skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was just complaining yesterday about how bad their API docs were. This simplicity and the clean documentation is a welcome change.

However, one thing stands out to me: the new APIs don't expose networks or network affiliations. It seems like Facebook has been phasing these out for a while, but they could be very useful to me. Does anyone know the story here?
Show HN: Super Hacker News adds one page browsing & keyboard navigation to HN
HN has been a destination on the Web for me recently, but I've had trouble really _getting into_ it. I realized that was because there wasn't an intuitive way for me to browse through articles, comments and authors.

I started working on a GreaseMonkey script for myself and, as I got into it, decided I would share it with others who may be interested.

SuperHN keeps everything on one page and adds keyboard navigation. 'W' and 'S' browse through articles, 'A' and 'D' cycles through an article, its comments and poster. It also makes the front page a bit more readable.

You can get Super Hacker News at http://superhackernews.com

Would love all of your feedback!

Note: It only seems to be working in Firefox right now; I haven't found a suitable way to load jQuery in Chrome. Any thoughts?
More Ed Catmull/Pixar on creative process, at the Economist [2010] [video]
I think it's more that people are insulted or offended by the possibility of generating karma with such a meta karma comment because it's "cheating".
Scott Berkun extracted some notes.

http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2010/inside-pixars-leadershi...
Google is using Scheme for most of the code on their "App Inventor for Android" program, which is supposed to be a modern-day successor to Hypercard: a way for interested amateurs to easily make basic mobile phone apps.

Then again, not every Google project has Hal Abelson on the team. That might have something to do with it.

http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/07/app-inventor-for-...
A person that lost some money to enso just mailed me the link so I posted it.

Has anybody here actually ordered and received one?
Twitter / Neil deGrasse Tyson: If Earth spun 18x faster...
Facebook Launches “Insights For Your Domain”
Mix in community with adsense and you get: looking for gadget XYZ? Here are the ads for it, by the way X of your FB friends bought product 1, 4X of your FB friends bought product 2. Which are you more likely to buy?
I highly doubt he is 'afriad'.

It's easy for a new product to gain marketshare, the impressive thing here is that apparently that did not come at the expense of apple but at the expense of all apples' competitors.

When the android phones start taking marketshare away from the iphone Jobs will have something to worry about. That's going to be a while though, if it happens at all.
I actually think it's the opposite. I find that when talking to someone I'm watching their face for expressions. PG and JL come across as completely open and their expressiveness helps you feel like you understand what they're thinking/how they're feeling. On the other hand, Rtms' stone-faced-ness can be intimidating because you don't know what he's actually thinking.
Interestingly enough, there is a danger in that because you might tend to focus on just the people who are responding when everyone there is important.
Misses the point. Apple already released their TV and gaming console, and it's called the iPad.
You don't run AV? I'm going to bet that the last virus you know about was 89-90... Although depending on what you use your computers for your still probably ahead of the rest of us.

EDIT:Fixed some typos
Agreed. Facebook has already become a giant contact list for me, I don't feel like I can "be myself" there b/c of the varied audience (from kid cousins to random ex-coworkers).
> Their current goal is usually just to make sure it runs at all.

Indeed. I'm the lead of the "IT Staff" at a small non-profit (~70 users) running mostly on second-hand desktops. Two-thirds of our staff is unpaid, usually interns who are here a few days a week for 3 months, and then they're gone and someone new takes their place. Training proper computer behavior is hard.

So... we run A/V (not McAffee), because we have to. We also lock down the systems hard, not because I think that's a nice thing to do to your users, but because we have to. Imaging all these different desktop models is difficult, and we have very limited resources for doing re-imaging/re-installs/virus cleaning/whatever.

My goal is to enable you to sit down at your computer and be able to perform your job. A 20% performance hit on all computers is worth it if it means that 20% of the computers aren't down for maintenance. :)
Games Are Not Art
That was 100% my experience as well -- that opening is a pretty common spam tactic. Plus, like you, I'm the wrong audience: I wasn't even a CTO at the time, and I'm still not a CIO.
The code preceding that is actually pretty simple if you translate it to Haskell:

my_if test result alternative = if test then result else alternative

It's just trying to get currying and lazy evaluation in Python which causes all the ugliness.
Oh how awful that they used silverlight when you have it installed!

Funny that it works fine on linux/chrome+firefox without silverlight. They do display the message "Improve Your Experience: Documents load faster and text looks clearer when Silverlight is installed. [Install Microsoft Silverlight]"
From wikipedia: With a budget of 9 billion US dollars (approx. €6300M or £5600M as of Jan 2010), the LHC is one of the most expensive scientific instruments ever built in human history.

The Large Hadron Collider is pretty expensive! Why does nobody ever accuse particle physicists of "making up" the Higgs?
I imagine I was more likely to read this thanks to the non-list-evocative title
Memo to Roger Ebert: Chess is art.  It has a Muse.
DELL sells them starting at $38,999 http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/products/Processors/produ...
Should there be more entertainment in computer science education?
Facebook nixing 'Facebook Connect' branding
1) When evaluating excuses (or other "low-probability" events), it's important not merely to evaluate the likelihood of this exact pattern, but of all patterns that are of the same level of impressiveness or more impressive. For example, if you're evaluating whether to accept "my cousin died", you really have to evaluate the whole class of excuses "my relative who is at least as close as a cousin had a significant occurence". This is one of the best observations in this essay.

2) Taking a game-theoretic approach to excuses, rather than merely accepting "true" or "believeable" excuses, has the advantage of allowing you to reject excuses without calling into question anyone's character. Nobody wants to be the jerk who said "I don't believe your grandmother really died" to the kid whose grandma actually DID just die; it's much easier to be the guy with the "late work is not accepted even if your grandma dies" policy.

3) The excuse evaluator can add a cost to making excuses. A teacher might require an essay explaining the excuse in detail, thereby wiping out the added utility the student derives from procrastinating, but not wiping out the utility the student derives from attending his grandmother's funeral. This creates a threshold that prevents people with no real excuse from gaming the system.
Modulo some trivial semantics. The canonical nine muses didn't get sorted out from the Fates, Graces, Furies, Naiads, Dryads, and so on for a long time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muse
Google-voice-notifier : A simple system tray notifier for Google Voice
First off, I don't claim to be an IT person or know what normal users need to be safe. I can only speak to my personal experience as a programmer. I haven't had a virus in 14 years. I haven't ever run anti-virus software. I have a good feel for all the systems that I use. A little paranoia goes a long way. Not to say that I couldn't be targeted. I'm sure a skilled cracker could break my boxen. But I doubt any antivirus would stop them.
Just want to add that I much prefer "=/=" rather than "!=" when expressing an inequality.. I don't like the latter used in this context. I might totally wrong here, but I always something like "correlation != causation" as a test, not a statement - it could be true or false!
"no... I just haven't done it. I've so far found no need to."
Pretty good article, terrible color scheme.

I'm glad for this (to which I'm currently addicted):
http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
> Which pretty much sums up the entire reason for 3.3.1.

Apple isn't so much concerned with people porting iPhone apps to other platforms as they are apps targeting a lowest common denominator feature set, or targeting a meta-platform feature set instead of the iPhone SDK feature set.

I just semi-ranted about this on reddit, but my best example at the moment relates to the "XBOX Live" features coming for games in iPhone OS 4. What motivation would Adobe have to Adopt these features in CS5? How long would it take Adobe to adopt these features (if at all)? What if Adobe instead wanted to create their own "XBOX Live" system? Apple would be at the whim of the business interest of the meta-platform, much like they are with Flash on OSX.

After all, Flash devs are going to stay Flash devs, they're not going to port everything to Obj-C just to get one or two features on one platform they're deploying on, they're going to stick with what their meta-platform provides. Apple knows this and they don't want to be stuck the hoping meta-platform want's to move at the same pace they do.

Thats what Apple is talking about when they say these cross-platform apps suck, and if you look at the big ones out there for the desktop (eg, Eclipse, Firefox), they're right, those apps don't take advantage of the OSX features (CoreData, CoreAnimation, GrandCentral), they take advantage of the meta-platform features.
I agree with you in general, but watch out for the over-generalization. There are gym teachers out there who are as effective, caring, and dedicated as the best classroom teachers, and they impact the lives of some of their students as much as their classroom counterparts do for gifted and/or struggling students in an academic setting. Your "at best" description is way off.
Thompson has finally allowed himself to be subject to a
humiliating examination on the language he invented by an
acne-scarred, know-it-all Oompa-Loompa who is absent-
mindedly flicking paper pellets into a Starbucks cup
while Twittering.

Not to overstretch the point.

To be honest the consistent application of these rules is very important to their effectiveness. If Ken Thomson didn't need to take the test, how about the older guy who has been programming in C for 40 years. Why should he take the test...
I didn't reject the game theory comment; I merely played the game according to my values.

By adding my downvote to each and every comment in this subthread, I have imposed a cost upon the average user for attempting to game the karma system with uninteresting comments.

My downvotes signal that I would like to see fewer comments of this type. This comment does so more explicitly; I believe the utility I derive from discouraging karma-gaming comments (even those meant as a joke) is worth the risk of up to 10 of my own karma.
Not that hard on a qwerty keyboard. Try it.
Page requires login for no apparent reason.
I HATE however accessing essentially anything at all on Facebook requires one to sign in first.
This post is pretty heavy on rant and mudslinging against a variety of unrelated platforms.

The author forgets that GCC / the GNU toolchain alone is not sufficient to package, sign, and distribute a .ipa - instead, the developer is bound to Xcode, signing certificates, and the whims of the App Store approval process.

By declaring ActionScript, C#, and Java (all of which have open compilers and virtual machines) "vendor lock-in", the author glosses over the fact that the iPhone OS toolchain is not an open one, in fact, arguably more restricted than all of the above. Make no mistake - I'm not arguing that any of the above are "open" platforms, or that open platforms necessarily make for a better product ecosystem. But I would like to offer a correction to the article's imbalance.

Anyway, I wasn't getting my hopes up. The dream of "write once, deploy anywhere" software is generally one that disappoints.
20% is totally meaningless as well, but you posted it.
Flash on IPhone is a closed platform on top of a closed platform :)
Literally the other day I posted a comment with a link with the previous version of that calculator from the NY Times from 2006:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1275691

Weird coincidence. Nice to see they've updated that calculator, it's even more useful now.
Is Hacker News Slow for You?
When it finally loads, the style and images are missing. Is it just me?
The problem with this is that it assumes it's always safe to destroy a drive, as opposed to the scenario where the mere fact you destroyed storage media is enough to implicate you.

The other problem with this is that the NSA is paranoid, and paranoia doesn't necessarily move with the times. This relates back to the first thing: If it's cheap and safe to destroy drives, and you are storing secrets, why not? That does not mean you need to destroy drives, which is what this conversation is about.

Wearing a belt and suspenders does not mean belts are prone to failure.
I believe "him" was Urs Holzle, who built runtimes for Self, Samlltalk and Java (which was later bought by Sun). Urs knows way more about these languages than Gat. His "no way" should be enough for anyone.
Do you have facts that backup your hypothesis?
...but then every article with an excuse will want its leading number back!
not slow... but images are not showing up for me.
You did a duplicate submission. And yes, it's slow for me too, slower than ever in fact, which is saying something. When it takes 10 seconds to load a page I don't even think it's special any more, but today it takes up to several minutes for a page to load, and plenty of times the stylesheet doen't make it, which is strange because it is served up by a different server.
As others pointed out, there's already an existing code base. It's large, it works (solves hard problems) and it's scalable. There's also non-trivial C++ and Lisp integration, replacing Lisp FFI with Java JNI in some of these cases might not even work _at all_. ITA also does use Java, so Java integration is already there, to plug into Google's front/middle tier.

I imagine data persistence and distributed workloads are handled by the C++ portion of ITA code, which means plugging into GFS, BigTable, Chubby and more wouldn't be that difficult. ITA had already done the hard job of working around Common Lisp's missing pieces (a standard on concurrency and systems/network programming), something which would have been a huge distraction to e.g., Google in 2001 (when Ron Garrett attempted to evangelize Lisp).

Lastly, ITA isn't dependent on an acquisition by Google in the same way a start-up with no revenue (being acquired for talent and/or audience) would be. They're being bought partly for talent, but also they're being bought for actual technology and a working, profitable business. That gives them a lot more leverage in setting the terms of the acquisition (has e.g., Postini undergone a full re-write?).
These issues is what "technical due diligence" is supposed to work out and resolve: would an integration necessarily mean driving the employees away? If this is so and such integration would have to occur, then the merger may simply not happen.

Even in the case of a pure talent acquisition care has to be taken to avoid an exodus. Money isn't going to the deciding factor here: I'd imagine ITA employees are less bound by golden handcuffs; they're not staring at life changing sums of money and (like most hackers) are more motivated by doing interesting work with smart peers and powerful tools, than by what is effectively a equivalent to a yearly bonus (I am assuming they're likely looking at $100,000-$200,000 in shares vesting over a four year period).
Yep, that's a problem for me too. Images and hyperlinks aren't rendering properly. Checked HN in Chrome, Firefox and Safari to make sure, and cleared cache.
Average price of the top 50 books in each category for the iPad iBooks app
Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study (2007)
Well, that depends on how paranoid you are... while overwriting a sector probably renders the data on that sector unrecoverable, modern disk may 'disable' bad sectors, copying their contents to more reliable sectors.

Few people would care to try to recover these things, but if you really are working with nuclear secrets...
New, improved A-Pod video (ant-inspired hexapod)
I also seem to remember reading that Guido had to take a similar test for Python.
I really enjoyed this blog. The basic idea is that game genres are not art (the abstract idea of the game that you beat), but that the implementation is definitely art.
"I haven't had a virus in 14 years. I haven't ever run anti-virus software."

Then I'd say you probably have a virus ;-)
Best Practices, n.: Making the same mistakes everyone else
does.

However, what are the odds of someone being able to make special-purpose machines to do everything COTS boxes are used for, and making those machines as fast, cheap, and reliable as COTS systems are now? Some things seem obvious (x-ray machines, lab machines) but accounting and record-keeping? Going back to adding machines and purely manual filing is not an option in a large hospital, especially if it has to maintain modern standards of patient care over a large patient population.
Has anybody tried out the comments plugin? It seems to do almost the same thing as disqus, except it is tied more directly to Facebook, which could be a big win.
Google Acquires Another Piece of the Tablet Puzzle
Not quite as far back as Plato, but I was reading Seneca the other day who whines that physical education in Imperial Rome ain't what it used to be:

Can we possibly look on this as a liberal accomplishment for the youth of Rome, whom our ancestors trained to stand up straight and throw a javelin, to toss the caber, and manage a horse, and handle weapons? They never used to teach their children anything that could be learned in a reclining posture.
Mark Zuckerberg: What Facebook Changes Mean for Users [video]
Even when I was a pure mathematician, where a layperson might not expect it, we used the word "consensus" all the time.

"The consensus is that Foo's proof, once checked, will be found to be correct".

"The consensus is that the Wibble Conjecture must be true, even though nobody has any idea how to prove it yet".

etc.
It seems to be an on-and-off thing. The comments and submissions links on profiles are the worst offenders.
Full 32-bit Images Now Supported
The renter's manifesto http://www.mint.com/blog/goals/rent-vs-buy/
Shaw's DNS here in Edmonton is completely down at least a few hours a week; when it is up, it's slow. OpenDNS/Google/4.2.2.2 are both more reliable and faster
The facebook tie-in makes zero sense to me. Why isn't this aimed at business users?
World Wide Telescope (MS research project)
http://ycombinator.com is down, and it looks like Paul is hosting the static content of the site there...
I would recommend trying out one of the tours

E.g Using the Observing Time pane Tour
http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/webclient/default.aspx?tou...
OK, but Ron Garrett's no lightweight either: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/6f75cfb5a2...
I've been thinking along similar lines lately. I only care about what a few of my Facebook 'friends' like, think, do, etc., and I talk to them in real life. If it weren't for the social noise that is Facebook, I think I would have made a few more meaningful relationships like that in college. Friendship has been hijacked by acquaintanceship.
So the obesity problem is solved then?
Apparently google does take into account the location of the IP address when doing country specific searches, but I don't know how big a factor that is.
What every JavaScript programmer should know?
Again, you're outlining a highly specialized business plan for custom development — not a general principle for making money with FOSS. If I freely license my next game, I'll lose my shirt. If I create an awesome, game-changing productivity suite and GPL it, I'll lose my shirt. If I do anything outside of some very tiny niches, I'll lose my shirt.

There are a few small areas where FOSS is as commercially viable as anything else, and you'll notice those are also generally the areas where it seems to be most mature. You can't generalize those tiny areas and say that making open-source software in general is a reliable income source.
Sorry, I down-voted this but meant to up-vote it. These arrows are a bit small..
Speaking as someone who knows something about these things, it is clear that you are not as informed as you are making yourself out to be. There are two reasons why I say that. (1) Your knowledge of the AV industry is outdated. McAfee has actually been trending upwards in recent years. (2) A 97% detection rate is obviously bullshit. If any product achieved a detection rate anywhere close to that number, the false positive count would be through the roof. As this incident makes clear, the cost of a false positive can be astronomically high. Again, any AV product advertising or claiming 97% detection is bullshit. Any AV engine can achieve that number if accepts an unrealistic number of false positives. The fact that you even quoted that number makes me question your qualifications for giving advice about AV.

For non technical people reading this thread, the general sentiment of other commentators is correct. Most AV is garbage. It will protect you from about a 1/3 of what is out there at the cost of computer performance. Make an educated decision about whether to run it at home or not. On your corporate network, do whatever your security guy tells you to do.
How do you figure that? Airlines are losing money like it's going out of fashion.
WhiteHouse.gov Releases Open Source Code
The download file is a keynote file. Not readable on windows or linux without major pain, thanks Apple for making me feel like in the 90s all over again with your closed file formats.
Video: Hiten Shah and "Raising your Kids to be Entrepreneurs"
Did anyone else WTF when the author claimed that Chrome, Chrome OS and Android weren't open platforms?
I've often wondered what level of belief people actually had in ancient deities. Were there people who honestly believed in the existence of all these gods in the same way that the Pope believes in his god? Or perhaps people believed in the major gods (Zeus etc) while being a bit iffier on the personified concepts in the same way that Christians nowadays might believe in God and Jesus but perhaps be a little iffy on the distinction between angels, archangels and seraphim?
Tried my next 2 trips on it, and it's no cheaper than Expedia. Nice slick interface tho'.
How to Hire a Great Community Manager
The notification window does not close on Ubuntu 10.04 + Google Chrome or Chromium. I have to close the browser entirely to get it to go away. Does anyone else have this problem?
Yes, that's the problem. We just switched over to serving the static stuff off this server while we investigate. The extra load may make things here a bit slower but the site seems usable.
Yes, no images.
This is a really great tech presentation and it reads very well too.

It's interesting that it seems Twitter (and to some degree Facebook) are tackling really interesting problems that span every layer of technology in a way we haven't really seen since the early days of Google.

As a social graph becomes more integral to the applications many of us build, Twitter is a great example of what problems we may be facing down the road.