skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a great question and on that I asked myself last week. I am seeing a growing number of people register on my site and with that a larger number of rejected emails because they entered the email wrong. (Note: who ever owns gmial.com probably sees a ton of email sent their way). This made me rethink how people get registered. I think it is probably time to change gears and validate the email and not the password. Sure doing both would be better but I dislike having to double enter everything on a form.

Here is my rational for making the switch. I want users to become engaged. The fact that they are registering means I did something right that motivated them to act. I require, like many others, to validate their email and account by clicking on a link that gets emailed to them. If they never get the link they never get fully registered. I am sure a large number of users would not follow up on this. They were motivated at the time to register but that motivation might not be strong enough to persuade them to troubleshoot their registration. This results in turning a motivated user into a disgruntled surfer.

Plus if the password was wrong they can always reset it with their validated and confirmed email
A few months ago we developed our first Facebook application for a client. It was such an awful experience that I suspect it may be our last.
My favorite game is finding easy-to-fix bugs in the bug tracker that have thousands of votes and have been rotting away with no action for months or years.

I really don't understand how FB can have so much interest in the future of their platform but let the fruits of their labor spoil like this.

Hopefully highly read posts like this will finally bring some attention to the matter. Where are you Zuck?!%
Thanks for the reply, my next project is going to be doing the REST services with Node. I have been using Java for my services because until Node I really did not see a big enough reason to move platforms. What are you using for your REST services implementation, a Node library or did you roll your own? I did not know about Paperboy so thanks for pointing me to that project.
Big News: Google Starts Rolling Out Paid Android Apps Support In More Countries
If you are leaving your 9-5 to become an independent contractor then you actually are starting your own company. From my experience, I would never say that becoming an independent contractor would give me more time and freedom unless I was able to live on working a part time schedule.

It sounds to me like you don't really want to be an independent contractor, it's just a means to an end. Don't do it. Stuck with your day job and work on your other company on the side.
Ask HN: Eternal September?
(First off, the Eternal September reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September).

So this hulking Uroborus of an article is at the top right now:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metacontrarianism/

... and this is the central example used to explain countersignaling:

Those who study human romantic attraction warn men not to "come on too strong"... the most desirable men may deliberately avoid doing nice things for women in an attempt to signal they are so high status that they don't need to.

Why?! Why is it that every single intellectual hangout must eventually disintegrate into yet another internet echo chamber where socially aspirational losers can bounce "let's hate on chicks, they are all asking for it anyway" off each other? It took HN a bit longer than Digg or Reddit but here we are, an article quoting Pickup Artists' party line as though it were some sort of social science, upvoted to the very top of Hacker News.

(For the record, that statement is patently untrue - I have been lucky to date several high-status, top-of-the-food-chain men, and they were all very nice and markedly more generous with their time, compliments, etc. than their "lessers", so if you are going to be an a-hole, please have the balls to do it because you want to, not because "those who study romantic attraction" gave you their pseudo-scientific permission... and while I am at it, for the love of god, please do not use those nauseating gender-neutral pronouns, they do nothing to cover up your latent misogyny).

Why am I posting this instead of just signing off and never coming back again? Truly, honestly, I don't know. I've seen the future several times already. I know I am probably just inviting downvotes and general vitriol, or in the very least, accusations of hyperbole (as in, let's all feel grateful that it hasn't yet come down to http://www.reddit.com/r/misogyny/, right?). Or perhaps, there are not enough women on here to care, and not enough men to recognize that I am using a symptom to talk about a larger disease, as opposed to the symptom itself.

Sorry to be such a downer. I guess I fell for HN back in 2008 and it's hard for me to acknowledge that it's over. Is it over? What next?
The way Facebook's Graph API is structured can be applied to other datasets containing interconnected objects. It's like a REST service serving JSON, with a specific way to construct the URLs. I like it a lot. Here is a blog post explaining the Freebase implementation:

http://blog.freebase.com/2010/04/29/a-freebase-implementatio...

The Facebook docs:

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api

But even the cleanest API is of no use if the API calls don't actually work...
767 doesn't have fly by wire - 777 was the first passenger Boeing to get it. But it does have a lot of wiring.
Frank Reynolds Treated His Own Spinal Cord Injury and Walked Again
I'm not so sure. Assume you're at least a semi-serious blogger. Some person you don't know comes up to you and offers to take care of the blog that you already have and is already working, and charge you money for it. Are you sure you'd be interested, or that you'd trust him not to close shop in a month and leave you worse off?
Great point---Though there's also a way in which education gets tougher as your economy evolves. Educating kids to love computer science and engineering is obvs a lot harder than getting kids in school to learn basic literacy.

The productivity jumps that result from the latter are huge--but wondering if it's larger than the former? Might be there there's no increasing returns to scale as costs rise--even if the end benefits are vast.
Why Happy Employees Are Good for Business
A lot of this is already available. DailyBurn with scanner app will fill in nutritional info from labels. Scales transmit your weight to online services. Fitbit will track your movement levels and sleep. Runkeeper will track how much you run. Not perfect yet, but a synthesis is inevitable.
Ah, if that's the case then I misread.

If the problem is the broken promise of writing code once than runs perfectly well on the server or in the browser then I guess I could see the frustration. Although, I'm not sure that's an entirely realistic expectation given the different roles you'd expect the server and client to fill.
The New Yorker iPad app introduced by Jason Schwartzman
Depends on the people, but him wanting 100 is a good warning sign that you should quickly get un-involved. 50/50 is what I would expect in your situation, where neither person is obviously going to be carrying the company.

If you give a founder (or early employee) more than they're going to be worth in the long term, you'll feel increasingly motivated to fire them and recover their un-vested stock. If you give them too little, they become increasingly motivated to quit and start something they can own.

From what you described, you were at a lose-lose impasse. One or other of you was going to end up unhappy, in a company-destroying sort of way. I would have quit also and would make sure to sort the ownership question out earlier next time.

Somewhat tangentially, people also tend to over-value the ownership that their "idea" should entitle them to. If someone spends 3 months thinking day and night and you just started, it can seem like they deserve a big chunk. But you have to remember, standard vesting is 4 years, so their 3 months of thought is only about 6% of the time you're each committing to the business.
No it makes the assumption that UI logic provides the best user experience when it is closest to the UI. Services can provide any form of calculation logic that one needs them too. UI logic is removed from the server and placed with the UI while business logic and data services remain with the business systems.
Not farmville but I enjoy reading on my phone, RSS feeds, kindle books, Instapaper. etc. Short flights espeically in the EU e.g. 1.5 hours to Amsterdam on the weekend in great time to catchup on reading. Missing the takeoff and landing cuts about 30 minutes of reading time.

It sounds selfish and there is enough evidence here that I am now happy to just turn my phone off, maybe I will just print off some of my Instapaper articles :)
if there's something awry, it affects potential founders a great deal.

it's not analogous to politicians talking about the economy.
That's why RNAV (GPS) approaches are still not allowed (for commercial flights) AFAIK.

30 degree error has nothing to do with GPS though. Probably DVD player interfered with Localizer signal.
USB Drive for Cyber Intelligence Missions
As someone who also runs various open-source software projects, I wonder if this guy actually sent a message to Yehuda about his suggestion (forcefully deprecating this feature, which already seems to be removed from the documentation, with a warning on use), or if he feels posting messages to his blog (which Yehuda may or may not, and probably doesn't, read) is the best way to get his issue heard.
Remember folks, the downvote mechanism is not for when you disagree with people - it's for people who aren't contributing to the conversation. This is a legitimate, reasonable comment and doesn't deserve the downmodding.
"Despite incoming calls and SMSs during these flights, not once have any of the instruments been affected by the phone."

Without a fixed reference you have no way to verify this statement. Even if you crossed reference your flight instrument data with a ground-based reference it would not account for intermittent errors that could occur.
Illuminating the Future of Energy - David MacKay
I don't understand the applause for Javascript. Yeah, we've unified on one language for client-side and server-side, but I don't like programming in Javascript. Why would I move to Javascript for server-side when I could program in Python and minimize the amount of JS I actually have to write?

Does everyone just like Javascript?
Flagged as flamebait.
Imagine these compianies controlled who offered you cars, or siding, or which schools your kids got invited to. Its not a decision they have the right to make for their employees - its paternal and selfish.

I know, its just cold calls, and smaller companies make these agreements (or just don't do it out of respect). But these are not small companies. They must behave differently.
To which I ask you to check out Objective-J.
Volvo pedestrian avoidance test goes horribly, comically wrong
Next question - does excelling in education make them less poor?

Everyone assumes this to be true, but I've seen very little hard evidence that this is the case.
At last. A post about AngelGate I can leave unflagged.

Lets draw a line under the soap opera gossip and move on.
The Puppygames DRM could be an interesting case, though, since there are multiple ways to pirate it. The expert crackers, having read about the DRM, will find a way to disable the game's network connection.

However, there are presumably many not-quite-expert crackers who may not even realize the game has DRM beyond displaying a name and e-mail address. These people will register the game with a suitably anonymous credentials, maybe test it on a couple more machines, then upload it. They won't know the "crack" is ineffectual until they get an e-mail asking them to reset their ten registrations. And unless they keep replying to this e-mail for every ten downloads, their upload will stop working.

Two key questions: How many wannabes are there for every expert? And how many times will someone download an ineffectual crack before giving up?
I came into this one language concept in 2006. Back then there were already helma.org, which has functionality of RoR but it has being around since 1999.

Now Helma NG is relunched as RingoJS.org I would highly recommend checking it out.
I have another small idea that might help you gain some goodwill and some link-love.

You mention on your site that you have a "curated list of WordPress plugins", which I assume means that, for any request I have, you can tell me the best plugin to fulfill that request. Now obviously, since you're selling this as a feature, you assume (correctly) that this is a competitive advantage worth paying for.

However, you might want to consider releasing the curated plugin list. Maybe only parts of it, maybe not forever, but this is something that people often need, and if your site comes up first for every search of "best plugin for Wordpress that does X", you might get a lot of potential customers just through that.
I think it's a sign for founders to look a bit further afield, given the relatively small chunk of the entire angel funding scene these guys control there is no chance a smart founder is going to get lowballed on valuation everywhere they go.

Not saying that these investors are actually participating in this kind of thing but even if they were I don't see how a smart founder who weighs up all the options would get caught out.
Starting a company? Forget about the logo.
Meh. Just recording the weights I do along with my body weight (along with a graph of each) works fine, and it honestly couldn't be much easier [1].

[1] Shameless self-promotion: http://daytaapp.com
There are offline RSS readers, Kindle apps and Instapaper saves can be exported to various formats.
MeeGo Gets Ported to Nexus One, Dell Streak
Perhaps if anything that wasn't just a 'wrapper match' could be farmed out to Mechanical Turk. You could charge a monthly fee high enough to cover the identification, and increase your profit margin as your recognition gets better.
I often have a terrible time figuring out whether someone is being dishonest or is just stupid. Take buying a car at a dealership, refinancing your house, or anything else involving a lower-level salesman. They make absurd statements which benefit their cause if I believe them.

Last week, I was talking to a mortgage salesman affiliated with my financial advisor (who I think is pretty smart). The mortgages rates offered are about 0.25% lower
with a "point" (percentage of loan amount) paid up-front. One can compute the approximate () length of time the loan must be held for this to be a good deal. This guy, without any knowledge of how long I expected to stay in my home, said, "I never put people into points....you gotta pay all that money up front, you know?"

Was he being dishonest? I don't think his commission varied much depending on which product he sold me, and he seemed legitimately interested in forming a longer-term relationship rather than making a sale that day. When I mentioned that the point of indifference was probably around two and a half years and that I planned to stay in the house, he backed off of his claim.

I suspect he was just not .too sharp but perhaps realized that, when confronted with too many confusing mortgage choices, many people would just choose irrationally not to refinance. If someone chooses to buy nothing, he gets no commission. Maybe he was smart enough to want to reduce the number of choices for me to consider. And, when confronted with the need to cough up a percent of their homes' values, many people might back out of deals, so he decided to eliminate choices which might not pan out in his favor.

I have taken the adage "Never presume malevolence for what can be explained by stupidity." to heart and try to react in such situations with the presumption of stupidity. It's really hard though when I can't figure out how someone could actually believe the things he's saying. After all, shouldn't someone who spends his days selling mortgages understand the trade-off of paying a point down up-front for a lower rate?

() I don't know how the average person figures out which mortgage product is best. I have to put together a complicated NPV spreadsheet when deciding such things. And, even then, I'm not properly accounting for the interest rate options implicit in the products.
Excellent. That one belongs in any Python style guide. Though technically it's not a style, it does lead to better readability, and reduces the propensity for unforseen consequences.
Lots of companies have tried to go this route. Lots of failed, and there are lots still trying. The problem is that you always have to code, otherwise you are just installing something (no different from what we have already had for quite some time.) Having to code and learn the interface is still a burden.

Even if you can build something without really having to know how to code, businesses will still seek developers to build their needed apps. The CEO knows how to mop the floor, but that doesn't mean he will do it himself (though he might if he's the only employee.) Once you are paying a developer, then you probably give that developer the choice of tools to use to build that app. The developer probably wouldn't be choosing this platform.
I've never seen ~~~FREE RINGTONES~~~ in the Android market.

Again, this is something with an obvious software solution. Google is the best in the world at providing good search results...so, why not provide the best search results in the market? (I don't think they currently do a good job, though. I'll be the first to admit that the Apple App Store is still a somewhat better experience than the App Market, despite App Market getting quite a bit better during its life...but it's not because App Store is curated. It's because Google hasn't put the resources into making App Market work really well.)

Generally, I think if you've got people involved in processes that could be handled by software, it's a failure. It's costing consumers more money, costing developers more time, and insuring that it is a fallible process and subject to the whims of sometimes capricious reviewers. Since this article is about security (and not "~~~FREE RINGTONES~~~"), that's clearly something that ought to be handled in software. The fact that Apple doesn't handle it in the OS, and instead relies on human reviewers, is Apple's failure. The fact that Google doesn't handle it in the OS, and relies on vendor trust and user intelligence and a better than average (but still weaker than ideal) security model, is Google's failure.

On the subject of security, you've suggested that Apple have the problem solved by having a curated market. I don't believe that's at all accurate.
Exactly. There have been several years in the last decade where there were absolutely zero fatalities on US airlines. Say what you want about idiotic security rules, but strict safety measures seem to be working pretty well for us.
I like how TC will trash him and then give him their platform to use at 11:30 at night... TC is starting to seem like they are just angled for exclusives.
So writing this and posting it means you do care.....just sayin.
For those of us who use the newer Powershell, instead of the legacy cmd.exe, mklink isn't available. But you have some different options:

- Use the sysinternals tools, as recommended in the comment below

- Install PowerShell Community Extensions and use New-HardLink, New-SymLink, New-Junction, Remove-ReparsePoint http://pscx.codeplex.com/

- Use ln.exe

- c:\Windows\system32\fsutil.exe create hardlink

- Use mklink anyway: PS C:\> cmd /k mklink /D foo bar
This mode of doing things is, for the most part, already available. There are apps that work around the same principle as CalorieKing, where common restaurants and foodstuffs are saved in a database with their respective nutrition details. This tends to be very convenient when eating at popular restaurants, or eating commonly purchased grocery items.

The GPS element is an interesting twist on the idea though. How cool would it be if you walked into a Qdoba (just as an example), and your phone vibrated and asked you what you were ordering?
And comparing bickering "angels" to parents ..
Hi - nothing to do with me; though I did have a very similar idea, that got nowhere, so I'm keen to encourage this one.

Seems search got working toward the end of the weekend:
http://twitter.com/Launch48/status/25585635159
Hacker News London Meetup this Thursday
Dear Hackers,

The next Hacker News London meetup will be on Thursday, 30th September. Following three meetups at the delightful, yet somewhat noisy Water Poet we now have a new venue. Smarkets, the online betting startup, have kindly agreed to host us at White Bear Yard, on Clerkenwell Road. They do not have a bar, so please bring your own beers, but they do have wi-fi so please bring a laptop if you fancy showing off your work. If you get lost or need help with directions you can call Dmitri on 0789 11 99 440.

See you on Thursday,

Ben and Dmitri
I personally see more of a need for centralizing the Clojure Blogs/News/Articles (i.e. your blog entries have helped me more than any wiki). The real problem is sifting through the Google Group or Google searches. It's tedious. So I can't help but think creating a site like hackernews or the arc forum would be a huge benefit to the Clojure community. Having a centralized location for blogs with a voting system and a currency stemming front page would be a big deal to me.

I'm short on time these days, but as a side project I am about 80% done creating one fully developed in Clojure. I suppose I could have just used the arc code, but that felt wrong. So if no one else beats me to it I will pitch it out there. It may take a few months for me to get around to finishing though.
Licensing is usually state, county and sometime city specific. You will need to check with your local city hall.

Usually the distribution of licenses is per capita, i.e. for so many people you can have xx licenses. In Boston you can't get a license unless you legally purchase it on a secondary market or have relatives in the town hall or are prepared to bribe your way through (see Diane Wilkerson case)

In Florida, where I operated a restaurant for a bunch of years, it is much easier to get a license if you have a kitchen and do certain percentage of revenues in food sales; the total time to get one from scratch I think was 3 month or so and the total cost was few hundred dollars.

Your biggest problems are employee theft and liability issues. Theft usually comes in 3 forms, theft of product, theft of time and outright theft of money. Liability is usually silly lawsuits, I had a cook who fried his elbow in a deep fryer while high, I had slip and falls, I had broken teeth, fights, orgies in a bathroom, etc.

If you could - get an experience person and partner with him for first few years, you will be thankful that you did.