skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not everyone can nap well. I can't sleep in the day. Even when really tired, if I try, I end up half-sleeping, waking up feeling really weird with my heart beating faster than normal. I have fallen asleep before (on a bus or something), but basically always on accident and never when I try to.

Although I guess there are probably few enough people like me that excluding us won't really harm you, it still seems over-the-top to require it. And yes, I imagine you were exaggerating, but just saying.
It has only been out since November 2009, and it wasn't considered ready for production then. Maybe it is now, but it definitely hasn't had much time to be establish a large user base.
Yeah, it wasn't open source. Edit: wikipedia says it was only open sourced in 2002.

Incidentally, the 'crossing the chasm' approach would be to find some niche where a new OS could succeed - perhaps something where the network effects were less pernicious.
Force? As in medication for those who don't naturally want to sleep then?
The docs are horrible and often contradictory -- but with enough trial and error most things can be figured out.

The unannounced breaking changes are absolutely inexcusable and screw the people using your platform. It is not a sustainable development plan, you will eventually alienate 'the next Zynga' and all the smaller developers. Please, please, please put some effort into API stability.
Based on the previous discussion linked, I'm a little surprised and disappointed by the number of folks here at HN who think software patents aren't that big of a deal, or are somehow good for innovation.

I just assumed that anyone who had worked in software for any length of time was aware of the current minefield that is software development. Every field I've worked in (proxies and security, scientific computing, large-scale cluster computing, web service, web-based GUIs, virtualization) have had at least a few seriously dangerous and over-broad patents that loom over the whole field and make everyone a little nervous or forces workarounds or closing ones eyes and pretending to not know and hoping you don't get sued.

It is simply impossible to write non-trivial software without violating some patent or other. If you're lucky, it will be patents held by "good" companies that won't sue you.

The amount of harm done by software patents is vast, and the amount of good is pretty hard for me to spot.

Anyway, I've sent off my email in support of excluding software from patentability, though I have my doubts as to its effectiveness.
Design Secrets: Threadless
The business press is like the t-rex in Jurassic Park - they only see motion. Microsoft is big, but not growing.
This is more significant than you might expect from a first glance.

the media writes about companies or technologies that are innovative, game changing, cool, popular, controversial or scandalous. Companies that are feared, loved or admired get press - companies that aren't don't.

If you look at the press Microsoft is getting relative to its size (whether you choose turnover, profits, number of employees, market cap or any other metric) it's even worse. Microsofts market cap is $214 billion[1] and twitters is $1 billion[2], yet twitter receives twice as much press as Microsoft. If you factor in the fact that almost every technology consumer on earth has some sort of exposure to Microsoft (thus making it an obvious company to write about for the press) it's even worse.

This is a strong indication that Microsoft is neither feared, loved or admired. It seems like a company past it's prime.

[1] http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=msft

[2] http://tech.mit.edu/V129/N39/long2.html
Arrays and pointers: alike yet different
tried to clear this up for beginners
Glenda is super cute but did you try to use Plan9? I give it a small try last year and well... GNU/Linux is mainstream, FreeBSD is a really good derivative of Unix too, OpenBSD is great when we want to have a secure OS... NetBSD would probably run on my toaster... But Plan9? It have a cute mascot.

Oh and I really like its name and the "Plan 9 from User Space" thing, especially after having seen the fabulous movie! But I think of it only as a cool thing to know, never seriously think about using it in place of a GNU/Linux or a *BSD. (same thing for Open Solaris too in fact)
I registered as well and fired of an email to their feedback contact. The Twitter OAuth process is especially painful on an iPhone. You have to log in to Twitter and approve, then come back to Quora to enter username, password, and email.
What would the baseline be? Not told whether to nap or not? I imagine that's the same as non-napping, because most people don't nap.
All of the above. And also because, I just don't want to have to use FB to login to a totally unrelated site.

The use case is, I use FB sparingly because I don't have time to get sucked into that pit. I friend people I meet irl, and 'Like' sites that are relevant to my profession (personal branding & networking).

But I don't use it for any other purpose. So if your site isn't relevant to my profession, I don't want to connect via Facebook, and if that's the only login option, you've just lost me.

Every site should have OpenID and/or its own user accounts, so as not to lose users who for one reason or another don't want ot use FB.
Why would you trust a website asking for an email and password more?
That's why I said "Imagine". My point being that this is a small step, but in the wrong direction.
Windows Live Outsources Blogging, Migrating 30 Million Users To WordPress.com
There you have it folks, Python supports destructuring assignment. :-)
Agreed.

I found one service, where they have only Facebook login and it doesn't work for me.

I wrote to them and the assholes just ignored me.

I think it's arrogance. I mean, Google Account would make sense. Many hackers I know don't even have Facebook account.
Power naps are great... and have been for eons. Yet Harvard has just figured it out? LOL. Masters of the obvious.
http://kingdomofintroversion.com/table-of-contents/
I agree it's cool that it works on lists and sets and dictionary keys. Upvoted, etc. Just noting that there are many situations where it won't replace the [0].

Also, I don't worry about order on simple equality expressions unless someone asks me to do it a certain way. That's a religious argument and a complete waste of time for me.
I wasn't aware phrack was still around - certainly a blast from the past.
I have a site that requires Facebook to login.

For this site, user fraud is a big concern. I would much rather have an easy way to tell if someone is a "real" person, and Facebook gives me that.

If my market size goes from 1.5B to 500M because of this decision, that's fine. In our case, it's a calculated choice, like the dozens of calculated choices a startup makes every day.
In "The Promise of Sleep", the author talks about naps and getting tired in the afternoon, and his conclusion is that the only reason people get tired in the afternoon (which is when your clock-dependent alerting is at its lowest) is because they are sleep deprived. If you are well rested and don't have sleep debt, you should not get tired at that time.

Having consciously tried to get enough sleep over the past 2 years or so, I believe he's right. These days, I barely notice any afternoon dip and when I do, it's when my sleep has been disturbed for some reason.
A/B testing significance calculator (spreadsheet in Excel)
I do not know of a single $8 host that does the following:

- We upgrade the curated plugins we offer for you (though you can use any plugins you'd like)

- We keep WordPress itself upgraded (when ready, new releases are not always perfect)

- We make sure all the standard security stuff you'd read on any WordPress developers blog is in place (file permissions, admin account, etc)

- We go further by offering hardware DoS/DDoS mitigation, intrusion detection, and redundant firewall protection

- Aaron Brazell (Author of the WordPress Bible, http://goo.gl/mGgi) answers your support questions

- Speed. Tuning of various caches, memcache for database/object caching, modifications to your theme or plugins, and so on.

- Scale. We make sure your site stays up when you receive spiky or sustained traffic. Don't get Fireballed.

- On top of that, we're the only hosting company (that I know of!) who also puts your static content (images, CSS, JS) on a CDN for you as part of the base price! Which means even faster load times plus more scalability. (Granted we haven't advertised this on the site yet, something we'll be fixing soon!)

- Staging feature. Again, I'm not sure of any host who has something like this. We'll be adding more cool tools soon!

- We spell WordPress correctly =)

At the end of the day you shouldn't compare us to an $8 host. You pay for what you get. We go above and beyond regular hosting.
None, oddly enough. He managed to get a lot of girls interested in him, though.

High school must be different nowadays...
The suggested text is nonsense. Software is no more "mathematics" than are circuit diagrams, chemistry nor books.
I think you may misunderstand what signing in with Facebook does.

1) It could, potentially, provide some value to you as a user. Quora gets to suggest people to follow for you based on your Facebook friends, so your experience on there is seeded with relevant information.

2) Nothing you do on the site you signed in with is published to your Facebook profile, without your explicit consent on a dialog box.
I was involved in a buyout of a small (~15-20 people) company and the average stake was around 3%, but we had no outside funding at all.

It didn't end in FU money (it was a "small" exit when compared to VC backed exits), but its enough to completely pay for retirement someday.
I would much rather have an easy way to tell if someone is a "real" person, and Facebook gives me that.

How does Facebook give you that, exactly?
I agree. It is best if they provide an option. So you can login with facebook if you choose to. I use my twitter login more than facebook.
I think he meant "token" as in "trivial", not as in an OAuth authentication token.
On the other hand, it could just be that they've faded into the background. People don't often spend hours discussing something that is 'the default.' Windows isn't going anywhere for a long time.
It's because Unix has become very popular and it is good enough for mainstream use despite its flaws. Plan 9 brings certain design improvements but they don't actually justify a need for replacement.

It's actually not that surprising since good design on its own is never a sufficient criteria for something to become mainstream.
I don't want to overshadow the fact that somebody died, but I wonder how / if this will negatively affect Segway's PR.
phrack pwnz
Good answer. I didn't know that—that should be on your site somewhere :)
Thanks. Any idea what the ETA is (if there is one)?
Several ways, none of which is individually full-proof, but taken together they are a very good indicator:

- Does the user have a profile photo, or is it the default user icon?

- How many friends does the user have? (Generally 0, 1, or 2 is highly suspicious)

- Does the user have a real name? [Edit: we have a blacklist of fake names.]
I just wrote and emailed the following: http://www.jakevoytko.com/blog/2010/09/27/my-letter-to-the-u...

I was short on time, so it is longer than I hoped. However, I think it gets my core feelings across.
Super Angels: Like Making Love To A Lover. VCs: Not so much.
Have you ever thought about throwing a version of Physics Club for these game engineers?

Like having a contest to predict where something rolled down a ramp will end up? School them in the basic equations. Beer, pizza.
>the ultimate cause for the enjoyment is increase in genetic fitness

Falsifiable claims, please.
I have two fake Facebook accounts that I use to sign in to services. I even have a good rep on Quora using a completely fake name.

Forcing Facebook because you think it will give you real people and verified accounts is wrong.
The Four Possible Answers to Any Investor's Question
Most people don't go to the trouble of registering a fake Facebook account to sign up for a random web service. If you want to be even more strict, you can look for people with at least 3 friends -- most real people have more than 10 friends, and very few people with a fake account will register 4.
What the HELL is Social Media
Agreed. Knowing that the company requiring you to sign in can quite easily access all the data stored by Facebook worries me greatly. Twitter logins I have no problem with, as all my twitter info is public anyway (such is the nature of twitter), so there isn't any damage that can be done. Facebook, however, gives you no way of knowing exactly what it stores and shares, and because of this I am simply too paranoid to log in with it.

The best login system is OAuth by far - it is secure, and doesn't have any risk attached.
I think the author has a valid point, but I disagree with his tone. I feel like those of us who were speaking about this early on always said that the browser would be the constraint.

This is why Yahoo has been working on using YUI3 in Node to offer an API layer that works both in the browser and the server. (http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2010/04/09/node-js-yui-3-dom-man...)

The latest demos of this have Expressjs being used to render using a YUI3 based templating (http://express.davglass.com/).
GPS approaches are allowed, FWIW.

I'm also not sure the localiser signal was involved since I don't think the crew would have gone to the back to get the passenger to mess around with the DVD during an approach.
sudo apt-get install -y checkinstall

Then in root of project:

./configure && make && sudo checkinstall
While the save-quit approach would be a fairly pointless way of playing Galaga, save states could still be legitimately useful as a means of making it more convenient to practice playing the higher levels.
To be able to hear the gsm buzz in their headphones, the cellphone would have to be on their person, turned on, and be about send/receive some sort of call or data. If a cell phone from a distance away can cause a gsm buzz, then being in an area that has cell phone reception would cause the buzz and they need to design their headphone systems better.
And this needs to be posted to HN WHY?
Maintaining a separate identity for every site across the web gets more impractical by the second. I think most people would agree that a third-party authentication service is a positive thing, but there seems to be a stigma, earned or not, surrounding Facebook that makes people hesitant to assign that responsibility to them.

I think ultimately it's going to come down to a paid, independent service. Startups can't offer this kind of thing for free as there is no trust involved in the transaction. Likewise most large companies have already traded away their trust capital for various fiscal and political gains over the course of their existence. No, there must be some legal recourse for the consumer for the moment the authenticator screws up, and the only way to transfer risk in that way is with money.

Probably the single biggest barrier to this is the widespread desire to remaining anonymous on the web. The thing it seeks to combat is precisely the thing so many value so greatly: maintaining multiple identities, personas, existences on the web.
The brackets are optional; you can also write

thing, = [stuff]

though some people think that it's less legible since it has a completely different meaning without the comma.

EDIT: you can even play with the whitespace and pretend that ",=" is a list->scalar conversion operator:

x ,= [1]
Email is better because you are not locked into using some third party website to log in. You can set up an email server of you own if you wanted to.
This to me sounds a lot like wordpress.com, albeit over-priced.

I did a cursory price comparison. WP.com is the most annoyingly secretive website I've seen about it's pricing, so all these are from the second hand accounts in the forums ( http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/please-be-more-up-front... ):

CSS upgrade $15
Map domain: $10
25GB space: $90 (I know WP Engine is 10GB)
Unlimited users: $30
No ads: $30

$175, per year, which is roughly $15/mo.

The one thing missing from WP.com is the custom plugins and support. Honestly, if you're running my blog, why do I need support, really? And they have proven infrastructure, which is another selling point you're making. The plugins make for an interesting offering, but is it really worth it?

Please don't take this as me being rude. I just can't see much of a difference between WP Engine and wp.com after reading the websites to justify the price difference. Maybe that's something to work on?
It would if it were true, but it's not.

Still an interesting question, though. I've seen cats focus pretty hard on certain things.
While I personally use Django/python, going with Rails in quite beneficial as opposed to Scala.

Firstly, there is a huge established community to help you out and you can readily find programmers to hire.

Second, rails (or django) will allow you to get up and running quickly and will let you figure out whether your app is viable or not. If it works out, you can then start thinking about scaling and such. For now, use an established web framework(Django, Rails, Cakephp) and get it done.
Haha you are correct, we definitely need to update our site to avoid confusion like this! Thanks for the feedback =)
Ask HN: Will you apply for the Webby Awards?
I'm considering entering in the Webby Awards with a site I've been working on for 2 years (part time), but being a solo founder I find that the entry fee of $225 USD is very expensive.

Have you applied to the Webby before? Do you think it's worth paying the entry fee and try?

Of course I love my website ;) but I'm not part of the jury :)
It is your market. I am a teenager (guessing that is your market based on stats). I have a facebook account (don't use it much), but will absolutely never sign in to another site using Facebook. The security issues worry me, as does the access you have as a service to my facebook profile.
Does the user have a real name?

I'm very curious how do you believe you can check that.
It's also very frustrating for everyone behind the great firewall of China.
I'm definitely not suggesting making up some fantastical story in the 'PUA' style, or using a canned opener, or generally treating the girl as some machine that has a set of locks you need to open. At some point you have to have some shit to talk about. When you aren't good at talking to new people, you are nervous and 'in your head' which reduces your involvement with the conversation and amount you have to say. Sooo you need a plan. You need material. Simple (positive!) situational stuff is great.

Plus, if you have a plan (material!) you will come across as more confident because you aren't making it up on the spot.

Also, girls rarely 'help' you unless the environment is social. A friend's party is easy. She will 'help' you; you are already vetted in lacking creep. Bars are moderately easy. Just act like you are awesome. Salsa is easy as they are there to meet people. A cute girl on the train platform will not help you. You gotta be god damn don juan.
The following is my letter:

Undoubtedly there will be many comments emphasizing the bad effects of
software patents, and that for policy reasons they should not be
accepted. While I agree with this argument, I see other fundamental
problems with applying patents to software, and write to discourage
their use.

I instead want to stress that software is not a machine, but
instructions, an algorithmic, step-by-step, description of processes.
This core nature of software means that even when the process being
described by the software is patented, this should not hinder the
distribution of the software. A patent application is itself much the
same thing -- a description of the process to be covered. It would be
utterly ludicrous to forbid the distribution of an approved patent
application for violating the patent. The description is not the
process itself, nor is it a machine for performing the process. The
same really holds true programs. Imagine taking a patent application
and annotating with details of a particular way of implementing the
patent. At no point does it make sense to forbid the distribution.

It is, of course, perfectly reasonable to have an otherwise patentable
invention be partially implemented in software. I must argue though
that what violates the patent is the whole machine (including the
software, to be sure), and not the software itself, nor the general
purpose computer itself. Either should be free to be built, used, sold,
and otherwise distributed. This is not much different from parts
in an invention being illegal to combine in a way that violates the
patent, while perfectly legal to have apart or combine in other ways.

I will also note that in practice, many software patents have been
granted that seems obvious. Combining something with a general purpose
computer should never have been considered non-obvious, nor should doing
something with a computer network as an intermediary be considered non
obvious. Computers were built to perform algorithmic processes.
Selecting a particular algorithm may not be obvious, but the use of a
computer to execute it certainly is obvious. Computer networks were
built to carry general information; making that type of information more
specific to a certain use does not make the use of a general network
less obvious. Many machines are adapted to a specific used, and must be
readapted to be used in a different, but similar circumstance.
Computers and computer networks are different. They are general purpose
machines where the general really does encompass all specifics.
Power Sleep, by Cornell sleep researcher Dr. James Maas, transformed my idea of naps. I highly recommend the book. He recommends short "power naps" to quickly get in some rest. The key is to wake up before your body goes into a deep sleep cycle. For me, this means approx. 15-20 minute naps when needed. It truly is astounding how much this rejuvenates you. These naps were insanely helpful back when I was in college.

Buy on Amazon: http://amzn.to/bvumKg

WorldCat (library catalog search): http://bit.ly/c3NMpF

I just wish naps were more accepted in the corporate world. When I have a startup again, I'd love to have a "nap" room for employees. Google has sleep pods: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-sleep-pods-2010-6
A service with an addressable market of the entire Internet is very rare.

Usually your addressable market will be something like: "English speakers over the age 22 with household income of at least $30,000 per year."

And then suddenly more people are on Facebook than not.
The thing that you are failing to realize is that it's easier to lock down access using a public key than a password. You can specify the amount of access an incoming ssh connection has based on the public key. You can't do that w/ a password.

I could have multiple keys, all w/ different access levels, all on the same user account. There is no way to do this with a password, other than to just have separate user accounts.
And the ONE foundation has said 1) It's not a charity, 2) they don't take public contributions, 3) the private funders, who are on the board and include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, do not have a problem with the spending.
Not at all. There may be many things that can cause B ("sleeps more"), such as "hunts big game." So A -> B does not imply B -> A.
I don't know if it matters per se, but I'm in IE7, and while the 'run this code' demos work on the site, almost nothing else does. Specifically, none of the buttons in the floating toolbar do anything.

Also, I can't read the first paragraph of text, as the toolbar is hovering over it.
See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1732738
Go with whichever one will get you up and running the quickest.