skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Best affiliate marketing overview I've ever seen . . .
I've actually written a Ruby library modeled on Readability (quite closely modeled - I read the source code of the bookmarklet and based my library on what I learned) that is excellent for screen scraping - like Readability, it is pretty good at finding the element on a site that holds the content, and once you have that, it's trivial to pull the content out.

If that sounds useful to you, let me know, I can probably open-source it.
You're trying to refute an argument that I haven't made. The debate about the supervolcano was about our collective perception of the potential consequences of global warming, not whether or not warming takes place.

I don't know nearly enough about climate science to make any claims about it. What I do know about is scientific methods and I do know that there is no scientific method that can credibly make long term predictions about complex systems.

We had the Stern review tell us what the costs of climate change are going to be many decades down the road. It's not possible to make such predictions because it's not possible to know the social and scientific reaction to any change. It's that kind of government sponsored charlatanery that I don't like about this debate.

I am still in favor of reducing CO2 and changing our energy infrastructure in a moderate fashion, because by and large I do believe that we are causing changes in the athmosphere that we should try to minimise (There are other good reasons for doing this as well). I just think we need not have a collective bout of panic and I don't need politicised scientists present things in a way that suggests way more certainty than we could ever possibly have about goings on in complex systems.
> It's only self replicating if you ignore most of the parts and the assembly

RepRap is to replicators as thre Altair 8800 was to microcomputers: not enormously useful in itself, but showing enormous potential.
Hey, me too. It's my last day. It's way out of my comfort zone, but I realized if I don't take these risks now, I never will. I'm oscillating between excited and horrified.

Best of luck to you.
I think that's a totally different problem though: a manager who isn't a programmer trying to hire programmers.
This is sooo old. HN shouldn't have this crap on the front page.
you may be right that i've overgeneralized to the other products based on my experience with mongodb; all i know for sure is mongodb has some nice properties here.
Why Continuous Deployment is challenging for most companies?
As someone from Europe, I never really quite understood America's fascination with zombies: endless zombie movie films, semi-serious discussion about what to do when the "Zombie Apocalypse" hits, .... Care to enlighten me?
Triumph of the Golden Rule
I agree that the title is misleading, but this is good advice.

On the company I work for (insurance sector), they tried to implement an "internship" program in which people from different parts of the company (especially software development) would spend some time in different parts of the company, so we'd learn what they do and how our work impacted theirs (greatly in the case of software development of course).

Sadly it was cancelled, but I thought it was a great idea at the time.
http://www.scrumpad.com/public/faq#g6

How do we cancel?

You can cancel at anytime from within ScrumPad (Admin > Cancel Subscription). You are responsible for any amount due at the time of cancelation(sp). There is no undo for cancellation. Once your account is cancelled(sp), all your project information will be immediately and permanently deleted. In future, we will allow you to export all project data for a fee.

I would seriously rethink this. There should not be a fee to cancel. I would personally never pay for a service that would lock me in like that. My data is my data and I am only using any service for organization of that data.(project management, todo lists, etc)

It also adds a barrier to entry because once a customer chooses to try it out they are stuck with it. On the other hand if you were to allow free export it would be a definite selling point. Will they have to pay a fee at the end of a 30 day trial to export the data?

I would also suggest not deleting the data for at least a month or two. Just disable the actions of the site.
Perhaps I was harsh implying "no beauty". The definition of beauty is something that differs from person to person, depending on what then enjoy and where they are in life. I think we can agree that it comes down to a matter of personal preference. :)

I'm curious, but what racism did you see or experience in Boston? I'm likely shielded from it (white American english-speaking male), so it's not something that I've ever experienced.

Will check out Brooklyn the next time I visit. I've only ever spent a lot of time in Manhattan.
Social Graph In Mind, Twitter Starts Prompting Users To Fill Out Their Profiles
6 Breakout Stars of 2010 With the Biggest Box Office Potential
s/instapaper/arc90/g ?
I decided to try to inject some SQL to a form--I didn't specially seek it out--and to my surprise it worked. It seems to be really common, especially if the site looks shoddy and ends with .php.
Are you familiar at all with J? I've done some of the labs, and I'm getting fascinated with it. J and K are closely related, I'm wondering if someone more familiar with both could compare them.
I just assume I need to buy a new battery once a year. The life of the battery seems to decrease over time and budgeting for a new battery each year seems to work for me.

I usually keep a laptop as my primary for 2 years, so it is only one additional batter per machine.
Tech Wildcatters - new YC-like program in Dallas
High status gets you more dopamine receptors (even if money can't buy happiness)
Sounds like "Aleister Crowley's Guide to Entrepreneurship": Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
Nope, that's for the Ruble.
What's funny is that they're making it more convenient to play the pirated version than the legit version. The more invasive DRM you force on your legit users, the more they're going to look for workarounds online and fuel piracy.
it can run in a very small footprint. the one gotcha is that as it uses memory-mapped files, you need 64 bit OS for multi-GB databases.
New York State teacher and administrative salaries are now posted online
IBM Develop Energy Efficient Method to Analyze Quality of Data at Record Speeds
Real People. Real Reviews. Real Extortion Scheme?
CapitalFactory seed-stage startup mentorship program
The problem is that passion doesn't have 1 definition, it has a dozen. You and the guy who wrote the article are taking passion in the 'lust' definition of the term.

Those of us who think a passion for programming is important for programmer take it to mean a fondness or desire to do it. It fulfills a non-temporary need.

The point is that the guy did an end-around of what others meant in his main thesis. It only makes sense to shoot it down a priori.

It is the same as if someone had said 'I think programmers should have passion!' and I responded 'well, i think that is a little harsh, programmers shouldn't have to suffer!'
I found this article to be incoherent. Not sure what its point is.
> I'm sure if they make significantly less money than expected they'll scrap the idea.

OR they'll still blame piracy and try to make it even harder. until it's nothing more than a streaming webcam pointed at a TV playing it on an xbox.
I love this tool. A couple points of feedback. I don't mind @mentions if they're sent to people I'm not following since I don't see them. Also, it would be nice if you included the table headers every 50 rows because I can't remember what each column is once they're out of view. Great tool though!
I don't like the term "buffer overflow" because things haven't been that simple since the '90s (the recent Aurora kerfluffle happened because IE freed memory in the wrong order, no overrun involved). But yes, the point is you're trading a problem in a domain where we know how to mitigate problems for a maybe less likely problem in a domain where we have no idea how to mitigate problems.
This article is nonsense.

Passion generates ideas. Ideas have the potential to make life (and programming technique) more intuitive all around.

Get a new job. Don't hand out your single perspective gripes in the form of fact.
Who Will Watch The Watchmen? (The struggle between privacy and security)
Typing Tutor: Homepage of free touch typing tutor RapidTyping
I use this as well, but I wish someone would do a chrome extension which allows to apply Readability without needed additional click (for example they could display a tiny clickable icon behind every link, which will open the article in Readability mode).

Question: Don't you know if Readability can be used programmatically? I would like to have a script, which would automatically save a Readabilite'd version of a web page.
> I don't know nearly enough about climate science to make any claims about it. What I do know about is scientific methods and I do know that there is no scientific method that can credibly make long term predictions about complex systems.

Like the Solar System.
Or chemistry.
Or biology.
Or evolution.
Or medicine.

We're pretty much flying blind here. I'm not even sure if I'll be able to pay my taxes this year.

If you don't know anything about climate science, maybe you should do the rational thing and listen to the experts and the best scientific consensus of the time.
I'd be interested in that.
Sadly, this is true. I ran into this recently with the DVD for the movie Transformers 2. I normally rip all of my movies onto my Boxee system (NOTE: I do this after I purchase the legitimate physical DVD copy of the movie, which I then keep!) It's not only more convenient to pick the movies from a menu, but more importantly for me, with two pre-teen kids in the house DVD's get scratched up fast if don't.

Normally, this is a pretty easy process, but Tranformers 2 apparently has a rather aggressive copy prevention scheme that seems to defeat most DVD rippers. I finally found a ripper that would rip it successfully, but not until after I came very close to returning the damn DVD to the store after a friend at work showed me that the Pirates Bay had not only the full DVD version of Transformers 2 available for download, but the god damn Blue Ray version as well! It would have been easier for me to pirate the damn movie than to format-shift my legitimately purchased copy.
Sure. It depends on the database, the way the query is constructed, and the way the handle is initialized. But the bigger problem is what the web stack does to the query before it hits the database.

People have been playing charset games to get past SQL quoting for almost 10 years now, and not just in PHP.
Treadmill desk comes to the rescue of growing waistlines and aching backs
>In the unlikely case I end up working a day-job for the rest of my life

Statistically, that's an incorrect statement despite the best wishes of all present.

You also failed to present anything remotely resembling a sane value equation. The only product of yours that the mass market would've been interested in, you managed to crash and burn.

You're not exactly offering anything in return for the money at the moment, and you don't have that large of an audience either.

Not even Joel would have had the gall to try something like this.
No todolist, is that even possible to ship a good and profitable software like that? (assuming not everyone is a cofounder)
Yep, semantics. The author is focussed on the transient connotation that 'passion' can (but doesn't necessarily) imply. Substitute 'intrinsic motivation' or 'disciplined enthusiasm' and we're all in agreement.
Titles can offload more and more of their game content into code paths that depend on the Internet, and if those titles generate more revenue (because they're harder to pirate effectively), it's not unlikely that the market will move that way.
Parallel Computing: Why the Future Is Non-Algorithmic
Improve Your Typing Skills with Rapid Typing Tutor
I recently “Stumbled Upon” a great typing-skills-improvement program called the Rapid Typing Tutor. This website features all sorts of cool features, from actual typing programs to tutorials and arcades. So, no matter your age or temperament, you can take advantage of this website to “tweak” and improve your keyboard and typing skills.
You simply do not know Lisp. Lisp is a term to describe different dialects in a family of languages.

For example : Common Lisp is a multi-paradigm Lisp that supports dynamic typing AND static typing. Haskell has NO equivalent to Common Lisp's macros. Template Haskell is not equivalent Lisp's macros. Often a Common Lisp implementation will simply require type hints to be added to gain large performance improvements. Clojure(another Lisp dialect) is the same this way.
My number 1 FAQ would be -- What if you end up starting the next Microsoft. How would I reasonably expect to get a discount on my copy of Daeken Vista from Best Buy?
It is AT&T's 3G coverage and lack of Apple Stores. You can't buy an iPhone in some of these states. The Prius thing really doesn't apply to Apple. Apple hasn't attacked farmers, but Prius driving environmentalist have.

I would think with an article like this, you would check the sales of other Apple products with outlets in the states listed and see what the delta is from average. Given that Wal-Mart and other stores in the area sell a lot of iPods, I would think the "Apple hate in the flyover states" is a load of crap (which they cast doubt on later in the article).

I have an iPhone I bought when I was in Minneapolis, and now use it in ND / SD. Plenty of people are waiting for one and AT&T did buy cell towers and a phone company here.
I hate to poop into this thread (i dont want to make a new one), but can someone please tell me the link to a blog post the title of which is something to this effect:

"Customer Development: this shit really works" ?

thanks
I actually believe the two concepts are tied, and I get that sense from the article as well. A lot of people look for "passion" because it's something the believe they can detect and think it translates into more code and more hours worked. I think the idea of a super-productive introvert who never shows emotion doesn't fit well with the idea of what a productive employee looks like to a non-programming employer.

Of course, employment situations like this can be "hacked" by doing little Dilbert-esque things like closing ticket tasks at night rather than during the day to make it look like you're working later since the system sends emails to the management. That turned out to be one of my most productive career moves, which meant it was time for me to find a new job.
Readability, as well as Instapaper's similar Instapaper Text bookmarklet(http://www.instapaper.com/extras), have made reading online so much better.

The thought of being able to use this on an iPad makes me tingly in all the right places.
Then at least the OS should give me a little reminder icon, "you haven't discharged your battery in n weeks". I see what you mean, but it seems unlikely that is the reason?
Readability is awesome. It's actually a new feature in the Hacker News iPhone App I built and makes a huge difference when reading pages.

Before —> http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4595/hn-readibility-menu.jpg

After —> http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4595/hn-readibility-done.jpg

The update is scheduled for release on Monday.
> Template Haskell is not equivalent Lisp's macros

Well, Template Haskell is a compile time meta programming system based on quasi quotation and AST manipulation...
With Readability Redux (extension for Chrome) JS is stored locally, so it probably addresses those issues.
The writer doesn't 'assume' that they're mutually exclusive; he explicitly makes that part of his argument:

"Passion? Has no place in the process at all. Yes, you can use it as a motivation – but it’s worse than useless if you want to actually succeed. Passion is fleeting, transient, momentary on the timescales that achievement requires. For motivation, you need something deeper and more permanent – and more, you need something that lets you be dispassionate at the same time as remaining motivated."

His argument is that 'passion' is detrimental to the kind of diligent practice necessary to acquire mastery of a subject. So you can disagree with the thesis of the essay, but you can't really claim that the author is ignoring such a critical aspect of the argument.
I still use a fair amount of the novelties weekly if not daily a couple of years after they've been introduced. For example the fireman's poles are actually a great way of moving around. There's some nice outdoor spaces at the office too (including a rooftop terrace), they're just not shown on those pictures.

Does anyone work there just for the interior design? Of course not. But I don't see how they'd be annoying, and will take the Zurich offices over a beige cubicle farm any day.
The worst for me are scalability issues for database driven applications. I just had a conversation go like this.

"So your application produces 60MB of output. The LUNs on the SAN the database server has available is capable of easily sustaining 250MB/s of throughput. Assuming ideal conditions, how fast should it produce the results."

Uh.. about 0.3 seconds?

"Right. However we perform a lot of complex calculations and use some complex logic. Let's assume the penalty for this is two orders of magnitude. How long should it now take?"

About 30 seconds?

"Right. So now do you see why I consider an application that takes 3 1/2 hours to produce the results to have a lot of low-hanging fruit?"

Yeah...

----- -----

I spent the day performing a cursory review. I made three recommendations, only one of which requires non-trivial code changes (but minor in the overall scheme of things), but the overall risk of introducing regressions is very low. Estimated reduction is 97%, which would get it down to about 6 1/2 minutes. Actually refactoring most of the application could certainly get it close to the 30-second mark. The first improvement was simply querying a painful view (which is due to a fundamental schema design flaw) once, instead of querying it N times. It's being tested in their QA department. 82% runtime reduction improvement right off the bat (so from 3 1/2 hours down to 38 minutes)

Not a small company. Very high average level of education amongst the staff. Very bright group in general. Very poor design decisions resulting in very expensive hardware choices to compensate (i.e. FusionIO for a SQL Server tempdb!).
It's fine to use fibers, but everybody has to be on board with the plan
I've deleted the Yelp app from my iPhone. It seemed like a good idea early on, but I don't feel that I can trust the results any more, and it's not worth the trouble.

It's a bummer because I travel a lot for work, so it was nice to be able to find local businesses.
Most browsers let you control font size, and unless the site design is frozen with terrible margins, you can fix that by resizing the window. It still offers some help with the font and color scheme, but I guess I need to play with it more to understand the value.
Baidu uses register.com as their registrar?! That was their first mistake. What a bunch of noobs.
I find your comment interesting. Let's take a look at your list.

Solar System -- after 500 years of research, multi-body problem still not solved, many features still amaze and baffle, scientists have no idea how common the system might be

Chemistry -- in spite of having a great model with lots of reproducible experiments, issues remain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsolved_problems_in_chemistry

Biology -- where to start?

Evolution -- big vague term. Hard to critique this one. Do you mean natural selection inside a species? Speciation?

Medicine -- wonderful ability to find and fix many diseases. Lots of things work although we have no idea why. Lots of things that we think should work don't. Lots of medicine is so much of a mystery that only statistical analysis can give us rough correlations to begin to form theories. The reason it is so advanced? Billions of test subjects (as opposed to one climate for Earth)

And let's not even get into physics, quantum or otherwise. Or cosmology. Or the problems with the use of Cellular Automata as a modeling tool. I could go on.

Be careful with grand sweeping statements. Ignorance is a fine position and should be the default. Science is a humble questioning of the cosmos, always willing to correct itself and always looking for reproducibility. Be careful about putting so much trust in scientists that you forget what science is about.

Ignorant people have plenty of tools at their disposal to reason and understand the quality of the underlying science. The science itself may be complicated beyond belief, but the underlying meta-data -- how science is done -- is not.
Could you delete that link? I clicked on it out of habit, but tptacek's comment has me paranoid that my IP is going to end up in an investigation. I'm guessing other people would prefer to just not have the option to click on it.
As much as I abhor PHP, this is less a reflection of the language itself and much more a reflection of the people who seem to use it most. The low barrier to entry in getting a website up with PHP results in lots of people who have no business programming writing websites.
Every so often this makes me wince. My predecessors made the permanent mistake of giving out ".php" URLs for an app server that we later ported to Java.

http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
City officials hope to make Ann Arbor pilot city for new Google initiative
I think OP means an outdoor space as part of the office, eg a wifi enabled roof garden/patio where you can take a break or even bring a laptop and work. Highly recommended.
I did something similar in Java, though it was for a company so I can't open source it. FYI, I noticed that the script changed drastically between (roughly) December and January. The new script works a lot more reliably in my experience. It now has a multi-pass algorithm that relaxes various criteria if it can't find anything with the strictest settings. It also looks for content DOM nodes and assigns points to parent and grandparent DOM nodes. It used to only assign points to the parent, which would give the wrong results in some cases.

In any case, I was just thinking that I would really like to get a python library that does the readability thing for a personal Google App Engine project I have in mind. If anyone knows of anything, I'd love to save some time. Otherwise, I'll probably start from Beautiful Soup and try porting readability on top.

Your Ruby code might also be useful if you end up open-sourcing it.
That's the same side benefit that every SQL database has built in too, right? Pretty much every relational database has supported parameterized queries for, like, ten years. They're uninjectable and actually less work than constructing strings.

It's amazing that people are still constructing SQL queries as strings in 2010.
Sounds nice, I'll look into that.
That's pretty cool, I hadn't seen that. Seems like it would take more time though than coding it in once and then not having to maintain updates and redesigns in your Wordpress theme.
If RepRap articles keep getting voted up, then obviously someone finds each new article interesting. And isn't that the point?
Good Bye Heysan, acquired by Good Technology
Well, I just searched for "salt lake web design", tried three or four sites found on random portfolios, and none of them had an obvious SQL injection. I'm sure it's much, much too common, but I seriously doubt its prevalence constitutes even a simple majority of professional web work.
IMHO it would be pretty burdensome to have an additional element after every link, but the aesthetics probably depend on how often you're using Readability.

As of your question, you can inject <script> tags pointing to Readability into the DOM. If you want to do it without the browser, WebKit is your friend.