skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am interested in hearing the considered thoughts of HNers about how one could optimize the experience of developing (as opposed to consuming) OSS in such a way as to improve the chance the project would succeed, but virtually any article would be a better starting point for discussion than this one.
Genesis of Multi-Touch
The icon you've got there (tiny newspaper on what looks like a mac monitor) is completely unclear to me. What are you trying to say with it?

I don't know if this is true for anyone else, but for me the header nav stuff is HUUUUUUGE and could use some aesthetic work. For reference, here's what I see: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v624/adlaiff6/2010-04-14-1... It is smaller on other pages.

I will try to have more idea-based/conceptual/critical comments for you soon, kinda running out the door at the moment.
Because old farts never need to compare time zones...?
Interesting that you see such a huge improvement between 10.6 and 10.5. (To describe it as great)

In my day to day life, I haven't really noticed any practical difference. Maybe expose on the dock, which I haven't developed a habit for using.

We now have coverflow in the finder, which I did use one time to flip through a photo directory quickly.

That's really all I can think of. I know there were many under the hood changes with Grand Central and OpenCL, but it hasn't made any difference to my day to day life.

I will admit that I've become accustomed to my workflow so it's possible that some great new features are waiting there for me but I'm too lazy to learn.
There is a conspicuous lack of Mt. Dew in that photo.
MacBook Pro 2.53Ghz i5 Geekbench Scores
This isn't just a fascinating historical look into an obscure trade, but the a story of an businessman with amazing will and fight that took big risks to make big money, in the process created great debt and then looked for opportunity to repay his debt and make a profit instead of wallowing in his losses.
hah. the funny thing is that for about that much I can get a 48 core opteron with as much ram that will use way less power, and fit in 1u.
This is a great idea. Let's see if we can get those other areas filled up as well under marketing and design. Surely there are more?
Operators remain worried that they will offer no more value than an ISP.
I thought it was drag drop until I realized the animation on Chrome is too quick.
Laboratory Life
Ask HN: Any good books on graphing/charting/visualization?
My day job has me working on a project that has vast amounts of data available in tabular form, but no way to analyze the data except to search it and display it in more tables. Pages and pages of tables.

I'd love to build a way to query the data and display the results visually, and I'm looking for books that demonstrate various techniques for visualizing data that (in many cases) is quite complex. Right now, my experience doesn't really extend beyond basic pie/bar/scatter graphs.

I've heard amazing things about Tufte, but looking at the previews of his books on Amazon they seem mostly focused on artistic presentations of information - something a marketer or analyst would create manually, not dynamic charts generated from terabytes of data. Is that the case? Does it still have useful information for the sort of thing I'm doing, or can anyone recommend something more suitable?
And part of the problem is what we see here, which is that potentially incorrect information cannot be authoritatively debunked, perhaps for months. This gives plenty of time for the wrong "facts" to get lodged in people's heads, so even when the truth comes out people will carry on with false beliefs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_syndrome

The disease comes with a large number of physiological problems, and also serious problems in intelligence outside of social behavior.
Latest Android Platform Version Distribution
Surprising to see 1.5 leading these numbers. It seems the complaints about fragmentation aren't unfounded.
'IT genome' project launches Technopedia portal for IT asset data
I can think of some very easy ways to avoid it, the easiest being to take your samples at non-periodic intervals. I doubt this would be a problem.

Also, these things are already in close orbit to the star. Strobing would imply that they are much closer than thought (to get the much faster orbit you are hypothesizing), and I doubt these "hot jupiters" would survive very long if they were 10 times closer then thought when they are already about as close as they can be.
The author assumes this is Google's doing, and not Apple's. For all we know, Steve Jobs is hitting below the belt with this one.
Google Buzz buttons released
Services makes a huge difference for me. You should take a look at what can be automated and changed in how you work with OS X. It saves me a whole lot of time each day.
I find this interesting. I have a few nitpicks for everyone's consideration.

>* The source code is more than 100 MB.

Excluding images, example usage, and generated documentation, sure.

>* Your code tries to install into /opt or /usr/local [ +10 points of FAIL ]

Installing to /usr/local is the accepted default for linux. Plus, I actually use the package manager on my system. I want compiled software to install to /opt or /usr/local so I can find it later and remove it if necessary.

Now trying to install to /opt on windows is just stupid.

>* Your code does not have per-file licensing [ +10 points of FAIL ]

This is pedantic. If the entire codebase is under the same license which is given as LICENSE in the program's folder you're good. (You should make it clear in README that LICENSE does apply to the entire project.) If not, any inconsistent licensing should be explicitly defined either in a visible top level document next to LICENSE which lists each exception clearly (e.g. stuff in multiverse/ is proprietary, see multiverse/<project>/LICENSE for details) or at the top of each file that doesn't match the license in LICENSE.
Nice! I did the same thing a couple weeks ago <http://github.com/jackrusher/jssvggraph>; to help explain the simplicity of the algorithm to a friend. Mine paints SVG directly rather than using Raphael, so it only works with browsers that support that standard. One thing this brought to my attention is that the WebKit SVG implementation is much, much faster than Gecko's.
Absurdist Art Piece on the G
Guile - The Failed Universal Scripting Language
This is a novel finding and does help parse out the difference between how gender bias and racial bias form.

That said, I wish people would stop talking about Williams syndrome as if it were, on the whole, desirable. Yes, these people are blessed with some desirable traits. They are also cursed with cardiovascular defects such as aortic and pulmonary stenosis; renal defects; vitamin D metabolic defects; and often delayed development. Not to mention that their most desirable trait — a lack of social fear which makes them very friendly — is incredibly maladaptive in most circumstances.
The message is clear: Macs aren’t Apple’s focus right now.

The author is surprised? They just launched a new product category. They're probably pretty sure that most people, by now, already know that they sell laptops.
I don't understand the argument the telecoms are trying to make here. On the ISP side, the end user has already paid for the bandwidth. Google, or anyone else they're engaging in data transfer with has also paid some network operator for bandwidth. Said network operators have some sort of peering agreement. Under what theory could it possibly be fair to charge Google at both ends?
Interesting. Might try to port it to PHP.
Thanks. As dougmartin points out above, it already exists. (He links to it above.)

I'm also on iTunes with both a video and audio feed.
I agree completely and it's a poorly written article. However, it's been my experience that far too often in government/big business you wind up with a project that costs millions of dollars that could have been pulled off by two hackers, ~200K and an infinite supply of caffeine.
Test How Your Site Looks on the iPad
Social Factors in Autism Diagnosis
Pair programming review
AFAIK, in France, dailymotion already pays providers to have the right to exist on the networks (Orange, Free ...). Youtube doesn't... :)
You bet. :)
It seems that since last year, a lot of companies are trying to cash in on Googles success. I'm always curious, why is it only Google that they want to charge? Sure, Google has the biggest presence online. But I'm sure other companies are not far behind. Facebook being one of them, especially in terms of bandwidth usage.
Go is a systems programming language. It's not appropriate to expect Go to be able to send an email or create a web server in one line. Go is supposed to be a better systems programming language than C. It's not supposed to be a high level language with all of the things that he wants.

Also, language designers have to maintain a balance between improving the language and maintaining stability so that programmers can actually get work done. I think Guido is doing a good job of this (even though I might disagree with some of his design decisions).
The press release itself was a bit awkward, but I enjoyed this closing line:

> as the Chinese say, "If you wait by the side of the river long enough, the features of your old computer will come floating by"
Apparently the iPad doesn't support the contentEditable attribute, which would be pretty damaging to Google docs I would think.
Agreed. This is link-bait at its best. I've seen situations where a contractor worked in this capacity. Usually it also included hosting conferences, setting up a resource where a lot of information is organized and available, generating reports, and putting up a mailing list/wiki. How much they're doing for $20 million? I don't know. But it's definitely more than a mailing list and a wiki.
Of course, PhoneGap just give an easy access to developers to the WebView component, but it's still a native Obj-C application.
edit: I meant changing the icon based on the current weather at primary location, which should be the current location by default
Actually, both of them could, but just in very limited ways.

The Palm had 4 threads, only one of which was available to the developer. Another was used for comms and a third for graffiti processing. I don't think the last one was allocated.

The Newton had at least two threads -- comms in the background were needed even in those dark ages.
This is a novel finding

Yes, that is why I would look for replication of the finding, including replications with different ways of estimating racial prejudice, before accepting that this generalizes to the whole human population. But it's always a good idea to do research on a long-standing interesting issue (racism) with a new study population (Williams syndrome patients). An astrophysicist who was one of my undergraduate teachers said that one can often make a great scientific discovery simply by putting a scientific instrument where it has never been before. (His example was putting a Geiger counter into earth orbit, which discovered the Van Allen belts.) Similarly, doing this or that kind of psychological or sociological assessment or surveying can find new results if it happens with new subjects.
I left chemistry too, but more because I couldn't handle the pressure of being able to accidentally destroy 2 weeks work with a slip of the hand.

It takes balls to be a chemist.
I got past this requirement, but got a generic error:

"We're sorry, but something went wrong."

I really thought we had it there. I've emailed the developer, rbitar@gmail.com, awaiting response.
Disappointment. The layout is well done. In fact my eye was immediately drawn to the leads of the first 3 stories, from which I concluded I was faced with 3 more opinion pieces.

Disappointment because the web, tv, and all entertainment media are already drowning in post-post-modern opinion. Eric Schmidt wants Google to get opinions you don't share in your face (somehow). Actual news gathering organizations have had their budgets slashed. What little objective reporting exists is mostly rewrites from wire services.

I suppose with a name like "Tilt" I should have expected more "Look at me! I've got a great venue and I've got an opinion!"

Objective journalism would have been a nice surprise.*

*Disclaimer: Like I said, I was drawn to the story leads that first displayed. All reactions are drawn from that experience, i.e. I did not go further.
I'm aware that they both have dependencies
Plumb still looks miles more attractive.
% plumb /path/to/file.c:21
will open file.c at line 21
right clicking in Acme will do it automatically, I can feel the win from here
I bought an iPad about a week ago. It's lightly used (some scuff marks on the back). I'm willing to part with it and wait for the 3G model instead.

Email me if you're interested. I paid $550 (incl. sales tax). first_name@last_name.com
"We hear you have money, we'd like it."
Yeah, at first I thought it was something like "neurotypical." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurotypical
LaunchBox Digital Comes to Research Triangle, NC
It may be because I'm unfamiliar with the system, but I can't seem to find the contracts or awards.

What search criteria did you use to find them?
I would check out Visualizing Data - http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596514556

Also, I enjoy this site http://flowingdata.com.
You can call 610-DEAR-BEN (610.332.7236) or Skype "sixtendearben" to play this Voice Controlled Adventure Game.
thanks grellas. As always, you provide clear and professional understanding for us laymen.

My own personal attitude when I post something is that I don't own it. Since I lose most controls associated with traditional ownership, it helps me sleep better to not draw a fine legal argument and just assume I don't really own my comments. But of course, I don't post anywhere but HN, so I also make an assumption about pg and the community's attitude of what is the right thing to do.
Full-history English Wikipedia dump produced: 5.6TB uncompressed, 32GB 7z'd
Ask HN:Choosing the right open source license for SaaS software
We want to open source our soon to be released SaaS platform (CMS), but we are having hard time to choose license that protects our intellectual rights and also gives rights for people to install it on their own infrastructure and host their sites there. Any advice will be appreciated.
Obligatory: http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/09/you-suck.html
Congrats to the team!
Getting acquired only 9 months after launch is amazing.
Great article. I've never done a formal two weeks pair programming exercise like this. Like most, I've been involved in hours or even day long exercises where the goal is to solve a specific and troublesome problem, but never for regular day to day work.

How about the ergonomics though? Seems like it would be hard for both people to get a comfortable position in front of the monitor for that long. Seems like it would be ok for a couple of hours but longer than that I've always leveraged a projector type setup
And this is a "disorder", how?
The best force-directed graph I've seen - that is really interactive and extensible, although it is Flash - is http://www.creativesynthesis.net/blog/?page_id=60 Demo: http://www.creativesynthesis.net/recycling/graphgeardemo/
So in this parallel universe, people went three decades with no way to create apps for their iPads? This definitely sounds worth celebrating.
That’s the strange logic of ISPs. They basically don’t want to be reduced to dumb pipes because that’s low margin and not really a very exciting business model.

I guess in their dreams they would charge content providers (“You want to get your content to our customers? Pay!”) and they would also charge customers based on the content they want to see (“You want access to content from this one content provider? Pay!”).

Now you pay only for bits, whether it’s a bit from aunt Annie or YouTube doesn’t really matter. Let’s hope it stays that way.
You can find tons of web-apps/apps that show the timezone(s) in a traditional form, but this one has a different take on presenting the same data. Why change the one unique feature ?
Not really sure what the Emacs jab has to do with anything. It's a bit like comparing apples and Godzilla.
I wrote my first app with phonegap. I loved it at first but moved to Titanium because PhoneGap (UIWebView) is really slow. Now doing native. Can someone point out a phonegap app that isn't trivial/doesn't suck?

Also, it's a lot of work to do even simple things like, say, have your search field stay at the top when you scroll.
http://cubiq.org/scrolling-div-for-mobile-webkit-turns-3/16
I could see this causing problems on technical discussion sites as it might consider a block of C code a bad comment. Sometimes there are legitimate reasons to post something non-english, like a blob of numbers or some ascii (or unicode) art.

Slashdot has some filters like this on their comment system, but I think they are mostly targeted at blocking ascii art spam.
Why choose to cut space exploration? Surely there are a myriad of more "worthy" targets to cut in favour of social programs?
How to Maintain Normal Range Blood Sugar Levels
Very nice. I'm thinking of an interactive editor for directed acyclic graphs with labeled nodes and wondering if there's anything out there already. This is clear and simple enough to be a good starting point.
How did you pay at the Apple Store? Do you have a US issued credit card?
Google, or anyone else they're engaging in data transfer with has also paid some network operator for bandwidth.

Google has no-charge peering agreements with the companies which are complaining. Google's traffic is so vast that a major carrier which doesn't peer with Google would endanger other high-volume peering agreements or (less likely) pay more in transit charges to reach Google.

Tier 1 carriers play this game amongst themselves all the time except Google is different since it's main business isn't being a telecom carrier. In this instance Google is well known and making money out of the web and old incumbents think it's their money. None of the old incumbent telcos want to reach the stage of Cogent (think Ryanair for internet transit) where they are just dumb pipes.
Thanks! We did that intentionally. I have the same complaint about long tour videos. It also helps when we roll out new features -- we don't have to re-record the whole tour, we can just add another video.
I've read The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Tufte, and I think it would benefit you even though you are not talking about manually generating charts. For example, he talks about how it's easy to be misleading with a chart based on how you calibrate the axes, which is something you'd still need to do even with dynamically generated visualizations.
Perl 5 development resumes, version 5.12 released
Visualizing Data is a good choice, but I would also suggest you note the recent string of critiques of content-free visualization on flowingdata and start out with Tufte if you are new to the field.
JQuery Masked Input Plugin for Beginners
Rally Software Buys Up Kanban-Based Project Management Startup AgileZen
See also this article on the topic:

Crash-only software: More than meets the eye by Valerie Aurora

http://lwn.net/Articles/191059/
Edward Tufte's book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is a monumental book. He writes not about how to make your graphs look pretty, but how to display vast quantities of data and distill them down into useful graphics that communicate themselves effectively.

He provides examples of good and bad graphs, but more importantly, explains what exactly it is that makes those examples good and bad, and further generalizes it so you understand how to make good visualizations. If you don't want to shell out the money for it, it's probably at your library (remember those?).

Additionally, if I were you, I'd stay way from statistical approaches to displaying information unless you have some background or are willing to learn about it -- it tends to be highly technical and is probably too complex for what you're trying to do. Basic stats might help you, but not as much as Tufte will.
It wouldn't be an advantage. I hate to break it to you, but Mother Nature knows her shit. We've evolved the "negative" tendencies we have for very good reasons and most of them are still doing their job at improving your odds for reproduction.

I suspect that (seemingly) ugly tendencies like confirmation bias, stereotyping, vengeance, shame, etc. all increase your personal odds of reproduction. Likely at the expense of society, but it is what it is.

I can understand how complete social trust and lack of anxiety would be beneficial in a perfect world; alas, we do not live in one.
To me it sounds like you want to be using a tool like Matlab or matplotlib in python to automatically generate various types of plots from your data. There are a wide variety of books about Matlab, and I don't really know one better than the rest. For python, there's "Beginning Python Visualization" by Vaingast. It's pretty introductory, but provides good starting points. The matplotlib web site also provides a gallery of example plots with code.
hence the name.
Learn yourself some innovation - on TRIZ and software creativity
http://www.skepdic.com/wishfulthinking.html

The premise as I understand it is that modern languages are broken and have failed to evolve. An interesting point. A good start for an argument.

However, his rant devolves into:

"REAL WORLD, modern datatypes, built-in, literal, batteries-included
PLEASE!!! If the following aren't first-class types with first-class
literal constructors / representations supported at the language
level then your new programming language ISN'T EVEN ON THE PLAYING
FIELD"

No evidence. Not even a mention as to how he's reasoned that these statements are true. Nothing.

Why does my compiler/interpreter need to have an "email" data-type? Why is my language not even "on the playing field" without it? Why are there so many successful programming languages then that survive without it?

I can empathise with his frustrations. There are plenty of times on the job when I feel more like a glorified digital plumber. Deserializing/reserializing data and pushing it through various pipes isn't glorious work. But lets take the argument from there rather than flapping our arms and making frantic claims that everything the way it is is inherently broken because it's not the way we'd like it to be.

(And maybe he does just need a good dose of Lisp ;)
99 percent of the 40 children studied

*facepalm*
If you look at guile's history up to 2007 or so, it might indeed look like a failure. But since then, development has been taken up again, and progress is amazing. Andy Wingo did a lot of the work and has been blogging about it at wingolog.org, see especially his talk about the recent developments: http://wingolog.org/archives/2010/04/02/recent-developments-....

Guile now has significantly improved performance, a compiler, and it can run JavaScript and Emacs Lisp besides Scheme. The 2.0 release is around the corner. Things look good.
Symbian Still Leading In Mobile Ad Click-Through Rates, Android Dropping Fast