skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting is the start of the real growth roughly a year after the launch, coinciding with a broadening of the scope of HN.

This isn't true. What you're seeing there is the usual holiday dropoff, followed by the huge bump that happened when Arrington outed us. Actually HN's growth rate has been pretty consistent throughout. A graph of x^n generally looks as if it's nearly flat initially and then takes off at some point, but this is an illusion.

It also isn't true that the change in focus happened then. We changed the site from "Startup News" to "Hacker News" after 6 months.
Great weekend hack! One annoying request: paren-sensitive text box. :)
See timcederman's post below. Reviews can, and do disappear apparently. Yelp admits the "spam algorithm" can be aggressive on new reviewers.

>>"[The] spam algorithm can filter based on how established user is. [Your post was] not deleted & can re-appear on biz page. Still live on your profile."

It sounds fishy to me. Who cares if the review is "still live on your profile" if it's not live on the business page. It doesn't sound like a spam filter to me, it sounds like selective removal of reviews.
I have NoScript enabled and see nothing spectacular. This is probably more of a JS trick than a CSS one.
Google I/O 2010 Sessions
Unit Test or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Test
I found myself thinking: If you have slow sales, you should have more time to straighten up the place.
I think you're right, but I think it's both.
the only thing that consistently makes people happy (as opposed to just content, food, shelter etc.) is having higher status than their peers. thus human happiness has a zero-sum component.
My father is a teacher. To this day he still says: "Nothing succeeds like success or fails like failure." Meaning children need positive reinforcement to help achieve goals that are slightly beyond their reach. Once they succeed they will most likely continue to do so.
That's true, but other observational studies have also connected many forms of inactivity to reduced health relative to many forms of activity.
Are You The Best Version Of Yourself? - The Converted Geek Guide To Self-Upgrade
I dunno, but the credit card companies seem to be doing a pretty good job of it. Same with the Federal Reserve. Would you get rid of them as well? ;-)

(It's a semi-serious question. Credit card companies encourage people to buy things they can't afford and then carry the balance - it's how they make money. And the Federal Reserve attempts to cause continual low-level inflation, such that savings are worth less and debts are easier to pay back the longer you carry them. I don't really support either practice, but there are lots of things America is doing to discourage savings and encourage debt.)
I <3 my treadmill desk.
... and don't forget the greed. Looked at where stuff is made recently? I see a ton of stuff around me that comes directly from China. We like to buy stuff cheap from China, and we like to ignore the fact that China is not a free society. If we cared we would vote with our wallets, but we don't care. And in my opinion so don't a lot of Chinese (I didn't say all, or even most, but a lot) as long as it brings in the cash and the BMWs.
Directory of local tech communities
I'm working on a directory of local tech communities in the US. What else exists?

http://techscene.us
Building Your Knowledge Portfolio
Having a parent at home is a broken window?
As others have said, Gaussian elimination, or if the matrix is not invertible (square and singular or not square) then the Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse can be used to find the least squares solution.
this is veering into monetary policy. the government inflates the dollar to pay for things without raising unpopular taxes (80% of treasury bonds purchased by the fed last year). constant inflation causes several things

A) a disincentive to pay debts since they will be cheaper in the future

B) a disincentive to save since your money will have less purchasing power in the future
Atlas Venture shrinks back to Boston office
"There're costs to that economic output that are not reflected in its dollar value."

I agree, but I'd rather put that decision in the hands of each individual and not a bunch of central planning bureaucrats. You're assuming that people aren't capable of weighing all the costs (dollars or otherwise).
"Although it is possible that people who were already ill watched more television than those who were healthy, the researchers tried to rule that out by excluding subjects who already had heart disease.."

This is a typical same old correlation - causation confusion. There are many more "althoughs" and all of them have to be excluded before the title can be justified.
uh...my point was that goodness/badness is a product of interaction between circumstance and people's aggregate preferences.
This is basically the project I started working on a few weeks ago. If anyone is interested in getting together on this, feel free to get in touch (my email address is in my profile). I'm a programmer located in the Mission district of San Francisco.

It would be a nice to have a Craigslist or Wikipedia-style Yelp (fast, lightweight, and non-evil).
I don't know. I think that most trully disruptive technologies go through a phase where people who consider themselves "in the know," look for a thousand ways to dismiss it and its advocates.

I'm not making any predictions about Wave. I know I'd be trying it for a volunteer project I'm working on if it had better bridges too and from email.
This is partly inaccurate. You can connect two Google Voice accounts to one number, as long as it is marked as your "home" or "work" number (not a "cell").

However, if you actually used your cell phones in this way, then you'd give up the SMS receiving I think.
Any idea what caused that huge spike in late August/early September?
A lower paying position is still full time work, after all.

There's 9-to-5 full time and there's chained-to-your-Blackberry, I'm-going-to-need-you-to-come-in-on-Sunday full time.
If the parameters are set right, this could potentially increase the overall happiness of the society.

Anyone ever wonders why we earn so much more than our parents and grandparents, yet we're not any happier?

Data shows that inter-generational happiness stays the same, despite the fact that within the same society during the same time period, richer people are actually happier on average.

My hypothesis is that greater material wealth in the recent past comes with serious human toll. Higher competition at all levels. Larger and larger gaps between the rich and the poor, the skilled and the unskilled, the well-connected and the commoner. These effects offset the materials comfort we gain from all these fantastic technological innovations.

Focus on and competition for material wealth does shift us away from certain communal bonds & feelings. To experience an extreme case, try visit a middle- or lower-end shopping mall in China, you can feel the intense greed and competitiveness between sellers. That's hyper-competition at work. We feel it a bit more abstractly in a developed country. But it's certainly there.

I bet many people who has watched Avatar actually want to live as a Navi'. Their lack of material wealth and powerful technologies are more than compensated for by community bonds, closeness to the beauty of nature, and minimal competition for status. Such a community actually exists. Many of them can be found in a more remote part of the world. Bhutan and certain communities of Buddhist monks, for example, come to mind.

For more on this, I recommend this TED talk by Matthieu Ricard on the habits of happiness:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/matthieu_ricard_on_the_hab...
and the book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science by a noted British economist Richard Layard
http://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Lessons-Science-Richard-Laya...
Dude, he probably had more fun creating the magic file than he would've courting her in person.

Sometimes the journey is the destination.
The only way to achieve great things is to have ambitious goals.

To put it another way, are the many HN articles about starting your own business encouraging potential entrepreneurs to reach "beyond their means"? Who is to decide what another persons "means" are? How do you know?

I ask this in all seriousness, because to my knowledge there's been very little success in finding any early childhood characteristics that have a strong positive correlation to adult success. If I'm incorrect on that I'd love to see some links to studies that do show that adult success can be pre-judged in childhood with a high degree of accuracy.

Besides, as Thomas Edison supposedly said.. "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration". By encouraging children to pursue very ambitious goals and to NOT settle for what they consider beneath them, perhaps we can help them to develop the drive needed for that 99% perspiration.
Well, along with cars, and sports video games, and basically anything else with some chronologically oriented release cycle. Really the only things to buck this trend were Microsoft operating systems in the 90s.
The thread on _why.
Would you let me know what I need to cite? Immigration stats, along with national policies, are readily available on the web.
Check out Squarepusher, who has been doing this for years, but using an actual bass guitar with MIDIfied pickups to drive the stack of synths (in addition to being a sound source in its own right). Or if you want total eye candy, Jean Michelle-Jarre likes to control a wall of synths with a laser harp.

That said, I have no problem with keyboardists or knob-twiddling...perhaps because I'm not especially moved by stage theatrics or arena-size performance.
I think that the current set of filesystem ops is a nice base. The "everything is a sequence of bytes" actually works very well given the access methods on a low level. However I think there are two separate things that need some serious addressing.

First is lack of metadata intrinsic to the system. A lot of filesystems have such capability, but there are no standard APIs to access it. I think that if a standards body (cough POSIX cough) were to distill out a minimum set of searchable metadata functionality, a lot of fun could arise.

The other part is the file metaphor itself. This leads to a lot of focus on moving, and putting, and copying. There is a largely under-utilized bit -- linking. We tend to associate filesystem trees with their paper counterparts, hence the above focus. However, with ln, you can create multiple hierarchies for the same set of files, organizing them different ways. Similarly this doesn't allow for easy reasoning about things like unionfs.

All that being said, I don't thing this calls for a removal of the stream of bytes notion of files, in the end, such a thing pretty necessary. A good api/file format on top of the stream of bytes solves the problem just as well.
Do you have any links or other references to back up that statement?
http://www.yelp.com/myths
Don't want to one-up you for the sake of it, but last time I bought bootleg DVDs in China, I paid Y5.50 (about 80 US cents). The better prices will be outside of the main markets populated by foreigners - the guy I bought from was on the top floor of a market geared to only locals. Prices increase as you go out from there - foreigner markets in Beijing and Shanghai, then eventually other popular places like Vietnam, Thailand, Bali, etc.
This story showed up on Gawker months ago, so I'm a bit confused why it reemerges now. http://gawker.com/tag/oceanavebooks/

I disagree with the writer's tagline that Yelp is such a new medium it can drive you nuts. The same could happen on other social networking services, discussion fora, AOL, etc. Yelp maybe could have done some diligence to connect dots between the biz owner and the negative review, but that could have been seen as special treatment of one business, out of the 1000's listed on its service.

I believe the biz owner is a bit unstable, and the ongoing media exposure just isn't doing her well.
Either or both of which might be true of the $60k or $120k position. That's another problem with the article (and your response): it's making the assumption that salary correlates directly with hours worked. Clearly it doesn't, as we all know from experience. There are "easy" six-figure jobs out there, and some folks burning out in $30k office work.

The point is that it's a big world with lots and lots of variation. This particular woman has a financial incentive to work less. But to argue that we need to drop (or "reconsider the effects of", as the article euphemizes) assistance programs like financial aid or mortgage relief based on her particular situation is ridiculous.
They have old editions of Numerical Recipes online:
http://www.nrbook.com/a/bookcpdf.php

Sadly they're using the horrid 'File open' encryption on the PDFs.
Wow, thank you for the amazingly helpful feedback! I fixed most of the issues you raised, and I really appreciate your invaluable feedback. It can be really difficult for me to cut back on text, I'm such a longwinded person by nature, but I definitely see the need for it.

Thanks again!
Carnegie Mellon student robbed, uses iPhone to track down culprits
> As you have undoubtedly noticed, we've been doing some shuffling around here, and the page you're looking for seems to have gone missing.

Bad web designers, bad! There's no excuse not to ensure that old URLs return HTTP 301 redirects to the new URLs.
Some Social Skills May Be Genetic
Um, you are missing my point completely.

CSS is not a programming language.

However, when you are dealing with CSS related bugs in browsers a high level of determination and problem solving ability is required to get to the bottom of each bug. The same kind of determination is required to debug Ruby or Java or any other programming language.

So the jump from competent web designer to programmer is not as far as you might think. They actually require a similar skillset.
they thought of it just now and think they can do something better with it

It's not hard to do better than a landing page. "Domainers" make the web a less usable place overall - they've caused the growth of non .com domains and weird spellings and names, eg flickr.

Who here has ever clicked on a landing page?
This is actually a great idea. If Google has a problem with them using their name in the URL then I'm sure they'll make a stink about it, get free press, change it and continue on their merry way.
Bootcamp: Growing Culture at Facebook
1) Port 25 blocks are just a work-around for the fact that SMTP lacks any decent authentication system.

2) I think we can all agree that an ISP offering only a NAT ip address is evil

3) Fast, large content does not need a dedicated CDN network. I can stream video from my home computer. Naturally, a thousand people can't stream from my home computer all at the same time, but if I want to stream video to a thousand people, I have a huge number of existing choices[1] or I can buy a vps[2] with sufficient bandwidth, or I can use a more buzz-word worthy means of hosting[3]. Yes it it may money, but when youtube started up, they didn't have to cut deals with comcast, cox, verizon and warner in order to operate, and if I want to compete with them, neither do I. You can deliver content to millions of people a month for thousands of dollars or less. Or you can just send video to a couple of friends with even a crappy US broadband connection. This is the point here.

[1]http://www.google.com/search?q=video+hosting
[2]http://www.google.com/search?q=high-speed+vps
[3]http://www.google.com/search?q=streaming+cloud
All I can say is try it for a while. A month or two at least. I don't think the issues that you are anticipating are as great as you think they are.
Cool.

And for some more heavyweight Scheme->JS (stuff that you wouldn't mind using on a real project) check out inria's HOP (Scheme2JS is a component of it) and BiwaScheme.

http://hop.inria.fr/

http://www.biwascheme.org/
What is usually missing from these articles is even a simplified error analysis.

We can all count the floating-point operations, and today caches sometimes influence matrix algorithms more than raw flop counts. The problem gets more interesting when the matrix becomes ill conditioned and different algorithms will produce very different results.
Even if you hold that theory, there's an implicit limit as t->infinity. Certainly if a new keyboard that's objectively better was introduced today, by tomorrow it wouldn't have >50% marketshare.
I was working on a novel in 1998 which had 3d printers as a brand new technology. But now (as usual) life has caught up with fiction. The other idea in the book was going to be kids making wifi mesh networks. Another one that's now out of date.

It's not much fun being a SF writer any more.
I don't actually have a MIDI bass pickup, but I've been tempted.

Do it. I'm a crap bassist but I run the audio output into a Nord Modular and use pitch analysis to generate MIDI that goes to the drum machine (or whatever), and it's great for coming up with things I wouldn't necessarily do on the keyboard. If you're good at bass you'll get that much more out of it with per-string control.
does anyone have a business that is featured on Yelp? If so, do they offer any buisness centric tools. Like get satisfaction, where they encourage a dialogue between owner and client rather than one sided posts? If not, maybe some companies would be willing to pay for that kind of ability...
Sony Ericsson F305 White Unlocked 
Sony Ericsson F305, established by a new generation and for today’s generation in which you can find all the newest features of mobile phone with original understanding of operating F305.
The Guantánamo "Suicides": A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle
Not Traditional HN Fare, but I think an extremely important article.
What happened to the article? I am getting 404 errors? Is this some sort of Yelp conspiracy? Maybe East Bay Express didn't pay up!
How were the rules changed?
Actually, I think it qualifies as both.
I disagree that this article assumes that product prevalence has "no bearing at all". That would be silly.

Rather, I think it merely demonstrates that product prevalence is not the only factor, and often not even the most important one. It dismisses the popular delusion that early success is all that is required to become an entrenched, inferior monopoly.

When high profile figures with political influence fall prey to these delusions -- even in the face of contrary evidence -- it bears a detailed criticism.
The source is 404 Page Not Found
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/gyrobase/yelp-extortion-allega...

Google Cache Link:
http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:DdZjkw-XSRgJ:www.eastba...
Well, the tax/finaid structures here also place the decision in the hands of each individual, they just tilt the incentives.

I'm very much in favor of finaid working the way it does, because it also opens up the possibility of bright children from backgrounds who simply would not be able to afford it going to elite colleges. That's supposed to be the point of education - level the playing field, so that even if you're born to garment-worker immigrants, you can make it big in your own lifetime. If it means that middle class families have some skewed incentives, I don't care.

I'm less sure about the tax issues. I'd like to see the tax code simplified in general, if only because tax preparation is so inefficient now. And I think disincentives in tax rates may cause more harm than the revenue collected from them does good.
Failure isn't necessarily a bad thing. And the willingness to fail and learn from your failures is an incredibly powerful thing.

Ask anyone who regularly teaches both adults and children (musical instrument instructors, foreign language instructors, etc) and they'll tell you that one of the main thing that separates their adult students from their child students is that the children learn much faster because initial failure doesn't bother them. Adult students are paralyzingly frightened of failing, and this significantly impedes their progress in learning new skills. But children seem to understand and be more comfortable with the reality that failure is part of the learning process. You can't learn to play piano (as an example) without first playing the piano very, very ,very badly. :-)

BTW, I think this is why the currently popular advice to "fail early and often" is good advice. Yes, success is better than failure, but the fear of failure and the unwillingness to accept the possibility of failure can be crippling, and IMHO is a major differentiation between those people who do eventually succeed at great things, and the vast majority of us who just dream of doing great things.
Yelp doesn't charge biz owners to respond to reviews, in public or in private. I'm pretty sure about this because I built the feature.
What happens when you run it 1000 times, skipping the first?
Thanks for jQuery :)
It depends on what point you think you're making. (And perhaps you should make that point explicitly, so that I don't need to guess it before criticizing it, but if I'm guessing wrong, I apologize in advance.) If you are arguing out that an article from 1996 not timely, your argument is "relevant" but not necessarily correct. Note that the thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1062031 was on the front page when I first noticed this article. It contained a comment linking to the 1996 article. I don't know why the the 1996 article became a standalone thread instead of just a comment on the 1062031 thread, but it might be that someone who read the 1062031 comment found the 1996 article surprisingly worthwhile.

IMO, the 1996 article (and even more the 1991ish "Fable of the Keys" academic journal article which preceded it) remain timely because both QWERTY-is-superior and QWERTY-demonstrates-market-failure stories are remarkably hardy perennials, presented as established fact without acknowledging the Liebowitz/Margolis counterargument. (E.g., _Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations_ by David Walsh (2006), carries approving blurbs from _The Financial Times_ and _The Economist_ on its cover, and should be easy to find in a library, maybe even a chain bookstore. "Paul David" and QWERTY appear in the index many times, but Liebowitz and Margolis do not.)
From what I saw at WWDC, it's also pretty good about switching bitrates based on connection speed.
That is a good article, thanks. Every time I hear/read something by Elizabeth Warren I come away thinking that she is a voice of unusual sanity. Pity that her oversight work isn't amounting to anything.
or it could just not be true
My favourite bit was where she claimed she found his address and turned up at his doorstop to 'apologise', but was surprisingly antagonistic and violent when she got there.

Yeah, right, 'apologise', just admit you went crazy and intended to shout/beat him down.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

In a nutshell, it's the story of kids playing baseball and accidentally hitting a ball through someone's window. The fallacy is that by breaking the window, they've helped out the economy. The homeowner will now pay the glazier to fix it, whose wife will now have money to buy a new dress, etc.

It's a fallacy because it ignores the productivity that the money would have resulted in had it been used for its original intent. Perhaps his car needs new tires, or whatever -- but there was something that the homeowner would have preferred but for the necessity created by the ball.

By analogy, perhaps the hypothetical second parent, who is now staying home, might instead be a doctor helping people, or a teacher, or even a garbage collector. Whatever, it's something that we would have gotten had it not been for this disruption.
Tell HN: I just launched a reddit clone for financial/economic news
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1059921

That one has the link to the entire article on a single page, although no comments.