skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does this remind anyone else of the old adage that the best way to get rich is by telling other people how to get rich? 37signals may have something to teach the world, but I think its message is already out, and a lot of its success involved being the right place at the right time. It is not a particularly innovative company (Rails notwithstanding). And I doubt that their formula (make a blog that happens to get popular, then take a side project and start selling it as SaaS to the blog readers) is especially reproducible.
NumPy: -157,525 lines of code, mostly written in Modula-2.

http://www.ohloh.net/p/numpy
Unicode Fonts for Symbols and Ancient Scripts
A: Sell seats to your pointless masterclass for $1000 a pop.
Given that OSX has got to a fairly stable point, what would you want to see in a new version of OSX that would make you want to upgrade?
Irony - Minimalism in Website Design
The second part of the day could either be great or completely throwaway. If you get some good ideas out of it that help your startup, it's well worth the price or more. But what if you're not really working on a startup?
Congrats! I know one of the carwoo guys and it's a great idea and a solid team!
V. useful. And thanks for putting the source online -- a great help to those of us looking for solid app engine examples.
It's also possible that the general acceptance and promotion of intellectual curiosity results in a culture in which more scientific discoveries are made.
And they do not need to "agree". Google can just collect the data, and display it for every one to us.
The 3rd font down is Symbola, it contains quite a few Unicode 6.0 symbols not generally available.

All fonts on the page are free for reuse and distribution.
It looks like Amy Hoy (HN: ahoyhere) is probably going to net $50k today (or at least pretty darn quick) with http://unicornfree.com/2010/the-deal-30x500-launch-class-spl... too :-)
So, when are we going to get a law making it illegal to violate robots.txt?
Also anecdotal, from my exercise playing frisbee, wrestling, and ultimate calculus. If you don't train to do something while hurt, then you're going to poorer when hurt. Doesn't matter if your use to getting your smashed into the ground over and over. If you haven't been practicing integrating by parts while getting smashed around, you're going to suffer. Granted, you'll do better than someone who's not use to getting smashed around at all.

This is particularly true for head hits, cause beyond the pain, head hits really do make you dizzy and think fuzzy. I know in my experience, hitting smacked hard in my head will make my vision explode into white fuzz, and also temporarily make me feel like I just shot back 4 shots of rum.
One could go in almost any direction, like bible codes[1], by trying to infer things from the nature of the particular cat in question.

For example, "Lions are unusually social compared to other cats,"[2] which means that MacOS X Lion could have social networking as its main feature. Just pick what you hope for the most and find a way to tie it to the critter.

I only wish they had gone with "Liger".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_code

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion
Seriously? Why do they still call it "Zune?" I thought Zune had failed.
Sony unveils connected TVs using Google platform
No doubt. My experience in the processing world jives with what they are saying though. The biggest problems are the smallest customers, usually the ones that aren't earning you anything. Granted, keep in mind that they are focused on B2B. I think they could have handled it better, but I think they made the right call.
For web development, OS X was nice

I honestly don't want to miss the multitouch trackpad

These are the key take aways, OSX is good for web / mobile development and the track pad is one hell of a plus for going with a MBP. I would not use OSX for C or C++ development or any system development for that matter, but for web and mobile it is a great system.
Ask HN: APIs / Services to get User info
Does anyone here know of any service / apis that can give information about users based on their Twitter ID.

Like their LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, Hacker News, Reddit, Digg, etc profiles.

Something like Rapleaf. or something like what Rapportive is using.

Thanks.
"Kind of makes you wonder what all the digg employees do all day."

Communication. I'm always surprised that so few people who do software (I'm talking management at companies) are familiar with the mythical man month. Adding employees to a software project always yields diminishing returns due to the increase in communication required.
thanks for the nice words danielle, mail sent ;-)
MacBook Pros have their ups and downs:

Ups:
1) Really nice construction
2) Really well put together GUI
3) In general it's a nicer experience than a non-mac with similar tech-specs.

Downs:
1) No standard central packaging system; All the software you mention is available on the mac but you have to either:
a) Build it yourself
b) Use macports or fink, etc.
Furthermore, some of the more gui focused things have very nice mac-native ports (e.g. MacVim) but you'll have to track those down yourself.
2) Price. You can get a very nice non-mac laptop every year for the same price as getting the 17" Macbook Pro every 2 years. I compare to the 17" since I won't code on anything with less that 1200 vertical lines. If you plan on only coding with an external monitor, this may not apply.
3) Not super configurable. You get something very well put together and designed, but that also means there aren't a lot of options.

I had the option of getting a macbook pro at work but went with a Dell instead.
Yep -- let's dejargonize that for you:

"key-value binding and custom events": When a model changes its state, other JavaScript objects can listen for that change and be notified. It's the usual inversion-of-control pattern, but especially crucial for models and views. A model has no business knowing about what views may or may not currently be present in the UI. Instead, the views listen to changes in the model, and update themselves accordingly.

"rich API of enumerable functions": JavaScript arrays are pretty feature-poor, at least in terms of things that will work cross-browser. Backbone collections include all of these handy functions for working with your data:

http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/#Collection-Undersc...

"views with declarative event handling": Instead of creating a mess of nested jQuery "bind" or "delegate" calls, it's nice to just declare what elements in a view should be hooked up to specific callbacks:

http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/#View-handleEvents

"RESTful JSON interface": The persistence strategy for Backbone can be swapped out for something different (Websockets, Local Storage, CouchDB), but the default is to fire off a standard JSON Ajax call when you call "model.save()"...

Hope that helps a little.
I wonder how they'll get around the tech divide. For example: people don't sell gasoline online, but there are numerous websites that track that information. Also, any price index requires some decision over which goods are included in the basket. How would they determine this? How will they be able to determine the ratio of goods purchases online compared to those purchased offline? How will they overcome the "lowest price" problem that tends to come up (fortunately, for the consumer) when searches are done for products online. A simple average? A weighted average based on market share? How would that market share be determined?

Lots of unanswered technical details here. Still, it is another data point.
Then you probably aren't the type of person that will get much benefit out of it and shouldn't go.
It means that Backbone provides a way to cleanly separate your model/data from your presentation such that your model is concerned with synchronizing state with a server and the view is concerned with listening to changes in that model via data binding.
The difference is that digg has network information (IE: Followers). Stack overflow doesn't.

Think through the ramifications of each of these page flows:

1. Give me this question and everybody who commented on it.

2. Give me every post that this user is following has made over the last n days.

That's why.
[Sunglasses On]
Sounds like the .Net stack performs much better than the LAMP stack.
Chuck Jones and the Power of Scaffolding
Similar story from Stuart Roseman of Verifiable - http://stuartroseman.com/post/619953720/out-with-the-old-bus...
I tried out a X201 and really liked it, but it has two other problems as well as the video out which were deal breakers for me:

- Low screen resolution.

- Very tall screen (especially for a 12" - due to the huge bezel) so it won't open comfortable in the back of an economy seat.

I ended up with the bottom of the range Vaio Z series instead (1600x900 res 13.3" screen that is more than an inch shorter than the X201, with HMDI and VGA out). I run Ubuntu in a VM 99.9% of the time. That setup is working really well for me and I actually like the keyboard at least as much as the IBM one.

Running Linux in VMWare player doesn't seem to be any slower in practice thanks to VT, and it has greatly improved the ease of installing, upgrading and backing up my main Linux installation. I don't even bother to back up Windows - if it goes wrong I'll just blow it away and do a clean install.
OK, my experience is much different. I would far far rather provide a free ad supported service than charge.

If you give it away free as ad supported, users tend to be extremely grateful. Once they start paying, even a tiny amount, they start to be more resentful and demand far more.
Best escrow service
I'm looking for an escrow service that has a developer API. I've looked around and a lot of them look like crap. Preferably the API would let me set up the account in which the terms would be agreed upon and where the user can place and retrieve the money.
Apple: Back to the Mac Media Event 20-Oct
I'm not sure where you get the idea that the government needs to agree with something in order for it to be published. The CPI published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is just one of quite a few price indexes, some of which are privately published.
Yes it does. Thank you for the explanation.

For anyone unclear about REST, try this: http://tomayko.com/writings/rest-to-my-wife
Funny. Just reading the current title I know it would be about Chargify.
Finally MVC on the front end as well and no more custom json objects to keep all your data in one massively redundant and unreadable object.
Evony is maybe a clone of Tribal Wars, which is maybe a clone of something else...

Evony also ripped a lot of art out of the first half of the Age of Empires series. I don't know how they haven't been sued.
Maybe a UI overhaul. They've been teasing us for years with iTunes. Time to finally ditch Aqua.

Maybe something MacRuby related? Maybe making it a first class language?
Groupon: best unsubscribe page ever.
No, the experience on the MBP is not so much better as to warrant getting it for development.

IMHO, it's worse. My biggest gripes: (1) built-in terminal doesn't do fullscreen, (2) built-in terminal doesn't have easy way to emulate different keyboards (tmux requires function keys behave like xterm).

BUT the iApps are SWEET. iPhoto/iMovie are rocking my world.

I say this as a recent dabbler in Mac.
I think this is exactly it. You can't compare a comment thread on Digg to a Question on SO.
Awesome. But her class lasts 4 months.
I don't read most of the 37 signals stuff, but it feels pretty cult-like for people to be paying $1000 for a one day "master class". I mean seriously, for the same cash you could get all of the following: a professional logo designed for your business (~$100?), a 3 hour consultation on your pitch with a copywriter or speech writer (~$100?), 2 hours with an accountant ($200?), 1 hour with a lawyer ($200?) and then flying out to nice weekend relaxing listening to business podcasts and with two nice business books from Amazon on a south American beach (insert nearby cheap holiday destination, $500?). Also, putting your app/idea/code/whatever onto an "Ask HN" costs nothing. But if people are paying, people are paying I suppose. Furthermore, they must be masters of something to be getting people to pay that much and selling out the tickets so there is obviously something to be learned from them (although attending the event might not be required to learn it).
If you don't mind me asking - what did you end up paying compared to the sticker price? The problem with most services like Carwoo is that you can get a much better deal yourself with a little bit of knowledge and some time.
I'm not an iTunes hater since I use it all the time, but it does have it's issues.

The primary issue is that it is SLOW. I have an i7 MBP that everything flies on except iTunes. Now, to be fair iTunes seems to work fine when just playing music. I have a decent library (30GBs +) that it handles okay. The problems arise when doing anything else with iTunes like podcasts, movies, updating apps, or anything having to do with ITMS.

Apple has made iTunes the centerpiece of their entire ecosystem. One would think that they would have at least tried to optimize it while throwing everything and the kitchen sink in featurewise.
I love multitouch, but keystrokes are so much faster than using the touchpad.
Light improves student concentration
$21.3 million US DoE ultracapacitor grant may not be justified
I suspect it has more to do with the mechanism by which commit volume is measured than the actual commits themselves.

It's possible people are just moving away from verbose languages like C and Java and thus just needing to write less code, but I'm not sure I have enough faith in the human race to believe it.
Are My Classes Too Hard?
I don't see why they are charging the customer, instead of the dealer. It's like I'm paying you to get the privilege to shell out 30 grand.

At the very least, I should get a list of all dealers currently in the program.

The problem I see, is that if you only sell 250 cars per month, then the dealers have no actual need to compete. 250 cars / 1 car per model(25 brands * ~10 cars), in the entire country. Most dealers won't compete for the privilege to sell the one Honda Civic in the entire country.

+ it seems like all they do is email the dealers saying "So and so is looking to buy this car...what's your best price?" And then follow it up with "So and so got the best offer of X...can you beat it?". With email, I can do the same thing....and I can email all 20 dealers in my area with the car, instead of having you limit my choice.

+ there is no indication of what kind of deal someone gets. You need to show your actual results "Linda R from X, bought a 2010 Honda Civic EX for $14,950". For all I know the best deal I get on the service is $100 less than MSRP.
Interview With Salvatore Sanfilippo
The decline is in C, dynamic languages are on the rise. May be everything that had to be written in C has already been written?
Again, I agree with you on all points. I can't count on my hands the number of languages I've tried out and written a decent bit of code in, learning things along the way. However, that doesn't translate into "I should use this platform for a business-critical application."
I m mostly always doing 'site:www.stackoverflow.com how do I do XYZ ?' in google ..
If it allows syncing of iTunes content and pain-free access to the address book (I'm trusting that WP7 supports CalDAV natively) I would consider switching from my iPhone. I mostly use my phone as an DMP and web browsing device, so I'm not that particular about a lot of the features that bind people to one platform or another.
Thanks, I have fixed it.
On one hand there's DJ Pirate, on the other there's Apple Remote. I'm not a fan of iTunes, but for me Remote is a big win.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/remote/id284417350?mt=8
I'm a jealous american. How's the surf out there? How much would it cost to go ski in chile for a week?
The team pictures have obvious heavy shadows from a single flash. Otherwise, looks promising, I might give them a try next time round.
Seems to shadow the recession. I wonder how this compares to closed-source commits.
It will be interesting to see if they can escape Goodhart's law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodharts_law
Oddly I had exactly the opposite experience. My wife and I were interviewed together, the agent asked very straight forward questions about our past with me present. There was nothing tricky in the slightest. I guess it depends upon the situation, but if you've got nothing to hide then the above article is a non-starter.
This looks really nice! I always struggle with my client-side js becoming a tangled DOM mess, and this looks like it could push me towards a much saner path.
I clicked through and wound up disappointed. There's merit to the suggestions, no doubt, but I was hoping for something more like this:

1. Consuming stupid entertainment
2. Staying up too late
3. Eating crappy food
4. Not ever getting fresh air
5. Starving your muse

. . .

The self-confidence and intellectual exploration stuff I already know. If I didn't, I wouldn't be creative in the first place.
It's true, you would have to buy 2 plans to shop for 2 cars. The reason we do that is because there's a fixed cost per car on the back-end for us in terms of contacting dealers and getting offers, so letting users shop as many cars as they want isn't feasible unless we charged a lot more. However, most people don't want to shop 2 cars at the same time so we decided to cater to what the majority of our users want.

We'll be rolling out multiple deals/user in the near future, but for now, if you actually are shopping an Accord and a Camry, I can give you a coupon for a discount on the second deal if you're interested.
Which is why I said personal blogs. Nobodys personal blog has to be seen in IE.
It seems like very few people understand that it doesn't cost anything to upvote other answers and especially questions. Lots of good questions get around 0-2 votes, but clearly draw significant activity and interest otherwise. Are people afraid of point inflation?
That's a good question. I'm guessing that UI tweaks will be the order of the day:

- I remember when the Dock was a new idea; will there be a similar revelation in task management?

- The "Spaces" feature could use some work to bring it up to par with similar functionality in Ubuntu.

- Complete the transition to 64-bit for every single Apple sub-system|program.

- Tighter integration/control of external stuff: AppleTV, Airport Express, etc.
You'll get totally different picture if you remove C (even if you just replace it with C++) and Java. So, hm?
It's important that CarWoo be mindful of how their fonts render on different systems, but I also think you should send that comment to Microsoft. It's 2010 — there's no excuse for font rendering like that anymore. Time to fix it.
FSD makes sourcing locally produced food easy.
But that's the funny thing, is the Reddit is growing and Digg is shrinking- despite their staffing. Reddit does a much better job at allowing the community to manage themselves on a volunteer basis with the moderators/admins of the subreddits than Digg.
As far as necessary until told different by their bosses. I often don't agree with what they do, but law enforcement gets a lot of crap in all seasons.

When a terrorist slips through (eg, the underwear bomber) people howl, asking how they could be so stupid and blind not to follow leads that are obvious in retrospect. When they get caught following up a terrible lead (eg a Reddit post), people howl, asking how they could be so stupid and blind, and so on.
Snow Leopard was all about the internals. UI changes were not a priority.

Apple has presumably learned much from their iOS work that will inform their thinking about how people want to interact with a device. I don't think we'll see a touch-the-screen interface, but we might see an interface that is less file/application oriented and more task oriented. It won't be a replacement, but it might be a new direction.

Oh, and some gradients and textures will be slightly different and 10,000 blogs posts will be written about that.
It looks like the dynamic languages have been declining as well, though C's drop is much larger both percentage-wise and in absolute numbers.
But that won't give you 37k for a day!
no, that's for making $350,000 in a single day. http://texyt.com/minecraft+persson+notch+indie+game+success+...
Both. However, my only experience is with the west coast and my impression is that the east coast is different in some respects.

On the west coast (in Seattle specifically -- but I believe the same holds true in LA or the bay area) nearly all money is new money, which forces social mobility to be tightly coupled with economic mobility.

Another significant factor is that, culturally, Americans (in my experience) more closely associate wealth with success than any other nation and success correlates directly to social value (and mobility).

While it might be possible to move up the economic rungs without moving up socially, it's not generally possible to move up the social ladder without correspondingly increasing your wealth.

(Disclaimer: I'm not by any means a member of the social elite -- to the extent that such a thing exists in Seattle -- nor am I by any means "rich")
Make it easy for customers to leave and more will stay
Aren't SHDH lightning talks exactly that though?
My Thinkpad had ACPI.

But - no offense meant - this is the standard answer, if something does not work. Just upgrade. You do that 20 times, and then you get something that works now, and not after the next upgrade.
The Roots of CouchDB
Good question. Probably a similar timeline between the first major news coverage of email spam and the CAN-SPAM act
KISS - Keep it Simple Stupid. Very addictive, hugely successful and deservedly so.
Yes. I recently discovered js-model while wrapping up the Backbone documentation. The two libraries are extremely similar, and share the same core idea, but with that said, here are some of the differences:

* js-model is explicitly inspired by Rails' ActiveRecord models, and a lot of these points fall out from that fact...

* In js-model, a collection and a model class (constructor function) are the same object. This is a big problem in client-side code -- you don't always want to have just a single collection of say, notes. That makes sense in a one-database-per-app, one-table-per-model world, but not so much in JavaScript.

* Backbone sets up the prototype chain so that you can continue to extend (subclass) your Models, Collections, and Views.

* Backbone includes a richer set of enumerable functions, based on Underscore.js, so you get native performance in browsers that support them natively.

* js-model's validation and errors API mimics Rails' Errors object, which may or may not be what you want.

* Backbone includes Views, and js-model sticks to models.

That's just a list of things off the top of my head. It's an amazing example of convergent evolution in code -- and I think it's much more widespread than this. In my experience, many folks who work on big JavaScript projects end up with an internal framework that bears an uncanny resemblance to Backbone.
I'm 45 too, and there is theoretically no 'Can't be done' in my book either. Everything can be done, given enough time and resources.

I like your way of proving that something can be done by demonstrating it with a 'basic implementation'. I prototype a lot too, and I call it 'proofs of concept'. I always do proof-of-concepts when I have to use a new technology to prove to myself and to my customer that it can be done.
Standalone GitHub Wiki Hosting with Smeagol
Hi resolution screen? I've come to associate the macs with low-resolution screen. You can't get 1920x1200 unless you go up to 17" I'm used to getting it as an option on 15" laptops
Actually, they've only sold 7 out of the 37 spots at time of writing (see: http://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/27258896050).
Ask HN: What's the best job you've ever had?
I'm just curious about HN's joy.