skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for your helpful reply! I turned my comment into a blog post and incorporated your suggestion:

http://quandyfactory.com/blog/41/top_10_programming_lessons_...
This is actually the underlying concept behind my personal productivity technique. I'll write about my system (and the piece of software I wrote for it) in a couple weeks.
Except a good tablet would take a few years to make...
> A single "View Source" on any page of cdbaby.com shows a bloated mess of crap that goes completely against the minimalist aesthetic that drove CD Baby for 10 years.

That's nothing to do with aspx, that's to do with wrecking a philosophy.

Aspx was the chosen tool to do the wrecking in, but that could have been anything else. You can write bad bloated code in just about any language.
What we all seem to agree on is, people of different ages act differently. To the extent generalities can be draw, and to the degree these are used to spot-evaluate someone you've just met (job interview, radio survey etc), this is ageism.
It happens because it works, at least 80% of the time.
Its unfair because important decisions are made about people (me) with too little information. Yes I'm old, but I actually have kept learning.
walk through the compiler warnings fixing the code until the warnings are gone - never leaving the image.

To me, this seems like a disaster waiting to happen if you're doing something complex. When there are bugs in my code, it usually means bad things are happening to my data, my data structures, and the state of my program in general. When I find the bug, it often seems far easier to fix the bug and start over than it would be to both fix the bug and track down all the consequences and fix those as well, perhaps writing some more code to help with that which might end up with bugs in it... my attention stack was never that large to begin with, and as it gets smaller I try harder and harder to avoid situations where I recursively just have to do this one more thing before I can do the thing I want to do.

I did run some of my images for weeks, and one webapp in particular for months. After the first few days, though, I was always apprehensive about making changes to it, since I couldn't be sure my files were in sync with what was in the running system -- what if I'd forgotten to write a change to a file -- and since my system was running, I couldn't just reload from the file to make sure, since if there was a difference I'd lose the working copy in favor of one I'd replaced. It was all very nerve-wracking. In contrast, the systems I had that were written in Python could be changed and then bounced, trading about 5 seconds for all that stress[1], and the systems I had that were written in PHP didn't even need that; changing the file on disk was enough.

[1] I do know that I could have done this with CMUCL, but I assumed that there would eventually be a point at which I realized it was all worth it...
HTTP and REST give you several ways to make requests (PUT vs. POST? Fall back on POST for clients that don't support PUT? How?), several ways to specify parameters (URL path fragments, query strings, headers, or POST data?), and a set of standard errors that you do not control and which are not used consistently. I like how XML-RPC ignores all of that, because there are too many ways to do the same thing.
There aren't any scams. Please wire donations to routing number: 388299332 account: 1912818281
JQuery 1.4 released
I know what a log chart is and how to make one, it's just that I fail to see how making either a time axis or a per-mille axis logarithmic will clarify things.
Well, but what if it's true?

On the macro scale, I think it's obvious that people are getting smarter. If you compare people now with people 1000 years ago, it is obvious that the average IQ now is higher than it was then. If you compare with people 10k years ago, 100k ago .. no contest. There was a time when calculus was something only the smartest people in the world understood. Now it is a subject routinely taught in high school. All of human progress has been written by young people getting smarter than old people, and proving the old people wrong.

The question then should not be are young people smarter than old people, but is the difference in generational intelligence so great that it is noticeable? I don't know for sure the answer to that, but one has to ask what are the origins of the ageism prejudice in the first place.

Not saying that any kind of discrimination is acceptable, there certainly are highly intelligent, highly competent older people out there. But there are also a bunch of old people who stopped learning anything new 30 years ago, who nevertheless own a lot more stuff than their children and more political power than they deserve to have, and we should be able to recognize that too.
Wow that is annoying how you have to register to download the MP3.

Also, "Subscribe in iTunes" link is no where to be found.
Where is this report they talk of? Is it not released to the public [yet]?
Sharing the doc was not an intent to dilute, but to raise awareness. Apologies for any issues. There is a definite interest in plans from the members of this community.
This was the best part of the referenced page:

"Don’t be such a suck up Dan."

As if Carl here was just so damn annoyed that Dan beat him to "first DHH! First! Pick me for kickball!" I just picture Jan Brady as Carl: "Marsha Marsha Marsha!"

Ok enough semi entertainment by poking fun at the followers of David (since when did he start going by one name like Prince or Madonna or Quasimoto?)
Reducing weight doesn't necessarily mean they've reduced the containers strength in anyway. Aluminum alloys, by weight, can easily be three-times stronger than Steel alloys. By volume, I believe it can easily be ten-times stronger than steel. By a three-fold price increase over a standard container, I'm certainly betting they've got aluminium in there.

A fully aluminum container could be significantly stronger/lighter (not both) than a steel container, and it would have a significantly longer lifespan than steel as a rigid container could be virtually maintenance free for virtually ever. The only losses to the industry would likely be when a ship goes down, and then the containers would remain ready and waiting for salvage to return to work.

However turning the entire freight industry from Steel to Aluminium containers would probably require depleting all the earths aluminium reserves, and then likely require discovering an extra-terrestrial source and probably depleting that too.

Honestly, I don't think this new container will catch on for being light or collapsible. Also, a thing to wonder, is if the amount of rust washed off of shipping containers annually is helping promote algal blooms.
Handango delays monthly developer payments, slips further into irrelevance
I spoke too loosely. Shortest path traversing all nodes is NP (traveling salesman). Obviously shortest path between each pair of nodes is going to be polynomial since the number of pairs is polynomial.
Boards and executives have more responsibility than that: they must obey the law, look beyond the next quarter, and behave in a moral fashion. Corporations turn into soul-less carnivours if "fiduciary responsibility" is the only driving force.
Must...resist...w(h)iner...joke...
Does "fiduciary responsibility" mean "represent the voting stockholders" or "represent all the stockholders"? I believe the latter. Which puts executives in a bind when those two populations differ.
> Tricks like appending ".jpg" to the url seem a little hack-ish to me. That feels like a parameter.

that feels like a file type. If there is more than one representation available then it's a parameter, indeed, but the standard place to put that is on the end of the filename.

Surely it's clear that:
employees is the collection;
employees/110 is a specific employee;
employees/110.jpg is the jpeg representation of said employee.
I wonder if it would be feasible to construct a database where they enter the zipcode instead, and set a parameter that determines which area you belong to. (Eg. if you live in 94107, any zipcode within 60 mile radius would be considered the "Bay Area".
Appreciated the irony of reading this article while waiting a few seconds for a build.
Think as if you're a semi-proficient computer user. They often don't have the vocab to articulate what they mean(if they know what they mean).

Look at the UI of an Iphone or Xbox360, or process for signing up for gmail for good examples of "not confusing." Both are dummy friendly.

Don't lose perspective after having been immersed in the technical world. I've seen some very smart people completely lose grasp of how a non-technical person thinks. Words like driver and BIOS freak them out - forget Python and API.
Excellent post. Especially like the pic on how to create quality blog content. Very readable.
There were a few times in this interview that my BS detectors went off. Andrew asked a question regarding which VCs Noah had spoken with and Noah said he couldn't respond due to NDA. After some probing the story changed to say that only some of the VCs required NDA at the point of discussing monetary figures. Andrew did a nice job by continuing to ask questions like "what did they want you to do with the money?" and Noah again vacillated. It just struck me as odd that he couldn't remember what the discussions were about, it seems like something that should be really easy to remember. Of course, he could have just been nervous as well, but it really smelled fishy to me.

Disclaimer: I don't know Noah, I have never used TwitPic, I have nothing for or against Noah and / or TwitPic, so take all of this with an ENORMOUS grain of salt since this is nothing more than pure speculation
oh man.. don't be typing in 'asdfdsaf' into the rows!
10 figures = 1 BILLION. I have to agree with the OP on this. I think it's BS.
Working For The Weekend
I just downloaded his article, and he states that "With the advent of computers, algorithms for maze solving have become automated, but the solution times still scale unfavorably with maze size/complexity" and then references a paper by Dijkstra (Dijkstra, E. W. Numer. Math. 1959, 1, 269.).

That might be true for dense graphs, if you think that O(|V|^2 log|V|) is unfavourable.

A normal maze graph is planar and therefore |V| <= 3|E| - 6. Thus, maze problems can always be solved in O(|V| log|V|) time for a constant number of exits and starting points.

So, while the author made a little mathematical blunder ( single layer maze problems are efficient to solve), he's not the one that implied NP-completeness.

EDIT: Clarified my comment so that no-one can think I'm implying that an O(|V|^2 log|V|) algorithm is an NP problem.
That whole story is just one big WTF to me.

It seems most things sailing in the wake of twitter simply defy all logic and common sense. There have been literally dozens of picture sharing services before twitpic. The only difference I can see is the name ("look, we're for twitter!") and that he basically integrated an url-shortener.

The entire site looks like about a week's worth of work. 700k in annual profit? Not sure if I want to laugh or cry.
This point wasn't about accumulation of features, although that's a worthy topic in itself. This is about what you need to ship this iteration, this version, that product.

Once you have something out there you'll iterate. And yes, you'll likely add more than you started with. But that's a side point.
It seems you can edit without even signing in to Google Docs. Are your edits then anonymous?
When I heard about the contest, my initial reaction was that it's a clever move for Gawker, both for publicity and to actually get what they want.

But apparently, they could easily be sued for this. It's called tortious interference. They're off the hook if the prospective bounty winner hasn't broken any contracts, but I don't imagine anyone could ever see the iNigma and leave Apple alive without signing an NDA.
Why do you assume people don't release software in Common Lisp?

When you buy a piece of no one writes on the packaging "we did this in C++!" or "We did this in Java!" Why would you expect a big "Common Lisp!" sticker on the packaging? The deliverable is machine code, not source code. The customer doesn't care what the source is written in.
it says somewhere 8 figures. thats a typo.
What I found hard to believe was that if someone was offered more than $10M for something like that, they'd turn it down simply because it's fun to operate. Unless that person is already financially independant, I'm pretty sure they'd take the money.
Yep, it's amazing how well its coping with what's going on. I watched someone deface it partially and then someone fix it again. Very cool.
The survival must have mostly been luck - what are the odds of not becoming horribly infected?

What did the surgeon use for sutures, anyway?
Space Invaders in Stop Motion (video)
Dual-pivot quicksort revisited: here's a better quicksort
If you are using MVC maybe. ASP.NET WebForms and postback add tons of crap to the HTML.
> you'll implement this method and allow your users to invoke it via http://myservice.com/employee/simpson

That's fine of course for the trivial example, but what if my third parameter is an array, and I want to see a sensible error if I pass a hash table? What are the rules for which parameters go in the URL, whether they are delimited by ".", "/", or something else, and when they come as JSON in the request body, and how many there are, and what format they should come in?

> find a library (or implement your own) that will generate all the needed XML files etc.

Is this a problem? Many many such libraries exist which make exposing RPC calls nearly as easy as writing function declarations. (After all, that's what it's for - remote functions.) When I'm writing normal functions, I don't pass a request type, and a parameter string with various arbitrary delimiters, along with a possible big blob of text, and use that to fit every possible function, dealing with it in my own individual ad hoc way, do I?
How do you get a tetris without straight pieces?
If that works for you, awesome.

HTTP and REST give you several ways to make requests (PUT vs. POST? Fall back on POST for clients that don't support PUT? How?)

PUT is used for update operations and POST generally for create. Your library will abstract away the "client doesn't support sending PUT" so you don't deal with it. Same way XML-RPC libs abstract away the ugly portions of XML-RPC.

several ways to specify parameters (URL path fragments, query strings, headers, or POST data?)

Yes, there's more than one way to do that. Generally a service's documentation tells you what to do, so I'm not seeing the issue, but I concede that someone might find fault with that.

and a set of standard errors that you do not control and which are not used consistently

Whereas XML-RPC gives nothing, and everything is re-invented every time. Again, if that's a better solution for you, awesome, but for me the "some people use HTTP status codes to mean different things" isn't a reason to throw the whole thing out.
Wait until children learn how to type with their brainwaves. Then you'll be the old slow guy sitting there with the keyboard because your brain won't do that anymore (a la people raised by wolves)
Yes, they could be sued. They might even take the contest down.

But the real win for Gawker here is the publicity. Just look at how many links they've gotten to the story and the buzz, however short lived it is.

It doesn't matter if they go ahead with the contest or pull it down. Either way, they get what they want - some buzz, link juice and some publicity.
This has already been posted on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1051616
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1051616

Also a year ago some interesting stuff:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=187588

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fact-or-fic...

http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm
Flipcode - Featured Articles Archive
A lot of people (including myself) are willing to move to other cities. The way it's setup right now adds a level of fuzziness in a very simple manner that makes it more useful IMO.
You're missing the forest for the trees.

The heart of "do less" and "minimum viable product" isn't to do a crappy job or to have a minimalist product. The point is to relentlessly prune your feature set and relentlessly prune your features so that you're solving real problems and offering the most value per feature.

Prune your feature. If you cut two less use-cases from your feature's spec, is it still meeting user's -real- needs? Is it easier to use now because it's less complex?

Prune your featureset. Is that feature something that meets real users needs? Even an HN hero (patio11) had this issue recently when he launched a feature and had all of 2 customers use it.

Get validation. Don't answer these questions by intuition alone. Get customer feedback, hear what they are saying, and do root cause analysis on why they have those complaints. Make sure after you've launched a feature that it's actually solving customer's problems.

Tighten your feedback loop. Living in a black hole for weeks at a time lowers the chance that your feature will actually solve people's problems. Have a feature that will take weeks to build? What's the smallest subset of that feature you can launch that will tell you if it is actually solving real issues? Even if you have to launch that feature internally or to a small set of users, you need to figure out if you're on the right track as soon and as often as possible.

Do less isn't really about having less features. It's a strategy for satisfying the most customer needs for dollar. You do this by seeing a problem, proposing a solution, and building the least you can to verify that your solution is correct.
You'll probably still get periods when your service is slower than other times, because you're sharing the network either way.

Anyway, I recommend Softlayer. A bit more expensive than Linode but at least you aren't sharing the server with other virtualized users. And besides, if your business isn't worth $200/mo in fixed costs for this important part of your infrastructure, why bother investing your valuable time anyway?
Am I the only one that noticed the tv "scanning" that happens. That combined with the surrounding imagery of the VCR really are nice touches.

This guy is awesome.

What is doubly awesome is that there is no credit on the page as to who made it. He just made something cool, and put it up. Done.
More Weird zip codes from Netflix Maps
Sheer amazing. I wonder how his vitals would have compared to a regular appendectomy? Were his vitals concurrent with an appendectomy performed so late (literally the day before it would have burst), were they better because he was focused on the task at hand, or was his vitals worse? It's a shame we'll likely never know and there'll likely never be another auto-appendectomy performed.
Their English is usually a lot better. I believe English is one of nigerias national languages.
On the other hand, we used google spreadsheets as an issue tracker to guide working with clients. It fell over repeatedly over the course of an hour phone call on all ends (5 or so people viewing). It's really bad at keeping connections alive.
That story still gives me the chills when he describes how he cuts into the dead flesh of his arm and the gases hiss out of the cut. Ew x 10.
Have you ever had someone say something is confusing even if they understand how it works?
What if the user is your investor or manager?
There are several study's which suggest you are shortening your lifespan.
Howwl now in open beta
I think the ageist position is that experience and wisdom aren't enough to counteract the brain's decline as one ages. So really this is an argument about two things: 1. The rate of cognitive decline and 2. the value of experience. The former varies with each individual and can be mitigated with proper nutrition and exercise. The latter varies depending on the task.

Oh, and in case anyone disputes that cognitive abilities decline with age: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_and_aging#Memory_decline...
You do less, you make less. You do more, you make more (money). The only reason 37 Signals adds more, like every other successful company, is to make more. Less is just a story, more makes money.

In my company no other event generates more cash than adding and doing more in the product. No other event. It is true for any other company...

I am just getting tired of all "less" parroting :-)
Accordingly, Apple demands that Gawker Media immediately discontinue this program
and retract the offer to pay for photos, video, or samples of Apple's
unannounced product.

This line seems to confirm that the tablet is an "unannounced product."
IPhone Pixel Destiny
People keep saying that, and I can understand where they are coming from, but this isn't the case. Just yesterday, I managed to segfault python 2.6.something. I have no idea why (I really should have figured it out) but my hypothesis is that I freaked out the parser. It was vanilla python code; it should never segfault. I have had the same experience with the JVM: I once segfaulted the parser by incorporating a static string that was hundreds of lines long. Curiously, Eclipse "compiled" it just fine.

Sometimes environments have bugs. If you need an underlying runtime that simply will not crash, using something tried and true may be at the top of your priority list. That might be overkill for most projects, but I can see a guy who wants something so robust he knows its his fault when it breaks.
I think Edwards's approach is more compatible with Ames's construction approach than your description implies. Sure, Edwards is trying to get you to see what is in front of you rather than rely on preconceptions. But what is in front of you can often be described as a collection of generalized shapes, as Ames does. And, indeed, this is a good way to get the initial proportions of a drawing correct; I believe Edwards discusses some helpful construction rules in the portrait section of her book.

In other words, you should draw a circle not because someone told you to draw a circle, but because the thing in front of you genuinely has an underlying circular form at that size and in that position -- as Ames must have done when he came up with his drawing books in the first place. And the more you do this, the faster you learn the underlying structure of things, which makes it easier to draw from memory, draw from imagination, or simply draw from life without needing to stop as frequently to measure things.
While interesting, I'm not exactly sure why you need jQuery reference on a mobile device. Every single time I have been developing with jQuery I have been on a computer.
yes, please post them, but please add a "paywall" header to the subject line.

That way, folks can decide whether to click on the link or not (instead of clicking on a link without realizing that the content is behind a paywall)
So not only was school fucking me every night, it was also fucking me in my sleep...
If you can do design, but also understand how to optimize that design with things like google web optimizer you will be on your way to having a niche.

Beautiful graphic design is only half (or less) the battle. Many people also cannot afford a designer with 10 years of experience and a great portfolio.

Take a look around some of the best web apps, and many of them aren't 'pretty' but they are well designed. I'd even put basecamp in that lot. You can use simpler designs to your advantage.
It's a typo. He says 8 figures in the interview.