skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your example is probably more likely to be an outlier.

I've done several searches, some of the most disappointing were singular searches of pretty much any animal you could think of - returned nothing.

The search for "cow" is particularly bad, returning no entries for what you would expect (a cow), but 3/10 entries returned duplicate entries for cow dung.
Taxes and Deficits (A Visualization)
I absolutely love Python, can't stand Ruby.

The reason I love Python is that in general when I want to write something a certain way, or what seems to be the most natural way to do something is how it is actually done. As a programmer it gets out of my way and lets me do what I need to get done.

The author to a certain degree is calling for exactly that, a language that makes tasks that every programmer does over and over extremely simple, make the stuff that is not done nearly as often harder to do, or take up more lines.
From a design point of view, I think it's really great, but there's a couple of tweaks I would make. First, I would ditch the Zapfino script font, it's quite distracting and jars with the other fonts. Secondly, I would slightly increase the leading on the main body text (something like line-height: 150% works quite well for me). Apart from these small things, I think it looks lovely, keep up the good work!
I love this. So much, in fact, that I made an app for it tonight

http://hnhackers.com/

Let me know what you think! you should be able to claim your profile using the forgot password link. Email me at rbitar [at] gmail if something doesn't work. I'll get to it in the morning.
SPOD doesn't mean an unresponsive system, just an unresponsive app so this a functional regression in iPhone if you can't switch to other apps while the frozen one recovers.
I think it's interesting that he took it upon himself to write this unnecessary and unnecessarily long blog post then demonstrated his complete lack of self-awareness by putting this poem at the end.
That makes sense. Though I wonder if the problem of freelance match-making is similar to the problem of online dating.
Terrible earthquake’ kills hundreds in China | Breaking News
Such station should probably have higher prices to survive.
Not if you're the developer of the built-in weather app.
Obviously the browser would know the true url, so it'd be able to just copy that.

Also, it seems the functionality I mentioned is already in Chrome.
Is it not Flash? Then it's probably ok.

What!? We all know whats going on...
It all boils down to whether you believe that activities in space should consist of a series of big grandstanding stunts, or whether you think that space should become just another place where people live and work - expanding human horizons. It seems clear that the sorts of missions upon which Armstrong embarked, though pioneering at the time, were not sustainable. The main reason for this lack of sustainability was that the hardware was bespoke and too expensive, and required too large a ground crew to operate. What we should probably be working towards are sustainable and increasing levels of human activity in space. This means working towards lowering costs and standardising hardware, and greater commercial involvement.
They are in fact dramatically faster.
If everyone took to heart his "non-starter" characteristics, no one would start anything.

That said, it was a lovely rant ;-)
One has to wonder whether Mahalo primed the pump for reflexive hate of this sort of project. I'm not suggesting that there's actually anything ethically questionable about Cpedia btw, but just that people might subconsciously make the association and work themselves into a rabid frenzy.
Help my understanding: is this really an example of game theory?

I thought that game theory was about making decisions in which your success depends on the choices of others.

In the original secretary/dowry problem the values of your choices are random. In this case the gas prices aren't random but the strategy doesn't depend on considering the choices made by the gas station owners in setting those prices.

So while it's a nice solution (and one I've used myself when looking for an apartment) it doesn't seem to me to be an example of game theory.
Just my 2c, please rethink most of the fonts. Not a fan of those.

Also I just don't understand what NewsTilt is :/ It just looks like a blog with some articles... Is there a clear description of what's going on somewhere?

For example I see an article reviewing the movie "How to train your dragon". Why would I only read it on NewsTilt? Isn't it more likely I'd google for reviews and check out a few? I don't see how it fits into peoples behaviors atm... Sort of seems like an online version of a hardcopy paper, but without the hardcopy paper bit :/
A little context perhaps? Some more information on what is going on? Sample code? Explanations?
I'm not on Facebook, so sites that have this Facebook connect feature as the only way to sign up / log in have lost me as a user.

I realize I am probably in the minority, or at least not in the target market.
I don't realize why the people are pushing down an effort to give us more power of choice in our searches. There is a lot of room to improve? Sure. Let's support the improvements.
My Macbook Pro crashes my router at home every hour or so when I'm using OS X. Using Ubuntu or Windows causes no problems. It's not related to the number of devices, there are many laptops that come and go.

Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised to find out it's a long embedded bug.
The reason is that Google has control over the XMPP server. They do not need to send you presence notification if your gtalk client is not in foreground. Just staying online is not the problem. The problem is that usually with XMPP the server sends presence asynchronously. There is no standardized way for a client to request not being send those. If you happen to have 200 or more users in your roster there is always someone going away or coming back. Receiving those packets is draining the battery.

If your XMPP server happens to support privacy lists you can request not being send those presence notifications for a while. But at least some servers do not send the last presence when you clear that privacy list. And at least some of those servers do not allow you to get presence for all users in your roster by sending only one (unaddressed) request for presence. You have either to send all users in your roster that request or drop the connection and reconnect to get the current presence of all users.
But the ignorance anedoctes he tells all follow some ignorance patterns. Metaignorance should be described by these ignorance patterns: the context, the problems and how their solution will be missed, the ignorant rational. These ignorance patterns are distinguished from anti-patterns as they describe the process by which the solution is missed instead of the erroneous solution.
Yes, though I personally overwhelmingly prefer sans serif fonts, the font choice for the main article titles is rather uninspired. The design is not terrible, it just needs attention to details. Also a big readability issue: increase the line-height.
Why You Should Never Ignore A Nerd
"We Shared A Bedroom Brother!"
Phoonk 2 Movie Reviews, Wallpapers, Story, Trailers
Filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma is all set to scare the audiences yet again – with Phoonk 2, a sequel to his earlier film Phoonk - The Black Magic Story. Phoonk 2 is the sequel of movie Phoonk. Phoonk 2 will begin with Ashwini Kalsekar's ghost killing the tantrik (Zakir Hussain) at the very start and entering Sudeep's wife's (Amruta Khanvilkar) body.
EU telecom commissioner says ISPs will not be allowed to charge Google
Google exec make it sound like some suit pontificating about stuff they don't understand, but this is Joshua Bloch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Bloch).

Might be interesting to note that they mention JavaFX in passing, Sun's rather lackluster answer to Flash and Silverlight. It chose On2's VP6 for its video codec. Could be one more route into the browser if Google wants to push VP8 and IE, Safari and Adobe don't want to play ball.
HN Hackers: Add Yourself
I created a new website at:
http://hnhackers.com

that was inspired by this post
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1262467

to search for all HN contractors for hire. I thought it would be useful to be able to filter for contractors by skills / bio / location vs using the google spreadsheet, but would love to get your thoughts on this.

Note that I've populated the database with the first 260sh rows from the spreadsheet, so I'll add the new folks in the morning if you're missing.

Let me know what you think!

PS. Here is the spreadsheet:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlD_6iEb8Ed9dGs3clVJYi0yYVBka181Z0ZKRW9kQ0E&hl=en
> what seems to be the most natural way to do something is how it is actually done

I love Python too, but it's not without its quirks. Eg:

','.join(mylist)

Which nearly everyone I know at first assumed would be:

list.join(',')

Nobody thinks of what's being done here 'take a dot, and use it to join this list'. They think of 'take this list, and join it into a string using dot'.
Since the app bundle is signed, and the icon is inside the app bundle... no, but Apple can cheat for their own apps: Calendar's icon always shows today's date. Clock and Weather could update continuously too. For third party apps, I'd like my stopwatch to keep updating it's icon in the background, and one of my apps could do with it too.

A more serious problem is not being able to update Default.png, so if your app loads the last view the user had, it's hard to make it seamless.
I'm sure you can't make any significant money. Prove me wrong!

You'll thank me later... ;)
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I wondered what he meant here too. He knows the difference and in fact rails angrily against UK-English speakers because we use "subtitles" to describe both subtitles and captions.
some random observations:

Please rethink about fonts. I would prefer "continue reading" button on right side. "News" link can be little more prominent; centered content on "news" page.

on the side note: are you going to let user to customize/filter/personalize "news" page?
"Mostly harmless"
You can't really have this conversation without images.

What you describe as awful and jagged could well be the intended effect that Cleartype is supposed to deliver. It is designed to fit letters to the pixel grid, just a slightly finer pixel grid than standard windows because it makes use of subpixels horizontally.

Other people might give you advice on how to get "good" fonts without realising that what you want might be the OS X type rendering that they think is "blurry" and "unreadable".
Visualizing Time Zones
If they had learnt from the Cuil episode, they would have ensured at least the result for "Cuil" or "Obama" made sense. The negative reaction they are getting stems from the amout of noise they made when they launched their search product.

I am almost certain even Steve Blank and Eric Reis would have advised them not to "go to market" so soon

Cpedia and Cuil might be their minimum product, but it is not anywhere near viable. They are a great example why CLOSED Alpha and Beta exist.

Edit:
Their feedback section says
"Feedback: Cpedia is the first of its kind on the web and we'd love to hear what you think. We promise we'll listen!"

That poem is more applicable to him. Maybe he did not realise his smart 6 year old was talking to him.
Clickable: http://hnhackers.com
CSS vendor prefixes redux
+1, the article text fonts are spidery-thin and hard to read. I'm also not too sure what NewsTilt is -- a 'hn celebrity' type blog?
Or Newton OS devices from 1993. This isn't the first time that Apple has tried to build a computer with seamless state persistence and without a traditional exposed file system.

That said, neither Palm OS or Newton OS could multitask. Android and the iPhone OS seem to have found a very elegant approach to that particular problem without compromising the user experience.
Sometimes, big companies like the one I work for (Microsoft) or Google or Yahoo get beaten up for having 'obvious' bugs or failures. People say that given the scale of our resources, we should do better and perhaps they're right.

In this case, here's a small startup trying out something new and potentially cool. Sure, it doesn't work well in some (maybe many) cases but atleast they're putting themselves out there. That takes way more guts than what a lot of people have. This probably represents several late nights and weekends feverishly pounding out code and trying to get things to work.

As an engineer, I'm with Cuil.

To quote Roosevelt
"
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
So how can I claim my profile on this site?
Actually that author/developer usually specifically calls out Apple's Quicktime as a very poor H.264 implementation, so if he says VP8 will be nearly as good as the second best H.264 implementation then he's saying that it will be much better than Apple's. That probably applies to Adobe's encoder and in fact the vast majority of commercial H.264 encoders.

Considering he's an x264 developer that article is very positive about the quality of the VP codecs. The stuff he's down on e.g. it being proprietary, licence fees, patents, big name corporate approval, mobile support, buggy encoder are all stuff people expect Google to fix quite easily (well apart from patents).
I've had just that 'time zone math' problem for years, which is, why I wrote a small iPhone App just for the purpose of being able to easily lookup this information when on the road.
Globetrotter :)
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/globetrotter-timezone-calcula...

everytimezone.com looks swell though. Love it.
Well that's because we as users have been conditioned to make a copy of a document whenever an edit is required.

What should've been taught, from the very beginning, is that we really should be working on versions of the original document. Not that it's an easy problem in itself to solve... refer to various versioning systems as examples.
Donald Rumsfeld famously put it this way:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know.

There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know.

But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don't know.

This fellow's 'metaignorance' describes people who have a surprisingly large number of 'unknown unknowns'.
I used to think the same way. The turning point for me was reading Jordan Mechner's development log for the original Prince of Persia. It's long, but worth it:

http://jordanmechner.com/blog/2009/11/the-making-of-prince-o...

Basically, after the game was finished they spent two years expecting a word-of-mouth breakthrough which never came, then tried traditional marketing and had a huge success.
If you are a VC and want to be tough, be real tough. For a VC, real tough is:
The courage to do what’s right even if it makes you look really weak to the partners in your firm

That "the partners" should be "the other partners", right? IIRC, pg stated/implied in numerous places that no actual communication has taken place until you speak to a partner.

Also, from Introducing Andreesen Horowitz we will not have associates or other General Partner-track junior positions. Bravo for honesty. They don't have the track even in theory, while in almost all VC firms the track exists only in theory.

[whine] This comment in the spirit of one deleted from Ben Horowitz's blog, as is his right[/whine]
I think the general idea is to act as a central repository for information/articles and to syndicate that out as much as possible (clearly it's not going to wash as a news site with such varied content) and also act as a central "home page" for each journalists brand. (Im not 100% sold on the concept yet - but it has promise)

That is the impression I got from a newsgroup discussion I was part of a short while back when they were looking for ideas on how best to serve journalists (so it might be outdated).
controversial != awful
In general I think the video adds nothing to the Mixergy interviews -- I wish there were a way to subscribe to mp3 only.

Some kind of interview + screencast/demo would be vastly more interesting, but harder or impossible to do live.

I also appreciate the snowball microphone Andrew bought, and wish his guests had similar quality setups (a few have, many have not). It would also be nice to use a better audio codec and better buffering.
I was actually thinking the same thing... It really doesn't seem like it would be too hard to do on a networked computer with access to backup on the cloud and fast uplink.
I can't find anything to really disagree with in this article, but I feel like it gives Twitter too much credit or Facebook too little.

What Twitter has done so far is A) implement a cool and novel idea and B) cross the chasm with it to mainstream adoption. Those things are no small achievement. Of course the Twitter guys should be proud of that and I don't mean to disparage that in any way. It puts them in very good company.

However Facebook has gone an extra several orders of magnitude to bring them into the league of the Amazons and Googles. Two things Facebook has done are A) develop a business leadership that can reinvent the whole product every 6 months and actually continue to grow wildly as a result of these radical tactical shifts and (even more impressively) B) an engineering team that can keep up with this and deal with scalability profiles that make Google look like child's play all the while pushing code to production on a daily basis as if they were some kind of garage startup.

Twitter on the other hand took years to build a small team that was capable of scaling the existing minimalistic application, and what do they have now? A simple application and API that is somewhat mainstream, but also with only 1% of the hooks and stickiness that Facebook has established.

I don't even particularly like Facebook, I think it's a waste of time and that Mark Zuckerberg probably would have no moral qualms about reducing the entire world productivity down to a trickle by means of viral Zynga-style brain-crap. However I have to admit that there's always some hook that brings me back into Facebook (oh I gotta see so-and-so's photos or I'll just use Facebook Connect to log into this site because it's easy).

For Twitter to get there they need to figure out how to get past the geeky niche users, the vapid celebrities, and the huckster marketeers to find something wildly compelling to people. 140-characters is a nice idea, but it's not the kind of idea that's easy to make essential to people. Twitter has a long and steep road ahead and I fully expect an undervalued exit at some point rather than an IPO or massive profitability.
Apple may be laying the groundwork for specialized multicore processors on mobile handsets.

Take the just-released Macbook Pros for example. nVidia's Optimus has controls at the application-level whereas Apple's technology is at the library/framework-level. There is no user interaction to switch between different graphics chipsets; depending on need for performance/battery life, the OS does "the right thing".

Ars has an article on it
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/inside-apples-auto...
exactly my thoughts about the wording chosen. At least the op could have changed the title when posting here.
self-distance humor - love it :)
This has all the makings of a moral panic.

I can't believe that the advice boils down to "don't stimulate your child" as in later life they'll be bored by the slow pace of school. And this perfectly normal reaction will then be consider abnormal, because it disrupts the simplest and cheapest option for the mass-production of education.
Java drops to #2 in TIOBE index
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From the very beginning Apple have been ok with the ultimate cross-platform applications, web technologies. PhoneGap is a wrapper for web applications.

The reason PhoneGap is ok but Flash is not ok is that nobody controls web technologies, but Adobe controls Flash. PhoneGap developers are not writing for the "PhoneGap platform," they're writing web applications with a thin wrapper.

To be perfectly honest, I expect Apple to bring out their own wrapper at some point so that applications written with HTML5 and local persistence can be monetized in the app store.
I'm interested to hear in what ways the JVM is more advanced than the CLR (no, genuinely I am).

As for cross-platform, well that's not a goal of the CLR so the JVM wins de-facto.
Robin Milner obituary, from a computer science colleague
It seems to me as if he is mostly complaining about the lack of libraries to handle basic operations, rather than programming language syntax or design.
Not only the http:// prefix but the whole idea of URL is a notion that should not be user-facing in an ideal world. Even the pretty REST ones are the internet equivalent of the command line voodoo many non-technical users just don't get and type in or copy paste without knowing what it means. If the URL is too long only geeks understand its components, let alone edit it in place to go somewhere else.

It's debugging info for sure, but for most newbies is wasted vertical screen estate.

Bookmarks and web navigation via links are already hiding the fact that 'you go to URLs' now, entering a URL in the bar is the corner case because not everything is easily accessible from everywhere else in very few steps.

In the future the internet will be distributed and content addressable and not have a certain thing only available at a certain URL you have to remember, and then the URL will really go away. HTTP is client server, IP networks are peer to peer by nature.
I can't say the term is all that great, but man, the anecdotes are written hilariously.
Top JQuery Tips and Tricks for Beginners
A lot of management consulting appears to be based on finding problems that don't really exist and then being paid to fix them. So yes, this is already an extremely well established business model.
I doubt this will receive much attention since it is now a few weeks since his death, but someone commented on how a fragment of the first obituary posted would have been much better served by a fellow computer scientist.

This is that tribute, and it beautifully captures both the breadth and impact of his work, and his character.
too many new languages introduced in the last decade, no doubt, while most of them are just similar to the others, or simply as bad/boring as the others.