skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hacker News RSS hack: Sort by "magic" in Google Reader
Overwhelmed by the sheer number of stories coming onto the HN RSS feed? If you use Google Reader's "Sort by Magic" feature, it'll make it so you get the cream of the crop at the top.

While I'm uncertain how the system works, it looks like a combination of "likes" and clickthroughs of RSS feed items to determine which ones "magically" show up at the top.

However the system works, it's a great way to get as much HN as you can conceivably handle.

[Oh, and apologies if this had been mentioned before, I just discovered it, and it's been hugely helpful.]
I think the main complaint is that they're not neatly divided into namespaces or modules, as they are in Python.
Yes, but the sample size of people who don't share physical media (in an organized way) is also relatively smaller than other categories (thus, high market saturation).

Also, for the purposes of mapping opportunity, latent demand was described as both 1) those who share casually (not through a service or organized community) and 2) those who don't currently share at all but would be interested to. In the case of physical media, I suspect there's more people under #1 than #2.
Ask HN: The state of social games
Hi HN,

I wanted to ask your opinion about the state of social games today. I've been thinking about what I want to do for the rest of my life, and I found the answer could be games. So I'm aligning myself to learn the domain via choice of where I work (social analytics company), my pet projects, what I read/watch/learn, etc.

Upon starting my adventure, I came across videos such as Mark Pincus' Stanford talk, Siqi Chen's presentation, and a bunch more. They talk about the importance of analytics, testing, and metrics driven decision making.

Thinking about it, I realized that these companies are actually marketing optimizations; they don't optimize for game experience first. Never in the history of game development has anyone built a game around analytic performance, because the goal of games were to immerse the player in an experience, not to rapidly grow a userbase. Maybe thats why I don't find social games like Farmville to be very fun (I guess I'm a hardcore gamer), but 80 million casual players can't be wrong.

Do social games today suck? Rather than optimizing for distribution, can you optimize for user experience? If you were to start a game company, what could you do differently than the big players today?
It was properly shut down because most people here don't precieve it as an issue at all. Of course a gay person is welcome in this community, just as a blond person is - it is a complete non-issue.
Poll: Does your company provide free lunch every day?
Is it ordered-in, cooked in-house, or do you get a stipend?
the fact is that the rest of the industry has grown in step with the hardware in a lot of ways

This tells me that there is a tremendous opportunity in the form of huge inefficiencies in our computing infrastructure. I think Steve Jobs and others at Apple went down this mental path when formulating the iPhone/iPad. Actually, Opera Mini is a powerful demonstration of this idea!
You can't logically compare Django and Rails to PHP, though. How about comparing those two to CI, Yii, Kohana, Cake or Symfony? (I know which I'd prefer - Django - just pointing that out)
I have a different reaction. I figure that if other people already know about quaking aspen, then that no longer interests me. I'd rather press the "Random Article" button and find out about... Mount Grace Priory.

Did you know it was the last monastery established in Yorkshire? And the monks were Carthusians, who basically live as a community of hermits, keeping to their own rooms and only coming together on rare occasions?
> This is why, when you’ve piqued my interest, I keep asking questions, incessantly, while staring you in the face… never blinking.

Personally, I'm interested in what makes a person push themselves. Normally, in conversations with strangers or even friends about eating at X restaurant - I'm bored. But every once in a while we'll have a fascinating discussion about something important to me. It's a lot easier to do this one on one - perhaps because it's easier to process one data stream. When I go to parties that evolve into people telling stories, I usually sit back and soak it all in. I usually get asked by someone if I am having a good time - and I truly am - but the person thinks because I am not actively participating that I am wishing to be somewhere else. Sure, I've had my share of aborted conversations that are uncomfortable. But this article makes me think that true people persons are truly interested in finding out who someone is - what they feel about things, what their life is like. By limiting my relevancy filter to stuff that is important to me - I am potentially funneling out a significant amount of people that I meet. Interesting article - it makes me wonder if there is a hack for consistently being able to engage people in real conversation.
New Components and Contributors for IronPython and IronRuby
So what does the protect_from_forgery statement do? I've never seen that before.
Isn't there an extent to which this worked for this author simply because his actions were more of an outlier within the industry, rather than the norm? And it was perhaps entirely because it was an unusual exception (though not without precedent) that 4chan resulted in a surge of sales.

If this were standard marketing behaviour, I don't believe it would be nearly as effective.
You're not saying much of anything. Health care is good and killing people in Iraq and Afghanistan is bad. Google doesn't have much to do with one or the other. Nor is the company responsible for the distributional choices British taxpayers make when they elect government officials who decide to underfund public health in favour of blowing stuff up.

Why is this even a point under discussion?
A quick summary follows the quick editorial and after that a quick new thought:

Editorial: Stonebraker is, imo, and as usual, Right Again. His biggest problem is that he's boring that way. He doesn't open his mouth in contexts like this but to be Right.

Summary: People say "No SQL is right because of the CAP theorem." The CAP "theorem" says of DBs that: Consistency, high Availability, or Partition-tolerance .... pick any two. Quite true! So one of the pro no-SQL arguments is that high availability and partition tolerance are often the priorities ... so toss out consistency! SQL assumes consistency. Thus you need No SQL. Stonebraker correctly points out that, hey, you know what? Partitions are pretty rare and tossing out consistency really didn't increase your accessibility average by much .... so you tossed out consistency for no reason whatsoever. If you think the Cap "theorem" justifies NoSQL... you're just wrong.

Stonebraker's rant is nearly boring because it makes such an obvious point.

New Thought: I don't think NoSQL is popular because of the CAP theorem. I think it is popular because it is easier to get started with (even if that means using it poorly) than SQL. SQL is a little hard to learn. It's a little bit awkward to use in some "scripting" language or other HLL language. NoSQL may be bad engineering in many of its uses ... but its easier. A lot easier. And, people aren't much asking about engineering quality until sites start failing often. Which a heck of a lot of them do but by then the NoSQL architects have collected their money and are out of town or else are still around but able to point fingers of blame away from the abandonment of ACID.

An ACID DB that gave a more simple-minded logical model than SQL ... including, sure, relaxing ACID constraints where that was really desirable ... could go a long way fixing the confusion around NoSQL.

p.s.: given a typical distributed NoSQL DB, one thing you could do is regard that as the "physical model", implement proper transactions, and build a library that gave you ACID properties. Build up a high level way of using that library so that you have a logical model of the data that is independent of exactly how it is laid out in the underlying thing.... and you've got a Codd-style DB. Great thing to do. SQL 2.0
This is good advice.

Also to the OP: this book is good, and a must read. It will help you a lot on the fundamentals of CS.
http://www.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Manual-Steve-Skiena/d...
True indeed. I suppose I should have said "non-physical media"... Don't get metaphysical on me now :)
Silence of the dissenters: How south-east Asia keeps web users in line
I believe it was added in 2.3. It protects against CSRF attacks: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionController/RequestF...
Unsolicited plug for a friend's company:

http://www.zerocater.com/

They manage lunch for companies in SF.
Microsoft is opening up these projects to contributions from the community. Shouldn't they have done this to start with? Does this feel a little bit like they are abandoning them or is it all positive?
Actually Dalton was careful to qualify what he said. He never said music startups were impossible. His message was that, given the uniquely horrible obstacles in this domain, you'd be stupid to start a music startup when you could instead start one in some other domain where the obstacles were merely the obstacles all startups face.

Everything we've seen confirms what Dalton said. If we published anti-rfses, this would be the first. Avoid starting startups that handle label music.
Unless, of course, your primary goal is to be pretentious, in which case go ahead and use "vulgarisation".
Not exactly. Artists (musical, visual, literary) in Ireland aren't taxed on the proceeds of their sales, largely because Ireland benefits substantially in tourism and other revenue from exporting its culture.
I'd say that PHP is easier to learn and harder to master, whereas the opposite holds true for Ruby/Python. The difference being primarily the fact that the Ruby/Python communities generally are more invested in code quality and improving the state of the art of software engineering, and therefore it's easier to find better code to accelerate your learning.
Exactly. As soon as E-Readers become the norm, I'll bet physical books will be a collector's item just like Vinyl (mostly) or CDs (almost) are.
The install base of Mac is 50 million. http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/10/20/apple-cfo-tim-cook... There are about 9 million programmers in the world (heard this from Joel at BoS 2 weeks ago -- not sure if it's true, or if I am remembering correctly). If 50% of devs have a mac (way overestimate), we make up less than 10% of the users. Now ... how many of us need Java?
Restaurants don't usually have gardens.
Is PEP 3333 the final solution for WSGI on Python 3?
One thing this enables is switching platforms. If a future MacBook Air runs on ARM instead of Intel, anyone using Xcode would only need to recompile to target the new platform. Similar to how Intel support was easy for Xcode developers (but very hard for Metrowerks developers). Getting everyone on Xcode gives Apple tremendous flexibility. They could even have apps target LLVM-IL (whatever it’s called) instead of the CPU directly.
Apple sells 22M Macs a year, and growing. How many people do you think compiled a Java program on Mac OS X worldwide this year? 10K? M-a-a-y-b-e 100K?
Should there be some sort of moderator for Facebook's "Questions?"
To my way of thinking, the fact that life showed up on Earth relatively quickly, within half a billion years of the planet's formation, suggests that life is relatively easy. The fact that complex life took another few billion years after that suggests that simple to complex is the difficult step. But the fact that we nonetheless find ourselves here around a live-fast-die-young yellow star when the universe is only 14 billion years old rather than in close orbit around a dim red star a hundred billion years later suggests to me that it's probably not a one-in-every-zillion universes sort of event.
Does anyone else use Oxygen on the mac. I've never found anything that comes close when working with XML. But judging from the clunky UI, I have to conclude it's written in Java. I wonder what they will ship in future, maybe the app with a JVM installer?
JR
Isn't this like saying that we shouldn't use wheeled vehicles anymore, because wheels are a stone-age technology?

No, it's more like saying we should consider pneumatic tires, spring suspensions and ball bearings, despite greased wooden axles and wheels having done such a commendable job over the centuries.

Wheel = OS. I'm not proposing reinventing the notion of OS. I'm proposing using some more of the stuff we've learned and developed in the past 40 years to design and implement it.
Blame the headline writer, but the actual article is still pretty interesting.
You're not an exception. Opera is quite popular in all of central and eastern Europe:

http://people.opera.com/dstorey/images/OperaMarketShareEEhov...

(based on StatCounter and Gemius data)
I don't have any advice for you, but don't forget you did manage to launch a product, twice!
To me that's amazing.
CrowdFlower has some annoying particularities which are undocumented.

In particular:

The CSV parser doesn't work / is too strict / something. The only way to upload complicated data files in as "JSON". The only problem is they don't accept standard JSON. You cannot have a comma separating the rows. (!?) I have no idea how much time I spent trying to figure this out.

Additionally, if your task is too hard, and more than 50% of judgments are rejected, they auto-pause your task. When you resume it, it will simply pause a few minutes later. So, for certain tasks, you simply cannot finish the job. Their rationale is that CrowdFlower pays for the judgments that are discarded, and you pay for only the judgments they keep, so if they discard too many judgments they lose money. I would rather just pay extra money for tasks that are very hard.
In my experience, the designers are learning how to program way faster than the programmers are learning how to design. (This coming from someone who's doing the latter.) I can't give a good reason as to why; it's just a gut feeling.

So in addition to computer science based HCI programs like CMU and Stanford, keep an eye on programs in studio-based design schools. A lot of undergraduate programs in designing technological experiences - combining engineering training with studio method - are starting up in places like NYU, SVA, SCAD, CCA, CMU's art department, and the like. Many of these schools already have strong masters programs which take undergrads with computer science backgrounds.
Great, then I will go back and procrastinate a bit more.
Why Apps Are (Sometimes) Better Than The Open Web
Despite the fact that Wired Magazine has said that the web is dead, the browser-based internet is still thriving.

And why shouldn’t it? The web is open, accessible to anyone with a browser and is also widely adaptable. A browser window is many things: a television screen, a newspaper, a chat window, a social network or a webcam display.
Not all of the distributed NoSQL systems give up consistency. Notably, H-Base and, in certain scenarios, MongoDB, both offer consistent atomic reads and writes of one thing, be it a row, supercolumn, document or whatever.

You make a good point that NoSQL is about so much more than the CAP theorem. That doesn't mean there aren't a ton of people (some very smart) out there citing the CAP theorem as proof that you have to give up consistency to be "web-scale".
One of the joys of working in F# is how the stronger type system combined with the type hover-overs allows for a sort of debugging-as-you-type that allows you to think with the help of the type system. It really helps unwind difficult problems and when there are errors you can easily see inline how to fix them. This is an impressive use of that facility, though it's even more useful when trying to solve a problem.
I have a desktop with a 1.8 Ghz Core Duo. I have absolutely no problems with performance. Of course, I'm only running browsers, email, Gimp, etc... but what are people going to use a 11" MacBook Air for? Probably not games and professional Photoshop work. The processors in these machines are more than adequate and were probably chosen to balance speed with heat, weight and battery life.
Very curious to hear what the HN community thinks.

Not sure if the analogy holds but it seems Rapleaf is turning one's email address into the new social security # (for those in the US)?

Also, does anyone know if banks can use this in making consumer credit decisions? I believe this wouldn't be legal, but Om alludes to banks using it in his post.
Didn't OSX just recently get rid of ARM support? Might be wrong though..
Yeah, this book not only explains the "good parts" it gives you a lot of context as to why a lot of the weird stuff in JS is the way it is.
But U2 is FROM Ireland...
NoSQL may be bad engineering in many of its uses ... but its easier. A lot easier.

This sounds like a serious false economy. That's the story of our industry, though.

An ACID DB that gave a more simple-minded logical model than SQL ... including, sure, relaxing ACID constraints where that was really desirable ... could go a long way fixing the confusion around NoSQL.

As Stonebraker says, you can easily layer a key-value API on SQL. Or there's Berkeley DB; maybe they should rebrand it as Berkeley NoSQL.
I think of Unix as more of a local-maxima than a fundamental item

Recognizing the difference between fundamentals and local-maxima constitutes some of the most powerful entrepreneurship!
Neighborgoods.net charges a fee to "verify" your existence as a real person (how's that for a CAPTCHA?). I like the idea and thought of it like they turned my whole area into a Costco. But I had to pay to get my membership card. On thing their founder has been talking about recently is how more than saving people money, it's having a dramatic effect on communities that embrace it. The idea of sharing might be more powerful than the sharing itself.
Apply for unpaid internships. I'm sure most companies would rather have you than some young kid. Take the hit for a little while, and then turn it into a real job in a few months.
What should I be paying a django/python developer per hour?
what's the going rate for a django developer these days? I've got a project, it's pretty straight forward, and I need a good developer. what should I be paying?
Computer vision and deep learning: Eye robot
> “If a customer’s email address is attached to three or four social networking sites with 300 friends, the email likely isn’t fake and the retailer can put that person in the ‘good’ pile.”

The guy who sold sex.com had an interesting idea in his Mixergy interview about making loans to young adults by having them pledge their email or Facebook as collateral. For example, if the loan wasn't being repaid, the service would post on your wall using your credentials something like "isn't paying his loan back" Now, in some circles that might be taken as a positive status-enhancing comment but, privacy issues aside, the idea of putting up one's identity as collateral is interesting to me. Some of the more successful real world charities (Team in Training, for example) push you to raise thousands because you have pledged to do an endurance event (usually a marathon) and if you back out - you lose credibility and the more you raise for Team in Training - the more negative incentive to back out. You actually sign a legal contract when you sign up saying that you will either raise the full amount or pay the outstanding balance out of your own pocket - with a loophole that you can back out of the contract in thirty days and just lose your initial several hundred commitment fee. The power of social contracts. Rapleaf understands this well. So does Team in Training. At the extreme, there are cults. At the other end, stuff like being asked to donate money or volunteer at church. I wonder how well a public scorecard of how much money you were donating to charity, CO2 that you were generating would work to increase charitable donations and decrease personal CO2. But I digress
You already have the cheapest vpses, let Amazon deal with those who won't pay anything.

My only complaint so far has been that I can't seem to figure out where I reset my key (I lost the original to a dead computer), while I still have root I don't dare reboot it because if it doesn't come up I can't fix it.
>But doesn't this example show that people want physical copies[?]

Depends. Sometimes they do so for higher quality + to "give" money to the creator. Graphic novel fans (and Anime fans) pretty frequently buy the item they downloaded if/when it comes out, and if they think it was good. Trans/Scanlations are pretty much directly responsible for creating originally-Japanese-media sales in the US; while this is an English one, it's still likely being read by a lot from the same group of people.
Hands on with Google TV: 7 Reasons Why It's Awesome
Y'see, I don't see much point in having a free company lunch if you're in SF and presumably within walking distance of a dozen good lunch places.

If you're stuck in Mountain View at the Googleplex, though, free lunch is a great idea.
Which annoys the hell out of me, since they insist on getting a phone number to sign up for gmail now - but while I have plenty of credit cards, I do not have a phone.
Most of the juicy stuff is happening in these 3 files:

http://github.com/holman/facelette/blob/master/app/views/ses...
http://github.com/holman/facelette/blob/master/app/views/ses...
http://github.com/holman/facelette/blob/master/app/controlle...
Well, that was random!
Is it? This isn't coal and steel we are talking about.
About 50 years ago, a researcher developed a language he designed to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis called "Loglan." A speaker of its successor (Lojban) posted an AMA on Reddit last year[1]. He posted this in regards to whether or not it broadened his thinking:

I believe that learning lojban has helped me learn to think much more precisely in general. The first example of this that comes to mind is how often I see questions and confusion of family and friends as just confusion about language. I can't actually verify, of course, how much of my perspective is unrelated to lojban, how much is from lojban specifically, and how much is from learning a language that's dramatically different from English.

So while it is superior for communication, it doesn't affect our thought process.

[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9c90z/i_speak_a_constr...
I won't be upset to see that go. Worst bit torrent programme I think I've ever used since the rebranding.
Of course, you've got to remember that which chip has the best performance per watt depends on the job. A sufficiently smart data center could determine this automatically and take that into account in its job scheduling.
As far as I've been able to tell, Git, Mercurial, and Bazaar are relatively close to each other in terms of features. I'm pretty sure I could use any of them and be happy. It's the fact that GitHub is by far the best code-hosting site I've used (and that the alternatives, as far as I can tell, don't compare) that keeps me using Git.
Nice summary. http://bit.ly/9Pq3aE
Ask HN: Apple knows too much. Do you have any privacy concerns? 
The problem is that everything is connected to my Apple ID, which is connected to my credit card and my home address.

Apple knows what Movies I watch, what Music I listen to (iTunes), what people I talk to (Facetime), where I am (MobileMe), what Apps I develop and how much I earn with these Apps.

Apple knows way more about me than Facebook, Skype and all the others combined.

Does this bother you? If yes, what do you do about it (besides not using their services)?