skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Other than things mentioned here, we use an in-house graphing solution built on top of Postgres and custom views. This is great because we log almost everything and it's easy to join across users, etc.

Tableau also seems fairly promising, though it is really slow on live db queries. Does anyone here use Tableau?
I don't think this is true. As I understand the history, some states deliberately crafted legislative districts to reduce the voting power of particular racial groups. This lead to law suits and as part of court mandated settlements, the aforementioned states have to monitor racial composition of their districts to demonstrate that they are in compliance with the court rulings.

In other words, some racists tried to screw over minority groups, the courts slapped them down, and race data is needed to verify ongoing compliance.
Or there's also, http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage
Frenchman Builds a Dream Château on a Grand Estate in the Ozarks
That isn't a sound argument. Regulated California may be better than loosely regulated states, but that doesn't mean that an unregulated (EDIT: that is, more loosely regulated) California wouldn't be even better.
"Indian" is a race.

It is? Are you sure it isn't shorthand for "native peoples that live in the US but are not citizens"? Do you think that children of indians and white folk who lived amongst the colonists would have been counted as indians in 1790?

the race box was originally used to count free people, indians, and slaves.

Perhaps I am missing it, but I don't see a "race box" in the 1790 form. And even if it was there, it still wouldn't change the fact that the constitutional text mandating census is phrased in terms of slaves and free people without any mention of color. So again, I can't see how your cite is relevant to your original claim.
Can I pique your interest?
The beer pong guy was only trying to raise $10,000 and had one employee. Trying to raise millions requires finding investment banks with rich clients who will subscribe to your initial offering. If a firm wants to raise millions in an IPO (and you aren't Google), you have to hire one or several investment banks to shop your shares around. They charge huge fees, typically a percentage of the total offering.
On how the web would evolve, Jobs was profoundly wrong

The new Steve Jobs scoffs at the naïve idealism of Web partisans who believe the new medium will turn every person into a publisher. The heart of the Web, he said, will be commerce, and the heart of commerce will be corporate America serving custom products to individual consumer.

On how soon the web (and software development) would go from custom development to "lego blocks", Jobs was premature.

The number of applications that need to be written is growing exponentially. Unless we can find a way to write them in a tenth of the time, we're toast.
The end result of objects - this repackaging of software - is that we can develop applications with only about 10 to 20 percent of the software development required any other way.

Even today, while frameworks like Django are finally providing the basic building blocks, a lot of web development is still 'custom'.

But in the end, this is one of the most profound interviews I have seen of jobs.

But you seem very optimistic about the potential for change.

<snip>
I believe that people with an engineering point of view as a basic foundation are in a pretty good position to jump in and solve some of these problems. But in society, it's not working. Those people are not attracted to the political process. And why would somebody be?
</snip>

Could technology help by improving education?

I used to think that technology could help education. I've probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I've had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What's wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.
<snip>

It's a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they're inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy. I'm one of these people who believes the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system.

<snip>

These are the solutions to our problems in education. Unfortunately, technology isn't it.

<snip>

It's not as simple as you think when you're in your 20s - that technology's going to change the world. In some ways it will, in some ways it won't.
The tax/regulation issue can very easily become a red herring when it clashes with the reality of certain industries.
Bookmarked. It is now possible to click the comments link on an iPad without missing 70% of the time.

Edit: forget it. The links are target="_blank".
Sir John Cowperthwaite, the Financial Secretary of Hong Kong for 1961-71, refused to collect all but the most minimal economics statistics to avoid government meddling and felt this helped its economic miracle.
For some reason I can not zoom on that page on my Nexus One. Is that intentional, and how is it done? I can zoom on other web sites.

I guess links could be bigger - I tend to zoom on web sites to hit the smaller links, and since it is not possible on your page, it might become an issue.
Geometric Sculptures
Thank you! I've been using iCombinator but half the time I get a Python exception when loading comments. Hope this will work better. Cheers.
>The implicit message of the Macintosh, as unforgettably expressed in the great "1984" commercial, was Power to the People. Jobs's vision of Web objects serves a different mandate: Give the People What They Want.

This seems to echo a number of the current criticisms of Jobs and the App Store / iPhone OS. Numerous commentators – too many to count – have compared the current approach of Apple to that "garden of pure ideology" that the Big Brother character in the 1984 commercial proclaims. The iPhone OS and App Store seem to take freedom away from developers/tinkerers in order to give ordinary folks the easiest, most hassle free computing experience.

It's interesting to think that the roots of the current crop of Apple offerings may have been planted long ago when Jobs was ousted from his own company by the Pepsi CEO he hired and forced to wander and reinvent himself.
On the contrary, his only mistake was that he didn't see that the naive idealistic pseudo-democratization which co-opts the people's creativity to become conduits for advertising is one and the same as corporate capitalism.
Wait, you bought TM NOT because you thought it would be useful and make your life easier, but because you were expecting a free upgrade to TM2?

I bought TextMate about 2 years ago and couldn't be happier with it. I've extracted way more value than the ~$50 I spent on it and would be happy to plunk down another $50 for TM2 if there were compelling reasons.

It seems unreasonable to buy software solely because of what you expect out of it tomorrow. You should buy it for what you need today.
You're welcome. I'm happy to hear that it's useful.

I'm actually using that for a bigger project that I'm working on. While working on it, and having done so HTML processing with it, I realized that it wouldn't take me to long to wire up a mobile version of HN that uses it.

You can pass any URL through it on this form: http://toadjaw.com/article
Need app builder
I have an idea for an app - where do I find someone to build it?
I just removed it. I was wondering if that would turn people off. Thanks for the feedback. Now that you mention it, I really don't like links opening in a new window/tab either.
Top Tips To Choose Colors That Blend Excellently With Your Skin Tone & Season..
For the Emacs-heads out there, I would give Aquamacs a try if you haven't. I bought TextMate and tried using it for two months, until I realized that I never managed to get indenting to work exactly the way I liked (the Emacs way), and I really like having a single file (buffer) open in several windows, and integrated remote file editing. I guess I'll still be using Emacs when I'm 70.. Not sure on which platform, though. :)
Visualizing System Latency
On the iPhone, and I think also on Android devices, you can prevent a page from being zoomed withe the following meta tag :

<meta name="viewport" content="width=320; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;"/>

But this tag isn't being used here, as far I can see.
The main thing I didn't like about it was the way it uses environment variables and query strings to pass around information. E.g. take a look at this: http://code.gustavonarea.net/repoze.who-friendlyform/

The way you identify a user is to pull the 'repoze.who.identity' out of environment variables. The way you detect a failed login is to check whether the login count, passed as a query string in a specially named __logins variable, is greater than zero. This especially seems like an ugly hack to me.

Oh, and I really didn't like the fact that the latest release of repoze.who (2.0a1) has a ton of undocumented, backwards incompatible API changes. It was amusing trying to get it working, only to realize that the docs only referenced a much earlier release.

I understand the goals of repoze.who and think they've written a very impressive set of plugins, and I understand how it would be useful if your app happened to have multiple types of authentication that made sense to handle at the middleware level: HTTP Basic or LDAP or whatever.

But they've done that at the expense of keeping the base case simple: having a user model with a username and password that authenticates at the application level with a login form. 99% of websites use this approach so I was surprised that it wasn't simpler to do, especially coming from Django where this feature ships by default.
Yes that was some frustration with me too. I do this: if the connection times out (10 seconds) while reading HN, it'll serve the last successful scrape of HN. That's the reason I put the last fetched date on the page, I don't want anybody to be worried that they are receiving a stale version.

The comment pages don't yet serve cached pages if the fetch fails... working on that.
Very interesting application of heatmaps. From Sun's excellent FishWorks team.
Interesting viewpoint.

I think Wikipedia, Wikileaks, the use of Blogs, Twitter and even the epitome-of-corporate-antiprivacy that is Facebook by political movements: all present very strong counterevidence to your claim that the web has not been democratized.

The heart of any information medium has to be commerce, in that there has to be way to economically support the infrastructure costs of the medium but what makes the web more democratic is:

1) The infrastructure costs are very low and falling (The cost of a web server that you can run two hundred blogs off is not more than $200 / year)

2) Quite contrary to what Jobs claimed, everyone on the web is already a publisher.
Tell HN: a Google Chrome extension which highlights hot links on HN
"Why is this even a top link on HN? It's a stupid complaint."

Obviously not everyone here agrees with you that it is a stupid complaint.
It would be very nice someone purchased a more rememberable url... hnmobile.info is available, for example. I guess that would do the trick. No need of a .com tld here.
One of the main draws of TextMate for me is that it is a light weight native Mac OS X application that can be used to edit everything quickly, has excellent syntax / plugin support to make it a joy to do any type of editing in that really no other text editor I have used seems to be able to replicate as well (lots of plugins for Vim and Emacs, but none seem to provide the same polished and quick feel).

What I fear is that if 2.0 ever did reach a releasable state it will no longer be a light weight application I would use to edit everything from plain text configuration files, code, or a simple todo list. It won't have that same light weight do everything feel to it that the current version has. It will feel like a Visual Studio or Emacs. Which are good for their main purposes, but would you use them to edit a fairly small and simple configuration file?

TextMate, in my opinion is still by far and away the best modern day text editor available on any platform. I do like vim, but being a native Mac OS X application, TextMate wins out the majority of time (just drag a file onto the dock icon or typing mate . when in the terminal). It's visually pleasing and fast to open, browse, navigate and move around in.

The only features I really would like to see added is split panes/windows and full screen mode. Nothing is more awesome than MacVim with full screen mode and 4-8 split panes (on a single 2560x1440 monitor).
Is this a company hoping to make profit? Cause the only thing I can see them making a profit from is switching to a paid model when they've got you hooked in to their API some date into the future.
Getting Wired to work properly on your phone is only an easy 500meg download away...
Is Tolkien Actually Any Good? (2003)
That's true, but it's easy to see the point at which a long discussion turns unproductive. Unfortunately, that's usually easiest in retrospect.
Mostly because it's a lot more powerful than Django's ORM. Just take a look at the documentation table of contents to get a vague idea: http://www.sqlalchemy.org/docs/

- The support for various class inheritance hierarchies is much more powerful than Django's inheritance.

- You can customize the default JOINs between object relationships very easily.

- You can map objects against arbitrary select statements.

- It has supported multiple databases for a long time now (which only just got added in Django 1.2)

- It supports composite primary keys.

- It implements the unit of work pattern, so you can save entire object graphs without having to explicitly save each individual node. This is a lot more intuitive, IMO.

- It uses an identity map to maintain object consistency. So if you query for the same object in two different queries, the same object is returned (at the Python level).

- The docs are excellent.

I think Django's ORM is fine for simple web apps where the model objects are just used to shuffle data in and out of the database. If you've got complex domain models, or specific database requirements, though, then you'll probably hit a wall where Django won't do what you need, whereas SQLAlchemy probably does.
If whoever downvoted this would like to explain why, I'd be interested.

(General consensus seems to be that HPATMOR is in fact an exceptionally good instance of Harry Potter fan-fiction. It therefore seems likely that most people are not as good at writing Harry Potter fan-fiction as Eliezer is. Ergo, his success in getting more visitors to his site by writing Harry Potter fan-fiction is not likely representative of what other people would achieve.)
I've only ever used delicious in the past. Now I either open a ton of tabs or just bookmark them. Not very practical but I only use the one computer and never turn it off.

There's a Read it Later extension for Firefox that, when it's enabled and you click a link it saves it for later and you can sync it between computers.

Or maybe Instapaper, it also comes up when I google "read later."
Would you need to buy all the controllers ahead of time? I think you may be able to just buy a dozen or so and then buy more as needed. They are a part you can buy basically anywhere so I dont think you would need to keep inventory of it.
Digg, don't just "follow" Twitter, upvote instead.
The analogy I have always used: surfing the web with IE is like eating food you find in the dumpster. If you're very, very careful you can stay healthy for a long time, but eventually, you're going to catch something.

Surfing with IE6 is like drinking 9-year-old milk you found in the dumpster. It wasn't a good idea when it was just-expired milk, but now it's even worse.
Understanding and Applying Operational Transformation
The wait for TM2 would be less frustrating if some of the glaring problems, like unthreaded project-wide search, would be addressed in the TM 1.x branch. Thats really my only gripe with TextMate at this point, that and a few annoyances with the way that the project drawer works.

Shipping is probably one of the hardest parts of software development. I hope Allan can get through it and understand that people are going to be critical of TM2 only because they love TM so much and want it to be awesome.
Was planning on doing something similar using YQL. Nice one.
An icon for iPhone users would be nice...

EDIT: Oh, and thank you! It really seems to be better than iCombinator.
I suppose that's a possible hypothesis, but I'm skeptical. New York accommodates more people per square mile than anywhere else in the country, and your reason for why it's expensive is that it's not doing a good job accommodating even more?

California hasn't exactly been anti-growth overall. Los Angeles is a worldwide poster-child for unrestrained sprawl. The state not only allowed it to grow, but built a ton of freeways, making LA the world's first real car city. The Bay Area has not only interstates and state freeways, but county freeways, and stretches 75 miles across, with sprawl from Walnut Creek to Gilroy. And yet it's still expensive. Meanwhile, Portland has a strictly enforced Urban Growth Boundary, and it's cheap.

I suppose it's possible that in the 21st century, someone will show that there's an alternative possibility: a giant metropolis that, through less regulation, has cheap housing. Maybe Austin will become the utopia with 20 million people and $600 rents? We'll see...
I feel exactly the same way. Online advertising is cool in that its fast moving and intellectually challenging. Which is not to sneeze at compare to other options. And yet. And yet. It would be awesome to wake up every morning and have both head and heart aligned and be so energized about what you're doing.
Profile of 28 year old founder of OpenDNS, David Ulevitch
http://budgetinsight.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/research-and-d...

>Historically, between 50 and 60 percent of the federal R&D investment is made in defense.

>[mentions the American Reinvestment and Recover Act]However, despite this shift in R&D investment priorities, defense R&D spending continues to outpace non-defense R&D spending by $20 billion.

>For psychology claim, my own experience

sry takes a while to respond with /noprocast on
Jobs: "But it's a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light - that it's going to change everything. Things don't have to change the world to be important."

What would that Jobs think of Apple's new commercials that pitch the iPad as "revolutionary" and "magical"?

Interesting, that was (is?) a Jobs who trusts individuals, but has "a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups." I wonder if this shaped his leadership style (his "control freakishness" as some call it), so that he makes many of the calls and doesn't rely on committees.
Javascript and semicolon insertion
Do you know where to find a HN icon in ico format?

EDIT: Duh... HN itself has one. I'll use it.

EDIT: Ok, I added it. Thanks for reminding me about this.
Well, I've certainly done it a lot since I don't drive and since 1991 have lived in pedestrian unfriendly locations, but I certainly wouldn't sue a mapmaker or Google if I was slow/unaware/unlucky/whatever enough to get hit!
The Philly-area Hackathons started as HN meetups: http://www.groupomatic.com/haqsm3vj
I'm sometime tempted to do a s/GitHub/gitorious/g

Especially that the gitorious.org software is free :

http://gitorious.org/gitorious
good readable on my iPhone, better than what I have seen so far, nice weekend project. I will keep using it for now. Thank you
Intelligence and operational level by Siberia Exploit Pack
Remember, they do not know fear
Apparently, from the plot seems that if you are faster than the slow raptor, your best direction is not straight at it, but nearby. This makes some sense because if you you are close to the slow one and far of the fast ones you can outrun go around the slow one.
How do you work out what's hot, if you don't mind me asking? Something based on the points, comments and time I'm guessing?
Yeah, I think the home market is the way to go. Gaming is a big market and fitness-conscious gamers will likely be a nice long-term niche (also the parents of young gamers concerned about their health).
Personally, I find Tolkien unreadable. I much prefer Michael Moorcock or Robert E Howard.
Ask HN: Best day/hour to post on HN?
What's the best time to post something on HN? The weekends are "boring", what's the best day?
Does anyone have a study describing the relationship between number of comments/votes VS day/hour?
It doesn't appear to have been published in a peer-reviewed journal, fwiw, and he carried it out not in his capacity as professor, but in his capacity as owner of the consulting firm Varshney and Associates, which was paid for doing the study. Doesn't make it wrong, but those two factors do make me give it somewhat less weight.

Here's a copy: http://arc.asm.ca.gov/member/5/pdf/CostofRegulationStudyFina...
I wonder how much of their lead in traffic has to do with better SEO on Digg submissions. I see Digg submissions come up all the time in Google searches. I hardly ever see Reddit submissions.
I'm not sure you've ever seen an injured worm.

As for ants:perhaps so. The thing is, ants are really different and interesting. As I said, perhaps some animals don't feel pain, but they'd have to be pretty weird. I would suppose ants qualify, being essentially borg, which is pretty out there. Lobsters, not so much.
"The Web is not going to change the world, certainly not in the next 10 years."
There are two Concordes at Le Bourget: The prototype F-WTSS, with only 812 flight hours, and F-BTSD, with close to 13,000 flight hours. The Concorde they hope to fly again is BTSD.

I was hoping they'd get the prototype flying again. It's been sitting stationary for a lot longer than the production model, but it doesn't have nearly as much wear and tear. And it is, IMO, a more significant aircraft.
(that tag is on the site)
Fucking lawyers.
TL;DR: you should also 37Signals-ize your recruiting (take a stance, the extra filter is a good thing)
Pretty profound interview. Jobs always seems to put thought into his answers, rather than using "canned speak" which most CEOs resort to. At least his older interviews are like that.

I went looking for a page with a collection of all of his interviews but couldn't find one. I have started a subreddit to collect his interviews. Please submit your favorite ones.

http://www.reddit.com/r/SteveJobs/
API for the world: from TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon
Yeah, it's in the screenshots. Cute little utility.

suggestion: maintain a local cache of usernames I frequently upvote/downvote/ reply to/whose links I click. Special highlight for threads in which I have already commented or in which my top X posters are participants.
Turns out the fact that it's a drawer is quite handy if you use the excellent SizeUp window management utility because you can choose to ignore the presence of an open drawer when snapping/resizing the window in to a slot of your screen grid.
Wait, are you really telling me how I should purchase things? I was on the fence about dropping $50, which isn't insignificant, for a text editor. The promise of a free upgrade was the thing which convinced me to purchase.
must not feed the trolls, must not feed the trolls...cause when the sun comes out they will all turn to stone ;-)
I think the biggest improvements were in safety, efficiency and emission/noise reduction. Have you heard the A380? It's incredibly silent. Not as bad-ass as the Concorde, though.
I don't get it either. The street view photos are more an invasion of privacy than recording a few packets. If this WIFI data did become public someone could claim the traffic must have been from their neighbor or fabricated by Google,

Unless Google was matching the Wifi data with their server traffic?