skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bear in mind that descriptive grammarians determine what is and is not grammatical based not on abstract principles of grammar, most of which originate in the prescriptive tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries, but on actual recorded use (i.e. in the same way that dictionaries determine the meanings of words).

In other words, if there is a broad tradition of people saying and writing, "I can do that easy", it is de facto grammatically correct to do so.
No, your brain sees pixels and guesses at volume. And it is spectacularly bad at comparing the angles of a pie chart drawn in 3D perspective.

For example: http://www.olivierlorrain.com/2010/02/21/data-visualization-...
We're doing this first come first serve. One of the last bring-beverage discounts just got taken. There's only one more left. This is great networking. People at the party will know who's hiring and who's good to work for. You can't come to SF for a job hunt and skip this =)
It's an arms race.
It's ungrammatical.
Well I've been doing some work with facial recognition lately and I came across some interesting research along those lines.

http://leyvand.com/research/beautification2008/

I've also seen similar warping techniques used on more recognisable faces to achieve their "ideal" geometric spacings between facial features and they didn't look off-putting (from an uncanny valley perspective) but just.... wrong.

So, I'm leaning towards no, but I'm not an expert.
Though I appreciate the code, and will definitely read through it, and I like the idea of a self-compiled language... that seems like more hassle than it's worth (very specifically the double-compilation / failed => super.fail part. A compiler in the language it compiles has advantages for the programmers using it, among other things).
On Dropbox, the USB stick metaphor, & security
...and the other 0.1% kill you...
Habbo Hotel: Nieuws - De sneeuw is weg: tijd voor een Pool Party
I guess our brains are wired so that emotional content trumps informational content. (Which also explains why there always seems to be several "dramatic" posts on the front page of Hacker News like Calacanis vs. Cutts.)
Guido is exactly right. reduce is one line of code, not "a few" lines of code.
"we're creating evolutionary pressure on the germs to become resistant to our countermeasures"

I thought that's what we were doing anyway.
Texas Sets New Wind Power Record with 6,272-Megawatt Peak
Energizer Bunny's software infects PCs
Companies like Google care about and have responded to populist uprisings like this in the past (especially as it relates to search quality). I imagine that's the actual goal here.
Three lessons from the Chipotle iPhone app
Stardust spacecraft may have found cosmic dust
Some things are easier to evolve a resistance to than others. The antibacterial measures we apply externally (rather than internally) tend to be more of the "would kill anything living" variety than the "targets specific, removable weakness of this organism". Hence, hard to adapt to.

Hand sanitizers, for example, work by immersing bacteria in alcohol, a potent organic solvent. It dissolves cell membranes and denatures proteins.

While there are bugs that can live in some pretty harsh conditions, to my mind, worrying about the bacteria in your kitchen sink spontaneously developing resistance to alcohol is like worrying about them spontaneously developing resistance to boiling water.

Possible, on the millions-of-years scale. Not exactly a big concern in this lifetime.
This is my first winter using (employer supplied) hand sanitizer. I have to say that so far, I haven't had any seasonal illinesses - and I don't take flu shots either - so I believe it has helped (along with regular hand washing and wearing gloves whenever I go out).
I dropped by http://smartupz.com to find out more about your premium app. I found that the grammar was not correct in quite a few spots and would highly recommend you have someone proofread your copy. Not improving the copy will definitely impact your full launch in a very negative way. Having a crystal clear, engaging and gramatically correct message will go a long way to helping you extract people's hard earned money. Good luck with the launch!
No, it's not what I want thanks. It's not eager and it's not simple and it's pretty fiercely pure. What I am thinking of is something more like a functional Python, or a Scheme with a "nice" syntax.
Conversational grammar and written grammar are a little different; this sentence makes sense if you consider the author to be having a chat with you.
How to Become an Insta-Expert: A Confession
We're hackers not journalists. If he feels Calacanis is scum he should be free to say so and not be held to some arbitrary standard of wiki-objectivity. It's certainly a lot more truthy than most of the horseshit that Calacanis drops around here whenever the subject of Mahalo comes up.
This project has been the love child of myself and John Bender (nickelcode.com) for the past 6 weeks. We're both daily HN readers and would like to use this as a starting point to show Vagrant to the public. Specifically, I'd like to open up to any questions and feedback, so that the HN community can get to know Vagrant. Your feedback is extremely valued. Thanks!

A bit of background on this project: I work at a development company (citrusbyte.com) in LA. I see new projects almost every couple months, and I'm often working on multiple projects simultaneously due to work, freelance, and personal projects. Managing the development environments between many projects on a local machine became a huge burden and a coworker once mentioned developing in a virtual machine. I thought this was a great idea, and Vagrant was eventually born from it.

Like I said before, feel free to ask any questions. If no questions, I value your feedback very highly, so please let me know what you think!

Thanks,
Mitchell
As much as I like Python, Guido has repeatedly demonstrated a pretty fundamental lack of understanding when it comes to functional programming concepts (I'm thinking in particular of past HN discussions regarding his confusion about the difference between tail calls and tail recursion). While it's entirely appropriate to take the stance that Python should not become "more functional" (whatever that means), it's not appropriate to do so without a clear understanding of what you're talking about.

For the record, here's a link to the Haskell Prelude version of reduce, aka, foldr. Looks like "a few lines" to me...

http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base-4.2.0...
Information Architect's 2006 Facebook redesigns
I just spent about five hours this weekend experimenting with Titanium Mobile and for someone like me knows Javascript, but not Objective-C or Cocoa, it looks awesome. After spending some time trying to get kick started using Objective-C, Cocoa, Interface Builder and XCode, I would guess that Titanium might reduce the time it would take me to build a substantial iPhone app by maybe 5-10X.
This blog post is not considering the USB metaphor in context of Dropbox.

You wouldn't install Dropbox on someone else's computer just to get a couple of files. You would go online log into your Dropbox and get them from there.
I think an app like this could do it. The "businessy" apps (basecamp-like, targeting businesses or professionals) could probably pull it off. It would all come down to marketing and coverage.

If there's a network effect, or a chicken/egg problem, starting premium only would be very difficult, I think.
Interesting - I scrolled to the bottom (always looking for boundary conditions) and then was not able to Back Firefox to HN. No matter how many times I used Back individually, or picked the tenth previous page from the Back dropdown, HN never came back.

I ended up closing the browser to start over... Is this normal behavior for Google Docs? FireFox 3.6 on WinXP Pro 32bit Sp3 (wife's computer).
Good post. I think too many people think that the simplified English they learn in first grade is the same English they should use once they are adults. (I know first grade is where I heard "never begin a sentence with 'and' or 'but'", anyway. The other rules were introduced at a similar time. I ignored them then and my grades suffered as a result. But of course, now I get paid to write, and nobody tells me which words I can start a sentence with. LOL.)
I'd make the same point I would to someone griping about all the psychics, aliens, vampires, and wizards in the paperback books they've tried out:

Well, that's the geek media.

Worse, it's the young-geek media - most of that stuff is marketed to teenage guys. Admittedly, it's really hard to find anything else in the US because young geeks have been the primary source of demand for Japanese animation and comics. We mostly get the Bleaches and the Hellsings and whatnot.

It's as if the rest of the world only got SF and Fantasy movies out of Hollywood. There's stuff to love there, to be sure, but it's a necessarily limited sampling.
He was exaggerating about the scarcity, I've travelled Japan with vegetarian friends and they could fine suitable food (and quite nice food when we were in the mountains around Buddhist temples). In any case you're getting into a nitpick about the general idea which is that a meat loving boozehound is going to feel really out of place in India when compared to, say, Japan, Australia, North America, Europe, etc. . . .

As one of those I wouldn't move to India and expect to have my cravings for steak and a nice Bordeaux satisfied with any regularity. Just as I wouldn't move to Japan as a veggo and expect to have my cravings for super awesome tempeh dishes satisfied. And I certainly wouldn't complain about it like that.
$2 and the beach is a great way to neutralize the burn of ambition
Why Grow? and Other Wisdom from 37Signals
Use Scheme for more than five minutes and I think you'll find you don't care about the syntax anymore. Plus you won't have to write your own language, which is always nice.

Strict evaluation is a pain, though, IMHO.
The real problem with strict grammarians is that some of the rules were never normal usage (dont end a sentence with a preposition)

I would go even a bit further. The specific example you cite is a case where the rule not only doesn't follow normal usage for English, but derives from an entirely different language. The rule, like many others, comes from Latin usage. In English, as a Germanic language, it is not only common, but often correct and natural, to end a sentence with a preposition.

There is a common tendency for adverb-verb groups in English to split and for the verb to move forward in the sentence as the preposition slides down to the end. As an example, think about how natural this sounds: I'll be right along after I finish writing this reply down.

The rule was always complete crap. But it appealed to the sensibility of people who knew Latin and felt that applying its norms to English elevated them. It's a class thing, at some level, I suppose.
So, McAfee identifies a single node as "associated" with the incident: li107-40[dot]members[dot]linode[dot]com. And Linode has a post which specifically references a single node being associated but under Google's control and not malicious control at all times.

Doesn't appear to me that there's any contradiction. There is no evidence that a Linode was used for anything malicious. There is evidence that a Linode was used.
Point-Free style: What is it good for?
If you have interest in the public datasets used there, may be you like another public data browser, UN Data (http://data.un.org/)
The iPad is a genuinely new web user-agent. It will have an impact, possibly major, on the way the web is consumed. It's about to embark on its initial adoption curve. These early usage patterns should be interesting to hackers, especially web devs.
You make my point better than I could! You just explained to me that my query, which every human understood perfectly, is stupidly understood as "used cars", so Google is a basic keyword algorithm and this still doesn't explain result #5.

Really, I'm smart enough to understand your explanation of how the tool works. The problem is that I'm in the 99th percentile in the field of "computer keyword understanding" over the general Internet population. So what does that say about the tool?
I was halfway through the signup process when I realized I'd be at sxsw. Great idea though!
While there's no doubt that some times are better than others to submit, I think it's best not to abuse this to get karma. It's nice having at least a couple hour window where self-submitted blog posts from members of the HN community have a chance to make the front page, but this goes away if people are spamming the system with random stuff.
Halting Problem in Dr. Seuss' style
Conquer Video with MPlayer
I had to read through most of the site before I had a good idea of what exactly this was, but it does sound very interesting.

What about deployment? On the site, you only talk about local development environments. Could you perhaps turn convert a Vagrant project into an EC2 instance for deployment?
That corroborates one part but not the other, more worrying (but less likely) aspect.
Alternate theory: there are different kinds of plants in the US versus Kenya. Humans happen to be allergic to the pollens that the US plants produce, and not allergic to the ones that the Kenyan plants produce.

One thing that definitely causes a lot of disease in the US is moldy buildings. Bringing in fresh air is expensive, so they just recirculate the dirty, moldy air. Then everyone gets sick, because mold in your lungs is not so good for you. (Actually, the mold gets stuck in your sinuses and then forms a film that is difficult to kill with antifungal medications. Fun! At least the building is "green"...)
Great idea! Someone should do one at SXSW, too.
Using Google reader, when I happen upon items which are tl;dr for right now, I just hit 't' then type either "to-read" or "to-watch" which tags them. When I have a little more time, I hit 'g-t' and select one of those two tags. When I'm done, I un-tag it. This way I don't have to "note" it (which other people can see) or star it, and I can un-tag it when I'm done with it.

Also, Readability is a great boon.
"As one of those I wouldn't move to India and expect to have my cravings for steak and a nice Bordeaux satisfied with any regularity. Just as I wouldn't move to Japan as a veggo and expect to have my cravings for super awesome tempeh dishes satisfied. And I certainly wouldn't complain about it like that."

Fair Enough! Fwiw, some Indians bitch and moan about American food habits when they move to the USA so I am sure the habit is fairly universal !
App Engine joins the Google over IPv6 Program
SICP defines fold-right in 5 lines, so I'd rather say he's just wrong.
I hear there is this stuff called "moisturizer", which restores the moisture and oils that have been washed away by soap.
Why is this weird? It's iron-oxide and saltwater. Here's iron-oxide and freshwater: http://www.quikrete.com/ProductLines/CementColor.asp

The same used to be said about oil bubbling on the surface in California and Texas. And there's probably an asteroid of pure gold floating around somewhere too.

"The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be."

-- Douglas Adams (The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy)
Building a better buzzword: A righteous campaign, to be sure.
Both your claims are factually incorrect and it took me about 30 seconds to verify that you are indeed incorrect. It doesn't start at free, the first user costs 5 euros. Also, mite did in fact relaunch as a paid service in 2008. True, it would have been nice if they had mentioned the users they retained from the initial launch in 2006, but the picture you paint is not accurate.

http://www.crunchbase.com/product/mite
Indeed. Though you shouldn't end a paragraph with LOL. (Or start it with, or put it anywhere.)
Heh... Pun not intended; just typing too fast.
I probably spend half my day eating my fingers. I don't use antibacterial soap or hand sanitizers (but do wash multiple times per day with regular soap). I also rarely get sick.

It's almost like this whole "immune system" thing actually works...
Maybe I only notice because my parents pounded the difference between less and fewer into my head when I was growing up, but... It seems like speakers of American English have simply forgotten that "fewer" exists.
and my friend didn't even wait up for me.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175223
I liked the article because it conveys the message that most self-help drivel is at the level of a 12 year old. Although I'm not sure that is what the author intended to point out.
No one wanted to add their comments?
I also hate hand sanitizers. I feel very dirty after using them, and feel the need to wash my hands. So I just wash my hands and skip the sanitizers.
You are thinking of religions other than those based on the bible.

One of the goals of the bible was to get people to stop believing in other deities and to stop attributing natural events to mystical powers.
It is. The error, though, is one of spelling.
Croonmytune: Share a singing message with your friends
Quick someone make a program to transform this into dwarf fortress worlds.
It's still crazy to me that building such a thing is essentially a solved problem today.
> They had a theory of the disease that made sense, fit the evidence, but was utterly wrong. They had arrived at the idea of an undetectable substance in their food, present in trace quantities, with a direct causative relationship to scurvy, but they thought of it in terms of a poison to avoid. In one sense, the additional leap required for a correct understanding was very small. In another sense, it would have required a kind of Copernican revolution in their thinking.

Fascinating.
I was expecting to find a listing a which sites were being visited by iPads. (In addition to where the iPad requests came from.) Am I missing something?
Changelog directly from OpenSSH.com

http://www.openssh.com/txt/release-5.4
Xachi Pets fuse iPhones and Stuffed Animals into one Cute and Cuddly iToy
Software helps hackers empty corporate accounts
This is dumb.

Make a ZCP filter and the world will beat a path to your door.
Look again. The point isn't that he's using blue for red and vice versa, the point is that the 3d chart distorts the information. In a 2d chart, we'd have equal shares for each color. Since it's 3d, even though blue has a smaller slice, it gets more pixels.
bitch bitch bitch..that's all you guys do...haven't you realized by now that Google doesn't care about your complaints?

Put a sock in it...Mahalo creates excellent content and Google recognizes it. Instead of bitching about "spam" why don't you do something about it. Create your own "spam"...obviously Google thinks it's completely acceptable. So instead of complaining get on the gravy train.

It's like arbitrage a few years ago, those who bitched and moaned got nowhere, while others made millions.
This is my startup I'm doing with a few friends! We presented at the Open Angel Forum last week, so we're currently raising an angel round of funding to bring it to market.

We'd really like some advice from YC and HN people with experience pitching hardware startups to investors.
I used to have Opera read articles aloud to me while I worked. Sadly it's a bugged feature now, but it was good while it lasted.
AIG: How a company once seized by Mao ends up seized by Washington.
IMO the data singularity exists, but it will shepard in the age of the exceptional individual.

Exceptional individual = Ubermensch?

I think there, is going to be plenty of scope for well oiled companies, especially small companies.
Muphry's law
I believe it is just a simple typo. He meant to have "but" before "he knows."
he's acting in his incentive, who the hell cares. read: i don't understand why anybody cares.
In looking at that, I was surprised to see that the foldr/build deforestation technique is still in use. That was part of my advisor's PhD work from the mid 90s.
The user charts do not include any users from before July 2008. But we should have mentioned our history more clearly, at least in the English blog posts, that's right.
Hi mcantor,

I thought the iPad map to be of interest here at HN, because it gives proof that the devices are in active use although not yet in the market.

Maybe not hugely surprising, but at least factual from our base of data, you can see that there is traffic coming in from SF, NYC and even India on different types of networks.

We (Being a co-founder of PercentMobile) regularly start seeing devices that are being used on the networks, of which some aren't even officially acknowledged to be in existence. (Obviously, the iPad has been confirmed at this point)

I think sharing this kind of data is a good idea, in hope that it creates and feeds curiosity and awareness of the mobile ecosystem. How intellectually valuable it is for everyone, I am not able to answer. I don't know.

What would you like to know (if anything) about the mobile ecosystem? What kind of perspectives on what's currently happening on the mobile web would be nurturing your intellectual curiosity?
If he put a period after "...can't spell" I'd agree with you:

>A guy who writes I could of been a contender can't spell. Sure, he knows how to say grammatically that he could've been a contender (and who knows, perhaps in some realm other than writing he could've been).

Conversational and grammatical.
CIA Stuffed a Real, Live Cat With Electronic Spying Equipment (1967)
Fair, but the squares looked more like Dragon Warrior 3 than Zelda.
We spend 12 years of public schooling trying to drill some rudimentary general knowledge about the world into the heads of people who couldn't give a shit about it, and only partially succeed. What makes you think that Ed Tufte can do the same job with a website, or with a cameo on some weekly YouTube addresses?

The data is available for people who care to inform themselves. Doing better than that seems to me like a pretty damn hard task in the short term.
I find lots of rubyists get quite snotty about this concept. However, if you must, I'd suggest that you look into jrubyc as an option. It spits out Java bytecode that can't be trivially converted back to anything meaningful.
Yes, I agree. I woke up thinking of lots of downsides and I'm back to my good, old, jaded self.
I disagree with most of his advice. I really doubt you'll be able to quit your job and get anywhere with your business if you follow it. I don't really want to get into details for obvious reasons, but when I worked on my business on a side last year, let's just say I wasn't following the advice in this article, and I glad I didn't. If I did, I would still be working for "the man" and hating my life.

Everything in life takes balls. Decide what's important for you, and go for it, fuck everything else. You've gotta have the attitude that your business is #1, and the corporation just doesn't really matter that much. Again, I can't post that many details, but pretty much reverse most points from this post and you'll have a good idea of what to do.
Modren Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, etc) Vs. Forums
Life and death of online communities
Yikes, thanks for the heads up. I small portion of my ramen profitability comes from Amazon Associates.
It's not really a major objection. I definitely appreciate you sharing the data in the first place. :)