skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Really? Let's say you're a loyal reader. You have him RSSed, and you get excited whenever you see his posts show up in your feed reader. How would you feel if after a month or 2 you said "hm, Alex Payne hasn't blogged in a long time, wonder what the deal is."

You go to twitter: "@al3x why haven't you been blogging recently?"

"@you I decided to stop blogging"

Wouldn't you wish he had written one final blog post letting you know instead of waiting for people to figure it out?

To an outsider who just sees his posts occasionally on HN, it may seem dumb, but it makes more sense for his loyal readers, I assume.

A lot of HN readers and empathize like so: what if pg "just stopped" writing/publishing essays. Wouldn't you wish he had at least written one last amazing essay describing his rationale for stopping and letting everyone know?
Your description is getting better, but maybe somewhere have an example of something somebody could do with your dataset. For instance 'have you ever wanted to xyz on all the data from Acme company mashed with the data from AcMeToo, but didn't have access to that mass of data? well, now you can with Webscaled'...

Something like that.
Also, check out http://80legs.com/, it seems like you're in a very similar market, but that you are pre-building the crawlers.
They are a fairly well backed firm, so they've already put the time and money into some of the messaging, so use them to give you some ideas.
Molecular Cooking – my new true passion
Eh. They're not all like this. My college paper pays their web folks, and their online editor actually took it upon herself to learn some programming so she could help out and understand the technical side. I was pretty damn impressed actually.
I'm still a student at Penn State and I used to work at that paper. The demanded skillset has increased while the stipend has cratered to zero.

ps: I'm aware of your accomplishments. You make the Penn State startup community proud!
Best of luck with Xobni!
This ad is frighteningly similar to the ones out there in the real world at all but the most progressive papers, only difference is they pay a little bit better.
From the geek mindset, apple is the new microsoft. Apple has nice products, but seemingly agressive in their approach. Don't they realize that competition is good? Of course not...
Isn't statistics what you resort to when there isn't scope for rigorous thinking?
Because a website is inconvenient and user unfriendly compared to a native app on the iPhone or iPad.
That's very refreshing. What paper is this?
There will always be people that don't like a site's content. If that is the case, I feel they should try to help add better content. Hacker News is still a small enough community where the actions of 1 person can be felt throughout the whole thing.

Also, a fair amount of people seem to care that this is happening, so why wouldn't it get on the front page? It seems to me that the submission guidelines are somewhat flexible to account for this sort of thing.
Ha. We were blacklisted? That's interesting.

Thanks, I'm big fans of what you guys did with Hype Machine. Would love to do something similar, but the numbers here worry me.
They're a for-profit company. They'll act completely out of self-interest under all circumstances. Do you really trust any for-profit company? Think about it.
Not reading the linked article I expect, but not reading the one-word summary in the article's URL?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=hiatus

Edit: to be fair, the title of this submission is misrepresenting.
Django query set iterator - for really large, querysets
Sawyer Opines on the Eastern District of Texas
The problem is that tech people can go anywhere with their skills. They're not limited to journalism. This means that newsrooms should make it a priority to at least be somewhat competitive when it comes to hiring technical talent.
It is stunning in general that it can count as 'science' and a piece of 'scientific research' though the code employed is held secret. In fact, the use of proprietary software in science is at least as dubious as the use of .doc format for government documents.
Haha, oh the irony... I once had my very own WM articles deleted on the portuguese wikipedia by a proposition of guy that... cataloged guava varieties.
I think lots of items in this article are misleading or unrealistic.

1) though cloud based services are great for the capability of scaling, you will likely need to focus on your product more than scaling it. You'd hit the jackpot if you needed to expand resources right away on your first try.

2) the author mentions a few times 'have content ready to publish', 'plan tasks', 'show site visitors a roadmap', but in the early stages, you should be ready to get feedback and make changes quickly. You may have some ideas, but within the first few weeks, you'll likely learn or discover much better ways of doing things. Nothing wrong with planning ahead, but committing to writing content which will likely need major overhaul is just a waste of time at this stage.

3) 'Contact your friends and family about the site launch' really? did that need to be said? 'don't forget to breath'!
Not actually interesting; these are all projects that have massive public exposure and that I have already heard about. What would really be interesting are up-and-coming projects that are not already massively popular.

The page should be titled "look at how popular Github is" instead.
Quite Frankly Virgin America's website probably never should have been using flash in the first place. It wasn't adding value in this case. (I'm pro flash in the right context, this wasn't one of them)
I created a new Vim theme called Underwater. Let me know what you think.
I've posted this on reddit/r/vim already but thought you guys might like it too.
I think a couple of us have little blogs that we sometimes post snippets and short notes to, but nothing substantial. I haven't posted anything to my technical blog for over a year now.

Since they are personal blogs, we try to not get too specific about anything work-related. Hopefully we can get something official and work-blessed setup soon. I've got about 7 pages of 'XFS on a 20 disk raid array' benchmarking I'd love to publish.
I want a smart alarm clock that knows that where I've got to be in the morning and wakes me up earlier if the roads are blocked or there are major delays on the train.
I've heard that this is so. I've also heard that a YC investment also carries certain contractual terms that approximate the investor's rights that come with preferred stock. I'd have to see actual deal docs to judge.

If YC is truly taking only common stock and has only the rights of a common stockholder, it's a good deal.
Adobe should have had a class action lawsuit filed against it for the amount of daily mass suffering it has caused with flash.
This is just because that's the language style popular with people writing their own software. If it was "CorporateCubicleTeamHub", you'd see a lot more C++ and Java. Github shows what sort of tools are actually optimized for productivity, because when you are working on something for yourself in your spare time, you don't have time to waste.
http://getzazu.com :-)
I fail to see how Apple stating their intent to be an asshole makes them any less of an asshole.

Apple isn't a person, they are a company, and their primary goal is to make money, not be nice. In recent years their R&D budget has topped $1 billion. I don't think it's far fetched to assume that they are going to extract everything of value, patent everything they can, that springs from that investment. To do otherwise would be a disservice to their shareholders.

_I_ don't like what Apple is doing, but they are following the current rules of the game. If you don't like the outcome, then work to change the rules. Expecting Apple to play nice is unrealistic. They are going to do whatever is in their own best self interest. That's how our economic system works.
Is there a correlation between number of follow-up questions and on-site interviews? Is there a time window (just before/just after the deadline) where more follow-up questions are typically asked?

edit - clarity
Would You Pay Someone To Drive 253 Miles For Groceries?
It's as dumb as the arguments about who the best Captain of the Enterprise was.

Exactly. Everyone knows it was Patrick Stewart.
PragPub #9 (03/2010)
Just bought a Powerball ticket. $114M woohoo!

My odds of winning and her odds of finding someone are about the same.
Notes on Teaching JavaScript
No argument here that the market for data is woefully underdeveloped. What we have now is a market in which there are very few visible sellers and fewer visible buyers, with extreme inefficiencies in connecting one to another and processing the transaction.

My hope and expectation, obviously, is that that will change.

I think Bloomberg is both an excellent and a poor example. On the one hand, @joshu is exactly right that it can be a difficult sell. On the other, they've clearly built a very sizable business complementing data with the additional pieces described.

More to the point, Bloomberg is - in my opinion - selling data with a.) very little value add and b.) a perceived transience in value. Not that this is necessarily bad, particularly when you're selling to a volume audience, but it is different from retailing specialized, derived datasets.

But we shall see.
UNC, Daily Tar Heel.
Heh. I'm seriously considering quitting twitter right now.
There is no shark. You're just paranoid.
Kind of amusing given the extreme old-media bias they have for a web-based project: want to bet that a post on an NYT blog would count?
Believe me, I understand. That's part of the insanity of the system, it's turning everyone into assholes, especially publicly traded companies like Apple.

A large part of the problem is that most people aren't even aware that there is a problem. That's why public discussion such as this is valuable: if enough people are aware, then change is possible.
You Say NPR, But On Twitter We Say n.pr - Inside NPR.org Blog
What the world really needs is more people whining on HN about how other people should spend their time. Famous people clearly don't know how to spend their own time most efficiently, so it's nice when random people on HN that nobody has ever heard of can plan peoples' lives for them. A great service.
I know this is the situation in some fertile & densely populated countries, such as the Netherlands.

In other places, such as here in Austria for example, nobody is going to use the alpine pastures that cows graze on for growing anything else.

I am pretty sure it is the same in Switzerland and Bavaria, and probably other mountainous regions such as in Japan and Greece (although the grazing livestock in these places might not be cattle).
As far as the third one is concerned, there are many apps that do that already for the iPhone. E.g. Lose it! (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lose-it/id297368629?mt=8) which comes with a big database of food with nutritional info, preprocessed meal from brand names… It's well done, but it gets pretty cumbersome to enter what you ate.
I can't say I have ever done this for a physical product, so not sure how it differs, but why go in with a solid number? Why not use the feedback you are getting to adjust the product until you feel you've got it right.

One really good thing to do is what (I think) Panasonic did in the 90's with a focus group on what color they should make their portable CD players.
They brought in red, blue, yellow, green and black, and asked the group what colors they would buy, what each color represented to them, etc. Then, as the group was leaving, they were told they could take one of the portable disc players with them.
Apparently, the focus group had voted overwhelmingly that the players should be red and blue (or something like that), but when the researchers counted the players at the end, most had taken black or yellow.

If you can figure out how to get 'true' feedback, rather than getting your questions answered, then you'll be way ahead of the game.
Bloggers Now Eligible For Press Passes In NYC
Yes, it must have overlapped. (I can't edit my previous comment anymore to recognize that, or I would :)
No, statistics requires rigorous thought to be applied properly. That's why it's usually taught in the mathematics department.
I once met Roberto Padovani who is the CTO of Qualcomm. He is an alumni of my university, UMass Amherst, and he had come to give a talk.
We bombarded him with some really far fetched questions in information theory and signal optimization and he was able to give really good answers on the spot.
Here is a video of him:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-c6W0m_nEk
and his profile:
http://www.qualcomm.com/people/roberto-padovani
It's interesting to see the wave of URL shorteners spawned by the constraints Twitter put on its payload. Is the thinking that it's safer for individual organizations to have their own shortener rather than rely on the bit.ly's and tinyurl's of the world because in the future they'll be able to change where they point (e.g. if they adopt a new CMS with different URL scheme)?
Are you supposed to just disappear? I think it's polite to your readers to mention it. How you write the mention is entirely up to you and your style.
>> It's forgivable if Alex overlooked that perspective but this is by no means techcrunch's fault. They reported what he tweeted.

No, they didn't. They took what he tweeted, gave it a sensationalist headline, and vomited out a few paragraphs of text designed to drive traffic to their site. That is most definitely not reporting.

>> twitter should be very sensitive to how they communicate with developers.

Alex tweeted his opinion about some cool things to come. This is not "communicating with developers", it's making an offhand comment. Twitter communicates through developers through a mailing list, and several official accounts (@twitterapi, for example), not through the personal tweets of its employees.

I don't think it's Alex's responsibility to analyze in advance how every thing he tweets might be interpreted. TechCrunch and Silicon Alley are to blame for the over-sensationalized writing.
Your dishwasher does your dishes, and chemotherapy cures cancer.

It'd just be nice if my dishwasher did my dishes better, and chemotherapy cured cancer better (and less painfully).

Kinda like how Twitter lets people communicate better. New products are almost always a refinement of some existing product. The ones that aren't tend to elicit a big "Huh?" reaction from the marketplace.
Error establishing a database connection.
Web filter: Information from Answers.com
The online gay male in 2010.  Survey results on app usage.
A big problem is that there's often no objective way to pick the "right" statistical test. This gives experimenter the freedom to choose the statistical procedure that favors positive conclusion. Here's a classical example when the statistician has the freedom in choosing between binomial and negative binomial test

Two experimenters contrast treatments A and B. They both have A preferred to B in first 5 patients, and B preferred in the 6th. First experimenter planned to run 6 experiments and count the number of successes, so they get P-value 0.11 for the hypothesis that A is better. The second experimenter planned to run comparisons until B is preferred, up to 6, and got P-value of 0.03.
(see Appendix A of http://www.annals.org/content/130/12/995.full.pdf+html)

A realistic example of this issue coming up
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2336980

Another example is choosing between one-tailed and two-tailed t-test. When you ask for the probability of effect being as extreme as observed x under null hypothesis, should you ask for probability of effect>x or |effect|>|x|?

Eliezer Yudkowsky goes into some discussion on this
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1gc/frequentist_statistics_are_frequ...

The most illustrative example of subjectivity of hypothesis testing is probably the issue of testing strings for randomness. There are many tests for testing whether a particular string of bits is generated by a Bernoulli process, with not one having a legitimate claim to being "the right one"

One way to remove the bias is three-way triple-blind testing, ie to measure effects of existing, new, and placebo treatments, have statistician analyze datasets while blinded to their true labels.
This is great news. Further adoption of web sockets and PuSH (a little less ridiculous than PubSubHubBub) is good for developers and users alike. More interesting web experiences for users, and more business and hobby opportunities for developers and entrepreneurs.
Most doctors don't fix things - more like pop this generic pill and off you go.
I also have stopped contributing to Wiki. It's not worth it after hours of work being deleted. They only want popular articles.
When Pandora blocked access to Canadians, I built a streaming music service ala seeqpod, which did auto playlisting like pandora.

The music analysis stuff was really time consuming and expensive and of course wasn't nearly as good as Pandora, so I canned it, but had this left over code that crawled the web looking for music.

I did a few quick changes to the code so that it grabbed concerts instead of music, and voila, http://HearWhere.com
I have just read the claims of the patent you linked. The first 3 claims [1] describe events (basic MVC stuff) as has been used in the wild since at least 1979!!!

The patent has a filing date of May 13, 1994. I had written Smalltalk code in use at Fortune 100 clients using these very same techniques for several years prior to this filing date. At the time, I was clear I did not invent these techniques.

Its my understanding there are penalties for an inventor listed in a patent fraudulently claiming they created the invention. Perhaps its time we started enforcing these penalties. I find it impossible to believe that any engineer at Next or Apple did not understand they were not the original inventor of what is claimed in this patent.

[1] first 3 claims from http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=L-IeAAAAEBAJ&dq=5...

1. In a computer including at least one event producer for detecting that an event has occurred in the computer and generating an event and at least one event consumer which needs to be informed when events occur in the computer, a system for distributing events comprising:

storing means for storing a specific set of events of which said at least one event consumer is to be informed;
event manager control means for receiving the event from the event producer, comparing the received event to the stored set of events, and distributing an appropriate event to an appropriate event consumer; and
distributor means for receiving the event from the control means and directing said control means to distribute an appropriate event to an appropriate event consumer.
2. The system according to claim 1, wherein said distributor means comprises a distributor module for each kind of event possible in the computer.

3. The system according to claim 1, wherein a plurality of event consumers are included in the computer and the plurality of consumers comprise:

broadcast consumers having no relationship with other consumers, the broadcast consumers operating independently of other consumers and of the order in which consumers are informed of the event; and
sequential consumers having relationships with other consumers, the sequential consumers requiring that no other consumer be told about an event while they themselves are processing the event and having an ability to influence when they receive the event relative to the other consumers.
Thanks for making it readable for us. Now, it only needs a steady beat of bongos in the background while it's read aloud. I'll put on my black turtle-neck, beret, and sunglasses.

Really - it almost works as Beat Poetry.
There are plenty of methods (cough report Bayesian likelihood ratios cough and publish your raw data cough) that are simple enough for even average scientists to use. They would rather use much more complicated statistics, though, because then they get to publish more papers with "significant" results.

If you can handle calculus, which most scientists take, then you can handle likelihood ratios, believe me.

But the incentives are terrible, which is quite a different thing from supposing that the average PhD is too dumb to learn good statistics if the incentives were strong.
Copyright isn't an issue here. Honest truth, you could directly link to the manuals.
Usually I talk a lot more to people if I have a clear reason to. If you are an organizer you have a _very_ clear reason to talk to people, and it can help forcing you to do so.
coderdude - I work at 80legs (http://www.80legs.com). Just messaged you via your contact form. We should talk about a potential partnership. It would make more sense to cooperate than to compete, as we are in the same market.
Usually not. The researchers grants depend on figuring out the mechanisms around a certain class of compounds curing gout. A pharma company is going to take that research and find a compound that can be patented (a process that takes a while and rarely gets research funding
Said alpine pastures don't allow for a large quantity of cows, though.

And you Austrians really have to care for the cows in winter (prepare some sheltered and warm barns, with feed - I've been there, and was surprised at how easy we Uruguayans have it with our cows)
How do you know that this action by Apple will result in a positive outcome long-term? It's already hurting their public perception among developers, and in time, it'll hurt their workforce. And that's assuming they don't lose.
For some that might actually be an advantage.

Think: you know who will initially vet your application (as opposed to the normal process) so you can think how to hook him in. And if you successfully do so your now "recommended" to one of the partners.

Could be an advantage for a smart thinking founder :)
Part of the trouble is also that the decision makers in charge of adding staff and directing the digital version(s) of the Daily Collegian are not well versed in the technology themselves. They probably just copied and pasted the job post from last time and added in whatever new they needed, without knowing that these can be extremely diverse skillsets. "Let's make an iPhone app! Add it to the job description!" A lot of people think if you're "good with computers," you can do it all.
Management secrets of the Grateful Dead
The collegian's web site runs on a windows server. lol'in at LAMP.
You might want to look at some open source software like Open Clinica:

http://www.openclinica.org/page.php?pid=97
Why the heck is it still so hard to make iPhone applications? You'd think some smart HNer would realize that every publication on the planet wants to have its own iPhone app. But few of them can afford to pay someone $10k to build one. I bet a lot of them could afford to pay $500 bucks though...
Women refuse to go through airport body scanners
> A quick look over at the 'Top Languages' tab tells us that compiled languages don't even show up until position number 7.

Actually Ruby, Javascript, and Python can all be compiled.
Alex, I know you contribute on HN, and I'd just like to say I think some of the people here are being rude.

With that said, some (unsolicited, I know) advice for if you want to get back into blogging. Try getting feedback from your peers before publishing something, then use their input to edit. That should improve the writing, of course, but it can also indicate to you if the ideas you want to get across are apparent to the readers you care about.

Not everyone who reads your essays will even be willing to meet you on your own terms. Getting feedback from peers - as opposed to random people who feel it's okay to dismiss soemthing out-of-hand - may help with the feeling that your writing doesn't provide the insight you want it to.

This is, I think, closer to how PG approaches his essays. Notice, too, that we don't consider those blogs, but essays that pop up periodically.