skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is it just me, or does that page break everyone else's "back" button?

Anyway, not much of interest here. Ad company exploits new-ish social phenomenon, gets free publicity from media outlets looking for something to write about new-ish social phenomenon, world shrugs and moves on to the next thing.
Of course the first thing I did was validate it. Couldn't help myself... It passed.
Seems like this could be addressed by a browser UI enhancement. That is, let the user decide when to cut off a slow connection and try another IP. After n seconds show a "try elsewhere" bar.
Has Someone Already Done It?
You are graded on your paid work done, community participation, references from clients, and a qualification exam. If you get enough points, you get listed in the directory.
The HTML did, but not the CSS :-P

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http%3A%2F%...
Designers are not Programmers
Whoa! A new revolution in annoying advertisement pop-ups is coming...
oneforty can make money with sponsored application sections and a cut on selling applications. So it can be a profitable business on its own.

but first they need eyeballs.
It would be better done with canvas and javascript.

As of right now, it is a poorly done game with an ever expanding popup windows. It is hard to figure out what and where the paddle is. I automatically won 3 points merely being confused.

It is hard to see why the inhabitant of hacker news voted up the story.
Doesn't work at all when using xmonad :)
Absolutely. The lame excuse leads to the obvious conclusion that he could not give a demo of YouTube streaming video, which is very curious.

It might be an ARM processor. Flash can run on an ARM (works on my Nokia N800), but that is not a free flash player from Adobe. Money is a known issue, so that might be the explanation.

It might indeed be a custom OS rather than linux and they don't have flash (a binary blob) running on their custom OS, but why would they not use linux???

Hmmm, it could be a MIPS derivative (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson) - I don't know what the flash player availability is on MIPS. Interesting thought...
I couldn't find a really good source. It is referred to fairly often however:

http://weboflife.nasa.gov/currentResearch/currentResearchGen...

"The lack of gravity during space flight affects living things in a variety of ways. A number of these mimic common effects of aging."

Puts it very nicely. Perhaps the space scientists don't want scare people about going into space.

Also, more googling for you:

www.joanvernikos.com/uploads/space_and_aging.pdf

As the duration of space flight missions has increased, many other symptoms related in particular to being away from gravity have been observed. They include a kind of anemia due to reduced red cell mass, muscle atrophy and reduced strength of those muscles that keep the body upright, loss of calcium from bones, reduced bone density and strength, reduced calcium absorption from the gut, disturbed sleep and a depressed immune system. These are all normal body function adaptations that occur when away from gravity. Degradation of body functions no longer needed in space is the normal adaptation to living away from gravity.

-- Simulates the effects of aging...
Neat.

I'm sure I'm not the first to cheat by enlarging my paddle browser. But strange they didn't make the borders of the popup non-resizable.
Love the googly eyes in the default image. Way to make an attractive webpage guys.
Lame humor.
It demonstrates a neat effect. I'm sure many people like me soon were right-clicking to inspect the code.

edit:

And I'm sure this was done with just our kind of people in mind:

/*

Dear Source-Code-Reader

First of all, thank you for caring. Not that many
people view source. One of the beautiful things
about JavaScript is that it's necessarily Open-Source.
I like that a lot. I hope you find this source code
somewhat useful, and not too dirty. Remeber to
pay it forward.

Stewart Smith, Stewdio.
December 2009.

*/
Aluminum Smelting is actually one of the main industries in Iceland due to cheep electricity costs which are below below US, Europe, and China. At the same time Iceland's renewable energy industry provides over 70% of all the nation's primary energy and 99.9% of Iceland's electricity being generated from renewables. Iceland has explored the feasibility of exporting hydroelectric energy via submarine cable to mainland Europe and also actively seeks to expand its power-intensive industries, including aluminium and ferro-silicon smelting plants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Iceland
Any list of "algorithms that changed the world" which doesn't include the FFT is utterly bogus.
It looks a bit like a generic domain squatters landing page. No soul. Before it showed clearly that passionate programmers where at work. Now it looks like a "design job". A bit too much for my taste.
Unsecured Business Loans
I found EZUnsecured.com while searching in google for unsecured financing.I found them very helpful as they helped me in getting 50000$ Unsecured Loan.I have currently applied for an additional 85000$ for My Business and expect to get it within next week.
That sounds like a bad solution for such a problem.

Imagine your typical internet user going to yahoo.com and being asked "Try elsewhere?". They'd have no idea what that means. They don't know what IP addresses, servers or anything like that is.
A bit off topic, but: I like the way you get redundancy with Amazon: Elastic Load Balancing can proxy traffic to multiple availability zones. That said, Amazon AWS have had outages this year - goes with the business.
Nope, there in Lithuania show was delayed by 30 minutes for the same reason. Another one went without sound…
It's amusing that Techcrunch considers themselves and a handful of other startups "the internet".

This is why we architect provider independent solutions. Keep your TTLs low. Replicate your site to another provider, and be prepared to hit the switch when your primary provider inevitably fails. All datacenters lose power, all networks get borked, and all storage systems fail. It's a fact of life.
As you say, much of your points are personal judgments. I do want to respond to some that aren't:

"2. We're still well within the bounds of normal, habitable historical temperatures."

This is a severe oversimplification, IMHO. Human society is sensitive not just to whether the Earth is overall habitable, but to impacts to the significant "sunk costs" we have in the locations of population centers. It's not much comfort to the people of California if the Earth remains habitable on average when the Sierra snowmelt disappears and the state faces a drought of unprecedented proportions.

"4. Carbon dioxide currently makes up 0.3% of the greenhouse gases including water vapor, and about 5% of the non-water vapor greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide increases are lagging temperature increases - suggesting that CO2 is not the biggest culprit of global warming."

Where do you get that CO2 is 0.3% of greenhouse gases? It's true that water vapor is the largest contributor to the greenhouse effect, but CO2 is next. It accounts for 50% of the non-water greenhouse gases and for way more than 0.3% of the total greenhouse effect. Besides, counting water is a little spurious because the water content of the atmosphere is set by the temperature. Thus, if temperature goes up, water content goes up. So saying that CO2 doesn't matter because water vapor is much more important is wrong, it's precisely the opposite. CO2 matters more because its effect is amplified by water. (Barring controversies about cloud covers.)

CO2 is also the greenhouse gas that has the longest lifetime in the atmosphere. The others (methane, etc) break down a lot quicker.
And still a wrong doctype or mime type, depending on how you look at it.
It might have been possible to send humans beings to Mars in the 1970's - if you weren't concerned whether they arrived alive at the end.

The problem is that wouldn't have proved the prowess of US or Soviet technology.
When Rackspace has an outage does that generally mean Slicehost does as well? I ask because I was looking at using Slicehost but being a Rackspace company has me leery.
Not sure if I would go so far as to say it looks like a domain squatter page.
Facebook Announces Third F8 Conference on April 21-22
Low Testosterone Therapy- Boost Testosterone Without Drugs
Really, the one-liners are a reaction to the inflated importance people assign to a service which, to my best knowledge, doesn't even have any real plan to make a sustainable amount of money. Would a serious cyber-terrorist really choose Twitter to establish themselves as a credible threat?

I'd argue that the lampooning of such breathless awe, far from being some malevolent outside influence which is "hurting" the community, is a part of the community.
Report: Security Breach Behind Twitter Outage Didn’t Originate with DNS Provider
I tend to.
I liked most of it except for the blind Windows hate on the last one. I especially liked the XML one.
I was disappointed at first to see that the predictions for 2010 from (google.com) were actually some guy's sites.google.com site with "funny" fake predictions. I decided to humor the guy and I wasn't completely disappointed. #3 made me laugh.
#14 is funny
Science Videos Search: search many science video sites easily
I'm having the exact same problem on OS X 10.6
Yes but $9b of "credit" is created this way. The US government emphatically does not sell bonds for credit, only cash, which you still only have $1b of...
It's a read-only database of cocktails. Hasn't this been done to death? Is there an angle to the concept that i'm missing?
Shor's algorythm
Science is NOT about consensus. "Scientists" have no monopoly on truth. Science is about facts. Observation. Falsifiable, objective, and independently reproducible theories. They either produce predictions that match reality or they don't. It doesn't matter if the scientific establishment believes or disbelieves in the hall effect, or special relativity, or high temperature superconductivity. They are either real or not independent of the opinion of the majority of scientists.

One hopes that the scientific community is sufficiently objective and disciplined to embrace true science when they see it, but that may not be (and has not been) the case always.

Consensus should follow science but consensus cannot create science.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dio...

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nom...
http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/18/iphone-nabs-46-pecent-of-...

[About half-way down] The iPhone is less than 10% when compared to more realistic competitors.
Holiday party. Someone spilled egg nog on a surge protector.
Yeah the snotty attitude advanced in the article is pretty offensive. If you run something on the internet and rely on it for your dinner, you don't really have an excuse for single points of failure. Do your job.

It's exceptionally easy to engineer around these issues if you don't just outsource all of your thinking to a provider.
REST in practice for IT and Cloud management (part 3: wrap-up)
PR vs. CYA
Because it's a neat hack.
That wouldn't surprise me but I'm not sure it's germane to my point that he seems like a perfect candidate for Careers at StackOverflow. Yet he had one hell of a time finding a job. Yes it's new and yes not a lot of employers are on there yet but this guy was in a pretty decent area as far as tech talent and needs go. I'd think given his SO rep, he would have known about the Careers section and given it a go.

If he did and still couldn't find a job, I just find that interesting.
In case this wasn't clear, he didn't just "fail to test the code". He consciously put $1, where it was promised to be free. That is, he chose to not deliver what was promised. Not a "bug". Not a "mistake".
I can't believe how TechCrunch is turning into a tech-tabloid.

Yes, there are issues (perhaps sometimes serious) that needs reporting - but - the way it is done by TC isn't quite the quality I'm excepting.
Without reading the article: this follows directly from "Twitter is typically reached via HTTP and does not require users to type https://.
No, but it was $29 when he was looking which is almost negligible. If you're going to go broke, it will happen whether or not you have an extra $29.

On top of that, I have no doubt that if he emailed the team at StackOverflow and told them his situation, they would have gladly waived the fee. I just don't see the money as being a sticking point.
Ask HN: C/C++ Knowledge severely needed?
Hi guys,

in university we learn full time Java. At work I learned PHP and a little Bash. Just for myself I learned a lot of Python (I think I can use CPython and Django better than PHP and the company internally developed web framework). But these days in many cases I get the feeling that my lack of middle class languages (C/C++) are a really bad problem. So, do U guys think it is worth investing time I could spent making money, hanging out with friends, working on open source/my blog/other contributions, going deeper in SICP/onLisp or studying more deeply what I learn in university, to get a grip at these 2 languages?

Yes I know it is some knowledge that comes in quite handy, if U have it. But everytime U decide to go a new path U invest a great deal of time, engergy and what U could have gained with walking on known paths. What do U think?

I really need some guidance and some experience reports here! Even if it is not from Urself but some reference to other sources (Blog entries, books who talk about this matter).

Just for Ur time, I thank in advance.

(because english is my second language: spelling and grammar comments are welcome, too)
I believe most Slicehost slices are still hosted in St. Louis and would not be subject to the DFW data center downtime. Not sure if new ones are being created their or not.
The deal Tiger made to keep out of the National Enquirer
Scientists May Have Found Dark Matter in Minnesota Mine
without to mention how trivial is to replicate a blog.
Wow, the author's website has some fun stuff on it. Checkout hiding messages in Photoshop histograms: http://stewdio.org/work/histoface/
Thanks for sharing the numbers!

(And the story to make them digestible.)
I think you're missing the point. It's a fun hack. It's an off center way of doing something.

This is how new cool stuff gets created. Think outside the box. Think "hah what if we...." etc
Maybe the refresh button should just try another A record. Most of the time when a page is not responsive I'll give it a couple refreshes before I conclude it's dead.

(Or maybe some browsers do this already.)
perhaps the twitter employee that used "password" as his admin password forgot to change it on all his websites
17. Friendster revives to become the number one social network for gerbils.
Being able to program corrupts your ability to focus solely on the human.

Lines like this make me think the whole thing is an overworked troll. Domain name included. I couldn't be bothered to read much more. That said, my favorite part is from the profile:

my current snowboard is from Lib Tech. I live in a small cottage in a remote part of the Swiss Alps

sweet...
As professional as one could be, it would just gradually eat away at anyone knowing they were contributing work to something that they are at aims with.

I recently went through this (not military related) - working on something I had conflicts with. I did it for a few months and then, for the first time in my career, one morning I really did not want to go to work. I sat and stared at the wall for 10 minutes wondering if I should go or not.

This is probably the reason they ask.
Yahoo Search - Directory Search (blast from the past)
I wonder if it lies when it is too embarrassed to reply "sorry I don't know" like a real Indian.
Seriously?! I get modded down for asking a serious question? WTF? And, the response I get is basically "well you weren't paying attention. Anyone with half a brain knew this." Really?

Just the hummer joke alone should garner something. Sweet baby jeez no sense of humor.
Google to add space, jobs in Pittsburgh
Wow. Seattle, SF, NYC, etc. must be little islands of prosperity for programmers... Still seems pretty active. The OP went to Charlestown, SC ("home")... I wonder if he tried remote work? It seems like if he was willing to work retail/gas stations that he could find SOMEONE who would pay him $10/hr to do junior coding working from abroad AT VERY LEAST...
Linode.
I loved it. My fiancee and I have been talking about a similar business (not competing, bingo cards are all you) and it was interesting to see how your business has progressed and where you are.
> Consider the exorbitant cost of the LHC, which is one of the single greatest achievements of human engineering and physics.

And also two orders of magnitude less expensive than proposed global warming solutions:

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-09/defense-lhc
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05...
Kvardek Du: SBCL10 - Tenth year of SBCL
From the looks of the star html and _border declarations, validation is failing due to the IE-specific hacks :-P
What grade-level students do you find are using your cards?
"...after it's discovered that the entire banking industry is held together with Visual Basic 6 and Excel macros."

This is truer than anyone here would like to admit...
Google Wave is a Spammer's Dream
Arrington said CrunchPad was Atom-based; if so they could use the stock Linux/x86 Flash Player.

I wasn't aware that Nokia is paying for Flash Player; that would certainly add a twist to the "Open Screen Project" if true. (More like open wallet?)
Well, I was right about one thing
http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Things-Every-Developer-Should-Kno...

Post a status update and get the resulting status back as JSON: curl -u username:password -d status="your message here" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json

what it doesn't tell you is that it sends the pw in the clear (unless you count base64 as crypto!)
A lot of "shock" photography is like that. I don't mean shock in the "shockumentary" sense but rather in the sense that you cannot easily reproduce the photograph without gear and access. HDRs are similar.

Sadly, shock photography does very well on the internets. Photos like this, while of value as reference and of some interest, are ultimately devoid of any artistic content and basically show off a process and a location, not a photographer's ability.
There are a ton of stitching errors. I imagine the algorithm chosen was optimized for time, not for accuracy.
"8. The TARP bailout is extended to Microsoft after it's discovered that the entire banking industry is held together with Visual Basic 6 and Excel macros."

That second part is eerily accurate.
This is probably more accurate than most predictions you'll read elsewhere.

For what it's worth, the author of this is clawrencewenham on HN, a consistent source of good content.
I personally thought these were hilarious (esp #1).

You bring up a good (if slightly offtopic) point. There should be something to differentiate sites.google.com pages from those officially published by Google. Just add the "sites." so we know the difference.
If you have to be evasive for legal reasons it's probably smarter to not give the interview at all than to give a bad interview.
I hope you're joking, but if not... I think this is actually a fantastic example of what it means to hack. It's a very unexpected, humorous example of doing something with technology, that the designers of the technology (I'm pretty sure!) never would have anticipated.
The last boss I had included 1 day off for Christmas shopping that you could take any day between Dec 1st and 24th

That was totally appreciated.
I agree with you but I'd bet those are TechCrunch's most popular posts. In fact, the author (MG Siegler) was essentially hired because he's good at writing those types of post.

People like trashy journalism. It's like the Tiger Woods thing. I don't mind the networks reporting on it but the fact that it's been the top item on "legitimate" news sites should tell you how modern day journalism works.
I would have added "Microsoft then gives the money back after realizing that accepting it requires them to support VB6 in perpetuity."
why are the left and top menus (standards, participate, ...) the same? that seems very odd for an otherwise fairly professional-looking page.

edit: and why have the "pointer" point to yet another instance of the word "standards" rather than the one in the top menu? i know it's way better than it was, but it seems odd to be so much better and yet still have odd things like that...
The example with function m in their "white paper" (http://www.supercompilers.com/white_paper.shtml) is still not optimized fully. One first inlines the successive values of y:

if (x0<=0) y=0;
else
if (x0>=1) y=1;
else {
if ((2-3*x0)<=0) y=0;
else
if ((2-3*x0)>=1) y=1;
else {
if ((2-3*(2-3*x0))<=0) y=0;
else
if ((2-3*(2-3*x0))>=1) y=1;
else {
...
else {
y = (2-3*(2-3*(2-3*(2-3*(2-3*x0)))));
} } } } }

These can be solved for x0.

if (x0<=0) y=0;
else
if (x0>=1) y=1;
else {
if ((2/3)<=x0) y=0;
else
if ((1/3)>=x0) y=1;
else {
if (x0<=(4/9)) y=0;
else
if (x0>=(5/9)) y=1;
else {
...
else {
y = (2-3*(2-3*(2-3*(2-3*(2-3*x0)))));
} } } } }

Obviously, because floating point arithmetic is not distributive or associative (or exact), the actual constants will be slightly different from 1/3, 2/3, etc.

This performs an average of .004 subtractions and multiplications compared to my estimate of .988 for their algorithm.

Since this will probably not give strictly matching results for values close to 1/3, 2/3, 4/9, 5/9, etc., this is technically "super optimization" rather than supercompilation.

Are there any optimizers you know of that could get this far?
Those who think they have nothing to hide now can't always see into the future.

http://www.stockmaven.com/ibmstory.htm

"This approach appears to have been used in the Netherlands when small-area tabulations of population data by religion from the 1930 Dutch census made up one of several data sources used in the development of the so-called 'dot maps' of Amsterdam," he says. "These maps, which showed areas of the city where the density of the Jewish population was the highest, were used in planning Nazi-inspired attacks on some of these neighborhoods in February 1941."
17. Inane shite will still make it to the Hacker News front page.
Billionaire buys up 11% of Take-Two
Dig deeper.

But you are right, the underlying system is hard to figure out.
The (google.com) ending is a little misleading since it's just someone's hosted site on sites.google.com. It's not google's opinion, but it would be a lot funnier if it was.
I'm surprised to hear WebKit's DOM Inspector being compared unfavorably to Firebug. What's missing?
Which really goes to highlight the biggest flaw with DRM: It's an additional cost to add something that will not, under any circumstances, improve the customer's experience.

It's one thing to have a black market providing illicit versions of a product, but when the black market provides a superior product at lower cost with, often, greater convenience? Something that has gone horribly, terribly wrong.
If Bill Cosby Trusts the TI-99, So Do I
From what I've heard new slices are automatically created in DFW, but you can request that they be moved to an STL datacenter by contacting support.
Thanks for posting your annual write-ups. You have a straightforward style of writing that's very enjoyable to read!