skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe. It's still a bit alarmist though. For 99% of sites, it will barely have an effect. Best practices for websites serving millions of pages a day truly are different than for websites serving thousands of pages a day. They are also different for web apps versus largely static pages. There is too much emphasis on absolutes in the web development community.
The point of a start-up isn't to "get by", it's to discover, prove, and then scale up a new business model.

"Getting by" is pointless if you haven't found your product/market fit. You need to invest in finding it until it's found. If that takes 100 people, then that's how many people you should hire (if you can afford it).
The wave–particle duality of large molecules: C60 (the Buckyball)
Not a statement on anything, just found this interesting from article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_South_China_Mall

99% empty mall, Western Fastfood companies are only draws.
I've run across one or two compiler optimization papers where the conclusion given was that the proposed technique didn't work out so well, but on the whole, it seems it applies there as well. I agree that it's a problem -- if a null result is not published, other people will probably waste years making the same mistakes.
This is in a founder's interest only if there is more than one founder. If it's a single founder, there is no incentive for them to agree to this.
Not even necessarily true then - you also need each sample to have finite mean and variance...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confinity

Palm Pilot IR transfer system.
Stop trying to identify this user.

They did not issue a challenge to be identified--in fact they agree with the notion that privacy is dead, which seems to be what you're trying to prove with this exercise. They may have serious reasons for using a one time account.

If your name is one of the (very random) guesses in this post, please neither confirm nor deny that the user is you, since this could identify that user by elimination.

This item should not have so many points. The post is rubbish. A 275 word sample is long, but likely insufficient given the pool of candidates. The post did not explain what methods were used, what work in authorship identification influenced his approach, nor did he provide his ranked findings. The tries are actually failed guesses, rather than, say, different algorithms attempted. This item has now devolved into a guessing game, rather than a coding exercise.

Again, stop trying to identify this user.

written with a one time account
Yep. Actually a couple of times.

My first comment was a detailed criticism of his rant, noting that (1) registering multiple users and upvoting your own content is gaming the system, (2) when pg criticized him for it he said "I got you" but clearly didn't "get" what pg was getting at, (3) his failure to link to the original on twitpic was a violation of HN's submission guidelines and pg was actually cutting him slack by requesting that he include a link instead of changing the HN submission, and (4) HN's guidelines explicitly state that editors may change your title if you editorialize it. I noted that for someone so stuck on pg not giving him guidelines, he was awfully ignorant of those guidelines.

They stripped all of that out of my post, leaving only a poorly edited variant of my conclusion.

I added an addendum about how "egotistical, pompous, and self-serving" it was to spam this to HN, which he edited to say something libelous about PG.

I sent a note saying how classy that edit was, which was edited to use a different username (!) and was totally incoherent.

Quite impressive, really.
Making a business of selling your underwear online
Wow, we have some Kayne West fans. Say what you want about him, but I wouldn't want his name connected to my start-up... not if I wanted to be taken seriously. Might as well quote Glenn Beck while you're at it.
I think this is what he meant: Sometimes you can extract a valid proof from this kind of bad proof by reading it in reverse:

3. 0=0
2. 1*0=0*0
1. 1=0

However, in this case the step from 2 to 1 requires "division by 0".
No offense intended, it was just off the top of my head. Even though I do not think using a throwaway account would merit any embarrassment :)
On "Challenge HN": Request for Comments on a Protocol
Please have a look at the discussion following http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1199967

The idea is that we will introduce a tag "Challenge HN", where the submitter describes a challenge for the users of Hacker News. I suggest that the submitter should also be the judge by default and barred from competition, unless noted otherwise.

Some people have volunteered to sponsor small prices to spice things up. While everyone can just decide what to sponsor on their own, like-minded sponsors could also form groups and use, say, approval voting to decide on one challenge to sponsor each week. That may help to focus attention.

I have pledged 10 Pounds a week for the winner's charity of choice. jacquesm will match that in Euros (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1200094).

Any comments? I know that we do not have to standardize on any one protocol.

Also placing bets on HN and finding counterparties and an arbiter in the spirit of http://www.longbets.org/ would be interesting.
You don't have to do everything. If you try to you will be overwhelmed and unless you're a genius it will become demotivating if you think you have to learn all of it.

Do you want to work on large or small jobs?

For large jobs you will need to know a lot about reliability, scalability and sometimes performance. PHP or whatever language you work with is only a small part of the puzzle.

For small jobs you will have to know the browser quite well (CSS, JavaScript/JQuery).
Sure, and of course since I was wrong this is correct. But my brain thought that the using the term token for a username was sufficiently distinct to maybe be a subtle hint as to the original author (especially given the original context of the comment in question).
What's the distinction between what you're proposing and Squeezebox (formerly slimp3)?

http://www.logitechsqueezebox.com/

Their low-end product is a table radio at $150 street price.
Ask HN: Record keeping hacks?
Its that special time of year again, and after having fired my bookkeeper a year ago I'm hitting a good old session of digging through the mountains of receipts I've lazily tucked away in prep for tax season..

After having watched this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1199914 and seeing him scan docs straight into Evernote, I'm wondering - are there new hacks to proper record keeping? What tools are out there for lazy / distracted business owners to enforce good records without a bookkeeper?
Shouldn't this be "wholesome family merges", unless the number of parents exceeds two?
Good point. For what it's worth, I've done a little bit of work with the Bump team. Given their talent and technology backend, I suspect it's very unlikely that they've ever made a mistake. Also, they user is always prompted, "are you sure you want to exchange X with Y" before the transaction proceeds so you can be sure the bump happened with the person you expected. For more, see the second FAQ here: http://bu.mp/faq.html
If your object is a bunch of fields, you should still use an object. It might need behavior later.

I think the central issue is that there is too much friction to creating new classes in Ruby. It feels official and final. In Io, you just clone an existing object like you would send any other message.
They should post these at every park / beach / national forest parking lot in place of the current "Please don't litter" signs.
Thai protesters take ‘red’ theme to extremes
Jailbreak iPhone 3G
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> The post did not explain what methods were used,

The post didn't but the original thread did, I tried matching the vocabulary of the samples to the corpus of HN comments.

> what work in authorship identification influenced his approach

This is not a scientific paper.

> nor did he provide his ranked findings.

I'm not giving my ranked results because I think two attempts from me is enough.

> The tries are actually failed guesses, rather than, say, different algorithms attempted.

They were the #1 and #2 outputs of my code.

> This item has now devolved into a guessing game, rather than a coding exercise.

No-one said that you had to guess, but human guesses are also powered by computation at some level, even if it would be very hard to figure out exactly what went on.

> Again, stop trying to identify this user.

If that request would be posted by 'onetimetoken', who posted three times then it would have some credibility.

If you are not him/her why does this upset you ?

The 'one time account used as a rhetorical device' says fairly clearly that it is just a gimmick, not some kind of terrible secret.

And if you are 'onetimetoken' you are increasing the sample size ;)
No, you can't say x0 is the additive identity because 0 is the only additive identity. That would be equivalent to x0=0. Your way is fine if you just use what archgoon wrote to complete it.
From reading the original post, I think that "intimate patterns" was a stylistic choice, meaning to emphasize the invassivness of this phenomonon
That's just dodging the very real decision he had to make. He could continue searching for product/market fit with 40 people or he could do it with 100. There's no "right" answer, they're just different approaches. Many people would (and did) advocate taking the leaner approach, but he took the fatter one...
Avira is well-known in A/V for producing higher false positives than most other competing products.

That said, it also (as of late last year) had the highest actual detection rate (at 74% of 20,000+ tested bits of malware).

It also won AV Comparative's "gold" award for 2008, there's still a free version available for personal use, and it offers one of the lowest impacts on system performance of any antivirus product.

So, although I agree with the author that the heuristics in this case aren't optimal, Avira is still a very good product overall.
I think to boil it down to the "real issue" is probably oversimplifying it. I agree that high school English does not encourage reading, but how would you propose they do it differently?
Everyone tries to make lightning strike twice in the same place
Youtube video set to hidden is playing the conga(music). Maybe I was the only one wondering that but Firebug answered my question.
He lived on Home Depot gift cards?
Can I have some special kudos for thinking of this when the API was announced?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1010581
Ok, I misread the process then, I can believe that.
Dallas!!! Our startup community has grown like crazy over the past year and just keeps getting better! We have cool stuff going on like ShopSavvy, Traxo, Swingly, Woopra and more! Check out http://launchdfw.com as well. feel free to ping me directly if you want to chat about it.
Most obvious one: March 2005: http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html "Not Spending it".

From Eric Ries: Sep 2008: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/09/lean-startup.ht... "1. Lean in the sense of low-burn..."
Young entrepreneurs in Boston improving the startup ecosystem
From that search, what about tptacek, based on the non-standard use of "ROI": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1024825
His other photos are good too.

For example:

http://chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=9
Any website serving its assets from a CDN will be a) unlikely to make a mistake like this empty image src thing, and b) have a well-cached front-page that would be unlikely to impact on server load.
I've wasted a lot of time on this kind of analysis for picking brackets. I estimated that the odds of a person picking a perfect bracket are 1 in 924 trillion:
http://www.codeswimming.com/blog/2008/03/the-perfect-ncaa-br...

If you want a shortcut to estimate win probability instead of looking it up in a chart:

Prob Team 1 winning = Rank Team 2 / (Rank Team 1 + Rank Team 2)

That formula only breaks down at 1 vs. 16 and 1 vs. 2.

It's fun to postulate, but it won't really help in picking your bracket. What I do is look for teams highly rated by Sagarin or kenpom, but underrated by seeding. I have Wisconsin winning the whole thing in my bracket. You've gotta maximize the probability of occurance while also minimizing redundant picks with the rest of the pool. However, I've never done especially well in practice and regularly get beat by people who choose by jersey color. It's still fun though.
Make Checkins Relevant
A Mechanical Device Behaves as a Quantum System Right Before Your Eyes
Even as we move further away from the original JavaScript language with libraries built upon it, I think a good understanding of how JavaScript works allows you to work efficiently within them.

While it's possible to "learn" jQuery, it's a much less arduous process if you already understand how JavaScript works on a core level.
This technology is shaping up to be ridiculously exciting.
I remember recently reading a study that looked at possible correlations between political beliefs and squeamishness. They asked about 20 questions in each area, and found that 3 of the political questions correlated to 8 of the squeamishness questions at the 95% significance level.

Recall that 95% significance means "5% chance this correlation is a fluke". Correlating 20 questions with 20 others gives you 400 possibilities; they found 24 correlations. Given 400 trials, if there was no real correlation, they should've found about 20 flukes.

Needless to say, I was overall unimpressed by their results.
Does anyone know if other animals do this? Is that the presence of garbage combined with the birds' inability to taste plastic as well as their inability to regurgitate? That seems like an extreme environmental 'mismatch'. Sad.
Little Shrimp Makes Big Splash Beneath Antarctica
DropZap puzzle game extension for Google Chrome
I had the same thought - also note that the software powering the Squeezebox server AND the devices is open source! In fact they just flipped the player software (written in LUA) over to BSD, here's the commit:

http://svn.slimdevices.com/jive?view=revision&revision=8...

You can download nightly builds here:
http://downloads.slimdevices.com/nightly/?ver=7.5

Backend is perl, and is GPL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squeezebox_Server

The player software is written in LUA and runs well on OSX and OK on Linux (I am running the nightlies).

I have found the hardware players to be quite nice, and with iPeng on my iPhone I can control everything from anywhere: http://penguinlovesmusic.de/ipeng-the-iphone-skin-for-squeez...
Eh, it depends on who you hang around and how you've grown up - what you stated is just one specific example. The somewhat ambiguous way he described it "The term is widely in use, and refers to the exchange of physical pleasure, not necessarily intercourse, between two people who may not be going together or in fact may not have been introduced and indeed may not be strictly sober." describes it pretty well. (well I'd favor dropping the 'may' in 'who may not be going together')
Could be fun, but are there answers to these two questions?

1. Does this user object to being identified?
2. How will you know you succeeded?

I just skimmed the thread (already 107 comments), so perhaps I missed it, but I didn't see anything definitive.

Also, where's randomwalker when you need him?
Reminds me of how you may optimize your javascript DOM/style manipulations to avoid re-calculating the styles too often.
It was mentioned in this Google I/O session on GWT performance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9hhENmVTWg#t=32m38s
(slides located here: http://code.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/MeasureMillis... )

This is where Speed Tracer comes in handy ( http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/speedtracer/ )
YouTube Is Huge: 24 Hours of Video Now Uploaded Every Minute
Not just critiquing this particular model, but at least a couple things that need to be improved upon in game prediction:

1. Need to take into account playing styles of the teams along with their seed. (eg. how do teams that rely on 3pt shots fare vs. teams that play very physical defense, and all other permutations)

2. As Locke pointed out, extraordinary events play a large part in games. There was an article in the NY Times on stat analysis where a team official (may have been Houston Rockets' Daryl Morey) lamented a lucky shot-clock-beating 3-pointer by the opposing team, saying those kind of instances significantly alter the game. It'd be interesting to see if some teams are better at creating these lucky instances, or if they're strictly random
But also people are now more:
A) more sexual with who they date
B) are friends more with the opposite sex.

I still recall that when I was in high school, my mother was confused how I had both a girlfriend and several close female friends. Society is definitely different.
wired wrong again, if it's using midi I'm pretty sure the application doesn't digitizes anything.
I'll run the book through asciidoc's html generator soon enough, but thanks for doing this for now.

Looks like it loses some quality on translation to Google docs, though...
The UI looks good, but I have a hard time imagining it in use. Isn't the iPhone screen tiny for this purpose? Why not make a general laptop app or web app?
If your site is one of the world's top three most-visited websites and every pageview generates a single extra request and that brings you down, then like I said you've got bigger problems. Your infrastructure should not be so delicate that the difference between uptime and downtime boils down to a single extra hit per pageview.

I'm doing 500 hits per second right now, do I care if it becomes 600 or 700? Not at all, because that's still a nice, safe, comfortable distance from my maximum capacity.
The Death of the Pageview
A Google TV Set-Top Box is Coming
Austin and Boulder are definitely active cities as far as Startups. NY and Boston are great too but living costs are pretty expensive.
You're in the money!
1) based on his writing ('a one time account as a rhetorical device') I don't think he'd mind, also there is nothing in the comment itself that you would have to be ashamed of

2) you can't be sure, unless the person will confirm using the original 'one time' account.
What does be a web developer for open source mean?

To be a web developer you should have knowledge of html, css, javascript, and ajax.

You should understand table-based vs. css-based coding patterns. Cross browser issues, gzipping, js minification (yui, jsmin, closure), css minification, js and css file concatenation and why, learn a js library or two or three. Also learn sprites, and how forms work.

You need to really, really learn javascript. Prototypical Object Oriented development, after you know and understand it, then feel free to insult it (or love it).

Know which is quicker innerHTML or node creation and insertion (trick question!). Learn javascript development patterns. contribute to a javascript library.

json, json is very important.

There's a scattershot off the top of my head.
So you mean that you prefer this:

Point.with(1, 2).distance_to(Point.with(5, 6))

Over this?

distance [1,2], [5,6]

I guess it depends on how many interesting things you wanted to do with points. As things get more complicated, maybe something like this is worthwhile, but I don't feel that making everything an explicit object is categorically better.

But the section you're quoting is among the most contrived examples that RBP gives, it's mainly just part of a list of the different sorts of argument processing Ruby offers and the trade-offs betweeen them.

Maybe you skimmed and missed that, or maybe you read through and chose to ignore that detail.
Ask HN: What are good analytics numbers?
I launched a site approximately about 2 weeks ago and I'm looking at my google analytics numbers. I've never had anything be as successful as this, and I'm generating a few dollars per day in adsense revenue.

But I have no idea what good numbers are. Should I look at visitors? pageviews? avg. time on site? bounce rate?

The site is www.thathigh.com, so my goal is to get people reading and clicking on stuff.

FOR EXAMPLE: is a 50% returning user rate good? is that low? or is that very good?

thanks for any advice. this community is invaluable.
Re 1) I have used the previous PayPal app a lot and I found myself typing in emails more than I pulled them out of my address book. My address book has mostly phone numbers, emails are rare. I think this is because of Gmail's autocomplete; it reduces my need to save people's email addresses if I have ever sent or received email with them. Also, you are assuming you are giving money to someone in your address book, there are lots of use cases where this is not the case. But, true point if this is how you would use the app.

Re 2) There are multiple confirmation steps you go through after the bump. First, our API requires that both people say Yes to connect to the other person (PayPal uses your email or phone number, whatever the other person logged in with). PayPal has a second confirmation screen where you review the transaction before sending money. So while it is possible you could be matched to the wrong person (although very unlikely), you would both have to hit yes and then reconfirm you want to send money to that person. Bump does not connect you to anyone until you say Yes, there is a safety net.

Neither us or PayPal want to create a system where you send money to the wrong person. No system is perfect, mistakes have to pile up on top of mistakes for this to happen and the user always has control.

Give it a try, it is fast and fun. :)
Yes, I mentally gave you kudos at the time if that helps. ;)
Huge congrats on the app... with the iPad coming out, it's the perfect time for this.

A possible area for expansion (or maybe even a new app entirely). There's a whole world of classical music that is extremely competitive. Since you've got the iPad sitting on their piano, use the microphone to record yourself playing the song, and then it can be uploaded automatically and rated alongside others who've played the song.

Then you can have a leaderboard for each song, and even an overall leaderboard, like a global tennis rankings. They could challenge each other to a "duel" like a tennis match, or there could be a tournament. People can have their ranking, a profile, how old they are.

It would be hugely motivating to kids learning to play, and very disruptive/democratizing to the whole classical music world.
are you sure most people are unwilling? especially when they contact you and you don't respond?
I thought there were still serious problems with NaCl on x86-64. http://groups.google.com/group/native-client-discuss/browse_... gives a brief overview, and there's been no word since that post, which was just over a year ago. I believe the problems have to do with NaCl's dependence on the segment registers; if I recall correctly, the APIs for manipulating them are the ones that were dropped in 64-bit Windows.
Fuckin' bottle caps, man