skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> some upper-middle class teenagers, little more
> than pocket change

I think that my parents would be considered upper-middle class and I've never thought that $200 was pocket-change.

> Three days in jail (or juvenile detention), on
> the other hand is most likely a novel and frightening
> experience that's actually likely to discourage similar
> behavior in the future.

For some. For others it might just allow them to find bad role models more effectively.
Daylight Saving Time 2010: Why and When It Ends
The door close button in my previous apartment worked. Then again the door stayed open for an unreasonably (for a guy in his 20's) long time because of the number of elderly people in the building.
This is a (very much) known issue with most of the top-of-the-line Logitech mice.
Thanks, ssskai. That article was helpful to me as the writer did a good job of describing the study and the relative merits of the different states.

I'm learning that creating the writing to describe a visualization is often as hard as creating the visualization itself.
You're missing the point.

You are stating that if one eats the "correct types" of food, one will lose weight.

Not true.

You can eat to many calories of the "correct types" of food and still gain weight.

The article discusses a man eating Twinkies, yet still lost weight. You're saying you eat fatty red meats, yet still lost weight.

The Twinkies guy, as well as you, have lost weight because you're in a calorie deficit, regardless of the "types" of food you're eating.
Fusion io is about two years old, so of course it's expensive; the real problem is that they haven't refreshed it. BTW, the list price is $2,400 (including enterprisey markup) for the 80 GB ioDrive and $900 for the 80 GB ioXtreme.
Interesting to see this is possible, but this is beyond what I would want to use css for, how far will "look ma! no javascript!" go? Seing the logic in a jquery click handler seems at least as readable / maintainable as a bunch of css rules for the same reason I prefer to have more logic in java in android applications than in various xml layout and manifest files.
What a great idea and site! Great execution.

Are you making money through this via affiliate sales? With a little more polish and popularity, this site could make a ton of cash that way.
Yep. Python has a wonderful habit of taking the awesome features of other languages and expanding on them.

List comprehensions were added in 2.0, generator comprehensions were added in 2.4, and dictionary comprehensions came in 2.7
Giving people impossible deadlines that they can only achieve by staying late is the same thing as just forcing them to stay late.
What's an easy way to test if a pedestrian-walk button works? I think this would actually take a lot of work to chart time-to-walk with/without button presses. Elevator door-close buttons would be easier, assuming that the doors is supposed to close immediately after pressing the button.
Is F# still really just another ML flavor? In any way that is meaningful in the real world? Another poster on this thread asserts that F# adoption is happening in finance, by FP practitioners who would <i>otherwise use unix!</i> My impression (perhaps flawed) is that the main audience for F# are C#, Java and other programmers for whom F# is indeed their first foray in FP.
It seems like the imperative/functional hybridization of F# mirrors the Scala effort to market itself as a FP language that imperative/OO folks can understand.
I am not espousing a point of view, I am asking for insights about how a large firm like MSFT sees the dev tools market, not trying to poke a stick into other folks' ideas about what the best tools are.
Steps to reproduce broken button:

1) Open the demo page
2) Click image
3) Click 'X' in top left of image
4) Click different image
5) Click the 'X' in the top left of image
6) Click browser's 'back' button
7) Observe how you're staring at the image, not the hacker news page you came from.

The problem is that clicking the 'X' should pop the image off the stack, not just add another page ("#home") to the stack.

Opening an image then hitting back works as it should, though.
Looks and works great.

It would be an improvement to ajaxify the process so it doesn't refresh every time I choose a product.

Also, start marketing this like, pronto! Open a blog linked to it where you benchmark and review hardware and build a community as fast as you can around it. That way your idea is harder to steal by the big players (and they'll look bad by doing so exponentially), and you'll have a ton more leverage to have an affiliate program going on with the retailers.

Finally, implement user accounts so they can save their systems and configurations, and compare between them in with a spreadsheet like view. This can also go hand in hand with social features and will help create a community around your product.

Good Luck!
It's not a matter of hours. There has to be cause for promotion, correct? Whether that is exceeding expectations (be it by working longer hours, or simply being better, etc.) or being reliable over a prolonged period of time; these are both valid reasons to get promoted. I'm sure there are others as well.

Hours are a flawed metric for engineering, usually, since different people get different amounts done in the same amount of hours. But surely there should be some meritocratic reason for a promotion?
A word of caution -- this works until it doesn't. For example, if you have to optimize.
Smart Kid with great parents.
I had Lasik surgery 6-7 years ago, and I had a bad experience with it.

I went to a highly recommended surgeon in my area. I had the procedure done using a machine that didn't have eye tracking, so I had to look straight ahead and not move my eyes during the procedure. I must have done something wrong because my eyesight had some...issues.

All the visual anomalies they'll warn you about in your consultation (halos and starbursts), I had in spades. They were so bad I had trouble functioning in dark settings. So walking around at night was difficult, watching movies was awful, and so forth.

My vision DID kick ass though otherwise.

My surgeon had me coming in regular to monitor my progress, and when things weren't getting better scheduled a touch-up (all included in the initial cost). After the touch-up, all the problems were resolved, and 6-7 years later my vision is still pretty damn good. I don't need glasses, but my vision took a tiny dip a year after the surgery and maintained the quality ever since.

So with all that said, would I recommend Lasik? Absolutely. First, the technology has come a long way since then. Two, my brother had the surgery the same time I did from the same surgeon, and his turned out fine the first time. Third, having perfect vision is something I'm still thankful for all this time later.

tl;dr - I had Lasik surgery twice. First time gave me problems seeing at night, a subsequent touch-up fixed the problems. I still recommend the surgery, but when they say problems can happen, BELIEVE IT.
MSFT had a push towards basic research in the last decade. To do that they needed to hire PhDs and give them some control over what they wanted to work on. Most CS PhDs these days want to work in a language with Hindley-Milner type inference, so they created F#.
I never had impossible deadlines. I don't think anyone else around me did either.
Interesting; I may have to try that out.
Very interesting - F# fills a fundamental need that cannot be supplied even by C# 4.0 with its post-modern featureset. Thanks for that opinion.
A Coder’s Guide to Writing API Documentation
I believe this sort of analysis can only be written in retrospect. And I'm not sure it's very accurate.

TiVo faced a wide array of business challenges and I doubt they would have avoided any of them if they had release their device as some sort of "tape-less VCR". It would have seemed silly and probably wouldn't have fooled anyone. The cable and media companies would still have smelled blood in the water and the early adopters would have been put off by the silly positioning.
I disagree, because the "poor and stupid" who reproduce a lot are not necessarily genetically poor and stupid. Education, socialization, lack of opportunity, and environmental effects such as drugs and alcohol play a far bigger role in what you see as "poor and stupid" than genetics do.

I see no reason why a healthy infant from 10 generations of white trash has any less genetic potential than an infant from 10 generations of people who attended Ivy leagues.
That doesn't sound right. I don't think F# is a commercial success.

Can you give me one example of a hedge fund that uses F#?
Sure, I'm not disputing that, but it means that if you want to be treated like everyone else when it comes to promotions, redundancies, etc. that you're forced to work 12 hour days when at other companies you could just work 8 hour days to get equal treatment.

And remember while you like your job now, what happens if you start to like it less (or you have a family, etc.) but you can't reduce your hours otherwise you'll get penalized for it. One day you'll wake up and realize you're working for EA.

(Ref: http://andymerrett.co.uk/2004/12/09/ea-the-human-story/)
What do the motivating factors behind Clojure have to do with anything?

The CLR port appears to be fairly active (with regards to the amount of work going into it), and most of the libraries that are just shells over Java libraries can't be used.
All this does is make it easy for someone to package an app server full of malware for grandma to download. Never gonna happen.
Maintaining a healthy weight is by far the most important nutritional goal in the developed world, and, by a vast margin, the most important thing you have to do (not optional), is watch how much you eat.
It's easier to optimize a description of what the results should be than to optimize a description of how to calculate the results. If you say "give me the first 10 prime numbers", that's easy to calculate efficiently . If you write out the Sieve of Eratosthenes, then that's harder to make efficient.

Similarly, it's easier to optimize CSS rendering than it is to optimize arbitrary JavaScript programs.
util.Scanner

I recently learned about them and they simplify a surprising number of simple parsing tasks.
@stonemetal: I think what he's saying is: if you're more interested in playing this "what's the minimum number of hours I can get away with working" game than in making your customers love you, Apple isn't the right fit for you.
> there's no telling why he lost weight

Fat has about 3500 kCal/lb. If you consume fewer calories than you use, you will lose weight based on that ratio and your calorie deficit. Doing it wrong just means that your body tries to work against you (makes you hungry, makes you tired, makes you want to put on a sweater, etc) and you feel like shit, but for as long as you manage to stick to it you will lose weight.
My opthamologist and the nurses in the office all got the procedure done.
Laptop On Your Lap Might Cause Fertility Issues in Men
EA: The Human Story
Warren Buffett is a big practitioner of this kind of diet. In his biography, there is a segment about his dieting habits and he used a two pronged approach:

1. Calorie restriction but eat a food he loved - so ice cream or milk shakes all day one day.

2. Make it so if he didn't stick to the diet, he'd have to pay one of his friends a large sum of money.

The combination of greed and eating what you love seemed to pay off in terms of keeping his weight in line.
Finally a reason to use IE!
You're right. Tell everyone you know.
i only watched the video, but i really dig the pitch. im a heavy user of Pivotal tracker (which looks very similar to your dashboard), but i find that it can be sometimes too focused on command and control (one person assigning a task to another person). it seems like your solution will encourage more collaboration off the bat, with people having to step up and willingly take ownership of projects, which could lead to better delivery times.
CS PhDs who work in the area of programming language design.
What Can Be Done About The Growing Broadband Gap In The U.S.?
I've spent more time explaining monads to HN than I have anything else. It comes up at least twice a day and I am tired of writing an explanation twice a day.

Go read the Typeclassopedia.
Pretty funny coincidence that he'd have yet another thing in common with the Larry David/Curb Your Enthusiasm situation he found himself in. There's a whole episode of CYE about penis cakes (Meet The Blacks).
Why so rude?

It's a habit from writing email all day, not some sinister plot to get people to see my name a lot. I removed the ultra-offensive signature from my post.

I'm not inclined to get into an argument about how original or interesting I am... my ego is big, but not big enough for that. I'm content to gauge those things by the responses of my readers.
In Java, that would take a handful of code, a try/catch block, a loop, some sort of buffer and would ultimately create much more verbose, much less readable code.

How do you get away with none of this in Python? You need a try/catch block to catch exceptions on open and read don't you? There's no guarantee the file exists, or you have permission, or enough memory to read the file.

And while you don't necessarily need a for-loop to process the data, you often will.
Turbo and Mini aren't the same thing; Turbo mostly just compresses everything and lossily recompresses images to make them smaller, while Mini outright doesn't have a local HTML rendering engine.
This blog looks like a MySpace page.
Firefox Extension BlackSheep Detects And Protects You From Firesheep
In my experience, some funds may keep their technology choices close to their vest.
I was at a talk once by Ted Neward. He mentioned that many of the C# features we have today are because the F# team needed them in the CLR. C# owes a lot to F#.
Doesn't surprise me that much. Yes the possible gains from the WoW auctionhouse are much lower than from eBay. But:

1. The WoW auctionhouse has a finite set of goods that can be sold and the titles and identification of the goods are unambiguous.

2. The cost of failure is much much lower if something goes wrong with the tool.
(more and more people are going bankrupt and need services for this)

Yes, after all these people have already been demonstrated poor judgement when it comes to financial decisions, I can see how setting up a business to milk them further by extracting money for "services" could be quite profitable...
If all healthy infants from white trash were raised by ivy leaguers I wouldn't complain.

It's not only about genetics, it's also about upbringing.

Having said that though, it's pretty clear that IQ is related to parentage.
I think that part of the problem is the "verbing" of their brand. Nowadays even my grandparents (who don't even have a web connection) have a DVR, but most people don't know the difference between the DVR they get from Comcast and an actual Tivo. Since most people use the word 'Tivo' to describe all DVR's this education problem is incredibly tough to overcome.
Jane street already use Ocaml, so they are probably lost to Microsoft. But that at least prove the presence of a market. Microsoft may want a share.
Authenticity for startups
To me, the title is misleading. This post seems to be more about positioning a product in a way that users understand versus the general usefulness of hubris or humility in relation to products. While poor positioning might be evidence of hubris (in a bad way), I think it's a different issue.
Damnit, now you've got me all self conscious.

My email address has my name on it, but I still close it with -matt. I was going to post a comment to our work order system, which stamps my name on it, but I'm still inclined to close it with -matt. Same with Basecamp. Why? It feels more personal.

Does this really grind people's gears that hard? If so, where's it appropriate? Inappropriate? I respect the opinion of the HN community, so looking for honest feedback.
It also has what looks like a half inch of wasted margin space at the top and the right. It's shiny, but looks like a very big phone by today's standards.
People have tried to make that claim, but Apple's Reality Distortion Field picked it up and the guilty parties were taken out back and shot.

Remember that 1984 video? Yeah.
We're about to launch a new design that I hope solves this problem:

New product page: http://s3.amazonaws.com/scrnshots.com/screenshots/262877/new...
http://s3.amazonaws.com/scrnshots.com/screenshots/262881/new...
can someone post a screenshot of this in IE6
At least where I live, the non-placebo buttons have an immediate effect - press, and the walk light will change to a blinking don't-walk hand, which then turns to solid as the corresponding traffic light turns yellow/red.
"In 2004 the New York Times reported that more than 2,500 of the 3,250 "walk" buttons in New York intersections do nothing. "The city deactivated most of the pedestrian buttons long ago with the emergence of computer-controlled traffic signals, even as an unwitting public continued to push on."

And what do you expect them to do? Since only 2/3rds do nothing, how is the pedestrian to know which 2/3rds that is? They have no choice but to always push the button.
Ask HN: Hacking/Coding/Programming for Good?
I've been looking around for hackers (coders, etc) who also do socially good/conscious activities as well. I've come up short so I was hoping the HN community could help out. It's probably just me but I rarely see articles on hackers doing good (although a lot of startups have socially conscious messages, etc).

I know there's Code for America (making Gov't efficient), Taproot, and Catchafire but I've had a tougher time finding other like-minded initiatives or individuals.

And I'm not asking for any particular reason other than just to know.
The Harris-Benedict equations are generally accepted as empirically corroborated and reliable predictors of weight change as a function of daily caloric intake.
"Haskell is a scripting language inspired by Python."

:)

http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2010-November/...

(joke)
You need a try/catch block to catch exceptions on open and read don't
you? There's no guarantee the file exists, or you have permission, or
enough memory to read the file.

Doing a try / catch implies that you can recover from it.

That isn't the case most of the times (you cannot get extra permissions to a file, you cannot recover from not having enough memory, and if the file is missing that's a bug).

What usually happens in both Java and Python is that you have a top-level try/catch that catches everything and just does logging.

The difference is that in Java you catch and re-throw the exception, or put the exception type in the method's interface, which IMHO leaks encapsulation. Or just turn everything into RuntimeExceptions with a little compiler-plugin magic.

Either way, checked exceptions are a big fail.
That's the intent - the merchant price links are affiliate links when possible.
It definitely implies the former.
Why don't they remove the inactive buttons?
Why down modding? It isn't immediately apparent to me that presenting an alternate way of thinking about "extra hours "is worthy of down modding.
Just downloaded Virtual Drums, and he uses AdMob, according to the ads themselves.
It's simple, right? The result of <Integer> == <Integer> is undefined with respect to the value that is stored in the Integer object.
I know these are fun little code examples, but calling them web servers is a little extreme. What is the minimum functionality required to label something a "web server"? I mean, shouldn't a web server at least support a skeleton set of HTTP request types and return status codes?

I'm not trying to be pedantic here. I just feel that if a new developer were cutting their teeth and came across these examples of "A web server in X", they'd feel a little confused. "Is this all there is to a web server?" No, absolutely not. Not even close.
Ask HN:how do you manage time for reading news/links/articles?
we have twitter, facebook , HN, techcrunch and some additional newspapers too. i am have a dayjob and working on my startup too but the everyday routine of going through the above resources though helpful but it takes away atleast two hours or more on a ordinary day.
To manage this
i am ending up adding lengthy articles to my bookmarks to read later and simply avoiding opening any news link which is predictable.
Do you have any points or tips for managing such a huge infomation overflow in minimal time?
Interesting. Based on your anecdote, I'm pretty sure I've never encountered a functional push-to-walk button...
F# is the place where you can unleash the power of your core developers and make objects fully usable by an army of C# developers.

When I used it no one wanted to learn F#, but if I put a nice OO interface on top of whatever I wrote, packaged it as a DLL the other devs would be happy to use it.

F# isn't just cool, it will make you write better code, faster. The zen of it makes you follow a better path. Think about how many bugs go away when you make all sides of an 'if' 'else' block return the same data type.

Think about how much more sense returning an out parameter as a tuple makes.
I'd much rather write

let value = match dict.TryGetValue("foo") with
| (true,val) -> val
| (false,_) -> "default"

Than

string value;
if(!dict.TryGetValue("foo", out value)){
value = "default";
}

Also, if you're using a match statement and forget to handle the false case, the compiler will scream at you. In C# you're on your own. Also, in C# in this case you can't even use var because you're not initializing it.

The other thing about F# is that it's FAST, fast like beating C at the burrows-wheeler transform.
It really only bothers me in public fora like hackerne.ws where your handle is already right in your face.

I don't mind it at all in basecamp which lacks structure or email where it's traditional and signing off is a way to make it friendly. That said, I don't use automatic signatures, I write a personal benediction/have-a-good-day type thing for each email.

If it's not worth signing personally, it's not worth writing the email.

The short rule is, if it's occurred to you that it might be douchey, you're probably safe because you actually care.

Think of it as a Dunning-Kruger for douchebags.

A...Douching-Kruger if you will.
I am admittedly late to the party. I went to a university where they taught Java (and unfortunately not Python). For the last 10 years, Java has paid the bills, and it still does, so I'm not knocking Java. I stuck with it for so long because I felt that it took that much real world usage to get a good grip on the language.

But you are right --- I'm definitely not the first developer to have had that "moment of zen" when opening files in Python, but hopefully I'm also not the last.
When there is some hardware with a physical keyboard as good as the Blackberry's, RIM is in serious trouble.
Ask HN: Do you drop Chinese netblocks?
I've heard quite a few sys-admins talk about doing this. Do any web-dev do it? A site I just started working on is still small enough that I can tail -f /var/www/apache2/access_log and watch the traffic, and when I see an IP grab just the index, it's a pretty good indicator that it's not a human.

These are almost all coming from China.
You'd notice. The pedestrian green light wouldn't go green for several cycles of car lights. And, on the other extreme, I've seen lights that go green almost immediately after pressing the button.
While I agree his concerns may be a little overwrought, he does have a point.

The ability to innovate, like most abilities, is probably a bell curve, and the fraction of people capable of coming up with valuable innovations is probably small.

Since these innovations need to be able to provide jobs for "average" people who are less innovative, relying on innovation alone to "feed" a country this size is unlikely to work.
Rescued-Smoking-Waiter-Chimpanzee
50 Popular Social News Websites 
Content sharing site's list.