skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the tips! MQ and bookmarks look like they could be a solid fill-in for Gits staging area and cheap branching. I'll definitely look more into them.
Any chance that there is data to show whether they were right? I mean, I strongly suspect that there isn't. But I'd be interested if there is either way.
--trace-gc will show an endless sequence of mark-sweep/compacts.

I explained why that happens in my comment to the original post.
This is the site: http://dealdealdeal.net/

And this is the HN submission for feedback: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1713519
Discounted Bridesmaid Dresses on Amazon.com
my dream is a merger of the two companies. I went from Audi to BMW. I want the BMW engine, suspension, etc. and the Audi design and polish
I wonder why Apple didn't use color to distinguish from "GPS ON" and "Some App knows where you are"

To me, I'd like to know when my phone is sucking down juice on knowing exactly where I am, and I'd also like to know when the phone just knows about where I am in a low battery usage way.

I suppose that Apple thinks that most people just care if the phone knows where they are or not, battery life is a non-issue.
Bloom Energy Installs 1.2MW Fuel Cell at Adobe HQ, Fuels IPO Rumors
Should Startups Buy Billboards?
If it's an MVP to test the market, then that "few hours to launch" constraint is pointless. Take a few more days to make it "fast enough", then launch. By the way, 7AM Monday morning is an excellent time for news, if you want some social-media love.
I think the best user experience you're going to get is by giving the user as much information as possible. Throbbers deliver almost no information (just an indication that something is probably happening); progress bars exceed that a bit by indicating a rough percentage of completion and allow the user to estimate time until completion, but users are trained to be suspect of progress bars (who hasn't been at 99% for 99% of the time...).

I would give a progress bar with semantics specific to what you are doing (step 3 of 5 instead of 60%), estimated time to completion, and a description of the current step (Submitting search request to Expedia... Filtering results... etc).

It can be accomplished a lot of ways, but will likely be more responsive if you push the data. The easiest way I have set up something like this has been node.js, redis pubsub, and socket.io. Requires some reading, but the end result is you can push messages through Redis from your app easily, it will work in all browsers, and you won't have to write very much glue code at all.
Force of habit. Hmm, it's not long now until HN Gonewild.
Exactly. I taught programming, not dogma. Frankly, if I can teach two paradigms, and one is easy to explain while the other is hard, well I'm going to teach the easy one to explain.

Functional programming is just hard to explain to people who know next to nothing. Especially in a language like Python where the functional concepts are kind of half-assed.
don't get impatient, its only in alpha
Where is the science? Show me some studies and experiments. This qualitative BS is worse than useless.
did you have a test for it?
That's a really great idea! The best part is that if you can cache anything, subsequent loads should be faster, so the initial load serves as a loose upper bound for the entire load process.
Vevo has tens of millions of revenue but not profitable.
What's the point of telling the wolrd that you have tens of millions in revenue but ultimately the company is not profitable. TC Article here in case you missed it: http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/29/vevo-is-seeing-tens-of-million-in-revenue/

I run a company that has almost a million in revenue and we're profitable, not hundreds but 6 six figures and growing.

Is there a bubble here? or SV is going to self implode soon. ie. DemandMedia style.
Popular grant program for entrepreneurs in Cleveland may have run aground
Try making a call on an iPhone in Midtown Manhattan, which is hardly a 'desolate wasteland'
Pirates of Silicon Valley 2.0
I agree. However, they do fly a few different variations of the 737. They are in the process of replacing their 300s with the newer 700 series and they also have a few 500 series which are slightly smaller (122 passengers vs 137 in the 300/700). They have also recently been evaluating adding the 800 series (a stretched version of the 700 series) to their fleet.
> And since Southwest can't grow by adding capacity to current routes (we know the negative cycle that creates), they must find new markets.

I don't think I "know the negative cycle that creates." Could I trouble someone to explain it to me?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrivium
Yes, but it will be slow as hell.
"Higher-order functions, ... list transformations" you just said four words that are an entire book on their own.
The article mentions hashing the same data with multiple hashing algorithms; I would think this would be effective at preventing collisions (presumably different hashing algorithms are not vulnerable to the same collision attacks).
I checked out http://gs.statcounter.com/ . Select Browser Version, maybe view as bar graph.

Africa and Asia lead in IE6 by almost 25%. I was surprised, but it does make sense -- pirated XP comes with IE6, people can't use Windows Update, so they just stick with it.
Startup Weekend Vancouver is coordinated by Shauna, Melody, Lyndi from Seattle. They contacted us looking for space, and we said no problem. They're volunteering to make something cool happen, and how could that not be great. Actually, we're seeing more of that kind of thing happening in Vancouver, including the Hackathon.

I wont be able to make it due to family commitments for Thanksgiving, but there will be a bunch of people there and I hear they're making a turkey! If you're in the same boat as me, let us know, and maybe we'll coordinate another weekend where more of us can be available. - I've been hackin Ruby on Heroku, and would like to show it off, so I'm in for sure.

Of course, there are advantages to working together, but it's not necessary. The more of these events that happen the better and stronger our community is.
> "this guy who is using the game in an unexpected and novel way."

MineCraft Alpha was built with logic-circuit design in mind [1]. This guy built a pretty extreme example, but it's not any more "unexpected and novel" than, say, making a very large castle.

[1] http://minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Redstone_Circuits
They will think:

(1) that we write equations in white markers on glass windows (like John Nash in Beautiful Mind) prior to whipping out PHP to build a website,
(2) that Zuckerberg intended from the start for Facebook to become the photo-and-info-sharing megahub it is today (almost like he had Facebook Places in his head 7 years ago), rather than implementing something that Harvard IT had promised "in a few years" (from the horse's mouth),
(3) that we get more action than we probably do for being technology folks,
(4) that secret societies at Harvard are just as mysteriously sexy and dangerous as other movies like The Skulls have made them out to be,
(5) that kids entering college have more vision, ambition, and maturity about their futures rather than being awkward and confused (I teach freshmen sometimes),
(6) that "hacking" is frequently accompanied by hot nypmhettes pleasuring you in time trials, in which case "Hacker News" is a total misnomer.

In other words, they will not think anything new...
> Google is a freakin' giant. I don't see how you compete with that, unless you are a large company like Microsoft.

I agree with your statements here, but still, I think it's flawed thinking. Just because Google is big doesn't mean one person (or a small group) can't come up with innovations and compete.

Even if Gabriel says DuckDuckGo is not a competitor to Google, or if it doesn't have a sustainable business model, I applaud his efforts. I too enjoy the bang syntax, and that's something I wouldn't get using other search engines (even if DDG isn't classified as such).
Ask HN:Do you find HN mind numbing?
Ofcource,I do get to read a lot of interesting articles, and some great discussions...But at times, it's no different than an insect attracted to light. "looks interesting!" => Open Tab!
Or like Joker's dialog "I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it"
Have you had that feeling?
I disagree, I think that techniques like this do contribute to killing IE6. The reason that corporations don't upgrade their browsers is pretty simple: they don't have to. As it stands now, IE6 is "good enough" for their employees to do whatever it is they need to do.

The more websites that drop IE6 support, the more IE6 becomes "not good enough", and the more pressure accumulates for corporations to upgrade. Right now it's more practical in many environments for the IT group to stick with IE6 than upgrade. The day it becomes more practical to upgrade than stay put is the day IE6 dies.
Yep, the plan is to create a better site, offer the book on lulu.com in dead tree and ereader formats, and put it up in HTML format.

I won't do any of that yet though because I need to edit it and don't want people getting bad web pages from caches or places.
Blackberry DevCon Keynote [video]
Celebrate Petrov Day by not destroying the world
Slightly offtopic, but does anyone dislike Southwest? I have spent my entire life flying Continental out of EWR because they were basically the only option and I had a pile of FF miles, but now I'm near 2 Southwest hubs and I'm thinking of making the switch since I'm almost out of Continental miles. It seems very different but I've read a lot of positive things about Southwest.
The Las Vegas "Death Ray"
Will give that a try. Thanks for the suggestion!
Great comment! Anybody interested should check it out: http://hns.github.com/2010/09/29/benchmark2.html#comment-820...
Please don't put it online in HTML just yet. I need to get it edited, and I'm afraid people will put versions of the book up in HTML format with errors and problems. Once the book is 1.0 then I'll have it online and anyone else can put it online. Can you take your link down please?
Wow. I just used it while flying out of Milwaukee a few days ago.

Airtran is truly a trashy airline. I flew business and had to wipe bread-crumbs off of my seat.
How is Git's branching Cheaper than HG's? The only major difference I know of is an almost immaterial implementation detail.
http://sumzero.com/retail/users

Check the sidebar.
Interesting. I always heard it was because they didn't want the really big (loud) international planes flying in urban airspace.

Regardless, a variety of people (particularly congresscritters) have been trying for years to get that restriction lifted.
Thoughts from an angel investor
Vitamin D found to influence 200 genes, interacts with DNA (Oxford)
Surely Google et al, record the actual arrival time of the email in the headers do they not?

If not, then I'm sure they do in their logs.
Let's make some money and support IE6!
True. NN4 was the reason I moved to Flash.
Facebook and Skype will bring together contacts, communication
Why We Need to Reframe the "Women in Tech" Debate
Southwest has been ultra-competitive for many reasons, the biggest probably being its fuel hedging program. But it's only a matter of time before this competitive advantage asymptotically approaches zero, so it needs new strategies to maintain its advantage.

As a frequent flier and raving fan of Southwest, I've wondered what would change when they once again paid the same price for fuel as the legacy carriers. Today I stopped worrying. This acquisition ought to buy Southwest at least 10 more years as #1.

I'm also a frequent flier of Air Tran. AFAIC, except for Jet Blue, no other carrier is in the same class as Southwest and Air Tran. I have little doubt they will figure out how to make this work.

Now if only the feds don't fuck this up...
Freakonomics: How to Avoid a Bad Apartment in New York City
The time he spent doing this he could have taken a FPGA and made the next super-bang-whizmo.

This is a bad leap of logic right here. He simulated a very simple and well-understood piece of circuitry in a novel environment.This doesn't necessarily translate to being able to come up with something completely new and revolutionary.

No doubt, this kid is incredibly smart though. Probably some day he will be able to come up with the next super-bang-whizmo. To do that he'll need a deep understanding of the fundamentals of his field. He'll need to know it so inside out that he could build a computer out of the most unlikely materials, like say a video game. I don't think this was a lost opportunity cost. The world is not poorer by one gadget because he spent time modeling an ALU in Minecraft instead of on an FPGA. The world is now richer by one engineering student who knows his field a better than he did before.Probably better than he would have by doing it in a more conventional fashion.

Doing the same thing on an FPGA would not have been noteworthy. It's been done probably thousands of times before, and is likely included as sample code when you buy the FPGA kit.
This was brutal to read. The adminisTRators are basically making it "easier" for students by doing things like changing the number of multiple choice answers from 4 options to 3 and other such nonsense.

That 4 to 3 option choice reduction, by the way, will increase test scores by 33% for a kid who was just randomly picking answers.
Does the hiding of 'http://www really bother you? I remember it bothering me, until the first time I copy / pasted the URL and it is there in the pasted output.
A few highlights:

researchers at the University of Oxford have shown the extent to which vitamin D interacts with our DNA. They used new DNA sequencing technology to create a map of vitamin D receptor binding across the genome. The vitamin D receptor is a protein activated by vitamin D, which attaches itself to DNA and thus influences what proteins are made from our genetic code.

The researchers found 2,776 binding sites for the vitamin D receptor along the length of the genome. These were unusually concentrated near a number of genes associated with susceptibility to autoimmune conditions such as MS, Crohn's disease, systemic lupus erythematosus (or 'lupus') and rheumatoid arthritis, and to cancers such as chronic lymphocytic leukaemia and colorectal cancer.
They also showed that vitamin D had a significant effect on the activity of 229 genes including IRF8, previously associated with MS, and PTPN2, associated with Crohn's disease and type 1 diabetes.

"Our study shows quite dramatically the wide-ranging influence that vitamin D exerts over our health," says Dr Andreas Heger from the MRC Functional Genomics Unit at Oxford, one of the lead authors of the study.
This right here is a very bad attitude toward software development because it prevents you from making the product that proves its worth to users and developers. It seemed in the original article that they justified almost every design decision with "Our marketing team told us to." It almost feels as if they're preemptively trying to blame someone else absolve themselves of blame. I'm not sure to what degree this is influenced by the editing.
[Redacted] Misread your post.
Second this.

I built a similar site a year back and what I did was pull in the UK XML data daily (the feed was updated daily) and database that mother. I'm not sure how often Expedia updates its hotel prices, but you could maybe poll every couple of hours instead.

We also had a free search for anywhere in the world, so we'd pop up a spinner and grab the XML. Then we'd cache that result set in the DB with a rudimentary script and store it for the next 24 hours. That would then be served to anywhere searching for the same thing in the meantime.

Overall, it sped things up dramatically.
Except for Jet Blue, no other carrier is in the same class as Southwest

I greatly prefer Virgin America to Southwest, Jet Blue or any other domestic airline.
have you ever told anyone about FreshBooks?
Dallas has the same issue with DFW and Love Field.
Just hold it differently!

Edit: I guess I have to explain. Probability that a celebrity has an iPhone 4: 99%. iPhone 4 has known reception problems if you hold it wrong. Scott Adams complains about bad reception on his mobile phone. Therefore it seems probable that if he would hold it differently (or get a better phone), his complaints would be moot.
The current icon is complicated (i.e. non-obvious) enough as is, thank you. They advertised the arrow solely as a privacy feature and that’s what it is.
Right about what? That more people fly out of Dulles because they can't get a direct flight out of National? Seems pretty obvious.
http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/04/09/the-money-made-by-micros...
I'm pretty sure he's talking about simple command line work. You seem to be missing the point. Compare:

| awk '{print $2}' | ...

| python -c 'import sys
for line in sys.stdin:
try:
print line.split()[1]
except IndexError:
print' | ...
While I agree that it should be allowed to tape any interactions you have with an officer, it's a bit of a gray area if you follow one around taping everything they do.

First: they are off duty sometimes (they get breaks too)

Second: They are dealing with other people, and that interaction deserves a level of privacy as well. If I follow a officer up to a car stop, and start recording, that seems intrusive.

So, the question is where the limit of permissible is. Do off duty police officers have normal citizen rights to prevent themselves from being taped? Do on break officers have that? How about on duty officers talking with another person? Can I record that audio? Video?

In my mind it should be more permissible than taking video of normal people, but a blanket "lets tape everything" doesn't work either. Where exactly the correct middle ground lies isn't clear to me.
How to write a big app in an obscure Lisp dialect
I work as a product designer for different web apps. We just support the latest build of IE, Chrome, Fx, Opera, Safari - that's still alot of differences.

IE 6 should be ignored.
Django core: Improving our decision-making and committer process
Meh. Flying into Baltimore is usually cheaper anyway, and DC area public transit is fantastic. (Well, compared to Ohio.)
thrushtastic
But couldn't a better checkpoint be designed with some overhead?

Say all urls containing /static/.. don't refer to an actual physical resource but go to a controller which checks the access and then serves the file. As such, the URL if given to someone else will fail as the controller won't authorize the file transfer.

I did it once with nginx at the front and django at the backend using X-Sendfile. I don't have the code around but it was similar to what is proposed in this discussion: http://groups.google.com/group/django-users/browse_thread/th...

Of course, this can't be done for the CDNs.

When you say it's a common industry practice, is the practice there because of CDNs?
This is a great noodley point, but note that they can just increase the width of the identifier to maintain a constant threshold level of entropy. They won't, of course. But they could.
Isn't "sexy enough" Clojure's motto?
There was also a perimeter rule governing flights at Dallas Love Field after DFW was built. A compromise was reached a few years ago. Here's an article from the Dallas Morning News summarizing the effects of the change: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/stories/DN-l...
I've taken down the doc.
Stuxnet brings more new tricks to cyberwar
I doubt IE6 is a make or break reason for clients nowdays.

Don't mention browser support. And if the topic of IE 6 comes up, charge a price.
Yes, --trace-gc shows about 10 Mark-sweeps per second, each taking around 13 ms (no compacts though as far as I could see). But are those ~15% spent in GC are enough to explain the performance?
It doesn't bother me /much/, but I can feel it: as I copy/paste things from there a lot, as well as sometimes edit URLs, I'm in this interesting position of having to remember weird rules regarding what is theoretically in the box and what is actually in the box, which seems really silly.
I haven't had a dropped call in years (on Sprint).

The problem with text messages is that you can't actually have a conversation. For example I just had a conversation with a friend of mine about the MIT network flow algorithm. Given the rapid and back and forth, the call lasted about 15 minutes. A text stream of the same content would have taken days. The real result is likely that one of us would probably have decided to simply stop responding.
I understand your POP-related complaints completely, and they're all 100% valid. For the others, though....

Most recent at the bottom: because people read from the top down, I'm sure.

It only adds new mails if the heuristics are correct, those primarily being the subject, but also taking into account the recipients the timestamp, and who knows what else (they won't say).

If you start a new conversation from an old thread, just change the subject... especially if it has nothing to do with the subject at hand. If the subject of two messages is different, Gmail will never group them, ever.

The biggest complaint I've heard from non-techy users is that with conversations they frequently miss messages because they can't adequately gauge what is unread, especially if the volume is high enough that things move off the first page with rapidity.
The app under discussion is:

http://zeitgeist.prototyping.bbc.co.uk/zeitgeist

It counts the number of times a link to some part of the BBC website has been mentioned on Twitter. To do this it has to "resolve" shortened URLs and so on using a system of messages queues and workers.

The code is here: http://github.com/bbcrd/zeitgeist
I think the most appalling to me was open book tests with page numbers! I've taken hard open book tests thanks to a combination of not knowing exactly where the information is and a serious time limit that doesn't allow you to spend much time thumbing through the book. But if the test gives you the page number (especially since teachers probably aren't encouraged to put too much time pressure on kids either), it's almost certain to be a joke
Hedge Funds are built on trust and personal relationships.
python did not return any memory whatsoever to the operating system before 2.5.

http://bugs.python.org/issue1123430
The noise factor has been part of the argument. (Whether or not that makes for a valid argument is certainly up for debate.)
It explains why JSON parsing doesn't perform well, but doesn't explain the original benchmark results. Would be great to get a comment from @mraleph or the other V8 guys on that.
Very nice. I just randomly choose to view the arguments unpacking section and found a defect (no example given on pg 36 for passing in only two args instead of all three, but later cited as "see how I passed in two args"). Created a ticket.
What's the advantage over in-person tutoring, dance, music lessons et cetera?

You can break the geographical boundaries. If the best math tutor in the country lives in New York, and I live in Arizona, I'm out of luck. I worked for Kaplan, College Network, Sylvan Learning Center, and Veritas Prep...this was always the problem. If you live in Manhattan, you're in a great place to find GMAT tutors. If you live in Wyoming, your choices are more limited (noting against Wyoming, but people with high GMAT scores and MBA's tend to be on Wall Street). A system like this would allow equal access to great tutors, regardless of location. I know someone who flew a tutor from New York to Miami for tutoring. So it's not always about price. If I can get a better tutor online than I can get within driving distance, I'll pay the same or more.
I actually kind of like Airtran. Cheap biz class, satellite radio. Bread crumbs don't set me off.