skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry to hear about wanting a name that a seller refuses to sell. I'm in a similar situation with a neighbor who has several acres that adjoin my ranch. I've offered way above market value for the land that doesn't even have access to a public road, but he still won't sell. It's definitely frustrating.

Defining "legitimate use" is such a slippery slope. With automatic content generation becoming so advanced today, it's become increasingly difficult for both search engines and humans to tell spam from legitimate content. It's even worse when some of the spam and scraping is more useful that someone's 5 year old blog with pictures of their pets.
I think Asus had blown it already with no assistance from the iPad. They've been moving away from their core market for some time - the original 7" Eee was a hit, but now it seems to have been entirely replaced by larger, more expensive models.

They've diluted their brand significantly too; originally they were quite distinct from laptops but now there's a lot of crossover. And far too many models - a local comparison site pulls up 35 different Asus netbook models - how am I meant to know the difference between a 1000HA, 1008HA, 1000HE...

I doubt it's such a big deal to most people, but their move towards Windows really puts me off too. Having the original Eee run Linux was a big draw to me.
This article makes a lot of the "brain development" of people in their 20s. But that can't have changed too much over one or two generations, so I wouldn't look to it to try to explain why people in their 20s are taking longer to "grow up" than they did 50 years ago...

I think so much of this is just economic. My brother lived with a room mate until he was 34. He was an assistant professor at SF State, and his roomate was a high school teacher.

I know two men in their sixties (they are parents of my friends) who raised their children in San Francisco. They were... drumroll... a professor at SF state and a high school teacher. They both purchased houses in their late 20s/early 30s and got on with it.

Maybe the professions I've chosen are unrepresentative samples, maybe the city I live in is unusual for a high cost of housing... but in the early 70s, professors at state and school teachers could buy houses in SF. Now, they can afford to rent a 2br house with a roomate.

There's yer trouble.
Do people complain that they can't let their kids look at the App Store because of fart apps?
Honest question: does it take less energy to ship the book across the ocean or to print a new one (with a home laser printer and ordinary paper).
Happstack: A Haskell Web Framework
In our experience (examprofessor.com) setting more severe limits to our free plan boosted paid sales 2x, which was very welcome. We started with a free plan, one exam, unlimited students. Later, we limited the free plan to one exam w/ 10 students and many of our clients jumped up to a paid plan.

I think if you do have a free plan, seriously limit features in a manner that encourages clients to upgrade.
Somedays I just wish we had used Postscript with hyperlinks instead of HTML/CSS/Javascript.
Right, that's my point ... stop trying to get references from past employers and start getting them from past co-workers and subordinates. If this comment thread really did influence the decision, that seems like an opportunity.
Heres 2 random ones I had the last few days:

Roll your own self serve ad system. Much like how reddit lets you bid for ads on their site, let me install a system like that, complete with keyword bidding and the like. Im well aware of things like buy/sell ads, but those are for banner ads across the span of a time frame- not targeted really.

Also, A new analytics system which instead of focusing on already done things, it makes sense of ups and downs. For instance, it could tell me:
Traffic is slightly up today- Keywords X Y and Z are sending increased traffic

Traffic is slightly down today - Abandonment on page X is up 150%

etc..
Technically you can make 1 million $ in revenue and not have $1000 in profits.
This is not necessarily a crazy claim to make.

Mental differences are objective, but mental disorders are culturally relative.

This doesn't diminish the mental pain that such a difference can cause in a specific culture, but it's not absolute. It's more of a round peg / square hole kind of thing.
Here's a link to the Techcrunch comments mentioned in the NYT blog post: http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/06/skype-recruits-yahoo-engine...
yes...but it doesn't work the other way...you can't have $1,000 in revenue and $1 million in profits.
I might be interested in buying this if I could see the freaking hardware and software requirements of the phone. Even a list of phones that work with it would be a start.

Is this definitely a real product and not some kind of spoof? How can people be sure when they order them (as so many of you seem to have done) if you don't know the hardware and software requirements?
I've never more than dabbled in the functional programming world. I've been pretty happy professionally in Ruby for the last 5 years. However, if there's one thing that I learned, it's that unit testing is an invaluable sanity check but a poor substitute for mathematical rigor.

I see my trajectory over the next 5 years to involve learning Haskell well enough to know the functional approach for a much wider set of problems, but then falling back to Clojure professionally because, you know, I gotta get shit done.
"If you don't have a free plan, you will never get my business."

I love your honesty. Clearly you are not the type of customer he is looking for.
I agree with the author wholeheartedly.

I always assumed these were experimental of the "just 'cause I can" type. Trying to show off how far CSS can go, but not really in a realistic usage.

I read here though that people believe this is a useful type of use. Without getting into a flame-war if it is or isn't, I think the answer there is SVG: that should be just perfect for these sort of usage.
Windows was free (preinstalled) for end users since at least 3.0 IIRC. Adsense is essentially free for publishers. Both it and Adsense have huge positive network effects. Not to say that they weren't best products on the market when they got traction, but still.
As an iPhone developer, I don't want to compete with a developer that also happens to oversee the entire App Store approval process.
I wish the article would be a little more specific about what kind of fat they're talking about. Saturated? Polyunsaturated? Raw? Processed?

For example, if they're talking about processed polyunsaturated fat, it's probably a leap to apply the conclusions to raw butter.
I'm eagerly awaiting the binary release of ClojureCLR.
Isn't that just an ultra-portable PC, rather than a netbook? I thought the whole point of a netbook is that it was very cheap but underpowered (though more than enough for the internet, hence its name).
What happens if only a few people respond including somebody like the guy being criticised in the article? That way you'll potentially end up having to defend yourself against unwarranted criticism to the hiring company, or simply find they mysteriously don't hire you through no fault of your own.

"A friend" had a guy bully him from day 1 and who kept at him the whole time he was there, until the bully eventually left the company under mysterious circumstances following him making a physical threat of violence against my friend in the workplace. What's to stop a guy like that marking my friend down and making him look shit?

Additionally my friend works in a highly politicised environment where, by trying to do the right thing has pissed people off, not because he sucks, but because he cares - what if they vote too?

The problem is with these systems is that you can never be sure who's right and whether other things are at play there.

We'd all like everybody to love us, for the nasty pieces of work to be found out and the good people to be rewarded, but that very often isn't the case, and we shouldn't base a powerful assessment of somebody on an ideal.
He can earn his equity by the hour :)
Uh, I don't know what it's like where you live, but where I am "real estate investors" are some of the shadier individuals in society...
Thanks, I am going to re-install.
So you're proposing 80 total websites with $500/yr profit each should actually be costing their fictional single owner $40k?
Venting actually makes you more aggressive
This is pretty cool! Now I can send myself notifications from my Linux boxes without paying AT&T their SMS tax.
Do people complain that they can't let their kids look at the App Store because of Scheme apps or apps that superimpose the time over an image? Don't see the relevance. Even for objectionable apps, you can just block them.
Sure. This probably will turn into a blog entry, but here's the gist:

4 medium sized linodes, divided as follows:
1 app: unicorn (rails), nginx
1 db: redis, solr, mysql
2 worker: resque workers (both ruby/rails node.js) & the crawler

The crawler is written in node.js, backed by redis. When it finds a new page, it downloads it to shared local storage and adds a task to a resque queue monitored by the rails workers. They add a row to a mysql table that represents the permanent record of the page, use nokogiri to extract the body content and any metadata, index it into solr, delete the local copy, and upload the page to an s3 archive. When you request the page, rails asks solr.
To be honest it's not like Asus was doing so great before the netbook. I am happy for them 'cause it shows that there is a reward out there for PC makers that try to innovate (ASUS went up in market share a lot), but I think that expecting a series of home-runs was a bit optimistic given the company hasn't changed (or has it?).

Here is to Asus and the hope that they didn't give up after the Eee Keyboard: some you win, and some you lose, Asus! Keep trying!!! :)
What an uninformative article. Basically it resumes to

1. Farmville uses Membase.

2. Membase is related to memcached.

You have to go to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Membase) to find some relevant info (seemingly picked up from marketing materials, though). Such as: they seem to aim for easy installation and management.
You are correct to use median income, which was about $6500 in 1970, making $3000 = 46% of median income in that year [1]. You are also correct to say that taxes went up, by about 140% (according to Elizabeth Warren's data [3]).

In any case, this only makes the paradox I highlighted more puzzling. College is more expensive, and yet college attendance per capita is up 40% over 1970 [2]. If real income is flat, then people must be giving up other goods and services to attend college. And yet, people seem to be consuming more goods and services of all sorts in addition to college.

This doesn't make sense. I suspect that real income is being incorrectly calculated.

[1] See the table here, and do an inflaction calculations backwards to see that the average income was $6500 in 1970. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...

[2] Combine data from here http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98 with the fact that the population went up about 50% between 1970 and today.

[3] I'm citing Warren's data and ignoring her opinions. Some people seem to get confused when I do this, so I'll be really explicit about it.
Can you explain the point he is making in "Are we there yet"? I have watched it but I didn't really get a different viewpoint on state and identity. That could be because I already had the same viewpoint, but I doubt that.
Why Nothing Will "Save" Print Media
That, I freely admit, is a controversial title. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make it any less true.
You already do. It's called Apple. If they want, they can just ban your app and make their own version. You just have to trust that they won't.
I would hesitate to call it "mature".
Real Or Fake? (Fake.)
Good Friends Come and Go, But Enemies will always stay
I would imagine (or at least I hope) that Oracle was fully aware when they bought Sun that their company philosophy was going to clash with Sun's and they would have lost a lot of bright people. It's a pity, but I don't think it came as a surprise to them.
Update: We've setup a list at MailChimp and updated the signup form on the main website (http://www.weeklyandroid.com) to point to the new home of our mailing list :)
That does seem to be the point of netbooks, although I never really understood the reasoning behind it. It's underpowered but you are supposed to surf the net with it? If there's one program that is a performance and memory hog, it's a web browser.
Plenty of people blow $1000 per year on a hobby, though it's usually cars and parts, camera lenses, ski gear, or greens fees instead of domain names.
How to Email a Complete Web Page From Any Browser
Here are the best options I found for emailing full web pages from a browser. My personal favorite is to first clean up the page with the Readability bookmarklet. Please let me know if you have other solutions.
I dont know the guy, nor have I heard of him, but I suspect that many of the comments in the TC article are from the same person. Alot of the language is consistent, as are phrases and usernames chosen.

Also, If you go back a page or 2, practically all the comments are positive and from people leaving their names. Why not ask techcrunch if they are all from the same IP?
Notice how nobody in that thread that is negative will give their name. They're all well aware that it may have consequences, they might even be fakes. If you anonymize the reports you take responsibility. This can turn in to libel quite rapidly, especially if it has a direct impact on someone being hired or not.

TC is a public forum and in spite of the 'Possibly due to TechCrunch commenters?' above I doubt that would hold water because skype execs have not solicited TC to be their vetting agency.

But if they were and the vetting agency would give a 'no go' on what is anonymous hearsay then it would quickly turn in to something ugly.
Judging by the TC comments, it sounds like this guy strategically immunized himself from criticism, up until the dam burst.
Sorry, but the NYT does not do fact checking for their articles or blog posts. The New York Times Magazine factchecks their long feature stories, but that's it.
All 37 Twinkie Ingredients Beautifully Photographed
I'm fairly interested in cognitive science in general, but this was the first time I'd heard of any sort of scientific study of venting your anger.

When I get angry at my computer (which is the only thing I usually get angry at :) I often tend to hit whatever big solid object is nearby. However recently I've tried to switch to going to the gym. It might be even better to just lay down and relax for a while, but I find it a good excuse to get some exercise, and I take a nice relaxing shower after I'm done.
Go with a trial instead of a free plan. If your users find value in your service, they'll buy. Put a feedback form on the page that notifies them their trial has ended. If they don't pay, they might complain and give you feedback.

Also, you can collect emails with a free/trial plan, so use that to get feedback and/or try to sell to them again after you pivot on the initial feedback.
Tell HN: Saving the moment. An unobtrusive always-on audio capture device.
First time poster, long time fan of HN here.

After a recent impromptu brainstorming session a friend said something to the effect of "Damn it! It would have been amazing if that had been recorded!".

We've heard similar complaints over the years in numerous settings and decided to try to solve this pain in a rather unconventional way.

We're developing beautiful industrial designed lamp with a high quality omnidirectional microphone that is continuously recording audio in a circular buffer. When something interesting happens touching the lamp causes that moment in time to be marked as "interesting", to be played back and saved at a computer.

We're calling it the IdeaLamp. We plan to use it to capture our future brainstorming sessions, crazy conversations and random inspired moments at our office.

You'll be able to learn more about the project here as we progress:
http://theidealamp.com
> If there's one program that is a performance and memory hog, it's Flash video.

FTFY, based on my experience with my Eee 1005HA. Web's fine, but the world hurts when I try to view Flash video. Doubling the RAM to 2 GB helped with everything else. To be fair, I haven't tried to view any other video on this thing...
When I was a young child, Australians did not eat much Sushi either.

http://www.thebeijinger.com/blog/2009/08/26/Raw-Power-Beijin...
Yeah there are a bunch of different ways to start Clojure with a REPL and/or swank server running. Maven, Leiningen, and cake are all build tools that also do dependency management - great when you're working on a complex project but have some amount of setup overhead for their project descriptors. cljr is a different option that lets you start a REPL anywhere, with no project descriptor, and also takes care of setting up your JVM classpath with any dependencies you've installed via 'cljr install'.

All of these tools encourage running the JVM outside of emacs, rather than as an inferior-lisp, and have some command line option that starts a swank server on a specified port. After that you can just do M-x slime-connect and get hacking as usual =)
I don't see the relevance.

Spending $1000 a year for a domain is $1000 that gets cut from profits and $990 more than I'm willing to spend on a domain that's on standby until I have the time to work on my idea.

On the other hand I should have the first-mover advantage, because yes, I thought about that name before somebody else did.

Properties in general are cheap for first-movers ... I can think of dozens of places where I can buy land from uninhabited areas with a breath-taking mountains panorama ... for small prices like $5-$20 per square meter.

Prices get high sooner or later due to infrastructure developments, or increased demand, but thought luck, it's my property now.

And yes, for land you pay taxes ... but you're receiving services in return, like water, electricity, public roads, hospitals, etc...

So you want that domain name so badly?
Pay me a sum I cannot refuse.

Sure it will cost you more than $1000, but that's life for you, and you shouldn't have a problem if your project is not a hobby :)
I think some of the problems you describe are inherent to HR process in general. People still go have to go to interviews, explain their qualifications and (often) explain why they left past jobs. This would just be another data point.

My original thought is that this would be for executive/managerial jobs. Big dollar, recruiter kind of positions.

Plus, it would probably be best only applying a "bottom-up" approach ... get feedback from former co-workers or subordinates–not from former bosses.

Finally, don't charge and don't submit a report if there aren't enough responses to be statistically significant (or at least warn them). If 1 out of 2 people say this guys a tool, who knows. But if 78 out of 85 say it, it's probably trustworthy, no?
Î really love clojure, but this article is not a good plaidoyer, for a lots of reasons, the first and most pregnant being the ability of the author to vastly traverse subject he is probably not an expert about.

> Functional programming, of the kind shown in SICP, is a way to write code that does not manage the state of variables, and could therefore be partitioned to run in parallel on as many processors as you like

This is kind of true, but totally misleading, because very few tasks are actually easily paralelizable this way. When you stumble on one, you know it, and replacing map with pmap certainly is a joyful exercise, but this kind of parallelization are easy to do in any languages. The hard parts are those when you need to access shared state across threads. The facilities that clojure provide in this respect, while innovative and enlightening , have benefits that largely remain to be proven.

> languages like F# and Scala which have a complexity and "quirkiness" reminiscent of C++

Erm, sorry, what, F# reminiscent of C++, did you even try to read some code written in F# ? F# has one of the tersest syntax you're likely to find in any language. As an ML descendant it does already have a very clean syntax, and the addition of significant whitespace only adds to that.

> You can write Clojure code that derives from Java classes and overrides Java methods. In short, if you can do it in Java, you can do it in Clojure.

Yeah sure, but in practice, most people that says that didn't ever had to really handle a non trivial project with java interaction in it. I did. And frankly it can get ugly. It's good to have it, but ideally, all should be encapsulated in idiomatic clojure wrappers. While this is not that hard because java interaction is very well thought, it's a long and boring process, and when you're in the middle of a project and just needs some bit of functionnality that isn't in a clojure lib (and trust me there are still a lot of those), you tend to just use the java interop in place. And then you get back and read your code, and you cry.

In short, this is just a rehashing of what you usually hear about clojure, but with no insight of real use. My (uninformed) guess, is that the author probably didn't use clojure a lot, and frankly, this kind of stereotyped talk gets old.
1. Religious discrimination in hiring is illegal in most places. (Unless you are hiring for a religious organization or equivalent.)

2. It seems a bit extreme to regard the vast majority of the human race as "mentally ill". Misinformed or uneducated I could understand more easily, even though I happen to be religious myself.
This is bad advice. It discourages only the people that do not find value in your app to eventually pay.

I've been running a 30 day trial with my app since 2003, we've grown double digits every year.
The title made my day.
I thought it was about the game engine/editor
N is a Number: A Portrait of Paul Erdös
Seriously...I didn't read this article originally, but now looking at the comments--wow. He got raked over the coals. Must be a great guy to have so a motivated fan base.
It is not a great article overall. It is well written, and conveys a lot of enthusiasm, but has no insightfull/new content in it. I've read every clojure news and article for six months, and this just basically rehashes every "I love clojure article" i ever read.
Actual source: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174
Plus you can't actually encrypt anything with your fingerprint, you can only compare it with an earlier training version.
Topics in high-performance messaging
I'm really curious if that is the case. It looks like you're right though. That would suck for this guy, but if he really is as bad as the comments make him seem....maybe he deserved it.
Also, Yahoo messenger is trash. Full of bots and spam. Maybe if he actually had a product he could point to that was defensible this wouldn't be a problem.
Page Fold animation with CSS 3D transforms
People praising him on the thread are anonymous too.

Does taking money to solicit feedback and return a report really make you a vetting agency? (assuming you're not actually saying "You shouldn't hire this guy").

I'm not disagreeing with you–I see the libel point. I just find it odd that people tread so lightly here, while at the same time I can fairly easily trash a business on Yelp/Craigslist/Angieslist/TechCrunch/Wherever with varying degrees of anonymity.

EDIT: By "here" I meant the HR/hiring space, not HN ... sorry for the confusion.
>>> In that case, the only way OO can be defended is in the same manner as any other game or discipline

Brilliant meta-analysis of abstract patterns and narratives.