skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
so, are you saying that 'webapps are the present'? I mean, I spend most of my time on webapps or in a text editor. (well, if you count email as a text editor; I use gnus)

as far as I can tell, most other people do the same... text processing and webapps.
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I wonder if anyone from these rating companies ever bothered to talk to the people actually buying these mortgages - i.e. the people the whole crumbly edifice was based upon. Or indeed how they were being sold.

I would have expected someone to do some due diligence and find out what all of this business was actually based on.

Some guys from Lehman Brothers did some actual research (i.e. they went and talked to the sales guys selling these mortgages) and concluded that it was all going to end in tears. At according to:

http://www.amazon.com/Colossal-Failure-Common-Sense-Collapse...
Acceptance tests are not a by-product of development
This is totally AWESOME
Maybe he means that things like reducing (a * 5) to (a << 2 + a) are now obsolete.
I reorganized and removed/added more info.

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&t=k&...

Anyways, I don't know what it all means. I just wanted to interest you. That is all.
First Apple, now Microsoft. Sucks to be HTC. Is Google going to step up and defend their seemingly very patent-infringing OS any time soon?
Huh?

There is no reason why the amazon workflow couldn't be made identical to the appstore flow.

All it takes is a cookie.

Sure, you will still have to go through the long route during your first purchase. But I really think you're blowing this problem out of proportion.
I found myself thinking that too, but unlike some typical logic puzzle situations the underlying events seem sound as well. If you really do provide free public wifi access (from your house or a cafe), how does the law handle random peoples' illegal downloads? I know that in some cases, since they can't be identified the buck stops with you. But you'd be treated much less severely given that you might not be the person causing the harm...
I think "if you don't have anything interesting to say, don't say anything" is a better metric. I think the problem is comments from people who care deeply, but who are saying things that have been said before, often in comments on the same article. Originality is more important than passion when having a conversation.
My hairdresser applies cleverness to solve the problem of making my hair look good, but I still wouldn't consider her an engineer.
This sounds a bit like the idea that you don't have to pay income tax in the US... You might think you're safe, but the courts will probably disagree.
12 Reasons Why You should Choose PixelCrayons for Mark up Service
My hypothesis is that the best predictor for belief in the validity of IQ, is IQ. I'm not sure if that would support or contradict your statement. I'm sure it could be used to argue either way.
The point of that editorial is that business investment won't end the recession, so the only hope is housing.

"To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. "

Krugman is just repeating the same "insufficient demand" theory of recessions that Keynesian economists are using today.
"I can't give you the interview you've been begging for, but at least I can now explain how I was able to change fields and accomplish so much in such a short time."

It's not very often I stop reading HN-submitted article after the first sentence. ;) Do we really need more Stallman here?
The article mentions that this is true of cheaper digital cameras, but in fact SLRs have a similar effect. At high shutter speeds, the back curtain closes shortly after the front curtain opens, causing the exposure to happen as a slit of light that passes across the sensor or film.
Facebook Like Profile Edit with Jquery
A fast, variable shifter is a reasonably complicated slice of chip. Having a fast multiplier is one of the best improvements chips have been making for the last 20 years. At some point, you'll make the multiplier as fast as the fast shifter, and then you might as well slow the shifter down to save space, as no-one should be using it any more.
This is not a server in 20 lines of code, but server configuration in 20 lines (there is no parsing of the http protocols, but only calls into a lib that implements an http proxy).

The examples could be implemented in fewer lines of Apache configuration. I would have been nice with some examples that shows what node.js can do, which can't be done (easily) with Apache.
That was something like lea eax,[ebx*4 + ebx] anyway :)
Tremor Media raises another $40 million for web video ads
The problem typically comes when you are working in a role supporting someone else, i.e., traders.

Deploying software written in Matlab that other people can use is a nightmare.
My advice is what you don't want to hear. Go learn about another topic to postgraduate level if you really want to be at the forefront of a particular topic.

Pretty much every topic has extremely interesting and unsolved problems, but to solve them you more often than not need deep domain knowledge, or multiple supervisors (but I don't recommend that at all!).
RFC: Group Buying Widget in Action
Have you looked into VSTO? You still have to deal with bloat but at least you can write addins/automations for excel in C# and use Visual Studio...
If it's not possible to replicate, how is human biology replicating it?
You may want to reconsider.

It is a short story narrated by a character named Ethel. Nothing to do with Richard except that he authored it.
Can they?

They are not a party to the suit, and they apparently don't have any useful patents of their own in this area to fight with, even if they were.

I predict HTC and Motorola will enter into a cross-licensing deal, and Motorola will help HTC.
World chess championship - Game 4 (live)
BBC News - The mystery of the mega-selling floppy disk
Which is a good thing (tm).

I think I'll have to take a look at state-of-the-art implementations of shifters and multipliers. Does anybody know of some resources regarding this topic (papers or reasonably optimized VHDL code)?
Breaking Things Down to Particles Blinds Scientists to Big Picture
...and here was I hoping they'd talk about the economy.
Oh my, it would'a sucked to take that picture. I lost an arm walking in front of a prop plane once.
Duplicate of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1301136.
IEEE Spectrum: Evidence for Intrinsity in the iPad
I believe there's some sort of legal precedent about coming to court with clean hands when you're bring up charges against another party. And Match would be flirting the line of hypocrisy if they want to talk about false advertising.
Verizon Chooses Droid Incredible Over Nexus One
I think your comment about having read only one line of a story/article is one of the smarter comments about having read only one line of a story/article that I have ever read. Which is why I think it is safe to say that people who have only read the first line should refrain from making comments. You made a perfectly reasonable assumption given the first line, but even perfectly reasonable assumptions can be completely overturned a paragraph or two later. I think if someone is going to take the time to post, they should also take the time to read whatever they're going to post on.
Microsoft presents "Where's the 'Any' Key?"
Doesn't surprise me - I would estimate:

- Average life of a PC - 5 years
- Windows 7 has been out for 9 months
- Most purchases will be as part of new PCs

So I would expect by this stage something like ((9/12) / 5) * 100 = 15%.

10% hardly seems surprising - neither good or bad.

Not that I am knocking Window 7 - I use it and think it is pretty good.
I wonder where he got that old version of Risk, that still uses the figurines. This new version with the arrows completely sucks.
What do you think of this news mapping site? I made it myself
This is a strange type of comment, which often appears on HN. "I didn't bother to read the article, but here's my meta objection to it anyway". If you didn't read it, you don't know what's in there. If you don't like something, skip or flag it. Please stop posting smug comments about where you stopped reading articles.
Best 2 Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Online Business
The Future's Pretty Cool, or Why I Love Ruby
Where the latency of the (integer) multiplication is 3 clock cycles, of (integer) addition is 1 clock cycle and of (integer) shift it is also 1 clock cycle (according to the Intel® 64 and IA-32 Architectures Optimization Reference Manual [1]). Therefore the shifting is still faster than multiplication, however an optimization for 1 or 2 clock cycles doesn't make sense anymore...

[1] http://www.intel.com/products/processor/manuals/
Lots posted recently about the floppy and its demise:

http://searchyc.com/submissions/floppy?sort=by_date
Agreed. I'm also not sure that we're all talking about the same kinds of experiences here. To me, there's a difference between having a spirited difference of opinion with a colleague and having to walk through a basic set of instructions (e.g. "The red shirts go in the red basket") for the forty-seventh time with an employee.
"Error establishing a database connection"? That's deep wisdom indeed...
I worked at a previous job for about 1.5 years with the engineer and had subjected her to what must have been a terrible interview back then. Timing worked in my favor - her contract wasn't renewed by the company she was working at when I got permission to hire two contractors. I had been staying in contact and gently recruiting her for a couple of months. She became unexpectedly available, she called me up and we brought her in immediately. I know a handful of great hackers and I've pretty much added her to the group.

I was socially connected to the other person and knew he was smart and committed. I wasn't sure if his tech skills would be too rusty (he had been working on software outsourcing business development, working with overseas dev shops for an app outsourcer here), but I knew he'd work twice as hard as anybody else. Plus, he's the kind of guy who spent time learning Vietnamese when he was working with a Vietnamese software shop remotely. How can you doubt that someone willing to go that far just to make sure that communication is good? It's been a real win with him as well, he's picked up the medical research side of things much better than I have and has more than exceeded what I expected from a technical perspective.

My role is a little weird. I am a tech guy (MS in CS) with a background in SQL hacking for the last few years (lots of low hanging fruit in the enterprise db world) with a side of presentation side stuff. I originally came into my role expecting to do pure db dev work, maybe some lightweight (tool-based) report dev occasionally. But then the two original team members all left the organization and I had to become kind of a de-facto admin/project manager/technical lead.
Agreed, the code is trivial, but HTTP is a first-class protocol on node.js. Can't blame Peter for not reinventing the wheel.
Now if I understand you right. You're saying that US and worldwide financial markets have been ran by Keynesians for the last 30 years, leading to massive explosion and refutation of all Keynesian theories?

Let me guess - you also believe that Fascism and Nazism are right-wing ideologies?

EDIT: I'm no economist (barely an amateur wiki-economist): but as far as I know (read, heard) Keynes actually argued that money supply management should be "mechanically" managed - without central banks and officials who are corruptible and fallible.
The other reason, of course, is the Loudness Wars.

Older records were not mastered hot to stand out in juke boxes or on the radio, and thus had an actual dynamic range (instead of everything just being LOUD). Ultimately ended up being higher quality recordings for it, too. Only a few people ask for a high dynamic range nowadays (like Porcupine Tree). Everyone else gets mastered up to 11.
Hg tip of Mozilla now uses a HTML5 parser by default
The absence of a button may be a feature, but terrible UI design is not.
Microsoft has published their UI Design Guidelines, but it gets largely ignored as far as I can see - as long as developers don't see UI polish as a high priority issue, it gets pushed back as long as possible like other "polishing" tasks. I know I was certainly guilty of this when I was working in Delphi, less so nowadays.
(And if Raymond Chen's stories are any indicator, developers in general are too lazy to RTFM at all, why would they bother looking for any guidelines for a low priority task.)

If you develop a desktop app on your company's time, your boss will find a million more important things to do than to make sure keyboard accelerators work, make sense, or are configurable. If you do it on your own, you will probably find a different million of things to improve, like the main number crunching loop. After all, you're coding it primarily for yourself so why do you care what Alt-W or Ctrl-U do in your app, you use the mouse. Maybe if you publish it, you'll get some feedback from users and you fix it, but it's more likely that they'll just decide it's "no more limited than that other tool" and you'll never know that it is a problem for them.

Not to mention there are varied GUI toolkits available depending on the programming language you use, each with its own style - Borland's VCL, especially with its button graphics which stand out to this day; MFC; wxWidgets... each with their own idea of how things should be handled. And there's OwnerDraw, giving the more "hardcore" coders another chance to shoot themselves in the foot by allowing the application to draw the control as it saw fit, which of course means they cannot take advantage of the new Windows common controls themes.
Great: another potential source of antibiotics overuse.
Univ of Washington switched to an Apache License, and started calling it "alpine". Last release appears to have been in August 2008: http://www.washington.edu/alpine/changes.html
No idea what happened, trying to fix it currently.
Why do the patents need to be in the same area (ppl keep saying that, but I don't understand why they have to counter-punch in the phone market)? They have patents on pretty broad things, non-phone related things, like MapReduce.

Doesn't seem to be worthwhile to be an Android manufacturer. Lawsuit from Apple and licensing arrangement w/Microsoft.
Multi-touch floor display that still allows the direct touch
Yes, Ruby doesn't scale.
The blog is powered by Wordpress. :D
Ndee: Web Server and Serverside Javascript in Node.js
Building a Ghostwriting Business
Morning Read: Curiosities and Tidbits 4-28-2010 
stories of interest...
With regards to the Dutch Auction it may not have captured the maximum value for Google, but did it capture more than the alternative?

According to http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_47/b3656143.htm the average IPO gained 14.1%, which would suggest they did leave money on the table, although I'd question if Google's IPO would be described as average. By comparison Akamai gained some 458% in it's first day of trading.
I found this MatLab visualization of what happens inside the camera very helpful in understanding how it works:
http://scalarmotion.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/propeller-image...
Breaking out of a programming paradigm is difficult, but one of the most liberating things that you can do. Now when you go back to working on PHP projects you can approach it with different methods. The roughest time I had breaking my paradigm was when I learned a little Lisp...
Lost and Found: Soviet Lunar Rover
I'm glad that I am not the only resource (sorry person) that finds that habit really annoying.
Founder of FSFE receives Cross of Merit from Germany
The reason for the underpricing is simple: it was the first big Dutch Auction IPO and when something is new, only the few will participate leaving the hesitant to jump in once it trades on the open market, bidding up the price.

This left the auction open to certain big institutions (Fidelity and another I forget) to badmouth the deal to lower the price while buying big themselves. Of course they were joined by the Investment Banks who really like that 7% standard IPO fee and felt threatened. And the press to whom everything is either an epic success or huge failure.

As a first, the deal also had many technical issues which lead to the August pricing and fed the negativity.

Anyway, the key win was that anyone (even a tiny investor like me) could buy in the IPO. Just try to get shares in any decent IPO run the normal way. If you do, it's likely to be a broken deal they couldn't find demand for and you'll most likely lose money at first trade.
RIM previews BlackBerry OS 6
I didn't read this as an exercise as avoiding accountability for copyright infringement, I read it as a thought exercise that picks apart the Digital Economy Bill for the joke that it is.

I would like to fill the House of Commons with all those who voted for the bill and have someone read out said thought exercise to see how many of them remotely understand it.
my dad used the excuse of breaking the computer to not let me mess around with them when I was a kid. That probably set me back from programming around 7 years or so, now that I think about it.
AOL sell ICQ to DST (Russia)
Sources of Capital - Angel Investors
NoSQL CouchDB releases version 0.11
With the release of 0.11 version, CouchDB introduces some stunning new features and excellent performance.
Actually I am not sure you can get this effect on cheap camera. Which cheap camera uses curtain shutter? And I would be extremely surprised to see that kind of shutter on the cameraphone.
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I disagree with your assertion that they left a huge amount of money on the table.

From wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google#Financing_and...)

Google's initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004. A total of 19,605,052 shares were offered at a price of $85 per share.[27] Of that, 14,142,135 (another mathematical reference as √2 ≈ 1.4142135) were floated by Google and 5,462,917 by selling stockholders. The sale raised US$1.67 billion, and gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion.[28]

So - assuming the market established a price of $110, and the sold at $85. Google lost out 14,142,135 x $20. Now $280M is not to be sniffed at, but for a company with a market cap of $23,000M it's little over 1% of it's value. Given the shares had risen 25% on the opening day, 1% is not really material.

Given that the company was cash flow positive, the difference between raising $1.67B and and $1.93B of would probably not have any operation affect on the business.
I bought floppy disks recently for exactly the niche use they describe: a lighting console. Oddly enough, the console in question[0] was released in 2002 and was not a revision of an older product. There are also pins labeled "USB" on the motherboard, but they have nothing connected to them. Later, the manufacturer released a version that uses USB storage.

[0] http://www.compulite.com/index.php?page_id=25
Perhaps a user interface should have a "fearful user" mode, where a tooltip on each button describes the worst-case scenario that'd happen by clicking it, and how to recover from that to a pristine, unclicked state.
Imagine that everybody becomes a Blogger or an iPhone apps developer. I know it's a great job, to stay in front of a screen for 10 hours a day and pull insane money, just from typing in your keyboard and moving a little device called mouse.

But who will work for us? Who will build those roads? Deliver merchandise, teach your 5 year child... ???
Everyone has a job, we can't all become doctors, we can't all become entrepreneurs; it's a balance and everyone decide what to become and how.
Piolo Pascual is dead?
The NYC Startup Drink List
Thanks! Firefox or one of the plugins must be interfering then.
And the HN submission:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1299764
Fascinating story.

The story's narrator is supposed to be a woman, but the story has an unmistakably male voice. I can't pinpoint it exactly, but everyone I know who talks like that is male. Part of it may be that there is no discussion of her emotions at all, she sounds like a perfectly rational robot.

Also, considering the impact of voluntary ovulation and superior intelligence on reproductive fitness, I suspect evolution will quickly develop an immunity to the virus, reverting the harmful changes in merely a few generations.
Urbanspoon free iPad app helps explore local restaurants
Akadien has recommended "The Big Short" already, and I'd second that. It goes into a lot of detail about this situation. The problem with trying to price these CDOs was that an individual CDO might be made up of 100 pieces of other CDOs which each might be made up of parts of another 100 CDOs, which each might be made up of parts of a bond containing thousands of individual loans. So you could go and look at the individual loans but the effort to try and price the whole thing accurately would have been phenomenal.

The most honest thing the agencies could have done was refuse to rate them. But that probably wouldn't have gone down very well with their clients.
Writing Web Applications with Go
not a lot of details to go on here, there's no telling what the issue actually is.
fyi.

Opera Mini 5 for Android 605KB
Fennec alpha 10.2MB
They make patents sound like a pissing match (pardon the terminology). I really don't understand the "I have patents that are vague but are issued in the tele-comm industry so I could potentially sue you by picking one at random... So don't sue me." I need the details on what particular portion Microsoft feels is infringing, because right now it just sounds like they are throwing their weight around because they can.
How To Catch And Use Your Dreams Part 2
The mystery of the psychotic printer
No, it indeed came from the original 8" variety. I started in the microcomputer scene just as 5.25" floppies were thoroughly taking over the scene and heard stories about the 8" ones.

From Wikipedia and memory:

IBM does a 8" read only for loading firmware into mainframes in 1971.

Memorex and Shugart come out with R/W ones in the following 2 years.

Shugart comes out with the first 5.25" one in 1976, it has only a fraction of the capacity of 8" drives of that year or the following.

In 1978 5.25" drives start getting a respectable amount of memory (360KB on a side) and that's the end of the 8" form factor, no more new models come out.

As you note, the 8" disks are very big and cumbersome and I'm sure they and their mechanisms were a lot more expensive.
We7 shows ad-funded model can work for online music
TDD: tastes better without the T?
Can we compute an answer to every question?
"The truth is the 3½-inch, 1.44 megabyte floppy - the disk that made it big - has always defied logic. It's not floppy for a start. The term was a hangover from its precursor, the 5¼-inch floppy, which had a definite lack of rigidness about it."

I understand that this isn't immediately obvious to laypeople, but "floppy" refers to the data platter inside the diskette, which is, in fact, floppy.

Not too surprising that a news site glanced over this, but being the first one to mention it here makes me feel decidedly old.

Incidentally, I'd say my office goes through a box or two of floppies a week, mostly for use on those oh-so-expensive ancient oscilloscopes, curve tracers, and the like.
Weak MALE in fact!

http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.html

:)