skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dammit. Off by one.
And the winner is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1000000
It moves very quickly
I have a problem with accepting this. Much of it sounds like it's dumbing down human potential.

If you don't think about the past then how can you learn from previous mistakes? Or reflect on past happinesses?

If you don't think about the future, how will you know where you're headed, or check that you're progressing in the right direction?

I agree that removing past and future anxiety (ie - being in the present) will make you happier in what you're doing, but only to an extent. After a while, just doing day to day things without any sense of direction makes your feel like a drone. Or like an animal that knows just enough to feed, find shelter, etc.

"Doing" in the present is one thing, but dreaming from time to time about the bigger picture is equally important.
Using Gmm/r^2 we find that it should have almost exactly the same gavitaional pull as earth at the surface (89% g). That's neat. Means we could have a boat with a sealed cabin at the right pressure and sail around the ocean with basically normal gravity.
On a side note: Congrats for taking HN in to the 10^6
what!?! this! ;)
Item 10^6
Atlanta is a reasonably well run city. It gets cited a lot as a black city run by blacks that's a good place to do business.
sadly i did not have time to test my script and there was a bug or i would have for sure had it :(
Most of the reactions I see here and on Reddit are dozens of people saying, "Great, I can't use this until it's in IE." I'm not exactly seeing mainstream sites depending on these in-development technologies.
In keeping with the theme, there is also http://citygoround.org/ for finding transit apps that work near you.
Ruby on Rails Tutorial PDF download now available
Suggest HN: Algorithm to guess population size from poll results
Hey,

I'd like to share a little project idea I thought of a few months ago. I immediately liked it and felt like working on it, but I didn't have time. So I suggested it to a few of my friends, but they eventually didn't work on it either. So finally I'm posting it here, maybe someone here will do it, and if so I'd love to see the process and the result.

It's like this:

Make an algorithm that, given results of a poll, guesses the number of people in the population.

For example: "According to the poll, 18.75% of people prefer jazz music, 43.75% of people prefer rock, and 37.5% don't care."

The algorithm will probably guess that only 16 people were asked in the poll.

Now I know, it's gonna get complicated, with probability distributions, rounding errors, heuristics, and whatnot. But I think it will be very interesting, and possibly there will scientific uses for this algorithm as well. Maybe this is a good subject for a paper.

The first step would probably be to phrase and solve this problem mathematically. This will require good knowledge of probability. Then, developing an algorithm.
You forgot Ubisoft, and, of course, Younoodle.
Not me. Well, I'm a post-grad and my Ph.D. is quite mathsy. That doesn't make me a mathematician (I still believe that the title should be earned and I definitely have not yet earned it), but at least I've done some mathematics.

Anyway, I always find it much easier to move from the concrete to the abstract. But once you've mastered an abstraction, it does seem to become "concrete" in your brain and then you can build on it. Thus, with a good background in basic linear algebra, you can move on to tensor analysis, but good luck if you want to jump into tensors straight away.
I don't think the actual government improved. The city turned around, but that's just because loads of crack heads finally died off, many gangsters are permanently incarcerated, and then yuppies moved in and pushed up property values.
When totalitarian hellholes call themselves "people's democratic republic of whatever", nobody blames their failings on democracy and republicanism. Why is communism held to a different standard?
I have used SmartCVS and SmartSVN on Windows, Linux and OS X.
Got the same nice interface on each of the systems.
TortoiseSVN is Windows only, afaik.
I might try SmartGit too, but I doubt I will use it as much as I did SmartSVN—I think I prefer GitX and command line.
That article is weird. They already sent a probe to Titan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens_probe

Maybe it doesn't count if NASA doesn't build it?
WakeMate (YC S09) needs stellar software engineers.
WakeMate recently launched, took pre-orders and then took some angel funding. Now we need to finish building out our product and because of the overwhelming amount of orders we received we need some help. Here is our TC article if you want to know more about us - http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/24/wakemate-sleep-aid/

We need:

1) A backend database systems engineer with experience in python web-based frameworks like Django or Ruby on Rails.

2) A mobile applications engineer with experience designing & building apps on at least one of the main three mobile platforms (iPhone, Android, Blackberry). Experience with more than one platform is a major plus, as is experience programming with bluetooth devices.

Ideally we would like to bring someone on to the team who fits both of these needs, but we are also open to doing some contract work with someone on just one of these.

3) Separately we need a front end guy who would do some design work for us, but this would be on a contract basis.

Location: SF/Silicon Valley preferred but we are open to remote contracting.

Compensation: We can offer a combination of cash, equity and founder status depending on the candidate.

Send resumes & portfolios to greg@wakemate.com
It says a lot about me that I don't even consider this to be a difficult question: I would burn every forest, pave every wetland, and dance over every eggshell to save one African kid I have never met.

That said, it is a false choice. Look at the CDC graphs: we've already annihilated malaria on two continents. North America and Europe strike me as pretty livable. I'm quite willing to do that everywhere.
Historically, Microsoft has put forth their own standards well before anybody else, only to see the official "Standard" be written differently by a 3rd party.

DOM, CSS, Box Model, Events, SVG, and a bunch of other things they did before anybody else (in a straightforward and reverse-engineerable way) were ignored by later groups who put together slightly incompatible "standards", some of which had no reference implementation. NN6, for example, was out for a full year before it implemented the W3C Events model that the Netscape team had proposed (which of course didn't exactly match the reference implementation that IE5 had in place 2 years earlier).

It's only recently that the Standards folks have managed to spec out things that the IE group hadn't done yet.
hugh_ is right. It's a mass/volume calculation.
Thanks for your thoughts! Quick clarification: The App is free. The $3.99 price tag is for IMAP accounts.

We're not making millions of dollars on reMail (yet), but quick iteration is the key to success. We've rewritten the app once, then relaunched, then replaced its guts, then changed the business model, experimented with UIs and so on. Every time we do that more users start using the product. I guess the perception of Apps in the store is that most are one-hit wonders. Instead of cranking out a new app every two weeks, we're trying to make the one app we have better and better. I'll let you know how that worked out :-)
Go doesn't provide assertions
Of course not -- environmentalists don't value mosquitoes more than Africans. To say that would be a monstrous calumny.

Environmentalists value birds over Africans.
2 minutes between bkudria's comment and pg's submission.

Been watching the odometer? ;)
Why will performance go up when shifting from compilation targeting C to CPS-style compilation to assembly without compiler optimizations implemented? C compilers are crammed full of optimizations, so I would naively think that writing your own code generator is a lose in both complexity and performance.
I don't understand your assumption that users are buying iPhones only to use this app and not, say, to also make phone calls and browse the web. In the past, people bought iPhones even when this app was not available, and they paid more.

You should be asking instead if it's economical to invest $2 into an app to save 40 cents on ketchup. (And, if you plan to make more than five such purchases, the answer is "yes".)
You can take solace in the fact that you just had your 1K karma day :-)
At least the comment was original.
I was secretly hoping pg would hack things so that 10^6 was just skipped ;)
What I find awesome is people taking otherwise abandoned knowledge and breathing life into it again. It doesn't matters whether it is CMU, MIT, or De Anza College. The sharing of experience and thought is something we need more of.

I guess I would call it organic learning communities. And as momentum grows, these learning communities will change the way we think about education.

For me, it's an amazing opportunity to have a structure course presented after completing university. As an undergraduate, I never got the mathematics education that I now want.

When I watch one of these courses I actually download the syllabus and go through a class as if I were a student. I find that doing this really helps me get through the materials and complete the course.

The thing I like about MIT OpenCourseWear (OCW) is how complete the courses are. You can generally find all the related materials on the OCW website. A number of schools (Berkeley, UCLA) will post videos but fail to include documents that were passed out in class. Nothing is more frustrating than seeing everyone pickup a handout but not being able to get your hands on it.
How can we stop the botnets?
It was signed into law by the same guy as the Defense of Marriage Act.
It's hard to let go, but I'm working on it, so as a last throw of the dice, spin of the wheel, let's give these one last airing and if they get no response I'll move on:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=994358

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=996250
or "make something not that many people want to pay lots of money for"
The DMCA was created over a decade ago. Back then, the concept of streaming, let alone live video, was pretty much nonexistent.
Now we look to the 2^20 day:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1048576
I didn't try the "No" button, but I was amused to see that you are allowed (actually encouraged) to vote more than once.

Chicago style polls: vote early and often.
I considered it, but item ids are so deep in the code that it would have been asking for trouble.
Clearly not such a good idea. I thought HN was the perfect audience. Apart from your comment and one up-mod each, both stories have sunk wthout trace.
Among other reasons, because when compiling to assembly you can invent your own, model-appropriate calling conventions.
I agree on all points except I like a GUI tool for visualization, which I still use gitk for because none of the other tools on OS X even come close to the information density.

I'm also somewhat wanting of a better mergetool since I'm a little sketchy with the CLI tools for that, and usually end up merging anything complicated by hand.
1000000 GET
These lists are derived from employees' own reviews of the company on glassdoor. I'd trust them more than most.
That's a lot of guess work on my part, but I've yet to hear a better explanation for why there are hordes of homeless in SF.

Translation: I like my guess better than the explanation I'm responding to, so I'm going to label it as "better", even though I've just admitted that I have no data or idea of what I'm talking about.
It is a poor comparison, because the services provided by the state of Idaho and the city of San Francisco are so different. The author should have compared the sum of budgets of all cities in Idaho, or better yet found cities that are individually similar to San Francisco in ways other than spending (such as San Jose or Jersey City).

I think you're wrong about population and density though. I'd expect that the huge concentration of people would lower per-capita infrastructure costs and enable other economies of scale. Comparing San Francisco to New York City, we find that NYC, with 8.3 million residents [1] in 305 sq. mi [2] has budgeted $43.4 billion for FY2010 [3]. San Francisco has 47 sq. mi [4], so it's much less dense and yet spends over 50% more per capita.

[1] http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/census/popcur.shtml
[2] http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/landusefacts/landusefactsho...
[3] http://www.nyc.gov/html/omb/downloads/pdf/sum1_09.pdf
[4] http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:pRkHCezT76IJ:www.ci.sf.c...
There are lots of homeless people in San Francisco because San Francisco is a good place to be homeless.
Yeah gitx really bother me. The whole point of git is its amazing power. As much as a nicely designed OS X app makes me feel good, I'm not about to throw out the power of something like gitk and the speed of the command line for basic tasks in exchange for a watered down interface.

Even though gitk commits some of the most heinous UI sins on OS X—such as remembering large windows even after switching monitors so that you end up with a box that can not be resized without editing ~/.gitk—it's still head and shoulders above all the native OS X apps I've tried.

If a commercial product is good, I'm all for seeing it garner votes on HN.
Hexbug Micro Robotic Creatures
I didn't like that the charts at the start have different scale for the last one and as was pointed out there is geographic variety in response time test which is kind of important. Despite that, it's a good place to start any kind of CDN comparison.
"Of course their technical and operational execution is excellent"

Clearly spoken by someone who has only seen the beast from the outside...
It would be nice if this degraded more gracefully. There are going to be people that arrive at that link without hitting the JS for whatever reason. Arriving at a blank white page is going to confuse them.
New web startup launches public beta today
There is maven. Oh, and jpackage for rpm. And debian creates packages for quite a few jars.

Hopefully this will get easier in Java 7 with the modularity work in Project Jigsaw:
http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jigsaw/
Using production data sets is very important. It's also really important to understand what your users are doing or will be doing with your application. It doesn't matter if the dataset is realistic if the simulated traffic doesn't represent realistic activity.
Network while you travel - inspiration.
I asked a feral human (which really, takes some doing) and he explained that by corralling the rich people into the cities, and getting them to help push out the feral -- well, it made the rich people easier to harvest or, more commonly, cull for meat. I offered that, well, if that is the motivation, then you can hardly call yourselves feral any longer for, clearly, you've developed animal husbandry. He conceded that I was probably right and that, for pointing out his error, I deserved some reward. So he gave me an approved lease on this apartment in the city! And I'm not even rich!
Missed that. Thanks.
You're right, let's stop running apps on Linux, Apache, PHP, Ruby, Python, Rails...
Grats!
It's a darwinist thing.
Looks suspiciously like the professor's notes from the linear algebra class I took (on the opposite side of the same country) for the first part. Then my professor started talking about homomorphisms, and things started getting GOOD.

A vector space is an abelian group, a scalar field, and a homomorphism from the field to automorphisms of the group. That's all you need to remember for definitions.
perfect example to give when someone asks about the value of YC. Sure $5K is a drop in the bucket..hell I just dropped that on my holiday promotion. But does anyone think that without the YC connections and validation, that the remail guys would have gotten this deal? I doubt that.
14 Business Principles of Goldman Sachs 
No 2. => "Our assets are our people, capital and reputation. If any of these is ever diminished, the last is the most difficult to restore."
Not if there are certain things that are truly beautiful and good and will never occur again if we destroy them. Those things are worth saving, and that's not being anthropomorphic.
I've read that this is how NYC has "taken care of their homeless problem": they simply let the homeless die, which is quite easy to do in NYC during the winter by forcing the homeless to sleep outdoors, where the weather is much more deadly than it ever gets in San Francisco.

What is wrong with letting the homeless die, though? We don't have any problem with letting rats die, or pigeons, if they can't manage to support themselves. Why do I have an obligation to help another animal just cuz it happens to be the same species as me?
Maybe when Microsoft implements Web Sockets in their browser 10 years from now, this might be applicable.

FWIW, I believe the proper usage is "X is dead, long live X".
I'm definitely not talking about poor people. I'm talking about people who are literally incapable of living in a civilized society. People such as:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/12/02/... (multiple random stabbings on Muni and the streets)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Ramos (Triple drive-by gang murder against people he erroneously thought were in a rival gang)

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/24/... (Murdered a pizzeria employee apparently because she didn't like his beard)

That guy I saw defecating on Haight Street (ok, maybe that one was my fault for going to the Haight).

BTW congrats on item 10^6 :-)
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Ah, I see why SF attracts so many homosexuals, cost of living is much lower when you don't have to provide for children. So, homosexuals both get a nice living area, and all the heterosexuals who form families and might look down on their choices are filtered out. Best of both worlds for them.
Browser Size, from Google Labs
As a customer of s3 looking to use ec2, can you elaborate?
The Facebook Privacy Settings You've Lost Forever
It is painful to watch this. There's a HUGE opportunity for these companies to provide live sports content in a simple and unrestricted (i.e. not locked-in to a particular ISP in the case of ESPN 360) way on the web and these companies are blowing it.
Knifes from a Japanese Master - Wait List of 2 Years
Still a loooooong way to go... but the item IDs aren't limited to 32 bit ints are they? ;)
It would be nice if psychologists would be honest and introspective enough to call their field an Art... at least until the appearance of a Hari Seldon.
They did already send a probe to Titan, but the Europa probe project was in direct competition with a project to send another probe to Titan:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Saturn_System_Mission

This one would have included a lake lander and a balloon, and would have been generally neat-o, however I agree with NASA that Europa should be a higher priority for now.
The original post had no more data than the response. This post simply demonstrated that you could draw the exact opposite conclusion given the same amount of data (or lack thereof). Thus, it serves to invalidate the original remark without necessarily itself being correct.
Thank you for being honest. I only wish more advocates of cutting off aid to homeless people were even half as honest as you.
http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/GitFaq#Whythe.27git.27name.3F

Quoting Linus: "I'm an egotistical ###, and I name all my projects after myself. First 'Linux', now 'git'".

('git' is British slang for "pig headed, think they are always correct, argumentative").
Can you estimate how quickly 2e6 will occur at the current growth rate? I wouldn't be surprised if it happened in 2010.
App Engine JavaScript SDK
Multi-Process Plugins for Firefox
I must be missing something. Can't you just put your city's name in with your other search terms when using a normal app store? What does this add over that?
Which I don't disagree with either. So we are basically preaching to each of our respective choirs :)
Curious: has any of you used Linear Algebra in outside settings of academia? I know there are lots of uses in stats, numerical analysis, non-linear dynamics, and optimization but I've never used it practically.
Kinda cool, but it doesn't work well if you have a widescreen monitor with the browser full screen & your site is center aligned.

It seems to only work if you left align all your content.
Like all big companies... they refuse to innovate. It is such a shame. Partner with Justin.tv Don't take them to Congress!
Black Google Search Portal
Once you start looking for "interesting" ids you can find all sorts of reasons to find them. 2^20, the next prime, Fibonacci numbers, etc.

Perhaps for any given point in a increasing number series there is an infinite number of interesting numbers just around the corner.

Sigh.

It's the sieve of Giraffes
We could walk too!
The Web Is Your CMS
Which makes it a popular target of Greyhound therapy, along with LA.
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Your first point has been satisfiably answered by fellow commenters so I will leave it alone.

Karl Marx had a word for the “underclass” as you describe them. That is the “lumen-proletariat” (i.e. under the proletariat). What he advocated for them was as bad (if not worse) as his policies against the bourgeois.

No. OK this is clearly an argument from ignorance. First, please don't give German lessons if you don't speak German. The word is "lumpenproletariat" and it doesn't refer to anything like the "underclass" of which I was speaking. Lumpen doesn't translate to "under the proletariat" but to something like "rags of the proletariat." Marx was describing the people who he saw as being the refuse of the society: thieves, con-men, pimps (brothel owners).

From Marx himself:

Das Lumpenproletariat, diese passive Verfaulung der untersten Schichten der alten Gesellschaft, wird durch eine proletarische Revolution stellenweise in die Bewegung hineingeschleudert, seiner ganzen Lebenslage nach wird es bereitwilliger sein, sich zu reaktionären Umtrieben erkaufen zu lassen.

Roughly translated to[1]:

The “dangerous class”, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.

You'll notice that he basically said they were tools (ostensibly independent) who were likely to defend the status quo and would have to be defeated when the time came. I'd like to see where he advocated their slaughter.

[1] I'm lazy: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-ma...
I could cherry pick some senseless violence stories from any large American city. They don't prove anything.

While I do think San Francisco is poorly managed, it's naive to think that its homeless problem is caused solely by bad governance. It's a combination of a lot of different things: the hippies that turned into deranged homeless people, the strong lure of California for those down on their luck, the strong drug culture, the very consistent temperatures, the size of Golden Gate Park, etc.
Thanks for building this site, Paul.
> It's the sieve of Giraffes

Or the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox

Every number is interesting somehow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_number - and the quote: "Every positive integer is one of Ramanujan's personal friends."—J. E. Littlewood, upon hearing of the taxicab incident.
It isn't working for me either. I'm on the latest version of Chrome, with both Flash and JS enabled!
You can work around this by resizing your browser to the width you want to test at.