skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many feeds are limited to the last X posts. (How) does this workaround that? Are there some big feed archives or caches on the web?
It tends to produce a treadmill, though--- since science funding is available, science profs are expected to get it. In some areas with less funding, it's perfectly normal for professors to have their students TA most of the time; but in most science departments, the prof's expected to pay a substantial proportion of their students from grant money, and it'll look bad if a prof is always "dumping students on the department" by funding them through TAships.

And if you're expected to pay your students, it takes a lot of money! One student, including tuition, stipend, and departmental overhead, costs around $50k, so if your lab is 5 students, you have to bring in $250k a year just to support your grad students. And if you start dipping below about $150k, so are supporting fewer than half your students, people will start grumbling, and it'll look bad for your tenure case. (You can't avoid it by having fewer students, either, because having only 2 students will also look bad for your tenure case.)
Did not work for me, extension-free Chrome 6.0.401.1 on Linux.
You'd be amazed at the number of experienced developers who tell me "it is best practice to do XYZ" who when challenged as to what is the underlying justification for this recommendation can't actually provide a sensible answer.
I hope you meant to enter the URL into the 'url' field, not the text one.
It's interesting to see the contrast in comments here vs. the comments on Derek's blog.
About Cosmetic Surgeon Dr.Amiya Prasad
Flickr was Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, a husband wife team.
No.

What you'll get is tons of people subscribing to your service, you'll be so happy.

Then they start using your service, right up to that cap, and you're still happy.

Then two months later the chargebacks start rolling in and you're dead in the water.

Curing spam on a service like this will take a lot more than just a message cap, you'll have to think this through very carefully because spammers have been at this much longer than you have.

They'll eat you alive if you're not careful.
But your strong attribute seems to be marketing (according to you) with only basic technology knowledge. Think of all the hours and hours you may have struggled trying to figure some things out. You may enjoy it (or you just think you do) but perhaps it actually takes you longer than an actual development minded entrepreneur.

Of course, I don't know you, so I don't know. But that's how you should be figuring out who to pair with. You should be thinking "Whats the BEST use of my time?"

This is why some people pay people to clean their homes, cars, and clothes.
Ask HN: Geek phone / Phone to work
My girlfriend needs a new phone and she just told me that I could get a new one and she gets mine.

I have an HTC Magic, and my two options are Nokia N900 and HTC Desire.

The Desire is like the Magic, but with a faster (Snapdragon 1000Ghz) CPU and a newer version of the Android OS (2.1 and upgradeable to 2.2 Froyo) while I upgraded the Magic to 1.6 cyanogenmod, and it seems it will not be upgradeaable to 2.2.

As long as I've read

N900 pros:
Hardware keyboard
700+ Mb swap
Great browser with flash support (although Android 2.2 features flash support as well)
Maemo flavoured linux with out of the box linux shell
Great 5Mpx Carl Zeiss Camera
Great multi-tasking capabilities
32Gb internal space + microSD
Audio/Video codecs

N900 cons:
Bug 6063 (https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6063)
Resistive screen
Far Fewer apps than in Android Market
No portrait mode without exploiting a bug
Bigger
600 Mhz CPU
Battery Life (Many people reports that it doesn't even last a full day)

When I first read about the Nokia N900 i got excited: a linux computer in my pocket!! But bug 6063, battery life and resistive screen and quite a deal breaker for me...

On the other hand, I have already used an Android phone for almost a year now, and yet it sometimes freezes and I have to reboot, and is sometimes slow and unresponsive the overall experience is quite satisfying, and I think that with a better hardware (like the Snapdragon CPU) and newer version of Android (like 2.2 Froyo vs 1.6 Donut which I am currently using) would addrees these problems.

Maybe the rumored Nokia 920 solves the aforementioned issues, but it is not even officially anounced yet, so we will have to wait. Moreover, Nokia N900 uses Maemo 5, and the next step in Nokia phones will be MeeGo (Nokia Maemo + Intel Moblin).

What do you think? Is the N900 worth a try?
Emacs Lisp is better suited for text manipulation than Perl or Ruby. Powerful regexes just don't cut it, you need text related abstractions.

Emacs clones based on both Scheme and Common Lisp have been written, but they haven't taken off.
Six Annoying Chores That Used to Be Much Worse
People cleaning some stufe all life. Example cobweb, dusting, ...
I just now realized what you meant... The guy who doesn't really have talent can slip into a larger organization, since his work scope is often narrowed or siloed.
Apparently a 5" 800x480 touch screen:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/gadgetreviews/dell-streak-mini-5-t...

Not much different from the top end HTC phones (HD2/Desire), which also have 1 GHz CPU and 800x480 touch screens around 4", with prices about 500 euro.
one of my big gripes is (in the UK) all these FREE IPHONE! FREE LAPTOP! on a £30 - £40 / month contract. in small print: contract is 24 months. That's 960 quid. The laptop is a shitty bargain-basement dell that you get for £200. And on top of that you got data charges, 0845 numbers etc etc.
Dinosaurs were a superorder, not a species. To make it fair, you'd have to compare dinosaurs with euarchontoglires (rodents, rabbits, shrews, and primates collectively, humans included with primates). And you might even have to include birds with dinosaurs.
We are hiring. We want people with either backend J2EE and EJB expertise, or front-end expertise in Struts 2. We love developers who know hot work remotely. Drop me a line on mohammad@patientsknowbest.com.
Repetition is the Key to Network Automation Success
Hackers and Founders SV has been doing the "Hang out at a bar" thing for 2 years. H&F meets at a park and mingles when the weather is nice. Occasionally they do lightning talks and demos.

Things that have helped us as the group grows have been name tags, signs that tell people where in the bar we're meeting, and pads of paper an pends for people to write notes down, exchange emails, etc...

I've been meaning to write up a "how we do it" or a wiki for some time. I need to get on that.
> bring in your dying relatives to try and get some cash out of them.

I really hope you're joking ;)

Scary reading:

http://www.editinternational.com/read.php?id=47ddbe51262c7
http://redcareditor.com/ looks as if it will be decent. But yes, I agree.
Ah. Thanks for noticing.

Not-mini version will have send/received invoices and by so Clients and Suppliers. Is there any term that includes both of those? (We use partners here for it)
ok yes - you need excellent debit/credit card fraud prevention/detection. There are ways to mitigate this risk tho I think, at a cost obviously.
Boring for people who've already had the debate a hundred times, I agree, but I think it's not totally bad that some kinds of debates recur, as new people who haven't really participated in the debate before arrive somewhere. There's a sense in which debating an issue yourself, against someone else who's genuinely debating it, gets to understanding in a different way than just reading a writeup of a debate some other people had ten years ago.
Also, if anyone is interested in using the "Hackers and Founders" name, you're more than welcome to. The Indianapolis and NY groups are using it as well as the logo I made: http://iamelgringo.storage.s3.amazonaws.com/HackersAndFounde...

If you're thinking of starting a meetup, we'd love to help in whatever ways we can. We also like to keep in touch. Feel free to email me: jonathan@newsley.com or my co-organizer, Laura@Newsley.com.
I created a Meetup for Hacker News: http://www.meetup.com/Hacker-News/
Um - I can think of loads of "web 2" invoicing sites blinksale, zoho, freshbooks, less accounting... the web is full of them. (e.g. http://freelanceswitch.com/money/7-online-invoicing-apps-for...). You could probably find 15-20 in about half an hour.

I'm sure you've spent a lot of time on this but seriously you are dreaming if you think this is going to make any money.
> (Snapdragon 1000Ghz) CPU

Heh. That is one hell of a phone.
US National Debt 1940-2010
The Journalist as Programmer
A 1% error rate in pointer writes would be ... interesting.
Swig Master Class: autocreating wrappers around C/C++ code [pdf]
The 'personal seal', which some sites put on pages requesting login, would help fight this 'tabnabbing' attack.

I think Yahoo does that, and so does my bank. Of course, one has to bother creating the seal, but it's an easy one-time step.
Experts: Accused Jamaican drug lord akin to Robin Hood, Pablo Escobar
Maybe he should time-share it with a local university?
Yes, there are many invoicing apps out there. There is a thin line between being brave and being stupid :) . I am aware I am walking that line here.
You seem to have done an awful lot of research on the N900, why not put the same amount of time in to researching the HTC Desire if it is going to be a choice between those two ?
Rework (37Signals book) Meetups
Anyone here notice facebook is 'keeping users logged in' by default?
The 'Keep me logged in' used to be unchecked by default, but I recently noticed it to be checked automatically - obviously to help their facebook connect thing, but I just thought it was sneaky of them.
Well, what does it mean "be applied correctly" to you? Proper application may not be particularly palatable. There is no free lunch.

I would argue that the drug development has generally had properly applied patents. Drug prices suck. That poor countries cannot get adequate medical drugs sucks. However that is an entirely different kind of pain than the drugs not existing yet.

It is likely not that hard to apply properly. I think we just don't like how it feels. It reminds me of free speech. We gain so much good from it -- but we also have the Hannity, Beck, Jenny McCarthy types too.
Advice on CSS you'll wish your mother told you
I wonder if this could be the basis for a class action suit.
Thanks. I will change it.
Ask HN: comments silently censored?
Just noticed a comment i posted only shows up while i'm logged in. Does this mean i'm being "silently" censored, or is it some kind of bug?

The comment URL:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1376730

Which was in response to:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1376304
Sycophants and praise in the comments on the blog itself, rational discussion elsewhere. It's not that surprising or interesting. :-)
Bloxes
Two Theories of Change
Please ignore this if you're building anything for regular people.

OpenID is confusing and painful to the end user, and you'll lose a significant fraction of your potential userbase if you don't let them sign up for an account with their familiar username/password.

There's only one OpenID site that's valuable enough to me to jump through the constant hoops required to setup & maintain an OpenID account, and that's StackOverflow. So unless your thing is obviously going to be more valuable to me than SO, you won't get my signup if you force me to use OpenID.
Twitter is clearly not going to ask for a cut of ads not displayed on Twitter proper. To claim otherwise is a disingenuous scare tactic.

Fred Wilson's responds to the same effect in the comment thread as well:

the whole "we reserve the right to request a share of ad revenue" is designed to prevent people from going around the new rules. the rules themselves are pretty clear "only twitter can put promoted tweets in search results and timelines"

Seriously, I can't remember the last time I read a scripting.com post on HN that wasn't useless. I especially like the part in this post where Dave Winer plugs his invention of RSS for the millionth time, and states that Feedburner should have given him some money for monetizing RSS.
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Giant Cardboard legos, what's not to like?
Found via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1376075 ...
Broad test coverage is not always the safety net that its proponents like to claim it is.
"The language of GNU make is indeed functional, complete with combinators (map and filter), applications and anonymous abstractions. GNU make does support lambda-abstractions."

http://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/#Makefile-functional
Damian Conway on Perl and its future
Even when I was a kid I saw scarcity or demand as business opportunities. If I had a cool new toy that noone else had I would rent it out to the kids in the yard for a buck per go as soon as play with it. As one of the first kids to have a home computer I would charge kids to play arcade games at my house rather than go to the arcade, etc.

I try to convince myself that this makes me entrepreneurial rather than just a greedy bastard...
It is interesting that even though my post is still a valid statement, it is getting heavily moderated down merely because a third-party made a boo-boo :-)

There is something about that outcome that could dissuade one from posting references to controversial or mutable statements in future.
Yes, I saw this the other day too.

Also, the 'logout' is now buried in a drop-down, instead of in view all the time.

That said, I'm having a bit of facebook privacy fatigue.
Explore new themes in your Blood Brothers essays
Writing an essay on the Blood Brothers requires in depth understanding of the play. However, many students are left confused once reading or watching the play. With proper help you will be able to obtain new and interesting topic ideas as to how you should write the essay.
"Many of them will not even survive the process at all."

That's the point, and I think everything else in this article stems from it. Unit tests are supposed to be transient; you're supposed to be able to just ditch them and replace them when you ditch and replace the code they're testing.

Functional tests, on the other hand, should be longer-lived.
Google Pacman Code
The two dart system, mentioned at the end of the blog post, comes from early Buddhism: http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn36/sn36.006.nyp...
Learning Through Blogging
Ooh - notice that Dave has switched from a fluid width layout to a fixed width one in the last couple of days? That's an interesting move. My instant review is that the fluid width layout was better ;-)
68 comments and not a single one pointing out the obvious flaw with the article? If that was my blog, I'd be worried.

(Of course my blog is happy to have 3 comments on a post, but that is another matter entirely)
Google vs Apple: Google Doesn't Need To Win
Is anyone interested in helping with some other backend? For example, SimpleDB or CouchDB would be the next great candidates.
Where "launches" merely means "previews" or "suggests that it might possibly be released one day."
Quick and Dirty Remote User Testing
Thank you, I obviously had not checked in a while. Time to give Chrome another run as my New Favorite Browser.

[edit]

The "no javascript" control is under "Options / Under the Hood" click the "Content Settings" button. I see the ability to disable javascript and add exceptions. Javascript can be enabled by clicking on the icon at the right-hand side of the address bar. Cool!
I think it was because it was marked [dead], at least that is what I see.
With my students and used the analogy of unit tests (or asserts) with a fisher net to catch bugs. As a fisher net, it is made of a mesh that won't be able to catch small fishes. It may also have big holes in it here and there. So there is always a limit to its efficiency.

It requires a significant effort to make unit tests more efficient. This effort must then be balanced with the potential costs of the bugs and across the application, because some part of the program are more critical than others.

A good programmer should thus balance his effort in unit tests writing.

I also suggest to write unit tests as needed to be more efficient. If the software is a data processing pipeline kind, simply write a very tight data validity checks at the end of the processing pipe and inject test data (including bogus one). If no problem ever show up with the test data, there is no point in writing unit tests for all intermediate steps of the data processing pipeline. If a problem is later discovered, then write the test, but only at the middle of the processing pipeline. You'll know if the problem is before or after. Then continue as needed. With this approach, you'll write unit tests only where it is needed and won't waste you time.

Suggesting as the author that we don't need to write unit tests is like saying we don't need to put the car safety belt because people still die in car accident with it, and most of the time we don't have any accident even if we don't wear it. Is this a smart advise ? I don't think so.

BTW, I use asserts wherever I can by reflex in my code because it saved me valuable time on many occasions.
So software (or another part of the CPU) will handle the errors so that the programmer doesn't have to check that every single operation worked correctly. This reminds me of how Hadoop handles failures such as a hard drive dying. If we're abstracted from the failures we really don't have to pay attention to them (except with a distributed filesystem you would need to replace dead hardware).

This is a very interesting concept. Although it mentions decreased power consumption, would this also entail more performance for chips? It mentions that Moore's Law is being hampered by our "need for perfection."
PG: as a first category for Hacker News, I suggest meetups.

It's been a while since there has been a Pittsburgh Hacker News meetup. Anyone from Pittsburgh reading this that may be potentially interested in a meetup should comment here or email me.

In the past we've had them at the Church Brew Works in Lawrenceville, but I would be very open to suggestions for another place in Pittsburgh that can seat a large group, is reasonably quiet, and serves alcohol.
Followup post: http://vis.renci.org/jeff/2009/08/24/followup-to-my-earlier-...
2011 Dodge Challenger Review and Prices
Haven't heard of any. (But remember Murphy's Law.)
It only has the whitelisting functionality. I kept my noscript on allow-2nd-party, which unfortunately isn't offered in chrome.
This results in others sites that I browse being able to connect me to Facebook without my permission. Was initially surprised to see my profile photo at random sites that I visit.
what happened to that Utrecht meetup a few months ago? Did it happen?
Aside on testing: I was surprised in re-reading Fred Brooks how cloose he sounds to unit-testing, in Mythical Man Month, 2ed, pp.147-148. He suggests testing components separately, before integrating, even though this requires lots of "scaffolding".

Scaffolding includes dummy components, miniature file (minimal eg of a file format), "generators of test data, special analysis printouts, cross-reference table analyzers" (jigs and fixtures).

"It is not unreasonable for there to be half as much code in scaffolding as there is in product". I end up writing a lot of the above kind of code - not as automated unit tests, but just as a way to make sure my code is doing what I think it's doing - just plain ol' testing. It can feel wasteful, so it was reassuring to hear Fred's take.
Yes, you're right, but if I take into consideration that I'm already an Android user, and I like Android but in my current phone it is sometimes unstable and slow, I guess that with a better CPU and updated firmware the experience with the HTC Desire should be far better than with the HTC Magic.

I wish the N900 was usable but the cons seem to shadow the pros. I hope the next generation Maemo/MeeGo phone is better.
Emacs. I do everything within emacs.
How Many Lightbulbs? Energy options for the future [video]
Everybody I know who has an N900 basically say it is an awesome pocket computer that happens to come with a really crappy to mediocre phone app. Basically if you mainly want to do nerdy linuxy things, and can live with lackluster phone performance then get one. Otherwise you're likely to get frustrated.
oh, brilliant, so we need to make our software systems exponentially more complicated(when anything is possible, you need to add complexity) to gain a 30% power reduction in hardware?.

And add the possibility for the computer to fail at random(statistical atypicals that are not "filtered").

I think this is not a good idea.
Ask HN: Leave facebook but receive messages/invites
As i'm increasingly concerned with FB privacy and also not so interested in being on the site, but "hooked" on messages and invitations from friends, I'd be interested in an app/product that would "forward" correspondence from facebook to me, and allow me very basic interaction with the site, without having to login, interact with other parts, etc.

Anyone heard of such a thing in development? Anything similar?
HP subdivides the world
The pub.

"Hey baby, I'm a doctor. I do radiology." (Both true statements.)

"Ooh, tell me more."
Very odd. Some observations:

+ No slicing syntax. Sigils are used to type/namespace the variable, not to indicate rank.

+ Magic variables like $null instead of keywords. The ability to manipulate the lexical bindings of a closure with this seems like there are underspecified corners lurking.

+ Automatic binding of variables in subroutines makes implicit closures impossible. Instead PHP-inspired explicit bindings are required.

On the plus side: It has call/cc. This is useful enough to make up for most of the other failings.
but it's not what i see. i see the entire comment, but only when logged in as "exit". otherwise i see [dead].
Similar thing, other data sources:

IP address space: http://corte.si/projects/geohilbert/index.html and http://xkcd.com/195/

Genomic data: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/huber/docs/btp152v1.pdf

A portrait of the Hilbert curve as a young fruit salad: http://corte.si/posts/code/hilbert/portrait/index.html

and some art.. http://www.donrelyea.com/hilbert_algorithmic_art_menu.htm
It's no exaggeration to say that there are probably more invoicing apps than there are URL shorteners. Having run one for nearly two years, I can say that there are certain key differentiators that customers in this market are looking for. For starters, "simple" and "no bull*" do not have as strong a pull in invoicing as say in project management. When it comes to financial applications, users are going to expect some level of sophistication. I strongly advise the OP against leaning only in simplicity as a key differentiator, since TBH all 20+ competitors in the market could claim the same thing.

To the OP if you're seriously committed, shoot me an email and I can give you some pointers that I've learned over the last 2 years.
ah! They put the blind side in. Neat.
There are a few instances of unnecessarily keystrokes in this exercise. Moves to the start of the line for a command that will act on the whole line (0shift-D, 0shift-V, 0dd). The 0's aren't required for those. Also a few times it switches to command mode when the editor is already in command mode based on the last step. 0shift-V2j selects 3 lines, not two.