skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This hits home. I had a high school friend drown last week, at 11:30 AM, on a crowded beach. I still don't know much about it, but the description sounded quite similar to this:

Tweedy said he saw someone playing in the water. He looked again, and ocean waves were rolling the man over.

http://www.starnewsonline.com/article/20100630/ARTICLES/1006...

RIP Carter
Documentation.

Probable reason: some people would rather perform their own appendectomy than read a manual.

Seriously, I have often included features on strong user request (MUST! HAVE!) against my own better judgement, only to find that, surprise, they are not used. I don't necessarily regret it, there is a certain advantage to looking responsive regardless of the request.
Chrome was showing this for auto-complete. Totally confused me.
Ooh, I've got a couple. I'll just use one for an example though:

http://college.mychances.net/tools/college-choice-matrix.php

This tool is based on ~25,000 college applications and shows you the relative preference for each college. It's not based on direct matchups but instead based on an Elo point system, so that all colleges can be ranked along one dimension (essentially, revealed student preference).

It's rarely used because it's really hard to find on the site. It's also tough to figure out how to choose the schools that show up, instead of just looking at the defaults. It's also possible that college applicants care way less about this sort of thing than I, a processor and curator of their data, do.
Elements of Style by Strunk and White

If you want to learn copywriting, there's a correspondence course from AWAI that's pretty useful. I learned some things when I took it. (It's sold in a very "yellow highlighter/red underline/internet marketing" way, but it's very valuable.)
> I basically couldn't populate databases from a unit test, then run a controller, then check the results, since SQLAlchemy would lose the connection after the controller.

What you say makes no sense. SQLAlchemy just uses the usual adapter for whatever database you are using. What does "loses the connection" mean to you? SQLAlchemy, by default, uses a pool of connections. I suspect you tried it for an hour and gave up without really understanding what you were doing.
There can be no way to get around it. I will use a proxy if I have to, helllllllp!
I think a 4 hour window is more like it. That's a lot of work that will get done.
Zenbe Lists 2.0 was just released last night...

It's dirt-simple checklists with cloud sync, and their web UI is pretty good.

I don't need the fancy GTD or GPS stuff--just let me bang out a list, order the contents, check em off as they're finished--and gimme a web UI when I'm at my desk.

Last night they finally upgraded the app for iOS4 compatibility--it never worked right with iPhone OS 3. Hopefully they stay on top of future iOS releases (been waiting over a year for last night's release--thought it would never happen, was a pleasant surprise).

http://lists.zenbe.com
Hey guys i took the liberty of compiling all of these into an Excel. I think instead of these posts getting lost, might be a good idea to archive them by month. It's on Gdocs:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0At7Zl0IkSUKrdGl4RE1Y...
Oh yea. It sucked.
I really respect Tim and assume that if he took the time to point out the problems, the statements have veracity.
Technology is making people taller?
While one can't deny Grove's possible bias, the rebuttal seems to miss that his primary point is that technologies evolve, so that today's "low-value" manufacturing expertise often leads to tomorrow's breakthrough technology. In other words, Grove is also arguing for the next great industry, not necessarily to protect the establishment (admittedly, it would likely have this effect as well). His point is that Asia will be better positioned to evolve and create such technologies, to the US' detriment.

I'm no economist, so I won't pass judgment on his protectionist recommendations. However, Grove's point on the unforeseen evolution of markets seems valid given the history of computing and is only glossed over in Mr. Chafkin's response.
I'm rooting for HKBN (the guys making this broadband offer); even if you're nowhere near Hong Kong, I hope it warms your heart too to see an entrepreneur taking on slow-moving, incompetent, overfunded competitors.

The extended back story here: Hong Kong also lacks genuine competition in many non-tradable goods sectors. The major real estate development families use their free cash to buy up supermarkets, cellphone companies, construction materials suppliers, and anything else that can be nailed down, and then collude to prevent outsiders from muscling in on their territory (e.g. what happened to Carrefour back in the late 1990s when they tried to set up grocery stores here). HKBN are outsiders trying to improve their position in what is basically an oligopolistic market.

HKBN's major competitors are Cable TV and Netvigator, both closely linked to massive real-estate developers. They offer high prices, crap service, and speeds far below what their advertisements claim, but they survive because their salesmen have free rein to set up sales booths in their parent companies' apartment complexes and stuff fliers in all the mailboxes and harass every person walking out of the building. Netvigator in particular is a subsidiary of PCCW, which is pretty much a synonym for "inherited privilege" --- it's run (incompetently) by Richard Li, the son of Li Ka-shing (the richest man in Asia, and the founder of real estate company Cheung Kong Holdings).

HKBN on the other hand is owned by City Telecom, who have monopoly-smashing in their blood: their founder Ricky Wong came out of nowhere to take on the Hong Kong Telecom long-distance phone service monopoly back in 1992, in an extremely rare example of a successful challenge to the tycoon families. (Hong Kong Telecom was later bought by PCCW. I'm sure their corporate cultures were a good match.)
People are taking it too hard on these guys. It's $5 for a nifty gadget, the lack of which is not the end of the world. I pre-ordered one, and I don't think their delays are a big deal - probably because you expected that from a startup.
Right. I can't swim a lick. Once, while on a solo backpacking trip very much in the middle of nowhere, many tens of miles from the next person, and while navigating a river canyon, I fell into the cold water, well over my head.

Somehow my toe touched something on the bottom and I rocketed out of the water like an explosion. The next thing I knew, I was flopped over onto a large rock like a fish, a few feet from where I fell in.

I still have no idea exactly how that all happened, but near as I can guess I gave the best leap of my life and scrambled the rest of the way up.

I really need to learn how to swim. :-(
This is not in direct response of your question but i compiled all the who's hiring responses into Gdocs. Not sure if the job for you is there, but you might find something interesting nonetheless.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0At7Zl0IkSUKrdGl4RE1Y...
I dunno, when someone gets their front door phished, then maybe normal people will start to care about getting rid of IE6...
It is a precarious legal ground... technically you don't have reproduction permission unless they explicitly say so. Still, thanks for the great answer!
This is pure propaganda news. presstv is Iran's version of Fox on steroids.
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Hey guys i took the liberty of compiling all of these into an Excel. I think instead of these posts getting lost, might be a good idea to archive them by month. It's on Gdocs:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=tixDMXKPtbNapfqYx16Hs...
Quantum Psychology & The Word "Is": Better Living Through Improved Diction
"... This feature wouldn't be much use for people Australia, but at least it would be helpful for some users. ..."

Might not be that bad if you work at night - Aus time.
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I built an events search that aggregated data from several sources - upcoming, last.fm, etc. It didn't work out, mostly because even with multiple sources of events and a lot of data massaging, it was hard to get more than a page of results for any location / topic. At its best, it would just show a page of random results for a givne location, which was probably what it should have been in the first place (an aggregate calendar).
I still remember how much time I spent playing the first generation of RPG, like Bard's Tales and Ultima 1/2/3. After a couple of these episodes, I tended to avoid these kinds of games because of the huge time commitment. It felt like a pain to start learning and playing huge time-sink games. I have been cured since then.
Almost all firmware is extremely dodgy. The only common denominator is, they shipped the instant it worked the first time. All commands not vital to the driver, don't work.
57% of Android apps are free -- iPhone apps: only 27%
Working around a lack of NTLM / ISA Proxy server support in Linux
Ah, but we come to Hacker News because there's a higher signal to noise ratio. Otherwise, many of us would be wasting time trying to parse the internet for something worth reading.

Hacker News is actually helpful to me. I've limited a lot of my reading to here, which has saved me loads of time, to be sure.
And thus Zak withstood the zackattack...
Zed makes a big deal about getting long-polling for free, but with evented web servers (built on EventMachine, Node, Twisted, etc), you also get long-polling for free, since requests are just objects that get thrown around until they're completed. This architecture makes long-polling trivial, because when a request comes in you can put the request object into a hash or array, then when the data or computation you're waiting on finishes you look up the request and send it back to the client.

Regardless, there are a lot of interesting ideas here, and I look forward to playing around with it when it's more done.
I read the AP article that was linked as follows:

Certain Parties (not HN, Groklaw, Daring Fireball, etc..) have requirements that they license all the content they display (NYT, CBS, CNBC, GM, etc...) - those parties now have a mechanism to license our content. NYT and many (thousands) are already a subscriber to AP. Other parties can pay by the article and _eliminate_ any downstream liability. All others can play the fair use card.

SqlLite will do the same thing for their software - it's freaking public Domain, but: http://www.hwaci.com/cgi-bin/license-step1
FWIW, "The China Project," documented in the eponymous book, appears to show a dangerously strong correlation between meat intake/animal protein intake and cardiovascular problems, cancer, and dementia. This is possibly not true when the protein is going to work building flesh, but most americans consume vastly more protein in the diet than necessary.
I was saying that you'd stake your house and life on Santa Claus (as the entity that delivers presents to every child in one night with his reindeer) not existing. Not even the smallest bit of doubt enters your head. You are absolutely 100% confident.

That's how many atheists feel about the god considered by most Christians. Short of some insane brainwashing, it's just not possible to force yourself to "believe" just in case it proves useful later.
Thanks. Indeed, the purpose is very different.
>Personally, I want more precise controls over who gets what proportion of my money. Or multi-flattring, or something. Not all flattrable-content is of equal quality.

Interesting. I was about to find a quote to prove you wrong, but you're right! You can only Flattr a thing once per month (http://flattr.com/support/faq, the "Why can I click the same flattr button again all of a sudden?" question)! That seems like a needless restriction. Allowing you to multi-Flattr a site would make a ton of sense.
Mind making it save a cookie so I don't have to enter my password every single time I go to mixest?
I guess it'd be this entire website (visual amazon search):

http://bigbooksearch.com/

Reason for failure? Google doesn't index search results...
I also sent an email a week ago, and got no response. Sent to preorder@wakemate.com
Actually my thought is that the "fake" work is just part of life. What are real work and what are fake work? If real work means the work that supports the bare minimum you need to survive, then everything else are fake. All the extra money, fame, and success are just there to stoke your ego. People got their ego stoked by playing Farmville. Are those fake work?

I would say just enjoy life, every part of it, fake or real.
With some very heavy number crunching, instead of just cropping, you could have nonlinear stretching of low-detail parts of the image. This would totally compromise the directorial vision, but so does 4x3 cropping.
Ask HN: Who's Hiring? [GDocs]
I compiled the responses from the last thread into Gdocs:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=tixDMXKPtbNapfqYx16Hssw

The most recent Who's hiring thread is here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1490922
Clickable: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=tixDMXKPtbNapfqYx16Hs...
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Why don't you have a very limited free version that lets them kick the tires without paying you anything?

Then, put the free version limit at 25 page views per month, or something small. Once it's all set up and running, and customers are visiting the mobile site, they'll "see the value" and be much more inclined to pay up :)
I've got a personal todo application that's aimed for lazy people. I've seriously tried a dozen of "smart todo", and no one were good for me. The one I built is special because it is so simple, flexible, and it does more than what a paper agenda can do.

I could publish it but I would need to modify lots of thing to make it intuitive for new users, write docs, and basically just to make it "public".
A friend of mine successfully worked overnight at a hotel and played online poker profitably. He worked the front desk and said that he rarely had to do anything except be there. Seems like something like this would give you plenty of time to work on your project.
It doesn't have to be a conscious conspiracy.
Behind every stupid customer who needs to be "told off" is a stupid web developer who botched the job.

I have the greatest respect for the majority of my clients. Though some of them seem to be "stupid" about all things web, they are usually a lot smarter about business than I am. They are probably even smarter about the most important part of web intelligence, which is making money from it.

Even if just getting started, the clients need to build that knowledge from somewhere. It's your job to guide the "stupid" clients through the process. Otherwise, perhaps they wouldn't need to hire you, especially if they have a low budget. It's also your job to make sure that your own business doesn't take a hit by losing money in opportunity costs (spending more time on a project than you got paid for when you could have been working on other projects with better pay.) You also lost a possible source of referrals by needlessly "telling the customer off."

These things will happen to you as a web developer. Learn from your mistakes and move on. Don't burn bridges.
Go Zed! You rock.
Yes, I also notice this lately.

Do you think it is trying to be like drudgereport.com?
Oh, I know.. She doesn't have any bridges though, and I learned to write a contract. I spent 20+ hours for $100, wouldn't you do the same? Especially when the verbal agreement was a one-page site? Would do it again, and again.

Maybe some background is neccesary: Had to change hosts for her, make site without specs, then re-create WITH specs, answer daily emails to the effect of 'So, when is Google going to index my page? Today? Why would I pay you if they won't index the site?', etc. etc. ad 30 days.. Although I may have flown 'off' the handle, it was the result of a prolonged effort on her part. Some times as a dev you just have to draw a line, and this is the result of that line being run over by a dump-truck.
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That helps, but fat is lighter than water, so if they have some degree of it they'll float anyway.
As a former lifeguard (certification has expired), I agree with btilly. Treading water without your hands was part of the test for this reason. Part of the training also involved being grabbed underwater by fellow trainees. Until you've actually been grabbed in a bear hug underwater, you can't really prepare yourself for what it feels like. And this is with someone who isn't panicking, and that you know will let go if you can't break their hold after a while.

Another important thing that they brought up in my training: the first thing to check for before going in to save someone (land or sea) is if the conditions are safe. As far as I know, every trained rescuer is told to put their own safety above the person or people they are trying to save. While I don't fault anyone that sacrifices themselves to save others, it doesn't make sense to add another death to what is already a tragedy.
Well, this is long polling from any backend, not from within mongrel2. So your 0MQ handlers can respond to any connected HTTP or JSSocket, which other servers can do given the right design.

However, what I was more referring to was that by using a state machine I didn't have to actually implement anything. I just wrote the code according to the state machine, and what fell out was a ton of features simply because of design serendipity.
Sometimes they quote/summarize too much rather than directing you to the source, I'll grant you that, but as a website TC still has its place. If I want information about who's getting funded/doing what, that's where I go. I don't think it should cease to exist.

But I agree with you that aggregators shouldn't link to sites like TC, but rather the original source.
Lady wins 4 multi-million dollar jackpots in her lifetime
Exactly, or another way to do it is, "I have problem X, how can I make it go away without solving it." Either by designing the thing so I don't need to solve X, or by finding someone else who's already solved it for me.
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Building One Big Brain
By and large an excellent rundown, though I had a few issues with the details in places—e.g., totalistic CAs aren't anything special, they're just a restriction of the generalized rules, and happen to be used more often in many-state/many-dimension CAs because the rule enumerations just get too damn big. A niggle.

Seriously, though, some really fantastic stuff. My undergrad thesis used a lot of CAs, and some of the examples still floored me. A working prime generator with integrated LCD display? Um... what?
That site has a ton of potential. I'm sure with some tweaks here and there it could really take off.
hahaha I also did a double take on that on that one - I'd probably put we next time when I point out a typo :P
> I could publish it but I would need to modify lots of thing to make it intuitive for new users, write docs, and basically just to make it "public".

None of those sound like prerequisites for publishing something. Is the functionality there, and is the tool modestly resistant to things like SQL injection? If so, why not put a link out there (like, say, in this thread)?
Well, knowing haproxy user, it is embed into your infrastructure like a tick, so it probably wouldn't help you. My experience has been, if it ain't broke don't fix it.

But, if I were to do an alternative, I'd basically ditch haproxy and nginx and just have Mongrel2 talking 0MQ or HTTP to arbitrary backends directly, rather than through multiple layers. With 0MQ you don't have a single point of failure by design, so you could (theoretically) run tons of Mongrel2 servers in front and have them talk to big clusters of 0MQ in back.

That's the goal anyway.
Bread Crumb for Emacs, http://breadcrumbemacs.sourceforge.net.

I use it constantly everyday as I built it for myself. Judging from the download stat, not many people using it.
Wikipedia to Add Meaning to Its Pages
Another good example: http://fantom.org/
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I remember this site, I like it.

Regarding Google indexing the site, was that toungue-in-cheek? If not, you may want to consider some basic changes to the structure - I think its less that Google doesn't like your site and more that there's very little there to index.
It made the front page of Reddit a while back. My plan was to get traffic organically, but the site is basically one big violation of Google's policies (no original content, it's all search results, etc). The site doesn't even rank for it's own name, although it did for a few days after launch, until Google took notice, and blacklisted it.

I'd love to hear ideas for making something like this indexable. Generating a bunch of quality content around search results seems difficult (see: Mahalo), but maybe there's another approach I haven't thought of?
I just built a site for the CrossFit gym that I go to that allows members to track the results, flag various milestones, make easy comparison to previous workouts and comment on other people's results.

They initially loved it, but when they found out it couldn't be integrated into their Wordpress blog, they dismissed the completed project. So I guess the reason for its failure was lack of input.

The project didn't take that long to create and was made to be more of an advertising tool for my company.

http://crossfitter.ca (although you can't see that much unless you belong to a signed up gym)
I dunno, maybe they got sick of being rooted if they forget to patch their install twice a week.
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You can get a very nice range of Kindle covers and kindle accessories which will not only personalise your reader but also give it some protection against minor mechanical damage....
What really made foldl.org valuable was that Alec picked programming articles that were substantial and didn't just rely on what was most upvoted.

Not that I'd expect you or anyone else to do that. That requires a lot of extra effort. But it was cool that he did it. :)
Apple Blocks Developer from App Store