skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How about a word ration economy for brevity/value/time saving?
My personal model for clear and concise communication is Stephen Hawking; perhaps his proficiency at getting to the point is based on the fact that it takes a lot of effort for him to communicate, and so he, unlike most people, is forced to think about what is worth saying and the best way to say it.

Having said that, perhaps it's time to entertain the idea of a word economy on Hacker News, ie, some sort of daily/weekly "word count account" ... perhaps based on seniority/points ... that would counterbalance the compulsive counter-comment inspiring nature of this service.

Debate is sometimes good; scrolling down and down and down to get past endless trails of points/counter-points of exponentially decreasing marginal value to the original post seems like an exercise in obsessive-compulsive disorder reinforcement.

Surely having a set amount of words one can use in any given day for comments/responses would inspire more "on-point" and brief commentary that would make numerous editing features of this site redundant?

It's still free speech, just limited, self-edited free speech.

Flame away ...
How to reboot RSS
Binary space partitioning
One nice side effect of a descriptive title is that it makes it much easier for those of us who use bookmarking services and things like the Hacker News bookmarlket to tag your article since we don't have to come-up with a descriptive title. People are lazy and lazy people around the world are rejoicing! :-)
Not really, that is most of what Gearbox does, ports and expansion packs. They are used to working other peoples code and using other peoples tools to create games.
This is a feature, not a bug. If you don't want your personal device to fall under your organization's security policy, don't connect it to your organization's Exchange (or any other) servers.

It's saved our bacon in regards to stolen devices a few times.
A duplicate of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1686261.
Functional TDD: Codd is my Copilot
I can't imagine all the bad press iOS 4 got for its performance on the 3G had nothing to do with it, even if the study tracked the 3GS.
Wind Power Problems for Texas
The catch is that we have to reveal a lot of personal information before the ads can become highly targeted.

Not necessarily, unless that also includes revealing a lot of personal information by virtue of the site you're visiting. For example, a site focused on a specific sports team could fairly easily target their advertising to their typical user, and be showing ads that are actually relevant to their users.
Not according to John Oliver; every pre-arranged interviewee knows exactly who they will be speaking with and what their schtick is. Man-on-the-street interviewees are told they're with The Daily Show, but it's on them to know what that is.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1222483...
Interestingly enough, I had the exact opposite experience as a Canadian camping in the US this summer. The customs at the US was fantastic, it was our first time visiting, and my 11 year old daughter was very nervous. The customs office asked questions in a nice way, smiled at my daughter and told her not to be so nervous, indicated that we'd have a great time where we were going, and generally was very friendly and welcoming.

Coming back into Canada, the customs agent was not nearly as friendly. Perhaps we looked a little scruffy after a week of camping, but the questions were more brusque and suspicious.
> The problem that the posts points out is that there's no warning about this "contract" whatsoever.

But the post wrongly blames Microsoft and Exchange, when it's the person's workplace he should be blaming for supposedly not having clear enough policies.
You my friend, have some serious fig issues and have created the most compelling case I have ever heard for NOT planting a fig tree, ever.
OK, I think I see the misunderstand / impedance mis-match.

It seems to me that you're seeing all these small tests as preparation for the big tests. You seem to see the small tests as requiring cramming, and that the results from them hang over you. You seem to see them as boxing you in, converting you to a number.

That's not how it's supposed to go.

The point is not to have the tests arising from the culture of the large, life determining tests. The point is to have small, fast, fun tests where it's possible to get an answer wrong and not care. It should be possible to try something off-the-wall in a test, and should it work you get a reward, and if it doesn't work it doesn't really matter. Do it differently next time.

All the points you make are valid, but I think they are still to one side of the intention of the article, and other discussions. I agree entirely that pure "teaching to the test" and "the one true answer - or else" are deeply destructive to the attitudes that are more creative, inventive, and possible more useful in the real world. But I don't think that's the point.

There's a shed-load of stuff for kids to learn, and while exploratory, enabled learning can be effective, it can also be patchy and slow. It can be deep, but it often isn't wide, and it doesn't serve all children equally well.

And to some extent, that's the point. No single system fits every teacher-student pair, and yet that's what people tend to end up with. Teachers are forced to follow the latest fad, even if it doesn't suit their style. Children are exposed to current "best practice" with little of no feedback.

It's the feedback that counts.

If tests are normal, fun, expected and de rigueur then the kids get less stressed, and the teachers get more feedback about their understanding and abilities. Then the best teachers can adapt their presentation to the kids.

It's a tool, a technique, an option. It's not a silver bullet. But it's also not what you are arguing against. You are making valid, but different, points.
Hardware companies buying security software companies. Looks like it's the new trend. Now is a good time to own a security software company, but probably too late to start one.
Given that they are being funded by 'investments' from a large corporation in Redmond - not very soon.
Who’s shopping online? [graphic]
For the recipes, the sarcasm, or the intellectual banter?
I am not calling concurrency a fad, I am calling the rush to try hot new concurrency primitives without understanding these basic tradeoffs a fad.

Clojure's concurrency primitives are just wrappers around the same java libs I mention in the post.

For locking, it just matters which code you depend on based on your need. If you need to deal with it yourself, using Clojure's STM is good, since Rich has done the work to wrap the locking. But if you just need a data structure with synchronized access, then you don't even need Clojure's STM. Similar arguments hold for Agents vs Executors.

I am not saying Clojure's concurrency primitives are bad, I am saying we need to understand the basics, and Clojure's primitves are not always necessary or the right solution.
This HN submission suggests that's exactly what is happening: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1681844
2011 FoundupWeek global entrepreneur Fringe Festival -- (interested in helping?)
A foundup (tm) is a founder with an idea for a lean-startup bootstrappn a proof of concept" It's that simple. Foundups are fun and easy!

We are looking for early adapter hacker leaders that want to help with bringing the FW event to their town, city, region, country. The event will kick off in all together at NY/Bos/DC next Spring and travel to 20 countries, taking place in 5 locations each... At each location we will be establishing 10-20 Open Incubators (tm) with 5-10 foundups residents in each, we will set up five 12week long free Foundup Labs educational programs for HS and colleges student. These programs will teach the "Foundup Way"
By the time we do our finally in SF we aim to have over 200,000 foundup ideas on foundups.com and teenfoundups.com and over 10,000 foundups being developed into startups!

I am looking for help... The foundup early adapters and leaders will play a key role managing Open Incubators, and running the Labs educational programming. This is the only post I will be making on here... so it's up to you.

Cheers and good luck,

Michael J. Trout
CEO and Founder
Foundup CORP.
Poll: Sequel or S-Q-L?
I'm just curious how people pronounce the name of the database query language. It seems like most people say Sequel, but I'll occasionally hear someone spell it out.
S-Q-L
TC's 4 million feed subscribers gave you just 3k visits, much much much lower than I'd have expected.
I can't imagine the government authorities would allow this for at least two reasons:

1. safety. What if the jet needs to be evacuated because of an emergency and you're in a window seat and there is a very portly person in the middle seat who happens to be unconscious? Your normal exit path would be blocked and you can't easily climb over the seat in front of you.

2. children and infants: How would a five year old sit in one of these contraptions? How would you take a baby on board?
2011 FoundupWeek global entrepreneur Fringe Festival -- (interested in helping?)
http://younoodle.com/groups/foundupweek

A foundup (tm) is a founder with an idea for a lean-startup bootstrappn a proof of concept" It's that simple. Foundups are fun and easy!

We are looking for early adapter hacker leaders that want to help with bringing the FW event to their town, city, region, country. The event will kick off (all-at-once) in NY/Bos/DC next Spring and travel to 20 countries, taking place in 5 locations each... At each location we will be establishing 10-20 Open Incubators (tm) with 5-10 foundups residents in each, we will set up five 12week long free Foundup Labs educational programs for HS and colleges student. These programs will teach the "Foundup Way"
By the time we do our finale in SF we aim to have over 200,000 foundup ideas on foundups.com and teenfoundups.com and over 10,000 foundups being developed into startups!

I am looking for help... foundup early adapters and leaders will play a key role being paid to managing Open Incubators, and being paid to running the Labs educational programming. They will also in other ways. This is the only post I will be making on it here... so it's up to you. We have a Foundup Meetup group in NY... join it.

Cheers and good luck with your foundups and startups,

Michael J. Trout
CEO and Founder
Foundup CORP.
So what would happen if a large company in Redmond hired/contracted a bunch of ex-Sun engineers to make a java->.Net compiler so all this stuff ran on the CLR

As Oracle makes it harder and harder to use the JVM people are forced into the waiting arms of MSFT
Sorry, but where's the free version? http://pulseapp.com/signup
For that matter, why not just pile sleeping slots on top of each others bunk bed style.

Those seats look horrible for leg circulation.
1st Google Instant, then YouTube & GMaps...Now ShopStyle Instant
An appropriate problem for Programmer's Day?
I am not presenting breakthrough material here. I wrote this because there is still a lot of confusion about concurrency and people looking for hot new solutions without understanding the basic tradeoffs.
Ryanair and its plans for £5 standing only tickets:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/7864921/Ryanair...
Wait - you're saying that a man should be able to pick up a random piece of meat in a grocery store and be right to expect that congress has made sure it's properly tested for foot-and-mouth disease and other diseases and conditions?
Jacket for MATLAB on HP Z Workstation series
Google Evolves Code.Google.Com
You just made me realize I use both. Now I just have to figure out if there is a pattern to when I use each and if I am imparting any meaning with my choice.
Sweet, get ready to sell chafing relief products in the terminal.
It's communal viewing. Watch a program and chat about what is happening.
It coincides with Pedant's Day.
You can put the babies in little boxes at the front of the plane. At this rate, it will soon be a reasonable idea!
"I’m not worried about my reputation, and I sleep well at night"

I believe him ^_^.

That said, despite all his defenses of how doing this is OK, he's hired the second one without firing the first (in part because the 2nd does not require the supervisory overhead that was his #1 constraint) and plans to keep both "if conditions warrant".
> I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.

Sometimes if you ask nicely, the recruiter can tell you what you were missing. It's great that you're putting in a lot of effort, what you're missing is the feedback.

> Any advice? I'm young, 22, about to graduate in May.

Find a mentor? Find people who walked down any of the paths you're considering, and ask them what it was like. It's easier said than done, but it may prove valuable.
3D Mario Sprite in CSS3
After installing RVM if gem is giving you a zlib error, this info was useful on both Ubuntu and Debian:
http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/packages/zlib/

edit:
I put up a short tutorial on how to get this running on Lenny:
http://www.reedglaw.com/rails/InstallRailsRVM
The article doesn't say anything about this: what do you do on Programmer's Day? Do you still go to work, but just maybe mention that it's Programmer's Day when talking to co-workers?

Most novelty holidays are like this: on Wear a Hat day, you may wear a hat. On Yoghurt Day, you may eat yoghurt. What's the purpose of a holiday that only exists in name, and has no traditions to go along with it?
The true enemy isn't another company. It isn't even the back button, though that is closer (and that pernicious bastard is still costing me 97% of sales). It is the need going unfilled.

This. I think I'll print that out and hang it on my wall.
I don't know about the stock ownership theory, and by now they surely know they aren't going to win. The law firm's problem is that they signed a contract with SCO some time ago requiring them to do this sort of appeal out of pocket if SCO asks them to.
Scott Adams: Your Next Gym
You handed the company rights to it when you added it to the Exchange domain.

The only issue at hand is whether a phone should be more explicit in telling you doing this will hand IT complete control of the device.
I'm french , I'll vote for S-Q-L then
NHL 11 Deke Guide
The first page of google results provides no empirical evidence that either HFT involves market manipulation or that HFT caused the flash crash. All it provides is speculation.
Find A Founder (in Dallas) This Wednesday
Your relatives and friends congratulate you, and you get drunk in the evening with colleagues.

Seriously.

(Don't even ask how Militia Day is celebrated)
So this is basically solve the same problems as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SecurID, but using a paper sheet instead of a hardware/software generated key?
How do I choose the best Enterprise Software for my business?
The same thing happens with all major news sources, the benefit is in the incoming links that don't have nofollow on them and the various sources that then reblog and retweet about that post again sending more links back to your site. The traffic boost is fun but it is the long term link back benefit that is actually good.

I get traffic all day long from stumbleupon and that is useless traffic if you want to talk about horrible conversions.
I use it to track mentions of my name, my new company, and my products. It's not nearly as useful as it once was (twitter probably reveals more) but it's quick and easy to set up and still worth it - especially for tracking down blog posts from small "indie" blogs.
I pronounce it "sequel" because it was originally called "SEQUEL"

SQL was developed at IBM by Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce in the early 1970s. This version, initially called SEQUEL (Structured English Query Language), was designed to manipulate and retrieve data stored in IBM's original relational database management system, System R, which a group at IBM San Jose Research Laboratory had developed during the 1970s.[6] The acronym SEQUEL was later changed to SQL because "SEQUEL" was a trademark of the UK-based Hawker Siddeley aircraft company.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sql
Do you really need an ad-hoc program for such simple requirements?

Probably a spreadsheet (excel or any free alternative) can handle it easily (damn, even a calculator and some paper is more than adeguate!).

Want something free that can entertain your mind? do this with emacs and org-mode. Org's tables support formulas.
His prior book, Not Really An Alaskan Mountain Man, which coincidentally I just finished last night, is about working toward a subsistence lifestyle in Alaska. He never even gets close, but it's an entertaining read.
A duplicate of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1686430.
you'd better get your costume ready by Oct 31 if you want to have a halloween costume. You can slip your kid's birthday party to another day before you mail out the invitations, but after that you're committed. Christmas only comes on Dec 25, etc.
مشاهدة مباراة الزمالك والجونة
> Laurent saying that Apple have been working on an iOS port

Actually, Laurent hinted that the MacRuby team might be working on it. He in no way announced anything regarding Apple.
Force people. Get rid of $1 bills which are useless, and produce $1 coins.
But it's really more a sponsored project, not a project in the same sense as WebKit. It's more of a "sure, work on it and see where it goes" thing.
Yeah, I just came from New York as well. Visiting here was fun, living here is a hassle. I try to get something done and they ask me what the rush is.
Thanks for the comments. After years of teaching college undergraduate I totally agree with you on the "a lot of feedback is good" approach. We also agree that we cannot do away with the tests altogether.

My point was that although lots of tests->feedback->better performance is a valid and strong argument, in practice it degenerates into what I describe, at least from what I've seen. If the barrage of tests are well balanced with interactive activities that build on creativity and teamwork, that'll be a perfect combination. Hard to achieve, though, I think.
This is beyond ridiculous.

I'm also six foot three but I also happen to weigh in around 130kg and I would genuinely prefer to stand than use these seats.

Those afflicted with arthritis, parents with infants and almost anyone with a physical disablility will struggle massively. I appreciate it's a concept at the moment but Ryanair will bend over backwards to get something like this approved. They are already floating the idea of standing room only.
The Real 'Stuff White People Like’
More to the point:

Current airliner passenger loads are determined by a mandatory requirement to be able to evacuate the passengers from the hull within a set period.

Cram in extra seats, and you're up against the evacuation limit, which is a hard limit dictated by the number of bodies and the number of doors in the fuselage.

To work around it, you'd have to cut holes in the fuselage for additional emergency exits and then recertify the aircraft, which means an airline wanting to use these seats will need to buy new airliners certified to carry more passengers. But this higher density seating only makes sense for short haul ultra-low-cost tickets, which are less profitable, ergo ...

(And then there's the issue of weight. Passengers weigh, say, 75Kg on average, including clothing. They fly with luggage, another 5-25Kg. A Boeing 737-800 currently has a limit of 189 passengers and a payload of roughly 40,000kg, of which up to 26,000kg is fuel: put more than 189 passengers (18,900Kg by my BOTE estimate above) and you're going to be squeezing right up against Maximum Take-Off Weight unless you reduce the maximum fuel load. Even if there's room in the hull, you're going to have to redesign a lot more than the seats and the emergency exits ...)
@stephenou you mean cluttered interface not cluster right?
I use it to track press releases from competition.
So can still use basic auth, if you use a trick. Good to know for one-off scripts.
And how does this relate to VirtualBox (open-source)?
I'll grant it's a much better estimate than the previous "when it's done."

Although, this might imply it'll be released unfinished...
On Windows, GCC is not a very viable option (yes, I'm aware of Cygwin, MinGW, etc) for production software right now. And you'll be hard pressed to find a solid compiler that ISN'T proprietary.
Ours is a B2B app so it is incredibly hard to have a network effect. Some B2B apps naturally have that (e.g. Basecamp) which with a niche A/B testing product I doubt there can be a well-engineered network effect.
Really the first thing you must decide is that you need to charge as this is the only real way to get validation that what you provide is valuable. Someone needs to give you real dollars for what you do.

As for the actual price there are a number of ways to attack the problem but the key is the price will change over time as you learn from the marketplace and your customers.

- Ask your most active and least active users what they would be willing to pay and test them after they respond by asking them to actually pay what they suggest

- Survey the market and decide if you want to be low cost, high cost, or best value. This will give you a range of where to start

- Work with a pricing expert like http://sixteenventures.com
It seems like it would also inspire a lot of pointless, "I agree!" comments.
Thanks for sharing your info. I haven't sought coverage by those tech startup blogs since my customers aren't going to be visiting those kind of blogs.

Looking back on my referral log, the highest is from a blog called geckoandfly which I've never heard from. It generate consistent traffic for the last 3 months!

My coverage from Computer World was a spike like TC, with peak at 5k and dropped to zero after a few days.
A lot of the value of the JVM comes from the libraries and tooling that have grown around it over the years. Replacing both the JVM and all that support code is going to be a hell of a lot of work.

I hate to say it but a lot seems to depend on the ability of Oracle to make the smart move here.
3. Tall people like me who simply cannot fit in "normal" economy class. Every trip is a hassle trying to convince some deranged check-in drone that the script he/she is following to stone-wall is stupid and wrong.
I like the idea of asking the recruiter what was missing, but I mostly am put off by it since I fear he'll tell me they just went with a better candidate...and I'm afraid of hearing what I did wrong, because I think I'd feel even more hopeless after hearing that. I guess I need to take the hint from this post and try harder to not fear rejection.
I think they should make a slight change so that when you delete all of the text, it keeps the previous results visible until you start typing again. Sometimes just as you clear the field you catch a relevant result in the corner of your eye, but a moment later it all vanishes, with no 'back'
i use filevault on osx. just remember that timemachine & filevault don't play along well. you will have to log out of your account to backup your home directory, defeating the whole timemachine purpose. i'd recommend crashplan.com in this case.
Yep, that's why I am curious if it is the norm or not.
I've heard that explained by this: as more stories hit the front page, each individual one stays on the front page for a shorter amount of time, meaning that even though TC is more popular than ever, it actually sends less hits through for each story.