skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is powerful feature, but the demo example doesn't really give justice to it. There needs to be a good reason to use it. Resorting from name to size of the file it not it.

For instance:

- Filtering down to a small subset from a large set of visible items. It makes sense to use this effect in case the selected item's representation is zoomed or displays additional detail. The animation indicates that there's a relation between the selection and the larger set. It also gives a clue original distribution of the selected items within the larger set.

Example: Show all facebook connections groupped by country. Then select those that have a particular interest as a list. The animation would give you a clue about geo-distribution of people having the same interest. This clue is an additional information you could not see by simply showing the selection.

- Reordering (eg. promoting) a small set of items in a large set. The animation shows you how far the item travels when it is promoted.

Example: Display the list of tennis players according to their rank at after a given competition. When the user selects the different competition, the list is reordered. The payers who make big jumps attract more attention.
Please Rob Me
SaaS Metrics - A Guide to Measuring and Improving What Matters
a signficant portion of the profits go toward non-profit causes (the rest funds future breadpig projects). We're donating a chunk of all the LOLmagnetz revenue to the San Francisco SPCA

(http://lolmagnetz.com/instructions#help)
So, you're right, upvoted :)
Because he didn't stop at data and analysis and went off on a zealot's rant that included poor logic and dodgy conclusions.
Sorry about the misunderstanding, yes, at the end of 2008 we donated $15,000 of LOLmagnetz sales to the SF/SPCA (keeping the other $15,000 to cover cost of inventory. At the end of 2009, we donated $22,000 to the SF/SPCA to cover the $15,000 we 'owed' along with some more gravy gained from LOLsales during the year.

Breadpig is indeed a for-profit corporation (for reasons best left to another post) but I'd like to be more transparent about this to the point of real-time reporting. I'll publish our financial statements as soon as our accountant is done with them.

edit: account->accountant
kn0thing++
I wonder if the more gradual gradients will look even worse on cheap LCD screens - the ones with only 6 bits of color?
Mozilla Debates Whether to Trust Chinese CA
http://xkcd.com/435/
The company I work for does CMS and business-directory products for news/media companies; we've been doing the "open until" (and, for places not yet open, "opens at") thing for a while. Example:

http://www2.ljworld.com/marketplace/businesses/genovese/
There's a BIG difference in Pitchfork/tumblr and this article where the author had @digg on Twitter where he/she displayed data from Digg's RSS feed. This big difference is the tumblr guy was not infringing on Pitchfork's trademark while this guy was.

If Joe's Apple Farm has @apple or apple.tumblr.com, he should be able to keep it if he has non-infringing content where he talks about the apples he grows. If Joe starts displaying iPod affiliate links and blogging about iPads, he has crossed the line into a situation where he may be infringing on trademarks.
It's not in HTML5’s scope. That’s the domain of CSS3.
The Early Course of Autism
That's mathematics, not science. There's more to CS than algorithms. Even heuristics wouldn't fit your definition, never mind any kind of research like machine learning or human-computer interaction.
Obama pledges $8.3B in loan guarantees for nuke plants in Georgia
15 Internet Annoyances, and How to Fix Them
Heh, I remember when I believed that users should be responsible for the terms of service they agree to when signing up for a service, and if the company was entitled to do something in the terms of service the user had no cause to complain, because - after all - they agreed to the terms. Naturally, this ended up biting me in the ass more than somewhat.

After a lot of ranting to my girlfriend ('a contract's a contract', etc.) I reluctantly added this to the pile of stupid things I once believed in. Yes, you have to have terms of service to cover your butt in case someone actually bothers to sue you, but as far as your users are concerned, they didn't read them and they don't exist. Your webservice is subject to a set of unarticulated, unwritten expectations of what a users' rights should be, and if you violate any of these, the resulting PR backlash can make you wish they just up and quietly sued you instead.

Might not be fair, but that's how it is.
Anyone know of a mootools equivalent?
Costs were for inventory & production (we don't have any employee salaries):

Book production (cost of printing, binding, shipping to xkcd fulfillment center) - by far the most expensive thing
Contracted design work
ISBN registration
A few FEDEX shipments for prototypes

[Ultimately, we agreed with xkcd to share the costs and deduct those from the total revenue before splitting the profits, but I needed to put a hefty downpayment and it helped to have the $ in the bank.]
Congrats, Alexis!
Git, for going over the 100 MB free Github account? (I know, Git partisans, Bitbucket has a similar, not much larger limit on free accounts)
Judge Rules That Student's Facebook Rants About Teacher Are Protected Speech
> For N balls, the other balls can/should be binary searched.

Interesting assertion. Can you prove that? Can you give a provably minimal search pattern?

> It's just a little tricky when it comes to the last two.

Another interesting assertion. It seems to me that the case of exactly two balls is trivial, once the solution is found.
Can you really MapReduce natural language?
Why I don’t want to view bbc.co.uk through an app
Fav4.org is nice, but I agree - a bit to simple. There is an alternative - zenstart. It has a Goolge seach box and the 150 most popular links: www.zenstart.com
The "there’s one right way to do it" misquoting/misunderstanding of the python mantra is starting to annoy me.
The fact is with code, if you don't try it, it doesn't work. We all know this is true; when code works "the first time" we tell the story to our friends.
I debugged a string-move routine ported from linux to a RISC processor with a requirement for aligned word-moves. It had 11 bugs in like, 20 lines of code. Because it hadn't been tried on that architecture before.
Its not a bug if the code worked where originally designed to work, but not when moved to a new environment. Kind of makes "reusable code" an oxymoron.
oh. On chrome mac it is very smooth. On Firefox 3.6 Mac, sometimes the "rearranging objects" feels non-smooth.
That is: http://www.zenstart.com
A good read, good points criticizing the spec. At first, I was dead set against HTML5 because I had been waiting for wide XHTML+RDFa adoption. That isn't going to happen now. Still, if HTML5 implementations are good and support web app portability between browsers, then I am happy enough with it. I also liked Bray's point on bring patent troll problems with video codecs more into the public view.
Interview with Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia/Wikia) on getting traction
I'm more interested in seeing what happens with regard to Sun's esteemed ZFS and the GPL'ed competing file system, BTRFS, that Oracle is working on. It seems foolish for Oracle to continue devoting resources to two heavyweight file systems with overlapping functionality.

I suppose I'll keep on dreaming that Oracle will update ZFS with a GPL license and the process of inclusion in Linux would swiftly begin...
The painful truth about age discrimination among programmers
How different are the experiencing and remembering selves from the Freudian id and ego respectively, though?
Acne – A Clean Face – First Step In A 12 Step Program
I'm trying to get a bunch more traction interviews done, i.e. focused on the subject of getting traction. I've gotten a lot of good interviewee suggestions, e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1092630

If anyone could introduce me to some of these people (or others you think would make good interviewees on this subject), I would greatly appreciate it.
They are "pirates", not pirates.

I dig where you're coming from but this is kind of my whole point. Humans are humans, you cannot just ignore psychology. You are being asked to predict human behaviour. The "correct" answer is ridiculously unrealistic. Who is better - the guy who is competent at induction, or the guy who realises that human interaction is rarely, if ever, guided by such black and white rules?
This should be quite interesting. $500k for 100 customers seems pricey though, but stranger things happen.

Flippa.com seems to have pretty good pricing for selling websites though: http://flippa.com/pricing (Capped at $498 max)
Are you friggin' kidding me. Wikipedia hosts so many sites and serves so many requests that they are their partially their own cloud. They would not gain much from switching to some other cloud, not to mention the probability that there is no other 'cloud' that could handle them ad hock. I'm sure Amazon would swallow big if Wikimedia came to them with such a request, then probably laugh out loud. Get real..
Someone wrote a nice (though brief) description of ClearCase in the article comments:

ClearCase flies aircraft that resemble battleships being brought aloft by 25,000 parakeets, all of whom are weighed down by 25,000 pages of documentation, which none of them have ever read.
StencilsApp - an iPhone wireframing app
My UI design and prototyping tool for the iPhone just appeared on the Apple AppStore, so I thought it may be of interest to the readers of HackerNews.

It's a free download for the iPhone and the iPod Touch and the official site is:
http://www.stencilsapp.com

I'd really appreciate your feedback or bug reports either here or at info@stencilsapp.com

And yes, I'm posting from a brand new account not because I have something to hide, but because I'd like to keep this separate from my "regular" HN activity.

Thank you all in advance.
Isn't this just Paypal? But instead of giving someone my email address to transfer funds, they have to get their dingle-whatsit out and I have to get my card out and mess around?
That's why I always tweet 'In closet, with gun' before I leave the house.
Just don't violate copyright.

Or trademark, or patents, for the sake of completeness.
In the cases where there are no physical-world measurements, as with inputs and outputs to many machine learning problems, it is math. "Experiments" using randomized algorithms and measuring the results, themselves, certainly don't qualify as science.
One: Sites that quote a fragment of the original long enough to look like an article yet short enough to get away with it, and hide the rest behind a tiny link surrounded by "share" buttons. For reference, the original article is at http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9156959/15_Inte...
10 warning signs your IT job is in trouble
Having worked for a Defense Contractor and been forced to go through social engineering training in the past, the idea of gathering information like this is very real and happens everyday. Hopefully this makes people think twice before exposing certain personal information online for all to see.
Martin Fowler's unscientific agglomeration of opinion on version control tools
I think this falls into the same jurisdiction as Wappr does (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1123173 if you missed that conversation), where you're aggregating info from people that may not want it used as such. I know that this is trying to prove a point, and yes, the Twitter account for pleaserobme sends tweets to people who get listed on the site, but it's still a little heavy handed.
Thanks! BTW, did that shipment ever make it to India? :)
I like the design of the landing page and the main graphic. I am getting tired of seeing the standard "browser screenshot" graphic on landing pages. As for the copy on the landing page I also couldn't discern quickly what the application was about.
Read Ian's response in the comments, its brilliant. I love when the author of the spec casually comments on some blog ;)
To Cripple or To Build
I've recently released an iPhone app and am looking towards future development but I'd appreciate the opinion of smart individuals like you.

Let's say I have $5,000 to spend on an update to my app. In your opinion, would it be best to cripple the app and release a free (current price is $2.99) "lite" version with an in-app purchase that unlocks all the features? This would be done in hopes that it would spur downloads and, hopefully, purchases.

Or would it be better to use the money to improve the app and add new features which might also improve purchases?
Didn't even know about /newest. I am going to checking it now.
Apple patents enforced advertising
Feature Request: can you setup an affiliate program that gives me a cut of the "take" when a thuggishly inclined friend uses this to rob someone? thx!

-jlb
I think that we should also have a look at the quality of food. While the quantity of available food has increased and you can find cheap food, it's quality has decreased dramatically.
I don't want to live in such a world [video]
France on the verge of Internet censorship
Is givv.org a 501c3?

They don't state this on their website, and they claim you can give to anyone, not just charities, which makes me wonder if you lose the tax-deductibility by using givv.
Well it doesn't help when the people that say others should get over the UI issues then say if you do actually use the UI you won't really be getting much out of it and then supply command line examples of what they should be doing.
Augmented (hyper)Reality (video exploring consumerism and architecture)
Google faces FTC complaint over Buzz privacy
The website design is great too. Congrats.
This is pretty awesome. I've never twittered when I'm away from my place for a long period of time. I don't post about it to facebook. And I don't set email auto-responders. I guess my inner criminal automatically notified me that were I actually in the job of stealing, I would definitely use social media to pick likely targets.

In fact, generally no one knows I was away until I get back, short of close friends and family.
This is an absolutely brilliant use of data aggregation.
You keep adding twists to your argument in later comments, it's a nice trick but it really doesn't work.

Birthdays normally are 'invite only', and as long as they are they are private functions. Birthdays open to the general public are not common (at least not where I live).

Open to the general public but closed to some subset (the people with red hair, people born on Tuesday and so on) are possibly illegal but as long as they are in someones private dwelling they have the right to toss out anybody for whatever reason so it's going to be very hard to know what the real reason is. In my country if I tell you to leave three times and you don't I have the immediate right to even use force to remove you, whatever my reason for not wanting you in my house.

Houses are special, they are not generally open to the public, and in case they are no doubt the rules change but that was not the example used. So don't twist it that way.
this whole thing is leaving a bad taste in my mouth. heres why:

you have a kid that knowingly registered another's trademarked name, and when pitchfork asks (not tells, not purchases like so many re-blogs imply) tumblr for control of what appears to be a dead blog (IMO it wasn't producing anything worth-while anyways), tumblr hands over control. shame on tumblr for not making more of an attempt, and double shame on this kid for running to his real blog to cry that his fake blog was stolen by an evil corporation. then, half of the tumblosphere blindly and automaticaly reblogged his post.

pitchfork responded and the community mostly accepted it - no ill will on their part. tumblr has yet to officially respond past an immature blog post from a 25 year old 'director of outreach', but i bet they will and i bet they will provide evidence to their claims. they have millions of real dollars behind them, and no reason to jeopardize that. i also wager that this kid is trying harder to make a scene than he is to actually reclaim his name. his email to tumblr was very polite while his blog posts have not been. why? has he emailed pitchfork? they are not some nameless faceless corporation like exxon.

here is another point i would like to make: you don't own your username. read the terms of service. use your brain. just because you signed up does not mean you are actually entitled.

and another thing while i am shaking my cane: to all of you that reblogged it on tumblr without following up on the story or adding insight of your own: why?
I saw it mentioned earlier that one of the reasons they keep they keep the discussion private is to filter out general noise. Anyone who has been on these sorts of lists before knows that it can often become very difficult to conduct the business of the mailing list without having spammers, trolls, or complete newbies stumbling in every minute.

To some degree, this makes sense, but I'm not sure why a read-only but publicly-viewable list wouldn't do just fine. The whole behind closed doors committee aspect of the W3 seems incredibly dated.

Spec committees need a reboot.
Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free.

After they RTFM for how to start it. Attempting to drive away without that may result in seemingly random explosions.

That, and the consensus for anyone not in the consensus is that they should go fork themselves. The forked ones frequently agree.
Microsoft Remembers Facebook, Plans To Integrate It Into Outlook
I love how they are referred to as "opportunities".
If you can't be bothered to read the whole article, he recommends (based on anecdotal evidence) subversion, git and mercurial.
> The leaked emails did not say that.

You can keep saying that, but you're wrong. They did. They said that the models' predictions didn't correspond to what they thought that they were seeing from the measurements.

Christy's work appears to be post-leak and wasn't considered in the e-mails. He says that the supposed temperature increases, which the e-mails admit were less than what the models predicted, aren't real. What's your basis for claiming that he's wrong about the actual measurments?

> Please stop suggesting they actually had any significant impact on the science in question, because they did not.

How about telling us what you'd take as a statement or evidence that AGW wasn't happening?

Note also the difference between statistically significant and scientifically significant. Phil Jones is currently hanging his hat on the former and staying very quiet about the latter. However, the latter is the hockey stick.
Yes, and it's reminiscent of the Buzz launch as well. People seem to think that "publicly available" is a binary state, i.e. either X is public (1) or it's not (0). By that logic, if X is already public then aggregating/broadcasting it is fair game: you're not putting it through a state change, only going from 1 to 1. I think this is a mistake. There are clearly degrees here.
If you have a byte array on a 32bit machine, assuming your program's text (i.e. instructions) takes up some space, the biggest possible array will be less than 2^32 Bytes = 4GiB, so the midpoint will be too. There can be no overflow.

If you subtracted two 64bit pointers and stored the result in an int32 though, then you would have problems.
Put a screwdriver in their hand and let them try it for a month before paying for it.
A4S Ethical Hackers Security - خدمات العرب
Shipment made it safely to Dubai from Atlanta. next leg of the journey is on march 3, from Dubai to India. will keep you posted :-)
This is the ultimate free source of leads for home security and alarm businesses.

Edit: They could drive around the neighborhood dropping off flyers saying, "While you were out at "place homeowner checked into" someone could have been robbing you blind.
If version control systems were airlines VSS would be a bus.
In fact, given how many people on that list have their twitters set up with their own names, I'd say it's probably easy to grab a name from a location, look them up in the phone book (first stop for addresses, or at least it was a long time ago). From there it's just a matter of making sure no one else is at the house.
How many people on HN do you think fall in the 'common' bracket?

There is probably more IT competency here than you'd find in a very large majority of the net population.

For most people this would be news, for you and I, and most of the rest of HN it's old hat.
15 Outrageous Sex Apps That Made It Into The App Store
I think git's UI is terrible for one main reason: each git (porcelain) command can do a whole bunch of unrelated things.

Want to switch to a different branch (or tag/revision hash)? 'git checkout'

Want to change a single file's contents to a previous version? 'git checkout'

Want to create a new branch? 'git checkout'

This becomes a problem because 'git checkout' has to have many different options to be able to do all of these things and all of these options can interact in different ways.

This makes the 'git help' for every command enormous because it needs to document the interaction between all the different options. Large help docs are hard to read when you're in the middle of working and just want to know how to do something specific.

Contrast git's help with Mercurial's equivalent helps:

$ git help checkout | wc -l
236

$ (hg help update ; hg help branch ; hg help revert) | wc -l
100

Mercurial's docs are less than half the length of git's. This isn't because Mercurial isn't well documented -- it's because Mercurial splits up functionality into small, independent commands that do one main thing each. Mercurial's help doesn't need to waste time saying stuff like "if you use --foo then --bar means X, but if you use --bar on its own it means Y, and neither of them can be used with --baz".

This is why I hate git's UI. There's so much functionality crammed into every command that the docs for each command become impossible to scan (try 'git help log | wc -l' for laughs).
1. Programmers write apps that no one ever asked for but may be able to use.

2. Widespread adoption of apps that no one ever asked for but may be able to use.

3. Holy shit, what have we done to ourselves?

4. Programmers write apps to minimize the consequences of widespread adoption of apps that no one ever asked for but may be able to use.

5. Widespread adoption of apps to minimize the consequences of widespread adoption of apps that no one ever asked for but may be able to use.

What a great time to be a programmer.
It is, that's true.

It's also rude. As the child of a teacher, why would anyone want to be one again?
You grossly underestimate how much money goes into hosting Wikipedia. They're most certainly at the scale where physical boxes are cheaper than EC2 and others.

http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Server_roles
Actually BitBucket gives free accounts 1 GiB of space now: http://blog.bitbucket.org/2010/02/11/disk-space-is-cheap-hav...
Real time, FULL, non-PITA offsite backup from the home office.

(Some of my artistic endeavors can generate a lot of data quickly. Upstream is slow, and I could exceed my bandwidth cap in the course of a month.)
I worked at IBM in the late '80s. A secretary that worked in my department could have her earphone in one ear typing 100+ words a minute while in her other ear on the phone speaking/listening Spanish with her girlfriend. I could walk up to her and ask a question while she was typing in English and conversing Spanish and she would smile and handle my interruption without missing a beat. Simply amazing.

My ability to context switch has degraded over the years. In my 20s it was effortless. Now I plan each day to avoid context switches.
regardless of how they are represented, are not things that should be added together.

Maybe something about torsors?

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/torsors.html
http://www.torproject.org/ make sure you put on your rubber before trolling for your next "project"