skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Assuming McArdle isn't secretly worried about Marx's declining rate of profit in capitalism, then maybe returns to capital are falling because returns to labor are increasing. That should be good news for people who work for a living -- unless the only workers capturing those gains are in the boardroom. Uh oh.

BTW, average (geometric) returns for the US have been around 6% after inflation. The global average is about 5%. No country has averaged as high as 8%.

http://chrismealy.blogspot.com/2009/08/real-return-on-stocks...

In the old days (before the 1970s), with expensive brokers, expensive commissions, no index funds, and taxes incurred from rebalancing, just getting the average market return easily could have eaten up 2% of your return. It shouldn't surprise people that stock returns would fall as costs fell. The after-expenses return was never as high as those historical charts suggested.
When I get a speeding ticket, normally I bitch and moan. This time is different. I have spent the last 5 years solving this problem. I hope you like it.
Can we start the move to Google Checkout and Amazon Payments? They both charge the same amount of fees as PayPal yet do not have draconian policies and downright retarded treatment of their customers
"The entrepreneurs that impress me the most are the ones that are completely rabid about solving a need"

So what impresses you the most about developers who join startups?
So what happens six months after Apple greenlights a hypothetical "easter eggs can bypass stated rules" policy?

Do we see app instructions listing urls of unlocks right in iTunes? Is that a good place to be, with just about every new/updated app having an obtuse post-install 'enabling' process to achieve advertised features? (advertised, if not in iTunes, certainly by every review or word-of-mouth referral)

That doesn't sound like a remotely desirable situation to me. If a particular edge of policy is dumb, we should argue for it to be changed. Or flat-out argue for the removal of review.

Arguing for Easter Egg Bypass sounds like defeated bargaining.
Feedback for Phactory - A Database Factory for PHP Unit Tests
I'm surprised they completely failed to mention http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Sp... which is probably the classical text on the matter (and they appear to reinvent quite a lot of the same theories)
TeX itself has a really nice 'architecture' for a 'stack' with dynamic storage allocation and scope of names.
Effort Estimates vs. Commitments
Some thoughts on effort estimates vs. commitments in software development
I've heard this argument many times before and I'm well aware of the evolutionary mechanism behind strain resistance. However, I really have to wonder how much of this is just fear-mongering. Do we really believe that biotechnology will not keep ahead of this problem?
Point of protocol here - submitting your own startup idea for critique on HN is a respected tradition but the slightly misleading headline reads like a 3rd party submission.

Most of the ones I see are more like "Show HN: Rate my new MVP building service".
Pushing Our (Tweet) Button
Meteor Shower Peaks Tonight (Aug-12-2010)
Important Details You Should Know Regarding Weight Loss
I released the first public version of Phactory yesterday, and I'd like to get some feedback from developers here on HN.

Phactory was born from a desire to have something like Factory Girl for my day job writing PHP. A couple of my co-workers and I have been using it for a few weeks now, and we're finding it really useful.

If you have time to give it a try, any feedback/criticism would be much appreciated.

What features would you want to see in a library like this?
Here is another example of how PayPal is a bit shady:

Sign into PayPal to send money. If you have a credit card as a payment method and a bank account as a payment method, PayPal will auto select your bank account. That's fine, except when you change your payment method from the default bank account to your credit card. A confirmation page comes up and tries to change your selection back to your bank account. There are two options: Use Bank Account / Use Credit Card. These options are randomly changed back and forth to confuse the user. Even the highlighting of these to option (which one is yellow) is randomized to make you accidently select the Bank Account option.
Because all things that are the same stay the same right?
Ask HN: Would you give $5 to a wikibook project about github?
I would, for one.
because build scripts have hard-coded, absolute paths
We usually define these paths as constants in a config file (e.g. LIB_DIR, STATIC_DIR, etc.) and then use the constants in the rest of the code so that if you need to change it in your dev environment it's easy. It also makes it easy if we wanted to move those directories completely (e.g. to a different mount).
Apologies. The original headline said something to the tune of "I built this website in less than 2 hours" and I made this change. I don't think I'm allowed to change it again. Maybe an admin can make this change.
Clojure 1.2 RC3 released
The phone application comes to the forefront and the volume buttons then function normally under that context. Do you have an iPhone?
I've got twin babies of 15 months, a full time job and bootstrapping a business. There is only one rule for me: keep your priorities straight. Here are my priorities

#1: Family / Relationship
#2: Work
#3: Business
#4: Personal Time / Relaxation
#5: Side Work / Consulting
The technology isn't noteworthy but the marketing effort is. Surely there are tons of would-be non-technical-cofounders on Twitter drinking the Lean Startup / MVP koolaid who would jump at the chance to get their idea online overnight.

Maybe they could get it done by calling your or going on elance, but the copy and presentation of this site gets them closer to yes by speaking in today's startup lingo.
Can I access this in LaTeX in any friendly way? What I want to do is replicate the namespace features of modern dynamic languages, so I can "import" macro names into files, and then collate this collection of files somehow to produce the whole document, in a way that doesn't lead to name conflicts.
Yes. I feel much better right now knowing that Social Security is bankrupt and its obligations will only ever be met through the federal government's printing presses. Aren't we all having fun now?
There was also a time when "product" meant something mass-produced in a factory so expensive that the number of products on the market was tiny, and all it took to get consumers to buy anything was a bit of TV advertising.

These days just getting people to even try out your product is a major accomplishment. Sure, they haven't built a successful company yet, but for the capital expenditure they've made so far they are way ahead of the curve. What's the point of having a clear plan about how you will make money if it ultimately fails like most startups? You are going to need to pivot anyway, so the focus on users over revenue is totally a reasonable strategy. Even beyond the getting bought exit, the value of an audience is tremendous. Look at how 37signals transitioned from a dime-a-dozen agency to a very profitable company based largely on it's blog reach within the target market.
البورصة المصرية مباشر
Your finger will already be resting on the volume buttons, just like they naturally would on any point and shoot camera. You just compress the button to take the picture and it won't jiggle. You're not awkwardly pressing down on the button with the tip of your finger like you're pressing an elevator button.
Ask HN: Regular Expression to Remove Script Tags and Their Contents?
Hello,

I am currently working on a Ruby web parser for reading webpages and extracting the text only. I am using the following lines of code to strip scripts, styling, and tags:

cleaned = html.gsub(/<[^(>|\/)]*?script.*?>[^<]*?<.*?\/script.*?>/, "")
cleaned = cleaned.gsub(/<[^(>|\/)]*?style.*?>[^<]*?<.*?\/style.*?>/, "")
cleaned = cleaned.gsub(/<\/?[^>]*>/, "")

The only problem is that if the script tag contains a less than sign such as:

<script type='text/javascript'>
var foo=3;
if(foo<5) {
alert("bar")
}
</script>

In that case the first regular expression for removing script tags and their contents does not work. It all boils down to the part of the regular expression:

[^<]*?

I can't seem to figure out a better way though to make the star grab everything in a lazy fashion (in other words don't match the first opening script tag with the last opening tag in the HTML).

Has anyone else worked around this problem in the past? Are there any regular expression ninjas who might be able to lend a hand?

I thank you in advance for your time and consideration.
Sorry, PG, but I believe your post is an example of "dancing 'round and 'round and suppose while the secret sits in the middle and knows".

The most important thing is, the CEO very much needs to know nearly everything important for his company. For a company heavily involved in software, the CEO needs to understand software in general and the software of his company in particular.

In a startup, he needs to be able to understand all the software, in detail, from the 'architecture' down to line by line. So, for this he needs to have enough knowledge of computing to understand, evaluate, and construct the architecture and have good knowledge of all the crucial 'software tools'. So, if the software is in C++ and Apache, then the CEO needs to understand these two. Windows? He needs to understand some or all of .NET, the CLR, C#, Visual Basic .NET, ADO.NET, ASP.NET, etc.

Now we come to a curious point: For the CEO to acquire that knowledge takes more of his time than writing the code, given the knowledge. So, really, once the CEO has learned to write the code, he can, for less than the time investment in learning the tools, just go ahead and write the code. He should.

Since the CEO wrote the code, maybe that makes his company a 'hacker culture'? I hope not: There are things more important than ASP.NET, etc. While knowing ASP.NET might be necessary, it is not sufficient. Just because the CEO drives his car does not make him a chauffeur. Instead, the software is just part of his job.

Next, my experience is that the best software developers and, in particular, the ones best at the most technical details of software, and the best at software 'architecture' are not 'hackers' and are not even 'computer scientists' but are mathematicians who took out a few afternoons to understand, say, AVL trees, extensible hashing, Cartesian trees, minimum spanning trees, DeRemer's LALR parsing, and monotone locking protocols but also understand dynamic programming, linear programming on networks, Lagrangian relaxation and non-linear duality, Poisson and Markov processes, and martingales. Sorry 'bout that!

With that technical knowledge and work, he has to pay close attention to the product, customers, revenue, hiring, etc.

Not so strange.
Your point is well taken, but I have never seen a comment, here or elsewhere, where someone lauded the great PayPal service or the quick conflict resolution. It's always about being blindsided. Folks, if you have GOOD stories, those are worth posting for balance.
http://www.wikibooks.org/

http://www.github.com/

EDIT: ok, http://progit.org/book/index.html

As the more general question: How does a unified docs project sit with the open source community?
Frankly, this seems like complete bullshit to me. It is simply the contact form for a normal, run off the mill PHP developer. Nothing against PHP developers having web sites, but it is not HN stuff.

Also, I strongly dislike that the site evokes the impression of being associated with Eric Ries, Steve Blank and Brant & Patrick - I am guessing that is not really the case.
Ten Principles for Open Data
The Sunlight Foundation is proposing ten dimensions along which the openness of a data offering can be judged. They're hoping for feedback.
Not only Haskell: F#, OCaml, Erlang and Scala too. While Lispers were basking in the 50-year-old glow of being 30 years ahead once, all of these languages leapfrogged them and they don't even know it.
Customer service with PayPal is a hundred times better than customer service with Google, in my experience. I've never had a problem getting CS on the phone with PayPal. Google is a different story.
You lost me at "NT Insider". Seriously another argument against Agile twisted to make sense by someone who doesn't really understand the first thing about Agile.

That said I think a lot of "agilists" have already moved on from things like Scrum and even XP to concepts like Lean. The difference between Agile and traditional PM approaches is that Agile is evolutionary and focused on making continuous improvements to the process based on corrective feedback and communication. Traditional PM is based on a enforcing a set system from the top down that "just works" which in my opinion is a fantasy.
If you can really crank these out this quickly you should be able to get 5 things in your portfolio within a week. If there's a startup scene where you live you could make some friends by offering them your services at a heavily discounted rate.

Putting up a nice portfolio will allow you to get customers online. Getting local customers only requires a good pitch.
If you've got a bunch of math, I'd say stick with CM, unless you want to reconfigure a bunch of stuff. For mostly text, set with sturdy fonts, you can use the "Serif" and "Sans" in Ubuntu with \usepackage{bera}, which stands for B[itstream] [V]era, but without the Bitstream(R) Vera(TM) name. Larger x-height, greater stroke-width, a solid look all around.
The reason that Google is choking on this 30M pageview/month site is because analytics for a 30M pageview/month site is hard.

Things like unique visitor, unique referer, unique whatever tracking just explode when you have to compare each IP address you get with 20M-entry list.

If you try to do it on your webserver, you'll have a 3 hour window each day where a significant portion of your CPU and Memory is not available for serving web traffic. If you try to do it elsewhere, you get to ship 20gb daily logfiles around.

It's just not any fun. Which is why even Google has difficulty with it.

Running your own analytics is great for relatively small sites. For big ones it starts to bog down once you hit a certain size.
I thought "spooky action at a distance" was nearly as popular (and its context nearly as often misunderstood) as "God doesn't play dice."
The story isn't about that though. The story is about how someone created an Easter Egg and Apple took the app down--exactly like they said they would.

If this story was "$500K worth of users want to use the volume button to take pictures, but Apple won't let us" now you have a story that might actually be worthy. Until then, no story.

I'm getting awfully annoyed at all these stories about how the App Store sucks, and the approval process sucks. Non-developers don't care about this. They buy the apps that are approved and follow Apple's guidelines. Apple doesn't care because its vetting process protects its users, and its brand. Only developers care. And if developers care, they shouldn't waste their time writing software for the platform. And they shouldn't use it either. Force Apple to change by voting against them. Until then, they'll only see it as good exposure, and find another app that users will tolerate.
Yesterday, my Thinkpad running Windows 7 hybernated during sleep. It never woke up from that hybernation. So I did hard reset and it didn't boot (it did boot after second hard reset).

What does it have common with your situation? Sometimes shit happens, things go wrong and there is some lurking bug that is hard to duplicate. You wasted few minutes of your time editing xorg.conf. I wasted few minutes rebooting and holding breath. Neither it does make any system bad, nor is it any ground for generalizations. Just hard to find bug.
Why TBD.com is better executed than most news sites
20 Foursquare apps that show how it could become a platform
I've always liked the cheeky footer at The Setup†:

"This is yet another waferbaby snafu. Follow us on Twitter, subscribe to the feed, or grab the Ruby source code (if you're into that sort of thing)."

"Another website by Bob" isn't quite as catchy but it's moving in the right direction.

† http://usesthis.com/
DreamIt Demo Day 2010 - Winner For Best Company?
"ninjas" <- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1591573

Anyway, try the Ruby port of Python's BeautifulSoup: http://www.crummy.com/software/RubyfulSoup/
The story isn't really about them freezing the account. I think everyone accepts that PayPal needs to be vigilant against fraud, given the amount they deal with. The story is that that legitimate customers are pretty much powerless to unfreeze their accounts; there's no due process, no oversight, and no accountability. If PayPal decides to screw you, that's it. Game over. Thanks for the free money.
http://www.visibone.com/colorblind/
What efficiency would a charity need to have to be acceptable for you? Get a number in mind then move on to the next paragraph.

Ok, now, I submit for you consideration the possibility that you just picked a number quite inconsistent with your own behavior, that is, the other efficiencies which you accept as a matter of course. As an example, the efficiency of internal combustion engines.
Why? I call myself a programmer. Calling myself anything else anything else (e.g., "developer") seems to be sweeping the issue of what my actual work product is under the rug. My work product is working code. Not design documents. Not architectural diagrams. Code. This goes double for my actual job title ("software engineer"; software is hardly an engineering discipline!)

Let me put it this way: When writing a novel, there's a whole host of activity that goes on besides putting words on paper (or in a word processor). Yet we still call writers writers.
This kind of story about PayPal is extremely common.
Build very precise streams of data from Twitter tweets
To arrive at the scary 40% required savings rate, the article assumes an accumulation period (working lifetime) of 30 years. How many people do you know who started working at 30 and retired at 60?
Think of it this way: If Warren Buffet had given away half of the money he had started out with before making his fortune, he might not have made nearly as much or become rich at all. Money we have now is always worth more than money we have later.

It helps to think about it in the extreme cases. I could give all my income and time away today, but it would seriously hinder my ability to become rich later. I could also just give 1 dollar and 1 hour per year now and feel a little less guilty but it wouldn't really be helping anybody now would it.

Now perhaps there is some magical number that I should adhere to that will be the perfect mix of perserving my own time and money and helping others (and assuaging my guilt), but I think it'd be hard to pin down. That said, I'm taking the logical approach that one should aim toward giving the maximum amount of time and effort that one can possibly give. Without question that money and time comes towards the end of one's career.

To put it in perspective, the amount of money both Gates and Buffet are donating to charity not only dwarfs the amount that all of the HN users give, it makes it mathematically insignificant. In the end, we're all just buying indulgences.
He said 'truth or stunt?' not 'truth xor stunt?'!
I conclude that the marvelous scheme was, in fact, slightly non-marvelous.
ninjas

I was thinking of the XKCD comic where the hero swings in to save the day with his regular expression. ;)

I will look at Beautiful Soup and see if that can work as an alternate technique.

Thank you.
I've been using Gluster in a production environment for over a year now with an absolutely perfect track record. I use it for the "centralized" filesystem for a virtualization cluster (using KVM). Currently, I have three virt hosts setup with dual NICs each to get 2Gbps throughput, sharing a RAID1-style filesystem (with priorities to the local copy for r/w speed).

I was (and still am) fairly skeptical about using Gluster in this role for a production environment having come from a fiber/SAN shop before. However, I gained a lot of faith in Gluster after a non-incident a few months back. One of our core switches fell offline (the one all three virt hosts were plugged into) and remained offline for about an hour I believe. When the switch was brought back online, Gluster managed to put everything back together and continue operation without any human intervention. All 20 or so VMs were still humming along like nothing had ever happened. fsck confirmed this.

Even in the case of a failure (which I've not experienced), your data is still sitting on disk (at least that's how it is with RAID1, I don't know how it's RAID0 setup works) -- you'll always have access to the raw files Gluster uses.
Tuning the social web
The facts contradict you, at least here in France.

Here, we have 3 major carriers. None gives you a public IP, and each block most ports (except http, pop3 and such —smtp is blocked, of course). They may have Web neutrality, but Net neutrality is a distant dream.

On the land line, however, you have your public IP, and some providers don't even block smtp. The situation there is much better. Even if you take the low bandwidth into account.

I can't how this will evolve, but for now, the emergency seems to be the wireless.
Yeah, this is the sort of thing that happens when a business decides that it will simply terminate communication with a customer without explanation. We don't get to hear their side of the story. The customer has no idea what's going on. That's a pretty bad business practice.

I've heard enough insane PayPal stories from enough people that I trust such that I have no trouble believing pinksoda.
Nintendo is specifically targeting the mainstream consumer. Apple likes being a premium brand. Not supporting 1080p doesn't fit with being a premium product.
Hexxeh Releases Chrome OS Vanilla - Straight From Chromium
Point of the story is....if I want security/privacy...don't use anything?

Seriously though, interesting way to illustrate what someone says.
We were explicitly taught in pre-natal class that babies have to learn anew how to go to sleep once they're out of the womb, it's not something that's inborn.

For example, we were told it's hugely important to lay your baby down in their cribs as they're drifting off to sleep, but still just slightly awake, so they build the association between crib and going to sleep; if you only lay them down after they're asleep, this tends to have repercussions (e.g. because of the lack of the association, you're not equipping your baby to be able to go back to sleep if they randomly wake up).

As I recall, there is actually a fair bit of research behind this, but admittedly it's been 6 yrs so I don't remember all the details.

White noise is helpful, but falls into the same type of category.
Cameron Moll on Good vs. Great Design (video)
I think that PayPal has the same problem as many police departments. The police spend so much time dealing with criminals and looking for criminals, that soon everyone that isn't a police officer looks and feels like a criminal.

PayPal seems to have the same issue with fraudsters. They spend the majority of their time dealing with fraud and looking for fraud (the good transactions are automated and therefore abstracted away from human eyes for the most part) that everything that comes across their desk looks like fraud and is treated as guilty until proven innocent (hey, just like the IRS!). The assumption probably is that 'the system' detects fraud and 'the system' is practically infallible, so when it flags something as fraud they need mountains of evidence to prove that 'the system' is wrong (because 'the system' is perfect, didn't you know?).