skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cassandra Syndrome: Knowing that failure is inevitable, but nobody is listening
In death-march projects the developers are often suffering from the cassandra syndrome: They know that the project is doomed to fail, but they gave up on trying to change anything long ago.
Correct, I'm not addressing your argument. What I'm doing is scolding you for highjacking this thread with your simple-minded ideology.

I've always come to this site for interesting and novel ways of looking at the world. What you're offering is neither. We've heard it before.

Perhaps instead of considering all the negative votes as further reinforcement of your views, how about looking at it this way: maybe it's the wisdom of the crowds telling you that your ideology isn't as revolutionary or as brilliant as you think it is, and maybe it's a sign that using HN as a soapbox for it isn't welcome.

This has nothing to do with socialism (or whatever you perceive to be your ideological enemy). It's about the the intellectual value of what you are bringing to the conversation.
Huh?

Rapportive got 10k installs in 24 hours just because an early tester happened to send one tweet about it. (And surely many, many more since then.) That doesn't happen unless you've got a hot product, so I don't understand the sentiment here.
Docco (and its variants) do sort of what you describe:

http://jashkenas.github.com/docco/

I can see its usefulness in documenting test cases.
"The best ideas rarely come from the product manager"

Agreed. A product manager is like a jazz musician. You're a student of established patterns, and pay attention to everyone else on stage (designers, boss, customer support), but when the need arises, you can create something new to wow the audience.
This should perhaps be my last comment on this.

On your first point. I was a student and during that time I had access to all the papers I needed, sufficient papers to get the top grades.

Second, I do not know what profession you are in, computer science is very different from medicine. To start with, the latter requires actual physical stuff, you know, people you can experiment with, or monkeys, and substances, like bleach, and an actual physical space, rather than simply a computer and some time.

I understand that my opinion is in the minority. I understand too that most of you bright smart angels are trying to find loopholes in my reasoning or arguments. I am not however pleased at all with having the entire people of reason and intelligence set against like leaches.

This is a discussion. Not of an adversarial kind, but of a collaborative nature, where people of reason and intelligence try to arrive at a conclusion, rather than win one over. If I gather this wrong, then that is my bad. My intention however was to suggest as to how things taking in consideration practical matters, matters of principle, matters of a complex nature and combined by my own self, derives at simply copying a journal article and putting it on your web page to be no different than my buying the application you sell and putting it on my web page for free for all others to use as they please.

If reason is dead in this place and what counts is the "I am right", then that is fine.

Long Live Liberty of Choice.
Neat site - I think it's a fun side project. Congrats!
I'd also like to point out that Trumpet is hiring and has a fantastic office environment. If you have any questions feel free to ping me.
A Machine That Turns Plastic Trash Back into Oil
Wow people are sensitive. Of course it's perfectly fine for the Apple apologists to rehash their justifications on each and every instance of this. But for somebody to reaffirm the basic problem with the app store model is deserving of censure. What a place of intelligent debate this is.
His work on compressed sensing is ground-breaking, seriously game-changing stuff. Full-fidelity reconstruction of a data set from sub-Nyquist sampling through the use of a priori information about the data set's properties in some sparse representation... brilliant!
I teach music for a living (theory/voice), and I have to say, I feel like this validates a lot of my techniques when working with students.

Virtually all of my students want to sing pop/rock/etc. music when they first come in. My usual approach is to agree to work primarily in the genre of their choice, but to have some "classical" training as well. I largely due this in order to promote healthy singing, whatever the genre, so that no matter what kind of music they want to sing, they are at least not harming their voices.

Notice that almost all of Friedlander's comments focus on the relaxation of the vocal mechanism ("Like the first singer, he performs with perfect legato, clear diction, and a consistent, organic vibrancy. He arranges his resonance space to create a shallow snarl without setting up any resistance for his breath", etc). I've found that, above all, some classical training seems to reinforce this, allowing students to create resonance rather than merely screaming, to avoid straining at the edge of their ranges, and to approach all genres with a strong grasp of basic music skills. Of course, all of this also improves their basic technique immensely-- pitch, diction, and aural skills are usually highly improved as well.
Turkey & Russia Top Risky Places For Internet Surfers Sierra Leone The Safest
USA is at number nine when it comes to the riskiest places to go online where 1 in 48 people were hit by an attack , UK is ranked 31st (1 in 63), Australia 37th (attack ratio = 1 in 75) while German web surfers come in at number 41 (1 in 83).
Rapportive content itself could be a type of ad. For example when reading an email from someone who has a LinkedIn account Google/Rapportive will display the connection for a small fee per impression from LinkedIn.
"(The research was done on cell cultures; no rhesus monkeys were used in the study.)"
no not really, its not just about starting out fast - more importantly its that you aren't dependent on other types and don't have to hook into the existing code base to pull of something.
This is a protein that monkeys produce naturally, humans too, except HIV has evolved a resistance to the human version. There has been no research involving giving any animal this protein (even monkeys) and seeing results.

This doesn't represent any great progress toward a "cure". You can't administer proteins orally because they will be broken down by the immune system. If people start injecting monkey proteins into their bloodstream their immune systems are pretty likely to freak out, so they'd have to go on immuno-suppressive therapy, which rather defeats the point and may be far too dangerous to attempt with HIV in play. As likely as not, if this research is to come to anything (sans magical ultimate control over human genetics and immune reaction) it'll come from development of a drug that mimics the active site of this protein.

In short, we have not the slightest clue today whether this track of research will produce results in the form of effective treatments for HIV infection or whether it will come to nothing.
Jobs is a terrible example. If he founded a company he'd be a finger snap from surrounding himself with an A-List tech team, the likes of which SV VCs only dream about. It's the fact that he could find the talent if he needed it that the valuation would obviously be greater than 0. Your point is moot.
Well, in theory you don't have to deal with established company garbage ... but startup problems can be far worse (after all an established company has shown some level of competence to get there). And you can have a much greater effect, opportunities to do things right or at least OK instead of trying to fix up stuff that was done wrong long ago.

But the post-SarBox "more work for less compensation" trade off is anything but attractive, and to bring this back to NYC, it's clear it's one of the areas that don't particularly respect hackers (I suspect most are that way (the D.C. area is) and places like Boston and Silicon Valley are the exceptions).
"only now you and not the user has taken the decision to block those ads"

Actually the user does make the decision to block those ads. I don't care much for the ads in Gmail but never overcame my inertia to even think of installing an adblocker. Along comes Rapportive, which promises to offer me something useful and hey presto, my inertia is overcome.

In the end the user makes the choice and that is as it should be. It shouldn't be up to the user to worry about how Gmail does (or does not) make money.
I should point out that it wasn't a serious suggestion! I was just trying to think of practical uses for the hack. I didn't think my other idea of networked street fighter, were the victor was able cast the vote on behalf of the loser, would hold much water on HN.
AVG mentioned some web security tips: log off from webmail when using public or your friends PC, and backup you data when you carry a laptop!

What would be your advice? mine is use a MAC or Linux and ditch windows :P
I'd agree that's not rich, but plenty of people can and do survive on that.

Obviously it varies from area to area, but 35% of households in the US make under 30,000 a year. And that's not all just twenty-two year-olds fresh out of school.

The thing is, whenever this comes up on a tech site, software engineers don't realize how much money they really do make. If you look at the median household income anywhere, it's shockingly low. ( $38,000 in NYC? $60,000 in San Fran proper? )

I guarantee that if most people here looked at the median income in their region, their jaws would drop at the thought of families getting by on that. But somehow they are.

(Not that this has anything to do with FU money. It's just a pet peeve of mine whenever 'money needed to live' comes up in a group of highly-skilled highly-paid people, and they don't realize how good they have it.)
Facebook is down. What might be the reason?
I completely agree. I watched the movie thinking to myself every now and again "OK when's the full on mind fuck coming?" but it never really came, not for me anyway. Afterwards when I heard or read people talking about how confusing or hard to follow the movie was, I began to wonder if perhaps there was some huge extra layer of complexity to Inception that just went totally over my head. A bit more time has passed now and I don't think there was.

I still very much liked the movie though.
Excellent list; no battery-killing "task killers", for once!
Everybody should read the great post "The Treacherous Optimization" about `grep` at http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/archives/2006/05/30/old-age-a....
"Emergency Maintenance" seems to be a pretty broad get out of jail free card to me. I trust the Zencoder guys aren't going to try and weasel out of their commitments (and this SLA is probably better than most), but if you're having downtime for almost any reason, wont you be doing "Emergency Maintenance" to bring the site back up?
heh. It's a startup trying to tap the REAL VIDEO STREAMING market.

seriously?
Actually, I like it. API seems simple too. I have a forum where I like to go through every single new post; would be useful for this (right now my solution is middle clicking a ton of tiny "arrow representing updated posts" images).

Definitely needs a STOP button, though; stopping the current page using my browser didn't stop it from preloading.

Works fine in Opera, by the way.
"In the last 40 years (between 1967 and 2007), median wages have only gone up US$10000 (from 40k to 50k)."

That figure that you're citing is IN CONSTANT 2003 DOLLARS.

The nominal median household income in 1967, without adjusting for inflation, was $7,260.87. [1] So a "middle class" income has increased from $7,260 to $50,000 in 40 years.

Hopefully this clarification will make the author's nicey-nice spreadsheet make sense now.

[1] http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/househ...
OpenStudy (MIT OCW peer-study partner) gains early traction
Hey Ramit, for reason #1, I thought paypal also does credit card processing aswell?
Cool, but inaccurate. This is completely missing the 4th level dream that Cobb, Ariadne, and Fischer go into in the bunker.
I have to scroll down several lines just to see any text.

Also, hi Nat.
> started giving people whipped-cream inside your store because it improves the users experience...

I think in this analogy, he'd be right outside my window, not in my store. As you say, I'm not selling whipped cream to begin with.

> after all, none of the ones buying ice-cream were buying chocolate anyway?

If my customers weren't buying the chocolate then why am I stocking it? Clearly, there's something for me to learn here from the guy outside my window. Perhaps I should have a chat with him and see what we can do together. After all, the more people that come by my shop, the more opportunities I have to sell them ice lollies.
Haha, it's a feature!
This change seems very much in line with the GNOME philosophy. It would _greatly_ simplify theme creation.
Facebook uses HipHop to convert PHP to C++
The benefit of doing your design in a Readme over doing it on a whiteboard or elsewhere is that it becomes a nice piece of documentation sitting right there in the root of the project. The first place you look for an explanation of what the project does and how to use it. Everybody wins!
Originally posted in blog comment:

Indeed, we originally had this idea back in 2004 (pre-AJAX craze), which led to the creation of NOLOH (http://www.noloh.com), available to the public since 2009 (commercial since 2005, public beta in 2008).

NOLOH allows you to create your website/WebApp in a single tier and then NOLOH will output your application in a "single page". Furthermore, it takes care of bookmarking, back button, and rendering to search engines transparently to the developer. No additional pages necessary. It also handles all the client-server communication allowing your application to be consistently lightweight and on-demand.

It was very interesting reading this, as the beginning matches closely with certain portions of our original business plan. Ahh, nostalgia.

Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of NOLOH
That's a full third of my repos. :)
Based on years of research,observations and trials, the most effective, legitimate and simply way i have identified to becoming wealthy is rather simply, straight forward and with little risk to your existing routine. And it is no other than leveraging. leveraging is the age old proven strategy of gaining wealth that has been and is still in practice from over 2,000 years ago. Even Jesus used leveraging to execute his successful ministry. Leveraging when understood and properly engaged can make you wealthy in no time. And I mean in as little as a few years
Why are web browsers reporting this information back to Mozilla in the first place?
It depends on your idea of yachts and fancy cars.

My dream boat is one of these: http://yachtpals.com/files/userimages/laserworlds.jpg
Search and Gmail are only valuable because people use it and because they sell ads.

It takes both users and ads - one without the other is useless.
Thanks very much for the pointers. Looks like a good start.
The Hard Truth About Telepresence Robots
Ask HN: Rapleaf & alternatives?
Hey all,

I'm building a CRM. I would love to pull in social data on a contact in the CRM based on an email address like Rapportive does.

I've checked out Rapleaf but initially they don't seem very transparent about pricing or methods.

Would love to know if there are any alternative APIs I can use for such a service.. or if anyone can shed any more light on Rapleaf and how it works.

thanks
adekunlewealthcoach@wordpress.com
Also see Streeb Greebling's discussion of this article here:

http://streebgreebling.blogspot.com/2010/08/telerobotic-boss...
It's a voluntary study: https://testpilot.mozillalabs.com/testcases/aweeklife
PZ Meyers Heart Surgery
This would make a great alternative to an RSS reader. I've always had two problems with RSS:

1) Design has value. RSS readers strip the aesthetic qualities out of a web page and leave you with sterile text. Given the way some websites have been designed this is sometimes a good thing, but at other times I feel like I'm missing part of the experience.

2) Some sites only offer summary-only RSS feeds for various reasons.

Prldr could solve both of these problems really nicely. Consider expanding the project to allow uploading an OPML file, and tracking what users have read.
Also somewhat related, if there's a slow vehicle in front of you when you're going down the on-ramp to the interstate -- slow down even more so you have many car lengths to merge.

Nobody else I've ridden with will do this (I've suggested it). Instead, they tailgate the slow car, curse like mad, and then almost cause a wreck when the try to pass the slow car in full-speed traffic as soon as they enter the interstate.

If you leave enough space you can easily get up to interstate speed and pass them quickly and effectively.
My comment: They took it down because people were defacing it actually scored 100 without even being more than slightly technical.
HipHop is going to get a lot less production-ready.
She's a voice teacher. I'm sure you can find, say, some opera connoisseur who hates all other music as a principle, but she's talking about how these singers are using their "instruments", not about what kind of music they're performing.

(the choice of vocalists was a bit pedestrian, though :-)
Please see my other comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1628381

In a nutshell, Gmail business model != Google Search business model. Therefore, the relative importance of revenue streams is different.
> If my customers weren't buying the chocolate then why am I stocking it?

Indeed, so the right conclusion is that chocolate probably was being sold, in spite of what you might theorize about it.
Not working here...
all kinds of things can be turned into income sources if you're serious about them and any good. making money off of poetry and open source is obvious. (not at the sports car level, but below that, sure.)

i'll admit it isn't not immediately obvious to me how you could profit from raising foster kids in a moral fashion, though that does not mean there isn't one.
Well, yes, it's true. My daughter doesn't have 4 extracurricular activities going at once, she has one or two... or sometimes even none at all! The rest of the time, she and her friends just have unstructured play.

And, yes, her clothes will get a bit more expensive as she gets older, but I don't expect my spending there will ever more than double. If she feels that she needs more or fancier clothes, she can get a job to pay for them.
Sorry about that!
I didn't think it would be a problem, but I can see the programming error I made which is causing it.

Normally, when we pull pages from RSS, we have a UUID attached to each, to avoid pulling it again. Since it's scraping HN, it doesn't get those, and isn't behaving nicely.

The reason it pulls the destination page is to get the final link- Too many sites are tinyurl/bit.ly/etc, so I load them to see who I'm dealing with at the end of the day.

I'll generate some sort of Token for those to avoid the problem later tonight.
Thanks, and again, Sorry for the trouble!
I've read through the comments here and I'm really surprised by those that bring up Gmail's 'revenue' streams.

Unless someone from Gmail cares to comment on:
(a) How Gmail handles their P&L
(b) What the main drivers really are
... then anything you read here is speculation. If I've missed something, please do point me to it.

I agree that there may be a separate argument about 'messing with people's sites' on the client side, but that really isn't new.
Take a deep breath - why the world is running out of helium
>On your first point. I was a student and during that time I had access to all the papers I needed, sufficent papers to get the top grades.

Where did you go to school? From my experience yours is most atypical.

I don't sell applications. I configure and make slight modifications to free applications, or applications my employer pays for (and in my experience the ones that charge have negative value from my perspective, while the free ones save me hours of time.) So feel free to copy my code and documentation and put it all online. Those that aren't available online are only closed because I felt my clients/employers wouldn't appreciate their free availability. You would be giving me a great 'out' to give back to the community.

But yes, reason has little purchase in this place. The community has very strong biases and refuses to give time to opposition.

That said, long live liberty.
Meet the Japanese man who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki (2009)
The Mobility Myth
I was a bit scared about what she'd consider the "top 5", but that's actually pretty okay, although I wonder how King Diamond got in there. Not the one known for his singing, and I don't think he's in the best-selling or longest-running band. But it was a different style, and one that at least contains a bit more than sheer endurance (c.f. most growlers).

I was surprised at the high marks Dickenson got. Not that I don't hold him in high esteem personally, but he's the only one where I know of a direct connection to opera singing. It must've been a Freddy Mercury tribute, where he sang Bohemian Rhapsody with Montserrat Cabbalé. And as opposed to her previous duet with Freddy ("Barcelona"), those voices didn't mesh at all.

Really nice article, I always thought that trained opera singers tend to look down upon those doing less "serious" work. Just shows you that there's more than one way to skin a cat, which is why this actually fits nicely into HN.
I doubt these are for running php or other services-more likely acting as a key-value stores (which is what they already used memcached for). See http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fawnproj/ for a cmu research project that did this and produced great perf/watt numbers.
It probably wouldn't be as interesting to as many people if it was vocalists that only true metalheads had heard of.
You cannot scrape their prices because they keep bumping them by a cent for each N tickets (so they can say that "only N seats left for X euro, book now before it's too late" all the time), and also because you cannot reliably reverse engineer all their random fees.
California Measure Would Force State Agencies to Take IOUs for Payments
Why do we refuse to believe Mark Zuckerberg can grow up?
Shameless plug to my favorite toolkit: Qt has had this for ages now: http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.6/stylesheet.html

The Qt guys also have been trying to take this a step further with the declarative UI / QML (basically a tiny DSL for UIs) project:

http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009/05/13/qt-declarative-ui...
Why? [I don't know much about it] Facebook's HipHop JIT transforms PHP to C++ and then they compile it with g++ (or at least that's what they say.) GCC supports ARM already.
Not outside of the United States, Western Europe, and some parts of Asia and South America. What makes you think the same thing (over 50% reduction in GDP and almost ten million excess deaths) that happened following the bankruptcy of the USSR can not happen once the US is unable service its debt any longer?
Paying for College -- The Rich Are Different
Beijing-Tibet highway jam enters its 9th day, spans 100km
Carl Sagan: A Universe Not Made For Us
no school subscribes to all journals a student might want.

I went to a crappy (but huge) state university and they did indeed subscribe to ALL of the journals. My family has a good number of academics and this seems to be the case at any large university, regardless of quality.
Fair point. We'll reconsider the wording of that one. The expected use case is something like a critical security patch - we might have to bring a service down for a security update - but that is pretty broad.
> But few things do work the way one might naively think.

A bit cryptic. Can you elaborate?
Valve: no plans to bring Steam to Linux
Easy. Set up a non-profit dedicated to the foster kids' well being. Accept donations and funding from other organisations. Pay yourself a wage as an administrator. Sell the movie rights and retire rich!