skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's his 3rd, actually -- his second was a dismal failure in spite being a promising idea, mainly because the execution stank (NeXT -- with a black and white display, and even slower than the aging contemporary 68K-based mac with a color display , it cost 3x more).
Looks like we'd better add Dr. Odersky as another possibility for the mystery foreword in Joy of Clojure.
From what i know that was the original intention behind Slang and SecDB. Standardization of use across different departments and in some ways a way to subvert the politics.
Call of Duty: Black Ops is Activision's Largest Launch Investment
Yea, the new collections library is great once you can get used to it. I agree that now was a much better time to make big changes than further down the road
It also doesn't seem to lower the crime rate. [...] There were more social programs and money pumped into that city than any other, yet the murder rate is #2 in the US.

This should be pretty obvious to most HN readers, but I'm reminding people anyway. "Correlation does not imply causation".
If a company can reinvest profits and grow their marketshare or move into new markets, it's usually in the shareholders interest for them to do so. That reinvestment may eliminate or shrink a dividend payment.

Many large companies are unable to achieve significant growth numbers and in those cases it's usually int he shareholders interest to issue a dividend.
I pirated this game to see if it would work on my N900 as a standalone (since the demo did not). The game was still too slow, so i didn't purchase it.
How would you know? It takes a while to recognize a technology as revolutionary, and angels typically get in early.
I agree. Reddit&Digg have their own (what I can only describe as troll sites) such as DailyKos.

IRL, that is generally what I like about Europeans (or at least my impression of them) - they have more mild beliefs. A lot of Americans seem to have very strong predetermined beliefs.
What are you doing here? If you have something more interesting, post it.
Except those bicyclists pay taxes too, and have the exact same legal right to use the road. Riding in the "middle" of the road is a necessary technique to prevent being passed danngerously closely.

Neither of those things justifies being assaulted.

As a side note, it appears that SR-9 near Silicon Valley existed long before automobiles, and thus was not built for automobiles either. It was probably "built for" horse wagons and pedestrians, and used by bicyclists years before any motorist.
Sure, if you live 30km from where you work, you probably aren't going to ride a bike (or walk, or take transit). If you lived <5km, you'd waste less time commuting.

re: rain - sounds like rain gear is important. So are fenders.

re: showering - i've found that simply biking at a more relaxed pace avoids the whole sweat issue (besides in the morning, it's not the hottest time of the day. Biking home might be more of a problem, but then there is a shower at the end.) Plus even if you have some hills, you get in shape and will barely notice the exercise.

re: carrying extra work - what exactly are you carrying? I find i can haul a laptop and a lot of junk with a pair of panniers. Also good for picking up groceries.

Also, besides the environmental issues mentioned - i'm always amazed that drivers don't love cyclists. Every bike on the road means less traffic and one more parking space.
This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing but also when they are reasoning proactively with the perspective of having to defend their opinions.

And overcoming bias could also be motivated by wanting to persuade. It's covering your bases in case the person you're trying to persuade is aware of confirmation bias.

I'd hate for this paper to become support for the idea that you should just go by your gut and not by reason. It looked like this study only looked at highly subjective topics, which jam is better, which poster/car/jelly bean is better. Those are largely subject to taste, and are much different subjects than something like economics or science.
Hardcore pirates will always find a new excuse, but well-implemented DRM is really helpful at encouraging mostly honest people to be as honest as they believe themselves to be. A huge segment of the population will be every bit as honest as you require them to be.
Is it $5 for those who already paid ?
The tagline makes the name make sense. When thinking about the name it seemed like it should be relevant but I just couldn't put my finger on what it was trying to conjure up.
Dedicated hosting @ Softlayer. Sad to see they are "merging" with The Planet.
Seriously, any story with "world's smallest monkey" in the headline pretty much gets an automatic upvote from me. Assuming, of course, it really is the world's smallest monkey.
I Was a Strange Loop
Yeah, it's not valid, because it's an appeal-to-reverse-authority. And to top it off, that authority is rooted in snootiness, which is my least favorite form of bogus authority.

If you have something to say, say it. Reddit's probably irrelevant, and for the record, for any population, there's a lot of people smarter than you and me. Particularly if you and I are engaging in lazy categorization.
I converted the PDF to .mobi myself and it reads pretty well modulo images and code samples.
Unsurprisingly Huffington Post has turned sketchy information into a ridiculously emotive argument that one's freedom on the internet is at stake.

Exactly like OSNews did about H.264/VP8. The only thing this article didn't have is a selection of people's opinion from twitter.
There are plenty of high-quality waterproof bags you might carry a laptop in.
i don't know anything about investing, but why would VCs invest in a company if they only expect to just get their money back? can a VC investing a series C or D get more than just what they invested?
Tour of a distributed Erlang application
I love this sampling method. I've read both _Exploring Inner Experience_ and _Describing Inner Experience_ by Russel T. Hurlburt and found myself thinking several times "This has so many applications!"

E.g. say someone doesn't know whether to break up with their significant other or not. We could write a web app, let's call it _The Ambivalence Therapist_ that would ping them several times a day asking "What are you thinking at this exact moment" and if they're thinking of their significant other, "How are you feeling towards that person?" Then you could chart how often they're ruminating over the relationship and whether the feelings are positive or negative.

It's a superior method to just a standard questionnaire asking "How do you feel about your relationship?" since most users would only respond with their most recent emotions.
> Being an "old fuddy-duddy," while without a settled meaning, I think basically is a way of saying that an old person is acting childish or unprofessional

Hmm... that's almost exactly the opposite of what I think of when I hear that term. To me it conjures up someone who is overly serious, doesn't have any fun, and doesn't want to let anyone else have fun either.
Well you've conveniently left off a lot of products where they did come from behind and do quite well:
XBox, C++ (remember Borland C++?), C#, Excel, Word, Hyper-V, SQL Server, even Bing has had 13 straight months of growth.

And even WinMo came out and did match their chief competitor at the time, Palm OS.

The problem isn't that they can't make products successful -- Zune makes a profit. It's that they need to make a profit that moves the bottomline, which is hard if you have Windows and Office.
I've always found consolation in a line from one of Oscar Wilde's fairy tales:

"Injustice has parcelled out the world, nor is there equal division of aught save of sorrow."
IIRC, with respect to hypertext as a concept rather than specific HTML specs/implementations, hyperlinks were sometimes envisioned (implemented?) as being bi-directional references. As such, you needed an element on each end of the reference that pointed to the other end.

In thinking of "href" as "head reference", you are providing a URI (possibly also a target URL) from your source document -- the tail -- to the intended destination, the head.

I'm unclear what this looks like from the head's perspective. Is the tail/head distinction absolute, or relative and dependent upon the current document's perspective? If absolute, then the tail might be viewed as the link's instantiator.
Military power law: The equations of body counts
Putting it rather crudely: get your customers online through social media (eyes) and then get them through the door (feet)
If that 90% figure is accurate, that's really fucking depressing.

That's a beautiful looking game. I sure hope they're getting enough sales to make some decent money.
Sounds like a place I'd love to be right now :-(
Fair is more complicated. Mercy is part of fair. And, of course, treating our young and old in a different way than healthy adults is fair.
How The Guardian is pioneering data journalism with free tools
When you need the money, the stress from investors rises to the top.
I deleted mine a few days ago. Hopefully I'll make it through the 14-days where I can re-activate.

## My Facebook Rants:

* __Friends__ - A social network should just sense the people you're interested in and give updates accordingly. This would do away with your creepy co-worker demanding that you be his/her "friend." You wouldn't have to delete, and offend, that kid that you never spoke to in the 5th grade. In fact, Facebook kind of requires that its users adopt a kind of 5th grade mentality towards social interaction. "Will you be my girlfriend?"

OkCupid gets this part right. You can add people as friends but updates from people you've recently stalked show up in your feed automatically. If OkCupid wasn't a dating-oriented site, it wouldn't make a bad social networking site.

* __The e-mails__ - I block Facebook emails on gmail. There really should be a way to opt-out of this. It's annoying.

* __Tagging__ - This seemed neat at first and was what probably made Facebook popular in the Facebook but it was a mistake. When I had Facebook, I just blocked anyone from seeing pictures I was tagged in. If I went to a party or something; I would avoid cameras because I didn't want to have to worry about a picture of me drinking and playing dice in an alley to show up on my wall.

* __Vendor Lock-In__ - You can't download your own profile pictures, status updates, etc without the use of some ephemeral 3rd party tool that probably won't exist for very long.

* __The 14-day re-activation period__ - I quit smoking after 6 years; it was easier.

(Just pretend that HN supports markdown :)
This is a really interesting poll...and I'd love to see hard real numbers of total android and iphone users and the percentage of users that buy apps, since a poll like this might be difficult to get accurate results, as people who have never purchased apps might not respond
95 gene regions linked to plasma cholesterol and triglyceride levels
Somebody has to do something
Have you ever been to Minneapolis? Minneapolis has an incredible network of bikeways and is a place where bike commuting is very popular. Most folks don't do it all winter, but it's doable:
http://www.civiacycles.com/whattowear/

And personal experience as a Milwaueean on my part says biking in the cold feels awesome. You get that great warm-on-the-inside, crisp-on-the-outside feeling. The downside is that it can be sketchy on ill-designed roads.
Learn 80s BASIC in Spanish
Yeah - most of the people pirate because its easy and relatively risk free. They would never think of 'pirating' a car.

Who came up with the term pirating anyway? It adds a glamor that 'stealing' just doesn't have.
More Brain Scans to Detect Future Terrorists
All Things End
The Gateway Drug to Type Programming
Full link: http://www.youtube.com/v/kfEzHdWKOoQ
I call it being ruthlessly resourceful.
It's a problem, but more subtle than that, more systemic, because as others have said there is much value in recruiters too. But systemically it's become an international trade in a commodity (programmers). Obviously this is not confined to programmers, but it's a particular flavor of this very large and fluid international business climate.

I think it shifts much long term risk from businesses to the developer, and in addition provides little social and financial stability for the player with the least to start with, and their communities.

Of course, there advantages, not to disparage those, I have benefited from it, recruiters can be pretty damn good at what they do. I just think that the problems outweigh those.
Deep down these are philosophical concepts, so it should not be surprising that different natural languages developed words with slightly different shades of meaning.

Language may be misleading too. For example, I think that the fair in "fair game" is different from the fair as in "fair society".
The History of Search: a Timeline
"For example let's have this old interview question: find a loop in a linked list with O(1) memory. Here the used language does not matter. I feel the same with almost all algorithms."

Sure, it doesn't matter, as long as you don't actually write the code. When you write the code, the language then matters a great deal. I conjecture that the signal/noise ratio for such an algorithm would be much lower in Java than in Lisp.
C# 1.0? That's really your example of an old fashioned language?
It will be interesting to find out what the 'more standard' language that they decide on will be. With the resurgence of new Lisp-like languages, F# (which is already in wide use at Credit Suisse), and other functional types getting a little more mainstream, I wonder if something like that will be chosen over Java, C++ or C#.
why you have a 30km commute.

Because, if you understand Vancouver, you realize that if you want a house, and don't have millions, you need to live in the burbs. It's just too damn expensive here.

That said, I see it as an issue to be corrected, however that takes time. Sorry, but I'm not raising a family of 4 in a condo, based on the experience of raising a family of 3 in a condo.
I don't think so. A "standard" project is one that complies with zoning regulations and keeps the nutty neighbors happy (which often requires concessions far beyond zoning limits). So we're not talking about market control, we're talking about government policy. Governments set zoning rules. Not markets. Just because markets are involved, doesn't mean that a phenomena is fundamentally a product of a free market.
You should probably mark this article with a tag - [2007] as it is currently about 3 1/2 years old.
The reason in a nutshell: here's Google's revenue formula:

GDP of $NATION

x percentage of commerce transacted online

x percentage of revenue reinvested in customer acquisition

I think they end up with measurable percentages of the world GDP if something doesn't kill search as a usage paradigm.
It's Official: Google Acquires Slide to get social
Ask HN: Review our Web to Mobile Conversion Startup
Hey HN,

Been following HN for more than a year now, and I am completely addicted. I love how like-minded we are in trying to resolve/help each others, from technical, business or even personal side.

I have a new venture that we are currently launching called WebtoSmartphone.com. It's still in the early stage (on production site), and we have been working on this for quite some times now. No VC/Seed funding, just bootstrapping aside of fulltime jobs + Ramen diet :) It's doing a pretty good job converting most of the websites we own (in our network).

I had the idea for the service based on the need of my firm to convert existing websites to mobile and keeping the mobile site as authentic as possible to the actual website, not a wap-looking site, and hassle-free. There was and is many options on the market and we can see in the near future more and more of those options. Our humble goal is to provide a service that is affordable, pleasant and easy to use and that constantly synchronize your website with the mobile site without having to keep or host two separate versions. This is why we went for "on-the-fly" conversion.

It was a technological challenge, but our developers (Kudos to Gero and Adrian!) did a fantastic job in helping us achieving our challenges.

I (we) need your help to review the following aspects:

1. What do you think of the idea.

2. What do you think of the landing page

3. What do you think of the checkout page

4. What do you think of the process in general

5. Most important is: What can we do better?

There is still work ahead of us in keeping up with the technical optimization side: development, improving conversion speed and Business side: Sales, Marketing, (By the way we are looking for white label partners, so if you are interested for that or just connect with us (we are socal based), please drop us a line to hello@mobileappamerica.com, subject HN :))

This is my first time actually using "Ask HN", all your positives ideas and feedbacks are highly welcomed! We want to create a product that fits YOUR mobile needs.

Thank you in advance.
link: http://www.webtosmartphone.com
I find Ruby really close to CL/Clojure with regard to happily not using design patterns. I usually write pure code and use long method chains -- it mimics the Unix paradigm with small tools connected with pipes. I rarely write proper classes actually and I'm happy with it.

If anobody is interested, I described this style of coding here http://inthephase.org/partial-function-application-in-ruby

I also think that the oo-like call chain:

data.transform1.transform2...transformN

is better readable than:

transformN ...(transform2(transform1(data)))

because the order is transformations is not reversed, so one
sees what's going on with the data in the first pass as he reads, there's no need to mentally reverse the chain. The expressiveness is the same, but the readability of the former wins IMO.
People like like Cool Town Studios (http://www.cooltownstudios.com/) are trying to make financing for non-standard financings easier. But at this point it's like trying to get money for a startup pre-YC, or even pre-VC.

It's a broken, overly conservative market dominated by huge scale investors that want to invest tens of millions at a time. Imagine if instead of dealing with VCs, you had to go straight to LPs and have them give you money for a project.
Most American cities and streetcar suburbs are built at a density where it is very practical to bike. Even many new suburbs are built at a bikable density, though the non-grid/non-connecting infrastructure is often such that trips are twice as long as they should be, and in high-speed traffic.
I'm glad Google had the balls to fire this guy. Judging from the article, I was working with someone similar to this guy. He had a Phd and had been in the business many years. His code was terrible and he acted very childish. The company I was working for at the time did not fire him. He did subsequently leave which was a relief.
I confess http://DuckDuckGo.com seemed to be an admirable but quixotic effort; now I get it. http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/ - remember us when you are rich and famous won't you? ;-)
Pirate, or the term for a "copyright thief" was coined somewhere back in the 1800's I think, by a poet or author describing the people who stole and reprinted his works. Its seems to have stuck though. I know I have the link somewhere to back this up, but cant find it right at the moment
Double_rainbow_engineer();
I spent ten years as a real estate broker and developer. The market wants improvement to zoning codes to reflect current (post 1955) sensibilities. Unfortuneately archaic zoning codes and change-fearing planning and zoning commissions prevent most progressive projects from ever getting off the ground.

There are always exceptions to the rule in some localities...but as a nation... the U.S. is being held back by laws written 50 years ago. Mandatory setbacks (20 ft between buildings, mandatory front and rear yards, minimum number of parking spaces...all practices counterintuitive to effective land use.
I especially liked the joke at the end. It came through as playful dig at one of the key design differences between the languages and was answered in that spirit. Kudos to both of them.
I might have agreed with you once. These days, Google Analytics tracks 2/3 of pages on the Internet. I already know you downloaded it -- if you think you have a legitimate reason to not let me track that you turned it on once, send me an email and I'll be happy to discuss the many benefits of paying Big Freaking Enterprise pricing with you.

I have no desire to do privacy-increasing mechanisms which only help the privacy of pirates, which is what opposition to phone home is (since all legitimate customers left download and purchase logs).
Essay Outline for your Writing Plan
Writing an outline for your essay before starting to write the essay is quite useful as it gives you direction in writing the essay. Essay outline does not allow for any omissions if referred back to frequently. Here is some advice for writing the outline.
Custom Labels Are Valuable Products For Small Businesses
There is no denying that printing labels are valuable products. That is why online label printing company provides the best labels printing service to its valued worldwide cost effectively.
Wow, it took them a decade and billions of dollars in revenues to realize their original, petty goal.

I hope I don't become a famous billionaire astronaut Fields medalist, before I realize my vanity goal of getting a six-pack. That would suck.
Biking by itself is not that dangerous

It is if you are a pedestrian. This is also typical of a cyclist's attitude that their vehicle is the only one that matters; impossible to do any harm - it is most certainly possible for a cyclist to cause an accident between two other vehicles that is caused by their lack of due care. (e.g. car A hits car B instead of hitting cyclist C that is running a red.)

You're suggesting C walks as if nothing happened, I'm suggesting that it is an irresponsible law that allows this.

If you want to drive around in a 2 ton vehicle with the power to kill, you better damn be responsible for it.

I'm not suggesting that a car driver should not be at fault. I'm suggesting that all individuals on the road be held to the same standard.

Also, there is an imbalance in incentives to not get in an accident.

I realize this, which is why I provided my example, specifically. Do you not agree that the same imbalance exists for the driver of the mini?
A software system intended to store and manage a large portion of the data created and used by the members of an organization.

Most of the comments I see here so far are funny, pejorative, and spot-on accurate but the original post asked for a definition.

- a software system: an enterprise application is like a library (as in books) except that instead of books it stores smaller pieces of information - employee names, timecards, purchase orders, etc.

- intended to: because they don't always actually do that

- store and manage: not just store but make provisions for users to add to and look up the data stored there.

- a large portion: because a single spreadsheet shouldn't count. Postings on TheDailyWTF notwithstanding.

- by the members: enterprise apps may involve public-facing information services but if that's all they do then they don't count as enterprise

- of a an organization: not just businesses but schools, governments, and any other groups with a defined membership and purpose.
Greed is probably the motive, but....

I get the feeling no CEO wants to be testifying at a congressional hearing and try to explain that the content some kid saw wasn't created by their company. "This appears in your video game and as we all know (like animation) all video games are for kids" "No sir, that was not created by us....." "You should stop this..."
Just bought it, awesome game.