skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
AKA "some complicated buffering scheme". Without blocking IO you have to buffer the output locally.
Wasn't this also FaceBook headquarters until their very recent move? Or is that across the street?
Thank you very much. I liked what I read in the design doc (http://vc.gerg.ca/hg/hg-bfiles/raw-file/tip/design.txt), which seems to be trying to automatically do the best thing possible under the hg constraints.

It's interesting that the names are "Distributed Version Control Systems", or "Revision Control", but the ghost of the word "source" (meaning code text, in 1972's SCCS) is still read into it.

Surprisingly, when DVCS are shouted as the bees' knees for everybody, people who have images, documents and data may think they were included. Apparently not, those benighted heathens should use rsync or whatever manually, and not soil the "source control" systems with their binaries. Or go find not-included plug-ins, if they can.

(Those people are apparently too dumb to understand that a binary "artifact" produced with an image editor, spreadsheet, or data analysis tool is fundamentally different from a blessed code file written with a text editor, and thus is not entitled to be under real version control, or have a DCVS tool automatically do something smart about it.)

The Perforce guys must be laughing their asses off.
Yeah, but I think what we would consider fun would pretty much kill a game like Farmville in terms of popularity. I am only guessing... but your typical gamer is not playing Facebook.
What's the point? People are doing this with assault rifles, as maintenance. But with iPad? Heh.
they never actually bother to mention how their investments have been doing for them in the meantime

So, you're unhappy because other people don't use the same sort of anecdotal evidence that you are so fond of using yourself?

Who needs anecdotes when you have data? Here's a typical chart of median home prices since 1971, adjusted for inflation:

http://www.newfinancialwisdom.com/median-home-prices-inflati...

And here's a chart of the inflation-adjusted S&P500 since 1950 (skip down a few charts):

http://www.simplestockinvesting.com/SP500-historical-real-to...

What we see here is that, aside from some interesting but minor fluctuations and a scary but temporary blip representing last decade's bubble, housing prices are almost flat in real terms: The increase in median house price is almost equal to the inflation rate. Meanwhile, stock market investment values fluctuate a lot -- the last decade was not especially kind to investors -- but over the 1950-2008 time period the market averaged nearly 7% over inflation if you reinvest all dividends.

Now, you can get lucky. Or you can leverage insider knowledge: If you figure out that land in a certain area is systematically underpriced relative to future demand, you can make a killing without relying solely on luck. But the averages show that for every person who makes a killing in residential real estate, there's someone else who takes the equivalent bath. And note that the argument that "land in NYC/Northern California/Desirable Area X will keep growing in value because everyone wants to live there" presumes that the rest of the market hasn't already figured out that such land is more desirable and set prices accordingly.
Thanks for the reply. Lifehacker and my other searching has led me to these options.

http://www.debenu.com/benubird/overview.html
http://www.mendeley.com/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/docfetcher/

Going to try them out starting with Benubird as it looks like it will address my needs the best. Will report back.
Fair point. I still think she should publicize their names, but the NYTimes shouldn't include them.

Even if you're responding to my parenthetical first sentence, I don't see how that has anything to do with 'anti-anti-sexism'. I was just articulating the concern anybody should have for seeming like a troublemaker. There's a fine distinction between being outspoken and a troublemaker. The latter is just looking for a reason to seem outspoken - a distracting influence at a startup.
(just posted this to the blog before reading here... I essentially agree with diziet)

Dan,

I like your conclusion, but disagree with the premise.

I contend that your understanding of the Pareto principle was initially incorrect and you are not alone as your link to David's post is evidence.

I further contend that your new approach is actually more aligned with the Pareto principle.

The Pareto principle does not say that 20% effort will give you 80% of the benefit. The principle says that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. That is a very significant distinction.

The key is figuring out which 20% gives you the proverbial bang for your buck and doing 100% of that. That is not always easy or obvious.

If you are talking about 'time' and all the hats a founder has to wear in an early startup, the math quickly breaks if one tries to spend %20 of the time on more than 5 things. IMHO, Pareto Power Law applied to entrepreneurship is not about spending %20 time on anything, it is about getting to parity on the undifferentiated infrastructure that every company needs to run for as little time and money as possible, so you can focus on narrowing down and finding the %20 of causes that really move the needle in your space.

Then go all in...

Regards,
Andrew
JSON.NET 3.5 R7 released
Part of me feels like this is a natural phenomenon since ticket prices are artificially deflated, so as to be accessible to the broadest range of fans. This creates a gap between what people are willing to pay and the price they are offered, and the gap creates services like this.

Perhaps ticket sellers should keep the very best seats and auction them off, uncapping their price. The rest could be put in a lottery, and kept open for two weeks or so.
Then, only fans who win tickets pay money for them, for a low and accessible price. That would be far fairer than the current first-come first-served, overload the server system. You could also introduce a delay between closing the lottery and announcing the results, giving you time to scan for bot submissions.
Since I found this through a comment here a little while ago, it's become part of my regular toolset. Especially with TextMate, where it'll pick up the folder of the item you're working on. I can run an operation on that file / folder really quickly, without needing to mess up the terminal window(s) I typically keep handy. (I'm usually doing Ruby / Rails work with TextMate)

My only real desire (and I know there's a way to do it, I just haven't done it): a way to open a regular Terminal window from dterm. That'd get rid of my need for any "cdto"-like script. Something so I can use `term .` .

Word of warning to users: it's not a TTY. Sometimes this can cause unexpected behavior in a program meant to be run from the terminal, and it's not interactive at all. (I ran across this when my code forked right after printing - Terminal prints normally, this prints as if going to a file, so it printed after forking the buffer)
I was addicted to world of warcraft for about 18 months and I finally came to the conclusion that I was mostly using it as a "success surrogate." It was much easier for me to be successful in game than in real life, and the cycle time was much shorter. In an MMORPG you can achieve meaningful progress in your avatar in one weekend of solid grinding, but in real life to achieve meaningful results usually takes weeks, months or years of hard work. It was partly the immediacy of the rewards that made the game so compelling I think.
The Tumblr Story
Need a better way to enter the API key. With no copy and paste, entering a 32 character sha hash is a fail.
I read until the point I found a lapse in reasoning, in this case that the fact that Obama advertised in video games was related in some fashion to whether or not video game playing teenagers would make better citizens.

I then scanned briefly for references to Huizinga.

You might be right that not all of the essay is fallacious simply because some component part is, but this seemed esp. egregious.
Discovery In The High School Webcom Case: Guess What
For the record, I'm not unhappy at all, and if you'll look back at my original reply I was very up front about being just one data point.

You can get lucky. Or you can leverage insider knowledge. Or you can do some personal learning and invest wisely. All of these are equally applicable to investing in real estate or to investing in other things while being a renter. For some reason, however, those who profit from real estate are chalked up as lucky and those who profit from other things while renting seem to get to talk as if their success involved any less luck or any more informed investing. Why is this? In my case, I invested in a physical market in a particular region I had been watching for many years and which has generally steady indicators. I exited for entirely personal reasons (to live with my girlfriend, just to put it out there), not to "time" the market as claimed by one commenter who also claimed I got lucky. I was subsequently called out as unhappy by another - you. Again, why is this?

Any argument that can be made for or against success by an owner can be made equally well for or against success by a renter investing elsewhere, yet luck only gets cast towards the former, wisdom only towards the latter, and all the while the latter never seem to publish any of their investment success numbers to match their claims of benefit down the road. Again, why the disparity?

Whether in real estate or elsewhere, it's the same $500 per month during the same five years. Whether sourced from luck and/or expertise, why are one class of returns immediately disparaged while another goes entirely unstated yet entirely uncontested? I've never taken it as an offense personally, but do admit that it does seem to be a common pattern and not a particularly fair pattern, at that.
The scalability of their cohesive culture shows in their apps too. The Google account is so much more valuable than MSN/Hotmail or Yahoo ever did. It's almost as if their hiring process seems to translate to their apps itself i.e. each app is smart enough to play along nicely with other smart apps.
I don't understand how this counts as fraud. Ticket master got paid for their tickets by the purchasers right?

Today at Old Navy they were offering 20% off my jeans if I gave them my email address. Should I go to jail for giving them an invalid one?
Douglas Spink, Worst Google Footprint of Any Living Person
I am most excited about the css; this will cut our development time in half! We aren't going to need images to have decent looking buttons anymore.
Since the person in question is a programmer: RTFM

I'd say R is much closer to how a software developer is used to work than a spreadsheet. But I understand that many people who have no practice in software development would rather choose a spreadsheet in such a situation.
District claimed it only activated cameras in case of a stolen laptop. The picture in the article page that shows the kid sleeping kind of blows that claim.

I'm wondering why all the people who did this are apparently still employed by the district. The preponderance of evidence seems to be in.
His book "Head First Data Analysis" seems a fairly gentle introduction to data analysis. I've read it and it's enough to learn a couple of tricks. Where to go from here it's harder to figure out. I'm refreshing my stats classes with the Pearson, and looking for a good introductory R book.

This stats course from Berkeley isn't bad, too: http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/classes/s133/schedule.html
I do not like
Zynga Farm Spam..
I do not like spam, Sam-I-am.

I do not like them
in my house.
I do not play them
with a mouse.
I do not like Spam
here or there.
I do not like them
anywhere.
I do not like
Zynga Farm Spam.
I do not like it,
Sam-I-am.
College Grads' Outlook Grim
similar to walking past a slat fence and yet seeming to have an uninterrupted view of the yard as long as you're moving.
Event creator that accepts openid while rsvp'ing?
wufoo/icebrrg/google forms dont accept rsvp entries via openid.

didnt find one on openid's dirctory either

any suggestions?

~B
I actually find that tying aspect pretty annoying, especially as it relates to Google Groups. Yahoo Groups makes it much easier to subscribe to Yahoo lists with non-Yahoo email addresses and manage the subscriptions and what goes to which address from a control panel. With Google Groups, I had to make a separate Google Account for my .edu email address just so I could subscribe to a GG mailing list with it, so now I'm juggling multiple Google Accounts.
Pretty simple why it's illegal. They made up fake people, contact info, and email addresses that weren't tied to real people. The terms of the site don't allow that and when you are buying tens of thousands of tickets, people tend to notice.
Qualified people don't dip their toes in to see how welcome they feel, or how the money is, or anything else that happens offscreen. They live and breathe this stuff. Before PCs were available, some used to commit petty crimes just to score some computer time. And nobody regarded this compulsion as any kind of privilege until the pay improved.
This is usually how I respond to emails as well. Doesn't seem to be an issue.
Care to explain? :)
Hacker News?

First person who says "HEY BUT ITS HACKIN UR VISION" gets a fist sandwich.
I think it would be a mistake to apply the Pareto principle to time distribution as the author seems to want to do here:

"so putting 20% into any one thing and reaping 80% of the benefits is a very time-maximizing way to live."

The Pareto principle is really about the distribution of causes and effect and factors. The goal would seem to be to isolate and identify your vital factors and focus most of your energy on those to maximize your output.
Javascript makes my brain hurt. I will stick with assembly (and portable assembly: C)
Think of it as a DSL, statisticians like to use. While it has its dark sides, its vector-orientation is well suited for a language whose main purpose is data manipulation.
The physicist Werner Heisenberg was once asked if he knew where Stanford University was located. "I believe it is on the west coast of the United States, not far from San Francisco. There is also another school nearby, and they steal each other's axes," he replied, referring to Stanford's rivalry with the University of California, Berkeley. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University)

Lucky? Sun, Yahoo, Google, Loopt as a small sample. For god's sake, there is a Sequoia Hall on the map!

:-)
Conway's Law: "organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations."

If you create a corporate culture that encourages developers to talk to anyone in the company to get their job done, regardless of orgchart, you get a system that re-uses other systems whenever appropriate.

There're some downsides too: if anyone can talk to anybody, then the software starts looking like everyone's been talking to everyone. This leads to some real WTF dependencies, eg. why does websearch depend upon GMail?
Seriously, why bother then? Keep your fist sandwich to yourself.
There's no tagging or categories on HN, so it's getting more and more difficult to skip past all of the chaff coming through.
I was told FaceBook HQ was at 150 University Ave; just down the street: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=165...

But they may have very well leased space in 165 University Ave; I was also told by the time they moved, they had a complex shuttle system to get between their many office spaces in Palo Alto.
That was pretty cool. I wonder how they make the images, by hand or some automated algorithm that takes a few-framed movie and prints it up.
Interactive version here: http://blogoscoped.com/files/stripes.html
I found the design really offputting personally.
Nice domain.
right, humanities degree at the same college as an engineering degree is cheaper in terms of effort.
Other than the warrant being furnished "under seal" everything here seems to be above board.
Your response is pointless. Just flag it and move on. Your fist sandwiches should be reserved for people who waste comments saying things don't belong on HN. No tagging or categories does not mean that type of comment is a helpful alternative. It's worse.
Also highly relevant to why 165 University would be lucky: downtown Palo Alto is within walking distance from "the quad" on Stanford campus (just down Palm Drive).
Sure - my point was that you can't really get a degree in HCI yet. But once you can, they'll include case studies of the referred to social experiments.
It's not that unlikely that a randomly chosen person you see in California actually will be foreign-born, though, since about 1 in 4 people in the state were born outside the country.
I think that was a large portion of the attraction for me, too. Plus, all the mental engagement of running a guild filled a void in my life, since my job was not very mentally engaging at the time. (Running a guild is of comparable complexity to running a fairly simple business like a hairdresser or restaurant, except with a bigger staff. You have employee relations, accounting, governance issues, embezzlement, the whole nine yards.)

I've said it before and I'll say it again: you can structure your business such that it is also a success surrogate. Less dragons, better loot.

(A sufficiently data-driven business can produce shiny pixels of happiness every week out of a few hours of effort. Trust me.)
I don't know why you think my comment is supposed to be an alternative to something. What is your comment supposed to be an alternative to? My comment? Huh?

I'm specifically trying to discourage the original submitter from putting off-topic material on HN. There are plenty of sites that cater to whatever stuff. I realize there is a gray area and this argument has been rehashed countless times, but come on, this is irrelevant in every single way.
Looks like an automated algorithm to me, probably based on some vision research. Lack of a link with more details bothered me as it was a pretty cool hack.
Twitter clients that can filter tweets by regex?
Want to filter out tweets containing http://4sq.com or http://gowal.la.

Any recommendations on how to do this?
A tutorial here: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/01/updated_animated_op...
To be honest I'm pretty sure the clothes office workers around here wore to the office in the 70's are about the same today too (although you'd probably see more ties and suits then than now).
No sh*t, "When you think about this approach, however, this is the same thing that Microsoft has been doing for years. While they do not have hardware specifications set in stone like Apple, the ability to run applications is based on some set rules in a closed source platform."

Closed source or not, man, Apple is taking a beat on iPhone OS (4.0) like Larry Ellison harping on about "Microsoft's a monopoly."
Couldn't you make the same argument about Harvard (Microsoft, Facebook, Broderbund, Electronic Arts, OKCupid, not to mention Polaroid, Merck, and Weezer) or MIT (Hewlett-Packard, Thinking Machines, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Visicalc, Lotus, Akamai, Fairchild, Intel, 3Com, DEC, ETrade, Bose, Kurzweil, and iRobot, not to mention McDonnell Douglas, Campbell Soup, Boston, and the National Enquirer)?
Obligatory: http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-class/
It's not the right tone to take when talking with a stranger. So it would be a red flag if someone considered it appropriate to adopt that sort of language in an introductory email.

Maybe people are more relaxed about this sort of thing in California, but what that language would suggest to me that the applicant is young, male, and probably not very well-read (use of colloquialisms like "ain't" is another red flag). Right away I'd assume them unable to handle copyediting and communication work.
nostrademons, you have a terrific memory and you are right. But, this particular thread calls for Silicon Valley. Let the poor school have it's moment in the SUN :-)
So much more realistic this way. Thanks for the share :-)
Why do you use confusing language? How many people actually understand what "partisan politics" are?

Building a good product doesn't mean you have to be a hypocritical bunch of assholes, building a good product means creating a compelling product that people want to use.
In brief: Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations.

People are built to be social and be entangled in social obligations with other people. This may be less reflected in modern life than before but the tendency to get involved in that is nothing but gone. Earlier, these social obligations had a big role in reducing risk of famine and ensuring the continuum of life by making people do things together and keeping them doing that.
http://www.feedparser.org/ will help you make light work of that
Please refer to http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html for "gray area."
Actually, I just looked at the "famous alumni" lists on Wikipedia and filtered for a.) companies that we've heard of where b.) the founder's MIT degree was somewhat relevant to the company. There was some fascinating...TIL that Campbell Soup took off through the skills of an MIT-trained chemist who invented condensed soup, and that the National Enquirer was turned into a tabloid by an MIT-trained engineer who had worked for the CIA's psychological warfare unit. I can just see the conspiracy theories fly on that one.
The focal piece on the page, the moving images of the product, is quite off putting, and doesn't really explain what's going on with your product clearly. I suggest replacing it with a demo/promo video with voice over explaining the value of your product.
It doesn't matter if it's 80/20, 90/10, 60/40 or whatever. The point is that a task consists of a two parts:

1. a small part of effort that produces most of the results

2. a large part of effort that produces what is needed to make #1 sufficient

What explains number #2 is that people simplify their tasks in their heads.

If you want to do task X then theoretically you only need to do X. But, in practice, you will have to do half a dozen other possibly smaller tasks as well which you have, while leisurely focusing on X, conveniently forgotten exactly until the point you actually start doing X.

This applies to a surprisingly good number of various tasks, from programming tasks to even physical ones such as gardening.
(Speaking from the Australian market, so there might be a few things that make the situation different for you.)

If you want to make major improvements or tweak your home, then home ownership beats renting. If you don't plan to live somewhere for more than five years (and transactional costs in buying and selling are harsh, as in South Australia), then renting could be your best option. If you lack financial discipline, then buying can beat a combination of renting and investing in shares.

Of course, you can always buy one place, rent it out and then rent another place yourself.
http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories
http://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments
Some Essay Sentences Tips you might Find Helpful
Sentences are the first language structure with a full meaning attached. While words can be ambiguous, sentences are already giving the reader or the listener some valuable information. When you are writing your essay, you should consider all the essay sentences as a reflection of the essay itself:
Hewlett-Packard: I'd give that one to Stanford way more than MIT. From Wikipedia:

"Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard graduated in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1935. The company originated in a garage in nearby Palo Alto during a fellowship they had with a past professor, Frederick Terman at Stanford during the Great Depression. Terman was considered a mentor to them in forming Hewlett-Packard."

If anyone's interested, here's a fuller list of SV companies founded by Stanford-affiliated people:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/wellspring/economic.html