skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your header links wrap, I think it's grid5 (960gs right?) is not big enough to contain them (I browse at +2 font-size).

On the homepage I'd move the books-on-a-shelf graphic alongside the title "TextbookCentral" then bump up the listings to be alongside the black box.

Could you use Amazon (or similar) to grab an image for each book and maybe link as a "buy new" option. You could then check your logs for most searched for books and add listings for those as buy links with a call for action of "have this book, why not sell it here" or whatever.

If you have long summer breaks between "years" as we do in the UK then I think you missed the boat. You need to catch the exiting students to build up listings and have advertising going out with info for freshers.
Thank you. The original name I was looking for was geometric.com, but a domain squatter has it and I don't want to deal with that on principle.
It was designed by evolution to give babies the best nutrition.

From Wiki: These benefits include; lowered risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), increased intelligence, decreased likelihood of contracting middle ear infections, cold, and flu bugs, decreased risk of some cancers such as childhood leukemia, lower risk of childhood onset diabetes, decreased risk of asthma and eczema, decreased dental problems, decreased risk of obesity later in life, and decreased risk of developing psychological disorders.

For me, the fact that it's natural gives it a lot of appeal. I'm sure there are psychological benefits too - being breastfed is something babies instinctively want, so I'd bet it'd result in a calmer baby.

And all other substitutes are just that - substitutes. Baby formula was designed to emulate breastmilk; why not choose the original?
It's a bug, but only with the front-end, only one vote actually gets remembered.
In order to do it, they should have never ported Solaris to x86.
With HTML5, you can.
* maybe when one has filled in the URL, tested the ping, if he checks the "page load" or "web server latency" button, you could load the results right away without letting us do the extra step to click "enter" again.
* it would be interesting if you would keep the history per link and graph the performance at the different point in time where people tested the ping.
Are modern women somehow fighting against nature in
the way they breastfeed? Have the "natural skills" been
lost in the modern lifestyle?

No to the first, maybe to the second.

Evolution A/B testing only works at the level where something influences the ability of successive generations to survive. It also selects for whatever barely works.

As far as evolution is concerned, there is no difference between it being easy to do, and learnable. If all women end up learning (say, for other more experienced mothers), then there's nothing for evolution to select for.

It's unfortunate for the woman who has trouble at first (like my wife, for instance) but it clearly isn't evolutionarily significant.
Perhaps he could sniff IP to get geolocation info and put callouts for the 3 closest Uni's or something ...?
My wife pledged first that she will breastfed our daughter for at least 1.5 year, then until 2 years, and now it's 26th month already and she still persevered to this day. It is surely a sacrifice for the mother, but very important for the health of the child.
Well, every development job I've had has been a ten am start. Most people I know out here(finance, advertising, marketing) start a ten too. Then again all of my buddies that work in finance work in boutique agencies so maybe it's different at the big shops.
Is this how block monitors will work in our Aldous Huxley future? Turn reality into reality TV, and make it a game to call in the crime?
> there's potential gains to be had by using both

Only if your ATR crosses the .6 boundary frequently. If it consistently remains on either side, the performance would be worse at the cost of added complexity.

I agree with your assumption we need more instrumentation. I strongly suspect my ATRs are consistently closer to zero, but I never looked under the hood to check.

Also, the ATR should vary according to what you are serving. Longer streams would drive the ATR up while serving shorter bursts would drive it down.
very cool idea. I really like the logo :)
The choices are either to ignore him and continue irrespective of his feedback or modify my business plan and try something different (possibly in a totally different sector).

Ignoring him is just irresponsible. If he's got facts and figures, you need to deal with them. Analyze them. Look for hidden assumptions. If your perspective is different than his, try to figure out why.

The fact that you and a well-known blogger in your industry disagree is not a reason (by itself) to pivot-- but it is a wake-up call.
Essentially what TheSOB88 said.

I honestly have no intention of getting into a debate about the issue but at this point in time, a minimal amount of research will present you with an overwhelming number of proven benefits that breastfeeding has over bottle feeding.

There are definitely cons, and there are big cons but most of the cons are relating to the mother and not the baby.
I have yet to hear of any proven, significantly negative effect breastfeeding has on a baby.
I just started a newsletter list for guys with girlfriends. Make your Girlfriend Happy: http://makeyourgirlfriendhappy.com we give you useful reminders about your anniversary and her birthday plus weekly ideas to help make her happy.

Let me know what you think.
Small remark: your map of Europe appears to be strechted out along the Y-axis. Is that possible? Or is it just using an unfamiliar projection?
Nice - I suppose one feature would be to implement a RESTFUL api that returns JSON or XML results so it could be used programatically - sys admins could write cron jobs to test their servers etc...

or it could be integrated into a software build process / test framework (continuum, cruise control etc) and sites could be tested automatically upon deployment...
What is he saying? This reads like the ramblings of a mad man, of a recording of a therapy session in a mental institution. There is nothing to attack or praise because it's empty rhetoric, although in the mind of the author undoubtedly profound and insightful. I don't know the website this is on, but I don't see why this is a 'letter of note' - at best it's a 'letter by someone somewhat famous'. That's one way to fill a website I guess.
When we were expecting parents, attending our birthing classes, one night was dedicated to breastfeeding, and taught by a lactation consultant, basically a nurse specializing in breastfeeding.

She told a story about Nestle and the third world that was rather chilling:

The company, at some point, donated a large amount of formula to some third world country or other. (Sorry, it's been 15 years, so the details are sketchy). Short story: they convinced a lot of very poor women to use the formula. There was enough formula to last until their own breastmilk dried up. Nestle didn't send any more, and these women had no means to get more, and now, no breastmilk either. Lots of babies died.
Black Techies Find Niche Online
I think all our children should be sent to retraining camps and made to work fifteen-hour days assembling electronics. That will create true grit and allow them to value whatever small rewards later life will give them.

I get your larger point, that a sour-grapes excuse of "Well, school was booooring" doesn't necessarily indicate a successful individual - but just because losers also hate the system doesn't mean the system actually works for any real purpose.
Maybe, maybe not, but for the time and cost investment, it's not a good proposition if you aren't going to make money off of it. And, at any rate, if you're not going to use the qualification bestowed, why not simply take part time classes and take on the subjects that interest you most as oppossed to taking the curriculum mandated for a degree?
Yes, I struggled with how to have the user choose which test to run. In the end I went with something that would allow the page to work even if JavaScript is disabled. But I will certainly be revisiting this portion of it to minimize the number of clicks it takes.
Also, yes, I do keep a history of all the measurements. That is going to be a part of it.
I'm working on my social networking site where users can share music playlist, photos, exchange messages, real- time chat ala Facebook, and schedule their daily task. http://www.jamafriend.com
I am using whatever Google Charts API produces and at their maximum size (440x220 px). It may be that they use a strange projection.
Ask HN: The best university degree(s) for a budding entrepreneur/engineer?
I'll be finishing high school in a few months and I've been struggling to choose a degree that will best prepare me to start a company in the future, in addition to networking with smart/driven people who I can work with to get there.

I've been following the "start-up" scene on and off for a little under a year, and I seem to have an affinity for "entregineers", people who not only understand advanced scientific/engineering concepts, but also help bring them to the world (Elon Musk, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison).

I'm a high achieving student, so entry for most degrees isn't a problem for me.

I have been leaning towards double degrees which have a Commerce/Law component and some form of engineering (Mechatronics/Aerospace/Mechanical/Electrical). I'm unsure as to which one to choose though.

As "Hacker News" is a haven for start-up founders, many with engineering or business degrees (or both), I thought of no better cohort to pose this question to.

What degree (or degrees) would you choose to best prepare one to become an "entregineer"?
I think Norvig looks at Facebook as a lost opportunity for data mining: Facebook isn't used as a recommendation engine any more than Google is used as an ad company, yet all user actions always gets piped back to ad results. If John is friends with Sally (who is kind of cute, and kind of a photography geek, and recently bought a good midrange point-and-shoot), John subconsciously wants that brand to show up somewhere in the recommendations, even if it is too expensive. But Google doesn't know that John's friends have bought that camera, because who posts what camera they bought on their Google profile? If Facebook has the ad instead of Google, then Facebook might get the all-important click.
Unless you have some sort of NDA, why don't you just discuss your actual idea and its criticism here? You will most likely not get much useful help by being so vague.

If the blogger is giving facts and figures to say why your idea will fail, then he is either pointing to improvements in your execution plan or other more important problems that you should be solving instead. Surely, he's not claiming that there are no unsolved problems in your whole chosen area of work?
That is certainly another idea I considered. On top of that I could use this infrastructure to create a web monitoring service that is subscription-based.
Yeah lots of students graduate and think they know everything and are worth a lot. Especially computer science graduates.
One common remark on HN seems to be that high school is not challenging/interesting. One way to fix that would be to put pupils into different schools according to their ability. Several European countries do it that way, usually around age 12.
Your web page doesn't answer the one obvious question, "Why wouldn't I just use Amazon Marketplace?" So, why wouldn't I? If you have something to offer than Amazon doesn't, highlight it prominently on the main page. If not, then I don't see how you're going to compete.
Whoa! really? Which school?
>I'm challenging you to provide the data that apparently is still missing that proves that this was not 'a localhost test'.<

I think what he was saying in relation to it being not 'a localhost test' is that it isn't a test that touches the network stack, even to the loopback interface -- you seem to be equating localhost with anything that happens on a single local machine regardless of whether it has anything to do with the network or not. A difference in use of terminology, perhaps.
Read like link bait. Please change the title. Battery charging is not in the realm of secrets and mysteries.
This reminds me of The Onion's "High-School Senior Marvels At What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been" http://www.theonion.com/articles/highschool-senior-marvels-a...
how many friends do you know who say "oh i'm so much smarter than all these tools who got good grades" but then they can never actually finish any one of their 'divinely-inspired' projects because they quit as soon as some part gets tedious or boring?

There certainly are lazy people claiming to be smarter than those with good grades.

But in my experience, the students with perfect grades are far more likely to excel at school than at anything else.

When I started teaching at NYU, I ran into a lot of these students. They typically rocked my calculus 1-2 classes; they took calculus in high school but wanted to maintain a 4.0 GPA so they took it again in college.

Even in school, past a certain point, it doesn't serve them well. In Calc 3 or Linear Algebra (two more advanced classes I've taught), you must think for yourself to pass, rather than just applying the differentiation algorithm. That's when the 4.0's get pwned.

It gets even worse when I interview them for a job and ask them an open ended question: "Looking at XXX data, how can you estimate YYY? What other data would be useful?"

Many of them are reasonably smart. But they've spent years preparing themselves for schooling, not for actually building things. I'll take the kid with lower grades + open source project any day .
He is pretty pissed about it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONSDGdnb9Yk
Absolutely - people could create a 'named' suite of test/pings via a web interface, then trigger that named test or suite of tests via the API: pingbrigade.com/api/run/?userKey=XXX&suite=foo

...I would look for a business case before investing too much time! :-)
My theory about this is that much collective knowlege of breastfeeding was lost during the years when baby formula was in vogue. I expect this to change, so that, by the time today's baby girls become mothers, they will be able to breastfeed without having to turn to professional "lacation consultants", relying on reestablished collective knowledge and the experience of their own mothers instead.
My Biggest Fear as a Developer
Note that multiple part time positions of the right sort allow someone to be an independent contractor (1099 vs. W2).

In addition to the notes by exline, how many people out there know both ASP.net and the iPhone?

For that matter, the inconsistent treatment of both (ASP/.net vs. .net/ASP and failing to properly capitalize the P the second time you use it) is be a major turn-off to me. The general lack of attention to detail in your advertisement says a lot of things about your firm, all bad.
What makes anyone think this stopped TwitPic from losing users to Posterous?

I would imagine any user sophisticated enough to think of moving, would have some opinions about data liberation and services that try to lock them in.

On the contrary, I would imagine this puts more users on notice that TwitPic is locking users' own data in. Such users will begin looking for other places to post pics to.
Ask HN: What's the best money-making scheme you ever came up with?
Inspired by this thread on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/cx3lm/whats_the_best_way_youve_cheated_the_system/

Bone fida business model or devious hack - how much did you make and how long did it take?
Many reasons why it would make sense from a consumer point of view, but only a couple (mostly fairly weak) reasons why it makes sense for Amazon to do it. (Maybe #2, #6, #8 [a repeat of #2], #11 [a repeat of #2 an #8], and the only compelling one is #13 and #14 [really the same].)

A list of 15 "reasons" that boils down to about one and a half. Amazon is killing the category; even if they are going to buy them, why not let B&N flail longer and buy them for pennies on the dollar instead of quarters?

The first line said it best: "This is all about the money" As it should be, and because of that, there's no reason for Amazon to pounce, IMO.
The PDF is linked to at http://forum.icann.org/lists/jobs-phased-allocation/msg00316.... As of this moment, the link is now http://forum.icann.org/lists/jobs-phased-allocation/pdf6cGj5... - I'm not sure if they rotate the URLs to prevent direct-linking or if the original changed.

The issue is important because .jobs was originally sold, and marketed, as a guaranteed legitimate source of jobs because only real, verified companies can buy a .jobs - so if you go to microsoft.jobs, you know it will only shows jobs from Microsoft because Microsoft owns it. The new proposal completely does away with this requirement. It would be analogous to stealthily making the Ford Fusion no longer a hybrid.

What's worse is that the registrar will get first choice on who gets to buy which domain for how much - which would be a first for any TLD and set a dangerous precedent.

A better written piece explaining why this is an important issue (and why rejecting it is important to protecting jobseekers from fraud) is available at http://www.ere.net/2010/07/15/open-letter-to-icann-reject-th...
Why is this story getting any upvotes?
Thanks. You reminded me why I need to block HN access. It becomes poisonous quickly.
I've got an AWESOME scheme, but I don't want to post it publicly. It's worked really well for me though.

If you want, I'll send you a CD with complete instructions, just shoot $10 to my PayPal account to cover S&H. brk@notoriousbrk.com
In this case it is, since Apple devices don't charge from USB in the regular way.
Yes, look at what Twitter has done to shorteners, vs. bit.ly's continued business: bit.ly offers great reporting, use with services besides Twitter, and bit.ly pro to integrate your own domain. So bit.ly remains the shortener of choice for professionals.
I have a huge problem with that. It sickens me to think of categorising children/pupils (and even human beings for that matter) on any basis. There are many objections that I have against it, but the most pressing is "This will lead to no interdisciplinary or inter-school-of-thought discussions."

We need to understand how we categorize students. The fist thing that comes in anybodies mind is ability. But how do you measure ability? Everyone has a particular area of work she/he is good at. Then how will you measure their ability. I may am not be good with spellings, but may be I can write better prose. He may not be able to master the subjects of Mechanical Engineering but my god can he modify a car.

If you put children in different schools based on there ability in different fields, then that would need to field stagnations. Sometimes a short story would inspire a few innovations in neuroscience. We need to have discussions between people from different fields.

Also if you make another standardized test to test pupils abilities would that not have the same result. They would be just as bored, but with better people around them. Who is to ensure that they would not be bored by what they are taught.

Also such a process would lead to elitism, similar to what we have in the current academia. If you are not from your countries best college, then you would have a bloody hard time to get research grants and such.
Cool. I think a well-defined algorithm for defining a flagged character is important, to get cross-platform/application support and to validate the algo. (Any bug in the algo is a possible security hole, moreso if people become to trust that any dodgy characters are highlighted).

An exposed API to handle UTF8 strings to get count and/or indices of flagged chars would also be useful. Perhaps it could work as an extension to ICU?

http://site.icu-project.org/

If nothing else, the "change language within a word" should use a unicode-sane definition of 'word', which ICU would give you.

Once you have the two pieces above, adding the colouring etc should be reasonably straightforward. But it'd be a shame if the two pieces above weren't factored out - since I don't think the widespread adoption would follow otherwise.
I would take his criticism and categorize it as part of the "social-beta-test" for the future of your life as an entrepreneur. You had an idea, you got sophisticated outside criticism that upped the ante of your awareness.

Now you need to take this new awareness and run with it.

Sometimes the shit just hurts. :)
This is a video.

Definitely worth checking out for fans of the Wipeout games. For the unfamiliar: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tK1WSxNN4aU
Great. More cargo-cult nonsense from the touchy-feely crowd.

Hey, teenagers, here's a clue: life sucks unless you make it otherwise. Nothing in this article was in the very least insightful.. it did, however, score pretty well in the "Personality Cult" department.
Pagination vs automatic content load
What I've been saying all along is something very simple.

If the ATR > 0.6, poll wins. If ATR < 0.6, epoll wins.

You left out the part where you accused people who advocate using epoll of being bullshitting touts who perpetuate fallacies:

"why the touted benefits of epoll and most of the information out there is mostly bullshit because of some falacies people seem to have about epoll (mostly perpetuated by epoll's proponents)."

Which you proceeded to back up with a strawman argument about claims of O(1) performance and a rant about how graphs that show that epoll accomplishes exactly what epoll is designed to accomplish "flat out get it wrong".

You're using "ATR" to find the inflection point in the performance curve from epoll's constant overhead per active fd, for the purpose of micro-optimizing Mongrel2. That's fine. But when you claim that people who just use epoll because it solves the problem they actually need solved are making decisions based on "bullshit", you shouldn't act so surprised that they don't respond positively.
Hard to see how a seller in the U.K. would get 10 or more copies a month and a half before the publication date. The price before shipping is also quite high.

I too smell something wrong.

You could try sending him a message asking him to explain it.
sure. I'll need you to PP me $20 to cover transaction costs though
This reminded me of information theory. The idea of entropy in information - that if you can predict the next 0 or 1 with better than 50% certainty, you can compress that information (or in this case, you could have designed a better sequence of experiments).

I do think it's worth differentiating between types of failure, however. You don't want 50% of your experiments failing in the sense of failing to give you an answer in either direction (i.e. being inconclusive).

And this leaves aside the topic (covered in the article) of the more serious kinds of failure - of live code etc. You probably don't want that happening 50% of the time.
Exploring MongoDB and an N-Tier MVC 2.0 architecture using C#
Pingbrigade brings it home for me
I would do electronics, computer science & mathematical statistics, but then get some deep subject knowledge in a soft domain that really interests you (e.g. med, biochem, genetics, pharmacology, neuroscience etc).

There are soooo many problems out there just waiting to be solved by skilled engineers/mathematicians/statisticians, but the sad thing is that most of these people have no subject matter knowledge, and therefore are ignorant of the opportunities. Likewise the subject matter experts without the statistical/engineering background are unable to grasp what could be done, so never even contemplate the questions. Even "top" researchers in some of my fields are completely unaware of the possibilities. They are ignorant and unaware of it, and sadly even collaborations do not seem to help.

There's gold in the intersections of disciplines.

Edit: But, this is only one approach, and assumes that you want to break new scientific ground as well as make money.