skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of these days I intend to write a short piece of fiction in which all the usual solecisms occur but are, in context, perfectly correct. So, for instance, there would be a machine for making those cash-withdrawal devices: an "ATM machine". There would be a criminal gang with a big numbered list of identifying numbers and the accounts they apply for, hence lots of "PIN numbers". Perhaps someone would be doing statistics on the rate at which books are published, as measured by the rate of ISBN allocation, so their figures would be "ISBN numbers". And so forth.

(The actual article is about the question: when you have a bunch of very closely related things, such as "the same" e-book in different formats, should they get different ISBNs?. The author says that the answer is: they should get different ISBNs if and only if "the supply chain" needs to distinguish between them, and that there are some awkward edge cases for this criterion when dealing with e-books. For what it's worth, I didn't find it enormously interesting.)
RIAA spends 58mi on lawyer fees, gets about 2% back.
you can actually add city and state there, in fact you could enter your home address but i wouldn't recommend that. maybe i should make that clearer.
A Quick Introduction to the Cassandra Data Model
I'm sold. Count me in as a lifetime customer. Where do I sign up.
I had the same symptoms as you about 5 years ago, and it was from having a poor diet and an anxiety disorder (that i did not want to admit I had).
Amazon’s MP3 Store On Hiring Spree, May Be Planning Major Relaunch
The terminology is more correct, even if it sounds more weasel-y. If they said "oil spill" then someone would be complaining about them being inaccurate and ignoring all the other hydrocarbons that come out of the well, like natural gas.
Can you explain how the pathogen analogy applies to a corporation of people?
possibly, but i do everything i can to avoid captchas. Only registered users can send emails at the moment.i could implement a minimum karma before people can send you emails, but that seems a bit.. rude. for now i'll just rate limit it
ixtoc was not "about the same size" as this one.

Ixtoc was:
3 million barrels over 2,800 km^2.

Deepwater Horizon is (so far):
~8.7 million barrels (100,000 barrels * 87 days) over 6,500-24,000 km^2.

It's nearly an order of magnitude more significant than the Ixtoc spill. And we're not even sure it's capped, yet.

(according to wikipedia, anyway)
do you think the next generation will write about --websites that shaped how i think-- or paper-books will remain as the most important authority on written-word for generations to come
The Ten Commandments of an Entrepreneur
Saying that traditional media mostly dies is like saying "Since there's Youtube now, movie studios and cinemas will die off".

(Yes, I get a newspaper delivered every day, and love reading it).

I get the majority of my news from BBC/other TV, news paper etc. For funny, biased news, rumors, hyperbole, mob rule etc I go to the internet.
Tell HN: Summary of HN User Directories
I keep getting déjà vu every time a new HN directory appears, so I tracked down all the ones I could remember. I'm sure I've probably missed some...

EDIT: I moved the actual directory to my comment below, because this post wouldn't allow clickable links.
If you need to know this in the future, check out BuiltWith:
http://builtwith.com/hackernewsers.com
You are ranting and I honestly don't understand your need to compare an oil spill to a specific tragedy of radiation poisoning or an individual dying from exposure to oil. Oil spills are dangerous and hurt the environment greatly in the short term, but we are talking about a small region of the entire ocean that (while beautiful) doesn't sustain the large portion of the world's ocean.

Saying "never" and "always" is just a way to push propaganda unless it can be proven otherwise.
Guess it's ok as long as you need to be registered. Great site, by the way!
> const-correctness may be another misfeature (I know I make fun of it), but the point isn't hard to see: if you take the time to const-correct your code, the compiler will spit out errors that would have otherwise been runtime faults.

I think it is so interesting the mentality of static typing people. I would much prefer handling the few resulting run time faults than having to stuff with my code with const.

Anyway, there is no guarantee in C++ that something that compiles with all consts in the world will not throw a segfault at run time in the least expected moment...
Basically, any language with lots of modularity and lots of low level access is going to be big and have lots of features that are problematic in some situations.

Simply false: take a look at Oberon sometime.
Ask YC: When will FaceTime be open?
Is it just me, or is it a bit insincere to call it an open standard if all they did was promise to one day release documentation?
If anything that means this ones is much less severe - it's more diluted.

And 3 times larger is not an order of magnitude.

Remember: the more diluted, the faster it will be gone. As long as they have oxygen, bacteria will eat it. By diluting it more, there is much more oxygen available.
Grinding your own beans and brewing your own coffee is enjoying simple things.
iHack!
after you get caught

Caught doing what? Being successful?
I hope you understand I didn't mean you personally. I was responding to the concept.
"As a recent hire at Google, I don't really think this is the case. There's not just a bias towards false negatives, there's a strong bias. It's well understood here that lots of qualified people are turned away."

This is pretty much exactly what I said. Do you think if I'd pointed out that I'm actually a google employee also, I might have been spared the down votes?
Ask HN: Review my side project - DealBabyDeal
This is a mix between the Twitter API and the (closed beta) API for cash back site BigCrumbs.com.

Tweet @dealbabydeal on Twitter and the "Deal Baby" will send back matching deals on what you're looking for. Follow dealbabydeal and you can get a feed of the latest deals (updated hourly). What I think is most interesting is that one can see what other people are looking for. It's kind of like Blippy, only before people buy.

This took very little time to develop, but I'd love it if some of the smart folks here took a look. I'm debating if the constant update of deals is needed or appropriate and the search is very simple at this point. Usually one word searches work best.

http://twitter.com/dealbabydeal

I posted this before, but it was later at night, so I thought I'd try it again here.
I wonder if personalized news has that much appeal, really. Part of the success of traditional tv, radio and newspapers is the shared experience with some group you identify with.

Incidentally, this is why I read news.YC also, it's fascinating to read what smart people have to say after they have been exposed to the same stimulus like you. With traditional media, this discussion was in the pubs or the workplace the day after.

Traditional media is not necessarily dying because the stories are not interesting, well that's the symptom, but the cause is maybe that the group is not one that you feel you belong to anymore, and the content is taylored to the mean of that group anyway.
I don't know about plastic keychains, but with materials like the rubber or glass in the iPhone, absolutely. I mean, just as there are movies which use public domain music in the score, there might be some materials that aren't licensed or protected by IP laws, but I imagine that the vast majority of the materials are.
--HN Directory (directory by school, must login to view)--

http://hndir.com/

HN Post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=801496

--HN Contractors--

https://spreadsheets2.google.com/ccc?key=tk7rUIb-2aPdk_5gFJE...

HN Post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1262467

--HN Hackers (inspired by HN Contractors)--

http://hnhackers.com/

HN Post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1264544

---HN Proxy Desk Neighbor List (aka HN Yellow Pages)--

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

HN Post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1517198

--HN Yellow Pages V2 (uses form, not directly editable)--

Form: http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dE...

Spreadsheet: http://spreadsheets1.google.com/ccc?key=tJ4MdE7OPPucXtJAAKda...

HN Post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1517430

--HackerNewsers (search by skill and location, inspired by HN Yellow Pages)--

http://www.hackernewsers.com/

HN Post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1520916
I don't think the goal of XX Combinator is to make a women-only organization.

Y Combinator is designed to be an environment for young hackers to flourish, where they might otherwise be stifled by large institutions and various cultural expectations (read PG's essays, etc.)

It seems the idea behind XX combinator is to take a similar look at 40+ women and design an environment where they can flourish. Just like Y Combinator wouldn't turn away a promising woman candidate merely because she's over 40, putting up "girls only" signs is probably not going to help XX all that much either.
I have a crank-to-charge flashlight and I love it. Thirty cranks will run the flashlight a good ten minutes or so.
Why would you allocate a large chunk of memory, when you are using a garbage collected language?

There may be reasons to want to mix manual and automatic memory management. If you want to do that, there are language that support it. Like D.
Unfortunately though you are potentially adding subtle bugs here which can only be caught at run time.

To avoid excessive test coverage it would be more pragmatic to do:

backtrack = (consequence.signifies? :block_end) ? false : true

But that's not as easy to read :(
Unique Versace Woven Bucket Bag
According to Anandtech's investigations -- http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-review/2 -- both effects are real. #1 is the one that Apple seem to have screwed up on, and that might be fixable (to some extent at least) by putting something over some or all of the exposed metal of the antenna. #2 is the one that applies to other phones about as much as to the iPhone 4. Both will cause signal loss when you hold the phone, relative to sitting it on a table or whatever.
I've never heard of the upside-down method. That makes a ton of sense.
That's not really true. If you need to work with libraries that use const everywhere you have only two options:

* Use const everywhere

* Use casts everywhere

The same thing happens if you use const and your libraries don't...
> Does an article become less true or less readable just because it is followed by some bad comments?

I see what you're saying, but remember than many people judge a news organisation by the calibre of its viewers and readers.
"What's wrong with rolling a string class, adding a member or two?"

The fact that it's 2010?

A language and its standard library are theoretically different things, but in any practical sense, the choice to use a language carries with it the choice to use its standard library. Additionally, the way the standard library is usually reflects constraints placed on it by its language. Java, for example, has a verbose and ceremonial standard library, and that's not a coincidence.
Ask HN: anyone ever drop everything and leave software dev behind?
I know most everyone that hangs out here sees themselves as hackers/coders/etc, but anyone ever leave the software world to do something unrelated? I've been programming professionally for 5 years now, and am at a point where I can't really take it anymore.

The problem?

* Golden handcuffs - I'm leaving a lot of unvested money on the table if I leave, and realistically speaking if I leave this job I won't get anything that pays nearly as well for years

* Lack of "support group" - sure I could up and move to <random country>, but I don't really have much of a social circle so I'm a bit daunted by the prospect of being even more alone

* Still want to code - I don't hate software, but my job has made me realize that I'm really just a mediocre programmer with really good domain knowledge

* Aspirations - if I leave the corporate coding world, all of the other things I really want to do aren't exactly less stressful - move to LA and become a filmmaker, move to SF and join a startup, etc.

On the plus side, I can afford to be unemployed for at least a year, so I'm seriously considering just quitting outright to figure things out (with the caveat mentioned above that once I leave, coming back to this job/pay level is not going to happen). Anyone have similar thoughts/experiences/stories?
"It recovered $1,362,572, for a 2.3 percent return rate, according to Beta News. We’re not math majors, but that’s bad, right?"

Well, I was a math major, and the answer is "Not necessarily." (Not that you need any math to understand why)

Is money recouped through legal avenues the only way the RIAA stands to benefit by launching a massive legal assault? No, of course not. It also gets to scare the bejeesus out of people who might have thought about downloading or uploading pirated music, and choose not to, because of the thought of a lawsuit threatening their financial future. So, in theory, there's the possibility that the RIAA has also gained by reducing the loss of earnings due to piracy.

I'm not saying this has been a success for the RIAA, or even that it has been effective at all. Obviously piracy and legitimate sales are not zero-sum. But it's not quite as simple as this article (and the various others making the same point) makes out.
How to Fool Yourself---And Others---With Statistics
Why should memory management related to managing other resources. Anyway, you might be interested in The Haskell Disciplined Disciple Compiler (http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/DDC) which lets you statically encode resource management rules. (And of course spots garbage collection for memory.)
Did you read the article? Allen is not planning to "drop a few billion dollars on Africa." He's making specific charitable investments, just like you suggest.
"Yeah, no. Of the dozens of Googlers I've met, their take is that this is just not the case."

I am a Googler. I mentioned explicitly that false negatives happen, and stated why they are preferable. Why, then, do you preface your comment with a disagreement?
No, I didn't mean that you were not rooting for him, but that you implied his story was not interesting for bloggers. I said the "david and goliath" aspect of the story was interesting and news-worthy.

Reading the TC story, and this discussion, the gapingvoid cartoonists' line comes to mind:
"Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on an antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would SERIOUSLY surprise me."
More to the point, you should at least enter the city and state. I wasn't paying attention at first and simply provided my city name (Madison) and noticed it was finding hackers in Wisconsin that were (for example) "75 miles away." When I realized it thought I was in Madison, WI, I edited my city to read "Madison, AL" and it started providing some more relevant results.
>someone who has powerlifting or Olympic lifting experience

why are you implying that personal training has to be weight lifting? I personally find weight lifting stupid, useless and boring, not to mention that it's not the right way to work on the body I have and for the body I want to have. Just my 2 cents.
nitpick: MS-DOS wasn't their first product
I would imagine that it won't generate enough power for a Wii controller. At the very least it would be bad user experience if for some reason your ability to interact with the game occasionally dropped out because you weren't in a 'vigorous' enough part of the game.

The wii controller is constantly using (relatively) large amounts energy to measure/process/send sensor data for however long you play. A remote on the other hand is intermittently transmitting short messages. My guess is that a large amount of the energy dissipated in the remote batteries is self-discharge, which makes putting a normal battery in one a little bit of a waste.
That'd work well. As long as you make it seem like they aren't adverts. Some people just hate ads and will not click on them, even if they're the most useful tailored special offer you can imagine.
There are forums and threads on SomethingAwful with fairly intelligent discourse. There are also threads and forums with "quality" trolling. Either way, the cost and the harsh moderation has definitely improved the quality of the site.
Women who start businesses like to know what they’re doing, and be trained and experienced in it.

What does this borderline-sexist generalization even mean?

First, there aren't enough women entrepreneurs. There aren't enough women VCs. There aren't enough women developers.

Is there a quota? The beauty of our (Western) society (at this moment in history) is that people have the freedom to shoot for whatever they want independent of their race/religion/age/gender. Using people's physical or demographic characteristics to fill out some sort of social prescription is as offensive as it is misguided.
Facts Don't Change Minds
> Rather, women with technical and/or entrepreneurial aspirations need to get over themselves, stop being so concerned about peer pressure or what anybody else will think, do what they love, and prove to others that it can be done.

I don't think it's that simple though. For a majority change, positive feedback is required along the lifecyle from knowing nothing to loving it and having entrepreneurial aspirations. I think the main problem is the mostly invisible peer pressure to do something else - not the peer pressure to not do something. This is why more female role models are needed and more tech-oriented schooling from a young age and more gender neutral literature, etc.
No compiler error ever ruined a NASA mission.
Correction: Conway says don't use postfix unless, for, while or until

So last example should be:

for my $i (@list) {
next if not $i % 2 == 0;
do_something();
}

Personally I don't follow the bible to the letter :) I do use prefix & postfix unless but only with simple truth conditions like this:

unless ($this) { ... }

next unless $this;
There is a bug in your code, my hn account ends on "-". Your routing system doesn't seem to recognize this..

Other than that, looks nice :)
I guess, if you set your mind to it, you could probably make Forth do a nice mixture of low and high-level stuff, too.

But why do people insist on being able to do low and high level stuff in the same language? What's wrong with, say, using Python for high level stuff, and calling into C for low level tasks? C+Python is probably more convenient than C++.
Hey good on you for realising this, anxiety issues can be very difficult to admit to. I hope everything is good for you now :)
Er, no, as I said, the real difference between gigabit and 100 Mbps fiber is in the routers (and repeaters, and switches, and the like), not the cables. And it would cost significantly more to implement gigabit than 100 Mbps, and it wouldn't really make sense anyhow until the backbone infrastructure catches up. But if you build out the 100 Mbps network, you can then just upgrade the hardware later on, having already spent the cost on laying the fiber.

100 Mbps fiber to the home is no "pedal car." 100 Mbps is pretty damn fast.

Take a look at the global speedtest.net averages: http://www.speedtest.net/global.php . Note that even places with high penetration of FTTH, like South Korea and Hong Kong, only have averages for real-world performance a few times higher than, say, the US, which has very little FTTH penetration (the US is at 9.72 Mbps, Hong Kong at 14.18, South Korea at 32.26, and Australia currently at 7.12). Given these sorts of results, gigabit vs. 100 Mbps FTTH will likely make no difference in real-world performance, while gigabit will cost substantially more. And they both use the same fiber; once the backbone infrastructure and hosts are in place to support that kind of bandwidth, you can upgrade from the 100 Mbps to gigabit hardware at that time, rather than spending the money now when the extra bandwidth will go unused.
When an industry is slanted towards a gender, it really exacerbates groupthink.

Why? If you take a group of 100 random men from around the world, they're going to have as wide a range of opinions and ideas as a group of 100 women.

Groupthink comes more from cultures than genders. A group of 100 Americans is going to have more shared opinions and ideas relative to any other group than 100 men or 100 women or mixed culture. Cultural diversity would be more helpful to avoid groupthink than gender diversity.
Perhaps a more "sysadmin-ish" answer would have been something more like "Whatever the command 'echo 1 > /tmp/one && du -h /tmp/one && rm /tmp/one' prints".
They should have made it the cost of a stamp and they would have won more favor. "Instead of buying a stamp, buy the right to post on our site and you will be able to write back to the author and editor immediately." Instead they are charging $0.99 (just to say it's under a dollar?) - basically asking someone for money that could be spent on more important things.
You'd probably encourage more women to start companies if you gave them free day care and household services.

Who's the you in this sentence? The government? Investors?

This strikes me as a tautology. Just about anyone would start a company if the risk and sacrifices involved were mitigated by a benevolent 3rd party.
Isn't that what meetings about design of the project and coding standards are for?
If you are 5 to 10 years away from profitability. Amazon incorporated in 94 didn't show its first profit until 2002, 8 years later. If you pay your sysadmin an average of 100K that is almost a million just for the one sysadmin(Some how I doubt amazon had just one sysadmin in 02). Sure they weren't purely a web business, what with the need to warehouse and ship all of that stuff, but as they say it takes a long time to be an overnight success.
How does that tie up with the application rates? If only 2-5% of applicants were women, the end result merely reflects reality.

What percentage of people in YCombinator are black, gay, Muslim, or otherwise? Would low percentages of people with these labels be "pathetic"?
Prototype of iPhone DSLR kit for mounting Canon EF Lenses
Well, all these languages are very stringy because they are very weby.
Still want to code - I don't hate software, but my job has made me realize that I'm really just a mediocre programmer with really good domain knowledge

This makes me wonder if it is not programming that is the problem but the environment and processes at your work place.
The first thing, obvious as it may seem, is to see a professional for help. I had a similar situation and I was hesitant to talk to anyone about it, and even more hesitant to start taking any medication, but I got therapy and went on antidepressants for a couple months, and it truly did help.