skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My colleague and I have spent a couple months hacking together a gear recommendation engine for World of Warcraft characters. We hope you find it useful and welcome any feedback you may have!
Do what incredibly successful SomethingAwful does: it's pretty much free to browse and read (but saturated with ads) or you can pay $10 for life, and rid yourself of most ads and post content.

It removes 99% of the shitheads and creates a great community. You can also buy upgrades like an avatar, no-ads, a custom title, personal messages, etc.
Hijacking Apple iOS 4
And it thinks there IS caffeine in A&W Cream Soda. Hm.
http://wowdetox.com/
More likely you'd throw yourself off a bridge, trying to make a record for the longest distance yodelled while falling.
wouldn't even have to do that, right now their ads suck...they are either "hey pay us $20-$30 to advertise on reddit", thanks for not using adblock, buying some reddit schwag, yay reddit, and once in a while you see Amazon or some anime shows ads.

that's it...why can't they go to Honda and get them to pay them money to promote buying a Civic? or Coca Cola? etc etc/
My dad used to say "Throw the cow over the fence, some hay"
Usability on facebook is "truly horrific" ...? lol..
Aren't we at the point where we stop counting Facebook registrations as a metric?

Particularly in a discussion on if we are burnt out!
You're only going to sign-up once, so burn-out isn't measured by registrations.

Here are there visitor metrics
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/facebook.com+google.com+bin...

Doesn't look like they are having any problems.
Note google & bing are flat, facebook continues to rise.
There's also the offshore concentration camp Australia set up for the immigrants who do come across: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_immigration_detentio...
Depends on how you do it. There are lots of ways to transfer assets down to the next generation to avoid tax. I won't list them all here, but the key point is that most of them take time to implement and the important part is to plan ahead and not wait until you're nearing the end of your life.
I'm using Visual Studio unit tests (mstest) to test my viewmodels. Nunit would work too. I use model-view-viewmodel so I have very little (or no) code in the codebehind. If you want to take testing further look at the silverlight unit test framework in the silverlight toolkit. I haven't tried that but it seems to get updated with every version of the toolkit.
>That's not how it happened.

Granted, you know better than me.

>I like to think of myself as a grown up

By "grown up" I just mean someone experienced with running the business side. I wouldn't call myself "a grown up" either in that sense, having never done that.

> Marketing and ad sales is out of our direct control and has been lacking

Sorry to hear that. Seems like a common story for startups. I think you guys could do well with a paid model like Metafilter's.
Ask HN: interested in a SF East Bay HN meetup?
I was wondering if there would be any interest in a HN meetup in the East Bay (Berkeley-Emeryville-Oakland area)

Please upvote and/or comment if you are interested.

Not quite sure where it could take place, but feel free to offer suggestions as well. (I'm thinking more of a happy-hour kind of thing)
amber lamps has got to be the best eggcorn of all time
Only 45% at the federal rate. Don't forget (in most cases) the state taxes that get levied as well.
And if it's a married couple, that's per person, not per estate.
"The Aim Of Art Is To Prepare A Person For Death, To Plough And Harrow..."
Mondegreens are similar
The family farm has always qualified for a $1,000,000 deduction from the estate tax.

http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=108143,00....

The fact is that most of the "family farms" that still exist are actually huge multi-million dollar operations.
I count myself among the "Android crowd" and Advanced Task Killer has nearly tripled the battery life on my T-Mobile MyTouch slide post-installation.

I can't cite a single negative side-effect of using it for the past 3 months.
Does this foreshadow what having true AI would be like? It seems it's better to be in the business of automating being human than being an actual one.
Ask HN: Should I move? If so, where?  
[throwaway account]

I'm Indian. I've been pursuing the dream of finding a great job and a good life. I've considered myself a hacker of sorts, but most of what I do is simply to satisfy my own personal desires - tiny rails webapps, cool js animations whenever I feel like proving to someone that you don't need flash, and blinding desire to have the cleanest code :) I'd love to have a startup someday, and I spend hours reading and thinking obsessively about what kind of business I'd like to run, what kind of experience a user should be presented with, etc.

So I'm doing what I consider a decent, normal plan. I'm current on an L1 visa in the bay area, and I'll look for a job that'll give me an H1. I'm getting married soon, and will bring the wife back here. All's well-ish.

But The US is scaring the pants off me. On a daily basis I read about how the government is going more into debt, about rabid tea-party fans, internet kill-switches, racism, police brutality, California's financial misery. It's enough to make me reconsider moving back to India, but I'd REALLY like to work with some of the companies I admire so much.

So I have 2 questions -
1. Am I simply being paranoid? Is it just because I read too much reddit, etc that I feel this way and I just need to relax? Is it worth paying so much to rent in the bay area, and stuff will work itself out?

2. If I had to move somewhere, where should I go to? How easy is it to find a great web developer job in Europe/Australia/NZ/wherever? A place that'll ideally help me migrate, and would be a good place to raise family?

I'd love pointers, discussions, anything. Thanks HN.
I'm in San Ramon.
I don't know anything about Python, and had no idea what the GIL was until I scanned through the article, and found out a little more about it 5 paragraphs from the end. Please follow the inverted pyramid structure! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid

Here's how the blog post could have started:

"CPython, the standard Python implementation, cannot use coroutines, lightweight processes, fork/join frameworks, and other non-sequential programming techniques due to its Global Interpreter Lock, or GIL. Brett Cannon, a Python core developer, unfairly dismisses this fundamental flaw: <quote from brett>"
I would recommend Symfony as a PHP framework.
Oakland here
retarded lol
Founder personalities and the “first-class man” theory of management
Estate taxes are only morally repugnant if you believe that the children of the elite have a unique right to the accumulated wealth of the society (which tends to build up in those who own property and capital). Why should all of us whose ancestors for generations actually built this society with their hands end up with nothing while the man whose ancestor was a robber baron, land speculator, or plantation owner receives a handout of a giant pile of cash? Especially when such dramatic wealth inequalities severely distort people’s economic behavior, depressing the overall growth of the whole economy and wealth of the whole society?
Guess I was ahead of the curve. Was burnt out on facebook the first time I tried it. :)
Why on earth is that what you thought of when you think of an estate tax? Raping the peasants on their wedding day? Lobsters in a bucket? I'm having serious mixed-metaphor head explosion from your post. Is english even your second language?
Reddit exists in a society where US dollars can relatively easily translate into better performance and service for a web site. The reason Africa and Haiti are poor isn't because they lack US dollars, but because they lack the basic social and political infrastructure that allows for currency to be effective (or to reliably end up in the right hands).
I'm not sure what the problems are, and I agree with others' sentiment that they need to focus on business and advertising. Still, as someone who in the last few years has bought into the Rails explanation of scaling (sure, ruby is slow, but you can scale horizontally with more servers after you're sold and have bajillions to spend), I wonder if this is a bad sign for startups using dynamic languages.

I've played around with www.playframework.org, and in my tests it was a LOT faster than ruby, while offering many of the same benefits as Rails. I know Reddit is written in Python with Pylons, but I wonder if all those CPU cycles they sacrificed by using Python instead of Java wouldn't come in handy now?
If you read the whole article, you'll see that they're considering paid subscriptions.
Albany, for the win.
Berkeley.
Yeah, the trick about that is that servers aren't really as cheap as everyone says. Also, with horizontal scaling you spend more money elsewhere: on stuff the programmers usually don't know shit about, like big-iron loadbalancers, and on systems administration. So when someone says "hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive" be aware that they are forgetting about systems administrators who are often more expensive than programmers.

I was recently involved with a project where we were able to reduce our server costs by an order of magnitude by switching from ruby to java.
"Python, quite simply, attracts people who don't want to code or learn anything." should be rephrased as "Python, quite simple, attracts people who don't want language to stand in their way." What you are commenting is harsh and does not really apply in general.
Danville
This is correct advice. Warming the person by hugging them inside of a sleeping bag is the best way to help. Now, rubbing them or massaging them is not a good idea because it does circulate the cold blood back to the core.
Virb - hello website
This type of generalization are what language wars are made of.
"Today, she owes $370K, and the BPO of the home is 170K."

She's underwater by 200K, and not 300K.
If you are a US Citizen within the US talking to another US citizen within the US, this is true.
"Corporations aren't run like charities", but apparently they don't mind asking for some.
Any one of Berkeley, Emeryville, or Oakland would be great!

In Berkeley there's:

- the new David Bower center (aka The Hub) in downtown

- Caffe Med on Telegraph near campus is pretty spacious

- the 2 story Starbucks on Oxford & Center in downtown

Emeryville is kind of limited:

- Peet's on Bay Street seems roomy

Oakland:

- A'Cuppa Tea on College & Alcatraz is bigger than the average local coffee shop, open late, and has free Wifi

I'd also be happy to put you in touch with someone in Startup @ Berkeley for more help and ideas.
Twitter's business model: A visionary experiment
It's not that the children are entitled to it, but the deceased wanted to give it to them. It's their assets, shouldn't they be allowed to decide what to do with them?
When they film inside an intelligence agency, they either turn off monitors displaying sensitive information or show non-sensitive information on them (like the NSA logo).
Yes, very wealthy people... like a two-income family of programmers that saved 20% of their money and invested prudently.
he should be more concerned of his algorithms that continuously replay the same songs every day.
Have you tried Moodle http://moodle.org/? It doesn't have any "facebook" features... but its still useful and open source.
Thanks for pushing to get python in a more competitive position. Even if you don't like threads it's a bad idea to not let anyone use them. With growing multi-core machines developers want all the options available to them. I don't want my language to tell me what I can't do. Running python on other vm's is a fine idea but the most effort goes into cpython NOT jython or others. I wouldn't want great features on a VM that gets little attention from the python core developers. Ironically I'm complaining and not helping.sorry. I would love to tackle these issue's if I had the time.
The end of the road for the live concert business?
Google Voice…A Telecommunication Service
What could have caused a decline like this?

What could have caused a recent decline in the month-on-month new user numbers? Well, one possibility is a logistic growth curve

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function

based on Facebook having largely already saturated its easiest growth markets. No pattern of growth can remain exponential forever in a finite world.
It makes you an annoying person if you say it without any research, and without even reading any of the decade of accumulated identical discussions, on the mailing list devoted to python development, distracting contributors from actually fruitful discussions and developments.
If you had children and a lot of money, were old and racked with health problems that left you bedridden, and the date of your death was by all accounts sometime in the next two years, would you actually insist on living an extra year and saddling your children with hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes on the things you pass on to them?

There may not be a clear answer, but is it so insane to even contemplate these things? The elderly are not being greedy- they don't benefit monetarily. They are trying to care for their children in the last way they can, similar to those who choose to take out life insurance. Would you similarly condemn a parent who dies protecting their children from danger?
Berkeley.

The new philz on shattuck and cedar is also nice
What is the best functional language for scientific programming?
That's crabs, not lobsters. I was more confused by the peasants and noble thing. I didn't mean it as an insult, I was genuinely interested in which country has a folklore of buckets of lobsters and the princes raping the peasents during their wedding. Seems like a pretty interesting place!
Explaining Functional Programming to Eight-Year-Olds
I used to be one of those who argued email should be plain text. I gave up because it was clear we lost. After I thought about it a while I realized we lost because we were wrong.

Imagine an alternate reality, very similar to our current reality. It has computers and computer networks, but for some reason, it never occurred to anyone to invent email. Networks are used for file transfers and web browsing and stuff like that.

Finally, someone gets the idea for email. Are they going to make it plain text? Of course not. They are going to want email to be an online alternative to regular postal mail, and so are going to try to match the features of postal mail.

Postal mail is often generated by composing in a word processor, printing the result, and mailing it. It is not limited to plain text. It can have bold and italic and colors and different typefaces and sizes. It can have embedded photos and graphics. It can have attachments (other printed itms, or a CD can be dropped in the envelope).

Email is going to have to support all that to be a viable alternative to postal mail. And thus email in this alternate reality would very likely start off as HTML email (or perhaps as .doc email).

Now back to our reality. In our reality, email was invented early in the computer age, when the technology simply didn't exist to match the graphical and formatting capabilities of postal mail. Hence, it was plain text--as that is all the technology could reasonably handle.

Well, we've got better technology now. Saying we should stick with the limitations that were imposed by 40+ year old technology is about as dumb as saying that we should limit thumb drives to 80 kilobytes because that was the capacity of floppies 40+ years ago.
Are these sort of things only open to US users? many apps I find on the net I scan the QR code and it finds nothing. I'm in Australia, so I assumed Pandora, Last.FM etc were all region specific, but this? I wish it would at least tell me that I'm not eligible rather than just saying nothing was found.
I found that interesting to read! Thanks for posting it. Stories like that always make me glad I don't have to choose between eating and being honest. We take that for granted too much in First World countries.
Business Web Hosting For the Small Startup Company
Sounds good. Anywhere in the East Bay is fine but Oakland or Berkeley would be ideal.
Irrelevant - the money has already been paid for on the taxes.
Holy crap, I was just about to implement this functionality this morning, this saved me a butt load of time.....thanks..
Which apps are you "killing" that are putatively improving your battery life?
Excellent, now they only need to hire a guy to go out and evangelize the MS platform for startups and small businesses!

Oops: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Dodge
Oh, so it's only a matter of degree?
If it's school year. Anyone has sign up rates for June 2007, 08, 09?
I believe that you are limited in that, too - you can only give away so much money to relatives before it starts being taxed as well. I can't really cite anything, though, so feel free to disregard this.
Berkeley / Albany / El Cerrito
I assume he's saying there isn't a licensing restriction to have as many users as you'd like. Meaning, the client doesn't have to buy the hardware product plus a per-seat license.
Thanks. Good Post. This is great example that good application and complex systems can be written in perl as well.

On a side note, i saw the previous post on DDG, where discussion was about how DDG does not store any private information. It makes sense in the context, that since he leverages upon other search engines , his cost of running is low. So he can afford to ignore user information otherwise used for commercial purpose by others.
What happens if you've created your account on lots of websites using Facebook Connect, and then one day you decide to completely delete your Facebook account?

I don't mean created a unique account on the site then linked your FBC (and Twitter, etc) to it, I mean actually created the account by registering on the site through FBC.

Do you lose all your accounts on the other websites too, or do they somehow remain even though you didn't create a unique userid, pwd, email for the account on those sites?
What I would do...
Tier 1: $36 a year to get rid of ads and get a silver badge
Tier 2: $72 a year to get rid of ads and get a gold badge and be mentioned on a "featured supporters" page
Tier 3: $144 a year to get all of the above (except make it a platinum badge) and become a "platinum-supporter," which would entitle you to discounts to Conde Naste events, pulications, etc. Conde Naste owns Wired, the New Yorker, etc, so the discounts could be pretty cool with a bit of creativity.
Thanks for the suggestions. Some we have tried, others we would like to, and some are totally new.

The big problem is that we spend most of our time just keeping the site up and don't have time to focus on these ideas, and Conde is unwilling to invest.

We're hoping the reddit gold money gives us the flexibility to bring in the talent we need to make some of those ideas happen.
> but I can't really see paying for reddit now.

If I may ask, what did we do to lose you?
I'll be living in Berkeley starting in August. I'm up for meeting anywhere, but don't delay the meetup on my account.
> But that begs the question: if I'm paying reddit, why am I not giving back to the content authors that reddit linked to?

Hopefully when you visit their sites, you are involving yourself in whatever their method of monitization is. Subscriptions, viewing ads, whatever it is.
Microsoft Readies For War with New Small Business Division For Cloud Push
McCain: Kandahar is the key to achieving victory in the war in Afghanistan
I learned about these in a linguistics course in college. My favorite from back then was, "The building blocks the sun faded toppled."

Depending on how you are led down it, you might have two abrupt and unanticipated words at the end.
> once you start charging me I'm going to gain some expectations. Downtime is going to be harder to excuse then it was before is just one example.

One of the main reasons we hesitated so long. We didn't want to let down the community, especially those that paid.

As always, we will do our best to keep the site up, and hopefully this new income will make it so we can afford the redundant servers we need to do a better job at it.
Did you investigate resizing them on the fly with some kind of caching layer? As one of the posters notes, it seems likely that a lot of those images will be very rarely seen, if ever.
Just lost job today, possibly due to HN. Pondering whether to start job search or startup my business.
Why? By common cultural and legal convention (and in my firm opinion), the accumulated wealth of most countries partly belongs to all who are citizens. You’re suggesting that the rest of us cede complete social and economic control to those who own property. Such is the typical libertarian utopian ideal, but in practice the result is a sort of quasi-aristocratic society with sharply limited opportunities for those at the bottom.

If you change your perspective, recognize that every fortune depends just as much on the context and the society it was built in as it does on the individual who built it, that our definitions of wealth and property are essentially arbitrary human constructions, defined to be whatever we can mostly agree on (through our institutions of government), and decide that the accumulated wealth created by all our ancestors should "rightfully" (another human construction) belong somewhat to all of us, then suddenly inheritance in general becomes a way for some people (the rich) to take our property (that is, your property and mine and everyone's) and give it to a few people that they personally selected.

Now, in practice, there's some kind of balance between these positions (full inheritance or no inheritance), because again, our culture and laws in a republican society are based on what we can agree on. In America, there's more of a cultural and legal emphasis on inheritance and personal wealth than in any of the Scandinavian countries, for example.

But for someone to say that the very concept of broader societal input into inheritance is "morally repugnant" is in my opinion a pretty narrow and socially destructive morality, and I’m glad I don’t live in a country where a small elite has enough power and influence to impose such cultural definitions through force.
It has nothing to do with that.

It is simply that EC2 offers us the best bang for the buck for our requirements (one of the main ones being able to spin up a lot of iron very quickly).
Call me naive, but I think for any serious processing, you need to dig into the actual underlying algorithm and implementation to made difference. The hardware difference between generations are huge, different arch can have a big impact in term of performance (really down to the detail: cache-line, bandwidth, and SIMD inst, image processing is sensitive to all these above). Tuning your custom implementation can suddenly be worthwhile.
The best way to improve the lives of hard working, blue collar Americans, is to have them compete with desperate, starving illegals with no rights. Why would you hire someone with rights when you could hire someone, who if injured, you can just push off the back of a truck. If you don't enforce the law, then you force everyone to break that law in order to be able to compete with the scumbags who hire illegals.
Nice. So they suspended a user instead of fixing their problem. Stay classy Twitter.
The danger of having .55n million rather than n million?
Citizen Engagement Lab (http://engagementlab.org) is in the David Brower Center and may be able to host.

Reply if there's interest..
I wish I had the same foresight you did - my one regret about signing up for HN is not using my real name as my username.

It would be great if pg added the ability to change one's username, but given the HN community's usual sentiment on feature requests (a sentiment I share), I'm not holding my breath.