that, the bottom floor has such thick walls it's all brick, no living space.
Limit to steel-skeleton buildings is elevators. After around 100 stories, the bottom floor is all elevators.
How did the Dubai building get around this?
First I think they need a rating system so people can see at a glance who is really good.

Then they need to pay based on ranking. Everyone starts at minimum wage but if you get five stars suddenly you are making $25 an hour.
If you are referring to business/commercial projects in the last 5 years then this is what I know:

1) Direct knowledge: I've been involved in a few medium to big projects for two of the big car manufacturers. Currently involved with big reporting / MIS web projects for two of the biggest car rental companies.

2) Word and mouth from ex-colleagues & friends: Perl is heavily used in the financial market, especially here in City of London. After Java, there were lots of Perl programmers who were unfortunately given the boot during the recent financial crisis :(

3) From the grapevine (ie. web!): http://bit.ly/5S7UMa This link mentions a list of companies that have had Perl apps built for them in last 5 years.

"I would like to know what motivated your choice of language"

In my case its mainly because I'm more competent in Perl and its been my main language of choice and circumstances for well over 10 years now.

I have and continue to use & play with other languages/frameworks but given a blank slate I think Perl would probably still come out has my #1 choice because of CPAN and its maturity (language & VM).
As a sidenote, his book "Ratio" he mentions is exactly the opposite and has a nice methodological way of explaining cooking which gives a lot of insight into how everything works as opposed to blindly following recipes. Great for engineers and tinkerers.
Rethinking artificial intelligence
You are quite right - this is a carefully managed publicity stunt which presumably has tickled the BBC's fancy - perhaps it is otherwise a slow news day?
Circa - livecoding games
http://www.circa-lang.org/
No, I meant marketing their films is not my concern. I want to implement tools to help them market their films, but not to do it for them. Like I said before, this is a service to let filmmakers more easily do-it-themselves.

Obviously marketing the site itself is going to be done. I'm targeting it towards indie filmmakers. I was planning to use my connections in the indie industry to spread a word of mouth campaign.
Physically attractive -- hard to find, computer science dept is probably NOT going to help.

There were few women in my undergrad and graduate programs, but they were all at least cute. Even undergrad, there were a few hot ones!
This seems oddly relevant:

http://img39.yfrog.com/img39/6247/h807.png

On a more serious note, there are a lot of difficult problems in onlne dating that someone could make a lot of money by solving. The lack of attractive pictures is not one of them.
That might very well be the case that gets argued, though note that expired gift cards can also be reclaimed by the government. A quick read of the link posted by patio11 suggests that states may declare that gift cards should have no expiry dates, perhaps they could force a similar ruling onto pre-pay call cards.

Clearly there is enough grey space to go to court about it.
Wow, Kevin is amazingly good at articulating what makes YC work. In particular, most people forget the "forced 3-month move" to Mountain View which, among many other things, frees you from obligations (girlfriends, side gigs, friends in the area, etc).

I'm curious whether YC founders who did not have to relocate to participate end up statistically less productive...
Worlds Collide: Twitter Has More Uptime Than Facebook
I really like this idea! A few suggestions:

* Is there no way to delete a task? I wouldn't consider using it unless there were, because it would get awful annoying if I needed to change the schedule but was incapable of doing so.

* It would be nice if there were more options for the HTTP request (most especially sending POST parameters, but also stuff like HTTP auth would be useful)

* Perhaps nitpickey, but could you make the interface more RESTful? That is, POST to create an unnamed task, PUT to create/update a named task, DELETE to remove, GET to get information about a task.
http://www.circa-lang.org/
The main problem with any Drake Eqn. related statement is that nobody seems to propagate uncertainty about the terms.

The main problem with any mathematical analysis of whether you're going to meet someone and build a rewarding relationship with them is that you're looking hard at your own life instead of caring about someone else's.
I've often wondered about this too. Pseudo-scientific "explanations" of natural phenomenon often ignore the obvious questions. Another interesting question: why do people swallow facile explanations for things with little/no critical dialog?
Very fun in that it appears to be alive in some way and allows the user to project feelings/emotions onto it.

To me, it looks like the machine is bothered when the user flips the switch and wants to be left alone. Of course, that's ridiculous, but that's the fun of the machine.
This seems like a great thing to prioritize. It's easy and it affects people who have already decided to pay. It seems ridiculous to lose a customer who wants to give you money. The return on investment is probably far greater than usability fixes earlier in the customer acquisition pipeline.
You're right, frost on a window grows asymmetrically, why not snowflakes?
Who has tweeted "Y Combinator interview"? Useful twitter people search: twendly
I'd use this with the Tumblr API which, last time I looked, didn't let you schedule a post in the future.
Yes it is radically different. Initially at least. I will not have a "store" featuring indie films. This is something I don't think I can accomplish initially, and must be slowly built towards. The barrier to entry to using our service to sell digital downloads (on their own sites) is low, but if I were to launch a digital store, I would have to erect some sort of quality minimum in order to build a reputation for that store. I would want to keep such a store from turning into YouTube. Instead, what I'm trying to accomplish immediately is more like paypal. It's a tool, a mechanism to digital download distribution. Except the difference from paypal is that I'm also offering a better post-sale experience, as a feature to the publisher to attract sales, and more customized toolset for indie filmmakers, including things that will help them market.

Indie filmmakers usually have their own websites. They probably don't need a community to sell their films to. Even if they do, they can target those communities themselves.

Hey thanks lkrubner, I think I just got my answer to the "What are you making?" question.
This is a brief overview of reconfigurable asynchronous logic automata http://phm.cba.mit.edu/papers/09.11.POPL.pdf
Better: "Vatican admits perfect security is impossible, and the side-effects of pursuing perfect security are undesirable."

If perfect security were costless, it would be an easy decision. The problem is the cost of perfect security.
Which is why I said it's confused.
If you're wanting to be more RESTful, you should be creating tasks with POST instead of GET, since you're creating new resources. How do you cancel tasks? Might I suggest a DELETE to a URL, specified in the return?
InfoQ: Estimating Business Value
2010 Is A Tough Year To Budget
AWS Solution Pages
Conversation with Engineers about 10 yrs ago:
Me: Nobody knows how to cook anymore.
Don: Yeah, my Grandmother was a great cook. She really knew how to microwave a baked potato!
Me: {jaw drops, dumb silence}
Shallow people are also a market.
* Renders poorly on Firefox 2.something on Vista. Basically same issues as others have noted

* Use of the word "cron" threw me off. I was wondering how your Web service was going to interact with the cron service I have on my machines. But, of course, that's not what it does at all.

Suggestions: Fix the layout, and make it obvious what problem you are solving.
That's Schneier's title, not mine
I can imagine one with a crank and a flywheel, where pumping enough energy into the flywheel mechanically activates a hand that cranks in the opposite direction to discharge the potential...
I really, really think you're right!

I learned to cook because I grew up in a house where meals were cooked, not ordered out. I was making simple dishes and baking cakes on my own by age 10. Likewise, my 9 year-old son is learning to cook from me. He likes helping and the look of pride on his face when I let him make up a batch of meatballs from scratch (everything except putting them in the oven) because I was busy with something else had to be seen to be believed.

Even something as simple as letting a child mix some ingredients helps. They learn mise en place, how to use kitchen tools properly, basic kitchen hygiene and the overriding idea that everyone can cook!
State of the Postgres project
I've read a case study of someone with essentially this service trying to make money by offering a pro service. It's not going well.

So it might be hard to get enough people to pay for it to make it a sustainable business, but at the same time I would have a hard time recommending anyone do anything important through a free service where I couldn't see what the provider was getting out of it.
Or maybe it's just been an interest of his over the time that "security" and associated paranoia have been a part of the public discussion in the US.
Can't just throw a chicken in the oven, unless there's a chicken in the fridge. Can't always have them in the fridge - they go bad in 2-3 days. Don't have the family together reliably enough, half of them will go bad. Freeze them? Add 15 minutes to defrost, up the mess factor by X2, include shopping and freezing the chickens, dividing the chicken into portions, repackaging the leftovers, remembering to reheat the leftovers, time spent cleaning the fridge of month-old disgusting forgotten leftovers. Doesn't Stoeffers have a chicken TV dinner? Sigh.
yup, that's totally okay. it's better to lay out the premise up-front, though, so that my articles can be fail-fast ;)
"I think that stems from the 'we're on the right side' feeling"

What does that have to do with this?
This post is nothing new but it's worth reading if you're a Rails dev because it highlights a uniquely Railsy security flaw, which is the default-allow accessibility of model attributes, which is made worse by the fact that ActiveRecord hides the schema (and therefore the attribute file) from the class definition where you override accessibility.

By default, all attributes should have been inaccessible to ActiveRecord::Base#new and ActiveRecord::Base#update. That was a design-level mistake.
My company's publishing system runs on Perl 5 (and some LaTeX macros). That's the core of my business.

We used Perl 5 because we know the language well, because it has great tools, because it scales from command-line programs to big systems, and because a lot of what we need is serious, fast, and reliable text processing. I have a great deal of confidence that any bugs we find will be easy to resolve, whether it's a problem in our own code or a CPAN component or the Perl 5 core itself. (There have been few bugs; all of them in our own code.)
On the other hand, given the amount of time they spend in the area, and their dependency on the federal workforce in DC, to some degree every other Senator and Representative looks out for DC's interests. DC has plenty of de facto power to get pork, even without the de jure representation.
m0th87,

I plan on adding them in the near future (e.g. delete task, POST, Http Auth).
Is Open Source really Sustainable?
"Of the top five books on the NYTimes advice and how-to bestseller list, half are about cooking"

There are 2.5 books? Lord knows I've read novels with gratuitous cooking scenes, but I wonder whether that's what he means. One should also consider that cookbooks are a handy gift--about the right cost and heft.
johns,

Yeah. Task Management Panel will be added in the future.
Freescale Smartbook Tablet Reference Design
Again, to clarify: I'm not talking about conventional factory farming vs. organic/local farming; I'm not referring to the economies of scale realized by industrialized farming practices.

I'm talking about massive, direct economic subsidies for the kinds of crops that tend to go into prepared foods vs. the comparative absence of massive, direct economic subsidies for the kinds of crops that tend to be the ingredients of home cooked meals. (The actual ingredients of home-cooked meals vs. their prepared equivalents are rarely even remotely similar.)

I hope what this has to do with the cost of cooking ingredients vs. eating prepared food is self-evident.
Manifesto on JAR's Next Language [2002]
All style tags after the first 30 style tags are not applied in IE (4-8)
I did this same thing too in first year undergrad (first year alone in a strange city), and then I realized that I was an idiot. Clearly people hook up all the time, so the probability of meeting someone isn't that low.

Key difference: people who want to hook up put themselves in situations where they meet other people who want to hook up.

The probability of me meeting a fruit vendor is the same if all I had to go on was total random probability of meeting strangers, but instead I just go to my closest grocery store which is conveniently located 80 metres from my house, and then I buy some fruit.
How are you handling employment/income tax issues?
It looks as if someone who grew up coding in FORTRAN on punched cards just ran their brain through f2c then wrote that code. It's very old-school FORTRAN-like.
You know what would be cool? If it could send me a summary of what my script told it. For example, I do batch sending of emails every 10 minutes. It should tell me at the end of the day: Sent 120 emails. 3 emails failed, they are max@max.con, max@max.ckom etc.

I still wouldn't pay for this - it's too easy for me to setup cron for me to pay you to do this for me. You'd have to offer me a lot more compelling reasons to pay you for this.
I am going to go out on a limb and say the reason he does not have a girlfriend is the fact he is too busy pondering the Drake equation. It's funny how highly analytical people can quantify the most difficult things, but fail to see the obvious.

I am sure there is some sort of equation you could perform to figure out how many girls you have to meet daily to increase odds - but instead of doing that, go out and actually meet girls. You might surprise yourself.
I've been using Vanity* for a few weeks and I must say, it's the cat's pyjamas.

* http://github.com/assaf/vanity/
Paid Version: Launch Web requests based on phone calls. Use Twilio for the telephony and use your json results to make it more interactive.
Hmmm. I actually got paid to design and build one of those :-)

For some industries they can be quite useful.
I haven't used it, but a quick Google search turns up this plugin, to require whitelisting mass-assignable attributes:

http://github.com/ryanb/trusted-params

That should fix this problem for apps that use the plugin.
Candidates turning down an offer after accepting is more likely to happen to a small company than to a large one. It's always hard to leave the job one loves for a job one thinks they'll love, it's harder when uncertainty of a start-up enters the mix. On the other hand, it's a lot easier for a start-up to make a candidate feel wanted (because that's actually the case).
The black box test really drives home the point that this is a very discoverable and exploitable issue when not handled correctly.