skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. I'd much rather be able to go out to, as an example, mozilla.com and download the latest firefox in an easy to run installer (like I can do on Windows), than have to upgrade my entire fricking OS just to get the latest Firefox.

Again, just using Firefox as an example. The same applies to most end user apps, stuff like Java and Flash, etc.
That would prevent people from using throwaway accounts, which a lot of people seem to do. And they are not spammers.
It's a little different than DLL hell: most applications provide their own libraries precisely to avoid DLL hell. Rather than relying on (or trying to install) some globally-shared DLL, they include their own versions of libraries, and it doesn't matter if those versions match the versions used by other applications. (As a developer you have to worry about dependency differences between libraries, but as an application installer/user you don't have to worry about it once the developer's got everything working and bundled up). The Linux distro guys are in some ways asking Java applications to go back to a world where DLL Hell is possible, which might be good for distro packagers but would be a disaster for developers.
First, take a deep breath.

Second, approach the situation honestly. Honesty does not mean you need to approach everyone on your knees. Most of your creditors likely do not know what situation you are in right now. Many people actually enjoy finding creative win-win solutions. You never know unless you ask.

Third, good luck. Looking back at the low parts in my life, they all worked out one way or another. Without challenge and without hardship, I would not appreciate what is good in life. Learn what you can and always remember to smile :)
I'd say there's a pretty obvious reason why bartenders have a higher divorce rate than engineers - access to alternatives.

A bartender spends a good chunk of their time socializing with alternatives to their spouse. They're bound to meet someone else eventually.

An engineer is typically cooped up in an office with a bunch of other engineers. Not much in the way of alternate lovers...
I dislike articles that are expansions of lists, when lists will do, so in handy list form:

HIGH:

- Dancers and choreographers (43.1 percent)

- bartenders (38.4 percent)

- massage therapists (38.2 percent)

- Also in the top 10 were casino workers, telephone operators, nurses and home health aides.

LOW:

- optometrists (4 percent)

- clergy (5.6 percent)

- podiatrists (6.8 percent)

- Three types of engineers -- agricultural, sales and nuclear engineers -- were represented among the 10 occupations with the lowest divorce rates
How did FedEx do it? Nobody knew they wanted that.
Yeah, this is a frequent pain point for a large number of users. If you search twitter for "how can I see my old tweets", there's thousands of people wanting that feature.

No wonder dozens of services (or even curl-based shell scripts or tutorials) are available to back up the tweets (shameless plug for my own http://sparrw.com/, which focuses on easy searching of past tweets and treating tweeted links as sort of auto-bookmarks, which is what I'm often using Twitter for).

But all this works only if you're quick enough, and set up some sort of backup system before the magic 3200 limit :(
$120/year is not worth it to me. $10/year would be. Just my feedback. :-)
Interesting, thanks for the link. I wonder if this means ILOG is in trouble...
I think it's because Java sees itself as its own operating system, and because it started out with a pretty crummy module system that's only been incrementally improved over the years.
I still find enjoyable the following:

Star Force (1984, Tehkan, Arcade game)

Black Tiger (Capcom, 1987, Arcade game (2x Z80), 7 megabit ROM set)

Ninja Kid II (UPL, 1987, Arcade game)

Legend of Hero Tonma (Irem, 1989, Arcade Game)

Parodius Da! - Shinwa kara Owarai e (Konami, 1990, Arcade game)

Super Mario World (Nintendo, 1990, SNES, 4 megabit ROM cartridge)

The Legend of the Mystical Ninja (Konami, 1991, SNES, 8 megabit ROM cartridge)

Super Metroid (Nintendo, 1994, SNES, 24 megabit ROM cartridge)

Super Mario 64 (Nintendo, 1996, N64, 64 megabit ROM cartridge)

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997, Playstation, CD-ROM)

It is possible to play it in its original form, and also in the PC, using emulators.
Where in the article did it say anything about mathematicians?
>but why is slapping together an API with some javascript worthy of a job offer?

I was equally leery for the same reason. I've made tons of apps that bound events and pulled/updated data from cache layers I had setup.

Apparently I didn't have the good sense to be a shameless self-promoter.

This is frankly exemplary of the one thing I don't like about HN, even though I dearly love the community here.

The emphasis on typical business values, rather than on true productivity and hard work agonizes my conscience on a regular basis.

It makes me nauseous to think he got such publicity and a job offer for that.

I hate to be sour about it, but damn.

S'like hiring a B-school kid because he completed a rudimentary business plan, rendered it into PDF, and put it online and it happened to go viral for some absurd reason.
Maybe I'm missing something, but does anyone see what the tool actually does. I saw the constraint solver, but there are already many existing packages that do the same (Octave is open-source, I believe). What is all the excitement about?
You can play it in Safari for Mac OS X with a Java Theora decoder (as an absolute last resort), with the XiphQT plugin for Quicktime, and at early alpha stage the Quicktime version of Webm.

Perian will pick up WebM decode next time it syncs with the latest ffmpeg too.
Please don't design your site so that I have to authorize my account and only then find out that I have to fork over $5 or $10 for the service (and de-authorize my account). Only a "Pricing" link in the top-right corner indicates that the site is behind a paywall.
The study was derived from census data where occupation is self reported which makes me think you may have a point.
You can run Tweetnest yourself http://pongsocket.com/tweetnest/ so that's free, here's mine: http://tweets.rythie.com/ for example.

There are other solutions around if you look.
Man gets 10 years for VoIP hacking
I'm want to agree with you, but I have a question.

Binaries tested against what? Obviously the testsuite that upstream uses, but every program will have dynamic dependencies into the distro. In that case wouldn't the upstream maintainers have to test every version or every distro to make sure it works for you? That seems time intensive (not infeasible, but it would become chaotic very quickly when we multiply the number of distros by the number of apps people want).

I'd also presume that the upstream maintainers include their testsuite with their source, so nothing should prevent the downstream distro maintainers from running the testsuite before shipping (I have always assumed they do, I hope I'm not wrong).
That is correct. However does that make it a good idea to do so?
As a yerba mate drinker for years I am excited to see some support for the farmers. I am afraid that companies like this bastardize the real thing and dilute it's significance in the minds of the (north)American mind.
Whenever I signed my contract - it did. It was one of the "upgrade packages" along with the verizon mobile tv that tacked 10$ a month onto the bill.
"Worthwhile", I don't know. I guess it depends on what your product is supposed to do.

My product is http://smallpayroll.ca, it's a do it yourself payroll site made for people who don't know anything about payroll. I freely admit it looks like crap. But of the handful of people that have tried it out and paid for it, I haven't heard "this looks like crap". What I hear is "this product makes my life so much easier"

Could I get more conversions with a better design? Maybe... But I know for my product it's not preventing me from getting paying customers.

(As an aside, I've often thought there should be a place for people like us to find designers that know how to work with applications instead of just designing web pages.)
Preservation of Twitter and other real-time services is definitely important, but not just for personal use. I'm also interested in viewing the tweet history of my friends, evolution of certain hash tags, etc.

My startup http://keepstream.com is involved in this real-time curation (Twitter now, more services later). I would love to chat with anyone interested in the subject; my contact information is in my profile.
It's only overkill if the user is aware of the infrastructure. If you make notes on your Mac, it auto-syncs to your iPhone, blah blah, the user is only vaguely aware that complicated computation is occurring behind the scenes.

Think of email. Email pretty damn complicated behind the scenes, all to send text to other people. Why don't people just write letters to each other!? Why bother with all this error prone infrastructure? Because if it's done right, people aren't even aware of it, they just click send and get instant value.
It was so bizarre that I had to post it on Mashable. It's already on top of Reddit as well. I'd say they're getting the bang for their buck with this one already.

It also comes with a slew of easter eggs, starting with the basketball at 0:42.
Me too, but I found a torrent for it. I then later found it in a software bin somewhere for like $4.99 a few years ago and bought it a second time.
Super-High-Resolution Display, With Pixels 8x Finer Than iPhone's
Also, bartending isn't a nine to five job. Late nights and weird schedules can be tough on a relationship. I have a few friends that are bartenders, and they can go days maybe weeks without seeing their significant others if their schedules line up that way.
Praveen Rathore's Blog - How to deal with Stress and Anxiety
I've thought about this too and it looked like a tough problem to solve, but it isn't.

Why do people do that?

They usually do it for Ask HN posts and well you can easily discriminate for them. Further if anyone tries to spoof the system by adding a URL there then we can parse it to see if there is any text there according to the stupidity filter. So, essentially it will still work.
The amount of spam just flowing out of the site right now is ridiculous. I guess everyone is trying to XSS it.
Doesn't anybody find this funny in a weird way? I'm actually in shambles over this one. Just like the subtle weird humor in David Lynch movies. It's surreal.
Hoff, which graph are you looking at? I'm looking at page 20 of chapter 3 (http://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/Propagation/1108/1108Chapter3.p...) - it does show a small peak but it looks to me as if it's at ~22 GHz, not 2.4. Note that it lies between "10" and "10²" on the X-axis. Also the magnitude of even that peak is only 2 x 10 to the minus 1 - i.e. 0.2 dB per km, and the nearby freqs are really not much different. The graph on page 21 agrees.

This article: http://www.martin.chaplin.btinternet.co.uk/microwave.html suggests that 2.4 GHz was chosen for microwave ovens as a NON-optimal absorption frequency, as this allows some of the energy to penetrate past the outermost layers of food!
It makes a lot of sense, android and phones are a complement to their business. Android is simply a way of reducing the cost for producing more phones. Facebook while large doesn't pose a serious threat to "organizing the worlds information" once Facebook sells their social graph information Google will simply purchase it and use it to further optimize search results. Neither Facebook, nor Apple are real competitors to Google's core operations. Google is a much more serious threat to Apple with Android than Apple is to Google with iPhone. Facebook and Apple ARE threats to mind share, but that pales in comparison to a threat to the bottom line.

Bing IS a threat also because Microsoft has a large stake in Facebook and could ostensibly find itself with preferential rights to Facebook's social graph. If Bing could integrate the graph into results first it could give them huge search advantages. Traffic from Bing also costs about half of what it does from Google.
I looked at the complete list (linked to from Robin Hanson's blog: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/09/low-divorce-jobs.html).

Mathematicians are #9.
I think I suffer from this problem, I like to compare it to writers block or something like that, my problem is that I want to develop something but I don't know what and get frustrated at having a lack of ideas.

This frustration then gets interspersed with furious bouts of development on personal projects that can last 4-6 weeks, and then I go back to another 3 months of doing nothing and hitting my head against a brick wall.

Help?
Thanks for the upvote. I was the one who submitted it, and I really thought it was something HNers would like to see-- a real piece of Hacker history.

I was quite surprised when it didn't make the front page.
Great idea but the UI needs some work... Everything blends together. What I'd love is notifications when a comment receives a reply. Sign me up for that!
No, it isn't harsh at all, but I think that to people that have never been on or over the edge that it may sound harsh.

I had a stake in a Canadian gas station, the lady that ran it had signed up for some stupid carpet cleaning machine that they were paying through the nose for. She was complaining about how much it had cost and how many years they would still be under contract, it would have cost about 50 times what the p.o.s. was worth.

So I asked for permission to negotiate a solution, received it and called the company. I presented them with two options, $100 to buy out the contract (and keep the machine) or a very protracted collection procedure with 0 chance of success and a very large amount of bad publicity. The one phone call was all it took.

Business is not always being nice, and in this case the OP is being way too nice and is not looking out for his own interests as much as he should. The fact that his co-founder left him to rot is particularly galling.

Oh, and I think you meant 'wouldn't', not 'would'.
I think it comes down to usability as opposed to design. I've seen some absolutely beautiful sites (professionally) that nobody could figure out how to navigate, and thus had a low conversion rate. Yet a site that look straight out of a 14-year old's bedroom hosted on Geocities could return more results since the call to action was very clear.

This post talks a lot about this type of usability and speaks to this point (and even mentions A/B testing with usability):
http://sixrevisions.com/usabilityaccessibility/10-usability-...
I thought you were joking. I'm sorry you're not.

http://shweeb.com/
What happens when a check box and a select have a baby? A dropdown check list
Also in the top 10 were casino workers, telephone operators, nurses and home health aides.

And Mathematicians (#9).

Complete list is here: http://hanson.gmu.edu/temp/DivorcebyJob.xls
we tried yearly pricing and it turned out to be a big pain.. people forgot about their subscriptions and we're confused/angry when it renewed, people's credit card numbers changed or expired after a year and caused subscriptions to expire, etc etc... $10/yr pricing on a monthly subscription doesn't work because there are just too many fees. Appreciate the feedback though... still trying to figure out the right price.
This.

Sure, they integrated all of these unicorns and faerie dust together very well and very convincingly, but ultimately it's still just fantasy.

The advantage of a design concept predicated on technology that's not. quite. there. yet. is that you can save embarrassment from failing to make it a reality by being dependent on technologies that may not even make it to market. Ultimately that's a form of design cowardice.
Location in Internet services – the panel discussion
I volunteer for an organization called Raising a Reader, a non-profit literacy organization that teaches families the importance of reading to a child from birth to age 5 in order to have them reading-ready for school. This is a very worthwhile cause.

When my own children were born I took reading to them as a given and read to them every night, enjoying the cuddle time. When they became competent readers themselves, I would read the first chapter of a juicy book to them and they'd be grabbing the book from me like it was a piece of candy.

The screens are ok, as long as you don't use them as a babysitter. We're in a technology age, so we can't ignore them. As parents, we need to teach our children a balance between screen time and other stellar activities like reading.
Very Clever Toyota - Donate your way to more email opt-ins
you don't have to authorize your account to find out it's behind a paywall... but I agree, the flow needs to be improved.
If I whisper the most beautiful poem over the telephone to my lover today, am I going to complain about the phone company not archiving that call properly when I want to revisit it 20 years from now? You go into Twitter knowing it's about the ebb and flow of current conversation, not about what was said when it first came out. If Twitter wants to eventually offer that, that's cool, but that's not the case right now, and you shouldn't expect it any more than you should expect 7-11 to keep their security footage of you for your perusal indefinitely into the future.

edit: from Twitter's Terms of Use (http://twitter.com/tos): "This license is you authorizing us to make your Tweets available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same. But what’s yours is yours – you own your content."

You own your content. You are responsible for it.
The obvious problem with this is that it eliminates the possibility of old-timers using throwaway accounts to submit anonymously. That's a pretty major drawback, if you ask me-- there's a lot of good discussions that begin with an anonymous "Ask HN" or "Tell HN"...
So, you had an idea, your idea was validated because there are competitors and someone else just got funding to make that particular idea.

And then, because you'd have competition, you gave up.

And our startups won't make it because we'd give up if we found a competitor, which most people actually think of as a good thing?

A very odd post. Feels more like an attempt to justify your decision.
With some missing periods
Bingo.

I actually use only the new page since enough of my interests are sufficiently esoteric that submissions about them never get many votes (often only mine).

But your title was a distinct turn-off, strongly enough so that I actually remember it as such. Unfortunately I just about never look at who submits items, otherwise I might have given it a chance.

At least for me, you'd be much better off with a title that gives me at least the slightest concrete idea of what the submission is about.
Ask HN: How to design app shortcut icons for iphone/android etc?
Many of you must have written and distributed apps on iphones, android, plain old desktops etc. I wanted to make an icon (say 256x256) for the app shortcut and am having two problems:

1. I don't want to accidentally make an icon that is too similar to some brand and get sued.
2. I am no artist.

How do you solve these two problems? What are the tools/software that you use to make icons?
Friendfeed seems to be archiving all of my tweets just fine... for free!
I was thinking it would be opt-in on the preferences page.

Another option would be an extra link at the end of the headline (like how scribd appears for pdf), but that just ends up looking cluttered.
How do they determine the "best layout" at the top? I pasted in a couple hundred lines of code and it claims that Colemak is the best, but Arensito (hadn't heard of it before) has fewer meters traveled and more home row usage (where Colemak is beat by everything except QWERTY).

At any rate, all the layouts other than QWERTY and Personalized were within 10 percent of each other for meters traveled.
I think anyone that's done even a little bit of C work on any platform is aware of this issue.... but it's always worth griping over it some more. I guess the poster just ran into it and couldn't help but express his frustration :)

For Win32 developers who don't have the glib g_strsplit function, you can use strtok_s which is detailed on MSDN here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ftsafwz3(VS.80).aspx

strtok_s is re-entrant, thread-safe, and uses no global data, but keep in mind it still modifies your input string.
Heatmap of your foursquare checkins. I'm sure these guys would be up for doing it for geotweets.

http://www.weeplaces.com/
The issue isn't with the code. What I'm saying is that the code you produced is effectively a counterargument to deterministic quicksort and doesn't apply in the random case. What McIlroy is doing is selecting an element on the fly during the algorithm. If quicksort was randomized, he would not be able to do so. Thus his argument breaks down there.

If you are constructing a "worst case" for randomized quicksort, the answer is still obviously O(n^2), but the purpose of randomized quicksort is that it is O(nlogn) EXPECTED running time. Thus, by constructing a worst case input, you really haven't broken randomized quicksort at all. In fact, you're doing exactly what its intended to do: perform badly sometimes, perform well other times, and in the expected case, perform O(nlogn).

I read the entire paper, and I'm, of course, no expert, but I've ran my argument past a professor in algorithms (who is a Turing award winner), and he also believes that McIlroy's argument does not work for the randomized case.

His heuristic cannot be legitimately applied in the randomized case because the adversary simply is not allowed to choose elements in the randomized case. That, of course, is the purpose of randomization. Thus, it doesn't matter what his code or heuristic shows. His argument has a logical fallacy and thus is illegitimate (only when applied to the randomized case of course).
Well, some say that any publicity is good publicity.

But if it comes off as foolish, and you don't even get the point of it, and most who share it are only sharing it because they don't get it, then in the end you've just contributed to people wasting time. They tried to promote their product or service, but all I remember is "stupid" and "pizza". It did however make me associate "Google" with "stupid" and "repetitive".
Wha? He Says he'd dying, and nobody questions it? Is he some kind of doctor, diagnosing himself...I don't get it.

This guys is so full of opinions, but that doesn't mean he's right all the time.
Which fees? If you mean credit card processing fees, then even $20 would make more sense, no? You have to remember: your service isn't twitter so I think people would be less inclined to pay a total of $5-10/month. (I don't know this market well enough, but that's my initial takeaway.)
Kind of, although I think that 'in the style of' is a more accurate translation. For example, you might see '日本風のステーキ' for 'Steak, in the Japanese style.'
First off, strtok() is dead, long live strsep().

Secondly, this is C code--it's pretty low-level. Yes, strsep() messes with your input. But that is very well documented. If you don't want it to, strdup() beforehand (or strndup() if you don't trust the input).

His whole example of strtok() dying on a character constant is stupid--why on earth would you do that? If you've got a string constant you may as well just have the constant array and save yourself the parsing headache.

This isn't rocket science.
Property values, taxes, etc.: unusually good infographic
Always use strndup(). Never trust your input.
That's a much more interesting article. Thanks.
It does seem like things fly by too fast. Here's an idea: what if every person saw only a random subset of the new stories?

Kind of like how Facebook has "Top News" and "Most Recent," but instead of intelligent filtering there would a simple random selection. The selection would be persistent, so that you'd see the same articles when you went back to the page.
If it wasn't for VIM, I'd consider switching to a more efficient keyboard layout.