skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No no no. That apsx crap running the existing site is absolutely not mine.

I sold the company in 2008 to Disc Makers, a company whose internal systems are all Windows.

After leaving the site as it was (FreeBSD + PHP + MySQL + Ruby) for a year, they rewrote it all from scratch in Windows ASP stuff, so they could merge it with their existing systems.

I was long-gone and knew nothing about their rewrite until it was launched.

Funny thing is: when I sold the company, people kept asking, "How does it feel that it's not yours anymore?" It was always fine and didn't phase me a bit because it was still my software running the site. It still felt like my vision was upheld.

But when they trashed all my old software (even the internal intranet that all employees use to run operations!) - THEN it hurt. 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 was really sad.

But, like the new owners painting your old house pink, it was the final proof that it's not mine anymore.
It's not necessarily society's fault. I don't think you understand how far a mother (and the occasional father) will go to save their children's lives.

It can be very hard for people to let their loved ones go, society be damned.
Self-description
And I lose at 4420.
Thanks pvg. You said it much better than I did. :-)
Has anyone seen a tetris implementation from the other first-person perspective? As in, you're the block, looking downwards?

Probably far too hard to play, but that is what I was expecting when I hit the link..
@jacquesm: I think I just inadvertantly gave you a case study!

/me hangs head in shame
OK, I haven't really watched many news about Haiti. Seems they have severe problems keeping power supply and telephony up. So I suppose mobile apps in the field wouldn't help that much. Unless rescue teams can set up their own infrastructure.

Maybe the best one can do from far away is to help collect donations?
Mouse over text:

The contents of any one panel are dependent on the contents of every panel including itself.The graph of panel dependencies is complete and bidirectional, and each node has a loop.The mouseover text has two hundred and forty-two characters.
There are transactions in MongoDB, they just wrap one operation on one document. But that one operation can be quite complex.

Example, one op can pick a money account, decrement its balance, and push an entry to the list of outbound transfers. After a few more similarly atomic steps, you have a safe and restartable money transfer.

The upside of working with this extra complication is that your data scales via sharding far beyond the maximum size of a MySQL installation.
Now I'm dizzy. Pretty cool idea though.
Heroes of Hellas 2: Olympia Game Download Free
Build a city from the ashes of a fallen civilization and rule your people with wisdom and justice in Heroes of Hellas 2: Olympia! A mix of gripping Match 3 gameplay and city building fun, Heroes of Hellas 2 challenges you to drag your mouse across chains of identical items to remove obstacles, activate bonus items and collect valuable objects. Between levels, you can play one of eight minigames and spend the gold you earn on upgrades for your city!
This has been known forever to people who frequently travel with high-value gear (photographers, videographers, etc.)

It is a good hack, but it also prevents you from easily doing kiosk bag check-and-drop stuff, so there is a lot of waiting in line. And I wouldn't recommend it for international travel.

I haven't kept good track, but I'm sure I've flown over 200,000 miles in the last decade, with all sorts of miscellaneous high-value gear. The only domestic baggage incident I've had was a Canon EOS5D and 28-300mm L lens go missing on a flight from SFO->BOS. Granted that was an ~$5,000 loss, I probably should have kept the gear in carry-on. I don't think I would have wanted to deal with the process of declaring a weapon in my bags on every flight where I had something work stealing just to prevent the 1 incident out of 1,000 where there was actual threat, that's why I have insurance.
> #1: The goal of good writing is not to be understood, but rather to not be misunderstood.

While I agree with this idea, I felt that you made it perfectly clear that you loved the Rails framework, loved Ruby, etc…

If you were attacked in comments, it's because it's was a supercharged topic, not due to any failing of your writing.
I agree it's mostly rubbish now. I wrote that article in 2001, when “The Wisdom of Crowds” was not really in effect online yet.

Still, in many places in the music industry, an artist is taken much more seriously when they are represented by a company (whether label, agency, manager, etc) - that communicates that the artist is not just one of the 2 million amateurs on MySpace.

That subtle difference in perception and image actually changes how people listen.

Read this great Brian Eno quote about that: http://musicthoughts.com/t/112
I think the point is that this is simply the best dataset out there, it hasn't been cherry-picked.

The only problem with this article is that there is no mention of how the gulfstream could have had a stabilising effect.

The 30 year periods aren't cherry-picked either, they are picked because they were the ones with the greatest increase in temperature.
Let me use your reply as an opportunity to make points I've made in a heated fashion elsewhere on this thread more calmly:

1. It's not clear that CET is a proxy for global temperatures.

2. If CET is a good proxy (and that could be easily checked from the Met Office data) then fast warming in the past needs to be explained to be sure that we are seeing something anomalous now.

3. This Daily Telegraph claims that man-made global warming is refuted by the CET. I don't believe that to be true. It may be questioned by the data, but questioning is within the realms of science.

4. The original blog posting makes the claim "since we've seen 30 years of warming in the past that are faster than the last 30 years of warming there's nothing to worry about". The last part is not correct. If this is correct (modulo #1) then we need to determine what was causing warming in the past compared to today.
So YQL is the proxy instead of one on the original domain.
Honestly speaking, I think you might have a bit of a chicken and egg problem with getting started.

I like the idea of your app and it's something I could use, but since you're asking your customers to hard code stuff into their application at potentially experience-critical moments, any kind of failure on your part would be pretty disastrous.

This service is something I would use when it matures a little, it's not something I would hook my app into whilst you're just starting out. Venture backing or an established partner might help me convert sooner.

My 2c.
¡Vaya Parece que este vínculo está roto: www.noticierodigital.com
As far as I know, Gaikai's not looking to replace consoles or whatnot like OnLive is: the primary purpose is advertising.

Current game demos are a marketer's worst nightmare: to get a player to try them, they have to download gigabytes of installer, install it, and after hours of messing around, they can finally go try the game. Gaikai's goal is to provide a better way for companies to promote their products--not to try to get people to shelve their Xbox.

Which is probably smart, because this kind of video streaming is hardly an efficient way to do gaming in the general case.
Compared to javascript, yes. True class-based inheritance, optional strict typing, getter setters, and methods and closures retain class scope. What's not to like? Null-reference errors?
I hope You fail
I've done a fair bit of live streaming on justin.tv and uStream; I can't wait to see this new capability available - maybe in Flash Media Encoder?
It works in Flash with streaming, but Flash won't seek in offline files created with intra refresh (as in, if you try to seek, it will reset to the start of the file, it seems). I haven't tried lately though, maybe they fixed it.
RealNetworks' founder to step down
Interesting, but what happens with the submissions? How does one even know that it is real?
I agree. I read it for the first time and honestly couldn't care less about languages and found it quite clear that you liked ruby but found php worked for your needs.
I have no idea why, but I find this so much more intuitive than "normal" tetris.
Chinese entrepreneurs, investors on Google: ‘Just quit. We don’t care.’
I've left HN some time ago, when I came back here today, I've seen three PHP stories on the front page. I'd say: yes, it changes. But I must credit one PHP story was on Pharen, "A lispy language that compiles to PHP".
Until I grew a beard I was getting reverse ageism at job interviews. Despite 10 years of programming experience, companies were telling me they wanted someone more "senior".

Who knows, maybe that was just an excuse. But the beard seems to have helped.
Like this http://www.3dtris.de/?
My hack is that I don't check baggage.

For my personal item, I use a backpack. I have a nice, big L.L. Bean backpack that fits a ton of stuff in it.

For my carry-on, I use a soft bag of the appropriate size. You might be able to compress more stuff into the hard case rollaways, but the nice thing about the soft bag is that it always makes it into the overhead compartment (unlike many of the hard case suitcases I've seen.)

But I guess if you're traveling with a lot of camera equipment you wouldn't have that option.
Yeah, I've wondered if this was akin to military Basic Training and the like, where one of the objectives is exactly that, to learn how to preform when sleep deprived and stressed out.

Another factor is being on call, getting woken up at a bad time and nonetheless having to make the best possible decision.
Google's Chinese Diplomacy: Can Google Make a Difference?
Economic embargoes on their own never help developing countries develop faster. If I have milk and you have cookies and we trade freely, we can both be better off.

If you decide not to trade with me because you think I worked too hard or had to get up too early to get that milk, neither of us is better off. Even worse is when you decide not to trade with me because someone else told you not to, for my own good.
Dear god, is this a common occurrence?
The Story Behind Earth's Coldest Temperature Ever
Gene for immortality
"The 30 year periods aren't cherry-picked either, they are picked because they were the ones with the greatest increase in temperature."

Lol. If that's not it, would you mind explaining to me exactly what you think cherry-picking is?
Transferring Audio From C-cassettes to Computer
I never even mentioned economics, thus your comment does not in any way disprove anything I said.

In your example, the employer buys time, not information. Time is significantly harder to reproduce or copy than information is.

So, one way to charge for information is to sell time sensitive information (like stock information), but then what you're really selling is time exclusivity.

Selling information without any kind of unique or time sensitive properties is doomed to fail — the only thing that made it once possible was technical limitations; information needed for instance paper as a vehicle to distribute it. Those technical limitations are gone now.
One of the great strengths of SQLite is that it handles large (many gigabyte), complex datasets (many tables) and lets you run fairly sophisticated queries. You trade the lack of concurrent access for its zero-administration, of course, but if you want to slice and dice a large dataset, you can do a lot worse than load it into SQLite, build some indexes and work in SQL. The "low level" interface this Java provides doesn't even let you do a join...
With A/B Testing more usable is not always more effective
And even if it was routine, it doesn' make it any more acceptable.
Nothing in here about age discrimination in the IT industry.
What types of companies were you interviewing at? I've really never seen anything but ageism in the favor of younger people.
Web Laureate Classic: Twitter, "Oh Twitter"
Right, it's one of the few pieces of software with an actual "free" license (as in freedom AND beer).

Their approach to licensing is interesting and simple.
The leftmost self-description is false. The amount of black ink is actually greater than what is shown on the pie due to the black ink being used to show the pie (i.e. circle) perimeter.
I think if it wasn't prepped and trained on before it won't go well now.

That being said, I would think getting ahold of official identification photos and then having people take photos of people (alive and dead) and use a facial rec app for identification.
Give Altruists a Chance
Simulating the Eurovision Song Contest
Groups seek to challenge US gov't on seized laptops
A large number of people who make failed suicide attempts don't try again, ...

I doubt the truth of that. There are studies that suggest otherwise: http://theviewfromhell.blogspot.com/2008/08/on-permanence-of... .
Security by obscurity: The No Lock People
French 3 Strikes Group Unveils Copyright Infringing Logo
My lab has done lipoprotein Mendelian randomization. It is certainly a useful technique. The article linked here doesn't really address any of the technique's shortcomings, and those are important to know. For example, population stratification can affect your conclusions, and pleiotropy can lead to biased enrollment. For more info, see (free article) http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/163/5/397
Re #2: You appear to have learned lesson number 1 - Fixed opinion based on incomplete understanding is worthless.

Your context was perfectly clear, and those criticising the article because they thought you that were saying that PHP was better than RoR, based on their superior understanding of RoR, were feverishly creating a wondrous shrine to the gods of irony.
that was fun 9400 points / 55 lines . . . and now back to making stuff work properly in IE :(
Google Nexus One Sales Off to Slow Start
How Clozure CL implements closures
I think that he has acounted for that too. For example, the mouse-over text says: ...The mouseover text has two hundred and forty-two characters.

It is indeed 242 characters. i.e. he considered the meta data too in the length.(That is why it is called self-descriptive)

Related read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenos_paradoxes#Achilles_and_th...
Ancient map with China at centre goes on show in US
Zippers: Making Functional "Updates" Efficient
If you shift the end point you cannot make any claim about the last y years, because the last y years always end at the beginning of the current year. What he did is to take the entire dataset, not some selected part of it.

And there aren't many places on earth for which long term measurements even exist. So selecting this particular dataset seems plausible enough to me.

On the other hand I would like to hear the counter arguments as well, because if this is such an important dataset, proponents of AGW will have an opinion on it. There may be a good counter argument.
Wouldn't it be trivial to poison your DB with false reports?

And it would be pretty much impossible for you to distinguish this from the reporter getting hammered for real.

This sort of attack wouldn't be likely ... unless and until your service became popular, at which point the payoff might be worth the trouble.
Longevity != Immortality.
One can't unsuicide, but dead people don't feel the desire to unsuicide anyway. Even if they were about to win the lottery (i.e., see a brighter day), they don't regret being dead. No matter how good life can be, it's always worse than death.
Google 2010: What Makes the Muskrat Guard His Musk
Male Chromosome Evolves Faster Than Rest Of Genome (Audio)
I just quit my day job and moved to Japan (Tokyo specifically) and I have to say: the option to buy healthcare is pretty nice. It's priced according to your previous year's tax return, so those who can pay more, do so.

I have also found a very healthy tech community here, although the bridge between the locals and the foreigners is somewhat weak.

Also, new stories on HN are on the US cycle so I'm usually commenting when people are asleep. I feel like the comment fairy.
Me either. Very nifty for searches in case the user typo'd something.
The Apple II was a genius product for reasons that had NOTHING to do with: the case, the logo and the advertising.

Well, yes... but there are many things that are genius that I have never heard of. And plenty that I know of that will never be well known.

no one cared what color the case was

Well, Jobs did. As a programmer with some depth, I know how little engineers care about product development and marketing. Great things sell themselves, right? I used to agree, but after seeing the waste of unwanted products and the tragedy of unused pearls, I can no longer believe the Field of Dreams mantra (If you build it, they will come). The guts of the Apple II didn't sell themselves, and the color of the case does matter to buyers. Certainly it was a feat of engineering that would have been impossible without Woz. I also think that it would have been a forgotten player without Jobs.
It seems to be one data set from one location. How can this be "the best data set" out there? I don't think looking at one location is sufficient at all.
It's an execuse so they can higher you for less money.
Have you not been consuming any American pop-culture for the last 15 years? :)

It's worth noting that although American entertainment is consumed all over the world, the acting is often overdubbed in the local language.

Hence it's not possible for a Frenchman to learn colloquial English by watching "American Pie" -- presumably beaver references are translated to something more appropriate than "le castor" ;)
A Startup is Not a Smaller Version of a Large Company
Blippy - Facebook Beacon all over again?
Ask HN: Review my site erwaittimes.us
After a recent trip to a crowded emergency room, I put together this site to track wait times published by hospitals and to let people submit their own wait times after a visit to the ER.

http://erwaittimes.us

It's my first project and I (obviously) haven't put any time into design. I'm looking for some help kicking the tires and steering this project in the right direction.

Currently it aggregates wait times from all known US hospitals that advertise them online; that number is growing every day. However, the key would be getting people to post their own times when they're in the ER or after their visit. Think that's possible?

Would you ever use it? How could it be improved?

Also, I recently came across InQuickER, which partners with a small number of hospitals to track wait times and sell you a place in line for ~$25. What would you do in the face of this emerging competitor?

Thanks for the help.
David
Indeed. Unless i'm mistaken, this is more "hosted by Google" than "provided by Google" - a simple form set up by a Google account holder using Google spreadsheets. Though that's not to say it's not useful or well meaning.
Shifting the end point was an example from the stock market (I think I remember better now: to make your fund look good, you can almost always find a point in the past from where you made earnings relative to today). It was just an example of hand picking data to prove what you want.

I have nothing against this particular data set. I just doubt that it is all that relevant in the bigger picture. It is just another data point that can be fed into models and whatnot.
Flash lands on iPhone via Javascript Runtime
It's also a good way to get arrested at a Chicago or NYC/NJ airport if you're forced to be reunited with your checked bags (say your flight gets diverted).
The article is misdated, as "2007-08-18"

The general principle still seems relevant, of relishing obstacles and difficulties because they discourage the competition. Although we don't have "yes/no" filters today, don't influencers have a role - like what youtube highlights etc? Or do these have relatively little effect, compared to the spontaneous, organic, emergent, collective choices of crowds?
What really affects behavior
translation: rewrites hurt, a lot

see this from 2000 :
Things You Should Never Do, Part I
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

They [Netscape] did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make:

They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.
Yes. It is the link between funding and publication records that matters here, not how useful journals are for doing research.

I was fortunate enough to work in an area of research for which the arXiv was originally established, and found that printed journals became increasingly irrelevant to me. Certainly, I would use them to find the dwindling number of papers not covered by the arXiv for reasons of age or subject matter, but for the day-to-day business of keeping up with the latest developments, the latency between submission to and publication in peer reviewed printed journals is far too great to be useful.

These preprints are not formally peer reviewed, but this mostly doesn't matter since they are always subject to an informal review by their readers -- if you are reasonably well-versed in a subject you can make up your own mind about whether or not a paper is any good, particularly after discussions with colleagues.
Theft and burglary are, in the vast majority of cases, crimes of opportunity. That's the only point I can think of that favours locking one's door. Otherwise, if you have something someone really, really wants to steal, they'll find a way. Bit like IT security ;)
Oh man. I've been noticing this divide for a long time now. Im a sorta-lock person. Im not opposed to locking stuff, but I don't go out of my way for it. I used to lock much less, when I had roomates -- convenience really. I don't lock up my bike either, when I'm at the coffee shop or bakery or whatever anyway. My garage is never locked. I live in a "bad" neighborhood and have yet to be robbed. Some say it is only a matter of time, but statistically this is unlikely.

This area seems to contain the best anecdotal evidence for something like karma too. Seems those who are most fearful, and super lock everything also get robbed a lot. Those who don't worry about it don't get robbed as often.

Anyway I think its funny that the people who are afraid of robberies and "double lock" and "tripple lock" talk about how its "inevitable" they will get robbed, and that it makes "common sense" that the extra locking is required. Of course if that was so true, the number of "no-locks" reporting 0 robberies would be way fewer. Seems that there is a huge amount of fear manipulation happening in the lock industry.
The large "unspecified" category leaves me in the dark about whether this is various stuff possibly well related to the HN guidelines

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

or various stuff not well related to those guidelines at all. A trend within that category probably does more to change the general flavor of HN than the observed relative size changes of some of the specified categories.
You could also make it your username when you have to sign up for something.
Oneforty opens its Twitter app store, says developers are its "first priority"
Put legend on the axes.
Use a logarithmic scale.
US TIPS seem to be currently yielding between 0.21% and 2.01%: http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/rates

It doesn't change your point though. They'd have to make >$200k/year to be an interesting investment.

And 501(c)3 donations get tax deductions, which is worth at least 15% for most people who can afford these sums. http://www.givewell.net has a few ideas on efficient donations.
Stalking the Wily Hacker (1988) [pdf]
The points raised in the article are still relevant today. Not that you can't do good web sites with Rails, but sometimes it is easier to use the tool you are more familiar with.
One was a consulting company, and the other person to tell me that was a recruiter as a reason for not submitting me for a job i.e., "they're looking for someone more senior"