skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. The ads are really relevant too: Wufoo, grasshopper, and shopify are all very useful resources for entrepreneurs. I actually want more ads, because I trust the services + recs that Andrew puts up.
See also the curious case of James Tilly Mathews who in c.1810 believed "that a gang of criminals and spies skilled in "pneumatic chemistry" had taken up residence at London Wall in Moorfields (close to Bethlem) and were tormenting him by means of rays emitted by a machine called the "Air Loom". The torments induced by the rays included "Lobster-cracking", during which the circulation of the blood was prevented by a magnetic field..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Tilly_Matthews#The_.22Air...

Well before the days of satellites, aluminum foil, and Major League Baseball.
It'd be interesting to see the data comparing urban and sub/ex-urban habits.

I'd guess that urbanites are less predictable. But it would be really neat to see to what degree that holds true and how much (or if) it actually diverges from their suburban counterparts.

(Given the increased density of destinations, increased discoverability of destinations, more efficient and numerous methods of transit and lower travel times, I'd expect they would go more different places more often.)
Douchebag tricks Android users into giving him donations for FOSS.
You don't remember Bill Gates testifying in court that IE could not be unbundled from the OS? IE is still a choice.

IE9 will be a much better product because of the changing browswer landscape. The progress of the Internet really has suffered because MS didn't put much effort into IE development. It is the worst browser and it has the most market share.
Hasn't anyone told them make love not war.
This looks like a relatively old paper (2002) and so I think it is measuring performance on strictly single processor machines. On the other hand it is trie based which suggests that it could also be highly parallelizable on modern multi-processor systems. (I am thinking clojure data structures here and maybe the submitter was too... http://fogus.me).

Then again maybe datasets of the size tested (or much bigger) are now just broken down in a map-reduce fashion over multiple machines, and then who cares about the efficiencies of cache misses etc?

Can anyone comment on if burstsort or trie based sorting algorithms in general have been adopted? (All my experience has been as a consumer of library provided "sort" methods rather than ever looking at current state of the art algorithms).
Here's The Screen That Will Obliterate Microsoft's Browser Share In Europe
It looks to me like the definition is intended to be intentionally vague while appearing narrow.
The Endoscope Camera in a Pill | Popular Science
Absolutely false. The United States Declaration of Independence does not declare war on Britain or advocate violence.
This made my day.
The Syrus quote is exactly what I meant when I put the quotes around fair and efficient. I still remember when I learned that lesson: when I took my comic collection to sell and got maybe $50 for what the Wizards guide said was worth $700 or so. I couldn't find anyone willing to pay guide prices so it was actually worth much less than what I thought was 'fair'.
"For example, almost every computer system can be represented by a physical equivalent."

NO!

Outside of the lower end of the embedded realm, computer systems are fantastically more complicated than anything physical we've every tried to construct, and they contain so many ideas that could be subject to patent in the current regime that you analogy fails.
I could be the only one, but I don't actually desire to live for 1,000 years, let alone 10,000 or more.
Yes I enjoyed that as well. Nice hack!
Chatroulette - simple random chat.
This is a great place to start. http://putthison.com/ is a great place to keep going back to.

Fashion hacking is just generally something good to do. It'll make all impressions of you automatically more of everything positive.

At least so long as you don't brag about it. Fashion is about emphasizing the traits you already have by putting them against a pleasing background.
Young people today will be old people tomorrow.
<quote>I'm guessing that most people on hacker news have pre-existing opinions on both of those issues in favour of the scientist; while for climate science it's significantly more split.</quote>

I'm not sure this is true. There is currently an energetic astro-turfing campaign under way on HN and other social media sites that makes the denier community look larger than it really is, certainly among the more educated population that you expect to find on HN.

If creationists start taking a similar interest in HN, you'll come to think that there are a lot of creationists here too.
This is the worst thing to hit the web since url shorteners. Just stop it. Wipe it from your mind. It's unethical. You are gathering information from your visitors that you have neither asked for, nor been given permission to retrieve.

It should be illegal. It's an invasion of privacy. Don't do it. Don't even learn that it is possible.
56kbps was download only, upload was 33.6kbps.
I would think the variance between text entry methods could cause a problem with this for users going between different machines. Typing on a desktop keyboard, versus typing on a netbook keyboard, versus typing on an iPhone keyboard are far from the same experience. Even typing on a short-travel dome switch keyboard versus a scissor switch or buckling spring keyboard could probably change cadence for a lot of people.

That said, if a user's cadence "scales" at all (at least for home-row applications, probably not for thumb keyboards) it shouldn't be hard to find the patterns there.
My counter argument:

Since the beggining of time consumers have undergone the same process when making a buying decision.

In the past you might drive to the convenient local Circuit City to check out a TV you read in consumer reports was quality, and then order the thing from Sears catalog because you were discount shopping.

I agree that it's a shame we can't all split a few pennies of advertising dollars on the research side, but I look at the REAL opportunity here as helping people create BETTER websites & CRM to shorten the sales cycle and capture those dollars for themselves.
So turns out you're totally wrong. I just went to the settings page to kill Buzz completely now that they've added the ability, and the default option is worded as such:

"Show the list of people I'm following and the list of people following me on my public Google profile Learn more"

So that list of followers (people who simply didn't read the splash page and blindly picked "yes") WERE exposed to the public.
MIT -- It's in the code, but I should mention it on the page.

Feel free to do whatever you like with it -- I also don't mind email questions if bits of it don't make sense.
Why not just have a non-linear scale but labelled correctly?

And it's fixed in quicktime 10.
James Tilly Mathews and the "Air Loom" (first documented paranoid schizophrenic)
Dang. It's nice to hear you guys say stuff like this. I've gotten a hundred emails per day calling me a crook, a money-grubber, a cheat, and worse. I was starting to doubt myself.

But it did indeed work. I forced a whole lot of those 30,000 Hearts Solo players to upgrade. But at this point, that can't account for all of it. The number of Hearts Solo downloads has peaked, and is trending down. But the number of people buying Hearts Net is still going up.
Thank you for the opportunity to (re-)make my point.

Think if someone had said these exact words about climate sceptics: "These things are not science and do not deserve the dignity and resources of scientific consideration."

Outrageous, unscientific arrogance. If you believe the sceptics have a point. But if you don't, it's completely justified (although politically unwise to say out loud).
50kbps about 6Kb per second, 22Mb per hour

On a TWC 5Gb cap line for $30 per month thats 232 Hours playing time per month (8 hours per day) if you do no other downloading.

What if you had 3 people in your house all wanting to play games DRMd like this ? You'd have to upgrade your connection just to play games you already paid for.
Yeah, as far as I can tell C-- is lying the street slowly bleeding. The group at Harvard has run out of money for the compiler they were working on, and as soon as the principle investigator can catch his breath (he had to assume the duties of a TA) he'll finish packaging it into something that others can easily work with (e.g. a Git repository as I recall).

As it is, it's supposed to be pretty hard to build, depending on a lot of old and/or exotic tools.

GHC forked off of this effort sometime before the current C-- standard.
Search Engine Marketing Tactics - Bismillah Slamet
actually I think a profit-based insurance model is the problem. you cannot take care of shareholders and patients at the same time.

but since you have a profit-based model, excluding planned (or unplanned for that matter) pregnancies from coverage is the same problem as excluding pre-existing conditions. insurance companies cherry-pick the risk pool to increase profits - they only want to give insurance to people unlikely to need it.

for private insurance to provide any social value, you need a large risk pool that includes healthy and high-risk patients, and the insurance companies must be required to actually cover people who need medical care.

the healthy can't be allowed to opt out, and the insurance companies can't be allowed to decline coverage to anyone in the group.
Hmm. Have you actually used Drupal much? The reason I ask is that you talk about "plug-ins" whereas anyone who's spent any time with Drupal will always refer to "modules".

In any case, I actually find that keeping up to date is very easy. It's dead simple to keep Drupal core and contrib modules up to date with security releases etc, especially if you use Drush (the command line tool). The pain comes if you want to move from one major Drupal version to another and only then do you have to rework a custom module or theme. Even so, there are tools to make it relatively easy. The fact that Drupal tends to introduce major architectural changes from one version to another is really a feature. It's meant that Drupal has become much more flexible, powerful and standards compliant with every major release. For some people that might not be worth the pain of dealing with the changes. Then again, why are you upgrading unless you want to take advantage of the new capabilities?
Why would you rely on a service so capricious, transient and (most troublesome) public as Twitter to handle financial transactions? My experience with the Twitter API is that it's unpredictable and statuses and users can just flit in and out of existence from one moment to the next. That's not something I want to depend on to handle money.
What about GC? When I last looked at LLVM (the current stable release, in fact), it looks like it didn't have a very good story there. Plenty planned out, but little implemented and less solidly.
clothes are made for normal, maybe slender and fit people and it just seems like fatties need not apply.

I'm not sure that's true. I'm well within the recommended weight range (fat percentage ~20%-21%). But I have a muscular neck (too much head-banging in my youth?). Not too musculare, I don't look like a football player. But enough to make a difference, it seems.

A shirt that I can button around my neck is always much too fat for me. Even a "fitted" shirt has a circumference at least 8" greater than my girth.

It would seem that whomever clothes are fitted for, it's neither those who have a more ample size, nor even someone in the recommended range.
This would also vary depending on how you calculate the accuracy of the predictions. Urbanites might be more predictable than suburbanites because (pure speculation) the urbanites tend to only do things in the city, whereas suburbanites are used to driving all over and will therefore have a much larger sense of "nearby"....

In the study this is "within a square mile" which is a HUGE portion of san francisco, but doesn't even get me to my dry cleaners in the burbs.
Interesting - 40% of MongoDB users surveyed prefer Ruby & 50% use OS X as their development environment
scientific paper about domainname squating.
Bought a copy.. good luck =)
So this adds even more to the argument that software should retain its patentability. If it's even more complex than the old stuff we thought was so complex it deserved special protection.

> NO!

It's hard to believe, but it is true. Imagine simply replacing tiny transistors on a chip with big relays and physical switches that flop back and forth. Yes, it would take a long time and be a very big device, but it's a mathematically proven fact.
This is where I usually draw the line at the "everything is a service" world view. It is much better to provide this as a library than as a service, particularly algorithms that run across large data sets.

However, the exception I see to this is a service that applies the algorithm across a large dataset that is owned by the service. An example of this is geocoding, where you probably don't want to store the addresses of everyone in the world in your database, but it is easy to reach out to a range of providers to get latitude longitude for your address.
Your application seems slightly more niche for your category, I'm not sure that a lower price is going to necessarily drive up sales but I absolutely encourage you to test - I dont see how lowering the price could send you backwards.

I have experience with two completely opposite end of the spectrum apps in the store – one puzzle game that is doing 7 – 10 sales a day on average for ~1yr and one free app that’s been downloaded over 1 million times (after making it free) and makes respectable money on advertising.
So, if these 'scientists' were trying to get a publisher fired and a journal shut down for publishing a paper that cast doubt on the scientific consensus, would that be pretty damning in and of itself?

I don't think so: That was the exact situation when a paper was published that attempted to cast doubt on evolution, and I believe that, far from being damning, it was fully justified.

Whether you judge that action as censorship most foul, or simply upholding standards, depends thoroughly on how you felt about it in the first place.
The monopoly is not IE. It's Windows. It's not wrong to have a monopoly. What's wrong is to use (or abuse) one (Windows) to gain an unfair advantage in other segment (browsers) by making your secondary product an integral part of the monopoly product.
Especially when the article is titled "Does Education Make You Happy?"
Divvyshot Might Just Be The Most Gorgeous Photo Sharing Site Yet.
The Power of Six Degrees -- Understanding Networks
actually, i came up with the idea on This Week in Tech for Audible and brought the idea to my podcast... but close enough. :-)
High heels aren't about making the feet look better....
Not that I'd do this, but I can at least see the appeal. Just about everyone who wasn't a "big name" that I've contracted for has dicked me in some way. Demanding more work before payment, or dropping off the face of the earth, or "suddenly realized" that 100 hours of work at $100/hr is going to be $10,000, etc.

I realize both parties are taking a risk that the other won't deliver, but once a project is done the situation is heavily in the favor of the person who hires the contractor. At that point the employer has everything they want and the contractor has nothing (or maybe some up-front cost). A method for being able to "un-deliver" or "repo" an un-paid-for product would have been useful to me many times. But un-like a car or house, I can't just take it back.

That being said I'd be paranoid that something would accidentally trigger the validation mechanism. Any time it validates over HTTP there's a chance the server won't make a connection for various reasons, and then you look like an ass.
I was thinking that as I was typing my comment. Another solution, which S3 uses, is to ship hard disks by courrier. I guess the real metric here is cost per GB transfered in a unit time, say $/GB-hr.
No, the point here is that no one can build a software system of any complexity without infringing on many patents. Tracking that and even paying RAND fees without the need for negotiation makes this impossible, not just difficult or impractical.

And it kills open source software, which doesn't have a model to pay license fees.

Plus there are so many not formally documented ideas that the Patent Office regularly issues patents covering well known prior art; surely you've heard of this? E.g. the XOR patent?

With any luck http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_re_Bilski will drive a stake into the heart of this madness.
They do? News to me. I've never gotten a free penne puttanesca. But I've gone back to my favourite restaurants after 5+ years. And god damn, I do code changes for "free" too. I need to harden up!
your last line is basically a public plan like I suggest, except run by the private sector, with direct payments instead of taxes. We basically agree on the shape of the solution, if not the specific implementation.

But expecting insurance companies as they currently exist to pay for pre-existing without that kind of tradeoff is like crashing your car into a pole, then walking down to state farm and being like "ohh, I need car insurance, full coverage, and pay for my repairs. I don't expect my rates to be different because of that though".

And really, a planned pregnancy is mostly a pre-existing condition. I wonder why there aren't any supplemental policies for complications though. Something that wouldn't cover the expected stuff, but would cover real medical complications.
Can anyone else see Google becoming the Stark Industries of the Informatics Age complete with their own Arc reactors?
You realize, of course, that one-third of medical research turns out to be wrong, and a high percentage of the remaining studies are usually either mis-reported or mis-understood by the professional community. Link: http://www.livescience.com/health/091026-medical-research-fr...

(I remember reading a much higher ratio, but I think that was from a decade or so ago)

The reason why this is not more of a scandal? Twofold.

1) Doctors are wise to this. They rarely recommend sweeping changes based on a few studies.

2) The fraud and errors are out in the open. In most places the politics has not "gotten ahead of the science" where the researchers are actually rooting for the outcomes to fit one narrative or another.

Neither of these are true about this particular topic. Great expensive changes are being requested, millions or billions are already being spent at the fringes of this issue with the damage to endangered habitats being "exaggerated" by climate change, and for many, many scientists (not all or even the majority, but a lot)? They already know what the answer is, and scientists or studies that don't fit with that narrative get excluded, shunned, de-funded, and ostracized.

Not trying to be snarky, but does that explain the differences well enough for you?
>How about we want an open standards Internet and the 90% monopoly Microsoft has on the desktop really endangers that?

Why does 90% Windows market share endanger open web standards? Web standards are implemented by the browser, not the OS.
LLVM is the low-level virtual machine. (Basically portable assembly; except much smarter.)

GC is orthogonal. There is some work to add auto-gc to anything on LLVM, but while that's brewing, you can also do it in your runtime. GHC's runtime already does GC, so this is not a big deal.
It was survivable before we invented nukes. We've gotten by on luck for half a century, and now we're working on nanotechnology and genetic engineering.
At this rate, there won't be any young people in America at all. They'll all go to other countries that treat all citizens equally.

I know many believe elders deserve respect, but I disagree. The older generation in this country has sapped our energy sources, polluted the planet, and robbed other nations of their resources for decades.

Now, they want to continue to require other people to pay their bills, ensure their quality of life, and help them live even longer at the expense of all those things for the young.

When the younger generation has nothing positive to look forward to in this nation, they are going to go to another nation that will welcome them and treat them with the same respect and decency that the U.S. currently showers on the baby boomers. The older generation is already rich. They've already saved up their money. They are already getting free rent through social security and medical care through medicare. They are set.

The young don't have jobs and can't get them. They can barely feed their own families and here the government wants to take even more money from them. It is unsustainable.
I'd like to second this, my account cancellation with SEOMoz was handled wonderfully as well. In my case, I simply sent them an email, and got a very nice response back within minutes letting me know everything was taken care of and I wouldn't be billed again.

Its really important to me how a company handles parting ways. Because their cancellation experience was so easy I am more likely to reopen my account again in the future.

Note: SEOMoz's Pro service is a great deal if you need the tools it provides. I canceled simply because our workload shifted, but would re-up in the future.
What evidence is there of widespread astroturfing on climate change, specifically on HN?
This is a very long time coming. I really thought it would happen much sooner than it has, though I wonder how long before it starts shipping.
It was really interesting to read and then the end of the world garbage at the end ruined it for me.
An approach worth contrasting seeking either happiness or interesting life is to try living a life with morality and purpose that leaves the world better than you found it in some meaningful way.
The common complaints about software patents rely on mistakes and shortcomings of the book-keeping: obvious inventions sneaking through, prior art missed, terms too long, etc.

But the real difference (and problem, imo) can be found in the claims.

A patent for a physical invention lays out, in its claims, precisely how an invention works. A lever-arm here, a catch there.

Infringement on that patent can only happen if a competing implementation contains all the elements of the original claims.

So if I want to achieve the same result that you did, I simply have to build my solution such that at least one element is distinct.

E.g. If you were granted a patent on a traditional set of gears to effect variable windscreen wiper delay, I could use an orbital gearing solution. Regardless of which solution is better, at the end of the day we'd both be able to offer our clients variable wiper delay.

Software (and process) claims, by contrast, invariably work at a higher level. Gone are levers and gears, in their place we find 'a method', 'a network', 'a client'. As we all know "a network" describes a far, far larger domain than "a gear" (and even "a gear" is pretty darn generous).

Software patents are literally staking their claims at a higher level of abstraction and the practical result is that there is generally no feasible alternative implementation. So no competitor can offer a competing product that effects the same result, even if the substance of their solution is wildly different than the original invention.

Rather than granting a monopoly on the invention, software patents live far closer to the level of granting a monopoly on the idea. And this introduces a much more severe drag on the market than you see with physical inventions.
Will IPv6 ever be a reality?
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