skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've always hated the "programming languages are just tools" argument too, when it's used in a minimizing fashion. Programming languages, if they are tools, are at least extremely sophisticated tools that differ widely. It's like choosing between shovels, bulldozers, explosives, and backhoes--yes, they're all ways of moving dirt and you can get the job done with just one of them, but it makes all the difference which tool you use.
If you code HTML, Zen Coding will change your life
What's wrong with 2 spaces? I like 2 spaces.
I remember doing that while living in Taiwan. At least the climate in Boston makes having lukewarm water more bearable. When you are sweating in a tropical summer the last thing you want is a warm glass of water.
More likely, though, everyone will just use h.264 and fall back to Flash (since Flash plays h.264 without any problems) when the browser doesn’t support it.
You don't need to. The uniqueness part of the definition is never used in that argument. (In fact, a*e^x also differentiates to itself, for any a; but that's a trivial case.)

Uniqueness almost follows from that argument. It's now easy to see that exp is the only analytic function satisfying exp' = exp and exp(0) = 1: if you have another one, by the same argument, it has the same Maclaurin expansion, hence is the same function.

However, I don't know how to prove uniqueness over all functions, not just analytic ones.
Overall, the graph is correct. But...

Twitter population is about 10 times smaller than of Facebook. Also, many twitter-ers simply use a desktop/mobile client and not do anything Twitter-related on the web.
Ah--I botched the headline. This is about the culmination of an 18-year (not 1.8, but eighteen) project to turn off core mainframes in favor of web access.
Warren Buffett's Secret Millionaires Club
The spirals are called "Synchronous DSPS", as I recently found out. I've been sleeping like that for about 10 years.

There's some similar charts here: http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleepchart.htm
There is a secondary effect with respect to the platform too. I made a startup that served the Twitter platform market. It is very, very small compared to facebook's platform.
I'm not decrying abstractions. I am the biggest proponent of abstractions on the planet.

What I disagree with is the tendency to use the same monstrous framework for every project, regardless of size, scope, and purpose.

And part of my complaint is that the abstractions don't always abstract anything. Some of them just rename things for the sake of style. That may or may not be a bad thing, but I don't think the average developer even gives this any consideration. If anything, the fact that you're passionate enough to actually leave a comment about the article generally points to the fact that you're not one of the people that needs to hear this sort of lesson. :D
You can't just use search engine queries as a proxy for popularity, especially on something like a website. Is it possible that Twitter serves a more technically savvy portion of users that knows how to use the address bar in their browsers? Or that people are more interested in researching about Facebook than Twitter even if they use both?
Graphing COMscore data vs media mentions would a better indicator of hype/popularity differential than google query volume vs media mentions.
I just upgraded my VMware Ubuntu instance which hosts neosmart.net to 10.04 - no problems thus far, in fact, I'd gander and say it's smoother than before...
The Early History of Smalltalk
I use the comments section to watch for new comments on article that is generating an interesting discussion. It's useful if you already know which article you want to follow (you can scan for the title). I find it easier than revisiting the article's page because comments move around over time which makes it difficult to pick out the new ones. Also, as someone pointed out already, you can find comments that have been upvoted which usually lead to an interesting discussion.
Open Street Map is an incredible resource and really should be supported.

Over at Yell Labs we're looking at producing tiles from OSM that might be more readable on specific devices and include layers that are hold data suited to the way the map is consumed.

An example of this being done already is http://www.opencyclemap.org/ which is generated from Open Street Map but they have reduced the importance of things like motorways, and increased the importance of national and regional cycle routes as well as contours and cycle shops.

Tiles that suit driving don't necessarily suit cycling or walking. When I'm walking I'm more likely to want to see where post boxes, ATM machines and phones are... when I'm cycling I want to see contours and bike routes, and when I'm driving gas station and alternate routes.

This is all possible because of open street map. I don't know how we'd be able to consider tuning the display of devices to device/utility without them. It's a pretty awesome project.
Ah, cute, thanks!
I think you're lucky it was forgotten.

- It's highway markers look like gel capsules

- Many users put their hometowns so that they're visible when you zoom out really far (you see the suburbs of Salt Lake City & L.A. before you see SLC & L.A.)

- There seems to be 80 airports in every county (I've never heard of most of the ones around my area)

- It's incomplete in many places

- It doesn't even give you directions

I'm sorry, but I just don't trust OpenStreetMaps over Google Maps. I'm sure there aren't many inaccuracies, but it's not worth taking the chance when I'm traveling in an unfamiliar area.
That ain't no iPad, that's for sure!
If you have to use a stylus you've already failed.
Domestic water pipes often have holes in them, relying on the pressure of the water in the pipe to not let any polluted water get in, if the water pressure dropped as a result of the leak then the dirty water can enter the pipes.
Please understand that throughout this thread, you have been projecting your own personal preferences onto everyone else. You write in absolutes and state things as if they were facts, but it seems clear from posts like the one I'm replying to here that you don't actually know any of these things for sure. You are making assumptions about things that would happen under certain circumstances, mixing in some of your personal ethics and business strategy, and then claiming that the entire world should behave as you wish, because otherwise Bad Stuff will happen.

You might be right, but you haven't provided the slightest objective reasoning or empirical evidence to support your position anywhere in this entire thread that I can see. Even when you accused me directly of being incorrect, and I asked you to explain why with specific points you could debate, you still only repeated your objection to something I never actually wrote. What are you trying to prove here?
Actually using Google's nameservers are really fast compared to a default Bind/PowerDNS setup.

I have a PowerDNS setup on localhost that was a lot slower than Google's servers. That's because by default it recurses to the root servers.

I found that the fastest setup in my case was to use PowerDNS and have it recurse via bt.com servers (this is in London). BT is a big commercial provider so what I need is often hot in their cache, the same goes for Google.
I'll get flamed, but I feel that way about most the water supply in the U.S. Ever look at the reports per county for what is in your water supply here? I don't care what anyone says, most of those contaminates listed aren't acceptable to me at any level. I hate the fact that I have to shower or brush my teeth with it.

Even worse are the chemicals they use to "clean" it, which doesn't get things like medications out, like my favorite additive "chloramine". The website is a little wonky, but check out http://chloramine.org --not to be confused with chlorine which can be filtered out... chloramine is damn near impossible to filter.

I'm not an environmentalist nut, but if there is one thing in this country I don't find safe, it is my drinking/bathing water--and I'm not buying what the government is dishing about its safety and purity.

<!-- end of paranoid rant -->
Boil it then put it in the refrigerator?
I'm a social media utilizer - and my sites were hacked as well - second time in a week - we're trying to get some motion behind godaddy and make them hire some people or do something to make their service more secure. As such I'm starting a Twitter grassroots campaign. I'm no way affiliated w/ the link - but we all need to tweet this message and retweet it as often as possible today - we're trying to get #ihategodaddy as a trending topic.

The tweet: RT @patrickcurl Customers transferring OUT of GoDaddy QUADRUPLE! http://bit.ly/dvwtoT #ihategodaddy pls RT
How did you get a .it domain? As far as I know they are restricted to EU citizens or companies.
I don't think you'll see it fixed any time soon.

Using a fork per request is the easy way out. The problem as you've all seen, is that memory will be used up very very quickly.

The solution is to rewrite the app to use an event loop like select or epoll, or to queue the requests in a message queue: doable, but worth the effort? I doubt it, since the website looks like a hobby rather than a commercial product.
How Personal Genomics Could Change Health Care
Not acceptable at any level? Do you think infinitely dilute poisons are still harmful poisons? Do you think one molecule of arsenic will kill you?

BTW, did you know that natural spring water has contaminants too? And the water in every other country? Maybe the level of contaminants is better in some places, but you don't seem to be paying attention to that.

And did you know that all filters do is reduce the level of contaminants? There is no such thing as an absolutely perfect filter.
I don't get the scrollbars. How exactly is this better than the regular scrollbars? I've seen it mentioned in many discussions but never actually got to experience it first-hand.
I once witnessed a pipe of the same dimensions bursting - the difference being that it was carrying 80 degree celsius hot water for central heating...

It was right under a main street (it's standard procedure to put large pipes under streets so you can get to them if anything goes wrong) and within 10 minutes the street looked like an earthquake had hit it - the massive amount of almost boiling water simply eroded the foundation under the street and washed it away. Tonnes and tonnes of 80 degree hot muddy water gushed up and flowed down the street to a nearby low-lying town square that quickly filled up. Luckily they got it shut off within 20 minutes, but it looked like the gates of hell had been opened with all that water and steam just spewing out of the ground.

Luckily nobody was hurt, but it was an interesting experience.
Even if you're right on all of those things, the difference in the numbers is staggering, and what you're talking about can't really account for that big of a difference.
The installs were updated. In fact, some were not even running Wordpress at all.

It seems a problem on their shared servers where someone got access to all the files.
I just did a fresh install of Ubuntu on my netbook, and I'm impressed. Things that didn't work before in previous releases (like the camera which I used to have to configure, or skype sound which I had to go through several opaque sounding options before I guessed the right one) JUST WORKED.

Yes, there are a few green technologies, as the author points out, but I'm very happy to see this level of innovation, especially in the "social from the start" space. They're not just innovating, they're leading the pack.

Very positive experience so far.
If you're on a Mac: http://ditchnet.org/httpclient/ .
That's a very weird thing to say imho. I actually prefer using stylus. Designing so that stylus is not needed is cool - not including a stylus at all is not.

Most touch-screens/panels work with either stylus or finger just fine.
What's a refrigerator, amigo?
They would have won if there was a valid competition. Its an ever changing market, there is no definite winner or loser. Its as silly as saying IE already won five years ago. IE had a market share at 95% in 2003. Did they win?

With Google opening up VP8 the market is likely to be shifted in the next 4-5 years. They have both the money and tech background to make VP8 just as good if not better. Hardware adoption is a matter of time.
Major press coverage of new Ubuntu release
A quick glimpse at all of the major press outlets covering the new Ubuntu release.
Stanford students create and market $25 hospital incubator for 3rd world
Try a server which is only caching instead -- not the normal standalone resolution. For example dnsmasq caches entries locally, but you can select the "upstream" servers yourself, so that you do either no internet queries or only one. In that case asking dnsmasq, which is configured to use 3 google dns servers, is never slower than configuring them in resolv.conf. You never hit the root servers yourself.
You know the computer monitor you're sitting in front of is giving off radiation, right? Which is also bad for you at any level. The brick wall behind the monitor is giving off radiation too, for that matter.
Yeah. Faster ZeroConf resolution. Make ad-hoc wifi more useful. Fix up wireless security so I can have encrypted traffic going between my laptop and the base station while still making it open access. Get everyone to adopt IPv6 so I don't have to do all this NAT stuff. More mesh networks. Run a mesh network on trains so you can get continuous Internet connectivity in tunnels. Make VPNs and tunnels easier to setup so normal people can proxy around the Great Firewall of [China|Australia|Britain|employer|university|school].

Perhaps this betrays my non-entrepreneurial mindset, but this is all far more useful stuff.
Hear, hear! Thank you, Silhouette, for putting that so well.
Ask HN: what is the length of your penis ?
just asking ;)
Cloudy... zing
I wasn't going to say anything further on this thread, but I just checked out your site:

http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/6032/wwcom.png

I'm sorry dude, but Posterous found a way to finance their site without plastering their homepage with ads for 'AdultFriendFinder'. The fact that I don't have women's crotches shoved in my face when I go to a Posterous blog means they're one step ahead of you.

The fact that you couldn't pull off what Posterous did without the sky falling on your business doesn't mean that it will for other businesses. When you've got $5 million worth of other people's money on the line and you need to find a working business model, I think you'd find your priorities shift pretty quick and you'd get down to brass tacks. Your particular experience does not generalize universally.

If a business is so pussy-whipped they're afraid to cover their bottom line with a completely unobtrusive way to make some scratch, without asking their customers for it directly or pimping out their site with dirty ads, I think that's a pretty sweet way to go. I'd rather be running the business that provides incredible value to its users for free but doesn’t have to ask them whether it can please go to the potty.
Research Suggests How Lucky Charms Really Make Us Perform Better
I love that dirty water, OOOOOO Boston you're my home!!!!

(Sorry, had to, since EVERY Boston sports team plays it after a game)
I do agree with the general sentiment here, that people should try to historically put their lives in context: our instant access to information is unrivaled in any history of which we are aware.

However, I've written before on the important difference between information and facts (http://tumbledry.org/2009/11/20/when_information_overwhelms) -- when the filter for publishing and disseminating bits becomes so low, the onus transfers from the distributors to the consumers for important tasks like fact-checking, context, and bias-hunting.

Furthermore, "any piece of knowledge, ever created, accessible literally at our fingertips" is still a stretch -- some of the most valuable information (untranslated, undiscovered diaries, research, historical texts) those remain offline. To tell people that "Google can access any piece of information you can ever think of in 0.15 seconds" is to narrow their understanding of sources for true knowledge and understanding.

It's a good article, but one that needed a few caveats. I hope I've provided those.
of course, measurement when u see the nude girl
>> Its as silly as saying IE already won five years ago.

Or even closer to the topic, RealPlayer.
It seems to me that Buffett's reaction to Goldman Sachs is a little more emotional and a lot less objective then his other investments.

While I agree that the specific charges against Sachs should be proven first, it's hard to deny the questionable behavior and dealings that Goldman has been involved in since the bailout began, not the least of which was the ex.Chairman and CEO being the Treasury Secretary and billions of dollars disappearing as part of the initial TARP program.

It seems Buffett really wants Goldman to be a pioneering American investment bank with a solid ethical reputation, but unfortunately for him the reality is less rosy.
To be fair, I think the performance of that page has something to do with the embed API, and the face that it was trying to load multiple copies of wave.

The actual wave client performs pretty well now.
http://www.smckids.com/episodes/lemons-to-lemonade -> This is amazing. To be honest, all kids should learn this stuff. It surprises me how people are so uninformed that they make really stupid business decisions.
I once thought of a browser UI feature which, when enabled, makes broken links (eg, links leading to 404's) crossed-out as text links, and with a red border for image links. But nobody would implement this. But I guess I could make a plugin.
Impressively unusable from an iPad.
PasswordCard: a paper password generator to keep in your wallet
Rop Gonggrijp: "We also made it lie about election results"

http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0802/msg0002...
Photoshop tutorial – glossy heart
In this tutorial, I will teach you how to create a glossy heart...
BackTrack Tutorial – How to crack WEP
In this Tutorial, I show how to crack a wireless network secured with WEP encryption.This information should only be used for education purposes.
On a related note, I've been on the partial Twitter firehose and I've only seen around 5 million unique users over a couple of months. Granted this is the partial firehose, but I'd still expect the number of uniques to approach the true number of active users over a long enough time period. I'm seeing comparitively few new users at this point.

One other researcher I've talked to has similar results, anybody else gathering data on this?
A Letter to Adobe Flash: At Least Consider Open Source
In many ways, Google Chrome is the ultimate fork of Firefox. It took almost all the good ideas of Firefox and dumped the bad code. If somebody was going to come up with a "new" brower, a de-Googled Chrome would make a much nicer base.
Forking could fix the fork problem.

That is, if someone forks hurl (http://github.com/defunkt/hurl) and rewrites it to use one of the fixes you referred to above, I'm sure they'd merge that in and deploy that.

Doing it with Resque would make a lot of sense since hurl uses Redis already.
There are a couple of automaking units around that area. Since he seems smart, he probably is educated and might be working as an engineer or an accountant in those units.
It took years and years to find the LP64 slipup in qmail. No, I'm not going to bother trying to prove you wrong.
That is what the tinfoil hats are meant for.
YA iPhone leak/shield law analysis from NPR's "On the Media"
After a win, you mean :)
No one :(
> I recently read a stat that claimed that 80% of college graduates NEVER READ A BOOK AFTER FINISHING UNIVERSITY.
This sounds like utter bullshit. What about the statistics that say people read so and so many books each year? Any references?
ah, yes, like the Bruins today!
He's defending those $5 billion invested in GS.
Very strange.

I just finished reading Robert Harris' "Pompeii" which I started a couple days before the Iceland Volcano started putting out ash. Now the aqueduct breaks. Very strange coincidence... I hope my brain isn't projecting the content of the stuff I'm reading...

Luckily I live just outside the boil water area though.
Ask HN: Monetizing vertical search by charging for premium content?
I am trying to find a practical way to monetize a free Google-indexed vertical search engine that already has traffic.

Has anyone tried to monetize a vertical search engine by charging users for premium content?

For instance:

Let's say you have a free vertical search engine for real-estate, but you charge a yearly subscription fee for the ability to download scanned TIFF images of quit-claim deeds from the county courthouse.

Has anyone tried something like this? How well did it work?

There are many pre-Internet "vertical search" engines which seem to charge for content: Westlaw, Lexis-Nexis, Bloomberg, IHS, etc...

Are there any examples of more recent vertical search engines that monetize via subscription?
Yes. And the air we breathe is full of dangerous microbes. Almost anything we touch or ingest contains something risky. The bodies of human beings, as the bodies of all living organisms, include adaptations to deal with less than ideal environments.

As an actual matter of fact, tap water in quite a few parts of the United States is all but sterile.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17456554

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1472650/
This little app won the 2009 Rails Rumble, but they put it on Sinatra after that I suppose. It's a really nice example of a proxy server coded in ruby if you're looking for that sort of thing. And reading the source is a good introduction to Redis integration as well. I actually have a local copy running on my computer most of the time for debugging web apps.
The author clearly prefers Google Maps and is so biased in his analysis it is worthless.

Take the coloring of highways. I actually find Bing's use of multiple colors greatly increases legibility. The increase in contrast also makes it easier to scan over the map. I cannot see how the author can state that less colors results in increased legibility.

Bing Maps to me has a superior coloring scheme. When I look at Google Maps they look like FisherPrice drew the map. Bing Maps' warm and desaturated color scheme makes it feel more mature and consequently much more pleasant to look at.
Well said. I like Ken Iverson's phrase for this (and lecture), "notation as a tool of thought".
At first I thought you were going to write about decrepit infrastructure in the US. That's probably more worth ranting about.
Then use 2 spaces. To me 2 spaces squishes code to close together. I like 4 spaces so that is what I use. You can always sift your code through a code formatter if there are differing standards on whatever project you are on.
The Chicago meetups have been really good. The more recent ones are getting slightly less turnout but are still a great way to spend an evening.

In terms of features/tools to help organize, there's a lot of multi-person messaging back and forth that goes into getting a meetup scheduled, something that helped the group settle on questions like time/date and venue would be useful. I'd be careful about going too far into automating the process, you risk loosing some of the engagement that gets people aware of the meetup. I could see extending the Hacker News' site's up-voting system to various choices for time/date/venue working well for this.