skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
besides "you and everyone you know are going to die" at age 3, or "there is no santa claus" which logically led to "God is an imaginary friend for grown ups" at age 10.

The fact that we're all akin to lumbering flesh robots designed to help our genetic material persist. That was kind of humbling.

http://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Gene-Anniversary----Introducti...
I don't like adding new handlers to my app for unit testing.

For my money, nose-gae has the right approach. Unfortunately, it seems to have stagnated a bit.
Why Freemium might not be right for your startup
Market share for the taking, or, outrunning the bear
So You Want To Be A Designer: Top 5 List
Google TV: Developers
What I like about this is that Web Apps are now starting to remove the free plan. Makes it more exciting. People need to get used to pay, and not get everything for free. That way we can make money!
That's a good question - I copied it from ScienceDaily and although they have been fairly neutral on controversial topics, the quotes imply something unconventional.
This is pretty cool me and my daughter are trying to break it.

My daughter had the following suggestions:

- Be able to spank the guy that fixes the setup

- Be able to it hit bob in different areas

- Sound effects

- Compete to go next

edit: Waiting for the machine to be fixed is more exciting than hitting it.

edit #2: Make it like the saw movie just with pinatas
When you're quoting someone else and you don't understand the term, quotes are appropriate. It means that you are just repeating something someone else said. I have to assume that's what happened here.
> From the comments - http://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=9#c576

"Gone" can also be an alternative :))
ZoomRead follow-up
In Enterprise Company there is no such thing as "Auto Upgrade"
I haven't tried it but can you upgrade those browsers without administrative rights? I am assuming you can't do it on corporate settings.
It's not just a remake. This is interactive and has more physics to it, from what I can see. Reminds me of Ski Stunt.
nose-gae has worked fine for me, don't see its lack of updates mean it is any less useful
I like to mess with my team at work every now and then. I use them as my own personal market research as they are from a host of different backgrounds (mech engineers, business administration, accountants, legal).

I showed them the advertisements and they all enjoyed it and thought it was clever and amusing. The consensus was even though they didn't find out anything about the phone, they all really want to find out. So for a study population of n=7, the advertisement 'worked'.
Not to worry. HN readers have high standards and wield their downvotes aggressively. I've never seen such a well-maintained community as this one.
This is a follow-up to a post I did about 3 weeks ago for my site http://www.ZoomRead.com. HN gave a lot of really good feedback and I appreciate it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1726256

The main message was that the various ways of moving around and 'zooming' (of course) needed to be smoother. For that I've taken a look at the Silverlight 'DeepZoom' (seadragon) API - and so far it's worked quite well.

I'm currently working on 'falling back' to the AJAX client if Silverlight isn't chosen to be used, and will see if I can make it a little faster too.

Thanks again for the feedback from before, and do let me know how this version works out for you. It's been fun working on it.
The most mind-blowing things in my life have mostly not been facts.
Is there a conference line to dial into? I am looking at the video but there is no way to interact. Am I missing some kind of chat widget that's hidden somewhere on screen?
I like some of those. Thanks!
> I'm happy to learn a new language but want to learn the "right one" and also have reservations about starting a project while still being new to a language.

There really is no such thing as the right language, but you can find a language (and framework) that suits you well.

For me the language and framework that I work the best with is Python and Django (with jQuery for frontend).

I would recommend picking a couple of languages and frameworks and try building a small project (or even a prototype of your app) in each one. That way you'll probably figure out what works for you and if the framework is going to meet your needs.

You seem hesitant to just pick something and go for it, so this way at least you can try a few thing out before you launch into it and find out halfway through that you don't like the way things work. It might seem like it will take a bit longer this way, but buy jumping in with one language and framework it'll only be quicker if you fluke it and happen to pick something you really like.
Thanks for responding :-)

It turned out nobody else had much to say here, but I posted at /r/javascript ... if you're curious, here's what's going on there:

http://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/dppwu/ask_rjavas...
Wait - so after all that they are not going to milk this into some kind of contest? They are just going to give up and walk away?

"This wasn’t the right project at the right time for crowd sourcing" - what? Isn't that the whole point of this crazy stunt?
Over half our Firefox traffic is still pre-3.6. Not IE6 bad, but it lacks CSS gradients and such.
It actually appears to be a real product, as opposed to an elaborate joke. Even after the initial feeling of nausea wore off, I'm still left wondering about what the market for this thing really is.

From what I've read (very little), ad clickers make up some fairly negligible portion of total internet users, and tend to be less educated or have impulse problems like compulsive shoppers, gamblers, etc. Making a complicated system to 'save' and re-visit your 'favorite' ads later on seems to not target this ad clicker market at all, as they'll most likely never look at an old ad again. And I really, really don't see this turning more people into ad clickers.

This might induce job creation for paid ad clickers in india, though.
Also the authors are still getting scammed by the industry and only see a tiny fraction of what the buyer pays. This is not it.

My partner is an author with a mainstream publisher and actually, Kindle offers a lot of opportunity for writers to publish independently and make more $$$.

An indie publisher can take take 75% of the profits from their Kindle sales. If Kindle as a format takes off then it removes the power of the publisher who is suddenly doing less and less (no need to print paper or deal with distribution contracts).

With lower overheads she can afford to sell her books at a lower price point (to your point on reduced e-pricing) and still make more than her traditional sales.

She agonizes over the DRM however, which I think is still hurting this area. She also sells PDF's but the issue then is the lack of distribution as you can't sell PDFs on Amazon obviously. It will get better over time, however - like iTunes went mp3 in the end.
I'm not advocating asceticism -- if owning a car is so important to you that you're willing forgo other luxuries to do it, then that's your choice. But don't pretend that it's always a sacrifice to live without owning a car, or that the choice to own one is automatically financially prudent.

For many of us, cars are nothing more than a rarely used, depreciating asset with high maintenance costs that gets us from point A to point B. I'd rather rent one occasionally, and spend the money I save on all of the other things you mention.
Ask HN: Payment Gateways?
Reading up on the Chargify pricing increase (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1780348 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781156) led me to compare subscription payment services, which quickly lead to questions about gateways and merchant accounts:

1. How do payment processors like Speedly and Chargify relate to merchant accounts and payment gateways?
2. Are there any other pieces of the puzzle of getting the money from my paying, online customer to my account?
3. What should one look for in a payment gateway and/or merchant account? Does one need multiple gateways and/or merchant accounts?
4. Any recommendations for payment gateways and/or merchant accounts?
5. Any reasons not to go with PayPal instead?
6. Any one have experiences with Braintree?

__________________________________________________________________

From my notes: Brief comparison online subscription payment processing options October 2010

* CheddarGetter (https://cheddargetter.com/)
o Up to 20 customers free
o $39/month for up to 1000 customers
o $169/month for up to 10,000
o $549/month for up to 50,000
o requires merchant account
* Recurly (http://recurly.com/)
o $29-$699/month plans
o +20-8 cents per transaction
o +2-8 cents per user
o must pay gateway and merchant fees separately
* Spreedly (http://spreedly.com/)
o $19 per month + 20¢ per payment transaction or 2% per payment transaction, whichever is less
o Payment gateway required
o 5000+ transactions per month, ask for bulk pricing
* Chargify (http://chargify.com/0
o free development
o $99/month for up to 500 customers
o $349/month for up to 2000
o $999/month for up to 10,000
o branded payment pages
o set up your own merchant accounts separately
* Braintree (http://braintreepaymentsolutions.com/)
o includes merchant account
o payment processing with recurring payment add on option
o 2.89% + 30 cents/transaction
o $15/chargeback
o $75 monthly minimum
o one time $99 setup fee
o $20 + 1 cent/card/month for credit card info storage
o 20 cents/subscription per month for recurring payments
There are betterse ways already: underscore.js(http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/) and coffescript(http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/, which also has its own underscore.coffee http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/documentation/docs...). All three started by Jeremy Ashkenas (http://www.documentcloud.org/about).
The best way to help is to port Chrome to Windows 2000.

Firefox is too slow to be usable on most Windows 2000 boxes, IE newer than 6 isn't supported, and Chrome isn't supported, which makes IE6 the best option.
It's over, so the link takes you to the recorded video rather than the live page that has chat.
What Will Shopping in the Future Be Like?
This complaint is as old as the hills. You may as well slap an obnoxious "Designed for HTML5" button on your site. The cost of having the world's largest addressable audience of any development platform is that web developers have to deal with the fact that it varies a lot. Them's the breaks.

Edit: because I hate comments that are purely negative, my suggestion for getting users to the latest technologies is to use libraries (like YUI and jQuery) which do the hard work of implementing newer features in backwards compatible ways, but use the modern feature if it's available. That way the difference between IE8 and a more recent browser becomes one of performance rather than the binary absence of functionality. Users can that way see what they're missing and have a reason to upgrade that's more compelling than the designer petulantly insisting their browser sucks.
Most of the "crowd-sourced" reaction I heard was that they should keep their current logo.
Guys, I like your logo. Very cleverly done. The demo is useful to understand what the solution can deliver.

Viral - In my opinion, a video is truly viral when my mom forwards it to me. That said, you can make a product video viral amongst in target market without it being to my definition. Do you know who is key target? If you do then a contest aimed at that group is likely your best path.
The Signal-to-Noise Ratio on Twitter
So what? We live in the sticks. There aren't enough of us to matter. If we keep driving around with one SUV per person it doesn't add up to much, comparatively. The low hanging fruit is fixing the metropolitan areas. Most people live there, and demographically, people are still moving there. So fucking around with making cars and rural areas more efficient isn't going to make much difference compared to making metropolitan areas more efficient and reducing car usage within them.

That said, rural college towns can have pretty awesome bus systems that run all year, even during subzero temperatures, and they can also have bike paths that go mostly everywhere, which are usable for nine months of the year. Because mine has all that. I'm sorry yours doesn't; but obviously, there is room for improvement, which is exactly my point.
not sure why they aren't taking a real-time fourier transform of the signal and using that. The data bandwith would be orders of magnitude higher.
In a way, his message is satrically funny.

The hollywood machine will pay for the noose that hangs themselves, as long as they make money in the next 6 months.
Make It Happen: How to find a Programmer
Many clients require a business license to avoid having you classified as a
Employee. (The IRS doesnt like you. There are a dozen or so traps that they lay for you, easily avoided if you know about them. See http://ohioline.osu.edu/cd-fact/1179.html) Better still, talk to an accountant. In general a business license isnt a huge hassle. The zoning requirements are usually waived if you have no employees and no visiting customers.
Oh. I just shot a tweet to @kn0thing. My bad.

Thanks dkasper.
My favorite isn't there.

Back in the 1920s Hubble did photographic surveys of the sky with long exposures. Here is what he found. Pick a random spot in the sky. Take a long exposure. Count the stars you can see. Take a magnifying glass. Count the galaxies you can find. With a few obvious exceptions, there will be more galaxies than stars. A lot more. (Obvious exceptions would include things like nebulae that you can't see through to see galaxies behind them.)
The episode in question finished 3rd (of 4) in the 18-49 demo and 4th (of 4) in Total Viewers so I'd say they could use some attention. I think a lot of people gave up on the Simpsons around Season 10 and have never bothered to look back.

Source: http://tvbythenumbers.com/2010/10/11/tv-ratings-against-sund...
G2 doesn't have rootkit, it's just the same old NAND lock
anyone have any experience with recurly? http://recurly.com/pricing
> AdKeeper is founded by Scott Kurnit

Founder of MiningCo -> About.com, which IPO'd. The allstar cast of investors is not surprising.

I like the idea of an inventory (like in the old text adventure games) for the internet, but I wonder if just having it be for a single object type is what users (versus what advertisers) want. Ideally you'd be able to keep anything in your inventory. This was part of the ultimate vision for Delicious a long time ago.
If you look at the contestants, you'll see why: http://99designs.com/logo-design/contests/design-better-gap-...
A quick suggestion: add retweet and facebook like buttons to the pinata buster page to make it easier to share.
Replicating the new Twitter design with CSS and JQuery
I didn't say anything about a tax increase. I said "my tax dollars".
I do agree that that the Wall-clock hours argument is somewhat weak due to the international crowd behind HN, but it would be interesting to see how weekends or really more general traffic patterns such as what may happen on holidays attribute to scores. I know that in these cases, I generally diverge from my normal HN-checking patterns.
visit count is not trivial. A db write for every page view is heavy.
I agree it would be great, I've gotten letters from Amazon that it is hipaa compliant but not PCI, and from rackspace that it is pci compliant but not hipaa.
"Popular" here is going to mean maybe 15% market share, if my memory serves correctly. Popular server languages remain Java, PHP, ASP.NET, and increasingly Ruby.

In my mind, the reality is that you should choose the programming language based on the skills of you or your programmer(s) and the task at hand. If I were going to implement a banking system, I'd probably look first at Java and its J2EE libraries to see what options were available there. I've used PHP recently (despite it being a reasonably painful language) because it has some wonderful productivity and scalability features that we've been able to really take advantage of.

However, I've nothing against any of the other platforms (with the exception of a slight bias away from anything that requires me running windows servers), and have been fiddling with Ruby, and also exploring Haskell, Erland, Clojure, and even Scala.

Unless we're talking in-house applications using VB or C#, or mobile phone applications using ObjC or Java, "client-side" almost always means HTML/CSS/JS these days.

So, look at the task and the talent, and go from there. Most of the common platforms that you've heard of are all going to have large enough communities for support and libraries to perform various non-standard tasks.

Good luck!
Got the impression the PR was written by someone in the advertising industry. They were practically slobbering all over themselves with lust over the magical deliciousness that is Internet advertisements.

Meanwhile, back on Main Street, and in Hacker's Haven, I bet most folks find them usually annoying or irrelevant noise, at best.
New Coke.
gmail didn't trigger any.
If it ain't broke don't fix it:

http://flowingdata.com/2009/08/13/pepsi-and-coca-cola-logo-d...
Animator vs Animation 3
I like python + Tornado web server because I am a minimalist. If you want to learn how the web works from the top down & bottom up, this is a great framework to start and end with.
Hmm... this is a separate issue altogether but what is up with the "Gap Inc." site? It has zero branding whatsoever... I'd have assumed it was a domain landing page if it wasn't for the link being posted here.
Also: http://pipes.yahoo.com/ :)
Actually he never actually DOES from what I can tell. He dances around the issue and makes general claims but never actually says "X% went here. Y% went here". He says things like "spending on safety-net programs, mainly unemployment insurance and Medicaid, has risen" which means squat. Is he implying that the administration misused stimulus funds to instead fund saftey-net programs?

The fact of the matter is that the stimulus money went exactly where it was intended. Government works programs and questionable "initiatives" (Unless those signs I see every 10 miles are made up).

It just didn't work so the new tactic is to claim "It wasn't enough" or "It wasn't actually spent".
I see most TV ads with the sound off (I mute the TV during ad breaks).

Watching this one with the sound off completely reverses the intended effect. At least one person I've seen mention it on Twitter wasn't paying attention to the sound and thought that Windows Phone 7 making you fall down the stairs was the point of the ad.

Lots of people don't pay that much attention to adverts, and what they'll take away from this is: people are dicks with Windows Phone 7.
Webob + a few WSGI middleware libraries, Mako, MongoDB, mod_wsgi (Apache), Varnish

I'll probably try Flask for my next project.
This must have been a stunt.
Very few ebooks I've bought have been full price. They are typically 50-75%. I suspect you see equal pricing mostly on very new books. I also expect the market to shift. I have been known multiple times in the past to pay $0.99 for a nicely formatted digital edition of a public work I could download (raw text or broken formatting) for free or buy at a booksale for $0.49; one of these days, people will pay MORE for ALL digital books, because it will be worth more to them.

> Also the authors are still getting scammed by the industry and only see a tiny fraction of what the buyer pays. This is not it.

Ok, first I think the idea that we should reject groundbreaking advances because they haven't fixed every problem by themselves is insane. Second, it really is opening the door for authors to get a larger cut. The industry had the authors by the neck because the authors depended on a lot of the value the industry added (publishing, editing, advertising, etc). Many authors still rely on those things, but with digital distribution it is now POSSIBLE, for authors who are willing, to do it (at least mostly) on your own.
Logo #FAIL
Ask HN: Best Windows based PBX software?
I am about to sign up with VoicePulse to get a toll free number for my business. I would like to know HN's opinion on a Windows Based PBX solution?

Currently thinking of using 3CX - (Free Version)

I will be using a Grand Stream SIP Phone
I am running Windows 7
One of my pet peeves is that Ads don't respect the back button. Sometimes, I hit the back button on Stack Overflow because the ad was interesting, but it's been rotated away.
oh gosh just 'secretly' point them at some lame celeb randomly and have someone blog about seeing it.
If you use web2py, web2py does that for example here is complete code to create a page that lets user post messages and read previous messages.

m=db.define_table('message',Field('body'))
def index():
return dict(form=crud.create(m),rows=db(m).select())

It runs on GAE as it is (requires the scaffolding app).
This is a truly despicable and irresponsible business decision. Not only did Chargify pull a bait-and-switch but they completely pulled the rug out from under both developers and merchants by providing virtually no warning on this price change. Unfortunately, we launched with Chargify just a few months ago. Big mistake!

Ning.com did this not long ago but did it in entirely responsible manner but providing many, many months of notice.
Questions:

- How much money was wasted?

- Did tons of newly printed tags on clothes need to be manually removed and retagged?

- Who was responsible for the creation of the new logo and who made the decision to use it?
another vote, to add social media buttons on the page. I really don't understand whats going on. I press the live button, and what now ?
To me, merely reimplementing an old idea using a new technology doesn't full under the umbrella of innovation.

Regardless, I'm going to be playing it for the next half-hour.
and of course this is a completely neutral and unbiased suggestion. LOL
One of the problems you have is that your reason for pricing doesn't jive with how you're doing it. If it's really a question of support costs, just charge for support at the lower tier(s).

Plus let's be honest, once someone is up and humming, support costs for them (provided your service is as solid as you sell it to be) shrink very drastically.

I'm all for you making money, we want you to survive as much as you do. But given the locked-in nature of what you're selling (i.e. you've got us by the short hairs), and the extremely high cost to integrate with you, waking up one morning to a massive change like this is deeply, deeply unsettling.
The main point of the article seems to be that the JavaScript for construct is exactly the same as the C for construct. You get the same power, the same freedom and the same responsibility to for the love of god use something better.

Especially in JavaScript. Please stop using for loops in favour of asynchronous recursion (or similar). Thank you.

This is what I've been using lately, pretty neat: http://github.com/caolan/async
Hi Daniel - I wrote the article. You reference some excellent high order functions, we now also get pretty much the same functions for free in every browser except IE8. We get them with jQuery and Prototype.js too.

But the point of the article was: now that for-loops are gaining obsolescence as conventional array iterators, what can we use them for (and how do we have fun with them). A bit like a "what to do with those old LPs" discussion - except I still love listening to LPs :-)
- was this just a publicity stunt?
Whatthefuckismyinformationsecuritystrategy