skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sure many people do benefit from taking notes but I'm convinced that pg most likely wasn't dismissing note taking in general. I think he was more likely to be meaning you don't need to write down every word he says, akin to almost transcribing the talk - well this was my take on it anyway. Basically he was implying that the substance of the talk will appear in a later essay, which it did. To me, with this point in particular, the author of the article appears to be trying to find something (anything?) to take issue with, which in my opinion makes me value his other points a little less favourably.
While interesting, these conclusions require much more in-depth analysis over multiple years to be of much real value.

Colourlovers.com is pushing this as a way of finding out what color clothes people are going to buy, but do the results of this survey correspond with the colors people choose in their clothing? Do these colors vary significantly from year to year? What are the mean values and standard deviations for various popular hues across international borders? Sure, the US is red, Canada is yellow, and Australia is orange, but by how much?

You could do a lot of interesting things with this data...does anyone know if they've released it?
... and helps keep the denominator of the per capita small.
You could put them on Craigslist or Ebay. I've bought two LCDs that way in order to repair other laptops of the same model with broken screens.
Limewire? In 2010? Seriously?
If you have it built then launch the thing and see if it has legs. If it doesn't have legs using PHP it won't have legs using rails either, in that case you can just flush it down the toilet and do a new project in rails.

If it does have legs then you can justify the time and effort it will take to port it to your favorite new language du jour.

Delaying launching for pointless rewrites is a great way to never get to the point where you will launch it, it means you're in love with the tech, not trying to get off the ground.
Cool idea, which all platform does it support, right now
I think that was done as a courtesy not to make North Korea's government look that bad in comparison.
My First Chrome Extension
Any feedback?
This is plausible, but here's the problem I have with that.

If you look at the data, these accounts are not digging only preferred publishers.

They are Digging mostly preferred publishers, but also occasionally random blog-spam. (ex buzzll.com)

If Digg was behind this, why Digg random blog-spam as well?

No, if Digg was behind this I expect that would either make the accounts realistic by simply taking what an average user Diggs and replicating it a few times, perhaps with only preferred publisher diggs.

Any first-year CS student could come up with a script to create plausible user names, at least better than those in question.

The Digg team is not the best, but I have slightly more faith in them than this.

What I think we have here is someone who figured out that in order to slip in diggs for blog-spam, they had to digg some "top stories".

Let's think about this for a moment.

Let's say you're writing a Digg spam-bot.

You know in order to make your account look good you need to Digg some top-stories.

The easiest way to do that is pick some stories you know will be top stories...stuff that's always on the front page...e.g. Digg preferred publishers.

Let's say you didn't do this.

In this instance, you'd have a bunch of accounts digging only the same small set of blog-spam.

They would stick out obviously as a set, and digging only the same small stories.

But, wait...

Now they are not digging only random small stories...they are Digging top stories...so now they are part of a huge set of "normal" users, and their digging patterns look more like a normal user.

I think what we have here is simply a spammer who found a hole in Digg's automated account detection.
I've flown with my Macbook and just let it sleep instead of turning it off. Nobody has ever cared.
Paul, you need to redesign the website. It looks bloody awful for something as simple and elegant as your service.
Some snowed-in Ohio students to learn online
What do you mean by "Page name"?

Also, I should go ahead and tell you that I know very very little about Wordpress, and how it handles things. Would it be feasible to move this part of your project away from Wordpress?
I'd have less of a problem if that hierarchy seemed useful. I usually see a <company> folder, and under that, 3 things. <program>, of course; a link to README.txt; and the uninstaller.

Just put <program> at the root and be done with it. I most likely don't have more than the one app from you.

One of the few vendors that I'm rather likely to have multiple products from is Microsoft, and of course they have to be different and delight in having <Microsoft - product name>.
We developed it over last weekend for android in the startup weekend. It is a prototype now. But We are working hard to make it available soon in android and iphone market.
Reworder – A tale of learning Python and launching an app in five days.
Richard Dawkins has talked about this phenomenon. He says we live in a "middle world" and make all of our important judgments based on our size. (He says that our view of the universe would be fundamentally different if we lived on a different scale.)

http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkins_on_our_queer_univer...
I can do international wire transfers straight from my bank's online interface - is there a regulatory reason that US and Canadian banks can't offer something similar?
Must be a rough gig if you can't take ten minutes here and there. How do you poop?
It educates by providing information about the attack used and how to prevent it happening in the future. You can find the link provided to users here: http://jonty.co.uk/idiocy-what

The tweet can be instantly removed by the user. It's hardly vandalism as nothing is being damaged or destroyed.

As I've said in a message elsewhere in this thread, posting to your own account is an easily understandable visible demonstration of what's possible and why they should care - a DM from another account, or an @ just won't have the same effect on the user.

I've been informed that it's possible to send a DM to yourself, so I'm going to add that as an option shortly.
I'm not even going to use my stock rebuttal of "correlation != causation" because in the case of #1 through #5, I doubt if we even have correlation. For every example of a good programmer for any of these 5 that OP can provide, I can provide multiple counter-examples. None of these is much of an indicator of anything.

1. How opinionated are they?

Everyone has an opinion, assholes included.

2. How much do they contribute to open source projects?

Many of the best programmers I know contribute nothing to open source because of confidentiality agreements.

3. How much do they enjoy programming?

You mean when it's fun specing something out or at 4 in the morning when everything is down?

4. Do they actually ship?

And what does it cost to maintain or fix it? There are 2 ways to find out. a. Read the source. b. Wait a year. Which would you prefer?

5. What have they mastered?

Who cares? What they do on their own time is their own business. This is an indicator of nothing.

6. How well do they communicate?

This is important for all people, for all things, so it doesn't even need to be on this list.

So, how should a non-programmer hire a programmer?

a. Become a programmer.

b. Hire a programmer to hire a programmer.

c. Punt.
Release. I perfectly understand your qualms, as I've been there, both with PHP and Java (worse). But it seems you've got a product that's pretty much ready, so push it out. This might sound harsh, but what if it fails? Then there's no need to rewrite it. If it miraculously succeeds, you can live off the money while you're rewriting it for version 2, if you still feel the need for it.

If you fall in the middle, then you might have a tough choice to make, but let that time come.

Also, there are still other projects, either after this one is done or as a complimentary service/product to support it. You can use Rails for that.

If you're that close to release, this is a bad stage to rewrite anyway, regardless of language. Second system effect might overpower you, and you waste lots of time to implement features that you don't need (yet).
It would be cool if all inspectors' front-ends and back-ends became interchangeable.

Opera Dragonfly goes in that direction. It's open-sourced (http://bitbucket.org/scope/dragonfly-stp-1/) and uses documented protocol for communication with browser core:

http://dragonfly.opera.com/app/scope-interface/

Recently Dragonfly has been made compatible with Chrome, debugging Opera remotely:

http://twitpic.com/30ul4b
Ask HN: Legal risk of signing up on a competitor's website?
If you are developing a new application and exploring the competition in your market, is there a legal risk of signing up on the competitor's website and agreeing to the terms of service (especially relating to ownership of intellectual property)?
I never have business cards and would love a way to make contacts from my smart phone. This will help me build my professional network.
"This case has been twisted into something it is not."

It's like they've never been to court before. Congratulations, you've been outlawyered.
Excellent! Karsten Self's prediction (http://linuxmafia.com/~karsten/Rants/piracy.html) about prices in the face of software piracy is true!
The webkit nightlies tend to have more features. There is still one behavior that frustrates me every time I use the webkit tools, though: clicking on an asset link (eg, to a javascript file) brings up the resource tracker rather than the file.
I recommend against a chair :-)
Yea but there may be an unbounded number of approximation methods that aren't the textbook answer but still diagnostic of competence on behalf of the answerer.
U.S. slips to historic low in global corruption index
Why I Love the Startup Community
Only showing non-working mockups and a "look but don't touch" demo unit at the press event for a device that's supposed to ship on Nov 19th makes me highly suspicious.

For this thing to succeed it needs a killer web browser, and I suspect it doesn't have one.
> What computing blogs / magazines do you read?

Would Hacker News/Proggit be an acceptable answer?
I started working on markup for a new site this week and put HTML5 Boilerplate into real use for the first time. It has been a very helpful, time-saving starting point. I'll definitely be incorporating most of it into my "new site" template.
Find a Podiatrist, an Attorney | Restaurant Reviews | Yellow Pages
Thanks, yes will change how we use business cards. Our tag line is share forever. Once you share a digixcard anytime onwards you can goto facebook application launch it and connect with people when needed. Mainly that person don't need to be your facebook friend.
Can't they simply encrypt much of the data or obfuscate in such a way that it never points directly to a user?
This is offtopic, but what's MM? What's the second M for?
Indeed. But that makes a pretty boring blog post.
I do not think this can really be considered "shaming" as it's nothing to be embarrassed about.

Regarding private/public notification; Posting to your own account is an easily understandable visible demonstration of what's possible and why you should care - a DM from another account, or an @ just won't have the same effect on the user.

(I have said this elsewhere in the thread, so apologies for repetition)

I have been informed that it's possible to send a DM to yourself, so I'll add that as an option shortly as a nice alternative.
Horton Hears a Who
Yes, not good for your circulation.
Make your error page prettier. You guys are capable of better design (after seeing your pricing page).
I agree, it is sustainable. However, I think it's more sustainable than the average Western American-European diet and certainly more sustainable then things like Atkins and South Beach. I firmly believe that grains and gluten are producing silent damage and health issues. Of course, this is again largely anecdotal based on my personal experience.

I did not make any other lifestyle changes, at least not on a conscious level. My exercise, stress, job and the usual suspects are all still the same. My body fat is down 2% without any increase in exercise. My sleep cycles have increased (at least according to my Sleeptracker watch) by about 50-60% on average. My energy levels are completely subjective but it "feels" like I have more energy. I haven't done blood work yet to see what my cholesterol and thyroid levels are but should have that done in the next few weeks.
Having biked North, South, and Middle San Diego for years, we have bike lanes, drivers that stop, and fewer days of cool weather than SF :-). In fact, having been to SF, I don't recall as many bike lanes there as here in SD. I suppose we'd have to measure to really know.
"Paul notes that strings and lists really should just be represented as lists and the compiler should efficiently handle lists of characters as a special case."

Instead of "strings represented as lists", I think it is more useful to say "strings and lists implementing a common interface." For example, in Clojure, it is perfectly fine to treat a string as a sequence.

> (doseq [ch "abc"]
(println ch))
a
b
c
I'm personally disappointed that it's more of a "Nook with color" than it is an Android tablet.

Wish there was more information about "Nook Developer" as it's hard to tell how much work an Android app needs to run on this.
Self-building chips - easy as microwave ready meals
A language that can express algorithms in few lines that are very cryptic (read: hard to read) is not very useful.

Part of Arc's design philosophy is to never inconvenience advanced users in order to serve novice ones. Long, descriptive names help people unfamiliar with a language's operators better understand what they do, but the length can become a burden once they do know.

For example, when I first started learning Arc, it would have saved me some headache if afn had been named anaphoric-function. Now I would find that a real nuisance. I love being able to invoke such a powerful abstraction with just three keystrokes.

Here's an interesting exercise. This is the given solution to the Arc Challenge [1]:

(defop said req
(aform [w/link (pr "you said: " (arg _ "foo"))
(pr "click here")]
(input "foo")
(submit)))

What would you prefer that it looked like? If you replaced all the abbreviated names with long descriptive ones, you'd have something like:

(define-operator said request
(html-anaphoric-form
[html-with-link
(print "you said: " (argument _ "foo"))
(print "click here")]
(html-input "foo")
(html-submit)))

---

[1] http://arclanguage.org/item?id=722
How many of you can do all this (linked from OP http://www.menshealth.com/mhlists/be_fit/index.php?cm_mmc=MS...)?

* Bench 1.5 Times Your Body Weight

* Run 1.5 Miles in 10 Minutes

* Touch the Rim

* Leg-Press 2.25 Times Your Weight

* Swim 700 Yards in 12 Minutes

* Do 40 Pushups

* Measure Up

* Run 300 Yards Sub 1 Minute

* Touch Your Toes

* Toss a Basketball 75 Feet Kneeling

A couple are pretty intense. I lift 3 days a week, climb, and do cardio 1-2 times a week. I cannot bench 285 (1.5x bw; my 5 RM @ 235), or squat 425 (2.25 bw; 5 RM @ 275). Also not sure about the swimming.
I imagine that would depend on what the terms of service says.
Please tell, "How to post this question into ASK HN category"
"He added that Google "rewrites" your search history after a year and a half, so that it can no longer be tracked, even under a court mandate."

My search history on http://google.com/history goes back to January 2007, which is over three years.

Maybe he meant that history entries older than one and a half years will be "rewritten" if you manually went and asked Google to remove them (by using the "Remove Items" function in the history). I wonder how many people are aware of that function.
M = 1000 in Roman numerals, but the confusing bit is not reading them like Roman numerals (2000) but rather interpreting them as one thousand thousands, or one million.
Social Logins: Twitter vs. Facebook
Given the concerns surrounding privacy these days I have a couple of questions as to how people are using social login services like Facebook and Twitter. While these services are helpful in removing barriers related to users engaging with our websites/web services I have a hunch that they are (or will be) used for different purposes.

Who do you trust with access to your Facebook information?

While we've already incorporated Facebook Connect in our web app, we recently added a Twitter login button to blockwild.com in order to encourage users to test it out without having to be concerned about potentially exposing loads of 'private' Facebook information to a new and unverified web application. We shall see which service NEW users gravitate towards.

Is Twitter a more disposable social login service?

My hunch is that users generally view Twitter as a 'lower risk' login service for testing new applications while reserving Facebook Connect for services that they are comfortable entrusting their social graph to. Ironically, it seems the wealth of information that can be accessed through Facebook could potentially be a barrier to users signing up through Facebook Connect.

Anyone care to share any experiences with these two alternatives?

http://blockwild.blogspot.com/2010/10/social-logins-twitter-vs-facebook.html
This is practically the archetype of the "question developers ask in order to procrastinate on releasing". Why don't you want to release? Because, you don't.
In WordPress, ... in addition to your (blog) "Posts" you can create a "Page". The typical example would be an "About" page.

In my case, I created a paged called "app". What is nice about this is I can use WordPress as a content management system, I can change Themes easily, etc. ... but embedded inside the page I can put vanilla PHP code.
I found this:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=tNSBeVi-DEbMXw-9cWm3...

But it's underwhelming.. This list has the right idea though: simple no-bullshit access to people who could potentially fund your product/idea with out all the overhead of an incubator or VCs.
I recommend you get evaluated by a physician if you are concerned about your physical ability to stand for prolonged periods. Seriously. I don't know if you've had ankle surgery, Gaucher's disease, or something else. In general, standing, though, is great strength training for those joints.
For a politician "shielding from public view" is the same as "shielding from consequences". Do you agree?

If you still disagree with the quote, then you're saying that people will misbehave regard of consequences.
Digg responds to "test accounts" controversy
Does anyone understand why we need both sales tax and income tax? That never made any sense to me.
After following your suggestion, I dove into the WordPress index.php and followed the flow for how it routes you to a particular page.

I found that I can insert my own PHP code to scrutinize the REQUEST_URI, QUERY_STRING, etc, so I can pull out the parameters needed for my app, and then edit the REQUEST_URI so WordPress is none the wiser, ... and simply displays the proper page. ... then my app code gets invoked, ... plus it has access to my parameters. Solution found.
Techstars to hire Freelancers to work for them, assist their startups
Relevant story from yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1832767
What do we know about the possibility of life on Mars?
Do you know if compcache has finally been integrated in the kernel?
How to use Google Squared to Research Essay Topics (for Students)
Stunning iPad App Interface Design
Not sure who you want to contact you, but if it is me, my email is yegg@alum.mit.edu
I agree! Very interesting.

I remember when "document-centric" was all the rage in UIs (often went hand-in-hand with the term "object-oriented"... right around Windows 95/OpenDoc/Workplace Shell timeframe) and I would think that it seemed odd, because most users I knew had nearly no real concept of document/folder hierarchies.

You'd ask a user where their document is and they'd answer — just like they do today — "It's in Word."
ARP poisoning doesn't require control of the router; it makes MITMs pretty trivial.

http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles/Understanding-Man-in-...
Seriously, note-taking? I aspire to reach the point where my statement about whether or not my audience should take notes is one of the top five things I'm wrong about.
There is no configuration for the update engine. It periodically checks for updates, and in the background will download and install those updates. There may situations where I don't want it doing so: e.g., if I'm on a low-bandwidth link. I can maybe understand this if I've got a Google application running, but to do so w/o any Google applications running is unacceptable.

To be clear, I think auto-updating software is a fine default. But every other Mac app I have (since they almost all use Sparkle) will only update itself when running, and further, give me a preference to disable the auto-updates as well as specify how often I want update checks to occur. It is un-Mac-like to silently update in the background and w/o providing the user any control.
That's a great article. Which raises the question, do you want predictable performance, or better expected performance with occasional inexplicably slow outliers? Is it impossible to have both with high level languages? Can it be made configurable?
Designing Effective Entry Points in Web Design
Not at all, let's just say if you have read any of his prior articles it isn't difficult to see a pronounced bias on everything apple.
Yes, this is precisely the theory I had as soon as I read the first several sentences.

If you look at the list of sites, you'll see there are spam sites in there (ex: buzzll.com) that have diggs from the suspected accounts.

If Digg is behind this, why digg random spam sites?

Also, as dumb as Digg is, I have faith they could do a little better than d42, d43, .... etc.

I think what we have here is a spammer testing ways of gaming the system, or proceeding with gaming the system.
Brands analyzed by degree of abstraction
Looking for funding has forced us to shift focus from developing our product to courting investors. It is such a waste of precious time. I would love to see a collaborative list, such as a spreadsheet on Google Docs, of less than well known investors.
A Portal Shirt, Just In Time For Halloween
If you're in the US you'll run in to the accredited investor issue pretty quickly.

see: http://www.sec.gov/answers/accred.htm
Apple Store app shows up white iPhone 4 reservations
I'm waiting on CES in January. I've heard that most of the companies who will be producing android tablets in the near future will have manufacturing samples then. Most are probably waiting for 3.0+ to optimize Android for a tablet experience.
I tried to do this, but there were a few major hurdles. First, MS Windows left a million poorly categorized things cluttering up my program categorization. Second, when new programs were installed, I had to manually move them from where they put themselves in the start menu. Occasionally, this broke them. And if I didn't think to do it, my list of programs quickly became ugly and unorganized. Third, multiple locations for the start menu folder items (all users vs. the local user) made this really annoying.
I don't really get all of the Digg hate recently. It seems that Digg has a perception problem similar to Windows Vista.

Sure they made some technical/communication/process mistakes, but they seem to have fixed most of the ones that are easily fixable.

I personally find Digg more useful these days because of the changes.
Or better YC brand recognition?