skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going to take the opposite approach here. While the idea of a cartel controlling diamond production and pricing is a very bad thing, I don't see how it is so wrong to show your partner your affection with an expensive present. Things to consider:

Most women now prefer other kinds of expensive gifts - http://tech2.in.com/india/news/entertainment-internet/women-...

The whole "Diamonds are not forever" bit is true, and I think it would be very cool to see some diamonds burning/vaporizing. On the other hand what is homeowner's insurance for?

The bit about how diamonds are not perfect and are now produced artificially does not bother me. You get what you pay for.

Lastly, the thing about how diamonds are just a big scam introduced by De Beers in the 30s is not anything new. Does it bother me? Not any more than the fact that I have to shave. Should I stop shaving just because somebody at some point popularized shaving and is now selling me razor blades at $2/blade? Would be a great conversation with my boss:
Boss: "So Igor, you grew a huge unruly beard. What's up?"
Me: "Yes. I refuse to support Gillette's market position. I'm off to see a client."

Most of our social norms are built around the fact that somebody at some point had an interest in things being this way. Diamonds are just one small, almost insignificant part of it.
Ex Apple executive: "My definition of what a 'tablet' is doesn't match Apple's."

Boring. Arguing about definitions is stupid, childish and meaningless. There is an interesting analysis in there but it's obscured by all that futile babble about what constitutes a proper tablet and what not.
How To Upgrade Debian Etch To Lenny
Acai Ripped Review
It's not always true and the reason for that is they are giving you the wrong supplements. At least they are giving you incomplete supplements. Acai Berry Select Ripped is there to pick up the slack.
You hit the nail on the head. Generally, it's counterproductive to allow emotional valence to overshadow the cold meaning of the words. For me, a statement like "this code is beautiful but unmaintainable" sounds perfectly fine and meaningful. But many people seem to have a vague cluster of "good" words, and when they're told that a certain "good" thing doesn't have another "good" attribute, cognitive dissonance ensues and they start making stuff up.
I don't understand your first paragraph. Shouldn't the cosmic ray flux through each bit be the same for each bit, and unchanged as you increase the total amount of memory? If I'm a given bit, should having a second stick of RAM 10 inches away affect whether I flip during a given time period?
> But once you know you have good DIMMs, it doesn't look like you need to be quite so paranoid about bit errors.

Assuming that only the one-error-per-year cases were due to random bit flips, and all the multiple-errors-per-year cases were due to bad DIMMs, I came up with about a 1/5 chance of getting a single random bit-flip over a 6 year lifespan. But there also seems to be about a 1/3 chance of having a DIMM randomly go bad after a couple years, which of course without ECC would manifest as random crashes and lost (or maybe corrupted) work.
Anecdotally: Just about everyone I've met who run affiliate marketing and/or direct marketing companies (not necessarily their employees, but definitely the owners) are probably the most shady individuals I have ever dealt with.
Great job killian, I was looking for something exactly like this. =)
I do find the appeal of Clojure quite alluring (I've long had a weakness for Lisp-based languages), but I'm not so keen on having to deal with the Java platform as it's not really to my taste.

Not really wanting to deal either with the Java class libraries or all the XML that seems to proliferate in the Java world.
Have you ever been in love? ;)
Very nice, but I don't see any way to generate a legend. I'll probably need to cut the graphs from a screenshot for my less technically oriented superiors, so a legend is mandatory. I love the sparkline support, btw.
I wrote the default study referenced in publicbonds.com and was pleased to see the assumptions still hold up. I have started a blog to cover some of these issues again: http://www.thepublicpurse.com
How can I change the email address
How can I change the email address where the form submittal is sent to? A. After you login into your account, you can go at Forms List in the right menu, and then Edit the form for which you want to change the contact email.
Links to the demos here:

http://ajaxian.com/romancortes/ajaxian.html
http://ajaxian.com/romancortes/starry.html
http://ajaxian.com/romancortes/romajaxian.html
http://ajaxian.com/romancortes/reverse-spinning-coke-can.htm...
One thing that always surprise me about most of the web startups is why we're so reluctant to the affiliate marketing.

The industry has a bad name, I agree. On the other hand, it's just selling something for a provision. It does not have to involve sneaky get-rich-quick schemes. Most of the world sells something for someone and does (financially) better than many startups.

It's relatively easy to start selling for someone and when it turns out to be profitable, creating your own product.

For instance, it's hard to get into booking industry, w/o some partnership initially. Once you're big, though, you can drop the middle party and speak with GDS or hotels directly.

EDIT: I know that many startups are about changing the world. I'd say, however, that many are just about making money. And affiliate is a good path.
It is sort of like SEO: it gets a bad rap from a contingent of the market who perpetuate abuses. This man, for example, made hundreds of thousands of dollars of sales by facilitating theft. (There is no other way to describe rebilling if you understand what the game is.)
If you download the videos I think you should be able to speed them up with MPlayer.
I know that DoubleClick allows location-targeted ads; I'm sure other ad platforms do as well.
Ask HN: Review My App - CareLogger (A Diabetes Tracking Tool)
I'd love seeing a copy of that if you don't mind. (Incidentally, should any of you ever want to do this to a quote on HN from me, feel free. I trust your judgement regarding whether it is substantative enough to merit attribution.)
Define shady?
I thought the same thing. :)
Beauty is not a sufficient basis for a happy marriage.

But every happy marriage is founded on that each finds the other beautiful.

If you at least get the foundation of the system "beautiful", when the abstractions start to leak, as they invariably will, you can manage them to a much greater extent. You're right about not expecting the simplicity and elegance to remain, but there's a huge difference in manageability toward the end of each system's life. Get the foundation right; the house will follow.
I've been learning functional programming over the last few months and I really like it. I can't help but notice, however, that there is a difference in "beauty" as it applies to fp and oop.

A good piece of OOP code is verbose yet simple. It may be a world of nouns, but there's a little tiny chunk of code in there that does one thing and does it well. Beautiful OOP is made for morons. And I mean that as a compliment.

FP, on the other hand, couples the data structures so tightly in with the code that I'm always the human linker -- keeping track of dozens of different things at the same time. But when done well, all of this incredible amount of work just falls out of a line or two of code. You have to keep track of the pieces, but your opportunity to combine them in cool ways is incredibly higher. Beautiful FP is like watching origami -- from a simple base somehow something beautifully complex emerges.

Then there's the difference between beautiful startup code -- you have no idea of the problem so it is able to pivot in multiple directions quickly, and beautiful commercial code -- you know the problem and you've met the solution in the most maintainable, understandable way possible.

The term "beautiful" is overloaded too many times. And good coders aren't looking for artistic perfection. I agree with the author: it's a bad idea.
Then again, the way Twitter overcame their scaling issues was to.. uh, well.. move off from Ruby for a portion of their stack.
Three sad programmer stories and a happy ending:

In order to handle complexity, I split my program carefully into
modules with low coupling. I'm happy until a new feature comes along
which cannot be implemented without destroying the independence of the
existing modules. Then there are two options: Either I redesign the
system based on the new requirements or hack the new feature into the
old architecture. Both alternatives make me sad.

I recognize some repetitive pattern in my code. So I create some
straightforward abstraction that removes the redundancy. I'm happy
until the pattern appears again, but this time in some slightly
different form so that the old abstraction can't handle it. Then I
change the abstraction to include the new case. Eventually, I realize
that the abstraction has only complicated the system, because now one
has to understand both the implementation of the abstraction and the
use of it. This make me sad.

I'm working on some easy task. I know that I have solved problems like
this many times before. Unfortunately this time my brain just refuses
to solve the problem. Without solving the problem, I go home and think
about pursuing a different career.

On the next morning I solve the problem within 5 minutes and I'm glad
to be a programmer.
Based on pure gut feeling, I doubt that sensitivity has increased at all for at least a decade now. Anything that penetrates into the casing is either something that will not interact with it, or has enough energy to flip a bit both in a 180nm and 32nm process.
A tablet is not just a laptop with an on-screen keyboard - that's the mistake MS made.
I think his point was that as you get a higher number of bits per volume, the number of flips per GB would go down, basically because for a given number of bits, a higher density would imply they are exposed to less flux.
Google are advertising everywhere in London. You can't get on a Tube without seeing a billboard-sized ad for Chrome on the platform. They take out ads in the freesheets too. This has been going on for several months now.
Thanks, this should help in figuring out if Clojure is the way forward for me!
That seems to be the case with this guy as well. "richoffyou: Google wouldn't be where it is today without people like me feeding its revenue. Google = value." Delusional.
Maybe as shady as any other 'man in the middle' deal - for instance insurance brokers, realtors, etc

So many websites do affiliate marketing in some form that you can't just throw them all in a bucket of 'shady'.

If you do a blog post comparing slicehost to linode, and have your signup links in it, that's affiliate marketing. Nothing particularly shady about that.
Kindle Dev Kit open to beta testers
Should hair extensions be banned?
Compile-time metaprogramming for PHP with no performance penalty
For Students at Risk, Early College Proves a Draw
When I use my Vodafone USB stick on their UK 2G network, they silently proxy everything and compress images - it's dreadful. On 3G, they seem to let images through in their original state.

They're also pretty censorious. Needless-to-say, the likes of 4chan and porn are blocked on Vodafone's cellular network. But so are Flickr, Meebo, Google Talk and a whole host of other inoffensive yet useful websites. All redirect to a page telling you that they're barred by "content control".

Why can cellular operators get away with blocking stuff that other ISPs would never dream of filtering out? Why should it be any different whether I'm accessing the net through my Vodafone dongle or my ADSL line?
Maybe college helps because students can start taking themselves more seriously there than they can in high school.

http://paulgraham.com/hs.html
Google's index is increasingly polluted. Let me give you an example, the other day I needed the exact address of an electronics store, I entered the name of the company and the street it was on. The top search results were "places to eat near..." - WTF? Who searches for places to eat near a named shop!? Similarly, if you search for "X review" you will mostly get pages that are just affiliate links to retailers and the text "Be the first to write a review of X!"

Right now Bing is a better search engine even if the only reason is that fewer people are trying to game it. The thing that makes Google most useful is searching other people's sites (e.g. adding +site:news.bbc.co.uk to your search terms). As a standalone service, they're going the way Altavista went.
The iPhone obsession (mobile web development)
The rate of cosmic ray intersection is most likely directly proportional to the physical cross section of the silicon. The author uses per-bit empirical data from 10 years ago, when memory was 100 times less dense, and then extrapolates to the present. It would likely be more correct to use a per-chip (or per cm^2) rate.
So you want to autolink urls...
My main problem with javascript graphing libraries in general is that there's no way to copy & paste the graph into facebook, forums, etc. And if you're a data orientated site then visitors from shared graphs, etc. are going to make up a significant percentage of your traffic. If it's not easy for people to share your graphs then you're just giving away a lot of free traffic.
I've wondered when an opinionated charting library would appear and gently guide people away from pie charts.

Apple dropped a couple of notches in my estimation when they brought out iWork and 3-D woodgrain pie-charts were proudly displayed.
It is difficult to scale affiliate marketing like you can scale products, at least in a way which makes sense. For example, typical affiliate payouts for many products are in the 30% range. Many startups want to have many, many millions in revenue. Once you start talking about a million here and a million there you have to ask yourself what it is about the affiliate that the merchant can't bring in house.

In some cases, the answer is that the affiliate's aggregation capabilities provides value -- hotels would be a good example of this. In many cases, the answer is NOT pleasant. Sometimes the right hand doesn't really want to know what the left hand is doing.

The other alternative is somehow making a scalable business out of bundling lots and lots of little merchants together and providing scalable affiliate services to all of them. By that metric, Google is almost the biggest affiliate in history. (You can even do CPA bidding!)

Relatedly, Google takes huge, huge amounts of money from advertisers whose hands are less than clean. (Ringtones, for example: essentially 100% of these are rebill scams. Ditto diet, weight loss, acai berry, teeth whitening products, whatever the flavor of the month is.)

Think ScamVille times two or three orders of magnitude and perpetuated under the curiously unseeing eye of the most beloved tech company in history.
Ask HN: Can we recruit on HN if not YC-funded?
We need people to do things (casually but paid) that we think some people on HN may find interesting. Would it be acceptable to post seeking those people, if not is there somewhere more suitable?
Science is self-correcting
Identifying John Doe: It might be easier than you think
Agreed. Back in the first year of university I did some affiliate marketing (not in quite the same way but similar) and made around $10K or so with a lot of work.

It's possible to do it ethically, which is what I tried very hard to do (at the end of the day it's just advertising and a lot of it depends on the product). But it becomes incredibly difficult to pick products that aren't essentially rip offs. The affiliate networks are as much trying to scam the marketers (which is why his advice of picking only the bigger networks is good).

I used to market stuff similar to what JML sell (i.e. fairly niche "time save" appliances). Most of the products were good - but ultimately the kind of thing you buy on a whim and then use once or twice a year.

The margins aren't great for the time input [nearly failed my first year outright] so I moved on to other pastures (where ethics were more prevalent too)
"I can't help but notice, however, that there is a difference in "beauty" as it applies to fp and oop."

I don't know that I agree with this. Code is code. Now, I will agree that you may have to take a different approach to writing beautiful code in OOP vs FP. But I don't think that what makes functional code beautiful is different than what makes object-oriented code beautiful.

In all, I feel that beautiful code is (in this order):

* Something that gets the job done.

* Something that gets the job done correctly (there is a difference).

* Something that tackles a complex problem in an easy-to-understand way.

I agree that we as programmers shouldn't seek perfection when no perfect solution exists. However, it's usually in your best interests in the long term to put forth the extra effort to make your solution beautiful where it's feasible.
"On the next morning I solve the problem within 5 minutes and I'm glad to be a programmer."

I can't count the number of times this has happened to me. Never underestimate the effects of a good night's rest.
Very nice! This will be perfect to use in my project. Thanks!
I don't know about other websites you mentioned, but raaga.com looks legal.

They've an advertisers page which looks genuine - I've seen ads for new movies show up on raaga.com (I'm guessing if movie producers don't have a problem buying ads on that website, they're probably legal?). http://www.raaga.com/channels/home/advertise.asp
If you're interested in this, definitely check out ShoeMoney and his story. I've had his Google check photo hanging up in my office as motivation for 2 years. http://www.shoemoney.com
Pharaoh's snake
From someone on StackOverflow:

"Beautiful code is like obscenity. You know it when you see it."

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20564/what-constitutes-be...
Hi Idan. I an happy to see this online after you showed as a quick preview yesterday on Tel Aviv HN meetup. Keep up the good work.
This is the problem I tried to solved with the Indefero hosting I offer. All the forges have their own domain name for free and you can migrate all your data to your own server with your own Indefero installation in 3 easy steps (download, import, switch DNS).

Anyway, the problems with Github is that their level of quality result in people considering all the offers as having such level of quality. We (code hosting providers) are all suffering when Github is down... this is where it annoys me.
It looks really nice and I've been looking for a while for something like this. However, until it supports IE properly are things like this useful? IE (combined) is still 62% of browsers. Don't get me wrong - it's a great concept. But it has to work on the most common browser.
Yes, it did load finally. That's great, so are you generating VML or using excanvas?
Tale of a Would-Be Spy, Buried Treasure, and Uncrackable Code
> Eventually, I realize that the abstraction has only complicated the system, because now one has to understand both the implementation of the abstraction and the use of it.

That's a real problem. The best abstractions are so useful, that they even help understanding when you only use them once.

E.g. functions come to my mind --- because they have clear entry and exit points (of control and communication), they can be easier to understand than the same code inlined.

(Functors and Monads also seem to enhance my understanding.)
Additionally, the mined usernames / passwords could still be used to brute force other banking / credit card web sites.
Verizon Wireless blocks 4chan image boards
DirectorySeo.org.uk-Directory
I found Internet Web Directory organized by category, offers content rich and well designed web sites. Submit URL for editor review and have your site listed within search engines.
The beauty of Clojure is that it let's you get as close to Java as you desire. Aside from installation considerations ("Do I have the right version of Java installed?") this is especially true in the upcoming 1.2 release. That is, with the addition of types and protocols it's never been easier to forget that you're on the JVM. I'm not sure what to make about your comment regarding XML, but if that is truly a determining factor then there are reasonable facsimiles of Clojure targeting .NET and Javascript (http://github.com/richhickey/clojure-clr and http://clojurescript.n01se.net/repl/ respectively).
Do we need touch events?
I'm sorry, but that was in the period of 1975-8, so there's not a chance in the world I could remember them. And I went on to be a Chemistry major at MIT ... but everyone at MIT must pass the first four classes listed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1107911 (the calculus plus physics as of the 19th century).

My advice is to find older textbooks (used is cheap). Pre-calculator is good (cheap non-graphing calculators were available long before the graphing ones were), avoid New Math and all that like the plague (yes, set theory is tremendously useful (and multiple bases even more for people like us), and I'm very glad I started learning it in elementary school, but for 99% of students it's going to be a totally unmotivated distraction then (I was lucky I found it "neat" and simple to learn)).

Rainforest Math is right out, as it anything that doesn't assume you've drilled your arithmetic tables until you know them cold.

People have said good things about the Singapore Math curriculum (http://www.singaporemath.com/) but I haven't really looked at it. Others like the Saxon math texts (http://saxonpublishers.hmhco.com/en/saxonpublishers.htm;jses...), which integrate geometry throughout. Avoid anything with manipulatives.

(Side note: DO NOT try algebra based physics (generally taught as a US senior class); it's cargo cult science and no one does it but "educators" and their victims. There's a reason Newton invented the integral calculus to figure out his system of mechanics.)

I've procured some texts to someday relearn my math starting with Algebra; I can only vouch for the beginning of the first ones and not for someone learning this for the first time; I haven't touched in detail any beyond those two. If you're interested, just ask and I'll supply the list with ISBNs.
Don't you share the same perception?

I share the perception that HN has an exceptionally rational group of participants, which is why I feel welcome here to post links to websites that promote rationality. But perhaps you and I read different threads. I post some of those links to websites promoting rationality precisely because I still see plenty of irrational discussion here, especially on issues in which the hook to believe irrational ideas is a belief on the part of the reader that he is smarter than average people. Smart people can readily fall prey to irrational beliefs if those believes appeal to pride in being intelligent.
That was unexpected.

If you haven't watched the video yet, do it now. Some cool juju.
This was an app I built over the winter break in about 3 days. Its just a simple tool for people with diabetes to log their blood glucose levels, meals, etc. I explained the story here in a blog post: http://dmix.ca/2010/02/announcing-carelogger-a-diabetes-trac...

We soft-launched about a week ago and have had 80 people signup which we think is awesome.

We'd appreciate any feedback.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/i8/religions_claim_to_be_nondisprova...

My belief is that science and religion are reconcilable, but by the time you become a rational theist, what's the point of still being a theist? You'll have already rationalized away most of your core beliefs, like a God that is really answering your prayers.

By the way, you can discuss this at Less Wrong with an obnoxiously rational crowd, but you'll probably get mercilessly downmodded because the question is answered already in the existing writing. Doing some more reading on Less Wrong should help make you more confident in your existing answer to the question.