skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "it can only tell us if investors believe that it will lead to an increase or decrease of investment income."

I think that's rather his point. It's well-understood here that movement in the market is but a tiny window into a huge range of financial bets.

But the overwhelming majority of financial reporting perpetuates the myth that the window is providing a value judgment on the economic impact a particular action.

E.g. We know an uptick following a bailout is as likely caused by a desire to cash in on a sucker's rally as by optimism about long-term value. But articles such as the above link persist in suggesting that the uptick means the bailout is good, or helpful, or assuages actual concerns.
... but if you do it right now without thinking about it, you might just run into one of many hazards:

1. someone else has already done it.
2. you end up doing it poorly.
3. you end up wasting time on something nobody cares about.
4. you could have been doing something else.
You make some interesting points. But let me respectfully point out that the vast majority of users of wikipedia have a"non-medical mind". Even the vast majority of people looking specifically for medical information on wikipedia are not and will never become professionals in the medical field.

It is probably best in terms of both using an abundance of caution in staying on the right side of the law and in keeping the image away from people that would see it in a non-medical light to keep things like that off of wikipedia. They may be perfectly fine on sites focused specifically on medical information and targetting primarily medical professionals, but wikipedia is not such a place.
Even in the scope of business logic, though, there's almost always multiple implementations that will result in a functionally correct output.
I wonder how they plan to monetize this...
Ask HN: How should I name my business?
How can I find the perfect, or at least satisfactory, name for my freelance programming business? I can't use my name, too common. I'll be doing purely coding and thus can't use "Design" or "Studio" at the end but what should I use?
I have a couple core principles (communication, beautiful design, and efficient code) but don't know how to turn those into a name.
Charlatan, Martyr, Hustler
blogspam. the source:

http://nenuno.co.uk/creative/design/20-stunning-3d-landscape...
I guess I wasn't clear. I mean compared to other quarters where they (or other firms) made similar or greater amounts of money. Is the constant winning a side product of less risky bets, less leveraged & more fearful markets or...?

What is it about this particular time that has allowed them to do so well? (and where can I get me summa that!) I guess we won't know since we don't work there...
The number of conanobrien's "friends" is going up ...
It's fun. Why does everything have to be monetized?
If by "exploding" power supply you mean the potential for a power supply to explode with eruptive force and destroy other equipment in the rack, I believe that the other equipment being destroyed would be considered an multiple failure. It's very unlikely that a power supply could do that (although I guess anything is possible). A proper datacenter built with Datacenter-grade equipment will have multiple redundant power supplies in a blade enclosure, fed by different rails, which come off of different main lines in to the building. So a single failed source of power won't cause a failure.
No credit check payday loans
wow, finally made something that someone feels is worthy to submit to hacker news, I'm happy :)

For reference, the app was developed in 24 hours for a twitter hack day, it uses a tonne of YQL and has problems with accounts with over a million followers.
I think you're confusing the format of a file with the abstraction of a file as unit of data. Another way to look at the iPad is that it has files but it limits how you're able to work with them.

As a content producer, you want to able to take your unit of data (photo, image, document, etc) and use many different applications to work on it. You might want to make a copy of it, rename it, or move it to other machines too.

No abstraction will effectively take "files" away from you without also taking away the functionality behind them. I'm honestly not sure you've thought through the consequences of that.
Top College Dropouts
Frankly, I agree with you (and I wrote that title). I'd much prefer to have submitted it with the actual article's title, but I didn't think anybody would read/upvote it in that case, so the post would die without HN seeing it. I've noticed a lot of people lately getting all excited about async I/O, and I wanted something from the other side to hit the front page so people would read it, think about it, and comment. It would be interesting to A/B test submission titles, but unfortunately HN doesn't really support that. When we do get dupes, it does seem that the most inflammatory, least informative titles tend to win.
So you are saying that most terrorism acts you remember happened in your lifetime.

Could it be that you simply remember those which happened in your lifetime better than those that happened before?
I think that the real irony is seeing this after Apple used Toy Story 3 as the demo for iAd.
The left panel has "this should auto-hide" written all over it.

As a Ubuntu Netbook Remix user, though, I'm looking at the window titlebar and wondering, what happened to the titlebar-integrates-into-top-panel stuff from UNR? Shouldn't that remain a part of the "conserving precious vertical display space" approach?
Linkedin profiles with 500+ connections are still not at the top when searching for people names, some junk pages somehow get higher rank
Well, "Google" rolls off the tongue much easier than "Duck Duck Go". "Duck Duck Go" is also hard to "verb", as it were. I don't have a problem with the mentioned silliness of the name, I just think it's too long and hard to say/write.
I strongly agree. The concept of file is extremely popular because it is intuitive. Sometimes designers get carried away in trying to simplify an interface that doesn't need any simplifying. For some simplistic devices like a DVD player or a game console, it might make sense to hide the filesystem because what the user will be doing is predetermined by the designer (console = play game. DVD = watch movie). But for general purpose computers, it makes no sense to hide such a powerful feature.
"If all it takes to break a privacy system is for one of your friends to copy and repost your “private” photos or tweets then they’re not private at all."

Maybe if you have shitty friends. Obviously limiting photos to being viewed only by friends is exactly as private as your friends are willing to sustain, but that might be a lot more than "not at all".
I can't. The trademark is already registered ;-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Capital_LLC
It's from 2006, so I'd hardly consider it a good sign ;)
Strategic Default
This isn't true across the board, e.g. http://duckduckgo.com/?q=gabriel+weinberg

In any case though, I'm happy to fix if you give me some specific examples to work with.
If we have to assume no privacy around the data on the site, it's much, much easier to just export that assumption to Facebook and keep using that since it has the benefit of existing.

The social-service your friends are using will have the same access to the data your friend has access to, and if compromised, you are also compromised. So now you have to trust the integrity of potentially hundreds (actually infinite, since the ability for your friends to carry your authentication for them to access you to a new service would be central) of services - which you can't/don't - and then it's easier to just not trust Facebook.
Sure, I'd be more then happy to give codes to HNs!

My email is in my profile for who's interested.
"Unity is available now for testing on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS" (http://www.canonical.com/products/unity)

Oh hell. Now I have to run out to my pickup and grab my netbook. There goes a productive morning.
Sweet works for me. Check my followers: http://twitter.com/chegra
Interesting idea and nice design/layout.

The only suggesting I have would be to add a 'Quick Start' section that gives you a quick, visually pleasing over-view of the entire system. Right now I had to dig through the faq section to figure out what is going on - not a bad way to handle it either but I think most people are going to give you about 20-30 seconds tops to 'sell' them on your idea. Creating a nice, animated over-view would be helpful.

That said this is a cool idea; I'm wrapping up a jquery/javascript heavy weekend project and once I push it's on my vps I'll setup an account and see how this all works.
The problem with files is that there are so many of them! An average computer contains millions of files yet only a small fraction are actually created by users. Those files are images, or spreadsheets, or documents and people can understand and work with them pretty easily. But these files are often stored in deep folder hierarchies (C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\My Documents really?) on a hard drive filled with other hierarchies that nobody cares about.

I don't think we need to get rid of files the way the iPad does, but we do need to rethink what a unit of a data to a user really is. For a user, a photo is a single unit of data (one file) but so is an application (many many files).
That's the message VisualWorks Smalltalk uses to notify users of an exception.
"Because users are dumb."

Ignorance is not stupidity. I agree that asking users to make UI decisions isn't the best approach, but calling users dumb because they can't use your software is dumb.
The BP Oil Spill as Seen by Astronauts on the ISS
Be sure to crank up your recursion limit to at least 1459 if you want the posted example to work.
Duck it! Working on shorter domain names...we have dukgo, though that isn't that memorable. I hope to have something soon though.
38 hours a week implies that a total of maybe thirty minutes a day of after hours work, I'll go poke my head around but I'm pretty sure I've seen studies putting average work load at 16 hours a week after hours (+ 38h at school giving my 50). I like how the second link acknowledges that teachers spend time after hours grading and writing tests and lesson plans (including specialized 30 page reports for how they will personally ensure that billy will pass the state test this year) etc, but hand waves it with "a job that permits relatively more work at home is typically attractive."

That said while I feel that the people in charge of making sure the next generation is capable of progressing society should probably get paid more than they do, I'm not going to claim that doubling teacher salaries would really help anything. I only made that comment in response to the idea that the "Gov's Education Department metric seems to be "pleasing the teacher's unions"... And at that, they are very good."

>>Incidentally, while it may be the case that private schools don't educate everyone, so what? If they can educate students in category X better than public schools, but schools can educate category Y better than private, isn't it best for everyone if private schools take the X students and public takes the Y students?

I'm not arguing against private schools categorically, more so I'm sticking up for the public education system. That said 1. I'm generally a big proponent of heterogeneity in peer groups 2. It's not that public schools are better at educating Y, it's that private schools are often unwilling to.
Quick question: what types of searches are better done through DDG than Google? I've tried a few searches, but haven't found DDG better than Google...is DDG superior only for certain types of searches?
I am one of them! Definitely strange how twitter would allow these "commands"...
Now wait one minute here. That quote was from the post itself. That someone down-voted it leads me to suspect GS has trolls here. Stop it.
User face is needed so that you can see "WTF?!" on their face, but that can be somewhat replaced by asking users to utter their "WTF!?" verbally, so I am not too worried about that.

What I am worried about is user finger hesitating over an area of a screen only to move to a different area and tap there, or not tap at all. I can't think of a way to fix that problem, but that's the last thing that stands between us and the remote usability testing with no special hardware on the user's side. I have many new users joining every day, I could ask any of them to become usability test subjects. Wouldn't that be super cool? no more multi-thousand dollar setups - usability for everyone! Or better yet, usable software for everyone!
If that works there must be other "cool" commands the coder added after implementing this one...
I understand the sentiment but it is a substantial part of diversity literature and therefore I decided to include it.

Generally it is not about a difference in race making someone better or worse but if this difference in ethnicity leads to social categorization which inhibits a team to work together efficiently and effectively.

If you are interested you can send me an email but I don't want to state what previous research has found here and possibly influence the survey.
On a serious note -- was John Gruber ever known for anything besides being a ridiculously biased Apple apologist?

I do remember reading his site and enjoying it in the past. Now...holy shit I can't stand it. It's like reading an eager hopeful of the politburo trying to impress the communist ranks. All credibility has long gone out the window.
Confirmed and it works, nice catch.

How do you find it?
If you search for the MD5 hash of an email address, DDG finds them on Disqus (if they exist there) and Google doesn't.

Only one I've actually noticed ;)
Some users take the "Hacker" out of "HackerNews" :-)
I think I read most of it, but then suddenly I felt no smarter than before. Yes, he presents a lot of evidence for what he is convinced is the right theory. However, just from reading his book, I can not really verify it. Who is to say that the cases he presents are not hand selected (in fact, he admitted himself that they are), and that the opposition could not be possible to line up a similar study of numbers? It is not a very readable book, it is just hundreds of pages describing various health studies and arguing why some of them are wrong and others were wrongly not taken seriously.

It makes me a little bit suspicious that it is such a bad read and such a huge collection of studies, because quelling the opposition with an immense amount of information seems more like a rhetorical approach than a scientific approach.

Also, on videos I saw Taube still is overweight. Not eating his own dog food?
And yet, amongst the developed countries, it is those who eat rice at nearly every meal (Japan, Korea, HK, Taiwan) that have the lowest rates of obesity, heart disease diabetes and similar lifestyle diseases.
I think of DuckDuckGo as a "budget airline" sort of search engine. It seems to be best at handling the "low hanging fruit" or the common case, but it does so with better presentation, more convenience, and no bells and whistles.

By contrast, Wolfram Alpha is more like an arctic bush pilot. Or maybe that's Cuil?
I believe the 'Accept' is used when you are in private mode and you get notice that someone wants to follow you. So they don't check if the user is in the request queue. Bad bad programmer.
http://duckduckgo.com/about.html

Of course it is subjective, but it really should be better across a wide swatch of searches. I think it is most clear though on what is X searches. The information view (from the home page) goes even further on these type of searches and grabs topic summaries in real time.

Other areas where I think we do noticeably better on average are with names and long un-quoted searches (5+ words). Of course you can find counter-examples everywhere...

What I always suggest to people is to give it a week as your primary search engine. If you (or anyone) do/does, I'd really appreciate you getting back to me with your feedback.
No wonder they get confused, upset, and occasionally angry when we then introduce 2^N as being "bigger."

As a closet constructivist I feel compelled to point out that 2^N certainly has a more complicated internal structure, but "bigger" is entirely a question of interpretation.

There are a countable number of possible constructions of something in 2^N, and therefore in the traditional interpretation of mathematics all but a countable number of members of 2^N are unconstructable. However a constructivist looks at this and asks what sense it makes to talk about the real "existence" of mathematical objects that cannot be represented in any way, shape or form, even in principle? To a constructivist these don't really exist at all, so there really can't be more of them.

Incidentally the classic picture most mathematicians have of the infinite cardinals being nicely sorted by size depends on the axiom of choice. Specifically Friedrich Hartogs proved in 1915 that if all infinite sets are comparable in size, then the axiom of choice holds. The reverse statement is also true, and is easy to prove from the well-ordering principle. So if you want to be a classical mathematician but are heretic enough to doubt the axiom of choice, then again the simple picture people have of infinite cardinals breaks down.
I kinda disagree. There's a difference between saying "search yourself" and "search for yourself using these keywords"

And depending on context, some people really do need to be shown that they can type keywords into the search box like so in order to get results like these.
Like I said, I have limited experience. I'm not aware of a cluster of terrorist attacks like that ever before. Correct me if I'm wrong.

As a FWIW note, Wikipedia has 3 incidents between 1800-1899, 9 for 1900-1969, and markedly more after that (around 30-40, I didn't count).
The world has changed. And/Or, reporting has changed. I'd go with the former.
Apple will get $40+ mill on iWork iPad apps, compares well to Google Docs
You care about files because you have to, not because you want to. As a content producer I consider every abstraction that lets me ignore the fact that the project I'm working on is actually made up of tens of thousands of files in dozens of different formats an unequivocal good thing.
The title is misleading. This isn't a global bailout. This is the European Union protecting its currency by stating that the Union will stand behind the sovereign debt of member countries. It has little to do with the rich and everything to do with preserving the EU.
Named parameters are awesome. The equivalent pattern in javascript is passing in an options object.

foo({
'name': 'bar',
'title': 'Bar'
});

This means not having to look up what the exact order of options are, nor having to pass in a bunch of null parameters because the one you want is the last parameter. Very cool.

}
conan is following me too.

wow.
I very much agree with this line in the first comment:

"3. Getting out in public and having an open dialog with other human beings about something that does NOT involve programming."

To avoid burnt out that is.
The NYPD Tapes
DDG seems to be less 'shopping biased' than google, and seems to do a better job of categorizing stuff.

I wished some search engine would implement a 'context' search though, that would really make my day.

Trying to find something like 'go' by keyword search alone is really a problem, you always have to add a bunch of other keywords in the hope that that will narrow it down enough, if you could just filter out those contexts that you're not interested in after the first search is over that would be really neat.
You can also md5 an email http://duckduckgo.com/?q=md5+yegg%40alum.mit.edu :). More goodies at http://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html & http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html
Wow, this works. SnoopDogg is now following me: http://twitter.com/snoopdogg. I'm the cartoon figure.
Actually the only reason I started using duck duck go is because the name sounds cool.
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=go ?
In New York for instance as far as I know a Masters Degree is required.
That means that that top 10% $80,000 salary is being paid to a someone in the middle of NYC with 30 years of experience and a Masters degree (at least, probably a PHD).

Also yes firefighters earn terrifyingly low salaries, so do cops and a lot of other government funded position necessary for the continued survival of civilization
> Or maybe that's Cuil?

I think you mean 'cpedia'.
obama is following me :)
Making a Case for Personalized Curation on Twitter
Startup Insights From Paul English, Co-Founder and CTO of Kayak
http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/05/10/does-this-twitter-bug-fo...
For years, over-thinking, over-engineering, and over-planning struck me as a problem in software engineering. Agile and iterative development sprung up in reaction to this.

However, I think the programming world has now oscillated to far in the other direction. There seems to be a widespread perception that having a 5 minute discussion, hacking some shit out, and releasing it is the best way to do things.

The "fuck planning, just ship it" dogma is just as perilous as the "don't ship it until it's ready, even if that means it will take years" dogma.

Instead, try to ask yourself the following questions before you hit the "deploy" button:

- Will I be embarrassed by the quality of this software?

- In user tests, has it shown itself to be useful enough?

- In user tests, has it shown itself to be confusing?

- Will future features be undermined by releasing this version? (For example, will the UI have to change dramatically to add certain must-have features I have yet to implement?)

As is the case in most things, the best advice can be summed up in one word: think.
Hehe, mindreader!

Neat one, when did you roll that out, I completely missed that trick.

Congratulations!

& thanks !

To embarrass me further you could now say you rolled it out in 2006 ;)
... ditto. :)
Can we flag this as 2006?

Kinda wish he'd posted this somewhere other than somewhere supposedly devoted to making web sites better for users.
Gordon Brown steps down
Who is Tara Ploughman?

The seriousness of DDG is to make damn sure that when someone types in the word 'dog' or some other simple search test, that pointed, relevant results are returned. And for that DDG seems to be getting better at each day.

He's been very upfront about who he is (one man operation) with zero interests in storing personal tracking information (the antithesis of Google).

He is serious.
Software freedom matters, and I intend to prove it (Simon Phipps)
Does this Twitter bug force anyone to follow you?
Have a look at http://www.khanacademy.org

It has a good coverage of topics (including Arithmetic and Pre-algebra)
I haven't read C# In Depth for 4.0 yet, but I would suggest that you should not pass on the 3.0 version. Here's why.

C# In Depth is not like a technical reference book where the author rehashes the same information what you can find on your own at MSDN. Jon discusses the evolution of language starting from C# 1.0 up to 3.0. I sincerely wish that all technical books were written like this. If you are still not convinced and want the cofnirmation from someone more authoritative, let me point you to Eric Lippert's forward for the book.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/2008/04/28/c-in-de...

Eric Lippert is a senior developer on the C# compiler team and his blog is a must read for all C# developers.

Coming to the main point, my guess is that Jon may be skipping on some details in the new version of the book which he has already covered in the current version. And I think it would be great idea to learn about the choices/compromises made by the language designers.

Good luck.