skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Also, the Greens are gaining like crazy right now. Probably for two reasons: One, before about 4 years ago, there was 13 years of Liberal government (once again, they are capital-L Liberals, not lowercase-l liberals). And then the "left" party came into government, and it turns out that hey, they're actually centre-right. I mean they're actually centre-right. They're not left at all, not on the economy (which I'm okay with), and not on moral issues (which I'm less okay with). So the greens are picking up voters that wanted a more progressive government, and whom voted Labor, and whom were then disappointed. The Greens picked up a seat in the Senate, are polling about 15% in Victoria for the State elections. So they're becoming influential at the expense of Labor.
On the other hand if they weren't trying to gather as much information about users as they possibly could this wouldn't even have been a problem in the first place. What possible benefit does an optional "Company" field provide?
I have some questions. Could you send me an email so that I can get in touch? My address is on my profile page.
It's been a (long) while. Is yum still painfully slow?
On my iPhone 4 it correctly adds the apostrophe after typing "Okay, then ill". As far as I can tell in all situations the phone considers "ill" to mean "i'll". If you really meant "ill" you just have to tap the suggestion to tell it no.

I can't see Apple going the route of Swype or 8pen, too confusing. Apple likes simplicity (how many decades before they succumbed and released a two button mouse?)
It would be interesting to see a (trained) person using this, and how many wpm they can get compared to using a normal phone keypad.

The video makes it look like it could be fast, but no hard numbers from real experiments it seems.
Eh, I think that more things are matters of style than people would have one believe.
Screencast: Git in Action - Introduction to distributed version control with git
That's why there are TWO chambers. House gives you representation based on population while Senate give you equal representation. Checks and balances.
Content-maker BlueGlass launches new tool for online publishers
I thought this was a refreshing move. They've accepted the situation and adjusted their strategy accordingly. The only other option seems to be ignoring reality and continuing on their old course, which won't do anything to improve the success of Silverlight.

Even Adobe seems to have given up the fight and accepted html5 as the winner (given their demo's of html5 authoring tools recently).
Community Escrow: What do you do when your supplier changes track?
I don't get that more is implicitly better. It is pretty clear from a naive glance at the list of leaders that there are diverse average points that correlate to diverse posting styles.

If you want it scaled to fit a continuum of "bigger is always implicitly better", a more reasonable number would be:
average of (comment points/parent points)

Even if a number has no [absolute cardinal, > x] meaning, there is still a nominal information value to the datum.
I would also like their phone number, home address and working place.
I see where you're coming from, but in regards to MS and developers I really can't disagree with you more. MS, more than most, bends over backwards to reach out to developers. You can still target COM and OLE, you can still write VB4. I have applications written for DOS and Windows 3.1 that still work on Windows 7.

In this case, I think it is more a failure in PR than anything else. Silverlight will continue to work on Windows and Mac, and it will be the primary way of writing apps for the Windows phone. MS has just publicly acknowledged that it's stupid to try to get the Silverlight VM to work on every stack of hardware / OS. They just did it in a very ham-fisted fashion.

That wasn't really news to anyone that's been paying attention anyway. We've been warning our developers away from writing any web apps with Flash or SL (except for video playback) for over a year now. You can write very capable, very pretty web apps using just javascript, CSS and HTML4. HTML5 just makes it that much easier.
This is, of course, all about Oracle buying Sun, the author's ex-employer. So many projects got discontinued, but fortunately many were open source.

Whether or not this open source approach was a disastrous strategy for Sun, it did mitigate some of the consequences of the collapse.
I want to try this. Badly.

Currently on an HTC Hero with Android 2.2 The problem with the Hero is that the keys are way too small. I have normal sized fingers (for a male) so I reckon I'm not the only one with this problem!
If you want to see how browsers stack up on finalized web specifications, I find http://www.webdevout.net/ is the single best place to go.
Also it says "those who merely think they are fit enjoy the same lower risk". How fit I see myself has a lot to do with how often I fall ill.
I do wish MS would release a SL to HTML5 compiler though. That would mitigate a lot of the rancor.
Final Build of Mac OS X 10.6.5 Reaches Developers - Release Imminent
Iida X-Ray - tranparent phone from Japan
"It would be great if we knew what percentage of our customers were business travelers. It would really improve marcomm.". "The web guys say they can ask, it won't take five minutes.". "Brilliant! Do it. Next order of business..."

Six years later, nobody has checked the form since. After all, that isn't their job.
In the event that there are several companies sharing the same address. E.g. my address here is <name>, <company name>, <building name>.
Actually, I think Microsoft is doing developers a lot of good by keeping Silverlight in use in other areas, for Windows Phone development, for example. The technology is still useful, and they can transfer their skills to this new area.

So, rather than just dumping Silverlight, they are still using it in other key areas, areas they are looking to help developers make money with. Don't tell me Flash developers wouldn't love to have a mobile platform where they could use their skills to develop applications on.
In Israel election day is a national holiday and everyone is off from work/school.

EDIT: Spelling
As a developer in the Microsoft stack, this is par for the course. Choose your tech wisely.
I'm voting for a platform if I vote for a Democrat or Republican or Libertarian

That's true to a certain extent. But it's only one side of the equation. Even if you can take party as a proxy for the candidate, it tells you nothing about the issues.

So, let's say that your biggest concern at the moment is the economy. Without knowing something about economics, how do you decide which party to support? If you can't tell the difference between Keynes and Hayek, everything else is just demagoguery. You're just judging the propaganda.

What if you're concern is healthcare? I know plenty of people who say "vote out the damn Democrats, and put in somebody who's smart enough to enact tort reform to fix the problem". These ill-informed views might make them feel superior, but giving people power to create policy based on them isn't going to help anything.
Found an answer.

The problem is that String.fromCharCode takes multiple arguments and Array.map also passes multiple arguments to the callback, therefore the equivalent of numbers.map(String.fromCharCode) is actually:

numbers.map(function(x, y, z){return String.fromCharCode(x, y, z);})

Which of course is slower as the end result will actually be array with longer strings in it.
Yes, I get that, but it'd still be interesting to play with some actual numbers.
Honestly I think Microsoft's extreme desire to maintain backwards compatibility has hurt developers in the long run. That's an awful lot of legacy to carry around and they haven't been proficient at phasing products and platforms out when they're clearly way beyond their prime. They should focus more on being innovative and having solid strategies for moving developers incrementally towards new platforms and frameworks.
What fraction of the market is underserved by Firefox not working on OSX 10.3 and earlier?

Meanwhile what fraction is underserved by IE9 not working on Windows XP?

I have no objection to your numbers as long as we also compare apples to apples and quantify the impact.
what if it were average of: (comment score/parent score) ?
Oh, definitely. Luckily, that's not very hard to do yourself...
My suspicion is that part of the motivation for IE9 is encourage upgrades from XP. Otherwise, there isn't much of an economic basis for its development because unlike Chrome, IE doesn't send every keystroke in the address bar to a server for analysis.
No one has brought up socialism in this campaign at all. Ron Johnson has run a specific, issue oriented campaign. His major focus is stopping the run away spending of the Obama agenda. He entered the race when Obamacare passed, because he felt that was the last straw.

Feingold on the other hand is standing by his vote for Obamacare. I haven't forgotten the disdainful smirk on his face when he addressed his enraged constituents at last years' health care town hall meetings, and I don't think my fellow Wisconsinites have either.

This election is all about consequences for those who ignored the will of the people, and Russ Feingold is chief among them.
I'm not mzl, but there are all kinds of reasons why it might be a long project: waiting for public transit (especially if there's more than one connection), waiting in line at the poll (if turnout is much higher than expected), etc.
> it will be the primary way of writing apps for the Windows phone.

This, right there. Silverlight isn't going away. It's still useful. They just aren't trying to compete in an area where it won't be as useful. However, Silverlight developers suddenly have this transferable skill that Flash developers don't have on the mobile side.
I've spent an hour and a half before, mainly due to excessive turnout and lack of voting booths.

2 of the 6 machines the precinct received did not verify when turned on. They're an electronic booth with paper printout (yes,what the vote hackers wanted to begin with). However the paper did not agree with the electronic tally, hence machine invalidated.

And they got 4x the turnout they were expecting. Now, usually, it's 20 min in line and 3 min for the vote itself.
I need this go way down, so I can buy lots of Aussie FJ60 parts :D
Ask HN: idea for a startup, how important should be the path to revenue?
Hi HNers,
So here is the situation : having recently graduated ( in CS ), I'm currently refusing job offers as I want to start a company.

I've been reading HN and startup-related news for a while, but it turns out I'm still extremely confused when it comes to my next step : in which direction to go ?<p>I mean, should I think about starting a company that can clearly generate revenus ? Or should I aim at doing something that add value, build traction and then figure out how to monetize it ? ( let's say for instance a web/mobile app for a new kind of social photo sharing )

I have the feeling that starting a company based on a "fun" or/and useful product without any idea on monetizing it works only if you're in the Sillicon Valley area. Does anybody else share that feeling ?<p>So basically I'm just wondering if I should really focus on a product that generates revenue from day 1 ( à la Wufoo ), or do something more risky that might one day make money once it has traction ( à la social apps ).

Reading blogs/HN etc make me even more confused since a lot advices/recommandation contradict themselves.

Any help is appreciated, thanks.
Where were you guys when Medicare Part D passed?

It's way worse for the deficit, and was a way bigger spending bill.

Oh, wait, that was a Republican.. I get it..

This is how Rome fell - if beating your domestic enemies is more important to you than improving the country, you are hurting the country.
Firesheep, a week later: Ethics and Legality
I'm sorry but I frankly don't get what you are saying. Democracies are generally based on representation, where you elect someone to represent your values and what's important to you. I don't know how you would do this without taking your previous experiences into account. I also don't get where you got bias from group or political party from. The group I referred to wasn't an actual group, but a representation of people with similar experiences. I'm not saying these people will come to the same conclusion based on those experience, but they still represent a shared part of what is going on in society.

I would understand if you said that people should stay informed, but asking people not to vote seems undemocratic to me. Democracies are still supposed to be a reflection of the people. Not a reflection of those who had the opportunity to evaluate every issue without consideration of previous experiences. It seems to me you're blaming voters for something that is the responsibility of politicians. As a voter you have the right to vote even if you're wrong. I can't really make my point any clearer than this without seeming condescending, so this will be my last post in this exchange.
Both MS and Mozilla have explicitly stated that they're not going to get 100 in Acid3.
No no, you're wrong. It's $10 with the promo, but with an additional $3/month for the DNS service that's free in GoDaddy. A grand total of $46/year, hands up!
37signals' Chalk: a fun little browser-based app for iPad
i never heard anyone who is finished in 2 years(maybe for house painting department). 3 years for competent student make sense, the norm is 4 years
High turnout will ensure his defeat. He's not listening to the Wisconsin electorate and they noticed.
How can your non-vote be a louder act of protest if it can't be distinguished from an apathetic non-vote?
Is voting Republican so rare for HN readers? I doubt it. It seems like the majority of readers here are libertarians, and a lot of libertarians, when they vote for a major party, vote Republican.
I never realized how much food we actually threw away until recently. Our city began a green box composting program (compostable items such as food waste are picked up at the curb on garbage day). When you have to collect it all together once a week, you can see just how much you have wasted.
google shopping shows me 5 packs at sub-$10.

just sayin'.
Ask HN: Best customer support solution for one-person software company?
I've been struggling to find a customer support solution that fits the bill for my one-person software company. Price is usually the most prominent factor in deciding to use a service. I currently use GetSatisfaction but desire features in their expensive premium plans. I have tried many other services but each service seems to lack what another service has and vice versa.

What customer support solutions would you recommend?
My guess would be, the same people who pay £1 for a 'one day newspaper'. I can't think of another group that would be more likely to do so.
In all the times I have seen this topic raised (and I've seen it raised a lot) I have yet to see anyone who engages in the debate actually do the experiment to determine where the actual breakeven point is. Hint: it's less than 5000.
Ah yes I see, that's nice. It's even available for remote workers. Thanks.
Applying the Golden Ratio to Your Web Designs
Why do you assume there's a constant breakeven point? It depends on the specific implementations of the things being compared.
Yep, I worked on AT&T's ATG-based implementation for their mobile dumbphones. Once you get on ATG it's mighty hard to get off, even if it's costing you millions of dollars in licensing/support fees.
Ask HN: How badly has Facebook screwed Rapleaf?
What does it mean for Rapleaf, and other companies that operate in the same domain?
Dude, he specifically said that's why he shipped the trackpad. It's one thing if the reporters didn't accurately report the story, quite another when they broadcast the press conference so we call can hear directly what he said.
As a python developer one of the things I particularly like about Fedora is its inclusion of Python systemtap probes. This allows you to examine at a glance which python functions are taking most of the runtime. The fedora patches have been submitted for upstream inclusion at http://bugs.python.org/issue4111 . More details about this feature can be found at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SystemtapStaticProbes... . fwiw I am not affiliated with Redhat or any other OS vendor in any way.
Windroplr: a Droplr client for Windows.
I agree - that's the main motivation .. but realistically, a lot of people will stick with Windows XP.

Microsoft rarely seems to think that altruism can align with good business sense, and I think it suffers because of this.
In general, good business people make very bad politicians. It's a very different skill set.
Microsoft has an interest and is a member of the W3C. They do not own them though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W3c
No, you have it all wrong.

Anonymous for President.
Name change to /B/stonia

I jest, I jest :) Still, I've heard of some cool governmental tech over there. Voting, as grandparent said, along with cell-phone payment of gasoline, painless e-banking with 2 factor auth, and other cool stuff.

I also remember a pyramid that was built in that area that was on History International... I _think_ it was there, as it talked more about the architecture than the location, other than temps going from 80F to -30F.
hey gilbax, from what i have read/realized, successful startups don't aim at building the world's best business model... u build the model around your product... i think if your product is good (it solves a pain), your customer's will buy it... so.. focus on getting a kick a*s product out... and don't just try to build something just becoz you want to do it... build something that can actually solve the pain of a million people... and it will bring revenues in before you know it :)
I like and use zendesk. It is worth checking out with the free trial. The only thing I don't like about it is the code used on the page cannot be optimized in the manner I would like. It really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things but just knowing that i can't tinker with it gets me.
the problem I have is that it's never a single state getting proportion. They always band together. So California with millions of voters become insignificant, when 10 states with combined total of 500,000 voters band together.

That's why we have more subsidies for corn production than science research.

I'm sorry, but 10 states in the boonies with no people, should not be able to dictate policy to California. Crap like that is exactly why California ends up subsidizing half the red states, who then turn around and vilify it every chance they get.
It seems like just yesterday that developers were saying Microsoft betrayed them by breaking compatibility between VB6 and VB.Net.
I think it's less likely. My grandmother wouldn't have heard of iTunes, or know what an "mp3" is, so if she learned about it she wouldn't realise it was just one of multiple options.

However she does know that there's more than one national paper in the UK.
Pros/Cons of Interlinked Landing Pages
Example of a bad website
It is really sad because it is to promote one of the most beautiful place in India.
I consider those "apathetic" non-votes to be louder than voting as well. I don't mind being lumped in with those people who just can't be bothered to care. I sympathize with them.
Sorry, that's completely insane even if it's open source.
I've been working on a Silverlight app full time for the past 8 months. I was relieved when Microsoft made this announcement (even if they are now trying to back track on it a bit).

Silverlight isn't bad at all, really. In some ways it's just fantastic. And given another 3 or 4 years or so, it will mature to the point of being a great framework. It's a truly awesome framework for WP7 and if MS can gain some traction behind WP7, having Silverlight in their corner is going to be a boon for them.

But right now Silverlight is both mighty raw and almost pointless for webapps. There are so many bugs in Silverlight itself and its related tools that it can make working in Silverlight quite frustrating. When all this time I watch HTML5 blossom and take off and pretty much gain feature parity (and beyond) to Silverlight, I can't help but think to myself as I look at my app, "What's the point?"

Nothing is perfect, and of course HTML5 is going to have its warts, especially when dealing with every vendor's own implementation of JS and the new HTML5 components. But at least with this route you're swimming with the current and not against it. There's a lot to be said for that.
Back then, their product really was one of the best. You had Dynamo and Sapphire (now owned by HP I think), then a big gap, then WebLogic that was only being used by existing BEA shops, then another big gap, then Sun/Netscape's awful iPlanet thing.
That would be a hard cookie. In many ways, Silverlight has a lot more features than HTML5 and it is also compiled to binary. I guess it would be possible to compile the binary to some sort of JavaScript and emulate some of the Silverlight API, but I seriously doubt that it would yield very convincing results.
"You can write very capable, very pretty web apps using just javascript, CSS and HTML4. HTML5 just makes it that much easier."

Which part of HTML5 are you talking about here? I always assumed that in this context HTML5 meant 'Canvas + <video> element'. I hope that developers aren't going to use Canvas to replace CSS/javascript menus, rounded corners etc. with Canvas-based ones 8(
My work pc is powered by Fedora (my boss is a huge fan). It is not what I would choose for my laptop/home desktop (I love to tinker and I find myself perfectly at home with Arch right now), but it's a pleasure to have this distro in a pc where you need the utmost stability and the distro choice must be as transparent as possible.
don't think pg is american born. sorry.
If you're wondering if this still works in a non-iPad browser... it doesn't. I was curious if I could still draw with the mouse.
It works without the trailing slash too, if you want to save a couple of keystrokes.

git diff | mate
I don't think a non-politician would be able to successfully deal with the huge political machine in the government.
Which I never understood anyway - I agree with many libertarian principles but both Republicans and Democrats are going to grow the government so I vote Democrat since I at least agree with their principles.
The epic demise of Realtime Worlds, maker of Crackdown & APB
Pong written in both flash and HTML5. Left side is flash, right side is HTML5.
Dropbox would be the first example I would cite if asked

What do you mean? Was dropbox.com once owned by a squatter? Just curious.
If you are Richard Jones, thank you for showing the world that functional programming can also be used for systems programming! :)
I could be wrong, but I don't think translating between Silverlight and actual web development with an acceptable level of fidelity is realistic. If it were, ASP.NET WebForms 3.5 and 4.0 would have implemented something like that to begin with and Silverlight would have never existed.
Another YC inspired incubator
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1014074107
Just sharing a tool I made, suggestions would be awesome
Just went through the ordeal of having replaced a "robots.txt" file on one of my clients websites for the second time this month with a Disallow *.

For anyone who does SEO this is very damaging to your google rankings, if it goes unnoticed.

So I setup a small cron job to monitor my robots.txt on each of my sites, I decided for fun to setup a UI wrapper so others can use it if they like.

I implemented a system where you don't have to sign up. You just request a login session through your email and you receive a link to login. Saves having to remember a username
and password for a service where you don't have to login much.

I'm trying to think of other alerts which are rare but important, possibly when page rank changes.

beta.poilep.com