skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm reasonably color blind (I couldn't get any of those test blots), and I think I have better night vision. At least better than my wife. At night, in our room when it is very dark, I can describe details of objects that she can't even see at all. May not have anything to do with being color blind, but it makes sense if I have rods than cones.
Firefox 4 release slips to 2011
Hey...I'm in Venice! I run out in that area on trails in Myakka everyday. I certainly hope you don't assume all of us Venetians to be as abusive about privacy as Senor LosHuertos.
My understanding was that after the second failure you were eligible for a replacement. Apple consistently scores well on customer service.

All PC makers are buying from the same place so of course one isn't going to be much better than the other. The difference is in customer service and extras (e.g. that fantastic touchpad on the mac book line).
The alternative is a revision of IEEE 754 to include "decimal floating-Point arithmetic," which is apparently something "in progress" because the interests of those involved can't result in agreement. I'd really like to read anything from some insider. I know that IBM did the most of the work in that direction. Decimal Floating Point is the thing to have, but who know when that can happen in processors or in wider use. I know from Brendan Eich that there were attempts to add DFP in Javascript but that even there no agreement was achieved.

Edit: or it was standardized but still not gaining acceptance:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754-2008
Web Instant (Web It) aka 'I Feel Lucky" Instant
Exactly right. You remove the 10 worst or 30 worst days, your returns would be way above the 8.2% average. The point is, no one knows ahead of time which days will be one of the 10 best, and which will one of the 10 worst. Same thing with angel investors - you don't know which startups will be home runs and which ones will be strike outs. The data suggests you should play every day.
The World Bank - Apps for Development
You may like: http://g.raphaeljs.com/
The co-founders meetup is landing in Austin, TX on Dec 6th
Yeah, but totally locked down. It does look like a great phone, though.
I have used a few like jqplot, flot, highchart.

I stuck with flot but if I was to do it again I would give high charts another look.
Then let's clarify my hyperbole: if you make minimums, you're going to need a long long time to get out of the debt. Decades.

New laws and higher minimums are working to alleviate this problem, but if you can't make the minimum as it is, how will you do it when the minimum has doubled?
I had a Captivate and the GPS was useless.
(Not a lawyer and this should not be taken as legal advice, just my two cents worth.)

It does sound like bluster. It's certainly not grand theft (which would be a criminal matter), it's a contractual dispute. When people start throwing around legal terms they don't understand I always suspect that they either aren't serious, or that they know so little that their intent is irrelevant as it's likely to change when they learn the reality of the situation, the likely costs and so on.

My guess is that if you made him an offer - possibly just 50% of profit to date - he'd accept and go, but what you need to make sure is that any deal you do with him makes clear that the payment is made in full and final settlement of the matter.

In the UK full and final settlement is a specific legal term (I'm guessing that there is a US equivalent) basically meaning that the matter is settled and the other party can't then return at a later date with a further claim. This should be stated clearly in the accompanying letter (make sure the letter and payment are signed for and you record all details) and also make it clear that by cashing the cheque he waives any right to further payment or claim against you or the company in relation to any business dealings you have had.

But the point others have made is valid - just because it's not worth him suing now don't assume it won't be worth it in the future.
Ugh, the "American Libertarians" on this site get a tab bit boring. Sorry I said something negative about your religion. Downvoting is easier than citing some credible source that shows that American Libertarianism is anything but a crackpot anti-theory.
indeed! :)
played with it last night and it worked right out of the box. Definitely going to be trying this out for all my CRUD stuff. nice work moo.
I get $4-$5 eCPM on iAds. My admob eCPM has been low (20c) but I know other devs that get $1-$2 eCPM with admob so it isn't out of the question. CTR is a big factor for a lot of mobile ad companies.
I second highcharts, i find it an absolutely excellent chart library. I even created a PHP wrapper for it so i could control it from the backend.

Oh and I did this because i was bored: http://zestmonkey.com/charts.php
Here Is How We Choose Who To Date And Hire
There are some titanic-sized caveat that applies any time you start having the "there's a more direct way of doing this", or "this doesn't fit the framework" conversations.

Whether or not you agree with the philosophy of many of the existing frameworks, the people who are writing them develop, think, and live at a higher level of abstract thinking than most developers. If you look at the total pool of developer talent available, only a small portion ever write a successful framework? Why is that? Because writing a framework that is, at the same time, flexible, fast, and powerful is incredibly difficult.

I can't tell you how many times I've sat across from the table and listened to someone tell me how their problem doesn't fit pattern X. In most cases it's true there is a more direct way to accomplish a task, but patterns aren't designed to provide direct solutions, they're designed to structure your code in a way that makes it modular and easy to maintain.

When you deviate from the path, you better have a good reason, because you're often trading a lot of things that aren't immediately apparent: abstraction, consistency, maintainability, and portability.
I like JIT which is a beautiful data visualization library.
http://thejit.org/
This is exactly why the app ads goldrush will not last. I can only imagine that >90% of clicks are accidental, and the placement of ads right next to key game/app controls only exacerbates the situation.

I feel sorry for all those adwords users who don't realize they're opted into Google's mobile ad network.
It's a shame that organized crime is involved but I view it as an otherwise healthy system if they prevent one company from becoming a monopoly. "Too big to fail" means someone didn't do their job.
jit is nice
http://thejit.org/

demos: http://thejit.org/demos/
Ah, but you don't overpay for the failures, because they don't take more of your money. Instead, you invest the same $500,000 and get a smaller percentage of ownership. But in all of the 0x and 1x return cases, it doesn't matter what percentage of the company you own.
By my reading of it he made two payments of $500 dollars which were accepted (and are almost certainly traceable). It's almost certain that there are e-mails showing a business relationship between the two of them too.

It's not clear but it's not nothing either.
Why would you use an int for currency? Isn't that what BigDecimal is for?
Are you the pilif of the pilif inter-base railway?
Stack Overflow results now included in MSDN Search
As a mathematician I do not value 0.3 above 22/7.
'With NoSQL all relationships have been pushed back onto the poor programmer to implement in code rather than the database managing it. '

OK I'll bite.

Yes. I, the poor programmer, want to implement relationships in my code, rather than adding a secondary language to my application to manage relationships (the database itself never 'managed this' for me, I had to do it manually).
It's upsetting news that the most popular virgin place on earth is now a little less virgin than before. Step by step, losing its natural value.
How about double-posting session ID's from the cookie within AJAX requests to prevent XSRF? I've certainly used document.cookie for that.

The only other scheme I know of to defend against XSRF is to generate secret values for every request, which is not always practical.
This is what print stylesheets are for.
That's true but Indian law is an absolute minefield, particularly for those not familiar with it. I have a former colleague who is still embroiled in a case that's been going on for over a decade. Jarndyce and Jarndyce anyone?

It would take a brave soul indeed to get involved in that from abroad with relatively little at stake.
Protovis http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/ hands down. (Assuming a decent browser)
The other related term is `stiffness'.
Would you like to provide some examples?
It could also be people laying minecart track. This, unfortunately, completely kills the server and makes it need to be restarted.
I don't really understand what the debate is about. Even if the market is totally 'bimodal' valuations matter the same way as in a non bimodal market. Expected return is orthogonal to expected Risk.

Let's say the market is so bimodal that a startup fails or becomes google. Then the expected return is:

p * G

where 'p' is the chance of becoming Google, 'G' is Google's value.

Basically investors' bid for valuation is their bid for what p is.

The story is only that if they say that the company's value is X while the startup says it is 2 * X that means that they say p = p1 while the startup thinks p = 2 * p1

Of course valuations matter. It matters linearly. In any market. Even in the most risky markets. I can decrease my risk by diversifying my investments into lots of different high risk assets and my expected return remain the same, but I can only increase my expected return by buying in at low valuation. This is exactly what YCombinator does. This is just very basic math.

TL;DR: The fact that investors care about valuations does not mean they don't recognize that the success distribution is bimodal.
Know Your Market (or iterate quickly)
GHC (Haskell):

$ ghci
GHCi, version 6.12.1: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ :? for help
0.1 Loading package ghc-prim ... linking ... done.
Loading package integer-gmp ... linking ... done.
Loading package base ... linking ... done.
Prelude> 0.1 + 0.2
0.30000000000000004

And just for fun with GHC's rational numbers:

Prelude> :m + Data.Ratio
Prelude Data.Ratio> (1 % 10) + (2 % 10)
3 % 10

Hugs (Haskell):

$ hugs
Hugs> 0.1 + 0.2
0.3

bc:

$ bc
0.1 + 0.2
.3

Gforth:

$ gforth
0.1e 0.2e f+ f. 0.3 ok

dc:

$ dc
0.1 0.2 + p
.3
>It's these contradictory intuitions that are simultaneously difficult and useful. You just need to pick the right one at the right time.

I have heard it put that you actually need to learn to ignore your intuitions and follow the actual calculations to do higher-level math. Rather like Eliezer's "shut up and multiply" on Less Wrong. I have no personal opinion on that since I haven't learned any higher math, past first year calculus and discrete math, yet.
Apple passes RIM, now number four cell phone maker globally
Generally though economies of scale make it cheaper to buy something with extra features which has been mass produced, than a closer to custom made model without them.

I've learned this trying to buy a simple mobile phone for my technophobe father and a VCR that just played stuff (no recording) for my aging grandmother.
4 Square should sponsor a competition to see who can be the first to check in from the summit.
Well on the subject of China let's start with Ghengis Khan conquering not only China but a vast empire... Or Athens, or Rome (these pre-date Greece and Italy existing as countries)... Or England, Holland and Portugal building vast trading empires and driving the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution.

Numbers are nothing. Culture is fate.
http://docs.sun.com/source/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html

However, my problem is that modern language are hiding these things for you.
I've had a few random thoughts in and around this area, so if you ever want to talk about this, get in touch...

I even had a fully working prototype that I ended up losing somewhere...
Use Flot on several of my sites. They have some nice plugins that I like too, and it integrates very nicely with jQuery.
This is valuable discussion but not to the HN audience as we already get it. There are some tough laws that can be applied to his behavior. I don't know what the odds are of getting caught into a criminal prosecution, but you don't want to spend the next 10 years of your life dealing with the fallout of a blog post.
was the performance gain worth it in the end? In my experience numpy is pretty tight on its own, but I've seen some excellent speed gains from using cython + numpy.
I've had other people tell me the same thing.

I've been an embedded software guy forever so it can be hard to remember how much fun it was to blink an LED, but the excitement on the faces of experienced (non-embedded) SW people when they blink that first LED, or move a servo motor or whatever is palpable. There's a reason I never moved onto the desktop or server world: this stuff is addictive :-)
Yes, you can now sue a 4-year-old for negligent bike riding
Linky: http://code.google.com/apis/chart/
Your email address has also been associatively filed. Thanks.
I suspect the roaming charges at the peak of Mt. Everest are far more profitable than in a city.
This one is pretty fun: http://danvk.org/dygraphs/ - the best part IMO is that the charts are interactive.
nice, added to http://hnresources.com/hackernewsers/
Loverhugs.Com | Loving Hearts High Quality Desktop Wallpapers
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How unique and trackable is your browser
No, I actually view anarchy as potentially workable [1]. American libertarianism is closest to Ancap. I find them both unworkable for the same reason.

[1] Probably to complex too explain here but the key is that Government and money depend on each other. You can't have one without the other.
I believe it depends on the atmosphere of your full time job. I've been working on my current project for the past 2 years now and have had 2 different full time jobs in that period. My previous job had me working at 120% of utilization, with a bunch of overtime. Needless to say, not much of my side-project got done. When I got home from work every day, I wouldn't even think about touching a computer. My current job isn't nearly as stressful. Although I get a lot done, I still salivate about programming when I get home. I think it all depends on how much of a workload you can handle past your full time job and how stressful your full time job is. Having positive and motivated people at your full time job also helps your motivation on your personal project.
Do you mean zoom, or changing font size? Because zoom scales everything, images included. Scaling affects only text, and ideally, things that are sized relative to the text (but not pixels).
That's fair, but all the same, one really does have to wonder.

I know basically nothing about who actually looks at the apps that get submitted. Nor do I know anything about what apps typically get rejected. I've never worked with the App Store personally, as a developer or a consumer. But I understand developers should expect a time period of anywhere between an hour and two weeks before getting approval, during which presumably a human looks at it, right?

I just can't imagine any adult of sound mind and typical socialization (and presumably having gone through training that explained what Apple's internal policy is toward app approvals) wouldn't realize that that app is offensive. Thus, the only explanations I can come up with are either a) whoever approved it genuinely didn't notice its content (possible but highly unprofessional and careless, to a degree I normally wouldn't expect from a company with Apple's reputation) or b) Apple's famously stringent approval policy contains nothing that forbids this content.

Hell, it's possible I'm expecting more stringency from them than actually exists. Most of my knowledge of the App Store comes from the tech press. But there's no getting around the fact that a human looked at this and approved it. We are thus in the second scenario you mentioned: someone has seen your pants and very likely your unbuttoned fly, and the situation has not been rectified. Consequently, I feel I do have standing to hold Apple accountable for this, and as you say, more so because of their apparent position in the past in support of their LGBT employees.
UDP is not always the best protocol for networked games. TCP can be a good choice for games which exchange only or mostly important messages which must not be dropped and delivered in sending order (eg. most round-based games). To make that work with UDP you'd end up re-implementing a lot of already existing functionality inside TCP.

UDP is supposed to be better for real-time games, but both Minecraft and World of Warcraft actually do great with TCP.
I haven't had this myself, but a couple weeks ago there were one or two people who said that they initially launched with a site that prompted a correction from Google. After a few weeks or so the prompt went away because their search term became legitimate. I can't remember the specifics though. It probably depends on the term and how fickle Google decides to be.
I said "without any useful output or side-effect". I/O falls under those categories.
'Nother vote for this, it rocks.
Permutations and Combinations in theory and in Ruby
That's definitely a problem (I knew a few people that I've spent time helping out who would probably run the risk of what those links describe), but according to all of those links, the agency in the wrong is ICE, not any particular state - as far as I know (even with the Arizona law), actual deportation and citizenship issues are still handled at the Federal level.

While I don't think that the analysis and worries of "papers please" regarding the Arizona law is wrong (I'm a firm believer in sunlight), I'm not seeing, 6 months in, where the doom and gloom is still coming from. They've revised the laws to remove some of the ambiguities, and I still haven't seen evidence of citizens being throw in jail, nor any onerous requirements on immigrants besides what is defined in Title 9 of the Federal laws.

The big argument today, which the Feds are suing for, seems to be that the state law preempts something which is clearly defined at the Federal level (the aforementioned Title 9). I can understand that particular argument, even if I think it's relatively ridiculous to make (the Feds have had a hard time enforcing the law there, especially in border states where the drug war is bringing more and more criminal elements into the area).
I work for SparkFun and feel the same way: there is simply never enough time for projects :) I was just talking to marketing to see if I could get a HN discount code if anyone wants to play with an Arduino for the first time. If you're interested shoot me an email and I'll see if I can convince them; dave@sparkfun.com
Ask HN: What sorts of non-traditional recruiting practices do you use?
We all know technical recruiters are stereotypically pretty poor, especially at finding people who are truly good engineers and not just filling their resumes with certifications. My question to the HN community is: how do you find those truly good engineers? What sorts of recruiting practices do you use that are not "typical" or the usual job postings route?
There's never such a thing as a coincidence, everything that happens is ordained and brought about by mystic forces.

There's never such a thing as an accident, someone always needs to be at fault and punished.

Some people tut, sigh, and shake their heads, but it seems inevitable that people will try to assign blame and receive reparations for what in earlier times would have been called accidents. Insurance companies get away with clauses about "Force Majeure," but they have money to make sure the law-makers listen to them.
Libraries Replacing Hard-Cover Books with Digital Copies
I don't remember where I saw the study. But mean iPhone app makes 3K and median is $700. This is is total revenues, not monthly. So mobile is definitely a hit-driven industry, as you can see by the delta between the mean and median. The top guys make millions but most indie mobile devs barely make minimum wage.
We use Flot currently, but we're looking at purchasing a license for Emprise. Specifically, they offer candlestick charts, which are difficult to find elsewhere, yet absolutely critical in expressing the volatility of series data.

http://www.ejschart.com/

IMO, candlestick charts are way underutilized. Take application response time graphs for example. Most reporting suites rely on moving averages. If your application can have an acceptable average response time, but still have a high level of deviation. Let's say you have an app where, on average, one out of six requests is an entire order of magnitude slower than other requests:

# Ruby code where r is response in ms
r = [
100,
100,
100,
100,
100,
1000
]

r.inject{ |sum, ms| sum + ms }.to_f / r.size # => 250

So my average response time is 250ms, which I may consider acceptable, yet some responses are taking 1000ms, which I wouldn't consider acceptable. With a simple line chart, I wouldn't see the significant deviation. With a chandlestick chart, the upper boundary would be blindinly obvious.
NoSQL does not mean nothing...

Redis does not use the Relational Model not because it promotes a simple key-value model, but because it proposes a different paradigm and data model based on fundamental data structures.

MongoDB for instance does not took away the relational model at all, in some way. So what NoSQL are we talking about? :)

NoSQL was a good marketing idea at start, but now it's starting to be really misleading.
Since you're already using jquery, try flot, http://code.google.com/p/flot/. It has a simple api, good documentation, pretty extensible and works in all browsers (with google's excanvas script for ie).
> Conversely, it's impossible for a Indian citizen to own individual ownership in a US company (unless it's through a company JV type arrangement, or he has a legal visa to work in the US - this is the founders dilemma that often plagues startups)

Actually, it's easy for an Indian to have an ownership interest in a US company.

The founders problem is that US immigration law doesn't have a special case for self-employment and SE is what a startup looks like.
I've been very happy with highcharts http://highcharts.com
Chinese Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Zynga
Ask HN: Love Coding, Hate Marketing
I suspect I'm like most users on HN in this regard, but there's nothing I enjoy more than coming up with a good idea and sitting at my computer for a good hard week(s) of coding it up and turning it into a good/great web application (in my opinion at least). I like the coding, I like the design aspect of the page, I like testing it, I like seeing it all come together nicely in the end and turning it into a nice product.

However, when it comes time to market and sell the web application, I hate it. I hate finding people to e-mail about it, I hate trying to convince leading industry people to look at it. I hate cold calling people trying to sell them on the site. I hate trying to figure out Google AdSense to get my ads into a winning strategy.

The bad part is, I like making money too. So, I can't do that at all without loving both aspects. What should I do? Try to find someone who will handle all the selling/marketing? I'm sure there's lots of people that love that part of a business. Pack it in and call it quits because I don't have "it"? Any recommendations?
"in that they put the OS partition and swapfile on a fast SSD"

So at $8,000 for 160GB, we now use ultra expensive SSD as an alternative for more cheap faster RAM?
You do remember why swap was invented - because memory was scarce and disk was cheap.