skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
See this http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/tag/mat...
> Fast, even on a tiny platform.

Really? We have it running on a 2x4 core Opteron 2.2GHz system with 4GB of RAM, supporting barely 60 people, and page load times are slow as hell. And it was even installed and set up by a consultant.

> Takes 3 minutes to install

Sure, if you don't mind that the default install uses (and warns you about!) a non-production-worthy database to store your data.
Using CSS sprites with Rails helper methods
HN won't let me reply to your answer below (presumably to stop me from flaming you :p). But thanks, I'll read that blog post later but it looks like it answers my questions plus a bit more.

Seems my understanding was even less than I thought :)
Simple calculus shows that under certain models of consumer markets there is space for two big players. Optimal pricing of commodity goods shows that the share of the market is provably strictly less than 50% at the optimum price.

OK, now Google and Apple aren't producing commodity goods, and the model is extremely simplistic, but nonetheless there is probably space for two big players.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=488663
The App Store allows custom EULAs though they have to meet some minimum terms. I have no idea if the minimum terms are GPL compatible (probably not you'd imagine).
Is there really an aversion to using Java in a lean startup, or is this just an example of Voluntary Response Bias?

That is, are you simply observing that startups who make a big deal about the language they're using are more likely to be using one of the "hot" languages than a stodgy old language like Java?
I would love to see a bigger 'twist' than this. I would love to see the <i>investors</i> pitching to the start-ups.

I would love to see investors put more effort into demonstrating the value that they bring to young companies - over-and-above capital. Quite often it's hard to get anything more than some pretty intangible statements on the topic.

I spent 9 months of my precious life schlopping round VCs in London (well, it was 2001...). Sitting behind expensive oak tables in ostentatious board rooms pitching for investment. Listening to what was in too many cases downright arrogance on the part of the investors whose understanding of the market was at best surfacial.

I think much of this world is gone (thankfully) but wouldn't it be nice to hear the <i>investors' elevator pitch</i> for a change ?
Gemini DJ Mixer
Gigasonic is your source for the Gemini iKey. Give us a call, learn all there is to know about this innovative recording device, and get it at the best price around.
Dalvik JIT
Also, the users are free to obtain the source code recompile and run it on their phone at any time. While the iPhone requires a SDK license to be able to distribute the software to the phone and can only do so through the app store. I think this is their problem with apple and GNU Go. There is no way for the user to modify the application and run it on their phone.
I've found $seen{$_}++ and similar constructs made out of hashes incredibly useful, but having built-in hashes is itself incredibly useful.

For example, when I first heard about them, I didn't understand Markov chains at all. Then I saw some example code that was only a few lines long and which used hashes to implement them. In about an hour, I had my own nonsense text generator up and running. It's not very different, conceptually, from using a hash to remember what you've "seen"--the only difference is that the hash key is a chunk we've seen, and the hash value contains everything that could possibly come next (and multiple copies of it, so that common text is more likely).

And then there's how sorting things can simplify them. Want to find anagrams? Inexperienced folks might try to program something that generates every permutation and tests for equality. That's slow and horrible. Just sort the letters first and compare. If they sort to the same string, they're anagrams. But you don't actually have to sort, you can just turn them into a vector (an array where the first element is the number of As, the second the number of Bs, etc.) and just compare those. (Incidentally, you can use a letter as an array index in Perl, but I don't recommend it and it generates a warning.) You can end up turning text processing into Linear Algebra if you go far enough down that road.

Perl's map function can do some pretty crazy stuff, too. For example, the fairly well-known "Schwartzian transform" (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwartzian_transform if you want more information). Someday, I intend to sit down and play with map until using it comes naturally to me. I've even programmed some Lisp (AutoLisp, to be exact), but I know that I'm still thinking in procedural terms and I'd like to understand functional programming properly someday, and applying a function to a list of values is pretty much all that you do in functional languages.
I'd consider that new code a step backwards since it removes the vital words "Newton-Raphson". If I didn't recognize the algorithm I might have a very hard time working out exactly how and why that lump of code approximates a square root. With the words Newton-Raphson included somewhere I could easily look it up and find out everything I need to know about not only how and why it works but also its strength and weaknesses. Personally whenever I use some non-trivial algorithm I haven't made up I tend to include a comment pointing to the book or paper I got it from so that others can get the canonical description of what the algorithm does.

Ideally I'd even like to see a brief comment on why Newton-Raphson was chosen as well. Is there a good reason why I shouldn't replace that code with some other square root approximation technique or was it chosen because it was the only algorithm the author knew?
Exactly backwards: Buck Rogers is the fictional character, Buck Rodgers the senior IBM guy. But he was never CEO, only VP of Marketing. See, e.g., http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/dpd50/dpd50_5406R... .
How kanban can help you measure productivity
Anyone involved in video (movies, music videos, commercials) could put this on heads of a test audience and see what people focus on and how to deliver a message more effectively.

I'm guessing people with autism could be detected with these things easily since they focus on different things than people without the condition.
Hah, fancy that! Apologies, I could have sworn it was the reverse. Thanks for the correction.

Please vote that down, I can't delete it anymore, and I don't like deleting stuff anyway, it's the cowards way out.
Your way is much simpler. I was building an AI to handle all my emails but it turned out to be a lot harder than I had originally envisioned.
I use this feed:
http://andrewtrusty.appspot.com/readability/feed?url=http%3A...
via Google Reader.

Because it expands out the content of the links, this makes reading it significantly easier. It's not perfect, but it does a pretty good job.
This is neat, but I'm sort of wondering what value it really is. It would seem that until we have highly flexible batteries, LCD controller chips, and all the other periphery that would have to go with this to make a finished product the applications are somewhat limited.
I used to work in an organisation which sounds very much like yours. Our rivals also played the same undercutting tricks to get contracts and then often couldn't deliver. The sad part was that then they would subcontract us to do the work, instead of us doing it in the first place.
The Internet and the Web are not synonymous. I'm surprised that this title doesn't seem to bother anyone on a site like HN.
When you're a parent yourself you'll understand why your Mom asks you the _same_ _boring_ questions everyday. Count yourself lucky that she cares and that's she's savvy enough to use IM :)
Coroutines in C (Simon Tatham, 2000)
This is extremely silly. Some academic has a chip implanted in his forearm (probably an associate of "Captain Cyborg"), has said chip infected with a computer virus, then uses the chip to deliberately infect a Pee Cee with the same virus.

Of course this sort of thing will work, he carefully managed all the probabilities. This sort of material is far better dealt with by "The Register" and/or "The Inquirer" rather than a stodgy trade rag type of website.
1. Roll-up phone display to make the pocket size smaller and simultaneously make the usable display size larger.

2. Animated blowout party favors for those $100k+ parties people seem fond of throwing.
Outrageous combination of macrology with Duff's device to create a simple coroutine facility in C. You probably don't want to do this in practice, but it's ingenious and amusing.
The Perfect Server - CentOS 5.5 x86_64 [ISPConfig 2]
Where is Nokia in this game?
I'm seeing my dad and his friends run businesses in India. Basically, you cannot do ANYTHING without bribing someone at every step. If you don't want to be "corrupt" you can simply close shop and go home. I'm grateful to the West for creating a society which gives me a chance to live an honest life. I think most people in developed countries hugely undervalue what they've got.
Do you not have an editor/IDE that can automatically format code for you? Both Visual Studio and Eclipse can do this, and editors like Vim or Emacs can too.
Saving Your Data Bacon with Write Barriers and Journal Check Summing
Calling that real-world corruption seems fairly self-important. Real-world corruption is when you have to bribe the DMV to get a driver's license on top of the normal fee. Or when you can bribe your way out of most criminal offenses.

Getting taken in by a flashy corporation's sales division is just bad management.
How 20 popular websites looked when they launched
Notebooks and Sketchbooks for Designers
4 Excellent And Free Web Design Tools for Beginners
Being a web designer is a hard but very rewarding job. It’s a life long journey, because technologies change and improve every single year, and you always have to keep up with them, otherwise you’ll be obsolete and out of work.
Not true in the US: http://www.ij.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view...

At the state level a whole bunch of rent seekers have created licensing etc. hurdles for innocuous things like interior design and flower arrangement (two current areas being litigated). There's been talk off and on about doing this to programmers, although that doesn't look likely any time soon.

And then there's this atrocity: http://www.ij.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view...

"Texas now demands that every computer repair technician in the entire state acquire a private investigator’s license to repair a computer."
Sorry for being irritated in the other comment, you obviously asked serious questions out of interest. I'll try to not let the trolling whenever Perl is mentioned to get under my skin in the future.

(On the other hand, you got a better answer than from me when Chromatic answered. :-) )
JQuery makes Google style fading-in effects so easy
I'm personally far more likely to click something like "Start Making Bingo Cards" -vs- "Sign Up Now" because it feels more like a call to action, not a call to fill some stuff out, then do some action.
I think this is the app in question ("Go go"): http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/go-go/id300106575?mt=8

("It's driven by the GNU Go 3.6 engine")

I ran into a similar issue with a GNU Backgammon app. The publisher (who wasn't charging for the app) put up the source (https://svn.leozide.com/pocketbg/) after being asked but now that I'm looking at it, it doesn't appear to get linked to obviously on the site (I haven't checked inside the app).
So... when can I get my Daily Prophet? I'm expecting pictures of politicians making faces and such ;p This is truly impressive. I wonder if the lines are bad pixels or just meant to be there for testing.
Suggest HN: Saving articles feature request
I really like HN, technical articles with little or no bullshit tolerated. However, there are often so many good articles that appear for a couple of days and then vanish into the nether. I've been making good use of the Save Article feature on the nytimes iPhone app, and was wondering if there could be a similar feature added to HN. With the amount of good links floating around (as well as the useful commentary), I believe this would be a good addition.

On the other hand, does anyone have any suggestions on how to manage good links/articles? I occasionally hear Read it Later mentioned, and there are bookmark sites such as del.icio.us. I do find that saving good links locally as a bookmark often means that it goes into a black hole as I just don't organise my bookmarks any more.
I think you meant to submit this to Digg.
This went live before we launched our premium account so don't have those stats to track.

We measure 3 related goals in GA, the homepage -> signup form; homepage -> signed up user; and new visit -> paying user (using the goals but also e-commerce values).

Looking back and learning from this exercise, in the next tests that we're doing we'll be adding different UTM campaigns to the different variations (in VWO) and be able to track conversions to paying customers further down the track. I cannot stress enough how much valuable information this gives.

In any case we CAN see the increase in homepage -> signup form:
http://cl.ly/503bf3943cc390e4f715

This did increase the actual signup conversion as well (homepage -> signed up user):
http://cl.ly/e6403e90307c58c8a6e7
- curved displays so you don't have to refocus all the time on a wide screen

- an e-book reader that is just a spine with a roll out display
Sure, but even the Hacker News title is specifically biased towards Apple.

I understand why the media does it, and I can certainly sympathise with them wanting to get the story as much attention as possible but it just seems unfair to single out one company out of the masses just because anything mentioned about said company turns to gold, or something close to it with ad impressions.

Morally I don't think it is fair reporting, especially since most people won't read past the first two or three paragraphs, let alone read all the way to the eighth paragraph to find out that Hon Hai (Foxconn) makes products for other corporations as well, thereby painting just Apple in a bad picture.
Firefox Losing Early Adopters to Chrome - Will Mainstream Users Follow?
Download High Quality Coolest Desktop Wallpaper
No, I'm saying there's really no reason to expect a "rapid" change after peak. It's not like all the world's oil is coming from one upended bottle that'll just suddenly run dry, there are many different fields with different amounts left and different costs of extraction. Right now it looks like some of the larger fields (particularly the alberta tar sands) are becoming economical, and also various alternatives (wind, solar) are becoming economical.
This link was more likely to be clicked because it appeared more relevant to the interests of HNers:

- The previous two links were Youtube links. I can't click those during business hours so I rarely notice them. I am guessing that many HNers skip Youtube for similar reasons.

- This submission had a better-targeted title: it led with a feminine name. This is good headline craft, especially if your target audience skews male.

- Smarterware.org sounds like either a typo for HN-regular asmartbear.com or a noncommercial lifehacks site. Again, better targeted than Youtube and more likely (from a "should I click this?" heuristic perspective) to have a writeup and the possibility to research the author.

Edit: Just clicked through and noticed that smarterware.org is Gina Trapani's new shindig. This gives added cachet for lifehack enthusiasts.
You can use a different version for people who uses Chrome/Iron (I think most chrome users are tech savvy). For other browsers you can use some other filter mechanism (like referrer).
Not worth the bytes on the wire; the short version: the app store approval process is schizophrenic and fascist. Everyone already knows this.
No single vendor will ever be able to displace another completely in this market, I really don't see how.

Right now there are already at least 4 different smart phone lineages and you can expect that number to increase in the future. Each of those will find their following, some will be more successful than others, but nobody will be able to claim the cake for themselves.

We're not talking about network effects to the exclusion of others, after all if there is a 'niche' then someone will fill it.

Imagine today there would be nobody developing for the android, then that by itself would be an enormous incentive to develop for it because you'd be king of the hill instantly. Users don't need 100,000 apps, they need at best a few that work, so you'd only need to clone the 'top sellers' in order to have significant presence, and that is not at all impossible.

Smartphones are like computer systems, just like apple managed to stay alive in spite of limited marketshare and linux has a dedicated following and both of them competed with microsoft (which used every dirty trick in the book) they still persisted.

And yesterdays 'loser' seems to be todays winner, elsewhere someone is asking where Nokia is, you could ask the same thing about Sony-Ericsson and Microsoft.

They'll all be back, they'll learn from their mistakes and will attempt to get another piece of the pie.
It looks really neat.

It's interesting that it is on a rig - is it just an automated way of displaying that it can be wrapped round a pencil. Or is it because it has to be kept taught still to work right (I know previous thin OLED/liquid paper displays have had problems when not held taught)
Right now it's about 1% of our raw unique daily visitors.

The tricky thing is to drill down and see which users these are and where are they coming from and how are they using Soocial. Any tips are welcome! ;-)
Click on the name of your profile at the top right, then click 'saved stories'.
Agreed, this has come up more and more frequently and I'm beginning to see the light of allowing string methods on bytes more and more.
Don't confuse "development" with "maintenance". They are very different things. We see most of those projects merely being maintained, not radically improved.

True development is happening within the Haskell community, for instance, where they're taking concepts from various fields of mathematics and applying them to software development in ways that haven't really been done before.

Most Java-based projects are merely reimplementing something that somebody else has already done, or they're making minor, incremental improvements to a well-aged piece of software.
Fair enough; but I'd rather see things fixed then see the constant drum beat of "this is broken and a piss-poor design decision". If it's broken, fix it. There's no excuse to not fix bugs, even in the name of backwards compatibility.
Hafeez Center
It can, sometimes and with great skill, be used to write understandable code.
Fantastic info. Should have included in the case study ;)
Same here - I'm mostly on a mac so I use Textmate (and just gEdit on linux lately), but I can't recall the last time I used a snippet or anything.

Decent editing functionality, syntax highlighting, the concept of opening a project directory (which gEdit doesn't do well), and open file by pattern match is 95% of my use cases.
Sometimes you manage your own memory, so you can't use calloc. Sometimes you're zeroing out stack allocated memory, such as the common practice when doing socket programming in C.

Setting memory you own to a known value is just good, defensive programming. If I screw up - and in C, you're going to screw up - it's good to see a known value rather than unknown values.
Is anyone aware of Apple going after somebody that distibutes the source code of their iPhone app? My interpretation (IANAL) of sectoin 7.2 of the Apple Developer License is that you are not allowed to distribute your apps anyway other than through the App store. But if you are distibuting the source code, as required by GPL v2, that doesn't seem to be infringing to me. Of course, maybe someone can point to an example of Apple harassing someone that was doing this.

Of course, maybe the FSF is getting all upset about the fact that not just anyone can download code onto an iPhone., only those in the Apple Developer Program? Except I personally find that situation as similar to needing to have a piece of hardware to use software designed for that hardware. If I use GPL code that I have modified such that it will only run on a PS3, I'm not obliged to furnish users with a PS3...
Simon is the guy who wrote PuTTY - he generally know his stuff. Some of this is NSFW, in the sense that you don't want it in commercial code for someone less able to have to support.

However, it's beautifully instructive, and a clever hack.
The results could really benefit from some inferential statistics. The percentages, while interesting aren't particularly meaningful on their own. I realize you may not want to share how large your sample sizes are, but something like a Pearson's chi square test would be very useful here.
Http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&username=xa-4bc437493800f69a
Odds of 1-in-3 that mega-earthquake will hit Pacific Northwest in next 50 years
I seriously doubt most geeks are suffering from a stressed heart due to too much exercise. I don't think /standing/ will tip that scale.
you are right - without the sample sizes (for before and after) there's no way to know whether this measured increase of 28% is statistically significant or not.
Compilers have long ago memorized the code for memset (and memcopy and ...) and substitute optimized algorithms. As part of faking their benchmark stats for marketing purposes. So no worries, this code should result in kick-butt optimized assembler. Except for the obvious bug.
Freeloading & Digital Media
Quick notes on trying the Twisted websocket branch example
Thank you, that puts it much better in to perspective.
His collection of little puzzle programs is very nice too. I don't know how the global productivity cost of the puzzles balances off against the global productivity gain from PuTTY.

For all this and more, see his home page: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/ .
I think I get that - any story that I upclicked or commented is a "saved story"?

It's nice to have I guess, but not really the stories that I explicitly wanted to save. I upmark HN stories that I think other people would be interested in reading, which is not explicitly the stories that I want to save and maybe refer to them later - that would be a much smaller subset.
One thing I've found that can make a big difference is to adapt your landing page to the language of your visitors.
Google, Yahoo, others work to make search engines better at scanning the Web
Ok. Well, I can't make that happen for you, but better this much smaller set to look through than the one of 'all urls' right ?

I upvote that which I would possibly want to re-visit so for me it works just fine.
First, good job getting it released and the video issue wasn't really a big deal. I think instead of 45+ minutes though it needs to be like 10 minutes max and be a real fast overview of the past week. As is, I don't really see any value added, as it is basically just like another comment on the article that I can't up/down vote.

Also, one thing I would recommend doing is linking to all the stories so that someone can quickly get access to them.
Pacman Ghost Psychology
Exactly. The real problem here is underhanded practice within the industry, and they could just as easily be targeted like this without being included in Metacritic.

In fact, since Metacritic do actually have a policy for the kind of reviews Ars makes, this article ends up feeling a little disingenuous. Or at least not the whole story. I don't think they are really doing as much of a service as they make out by not giving a real score. For me it's a negative.