skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Silk is a good set, but it's true that it's very easy to recognize in the wild. I think it's a good stopgap before you pick something less-used, but if you want your web app to have a voice and a point of view from a design standpoint, it's better to go custom.
About a year ago, I bought my parents a Phillips digital frame with wireless which (8FF3WMI) could read directly from a feed with no third party software. As long as you don't use the URL anywhere else, no one will be able to find it.

I built a small web interface for it where we can all upload pictures. My family is in different parts of the world so it's nice to send the pictures right into my parents' living room with two mouse clicks.

The frame re-scans the feed about every 10 minutes.
It depends on the industry but there are a lot of suppliers that will drop ship for you. Blind drop shipping is a whole different beast since you might not want to have the supplier advertise his wares or include an invoice for what you paid so be careful.
One thing I would do is make the Visit our shop button a different color entirely than the background is. Dark blue on light blue is not screaming "click me to shop for the awesome product that I am selling you!"
Haskell nearly requires programmers to read papers each time they want to solve a new problem.

Why is that?
Indeed. http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/03/11/numerator-only-data...

According to information I was able to gather, the iPhone has about 25% marketshare in the smartphone market, given that not all technical professionals have any kind of smartphone I'd say 10% may be about average penetration for the iPhone.
You haven't talked to many AGI (artificial general intelligence) researchers, have you?
Semantic Search Engines - The way ahead
Hardware + per customer customization + sales cycle which requires talking to people = I have no interest in that business at all. But if you want it, go for it.
i don't see how that makes sense. the fraction of drivers doing this, according to the report, is small. so if there was a popular objection then it must also have included people (a majority) who don't do this.

perhaps people simply value privacy, even while doing their job.

[also - note how the bad behaviour of a minority is being used to justify the loss of privacy by the majority; this happens again and again]
Check Latest movies location and show timings with google Movies
The problem with accidentally pulling in libraries seems unavoidable with Homebrew since it uses /usr/local. Is the lack of sandboxing what you think makes it better? This seems like exactly what you should be looking for.

While I agree that it would be nice to have seamless integration with the OS, having a completely separate installation helps with things like OS upgrades or when you need to use a different version of a library that is installed by the OS. Does Homebrew do anything to handle that kind of problem?
No. Why is over-the-air broadcast is obsolete? What a piece of sheet article that makes unjustified assumptions. I'm using over-the-air broadcast and I intend to keep it this way. Finally, a piece of technology that benefits everyone, and especially those who cannot afford the cable fees.
Homebrew targets specific versions of OS X (currently 10.5/10.6).

Within a released version of OS X, they don't tend to break backwards compatibility.
"brew install python" works (and I've used it). In fact, I have a small pile of additional recipes locally for just doing custom, well-controlled compiles of Python.
Can you clarify? I thought that keeping separate streams of side effects is not possible when one stream influences the other. The logging process depends on what actions happen in the IO sequence though not the other way around. Are you talking about keeping the normal IO actions in one monad, logging actions in another & then composing the two into an outer IO monad?
Amazing how the mind locks on to the given pattern. Maybe that's related to the psychological fact that people tend to overestimate the control they have over the physical world. You could also call it optimism.
This blog post, recently on HN, does a great job showing the Chinese approach to manufacturing including videos of some of the high-skill workers:

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=185
Top IT Billionaires -- A Closer Look
The way those problems are posed, by the Clay Institute, they're more math problems than physics problems. Check out the price lectures on their site to see what I mean.
It is a beautiful device, but if the average Joe expects it to behave more like a standard computer than an iPhone, and if Apple doesn't make it more open, it may very well end up a failure.

Exactly what's appealing to the average Joe about the iPad IS that it acts more like an iPhone than a standard computer.
Only because he actually includes the text in the outer span tag. It's entirely unnecessary for display purposes. Remove that, and bots would have to do OCR.
. . . ironic.

(Downvoted. And others too. Did somebody just spam downvote as a joke?)
It can use /usr/local - and you can set it up so that /usr/local comes before the rest of your system as you need to. Yes, an entirely self-contained sandbox avoids this, but most of the time, I don't want that.

Like I said in a previous comment, most of the time I'd find myself compiling things by hand into /usr/local anyway.

Please! Use the system's provided libraries. If I need something newer, I'll brew install it myself. For me homebrew strikes a good balance between "compile it myself, damn it" and Macports/Fink. The formula are easy to hack and update (it's simple), and for the most part it just gets ourt of your way.
what bothers me most about downvotes is their passive aggressive nature - when you get a downvote but no explanation. that, more than anything, has made me consciously try to ignore karma.
I hated having to download 800mb of dependencies to install something simple. I already have Perl or lib(whatever); I don't need you to download it and install it.

I get the reliability argument (i.e., the only way to guarantee stuff builds right is to manage it yourself), but that's a problem with any platform where you might compile things alongside the package manager. So, let me manage that. I don't need a package manager to argue with me about what I want installed.
You don't have to use /usr/local/
I just listened to the audiobook and jotted down very similar notes on my whiteboard. Thanks for sharing!
It wouldn't necessarily have to involve any of these. Most of these that I've seen have been cobbled together through Excel, so they have the skills to get everything into Excel. You could offer a product that made really pretty charts around these metrics.

The hardware would be just a 720p TV which they would have to buy and mount - you would just sell teh software.
I think it is more than just "accepting yourself". I have found that one of the best things I can do to convince people I am competent is to know those things I should not give opinions about because I just don't have adequate information. Admitting "I have no experience with that" (or some similar limitation) tells people that I am not simply being willfully unhelpful but, instead, I am trying to avoid giving bad advice. An awful lot of smart, educated people fall victim to the feeling that they must have an opinion or answer on anything that comes up and get themselves in a pickle by then saying something really ill-informed. Knowing when to say "I simply can't help you with that because I lack adequate knowledge/skill/experience" is relatively rarely done and is psychologically powerful. I used to think it gave an illusion of greater competence than what you actually possess, but perhaps it works in part because "do no harm" genuinely provides superior quality than willy-nilly running around trying to work on things you aren't really qualified to do properly.
I've been a windows developer for more than 15 years and I'd be hard pressed to find an app that I couldn't build with the express tools. The components missing are things I wouldn't use anyhow, that being the integration of Microsoft's version of unit testing, source control, etc... Granted I've only used XCode for the last year and a half or so, but I'd choose VS Express over XCode any day. Aside from that fact, I can't believe that any company puts more effort into their development tools than Microsoft and I think it shows, so if they want to charge for a product that is years beyond anything anyone else offers then that's fine by me.
A better way to use all those unix tools is to just run Ubuntu in a VM and develop there, or just replace MacOS with Ubuntu entirely.
I've had MacPorts completely explode in my face several times when installing a seemingly innocuous package - some shared library gets replaced due to a requirement, and suddenly every utility I've installed doesn't work. Eventually I got to a point where I only used MacPorts to install ImageMagick and compiled everything else by hand; so far homebrew has felt like a more disciplined version of "compile it yourself".

I can't say I've had any problems with compiling Ruby gems against homebrew besides some settings that needed to be overridden in the MySQL gem, so that hasn't been a problem for me.

I kind of have mixed feelings about the ownership. So far I've been running it in /usr/local owned by my user and haven't had any problems, but I can see the security argument for not doing it. It doesn't feel any different then compiling your own binaries and leaving them in your home directory, something I've had to do on several hosts I've had in the past. (Also: Snow Leopard doesn't install anything to /usr/local by default, so if you're starting from scratch there's nothing to take ownership of...)

Overall, I've rather liked it so far. We'll see if I regret it...
A cursory search reveals no less than 8 companies already selling this
Well, when I comment on anything to do with Mahalo the group of SEOs who are leading this campaign against me just attack en masse and overpower the native HN group.

I'm a polarizing guy who shoots from the hip, so I expect detractors or people who disagree with me to vote me down.

In fact, I think it's kind of funny that sometimes within 30 seconds of posting I'll have a ton of down votes.

It would be great if HN SHOWED the down votes and who votes each person down the most. If there was a leaderboard of who is voting me down it would be VERY telling. You would see ten folks voting me down all at the same time.

That's the thing about social news systems... they are easy to game. If control as not put in place the dialogue simply goes to shit.... which is starting to happen.

What normally happens is that intelligent folks leave the discussion and go somewhere else. I'm sure many folks here are refugees from digg or reddit or /. in fact.

At this point I don't bother commenting on threads about me or Mahalo... and I'm skipping the comment section on HN and going to the links themselves for dialogue.

The only way to correct the issue is really to expose the down votes.... folks need to take ownership of their voting.

we did this on Mahalo Answers and we don't have the problem of folks using voting down as a way to attack someone. we did have this problem in the early days and when we exposed it it was VERY telling. you had really good users who would have it in for just one person and they would follow them around the site voting everything they did down.

so, we did amnesty for past votes and turned on down votes from X day forward. That is what i would do here.... you should turn on link for every post from April 1st on that shows a list of who voted and how--as well as a leaderboard.

anyway.... hack on.
Deps: what am I missing?
Because it's conceptually different from what we learn, and semantically very rich. You have many 'aha!' moments, seeing that an abstraction corresponds to a really better way to solve a problem.

And because it's research oriented: maybe a simpler language with 80% of Haskell benefits will emerge out of it once those concepts have matured in Haskell.

And maybe mostly because people learning Haskell do it by curiosity, so they'd like to explore the best way to do it, not being under their boss/client 's pressure.
It has happened before.

"Piltdown man" was considered the greatest scientific hoax of all time

See PBS May 30, 2006 program

Link
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/hoax/

"For decades, a fossil skull discovered in Piltdown, England, was hailed as the missing link between apes and humans. Entire careers were built on its authenticity. Then in 1953, the awful truth came out: "Piltdown Man" was a fake! But who done it? In "The Boldest Hoax," NOVA gets to the bottom of the greatest scientific hoodwinking of all time."
How is D is on the list? And how is Objective C less popular than Lisp?

I'd be curious to see where this list comes from...
<spelling-nazi>
s/compliments/complements/
</spelling-nazi>

The former changes the meaning of the sentence completely.

But otherwise looks great. I would give anything to completely ditch macports.
Don't know if anyone will see this comment, so long after the post came up, but I wanted to add that obviously this was not the saddest thing I have ever read, nor do I value trees more than human life.

There was, however, a dramatic mood shift when reading this article from 'Wow! That's awesome!' to 'Holy crap! It was destroyed by a drunk driver? That's terrible!'. In any case, I never expected such a dizzying comment thread to follow.
Jeremy Evans addresses criticism that Sequel is "unfriendly and ugly"
lisp users generate more popularity units per capita than objective c users, because they are true believers rather than seeking dollars...
Thank you, the "a more disciplined version of "compile it yourself" line exactly sums up my feelings.

If I really wanted a fleshed out, mature package management system, honestly - I'd install Ubuntu or Fedora.
Dysfunction Junction - Dysfunction Junction
If you want a piece of http://www.squeezedbooks.com , you're welcome to it. I'd love to hear your ideas about making it better.

Phillip Greenspun puts it rather nicely on a review of "Crossing the Chasm": "This book illustrates a fault in the publishing industry. If you have a 50-page idea it is too long for a magazine. But it is too short for a book. So if you wanted to get it distributed before the Web came along, you had to drop in words until you reached 200 pages."
Many, many stories about this over the past week:

http://searchyc.com/submissions/jetpack+-mozilla?sort=by_dat...

... and 5 months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830868
I'm a designer, and would love to help out. What's the best way to get in touch with you?
It depends on what you're logging. Pure code can keep its own log in Writer and then depose the whole thing to the IO logger later. Since there's no guarantee of the timing or synchronicity on non-IO code, this works well.
What companies? I did a search for "LCD Marketing Dashboard" and didn't come up with anything. Not doubting you, just curious what these would be called!
Yeah I doubt it's in any way accurate. You can get a very rough guide (albeit skewed towards .net) from http://stackoverflow.com/tags.
If we assume the facts cited in the article are true:

* 99% of households have access to cable
* satellite could reach almost all of the rest
* 10 million households rely on broadcast TV currently

In terms of access (subscription fees aside), using radio spectrum to deliver television content is no longer necessary--i.e., obsolete.

The question is about the opportunity cost of continuing to use this spectrum to deliver television content to American households. If we can make use of this spectrum in a way that provides an overall greater benefit (government revenue, new & better performing wireless services) than the benefit of providing free over the air broadcast television, then we should be seriously considering it, especially if some of the revenues (in the way of subsidies for satellite or cable hookups; and mandates for those services to provide low cost limited programming analogous to current over the air offerings) can mitigate any negative impact of taking these services away -- what's the problem? IMO access to free (as in beer) broadcast television is not a fundamental human right.
What kind of a blowhard would make bombastic claims of achievement against the odds?
Second, over-the-air broadcasts are becoming a nearly obsolete technology. Already, 91 percent of American households get their television via cable or satellite. So we are using all of this beachfront property to serve a small and shrinking segment of the population.

I doubt it's shrinking anymore. Over-the-air HDTV is superior to (compressed) cable and satellite feeds. Plenty of people who never considered broadcast TV when it was analog are now buying antennas replace or supplement their pay-TV.

As more people decide that their TV needs can be met by OTA HDTV and Internet video, it may be cable TV that soon becomes obsolete.
If you are honestly worried about a closed app store coming to OSX based on what Apple does with phones and devices that they clearly think of as large phones, you are paranoid.

Then I'm paranoid. Like Mark Pilgrim (http://diveintomark.org/archives/2010/01/29/tinkerers-sunset), I don't believe Apple will be selling general purpose computers to consumers in 10 years. Remember Steve Jobs's plan for Apple: "milk the Mac for all it's worth and then move on the next big thing". The next big thing is mobile computing, and Apple has made it clear that they want absolute control.
At the moment, I can totally relate to this. I submitted a proposal to try to improve something specific at work but basically my motivation is to try to get management out of my hair. I don't know if anything will come of it, but I am having ugly visions of how that conversation could go. <rolls eyes>
The overcharged customers, of course... all 1.8 million of them.

Pity, as the meter in a cab is clearly visible and the regulations are posted for the passenger to see.
There's been lots of in-depth discussion about the pros and cons of MacPorts or Homebrew on HN already:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871341
I worked at Microsoft; lot of people had iPhones.

Does that matter? No. Rational people choose products based on their merits. This is not new and there is no reason for surprise.
Actually, I would. A lot of my "bombastic claims of achievement against the odds" are completely true. The problem is getting anyone to believe me. :-/
lol I missed... delphi, coldfusion, scheme,tcl, cobol
It apparently uses my stats at http://LangPop.com . While the numbers are rough, and there are some (stated) biases, I think they do a pretty good job of reflecting reality, and in any case, you get everything broken down with a normalized chart, so you can play around with the weights of different things.

As to why anything is on that list: because I put it there. In some cases, after being asked to.

(BTW, I know the IRC numbers for the most recent version are a bit off - I'm currently working on that).
Put your email in your profile or contact me.
Website need formula -> formulae for pluralization.
Not surprising. I think this is a good stat for open mindedness -- it's simply wise to personally use the best products out there.

It blows my mind when I see companies have a dogma that everything they do is the absolute best. While it is a good thing to believe in your products, it is another thing to be dogmatic in extreme ways about what products you should use.

I think the more extreme example of this is web stacks. Microsoft and Apple both seem to suffer from this not-invented-here syndrome around .NET and/or WebObjects, and the browsers they create. I speculate there are just massive losses in productivity there, simply because open source produces better web tools. Microsoft routinely makes web pages that only render in IE, and the Apple Store routinely fails on anything but Safari.

Use the best stuff there is. And it might not be invented at home.
An attempt at the world's biggest math magic trick.
OK, so many of you will know, or be able to work out, how this will work, but I've used exactly this trick to freak out so many people. Join in, tell others, help to raise the profile of math and science.

Please.

ADDED IN EDIT: Please up-vote this submission to get it to the front page. If you don't want me to get karma, feel free to down-vote this comment as a scapegoat. If it bottoms out I'll add another scapegoat. Thanks.
Continuations in Scala 2.8 (2009)
A considerably more in-depth paper linked to in the article is at http://lamp.epfl.ch/~rompf/continuations-icfp09.pdf
I'm really just beginning to learn Haskell while working professionally with Ruby. My gut instinct is that with Haskell you have to put in a lot of extra effort but you are repaid doubly in robustness. Obviously in real world scenarios there is a balance to be struck since a lot of code is just for throw-away purposes, or failure around edge cases does not affect the bottom line. However I suspect that the lack of traction Haskell gets in the commercial software world is more a result of human nature than actual economics of long-lived software projects.

The reason I'm bullish on Haskell is because I suspect it can be a significant competitive advantage in a lot of the type of data processing scenarios that start out simple in a startup, but can become slow/buggy/unmaintainable over time.
Ah, fair enough. I didn't spot the source. If you were omnipotent and could get at all the information directly, what would you consider to be a true measure of popularity? (Eg, number of people who know each language, total time spent writing in each language over the last week)
Since when is SQL a programming language?
I guessed 21/25 in the time limit. Missed ones are Shell, ActionScript, Tcl, and Cobol.
But there's all kinds of issues. How do you display them all (especially if you exceed 2 sets of arrows)? How do you remember which one is which (again, not a huge issue if you just add one more karma type)? How much will having to sort by several karmas slow down the site?
Ubuntu’s Flawed Window Controls
To the "why not X" comments:

It's a list with eleven entries. Do you really expect a comprehensive set?

And the black hole information problem (#8) is neatly solved by having all data in the black hole revealed on a the event horizon. Granted, just a theory, but you're welcome to go and look. Bring a camera ;)
There's nothing wrong with monetizing content, but I think the main issue is that Andrew didn't manage expectations effectively. If Mixergy had started with a hint of a commercial angle, it would have telegraphed the change and softened the blow. Instead, many Mixergy fans (including me) thought that Mixergy was a feel-good project "giving back" to the entrepreneur community, and we felt blindsided by what seemed like a sudden shift in emphasis.

That's not to say the balancing act is easy. I'm working on a Ruby on Rails tutorial project (http://www.railstutorial.org/) that definitely has an altruistic component, and it has been a challenge to indicate that it's not a charity. For example, although I'm giving away the HTML version of the book, I've emphasized that I'll eventually be selling a screencast version of the tutorial. I'm also offering "Unlimited free downloads [of the PDF version] 'til the book is done", which creates the expectation that I may eventually charge for the PDF.

Managing expectations is an art, and even highly capable people sometimes blow it. Imagine how much friendlier the reception to Arc would have been if pg had soft-launched it in '03 rather than writing essays about it for half a decade and calling it the "hundred-year language". It was pretty hard to live up to those expectations.
This is nice as well http://www.sporcle.com/games/psychofish25/hello_world_syntax
Why are we all doing this with RSS feeds?

I want a frame that serves up a samba folder over a wifi network. That's all. I can make a dozen different things that stuff pictures dynamically into that folder, all the frame needs to do is cycle through them.