skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yep that's too little even for us.

And your point is that the kind of "I need a website for U$ 200" don't know how to get to rentacoder or equivalent.

I wonder if they get to craigslist, or if you could have a high enough volume with a very small US presence.

One of my first jobs was for a small company that outsourced, it had an US phone, an Uruguay-based sales rep that spoke very good american-accent English.. maybe that's enough for the sales leads?
That was my reaction -- I don't get it.

I liked his Circos package better: http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/circos/
I'm sorry if I misinterpreted your statement. I just wanted to clarify that "the most unreadable solution is the most elegant" is not Perl's philosophy by far :) More the opposite.

Most of the times you see Perl hackers celebrate some kind of complex syntax expression, it's mostly not the syntax they're enjoying, but the expressed principle. You could still hide it behind a DSL, which most of the time makes sense anyway in production code; DRY and all that. But that would also hide the principles and implementation that was used. So, in generally the Perl community will communicate ideas and concepts via short Perl snippets, and Perl's freedom of syntax makes that easily possible even on Twitter or IRC.

In Perl, expressiveness was always very important. It was just done by the use of symbols and syntax instead of words. It's always a trade-off between being able to read an algorithm without knowing the language, and being able to express your ideas concisely. Personally, I have more troubles with sigil-less variables than with any implementation that uses any kind of symbol to identify them. Others find them distracting. It's a personal choice.

If you have complex nested expressions in Python that do lots of things, you should put it in a function and call it by name. It's the same thing in Perl.
Now I’m depressed.

I never said that I will never use extensions. I never said that I will never use Opera. I have Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Opera on my HDD and ready to go. If somebody on HN or anywhere else tells me about a cool new extension or a cool new feature I will of course want to try it out. I love doing that, I really do!

It’s just that for my day to day usage I have until now always returned to vanilla Safari [+]. That’s just how it is and I can’t change it. That’s how I like it best.

[+] The only extension I have installed is ClickToFlash.
I have found the Pomodoro technique quite useful. Once I get off my ass to actually start the 25 minute work interval, the conditioning kicks in and concentration appears.

Surprisingly, the first part (just starting) is harder than following through.
Yummyfajitas' argument regarding life expectancy of different ethnic groups that have come to the US is thoughtful.

I've always felt that the life expectancy stat only works in a statist, hyper-controlled system. Once you let people make personal decisions about their health, the utility of the stat declines.

The scientists in this article try to distinguish health-related from non-health-related causes of death. But even our health-related causes of death are not exactly under the control of the medical establishment. People eat food as if they had an active death wish.
Verizon Cuts A Deal With Apple – Will Sell The iPad Starting October 28th
How am I aggressive? Sorry for the slang I used, too much reddit in my system; I did not mean it to be offensive. Other than that, I am asking an honest question. If you don't know that a feature exists (and Opera has a lot of features but it doesn't shove them in your face) how exactly do you know you don't need it.

Obviously Opera has crap marketing but that's because it assumes intelligent users that will bother to take 10 seconds and read about its features.

Here, if you want a quick fix: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_browser_features

You say you prefer something lean and minimal. How exactly is Opera slow and bloated by comparison? If you haven't used it for a couple of weeks and learned what it can do I think you're passing judgment too easily. Opera has a lot of great stuff other browser don't have, you just need to be a bit curios and not wait the information to be spoon-fed to you.

I don't have a problem with you or anyone else using another browser but I don't like people saying things without full knowledge of the facts.
I've a T61 and a desktop LCD next to it (Samsung 193p+). The colour profiles are noticeably different (and I grumble about lack of just-working color correction in Linux), but I don't notice any qualitative differences.

Do you prefer glossy or matte laptop screens? Thinkpads are all matte, which makes the screen easier to read in various lighting conditions (no reflections), but makes the colours less vibrant.
Twitter has value when you look at its content as a whole.

While I'm of the opinion that Twitter is over-hyped to a point, I would say that I've met a large number of people in real-life as a result of using Twitter. Going to meetups and other tech events in NYC take on a new dimension when you already 'know' people there, and its an immediate ice-breaker.

Likewise I've been able to solicit feedback on projects from people I could not otherwise reach, peoples who's opinions I respect. I could not do this in Facebook, email, or in a forum.

So while we do not 'need' the Twitter platform, it is very useful to have.
Yahoo surges on report AOL wants to buy it
In American English it is referred to colloquially as a dead man's switch.
You're correct. The kernel does not include a C standard library.
Yes I can, my grandfather, my father and myself (in my early life) where all Aircraft Mechanics. I am still a motor-sports mechanic (hobbyist for off-road motor-sports team) and restore old Jeeps, Bronco's and Scouts. From Frame to finish. I can tell you emphatically that software development is more complex than Mechanics. Further, I do hobbies work in the automotive electronics space and develop software that uses CAN, OBDII and hack ECU's. The development environments and list of technologies required are far more spare because it is an fairly heterogeneous environment but I did not say anything about automotive programming (though I do believe that it is less complex than web, mainly because it is not cluttered by technology soup) I was speaking specifically about pull a part off, replace it, run a diagnostic machine on it mechanic. I specifically chose mechanic because it is a trade I know a lot about given that it is the family business.
Would it not be slow? Binarizing and OCR'ing documents is not cheap. I would hate it if I had to wait for 2 minutes before I could pick the printout.
"dead mans lever" is probably what I would call it. :) Amusing transliteration though.. I'd keep it.

HackerBacker is probably fraught with legal problems, which absolutely sucks because it would be a great thing to do.

Registrate has promise though.. you could add the ability to upload photos of your stuff to it. Then work on ways to convince insurance companies to work with you. So subscribers could simply select their insurance company, enter a policy #, choose what they are claiming for and enter a claim etc.
William Bernstein's "A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World" is also quite interesting. It correlates social and technological development with increased trade by examining various societies throughout history.

http://amzn.com/0802144160
Browser-based feedhose: AFP, NYT, BBC, tech news.
@ugh - nevermind, it's a miscommunication issue; I'm sorry for my harsh tone. Whatever browser you use try mouse gestures.

Here is a quick tutorial for Opera - http://www.opera.com/browser/tutorials/gestures/

And also in Opera you can go back/forward by using the following combos:

1. press right mouse button
2. left click
3. release right button
(back)

1. press left mb
2. right click
3. release left mb
(forward)
I've always thought that life expectancy was a poor measure of health care quality. My reasoning is simple, the US is the most obese country in the world, and obesity is known to cause numerous health problems and shortens life expectancy. The health problems and shortening of life expectancy ends up having very little to do with poor health care quality (poor health education maybe).

I wonder if an argument could be made that given the USs propensity towards unhealthy lifestyles that the US is in fact great at healthcare because the life expectancy is as high as it is?

Finally, the best measures I've seen to date on healthcare quality are looking at individual outcomes. For example, if you get prostate cancer what are the odds of living in the US versus other countries. I can't find the exact article now, but various countries do better at various health issues with the US leading many of them.

http://www.webmd.com/cancer/news/20080716/cancer-survival-ra...

The highest survival rates were found in the U.S. for breast and prostate cancer, in Japan for colon and rectal cancers in men, and in France for colon and rectal cancers in women, Coleman's team reports.
This raises my opinion of John Sculley more than it does of Jobs. Considering the obvious conflicts he's had with Jobs in the past, plus the fact that Jobs basically succeeded where he failed, this is a very gracious and (apparently) honest appraisal of his former rival's abilities.
I just don't see it, I could be wrong it happens more than I would like. But I don't see how you can have a US presence. If someone can figure out that part they will have a big piece of the puzzle solved.
Great insight: "The thing that separated Steve Jobs from other people like Bill Gates - Bill was brilliant too - but Bill was never interested in great taste. He was always interested in being able to dominate a market. He would put out whatever he had to put out there to own that space. Steve would never do that. Steve believed in perfection.”
Why you should care about Opera:

1. More minimal interface than Chrome. New-tab Speed-dial can be a solid background [or image] with no extra cruft. Unlike Chrome which adds bookmarks, recently closed, help links etc.

2. Equivalent performance to Chrome including JavaScript.

3. Firefox-isms while offering chrome performance. Aka Pop-in sidebars for downloads and history rather than new tabs.

5. CTRL-Tabbing is similar to operating system alt-tabbing. You don't even need a tab bar occupying screen real estate.

6. Password manager light-up button is a superior user experience to saved password autocomplete in Chrome and Firefox.

7. Right click mouse gestures. [and fully navigable keyboard only]
I'd bet that while they don't self-identify as "knowing Java," a large proportion of the other 68% would be happy trawling javadocs and getting javac (or Eclipse) to do the right thing. I would argue that's "knowing Java" well enough to get a job writing it, if they wished.
I trust you've also seen the Wikipedia article cited elsewhere in these comments, where copying fictitious map entries was also ruled non-infringing? A map is ostensibly a presentation of facts, and while there are creative decisions involved that can be copyrighted, trap streets are not among these decisions. In the U.S., at least, it's not enough to establish that copying took place, if facts are the only things being copied.

And that's a good thing. If intentional factual errors were copyrightable, newspapers would fill their articles with misspellings and falsehoods in hopes that they could sue competing publications out of existence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street#Legal_issues
I haven't used 1password so I don't know all the features it has but Opera's Wand has password storage (fills username/password for the pages you want). Not sure if that's all you need.
This article is disingenuous. Does capitalism get credit for all the miners that have died in the past as well?

A few points:
1) The rescue was financed by the government as the company couldn't afford it.
2) The rescue operation would not have been necessary if the company had maintained two escape routes with ladders as mandated by law. They maintained a single one without a ladder.
3) To the extent that capitalism helps it is because people choose to employ it as a tool. Chile and others did save Chile.

Disclaimer: I live in Chile.
I did this before, I was making the case that JavaScript run tests took extra time and that server side tests were superior for large companies because they didn't need to call out to a resource outside their network. Sure enough conversions were 9% lower (percent of a percent, so from 2% to 1.82%). The funny thing was that when we tested another one of these JavaScript based split testers it was coincidentally in the same server room as the hosting provider at the time, so it didn't negatively effect the conversion rate.

That being said, almost nobody split tests. It's a serious problem because marketing usually needs technical to split test, so even if Optimizely cuts your temporary conversion rate by 9% you will still make that back quickly after a couple of split test iterations.

My number one question for optimizely is when are they going to include some sort of call back api or something to track real conversions. The number one concern SaaS businesses have is visitor -> paid account not visitor -> free account or signup screen.
Genetically yes, Japanese Americans are like Japanese [1]. Their diets are also closer to Japanese diets than standard American diets.

I may only be comparing lemons to oranges, which I agree is only marginally better than apples to oranges. But that's ok - I'm certainly NOT trying to make the claim that US health care is better than Japanese health care as a result [2]. I'm simply pointing out that if you include slightly better controls, the effect completely reverses itself. This strongly suggests the original comparison is crappy.

[1] Genes matter. A fact I've heard - Indians have narrower blood vessels than non-Indian Whites, leading them to be more vulnerable to hypertension. The UK NHS takes this into account when giving medical advice, though supposedly US doctors do not (that would be racist).

[2] To draw conclusions like that, you need to take groups of statistically similar people with the same disease and measure health outcomes. No one does this, it's very hard.
Tell HN: This community is no longer accommodating to diverging views
In recent times, I have noticed that a comment that tends to diverge from the major trend of comments on a submitted even though article tends to get down voted to oblivion h that diverging opinion makes sense. A community is made up of different people with different mindsets and points of view, not everyone see's things the way others do, so I do not see the reason why HN cant just accept that other people can be different.
Google has a lot of money (and more importantly, exposure) to push their browser forward and make ridiculously huge marketing campaigns. Opera does not.
This mistake and subsequent lesson learned has been documented time and time again--why do companies still have the oversight to alienate customers like this?
As I've gotten more programming experience, interruptions have become less and less of a problem. As long as it's something that I've worked on in the last few days, I can hop in and get working pretty quickly. I don't know if my brain has just adapted to the environments I've been working in, or if I'm just a better programmer now. Maybe I've just become really good at ignoring people while seeming to be paying attention.

But taking a couple weeks off from a project really sets me back. It could take can entire day to get back up to speed.
Listening to Customers is Becoming a Lost Art
Appleseed uses identities that look just like an email address. For instance, mine is:

michael.chisari@developer.appleseedproject.org

My public profile then is:

developer.appleseedproject.org/michael.chisari

When I'm logged into my home node, I can go to any other Appleseed node, and "remote login" with my Appleseed identity. From there, it uses the same flow as OpenID, just in a more user-friendly fashion.

It's all quite painless for the end user.
My point was this request always comes with, I want professional services on a shoestring. They want you to build Facebook for $500. Facebook required a professional graphics team and a professional marketing team that has copywriters. That is before you ever get to code. My point is they expect Champagne on a beer budget.
Thank you very much for making this data available Joel. This is really interesting stuff.
Ah, that's a pet peeve of mine... I've always loved looking at the guts of any library I use, first because I often learn something new, second, because otherwise how can I rely on it?

But, a lot of programmers I know, don't look at the code for some reason, they just search and search on google, then go to irc to ask around and waste a lot of time when they could have found their answer in 5 minutes...
Scientific Curiosity Captured in Photos
I'm sure I'll be in the minority here, but a huge benefit of using libraries is that I don't have to know how they work, or care. The documentation says 'call foo() with this argument to do bar', and that's all I want to care about.
I have other things to worry about (like my own code), than to want to dig into the internals of somebody's else's library to figure out something which should be easily documented.
>Can you think of a person who has been advertising vaporware that you would not listen to?

Microsoft. I ignore anything they say until they have something I can actually buy. They've made too many announcements that were just never spoken of again.
I like the dutch auction model. I wonder whether it results in significant difference in prices paid.
Reminds me of an old JWZ's quote: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

I think all Opera's extra goodies are good only if you expect 75% of functionalities. E.g. Opera Chat still don't support encoding fallback (X-chat, IRSSI, mIRC, etc. does), or it is not very obvious to disable the built-in BitTorrent client (disable it in `about:config` by yourself), Opera Link that only merge two bookmarks together, requiring me to manually delete all default bookmarks before (or after) syncing, etc.

But it is a really good browser: fast, has minimum resource usage. I wish there is Opera Lite. (And hope Opera team to finally fix Asian language support.)
The problem arises when you are focused on something very specific, for example designing a particularly complicated series of function calls, you effectively have to keep a stack in your mind, think about locals, instance variables, whatever, abstract stuff that the brain isn't so well designed at retaining, which becomes very vulnerable to disruption.

If you are unlucky enough to be interrupted while in that kind of state, the spinning plates effectively fall and break - it can almost be painful, and certainly drudging to get back up to where you were before. I've found this tends to take anywhere from 30 minutes to a day of time away from me because getting back in that flow state can be so damn difficult.

I think a lot of the problem comes down to us using the brain for stuff it's not great at.
Wouldn't this be better titled "Start Looking At Code" instead of "Stop Googling"?
Some of the Windows information on Git from this article is outdated. I use TortoiseGit on Windows regularly. It handles all the common cases for me very well. For the uncommon cases, it comes packaged with Bash for Windows, so I can use Git easily from the command line as well.
I have the same experience! You start to anticipate arrival and focus on "cleanup" work at some point. It happens so naturally that you hardly notice. If there is something left to be done, it's usually something small, like a 5 minute task.(maybe the train was early?)
We put that limit in place. Eventbrite lets you set any limit you'd like.
Bing Gets Facebook-ized
Ask HN: What are your recommended podcasts on technology and related topics?
I used to listen to LUG Radio (http://lugradio.org./) back in the days they were still active and I noticed that I haven't really been listening to any podcasts since then. So I'm looking for recommendations. What podcasts are you listening to? I'm mostly interested in technology, although I'm open to suggestions covering other topics. Some British type humour (I was a fan of the LUG Radio format, after all) doesn't hurt either.
Can you require keys AND passwords? I haven't been able to figure out how to get that to function - if passwords are allowed, it lets you in with or without a key, from what I can tell.
I'd be happy to be wrong though!
(49) Registrate actually exists as http://immobilise.com. UK only, but I assume there are ones in other countries. Definitely worth registering as the police check stolen property serial numbers on it. Also, I recently heard about a very specialist stolen property locator service — http://www.kegwatch.co.uk/ — which specialises in the metal beer barrels delivered to pubs! If there is a market for barrels, there is a market for everything, even collectable ties :-)

Regardless, an excellent, fun and inspiring list, thanks for sharing!
IsItRails.com; Error 503 Service Unavailable. So I guess it is rails.
I see Opera as being flexible like FF but has the speed and UI polish of Chrome. That way, I only need to use one browser.

Top feature that no other browser offers: fully customizable UI.
Right click on any UI element of the browser and select Customize->Appearance. The Toolbars and Buttons tabs allow full control over the browser UI so I can move buttons and toolbars to my heart's content.

Fully customizable keyboard navigation. Customizable using the interface at Settings->Preferences->Advanced->Shortcuts->Keyboard setup->Edit. Make sure to check the "Enable Single Key Shortcuts" option on the "Keyboard setup" pane to get the most out of it.
Check out http://www.opera.com/browser/tutorials/nomouse/

Fast history navigation:
This one isnt actually enabled by default; set the following preference to 3
opera:config#UserPrefs|HistoryNavigationMode
The history is fully cached so there is absolutely no delay between pressing the back button and viewing the previous page in history and it comes up exactly at the point you left it.
Usability.gov
My reason number #322: Instant fully RAM-cached Back button.

I can't stand when other browsers sometimes reload pages when I go back/forward, especially when I had text typed in forms.
"Bulgarians"? Surely you mean Bolivians.
ArticleBody - Instapaper and Readability do this, but definitely can be improved.

AutoTagger - OpenCalais does this, again opportunities for improvement of course.

Still a nice list of ideas.
I want a server rack in a (small) box
Besides mouse gestures I've gotten so used to browsing via keyboard (especially when using Shift+arrow keys) that switching to another browser is nigh impossible, because I get irritated too easily.

And the builtin RSS reader is better than anything else I've come across (not that I spent that much time looking ;-))
Lots of comments from over a week ago:

+ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1762998

Earlier submission of exactly this item:

+ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1788591
Hardly a behemoth since I can run more tabs on Opera at the same time than on any other browser. Granted, I have quite an old computer but it's perfect for spotting differences between browsers. For others this is probably not an issue.

I use the mail client for my GMail and RSS feeds. Try it and tell me if you notice anything wrong with it. Actually I've been using the integrated client for so long that my perception about stand-alone mail clients is that they're a thing of the past.
I guess it's just a matter of perspective, but for me it's far more convenient to open my browser and not think about checking my mail (it lets me know if new mail has arrived).

I don't use Opera Unite and nobody is forcing me to. It just stays out of my way, and so do the other features. Keep only what you like; just because they're there if you need them doesn't mean they slow you down.