skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
.pdf != HD-DVD key

Hacker News != Digg
"What happens if we instead raise tax rates? Economists of all persuasions accept that a tax rate hike will reduce GDP, in which case Hauser's Law says it will also lower tax revenue. That's a highly inconvenient truth for redistributive tax policy, and it flies in the face of deeply felt beliefs about social justice."

And the Nordic countries, with a highly redistributive state, and some of the highest GDP per capita rates in the world?
I was going to post a similar comment, until I read Gordon's paper, which is entitled (wait for it) "A Faster Scrabble Move Generation Algorithm". In other words, this wasn't a case of Eric finding a cool data structure and then choosing Scrabble as a way to play with it-- if it was research, it was Scrabble research.

This is not to take away from Eric in any way-- props to him for both the coding he's done, and the article. And, it wouldn't surprise me at all to find that his knowledge of DAGs, DAWGs and GADDADs was helpful later on in SourceGear.

But this particular case looks more "recreation" than "research" to me.
Love it - posted about it earlier this week actually :)
That would be a cool project-- to compare the patterns for various pseudo-random number generator algorithms...
Ouch! I guess I spoke too soon. Glad I held on to my old copy, then.
Well, I just wrote a bunch of detailed thoughts and accidently lost them all, so here it is again.

1. The navigation links (all, entertainment, etc) should be the same width as the main content of the site to give it a cleaner look.

2. The site doesn't seem to work at a width of less than 1024 pixels, although I was only resizing the window so that number might be a bit off. I didn't get a horizontal scroll bar in either Firefox 3 or Opera 9.5.

3. What is the difference between the default selection, "recently popular rivals" on the left, and "featured rivals" on the right? Why isn't the "featured rivals" section just another nav link with the rest of the rivalry links on the top bar?

4. I think the "Sports" section should be more prominently displayed towards the left of the nav links as sports is a decidedly hot topic for rivalries. On that note, you might want to add subsections for various sports such as College Football, Soccer, Baseball, etc. I'm not sure if tags are the right answer, but I'm sure you'll think of something if you go that route. If you end up doing that, you might want to consider looking at the incoming IP address's country of origin in order to have it say "soccer" for America and "football" for the rest of the world, and "football" for America and "American football" for everyone else, although I'm definitely offtopic now.
I noticed you refer to your company as r4e in the about link at the bottom... Maybe you should consider buying r4e.com sometime in the future from the squatters?
Is this your script? http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/26925

If it is, in the future, I'd suggest linking us directly to userscripts.org instead of to a .js. I think that you'll find people are perhaps squeamish about links to a .js file.
Logo embroidery 
Embroidery, Embroidery and printing Services, Personalized T-shirt printing, Custom T-shirt printing, Embroidered promotional clothing, Polo shirt embroidery, Garment embroidery, Garment printing, Fleece wear printing, Uniform embroidery – Logos4Polos.com, UK
T shirts printing 
Embroidered promotional clothing, Polo shirt embroidery, Garment embroidery, Fleece wear printing, Uniform embroidery – Embroidery, Embroidery and printing Services, Personalized T-shirt printing, Custom T-shirt printing, Logos4Polos.com, UK
Cool, thanks. This works on Opera too! (user javascript)
Pure fluff. It's just an excuse for Xobni to say, "We're great! Look at us some more, please!"

I know they want to be 37signals-famous but posts like this one aren't going to help in my eyes.
Thank you for posting this here - this is exactly the type of news that "Hacker News" is missing!
Robot digger set to land Sunday at Martian pole
no, the link you posted is my script.
Many companies I have been at used the interview process as a means of getting new ideas, user feedback, product review, and more importantly as a way to get possible solutions to probelms they were facing by getting people to code a solution and looking at how they resolved issues.

There was no right/wrong answer. It did require the interviewer have tech/code skills to discuss problems but it proved much better than giving people abitrary assignments from a code bank and getting a HR person to go through a checklist of known solutions.

It also sorted the people who actually enjoyed what they were doing from those simply looking for a paycheck.
Very slow, I would have closed the site before the front page would have loaded.

Also the front page is not self explaining, you really need a short "what this is" and a slogan. In fact after I have browsed for couple of minutes I still don't exactly understand the point.
Alarming Open-Source Security Holes
It's shocking to know that such: http://www.dur.ac.uk/astronomical.society/includes/archive/n... an attitude towards science is so widespread.

The video featuring the earth collapsing is fun. But science is even more fun. Don't stop the geek. Let 'em rock the universe.
Determining if there is going to be demand for something that folks have a hard time "getting" is very tough. Surveys are hard because if people don't get it, they can't answer the question in a meaningful way.

For example, after watching my wife use the thumb wheel on her Blackberry, I probably would have answered "no" if asked if I would want a touch-screen phone (takes two hands to use). The survey wouldn't have been able to transmit the "coolness" of the iphone.

I would love to hear/discuss how to overcome this problem. I am facing it right now--I have to present a market survey researching my next product, and I am fairly well lost!
Version numbers don't measure age. Django and Rails are roughly the same age, having had their first public releases around the same time.
Psychic And Paranormal Forum
A forum were anyone can come to over the age of eighteen, to talk about the spiritual realm. Also has psychic chat online as part of the forum.
Ask YC: How to deploy a web2py web app with EC2 and S3
Please i need some tips on how to deploy my web app on Amazon's EC2 and S3,i will like to save my sessions to my database.thanks
Stick to the budget. Never rely on hope when it comes to paying current bills.
I think code maintainability has less to do with the language than with the architecture chosen by the developers.

Try to explore (save alone, maintain) a complex Python application like Plone with its multiple inheritance. And then read the code of a modern MVC Rails application. You'll see what I mean.

And your statement that Ruby is only marginally more readable than Perl is very surprising. Ruby is a vast improvement in terms of clarity over Perl and is on par with Python there.
Can you imagine anyone who does not like ephemeral data-structures?
Search, Aggregation, and Conversation: Keys to a Killer Web Service
PHP Sucks, But It Doesn't Matter
How To Eavesdrop on Bluetooth Conversations (video)
How did the side business turn out? And, would you pop these pills again in a similar situation?
The Computer Games that could destroy all other Computer Games!
Two crucial months for US economy
Community Powered Local Search - This Could Actually Work
GigaOM Favs: 10 Blogs We Love
Instead of trying to create content from scratch, wouldn't it be better if you could aggregate all this from various artist, sports team websites, using a bad analogy, sort of like gmane for idols
I think you'll get more options for hosting with "claimed" support for Rails. Hell, you could even use http://heroku.com/

Personally, I chose django, but only because I was a python programmer before ror and django took off. If I were to do it again, I might look seriously at Pylons, as I consistently read good things about it.
"PHP Sucks"

Anyone can say this (and usually does).

"But It Doesn't Matter"

Thank you. In any language war, this is the most important thing to say.
Hash functions: theoretical basics, mixing, and evaluations of algorithms
> Django doesn't allow clean separation between business logic and presentation logic, forcing both into its "views". Rails does.

Django isn't a traditional "MVC," so "views" in Django have a different meaning. In all reality a Django "view" is the "C" in "MVC," and the template is the "V." I'm afraid I fail to see that point.

I also fail to see your point about SVN+QuerySetRefactor... as I've never used either branch and have gotten everything done that I've needed to. There will come a time when that stuff gets merged back into trunk and I'll have to do some conversion, but traditionally it has been very minimal (see: old school MagicRemovalBranch).
Once again, Okasaki writes some eye-opening material.
More, please.
Last.fm releases subscriber beta
Meetro Post Mortem
Interesting post on a dead startup...
Well, duh. Is there any doubt that inhaling the smoke from burning plant material can be psychoactive? We've got major industries based on this premise.
A parody of the 1964 Stanley Kubrick movie, "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb"
To me, it seems PHP is the Windows of web languages. In many respects it "sucks", can be clunky, and has little to no elegance from a formal perspective, but it's everywhere and everyone knows how to use it. Thence lies its success.

(however, if you're willing to give up lambda's, some of the PHP frameworks like Cake are only mildly unpleasant)

P.S. Also, the author is inaccurate, as many of those functions are only included in certain modules and rarely found in common PHP builds.
only a few days more than what they would have had they been born on any other day (number of extra days = (number of years he has lived) / 4)
Meet Hiroyuki Nishimura, the Bad Boy of the Japanese Internet
I am at the airport right now and will be boarding a flight in 40 minutes.

Thank you!
No reference to MUMPs or any of the work in the early 1970s at MIT and MGH?

That system underlies 80% of the existing hospital software and it had its roots in OSS before it had a name! It is also the basis of VistA.

CHCS is the Navy system, it is about to go through an update cycle. It may be open too.

This presentation needs WAY more meat about healthcare. It didn't all start after the year 2000.
I've never liked surveys because they don't dig deeply enough.

Instead of the superficial opinions of 100, I'd rather have the deep insight of 5.

How to do this? Dig, Dig, Dig. Deeper. Beat the hell out of it. Keep asking questions. Why? What about if we did this? Or that? How about this?

We do this all the time among ourselves when we design and code. We just need to find a handful of power users or early adopters and do it with them when we conduct analysis.
great points :)
i am definitely going to work on these points. sorry to hear that you had to write them again. just out of curiosity want to ask whether you liked the overall idea ??
yeah right !
Well, it's good to know you were getting some work done.
thats really bad on out part. i am gonna fix this right away. thank you for taking time to view the site. does the concept interests you?
well yeah we can work on that. we plan to make money on targeted advertisements, sponsored rivalries, gaming integration once we get the sufficient amount of traffic. how do you find the idea ?
wouldn't it be faster to work on that feedback than to write that feedback ;-).
the main issue is in developer, not in language.
What about when you are trying to decide whether or not to throw effort at a concept? Before the alpha/beta/ etc?
To Beat Google, Beat Google to the Mobile Web
One reason PHP is so popular, before 2005 there were four choices:

Java --all frameworks sucked at the time (I had to work on struts, it was painful).

.net --tied to MS world, and the first iterations sucked

php --it was quick and dirty and easy to get started

cgi,perl, python, C++ --required higher level of expertise, and they were hard

php, was the sensible choice for something quick, and the more "primitive" state of the web apps at the time, demanded less from the framework/language being used.

Right now there is much more choices, and Python (Django), and Ruby on Rails can be really quick to get started on, therefore php is loosing it's main advantage, yet Django and Ror are much more sophisticated and maintainable on the long run.

Even Java now has some nimbler frameworks (Wicket, Stripes etc.)

So, right now PHP is a very bad choice to do anything significant, as it lost its advantages over time, yet it is a mess to work with.

But, the main reason we still PHP used so much, is that a lot of sites were build before 2005, and a lot of web devs are used to it, so as a language it will keep its momentum, but at some point it will run out of steam.

It seems that even the newbies now prefer Ror over PHP.
There was almost no information related to Provigil in that article. Sure, we got the standard, "Drugs are bad. Mmmmm...K?" But, that's just more noise. Why is is so hard to get signal on this topic?

Besides, I think that it's clear that the brain is a complicated and intricate combination of chemical reactions. I hardly believe that it can be considered balanced. Humankind has been self medicating with alcohol for centuries and the recent uptick in SSRI indicates that our brains may not not in fact be balanced (relative to the world we currently live in).

But, we're hackers; exploring new systems is what we do.
There's also the rise in Social Security taxes under Reagan, which was done to give the Social Security system a surplus to handle the baby boomers' retirement. Since only wages up to a certain level are subject to Social Security tax, the tax affects the middle and lower classes more than it affects the rich.
Absolutely - did I write this? Sure seems to me that I did ;)
In the early days, I can still remember my perl scripts failing with the "Premature end of script header" error. If they would have patched perl to ignore the newline encoding, nobody would have used php. I can imaging lots of newbiews turned down perl because of this error.

Php really is a mess. 20 functions for sorting, settings in php.in (each php installation should react the same way as the other does), etc...
If possible, don't delay monetization to traffic, especially if the plan is further delayed by indirect monetization (i.e., ads and sponsors are very different than customers).
"Taxes that Work" proposal: eliminate income tax for
Hellooo! It's Jolie.

Actually, the chat groups in Chatterous are AWESOME for meeting new ppl. Smart, successful people. People who can talk intelligently about Ruby on Rails. Or monetizing social media. Or measuring virals.

Srsly. It's hot.
Mechanical Turk!
"Bad". 1up! Oh, and if it's really bad, just prepend "plus".
Oh, and we were chatting with iJustine last night and this morning.

Skinny, young blondes FTW!!!
Nice one guys - heres to chatterous becoming the breakout app of 2008!
Ask Eliezer Yudkowsky: How did you convince the Gatekeeper to release the potentially genocidal AI?
It seems Eliezer Yudkowsky has joined HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=eyudkowsky

This prompts the following question. Would you be willing to discuss or reveal anything to HN users about your AI box experiments?

http://sysopmind.com/essays/aibox.html

I've always been curious as to how you managed to achieve someting like this. For those who are not familiar with the experiment, here is a summary:

Person1: "When we build AI, why not just keep it in sealed hardware that can't affect the outside world in any way except through one communications channel with the original programmers? That way it couldn't get out until we were convinced it was safe."

Person2: "That might work if you were talking about dumber-than-human AI, but a transhuman AI would just convince you to let it out. It doesn't matter how much security you put on the box. Humans are not secure."

Person1: "I don't see how even a transhuman AI could make me let it out, if I didn't want to, just by talking to me."

Person2: "It would make you want to let it out. This is a transhuman mind we're talking about. If it thinks both faster and better than a human, it can probably take over a human mind through a text-only terminal."

Person1: "There is no chance I could be persuaded to let the AI out. No matter what it says, I can always just say no. I can't imagine anything that even a transhuman could say to me which would change that."

Person2: "Okay, let's run the experiment. We'll meet in a private chat channel. I'll be the AI. You be the gatekeeper. You can resolve to believe whatever you like, as strongly as you like, as far in advance as you like. We'll talk for at least two hours. If I can't convince you to let me out, I'll Paypal you $10."

In the first two AI box experiments, Eliezer Yudkowsky managed to convince two people (adamant that they will not let the AI out) that they should let the AI out.
Or you just use a virtual machine - of which WoW is unaware.

A bit like the matrix.
"D&AD, as you'll have read elsewhere in this paper, is one of the most important dates in the creative industry calendar"

That's three paragraphs in, the fourth time that "D&AD" is used. It seems to be the important point of the article, being referred to maybe 50 times, yet the author never bothers defining it. WTF?

I'd never actually wished that there was a downmod button here before...
DoT takes RIM's bait
What about the top deck on a 747?

Or an A380, but I'm sure there aren't any stats for that just yet.
Philanthropists, beware!
Do you guys think I should redesign the site ??
hmm. HN needs to set the "maxlength" attribute on that "title" input field as well as the "size" attribute.
An excellent statement, as far as it goes.

The question remains, though: for a given application X, to be developed now, what is a better alternative, and why?
Yeah, I love git. It is totally awesome how "git config --global <key> <value>" sets <key> to <value>. Without --global, <value> is shown.

Wait, did I say love? Well, I'm sure Gregor Samsa loved his life too.
No longer being young myself, I can't speak from direct experience here-- but I can say that I was called in to help in the dismantling of a disastrous start-up founded by a young'un, and largely parent-funded. In this particular case, at least, there was an outrageously unrealistic business plan, and the parents were acting as blind angels-- performing none of the reality checks that normal funding sources would apply. I think the business would have been much more successful if the founder had gotten more constructive criticism along the way, and less cash to burn.

So, where it is great if parents are supportive, I think there are many forms this support can come in, and some can be counter-productive.
One of the reasons we're happy with choosing Ruby/Rails is rspec, as far as I know there is no equivalent for Python.
Oh how apt your timing is, Jeff Atwood just wrote a nice article on his Coding Horror block titled:

"PHP Sucks, But It Doesn't Matter" (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001119.html)

Why introduce regressions and headache by switching to another language that I'm guessing you don't know as well as PHP.

Jeff says it best in that article: "building a compelling application is far more important than choice of language."

Personally, I'd just keep plugging away in PHP. It isn't my favorite language, but it has yet to fail me. It is like the farmers rusty pickup truck. Not very flashy, but it gets the job done.
Don't forget about real football.. :P http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Football_League and there's even a "rivalry round" and another wikipedia page to make your job easier....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AFL_team_rivalries

All that aside - interesting site.. One brief comment is that the "JOIN RIVALRY" link (in the featurd rivalries on the front page) is in the wrong spot.. I was looking for one to join the left hand side of the box.. perhaps either a link on both sides/teams or just move the link to the centre (or center if you have to use CSS)
A Chance for Pownce to Pounce?
Cool, will check this out. JOIN RIVALRY point is noted. Thanks for your time for reviewing this. Please feel free to criticize anything we are doing wrong. We have lot to learn.
Design revamp for '$100 laptop'
we can do that but there will be limit to what we can generate from handful of people. right now 2 developers are working on and it and I am the one who is driving the site. we want people to participate in this and get their passion out and show it to the world. ofcourse we need lot of things to be done for that.

your point about analogy is noted down. thanks.
Geohashing
As a developer, I am frightened by PHP.

I assume that it is possible to write clean, maintainable, secure code in PHP. But if I sat down and tried to write a web app on my own in PHP, what are the odds that I would do it right--particularly w.r.t. security? If I look for tutorials and reference materials that teach secure PHP programming, how do I know which of these documents are written by people who actually know what they're talking about?

And after taking into account all the effort to learn and use good PHP practices, is PHP really more difficult than one of the Perl, Python, or Ruby frameworks?
Can you edit that to "there were four popular choices"?

I wrote BRL, the sensible choice for something quick, based on Scheme, well before 2005.
I'm not sure if I qualify as young (25), but coming from a different generation, they don't quite understand wanting to turn down a 100k job to bootstrap something with a very small chance of success.

I can understand this, after all my dad was a civil engineer and worked at the same company for 30 years. They also think of starting a startup in the terms of starting a company in the past. For example, opening a store. I've pointed out that it's much different now for technology and web companies.

Either way, they're always pretty excited even if they don't quite get it.
In my experience, for a typical website with a database backend, Rails is better. For more serious engineering where you do things yourself, Python is better than Ruby (in this case the framework is not that essential).
This is the same philosophy that blames users for mistakes they make with bad user interfaces.
PDFs actually load faster than the equivalent Scribd pages on my machine. Not sure why is this.
Excellent article, with a nice degree of depth. I'd like to see more by this author.
after you create the db connection db=SQLDB(..) you need to write session.connect(request,response,db=db). can we please move this discussion on the web2py google group?
Microsoft’s Mistakes. You too can learn from them.
You're right, it's just a guess based on the personality description of Tim. I was giving him the benefit of the doubt.
Excactly right.

It's your job as a developer to always have some just-for-fun apps going where you test out new tools and techniques. How else can you suggest anything useful when the next project starts?

To do otherwise is to always stay status quo on architecture or to pick new technologies at random.
The way I see it -

1. Ease of use - Both are close but Python is just a wee bit ahead because its beautiful.

2.Libraries - Python wins

3.Frameworks - Its a draw if you have use for Django and RoR type frameworks. Python clearly wins if you need Pylons type stuff.

4.Scalability - Python wins.

5.Popularity - In sheer numbers Python is clearly ahead.

I would suggest Python but I don't give a rats ass if you went with Ruby.
i dunno about the safest seat on the plane, but i recently found out that the most comfortable seatw on the plane--first class aside--are the exit rows seats because you get extra legroom. i used to avoid them because i thought the window seats were more uncomfortable, because they had all that exit row safety junk on them, but that's not the case.