skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure how feasible this is, but if you could somehow detect that a user has submitted several lines very quickly (ie: they've just pasted something into the channel), automatically dump it to some Pastebin variant, and then show the link to that instead.
I know it's ingrained into the culture of HN and other sites, but karma is dumb.

In response to the bury, let me clarify. On HN, upvotes and downvotes allow a comment to stand on its own merit. Using amassed karma to determine the quality of an individual is dumb. Since IRC's nature is instant and ephemeral communication (yes, often logged, etc), it makes little sense to use a karma system for IRC. Individual comments can't be filtered or buried (they're instant!) so the only other option would be to filter people individually by karma. We call that a popularity contest, and THAT is dumb.
You know how occasionally some old guy will retire and then die within weeks or months of his retirement? Strom Thurmond, for one, did this. Sometimes people assume that without the job to keep them busy some people just lose the will to live, but maybe they're sensing they don't have long to go and retiring in advance so they don't inconvenience anyone.
Apache Ivy is another solution for auto-downloading dependencies but plays nice with Ant.
The title is a bit inflammatory, that's all.
> I'm not the guy suggesting he take out a personal loan to cover this.

I know, that's even weirder.

> I'm just saying that if his creditors want to pursue him personally for the debt they do have the law on their side.

Sorry, but I really don't buy that. In theory, maybe, in practice, knowing what I know about this situation so far, no way.

edit: man I hate it when people delete their presence from a thread like that, Paul please stop that from being possible.
to be honest, it was mostly based on "what would I pay for this service" ... operating costs at this point are pretty low
Tuff competing with the big boys
I run a website that gets occasional buzz in programming channels. As a result, I'm in a dozen or so IRC channels, with hilight rules set up to ping me when someone's talking about the site--that way I can dive in and address misconceptions or problems, or just generally interact with an interested community.

I had an idea for a bot that would allow temporary, rule-based bridging of conversations in participating channels. I never got around to coding, but I did blog the concept in more detail: http://mmol-6453.livejournal.com/213900.html
Logging is usually up to the users. Also, it's generally assumed (unless otherwise stated) that the logs will not be explicitly made public.
XSS Accounted for 51% of Vulnerabilities In Test of 2,922 Web Apps
On the thrill of the single-player: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/9/20/

Myself, I'm enjoying the multi-player with friends. We just dig, explore and build, which has been a hoot. Though we're kind of itching to actually fend off monsters from our complex, once that gets implemented.
My grandfather used to say - never make friends with a cop. I should add bloggers to the list.
We have hit 1000's of updates per second on our current system during some high load periods and did not see any problems. Our steady state is 100's per second, but it bursts to 1000's for extended durations about once per week if not more often.

10 reports per second is actually not that much load and has almost no impact on writers. We have an alerting system that runs while data is input to the system. It effectively loads a report for each metric reported in the input and decides whether or not to send an alert. That system generates queries about 50 reports per second on an ongoing basis and does not impact the writers. Our read volume in steady state is about 2x our write volume.

We have not seen any queueing problems on writes and the lock ratio in mongodb is typically in the 0.01 - 0.005 range.

We have found that we can break this by running lots of map-reduce jobs simultaneously while processing high write volume but that's a whole other ball of wax.

Our data access patterns very easily accomodate sharding. Both reads and writes are pretty even distributed across the set of URL's we track. By activating sharding using URL as shard key, we feel we can handle scaling several orders of magnitude beyond where we are now without anything more than additional hardware (or virtual machines).

I'd love to hear how your system scaling goes. Feel free to hit me up via email if you want to discuss (jrosoff AT yottaa.com)
Facebook 'Likes' Starting To Resemble A Ponzi Scheme
Check this out for other ideas on what can be done with it: http://lifehacker.com/5527055/the-cleverest-ways-to-use-drop...
Wow I just looked at US Copyright Group's website:

www.copyrightsettlement.info

"All Major Credit Cards Accepted". I think that says it all right there.
Hacker Sentenced to 10 Years
Hummingbird is awesome and both as a tool and a case study. We learned a lot from Hummingbird that we incorporated into the design of our system.
I agree, for the most part. But there's some subtleties:

1. Yes, Twitter's real-time just like the phone, but it's not only real-time like the phone. You can revisit any tweet you like. They support viewing old tweets, they support listing old tweets. My only concern is that they place limits on how much they list.

2. Yes, we're responsible for our content, but the significance of services change over time. Tomorrow's Hacker News startup might be interesting, you might drop some content in, but most people aren't going to immediately create an offsite backup. Likewise, the tweets we made in the first two years of Twitter's life probably seemed worthless to us at the time, but now their value has increased. It just would be nice to have access to that.
Little can be inferred from the link, but I am 100% sure that Zed makes an awesome teacher for anyone who's considering taking the class. Just hit him up on Twitter or e-mail, and I'm sure he'll oblige.
And then the homeowners will declare bankruptcy and the third parties get nothing instead of possibly something. The risk of this happening is supposed to be encoded in the risk rating of the loan, but that didn't happen in a very useful fashion.
I made this tool over a year ago as a proof of concept. It doesn't support all features (like negations inside of character classes), but it should demonstrate the benefit that a tool like this would give you. I'd be interested in helping someone else understand the guts and make it into a public service to help out newbie developers coming to understand these notoriously-difficult-but-highly-useful expression.
Ah, this is a very good point you bring up here. Had not thought in those terms, but you are very right. Advertisement, however tends to be very pan-platform if you will. Even more so these days, integrated, vertical marketing seems to be the name of the game. The big money will continue to make ad buys on all platforms that deliver eyeballs, not just one or the other.
What services are these?
Interesting that this is still the popular definition of "hacker" in mainstream media.
When I was single, I went on a modified (included small portions of lean meats) Eat To Live diet as an experiment.For breakfast, I jammed myself full of fruits and some dairy. For lunch I had a Subway salad with all the veggies and a lean meat. For dinner, I had a large punchbowl-sized salad with a variety of vegetables and a lean meat. Broccoli and vast amounts of spinach seemed a common theme. I also drank A LOT of water. I did not modify my sedentary fitness scheme.

The results were that I dropped 10 lbs a week for that month, didn't seem to lose any muscle, and didn't feel hungry. I felt more energetic. The downside was that I had to make 3 trips a week to the store for fresh veggies.

Some of my other "body hacks" experiments were:

- Vegan for 2 years

- Vegetarian for 10 years. Going back to meat (especially tuna) had amazing effects on my brain functioning. Tuna was initially the only meat I could eat without throwing it back up. I noticed great mind improvements within a couple days.

- Eliminating all sodas (of which I only drank diet pepsi) for a month. I very rapidly lost (probably water) weight. If I recall, it was about 20 lbs. I have no clue whats in Diet Pepsi that causes weight/water retention.

- Polyphasic sleep: A total scam in my experience. Maybe I need too much sleep.

- 5BX: Really works

- Body For Life: Really works as advertised, but consumes your life.

- Couch (couldn't jog 400 meters to start) to ultramarathon in 8 months, with several marathons as "training" along the way. Some marathons were at high altitude and quite rugged.

- I have not used any soap or shampoo for 2 weeks now (per http://freetheanimal.com/2009/12/paleo-i-dont-care-i-like-no...). To save space, I am finding the same results as the author, Richard Nikoley, has.

I don't stink. I haven't told my wife about this experiment and she hasn't mentioned any stink yet! Another modifier to my washing regime is that I now use a washcloth instead of just a bar of soap in hand, so this probably has an effect, too.

I don't have any particular ideological aims behind these experiments (except maybe to go against conventional wisdom).

If anyone has any other interesting experiments they want/wish they could try, post em here, maybe I'll try for you!
The fact that you're trying to perpetuate IRC in a time after the nineteen-hundreds is admirable, but the protocol itself is somewhat broken. I mean, it'd be great if a network offered Public Key Infrastructure for authentication (non-spoofability), Encrypted communication, and non-repudiation... but then you're talking about SILC (which, by the way, I think is vastly superior to traditional IRC)
You need to think about the whole market size. What if the existing note taking applications like Simple Note are utilizied by only a tiny percentage of the possible market? Intead of just giving up, think of what other features you could introduce to beat Simple Note. Have you done any research to see how they are even doing? Don't be discouraged by competition. Google always pops up in my mind whenever I hear a story like this.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that daily access to physical contact with clients might give rise to both temptation and jealousy.
Yes. We agree.
It's not just Java. Python is stuck at 2.4 in most Linux distros, and arguably Python's been a symbiotic part of Linux's success.
I recommend learning Blub
Most "corporate firewalls" are egress filters with a proxy server, and proxy servers won't just barf IRC packets to a box on port 80. Some will barf random non-SSL traffic to port 443, though.
It very well may. I point it out because it seems to be becoming a default, just as Helvetica has.
Parallel Programming using R in Windows
like? can you give example?
Ask HN: PHP library/script for site analytics
I have a web app that allows members to create custom pages/profiles (think Facebook). I would like each member to be able to see their own analytics. Do you know of a php script or library for storing, and then nicely displaying visitor stats/analytics?
we're testing our technology
It wasn't actually an uncontrollable laugh, it was a picture of a double rainbow and a really quick parody of this viral video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQSNhk5ICTI
Yeah I've been thinking about moving in that direction. I'm currently halfway through an 18 month contract, so its going to be some time before I'll be able to change some things up.

I'm not entirely sure how to break into the consulting market, I've been doing misc contract jobs for several years now. Any recommendations on how to migrate to consulting?
The green CTA isn't very readable. Making it a bit darker with a contrasting text color (black) would assumingly increase conversion :)
Alas, neither Numbers nor Google Spreadsheet seems happy with this file.
He probably can't... but his spouse, grandma or whomever can.
If you're trying to strdup() something you're not even sure is null-terminated, you're already doomed.
He also elided basic error checking. I have no problem if people don't follow all good programming practices in pedagogical examples.
Its hard to differentiate between Wolfram the intellectual and Wolfram the Mathematica peddler.
Yes and No. If you have a few options than your entire business won't come grinding to a halt but if half of your customers choose to use FB Connect as their login option than they likely don't care that FB's down, or that people with email logins can still access your site. To 50% of your user-base your site has failed and so in that sense I would say that you still rely on FB for your business.
i like it that tweets are ephemeral. its good that way. why the need to archive every-fucking-thing? imagine how shit the world would be if everyone could browse everything they ever said? rather than the things memorable enough to remember. or memorable enough to someone else that they'd remember? imagine how many useful people would become lawyers?

WHAT ARE YOU THINKING!!!!!!!!!!!!???????????????
I often go to the comments page for a submission first, then click the article link. Particularly if it looks like it's going to be one that drifts off. That way the back button puts me in the right place, even if I come back to it hours later.
If you think of advertising as "traditional advertising" and "internet advertising", then FB and Google are certainly rivals. However, in pure marketing terms, they are actually very different.

Google search ads EXCEL in "Demand Fulfillment" - say you want need a plumber now since your toilet is overflowing. I don't think Facebook will ever beat Google here. Google sort of created this niche where they were better than any competitor that had ever existed.

Facebook, on the other hand, is better at demand generation. Consider advertisers who want to reach teenagers who would want to buy videogames - a new game is coming out, and they want you to know about it. Before, you'd have to find the TV shows that they would watch, or billboards that they would see, or queries that gaming-teens would search for, and advertise there. These are all competitive and difficult proxies for the audience you want to reach. Facebook is a much better place for that than Google.

In fact, you can imagine synergy between FB ads and Google ads. FB tells people, "you should listen to this band that you haven't heard of", and when you Google that band name, you see ads for places to buy tickets and albums.
don't forget guys that toxic mortgage bonds (say totaling X) were "covered" by something like 10X of CDS (sold for the price of 0.01X), so whenever toxic bold holder (state teacher pension fund) lose the X, the CDS holders (smart Wall St guys like Paulson) make 9.99X. So the failure of the toxic bonds was historically necessary and thus unavoidable. The more toxic the toxic bonds are, the better it is for the CDS holders.
The parent said to use strndup(), which takes a max value of characters to copy.
Very good interview. I think it's smart that he is not underestimating Bing. Mr. Schmidt also has great comments clarifying Google's position on the net neutrality announcement with Verizon (about 12:00 mark).
Doing More With Less: For profit vs not for profit schools
The thing that all these people who are bullish on streaming content replacing TV never discuss is sports. It the main reason I haven't ditched a cable subscription. Plus I don't like the idea of 5 different content providers replacing the 1 I have now, where's the convenience in that?
Ask HN: When is outsourcing a good idea?
I am not running a startup or anything like that, I have never even been what you would call "gainfully employed" so far, I'm just finishing my MSc in CS right now and I'll probably work in software engineering after that. However, I am still interested in learning more about the process of developing as a team, splitting up a larger problem into smaller ones which can then be distributed as workloads among the developers, etc. Outsourcing is obviously a part of this.

Do any of you have any experience with outsourcing development to, say, India? What kind of tasks are good for outsourcing? I have heard very mixed reports from the few people who were willing/able to shed some light on this subject. Some told me that only rather superficial work is suited for outsourcing - like, generic web development tasks with PHP/JavaScript, some C# GUIs which run on top of databases to manage customers and such. The general sentiment I got was that more specialised tasks (in particular with embedded systems) are generally less suited for outsourcing. For example, does it make sense to outsource low level development like writing drivers in C?

I would imagine that complicated code which will be subject to a lot of maintenance is less suited for outsourcing since you usually want the original authors to work on it and getting new people in on it takes more time. You probably don't want to depend on a very specific group of people you outsourced a task to anyways since it's usually more of a short term solution, right?

Any input on the subject?
Realign Exercise: Hacker News
You can post for free, no harm in trying.

We have case studies on founders hiring people from the classifieds site http://thestartupdigest.com/2010/09/08/hiring-startup-case-s... but if anyone has feedback on the "feedback section" would be great to hear from you.
From Twitter's perspective, you're absolutely right. From a user's perspective, the bulk reliance on singular companies to manage our data is an issue that I'm afraid is going to become dangerous.

Look at the 2.5 hour Facebook outage from a couple of days ago. If Facebook were to be hit by an airplane or asteroid, a seriously significant portion of 500,000,000 peoples' lives would be lost, if only just in photos. If my house were to have the same thing happen, 150 people would experience a somewhat lesser loss.

I have thousands of emails between close friends in Gmail that I would like to preserve, but no convenient system exists for archiving them away from Google. The point of archive is to have redundant systems on which to rely. Archiving my Gmail with Google is therefore not an archive since it's still only one system.

It's like leaving a tasty pork chop in the 'fridge at work and expecting the cleaning lady to not toss it over the weekend. I really think archive should be the responsibility of the user.
Dvorak is natively supported by both Windows, as well as the Mac. I believe Colemak has instructions on their website http://colemak.com/.

My experience (I switched to Dvorak about 6 months ago) is that you really need to be typing a lot before you get to type as fast as what you used to type. Even after 6 months I'm still not as fast in Dvorak as I am in Qwerty. I have to say it's definitely easier on the wrists though :)

Here's what I did to switch:

- Switch all the keys on the keyboard of just one of my computers

- Only that pc was dvorak for about a month

- Lots of typing on typeracer (at least half an hour every single day)

- Slowly start putting stickers on the keys (to force myself into touchtyping with dvorak

- After a month I installed DVAssist at work (this way I can quickly switch between 'this needs to by typed _now_ (qwerty) mode' and 'Typing a bit slower gives me more time to think about the solution mode')

- I think after four months I switched entirely. (I still use DVAssist but that's mostly for pair-programming.)

I found the following things to be the most difficult:

1) Passwords (I barely 'know' my passwords, I just know the rythm...)

2) Windows (When using DVAssist it's always a surprise what keyboard layout is in use at the logon screen)*

* This does not happen if you just set two keyboard layouts in windows. You can switch to other layout with a keyboard shortcut (CTRL+SHIFT).
GM audio engineer lists Top songs to test your car's stereo
An aside, but in case you weren't aware of it, I believe the AI strategy you describe is known as "simulated annealing".
December 31, 1996. My grandfather, who repaired hospital blood lab equipment such as centrifuges and microscopes told his customers he was shutting down.

January 17, 1997. My grandfather was tying twine around a box holding a microscope for Kansas University Medical Center. It was the final item on his backlog from 1996. His heart stopped, and he fell over dead onto his shop floor, doing what he loved doing most.

RIP, Grandpa. I still miss you, and I'm forever thankful that you passed to me your insatiable curiosity, knack for mechanical synergy and desire for unfaltering ethics.
I've been using http://www.backupify.com to backup my twitter account. It was really interesting to go back over my first tweets.
Another motivator we've used for our older boy: give him reading time before bed. Now he's allowed to stay up a bit later (a benefit of homeschooling is there's no pesky bus to catch the next morning), as long as he reads. He really looks forward to this time now.
Even better when you have friends with the same M.U.L.E nostalgia to play with. My favorite was monopolizing the market on food to make all the other players starve and pay me crap tons of money just to eat.
Seconded, thirded, fourthed, and fifthed. Rob is awesome. You can send him a DM on Twitter or just call him. He puts his phone number on his website.
Great! I just posted it using submit. I did notice that it appears in the New section, but not in the Ask section -- again, sorry for my newbie-ness, but how do you get your submitted post to appear in "Ask"? I used the Ask HN: prefix.

Tnx!
Sure it wasn't a Beagle Boys/Scrooge McDuck comic?
unicorn @5:11
Does it make sense to rely on the original provider for archive? As I say in my other reply to the other replier, I really think diversity in archive options is important to the overall infrastructure of the 'Net.
As a Netflix subscriber, your (3) is probably the closest. My wife and I signed up for Netflix because we didn't want to pay for cable. Netflix's streaming service was the first to offer an easy path to get content to the TV. Roku's player is why we keep paying for Netflix.
Ask HN: Review my photo tagging script
you just described facebook.
He plans to go in his sleep.
A design and usability blog: Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)
Scobleizer interview with Jessica Mah / inDinero (YC S10)
It fits a certain attention-getting trend with these titles, really.

* Why [bad thing will happen to you]

* Why I gave up [popular service].

* Why [popular tool] sucks [optional], and how to fix it [/optional]

There are a few more but I can't think of them now.
That's a pretty big whole for Bing to miss. Probably doesn't track as well since it requires a mistyped query -- most people doing comparisons of relevance compare correctly typed queries. But a big hole for real world usage... at least I'd think so.
It was my impression that usernames are deliberately de-emphasised on HN, and I have come to see the reason for it and like it.
It doesn't seem to be able to handle character classes of the type [^abc], which matches any character except a, b, or c. It's pretty cool, though. I tried copying and pasting some crazy regexps from the internet in there, and it immediately gave me some idea what they do. Well done!
Given the source, I'm inclined to agree that this is probably his third-to-last convention, rather than the last. That said, it is Harlan Ellison; I don't think he would be making these claims if things weren't winding down, and I'll be sad to see him gone.

He's kind of like that asshole friend you acknowledge is an asshole while still enjoying his company. Yeah, he's a raging narcissist who pulled a gun on someone to get out of a bet, and he grabbed another author's mammary gland at a convention, but I don't know, it's Harlan. I mean, he wrote, "Repent, Harlequin, said the Ticktockman". It takes a lot of dickery to eclipse all the great things he's done, and he's hopefully not going to manage that in the time he has left.